Sex Under Socialism
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing SEX UNDER SOCIALISM BY PEARL K. BELL hat is the tenor of mundane existence in Eastern Europe for intellectuals, writers, lawyers, doctors, professors—for people much like our...
...The Joke dealt with the severe punishment meted out to a university student who playfully rewrote some Stalinist slogans for his politically humorless girl friend, but it had some desperately unfunny consequences for its author...
...Until now, Milan Kundera has been associated here solely with his sardonic but straightforward protest novel, The Joke, published in 1967 as part of the campaign against government repression which culminated in that brief bloom of freedom, the Prague Spring of 1968...
...his plays may not be produced...
...At the University of Prague, in the heady revolutionary days of 1948, Jaromil discovers the solacing role of People's Literary Hero, and this soon leads him to become an informer for the police...
...In this book you will find no fighters against the injustice of the Soviet regime, no dissidents who die for a 'just cause,'" Kuper smugly warns us at the start...
...cynical children of their times...
...Is the book an attack on the romantic poet's unspeakable ego, with its treacherous confusion of poetry and politics...
...it is the idea of sex, rather than sexual gratification itself, that ensnares them...
...But suddenly the escapade turns frighteningly real: The man's customary gallantry vanishes, and he begins "to play the tough guy who treats women to the coarser aspects of his masculinity, willfulness, sarcasm, self-assurance...
...Kundera reminds us, particularly in his stories, that sex under socialism can be as awkward, funny, delicious, and humiliating as its decadent-capitalist counterpart, but Yuri Kuper, in his semifictionalized memoir of Russia's bohemian demimonde, Holy Fools in Moscow (Quadrangle, 230 pp., $7.95), offers a much more cynical version of the universality of Eros...
...The corrosive irony of Laughable Loves, for example, touches barely at all upon politics...
...Kuper calls his seamy cast of characters "a small circle of the creative intelligentsia, bohemians of a kind," yet he fails to endow them with the charm that would make them tolerable, or with the personal and intellectual stature and energy that the word "creative" demands...
...Three recently translated works by two East European writers scarcely known in the U.S.—the Czech Milan Kundera and the Russian Yuri Kuper—shed some light on this subject...
...In episode after unoriginal episode, Kundera ridicules the spineless mama's boy as he tries, in childhood and adolescence, to lose his virginity...
...Unblushingly, Kuper assents to this infantile insolence...
...A somewhat similar failure is evident in Life Is Elsewhere, which won France's Medicis award in 1973 as the best foreign novel of the year...
...he is prohibited from traveling in the West...
...In the harsh and uncomfortably sadistic "The Hitchhiking Game," a young man and his attractive though prissy girl, driving to a country inn for their summer holiday, gaily plunge into a game of pretending she is an anonymous hitchhiker he has picked up on the road...
...My heroes had no luminous ideas, did not experience Stalin's camps or prisons...
...it is directed almost entirely at the characters' sexual foibles...
...When the child Solzhenitsyn was devouring Pravda editorials, Kuper explains, he and his cronies "were reading Swift, Jack London and Cervantes, and masturbating...
...Havel and an erotic tug-of-war in a city hospital, his psychological and dramatic insight is undeveloped, and a nattering repetitiousness reduces the whole project to tedium...
...But since he consistently emphasizes Jaromil's abysmal lack of talent, Kundera's fundamental meaning is indecipherable...
...Writers & Writing SEX UNDER SOCIALISM BY PEARL K. BELL hat is the tenor of mundane existence in Eastern Europe for intellectuals, writers, lawyers, doctors, professors—for people much like our educated middle-class selves...
...and he is being financially victimized by a tax, aimed specifically at dissident writers, that confiscates more than 80 per cent of the considerable royalties his work earns outside of Czechoslovakia...
...On another level, however, Life Is Elsewhere describes the aspiring poet's effort to identify the lineaments of his literary persona...
...But more often, as in "Symposium," an ambitious tale about the tireless Casanova Dr...
...They make it quite clear that day-to-day existence, and sexual life in particular, are basically the same in the East and West, no matter how disparate the governmental systems may be...
