They came dropping pearls and vermin

With Vesna Goldsworthy on the game of broken telephone between the east and the west

Hello! Pardon the radio silence; COVID hit the LP Towers on Labour Day weekend and made work impossible for about a week. This is why there was no September in Arts dispatch, and why this is later than planned. Back to the regular programming soon. To my new subscribers: welcome!

Vesna Goldsworthy (photo by Jonathan Greet)

Vesna Goldsworthy, British author who grew up in Belgrade, Serbia, in what was then Yugoslavia, is probably best known on our side of the anglosphere as the author of Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination, a 1998 study of the weird and wonderful things that British literature imagined about Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Her novel Gorsky (2015) is a reworking of The Great Gatsby as a crime-tinged drama of Russian wealth in London, while Monsieur K (2018) imagines Anna Karenina’s son as an aged émigré living in Chiswick. Her latest, Iron Curtain, out in North America in February 2023, is a smooth and compelling read with a narrator whose snark brings to mind the ladies of the Red Scare podcast as well as Ninotchka. We’ve met recently in London, where I sought her out to ask her about the still persistent line “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic” that divides the European continent.

__“I’m from a small and insignificant nation in an insignificant corner of Europe and I’m glad this is so.” I am going to start using this when people ask me when I’m originally from. This is said by the narrator of your novel Gorsky, who comes from our part of the world. My impression is that your fiction centres Russians, though; is this a conscious decision?

VG: No... There are no Russians other than as shadows in Iron Curtain, and each of the previous two novels, Monsieur K and Gorsky, grew differently. It’s by accident that they both feature Russians. Gorsky is about the Russian presence in London in the late noughties. London was called Londongrad; that moment has now passed. One evening I was at a loose end between books, I was going to a party in Belgravia and as I approached the building I saw this long line of cars and incredibly wealthy people coming out and at the entrance there were two men dressed in a kind of eighteenth century powdered wigs costumes, holding candelabra. As I was walking towards them, I realized this was not my party, I was going to the Serbian embassy which was three doors down, but what I didn’t realize until I approached was that the guests were speaking Russian, whereas the doormen were speaking very posh English. The doormen were actors hired for the party. And I thought – this was 2006/7 – this was a bit like The Great Gatsby. And that kernel of idea stayed with me until about 2013, when I wrote the novel.

Monsieur K actually started from a different premise and I didn’t think there’d be any Russians in it. In 1990s I taught a course on the Novel of Adultery at Birkbeck College. There was obviously Madame Bovary in it, and Anna Karenina was central. My dream then was, and this is the beginning of Monsieur K, that I would write the reverse novel of adultery. This would be a novel where my heroine, who is French, is married to a very dashing army officer, good looking, perfect partner, falls in love with someone who is boring and ugly. When I started writing the novel, I realized what an idiotic idea that was, because there’s good reason why people fall in love with people who are charming and exciting rather than boring. So the characterization was a major challenge but I persisted. In the middle of it all, I met the man, or rather heard about him – because his niece is very good friend of mine, Sofka Zinovieff, a writer – this man, his name escapes me, very English name, played Sergey in the film of Anna Karenina with Vivienne Leigh. And Sergey in the film is played by someone who looks totally English, has an English name, but who, thanks to my friend I discovered, is in fact Russian and has Russian ancestry. And this kind of masquerade of immigration becomes to me a parallel story of the novel; that in fact my “boring” lover is redeemed by the fact that he has this interesting Russian past – that his father is Sergey Karenin of Anna Karenina. So the Russianness in that novel came out of the struggle to re-engineer what was a very foolish idea. To make it work.

The Russians then took over, however. I enjoyed retrofitting the elements, and that was the best part of the writing process. But the Russians kind of hijacked it from my original idea.

__What is it with Russians and the UK? And the English fascination with Russians. You write about this in various places and this quote about “vermin and pearls” appears in Gorsky.

That’s a quote that I first encountered in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. And I went back to find Macaulay’s History of England, which is beautifully written so I kind of traced it back.

In some ways I see Britain and Russia as both antipodes and twins. Because they’re on the margins of this great continent; there are similarities in how each nation came to be, historically… and it’s a sort of love-hate relationship. When it’s love – I mean no one stages Chekhov with as much feeling as the Brits; and they somehow almost appropriate these works. And there are so many amazing translations. And there’s this feeling culturally that Britain, and England in particular, is the only country that sometimes functions like imperial Russia. You would have a house in London and then sometimes a country house where people would decamp and meet very much as in Turgenev or as in Chekhov plays. Culturally, they totally feel it. They also feel that they’re not centrally European, in the sense that France or Germany is. But at the same time, there is the rivalry and the hatred. And particularly after 1917.

