Rootless writer pays the price

VITALI Vitaliev . . . the very name spells animation, a life

tirelessly on the move. And it is true, Vitaliev inhabits mobility as if

it were his home, the only significant furniture being his ethnic

complications. These he intones with a blade of satire in his voice, as

if recalling the nitpicking of some petty Soviet bureaucrat: Jewish by

origin, Ukrainian by birth, Russian by culture, European by instinct,

Australian by passport, British by residence. It adds up to what?

Vitaliev shrugs, incredulous as anyone. Is he a global nuisance? A

clapped-out empire thought so, which is why he now describes himself as

a vagabond, but a vagabond captivated by hotels.

That, anyway, is the story so far. But even in the worst of times when

the might of the Soviet Union crushed the very breath of freedom from

its people Vitaliev was, by emotion, a buccaneer. In order to dream that

he was living elsewhere he learned foreign languages compulsively, and

for 30 years the child, the journalist, and the husband in him absorbed

every twist and turn of remote voyagers through books.

''We were duped by an appalling patriotism,'' he reflects. ''The

patriotism of lies which told us that because the motherland loved us we

must lead isolated lives in the largest cage in the world.'' No real

mother ever maimed her children so.

In Edinburgh, the other day, Vitaliev was promoting Little Is The

Light, his fifth book of humorous insights on the West, and once more he

was relishing the floating anywhere-ambience of hotels.

His bleak experience of empire spurred this latest travelogue, a

journey through nationhood in miniature, which focuses Vitaliev's

idiosyncratic eye on 11 tiny European states from the Faroes to Andorra,

from Liechtenstein to the Isle of Man.

What emerges is a hymn to smallness and the bravery of those who

defend their culture against the big batallions and, in so doing,

acquire a self-esteem.But, as the world knows, small countries can also

be the dung heaps of bigotry, national pride souring into national

conceit and, worse still, the poison of corrupted nationalism. Look at

former Yugoslavia where territorial wars stain everything with hate. In

trying to comprehend that horror Vitaliev crafts a metaphor of the kind

that is never far from a Soviet victim's psyche.

The dismay of ages fills his voice, and his conviviality seems suddenly

rammed by the hopelessness of it all: ''For me, poor trampled Bosnia is

like a person who has lived all his life in a prison cell with no

daylight, and the belief that the world is a plate of soup. One day a

sympathetic jailor shows him a little window in the ceiling, and he sees

outside just a fraction of a wonderful world with sky and colour, and

pine trees.

''So, now he knows that he has been cheated; the world is not a plate

of soup. But instead of rejoicing, he tries to redress the injustices

visited on him. In anger he wants to reclaim years that cannot be

returned. He seeks recompense through violence from the person in a

neighbouring cell where he believes the view is better. And once he has

broken the boundary into vengeance and barbarity he, too, is lost

because he can never step back . . .''

Moscow's perestroika promised so much, and for a while came good. But

just when things were looking up for Vitali Vitaliev, KGB harassment

forced him into exile.

So, in 1990 Vitaliev came West, arriving first in Britain to be

embraced by the jesting Socrates, Clive James. Through James's good

offices he acquired a TV persona, but even if a vagabond may call the

world his home, he sometimes finds it inhospitable: Britain refused

Vitaliev a visa.

The solution, encouraged James, was to point himself and his family

towards Australia, and thus Vitaliev became a columnist on the Melbourne

Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. Did paradise beckon? Admiring

readers, a big house and swimming pool, a happy wife, a son excited by

shimmering horizons . . . no matter how moved by Australia's kindness,

Vitaliev felt himself bereft. His sudden freedom seemed to be

evaporating in the tyranny of Australia's distance.

''For 35 years I had lived with the great emptiness of

totalitarianism,'' he says, ''but in Melbourne I couldn't find myself

creatively there either. I missed Europe too much. I missed the smell of

flowers, the colour of the sky, and I longed for Britain's shabbiness

and grace.''

To escape his loss, Vitaliev would take off whenever possible for

Tasmania. There, amid its small scale and European sensibility, he would

be almost moved to tears, and inevitably such pining brought him back.

So, today he is based in London, a recognised figure from his engaging

television documentaries, and a regular contributor to the European.

''To be rootless is important for a writer because it helps to make him

objective, but I have paid a heavy price for it. My wife and I are now

divorced, and Mitya, my only child who is 15, stays with her in

Australia.''

As for his own childhood Vitaliev returned to the Ukraine some years

ago to discover that everything he remembered had been bulldozed as

unimportant.

''My childhood country didn't exist anymore except in my memory, but I

carry that horrible, dear place inside me wherever I go.''

Although he insists his interest in Russia has drained away, the

country clearly haunts him: ''I wrote the other week that I was ashamed

to be associated with Russia because of what it had done in Chechnya --

and this at a time, when the Government asks Germany to apologise for

the atrocities of the Second World War. So, nothing has changed. The

lies continue and people in power suppress their guilt. Why else is

Yeltsin drinking himself to death?''

Vitaliev is, if anything, a reversed ageist in his attitude to

countries: ''Beauty is a category of age and for me Australia is a

teenage girl, the land where I first allowed myself to write lyrically,

and for that I will always be grateful. But Britain is the older woman:

experienced, elegant, often complaining but eternally seductive.''

So there it is, the life of the vagabond turned Commonwealth citizen

contained within a piquant symmetry of its own. Vitali Vitaliev swapped

one crumbling empire for another, only this time he can say the

motherland is not the country of his birth, but the country where he

started growing.

* Little is the Light by Vitali Vitaliev. Touchstone Books. #14.99.