CENTRAL EUROPEAN WRITERS
AS A SOCIAL FORCE
is not to present... Russia to the world (we've had our fill of doing
that), but
to
try, while it's still not too late,
to
rejoin the world
community, to share its burdens and joys, and, at last, to accept its
laws, which apply
to
all humanity.
663
Now, in the magazine
211amia
for October 1991, Chuprinin has an
article called "Functioning Normally: Russian Literature After
Pere–
stroika,"
in which he refuses to be nostalgic for the time when certain
writers claimed the attention of all readers and their works constituted
events. That time ended, he says, in 1988; for three years since then, the
press had been so full of previously suppressed works that one writer
could quip, "These days it's more interesting to read than to live."
Now, however, "books have ceased to be 'our everything,' because they
have ceased to be the sole life-preserver for hundreds of thousands, per–
haps for millions, wishing not to drown in the sea of ideological lies,
social falsehoods, and everyday
poshlosl."
Solzhenitsyn's
Gulag Archipelago
was "the last literary-social event." Now, "what everybody is talking
about" may be "yesterday's TV broadcast, the sharp exchange between
political leaders .. . or the latest program for saving Russia."
"The longed-for freedom - with no omissions, no prohibitions,
nothing passed over in silence - has already been achieved," and one re–
sult has been the discovery that "the circle of those who value literature
precisely as Literature is not so large." Andrei Vozenesensky had boasted,
"America is strong in computers, Russia in readers." But the reading
public is splintering: "It has become clear ... that the previous unanimity
among readers is no longer to be seen and that what is interesting, what
constitutes an event for some, leaves others unmoved." In the time ahead,
Chuprinin concludes, "there will be no books that are events for every–
body; there will be bestsellers, and that is a very different matter." Russian
literature has been "desacralized," and is now "a collective noun,"
designating a plurality of phenomena.
Recognizing the autonomy and plurality of literature is a new thing
in Russian public discourse of the last sixty years, and we can expect
large-scale consequences from it. We shall, for instance, be seeing new
histories of Russian literature, and the constitution of a new canon. On
the other hand, much of the good and useful writing of the Soviet pe–
riod, having lost its surplus value, will - like the good and useful writing
of other countries, and of the post-Soviet period - soon be forgotten by
all but the occasional sociologist or antiquarian. And the subjection of
literature to market forces can be counted on to produce a whole range
of concretely pernicious results, alongside the abstractly laudable ones.
