The recent convictions of the Russian writers, Andrei Sinyavsky (alias Abram Tertz) and Yuli Daniel (alias Nikolai Arzhak) to seven and five years imprisonment respectively for the crime of sending abroad “anti-Soviet” works constitute only the latest of a number of such scandals which have rocked the Soviet Union since Stalin’s death. However, unlike the attacks mounted against Ilya Ehrenburg and the poets Voznesensky and Yevtushenko in 1962 and 1963, the trial was obviously not intended to signal another general freeze; to counter its impact, Voznesensky and Yevtushenko were nominated for the Lenin Prize in literature, and Valery Tarsis-a self-confessed member of the Sinyavsky-Daniel group-was permitted to lecture in England (though he was subsequently deprived of his citizenship).
What the trial and the counterbalancing measures accompanying it signify is the determination of the Soviet leadership to enforce the modus vivendi reached with the Russian literary community under Khrushchev. Under this accommodation it was understood that the intellectuals would not openly challenge the ideological supremacy of the party, while the party assented to limited exercises in artistic autonomy. This somewhat artificial marking-off of spheres of influence has been upset several times, once by the literary activities of the poet Iosif Brodsky and now again by Sinyavsky and Daniel-and in both cases the Soviet leadership reacted solely against the individuals concerned and carefully avoided putting the entire intellectual community in the dock.
Despite the party’s attempts to isolate individual transgressors, however, it seems inevitable that the equilibrium between the party and the intellectual community is bound to remain unstable for some time to come, for it is based on a very radical and rather recent restructuring of the traditional relationship between Russian art and politics-a relationship which was based on the recognition of art and politics as equal and interpenetrating realms.
From Pushkin forward, Russian writers were typically influenced by the political currents of their times and by an “ideological” conception of their relation to the public. The “mission” of most 19th-century Russian writers was that of educating and elevating the Russian people, and they shared or created ideologies-ranging from Westernization to Slavophilism, from socialism to Christian anarchism to populism-whose common purpose was to overcome or transvalue the impotence and humiliation of Russia vis-à-vis the West. Moreover, as Dostoevsky’s fate reminds us, this involvement was not an idle intellectual pastime; it involved agitation and conspiracy, and the threat of jail, exile, or death. Whether despite their involvement or because of it, the works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev demonstrated the aesthetic potential of this “civic literature.”
The revolution of 1905, and still more that of 1917, if anything intensified the political engagement of Russian literature. The Bolshevik revolution became the obsessive central fact of existence and the exploration of its significance brought into common focus virtually all the diverse tendencies, groups, and individual talents that were active in Russian letters. At its highest point, post-revolutionary Soviet literature enlisted major older writers such as Bedny, Blok, and Akhmatova and produced giants like Pasternak, Mayakowsky, Mandelstam, and Babel.
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To be sure, this tremendous burst of creative energy did not last long under Stalin’s rule. In those terrible years when literature was inexorably declining into propaganda, it became apparent that the peculiar Russian synthesis of art and politics had broken down. Bolshevik ideology had developed into a cancer which devoured and destroyed the intellectual and moral life of the nation. The Communist cadres increasingly opposed the hopes, needs, and desires of the people and artists alike; while the artists, now forcibly disengaged, were driven to accept a doctrine of accountability to the party and the state in the name of the public welfare that was a bitter parody of the sense of mission which once had animated them. In the name of “socialist realism” they were compelled now to fabricate a totally false reality. There were the odes to Stalin by poets who were deathly afraid of the monster, the epics of factory life by writers who were appalled by the ugliness and suffering of forced industrialization, the romances of kolkhoz life by novelists whose relatives had perished in the collectivization drive.
The fate of the next generation was even worse, for by now Joseph Stalin’s primitive world had become their only frame of reference. His simple dialectical catechism provided their only categories of political awareness; and because their habits of thought furnished no other premises than those of vulgar Marxism, personal revolt—even disagreement-became increasingly impossible.
This total regulation of ideas also constricted the expression of emotions and eventually the emotions themselves. Whole areas of human experience were proscribed from literature, including those which have always seemed peculiarly Russian: religious inwardness, existential sorrow, the dramatic swings from despair to exaltation. Of course, intellectuals in Russia continued to love and grieve and to experience the world in various moods. But because their emotional life could no longer be expressed in literature, its quality was bound to diminish. One of the basic functions of literature is to articulate and reinforce otherwise inchoate feelings and intuitions and to provide models of personal behavior; in Russia, where this function had been particularly essential because of the backwardness of most of the society, the failure of literature to perform it inevitably led to a general decline in awareness, a general flattening of sensibility. Thus in both of its traditional concerns-with the Russian state and the Russian spirit-Russian literature under Stalin was distorted and denatured.
