Icon and Axe

3. Fresh Ferment

THE GENERAL NATURE of Russian accomplishments under Bolshevism have long been evident. Urbanization and industrialization have accelerated; the sinews of military strength have dramatically increased; and centralized control has combined with a scientific ideology to achieve greater internal discipline than had previously been attained by Russian rulers. The resourceful, if brutal, leaders of the USSR have perfected—out of their own revolutionary experience—effective means of frustrating any political challenge to their authority, whether through agitation from within or subversion from without. Finally—largely because they were in power during World War II and have registered important material accomplishments since— the Communist leadership has sold itself to the long-suffering Russian people as something more than a passing phenomenon in their long historical experience.

But the plans and accomplishments of the ruling oligarchy have always been only a part of the complex record of Russian history. Just as the Russian heritage influenced in many ways the official culture developed under Stalin, so also the problems that came to perplex him seem strangely familiar. The historian can, of course, never know precisely how the past relates to the present, particularly when surrounded by the unprecedented problems of the atomic age. Nor can he know precisely how the inherited forms of art and thought affect the world of power politics and economic necessity. But it is his duty to point out those themes which sound like echoes from the past, and there was a hauntingly large number in the late Stalin era.

To begin with, there was the stimulus of war: a recurrent theme of modern Russian history. The sense of exhilaration, self-sacrifice, and increased social mobility had traditionally combined with new Western contacts to stimulate reformist sentiment in modern Russia. Indeed, radical agitation had almost invariably followed important wars and enlisted the services of returning veterans: the Decembrists following the Napoleonic wars; the “new men” of the sixties, the Crimean War; the revolutionary populists, the Turkish War; the Revolution of 1905, the war with Japan; and the Revolutions of 1917, World War I. It was not unreasonable to suppose that the dislocations and exposure to the West during World War II would lead to similar reformist pressures—coming in the wake of the suffering and deception of the 1930’s. Many Russians did, indeed, defect to the Germans; and Stalin went to extremes to limit contacts with his wartime Western allies. The purges and violent anti-Westernism of the early post-war period were, in large measure, attempts to prevent what might otherwise have been an irresistible drift toward some form of political liberalization and accommodation to long-suppressed consumer needs.

The fact that the key purges of 1948–9 are referred to in Soviet literature as “the Leningrad case” points to a second traditional feature of recent Soviet history: the recurrence of the old tension between Moscow and Leningrad. The revenge of Muscovy had perforce to be directed against its ancient rival for pre-eminence in the Russian Empire. Leningrad was still a “window to the West,” and, within the Communist Party, the Leningrad organization had traditionally represented revolutionary idealism and broad international culture from the time of Trotsky and Zinov’ev. These figures had been among the earliest victims of Stalin’s intrigues; and he began the purges of the thirties with the murder of their successor as head of the Leningrad Party, Serge Kirov. His successor, Andrei Zhdanov, perished in turn with mysterious suddenness in the midst of the post-war decimation of the Leningrad Party. Having suffered nearly three years of blockade during the war, Leningrad had emerged with certain credentials of heroism that commanded respect in the post-war USSR. It had become the center not only of artistic and intellectual ferment but also of a relative emphasis on light industry in future economic development. Leningrad was still, as it had been in the days of tsarist St. Petersburg, the center and symbol of patterns of development closer to those of the West than those favored in Moscow.

Another recurrent theme is the dilemma of despotic reformism confronted by Stalin’s successors. Following, as had Catherine II, Alexander I, and Alexander II, on the heels of a repressive and authoritarian predecessor, Stalin’s heirs sought to rekindle popular enthusiasm by sweeping initial amnesties and vague promises of reform. The line first sounded by Malenkov with his amnesties from forced labor camps and promises of a “new course” was taken over and given a new theatrical quality by Khrushchev. But the new ruler soon confronted the classic problem which had so perplexed Catherine and the two Alexanders. How can one introduce reforms without jeopardizing the despotic basis of control? How can one revive initiative without stimulating insubordination? In the wake of his denunciation of Stalin in February, 1956, Khrushchev met in Hungary, Poland, and his own country the equivalent of the shock administered to Catherine by Pugachev and the French Revolution, to Alexander I by the Semenovsky uprising and the European revolutions of the early 1820’s, and to Alexander II by the ideological tumult and assassination attempts of the 1860’s. Faced with a revolution of rising expectations that he had helped to call forth, he was forced to reassert the authoritarian essence of his position. As so often in the past, reformist rhetoric gave way to renewed repression.

Pressures for retrenchment on reform in the late fifties and early sixties were, however, to some extent countered by yet another recurrence of an old Russian theme: the conflict of two generations. Khrushchev appeared to have sensed the wisdom of attempting to befriend the articulate young generation, whose outlook differed profoundly from that of the shell-shocked survivors and bureaucratic beneficiaries of the Stalin era. For the new generation the material accomplishments of the second, Stalinist revolution seemed as remote as the utopian dreams of the first Leninist revolution had been to their Stalinist parents. The new generation was brought up, rather, amidst the high hopes that had accompanied the wartime effort. It was a better-educated generation, conscious of the disparity between its own technical competence and the bureaucratic sloth and psychotic excesses of Stalin’s post-war rule. It had been a silent generation; but it rapidly found things to say, when Khrushchev in his own political insecurity gave it the opportunity in 1956. Even more important, the new generation kept on talking after the inevitable reaction in late 1956 and 1957. Voices began to be heard from creative periods of the Russian past; less timid they seemed, or at least less intimidated. By the early sixties some were speaking of an even more radical generation composed of those in their early twenties and known by the historically venerable term “men of the sixties.”

The age of Stalin was at last coming to an end: a quarter of a century dominated by the idea of zagovor, or “conspiracy.” A conspiratorial code of revolutionary expediency had been transposed into a system of government, and Stalin’s own intrigues camouflaged with tales of conspiracy by Trotskyite wreckers, capitalist encirclers, Titoist vampires, or simply “certain circles.” All these forces were united in “a conspiracy of the condemned” against the USSR (to cite the title of Virta’s violently anti-American drama of 1948). Within the USSR, Stalin’s subordinates might be forming a “conspiracy of boyars” (the subtitle of the second part of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible). Even inside the Kremlin, the possibility existed that conspiratorial doctor-poisoners were secretly at work.

From the populace in general, Stalin was aided by what came to be called “the conspiracy of silence” (a phrase used first in the 1820’s by a disillusioned Westernizer, Prince Viazemsky, to describe the political passivity of Russians before the tyrannical methods of Nicholas I).¹ Bruno Jasieński, a Polish Communist who moved to France and then to suicide in Russia during the purges, used the even more telling phrase “conspiracy of the indifferent” (the title of his important unfinished work of the thirties, which was published only after the denigration of Stalin in 1956).²

After the death of Stalin, the all-important question was: What could provide an antidote to conspiratorial government supported by conspiracies of silence and indifference? A prophetic hint was provided by yet another concept of conspiracy that had been put forth on the eve of Stalin’s second revolution by the last of the short-blooming crop of humorists from Odessa, Yury Olesha. In his tale of 1927, Envy, Olesha gathered together a few Old World intellectuals into a “conspiracy of feelings”³ (which became the title of the dramatic form of the novel). Supremely superfluous people, envious of the brave new world being built about them, Olesha’s “conspirators” are implausible egg-head cavaliers (one of them is named Kavalerov) among the revolutionary roundheads: vacillating, yet still princely Hamlets in an age when this symbol of the old intelligentsia was about to be abolished from the stage.

In Olesha’s novel the strong arm of Soviet power is represented by two figures, one a soccer player and the other a sausage maker, bent on building a kind of giant supermarket system for the new society. They are clearly the wave of the future, and to sustain their conspiracy Olesha’s errant cavaliers flee to the world of fantasy, where they build a machine to destroy all machines and name it “Ophelia.” But this missing Madonna for the conspiracy of feelings will not permit herself to be used. It was Hamlet’s coldness that killed Ophelia; and now, brought back to life by the Hamlets of the old intelligentsia, Ophelia proves a vengeful lady—turning on them rather than the machines.

The net effect of the story, however, is to arouse sympathy for the “conspiracy” and leave one with the impression that its apolitical opposition to the new order will somehow continue. The activity of the decade since Stalin can be viewed as a posthumous vindication of some of the feelings which Olesha’s cavaliers had been unable to defend.

After a quarter of a century of Stalin’s “conspiracy of equals” (the title of Ehrenburg’s laudatory novel of 1928 about Babeuf’s organization of that name⁴), the time had come for “the thaw” (to cite the title of the novel he published in 1954). The killing frost had stricken Russian culture in full blossom, and no one could be sure what would emerge after such a winter. But one old branch survived unbent, and many new shoots did appear. Thus, one must turn to the envoi left by a “survival of the past,” Boris Pasternak, and to the fresh voices raised by Soviet youth in the decade since Stalin.

The Reprise of Pasternak

WHATEVER his historical impact on Russian culture may prove to be, Pasternak set forth in the last writings before his death in 1960 a remarkable human testament and a moving reprise on the culture of Old Russia that is deserving of study in its own right.

It was perhaps to be expected that this reprise should be that of a poet. Man’s power to sing spontaneously and implausibly may well provide his only path to dignity and self-respect in an age of calculation, deception, and spiritual isolation. Boris Pasternak, one of the purest and most musical poets of the century, had that power. It put him in communion with the world of unheard melodies and higher harmony which has always been suspect to proponents of a closed and authoritarian society. Plato would have banished the poets from his Republic, and Lenin the sounds of the “Appassionata” from his memory.

But, for Pasternak, poetry was everything: not just a form of consolation for the adversity of contemporary political and economic life, but rather a way of cutting through all artificiality to the real world—the throbbing and sensuous world of persons, places, and things. Pasternak seeks to defend that world against the less real world of abstract slogans, creeds, and statistics. Individual poetry is the language of the former; corporate prose, the medium of the latter. In a land bent on producing quantities of the most artificial prose in a pretentiously bureaucratic century, Pasternak remained an uncompromisingly lyric poet. His commitment was not to ideas but to life itself—from the verses he wrote in the revolutionary year of 1917 entitled My Sister Life to the last poems of Doctor Zhivago, whose name means “living.”

