UNDER EASTERN EYES

THERE IS A contradiction about the genius of Russian literature. From Pushkin to Pasternak, the masters of Russian poetry and fiction belong to the world as a whole. Even in lame translations, their lyrics, novels, and short stories are indispensable. We cannot readily suppose the repertoire of our feelings and common humanity without them. Historically brief and constrained as it is in genre, Russian literature shares this compelling universality with that of ancient Greece. Yet the non-Russian reader of Pushkin, of Gogol, of Dostoevski, or of Mandelstam is always an outsider. He is, in some fundamental sense, eavesdropping on an internal discourse that, however obvious its communicative strength and universal pertinence, even the acutest of Western scholars rind critics do not get right. The meaning remains obstinately national and resistant to export. Of course, this is in part a matter of language or, more accurately, of the bewildering gamut of languages ranging all the way from the regional and demotic to the highly literary and even Europeanized in which Russian writers perform. The obstacles that a Pushkin, a Gogol, an Akhmatova set in the way of full translation are bristling. But this can be said of classics in many other tongues, and there is, after all, a level—indeed, an immensely broad and transforming level—on which the great Russian texts do get through. (Imagine our landscape without “Fathers and Sons” or “War and Peace” or “The Brothers Karamazov” or “The Three Sisters.”) If one still feels that one is often getting it wrong, that the Western focus seriously distorts what the Russian writer is saying, the reason cannot only be one of linguistic distance.

It is a routine observation—the Russians are the first to offer it—that all of Russian literature (with the obvious exception of liturgical texts) is essentially political. It is produced and published, so far as it can he, in the teeth of ubiquitous censorship. One can scarcely count a year in which Russian poets, novelists, or dramatists have worked in anything approaching normal, let alone positive, conditions of intellectual freedom. A Russian masterpiece exists in spite of the regime. It enacts a subversion, an ironic circumlocution, a direct challenge to or ambiguous compromise with the prevailing apparatus of oppression, be it czarist and Orthodox ecclesiastical or Leninist-Stalinist. As the Russian phrase has it, the great writer is “the alternative state.” His books are the principal, at many points the only, act of political opposition. In an intricate cat-and-mouse game that has remained virtually unchanged since the eighteenth century, the Kremlin allows the creation, and even the diffusion, of literary works whose fundamentally rebellious character it clearly realizes. With the passage of generations, such works—Pushkin’s, Turgenev’s, Chekhov’s—become national classics: they are safety valves releasing into the domain of the imaginary some of those enormous pressures for reform, for responsible political change, which reality will not allow. The hounding of individual writers, their incarceration, their banishment, is part of the bargain.

This much the outsider can make out. He looks at the harrowing of Pushkin, at Gogol’s despair, at Dostoevski’s term in Siberia, at Tolstoy’s volcanic struggle against censorship, or at the long catalogue of the murdered and missing which makes up the record of twentieth-century Russian literary achievement, and he will grasp the underlying mechanism. The Russian writer matters enormously. He matters far more than his counterpart in the bored and tolerant West. Often the whole of Russian consciousness seems to turn on his poem. In exchange, he threads his way through a cunning hell. But this grim dialectic is not the whole truth, or rather it conceals inside itself another truth instinctively apparent to the Russian artist and his public but almost impossible to gauge rightly from outside.

Russian history has been one of nearly inconceivable suffering and humiliation. But both the torment and the abjection nourish the roots of a messianic vision, of a sense of uniqueness or radiant doom. This sense can translate into the idiom of the Orthodox Slavophile, with his conviction that the Russian land is holy in an absolutely concrete way, that it alone will bear the footsteps of Christ’s return. Or it can be metamorphosed into the messianic secularism of the Communist claim to a perfect society, to the millenary dawn of absolute human justice and equality. A sense of election through and for pain is common to the most varied shades of Russian sensibility. And it means that there is to the triangular relationship of the Russian writer, his readers, and the omnipresent state that enfolds them a decisive complicity. I had my first inkling of this when visiting the Soviet Union some time after Stalin’s death. Those whom one met spoke of their survival with a numbed wonder that no visitor could really share. But at the very same moment there was in their reflections on Stalin a queer, subtle nostalgia. This is almost certainly the wrong word. They did not miss the lunatic horrors they had experienced. But they implied that these horrors had, at least, seen dished out by a tiger, not by the paltry cats now ruling over them. And they hinted that the mere fact of Russia’s survival under a Stalin, as under an Ivan the Terrible, evidenced some apocalyptic magnificence or creative strangeness of destiny. The debate between themselves and terror was an internal, private one. An outsider demeaned the issues by overhearing it and responding to it too readily.

