The Abram Tertz Affair
The Abram Tertz Affair—Three Articles The Arrest of Andrei Sinyavsky By Andrew Field On October 18 a New York Times dispatch from Moscow reported that, according to "usually reliable...
...It is really from another world that the calm, dreamlike, quiet voice of Sologub sounds in our turbulent and stormy days," [wrote one critic of his work in 1922...
...He prefers to let "snow" and "rain" represent him and take his place...
...I heard a voice...
...Georgy Ivanov, and Georgy Adamovich...
...And is Andrei Sinyavsky really Abram Tertz...
...Anna Akhmatova FOR MANY YEARS the poetry of Anna Akhmatova seemed to her contemporaries as though it were set within the fixed boundaries laid down by her first books—Evening, Beads, A White Flock . . It seemed that, immersed in the past, in a world of intimate experiences, in her own poetic culture, she would never tear herself loose from the capitivity of her own favorite themes, familiar images, discovered intonations...
...Sologub brought the traditions of Chekhov's "Man in a Case" to their extreme limits of satirical grotesquerie...
...This is from the beginning of Frost's poem, "The Wood-Pile...
...On his third attempt, his victim does not fall after he shoots, but keeps walking to ward his executioner, cursing him and praising God...
...His lyrics are not only full of motifs of this type (natural in a man living in nature),but also, one might say, his lyricism is based upon a similar "entering in" by the poet (and after him, the reader too) into a imaginary world, represented in three dimensions, ever so full of a secretive, alluring depth, and there is significance in everything that happens in it: The view was all in lines Straight up and down of tall slim trees Too much alike to mark or name a place by So as to say for certain I was here Or somewhere else: I was just far from home...
...And with you beyond the gate stretches, Beyond the outskirts, far, far off the song of a woman's "Goodbye now," warm as steaming milk...
...Fyodorf Sologub THE POETRY of one of the representatives of the older generation of the Symbolists—Fyodor Sologub-— was filled, even in the early 1900s, with deep pessimism and hopeless skepticism and a feeling of doom...
...On this day "any citizen of the Soviet Union who has reached the age of 16 has the right to murder freely any other citizen," transport workers and militia personnel excluded...
...This analogy with a walk in a forest suggests itself in reading Frost...
...But since the Soviet authorities maintain that Daniel is Arzhak, Ms case may nevertheless furnish an even stronger test of the tolerance of the present Soviet regime in regard to Russian intellectuals, for the politi cal commitment in Arzhak's work is forthright and unambiguous...
...The Sinyavsky-Menshutin book fulfills much the same function for the post-Revolutionary period: Although the book opens with a long citation from Lenin and deals primarily with the standard, approved figures, it does treat the "unnecessary poets" (c/., the sketches of Sologub and Bely) at remarkable length for a Soviet study, and the authors' interest in them can be felt behind the obligatory negative assessments...
...His combative temperament, on which his taut, energetic rhythms often play, cannot by itself carry one far, the more so because these rhythms, going from poem to poem, often end by becoming boring and "mechanical" It is for this reason that one wishes to support the attempt of the poet himself to reach a deeper representation of moral and philosophical problems, which can be felt, for example, in his poems "Goya," "The Last Electric Train," [for] Voznesensky is one of the most interesting poets of the . Bella Akhmadulina THE DEVELOPMENT of contemporary lyricism [also] gives many examples which permit one to speak of the broad possibilities for small genres, intimate intonations...
...the only consolations were the subjective illusions and sweet dreams of the poet fleeing from real life, the play of his fantasy...
...Of course, the same mystery that surrounds Tertz's identity surrounds Arzhak's...
...The poem which opens the collection leads us into a world of intimate, innermost feelings —expressed, however, in the simplest, most ordinary words—and relations between chance passers-by, unknown people: "Goodbye, my hostess...
...Although cynical, disillusioned, and non-heroic, Kartsev refuses his mistress' suggestion that he take advantage of the license of the day in order to kill her husband...
...How they crunched on your teeth, how they crunched...
...What rusks...