Why was the poet of life permitted to survive? He was too well known to have been overlooked; yet, despite long periods of silence and diversion into translating, Pasternak never renounced his poetic course nor compromised himself by writing servile odes to Stalin and hymns to collectivization. Stalin himself must have willed or agreed to his survival. Perhaps he was in some way moved by the uncorrupted quality of this pure poetic offshoot of Old Russia. Or perhaps Stalin sensed a certain occult power in the one who defined the poet as “brother to a dervish.”⁵ Certainly Pasternak had a singular record of nonconformity to the artistic mores of Stalinist Russia, beginning with his letter to Stalin at the time of the mysterious death of Stalin’s first wife in November, 1932. Refusing to sign the stereotyped letter of consolation offered by other leading writers, Pasternak published a letter of his own to Stalin:

I align myself with the feelings of my comrades. On the eve I was thinking deeply and tenaciously about Stalin; for the first time as an artist. In the morning I read the news. I was shocked exactly as if I had been alongside, had lived and seen.⁶

Whatever the reasons, Pasternak survived and stayed on in Russia. With the coming of the first “thaw” after Stalin’s death, Pasternak published in April, 1954, ten poems described as “poems from the novel in prose, Dr. Zhivago.” There was a good deal even in this first announcement. The statement that the poet had nearly finished his first and only novel created considerable anticipation, for it meant that he had for some time been occupied with a new kind of work. He had accepted the prosaic world of contemporary Russia, and decided to communicate at length with it apparently in the language it could understand. The description “a novel in prose” indicated that he intended to replay with variations older literary themes, since Pushkin had characterized his Eugene Onegin as a “novel in verse.” The idea that the novel would deal with Soviet reality and at the same time recapitulate some of the older Russian cultural heritage was quietly set forth in the author’s explanatory note that Zhivago was to “cover the period from 1903 to 1929,” and deal with “a thinking man in search of truth, with a creative and artistic bent.”⁷

There are many ways of looking at this work, which was published abroad three years later despite strenuous Soviet objections, and then awarded a Nobel Prize which its author was forced to decline. Stalinists in Russia and sensationalists abroad have referred to it as a kind of anti-Revolutionary diatribe; literary specialists have demonstrated their critical sang-froid by calling it inferior to his poetry and assigning to it a kind of B+ to A- rating on their literary scorecards; students of the occult have looked at the work as a kind of buried treasure chest of symbols and allusions.⁸ Behind this critical din stand the massive shadows of two less articulate groups: the millions with no knowledge of Russia who have read and been moved by it; and the millions within Russia who have not been allowed to see it.

If Stalin would not permit Pasternak to be done away with altogether, neither would Stalin’s successors permit him to publish freely. Pasternak’s last years were spent in forced isolation, surrounded by petty harassments and veiled threats. Indeed, no figure within the USSR was treated to a more shrill and vulgar chorus of official denunciation during “de-Stalinization” than this mild poet. To the all-powerful Communist bureaucrats of Khrushchev’s Russia he was the bearer of a “putrid infection,” the producer of “decadent refuse,” and generally “worse than a pig,” because “a pig will never befoul the place where it eats and sleeps.”⁹

There were good reasons why the campaign against Pasternak had to be pursued vigorously despite awkwardness and embarrassment. For Pasternak’s Zhivago posed in effect a challenge to the moral basis of the regime. Rather than follow the approved path of criticizing the particular cheers which writers had previously rendered to Stalin, Pasternak was challenging the entire conception of writer-as-cheerleader. He presented in Zhivago a challenge to the moral superiority of the imitative activist who has externalized and materialized life, who accepts the constant rationalization that the individual self must be sacrificed for “the good of the social collective.”¹⁰ By creating an essentially passive sufferer and giving him a credible, even appealing, inner life, Pasternak offered an alternative to the two-dimensional “new Soviet man.”

The editors who rejected his novel for publication in the USSR seemed particularly peeved that Zhivago did not take sides in the Civil War, so that the familiar label of counter-revolutionary could be applied to him. He was, perhaps, a counter-revolutionary, but only in the deeper sense of advocating “not a contrary revolution, but the contrary of a revolution.” Pasternak was the real alternative to social revolution: one which Stalinist activists could not understand because it could be neither labeled nor bought off. Even in humiliation, Pasternak preserved dignity and integrity in the eyes of his countrymen. He refused to flee abroad as he was urged to do by his primitive tormentors, who accused him of seeking nothing more than the “delights of your capitalist paradise.” In his letter retracting acceptance of the Nobel Prize Pasternak insisted that “with my hand on my heart, I can say that I have done something for Soviet literature.”¹¹ It was obvious that his tormentors could neither place their hands over their hearts nor say that they had done anything for Russian literature. No Soviet writer of the first rank signed the official denunciation that accompanied the campaign of defamation.

Both his Soviet critics and his Western admirers agree that the book is in some sense a throwback to pre-Revolutionary Russia, a voice that has come “as from a lost culture.”¹² There is indeed a deliberate assertion of long silent themes at variance with official Soviet culture. Yet at the same time the book deals basically with the origins and development of the Soviet period, and Pasternak clearly viewed the work as a kind of testament to his native land. In his last autobiographical sketch, written after the novel was completed, he pointedly described it as “my chief and most important work, the only one of which I am not ashamed and for which I take full responsibility.”¹³

The greatness of the book lies not in the affair that grew around it, still less in the plot of the novel itself, but rather in the alchemy with which he combines three main ingredients: recapitulation of the pre-Revolutionary literary tradition; rediscovery of the deeper religious and naturalistic symbolism in the Russian subconscious; and a new view of the Russian Revolution and the Russian future.

The attempt to recapitulate the Russian literary tradition is evident at every turn. The work is first described in a manner reminiscent of Eugene Onegin, and is structured like Tolstoy’s War and Peace—telling the interrelated tales of a great national epic and a lonely search for truth, complete with two epilogues. Zhivago himself is a combination and fulfillment of two key types in nineteenth-century Russian literature: the obyvatel’, or “oppressed little man” who passively observes the misfortunes that fate has sent him, and the lishny chelovek, or “superfluous aristocrat” incapable of effective action and alienated from both family and society. Symbols from the Russian literary past are played back slightly out of tune: the troika from Dead Souls, the train that crushes Anna Karenina. Long sections of Dostoevskian and Chekhovian dialogue are inserted, often at the expense of the narrative. The old opposition between the rich, uncomplicated world of nature and the artificial world of the machine is played antiphonally throughout the novel. Zhivago dies trying to let fresh air into a crowded trolley car.

Above all stands the idea that increasingly obsessed the literary imagination of the late imperial period: the belief that a woman, some strange and mysterious feminine force, could alone show the anguished intellectuals the way to salvation. This was the missing Madonna of Russian romanticism: the “beautiful lady” of Blok’s early poetry, the “sophia” of Solov’ev’s theosophy, the “Ophelia” of Olesha’s fantasy. As often in Dostoevsky, women are given a special clairvoyance. Pasternak’s mysterious lady of salvation has been defiled, yet she offers a mixture of sensual and spiritual quality. Lara is many things: Russia, life, poetry, a tree, unaffected simplicity. The wandering Zhivago seeks her throughout the great events of the revolutionary period. He achieves physical union with her in the snow-covered countryside; and then, beyond death, there is a moving last vignette where she weeps over Zhivago and makes the sign of the cross over his dead body. What might seem trite in another context suddenly becomes transformed into a powerful scene containing elements both of a Pietà, wherein the Mother of God weeps over the broken body of her son, and of a Liebestod, wherein swelling music finds harmonic release only as Isolde joins her lover in death.

Lara has the same combination of beauty, integrity, and ambiguous depth which lay behind the greatest achievements of Russian literary culture. In the brave new world of twentieth-century Russia, Lara must bear the fate of that culture: disappearance and anonymous death. For Pasternak as for the theologians of the Eastern Church, all of nature participates in the suffering and martyrdom of sacred history. Through one of his innumerable images Pasternak points out that this culture suffers martyrdom at the hands not of evil men but of pharisees with their “retouching” and “varnishing over” (lakirovka) of truth. Even the coming of spring is affected by the Civil War.

Here and there a birch stretched forth itself like a martyr pierced by the barbs and arrows of its opening shoots, and you knew its smell by just looking at it, the smell of its glistening resin, which is used for making varnish.

Yet suffering and deception do not have the last word; for the over-all frame of the book is religious. The work is saturated with images from Orthodox Christianity; and one senses that they will in some way be recovered like the old images on the icons whose purity was only rediscovered through layers of varnish during the years of Pasternak’s youth. The name Zhivago is taken from the Easter Liturgy and the communion prayer of John Chrysostom; events are repeatedly related to the Orthodox calendar, and Zhivago’s tour with the partisans and experience of atrocities occurs during Lent. The old sectarian idea that people actually re-experience the passion and suffering of Christ is often hinted at, and the idea suggested that the period of revolutionary torment in Russian history is related in some way to that terrifying interlude between Christ’s crucifixion and His resurrection.

As with Dostoevsky and so many others, the basic Christian message is placed on the lips of a seeming fool: “God and work.” There is really nothing else that matters. Yet these are the very things that have been missing from the lives of the secular intelligentsia. “It has always been assumed that the most important things in the Gospels are the ethical teaching and commandments,” Pasternak writes in criticism of the abstract ethical fanaticism of modern Russian thought. “But for me the most important thing is the fact that Christ speaks in parables taken from daily life, that he explains the truth in terms of everyday reality.” The natural universality of the central New Testament miracle, the birth of a child, is contrasted with the nationalistic melodrama of the central Old Testament miracle, the passage through the Red Sea. Throughout the work, Pasternak’s religious feeling is portrayed in images rather than abstract ideas; and as such his work represents a return to the old Muscovite culture of sounds, sights, and smells rather than the St. Petersburg culture of words and ideas. Pasternak used the old word for “icons” (obraza) to describe poetic images, which he defined as “miracles in words”¹⁴ rather as one used to speak of the miraculous paintings “not made by hands.” Moscow and the deep interior rather than St. Petersburg and the West provide the mis-en-scène for Zhivago. For Pasternak Moscow of the silver age “far surpassed Petersburg,” and he spent almost all his life in its environs. “Moscow of 1600 belfries” had become the Moscow of Scriabin, who was perhaps the greatest of all formative influences on Pasternak.¹⁵

Like Scriabin, Pasternak sought to affect a kind of fusion of the arts in which music played a special role. Pasternak’s description of Scriabin’s artistic quest applies to his own: an effort to find “an inner correspondence in musical terms to the surrounding world to the way people thought, felt, lived, dressed and travelled in those days.”¹⁶ To Pasternak Scriabin’s work was not just music, but “a feast, a celebration in the history of Russian culture.”¹⁷ His own work is an attempt to carry on that interrupted feast. It is not accidental that Lara’s faith is described as “inner music,” that the prose part of Zhivago ends with “the unheard music of happiness” swelling up out “of this holy city and of the whole world.” Thereafter, the novel turns to song, and ends with the posthumous poems of Yury Zhivago, some of Pasternak’s most hauntingly musical verse. If his father was a painter and he a student of philosophy, it is the sound of music first heard, perhaps, from his pianist-mother that lends a special magic to both image and idea in Pasternak. It seems fitting that his death and burial should be accompanied, not by the prosaic speeches and editorials of the official Soviet press, but rather by the pure music of Russia’s greatest pianist and interpreter of Scriabin, Sviatoslav Richter, playing until drenched with perspiration at a small upright piano in Pasternak’s cottage, near the dead body of the poet.

