The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  child shall weep." The page containing these lines, which Dostoevsky underlined heavily in his notebook, was long kept on public exhibition in the Dostoevsky museum in Moscow; and it comes close to stating Evtushenko's inner ideal.

  But Evtushenko is also, of course, a poet-self-consciously so. His pose as the patriotic voice of liberation in his generation is somewhat reminiscent of the nineteenth-century Eastern European tradition whereby Mickiewicz in Poland, Petofi in Hungary, and Runeberg in Finland were able to crystallize in verse the inarticulate aspirations of their people. But his true poetic ancestors are Russian, the four poets of the early twentieth century whom he has acknowledged as his models: Maiakovsky, Blok, Esenin, and Pasternak.36

  Evtushenko described the goal of his poetry as poeticizing the Russian language: continuing the work of Blok and Pasternak in turning language into a thing of beauty and even a means of redemption in human life.87

  For a time his work seemed in the Maiakovsky tradition of driving and didactic "slaps in the face of public taste." However, he is probably closer in spirit to Esenin, the peasant poet, the least intellectual of the four. Evtushenko's first poem was on the subject of sport, and he was in fact a professional soccer player before turning to verse. He comes from the Siberian hinterland: a simple, almost childlike extrovert, exuberantly self-confident. Perhaps for that reason his vanity and "court poems" for the regime do not seem so reprehensible, and the possibility of a tragic end always seems close at hand. The message that he has to convey is the old contrast between the perversions of power in Moscow and the purity still lying in the deep interior of Russia, personified for him by "Winter Station," the small Siberian town where he was raised and the title of his first important poem. His approach is that of a country boy, a would-be poet of life in all its exuberance, but his final lines, the farewell "advice" of the town to its departing son, seem more like the message of the Old Russian intelligentsia distilled to its inner essence:

  Do not grieve that you have not yet answered

  The question put to you by life. Abandon not the search, seek night and day;

  And if you do not find, still go on seeking; Truth is good, but happiness is better-so they say,

  but without truth there is no happiness!38

  Andrew Voznesensky, the second of the "fiery chargers" on the poetic front, filled in the color and detail for Evtushenko's bold sketches. Voznesensky soon proved to be the better poet. Although born in the same year as

  Evtushenko, he began serious publishing five years later. The suddenness with which his name came to be paired with that of Evtushenko in the early sixties is a tribute both to the growing sophistication of the younger generation and to its increasing responsiveness to traditional themes and emphases of the Russian intellectual tradition.

  There is something strangely fitting about the fact that his first collection of verse, published in i960, bore the title Mosaic, and was published in Vladimir, the original center of Orthodoxy in Great Russia. Voznesensky's poetry combines a mosaic of visual images with a flow of musical sound. He recaptures something of the genius of old Orthodox culture with his use of sensual suggestion for super-sensual ideas. He is the truest renewal of the poetic tradition of the silver age: a confessed disciple of Pasternak, who has succeeded in incorporating many contemporary ideas into his poetic idiom.

  His favorite poem, "Parabolic Ballad," is also one of the favorite subjects of official attack. It is a defense of the "Aesopian language" that the true poet must use to make his point. He must speak not in direct statement but symbolically and indirectly. Gauguin reached the Louvre not by moving down from Montmartre but by going to the south seas.

  … he sped away like a roaring rocket

  .. . and he entered the Louvre, not through stately

  portals, But like a wrathful parabola

  piercing the roof . . .39

  Voznesensky's own poetic "Parabola" (the title of his second collection of poetry, published in Moscow in 1961) was more than much of the Soviet bureaucracy could tolerate. Accused of "formalism" by official critics, he uses the magic of language to damn them for smelling of formalin and incense (formalizm . . . formalin . . . fimiam). There is the hint of fiery apocalypse in his clipped poetic judgment on Stalinist architecture:

  Farewell architecture! Blaze freely on, Cow sheds with cupids, Rococo savings banks … To live is to burn.40

