662
PARTISAN REVIEW
Other prohibitions were listed in a volume called by those who
worked with it "The Talmud"; the organizers of an exhibit on the sub–
ject, scheduled to open in the summer of 1992 at the Moscow Library of
Foreign Literature, announced plans to include a copy of this elusive
volume.)
The resl/lt is that th e sitllatioll oj RI/ssia ll writers alld readers ill
RI/ssia
IIOW
promises illcreasillgly to resemble that oj America/! writers and
readers.
The process of "raising sunken ships," in Marietta Chudakova's
phrase - that is , of publishing previously suppressed writers, works,
themes, and styles - seems now to be nearing completion, and yielding to
another process, that of "normalization" of the literary situation (for
better or for worse) as we understand that word. Let me once again cite
recent testimony from the Russian press.
In
an article entitled "An Outline of the Crisis: The Socio-Cultural
Situation and the Literary Process" in
LiteratI/moe obozrellie
(Number 3,
1991), Alexsandr Ageev presents "a picture of the gradual
seCIIlarizatioll
alld del1locratizatio/!"
of literature [my italics - D . F.
J.
In
Russian literature
today , he finds "a healthy, elemental process is taking place which I
would call, by analogy with the currently fashionable term in economics,
'prillatizatioll'."
Though old mentalities may slow the process (because
"the overwhelming majority of readers are not ready for the new rela–
tions with literature, and continue to look to it for final answers and
authoritative chartings of goals"), it nonetheless promises to end the sin–
gularity that Chernyshevshy and others proclaimed. The new literature,
Ageev finds, will operate "in its own discrete world, knowing that
alongside it are [the worlds ofj science, religion, and philosophy - not to
speak of an enormous number of independent, rational individuals."
The other voice I would cite as symptomatic of the present con–
dition of Russian literature is that of Sergei Chuprinin, who has set up as
a leading advocate and analyst of "normalization." Three years ago he
published in the journal of the Writers' Union,
LiteratI/moe obozrwie,
(no. 3, 1989), an article called "Out of Discord: Subjective Observations
on the Literary Criticism of 1988," in which he declared :
For so long we Russians have based our hopes on our "specialness,"
on the originality of our historical path and nature (at first religious ,
then governmental, then ideological, and finally ethnic) - and we've
gotten so many lumps and black eyes than ks to those hopes - that it
may well be time to stop, time to seek in ourselves, our soul and our
culture not what sets us apart from the rest of the world, but rather
what is common to all human beings no matter where they were
born or where they find themselves living, whether in Moscow or
Osaka, in Velsk or Chicago. I am convinced that our histori cal task
