On Thursday, Russian-speakers from the New York and Columbia communities gathered to discuss Viktor Perelman’s life and his groundbreaking magazine Vremya i My.

Russian literature is well-known to most: Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Akhmatova are just some of the names that come to mind when discussing the rich literary history of Russia. But what happens when oppression and censorship drive the most creative minds out of the USSR, out into the Western world?

Viktor Perelman (1929-2003) is an iconic figure in diaspora literature history. He was a one-man publishing company, starting and running a print of the magazine Vremya i My for 152 issues. With over 25 years of print, and over two thousand different authors, the magazine was a pioneering force in Russian literature. In 1973, he left the USSR and immigrated to Israel, where he began Vrema i My in 1975. He later moved to New York, and spent the rest of his life and publishing career in the United States.

On Thursday, February 27th 2020, Perelman’s family, along with Russian diaspora literature experts came together for a panel discussion on life and literature titled “Remembering Viktor Perelman’s Vremya i My”. The panel was moderated by Prof. Mark Lipovetsky of Columbia University, and consisted of Alla Perelman and Irina Perelman-Grabois (respectively, Viktor Perelman’s wife and daughter), along with Aleksandr Genis (a well-known Russian-American author) and Yasha Klots (an assistant professor of Russian and Slavic studies at Hunter College). The event was conducted almost entirely in Russian.

The discussion began with a short introduction by Lipovetsky, followed by some historical background from Klots. He described the idea of the “metropolitan” vs the “diaspora”, and the Russian diaspora as being seen as the zapastnaya rossiya, literally “spare/backup Russia”. When situation in the home country became tense, much of that tension was eased by artistic expression in the diaspora, where censors and politics mattered less. Klots described how in the 70s, around the time Perelman immigrated out of Russia, there were only a few prominent literary magazines. The most prominent, Continent, was unlike Vremya i My in its staunch political stance and strong anti-Soviet sentiment. Lipovetsky provided more specific details as to Russian texts at the time and the nuanced differences between publications across the diaspora.

The next speaker was Alla Perelman, who added some personal context to Viktor Perelman’s life. She described how he was a hard-working man, a self-made man, who believed in independence above all else. He prided himself on running his own affairs although it was often hard to find funding or support.

After Alla Perelman, Genis gave some literary context. He himself was published in the magazine many times, and was a close friend and collaborator of Perelman’s. He told a short story about his discovery of Vremya i My – his first time abroad, he accidentally picked up a copy that had been resting on a table. It was the 16th issue, and he read two essays, which got him hooked. His first publication in the magazine was “We are from Brighton Beach”, a collaboration about his experience in the Russian mecca of New York.

Genis discussed the literary situation in the USSR at the time: it was a translator’s game, as native Russian authors were “writing things such as ‘Love Poem to Mariana’, where Mariana was a textile machine”. As foreign novels slowly took over intellectual circles, the only viable option for writers remained tamizdat – sending work abroad to be published by non-Russian companies. Genis described how Vremya i My became a third alternative for Russian-speaking authors. They were no longer barred by Soviet censors, or by foreign opinion and markets. This magazine gave Russians a chance to write about Russians, for Russians.

The discussion was concluded by the presentation of a memorial/archival website, created by Viktor Perelman’s daughter, Irina Perelman-Grabois. She guided the room through pages of content, from copies of Vremya i My, which is now available online to read free of charge, to a collection of New York Times articles published by Perelman, to a short biography of Perelman’s life. The website, both in Russian and English, is available at https://dririnaperelman.wixsite.com/viktorperelman.

Image via Columbia Harriman Institute