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PAR.TISAN REVIEW
novelists should not be snobbish about television and should use it to
reach millions more minds than any book ever could. But as Russia
shows, television is at its best when it is a nonfiction medium. The
imagination, forever childish, loves the gigantic and the miniature, pre–
ferring the grandeur of the big screen or the intimacy of the page.
Therefore, television is inimical to literature, both fiction and nonfiction,
co-opting the one, debraining the other.
Television is only one enemy and not the greatest of them either.
There is the nature of Russian literature itself, as it has taken form in the
last two hundred years, all that there really is of it except for a few scat–
tered medieval masterpieces. From its very inception, Russian literature
was defined by its relationship to the state. It could be either for it or
against it, but it could not be apart from the state. This was not litera–
ture's choice but a choice imposed on it by the state. It started when
Catherine the Great began personally to censor books, merely her right
as an enlightened despot and correspondent of Voltaire. In the margins
of Radischev's
Journey from St. Petersbllrg to Moscow,
Catherine wrote,
"Worse than Pugachev!" She was referring to the Cossack who had led
an army against her state, and she was right. It was the writers and the
readers who would bring down the old Russia .
And when they did, some sort of perverse Hegelian antithesis oc–
curred - the censorship was never worse, the penalties for writers never
more severe than under the Bolsheviks, themselves men of the written
and spoken word. (Stalin was known to quote Walt Whitman.) In any
case, under the Soviets, literature once again found itself in a position
not of its own choosing. That situation came to an end sometime in the
late eighties, though it would be difficult to point to a single publication
that could effectively mark the end of the stranglehold of censorship. I
do remember asking to interview a Russian priest for a book I was doing
and being refused because, as he put it, "There are only two books - the
Bible and
The Gulag Archipelago.
What need is there for any more?" By
his standards, the moment when both Scripture and Solzhenitsyn were
readily available marked the official end of the two–
hundred-year life of Russian literature as a literature forced into
engagement by censorship.
So it turns out that like everything else in the country, Russian liter–
ature is in need of
perestroika .
But as we know from both theory and
practice,
glasnost
precedes
perestroika,
if only because it is easier to shout
than to to produce.
Glasnost
too proved something of an enemy to lit–
erature. Only newspapers and television were able to keep pace with the
headlong course of events that produced a sort of "history shock" in
Russians. Suddenly there was too much important information. Russia
