Cultural Revival in the Soviet Union
Medvedev, Roy
In the history of Soviet culture, the spring of 1987 will go down as a time of significant changes. A year ago we could only speak of a "thaw," major changes in the principal branches of culture....
...Changes have been launched before, but they came to an end quickly without satisfying expectations...
...Along with a group of soldiers Baulin is to purge the village of Pyrlitsa of "unreliable elements...
...a whole generation was lost, simply unable to fulfill itself either in science or in culture...
...The majority prefer to work behind the scenes, to send notes and letters to agency heads, and to use intrigue, insinuation, rumors, etc...
...People are not gathering by the thousands in the houses of culture, institutes, and scientific research institutes to discuss the latest play or movie...
...By the same token Chaliapin could be termed a "French singer...
...trans...
...You haven't...
...There are no lines in the libraries for Aitmatov's newest novel or Gerasimov's stories or Akhmatova's Requiem...
...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...
...For example, we know that VAPP (Soviet Copyright Agency) refused to conclude agreements with foreign publishers for translation rights to The Children of the Arbat until the very last moment and that the leadership of VAPP even prohibited any publicity for the book in the hope it would ultimately be banned...
...Recently, when she decided to return to Russia, she was given a warm welcome in Leningrad, which she had left for the West some sixty–five years before...
...work and more work is needed...
...At first the reader might think this yet another tale about the hard lot of war orphans fallen into the hands of cold, cruel people who robbed these sick and starving children...
...Films that went into production three, four, and even more years ago, are now being released...
...Many people are playing more of a passive waiting game...
...Ivanov, 0. Kuchkina, B. Lyubimov...
...Even a year ago few of those who knew the novel believed it could be published...
...The novel by B. Belov, It All Lies Ahead, published last year, was subjected to justifiably harsh criticism in the press...
...The press is reporting that the best films of the 1960s and 1970s will now be given wider release...
...Among the most important aspects of Soviet cultural life is the rebirth of independent and competent criticism in literature and the arts...
...The resistance to perestroika is, however, quite natural and need not cause especially great anxiety...
...But it is in the third house that Baulin experiences real shock...
...For a long time none of the world's museums has been buying the paintings of the most venerable members of the Soviet Academy of Art, and no one would think of exhibiting their work in Paris or New York...
...Are not such "titles" being handed out a bit too freely here...
...Five hundred children, including the heroes of the tale, the Kuzmenysh twins, end up in a large deserted settlement surrounded by ripening fields and orchards...
...Very belatedly, the USSR has bought several Western films which have long been classics...
...We've adapted...
...Progress in these two areas was not only accompanied by many remarkable plays and films, one of which, Repentance, can be considered a milestone...
...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc...
...Look at our last few issues to see if your idea fits in...
...Back in the 1950s and 1960s and on into the 1970s, Soviet culture had begun to replenish its capital with the works of outstanding émigrés...
...Soviet citizens now spend twice as much time in front of the television as they did two or three years ago and there are lines in front of the newspaper stands in the morning...
...This novel is the result of profound attention given to both content and form...
...6, 1987...
...I would compare the current state of Russian literature . . . with the situation in July 1941 when the forces of progress offered disorganized resistance, as they retreated from the onslaught of hammer blows . . . aimed at destroying a great culture...
...Opening with the events of fall 1933, the novel offers a panorama of Soviet society in that crucial period...
...The most successful plays of the Moscow and WINTER • 1988 • 15 Leningrad stage are being performed in the provinces by dozens of troupes...
...In 1986 the most visible changes occurred in film and theater...
...saying that the Fifth Congress of Cinematographers had supposedly undertaken an "immoral attempt to devalue the authority of certain right-thinking artists . . . and to cancel out the contributions made by certain masters of the cinema...
...The dirty work wasn't your idea...
...in a minuscule edition, as has been done before with a great many books...
...As an observer of, and, to some degree, participant in both events, I must say that the current revival is more rapid, powerful, and comprehensive than that of the 1960s...
...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...
...One of the Kuzmenysh brothers is killed, apparently because he was wearing a beautiful, Caucasian wristlet...
...Pictures by followers of Chagall, Picasso, and Filonov have begun appearing in supplements to such popular magazines as Ogonyok...
...Then read it...
...Otherwise, dammit, it's going to be really bad...
...A well-known writer, whose last book, Heavy Sand, about the tragedy of Soviet Jews during the Second World War, was translated into many languages, Anatoly Rybakov began writing The Children of the Arbat in the 1960s...