If artists and writers were particularly hard hit by Stalinism, this was not only because ideas and sensibility are their stock-in-trade and their reason for living, but because they stand in particular need of a vital, unbroken tradition. What writers most respond to and react against, after all, is the work of their predecessors: eliminate a generation and you orphan an entire literature.
Thus by the end of Stalin’s rule, an entirely new “civic literature” had been established whose monolithic politics, uniformly naturalistic style, and depressed emotional and intellectual level bore little trace of the lively, varied, and self-assertive literature of pre-revolutionary and early revolutionary times.
The full extent of the malaise afflicting Russian letters became apparent only after Khrushchev removed some of the restrictions on the literary and artistic community during the “thaws” of 1957 and 1962-63. Until then it had been possible to believe in the existence of a large and rich underground literature, locked away in desk drawers and safes all across Russia. However, once these manuscripts began to circulate widely, if sometimes clandestinely, it became disappointingly clear that subversive writing had suffered virtually the same inanition as had the literature of accommodation. There was Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, a towering moral achievement but flawed as a work of art; there were in addition several first-rate novellas and a number of fine poems. All the rest could be summed up by the remark of a Russian observer who described the unpublished protest novels as “a flow of earnest . . . productions in a critical and honest vein but in the same old, flat-footed Soviet manner.”
Even more indicative of the withering influence of Stalinism was the behavior-political as well as literary-of the Soviet literary community during the thaws of 1957 and 1962-3. We have had exceptionally ample accounts of this behavior during both thaws;7 here I want to discuss only the later one in some detail as a way of focusing on how the legacy of Stalinism-a legacy that still besets Russian letters-has worked to destroy the genius of engaged Russian art.
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The 1962-3 thaw was initiated by Khrushchev himself at a time when his struggle with the Chinese was coming out into the open, and when the local party chairmen were opposing his plan to split the Communist party into an industrial and an agricultural apparatus-a move that threatened their jurisdiction. (Behind this latter issue loomed Khrushchev’s intention of reorganizing the entire Soviet economy, so the stakes were high on both sides.) What better way of attacking both groups simultaneously than by resurrecting the specter of Stalin? Khrushchev ordered the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s labor-camp novella, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and Yevtushenko’s poem, “Stalin’s Heirs.”
The initial response of the liberal writers and artists was almost exclusively a matter of organized political action-thus illustrating how deeply Stalin had rent what was once the indivisible genius of Russian engaged art. Almost immediately, they organized a closely-knit faction under the mixed leadership of survivors of the older generation like Ehrenburg and Paustovsky, middle-aged writers like Twardovsky, and young Turks like Yevtushenko. They embarked on a major campaign to promote their ideas and to take over the power and positions held by the members of the old Stalinist clique. With help from above, the liberals managed to elect their own people to the boards of various locals of the Writers’ Union, to oust “conservatives” from editorial and managerial posts, and to gain official recognition in the form of foreign trips and large printings. They also took increasingly more belligerent positions on questions of artistic freedom at writers’ congresses.
According to Peter Benno, whose essay on the “Political Aspect” appears in the Hayward-Crowley volume, the battle between liberals and conservatives boiled down to a simple power struggle in which matters of principle were little more than identification badges. Mr. Benno’s tough-minded approach is a needed corrective to the overly idealistic accounts we have been given of the struggle. Still, his judgment of the motives of the participants is unduly reductive. Clearly, the liberals did want to do away with the worst restraints of the Stalin era, to broaden their freedom of expression and of experimentation (though not absolutely), and to have more contact with the rest of the world.
Up through November 1962, the liberals won one victory after another. And then, just as they were about to grow dizzy with success, their fortunes went into an equally sudden reversal. On December 1, Khrushchev denounced the paintings and sculptures exhibited by Russian modern artists at the Manezh gallery. The next day, the newspapers were full of denunciations of the liberals and their works, and in the weeks that followed they began to lose, one after another, their newly-won positions of power and influence.
