Упражнение 62

1. The worst floods to hit Mozambique in years have made the province of Gaza a disaster area. One of the first countries to respond to appeals for aid was Russia. Gifts of food, medicines and other essentials from the Rus­sian Red Cross are now on their way to Africa aboard the motor vessel Sretensk.

2. The "burka", or shepherd's cape, that looks so exotic to the average Russian, but is still worn all over the Caucasus, now comes ready-made, produced in the city of Stavropol. This traditional garment, long, voluminous and warm, is pure wool felt, and has always served its wearers well, for be­sides looking romantic, it sheds rain and snow; also oddly enough, it is good protection against the hot sun in the summer time.

3. The Hilok Taiga, a vast area of coniferous forest in Eastern Siberia, has long been known for its cedar pine, that produces a delicious edible seed, the pine-nut. Special protective clothing, food supplies and log cabins have been provided for the teams that will come here to collect the pine-nut har­vest this season. This season's target was a hundred tons, but local experts believe there will be considerably more.

RIDE IN A TIME MACHINE

The passengers got into the carriage, settled themselves in their seats and travelled to... the past. From Petersburg to Strelna along the famous iron road of Oranela we rumbled on the first of the new excursions.

The old tram pulled away from the stop on Admiralty Avenue. This is the cradle of the Petersburg tramway. Our excursion along the Oranela, one of the first lines, has become the second tram route into the past. For five years now people can see this eajly 20^th century tram running along the roads and avenues of Petersburg.

With its elegantly inscribed sides saying: "Passengers must not alight whilst the carriage is in motion", it runs regularly through the city's streets. Only the experts could tell the difference between it and the real Bresh trams brought from England in 1907.

The first line to be opened was not very long, just a little over a mile and a half. When the inaugural banquet heard the toast "To the Petersburg workers, the builders of the Petersburg tramway!", control of the driver's handle was taken by engineer Heinrich Osipovich Graftio (the builder of the Volkhovsk electrical station and the Oranela) who took the tram for a trip of about two miles.

Five years ago the old tram was brought out of retirement by the workers of the Leonov Tram Park and the City Excursion Bureau. They were aided in their project by the Volodarsky Tram Park.

"In 1912 they started laying the rails from the Narvsky Gates to the Ora-nienbaum (now Lomonosov)", explained our tour leader "Mr. Lazarev whose idea it had been to open up these routes for tourist excursions. "Unfortunately the First World War meant that the Oranela, which is short for Oranienbaum Electric Line, was not finished. The tram started running as far as Strelna and that is the route of our new excursion. We are planning a third route, past the Nevsky Gates".

The driver for the first trip along the Oranela was Igor Timofeevich Skvortsov. It was he who five years ago brought the old Bresh tram out of its place of retirement in the tram park and all this time had been driving it along a tourist route. On the eve of the anniversary of the Petersburg Tram­way I went to see the man responsible for this "time machine".

I opened a metal "gate" and mounted the platform from where I could glance into the driver's cabin, just as it had been years ago. Compared with today's cab­ins, it is rather Spartan. The usual control handle for the left hand is there, but here all similarity ends. There isn't even any seat, which was to appear much later. The cold and dust, rain and snow were for a long time the enemies of the driver, until the advent of the electric heater in the cabin.

In the carriage running the length of the ceiling above the long wooden benches there are metal bars with leather straps hanging from them. The straps were for the passengers who used to hang off them in clusters right up until the 1960s, when the last trams of this design finally disappeared from the streets of Petersburg.

The very first carriages were divided by a barrier into two compartments, first and second class. Tickets cost six and four kopecks, respectively. The door to the first class compartment was operated by the conductor who sat in one comer. When the tram was crowded he could flip up his seat and carry on with his work standing up to make more room.

The regulations on the old tramway were stricter than they are today. It was strictly prohibited to "Smoke and Dirty" the carriages. Trams were off limits to "chimney sweeps, herring salters, millers, painters and persons in a state of inebriation". People entered by the rear doors and left through the front. Some passengers were permitted to enter through the front doors. For a long time it was a special privilege. There were even reduced price tickets, which, said our guide, were given to people like the ballerina Galina Ulanova.

Next to the conductor was a mark on the wall, measuring one metre from the ground. Children who were shorter than this were allowed to travel free. The kids of those days who couldn't afford to travel inside the tram had their own special "privilege" — they could hang on outside.

Our tram uses a disused ring line. Tourists from Moscow, from the Urals and the Ukraine come here to study it. They are all especially interested in the famous footplace that people used to perch on outside.

It was not an easy going for the tram in Petersburg. It was introduced here quite a long time after other cities. The City Duma wanted a tramway but could not get permission to lay rails along the streets as this was in the power of the horse tramway owners to grant and they of course did not want a'ny-thing to do with the "electrical competitor".

Although the very first tram did appear in Petersburg in the 19^th century, it ran over the iced-up Neva River in winter, the first one to run on dry land did not appear until this century.

The tram is a hard worker. It carries freight and to this day works between the factories on Vasilevsky Island. It has carried millions of passengers. The Petersburg tramway is a fighter too, having worked throughout most of the Siege taking troops and munitions to the Front. It only stood idle from De­cember 1941 to March 1942 when there was not enough electric power in the city. On April 15, 1942 it restarted its passenger service.

Today there are more than a thousand comfortable trams plying over 60 routes in the city. If all the rails were laid end to end, they would reach Moscow. These are the sort of statistics that come to mind at anniversaries. The rest of the time our friend the tram does not get from us as much as a word of thanks.

RUSSIAN LITERATURE — PAST AND PRESENT

There is Russian Soviet poetry and prose, just as there is poetry and prose of the other peoples living in the USSR. It is an illusion, however, to talk about Soviet literature as a single entity somehow uniting all these various literatures. For many years writers, simply to survive, were forced to com­promise with their conscience. Moreover, they compromised with their writing, which was equally destructive. Some managed to adapt well, other sold out (neither the former, nor the latter were saved from the Russian rou­lette of Stalinist terror), still others committed suicide. But the grief brought by this torture coupled with the arms twisted by the censor could hardly serve to cement the Tower of Babel of Soviet belles lettres.