...Changes have even begun in the world of art, which had been marked by decades of stagnation...
...the state film commission had permitted those films to play only on the so-called "second screens" and for that reason they were almost unknown to the greater public...
...We are no longer surprised by newspaper exposes that bare all, and we only pass them along like some risque joke: "Have you read this article...
...Baulin tries to protect Ursule, but the secretary of the district committee remains silent and KGB Captain Tkach orders the trucks loaded, saying: "We'll sort it out later...
...In the second house he encounters Verdysh, a veterinarian...
...If this attack is not stopped, if there is no Stalingrad, then the national treasures that have become the country's pride will be toppled into the abyss...
...We have seen the publication of The Defense and several stories by Vladimir Nabokov...
...There was an announcement that his novel Doctor Zhivago would be published...
...Then soldiers, still clearly needed at the front, arrive to wipe out the last of the Chechens hiding in the mountains...
...And please remember that we can't return articles unless they're accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...Writing in Izvestia, the well-known actress Alla Demidova noted: How quickly we grow used to everything...
...Purchase of films by Bergman and BuiWel is also under consideration...
...3, 1987...
...Sometimes, however, such "allusions" are dispensed with...
...A Rumanian and a member of an underground organization that fought against the Antonescu regime, Verdysh had spent several years in a hard-labor prison...
...Literary Russia, March 27, 1987) In mentioning Stalingrad, Bondarev was apparently thinking of Stalin, whom he had spent no little effort extolling in the 1970s...
...He has to resettle a weak, old church watchman whom even the Rumanians had not taken into their army...
...Belov is a talented writer, one of the so-called "village" school, but in It All Lies Ahead he not only tackles material with which he is unfamiliar but reveals himself as a reactionary in many respects...
...Rybakov describes the life of a few Arbat families, some ordinary, some not so ordinary, the workings of the Kremlin, the arrests of Komsomol activists, the Seventeenth Party Congress, the growing discord between Stalin and the party's old guard, the assassination of Kirov, which allowed Stalin to usurp power, the increasing conflict between Stalin and Ordzhonikidze, the gradual development of the type of people whom we would later term "Stalinists," paralleled by the blossoming of the young people, sincere, honest, and dedicated to socialism, a significant percentage of whom would be killed during the Second World War...
...In fall 1986 Literaturnaya Gazeta (The Literary Gazette) published a long, positive review of a book published in Paris by the poet Irina Odoevtseva, the wife of Georgy Ivanov...
...Three families are to be resettled (the trucks are ready, a train is waiting...
...In 1985 numerous art exhibitions organized for the fortieth anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany were unable to recoup their expenses...
...18 • DISSENT Only a few isolated pages leave an impression of a certain reticence, but that may have been the work of the editor—significant cuts were made before publication...
...Recounts, reviews are rare...
...In the 1970s and the second half of the 1960s many of our best writers and critics often had to resort to Aesopian language or, as they used to say then, "allusions," in order to express their ideas...
...A similar theme is to be found in Ivan Gerasimov's novella A Knock at the Door, written in 1960 but only published by the magazine Oktyabr (October) in 1987 (No...
...As I mentioned, the publication of Rybakov's novel was accompanied by a struggle that was conducted far from openly...
...would no other newspaper print his article...
...This failure of the Soviet arts has helped launch a painful examination of many fixed dogmas and customs...
...Kuzmin, also a translator and composer, died in 1937, alone and forgotten...
...Changes don't happen often...
...But he begins to have his doubts in the first house that he and his squad are to "purge...
...There is some excitement, interest, attention, but there still is none of the enthusiasm, active support, or even radical change in mood that alone could serve as the most reliable guarantee of perestroika's durability...
...Some magazines are publishing poems, essays, and plays by Mikhail Kuzmin, an early twentieth-century modernist...
...Entitled On the Shores of the Seine, this is a memoir about the most important émigré writers and poets...
...These changes are only to be welcomed...
...he is remembered only by a few of the older literary people...
...The genuine revolutionary change occurring here has many influential enemies, though few of them spoke out as openly as Yuri Bondarev...
...Baulin, who had fought both at the front and as a partisan, is appointed the principal of a school...
...It was not only time that was lost after the early 1960s...
...Adults and children flee, driven away by fear...
...Verdysh greets Baulin calmly, drinks to Baulin's health, and says: "I'm well aware there's lots of dirty work to do, Baulin...
...In summing up, one must note not only the important changes but certain alarming tendencies as well...
