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 certain inner strength: "the good-humored serenity characteristic of people who see life as movement along the winding bed of a river, between hidden sandbanks and rocks."10 One senses that deeper currents may be slowly pulling those on this river away from bends and banks into more open seas. One feels that neither the "stormy passage"11 of recent times nor the deceptive reefs that no doubt lie ahead will prevent them from reaching their long-sought and still undiscovered destination: "the other shore."
Thu, Aug 16th, 2012, via SendToReader