...Malinin does not believe in "various gods, angels, and archangels," but there are childhood associations that bother him—memories of how his mother used to take him to church, and how he would kiss the priest's hand...
...He said that new works by Tertz would continue to appear, and that the next would be "a small book of religious aphorisms" the manuscript of which "was received here a few weeks ago.' It is understood, too, that the manuscript of a new novel by Tertz has reached the West...
...With a new name 1 shall cover The pain of defeats and offenses...
...Sinyavsky's first appearance in print was in 1950, while he was still an "aspirant": It was an article (again, quite correct) on Mayakovsky which appeared in the Moscow University Messenger...
...I have judged it and its people more severly and more leniently than I should have...
...If Sinyavsky is indeed Tertz, it will not be easy for the Soviets to "erase" his name, for Sinyavsky is an established and widely published scholar and critic...
...But indifferently and calmly I covered the sound with my hands So that my grieving spirit Was not soiled by this unworthy speech...
...By a skillful combination of realism and fantasy the writer poses a provocative question: What would happen in a totalitarian state if the government sud denly announced, as a state ordinance, a "Day of Open Murders...
...In a series of poems, long and short, written at various times in his life, the Revolution and the new Soviet reality are caught, and are shown (in a manner peculiar to Pasternak) from the point of view of the moral transformations which are precisely those of our time and our people...
...Their significance is broader than ordinary landscape pictures...
...It called in a soothing way, It said: "Come here, Leave your sinful, Godforsaken land, Leave Russia forever...
...Also taken into custody was Yuli Daniel, a translator into Russian from other Slavic languages, who, like Sinyavsky, was connected with the Gorky Institute of World Literature...
...But, as is the case with Tertz, to note this alone about his work would be a gross and unjust oversimplification...
...Very soon Zalessky finds himself in heavy demand by various Soviet wives who cannot obtain similar services from their husbands...
...He has already seen enough of death in World War II...
...In his poetic usage, however, Pasternak's "eternity" and "time" did not emerge only in such isolation and juxtaposition...
...He wanders through the semi-deserted streets of Moscow, sees a corpse lying in Arbat Square, and repulses an over-zealous citizen who tries to kill him...
...In "The Hands," Malinin, a loyal Communist, finds himself drafted into the secret police where he is assigned to execute "enemies of the people.' He conscientiously carries out his duties until he is told to execute some "counter-revolutionary" priests...
...the sudden transference of politics or ideology onto such a flat plane serves as a source of cutting, unmasked laughter [But soon in proletarian satire] the fantastic and the grotesque, characteristic of Shchedrin, were made secondary, and the primary factor became a vital explicitness of image, with its power to convince, its comprehensibility, and its narrative ease, which projected an engaging and instructive moral sermon employing direct analogies between politics and ordinary life, between the universal and the personal...
...The answer that Arzhak gives to his own grotesque fantasy is both unexpected and undramatic: People have become so immune to government ordinances that their official reaction is one of apathy, while in their own minds they are concerned only with personal survival...
...For even within the hmits of intimate lyrics in the precise meaning of this word, not exceeding the frame of some personal experience, say, of love, there is required some moral and psychological significance, depth, atmosphere, without which the poems turn into a protocol communication about what happened—"in and out of love"—and lose their claim to poetic (and not merely factual) existence...
...Voznesensky requires, in our view, a more serious, and deep feeling of the "sacred truth" which could inspire and direct his flights...
...You are a hostage of eternity Held prisoner by time...
...To run from the Russian Revolution is shameful...
...He lived out his days as an anachronism, fixing all his energy upon the "removed...
...A number of the poems in the Moscow edition have been subjected to unjustified "correction " For that reason it is recommended that the reader acquaint himself with Voznesensky's poetry from the Vladimir edition, published with greater care...
...His 62-page introduction was an adaptation of the essay he wrote on Pasternak for Novy Mir, This edition is now said to have been withdrawn and replaced by a new printing with an introduction by Kornei Chukovsky...
...Ordinary reality" here serves as a means of satiric realization of the complex processes of governmental life and of their underlying mental assumptions...