...it means refusing to treat the official dogma of "socialist realism" as the only acceptable method...
...Recently in Moscow there were a few and, unfortunately, brief, exhibitions of young artists affording representatives of the Soviet "avant garde" an opportunity to show their work...
...People are talking about new, interesting novels, novellas, poems, and short stories, important articles, bold journalism, unusual films and plays, and even interesting exhibitions by contemporary artists...
...Stories by the splendid Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin who died in Paris in 1937 are now in print here...
...THE EDITORS 20 • DISSENT...
...3) Type your ms double-spaced, with wide margins...
...Such grief might make the mountains stoop, reverse the waters where they flow, but cannot burst these ponderous bolts that block us from the prison cells crowded with mortal woe...
...Important new developments occur almost daily...
...While the revival of the 1960s gave way to long years of stagnation and decline, it is to be hoped that this will not reoccur—though it is too soon for anyone to guarantee that...
...Fundamental changes have also occurred in the theater where, because of pressure from below, a completely new Soviet Theater Workers' Union was created...
...But some of WINTER • 1988 • 17 the mountain people are still in hiding and they defend the lands where they had lived for centuries, attacking the new settlers and burning their houses and storehouses...
...In the Writers' Union as well, there were more opponents than supporters of the book...
...Some films, though they had been long and well publicized, proved utter flops...
...Not only new rock groups but poems by new poets do not draw audiences in the thousands...
...However, these works are not meeting with the broad social response we observed twenty–five or thirty years ago...
...These include Yuri Ilenko's A Spring for the Thirsty, Kira Muratova's Long Goodbyes, Smirnov's The Angel, and Shepitko's Electric Homeland...
...The director of that museum recently wrote an article in Izvestia, proposing concrete plans for establishing a similar museum in the Soviet capital: Why do we produce a colossal number of paintings that nobody wants to look at...
...Trying to defend Belov's weak novel, the writer Piotr Proskurin unexpectedly declared at a recent meeting of the Secretariat of the Soviet Writers' Union that the author of It All Lies Ahead must not be criticized since he is "among those who can be called the conscience of Russia...
...This is characteristic of our present situation...
...The popularity of these exhibitions exceeded all expectation...
...Soviet literature seems to be striving to say everything it failed to express in the 1960s...
...The city of Vitebsk has begun work on a museum dedicated to Marc Chagall, the great twentieth-century artist born in that city who emigrated to France in the 1920s...
...It would be foolish to expect radical results after two years of perestroika...
...Selections of works by Olga Bergholtz, Boris Slutsky, and even Evgeny Evtushenko, previously unknown to the reading public, are now being published...
...Poems by Dmitri Merezhkovsky and his wife Zinaida Gippius appeared in Ogonyok (No...
...Now he is to be sent to Siberia as a "member of another party...
...almost everywhere you cast your eye throughout the land things are bad...
...In the 1970s the persecution of nonconformists led to the emigration of a few hundred artists of all schools...
...Anatoly Pristavkin's long novella A Golden Cloud Spent the Night (Znamya Nos...
...4) Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate sheet...
...It is with great pleasure that we now read analyses by the best critics of the 1960s who were simply not allowed to work in their field for many long years, people like Rassadin, Lakshin, Ivanova, Igor Zolotussky, and Igor Dedkov...
...Boris Pasternak was rehabilitated and posthumously reinstated in the Soviet Writers' Union...
...everything sells out in an hour, both the latest editions of the papers, and all the journals "thick" or "thin...
...The lists of those to be resettled had been drawn up by the KGB and are not subject to discussion...
...Poets famous at the beginning of the century, they were then affiliated with the most mystical branch of Russian symbolism...
...Not only are interesting new plays appearing, but new theaters as well...
...Student audiences are not stirred as they were in 1956, for example, by the publication of Dudintsev's Not By Bread Alone...
...There are many explanations for this situation...
...New names have also appeared in criticism—D...
...There is no hunger here but the orphans find no peace either...
...It is not surprising that when speaking at a Moscow forum on the problems of peace, the Soviet poet Andrei Voznesensky demanded that the "art of the great Chagall be returned to the country where he was born and where he was absurdly banned...
...Stanley Kunitz, Max Hayward, Poems of Akhmatova, Little, Brown, Boston, 1967) These lines are from the "Dedication" to the poem, which was begun in 1935 but took its final form in 1961...
...Few people realized Odoevtseva was still alive...
