RUSSIAN WINTER JOURNAL, FEBRUARY ‐ MARCH 1967

2 2 Y R U S S I A N W I N T E R J O U R N A L , F E B R U A R Y — M A R C H 1 9 6 7 L A W R E N C E F E R L I N G H E T T I On this trip across vast Siberia, I felt I penetrated the very heavy heart of its great Revolution at the time of its 50th anniversary. – L.F. 9 February Soviet Air Flot, Berlin to Moscow – an enormous bunch of furry citizens flood out onto the dark field to take plane at East Berlin airport, crowd looking like they just were de-mobbed from the ‘‘Battleship Potemkin’’ crowd scenes, 1917 . . . They all succeed in getting on jet and we’re o√, in sunny clear weather, Berlin tilted below as plane climbs & banks North & East . . . No announcements at all on P.A. system, no oxygen masks stowed anywhere to be seen, cabin very bare, circa 1950 U.S. plane . . . But jet works & it’s two hours to Moscow above the clouds, an excellent cold lunch served with white wine & caviar . . . German students, 12 to 15 years, from East Berlin on excursion for six days in Moscow, some teachers, Soviet business men, no beards but fur hats and heavy 2 3 R coats, women all hefty & healthy, ready for any scrimmage . . . A price list of articles available for purchase on plane includes recordings of ‘‘Lonely Accordion,’’ ‘‘Evenings in the Moscow Woodlands ,’’ ‘‘Sevastopol Waltz,’’ ‘‘Song About Leningrad,’’ ‘‘Kiev Waltz,’’ ‘‘Field, Wide Field,’’ ‘‘Ensemble of the Soviet Army,’’ ‘‘Snowball Tree,’’ ‘‘The Volga Flows,’’ ‘‘Flowers Were Blooming in the Fields,’’ ‘‘Song of Russia,’’ and ‘‘Do the Russians Want War?’’ – the author of the last being E. Yevtushenko . . . Also, available for purchase: a memorial medal of Gagarin’s space flight . . . Light brown flat land visible clearly below . . . We fly over what history? We’ll be coming down soon, into what snowland, thirty below zero . . . snow & frozen tundra below . . . limitless weightless fields & fields of snow lost in some Klondike, windswept ice plains in white sun glimmering. Ivan spurs his White Steed somewhere still & gallops into Siberia, thru Tashkent Nowheres . . . almost sunset here now while the West still freaks in afternoon, great forests visible, small cities banked in snow, straight railway into nowhere, snowhere, over the horizon, forests washed back stand frozen like islands in dry-ice seas . . . sun gone, dusk down, still we swoop across the land-escape, and so down now at last, smoothly, into Mockba, Mock-haven . . . Fall out, in Russian winter light, balled in fur, looking for igloos & cold men, find self in same old body instead, passport extended, a would-be moksha in Mockba, lost in his samsara. Trans-ported? We take our selves with us wherever we go. Thru ‘‘In-Tourist’’ + Customs and out into a car to Metropol Hotel, thru the first darkness midwinter snow landscape way outside of the city, great snow world and white birches in the gloaming , on both sides of straight single highway, snow farms + crossroads , no billboards or roadsigns anywhere, finally more houses, then huge housing developments stretching for miles, then the beginning of long straight boulevard into the city, streetcars + buslines, lighter waiting rooms glassed in, and the black figures of the people against the white snow under high streetlamps, Gogol night-scene, Gogol night-tale, black figures against the white landscape, ‘‘eternal Russia’’ . . . Life still noble and tragic . . . Two days in Moscow, full up with sound + sight of strange city . . . Went to Writers Union + made contact with people Allen [Ginsberg] had told me to look up, Yelena Romanova, Frieda 2 4 F E R L I N G H E T T I Y Lurie, and Andrei Sergeyev, the latter Allen’s + my translator here. Zoja Voznesensky, Andrei’s wife, took us to see the production of Ten Days That Shook the World – a Brechtian dramatization based on but distant from the John Reed book. This was at the Drama Theater on Taganka Square + the director was Yuri Lyubimov. Really brilliant direction with many great scene e√ects, devices such as banks of spotlight-footlights raised to shoot a...