The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  There is meaning in all of this. Man's only mistake has been that of all the heretics from the early Judaizers to the Bolsheviks: presuming to unravel the secrets and determine the path of history. The ancient flame symbol is summoned up to suggest the impulsive and unpredictable quality of providential history: and the Christian message of voluntarily taking up the cross is suggested:

  Thou see'st the passing of the years is like a parable

  And could burst into flame along the way.

  In the name of its awful majesty

  I go in voluntary suffering to the grave.

  In the final verse men move from the world in which they see through a glass darkly toward their final destination and place of judgment. He reverts to the classical image of a ship at sea. It had served him as a symbol of sensual deliverance in his poem of 1917, "Oars at Rest," where a boat lies motionless and the poet and his lover within it are blended into a kind of liquid union with one another and with their natural surroundings.24 In the last lines of Zhivago, however, Pasternak returns the image to its older religious framework. He seems to be saying that beyond the private fate of the poet united briefly with Lara at Varykino, there is another destination; that all the barges so long hauled up the Volga by the sweating multitudes are in truth storied vessels which will yet lead Russia out of its landlocked insularity to worlds beyond.

  I descend into the grave, and on the third day

  rise again And, like barks weaving down a river The centuries shall come like a caravan of barges Out of the darkness, unto me.

  They are the last lines in an extended chronicle, the last image in a long series of icons. The message which Pasternak left to a Russia in turmoil and conflict in the twentieth century is very much like that which a revered metropolitan of Siberia left to his flock amidst the troubles and schism of the seventeenth century-and which the official journal of the Moscow patriarch quietly reprinted in mid-1965:

  Christians! even in darkest days a sunflower completes its circular course, following the sun by unchangeable love and natural inclination toward it. Our sun, which brightens our life's path, is the will of God; it illuminates for us, not always without shadows, the path of life; dark days are often mixed with clear ones; rain, winds, storms arise. . . . But may our

  love to our sun, the will of God, be strong enough to draw us inseparably to it in days of misfortune and sorrow, even as the sunflower in dark days continues without faltering-navigating through the living waters, with the "barometer" and "compass" of God's will leading us into the safe harbor of eternity.25

  Out of some such deeper vision was it possible for the land of "scientific atheism" ironically to produce through Pasternak some of the most magnificent religious poetry of the twentieth century. Perhaps his Zhivago is only another poignant Chekhovian farewell, the last afterglow on a solitary peak of a sun that has already set. Yet it may also represent the beginning of some new magnetic field: a kind of unexpected homing point for the spinning compasses of the space age. We turn now to that age and to the aspirations of the young generation in which Pasternak placed such high hopes.

  New Voices

  The crucial question for the future of the creative life in Russia deals not with internal emigres from late imperial culture but with the purely Soviet young generation: not with Pasternak but with his judgment that "something new is growing . . . and it is growing in the young."

  It is, of course, extremely difficult to characterize an entire generation of a sprawling and complex modern nation. Large numbers of competent and often gifted people obviously enjoy profitable careers as faithful servants of the state and party. Many more-perhaps even a majority of the young generation-feel genuine pride in the accompUshments of Soviet science and technology and a measure of gratitude for the opportunities that have opened up under the new order.

  Yet, there has also been at work within the USSR an unmistakable and extraordinary ferment, which is popularly identified with those under thirty-five even though many older people participate in it and many younger ones do not. The crucial question for the historian is to determine the nature and significance of this process: to say how present ferment in the USSR relates to the Russian past, and how it might bear on the future. For all its confusing and often contradictory qualities, youthful ferment in the USSR can be divided into four essential aspects or levels.

  The first and least elevating is the impulse toward purely negative protest. This restlessness has expressed itself in a variety of ways: the violent delinquency of "hooligans" (khuligany), the flamboyant innovations in style

  and dress of the "style boys" (stiliagi), and the compulsive opposition to all dogma of the nibonicho (an ingenious contraction for the Russian words "neither God nor the devil").

  The antagonistic official press has referred bitterly to "nihilists in short pants,"26 and the most radical of Russia's restless youth have adopted the term "men of the sixties." Thus, both extremes of opinion in the USSR point to a resemblance with the original nihilists and "men of the sixties" who appeared after the repressive reign of Nicholas I just a century before. The opportunity for communal social experiments and revolutionary organization that had given elan to the young nihilists under Alexander II was, of course, absent a century later. But the sense of persecution and a need for new answers was, if anything, even more intense.

