Upon The Airy Ocean: Australia, the Russian Pacific, and the Transnational Imaginary

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Chapter 6

‘Upon the Airy Ocean’: Australia, the Russian Pacific, and the Transnational Imaginary

Nicholas Birns

Transnational turnsBoth Australian and Russian literary studies have undergone transnational turns recently. As the influential Russian studies journal Kritika put it in 2007, ‘The transnational is frequently understood to signify the movement of groups, goods, technology, or people across national borders; and in this definition the accent is on movement transcending the borders of the nation-state’.1 Similar statements have been made within the context of Australian literature, and even if more challenged and qualified in the past couple of years than in the decade of the 2000s, transnationalism may still be said to be the dominant paradigm in Australian literary studies today.2 It might even be averred that the entire study of world literature(s) has gone transnational, privileging above all what Emily Apter has termed ‘the internationalization of literary geographic vistas, social settings, cultural commonplaces, and generic forms’.3 But the turns in these two national literatures, Russian and Australian, seem especially pronounced.

Neoliberalism has enhanced the real and virtual presence of these countries worldwide, in terms of the dissemination of

investments and natural resources. A critique of exclusionary ideas of Eurocentrism has reduced the way in which Russia and Australia are seen as being fundamentally other from the mainstream West, how their European cultural institutions and practices were made to feel less than completely or adequately European. Yet surely the biggest common denominator over the past quarter-century has been a loss of privilege. Twenty-five years ago, Great Russians controlled one of the highest powers on the globe, and dominated the world awareness of the then-Soviet Union, so much that even sophisticated intellectuals conflated a Russian ethnic identity with the peoples who had been dragooned into the sphere of Soviet power: Russia and the Soviet Union were interchangeable. Equally, at that time Anglo-Celtic Australia was Australia itself: the Aboriginal presence, though acknowledged, was seen as being a small part of Australian identity, and whatever people’s nascent awareness of past and current immigration, Australia’s concerns were still seen as those of a white, Northern European population transposed to the southern hemisphere. The three years between the fall of the Berlin

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Wall in 1989 and the Mabo decision in 1992 changed all this; the Brezhnev doctrine and the doctrine of terra nullius became equally scattered as dust.

Of course, this could all be no more than fortuitous coincidence, and, as Ellen Berry and David Chioni Moore have warned us, the ‘post-’ in post-Soviet is not necessarily the same as the ‘post-’ in postcolonial.4 (Nor are Australian Indigenous peoples necessarily at home in a postcolonial paradigm.) But a look at the interlocking literary histories of Russia and Australia from the mid-nineteenth century to the present can give us an insight into how ‘country’ was imagined in two very different geopolitical spaces and how, for all their territorial remoteness, the Pacific and eastern hemisphere locations of both countries, as well as unexpectedly analogous discourses of race and ethnicity, bring them into convergence.

I first conceived of this essay in July 2008, when a visiting research fellow at the University of Wollongong. There, I walked around a large nineteenth-century fort in the harbour. It turned out that it had been built against the Russians – at a time when it was feared that the Czarist navy would plunge deep into the South Pacific in their zeal to vex Her Majesty’s domains. In the Cold War, it was seen as the system that was wrong, not the country; anti-communism, not anti-Russianism, reigned. But in the Victorian era, people feared Russia as such, with its authoritarian government, numerically huge military, and a land mass that looked so imposing in the atlas. As the Queensland journalist Clem Lack put it, ‘Fear of bombardment by a Russian fleet and possible invasion caused successive war “scares” in the young Australian Colonies in the nineteenth century’.5 Russia saw itself as a major maritime power in this era and

was perceived as such even more within the British imperium. In turn, Russophobia, over and above explicit Anglo–Russian engagements such as the Crimean War and the Great Game in Central Asia, flourished in Britain and its colonies.

One can see this Russophobia in the work of prominent British authors such as Harriet Martineau, who, at the height of the Crimean War, wrote, in her Autobiography, of a period in the 1830s when it was thought that ‘the Czar had a mind to annex us’ – ‘us’ being the actual islands of Great Britain – and that ‘the idea of our ever submitting to Russia seemed too monstrous to be entertained’, indicating that submitting to less unpreventable adversaries would be, if still unpalatable, at least slightly more tolerable.6 These attitudes could be explained by being present at certain critical moments such as the Crimean War or the Eastern Question, when Anglo–Russian interests collided in Europe, yet the tensions in the relationship were more long-term than this. Whereas the Soviet Union was undeniably a geopolitical power during its era, and as it enters historical memory its image will remain such, our image of Czarist Russia in this respect is far hazier. We are aware of its eastward expansion, but this was traditionally difficult even for left-wing Europeans to see as expansionistic, since Britain and Russia were in direct imperial competition in consolidating their contiguous territories in Central Asia and the fringes of South Asia in what became famous as the Great Game. It is a mistake, though, to see this Anglo–Russian rivalry as pertaining exclusively to lands contiguous to Russia. Before Russia’s loss to Japan in the 1904–05 Russo–Japanese War, there was no Asian power able to rival Britain in the Pacific. Indeed, before the expansion of the United States and German navies in that region

