A Soviet emigré's New York remembered.

On February 18, 1975, in the belly of a PanAm jet, my wife Elena and I arrived in New York from Rome. We took a bus from Kennedy airport, riding through the nighttime streets. We drove past the store windows, struck by the senselessly huge cars, so different from Europe's. Columns of steam rose from the smokestacks and subway gratings, making the city seem like a hellish boiler-house. The city looked inhospitable. They dropped us off in the middle of the night at the King George Hotel, located on 28th St. between Madison and 5th Aves.

After waking up early the following morning, I went down the hotel stairwell and into the city. I felt like a cockroach, scrambling in terror among the pantries and cupboards towering above it. Raising my head, I suddenly saw looming over me like a spire of cloud the Empire State Building. Ah!

The Tolstoy Foundation helped set us up, although they were stingy about it. They paid for our hotel rooms, gave us money for food and found us jobs. I went right down to the Russian-language newspaper, Novoe Russkoe Slovo, and within a month they were publishing my articles. I got $20 a pop. As summer approached I started working as a proofreader. The newspaper's office was on 56th St. between Broadway and 8th Ave. On the first floor were the typographers who used an ancient linotype machine. Toward morning, the compositors would fire them up.

Heading down Broadway from 56th St. to 42nd St., you passed through the entertainment district. The Broadway and off-Broadway theaters lit up like Christmas trees day and night. The stretch of 8th Ave. from 57th to 42nd was at the time a seedy place of peep-shows, striptease bars and porn theaters. Herds of prostitutes of all breeds stood along 8th Ave.

Having found work, I was able to get my first American apartment. At 233 Lexington Ave., at 34th St.?a "one-bedroom." From three strategic points: E. 28th St., W. 56th St. and Lexington Ave. to 34th St., I started to orientate myself to New York, to make connections. Social connections and connections with high society. I viewed the idea of working my way into high society as a way to spend a night in a nice place, eating well and drinking.

Joseph Brodsky stopped by my place on Lexington along with Tatyana Yakovleva. This woman was famous in Russian literary circles as the lover of Mayakovsky. After the war she married Alex Lieberman, the head artist at Conde Nast Publications. In her fashionable place on 70th St., among the living legends, I was able to attract Tatyana's interest by telling stories about her rival, Lily Brik. In my last couple years in Moscow I had been acquainted with her.

Tatyana had become so fascinated by me that she started to invite Elena and me to the Liebermann house, where the art world gathered. Andy Warhol stood with his white head next to Truman Capote. Next to them, the heir to the throne, Vladimir Kirillovich, the photographer Avedon, Salvador Dali, Natasha Makarova, with her hangers-on, the millionaire Gregory with his wife and many others I've already forgotten. Then there was Joseph Brodsky, who had just arrived from Michigan.

At the time Brodsky hadn't yet won the Nobel Prize for literature. Instead he was a humble professor of Russian literature at Ann Arbor, though already famous thanks to having been repressed by the Soviets for "parasitism." The Liebermans, Alex and Tatyana, would later help move him to a New York university. They intrigued incessantly on his behalf to see that he got the Nobel Prize. They "lobbied" for him.

Between 1975 and 1980, there weren't many Russians in America. Maybe this was why I was able to get close to Joseph back then. We'd get together either at his favorite cafe in the East Village, or later at his apartment on Morton St. Besides getting help from the cultural lobby headed by the Liebermans, Brodsky adapted to American culture; he became one of its leading figures for that very reason. He won the Nobel Prize in 1987.

American-born poets such as the beatnik Allen Ginsberg and the so-called avant-garde poet John Ashbery were all modernists or postmodernists, dwelling in free verse, while Brodsky, at the same time as they, was a classical poet. And classicism is an imperial Style. Therefore Brodsky, frozen in the refrigerator of the U.S.S.R., composed archaic creations in the style of the 1930s, precisely because that fit into the classical period of the imperial United States. This put him in the ranks of national poets. As for how he was nominated by the Liebermans?the lover of Mayakovsky and her husband?this isn't just some hypothesis, but rather a living, meaty fact. Even Brodsky's publisher, Robert Straus, was introduced to him at one of the Lieberman parties. Robert Straus, the owner of the publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux, was a neighbor of the Liebermans; his brownstone mansion was located right next to the Lieberman's brownstone on Lexington.

