SOURCE: "Introduction: The Life and Works of Aksyonov," in The Steel Bird and Other Stories, by Vassily Aksyonov, Ardis, 1979, pp. ix-xxvii.

[In the following essay, Johnson discusses several of Aksyonov's novels and short stories and provides a comprehensive look at the author's career.]

Vasily Pavlovich Aksenov was born on August 20, 1932 in Kazan. His mother, Eugenia Semenovna Ginzburg, was a history instructor at Kazan University who later became a well-known writer for her prison-camp memoir Journey into the Whirlwind (1962). His father, Pavel Vasilievich Aksenov, was a leading member of the Tartar Regional Committee of the Party, a professional Party man and revolutionary.

Previous to the Stalinist incarceration of his parents in 1937 Aksenov lived in a happy home that in addition to his parents consisted of his older brother, Alyosha, who died in the blockade of Leningrad, an older sister, Mayka, presently a Russian language teacher at Moscow University, a nurse, Fima, and his paternal grandmother, who was glowingly described by Ginzburg in her memoirs. Although the memoirs mention young Vasily as a two-year-old, he was actually four years old when his mother was arrested in February 1937, and almost five when his father was arrested later that year. Eugenia Ginzburg spent two years in Yaroslavl, followed by sixteen years in the Far East region of the Kolyma River, first at Magadan, then Elgen (the Yakut word for "dead"), then back in Magadan, "farther from Moscow than California," Aksenov once said, with an average temperature of −4 degrees Centigrade. His father ended up on the Pechora River in Siberia, 10,000 kilometers from his wife.

In 1948, at the end of his eighth year in school (on a ten-year system), Aksenov joined his mother, who was by then out of the camp and living as an exile in Magadan. (His father had not yet been released.) In 1950, still in Magadan, he completed his elementary education. He then returned from the Far East to Leningrad where in 1956 he graduated as a doctor from the First Leningrad Medical Institute named after I. L. Pavlov.

From August 1956 until October 1957, Aksenov worked in the quarantine service of the Leningrad seaport and then in a hospital for water transportation workers located in the village of Voznesenye on Lake Onega, which is still in the Leningrad administrative district. In 1957 Aksenov met his future wife, Kira, in Leningrad, at a dance. He once recalled how he used to love to "rock to Bill Haley at university parties." Kira was from Moscow, and he followed her there after their marriage at the end of 1957.

From December 1957 until June 1958 he was a staff physician in the TB clinic located in the village of Grebneva in the Moscow area. Then until September 1960 he was a specialist in adolescent tuberculosis in a Moscow TB clinic. In July of 1959 Youth (Yunost') magazine published two stories, "Our Vera Ivanovna" and "Paved Roads," which announced him as a new and interesting writer. Then in June and July of 1960 his novel The Colleagues was presented in two issues of the same magazine. Controversy immediately pushed him into the foreground, and he left medicine to write full time. In the same year his only child, Alyosha, was born.

Much of Aksenov's early work is autobiographical or heavily drawn from a familiar environment. "Our Vera Ivanovna" is set in a hospital much like the one he knew in Voznesenye. A government minister from Moscow finds himself hampered by a possible heart condition and a doctor who treats him as she would a regular patient. A flash flood forces him to help evacuate the hospital and then help look for the doctor, whom they so badly need. In admiration he now invites her to Moscow to have a plush job. Typical of Aksenov's early stories, the moral is meant to be obvious, and so she refuses because the people need her more.

"Paved Roads" is much more significant because it is an early example of the "youth story" genre on which Aksenov's controversial name was built. As a twenty-six-year-old writer he felt close ties to the young and to their highly colloquial speech. He chose to portray the generation that he saw and heard as they really were, not as the political theoreticians had hoped they would be. In this story twenty-five-year-old Gleb Pomorin returns from the army and tries to make a smooth transition back into civilian society. He runs into an old friend, Gerka, who seems to be living quite well: smoking foreign cigarettes and driving his own car. Slowly the new immorality of his old friend unwinds. "Work! That's a laugh! People go to work, save their money, dream of the future, but I want it all now: a dacha, a car, a good suit, women. That's happiness!" Further revelations show that Gerka is a fartsovshchik (black market operator), and because of his relative wealth he has managed to coax Gleb's former girl-friend into a living arrangement with him. At the end, as Gerka runs from formerly fleeced road-pavers, the morally indignant Gleb notes: "He won't get far: the earth will burn under his feet. Our roads aren't for the likes of him." Clearly, here and in later works the moral message of Aksenov is to show that all young people are not alike, that they cannot be condemned as a generation. Yet his insistence on revealing the problem side of the young generation bore a mixed blessing—popularity with some, infamy with others. While the first group was large and representative of the reading public as a whole, the latter group was in power.