If Pasternak’s novel does not reach as high as those of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, it moves in the same direction. Like them, Pasternak was driven by religious concerns that he was unable to resolve in any conventional way. In his last years, he described himself as “almost an atheist”¹⁸ and denied that he had any philosophy of life whatsoever, admitting only to “certain experiences or tendencies.” He confessed a special tendency to see art as an act of “consecrated abnegation in a far and humble likeness with the Lord’s Supper,”¹⁹ and to believe that out of voluntary suffering in imitation of Christ would come the miracle of resurrection.

Resurrection is the real theme of the novel—a fact which links him once again with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and the submerged culture of Orthodoxy. “Why seek ye the living [zhivago] among the dead?”²⁰ Christ’s followers were asked when they came to His tomb on the first Easter. Henceforth, all who would “rightly praise” his name should cry forth “Christ is risen! … In truth risen.” Dostoevsky’s last testament to new life out of death, The Brothers Karamazov, begins with the legend: “Except a grain of wheat fall in the ground and die …” Tolstoy’s last novel bore the title Resurrection; and the original illustrations of this work by his father were on the walls of Pasternak’s dacha at Peredelkino when he was writing Zhivago.

Pasternak’s novel begins with a funeral and ends with the resurrection on the third day of a man to whom the centuries are moving “out of darkness to judgment.” Pasternak suggests, moreover, that God may be bringing a new kind of life out of death on Russian soil; that a cultural resurrection may lie at the end of the revolutionary Calvary even for those like himself and Zhivago: the confused observers and superfluous figures of Old Russia. Nothing which they did earned salvation. But, for all their faults, they had been touched in some mysterious way by the warm forgiving natural world, and by the image of Christ Himself. These two supernatural forces converge on the lonely, dead body of Zhivago. There was to be no formal church funeral; and Lara had already bid him farewell.

Only the flowers compensated for the absence of the ritual and chant. They did more than blossom and smell sweet. Perhaps hastening the return to dust, they poured forth their scent as in a choir, and steeping everything in their exhalation seemed to take over the function of the Office of the Dead.

The vegetable kingdom can easily be thought of as the nearest neighbour of the kingdom of death. Perhaps the mysteries of evolution and the riddles of life that so puzzle us are contained in the green of the earth, among the trees and flowers of graveyards. Mary Magdalene did not recognize Jesus risen from the grave, “supposing him to be the gardener.”

Russia’s resurrection is hinted at in a no less powerful manner. Indeed, for the historian of culture, Pasternak’s view of the Russian Revolution and of the Russian future is perhaps even more important than his views on personal fulfillment and salvation. It is significant that, despite Zhivago’s intimate relationship with Lara, she chose to marry his spiritual opposite, Strelnikov, the “shooter,” the revolutionary activist. For the spiritual culture of Old Russia did, to a considerable extent, wed itself to the Revolution in the initial period of purity and new vision.

The story of Strelnikov offers a marvelously distilled account of the drift into revolution. It all began, in Pasternak’s view, when the young man named Antipov ceased responding as an individual to the real world and began repeating the abstract slogans dinned about him: in this case the war cries of 1914. He goes off to war under the new name of Pasha, disappears from view under a cloud of shell smoke, and is next seen under the name of Strelnikov in a new capacity as revolutionary leader. Thus, with economy and graphic power Pasternak relates revolution to war, and war to man’s flight from the individual and the concrete. Strelnikov becomes the epitome of revolution: intensely devoted to abstract ideas and completely pure personally. He marries Lara, and Pasternak assures us in the last dialogue between Strelnikov and Zhivago that her choice—and thus Russia’s attachment to revolution—was not a mistake. The revolution which Strelnikov personified offered men the purity of self-denial in the name of a fresh start in human affairs. This impulse was destroyed in Russia not by counter-revolution but by the destructive logic of revolution itself. Thus Strelnikov dies a suicide even before the Civil War has ended; and the last image of him is that of his sacrificial blood, which Pasternak links with that of Christ by way of the naturalistic images of Russian folklore. Pasternak depicts the dead Strelnikov through the blood from his wound congealed on the snow “like the frozen berries of the rowan tree”—thus calling to mind the popular folk song recited earlier, in which the rowan tree voluntarily threw its red berries to the wind rather than give them over to the ravens.

If the ravens took over in the wake of the Revolution and feasted on the remains of the spiritual culture of Old Russia, Pasternak insists that their day is passing. In the first epilogue one learns that Zhivago and Lara have been survived by a daughter living somewhere in the interior of Russia “where the language is still pure” and that “portents of freedom filled the air throughout the post-war period and they alone defined its historical significance.” Pasternak sounded the same theme in characteristic natural imagery during an interview with a Western journalist as Zhivago was being readied for publication:

The proclamations, the tumult, the excitement, are over. Now something else is growing, something new. It is growing imperceptibly and quietly, as the grass grows. It is growing as fruit does, and it is growing in the young. The essential thing in this epoch is that a new freedom is being born.²¹

But Pasternak’s “message” is ultimately found in his poetry rather than his prose; and it is appropriate that the final epilogue of his novel takes the form of verse. Whereas Tolstoy’s second epilogue had been a statement of his philosophy of history, a retreat from magnificent fiction into polemic prose, Pasternak’s second epilogue marks an advance from fine fiction into magnificent poetry. The two epilogues are as different as was Tolstoy’s “Kreutzer Sonata” from Beethoven’s; and Pasternak, as always, is on the side of music.

There are twenty-five poems in all—the number of songs frequently used in Akathistoi, the hymn cycles popularly used in the Eastern Church to honor the Virgin. Pasternak’s poems can be looked on as the Akathistoi of an intelligent feeling his way back to God.

At the beginning of the cycle stands Hamlet, the symbol of indecision about life itself that had so long fascinated the Russian imagination. Pasternak does not resolve the “Hamlet question,” but rather changes the Hamlet image. As a translator of Shakespeare he had lived closely with this play, and had suggested years before Zhivago that Hamlet was a figure not of weakness but of nobility:

Hamlet is not the drama of a weak-willed character, but of duty and self-abnegation.… Hamlet is chosen as the judge of his own time and the servant of a more distant time.²²

In the opening poem of the second epilogue, Pasternak identifies himself not with Hamlet himself but with an actor who is forced to play the role before an unfeeling new audience. Then, suddenly, the actor acquires a new dimension as he acknowledges his despair and suddenly repeats the words of Christ: “Father, if it be Thy will, take this cup from me.”²³ The agony of Gethsemane, the subject of the last poem, is thus introduced in the very first:

I am alone, all are drowned in Phariseeism.

To live out life is not to cross a field.

The cycle continues through a world of progressing seasons and natural images into which are woven poeticized passages from scripture and other religious allusions. At the end, there are several poems on the birth and early days of Christ, two on Mary Magdalen, who mistook Christ for a gardener, and a final poem, “The Garden of Gethsemane.” His final affirmation of faith comes only after the Christ of his poem has bid Peter put up the sword and has reconciled Himself to drinking His cup to the full. Thus, Pasternak, in his last three stanzas, writes of coming suffering with the prayerful resignation of a monastic chronicler:

The book of life has come unto a page

That is more precious than all holy things.

Now that which has been written must take place.

So be it then. Amen.

There is meaning in all of this. Man’s only mistake has been that of all the heretics from the early Judaizers to the Bolsheviks: presuming to unravel the secrets and determine the path of history. The ancient flame symbol is summoned up to suggest the impulsive and unpredictable quality of providential history: and the Christian message of voluntarily taking up the cross is suggested:

Thou see’st the passing of the years is like a parable

And could burst into flame along the way.

In the name of its awful majesty

I go in voluntary suffering to the grave.

In the final verse men move from the world in which they see through a glass darkly toward their final destination and place of judgment. He reverts to the classical image of a ship at sea. It had served him as a symbol of sensual deliverance in his poem of 1917, “Oars at Rest,” where a boat lies motionless and the poet and his lover within it are blended into a kind of liquid union with one another and with their natural surroundings.²⁴ In the last lines of Zhivago, however, Pasternak returns the image to its older religious framework. He seems to be saying that beyond the private fate of the poet united briefly with Lara at Varykino, there is another destination; that all the barges so long hauled up the Volga by the sweating multitudes are in truth storied vessels which will yet lead Russia out of its landlocked insularity to worlds beyond.

I descend into the grave, and on the third day

rise again

And, like barks weaving down a river

The centuries shall come like a caravan of barges

Out of the darkness, unto me.

They are the last lines in an extended chronicle, the last image in a long series of icons. The message which Pasternak left to a Russia in turmoil and conflict in the twentieth century is very much like that which a revered metropolitan of Siberia left to his flock amidst the troubles and schism of the seventeenth century—and which the official journal of the Moscow patriarch quietly reprinted in mid-1965:

Christians! even in darkest days a sunflower completes its circular course, following the sun by unchangeable love and natural inclination toward it. Our sun, which brightens our life’s path, is the will of God; it illuminates for us, not always without shadows, the path of life; dark days are often mixed with clear ones; rain, winds, storms arise.… But may our love to our sun, the will of God, be strong enough to draw us inseparably to it in days of misfortune and sorrow, even as the sunflower in dark days continues without faltering—navigating through the living waters, with the “barometer” and “compass” of God’s will leading us into the safe harbor of eternity.²⁵

Out of some such deeper vision was it possible for the land of “scientific atheism” ironically to produce through Pasternak some of the most magnificent religious poetry of the twentieth century. Perhaps his Zhivago is only another poignant Chekhovian farewell, the last afterglow on a solitary peak of a sun that has already set. Yet it may also represent the beginning of some new magnetic field: a kind of unexpected homing point for the spinning compasses of the space age. We turn now to that age and to the aspirations of the young generation in which Pasternak placed such high hopes.

New Voices

THE CRUCIAL QUESTION for the future of the creative life in Russia deals not with internal émigrés from late imperial culture but with the purely Soviet young generation: not with Pasternak but with his judgment that “something new is growing … and it is growing in the young.”

It is, of course, extremely difficult to characterize an entire generation of a sprawling and complex modern nation. Large numbers of competent and often gifted people obviously enjoy profitable careers as faithful servants of the state and party. Many more—perhaps even a majority of the young generation—feel genuine pride in the accomplishments of Soviet science and technology and a measure of gratitude for the opportunities that have opened up under the new order.

Yet, there has also been at work within the USSR an unmistakable and extraordinary ferment, which is popularly identified with those under thirty-five even though many older people participate in it and many younger ones do not. The crucial question for the historian is to determine the nature and significance of this process: to say how present ferment in the USSR relates to the Russian past, and how it might bear on the future. For all its confusing and often contradictory qualities, youthful ferment in the USSR can be divided into four essential aspects or levels.

The first and least elevating is the impulse toward purely negative protest. This restlessness has expressed itself in a variety of ways: the violent delinquency of “hooligans” (khuligany), the flamboyant innovations in style and dress of the “style boys” (stiliagi), and the compulsive opposition to all dogma of the nibonicho (an ingenious contraction for the Russian words “neither God nor the devil”).

