Two Fulbright Scholars Gain New Views of Southern Literature

Peter Palievsky

"Nobody wanted to explain it. Nobody wanted to defend it," says Palievsky, recalling the flap over the book. "My idea was to show that it is not as bad as it seems."

The novel finally did make it to print in 1982, and Palievsky, vice director of the A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow, wrote the preface. But party censors forced him to add a bit of wisdom from Karl Marx, that although the Civil War liberated blacks in the South, it also enslaved whites in Northern capitalism. No matter. To Palievsky, the important thing is that great literature reaches the masses, and the 100,000 copies in the first run of Gone with the Wind were instantly snapped up.

Today, the Communist Party and its thought police are in disarray, and the Soviet Union is shattered, but the old problem of getting books to the people remains. In Russia's crude new market economy, only literature that can generate a profit is printed. And the only stuff making any money these days is pornography, says Palievsky. "Economic power is sometimes worse than political power," he says.

Palievsky, 62, came to Ole Miss on a Fulbright grant and sponsorship by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. During the spring semester he taught a seminar comparing civil war literature of both the United States and Russia, which was beset by internal warfare following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Readings included not only Gone with the Wind, but Mikhail Sholokhov's enormous civil war epic, Quiet Flows the Don, Shelby Foote's Shiloh, and The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov.

Palievsky's lectures were something new for students. In a thick Russian accent and often with a quiet dramatic flair, he wove a dense collage of sweeping history, literary analysis, and colorful anecdotes from the lives of great authors. Half the seminar, however, was reserved for what he calls the best part: hearing from the students themselves.

Aside from his work on Margaret Mitchell, Palievsky has published three books and dozens of articles on topics ranging from literary theory to Tolstoy to Graham Greene to William Faulkner. He helped organize two Faulkner conferences in Russia in the 1980s and willwrap up his stay in America this summer with his second speaking appearance at the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. His topic, appropriately enough, will be "Faulkner's Unrecognized Sister, Margaret Mitchell."

The rise of Faulkner's work in the former Soviet Union is an interesting story, says Palievsky. His first work to receive official sanction was the Snopes trilogy, The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion. To Soviet ideologues, the character of Flem Snopes was "the symbol of capitalist power, the power of money, which swallows everything around him," says Palievsky. "In a way, it coincides with the Soviet view of the American way of life . . . evidence of this bad society."

Faulkner's work is popular today in Russia, though Palievsky considers Mark Twain the greatest of all American writers.

An avid suitcase smuggler of prohibited literature on official U.S. visits, Palievsky says he never took on the role of dissident. Yet he never joined the Communist Party, either. He rejects his own inclusion in Russia's literary intelligentsia, describing himself as "just a specialist" who shares a four-room apartment on the outskirts of Moscow with his wife, Elena, their 12-year-old son, Vassily, and some 6,000 books.

In Soviet times, he says, it was de rigueur for literary critics to laud mainly those writers who praised the Soviet system. Typically, they were poor writers who "invented artificial characters" for the scholars to study and the people to emulate, he says. "Unfortunately, when I visited the United States, I noticed almost the same policy," says Palievsky. "If you said something against the Soviet regime, you became a great intellectual."

The best writers embrace not some immediate political ideology but what Palievsky calls real truth about real, ordinary people. It was one of the key themes of his seminar.

To live among real Southerners, then, is to Palievsky the chance of a lifetime. "I really believe that the real culture in the United States starts with the South, is derived from the South," he says. Russians and Southerners today are "dressed in civilization," yet they still seem to share a special bond with the land, with "something that lasts."

Palievsky, whose family accompanied him to Oxford, hopes to complete research this summer for a book on Russian and American civil war literature.

Manana Dumbadze

Manana Dumbadze, a visiting Fulbright scholar from the former Soviet republic of Georgia, got an unexpected jolt on an April tour of the Mississippi Delta. There he stood, big as life, festooned in a white suit and reeling off one comic folk yarn after another. Mark Twain! A literary hero not only to Dumbadze, but to her renowned novelist father.

This Twain was an impostor, of course, an actor who popped up at Hopson Plantation, near Clarksdale, to charm a group from the Oxford Conference for the Book. Back home, Dumbadze had heard of such Mark Twain impersonators, but never expected to actually encounter one. "Suddenly it was like fate," she says, recalling the moment. "I never dreamt that I would see it."

For Dumbadze, the chance to spend a few months in tranquil Mississippi comes as a welcome respite from conditions in her own country. Wracked by civil war since declaring its independence from the decaying Soviet empire in 1991, Georgia today is a beautiful but inhospitable land. Dumbadze has herself run from gunfire in the streets of Tbilisi, her home and the Georgian capital, and suffered the loss of her summer home in a war-torn district on the Black Sea coast.