This tower was erected on orders from above instead of collective com­promises. The orders demanded that writers adhere, not honestly but blindly, to the general line. It zigzagged incessantly, appearing like some joke on its most orthodox believers. These constantly changing orders tested the extent of the believer's baseness rather than the strength of his conviction.

Soviet literature was the child of the Socialist Realist worldview rein­forced by the weakness of writers dreaming of the good life, fame, and pre­serving their standing with the State authorities, which were anointed, if not by God himself, then by a Universal Idea. In the opinion of the early 20^th century philosopher Vasily Rozanov there were several elements that lay at the foundation of Soviet Literature. The power of the State and the weakness of human nature, for one. Also, the social complexes underlying Russian lit­erature and the orgy of loutishness that followed the Revolution and was em­bodied in the Utopia of a "cultural revolution". When they cleared the "scaffolding" away in the 1920s, there was good reason to gasp at the result.

This grandiose tower of Soviet Socialist Realism designed according to Stalin and Gorky's blueprint was a baroque structure with plenty of room for all. It survived for several decades and even reproduced itself in other neigh­bouring Socialist cultures.

In the last years of its life, having recovered from the Stalinist shock, So­viet Literature existed in three main currents. These three trends were "Official", "Village" and "Liberal" prose. Each of them was in the grip of a crisis. Official literature operated according to the principles of "Party Spirit" established in the 1930s and 1940s. In its essence this literature passionately strove towards goals that were outside of literature. Its most infamous task was the construction of a "New Man". Socialist Realism taught the reader to view reality in the process of revolutionary transformation. It preferred the future to the present, oriented itself towards overcoming the hardships of everyday life, and was full of grand promises.

During the Brezhnev period corruption infected all society. It pervaded Socialist Realism as well. If during the Stalinist years the writer served So­cialist Realism, then under Brezhnev Socialist Realism began to serve the interests of the writers. This shift was not so apparent from outside, but to those caught up in it, it undermined the very idea of selfless service. Moreo­ver, it contributed to the relentless degradation of the entire system that eventually forced society to seek another societal model. In this way, the womb of senile Brezhnevism conceived the preconditions for Perestroika.

In those days the question of how far a Brezhnev-era writer such as Georgy Markov believed in what he wrote was never asked: it seemed inde­cent. Such questions were not discussed. Moreover, they were not even thought about. Because of social schizophrenia there appeared a peculiar kind of writer who was a spokesman for State thinking at his writing desk and an adherent of the consumer society at his country house. But what has this to do with literature? A great deal. It is not entirely insignificant that Of­ficial Literature had a readership of hundreds of thousands. It formulated their tastes, even to the extent of manipulating their way of thinking. In a closed society, the scope of each citizen's rights is a function of his social position. The elite echelon of official writers (known as literary "Nomenklatura") often speculated on forbidden or semiforbidden themes. This brand of Official Literature is referred to here as "Secretarial'Litera­ture". Only influential secretaries of the Writers' Union could produce it, since they occupied positions secure from both critics and censors.

These taboo subjects included: Stalin, the determinants of the Russian na­tional character (here Official Literature overlapped the conservative flank of Village Prose), the collectivization of agriculture, the dissident movement, emigrating, youth problems, and so on. It goes without saying that Official Literature deliberately distorted these themes and intentionally misled the reader. It monopolized these themes in the censored press which appeared side by side with the piquant themes of Soviet intelligence abroad or the Af-gan war. The mass reader, starving for information, devoured these "secretarial" works with genuine enthusiasm. He found satisfaction in par­taking in forbidden and "hot" issues, even though he ended up with a mud­dled head for his labours.

With the advent of Perestroika Official Writers themselves grew con­fused. They viewed Perestroika as some kind of Party maneuver whose hid­den meaning ^hey were unable to decipher..Above all, Perestroika stripped Official Literature of its ideological role and its inviolability. The child of a closed society, Official Literature was able to exist only in a hermetically sealed environment. Now, however, liberal critics had grown courageous

enough to deride it frequently, pointing out how feeble, shallow, and stereo­typed it was.

Official Literature became an intransigent opponent of change. One proof of this opposition were speeches by the writer Yury Bondarev. Bondarev lik­ened the new forces in our literature to the Nazi troops who overran the So­viet Union in 1941. On the lips of a former front-line soldier, Bondarev's comparison was a pretty sharp accusation.

As Official Literature was falling into decay, it could have well taken as its theme the Shakespearean tragedy occurring among the older generation. Some people in their 70s had suddenly grasped the futility of their earthly existence. Enlightenment had come too late. They had wasted their lives in worshipping false ideals, while scoffing at belief in any metaphysical values. However, Official Literature was too weak to cope with genuine conflicts. It pre­ferred its trusty weapons of political intrigue and the old-comrade network. Offi­cial Literature thus found itself miscast in the role of an opposition, a role it could not fulfill, for it was essentially devoid of principles and operated only on others' authority. However, it was prepared to search for new paths, by aligning itself with the Russian nationalist movement — which, in fact, it had always secretly favoured. As it made advances to the nationalist camp it appeared rather ludicrous — after all it once sang the glories of Internationalism! Yet, even while laughing at its misadventures, one had to remember that should the process of reform be halted, it would be hard to imagine more zealous ideologues of counter-reformation than "Secretarial" writers.

To be sure there remained the path of repentance, but it was chosen only by a handful of official writers, and hardly the most representative ones. Others preferred another version of self-justification. They argued that they took part in the persecution of dissident writers — from Pasternak down to the participants in the "Metropol" almanac — on "orders" from above. Offi­cial Literature broke up into sections and decayed but this actually had little relevance, if any, for the future. However, as it declined, this resulted in tan­gible changes in the literary-social hierarchy of values.

The degeneration of Village Prose had greater significance for literature, as it involved more gifted and socially important writers. Village Prose arose in the post-Stalinist years, describing the horrific conditions in the Russian countryside after it was subjected to ruthless collectivization and the miseries of WW II and the post-war period. It created portraits, sometimes brilliant ones, of village eccentrics and home-spun philosophers, bearers of popular wisdom, and it contributed to the revival of national self-consoiousness. The central figure of this literature was the Pious Woman who despite all the hardships of Soviet life remained true to her religious instincts. She was to be found, for example, in Solzhenitsyn's story "Matryona's House".

