Moscow nights

Ronald Hingley Moscow Farewell George Feifer (Jonathan Cape E4.95)

To leaf through this publication, in the dismembered proof form in which it reached me, was to receive an array of disturbing impressions. Here, it seemed, was yet another book on Russia' such as 1 have perhaps reviewed to excess over the years. ('Galya looked up quizzically. "But you see," she said, "Soviet Youth '1

Then came an unnerving surprise: elements of what appeared middling to hard Pornography. As soon became obvious, if any Galya looked up quizzically in these Pages it would not be in order to discuss the Problems of Soviet Youth, but rather to draw breath in mid-fellatio.

Could it be (I wondered) that Mr Feifer, n American journalist, had conceived the Inspired idea of wedding two hitherto disParate genres of commercial titivation, simultaneously lifting the veil of the Kremlin and the bedroom in order, as it were, to erect the largest graffito of all time on the world's largest urinal wall ? Such was my first impression.

The material is based on extended visits to Moscow made between 1959-71, including a Year as an exchange graduate student. Solemnly warned at the outset by the US Embassy to eschew 'sexual fraternisation', the young man promptly turned this wellMeant but officious warning on its head. Muscovite girls were, he soon discovered, the easiest 'lay' on the face of the globe, driven by the sheer boredom of their lives to overfulfil, with casual exuberance, their 11„orm in performing woman's primal role. tatistically speaking, however, the col!eetive yield lags well behind Soviet election iires, for it turns out that an 11 per cent Tallure rate must be allowed for with atternpted pick-ups. This is the authoritative view of Mr Feifer's main informant and Chief initiator into group sex a Ia russe, a

mass fornicator called Alyosha Aksyonov.

Far outstripping Don Juan's conquests (with the mere 1,003 Spanish episodes so pompously listed by Mozart's Leporello), this Alyosha did once try to compute his overall score, but had to stop counting at the staggering figure of 3,000 conquests. Girls were always coming and going, particularly the former, in a series of orgies staged in his Moscow flat, often on their way to or from abortions and newly married or divorced husbands. To cater for all eventualities, the genial host maintained an assortment of anti-crab salves, syringes and do-ityourself specifics against syphilis. Before and between copulations he liked to bath, wine and dine the young women. Now in his lusty fifties, he energetically apprenticed young George to his arduous craft, with the result that this fledgling seducer and naïve New Yorker acquired a knowledge of Russian life, in this particularly intimate sense, greater than that of any other foreign or Russian observer known to me.

Being unusually prone to find secondhand, retailed, theoretical sexual activity boring, I took a lot of converting to Mr Feifer's approach, but was eventually won over by certain sterling virtues which make the whole mixture, in the end, palatable.

The chief of these is the patent sincerity of the author in trying to get at the truth. He wanted all the girls, yes; he showed that in the most practical way. But he also wanted to discover something : not only about Russians, but about human nature in general and above all, naturally enough, about himself. As a second generation New York Jew and graduate of the wrong Cambridge, the young Harvarder had naturally felt somewhat insecure as an American citizen. He therefore found himself far more at home in the slummy squalor of Moscow, where merely to be a foreigner—especially an American—is widely recognised as a meritorious achievement in itself.

All this is much less absurd than it is bound to sound in a brief résumé. I welcome in Mr Feifer the absence of self-exposure for its own sake, astonishing though this may seem in a book which consists almost exclusively of blatant self-revelation. Still, the fact is that we live in an age when many eminent men—politicians and ego-trip academics especially—seem chiefly engaged in trying to demonstrate that they possess the largest and most purple bottoms in the world's mandrill cage. This distasteful jactitatory element Mr Feifer's book wholesomely lacks. Nor is his one of those

'books on Russia' which imply that the most important episode in the country's evolution is the author's own condescension in visiting it. Nor yet, an even greater relief, does Feifer use the account of his priapic athleticism in order to claim credit marks for superior manhood. There is not a trace here, thank heavens, of any Hemingway syndrome. By now, presumably, young George has long been able to take his virility for granted, like any proper grown man, without having to be constantly exercised in proving it.

Finding Moscow wallowing in squalor barely conceivable to the uninitiated, Mr Feifer concentrates a great deal on distasteful topics: the common native practice of wearing a single pair of unwashed socks or underpants throughout the winter, not to mention all the ejaculating, vomiting, expectorating, urinating, menstruating and excreting episodes which besmear or lend depth to this work. He successfully suspended any natural squeamishness in order to achieve oneness with the huddling. bundling, smelly Russians with their love of close human contact. That this side of Russian nature exists is undeniable. But in my own experience there are also plenty of Russians such as Mr Feifer apparently did not meet and who are as allergic to undifferentiated human togetherness as I gladly confess myself to be. Still, since Feifer's ability to muck in provided him with so much scope for acute observation and analysis, it can only be praised. Moreover, he freely admits that his own highly exotic contacts were not typical of the drab population as a whole.

Nowhere are Mr Feifer's talents more effectively deployed than in the detailed character study of the book's main figure, the above-mentioned satyriasis-blessed panfornicator Alyosha Aksyonov. A fascinating, complex, almost Shakespearian figure, the great legal fixer and wheeler-dealer also has something of Leskov's Enchanted Wanderer and of Ilf and Petrov's Ostap Bender about him. This impressive embodiment of the human spirit at its most resilient and unconquerable (I write entirely without irony) eventually dies of cancer, the details of his sufferings being harrowingly recounted. To George Feifer, Alyosha's death was a supremely tragic experience, the loss of his closest friend. It also gave the KGB an opportunity to attempt to blackmail Feifer into becoming an agent, an episode somewhat tediously described.

Nor is Mr Feifer at all convincing in hymning the charms of his 'Anastasia' : the hyper-volatile young woman whom he describes as peeing all over the place, with whom he fell in love, and whom he wanted to marry. Seemingly polarised in his sexual attitudes, he apparently likes a female either to be totally, instantly and submissively available or else to lead him no end of a frustrating dance. Personally I prefer more of a compromise.

While accepting and learning much from George Feifer's analysis, I cannot, to put it mildly, shire his desire to be so much at one with the Russians or any other collective entity. But I honour him for his ability to talk of his sexual and other exploits without bragging or boring; as also for the knack of discussing his Jewishness without belabouring one with it. I don't like his prose style, which is somewhat biased in the direction of journalistic deathless prose. His book would have been better pruned. He reveals little of any sense of humour which he may possess, and this seems a grave deficiency in anyone undertaking the close scrutiny of matters Russian. There is, too, something intangibly blurred about the general cut of Feifer's jib as he projects it on paper. He is not, in his literary persona, one of my own supreme elective affinities.

In spite of these powerful but largely subjective reservations this is far and away the most informative, authoritative and stimulating book on Russian life which has come my way for a very long time. [salute George Feifer's enterprise, his vitality, his concern with the riddle of existence—and even, in a way, his good taste.