From Russia with love

Since leaving his home country, Gorodinsky
has discovered the passions of freedom

Beads of sweat begin to form like little drops of fear on the furrowed brow of Victor Gorodinsky, as he and his mother approach a soldier checking passports at the Moscow airport. On that day in March 1982, Gorodinsky’s nerves are stretched as tight as strings on a balalaika: He’s being hunted by the Soviet army. He and the army have differing ideas on the desirability of conscription.

The soldier looks at Gorodinsky’s passport, then stares, unblinking, at the sweat-drenched man. After a pause that seems to foretell a very unpleasant future, the soldier motions them on.

“That,” says Gorodinsky, “was a bloody scary moment.” And that, as it turned out, has been the hinge on which the rest of his life has swung.

If he had been nabbed at the airport, there would likely be no Russian Folk Orchestra at UW–Madison today, and there certainly would be no Slavic languages cataloger in Memorial Library who sidelines as a magician.

Being a librarian is not what Gorodinsky had in mind growing up in Moscow. He earned his first college degree in classical guitar and conducting. “I love conducting, the notion of doing crazy things with my hands that people follow,” he says.

After graduation he taught for three years in a music school for children. But his career caught fire and plunged into the Communist sea the day he told school officials he and his mother had applied for emigration to Israel: He was fired on the spot.

“Teaching music was considered an ideological role in the Soviet Union,” says Gorodinsky. “Since emigration was regarded as disloyal, I couldn’t be allowed to teach children.”

When at last they made it past that soldier at the airport and landed in Vienna, they flew to Italy instead of Israel — their plan all along. After a wait in Rome they emigrated to the United States, which had an instantly cathartic effect on Gorodinsky.

“When you’re free, it changes you,” he says. “In the Soviet Union you had to filter everything you said, even with friends, out of fear that someone would report you.” In America he was not only free to utter unfiltered thoughts, he was free to flourish as a human being.

Gorodinsky first came to Chicago and, desperate for a job, worked for three years in the wholesale diamond business. Then he found a job as Slavic languages cataloger at the University of Illinois library in Champaign-Urbana, later earning a master of library science degree at Illinois.

At the university he began playing contra-bass balalaika in the Russian Folk Orchestra, a 40-member recording and touring ensemble. When the conductor retired in 1990, Gorodinsky picked up the baton.

Five years later, when he left Illinois to join the UW–Madison library staff, he knew he would sorely miss the making of Russian music. So his eyes lit up when Mark Beissinger, a political science professor and director of the Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia at UW–Madison, asked if he would start a Russian folk music orchestra.

“Mark was critical to the orchestra’s formation because he found the money for it,” says Gorodinsky. The funds, which came from a federal grant, bought balalaikas and domras — traditional Russian stringed instruments — for about 15 students recruited for the orchestra.

But then Gorodinsky, with the help of UW–Madison researcher emeritus Fred Middleton, had to teach the students how to play these brand-new instruments — an enormous pedagogical task. It was akin to what a conductor in Russia would face after forming a banjo band to play American folk music.

The balalaika and domra are what you hear on the haunting sound track of the movie “Dr. Zhivago.”

“The domra sounds something like a mandolin, and the balalaika sounds like, well, nothing else in the world,” says Gorodinsky. The domra’s soundbox is oval and the balalaika’s, triangular.

“Russian folk music is distinctive, joyful, contagious,” he says. His love of it all shines through in his conducting. Leading his orchestra at a recent concert and wearing a bright red shirt, he dipped and swayed his entire body to the rhythms of the music, waving his baton like a magician’s wand.

Magic vies with music for Gorodinsky’s attention, as a matter of fact. “I go to magic conventions, subscribe to magazines on magic and read books about its history,” he says. “I believe magic is an art — and one of our most ancient arts.”

Gorodinsky can roll up his sleeves and, within inches of your nose, make a quarter disappear and reappear with fluid, silky motions. And he can lock two rubber bands in tension against each other and then magically, you might say, pull one rubber band through the other, showing that Scotty of “Star Trek” isn’t the only one who’s got the knack of dematerialization.

“It took me a month to master that rubber-band trick,” says Gorodinsky. “And if I skip even two or three days of practicing it, I begin to lose the touch I need to pull it off.”

He’s as nimble with languages as he is with rubber bands. He speaks fluent Russian, French, Italian, Polish and English, and reads Ukrainian, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, Lithuanian and Latvian. That is handy indeed for a Slavic languages cataloger and a lover of Russian fiction and French poetry in their original languages. He seems to soak up languages simply by listening to native speakers and reading dictionaries and grammar books.

Linguistic dexterity runs in his family. His mother, Nadya Vinokur (who now lives in Madison), was a philologist for the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. And Gorodinsky’s grandfather, Gregory Vinokur, was one of the greatest Russian linguists of his day.

Victor has the pleasure of using his native tongue with his wife, Galina Frolova. They met in Memorial Library when Frolova, living then in Moscow, was visiting a friend in Madison. She now works as a programmer for the Center on Education and Work at UW–Madison.

Though thoroughly a polyglot, Gorodinsky is decidedly American — “a democrat by nature,” as he puts it. America freed what was locked up tight in the Soviet Union.

“Even musicians weren’t exposed to famous conductors such as George Solti of the Chicago Symphony,” he says. “I realized how little I knew about modern music when I came to the United States.

“There also were no magic shops in the Soviet Union, and in literature, you weren’t allowed to read certain authors. I had to come to the United States to read Solzhenitsyn.”

These disparate passions have taken a joyful place at Gorodinsky’s table over the years for a fundamental reason: “That bloody scary moment in the Moscow airport,” he says, “gave me my freedom.”