the time of the Stalinist blight.
In a short poem written in a Soviet youth magazine in the old folklore form a young Soviet poet seeks to rehabilitate the symbol of Westernization desecrated by Stalin, to free it even of its Leninist name and revolutionary symbols:
Tell us something of St. Petersburg,
For as yet we have not seen it.
Long ago we implored the producers
Please, do not bring us all those miscellaneous films
About lovely, deserted ladies,
But bring us St. Isaac's in a movie
The Bronze Horseman, the old fortress
And all about the vast St. Petersburg.85
Of course, it is impossible fully to appraise-and would be dangerous to underestimate-the crippling effects of a generation of terror and the continuation of tight censorship and control. 'Moral convalescence'8* may be a long process. The 'silence of Soviet culture' is most insidious in the self-imposed censorship that it subtly encouraged. As the Soviet novelist Daniel Granin wrote in a short story in 1956 significantly entitled 'My Own Opinion' (and severely criticized by the party bureaucracy):
Silence is the most convenient form of lying. It knows how to keep peace with the conscience; it craftily preserves your right to withhold your personal opinion on the grounds that someday you will have a chance to express it.87
Yet there can also be a positive side to silence: a depth and purity that sometimes comes to those who have suffered in silence. This quality is often hard to discover in the uninhibited and talkative West, but may be more familiar to those who for so long gave special authority to monastic elders trained by long periods of silence and withdrawal from the world.
'Speech, after long silence; it is right,' wrote Yeats.88 Perhaps those who have been so long forced to live with silence may have rediscovered the joy of simple speech or penetrated the mysteries of authentic human communication more fully than many seemingly sophisticated and articulate writers outside. 'Music is born in silence,' reverently writes one of the best of contemporary Soviet movie directors,89 and one of the best of the young poets has written vividly:
I know that men consist of words which
have embraced them. The word moves. Earth is on fire. Deep feelings rest on silence. Suffering is mute and so is music.90
The respect of so many of the young artists for Pasternak is based on his faithfulness in guarding the integrity of his words, and his faith that a new birth would come out of those regions 'where the language is still pure.' The most intense and dedicated of young writers seem to have recaptured some of the old monastic sense of writing as a sacred act, the recording of words so that they may be sung aloud with joyful exaltation. Some of them even seem to be suggesting that the Word of the evangelist may offer an antidote to the 'words, words, words' of the old intelligentsia and the endless slogans of the new. One poet has written in honor of the great monastic iconographer:
Rublev knew how to fall on his knees before the word.
That is to say
The One that was in the beginning.91
He goes on to point out that Rublev was redeemed and inspired 'not by a swineherd symbolizing labor, but quite simply by the Savior.'
There is, of course, no way of knowing how deep and lasting the ferment of the Khrushchev era may prove to be, or of evaluating how much and in what ways the young generation will continue to press for reform when tempted by lucrative careers in the official establishment and increasing material prosperity. One recent Soviet story tells how a watchman suddenly discovers on the outskirts of a collective farm Christ in bast shoes saying to the Mother of God: 'We have tested men in many ways-by war and hunger… . We must try them now with a good harvest.'92 Perhaps with a few good harvests unrest will vanish and the unfulfilled aspirations of Russian culture will linger on only as a kind of wistful memory. All things pass, and the impossibility of knowing what may prove important to the generations ahead is the final fascination and ultimate mystery of history. Perhaps all that the non-prophetic historian can do is make a few last reflections on the historical process itself, and on that part of it which he has examined in search of some final clues to the chapters that lie ahead.
4- The Irony of Russian
In looking for some way of understanding the perplexities of history, the concept of irony has a certain appeal. A sense of the ironic leads man somewhere between the total explanations of nineteenth-century historicism and the total absurdity of much present-day thought. In his Irony of American History, Reinhold Niebuhr has defined irony as 'apparently fortuitous incongruities in life which are shown upon closer examination to be not merely fortuitous.'1 Irony differs from pathos in that man bears some responsibility for the incongruities; it differs from comedy in that there are hidden relations in the incongruities; and it differs from tragedy in that there is no inexorable web of fate woven into the incongruities.
Irony is a hopeful, though not a reassuring, concept. Man is not a helpless creature in a totally absurd world. He can do something about ironic situations, but only if he becomes aware of their ironic nature and avoids the temptation to conceal incongruities with total explanations. The ironic view contends that history laughs at human pretensions without being hostile to human aspirations. It is capable of giving man hope without illusion.2 Applied to history, irony suggests that there is rational meaning to the historical process, yet that man-as a participant-is never fully able to grasp it. Seeming absurdities are part of what Hegel called 'the cunning of reason.' History does make sense, though our understanding of it tends to come too late. 'The owl of Minerva spreads his wings only at the gathering of the dusk.'3 Ironically, yet not senselessly, the flow of history always seems to be just one turn ahead of man's capacity to understand it. Today's equilibration of forces is said to be an equilibrium or even a permanent solution by those who confidently project current trends forward into the future without considering those deeper forces which account for discontinuous (or 'dialectical') changes in human history. Yet such changes do occur-often with great suddenness in ways not foreseen except by isolated thinkers far removed from the rational consensus of their day. Recent Russian history is full of such discontinuous change: both revolutions of
