THE

SOVIET MIND

RUSSIAN CULTURE UNDER COMMUNISM

edited by HENRY HARDY foreword by STROBE TALBOTT


/

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THE SOVIET MIND

Also by Isaiah Berlin

karl marx the hedgehog and the fox the age of enlightenment

Edited by Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly russian thinkers

Edited by Henry Hardy concepts and categories against the current personal impressions the crooked timber of humanity the sense of reality the roots of romanticism the power of ideas three critics of the enlightenment freedom and its betrayal liberty

flourishing: letters 1928-1946

(published in the us as Letters 1928-1946)

Edited by Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer the proper study of mankind

THE SOVIET MIND

Russian Culture under Communism

isaiah berlin

Edited by Henry Hardy Foreword by Strobe Talbott Glossary by Helen Rappaport

brookings institution press

Washington, D.C.

about brookings

The Brookings Institution is a private nonprofit organization devoted to research, education, and publication on important issues of domestic and for­eign policy. Its principal purpose is to bring knowledge to bear on current and emerging policy problems. The Institution maintains a position of neutrality on issues of public policy. Interpretations or conclusions in Brookings publications should be understood to be solely those of the authors.

Copyright Isaiah Berlin 1949, 1952, 1956 © Isaiah Berlin 1957, 1980, 1989 © The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust 1997, 2000, 2004 Introduction © Strobe Talbott 2004 Glossary of Names © Helen Rappaport 2004 Editorial matter © Henry Hardy 2004 Photograph of Stalin copyright James Abbe 1932 Photographs of documents © The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust 2004

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmit­ted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the Brookings Institution Press, 1775 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036 (fax: 202/797-6195 or e-mail: permissions@brookings.edu).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data Berlin, Isaiah, Sir.

The Soviet mind : Russian culture under communism / Isaiah Berlin ; edited by Henry Hardy ; foreword by Strobe Talbott. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8157-0904-8 (alk. paper)

1. Soviet Union—Intellectual life. 2. Arts—Political aspects—Soviet Union. 3. Berlin, Isaiah, Sir—Travel—Soviet Union. I. Hardy, Henry. II. Title. DK266.4.B47 2003

700'.947'09045—dc22 2003023297

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication meets minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials: ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Typeset in Stempel Garamond

Printed by R. R. Donnelley Harrisonburg, Virginia

For Pat Utechin

The American photojournalist James Abbe scored a publishing coup in 1932 by talking his way into the Kremlin for a private photo-session with Stalin. The results included this rare personal shot of the Soviet leader, at a time when he was becoming increasingly reclusive.

The task of a Communist educator is [. . .] principally that of Stalin's engineer - of so adjusting the individual that he should only ask those questions the answers to which are readily access­ible, that he shall grow up in such a way that he would naturally fit into his society with minimum friction [. ..] Curiosity for its own sake, the spirit of independent individual enquiry, the desire to create or contemplate beautiful things for their own sake, to find out truth for its own sake, to pursue ends because they are what they are and satisfy some deep desire of our nature, are [...] damned because they may increase the differences between men, because they may not conduce to harmonious development of a monolithic society.

Isaiah Berlin 'Democracy, Communism and the Individual' Talk at Mount Holyoke College, 1949

CONTENTS

Foreword by Strobe Talbott xi

Preface by Henry Hardy xix

The Arts in Russia under Stalin 1

A Visit to Leningrad 28

A Great Russian Writer 41

Conversations with Akhmatova and Pasternak 53

Boris Pasternak 85

Why the Soviet Union Chooses to Insulate Itself 90 The Artificial Dialectic:

Generalissimo Stalin and the Art of Government 98

Four Weeks in the Soviet Union 119

Soviet Russian Culture 130

The Survival of the Russian Intelligentsia 166

Glossary of Names by Helen Rappaport 171

Further Reading 227

Index 231

FOREWORD

Strobe Talbott

Isaiah Berlin believed that ideas matter, not just as products of the intellect but as producers of systems, guides to governance, shapers of policy, inspirations of culture and engines of history. That makes him a figure of iconic importance for the Brookings Institution and others like it in Washington. Whatever their dif­ferences, these organisations are dedicated to the importance of ideas in public life. They're in the business of thinking about the hardest problems facing our society, nation and world - and thinking up solutions. That's why they're called think tanks.

Berlin probably would have had something gently teasing to say about these outfits (and their nickname), not least because of his scepticism about the quintessentially Yankee conceit that all ques­tions have answers, and that any problem can be completely solved. But Berlin would have enjoyed an occasional visit to our own building at 1775 Massachusetts Avenue. He'd feel right at home, since from 1942 until 1946 he worked up the street at 3100 Mass. Ave., in the British Embassy. As a prodigious and exuberant con­versationalist, he would have found the cafeteria on the first floor particularly hospitable. Every day, from noon to two, it's teeming with Brookings scholars and others from up and down Think Tank Row, who gather regularly to field-test their own latest ideas over lunch. It would have been fun to have Sir Isaiah in our midst, not least because fun was yet another ingredient of life - including the life of the mind - that he both dispensed and appreciated in others. His stepson, Peter Halban, recalls Berlin teaching him to play a Russian version of tiddlywinks. He loved wordplay, storytelling and gossip. His commentary on the human condition was often freewheeling and playful.

Berlin would have spent some time in the library on the third floor as well. He believed that ideas, like civilisations, States and individuals, owe much to their forebears. Those ideas live on in books. He called himself not a philosopher but a historian of ideas. He saw himself not so much as a promulgator of new truths as a student, critic, synthesiser and explicator of old ones. He put a pre­mium on scholarship - on analysing the empirical evidence, pon­dering work others had done before him, and mastering its impli­cations for their time and our own.

One quality anyone who knew Berlin, whether in person or through his writings, associates with him is open-mindedness. He had respect not just for the views of others but for the complexity of reality - and of morality. 'Pluralism' was one of the rare words with that suffix that, in his vocabulary, had a favourable connota­tion. Most other isms were somewhere between suspect and anath­ema. He was a champion of the spirit of openness and tolerance, whereby a community - a university common room, a gathering of townspeople or a nation - encourages different and often compet­ing ideas of what is good, true and right.

The last time I met Berlin was in 1994, a little over two years before his death. I was serving in the State Department at the time and gave a lecture in Oxford on the promotion of democracy as an objective of American foreign policy. It was unnerving to look down from the lectern and see him there, in the front row, fully gowned, eyes riveted on me, brows arched. After I finished, he came up to me and, along with several courtesies, offered his favourite piece of advice from someone who was not, I suspect, his favourite statesman: Talleyrand. 'Surtout pas trop de zele,' he said. I had the impression that he was not so much reproving me as letting me in on what he felt was a home truth about pretty much everything American, notably including our foreign policy.

What he called 'the unavoidability of conflicting ends' was the 'only truth which I have ever found out for myself'.[1] 'Some of the

Great Goods cannot live together . . . We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss.'[2] It's a kind of corollary to his concept of pluralism, and of liberalism.

Thus, for him, all interesting issues are dilemmas. The only thing worse than making a mistake was thinking you couldn't make one. He believed we must face the inevitability of undesir­able, potentially hazardous consequences even if we make what we are convinced is the right choice.

Had Berlin taken the matter that far and no further, he would have left all of us - including those of us in the think-tank business - in a cul-de-sac, a state of ethical and intellectual paralysis, not to mention chronic indecision.

But he did not leave us there. He argued that the difficulty of choice does not free us from the necessity of choice. Recognising a dilemma is no excuse for equivocation, indecision or inaction. We must weigh the pros and cons and decide what to do. If we don't, others will decide, and the ones who do so may well act on the basis of one pernicious ism or another. All in all, the making of choices, especially hard ones, is, he believed, an essential part of 'what it means to be human'.

Perhaps the best-known phrase associated with Berlin's view of the world and humanity is the one used as the title for his essay, The Hedgehog and the Fox. It comes from a fragment of Greek poetry by Archilochus: 'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.' As he applied this saying to the major actors of history, Berlin was not praising one beast and con­demning the other. Everyone combines both, although in different proportions and interactions. In that sense, the proverb doesn't quite work as a bumper-sticker for life - which is appropriate, since Berlin was wary of slogans and nostrums.

He did, however, have one big idea of his own - his own per­sonal hedgehog - and it was (also appropriately) paradoxical: beware of big ideas, especially when they fall into the hands of political leaders.

The antonym of pluralism is monism, which holds that there is one overarching answer to who we are, how we should behave, how we should govern and be governed. It's when the powers- that-be claim to have a monopoly on the good, the right and the true that evil arises. Monism is the common denominator of other isms that have wrecked such havoc through history, including the two totalitarianisms of the twentieth century. One is associated with the name of Hitler, the other with that of Stalin, the photo­graph of whom on page vi shows him sitting beneath a portrait of that Big-Idea-monger, Karl Marx. Stalin looms in the back­ground, and sometimes the foreground, of all Berlin's essays on Soviet politics and culture, including those written after the tyrant's death in 1953.

After perusing the manuscript of this book, George Kennan had this to say: 'I always regarded Isaiah, with whom I had fairly close relations during my several periods of residence in Oxford, not only as the outstanding and leading critical intelligence of his time, but as something like a patron saint among the commentators on the Russian scene, and particularly the literary and political scene.'

Berlin himself was not ethnically a Russian but a Jew (a distinc­tion that has mattered all too much in Russian society); he was born not in Russia proper but in Riga, on the fringes of the empire; he was only eleven when his family emigrated from Petrograd to England, where he spent his long life; and he returned to Russia only three times. Yet he was, in many ways, a uniquely insightful observer of that country. As a boy, he had been able to dip into leather-bound editions of Tolstoy, Turgenev and Pushkin in his father's library and hear Chaliapin sing the role of Boris Godunov at the Mariinsky Theatre. And, of course, he retained the language, which gave him access to all those minds - Soviet, pre-Soviet, post- Soviet, un-Soviet and anti-Soviet - that informed what he thought and what you are about to read.

Throughout his life, as Berlin's own mind ranged over the cen­turies and around the world, he continued to think, read, listen, talk and write about Russia, both as the home of a great culture and as a laboratory for a horrible experiment in monism.

In pondering how that experiment might turn out, Berlin rejected the idea of historic inevitability, not least because that itself was monistic. Instead, he believed in what might be called the plu­ralism of possibilities. One possibility was that Russia, over time, would break the shackles of its own history. He asserted that belief in 1945, immediately after his first meeting with the poet Anna Akhmatova, recounted in 'A Visit to Leningrad' and 'Conver­sations with Akhmatova and Pasternak'. He returned from Leningrad to the British Embassy in Moscow, where he was work­ing at the time, and wrote a visionary dispatch to the Foreign Office in London. It expressed a hope that the vitality and magnifi­cence of Russian culture might withstand, and eventually even overcome, what he called the 'blunders, absurdities, crimes and dis­asters' perpetrated by a 'most hateful despotism'; in other words, that the best in Russia's dualism might win out over the worst.

Akhmatova wrote Berlin into her epic Poem without a Hero as 'the Guest from the Future'. Yet in real life, his powers did not include that of prophecy. He did not expect to outlive the Soviet Union. In 1952, in an essay included here, he advanced the concept of 'the artificial dialectic', the ingenious tactical flexibility in the Communist party line that would, he believed, never allow 'the system to become either too limp and inefficient or too highly charged and self-destructive'. It was 'Generalissimo Stalin's origi­nal invention, his major contribution to the art of government' - and part of the tyranny's survival manual. He feared it would work:

[S]o long as the rulers of the Soviet Union retain their skill with the machinery of government and continue to be adequately informed by their secret police, an internal collapse, or even an atrophy of will and intellect of the rulers owing to the demoralising effects of despotism and the unscrupulous manipulation of other human beings, seems unlikely ... Beset by difficulties and perils as this monstrous machine may be, its success and capacity for survival must not be underesti­mated. Its future may be uncertain, even precarious; it may blunder and suffer shipwreck or change gradually or catastrophically, but it is not, until men's better natures assert themselves, necessarily doomed.

Some might find in this judgement evidence that Berlin was blind to the handwriting on the wall, or at least less far-sighted than Kennan, who had, in 1947, discerned in the USSR 'tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power'.[3]

Another interpretation may be closer to the mark. For one thing, the wall was a lot more solid-looking than anything written on it in the last year of Stalin's reign. For another, 'not necessarily doomed' may not be a diagnosis of terminal illness but it's not a certification of good health either. And finally, most pertinently, Berlin did not believe in certainty - especially, to paraphrase Yogi Berra, about the future.

I interviewed Berlin in the summer of 1968, just after Soviet tanks overran Czechoslovakia and crushed the Prague Spring. He talked, at breakneck speed and in a baroque, erudite manner, but with great clarity, about how the invasion proved the weakness of a regime that relied so utterly on brute strength, and how it revealed the 'decrepitude' of the Soviet system and of its ideology.

Yet he - like myself and virtually everyone else I knew - still expected that system to hang on for a long time to come. In the mid-1980s, Margaret Thatcher chided Berlin for being a pessimist when he suggested that it would take a war to bring about what now would be called 'regime change' in Moscow.

Even in the Year of Miracles, 1989 - when the wall (literally and figuratively) came tumbling down - while others saw the end of history, Berlin was not ready to pronounce the end of anything. In 'The Survival of the Russian Intelligentsia' he hails the Russians for their part in the peaceful revolution that was spreading throughout the Soviet bloc. They are, he wrote, 'a great people, their creative powers are immense, and once they are set free there is no telling what they may give to the world'.

But even amidst what he calls his 'astonishment, exhilaration, happiness' about what was happening in Central Europe, he recalls Madame Bonaparte's comment when congratulated on being the mother to an emperor, three kings and a queen: 'Oui, pourvu que ga dure.' There's an echo of that caution at the end of the essay - which concludes: 'A new barbarism is always possible, but I see lit­tle prospect of it at present. That evils can, after all, be conquered, that the end of enslavement is in progress, are things of which men can be reasonably proud.'

He believed that history, including the history of ideas, is always 'in progress'. At moments when the direction seems positive, progress can be acknowledged, even celebrated - but without excessive zeal, or certainty.

This much can be said with total certainty: to be associated with the publication of this book is a cause for all of us to be more than reasonably proud.

This book, like much that bears the Brookings imprint, is the result of collaboration. Along with Bob Faherty, the director of the Brookings Press, I wish to express our gratitude to Henry Hardy of Wolfson College, Oxford, who edited these essays, lec­tures and other writings by Isaiah Berlin. Henry accomplished that task with the same skill and care that he has brought to four­teen earlier collections of Berlin's work, including five since Berlin's death in 1997. There are more to come, beginning with the first volume (1928-46) of Berlin's letters, published in the same season as this book.

I join Henry in expressing appreciation to Aline Berlin for sup­porting this project, and for contributing, along with Peter Halban, to a roundtable discussion of the manuscript, convened on 7 July 2003 under the auspices of St Antony's College - an event made possible by the kindness of the Warden, Sir Marrack Goulding, and Polly Friedhoff, the College's Public Relations and Development Officer. That session brought together scholars, col­leagues and friends of Berlin's who shared with us their reminis­cences of him and their knowledge of his work. The other partici­pants were: Sir Rodric Braithwaite, Professor Archie Brown, Professor Cao Yiqiang, Larissa Haskell, Camilla Hornby, Professor Peter Oppenheimer, Dr Alex Pravda, Helen Rappaport, Professor Robert Service, Brooke Shearer, Dr Harry Shukman and Pat Utechin.

PREFACE

Henry Hardy

he possesed a clever but also cruel look and all his countenence bore an expression of a phanatic he signed death verdicts, without moving his eyebrow. his leading motto in life was "The purpose justifies the ways" he did not stop before anything for bringing out his plans.

Isaiah Berlin, 'The Purpose Justifies the Ways' (1921)[4]

I have long known that this book ought to exist. Isaiah Berlin's scattered writings on the Soviet era of Russian politics and culture are substantial both in quality and in quantity, as well as being unlike those from any other hand.

In 1991, after the successful publication of The Crooked Tim­ber of Humanity, and in response to the collapse of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, I suggested to Berlin that a collec­tion of his pieces on the Soviet Union might be especially timely, but he demurred, saying that most of the items in question were occasional, lightweight and somewhat obsolete. I returned to the fray, setting out the arguments in favour of the proposal. He replied as follows:

No good. I realise that all you say is perfectly sensible, but this is the wrong time, even if these things are to be published. [. . .] I think at the moment, when the Soviet Union has gone under, to add to works which dance upon its grave would be inopportune - there is far too much of this going on already - the various ways of showing the inadequacies of Marxism, Communism, Soviet organi­sation, the causes of the latest putsch, revolution etc. And I think these essays, if they are of any worth, which, as you know, I perma­nently doubt, had much better be published in ten or fifteen years' time, perhaps after my death - as interesting reflections, at best, of what things looked like to observers like myself in the '50s, '60s, '70s etc. Believe me, I am right.

More than a decade later, and some six years after Berlin's death, it seems right to put these hesitations aside, especially since developments in the former Soviet Union have not followed the swift path towards Western liberal democracy that so many (not including Berlin himself) rashly predicted; it is a commonplace that much of the Soviet mentality has survived the regime that spawned it. As for Berlin's doubts about the value - especially the permanent value - of his work, I am used to discounting these with a clear conscience, and his phrase 'observers like myself' splendidly understates the uniqueness of his own vision.

What has brought the project to fruition at this particular juncture is the welcome proposal by my friend Strobe Talbott that the pieces in question be made the subject of a seminar on Berlin's contribution to Soviet studies and published by the Brookings Institution Press. Strobe's foreword expertly places the contents of the book in the context of Berlin's oeuvre as a whole.

All the footnotes to the essays are editorial except those to which 'I.B.' is appended. A few supplementary remarks now fol­low on the circumstances in which the essays I have included came to be written.

The Arts in Russia under Stalin

In the autumn of 1945 Berlin, then an official of the British Foreign Office, visited the Soviet Union for the first time since he had left it in 1920, aged eleven. It was during this visit that his famous meetings with Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak took place. He did not record his memories of these encounters until thirty-five years later.1

1A shortened version of his account appears in this volume.

But he also wrote two official reports at the time. At the end of his period of duty he compiled a remarkable long memorandum on the general condition of Russian culture, giving it the charac­teristically unassuming title 'A Note on Literature and the Arts in the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic in the Closing Months of 1945'.

He also understated the coverage of his report. He enclosed a copy of it with a letter dated 23 March 1946 to Averell Harriman, US Ambassador to the USSR, congratulating him on his appoint­ment as Ambassador to Britain. In the letter, written from the British Embassy in Washington, he told Harriman:

I enclose a long and badly written report on Russian literature etc. which I am instructed to forward to you by Frank Roberts.[5] I doubt whether there is anything in it that is either new or arresting - here only Jock Balfour[6] has read it, in the Foreign Office I doubt if anyone will. It is confidential only because of the well-known consequences to the possible sources of the information contained in it, should its existence ever become known to 'them'. I should be grateful if you could return it to me via the Foreign Office bag addressed to New College, Oxford, in the dim recesses of which I shall think with some nostalgia but no regret of the world to which I do not think I shall ever be recalled.