Aksenov's attitude toward young people is more thoroughly developed in The Colleagues. Here three young people, recent graduates of medical school, Maximov, Karpov and Zelenin, are faced with their mandatory postgraduate assignments. Maximov and Karpov accept work as shipboard doctors because of the promised travel and excitement. Zelenin opts for more dedicated work in a village.

One scene in the novel highlights Aksenov's main argument in this period. The three young men, out for a walk, encounter an invalid from the war who sizes them up by their clothing and hair-length and then proceeds to verbally abuse them as "hippies." The argument against the older generation's prejudice is immediately evident by the fact that these are doctors about to serve society in positions of responsibility. In their work they cross all kinds of realities, mostly unheard of in Soviet literature but well-known in real life.

Karpov's girl friend marries a local laboratory researcher to avoid an unattractive post-graduate work assignment. The ship doctors find bribery and corruption in the port service. Zelenin finds alcoholism, violence and inhuman living conditions in his remote village location. But morality wins again, i.e., the girl is forever miserable, the doctors expose the corruption and Zelenin joins the dedicated local authorities in building a new order.

The controversy that sprung up following this novel posed questions far beyond the scope of the book or the writings of Aksenov as a whole. Writers and critics paired off into camps either attacking or approving of the new presentation of reality, of the new image of youth which was referred to as the "youth-theme" genre.

Because of the success of The Colleagues Aksenov left medicine at the end of 1960 and dedicated his life to writing. In an article which might be interpreted as an announcement of his intentions, he attacks the anti-youth attitude of the critics and the older generation as a whole. "We're talking about people who don't believe in youth, who consider them a generation of 'hippies' and pretty bourgeois. Not to believe in youth is to not believe in our future." His intention was to write about youth as he saw them, as he felt they really were. While his intention seems to have been logical and worthy of pursuit, it clashed in principle with the make-believe world of socialist realism and inflexible Soviet rhetoric.

The problems of youth and their solutions are even more sharply drawn in Aksenov's most famous work A Ticket to the Stars (1961). "The heroes of this work seek answers to the questions: how should I live and for what purpose? They do not want ready answers, relieving them of their responsibilities. They seek their own solutions." Aksenov, in fact, has caught the most characteristic psychological feature of young people in those years—striving for their own, personal answer in their relationship to life. The key difference in A Ticket to the Stars is that he delivers his message from the view-point of seventeen-year-old high school students just when they are graduating and learning to cope with the world. When the older generation attacks them they can not yet claim to be doctors and responsible citizens. Where Aksenov showed the attacks in The Colleagues to be purely an argumentum ad hominem and not logically directed to the philosophical beliefs of the young, he now strips his heroes of that defense. The basic story is that upon graduation four young people decide not to go on with school right away, nor to go off to work, but instead to head for the Baltic Sea beaches and enjoy life. When their money runs out they take jobs in a fishing collective, and in the end they are better people for it. However, this moral improvement did not prevent violent attacks on the novel by critics who were fearful of the example of freedom of action that it set for young people.

During 1961 a stage version of The Colleagues was produced in numerous theaters throughout the Soviet Union. In August 1962 it was performed by Moscow's Maly Theater Company at an international festival in the Paris Theater of Nations. 1962 was a year of travel not only for Aksenov's works but for Aksenov himself. The mandatory first trip to socialist nations sent him to Poland; he then joined a delegation to Japan and relaxed in India on his return home. Meanwhile his first movie My Younger Brother (1962) based on A Ticket to the Stars was finally on the screens at home, having been held up nearly a year for ideological reasons.

