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MAX HAYWARD
is disgust. It is revolting to quote the vulgar things with which
the pages of their works abound. With morbid prurience, both
of them delve into sexual and psychopathological "problems."
Both of them present a picture of total moral degradation. Here
is a typical example from the work of Daniel-Arzhak: "You see
women walking about the streets, looking like eunuchs-wad–
dling like pregnant dachshunds or as scrawny as ostriches, with
swollen bodies, varicose veins, wadded breasts or tight stays
hidden under their clothes."
One would search the works of Daniel-Arzhak in vain for this passage,
since it actually appears in
The Trial Begins
by Sinyavsky-Tertz. And
Eremin does not so much as hint at the context: the vixenish heroine
of the story is examining herself in front of the mirror and mentally
comparing herself with other women of her age.
Eremin goes on:
They like nothing in our country, nothing is holy for them either
in its present or in its past. They wish to slander and curse
everything that is dear to Soviet man. This is what they write
about Anton Pavlovich Chekhov: "The classical writers-it's
them I hate most. . . . That Chekhov ought to be taken by
his wretched tubercular beard and have his nose stuck in his
consumptive spittle which has unfortunately now dried up."
This is quoted from Tertz's
Fantastic Tales
and is part of the ravings
of a semi-demented graphomaniac who is jealous of the classics.
Sinyavsky is further alleged to have slandered the Soviet army,
but there are no quotations to back up this particular contention. Finally,
and
horribile dictu,
there are things about Lenin which are so terrible
that Eremin cannot possibly reproduce them. The most "terrible" things
about Lenin I have been able to find are a passage in
On Socialist
R ealism
in which Tertz says that it is impossible to replace the cult
of Stalin with a cult of Lenin because "Lenin is too much like an
ordinary man and his image is too realistic: small, bald, dressed in
civilian clothes," and a reference in
The Makepeace Experiment,
not in
the least bit unkindly to Lenin, to the widely-held belief that in the last
days of his life "he bayed at the moon, our Ilyich, knowing that he
was soon to die."
With all these out-of-context quotations, Eremin makes at best only
a case for moral delinquency, which is not covered by Soviet criminal
law. To make a case for criminal delinquency, Eremin asserts that
Sinyavsky and Daniel, by their works, have engaged in psychological
warfare against the Soviet Union, helping those who stir up the flames
of international tension. They are not just morally depraved, but
