This Michael Frayn is so... Russian!

Russian students as well as Russian public in general have a long and established tradition of reading and understanding British classics, while major authors of the early twentieth century, such as D.H. Lawrence, Conrad, Joyce, Virginia Woolf and some others are not so widely read. Serious problems emerge when modern fiction is concerned, as Russian students appear totally unprepared to new styles and manners due to the insufficient knowledge of the above mentioned novelists, who represent a certain link between Dickens and Thackeray and the latest authors. The novels breaking the tradition, departing from the traditional forms and techniques and going beyond many familiar rules are often confusing for Russian students, even if they are into philology and are expected to deal with literature professionally. Indeed, the majority of pieces of contemporary literature make special demands. Literature relies on conventions, but they keep evolving.

That is why I was so relieved when one of my students exclaimed after reading the first chapter of Headlong by Michael Frayn: “He is so Russian!” Being aware of the fact that Frayn knows Russian, the second-year students offered a funny, though may be a bit far-fetched interpretation of Tony Churt’s family name, which sounds very much like Russian “черт” (devil). Though it is likely to be just a joke and does not open new ways for interpretations of the character, it is interesting and amusing for Russian readers.

This “language joke” is not the only one and illustrates Frayn’s peculiar sense of humour, which the students found ‘astonishingly Russian’. A bright example of such game may be traced in the piece entitled ‘Ivan Kudovbin’. Here the author invents a family name, which seems to be Russian, but at the same time maybe understood as “could have been” (as it sounds pretty much like that), which acquires a deep meaning in the context of the text. The author speaks to the opponents of legal abortion and reacts to their statement that abortions could have deprived humankind of Shakespeare and Da Vinci. All such “could have beens” are mocked at. To sound more convincingly Frayn creates a sixteenth-century figure Ivan Kudovbin:

He invented a primitive form of gas-mantle; he wrote 123 flute sonatas, before the sonata form had been invented.... He was undoubtedly a genius. But as we know from studying the history of the period, he was one of the unlucky ones who didn’t get born... His loss is a tragedy both to himself and to mankind (Frayn 1983: 134).

Why has he chosen a Russian name for the discussion devoted to abortion? Probably, just to intensify the sense of absurdity, as for British readers the name Ivan Kudovbin must sound in the most weird way, being still recognisable as Russian, as Ivan is highly typical. Probably here we face a hint at the Soviet Union, where abortions were a criminal offence (though the main character ‘failed to be born’ much earlier, in the sixteenth century). The author is far from being indifferent to Kudovbin’s fate, contemplating different reasons of his nonexistence:

Perhaps Kudovbin was aborted or miscarried - I’m not sure. But I think the trouble was quite probably that he never got conceived (Ibid).

This sort of humour is absolutely clear for a Russian reader, contrasting notorious English humour, which is so often confusing and even misleading for foreigners. Here I was a bit sceptical at first, insisting that the girls have been “spoilt” by reading too many British authors and thus having learnt to feel the humour, but then I started thinking that may be there is a grain of truth to their opinion. Though Frayn himself never claims his humour to be related to Russian tradition and, more than that, is sometimes far from being enthusiastic about his role of a humourist. Once he told Benedict Nightingale, “I very much dislike the side of myself I discovered when I first began to be a humourist” ([Nightingale 1985: 128).

Anyway, humour is one of integral characteristics of Frayn’s writing, though bitter humour sometimes, the one we see in Chekhov’s plays, full of loss and nostalgia.

To trace other instances of “Russianness” of the writer it may be fruitful to examine some proofs of his Russian sympathies and intercultural connections, and here the key point is that Michael Frayn has translated a lot from Russian, being mainly preoccupied with Chekhov’s plays. He himself explained this interest in translating from Russian and the fact that he translated only plays in a self-deprecating way, claiming that those other writers who knew Russian could not write plays and those who could write plays did not know Russian [cited from Moseley 2006: 28].

