SOURCE: "Vasili Aksenov at 33," in Tri-Quarterly, No. 2, Spring, 1965, pp. 75-83.

[In the following essay, Brown examines a variety of Aksyonov's works and provides an overview of the author's career.]

Kirpichenko, a roughneck tractor driver in the Soviet Far East, begins his vacation with a three-day binge, then boards a jet for Moscow. On the plane he is fatally dazzled by the beautiful stewardess Tanya. Tamed and bemused, he spends the rest of his vacation, and all his money, flying back and forth on the Moscow-Khabarovsk run, hoping for another glimpse of Tanya. When he finally sees her again in the airport, it is too late; the broken giant retains his fair vision, but he must go back to work.

Uncle Mitya, a taxi-driver in Yalta who is plagued by speeding tickets, tries to immunize himself by marrying off his daughter, a sister-in-law, and sundry other in-laws to the local traffic cops. The marriages succeed, but the project backfires: Uncle Mitya finds himself hemmed in by his new relatives—staunch enforcers of the law who are first of all anxious to demonstrate their impartiality by pinching him as often as possible.

Georgi Abramashvili is an eighteen-year-old lifeguard at Sukhumi who is awaiting his draft call. He spends his sunny days impressing the girls on the beach with spectacular handstands. At night he courts trouble with the Komsomol by evading service in the local druzhina. One fine evening this Tarzan is introduced to sex (and cigarettes!) by the vacationing Alina. Next day Alina's husband arrives, there is a fight, and Abramashvili is publicly denounced for hooliganism. The army, he decides, will be fine. He might even get to be a cosmonaut!

Kirpichenko, Uncle Mitya, and Georgi Abramashvili would seem to have little in common. In the context of contemporary Soviet literature, however, there is much that unites them. All three are ordinary, stumbling, bewildered guys, trying to get along in the world without too much discomfort, largely unconcerned with the fate of society at large. They are only minimally aware, if at all, of participating in the building of communism. All three, in fact, would be vulnerable to the accusation that their horizons are narrow, that they lack any sense of the lofty purpose of life, and that they are ideologically too passive to play a conscious role in shaping the world about them. It is just as true, however, that these three fictional characters, conceived by their author in a spirit of irony, sympathy and humor, are interesting, colorful and believable. They are typical of the best characters in the Soviet literature of the nineteen sixties precisely because of their authenticity and lack of schematic adulteration.

The creator of these characters, from three separate short stories, is Vasili Aksenov, a 33-year-old Muscovite who five years ago abandoned his profession as a physician to take up a career in literature. Since his first appearance in print in 1959, Aksenov has published three novels, one novella and roughly a dozen short stories. He has also done scenarios of two of his novels and one or two independent scenarios. Together with Evgeny Evtushenko and a few other prominent writers, he is an editor of the outstandingly successful monthly magazine Yunost' (Youth). Aksenov is one of the half-dozen most promising young writers in the U.S.S.R. today, and he is certainly one of the busiest.

Aksenov is also controversial. His second novel, A Starry Ticket, which appeared in the summer of 1961, featured an engagingly irreverent and rebellious group of Soviet teenagers, rock-and-rolling runaways from the discipline of both parents and society, whose pungent, flip language was loaded with foreignisms (especially Americanisms) and whose sceptical, wry view of the Soviet middle-class success pattern earned their creator, for a time, the title of the Russian Salinger. Aksenov's "starry boys," as hostile critics have come to call them, met with bitter disapproval from the watchdogs of orthodoxy, who not only resented their hip lingo (a mixture of foreign borrowings, pure invention, Soviet underworld argot, and jargon from the concentration camps), but, even more seriously, were shocked by their open though adolescent mockery of Soviet sacred cows. Because of this novel and subsequent literary sins in the same vein, Aksenov got a parental scolding from Khrushchev in the spring of 1963 and was forced to make a public apology. Since then his published works appear to have been free of literary heresy, although they have retained in large measure the saucy flavor that has always irritated his critics. At the same time his writing continues to be experimental. It has its ups and downs. His most recent novel, It's Time, My Friend, It's Time, published last summer, was in many respects an artistic failure. On the other hand, his three most recently published short stories display the strength and charm of the best of Aksenov. Even more important, both the novel and the stories give evidence of a literary mind that has not lost its restlessness.

