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PARTISANREVIEW
"Alas, for the time being, I don't have any other writers." The Soviet
Union Communist Party, always loyal to Stalin's traditions, before each
holiday addressed the Soviet writers with a slogan: "Soviet writers,
strengthen your ties with life, create more profound characters from our
remarkable contemporaries!
In 1960, I, a young author, for the first time entered the Writers'
Union Building to see, first of
all,
a big slogan in the lobby: "Writers ar
the faithful assistants of the Party!" One might have said: "Give up
all
your hopes, everybody who comes here!" However ... one might have
said that least of
all
I, a wolf cub of Kolyma's litter, should join this
collective farm; however, I passionately dreamed of becoming a member
of that union, a Soviet writer of the Sixties. It's hard to believe, but that
union completely unified and, down to the slightest detail, controlled by
the Party and the KGB, was in those years, perhaps, the only, so to
speak, "nest of sedition," the only small pocket of resistance to the
overwhelming bacchanal of totalitarianism. Established by Stalin in
1934
that union, immediately after Stalin's departure, started bubbling with
sedition, to produce some ambivalence, against he grain of collective
wisdom, literary works.
There was a guess: Stalin committed a serious mistake as he spared
the authors' literature. A serious disproportion was created by the very
presence of a group of literati, i.e., the individualists, in a completely
collectivized society. Under
all
ideological regimentations, a writer,
nonetheless, still worked alone. This means, at least hypothetically, that
he remained susceptible to fits of extreme individualism known as
"inspiration." He could be, and quite frequently was, a narcissist, nurtur–
ing his vain "ego." Not seldom did he want to be called a "master of
minds" or even a "subtle stylist," instead of a "faithful assistant to the
Party." Lonely writing and twenty volumes of the Encyclopedia behind
his shoulders created some megalomaniacal proclivity to the throng of
classics, rather than to the Central Committee's literary section. Some–
times he was even visited by the seditious idea of a perishable existence,
and could be struck by the notion of futility, and could question the
grandeur of the "Great Five-Year Plans."
Earlier than all the others, the writers started getting out of control.
Not without reasons, Nikita Khrushchev believed that the
1956
Hungarian uprising was fomented by the members of the Petofi Club. In
1963, brandishing the Bolshevik's fist, he shouted at us: "We won't let
you make your own Petofi Club! We'll wipe you off of the Earth!"
I've known a few writers who buried their new creations, literally
dug the manuscripts into the planet Earth. Let us visually imagine the
process of that sacrifice. A symphonical conclusion of the opus, the last
touches of chords, the dialogues with the gods are dying away in the