In the 1970s, Village Prose flourished, as Victor Astafiev, Vasily Belov and Valentin Rasputin succeeded in establishing an independent school, un­der the banner of "Patriotism". Precisely this patriotism attracted Official Writers, although it was not sufficiently pro-establishment and this often led to misunderstandings. Nonetheless, Official Prose tried to draw Village Writers into its ideological ranks and coerce them into joining in the fight with the West. Establishment showered them with State prizes and medals. It did not always work; Village Prose had its own religious and political agenda, even boldly taking part in the ecological movement.

In time, however, things began to change. The shift began even before Perestroika, but with its arrival it became more profound. Soviet Society took a pro-Western turn in its development. This happened spontaneously and without official sanction. It also determined the social basis for reform and brought about a clash between the Village Writers and society. Village Prose began to expose and condemn rather than to extol. It had three "sworn enemies".

Strangely enough, the first new enemy was woman. Whereas before the female figure was a positive heroine as the "Righteous Woman", now, in the role of a sensual and even promiscuous wife, she was portrayed in the spirit of the old Orthodox doctrine, as "Satan's seed". The second enemy was youth and youth culture. Village Writers bristled with a pathological hatred of rock 'n roll ("spiritual AIDS"). They regarded aerobics with equal venom. Village Prose, much like ancient folklore, demarcated "us" and "them" — two categories of people who dressed, ate and thought in entirely different ways and were ontologically incompatible. "Them" included Jews and Non-Russians in general. This was a delicate topic for Village Writers. They dis­cussed it in soft tones, ambiguously and evasively, but incessantly nonethe­less, just as the "Pamayat" society did it in its declarations. Village Writers were seriously alarmed by the Jewish influence on Russia's fate. They had a unique brand of racism which was shaped by a historical desire to shift the blame for all national catastrophes onto "them". They wanted to find an en­emy and through hatred to sublimate their own national inferiority complex.

In other words, Village Prose was not so much a thematic school, but a way of viewing the world. Traditionally in Russia, as in other countries with a large farm population such as Canada and Poland, this literature was in­fected with a messianic spirit. This disease was a strange combination of a national superiority complex, bred on ethnic and religious exclusiveness and an inferiority complex. Its language was saturated with dialecticisms. At the same time it was highly impassioned and induced a headache even when it described the real tragedies of the Revolution and Collectivization. The Vil­lage Writers appeared to reject "Soviet" values, but their apocalyptic tone drowned out everything else, exhausting the reader with its total lack of taste.

They saw their saviour in the foggy, romantic monarchist-religious dream of a theocratic order. They would replace Socialist Realist fantasies with the no less monstrous idea in which hatred reigned over love. It was no accident that this literature was in decay. As was demonstrated by literary history, a literature bitten by hatred inevitably destroyed itself, either scaring off or amazing the unbiased reader.

One serious problem of Russian literature has always been hypermoral-ism, a disease which exerts tremendous moral pressure on the reader. It can be found even in Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and other classics of the 19^th century. It had often been considered the distinguishing trait of Russian prose. No doubt the foreign reader viewed this hypermoralism as amusing and exotic. Yet even to me, it is something alien: that is the demand that writers be so­cially committed grew so great that it all too often distracted Russian litera­ture from aesthetic concerns and drew it into the realm of sermonizing. They often assessed literature by the acuteness and social significance of its topics.

Village and Liberal Prose, each in its own way, suffered from this hyper-moralist disease.

Liberal Prose, the child of the Khrushchev Thaw, is an honest movement and has always been. Its main concern was to tell as much truth as possible in its fight with the censor, who tried to permit as little truth as possible. Censorship was a formative influence for this Liberal school. It fed an ad­diction among Liberal Writers to an obtrusive reliance on allusions. Simi­larly, readers grew addicted to a "treasure-hunt" for hints, to seeking out places where the writer had his tongue in his cheek. The result was that writers got carried away with all this tongue-in-cheek parody and forgot how to think.

Liberal Prose hailed the advent of Perestroika and played, at least at first, the role that it had always sought: that of public prosecutor judging society by the laws of morality and common sense. But that joy was short-lived: unlike Khrushchev's Thaw, Perestroika proved to be a bottomless well, in which many works that not long ago seemed remarkably bold sank without trace.

Curiously, a large proportion of Dissident Literature originated in Liberal Prose, which had over-estimated the softness of post-Stalinist censorship. In other words, many works fell into the dissident category by accident. Yet, having shed all censorship restrictions under the aegis of Western publishers, the significant majority of these writers suffocated from too much oxygen. Logically speaking, the Liberal Writers should have blessed their comfort­able bondage; in fact, the more intelligent ones did just that.

But now, with freedom at home (albeit still incomplete), the boldest works of literature aged with amazing speed. Examples of such works are Anatoly Rybakov's "Children of the Arbat" or Mikhail Shatrov's liberal dramas.

An enormous number of works intended to be "Liberal" died, carrying away decades of writing by talented writers. I remember the dramatic mo­ment when poet after poet stepped up to the "first" open microphone, in a Moscow literary club to recite their beloved liberal poems written in great secret during the Brezhnev era. It turned out that the young audience didn't need these poets, they simply hounded them off the stage with an ironic flood of applause.

"A poet in Russia is more that just a poet", Yevtushenko, a liberal Soviet poet, once remarked, hoping to extol the poet's role here and not under­standing that actually a poet in such conditions is less than a poet, because he eventually degenerates. In general, a writer in Russia had to fulfill several functions at once: to be priest, prosecutor, sociologist, economist, mystic, and expert in matters of love and marriage. While he was busy being everything else, he was least of all a writer. He was often unable to feel the particular texture of literary language or of a writer's figurative and often paradoxical way of thinking. He would rent out a style for each particular job as one rents a car, it was nothing more than a vehicle to reach his social destination.

