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cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr><tr><td><img src="Samambaia_files/spacer.gif" alt="" border="0" height="10" width="1"></td></tr><tr> <td class="green-bold">Letter from...</td></tr><tr><td class="green">&nbsp;</td></tr><tr> <td class="green">Cynthia Haven</td></tr><tr><td><img src="Samambaia_files/spacer.gif" alt="" border="0" height="10" width="1"><span class="green">May 31, 2002</span></td></tr><tr> <td>&nbsp;</td></tr><tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr><tr> <td><p>Casa Dana, a 1920s Spanish-style dwelling surrounded by a stucco- and-wrought-iron wall, overlooks a 100-foot cliff. Beyond it -the hot white sand and limitless Pacific, set off by a brilliant, cloudless sky. Nothing could be less evocative of Moscow's grimy brick apartment blocks or St Petersburg's grey, crumbling facades than these bright colours, the dramatic sheet of rock, and the merciless sunlight.</p> <p>Yet the connection is an intimate one. Casa Dana has long been the home of Ardis Publishers. Prior to glasnost, the pre-eminent publisher of modern Russian literature was based not in Leningrad or Moscow, but here, in suburban America. Ardis was the largest publishing house anywhere devoted exclusively to Russian literature.</p> <p>The competition was admittedly limited -Soviet publishers were hamstrung in what they could print; they weren't publishing much that was new, let alone ground-breaking. The emigre YMCA press in Paris (which published Solzhenitsyn, among others) and Possev in Germany had a religious or political bent -a bias that often alienated younger writers. Samizdat was one alternative -haphazard, handwritten or mimeographed, and highly perishable.</p> <p>Then there was Ardis. With its related venture, the innovative Russian Literature Triquarterly, Ardis brought Western readers to Russian writers. </p> <p>Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Khlebnikov, Bulgakov, even Akhmatova were comparatively little known in the era before Ardis set up shop; their works were suppressed, their names and reputations were inevitably jumbled with a plethora of lesser, officially approved writers. Ardis provided quality translations. During the Cold War, Ardis also had the ambitious, perilous role of returning suppressed Russian literature to Russians in their own language (Ardis Books were even smuggled to Siberia).</p> <p>Ardis's journey ends here, at the end of El Camino Capistrano, amid the lush palm trees, oleander, birds of paradise, and ubiquitous jasmine of Southern California -as if the climate of Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Ardis began, had not been sufficiently unlike Moscow's to provide a measure of distance from the notorious bickering of the Russian literary scene.</p> <p>The acquisition of Ardis last month by New York's Overlook Press provides a literary Cold War coda. Overlook hopes to reissue a number of out-of-print Ardis titles, and then perhaps add some new ones to address the emerging sensibility of twenty-first-century Russia. Whatever the future, however, the change of ownership marks the end of an era for the publishing venture that, according to Joseph Brodsky, had an impact on Russian literature second only to the advent of the printing press.</p> <p>Ardis's story has been inextricably bound up with the energy and enthusiasm of its founders. Carl Proffer, then a thirty-two-year-old professor at the University of Michigan, a specialist in Gogol and Nabokov, and his twenty-six-year-old wife Ellendea, an assistant professor in Russian and a Bulgakov scholar, began the venture almost as a lark. The Proffers had visited Russia in 1969 on a Fulbright fellowship, with a letter of introduction to Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of the poet Osip. After that enviable entree, the Proffers hobnobbed with the Russian intelligentsia. When they received a rare, pre-revolution edition of Mandelstam's early collection, Stone -one of only fifty left, according to collectors -they had their first book. When Elena Sergeevna Bulgakova gave them an unpublished 1935 version of Bulgakov's Zoya's Apartment, they had their second.</p> <p>They launched Ardis and RLT in 1971 with $3,000 borrowed from Carl's bewildered parents. Ardis's first office was the bedroom of their cramped Ann Arbor townhouse. Not taking academic or government subsidies, they quickly amassed a sizeable debt and a stack of news clippings. International fame came quickly, within a year. The Proffers, friends of Brodsky since 1969, were visiting Leningrad in 1972 when the authorities ordered the thirty-two-year-old poet out of the USSR. Carl Proffer, with the hubris typical of the early Ardis days, offered Brodsky the position of poet-in-residence at the University of Michigan. Brodsky had never taught a class in his life, his poetry was largely unknown, and his English was garbled and virtually incomprehensible. Proffer pulled it off, while dealing with the clamorous international press.</p> <p>I met the Proffers a few years later, in 1976. By that time Ardis had achieved a measure of success -enough for them to relocate to the erstwhile Huron Hills Country Club, a rambling, ramshackle, twenty-four-room residence, also from the 1920s, which, in the winter, was whimsically reminiscent of a dacha. The cream- coloured living room with its large picture windows, a former ballroom, was the scene of all-night Ardis mailings. While the Russians usually imagined a rich American publishing venture, the reality was translators, friends and graduate students stuffing envelopes on the beige carpet, paid only in pizza and Coca-Cola.