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in the late 1890s, Britain’s main perceived rival in the Pacific was Russia. This provides one explanation for the Russian support for the United States in the Civil War – the last country to abolish serfdom supporting a country trying to abolish slavery.7 It is also key background for the rapidity and drastically discounted pricing of the Russian sale of Alaska to the United States. Russia preferred to deal with the United States – a country that had experienced tensions with Britain over Britain’s less than ardent backing of it during the Civil War – rather than Britain, its core geopolitical rival, whose territories in then-British North America bordered their colony of Alaska.8

Although these geostrategic stakes were genuine, what Rich calls ‘paranoia and Russophobia’ led elements of the Anglophone Pacific, including Australia, to fear a Russian threat where none was plausible.9 It is important to realise that, however much the rhetoric of fear associated with the spectre of invasion from the north was associated with Japan and China in the twentieth century, it started with this eidolon of the Russian threat, and thus was originally ethnic and xenophobic in tincture, but not a priori racist. It was the original of the tropology of anxiety and vulnerability that continued to inform Australian self-reckoning through the ensuing century, even after the ability of Russian power to project itself into the Pacific collapsed in the wake of its traumatic defeat by Japan in the 1904–05 war, the turning point in the failure of European imperialism to fulfil its white-supremacist and world-girdling aspirations. It was a white globe until the Russo–Japanese war. Russian (Soviet) naval power did not recover until the late 1960s, with the rebuilding of the Soviet navy under Admiral Gorshkov at the time of Third World independence, with

independent regimes as key clients, when the permanence of non-white global actors had to be admitted.

After the Russian defeat at Tsushima, there was no possibility of a geopolitical conflict in which the envisioned foe was entirely European (something only masked by the fact that the Arabs and Japanese were on the British side in World War One). The West’s xenophobic othering of Russia, compounded by the Slavophile and/or ‘Eurasian’ rhetoric of some Russian intelligentsia, meant that Russia was often seen as being not entirely European. In this light, undeniably Asian powers can be seen to be Russia’s successors as objects of Australian geopolitical fear.

The paranoia about Russian intentions with respect to Australia, though, did have a grain of truth with respect to both countries. Though one might think of the geostrategic relationship of Russia and Australia as being nearly antipodal, of the two countries as being very far apart, both are powers of the western Pacific rim founded on European traditions – in fact, arguably the only such. Furthermore, these Pacific aspects tend to undo certain nationalist bromides with respect to both countries. In Australian studies, for example, Suvendrini Perera and Elizabeth McMahon have argued for the pertinence of an ‘island’ rather than ‘continental’ paradigm for the Australian imaginary, which would have the effect of making an Australian geopolitical relation more serial and less static.10 Similarly, an oceanic aspect to Russian identity has the potential to undo the stereotypical Western–Slavophile dichotomy often applied to Russia by outsiders. The oceanic aspects of Russian identity can assume unusual avatars. Katerina Clark (daughter of the great Australian historian Manning Clark, of whom more later) has argued that in the 1930s, Arctic

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exploration lent a soupçon of cosmopolitanism to that most unlikely of oxymorons, Stalinist civilisation.11 Russia’s access to other oceans was a part of its story as well – the Antarctic explorations of Bellingshausen in the 1810s and 1820s, for example, which involved Australian stopovers. The aspiration after a port on the Indian Ocean that was said to be part of Russia’s push into Central Asia injected at least the rhetoric of Russian presence in Australia’s ‘other’ ocean. Indeed, what is surprising is that Russia made no attempts to be an Atlantic colonial power; after all, the country ‘next over’ after the construction of St Petersburg, the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia, were colonies in West Africa and the Caribbean during the later seventeenth century. The role of Courland as coloniser had an after-effect in Australian poetry in Michael Dransfield’s fantasised rural estate of ‘Courland Penders’, combining the near-Russian and the colonial Anglophone; in arguably his most famous poem about Courland Penders, ‘Courland Penders: Going Home’, Dransfield speaks of the decayed estate suggesting ‘Dostoyevsky’s Eternity’.12 Also in the seventeenth century, the ‘Swedish’ colonisation of North America – that is, in present-day Delaware – was in fact largely accomplished by Finns, who a bit more than a century later would fall under Russian rule, where they would remain past the era of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Only certain symmetries of power in the Eurasian landmass, combined perhaps with the legacy of the Mongol hegemony, resulted in Russian power reaching the Pacific earlier, and with far greater directness and force, than ever occurred in the Atlantic. The desire to other and Orientalise Russia has masked this potentially Atlantic and oceanic aspect to Russian identity.