Following his success with longer works Aksenov composed a number of short stories most of which were published for the first time much later in collections. "The Ejection Seat" (1961) shows certain narrow-minded types, here military airmen, who have little respect for other people until they establish a strange and artificial liaison (a "granfalloon" in [Kurt] Vonnegut's terminology) that bonds them together—here the bond is having been catapulted from an ejection seat. "Changing a Way of Life" (1961), which is translated here, is about a hard working businessman who takes some time off at the beach for a change in his life-style. The real change comes when he reevaluates his relationship with his girl friend and the reader is left to believe that he may finally marry her. "The Lunches of '43" (1962), also found here, may be thought of as one of Aksenov's early experimental works. The story takes place on a train with the hero certain that he has recognized a traveling companion as a friend from his childhood. Through the use of erratic time changes and flashbacks he tells the full story of their relationship, concentrating on the school lunches that he was forced by the bully to hand over in 1943.

The experimental nature of the time sequence in "The Lunches of '43" was new to Aksenov but used not long before by Valentin Kataev, one of Aksenov's early mentors. Kataev was editor of Youth magazine in the period that Aksenov began to submit manuscripts and is known to have reworked the entire first part of The Colleagues. What is especially interesting in "The Lunches of '43" is the psychological portrayal of the hero. Aksenov seems to portray this character in a very personal and internal world somewhat reminiscent of [Fyodor] Dostoevsky's humiliated men. For political reasons the hero is not as humiliated nor as pessimistic as with Dostoevsky's heroes, but the literary connection, if not the intention, is there.

In 1962 Aksenov was already thirty years old and an internationally known writer for two years. Naturally he found it difficult to continue to identify with teenagers and young street types, and as his circle of friends and life-style changed, so did his stories.

Highly representative of this maturing yet still young hero is thirty-two year old Sergei, the chief character of the significantly successful short story "Papa, What Does it Spell?" (1962). Sergei is a former soccer player who never made it to the big leagues as he dreamed and now feels the emptiness of his present life. We slowly learn that the things which he holds in esteem—his work, his sports, his family and his friends—are all eroding in value under the banality of everyday life.

Sergei's wife, Alla, must attend a conference at her institute, so he must watch Olga, his daughter, on a day when he had planned to meet his friends and take in a soccer game. What appears to be a mild conflict at the outset soon develops into a serious disruption of his various relationships: his friends see him for the first time as a family man; Olga has no interest in going to the game and insists upon going to a park instead; his daughter, surprisingly seems to know one of his friends very well, explained by frequent, hitherto unknown, meetings with Alla, meetings which imply an adulterous relationship. A phone call to the institute reveals that there is no conference that day and Alla is nowhere to be found.

Sergei is therefore forced to review his life and relationships, portrayed with obvious sympathy from the author. Almost instant maturity is accompanied by a growing concern and feeling of responsibility for his daughter.

"… he thought about how his daughter would grow up, how she would be eight, fourteen and then sixteen, seventeen, twenty … how she would go away to pioneer camp and come back, how he would teach her to swim, what a fashionable little lady she would become and how she would neck in the stairway with some hippie or other, how they would sometime or other go off somewhere, maybe to the sea."

Aksenov ends the story on this thought, a bond of unity with his daughter against all else in the world.

"Half-way to the Moon" (1962) is probably Aksenov's most internationally known short work. He was inspired in this effort by a real-life character who got on an airplane with him in Khabarovsk. When this worker, straight from the taiga, took off his outer coat, the stewardess offered to take it from him and hang it up. "He was so stunned by this" Aksenov later explained in an interview "that he gasped dumbfoundedly: 'Do you believe that? She took my coat for me!…'." The effect of this kindness on the worker can apparently be compared to the effect of art or music on the savage beast. The story derived from this event is described by one critic as a "variation on the theory of moral self-perfection." What this critic describes is a "Jack London device: 'a wild' worker meets a heavenly creature—a girl of 'the highest order' … and his soul, dedicated to beauty, finally sees the light!"

The story which is included in this collection received much praise for its aspects of contemporaneousness: it is a jet-age search for love covering half the distance to the moon. However, if moral awakening is accomplished then the import of the story should be seen instead in the internal distance traveled by the hero. Clearly a new emphasis and a more mature hero were evident in Aksenov's work by 1962.