...To this day Soviet encyclopedias refer to Chagall as a "French painter and graphic artist...
...That generation cultivated bourgeois, philistine pursuits in an almost deliberate manner...
...But their creative legacy contains a great many beautiful poems, interesting studies of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and significant novels and plays on historical subjects...
...The revival in culture in 1985-87 is now often compared with the revival that occurred in 1962-64 under the influence of the Twenty-Second Party Congress...
...At a time when minimal material needs are at least basically satisfied, the creation of higher values through culture assumes a special significance...
...He recognizes its owner as Unde Ursule, a partisan from his own detachment, whose commanding officer is now the man in charge of this entire punitive operation...
...Only now, however, are we seeing the release of several excellent films that had for many years been banned for various absurd and stupid reasons...
...Valentin Rasputin takes a somewhat different approach to the same issue when writing in Pravda (May 5, 1987): WINTER • 1988 • 19 Many problems have built up...
...The world of music is also undergoing change with more rock groups appearing all the time...
...Burlayev's film Lermontov was every bit as much a flop when released...
...As émigrés, Gippius and Merezhkovsky were connected with the most anti-Soviet groups...
...To overcome that social passivity is no easy task...
...The poems of Vladimir Vysotsky are being readied for publication, and records and cassettes of his songs are in production...
...A museum of contemporary art was established quite some time ago in Armenia and is one of the most popular museums in that republic...
...And the form of self-defense we have developed is indifference, the most frightening symptom of conformism...
...The cinema also continues to change...
...Let everyone have his say, and every such statement will meet with a reply that will strike the reader as much more convincing...
...Nearly all magazines are carrying reminiscences of Vysotsky, and the Dovzhenko Studio has released a film about him, Remembrance...
...The writers do a little writing, the readers do a little reading...
...We fear and distrust abrupt changes...
...No dot matrix submissions, please...
...But still you have to think when you're doing it...
...This has caused real panic among some of the former "bosses" of the little mafias that had formed even in the world of culture...
...As a rule, these writers focus on the prewar and postwar periods, their predominant theme being Stalin's repressions...
...The magazine Znamya (Banner, No...
...But as of February and March 1987, we could observe a decisive breakthrough, the beginning of a genuine cultural revolution...
...Some ten or even twenty years ago, the situation of Soviet culture was comparable to the forced feeding of a young child who is only allowed to eat strained, unspiced, monotonous food...
...But this requires removal of impediments in this sphere and of a host of absurd taboos...
...2) Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...
...Among those were world-class artists like Ernst Neizvestny and Mikhail Shemyakin...
...It reflects the tragedy of the mass repressions in Leningrad that began in 1935 as well as Akhmatova's own personal tragedy—her son was among those arrested and Akhmatova spent seventeen months standing in lines in front of the prison with its "implacable iron bars...
...The principal events in literature have been the publication of stories, novellas, and novels by the Soviet writers V. Shatrov, Bulat Okudzhava, Boris Vasilev, Anatoly Pristavkin, Fazil Iskander, Nikolai Smelev, Ivan Gerasimov, Yuri Trifonov, and Anatoly Rybakov, among others...
...Think about it, Baulin...
...The time has come to liberate the walls of our museums from all work devoid of sincerity and artistic merit...
...Now that censorship has been sharply limited, it is the enemies of perestroika (restructuring) who resort to Aesopian devices and "allusions...
...Orders are orders and Baulin has no doubt as to their expediency...
...In terms of artistic power and depth of treatment, The Children of the Arbat ranks among the two or three best books in all Soviet literature...
...Today that would no longer be a fair comparison...
...The cultural revival or "cultural revolution" has only just begun and a great deal of effort must yet be expended to make it irreversible...
...The overall atmosphere in film-making has changed...
...There is now talk of establishing a large museum in Moscow to exhibit the best work of contemporary artists whose names are practically unknown, as well as of such world-famous artists as Kandinsky, Malevich, and Filonov whose work has until now been gathering dust in the storerooms of Soviet galleries...
...This area had formerly been inhabited by Chechens who had been "resettled" to the East and now the Moscow orphans are to constitute a new "population...
...Those changes cannot be quick, of course, since considerable time is required for making new films...
...Now he must abandon his native village with wife and children...
...In the middle of the night he receives orders to appear at the district committee...
...Suddenly, orders arrive to send thousands of orphans from the starving Moscow area to the liberated territories of the North Caucasus...
...Basing himself on impeccable historical sources and his own personal experiences, Rybakov answers questions that had been tormenting his mind and conscience since the early 1930s...