This is why Russian critics were rather suspicious of irony, seeing it as violating the serious view of literature as a social enlightener. This is why lit­erary functionaries were annoyed to see any playfulness in art, just as they were annoyed by Solzhenitsyn's political sedition. The socially-oriented lit­erature of resistance, both in its liberal and dissident varieties, completed the social mission which literature, alas, was forced to assume during the era of a closed State. But in the post-utopian Russia, it's time we returned to litera­ture as such.

Today we are witnessing the emergence of "another", "alternative" litera­ture. It is opposed to the "old" literature chiefly by its readiness to communi­cate with any culture — even the most remote in time or space. Its aim is to create a polysemantic and polystylistic structure, a structure that would draw support from Russian philosophy of the turn of the century, from the exis­tentialism of world art, from the philosophical-anthropological discoveries of the 20^lh century that Soviet culture preferred to ignore. Moreover, this new literature also draws strength from adapting to the conditions of free self-expression and rejecting opportunistic political journalism.

Soviet Literature was burdened by a social commitment of either the offi­cial or dissident nature. It has come to an end and {his in fact offers an op­portunity to revive the ethnic literatures throughout the former Soviet Union, including, of course, Russian Literature. The first roots of this "alternative" literature give cause for hope however modest they may now be.

13 Зак. 101

"ENEMY SYNDROME": THE ANATOMY OF A SOCIAL DISEASE

Question: Why are so many people in this country bent on creating "enemy images"?

Answer: There are several reasons, I guess. One of them is that for centuries the peoples inhabiting this country lived under an authoritarian state.

Authoritarian rule is seen as a salvation when people are poor and the state is poor. Poverty is the thing that makes people seek "monolithic" unity. They need it to survive. This tendency is also the result of a low level of education, the lack of information and the state of confusion created by the nature and scale of problems that require prompt and resolute action. It is also the awareness of an external threat, real or potential, and the need to be ready to rep'el an attack.

Russia, for instance, was always either besieged by enemies, who tried to tear her apart, or herself conquered new territories, seeking access to seas and oceans from Moscow to the Baltic and Black Seas, the Pacific and the Arctic. It often nearly disintegrated as a result of internecine strife or social upheavals, but later pulled herself together. She has had so many enemies to fight against. And all those wars have remained in people's memories. They have molded our national consciousness and our national character. You may lose and you may win, but the fight stays in your memory anyway.

Russian history has always had a lot of this. Psychologically, it is our crippling heritage. The same applies to the decades of Stalinism, when mil­lions of people were forced to seek out and destroy "enemies". A great many people perished in that grisly hunt for dissidents and many more became spiritually impoverished as a result of the constant hatred, spying on one an­other and struggle for power. Fear turned many into cynics or cowards.

Such is the price we paid for that witchhunt. It still drives on those who hope to turn the clock back and regain power, honours and privileges. These people have no principles or morality. They are like autumn flies that bite you fiercely before they go to hide in the snow. However, the wave of reac­tion that is now trying to clear the way for a rightward shift will ebb away in the end. It will end up in farce.

Time is cruel and merciless, unfortunately, for all. Yet, it is also beneficial because the human memory along with time itself records people's behav­iour, exploits, betrayals, intelligence and ignorance. It remembers the petty intrigues of nonentities who harassed their contemporaries. They did it out of envy and servility. That was in the last century, and during the past 80 years we have been fighting all the time: in the absence of an enemy, we invented one.

These are genetically inherited factors. But there are also subjective fac­tors, such as hatred, inordinate ambition and vanity. One should also add to

these stupidity, ignorance and arrogance. Against this general historical and social background one should see absolutely concrete things, such as the ac­tual relationships between different people, who can be mean and dishonest, kind and honest, emotionally involved and indifferent.

Such is reality. And reality molds consciousness. Consciousness may be destructive sometimes: it may create social groups and forces who need an enemy, no matter who it may be. Such consciousness cripples the soul of the new generations, which under certain circumstances may also feel the need to create some sort of an "enemy image".

Who needs all this? What for? This is needed by all who are angry and lazy and jealous, who would not hesitate to trample anyone underfoot for the sake of their own career and ambitions. It is convenient for a money-losing factory to blame suppliers for its own faults. It is convenient for an incom­petent or lazy manager to claim the existence of all sorts of "conspirators" and "intriguers". It is convenient for a person to blame anyone except himself for his own failures and incompetence.

True, there are different things that make people behave in this manner. One can make another person's life hell by harassing him or spreading ru­mors about him. Unfortunately, this desire to find an "enemy" is part of hu­man nature. Many writers hi Russia, especially Dosfbyevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol and Chekhov identified this in Man and despised him accordingly.

The authoritarian way of life suppresses human individuality and inde­pendence. It has thousands of ways of doing this. The suppression begins at kindergarten and school. This fact has long been the subject of public con­cern. It continues at university and vocational school, in the army and at work.,All that happened when we were in bad need of democracy. We still do not have enough democracy. We should have no illusions on this score.

As a result a person fails to learn a great deal of what he might have learned professionally and from the point of view of his general culture. If one lacks culture it is the result of lack of skills. No wonder many try to make up for these shortcomings with vanity, arrogance, preoccupation with other people's faults and failures and the search for "objective reasons" and all sorts of "enemies". This is the reason why some people are so fond of lies, abusing others whom they don't like and doing other atrocious things.

Is it possible to change this situations? Certainly. We can change it if we raise the level of general and individual culture of human relations. If we fail to do so, we shall have a lot of trouble, because there are too many pyroma-niacs around who are playing with matches and may set our home on fire.

Question: Why is this social disease getting worse (there are many signs showing that it is)?

13*

Answer: Perestroika is a veritable revolution. It has brought about many new and sometimes incomprehensible and unexpected phenomena, which many cannot accept. This agitates people and makes them nervous. They face a choice: either try to understand these phenomena or reject them. The most important thing is that perestroika requires constructive action and many people are unable to take such action, because for many years they have been taught not to.

As soon as it became clear that the old methods and practices were inef­fective, it turned out that there were people in all social groups, including the intelligentsia, who were interested, for one reason or another, in discrediting the new policies.

