simplicity, and a complete absence of propaganda the accidental heroism, brief leave, and return to death of a childlike young Russian soldier. Chukhrai's Clear Skies, which provided the occasion for an emotional demonstration of approval at its first performance in Moscow in 1961, contrasts the honor and suffering of Soviet prisoners of war with the brutality of the system which suspected and humiliated them in the post-war period. The picture which makes the most daring technical innovations and at the same time the most moving indictment of war is My Name Is Ivan, which appeared in 1962, introducing dream sequences along with documentary excerpts into its tragic tale of a young orphan.
This new cinematic emphasis on the integrity of the individual rather than the nature of his cause has also altered the traditional method of representing the Civil War. Just as Hollywood has introduced "good Indians" into its melodramatic Westerns-partly out of a need to break the monotony and partly out of a belated sense of justice-so Soviet films have begun to find traces of humanity and even nobility in the White opposition. Indeed, audience sympathy is ultimately on the side of an individual White guardsman in two widely admired recent films of the Civil War: Chukhrai's Forty-First of 1956 and Vladimir Fetin's The Foal of i960.
Finally, it is interesting to note the return of film makers to those classics which especially fascinated the Russian intelligentsia in the nineteenth century. Thus, Gregory Kozintsev has moved on from his sensitive Don Quixote of 1956 to his film version of Hamlet in 1964. In contrast to Turgenev's "Hamlet and Don Quixote" of almost exactly a century before, Kozintsev depicted Quixote as a psychologically disturbed and tragic figure, and gave to Hamlet a certain quiet nobility. Like Pasternak (whose translation of the play was used for the script), Kozintsev seemed to be vindicating Hamlet from the symbolic opprobrium heaped on him by Turgenev (and the lesser critics of the Stalin era). The message that the new Soviet drama as a whole is conveying to its interested if often perplexed audiences is essentially that which Hamlet conveyed to the loyal but two-dimensional Horatio: "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy."53
At the same time, it is only fair to note a less flattering resemblance between the present generation and the "Hamletism" of the old intelligentsia: its confusion and uncertainty of objectives. The younger generation is far surer of what it opposes than of what it accepts, and much of its work is not technically impressive by the increasingly refined standards of literary criticism. Yet the authenticity of aspiration and popularity of the quest cannot be denied. Their art has, as Tertz maintains, "hypotheses instead of a goal"; and the testing ground for such hypotheses lies not in the
hothouse of literary criticism but in the broad arena of life. The response elicited in the lives of the audience-that indispensable second participant in Akimov's unending dialogue of creative culture-is a truer measure of significance than the reviews of critics. Increasingly, new productions in the USSR are animated by lively and often turbulent "exchange of opinion" sessions in which artists discuss with the audience the nature and significance of a play immediately after the final curtain.54
New literary "hypotheses" often seem to draw less inspiration from literature than from other art media. But, whereas the hidden source of inspiration for the new literature of the silver age was music, the controlling medium now tends to be the visual arts. Akimov is a gifted painter; and Voznesensky, who was trained as an architect, has stated:
I do not think that closeness to his literary predecessors is very good for a writer. "Incest" leads to degeneracy. I have got more from Rublev, Joan Miro, and the later Corbusier than from Byron.55
The importance of painting lies not so much in the large numbers and occasional virtuosity of the experimental canvases that are unofficially painted in the USSR, but rather in the fact that visual art tries to do what the most gifted new writers are also trying to accomplish: depict objectively the real world. The Promethean visionaries of the late imperial period sought to leave the material world altogether, and fled into the world of music, the most immaterial of all the arts and the only guide man could hope to find in his quest for a new language of outer space. In the post-Stalin era, however, when the philistine "metal eaters"56 have thrust their wares out into space, the creative imagination has moved back to earth and sought to grasp once more Russian reality. Thus, young Russians turn to the visual arts for guidance, but they instinctively look beyond the conventional realists to the "more real" art of ancient Russia and the modern West. Hence Voznesensky's juxtaposition of Rublev with Miro and Corbusier, and his powerful anti-war poem that begins "I am Goya" and describes his paintings by means of plays on his name.57 This disturbed and often grotesque Spanish prophet of artistic modernism also appears in the small list of those whom Tertz commends as guides toward the new "phantasmagorical art which . . . would best respond to the spirit of our epoch."58
May the unearthly imaginations of Hoffmann and Dostoevsky, of Goya and Chagall, of Maiakovsky (the most socialist realist of all), as well as those of many other realists and non-realists-,may these teach us how to express truth with the aid of the absurd and fantastic!59
Akimov speaks of the influence upon his theatrical conceptions of pictorial images from Russian icons, Daumier, Van Gogh, and the post-war Italian cinema.60 Yutkevich speaks of the ideal Soviet movie of the future as a "synthesis of the style of Watteau and Goya."61
One of the most remarkable of recent Soviet short stories, "Adam and Eve" by Yury Kazakov, tells of a young painter and a girl going to a deserted island. It is a kind of return to Eden in search of artistic truth. Yet the painter is as restless as the Soviet youth he personifies. He sees himself as "a prophet without an idea." In a deserted church, however, he has a kind of vision of rediscovering "the genuine life of the earth, the water, and the people." He climbs the belfry, and looks down from the sky above to "another sky . . . the whole immeasurable mass of surrounding waters luminous with reflected light."62 In the last scene, he departs over those waters amidst the strange, unearthly whiteness of the northern lights.