...It is permeated with goodness and tenderness towards people, but it consists of little things, prosaic elements and half-confessions...
...Interesting examples of such lyrics, rich in half-tones, shades, and modulations, are given to us in Bulat Okudzhava's book of poems Islands, issued in 1959 by the Soviet Writer publishing house...
...I don't want to...
...I froze...
...All of these springs, winters, rains, and dawns instruct one in goodness and tell us about the nature of life itself, which is understood in his poetry as an all-embracing element, a higher good, and the greatest of miracles...
...On the positive side, Sinyavsky has written in Novy Mir some of the most sensitive and consciously apolitical Soviet criticism of poets such as Anna Akhmatova, Olga Berggolts, Bulat Okudzhava, and Boris Pasternak...
...It is not an accident that a number of his poems are dedicated to words, or, to put it more precisely, to how these words are spoken and to whatever content may be concealed in them...
...He is a graduate of Moscow University (reportedly in 1953), where he wrote a thesis on a perfectly "correct" subject, Maxim Gorky's novel The Life of Klim Samgin...
...Despite this, the narrator of the story, Anatoly Kartsev, who is clearly the spokesman for the author, does take a moral stand on the issue...
...He ascribed to Russian Symbolism uncharacteristic features of a Revolutionary sort, and he saw the triumph of the ideals of Symbolism in the Revolution...
...and he speaks about the most important thing inadvertently, by chance ("And bullets...
...The memory of the Revolution, in spite of all, still appears to him as a shining landmark of history...
...The final image is of a de-humanized Volodya who "eats, sleeps, exercises, and watches television under the supervision of doctors...
...Into another riverbed Past the other my life has flowed, And I know not my shores...
...It is distressing that the quality of this edition is inferior to Voznesensky's collection Mozaika which came out in 1960 in Vladimir...
...We may cite her lines about the Ezhov persecutions which constituted a great personal tragedy for Akhmatova herself: No, I was not under another sky And not defended by foreign wings, I was with my people then, Where, alas, my people were...
...Tikhomirov...
...In fact, the question "either-or" in poetic practice during the period of the Revolution was posed extremely harshly, and it really could not be any other way: A new stage in the history of our literature was beginning...
...Even more, on the "Day," Kartsev decides to go into the streets and shout to the people "not to kill each other, but to love your neighbor...
...which connects him with Zoshchenko and Ilf and Petrov, the famous Soviet satirists of the '20...
...of course, is the protagonist's name in the most recent Tertz novel, Liubimov (published here under the title...
...Andrei Voznesensky VOZNESENSKY has found a "key" which fits too many doors...
...Respectful reviewers of Sologub's new books could not conceal that he had almost died as an artist, stiffened, become petrified in his old motifs, images, and intonations...
...This is why (according to the authority of Kornei Chukovsky) Aleksandr Blok, who loved this poem and learned it by heart, ascribed central significance to it...
...But probably nothing expresses Arzhak's ownr feelings as much as the following lines, also from "This Is Moscow Speaking": "I believe that what I have written could have been written by any other man of my generation, of my fate, who like me loves this accursed, this beautiful country...
...Volodya is subjected to severe attacks, and his condemnation by "public opinion" is a foregone conclusion...
...Since 1959, Sinyavsky has been a frequent reviewer and essayist in the leading Soviet liberal monthly Novy Mir, where he has written some rather caustic reviews of potboiler Socialist Realist works, including one on the poetry of Anatoly Sofronov (who is satirized in Tertz's Liubimov...
...Sinyavsky was chosen last year to write the introduction to the new 730-page Soviet edition of Pasternak's collected poems, the recent publication of which drew widespread notice in the West...
...It was translated in an abridged version in the Reporter of August 16, 1962...
...Such a saturation of lyrical "trifles" with the content of life can be felt, for example, in Bella Akhmadulina's poems on the traditional theme of "separation": You walk along the platform Face covered by your collar, And you snuff out a smouldering cigarette In the snow, using the heel of your shoe...
