Limited Edition

A new attack on censorship

It was planned as Moscow's publishing party of the year, perhaps even of the decade. But when Soviet literati, and a few Western journalists, arrived at the Rhythm Cafe last week, they found a sign on the door announcing that the party site was closed for "cleaning." Workers at the people's bistro said that sanitary inspectors had descended on it during the night, found the precincts wanting and ordered a day of mandatory hygiene.

That heavyhanded action was apparently the Soviet hierarchy's response to an unprecedented literary stroke by some the country's best-known writers and poets. At the Rhythm Cafe, they had planned to unveil a major anthology of nonconformist Soviet writings and drawings, many of which the censors had previously turned down for official publication. Novelist Vasili Aksyonov, one of the collection's editors, made it clear that the anthology, entitled Metropol, was not a collection of dissident writings, but a collection that was "purely literary, with no political implications." Nonetheless the anthology is a courageous public attempt by the 24 writers involved to resist the literary clamps that are fastened on Soviet culture at home and that have sent some the country's most powerful writers into exile. Declared Aksyonov: "We think that the time has come for our readers to decide for themselves."

The vast majority of Soviet readers are unlikely to have that opportunity. Only ten copies of Metropol, a 480-page 17-in. by 24-in. volume, were produced and eight are still in the hands of the editors. Meanwhile, a limited edition of Metropol will be printed in the U.S. in May by Ardis Press, a small publishing house in Ann Arbor, Mich., that specializes in Russian literature.

Westerners would find little that is startling in the anthology; Soviet citizens a lot. Defying the censors' prudish tastes' Satirist Fazil Iskander recounts the sexual adventures of an undersized lover named Marat in The Little Giant of Big Sex. His revels include an interrupted moment of intimacy with the mistress of Lavrenti Beria, Joseph Stalin's last secret police chief. Three poems by Yuz Aleshkovsky touch on a subject that has been taboo in the Soviet Union since the ban on Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: the concentration camp. One verse describes a lesbian wedding" in a camp barracks; another, a conjugal visit by the wife of a political prisoner.

Short-story Writer Boris Vakhtin evokes 19th century Satirist Nikolai Gogol in The Sheepskin Coat, a story about the day-to-day corruption of Soviet bureaucracy. In a less contentious vein, Poet Andrei Voznesensky has contributed two short, meditative verses on the loneliness of artistic creation. The volume is illustrated with some tamely sensuous drawings of bound nude figures by Artist Anatoly Brusilovsky. There is also one foreign fillip in Metropol: an excerpt from American Novelist John Updike's latest work, set in Africa, entitled The Coup. It was included to illustrate the art of contemporary Russian translation.

Metropol, which took eleven months to put together, is more than a collective joust with censorship and what the volume describes as "the nauseating inertia that exists in our publishing houses. It is also an attempt by established artists who matured in the Khrushchev era to lend support to younger, often unpublished writers who have never known the same limited relaxation. Says Ellendea Proffer, who with her husband Carl runs the Ardis Press: "The older generation wants them to have a chance that is officially denied them."

Official denial is what the anthology's editors got when they presented their labors to the Moscow branch of the all-powerful Soviet Writers' Union. After a little pondering, a union committee delivered a "severe criticism" and decided not to allow publication, pending review and discussion by other sections of the organization. But the solons of censorship in Moscow may soon find themselves outmaneuvered. The Voice of America has obtained excerpts from Metropol and intends to broadcast them across the whole country.

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