The antagonistic official press has referred bitterly to “nihilists in short pants,”²⁶ and the most radical of Russia’s restless youth have adopted the term “men of the sixties.” Thus, both extremes of opinion in the USSR point to a resemblance with the original nihilists and “men of the sixties” who appeared after the repressive reign of Nicholas I just a century before. The opportunity for communal social experiments and revolutionary organization that had given élan to the young nihilists under Alexander II was, of course, absent a century later. But the sense of persecution and a need for new answers was, if anything, even more intense.

Certainly, the Communist regime was both distressed and profoundly perplexed by the antagonism of so many young people to official culture. The leaders of the mammoth Communist Youth League are now nearly a decade older than in Lenin’s time, and veteran Bolsheviks petulantly acknowledge their inability to understand the indifference of youth to the paths that they have prepared for them to follow. Speaking at a congress of the Young Communist League in March, 1957, Voroshilov complained almost pathetically of “young people among you, in our midst, who are maneuvering. They are dreaming about something—but certainly not what they should be dreaming about.” His only prescription for “these bugs and beetles” was to “say ‘they shall not exist’ and take all steps in this respect.”²⁷

But the “bugs and beetles” continued to exist and even proliferate. At the next congress of the Communist Youth League in March, 1962, the attitude of the Communist leadership was equally despairing. Khrushchev, having set up new boarding schools to help condition a new Communist elite and a compulsory work period between high school and higher education to help young people “overcome their separation from life,” was vehement in his denunciation of the continued nihilism and “parasitism” of the young.²⁸

This continuing indifference to official ideals and seemingly pointless search for novelty in clothes, sex, and crime is, of course, part of a more universal antagonism toward the depersonalized and urbanized modern world. This first level of protest is not simply a Soviet phenomenon but rather a particularly unrefined expression of the widespread desire in advanced civilizations to penetrate beyond the monotony of daily routine to more authentic kinds of individual experience.

A second, more positive aspect to the youthful ferment is the rebirth of Russian humor. Genuine comedy had all but vanished from the Russian scene in the Stalin era. All that remained were the crude vulgarities of the dictator himself, compounded largely of lavatorial allusions and heavyhanded insults to national minorities. The rich traditions of literary satire and peasant humor which had flourished under all but the most extreme periods of tsarist repression were severely crippled by Stalin’s psychotic sensitivity to all forms of implied criticism in his declining years. Denied the opportunity for public laughter at their system, the Russian people turned increasingly to private bitterness. This damming up of the humorous stream that had traditionally been a free-flowing part of the “broad Russian nature” had dangerous consequences which even Stalin’s long-delayed last Party Congress recognized, with its call in 1952 for new Gogols and Saltykovs.²⁹ The rehabilitation of Russian humor was further aided by the rise to power of Khrushchev, who had a better sense of humor than any preceding leader of Russian Communism and made a jocular style part of his new political technique.

The humor that arose in the post-Stalin era acquired, however, a sharper bite than even reformist Communist leaders could readily accept. Pointed fables and colorful plays on words revealed subtlety, lightness, and irreverence for pretense—attitudes which contrasted sharply with official Soviet culture and provided fresh resources for the fast-evaporating stock of human satire.

Beneath the satirical posture of Soviet youth usually lay, however, the positive conviction that there is still work worth doing in one’s private life and professional calling. If one cannot change the political and administrative system overnight, one can at least gain dignity through honorable work, free of either bureaucratic cant or political interference. Thus, humor allied itself, not only with the passion for reform that has always been feared by pretentious authority, but also with the “creeping pragmatism” of a new generation, increasingly confident that expanding islands of creative integrity can yet be dredged out of the sea of official deceit and sloth.

A typical joke of the early sixties told how a collective farmer was brought to Moscow to keep a lookout with a telescope atop Lenin Hills for the coming of the classless society. One day, en route to his sinecure, the peasant met an American, who offered to triple his salary if he would transfer to New York to watch from the Statue of Liberty for the coming of the next crisis in the capitalist system. “The terms are attractive,” replies the peasant, “but I can’t afford to give up a permanent job for a temporary one.”

The simple hero of this tale has a rich ancestry in the popular fables and satirical literature of Great Russia; but he also has ancestors in Yiddish humor, with its idealized Peter Schlemihl and his life-affirming laughter at human foibles and pretense. This joke is, in fact, a variant of an age-old Jewish joke about waiting for the Messiah—pointing up, perhaps, a subtle way in which the indigenous Yiddish culture of Russia seeks hidden revenge on its latest persecutor. Forced both to assimilate into the atomized society of the USSR and to endure the continuing indignities of anti-Semitism, the Jewish community continues to assert itself anonymously by providing fresh satirical resources to Russian culture as a whole.

The comic contribution of the emigrating Jewish community to the American melting pot in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century is thus being in some ways duplicated by this inner emigration and assimilation of Yiddish humor in the USSR of the mid-twentieth century. The satirical playwright who has become the posthumous idol of the young generation, Eugene Schwarz, and the man that championed the production of his works, Akimov, are both Jews. The philo-Semitism of the young generation is a mark of gratitude for the Jewish contribution to the new cultural ferment as well as an expression of new-found identity with the long-endured persecutions of Jewry. It is entirely fitting that, of all the half-heretical literary works of the post-Stalin era, Eugene Evtushenko’s simple poetic tribute to Jewish suffering, “Babi Yar,” should become probably the most important single symbol of fresh feeling and aspiration among the younger generation.³⁰

The revival of Russian humor has also benefited from the increasing assimilation of other minority groups, such as the Armenians, who, like the Jews, have an age-old Near Eastern civilization, with folklore accumulated from long centuries of persecution, wandering, and commercial adventure. An imaginary “radio Armenia” is frequently cited by bemused Russians as the source of humorous comment on internal Soviet affairs. Georgians and Armenians played leading roles in developing the art of humorous and satirical folk singing in the early 1960’s.

Many of the deeper, positive ideals of the new generation are expressed in the third aspect of ferment: the revival of Russian literature. In the late imperial period literature was, after all, the main medium for developing new ideas about man and society. The revival in the decade since Stalin of this search for ideas in literature is a phenomenon of great importance for Russian development (though not necessarily for world literature).³¹

In part, the new literature seems impressive because of the extreme sterility of that which preceded it. One is repeatedly reminded that there are no Tolstoys or Dostoevskies even in potentia. Indeed, the closest present approximation to the epic style of the former and to the psychological religious preoccupations of the latter among Soviet writers of today can be found in the novels of Michael Sholokhov and Leonid Leonov respectively: two elderly and idiosyncratic figures with little apparent influence on the rising generation. Yet this new literary production has a freshness and vitality of its own. Ever since the publication just after Stalin’s death of Pomerantsev’s much-discussed essay, “On Sincerity in Literature,” which, among other things, contrasted the honesty and resourcefulness of a Siberian peasant woman with the mechanical falsehoods of authority, there had been a rising tide of what might be called neo-populist literature. Stories like Yashin’s “Levers” and Nagibin’s “Light in the Window” emphasized the contrast between corrupt officialdom and the uncorrupted people.³² Sometimes an idealistic scientific worker is substituted for a simple muzhik as the contrasting force to Communist bureaucracy, as in Granin’s “My Own Opinion” or Dudintsev’s much-discussed novel, Not by Bread Alone. Sometimes the editorial point is made quite bluntly, as in the poem “Careful People,” whose title is an ironic comment on the omnipresent “Careful Pigeons” signs which Stalin scattered through Russia at the very heights of his Neronian bloodbaths.³³

The literature of protest in 1956 proved to be only the harbinger of still more blunt and pointed social criticism which came late in 1962, with the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s portrayal of a Soviet concentration camp in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Fedor Abramov’s scathing depiction of collective farm life in One Day in the “New Life.”

All in all, a remarkable amount of stylistically conventional but ideologically exciting fiction has been produced in the USSR since the death of Stalin. At the same time, traces have begun to appear of that even more daring literature which is written “for the drawer” or “for the soul” and circulates in manuscript or typewritten copies within the USSR (along with innumerable bootlegged copies of proscribed Western publications and private translations thereof). Some of this literature appears in the leaflet-sized papers that are illegally produced and distributed in the USSR, and some of it has found its way to publication in the West.

Even more important than the novels and short stories of the new generation is the extraordinary revival of two of the most public and yet most personal of all literary forms: poetry readings and the theater. These media—in which Soviet men and women communicate directly with fellow Russians about problems of common concern—have done much to create such sense of communal purpose and aspiration as has come to animate the young generation.

The poetry readings have attracted considerable public attention because of the magnetic appeal of Evtushenko and the causes célèbres that have grown up around his name—the first in 1960 following the publication of “Babi-Yar,” and the second in 1963, following the publication while abroad of autobiographical sketches and reflections.

It is doubtful if anything written by Evtushenko will find its way into the anthologies of the world’s great poetry. Yet well before he was thirty, he was assured an important niche in Russian cultural history, as the recognized spokesman of his generation. His direct and easily understood poems of protest and self-affirmation, his handsome appearance, his simple love of travel and of love itself—all made him a kind of romantic idol. His exploits in forcing open previously closed doors and weaving his way in and out of official favor were followed vicariously by thousands; and he, in turn, shared with the thousands who flocked to his poetry readings verses, comments, and innuendos that he did not dare commit to print.

“Each man has his secret personal world,” he wrote in the first poem of a Soviet edition of his printed works;³⁴ and Evtushenko appeared as the defender of that colorful, uninhibited world against the drab and stereotyped world of “Stalin’s heirs.” His poem “The Nihilist” tells how someone derisively labeled a nihilist in official circles was capable of more noble human actions than his more conformist contemporaries. His ode “To Humor” praises this quality for its power to scourge tyranny.

The appeal of Evtushenko was, however, based on more than youthful exuberance and a general spirit of protest. For Evtushenko played—even if crudely and perhaps unconsciously—some chords with sympathetic resonance in earlier Russian tradition. For the decade after Stalin he represented a reincarnation—however pale—of Belinsky, the “furious” moral hero of the original “remarkable decade.” Evtushenko seems close to Belinsky not only in his effect on contemporaries, but in his refusal to accept rationalizations for human suffering. In “Babi-Yar,” particularly when recited by Evtushenko, the emotional climax comes with the mention of Anne Frank and the image of innocent suffering childhood, after which he moves on to naturalistic imagery and a moralistic conclusion. His sense of outrage began—according to his officially criticized autobiography—when he saw a helpless ten-year-old girl crushed to death at the funeral of Stalin simply because no one had the proper authorization to prevent the thoughtless mob from surging forth.³⁵ At this point Evtushenko returned the ticket of admission to the Stalinist establishment, which a man of his talents could so easily have gained. The motivation is that of Belinsky in rejecting Hegel’s ideal world order, and of Belinsky’s echo, Ivan Karamazov, in rejecting his ticket of admission to heaven because of the innocent suffering of children. It may be that the most enduring legacy of the Old Russian intelligentsia lies not in any of its utopian dreams, but in this passionate desire “that no child shall weep.” The page containing these lines, which Dostoevsky underlined heavily in his notebook, was long kept on public exhibition in the Dostoevsky museum in Moscow; and it comes close to stating Evtushenko’s inner ideal.

