Breaking Through in Fiction

By Patricia Blake

New writers shatter the conventions of the past

"You can cover the whole world with asphalt, but a few blades of green grass will always break through," concluded Soviet Novelist Ilya Ehrenburg, as the Stalin era faded. And still they come: surprising new writers who have shattered the deadening conventions of the past. They have recoiled from the novel, viewing it as prefabricated Stalinist architecture. The genre of choice is the short story or novella. Many writers have managed gradually to escape from Socialist Realism, with its obligatory jargon and hortatory themes, traveling a world away --back to 19th century realism. Even Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the two major Russian writers to produce big novels, did so in the classical manner.

Of all the short story writers to emerge since Stalin's death, Vasili Aksyonov, 47, continues to display the greatest virtuosity. Although he has written enormously popular stories in a realist vein, Aksyonov has gone on to explore a variety of modes and permutations of language, entering the 1980s as the Soviet Union's only truly modern prose writer. His evolution is instructive. Aksyonov's first fiction dealt with a previously unheard-of theme: the real life of Soviet teenagers.

In his 1961 novella Starry Ticket, for example, a group of Muscovite dropouts run away to the Baltic beaches to escape the crushing conservatism of their elders. Old guard critics were scandalized, as much by the "uncivic" behavior of Aksyonov's heroes and heroines as by their use of colloquial speech, mixed with underworld and concentration-camp slang, invented words and such Americanisms as gudbai, Brodvei and bugi-vugi. Funny, fresh and richly expressive, Aksyonov's idiom has been his contribution to the larger effort of modern Russian poets to rescue the Russian language from deadening officialese.

Much of Aksyonov's fiction has a dark and enigmatic cast that is the shadow of the Gulag. Like many other contemporary Soviet writers, he is the child of Stalin's victims: Aksyonov was brought up in one of the infamous orphanages called Homes for the Children of Enemies of the People. Few writers can reproduce the lingering stench of brutality and fear better than he. In his story Victory, a gem of Russian short fiction, a chance game of chess on a train between a brutish but canny player and an intellectual becomes a moral life and death struggle.

The Steel Bird, which was published last year in the U.S., marks Aksyonov's break with realism in favor of the grotesque. This novella features a ghastly humanoid with a metal carapace who blackmails the superintendent of an apartment house into letting him live in the elevator. Acting with Stalinist guile, the steel bird takes over the entire building and its tenants. The structure soon collapses; the creature is left to roost triumphantly atop the elevator shaft, surveying the debris.

This allegory of dictatorship scarcely endeared Aksyonov to Soviet authorities. Much of his recent work has been deemed unacceptable, including The Burn, a novel that will be published in Russian in July by Ardis Press in Ann Arbor, Mich., and in English next year by Houghton Mifflin. A masterwork of modern Russian literature, The Burn offers an engrossing view of the life of party officials and literary bureaucrats in the Brezhnev era. Aksyonov, who has been under heavy official pressure to leave the U.S.S.R., ought to be in the U.S. in time to help his translator render 230,000 words of racy experimental prose.

The reigning Soviet master of realism, Yuri Trifonov, 54, is also a child of the Gulag. Among his first writings is a biographical work about his father, Valentin Trifonov, an old comrade of Stalin's whom the dictator ordered shot in the late 1930s. Trifonov's forte is the novella evoking the mean-spiritedness and venality afflicting much of the Soviet urban middle class. Trifonov's stories turn on moral choice--seemingly paltry everyday decisions that make the difference between a life of decency or betrayal of self, family and friends.

Trifonov's most important recent work is his novella The House on the Embankment, which deals with the ultimate Soviet dilemma: whether or not to turn in a fellow creature to the secret police. The book explores the process by which a student comes to denounce the teacher who is also his benefactor and prospective father-in-law, all the while justifying his actions as perfectly reasonable. A dramatization of the novel was cut by censors, who removed unflattering references to Stalin before allowing the play to open. In spite of these deletions, Trifonov's powerful theme riveted audiences when the play opened in Moscow last month.