One of Aksenov's great strengths is his sense of fun—a fascination for the grotesque that suggests a combination of [Nikolai] Gogol and a somewhat milder Joseph Heller. He purposely lets things get out of hand. Kirpichenko, in his search for Tanya, covers the 4,000 air miles between Moscow and Khabarovsk not once, but ceaselessly, back and forth, back and forth. The boys in A Starry Ticket, picking up odd jobs for eating money on their runaway to Estonia, are hired to repaint the hull of a black fishing trawler. They find some red paint and decorate the hull with it.

But then we started to wonder whether it wouldn't be even nicer if we painted the whole ship red. Shouldn't we turn everything red that had been black until then? Go over the whole thing with bucket and brush and, before anyone knew what had happened, the entire thing would be red.

When the boss discovers his tomato-colored ship the next morning, he, too, crimsons. At times Aksenov's taste for the extravagant and the improbable get him involved in huge, farcical situations that can best be described as a kind of rollicking panic. A ship from Morocco, laden with oranges, arrives in the dead of winter at a remote port on the island of Sakhalin. The locals, many of whom have never seen an orange, rush in from every outlying village and work-site, clogging the roads and plowing through the snow on tractors, dump trucks, motorcycles, road graders, bulldozers, cars and buses. Nanaian tribesmen on dogsleds join the crush. A steamy bacchanal ensues as the entire populace, punctuating its revelry with fistfights, gorges on oranges. What happens is plausible, but it is somehow heightened, larger than life, and juicier.

Like many young Soviet poets and writers, Aksenov is fascinated with the jet age and awed by speed. The world of his novels and stories is full of cars, helicopters and airplanes. But he is not a naive worshiper of technology, and, unlike many of his more chauvinistic compatriots, he seems to have reacted to Soviet achievements in space with equanimity. There is evidence in his writing of a healthy respect for the ominousness of violent motion. A major development in A Starry Ticket turns on a catastrophic plane crash. And the most poignant character in It's Time, My Friend, It's Time, the ungainly young misfit and dreamer Kyanukuk (who, among other things, has made up the story that he is about to be selected as an exchange student at the University of Michigan), dies as his motorcycle crashes at top speed into a piece of highway construction equipment.

Aksenov likes to describe movement, both of people and of things. His characters love sports and play them well. (Wilt the Stilt Chamberlain is the idol of one of them.) They are handy with their fists and quick to resort to them. They are intrigued by rhythms, and collect jazz tapes and dance steps. Dimka, one of the boys in A Starry Ticket, gets a job as a bricklayer's helper and, relishing the sarcasm, describes his work:

Talk of a complicated occupation: you put a couple of bricks on top of the belt and when they're gone, you put a couple more on … And so I took two bricks and put them on the belt, too. And to think it was a human being who invented a damned contraption like the conveyor belt! It never stops moving, that belt, and you keep putting bricks on it two by two and your pile grows smaller while the wall gets taller and taller….

Motion—even when it is absurd and purposeless—holds a special charm for Aksenov and seems important to him in and for itself. One of his most recent stories concerns the nostalgic visit of an old man (now rehabilitated and pensioned after eighteen years' imprisonment and exile under Stalin) to the village of his birth. There he finds a boyhood acquaintance whose nickname is Dikoi (The Strange One). Fifty years before, the narrator, with a group of other boys, had smashed a weird, Rube Goldberg machine which Dikoi was building in a deserted bathhouse. They talk of their lives and, as the visitor is about to leave, his host takes him to a locked shed in back of his hut.

I saw the same intricate machine which we had broken in the bathhouse. It was built along the same lines, only more complicated, more majestic. The machine was moving, wheels rotated, big and small, the spokes and levers moved silently, the belt-drive slid quietly over the pulleys, and there was the weak click of a little board, a little board, a little board …

"Remember?" Dikoi whispered.

"I remember," I also whispered.

The little board clicked, as if ticking off the years of our lives to the end, and even beyond the end, back and forth, and we didn't even know where these noises were rolling to …

I felt sick.

"An amusing gadget," I said in a sarcastic voice, to give myself courage. "What's it for? Eh, Dikoi?"

"Simply, Pavlusha, for motion," he answered again in a whisper, still looking at the wheels.

"And when did you start it up?" I again asked sarcastically.

"When? I don't know, don't remember. Long ago, very long. You see, it doesn't stop."

"What is it—perpetual motion?"

He turned to me and his eyes gleamed madly, not from the electric light but from the light of the early moon.