So it is with the great Russian writers. Their cries for liberation, their appeals to the drowsy conscience of the West are strident and genuine. But they are not always meant to be heard or answered in any straightforward guise. Solutions can come only from within, from an inwardness with singular ethnic and visionary dimensions. The Russian poet will hate his censor, he will despise the informers and police hooligans who hound his existence. But he stands toward them in a relationship of anguished necessity, be it that of rage or of compassion. The dangerous conceit that there is a magnetic bond between tormentor and victim is too gross to characterize the Russian spiritual-literary ambience. But it gets nearer than liberal innocence. And it help explain why the worst fate that can befall a Russian writer is not detention or even death but exile in the Western limbo of mere survival.

It is just this exile, this ostracism from the compact of pain which now obsesses Solzhenitsyn. For this haunted powerful man, there is a real sense it which reincarceration in the Gulag would be preferable to glory and immunity in the West. Solzhenitsyn detests the West, and the oracular nonsense he has uttered about it points as much to indifference as to ignorance. Solzhenitsyn’s theocratic-Slavophile reading of history is perfectly clear. The French Revolution of 1789 crystallized man’s secular illusions, his shallow rebellion against Christ and a messianic eschatology. Marxism is the inevitable consequence of agnostic liberalism. It is a characteristically Western bacillus that was introduced by rootless intellectuals, largely Jews, into the bloodstream of Holy Russia. The infection took because of the terrible vulnerabilities and confusions of the Russian condition after the first great military disasters of 1914. Communism is a travesty of the true ideals of suffering and brotherhood that made Russia the elect of Christ. But 1914 saw Mother Russia fatally dishevelled and defenseless against the plague of atheist rationalism. Hence the tremendous importance that Solzhenitsyn attaches to the first year of the World War, and his resolve to explore every material and spiritual aspect of 1914 and of the events leading up to March, 1917, in a row of voluminous “fact-fictions.”

But in this demonology Lenin poses a problem, of which Solzhenitsyn has long been aware. Marxism may have been a Western and Hebraic disease, but Lenin is an arch-Russian figure and the Bolshevik victory was essentially his doing. Already in Solzhenitsyn’s earlier writings there were traces of a certain antagonistic identification of the author with the figure of Lenin. In a sense that is only partly allegorical, Solzhenitsyn seems to have felt that his own uncanny force of will and vision were of a kind with Lenin’s and that the struggle for the soul and future of Russia lay between him and the begetter of the Soviet regime. Then by a turn of fate at once ironic and symbolically inescapable, Solzhenitsyn found himself in Zurich, in the same prim, scrubbed, chocolate-box arcadia of exile in which Lenin raged away his time before the 1917 apocalypse. He had left out a Lenin chapter in “August 1914” and had much Lenin material in hand for later volumes—or “Knots,” as he now calls them. But the Zurich coincidence was too rich to be left fallow. From it comes the interim scenario “Lenin in Zurich (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

The result is neither a novel nor a political tract but a set of vignettes in depth. Solzhenitsyn aims to establish Lenin’s fallibility. News of the Russia Revolution takes the Bolshevik leader totally by surprise. What he has been concentrating his conspiratorial genius on is a wildly involuted and harebrained scheme to involve Switzerland in the war and consequent social unrest. Lenin worries over his breakfast. He dabbles fastidiously in each and any contrivance that may secure funds for his embryonic movement. He aches for the other woman in his austere life, the thrilling Inessa Armand, and accepts ideological deviations from her that would bring down anathema on any other disciple. Above all, like Solzhenitsyn himself, he finds the antiseptic tolerance of his Swiss hosts maddening:

All Zurich, probably a quarter of a million people, locals or from other parts of Europe, thronged there below, working, making deals, changing currency, selling, buying, eating in restaurants, attending meetings, walking or riding through the streets, all going their separate ways, every head full of thoughts without discipline or direction. And he stood there on the mountain knowing how well he could direct them all, and unite their wills.