This oceanic aspect to Russian geopolitical deployment has been discursively sidelined because, as with Australia, it was so important to both internal and external observers to see Russian identity as bring solid, continental and contiguous. One of the reasons that Western intellectuals often did not regard the Soviet Union as an empire is that its possessions were continuous, continental and apparently seamless, and not displayed on the map with the obvious discontinuity that attended the distended global patches of pink that characterised the British imperium. Similarly, Australia seemed, in its continentally grounded albeit underpopulated solidity, as the great stanchion of assured identity among the British possessions, the least porous and susceptible to external adulteration. For both Russia and Australia, contiguous landedness therefore served as an imperial equivalent of the Horatian aesthetic dictum ars celare artem – it was expansion that concealed expansionism because it seemed natural, organic. Moreover, both Russian and Australian identities seemed securely European, even if outside the traditionally defined boundaries of Europe per se. Both Russian and Australian literary studies have undergone transnational turns because both were embedded within definitions of landedness that seemed more epistemologically secure than, in fact, they were.

Affectivities: Russian or Soviet?These mutual images of Russia and Australia made their way at least onto the periphery of literary awareness. Anton Chekhov’s short story ‘Gusev’, for instance, mentions the Indian Ocean in the context of the furthest a Russian naval cadet could be dispatched, and shows an awareness of the nautical manifestation of Russian military space. Chekhov famously

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visited Sri Lanka, and his period on Sakhalin certainly gave him exposure to the Pacific.13 Somewhat ironically, the Russian writer renowned for being the most nuanced, psychological and domestic is also associated with a wide array of transnational spaces. This intimacy between distance and subjectivity is not infrequent. When the nineteenth-century Russian lyric poet Afanasy Afanasievich Fet, who himself journeyed on the Indian Ocean, says in his poem ‘Sea Journey’ (на корабле):

I seem to have a foretaste of that day

When I, without a ship, shall sail

Upon the airy ocean, leaving behind

Beloved earth to vanish in the mist.

Ей будто чудится заранеТот день, когда без корабляПомчусь в воздушном океанеИ будет исчезать в туманеЗа мной родимая земля,14

He sees the ocean (vozdushnom oceane, meaning as much ‘ocean of air’ as ‘ocean surrounded by air’) as aspiration and void, a site of renunciation of the given, of transcendental impossibility. One has to see this ocean citation – as opposed, for example, to that in Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’ – as something at once proximate and far away in Russian discourse: a century before Fet was born, Russia had no access to the Black Sea and thus the Mediterranean, and only a narrow Baltic window to the Atlantic. The only ocean that Russian territory abutted in any fully-fledged way was the Pacific – geographically distant, conceptually articulable. This is the manifestation of the distance that is always at play in the Russian–Australian literary relation; but it is wrong to think that there is only distance, unsolved by an anomalous propinquity. Even today, the Russian Pacific

city of Vladivostok is closer to Australia than it is to Los Angeles, and one can fly from Perth to the Caspian Sea in less time than from Cairns to Sausalito. Despite Australia’s late ‘discovery’ by Europeans, Russia and Australia are both part of the Old World, and are connected through a far more settled series of areas in what has come to be called Australia’s ‘near north’ than the scattered archipelagoes which dot the long Pacific space between Australia and the United States.

In turn, there was an affect of propinquity as well as distance in Australian literary evocations of Russia. As long as the Russian threat was a conceivable reality, everything Russian seemed menacing, foreign and exotic, but in the twentieth century a notable dichotomy ensued. It is important to remember that, even after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, what became the Soviet Union, as much as it was an object of ideological fear, was not significantly an object of geopolitical paranoia, especially in the Pacific where the rising power of Japan stood between the Soviet and Australian polities. To its pre-1945 Australian sympathisers such as Jean Devanny and Katharine Susannah Prichard, the Soviet appeal was one of ideology and revolution. But aside from this, there was a separate Russian appeal, one wholly literary in affect, and stemming ultimately from the vogue for Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in the late-Victorian and Edwardian Anglophone world, manifested in practical readerly terms by widespread familiarity with the translations of Constance Garnett and Aylmer Maude. Whereas the Soviet appeal was ideological and progressive, the Russian appeal was universal and humanistic, having no other politics than that of the tacit domesticity of psychological states – however extreme – and interior feelings – however violent. This is seen in a book such as

