So where does this leave me? I have attempted to demolish certain ‘liberal’ assumptions, because I believe they are not truly liberal. ‘Permissiveness’ has become the right to free speech for anything some people choose to hear: and that is not good enough. We must often listen to what we do not in the least want to hear, if we even pretend to be a free society. And after we have heard it, we can begin the debate.
I detest racialism: in revolt against the ideas of my father, I dare say, I have never felt racial prejudice. I want every child to have the best education possible for him, and in this respect, the parent should have the freest choice available. Some children are born academics: for others, the good life – if we can make it a good life – lies elsewhere. I oppose the censorship of books, mainly on the grounds that few people read them, though I reserve the right to change my mind if some really preposterous outrage should crop up. The theatre must be allowed to go its own way. Television, the greatest mass-medium of all, must be left to the social responsibility of those who run it. There should be religious freedom – and by this I mean freedom from trivial insult to the beliefs of many. To a serious play or book, in opposition to these, I should have no objection. But I mean serious.
I believe in the Pill: God help us, we all must – unless we are Catholics – if the flow of illegitimate children and of abortions, is to be checked. I believe in responsible sex-education, though how mankind has survived without it for so long, I find it hard to comprehend.
I do not believe that earlier menstruation means earlier emotional maturity. This is bosh, and dangerous bosh. Incidentally, the age of menstruation appears to have stabilised, and presumably won’t go lower.
Lastly, I believe in the final establishment of a socialist society. But it is not with us now, and it is absurd of us to try to behave as if it were. It may be a long way off, unless the demands of the more extremist Trade Unions make life impossible for the general public, and I suspect that this could only result in a swing to the extreme Right. But which ever side took over, as an authoritarian government, they would see to it that the strike weapon would be the first to be abolished Anyway, we must make do primarily with what we have, and make the best of that.
21. Travels II: U.S.S.R.,
and a Note on the ‘Generation Gap’
Recently, at a reception at the Soviet Embassy, an Izvestia correspondent asked me: ‘Why did you go to the Soviet Union in the first place?’
I replied, ‘Because of my knowledge of, and deep interest in, Russian classical literatures. I did not believe any great upheaval could have changed people much. I expected to discover traces of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky. But I was rather surprised to find that in the field of human personality, Dostoevsky was not, as I thought, a fantasist: on the contrary, I found him a realist.’
My questioner was amused.
I am not going to write a travelogue. This has been done often enough already. I shall say little about places, unless they are fairly unfamiliar to western readers, such as Tbilisi and the river at Rostov-on-Don. I need to talk about people, and it is because I want to embarrass none of the friends, that I shall use their names seldom.
I was not altogether honest with my Izvestia acquaintance. I could have said that I had rejoiced in the ideals of the Revolution of 1917, and still recognised the good they had wrought. (To turn a country of a majority of illiterates into a country almost wholly literate, is no small achievement.) Of the Stalinist horrors I had not, as a girl, been aware: I am aware of them now. But I am not prepared to condemn this great country, out of hand.
It is hard to write of it. If I write of it too warmly, fanatic Russophobes in this country will say I have been ‘conned’. If I write too critically, I may cause pain and anxiety to many of my Russian friends.
So I shall try to write of precisely what happened.
And here I may say that Charles and I, having made many trips to the U.S.S.R., found no attempt by anyone to ‘con’ us at all. They did not think we were fools. For one thing, we refused to ‘play politics’, which is a trap into which western visitors often fall: so they learn nothing whatsoever. We made acquaintances both on the left and the right (I use these terms for convenience) and it was rare for either side to refuse to talk to us freely and argue late into the night.
We went first to Moscow in June 1960. That was in the springlike, early days of the ‘thaw’, under that wayward, Dostoevskian but essentially progressive figure (not strong on contemporary painting, though, which remains – in its official form – bad) Khrushchev. We went under the auspices of the Writers’ Union, and of course, were thereby privileged. I should like that made clear. I know how desperate, uncertain, and gramophone-like some Intourist guides can be, though here, obviously, there are striking exceptions. But, poor girls, they are responsible for far too much: for the shepherding, feeding and safety of far too many people, and for attempting to keep them on the ideological rails. We only suffered once: from a guide in Leningrad, who turned to us sternly with the remark, ‘Perhaps you may have heard of Lenin!’
