BOOKS
657
Venclova sees the Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky as a philistine
pretending to be an anti-philistine, who tries to impress readers by his
boldness and profundity while offering pompous platitudes, "moral
recipes of the Ann Landers type" and worst of all,
poshlost,
"an aggres–
sive and pretentious sort of banality and triteness."
Venclova's essay on Joshua Rubenstein's
Tangled Loyalties: The Life
and Times of I/ya Ehrenburg
examines the "bizarre destiny" of this
Soviet writer, "a decoy for the dictator," whose life was repeatedly
tainted by moral compromise; he was also the first person, in
1921,
who
managed to emigrate from the Soviet Union legally. Venclova sees
Ehrenburg as his own best censor, whose ellipses were sometimes worse
than lies, an intermediary between Russia's past and Russia's present,
who served the system but was somewhat exempt from its iron rules.
"Born to survive," Ehrenburg, to Venclova, was "the very embodiment
of the slippery and shadowy post-Stalin period known as the thaw," a
term Ehrenburg coined in his novel
(The Thaw)
about the early politi–
cal and cultural stirrings after Stalin's death. Venclova feels that while
Ehrenburg attempted to manipulated the regime, it was he whom the
regime successfully manipulated by rewarding him for his compromises.
The primary purpose of verse, Venclova believes, is to overcome
despair, "to be victorious over entropy." The writers Venclova admires
have inspired hope by preserving their spiritual and intellectual
integrity, inevitably going against the common opinion of their times. To
Venclova, -"that is what writing is all about."
Susan Miron
The Social Construction Blues
THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF WHAT? By Ian Hacking. Harvard
University Press. $29.95.
MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES: Is EVOLUTION A SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION? By
Michael Ruse. Harvard University Press . $27.50'
LET ME BEGIN WITH A CONFESSION: I am one of those old-fashioned
sorts who associates the scientific method with scrupulously objective
observation, the rigorous testing of hypotheses, and explanations of the
natural world that are as precise (and, yes,
true)
as they are often
poetic. No doubt my admiration for scientists who engage in the slow,
