Vladimir Makanin came of age professionally during the Brezhnev years. He described the unwritten pact:
As a member ofthe Writers' Union you got all sorts of advantages: they looked after you if you were ill or disabled . . . they might appeal on your behalf to the Moscow City Council to get you an apartment or a kindergarten place for your child; they guaranteed a good rate of pay for your writing, provided
Documentary Materials, 2nd edn (New York and London: Collier, 1975), p. 544; I have modified the translation. 37 Adele Marie Barker, 'The Culture Factory: Theorizing the Popular in the Old and New Russia', in Adele Marie Barker (ed.), Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 20-1.
writers' retreats and so forth.... But of course the Union of Writers, like any other trade union, had a political edge to it: it guaranteed all these material advantages, but in exchange you had to write as they wanted you to ... Under such circumstances it's an enormous labour to go your own way and remain an individual.[77]
Nevertheless, even the most repressive years -1968,1970,1972,1979 - reveal inconsistency and a growing multivocality. Non-conformists willing to remove themselves from the central Moscow-Leningrad axis sometimes found havens inprovincial cities. A workproscribed in one city might be published in another. Plays occasionally sneaked onto theatre stages without official permission. Films (like Irakli Kvirikadze's The Swimmer (Plovets), made and shelved in 1981) might be shown in clubs if not in commercial theatres. Texts by safely dead, once-proscribed writers - Marina Tsvetaeva, Ivan Bunin, Mikhail Bulgakov - reached Soviet readers for the first time, in part to compensate for the disappearance of living writers who, forced into emigration, lost their status as authors along with their citizenship: their books vanished from library shelves, their names from literary history. (Dancers who defected and musicians who transgressed - as Rostropovich did by helping Solzhenitsyn - were similarly erased from officially recorded Russian culture.) When publication was foreclosed, writers often chose to circulate their work unofficially, via samizdat, underground distribution of typed or occasionally mimeographed copies of manuscripts, orto send it abroad (tamizdat).[78] Liudmila Petrushevskaia, whose unpublished plays were performed in private apartments during the early and mid-1970s, recalled the cachet of illicit art: 'If a play was widely advertised it meant it wasn't worth seeing, no one went. Whereas crowds and crowds would turn up for something that hadn't been advertised at all; everyone would hear about it by word of mouth... It would be announced as a "creative evening" or "a meeting with young actors", without mentioning the author or the name of the work.'[79]
Individuals in positions of responsibility often consciously (and occasionally inadvertently) shielded artists. A publishing house held on to Fazil Iskander's story 'Tree of Childhood' (Derevo detstva) for years rather than rejecting it outright, simply because the director wanted to avoid controversy, and eventually the story appeared.41 The editors of Novyi mir, although unable to publish
Petrushevskaia for many years, 'fed me, gave me work, all through the most difficult and hungry times they gave me reviews and book reports to do. They . . . read me and gave me their opinion - always . . . And when the time came [under Gorbachev], they did publish me.' Similarly, her play Three Girls in Blue (Tri devushki vgolubom) appeared in the journal Contemporary Drama in 1983 'thanks to the courage of a few people who'd simply taken the responsibility on themselves': specifically, the chief editor of the journal and an apparatchik in the Ministry of Culture who said, 'This play is about me!'42
In what amounted to an ongoing tug-of-war between two unequal forces, state and artist, the artist had surprising if insecure resources. The state expelled beyond its borders incorrigible cases, but it did so reluctantly, fully aware of the negative publicity resulting from the departure of some of its most creative individuals. (When authorities bulldozed an outdoor exhibit of paintings by non-conformist artists in 1974, the ensuing negative publicity won a degree of freedom for the artists involved.43) Andrei Siniavskii, himself one of those miscreants compelled to emigrate, described the resultant situation:
With the appearance of ventures which the state interprets as hostile to itself- samizdat, the activities of the dissidents and so on - the censorship has tended to be more lenient with certain official writers, who are therefore permitted to deal quite boldly with subjects which, although not the most burning in social and political terms, are nonetheless ofconsiderable peripheral interest, like the subject of the Soviet past and individual destinies . . . The state is obliged to tolerate them, because if they banned them completely they would all go straight into samizdat or emigrate to the West.44
Artists who chose to remain within the system during zastoi adroitly capitalised on their knowledge of its personalities and institutions to evade its constraints. Anatolii Rybakov had never sent his manuscripts abroad for publication, thereby sustaining a reputation for 'loyalty'. Nonetheless, several journals rejected his 1978 novel Heavy Sand (Tiazhelyi pesok) depicting a Jewish family's life in the Ukraine from about 1900 until 1942, primarily because of its depiction of Belorussian complicity with the Nazis in the destruction of the local Jewish ghetto. He then submitted it to Oktiabr, a journal known for its conservatism, in the hopes that the new editors might want to 'raise the journal's respectability by publishing a daring, sensational work'. Moreover, he knew the censors were less likely to read ahead of time an entire work
42 Ibid., pp. 32-3.
43 Alison Hilton and Norton Dodge, 'Introduction', in New Art from the Soviet Union (Washington and Ithaca, N.Y.: Acropolis Books, 1977), p. 10.
44 Andrei Siniavskii, 'Samizdat and the Rebirth of Literature', Index on Censorship 9, 4 (Aug. 1980): 9.
scheduled for serial publication in Oktiabr' than one scheduled for a known liberal monthly like Novyi mir. 'Thus the first, relatively harmless portion of Heavy Sand passed through censorship. But the next installment described Soviet repressions of the 1930s and the Nazi's [sic] "final solution" . . . The censors were dumbfounded, but deemed it too awkward to interrupt the novel's serialization.'[80] The same tactic enabled Iurii Trifonov to publish House on the Embankment (Dom na naberezhnoi) in another 'conservative' journal, Druzhba narodov.
Writers frequently relied on Aesopian language, embedding sensitive ideas in a code of allusions, manipulating rigidly defined and instantly recognisable images and topoi in order to suggest parallels to current moral dilemmas and to alert readers to a very different set of values from those officially authorised. 'Since Stalinist socialist realism offered writers a ready-made system of signs with fixed political meanings, it had the potential to be used as . . . a medium for [post-Stalin] writers to express themselves - even if only in a very tentative way - on politically delicate subjects.'[81] Such codes, requiring 'respondents' who share information, point of view or values with the artist,[82] need not be exclusively verbal. In theatre, for instance, an actor's inflected delivery of'inno- cent' lines might cue the audience to a coded meaning; in film, juxtaposition of image and sound can signal satiric intent.
77
Sally Laird,
78
For a survey of
81
Katerina Clark, 'Political History and Literary Chronotope: Some Soviet Case Studies', in Gary Saul Morson (ed.),