We were met at Moscow airport by an impressive delegation, including that great and stalwart man Tvardovsky, with flowers: and by the woman who was to be our interpreter over the years, Oksana. She was the most wonderful oral interpreter I have ever met. Her English accent was not perfect: she did not care. She said the important thing was grammar and a large vocabulary. She was also a bit of an actress: when she interpreted our speeches, and we made jokes, the laughter would come readily. She was a dedicated Soviet citizen, though always ready to argue a case. She became a close friend. She is one still.
Here I must say more about Tvardovsky. He was, and is, one of the most beloved poets in the U.S.S.R. His ballad-saga, ‘Vassili Tyorkin’, and its sequel, ‘Tyorkin in Hell’, are part of everyone’s luggage. He was grieved that it was not published in England in his lifetime (though a translation is appearing at last). It had, he said, been translated into English for Russian use, but that, he added ruefully, ‘Is like taking your own sister to a dance.’ He was best known here as the courageous editor of Novy Mir, from which post he was removed just before his death. It was he who first published Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, with Khruschev’s consent, but was later refused permission to publish The First Circle. Solzhenitsyn, at his graveside, made the sign of the cross, which might have puzzled Tvardovsky himself, who was a devoted citizen of the U.S.S. R., a Communist, and a party member. But Solzhenitsyn is a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church, which makes things even harder for him. Tvardovsky was a very big man, with piercing blue eyes, and a flat Slavic face. He was absolutely free in his speech, and could be extremely funny. Parties at his very handsome dacha were, in my husband’s phrase, remarkably apolaustic. I never met a Russian of liberal tendencies who did not love and admire him: I did both. Some of the things that have happened since his time – and were happening during his later days – would bitterly have grieved him.
But to continue. This was a preliminary visit. Moscow: the smells, intermingled, of lilac, building dust, Russian cigarettes, and that at first offensive petrol which finally evokes nostalgia, individuals to meet, groups to attend. The Kremlin, red and stupefying: St Basil’s, a Hansel and Gretel church made of coloured sugar sticks. Sparrow Hills, with the ugly university and the ski-slope, and at one side, a lovely church with onion domes of turquoise blue. Leningrad, a delicious night’s train journey: a white night, with the sun blazing at three in the morning. Leningrad, in its faded pastel splendour: the Hermitage, through which I raced like one demented – too many marvels to take in, but one had to try. I kept it up (as I could not do now) for three hours, till even Charles and Oksana were on the point of striking. All travellers’ stuff.
But I now want to go forward two years in time, and say a word or two about Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Zhenya, as everyone called him. I met him first, not in Moscow, but in London, at a luncheon given in his honour. He was then at
the height of his fame: a Siberian, very tall, delicately handsome, used to giving his highly histrionic poetry readings, in his tremendous voice, to audiences of 30,000 people. He had already written the courageous Babi Yar, and was later to write, even more courageously, having a nose for danger, Stalin’s Heirs. It was to be prophetic.
There were those in England who imagined that, because of the freedom of travel he was allowed, he might become a dissident. Nonsense, if one knew anything about him at all. He was Russian to the core and a splendid ambassador.
I did not know then that he knew anything about me.
But he did. He knew that Charles was in hospital in Moorfields, temporarily blinded after an eye operation (whether he would ever recover the use of one eye was doubtful) and that I was to visit him after lunch was over. Nothing would do but that he must go with me, he must meet Charles, he wanted to wish him well. So he and I went off, with interpreters, to take Charles by considerable surprise. I don’t remember what Zhenya said to him, except that it was full of kindness and imaginative sympathy. No one could have got through, to a man who could not see, a greater impression of eager friendliness, and the hope that they would meet in full sunshine in the future.