  To Voznesensky, the function of the poet is prophetic, and the reaction of audiences is "an almost sensual expression of feeling" which leaves their souls "wide open like a woman who has just been kissed."41

  Nothing could be more different from the puritanical didacticism of

  official Soviet culture. The personalized poetry readings of the early sixties were the scene for original thoughts punctuated by spontaneous applause and boisterous commentary. The rhetorical rallies of the state were, by contrast, characterized by ritual rhythmic applause in response to lengthening stretches of increasingly unoriginal prose. There could be little doubt as to where authentic vitality lay, even though the latter forces retained the power periodically to silence the former, as they did by severe denunciations during the first half of 1963. The work of Evtushenko and Voznesensky seemed to decline during the following two years. But whether these particular figures flourished or faded, the younger generation had built up an oral folklore of its own42 to preserve the memory of good words and courageous action just as an older oral folklore had kept alive the memory of heroic deeds during the long literary silence of the Mongol occupation.

  Hardly less striking is the contrast between the new theater that has arisen since Stalin's death and the stereotyped staging of Soviet success stories in the Stalin era. It was, indeed, on the stage that the first sweeping break with Stalinist literary forms took place late in 1953 with the staging of Leonid Zorin's play Guests. If Ehrenburg's novel The Thaw provided the key metaphor for the post-Stalin literary revival, and Pomerantsev's "On Sincerity in Literature" provided its combat slogan, Zorin's play dramatized what the conflict was all about. Based on the infamous "doctors' plot," Guests portrays the villainy of the secret police in a manner suggesting that it was a natural outgrowth of the entire Soviet system. The drama was severely criticized by the official press and forced to close down after two performances.43 Criticism of secret police excesses gained official approval only after Alexander Korneichuk's Wings rendered the dragon of Beria into almost a caricature in order to render the slaying by Khrushchev even more heroic and melodramatic. Khrushchev put the official stamp of approval on this formula with his attendance and ostentatious applauding at a performance of Wings early in 1955; but the question raised by Zorin's more realistic portrayal had not been forgotten merely because it could no longer be directly posed in public.

  Almost as important as Zorin's play in opening up fresh perspectives to the Soviet theater was the extraordinarily popular revival of Maiakovsky's Bedbug in 1954. Renewed exposure to the blunt, direct speech of Maiakov-sky (and to that of Hemingway-perhaps the most popular of all foreign writers with the young generation) provided Russians with a model for simpler forms of discourse. At the same time, the fresh look at the long-prohibited staging of Meierhold reminded a new generation of the expressive possibilities of non-realistic stagings. The rather sterile and pompous schematization of the Stanislavsky method that had become the accepted

  way of projecting socialist realism on the stage now had a challenger. Insofar as the public was given a chance to choose, it elected to see new productions with a decisiveness clearly embarrassing to vested interests within the party.

  More modern methods of staging were evidenced in 1955 in a new production of Hamlet by Okhlopkov. He seemed to be reviving the techniques of his teacher Meierhold in order to realize the latter's dream of doing a totally new Hamlet. The impresario who broke most completely with the theater of the Stalin era was Nicholas Akimov, who had fallen afoul of Stalin in the early thirties for his "formalist" staging of Haml
et.**

  Unlike the theatrical bureaucrats of the Stalin era, Akimov is both a modern artist and an independent philosopher. Central to his concept of the new theater is the importance of distinguishing between the theater and the cinema, which tended to be two sides of the same dull coin in the Stalin era. The former has a unique role to play in cultural development for two key reasons. First, plays have what he calls "materiality" {material'nost'), a sense of material immediacy that can only be conveyed by real people, things, and colors. The failure to develop this sense of immediacy comes largely from conservative adherence to the conventions of the "mechanical" stage of the eighteenth century, and unwillingness to experiment boldly with an "electric" stage for modern man.