The most cogent explanation of this reversal is that Khrushchev had sustained a number of setbacks-the Cuban missile crisis of October, rising prices during that summer, and the unexpectedly tenacious opposition of the local party chairmen to his reorganization scheme-that forced him to retreat from his liberalization policies. Also, the anti-Stalinist campaign had begun to touch him personally as a close collaborator of the late dictator. Once he had decided, or been compelled, to retrench, his crackdown on the literary community served as a way of ending the thaw, just as his encouragement of that community had served as a way of initiating it.
By March 1963, Khrushchev had partially rehabilitated Stalin, and the conservatives, in the ascendent again, were calling for the use of force against their opponents. “The atmosphere in Moscow by now was one of fear,” writes Priscilla Johnson. “There was a feeling that anything might happen.” By the end of March, the poets Yevtushenko and Voznesensky had publicly recanted, and soon after, the writer Aksenev apologized as well.
This marked the nadir of the liberals’ cause. By mid-April the campaign against them began to abate. Perhaps because of the protests from Communist parties abroad, or perhaps simply because he had regained control, Khrushchev rejected the more extreme demands made by the conservatives and reasserted the authority of the party over both factions.
By comparison with the political activity of the literary community during the thaw, the efforts expended on artistic expression during this time seem perfunctory: the novellas, short stories, and poems that came from this period were typically cautious and noncommittal. One suspects that even during a time when writers felt free to act in behalf of their beliefs, they were not yet able to write freely as artists, to overcome-overnight, as it were-the break in the tradition, the decades of repression and inhibition. Moreover, there must have been strong feelings of uncertainty concerning the new relationship between art and politics—a problem which had unexpectedly been reopened by Khrushchev’s liberalization program. It was obvious that neither the pre-revolutionary role of public spokesman nor the Stalinist function of camp-follower was open to them; and of the options lying between these extremes, none seemed very clear or secure.
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The thinness of the literary response to the thaw is suggested by the fact that only a handful of competent writers were engaged by it in their work. Thus, in three different anthologies of the period (edited by Thomas P. Whitney,8 Andrew Field,9 and Patricia Blake and Max Hayward,10 respectively), only eleven new writers are represented by a total of twenty-five selections—and four of the writers account for eighteen of them. Nor does one find any marked increase in diversity; the range of the Soviet literary imagination is still so restricted that the new directions which emerged during the thaw all seem to lead into the same three or four paths.
The first and most frequent tendency is found among orthodox followers of the party who are struggling to introduce some degree of artistic freedom and complexity into their celebrations of Soviet life. A good example is Vladimir Tendryakov’s “Short Circuit,” which, like many of his other stories, affirms the achievements of Communism while pointing up their moral costs. The hero of “Short Circuit” is a Khrushchev-like manager whose ability to make hard decisions under stress is shown to be bound “up in a personality that is damaging to his family, his friends, and subordinates. Though a rather simple form of conflict for a writer to deal with, it still puts a heavy strain on Tendryakov’s resources. Instead of moving toward a meaningful confrontation between political goals and moral scruples, he limits the issue by permitting all the key figures in the story to experience the same contradictory emotions in varying degrees. Thus the conflict between power and virtue remains unexplored, and Tendryakov’s personal uneasiness toward his hero merely transmits itself to his equivocal and vacillating cast of characters. This is “constructive writing,” to be sure, but at the expense of engaging the question it raises. There are a number of Central European writers who would know how to exploit the ambiguity of Tendryakov’s situation, but lacking their gift of dual vision, he can only founder amid the disjunctions between political loyalties and personal consciousness.
There are many such holdovers from Stalin’s world: heavy-handed social realists, inveterate moralizers who are redeemed, if at all, by their stubborn honesty in dealing with individual relationships. Even the best book in this genre, Vladimir Dudintsev’s Not by Bread Alone, is undermined by its emphasis on the possibilities of making Communism more efficient and humane. A more extreme case of what Peter Benno calls “Stalinist literature à rebours” is the poetry of Yevgenyi Yevtushenko. When his anti-Stalinist poems “Stalin’s Heirs,” “Babi Yar,” and “The Dead Hand” appeared in the West, Yevtushenko quickly acquired a reputation as a significant poet and a political rebel. On second look, he has turned out to be neither. Much as one hates to say so, the directness, simplicity, and sensitivity which made a poem like “Babi Yar” so effective in publicizing the plight of Soviet Jewry are not the qualities which of themselves make for major poetry. On the contrary, Yevtushenko’s polemical verse, detached from its political content, seems unsophisticated and anachronistic, much as his lyrical poems are heavily romantic in their sentimentality and conventional in their non-conformity. Far from being a radical, moreover, Yevtushenko is a man so thoroughly conditioned by his Stalinist upbringing that his political vision goes no further than de-Stalinization combined with reform of the party. Indeed, Khrushchev’s famous secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress was more revolutionary than Yevtushenko’s “Stalin’s Heirs.” Because of his youth and flamboyance, however, Yevtushenko became the political spokesman for the new generation, faithfully expressing in his “bohemian” way of life no less than in his poetry their repudiation of the past and their urgent, if vague, search for a better future.