...On one level, this is a comic story about the delusions of a mediocre poet doomed from birth to be the consuming obsession of his stupidly self-pitying and resentful mother...
...his books are barred from Czech libraries and bookstores...
...sexual Oblomovs, these people spend their lives in bed, not because they have an uncontrollable need to sleep, but because for them existence is—against all probability—a nonstop merry-go-round of fornication...
...In other pieces, Kundera trains his mordant eye on the sexual ironies of age and youth, seduction and disappointment, the fiery emotions of the libidinous past recollected in a flabby, exhausted present...
...Curiously, very little journalism or fiction coming out of Communist countries allows us to answer this question with any degree of assurance...
...The girl, for her part, unzips her habitual modesty like a strip-teaser, revealing an unsuspected lewdness...
...289 pp., $6.95) must feel only shock and perplexity at the political treatment he has received...
...As Philip Roth notes in his generous introduction to the American edition of Laughable Loves (Knopf, 242 pp., $6.95), Kundera's volume of stories, he has been expelled from the writers' union and fired from his teaching job at the Prague Film School...
...Although we are enormously well-informed about political repression and brutality in totalitarian states, we have practically no familiarity with their social and sexual ways—the quotidian ordinariness, implacably human, predictable and unsensational, that perforce takes up most of a person's time whether he resides in New York, London, Paris, Moscow, or Prague...
...In "The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire," Kundera's remorseless mockery of sexual illusion is scathingly aimed at two breathlessly ardent Lotharios, doomed to pursue their bewitching quarries on a treadmill of self-delusion...
...Sneering at notions of conscience and honor, they pepper every sentence with obscenities as though they invented the words, and reserve their most blasphemous contempt for Solzhenitsyn, whom they cavalierly dismiss as a "Christian martyr...
...To him Solzhenitsyn is a murderous itch that cannot be scratched away, and in a publicity release of blustering chutzpah, he compares himself with the despised Nobel laureate, who, we are haughtily informed, inhabits an "absolutely separate zone, both spiritually and politically," from the bumptious Kuper...
...Like a defiant child, Kuper shouts the dirtiest words he can recall, but they are much less than a man needs to know...
...Without knowing how it has happened, they become insidiously locked into their roles, fighting a savage battle for erotic power that horrifies and exhilarates them...
...But their tragedy is no less profound...
...In the midst of his protagonist's pilgrimage of immaturity, Kundera contemptuously intrudes his own ambiguous commentary on the weakness of lyrical poetry, "a realm in which any statement is immediately accorded veracity...
...Only the consequences of action are different, because action under Communism is judged by political criteria...
...Yet a Western reader unfamiliar with The Joke and first encountering Kundera's quirky talent in his stories or the simultaneously published American edition of his novel Life Is Elsewhere (Knopf...
...They are trapped in the abstract unreality of lust, frenetically reaching for every skirt in sight, never pausing long enough to make a genuine physical conquest...
...His awkward attempts, one need hardly add, are painstakingly documented...
...Kundera's portrait of the monstrous child-eating stage Mom is superb, yet it is difficult to understand what he intends with the foolish and insipid poet-hero Jaromil...
...They are not amusing, merely disreputable...
...Unfortunately Kuper, a young Russian Jewish painter who emigrated to Israel in 1971 and now lives in London, portrays his remembered underworld with a defensive arrogance—and an inadequate literary competence—that continually diminishes the startling force of his material...
...Occasionally the setting and mood of a story offer Kundera exactly the scope he requires for his comic scrutiny...
...Nonetheless, this celebration of sexual egotism as the only valid antidote to the hypocrisies of Soviet Russia is unper-suasive...
...In fact, Kundera's essential attitude toward sex and women—part acid amusement, part macho contempt—is strikingly like that of his American admirer, Roth...
...One can only make a half-hearted guess, for in the end Life Is Elsewhere remains an unenticing mystery, overweeningly arch and coy, a long-winded and unamusing joke without discernible point or punchline...
...Kuper's "heroes" are foul-mouthed drunks, lechers, bums, idlers, uninspired artists, indolent poets, and ne'er-do-wells whose horizons stretch only as far as the next bottle of vodka or the next casual lay...
Vol. 57 • August 1974 • No. 16
