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Homo Duplex
The enigmatic decision by the Ford Madox Ford Society to choose me to deliver the Annual Ford Madox Ford Lecture prompts a question: what do Zinovy Zinik and Ford Madox Ford have in common? Could I compare the duality of my life, the personality split that took place after my emigration from Soviet Russia thirty years ago, to that of Ford's for whom his past became another country as for many of those of his generation, who had survived the Great War. Ford's life is, indeed, an epitome of existential splits and departures. Because of his lifelong attempts to re-discover his historical fatherland and spiritual home - from England and Germany to France and the United States - his biography has become a parable of expatriate existence, both in a literal and in a metaphorical sense. Especially for a self-willed and voluntary kind of exile like my own: I was granted a one-way exit visa to the West in exchange for my Soviet citizenship.
Unlike Ford, I wasn't allowed to re-visit my native town for the next fifteen years. Like Ford, though, I was endowed with the blissful ability of making friends (and even enemies) easily at every stage of my life. These friendships were nourished not only through direct contacts but also via the post office: like Ford, I was a compulsive writer of letters from my first days in the West, describing my new life to those who were left behind the Iron Curtain as if it were a novel. I used emigration as a literary device. Like Ford, I had even taken part in founding an émigré publishing cooperative that eventually failed; but, unlike Ford, I didn't, thank God, start a literary magazine. And last but not least in this list of similarities: my pen name is, like Ford's, different from the one written in my passport, which is Zinovy Gluzberg-Zinik.
The bifocal nature of Ford Madox Hueffer's literary temperament was quite literal because of his father's German origin; this duality was also epitomised in the style of his pseudonym: Ford Madox Ford. I cannot resist here the temptation of suggesting that Ford's double name was an inspiration for Nabokov to call his hero Humbert Humbert. Nabokov lived in Paris...