POETH..Y IN EXILE
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went from the days when every newspaper said the same thing to a situa–
tion where there were at least seven you had to read just to barely keep
up. Poets complained they didn't have time to think, let alone write.
And readers waxed nostalgic for Brezhnev's stagnation when they had
been able to reread the classics in unhurried calm. Once again with some
peculiar local conditions, Russia had entered the information age, and
there was no turning back.
Glasnost,
as word and idea, had a good lineage. It even appears in
Dostoevsky's
Crime and Pllnishment,
published in 1866, when the charac-
ter Svidrigailov, of all people, looks back at the past and says, " ... a few
years ago, still in the days of beneficent freedom of expression ... " -
"freedom of expression" being the translator's equivalent of
glasnost.
And
Solzhenitsyn was calling for
glasnost
in the seventies.
Perestroika
was a less inspired choice of slogan. The "pere" is Russian
for the prefix "re"; "stroy" means "build" and is echoed in the English
"destroy"; the "ka" at the end is just a Slavic kiss of suffix. But
perestroika
conjures images of machines and factories and edifices being rebuilt and
restructured. It is an image that emerges from the essentially
"engineering" cast of the Soviet mind and recalls Stalin's labeling of
writers as the "engineers of souls." It presupposes something that was
built and that can be rebuilt, yet the tinkering with the machine of the
economy and of politics that has been done has already proved inade–
quate. Literature too will need more than a mere overhaul.
Still, when speaking of the death of Russian literature, one must
preserve a sense of measure. Andre Dementiev, editor of the well-re–
garded literary monthly
YOllth,
took me to lunch at the elegant restau–
rant Sophia on Mayakovsky Square, where a meal of black caviar, stur–
geon, Stroganoff, vodka, espresso, comes to less than sixty cents, even
with a wildly extravagant tip. The customers wore fur hats and breathed
clouds of vapor, and the waitresses simply shivered. The heating system in
the restaurant had inexplicably gone out, and the only vodka available
was American, another mystery. In Russia no one ever really quite knows
anything. The editor clutched his head, then smoothed back his hair and
sat up straight.
"What's the matter?" I asked.
"The circulation of my magazine has fallen by two thirds," he said.
"From what to what?" I asked.
"From three million to one million," he replied.
I didn't know whether to put my arm around him or to laugh out
loud. All the literary journals in America put together wouldn't reach
knee-high to that number. And so I ended up feeling a strange emotion
- compassion tinged with irony.
