Freedom's just another name for nothing left to lose?
Andro Linklater
DREAMS ON HITLER'S COUCH by Vitali Vitaliev Richard Cohen Books, L12.99, pp. 277 The background of the furniture in question is complex, but easily unravelled compared to that of the dreamer. Constructed in the heavy Biedemeyer style beloved by 19th-century Austrians, the couch seemingly passed into the Fiihrer's possession and thence to a Nazi who settled in Tasmania. There one night in 1996 it provides a bed, and eventually a literary device, for Vitali Vitaliev, a Ukrainian-born, Russian journalist who seven years ago fled to Britain, and for a time to Australia, with his wife and son. If history was the nightmare from which Stephen Dedalus was trying to awake, the dream that envelopes Vitaliev is freedom, and the fearful, only half-answered
question hovering inside this febrile collection of reminiscences is, what do you awake to when you are living out your dream?
Unlike most Russian émigrés, Vitaliev was famous in the West before he arrived, thanks to regular appearances as an ironic and witty commentator on life in the Soviet Union on the Clive James Show. Once here, television, newspapers and magazines, including The Spectator, competed to employ him, and soon, with a house in Melbourne, a swimming-pool, credit cards, and an expanding waistline, he had most of the materialist rewards that capitalism has to offer.
It is easy to see why he was so immedi- ately in demand. He writes with a human- ist's appetite, and an outsider's discrimination, for social oddity. Thus, watching the reluctance of Londoners to touch one another even in a crowded Tube, he hears the station announcement, 'Mind the gap!', as an instruction to maintain the social proprieties. In Holland, he notes with pleasure that one per cent of the prison budget is spent on art. And illustrat-
mg the intense inner life fostered by Soviet restrictions, he quotes the Moscow intellectual who says grandly to his friend, `I want to go to Paris again'. 'I didn't think you'd been there', the friend replies. 'I haven't', says the intellectual, 'but I want to again.'
Yet he was to find that freedom imposed its own obligations. The Australian good life began to induce what a compatriot termed 'spiritual heartburn', and when he decided to return to London, his marriage broke up. He started sinking into a miasma of alcohol, lonely hearts columns, and psychotherapy, and this uneven book records his attempt to find a personal moral framework that would give purpose to a life of freedom. Even at his lowest he is never self-pitying, merely referring to the old Soviet crack about the pessimist saying gloomily, 'Things are so bad they can't get worse', only to be contradicted by the optimist insisting brightly, 'Oh yes they can!', but the search is evidently still in progress.
As the book makes clear, the individual- ism that drove him to find a way round, and eventually an escape from, Soviet restrictions, also prevented him accepting any limitations on his freedom. In a reveal- ing story, he tells of his fury when some privileged people are let inside the railings of Buckingham Palace to see the changing of the guard while he is kept outside with all the other onlookers. Then peering through the crowd, he sees that the privileged are a group of mentally handicapped children, and he bursts into tears of shame at his anger.
There is great charm in this emotional roller-coastering, but it evidently reads better than it lives. And that also is part of his problem. The columnist's life is in the purest sense epiphytic, that is, it is nourished by the surrounding atmosphere rather than by roots. Vitaliev's trade, which requires him to travel and observe, ensures that he remains a perpetual exile unable to settle and participate.
Momentary twitchings suggest that he is about to awaken from this nightmare of non-attachment — a turbulent romance offers glimpses of happiness, a Korean martial arts class gives a taste of self- discipline — but he is still asleep on the couch. Yet paradoxically his restless journeying around the globe does in the end provide the book with an inner cohesion. What brings him back to Europe are the virtues of ancientness — stability, roots, history — and they, it is exasperat- ingly obvious, happen to be precisely what he seeks in himself. In A Voice from the Chorus, his great predecessor on the road to freedom, Andrei Sinyaysky, observed, they are to have a soul, things must be ancient.' In other words, for all its contem- porary concerns, Dreams on Hitler's Couch really belongs to that rich seam of Russian literature whose theme is the search for a soul.
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