For Russians, post Revolution, the main place of settlement is Paris, but London is a huge centre also. There are two churches where I live in Chiswick, there’s an old people’s home, there’s a live sense of their presence. For me that is naturally interesting. But I have to say something else. My writing stems from my own love of Russian literature; the fact that in this country I taught myself Russian because I couldn’t face reading Russian novels in English. At the same time, the key for me was when you’re in London, you sort of acquire this bigger umbrella… I feel a kind of affiliation with the Poles or with the Czechs that I wouldn’t feel if I were sitting in Belgrade right now. At a particular time I was hugely immersed in Israeli literature. And I even went to learn Israeli hora dancing because it was like kolo. Cause I felt this affiliation… when you’re removed, the perspective widens in some ways. I don’t mean widens in a moral sense, I mean geographically. Your sense of what your homeland is doesn’t necessarily change, but you feel these other kinships.

__And you realize how little you matter, really. We were in the news in the nineties, but no one’s interested any more.

Someone asked me recently in an interview whether I chose these topics, characters, stories in order to meet the readership’s horizon of expectations and I had to say a very strong no. I kinda write for myself. I am my own ideal reader. And in order to lose inhibitions in writing, I have to somehow pretend in my head that I’m writing for myself and that what I’m writing is never going to be published. And if I’m interested in Russians I’ll write about the Russians, I don’t care about the horizon of expectations. I won’t even know who the readers are. My international readers have different tastes.

But a sort of pragmatism does come at the stage when the book is published and we’re writing blurbs and deciding how to present it. Monsieur K was a huge bestseller in Romania as Karenin. Here, my publishers at PRH thought Karenin in the title of the book would be off-putting. So that’s how those marketing games come into play… Similar story with my memoir, Chernobyl Strawberries. I had a huge problem with the title here; I was going for something like Between the Thames and the Danube. The title came from accidentally saving the document; when you do, the first two words in the document become the doc’s name. But where the book did best by a long, long chalk, was in Germany where it had 14 editions and was TV-programmed and was adapted into a stage play – and it wasn’t called Chernobyl Strawberries there. It was called Homesick for Nowhere. The reason was that editors there thought that “Chernobyl” would be off-putting for German readers. Still in 2005. 

Iron Curtain, when I first submitted, was called Betrayal. It went out of the window on day one. There was Harod Pinter’s play of course… but also because the title was “too abstract”. What happens in the Anglophone publishing is they like the book to do what it says on the box – and the box to say it precisely.

__A huge chunk of your writing isn’t about Russians at all but about East Europeans, and the imaginary East Europeans. In Ruritania, you cover the Balkan-focused British literature from Byron to about Evelyn Waugh, via The Prisoner of Zenda which introduces “Ruritania”.

The most recent author is Olivia Manning who died in 1980. And at one point I thought I was going to do a Manning biography. I interviewed an awful lot of people who knew her and then decided that I was in fact bored with Olivia Manning. The only aspect of her life that was interesting to me was Bucharest and the Balkans. I would have these interviews with her friends and they would tell me secrets about her lovers etc. – which didn’t interest me at all. So getting away from that, I went to do a doctoral thesis, proposing to look at the Balkans in English fiction mainly.

__And this was before Maria Todorova and all that? Was it on the traces of Said?

It was absolutely on the traces of Said. I was in an English dept, I didn’t know Maria Todorova existed when I finished this book. But our interests are complementary in a sense that she’s a historian and I’m literature person. In a sense the less you knew about the Balkans, the more you were interesting to me. I liked to look at the people who write about the Balkans but never went there. Had no desire to go there. Typical example, Graham Greene. Very short of money, wants to write Stamboul Train. Gets enough money to get to Cologne to research the train, but he’s not bothered with the rest of the journey. When you get to Subotica in Stamboul Train, there were a couple of mud huts outside and some clucking chicken and some children running around. The veracity wasn’t the point, he was writing fiction. For me, that was gold dust. How do you imagine the Balkans when you can’t go through the trouble of imagining it.