But Evtushenko is also, of course, a poet—self-consciously so. His pose as the patriotic voice of liberation in his generation is somewhat reminiscent of the nineteenth-century Eastern European tradition whereby Mickiewicz in Poland, Petöfi in Hungary, and Runeberg in Finland were able to crystallize in verse the inarticulate aspirations of their people. But his true poetic ancestors are Russian, the four poets of the early twentieth century whom he has acknowledged as his models: Maiakovsky, Blok, Esenin, and Pasternak.³⁶

Evtushenko described the goal of his poetry as poeticizing the Russian language: continuing the work of Blok and Pasternak in turning language into a thing of beauty and even a means of redemption in human life.³⁷

For a time his work seemed in the Maiakovsky tradition of driving and didactic “slaps in the face of public taste.” However, he is probably closer in spirit to Esenin, the peasant poet, the least intellectual of the four. Evtushenko’s first poem was on the subject of sport, and he was in fact a professional soccer player before turning to verse. He comes from the Siberian hinterland: a simple, almost childlike extrovert, exuberantly self-confident. Perhaps for that reason his vanity and “court poems” for the regime do not seem so reprehensible, and the possibility of a tragic end always seems close at hand. The message that he has to convey is the old contrast between the perversions of power in Moscow and the purity still lying in the deep interior of Russia, personified for him by “Winter Station,” the small Siberian town where he was raised and the title of his first important poem. His approach is that of a country boy, a would-be poet of life in all its exuberance, but his final lines, the farewell “advice” of the town to its departing son, seem more like the message of the Old Russian intelligentsia distilled to its inner essence:

Do not grieve that you have not yet answered

The question put to you by life.

Abandon not the search, seek night and day;

And if you do not find, still go on seeking;

Truth is good, but happiness is better—so they say,

but without truth there is no happiness!³⁸

Andrew Voznesensky, the second of the “fiery chargers” on the poetic front, filled in the color and detail for Evtushenko’s bold sketches. Voznesensky soon proved to be the better poet. Although born in the same year as Evtushenko, he began serious publishing five years later. The suddenness with which his name came to be paired with that of Evtushenko in the early sixties is a tribute both to the growing sophistication of the younger generation and to its increasing responsiveness to traditional themes and emphases of the Russian intellectual tradition.

There is something strangely fitting about the fact that his first collection of verse, published in 1960, bore the title Mosaic, and was published in Vladimir, the original center of Orthodoxy in Great Russia. Voznesensky’s poetry combines a mosaic of visual images with a flow of musical sound. He recaptures something of the genius of old Orthodox culture with his use of sensual suggestion for super-sensual ideas. He is the truest renewal of the poetic tradition of the silver age: a confessed disciple of Pasternak, who has succeeded in incorporating many contemporary ideas into his poetic idiom.

His favorite poem, “Parabolic Ballad,” is also one of the favorite subjects of official attack. It is a defense of the “Aesopian language” that the true poet must use to make his point. He must speak not in direct statement but symbolically and indirectly. Gauguin reached the Louvre not by moving down from Montmartre but by going to the south seas.

… he sped away like a roaring rocket

… and he entered the Louvre, not through stately

portals,

But like a wrathful parabola

piercing the roof …³⁹

Voznesensky’s own poetic “Parabola” (the title of his second collection of poetry, published in Moscow in 1961) was more than much of the Soviet bureaucracy could tolerate. Accused of “formalism” by official critics, he uses the magic of language to damn them for smelling of formalin and incense (formalizm … formalin … fimiam). There is the hint of fiery apocalypse in his clipped poetic judgment on Stalinist architecture:

Farewell architecture!

Blaze freely on,

Cow sheds with cupids,

Rococo savings banks …

To live is to burn.⁴⁰

To Voznesensky, the function of the poet is prophetic, and the reaction of audiences is “an almost sensual expression of feeling” which leaves their souls “wide open like a woman who has just been kissed.”⁴¹

Nothing could be more different from the puritanical didacticism of official Soviet culture. The personalized poetry readings of the early sixties were the scene for original thoughts punctuated by spontaneous applause and boisterous commentary. The rhetorical rallies of the state were, by contrast, characterized by ritual rhythmic applause in response to lengthening stretches of increasingly unoriginal prose. There could be little doubt as to where authentic vitality lay, even though the latter forces retained the power periodically to silence the former, as they did by severe denunciations during the first half of 1963. The work of Evtushenko and Voznesensky seemed to decline during the following two years. But whether these particular figures flourished or faded, the younger generation had built up an oral folklore of its own⁴² to preserve the memory of good words and courageous action just as an older oral folklore had kept alive the memory of heroic deeds during the long literary silence of the Mongol occupation.

Hardly less striking is the contrast between the new theater that has arisen since Stalin’s death and the stereotyped staging of Soviet success stories in the Stalin era. It was, indeed, on the stage that the first sweeping break with Stalinist literary forms took place late in 1953 with the staging of Leonid Zorin’s play Guests. If Ehrenburg’s novel The Thaw provided the key metaphor for the post-Stalin literary revival, and Pomerantsev’s “On Sincerity in Literature” provided its combat slogan, Zorin’s play dramatized what the conflict was all about. Based on the infamous “doctors’ plot,” Guests portrays the villainy of the secret police in a manner suggesting that it was a natural outgrowth of the entire Soviet system. The drama was severely criticized by the official press and forced to close down after two performances.⁴³ Criticism of secret police excesses gained official approval only after Alexander Korneichuk’s Wings rendered the dragon of Beria into almost a caricature in order to render the slaying by Khrushchev even more heroic and melodramatic. Khrushchev put the official stamp of approval on this formula with his attendance and ostentatious applauding at a performance of Wings early in 1955; but the question raised by Zorin’s more realistic portrayal had not been forgotten merely because it could no longer be directly posed in public.

Almost as important as Zorin’s play in opening up fresh perspectives to the Soviet theater was the extraordinarily popular revival of Maiakovsky’s Bedbug in 1954. Renewed exposure to the blunt, direct speech of Maiakovsky (and to that of Hemingway—perhaps the most popular of all foreign writers with the young generation) provided Russians with a model for simpler forms of discourse. At the same time, the fresh look at the long-prohibited staging of Meierhold reminded a new generation of the expressive possibilities of non-realistic stagings. The rather sterile and pompous schematization of the Stanislavsky method that had become the accepted way of projecting socialist realism on the stage now had a challenger. Insofar as the public was given a chance to choose, it elected to see new productions with a decisiveness clearly embarrassing to vested interests within the party.

More modern methods of staging were evidenced in 1955 in a new production of Hamlet by Okhlopkov. He seemed to be reviving the techniques of his teacher Meierhold in order to realize the latter’s dream of doing a totally new Hamlet. The impresario who broke most completely with the theater of the Stalin era was Nicholas Akimov, who had fallen afoul of Stalin in the early thirties for his “formalist” staging of Hamlet.⁴⁴

Unlike the theatrical bureaucrats of the Stalin era, Akimov is both a modern artist and an independent philosopher. Central to his concept of the new theater is the importance of distinguishing between the theater and the cinema, which tended to be two sides of the same dull coin in the Stalin era. The former has a unique role to play in cultural development for two key reasons. First, plays have what he calls “materiality” (material’nost’), a sense of material immediacy that can only be conveyed by real people, things, and colors. The failure to develop this sense of immediacy comes largely from conservative adherence to the conventions of the “mechanical” stage of the eighteenth century, and unwillingness to experiment boldly with an “electric” stage for modern man.

A second and even more important factor in distinguishing films from plays is the fact of audience participation. A play is necessarily “a dialogue between audience and actor in which neither can remain silent. The only dialogue in a movie occurs with the mechanic in case of failure.”⁴⁵ Another outstanding and experimental impresario of the Leningrad stage, Georgy Tovstonogov, has pointed to the significance of the dialogue between living performers and a living audience by speaking of the unique possibility of creating “a charged atmosphere on the stage and an electric silence among the audience.”⁴⁶

It is precisely such effects that Akimov was able to produce in his memorable production of Schwarz’s The Shadow. Based on the fable of Hans Christian Andersen about the man who lost his shadow, Schwarz’s play as staged by Akimov is a production with color, lightness, laughter, and fantasy: the antithesis of the Soviet theater under Stalin. At the center of the drama stands a lonely idealist identified in the dramatis personae as “the scholar,” but known in the play as Christian Theodore. Traditional realism is challenged at the very outset when he loses his eyeglasses and observes that he sees better without them. A number of stage tricks leave the audience uncertain as to what is real, as Christian loses his shadow, which goes on to become ruler of the kingdom of fantasy in which most of Schwarz’s dramas take place. In the climactic trial scene, the new spectral ruler brings to trial the visionary idealist whose shadow he once was; and at the dramatic moment when a doctor, who was Christian’s best and last remaining friend, joins the general chorus of denunciation and betrayal, “electric silence in the audience” is movingly achieved. The context is semicomical, but the effect is more than that of sudden tears in the midst of laughter; it is a kind of catharsis, a sense of shared involvement in the tragedy, and of unspoken resolve that it shall not happen again. The characters in Schwarz’s fable are far more realistic than the wooden puppets of the socialist realist theater. The motives and rationalizations for their evil behavior are psychologically credible: they are skillfully woven out of the venality and compromise of everyday Soviet life. The doctor does not denounce Christian directly in the trial scene but (like those who listen to the Christ-like preachings of Dostoevsky’s Idiot) simply pronounces him out of his mind. Here, as elsewhere, the moral is not heavy-handed but only implied. One is made to feel that the message must become a living force in the life of the audience just as it has been a living and dynamic force in the production—if the vital dialogue between performer and spectator is to continue. Akimov has come closest to a short paraphrase of the message:

The contemporary epoch proceeds under the sign of the struggle of the creative principle with the parasitic; the creative with the decaying; the living with the dead; or, as Schwarz says in his language, of man with his shadow.⁴⁷

Two other recently produced Schwarz plays carry even more pointed political messages: The Naked King, in which the Andersen fable about the Emperor’s new suit of clothes is turned into a witty satire on the conspiracy of silence that prevailed during the Stalin era; and The Dragon, in which the slayer of a tyrannical dragon (that is, the Khrushchevian debunkers of Stalin) proves to be only another tyrant rather than the idealized St. George of Russian hagiography.⁴⁸

These remarkable allegories, for all their popularity among the younger generations, are still primarily the work of older men. In the Stalin era fables and legends had the value of providing remote locations and a new “Aesopian” language with which to talk about vital questions. Others of the older generation used children’s tales or “Eastern fables” as media in which serious ideas could be discussed with relative safety. Sergius Mikhalkov, an established writer of children’s stories and author of an allegorical satire written in 1952, The Crayfish, which was daring for its time, composed an extraordinarily pointed poetic fable about the legendary Khan Akhmet. This cruel, one-armed ruler wanted his portrait painted, but killed the man who portrayed him with only one arm for insulting the state, and killed a second who represented him with two arms for “lacquering over” reality. A third painter found the key to survival in this eminently Stalinesque situation by painting the terrible khan in profile.⁴⁹

Schwarz, the master of dramatic fables, wrote almost all his plays during the Stalin era, though he was understandably not widely produced till after the dictator’s death. Schwarz kept himself alive largely by writing for the movie and puppet theaters—the latter providing for him another outlet for Aesopian commentary on Soviet society. His fabulous world combines elements from Russian folklore and the Yiddish theater with the tales of his beloved Andersen in an effort to keep alive “the spirit of music” that had animated the culture of early-twentieth-century Russia. His first book, The Tale of an Old Balalaika, published in 1925, told of a balalaika in search of words for its music. His entire dramatic career can be seen as an attempt to provide those words for the fading but still unextinguished music of a rich culture.

