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PARTISAN REVI EW
choosing. But let us presume, the question of truth or falsehood
aside, that by some miracle you were lucky enough to obtain a copy
of
Doctor Zhivago,
a book already read and reread by the entire world
and written by your fellow countryman, Pasternak. And, let us
presume that you managed to read the book overnight, instead of
the two nights for which you were loaned the book, and it inspired
you. No, it totally enthralled you, not by its subject matter, nor by
the academic play of imagery and characters, but by the naive faith
of the author in the power of the subject matter and the necessity of
those images. It was the endless lyrical, religious-philosophical, his–
torical retreats from the subject that so enraptured your heart, with
their ebbs of freedom and inspiration, and their recitatives that
choke in your throat and leave you dizzy. And taking this weighty
unweighable tome under your arm, you run to your best friend or to
your loved one to share with them your inspiration, your happiness
for the second saved-up day. It is this eagerness of yours that has no
particular sense or purpose to it (except that there is a fine purpose,
although it may be hidden, in sharing a reader's joy) that without
further warning already qualifies as dissemination of anti-Soviet lit–
erature under Article 62. The question of printing presses or photo–
copiers does not even arise here. Just in case, God forbid, you
happen to have two friends and both of them happen to reveal
during a KGB interrogation that you gave them the ill-fated
Doctor
Zhivago
to read, then any prosecutor has the right to sign a warrant
for your arrest. But what if you did not know that this novel of
Pasternak's is anti-Soviet literature? This is not a superfluous ques–
tion. In reality, there is no public office in the Soviet Union that
prints lists of anti-Soviet books. At one time, the poems of one of the
classic Soviet poets, Sergei Esenin, were forbidden. There was also a
time when the works of the Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin were erased
as literature and his books were seen as criminal. Today he is viewed
as a much acclaimed writer and his works are published in many
volumed collections.
I remember one day in the early fifties when my father, a party
journalist, brought home a book of the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko,
who was ferreted out by the Stalinist cultural propagandist, Zhdanov
(and to this day there is a city and even a university named after
him). At that time Zoshchenko was seen as a monstrous criminal.
Late at night after my father put my brother and me to bed, he read
the stories aloud to my mother, stories that were printed only after
