422
PARTISAN REVIEW
He had long observed that there's no such thing as too great a com–
pliment. It's true not only for women, but for the Party bosses as well,
who ate it up. They devoured every letter of the crap he wrote in two
weeks. He was disgusted with himself and the literary souffle he had
cooked up for them. They weren't even bothered by the lack of subtlety
in the title
Hail the Soviets!,
the fools.
How voraciously his liberal friends sank their teeth into this work! You
got it right, my confreres! Don't have any doubts about it. A tsar or some
other dictator-it's all the same to me. My whole life is lived within ten
inches-from the tip of my nose to the tip of my pen. It's high time you
understood this. We're a terrifying breed-carnivores, cannibals. We have
no mercy even towards our own wives, sacrificing them to the Moloch of
the Word. What kind of woman understands and accepts this? The most
rare, the incomparable. Someone like Masha. True, Masha?
She didn't answer, just smiled gently. Only Masha had such a smile.
She brushed a crumb from the lapel of his jacket.
Pandering to the authorities.
It
doesn't enter my colleagues' stubborn
heads that they live by exactly the same cannibalistic principle as the
system they despise: "He who is not with us is against us." What about
compromise? The whole Western world would have fallen apart long
ago if not for that principle. It's only in my adolescent Russia that "com–
promise " is a dirty word.
"He compromised his conscience . What a shame!" I spit on all these
big words. My passion is greater, stronger than I am, and I will be
judged not on what I've said, but on the best I've written. It was the
right thing to do-to write that novel.
It
brought me the State Prize in
Literature and that piece of tin, the Order of Glorious Labor. Of course,
it wasn't the money and state honors I was after. I got myself something
more precious-they left me in peace to do my true work. Otherwise I
would never have been able to see that novel about the Civil War in
print. Those years forever scarred my memory with their blood and
destruction of all that was truly dear to me-my youth, my tender and
gracious world that the revolution consumed. I couldn't help but write
that novel. I had to get it out of my system.
When I brought the manuscript to the publisher, they jumped at the
chance to please me, a decorated writer, to find a way to get my work
through their very own censors. And they did it! They prefaced it with
a long article instructing the reader on how best to interpret it.
So, I'm re-pug-nanr, he stretched out the word almost voluptuously.
I'm rot-ten. I don't defend my fellow writers. Ha-ha! No! N-o. They
don't exist, there's no such thing as a fellow writer. There's only myself,