We set out to curb the powers of the economic bureaucracy and encourage independent producers, including the co-operatives, but look what has hap­pened. At first the l.ocal government officials gave the green light to co­operatives that sought to make quick profit by dishonest means. Such co­operatives had more money and were more "compliant". I know of dozens, hundreds of cases when such co-operatives were registered in a couple of days, while it took months for industrial co-operatives to overcome all the bureaucratic barriers.

However, when the first kind provoked a public outcry, the authorities cracked down on all co-operatives, and the industrial ones were the first to go. This is just to show how perestroika was sabotaged by the bureaucrats and also an example of a new search for "enemies".

As soon as things became a little more difficult for the black-market deal­ers, corrupt officials and the shadow economics and politics, there appeared all sorts of social provocations. All these people and groups need some justi­fication for their egotistic and sometimes criminal interests and actions. They all need an "enemy" and when the situation becomes dangerous, their anxiety to find such an enemy increases.

Meanwhile, normal, honest, hard working people face empty shop shelves and stand in long queues. They have to fight with countless problems and difficulties and live under the burden of red tape, indifference and soaring crime. They must have some explanation or a semblance of explanation. The problem is that the real villain is clever and crafty; he does everything to dis­tract public anger from himself and direct it against perestroika, democracy and glasnost; he does everything to make people nervous and incite unrest, capitalizing on people's credulity.

Lastly, there is the problem of ineptitude, of people who are ill prepared to care for themselves. We say that perestroika has brought us freedom, but freedom is a gift only for those who can use it for constructive endeavour. Otherwise, it may be a scourge;* it can destabilize a person's inner world.

Moreover, for the lazy and the weak-willed freedom is a way to social deg­radation, anarchy and crime.

The same applies to glasnost. For a thinking, creative and independent-minded person it is a great gift. But for those who are wont to take their c.ue from others and trust trite stereotypes, glasnost, which has opened a flood­gate of new facts, may become a source of nervousness and irritation. Small wonder so many people write in their letters about "loss of faith" and "loss of ideals" and ask how they should live. They do not always realize that they should live by such simple rules as kindness, honesty and justice and do their work well. Once again society falls under the spell of dogmas, which fre­quently deceived it in the past.

In other words, as we are dismantling the old structures and practices, while not yet having new ones in place, economic troubles and psychological confusion stimulate this disease at all levels, at that of society and the indi­vidual.

Question: What is the cause of the present divisions among our in­tellectuals, especially writers? Is this division akin to last century's polemics between the Slavophiles and the Westerners?

A n s w e r: It depends on how you look at it. It is only natural for people to argue about nagging social problems and artistic forms and styles. Dis­putes are vital to science, the arts and literature. And they always lead to di­vision into groups and associations. Each group has its likes and dislikes, prophets and antichrists, banners and slogans. This is natural. Such is reality. It has always been that way.

But this is not what you have in mind. I think you mean the deplorable situation in which people engaged in literary polemics go to seed and begin to form warring factions, report and stick labels on one another and abuse one another. It is disgusting. It is humiliating for artistic intellectuals and their work and turns the public against them. It has a negative effect on the cultural climate in society and offends public morality.

True, not all artistic intellectuals or scientists participate in this fighting.

Gifted people and people with dignity are not wont to do it. But the quasi-intellectual "birds-of-a-feather" spirit does exist. It is acquiring increasingly ugly forms and giving strength to reactionary forces and dark instincts. Pere-stroika makes the trend all the more noticeable and more intolerable than ever before: noticeable — because changes in society's cultural life have brought to the limelight the utter absurdity and moral inadequacy of what seemed to be a "norm" throughout decades, and intolerable — because all these intrigues are objectively aimed against perestroika, slowing down the process of renewal and pulling us back to the past.

Intellectual quest and striving as well as differences of intellectual nature are of secondary importance here. The point at issue is not a conflict between pro-Westerners and Slavophiles, but a combination of numerous outrageous distortions and abnormalities — historical, economic and political — which have accumulated and which have enhanced one another over many decades. This does not relieve an artist of personal responsibility for either his posi­tion or his moral and civic attitudes. But because we are faced with a phe­nomenon of social significance, it is essential to study its root causes.

One group of its causes is of historical nature. For a long time the leaders of the party and its bureaucratic apparatus aroused in intellectuals precisely the feeling of confrontation. Many honest and upstanding people, who were considered inconvenient and uncontrollable, were removed from the scene, harassed and, more recently, placed in conditions which did not allow them to work normally. They were labeled dissidents. It is obvious that attempts to streamline creative quest by fiat are destructive socially and morally. This is all the more so if such attempts are made by far from impeccable people. Nevertheless, many got used to this and liked it the way it was. For personal honours and benefits they readily harassed some of their own who dared to have different views.

Even worse than this, part of our intellectuals realized back in the years of the Proletarian Culture Drive that by flocking together, using their private connections and demagogically playing on serious problems it was possible to manipulate the party's position. Unfortunately, the scope of damage this has done to our society is not generally realized. And some manipulators from the apparatus continue to encourage the same attitude.

I somehow can understand why these things happened in the past. But to­day, in the era of glasnost and democracy, there are still scientists and writers who do not hesitate to send detailed reports to the authorities once they disa­gree with any of their colleagues ideologically. And there are many of them, I know by experience. They could lay down honestly and openly a different point of view and try to substantiate it with arguments, instead of reporting to the authorities. Some articles that are published often look more like indict­ments than attempts to establish the truth. And some quasi-intellectual lack­eys of stagnation during the Brezhnev years would like to forget what they themselves wrote at that time but are very eager to dig the archives of others. Those who lose their sense of humour and shame have never ended up with anything but embarrassment.

There are political causes, in my opinion. Our country has been deprived of normal internal political process for much too long. But life goes on, no matter what. There is no stopping it, as there is no stopping thought.

Our science, literature and art are overloaded with social and political problems. In some instances, this is good, but in others, as we see, it is not. If someone is unwilling to call a spade a spade, there appear all sorts of hints, implications, associations, allusions and historic parallels. People who are either very naive or extremely sly take them at their face value, thereby starting a new line of a dispute, discussion or clash.