Yevtushenko’s importance derived from his role as the idol of the Russian students. And for a time he seemed to be the heir of those poet-leaders who might revive the distinctive tradition of a powerful civic literature. This possibility, however, was quickly nipped in the bud by the party, which took the sensible course of wooing the would-be rebel rather than attempting to silence him. Since Yevtushenko wished only to reform the Communist party, and since he needed to keep open the channels to the Kremlin if he was to remain the spokesman of his generation, he was easily seduced. In time, his various conflicting political responsibilities led him to compromises (such as altering “Babi Yar”), and these days he can be trusted enough to be allowed to go abroad again, there to declaim his old rebellious poems as part of the campaign to promote a “progressive” image of Khrushchev’s successors.
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In sharp contrast to this new civic literature is another category, which might be called the school of inner emigration, represented mostly by short-story writers who have turned their backs on politics and deal with the little incidents and poignancies of everyday life. A village carpenter drives his dying wife to the hospital and daydreams of having a meal in a fancy restaurant; an engineer on a brief vacation shows himself to be insensitive to the troubles of a young girl who happens to sit next to him on the bus; a truck driver picks up a woman hitch-hiker, fantasies a romance with her, and is brought down to earth by her insistence on paying him for the ride; a schoolgirl is punished by her friends for talking to a boy whom they have ostracized. From such sad, inconsequential stuff Kazakov, Nagibin, and most of the writers in the anthology, Pages from Tarusa, spin their unadorned tales. The great popularity of these authors in the Soviet Union evidently derives from the ease with which readers can identify with the minor triumphs and sorrows of their characters, and with their predominant mood of fatalistic acceptance which reflects an enduring Russian trait-as well as the actual situation of the individual in Soviet society.
Lifelike, honest, tightly-structured, these modest stories are among the best-written literature produced in the Soviet Union. Nor are they quite as detached from the issues of Communist life as their authors and public like to believe. In a completely politicalized society, the very act of writing a deliberately non-political story is a protest, however weak, against the state. Moreover, being a species of socialist realism, this fiction cannot help but comment, indirectly but sometimes tellingly, on the conditions of Soviet life. One finds, for example, a devastating judgment of Soviet agricultural policy communicated by stories in which the emptiness of the peasants’ existence is powerfully suggested by the pathetic modesty of their desires. Finally, the main characteristics of this literature-its understated style, its fatalistic philosophy, its focus on the individual-all serve by implication to debunk the bombast, the shallow optimism, and the inhuman stress on the importance of institutions which are the hallmark of the official literature.
This genre, though, is perhaps less subversive of the state than it is of the genuine talents of some of its practitioners. By hewing so closely to the surface of things, these writers inevitably scant the deeper layers of individual experience, just as they tend to simplify and foreshorten social perspective through the brevity and narrowness of their tales. Thus is the Chekhovian sketch converted into a peculiar species of escape literature which evades the reality of social control in the Soviet Union by adopting the comforting fiction that only the individual counts. Yet what actually emerges from these stories is precisely the opposite point: it is the impotence of the individual we see, not his importance, in the endless procession of pathetic and nondescript Ivans and Natashas.
This central pretense concerning the individual accounts for much of the sentimentality that marks the stories in Pages from Tarusa. It also explains the sense of incongruity that gradually takes hold of a reader who goes through a large number of such stories, for they register a consistently anemic response to the enormous realities of the Soviet state-the convulsions of Stalin’s regime, the Second World War, and the domestic and foreign crises in which the Russian people have been and are involved. A constant preoccupation with the commonplace, however honorably motivated, cuts off consideration of larger and more decisive issues; and to humanize the Soviet character by reducing it to the purely personal is to narrow rather than broaden the horizons of consciousness.
