Yuri Slezkine

29.10.2025Memoir

I grew up in Moscow, in a succession of communal apartments. The first book I learnt by heart (according to my father, who kept track and took pictures) was *Ram the Baby Elephant, *published in 1959, when I turned three. When Ram was born, all the animals came to say hello. The bear played the double bass, the giraffe danced the Russian squat dance, the camel brought a huge pacifier, the hippo got stuck in the doorway, and the rhino claimed to have walked “all the way from the Ganges”.

New books introduced more characters: a cast of local heroes, led by the wolf, the fox and the hare, and a large selection of jungle dwellers, including Bagheera, Baloo, and, from a much thicker book, the lion, the bull and two jackals named Dimanaka and Karataka.

Soon, animals – foreign, domestic and stuffed (in 1969 Winnie-the-Pooh was reborn as a popular Soviet cartoon character, Vinni Pukh) – were joined by mostly human orphans, robbers, soldiers, princesses, emperors and stargazers. Things happened once upon a time, in faraway lands. Fools, shepherds and youngest sons usually won. Commercial transactions involved ducats, thalers, guineas, sovereigns, doubloons and, most memorably, rupees, which were related to rubles, but could buy magic carpets and dancing cobras.

The books of my adolescence came with specific realms, names and uniforms. At the centre lay the Russian noble estate, surrounded by an overgrown park with a lily-covered pond, populated by old generals, eternal students, French governors, German tutors and a girl with an open book. It existed in a mythic space, unnamed and unchanging, troubled but safely landlocked.

All around were seas (mostly South) and islands, not all desert: Robinson Crusoe’s, Lemuel Gulliver’s, Captain Flint’s, Captain Blood’s and, of course, Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island, where the elusive Captain Nemo (Nobody) secretly aided a crew of enterprising American castaways. Islands were fragments (or figments) of continents; continents were bounded by seacoasts that opened onto frontiers. In Verne’s Dick Sand, A Captain at Fifteen, the inexperienced American crew, tricked by a Portuguese slave trader, mistook Tristan da Cunha for Easter Island and landed in Angola instead of Chile; in H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, a small expedition led by a big-game hunter set out for the “Matabele country” in search of lost treasure; in Louis Henri Boussenard’s Le Capitaine Casse-Cou, a young Frenchman travelled from the Yukon to the Transvaal to help the Boers fight the British (who retaliated by never translating the novel); and, in ‘Captain’ Mayne Reid’s Osceola and The Headless Horseman,* *the Seminoles fought the US army in Florida and an Irish mustanger triumphed over the “slave-whipping” Mississippian in southwest Texas, a few miles north of where O. Henry’s Llano Kid shot the wrong man in Justo Valdos’s gambling house.

In the meantime, the last Mohicans had disappeared from the Adirondacks, Russian-America had become Jack London’s Klondike, and Huck and Jim had missed Cairo and were floating down toward Louisiana.

*

These books were born in Western Europe and North America at the confluence of imperial expansion, mass literacy and the rise of the translation industry, popular periodicals and book serialisation. They owed their existence to the arrival of boys as a separate – and increasingly profitable – segment of the book-reading public. Robert Louis Stevenson described Treasure Island as “a story for boys”; Haggard, his imitator and competitor, offered King Solomon’s Mines “to boys and to those who are boys at heart”.

In Russia, these books had become required reading by the turn of the twentieth century. My grandfather, born in 1885, read them, and so did my father, my father’s war-veteran friends and most of my classmates, no matter what their fathers and grandfathers did for a living.

In *Speak, Memory *(1951), Vladimir Nabokov remembers “savouring” The Headless Horseman as a child in St. Petersburg, the book’s watery-grey frontispiece turning “completely bleached” in the blaze of his imagination. In 1935, the Pravda correspondent Mikhail Koltsov spent a week as a ninth-grade teacher in one of Moscow’s schools. The most popular writer among his students was Jules Verne: all 35 of them had read at least three of his novels.

