Edgar Allen Beem – Stuck in the Russian Revolution: Serge Rossolowsky

For over forty years, from 1976 to 2020, I spun my literary wheels in the sticky mud of Russian history as I tried to complete a novel I felt I was destined to write. It was the story of an elderly Russian émigré artist living out the final year of his life in a provincial New England city very much like Portland. The novel was based on the life of Serge Rossolowsky (1895–1976).

I knew the intimate details of Mr. Rossolowsky’s last year because I cared for him. I knew the rough details of his life from tsarist St. Petersburg through Stalinist work camps and emigration to America after World War II because he told me his story as I took page after page of notes and recorded hours of interviews.

I met Mr. Rossolowsky at the Portland Public Library, where I worked from 1972 to 1980. He was one of the characters who populated Congress Street and hung out at the library. He tended to be a bit voluble and when he became a distraction, I was dispatched to calm him down. One day, Mr. Rossolowsky asked me if I knew where he could get a typewriter with a Cyrillic alphabet keyboard. As it happened, I did and borrowed it for him from a local education publisher.

Within a few days, the old man had hopelessly snarled the filament ribbon on the electric typewriter, which looked more like a miniature war machine than a writing implement. When I was unable to unfoul the ribbon, Mr. Rossolowsky talked me into letting him tell me his life’s story and then write what he called “my terrible history” as the biographical novel he had wanted it to be. He saw himself as a colleague of Leo Tolstoy and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but I was just a part-time freelance journalist who hoped one day to write fiction.

When Mr. Rossolowsky died in 1976, it fell to me to arrange his funeral and to clean out his apartment and his studio. I then got to work on the book. It was going pretty well between 1977 and 1980, but then life intervened. I left the library to pursue my girlfriend to England. We came back married three months later with the first of three daughters on the way and I had a new job as a reporter on the weekly Maine Times waiting for me.

If I got “stuck” in the 1980s, it was largely because of the responsibilities of family and work. But I was young and there was time. The future seemed endless even when I hit forty in 1989.

Over the years, I tried writing The Russian Lesson as a non-fiction memoir, both in my voice and Mr. Rossolowsky’s, as a Dr. Zhivago-esque screenplay, and as the historical novel Mr. Rossolowsky had intended. But in order to create a work of art, whether literary, musical, or visual, you have to believe in it. I kept getting stuck and setting the manuscript aside because I was unconvinced.

The Russian Lesson was unconvincing in large part because I hadn’t been to Russia. A real writer would have traced Mr. Rossolowsky’s odyssey through the Russian Revolution and World War II from St. Petersburg to the family dacha, from Butyrka prison in Moscow to the Belomor-Baltic White Sea Canal Project, from a floating opera company on the Volga to capture by the Germans on the Western Front and surviving the Dresden Firebombing. But my understanding of the Russian social and geographical landscape came from a 1914 Baedeker’s guidebook. It wasn’t real to me.

I was a librarian, a local yokel who had never really been anywhere. I knew the world only through books, and Mr. Rossolowsky seemed to have stepped out of one of those books—Doctor Zhivago, War and Peace, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Painted Bird, The Master and Margarita.

I tried to be honest about my ignorance, making the librarian who cares for Mr. Rossolowsky a young woman who had never been anywhere herself. She filters the stories the old man tells her through books she has read.

Whenever I explained the idea of the book to someone—eighty years of Russian history seen through the last year of a Russian émigré’s life, an old man who has seen everything, cared for by a young woman who has never been anywhere—I would get an enthusiastic response. The trouble was, I just couldn’t make it work.

Not only had I never been to Russia, I had not even bothered to learn Russian. That’s why Mr. Rossolowsky speaks in broken English informed by Russian, German, and French.

The Russian Lesson never became the novel I set out to write because I was stuck in my own ignorance.

In 2019, now age seventy, I became ill and spent half the year in and out of the hospitals and rehab facilities. I was almost as old as Mr. Rossolowsky. Time was running out. When I recovered, in order to keep my promise to the old man, I took the manuscript out of its box one last time and started typing. I began The Russian Lesson pounding away mechanically on an old Smith-Corona manual typewriter and completed it on a Hewlett-Packard keyboard.

But what I still did not know was how to make his story come alive in fiction, how to make his friends and family and the historical figures he met—Tsar Nicholas, Rasputin, Mikhail Bulgakov—more than mere words. So in the end, I just gave up, declared the book finished when I got to the end, a snowy funeral attended by a handful of mourners.

After being turned down by a few publishers, I asked my oldest daughter to post The Russian Lesson on Amazon where, as of today, it languishes virtually unread at #14,578 on the biographical historical fiction list. Carl Little’s overly-generous review in Maine Arts Journal is the only notice The Russian Lesson ever received.

It took me forty years to write The Russian Lesson because I am not a novelist. I am a journalist. I was stuck all those years because my way with words is limited to the expository. What I learned from long experience is an admiration for writers who can make characters come alive on the page. I wish now that old Mr. Rossolowsky had found one of them.