Honeytrap Historical Note
Sep. 27th, 2021 12:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerA wild historical note for Honeytrap appears! This came together much more quickly than the note for The Threefold Tie, possibly because I'm getting the hang of historical notes now, or perhaps because I didn't try to write it at work where I am always popping up to help someone send a fax.
***
I would be remiss not to begin this note with a shout-out to Man from U.N.C.L.E., the classic 1960s TV show about a Soviet and an American spy who work together at an international counterintelligence agency. I always wished the show would dig deeper into the culture clash between Illya and Napoleon, and this book is the result.
I could never have written it without the wonderful Russian department at my alma mater. This book grew out of the classes, where we read Zoshchenko’s wonderful short stories and Tyutchev’s “Silentium,” and the conversation table, where we watched Cheburashka and listened to our TA Katya’s stories about her childhood longing to join the Young Pioneers - never to be realized, because the Soviet Union fell before she could get her red scarf. Most of all, it grew out of the incredible camaraderie of the department.
I also owe a great debt to Peter Carlson’s K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist, in which Carlson recounts Khrushchev’s madcap 1959 American road trip. The assassination attempt that Daniel and Gennady investigate is made up, but Khrushchev’s road trip is very real, and even more surreal than the title suggests.
Speaking of road trips, there are two different English versions of Ilf & Petrov’s American travelogue, which the two Soviet humorists wrote after driving across America in 1935. Little Golden America is a translation of the book they wrote about the experience; Ilf & Petrov’s American Road Trip: The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writers is a translation of their photo-essays serialized in the magazine Ogonek. Much of the text was incorporated into the book, but the photos weren’t included in the first (1937) edition.
Ilf and Petrov are sometimes admiring, sometimes condemnatory, occasionally arch, and always funny. Gennady’s sense of humor owes a lot to Ilf and Petrov. See, for instance, their complaint about American movies: “The plot is always the same: love, uninteresting monotonous American love with strictly timed kisses (in Hollywood, the censors only allow kisses of a certain length.)” A fascinating read, hilarious and insightful about both the Soviet Union and the United States.
Another book that offered insight into 1950s America was Laura Shapiro’s Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America, which I read in hopes of digging up some interesting food tidbits. Instead, it served as a reminder that 1950s America, for all that it now has the reputation of a static time, was actually a period of social tumult. (But then, what age is not an age of tumult?)
The food tidbits (particularly the perfection salad and the Ne-Hi cola) come instead from Bill Bryson’s memoir of his 1950s childhood, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. This book is also a source for Daniel’s (somewhat earlier) childhood recollections, which also grew out of my love for children’s books from the 1930s and 40s, like Doris Gates’ Blue Willow.
Gennady’s reminiscences about his childhood grew out of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya’s memoir The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia, about Petrushevskaya’s childhood during World War II. Another invaluable source was Anya von Bremzin’s description of her mother’s World War II childhood in Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing. which is also full of vibrant (if not always appetizing) descriptions of Soviet food and daily life. Gennady’s comparison of his own childhood home and Daniel’s relies heavily on von Bremzin’s memories of home life in a Soviet communal apartment.
Von Bremzin comments on the widespread Soviet appetite for Western books and movies, a topic explored in wonderful detail in Eleonory Gilburd’s To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture. This book is entirely responsible for the used bookstore scene: of course I had to give Gennady a chance to find that as-yet-untranslated Hemingway novel to take back to Moscow.
Gennady’s memories of Moscow more generally draw on the wonderful 1964 film Walking the Streets of Moscow, which is available in full on Youtube. The main character, Kolya, inspired Gennady’s physical appearance.
Ben McIntyre’s The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War is an irresistibly readable book that offered fascinating insight into the internal squabbles of the Russian intelligence agencies, as well as illuminating glimpses of a Soviet defector’s post-defection life. It also tells the story of a homosexual honeytrap that a western spy agency attempted to spring on a KGB agent after he bought a gay porn magazine. Alas for their attempted honeytrap, the agent bought it not out of suppressed gay urges, but because he was so astonished that such a thing could be published.
David Tuller’s Cracks in the Iron Closet: Travels in Gay & Lesbian Russia offers fascinating insight into the unsuppressed gay urges of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. The book grew out of Tuller’s friendship with a tight-knit circle of queer Russians, and records their life stories, their attitudes toward not only sexuality but a wide range of topics, and their jaded response when American LGBTQ+ organizations rushed in during glasnost, intent on proselytizing their vision of LGBTQ+ identity.
Although Honeytrap makes no direct reference to the Soviet gulag system, I would be remiss not to mention Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope, Eugenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind, and especially Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago for their unparalleled insight into Soviet society and human nature. Solzhenitsyn’s description of the prisoners’ fatalism, in particular, influenced Gennady’s outlook: "Submissiveness to fate, the total abdication of your own will in the shaping of your life, the recognition that it was impossible to guess the best and the worst ahead of time but that it was easy to take a step you would reproach yourself for - all this freed the prisoner from any bondage, made him calmer, and even ennobled him."
Finally, I have to mention Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, which is about post-Soviet memory of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The mother of a girl who was badly injured in a terrorist bombing on the Moscow Metro tells Aleksievich, “You’re a writer, you’ll understand what I mean: Words have very little in common with what goes on inside of you.” And yet she keeps talking, and Aleksievich keeps recording: words are insufficient, but they are all we have.