In general 1962 had been a year of literary hope and advancement. [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn had been published by order of Khrushchev. In November Aksenov was made an editor of Youth along with Evtushenko and Rozov. "The hopes of 1962 were perhaps best expressed by the poet Alexander Tvardovsky: 'In art and literature, as in love, one can lie only for a while; sooner or later comes the time to tell the truth.'" But in this hope and openness, in this very push for the truth were to be found the roots of the oncoming reaction. "The mood of the artistic and literary intelligentsia in 1962 can perhaps best be gauged from [Leonid] Ilichev's complaint that 'in certain intellectual milieux it is considered unseemly and unfashionable to defend correct Party positions.'" The mood of the neo-Stalinists, then, was to put an end to the literary liberalism.

In December Khrushchev drew the attention of the world by attacking an art exhibit at the Manael Riding Stables. His personal attack on Boris Birger, Ernst Neizvestny and others was thought to be a warning to the proponents of the new creativity in all arts. The attack, however specific and personal in form, was indeed a declaration of war by the old-school realists (i.e., socialist idealists) on the representatives of alternative art forms (i.e., emancipatory realists, modernists, abstractionists, etc.).

But by 1962 Aksenov was not writing the offending "youth stories," at least not exclusively. He no longer felt close to younger people. He felt that a generation change had taken place and that the characteristics of his early heroes, so heatedly denied by official party critics, were no longer to be found in young people. His new novel of January 1963, Oranges from Morocco, which had been released at the beginning of the attack, was instead about workers in the Far East. Aksenov explained that as a writer he did not feel himself limited to youth problems. However, not everyone was pleased with the descriptions of these workers in Oranges.

The story is simply an event and various people's reactions to that event. The event is the arrival of a ship loaded with oranges from Morocco. The reactions are not complimentary, however honest they might be. An American reader could be easily confused by what truly seems to be an exaggerated portrayal. Life practically stops for hundreds of miles around while all available personnel and means of transportation are directed toward the port. The fallacy here is in comparing two remotely different cultures, for although an orange brings very little attention in America and is available throughout the year, everywhere, the same humble orange was then rarely seen in the Soviet Union in winter except in large cities and in the southern climates. At the time that the story was written oranges commonly sold on the black market for more than a dollar apiece. It is then consistent with known realities about the supply system and the attitude of Soviet citizens toward the arrival of such goods to assume that the apparent exaggeration is, in fact, responsibly close to the mark.

Perhaps because of this disparity in cultural reactions to oranges the novel has never been well received abroad. Its scope compared to the "youth themes" may be justly considered excessively provincial. Regardless of Aksenov's movement away from the polemical stories which instigated the attack on his ideological correctness, the unfriendly description of greedy and coarse workers riding their tractors into town for oranges and not off into a socialist sunset led to further attacks.

The journals in February and March were filled with attacks on the "young" writers, Aksenov often being singled out, like Socrates, as an example of a corrupter of youth. On March 8, 1963, a meeting of intellectuals was called in the Kremlin. Khrushchev and Ilichev elaborated the correct party position and called for renouncements of former ideological errors. The first to do so were Simonov and Shostakovich. They were soon followed by Neizvestny, Rozhdestvensky, Voznesensky and others. Another meeting was called by the Writers' Union to escalate the attack. A writer named Vladimir Firsev delivered the following message:

What compliments were not showered upon Evtushenko, Akhmadulina, Aksenov!… But have we re-educated comrades Aksenov, Evtushenko, Voznesensky by continuously letting them go on foreign trips, by putting them on editorial boards, and by publishing their works in enormous editions? It is they who have been 'educating' readers during that time, and often they have educated them in such a way that it will take us a lot of work to liquidate the consequences of their educational efforts.

The threat of this official speech, then, was clear—they were subject to losing their travel abroad, their positions on journals and their normal publication rights. Evtushenko recanted on March 29. Aksenov who had been conveniently out of town during the writers' meeting returned and, like Galileo, recanted.

April 3, 1963, in Pravda, he said that under the threat of imperialism Soviet writers must recognize their responsibility. They must be prepared to answer for every line which could be misinterpreted in the West. "I, like any writer," he added "am trying to create my own, unique, positive hero who would be at the same time a true son of his times—a man with strong bones and a normal circulatory system, a decent, open soul, with a concept in mind concentrating into one thought all the magnitude, optimism and complexity of our communist era."

