CENTRAL EUROPEAN WRITERS
AS A SOCIAL FORCE
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Ellendea Proffer's Ardis, Chalidze Publications, Inter-Language Literary
Associates, and the Chekhov Publishing House; by such independent
periodicals as the
Novyi
ZllIImal;
and by the premier editions of poets -
Gumilev, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak - produced here. A histor–
ical chapter would consider Russian writing as mediated for Americans by
translators, publishers, reviewers, and, beginning some fifteen years after
the end of the Second World War, by several generations of American
scholars whose engagement with the Russian language and culture went
beyond the occasional. There might, if someone could devise a way to
avoid distressing generalities, be a consideration of the impact of Russian
writing on American writers, and there would surely be a tracing of the
reception of Russian writing by the American reading public, an analytic
charting of the place it has occupied in the American literary
conscIOusness.
In
the absence of such a book, I want to use the title I was assigned
to cover a few remarks on the ultimately unknowable situation of
literature in Russia today - unknowable because what Russian scholars
like
to
call "the literary process" is clearly carving out new channels, not
all of them yet mappable.
In
the interests of concreteness and economy,
much of what follows is in the form of quotation, much of it taken
from the Russian press; the American angle comes chiefly from the fact
that an American is doing the quoting. But, as Bakhtin has insisted (and
Stavrogin before him), the same words take on different meanings de–
pending on who utters them and in what situation.
I group my remarks under three headings. The first two sections
("The Singularity of Russian Literature" and "The Double Standard") set
up a context for the last ("Toward Normalization") which sketches the
current state of affairs.
The Singularity of Russian Literature: By the middle of the nine–
teenth century the complaints of earlier decades that Russia had no
literature commensurate with that of contemporary England, France, and
Germany had ceased; what came to be called the Golden Age of Russian
literature was already under way. And the critics who promoted it - not
only Russian critics, but the most influential ones - were quick to
emphasize its distinctiveness. The young Dmitrii Pisarev explained in
1861:
The English have Dickens, Thackeray, and IGeorge] Eliot, but they
also have John Stuart Mill; the French have journalists and socialists as
well as novelists. But in Russia the whole sum of ideas about society,
about the human personality, about social and family relations, is
concentrated in fiction and in the criticism of fiction; we do not have