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While this self-limitation is the essence of the non-political Soviet writer’s craft, it functions as a strategy for writers-like Aksenev, Okudzawa, and Solzhenitsyn-who attempt to offer serious comments on their society. Aksenev’s “Half-way to the Moon” is the tale of a robust young lumberjack who falls in love with an airplane hostess-symbol of unattainable elegance and refinement-and, in the vain hope of meeting her again, flies back and forth on her route like a lost soul. Despite its whimsy, the story is coolly detached in its portrayal of Russia’s confused and rebellious youth, and unlike the “inner-emigration” genre pieces, it aims at making a more than merely “personal” point. So, too, with Okudzawa’s “Lots of Luck, Kid,” a downbeat war novella whose non-hero, a likable peasant lad, tells in the first person singular “how I fought in the war, how they wanted to kill me, and how I made it through all right.” And so, of course, with Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: in this famous account of the daily struggle to stay alive in a Soviet labor camp, the very walls of the camp seem to come forward to bear unemotional witness to the sufferings of Ivan, the Russian Everyman.
Aksenev, Okudzawa, and Solzhenitsyn make up the small group of Soviet fiction writers who confront major social issues in a serious and solid way. They all feature the common man as a hero; and they all use his peasant heart and mind, his goodness and slyness, to serve as the recording center of consciousness. Generally, their style is naturalistic and highly idiomatic; indeed, all three writers are almost unintelligible in Russian unless the reader has an extensive knowledge of peasant dialect, adolescent slang, or the argot of labor-camp inmates.
In short, what we have here is a quasi-documentary form which permits the author to let “the facts” and “the people” speak for themselves. This is of obvious value in a society where the fear of repression and reprisal is still strong; the form also leans on a cherished populist tradition in Russian letters, and since it allows for easy identification on the part of the reader, it makes for a deep and lasting impact on a mass audience. Solzhenitsyn’s spare tale of the Stalinist camps shook the Russians as Pasternak’s complex novel never could have done.
Nevertheless, much of what has been said about the other types of contemporary Soviet fiction applies to the documentary protest novel as well. By depicting the social scene strictly as seen through the eyes of their simple protagonists-who are, moreover, deeply caught up in events-the authors deprive themselves of whatever larger awareness they have gained of the dynamics of the system; they also relinquish whatever distance they have been able to put between themselves and their social conditions, and they sacrifice any possibility of letting their art confront and transcend the conditions of life. More seriously, the narrow focus of the documentary form itself commits the author to a flat, oversimplified realism which cannot finally do justice to the surrealistic qualities of, say, Stalin’s labor camps. The assumption of neutrality, the quiet style, and the very definite structure called for by the medium, produce an order and rationality which negate and betray the chaos and madness at the heart of whatever it portrays. Perhaps the best proof of this inherent tendency of the documentary form to diminish its subject is the fact that Khrushchev and his successors have been able to make use of books like Ivan Denisovich which, on the face of things, should have been a radical indictment of the entire system.
In the end, then, Solzhenitsyn and the others have failed to establish a significant political literature. One can point to the severe restraints on such writers in the Soviet Union, but it is also true that other writers of fiction like Sinyavsky-Tertz have chosen to remain unpublished in Russia rather than submit to the restrictive “objectivity” of socialist realism or its contemporary variants. If the “documentary” writers have lowered their sights to the “facts,” one suspects that they have done so at least partly in order to write on the level of their imaginations.
This is particularly true, I think, of Solzhenitsyn. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Matryona’s Home are great documents, but their author is not a great artist. There is no resonance to his work, none of the richness one senses when a first-rate mind is in the background. His characters and situations, given to him by the times, are so powerful in themselves that they needed no more than an accurate observer, an honest craftsman-which Solzhenitsyn certainly is. When, however, he turns to more introspective material, as in his personal sketches published last year in Encounter, one is immediately conscious of a commonplace, and rigid, sensibility. The cases of Aksenev, Okudzawa, and Dudintsev are not quite as clear-cut, but reading them, too, one becomes aware as much of their internal inhibitions as of the severe limits to acceptable Soviet writing during the thaw.
However, the full extent to which even the most liberated Soviet novelists operate under the dead hand of the Stalinist past-and the high price they must pay in terms of the limitations imposed upon their creative capabilities-is seen perhaps most clearly in the case of those novelists whose alienation from their society seems total. I am referring to the small group of writers whose sense of mission is so intense that, unable to publish at home, they smuggle their work abroad-including the recently-imprisoned Andrei Sinyavsky-Tertz and Yuli Daniel-Arzhak, and also Valery Tarsis, the author of “Ward 7.”
