The Thinking Reed

The increase in the popularity of the Rights can be followed with particular ease through the example of Ilya Glazunov. In 1967 nobody took him seriously. Volynsky wrote of his lack of talent as an artist as something well known and taken for granted. Yet in July 1978 ‘Ilyushka’ Glazunov was enabled to hold an exhibition of his work at the Manège. Izvestiya wrote in 1982 that ‘it would be hard to find another artist whose work has attracted so much attention and aroused such lasting interest’,142 and misquoting — as was to be expected — the title of his book (in the newspaper it was given as Doroga k tebe [The Road to You]) said of him that Glazunov was a real ‘master of painting with words’.143 Although the book, when it appeared, had aroused only bewilderment, in 1982 this panegyric surprised no one. Glazunov was forgiven even for such flagrant cringing as his portraits of the builders of the Baikal-Amur Railway and the like. In Sovetskaya Kultura N. Malakhov praised Glazunov because his works were ‘always socially active and sometimes even sharply agitational’.144 His nationalist propaganda put Glazunov on a good footing: about 600,000 people visited his exhibition (although we do not know how many of them he succeeded in ‘agitating’).

A few months before the exhibition at the Manège, on 6 December 1977, the nationalists organized heckling of Anatoly Efros when he spoke at the Writers’ Club. His only crime, it turned out, was that he, a Jew, had dared to produce classical Russian plays. From the publishing house of Molodaya Gvardiya the neo-Slavophils issued, in huge editions, books that gave a new interpretation of Russian literature. The petty tyrant Kabanikha in Ostrovsky’s The Storm was presented here as ‘a custodian of worldly wisdom and of the foundations of family life’ (women’s liberation being seen as undermining these ‘foundations’). Belinsky, it appears, ‘expressed lack of confidence in the Russian way of life, depriving it of positive content and significance’, while Gogol’s aim was to protect Russia from the costly experience of European civilization. And so on.145 But the object of their special interest was Dostoevsky.

Objectivity demands that it be admitted that they were right to refer to Gogol and Dostoevsky. I have already written about that. However, something else must be borne in mind. The work of both these writers constitutes an extremely complex artistic system. It was not accidental that it was on the basis of Dostoevsky’s writings that Bakhtin developed his theory of dialogue. Dostoevsky’s books are polyphonic, and the voice of the writer himself is only one of the voices that make themselves heard in these works. The work is higher than the author: the dialogue form of creative thinking, demonstrated later by culturologists, makes this an inexorable law of all creative work (and not only of creative work). The neo-Slavophils fail to hear this polyphony in literature. For them there is only a monologue, a sermon, where actually there is dispute. ‘Any multisemantic artistic structure’, wrote I. Volgin, in opposition to their view,

can be subjected to a more or less monosemantic interpretation. War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Fathers and Sons, Crime and Punishment, all can, if one so desires, be interpreted (and they often have been) as reactionary works.146

The thing is, though, that with such an interpretation, the very essence of art is lost. Sartre once said that it is impossible to write a good anti-Semitic novel. Culturology provides the essential explanation for this. Creative thinking takes the form of a dialogue, whereas reactionary consciousness is always a monologue, the consciousness of a preacher. Sooner or later, this inevitably kills creativity. For this reason, while swearing by the name of Dostoevsky, the neo-Slavophils proved incapable of understanding the artistic meaning of his work.

Which, however, does not prevent them from claiming him as their forerunner. This applies particularly to the group around Solzhenitsyn and Shafarevich, who came together in the symposium From Under the Rubble and subsequently expressed their views in a very consistent way in Russian books published abroad. The symposium begins with the excellent words: ‘The universal suppression of thought leads not to its extinction, but to distortion, ignorance and the mutual incomprehension of compatriots and contemporaries.’147 Solzhenitsyn complains that