Berlin's self-effacing account of his despatch is of course quite misleading. As Michael Ignatieff writes in his biography of Berlin:

Its modest title belied its ambitions: it was nothing less than a his­tory of Russian culture in the first half of the twentieth century, a chronicle of Akhmatova's fateful generation. It was probably the first Western account of Stalin's war against Russian culture. On every page there are traces of what she - Chukovsky and Pasternak as well - told him about their experiences in the years of persecution.[7]

A Visit to Leningrad

The other piece written contemporaneously with the events of 1945 is a more personal account of his historic visit to Leningrad from 13 to 20 November, less than two years after the lifting of the German siege. He deliberately underplays, indeed slightly falsifies, his encounter with Akhmatova on (probably) 15-16 November. But in a letter to Frank Roberts, the British Charge d'Affaires in Moscow, thanking him for his hospitality, he writes that when he called on Akhmatova again on his way out of the Soviet Union at the end of his visit, she 'inscribed a brand new poem about midnight conversations for my benefit, which is the most thrilling thing that has ever, I think, happened to me'.[8]

A Great Russian Writer

On 28 January 1998 'An American Remembrance' of Isaiah Berlin was held at the British Embassy in Washington. One of the tributes delivered on that occasion was by Robert Silvers,[9]co-editor of the New York Review of Books, and a friend of Berlin's for more than thirty years. In the course of his remarks he spoke of the circumstances under which the next essay was written, and of his own reaction to Berlin's writing:

The prose of the born storyteller - that seems to me quintessential in comprehending Isaiah's immensely various work. I felt this most directly [in autumn 1965] when he was in New York, and a book appeared on the work of the Russian poet Osip Mandel'shtam, and Isaiah agreed to write on it. The days passed, and he told me that he was soon to leave, and we agreed he would come to the Review offices one evening after dinner, and he would dictate from a nearly finished draft. As I typed away, I realised that he had a passionate, detailed understanding of the Russian poetry of this century. [. . .] When he finished and we walked out on 57th Street, with huge, black

garbage trucks rumbling by, he looked at his watch and said, 'Three in the morning! Mandel'shtam! Will anyone here know who he is?!'

Conversations with Akhmatova and Pasternak

Berlin's famous essay 'Meetings with Russian Writers in 1945 and 1956' was published in full in 1980 in his Personal Impressions. The story it tells so clearly forms a part of any volume on the present theme that I have made an exception to my general prac­tice of not publishing the same piece in more than one collection, and have included this shortened version of the essay, taken from The Proper Study of Mankind. Besides, the latter volume differs from my other collections of Berlin's work in being an anthology of his best writing, drawn from all the other volumes, and this is the only piece it contains that had not already been published (in this form) in another collection.

Ever since he visited Leningrad in 1945 Berlin had intended to write an account of his experiences there. It was in 1980, while Personal Impressions was in preparation, that he finally turned to this long-postponed labour of love, in response to an invitation from Wadham College, Oxford, to deliver the (last) Bowra Lecture. The text he wrote was much too long to serve as it stood as an hour-long lecture, so he abbreviated it. The result is the ver­sion included here, with the addition of some material restored from the full version when the lecture was published in the New York Review of Books.

Boris Pasternak

This appreciation was probably composed in 1958. In the September of that year Doctor Zhivago was published in Eng­land, and in October Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Berlin had been strongly against Pasternak's nomina­tion, on the grounds that, if the prize were awarded to him, he would be in even more serious trouble with the Soviet authorities than Doctor Zhivago had already brought him. Indeed, Pasternak formally declined the prize, under considerable duress. Old and sick, he did not have the strength or the will to confront the Soviet authorities, and was also worried about threats to his eco­nomic livelihood (and that of his lover, Olga Ivinskaya) if he did accept; in addition, had he left the Soviet Union to collect the prize, he would not have been allowed to return.

The fact that the piece was written at all is slightly surprising. Berlin had earlier promised an article to the Manchester Guardian, presumably in connection with the publication of Doctor Zhivago; 'then after the fuss about the Nobel Prize I said I would rather wait'.[10] He would surely also have been asked to write something for publicity purposes once the Swedish Academy's decision was announced. At all events, the text was drafted, but if there was a published version, I have not found it; perhaps it was used as a source rather than printed verbatim. When I came across the typescript, I showed an edited version to Berlin, who read it through and filled in a few gaps. He himself could not tell me the circumstances of its composition.

What did appear in print, at the end of 1958, was Berlin's appreciation of Doctor Zhivago in his 'Books of the Year' selec­tion for the Sunday Times:

Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak, seems to me a work of genius, and its appearance a literary and moral event without parallel in our day. The extraordinary circumstances in which this book was pub­lished in Italy, and, in particular, the crude and degrading misuse of it for propaganda purposes on both sides of the Iron Curtain, may distract attention from the cardinal fact that it is a magnificent poet­ical masterpiece in the central tradition of Russian literature, per­haps the last of its kind, at once the creation of a natural world and a society of individuals rooted in the history and the morality of their time, and a personal avowal of overwhelming directness, nobility and depth.

Some critics have tended to attribute the exceptional success of this novel to curiosity, or to the scandal that its appearance created. I see no reason for this belief. Its main theme is universal, and close to the lives of most men: the life, decline and death of a man who, like the heroes of Turgenev, Tolstoy and Chekhov, stands at the edges of his society, is involved in its direction and fate, but is not identified with it, and preserves his human shape, his inner life and his sense of truth under the impact of violent events which pulverise his society, and brutalise or destroy vast numbers of other human beings.

As in his poetry, Pasternak melts the barriers which divide man from nature, animate from inanimate life; his images are often meta­physical and religious; but efforts to classify his ideas, or those of the characters of the novel, as specifically social or psychological, or as designed to support a particular philosophy or theology, are absurd in the face of the overwhelming fullness of his vision of life.

To the expression of his unitary vision the author devotes a power of evocative writing, at once lyrical and ironical, boldly prophetic and filled with nostalgia for the Russian past, which seems to me unlike any other, and in descriptive force today unequalled.

It is an uneven book: its beginning is confused, the symbolism at times obscure, the end mystifying. The marvellous poems with which it ends convey too little in English. But all in all it is one of the greatest works of our time.[11]

He returned to the book in 1995 when asked by the same news­paper to choose a book for their 'On the Shelf' column. Because his comments add significantly to what he says in 'Conversations with Akhmatova and Pasternak', I reproduce them here:

A book that made a most profound impression upon me, and the memory of which still does, is Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. In 1956, I was in Moscow with my wife, staying at the British Embassy. (I had met Pasternak when I was serving in the embassy in 1945, and I made friends with him then, and saw him regularly.) I went to see him in the writers' village of Peredelkino, and among the first things he told me was that he had finished his novel (of which I had read one chapter in 1945) and that this was to be his testament, far more so than any of his earlier writings (some of them undoubted works of genius, of which he spoke disparagingly).

He said that the original typescript of the novel had been sent the day before to the Italian publisher Feltrinelli, since it had been made clear to him that it could not be published in the Soviet Union. A copy of this typescript he gave to me. I read it in bed throughout the night and finished it late in the morning, and was deeply moved - as I had not been, I think, by any book before or since, except, perhaps War and Peace (which took more than one night to read).

I realised then that Doctor Zhivago was, as a novel, imperfect - the story was not properly structured, a number of details seemed vivid and sharp, but artificial, irrelevant, at times almost crudely cobbled together. But the description of the public reception of the February Revolution was marvellous; I was in Petrograd at that time, at the age of seven, and I remembered the reactions of my aunts, cousins, friends of my parents and others - but Pasternak raised this to a level of descriptive genius. The pathetic efforts of moderates and liberals were described with sympathy and irony. The crushing, elemental force, as he saw it, of the Bolshevik takeover is described more vividly than in any other account known to me.

But what made the deepest impression upon me, and has never ceased to do so, was the description of the hero and heroine, sur­rounded by howling wolves in their snow-swept Siberian cottage - a description that is virtually unparalleled.

Love is the topic of most works of fiction. Nevertheless, what the great French novelists speak of is often infatuation, a passing, sometimes adversarial, interplay between man and woman. In Russian literature, in Pushkin and Lermontov, love is a romantic outburst; in Dostoevsky, love is tormented, and interwoven with religious and various other psychological currents of feeling. In Turgenev, it is a melancholy description of love in the past which ends, sadly, in failure and pain. In English literature, in Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, Thackeray, Henry James, Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, even Emily Brontё, there is pursuit, longing, desire ful­filled or frustrated, the misery of unhappy love, possessive jealousy, love of God, nature, possessions, family, loving companionship, devotion, the enchantment of living happily ever after. But passion­ate, overwhelming, all-absorbing, all-transforming mutual love, the world forgotten, vanished - this love is almost there in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (not in War and Peace or the other masterpieces), and then, in my experience, only in Doctor Zhivago. In this novel it

is the authentic experience, as those who have ever been truly in love have always known it; not since Shakespeare has love been so fully, vividly, scrupulously and directly communicated.

I was terribly shaken, and when I went to see the poet the next day, his wife begged me to persuade him not to publish the novel abroad, for fear of sanctions against her and their children. He was furious, and said that he did not wish me to tell him what to do or not to do, that he had consulted his children and they were pre­pared for the worst. I apologised. And so that was that. The later career of the novel is known; even the American film conveyed something of it. This experience will live with me to the end of my days. The novel is a description of a total experience, not parts or aspects: of what other twentieth-century work of the imagination could this be said?1

Why the Soviet Union Chooses to Insulate Itself

A month after his return in early April 1946 from his wartime duties in the USA Berlin was invited to speak to the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House in London on 'Soviet insulationism'. He sought and received assurances about the composition of his audience and the confidentiality of the pro­ceedings, and gave his talk on 27 June, under the title used here. This piece is the text of the talk as it appears in the minutes of the meeting, edited for inclusion in this volume. I have omitted the introductory remarks by the chairman, Sir Harry Haig, and the discussion period, which are posted on the official Isaiah Berlin website as part of the original minutes, written in the third person, in indirect speech. I have here translated this into direct speech for the sake of readability; but the result should not be taken as a full verbatim transcript of Berlin's remarks.

The Artificial Dialectic

The story of the articles from Foreign Affairs included here is best told by quotation from Berlin's entertaining letters to the jour­nal's editor, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, to whom Berlin's readers owe a great debt of gratitude for his tireless attempts over more than two decades to extract articles from this reluctant author. He succeeded four times, and two of his successes appear below.

The trail that leads to 'The Artificial Dialectic' begins on 29 June 1951, when Armstrong presses Berlin to write for him again, following the critical acclaim that greeted 'Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century' in 1950. Berlin replies that he does in fact have a 'piece' that might do, and explains its origins in a letter dated 16 August 1951:

The circumstances are these: months & months & months ago [Max] Ascoli wrote, not once but repeatedly, reproaching me for writing for you & for the N.Y. Times & for the Atlantic Monthly, but never for him. I have, I must admit, no great opinion of his 'Reporter', but him I like quite well. At any rate, bullied in this way, I sat down, wrote a piece, & sent it him, explaining that though it might be too long for him, I wd rather have it rejected & forever unpublished, than cut or edited (he criticised the piece in Foreign Affairs for being too long, filled with truisms which he cd have cut out, etc.). He replied eulogistically, sent me a handsome turkey for Christmas, then fell ill & there was a long silence. I took (I am ashamed to say) the opportunity of the silence, & wrote (not altogether truthfully) that I wanted the piece back in order to lengthen it, which wd doubtless make it still more unsuitable for him. He returned it, I did add a line or two in ink (as in MS enclosed) & asked me to give it back to him in October. This I am determined not to do whatever happens. I am not keen to appear in the Reporter; my obligation vis a vis Ascoli is now discharged; I wd rather always be printed by yourself, or if you don't want it, by the N.Y.T., or if they don't, by nobody. After doing nothing with the piece for 3 or 4 months (although he assured me it was scheduled for publication in August) Ascoli can have no claims.

The second point is more difficult: as I have (I hope still) rela­tions in the U.S.S.R., & as I visited innocent litterateurs there, I

have always followed the policy of publishing nothing about the Sov. Union directly under my own name, because that might easily lead to something frightful being done to people I talked to there. I needn't enlarge on that prospect. Hence if I am to publish anything about Uncle Joe [Stalin] it must be (a) anonymously or under a pseudonym (b) the identity of the author must be really, & not as in George Kennan's case, only notionally secret. I invented the name of John O. Utis for the 'Artificial Dialectic'. Outis means 'no­body' in Greek & you will recall elaborate puns about this in the Odyssey where Odysseus deceives the one-eyed ogre by this means. Also it sounds vaguely like a name which a Lithuanian D.P., let us say, or a Czech or Slovene cd have: & so, plausible for the author of such a piece. Ascoli & possibly a confidential typist may know the secret. Nobody else; & he will certainly be honourable & lock it in his breast, whatever his feelings about where & how the piece is published. Do you ever publish anonymous pieces? if not, I shall, of course, fully understand: since lives depend upon it, I wd obviously rather suppress altogether than compromise on this - I really have no choice. There is only one other person to whom I showed it - Nicholas Nabokov - who has begged it for his 'Preuves' - some Paris anti-Soviet institution. If you do want it, I shd be grateful if you cd give me permission to have it translated, after U.S. publication, into German (The Monat) & French etc.: I shall, of course, never read it aloud myself to anybody: my author­ship must remain a secret from as many as possible: but I may let Nabokov have a copy, provided he promises formally not to have it published anywhere (until you reply) but only uses it for informal discussion as a letter from an unknown source, offering various loose ideas. I apologise for this rigmarole - these queer conditions - the recital of the past etc. I hope you'll like it, but I've no opinion, as you know, of anything I write: & if you'ld rather have nothing to do with the piece, pray forget this letter.

Armstrong replies on 30 August. He feels that 'people will see through the disguise', but agrees to the pseudonymity. Shortly thereafter a colleague reads the piece, finding its style difficult and its conclusion unsatisfactory. Armstrong makes these points, tactfully, to Berlin on 10 September, and Berlin (who is in Maine) replies two days later:

You let me off much too gently, of course. Well do I know that, like my unintelligible speech, my prose, if such it can be called, is an opaque mass of hideously under-punctuated words, clumsy, repeti­tive, overgrown, enveloping the reader like an avalanche. Conse­quently, of course I shall, as last time, accept your emendations with gratitude for the labour they inevitably cost you. You are the best, most scrupulous, generous & tactful editor in the world: & I shall always, if occasion arises, be prepared to submit to civilising processes - judicious pruning you kindly call it - at your hands [.. .] Although you are no doubt right about impossibility of real con­cealment, there is, I think, from the point of view of repercussions on my acquaintances & relations in the U.S.S.R., a difference between suspected authorship & blatant paternity. Hence I think it best to stick to a pseudonym. If you think O. Utis (no "John") is silly - I am attracted to it rather - I don't mind anything else, pro­vided you & your staff really do refuse to divulge & guard the secret sacredly. So that I am [open] to suggestions. [. . .]

I don't know whether 'Artificial Dialectic' is at all a good title, or 'Synthetic Dialectic' either: if you cd think of something simpler & more direct - I'd be very grateful. [. . .]

I have just had a line from Ascoli wanting to see the piece again - but he shan't - I'll deal with that & it needn't concern you at all.

Armstrong (17 September) thanks Berlin for his 'untruthful flat­tery', and shortly afterwards sends an edited script, explaining in more detail the case for revision of the conclusion. After some desperate cables from Armstrong, Berlin writes (30 October):

Do forgive me for my long delay, but Mr Utis has been far from well and overworked. He will be in New York next Saturday, but too briefly - for a mere 4 to 5 hours - to be of use to anyone. But he will, under my firm pressure, complete his task, I think, within the next fortnight and you shall have the result as soon as possible. He is displaying a curious aversion to social life at present, but it is hoped that the completion of some, at any rate, of his labours will restore his taste for pleasure, at any rate by mid-December. I shall certainly keep you posted about the movement of this highly unsat­isfactory figure.

All this was composed before your telegram - the technique of your communication has by now, I perceive, been established in a

firm and not unfamiliar pattern of the patient, long-suffering, but understanding editor dealing with an exceptionally irritating and unbusinesslike author who does, nevertheless, in the end respond, apologise, and produce, although after delays both maddening and unnecessary, which only the most great-hearted editor would for­give. But in this case, I should like to place the following considera­tions before you:

Mr Utis would like a little time in which to incorporate ideas induced in him by casual conversations with intelligent persons - e.g. that the rhythm of Soviet scientific theories is induced by extra- scientific considerations - this being a point useful for consumption by local scientists of an anti-anti-Soviet cast of mind. Also, he feels the need to say something, however gently, to deflate the optimism, which surely springs from the heart rather than the head, of those who like Mr X[12] argue that some things are too bad to last, and that enough dishonour must destroy even the worst thieves; Mr Utis does not believe in inner corrosion, and this, pessimistic as it may seem, seems to be worth saying; he is prepared to withdraw the story about the waiter-steward as being perhaps in dubious taste unless it could fitly appear as an epigraph to the whole, in which form he will re-submit it, but will not have the faintest objection if it is eliminated even in this briefer and more mythological guise;[13]

It would surely be most advisable for the piece to appear after Mr Utis's friend is out of the country and is not put to unnecessary embarrassment or prevarication. He intends to sail back to his monastery towards the end of March or the beginning of April;

A plus B would have the added advantage of making it possi­ble for the incorporation of any new evidence which may crop up in the intermediate period. However, Mr Utis sticks to his original resolution; the manuscript shall be in the hands of the editor within two or three weeks in a completed form ready to print as it stands. Any additions or alterations - which at this stage are neither likely nor unlikely - could be embedded by mutual consent only if there was something really tempting. Mr Utis's name is O. Utis.

I hope this is not too much for you - do not, I beg you, give me up as altogether beyond the bounds of sweet reasonableness and accommodation. I really think that the arrangement proposed is the best all round.

The revised script is acknowledged by a relieved and satisfied Armstrong on 16 November, though he wonders again whether anyone will be taken in by the pseudonym; on 20 November Berlin sends further thoughts:

I see that a somewhat different analysis of U[ncle] J[oe] is presented by Mr A. J. P. Taylor in the New York Times this last Sunday,[14] but Mr Utis sticks to his views. I think the signature had better remain as arranged. All things leak in time and there are at least a dozen persons in the world now who know the truth. Nevertheless, the difference from the point of view of possible victims in the country under review seems to me genuine; and so long as the real name is not flaunted, and room for doubt exists, their lives (so I like to think) are not (or less) jeopardised. More thought on these lines would make me suppress the whole thing altogether on the ground that you must not take the least risk with anyone placed in so frightful a situation. (Never have so many taken so much for so long from so few. You may count yourself fortunate that this sen­tence is not a part of Mr Utis's manuscript.) So, I drive the thought away and Mr Utis is my thin screen from reality behind which I so unconvincingly conceal my all too recognisable features.

Only one thing has occurred to Mr Utis since his last letter to you; and that is whether some added point might not be given to the bits scrawled in manuscript concerning the chances of survival of the artificial dialectic. Perhaps something might be said about how very like a permanent mobilisation - army life - the whole thing is for the average Soviet citizen and that considering what people do take when they are in armies - particularly Russians and Germans - provided that things really are kept militarised and no breath of civilian ease is allowed to break the tension, there is no occasion for surprise that this has lasted for so long, nor yet for supposing that its intrinsic wickedness must bring it down (as our friend Mr X seems to me too obstinately to believe). I was much impressed by what someone told me the other day about a conver­sation with one of the two Soviet fliers - the one who did not go back. He was asked why his colleague who returned did so (I can­not remember the names, one was called, I think, Pigorov, but I do not know whether this is the man who stayed or the man who returned). He replied that after they had been taken for a jaunt around Virginia, they were dumped in an apartment in New York, provided with an adequate sum of money, but given nothing very specific to do. The flier who ultimately returned found that this was more intolerable than a labour camp in the Soviet Union. This may be exaggerated, but obviously contains a very large grain of truth. Apparently the people here who were dealing with some of the 'defectors' found the same problem - how to organise them in a sufficiently mechanical, rigid and time-consuming manner, to pre­vent the problem of leisure from ever arising.

