QUEST FOR AN ISLAND
Vassily Aksyonov
New York: PAJ Publications, 1988
246 pp., $17.95
Like many other twentieth-century intellectuals, the Russian writer Vassily Aksyonov has thrived in exile. He left the Soviet Union in 1979 and has since become a popular figure on American campuses. He is not the only émigré Russian who has published at an amazing pace while in exile. Vladimir Voinovich and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn have done it. But he possesses one characteristic the others do not have: an ability to ignore half a century of Russian linguistic practice and to reach back to the 1920s and earlier for stylistic inspiration. Let me explain.
Since the creation of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1932, so-called socialist realism has been the obligatory method of creating literature in Russia. It has affected not only the quality of literary production but also, and primarily, the Russian language. For all the disclaimers, modifications, and up-datings that have occurred since Stalin's death, socialist realism has remained a straitjacket into which the Russian language has been forced by hundreds of writers and thousands of journalists. Under their leadership, whole areas of human experience have disappeared from the language, and therefore, from consciousness and culture.
Through their songs, film scripts, novels, poems, skits, and articles, Soviet Russian writers have inscribed in the Russian language a crudely materialistic, yet sentimental, vision of man and the world. With few exceptions, Russian literary historians have obligingly applied a fixing solution to this simplistic version of reality. The average Russian is born into a linguistic and literary scene strewn with garbage. Socialist realism shapes and structures his language and view of the world. In school, he absorbs the acceptable words and styles of verbal expression, which he may consciously despise but which nevertheless are internalized and become part of his cultural heritage. The average Russian reader may not take the socialist heroes, villainous capitalist enemies, or wicked internal saboteurs seriously, but he inevitably retains such concepts because they are among the few things in abundant supply in his world. He may know that in languages other than Russian, the word "God" is written with a capital G, but he uses the lowercase because this is what he sees in Fyodor Dostoyevski's novels as they appear in the Soviet Union.
The damage to language and culture has been enormous. While it has not affected the few hardy intellectuals who have had enough inner resources to withstand the assault, Russian society today thinks in and uses the defective language and conceptual apparatus imposed on it by its writers and journalists. Maksim Gorky once said that writers are engineers of human souls. This engineering has produced what Aleksandr Zonoviev has called Homo sovieticus.
How deeply the world view generated by socialist realism has permeated the Russian sensibility can be gauged by the popularity of such pseudo-poets as Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Robert Rozhdestvensky, or of such pseudo-novelists as Aleksandr Dudintsev or Yuri Trifonov. These writers, with their ostensible demasking of Soviet Russian reality, are like timid sweepers of floors that have not been washed for generations and in
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