REVIEWS
Voinovich, Vladimir
Vladimir Voinovich was born in 1932 in Soviet Central Asia. His early work experience, though limiting his formal education, gave him intimate knowledge of the daily realities of Soviet life....
...The Soviet newspapers began to assail the gray-haired laureate with a stream of invective and mud-slinging...
...Rumors about a possible publication of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago have also been in circulation...
...The students of the Literary Institute walked past Pasternak's dacha shouting curses Chinese-style and smashing bottles of ink, issued to them beforehand, on his fence...
...You should understand," he confided to the audience, "that we have published Mandelstam in order to shut their mouths...
...When they crucified your teacher, You walked over to hammer in the first nail...
...The same thing is happening now...
...Why some Pasternak whom the Soviet people have never even heard of...
...The Soviet authorities could have subscribed to the latter two points for they too were surprised and embarrassed...
...The self-assured Soviet authorities think that they control everything, including literature...
...It is published in Russian, and despite the vigilance of the border guards, copies end up in the Soviet Union and are distributed by those who speculate in books and by unselfish lovers of literature...
...All the same, I'd like to end on an optimistic note...
...Many of his persecutors have gone to the next world as well...
...People either say that a flying saucer hovered over Petrozavodsk for a few hours or that some miracle healer has appeared who can telepathically cure someone ill with cancer thousands of miles away...
...But there's an essential difference...
...There are many Heroes of Socialist Labor in both fields but the actual results are deplorable...
...They were afraid of being accused of hiding behind the Crimean mountains at a key moment in history...
...His major works are available in English: The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, In Plain Russian, The Ivankiad, and Pretender to the Throne...
...And, no matter what, it would be published in the Soviet Union in a paltry edition, of which most would be sent abroad...
...In 1958, that is, just over a quarter of a century ago, the author of Doctor Zhivago was 136 awarded the Nobel Prize...
...A brief reminder of the history of that novel on which Pasternak worked for many years: when he finished it in the '50s, he offered the manuscript to the magazine Novy Mir...
...The case of Doctor Zhivago demonstrates this with utter clarity...
...Hatred, spite, envy, and fear...
...But the literature they control, encourage, favor, and reward has no greater success than the agriculture they also control...
...Shut ours too...
...What motivated those writers...
...The belief that if they didn't trample him today, they'd be trampled themselves tomorrow...
...The author of one letter wrote that he only knew Sholokhov and Fedin, good writers, but had no idea who this Pasternak was...
...He has written short stories, novels, plays, and even a song, Fourteen Minutes To Go, which became the unofficial anthem of the Soviet cosmonauts...
...Unfortunately, or fortunately, the distance between rumor and news is immense...
...People also said that Andropov, the late general secretary, loved jeans and read the American writer Jacqueline Susann in the original...
...Who's this Pasternak...
...And those who govern literature, no matter what ranks they may hold, should remember that true literature is beyond their control, that anyone encroaching on its sovereignty will suffer inevitable defeat...
...They weren't, however, afraid of disgracing their names forever...
...And that truly made for a sensation, which caught everyone by surprise, including the laureate himself...
...And a very few would be sent to the bookstores in Moscow and a couple of other cities...
...Another expressed his feelings in verse: Pasternak is as dark and slack as an empty sack...
...If any outstanding talent should appear today, he will also be persecuted, stifled, and left to rot by so-called literary public opinion, front-rank workers, and specialists from the KGB...
...It was rejected by the editorial board, which was headed by Konstantin Simonov at the time...
...They called him anti-Soviet and an enemy of the people...
...And, as before, the general reader will have his mouth shut with volumes by Markov, Sartakov, Bondarev, or Chakovsky...
...But Doctor Zhivago continues to be published and republished in many languages...
...Or that a foreigner has come to Moscow and is giving unsuspecting Muscovites poisoned Tshirts that, once on, can't be pulled off...
...From time to time, not very often, despite everything, writers do appear who can be stifled, left to rot, and killed but who cannot be governed because they are ungovernable...
...He who had written: "I have not hammered a single nail in my life" became the subject of one of the most brilliant epigrams in Russian literature: All's behind you now, the glory and disgrace, Envy and dull malice remain...
...In 1957 the novel was published in Russian by Feltrinelli, an Italian Communist publisher...
...The secretary of the Komsomol Central Committee and future chairman of the KGB, Semichastny, called Pasternak a pig and declared that the Soviet government would have no objections if Pasternak left the country...
...And those who are destroying literature today would keep some of the copies for themselves...
...Speaking to a group of intellectuals in Leningrad, a party lecturer explained that the volume had been published to demonstrate our freedom of the press to the West...
...They've been flaring up and dying down for some 20 years now, if not more...
...Then all hell broke loose...
...What would that bear comparison to as an event...
...Translated from Russian by RICHARD LOURIE q 137...
...A correspondent for the London Times has termed these rumors sensational...
...Bulgakov's novel seemed to return from oblivion, to rise from the ashes, thereby confirming the author's principal hope—that manuscripts don't burn...
...And it is those writers who create the books that must not be destroyed...
...Why wasn't Sholokhov given the prize (Sholokhov would be awarded the prize seven years later), or Fedin, or Mikhail Alekseev...
...A chosen few will receive the legal edition of Pasternak...
...Selvinsky's exploit did not pass unnoticed...
...Writers die as do their oppressors, and states fall, but the books remain...
...ALL RIGHT, LETS ASSUME that it'll be published now even in the Soviet Union...
...Doctor Zhivago would not cause a sensation like that...
...Since 1981 he has been living near Munich...
...R. L. There are rumors afoot that Doctor Zhivago will finally be published in Moscow...
...Writers and so-called simple working people inveighed against Pasternak...
...The writers who spoke out at the meeting in 1958 promised the author of Doctor Zhivago a place on the garbage dump of history...
...The meeting held by the Writers' Union was a shameful, pogromlike affair...
...An even smaller number would be sent to the Writers' Union bookstore and allocated to those with membership cards as a reward for good behavior...
...At one point a collection of poems by Osip Mandelstam, who had been martyred in prison, was also published...
...Why didn't they use that opportunity to avoid taking part in the general persecution of the man...
...Even now it is one of the most popular books in the world...
...If, on the whole, rumors can be termed sensational, then we never had any shortage of them—the less trustworthy news there is, the more utterly fantastic rumors there are...
...Two elderly and still more or less respected writers, the poet Ilya Selvinsky, and the literary critic Viktor Shklovsky, were in Yalta at the time...
...Pasternak sent a telegram to the Swedish Academy that had awarded him the prize and he expressed his feelings as follows: "I am infinitely grateful, touched, surprised, embarrassed...
...And, at some point, some 20 or 30 years after his death, they'll forgive him for having lived on earth and publish the books they're spitting on today...
...Nevertheless, the situation in literature is better than in agriculture...
...Since then 26 years have passed and the creator of the novel died quite some time ago...
...Perhaps the publication of the serialized version of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita in 1967...
...And so, panting from the heat and the steep incline, gulping heart medicine on the way, they dragged themselves up the mountain to the post office to send a telegram condemning their colleague...
...came a voice from the audience...
...That novel is alive and has been read by millions...
...But the fear that had eaten away at their souls during the years of Stalin's terror gave them no peace...
...Selvinsky, after all, had called Pasternak his teacher...
...They were well aware of who Pasternak was as a poet...
...One after the other, those engineers of human souls mounted the podium to shout hysterically that Pasternak hated the Soviet people, was a lackey of international imperialism, that to speak his name was like making an indecent noise in public, and that Pasternak's place was on the garbage heap...
Vol. 32 • January 1985 • No. 1