I have heard criticism of Zhenya, when times grew harder: a good deal of it is prompted by envy and malice: but one does not forget such gestures.
We saw him many times between our first meeting and our most recent, in 1971. He had been to our flat in Cromwell Road, to which we had moved from Suffolk in 1957, on several occasions: once to a large party, where he recited with generous vigour to people sitting all over the floor and along the hallway: once, to read to us, privately, for the first time, Stalin’s Heirs. I have seen him only for a short time since, and know little about his anxieties.
We went on long visits during the more relaxed times: with Philip, Lindsay and her American friend, Betty Linn Smith, who had been Beauty Queen of the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, where both had been educated, we went to Rostov-on-Don and spent ten days in a dacha attached to a rest home for miners, just above the river, and right on the Steppes. (We were told casually that it was all right to go for walks, since in August the wolves kept to the ravines.) Here we boated and bathed. I had told the girls they were not to wear bikinis. ‘But Russians do!’ ‘You won’t.’ So they appeared on the river beach in neat little chic cover-up suits from California, and were more of a sensation than if they had appeared stark naked. Betty Linn was an expert at water-ballet, and performed feats in the middle of the Don that sent emulating miners bubbling to the bottom. (They rose again.)
On that occasion Mikhail Alexandrovich Sholokhov gave us a dinner in Rostov itself. (Charles and I had already stayed with him in his extraordinarily palatial house in Veshenskaya.) I am not going to mention all the very many writers and academics whom we met, by name: but I must say something in fairness of him. Short, back like a ramrod, with silver hair and a delicate face that seems to be made of silver also, he a pure Don Cossack, and an Old Guard Communist. It is among his Cossacks that he most cares to live; he is rarely in Moscow, but keeps open house in Veshenskaya. He does not care to eat alone: there are seldom less than ten persons at breakfast, and often three times that amount at other meals.
When he goes abroad, his public statements can be dismaying, though I have known him speak at his own table, to his own Cossacks, about the evils of anti-semitism. ‘This must never happen again.’ And one morning, after I had announced at dinner the previous evening that I was a Christian, he suddenly rose to his feet at breakfast and said: ‘I have been thinking all night about what our friend “Pamélla” [he always called me that] has said. Though I do not share her beliefs, I respect them. Today is Sunday. If she wishes to go to church, I will go with her.’ Naturally, I did not accept this most quixotic offer. (Besides, I believe a Russian Orthodox service lasts for three hours.) But his statements for internal consumption can be dismaying also, and many of the literary young feel he has failed to support them when they needed help most.
But let there be no mistake about this. Sholokhov is a great novelist. And Quiet Flows the Don is a great book, a deeply tragic book, and nothing like a churned-out work of ‘socialist realism’. Even young students, writers and poets who are his ideological opponents, will not deny that. His best work was concluded by the time he was thirty. Now – well, perhaps there is a novel to come, ‘They Fought for their Country’. We shall have to wait for that. Perhaps for a long time.
In private, he is wildly, often bawdily humorous. At his dinner speech at St Andrews, where he received an honorary degree, he made a discourse of so racy a character that he had his interpreter frequently convulsed with laughter, and at a loss to know how to put what Sholokhov was saying into fairly decorous English.
But his remarks about the great poet Boris Pasternak (not a great novelist, I think, and had the Swedish Academy given him the Nobel Prize for his poetry, all would probably have been well) are not easily forgotten in the West, nor, I think, by many in the East. They were probably thrown off, half ironic-nearly all arising out of a complete misconception of the mores forget that he was a kingly host. I cannot, and I will not, deny my gratitude. I think we must try to think of Mikhail Alexandrovich Sholokhov, not in the here-and-now, but in the context of history, as we think of Gogol. Was there not there, too, much to deplore? (To put it mildly.)
A final Sholokhov story. One morning, he offered to make me a present of one of the little islands in his spur of the river Don, which he seemed to own, on condition that I should cultivate it. I protested that I was a poor hand at horticulture, and that during the war, trying hard to grow vegetables, all I had successfully produced was mignonette. ‘Then,’ he said triumphantly, ‘you shall plant le réséda.’
