The Not So Dissonant Voices in Soviet Literature
FIELD, ANDREW
THINKING ALOUD The Not So Dissonant Voices in Soviet Literature By Andrew Field The reports which our growing corps of specialists in Soviet literature give us are, at best, written in a...
...The wife knows she will die there and be buried with her family...
...In each case, exile was the least severe result of their temerity...
...Kazakov consciously turns to the past for his models, to Chekhov and Turgenev, particularly the Turgenev of The Sportsman's Sketches...
...So do we not have a right now to ask for some real poetry...
...I remember that, when she came to New York with Konstantin Simonov (I will be kind and call him the Russian James Jones), scarcely anyone knew who she was...
...I object to the character of our present literary relations with Russia on (at least) two grounds...
...Their language is "tight" and rings true...
...Make no mistake about it, viewed in terms of even our own literary situation, contemporary Russian literature still has a long way to go...
...But just you wait...
...Criticism of contemporary Russian literature has been abandoned to the political scientists-in-disguise...
...Not since Pasternak," reads an ad, "has there been anyone like Evtushenko...
...Her novels are masterfully constructed...
...The husband dreams about how he will go to a cafe and be served by a waitress in a starched apron...
...They are important, of course, and do have their place-in the news columns...
...It may be that the discrimination is not made because readers have not thought to ask for it...
...As in a spectrum, they're seven of me, Insufferable, like seven beasts, and the bluest has a flute to blow...
...It ought to have a sizeable audience here...
...Mostly, in fact, it is precisely bad poems and novels which are good politics...
...For in taking up and bottling the bath water, we are ignoring the baby...
...Weak politically perhaps...
...In quality and tone it reminds me somewhat of Melville Cane's poetry...
...Her poetry is superb, but it is not sufficiently "dissonant": too much artifice and too little protest...
...Such a writer is Konstantin Paustovsky...
...Many will recall the film, A Summer to Remember, made from her long short story, "Seryozha...
...And so the funny little woman with the thick neck, perhaps a schoolteacher-turned-reporter but certainly not a writer, sat on the rostrum while Simonov declaimed his war verses in a turtleneck sweater...
...There are, however, good and interesting artists who do deserve our attention-Vera Panova, for one...
...Yet while I agree that Kazakov has written some not too successful pieces (one of which, for some strange reason, was chosen for translation), I find the great majority of his short stories forceful and well written...
...Kazakov deserves more than inclusion m a protest anthology...
...We should be grateful that the past is being openly examined and criticized...
...There simply are no young poets of the stature of Alan Dugan, no playwrights comparable to Edward Albee, no novelists as exciting as (our gift from Russia) Vladimir Nabokov...
...Are they in fact worthy of comparison with Russia's illustrious honor role of literary dissenters: Aleksandr Radishchev, Aleksandr Odoevsky, Kondraty Ryleev, Wilhelm Kuchelbecker, Aleksandr Herzen, Isaac Babel, Eugene Zamyatin...
...There are writers who are doing genuinely daring things on the Soviet literary scene, but quietly and without much fanfare...
...A peasant couple, long out of love, set out for the city, and we seem to hear an echo of the plaintive cry from Chekhov's play: "To Moscow...
...It is high time that cultural exchange got started...
...Come Spring I dream that I am eight Poetry of this sort is not very likely to earn Voznesensky a cover spot on Time, but all the same, in Russian, it is original and good verse...
...But critics are not being entirely honest when they say "literature" and mean "Soviet...
...Let us turn our attention and give our support to the real Russian literature which is being written in Russian in the Soviet Union...
...But I would call attention to the fact that deplorable as the "cult of personality" is in politics, it remains the sine qua non in all artistic endeavor...
...Andrew Field, a young critic of Russian literature who teaches at Harvard University, most recently translated Fyodor Sologub's novel, The Petty Demon...
...The poverty of his fantasy is grippingly effective...
...These stories have life...
...To Moscow...
...My second objection is more serious in character and more to the point...
...First, are the Evtushenkos and Ehrenburgs really rebels against tyranny at all...
...Her novels are not even in print in this country...
...THINKING ALOUD The Not So Dissonant Voices in Soviet Literature By Andrew Field The reports which our growing corps of specialists in Soviet literature give us are, at best, written in a manner more reminiscent of James Reston than of John Crowe Ransom...
...She writes of heroism in a minor key, delights in the humor of an eccentric character placed in a demanding situation, and is not above a quiet tour de force (in the central part of one of her novels, for example, there are no major characters...
...We do not say "United States literature" yet we see nothing wrong in saying "Soviet literature...
...Yet Vera Panova is perhaps the most accomplished prose stylist in the Soviet Union today...
...She grieves and is consoled, alone...
...Another young man, Andrei Voznesensky, is notable for poetry which is at once both serious and whimsical: I'm a family...
...Kazakov's stories are, I read, "interesting but weak...
...Several of our publishing houses have large and flourishing lists of "Soviet literature," and second-rate novels like Vladimir Dudintsev's Not by Bread Alone and Viktor Nekrasov's Kira Georgeevna are translated, printed, and in the bookstore windows only a few months after the first news items about them have appeared in the Times...
...Certain attention has been given of late to the young short story writer, Yuri Kazakov, and one or two of his stories have been translated...
...On the contrary, they and many other "bold new voices" whose names are less well known to American readers are quite consonant with Khrushchev's current political line of deStalinization...
...Now obviously neither Evtushenko nor Ehrenburg is in any imminent danger of exile...
...Literature is, after all, one of the chief means by which we follow the political weather in the Kremlin (thaw today...
...Her work is not very sensational from a political point of view, but it is interesting from a literary point of view...
...possibility of cleansing flood tomorrow), and bad poems and novels can be good politics...
...Well, there's no help for it: If she wishes to have an English audience for her poetry, Miss Akhmatova is advised to begin work at once on a controversial novel...
...Evgeny Evtushenko's poetry has been published in a handsome format and execrable translationfortunately the damage has no real significance-but we still do not have an English edition, good or bad, of Russia's greatest living poet, Anna Akhmatova...
...A middle-aged man and a student meet on a hunting trip, and the student is an agonized bystander to the older man's seduction of a beautiful peasant girl...
...He deserves a book of his own and consideration as a serious and talented writer...
...We have too long accepted the pretense that there can be such a thing as "Soviet" or "anti-Soviet" literature...
...All of these men, and the fist is only a partial one, were talented poets and writers who, with full knowledge of the probable consequences, chose to speak and act according to the dictates of conscience...
...We have suffered not only Evtushenko but, still worse, the pathetic protest poetry of the son of the great poet Sergei Esenin, Esenin-Volpyn (whatever could have prompted the publisher to commit the fatal error of printing facing Russian texts...
Vol. 45 • December 1962 • No. 26
