POETRY IN EXILE
591
politics, there are two things in which the poet is an expert. Human
suffering and human dialogue.
Charles Russell:
Thank you. Richard Lourie.
Richard Lourie:
"Is Russian literature dying?" I remember the first time
that thought, keen as a paper cut, went through my mind. I was sitting
with Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner in their kitchen in Moscow.
There was good food, cognac, and that effervescence of spirit that rises
in the Russian intelligentsia as the evening grows later. Suddenly,
Sakharov jumped up, with an odd expression of glee and alarm on his
face. "It's already eleven-thirty, time for
Vzglyad!"
I had heard of that
new television program whose brash fearlessness had the whole nation
watching and talking. This was March of 1988,
glasnost
at its headiest.
"Come on," Sakharov said to me, "you'll like it."
We went into the room next to the kitchen which, like all rooms in
Russian apartments, had a multiplicity of identities - living room, study,
bedroom. Sakharov lay on the bed, seemingly relieved to be free of his
body that had something of the endearing ungainliness of a giraffe. For
about twenty minutes, the three of us sat in rapt silence, mesmerized by
the searing reportage and the talk-show segments where people spoke
passionately - not about "women who cheat on their husbands with
their daughters' boyfriends," but of prison and history. Sakharov was
right; I liked the program, but that was putting it mildly. I had never
seen television like that, truly wired
to
every nervous system and truly
creating collective consciousness. It was invisibly weaving in the lacunae
of memory, a nation in conversation, confession, catharsis.
"But, Andrei Dmitrievich," I said, "this is going to be the death of
Russian literature."
"God forbid!" he cried with real pain and a touch of impatience -
he wanted
to
keep watching.
Yet in this century, God is not famous for intervention. If Russian
literature dies, it will be of natural causes, historical forces. Television is
one obvious source of the demise. We know that television can not only
transmit reality but become reality. Every event gets its signature image:
champagne and dancing on the Berlin Wall. The war in Iraq took the
process one step further. The signature image of that event was the one
that originated in the television set in the nose of a smart-bomb, televi–
sion seen on television. The great high-tech forces of the age take differ–
ent form in different places. Mostly distraction in America, television in
Russia became a means of constructing consciousness. In either case,
whether television saps or inspires, the net effect for literature is much the
same. I have seen Gabriel Garcia Marquez argue, on television, that
