Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (71 page)

As always, I am deeply grateful to my glorious editor at Scribner, Nan Graham, whose trademark mix of loyalty, integrity, genius, and kindness has become an organizing force for my work and beyond my work. Also invaluable on the Scribner team are Brian Belfiglio and the divine Kate Lloyd, my beloved publicists; Daniel Loedel, whose calm patience protected me from stressful bureaucracy time and again; and dear, dear Roz Lippel, who publishes with such bighearted enthusiasm; also to the tireless Katie Rizzo, who filtered endless corrections with infinite patience. I am grateful to Steven Henry Boldt for his excellent copyediting, and to Eric Rayman for his careful legal read. At Chatto & Windus, I thank my entirely splendid editor, Clara Farmer, and her perfectly delightful deputy, Juliet Brooke. I thank David Solomon for the photo for the cover, Gh. Farouq Samim for the picture on the spine, Luca Trovato for the frontispiece photo, and Claire Jones for her work on digitizing these images. I thank Julia Mandeville for her help in conceptualizing the cover, and Jaya Miceli for the beautiful jacket design.

My agent, Andrew Wylie, has been the guiding light of my career, and with each book, I appreciate anew how lucky I am to have him as my representative and friend. I am also grateful to the others at the Wylie Agency who have devoted themselves unstintingly to this work: Jeffrey Posternak, Sarah Chalfant, Charles Buchan, Percy Stubbs, and Alba Ziegler-Bailey.

I am deeply indebted to Alice Truax, who does the equivalent of auto-body work on my writing, pounding every dented sentence to a high-gloss shine and replacing all the scratched and fogged glass of
my arguments with breathtaking transparency. Kathleen Seidel has identified research errors and found the right answer to every query or uncertainty; she has combed through my prose with meticulous care and made it more lucid; she has organized footnotes, bibliography, website, and anything else that could possibly be organized. Writing is a crazy trapeze act, and she is my net. Thanks also to Jane McElhone for assistance on fact-checking.

I wrote portions of this book at Yaddo, where I write faster and more clearly than anywhere else, and I am profoundly grateful for my time there. I am particularly indebted to Yaddo’s enchanting president, Elaina Richardson, who adds a patina of joy to each of those productive visits.

I thank my colleagues at PEN, who have helped me to think more deeply about freedom and justice, in particular PEN’s remarkable executive director, Suzanne Nossel.

I thank Bonnie Burnham, Henry Ng, and George McNeely at the World Monuments Fund, who have been invaluable advisers time and again on far-flung corners of the world.

Christian Caryl has been something of a muse to me. He hosted me in Germany when I first began to write about Russia in the 1980s and the artists had started exhibiting in Berlin. I stayed with him when I went to Kazakhstan, and climbed mountains, both physical and ethnographic, in his company. I crashed with him and his family in Tokyo when he was living in Japan. He talked me into visiting Afghanistan when I was afraid to do so, and he made sure I had a place to stay and someone to guide me when I got there. Additionally, he read the manuscript of this book and provided invaluable feedback.
Far and Away
and my life would have looked very different without him.

I thank the people who appear within these various stories, too many to list again here: all those who allowed me to observe or interview them. Some of the people who helped me where I went or helped get me there deserve special acknowledgment: Beezy Bailey, Sara Barbieri, Janet Benshoof, Eliot Bikales, Bonnie Burnham, Mario Canivello, Hans van Dijk, Ashur Etwebi, Susannah Fiennes, Fred Frumberg, Maria Gheorghiu, Philip Gourevitch, Guo Feng, David Hecht, Harold Holzer, Roger James, Cheryl Johnson, Susan Kane,
Aung Kyawmyint, Francesca Dal Lago, Lee Yulin, Elvira Lupsa, I Gede Marsaja, Joan B. Mirviss, Freda Murck, Henry Ng, Brent Olson, I Gede Primantara, Michaela Raab, Emily K. Rafferty, Jack Richard, Ira Sachs, Hélène Saivet, João Salles, Gh. Farouq Samim, Gabriel Sayad, Andreas Schmid, Lisa Schmitz, Jill Schuker, Luiz Schwarcz, Julie Krasnow Streiker, Andrea Sunder-Plassmann, Corina Şuteu, Dina Temple-Raston, Farley Tobin, Ko Winters, and Mauricio Zacharias.

I owe a debt also to my many companions in travel, among them Anne Applebaum, Jessica Beels, Chuck Burg, S. Talcott Camp, Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, Kathleen Gerard, Kathryn Greig, Han Feng, John Hart, Leslie Hawke, Cheryl Henson, Michael Lee, Sue Macartney-Snape, David Solomon, Claudia Swan, and, always most of all, my beloved Alexandra K. Munroe, who has joined me on continent after continent.

My thanks to Richard A. Friedman and Richard C. Friedman, who have kept me sane through experiences that often felt insane, and to Jon Walton for providing spiritual guidance when life seemed less than heavenly. Judy Gutow arranged the travel year in and year out, finding discounted fares and emergency hotel bookings in the most far-fetched destinations. I pay tribute to Danusia Trevino, who helps gracefully with so many thankless tasks and never grows impatient, and to Tatiana Martushev, who helped similarly in the earlier years of this project. Tremendous thanks to Celso, Miguela, and Olga Mancol, who have kept my household humming when I’ve been frantically writing and have coddled me when I’ve been too busy to coddle myself; to Sergio Avila, who gets me wherever I need to go; to Kylee Sallak and Ildikó Fülöp, who have brought both love and order to my son’s life and hence to mine.

