Tales of the Mountains and Steppes
by Aitmatoy Ch.
Moscow: Progress
The White Ship
by Aitmatoy Ch.
Crown
The Ascent of Mount Fuji
by Aitmatoy Ch.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Stikhi (Poems)
by Bella Akhmadulina
Moscow
Selected Poems
by Iosif Brodsky
Harper & Row; Penguin
Chast’rechi (Part of Speech)
by Iosif Brodsky
Ardis
Forbidden Fruit
by Fazil Iskander
Moscow: Progress
Sandro iz Chegema (Sandro from Chegem), Novy Mir
by Fazil Iskander
The Goatibex Constellation
by Fazil Iskander
Ardis
To Be Preserved Forever, in English
by Lev Kopelev
Lippincott in US; Secker & Warburg in Britain
Khranit’ vechno, in Russian
by Lev Kopelev
Ardis
Vremena (Times)
by Naum Korzhavin
Posev
(Three Tales), Novy Zhurnal (The New Review)
by Yury Mamleev
Blondin obeego tsveta (The Blond of Both Colors)
by Vladimir Maramzin
Ardis
Istoriia zhenit’by Ivana Petrovicha (The Story of Ivan Petrovich’s Marriage), Continent
by Vladimir Maramzin
No.2 pp.
Collected Tales (in Russian)
by Vladimir Maramzin
Ullstein Verlag
Seven Days of Creation
by Vladimir Maximov
Knopf
Kalina krasnaia (Red Snowball-Tree)
by Vasily Shukshin
Moscow
Shkola dlia durakov (A School for Fools)
by Sasha Sokolov
Ardis
White Grass
by V. Soloukhin
Moscow: Progress
Prigovor (The Sentence)
by V. Soloukhin
Moscow
Telenok bodalsia s dubom (The Calf Butts the Oak)
by A. Solzhenitsyn
In English: Harper & Row
Lenin v Tsiurikhe (Lenin in Zurich)
by A. Solzhenitsyn
In English: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
The GULAG Archipelago Two
by A. Solzhenitsyn
Harper & Row
Dolgoe proshchanie (A Long Goodbye)
by Yury Trifonov
Moscow
“The Exchange,” Russian Literature Triquarterly
by Yury Trifonov
No. 5 pp.
Drugaia zhizn’ (“Another Life”)
by Yury Trifonov
Novy Mir, No. 8 pp.
Zhizn’ i neobychainye prikliucheniia soldata Ivana Chonkin (The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin)
by V. Voinovich
In English: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Ivan’kiada (Ivankiada)
by V. Voinovich
Ardis
“An Incident in the Metropole,” Continent
by V. Voinovich
Kontinent (Continent) Anchor/Doubleday
published by Ullstein Verlag. Selections in English to be published by
In cases where Russian texts are cited, the Russian is given first with the English in parentheses after. A number of these authors have been published in English in Moscow, by Progress Publishers.
The Russian literary scene is bizarre. The funniest new satirical work by a Soviet writer is Vladimir Voinovich’s story of his own real-life battle to get into a two-room apartment which is coveted by another “writer” (only publication: Taiwan Belongs to China) who wants the extra square meters for a toilet (an American toilet at that) which he purchased while at the UN. The finest novel in the last twenty years (Sokolov’s A School for Fools) is by a Russian born in Ottawa who left Moscow this fall to become a gardener and lumberjack in the Vienna Woods. Solzhenitsyn has written a book about Lenin that his friends say is too autobiographical. The best-selling Soviet poet is a blind man who writes like Rod McKuen. The best Russian-language literary journal is published in Munich; the best Russian poet lives in Ann Arbor; and the first Agatha Christie in Russian has gone on sale in Jerusalem.
Because of this odd literary diaspora, a trip from Petersburg to Moscow provides only part of what one needs to know for a full picture of the current literary scene. But nearly every winter for seven years I have made the journey, and did so again in November 1975. Since these visits began in 1969 the community of Soviet writers has gone through several stages. From 1969 through 1971 there was still hope that things could be improved gradually. Then most people thought that the process of de-Stalinization, while it might have its detours and dead ends, could not be totally reversed—and that every year would see the publication of poetry and prose which couldn’t have appeared the year before. Beginning in 1972, however, particularly after Nixon’s visit and the internal crackdown which accompanied détente, the major topic of discussion in many families was whether to stay or to emigrate. By the end of 1975 many of the literary intellectuals who wanted to emigrate had managed to do so; those who remained had made a conscious decision to stay, either because of principles or for practical reasons.
Things (including editors and censors) are getting tougher. Voinovich and others say that the level of the literary journals is perhaps lower now than under Stalin. The mood of the liberal intelligentsia seems demoralized and apprehensive. In spite of this writers keep writing in the face of bureaucratic meddling and foreign indifference.
Leningrad is a colder, more imperious city than Moscow. Literary trials are more frequent there (just last year Vladimir Maramzin was on his way to the Archipelago—and now, thanks to a humane solution, he is in Paris, working for the new magazine Continent); the sense of community among the writers is much weaker than in Moscow. Leningrad is a city for individualists, like Nabokov …