If you think well of the military life analogy, could I ask you - you who now know Mr Utis and his dreadful style and grammar[15] so intimately - to draft a sentence or two, to be included in the proof in the relevant place, saying something to the effect that the question of how long the lives either of executive officials or the masses they control can stand the strain of a system at once so taut and so liable to unpredictable zigzags is perhaps wrongly posed; once the condi­tions of army life and army discipline have been imposed, human beings appear to endure them for what seems to the more comfort- loving nations a fantastic length of time; provided they are not actu­ally being killed or wounded, peasant populations show little tendency to revolt against either regimentation or arbitrary disposal of their lives; the decades of service in the army which Russian peas­ants in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries had to endure led to no serious rebellions and the emancipation of the serfs less than a century ago had less psychological effect than is commonly assumed, or civilised persons hoped it would have. The possibility of cracking under the strain is smaller in a system where everything obeys a dead routine, however inefficient and costly in lives and property, than one in which ultimate responsibility rests in nervous or fumbling fingers; hence, the prospect of upheavals and revolt, etc. when M. Stalin (I hope you will keep the 'M.')[16] is succeeded is greater than during his years of power, however oppressive,

arbitrary, and brutal. But perhaps I have said this already in the article. If so, I apologise for repeating myself this way.

With well repressed resignation Armstrong accepts, on 28 Novem­ber, the expansion, even though he had asked Berlin for a cut; another piece is shortened to make room for it. And with that the dust settles and the article is printed.

Four Weeks in the Soviet Union

This piece is based on an unfinished draft of an account of Berlin's visit to the USSR in 1956 with his wife Aline, whom he had married five months earlier. They were the guests of the British Ambassador, Sir William Hayter, at the British Embassy in Moscow. If Berlin had any plans to publish this piece, they appear to have been abandoned after he incorporated some of its contents, in a somewhat altered form, in the last section of the following essay; but much was omitted in this process, and not the least interesting material, so that it is well worth preserving this more personal narrative in full.

Particularly toward its end, the typescript, made from re­corded dictation by a secretary, contains gaps (some large) and uncertainties; these I have edited out to provide a continuous text, without, I trust, altering Berlin's intended meaning. At the very end of the typescript there was a sentence that evidently did not belong there, but was probably an afterthought intended for insertion earlier: it does not seem to fit exactly anywhere, but it appears in the least unsuitable place I could find, as a footnote to p. i27.

Soviet Russian Culture

This essay was originally published as two articles, one pseud­onymous, in Foreign Affairs, but is here restored to its original unitary form. For its history we return to Berlin's correspon­dence with Armstrong, beginning with Berlin's letter of 6 Feb­ruary 1957, responding to an invitation from Armstrong to apply the thesis of 'The Artificial Dialectic' to recent events:

My friend Mr Utis is, as you know, a poor correspondent and liable to be distracted by too many small and mostly worthless preoccu­pations. Your praise acted upon him as a heady wine, but his moods are changeable, and although, as his only dependable friend, I am trying to act as his moral backbone - an element which he conspicuously lacks - it is difficult to make any promises on his behalf, and the prospect of a decision by him on the subject of which you wrote, especially by the first week in August, is by no means certain. It would therefore be a far far safer thing not to anticipate its arrival too confidently. I will bring what pressure I can upon my poor friend, but I need not tell you, who have had so many dealings with him in the past, that his temperament and per­formance are unsteady and a source of exasperation and disappoint­ment to those few who put any faith in him. I shall report to you, naturally, of what progress there may be - there is, alas, no hope of a permanent improvement in his character. Utis is under the queer illusion that his very unreliability is in itself a disarming and even amiable characteristic. Nothing could be further from the truth, but he is too old to learn, and if it were not for the many years of asso­ciation with him which I have had to suffer, I should have given up this tiresome figure long ago. Nor could I, or anyone, blame you if you resolved to do this; there is no room for such behaviour in a serious world, without something more to show for it than poor Utis has thus far been able to achieve. You are too kind to him; and he, impenitently, takes it all too much for granted.

Armstrong nags gently over the ensuing months, and is rewarded with a script, not totally unrelated to the subject he had sug­gested, a mere six months later. Its original title had been 'The Present Condition of Russian Intellectuals', but this has been altered, with typical Berlinian understatement, to 'Notes on Soviet Culture'. In his acknowledgement, dated 28 August, Armstrong writes: 'I have accepted your suggestion [presumably in a letter that does not survive] and am running the first six sec­tions under your name, and running section seven as a separate short article, signed O. Utis, under the title "The Soviet Child- Man".' This seems to give us the best of two worlds.'

It is clear from Armstrong's next letter (4 September) that Berlin cabled disagreement about the title of the Utis piece and - lest anyone suspect that he was the author - the re-use of Utis as a pseudonym. Armstrong tells Berlin that it is too late to make changes, as printing of the relevant part of the journal has already occurred. Berlin must have begged or insisted (or both), since on 9 September Armstrong writes that he has now 'made the changes you wanted', adopting 'L' as the pseudonym, which 'puts the article in our normal series of anonymous articles signed with an initial'. To accommodate Berlin he had had to stop the presses, and he withheld the honorarium for 'The Soviet Intelligentsia' as a contribution to the costs involved.

The only sign of what must by this point have been firmly gritted teeth is Armstrong's remark in a letter of 20 September that he 'only didn't quite see why if there was to be no Utis it mattered what Mr L called his article, but doubtless you had a good reason for protecting him too'.

As an example of editorial forbearance this episode would surely be hard to beat. I conclude my account of it with a splen­did account that Berlin sends Armstrong (17 December) of the feedback he has received to the pieces:

I have had two delightful letters from unknown correspondents in the USA: one from a lady who encloses a letter she wrote to John Foster Dulles, commenting on his articles in the same issue, and drawing his attention to the deeper truths of mine - so far so good. She goes on however to say that the article by the unknown 'L' seems to her to give a truer picture of some of these things than even my own otherwise flawless work - and wishes to draw my attention to an article from which I have to learn, she hopes she is not hurting my feelings, but she does think it a good thing to be up to date, my own article is somewhat historical, the other article is on the dot and on the whole a better performance altogether. I am oscillating between humbly expressing my admiration for the genius of 'L' and jealously denouncing him as a vulgar impressionist who is trading on people's ignorance and giving an account which no one can check, which is, when examined, no better than a tawdry fantasy, which has unfortunately taken innocent persons like her - and perhaps even Mr John Foster Dulles - in. The other letter is from an Indian at Harvard who praises my article and denounces that of 'L' as a typical American journalistic performance unworthy to stand beside the pure and lofty beauty of my deathless prose. I thought these reflections might give you pleasure.

The Survival of the Russian Intelligentsia

This comment on the post-Soviet situation provides an interest­ing postscript to the previous essay, recording Berlin's delight and surprise that the intelligentsia had emerged so unscathed from the depredations of the Soviet era, contrary to his rather gloomy expectations. In subsequent years his confidence that the death of that era was truly permanent steadily increased, despite the immense problems of its aftermath, some of them only too remi­niscent of those engendered by Communism.

Glossary of Names

Rather than sprinkle the text with possibly distracting footnotes identifying the large number of individuals named by Berlin in these essays, I invited Helen Rappaport, already an expert in this area as the author of Joseph Stalin: A Biographical Companion,[17] to compile a glossary, concentrating on the Russians, for readers not already familiar with the people referred to. I could not have done this myself, and those who find the glossary invaluable, as I do, are greatly in her debt. Three persons in particular caused problems: the Jewish bookseller Gennady Moiseevich Rahklin in 'A Visit to Leningrad', the Jewish Soviet literary scholar Naum Yakovlevich Berkovsky in 'A Great Russian Writer', and the historian Professor Kon in 'The Artificial Dialectic'; information from readers that would enable us to identify these more fully, and to say whether Rakhlin and Kon survived the Stalinist era, would be gratefully received, as would additional information about Nikolay Osi- povich Lerner and Vladimir Nikolaevich Orlov.

Bibliographical

The sources and original publication details of the pieces I have included are as follows:

'The Arts in Russia Under Stalin' is based on a text held, in the form in which it was printed for internal circulation, in the

British Public Record Office file FO 371/56725. (A copy of the original typescript, dated 27 December 1945, is in the Berlin Papers, MS Berlin 571, fols 328-43.) The version published here incorporates two sets of revisions made by the author - one probably not many years later (including a few references to post-1945 developments), apparently in preparation for a talk; the other in 1992, in response to a request that the memoran­dum should be published in Russian. A partial Russian transla­tion by Galina P. Andreevna appeared as 'Literatura i iskusstvo v RSFSR' ('Literature and Art in the RSFSR'), Nezavisimaya gazeta, 16 December 1997, in the supplement Kulisa NG No 2, December 1997, 4-5; this was reprinted with the cuts restored, and with an introduction by Nina V. Koroleva, in Zvezda, 2003 No 7 (July), 126-42. A cut version of the English text was pub­lished under the present title in the New York Review of Books, 19 October 2000; the cut material was posted on their website. The full English text appears in print here for the first time. The title and the notes (which incorporate information supplied by Helen Rappaport, to whom I am in this case particularly indebted) are mine.

'A Visit to Leningrad' is to be found in the British Public Record Office file FO 371/56724; this lightly edited version appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, 23 March 2001, 15-16.

'A Great Russian Writer' is a review of Osip Mandelstam, The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, trans. Clarence Brown, and appeared in the New York Review of Books, 23 December 1965, 3-4.

'Conversations with Akhmatova and Pasternak' - a shortened version of 'Meetings with Russian Writers in 1945 and 1956', which was published in the author's Personal Impressions (Lon­don, 1980; New York, 1981; 2nd ed. London, 1998; Princeton, 2001) - appeared in the New York Review of Books, 20 Novem­ber 1980, 23-35, and in the author's collection The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (London, 1997; New York, 1998).

'Boris Pasternak' and 'Why the Soviet Union Chooses to Insu­late Itself' have not previously been published.

'The Artificial Dialectic: Generalissimo Stalin and the Art of Government' appeared under the pseudonym 'O. Utis' (from 'outis', Greek for 'no one') in Foreign Affairs 30 (1952). The present subtitle served as its title on that occasion; the main title is Berlin's.

'Four Weeks in the Soviet Union' appears here for the first time.

'Soviet Russian Culture' was published in Foreign Affairs 36 (1957), the first six sections as 'The Silence in Russian Culture' under Berlin's own name, the last section as a separate article, entitled 'The Soviet Intelligentsia', under the pseudonym 'L.'.

'The Survival of the Soviet Intelligentsia' was an untitled contri­bution to 'The State of Europe: Christmas Eve 1989' in New Europe!, the title of Granta 30 (Winter 1990).

Naturally enough, there are some overlaps between the essays, independently composed as they were, over a long period. These I have deliberately not tampered with, in order not to damage the internal structure of each piece.

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, my thanks are due to Strobe Talbott, whose inspired initiative in suggesting the roundtable discussion of this collection of essays provided the timely opportunity to pull it off the shelf, blow the dust away, and put it into final publishable form. Otherwise it might have waited a good deal longer before seeing the light. His splendid foreword adds largesse to benefi­cence. I am also grateful to Aline Berlin for accepting his sugges­tion, and its publishing implications.

Andreas Xenachis, Strobe's Assistant, and Serena Moore, my own Assistant, have given all manner of help at all stages. Betty

Colquhoun typed the texts. Helen Rappaport not only compiled the masterly glossary, but also answered numerous queries about points in the text, providing draft notes when requested, with good humour in the face of my relentless pressure to explain every detail. A number of the other participants in the round- table, in particular Rodric Braithwaite, Archie Brown, Larissa Haskell and Harry Shukman, have made valuable suggestions and corrected errors in a draft of the book. Michael Hughes, Archivist of the Berlin Papers at Oxford's Bodleian Library, has kindly winkled out for me some of the background information I draw on above. David King of the David King Collection gener­ously provided the photographs of Osip Mandel'shtam on pages 46 and 47. To all these, and any others whom I have forgotten to mention, I record my grateful thanks.

Finally a word on the dedicatee. Pat Utechin was Isaiah Berlin's secretary from before the time I met him (in 1972) until his death in 1997. For all those years she was endlessly helpful and supportive to me in my work, which could hardly have been done without her. I have long wanted to dedicate one of Berlin's collections of essays to her: this one is a perfect candidate, given her marriage to a Russian whose expertise on its subject-matter is reflected in her own knowledge and interests. Thus I salute her.

henry hardy

Tisvilde Lunde, Nordsj^lland, Denmark, August 2003

THE SOVIET MIND

THE ARTS IN RUSSIA UNDER STALIN

December 1945

the Soviet literary scene is a peculiar one, and in order to understand it few analogies from the West are of use. For a vari­ety of causes Russia has in historical times led a life to some degree isolated from the rest of the world, and never formed a genuine part of the Western tradition; indeed her literature has at all times provided evidence of a peculiarly ambivalent attitude with regard to the uneasy relationship between herself and the West, taking the form now of a violent and unsatisfied longing to enter and become part of the main stream of European life, now of a resentful ('Scythian') contempt for Western values, not by any means confined to professing Slavophils; but most often of an unresolved, self-conscious combination of these mutually opposed currents of feeling. This mingled emotion of love and of hate permeates the writing of virtually every well-known Russian author, sometimes rising to great vehemence in the protest against foreign influence which, in one form or another, colours the masterpieces of Griboedov, Pushkin, Gogol, Nekrasov, Dostoevsky, Herzen, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Blok.

The October Revolution insulated Russia even more com­pletely, and her development became perforce still more self- regarding, self-conscious and incommensurable with that of its neighbours. It is not my purpose to trace the situation histori­cally, but the present is particularly unintelligible without at least a glance at previous events, and it would perhaps be convenient, and not too misleading, to divide its recent growth into three main stages - 1900-1928; 1928-1937; 1937 to the present - artifi­cial and over-simple though this can easily be shown to be.

the soviet mind 1900-1928

The first quarter of the present century was a time of storm and stress during which Russian literature, particularly poetry (as well as the theatre and the ballet), principally (although one is not allowed to say so today) under French and, to some degree, German influence, attained its greatest height since its classical age of Pushkin, Lermontov and Gogol. Upon this the October Revolution made a violent impact, but it did not dam the swelling tide. Absorbed and inexhaustible preoccupation with social and moral questions is perhaps the most arresting single characteristic of Russian art and thought as a whole; and this largely shaped the great Revolution, and after its triumph led to a long, fierce battle between, on one side, those primarily artistic rebels who looked to the Revolution to realise their own most violent 'anti- bourgeois' attitudes (and attitudinising) and, on the other, those primarily political men of action who wished to bend all artistic and intellectual activity directly to the social and economic ends of the Revolution.

The rigid censorship which shut out all but carefully selected authors and ideas, and the prohibition or discouragement of many non-political forms of art (particularly trivial genres such as popular love, mystery and detective stories, as well as all vari­eties of novelettes and general trash), automatically focused the attention of the reading public on new and experimental work, filled, as often before in Russian literary history, with strongly felt and often quaint and fanciful social notions. Perhaps because conflicts in the more obviously dangerous waters of politics and economics might easily be thought too alarming, literary and artistic wars became (as they did in German countries a century earlier under Metternich's police) the only genuine battlefield of ideas; even now the literary periodicals, tame as they necessarily are, for this very reason make livelier reading than the monoto­nously conformist daily, and purely political, press.

The main engagement of the early and middle 1920s was fought between the free and somewhat anarchist literary experi­menters and the Bolshevik zealots, with unsuccessful attempts at a truce by such figures as Lunacharsky and Bubnov.1 This culmi­nated, by 1927-8, first in the victory, and then, when it seemed to the authorities too revolutionary and even Trotskyist, in the collapse and purge (during the 1930s), of the notorious RAPP (Revolutionary Association of Proletarian Writers), led by the most uncompromising fanatic of a strictly collectivist proletarian culture, the critic Averbakh. There followed, during the period of 'pacification' and stabilisation organised by Stalin and his practi­cally-minded collaborators, a new orthodoxy, directed princi­pally against the emergence of any ideas likely to disturb and so divert attention from the economic tasks ahead. This led to a uni­versal dead level, to which the only surviving classical author of the great days, Maxim Gorky, finally and, according to some of his friends, with reluctant despair, gave his blessing.

i928-i937

The new orthodoxy, which became finally established after Trotsky's fall in 1928, put a firm end to the period of incubation during which the best Soviet poets, novelists and dramatists, and, indeed, composers and film producers too, produced their most original and memorable works. It marked the end of the turbu­lent middle and late 1920s, when Western visitors were aston­ished and sometimes outraged by Vakhtangov's stage;2 when Eisenstein, not yet a film producer, directed his amusing futuris­tic experiments on stages discovered in the disused palaces of Moscow merchants, and the great producer Meyerhold, whose artistic life is a kind of microcosm of the artistic life of his coun­try, and whose genius is still only secretly acknowledged, con­ducted his most audacious and memorable theatrical experiments.

The first two holders of the post of People's Commissar for [Culture and] Education (the translation of the Russian word 'prosveshchenie', whose mean­ing includes culture and education, is problematic): for their details see Glossary.

Evgeny Bagrationovich Vakhtangov (1883-1923), actor, director and drama teacher, pupil of Stanislavsky, was famous for his innovative work in the Moscow Arts Theatre in the early i920s.

There occurred, before 1928, a vast ferment in Soviet thought, which during those early years was genuinely animated by the spirit of revolt against, and challenge to, the arts of the West, con­ceived as the last desperate struggle of capitalism, presently to be overthrown on the artistic as well as every other front by the strong, young, materialist, earthbound, proletarian culture, proud of its brutal simplicity and its crude and violent new vision of the world, which the Soviet Union, agonised but triumphant, was bringing to birth.

The herald and chief inspiring force of this new Jacobinism was the poet Mayakovsky, who, with his disciples, formed the famous LEF[18] association. While there may have been a great deal that was pretentious, counterfeit, coarse, exhibitionist, childish and merely silly during this period, there was also much that was brimming with life. It was not, as a rule, didactically Communist so much as anti-liberal, and had in that respect points of resem­blance with pre-1914 Italian futurism. This was the period of the best work of such poets as the popular 'tribune' Mayakovsky, who, if he was not a great poet, was a radical literary innovator and emancipator of prodigious energy, force and, above all, influ­ence; the age of Pasternak, Akhmatova (until her silence in 1923), Sel'vinsky, Aseev, Bagritsky, Mandel'shtam; of such novelists as Aleksey Tolstoy (who returned from Paris in the 1920s), Prishvin, Kataev, Zoshchenko, Pil'nyak, Babel', Il'f and Petrov; of the dramatist Bulgakov, of established literary critics and scholars like Tynyanov, Eikhenbaum, Tomashevsky, Shklovsky, Lerner, Chukovsky, Zhirmunsky, Leonid Grossman. The voices of such emigre writers as Bunin, Tsvetaeva, Khodasevich, Nabokov were heard only faintly. The emigration and return of Gorky is another story.

