Freedom Waiting for Vision

By JOHN KOHAN MOSCOW

A Cyclone fence and metal bars encircle the stage. Like a caged animal, a slender young woman in black paces back and forth. Suddenly, she rattles the prison door, her pale features exposed by the spotlight. "Three hundred forty-nine days! Three hundred forty-nine days!" she screams. "Bite on your hat, anything to keep from sobbing!" Few in the audience at Moscow's Sovremennik Theater stifle the emotion inspired by such searing scenes from Eugenia Ginzburg's memoirs of the Gulag, Journey into the Whirlwind. An innocent victim of the Stalinist purges, the heroine endures humiliating interrogations, strip searches and endless nights during which she covers her ears to block out the cries of the tortured. In a final, chilling tableau, she even welcomes assignment to the labor camps as a liberation. Viewers leave speaking in hushed tones, bludgeoned by the past.

In the colonnaded auditorium of the House of Physicians, other Muscovites listen transfixed to a recording of poet Anna Akhmatova reading her long- banned poem Requiem in a deep, rasping voice. When the melancholy cadences end, literary historian Lydia Chukovskaya, 82, recounts how she memorized the verse from scraps of paper that Akhmatova had handed her before the poet burned them in an ashtray.

The lights come up at the House of Composers after a screening of The Puppy, director Alexander Grishin's new film about a young defender of perestroika who loses his battle to expose corruption. At least one viewer is disturbed by a final scene showing the body of the youth floating in factory waste water. "Why can't the film have a positive ending?" asks the decorated war veteran. "Everything is so negative today." He is interrupted by hoots of protest from the audience.

Forget those quiet Moscow nights of song. There are not enough evenings in the month now to attend all the theater premieres, art exhibitions, poetry readings, film previews and cultural debates taking place in the Soviet capital. Time has to be set aside for watching trend-setting "musical- information shows" such as View or the monthly video digest Before and After Midnight, or for perusing the thick monthlies like Novy Mir and Znamya, which Soviets affectionately call the "fat journals." If the short-lived liberalization that followed the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 was known as "the thaw," the cultural revolution set in motion by Mikhail Gorbachev has proved to be nothing less than a spring flood.

Culture has not remained the exclusive domain of Moscow intellectuals. On the Arbat pedestrian mall, would-be Pushkins and Pasternaks peddle their autographed poetry for a ruble or more a page. Sunday painters in Izmailovo Park display their labored tributes to the Russian futurists, suprematists and constructivists of the early 20th century. More than 200 experimental studio theaters have sprouted in Moscow alone. The cultural explosion has been felt as far away as the Pacific port of Nakhodka, where local artists set up a puppet theater workshop, and in Yaroslavl in the Soviet heartland, scene of a rollicking street festival celebrating the arts.

Artistic exiles and emigre art have been joyously welcomed home. Director Yuri Lyubimov is working again at Moscow's Taganka Theater, with the company he led until he was forced into exile in 1984. Literary journals print works by emigre writers like Georgi Vladimov, whose chilling moral parable of a Gulag guard dog let loose in society, Faithful Ruslan, appeared two months ago in Znamya. Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn remains an exception, awaiting official rehabilitation from his sylvan refuge in Vermont.

Rejected works such as Boris Pasternak's epic novel Doctor Zhivago and Vasili Grossman's saga of the Battle of Stalingrad, Life and Fate, now occupy their rightful places on Soviet bookshelves. Mikhail Bulgakov, who died in 1940, has been accorded more recognition today than he enjoyed when he was alive; dozens of productions of his plays and prose works have been staged in Moscow since the advent of glasnost, including his satiric tale of Soviet social engineering, The Heart of a Dog. Says literary critic Vladimir Lakshin: "Even if perestroika were to end today, what has already been accomplished in the past three years will go down in the history of Russian literature."

Soviet audiences once delighted in conspiring with performers to find double meanings and nuances in every turn of phrase. Reading between the lines of classic and seemingly innocent plays became a form of art, a weapon against literal-minded censors who failed to perceive the broader message. The loosening of state controls over the press has made such clever stratagems irrelevant. Blunt social criticism can be found in the latest copies of the weeklies Ogonyok and Moscow News. Says theater critic Vilas Silunas: "When the press can say everything in black and white, why resort to stagings of Shakespeare?"

The most vigorous response to the new demand for bold and open debate has come from documentary filmmakers. The problems of growing up in the Soviet Union have been unblinkingly presented in such films as Is It Easy to Be Young?, a group snapshot of Soviet teenagers, from heavy-metal fans to Afghanistan war veterans. Director Marina Goldovskaya vividly exposed the brutality of the first Soviet labor camps in Solovetsky Power and profiled a farmer fighting against bureaucrats in The Peasant of Archangel. This new style of "critical realism" has found echoes in feature films like Little Vera, a blistering psychological portrait of family life in a hellish industrial town.

Yet the new freedoms have not inspired anything approaching a Soviet Renaissance. The two landmark works that represent glasnost in the West, Tengiz Abuladze's film Repentance and Anatoli Rybakov's novel Children of the Arbat, were completed before the new period of liberalization. Says theater critic Igor Shagin: "Our artists now have freedom, more money, the right to travel abroad and meet foreigners here. People want to know where all the masterpieces are."

Poet Bulat Okudzhava, one of a handful of artists whose works captured the spirit of the first post-Stalinist era of reform, wonders about the aftereffects of the long period of stagnation. "The 'thaw' generation is tired and burned out," he says. "But the next generation is simply not prepared to carry on the reforms." Filmmaker Elem Klimov, the head of the Cinema Workers' Union, admits that the transition has been difficult, like "struggling to break down a wall, only to confront yourself on the other side." Says he: "For so long we have said, 'Give us our freedom, and we will show you!' But having freedom is not so simple. Many have discovered they have nothing to say."

Though the country's cultural life is being invigorated by a transfusion of the best of six decades of banned Soviet and emigre art, the competition has exposed the mediocrity of many established artists. The freshly released crop of classics has also set exceedingly high standards for aspiring artists, who were spoon-fed notions of official culture that are now held up to ridicule. Says Sergei Zalygin, editor in chief of Novy Mir: "Like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky in the past century, our artists need to find a new style and a new way of thinking if they hope to create a psychological portrait of society today."

The sense that the artist has a prophetic mission in society has haunted Russian culture since the 19th century. That heavy burden crushed novelist Nikolai Gogol, who was never able to equal his masterpiece Dead Souls. It ultimately led other writers, like Leo Tolstoy, away from art and into dogmatic polemics. The weight can be felt today on the Soviet artistic community. But the essential paradox of glasnost is that when cultural leaders raise their voices, they can no longer be heard above the excited babble of an entire nation learning to speak for the first time.

Some younger artists question whether an obsessive concern with the raw realities of daily life may prove to be as intellectually numbing as the . pompous official art of the past. They have turned inward to explore the realm of the subconscious and myth. Others have followed a completely different path, setting art aside to take up journalism, history and politics. The diversity, even the confusion, has been welcomed after decades of conformity. "We need time to get over our feeling of shock and process all this new information," says Okudzhava. "The masterpieces will come later. Now we must editorialize, speak out, make our confession and repent." And perhaps weep, like the audiences at Journey into the Whirlwind.