Letter from a Soviet Writer

...I refer simply to the proponents of elementary tolerance, curiosity and goodwill...

...He was shocked to see how well dressed they were...

...This is talked about (and what a huge difference it makes...

...Every journal and publishing house also has its unofficial censor who checks on the pro-Soviet orientation of every contribution: in the publishing house Isskustvo he is the assistant editor Goldobin...

...As for the embryonic or totally unknown Ionescos and Hitchcocks of Moscow, Leningrad or Minsk, they can only keep their mouths shut...

...Russia, one feels, will always be an unhappy country...

...This article was received by The New Leader from Warsaw...

...A writer, critic or journalist usually knows to whom he is going to submit his work...

...On such occasions, they must display prodigious resourcefulness to "put over" any artistic or critical point, since it is certain to be repugnant to the far-seeing geopolitician with his impenetrable hide...

...And that is why every confrontation with the "lieutenants" is an ordeal for most authors...

...They are upset by what upsets everybody else...

...In the middle 1950s he visited France, where in a restaurant at Orly he saw a group of peasants who had met to close a cattle deal...

...The pioneers in this effort have become familiar names: Ehrenburg, Paustovsky and such younger people as Nekrasov, Yashin, Aksenov...

...They entreat them not to condemn everything Western without examination and not to eulogize everything Soviet...

...The brutal irony of this process is that the editors know well enough what they can do and what the State, which pays their salaries, requires them to do...

...Usually they are intelligent, independent, subtle men, or at the very least men deeply involved with their work (I am not talking of the other type...

...But those who read about him in a newspaper know only that he mined more coal or turned out more parts than others...

...Postscript: When I had finished writing this, a friend of mine from Moscow told me that there are at least a dozen "Ionescos" and "Hitchcocks" in his city...

...The ideas and vocabulary of the editor are known beforehand to the author, and nine-tenths of his work is simply trying to think like the editor...

...These men are not complex types, but simply human beings...

...Nikolai Gavrilov is a Russian writer known in the West by another name...

...Considering this along with everything else, one can easily understand the air of rootlessness which hangs about everybody connected with an editorial office, or, indeed, anybody one passes in the street...

...Writers have had the chance, previously unimaginable, to appeal to one publisher against the interference of another...

...Even when it ceases to be impoverished, it will still be unhappy...

...should the essay lose popularity, they turn to sketches or editorials...

...Finally, there is the most revolting situation of all, that of compulsory idiocy...

...In attacking the Soviet artists and writers, Khrushchev attacked the people who were essentially his allies, and in so doing once more showed that it is hard to know when to leave well enough alone...

...Who it is that withholds permission is not known...

...SOCIALISM IS ACCOUNTING...

...In Russia unhappiness is almost a national characteristic...

...One man I know keeps a diary, raw material for a future novel, in which he has written: "Ionesco sometimes puts on a pose...

...In general, the power of such people increases with the obscurity of the journal, as in the case of A. Ivanov's almost total control of Siberian Fires...

...Everyone labors under too great a strain...

...As for the other leaders, Brezhnev is a lecherous toady, Suslov an anonymous illiterate, Uyichev a fool and Kozlov a mean coward...

...Every adult in the country knew that Stalin was a monstrous political criminal and, evidently, of unsound mind...

...Soviet writers spend an inordinate amount of time dreaming up arguments, in which even they themselves do not really believe, to justify a normal confidence in facts, in humor, in verbal and intellectual novelties-in everything, in other words, that bureaucrats have always mistrusted...

...it is a reaction from the entirely abstract dogmatism of Stalinism which completely rejected facts...

...In fact, I would not be greatly startled if half the people I met were suddenly taken by fits...

...And all this is in addition to the official state censorship exercised by Glavlit, the government security agency whose inspectors are attached to a separate department of each publisher...

...but I am sincere...

...The heroes of films, plays and poetry talk about things which, under different circumstances, their authors would discuss publicly themselves...

...what "should not" be praised, they do not praise...

...And Western sociologists who describe the situation in the Soviet Union rely primarily on the crumbs to be found in the millions of sheets of printed wastepaper regularly issued by the government...