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Elizabeth Harrower’s The Watch Tower (1966), in which Clare Vaizey is famously described as being ‘the only Russian in Sydney’, precisely by virtue of her psychological depth and emotional insight.15 Sometimes these Russian and the Soviet strands could coexist in the same writer. This was true of Christina Stead, who supported a hard-Soviet ideological line all her adult life but whose novels were nonetheless – and separately – ‘Russian’ in their emphasis on romantic, marital and family relationships, even as they went beyond the Anglophone Victorian framework by allowing tragedy, unhappy endings and unfulfilled lives a serious place on the literary canvas. Near the beginning of Stead’s Letty Fox (1946), this association of the ‘Russian’ with the occurrence of emotional unrest within a still-overall domestic context is seen when the protagonist learns that what her mother claimed had been her own emotional sufferings were in fact those from the Chekhovian roles that she had played: ‘When I first read one of my mother’s roles – it was Chekhov’s The Seagull – and I read it when I was about nine years old – I was astounded and then angry, I thought my mother had stolen the words and was a liar. But I at once got to understand about the theater through this and became a voracious reader.’16 The primal scene of initiation into reading not only occurs through Russian literature but is also accompanied by the replacement of a proprietary, individualistic way of reading with a larger sense of independent humanity, in which everything can be appropriated or shared. This deeply Tolstoyan vision – though Tolstoy did not write much of oceans, he might be said to have manifested an oceanism of the heart – can be said to have subtended the general sense in which the literary Russian was received, for instance in Nina Christesen’s promulgation of Russian studies at Melbourne,

which at once complemented her husband Clem’s Australian literary nationalism in Meanjin and subtended it with a deeper and wider humanism.17

Of course, one aspect of this literary Russia is that it was a vision of a European literature that was not English. As Pierre Bourdieu puts it:

The principle of change in works resides in

the field of cultural production and, more

precisely, in the struggles among agents and

institutions whose strategies depend on the

interest they have – as a function of the

position they occupy in the distribution of

specific capital (institutionalised or not) – in

conserving or in transforming the structure of

that distribution, hence either in perpetuating

the current conventions or subverting them.18

To embrace Russian literature was a form of subversion, of Australia trying to turn its marginal position in the Anglophone world into a point from which to marshal external capital that could subvert Britishness: au fond, it was a postcolonial tactic, a lateral mimicry, a perruque, in the sense made famous by de Certeau, to circumvent and upend the accustomed givens of literary inheritance.19 There might have been purely literary aspects of this – the aforementioned formal/affective tendency to display more unbounded passion and less providentially framed employments, for example – but surely part of the whole phenomenon was an attempt to find literary precedents beyond England. Interestingly, when this happened with respect to nations nearer England, or more traditional rivals of it, its torque seemed anti-English, as Marcus Clarke’s interest in French literature in colonial Melbourne was,20 or as the fantasies of La Pérouse and d’Entrecasteaux as counterfactual founders of Australia were intended to bruit a

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possibly revolutionary French alternative to English stewardship. There was also, of course, a Catholic counter-factualism, as evidenced by James McAuley’s Captain Quiros, with its yearning that, if the Portuguese explorer had ventured just a little further south, the Great Southern Land would have been redeemed for the Holy See.21 The embrace of the Russian – occurring as it did between the post-Tsushima recession of the Russian threat and its Cold War-era resurgence – was in a way less anti-English than anti-Australian. Russia was seen as a land of people with full motivations and deep feelings. A look to Russia is not anti-British or anti-colonial (as the looks to France, with its seemingly greater cosmopolitanism, are in Australian literature) but anti-Australian, in rebellion against the bourgeois repressiveness and functionality of what passes for Australian civilisation and a yearning for larger and more authentic motivations, even if they entail an at least notionally more pre-modern society.

This is meant not at all in the sense of being unpatriotic, or anti-Australian nationalism – the marriage and conjoint interests of the Christesens illustrated this – but in the sense of being a critique of the narrow and utilitarian aspects of Australian society. When Harrower’s Clare Vaizey is said to be the only Russian in Sydney, it is as if to say that the people who surround her are uncreative, insensitive clods. When Arthur Brown in Patrick White’s The Solid Mandala (1966) is tacitly compared to Dostoyevsky’s Alyosha Karamazov, it is accusing the cerebral and other-directed denizens of the Australian middle class of blocking out the spiritual benefits of Arthur’s extra-normal mental states.22 This is less a fantasy of alternate colonisation than of the Russian as a key to broadening and humanising the Australian soul, internationalising it not in the sense of

having it be more superficially cosmopolitan – know more languages, drink finer wine, and so on – but of manifesting a moral expansiveness that is global in making the felt cognition of human life as ample as possible. Even what might have seemed provincial aspects of a Russian literature – its frequent focus upon a rural peasantry, for instance, or upon an inherited rural tradition very different from the improvised one of the Australian bush – was not seen as local or quaint but as potentially fostering the most universal outlook of all. In other words, the readerly affect of the Russian referent in mid-twentieth century Australian literature is disinterested in political terms in order to further the ultimate purpose of creating morally interested personalities as far beyond the merely politically committed in one sense as in the banally workaday in the other. Even though Dostoyevsky, with his power to shock and his ideological polarities, is far more cited in twentieth-century Australian fiction, the source of this humanism, decidedly denser than a merely braiding universalism, is unquestionably Tolstoy: indeed the idea of the distinctly Russian flavour to literature that nonetheless is not limited to region, nation or ideology could not be anything other than Tolstoyan, however much that affect might help to explain the readerly response to the other great Russian writers. Interestingly, though, the (highly different) Christianities of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky were lopped off in this paradigm; the spirituality here was certainly palpable, but it was humanistic rather than denominational or dogmatic; a kind of altruistic, open-air Parnassianism with all the integrity of a formalist viewpoint but with far more generosity and applicability.

