ANDREI BITOV, Toronto 1988
Andrei Bitov was a Soviet writer when I photographed him at the authors festival in 1988, even though he had been labeled a dissenter and offered the choice that so many other writers in the Soviet Union had taken - exile - and turned it down. Under glasnost and Mikhail Gorbachev's regime, though, his career had taken a positive turn and Pushkin House, the novel considered his masterpiece, had been published in both Russia and the west. Born in Leningrad in 1937, he spent part of his childhood in the city when it was attacked by Nazi armies - an 872-day siege where an estimated 1.5 million people died of disease and starvation. He'd work as a stevedore and construction worker and serve in the army before he graduated from the Leningrad Mining Institute and began publishing short stories in the '60s. While he finished Pushkin House in the early '70s, he would have to wait for over a decade to see it in print.
Writer Andrei Bitov's reputation with the Soviet government went bad in 1979 when he edited and contributed to the Metropol Literary Almanac, an anthology that was offered for publication in both the Soviet Union and the west despite lacking official sanction. It was never published in the Soviet Union and Bitov was offered the choice to leave the country, which he refused for personal and family reasons. Describing the family and upbringing of Lyova, the "hero" of Pushkin House, Bitov wrote that "politics was never mentioned in the family, neither damned nor praised, and he regarded it as something very external and exempt from criticism, not even so much out of caution - they didn't seem to have taught him that, either - as because it was totally irrelevant to him." But in the Soviet Union you might try to be disinterested in politics, but politics was very interested in you.
Glasnost came along just in time to give writer Andrei Bitov a career inside and outside the Soviet Union, and around the time I photographed him at the authors festival he helped found what would be the Russian chapter of PEN International. By 2000, when he was president of PEN Russia, there was a controversy when Russia hosted the PEN International Congress, and members protested that this shouldn't be happening while Russia was waging war in Chechnya. While he disapproved of the war, Bitov said that he felt that PEN Russia had "become hostages of East and West at the same moment…now the word 'Soviet' is being replaced by the word 'Russian,' and I don't like it. What I don't like is that as a private person I was made to feel responsible." My principal memory of my shoot with Andrei Bitov in that little wood-paneled alcove off that hotel lobby in 1988 was his gravitas; he seemed like a very literary person, more concerned with his work and the culture of books and words around the world. It seems like a very long time ago now. Andrei Bitov died in Moscow in 2018.
