The Icon and the Axe

A cultural history cannot offer a net prediction; but it must insist on the importance of the national heritage and the vitality of the ferment now at work. This ferment is not like a factor in a mathematical equation that can be resolved on the computers of Eastern political manipulators or Western political scientists. The ferment in the USSR today is more like indeterminate plants appearing on a burned-out field. One cannot tell whether they stem from old roots or fresh seeds blown in from elsewhere. Only time will tell if the landscape will be fundamentally changed. Yet the very appearance of the plants indicates that the soil is fertile; and even if they were to die, their leaves might yet provide humus for a stronger, future growth. The critical condition for growth in the years ahead will be the continuance of the relatively mild international climate of the post-Stalin era. Sustained storm clouds from East or West could have a chilling effect. Gusts of fresh vitality from neighboring countries could greatly stimulate growth in a culture that has always responded to fertilization from outside and in a world that is increasingly interdependent. Already the assimilation into the Russian orbit of such traditional foes on its Western borders as Poland and Hungary has had not the intended effect of silencing these nations but the ironic one of bringing added Westward-looking ferment into the Soviet sphere. There is no telling how important for future Soviet development increasing contact with the West or a renaissance of ideological elan within the West might prove to be.

One cannot wishfully expect automatic evolution toward democracy in the USSR now any more than one should have expected revolution for democracy under Stalin. Forces within one culture do not exist to serve the purposes of another; and the familiar institutional forms of liberal, parliamentary democracy are still incomprehensible to many Russians. But

Russia may well develop new social and artistic forms presently unforeseen by either East or West which will answer the restive demand of its people for human freedom and spiritual renewal. If the West has anything authentic to communicate and has any direct and unpatronizing ways of doing it, it could almost certainly play a key 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