Lost in transition

...The fifty-year-old poet, who had freedom thrust upon him while still in his youth, saw it as a nonissue...

...Such a course, the director implied, is doomed to be shallow...

...Beck had observed that a reading by a poet as prestigious as Brodsky, which drew only about two-hundred-and-fifty people in Connecticut, would attract thousands in Russia, where poetry is a popular art...

...BETHE DUFRESNE...

...Brodsky has yet to return to the Soviet Union, fearful, he said, that he would be met with flowers and-he searched for a modest word-"enthusiasm...

...While many of the voices that were silenced during the years of repression and stagnation are now being widely heard for the first time, writers in both the performing and literary arts admit that often the edge is gone...

...They were all Russian writers, but they were worlds apart in other ways...

...As for myself," said Brodsky, "I think the situation here, where poetry is all but ignored, is healthier...

...Coincidentally, while the writers met at Connecticut College, an hour's drive away Oleg Yefremov, artistic director of the famed Moscow Art Theatre, was rehearsing Chekhov's Ivanov at the Yale Repertory Theatre...

...Poet Tatyana Beck had come from Moscow, short story writer Valeri Popov had come from Leningrad, and the poet Joseph Brodsky, winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize for Literature, had come from South Hadley, Massachusetts, where he teaches at Mount Holyoke College...

...Yefremov may be unhappy with the quality of contemporary plays, but to him, theater is no game...

...Speaking through an interpreter, Yefremov said that the disillusionment of Chekhov's late nineteenth-century farmer-reformer, baffled by the failure of social reform to transform human nature, provides an apt metaphor for the Soviet theater today...

...What would happen when honest writers no longer had to camouflage their message between the lines...

...Playwrights caught up in the fervor of what Yefremov thinks is nothing less than a revolution have put aside their historical duty to probe the human soul in favor of knee-jerk rehashes of current events...

...Would telling the truth bring the same thrill...

...It is publishing that is not free...

...In a nation in which so many writers are just coming out of hiding, it may be awhile before they can entertain Brodsky's notion that the surest way to see clearly is to keep out of sight...

...Those Soviet writers found no comfort in anonymity...

...That is its insurance...

...A purging is going on, she said, and when it is through, a new poetic voice will be heard...

...Unaware of these remarks by his decorated detractor to the north, Yefremov said the ideal play is the one "that can open up things about the human soul that are absolutely new, surprising...

...In Moscow last year, the prominent critic Michail Shvidkoy, editor of Theatre magazine, observed that before perestroika the theater was "an island of freedom...

...Poetry must be of its time," said Beck, "and that is why it's so tragic...

...Throughout the day Brodsky used this collegiate forum to make a very American case for self-reliance and the power of the individual...

...Exiled from the Soviet Union eighteen years ago, he could not resist interrupting when in the midst of a bland but heartfelt speech about the desire of Russian writers to rejoin the world community, Popov used the collective "we...

...Today, said Beck through an interpreter, slogans still abound in contemporary Soviet poetry, although they are wielded satirically, angrily...

...But in the Soviet Union today, the media sometimes give the audience more to think about than the playwright does...

...It at least makes you sort out in your mind what you are doing this for-for success, for applause, for publication, or for the degree of truth you can put down on paper...

...On this point Brodsky would no doubt agree, although the poet hastened to dismiss the theater as "a low-brow, populist form of art" which "in order to survive has to attract the masses...

...Even a small truth like "we have not enough sausages"-usually spoken by a character in a play written a century earlier-was savored with delight...

...As for the new plays, many are so much "of their time" that they offer little more information or insight than the evening news...

...The word agitated Brodsky like the inflammation of an old wound...

...I don't want to brag about it," Brodsky said, "but as for writing, basically one is always free...

...In the theater world, pre-glasnost "kitchen dramas"-so named because they could only be performed in the privacy of homes-are not having much success on the legitimate stage...

...Prior to Brodsky's arrival, Beck had spoken of poets driven to suicide during the years of repression because their style was stolen by poets of lesser talent and integrity, who infused it with slogans and were rewarded with fame...

...The issue on the table was: Has freedom undermined the creativity of the Russian writer...

...LOST IN TRANSITION LITERATURE AFTER CENSORSHIP Ever since glasnost and perestroika rid Soviet writers of a dependable as well as inspirational enemy-political repression-there has been talk that creativity would suffer and public interest would wane...

...The philosophical premise of the event was nearly sabotaged by a declaration of independence by Nobel Laureate Brodsky...

...Poetry has only to attract the individual," he said...

...Brodsky went on to throw even the validity of publishing into question, delivering-to tenuous applause-a very un-American speech in praise of anonymity...

...He hasn't lost his reverence for the "profoundness with which a human soul can be affected" by great theater, and he believes-like the poet Beck-that Soviet playwrights must purge themselves of "a lot of cruelty and negative emotions" before they get back to the highest purposes of art-vision, inspiration, revelation...

...A small group of Russian writers met in September at the Daniel Klagsbrun Symposium on Writing and Moral Vision at Connecticut College in New London to address these questions...