YUGOSLAV REPORT
121
tions protesting the insulting and inhuman treatment of Soviet writers
of the stature of Anna Akhmatova? I can't fathom why PEN didn't
speak out for the American writers. But as for its not raising a storm
over the plight of the writers in Communist countries, the answer again
seems to be that PEN is a political organization.
It
pushes where it can
hope to accomplish something. In the case of the Russians, wholesale
denunciation would accomplish little except make the denouncers feel
more virtuous, but, say, the establishment of PEN centers in the Soviet
Union might indeed lead to an easing of conditions there. And this
prospect, which seems close
to
realization, supplied the principal drama
of the recent congress. For the first time, the Soviet Union sent a delega–
tion of "observers," a big step toward joining PEN, setting up centers in
the largest Russian cities, and participating as regular members in next
year's congress.
It was not simply the presence of the seven Russian observers that
augured well, but the fact that the delegation agreed, after much soul–
searching, to split up, and participate singly, each out of the watchful
surveillance of the others, at the five
tables randes,
or seminars, organized
by Keith Botsford, which took place in a small building near the congress
hall and overlapped with the large speechifying plenary sessions. (These
seminars were a new feature of PEN congresses, and had many veteran
members angrily complaining that PEN was being divided into first- and
second-class citizens-which it was-and that the small rooms and the
scheduling of the seminars made it virtually impossible for other PEN
members even to audit-which it did. Each seminar had about ten
participants. Their composition rotated among a specially invited fifty
out of the more than four hundred PEN members who came to Bled,
and included virtually all the famous writers at the congress.) And take
part the Russians did, at first shyly and watchfully, and eventually gain–
ing the full confidence of their cliches. For PEN didn't get Anna Akhma–
tova or Andrey Voznesensky or Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn, who were
invited. We got Surkov himself, some critics and professors, and only one
writer of some note, the novelist Leonid Leonov. These were big bulky
elderly men, full of exhausting affability, who turned out a kind of end–
less verbal bubble gum. The other members, including those from East–
ern Europe, generally treated them with an eager and slightly guilty
politeness that made one think of upper-middle-class white children in a
newly integrated liberal private school welcoming and trying to put at
ease a small troupe of mentally defective children from Harlem. The
way the Russians talked-all that they did not respond to or jovially
evaded-was terribly depressing. Yet they were there. That was what
mattered. And if we did nothing to excite their paranoia, maybe next