  A second and even more important factor in distinguishing films from plays is the fact of audience participation. A play is necessarily "a dialogue between audience and actor in which neither can remain silent. The only dialogue in a movie occurs with the mechanic in case of failure."46 Another outstanding and experimental impresario of the Leningrad stage, Georgy Tovstonogov, has pointed to the significance of the dialogue between living performers and a living audience by speaking of the unique possibility of creating "a charged atmosphere on the stage and an electric silence among the audience."46

  It is precisely such effects that Akimov was able to produce in his memorable production of Schwarz's The Shadow. Based on the fable of Hans Christian Andersen about the man who lost his shadow, Schwarz's play as staged by Akimov is a production with color, lightness, laughter, and fantasy: the antithesis of the Soviet theater under Stalin. At the center of the drama stands a lonely idealist identified in the dramatis personae as "the scholar," but known in the play as Christian Theodore. Traditional realism is challenged at the very outset when he loses his eyeglasses and observes that he sees better without them. A number of stage tricks leave the audience uncertain as to what is real, as Christian loses his shadow, which goes on to become ruler of the kingdom of fantasy in which most of

  Schwarz's dramas take place. In the climactic trial scene, the new spectral ruler brings to trial the visionary idealist whose shadow he once was; and at the dramatic moment when a doctor, who was Christian's best and last remaining friend, joins the general chorus of denunciation and betrayal, "electric silence in the audience" is movingly achieved. The context is semi-comical, but the effect is more than that of sudden tears in the midst of laughter; it is a kind of catharsis, a sense of shared involvement in the tragedy, and of unspoken resolve that it shall not happen again. The characters in Schwarz's fable are far more realistic than the wooden puppets of the socialist realist theater. The motives and rationalizations for their evil behavior are psychologically credible: they are skillfully woven out of the venality and compromise of everyday Soviet life. The doctor does not denounce Christian directly in the trial scene but (like those who listen to the Christ-like preachings of Dostoevsky's Idiot) simply pronounces him out of his mind. Here, as elsewhere, the moral is not heavy-handed but only implied. One is made to feel that the message must become a living force in the life of the audience just as it has been a living and dynamic force in the production-if the vital dialogue between performer and spectator is to continue. Akimov has come closest to a short paraphrase of the message:

  The contemporary epoch proceeds under the sign of the struggle of the creative principle with the parasitic; the creative with the decaying; the living with the dead; or, as Schwarz says in his language, of man with his shadow.47

  Two other recently produced Schwarz plays carry even more pointed political messages: The Naked King, in which the Andersen fable about the Emperor's new suit of clothes is turned into a witty satire on the conspiracy of silence that prevailed during the Stalin era; and The Dragon, in which the slayer of a tyrannical dragon (that is, the Khrushchevian debunkers of Stalin) proves to be only another tyrant rather than the idealized St. George of Russian hagiography.48

  These remarkable allegories, for all their popularity among the younger generations, are still primarily the work of older men. In the Stalin era fables and legends had the value of providing remote locations and a new "Aesopian" language with which to talk about vital questions. Others of the older generation used children's tales or "Eastern fables" as media in which serious ideas could be discussed with relative safety. Sergius Mikhalkov, an established writer of children's stories and author of an allegorical satire written in 1952, The Crayfish, which was daring for its time, composed an extraordinarily pointed poetic fable about the legendary Khan Akhmet. This cruel, one-armed ruler wanted his portrait painted, but killed the man

  who portrayed him with only one arm for insulting the state, and killed a second who represented him with two arms for "lacquering over" reality. A third painter found the key to survival in this eminently Stalinesque situation by painting the terrible khan in profile.49

  Schwarz, the master of dramatic fables, wrote almost all his plays during the Stalin era, though he was understandably not widely produced till after the dictator's death. Schwarz kept himself alive largely by writing for the movie and puppet theaters-the latter providing for him another outlet for Aesopian commentary on Soviet society. His fabulous world combines elements from Russian folklore and the Yiddish theater with the tales of his beloved Andersen in an effort to keep alive "the spirit of music" that had animated the culture of early-twentieth-century Russia. His first book, The Tale of an Old Balalaika, published in 1925, told of a balalaika in search of words for its music. His entire dramatic career can be seen as an attempt to provide those words for the fading but still unextinguished music of a rich culture.

