Saga o Forsaitakh

PERSONAL COLUMN 11130R SZAMUELX

Once every week for the past five months, as regularly as The Forsyte Saga appears on the television screen, I have been steeping myself in gentle nostalgia. This may seem strange, considering that I was only born many years after 'the end of the Edwardian era, at a point in time somewhere towards the middle of A Modern Comedy. But what I am feeling nostalgic about is not the lost world of the Forsytes: it is my youth in Moscow. For The Forsyte Saga has been, is, and will probably go on being one of the supreme favourites of the great fiction-loving Soviet public.

Galsworthy would certainly be surprised were he to know that it was in Bolshevik Russia, of all places, that his magnum opus had found its most secure home. Hardly a year passes without some Russian state publishing house putting out another 100,000 or 200,000 Or 300,000 copies of the two unwieldy three- decker volumes. The market for the Forsytes seems inexhaustible. One sees people balancing the books on their knees in the Metro, on park benches, in suburban trains. The huge Forsyte cast—Soames, Irene, the two Jolyons, Mont and Monty and old Uncle Timothy Forsyte and all—and every intricate ramification of their family tree are as familiar to cultured Russians as their own family relationships.

I have often wondered what it was that made Saga o Forsaitakh more popular in Russia than the work of any other twentieth century English novelist. Wells is Popular, but only for his science fiction; hardly anyone has even heard of Bennett or Conrad; Hardy is regarded as a high- brow; Lawrence and Joyce are evil spirits from whom the decent-minded Soviet reader must at all costs be protected. Of course, it is notoriously difficult to find rational explanations for any country's popular reading tastes, and certain factors peculiar to the Soviet scene render this problem infinitely more complex (which is why I deliberately omit all mention of contemporary authors). I refer 'not only to the political decisions, taken regardless of literary merit, about which authors to publish and which to consign to the nether darkness. Frequently these things are influenced by much more bizarre historico-sentimental considerations. Jack London, for example, owes his enormous popularity in large measure to the widely publicised fact that the dying Lenin asked his wife to read him some of London's stories. With a write-up like that, who needs publishers' blurbs?

HoWever, one must look elsewhere for the explanation of the phenomenon of Saga o Forsaitakh. It is certainly a work in the tradi- tion of the Russian classical noveL And Russians, conservative in this as in many other matters, prefer. those foreign writers who bear a familial resemblance to the great names of their own literary past. Dickens is a case in point—he is much more widely read in Russia than in his own country. On the other hand, the very 'un-Russian' Jane Austen, to the best of my knowledge, has never been translated into Russian, and is not mentioned, even in passing, in the ten-volume Small Soviet Encyclopaedia—unlike such eminent nineteenth century English female writers as Margaret Harkness (dates of birth and death unknown). True, nobody, has ever heard of Miss Harkness here or anywhere else, yet she

rates a separate Encyclopaedia article of her own, as she once had the good fortune to receive a letter 'from Frederick Engels himself. The Brontës have only begun to be published in the last few years, and are little known—although I once saw with my own eyes a trolleybus driver driving his bus with an open copy of Wuthering. Heights propped up before him.

Which brings me 'to the most obvious and familiar point : Russians of all classes like serious literature, they are brought up to like it, and they enjoy reading it. Well-meaning but ill- informed people in the West often draw mis- leading conclusions from this fact. 'Oh, look,' they exclaim, 'there's that young crane-operator reading War and Peace! And see that girl ditch-digger relaxing over Madame Bovary! And have you noticed—nobody reads James Bond or sexy paperbacks? Well, the system may have its faults, but it has certainly taught the people an admirable set of values.'

Alas, this assumption—like so many super- ficial observations made with great aplomb on flat basis of a few weeks' privileged stay—is essentially incorrect. The crane-operator reads War and Peace and the giyl ditch-digger Madame Bovary, not because they prefer them to sex-and-violence paperbacks, but because they have never been given the choice. Soviet printing presses do not publish thrillers, detec- tive stories, sexy novels—anything smacking of sadism or eroticism, or rather, of what the Party regards as sadism and eroticism.