The distinctive new feature of the post-Stalin stage was the increasing success of problem dramas on contemporary themes in pushing out older Russian classics and propagandistic melodramas from theatrical repertoires. In the late Stalin era, for instance, Ostrovsky and Gorky tended to be the most frequently performed dramatists. By the early sixties, however, their works received less than one tenth the number of performances in Moscow that they had been given in the last year of Stalin’s life.⁵⁰

The harsh official criticism of Zorin’s Guests just after Stalin’s death encouraged aspiring dramatists to be more oblique but at the same time more many-sided in their critiques of Soviet society.⁵¹ The popular and gifted young playwright Volodin ridicules a Young Communist League organizer in his Factory Girl, and tells in intimate, unheroic terms of an old love broken up by long years of absence (presumably in a forced labor camp) in his Five Evenings. A virtual catalogue of new thematic material is introduced into the play Everything Depends on People, which includes a suicide of despair, and a sustained on-stage dialogue between a scientist and a priest in which the latter scores more than a few telling debating points.

Zorin’s new play of 1962, By Moscow Time, presents the now-characteristic juxtaposition of an old-style party official with a young reformer anxious to press de-Stalinization to the limit. The latter decides that the old man must go because “he is not a town, you can’t just rename him.” Another play of the same year, More Dangerous than an Enemy, works this juxtaposition of the good worker and the bad bureaucrat into a farcical, almost Gogolesque plot. Staged appropriately enough by Akimov, the play depicts the battle of wits between evil party leaders and the good scientific workers in a provincial institute dedicated to the study of yoghurt. When the managers hear a rumor (ultimately proved false) that Moscow is about to launch a new campaign to rid the USSR of fools, they make great efforts to arrange to pin this label on their subordinates—only to be outfooled by the scientific workers after a series of episodes faintly reminiscent of a Damon Runyan story. Aksenov’s Always on Sale of 1965 is both more inventively fantastic and more bitingly contemporary in vernacular language and satirical thrust than these earlier plays, and may be the harbinger of more interesting drama yet to come.

The new dramas on contemporary themes clearly provide both the best entertainment available in the USSR and some of its most effective social criticism. The old dream of Schiller and so many others of restoring to the theater the quality it once possessed as an educational and moral force in society seems, indeed, closer to realization in these new Soviet plays than in the avant-garde theater of the West. However, in view of the struggle still required to gain official consent for any theatrical production in the USSR, the day is probably still far away when the stage can serve—as Tovstonogov put it—as “a great exponent of public thinking … a huge operating table where the actor, the surgeon, can sense the throb of the human heart and brain.”⁵²

New movies, like new plays and poems, illustrate the “interrupted renewal” of Russian culture. Not only has the recent Soviet cinema recaptured some of the creative vitality of its precocious infancy in the 1920’s, it has added as well new dimensions of disinterested humanism and psychological introspection.

Many of the outstanding films of this cinematic renaissance have dealt with the event that has the deepest meaning for the younger generation: the Great Fatherland War (as World War II is known in the USSR). Whereas the many war movies of the late Stalin era emphasized the glory of Soviet victory and the wisdom of the dictator’s leadership, the new war movies focus on the impact of this most destructive of all wars on ordinary Russian people. Beginning with Michael Kalatasov’s The Cranes are Flying of 1957, Russian films began to portray war as devoid of all constructive purpose. The war became an unwelcome intruder into the world of personal and family relationships, which suddenly seemed somehow more real and appealing than the public world of the “new Soviet man.” “The fate of a man” is made to seem as important as ultimate victory or defeat in the cinematic version made in 1959 of Sholokhov’s short story of that name. The following year appeared Ballad of a Soldier, the first of the great films of Gregory Chukhrai, which portrays with photographic skill, heartbreaking simplicity, and a complete absence of propaganda the accidental heroism, brief leave, and return to death of a childlike young Russian soldier. Chukhrai’s Clear Skies, which provided the occasion for an emotional demonstration of approval at its first performance in Moscow in 1961, contrasts the honor and suffering of Soviet prisoners of war with the brutality of the system which suspected and humiliated them in the post-war period. The picture which makes the most daring technical innovations and at the same time the most moving indictment of war is My Name Is Ivan, which appeared in 1962, introducing dream sequences along with documentary excerpts into its tragic tale of a young orphan.

This new cinematic emphasis on the integrity of the individual rather than the nature of his cause has also altered the traditional method of representing the Civil War. Just as Hollywood has introduced “good Indians” into its melodramatic Westerns—partly out of a need to break the monotony and partly out of a belated sense of justice—so Soviet films have begun to find traces of humanity and even nobility in the White opposition. Indeed, audience sympathy is ultimately on the side of an individual White guardsman in two widely admired recent films of the Civil War: Chukhrai’s Forty-First of 1956 and Vladimir Fetin’s The Foal of 1960.

Finally, it is interesting to note the return of film makers to those classics which especially fascinated the Russian intelligentsia in the nineteenth century. Thus, Gregory Kozintsev has moved on from his sensitive Don Quixote of 1956 to his film version of Hamlet in 1964. In contrast to Turgenev’s “Hamlet and Don Quixote” of almost exactly a century before, Kozintsev depicted Quixote as a psychologically disturbed and tragic figure, and gave to Hamlet a certain quiet nobility. Like Pasternak (whose translation of the play was used for the script), Kozintsev seemed to be vindicating Hamlet from the symbolic opprobrium heaped on him by Turgenev (and the lesser critics of the Stalin era). The message that the new Soviet drama as a whole is conveying to its interested if often perplexed audiences is essentially that which Hamlet conveyed to the loyal but two-dimensional Horatio: “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.”⁵³

At the same time, it is only fair to note a less flattering resemblance between the present generation and the “Hamletism” of the old intelligentsia: its confusion and uncertainty of objectives. The younger generation is far surer of what it opposes than of what it accepts, and much of its work is not technically impressive by the increasingly refined standards of literary criticism. Yet the authenticity of aspiration and popularity of the quest cannot be denied. Their art has, as Tertz maintains, “hypotheses instead of a goal”; and the testing ground for such hypotheses lies not in the hothouse of literary criticism but in the broad arena of life. The response elicited in the lives of the audience—that indispensable second participant in Akimov’s unending dialogue of creative culture—is a truer measure of significance than the reviews of critics. Increasingly, new productions in the USSR are animated by lively and often turbulent “exchange of opinion” sessions in which artists discuss with the audience the nature and significance of a play immediately after the final curtain.⁵⁴

New literary “hypotheses” often seem to draw less inspiration from literature than from other art media. But, whereas the hidden source of inspiration for the new literature of the silver age was music, the controlling medium now tends to be the visual arts. Akimov is a gifted painter; and Voznesensky, who was trained as an architect, has stated:

I do not think that closeness to his literary predecessors is very good for a writer. “Incest” leads to degeneracy. I have got more from Rublev, Joan Mir6, and the later Corbusier than from Byron.⁵⁵

The importance of painting lies not so much in the large numbers and occasional virtuosity of the experimental canvases that are unofficially painted in the USSR, but rather in the fact that visual art tries to do what the most gifted new writers are also trying to accomplish: depict objectively the real world. The Promethean visionaries of the late imperial period sought to leave the material world altogether, and fled into the world of music, the most immaterial of all the arts and the only guide man could hope to find in his quest for a new language of outer space. In the post-Stalin era, however, when the philistine “metal eaters”⁵⁶ have thrust their wares out into space, the creative imagination has moved back to earth and sought to grasp once more Russian reality. Thus, young Russians turn to the visual arts for guidance, but they instinctively look beyond the conventional realists to the “more real” art of ancient Russia and the modern West. Hence Voznesensky’s juxtaposition of Rublev with Mir6 and Corbusier, and his powerful anti-war poem that begins “I am Goya” and describes his paintings by means of plays on his name.⁵⁷ This disturbed and often grotesque Spanish prophet of artistic modernism also appears in the small list of those whom Tertz commends as guides toward the new “phantasmagorical art which … would best respond to the spirit of our epoch.”⁵⁸

May the unearthly imaginations of Hoffmann and Dostoevsky, of Goya and Chagall, of Maiakovsky (the most socialist realist of all), as well as those of many other realists and non-realists—may these teach us how to express truth with the aid of the absurd and fantastic!⁵⁹

Akimov speaks of the influence upon his theatrical conceptions of pictorial images from Russian icons, Daumier, Van Gogh, and the post-war Italian cinema.⁶⁰ Yutkevich speaks of the ideal Soviet movie of the future as a “synthesis of the style of Watteau and Goya.”⁶¹

One of the most remarkable of recent Soviet short stories, “Adam and Eve” by Yury Kazakov, tells of a young painter and a girl going to a deserted island. It is a kind of return to Eden in search of artistic truth. Yet the painter is as restless as the Soviet youth he personifies. He sees himself as “a prophet without an idea.” In a deserted church, however, he has a kind of vision of rediscovering “the genuine life of the earth, the water, and the people.” He climbs the belfry, and looks down from the sky above to “another sky … the whole immeasurable mass of surrounding waters luminous with reflected light.”⁶² In the last scene, he departs over those waters amidst the strange, unearthly whiteness of the northern lights.

One is left again with the image of a ship at sea and no fixed destination. But one feels certain that the destination is not to be found on the approved itineraries of the state travel agency. One can almost imagine a middle-aged Communist official rebuking him with the words addressed by a Pravda editorial five years earlier “to all Soviet workers in literature and the arts”:

He who tries to reject the method of socialist realism imitates the irresponsible captain who throws the ship’s compass overboard on the high seas so that he may guide his ship “freely.”⁶³

The title and imagery of Kazakov’s story are but one illustration of the fourth, and most surprising, aspect of the cultural revival: the renewed interest in religion.

