Caroline Clark interviewed by Rowena Macdonald.
This interview was put together before the war in Ukraine started. I don’t know how I would have answered the questions differently but I do feel the need to add something. It’s become increasingly apparent from watching the news over the last few days and seeing the young Ukrainian MPs that they have moved on from the Soviet Union in a way that Russia has not. That end date we have of 1991 was by no means the end of all things Soviet — Caroline Clark
Sovetica (CB Editions, 2021) is drawn from Caroline Clark’s conversations with her Russian husband, Andrei Nikiforov, about his childhood and adolescence during the 1980s in Zhukovsky, a town 25 miles from Moscow. Caroline is a poet but the book also reads like a series of tiny short stories and as an elliptical memoir of a time and place that I used to wonder about as a child of a similar age to Andrei. Though I have never been to Russia, it has long held a vivid place in my imagination — perhaps because my parents were members of CND and I lived in terror of a nuclear war between the West and Russia. Perhaps because in 1986 I was due to go on a school trip to Moscow, which would have been my first time abroad, but then Chernobyl blew up, so the trip was cancelled because of fears we would get irradiated. In short, Sovetica touched me and it would touch anyone who has a passing interest in late Soviet Russia. Caroline and I were introduced some years ago by the writer, David Rose, who has written the Afterword to this book. We connected over the fact we have both lived in Montreal and then, later, we had cancer within a couple of years of each other, at an unfairly young age, while also dealing with small children. Caroline now lives in Lewes, where she grew up, and this is where I started (and quickly abandoned) my first career as a journalist on the Sussex Express. When I read Sovetica I immediately wanted to know more about it. Here is my interview with Caroline:
3:AM: How did Sovetica come about?
Caroline Clark: Sovetica grew slowly over many years. It started back when I was living in Moscow in the early 2000s, Andrei showed me some stereo slides he had made in the late ‘80s. I talk about them at the end of the book. They fascinated me. How you peer into the viewer and look into these pictures of the past. You have to hold them up to the light and then they come alive. Then there was his way of telling stories about growing up: I was again fascinated — this time by the ease and fluency with which he spoke. In my first collection, Saying Yes in Russian, there are three poems about ‘malchik’ — ‘boy’, where I retell some of his stories (the Big Mac story features in both books), but there is one other — ‘At Play’ — which paved the way for Sovetica. It starts: ‘I was Stalin, he was Beria, / Pasha was Mandelstam.’
A few years later, at the end of 2018, I was invited to submit some work to Snow lit rev. I’d just been through a year of treatment for breast cancer and didn’t know what to send: recent stuff wasn’t ready. I trawled through my notebooks and found three early versions of some of Andrei’s stories. I quickly edited and sent them under the title Sovetica. Their acceptance encouraged me to write up more of Andrei’s stories as I already had lots of conversations recorded.
In January 2021 I emailed Charles Boyle of CB editions, and he took on the book. After this acceptance I wrote a third of what you see today.
3:AM: Can you explain your writing process, because although Sovetica has a beautiful artless casual quality, I know it is carefully shaped?
CC: I did at one time try laying them out like poems but very soon I realised they needed to stay blockish. That was their form. And whether they were poems or stories I couldn’t say. I called them soveti-texts for fun, but I can say they come from the same place as poems. They bite in the same way — a good way, and that’s when I know they’re done. They are of my making, of my fascination and of my attention.
The conversations were originally in Russian. Sometimes Andrei would tell me a memory and I’d dash to record it; sometimes I’d ask questions to get more details. I’d first translate them into English, then I’d edit and work with this. Some needed only very light adjustments, some more, but I made nothing up. In this way, the words are not my own. But in another way, they are very much my own.
Throughout I’ve thought a lot about permission and using others’ stories. Perhaps what I do here is comparable to being a photographer: Andrei is my subject, and I have his permission. I was very interested to read recently the wonderful Osebol: Voices from a Swedish Village by Marit Kapla. She works with verbatim language but shapes the lines on the page, some short, some longer.
The title — Sovetica — is a made-up word. It’s not entirely ‘Soviet’, missing that ‘i’. I pronounce it ‘sovyetica’ with a Russian ‘e’. It feels neater this way, not so political and it has something of a collective noun about it like marginalia and memorabilia.
3:AM: For me Sovetica reads like a series of very short stories. Did you ever have the impulse to make them longer or write a more conventional memoir of Andrei’s childhood?