Except that he lacked the necessary power. He could stand here up above Zurich, or lie in that grave, but he could not change Zurich. He had been living here for more than a year, and all his efforts had been in vain, nothing had been done.

And, to make matters worse, the good burghers are about to stage another one of their tomfool carnivals.

Lenin will get back to Russia in the famous “staled carriage,” with the connivance of the German imperial government and general staff (anxious to get Russia out of the war). But this brilliantly ambiguous escapade is not the product of Lenin’s cunning or political means. It springs from the teeming brain of Parvus, alias Dr. Helphand, alias Alexander Israel Lazarevich. Despite a full-scale biography by Z. A. Zeman and W. B. Scharlau, “The Merchant of Revolution,” much about Parvus remains unclear. He was an amateur revolutionary whose foresight sometimes exceeded Lenin’s own. He was a fundraiser of genius for the Bolsheviks, but also a double or triple agent acting as go-between for Turkish, German, and Russian parties. He was a dandy and cosmopolite, at once fascinated and amused by the fanatic asceticism of Lenin’s ways. The opulent villa that Parvus built for himself in Berlin, and in which he died, in 1924, was later used by Himmler to plan “the final solution.”

The meeting between Parvus and Lenin is the crux of Solzhenitsyn’s book. There are fine touches in it, as two kinds of corruption, that of worldly intrigue and that of an agnostic will to power, circle each other. There are also grating undertones. Parvus is the wandering Jew incarnate, the supreme fixer. He invests in chaos as he does on the bourse. Without Parvus, Solzhenitsyn intimates, Lenin might not have succeeded. Lenin, with his own Tatar strength, becomes the carrier of a foreign virus. In the original, these ethnic-symbolic allusions are, one suspects, underlined by the analogies between the Lenin-Parvus dialogue and the great dialogues on the metaphysics of evil in Dostoevski’s “The Brothers Karamazov.” Indeed, if “August 1914” can he said to illustrate, not altogether coherently, Solzhenitsyn’s Tolstoyan side, his epic vein, “Lenin in Zurich” is a frankly Dostoevskian work, drawing both on Dostoevski’s Slavophile politics and on his dramatic pamphleteering style. It is intriguing but scrappy and, in many respects, very private.

The privacy of Abram Tertz’s “A Voice from the Chorus” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is of an entirely different order. Tertz is the pen name of Andrei Sinyavsky, who became famous with the publication in the West, from 1959 to 1966, of a series of critical essays and fantastic tales, blending surrealism with acid political and social satire. It was the work and example of Pasternak, at whose burial in May, 1960, he took a prominent part, that seem to have compelled Sinyavsky toward opposition and the dangerous road of publication abroad. He had begun, like so many of his generation, as a Communist idealist or even Utopian. “Doctor Zhivago,” the revelations concerning the true nature of Stalinism in Khrushchev’s Twentieth Party Congress speech, and his own sharp-eyed observations of Soviet reality disillusioned Sinyavsky. By means of critical argument and poetic invention, he sought an alternative meaning of Russian existence.

For a time, “Abram Tertz”—the name is that of the hero of an underworld ballad from the Jewish thieves’ quarter of Odessa—protected Andrei Sinyavsky. But the secret leaked out, and Sinyavsky, together with his fellow dissident writer Yuli Daniel, was arrested in September, 1965. The trial, in February, 1966, was at once farcical and of extreme importance. The crime of the accused lay in their writings. This fact, added to the ferocity of the sentences imposed, unleashed a storm of international protest. More significantly, it gave impetus to the widespread intellectual dissent and clandestine distribution of forbidden texts (samizdat) which are now so vital a part of the Soviet scene.