Sometimes Australia was even likened to Russia in a categorical sense, as Patrick White – late in the Soviet day, in a 5 June 1983 article

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for the Sydney Morning Herald – did when he asked:

How […] could this barbarous nation have

produced the poets Pushkin and Pasternak,

the playwright Chekhov, the novelists Tolstoy

and Dostoevsky, and composers such as

Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and

Stravinsky. (Incidentally, a backward glance at

the barbarous and brutal shows that decent

Australians contributed a fair measure of

brutality in their treatment of convicts and

Aborigines.)23

Here, White not only finds a likeness in the nations’ relatively short literary histories and their ‘newness’ with respect to European genres, but in a certain connotative trauma. More often, though, Russia is seen in a literary sense as being at once broader, more abstract, and more emotionally intense than Australia. It is this affective mediation, not a merely Eurasian global position, that leads Gail Jones, in Five Bells (2011), to have Pei Xing, her Chinese immigrant to Sydney, read Pasternak and Gogol.24 Russian literature not only mediates between East and West in the literal sense, but is also a balance between imaginative and real space. And, necessarily, once this motif is there, it can be troped or inverted, as arguably occurs with Gerald Murnane’s interest in Hungarian, both ‘minor’ and ‘nomadic’ in the style of Deleuze, and born partially of the 1956 Revolution and its puncturing of the dreams of both the progressive Soviet and the suprapolitical Russian.

Even though the ‘Soviet’ side of Australian literature – Prichard, Dorothy Hewett, Frank Hardy, Judah Waten, Devanny – had a very different aspect to the ‘Russian’, there were nonetheless some similarities. Prichard’s calling her 1934 book about the Soviet Union The Real Russia not only postulated a kind

of ontological primacy but also crystallised the habit of equating Russia and the Soviet Union, which was the product of more than being taken in by Soviet propaganda.25 After all, even the Soviet Union itself made no bones about being de jure a federation of different nationalities, with the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic being only one of them: it was all there to see on the map, the nations that today are Estonia, Moldova, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan were all clearly demarcated as discrete political sub-units. That Australians and other ‘Westerners’ did not see this had to do with their at once wanting to other ‘Russia’ as a giant, secure monolith, and wanting to repress fissures in their own societies. Moreover, as John McNair has shown, Prichard’s sense of an audience for her writing in the Soviet Union gave her a sense of international linkage and of world literary importance.26 This is precisely the sort of role that Australian writers in the first instance might have looked to England to provide, and Russia became for Prichard a kind of substitute England, a European arena where Australia and Australian writers could resonate, could matter. Buttressing this is the fact that, even after 1949, when a far geographically closer communist regime ruled in China, it was still Russia that was the locus of these devotees’ attention, as occurred with Manning Clark’s Meeting Soviet Man (1960), whose title at least had the minor grace of a mild sarcasm.27 For these writers (and despite Prichard’s sympathetic portrayal of Aborigines in her 1928 novel Coonardoo), Australia and the Soviet Union shared radicalism and whiteness. In Australian contexts, the whiteness of Russia was key; whiteness was the paramount fact in mutual relations; the multi-ethnicity of the Soviet Union was played down, as it was generally in the West. Again,

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this was to an extent as the Soviet Union wanted it to be, but there were also uniquely Western, in this case Australian, reasons, having to do with race and the crystallisation of race across the modalities of otherness and resemblance. There was some sympathy for China in the wake of the Sino–Soviet split, as evidenced by communist activist Ted Hill’s supporting China after the split, but there was not the cultural identification with the sort of cosmopolitanism limned by Katerina Clark that, over and above a support of communism per se, was an element in Prichard’s investment of cultural capital in Soviet–Australian literary relations. Manning Clark himself, as Mark McKenna’s biography shows, went to China in 1984, albeit at a point when China was far closer to being the quasi-capitalist country it is now than the hard-Stalinist realm of the 1950s. Yet Clark’s vision of Australian potential and futurity had affinities to Soviet ones that it did not possess to Maoist equivalents.

Poignantly, the Soviet Union was a mirror image of England, or in a way the United States, in another way, for Australian authors. For all the reviews, publication and revenue that writers like Prichard received from the Soviet Union and wider Eastern bloc, with some exceptions – as Nicole Moore and Christina Spittel show in their study of Dorothy Hewett’s reputation in East Germany – they never really became a part of the literary conversation there, never entered what Katerina Clark sees as Soviet cosmopolitanism, never became part of official literary as opposed to propaganda culture (and, for all their necessary overlap, there was a difference).28 Moore and Spittel speak of the ‘large print runs, substantial media attention and explicit state sanction’ (115) that the East German media and governmental sphere gave to Hewett’s work.