CC: I can’t say strongly enough: no! I really feel that this is the only form I can put them in. It feels right. Like other writers, I have learnt when something feels wrong. Trying to make more out of them would feel wrong.
3:AM: You lived in Moscow for ten years. Why did you move there and what was your experience of Russia?
CC: I studied Russian and German at Exeter University. But as happens with lots who take Russian with another language, the Russian just completely won me over. This was partly because the department was smaller and the sense of community greater, partly because of the new culture that was opened up to me by wonderful teachers. In my year abroad, while the other students went to Yaroslavl (150 miles north-east of Moscow), I went alone to Moscow. And then after graduating I moved back straight away. I just made my life there teaching English and translating. I loved it, but I had the privilege of knowing I could always leave.
The biggest shock, funnily enough, was when I saw how quickly capitalism had spread. I was there in 1997-8 and there were kiosks, there were Mars Bars, Ariel and Bold washing powder, but there were still shops with the Soviet kassa system: you’d tell the server behind the counter what you wanted, take a handwritten receipt to the till (kassa) and pay and then go back and pick up your purchase. When I went back in late 1999 I was astounded by the new supermarkets, the pyramids of cans, the free plastic bags at the check-out. The flashing neon signs.
At first I was also shocked by how seemingly unassertive a lot of women were. I felt loud next to them, as though I was always doing something wrong. I think that’s changed now, and my first impressions weren’t necessarily correct, but I remember how one young woman came up to me and said, ‘you’re so emancipated’, which in one way summed up our differences well.
3:AM: How did you meet Andrei?
CC: In a Moscow nightclub called Vermel in 2000. He was wearing a baggy jumper and offered me a Sprite, which I found dispiriting. He later told me it was out of respect.
3:AM: America comes across like a promised land to Andrei and his friends when he was a teenager in Russia. He talks about how beautiful America looks in the Lassie films, and how he wishes he could have a colour Sony TV as his family only has an old black and white TV. I also loved the poem where he describes how he hears a Queen song — ‘I heard a guy singing/ bicycle, bicycle. I just/ liked the way he sang/ it and asked who’s that?’ What were Andrei’s feelings for the West then?
CC: Unlike his other friends, Andrei was desperate to get to the United States. He dreamed of it. He wanted that kind of freedom he saw expressed quite specifically in material things. You can’t get a better sense of this other than to read the poems/stories. He was the only one of his friends to settle abroad. We moved West together in 2007. First to Montreal and then to the UK. Our stories became entangled and I can’t speak for him, but I think it’d be hard to give a quick answer to this. It was a long and, at times, difficult journey here. Not least because of the UK’s visa system for non-EEA spouses.
3:AM: I loved the poem ‘Culture’, in which Andrei describes how ‘At that time in Russia all the shops/ were empty and there was nothing/ left to drink. All the eau de cologne/ had been drunk, all the lotions,’ and his family go on a train trip to Georgia and ‘not only was there eau de cologne/ in stock but there was even vodka…They had/ cars. And culture too.’ What was going on in Russia at that time and why was Georgia so different?
CC: It’s helpful to remember that in a Soviet passport, it would read: Citizenship: USSR, Ethnicity: Russian/Georgian/Ukrainian, etc. To various extents each republic preserved a sense of its own culture — Georgia very much so. Andrei was very struck by the differences he saw: how children were brought up with a deeper knowledge of their traditions — dancing for example, food and a greater sense of family. If someone started to drink too much, the whole family would, as a rule, get involved. Andrei tells me he remembers the Georgians to be better dressed, the houses nicer, the cars better. Of course, it’s further south and as such the vineyards and variety of food also added to his impressions.
He remembers the Gorbachev era as being a very difficult time for Russians. There was widespread poverty and alcoholism. Gorbachev famously led an anti-alcohol campaign and this drove some to drink anything they could find, including eau de cologne.
3:AM: For me there is a great feeling of freedom about Andrei’s childhood in late Communist Russia. What did he and his friends gain and lose from growing up under Communism? And what did they go on to do?