His Chekhov translations were well received in New York as well as in London and have become recognised as the standard translations for most productions. A fellow translator, Jack Laskowski, calls his work on Chekhov’s plays ‘as close to perfection in the translator’s art as it is possible to get’ (cited from Moseley 2006: 29). Frayn’s translations of ‘The Cherry Orchard’ and Tolstoy’s ‘The Fruits of Enlightenment’ were produced by The National Theatre of Great Britain, as was ‘Wild Honey’, his translation/adaptation of Chekhov’s earliest and untitled play. Actually, he translated all of Chekhov’s plays. Maybe from Russian literature originates Frayn’s love for so-called “speaking” family names. The fact from Chekhov’s biography occurs as we start comparing him and Frayn: Chekhov also started as a humourist in comic journals. However, drawing parallels between the two of them we should not, of course, insist of their complete similarity. Clair Armistead also refers to Frayn’s sympathies with Chekhov and points out that each of them is ‘a polymath who did his time as a professional humourist’. But she also sees a huge difference between the two writers.

But to describe him [Frayn] as Chekhovian is to ignore the feature that unites his oeuvre, and sets it apart from anyone else’s: he is first and foremost a journalist, with a reporter’s ability to smell a story and then research it and find the right form for it. (Armistead 2002: 10).

We can share this opinion or not, but one thing should be clearly understood - trying to trace Russian influences in Frayn’s works we should not ignore the fact that he is first and foremost English.

Among the plays translated from Russian there is one by Yuri Trifonov, entitled Exchange. The fact that Frayn turned to this work is remarkable, taking into account that the play is not particularly well known even among Russian readers, to say nothing of Western Europe. Trifonov gained acknowledgement first of all for his short novels, he was a novelist, not a dramatist, and his only two plays, Exchange and The House on the Embankment, he adapted from short novels. However, we get the clue to this puzzle in the first lines of the Introduction, written by Frayn for his translation of the play. He saw the production of ‘Exchange’ in Moscow in 1978, and immediately asked the author’s permission to translate it; not something I have been moved to do before or since. (Frayn 1990: v).

He was lucky indeed, as it was next to impossible to get a ticket to any production of famous theatres in the capital - and he saw Exchange at the Theatre on the Taganka under the direction of Yuri Lyubimov. But Frayn was a foreigner, and their treatment in the Soviet Union was always different from that of Soviet citizens. Foreigners were privileged to have the best, it was important to impress them and to produce some illusion of prosperity. Frayn with his unfailing flair and humour describes another feature of Russian mentality - the almighty profitable connections: “I asked around in the interval; no one had bought their tickets from a ticket office. They had all, in classic Soviet style, known someone who knew someone” (Ibid).

In the Introduction Frayn demonstrates subtle understanding of Russian people and their psychology, having managed to penetrate into very intimate and hidden depths. He argues, that it was their own lives that people had come to see, shown as they had never been shown in public before, in all their compromise and muddle, in all their dogged intensity of family feeling. [Ibid], In the play Frayn felt that something was about to change, there was something in the air too delicate to catch, but he felt it and became enthusiastic about it.

Michael Frayn speculates on the notions deeply Russian, which sometimes cannot be translated into English, such as meshchanstvo (the approximate Russian equivalent of the lower-middle class, but still not the same), glasnost, and byt- the one I consider the most complicated and incomprehensible, but Frayn understands it and criticises the dictionary entries, where this word is evidently misinterpreted. Following Trifonov himself, Frayn disagrees with the statement that byt is just one untranslatable Russian concept, some special form of Russian life. On the contrary, he is convinced that byt names an aspect of our own life which is only too familiar. It is life seen as a network of everyday concerns, and from this network, whatever our aspirations, we can none of us escape. (Frayn 1990: vii).