Between 1955 and 1959, the State Children’s Press published most of those titles in its Adventure Library series. They came in different colours, but all had the same immediately recognisable design: an old-fashioned cloth cover that frayed readily along the seams; a wide border with curly gold leaves framing tiny balloons, sailboats, V-shaped palm trees; and a black-and-white picture pirated from the original foreign edition. The men of my grandfather’s generation who came to power after the revolution contributed to our education by banning copyright and canonising the books they loved as children.

It was colonial literature, with white protagonists assisted or impeded by assorted natives; it was anti-colonial literature insofar as savages were noble, slavers were savages, and most of the protagonists were white boys learning to tell the difference.

The cleverest was Huck Finn, from vol. 12 of Adventure Library, who discovered that “there warn’t no Spaniards and A-rabs, and there warn’t no camels nor no elephants”. True adventure, he came to realise, was about Jim getting his freedom, not Tom rubbing “an old tin lamp or an iron ring, and then the genies come tearing in, with the thunder and lightning a-ripping around and the smoke a-rolling”.

Verne’s 15-year-old captain and his friends were rescued by a Black American named Hercules, who fooled their captors by pretending to be a mganga medicine man, lightning a-ripping around and the smoke a-rolling. Captain Nemo, the second coming of Odysseus and the Count of Monte Cristo, turned out to be Prince Dakkar, son of the Raja of Bundelkhand, who had lost his kingdom in the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

In the only two Adventure Library books set in England, India struck back with a vengeance. Sherlock Holmes (vol. 5) traced at least three crimes back to a theft (in The Sign of Four), a murder (in The Speckled Band) and a betrayal (in The Crooked Man) committed by the British in India. In Wilkie Collins’s Moonstone (vol. 20), a large, yellow diamond stolen from a Hindu temple was restored to its rightful place in the forehead of the moon god. The jewel, we understood, belonged in another crown.

*

Even as “faraway lands” were being transformed into places that could be found on a map, “once upon a time” turned into history that could be checked in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. One half of our reading list was Orientalist and Meridionalist, with a little Septentrionalism sprinkled in, courtesy of Jack London. The other was retrospective Occidentalism, with Walter Scott’s Highlanders, Prosper Mérimée’s Corsicans, Victor Hugo’s Jacobins, Raffaello Giovagnoli’s gladiators, and Alexandre Dumas’s musketeers, among others, turning the European past into a frontier.

The book that brought all the threads together and wove them into a narrative that summed up the dreams of Soviet boyhood was written in the Gulag. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the journalist, translator and war veteran Robert Shtilmark was doing hard labour for anti–Soviet agitation (of uncertain description). He survived by entertaining criminals with “monstrous concoctions of Stevenson, [Émile] Gaboriau, Haggard, and Boussenard” (as one of his listeners put it). His foreman, a prisoner named Vasily Vasilevsky, promised to get him off work if he wrote an adventure novel set in a foreign country, in the distant past, and involving pirates, jewels, desert islands, kidnapped children and a tame lion. The result was a swashbuckler set in the eighteenth century, in India, England, Spain, Greece, Italy, Africa and the South Seas. Shtilmark drew the line at the tame lion, and after much persuading, Vasilevsky settled for a large dog.

When the book, which they called The Heir from Calcutta, was finished, Vasilevsky ordered Shtilmark murdered; he wanted to claim authorship and apply for amnesty. But Shtilmark was saved by the camp’s criminal boss, Georgy Trifonov, who described the events, more or less truthfully, in his autobiography, The Criminal. Shtilmark was released, and Тhe Heir from Calcutta was published in 1958 as vol. 91 of Adventure Library, under two names. After a short trial, Vasilevsky’s name was removed. The Heir from Calcutta became a classic. Georgy was the cousin of Yuri Trifonov, the author of The House on the Embankment (1976) and the main character in my own book, *The House of Government *(2017). As Trifonov wrote, “Everything fits into a circle.” We all read the same books growing up.

*

Childhood, boyhood, youth: Soviet reading practice followed Tolstoy’s triad. The Russian terms are gender-neutral, but the standard English translation is not wrong, insofar as girls tended to be less keen on the colonial part of the canon.