One is left again with the image of a ship at sea and no fixed destination. But one feels certain that the destination is not to be found on the approved itineraries of the state travel agency. One can almost imagine a middle-aged Communist official rebuking him with the words addressed by a Pravda editorial five years earlier "to all Soviet workers in literature and the arts":
He who tries to reject the method of socialist realism imitates the irresponsible captain who throws the ship's compass overboard on the high seas so that he may guide his ship "freely."63
The title and imagery of Kazakov's story are but one illustration of the fourth, and most surprising, aspect of the cultural revival: the renewed interest in religion.
There is, to be sure, no dramatic religious revival in progress; and regular churchgoing continues to be primarily an activity of women and elderly people. But there is a continuing fervor in the liturgical worship of the Orthodox Church which attracts a steady stream of brief appearances for baptism and Easter services.64 The growing appeal of church marriages has forced the regime to set up its own grotesque "marriage palaces" designed to provide all the material accouterments of a church (music, flowers, and solemn decor) for the approved civil ceremonies of the atheistic state. The number of those seeking training for the priesthood in the post-Stalin era increased to the point where a correspondence course was even introduced to accommodate those who might otherwise have been barred by distance, poverty, or bureaucratic obstruction. A program of sharply increased persecution built around the requirement that all would-be semi-
narians submit to a preliminary interrogation and discussion with specially chosen committees of the Young Communist League has enabled Soviet authorities to report with grim satisfaction that the numbers in seminaries have sharply declined since 1959 as a result of "extensive individual work with the students."65
But there still appears to be some validity to th
e old comparison reputedly made between religion and a nail by Lunacharsky in the early days of atheistic propaganda: "The harder you hit it, the deeper you drive it into the wood." Some of the continuing excesses of atheistic evangelism-the noisy interruption of church services, the offering of rewards for unearthing secret prayer meetings, and the official glorification of those who break with religion and publish lurid exposes-all serve to arouse a certain sense of sympathy even among the atheists and agnostics who still predominate within the younger generation.
In an ironic inversion of the classical conflict between fathers and sons, the younger generation now often picks up religious interests as a means of shocking their atheistically conformist parents. Young Russians seem particularly fond of ridiculing and embarrassing the stereotyped party lectures on scientific atheism, which were increased in number some threefold in 1958. A favorite cartoon in the Soviet humor journal Krokodil shows believers praying for the return of another anti-religious lecturer to their region.66
On a deeper level, the story is frequently told among the younger generation of the old peasant woman whose stubborn religious convictions were impairing the ideological training of the young. A leading party propagandist was brought all the way from Moscow to give her a highly technical illustrated lecture on the material origins and evolutionary laws of creation. The old woman listens intently to this brilliant performance designed to demonstrate once and for all the irrefutable wisdom of scientific atheism; and at the end she nods her head and says: "Yes, comrade, great indeed-greater than I had supposed-are the works of the Lord."
The new interest in religion is more than casual curiosity. It arises in the first place out of the re-examination of the Russian past that has been quietly going on among the young in the wake of the denigration of Stalin. The high price now placed on religious art, the staging of Dostoevsky's novels, Melnikov-Pechersky's tales of Old Believer life, and Rimsky-Korsakov's long-proscribed Invisible City of Kitezh-all respond to the extraordinary interest of the young in rediscovering these "survivals of the past." A new community of interest began to develop in the fifties between the very young and the very old at the expense of the middle-aged "heirs of Stalin."
Solzhenitsyn's use of the vernacular in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich gave an evocative power to that pioneering revelation of suffering under Stalinism not unlike that which Awakum's use of an earlier vernacular had imparted to his harrowing autobiography. Solzhenitsyn subsequently turned more calmly but no less passionately than the arch-priest to the forms of the Old Russian Church for such consolation as he was able to find.
When you travel the byroads of Central Russia you begin to understand the secret of the pacifying Russian countryside.
It is in the churches . . . they lift their bell towers-graceful, shapely, all different-high over mundane timber and thatch . . . from villages that are cut off and invisible to each other they soar to the same heaven. . . .
