WRITERS IN EXILE
335
But, if you talk of Soviet literature, then it differs from other
literatures by the fact that the amplitude of its fluctuations is
broader than anywhere else, and its poles are at a distance from
each other such as you won't find in either contemporary French
or German literature.
Pravda
and
Literaturka,
the unimaginably
broad
Novy Mir,
the Parisian
Kontinent
and the Moscow
Ogonyek, Moskva-Petushki,
or
Chonkin,
or A. Chakovsky's
Blokade,
or the next opus of Yulian Semenov-all these taken
together, so dissimilar and even hostile to each other, are called
Russian literature of the second half of the twentieth century.
And in this dissimilarity, hostility, and simultaneity of existence
is contained a uniqueness.
Excuse me, they will say, but in the first half of the century
there was both dissimilarity and hostility. On the one ha!1d, the
initiators: Gorky, Mayakovsky, Sholokhov; after them the Fadeevs,
Nikolay Ostrovsky, Marietta Shaginyan. And on the other hand
Bunin, Kuprin, Teffi, Sasha Cherny, Merezhkovsky, Gippius,
Nabokov, finally ...
Yes, true, that was so. Two worlds. But between them was a
wall, insurmountable.
We knew nothing or very little about each other. We-in
any case, those who lived on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain–
we lived in a tightly soldered tin can. About Bunin we heard
things here and there, something about the Nobel Prize; about
Kuprin, that he came to die in Russia. But about Nabokov? That
he wrote a certain very indecent
Lolita,
and that's all. About
Mark Aldanov, a wonderful, serious writer, I learned, for example,
only after I had come to Paris.
I can't help but recall a certain shameful incident from my
biography, about which, incidentally, I wrote some twenty years
ago, and which, by some miracle, was published. This happened
in 1956 or 1957, in Leningrad. Alberto Moravia had arrived, al–
ready famous in Italy, while only just published in Russia. We
were invited to spend an evening with him, to talk on some
" progressive" themes. We met in the Hotel Europe for a cup of
tea. (No vodka, for God's sake!) The participants were represen–
tatives of the vanguard, fairly liberal
(Novy Mir,
understand!)
Soviet literature. The tedium went on for an hour and a half. We
knew a little something of Italian neorealism and had just read a
few of Moravia's short stories, while he knew, I believe, nothing
about us. Finally, in order somehow to bolster (he foundering
