The Unconquered

Out of Russia each month comes a trickle of contraband manuscripts. Usually handwritten in loose-leaf notebooks by pseudonymous authors, the books are smuggled to Western publishers via an intellectual underground. Last week two of these recently published volumes. Abram Tertz's On Socialist Realism and Aleksandr Sergeyevich Yesenin-Volpin's The Leaf of Spring, gave Western readers a look at Russian intellectuals' bitter disenchantment.

Whores & Hangmen. Already noted for a brilliant satirical novel on Communism. The Trial Begins (TIME, Oct. 3, 1960). the author who hides behind the pseudonym Abram Tertz has been variously reported to be a professor in a Russian university, a prominent Russian novelist, or Poet Yesenin-Volpin himself. In his new work (Pantheon; $2.95). he lashes out against the state-dictated code of "socialist realism," which reduces authors to mere copywriters of Communist propaganda, beholden to "Purpose with a capital P." Writes Tertz: "A poet not only writes poems, but helps, in his own way, to build Communism. So, too, do sculptors, musicians, agronomists, engineers, laborers, policemen and lawyers, as well as theaters, machines, newspapers and guns." Soviet literature, says Tertz, has become the false bible of Communism, in which "whores are as modest as virgins and hangmen tender as mothers."

The doublethink of Communism, continues Tertz, has even more ominous overtones : "So that prisons should vanish forever, we built new prisons. So that all frontiers should fall, we surrounded ourselves with a Chinese Wall. So that work should become a rest and a pleasure, we introduced forced labor. So that not one drop of blood should be shed any more, we killed and killed and killed."

Bleak Notations. The hypocrisy of the code of socialist realism is equally repellent to Yesenin-Volpin. His Russia is one of pain ("The only beauty that I know"), drugs, suffering, alcoholism, prison; many of the poems in The Leaf of Spring (Praeger; $3) bear such bleak notations as Lubyanka, Karaganda and Prison of Chernovtsy--the jails, mental institutions and concentration camps where Yesenin-Volpin has spent most of his adult life.

Yesenin-Volpin's pessimism and rebelliousness come naturally. His father, the great Russian village poet, Sergei Yesenin, was an ardent early Bolshevik, whose increasing disillusion with Communism was accompanied by a marriage to Dancer Isadora Duncan and a slide into alcoholic and narcotic torpor. His bastard son, Aleksandr Sergeyevich, was the result of a liaison with a Russian writer-translator, Nadezhda Volpin. Shortly after his son's birth, Yesenin slashed his wrists in a Leningrad hotel, wrote his last poem in his blood, then hanged himself.

Black Despair. Like his father, Yesenin-Volpin is a natural anarchist. "Only a morally and mentally defective person can fail to reach a stage of extreme indignation in the Soviet Union," he wrote. Yesenin-Volpin expressed his sense of outrage in a parody of Poe.

O Prophet, plainly no mere bird! Is there no foreign country Where to argue freely about art portends no peril sore? Shall I ever reach that region, if such be, and not get shot? . . . Croaked the Raven: Nevermore!

In 1949 the Soviet regime packed Yesenin-Volpin off to an asylum for "irresponsibility," then sent him on for further therapy at a Siberian prison camp. After Stalin's death, he was freed in a general amnesty, but this did not ease his black despair. He raged:

O fellow citizens, cows, and oxen Just look at what the Bolsheviks have done to you! . . . Drunk from despair, I'll shoot myself, So as not to watch the ruthless simplicity Of man's dismal, everyday existence, And with all the holy bitterness of gloom Not spoil the life of some young person; And, in addition, make absolutely sure That Russia gets no vestige of my ashes.

Such poems--never published in Russia but circulated among friends--caused the Soviets to jail Yesenin-Volpin in 1959. But he had made elaborate plans to smuggle his work out. "When these works are finished and publication arranged," he wrote, "I shall calmly go to jail in the knowledge that they have failed to conquer me."

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