Living Against the Rules
Newspaper "Moskovskiy Komsomoletz - Spain", July 2006
 

Vadim is restrained and polite. Wears dark glasses. Is tanned thanks to hours on the tennis court. Speaks English. Just another young Nabokov. But no: he's not going to make any kind of Nabokov out of himself. There's no posturing about him: he gives all his energy to work. And the focus of Vadim Babenko's work, as he sees it, is to write books. Completely unaffectedly he explains to his friends that he lives on the money he made in the United States, he plays tennis to stay in shape, and the rest of the time - he writes.

He considers writing his fate: "you can't cheat fate, and it is useless to argue with it no matter how strong your arguments appear to be at first sight."

Although there is no small number of people who consider writing their fate, this writing (if it really gets that far) is only suited for "private" use. In fact, it is in the nature of human beings not only to "know themselves", as the ancients put it, but also to invent themselves. And a Russian in general is a voluntarist: I wanted to become a writer and that's it - I became one. Only the quality of their writing can confirm that a writer is not "self-appointed". We will speak about Vadim's texts later. But working in his favor is the fact that his passion for writing wrested him from the clutches of reliable commercial activities. This is no case of some bored girl who can't find any other way to fill up her time.

The Great Soviet Dream

The great Soviet dream was to make the impossible possible. In part with the help of scientific achievements. Vadim graduated from the prestigious Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and went out into the world of science.

"In Moscow you could tell I was a young scientist," he says. "I dealt with problems involving artificial intelligence, molecular biology and genetic engineering. I created computer software that helped to construct new DNAs and proteins inside human cells. When cooperatives began to be created, we used these scientific discoveries to make commercial programs that were then sold to all kinds of biological and medical companies. But then the financing dried up, no money was provided for scientific work and our Russian business peacefully perished.

Then the American dream began."

The Great American Dream

Vadim's "American" business is "another story". He continues:

"It was very difficult to start the business: there were two of us - both Russians without any connections or capital. We lived in the Washington D.C. area in a one-bedroom apartment: me, my companion and his girlfriend. Only after a few months I could afford to move into my own place - this substantially increased our expenses, which we reluctantly accepted. We raised money from private people to start our business - five thousand here, ten thousand there. They were all people who were close to the family of our American friend who helped us unselfishly - because he was in love with Russia and even had a Russian wife.

Clearly, it is very difficult to get a business on its feet without good start-up capital - and that's the way it was for us. We made every mistake you could possibly make and survived many rough spots. It wasn't just once or twice that the company was on the brink of going bankrupt those first few years - but we made it. And we even managed to bring our main product up to a fairly high level - the same computer program helping to create stable genetic structures, reorganize DNA chains, exchange genes between different molecules and do a number of other things that a biologist or individual would not have the patience or the time or the brains to optimize.

The program was intended for scientific organizations as well as large biotech companies and the pharmaceutical industry. We had nobody to handle sales: our team at that time grew from two to three people on account of yet another Russian programmer, who was not an expert in questions of marketing. We had no money to hire specialists, so my partner and I, decked out in suits and ties, began to importune potential purchasers who looked at such exoticness in astonishment. We were two completely unknown Russians who had the audacity to burst on to the exclusive business scene that operates solely on the basis of connections and acquaintances. We stuck at it however, and we were smart and decisive, our "intellectual" program gradually began to win over the hearts of established biologists, rumors about us spread, and at some point we received our first permanent contract. It was for a ridiculously small amount of money, but - when it starts to rain, it pours. Within a year, our company had a real office and hired a few Americans that included experienced sales specialists. The ice had been broken, and our business began to grow like a snowball.

Soon it turned out that everyone needed our product. The period of "success" began - the kind you read about in the textbooks that they study in American business schools. By the seventh year of our "American story" the company already counted 300 people, had a division in Europe and on the west coast of America, and was on everyone's lips. We rushed ahead by leaps and bounds, made a lot of money, the Washington and New York newspapers wrote about us and our competitors looked at us in helpless envy. Then the most important thing happened - bankers approached us.

Not the ordinary ones - not those who issue loans. But those that help you go public on the stock exchange. The great American dream - an IPO for your company on the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq, since popular opinion holds that once you have done that, the road to personal enrichment is open. This opinion, I might add, is not completely correct - it's not that easy for the heads of a company to make a fortune - I mean in the form of real money, not paper shares. But that, as they say, is the special thing that only the initiated know. And we were not initiated back then. Yet we were exceedingly pleased - even, I would say, stunned.