</p> <p>The basement, however, was the heart of the Ardis operation, announced by a memorable poster, &quot;Russian Literature is Better than Sex&quot;, and dominated by a Cyrillic cold-type composing machine. There, by the IBM typewriter with a Cyrillic keyboard, the Proffers introduced me to the man I had come to interview: the newest Ardis house guest, a lithe, olive-skinned and very frightened Sasha Sokolov, the disowned son of a retired general in Soviet military intelligence. He had feathery black hair and startlingly green eyes. </p> <p>His manuscript, &quot;School for Fools&quot;, had arrived some time earlier in an almost unreadable carbon, postmarked Egypt, with an unsigned note, &quot;Does this interest you?&quot;. His was one of many bootlegged manuscripts that arrived weekly, even daily at Ardis, postmarked Paris or Vienna or anywhere they could be smuggled to, often illegally via the diplomatic pouch. This one, however, was different: it catapulted the unknown, thirty-one-year-old avant-garde author to the forefront of Russian literature; he went on to win Russia's prestigious Pushkin Prize.</p> <p>Outspoken, savvy Ellendea was the perfect foil for the tall, genial, soft spoken Carl, a former basketball player. They couldn't have been more American.</p> <p>Neither was Russian by descent, which puzzled their Russian contacts. Ellendea is Irish-American; Carl was a true son of the American prairies, distantly related to Daniel Boone. Their motive was not ethnicity, but an exuberant love of Russian literature. Ellendea's keen intelligence and keener tongue have not diminished with the passage of a quarter-century -her memoirs, which she insists she will never write, might rival the fierce and formidable Nadezhda Mandelstam's in pungency. Her conversation is peppered with gossip, anecdotes and snippets of Ardis history. At one moment she recalls smuggling the Hite Report, bibles and issues of Cosmopolitan to the eighty-year-old Madame Mandelstam, at the widow's request; at another, how she and Carl competed with each other in the Hotel Armenia in Moscow to read the advance galleys of Nabokov's Ada, forwarded from Playboy magazine via the diplomatic pouch. Or how </p> <p>400 queued when Ardis first had a stand at Moscow's Book Fair in 1977: </p> <p>&quot;Peasants would spend forty-five minutes reading Esenin and say, 'You published our poet!' Others would say, 'I got a copy of a copy of a copy of your book in Siberia -I stayed up all night to read it.'&quot;</p> <p>The Proffers were subjected to surveillance, body searches and press attacks (the Literary Gazette called Ardis &quot;an anti-Soviet bakery&quot;). Their Russian friends were interrogated. Carl was finally banned from the USSR in 1979, Ellendea in 1980. Carl never returned; he died of cancer in 1984, at the age of forty-six. Brodsky said Proffer &quot;was simply an incarnation of all the best things that humanity and being American represent&quot;.</p> <p>Insiders questioned whether Ellendea, a devastated widow with four children, would be able to carry on -the business acumen, after all, had been Carl's. </p> <p>Within a few years, however, Ellendea received a stunning vote of confidence: she received a MacArthur &quot;Genius&quot; Fellowship in 1989 -Ardis's first external funding. A few months later, she made a triumphant return to Russia and the Moscow Book Fair. The Soviet Government again tried to deny her a visa, until other publishers at the fair threatened to boycott.</p> <p>She remarried and moved to Dana Point, California -a place that had no literary history except in its name. Richard Henry Dana, author of the popular Two Years before the Mast (1840), was a nineteen-year-old Harvard student when he worked as an ordinary seaman on a voyage around Cape Horn to the West Coast. The idyllic natural harbour here is the place he loved the most -hence it is named for him.</p> <p>With the coming of glasnost, Ardis emphasized Russian literature in translation. Ardis's last book in Russian was Brodsky's final collection of poems, Landscape with Flood -&quot;he faxed the changes a few days before he died&quot;, says Ellendea. Glasnost changed Ardis -but some claim Ardis had a role in triggering glasnost, by forcing the hand of the Soviet literary powers-that-be, who were put in the humiliating position of watching a couple of eager Yanks shape and preserve its literary heritage. For example, when Ardis began publishing a projected ten volume edition of Bulgakov's collected works, the famous critic and journalist Vladimir Lakshin, in the Literary Gazette, warned that the series &quot;has started to come out beyond the ocean&quot;, and argued that Russia should publish its own. It did, and Ardis halted its series after the fourth volume.