This is a remarkable example of intercultural communication, resulting not in rejection, but in acceptance and recognition. The translator perfectly realizes that the play can never have the same familiarity to English audience that it has to Russian, but he claims that this is only for the better:

It has the effect of showing us our own world at a distance <...>. Because in the end this is us. In these cramped and gimcrack rooms, in these unfamiliar suburbs, we are watching our own small wars, our own small victories and defeats. (Ibid: xi).

The origins of Russian influence upon Frayn are not only of literary nature. Being born in London, he was educated first at a private, and then in a state-supported school. A good student, he earned a place at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Before the matriculation, he made up his mind to complete his military service. Thus, he came to Cambridge to undertake a course for military interpreters, where he studied Russian. Those studies proved extremely useful in his further career as a writer. However, his Russian (Soviet, to be exact) sympathies emerged even earlier, in Kingston Grammar, where he formed a Communist cell with his classmate. His Communist sympathies, though, did not last and, as he says, ‘vanished in 1956,’ when he and four Cambridge friends visited the Soviet Union on an unofficial exchange (Guppy 2003: 200).

It was not the only visit to the Soviet Union. Being employed with The Guardian he was assigned to cover Harold Macmillan’s trip to Moscow thanks to his knowledge of Russian. Though his belief in Communism was behind by that time, he was still interested in everything Russian and Soviet, including not only literature but political affairs as well. One of Frayn’s novels, where the Russian theme has been manifested from the title, is the novel The Russian Interpreter, first published in 1966. From the first page the action takes place in Moscow, in the university skyscraper on Sparrow Hills (Vorobyovy Gory). It may be argued how successful the work is as an espionage thriller, but the way the setting is drawn and used is, undoubtedly, remarkable. Moscow is seedy. The narrator describes Manning, one of the main characters, crossing a square.

Everything seemed enormous and out-of-scale, like one’s finger ballooning beneath one’s touch in a fever. Beyond the plaza, in the formal vista of the ornamental gardens, solitary pedestrians moved like Bedouins, separated from one another by Saharas of empty brown flowerbed and drying tarmacadam. They were so small they seemed to be merely an infestation. The authorities should have put human-being powder down and got rid of them. (Frayn 1966: 9).

This monstrous scenery, devoid of anything human, reflects Frayn’s concept of Soviet Russia, an absolutely different country from the one Chekhov used to live and create in. Moscow is gloomy and lacks freedom. Its habitants and guests are preoccupied with the idea of espionage, spying on each other, full of suspiciousness, the idea of arrests and punishment. Frayn saw it with his own eyes, thus the descriptions are so realistic, vivid and recognisable for everybody, who happened to live in the Soviet era. Some episodes are quite humourous, though again in a bitter way. In one passage the writer manages to touch upon two huge human problems of the time -alcoholism and indifference to each other, people’s alienation and preoccupation with their precious selves:

A man in a stained blue suit tottered towards Manning, his arms hanging down, his eyes closed. He opened them at the last moment <...> Then he took a pace backwards, side-stepped elaborately <...> and fell through the hedge. He stayed down, invisible but for his boots, which stuck out motionless over the pavement. No one paid any attention to him. (Frayn 1966: 11).

Judging by the reaction the picture was common for the people and did not arouse the slightest curiosity.

Reading the pages of the novel describing Moscow and Soviet people, a Russian reader cannot but think of a different picture of the time, that of the Soviet films. It is striking how huge the discrepancy was, the one between ideology and reality. The real Moscow was dusty, gray and sour-faced, like the old woman, sitting on a broken chair and demanding passes to let people into the University building (another feature, highly familiar to the Russians). University people themselves work in ‘the untidy little office <...> beneath the portrait of Lenin with the brown stain gradually spreading outwards from the bottom left-hand corner...’ (Ibid: 13). The description could seem exaggerated and stereotyped to a foreign reader, but for any Russian it is true to life. Bleak, cracked and broken are among the key epithets of the novel, reflecting, probably, Frayn’s own disappointment with what he witnessed.