A different strain of realism is represented by the derevenshchiki (village writers), who celebrate Russia's traditional rural values and lament the woes of the peasantry. The most promising derevenshchik is a Siberian writer, Valentin Rasputin, 43, author of numerous stories and small-scale novels, including Live and Remember, published in the U.S. in 1978. Live and Remember is an unsentimental yet compassionate depiction of a peasant couple: a World War II deserter on the run and his wife, one of the strong, suffering women who have remained the queens of Russian literature.

These works have not appeared in print without a struggle. Many remained in limbo for years until cuts and revisions were made to fit political demands. Books by such established writers as Andrei Bitov and Fazil Iskander have been dismembered or suppressed altogether. Only odds and ends of Bitov's novel, Pushkin House, have appeared in various Soviet magazines. The full text of this elegant portrayal of a Leningrad literary family is only available from Ardis Press, publisher of Iskander's wonderfully funny cycle of stories, Sandro from Chegem.

Some of the Soviet Union's most important writing has never been published there at all. Instead, it circulates widely from hand to hand in the process known as samizdat (literally, self-publishing). Varlam Shalamov's lapidary concentration-camp stories, some of which were recently published in the U.S. by W.W. Norton under the title Kolyma Tales, have been in samizdat for 20 years. Currently the most prized samizdat work is Venedikt Yerofeyev's Moscow-Petushki. The account of a phantasmagoric drunken excursion on a suburban train, Yerofeyev's novella may be the most innovative piece of prose written in the U.S.S.R. for more than four decades. The Russian text has been published in France.

Once a book has been forced into exile, its author often follows. Solzhenitsyn was ostentatiously deported in 1974, while Andrei Sinyavsky, Joseph Brodsky, Victor Nekrasov, Anatoli Gladilin, Yuz Aleshkovsky and others were pressured in various ways to emigrate. Vladimir Voinovich, the author of The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, a samizdat favorite published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1977, was warned by the Soviet authorities in March that his life would become "intolerable" unless he left the Soviet Union.

Georgi Vladimov, 49, is another exceptionally talented writer who has been cut down in mid-career and who is being hounded by the KGB. One reason for the persecution is his celebrated novella, Faithful Ruslan, which has circulated all over the country in samizdat; it was published in the U.S. last year by Simon & Schuster. Ruslan tells of a concentration-camp dog, pitilessly trained to guard convicts, that becomes a stray when most of the Stalinist camps are closed down in 1956. Ruslan, and other dogs of his kind, keep a vigil at the local railway station, hoping for the arrival of the familiar convoys of prisoners whom they can once again herd to the camp. "Anyone who waits with such single-minded devotion is always rewarded in the end." Sure enough, one day "an incredible horde" came tumbling out of a train, laughing and shouting. "In a moment Ruslan was transformed: flexible, alert, his yellow eyes sharp and keen." The dogs mistake for prisoners a group of construction workers who have come to turn the abandoned camp site into a factory. When the young people begin strolling toward the site in a disorganized column, some singing and even dancing to the music of accordions, the dogs know what to do: attack.

Vladimov's allegory of contemporary Soviet society, which was inspired by an actual event, hardly needs to be explained to Soviet readers. As a fable of literary life, it signifies that the official hounds schooled under Stalin are likely to keep biting at the heels of insubordinate writers in the Soviet Union for a long time to come. --

EXCERPT

"He came to see me and complained about his appetite. His stomach actually was swollen and covered with blue lines. My appetite has disappeared, he said. Then take the matter to the police, I advised boldly. What about the digestion tract, he asked. Some rivets in the gut really had worked loose, there were bolts rattling around, and some welded seams had come apart. When all's said and done I'm no engineer and we're not living in some science fiction novel, but in ordinary Soviet reality, I announced to him and washed my hands of it. Very well, Doctor Zeldovich, you'll end up in here, he said and slapped his swollen belly. I opened the window and suggested he vacate the flat. He flew out of the window. His flight was heavy, sometimes he would fall, like a plane in air pockets, but then he would suddenly soar and disappear. Of course I realize I'll have to pay for my boldness, but the prospect of ending up in his stomach, in that steel bag, I tell you straight, I don't relish in the least. "

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