Mikhail Iossel had a convoluted route to becoming the College's writer-in-residence
Engineer, writer, teacher, night watchman — Mikhail Iossel's resume reads like that of an eccentric character in a novel.
That's not surprising given that Iossel, the writer-in-residence at the College, writes fiction, and some of the best fiction-writers draw on their unique life experiences in their work. The recent winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Iossel is at work on his second book, comprising two linked novellas. His first book, Every Hunter Wants to Know: A Leningrad Life, a collection of stories, was published in 1991.
Iossel grew up in Leningrad, and his family's library was filled with the Russian classics (as well as Twain, Jack London, Faulkner, and Hemingway). He remembers always wanting to be a writer, and he began as a boy, winning several writing competitions. But that was not a simple path for a Jewish boy in St. Petersburg (as Leningrad was called until recently). “Jews could not be admitted to any college that had anything to do with humanities because that would be infringing upon the ideological sphere,” he says.
So, rather than enter the Soviet army, he chose to attend the Leningrad Shipbuilding Institute, where he studied engineering, electromagnetic fields, mathematics, and physics. “It was not something that I could envision myself doing for my whole life because I knew that I wanted to write,” he says.
Nevertheless, he spent several years after graduation screening Soviet submarines and lowering their electromagnetic levels to the point where American submarines wouldn't detect them. Then, in the early 1980s, he became involved with an underground literary club, called “Club 81” for the year of its founding. He began to publish his work in “samizdat” (underground magazines) and meet frequently with foreign writers — even though such contact jeopardized his engineering work, which banned contact with foreigners.
He negotiated to leave his position at the research institution and went to work for a computer center, which required little secrecy. Shortly thereafter, like many underground writers and artists, he quit his day job and took a position as a night guard at the central park in St. Petersburg. His primary responsibility was watching over the roller coaster.
“I spent two-and-a-half years very happily that way,” he says. “I was writing and meeting people, publishing in the underground magazines, and co-editing a magazine of translations published by Club 81. By that time I had already made up my mind that I was going to leave the country.”
He applied for emigration to the United States several times, and was turned down repeatedly for a variety of reasons. He also started having “minor run-ins” with the KGB – due to his status as both a “refusenik” (someone who had been turned down for emigration from the Soviet Union) and as member of the underground. “Either you are an underground writer or you are trying to leave,” he says. “You don't want to be an underground writer trying to leave.”
Iossel was tracked by two departments of the KGB — one that watched his activities as a writer and one that watched refuseniks. “The counter propaganda were sophisticates, secret police who could discuss current trends in literature,” he says. “They just wanted to make sure that what you were writing would not find its way to the West.”
Those who tracked refuseniks were simply hoodlums. “They tried to make life uncomfortable for those who tried to appeal their situation,” he says. “Essentially, their job was to keep you as quiet as possible so that you would not attract international attention. If you started sending letters about your case, they would find a way to indicate that they didn't want you to do that, which was to bop you over the head, for instance.”
After five years of waiting to emigrate while the KGB made his life “uncomfortable,” Iossel was finally granted permission to leave the Soviet Union in 1986, when Gorbachev came to power and tensions eased.
Iossel settled in Boston, where he knew a few writers and poets whom he had met in Leningrad. He was also attracted to the large Russian immigrant community in Boston. “It gave you a certain degree of support,” he says. Working in bookstores for $5 an hour, Iossel continued to write. He resolved to write fiction only in English, which he had taught himself when he was still in middle school (he also took a series of courses on the theory of translation after earning his engineering degree and published Russian translations of contemporary American poetry in a literary magazine).
“I wanted to limit the scope of my self-expression,” he says. “Samuel Beckett said he began to write in French because he knew too many works in English. In Russian, I was too fluent, too many words, too much emotion. Writing English was an exercise of a mechanical nature, like a crossword puzzle. Forget untrammeled emotion.”
After working and writing in Boston for a year, he began to think about returning to engineering. “But I basically still wanted to write. Then someone told me about the notion of writing programs, so I applied,” he says. He entered a graduate writing program at the University of New Hampshire, eager to have blocks of time to write. He developed his own literary voice and style, which critics widely praised with the publication of his first book in 1991. He went from New Hampshire to Stanford, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction writing, and then taught at several other universities before coming to Union in 1995.
Iossel enjoys teaching writing because it allows him to talk about the things that he loves. And, of course, he has the chance to write, which he tries to do every day. For Iossel, the best thing about writing is the opportunity to “say whatever you want to say — about life, about yourself, about other people — and know that others will probably be able to relate to that.”
Iossel has returned to Russia several times. On his first trip in 1993, he was extremely apprehensive. “It is very difficult, but then, a couple of days into your stay, you realize that you actually have never left,” he says. “Russia, while changing, still remains the same. Though you can no longer belong there 100 percent because you have already severed your ties, there is a very strong pull because your first language is there, many of your friends are there, and it is the place of your youth, the landmarks of your life.”
Iossel has returned to St. Petersburg several times since that initial journey, sharing his enthusiasm for writing in a series of summer literary seminars, where American students study with well-known American and Russian writers.
Now in his mid-forties, Iossel lives in Schenectady with his wife, Victoria. Like Iossel, she was born in Leningrad, of a Russian mother and a Kenyan father. She grew up in Kenya speaking English, but she speaks fluent Russian and the couple speaks only Russian to their daughter, Yana, who is two years old. “We hope she will become bilingual,” Iossel says. Although he plans to take at least six months away from teaching to write thanks to the Guggenheim Fellowship, he has not yet solidified his plans. “Maybe I'll just throw a party at Geppetto's for 7,000 people and that will be the end of my Guggenheim,” he says with a laugh.