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BOOKS
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill .
295
There was no need to recite the lines; the audience knew them by
heart.
It
was thus as early as 1948 - the year Orwell wrote
1984 -
that
Max Hayward became aware of a world still much alive under the
stifling "totalitarian" world of Party domination, a world in which
the interests of "the common people" (with whom, as Leszek
Kolakowski pointed out, Max always identified) and the suppressed
but still smoldering freedom of literature and culture were closely
linked. Pasternak was king of the gypsies, symbolically enthroned,
but wielding real power. When, years later, through the interven–
tion of his mentor Katkov and with the collaboration of Manya Har–
rari, Max translated
Doctor Zhivago,
it was no mere job of work, but a
long-standing commitment to a deeply felt cause.
Max was not literary. He referred to himself as "a vulgar fact–
ologist" and had little patience with what he called "literary twaddle."
Complex interpretation of literary texts, the relationship between
story and plot, form and content, the fine points of structure and
style - in his writing, Max seemed always to be tiptoeing nervously
away from such considerations. But he knew authentic voice when
he heard it. He could hear language stirring against all the struc–
tures designed to muddle and befuddle and bend to other purposes
its efforts to speak the bedrock human. That was his great, iffragile,
gift.
When most Sovietologists were saying, after Stalin's death, that
nothing in the Soviet Union had really changed, because there had
been no major institutional changes, Max was among the few to in–
sist that in the institution of literature at least there had been a real
change, if not of official policy, at least in tone and atmosphere and
the degree of rigor of exercised control. And voices were being heard
in public, saying things that could not have been said a few years
earlier. Perhaps Max went a bit overboard on the importance of Ev–
tushenko and even Voznesensky. Nevertheless, he was not wrong in
pointing out their importance, nor was he mistaken in insisting
later, after they had fallen from fashion in this country, that in spite
of some pretentious hollowness especially in the "platform" poems of
