So why did Solzhenitsyn stop? Why didn't he go on with those two or three paragraphs? Didn't he feel at the moment that he was on the verge of something? Perhaps he did, although I doubt it. The point is that he had no material to stuff those two more paragraphs with, no other tasks to mention. Why, then, one would ask, didn't he invent some? The answer is at the same time noble and sad: because he is a realist and inventing things would be untrue: both to the facts and to his nature as a writer. A realist, he had a different set of instincts from those that nudge you to make things up when you see an opening. It's for this reason that I doubt that he felt he was on the verge of something: he simply couldn't sense the opening, wasn't poised enough to see it. So the chapter ends on a moralizing, see-how-bad-things-are note. I remember reading it with my fingers almost trembling: "Now, now, now it's going to happen." It did not.
This episode in Cancer Ward is all the more symptomatic since Solzhenitsyn qualifies as both a published and an underground writer. Among many other things that these two categories have in common are their flaws. Unless he has completely crossed over to the experimental side, an underground writer can be distinguished from his colleagues in the establishment mainly by his subject matter, much less so by his diction. On the other hand, an experimentalist tends to go about his experimentation with a real vengeance: having no prospects of being published, he is usually quick to give up didactic concerns altogether, which eventually costs him even his limited audience of a few cognoscenti. Frequently, his only solace is a bottle, his only hope, to be compared by a scholar in some West German magazine to Uwe Johnson. In part because his work is utterly untranslatable, in part because he is usually employed by an institution doing some classified scientific research with military applications, he doesn't entertain thoughts about emigrating. Eventually, he abandons his artistic pursuits.
This is the way it goes, for the middle ground claimed in countries with a better political system by somebody like Michel Butor, Leonardo Sciascia, Giinther Grass, or Walker Percy simply doesn't exist in Russia. It's an either/ or situation in which even publishing abroad is not of decisive help, if only because it's invariably detrimental to the author's physical well-being. To produce a work of lasting consequence under these circumstances requires an amount of personal integrity more frequently possessed by tragic heroes than by the authors of those tragedies. Naturally, in this predicament prose fares worse than other forms of art, not only because the process of creating it is of a less mercurial nature, but also because, thanks to prose's didactic nature, it's been watched very closely indeed. The moment the prose watcher loses the author, it's curtains for the work; yet efforts to keep the work accessible to its watchdog render it properly sheepish. As for writing "for the drawer," "for the attic," which an established writer sometimes undertakes to clear his conscience, it too fails to bring him a stylistic cure—which became evident during the last decade, which saw almost the entire attic prose swept clean to the West and published there.
A great writer is one who elongates the perspective of human sensibility, who shows a man at the end of his wits an opening, a pattern to follow. After Platonov, the closest that Russian prose came to producing such a writer were Nadezhda Mandelstam with her memoirs and, to a somewhat lesser degree, Alexander Solzhenitsyn with his novels and documentary prose. I permit myself to put this great man second largely because of his apparent inability to discern behind the cruelest political system in the history of Christendom the human failure, if not the failure of the creed itself (so much for the severe spirit of Orthodoxy!). Given the magnitude of the historical nightmare he describes, this inability in itself is spectacular enough to suspect a dependence between aesthetic conservatism and resistance to the notion of man being radically bad. Quite apart from the stylistic consequence for one's writing, the refusal to accept this notion is pregnant with the recurrence of this nightmare in broad daylight—anytime.
Aside from these two names, Russian prose for the moment has very little to offer to a man at the end of his wits. There are a few isolated works which in their heartbreaking honesty or eccentricity approximate masterpieces. All they can supply our man with is either a momentary catharsis or comic relief. Though ultimately furthering one's subordination to the status quo, this is one of prose's better services; and it's better if the reading public in this country knows the names of Yury Dombrovsky, Vasily Grossman, Venedikt Erofeev, Andrei Bitov, Vasily Shukshin, Fazil Iskander, Yury Miloslavsky, Yevgeny Popov. Some of them authored only one or two books, some of them are already dead; but, together with the somewhat better-known Sergei Dovlatov, Vladimir Voinovich, Vladimir Maximov, Andrei Sinyavsky, Vladimir Maramzin, Igor Efimov, Eduard Limo- nov, Vasily Aksyonov, Sasha Sokolov, they constitute a reality with which everybody for whom Russian literature and things Russian are of any consequence sooner or later will have to reckon.
Each one of these men deserves a discussion of no lesser length than this lecture already is. Some of them happen to be my friends, some are quite the contrary. Squeezing them into one sentence is like listing air-crash victims; but then that's precisely where a catastrophe has occurred: in the air, in the world of ideas. The best works of these authors should be regarded as this catastrophe's survivors. If asked to name one or two books that stand to outlast their authors and the present generation of readers, I for one would name Voinovich's In Plain Russian and any selection of short stories by Yury Miloslavsky. However, the work that faces, in my view, a really incalculable future is Yuz Aleshkovsky's Kangaroo, soon to come out in English. (God help its translator!)
Kangaroo is a novel of the most devastating, the most terrifying hilarity. It belongs in the genre of satire; however, its net effect is neither revulsion at the system nor comic relief, but pure metaphysical terror. This effect has a lot less to do with the author's rather apocalyptical world view as such than with the quality of his ear. Aleshkovsky, whose reputation in Russia as a songwriter is extremely high (in fact, some of his songs are a part of national folklore), hears the language like a prodigy. The hero of Kangaroo is a professional pickpocket whose career spans the entire history of Soviet Russia, and the novel is an epic yarn spun out in the foulest of language, for which either "slang" or "argot" fails as a definition. Much like a private philosophy or set of beliefs for an intellectual, foul language in the mouths of the masses serves as an antidote to the predominantly positive, obtrusive monologue of authority. In Kangaroo, very much as in everyday Russian discourse, the volume of this antidote overshoots its curative purpose by a margin capable of accommodating yet another universe. While in terms of its plot and structure this book may bear a resemblance to something like The Good Soldier Schweik or Tristram Shandy, linguistically it is absolutely Rabelaisian. It is a monologue, nasty, morbid, frightful, rampant with a cadence resembling biblical verse. To drop yet another name, this book sounds like Jeremiah: laughing. For a man at the end of his wits that's already something. However, it is not exactly concern for that anonymous yet ubiquitous man that makes one appreciate this particular work, but its overall stylistic thrust in a direction unfamiliar to the Russian prose of today. It goes where the vernacular goes; that is, beyond the finality of a content, idea, or belief: toward the next phrase, the next utterance: into the infinity of speech. To say the least, it strays from the genre of the ideological novel of whatever denomination, absorbing the condemnation of the social order but spilling over it as over a cup too small to contain the flood of language.