Tatyana was quite beautiful in her youth. She was tall, bright, a lot like one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's heroines, a girl of the Jazz Age. By 1975 she was a tall, bony old woman, painted up like a clown, though a good-natured one. When in 1978 I wound up unemployed, she came up with the idea that I could sew and fix up her slacks and dresses. She also introduced me to two other old women who offered me the same work. Now I understand that this was how she had tried to help me.

All of these people are now dead. And today only the dead gather late at night for a party at the Liebermans' on 70th St.

Warhol talks with the dead Capote, the dead Dali kisses the hand of Tatyana, and Brodsky mockingly observes them all.

I personally lived a life very far from high society. Cockroaches swarmed our apartment on Lexington. I earned $125 a week working six-day weeks, and at nights I wrote articles for 20 bucks each. Out of this, 230 dollars went to paying rent on the apartment. There wasn't much money left over for two?me and my wife. She was trying to make it as a model, and every day she ran around getting photographed for her portfolio. That's why my pauper's nature drove me away from high society into the world of anarchists and the Socialist Workers Party and anywhere around Washington Square or St. Mark's Place?there on the Lower East Side just as the punk movement was being born. I'd go to CBGB where, having got myself a beer, I'd hear Richard Hell, Patti Smith, Blondie, the Ramones, the Plasmatics?

If Brodsky were a classicist, then I could be characterized at that time as a right-wing anarchist. This was how our styles differed.

I also had connections with the criminal world. In 1979 my first book, It's Me, Eddie, was published in Russian and was a noisy success among the emigres. They hated and cursed it. At an emigre get-together at my place, a guy with a broken nose showed up, introduced himself as Yuri Brokhin and announced, "You wrote an ingenious book. I used to want to write like that. But you beat me to it."

Brokhin had been a screenwriter in Russia. In America he had already managed to publish Hustling, which had attracted a lot of notoriety. For his second book, The Big Red Machine, about doping in the Soviet Sports establishment, he got a $25,000 advance. He bought himself a Cadillac with the money. He drove it over to see me (I was already working as a housekeeper for the multimillionaire Peter Sprague in Sutton Square) and enlightened me on life in New York.

We went to an underground casino; he took me to Russian restaurants in Brooklyn where all the private Russian deals were made. Some casino owners from Berlin were there, dealers of counterfeit gold coins, Godfathers big and small. Once he admitted to me that, along with his lawful career as a screenwriter and author, he'd had other pursuits in his earliest youth?he had been a thief with a long criminal record. In his native city of Dnepropetrovsk, as a teenager, he was such a renowned pickpocket that he earned the nickname The Student, and that even now he "did stuff" because he didn't make enough to live on from literature. Then he proposed robbing my boss' house. I turned down the proposal. The criminal's path was closed for me, but I kept in touch with him because he interested me.

In December, 1982, when I was living in Paris, I heard that Brokhin had been killed.

A mutual acquaintance called me and said, "Go buy a New York Times. Your friend Brokhin got killed."

Brokhin's body was found by his girlfriend Tina Ragsdale (if I'm not mistaken, his wife Tanya had died in 1981, drowned in the bathtub). Yuri was lying on his stomach on a bed. He was killed with a shot to the head just behind the right ear. There were no signs of a struggle. They found a suitcase with $15,000 under the bed. An Associated Press obituary writer wondered who could be responsible for bringing a peaceful writer's life to such a violent end.

A year later, the New York police investigation concluded that he had not been peaceful.

I was soon fired from the emigre newspaper, since in November 1975 the chief editor, Andrei Sedykh admitted his error in publishing my article "Disappointment." In the article I talked about the way America disappointed many Russian immigrants. It turned out the Soviets followed the emigre press carefully, and they quickly reprinted my article with their own commentaries. Several very sober, distinguished personages went to see Andrei Sedykh and in January 1976, I was left to my own devices. That is, unemployed. In February, as is the rule in American tragedies, my wife left me.

In March I was slaving away with a white Soviet sailor named Petka. He was driving a moving van, and I was his loader. We usually moved emigres from one apartment to another. We had no American customers. Usually our clients were people of modest income. When we had lots of work we'd get the dissident Alyosha Tumerman to help us. Tumerman dragged his feet, was loud, indecisive, had a face like the maniac Son of Sam, who was just starting to terrorize New York at that time. Sometimes we enlisted a fourth man: a skinny, mustachioed lad, movie lover and bookworm, my neighbor at the Winslow Hotel, Edik Gut.

