Craig Raine goes to Moscow

Letters

Vol. 12 No. 8 · 19 April 1990

From Nicholas Benda

I wonder if the anecdotal, impressionistic approach Craig Raine takes in his Moscow diary (LRB, 22 March) isn’t a way of appearing more modest in the face of foreign reality than one in fact is. The myriad touching or amusing fragments which make up the narrative cajole the reader into accepting the writer’s innocence, his slight comic helplessness in a world of unfamiliar logical structures. The X-ray, however, shows Raine to have squeezed in a free three-day trip to Russia and, once there, to have absented himself physically or mentally from the Pasternak celebrations he had been invited to attend. My difficulty is not so much in taking his word for the boringness of these programmed events as in his implication that the whole thing was bound to be a grey, state-crushed affair from the start. In other words, shouldn’t he have declined the invitation and left visiting his wife’s relations to a less convenient occasion?

The opportunism would be forgivable if it wasn’t collusive with what I’m calling Raine’s narrative trick, by which the writing subject becomes flirtatiously naive at regular intervals in order to put himself on a par with a reader inexperienced in Eastern Europe but impressed by the author’s literary and marital credentials. We are invited simultaneously to contrast the work-redolence of communist denim with the capitalist version’s message of leisure, and to compare Adam Michnik’s and Craig Raine’s jeans! It would take a prison experience only slightly more gruesome than one imagines Michnik’s was to lend the words ‘stone-washed’ and ‘pre-stretched’ a whole new set of associations. But this is only to distract from the Trotsky-like clarity with which Raine’s text condemns its author’s capitalist culture. Again: ‘Waiters and waitresses are more concerned to establish their lack of servility than they are to serve. Only in the abstract is this no bad thing.’ An abstract which, waiting for one’s underpriced lunch, one has little time for. Elsewhere Raine appears to believe he won’t be taken for a Western tourist if he dons his vatnik (a wadded jacket as worn in the gulag). How do these naiveties get past the reader in the way they do? Perhaps they represent a desperate bid for sympathy, for protection against the uncomprehendedness of the Russian experience. This may explain why Raine’s reflections are mediated to a greater extent than even this occasion demanded by reference to his marriage. Why aren’t we reading Lisa’s diary rather than his? Because Raine will assert his centrality to a narrative which continues to push him into the most marginal positions. He actually admits defeat, though characteristically in tones of unruffled wisdom, when he says: ‘Being here’ – in Russia – ‘isn’t a guarantee of authenticity … Stay at home and see more on television.’ A guarantee, no, but surely a unique opportunity. It is because he really does mean television, and is not, say, using a metaphor for painstaking and researched analysis of a complex cultural-political phenomenon, that one has a right to ask if one isn’t being offered an old Eastern European stereotype under a new name.

Nicholas Benda
London E1