There is one character in the novel - Katerina, or Katya -who looks as if borrowed from the world of Dostoevsky. She is poor, humble, unhappy, betrayed, really sombre at times, having some bitter wisdom. Katya is a Christian and that fact, along with her patience and passive endurance of mistreatment, puts her into line with the characters like Sonya Marmeladova in Crime and Punishment.

It is difficult to say that the novel Headlong (1999), the discussion of which with the students gave me the impetus to start thinking in this direction, is rich in Russian themes and allusions (beside the above mentioned Churt and its Russian counterpart), but still there are some, mainly dealing with negative references to Stalin and his circle. The disillusionment in Communist society is sometimes coming partly into view. There are two key parallels drawn between Spanish invaders in the Netherlands in Medieval times with the comparatively recent events. These are the Nazis and Stalin. In the chapter ‘Hint of Thunder’ we read the following characteristic of the Cardinal brought by the Spanish to rule in the Netherlands:

All in all, he was the Seyss-Inquart of his day - a Burgundian brought by the Spanish to repress the Netherlands just as the Austrian later was by the Germans. And how did the Nazi Reichkommissar’s predecessor use his new-found wealth? What did the newly created Cardinal Granvelle spend his rapidly accumulating guilders on? (Frayn 1999: 150).

An important motive of the history being repeated again and again is transparent in this and other similar episodes. Some deep moral matters are touched upon within this parallel:

Am I beginning to think of Bruegel the way we think of the artists and entertainers in Occupied Europe who worked for the Nazis - as some kind of collaborator? (Ibid: 151)

The further “Soviet” parallels are not complimentary for the Soviet Union, but nevertheless quite characteristic and understandable, a sort of stereotypes about the Soviet Union and its regime. In different allusions, like in The Russian Interpreter, we feel again this personal, face-to-face experience of the Soviet reality, full of falseness and tyranny:

He [Bruegel] was merely serving up the same reassuring myth <...> of a happy bucolic world untouched by the conflicts of real life, one more episode in the long-running story of Arcadian shepherds and Bourbon milkmaids, of Soviet tractor drivers and Merrie England. (Ibid: 156).

Bitter irony is disguised in putting together Arcadian shepherds and Soviet tractor drivers, as it is evident to the most ignorant reader, knowing nothing about the Soviet Union, that there hardly could be anything romantic or bucolic about a tractor driver, though that was the way to present hard labor in official posters.

In the novel Soviet Russia is also mentioned as an obstacle between Europe and art:

Then for a few years the three pictures remaining in Vienna vanished once more when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany and Europe was closed by the Second World War; and for a few more years after that, with the extension of the Russian empire to central Europe, the Iron Curtain was drawn upon Haymaking in Prague. (Ibid: 346 - 347).

Julia Llewellyn argues:

In all Frayn’s work, from Clockwise, his film starring John Cleese, to Spies, the recurring theme is chaos. The most logical plans are upstaged by events. (Llewellyn Smith 2002: 3).

Again, that can be found a fair description of both the essence of Russian literature and the Soviet reality Frayn was so fascinated with.

Frayn's fascination with Russia is evident in much of his writing. Thus, his works may be studied not only as bright examples of modern British literature, but also from the point of view of intercultural communication and the theory of translation. Indeed, the analysis of Frayn’s translations of Chekhov, for example, makes it possible to draw conclusions concerning transformation of some cultural concepts in the process of translation, as in literature it is not just translation from one language into another, but from one culture to that of the interpreter. Reading Michael Frayn, Russian students have the chance not only to study British literature, but also to have a fresh look on Russian one. Besides, in Frayn’s writing we can see the latest Russian history from a new angle. Frayn’s Russia is dual, ambivalent, contradictory, more and more chaotic as it is transformed from Chekhov’s Russia to the Soviet Union, from deeply human literature to ugly authoritarianism. However, despite all the transformations it remains fascinating and provocative.