WRITERS IN EXILE
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mentalism during the period from 1910 to 1930 or 1935-the great
experimentalism in the theater of Vakhtangov and Meyerhold
and Tairov, of people like Tatlin, El Lissitsky, Rodchenko. One
almost weeps when one hears the roll call of people like Blok,
Esenin, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Bell.
I now ask Mr. Vassily Aksyonov to address this question.
Mr. Aksyonov is one of the great younger Russian writers. He is
fortunate in another sense; he is the son of a woman who is one
of the most extraordinary persons both in Russian literature and
in Russian history: Evgenia Ginsberg, whose two books about
the nature of the whirlwind represent one of the great landmarks
itself of twentieth-century writing. Mr. Aksyonov.
VASSILY AKSYONOV:
It
seems I was once a young writer and I
am still a young writer. Some are so lucky to be ever-green writers.
I have decided to entitle my speech "Gratitude to Our Former
Rulers." Thinking of my own destiny as a writer and of my own
past, I feel I should confess my feelings of gratitude to the Com–
munist rulers of my country. First of all, I thank them for the
frustration they suffered after the death of their idols in 1953. For
a period of fifteen years after that time, they could not find a new
style. Thanks to this frustration, my generation had the oppor–
tunity to express itself in literature, in art, and even in politics.
While they discussed questions like the "cult of personality" and
its aftermath , " socialism with or without a human face" -or
with or without human maxims-socialist realism with shores
or without, etc., we were writing books, sculpting, painting,
playing jazz. The post-Stalin Communists were so diffident that
they saw, even in the armed crackdown in Budapest, an "over–
bending of a stick," -the dreadful consequences of the personality
cult that could have been avoided if ... if ... if. ... Not to
mention Krushchev's hooligan attack on young literature and
art in 1963. That was a definite mistake of the so-called voluntar–
istic leadership, accused the collective wisdom of our Party. Even
in 1966, when Siniavsky and Daniel were on trial, some of the
rulers were uncertain about what they were doing.
They were frustrated even more after the unexpected protests
by many of the new intelligentsia. The frustration was so deep
that some of the rulers were reluctant to see the KGB as the best
tutor for writers . The KGB of that time was rather timid in its re–
lationship with literary circles. The criminal persecution of dis-