...However, these attempts could not meet with success inasmuch as Bely, unlike Aleksandr Blok and Valery Briusov, stayed in the mainstream of that same Symbolist tradition, changing nothing essential to it, not really discarding anything but limiting himself, for the most part, to a search for its historial justification...
...Some copies of the book with Sinyavsky's introduction, however, did reach the West...
...In a poem which was dedicated to the October Revolution (1925), he wrote: "We are the earth's first love " And many years later, in 1941, this same idea of moral renewal sounded in his poems: Through the troubles of the past And years of wars and poverty I silently recognized Russia3s Inimitable features...
...it is clearly intended to be a sequel to Academician Boris Mikhailovsky's Russian Literature of the 20th Century —1900-1917, which appeared in 1939, and Sinyavsky, in fact, is said to be a protege of Mikhailovsky's...
...The Makepeace Experiment...
...The experience causes Malinin to have a mental breakdown, and his hands are palsied from that time on...
...The following are representative excerpts from the large body of Sinyavsky's critical writings (about half of them, it should be noted, written in collaboration with A. Menshutin...
...Arzhak is concerned with moral problems, with the question of the individual's right to freedom, to be true to himself...
...In the place of a smouldering cigarette in the snow which "he" finishes with his heel, there arises a human soul which has experienced a deep tragedy, and a personal, "petty" biographical episode turns into an event, a theme, an object of lyric art...
...Nature is presented in an unusual guise—a single, individual face, a living unified world created by the poet with bold metaphoric transferences from one object to another...
...Footnote in original.] This poem gives rise to a certain perplexity...
...Volodya is finally caught in flagranti by an outraged husband and hauled before a Komsomol court...
...The social typicality of Peredonov, however, is reduced because of his psychopathological disorders...
...Boris Pasternak THE CREATIVE path of Pasternak is uneven, complicated...
...The singer of death and beauty (which in a strange way approach one another in his poems) was now not considered a factor in contemporary literature...
...I don't want to kill anyone any more," he finds himself saying...
...And it is precisely because nature reveals the poet, while he, having ceased to occupy a central position, virtually dissolves within it, that Pasternak's images are lyrical...
...But Akhmatova disputes those who would like to see in her a "peripheral" phenomenon, alien to the life of her native country, indifferent to the fate of her people...
...But if one turns to the present Akhmatova and attentively reads over her work of the past three decades, in very many places decidely new notes become audible...
...His sincere ecstasy over the events which were taking place turned into "holy madness," the ecstasy of a poet-seer, while historical reality was represented in the rays of the "transcendental" in such a way that reality sometimes gave way entirely to fantastic scenes on a "surrealistic" plane...
...In 1960 Sinyavsky contributed a study of Gorky as a satirist to a collection published by the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and, more recently, he wrote the section dealing with Russian Decadent and Symbolist poetry at the beginning of the 20th century in the three-volume History of Russian Literature published jointly by the Pushkin House in Leningrad and the Gorky Institute...
...And besides, is such easy originality, motivated by calculations of a "direct hit," worthy of the fate of a genius...
...This story is set in the immediate post-Revolutionary period, and the narrator, a simple factory worker, is much less sophisticated than Kartsev...
...This volume is the result of nearly 10 years of full-time research...
...MINAP is a name made from the Russian letters standing for the "Moscow Institute of Scientific Profanation...
...The dramatic quality of the situation, the grief and pain of loss are more hinted at than named directly in this little scene...
...There had been no miracle: Malinin's comrades, either as a joke or as a result of their own uneasy consciences, had merely put some blank cartridges into his rifle...
...In any event, while the question of Tertz's real identity remains unanswered, the arrest of Sinyavsky at least furnishes the meager consolation of an opportunity to become acquainted with his work...
...There can be no doubt of Arzhak's fervent opposition to the pressures that a totalitarian state generates...
...The court scene is the high point of the story and a masterful parody on Soviet "show trials...
...unexpectedly bold movements and turns in the lyric character, which took shape long ago and became firmly fixed in our consciousness, are noticeable: My stern epoch Turned me like a river...