CC: There is a great sense of free-roaming camaraderie, isn’t there? He has spoken about how the free education and housing gave him and his friends a good start in life. They all seemed to display some kind of entrepreneurial spark, which was an impulse behind many of their adventures. Later it led to something more practical. Oleg, who is in several of the photos, is now the director of a large factory. ‘Horse’ is an engineer and often travels to the States. Pasha has his own workshop and stone carving business. Sliva is a private driver. Ilya, who took the black-and-white photos [see above], is a geodesist, and Andrei became a database programmer. Most of his friends have comfortable lives now; they have houses or flats, cars, loans that they can repay. But he has a few friends who have sadly died: some from illness, others from drug addiction.
He finds it hard to say what he lost out on. None of his friends mourn the demise of the USSR, but equally, like lots of children of his generation, they would say they had happy childhoods.
3:AM: Sovetica has a lightness to it although there are poignant aspects. The Soviet system doesn’t seem particularly oppressive in your book. Was this true or have you not focused on the strictures?
CC: I don’t think anyone will take this as a comprehensive overview of the USSR in the 1980s. These are one boy’s memories of growing up. Some of his memories. Mostly the fun ones. But there’s something else there too, isn’t there: a sense of the pointlessness of what he’s being told to do and yearning to get away, which is part of all adolescence, but also very specifically for the things they weren’t allowed. He talks about how they wanted to live like normal people: to be able to go to the shop, for example, and buy a chicken without standing in a queue.
3:AM: How did Andrei’s parents adjust to the fall of Communism?
CC: As you’ll remember in the book, there’s a story about how he sold his father’s army overcoat for two months’ worth of his mother’s wages. He sold it at the tourist market, which was where early tourists would go for Soviet paraphernalia. They desperately needed the money at the time and he knew his father would never have agreed because it was part of his uniform for official occasions. Eventually Andrei even had a stall there and when he started bringing home money, his father slowly started to see that this was necessary.
In the ‘90s and 2000s his father worked as a security specialist (he had previously been a major in the army) and his mother retrained as an accountant (she had been an engineer). When I first met them they were wonderfully welcoming. His father was very much like my Italian relatives in hospitality and warmth.
3:AM: Although Sovetica has been generally well received, I’m aware you’ve had one negative reaction from a Russian person. Could you explain why, and also give us Andrei’s feelings about the book?
CC: There was one early reaction: a Russian woman living in the UK emailed to say how dare I slander the Soviet Union like this, how much the Soviet Union had done for her and how joyful her memories were. She’d seen a few excerpts online. I did write back a few times to explain how, among other things, Andrei’s childhood had been joyful too, but she was set on the idea that I was slandering the USSR. Of course, she hadn’t read the book, so how could we have a discussion?
When it was first published, Andrei would read it in bed at night and almost die laughing (I wish I’d recorded him). ‘Yes,’ he’d shout out, ‘it really was like that’, or ‘he really did do that’. A couple of Russian and Polish friends have told us how funny they found it too. He loves the book. It’s dedicated to our daughters as lots of these stories were told as ‘daddy’s naughty stories’.
3:AM: You clearly love Russia and its culture. Could you explain why?
CC: When I chose to study Russian at university, it wasn’t because I loved the culture and the country. I’d just happened to do a Russian GCSE along with my A levels. I knew languages were my thing and so I chose to carry on learning it, then I started to love it. I grew into it. I spent nearly all my twenties there; I learnt a new way of being. Andrei and I speak Russian together at home. It was never a conscious decision, it’s just the way things have always been. I don’t feel Russian, of course, but I have a Russian element in me now. How to separate out those things? I can’t directly.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Caroline Clark’s first collection is Saying Yes in Russian (Agenda Editions, 2012) and her second is Sovetica (CB editions, 2021). Her translation of a long essay by Olga Sedakova, In Praise of Poetry, came out with Open Letter Books in 2014. She edited the novel Meridian by David Rose (Unthank, 2015). She has a new book, Own Sweet Time (in part a verbatim transcript of her cancer diagnosis), forthcoming from CB editions. Here are three excerpts from Russian conversations on which Sovetica is based.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Rowena Macdonald’s first book, Smoked Meat (Flambard Press, 2011) is an interlinked collection of stories set in the demi-monde of Montreal. It was shortlisted for the 2012 Edge Hill Prize. Her debut novel, The Threat Level Remains Severe (Gallic Books, 2017) is set in the House of Commons, where she has worked for the past twenty years. It was shortlisted for the 2017 Guardian Not the Booker Prize. She is currently writing a novel set in Selfridges.
