Robert Hanks: The Week In Radio

From clever exiles to clawed immigrants

We hear a lot about immigrants and – a bit less, these days – asylum-seekers, but not so much about exiles, who sound rather more glamorous. Perhaps that's a reason why people don't use the term, but "exile" is a useful word: to call someone an immigrant is to identify them purely in terms of their relationship to this country, which is narrow-minded; calling someone an exile grants them an identity and attachments elsewhere. I think it would be harder for callers to Any Answers? to get as hot under the collar about exiles.

The term staged a comeback in Saturday's Archive Hour: Snowy Streets of St Petersburg (BBC Radio 4), in which Martin Sixsmith, once the BBC's man in Moscow, explored the importance of exile for writers in the former Communist bloc. The tradition of writing from exile was never just a phenomenon of Communism – for centuries, Russians have been going into exile (including internal exile, to Siberia) and ostentatiously yearning for the homeland. And exile isn't necessarily a geographical experience, either: Poles in the 19th and 20th centuries felt themselves exiled, because they had been dispossessed by foreign empires.

While exile implies unwillingness, it wasn't at all clear that exile is bad for writers. Milan Kundera, the Czech author who lives in France, complained that when he tells a joke in French, nobody laughs; when he tries to say something serious, everybody laughs. But his fellow Czech Josef Skvorecky (in an interview freshly done for this programme, which was supposedly culled from the archives...) saw advantages in seeing the world with other people's eyes: he would not have written so much or so well if he had stayed put, he thought. And while they may yearn for the homeland, exiles don't always return when they have the chance: many of the writers that Sixsmith mentioned stuck with the yearning.

There were some neat anecdotes and acute insights along the way but, given the depth of feeling being talked about, the programme was oddly dry and unengaging. It did have a secondary interest, though, as an addition to a new genre: journalists showing off their hinterland.

Before Christmas, Martha Kearney was on Radio 3 enthusing about Horace; and last week Radio 4 had Nick Robinson, the BBC's political editor, putting daily readings from Machiavelli into context (and perhaps underplaying the gulf between a Renaissance tyrant and a modern elected ruler).

Sixsmith – admittedly, not a journalist for a while now – remembered his time as a young fellow at Harvard, recited Ovid in the original Latin, and remarked shrewdly on how the theme of exile lurks in Nabokov, sometimes heavily disguised. I wondered whether maybe he feels like an exile from the ivory tower. It might explain why this all felt a bit academic.

Advance of the Giant Crabs (Monday, Radio 4) was definitely about immigrants, not exiles: the Kamchatka crabs that are now invading Norway's coastal waters. They were originally transplanted from Russia's Pacific coast to the Arctic Barents Sea by Stalin, to provide food for prisoners of the gulags. Being huge – sometimes 6ft across – omnivorous and with no natural predators, they thrived, and Norway now has four million of them.

The silver lining for fishermen is that they're delicious and command high prices. As David Lomax said, how ironic that Stalin's initiative now furnishes the tables of wealthy capitalists.