State control was absolute throughout. The only period of freedom during which no censorship existed in modern Russian history was from February to October 1917. In 1934 the Bol­shevik regime tightened old methods by imposing several stages of supervision - first by the Writers' Union, then by the appro­priate State-appointed commissar, finally by the Central Com­mittee of the Communist Party. A literary 'line' was laid down by the Party: at first the notorious Proletkul't, which demanded collective work on Soviet themes by squads of proletarian writ­ers; then the worship of Soviet or pre-Soviet heroes. Never­theless, arresting and original artists were not, until 1937, always brought to heel by the omnipotent State; sometimes, if they were prepared to take sufficient risks, they might manage to convert the authorities to the value of an unorthodox approach (as the dramatist Bulgakov did); sometimes unorthodoxy, provided that it was not positively directed against the Soviet faith, was given some latitude of expression, as a not unwelcome seasoning, at times exceedingly sharp, of the flat daily fare of normal Soviet life (for example, the early, gay, malicious satires of Tynyanov, Kataev and, above all, Zoshchenko). This was not, of course, permitted to go far or occur too often, but the possibility of it was always present, and the genius of writers was to a certain extent stimu­lated by the very degree of ingenuity which they had to exercise in order to express unconventional ideas without breaking the framework of orthodoxy or incurring outright condemnation and punishment.

This continued for some time after Stalin's rise to power and the imposition of the new orthodoxy. Gorky died only in 1935; and as long as he was alive, some distinguished and interesting writers were to a certain degree shielded from excessive regimen­tation and persecution by his immense personal authority and prestige; he consciously played the role of 'the conscience of the Russian people' and continued the tradition of Lunacharsky (and even Trotsky) in protecting promising artists from the dead hand of official bureaucracy. In the field of official Marxism an in­tolerant and narrow 'dialectical materialism' did indeed hold sway, but it was a doctrine concerning which internal disputes were permitted, between, for example, the followers of Bukharin and the followers of the more pedantic Ryazanov or Deborin; between various brands of philosophical materialism; between those 'menshevisers' who saw Lenin as a direct disciple of Plekhanov, and those who stressed their differences.

Witch-hunts occurred; heresy, both on the right and the left, was continually being 'unmasked' with grisly consequences to the convicted heretics; but the very ferocity of such ideological disputes, the uncertainty as to which side would be condemned to liquidation, communicated a certain grim life to the intellec­tual atmosphere, with the result that both creative and critical work during this period, while suffering from one-sidedness and exaggeration, was seldom dull, and indicated a state of continuing ferment in all spheres of thought and art. Well might the sympa­thetic observer of the Soviet scene compare such activity favourably with the slow decline of such of the older generation of emigre Russian writers in France as Vyacheslav Ivanov, Bal'mont, Merezhkovsky, Zinaida Gippius, Kuprin and others, though their literary technique was, at times, admitted, even in Moscow, to be often superior to that of a good many of the Soviet pioneers.

1937 to the present day

Then came the great debacle which to every Soviet writer and artist is a kind of St Bartholomew's Eve - a dark night which few of them seem ever completely to forget, and which is scarcely ever today spoken of otherwise than in a nervous whisper. The Government, which evidently felt its foundations insecure, or feared a major war in, and possibly with, the West, struck at all supposedly 'doubtful' elements, and innumerable innocent and harmless persons besides, with a violence and a thoroughness to which the Spanish Inquisition and the Counter-Reformation alone offer remote parallels.

The great purges and trials of the years 1937 and 1938 altered the literary and artistic scene beyond all recognition. The number of writers and artists exiled or exterminated during this time - particularly during the Ezhov terror - was such that Russian lit­erature and thought emerged in 1939 like an area devastated by war, with some splendid buildings still relatively intact, but standing solitary amid stretches of ruined and deserted country. Men of genius like Meyerhold the producer and Mandel'shtam the poet, and of talent like Babel', Pi'nyak, Yashvili, Tabidze, the then recently returned London emigre Prince D. S. Mirsky, the critic Averbakh (to take the best-known names alone) were 'repressed', that is, killed or done away with in one way or another. What occurred after that no one today seems to know. Not a trace of any of these writers and artists has been sighted by the outside world. There are rumours that some of them are still alive, like Dora Kaplan, who shot and wounded Lenin in 1918, or Meyerhold, who is said to be producing plays in the Kazakhstan capital Alma-Ata; but these seem to be circulated by the Soviet Government and are, almost certainly, quite false.[19]One of the British correspondents, whose sympathies were all too clear, tried to persuade me that Mirsky was alive and writing in Moscow incognito. It was obvious that he did not really believe this. Nor did I. The poetess Marina Tsvetaeva, who returned from Paris in i939 and fell into official disfavour, com­mitted suicide, probably early in 1942.[20] The rising young com­poser Shostakovich was criticised in 1937 so harshly, from a quarter so high, for 'formalism' and 'bourgeois decadence', that for two years he was neither performed nor mentioned, and then, having slowly and painfully repented, adopted a new style in closer accord with present-day official Soviet demands. He has on two occasions since then had to be called to order and to repent; so has Prokofiev. A handful of young writers unknown in the West, who are said to have showed promise during this period, have, so one was told, not been heard of since; they are unlikely to have survived, although one cannot always tell. Before this the poets Esenin and Mayakovsky had committed suicide. Their disillusionment with the regime is still officially denied. So it goes on.

The death of Gorky had removed the intellectuals' only pow­erful protector, and the last link with the earlier tradition of the relative freedom of Revolutionary art. The most eminent sur­vivors of this period today sit silent and nervous for fear of com­mitting some fatal sin against the Party line, which anyhow was none too clear during the critical years before the war, nor there­after. Those to fare worst were the writers and authors in closest contact with Western Europe, that is, France and England, since the turning of Soviet foreign policy away from Litvinov's policy of collective security, and towards the isolationism symbolised by the Russo-German Pact, involved individuals regarded as links with Western countries in the general discredit of pro-Western policy.

Bending before authority exceeded all previously known bounds. Sometimes it came too late to save the heretic marked for destruction; in any case it left behind it painful and humiliating memories from which the survivors of this terror are never likely completely to recover. Ezhov's proscriptions, which sent many tens of thousands of intellectuals to their doom, had clearly, by 1938, gone too far even for internal security. A halt was finally called when Stalin made a speech in which he declared that the process of purification had been overdone. A breathing-space followed. The old national tradition re-acquired respectability; the classics were once again treated with respect, and some old street names replaced the Revolutionary nomenclature. The final formulation of faith, beginning with the constitution of 1936, was completed by the Short History of the Communist Party of 1938. The years 1938 to 1940, during which the Communist Party made even greater strides in the strengthening and centralisation of its power and authority - tight enough before this - remained, during the slow convalescence from the wounds of 1938, blank so far as the creative and critical arts were concerned.

The Patriotic War

Then war broke out and the picture altered again. Everything was mobilised for war. Such authors of distinction as survived the Great Purge, and managed to preserve their liberty without bow­ing too low before the State, seemed to react to the great wave of genuine patriotic feeling if anything even more profoundly than the orthodox Soviet writers, but evidently had gone through too much to be capable of making their art the vehicle of direct expression of the national emotion. The best war poems of Pasternak and Akhmatova sprang from the most profound feel­ing, but were too pure artistically to be considered as possessing adequate direct propaganda value, and were consequently mildly frowned upon by the literary mandarins of the Communist Party, who guide the fortunes of the official Writers' Union.

This disapproval, with undertones of doubt about his funda­mental loyalty, did finally get under Pasternak's skin to so effec­tive a degree that this most incorruptible of artists did produce a handful of pieces close to direct war propaganda which had been too obviously wrung out of him, sounded lame and unconvinc­ing, and were criticised as weak and inadequate by the Party reviewers. Such pieces d'occasion as the Pulkovo Meridian by Vera Inber, and her war diary of the Leningrad blockade, and the more gifted work by Olga Berggolts, were better received.

But what did emerge, possibly somewhat to the surprise of both the authorities and the authors, was an uncommon rise in popularity with the soldiers at the fighting fronts of the least political and most purely personal lyrical verse by Pasternak (whose poetic genius no one has yet ventured to deny); of such wonderful poets as Akhmatova among the living, and Blok, Bely and even Bryusov, Sologub, Tsvetaeva and Mayakovsky among the (post-Revolutionary) dead. Unpublished works by the best of the living poets, circulated privately in manuscript to a few friends, and copied by hand, were passed to one another by sol­diers at the front with the same touching zeal and deep feeling as Ehrenburg's eloquent leading articles in the Soviet daily press, or the favourite conformist patriotic novels of this period. Distin­guished but hitherto somewhat suspect and lonely writers, espe­cially Pasternak and Akhmatova, began to receive a flood of letters from the front quoting their published and unpublished works, and begging for autographs and confirmation of the authenticity of texts, some of which existed only in manuscript, and for the expression of their authors' attitudes to this or that problem.

This eventually could not fail to impress itself upon respons­ible Party leaders, and the official attitude towards such writers grew somewhat softer. It was as if their value as institutions of which the State might one day be proud began to be realised by the bureaucrats of literature, and their status and personal secur­ity became improved in consequence. This is not likely to last, however: Akhmatova and Pasternak are not loved by the Party and its literary commissars. To be non-propagandist and survive you must be inconspicuous: Akhmatova and Pasternak are too obviously popular to escape suspicion.

the present

The more benevolent, if no less watchful, attitude of the official State censors has enabled the better thought of among the estab­lished writers to adjust themselves in what they plainly hope is a series of relatively secure niches; some have avowedly harnessed themselves, with varying degrees of conviction, into the service of the State, and declare that they conform as faithfully as they do, not because they must, but because they are true believers (as Aleksey Tolstoy did with his radical revision of his famous early novel The Road to Golgotha, which originally contained an English hero, and his play about Ivan the Terrible, which, in effect, is a justification of the purges). Others apply themselves to nice calculation of how much they can afford to give up to the demands of State propaganda, how much being left to personal integrity; yet others attempt to develop a friendly neutrality towards the State, not impinging, and hoping not to be impinged upon, careful to do nothing to offend, satisfied if they are suf­fered to live and work without reward or recognition.

The Party line has suffered a good many changes since its inception, and the writers and artists learn of its latest exigencies from the Central Committee of the Communist Party, which is ultimately responsible for its formulation, through various chan­nels. The final directive is today officially produced by a member of the Politburo, Mikhail Suslov, who for this purpose replaced Georgy Aleksandrov. Aleksandrov was removed, so one is told, for writing a book in which Karl Marx was represented only as the greatest of philosophers, instead of someone different from and greater in kind than any philosopher - an insult, I suppose, rather similar to describing Galileo as the greatest of astrologers.

Suslov is responsible to the Party for propaganda and publicity; the members of the Writers' Union who adapt this to the needs of their colleagues are the Chairman and in particular the Secretary, a direct nominee of the Central Executive Committee of the Party, and often not a writer at all (thus the late Shcherbakov, a purely political figure, a powerful member of the Politburo at the time of his death in 1945, was at one time secre­tary of the Writers' Union).

When, as occasionally happens, reviewers of books or plays or other 'cultural phenomena' make mistakes, that is, stray from the Party's path in some particular, this is put right not merely by bringing the possible consequences of his errors home to the individual reviewer, but by publishing a kind of counter-review of the original review, pointing out its errors and laying down the authoritative 'line' about the original work under review. In some cases stronger action occurs. The last chairman was the old- fashioned but none too enterprising poet, Nikolay Tikhonov. He was ousted for permitting so-called pure literature to appear: and the politically totally committed Fadeev succeeded him.

Writers are generally considered as persons who need a good deal of watching, since they deal in the dangerous commodity of ideas, and are therefore fended off from private, individual contact with foreigners with greater care than the less intellectual profes­sionals, such as actors, dancers and musicians, who are regarded as less susceptible to the power of ideas, and to that extent better insulated against disturbing influences from abroad. This distinc­tion drawn by the security authorities seems fundamentally cor­rect, since it is only by talking with writers and their friends that foreign visitors (for example, the author of this memorandum) have been able to obtain any degree of coherent insight, as opposed to brief and fitful glimpses, into the working of the Soviet system in the spheres of private and artistic life - other artists have largely been conditioned into automatic avoidance of interest in, let alone discussion of, such perilous topics. Known contact with foreigners does not in all cases lead to disgrace or persecution (although it is usually followed by sharp interrogation by the NKVD), but the more timorous among the writers, and particularly those who have not thoroughly secured their position and become mouthpieces of the Party line, avoid discoverable individual meetings with foreign­ers - even with the Communists and fellow-travellers of proven loyalty who arrive on official Soviet-sponsored visits.

Having protected himself adequately against suspicion of any desire to follow after alien gods, the Soviet writer, whether imagi­native or critical, must also make certain of the correct literary targets at any given moment. The Soviet Government cannot be accused of leaving him in any uncertainty in this matter. Western 'values', which unless avowedly anti-Soviet or considered reac­tionary, used at one time not to be thought too disreputable and were left alone, largely glossed over in silence, are once again under attack. The classical authors alone seem to be beyond political criticism. The heyday of earlier Marxist criticism, when Shakespeare or Dante - as well as Pushkin and Gogol and, of course, Dostoevsky - were condemned as enemies of popular culture or of the fight for freedom, is today regarded with dis­taste as a childish aberration. The great Russian writers, including such political reactionaries as Dostoevsky and Leskov, were, at any rate by 1945, back on their pedestals and once more objects of admiration and study. This applies to a large degree to foreign classics, even though such authors as Jack London, Upton Sinclair and J. B. Priestley (as well as such, to me, little-known figures as James Aldridge and Walter Greenwood) enter the pan­theon on political rather than literary merit.

The main burden of Russian critical writing is at present directed to the rehabilitation of everything Russian, particularly in the region of abstract thought, which is represented as owing as little as possible to the West; and to the glorification of Russian (and occasionally non-Russian) scientific and artistic pioneers active within the historic limits of the Russian empire. This is modified by the fact that lately there have occurred signs of awareness that the Marxist approach was in danger of being abandoned too far in favour of excessive wartime Russian nation­alism, which, if it spread, as it showed signs of doing, into regional nationalism, would act as a disruptive force. Conse­quently historians like Tarle and others - and particularly Tatar,

Bashkir, Kazakh and other ethnic minority historians - have been officially reproved for a non-Marxist deviation towards national­ism and regionalism.

The greatest binding force of the Union, apart from historic association, is still Marxist, or rather 'Leninist-Stalinist', ortho­doxy, but above all the Communist Party - the healer of the wounds inflicted by Russia on her non-Russian subjects in Tsarist days. Hence the paramount need for re-emphasising the central egalitarian Marxist doctrine, and the fight against any ten­dency to fall into easy nationalism. The greatest attack of all was launched on everything German; the origins of Marx and Engels could hardly be denied, but Hegel, whom earlier Marxists, including Lenin, naturally enough regarded with the piety due to a direct ancestor, is today, with other German thinkers and his­torians of the Romantic period, subjected to violent assaults as a Fascist in embryo and pan-German, from whom little if anything is to be learnt, and whose influence in Russian thought, which can scarcely be altogether concealed, has been either superfluous or deleterious.

By comparison, French and English thinkers get off more favourably, and the careful Soviet author, both historian and lit­terateur, may still continue to permit himself to offer a little cau­tious homage to the anti-clerical and 'anti-mystical' empiricists, materialists and rationalists of the Anglo-French philosophical and scientific tradition.

After every care has been exercised, every step taken to avert official disapproval, the most distinguished among the older authors still find themselves in a peculiar condition of being at once objects of adulation to their readers, and half-admiring, half-suspicious toleration to the authorities; looked up to, but imperfectly understood by, the younger generation of writers; a small and decimated but still distinguished Parnassus, oddly insu­lated, living on memories of Europe, particularly of France and Germany, proud of the defeat of Fascism by the victorious armies of their country, and comforted by the growing admiration and absorbed attention of the young. Thus the poet Boris Pasternak told me that when he reads his poetry in public, and occasionally halts for a word, there are always at least a dozen listeners pres­ent who prompt him at once and from memory, and could clearly carry on for as long as may be required.

Indeed there is no doubt that, for whatever reason - whether from innate purity of taste, or from the absence of cheap or triv­ial writing to corrupt it - there probably exists no country today where poetry, old and new, good and indifferent, is sold in such quantities and read so avidly as it is in the Soviet Union. This nat­urally cannot fail to act as a powerful stimulus to critics and poets alike. In Russia alone does poetry literally pay; a successful poet is endowed by the State, and is relatively better off than, for example, an average Soviet civil servant. Playwrights are often exceedingly prosperous. If a rise in quantity, as Hegel taught, leads to a change in quality, the literary future of the Soviet Union ought to be brighter than that of any other country; and indeed there is perhaps evidence for this proposition better and more solid than a priori reasoning by a German metaphysician, discredited even in the Russia whose thought he affected for so long and so disastrously.

The work of the older writers, with roots in the past, is natu­rally affected by the political uncertainties by which they are sur­rounded. Some break a total silence very occasionally to write a late lyric, or a critical article, and otherwise subsist in timid silence on pensions, in houses in town or country with which the State, in cases of real eminence, provides them. Some have taken to a politi­cally inoffensive medium, such as children's or nonsense verse; Chukovsky's children's rhymes, for example, are nonsense verse of genius, and bear comparison with Edward Lear. Prishvin continues to write what seem to me excellent animal stories. Another avenue of escape is the art of translation, into which much splendid Russian talent at present flows, as, indeed, it always has. It is a slightly odd thought that in no country are these innocent and unpolitical arts practised with greater perfection. Lately there has been a drive against them too.

The high standard of translation is, of course, due not merely to its attraction as a distinguished vehicle of escape from politi­cally dangerous views, but also to the tradition of highly artistic rendering from foreign tongues, which Russia, a country intellec­tually long dependent on foreign literature in the past, developed in the nineteenth century. The result is that persons of excep­tional sensibility and literary merit have translated the great clas­sical works of the West, and hack translations (which the majority of English versions of Russian still are) are virtually unknown in Russia. In part, such concentration on translation is due also to the emphasis at present laid on the life of outlying regions of the Soviet Union, and the consequent political pre­mium put upon translations from such fashionable languages as Ukrainian, Georgian, Armenian, Uzbek, Tadjik, at which some of the most gifted Russian authors have tried their hand with brilliant effect and much resultant inter-regional good will. Indeed, this will probably turn out to be the most valuable single contribution which Stalin's personal influence will have made to the development of Russian letters.

As for fiction, the commonest path is that taken by such steady, irretrievably second-rate novelists as Fedin, Kataev, Gladkov, Leonov, Sergeev-Tsensky, Fadeev and such playwrights as Pogodin and (the recently deceased) Trenev, some of whom look back on variegated personal Revolutionary pasts.1 All of them today make their bow in the manner prescribed by their political directors, and in general produce work of high medioc­rity modelled on late nineteenth-century archetypes, written with professional craftsmanship, long, competent, politically bien pen- sant; earnest, at times readable, but on the whole undistinguished. The purges of 1937 and 1938 appear to have stamped out that blazing fire of modern Russian art to which the Revolution of i9i7 had added fuel and which the recent war could scarcely have extinguished so swiftly if political causes had not begun to do so earlier.