The onset of youth put an end to the gender division and social solidarity: some boys and girls moved to new shores, others stayed behind or stopped reading altogether. But those first images – magic, domestic and exotic – would never vanish completely.

I learnt Portuguese in college because I wanted to travel to Africa. I wanted to travel to Africa because ‘Africa’ stood for adventure. It stood for adventure because of the books the ‘Old Bolsheviks’ had read as children.

In 1975, a year after the Carnation Revolution, Portugal’s African colonies won their independence. Thousands of Soviet ‘cooperantes’ were dispatched to the USSR’s new allies. The demand for interpreters was so great that I could choose the country to work in and the company to work for.

I applied to join the Soviet merchant marine in Mozambique because I had read Luís de Camões’s *Os Lusíadas. *I had read Os Lusíadas because a biography of Vasco da Gama had impressed me as a boy. Da Gama, I had learnt, not long after memorising Ram the Baby Elephant, discovered the sea route to India. On one of the islands off the East African coast, the Portuguese found Arab traders and negotiated with a local sultan (Mussa Bin Bique, hence the island’s Portuguese name) but did not secure local pearls, gold and ivory, chastised the “treacherous Moors” (per Camões) and fired cannonballs into the town before leaving for Malindi.

I ended up spending a year (1978-79) in the port of Beira, down the coast from the Island of Mozambique and just north of old Sofala. I did not count on meeting Arab traders, but I did hope to find some heirs from Calcutta, so to speak: a world more vivid and vibrant (I almost said “diverse”) than ‘stagnation-era’ Moscow. I did, I am happy to say. There were the pointedly polite Indian shopkeepers (mostly from Goa, keeping the empire connected); the Cuban doctors equally enthusiastic about baseball and proletarian internationalism; the bare-chested ‘occasional’ dock workers waiting on the pier for a loading job; the melancholy North Korean railway engineers whose boss traded in Soviet watches; a British Trotskyite who listened to Ian Dury and the Blockheads while his wife had an affair with a Portuguese electrician; a Swedish agronomist who ran out of bribes for the port customs officials and drove his Renault through the closed checkpoint, tires screeching and guards scattering; a Chilean refugee who came to build socialism but became a pimp; a 17-year-old Spanish sailor who told me in a bar he had dreamt of seeing the world but had seen little outside bars; a refugee from Soweto who woke me up in the middle of the night to celebrate the victory of ‘Big John’ Tate over an Afrikaner policeman in a heavyweight boxing match; the air-conditioner repairman at Hotel Mozambique, who, by way of explaining his failure to repair the air conditioner, took me to a tiny room in the basement, showed me his revolver, and told me, in strict confidence, that he was working for the secret police (known under the fittingly tooth-snapping acronym SNASP); and the Lithuanian head of the Soviet community who wrote surveillance reports to the embassy in Maputo but was viciously beaten by the hairy-armed head surgeon for sleeping with his wife, a pretty young doctor who treated my malaria (which I had contracted by assuming that the prophylactic ingredient in gin and tonic was gin).

There were also two wars going on. The national government, supported by Cuba and the Soviet Union, was fighting the Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo) guerrilla army, backed by white-rule regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia; and Ian Smith’s government was pursuing Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) troops based on the Mozambican side of the border, blowing things up along the way. When I was not listening to pop music on Radio Seychelles or Johannesburg-based Radio 5 (my favourite that year was One Way Ticket by Eruption), I would tune in to the Voice of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, which ran communiques announcing armed convoys between Salisbury and Bulawayo, and the Voice of Free Africa, which played prerecorded messages threatening to kill Cubans and Soviets. On trips to areas where Renamo was active, I carried an ID issued to my Swedish agronomist friend, Gunnar Gunnarsson.

My job was to interpret for Soviet mechanics, electricians, crane operators and pilots, translate reports by port economists, attend meetings with shipping agents, fill out personnel forms (all non-Soviet employees had brown hair and brown eyes) and register new arrivals (a process involving blue paper, fiscal stamps, gifts of razor blades and extra naps on the pretext of doing more of the above). When other interpreters were unavailable (one got killed when his Jeep ran over a mine), I accompanied agricultural specialists who helped form rural co-operatives, civil engineers who repaired bridges bombed by Rhodesian aeroplanes and, on one occasion, the hairy-armed surgeon who had to sew together the mutilated bodies of ZANU fighters.

