Зиновий Зиник — Genius of the writing as a genre. It seems his essays and novels grow from letters and diary notes. Zinik is always included in the history of the Third Wave of emigration: Brodsky, Dovlatov, Wajda, and Genis… However, with his literature and the interpretation of emigration as a theme, not only the essays, he falls out of this well-organized row. Whether it’s the country of residence (few moved to the UK), or his own detachment from this reality, or something else. Therefore, Zinoviy has a very successful observer position. I tried to talk to him about all this.

– I really want to talk to you about memory. This is about your memoir novel “Stolen Handwriting” and many other of your texts. But my first question is about you: what is your first memory? How do you remember yourself? – I must say that memory, as you know, is a bottomless barrel, and it does not exist at all—in the sense that it needs to be constantly created. How this or that episode emerges, I do not know. For what reason did Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy recall his first relationships with his parents after birth? He made it up, I have no doubt. We all make up some memories. And for what reasons this or that tendency of remembering, I just don’t know. It depends on what you are thinking about. We, like Stalin, change our past for the needs of the present. Jerome Klapka Jerome wrote an essay about memory, where he very accurately described all this. He says that he remembers very well how he fell into a pit in a field in childhood, but does not remember at all how he got out of that pit. In other words, relying on memory, he spent the rest of his life in that pit. We remember different other separate pieces and unrelated parts of life—and, following the laws of memory, our life resembles Roman ruins. However, if we remember our ancestors, then the first memories that, I think, influenced my life are connected not with parents, but with my grandparents, Emmanuil Glezer and Lyubov Glezer, also known as Ginzburg.

My grandfather Emmanuil, who everyone called Musey, had a very adventurous biography, but in my childhood he was a rural doctor in a place called Bobrik-Donnoye. What a wonderful name. I tried to find it, someone told me how it was renamed, then I forgot. You see, much disappears from memory. But this is the Moscow coal basin. And this is a village where there was a farm, where my grandparents lived. My parents sent me there so they could breathe a little freer. In Moscow, we lived in Marfino, where I was born. It was the apartment of my grandfather and grandmother, the first cooperative apartment they bought in the 1930s to live there when they retired. However, naturally, as the years went by, the children, who, as always, were less well-off than their parents, occupied this apartment. It was a completely wonderful classic childhood: family scandals and so on. And everything was in one room, all together, all foldable: camp beds, writing desks, many shelves and all sorts of screens behind which their own life took place, especially parental life. So, I was born in a certain sound orgy, which is probably why I have such a passion for radio. And Grandfather and Grandmother were wonderful people. They studied medicine first at the University of Konigsberg, and then graduated from the University of Berlin. It is unclear why they returned to Russia.

– In which years did they return? After the revolution? – No. It was before the Great October Revolution. Maybe they returned because the grandmother’s father was a very wealthy timber merchant in Belarus. I adored them. The house was absolutely wonderful, because peasants had no money, and therefore paid in kind, so to speak. I remember carts parking in front of the house with vegetables, apples, tomatoes, sometimes meat. In short, it was a fabulous house for me, where apples ripened under every bed, so the whole house smelled of them, and in the hallway there were four huge barrels: one barrel with pickles, the second barrel with slightly salted cucumbers, the third barrel with salted tomatoes, then a barrel with pickled Antonovka apples. So, when I first arrived in New York, I felt like I was transported back to my childhood: there was still a Jewish district, almost a ghetto, where men were standing on the sidewalks selling pickled cucumbers— in Manhattan, Lower East Side— and selling these pickled cucumbers.

About the Berlin past of my grandfather and grandmother, I did not know. I was not interested in family history until I myself ended up in Germany—in 2000, I almost moved to Berlin for three years for various reasons. In those years, I had a recurring dream about our family home, like a serial dream, and the facade of this old house with a tiled roof featured in every “episode”. And during one walk in old Berlin, I suddenly saw a house with a tiled roof— exactly the same facade as in my dream. This house turned out to be the medical faculty of Humboldt University in Berlin. I was in shock. That’s how I found out that my grandfather graduated from there. So I encountered my family’s past in Berlin. This led to a book, unfortunately, only exists in English, called “History Thieves.” This is my monologue on memory.