Over the entire scene of Russian literature there broods a curi­ous air of total stillness, with not a breath of wind to ruffle the waters. It may be that this is the calm before the next great tidal wave, but there are few visible signs as yet of anything new or original about to be born in the Soviet Union. There is no satiety

1 These writers, now largely forgotten and unread, were among the most successful and widely read exponents of socialist realism (for details see Glossary).

with the old and no demand for new experience to stimulate a jaded palate. The Russian public is less blase than any other in Europe, and the cognoscenti, so far as there are any, are only too well pleased if there are no worrying political clouds on the hori­zon, and they are left in peace. The climate is not propitious to intellectual or artistic enterprise; and the authorities, who would eagerly welcome invention and discovery in the technological field, do not seem aware of the indivisibility of the freedom of enquiry, which cannot be kept within prescribed frontiers. Invention seems for the present to have been sacrificed to secu­rity; unless and until this changes, Russia is scarcely likely to make a crucial contribution, at any rate in the field of humane arts and studies.

And, it may be asked, the younger writers? No foreign ob­server of the Russian literary scene can fail to be struck by the gap between the older writers, loyal but melancholy figures of no possible danger to the stability of this, to all appearance, thor­oughly stable regime, and the immensely prolific younger writ­ers, who appear to write faster than thought itself (perhaps because so many of them are free from it), and rehearse the same patterns and formulae so tirelessly and with such apparent sin­cerity and vigour that it is scarcely thinkable that they can ever have been assailed by any real doubts, either as artists or as human beings.

Perhaps the immediate past explains this. The purges cleared the literary ground, and the war provided the new subject and the mood; there sprang into being a brood of writers, facile, naive and copious, varying from crude and wooden orthodoxy to con­siderable technical skill, capable at times of moving, at others of genuinely gay, and often vivid, journalistic reportage. This applies to prose and verse, novels and plays. The most successful and most representative figure of this type is the journalist, play­wright and poet Konstantin Simonov, who has poured out a flood of work of inferior quality but impeccably orthodox senti­ment, acclaiming the right type of Soviet hero, brave, puritanical, simple, noble, altruistic, entirely devoted to the service of his country. Behind Simonov there are other authors of the same genre; authors of novels dealing with exploits in kolkhozes, fac­tories or at the front; writers of patriotic doggerel or of plays which guy the capitalist world or the old and discredited liberal culture of Russia itself, in contrast with the simple, now wholly standardised, type of tough, hearty, capable, resolute, single- minded young engineers or political commissars ('engineers of human souls'), or army commanders, shy and manly lovers, spar­ing of words, doers of mighty deeds, 'Stalin's eagles', flanked by passionately patriotic, utterly fearless, morally pure, heroic young women, upon whom the success of all five-year plans ulti­mately depends.

The older authors do not conceal their opinion of the value of this kind of conscientious but commonplace literary mass- production, related to literature much as posters are to serious art. Nor would they be as critical as they are if, side by side with the inevitable mushroom growth of such work, inspired by, and directly ancillary to, the needs of the State, there were also some­thing profounder and more original to be found among the younger writers - among those, let us say, who are under forty. They point out that there is intrinsically no reason why contem­porary Soviet life should not generate genuine and serious 'socialist realism' - after all, Sholokhov's Quiet Don, dealing as it did with Cossacks and peasants during the civil war, was on all sides recognised as a genuine, if sometimes dull, lumbering and overweighted, work of imagination.

The obvious criticism which these older writers urge - and such 'self-criticism' is allowed to appear in print - is that out of shallow facility and the easy orthodoxy of standardised hero- worship no genuine work of art can ever be born; that the war heroes themselves have won the right to subtler and less hack­neyed analysis; that the experience of the war is a profound national experience which only a more intense, sensitive and scrupulous art can adequately express, and that the majority of the war novels now published are crude travesties and a hideous insult to the soldiers and civilians whose ordeal they purport to describe; finally (this is never said in print) that the inner conflict which alone makes an artist has been too easily resolved by the over-simple rules of an artificially flattened political schema, which allows no doubts about ultimate purpose, and not much disagreement about means, and which has, perhaps as a result of the purges and their physical and moral consequences, so far failed to create its own artistic canons, standards in the light of which something no less strictly conformist but also no less devout and profound than the religious art of the Middle Ages could evolve in Russia today. Nor do I see much hope of that at the present time. The cry by the poet Sel'vinsky for socialist romanticism[21] - if socialist realism, then why not socialist roman­ticism? - was ruthlessly suppressed.

Meanwhile the financial rewards of these fashionable younger authors, unaffected as they are by the strictures of the critics, entitle them to be considered the equivalent of best-sellers in Western countries; no literal equivalent exists since fiction and poetry, good or bad, is sold and distributed immediately on pub­lication - such is the hunger of the public and the inadequacy of the supply. The subjects of historical novels, since romans de moeurs are scarcely safe, tend, apart from war and post-war propaganda themes, to be the lives of such officially approved heroes from the Russian past as Tsars Ivan IV and Peter I, sol­diers and sailors like Suvorov, Kutuzov, Nakhimov and Makarov, honest patriots and true Russians, too often plagued and frus­trated by the intrigues of sycophantic courtiers and disloyal noblemen. Their character and exploits offer opportunities of combining a pleasantly romantic and patriotic historical back­ground with political or social sermons only too clearly appli­cable to contemporary needs.

This fashion was not indeed begun, but was given its strongest fillip, by the late Aleksey Tolstoy (he died this year [1945]), who alone, perhaps, had the makings of, and the ambition to be, the Virgil of the new empire which had excited his rich imagination and brought his remarkable literary gift into play.

The same gap between the young and old is perceptible in the other arts, in the theatre, in music, in the ballet. Whatever has grown without a definite break from a rich past and leans on a pre-Revolutionary tradition has, by firmly clinging to such old and tried supports, managed to preserve its standards into the present. Thus the Moscow Arts Theatre, while universally acknowledged to have declined from the extraordinary level of its golden age, when Chekhov and Gorky wrote for it, nevertheless preserves a remarkable standard of individual acting and of inspired ensemble playing which rightly continues to make it the envy of the world. Its repertoire, since the post-1937 era, is con­fined either to old plays or to such tame new, conformist pieces as have relatively little character of their own, and simply act as vehicles in which gifted naturalistic actors can exhibit their superb, old-fashioned skills; what the public remembers is for the most part the acting and not the play. Similarly the Maly (Little) Theatre continues to give admirable performances of Ostrovsky's comedies, which were its mainstay in the nineteenth century; the acting of plays attempted since the Revolution, whether classical or modern, at the Maly tends too often to sink to the level of the repertory companies directed by Ben Greet or Frank Benson. One or two of the smaller Moscow theatres perform classical plays with verve and imagination, for example Ermolova's theatre and the Transport Theatre in Moscow, and one or two of the little theatres in Leningrad. The best performances given even in these theatres are of classical pieces; for example, Goldoni, Sheridan, Scribe; modern plays go less well, not so much because of old-fashioned methods of acting, as because of the inevitable tameness of the material itself.

As for opera and ballet, wherever past tradition exists to guide it, it acquits itself honourably, if dully. When something new is put on, for example the new ballet Gayaneh by the Armenian composer Khachaturyan, playing in Leningrad this year, it is capable of displaying exuberance and temperament, which disarm the spectator by the gusto and delight in the art of the dancers. But it is also, particularly in Moscow, capable of sinking to depths of vulgarity of decor and production (and of music too) which can scarcely ever have been surpassed even in Paris under the Second Empire; the inspiration of the scenes of clumsily heaped-up opulence with which the Bolshoy Theatre in Moscow is so lavish derives at least as much from the tawdry splendours of the early Hollywood of ten and even twenty years ago, as from anything conceived in Offenbach's day; and such crude dis­play is made to seem all the more grotesque and inappropriate by the individual genius of a truly great lyrical and dramatic dancer like Ulanova, or of such impeccable new virtuosi as Dudinskaya, Lepeshinskaya and the ageing Semenova, Preobrazhensky, Sergeev and Ermolaev. In either case it lacks the fusion of undevi- atingly precise, inexorable discipline with imaginative originality and wide range, and that combination of intensity, lyricism and elegance which had raised the Russian ballet to its former unat­tainable height.

There are still fewer signs of new life in the two great opera houses of Moscow and Leningrad, which confine themselves to a highly stereotyped repertory of the best-known Russian and Italian works, varied by occasional performances of, for exam­ple, Carmen. Minor theatres, in search of politically innocent amusement, offer their clients operettas by Offenbach, Lecocq and Herve, performed with more gusto than finish, but vastly welcomed as a contrast with the drab monotony of daily Soviet life. The contrast between age and youth is again noticeably pres­ent, not so much in the ballet (which could not exist without a perpetual recruitment of young dancers), as on the dramatic stage, where few, if any, outstanding actors or actresses have come forward during the last ten years. The audiences seem clearly aware of this, and whenever I hinted at this to my anony­mous neighbours in the Moscow theatres, it was invariably as­sented to so rapidly that it must be a very obvious commonplace. Such casual neighbours in the theatre almost invariably expand dolefully on the regrettable absence among the younger people of dramatic talent, and even more of the right sensibility - with which the older actors, still on the stage (some whose careers go back to the early years of the century), are so richly endowed - and one or two have wondered whether the theatres of the West do not produce better young actors than the Soviet Union. Perhaps 'the tradition is not so rigid and oppressive there'. Even the Arts Theatre seems to have stopped dead in technique and feeling - or else has been forced to go back to the days before the First World War.

This combination of discouragement of all innovation - the name of the purged producer Meyerhold is scarcely spoken aloud - together with a considerable encouragement of the stage as such is bound, unless something occurs to interrupt the process, to lead in the relatively near future to a widening chasm between accomplished but unreal, and contemporary but com­monplace and provincial, styles of acting. On the other side it must be said that the childlike eagerness and enthusiasm of Soviet readers and Soviet theatrical audiences is probably without paral­lel in the world. The existence of State-subsidised theatres and opera, as well as of regional publishing houses, throughout the Soviet Union is not merely a part of a bureaucratic plan, but responds to a very genuine and insufficiently satisfied popular demand. The vast increase in literacy under the stimulus provided by the earlier period when Marxism was in ferment, as well as the immense circulation of Russian and to some degree of foreign classics, particularly in translation into the various languages of the 'nationalities' of the USSR, has created a public the respon­siveness of which should be the envy of Western writers and dramatists. The crowded bookshops with their understocked shelves, the eager interest displayed by the Government employ­ees who run them, the fact that even such newspapers as Pravda and Izvestiya are sold out within a few minutes of their rare ap­pearance in the kiosks, is further evidence of this hunger.

If, therefore, political control were to alter at the top, and greater freedom of artistic expression were permitted, there is no reason why, in a society so hungry for productive activity, and in a nation still so eager for experience, still so young and so enchanted by everything that seems to be new or even true, and above all endowed with a prodigious vitality which can carry off absurdities fatal to a thinner culture, a magnificent creative art should not one day once again spring into life.

To Western observers the reaction of Soviet audiences to classi­cal plays may seem curiously naive; when, for example, a play by Shakespeare or by Griboedov is performed, the audience is apt to react to the action on the stage as if the play was drawn from contemporary life; lines spoken by the actors meet with murmurs of approval or disapproval, and the excitement generated is won­derfully direct and spontaneous. These are perhaps not far removed from the kind of popular audiences for which Euripides and Shakespeare wrote, and the fact that soldiers at the front have so often compared their leaders with the stock heroes of patriotic Soviet novels, that fiction is to them, as often as not, part of the general pattern of daily life, seems to show that they still look on the world with the shrewd imagination and unspoilt eye of intel­ligent children, the ideal public of the novelist, the dramatist and the poet. This fertile soil, still so little ploughed, in which even the poorest seed seems to sprout so quickly and so generously, can scarcely fail to inspire the artist, and it is probable that it is the absence of precisely this popular response that has made the art of England and France often seem mannered, anaemic and artificial.

As things are, the contrast between the extraordinary freshness and receptivity, critical and uncritical, of the Soviet appetite, and the inferiority of the pabulum provided, is the most striking phe­nomenon of Soviet culture today.

Soviet writers in articles and feuilletons love to emphasise the extraordinary enthusiasm with which the public has received this or that book, this or that film or play, and, indeed, what they say is largely true; but two aspects of the case are, not unnaturally, never mentioned. The first is that, despite all official propaganda, strongly felt and perhaps almost instinctive discrimination between good and bad art - for example, between nineteenth- century classics and the very few surviving literary masters on the one hand, and routine patriotic literature on the other - has not been wholly obliterated, and standardisation of taste does not, so far at least, seem to have occurred on the scale which might have been expected, and which the best members of the Soviet intelli­gentsia (such as survive) still fear.

The second qualification is the continued existence, although under difficult conditions and in dwindling numbers, of a real nucleus of ageing but articulate intellectuals, deeply civilised, sen­sitive, fastidious and not to be deceived, who have preserved unimpaired the high critical standards, in certain respects the purest and most exacting in the world, of the pre-Revolutionary Russian intelligentsia. These people, now to be found in politi­cally unimportant Government posts, universities, publishing houses, if not positively catered for by the State, are not vastly harried either; they tend to be gloomy or sardonic because they see few successors to themselves in the succeeding generation, and this is said to be mainly due to the fact that such young men or women as show any signs of independence and originality are ruthlessly uprooted and dispersed in the north or central Asiatic regions, as an element disturbing to society.

A good many of the young who showed signs of talent as independent artists and critics are said to have been swept away in 1937-8 ('as with a broom', as a young Russian said to me at a railway station, where he felt unobserved). Nevertheless, a few such are still to be found in universities or among translators from foreign languages or ballet librettists (for whom there is great demand), but it is difficult to estimate whether by them­selves they are sufficient to carry on the vigorous intellectual life upon which, for example, Trotsky and Lunacharsky used to lay such stress, and for which their successors seem to care so little. The older intellectuals, when they speak with candour, make no bones about the atmosphere in which they live; most of them still belong to the class of what are known as 'the scared', that is, those who have not fully recovered from the nightmare of the great purges - but a few are showing signs of emerging once again into the light of day. They point out that official control, while no longer as fiercely devoted to heresy-hunts as before, is so complete in all spheres of art and life, and the caution exer­cised by the timid and largely ignorant bureaucrats in control of art and literature so extreme, that whatever is new and original among the ambitious young naturally tends to flow into non- artistic channels - the natural sciences or the technological disci­plines - where more encouragement to progress and less fear of the unusual obtains.

As for other arts, there was never much to be said for or about Russian painting - today that which is exhibited seems to have fallen below the lowest standards of nineteenth-century Russian naturalism or impressionism, which did at least possess the merit of illustrating, with a great deal of life, social and polit­ical conflicts and the general ideals of the time. As for pre- and post-Revolutionary modernism, which continued and flowered during the early Soviet period - of that not a whisper, so far as I could tell.

The condition of music is not very different. Apart from the complicated cases of Prokofiev and Shostakovich (political pres­sure upon the latter seems scarcely to have improved the style of his work, although there may well be vigorous disagreement about this - and he is still young), either it is again largely a dull academic reproduction of the traditional 'Slav' or 'sweet' Tchaikovsky-Rachmaninov pattern, now worn very thin (as in the case of the endlessly fertile Myaskovsky and the academic Glier), or it has taken to lively, shallow and occasionally skilful, at times even brilliantly entertaining, exploitation of the folk song of the constituent republics of the USSR, along the simplest pos­sible lines - perhaps, to put it at its lowest, with an ultimate view to possible performances by balalaika orchestras. Even such moderately competent composers as Shebalin and Kabalevsky have taken this line of least resistance, and have, with their imita­tors, become monotonous and tirelessly productive purveyors of routine music of remorseless mediocrity.

Architecture in its turn is engaged either in the admirably done restoration of old buildings and occasional supplementa­tion of these by competently executed pastiche, or in the erec­tion of vast, dark, bleak buildings, repulsive even by the worst Western standards. The cinema alone shows signs of genuine life, although the golden age of the Soviet film, when it was genuinely Revolutionary in inspiration and encouraged experiment, seems, with some notable exceptions (for example Eisenstein and his disciples, still active), to have yielded to something cruder and more commonplace.

In general, intellectuals still seem haunted by too many fresh memories of the period of purges succeeded by rumours of war, succeeded by war and famine and devastation; regret as they might the flatness of the scene, the prospect of a new 'revolution­ary situation', however stimulating to art, could scarcely be wel­come to human beings who have lived through more than even the normal Russian share of moral and physical suffering. Conse­quently there is a kind of placid and somewhat defeatist accep­tance of the present situation among most of the intellectuals. There is little fight left even in the most rebellious and individual­istic; Soviet reality is too recalcitrant, political obligation too oppressive, moral issues too uncertain, and the compensations, material and moral, for conformity too irresistible. The intellec­tual of recognised merit is materially secure; he or she enjoys the admiration and fidelity of a vast public; his or her status is digni­fied; and if the majority long, with an intensity not to be described, to visit Western countries (of whose mental and spiri­tual life they often entertain the most exaggerated notions), and complain that 'things are screwed up too tight in this country', some, and by no means the least distinguished, tend to say that State control has its positive aspects as well. While it hems in cre­ative artists to an extent unparalleled even in Russian history, it does, a distinguished children's writer said to me, give the artist the feeling that the State and the community in general are, at any rate, greatly interested in his work, that the artist is regarded as an important person whose behaviour matters a very great deal, that his development on the right lines is a crucial responsibility both of himself and of his ideological directors, and that this is, despite all the terror and slavery and the humiliation, a far greater stimulus to him than the relative neglect of his brother artists in bourgeois countries.

Doubtless there is something in that, and certainly art has, his­torically, flourished under despotism. It may be a particularly unrealistic moral fallacy, so long as glory and high position are the rewards of success, that no form of intellectual or artistic genius can flourish in confinement. But facts, in this case, speak more loudly than theory. Contemporary Soviet culture is not marching with its old firm, confident or even hopeful step; there is a sense of emptiness, a total absence of winds or currents, and one of the symptoms of this is the fact that creative talent is so easily diverted into such media as the popularisation and the study, sometimes both scholarly and imaginative, of the 'national' cultures of the constituent republics, particularly those in Central Asia. It may be that this is merely a trough between high crests, a temporary period of weariness and mechanical behaviour after too much effort spent on crushing the internal and external ene­mies of the regime. Perhaps. Certainly there is today not a ripple on the ideological surface. There are appeals to cease reading the Germans, to cultivate national Soviet (and not local or regional) pride, above all to cease to uncover non-Russian origins of Russian institutions or alien sources of Russian thought; to return to orthodox Leninism-Stalinism, and to abstain from the vagaries of non-Marxist patriotism, which luxuriated during the war; but there is nothing remotely resembling the fierce, often crude but still sometimes profoundly and passionately felt ideo­logical Marxist controversies of, say, Bukharin's lifetime.

Yet this account would be misleading if it did not include the fact that, despite the difficult and even desperate situation in which persons of independent temper and education at times find themselves in Russia, they are capable of a degree of gaiety, intel­lectual as well as social, and of enthusiastic interest in their inter­nal and external affairs, combined with an extravagant and often delicate sense of the ridiculous, which makes life not merely bearable to them but worthwhile; and makes their bearing and their conversation both dignified and delightful to the foreign visitor.

