The Jaguar Smile

9 ON CATHARSIS

I was sitting on a verandah at the ASTC cafeteria, in the company of two young Nicaraguan writers, Mario Martínez and Donaldo Altamirano, and two visiting writers from Eastern Europe: the Bulgarian poet Kalin Donkovy, a slow, silent, heavy man, and one of the secretaries of the Soviet Writers’ Union, Vladimir Amlissky, a much more urbane fellow altogether. Conversation wasn’t easy. Amlissky and Donkovy had to be translated into Spanish by one interpreter, and that was then rendered into English, for my benefit, by a second intermediary. Nevertheless, I thought, one might as well plunge in. ‘What news,’ I asked, ‘does Comrade Amlissky have about the reported liberalization of censorship in the Soviet Union?’ He nodded a number of times. ‘Things are better,’ he said. ‘Now more writers, and, which is more important, a greater number of publishers have the confidence to speak out on social issues. I myself have written on the subject of delinquency.’ He also told me about all the prizes he had won.

I thought what he said was very likely true. ‘But,’ I pressed on, ‘what about Doctor Zhivago? Can we expect its publication soon?’

‘My personal opinion,’ Amlissky replied, ‘is that this novel of Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, is a poor novel. The Nobel Prize was not given to him for literary reasons.’

‘To tell the truth, I’m not too fond of it myself,’ I said.

‘And it made an absolutely terrible film,’ he added.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but whatever one thinks of Zhivago, it has become symbolic of Soviet censorship, and, anyway, you can’t seriously be saying that Pasternak was not a writer of Nobel Prize calibre.’

Amlissky nodded again, many times. ‘Yes, I think this novel will probably be published soon,’ he said, as if it were a trifling thing. ‘And, for his poetry,’ he added, reasonably enough, ‘I would give him all the prizes in the world.’

What about other writers? ‘A number of errors were made,’ he said, ‘in the case of many of our great writers: Akhmatova, Bulgakov, Pasternak. These are now being rectified. For example, the poet Gumilyov, the husband of Akhmatova. A volume of his verse is now being published.’

No mention of Mandelstam, I noticed; and, after all, the ‘error’ made in the case of Gumilyov was that he had been executed. It seemed an inadequate word to use.

‘Yes,’ Amlissky said, ‘certain errors.’ Something of my views had evidently been lost in translation.

‘These days, there’s a strange schizophrenia in Russian literature,’ I suggested. ‘Most of the writers known outside the Soviet Union are unread within it, and vice versa. How does that feel to a writer who is still on the inside?’

He answered by attacking the dissident writers. They had ceased to write literature and become pamphleteers. They were mediocre. ‘Even if that were true,’ I said, ‘and as a matter of fact I don’t think it is, not when one thinks of Brodsky, Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky, Voinovich — but even if it were, mediocrity is no reason for banning a writer. Third-rate writers get published all over the world, after all.’

‘Let me give you my personal view of Solzhenitsyn,’ he said. ‘I don’t care for his writing nowadays. It has been getting worse and worse, and he has become a very right-wing figure, very Reaganite, very illiberal.’

I, too, was critical of many of Solzhenitsyn’s pronouncements since his arrival in the West, I said; but surely one had to separate that from his stature as the author of, above all, The Gulag Archipelago? ‘Let me give you my personal view of this work, Archipelago Gulag,’ Amlissky offered. ‘You must understand that in our great classics we have a tradition of high tragedy, in which many awful things are shown and done, but always in the end there is catharsis, the cleansing of the soul. But in Solzhenitsyn we find no catharsis. This is why I do not care for this work.’

I was about to suggest that the lack of catharsis in Solzhenitsyn’s writing might have more to do with Russian history than with his artistic limitations, but at this point I realized that the Nicaraguan writers were puzzled and confused. ‘The Soviet Union is a country with many great problems,’ Mario Martínez said. ‘It is interesting to hear how it is learning from its past errors.’

Later, one of the interpreters asked me a breathtaking question: ‘What’s a labour camp?’

‘What’s a labour camp?’ I echoed, disbelievingly.

‘Oh, I can see what you’re trying to say it is,’ she said. ‘Something like a concentration camp. But are you really saying they have such things in the Soviet Union?’

‘Um,’ I stumbled, ‘well, yes.’

‘But how can it be?’ she asked in obvious distress. ‘The USSR is so helpful to third world countries. How can it be doing things like this?’

There is a kind of innocence abroad in Nicaragua. One of the problems with the romance of the word ‘revolution’ is that it can carry with it a sort of blanket approval of all self-professed revolutionary movements. Donaldo Altamirano told me how deeply he felt in solidarity with the Provisional IRA.

Now Kalin Donkovy, who had been ponderously quiet all evening, began to speak, as unstoppably as a steamroller, about the poetry of Bulgaria. ‘Our tradition is of martyr poets,’ he declared. ‘Do you know that the symbol of our writers’ union is of the winged horse, Pegasus, with a bullet-hole in his chest? The most successful volume of modern poetry in Bulgaria is an anthology of dead poets. And this is not surprising. When poets suffer with the people, their work improves.’

Martínez and Altamirano responded to this statement with great warmth. The parallels with Nicaragua were obvious. The ghosts of the local martyr-poets walked into the ASTC cafeteria and joined us, the ghost, for example, of Leonel Rugama, who, in the old days at the India Cafe, used to tell stories about his mad uncle who lived in Macondo, with the Momotombo volcano in the background; who died at the age of twenty; and who believed that the revolution was ‘communion with the species’.

That was a fine, romantic sentiment, I said to Rugama’s ghost. But nation-building required something more prosaic: the ability to make distinctions, for example, between the PLO and the IRA.

I wondered if Nicaragua’s ghosts would permit the living to make such distinctions. On the one hand, the romance of the dead; on the other, the great American fist. It could turn into quite a trap.