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PARTISAN REVIEW
substance-abuse specialist resurrected from Belov's early prose. In par–
ticular, vile and despicable things are openly proclaimed about Judaism
as a religion that allegedly "permits to kill members of other confes–
sions." Ivanov preaches to Medvedev about the existence of "a mighty,
organized, malevolent and secret force" that acts by "dividing and rul–
ing"-a formulation almost word for word from the
Protocols.
Brish's
manipulations are made into an allegory of what the Jews do to the Rus–
sians. Ivanov points out to Medvedev that "in order to destroy a peo–
ple.. .it is enough to divide the children and the parents, to turn the
women against the men." At the very end of the book, Ivanov warns his
friend that Brish is intent on leaving the country and taking with him
both his Russian wife and his adopted Russian children: "When you
make a decision, they will be in Arkansas [not a very likely place for a
Soviet Jew to emigrate to] or something like that. You have betrayed
your children!" Advancing an unequivocally political and nationalist
cause, this novel truly marked the aesthetic decline of the Village Prose
in the late 1980s.
IN THE THIRD-and final-knot of the Eidel'man-Astaf'ev correspondence,
the Russian-Jewish historian made a seminal pronouncement on the destiny
of a writer who embarks on a path of anti-Semitism: "Our argument...is
very simply resolved: if you can still write well, or even better, while also
keeping intact your present way of thinking, then you are right. But you will
not be able to. You will follow the example of [Vasilii] Belov, who has so
overcome his own gift with malevolence that he has learned to write per–
fectly talentless prose...." This, to my mind, is the highest point of the
entire exchange.
It
has been noted-by Iu. Karabchievskii and others-that
in his first letter Eidel'man appears too charitable towards Astaf'ev, over–
looking the obvious fact that in his "honesty" about and his "aching" for
Russia (these are Eidel'man's words), Astaf'ev makes no attempt to under–
stand his Jewish compatriots, treating them consistently as threatening
aliens. Be this as it may, Eidel'man is absolutely right in his final judgment
about the destinies of Russian village writers.
Village Writers brought their aesthetic decline upon themselves by
subscribing to a vehemently anti-Semitic narrative of Russian and Soviet
history. While allowing themselves to be manipulated by career anti–
Semites such as the critic Vadim Kozhinov or the poet and publicist
Stanislav Kuniaev, the Village Writers had nearly strangled the artists
within themselves by the middle of the 1980s.
It
was inevitable that they