...But the works of Andrei Bely on poetic language brought him closer to the Futurists and the Formalist school of literary criticism, and his very experimental prose, especially, was more interesting and contained more innovations than was his poetry...
...From a barely audible whisper to fiery oratory, from modestly lowered eyes to thunder and lightning—such is the breadth of her feeling and voice...
...He is discharged from the Cheka...
...Those poets who could not or did not want to follow the path of change to the new did not, as a rule, play a notable role in the further development of Russian poetry, even though they were greatly gifted—as Sologub, for example, was—and his proper place (not only because of the content of his poems, but also because of their form) is as a poet of the pre-Revolu tionary milieu...
...Yet another of Kartsev's remarks shows Arzhak's awareness of the bitter irony of his position: "Anyway, to tell the truth, to be printed abroad in anti-Soviet publications is not so good...
...About Andrei Sinyavsky, one can speak with more precision...
...Akhmatova is right," he said...
...But who will reproach me for this...
...Abram Tertz, he said, is a "well-known figure in the Russian literary world" who does "not live in Moscow but in another part of the Soviet Union...
...While reading his "daring" poems a feeling sometimes creeps over one which might be called a lack of confidence in regard to an author whose poetry overcomes, with uniform rapidity and glibness, all obstacles on the basis, one assumes, of enthusiasm alone...
...Also of note in the Sinyavsky-Menshutin book are the extensive references to emigre Russian poets such as Marina Tsvetaeva...
...He is a 49-year-old scholar associated with the Gorky Institute of World Literature, a prestigious Soviet research foundation in Moscow...
...Volsky, too, leads an ordinary, easy and untroubled existence, but a sinister shadow from the past suddenly appears in his life—a man he had known in earlier days who was arrested, exiled, and has just returned under an amnesty...
...But Kartsev finds no opportunity for heroism...
...Could this have been what Paul Gauguin, in travelling to the far-off islands of Oceania, was striving for...
...Essentially the same theme—civic justification for murder, and the individual's reaction to it—also plays a central role in "The Hands" (1963...
...In Paris, the editor of the Polish-language emigre journal Kultura, Jerzy Giedroyc, who first published Tertz's manuscripts in the West, issued a strong denial...
...This is what gives rise to the conflict, characteristic for him, between the "eternal" and the "temporal," "poetry" and "history": Sleep not, sleep not, artist, Give yourself not to dream...
...And although in the beginning the language has a commonplace, effortless tone (and it likely owes its strength precisely to this unobtrusive, uncommitted, but careful unhurriedness of the tale), we are, without noticing it, taken up by what we see surrounding us, and having taken the first step, we, along with the poet, cannot say whether we stand "here" or "there.' We are already moving along in the forest, along the path of the narrative, following a stray bird that, flitting from tree to tree, leads us deeper and deeper until we all but stumble over a stack of firewood left by someone in the woods—God knows why or when—and then finally run up against the thought to which we have been led by way of a slowly evolving, detailed story, apparently not at all remarkable if it were not for the fact that everything here directly or obliquely leads to a certain thought on the part of the author and is illumined by it from afar, long before it has taken shape in the form of a philosophical lamentation over the abandoned wood-pile and its missing owner This sort of poetic composition, in which the source of the action is placed off in the wings or put at some distance, somewhere to the side, or behind, and from there illumines the downstage area with a diffused light, is characteristic of Frost...
...Readers of this magazine will recall Mihajlo Mihajlov's description in "Moscow Summer 1964" (NL, March 29, 1965) of a visit with Mikhailovsky, and his comment that Mikhailovsky's book "in spite of numerous omissions and shortcomings, played a helpful role at a time when a mention of the Symbolists was inadmissible...
...Arzhak's most arresting and complex story is "This is Moscow Speaking," which appeared in 1962...
...Unable to prove his innocence, persecuted and unhappy, he ends up in an insane asylum...
...I shall wash the blood from your hands, I shall take the black shame from your heart...
...Three days later Soviet "literary sources" were quoted in the Times as claiming that Sinyavsky had confessed his dual identity...
