[In the following review, Baranczak discusses Aksyonov's In Search of Melancholy Baby, pointing out that the account "illustrates two sides of the émigré's problem at once."]

Every Nabokov fan remembers the scene in Pnin in which the hero, an émigré Russian scholar who has lived for years on an American college campus, attempts to purchase some sports equipment:

Pnin entered a sport shop in Waindell's Main Street and asked for a football. The request was unseasonable but he was offered one.

"No, no," said Pnin, "I do not wish an egg or, for example, a torpedo. I want a simple football ball. Round!"

And with wrists and palms he outlined a portable world. It was the same gesture he used in class when speaking of the "harmonical wholeness" of Pushkin.

The salesman lifted a finger and silently fetched a soccer ball.

"Yes, this I will buy," said Pnin with dignified satisfaction.

This captures perfectly the Eastern European's experience in this country. We come here with our portable worlds sharply outlined. The years of living there, the cultural stereotypes we have inherited, the semantic distinctions that our native tongues imply—all have created in each of us a repertory of mental mannerisms that we, in our naïveté, take for a reflection of reality. One has only to pass through the now-symbolic Ellis Island for this illusion to burst with a bang. It's not only that the New World turns out to be actually new and surprising at every step. What throws an Eastern European émigré off balance even more is that his semantic system itself seems not to correspond to American reality. A word that in his system of thinking referred to a nicely rounded object denotes here something like "an egg or, for example, a torpedo."

There are two ways of dealing with this problem. One is Pninification: the émigré sticks to his old mental habits and semantic categories, and gradually encloses himself in the cocoon of his Old World personality. (And he is at liberty to do so: this is, after all, a free country.) The other is the method adopted by the hero of Paul Mazursky's Moscow on the Hudson, who insists on playing his tenor saxophone like Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins. He may be different, but he wants to join in, which is the only way (not always satisfactory, to be sure) of understanding the nature of the difference.

Vassily Aksyonov has chosen to join in. Written for an American audience, In Search of Melancholy Baby is a book-length autobiographical essay (whose chapters are interspersed with "Sketches for a Novel to Be") on a Soviet émigré's perception of America. (Aksyonov has lived in the United States since 1980.) The book illustrates two sides of the émigré's problem at once. In the spirit of a rich literary tradition dating back to Montesquieu's Persian Letters, it tries to reveal some truths about a country that only a visitor from a different part of the world can discern. At the same time, the encounter with America serves as a way of revealing truths about the Soviet mentality, and the Soviet reality of which it is a product. It's as if Montesquieu's device were used to say as much about Persia as about France.

Both of Aksyonov's inquiries spring from the overwhelming sensation of cultural difference that is the lot of every newcomer from behind the Iron Curtain. From smells to intellectual discoveries, from food and cars to natural landscapes and urban planning (or the lack thereof), from taxes and finances to interracial relations and sexual mores, from sports and cocktail parties to the literary scene and the political system: everything is new. Some of the oppositions of the émigré's experience are almost distressingly symmetrical; but founded as they are on the author's empirical observation of both worlds, they serve to convince us that the American and Soviet ways of life indeed differ in every essential aspect:

America's prosperity becomes apparent the moment you leave her large cities. In Russia the opposite is the case. What remains after the military has drained off most of the resources goes toward maintaining a minimal level of decency in the cities; the countryside and villages are left to rot….

Among the even more striking differences is the difference in the way people learn about what goes on in the economy. The citizen of a society with a "planned economy" has no way of assessing his country's coffers (Pravda's daily hip-hip-hoorays to economic growth and prosperity notwithstanding); the citizen of a free market society has a never-ending stream of hard figures to go by. The Soviet feels he is astride a gigantic inert mass; the American enjoys the sensation of rising and falling; of pulsating activity; it may look chaotic but it is very much alive.

From such observations a highly favorable image of America arises—the image of a society based on what Aksyonov calls "beneficent inequality" or "economic inequality in a framework of human dignity," a society "freer of xenophobia than any other nation," a society that sincerely sets itself the task of resolving all its inner conflicts. Aksyonov places himself unabashedly among the "Soviet Americanophiles," and he goes to such extremes in his enthusiasm for the USA that he begins to sound decidedly conservative by American standards. Though he declares his support for "liberalism," he means only (with a characteristically Eastern European twist) that in the age-long strife between the principle of liberty and the principle of equality he is on the side of liberty. His Soviet experience has taught him to distrust "the utopias of equality," which never work out anyway, and to place the highest value on freedom, in spite of the social and economic strings attached to it.