– In your journal “Demagogue,” the memoir novel “Stolen Handwriting” is published chapter by chapter. Why did you start publishing it now—not 10 years earlier or 10 years later? – I embarked on this strange endeavor because of complete irresponsibility. I thought I would now entertain myself and others with some installations, like Dickens, episode after episode. And I started writing about Asarkan, Ulitin, and Aykenwald immediately after leaving. I started writing about this even in Moscow, of course, but it all took shape more or less in what is called comprehensible by English in the late 1970s, when I produced an exercise called “Toward ‘Artisticity’.” Simply because I was invited to give a lecture at the University of London about my literary past. I had practically no literary past, it had to be invented, so I created this trio: Ulitin, Asarkan, and Aykenwald. These are quite real people. Alexander Asarkan, a wandering philosopher, as I call him, made a living by theater criticism, but his main occupation was homemade collage postcards chronicling his daily life. Pavel Ulitin gave private lessons in English and French, but most importantly, he created prose as abstract collages of conversations. Yuri Aykenwald taught literature in school, but he is a special name in the civil poetry of the 60s and 70s in Moscow. It’s all documented: all major monologues, all situations. But I do not vouch for the accuracy of all the lines and dialogues. And the sequence of events has been slightly adjusted. In short, I don’t know what this is; it can be called fiction, it can be called autofiction, as it is now called. I decided that, in fact, it is senseless to remember the past as such—it is interesting to remember the past that is played out in the present. And I felt that these characters and my personal relationships with them, which I have carried with me for half a century, are eternal. They are eternal primarily for me and therefore eternal for a certain way of thinking and communication. Because all these years, I have traced the echo of these relationships in different cultures, in different literatures, in different stories. Some Moscow plots with Asarkan have been moved, for example, to a Jerusalem context in my novel “Displaced Person”— because of my active correspondence with Moscow in the 70s. But even in the London plot—in the novel “Russophobe and Fungophile” — there is a propagandaist Cloy Pohtlebkin, a real figure, cultivated by Asarkan in Moscow. Tracking this echo of their lines in completely unpredictable characters of a different culture and literature is a story in itself, a modern interesting task that I simply like because my head has always been too full.

– Interestingly, in 2021, “The Schultz Archive” by Vladimir Paperny and “This Is Here” by Mikhail Aizenberg were released, and now “Stolen Handwriting” is coming out. These are all memories of one era, roughly the same circles: both Asarkan and Ulitin are there. What do you attribute this to? – I cannot speak for other authors; they must answer themselves. I know that Vadyk Paperny met with Asarkan long before me; he was one of the first students in Asarkan’s “college.” For him, this meeting was, I have no doubt, a revelation. But he had long experienced this revelation, and already in my time, he had a close and friendly relationship with Asarkan. Pavel Ulitin was never something mysterious and great for him, as for me. I, however, turned the relationship with the trio—Asarkan, Ulitin, Aykenwald— almost into a cult. I retold their monologues, ideas, recorded dialogues with them; in general, I was like an apostle, preached, converted new recruits to this new religion at my weekly “Thursdays.” That is to say, I want to say that what once seemed like friendly banter turned into epochal dimensions, the symbol of an era. After my departure from Russia in 1975, Misha Aizenberg became engrossed in the chronicle of his relationship with Asarkan and Ulitin, not only a great poet, but also a wonderful essayist and memoirist. Our relationship was documented in a wonderful correspondence between Moscow, Jerusalem, and London. So, only the fourth evangelist of this “new testament” is missing. The fourth would probably be Lena Shumilova, who later became a scientific secretary at RGGU. But she is not a writer; what remains for me are thick packets of detailed letters from Moscow about communication with Asarkan and Ulitin after my departure. I do not know who will take on the role of the apostle Paul. Pavel Ulitin is now a classic of Russian avant-garde of the 20th century. We are talking about a certain type of people that we encounter in all cultures. In an ideological regime like the Soviet government or in an era of moral dictatorship, such as America in the 1950s, or in a very strict, harsh literary and cultural tradition in France, such people created their little circles, developed a language that is not a language of active revolutionary resistance, not dissident—in the sense that dissidence was in Soviet Russia, not to mention nihilism or populism at the end of the 19th century. This was not a language against something; it was a different language. And Asarkan and Ulitin understood very well: every language of struggle is a mirror image of your enemy’s speech, with a reverse moral pole, but stylistically, it is the same type of thinking. As Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky said about socialism: wonderful ideas, but the bootiness of the process crushes. Or Ulitin: “In the same language, by the same language.” People like that create their language—it is what I began calling the third language.

This is the third language of personal communication, which has a chance to become a language of public thinking in certain situations. This is a situation of an imperceptible, as if invisible revolution in language. Such a situation arose in Moscow in the 1960s in my circle. The same thing was happening in America in the 1950s and 1960s when Ray Johnson created The New York Correspondence School: they were creating a culture of communication among themselves through personal correspondence. The situationists in France in the 1960s and 1970s belonged there too. The “Cambridge Apostles” before World War II. Or the circle of the poet Alexander Pope in 18th-century England. Such friendly alliances can be traced in all times, in all civilizations. And the Talmudists and the earliest Christian communities were alliances of the same kind. In short, it became clear to me after leaving Russia that this culture of personal communication, the attempt to find a third language—like the beatniks, say, the zaum of William Burroughs—this trend is actually not related to the purely Moscow situation that I experienced. And finding these parallel connections gave me the opportunity to look at the whole history called “Stolen Handwriting” in a different way. It is already a discussion of past events as a chronicle in the present. Or as a memory, as if it is being experienced now.