From 1966 to 1971, Sinyavsky served his term in a succession of forced-labor camps. Twice a month, he was allowed to write a letter to his wife. Oddly, these letters could run to any length (the inmate having to use all the cunning and good will available to him in order to get paper). References to political topics or the literal horrors of camp life would be instantly punished. But within these limits the prisoner could let his mind and pen roam free. “A Voice from the Chorus” is based on Sinyavsky’s missives from the house of the dead.

But this is no prison journal. There are few dates or circumstantial details. What Sinyavsky has kept for us is a garland of personal meditations on art, on literature, on the meaning of sex, and, principally, on theology. Sinyavsky’s literary range is prodigious: he sets down his reflections on many of the major figures in Russian literature, but also on Defoe, whose “Robinson Crusoe” assumes a direct, evident relevance to his own estate, and on Swift. His inner eye of loving remembrance passes over Rembrandt’s “Prodigal Son” and the holy icons, whose magic reflection of suffering becomes clearer and clearer to him. Though the actual details of the play are no longer certain in his mind, Sinyavsky writes a miniature essay on what he now takes to be the core of “Hamlet”—what he calls “the inner music of his image.” Over and over, he ponders the creative, fictive genius of human speech, its power to shape worlds.

In the camps, Sinyavsky meets members of various religious sects dogged nearly to annihilation by Soviet repression. They range from strict Orthodoxy to Christian fundamentalism (he records prisoners speaking in tongues) and the Islamic Faith as practiced among the Chechen people of the Crimea. These encounters and his own sensibility impel Sinyavsky toward an ever-deepening religiosity. He studies Church Slavonic and the martyrs’ chronicles; he meditates on the unique place Orthodoxy assigns to the Assumption of the Mother of the Lord; he seeks to make out the possible relations between the Russian national character and the special focus of Orthodox theology on the Holy Ghost. Above all else, Sinyavsky bears witness that

The text of the Gospels explodes with meaning. It radiates significance, and if we fail to see something, this is not because it is obscure, but because there is so much, and because the meaning is too bright—it blinds us. You can turn to it all through your life. Its light never fails. Like the sun’s. Its brilliance astounded the Gentiles and they believed.

It was doubtless this ecstatic piety, and its specifically Russian Orthodox flavor of accepted suffering, which enabled Sinyavsky to endure his sentence with something akin to zest. He comes to cherish the slow tempo of camp life: in it “existence opens its blue eyes all the wider.” Such is the radiance of spiritual revelation that “when all is said and done, a camp gives the feeling of maximum freedom.” Where else do the woods, seen beyond the barbed wire, glow with such pentecostal flame or the stars throw down their spears before His coming?

Punctuating these homilies are the literal “voices from the chorus”—brief interjections, snatches of song, oaths, anecdotes, malapropisms selected from the babble of camp speech. Max Hayward, who with Kyril Fitzlyon has produced what is obviously a brilliant translation, tells us that these fragments are among the most fascinating to come out of modern Russia. He adds that their quality is accessible only to a Russian ear. This is certainly the impression one gets. There are haunting exceptions (“Buy yourself a nice pair of shoes—and you’ll feel just like King Lear” or “Till our children’s dying day!”), but most of the phrases are poignantly banal.

This is a profoundly moving testimonial by a man of exceptional strength, subtlety, compassion, and faith. Deliberately, perhaps, it leaves a rather dreamlike, muted impression. Sinyavsky read a great deal in the camps. In fact, he wrote a dazzling study of Pushkin while incarcerated. How was this made possible? Did his reading include the prohibited texts of Pasternak, Akhmatova, and Mandelstam to which he makes extended reference? One jotting alludes to what must have been an ideological discussion between a camp commander and the condemned. Was this an exceptional lapse of the usual discipline? One of the voices from the chorus makes a highly significant remark: “There used to be more fun in the camp in the old days. Someone was always being beaten up or hanged. Every day there was a special event.” What are the metamorphoses in the politics of hell? There is so much more one would want to learn about from a witness of Sinyavsky’s stature. But, again, his message is intended for Russian consumption. We eavesdrop. And Sinyavsky’s exile—he now lives in Paris—makes this process the more uncomfortable.