The political orientation of Aksyonov's readers will, I think, largely determine the way his portrayal of America is received. Liberals (this time in the American sense) will probably excoriate him for having painted too rosy a picture. The charge is false. From his vantage point Aksyonov can see the South Bronx as well as Beverly Hills. His account devotes a great deal of attention not only to "American fascinations" but also to "American frustrations." Aksyonov's greatest surprise, among these frustrations, was not the existence of enclaves of destitution or racial tension (he found the reality itself much less shocking than its inflated image in Soviet propaganda), but what he calls "American provinciality":

In the Soviet Union we pictured Americans as "citizens of the world," cosmopolitans; here we find them to be detached, withdrawn, sequestered in their American planet…. In a closed society like the Soviet Union, public interest … is directed outward, while in open, democratic America it is almost wholly inner directed. The outside world interests Americans much less…. Despite the Iron Curtain the Soviet Union is in many ways closer to Europe than Europe's closest political and economic partner, America.

Provinciality and isolation also mark contemporary American literature, he claims. Both these features, along with the pressures of the commercial market, have caused it to "simply take its place in the ranks of Western literature as a whole. Now the aura of the hazardous undertaking belongs to the oppositional literatures of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union."

Now and again, amid the oppositions, Aksyonov points out disquieting analogies—the paperscape produced by both countries' bureaucracies, for instance, and the fact that "while the U.S.S.R. inches toward capitalism, capitalism [in the United States] is undergoing a Socialist warp of apathy, poor service, and hackwork." Still, the most revealing parts of the book are those in which Aksyonov portrays not America, but popular Soviet misconceptions about America. These come in many shapes and sizes, from propaganda's outright lies (according to which America is a land of universal misery, oppression, and injustice) to the illusions of the "Soviet Americanophiles":

Soviet propaganda has piled up so many lies in its lifetime that it now gives reverse results: a certain brand of "critically thinking" Soviet citizen—and most of the new émigrés fall into the pattern—no longer believes a word of it; the critically thinking Soviet rejects both lies of propaganda and the scraps of truth the propaganda machine needs to make the lies appear true.

But beyond the fabrications of propaganda and the fantasies of the pro-Western intelligentsia, we find yet another Soviet vision of America. This is the body of genuine beliefs shared by party apparatchiks and their hired intellectuals, most especially the so-called National Bolsheviks. Aksyonov meticulously analyzes their writings on America. Theirs is a vision marked by utter "disdain for the strength of America and the West in general" and "contempt for America's lack of unity," which in the Soviet strongmen's minds can only be identified with decadence and degeneration.

Aksyonov argues exactly the opposite. For him, "If America was unified along Soviet or Iranian lines, it would no longer be America. It must therefore instill in its population a passionate desire to defend its multiplicity, its ferment, its intellectual and aesthetic waverings." He doesn't mince words in his conclusion:

Let me call a spade a spade: the anti-Americans of this world—Gabriel García Márquez included—are enemies of freedom and friends of a global concentration camp. The paradox of it all is that to remain what it is America must defend even its own anti-Americans.

Another "paradox of it all" (I would add) is that the first of the sentences quoted above has a rather right-wingish ring to it, while the second would probably be criticized as too liberal, if not leftist, by a good half of Aksyonov's fellow Eastern European exiles. Aksyonov's book should be compared with Solzhenitsyn's famous Harvard speech, or with Zinoviev's Homo Sovieticus. Their differences aside, Solzhenitsyn and Zinoviev share the notion that the very premises of democracy are the cause of its ultimate weakness, its ineffectuality in the struggle against totalitarianism. Aksyonov, by contrast, represents a position far more akin to Western values, far more supportive of them.

Which comes as no surprise, if you consider his background. His youthful cult of America in the Moscow of the '50s—when, as he notes, jazz was America's secret weapon, and the pro-Western stateniks emerged as the first Soviet dissidents—seems to lead directly into his present situation as a Russian writer who makes his home in Washington, D.C. To return to Pnin, there is a scene in which the hero says in his funny accent: "In two-three years I will also be taken for an American," and every American present roars with laughter. When Aksyonov declares in his final chapter: "Now I am … almost an American myself," we are compelled to take his words, accent or no accent, at face value—and, at the same time, to hope that he will never give up that "almost," which, for both the writer and his readers, makes all the difference.