Thirty years later, I struck up a conversation with the guy who was fixing my fence in Berkeley. He said he was a safari guide from Zimbabwe, working odd jobs in California in the off-season. That night, I took him to the Hotsy Totsy bar in El Cerrito (downhill from the high school where Creedence Clearwater Revival got started). He told me that in 1979 he had served as a paratrooper in the Rhodesian air force; his unit surrounded ZANU camps at night, shot flares, and machine-gunned the men, mostly very young boys, crawling out of tents. Once, after several minutes of ceaseless slaughter, he turned to his buddy and said: “We can’t keep doing this. We can’t possibly kill them all.” His buddy went on shooting.

He deserted sometime later. I asked him if he had blown up the oil tank in the port of Beira (I still have the picture of the flame I took from my hotel window). He said he didn’t think so, but he couldn’t be sure.

*

Back in Moscow, I got a job as an editor at Progress Publishers, which specialised in translating Soviet fiction, nonfiction and fiction-posing-as-nonfiction for international audiences. It published some Russian editions of foreign, mostly Western, literature, but its principal target was the world, primarily its ‘third’ or ‘developing’ part.

As Karl Marx should have said but didn’t, much in human history and individual lives happens twice – first as romance, then as farce. Working at Progress felt like a mockery of the books we had read as children and the impressions we had brought from Africa. Progress’s mission was to reverse the flow of enchantment. Instead of importing vicarious adventure, it was exporting a fanciful and, it seemed to us, wholly inadequate Soviet self-portrait, comic in its naive cubism: Lenin’s proletarians intersecting, at absurd angles, with Turgenev’s young ladies, Turkmen carpet weavers, and earnest young pioneers playing chess. But of course, we were not impartial observers: sojourns in the South Seas had done little to break Captain Nemo’s spell.

The company’s Portuguese section was housed in three rooms of a rundown apartment on the second floor of a late-nineteenth-century residential building, two trolleybus stops from the big glass box of Progress headquarters (across Garden Ring from Novosti press agency, which specialised in newspapers and magazines). A dark corridor connected our portion of the apartment to two or three rooms where “the Slavs” worked, and the toilet at the far end. There were about a dozen of us in the Portuguese section – young and not in love because we were too cool to let go of our irony. We cared little about what we translated and could care even less. We did a lot of talking, joking, smoking and tea drinking. We took two-hour lunch breaks and celebrated every official holiday. We despised our boss, who didn’t seem to have much respect for himself, and pitied his secretary, who might or might not have been his mistress.

Proofreaders worked in pairs: one read aloud in Portuguese, the other followed the text. To relieve the boredom, the reader would squeal, stutter or do impressions; the most popular were Brezhnev’s slurred monotone and the American “porrr favorrr” accent. I translated L. Maksudov’s Ideological Struggle in the Modern World. You can still buy a copy for R$9.00 from Estante Virtual, Brazil (but hurry, because the next best offer is R$49.00).

In late February 1981, most of us were taken to a Central Committee sanatorium (formerly a noble estate, like most Central Committee retreats) in a snow-bound forest outside Moscow. There were a couple of hundred young people there, representing dozens of languages. Our job was to translate the speeches scheduled to be delivered at the upcoming 26th congress of the Communist party from Russian into the languages of the visiting delegations and the other way around. We were not allowed to leave the premises until Brezhnev had delivered his address; armed guards sat by the public phones to ensure we did not reveal the contents of the address in our calls home. It was a glorious week: we worked hard during the day and drank smuggled liquor at night. Two people from our section lost their cool and fell in love.

The speeches themselves were mostly boring and occasionally amusing: some contained references to proposals Brezhnev had not yet made. About half the paragraphs in his address were highlighted. The reason for it became clear on the first day of the congress, when we sat down in front of the big television screen to wait for our release and make fun of the old man’s infirmity. Obviously unable to get through the entire text, he struggled painfully with the highlighted passages (which the not-so-simultaneous interpreters were reading in so many languages) until he could speak no more. Laughter died down, his jaw slackened, eyelids drooped, and the producers switched to a newsreader, who took another hour or so to finish the job.