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What distinguishes these men is their determination to confront in their writings the major problems besetting Soviet society, paired with the recognition that they can do so only by resorting to unconventional literary idioms capable of reflecting the disjointed character of their time. (I shall limit myself in what follows to the work of Sinyavsky-Tertz, but my comments—particularly as they concern the “new style” and its implications-apply, with modifications, to Daniel as well. Tarsis shares their political convictions completely, and their artistic orientation to a limited degree.)
In Sinyavsky’s case, the close connection between political dissent and literary apartness was demonstrated, from the outset, by the joint Paris publication, in 1959, of the novella “The Trial Begins” and the critical essay, “On Socialist Realism”-both under the Tertz pseudonym. Then, it was the novella that caused most of the comment. For here, for the first time within the memory of our generation, could be heard the authentic, un-censored voice of the Russian intellectual-and that voice turned out to be surprisingly familiar; or so it seemed. Tertz, with his sophisticated, ironic, and self-deprecating view of personal relationships, and his high, grotesque style, was readily accepted in the West; there his intense political engagement was not only greatly admired for its courage, but also envied insofar as his targets-Stalin’s camps, Russian anti-Semitism, Soviet bureaucracy-were the kind of visible, uncomplicated evils which Western society, with all its moral ambiguities, does not as a rule offer intellectual and artistic critics. Small wonder, then, that “The Trial Begins” received the lion’s share of attention. In retrospect, however, the essay seems at least equally important, since it offers nothing less than a manifesto for a new Russian literature. It calls, in the most uncompromising terms, for emancipation from the “purposes” of Communism and the replacement of socialist realism by a “phantasmagoric” and “bizarre” style appropriate to the quality of life in the 20th century.
There can be little doubt that “The Trial Begins,” and Tertz’s subsequent stories and novels were meant to be the first specimens of this new Russian literature, or that Daniel’s literary ambitions had also been defined in Tertz’s essay. It is all the more ironic, then, that though “The Trial Begins”, is a great work in many respects, it fails to measure up to Tertz’s manifesto. For while the novella does indeed move away from Communist purposes and socialist realism, it does so not by progressing toward new artistic purposes and to a new idiom of its own, but by falling back, both in conception and style, on 19th-century Russian romanticism.
As it happens, there is an extended discussion of that movement in “On Socialist Realism,” and the similarity between its governing themes, as seen by Tertz, and those which govern his own novels is striking indeed. According to Tertz, 19th-century Russian romanticism is dominated by the dilemma of the “superfluous” man, the intellectual who feels compelled by the absurdities and injustices of his age to search for a higher “Purpose” but is prevented from finding it by the stultifying effects of those very absurdities and injustices upon his own character. Writes Tertz:
For all his generous purposes, he [the superfluous man] is unable to find a destiny and he presents a lamentable example of . . . purposelessness. He is as a rule a reflective character with tendencies to self-analysis and self-flagellation. His life is full of unrealized projects, and his fate is sad and slightly ridiculous. A woman usually plays a fatal part in it.
The part played by the heroine-one for which she is qualified by a “beautiful, magical, mysterious and not too concrete nature . . . is to serve as a substitute for the absent and desired Purpose.” Tertz concludes that “Russian literature is full of stories in which an inadequate man and a beautiful woman meet and part without having achieved anything.” Precisely. And at bottom, Tertz’s own novels are just such 19th-century stories, presenting in symbolic form the enduring plight of the Russian artist and intellectual who is unwilling to accept the purpose imposed upon him by the state and yet rendered incapable of realizing (and frequently of conceiving) his own purposes.
What, after all, is Karlinsky, the major figure in “The Trial Begins,” but a man unable to find his destiny? Continually thwarted by an all-powerful, mean, and stupid authority, he finds that his intelligence, generosity, and wit only serve to bring home to him all the more poignantly his impotence-symbolized by his failure to satisfy either the beautiful Marina (a very obvious ersatz purpose) or himself; in the end he inadvertently contributes to sending a child to a labor camp.
And what is Lenny Makepeace, the hero of Tertz’s latest book, but another superfluous man who, though magically endowed with power, fails to use it properly because he finds himself in an impasse where everything-Soviet society at large, the common people, his own nature-conspires against his discovering that new purpose which alone would permit him to enter into a saving communion with his people and his beautiful, mystical wife?11
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The style and the language of Tertz’s novel belong no less to the 19th century than do his themes. Distinctive as is his “phantasmagoric” and “bizarre” style (and the similar style of Daniel) amid the flat conformity of socialist realism, it is hardly a literary departure on the scale of Joyce, say, or Rimbaud; it falls back, rather, on Gogol and the German E. T. A. Hoffman, whom Tertz invokes at the very conclusion of his essay.