Certainly the present aspect of the Soviet artistic and intellec­tual scene suggests that the initial great impulse is over, and that it may be a considerable time before anything new or arresting in the realm of ideas, as opposed to steady competence and solid achievement firmly set by authority within the framework of established tradition, is likely to emerge from the USSR. The old Russia, the condition of which preoccupied and indeed obsessed her writers, was, in a certain obvious sense, an Athenian society in which a small elite, endowed with a combination of remark­able intellectual and moral qualities, rare taste and an unparalleled sweep of imagination, was supported by a dark mass of idle, feckless, semi-barbarous helots, about whom much was said, but, as Marxists and other dissidents justly observed, exceedingly little was known, least of all by the men of good will who talked most about them and, as they supposed, to them and for their benefit.

If there is one single continuing strain in the Leninist policy it is the desire to make of these dark people full human beings, capable of standing on their own feet, recognised as equals and perhaps even superiors by their still disdainful Western neigh­bours. No cost is too high for this; organised material progress is still regarded as the foundation on which all else rests; and if intellectual and indeed civil liberty is considered to hamper or retard the process of transforming the Soviet peoples into the nation best equipped to understand and cope with the technolog­ically new post-liberal world, then these 'luxuries' must be sacri­ficed; or at least temporarily shelved.

Every citizen in the Soviet Union has had this brought home to him with varying degrees of force, and if some perform an inward act of protest, it remains inarticulate and ineffective. Nevertheless it is doubtful whether this remorseless course can be kept up quite so rigorously beyond the life of the fanatical and single-minded generation which knew the Revolution. The prin­cipal hope of a new flowering of the liberated Russian genius lies in the still unexhausted vitality, the omnivorous curiosity, the astonishingly undiminished moral and intellectual appetite of this most imaginative and least narrow of peoples, which in the long - perhaps very long - run, and despite the appalling damage done to it by the chains which bind it at present, still shows greater promise of gigantic achievement in the use of its vast material resources, and, by the same token, pari passu, in the arts and sci­ences, than any other contemporary society.

A VISIT TO LENINGRAD

!945

The train left Moscow and arrived in Leningrad very punctu­ally, nor was there any obvious NKVD agent in the compartment on either side of ours. No food was served on the way to Leningrad; moderately attractive belegte Broetchen[22] were offered at the usual fantastic prices on the way back. Tea flowed copi­ously from the guard's samovar during both journeys. Everyone was polite and well behaved; we were not accosted by tipsy Soviet colonels.

The centre of Leningrad shows virtually no destruction, and the restoration and renovation of public buildings, to which much attention has been devoted, seems now to be complete; they glittered with pride and splendour in the clear wintry air. The public statues and monuments are once again exposed to view, the Hermitage is open (all save the Spanish, French and English rooms), and is said to be preparing its German acquisi­tions - apparently for the most part drawings from Dresden and Berlin - for exhibition fairly soon. There is some jealousy about the retention of all the Dresden paintings by Moscow, but this seems to be regarded as inevitable.

People on the streets look shabbier and more emaciated than the Muscovites, doubtless mainly as a result of the blockade which fills all memories and colours every conversation, but probably also because there are not so many peasant types to be seen in Leningrad, and one sees more worn and torn members of the old intelligentsia, or persons who give that impression, upon whom threadbare clothes flapping in the piercing wind and snow look more pathetically tattered than on the cruder and more corn-fed inhabitants of Moscow. The streets are a good deal emptier than in Moscow, save the Nevsky (the main thorough­fare), which at times is as crowded as the Okhotny Ryad in Moscow; the trolley-buses are, as everywhere in the Soviet Union, filled to overflowing. As for trams, they present a gro­tesque appearance, crawling slowly like gigantic disabled wasps, covered with human barnacles, some of whom tend inevitably to be knocked off by persons attempting to get on or off, and then with loud imprecations and groans hoist and squeeze themselves back on to their very inadequate footholds. In consequence trams are frighteningly close to being literal death-traps, as I al­most discovered to my cost. Even at 4 a.m. and 7.30 a.m. I found all seats occupied.

More persons are said to be arriving from the country in Len­ingrad every day, and the housing problem, although perhaps not quite as acute as in Moscow, is grim enough. Rooms - at any rate those inhabited by the writers I visited - are at once handsomer and emptier than their equivalents in Moscow, the former because Leningrad in general is a better-built city than the more provincial Moscow, the latter because, so I was told, a great deal of furniture, some of it old and beautiful, was used for fuel dur­ing the blockade, and there is little likelihood of early replace­ment. Fuel is conspicuously short in Leningrad still; the Astoria Hotel, not to speak of public museums and galleries like the Hermitage, is not adequately heated, and Miss Tripp[23] found that in one scientific institute there was no heating at all provided in the library, and that such warmth as existed was to be found in two small rooms, yielded by tiny improvised stoves lit by the librarians themselves each morning. Miss Tripp obtained the impression that private individuals could get logs for their stoves only in exchange for bread rations or such belongings as they could sell in the market. Prices appeared considerably lower than those in Moscow (despite rumours to the contrary), from carpets and grand pianos in the Commission shops, and second-hand books (which cost approximately one-third of their price in Moscow), to carrots and sunflower seeds in the market on Vasil'evsky Island.

As for the outskirts, I was informed that Tsarskoe Selo (re­ferred to mostly as 'Pushkin' by Intourist guides) and Peterhof were both still in ruins, Gatchina still gutted; and transport to Pavlovsk, which is a mass of destruction, seemed difficult. At any rate my own suggestion of a visit there was regarded as quite impracticable: 'The trains are very bad and it is very far', though it is only a very few miles beyond Tsarskoe Selo. The poetess Vera Inber said on a later occasion that the Pavlovsk palaces were being very rapidly restored and would be finished by New Year. My suggestion about visiting Oranienbaum was even less well received and I therefore dropped the subject.

Despite the Intourist lady's open scepticism about the quality of the performances, I saw Ivan Susanin at the Mariinsky Theatre, now back in its traditional blue and gold; the opera was more poorly sung and acted than anything at the Bolshoy Theatre in Moscow. The orchestra scores still called it Life for the Tsar and this was remarked sardonically by my Red Army neigh­bour. The Leningrad ballet is, however, a notable one. Sleeping Beauty, which I saw with Miss Tripp, and Gayaneh, an Armenian ballet by the popular composer Aram Khachaturyan, which I saw with Miss Tripp and Mr Randolph Churchill, were superior to the usual Moscow performances, particularly Gayaneh, the libretto of which is a fairly normal version of the orthodox kolkhoz-Boy-Scout morality play, brought to life by a series of national dances of the Caucasian and Caspian peoples, danced with very uncommon spirit and skill. This contrasted with the dull pomp and routine competence with which even Tchaikovsky ballets are performed in Russia nowadays, and is rightly put for­ward by Leningrad today as one of its major claims to fruitful artistic activity.

There is a good deal of wounded amour propre about Leningrad, a coldly handsome and once arrogant old capital, now viewed as something of a back number by the Moscow arrivistes, and responding with sharp but not altogether self-confident dis­dain. People appear poorer and less cared for than in Moscow; the writers I saw looked less prosperous, and their appearance and general tone was sadder and more genteel and weary than that of their Moscow colleagues. On the other hand life seems politically easier. I was not, so far as I could tell, followed by anyone in Leningrad, and contact with Soviet citizens seemed less difficult than in Moscow. During three long evenings which I was permitted to spend among writers, occasionally tete-a-tete, the most timorous among them told me that he was most careful to avoid foreign contacts in Moscow, and generally to exercise a degree of caution not called for anywhere else, for example in Leningrad. I met these writers through the kind offices of the manager of the Writers' Bookshop in the Nevsky, a ripe character who deserves a few words to himself.[24]

Gennady Moiseevich Rakhlin is a small, thin, gay, baldish, red- haired Jew, noisy, shrewd, immensely and demonstratively af­fable, and probably the best-informed, best-read and most enterprising bookseller in the Soviet Union. Although, like other managers of State bookshops, he makes no official commission on his sales, and says that he subsists entirely on his official salary, his interest in and passion to promote the sale of books is at least as intense as that of any bookseller in the Western world. As the manager of the two most important bookshops in Leningrad, he is the official dictator of book prices in the city, and is evidently able to get books from other shops at very short notice, and thus to supply the needs of his clients more efficiently than any other known agent. Having certain vaguely romantic literary ambitions, founded on the memory of the famous book­sellers of the nineteenth century who acted at once as the pub­lishers, distributors and patrons of literature - his own bookshop is on the site of Smirdin's famous establishment - he has con­verted one of the rooms in his bookshop into a kind of club for writers and other favoured visitors, and in this room, which

Miss Tripp and I were kindly invited to frequent, I was enabled not only to purchase books with a degree of comfort unknown in Moscow, but to make the acquaintance of several well-known lit­erary persons, such as Zoshchenko, Akhmatova, Orlov, Dudin. Whenever I called, there were some three or four people in the room - artists, academic persons, writers - ostensibly looking round the bookshelves, but, as they very rarely carried anything away, perhaps more anxious to meet their friends in a warm room during the winter weather than to make any purchases. Con­versation ran easily and freely in this little salon on literary, aca­demic and even political subjects, and it was as the result of an acquaintance formed there that I visited an eminent literary per- sonage[25] at home, and there met other members of the Leningrad intelligentsia. Rakhlin himself took a lively part in these conver­sations, though it was quite evident that his clients did not look upon him as an intellectual equal, but rather as an exceedingly capable literary factotum (which he is) with whom it was a good thing to keep in, since he acted as a kind of general Leningrad Figaro, procured theatre tickets, arranged lectures, gave monthly literary suppers, carried intelligence, disseminated gossip, and in general performed innumerable small services which made life more interesting, agreeable and indeed tolerable.

Rakhlin, who spoke of his frequent and lavish entertainment in Moscow by Mr Lawrence and Mr Reavey[26] with great gratitude and pleasure, seemed most anxious to continue contacts of this type with members of the British Embassy, and spoke with pride of the number of books which he had succeeded in selling to British and American officials and journalists since 1942. He did display a certain social sensitiveness on the subject and com­plained, with bitterness, of a British journalist who had made a disparaging reference to him in a recent book, which he thought uncalled for and unjust. He spoke of his plans for opening a bookshop in Moscow with at least five rooms, one of which would be devoted to the foreign colony, whence his foreign buy­ers would be able to circulate through the other rooms and thus perhaps meet distinguished Muscovites with similar interests. He seemed totally unaware of the kind of difficulties which seemed likely to be put in the way of such a project for promoting easier contact between foreigners and Soviet citizens, and indeed such unawareness of the degree of segregation in Moscow seemed to emerge from the conversations of most of the Leningrad writers with whom I spoke.

As Mr Randolph Churchill expressed a desire to see the 'inside of a Soviet home', which he had not succeeded in doing in Moscow, I asked Mr Rakhlin, who happened to be in bed with a cold, whether he would care to be visited by Mr Churchill and talk to him about his experiences during the blockade, on which he is very interesting. Rakhlin seemed to welcome the suggestion and Mr Churchill and I visited him on 16 November at about 3 o'clock in the afternoon. Rakhlin was in bed but talked with irrepressible vivacity about himself and the blockade, and an­swered all Mr Churchill's questions with great readiness and ease. His wife presently entertained us handsomely with vodka and a solid meal of fish and chicken. The flat, which is off the Nevsky, consisted of three rooms; it was small and gloomily but not uncomfortably furnished, and was approximately such as might have been found in Clerkenwell or Islington, though very much barer, furnished with the heavy German furniture of the 1880s and '90s common in Russia, with no bric-a-brac of any kind. Rakhlin spoke of the days during the siege when 125 grams of bread and no other food was the maximum and total ration allowed civilians, and of the fact that although a great many books were sold to him at that period by families of the dead and evacuated, his customers were too feeble for lack of food to be able to carry away heavy books, and chose either thin volumes or tore chapters out of novels or histories to carry away sepa­rately through the frozen streets. He gave gruesome details of the difficulties of burial of the dead, and a very graphic account of the taste of carpenters' glue, which he used to dilute with a little cold water to drink as a soup.

Although stories have reached Moscow that Popkov1 and not Zhdanov was regarded by the citizens as the saviour of Lenin­grad, Rakhlin confirmed the general view that Zhdanov was regarded as having been, more than any other man, responsible for keeping up morale in the city, and said that without Zhdanov's convoys across the frozen Lake Ladoga, he, Rakhlin, could not have saved the life of his old mother, who had miracu­lously survived. Old people and children died in their thousands during this period, everyone assured us, the total number of dead from hunger alone being somewhere in the neighbourhood of 200,000 to зоо,ооо.2 Among his customers Rakhlin proudly claimed Molotov, Beriya (the head of the NKVD), the Patriarch Aleksis,3 and the Leningrad Rabbi - he said that he himself fre­quently attended services at the Central Synagogue in Leningrad, which was normally very crowded and was getting a particularly good 'cantor' from Odessa that year - and wondered if he could be invited to England one day to see how 'real' bookshops were run. Towards the end of the visit he presented Mr Churchill with a volume on Leningrad for himself, and one published in 1912 and commemorating the retreat of Napoleon in 1812 for Mr Winston Churchill, who, his son had earlier remarked, was a pas­sionate collector of Napoleoniana.

Rakhlin's harrowing story of the blockade was more than con­firmed by others. The critic Orlov told me that virtually all chil­dren born during that period had died. He himself had been able to keep alive only as a result of the special rations issued to intel­lectuals thought to deserve them, for example himself as well as

Petr S. Popkov, as First Secretary of Leningrad's Provincial Committee (i.e. mayor of Leningrad), was responsible for maintaining the supply lines across Lake Ladoga, organising rationing and evacuating writers. Stalin, who had always felt theatened by the power of the government in Leningrad, and jealous of Popkov's status as local hero, later had him liquidated - along with most of Leningrad's wartime city government. Popkov was shot after being tried in the famous 'Leningrad Affair' of 1949-50.

This estimate was far too low: today the figure is believed to be nearer one million.

Aleksis Shimansky, Metropolitan of Leningrad, elected Patriarch February 1945.

Rakhlin, who was rated for rationing purposes as a 'second-rate writer' (the 'first-rate' and 'classical' authors are relatively well off). The only persons actually evacuated by special aircraft first across the German lines to Moscow and later to Tashkent were Zoshchenko, the short-story writer, and the poetess Akhmatova, on direct orders of Stalin. Both had at first refused to leave but ultimately bowed to authority. They and Orlov said that most of their friends died during the blockade, since, being non-essential civilians, they were virtually condemned to death by the order of priorities for food and fuel. One of them remarked that to him personally Leningrad was now a graveyard. Miss Tripp was told that many people who had been through the blockade were still subject to fits of giddiness, and that general health had steeply declined as a result - a rise in mortality was expected during the next few years, unless nutritional measures are taken to prevent this, which seems unlikely.

All the writers to whom I spoke begged for English books, which they said had been singularly difficult to obtain through VOKS,1 which was an inefficient and obstructive organisation; and indicated methods by which this might be done. We talked at great length about English and American literature, and three out of the four writers with whom I had more than casual con­versations spoke of Mr Priestley's recent visit and address to the Writers' Club; and indicated very insistently that they did not rate him too highly as a writer, although he did obviously pos­sess a high degree of professional skill. They found it hard to believe that he was really regarded in England as one of the greatest of her authors, and the heir to the great Dickens's mantle - though he told them that that had been said of him. While they found him affable enough personally they thought it queer that in his article for the Moscow Literary Gazette, in dealing with the present state of English letters, he should have damned every one of his contemporaries with praise of varying degrees of faintness, conveying throughout that their later works invariably represented a decline from sometimes promising

1 Acronym of 'Vsesoyuznoe obshchestvo kul'turnoi svyazi s zagranitisei' (All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries).

beginnings. One of them finally asked outright why His Majesty's Government should have chosen Mr Priestley, whose achievement as a dramatist is neither ideologically nor artisti­cally so very important (his novels are not known widely), as the literary ambassador of Britain. I tried to explain that it was VOKS and not His Majesty's Government which had arranged Mr Priestley's trip, but this was met with scepticism both in Leningrad and in Moscow, where Mr Priestley's criticisms of the British social order did not seem to register and very similar views of him are to be heard, at any rate among the well- established writers.

During one or two frank conversations about the condition of Russian life and letters which I had with the Leningrad writers, they said that they knew of no exceptionally gifted Russian authors under forty, although there was a great deal of enthusi­asm and energy and considerable industry among them. The 'line' at present was to devote attention to the lesser-known parts of the Soviet Union, such as Siberia or Tadjikistan, as the nursery of much brilliant new talent about to spring to life with the advance of education and civic consciousness; and that while this might be repaid in the long run, it led for the moment to the encouragement of, and publicity for, a mass of pseudo-archaic lyrics and bogus ballads and epics and official poetry generally, which were driving out whatever originality there was among these primitive or semi-medieval peoples. They asserted with much pride that the Leningrad literary papers were commend- ably free from this incubus, which cluttered up the pages of the Moscow literary weekly, although they made an exception in favour of Georgian and Armenian literature, which contained works of true genius. For their own part they are not ashamed of the tradition of Pushkin and Blok, Baudelaire and Verhaeren, and would not exchange them for all the poetical treasures of Uzbekistan or Azerbaijan, whatever might be the fashion 'in Moscow'; and more on the same lines.

They spoke of the difficulties of educating their children ac­cording to the 'European' standards which they had known before the war, and said that in Leningrad it was in spite of all difficulties easier than in Moscow, because the number of well- educated persons outside the State schools continued to be greater than elsewhere, and that children therefore came under civilised influence, which prevented them from becoming the standardised technical experts - even in literature - which they were otherwise in danger of turning into. There was much talk about the 'values of humanism' and general culture as opposed to 'Americanism' and 'barbarism', which are thought to be the main perils at present. Indeed, I can say from my personal meetings with one young member of the Red Army, lately back from Berlin and son of a person liquidated many years ago, that he was at least as civilised, well-read, independent and indeed fastidious, to the point almost of intellectual eccentricity, as the most admired undergraduate intellectuals in Oxford or Cambridge. But I gathered this case was a very exceptional one, although per­haps less so in Leningrad than anywhere else in the Soviet Union. As the young man in question gave evidence of having read both Proust and Joyce in the original (although he had never left the confines of the Soviet Union), I can well believe that this is so, and that no generalisation can possibly be drawn from one aston­ishing example.

I cautiously touched with my newly made acquaintances among the writers on the degree of political conformity which they had to observe in order not to get into trouble. They said that the difference between Communists and non-Communists was still pretty well marked. The main advantage of belonging to the Party was the better material conditions, due to the high pro­portion of orders placed with reliable Party men by the State publishing firms and literary journals, but the main disadvantage consisted in the duty of grinding out a great deal of lifeless gov­ernment propaganda at frequent intervals and of appalling length (this was said in a mild, evasive fashion, but the sense was quite unmistakable). When I asked what view was taken, for example, of so faithful a Party member as the poet Tikhonov, the President of the Writers' Union, the answer was that he was 'the boss' (nachalstvo) and consequently undiscussable. I obtained the gen­eral impression that there are few real illusions about the actual quality of the work of Soviet writers, and that pretty frank dis­cussions of this went on, but were scarcely ever published in so

the soviet mind many words. Thus everyone seemed to take it for granted, for example, that Boris Pasternak was a poet of genius and that Simonov was a glib journalist and little more.

