BOOKS
631
this much in his own words.) Writers and poets, like Jews, are natural
scapegoats.
Tertz senses the danger inherent in this negative image of the
writer. He would not like Russian literature to become a single "book
of complaints." But he has no vision or anticipation of a positive
alternative.
In
this, he-and, one may say, the entire dissident
movement-depart from the tradition of Russian literature which, for
over a century, lived in the historical future. The drive toward a better
future, no matter how illusory or misdirected, which animates Gogol,
Dostoevsky, Blok, Maiakovsky, or even Platonov, is absent.
As Tertz points out, the Gulag syndrome is
the
central theme of
Russian literature today. (Russian literature is defined as "dissident
literature".)
It
is a discouragingly bleak and sterile theme, because it
hinges on an unanswered, and unanswerable, question: how did it
happen, and how does it continue to happen, that Ruslan (hero of G.
Vladimov's Swiftian satire), such a
"~onderful,
peaceful, and humane
dog" would become a Gulag guard dog? The existence of millions of
Trezorkas, untrained mongrel dogs, untouched by ideology, offers no
reassurance, because thousands of Trezorkas were, and still are, trans–
formed into Ruslans. The mystique of "the people," in whom Russian
writers of the past put so much faith, is another victim of the Soviet
period of Russian history.
A Voice from the Chorus
is a collection of short essays and
aphorisms, excerpted from Siniavsky's letters to his wife, written while
he was serving a seven-year sentence in a labor camp. (The translation
is always competent, and in places outright ingenious. Hayward's
introduction is excellent.) Interspersed with aphorisms in Siniavsky's
own voice are others, usually quite short, picked out of the general
hubbub of the prison camp. There is a distinct effort to establish the
effect of a counterpoint. I do not believe that it is a success, because
there seems to be no organic bond between Siniavsky's "own word"
and the "alien word" of the chorus. While the persona of
A Voice from
the Chorus
reminds one of Dostoevsky, it is
The Diary of a Writer
and
not
Notes from the House of the Dead
which comes to mind. Chorus
lines and occasional aphorisms which remind one that these thoughts
were thought in a prison camp strike an unresolved dissonance with
the intellectual, not to say bookish, main body of the book.
Siniavsky's aphorisms on the essence of art might be a revelation
to a Soviet reader, but they are Neoplatonic cliches-most of these
thoughts can be found in Schelling and Novalis, or in Dostoevsky and
Apollon Grigoriev. One example: "A metaphor is a memory of that
