POST-IMPERIAL BLUES.(post-Soviet Russia)

On a murky day twenty years ago, I sat in a Soviet railcar (Helsinki-Leningrad; rain-drizzled windows) reading a collection of stories by Vladimir Nabokov. There was then, as there no longer is, an illicit thrill in crossing over, West to East: the neat Finnish streets and houses thinning, then vanishing, near the border; just minutes later, the signs of Soviet dilapidation. A puttering Zhiguli towing another Zhiguli by a rope along a muddy road; waterlogged posters ("Communism = Soviet power plus Electrification of the whole country!") nailed to the sides of a shack; a scaly drunk in a padded jacket, oblivious of the rain, stomping his boots in a puddle. The train stopped with a creak at the border town of Vyborg. The ventilation coughed and went still. A trio of clean-jawed men in uniform--they could not have been more than twenty years old--climbed on board and made their way down the aisles, checking passports and visas, making cursory searches of our bags. As agents of state security, the guards tried to affect a haughty expression, but they managed to radiate only nervousness, the sense that, just as they were watching us, someone of greater consequence was watching them.

By the time the guards reached my row, they had already gathered a small stack of Bibles tied together with twine and a cache of German skin magazines. They looked through my duffelbag and saw nothing of interest. Then one of them extended his index finger and tipped back the book of stories in my hand in order to examine its foxed cover. The cover illustration was of a generically pretty girl with shimmery light hair, though curiously un-Russian, more like a model for the House of Breck. The guard paused and narrowed his eyes. The book was not "Lolita," but it was Nabokov, illegal all the same. Authors are banned not by title; they are banned whole. He knew. And yet he looked me over and moved on, leaving me to my counter-revolutionary pleasure.

A few minutes later, the train eased once more into the trip eastward, the pleasingly numb hours of birches and rain, the villages going by. Soon it was dark and the windows were fogged. I turned to "The Visit to the Museum," in which a Russian emigre finds himself wandering through a provincial museum in France. In a dreamlike state, he comes to realize that he has passed through a magical portal into his native land, into Russia, and yet he has the dawning sense that this is not quite his Russia. Everything is vivid: the coolness of the air, and "the stone beneath my feet was real sidewalk, powdered with wonderfully fragrant, newly fallen snow." But as he approaches a shoe-repair shop and sees the word "shoe," he realizes that something is wrong; there is no tvyordy znak, the "hard sign" at the end of the word. The letter was largely eliminated by the Bolsheviks. They'd set out to remake the world, including its orthography:

I knew irrevocably where I was. Alas, it was not the Russia I remembered, but the factual Russia of today, forbidden to me, hopelessly slavish, and hopelessly my own native land. . . . Oh how many times in my sleep I had experienced a similar sensation! Now, though, it was reality.

Nabokov left Russia in 1919 on a ship called the Hope and became a permanent exile: Berlin, Paris, Cambridge, Ithaca, Montreux. His revulsion for what had become of Russia was such that in "The Visit to the Museum" he could never bring himself to call the place "the Soviet Union."

The train slowed. The suburbs of Leningrad, then the ghostly apartment blocks of the outer city, sluiced by. With a jolt, we arrived. The Finland Station. The doors opened with a rubbery kiss. The air that rushed in was damp and cold and smelled of cheap tobacco. On the platform, I bought a roll stuffed with a few pebbles of bluish meat. I needed help getting around, and so, for a few kopecks, I bought a copy of Pravda and a map and set off on my way.

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