For decades political life was forced into an outrageously perverted har­ness; this could not but affect the creative process. Small wonder that this very process developed all the typical features of political intrigue and ma­neuvering — ideological division, sharp clashes of ambitions, noisy quarrels and all the other attributes which continue to characterize our political cul­ture in general. There were also shameful instances of political destruction. Suffice it to recall the fate of Mikhail Bulgakov, Adrei Platonov, Alexander Tvardovsky, Vladimir Vemadsky, Andrei Sakharov, Victor Nekrasov, Boris Pasternak, Nikolai Vavilov, Andrei Tarkovsky and many others.

Perestroika does change things, but it cannot rectify the situation over­night. I believe, however, that as democracy, normal political life and demo­cratic public movements develop, the situation will begin to change in the di­rection of common sense. Our cultural life will be cleansed of sickly over-politicization. It will yield to habits of greater tolerance and the readiness to carry out a respectful debate. Thirst for blood will no longer prevail; true ' artists will do what they are supposed to do, and only pseudo-artists will continue their machinations, because they are not trained to do anything else.

It is through the same prism that I would evaluate the extremely sharp de­bates which are going on among our intellectuals in connection with pere-stroika. Perestroika is a revolution which leaves no one indifferent. It has stirred up passions which are flying particularly high in the intellectual mi­lieu. I am for emotion, for the clash of ideas, appraisals and attitudes. Pere­stroika only stands to gain by all this. It needs a smart and inspired opponent on the right, on the left and in the center — among conservatives and neo-conservatives and among radicals and ultra-radicals. But only on one condi­tion: there should be no hatred which may lead to violence. A normal demo­cratic process means competitive spirit in everything, including the intellec­tual sphere, but it does not need a vanity fair or a literary version of Vyshin-sky, chief public prosecutor during the Stalin purges of the 1930s.

In all these discussions, on whatever side they may be conducted, I most emphatically reject attacks on the dignity of the opponent. It is possible to argue from any position and against any point of view. But it is inadmissible to intimidate anyone only because he does not share your views and convic­tions. It is all the more impermissible to do so by juggling with quotations,

labels and concoctions. This is a sign of moral degradation, reviving the spirit of "special conferences", sham trials during the Stalin years.

Some of the recent public meetings too often saw attempts to find a scapegoat rather than ways and methods of solving our common problems. Currents of rhetoric have drowned what each of us should do right away to ensure for ourselves a better future. It is time to understand that this not only leads to hatred and dissociation in society but develops indifference, lack of principle and the absence of any conviction and moral standards. Isn't it time to stop?

Heated debates are as old as the world. It is much later that historians of art and literature exalt them by discarding all of no substance and ambitious and leaving only what really matters and has any artistic value. Let us re­member the degree of intolerance which characterized literary debates in Russia in the 19 century. A century and a half later, people finally separated the husk from the grain, and their memory retains only the true giants of lit­erature, thought, harmony and art. When I remember what pains these out­standing personalities had to go through in their search for the truth before they finally acquired vision, my heart starts bleeding at the sight of petty in­trigues in our literary corridors: writers trying to bite and outbark each other in order to get into the limelight. I am sorry for them. All this is a sign of moral degradation.

Different people mingle in those corridors, and they are angry for differ­ent reasons: some — because they were born angry, others — because they lost the privileges they used to have; and still others — because they either have the inferiority complex or, on the contrary, think of themselves as men of genius.

These factional fights are sometimes conducted even by honourable and really talented writers, whose books advocate goodness and compassion. They neither look for personal gain nor strive for power. But they are in the grips of a burning and endless pain which has very real roots — an ecologi­cal catastrophe, for instance. They are confused, because they cannot find a remedy and ease their pain. In a state, when they can think about nothing but this agonizing pain, they, too, are tempted to search for the enemy. Paradoxi­cal as this might seem, this happens because they are very sincere and trust­ing people.

Searching for the "enemy" is a social disease. It is especially dangerous at the present period, when we badly need national accord. Such searches are intolerable and immoral, for they are rooted in the psychology of the year 1937. And they become all the more horrible when they are of ethnic origin, when people are harassed because of their genealogical roots and those who do this find sadistic pleasure trying to establish the original names of the 200

mothers and fathers of their victims. A truly Russian intellectual always had a clear conscience, high moral principles, compassion for people in distress and a feeling of internationalism. Today, we rediscover this indigenous trait of Russian intellectuals, reading the great Russian philosophers of the end of the 19^th and the beginning of the 20 century, for whom, to our great regret, there was no room in the former Soviet Union.

As for the dispute between Slavophiles and pro-Westerners, I think that in its current form it is both artificial and too simplified. It is permeated with ideological speculations and animosity.

This outstanding dispute has been going on not only in literature, but in all the other spheres of cultural and social life throughout the history of Russian self-awareness. It emerged and developed because of the very position Rus­sia occupied. I would like to note, however, that these principled polemics used to be conducted at a very high moral and ethical level. Unfortunately, that spirit has been lost nowadays.

The fundamental question was: should Russia develop according to her own, unique pattern, or should she borrow certain objectives, guidelines and patterns of development from the West? Initially, I believe, an answer to this natural and quite sincere question was given by life itself. It was a dialectical answer: Russia should pursue her own way and us* her own judgment, but she should not shun anything that proved of value in the experience of other countries and peoples.

So, what is there to argue about? And, also, why Slavophiles vs. pro-Westerners and not pro-Easterners? We could borrow a lot from Japan, In­dia, China or the other ancient Oriental cultures.

Debates around Slavophilism went on and on. It was classified scientifi­cally not only by revolutionary democrats led by Nikolai Chemishevsky, but such famous Russian philosophers as Nikolai Berdyayev and Vladimir So-lovyov. But Slavophilism of those times meant searches for the truth, not for the people who were to be intimidated.

In today's debates, in my opinion, Slavophilism is just a cover for super­fluous disrespectful and base instincts. Slavophiles were decent people and real patriots who sought a special way for Russia. They thought that the West posed a threat to such a way, although objectively they were largely influ­enced by the West. They sincerely fought for the purity of the Russian lan­guage against unnecessary borrowings from foreign languages.

