656
PARTISAN REVIEW
During the purges of the late
I930S,
the Soviet Writers' Union
became an agency of Stalin's Terror against its own members. "In those
days," he writes,
the occupational hazards of writers were much greater than the
occupational hazards of flying planes or climbing mountains.
Nothing similar had ever happened in the history of world culture.
As a result, the Russian and Soviet literary scene remains a disaster
area, a cultural Chernobyl, a field inhabited by surviving mutants
and by several incredibly tough men and women who withstood
the poisoning against all the odds.
He recalls in the late
I950S
(dubbed the pre-Gutenberg period by poet
Anna Akhmatova) the thrill of discovering and memorizing samizdat
copies of Marina Tsvetaeva's poems, full of mistakes and blank spaces,
"compressed and intense to the uttermost limit, and sometimes it
exceeded all limits." While pointing out the "unusual" nature of most
Russian lives of her time, Venclova notes Tsvetaeva's biography "was
something \.ike an adventure novel that grew into a classical tragedy....
She would have been a sort of Russian Virginia Woolf-if the Revolution
which she expected and called for in her youth, had not taken place."
Tsvetaeva, he writes, believed a poet's calling was "to live more
intensely than others, as though for and beyond everyone, for the
expiation of all." Her experience leads him to speculate if there is
perhaps a profound connection between the demands of language and
the demands of ethics. "True contemporaneity," Venclova explains,
"which is the same thing as true immortality, can be achieved either by
obeying the command of one's time or by rejecting it and becoming the
antidote to an era. Tsvetaeva did both."
Two Russian poets come in for rather less adulatory treatment than
Tsvetaeva, Brodsky, Milosz, and Pasternak, whom Venclova feels
belongs in the company of Pushkin and Shakespeare. Agreeing with
critic Stanislaw Baranczak that the case of Russian poet Yevgeny Yev–
tushenko is "among the top ten hoaxes of the twentieth century," Ven–
clova (in
I99I)
rails against Yevtushenko's "fatal half measures, fatal
half truths," explaining that the poet strives to improve his fatherland
without rejecting the main part of the ideology that makes such a pro–
ject hopeless. "In this way, he is the counterpart of his presumably avid
reader Gorbachev. Both attempt to promote something like totalitarian–
ism with a human face. It never worked.
It
never will."