By and large the sources I look at, when they researched, they researched for “devious” purposes. Bram Stoker is a good example. When you read Dracula, everything is spot-on correct. The trains leave Budapest at exact time they did, the restaurants serve things that were on the menu then, and he researched it so much because he needed the vampire to appear…

__Authentic!

Right? You know what I mean? So that’s where Ruritania is the exact opposite in some ways to Imagining the Balkans by Todorova. She was looking at travel writers, historians and that’s a fascinating topic and a groundbreaking book, but it’s not me.

What you asked about Said – for Todorova, “balkanism” is in some ways different from “orientalism”, but I claim it’s the species of the same thing. And one of the things Balkan historians who read my book didn’t necessarily see is why I used the word colonialism – I talk of the colonialism or imperialism of imagination. I still maintain these people write from the framework of colonialism. They would use the resources of their territory very much as they would use the resources of India… it doesn’t matter that they weren’t directly, physically there.

__I think your argument will still be interesting in 20 years time. But I kinda lost interest in Said and the people who’ve followed in his footsteps. Said himself came on the wave of Foucault – and for a long while in the anglo-academy, any intellectual pursuit was seen as being about power. Every interest in foreign cultures = it’s the all-permeating power. And today, some decades later, we’re talking about who’s allowed to write about who, and about the so-called “cultural appropriation”, the casting issues – and I find myself missing the time when anybody could write about anything, and isn’t it charming that Byron would cosplay as a Greek? I mean, why not? A lot of nonsense has been written by westerners about foreign cultures, but a lot of it is kinda silly and fun And you write about this as well; you say somewhere that you love the Ruritanian Balkans, this invention of the British upper classes; that as a reader you enjoy its mystique, funniness.

The thing about that is that – first of all I know as a writer myself, I would hate it if someone told me I can’t write from the perspective of a French Jewish woman, for example. Also - how many years do I have on this earth? I spent ten years of my life reading Ruritanian novels and I wouldn’t do that if I weren’t totally entertained by them. And “the worse is the better” was important part of it. But the political message was deadly serious as well, only on the next level. And the next level is that when politicians and people who are in the position to decide take that fiction to be true, and it influences their decisions. Then it becomes serious. That doesn’t happen so much with the Byron-type cosplay, but it does happen with other things – I have a quote somewhere there is an article in the Guardian, where one of those UN officials talks about the conflicts in Kosovo and says “they’re like children playing in the dirt and you have to dress them up and clean them”. If someone who has political power thinks they’re dealing with children, then it becomes pernicious. It also becomes pernicious when you’re deciding who to admit to Nato or the EU in order of your sense of familiarity.

I had this engagement with one of the big Romanian tourist organizations back when Romania was opening to the world before it joined the EU. I had a paid consultancy essentially to help them decide what to do with Dracula. It was fascinating. What do you do? You have thousands of people descending there, wanting to see the spots that are invented, that are not there. Do you use this castle? Do you dress up?

__And Dubrovnik has a Game of Thrones theme park now!

It’s the same thing. So what happens is, these narratives are lovely and entertaining, but when they start this kind of retrofitting of the geographical map, then it becomes more serious. You can use it up to a point, but it can also ruin you. In Romania it started with some hideous amusement Dracula theme park – and the question was, how many of these parks do we have? Do we have notice boards explaining that Dracula is fictional?

__The British upper classes did read the novels that you analyze in Ruritania, so they must have influenced the decision-making?

Yes. Some people are sometimes not careful enough so they let their quotes slip, and it suddenly the worldview reveals itself. You suddenly see the thinking. There’s a famous quote from the former secretary general of NATO Willy Claes in which he talks about the countries of “byzantine influence” that are corrupt etc and names all the Orthodox countries in the Balkans and all the Catholic countries are proper and not corrupt. And then Claes himself was replaced for corruption. So much for that one. That’s what I mean about mind maps. It’s serious when it has that influence, but at the level of entertainment, those novels could be great fun.

__What would it be now, it would probably be television and film rather than novels, if you were to write a sequel?

Yes. If you update Ruritania, the essential dichotomies haven’t changed. You still have the same contrast in play, but the genres would have changed. I caught my son playing a computer game where the Balkans have exactly the same role: the bang bang bang area. So it’s the computer games too.

__I remember reading your quote in a piece about the film Borat. Borat’s Kazakhstan embodies a “medley of east European stereotypes.” The region is “last refuge for feelings of superiority that can’t be placed anywhere else.”

