22
PARTISAN REVIEW
So he has written a book which is all but designed to be passed
around as surreptitiously as the poems of the hero. Can one conceive of
the impact of
The Joker
if copies were ever circulated hand to hand
through the Soviet , there to give life to that undeclared enclave of
resisters who read Solzhenitzyn and prepare to write more poems .
Perhaps this edition will yet go slipping in. Let us hope we are not
studying it in America fifty years from now like an artifact of hiero–
glyphs while the TV sets emptied of all content by the aesthetic stric–
tures of the final domination merely drone their waves and clots into a
stroboscopic sea and the hour of the wolf is in the neon of every used–
up eternity on that drear dawn .
