POETRY IN EXILE
595
Asi a became Kazakh, and their republic Kazakhstan. " Stalin's thick
Georgian accent smears a "k," and the name of an entire nation is
changed! The Kazakhs have voted to change the color of their £lag from
the red of Communism to the green of Islam, but they're still not quite
sure what to do about their name, which, with the original hard "k"
means, ironically, "the free."
Fewer people will be speaking Russian . In East Berlin, every German
I spoke with who had learned Russian in school refused to speak it with
me, even though it meant having a simple-minded conversation in my
pidgin German. Every day memory cells containing Russian words will
dim out in millions of brains. The Russian birth rate is declining, and
Russian men are dying earlier all the time . Nature and history conspire
against the Russian language. As the international language, English is
triumphant. Even the most humble sidewalk kiosk in Moscow, with little
for sale besides Marlboros, a gray knitted sweater, and a few watchbands,
will display its name in English, the characters themselves more chic than
Cyrillic ones. Russian youth adores English characters, especially on T–
shirts and swea tshirts. And it is now
de rigellr
for educated Russians to
sprinkle a little English into their conversation. English is also wafted
through the air on music, rock-and-roll having become the soundtrack
of the age.
It may not be entirely bad that the Russian language is in a state of
contraction. It is in desperate need of purifica tion. In the years of Com–
munism , the language was polluted every bit as much as the environment.
The eilluents ofbureaucratese have deformed syntax. Russian has become
a language of blood-stained abstractions - collectivization, repression,
rehabilitation . And there is simply no calculating the damage done to it
by all those Marxist categories with their grandiose fuzziness. Yet para–
doxica lly, Russian literature's greatest enemy now may well be the very
forces that are liberating the society. Those are the "objective" historical
forces of which the Marxists were so fond. So then does Russia arrive at
Fukuyama's "end of history ," voting, consuming, and drifting with all
the rest of us. Writing thirty years before Fukuyama, Andrei Siniavsky
said in his book that still bristles with brilliance and irony,
On Socialist
Realislll:
The modern mind cannot imagine anything more beautiful and
splendid than the Communist ideal. The best that it can do is
to
re–
store to circulation old ideals of Christian love and the liberty of the
individual. But it has been unable so far
to
set up a new Purpose.