"It seems, yes," he whispered with a sickly smile, "but perhaps not. So … let's take another look …"

Motion in this story is more than just a thing in itself, for it has a distinctly symbolic function as well. We are concerned at the moment, however, not so much with Aksenov's ideas as with his writer's temperament—the way he uses words to convey the shape and texture of life. His style of writing is truly arresting (much more so, unfortunately, in Russian than in English translation). It is based, first of all, on a very heavy use of dialogue—brisk, racy, ironical, quarrelsome, tart. Most of his abundant humor, and a great deal of his narrative development, is located in the dialogue. Since Aksenov is also particularly fond of first-person narrative, his dialogue is, more often than not, reported dialogue, in which the narrator himself (not the author) has been closely involved, either as a participant or as an interested observer. This method lends an intimacy and warmth, as well as an especially opinionated flavor to the writing. Furthermore, since the narrator is as candid in reporting his own feelings as he is in recounting the utterances of others, there shines through his joking, mocking, sceptical, off-beat language a startling emotional authenticity. Aksenov and his generation have grown up under the genial influence of the matchless Soviet satirists Ilf and Petrov. His own language and attitudes, as well as those of his characters, bears heavily the imprint of these wisely crazy humorists, who were always alert to the phony and ridiculous in Soviet life. At the same time, Aksenov is more serious than Ilf and Petrov; whereas they attempted to get at the truth through wild indirection, Aksenov tries more often to name things for what they are. As a consequence, he has cultivated, in both his first-person and his third-person narrative, a vein of terse, laconic description and exposition based largely on verbs and nouns. It is not surprising that one of his few acknowledged mentors is Ernest Hemingway.

Aksenov's style, however, is more than just a mixture of colorful dialogue and telegraphic authorial statement, for it is full of all kinds of tricks and surprises. Some of these, such as his occasional bizarre experiments with typography, are merely amusing. More interesting and meaningful is the allusiveness of his prose, which is so crammed with topical references that his works constitute a small, though slanted, encyclopedia of contemporary Soviet life. (There are Soviet critics who would deny him this value by arguing that he portrays only a narrow, special, and negligible segment of the Russian scene, but his very popularity among the generation whose life he describes testifies to his relevance.) He cites snatches of songs, current slogans and catchwords, the names of sports greats and movie stars. He parodies the clichés of newspapers and classroom, the cozy advice of parents, and the smug admonitions of the collective. Much of his language is figurative, and it is particularly rich in bold and sprightly metaphors. Interjections and wry rhetorical questions abound. The sentences themselves are short and choppy, enabling the writer to draw attention to the individual word. This is particularly important, for ultimately the most distinctive thing about Aksenov is his vocabulary.

There have been many complaints, even from critics who are benevolently disposed toward him, about Aksenov's stock of words. A couple of years ago the humor magazine Crocodile, only half in jest, printed a sample glossary of Aksenov for the guidance of readers who were stumped by his outlandish vocabulary. Everyone agrees that the salty, swinging language of his characters can actually be heard on Moscow streets and Siberian construction sites. The trouble is, as the venerable writer and language authority Kornei Chukovski has remarked, such slang should not be heard anywhere: it is a threat to the purity of Russian! Others who object to Aksenov's esoteric jargon see it as an ugly symptom of incipient disrespectfulness and cynicism among Soviet young people and view his writing as a pernicious influence on youth. Such critics, bigoted and hidebound though they may be, have a point. One of the reasons why Aksenov's characters talk as they do is that they are profoundly dissatisfied with the stale, hypocritical, hollow vocabulary that was foisted on the Soviet people during a quarter-century of Stalinism and, despite some reforms, continues to plague Soviet public life.

Although they are dissatisfied with many things, Aksenov's characters are really not cynical at all. And although some of them do resemble in some respects the stilyagi—approximate Soviet equivalents of England's "mods"—Aksenov takes pains to distinguish them from truly anti-social parasites. They are wary of emotional and intellectual commitments, but underneath their scepticism and occasional surface callousness there is an idealism of a rather pristine type. With few exceptions, Aksenov's characters observe a clear, if unspoken moral code that emphasizes simple honor and decency, faithfulness in love and in friendship, the dignity of conscientious effort, and efficiency and trustworthiness in one's work. Despite their attempts to cultivate the flippant sneer and a certain premature, world-weary acidity, they are ultimately warm and engaging.

It is important to distinguish, however, between various types of characters in Aksenov. First of all, he does not write exclusively about young people. Middle-aged persons crop up even in his earliest stories and, if his most recent publications are an indication, he is also interested in the elderly. Furthermore, although teenagers continue to fascinate him, he has recently tended to concentrate on characters in their twenties or early thirties. These, of course, are his own contemporaries. Whereas he portrays his teenagers with an amused, ironical, older-brotherly affection, he depicts his contemporaries with a deep, involved sympathy.

