The Icon and the Axe

There is something strangely fitting about the fact that his first collection of verse, published in i960, bore the title Mosaic, and was published in Vladimir, the original center of Orthodoxy in Great Russia. Voznesensky's poetry combines a mosaic of visual images with a flow of musical sound. He recaptures something of the genius of old Orthodox culture with his use of sensual suggestion for super-sensual ideas. He is the truest renewal of the poetic tradition of the silver age: a confessed disciple of Pasternak, who has succeeded in incorporating many contemporary ideas into his poetic idiom.

His favorite poem, "Parabolic Ballad," is also one of the favorite subjects of official attack. It is a defense of the "Aesopian language" that the true poet must use to make his point. He must speak not in direct statement but symbolically and indirectly. Gauguin reached the Louvre not by moving down from Montmartre but by going to the south seas.

… he sped away like a roaring rocket

.. . and he entered the Louvre, not through stately

portals, But like a wrathful parabola

piercing the roof . . .39

Voznesensky's own poetic "Parabola" (the title of his second collection of poetry, published in Moscow in 1961) was more than much of the Soviet bureaucracy could tolerate. Accused of "formalism" by official critics, he uses the magic of language to damn them for smelling of formalin and incense (formalizm . . . formalin . . . fimiam). There is the hint of fiery apocalypse in his clipped poetic judgment on Stalinist architecture:

Farewell architecture! Blaze freely on, Cow sheds with cupids, Rococo savings banks … To live is to burn.40

To Voznesensky, the function of the poet is prophetic, and the reaction of audiences is "an almost sensual expression of feeling" which leaves their souls "wide open like a woman who has just been kissed."41

Nothing could be more different from the puritanical didacticism of

official Soviet culture. The personalized poetry readings of the early sixties were the scene for original thoughts punctuated by spontaneous applause and boisterous commentary. The rhetorical rallies of the state were, by contrast, characterized by ritual rhythmic applause in response to lengthening stretches of increasingly unoriginal prose. There could be little doubt as to where authentic vitality lay, even though the latter forces retained the power periodically to silence the former, as they did by severe denunciations during the first half of 1963. The work of Evtushenko and Voznesensky seemed to decline during the following two years. But whether these particular figures flourished or faded, the younger generation had built up an oral folklore of its own42 to preserve the memory of good words and courageous action just as an older oral folklore had kept alive the memory of heroic deeds during the long literary silence of the Mongol occupation.

Hardly less striking is the contrast between the new theater that has arisen since Stalin's death and the stereotyped staging of Soviet success stories in the Stalin era. It was, indeed, on the stage that the first sweeping break with Stalinist literary forms took place late in 1953 with the staging of Leonid Zorin's play Guests. If Ehrenburg's novel The Thaw provided the key metaphor for the post-Stalin literary revival, and Pomerantsev's "On Sincerity in Literature" provided its combat slogan, Zorin's play dramatized what the conflict was all about. Based on the infamous "doctors' plot," Guests portrays the villainy of the secret police in a manner suggesting that it was a natural outgrowth of the entire Soviet system. The drama was severely criticized by the official press and forced to close down after two performances.43 Criticism of secret police excesses gained official approval only after Alexander Korneichuk's Wings rendered the dragon of Beria into almost a caricature in order to render the slaying by Khrushchev even more heroic and melodramatic. Khrushchev put the official stamp of approval on this formula with his attendance and ostentatious applauding at a performance of Wings early in 1955; but the question raised by Zorin's more realistic portrayal had not been forgotten merely because it could no longer be directly posed in public.

Almost as important as Zorin's play in opening up fresh perspectives to the Soviet theater was the extraordinarily popular revival of Maiakovsky's Bedbug in 1954. Renewed exposure to the blunt, direct speech of Maiakov-sky (and to that of Hemingway-perhaps the most popular of all foreign writers with the young generation) provided Russians with a model for simpler forms of discourse. At the same time, the fresh look at the long-prohibited staging of Meierhold reminded a new generation of the expressive possibilities of non-realistic stagings. The rather sterile and pompous schematization of the Stanislavsky method that had become the accepted