...That is unworthy talk...
...The author could juxtapose nothing to this miserable life and its triumphant vulgarity except estheticism and the spicy eroticism of the relationship between Liudmila and the little boy Sasha...
...A substitute life has been given me...
...So that, having "made the curved route" he could work his way into the "kingly Louvre...
...ARZHAK'S FUNNIEST and most irreverent story is: "The Man from MINAP...
...He prefers appearing even a bit foolish in order not to seem stilted and grandiloquent, and often treats not the most important thing, it seems, but some chance, secondary matter ("What rusks I used to chew...
...There have, after all, been "Days of the Artillery" and "Days of the Soviet Press," so the "Day of Open Murders" must be like them, the narrator muses, expressing the general reaction of all Soviet society...
...Andrei Bely AT THE BEGINNING of the Revolution an attempt was made fay Andrei Bely to revive Symbolism and return it to its former influence by transplanting it in the soil of the times...
...Nature itself is realized as a lyric hero, while the poet's presence is—everywhere and nowhere...
...The passion and energy which so win us over in the poems of Voznesensky is unexpectedly replaced by passive submission to some sort of alien will, which the author moves but does not control and direct...
...Arzhak's last story, "Atonement," which appeared in 1964, is the most somber of all...
...Sinyavsky's major scholarly publication, however, is the 441-page book, Poetry in the First Years of the Revolution, written jointly with A. Menshutin and published in a tiny edition of 4,000 copies in 1964...
...And in a dream-like sequence he evokes the image of a Don Quixote riding through Red Square "ready to break his lance in the name of the Beautiful Lady, in the name of Russia...
...Under these conditions (and in spite of the fact that the contemporary scene was being depicted by her then in a generally gloomy light) the very choice made by Akhmatova in favor of her native land was important...
...The critics were writing about how Anna Akhmatova was doomed to "repeat her song' as far back as the '20s, and, unfortunately, such a view of her art has still not been outlived even now...
...This complete identification with the landscape, without witnesses and observers, gives Pasternak's poems a special intimacy and authenticity...
...The title is taken from this essay on Anna Akhmatova...
...On September 30 (well before the news of Sinyavsky's arrest), it was cited by the London Times Literary Supplement in a list of the most outstanding foreign critical studies of the '60s...
...We'd spread out our torn coats, well, and they we'd chew...
...However, in the years of revolutionary upsurge Sologub did write the most significant of his prose works, the novel The Petty Demon (published in 1905), which exposed the reactionary nature of the petty bourgeoisie and the bureaucrats...
...Bulat Okudzhava THE ART OF the poetic confession (which one should not take literally) presupposes an internal restraint, wisdom, and purity of thought, an intonation of natural and unaffected veracity...
...A "student" at MINAP, Volodya Zalessky, has the rather extraordinary ability to determine the sex of a child at conception by an effort of his will...
...In one or another way Pasternak has tended towards the moods of the old, pre-October intellectual rnilieu, toward the ideas of what is generally understood as humanism...
...If, again, he is Tertz, Sinyavsky joins the ranks of those major Russian writers and poets (among them Innokenty Annensky, Yury Tynyanov, Anna Akhmatova, and Vladimir Nabokov) who are also distinguished scholars...
...The scope of her lyric gift made itself felt quite early in Akhmatova's works, which are permeated by the consciousness of civic duty, of personal and general responsibility for the fate of her native land...
...The Abram Tertz Affair—Three Articles The Arrest of Andrei Sinyavsky By Andrew Field On October 18 a New York Times dispatch from Moscow reported that, according to "usually reliable sources," a Soviet literary critic and scholar named Andrei Sinyavsky had been arrested for having published works abroad under the pen name Abram Tertz...
...A content which is necessary and close to people, both of today and tomorrow, permeates many of Pasternak's poems which deal with nature, and it is these perhaps which belong to the best work that he produced in half a century of poetic effort...
...First of all, for what purpose was a "parabolic" path chosen...
...Volodya proves unable to transmit his gift to others, and, in the end, he is utilized only in narrow high Party circles, where he becomes known as "the man from MINAP...