What became of the sailor Petka I don't know. Tumerman and a group of immigrants realized Petka's dream: They bought in the state of Maine a trawler and tried to become fishermen. But they ran into debt problems. One day Tumerman shot one of the other co-owners of the trawler and ended up in an American prison. While he lived in Russia he'd played the dissident until he emigrated.

The last I heard of Edik Gut, he was in a psychiatric ward in some American state.

Not all of my emigre friends and acquaintances from 1970s New York, the era of the Me Decade as they called it, came to such tragic ends. Sergei Dovlatov came to New York after me, around 1978. I remember I took a whole crowd of new arrivals, Dovlatov among them (I also remember Petr Weil, who now writes for Radio Liberty), to Central Park for a late-night picnic. After having bought several gallons of cheap California wine, we took a spot not far from the entrance on Central Park South. At first the Russians were afraid to go into Central Park?they said some stupid things about it. But I changed their minds.

Subsequently Dovlatov managed to get hold of some money, and for several years he published the newspaper Novyi Amerikanets, competing with my old editor Yasha (Andrei) Sedykh. Dovlatov regarded me with cautious timidity. Based on several things he is reported to have said, he recognized my talent early, even back in 1977.

Dovlatov died young, just before reaching 50. He published several books in America, and today he's hugely popular in Russia. Tall, not stupid, with Armenian eyes, Dovlatov, in my opinion, was only an average writer. He lacked tragedy.

All the others who sat with him and me on a slope in Central Park that night are still alive, God willing. Especially this one girl, Svetlana. Later, I slept with her.

At the end of the 1980s I was walking aimlessly around Amsterdam, along the canals. I was in a messed-up state; another marriage had broken apart, this time with the singer Natalya Medvedeva. Suddenly a huge new window front on a building in the center of town caught my attention. The windows loudly stood out from the ancient wall. I read a signboard hanging out: "Yuri Egorov's Foundation." Under the signboard was a notice, written in a large thick font, that the Foundation was established by the executors of the pianist Yuri Egorov, and that its goal is to encourage and give financial support to young musicians, set up music competitions and so on.

My God, Yurochka, Yurka! I didn't know that he'd died because I'd lost contact with him after I left the United States for France. We became friends in New York. In 1978 he decided to live in the modern-day Babylon, and in 1979, together with his Dutch lover Jan, he bought himself a loft in the Village and a white grand piano.

At that time Yuri Egorov was very well-known. His story, in short, went like this: After winning the Tchaikovsky competition, this young, well-proportioned boy with black hair defected while in Holland sometime around 1972, if I'm not mistaken?he didn't want to go back with the other Soviet artists on tour. His famous concert took place in Carnegie Hall in 1979, when he became one of the few elite who have played two sets of Chopin etudes in one night at Carnegie Hall. This was obviously incredibly difficult, workhorse-like, physically exhausting work, doing a whole set of Chopin etudes. But few have ever had the strength to do two sets.

Yurka invited me to one of his concerts. He asked me to meet him after the show.

"There'll be a line of people," he said. "There'll be policemen. Tell them that you're my personal friend. Don't wait in line!" I didn't have to wait. The policeman escorted me to him. He blew off some old woman and shouted, "Editchka!" and came up to me. Later, I remembered that incident with pleasure.

The thing is, at that time I had an enormous inferiority complex. In three years I'd written two manuscripts, It's Me, Eddie and Diary of a Loser, but I couldn't get them published. And yet Yurka treated me like an equal! He loved to see me, it was written all over his Tartar face. He supported me and gave me much-needed attention. For that reason I'll always be grateful.

One night I went to his loft to congratulate him and give him flowers. He arrived later, after the loft was already full with his friends. He dropped two small, purple caps of mescaline into my palm. I got them because the artist Shemyakin had earlier turned them down.

Toward morning, at my place on Sutton Square, I made love to a Chinese girl, imagining that my body was a brick wall and that it was starting to crack apart. And I felt like a brick wall too.

