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PARTISAN REVIEW
with its recognition that, finally, self-discovery always has to be self–
transcendence. One of my favorites is about to come out in English,
a book by a friend of mine namedJiri Grusa, called
The Questionnaire.
VLADIMIR VOINOVICH: My stay here has somehow had an ef–
fect on me, but how, I still don't know myself. For example, a terri–
ble thing has happened to me here: in Russia I usually wrote one
book without being distracted, but here I'm writing simultaneously
- I'm afraid to even say now- about ten books. I begin, write, write,
and then I think, "I'd be better writing this other book." I made a lot
of shelves at home, and on each shelf I put an unfinished, or, let's
say, an only just begun manuscript. I think that in part this may be
the result of some sort of subconscious liberation. I don't mean that I
have become free in the social sense, because in the Soviet Union
many of us tried in general to write what we wanted. But maybe this
is somehow a liberation from the direct bond with the reader, to
whom a writer addresses himself. I don't know about the others, but
I still mentally address myself to the same reader, and though I
know that what we write here is very important to him, now I don't
feel this as tangibly.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: Thank you. It's my impression from read–
ing emigre writings, fiction particularly, that, insofar as one can
generalize, there is a common quality that distinguishes them from
Western writing. And in my opinion they're often better than West–
ern writing, to pick up a theme that Mr. Kohlik mentioned earlier.
Would it be fair, or is it stretching the point, to speak of a Russian
literature that is still based on Russian experience but is free, and
therefore distinguished from, Soviet literature in some ways, and
certainly distinguished from Western writing?
VIKTOR NEKRASSOV: Well, I can talk of the difficulties I have
encountered in the West. It's not even the fact that I have lost touch
with my readers, with the millions of Russian readers with whom I
actually have lost touch. The difficulty is based on something else.
We Soviet writers were suffocated by lies, by the absence of
truth, and by the possibility of setting forth this truth in Russia. But
we derived a certain pleasure from what can be called tightrope writ–
ing. Now this is all behind us, and we have to ask who needs us.
There are few Russian readers, and our problems aren't very inter–
esting to the French, Americans, or Germans. But that's another
question. The real problem is that now I write, and I don't risk any–
thing. So what I'm missing in the West is knowing that I'm coura–
geous.
