WRITERS IN EXILE
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was shrinking. And the feeling of freedom was also growing.
Maturity brought about more courage and more determination.
From time to time, it even seemed that we would overcome. I
thank our watchdogs for their weakness in those times, which
produced such happy false feelings. For surely our life has con–
sisted of a mixture of false and true feelings, which is, believe me,
the great fertilizer of poetry and prose. Alas, our generation has
left behind a horrible memory of terror and Gulag, and it is hard
to sustain the carnival mood of renaissance with a memory like
this. Alexander Blok has written:
Those who were born during the deaf times
fail
to
recall their path.
We, the children of Russia's horror years,
cannot forget anything.
The contraposition of "the deaf times" and "the horror
years" implies that by
deaf,
the poet meant the quiet, peaceful
years. Without memory, literature is dead. "Old wounds are hid–
den treasures," Yuri Trifonov once said. From this perspective, I
would dare say that Russia is not a bad country for a writer: we've
never suffered from a surplus of tranquility. There is definitely a
lack of "deaf times," and a good deal of wounds and of "horror
years." So, once again, we have sufficient reason to thank our
rulers.
One can hardly regard that false renaissance period as deaf.
Nevertheless, our memory has not been totally awakened. I have
often asked myself, Why was I so reluctant for so long to put my
memory into motion? Why did I not recall the landscape of
Magadan, with its watchtowers, the thousands of prisoners under
escort, my mother's face in the window of the KGB car ... ? I
used to lull myself: "It's not yet time for recollections like these."
And apparently it wasn't. Obviously I had a sort of subconscious
feeling that this gloomy memory would be out of place in our
village feast; it could damage the carnival mood of our generation.
The end of this Soviet serenity has an exact date: August 21,
1968, the night of The Fraternal Assistance for our Czechoslova–
kian brothers. That was a turning point for post-Stalin Com–
munists; they reached the end of their search for a new style.
That was also a great moment for us. The invasion brought