Yet for all this, Hewett never became part of the general cultural conversation, in that, as Moore and Spittle make clear, East German writers did not respond to or allude to her work, no doubt seeing it as being too propagandistic (as Hewett herself eventually came to see it), and the entire publishing project of which it was a part as being substantially for the purpose or marketing of these books in English to ideologically aligned English-speaking readers. By 1968, as Moore and Spittle relate, Hewett’s book was pulped. There is thus a difference in Hewett’s Eastern bloc reputation and those of American writers. Whereas twentieth-century writers like Hemingway and Steinbeck were lauded by an ‘official’ Soviet writer like Konstantin Simonov,29 the Australian writers lingered on the back shelves of party propaganda, bit-players to swell a scene in the cavalcade of orchestrated international admirers of the Soviet state. For all the differences, it is not unlike the role of the Australian writer in Britain or America at the time: published, yes; reviewed, yes; in bookstores and libraries, yes; but part of the canonicity of self-consciously advanced literary culture, no. Patrick White was published by a major New York publisher and lavishly praised. But he was not a herald of Australian literature as a system in the way that Peter Carey became. The Soviet reception of American literature and the American repletion of Russian literature were not only motivated by a sense of the other nation’s importance, pro or con, but of the capability of the other literature with respect to previous models. Dorothy Hewett may have been known in the Eastern bloc, Patrick White in the United States, but their works did not become signals of cosmopolitanism as, say, a Pasternak did in the United States, a Steinbeck in the Soviet bloc.

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The late Soviet PacificIn October 1985, the Soviet Union signed a fishing treaty with the Pacific island nation of Kiribati.30 This received great press attention in the West at that time, with most people then, if ever, learning the correct pronunciation of the island nation as ‘Kiri-BASS’. It was, of course, not uncommon in that era for the Soviet Union to promote itself in newly independent developing countries, or for the Western media to react in an alarmed way. What was new was that the Pacific islands were a fresh arena in this regard, most of them (Kiribati, Tuvalu, the Solomon Islands) having become independent only in the later 1970s. The other notable feature here was retrospective: this was the last move that the Soviet Union made that could be considered as being geopolitically aggressive. Indeed, given the pace of diplomatic operations, it is likely that it was conceived by the ‘old’ regime of General Secretary Konstantin Chernenko and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, not that of Mikhail Gorbachev and Eduard Shevardnadze which replaced them earlier in 1985. After this, there was glasnost, perestroika and a fundamentally new order. The fishing treaty has the effect of a poignant coda to Soviet imperialism, and the paranoiac response to it is redolent of the fear that had occasioned the building of the fort at Wollongong. Briefly, ephemerally, journalists, commentators and polemicists took an interest in the region, reflected in the appearance of books such as Scott Malcomson’s Tuturani.31 The late Soviet Pacific had replaced the late Czarist Pacific, but the combination of an actual Russian presence and a panicked response to that presence was a constant. (One may wonder if a Russian interest in the Pacific and Oceania is somehow a swansong, a signal, in both Czarist and Soviet avatars, of a regime about to fail?)

The year 1985 was arguably also the one that saw a change in the situation referred to above with Prichard, of Australian books existing in the United States but not really registering a ripple. One month after the fishing treaty with Kiribati, Peter Carey’s novel Illywhacker received a glowing notice on the cover of the New York Times Book Review for 17 November 1985. It was a review by Howard Jacobson, whose first line asked if we were to see the book as an allegory for ‘modern Australia’. This was so different from the earlier reception of Patrick White in the United States, seen often as an isolated aesthetic genius whose Australian manifestation was one of happenstance. The review of Carey’s novel ends, ‘If you haven’t been to Australia, read “Illywhacker”. It will give you the feel of it like nothing else I know.’32 This could never have been said even of The Tree of Man (1955) or Voss (1957), much less The Solid Mandala. Carey was not only seen as being indelibly Australian but as part of an Australian literary project. The appearance of this review in New York saw the introduction of the idea not just of Australian writers but an Australian literature, that through hither and yon, vogues and recesses, nationalisms and transnationalism, is still visible today. The very idea of there being a modern Australia, in Jacobson’s phrase, of an Australia contemporary with the rest of the world, granted coevalness with it, was in this sort of context novel.

