VASSILY AKSYONOV
183
night. Then the author takes a metal box - in some cases, the round, flat
movie-film boxes were used - puts his creation inside - the "unperishable
stuff," as it was trendy to say
in
those times - and comes out to a grove
with a shovel. The Milky Way glitters. There are no witnesses to the
burial but the nightingales and fire-flies. Whey did he do so? For his
personal safety? If so, why did he write that dangerous stuff? For
posterity's enlightenment? Well, there is so little chance that posterity
would dig in the right place. Lamentably little chance, alas. And only the
purely metaphysical, sheer conceptualist aspect of the action is worth
talking about.
"The goal of creativity is self-sacrifice, not hoopla, not success,"
wrote Boris Pasternak. Somehow he smuggled his novel to Italy. Either
he, or Solzhenitsyn, or other lone rebels, with their extremely developed
individualism, were somehow eager to bring "the message" to society, to
bum the peoples' hearts with their word.
The breakup of Communism introduced a curious paradox to our
writers' life. Our beloved, so fruitful and dependable device of sarcasm
started fading, the familiar facets of a rebellious personality got somehow
erased. We're going to come closer to this them as we're approaching
the West; however, so far, we still have in sight the awkward, though
heroic struggle between our "lonely hero" and the soft, strangling ma–
chine of the post-Stalin state.
As
a natural result of this struggle, the
hero was elbowed out into emigration, no matter whether external or
internal. Both sides in that fight were wrong. It seemed to the soft
machine that if it would spit out that indigestible morsel, its limbs would
stop entangling into meaningless knots, and
all
its peristalsis would obtain
some other sense than that of the self-suffocating. Meantime, the hero
regards himself as Laocoon and hopes that a breaking through the boa
constrictor-like walls of the machine will salvage his personality.
And what has happened in reality, i. e., when the desired separation
was obtained? The machine kept going on with its self-suffocating pro–
cess, since this was its predestination from the beginning, and the hero
was
suddenly struck with the idea that his personality might be erased
without having that struggle, that his muscles would wither and his spirit
would languish without the enemy and therefore, in wild bursts of self–
protection, he kept performing the same motions, stretching the same,
now absent snake-monster. Time was required to make a stop, and
to
inhale and regard the new shores. And so, yours truly, eleven years ago,
having exchanged a four-digit abbreviation with an overly rumbling
COnsonant on the end for a three-digit one with an oblong and
resounding, like an echo in the woods, vowel on the end, that is, having
moved out of the USSR-R-R to the USA-A-A, looked around and
asked
myself: "Where am I?"
