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that Dr. Loebl didn't talk of his experiences in prison, about
how painful it was.
But then how can there be any dialogue between a prison–
a well-organized prison-and the free world? But the Americans
still say: You're wrong, because if you have a preconceived notion
that a bandit is a bandit, and you can only talk with him in the
language of power, then he'll be a beast. You must speak with
him as with a person. I wish I could speak in public somewhere
to tell people not to believe their Marxist professors. We know
what we see, know when they grab you by the throat and see in
your eyes, not just in your words, whether you believe them or
not. Not a single dictatorial regime orders you to love it; it says:
Listen to me, submit to me while I exist. But in the Soviet Union
we must love our authorities, and this is something people can't
understand .
In
general, we have here an eschatological sense of
the end of the world, because people are naive and don't under–
stand what is going on. This is probably what possesses all us
Russians; this is not only my pain. Understand, you who write,
try to explain things, because we will all perish together if we
don't understand something today. Thank you.
EUGENE GOODHEART: What I'm going to ask may sound a
little perverse coming after that impassioned statement, but this
is really a follow-up to Professor Bell's question. I think Mr.
Nekrasov spoke of writing in the Soviet Union as a kind of jug–
gling act: you have to be a circus performer, you have to be very
resourceful, ingenious, inventive, fantastic. And now that Mr.
Nekrasov and other dissident writers have left the Soviet Union,
they don't have the problem of avoiding censorship. And so the
question is, How do you compensate in your work for the loss of
censorship?
VASSILY AKSYONOV: Censorship has subtle meanings. For
example, Yuri Trifonov said that censorship can give you some
opportunities to develop your peculiar style, because in trying to
find some loopholes to avoid the restrictions of censorship, a
writer can develop in more and more sophisticated ways. But it
seems to me that Yuri Trifonov was the only writer who really
succeeded. But here in the West we face the problem of inner cen–
sorship, the censorship of taste.
JAPANESE GRADUATE STUDENT: As you can see, I am
Japanese, a graduate student of Russian literature, presently