...These are uncompromising, serious, often impressionistic observations about modern life and art...

...It is hardly worth adding that on Oktyabr the censor is the chief editor himself, Kochetov...

...I then recalled that I also have seen a couple of manuscripts in Moscow...

...they became familiar with the world at the worst possible moment and are not surprised by anything...

...Consequently, he must work out his style, develop his ideas and choose his exprèssions with the publisher's responsible bureaucrats constantly in mind, adapting himself not to his readers but to the intermediaries between them and himself...

...This gap is three-quarters filled by complaints exchanged among close friends and one-quarter filled by creative work done exclusively "for the desk drawer...

...The words "Soviet novel," "Soviet play" or "Soviet film," like "Soviet man," have become pejorative terms among us...

...They, too, write "for the desk drawer...

...If, for example, the publishing house Isskustvo kept to its old conservative and official position, an art specialist might (and often did) try his luck at ?t?, the other art publisher...

...Tvardovsky replied by asking: "Do you think I am...

...and the more able he is at doing this, the more cunning he is considered...

...Indeed, those criteria have been reimposed with considerable force since it was discovered that several Glavlit inspectors had become friends and abettors of the new authors...

...But halfway there he turned back...

...The writer must figure out how to deceive a fool, yet he can succeed at this only by showing himself also a fool...

...He also usually knows who will decide its fate...

...I am not referring to those who simply ignore politics, nor to those who single-mindedly follow a constant star of their own: the Slavism of Pasternak or the painter Glazunov, the stubbornly Jewish core of Babel and Markishch, the urbanism of Olesha, the search for new poetic limits of Akhmatova or Mandelshtam, etc...

...Imagine a "weakling" without rights-i.e., a humanitarian intellectual-whose views, tastes, even whose very talent, do not square with one of the inviolate big-shots...

...It stands next to everyone...

...For this reason current literature in the USSR is in direct opposition to the authorities...

...Today, "critics of principle" calmly pour their verbal slop over the few honest liberals and realists still around...

...The position of today's Soviet intelligentsia is created by the gap between the "printed" and the "unprinted," between the "journalistic" and the "essential," between the "political" and the "normal...

...I love your poetry," Khrushchev declared...

...If the East is denounced, he will write about the Antarctic...

...The lack of publicity is really unique here...

...And Russia's only comfort, as always, will be that marvelous Russian woman, the only positive character in our literature...

...There he had another profound shock, for this eulogist of the FiveYear Plans witnessed a truly democratic and industrialized country...

...If essays are in vogue, they turn out elegant essays...

...How can he reply to the "criticism" which will engulf him if the bossman should comment unfavorably about him...

...The little bit of scholarly research that is done is so tendentiously political that it precludes any candid observation of morals, attitudes or motivations...

...Oh, how Suslov has let me down," Khrushchev shouted...

...Certainly not by Communism alone...

...Their position is pure empiricism and respect for facts...

...In that instance, the liberals helped the avowed conservatives...

...I am ashamed...

...Soon afterward, Pasternak was rehabilitated...

...This aphorism from the Soviet deity Lenin has an extraordinarily vicious connotation for today's Russian intellectuals...

...Consider the story of Nikolai Pogodin, the well-known Soviet playwright...

...on the journal Theater, assistant editor Rybakov...

...Most commonly he shoots short, writing intolerably simple-minded prefaces, textbooks, articles and reviews which anybody could grind out...

...The point is that Khrushchev has the same role in politics that the Soviet liberals have on the current Russian literary scene...

...That is the way things are divided-halfway between publishing everything and publishing nothing...

...As for those who do not have to simulate, they include popularizes who are in reality vulgar types, though in philistine circles they are taken as subtle critics of art and champions of humane principles...

...It is a different case when clever and able careerists deliberately restrict their activities to the prevailing cultural situation...

...Pogodin, who had recently been discharged from a sanitorium with a dangerous stomach ulcer caused by too many years of hard drinking, soon began to drink again...

...God help the artist who obviously experiments or who gets carried away by his own discoveries of self-expression...

...How can this unhappiness be explained...

