Soviet Union: Notes from Underground

SOVIET UNION

“Even the most liberal God offers only one freedom of choice: to believe or not to believe. Communism offers just about the same right. If you don’t want to believe, you can go to jail—which is by no means worse than hell.

—Abram Tertz, On Socialist Realism.

If you could believe the rumors racing through Moscow’s literary under ground last week, the man who wrote those words was himself in a place no worse than hell—the Lubianka prison. “Abram Tertz,” the pseudonymous critic of the Soviet system, had for more than six years eluded the Kremlin’s wrath while smuggling out satiric manuscripts to be published abroad. These included The Trial Begins (1959), a savage study of Soviet life in the New Class, and Fantastic Stones (1962), a collection which Western critics compared with Kafka and Gogol. Was the man in the Lubianka really Abram Tertz? Western Kremlinologists found it hard to believe.

Mere Mockery. Under arrest was Andrei D. Sinyavsky, 40, a ranking literary critic for the “liberal” magazine Novy Mir. Though Sinyavsky is known in the West as a supporter of the late Boris Pasternak and has penned essays on Picasso and Robert Frost, his delicate style just did not seem to fit. Tertz writes with a heavy undercurrent of Jewish Weltschmerz, Sinyavsky with a gentle wit reflecting his Russian Orthodox background.

But the Russian literary underground runs deep. Tertz has made his mark as a bitter, bedrock enemy of Communism, while Sinyavsky merely mocks its Stalinist aspects. To Kremlinologists from Bonn to Washington, this suggested that Sinyavsky might be one of those Russian writers who produce critical work that is acceptable for open publication, but whose best efforts are for the “drawer”—they cannot be published anywhere but in the West. Thus a foreigner reading a noted critic’s articles in Literaturnaya Gazeta may get a wholly false impression of his talents. Of one bottom-drawer writer, a Soviet official recently exclaimed: “He’s much, much better than his work!” On the other hand, the real Abram Tertz could well be that breed of writer known in the underground as an “internal émigré”—a man who produces only for the drawer or for a select circle of trusted intimates who can read his hand-copied manuscripts in secrecy and delight.

Quiet as Hell. Did the arrest presage a new cultural crackdown? So far, the Brezhnev-Kosygin regime has taken a moderate approach to intellectuals, avoiding the shrill, savage attacks of the Khrushchev era. Khrushchev’s cultural hatchet man, Leonid Ilyichev, has been removed; Stalin’s pet geneticist, Trofim Lysenko, has been disavowed by Russian science; imaginative and critical writing appears frequently in Soviet publications so long as it remains within limits. More importantly, B. & K. seem to recognize the sheer public-relations value inherent in “liberalization.” Says one Washington Kremlin-watcher: “These men would like to handle this whole thing as quietly as possible. They don’t want to be brutal and cause an outcry of protests abroad. They are not interested in big trials and another Pasternak incident.”

To that extent, Sinyavsky’s jail may be quieter, if not worse, than hell.