WRITERS IN EXILE
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very things with which we tire each other in our kitchens for entire
evenings. There is no trace of unrestrained drunkenness-only
separate, untypical bouts; drug addiction, all the more rare. Only
salesgirls and warehouse managers steal. No one higher up than
a building superintendent lakes bribes. A Communist might
take the wrong step occasionally, but he must immediately be
taken by the hand and put back on the right path.
I remember-true, this was a long time ago, in 1954-how
the whole editorial board of
Novy
Mir,
headed by Tvardovsky
himself, banished vodka from my novella
In My Home Town.
(The latest anti-alcoholic campaign was just under way.) "What
is this, they're already drinking on the first page?" complained
Tvardovsky, who himself was far from an enemy of this sort of
thing. "They can't say two words without a half liter!" And by
his editorial command (I fought like a lion, but what can you do,
being one against everyone else?), half liters turned into quarter
liters, quarter liters into small glasses, small glasses into mugs of
beer ...
It all ended, true , after two hours with Tvardovsky sighing
heavily and saying, "And now let's go down to the bar for a bit
to
drink. I'm exhausted."
And so, in struggles such as this, or even worse, in the ruses,
evasions, reticence, hints between the lines, allusions, decep–
tions-taking all the appearances of a circus tight-rope walk or
of military strategy, surrendering some secondary positions in
order to seize higher ground-we chased after that firebird
known as Truth.
Oh, how we envied the Hemingways and Remarques, our
idols in those days. They wrote about what they wanted, cursed
whom they wanted, and drank what they wanted, and in any
quantity. We couldn't even dream of that.
When I say "we," I mean that portion of writers
(I
can't say
the greater or smaller, but at any rate, a definite portion of writers)
for whom Russian literature of the nineteenth century was a sort
of model, who did not chase after titles and decorations, didn't
drink with the Gribachevs and Sofronovs, but still wanted to be
published by the Soviet Writer publishing house and, hopefully,
with a decent edition. We didn't write things we knew would not
get any farther than the desk drawer; that was something I did
only toward the end. We didn't send our work abroad; at general