His promise here to create a positive hero "of his times" in a normal human being was in a sense, a reworked description of his heroes as they might be described in communist propaganda. By this interpretation one could suggest that he actually meant real-life people who live in this contemporary world with all its problems and who reflect not the weak official optimism which he always rejected by the "complexity of our communist era" which is what he always wrote about.

As Thomas Whitney has pointed out [in The New Writing in Russia, University of Michigan Press, 1964], world influence and opinion had an effect on the events of 1963 in the Soviet Union. China had played up the ideological controversy that year and the Stalinists found themselves in a more important battle than controlling the "young writers." The western communists had, moreover, taken a stand against the new literary policies outlined above. Even Soviet bloc nations such as Poland had reacted critically to the literary repression. The result was a letup in the clampdown of early 1963.

1963 also saw the release of a film, When the Bridges Go Up, written by Aksenov in 1962 and identified in the press as "based on the short story" although no such story ever existed. The same year his earlier film The Colleagues was shown at Mar-del-Plata, Argentina at a film festival which he also attended as a member of the delegation.

A travel article, "Japanese Jottings" (1963), which is translated in this book, was written in a form that seems to repeat itself often whenever Aksenov wishes to relate his various impressions of a foreign land. It is an enigmatic rendering of witty statements and allusions intended to give an overall view by its juxtaposed dashes of color. On canvas it would be called impressionism. Amazingly its experimental form has never drawn criticism from the old-school Socialist realists.

Previously, form took less of a role in Aksenov's work than content. "I think about form" he said once, "when I'm not writing. When I write, I don't think about it." However, progress in literature for Aksenov often meant the ability to go off in any and all directions. As the force of his "youth themes" genre was slowed by time and by criticism, he began more and more to experiment in form.

In 1964 a novel written by Aksenov in 1963 was serialized in the journal, The Young Guard. It's Time, My Friend, It's Time (1964) was an attempt to supply the positive hero which he had promised in his recantation. This positive hero is Valya Marvich, a driver attached to a movie crew which is shooting a film in Estonia. In the manner of Aksenov's earlier "youth stories," and this may be chronologically the last example of that genre, Marvich questions his life and the direction it is going. Since Marvich is no longer young, this mature hero is given an appropriate adult complication to his search—he is additionally confused about the renewal of feelings from his former marriage. Another new feature found here that becomes typical for the mature hero in Aksenov is that he is always a loner: always aloof, an individual in the collective. The strength of the novel lies in Marvich's internal psychological conflict between his ideals and his failure to realize them within his circle of friends and loved ones. Marvich is a very real, atypical for Soviet literature, positive hero, who searches for truth and his ideals in a real world filled with negative activities and people. The credibility of both the positive hero and of the author is maintained.

From 1964 to 1966 Aksenov wrote a number of short stories that were to appear in collections of 1966 and 1969 as well as in literary journals individually. These stories are significant in so far as they reveal both a new interest and a new emphasis in his creations, completing the break with "youth themes" begun in 1962. His works of this period involve the growing importance for Aksenov of fantasy and imagination. They emphasize exaggeration and irony in style, deviance and ill-adjustment in characterization.

One of the best of these stories and a good example of his new style and characterization is "The Odd-Ball" (1964). Far from a "youth" story, it is about two old men, one of whom, Zbaikov, is an old bolshevik revolutionary and victim of Stalinism, as was Aksenov's own father. The other, the "odd-ball" from Zbaikov's childhood, has never left his village except to shop in a neighboring village. As the old friends meet and talk, the reader is struck by the tremendous differences in the fates of these two men. "Odd-ball" complains that they would not take him in the Red Army and was even passed up in the Stalinist excesses of the 1930s. "'Ye-ah' drawled Odd-ball, 'I didn't even get to go to prison.'" There is a tacit agreement that Zbaikov, even with his horrible experiences of war and prison, has lived a better life than a man whose life has apparently been no better than a farm animal's.