The IPO process is very complicated and by no means do all of the companies that start out on this path reach the end successfully. But as before, fate smiled upon us and we made it to the end after thinking up the basics of a new direction to develop - simulating the behavior of human cells. This is a very complex problem that will not be conclusively resolved in the near future, but we were one of the first companies to offer technology that had good future prospects. The result was that one day we stood on the floor of the Nasdaq and watched our shares be traded for the first time. This was the company's most successful moment. Then the fall began."

The Great Russian Dream

"...No, business didn't go that badly, and although the stock market crash inevitably had an effect, it did not disturb us too much: the market is falling today, it will rise tomorrow. The position of the company was more than stable, it seemed as if nothing could threaten it. Nothing except internal conflict.

The involuntarily guilty party in all this was me - even though I didn't want any discord. I just wanted one thing: to drop everything and write books. I persisted in considering myself a writer and I only viewed my adventures in the world of business as a somewhat tiresome hobby. Nobody believed that I, completely on my own, without being forced, would abandon my high post, a large office, a whole host of assistants and the technology I had developed, but I was not goofing around. And soon after we became a publicly traded company, I informed my partners that I was leaving the company.

This had the effect of a TNT explosion. Everyone thought I was scheming and organizing the redivision of power. Rumours flew through the company, what had seemed to be a united management team turned into a medley of arch enemies: each began to undercut the others and hog the stage. Then they involved the investors in the process - the people who had provided the financial backing: they also did not believe such an improbable explanation for my departure. But I wanted to write books.

Ultimately they all ganged up on me: because I dared to go against the grain and refused to play by the accepted rules - and I fought with everyone. I would not say that there were any victors in this war, but I don't regret a thing. After some serious troubles, I was able to burst the tenacious embrace of my former colleagues as they ground their teeth in fury, even managing to rip a portion of my share out of their no less tenacious fingers. And the company… the company went down the drain, its various parts being sold for a smidgen a year later. My former colleagues were unable to divide the space I had left them completely voluntarily. And those "intelligent" programs are still being used around the world, helping biologists and geneticists create new medication and search for the cause of hereditary diseases."

So the great Russian dream to become a writer outweighed the great American dream to make a fortune.

Vadim left the new world and settled down… in Madrid. That happened five years ago. He has a calm, cosmopolitan attitude toward moving from country to country: "Emigrating used to be an earth-shattering decision: consider it for a year and a half, prepare for another six months… Now you just get up and go live in another place." But, of course, it isn't all that simple: a person has a special relationship to their homeland. And if you return not to your homeland, but somewhere else, then - why is this? Vadim has written about the subject in his poetry:

In short, don't come back here, there's no reason -
Being foreign in the unknown is certainly easier
than in the drizzle of the evening promenade
to pray daily, as you do for holy powers,
for a familiar tongue and listen to your steps,
the only clear sound moving without a glitch...

Nonetheless, Vadim often travels to Moscow, knows, surprisingly enough, the landscape of contemporary Russian literature (usually writers do not have enough time to read their literary counterparts). By the way, the connections are old: back at the end of the eighties the then young scientist Vadim Babenko became well-known in Moscow literary circles as a poet. A flight of inspiration with ripe fruit from Madrid: his collection of poems, "The Refuge for the Stunned Ark" (2001), was brought out by the Moscow publishing house "Siluet", as were two thoroughly unusual poetic tales, "In the Unnamed Seas" (2000) and "Buenos Aires" (2002). In 2006 the Saint-Petersburg publishing house "Amfora" came out with his first novel "The Black Pelican".

You ask: how can a Russian writer live abroad? Doesn't he lose his feeling for the Russian flair?.. But Nabokov in "Invitation to a Beheading" managed to do without the Russian flair, and Kafka did without the Austrian in "The Castle", while Dino Buzzati did without the Italian in "The Tartar Steppe". Let's just say that this is the genre of philosophical, proverbial literature.

Vadim Babenko's novel "The Black Pelican", for example, is about the discovery of your own "I". Imagine suddenly understanding everything about yourself, gauging your own strength. Here is the admonition of the ancients: "Know yourself!", which is to guide mankind through life. And usually you don't reach the conclusion - you suddenly accomplished something. What does this give you? Try to imagine… The book is not entertaining reading and not cheap "psychotherapy"; it leads every reader inside themselves. A genre of its own - the "simulation" of any individual's inner world. A first novel, of course, cannot be faultless, but "The Black Pelican" contains everything you appreciate in good literature: original ideas and serious questions, a pretence to the universal, a cry from the heart together with concern for not boring the reader.

Now Vadim is at work on his next novel. "Little bits and pieces do not help you escape fate," he says, as if he were complaining. "You sit, suffer and write each book for years on end."

As long as Vadim Babenko's books are published and distributed only in Russia, we here in Spain can get to know them at his website under www.vadimbabenko.com.

Vera Dudina

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