The problems which this latter group faces are universal ones—finding and keeping a mate, discovering the fact of inevitable death and somehow digesting it, selecting one's life work and qualifying for it, and reconciling one's ideals with an imperfect world. Since Aksenov's characters, by and large, are never more than mildly neurotic, they approach these problems with a minimum of self-deception, with energy and with courage. This is not to say that they do not flounder, waste time and talent, or engage in aggressive or self-destructive behavior. Love in his stories is very frequently a source of mutual torture or agonizing loneliness. And although Aksenov, like all contemporary Soviet writers, spares the reader the lurid details of sex, he quite freely shows its uglier implications as well as its charm. Nevertheless, he avoids the extremes of human behavior; his people bloody each other's noses but they do not murder; they get the blues but they do not remain permanently on dead center; they gripe about working conditions but they stay on the job; they run away but they come home. Aksenov believes that the human situation is good and that its maladjustments are curable.

Aksenov has had to overcome, however, a tendency toward superficial sunniness. His first novel, Colleagues, often reads like a study in socialist realism. It is the story of how three friends, just out of medical school, pass the initial tests of their ability, moral fibre and stamina. While two of them are marking time in the port of Leningrad, awaiting assignment as ship's doctors, their Komsomol vigilance helps to break up a ring of embezzlers. The third, assigned to a rural dispensary in Karelia, becomes a kind of Dr. Kildare of the wilderness and proves his mettle in a series of rugged adventures. The novel climaxes in a suspenseful midnight surgical operation. The young rural doctor, knifed while thwarting a burglary, is saved by his two medical-school pals, who have appeared on the scene in the nick of time. This novel was filmed, and one is tempted to conclude that Aksenov had the scenario in mind when he plotted it.

Colleagues is by no means devoid of serious social commentary or moral probing. A number of references to problems of Soviet public life and institutions indicate that Aksenov is seriously and intelligently concerned with telling the truth about the society in which he lives. There are alcoholics, common criminals, and other flotsam and jetsam in the novel; the poverty of collective farms is mentioned; there is reference to bureaucratic corruption and official stuffed-shirtism and hypocrisy. One of his young doctors complains, in a remark that has frequently been re-quoted:

If you only knew, I'm fed up to the teeth with it, all this drumming in of propaganda, all these highfalutin' words. I know there's a host of fine idealists like yourself who're always mouthing them, but there are also thousands of scoundrels who just parrot them. I don't doubt Beria too used the same language while he was deceiving the Party. Now that such a lot of things have become clear to us, such language rings very false. So for Heaven's sake let's manage without claptrap. I love my country, I love its system, and I wouldn't give a thought about giving an arm or a leg or my life for it. But all I'm responsible to is my own conscience, not any fetishes of words. All they do is make it more difficult to see the realities of life. See what I mean?

Aksenov has in fact endowed this particular character with a formidable Weltschmerz. In his person the author poses a question which few Soviet writers in recent times have dared to dwell on:

We spin philosophies, we battle for progressive ideas, we babble about the usefulness of working for the community, we build up theories, but in the last resort we all break down into a number of chemical elements, just like plants and animals which don't dabble in theories. It's all a tragicomedy and nothing more. People are wont to say: we all come to it at the end. All of us. Both the leaders of productivity and the idlers, both the decent ones and the rogues. But where is this it where we're all going to be, eh? There isn't anywhere. Just darkness. What do I really care about anything in the world if I always have that awareness that the time will come when I shall vanish forever?

Having raised this question, however, Aksenov in effect dismisses it by bathing it in a mist of communist affirmation. He prescribes comradeship and socially constructive activity—scarcely an exhaustive answer.

After his sojourn with teenagers in A Starry Ticket, Aksenov returned to the concerns of persons his own age. Oranges from Morocco, It's Time, My Friend, It's Time and several of his recent short stories have centered on the problems of emotional and social adjustment that face young Soviet adults. There is generally less pink-cheeked enthusiasm among them than among the heroes of Colleagues. They brood, drift from job to job, disappoint and sometimes insult one another. They wander about the country puzzled, frustrated and dissatisfied, and often they behave more like victims of a social order than builders of one. Their ability to see the funny side of things and to ridicule themselves does prevent them from seeming simply sour and lugubrious. And as a rule they experience some sort of saving revelation, or at least there are indications that their problems are beginning to straighten out. All the same, Aksenov endows these characters with dignity and genuine pathos, and in determining their fates he avoids doctrinaire optimism and pat solutions.

