POETRY IN EXILE
605
in
samiz dat
and was later published abroad. He had not at the time read
Orwell; the date in his title was suggested by Amalrik's friend Vitaly Ru–
bin, who had. Although it was not meant in any case as a precise predic–
tion, Amalrik turned out to be off the mark by only seven years. Every–
thing in his book - its shrewd analysis of social formations, of the role of
culture and the intelligentsia, especially of the insecurity of the
nomen–
klatura,
was prescient and eloquent. If anything, he slightly overestimated
the force it would take to bring the Soviet Union down. He envisioned
it as being the result of a military engagement with China when, in fact ,
a much lesser power, Afghanistan, served as well. Not one of our profes–
sional Kremlinologists in the West, or for that matter the researchers of
the CIA, anticipated what Amalrik with his vibrant antennae and fine
literary sensibility had seen clearly and with true poetic vision - the clay
feet of the Krenuin giant.
Russian literature went into exile in part in 1922 and in entirety by
1934, either by spiritual emigration or by displacement abroad. It never
entirely lost its sense of power to change lives or its utopian strain . Yet
the shameless Bolshevik parody of that strain in the propaganda state en–
couraged a stance that reached beyond politics; it revalued aesthetic
standards and derailed respect for traditional culture free of the compul–
sions of narrow nationalism. The attitudes formed in exile reflected a
new trend towards objectivity and toward objectification, in the strong
sense that for writers the proper arena is literature itself. In the turmoil
since the August 1991 coup, no writer has played the kind of active po–
litical role that distinguished Sakharov or even that of the historian Yuri
Afanasiev. Solzhenitsyn, the best known and most compelling figure
among the external exiles, has seemed curiously out of touch. Yet the
writers and poets of Russia have been at work as, in Hegel's image, "the
moles of history." When the ground collapsed, it was not without their
doing.
Charles Russell:
Thank you. How horrible it is to be an administrator
and in the position of having to cut short the words of poets and writ–
ers. Our next speaker will be Oksana Zabuzhko.
Oksana Zabuzhko: I
have titled my remarks, "Ukrainian Literature as
a
Dramatis Persona
in History." In one of his essays, Grigory Pomerants, in
my opinion the most independent-minded thinker in Russia today, tells
the story of a fellow countryman who happened to be in Prague in the
autumn of 1968. A Czech woman on the street recognized the man's
Russia accent and asked him whether he was Russian. Since he was a Jew,
he might have found a good way to avoid this question, but instead he