Slavophiles idealized Russia before Tsar Peter the Great but not the "oprichnina", special administrative elite under Tsar Ivan the Terrible. They were keen on Russian, Slavic uniqueness, but they did not provoke pogroms or searches for the "enemy" to protect it. Their views can be judged differ­ently — politically, ideologically and practically, but they can't be accused of

advocating anything immoral. They were honest thinkers, chroniclers, col­lectors and researchers of their country's culture. Their ideas are still of value and some of them are very topical at present. It is sacrilege even to suppose that Slavophilism — a philosophy of love for Slavs and their culture — can be a political base for anti-Semitism. Even Stalin wrote that "anti-Semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous survival of cannibalism".

It is only to be regretted that a very serious idea of Russian revival is sometimes used today by the hysterical and reckless, who scare away those people who in their thoughts and actions seek the flowering of Russia. One won't make Russia any better with splits and riots. Russia needs unity and a new vision of her centuries-old uniting and consolidating strength, rather than calls which provoke hatred. It is necessary to rekindle the feeling of dignity and compassion in the nation, rather than inflate suspicion. The country needs a triumph of free labour in a free land.

Question: What is to be done so as to channel all polemics, whether political or literary-critical, onto a constructive course?

A n s w e r: It is increasingly important to do this. But in a democracy nothing can be done unless there is a will for a dialogue on all the sides and unless growing "cannibalism" is condemned and arrested.

It is also necessary to restructure social relations, for it is these relations that predetermine both the degree of alienation and the moral situation. It is necessary to restore a high culture of communication. In actual fact, we have never had a need for either a constructive dialogue or its moral environment. For decades we strove to be manageable and ready to deliver. We pretended to have a vigorous life, demonstrating our "monolithic unity" and escalating the struggle for different causes. We have now to change all that. Which is only possible through changes in social conditions and cultural attitudes.

Let us take relations between different social and professional groups and between nationalities. Some stand to gain from flare-ups of ethnic differ­ences. Some try to drive a wedge between the authorities and the people. Some reproach our peasants because they allegedly cannot feed this country. It is crystal clear, however, that peasants have nothing to do with the situa­tion. Any peasant knows that in a vast country like ours, with its bad roads, grain and potatoes should be stored by those who produce them, and that no one needs annual noisy campaigns for bumper crops and competition in stu­pid bungling. Taking in crops, storing and processing grain has always been the prime concern of peasants, which kept them busy from spring to autumn. But since Stalin's time, we have been pestering and nagging our peasants, as if they didn't know better themselves what to do.

Some see all the evil in the intellectuals, who do everything wrong and cannot come up with anything of value in science, literature or the arts, and should, therefore, be "dethroned". There are people who are even convinced that the shelves in our stores would be well-stocked and everyone would work much better, if it weren't for glasnost.

This is another example of searching for the evil spirit.

A constructive dialogue is unthinkable without real professionalism, which is the only source of all constructive ideas. But does everyone want them? Constructive attitudes can kill some morally and materially. Reading papers, I can't overcome the feeling that we are ready to accuse anyone but ourselves for the inability and unwillingness to work.

We should improve the climate of our relations in big and little matters alike — both are equally important. It is a moral duty of our intellectuals and, in particular, our writers to lead and set an example in this field. I am not urging anyone to love someone to whom he or she takes a strong dislike or whose views and behaviour are subjectively appalling. But humanitarian norms of communication should be observed.

A constructive dialogue is not a debate or discussion on a specific issue in a certain place and at a certain time. It should become the general state of so­ciety, its psychology and practice. Only then we Will feel the results of our efforts and satisfaction in our hearts, and both our life and we ourselves will change. This is one of the goals of perestroika. But no constructive dialogue is possible without real freedom and in the absence of glasnost, when the in­formation the public gets is strictly measured. There can be no constructive dialogue without democratic rules and a democratic outlook.

THE WHITE SOW

A team from Soyuzmiaso, a government organization in charge of meat procurement, arrived in the village for pig contracting.

A village nearby heard the news and, believing that the pigs would be re­moved witiiout pay, slaughtered off the entire stock in one night.

Only the blacksmith kept his big white sow with a black mark on her forehead.

The only pig in the whole village.

He did not have the heart to kill her and decided to trust to chance.

And the next day rumor got round that those who had slaughtered their pigs would be fined and, worse, sued for malicious livestock destruction.

"What are we to do now?" someone asked.

"What do you think? We're all in the soup now, 'cept the smith: he'll get his money and won't go to court neither".

"Our folks have butchered theirs, too, to the last pig" said a peasant from the neighboring village where they had a collective farm. "When they're fin­ished here, they'll be onto us, and what shall we do?"

"They'll start with you, Puzyrev", said the harness-maker. "The smith will be the last on the list, his house is at the very end".

"They're coming!"

The excited crowd waited, in grim silence, for the contractors to approach, as one might wait for a coroner at the murder site.

Puzyrev, who was to get his comeuppance first, suddenly darted through his hut door, bumping into his wife in the passage, whispered something to her and scurried off across the village backyards.

The peasants watched him go in bewilderment.

"Does he think he'll give them the slip, or what?"

"He may do, but his missus will still be here," said people in the crowd.

The visitors, two clean-shaven men in cloth caps, whoaed their horse by Puzyrev's hut.

Suddenly, from the far end of the village, came the sound of piercing pig squeals.

The visitors exchanged looks, their faces, livid with cold, splitting with smug grins.

"We've got something there, Comrade Kholodkov," said one.

"Stow it," said the other and wagged his finger at his mate, the way an ex­perienced hunter would caution an over-enthusiastic assistant all agog at the first signs that the quarry was near.

Puzyrev's missus emerged from the hut and invited the guests to come in for a little warmth and refreshments.

"Is your man at home, then?" asked the visitors, pouring themselves a glass of vodka with numb hands.

"Aye, he is," said the hostess," just gone out to feed the beasts."

At long last there appeared the master of the house, slightly out of breath, and having greeted the guests, hung his hat on a nail by the door.

"Well, how's things on the pig front here? Got any yourself?"

The peasants who had packed into the hut held their breath.

"Depends..." drawled the host. "Can't say I've all that many, but one is what we can produce all right."