Because the Balkans are seen as geographically European you’re free to use the kinds of imagery that you’d be very careful about if you were talking about Africa or Asia. The Balkans are in a sense the last reserve for all sorts of prejudices.

__The Balkans and the ‘Stans.

Yes, but. It is absolutely not accidental that Borat was filmed in Romania. The visual imagery is still Balkans. The Stans are the sort of grandchildren of Ruritania. It’s geographically still European but not quite. When you see Borat with his suits, it doesn’t owe so much to Kazakhstan as to.. you know that book, Molvania, A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry? That’s the kind of thing that Baron-Cohen’s going for.

__Why are there no Polish characters on British television? Or East Europeans of any kind?

It’s interesting. The only thing that comes to mind is Pavlikowski’s film Cold War. Perhaps it’s that you have in Britain a concept of diversity that is in some ways very Commonwealth. If I were from Zimbabwe or Nigeria or New Zealand or India, they would know where to put me. Whereas like this I’m always slightly off. East European writers in this country, there is a handful of us, don’t really get any credit for the hardships and obstacles. Part of me thinks, why do you want to be given credit? Work hard and shut up. But part of me thinks, if someone comes across me, and in their mind I’m some latter-day Nabokov with an English nanny etc. that’s just not the case. I had ten years where I struggled with this language and published nothing… My friends in the creative writing departments who come from the commonwealth have this benefit of the shared heritage. This is their language, their points of reference.

There’s this thing that Dubravka Ugresic says that I agree with: in western countries, we always talk with one hand behind one’s back. Not in some deceptive sense, like we’re hiding something, but if you want to use the recognized frame of reference, you can’t just put your whole obscurity on the table; all those writers we grew up with, those films. You just kind of forget them. Because you want to be part of the conversation. If you’re part of the commonwealth, you don’t do that as much. And I think that does have a cultural influence. I’d probably have a harder time pitching a show with East European characters.

__And we are fewer in numbers anyway.

We are. Although… In some ways there’s a lot of people who think they are here temporarily and in their mind they are still somewhere else. There are 600,000 Poles in this country, however! Not a low number. Generationally, they’re more where let’s say Pekić was. If they’re writing they will write in their own language. But people eager to make inroads, people wanting to make their presence known in the culture here – those are few.

__How many East European writers in the British part of the Anglosphere can we name?

The best known was probably Kapka Kassabova, who is a Bulgarian who lives in the Highlands. There’s also Lea Ypi, who just debuted her memoir to great acclaim.

__What about Marina Lewycka, who grew up here, but writes on Ukrainian topics.

That’s right, Marina’s here. But that’s it, probably. In the States, there’s probably more. And there’s the larger Soviet-Jewish migration, and the States inscribe themselves in that particular wider tradition.

__Absolutely, and that’s a huge tradition. And then they also have Aleksandar Hemon… there’s also a younger writer, Sara Nović.

Yes, and there’s also Miroslav Penkov, a Bulgarian short story writer who’s huge fun to read. And I have a good friend here who lives less than a mile from where we’re sitting, Michelle Lovric, who’s an Australian writer. Her father emigrated from Belgrade. When we first met, I cornered her instantly but it turned out she was born in Australia.

There’s Mary Novakovic, a travel writer who just published a book called My Family and Other Enemies, which is set in Lika, where her family is originally from.

__I wonder if we can count Olivia Sudjic. She’s already third generation here but her new book had post-Balkan war themes.

I know Olivia’s dad, who’s a fantastic architecture writer. His father worked at the BBC world service where I worked. You sort of wonder how far the writers search for big stories, and the war almost earns you a big story before you even started.

__Where does the urge come from to process what your grandparents dealt with – or perhaps haven’t.

Well there is sometimes a similar situation with the families of the Holocaust survivors. The Holocaust survivors themselves did not want to talk, the children didn’t want to ask, they wanted to have a secure belonging, and it is the third generation that has the roots and the space that allow to work on that.

I’ll also mention Najla Said’s memoir which I loved, about her Palestinian identity and her dad and growing up on the largely Jewish Upper West Side. “I am a Palestinian-Lebanese-American Christian woman, but I grew up as a Jew in New York City.” She didn’t want this burden of the Palestinian cause, she writes; what she loved was her mother’s Lebanese identity. The memoir is kind of What do I do with my Palestinian side. And you get an insider view of Said -- as essentially an Upper West Side intellectual, a Columbia man. It’s a great read.

Iron Curtain is out now in UK, Feb ‘23 in US

London, August 2022