Oranges from Morocco is a series of character portraits strung together by a couple of love intrigues and the dominating episode of the oranges. Its main figures are Victor Koltyga, who works on an oil prospecting rig in what he sarcastically describes as "this stupendous, enchanting, stinking valley" and dreams of quitting the Soviet Far East forever; Nikolai Kalchanov, a Pechorinesque engineer who is bitterly and hopelessly in love with another man's wife; German Kovalev, a sailor who writes atrocious poetry; Liudmilla Kravchenko, a prim, model Komsomokla who dutifully reads Gorky and finds it shocking that other girls are unwilling to show their diaries; and Valentin Kostyukovski, an undisciplined knockabout whose father, a distinguished professor, sat for sixteen years in a concentration camp and left him, in effect, a homeless orphan. The oranges, and the spontaneous celebration which they occasion, bring welcome extra color into their lives and produce confrontations that set each one of them off in a new direction. This story has been attacked by Soviet critics on the grounds that all of the characters tend to use the same vulgar jargon and for this reason are not sufficiently differentiated, and that the changes in their lives and their relationships that come about as a result of this one event are insufficiently motivated. Such criticism is warranted. Nearly all of the characters do speak in the same tone, and the dimensions of the story are indeed too small to encompass and justify so many fundamental changes in private individual destinies. Some critics have argued further, however, that the characters themselves are deficient in moral and intellectual stature, and that their problems are essentially trivial. Similar charges, as a matter of fact, have been directed at most of Aksenov's writing, and his ultimate reputation will depend, to a great extent, on whether or not such charges are valid. For this reason it is important to try to determine just how relevant and profound Aksenov's images of young adults really are.

It would be difficult to argue that such characters as Kirpichenko, Georgi Abramashvili and the persons in Oranges from Morocco have an impressive intellectual and moral stature. Aside from the fact that they are healthy and working and that they get along passably well with their fellow men, there is little to recommend them as exemplars of constructive thought and demeanor in any society. But this does not mean that as images in literature they are superficial. One of Aksenov's best stories—perhaps his finest—concerns a sports-loving young lathe operator who is taking care of his six-year-old daughter on a Sunday afternoon because his wife, who is well on her way to a doctor's degree, is presumably studying somewhere. Father and daughter stroll to a park, where he has a beer with some old soccer-playing buddies. Suddenly he realizes that his wife, who has surpassed him in life, is not studying but is having a rendezvous. The discovery that part of his world is about to cave in produces a momentary panic. As he looks at his little daughter, however, he feels a new sense of responsibility and purpose in life: taking care of her is ample reason for living. There are other threads in the story—and some symbolism—that lend it profundity. Nevertheless the story depends mainly on this central situation—the ordinary, private circumstances of a simple, decent man who is experiencing a major disappointment in life.

In another, more recent story of Aksenov, the naive example of a three-year-old boy gives his father courage to make an important (but unspecified) phone call over which he has been fearfully procrastinating for days. Ostensibly this episode, too, is a slight one; like the story just mentioned, it has practically nothing to do with society and absolutely nothing to do with the building of communism. On the other hand, both stories, in the tenderness and delicacy with which they report on mundane but vital human problems, have ultimately more to say about contemporary Soviet society than the most earnest socialist-realist tract. However, a number of Soviet critics (those of a conservative or crypto-Stalinist inclination—and there are still a great many of them) are infuriated at any displacement of the civic element in Soviet literature by the personal element. The notion that there are human problems that do not lend themselves to the therapy of the collective, or for which ideological solutions are irrelevant, is anathema to these critics. It is such persons, in the main, who accuse Aksenov of being superficial. If for this reason Aksenov is in fact superficial, so then are a vast number of other prominent young writers who are attempting to produce similarly modest, Chekhovian slices of Soviet life.

Another reason for the accusation that Aksenov's characters lack stature is their reticence—their preference for silence or at best a cryptic response to challenges that are supposed to produce ringing communist answers. One of their major traits is their passion for seeing things simply and clearly, without the encumbrance of ideological preconceptions. They abhor lofty words, not because they are incapable of understanding them, but because in a Soviet context these words have become the labels of planned lives in a planned society. Aksenov's young people are seeking independent answers to the questions they ask of life, since they are weary of prefabricated solutions. Hence the irony with which they refer to practically everything that is orthodox and established, the relish with which they pronounce new words, and the eagerness with which they embrace things that are foreign or off-beat. Aksenov's characters, I would submit, are not superficial. They are simply engaged in the serious, dangerous, and infinitely trying task of sloughing off the ideological excrescence of forty years of Party misrule. As the thaw continues, they will find more positive, committed ways of expressing that which is already in their hearts.