34
PARTISAN REVIEW
one's nostalgia for taking a risk-which, by the way , Nekrassov has
already done here more than once , in his travel sketches, which don't
correspond with opinion established among emigrants in the West.
VIKTOR NEKRASSOV: I don't think that Maximov's
Rhinoceri
is
his best work, but to say that this is Soviet ideology is, to put it mildly,
unsophisticated . I think that we are fortunate here precisely because
we can criticize one another without tripping anyone up or depriving
them of a piece of bread.
We can criticize.
Here we're not threatened
with imprisonment or expulsion from the Party , from the union. So
let's cross arms without offending one another and without pinning
labels on each other. We had enough of that in the Soviet Union .
MIHAJLO MIHAJLOV: I would like to answer Nekrassov in one
way. Precisely speaking, I am not in exile; I am from the Yugoslav
part of the Soviet Union; I am not an emigre. But, in general, I am a
Yugoslav dissident who has been tried five times. I'm in a somewhat
different position because, for almost two decades now , all my books
and articles have been published in the West. I lectured at Yugoslav
universities, and now I lecture at American universities, so for me it
doesn't make as much difference being here.
If
a writer has something
very important to tell the people, to tell somebody, he will find ways
to do it whether he knows the language or not . So for me it's rather
difficult to understand this business of saying, "I'm writing for these
people, not for those people; I'm writing for Russian people, for
Czech people, and Ukrainian people and so on. " I don't see any
sense in that.
VALERY CHALIDZE: This is just a suggestion for our chairman .
Because it will be a long time before so many prominent writers and
dissidents are together in one room again , maybe we should ask
everyone's opinion about the future development of Russia.
EFIM ETKIND: In Stalin's time there was slavery in the camps,
feudal dependence on the extreme exploitation in industry - the
maximal development of monopolies in the form of state ownership
of enterprises. I believe that development of the future must without
fail take the course that mankind has taken up until now, the course
of increasing man's freedom . I not only believe in the democratiza–
tion of Russia, I am absolutely certain that this is a thing of the fu–
ture, maybe not the near future, but it's inevitable . This is one of the
reasons I stand for democratic development, and not for some sort of
authoritarian system in Russia that would dignify the nonfreedom of
man .
