The Thinking Reed

Another play about bureaucratic morality was Radzinsky’s Sporting Scenes of 1981, which shows the corruption, alienation and lack of spirituality prevailing ‘among the elite’, the degeneration of the grandchildren of the powerful leading figures of Stalin’s time. In the form it takes, Sporting Scenes frankly recalls the plays of Edward Albee. Radzinsky does not hide this. Everything that happens in the play is quite absurd. Unfortunately, though, all the absurd situations are taken from life and the spectators recognize them. Many people are shocked by the cynical conversations about sex, the purchasing of articles in foreign-exchange shops and all sorts of intrigues. For the first time the unattractive aspects of the life led by the upper circles have been depicted on the stage, and this even in disgusting detail.

Both plays, The Quotation and Sporting Scenes, are brilliantly written, but neither opens up a new prospect. Instead, they sum up the lessons of the past, talking about things one wanted to discuss many years ago but was never allowed to. The appearance of several more works on the same theme might have undermined people’s interest in it. What is much more important for people today is how relations are developing between the opposing social forces in the process of change — the anatomy of new political conflicts, so strange after eighteen years of Brezhnevite stability. The political scientist Burlatsky has made an attempt to answer these questions, choosing, for the sake of clarity, the unexpected form of a dramatic dialogue. Burlatsky’s Two Views from One Office was first published in Literaturnaya Gazeta and then shown on television, the collocutors being played by the excellent actors Boltnev and Vel'yaminov. If we are to judge Burlatsky’s success by the number of people who watched his work, his triumph is beyond any doubt. The production aroused enormous interest. But has the author answered the questions he posed?

By resorting to the dialogue form, Burlatsky remained true to himself. Previously he had written a book about Macchiavelli in which the attentive reader could easily note the resemblance between hero and author. Now, imitating his hero, Burlatsky chose a typically Renaissance form to set out his views. The trouble is that by doing so he merely demonstrated the unsuitability of the tradition of the sixteenth-century ‘treatise in dialogue form’ for an exposition of present-day problems. In Burlatsky’s book the Florence of Macchiavelli bears a suspicious resemblance to Moscow in the early seventies, but one obviously needs to converse with today’s Soviet reader otherwise than with the readers to whom Macchiavelli, Bruno or Campanella addressed themselves.

The participants in Burlatsky’s dialogue are the progressive First Secretary of a regional Party committee and its conservative Second Secretary. The author obviously set out to refute the arguments used by opponents of change in their debate behind the scenes. In the upshot, however, it is Burlatsky’s positive hero who proves the clear loser in the contest. The conservative speaks frankly about the dangers to the system with which the changes are fraught, about the destruction of established and more or less viable bonds and ties on which a great deal depends, and about the contradiction between the new slogans and the old ideological dogmas with which the people’s heads have been stuffed for decades. In reply all the progressive can do is repeat general statements about the splendid future, the necessity of progress and the need for changes. Over many years most of our people have formed the habit of distrusting general talk and promises about the future.

The crisis of traditional concepts and of the old liberal-intelligentsia culture has found expression in prose literature no less than in drama. The fashionable books published in 1986 (Rasputin’s Fire, Astaf'ev’s The Doleful Detective, Aitmatov’s The Executioner's Block) bear witness not only to the disappearance of many censorship restrictions but also to the decline of analytic thought. None of these writers is sparing with dark colours in their description of numerous outrages and injustices, acts of cruelty and social defects of all kinds. When we come to the question of who is guilty, the answers are most unexpected. Rasputin blames everything on European civilization and urbanization; Astaf ev sees the root of evil in the Jews; and Aitmatov seeks to show the devil’s hand behind it all. Each of these writers is convinced that men are bad because they have lost God. But where, then, is he to be found?