The next morning Yurochka Egorov was found by the police in Central Park. The famous pianist had passed out under a bench. He was detained. Jan came and took him home.

Yurochka Egorov died from another pleasure of the classical musician type. When he found out he had AIDS, he got hold of some hemlock from a medical center. Some time ago Socrates had to drink hemlock as per the sentence of the Athenian court. In progressive Holland, not only do they sell drugs in bars, but they also passed a law on euthanasia allowing a person to take his life if he were suffering.

Yuri invited guests over, having beautifully prepared his place: flowers, wine? Everyone there drank, ate, talked with him, and he gradually drank from his cup of death. Toward evening he went cold, dying with a smile. Truly an incredible death! What style!

At that time Russians judged a person's power not by his wealth, but by his talent. That was why even as an unknown housekeeper, I was able to socialize with world-famous compatriots. In 1977 and 1978 I even courted Elena Rostropovich, daughter of the cellist, and I drank vodka with "Mama Galya" Vishnevskaya. Some friends of mine passed my first novel in manuscript form to Baryshnikov, and he invited me to his rehearsals at a time when it was impossible to go to one. Mikhail read the novel during his rehearsals and during breaks, carrying it around in a bag. [The novel, It's Me, Eddie, was finally published in 1983 by Random House.]

It should be said that at that time there was a truly impressive community of Russian ballet dancers studying in New York. In a large old apartment on Columbus Avenue lived: the ballet dancer Sasha Minz (he had played Drosselmeyer in The Nutcracker); the ballet critic Genka Smakov, who had written a book about Baryshnikov; and the ballet master Lenochka Chernysheva. Subsequently Alexander Godunov fled from the U.S.S.R., and you could find him on the streets of New York.

At that time I lived in the Embassy Hotel on Broadway, where I was the only white person. From the window of my hotel room I could see the roof of the building where Smakov, Minz and Chernysheva lived. In the summertime they'd drag their mattresses up on the rooftop and lie out in the sun. All of them, including Lenochka.

Genka Smakov was lachrymose. He loved colorful shirts, he spoke several languages, he could recite by heart kilometers of Baudelaire in French. In the U.S.S.R. he had written and published several books, including a biography on the actor Gerard Philipe. Genka had a very high opinion of my first novel. He helped me get by, gave me money, sometimes saying, "Go out and get something to eat, Raskolnikov."

He introduced me to the famous widow, Remi Saunder. Remi at that time was Baryshnikov's guardian?she was his agent and his mommie. Smakov or Minz, I don't remember which one, somehow convinced her to show my manuscript to a top publishing house whose editor she knew well. In the end Remi found me a literary agent, Sarah Jane Freymann. But it was only a few years later, after I'd moved to Paris, that she was able to sell my first novel. One time Genka Smakov, Remi Saunder and I became business partners, preparing and selling pelmeni and pirozhki [Russian dumplings] to the bar at Bloomingdale's. Sometimes Baryshnikov would stop by.

Smakov died young. I believe of AIDS. In contrast to Yuri Egorov, he met his end shamefully. He cried, screamed. He died in tears and sniffles. He died in New York. Sashka Minz, a fellow classmate with Nureyev studying under the teacher Vagonov, died later. The end of his life was embarrassing. He'd come from Europe to make a career as a choreographer. He took up a young Italian lover, a ballet dancer, and showed him off proudly to the Americans. But the kid dumped his choreographer-lover. Dumped him for the New York Ballet. Sashka took to drink and died of grief. His heart stopped. I remember his noisy, cheerful apartment on Columbus Avenue, Genka in his beautiful pants, the mighty Sashka pouring himself some vodka, Lenochka's young lover Charles in the apartment smiling up to his ears, myself in blue jeans and velvet jacket, still shaggy, not short-haired as I became later.

Then there were those Russians who frequented Studio 54. My ex-wife Elena used to take us there. The owner, Steve Rubell, took good care of us?his grandmother came from Russia. For that reason they'd let us in no matter how many of us there were. Steve himself used to stand there in his sneakers and a red jacket taking care of face control. I remember how he maliciously snubbed all types of millionaire WASPs, arriving in limousines with girls, and instead hugged us.

I'd write about wonderful non-famous people who helped me survive in New York, but readers want to know about famous people, and so I have written first and foremost about the well-known Russians. Just as I was asked to do.