*

I emigrated a year later, first to Portugal, where I saw the Belém harbour from which Vasco da Gama had set sail, and then to Texas, where I lived a short bike ride away from the O. Henry Museum. ‘Adventures’ (“things about to come your way”, in the original Latin) kept coming, with early readings providing directions, locations, meanings and moods. Every island I travelled to bore an imprint of Friday’s foot, every coastline remembered a shipwreck. As time went on, the domestic prevailed over the exotic, but the two remain inseparable, mutually dependent and mostly civil to each other. I live in the best Chekhovian dacha imitation I can afford, travelled to Cape Verde last Christmas, and just finished reading a Portuguese novel called Equador (Equator, a happy coincidence), by Miguel Sousa Tavares, about the governor of São Tomé and Príncipe trying to convince the British consul (exiled there after a scandal in Goalpara in Assam) that no slave labour was being used on the islands’ cacao plantations. No piece of music I know expresses longing for home more mournfully and movingly than Cesária Évora’s Sodade, dedicated to the Cape Verdeans shipped to São Tome’s plantations, never to return. Dick Sand, a captain at 15, turned East toward the Congo delta before he could get there.

But am I the last of the Mohicans (so to speak)? Most books of my boyhood were about lost tribes, souls and causes – from Indians, cowboys and the Scottish Jacobites to the cherry orchard and the Orange Free State (Conan Doyle’s The Lost World was vol. 43 in Adventure Library). The same may be true of my contemporaries, in and out of Russia. My American colleagues born before the mid-1950s read some of the same books growing up. They might have never heard of Boussenard or Mayne Reid (as I had never heard of The Phantom of the Opera or The Red Badge of Courage), but most have fond memories of Ivanhoe, Deerslayer, Treasure Island, White Fang, The Three Musketeers and *The Hunchback of Notre Dame. *Some had inherited them from their Russian-Jewish grandparents, others had moved straight from the Book to comic books (including the *Classics Illustrated *series). The Cold War was a civil war: we had all been captains at 15.

And then something happened, first in the US and then farther afield. Boys and girls started moving from childhood to youth or even adulthood, bypassing the history-and-geography stage (the way Siberian walrus-hunters were supposed to move from ‘primitive communism’ to socialism, bypassing feudalism and capitalism). They had their share of the mythic, magic, domestic and exotic, of course, but they no longer attached those things to particular times and places. Orientalism, Occidentalism, and those other two orientations I do not want to flaunt again have been edged out by fantasy, horror, superheroes and fairy tales.

Childhood has swallowed up the rest of human life. Most stories begin with some version of “once upon a time in a faraway land” and take you to places you can’t find on a map or hope to visit when you grow up. Globalisation, among other things, is about people from anywhere reading about people from nowhere.

We learn from stories. Our ancestors were raised on myths about their ancestors, tales about their saviours, emperors and lawgivers, and, eventually, novels about any number of times and places, most of them named. One could swell with pride, go on a pilgrimage, visit a battlefield or hope “to see Paris and die”[1] as many Thaw-era Soviets did. Fans of Harry Potter, Game of Thrones and The Lord of the Rings travel to shooting locations. The ‘secular’ world is more other-worldly than its predecessor. History textbooks do little to reenchant because they tell stories badly or not at all.

Ram the Baby Elephant, The Jungle Book and the excerpts from the Panchatantra and the Ramayana included in the Tales of the Peoples of India collection I loved as a child are, no doubt, an inadequate and perhaps misguided guide to India, but what else might have endowed that land with so much mystery? Or, perhaps more to the point, attached so much mystery to that diamond-shaped place in my Atlas of the World? Where would I have travelled had I grown up with the maps and myths of nowhere lands?

1. See Eleonory Gilburd’s wonderful To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture (Belknap Press, 2018). The title comes from the 1992 film, Увидеть Париж и умереть.