I thank my mother, who encouraged me to be adventurous. She has been dead a quarter century, but she read and commented on the earlier work in this collection. She always wanted my writing to be clear; she always wanted it to be kind. Returning to that early work has reminded me of how she influenced everything that has come since. My father has slowly come around to the idea that I head off to
places where he would never go and wishes I wouldn’t go, either. He is still my first and most loyal reader, and has been there with arms outstretched whenever I’ve flown too close to the sun. My thanks also to my stepmother, Sarah Billinghurst Solomon, who has been an unflagging supporter of this project.

I thank Tamara Ward and Laura Scher for always being in my corner, full of both love and fun.

I thank Blaine Smith, whose radiant and judicious presence has kept me steady when things looked stormy, and whose quiet insights help me to grow in beautiful ways.

I thank Oliver Scher, Lucy Scher, Blaine Solomon, and George Solomon. No one else could root me to the world as they have.

Finally, I thank my husband, John Habich Solomon, who has accompanied me on both outward and inward journeys. There’s no one with whom I’d prefer to see the world, nor to live in it. He is my north and south poles, my equator, my Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, my seven continents and seven seas.

ALSO BY ANDREW SOLOMON

The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost

A Stone Boat

The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

Dispatches from Everywhere

2
 The US Army’s Standards of Medical Fitness (Army Regulation 40-501) call for referral to a Medical Evaluation Board for “pes planus, when symptomatic, more than moderate, with pronation on weight bearing which prevents the wearing of military footwear, or when associated with vascular changes.” Mild and moderate cases of flat feet would not disqualify one from military service.

4
 Erika Urbach’s obituary can be found on the Norwegian Bachelor Farmers website, at
http://norwegianbachelorfarmers.com/lakewoodrock/stories/Erika.html
.

4
 This delightful collection is still in print: Frances Carpenter,
Tales of a Korean Grandmother
(1989).

8
 The ruins of Ingapirca—also known as the “Inca wall”—are currently being restored; see “En Ingapirca continúa proceso de restauración en piedras,”
El Tiempo
, April 8, 2015.

11
 The Chernobyl nuclear disaster is described in British Broadcasting Corporation, “Chernobyl: 20 years on,” BBC News, June 12, 2007. For a striking collection of photographs of the site at the time of the reactor fire and over the following twenty-five years, see Alan Taylor, “The Chernobyl disaster: 25 years ago,”
Atlantic
, March 23, 2011.

11
 In Chekhov’s 1900 play,
The Three Sisters
, youngest sister, Irina, yearns for the family’s return to the city of her birth. Act 2 closes with her plaint “Moscow . . . Oh, Lord. Could we go to Moscow”; see Anton Chekhov,
The Three Sisters: A Play by Anton Chekhov Adapted by David Mamet
(1992).

12
 Sotheby’s first auction of contemporary Soviet art, conducted July 7, 1988, was recounted in my first book,
The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost
(1991).

13
 Nikita Alexeev’s statement (“We have been preparing ourselves to be not great artists, but angels”) occurs on page 283 of Solomon (1991), ibid.

14
 For the Russian edition, see
The Irony Tower.
Советские художники во времена гласности
(2013).

16
 Tennyson’s “Ulysses” may be found on page 88 of
Poems by Alfred Tennyson in Two Volumes: Vol. 2
(1842).

16
 The earliest known instance of the quote attributed to St. Augustine (“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page”) occurs on page 2 of John Feltham,
The English Enchiridion
(1799).

16
 Christian Caryl is author of
Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century
(2013), and dozens of insightful pieces of political journalism; see, e.g., “The young and the restless,”
Foreign Policy
, February 17, 2014; and “Putin: During and after Sochi,”
New York Review of Books
, April 3, 2014.

18
 For more background on the shifts in Cuba’s official stance regarding religion, see Rone Tempest, “Pope meets with Castro, agrees to a Cuba visit,”
Los Angeles Times
, November 20, 1996; and Marc Frank, “Cuba’s atheist Castro brothers open doors to Church and popes,” Reuters, September 7, 2015.

18
 I reminisce about my Cuban New Year’s Eve party at greater length in my article “Hot night in Havana,”
Food & Wine
, January 2002.

22
 See Robert S. McNamara and Brian Van De Mark,
In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam
(1996).

24
 The Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum continues to welcome visitors; its website is at
http://www.jmuseum.lt
.

24
 The quote from John Ruskin (“It is merely being ‘sent’ to a place . . .”) appears in the essay “The moral of landscape,” anthologized in
The Works of John Ruskin, Vol. 5
(1904), pages 370–71.

25
 The quote from E. M. Forster (“When I got away, I could get on with it”) comes from an interview by P. N. Furbank and F. J. H. Haskell, “E. M. Forster: The art of fiction no. 1,”
Paris Review
, Spring 1953.

25
 The quote from Samuel Johnson (“All travel has its advantages . . .”) occurs in Boswell’s
Life of Johnson
(1887).

27
 The “paper architects” were the subject of my article “Paper tsars,”
Harpers & Queen
, February 1990.

29
 Walter Pater’s advice can be found in the “Conclusion” to
The Renaissance
and appears on page 60 of
Selected Writings of Walter Pater
(1974).