In the end, what is most significant about this school-for all the brilliance of individual works-is precisely the discrepancy between intention and achievement, between the optimistic program of Tertz’s manifesto and the unmistakable message of artistic impasse conveyed in his novels and stories. To be sure, the break with the oppressive present is accomplished, but only by way of regression-and that is a very high price to pay for independence.
Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Sinyavsky-Tertz and his friends paid the penalty for what turned out to be the impossible task of directly engaging the realities of Soviet politics in the old tradition of “civic literature-i.e., in works that proclaimed, in however disguised a form, the indivisibility of politics and art and the political “mission” of the intellectual. Unfortunately, the Communist state has even stronger means at its disposal than Czarist Russia had to frustrate such autonomous purposes for a long, long time to come; as a result, writers like Sinyavsky and Daniel run not only the risk of prison and exile, but the more lasting danger of coming to see themselves, in their everlasting frustration, as “superfluous” men out of Gogol and Tertz.
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Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that the writers who have best succeeded in freeing themselves are a few “pure” poets. Poetry generally depends to a greater degree than prose does on fresh language and new concepts: hence its irrepressible tendency-a tendency which Erich Auerbach has called the essence of literary progress-to slough off conventional responses and incorporate new realities. “In the Russian language,” according to Wladimir Weidlé, “words seek to express not so much factual relations as the speaker’s intention; they are oftener symbols than signals”; there is thus a natural correspondence between a poetic idiom and the Russian language itself which helps to explain why Russian verse in the post-revolutionary period has been more highly developed and innovative than Russian prose. There is also something of a Soviet tradition, going back to Mayakowsky, which, with notable exceptions, tends to give poets somewhat more latitude than writers of prose. But whatever the explanation, it is evident that a few Russian poets today enjoy greater freedom-above all, greater inner freedom-than other intellectuals.
Two of these poets are Andrei Voznesensky and Iosif Brodsky (who is not represented in any of the recent anthologies). In his politics, Voznesensky has styled himself after Mayakowsky; though not a member of the Communist party, he wishes to purify and rejuvenate Communism, while (unlike his contemporary Yevtushenko) keeping his lyrical poems free of a political slant. In contrast to Voznesensky, Iosif Brodsky is a loner. His poetry is so apolitical as to be almost totally devoid of even topical allusions; however, he was exiled to Siberia not long ago for having no profession other than writing poetry.
The idiom and vision of these poets are radically different from anything else to be found in Russian culture today. Their language is, above all, wilfully difficult, not to say hermetic. Voznesensky constantly changes rhythms and meters, and makes generous use of alliteration, sound associations, and assonances in heavily accented broken lines, while almost all of Brodsky’s poems might be said to consist of the “broken strings of images” so cherished by Russian Imagists in the 1920’s.
To be sure, a great many of the techniques employed-unexpected associations and contexts, concatenations of strange similes, omission of links between metaphors-date back to the 1920’s. But if the poets of that generation defined their aim as “making it strange,” those of today could more properly be said to be making their poetry “alienated.” Here lies the difference between the two generations. The older one devised its innovations to keep abreast of what it took to be the current of history. For this reason the originality of its poetry is in the imagery rather than in substantive conception. The contemporary poets, on the other hand, must break with their times in order to express themselves; therefore the technical aspect of their innovations must be sustained by a genuinely distinctive vision.
In the case of Voznesensky, this quest for uniqueness originally involved an exploration of the self abstracted from society. Perhaps the most famous example of this early style is his “Parabolic Ballad”:
There was a girl who lived in my neighborhood.
We went to one school, took exams together.
But I took off with a bang,
I went sizzling
Through the prosperous double-faced doors of
Tiflis.
Forgive me for this idiotic parabola
Cold shoulders in a pitch-dark vestibule.
More recently Voznesensky has moved on to broader topics. In his long surrealistic poem, “Oza,” he weaves together a number of 20th-century leitmotifs into a strange cacophonic symphony. His themes include the reversibility of time, the interchangeability of space, the meaning of technology for our age, the relevance of man to this world.
It is in Brodsky’s poetry, however, that we encounter the most radical departure from Soviet norms: a poet in the grip of a metaphysical vision. In his great “Elegy for John Donne,” Brodsky boldly describes the relationship between the 17th-century poet and his universe. He starts with an extremely long and almost hypnotic evocation of a primeval sleep descended on the English countryside:12
John Donne has sunk in sleep. . . All things beside are sleeping too: walls, bed, and floor-all sleep. The table, pictures, carpets, hooks and bolts,
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* * *
This Island sleeps embraced by lonely dreams and every garden is now triple-barred.