The peasants looked at one another, unsure what to make of it.

"That's fine, then, we'll just finish our drinks, take a look at it and get the contract ready."

The visitors downed one more glass apiece, put on their caps and made for the stockyard, munching a radish. The Russian ritual of vodka drinking requires food to be taken with alcohol.

The villagers could not believe their eyes: there in the sty, on a bed of clean fresh straw lay a big white sow with a black mark on her forehead.

"Ain't she gorgeous! How much shall we say, Comrade Kholodkov?"

Two hundred would be a fair price, and an advance of fifty."

"Right. Put it down, then. And make an entry about her looks: a white sow with a little black mark on the forehead. Lucky, that special mark on her. Now we won't get this one mixed up with the others."

The peasant from the neighboring village who had been awaiting devel­opments with the crowd of locals in the yard suddenly bolted out, climbed onto his horse and galloped homeward at top speed.

"Now let's try next door."

In the next hut they were offered a glass of milk, good wholesome stuff. As they were finishing the milk, in straggled the master of the house, saying:

"Not a good idea, this, to cool your innards with milk; only just come in from the cold, and there you are, letting in more cold. Much better to crack a bottle."

"Aye, he's right there... I'm getting shivery."

The host handed a glass of vodka to each contractor, and when they had gulped in down, he said:

"The sow is waiting. Ready for reception."

"Well, if she's waiting, out we go." '

The visitors went out into the yard and saw in one corner, reclining on clean new straw, a big white sow with a black mark on her forehead.

"Oh, look, another one to match," cried Comrade Belov.

"Them's all relatives here."

"Only this one's bigger, ain't she," said Comrade Kholodkov, adding: "Holy Mother, it's all that drinking on an empty stomach. I'm fuddled."

"This one'll be a couple of weeks older than the first," said Kulazhnikov.

"So how much shall we give for this one?" asked Belov.

"Make it two hundred, and seventy in advance. Write what she looks like, so we don't confuse her with the others, and so they don't cheat. Is it your vodka that's so strong, or is it because we ain't eaten?"

"Because you ain't eaten, sure thing. Nothing like a plateful of fresh meat, now," said Kochergin, whose turn came next. And when the contractors went towards his house, he winked at his wife coming out to meet them, and raced back to the sty. A minute later a pig could be heard squealing desper­ately, the way pigs do when hauled along by the forelegs.

Comrade Belov looked at Kholodkov with a drowsy smile and said:

"Struck gold here, we have. Our Moscow shops will be crammed with bacon."

He wanted to clink glasses with his companion, but missed and, with a re­signed wave of the hand, drank without further ceremony.

Some ten minutes later, in came the host and announced that the sow was waiting.

The contractors found their caps, which had taken some time, and fol­lowed him out.

And Comrade Belov, barely inside the sty, halted in amazement:

"Why, there's two in here."

"No, there's only one, it just seems so on an empty stomach," said one of the villagers, and the hut owner gave him a black look and showed him a closed fist from under his coat flap.

"But this one's as good as two. Huge, she is. Worth three hundred ruble, Comrade Kholodkov, if she's worth a kopeck. And write down that she's got this special mark, not to mix her up with the others: white with a black mark in her forehead."

In the next household they registered two white sows with black marks. Actually, Comrade Belov fancied there were four at first, but Kholodkov set him right, and even felt the pigs with his hands, to make sure, and was somewhat surprised that while he was feeling for different pigs, his hands kept knocking against each other.

"We're getting on nicely!" Comrade Belov exclaimed in delight.

Suddenly there appeared a cart on the road hurtling along from the neigh­boring village. The man driving the horse was instantly identified as the peasant who had been here to witness the contractors' arrival. Pulling up by the blacksmith's hut, the last in the row, the new-comer ran inside and shouted before he could get his breath back:

"For mercy's sake, let me have the sow, quick!"

"Isn't through yet. She's receiving next door."

Having done fifty homesteads, the contractors sat down at the black­smith's table, spread the pay sheet and ran their fingers over it clumsily, say­ing:

"The mind boggles. After a job like that one could celebrate for two days solid. If all these pigs were to be slaughtered at once, there'd be a mountain of meat. Comrade Kholodkov, you write a report now."

Kholodkov picked up a pencil that kept skipping from his grasp and wrote:

"Comrade Nikishin, we are choking with pigs. Paid out three and a half thousand in advance payments alone. A choice selection, export material every one, black all over, white marks on foreheads. We are moving on pre­cipitately, expecting like success."

Литература

Бархударов Л С Язык и перевод. М., 1975,

Бреус Е.В. Теория и практика перевода (английский язык): Программа курса. М., 1996.

Гак В.Г. Сопоставительная лексикология. М., 1977.

Комиссаров В.Н Лингвистика перевода. М., 1980.

Лещенко М.И. Виртуальный и актуальный аспекты предложения. Минск, 1988.

Львовская З.Д. Теоретические проблемы перевода. М., 1985.

Михеев А. В. Современная английская риторика и перевод: Учебное пособие к спецкурсу "Основы публичной речи". М., 1988.

Морозов М.М Пособие по переводу. М., 1956.

Рецкер Я. И. Теория перевода и переводческая практика. М., 1974.

Рецкер Я. И. Следует ли передавать аллитерацию в публицистическом переводе? / Тетради переводчика. М,, 1966, №3.

Стрелкова НС Практическая стилистика английского языка и стилистическое редактирование переводов: Учебное пособие. М., 1984.

Федоров А В Основы общей теории перевода. М., 1983.

Черняховская Л. А. Перевод и смысловая структура. М., 1976.

Швейцер А.Д. Перевод и лингвистика. М., 1973.

Швейцер А.Д. Теория перевода: статус, проблемы, аспекты. М., 1988.

Carrel ЯМ.. Laird Ch. Modem English Handbook. N.Y., 1954.

William Sirunk. Jr The elements of style. The MacmillamCompany, N.Y.. 1960.

Содержание

Предисловие..................................................................................................... 3

Введение. Перевод как акт межъязыковой коммуникации........................... 5

1. Денотативная функция............................................................................. 14

1.1. Общие сведения................................................................................... 14

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