356
PARTISAN REVIEW
Alexander the Great said, "Oh!
If
I'd had an army like that, with
those weapons and missiles and bombs, I definitely would be the
ruler of the world forever." Napoleon said, "No, I wouldn't need
those weapons. I would be able
to
rule the world much more
simply if I had a newspaper like
Pravda,
because then nobody
would know about Waterloo." I believe that this joke, unfortu–
nately, has much more truth in it, and anybody who lives in the
Soviet Union knows about that.
When people speak about literature in the Soviet Union,
they usually mean what in English-in America at least-is
called "fiction." Fiction, such as when people write about
worlds that they imagine and which they populate with heroes–
whether to look closer at life or to look at life from a distance-is
still called fiction.
But I want
(0
talk about a special Russian type of what in
America is called nonfiction literature, which in part at least ap–
peared to relieve the hunger for information in the Soviet Union.
In
that miraculous period of Soviet history after the death
of Stalin, and roughly up to the years
1965-1966,
certain things
could be published officially, from Aksyonov's
Ticket to the
Stars
to
Solzhenitsyn's
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisov ich–
books written by authors in this room or in other places. And at
that time, it looked like the Soviet authorities weren't arresting
people for their writings. At least we didn't know about such ar–
rests, although there were cases even during that period. But
still, this was probably the mildest period in Soviet history, in
terms of literature and many other areas of life.
It
all changed
almost overnight, with the arrest in Moscow of the writers
Siniavsky and Daniel; in Kiev and other places, of other people.
And in those years the harrassment of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
started as well.
At that time, a certain place in the Russian literary scene
started
to
belong to a special kind of literature-literature, we
can say, in defense of Russian literature, literature that appeared
in defense of Russian writers. People started
to
write letters and
articles in defense of arrested writers, to collect them in volumes,
to send those volumes abroad, and
to
circulate them in
samizdat.
Aleksandr Ginzburg and Yuri Galanskov and other people who
helped them made a collection of documents that was called the
White Book in Defense of Siniavsky and Daniel.
I didn't help