Along with many other analogous exercises in publishing history, the ‘historical close reading’ of the late Paul Magnuson on the Romantic period has taught us that it is well worth perusing even a periodical for what was in it at any given time and how these discursive co-presences might have set off or affected the articulation of the literary.33 Accordingly, it may be relevant that six weeks

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earlier, on 29 September 1985, the New York Times Magazine published an article by Seymour Topping, the then-managing editor of the newspaper, called ‘Being Australia’. These are its first two sentences: ‘Australia always seemed so far away and perhaps not so important. Suddenly, there was Secretary of State George P. Shultz flying off to Canberra, the Australian capital, to listen more carefully to what the folks down under had to say about global defense strategy.’34 Within six weeks of the first serious review of an Australian novel as an Australian novel in the United States’ leading newspaper, there came a statement of Australia’s importance within global defence – this only a few weeks before the Soviet–Kiribati treaty was announced. This seemed to be the capstone of the increased awareness of Australia in the United States, heralded by the Australian film boom, the airplay of music groups such as Men at Work, and Australia’s unexpectedly winning the America’s Cup in 1983. While the article brought with it the inevitable corollary trans-Pacific misreadings – the cover photo of the magazine, picturing Ayers Rock, turned out to be a composite and had to be reaccredited as such – the sense of an extraordinary breakthrough was nonetheless there. Whether or not there was causality between these events, there was certainly a discursive adjacency, a metonymic propinquity. Australia began to matter when there was Soviet interest in the region, causing the United States, in the words of Bay-Hansen, to ‘sit up and pay attention’.35

This was very different from the Australian–Soviet relation as Prichard and her literary peers envisioned it, where the Soviet Union replaced the Anglo-American world as literary hegemon and arena of cultural purport. The point about Russo–Pacific relations in the mid-twentieth century is that they were

at once world-spanning and, conceptually, thrived on segmentation. By the time of the late twentieth century, this segmentation had become implausible. Here, it was the Anglo-American world as such with the Soviet ‘threat’ looming as a prop and fillip. And the swift pace of consequent geopolitical events, the way in which the Kiribati treaty was truly the last diplomatic move that the Soviet Union made which was in any way assertive or expansionist, meant that the emergence of Australian literature on the world stage occurred, however accidentally or inadvertently, in the context of the eclipse of Soviet power. Thus Australian literature in a world compass became almost apodictically postmodern. Despite the near-invisibility of ‘theory’ in the global reception of Australian literature, even before postcolonialism as such emerged as a discursive formation in the United States academy in the early 1990s, the backdrop of understanding against which the awareness of Australian literature unfolded was a postmodern one.

This was visible as early as October 1988, when Manning Clark spoke at the Common Wealth of Letters conference at Yale.36 I was in attendance at this conference, and noted the difference between Clark and the other speakers, all of whom, in different modes, admitted species of postmodern relativism into their articulations. Clark, on the other hand, was optimistic in a way that was so out-of-kilter with everyone else as to seem both elegiac and magisterial. It was a moving moment, at once triumphant and tragic: the apostle of the Young Tree Green (nationalist Australia) in his final act, while lurking in the background was the awareness that the Soviet Union, which he had once felt to be some sort of global barometer of the emergence of the Young Tree Green from the Old Dead Tree

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Scenes of Reading

(imperial Britain), was itself becoming older and deader than Britain itself was, or ever would be. As with Prichard, Clark, though not unsympathetic to indigenous Australians, had no sense of the post-Mabo role which they would play in Australian discursivity or in problematising the very idea of a unitary Australia. If seeing Manning Clark speak was, for me, somewhat like hearing the voice of God, it was that of a god struggling and vulnerable even in his utmost dignity and majesty, a god knowing that much of what he had lived for was as close to death as he himself was.

Thus the global phenomenon of the late Soviet Pacific resounded in New Haven as much as in Kiribati, and the resonance of its dying fall served as an entr’acte for the transnational conditions under which Australian studies is practised today. It could be argued that the very term ‘transnationalism’ is post-Soviet. In other words, that this term and not ‘international’ is used precisely because, as an adjective, ‘international’ had been overused in the context of ‘the Third International’ or ‘international socialism’. Moreover, for all its purported internationalism, the Soviet framework relied on communist parties of individual countries serving as the supposed vanguard of revolutionary movements –

something that tallied in an Australian context where the rhetoric of the pro-Soviet writers was often a direct descendant of the nationalism associated with the Bulletin in the 1890s. The new transnationalism in Australian literature therefore flourishes in the space left by the Soviet évanouissement – as signified by Frank Moorhouse’s Edith Campbell Berry trilogy which, in its first volume, Grand Days (1994), nimbly inserts a counterfactual reference to Azerbaijan as a League of Nations member to show that this is a post-Soviet cosmopolitanism even though depicting the 1920s,37 or Christos Tsiolkas, who positions the former Soviet bloc as part of Dead Europe (2005),38 far from the fructifying arena it had occupied for Prichard and Clark. Transnational was also different from international in recognising that globalisation crossed racial and cultural lines as well as geographical ones; that the mania for global whiteness which, before Tsushima, had led Australians to see Russia as, in military terms, a nearer neighbour than China or Japan, was no longer conceptually plausible. In the twenty-first century, not only can the globe not be seen as being universally white, but no individual national space, no matter how small, discrete or segmented, can be seen as such either.

