334
PARTISAN REVIEW
tor was with a group under the supervision of a guide, and he
hoped to break away from this guide. He was able to break away,
and went uptown to a bar in New York, where he sat and talked
to ordinary people. And he thought, Isn't it wonderful I'm able
to do this! And then he reported: Actually, this is only a story; it
did not happen.
But now he is here. Mr. Viktor Nekrasov.
VIKTOR NEKRASOV: When you fly across the entire globe,
well, not the whole globe, but half, in order to tell someone
about today's Russian, Soviet literature, you always end up in
somewhat of a quandary. In the first place, who will your listeners
be? Japanese and New Zealand students? Or Shanghai emigres
living in Australia, or in Canada? Former followers of the Ukrain–
ian nationalist Petlyura? Or maybe the newcomers, and among
them literary critics, who know as well as you do all the com–
plexities of the life of a Soviet writer?
And the second thing. You yourself have long been torn
away from your native
soil~l,
for example, for seven and a half
years. You don't know the latest gossip from the House of Writers,
or about who died yesterday or was named "Hero of Socialist
Labor. "
In one of my appearances in Japan, I talked of the vitality
of Russiari literature, about how even during all the terrors and
the Stalins, Pasternak and Bulgakov and Platonov existed, and
were even published, and now Rasputin and Abramov are receiv–
ing State prizes. And after what I felt was such a convincing
speech, a young Japanese man came up to me and said, "You are
contradicting yourself. You say that it's very difficult for the So–
viet writer to work in-such conditions, and then you cite examples
of writers who speak the truth and even receive prizes for it."
And I realized that I had made an error. Or rather, gotten off
the track. Carried away by the Abramovs and Rasputins, I had
hardly said anything about those who actually govern the literary
process-all the Felix Kuznetsovs, Mikhail Alekseevs, Aleksandr
Chakovskys, Sergei Mikhalkovs, Georgi Markovs-who fill the
book shelves and libraries with their many volumes and the pages
of the
Literary Gazette
with monotonous cud about the struggle
of the vanguard with the unenlightened, or with eulogies directed
to a new-fledged laureate of the Lenin prize; about how it's im–
portant for us men of letters to learn adherence to principle, depth
of penetration, breadth of scope from them .
