How I Tried to Unite the Parts of my Soul

I can no longer say how I came to writing. I never tried to get an MFA in any of the so-called creative writing programs; my two impractical master’s degrees (one in linguistics, the other in Russian literature) were enough for me, in their total uselessness, as far as getting a job was concerned. And anyway, I didn’t feel a need for accreditation, since I began writing my own stuff very early, at the age of seven, as soon as I learned to write, and continued writing during most of my childhood, until a rather long period in which I wrote almost nothing, due to my family emigrating from Brezhnev’s Soviet Union and then moving from one country to another until we found ourselves in dreary Cleveland, where I experienced real Russian тоска (toska—gloom) for the first time in my life and where my father got a teaching job in Case Western Reserve University. It was in Cleveland that I resumed my writing late at night in our basement apartment on Mayfield Road, after all my homework was done, when my parents slept. Now, after many years, I realize that, besides being simply a natural thing, it helped me weld together my two selves—an early childhood Russian one and a looming American one. After that first American year, it was on and off. There were periods in my life when writing served as a kind of mirror in which I would look for an honest reflection of the world—as it appeared to me, not as a way this or that person, conditioned by this or that culture, or a rejection of this or that culture, perceived it. In this capacity as an honest mirror, my writing served me well for many years, whether or not it was published, until I (or rather—it) hit a kind of brick wall. In my early twenties I became aware of a sort of war between my two languages, my native Russian and my acquired English, and the fact that the battlefield was my psyche (my “soul,” as the Russian part of me would say), did not make it easy for me to be a mere observer, which was why, in order to escape their mutual enmity, I turned to painting, which did not require words. The silence of paint on canvas healed the part of my psyche/“soul,” split asunder by the two languages, two cultures, so different in nature that the only way to be deeply ensconced in each was either to reject one or to find my own way of being in both.



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If I were to try to explain, to my readers as well as to myself, what “soul” means—not only the word душа (Russian for “soul”) as a lexical unit but, first and foremost, душа as the basic concept in Russian culture and literature, and how this concept differs from the Western “psyche,” it would take me many pages of quasi-philosophical and literary discourse, in which any minor carelessness in phrasing would create major misunderstanding and result in a terrible mishap in which the Platonic “soul” is mixed up with the “enigmatic Russian soul,” and seen, in this unfortunate mixed-up state, as something almost racist, a Russian version of the Nazi ideology, a kind of Slavic Übermensch concept fashioned out of Pushkin’s and Belinsky’s nineteenth-century notions, twisted out of shape by the ideologues of the day, and later marketed like vodka or Palekh boxes and served on colorful platters as part of “Russianness.” Especially now, with Russia’s war in Ukraine and the Z ideology on the rise in Russia, this confusion of “soul” with the so-called “enigmatic Russian soul” would not be welcome at all. So let’s not even go there.

I remind myself that I intended to write a short piece on the origins of my writing, or, more precisely, the origins of my desire to write, not to delve into the cultural and historical associations of the Russian душа. But going back to душа, I would like to make two points. First, this word—as well as the concept—has the same meaning and significance in other Slavic languages, and since in these languages it plays a similar role as in Russian, it is not a uniquely Russian word or concept, so even when we mistake the Platonic soul with the “enigmatic Russian soul,” we might as well say “Slavic.” Second, I must admit that I have lived most of my life, or at least the longest part of it, in the so-called Western world, where “soul,” such as it is, is not at all as omnipresent as it is in Slavic countries and cultures. Having spent so many years in the West, far from the borders of the countries where душа is endowed with recognizable depth and intensity, I, too, have considerably cooled my jets (to use this old American idiom) about “soul.” But instead of going on and on about it, let me give you a real-life example of misunderstandings generated by this concept. As you will see very soon, this example is from my own life as a very young immigrant woman, and I hope you believe me when I say that not a single word of the conversation reproduced here has been changed, other than the changes wrought by memory.

Many years ago, I worked as a teaching assistant of Russian at a university. In those years I was not very diplomatic, to say the least. Once, at a Russian party, i.e., at a party for everyone who worked in the Slavic Department, a professor who was hosting the party said, after a drink or two, “So what is this famous ‘Russian soul’? All you Russians constantly talk about your ‘Russian soul,’ all your nineteenth-century novels and all your poems are filled with it, and where is it? What is it? It doesn’t exist!”

“It exists!” I said, defending the invisible Russian soul, or perhaps just wanting to contradict his assertions about things he could not know about, no matter how many years he had studied Slavic languages and cultures. “It exists!” I repeated stubbornly, “But not for you!”

A long silence followed my words. It seemed that everyone stopped drinking and talking as soon as I came to the defense of the Russian soul. It is not worth adding that this short conversation was the beginning of the end of my work at the university, just as it is not worth trying to define this concept of душа, or how its significance seemed of paramount importance in the nineteenth-century Russian novels as well as in the poetry of other Slavic peoples.

My intention was to write a short piece on the origins of the forces in my own life that shaped me as a writer when душа managed to get me sidetracked. Come to think of it, “sidetracking” is something of a specialty with душа—it makes you lose your way in your own words, lest you do not see the forest (душа) for the trees (words). I shall stop here and let the enigmatic (Russian) soul remain unverbalized, formless, a mystery, as it was intended to be, not only in the nineteenth-century Russian novels but in the languages and the consciousness of the people who were—and still are—their readers.