Notes1 Editorial, Kritika 9.4 (Fall 2008): 703–9 (703).2 See Peter Kirkpatrick and Robert Dixon, eds,

Republics of Letters: Literary Communities in Australia, Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2012.

3 Emily Apter, ‘Speculation and Economic Xenophobia in Literary World Systems: The Nineteenth Century Business Novel’, in French Global: A New Approach to Literary History, edited by Christie McDonald and Susan R. Suleiman, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011, p. 388.

4 Ellen Berry, Re-Entering the Sign: Articulating New Russian Culture, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995; David Chioni Moore, ‘Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique’, PMLA 116.1 (January 2001): 111–28.

5 Clem Lack, Russian Ambitions in the Pacific: Australian War Scares During the Nineteenth Century, Brisbane: Fortitude Press for the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, p. 432.

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6 Harriet Martineau, Autobiography, edited by Linda Peterson, Peterborough: Broadview, 2005, p. 475.

7 Hugh E. Ragsdale, Imperial Russian Foreign Policy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

8 Claus M. Naske and Herman E. Slotnick, Alaska: A History of the Forty-Ninth State, Norman University of Oklahoma Press, 1994, p. 30.

9 Paul John Rich, Creating the Arabian Gulf: The British Raj and the Invasions of the Gulf, Lanham: Lexington, 1991, p. 388.

10 Suvendrini Perera, Australia and the Insular Imagination, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; and Elizabeth McMahon, ‘Australia, the Island Continent: How Contradictory Geography Shapes the National Imaginary’, Space and Culture 13.2 (2010): 178–87.

11 Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitan, and Soviet Culture, 1931–1941, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.

12 Michael Dransfield, Michael Dransfield: A Retrospective, edited by John Kinsella, St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2002, p. 17.

13 Anton Chekhov, Selected Short Stories by Anton Chekhov, New York: Random House, 2009, p. 109.

14 Afanasy Afanasievich Fet, ‘Sea Journey’ (на корабле). Online: http://www.lotman.pushkinskijdom.ru/Default.aspx?tabid=5880 (accessed 2.12.2012).

15 Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower [1966], Melbourne: Text, 2012. (Accessed via Kindle, at location 1509 in text).

16 Christina Stead, Letty Fox: Her Luck [1946], New York: New York Review Books, 2011, p. 20.

17 Judith Armstrong, The Christesen Romance, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996.

18 See Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996, p. 234.

19 See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven K. Rendall, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, p. 25.

20 See Andrew McCann, Marcus Clarke’s Bohemia: Literature and Modernity in Colonial Melbourne, Carlton: Melbourne University Publishing, 2004.

21 James McAuley, Captain Quiros, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1964.

22 Patrick White, The Solid Mandala, New York: Viking, 1966.

23 Patrick White, ‘Let’s Find the Faith to Save the World’, Sydney Morning Herald, 5 June 1983, p. 9. Online: http://www.abc.net.au/arts/white/titles/other/whitespeaks.html (accessed 2.12.2012).

24 Gail Jones, Five Bells, Sydney: Vintage, 2011.25 Katharine Susannah Prichard, The Real Russia,

Sydney: Modern Publishers, 1934.26 John McNair, ‘“Comrade Katya”: Katharine

Susannah Prichard and the Soviet Union’, in Political Tourists: Travels from Australia to the Soviet Union in the 1920s–1940s, edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Carolyn Rasmussen, Milsons Point: Random House, 2008, pp. 146–68.

27 Manning Clark, Meeting Soviet Man, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1960.

28 Nicole Moore and Christina Spittel, ‘Bobbin Up in the Leseland: Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic’, in Republics of Letters, edited by Robert Dixon and Peter Kirkpatrick, Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2010, pp. 113–26.

29 David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy During the Cold War, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 95.

30 C.D. Bay-Hansen, Power Politics in the Pacific Age, Portland: Inklight Books, 2011, p. 344.

31 Scott Malcomson, Tuturani, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990.

32 Howard Jacobson, ‘Dirty Very Old Man’, New York Times Book Review (17 November 1985): 1.

33 Paul Magnuson, Reading Public Romanticism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.

34 Seymour Topping, ‘Being Australia’, New York Times Magazine, 29 September 1985. Online: http://www.nytimes.com/1985/09/29/magazine/being-australia.html?ref=seymourtopping (accessed 2.12.2012).

35 Bay-Hansen, Power Politics, p. 345.36 See Mark McKenna, An Eye for Eternity: The Life

of Manning Clark, Carlton: Miegunyah Press, 2011, p. 26, for an account of Clark’s presence at this conference. (Editors’ note: ‘Common Wealth’ – in the conference title – is correctly represented.)

37 Frank Moorhouse, Grand Days, New York: Pantheon, 1994.

38 Christos Tsiolkas, Dead Europe, Sydney: Vintage, 2005.

Upon The Airy Ocean: Australia, the Russian Pacific, and the Transnational Imaginary

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