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conversation, he asked us what we thought of Kafka. There was a
painful pause, and then one of us, I'm afraid it was I, asked:
"About what?"
About what! And this was in 1956 or 1957. After Stalin,
during the "thaw."
I am citing all this to show how we were cut off from every–
thing. Two worlds, side by side, and we knew nothing of one
another. We heard of these things only when we could pick up
the voice of the late BBC commentator, Anatoly Maksimovitch
Goldberg.
The radio-BBC, Voice of America, German Wave, Radio
Liberty-this is what the Soviet man cannot live without.
In
Ber–
lin they erected a terrible, shameful wall that is a lways being im–
proved. For more than twenty years now it has divided two
worlds, but it didn't succeed in severing contacts, intercommun–
ication, mutual penetration, mutual interest, curiosity, attraction
for one another.
We who live here know less, of course, than we would like,
but still we know about much that goes on behind this Berlin
Wall, sometimes more than those who live on the other side
(about Afghanistan and Poland, for example), and those who
live there come here at times, talk about things, ask questions;
sometimes something is explained, they manage to read some–
thing of "ours," hear something on the "slanderous" radio
through all the jamming. No, communications have not been
severed. They check what you take across the border-what
books, journals, manuscripts-but they can't sever communica–
tions. The main thing is mutual interest, mutual attraction.
A much more serious question: What do we write about?
Who are our readers? To whom do we address ourselves?
In
the Soviet Union, of course, our reading audience is the
largest, the most demanding and captious, a fact to which we
writers are eternally indebted.
In
the West the picture is different.
The French or German readers (and therefore the publishers) are
not so concerned with our Russian problems, and the Russian
readers can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
But we want to write. From each of us there bursts out: I
can't remain silent!
Oh, how difficult it was for us to write at home. Everthing
is prohibited. You can't drink, can't love, can't talk about the