  Certainly, the Communist regime was both distressed and profoundly perplexed by the antagonism of so many young people to official culture. The leaders of the mammoth Communist Youth League are now nearly a decade older than in Lenin's time, and veteran Bolsheviks petulantly acknowledge their inability to understand the indifference of youth to the paths that they have prepared for them to follow. Speaking at a congress of the Young Communist League in March, 1957, Voroshilov complained almost pathetically of "young people among you, in our midst, who are maneuvering. They are dreaming about something-but certainly not what they should be dreaming about." His only prescription for "these bugs and beetles" was to "say 'they shall not exist' and take all steps in this respect."27 But the "bugs and beetles" continued to exist and even proliferate. At the next congress of the Communist Youth League in March, 1962, the attitude of the Communist leadership was equally despairing. Khrushchev, having set up new boarding schools to help condition a new Communist elite and a compulsory work period between high school and higher education to help young people "overcome their separation from life," was vehement in his denunciation of the continued nihilism and "parasitism" of

  the young.28

  This continuing indifference to official ideals and seemingly pointless search for novelty in clothes, sex, and crime is, of course, part of a more universal antagonism toward the depersonalized and urbanized modern world. This first level of protest is not simply a Soviet phenomenon but rather a particularly unrefined expression of the widespread desire in advanced civilizations to penetrate beyond the monotony of daily routine to more authentic kinds of individual experience.

  A second, more positive aspect to the youthful ferment is the rebirth of Russian humor. Genuine comedy had all but vanished from the Russian scene in the Stalin era. All that remained were the crude vulgarities of the

  dictator himself, compounded largely of lavatorial allusions and heavy-handed insults to national minorities. The rich traditions of literary satire and peasant humor which had flourished under all but the most extreme periods of tsarist repression were severely crippled by Stalin's psychotic sensitivity to all forms of implied criticism in his declining years. Denied the opportunity for public laughter at their system, the Russian people turned increasingly to private bitterness. This damming up of the humorous stream that had traditionally been a free-flowing part of the "broad Russian nature" had dangerous consequences which even Stalin's long-delayed last Party Congress recognized, with its call in 1952 for new Gogols and Saltykovs.29 The rehabilitation of Russian humor was further aided by the rise to power of Khrushchev, who had a better sense of humor than a
ny preceding leader of Russian Communism and made a jocular style part of his new political technique.

  The humor that arose in the post-Stalin era acquired, however, a sharper bite than even reformist Communist leaders could readily accept. Pointed fables and colorful plays on words revealed subtlety, lightness, and irreverence for pretense-attitudes which contrasted sharply with official Soviet culture and provided fresh resources for the fast-evaporating stock of human satire.

  Beneath the satirical posture of Soviet youth usually lay, however, the positive conviction that there is still work worth doing in one's private life and professional calling. If one cannot change the political and administrative system overnight, one can at least gain dignity through honorable work, free of either bureaucratic cant or political interference. Thus, humor allied itself, not only with the passion for reform that has always been feared by pretentious authority, but also with the "creeping pragmatism" of a new generation, increasingly confident that expanding islands of creative integrity can yet be dredged out of the sea of official deceit and sloth.

  A typical joke of the early sixties told how a collective farmer was brought to Moscow to keep a lookout with a telescope atop Lenin Hills for the coming of the classless society. One day, en route to his sinecure, the peasant met an American, who offered to triple his salary if he would transfer to New York to watch from the Statue of Liberty for the coming of the next crisis in the capitalist system. "The terms are attractive," replies the peasant, "but I can't afford to give up a permanent job for a temporary one."

  The simple hero of this tale has a rich ancestry in the popular fables and satirical literature of Great Russia; but he also has ancestors in Yiddish humor, with its idealized Peter Schlemihl and his life-affirming laughter at human foibles and pretense. This joke is, in fact, a variant of an age-old

  Jewish joke about waiting for the Messiah-pointing up, perhaps, a subtle way in which the indigenous Yiddish culture of Russia seeks hidden revenge on its latest persecutor. Forced both to assimilate into the atomized society of the USSR and to endure the continuing indignities of anti-Semitism, the Jewish community continues to assert itself anonymously by providing fresh satirical resources to Russian culture as a whole.

  The comic contribution of the emigrating Jewish community to the American melting pot in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century is thus being in some ways duplicated by this inner emigration and assimilation of Yiddish humor in the USSR of the mid-twentieth century. The satirical playwright who has become the posthumous idol of the young generation, Eugene Schwarz, and the man that championed the production of his works, Akimov, are both Jews. The philo-Semitism of the young generation is a mark of gratitude for the Jewish contribution to the new cultural ferment as well as an expression of new-found identity with the long-endured persecutions of Jewry. It is entirely fitting that, of all the half-heretical literary works of the post-Stalin era, Eugene Evtushenko's simple poetic tribute to Jewish suffering, "Babi Yar," should become probably the most important single symbol of fresh feeling and aspiration among the younger generation.30

  The revival of Russian humor has also benefited from the increasing assimilation of other minority groups, such as the Armenians, who, like the Jews, have an age-old Near Eastern civilization, with folklore accumulated from long centuries of persecution, wandering, and commercial adventure. An imaginary "radio Armenia" is frequently cited by bemused Russians as the source of humorous comment on internal Soviet affairs. Georgians and Armenians played leading roles in developing the art of humorous and satirical folk singing in the early 1960's.

