Literature of the Thaw
VIERECK, PETER
SOVIET WRITERS VS. THE DROZDOVS Literature of the Thaw By Peter Viereck Before me is an extraordinary book—Pages From Tamsa, edited by Andrew Field (Little Brown, 367 pp., $6.75)—whose...
...this can be decreed by a Minuteman Court, after the parasites are duly indicted for "satanic laughter" by an aging Youth Leader...
...Ovechkin increased the already sensational uproar by asking why Paustovsky, being today so strongly against the Drozdovs, had never attacked them while Stalin was still alive...
...Anyone concerned with the finer aspects of Soviet life will want to know more about Paustovsky (compiler of Pages From Taritsa) and the forces he represents...
...In America the speech was printed in the valuable Year of Revolt symposium of the 1956 thaw...
...for these last three Tarusans I can invent no American equivalents...
...But if only a few thousand copies were sold, how much can that change American life...
...In Moscow Ilya Ehrenburg told me he considered Slutsky their best post-Pasternak poet (this is thawmanship namedropping, just to show one can compete with the monopolists...
...Obviously this surrealist America corresponds point by point with the real Russia, the writers' colony is the one near Moscow at Tarusa, the new slogan is "the Tarusa lads," the Soviet universities universalize the few unsuppressed copies of the text...
...Some foreign observers overpraise the ensuing American thaw as "freedom at last...
...We must fight this battle to the end...
...What has never been quoted or even discussed in print, either West or East, is a crucial incident following the Paustovsky speech...
...Too popular to arrest, he now saves the contributors and the censor from prosecution by taking total personal blame...
...Today Russia's nonconformists (risking more than America's) are trying to humanize and liberalize Communism peacefully from within...
...The best fiction writer in the book is the aforesaid Kazakov...
...This is only the beginning...
...Reformers rather than overthrowers, they are Fabians in reverse...
...At one subversive swoop it restores America's former literary standards, brashly restoring Melville the knocker and blasphemously dethroning Edgar Guest, the positive thinker...
...But there is still a hope for wholesome work-therapy in Arctic Alaska on charges of social parasitism...
...Of course, the anthology is speedily suppressed by Washington anyhow and withdrawn from all bookstores, having sold merely a few thousand of the 75,000 copies printed...
...Three times in succession the phrase "the usual...
...Also the superb essayist and novelist Frida Vigdorova and the poets Boris Slutsky and Yevgeny Vinokurov...
...Suddenly there appears an anthology entitled Pages From MacDowell...
...The real, unstated unity is simply the fact that they write independently...
...the Dudintsev character "Drozdov" symbolizes the Stalinoid bureaucrats): "There is a new group of acquisitive carnivores . . . cynics who . . . openly carried on anti-Semitic talk of a kind worthy of pogrom-makers...
...Yet his sweet reasonableness is never saccharine rationalization...
...it enforces the withering by still bigger government...
...Four copies reach Harvard, CCNY, Berkeley, and Mount Holyoke...
...Both he and Sherwood Anderson start out from Turgeniev's Sportsman's Sketches and end by turning all their heroes into the same wistful wandering waif...
...May we perhaps call that impact the psychological cause (not that he wasn't always brave) for his audacious compilation—his still more audacious protection—of the "Tarusa lads...
...several years ago he got into trouble for criticizing a Khrushchev farm policy...
...They do it by going to a provincial censor, a MacDowell colony member, instead of to the more dedicated censor in Washington...
...He is also an associate editor of Novy Mir, Russia's leading literary journal, publishing such familiar thaw exponents as Yevtushenko, Nekrasov, Slutsky...
...Not because it attacks America's rulers—it doesn't—but because it simply ignores their official "capitalist realism...
...How can such a bunch of slackers get approved for publication...
...indeed it was he who assembled the MacDowell anthology in the first place...
...they do not necessarily survive thereby...
...According to the secret transcript, Paustovsky made this semi-defense: "Never in the course of my long writing career have I referred to the name of a certain person" (meaning: it was already a risky contribution to refrain from grovelling, to refrain from the cult of praising Stalin...
...All the above-named writers, living or dead, were at some point Tarusa colonists...
...We cannot imagine what infinite number of talents, minds, and remarkable men have disappeared...
...Ovechkin's reproach, a frequent one from the younger generation, shows the vulnerability of any moderate middle position...
...His group does sincerely hail "the Revolution" as an irrevocable starting-point...
...It became generally known among Russian writers by the usual clandestine circulation...
...Also endangered is the provincial censor, whom the new ruler denounces in person for letting the wrong-thinking book slip through...
...not one of them bows to "Socialist realism...
...At this point old Robert Frost steps in...
...The slogan defines—and also spreads—the "outdated" ideal of free creativity...
...Peter Viereck, a Pulitzer prize poet, is the author of Terror and Decorum and Conservatism Revisited...
