Fear Of Freedom

Graham Greene said that every country becomes accustomed to its own restrictions as part of its own violence. All countries in the former Soviet Union fell in line with the Party but they also found ways around it through metaphor and irony to create some of the most vibrant literature. A great deal of this literature which was circulated clandestinely has now been translated in the Leopard Series (HarperCollins, special Indian price, £6.99), perhaps the best anthologies dedicated to the political struggle of writers, and their lives and works under conventional censorship.

Leopard 11 entitled Turning the Page: Essays, Memoirs, Fiction, Poetry and One Sermon, takes its title from Nadine Gordimers essay on African writers in the 21st century. This is followed by Yunna Moritzs The Great Russian Leadership: Where Has it Gone? on the effects of the post-Communist revolution and Yulia Pyanitskayas extract from The Diary of a Bolsheviks Wife, one of the saddest documents of the 20th century. Memoirs include Andrei Bitovs Passions of a City Planner, poems by Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak; extracts from works-in-progress like Claudia Margis A Different Sea, Uri Domovskys The Faculty of Useless Knowledge, Yasar Kemals Suleman, the Solitary, and stories by Jaan Kross and Luigi Pirandello.

 

Gordimer highlights a problem faced by writers freed from censorship which she calls fear of freedom fear for a writer, meaning not knowing how you are going to write. With the vise on the writers head removed, he does not know what to do because the very defiance of censorship had provided a read-made subject: the State was the enemy and the writer had to weld his work into a weapon. It impressed upon him that certain themes were relevant, certain modes effective.

Many writers are ill-prepared because wherever there was censorship, the counter-orthodoxy of literature had come about. Quoting Brecht, Gordimer says, It was an era when to speak of trees was treason... Instead of criticism, writers spoke of solidarity criticism. It was enough to be politically correct. Now writers would need to talk about humanity in all its forms, human consciousness in all its mystery.

There were two characteristics of Soviet literature under the Soviets. First, it was not intellectual but emotional. People who were sent off to prison camps were not those who had lost their reason but those who saw through the farce and suddenly acquired it. The second, which follows from the first, was that the anger went underground and emerged in disguise, as irony, sarcasm or an icy calm from which it was often hard to deduce the fury that lay beneath.

The literary pieces on the Soviet Union try to recapture the underlying physical fear that was an important cement of that society. Much of what happened makes little sense without understanding that everyone was afraid, including those who made others afraid.

Paradoxically, it was the all-pervasive fear The front was all round, there was no rear that drove many Russians to read everything and anything. But now when you can say everything, many feel there is nothing to say. The Great Russian Readership has almost disappeared in the stresses and pressures of the market. The market dictates all, which means cultural pulp is preferred to Platanov and Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova and Shalamov and Pasternak and ....

Leopard 11 contains 28 new works, new translations and works-in-progress and all of them are eminently readable.

V.V.