  Many of the deeper, positive ideals of the new generation are expressed in the third aspect of ferment: the revival of Russian literature. In the late imperial period literature was, after all, the main medium for developing new ideas about man and society. The revival in the decade since Stalin of this search for ideas in literature is a phenomenon of great importance for Russian development (though not necessarily for world literature).31

  In part, the new literature seems impressive because of the extreme sterility of that which preceded it. One is repeatedly reminded that there are no Tolstoys or Dostoevskies even in potentia. Indeed, the closest present approximation to the epic style of the former and to the psychological religious preoccupations of the latter among Soviet writers of today can be found in the novels of Michael Sholokhov and Leonid Leonov respectively:

  two elderly and idiosyncratic figures with little apparent influence on the rising generation. Yet this new literary production has a freshness and vitality of its own. Ever since the publication just after Stalin's death of Pomerantsev's much-discussed essay, "On Sincerity in Literature," which, among other things, contrasted the honesty and resourcefulness of a Siberian peasant woman with the mechanical falsehoods of authority, there had been a rising tide of what might be called neo-populist literature. Stories like Yashin's "Levers" and Nagibin's "Light in the Window" emphasized the contrast between corrupt officialdom and the uncorrupted people.32 Sometimes an idealistic scientific worker is substituted for a simple muzhik as the contrasting force to Communist bureaucracy, as in Granin's "My Own Opinion" or Dudintsev's much-discussed novel, Not by Bread Alone. Sometimes the editorial point is made quite bluntly, as in the poem "Careful People," whose title is an ironic comment on the omnipresent "Careful Pigeons" signs which Stalin scattered through Russia at -the very heights of his Neronian bloodbaths.33

  The literature of protest in 1956 proved to be only the harbinger of still more blunt and pointed social criticism which came late in 1962, with the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's portrayal of a Soviet concentration camp in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Fedor Abramov's scathing depiction of collective farm life in One Day in the "New Life." All in all, a remarkable amount of stylistically conventional but ideologically exciting fiction has been produced in the USSR since the death of Stalin. At the same time, traces have begun to appear of that even more daring literature which is written "for the drawer" or "for the soul" and circulates in manuscript or typewritten copies within the USSR (along with innumerable bootlegged copies of proscribed Western publications and private translations thereof). Some of this literature appears in the leaflet-sized papers that are illegally produced and distributed in the USSR, and some of it has found its way to publication in the West.

  Even more important than the novels and short stories of the new generation is the extraordinary revival of two of the most public and yet most personal of all literary forms: poetry readings and the theater. These media-in which Soviet men and women communicate directly with fellow Russians about problems of common concern-have done much to create such sense of communal purpose and aspiration as has come to animate the young generation.

  The poetry readings have attracted considerable public attention because of the magnetic appeal of Evtushenko and the causes celebres that have grown up around his name-the first in T960 following the publication

  of "Babi-Yar," and the second in 1963, following the publication while abroad of autobiographical sketches and reflections.

  It is doubtful if anything written by Evtushenko will find its way into the anthologies of the world's great poetry. Yet well before he was thirty, he was assured an important niche in Russian cultural history, as the recognized spokesman of his generation. His direct and easily understood poems of protest and self-affirmation, his handsome appearance, his simple love of travel and of love itself-all made him a kind of romantic idol. His exploits in forcing open previously closed doors and weaving his way in and out of official favor were followed vicariously by thousands; and he, in turn, shared with the thousands who flocked to his poetry readings verses, comments, and innuendos that he did not dare commit to print.

  "Each man has his secret personal world," he wrote in the first poem of a Soviet edition of his printed works;34 and Evtushenko appeared as the defender of that colorful, uninhibited world against the drab and stereotyped world of "Stalin'
s heirs." His poem "The Nihilist" tells how someone derisively labeled a nihilist in official circles was capable of more noble human actions than his more conformist contemporaries. His ode "To Humor" praises this quality for its power to scourge tyranny.

  The appeal of Evtushenko was, however, based on more than youthful exuberance and a general spirit of protest. For Evtushenko played-even if crudely and perhaps unconsciously-some chords with sympathetic resonance in earlier Russian tradition. For the decade after Stalin he represented a reincarnation-however pale-of Belinsky, the "furious" moral hero of the original "remarkable decade." Evtushenko seems close to Belinsky not only in his effect on contemporaries, but in his refusal to accept rationalizations for human suffering. In "Babi-Yar," particularly when recited by Evtushenko, the emotional climax comes with the mention of Anne Frank and the image of innocent suffering childhood, after which he moves on to naturalistic imagery and a moralistic conclusion. His sense of outrage began-according to his officially criticized autobiography-when he saw a helpless ten-year-old girl crushed to death at the funeral of Stalin simply because no one had the proper authorization to prevent the thoughtless mob from surging forth.35 At this point Evtushenko returned the ticket of admission to the Stalinist establishment, which a man of his talents could so easily have gained. The motivation is that of Belinsky in rejecting Hegel's ideal world order, and of Belinsky's echo, Ivan Karamazov, in rejecting his ticket of admission to heaven because of the innocent suffering of children. It may be that the most enduring legacy of the Old Russian intelligentsia lies not in any of its Utopian dreams, but in this passionate desire "that no