***
I would be remiss not to begin this note with a shout-out to Man from U.N.C.L.E., the classic 1960s TV show about a Soviet and an American spy who work together at an international counterintelligence agency. I always wished the show would dig deeper into the culture clash between Illya and Napoleon, and this book is the result.
I could never have written it without the wonderful Russian department at my alma mater. This book grew out of the classes, where we read Zoshchenko’s wonderful short stories and Tyutchev’s “Silentium,” and the conversation table, where we watched Cheburashka and listened to our TA Katya’s stories about her childhood longing to join the Young Pioneers - never to be realized, because the Soviet Union fell before she could get her red scarf. Most of all, it grew out of the incredible camaraderie of the department.
I also owe a great debt to Peter Carlson’s K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist, in which Carlson recounts Khrushchev’s madcap 1959 American road trip. The assassination attempt that Daniel and Gennady investigate is made up, but Khrushchev’s road trip is very real, and even more surreal than the title suggests.
Speaking of road trips, there are two different English versions of Ilf & Petrov’s American travelogue, which the two Soviet humorists wrote after driving across America in 1935. Little Golden America is a translation of the book they wrote about the experience; Ilf & Petrov’s American Road Trip: The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writers is a translation of their photo-essays serialized in the magazine Ogonek. Much of the text was incorporated into the book, but the photos weren’t included in the first (1937) edition.
Ilf and Petrov are sometimes admiring, sometimes condemnatory, occasionally arch, and always funny. Gennady’s sense of humor owes a lot to Ilf and Petrov. See, for instance, their complaint about American movies: “The plot is always the same: love, uninteresting monotonous American love with strictly timed kisses (in Hollywood, the censors only allow kisses of a certain length.)” A fascinating read, hilarious and insightful about both the Soviet Union and the United States.
Another book that offered insight into 1950s America was Laura Shapiro’s Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America, which I read in hopes of digging up some interesting food tidbits. Instead, it served as a reminder that 1950s America, for all that it now has the reputation of a static time, was actually a period of social tumult. (But then, what age is not an age of tumult?)
The food tidbits (particularly the perfection salad and the Ne-Hi cola) come instead from Bill Bryson’s memoir of his 1950s childhood, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. This book is also a source for Daniel’s (somewhat earlier) childhood recollections, which also grew out of my love for children’s books from the 1930s and 40s, like Doris Gates’ Blue Willow.
Gennady’s reminiscences about his childhood grew out of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya’s memoir The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia, about Petrushevskaya’s childhood during World War II. Another invaluable source was Anya von Bremzin’s description of her mother’s World War II childhood in Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing. which is also full of vibrant (if not always appetizing) descriptions of Soviet food and daily life. Gennady’s comparison of his own childhood home and Daniel’s relies heavily on von Bremzin’s memories of home life in a Soviet communal apartment.
Von Bremzin comments on the widespread Soviet appetite for Western books and movies, a topic explored in wonderful detail in Eleonory Gilburd’s To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture. This book is entirely responsible for the used bookstore scene: of course I had to give Gennady a chance to find that as-yet-untranslated Hemingway novel to take back to Moscow.
Gennady’s memories of Moscow more generally draw on the wonderful 1964 film Walking the Streets of Moscow, which is available in full on Youtube. The main character, Kolya, inspired Gennady’s physical appearance.
Ben McIntyre’s The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War is an irresistibly readable book that offered fascinating insight into the internal squabbles of the Russian intelligence agencies, as well as illuminating glimpses of a Soviet defector’s post-defection life. It also tells the story of a homosexual honeytrap that a western spy agency attempted to spring on a KGB agent after he bought a gay porn magazine. Alas for their attempted honeytrap, the agent bought it not out of suppressed gay urges, but because he was so astonished that such a thing could be published.
David Tuller’s Cracks in the Iron Closet: Travels in Gay & Lesbian Russia offers fascinating insight into the unsuppressed gay urges of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. The book grew out of Tuller’s friendship with a tight-knit circle of queer Russians, and records their life stories, their attitudes toward not only sexuality but a wide range of topics, and their jaded response when American LGBTQ+ organizations rushed in during glasnost, intent on proselytizing their vision of LGBTQ+ identity.
Although Honeytrap makes no direct reference to the Soviet gulag system, I would be remiss not to mention Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope, Eugenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind, and especially Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago for their unparalleled insight into Soviet society and human nature. Solzhenitsyn’s description of the prisoners’ fatalism, in particular, influenced Gennady’s outlook: "Submissiveness to fate, the total abdication of your own will in the shaping of your life, the recognition that it was impossible to guess the best and the worst ahead of time but that it was easy to take a step you would reproach yourself for - all this freed the prisoner from any bondage, made him calmer, and even ennobled him."
Finally, I have to mention Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, which is about post-Soviet memory of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The mother of a girl who was badly injured in a terrorist bombing on the Moscow Metro tells Aleksievich, “You’re a writer, you’ll understand what I mean: Words have very little in common with what goes on inside of you.” And yet she keeps talking, and Aleksievich keeps recording: words are insufficient, but they are all we have.