</p> <p>Some also claim that Ardis, directly or indirectly, established the reputations of prominent Russian writers for Western readers -a hierarchy now taken for granted. It is already hard to recall how few and far between translations were in the early 1970s -Western publishers simply didn't think such translations were commercially viable. Moreover, scholars and the public knew only that portion of Russian literature that Soviet officials chose to dole out. Ardis, with no political axe to grind, served as a sorting table for determining the relative importance of various names. For instance, when Ardis published Tsvetaeva's and Mandelstam's prose and Bulgakov's plays, they established the value of those writers' oeuvres; when they enthusiastically promoted Sokolov, or Bitov or Iskander, they probably rescued them from oblivion. Ardis may have created the Western audience that mainstream publishers were certain did not exist.</p> <p>The scale of the Ardis endeavour demonstrated in toto the density and richness of Russian culture in the last century. At full tilt, Ardis was putting out forty to fifty titles a year, more than many university presses. It took on tasks that were cumbersome and unprofitable:</p> <p>Ardis was first to publish the five-volume complete letters of Dostoevsky; they republished Nabokov's early Russian novels, long out of print, then published the first Russian translations of his English novels -thus reestablishing a Russian audience for his work. How much Ardis was ahead of a wave, and how much it created the wave, will be a subject for future scholars. Russians now reminisce about Ardis in memoirs -such as Aksyonov's In Search of Melancholy Baby.</p> <p>Meanwhile, Ellendea is casting her lot in a different direction. Her new publishing venture, &quot;Casa Dana&quot;, will focus on books about the West Coast &quot;for my culture about my culture&quot;, she says. And as for Russian publishing: &quot;Now everyone has everything to read, and they read trash. Just like us. Real national culture included writers until recently. I'm not sure they're going to withstand the onslaught of television and movies. Like us. But there are signs of high culture returning. It's still too early to say.&quot; She continues to encourage disheartened Russian writers: &quot;They are afraid Russian culture is shit, because it is acting like shit. It's hard to have faith when a slave gets freedom, and all the slave wants to do is read pornography on the subway.&quot; But culture follows money, she says, and Russia is only beginning to get flush. &quot;My conviction is that it is a great and rich culture, a deep culture, and it will come back again.&quot;</p> <p>As we walk along Dana Point's Cliff Walk, to the high pergola that overlooks the Pacific, the height and the ocean breeze provide a sun-bleached counterpoint to the day, thirty years ago, when the Proffers conferred with Brodsky on the windy roof of Leningrad's grim Peter and Paul fortress, famous as a prison for Russian writers (Dostoevsky and Gorky among them). Ironically, the prison roof provided a haven from KGB surveillance on the day Brodsky was ordered out. But that Leningrad is far away, in time, distance and spirit. </p> <p>Leningrad has already entered the world of myth; the Pacific Coast lives in another.</p> <p>We are within a few miles of the legendary old mission of San Juan Capistrano - where the swallows return, miraculously, on St Joseph's Day every spring. </p> <p>Perhaps, in the light of Ellendea's cautious hopes and the proximity of Ardis for nearly a decade, it might not be too frivolous to construe it as a very unRussian omen of regeneration, a harbinger of better times to come -always bearing in mind that optimism comes perhaps too breezily here, on the other side of the world.</p></td></tr><tr><td><img src="Samambaia_files/spacer.gif" alt="" border="0" height="15" width="1"></td></tr><tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr></tbody></table><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td><img src="Samambaia_files/spacer.gif" alt="" border="0" height="30" width="1"></td></tr></tbody></table></td><td bgcolor="#ffffff"><img src="Samambaia_files/spacer.gif" alt="" border="0" height="1" width="9"></td><td bgcolor="#999999"><img src="Samambaia_files/spacer.gif" alt="" border="0" height="1" width="3"></td></tr><tr><td colspan="2" rowspan="2"><img src="Samambaia_files/tls_body_bottom_left.gif" alt="" border="0" height="9" width="15"></td><td bgcolor="#ffffff"><img src="Samambaia_files/spacer.gif" alt="" border="0" height="6" width="1"></td><td colspan="2" rowspan="2"><img src="Samambaia_files/tls_body_bottom_right.gif" alt="" border="0" height="9" width="12"></td></tr><tr><td bgcolor="#999999"><img src="Samambaia_files/spacer.gif" alt="" border="0" height="3" width="1"></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></td><td><img src="Samambaia_files/spacer.gif" alt="" border="0" height="1" width="6"></td></tr><tr><td colspan="5"><img src="Samambaia_files/spacer.gif" alt="" border="0" height="10" width="1"></td></tr><tr><td colspan="5" class="white-bold12"><img src="Samambaia_files/spacer.gif" alt="" border="0" height="1" width="200"></td></tr><tr><td colspan="5"><img src="Samambaia_files/spacer.gif" alt="" border="0" height="10" width="1"></td></tr><tr><td><img src="Samambaia_files/tls_template_bottom_left.gif" alt="" border="0" height="10" width="9"></td><td colspan="3"><img src="Samambaia_files/spacer.gif" alt="" border="0" height="10" width="742"></td><td><img src="Samambaia_files/tls_template_bottom_right.gif" alt="" border="0" height="10" width="9"></td></tr></tbody></table></center></body></html>