WRITERS IN EXILE
349
studying at Harvard. Vassily Pavlovich, when you left the Soviet
Union the year before last, I recall you said that this was not a
loss for you; on the contrary, it would have a beneficial influence
on your work in the future. And then you mentioned Nabokov.
Somehow it's difficult for me to imagine that you will become
an American writer, since you write in Russian. I'm interested in
how life in a so-called free country influences what you are writ–
Ing now.
VASSILY AKSYONOV: I'm not going to write prose in English,
no way, because it's too late for me. But if in my childhood I'd
had a governess speaking English, as Nabokov had, or if I'd de–
fected twenty years ago from the Soviet Union to the West, when
it first occurred to me ... Well, anyway, I told you about my
own experience. For me, probably, at this moment of my life, it's
not harmful to my writing but probably rather useful, and I
hope that I will be inside American literary life with my Russian
writing, to be a part of American cu ltural life as well as of my
own culture. You know, when you leave behind forty-nine years
of your life, it means that you have enough luggage for future
writing.
Writing in an Open and a Closed Society
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: We hope there will be some disagree–
ment, some polemics, in what we perceive to be an exchange of
ideas. I assume that not all the dissidents agree with each other;
we don't agree with each other. I think it would be interesting if
we tried
to
air our disagreements as much as our agreements, be–
cause when you keep airing on ly your agreements, you tend to
skate on the surface of the question; whereas you tend to go un–
derneath the surface when disagreements arise.
The subject is, as you know, the writer in an open and a
closed society, which involves severa l basic questions. One is the
effect of censorship on writing. My own feeling is that censor–
ship alone does not create the vitality of literature.
If
it did, then
I for one would advocate censorship in America; maybe we
would keep some of our self-indu lgent writing from publica–
tion. It seems to me that writing of a high order flourished in
Russia under the tsar and in the Soviet Union because of the ten-