Nevertheless, Soviet readers are allowed a certain choice in their reading matter: the choice between the Russian classics and trans- lations of western literature, on the one hand, and the works of Soviet authors, on the other. Their preference can be in no doubt to anyone who has seen the huge stacks of modern Soviet novels piled up unsold in the bookshops, and the disappointed faces of customers told that the last copy of the French or English or American translation they wanted had been sold ten minutes ago—upon which they proceed to the black market, where they are sure of finding it at double or triple price.

This contrast provides the key to Russian reading tastes. For the Soviet mass reader the works of western and pre-revolutionary authors constitute a vast fund of escapist literature. We in the west, of course, also have our escapist literature—and pretty unsavoury it can be at times. But in our society escapist reading is only one among a great variety of outlets for release and relaxation. The Soviet citizen, however, has nothing but books: he cannot escape from everyday communist reality by switching on the telly or tuning his radio or picking up a glossy magazine or going to a cinema or theatre or club (save for the very occasional foreign or classical offerings). The entertainment media have long ago been trans- formed into means of propaganda. Stage and screen and printed page: all blare out the current party line.

Books—any books, as long as they are by non-Soviet authors—offer the sole refuge. Nor is this all: while our Mickey Spillanes and Grace Metaliouses provide escape routes to a world of self-evident fantasy, the main function of non-Soviet novels for the Russian reader is

to open up a window on reality. The out- side world is terra incognita, and Russians, although inordinately curious, are barred from visiting it. Yet they know that the official picture inculcated in them since childhood by every means of indoctrination is distorted and false.

There is only one breach in the mighty wall of unified ideology that hems them in : the realm of fiction. Fiction is the sole source of truthful information and of non-political entertainment. Foreign novelists alone are allowed to tell the Soviet reader about life in the mysterious, tan- talising, opulent, irresistible west.

And here, I believe, we have approached the secret of the Forsytes' fascination for Russians.

If ever writer painted a realistic picture of a

way of life utterly, and alluringly, dissimilar to that of the Soviet citizen, it was Galsworthy. The Forsytes have their matrimonial entangle- ments (who doesn't? sighs the Russian reader),

but apart from that they possess everything man could dream of : security, stability, property, assurance in the present and confi- dence in the future. And all this described in loving, mouth-watering detail. After half a century of propertyleSs existence, of instability, insecurity, overcrowding and shortages, the world of the Forsytes is the nearest thing to heaven that Russians can read about.

Saga o Forsaitakh is a better source of vicari- ous enjoyment than their own classical novas of upper-class life: it is about ordinary people, not aristocrats; about the life of a great city, got old-world country estates; and, most important of all, this life did not come to a sudden end in 1917, but continues, with certain modifica- tions, to the present day. Therefore one is free from the constant nagging apprehension 'That's all very well, but what is going to happen to you (or your children) come the revolution?,' and can whole-heartedly identify oneself with the members of this fortunate society. One can light one's cigar, go to one's club, buy a new house, travel to Paris, draw money from one's bank, and do many other equally fascinating things—all secure in the knowledge that this life has never been, nor ever will be, broken up by a 'proletarian revolution.' What bliss!

Those two marvellous Soviet satirists, Ilf and Petrov, once described a certain very com- mon category of their countrymen : people who assiduously visit the museums and stately homes, but once there evince no interest in the surroundings or the artistic value of the exhibits. Instead they touch the furniture, feel the up- holstery, eye the ornaments, calculate the size of the rooms—all the while sorrowfully mut- tering 'Ah. didn't people live though!' Not for them the name of the painter, the style of the architecture, the period of the porcelain : they are only curious about what the former owners ate, how they entertained, how many servants they had, how much fuel they consumed—and what it all would have cost at present-day prices. Fifty years after the revolution this pathetic curiosity about other people's way of life is more prevalent than ever. 'Ah, didn't people live though!' they think when they hear about it. And most often, probably, when they read and re-read The Forsyte Saga.

Every week, watching the television screen and remembering my Moscow days, I cannot help thinking: what an opportunity for the BBC to strike a knock-down blow at our balance of payments deficit. Never has it had the pros- pect of a better market or a more receptive audience. Go east, Sir Hugh!