  The distinctive new feature of the post-Stalin stage was the increasing success of problem dramas on contemporary themes in pushing out older Russian classics and propagandists melodramas from theatrical repertoires. In the late Stalin era, for instance, Ostrovsky and Gorky tended to be the most frequently performed dramatists. By the early sixties, however, their works received less than one tenth the number of performances in Moscow that they had been given in the last year of Stalin's life.50

  The harsh official criticism of Zorin's Guests just after Stalin's death encouraged aspiring dramatists to be more oblique but at the same time more many-sided in their critiques of Soviet society.51 The popular and gifted young playwright Volodin ridicules a Young Communist League organizer in his Factory Girl, and tells in intimate, unheroic terms of an old love broken up by long years of absence (presumably in a forced labor camp) in his Five Evenings. A virtual catalogue of new thematic material is introduced into the play Everything Depends on People, which includes a suicide of despair, and a sustained on-stage dialogue between a scientist and a priest in which the latter scores more than a few telling debating points.

  Zorin's new play of 1962, By Moscow Time, presents the now-characteristic juxtaposition of an old-style party official with a young reformer anxious to press de-Stalinization to the limit. The latter decides that the old man must go because "he is not a town, you can't just rename him." Another play of the same year, More Dangerous than an Enemy, works this juxtaposition of the good worker and the bad bureaucrat into a farcical, almost Gogolesque plot. Staged appropriately enough by Akimov, the play

  depicts the battle of wits between evil party leaders and the good scientific workers in a provincial institute dedicated to the study of yoghurt. When the managers hear a rumor (ultimately proved false) that Moscow is about to launch a new campaign to rid the USSR of fools, they make great efforts to arrange to pin this label on their subordinates-only to be outfooled by the scientific workers after a series of episodes faintly reminiscent of a Damon Runyan story. Aksenov's Always on Sale of 1965 is both more inventively fantastic and more bitingly contemporary in vernacular language and satirical thrust than these earlier plays, and may be the harbinger of more interesting drama yet to come.

  The new dramas on contemporary themes clearly provide both the best entertainment available in the USSR and some of its most
effective social criticism. The old dream of Schiller and so many others of restoring to the theater the quality it once possessed as an educational and moral force in society seems, indeed, closer to realization in these new Soviet plays than in the avant-garde theater of the West. However, in view of the straggle still required to gain official consent for any theatrical production in the USSR, the day is probably still far away when the stage can serve-as Tovstonogov put it-as "a great exponent of public thinking … a huge operating table where the actor, the surgeon, can sense the throb of the human heart and brain."52

  New movies, like new plays and poems, illustrate the "interrupted renewal" of Russian culture. Not only has the recent Soviet cinema recaptured some of the creative vitality of its precocious infancy in the 1920's, it has added as well new dimensions of disinterested humanism and psychological introspection.

  Many of the outstanding films of this cinematic renaissance have dealt with the event that has the deepest meaning for the younger generation: the Great Fatherland War (as World War II is known in the USSR). Whereas the many war movies of the late Stalin era emphasized the glory of Soviet victory and the wisdom of the dictator's leadership, the new war movies focus on the impact of this most destructive of all wars on ordinary Russian people. Beginning with Michael Kalatasov's The Cranes are Flying of 1957, Russian films began to portray war as devoid of all constructive purpose. The war became an unwelcome intruder into the world of personal and family relationships, which suddenly seemed somehow more real and appealing than the public world of the "new Soviet man." "The fate of a man" is made to seem as important as ultimate victory or defeat in the cinematic version made in 1959 of Sholokhov's short story of that name. The following year appeared Ballad of a Soldier, the first of the great films of Gregory Chukhrai, which portrays with photographic skill, heartbreaking