*      *      *

Lydia Chukovskaya’s novel “Going Under” (Quadrangle) is far more accessible to the Western reader than either Solzhenitsyn’s polemic fragment or Sinyavsky’s memoir. The paradox is that Miss Chukovskaya is still “inside,” in the twilight zone assigned to writers, artists, and thinkers who have offended the regime and are barred from normal professional life. In the Soviet Union, Chukovskaya’s writings circulate, where at all, by clandestine mimeographs. Thus there is a sense in which “Going Under”—pellucidly translated by Peter Weston—is meant for the outside. It is we who are to extract the message from the bottle.

The time is February, 1949, and the zhdanovshchina—the purge of intellectuals by Stalin’s culture hoodlum, Andrei Zhdanov—is beginning. The action takes place at a rest home for writers in Russian Finland. Nina Sergeyevna, a translator, is one of the fortunate few to whom the Writers’ Union has granted a month of pastoral repose away from the stress of Moscow. Ostensibly, she is to rest or get or with her translations. What she is actually attempting to do is to set down an account of her husband’s disappearance during the Stalin manhunts of 1938, and thus free herself, at least in part, from a long nightmare. Nothing very much happens at Litvinovka. Nina becomes more or less involved in the lives of Bilibin, a writer who is attempting to come to terms with the demands of his Stalinist masters after a spell at forced labor, and of Veksler, a Jewish poet and war hero. In the drawing room, the literati come and go, spitting venom on Pasternak, their nostrils quivering at the latest rumor of repression in Moscow. The snow glows among the birches, and just beyond the neat confines of the rest home lie the inhuman deprivation and backwardness of rural Russia in the aftermath of total war. Nina’s bad dreams draw her back to the infamous queues of the nineteen-thirties, tens of thousands of women waiting in vain in front of police stations for some word of their vanished husbands, sons, brothers. (There are echoes here of Akhmatova’s great poem “Requiem.”) Bilibin would make love to her, out of the gentleness of his desolation. The N.K.V.D. come for Veksler. War heroes—Jewish war heroes in particular—are no longer wanted. Soon it is March and time to return to Moscow.

Set in a minor key, this short novel echoes and reechoes in one’s mind. Every incident is at once perfectly natural and charged with implication. Walking in the white woods, Nina realizes that the Germans have been there, that the snow masks a literal charnel house. To have fought the Nazis in order to save and consolidate Stalinism—the ironies are insoluble. When the suave hack Klokov denounces the obscurity of Pasternak, Nina’s spirit writhes. But in her solitude she is shadowed by the conviction that very great art can belong only to the few, that there is, sometimes in the greatest poetry, an exaction that cuts one off from the common pace and needs of humanity. The narrative is both spare and resonant. Pushkin, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Turgenev are obliquely present—especially Turgenev, whose play “A Month in the Country” seems to counterpoint Chukovskaya’s scenes. This is a classic.

Under Eastern eyes—Solzhenitsyn makes the point relentlessly—much of our own concerns and literature have a trivial mien. Seen from the Gulag, our urban disarray or racial tensions or economic hiccups look Edenic. The dimensions of cruelty and of endurance in which the Russian imagination works are, to most of us, almost unimaginable. So, even more strikingly, are the mechanisms of hope, of exquisite moral perception, of vital enchantment that produce such books as the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam or the tales of Chukovskaya. We don’t really understand the daily breath of terror, and we don’t understand the joy. This is because the indissoluble bond between them is for us, at best, a philosophical abstraction. “Driven into a cage,” writes Sinyavsky, “the mind is forced to break out into the wider open spaces of the universe through the back door. But for this to happen it must first be hunted down and brought to bay.” The “cage” happens to be the name for the barred compartment of Russian railway coaches in which prisoners travel to the camps. Within it, the Solzhenitsyns, the Sinyavskys, the Chukovskayas seem to find their freedom, as did Pushkin, Dostoevski, and Mandelstam before them. They would not, one suspects, wish to trade with us. Nor is it for us to imagine that we can penetrate, let alone break open, the prison of their days.