* * *
The Hell-fires sleep, and glorious Paradise No one goeth forth from home at this dark hour. Even God has gone to sleep. Earth is estranged.
Then he addresses the soul of John Donne:
And thou didst soar past God, and then drop back,
for this harsh burden would not let thee rise to that high vantage point from which this world seems naught but ribboned rivers and tall towers—
that point from which, to him who downward stares,
this dread Last Judgment seems no longer dread. The radiance of that country does not fade. From thence our Lord is but a light that gleams through fog, in window of the farthest house.
And the poem ends:
Sleep, John Donne, sleep. Sleep soundly, do not fret thy soul. As for thy coat, ’tis torn; all limp it hangs. But see, there from the clouds will shine the star that makes thy world endure till now.
Even from a reading of the English translation one is aware of being in the presence of a major statement which in its splendor and autonomy soars far above the flat rationalizations and “scientific” ideologies from which it has risen. It is a declaration of inner freedom so absolute that it has no need to assert revolt. Recognizing that Brodsky cannot be seduced, intimidated, hobbled, or driven into safe pastures, the courts have banished him into exile. Russia’s greatness went with him.
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What of the future? It seems safe to assume that the Russian poet-leader is a thing of the past. Stalin dealt him a mortal blow and his successors have so restructured the Russian political and intellectual environment that, as proved by the Tertz case, a revival is practically ruled out for the foreseeable future. Moreover, this figure is perhaps an anachronism today; only in an illiterate country could men of letters lay claim to leadership on the strength of education and articulateness alone. In a modern, literate Soviet Union, the various interest groups (the armed forces, the managers, the skilled workers) bring to the fore their own spokesmen and lobbyists who represent them and who bargain on their behalf within the structure of the Communist party.
Thus it would seem that two possibilities are open to today’s Soviet writers. One is to modify their ambitions and scale down their claims to political leadership to the point where they become spokesmen only for those who are still outside the political process-except as victims: the peasants, the religious masses, the students, the unskilled, the untrained. A literature produced out of such an ambition, provided it kept to modest factual exposés and descriptions rather than to political programs, might well be tolerated as a safety-valve, or even as an accurate indicator of trouble spots in the society. Since both liberals of Yevtushenko’s stamp and the oppositionists of Solzhenitsyn’s school are drifting toward some such position, it seem evident that a very considerable number of talents can find a home there. Given sufficient time and latitude, a craftsmanlike literature of considerable force might well emerge under the wing of official tolerance.
The other possibility seems to be to divorce art from politics altogether-and much as one may regret the passing of a great literary tradition, there is a still tentative but unmistakable movement among the Russian intelligentsia to liberate all art forms from the domination of politics and to establish artistic disciplines which follow their own autonomous laws of development. We have seen this tendency at work, defensively and weakly, in the short story; one may add that it is also operating in such diverse fields as science fiction and abstract sculpture. Above all, it has already found unexpected fruition in a number of great poems. No one can predict its future; too many unforeseeable elements of political circumstance and personal fate may cut it off. All an outsider can do is hope for the best and salute the few brave spirits who, hemmed-in on all sides, have found within themselves and within their society the resources to create great and independent works of art.
1 See, for example, Soviet Literature in the Sixties, a collection of essays edited by Max Hayward and Edward C. Crowley (Praeger, 221 pp., $4.95), and Khrushchev and the Arts by Priscilla Johnson and Leopold Labedz (M.I.T. Press, 300 pp., $7.50).
2 The New Writing in Russia, The University of Michigan Press, 412 pp., $6.95.
3 Pages from Tarusa, New Voices in Russian Writing, Little, Brown and Co., 367 pp., $6.75. This is a translated selection from a larger Soviet work which appeared in 1961.
4 Half-Way to the Moon, New Writings from Russia, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 276 pp., $5.95.
5 If I focus more on Tertz’s treatment of the intellectual’s dilemma than on his indictment of the Soviet system, it is because the latter is really incidental to the former. Indeed, in The Makepeace Experiment Tertz treats autocracy pretty much as a “given” of the Russian situation, with little” change from the Czars to Stalin to savior Lennv
6 Translated by George L. Klein, The Tri-Quarterly, Spring 1965.
