256
PARTISAN REVIEW
the years, people quarreled with me, chatted with me, threatened me,
tried to buy me, and so forth.
RS:
Did this first confrontation take place in 1962?
EN:
The confrontation (with the head of Soviet ideology and the
Politburo) took place in 1962. But the first confrontation occurred
right after I graduated from the Institute.
It
was in 1955, while Stalin
was still alive. I had done several works which were different from
Socialist Realism.
In
1955, after the Hungarian events-the press
picked this up-I was officially accused of being the head of all
Soviet revisionism. My meeting with Khrushchev is not the begin–
ning but the end, since the world found out about this in 1962.
RS:
Do
you consider yourself a rebel?
EN:
I do not consider myself a rebel, but I consider myself a personalist.
Therefore I was perceived as a rebel.
RS:
During your days of official disapproval , when you were being
harrassed by the authorities, how did you support yourself?
EN:
For two years I worked as a simple worker at a plant. And for ten
years I made my living as a worker, a bricklayer, a longshoreman.
Sometimes I worked helping official artists 'to do their work and got
a commission for it.
RS:
So you actually produced some official artists' work for them?
EN:
Yes, I produced for them and they paid me a commission.
RS:
How did you get your materials, your metal?
EN:
Since getting materials is a State matter, I was forced to infringe on
Soviet law in order to work. I really got them on the black market but
always in such a way that I couldn't be accused formally. The head of
the K.G.B., Shelepin, tried to accuse me criminally, but, after
finishing his two-year investigation, he was forced to apologize to
me. I managed to get around the law so subtly that it was impossible
to accuse me directly of a crime.
RS:
The existence of the black market and the way in which you were
able to get your materials suggest the existence of a community of
some kind.
EN:
In
a certain sense, yes. This is an economic problem. Together
with official economics there is unofficial economics, which
manages to make up for the insufficiencies of official economics.
This is simply life itself.
RS:
You say that there were those who voiced total disapproval of your
work and those who were unswerving apologists for it. But an artist
needs aesthetic criticism. How was this generated or was it limited to
self-criticism?
EN:
A group of friends of mine and I created a particular type of
