IGOR POMERANZEV
65
In contrast, let us say, to the Germans, we have never had pure
philosophy. There were many Hegelians in Russia, but Hegel him–
self could never have been born in Russia. To have pure philoso–
phers in a country of tyrants and slavery would be too much of a lux–
ury. The books of Russian philosophers are a medley of philosophy,
theology, ethics, and belles-lettres. I imagine this might sooner be
considered a positive quality than a shortcoming. The uniqueness of
Russian literature lies in the fact that ethics has become for it the
source of poetry (here I have in mind the painful self-recognition of
the Russian classics, their diseased conscience, their compassion for
the other). Paradoxically, the surrealistic wonders of Gogol and
Dostoevsky are primarily not the creation of forms nor searches for
innovation, but passionate gropings for the spiritual and moral foun–
dations of human existence. For the Russian classicists ethics is
esthetics.
In one of the first issues of "Literaturnaya Gazetta" in 1978, I
read a poem of the well-known Soviet poet, Andrei Voznesensky, a
member of the American Academy of Arts, in which he acknowl–
edges his love for Sirin (Sirin is Nabokov's pseudonym). At about
the same time, during her guest tour of the United States, the equal–
ly well-known poetess Bella Akhmadulina did an interview for the
Voice of America, which the Soviet press decries as a slanderous
enemy radio station. I listened to this interview from a transistor
radio while sitting in my Kiev flat, which was bugged by KGB
instruments. The silvery voice of the poetess movingly spoke about
the "living wonder," the fascinating Vladimir Nabokov.
It
is not my
fault that under tyranny every single word and every single gesture
is tied to ethics.
It
becomes a matter of conscience. I know that the
literary elite in Moscow and Leningrad reads and speaks about
Nabokov without fear, and not only about him. Let me make this
clearer: the literary elites of Moscow and Leningrad are permitted to
keep Nabokov on their bookshelves.
It
was right before my interro–
gations that lasted from morning till late at night, when I was threat–
ened with a twelve-year sentence, that the Moscow poet Andrei
Voznesensky openly praised a line from his beloved writer, Sirin, a
line that was quite safe for him to quote.
Well, I do not believe in this line! From what I can remember,
there was only one appearance of Voznesensky's that remains out–
side of the boundaries of the "permissible." This was a letter to the
Writers Union of the U.S.S.R. expressing his indignation at being
