Russia's People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present

24 Aleksandr Germano

A. V. Germano—A Sometimes Gypsy. From Aleksandr Germano, Povesti i rasskazy (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel', 1960). •• • 24 Aleksandr Germano (1893–1955) BRIGID O’KEEFFE “Am I a Gypsy or not a Gypsy?” Posed by Aleksandr Viacheslavovich Germano, the Soviet Union’s most celebrated Gypsy (Romani) writer, the question is both surprising and puzzling—at least when taken at face value.1 Yet the question remains: Who was Germano? A Gypsy? A Russian? Why did his nationality matter? Three years before his death in 1955, Germano composed an autobiography and completed a short questionnaire in fulfillment of his duties as a member of the Union of Soviet Writers. He obligingly answered questions about his nationality, social origins, literary work, language proficiencies, party status, and Red Army service. Germano had performed this same routine many times before. As required of him by the Soviet state throughout his adult lifetime, he dutifully composed both long and short versions of his life story for bureaucratic consumption. As his writing career developed, Germano scrupulously updated his vita and tailored his autobiography to reflect the concerns of his bureaucratic inquirers as well as the ideological exigencies of changing times. In 1952, however, he made one significant edit to his autobiography . His status as the Soviet Union’s leading Gypsy writer notwithstanding, Germano disavowed his Gypsy nationality and instead declared himself a Russian.2 Despite its bureaucratic provenance, Germano’s 1952 narrative is a remarkably compelling read. In his own telling, Germano’s life is the unexpected and inspiring tale of an orphaned provincial upstart who became a Soviet writer, and of a proletarian son who became the prophetic transmitter of Soviet light to the empire’s benighted Gypsies. Germano is the self-made man whose triumph became possible only thanks to the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1952, he is the aging New Soviet Man—confident, but still weary seven years after the war. Naturally, he is Russian. Born in 1893 in Orel, Germano described himself in his 1952 autobiography as the son of a worker father and an illiterate mother. The youngest of five children, Germano’s early years were filled with sorrowful loss and crushing poverty. His father died of pneumonia while Germano was still in his mother’s womb. Pregnant, uneducated , and penniless, Germano’s mother sought factory work. Germano revealed little 266 Brigid O’Keeffe else about either parent. Although he mentioned that his mother lived until 1919, he credited his older sister with caring for him as a child and ensuring his education. Looking back, Germano envisioned himself as a young boy with a passion for storytelling . Otherwise, his childhood is a narrative blur. For Germano, life began anew with his enlistment in the Red Army in 1919. Due to health complications, Germano did not serve as a soldier on the front lines. Instead, he adapted his love of literature to his commitment to Bolshevik victory in the civil war. In service of the army’s cultural-enlightenment mission, he led political discussions and literary evenings for soldiers and civilians. Upon demobilization in 1921, Germano wrote, “I devoted myself completely to literary work.” He published widely in his local press, volunteered at Orel’s Turgenev Museum, and led the city’s first workers’ and soldiers’ literary circle. In 1921, his satirical play, In Some Bureaucratic Office, premiered at the Orel Metropolitan Theater. A professional triumph for the young writer, the play was often staged locally in subsequent years. Spurred by his success, Germano devoted still more time to writing. Germano soon became convinced that he and his literary talent had outgrown provincial Orel. In 1926, he relocated to Moscow with the naïve hope of quickly establishing himself as a great proletarian writer and Soviet literary icon. Moscow’s editors, however, wanted nothing to do with his “provincial” talent. Without money, housing, or even a reasonable chance of fulfilling his professional dreams, Germano nonetheless refused to return to Orel and instead accepted menial work in a publishing office. His pittance of a wage afforded him a room in the capital and nourished his improbable literary ambitions. Pockets empty, Germano relentlessly sought work as a writer until one day his life took a fateful turn. In 1926, Germano vaguely recalled, “Somehow someone among the Muscovites suggested that I apply to the All-Russian Gypsy Union [ARGU], where there was a need for a cultural worker and organizer of a publication in the...