...And you're off, a wanderer, And to your road there's no end...
...Indeed, his unawareness of the implications of his own tale, combined with his starkly simple language, somewhat relieve the gloom of the narrative...
...About me...
...Pasternak began from the supposition that two objects placed alongside one another closely interact, throw reflections upon one another, penetrate one another, and for that reason he connects them, not by similarity but by contiguity, using metaphor as the means of binding them In his landscapes Pasternak rarely speaks about himself or in his own person, he studiously shuns and hides his "I...
...A second arrested writer, Yuli Daniel, also was reported to have admitted writing in the West under the name of Nikolai Arzhak (see p. 17...
...While it is difficult to make such comparisons because of the rigid demands of the Soviet censorship, he may be said to be roughly comparable in stature to, say, an F. W. Dupee or an R. W. B. Lewis...
...Noteworthy in this regard is Akhmatova's poem, written in 1917, which sounded a rebuke to all who intended to leave Russia, then in the throes of Revolutionary conflagration...
...Malinin tries hard to overcome his "weakness" and does shoot two priests, but he becomes violently sick after each killing...
...The poet becomes like a gambler whose passion and enthusiasm do not prompt the desire to follow after him, but instead, awakening our curiosity ("Ech, he's really too far gone"), we are brought to ponder the fate of this man who has fallen prisoner to his own temperament, of his own seething nature, capable on any pretext of becoming inspired, going into a rage, falling into a state of very great and extremely unreliable excitement "Fate, like a rocket, flies in a parabola,' exclaims Voznesensky in his "Parabolic Ballad," which expresses his credo and served as the title to his collection issued by the Soviet Writer publishing house.* In this ballad the "parabolic" fate of the poet, sweeping aside the canons, is treated as the destiny of all that is great and original, and the artist Gauguin is taken as an example of this: And wound up in the Louvre not by the main door— His parabola angrily broke through the ceiling...
...Wonder in the face of the miracle of existence is the lyrical leitmotif in Pasternak, who is always struck, and charmed by, his discovery that there is "spring again...
...in several instances material from emigre publications is actually cited, but without indication of its source...
...it said flatly that Sinyavsky was Tertz...
...When he wants to produce a boy, he visualizes Karl Marx...
...Placed against a background of recent amnesties in Soviet Russia, this story concerns another Soviet intellectual, Viktor Volsky, who is very reminiscent of Kartsev in "This Is Moscow Speaking...
...The Satirical Tradition THE CENTRAL principle of the satire of Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, which Gorky in his time took note of (and in the manner of which he wrote his Russian Tales), consisted of a sharp displacement of political categories into the sphere of the ordinary, which allowed him to expose and turn inside out the actions and strivings of the ruling classes, and to show as their true face the behind-the-scenes reality in a reduced and parodied form...
...Is there still more Tertz to come...
...This leads to nature taking on the role of the poet, revealing not only itself, but him also—"Not I about Spring, but Spring about me," "Not I about the garden, but the garden about me": By the fence Midst damp branches and a pale wind There was an argument...
...Everything will pass, but it will stay This poem can serve as a key to Okudzhava's lyricism...
...A United Press International wire story was less equivocal...
...But precisely because all these precise, merciless details contain something greater than what is simply said about them outright, this scene acquires volume, a "three-dimensional quality"—and not only in the visual, spatial sense, but also in the psychological...
...The ideals appeared to him in the guise of the usual religious-mystical "re-creation" of art and reality...
...A lot went down...
...They cluster before the viewer like trees in a forest behind which other trunks and gaps open endlessly, creating the illusion that there at the next turn the end which we have been involuntarily following will be reached, until we realize that there is no end to the forest, and besides, the thing we set out for, in essence, is already behind us...
...But what's to say about them—war"), or he's just silent and let's us guess about everything ourselves . . Although Okudzhava's poems are clear and simple in their language and form, there is complexity in the range of psychological and intonational shades and re- poems and appears in the most humdrum statements ilexes which they radiate, and the poet's "lyricism" is and turns, in words which are at the same time infine and not always discernible, and yet it controls his poems and appears in the most humdrum statements and turns, in words which are at the same time in timate and of common usage...
