role in this process. For nowhere is curiosity about the West-and particularly America-greater than among the youth of the USSR. Nowhere is the disappointment at the lack of spiritual vitality in the West more keenly felt than among the restless youth of the USSR eagerly looking for some guidance in their unsatisfied search for positive goals and new approaches. It would be a terrifying double irony if American philistinism should lead some Russian youth reluctantly to go along with a Communist ideology which both Russian tradition and contemporary Soviet reality encourage them to reject.
'He is an honest-searching man,' says one character in quiet tribute to another in Everything Depends on People; and this might well serve as a characterization of the young generation in the USSR. The search is still incomplete; the hopes are unfulfilled; and the entire cultural revival seems at times a kind of evanescent mirage. But, since everything in history is ultimately incomplete, it may be well to introduce a final ironic perspective on the question of reality itself.
At the very height of Stalinist pretense, in the semi-official portrayal of the Revolution in Alexis Tolstoy's Road to Calvary, an idiot dreams that the great city of St. Petersburg-artificially wrenched out of the sufferings of thousands-was itself only a mirage that had suddenly vanished. That the phantasmagoria of Soviet construction seems to us the most real thing about Soviet history may be only a reflection of our own essentially materialist conception of reality. The Russians, on the other hand, have always been a visionary and ideological people, uniquely appreciative of the ironic perspectives on reality offered in such works as Calderon's Life Is a Dream and Shakespeare's Tempest. It may be that only those who have lived through the tempest of Stalinism will be able, like Prospero, to look on it as 'the baseless fabric of a vision'; to see in 'the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples' only an 'insubstantial pageant faded,' and to find fresh meaning in Prospero's final affirmation that man is, indeed, 'such stuff as dreams are made on.'
Tertz has spoken of the young generation's 'enthusiasm before the metamorphoses of God . . . before the monstrous peristaltic upheaval of his entrails and his cerebral circumvolutions.'7 It would be ironic, indeed, if God were in exile somewhere in the 'atheistic' East; and if the culture produced amidst its silence and suffering were to prove more remarkable than that of the talkative and well-fed West. But this, perhaps, is the irony
of freedom, which tends to be treasured by those who do not have it and profaned by those who do. Here, too, is the enduring irony of creative culture, which comes into being through the painful self-denial of an individual opening himself up to larger worlds. True creativity in the USSR today involves voluntary suffering, or as Pasternak put it, 'an offer of consecrated abnegation in a far and humble likeness with the Lord's Supper.'
Such a role seems close to the monastic conception of the dedicated artist; and insofar as this burden of dedication continues to be taken up inside the USSR, it is likely to be sustained, if not by the faith of the Church, at least by its central belief in the Resurrection. Resurrection was the title of Tolstoy's last novel, the theme of Dostoevsky's and Pasternak's. It is only in resurrection that there is any final, ironic sense either in the comic incongruity of God disguised as man or in the tragic incongruity of human rebellion against divine authority. It is only in resurrection, some unforeseeable 'metamorphoses of God,' that sense could ultimately be made out of the implausible aspirations of Russian thought and the repeated rejection of higher ideals in Russian reality.
None can say that rebirth will occur; none can be sure even that there is any sense to be found in the history of a culture in which aspiration has so often outreached accomplishment and anguish impaired achievement. There may be nothing for the historian of culture to do except provide accompanying notes for the great novels, luminous icons, and lovely music and architecture that can be salvaged from an otherwise blighted inventory. Repeatedly, Russians have sought to acquire the end products of other civilizations without the intervening process of slow growth and inner understanding. Russia took the Byzantine heritage en bloc without absorbing its traditions of orderly philosophic discourse. The aristocracy adopted the language and style of French culture without its critical spirit, and variously sought to find solidarity with idealized sectarian or peasant communities without ever sharing in either the work or the faith of these non-aristocratic elements. The radical intelligentsia deified nineteenth-century Western science without recreating the atmosphere of free criticism that had made scientific advances possible. The exploration of 'cursed questions' took place not in academies or even market places but in occult circles and 'Aesopian' journals. Even Gogol and Ivanov in fleeing to the sun-drenched centers of Mediterranean classicism could not escape the nocturnal world of German romanticism, of forests and lakes, and of the dark northern winters.
High Stalinism provided a kind of retribution. Russia suddenly found
– itself ruled by Byzantine ritualism without Byzantine reverence or beauty,
and by Western scientism without Western freedom of inquiry. One is
tempted to see in the terrible climax, the 'cleansing' (chistka) of the purge period, either total absurdity or some new and unprecedented form of totalitarian logic. But to the cultural historian, the horrors of High Stalinism may appear neither as an accidental intrusion upon, nor an inevitable by-product of, the Russian heritage. If he adopts the ironic perspective, he might even conclude that the cleansing did lead to a kind of purification far deeper than that which was intended-that innocent suffering created the possibility for fresh accomplishment.
Stalin may have cured Russian thinkers of their passion for abstract speculation and their thirst for earthly Utopias. The desire for the concrete and practical so characteristic of the post-Stalin generation may help Russia produce a less spectacular but more solid culture. The harvest may be long delayed in political institutions and artistic expression. But the roots of creativity are deep in Russia, and the soil rich. Whatever plants appear in the future should be more enduring than the ephemeral blossoms and artificial transplants of earlier ages. In an age of pretension, the cunning of reason may require a deceptively quiet rebirth. But Western observers should not be patronizing about a nation which has produced Tolstoy and Dostoev-sky and undergone so much suffering in recent times. Impatient onlookers who have come to expect immediate delivery of packaged products may have to rediscover the processes of 'ripening as fruit ripens, growing as grass grows.' The path of new discovery may well be parabolic, like that of Voznesensky's Columbus:
Instinctively
head for the shore . . . Look for
India- You'll find
America!8
Life out of death, freedom out of tyranny-irony, paradox, perhaps too much to hope for. One must return to the reality of plants not yet mature, of a ship still very much at sea. The last of the tempests may not have passed. We may still be in Miranda's 'brave new world,' and the perspectives of Prospero may not yet be in sight. This generation may only be, as Evtushenko has put it, 'like the men in Napoleon's cavalry who threw themselves into the river to form a bridge over which others might cross to the other bank.'9
Yet even here there is the image of that other hank. The melodramatic suggestion of a Napoleonic army somehow fades. One feels left rather in the midst of one of those long rivers in the Russian interior. There is no
bridge across, no clear chart for the would-be navigator. The natives still move along the river in zigzag patterns which often seem senseless to those looking on from afar. But the closer one gets, the more one notes a
