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number at least one great poet, Tiutchev, and one almost-great novelist,
Goncharov. A censor's lot was not a happy one; like ·the imperial eagle,
he needed two heads. Nicholas the First's chief censor, Uvarov, wished
literature would simply go away or at least be quiet for a decade or two.
The "grand inquisitor" Konstantin Pobedonostsev wanted literature
"frozen" to prevent it disturbing the status quo.
In addition to censorship and bans on publication by certain writers,
the old regime punished some writers convicted in its courts by re–
stricting their right of residence, confining them sometimes to a family
estate or home, sometimes to a certain area, always depriving them of
access
to
St. Petersburg or Moscow, and often forbidding them access
even to provincial capitals where they might, it was felt, make trouble.
Exile was a sentence tacked on to the harsher punishments of prison and
hard labor. [n itself it was not so much a punishment as a means of
political sanitation, keeping the troublesome and politically infected out
of the centers of activity.
It
was a sentence inflicted in bad conscience -
"what does one do with such people?" - and for the writer it confirmed
the alienated, exiled state of the literary enterprise. Physical exile was the
concrete embodiment of the spiritual exile from the state into which
literature had entered.
The Bolshevik regime during its first few years, which Akhmatova
later referred to as its "vegetarian period," made some partly successful
attempts to attract important writers to its own revolutionary-utopian
vision. Blok, the mystic, thought he saw a wraithlike Christ figure lead–
ing on the revolutionary guards, even as they shot at him. Mayakovsky,
whatever his distaste for proletarians in the flesh, responded to the daz–
zlement of the brave new world projected by the regime, and he turned
his gifts to work for its propaganda machine. But of the
intelligenty
who
survived the grim years of the civil war, at least half chose to emigrate
later. The year of decision was 1922. It is true that Berlin provided a
kind of halfway house for the emigre community, where Bolshevik pub–
lishing houses were at work, and from which (for another year or two
anyway) one could still return to Russia. But Russian culture, including
literary culture, virtually split in two at this juncture, with half of it in
exile abroad.
Within Russia not all writers who remained supported the Revolu–
tion, as did Esenin and Mayakovsky. Some stayed in spite of their distaste
for the regime, out of patriotic, or matriotic, reasons; out of some sense
that their culture and the Russian soil were indissolubly linked. But by
the end of the decade Esenin and Mayakovsky had gone into the ulti–
mate exile of death by suicide, while many others, who lived on, entered
a spiritual inner exile . They published, if at all, on ly with the greatest
difficulty, and that would soon stop. On the whole they did survive, es-
