In the World of Slim Journals and Thick Newspapers

Mikhail Epstein

Literature is one of Russia's childhood diseases, with its sweet languor, slight chill and delirium safely tucked under warm covers. When you get over it, you jump out of the bed — and the beloved book remains there, buried under a crumpled pillow. We will never again read with that same passion, with the same sobbing and sighing, the singsong voice, as we did during the stagnant Brezhnev era. In today's Russia one can begin to see the outlines of a post-literary culture, busy with the silent realities of this world. When a person has to take care of his own business, when he has to work hard and intensely, there just isn't much time left over for the kind of intoxicating reading that replaces the joys of life.

At the American school that my children attend, a teacher gingerly asked me: "What do your kids like to do?" Quite honestly, I didn't know how to answer. "Well," she asked, "do they like to swim? Do they like to take pictures? Perhaps they enjoy cooking? Do they go in for computer games? Basketball? Football? Are they interested in dinosaurs? Stamp collecting? Do they roller skate?"

I remained silent, sadly conscious of the fact that my children, from an American point of view, were in some sense underdeveloped. Finally, the teacher asked me: "What do they do at home in their spare time?" "Mostly they read . . . all kinds of books," I answered uncertainly. She brightened. "There we go," she said, "that's an interesting hobby. They like to read." And she wrote something down in her notebook.

What is it that I find so absurd and yet revealing about this conversation? In essence, it is a conversation between two cultures that have a hard time hearing each other. One of them is built around the book; for the other, reading is but one of a host of recreational activities, like basketball and computer games. In Russia, the concept of "hobby" can not be applied to reading as such. Rather it is applied to specialized reading interests, such as detective or historical novels, books about Pushkin, World War II, etc. This is how the relationship between the whole and the parts of individual cultures varies.

What can we expect to see happen to Russia in the post-Gutenburg age, which for many Western countries has already arrived? We will not discuss here the relationship of the printed word to television and other forms of mass communication: what I have in mind is a discussion of the changing relationship among the various forms of printed matter themselves. Nor will we prognosticate about some vague and far-distant future but rather have a look at what has already — for better or worse — begun to take shape.

The most obvious change that can be predicted is the following: Russian newspapers will grow thicker, our specialized magazines and journals thinner. Foreigners visiting the Soviet Union have always been amazed at how emaciated and feeble our newspapers are (the average Soviet newspaper is between four and six pages in length), and how fat, even apoplectic are our journals (for example, each monthly issue of Novy Mir, the leading official Soviet literary journal, is approximately three hundred large-format pages in length).

By contrast, the average American big-city daily newspaper consists of a half dozen or more different sections ("Politics," "Business," "Sports," "Metropolitan News," "Style," "Science," etc.), in most cases taking up at least a hundred pages in total length. As for Sunday newspapers, just to look at those mountainous piles of information-crammed paper fills one with dread and despair at ever being able to absorb it all. From this perspective, Western newspapers seem dryly formal: sixty, sometimes one hundred twenty and, on rare occasions, even one hundred eighty pages long.

This difference between Russian and American daily newspapers is not only a matter of a difference in size: we are speaking of differing slices of public consciousness. In the Soviet Union, where history trickled like a dry riverbed, a four page newspaper was more than enough to fill the stream of permissible news. The difference between one day and the next was no greater than the thickness of one of our daily newspapers.

It was a wholly different matter with our monthly journals and magazines! These journals subjected Soviet reality to literary-artistic and socio-political interpretation. Using a thin lining of facts, they created a thick coat of furry images and myths. Where else but in the journals were readers delivered fresh news, sometimes over periods of months and years, in the form of a family, military or production novel, or in a multi-volumed epic? Our days were trimmed and shortened in our truncated newspapers, only to be stretched out over months and years in the leisurely format of our magazines and journals.

The next stage was the production of a book, almost always in hard cover, as if it were packed inside a tin can, to preserve eternally the mighty sleep of the artistic soul. Soviet authors found soft covers insulting: they were seen as a sign of inferiority and were reserved for failed authors. Indeed most Soviet authors found it incomprehensible that a Western author could actually dread being published only in hard cover. Why did they all strive to have their books spring out like a crumpled ball from inside the refuge of a reader's pocket? Isn't it horrifying to be crumpled and maimed?

As reality in Russia grows, and myths crumble, our newspapers and journals are developing in opposite directions. A new feeling for history has increased the number of newspaper articles and the dissemination of facts. More text is now published in a single day's run of a newspaper than was published in a month in the past. The monthly journals, by contrast, are dispensing with serialized novels, epics, and long-winded poems: they are growing thinner and more cheerful, having experienced the accelerated rhythm of monthly life.

This change is affecting not only the body of the journals but also their soul. In the past, such literary journals as "Znamya" (The Banner) and "Moskva" (Moscow) were considered popular and were therefore aimed at a broad audience. Theoretical journals, such as "Voprosy filosofii""(Philosophical Inquiries) and "Voprosy psikhologii" (Psychological Inquiries) were thought of as specialized and therefore published in small runs. This seemed only natural, since in the one fiction flourished, in the other scholasticism. Art for the few and science for the many — that would have been unthinkable. It was simply impermissible to admit that art could have its own, refined language, not intelligible to everyone; nor could it be allowed that philosophy or psychology could make use of a living, generally intelligible language, dispensing with methodological rigor.

As for the future, one might soon expect to see the appearance of specialized literary-artistic journals, publishing in small numbers—between one hundred and a thousand copies—for readers interested in acquainting themselves with experimental literature and the visual arts. By the same token, one might also expect to see the appearance of journals of philosophy, ethics, psychology, sociology, religion, and spirituality, aimed at a readership of hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Such journals will orient theoretical speculation toward the urgent questions of life and the richness of everyday language. In other words, there will be separate journals for the artistic elite and the thinking masses.

The idea that artistic expression is transparent and popular, while scientific expression is fundamentally abstract and specialized, was indeed one of the strange assumptions of the now bygone mytho-ideological period. The twentieth century, which has inverted everything, is more likely to think of artistic expression as specialized and difficult to understand, while the humanist-scientific outlook has become the norm and reference point for the majority of the educated populace.

A final prediction: while books will leap out of their hard covers, today's soft-covered Russian brochures, written by the founders and followers of Marxist-Leninism, will take refuge in hard cover; that is, if they continue to be published at all, which any sincere democrat and pluralist can only hope for.

Thus, this is how the future of Russian publishing feels to the touch: newspapers will get heavier, books lighter, and today's brochures will take on hard covers. In general, Russian culture will become less conventionally literary, more trustingly tactile. And this is why interpreting it by the touch will cease to be shameful.

December 1990

Transl. Thomas Epstein