There is, to be sure, no dramatic religious revival in progress; and regular churchgoing continues to be primarily an activity of women and elderly people. But there is a continuing fervor in the liturgical worship of the Orthodox Church which attracts a steady stream of brief appearances for baptism and Easter services.⁶⁴ The growing appeal of church marriages has forced the regime to set up its own grotesque “marriage palaces” designed to provide all the material accouterments of a church (music, flowers, and solemn decor) for the approved civil ceremonies of the atheistic state. The number of those seeking training for the priesthood in the post-Stalin era increased to the point where a correspondence course was even introduced to accommodate those who might otherwise have been barred by distance, poverty, or bureaucratic obstruction. A program of sharply increased persecution built around the requirement that all would-be seminarians submit to a preliminary interrogation and discussion with specially chosen committees of the Young Communist League has enabled Soviet authorities to report with grim satisfaction that the numbers in seminaries have sharply declined since 1959 as a result of “extensive individual work with the students.”⁶⁵

But there still appears to be some validity to the old comparison reputedly made between religion and a nail by Lunacharsky in the early days of atheistic propaganda: “The harder you hit it, the deeper you drive it into the wood.” Some of the continuing excesses of atheistic evangelism—the noisy interruption of church services, the offering of rewards for unearthing secret prayer meetings, and the official glorification of those who break with religion and publish lurid exposés—all serve to arouse a certain sense of sympathy even among the atheists and agnostics who still predominate within the younger generation.

In an ironic inversion of the classical conflict between fathers and sons, the younger generation now often picks up religious interests as a means of shocking their atheistically conformist parents. Young Russians seem particularly fond of ridiculing and embarrassing the stereotyped party lectures on scientific atheism, which were increased in number some threefold in 1958. A favorite cartoon in the Soviet humor journal Krokodil shows believers praying for the return of another anti-religious lecturer to their region.⁶⁶

On a deeper level, the story is frequently told among the younger generation of the old peasant woman whose stubborn religious convictions were impairing the ideological training of the young. A leading party propagandist was brought all the way from Moscow to give her a highly technical illustrated lecture on the material origins and evolutionary laws of creation. The old woman listens intently to this brilliant performance designed to demonstrate once and for all the irrefutable wisdom of scientific atheism; and at the end she nods her head and says: “Yes, comrade, great indeed—greater than I had supposed—are the works of the Lord.”

The new interest in religion is more than casual curiosity. It arises in the first place out of the re-examination of the Russian past that has been quietly going on among the young in the wake of the denigration of Stalin. The high price now placed on religious art, the staging of Dostoevsky’s novels, Melnikov-Pechersky’s tales of Old Believer life, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s long-proscribed Invisible City of Kitezh—all respond to the extraordinary interest of the young in rediscovering these “survivals of the past.” A new community of interest began to develop in the fifties between the very young and the very old at the expense of the middle-aged “heirs of Stalin.”

Solzhenitsyn’s use of the vernacular in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich gave an evocative power to that pioneering revelation of suffering under Stalinism not unlike that which Avvakum’s use of an earlier vernacular had imparted to his harrowing autobiography. Solzhenitsyn subsequently turned more calmly but no less passionately than the archpriest to the forms of the Old Russian Church for such consolation as he was able to find.

When you travel the byroads of Central Russia you begin to understand the secret of the pacifying Russian countryside.

It is in the churches … they lift their bell towers—graceful, shapely, all different—high over mundane timber and thatch … from villages that are cut off and invisible to each other they soar to the same heaven.…

People were always selfish and often unkind. But the evening chimes used to ring out, floating over the villages, fields, and woods. Reminding men that they must abandon trivial concerns of this world, and give time and thought to eternity. These chimes, which only one old tune keeps alive for us, raised people up and prevented them from sinking down on all fours.⁶⁷

At the very least, religious ideas have opened up new areas of the imagination to a substantial number of young people seeking release from boredom inside the contemporary USSR. The literature of the post-Stalin era contains an increasing number of themes and images borrowed from the Orthodox heritage. Biblical titles are often used, as in Dudintsev’s novel, Not by Bread Alone. Names often have a symbolic value, as in The Shadow, where the idealistic hero who struggles with his shadow is named Christian Theodore, and the maiden who alone stays by him is called Annuntsiata. In the original version of Everything Depends on People (which was entitled The Torch) the Orthodox priest is represented not as a caricatured reactionary but as an ideal Soviet man—a mathematician and war hero—who converted to Christianity in order to serve humanity. Even after such details were stricken by the censor, the priest in the revised version still manages to explain his beliefs with some dignity. He does not attempt to refute the traditional anti-religious arguments of the atheistic scientist but rather counterattacks at a deeper level, insisting that “our young people are asking questions for which you have no answers.”⁶⁸

This very phenomenon makes the revival of interest in religion profoundly disturbing to the regime, whatever the extent of actual religious conviction. In calling “for more atheist books, good ones and varied!”⁶⁹ Communist officials rightly complain that much of the literature ostensibly designed to expose religious sects in the USSR is dispassionately objective if not even sympathetic to the object of study. The bizarre life and beliefs of the sects is more in keeping with the phantasmagorical and hypothetical world of the Soviet youth than the colorless world of bureaucratic atheism. Thus sectarian religion seems to have even greater appeal to the young than Orthodoxy or the ultra-Orthodoxy of the schismatics. Communist journals continually complain of fervid but elusive sects, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh-Day Adventists. These sects are similar in many respects to earlier forms of apocalyptical sectarianism, which also grafted new Western religious forms into a long-standing native tradition.⁷⁰

Far more important because of their impact in large cities and among educated youth are the Baptists, into whose ranks some of the more pietistic and less apocalyptical native sectarians (such as the “milk drinkers”) have tended to merge. Communist journals have repeatedly told of young people resigning from the Young Communist League to join the Baptist youth group, popularly known as the “Baptomol.”⁷¹ At the congress of the Komsomol in 1962, the head of this heavily subsidized, mammoth organization publicly beseeched his followers to emulate the enthusiasm and dedication of the harassed and indigent Baptist youth.

The biblical simplicity and fervid piety of the Baptists have had an impact on many more than their 600,000 active adult members. A Baptist appears as a leading positive character in N. Dubov’s story “A Difficult Test,” and as an admirable minor figure in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Conversions to some such simplified form of Christianity have taken place among a number of educated people. Even the leading Soviet pedagogical journal published an eloquent profession de foi of a university-educated teacher (together with a long refutation and an ominous notation that she lost her job in 1959):

I have recently read in the papers how various people have broken with religion.… Why may I not write and publish in a journal about how I came to Christianity, in what way and for what motives I have come to believe in God? …

I felt the need for answers to these questions: Whence came human suffering? Why does man live? and What does true happiness consist of? … I thoroughly worked through Indian philosophy, the gospels, etc. And as a result of all of this, I came to the conclusion that only religion, faith in Christ, gives meaning to human life, gives warmth and light to the human soul. Science then should be subordinate to religion, because when unchecked by religion as now, it works towards destruction.…⁷²

It is impossible to tell from these fragmentary printed excerpts from her letter what, if any, church or sect she has joined, just as it was difficult to determine the exact doctrinal allegiance of the thirty-two Russian Christians who asked in vain for asylum in the American embassy early in 1963. What is clear is that there are still many anonymous Christians in Russia, and that genuinely pious families often face one of the cruelest of all forms of persecution: the forcible removal of children from the home.

The ferment of the Khrushchev era may have represented only the passing unrest of peripheral intellectuals: foredoomed, if not ultimately meaningless. Certainly the young révoltés were more certain of what they were against than of what they favored. They were, moreover, not revolutionaries in any meaningful political sense. The ability of the regime to sustain one-party rule and to anatomize opposition lent an air of unreality to any consideration of alternative forms of political and social organization. In any case, the younger generation in the USSR—in contrast to those of other Communist states, such as Hungary and Poland—did not generally relate communism with foreign domination but saw it as an irreversible part of their history. Communism has been made to appear less odious by the fact that Russia has emerged under its banner to a position of power unprecedented in Russian history. Since there was every material inducement for gifted youth to join the managerial structure of a state able to use and reward the talented, cultural unrest seemed to some observers little more than the passing malaise of a bohemian fringe on the periphery of a growing industrial society.

To the Soviet leadership, however, intellectual ferment was a subject of the most profound concern. The extraordinary amount of time and energy spent on artistic and intellectual affairs by Khrushchev—an earthy figure, who clearly had no personal interest in such matters—must be explained at least partly in terms of the omnipresent concern of insecure autocrats for the realities of power. The Soviet leaders have vivid memories of the extraordinary role played by the intelligentsia in the genesis of their own aging revolutionary movement. They also realize that Leninist governments—no matter how “liberalized” or “de-Stalinized”—are ultimately based on an ideology. Political power in a totalitarian state is not based either on the periodic popular elections of a democracy or on the religiously sanctified hereditary succession of more traditional forms of authoritarian rule. The stated rationale for Communist rule in the USSR has remained the metaphysical pretensions of that party to represent the vanguard of the historical process on the verge of moving “from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.” Although the USSR could shed its ideological pretensions and become simply another powerful state with a permissive, pluralistic culture, there is no reason to assume (as the history of Nazi Germany demonstrates) that such developments must necessarily result from growing education and prosperity.

There are, nevertheless, at least four reasons for believing that the ferment of the post-Stalin era may represent the beginnings of something new rather than a finished or passing episode. First is the sheer number of people involved in the ferment. Previous ideological unrest in Russian history was invariably confined to a small minority which discussed issues in relative isolation from the populace as a whole. Many more people read Katkov’s chauvinistic Russian Herald than Mikhailovsky’s Annals of the Fatherland, the sensationalist illustrated Niva than the World of Art. In the USSR of the sixties, however, ideological controversy was waged in the most widely circulated journals—and among a populace which has acquired elementary literacy and some schooling in ideological terminology. The monopoly of the Communist party on the organs of communication seemed of decreasing importance in a time when the exact line on many questions remained either unclear or unenforced.

Khrushchev’s denigration of Stalin in 1956 opened a Pandora’s box of critical questions about where and how things went wrong. The petulant explanation ad hominem that the trouble began with Stalin’s “cult of personality” in the mid-thirties and his institution of purges against the party did not answer the question or even provide the kind of “profound Marxist analysis” that loyal Leninists were seeking. Some apparently view forced collectivization as the fatal departure; others blame the entire Leninist conception of a totalitarian party and compression of the two revolutions into one. The “Aesopian” tradition of discussing unmentionable political questions in terms of past history has been revived; and the great increase in the late fifties and early sixties in the number of students studying history in effect bespeaks a more lively interest in public affairs among the younger generation.