These troubles, however, have not dulled Dumbadze's enthusiasm for literature. A senior scholar at the Institute of Georgian Literature, specializing in comparative research, she came to Ole Miss to study such Southern authors as Flannery O'Connor, Tennessee Williams, and William Faulkner, whose work greatly influenced Georgian prose in the 1960s.

Dumbadze is the latest on a growing list of scholars from the former Soviet Union to discover Ole Miss and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. "We're getting more and more Fulbright scholars," says center director William Ferris. "They could choose any university in the country. The fact that they come here reflects the quality of programs that we offer."

Dumbadze has published articles on the works of Twain, Faulkner, and Longfellow, plus an analysis of the tricky problem of translating the titles of Ernest Hemingway's novels into Georgian. She also has published a few short stories, though she holds no illusions of duplicating the fame of her father, Nodar Dumbadze, perhaps Georgia's best-known novelist and poet.

Like Mark Twain, his favorite American author, Nodar Dumbadze had a flair for comedy in his writing. "Humor is free, and it liberates a person," he once said in an interview in the journal Soviet Literature. He loved children, made the sun an ever-present "character" in his works, and died in 1984 a winner of the Soviet Union's top literary honor, the Lenin Prize.

Erskine Caldwell's comic Georgia Boy was a big inspiration for Dumbadze's first novel, Myself, Granny, Iliko, and Illarion, first published quietly, in bits and pieces, in the humor section of a magazine. Manana Dumbadze remembers her father telling her of Georgia Boy: "I'll do the same and better." Despite its humble debut, the autobiographical story of a boy sent to live with his grandmother in the Georgian countryside after his parents were exiled hit like a bomb in the USSR, with its unusual references to Stalin and political arrest. The novel, published in 1958, has since been translated in at least 68 languages.

Manana Dumbadze, joined in Oxford this spring by her 17-year-old son, Nodar, and her husband, Vladimir, says she hopes her research here will help solidify the concept of Southern writing as a distinct genre in her native country. Publishing during these difficult days in Georgia, though, is hard. "We have no paper, we have no glue, we have nothing," says Dumbadze, who, like her father, finds solace in a good laugh.

Dumbadze will be in Oxford through August.

Wesley Loy

The 1994 Oxford Conference for the Book brought together one of the most impressive groups of literary figures ever to visit the University of Mississippi. The second year of the conference drew capacity crowds as authors, publishers, agents, editors, teachers, librarians, and students assembled April 8-11 to discuss crucial issues affecting book culture in America today.

After a day of area tours April 8, the conference opened Friday morning, April 9, with a creative writing workshop, a "sell-out" event, conducted by Ole Miss writer-in-residence Barry Hannah. Over 90 participants gathered in the Barnard Observatory lecture hall to hear Hannah, author Larry Brown, Georgia Review editor Stanley Lindberg, literary agent Wendy Weil, and bookseller Mary Gay Shipley.

The afternoon's activities shifted to the Education Auditorium, where Chancellor R. Gerald Turner welcomed guests to the campus and Richard H. Brodhead, dean of Yale College, gave the keynote address. Brodhead offered a historical perspective on American book culture, detailing the origins of the American best-seller phenomenon beginning as early as the 1850s. He described the publishing climate of that era and some of the "damn'd tribe of scribbling women" who ultimately-and ironically-created a market for Nathaniel Hawthorne and other writers of the day. Brodhead's remarks foreshadowed many of the issues addressed in greater detail in subsequent panels, including literacy issues, economics of the book industry, and marketing strategies used to garner readers.

With historical background in place, the audience was treated to a pleasant "future shock" provided by Bernard Rath, executive director of the American Booksellers Association. Rath offered a national perspective on the impact of "new media" on the book business, focusing on textbooks, professional and scholarly publishing, and trade and mass markets. "Every five days more information than is stored in the Library of Congress flows through the Internet," he remarked. Rath linked the survival of booksellers to their ability to adjust to a "paperless evolution."

Responding to Rath's remarks, Lawrence Kirshbaum, chief executive officer of Warner Books, reminded nervous booksellers and publishers that "the book business is thriving. Books have always grown and developed, based on the success of technological changes. Starting with television, the rise of movie attendance, and home video, people have said, `Well, here goes the book business down the drain.' That has not been true. These other media have enhanced our business. I predict that we will see more books in the year 2000 than we do today." Kirshbaum presented an encouraging picture of the future, describing the "interactive" book as "psychologically perfect for subsequent generations. The ramifications for education alone are staggering," he said. Respondent John Y. Cole, founding director of the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress, also provided encouragement in his remarks about the impact of technology on book culture.

