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PARTISAN REVIEW
denied his regular visit to the United States. I return to the idea of
the peculiar interrelatedness of ethics and actions under a state of
oppression. How can a person not be ashamed, especially a person
who sees himself as the national poet of Russia, of demanding a visa
in such an offended manner, when ninety-nine percent of his fellow
countrymen cannot even dream of a day-long trip to the West? How
deeply Voznesensky wept in his poem, dedicated to the Latin Amer–
ican poet, Obregon Morales, murdered by rightist reactionaries. I
also detest the murderers of Morales. I also weep for his death. But I
will only believe Voznesensky's tears for Morales when he will say
but one word in defense of his fellow countryman, the Ukrainian
poet Ihor Kalynets, who was put behind barbed wire simply because
he loved books and was true to his conscience. I will believe Voz–
nesensky's tears when he will voice indignation at the actions of
camp guards, also his countrymen, who took away and destroyed
the translations of R.M. Rilke and several hundred poems, written
by Vasyl Stus during his seven years of imprisonment. Who else can
be expected to stand up for the right to read and write if not writers
themselves?
In October, 1978, I went to a book fair in Frankfurt. I went not
as a tourist, but as a political refugee. I first went to see the Soviet
pavillion. There were not many people there. A dispatched police
unit patrolled the pavillion. I lost track of time and spent about one
and a half hours at the fiction section. There were books by Boris
Pilnyak,
*
who was killed in the thirties and is only occasionally
mentioned in literary essays since then. There were also books by
Aleksei Remizov,
**
who lived and died in emigration. These books
came out in a limited edition when I was still in the Soviet Union
• Boris Pilnyak was one of the most popular Russian writers in the Soviet Union in
the period following the revolution. His short stories were published in English
translation in a collection,
Mother Earth and Other Stories,
translated by Vera Reck and
Michael Green (Praeger, 1968).
••A1eksei Remizov was a prolific Russian writer who died in 1957 . His works
published in English translation are:
The Clock,
translated by John Cournos;
On a
Field Azure,
translated by Beatrice Scott; and
Fifth Pestilence,
translated by Alec
Brown. All three were published by Hyperion , 1977.