I have never achieved my island, though Charles, on receiving an honorary degree at the University of Rostov-on-Don, was made a present of a complete Cossack uniform: cap, boots, burka – an immense sheepskin cape, designed to cover not only oneself but one’s girl-friend, when eloping with her on horseback across the Steppes.
In 1967 we went with Philip and Martin to Tbilisi, to the hospitality of a great friend of ours, an academic, and a noted Shakespearian scholar. This is an eastern city, totally different from anything I myself have ever seen in the Soviet Union. Tree-lined streets, half-obscured alluring houses, with latticed balconies – to my eyes – Moorish in influence. There is an abundance of growing fruit, so scarce in Moscow – which, incidentally, has sacrificed a good deal for the well-being of the vast Republics. We went to a fifth-century church on a hill, older than any church in England, where there was to be heard taped choral singing of ninth- and tenth-century Gregorian chants.
To lunch in a Tbilisi restaurant, if you are with anybody well known, and may even be slightly known yourself, is an experience. We went into a welcoming vault, where we were invited to an enormous meal. (I have a slender appetite, and great Russian meals are always a strain on me.) After that was more or less digested, we had to make the rounds of all the tables, at each one drinking toasts in champagne. The very hot sunlight seemed hotter by far after that. Not much vodka in Tbilisi, but Georgian wine in plenty.
We visited the studio of the sculptor Amashukeli, whose statues – daring by Moscow standards – tower over the city, and the studio of the late Piros Manishvila, a primitive painter of quite remarkable verve and delightfulness who will decently bear comparison with the Douanier Rousseau. I would love to have one of his works, but most are in museums, all highly prized.
We went to Moscow again: but this time, it was only a short trip for Charles and myself. We were there chiefly to collect our royalties (which come in notes, wrapped in large brown paper parcels – the Russians do not use cheques – and have to be paid in elaborately to the Moscow Narodny bank, being counted many times, even if a patient queue is waiting behind). We needed these roubles for the young men: we were sending them on a journey (while we went home) from one si
de to the other of the U. S.S.R. Khabarovsk – with China ‘ ‘cross the bay’, as Kipling would certainly have said: Bratsk and Irkutsk in Eastern Siberia, on to hot romantic lands, Samarkand, Bokhara. They spoke adequate Russian, and were somewhat annoyed that they had to go with a guide: but this kind of visit could be arranged no other way. They travelled on the Trans-Siberian railways to Novosibirsk, having infinite stolidity and endurance, and then on by air.
So far as I can judge, they were all intensely interested in what they saw, but rather as world travellers than as tourists. The young, it seems to me, are less inclined to ‘gawp’ than their elders. As they find, so they take. They are not constantly making futile comparisons with things in their own country. They make no attempt to equate Bokhara with Birmingham. Why should they? They eat what they are given. They listen to what they are told. They are the last people to make instant judgments.
I have heard some blush-provoking idiocies by English and American tourists in the hotels of Moscow and Leningrad: of the country in which they were travelling.
If nation should ever be able to speak peace unto nation (poor John Reith!) then I believe it will be by the journeying young of this generation that it will be brought about. I do not mean the hippies on the dope-trails, looking for self-gratification. I do not mean the drop-outs, wandering without purpose, sometimes at their parents’ expense. They only bring their solipsistic worlds with them, wherever they go.
The young have been much berated. There are those who have no aim but exhibitionism and destruction. But there are others who have a deeper sense of purpose, a more profound structural sense of the way the whole world works, including the Poor World, than any generation since this century began.
I like and admire so many young men and women that I see: they often drop round to chat with us – I mean Charles and myself – and we always enjoy their company. They refresh what I have left of my own enthusiasm of youth. (I did say to Philip that sometimes this made me feel like a vampire bat.) But I think that if we, in our advancing years, were to put any sort of metal drain or pressure upon them, they would courteously, quietly, and ever so silently, fold their tents like the Arabs and, like them, steal away.
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