– Yes, today we also want to find that third language. – Of course, we want to find the third language. My great psychoanalytic theory is that everyone is born bilingual. In the sense that in English it is called the mother tongue, the mother’s language—it is the first language, almost meaningless, with which the mother addresses her child. And then the child turns away from the mother’s breast and begins to communicate with the father—with the external world. This is no longer the mother tongue but the fatherland, the language of social communication. I imagine the existence of a kind of neutral language, this third language, where both of them are played out. To express your wordless inner world, you need a language of the external world. You must learn this external language. Through imitation, mimicry. Therefore, in “Stolen Handwriting,” there are so many motifs— who imitates whom, who is the original, and who is the shadow, the double. And the maneuvering between these extremes is life, because you do not want to succumb to the dictatorship of the common language, but you understand that if you speak the mother’s language—your own, specific—no one will understand you. As, for example, with all my knowledge of the nuances of English, I find it difficult to follow, say, the squabble of construction workers in a familiar pub in Kent, and no Englishman can understand the kids’ chatter in the working-class districts of Glasgow. A kind of translator to another common language is needed. In this sense, my experience of communicating with Asarkan and Ulitin, with Aykenwald, with their special unique language in the general Soviet context, this experience has curiously begun to be played out in my English life, when I entered it with my “native” Russian.

– I think that your destiny, your creativity, and such conversations are often associated with escape: emigration, going beyond the norm of the accepted, etc. How important is this possibility of escape to you not as a writer, but as a human being? – The thing is that we all tend to confuse heroes with their authors; this is completely natural. But it should be noted that I don’t write about myself. Even if I steal some episodes from my own life. I have lived here [in London] for 50 years, an exceedingly happy life: I don’t need to escape anywhere, I don’t need to renounce anyone, I don’t need to fend off from any official language forced on me from above, no one suggests I politely shut up. I was stripped of my citizenship when I left Russia in 1975. After the fall of Soviet power, there was a period when Russian passports were distributed—citizenship was restored to exiles. An application had to be submitted. Of course, I did not want a Russian passport. I was 29 when I left. That’s a very serious age, and I remember a lot. It leaves its mark. But never before did the thought of returning to this past, to Russia, cross my mind. Never. I did not escape anywhere, although the authorities in Moscow began to treat me with some concern: the KGB asked neighbors who was visiting me, I was fired from my job for signing a protest letter, they tried to call me up for military service. But I don’t believe prison or labor camps were waiting for me. I think I became associated with the phenomenon of emigration because I invented a very catchy title for my London book of essays, “Emigration as a Literary Device.” “Emigration” was a fashionable word, but I’m not an emigrant—not a French aristocrat fleeing into exile from the guillotine. I’m not in exile or in a mission—I’m in discovery. I didn’t go to another country; I went to another life. It turned out to be English. So all these stories and novels (about 18 books) are not about me. It’s about people who can’t move from the point of departure—who think that their stay abroad is temporary, who judge the other new life prejudicially, through old cliches, as if through broken glasses. They changed their geography of life but not their thinking. Or they’re simply not interested in this new life. It’s sad. It’s a tragedy. And this tragedy is repeated throughout Russian history. Something similar happened with the white emigres. And with my Third Wave of mass departure in the 70s. It’s sad to witness how a whole plethora of today’s relokants preaches the same prejudice of stereotypical thinking in other countries—in literature, in politics, and even in personal communication; the same thinking that they peacefully coexisted with in Putin’s Russia. It’s interesting that when I write in English, the same, seemingly, themes move to a completely different level. In short, there is a difference between the author’s life and the life of his heroes.

– What distinguishes the Russian Zinoviy Zinik from the English one? – Now, perhaps, they are no longer very different. But about thirty years ago, I still wrote in Russian as a Muscovite who found himself in London. Now, even when I think about my Moscow past or my Moscow friends, I write—in Russian or in English—as a Londoner. It’s just a point of view, a perspective, and nothing more, but this change of perspective is very, very significant. I base my thinking, emotions on my present—in my current geography, in politics. It’s a matter of the point of view. And also of understanding that each of us has not one past but several. In this sense, I probably have to call myself an English writer who writes in Russian. It is not surprising that I have an extremely limited audience. When communicating in English, I never translate my thoughts from Russian to English; it’s English speech from the outset. Prose is an accumulation of such verbal noise. This noise is different, of course, in different languages. When you switch to English, you find yourself in a different play. The characters of this spectacle have a different daily routine, different ideas, myths, and, most importantly, different references, literary quotations in conversations—it’s a different world. All the worlds intersect somewhere; the Russian elite already speaks terrible russified English, everyone translates. But the ideological obsessions are very different despite all the successful attempts to translate Shakespeare into the language of native aspens.

– Do you choose on which language to write the next text? Do external circumstances influence this—**, for example? – Any war is always beyond the language. In war, you moo and shoot at the enemy. I say this to you as a person who underwent a young soldier’s training in two armies.