...But he had died before it happened...

...There is also available to the Soviet writer the Sisyphean labor of gradually introducing the "unpublished" into the "published...

...the reason for rejection is always kept general...

...If such a man is writing about South America when denunciations of the West begin, he switches his subject to Africa...

...The position of such a person on the Soviet literary scene might be described in artillery terms: He either shoots over or shoots short of the target...

...They spend days on end trying to see various chancellery clerks who keep busy by making all too familiar question marks on the margins of manuscripts...

...His "liberal" friends will quickly betray him...

...Feeling the end was near, he decided to travel through the country by car from Moscow to his hometown of Rostov...

...What is more, he accepted what he saw...

...Thus, both the official and the liberal intelligentsia rejected the work of Russian abstractionists, sight unseen...

...Authors a bit older fail to react at all and know only that they have to be careful...

...But it is clear that permission depends on official public opinion, which consists of the word of the big-shots and the "delayed opinion" of their devoted followers...

...How can it be escaped...

...It stands behind the sadist Stalin and the busybody Khrushchev...

...Everything that is negative is discussed only in the family, and not in every family at that...

...About a dozen people read every manuscript in the office of Foreign Literature, and for each reader it is a matter of prestige to find something questionable in what is submitted...

...Youth, of course, reacts most painfully to the interference of censorship...

...Their efforts are the efforts of popularizers, Kulturträgern, philanthropists...

...So while the author is wasting a major part of his energy in anticipating the editor, the editor is sharpening his claws for what he knows he can expect from any given author...

...they know, too, that this is definitely inadequate for the leadership of a civilized nation...

...This is a strange generation: knowledgeable and understanding, but without much stamina -it is the generation of Evtushenko and Aksenov, the vilified generation...

...And he can entirely forget whatever he was doing before...

...But one of the many tragedies of Russia is that here intelligent people all play the fool...

...In 1963, however, Glavlit once again reverted to its odiously narrow official criteria and severely restricted such liberty...

...Of course...

...They also know the author with whom they are working...

...not of sages or articulate, subtle individualists...

...I daresay, the same is probably true in the West...

...Pogodin drank consciously, as a form of slow suicide...

...An Ilyichev or Pospelov, with a train of specialized princelings behind them (e.g., Ermilov or Anisimov in literary criticism), start out from extraordinarily broad "geo-" categories in which there is no room for the living or, if you prefer, "individual" person...

...on the journal Soviet Literature, assistant editor Gaisaryan...

...Everyone also knows that Khrushchev is a total empiricist, a dull man, entirely engrossed in his immediate affairs...

...This is the concern of so-called Soviet ideological liberalism, which in many ways resembles a sticky, perishable honeycomb...

...The only liberal movement which can appear even momentarily loyal is represented by a few dozen (perhaps there are a couple of hundred) publicists of various callings who desperately try to persuade hypocrites and careerists-there is no need to persuade others-not to confuse politics with culture, bourgeois with intellectual, time-serving with talent...

...They are surprised by what surprises everybody else...

...Meanwhile, his better shots lie inertly in his desk, or remain restricted to his most intimate friends...

...These people often justify their actions with such sentiments as, "I only write what we need today," or, "Why bother to write something that won't sell...

...at any rate, they do not continue to do so beyond adolescence...

...This country is the last to hear any news about itself...

...Recent events on the Soviet cultural scene have shown that Stalinist Russia trained an ineradicable horde of "critics" who follow the hunt, and who "criticize" only after the leash is loosed...

...The current ideological bosses of Russia have absorbed the worst thing possible from their political leaders: the ability to look upon individuals precisely as "details...

...The authorities revolve in their vicious circle, while artists want to absorb the world in their own way...

...Although difficult to explain from the point of view of political logic, a similar thing happened when Khrushchev attacked the new writers last winter and spring...

...It stands before the glum, tense face of the man in the street...

...Later he traveled to America, where he was received by President Kennedy...

...What "should not" be attacked, they do not attack...

...In their own minds, they are able to ignore what may currently be in disfavor with their bosses...

...Because they ignore the strictures of the censorship code, they are unpublishable...