People were always selfish and often unkind. But the evening chimes used to ring out, floating over the villages, fields, and woods. Reminding men that they must abandon trivial concerns of this world, and give time and thought to eternity. These chimes, which only one old tune keeps alive for us, raised people up and prevented them from sinking down on all fours.67
At the very least, religious ideas have opened up new areas of the imagination to a substantial number of young people seeking release from boredom inside the contemporary USSR. The literature of the post-Stalin era contains an increasing number of themes and images borrowed from the Orthodox heritage. Biblical titles are often used, as in Dudintsev's novel, Not by Bread Alone. Names often have a symbolic value, as in The Shadow, where the idealistic hero who struggles with his shadow is named Christian Theodore, and the maiden who alone stays by him is called Annuntsiata. In the original version of Everything Depends on People (which was entitled The Torch) the Orthodox priest is represented not as a caricatured reactionary but as an ideal Soviet man-a mathematician and war hero-who converted to Christianity in order to serve humanity. Even after such details were stricken by the censor, the priest in the revised version still manages to explain his beliefs with some dignity. He does not attempt to refute the traditional anti-religious arguments of the atheistic scientist but rather counterattacks at a deeper level, insisting that "our young people are asking questions for which you have no answers."68
This very phenomenon makes the revival of interest in religion profoundly disturbing to the regime, whatever the extent of actual religious conviction. In calling "for more atheist books, good ones and varied!"69 Communist officials rightly complain that much of the literature ostensibly designed to expose religious sects in the USSR is dispassionately objective if not even sympathetic to the object of study. The bizarre life and beliefs
of the sects is more in keeping with the phantasmagorical and hypothetical world of the Soviet youth than the colorless world of bureaucratic atheism. Thus sectarian religion seems to have even greater appeal to the young than Orthodoxy or the ultra-Orthodoxy of the schismatics. Communist journals continually complain of fervid but elusive sects, such as Jehovah's Witnesses and Seventh-Day Adventists. These sects are similar in many respects to earlier forms of apocalyptical sectarianism, which also grafted new Western religious forms into a long-standing native tradition.70
Far more important because of their impact in large cities and among educated youth are the Baptists, into whose ranks some of the more pietistic and less apocalyptical native sectarians (such as the "milk drinkers") have tended to merge. Communist journals have repeatedly told of young people resigning from the Young Communist League to join the Baptist youth group, popularly known as the "Baptomol."71 At the congress of the Komsomol in 1962, the head of this heavily subsidized, mammoth organization publicly beseeched his followers to emulate the enthusiasm and dedication of the harassed and indigent Baptist youth.
The biblical simplicity and fervid piety of the Baptists have had an impact on many more than their 600,000 active adult members. A Baptist appears as a leading positive character in N. Dubov's story "A Difficult Test," and as an admirable minor figure in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Conversions to some such simplified form of Christianity have taken place among a number of educated people. Even the leading Soviet pedagogical journal published an eloquent profession de foi of a university-educated teacher (together with a long refutation and an ominous notation that she lost her job in 1959):
I have recently read in the papers how various people have broken with religion. . . . Why may I not write and publish in a journal about how I came to Christianity, in what way and for what motives I have come to believe in God? . . .
I felt the need for answers to these questions: Whence came human suffering? Why does man live? and What does true happiness consist of? … I thoroughly worked through Indian philosophy, the gospels, etc. And as a result of all of this, I came to the conclusion that only religion, faith in Christ, gives meaning to human life, gives warmth and light to the human soul. Science then should be subordinate to religion, because when unchecked by religion as now, it works towards destruction. . . ,72
It is impossible to tell from these fragmentary printed excerpts from her letter what, if any, church or sect she has joined, just as it was difficult to determine the exact doctrinal allegiance of the thirty-two Russian Christians who asked in vain for asylum in the American embassy early in 1963.
What is clear is that there are still many anonymous Christians in Russia, and that genuinely pious families often face one of the crudest of all forms of persecution: the forcible removal of children from the home.
The ferment of the Khrushchev era may have represented only the passing unrest of peripheral intellectuals: foredoomed, if not ultimately meaningless. Certainly the young revokes were more certain of what they were against than of what they favored. They were, moreover, not revolutionaries in any meaningful political sense. The ability of the regime to sustain one-party
rule and to anatomize opposition lent an air of unreality to any consideration of alternative forms of political and social organization. la any case, the younger generation in the USSR-in contrast to those of other Communist states, such as Hungary and Poland-did not generally relate communism with foreign domination but saw it as an irreversible part of their history. Communism has been made to appear less odious by the fact that Russia has emerged under its banner to a position of power unprecedented in Russian history. Since there was every material inducement for gifted youth to join the managerial structure of a state able to use and reward the talented, cultural unrest seemed to some observers little more than the passing malaise of a bohemian fringe on the periphery of a growing industrial society.
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