...it requires the spread of democracy and intellectual freedom...
...The Children of the Arbat caused a complicated fight and only the decision of higher party agencies cleared the way to publication...
...Some enjoy success—all the detective and adventure films— while others leave audiences cold, even the comedies failing to amuse them...
...Under the partisan nickname of "bear" Ursule had carried out the most difficult assignments and had been decorated for bravery...
...Twice, maybe three times, I knew the happiness, The delirium of change . . . I would consider it fate's grace, And a debt to God, If there could be change once again, Even if it didn't last all that long . . . Boris Slutsky wrote those lines many years ago but his poem has only been published now when he is no longer among us...
...they're the author's responsibility...
...It could not have been otherwise than politically passive and indifferent in the 1970s...
...Soviet audiences will have the opportunity to see Fellini's 81/2 and Antonioni's Red Desert...
...For example, when defending his film Lermontov, which proved a flop, N. Burlayev wrote an article in the newspaper Water Transport (why there...
...It was not by chance that one of these was Sergei Bondarchuk's two-part Boris Godunov...
...How long will we continue to expend huge sums of state money with no thought to the results...
...Forward movement in the sphere of culture is gaining power and momentum, toppling many false authorities and advancing new names while returning to the nation many valuable works that had been undeservedly kept concealed...
...While reading it we are for a moment indignant at injustice and then we go back to our daily lives again...
...6) Please bear with us—we have accumulated quite a backlog of material, and you may have to wait for a few issues before you see your article in print...
...There are films that are boring to watch," noted one of the reviewers, "but Boris Godunov is a film that's even boring to review...
...Translated from the Russian by RICHARD LOURIE A few suggestions: (1) Be sure to keep a copy of your ms—the mails aren't always reliable...
...This novella is set in Moldavia in July 1949...
...The most important event in Soviet literature is, however, the publication of Anatoly Rybakov's long novel The Children of the Arbat...
...Excitement can . . . once again turn into depression...
...Speaking to the board of the Soviet Writers' Union, the writer Yuri Bondarev exclaimed: The pseudo democrats of literature have lit the light of glasnost, which they have stolen away from truth and justice...
...But it also should not be forgotten that society's excitement— which we all worked for and secured—is still only excitement and not a firm position...
...Many interesting, pointed, and honest works are appearing in literature, theater, and film, more than at the end of the 1950s or the beginning of the 1960s...
...Recently Shemyakin made a gift of some forty color lithographs to the Erevan Museum of Contemporary Art and the Russian Museum in Leningrad...
...Recently several magazines featured poems and essays by the excellent Russian poet Vladislav Khodosevich, who began publishing in 1905 and remained productive until his death in 1939...
...The theater was packed with people eager to see Bondarchuk's film when it was shown at the Cannes Film Festival, but it was empty by the end of part one...
...Following the publication of Andrei Platonov's novella Juvenal Sea, his famous story "The Foundation Pit," which circulated in manuscript in the 1960s, is now being prepared for publication...
...As a historian I have studied for many years the material Rybakov depicts and there is practically no point on which I can fault the author...
...3, 4, 1987) attracted wide attention...
...It is, however, literature and literary life that have produced the most substantial changes...
...only now can this poem be published here...
...Before liberation there were a little more than a thousand members in the Rumanian Communist party...
...The directors of the Writers' Union, although not calling for a ban on Doctor Zhivago, are proposing that it be printed not in the magazine Novy Mir but as a book in the Literary Monuments or even in the Literary Archive series, i.e...
...The "rehabilitation" of many figures no longer alive continues...
...5) We're usually quick in giving editorial decisions...
...But the sooner the legacy of Stalinism is toppled, the better, easier, and more peacefully will the Soviet people live and breathe...
...The Nobel-Prize winner Bunin, Sologub, Severyanin, and Remizov returned to their native land via their books...
...Or take a chance and send us your article...
...3, 1987) published a selection of poems by yet another outstanding Russian poet, Georgy Ivanov, who died in 1958 as an émigr...
...There the party activists receive secret instructions— that very night they are to take charge of the resettlement to distant parts of the country of persons who collaborated with the Nazis...
...A month after the 16 • DISSENT publication of Alexander Tvardovsky's last poem "The Right to Memory," Anna Akhmatova's celebrated poem "Requiem" was published in October (No...
...This reinstating of important figures has accelerated in the last six months...
Vol. 35 • January 1988 • No. 1