Possibilities of travel were, I learnt, somewhat confined, as no writer could travel, for example, to Moscow of his own free will without a formal invitation from either the President of the Writers' Union or its Communist Party secretary, and although this could of course occasionally be wangled by indirect means, it was humiliating as well as difficult to do so at all frequently. The writers enquired with the greatest eagerness about writers abroad, particularly Richard Aldington and John Dos Passos. Hemingway was the most widely read of the serious novelists in English, and, of the English authors, Dr Cronin, although the highbrows did think him a somewhat commercial author, though superior to some. Knowledge of English literature obviously depends on what is accepted for translation and, to a smaller degree, on what VOKS permits to be supplied to individual read­ers of foreign languages. The results are occasionally eccentric: thus in Leningrad, for example, the names of Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster (mentioned in Priestley's article) were not known, but everyone had heard of Mason, Greenwood and Aldridge. The source of foreign books was in Moscow, but they were very difficult to obtain even there, and if some method of supplying them with the imaginative literature of the Anglo-Saxon coun­tries could be devised they would be most grateful. Anna Akhmatova was particularly pleased by an article which had appeared in the Dublin Review on her verse and by the fact that a doctoral thesis on her work had been accepted by the University of Bologna. In both cases the authors had corresponded with her.

The more eminent Leningrad writers are magnificently housed in the old Fountain Palace ('Fontanny Dom') of the Sheremetevs,[27] a kind of Holland House on the Fontanka, often visited by Pushkin - indeed the most famous of all the portraits of him had been painted in its morning room - a building of the late eigh­teenth century fronted by an exquisite ironwork grille and gates constructed round a wide quadrangle filled with trees from which thin, narrow staircases go up towards a series of high, well-constructed, well-lighted rooms. The problem of food and fuel is still fairly acute, and the writers I saw there could not be said to be living with any degree of real comfort - indeed their lives were still semi-obsessed by household needs. They hoped, I thought rather pathetically, that, as Leningrad developed into a port communicating with the outside world, more information and perhaps more foreigners would begin to visit their city and so bring them in touch with the world, isolation from which they appear to feel very deeply. My own visits, though arranged quite openly through one of my bookshop acquaintances, had been the first, literally the first, I was told, made by any foreigner since 1917, and I got the impression that it would be as well if I did not mention the fact at all widely. The writers in question said that they read Britansky soyuznik with great avidity, and any refer­ences to Russian literary achievement in it, for example reviews of books and the like, were most warmly appreciated.

I found no trace of that xenophobia in Leningrad signs of which are discernible in the minds of some of even the most enlightened intellectuals in Moscow, not to speak of Government officials and the like. Leningrad looks upon itself as, and indeed still is to some degree, the home of Westward-looking intellectual and artistic life. The writers in the literary newspapers, the actors in the theatres and the assistants in the half-dozen or so book­shops at which I bought books, as well as passengers in trams and buses, seem slightly better bred and educated than their cosier but more primitive equivalents in Moscow. Any seeds that we could plant in this ground would sprout more gratefully, if my impression is correct, than in any other part of the Soviet Union. Whether this is practical - whether for example, if a British Consulate were established in Leningrad, contact would still be relatively as easy and almost informal as it seems at present, is, of course, another and very real question. Present freedom of circu­lation may well be due to the absence of resident representatives of foreign institutions and countries, which makes the task of surveillance of those who pass through the inescapable (and sur­prisingly comfortable) turnstile of the Astoria Hotel relatively easier, and less worrying to the authorities.

A GREAT RUSSIAN WRITER

1965

Osip Emilievich Mandel'shtam was born in St Petersburg in 1891 and died in a Soviet prison camp. He belonged to a gener­ation of Russian writers who revolted against the unbridled mys­ticism, the self-dramatising metaphysical dreams, and the conscious 'decadence' of the Russian Symbolist writers. Their master was the remarkable and still under-valued poet Innokenty Annensky, the withdrawn fastidious classical schoolmaster who taught Greek in the famous Lycee in Tsarskoe Selo. An absorbed and patient craftsman, remote from the political passions of his day, austere, aesthetic, and contemplative, Annensky was a pre­server and re-creator of what, for want of a better term, may be described as the classical tradition in Russian verse, which descends in a direct line from the godlike figure to whom all Russian writers pray, from which they all stem, and against whose authority no rebellion ever succeeded - Pushkin himself. In the years before the First World War these poets called them­selves Acmeists and sometimes Adamists. They were a Peters­burg sect, nor is it extravagant to suppose that the formal lines of that solidly beautiful city were not without influence upon their writing. Annensky's most gifted followers, Nikolay Gumilev, Anna Akhmatova and Mandel'shtam, founded the Guild of Poets, the very title of which conveys their conception of poetry not as a way of life and a source of revelation but as a craft, the art of placing words in lines, the creation of public objects inde­pendent of the private lives of their creators. Their verse with its exact images and firm, rigorously executed structure was equally remote from the civic poetry of the left-wing poets of the nineteenth century, the visionary, insistently personal, at times violently egotistic art of the Symbolists, the lyrical self-intoxicated verse of the peasant-poets, and the frantic gestures of the Ego- Futurists, the Cubo-Futurists and other self-conscious revolu­tionaries. Among them Mandel'shtam was early acknowledged as a leader and a model. His poetry, although its scope was deliber­ately confined, possessed a purity and perfection of form never again attained in Russia.

There are poets who are poets only when they write poetry, whose prose could have been written by someone who had never written a line of verse, and there are poets (both good and bad) whose every expression is that of a poet, sometimes to the detri­ment of their work as a whole. Pushkin's stories, histories, letters, are classical models of beautiful and lucid prose. When he is not writing poetry he is not a poet any more than Milton or Byron or Vigny or Valery or Eliot or Auden are in their prose; unlike, that is to say, Yeats, D'Annunzio and, for the most part, Aleksandr Blok. All that Mandel'shtam wrote is written by a poet. His prose is a poet's prose - this he has in common with Pasternak. This, but little else. Pasternak, his friend, contemporary, rival (as writ­ers, they felt no great sympathy for each other), was only too acutely conscious of the history of his time, of his own place in it, of his function as a man, a genius, a spokesman, a prophet. He was, or became, a political being whatever his naivetes and aber­rations. His relationship to Russia and Russian history was an agonising problem to him - from first to last he addresses his people, testifies and, in his last years, bears the full weight of a terrible public responsibility. Only fanatics blinded by socialist realism or a party line, inside and outside the Soviet Union, have denied this and have attacked him for being 'Parnassian', aes­thetic, remote from Russian or Soviet reality, and so on.

This common charge is hardly worth discussing. Man- del'shtam is the precise opposite. Poetry was his whole life, his entire world. He scarcely had any personal existence outside it. He resembles his exact Western contemporaries, the imagists and the neo-classical poets; his self-imposed discipline derives ulti­mately from Greek and Roman, French and Italian models. If this conveys the notion of something cold and marmoreal, the impression is misleading. Concentration and intensity of experi­ence, the combination of an exceptionally rich inner life, nour­ished by a vast literary culture with a clear vision of reality, as agonised and undeluded as Leopardi's, divided him from his more subjective and self-expressive Russian contemporaries.

He began, of course, as they did, in the shadow of French Symbolism, but emancipated himself exceedingly early. Perhaps it was a conscious opposition to everything vague and indetermi­nate that caused him to cut his cameos so fiercely, to lock his images so firmly, sometimes a shade too firmly, in an exact, unyielding verbal frame. This tendency toward objectivity and his intimate relation to the great classical poets of Europe made him an original and somewhat Western figure in a country educated to confessional literature, and insistence and over- insistence on the social and moral responsibility of the artist. It was this that was described as lack of contact with reality, self- estrangement from the national life and the people, for which he and his Acmeists have been condemned since the early years of the Revolution.

Clarence Brown, in the Introduction to his skilful and accurate translations of Mandel'shtam's strange but very fascinating prose pieces,[28] tells us a good deal - although by no means everything - that is known of Mandel'shtam's life. He was born into a middle- class Jewish family, received a normal Petersburg education in the celebrated Tenishev school, went to St Petersburg University, and travelled in Germany, Switzerland and France. Early in life he became a passionate defender of poetry against those who made attempts upon it. Kaverin's account (cited by Brown) of Mandel'shtam's urgent pleas to him not to become a poet, his pas­sionate insistence upon the appalling demands and enormous, indeed absolute, rights of poetry, show him as a fanatical cham­pion of art against the ungifted and the presumptuous.

His first collection of poems appeared in 1913 and again in 1916 (he was for some reason not conscripted into the army) under the title Stone. He believed in sculpture, architecture, the fixed, the firm, in all that is the work of human hands according to rule and form: this enemy of flux and the undetermined, in his convictions and his practice, had clear affinities with his contem­poraries, Pound, Eliot and Wyndham Lewis. The October Revolution, not surprisingly, proved fatal to him. Unwilling, and indeed unable, to adjust himself and adapt his talents to the new demands, he could not talk himself into collaborating with trib­unes, organisers, builders of a new life. Timid, frail, affectionate, always in love, infinitely vulnerable, compared by his friends to an elegant but slightly ludicrous small bird, he was capable of astonishing acts; this shy and easily terrified man had a fund of mad heroic courage. Brown, whose thorough and scrupulous research seems to me totally reliable, corroborates a remarkable story. One evening early in the Revolution he was sitting in a cafe and there was the notorious Socialist Revolutionary terrorist Blyumkin (who later assassinated the German ambassador Mir- bach). Blyumkin, at that time an official of the Cheka, was drunk- enly copying the names of men and women to be executed on to blank forms already signed by the head of the secret police. Mandel'shtam suddenly threw himself at him, seized the lists, tore them to pieces before the stupefied onlookers, then ran out and disappeared. On this occasion he was saved by Trotsky's sister. But it was not likely that such a man would survive long in deeply disturbed conditions. He knew that he was condemned to perpet­ual exile. His next collection is appropriately called Tristia. He was an inner emigre, an Ovid helpless before the omnipotent dic­tator. In 1934 he wrote an epigram in verse about Stalin.1 It is a magnificent and blood-chilling poem that needs no commentary; and may well be the immediate cause of the tyrant's rage against the poet. He was persecuted relentlessly until he died, in condi­tions of unutterable horror, in a prison camp near Vladivostok, probably in 1938. The circumstances were such that no friend of

'Robert Lowell has composed an incomparably more magnificent transla­tion of it than that quoted by Brown. I.B. [Lowell's translations, made with Olga Carlisle, of this and eight other poems by Mandel'shtam appear on pp. 5-7 of the same issue of the New York Review of Books that contains Berlin's essay (see p. xxxviii above), and are reprinted in Olga Carlisle (ed.), Poets on Street Corners (New York, 1968), pp. 140-63, and in Lowell's Collected Poems, ed. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter, with the editorial assistance of DeSales Harrison (New York, 2003), pp. 906-23.] his who has any direct knowledge of them will speak of what occurred if he can avoid it.

On successive pages Brown provides two photographs of Mandel'shtam. One was taken circa 1936. The first shows the childlike, naive, charming face, with dandyish, slightly preten­tious sideburns of a rising young intellectual of nineteen; the other is that of a broken tormented, dying old tramp, but he was only forty-five at the time. The contrast is literally unbearable, and tells more than the memoirs of his friends and contempor­aries. The lives of Russian poets have often ended badly: Ryleev was hanged; the Decembrist poets died in Siberia or were broken there; Pushkin and Lermontov were killed in duels; Esenin, Mayakovsky and Tsvetaeva committed suicide; Blok and Paster­nak died in misery and official disfavour. But Mandel'shtam's fate was the most terrible of all. Indeed his whole life was haunted by the image of helpless innocent men, tormented by enemies and crushed by them. Perhaps, like Pushkin in Eugene Onegin, he had some premonition of his inevitable end.

Some of Brown's best pages in his truly valuable introductory essay trace the parallels between the hero of Mandel'shtam's quasi-surrealist story, 'The Egyptian Stamp', with those other victims in Russian literature - Evgeny in Pushkin's Bronze Horseman (beautifully translated by Edmund Wilson), the absurd hero of Gogol's 'The Nose', the victim of Dostoevsky's The Double, and above all the minor official in Gogol's 'The Overcoat', which Brown is the first to adduce as a source for Mandel'shtam's story. The nightmare became real and for Man­del'shtam became incorporated in the figure of the Kremlin's 'mountaineer', who slowly and remorselessly (not without some assistance from at least one writer of considerable gifts and a vin­dictive disposition) hounded him to death. No doubt it would be better to read these haunted stories without bearing in mind the fate of the author (as the poet himself would surely have wished one to do), but it is not easy to achieve detachment. Yet no matter how macabre the fantasies which Mandel'shtam wrote in his peculiar prose, they achieve the tranquillity of harmonious art - the Hellenic ideal which he inherited from Annensky and, ulti­mately, the early German romantics. Some of the most ironical

The originals of the photographs described in the text, both given to Clarence Brown by Nadezhda Mandel'shtam (or in one case possibly by Anna Akhma­tova) are missing. These substitutes tell the same story. The first photograph was taken in 1922; the others are the mugshots taken in the Lubyanka (the NKGB headquarters) in Moscow after Mandel'shtam's arrest in 1938.


and most civilised of his poems were composed during the dark­est hours of exile and persecution. No doubt despotic regimes create 'inner emigres' who can, like stoic sages, remove them­selves from the inferno of the world, and out of the very material of their exile build a tranquil world of their own. Mandel'shtam paid an almost unimaginable price for the preservation of his human attributes. He welcomed the Revolution, but in the 1930s compromised less than anyone, so far as is known, with the inevitable consequences. I can think of literally no other case of a poet who resisted the enemy to a greater degree.

Mandel'shtam had nothing to conceal, was filled with no inner panic, save about his health: towards the end he imagined that Stalin's agents were bent on poisoning him. The vendetta began in 1934. The best known episode in it is a famous midnight tele­phone call which Pasternak received from Stalin. Several versions of this are in circulation. Brown, relying, it seems to me, on dubi­ous authority, gives a mild and peaceful version from which Stalin emerges as an ironical but not at all malevolent despot,


who behaves creditably. This tallies with the account given by Robert Payne. The story that Pasternak himself told a reliable witness in later years is somewhat different from that given by Brown.1 Stalin asked Pasternak whether he was present at a read­ing of the notorious epigram. Pasternak evaded the question and explained how important it was for him to meet Stalin, for there were many problems which they must discuss. Stalin coldly repeated his question, and finally said 'If I had been Mand- el'shtam's friend, I should have known better how to defend him', and laid down the receiver. With this memory (whether it was accurate or touched up by his own fantasy) Pasternak was forced to live for the rest of his life. He told it with moving can­dour and anguish to at least one visitor.

Mandel'shtam was exiled to Voronezh but was allowed to return to Leningrad for a short while. There he quarrelled with the politically influential Aleksey Tolstoy (although this may have happened earlier - our sources differ on this). This was followed by expulsion from the capital cities, re-arrest, imprisonment in Moscow, transfer to camps in the Far East, sav­age beatings by guards and fellow prisoners (for stealing their rations from fear that his own were poisoned), hunger, emacia­tion, physical and mental collapse, death. Official oblivion descended upon him. Until very recently he was still an unper­son, although now there is said to be a prospect (experts differ on the degree of its likelihood) that, like the once ignored Esenin, Mandel'shtam too will come fully into his own. No socialist soci­ety has (or at any rate, should have) anything to fear from unfet­tered powers of creation; so at least Gorky taught us, and his views carry more official weight in the Soviet Union than Plato's. Yet today this noble classical poet is still read in clandestine man­uscript versions throughout the length and breadth of his coun­try. Perhaps like other maitres caches he too will be allowed to emerge into the light of day.

Brown has translated the three prose works of Mandel'shtam - 'The Noise of Time', 'Theodosia' and 'The Egyptian Stamp' - and provided them with clearly written and highly informative critical introductions and brief notes that deal with some of the more esoteric allusions in the text. It seems to me the most illu­minating commentary on Mandel'shtam in English at the present moment. It is a work of impeccable scholarship, throws light on dark places (no authors require this more than the Russian writ­ers of the first third of this century - Bely, Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky and, especially in his early prose writings, Pas­ternak, with whom Brown - rightly for this purpose - classifies Mandel'shtam), and the entire volume is well produced. Never­theless, these pieces may be described as prose only in the sense in which Novalis' novels or The Waves are prose. 'The Noise of Time' is a poetic sketch for an autobiography, 'Theodosia' is half reminiscence, half fiction, and 'The Egyptian Stamp' is a fantasy. Brown is a learned and sensitive student of the period and its atmosphere, and seems to me to make no error of fact or percep­tion. His renderings are always accurate, often skilful and ingeni­ous, the result of the most devoted care and a wonderfully good ear for the nuances of Russian Kunstprosa. Yet how is it possible to translate this kind of writing? How can one convey the fan­tastically complex web of local, historical, literary, but above all personal references and allusions, play on words, play on names? What would a contemporary Russian reader make of Auden's The Orators? Auden's poetry could be conveyed to them more successfully than his prose writings of the 1930s; and this for analogous reasons seems to me to apply to Mandel'shtam. Robert Lowell, in his translations, seems to me to have accomplished what Pasternak did for the poets of Georgia: both transform poetry from a wholly unfamiliar language and perform the task of imaginative utterance in the persona of another as expressively and profoundly as it can be done. The similarity between the classical interests of Lowell and his original may have played its part. The result is beautiful and moving.

Mandel'shtam's prose is scarcely translatable. The verse with all its fearful complexity and the tiers of meaning packed into the miraculously chosen words is, despite everything, more capable of being reproduced in an alien medium than his wildly eccentric, although rigorously disciplined, 'prose'. He intended to write in what he himself called 'wild parabolas'. He succeeded more often than not and to an astonishing extent. 'A manuscript is always a storm,' he wrote. But the writer keeps his head and dominates the storm. Sometimes he fails: then we have passages of brilliant virtuosity, the galloping wild horses of an exultant and disor­dered poetic imagination. But because Mandel'shtam is a marvel­lous rider the wild leaps, even when they seem to vanish in mid-air, are exhilarating and never degenerate into a mere exhibi­tion of skill or vitality. More often these pages obey a rigorous pattern; Brown seems to me right about this as against the learned Soviet scholar Berkovsky, whom he quotes in his book with justified approval. For the cascades of Mandel'shtam's glit­tering or tranquil images leaping out of one another, the histori­cal, psychological, syntactical, verbal allusions, contrasts, collisions, whirling at lightning speed, dazzle the imagination and the intellect, not as an impressionist or surrealist cavalcade of haphazard violently contrasted elements, a brilliant chaos, but as a composition, as a harmonious and noble whole. Brown speaks of Mandel'shtam's 'patterned selection of incongruous images'.

But it seems to me that they are seldom incongruous. They are bold, violent, but fused into a disturbing, often agonised, but demonstrably coherent unity - a complex, twisted, over-civilised world (needing a sophisticated and widely read observer) in which there are no loose ends. All the strands are interwoven, often in grotesque patterns, but everything echoes everything else, colours, sounds, tastes, shapes, tactile properties are related not by symbolic but literal - sensory and psychological - corres­pondences. It is all the product of a remorselessly ordering mind. The description of him by Russian critics as 'architectural' is per­fectly just.

In the centre there is always a suffering hero - the martyr pursued by the mob, a descendant not only of Gogol's and Dostoevsky's humble victims but (whether consciously or not) also of Buchner's Woyzeck (and very like Berg's Wozzeck). The suffering hero of 'The Egyptian Stamp' is a Russian Jew. His prose is populated with figures and images of his Jewish environment, treated with neither condescension nor irony nor aggressive self- identification, indeed no self-consciousness of any kind. This evi­dently remained his natural world until the end.