The party devoted a special Central Committee meeting early in the summer of 1963 solely to ideological and cultural matters. Indications of unrest (even including occasional strikes) in the industrial and agricultural sector point to the fact that the vague desires and rising expectations of the young intellectuals probably correspond more closely to the grass roots attitudes of workers and farmers than in any previous period of intellectual ferment inside Russia.

Even more important than the numbers of people involved is the fact that this ferment is the product of something necessary for Soviet construction itself: expanded contact with the West and increased education. Though the intention of the Communist leadership is clearly to use travel and education as subordinate weapons in the development of Soviet strength, the effects of its policies may prove more far-reaching. Vasily Kliuchevsky, the great historian of the late imperial period, put the case well in his classic study of the effects produced on Russian culture by increased Western contact in the seventeenth century:

We may consider that the technical fruits of a foreign culture may not and should not relate to the spiritual bases and roots of the foreign culture, but can people be kept from the desire to acquaint themselves with the roots of a foreign culture when borrowing its fruits?⁷³

For the USSR of today the answer is clearly, no. The curiosity about all things Western—art, music, sports, and manner of life—is animated and inescapable.

The scientific and technological emphases that the Soviet leaders have built into their educational system and cultural exchange proposals have led some Western observers to fear for a “new illiteracy,”⁷⁴ whereby people are successfully taught to read and even to perform difficult technical tasks without ever learning to think critically. It is difficult, however, to keep technology and ideology in hermetically sealed compartments, particularly in such fields as architecture. Garish and costly monumentalism had become a symbol of the Stalin era, which his successors were anxious to eliminate. By sending delegations to the West to study cheaper and cleaner methods of construction, the regime inadvertently stimulated curiosity about the possibility of integrating architecture with local surroundings and family needs and removing questions of aesthetic judgment from the hands of bureaucrats.⁷⁵

The first important denunciations of “degenerate excesses” in the anti-Stalin campaign after the Twentieth Party Congress in February, 1956, took place in a scientific laboratory.⁷⁶ There is receptivity among scientifically trained young Russians to the proposition that Marxism, although a logical outgrowth of nineteenth-century scientific thinking, is inadequate for the more complex and sophisticated thought world of twentieth-century science. Voznesensky, the most technically sophisticated and ideologically heretical of all the young poets, reports that his largest following lies precisely among scientists. Those who work most intimately with the complexities and subtleties of natural phenomena are, he reports, sympathetic to these same qualities in art.⁷⁷ Evtushenko makes a similar point by insisting that an art of the “oxcart” age is incompatible with life in the space age.⁷⁸

Increasingly, the literary heroes of the new generation are lonely scientific workers, misunderstood for the most part by their contemporaries and harassed if not persecuted by the Soviet system. Increasingly, the message they seem to be conveying is that of the lonely inventor in Dudintsev’s Not by Bread Alone: “Once a man has started to think, he cannot be denied his freedom.”

If, as seems probable, scientifically trained and practically oriented figures are to play an increasingly important role in pressing for change inside the USSR, some of the self-defeating utopianism of past intellectual agitation may well disappear. Creeping pragmatism may not seem an exciting phenomenon to the distant observer. But to those who have seen great expectations so often give way to renewed tyranny and despair this new no-nonsense approach may well provide fortification against disillusionment in the quest for meaningful reform.

A third and even deeper reason for taking the youthful ferment seriously is the psychological need for Russians to make some sense out of the enormous suffering they have undergone in this century. Perhaps forty million people have been killed by artificial means in the last half century—in revolution, civil war, forced repopulation, purges, and two world wars. The myth of Communist infallibility in terms of which all of this suffering was justified is now dead. The papacy of world Communism has been destroyed by Khrushchevian sacrilege—or perhaps moved to Peking. In any event, Russians no longer regard their leadership with the awe and passivity that so long prevailed.

The ordinary man still seeks a credible account of recent Russian history to replace the mythic one of the Stalin era. Thus, the quest for explanation goes on. It feeds on a belief rooted in the chronicles and secularized by Hegel, Marx, and Lenin that there is an intelligible pattern and meaning to history. Behind the quest lies the desire to feel that suffering has not been in vain, that beyond statistical consolations and ideological opiates something better is really coming into being—on earth as it is in space. Many continue to call themselves Communists, because that is the banner under which Russians have worked and suffered in recent years. But Evtushenko is typical in his highly un-Leninist definition of communism as “the decency of the revolutionary idea,” deserving of respect because it has become “the essence of the Russian people,” entitled to authority only in “a state in which truth is president.”⁷⁹

Decency and truth demand an owning up to some of the darker pages of Russian history. Just as the younger generation has embraced a kind of philo-Semitism as a means of atoning for the anti-Semitism of past Russian history, so has it adopted a sympathetic attitude toward the small Baltic states, whose periodic despoliation and repopulation by Russian conquerors from Ivan III to Stalin has long bothered sensitive Russians. The term “Baits” was used as a synonym for Siberian prisoners in the High Stalin era; and recent Soviet literature has tended to praise and indeed idealize this beleaguered region. There is special respect for the Esthonians, whose integrity and fidelity to democratic forms during their brief period of independence between the two world wars won them an admiration comparable to that earned by their cultural kin and northern neighbors, the Finns. The hero of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich devotes a special paragraph to the subject:

Well, it’s said that nationality doesn’t mean anything and that every nation has its bad eggs. But among all the Esthonians Shukhov had known he’d never met a bad one.⁸⁰

The rebellion of four youths in V. Aksenov’s Salinger-like Ticket to the Stars is told in terms of their plan to flee to Tallinn, the capital of Esthonia and traditional center of Westward-looking gaiety in the eastern Baltic.⁸¹

The growing respect for decency and truth can also be measured by the increasing inability of party functionaries to gain support for their periodic campaigns of denunciation. Younger writers seem unlikely to be either fully bought off by the material inducements or fully intimidated by the partial punishments which the regime alternately employs. Sensitive weathervanes of ideological change, such as Ilya Ehrenburg, have unreservedly thrown in their lot with the younger generation. The term “fighter of the first rank” (along with second and third ranks) has been introduced as a kind of informal patent of moral nobility; and Evtushenko has noted that “people someday will marvel at our time when simple honesty was called courage.”⁸² Even Khrushchev felt obliged to sell himself as the benefactor of youthful expectations against “Stalin’s heirs,” who were blasted with his approval in Pravda by Evtushenko’s poem of that name. Khrushchev’s successors were, initially at least, deferential if not defensive toward dissident young intellectuals, assuring them that the arbitrary interference of the Khrushchev era would cease and attempting to present themselves as the true friends of “genuine intellectuality” (intelligentnost’). This term became late in 1965 the latest in the long line of normative terms derived from intelligentsia, but when officially proclaimed to be “in no way opposed to narodnost’ or partiinost’,”⁸³ seemed more likely to remind Russians of the three “ism’s” comprising the confining “official nationality” of the nineteenth century than to guide them toward the new world they seek in the late twentieth century.

A fourth and related reason for insisting on the future implications of the current intellectual ferment is the fact that it has roots in Russian tradition as well as Soviet reality. The more one looks at the younger generation and its search for positive ideals, the more one senses that they are not just opposed to their Stalinist parents (often referred to now as “the ancestors”),⁸⁴ but are in many ways seeking renewed links with their grandparents. They are, in short, rediscovering some of the culture which was just reaching new richness in both the political and artistic spheres at the time of the Stalinist blight.

In a short poem written in a Soviet youth magazine in the old folklore form a young Soviet poet seeks to rehabilitate the symbol of Westernization desecrated by Stalin, to free it even of its Leninist name and revolutionary symbols:

Tell us something of St. Petersburg,

For as yet we have not seen it.

Long ago we implored the producers

Please, do not bring us all those miscellaneous films

About lovely, deserted ladies,

But bring us St. Isaac’s in a movie

The Bronze Horseman, the old fortress

And all about the vast St. Petersburg.⁸⁵

Of course, it is impossible fully to appraise—and would be dangerous to underestimate—the crippling effects of a generation of terror and the continuation of tight censorship and control. “Moral convalescence”⁸⁶ may be a long process. The “silence of Soviet culture” is most insidious in the self-imposed censorship that it subtly encouraged. As the Soviet novelist Daniel Granin wrote in a short story in 1956 significantly entitled “My Own Opinion” (and severely criticized by the party bureaucracy):

Silence is the most convenient form of lying. It knows how to keep peace with the conscience; it craftily preserves your right to withhold your personal opinion on the grounds that someday you will have a chance to express it.⁸⁷

Yet there can also be a positive side to silence: a depth and purity that sometimes comes to those who have suffered in silence. This quality is often hard to discover in the uninhibited and talkative West, but may be more familiar to those who for so long gave special authority to monastic elders trained by long periods of silence and withdrawal from the world.

“Speech, after long silence; it is right,” wrote Yeats.⁸⁸ Perhaps those who have been so long forced to live with silence may have rediscovered the joy of simple speech or penetrated the mysteries of authentic human communication more fully than many seemingly sophisticated and articulate writers outside. “Music is born in silence,” reverently writes one of the best of contemporary Soviet movie directors,⁸⁹ and one of the best of the young poets has written vividly:

I know that men consist of words which

have embraced them.

The word moves. Earth is on fire.

Deep feelings rest on silence.

Suffering is mute and so is music.⁹⁰

The respect of so many of the young artists for Pasternak is based on his faithfulness in guarding the integrity of his words, and his faith that a new birth would come out of those regions “where the language is still pure.”

The most intense and dedicated of young writers seem to have recaptured some of the old monastic sense of writing as a sacred act, the recording of words so that they may be sung aloud with joyful exaltation. Some of them even seem to be suggesting that the Word of the evangelist may offer an antidote to the “words, words, words” of the old intelligentsia and the endless slogans of the new. One poet has written in honor of the great monastic iconographer:

Rublev knew how to fall on his knees before the word.

That is to say

The One that was in the beginning.⁹¹

He goes on to point out that Rublev was redeemed and inspired “not by a swineherd symbolizing labor, but quite simply by the Savior.”

There is, of course, no way of knowing how deep and lasting the ferment of the Khrushchev era may prove to be, or of evaluating how much and in what ways the young generation will continue to press for reform when tempted by lucrative careers in the official establishment and increasing material prosperity. One recent Soviet story tells how a watchman suddenly discovers on the outskirts of a collective farm Christ in bast shoes saying to the Mother of God: “We have tested men in many ways—by war and hunger.… We must try them now with a good harvest.”⁹² Perhaps with a few good harvests unrest will vanish and the unfulfilled aspirations of Russian culture will linger on only as a kind of wistful memory. All things pass, and the impossibility of knowing what may prove important to the generations ahead is the final fascination and ultimate mystery of history. Perhaps all that the non-prophetic historian can do is make a few last reflections on the historical process itself, and on that part of it which he has examined in search of some final clues to the chapters that lie ahead.