Subsequently, the conference adjourned to City Grocery on the Oxford Square for an early evening cocktail buffet and many out-of-towners' first taste of chef John Currence's famous shrimp and grits. At 8 p.m. the Education Auditorium was filled for readings by novelists Tom Drury and Beverly Lowry, and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic. "I'd like to raise an imaginary glass of Calvados to the memory of Sam Lawrence," began Drury. "His imprint is on my book in more ways than one." Lawrence, noted publisher at Houghton Mifflin, died in January before Drury's first novel, The End of Vandalism, was published. Lowry, introduced by Knopf editor Gary Fisketjon as being from "just down the road in Greenville," read from her current novel, The Track of Real Desires. "Poets lie to tell the truth, you know," Simic told the audience and then read selections from various works, including The World Doesn't End and Hotel Insomnia.

On Saturday morning, Stanley Lindberg offered a provocative view of copyright, one that prompted more than a few seasoned agents, editors, and publishers to look for copies of his book The Nature of Copyright: A Law of Users' Rights. "The concept of art as property is very popular," Lindberg cautioned before quizzing the audience about their own knowledge of the laws pertaining to fair use. He proposed that the real purpose behind copyright law is not so much to "protect" authors as to disseminate information and advance public knowledge.

Later Saturday morning, Elaine Scott, head of the Arkansas State Board of Education and a 20-year volunteer for the Reading Is Fundamental program, moderated a panel on "The Endangered Species: Readers in the Year 2000." Cathy Stewart, a teacher at Lafayette County Elementary School, explained how she motivates her first-graders to read and to write. Jim Dees and Elizabeth Dollarhide, producers for the University of Mississippi-based Project LEAP (Learn, Earn, and Prosper), reported on their work developing satellite-transmitted telecasts to help educate disadvantaged adult students. Author Margaree King Mitchell and artist James Ransome talked about Uncle Jed's Barbershop, her first children's book and the seventh he has illustrated. Mitchell and Ransome, who met for the first time when they came to Oxford for the conference, also assisted with the Young Authors Fair at local schools.

Square Books, during the lunch break, hosted a party to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the founding of the New York Review of Books. On hand to blow out candles on a large birthday cake and to accept congratulations of admiring readers was publisher Rae Hederman. At an afternoon lecture, Charles Robinson, bookseller and president of the American Booksellers Association, offered his perspectiveon "The Shifting Landscape of Bookselling." Noting the rise of "superstores" in the American book business, Robinson said, "There's nothing un-American about competing for the existing market share. As an independent bookseller friend observed, 'My customers aren't necessarily looking for the lowest prices. They just don't want to feel like fools for buying books from me.'" Robinson voiced the growing concern of independent booksellers. "Many stores feel targeted because the locations the chains choose are often in close proximity to existing stores, and the chains are seen as predators by some." Robinson, whose own Village Books store in Bellingham, Wash., has received awards for its active volunteer work, cited community involvement as a positive force in strengthening the vitality of smaller stores.

Responding to Robinson's remarks, Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books in Miami, stated: "We don't have any inalienable right to exist just because we chose the noble profession of bookselling." He noted that the smaller personal bookstores have an edge when they choose to involve themselves actively in their customers' reading. Kaplan cited a long tradition of excellence in independent bookselling in such stores as Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare & Co., the Gotham Book Mart, and City Lights Bookstore.

Kaplan introduced the panelists for a session during which a team from Alfred A. Knopf, one of the nation_s most prestigious publishing houses, traced what happens after a book is accepted for publication. Gary Fisketjon, vice president and editor-at-large at Knopf, said, "First you have to sell the book within the company. Everyone is busy, and you work to see that the books you edit receive the attention they deserve in areas like promotion or cover design." Paul Bogaards, a 10-year veteran of book promotion, added, "The premise is that books don't sell themselves. The energy authors put into their work should be equaled or excelled by the energy the publisher puts into it." Bogaards cited commonly employed methods of book promotion such as advertising, "point of purchase" materials, and the use of news media. Kaplan spoke of the trust that builds over a period of years between publishers and book-sellers, then between booksellers and customers. Of bestsellers and national hype, Beverly Lowry remarked that for most writers, "Our world is not that world. A writer's life starts out to be a life of hope, determination, and uncertainty. You never know what will happen when you send out a manuscript. That doesn't change."

On Saturday night, novelist Caryl Phillips and poet Daniel Halpern read from their current works. Phillips read "Somewhere in England," a section of his novel Crossing the River. Introduced by Granta editor Bill Buford as one of the more important writers in Britain, Phillips cited the influence of Faulkner's novel Sartoris, "which features a black soldier unable to fit back into small-town Southern life. I began to wonder about the experiences of black GI's in Europe and slowly, over the years, the idea of writing something about the experiences of these soldiers occurred to me. Eventually the piece `Somewhere in England' began to take shape."