Two motifs run persistently through these strange pieces: one, that of a wistful, timorous, Jewish victim of men and circum­stances. Literary historians will surely one day devote chapters and perhaps volumes to this stock figure of our time and trace his evolution from his gentile ancestors, from Peter Schlemihl to Hoffmann's terrorised creatures, from Dostoevsky to Andrea, until we reach Mandel'shtam's Parnok, an obscure ancestor of Bellow's Herzog. Mandel'shtam identifies himself with poor Parnok and at the same time prays passionately to be delivered from his characteristics and his fate. Pasternak took a different and much solider path to salvation in Doctor Zhivago.

The other motif is that of music and composers, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and, at a different level, Tchaikovsky and Skryabin, the characteristics of whose art haunted Mandel'shtam much as they did Pasternak; and are constantly used by him to describe other things. They are similes for nature, ideas, human beings: the comparison between Alexander Herzen's stormy political rhetoric and a Beethoven sonata in 'The Noise of Time' is one of the most typical and brilliant of these. The two themes come together in the marvellous description of the contrast between two Baltic seaside resorts - the German resort where Richard Strauss is played before an audience from which Jews have been excluded, and the Jewish resort full of Tchaikovsky and violins; still more, in what is, if not the best, the most directly emotional of all his lyrics, the poem about the gloomy Jewish musician Herzevich (the play on Herz and serdtse - the Russian for 'heart' - and Scherzo can scarcely be conveyed in English). It is a poignant and profoundly upsetting piece, like the single Schubert sonata which the musician practises over and over again. (Vladimir Wendell has written well about it.)

In 'The Egyptian Stamp' the hero's enemy - his alter ego descended from Hoffmann and Chemise - is the stupid, brutal, handsome, insolent soldier, the miles gloriosus who steals the hero's shirts, persecutes him, is admired while the hero is despised, and robs the hero of what he most ardently longs for. He is the terrible Double - the Doppelganger - of the paranoiac imagination of the early German romantics, the Drum Major in Wozzeck, the symbol of detestable strength and success, the mocking dismissal of all forms of inner life.

'The Noise of Time' in its own euphemistic way looks back to the dying Jewish bourgeois world, the office-study of Man- del'shtam's father, the leather-merchant, a succession of tutors, Jewish and Gentile, the mingling of the Petersburg liberal intelli­gentsia with socialist conspirators - the world from which the Revolution sprang. It vividly recalls the not wholly dissimilar world of Pasternak's youth in Moscow, although there the Jewish element is much more remote.

As for 'The Egyptian Stamp', although the fantasy derives from nineteenth-century romanticism, it has points of similarity both with the phantasmagoria of Bely's Petersburg and the logic of Kafka's Castle. No wonder that this book, like much imagina­tive Russian writing of its time, was not held propitious to the social and political policies of the Soviet State in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

The first and second Five-Year Plans swept all this away. It swept away the writer too. The day will dawn, it may not be far off, when a new generation of Russians will be allowed to know what a rich and marvellous world existed in the midst of the hunger and desolation of the early years of the Soviet Republic; that it did not die a natural death, but is still crying for fulfilment, and is not therefore buried in some irrevocable past.

CONVERSATIONS WITH AKHMATOVA AND PASTERNAK

Berlin's diplomatic pass, issued in Moscow on 15 September 1945, and signed by the Soviet foreign minister, V. M. Molotov


because that savage ruler, with whom Stalin identified himself, faced with the need to repress the treachery of the boyars, had, so Stalin complained, been misrepresented as a man tormented to the point of neurosis. I asked Eisenstein what he thought were the best years of his life. He answered without hesitation, 'The early '20s. That was the time. We were young and did marvellous things in the theatre. I remember once, greased pigs were let loose among the members of the audience, who leapt on their seats and screamed. It was terrific. Goodness, how we enjoyed ourselves!'

This was obviously too good to last. An onslaught was deliv­ered on it by leftist zealots who demanded collective proletarian art. Then Stalin decided to put an end to all these politico-literary squabbles as a sheer waste of energy - not at all what was needed for Five-Year Plans. The Writers' Union was created in the mid- 1950s to impose orthodoxy. There was to be no more argument, no disturbance of men's minds. A dead level of conformism fol­lowed. Then came the final horror - the Great Purge, the political show trials, the mounting terror of 1937-8, the wild and indis­criminate mowing down of individuals and groups, later of whole peoples. I need not dwell on the facts of that murderous period, not the first, nor probably the last, in the history of Russia. Authentic accounts of the life of the intelligentsia in that time are to be found in the memoirs of, for example, Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Lydia Chukovskaya, and, in a different sense, in Akhmatova's poem Requiem. In 1939 Stalin called a halt to the proscriptions. Russian literature, art and thought emerged like an area that had been subjected to bombardment, with some noble buildings still relatively intact, but standing bare and solitary in a landscape of ruined and deserted streets.

Then came the German invasion, and an extraordinary thing happened. The need to achieve national unity in the face of the enemy led to some relaxation of the political controls. In the great wave of Russian patriotic feeling, writers old and young, particularly poets, whom their readers felt to be speaking for them, for what they themselves felt and believed - these writers were idolised as never before. Poets whose work had been re­garded with disfavour by the authorities, and consequently published seldom, if at all, suddenly received letters from sol­diers at the fronts, as often as not quoting their least political and most personal lines. Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, who had for a long time lived in a kind of internal exile, began to receive an astonishingly large number of letters from soldiers quoting from both published and unpublished poems; there was a stream of requests for autographs, for confirmation of the authenticity of texts, for expressions of the author's attitude to this or that problem. In the end this impressed itself on the minds of some of the Party's leaders. The status and personal security of these frowned-upon poets were, in consequence, improved. Public readings by poets, as well as the reciting from memory of poetry at private gatherings, had been common in pre-Revolutionary Russia. What was novel was that when Pasternak and Akhmatova read their poems, and occasionally halted for a word, there were always, among the vast audiences gathered to hear them, scores of listeners who prompted them at once with lines from works both published and unpublished, and in any case not publicly available. No writer could help being moved by and drawing strength from this most genuine form of homage.

The status of the handful of poets who clearly rose far above the rest was, I found, unique. Neither painters nor composers nor prose writers, nor even the most popular actors, or eloquent, patriotic journalists, were loved and admired so deeply and so universally, especially by the kind of people I spoke to in trams and trains and the underground, some of whom admitted that they had never read a word of their writings. The most famous and widely worshipped of all Russian poets was Boris Pasternak. I longed to meet him more than any other human being in the Soviet Union. I was warned that it was very difficult to meet those whom the authorities did not permit to appear at official receptions, where foreigners could meet only carefully selected Soviet citizens - the others had had it very forcibly impressed upon them that it was neither desirable nor safe for them to meet foreigners, particularly in private. I was lucky. By a fortuitous concatenation of circumstances, I did contrive, very early during my stay, to call upon Pasternak at his country cottage in the writ­ers' village of Peredelkino, near Moscow.

ii

I went to see him on a warm, sunlit afternoon in September 1945. The poet, his wife and his son Leonid were seated round a rough wooden table at the back of the dacha. Pasternak greeted me warmly. He was once described by his friend, the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, as looking like an Arab and his horse - he had a dark, melancholy, expressive, very race face, familiar from many pho­tographs and from his father's paintings. He spoke slowly in a low tenor monotone, with a continuous even sound, something between a humming and a drone, which those who met him almost always remarked upon: each vowel was elongated as if in some plaintive aria in an opera by Tchaikovsky, but with far more concentrated force and tension.

Almost at once Pasternak said, 'You come from England. I was in London in the '30s - in 1935, on my way back from the Anti­Fascist Congress in Paris.' He then said that during the summer of that year he had suddenly received a telephone call from the authorities, who told him that a congress of writers was in ses­sion in Paris and that he was to go to it without delay. He said that he had no suitable clothes - 'We will see to that,' said the officials. They tried to fit him out in a formal morning coat and striped trousers, a shirt with stiff cuffs and a wing collar, and black patent leather boots, which fitted perfectly. But he was, in the end, allowed to go in ordinary clothes. He was later told that Andre Malraux, the organiser of the congress, had insisted on getting him invited; Malraux had told the Soviet authorities that although he fully understood their reluctance to do so, yet not to send Pasternak and Babel' to Paris might cause unnecessary spec­ulation; they were very well-known Soviet writers, and there were not many such in those days so likely to appeal to European liberals. 'You cannot imagine how many celebrities were there,' Pasternak said - 'Dreiser, Gide, Malraux, Aragon, Auden, Forster, Rosamond Lehmann, and lots of other terribly famous people. I spoke. I said to them "I understand that this is a meet­ing of writers to organise resistance to Fascism. I have only one thing to say to you: do not organise. Organisation is the death of art. Only personal independence matters. In 1789, 1848, 1917 writers were not organised for or against anything. Do not, I implore you, do not organise.''

'I think they were surprised, but what else could I say? I thought I would get into trouble at home after that, but no one ever said a word to me about it, then or now. Then I went to London and travelled back in one of our boats, and shared a cabin with Shcherbakov, who was then the secretary of the Writers' Union, tremendously influential, and afterwards a mem­ber of the Politburo. I talked unceasingly, day and night. He begged me to stop and let him sleep. But I went on and on. Paris and London had awoken me. I could not stop. He begged for mercy but I was relentless. He must have thought me quite deranged: it may be that this helped me afterwards.' He meant, I think, that to be thought a little mad, or at least extremely eccen­tric, may have helped to save him during the Great Purge.

Pasternak then asked me if I had read his prose, in particular The Childhood of Luvers. 'I see by your expression', he said, most unjustly, 'that you think that these writings are contrived, tortured, self-conscious, horribly modernist - no, no, don't deny it, you do think this, and you are absolutely right. I am ashamed of them - not of my poetry, but of my prose - it was influenced by what was weakest and most muddled in the Symbolist move­ment, fashionable in those years, full of mystical chaos - of course Andrey Bely was a genius - Petersburg, Kotik Letaev are full of wonderful things - I know that, you need not tell me - but his influence was fatal - Joyce is another matter - all that I wrote then was obsessed, forced, broken, artificial, no use [negodno]; but now I am writing something entirely different: something new, quite new, luminous, elegant, well-proportioned [stroinoe], classically pure and simple - what Winckelmann wanted, yes, and Goethe; and this will be my last word, my most important word, to the world. It is, yes, it is what I wish to be remembered by; I shall devote the rest of my life to it.'

I cannot vouch for the complete accuracy of all these words, but this is how I remember them. This projected work later became Doctor Zhivago. He had by 1945 completed a draft of a few early chapters, which he asked me to read, and send to his sisters in Oxford; I did so, but was not to know about the plan for the entire novel until much later. After that, Pasternak was silent for a while; none of us spoke. He then told us how much he liked Georgia, Georgian writers, Yashvili, Tabidze, and Georgian wine, how well received there he always was. After this he politely asked me about what was going on in the West; did I know Herbert Read and his doctrine of personalism? Here he explained that his belief in personal freedom was derived from Kantian individualism - Blok had misinterpreted Kant com­pletely in his poem Kant. There was nothing here in Russia about which he could tell me. I must realise that the clock had stopped in Russia (I noticed that neither he nor any of the other writers I met ever used the words 'Soviet Union') in 1928 or so, when rela­tions with the outer world were in effect cut off; the description of him and his work in, for instance, the Soviet Encyclopaedia bore no reference to his later life or writings.

He was interrupted by Lydia Seifullina, an elderly, well-known writer, who broke in while he was in mid-course: 'My fate is exactly the same,' she said: 'the last lines of the Encyclopaedia article about me say "Seifullina is at present in a state of psycho­logical and artistic crisis'' - the article has not been changed dur­ing the last twenty years. So far as the Soviet reader is concerned, I am still in a state of crisis, of suspended animation. We are like people in Pompeii, you and I, Boris Leonidovich, buried by ashes in mid-sentence. And we know so little: Maeterlinck and Kipling, I know, are dead; but Wells, Sinclair Lewis, Joyce, Bunin, Khodasevich - are they alive?' Pasternak looked embarrassed and changed the subject. He had been reading Proust - French Communist friends had sent him the entire masterpiece - he knew it, he said, and had reread it lately. He had not then heard of Sartre or Camus, and thought little of Hemingway ('Why Anna Andreevna [Akhmatova] thinks anything of him I cannot imagine,' he said).

He spoke in magnificent slow-moving periods, with occasional intense rushes of words. His talk often overflowed the banks of grammatical structure - lucid passages were succeeded by wild but always marvellously vivid and concrete images - and these might be followed by dark words when it was difficult to follow him - and then he would suddenly come into the clear again. His speech was at all times that of a poet, as were his writings. Someone once said that there are poets who are poets when they write poetry and prose-writers when they write prose; others are poets in everything that they write. Pasternak was a poet of genius in all that he did and was. As for his conversation, I can­not begin to describe its quality. The only other person I have met who talked as he talked was Virginia Woolf, who made one's mind race as he did, and obliterated one's normal vision of reality in the same exhilarating and, at times, terrifying way.

I use the word 'genius' advisedly. I am sometimes asked what I mean by this highly evocative but imprecise term. In answer I can only say this: the dancer Nijinsky was once asked how he man­aged to leap so high. He is reported to have answered that he saw no great problem in this. Most people when they leaped in the air came down at once. 'Why should you come down immediately? Stay in the air a little before you return, why not?' he is reported to have said. One of the criteria of genius seems to me to be pre­cisely this: the power to do something perfectly simple and vis­ible which ordinary people cannot, and know that they cannot, do - nor do they know how it is done, or why they cannot begin to do it. Pasternak at times spoke in great leaps; his use of words was the most imaginative that I have ever known; it was wild and very moving. There are, no doubt, many varieties of literary genius: Eliot, Joyce, Yeats, Auden, Russell did not (in my experi­ence) talk like this. I did not wish to overstay my welcome. I left the poet, excited, and indeed overwhelmed, by his words and by his personality.

After Pasternak returned to Moscow I visited him almost weekly, and came to know him well. I cannot hope to describe the transforming effect of his presence, his voice and gestures. He talked about books and writers; he loved Proust and was steeped in his writings, and Ulysses - he had not, at any rate then, read Joyce's later work. He spoke about French Symbolists, and about Verhaeren and Rilke, both of whom he had met; he greatly admired Rilke, both as a man and a writer. He was steeped in Shakespeare. He was dissatisfied with his own translations: 'I have tried to make Shakespeare work for me,' he said, 'but it has not been a success.' He grew up, he said, in the shadow of Tolstoy - for him an incomparable genius, greater than Dickens or Dostoevsky, a writer who stood with Shakespeare and Goethe and Pushkin. His father, the painter, had taken him to see Tolstoy on his deathbed, in 1910, at Astapovo. He found it impossible to be critical towards Tolstoy: Russia and Tolstoy were one. As for Russian poets, Blok was of course the dominant genius of his time, but he did not find him sympathetic. Bely was closer to him, a man of strange and unheard-of insights - magical and a holy fool in the tradition of Russian Orthodoxy. Bryusov he con­sidered a self-constructed, ingenious, mechanical musical-box, a clever, calculating operator, not a poet at all. He did not mention Mandel'shtam. He felt most tenderly towards Marina Tsvetaeva, to whom he had been bound by many years of friendship.

His feelings towards Mayakovsky were more ambivalent: he had known him well, they had been close friends, and he had learned from him; he was, of course, a titanic destroyer of old forms, but, he added, unlike other Communists, he was at all times a human being - but no, not a major poet, not an immortal god like Tyutchev or Blok, not even a demigod like Fet or Bely. Time had diminished him. He was needed in his day, he was what those times had called for. There are poets, he said, who have their hour, Aseev, poor Klyuev - liquidated - Sel'vinsky - even Esenin. They fulfil an urgent need of the day, their gifts are of crucial importance to the development of poetry in their coun­try, and then they are no more. Mayakovsky was the greatest of these - The Cloud in Trousers had its historical importance, but the shouting was unbearable: he inflated his talent and tortured it until it burst. The sad rags of the multi-coloured balloon still lay in one's path, if one was a Russian. He was gifted, important, but coarse and not grown up, and ended as a poster-artist. Mayakovsky's love-affairs had been disastrous for him as a man and a poet. He, Pasternak, had loved Mayakovsky as a man; his suicide was one of the blackest days of his own life.

Pasternak was a Russian patriot - his sense of his own histori­cal connection with his country was very deep. He told me, again and again, how glad he was to spend his summers in the writers' village, Peredelkino, for it had once been part of the estate of that great Slavophil, Yury Samarin. The true line of tradition led from the legendary Sadko to the Stroganovs and the Kochubeys, to Derzhavin, Zhukovsky, Tyutchev, Pushkin, Baratynsky, Lermontov, Fet, Annensky, to the Aksakovs, Tolstoy, Bunin - to the Slavophils, not to the liberal intelligentsia, which, as Tolstoy maintained, did not know what men lived by. This passionate, almost obsessive, desire to be thought a true Russian writer, with roots deep in Russian soil, was particularly evident in his negative feelings towards his Jewish origins. He was unwilling to discuss the subject - he was not embarrassed by it, but he disliked it: he wished the Jews to disappear as a people.

His artistic taste had been formed in his youth and he remained faithful to the masters of that period. The memory of Skryabin - he had thought of becoming a composer himself - was sacred to him. I shall not easily forget the paean of praise offered by both Pasternak and Neuhaus (the celebrated musician, and former husband of Pasternak's wife Zinaida) to Skryabin, and to the Symbolist painter Vrubel', whom, with Nicholas Roerich, they prized above all contemporary painters. Picasso and Matisse, Braque and Bonnard, Klee and Mondrian, seemed to mean as little to them as Kandinsky or Malevich.

There is a sense in which Akhmatova and her contemporaries Gumilev and Marina Tsvetaeva are the last great voices of the nineteenth century - perhaps Pasternak occupies an interspace between the two centuries, and so, perhaps, does Mandel'shtam. They were the last representatives of what can only be called the second Russian renaissance, basically untouched by the modern movement, by Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Joyce, Schoenberg, even if they admired them; for the modern movement in Russia was aborted by political events (the poetry of Mandel'shtam is another story). Pasternak loved Russia. He was prepared to for­give his country all its shortcomings, all, save the barbarism of Stalin's reign; but even that, in 1945, he regarded as the darkness before the dawn which he was straining his eyes to detect - the hope expressed in the last chapters of Doctor Zhivago. He believed himself to be in communion with the inner life of the Russian people, to share its hopes and fears and dreams, to be its voice as, in their different fashions, Tyutchev, Tolstoy, Dosto- evsky, Chekhov and Blok had been (by the time I knew him he conceded nothing to Nekrasov).

In conversation with me during my Moscow visits, when we were always alone, before a polished desk on which not a book or a scrap of paper was to be seen, he repeated his conviction that he lived close to the heart of his country, and sternly and repeat­edly denied this role to Gorky and Mayakovsky, especially to the former, and felt that he had something to say to the rulers of Russia, something of immense importance which only he could say, although what this was - he spoke of it often - seemed dark and incoherent to me. This may well have been due to lack of understanding on my part - although Anna Akhmatova told me that when he spoke in this prophetic strain, she, too, failed to understand him.

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