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PARTISAN REVIEW
say, "Paris, New York, Paris, New York, Paris , New York. "
Finally it became so stupid to him he stopped naming the cities.
Then a voice yelled out from the audience, "Why aren't you
announcing the stops?" My friend, a little surprised, said, " New
York." In answer, the same voice pronounced, "Stop! I'm getting
off. "
I did the same as the man from the audience: I got off. I
still have many problems, individual and professional, and
nevertheless for the first time in my life, I am happy. And I know
only too well to whom I should be thankful, because the sole aim
of my emigration was freedom . I would like to finish all my
speeches in America with this wonderful word.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: Our next speaker is Yuz Aleshkovsky.
Like Aksyonov, he emigrated to the United States after the 1979
Metropol
dispute. He has written poetry, movies, children's
books, and novels, including
Nikolai Nikolaevitch, Kangaroo,
Camouflage,
and
The
H
and.
He's currently a lecturer at Wesleyan
University.
YUZ ALESHKOVSKY: As strange as it may seem in the West, on
the first morning in Vienna at a picturesque bazaar, where each
person appeared, because of the unimaginable quantity of food,
to be not an inhabitant but an artist shopping for a realist
still-life painting, the seemingly primitive thought entered my
head: But why then the Soviet regime? Please don't think that up
until that morning in Vienna I had never pondered the nature
of Marxism-Leninism and the bloody Stalinism it engendered.
Possibly I was too intent on finding a metaphysical solution to
the problem; or perhaps the search for a convenient sociological
system of explanation interfered with the posing of that ex–
tremely simple and even seemingly idiotic question: But why then
the Soviet regime? Why does it exist, Lord, if three hundred
million people have been deprived of the possibility of eating
normally for decades: Why, if in something over half a century's
time a centuries-old natural culture has been almost completely
razed? Why does it exist, if, in the place of a futile striving toward
social equality, toward brotherhood, toward freedom, the masses
have lived in that which at times is shamefully called in the
West a "closed society" and, to put it more precisely, a prison
of entire peoples unprecedented in the history of mankind?
"There is no answer," Gogol said.