...The book ends with personal reminiscences by Paustovsky...
...The partly Frostian anthologist is Konstantin Paustovsky, who in 1961 saved the contributors and censor by taking full blame...
...Very much indeed...
...too professionally sensitive in his vignettes of what amounts to Winesburg-on-the-Volga...
...Soon a new slogan sweeps the nation: "the MacDowell lads...
...Savor what the role would be of a MacDowell or Yaddo writers' colony under the dictatorship of the Star-Spangled Extremist Party...
...Don't exaggerate: Some of our colonists are simply overlooked, never martyred at all...
...If these Drozdovs had not existed, our country would still have such great men as Meyerhold...
...All writers must praise Big Brother or, rather...
...A different unregimentable poet, perhaps Allen Ginsberg, succumbs to years of prison...
...There are, to be sure, more rebellious leaders than this gentle, septuagenarian novelist, essayist, poet...
...Julian Beck dies at slave labor for the crime of being one of the most original theater directors of his time...
...Big Bircher...
...there is nothing tame about—well, just listen to this (I quote from his 1956 speech to the Moscow Writers Union...
...Denise Levertov is hounded to death for her beautiful non-Party poetry after being lured to America by a stratagem...
...He, too, is still alive in our fantasy America...
...thus does an aging dictatorship become ritualized...
...At worst he is by now a too mechanical wincer...
...Two decades of this...
...The living Tarusa contributors include Yuri Kazakov, a Soviet Anderson and notoriously "without ideology...
...Gradualists always sound so...
...ever cautious and moderate but also a national symbol of the thaw...
...Babel, Artyom Vesyoly and many others...
...Then Big Bircher dies, replaced by his most flexible ex-follower...
...The Party wants big government to wither...
...If these men were still living, our culture would be in full bloom...
...On the other hand, can one morally demand from anybody (except oneself) a civil courage tantamount to suicide...
...Refugee reviewers in Canada call the anthology "daring" and rightly so...
...Their weapons are betrayal, calumny, moral assassination, and just plain assassination...
...Whatever the answer and despite the official condemnation of Paustovsky's speech as rebellious rather than cautious, the conscience-probing Ovechkin question had an enduring impact on Paustovsky...
...But not as a stopping-point...
...Vinokurov's lyricism is equally moving...
...The latter coins the phrase "capitalist realism" for the correct literary style and sends batches of MacDowell writers to a different kind of colony— the penal colony of Kafka...
...Valentin Ovechkin is a story writer and an agricultural as well as cultural commentator...
...others overdamn it as "no real change...
...They were destroyed to preserve the stinking wellbeing of these Drozdovs...
...This association gives the book a pretext-unity...
...The martyred Tarusa contributors are the theater director Meyerhold (who died in a slave labor camp) and the poets Marina Tsvetaeva and Nikolai Zabolotsky (the former lured back into Russia and hounded to suicide, the latter prematurely dead because of his prison years...
...Ehrenburg, and Solzhenitsyn...
...At best Kazakov is a moving story-teller of international stature...
...They are the result of the Cult of Personality . . . from 1937 on...
...Sometimes successfully so: For example, the unapologetic reappearance in print of Ycvtushenko, Nekrasov, and Voznesensky (after being denounced by Khrushchev in March 1963) and the recent reported release of "parasite" Iosif Brodsky (after being sentenced to five years by the Party's Philistines...
...Let us call the incident (about which an unpublished eyewitness report has been consulted) the Ovechkin challenge...
...They have survived until today...
...It includes works, hitherto frowned upon, by the above director and the two poets as well as a prose writer (say, a still-living Sherwood Anderson) denounced for being "without ideology...
...Ovechkin is a convinced Communist idealist, eager to strengthen Soviet society by means of more rapid and drastic improvements than those of the old PaustovskyEhrenburg-Katayev pre-Revolution liberals...
...It was published in the West in the usual smuggled-out fashion...
...Many render the lip service "needed for survival...
...Does this Fabian role make Paustovsky sound tame, tepid...
...In Russia the speech was attacked in print by the usual Party hacks without itself being published...
...they pass through every dormitory secretly, reaching many thousands of students and writers...
...THE DROZDOVS Literature of the Thaw By Peter Viereck Before me is an extraordinary book—Pages From Tamsa, edited by Andrew Field (Little Brown, 367 pp., $6.75)—whose universal implications are best understood if we dream up a never-neverland America of some science-fiction future...
...In 1956 Ovechkin stood up and challenged the Paustovsky speech, not from the viewpoint of its dogmatist or Stalinoid challengers but from that of the more militant revisionists...
...Big Bircher being out of fashion, there is no hope for finalizing the physical decomposition of these MacDowellites by means of administrative measures at the back of the neck...
Vol. 47 • December 1964 • No. 25
