Poet on a String

"I am a Soviet writer, a human being made of flesh and blood, not a puppet to be pulled on a string." So wrote Andrei Voznesensky in a 1967 letter to Pravda protesting censorship. Pravda pigeonholed the letter, but it appeared in the West, and since then Russia's most brilliant young poet has been scarcely published in his own country, and he has repeatedly been refused permission to travel to the West. The author's latest play, Look Out for Your Faces, was in rehearsal for nine months while awaiting clearance from the Ministry of Culture.

Last month the play finally opened to cheers at the Taganka, Director Yuri Lyubimov's famous experimental theater in Moscow. For many Russians, its debut seemed to signify a small break in the official campaign to silence Russia's independent writers and intellectuals, including Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Poet Alexander Tvardovsky, who recently handed in his resignation as editor of the liberal magazine Novy Mir (TIME, March 2).

Boots on the Moon. It soon became clear, however, that at least one first-nighter found Voznesensky's revue an ideological bust. After only two performances, the play was pulled off stage for revisions, apparently on orders from an official representing the all-powerful ideological section of the Central Committee. It is anybody's guess when Look Out for Your Faces will be performed again in Russia. Last week Moscow was buzzing with speculation on which of the show's skits, poems and songs had offended the Central Committee. Among the possibilities: > In one skit, performers hold up letters spelling out A luna kamila, a palindrome meaning "The moon has vanished." An official, hypersensitive about the Soviet failure to get a man on the moon first, might have seen this as a suggestion that the moon had vanished to the Americans. But Voznesensky also includes the line, "They stepped on its soul with dirty boots," indicating that he is simply mourning the loss of the moon's mystery and romance. > In a sketch on a soccer game, the left wing for one team scores a goal but kicks the ball into his own net instead of into that of the opposing team. A narrator says, "In our day, there's no limit to our capacity to learn. The right knows what the left is doing, and the left knows what the right is doing, but neither knows who is really on the left and who is really on the right." > The last straw may have been the reading of a Voznesensky poem published in Novy Mir before Tvardovsky quit under conservative pressure. Called Can't Write, with the parenthetical subtitle (Ironic), the poem begins: "I am in crisis, my soul is dumb"--apparently a reference to Voznesensky's troubles with censorship. It goes on:

But my critic Will write in an article that I, Snarling in this most crisis-free of systems, Am the only one to have a crisis.

TIME Moscow Correspondent Stanley Cloud speculates that it might have been the overall impact of the play, rather than any single part, that proved unacceptable. "This Soviet version of an unstructured, multimedia show hardly seems likely to fit the conservative concept of socialist realism," observes Cloud. "In the final analysis, this, in the current age of literary conformity in the U.S.S.R., may be its most damning feature."

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