...The old men are not intimidated in the least by "criticism...

...Virtually none of them write, even for friends...

...They earn a living in an office or on a newspaper, doing the feeble best they can to escape the single trend that uses and perverts their talent, which wastes away on nothing...

...At the Maypremiere of the film The Russian Miracle, Khrushchev, who wobbles about in these matters and tends to cool off quickly, asked that "analysis" of art he happens not to like be stopped...

...Nor are there any journals in which historians, students of literature and other scholars might communicate with each other directly, bypassing the necessity of spending most of every published article repeating achingly familiar dogma...

...The editorial boards of the Leningrad magazines, Neva and Zvezda, consist almost entirely of such peoplebut Kholopov and Zhur on Zvezda, and Voronin and Sheyko on Neva deserve special mention...

...Authors, editors, office workers, housewives-all have too many surprises lurking beyond each corner, and none have any defense against them...

...several bees contribute to it, and everyone who loves the intellect gorges on the honey...

...Certainly in the last six or eight years many editors have shown more respect for the personal inclinations of their contributors...

...but nowhere, not in a single line of a newspaper, magazine or book, not even in an unprinted manuscript, can one read anything but panegyrics to Khrushchev...

...the writers, on the other hand, are concerned with the personal, the vital, the changing...

...He called in the poet Aleksandr Tvardovsky and asked: "Is this Pasternak a real writer...

...But who talked about it...

...But the analysis which eager critics had started two months before had been sparked by his own outburst at that time, and once unleashed these critics arc not so easy to curb...

...Less sharp, though still painful, is the reaction of those around 30...

...Thus, to say a word he writes a phrase, to express a phrase he writes a page, and a page of his own thought requires a whole book...

...This is lucky for them, but then one of their essential qualities has always been luck...

...Most parents are bigots, frightened to discuss public, or even private, calamities with their children...

...Felix Davain once wrote about the novels of Balzac: "The whole world is included in the unity of society, and the individual person is only a detail...

...In other words, he builds up his own word, phrase or page into an "editorial" phrase, page or book...

...The writer and artist search for alternatives in words with the root of "man": A "humane person," a "humane role," "human"-these are the epithets honored by the few artists who aspire to realism or an independent romanticism...

...Today it stands, like Death in Holbein's "Dances," before the writer whose hand cannot hold a pen after the latest gutter campaign against him...

...People with a trickier turn of mind or heart, Soviet lonescos, Hitchcocks and Kafkas, have to carry the unbearable weight of silence...

...Paustovsky, Ehrenburg and Shchipaev regularly and publicly complain about the inhibiting strictures put on their profession...

...Glavlit does not seem to read newspapers...

...on the magazine Foreign Literature, a certain member of the editorial board by the name of Tereshkin...

...I do not have the slightest idea...

...Along with their cultural lieutenants, the authorities are interested only in the abstract and the general...

...At the time of the Pasternak Affair, Khrushchev also backed down...

...He is correct...

...They must "take into account" not numbers but words: the words of the late Stalin, the words of the living but obtuse Khrushchev, the words of the reigning prince of the ideological careerists, the words of the director of their research institute or of the head of their bureau, and the words of their editors-in short, the words of all the authorities...

...Every day brings newnames of people being "analyzed," and the editors of the different journals calmly declare that right now they cannot, they are not permitted, to publish the work of those in question...

...Again, a lot of people know this, but no one dares mention it in public...

...On Navy Mir and, to a lesser extent, on Youth the "close readers" do not exercise as much real power...

...The "deceit" is usually uncovered and the author has the demeaning task of doing his work over, cutting down even that little bit of himself that he so carefully wrapped in conformity...

...Well, I don't even reach up to Pasternak's knees," Tvardovsky told him...

...I am weak on statistics, but I should guess there is a 50-50 split among professional scholars and journalists in the USSR between fools and non-fools...

...Drinking increased the flow of his blood, but it also eased his pain...

...Anyone acquainted with some "heroworker" who can hump it faster than everybody else knows he is a coarse, vicious, uninteresting person...

...I can't drive through this impoverished country," he said...