Book Reviews

One calls the book enigmatic because Ha raszti skips from sections in which he mocks himself to ~ore serious passages in which he seems to be saying it is quite normal for an artist to work within the confines of any culture that is his national inheritance. The excuse has a sometimes unnecessarily forgiving tone. Haraszti's thesis is that socialist writing comes in two forms, depending on the state of affairs pertaining to any given moment in a to talitarian society. If one is under a Stalin, Com munist pictorial art will be poster work, and literature will follow a propagandist line. There will be strict censorship exercised from a cen tral point. Under a Khrushchev or a Gorbachev, however, things might differ. In periods of re laxation, artists under socialism may be permit ted a wide degree of self-censorship. The ones that seem to be good socialist citizens will be rewarded by ample funds and good working conditions-hence the term "velvet prison. "

What Haraszti says may very well be true for Hungary. He doesn't talk much about specific Hungarian authors, so it is difficult to see where ,'soft aesthetics" may take over. In medieval times the architects of Chartres Cathedral would have endorsed everything Haraszti might have had to say about working in a culture. But in Soviet Russia the Haraszti thesis doesn't check out. True enough, there was plenty of poster work under Stalin. But the writers who were permit ted latitudes under Khrushchev did not ask for velvet prison cells. Doctor Zhivago and various books by Solzhenitsyn were uncompromising. Indeed, Solzhenitsyn' s Gulag Archipelago still awaits a Soviet publication under the so-called relaxed Gorbachev. The Haraszti book does not check with Max Eastman's excellent Artists in Uniform, written many years ago and unfortunately now out of print. Max dealt with Soviet writers both in the pre-Stalin period, when Lenin and Trotsky were permissive about art, and in the gloomy night when the totalitarian "inquisition" took over.

In Leningrad, in the first days of Bolshevism, poets were permitted their lyricism. They could sing to the moon if they pleased. But the story of Yesenin, who married the American dancer, Isadora Duncan, is symptomatic. Yesenin had hoped to travel about Russia with Isadora, sing ing while she danced. But when Lenin and Trotsky ceased to have a direct influence on Yesenin, he took to reading texts he couldn't understand. Says Eastman, "It was the two fold misfortune of Yesenin' s lyric nature to be born into an age of gigantic concentration upon a practical undertaking, and into a company of engineers whose blueprints took the form of metaphysical demonstrations that the universe itself, or man and all society and all history, is that undertaking. ' , In short, Yesenin was convinced there was no room for poets under either militant or a more relaxed socialism. "My poems," he wrote, ' 'are no longer needed here." So his suicide followed.