Introducing Daniel Halpern, Oxford bookseller Richard Howorth said, "Sometimes I feel like he is the person more than anyone else in the universe who is holding the responsibility of poetry on his own shoulders." Richard Ford later gave Halpern a similar accolade, saying that "for every generation there has to be somebody who steps up to the plate. . . . Plimpton did it in the 1950s with the Paris Review,, Danny Halpern did it in the '70s for poetry." Halpern read from his Selected Poems, which appears this spring. Halpern is editor-in-chief of Ecco Press and editor of Antaeus.

On Sunday morning novelist Richard Ford, publisher Rea Hederman, and editor Bill Buford discussed the history of Granta, a literary magazine that gained its formidable readership in part by billing itself as a magazine for people who don't like literature. "Magazines are very fragile things," Buford said. "They depend on their readers." Buford traced the magazine's development from a shoestring operation located above a beauty salon in London to its partnership with Hederman, publisher of the New York Review of Books. Hederman related his own excitement when approached by Buford. "We depend on subscriptions," former Mississippian Hederman reminded the audience. "We're not beholden to advertisers. They can't pull their ads if they don't like a review." "What Bill did was almost unbelievably hard," Ford said, "to go to England and start this magazine, and be the lightning rod that he is." When Buford noted that the typical Granta reader has "an appetite for the real world," Ford teased him about his tough editorial standards and the international status of the journal, recounting his own experiences. "You end up in a hotel in Milan with your head in your hands, sending your work off with the bellboy to the fax machine-and you don't speak the language-and the next time you see it, it will be in Granta."

Daniel Halpern led a discussion on "The Paradox of Poetry" featuring fellow poets and friends Charles Simic and Louise GlŸck. Simic outlined various paradoxes well known to readers and writers of poetry. "There's no money in it," Simic noted. "And yet poetry is being written. We've been hearing for 3,000 years that poetry is dead. Most poems are short, and they survive thousands of years. You want to hear them again and again."

Gluck added that "poetry is to create questions. The natural disposition of society is to provide answers. A poem has a recalcitrant mystery." When asked whether poets define readers by their numbers, Gluck noted, "A poem is a private negotiation between one speaker and one reader. I think it's a good thing to have a way of earning a living that's not influenced by the demands of an audience that's paying. What if their demands are not in your best interest?"

Sunday afternoon brought the performance of As I Lay Dying, a country blues opera based on the Faulkner novel, presented by Karren Pell, David Olney, Tommy Goldsmith, and Tom House. The Nashville-style musicians treated the audience to a remarkably faithful rendering of the Faulkner narrative and a generous sampling of indigenous Southern folk music, including blues and Sacred Harp techniques. Karen Tiller, Evans Harrington, and Donald Kartiganer provided commentary afterwards.

Fulton Chapel was filled to overflowing for the afternoon appearances of best-selling novelists John Grisham and Stephen King. Barry Hannah teased them about their success, asking Grisham about his private plane, which Hannah hears "passing overhead when he is down on earth accepting his awards from the Tupelo Word Society." Hannah inquired if they felt "hostage" to audiences that expect legal thrillers from Grisham and horror from King. "If the checks don't bounce, I don't care what they call me," King said. "It's been a great cover." Noting that he had used the horror genre to write about such subjects as "government paranoia," King added, "I never really wrote for money. I wrote because it's what I'm made to do."

Grisham remarked that King's track record of 33 books is "an accomplishment that makes me tired even thinking about it." When asked what motivates him to write, Grisham described his publishing contracts and their implied deadlines. But he quickly added, "This is not a rough life. A rough life was practicing law and suing people."

Following their panel both authors attended a reception in the John Davis Williams Library to open an exhibit of materials related to Grisham's career, including documents from the filming of The Firm. Out-of-towners also toured the newly created Seymour Lawrence Room for Writers.

The 1994 Oxford Conference for the Book concluded with a Sunday supper at the Gin, with music by the Tangents. Nancy McNamee came from Clarksdale to serve the first course-black-eyed pea caviar from her Mississippi Madness line. David and Bitsy Duggins brought their hot dog wagon and jambalaya pot to Oxford from New Orleans and served up these specialties to participants. A common refrain could be heard on the terrace as conference participants enjoyed the food, recounted their weekend experiences, and planned for the future. "Next year . . . next time . . . this time next year."

The 1995 Oxford Conference for the Book will be held March 31 through April 2.

Cynthia Shearer