...It is of some interest in connection with the charges made against Sinyavsky that the obscure proletarian poet Tikhomirov is mentioned in passing in Poetry in the First Years of the Revolution several times...
...Gradually, all of Volsky's friends and even his beloved Irina turn from him, and he is left in complete isolation...
...There were bullets...
...Arzhak's stories all concentrate upon one major character, and they have a clearly anticipated climax which results in an anti-climactic ending...
...Frequently the poet leads us to believe that his poems refer to the most ordinary and insignificant things...
...But Volodya Zalessky is saved when his talent is brought to the notice of medical experts and high Party officials, who decide to have him train other Soviet men in this skill...
...Sometimes silence is more essential in this enterprise than saying everything "to the end," while intelligent irony can remove any excess sentimentality...
...It must be that one has to seek, precisely in this poem, the sources of what developed later and gave Akhmatova's lyricism the opportunity to change into a new riverbed, containing within its banks patriotic pathos, the quiet of exalted metaphysical contemplation, and the noisy, many-voiced disputes of the living and the dead...
...The poetic and the prosaic, abstract philosophy and commonplace experience, are so closely connected in his lyrics that one becomes the source or shell of the other...
...Daniel has supposedly been charged with having written four short stories which appeared in the West under the pen name Nikolai Arzhak...
...Volsky had nothing to do with all this, but the stranger is convinced that he did and is determined to ruin Volsky's life...
...Still, the worthlessness and the bestiality of this provincial lower middle-class life are turned by the Symbolist writer into a sort of universal human state, into a force which rules the world...
...The name of the school teacher Peredonov, a stupid peasant-official and a hostile, cowardly, and hypocritical Philistinetoady, became a general pejorative term...
...Here Arzhak shows most clearly a strong colloquial emphasis in his portrayal of Soviet life (in his case, the "ordinary" life of a member of the secret police...
...Thanks to this light the dramatic quality of the episode is heightened and an impression of depth is created, of totality, of extension in time and space For Frost the relation of different planes—of life and death, the past and the present, the extrinsic and the intrinsic, of spring and autumn, lakes and trees—is extremely essential . . He would like in one stroke to grasp heaven and earth ("Birches") And in fine with this, the metaphysics of nature and existence which he extracts from the ordinary daily life surrounding him always has its roots in real soil...
...Isn't this romantic "trajectory" a little too commonplace, suddenly becoming, when seen in a less favorable way, not unlike dashing "eccentricity" with a reward—the Louvre—for the declared boldness and risk of the undertaking...
...In a country that has experienced as many purges as has the Soviet Union such a "fantasy" may not seem as fantastic as it does to us...
...In this there takes place—which is unavoidable in real poetry—an effacing of the boundaries between the "large" and the "small...
...Fyodor Sologub amazed his contemporaries by his unwavering, icy calmness...
...He is not a detached observer of nature, but its similar, its double, living in it, and becoming first the sea, then the forest...
...There are even strong "pro-Soviet" notes in Arzhak's writing, as when, for example, Kartsev says that one must defend the "real Soviet power" which has been corrupted since the Revolution...
...At this writing one cannot know, and speculation must depend on one's estimate of the efficiency of the Soviet KGB, which must certainly have been under tremendous pressure for some years to "produce Tertz...
...Unlettered Voices By Andrei Sinyavsky Robert Frost Frost's Pictures are stereoscopic...
...Although Arzhak's stories are not as great in volume or, for that matter, in accomplishment as those of Tertz, he is beyond any doubt an experienced and mature writer who is able to handle his material with skill and versatility...
...Nikolai Arzhak By Margaret Dalton IN THE TURMOIL over the news last month of Andrei Sinyavsky's arrest, the arrest of at least one other Soviet writer, reportedly at about the same time, has been somewhat overlooked...
...There is no hope for the narrator of the story, no possibility of escape except by death...
Vol. 48 • November 1965 • No. 22
