Komaromi, Ann Uncensored: Samizdat Novels and the Quest for Autonomy in Soviet Dissidence (review)

Abstract

SEER, 94, 4, October 2016 734 Aleksei Semenenko’s concluding summary outlines Aksenov’s role as a prominent, synthetically- (if not synaesthetically-) bound cultural persona of specific prominence deserving of further study. The volume’s successful mixture of Romantic, baroque and avant-garde perspectives offers the precise creative model that is typologically relevant for analysing Ivan Aksenov’s cultural output in all its splendid complexity. University of Ghent Dennis G. Ioffe Komaromi, Ann. Uncensored: Samizdat Novels and the Quest for Autonomy in Soviet Dissidence. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2015. x + 254 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $39.95 (paperback). This is an exceptionally stimulating monograph which sheds much new light on the role and significance of tamizdat and samizdat in what turned out to be the last two decades of the USSR. The author bases her discussion on three major works of prose fiction written or completed in the aftermath of the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia (this had a much greater impact on Russian writing that the brutal 1956 crushing of the Hungarian Revolution): Vasilii Aksenov’s Ozhog (1969–75), Andrei Bitov’s Pushkinskii dom (1964–71) and Veniamin Erofeev’s Moskva-Petushki (probably 1969). All three works, first published abroad and fairly quickly translated into English and other languages, were finally published in the USSR shortly before it collapsed. As Ann Komaromi reminds us, post-Stalin dissidence gradually developed from ‘Cultural Opposition’ into ‘Political Opposition’ (p. 133) — perhaps, one could add, reflecting the difference between the dissenters (like the three writers mentioned above, who strove for professional autonomy) and the dissidents. Like, for instance, Pasternak and Siniavskii, most of the literary dissenters (and many other Soviet citizens) had ‘stylistic differences’ with the Communist regime, but were not very anxious to participate in political activities and ‘merely’ wanted to engage in their chosen profession. This distinguishes them from dissidents like Vladimir Bukovskii, who can be (and has been) described both as a ‘Soviet dissident’ and as an ‘anti-Soviet dissident’. Much depends on how we define homo sovieticus, bearing in mind that in the USSR the sovety had less influence and power than councils in many other countries than the organs of the CPSU. Of course, some of the most active dissenters, such as Natal´ia Gorbanevskaia, whose consciences forced them to become dissidents, also had no wish to become politicians — they ‘merely’ wanted to help to ‘convert’ the USSR into a more tolerant, liberal and democratic country, giving up on its imperialistic and messianic ambitions. REVIEWS 735 The three authors to whom much of this book is devoted were (in one case he still is) more concerned about the parlous state of Russian society than about any attempt to replace those who rule over it. ‘Bitov [b. 1937], like Aksenov, directed his critique at his generation and people around him in Soviet society at least as much as he indicted the regime’ (p. 73). Komaromi quotes Lidiia Ginzburg as summarizing the main characteristics of the previous generation to Bitov’s as ‘accommodation, justification, and indifference’ (p. 78), apparently inherited by many or most of Bitov’s coevals. Perhaps only ‘a change of consciousness could furnish the building blocks of a new society’ (p.22). The USSR’s official philosophy and ideology were based on a very dogmatic atheism. The after-effects of this are only too apparent in today’s Russian society, which in some ways is more neo-Soviet than post-Soviet. Komaromi periodically touches on this, but one aspect of the juvenile nature of Soviet society which she might have said more about is the predilection for referring to the protagonists of the three novels (if Moskva-Petushki is best considered as a novel) by diminutives of their first names — Tolia (Toliachka) Von Shteinbok, L´eva Odoevtsev and Venichka (Venia) Erofeev. Naturally, diminutives are often used in the literature and life of other countries, and the current President of Russia is often called disrespectfully by one or another familiar version of his given name, but I think there is something significant behind Aksenov’s, Bitov’s and Erofeev’s use of this device. These characters are men who have...