VASSILY AKSYONOV
A Winged Endangered Species
During my adolescent years, I was obsessed with a desire to be like
all
the others, a happy-go-lucky young fellow with no problems, who
speaks a street slang, plays sports and drinks beer. I resolutely rejected
any
oddities. I learned painstakingly to dodge the questions about
my
parents, who were in prison camps, and to hide my literary tastes; just
not to reveal the presence of any. And so I did, until a certain age, when
all of a sudden, I realized that all these attempts were futile and I would
never be "like
all
the others"; with my parents, "the enemies of the
people," with my half-Jewishness and finally with a simple fact, that I
am
a poet. By the time I turned twenty, I had perfectly developed the
mentality of a pariah in Soviet society. A little bit later, I learned to be
proud of that. Thus, step by step, I was approaching the status of a rebel
and outcast; I considered myself an inner emigre until, to my complete
surprise, I realized that I was not alone: the post-Stalin society had
already formed a stereotype of the rebels and outcasts.
Contemporary society almost immediately forms a stereotype out of
originality, a fashion out of alienation, a caste out of uncoordinated an–
archists. Surprisingly, Russia didn't turn out to be spared from this phe–
nomenon as soon as the Bolsheviks' oppressive regime began to wither.
As a matter of fact, it commenced as early as the first half of the
nineteenth century, when, along with Pushkin's and Lermontov's
characters, Russia was visited by a Byronic type. What was prior to what
in this phenomenon, the chicken or the egg, the literature or the life?
By the way, from where has George Byron himself scooped up his
inspiration? Somehow or other, having turned up as an example of
extreme individualism. the Byronite in Russia vigorously multiplied
himself to the extent of the guards' mutiny against the Emperor in
December of 1825.
The defeat of the uprising and the hanging of the five leaders (three
of them were poets) didn't extricate that vogueish type from Russian life.
On the contrary, the events added a fashionable pallor to its young face,
shaping up the clan of the so-called "superfluous men." Sometimes it is
said about Russians that they're just the imitators of Western trends. It
may be true, but in their imitation, they so very often go farther than the
object of imitation does. Raskolnikov dreamed of imitating the ruthless
conqueror, Napolean, and ended up setting up the Cheka-KGB.
Editor's Note: This essay was first presented as a talk at the Fifty-sixth World
PEN Congress in Vienna, November 1991.