Then in the closing pages the irony sets in. "Odd-ball" ends up to be an engineering genius who has built himself a radio by means of which he is in constant touch with cities from London to Honolulu. He then decides to show his old friend his secret machine. His machine is a perpetuum mobile which has been running for many, many years. "'What is it then, a perpetual motion machine, or what?' 'Seems to be,' he whispered. 'Seems to be.'"

Another classic example of the deviant in Aksenov's works is Uncle Mitya from "Comrade Smart-hat" (1964). Uncle Mitya is a taxi driver and perhaps more basically a capitalist "hustler" in a communist society. In this story his illegal activities are in jeopardy because of police surveillance in general and because of the special attention of officer Ivan Yermakov, whom he calls "Comrade Smart-hat." Uncle Mitya plots to encourage Yermakov's interest in his daughter assuming that once they are married he will have carte blanche in his business. However, the irony is that after the marriage the local police redouble their efforts to keep Uncle Mitya, their new relative, in line.

In this same period a "youth" story of sorts does crop up, but with some interesting experimentation. "Local Troublemaker Abramashvili" (1964) is the story of a life-guard at the Gagra beach area in Soviet Georgia. The impression presented at first corresponds to the Soviet stereotype for such a situation. The reader is prepared to learn how the local "hot-blooded" native boys seduce the "fair-skinned" Russian girls on vacation. Ironically, it is eighteen year old Gogi Abramashvili, who is seduced by the northern Alina in her hotel room. "'Well, you've had a pretty good day' she said tenderly, 'your first cigarette, your first woman'." Gogi falls in love.

The following night he tries to talk to her at a dance and learns that her husband, who Gogi did not know existed, has unexpectedly arrived, as a result of which she does not want anything more to do with him. Gogi reacts angrily and is led out by the druzhinniki, the voluntary, civilian patrol. Several days later the town bulletin board, maintained by the druzhinniki, bears a picture of Gogi and the message that girls are forbidden to dance with the "local troublemaker Abramashvili."

What is unusually experimental in this story is not at first clear to the western reader. Sex in the West is a normal part of literature even to the point where critics refer to the "mandatory sex scenes" of a best seller. On the other hand sex is at best considered underground literature in both the Russian tradition and the Soviet present. While there are no sexually explicit scenes in the story, there are numerous implications and references to the contemporary sexual norms of Soviet youth. Soviet sociologists are only now, fifteen years later, dealing with the reality described in circumlocution by Aksenov in this story.

A basis in autobiographical fact which was found in Aksenov's earlier works is also found in "Little Whale, Varnisher of Reality" (1964). "Little Whale" is in fact Aksenov's son, Alyosha whom he actually nicknamed "Whale" and who was born in 1960 making him the same age as the young hero of the story. The story which is included here is, in essence, a study of what is reality and what is imagination—a subject that Aksenov was to explore in many of his future works. Stories from this period that are also included in this volume are, "It's a Pity You Weren't With Us," "The Victory" and "Ginger From Next Door." "It's a Pity You Weren't With Us," a short story written in 1964 is also the name of a collection of stories published in 1969. The story is an unusual, thought-provoking assessment of the lives of some very unusual people. "The Victory" (1965) is one of Aksenov's most successful stories. Outwardly it is the story of a grand master at chess playing a game on a train with a chance passenger. The ironic ending is one of the best in Aksenov's works.

"Ginger From Next Door" (1966) is, like "The Lunches of '43," a chronologically disconnected remembrance of childhood. This time it is more clearly Aksenov's own remembrance, as he refers to his one-time home in the former residence of industrial engineer Zherebtsov, in Kazan. The chief difference is that his fantasies change in this period from mental exercises to actual occurrences, in a fictional form, of course. Aksenov, by this period, already refused to make a clear distinction between "acceptable" descriptive fiction and his creative fantasies in prose. At a much later time he clarified his stance, somewhat:

The imagination of an artist is, after all, also reality. Fantasy is perhaps no less real than the rustle of leaves … I sometimes think that real events which surround us, such as sunsets, river currents, stones, birds and sand are not any less mysterious than fantasy is … The artist only gives a name to the yet unknown, he penetrates into another dimension and gives a name to previously unseen bodies, gives them form, color and sound. He substitutes them for life in the opinion of some people. I suggest that subjects of art do not substitute for life but that they become new states within it, that is, they refurbish life and expand its horizons.

Therefore there are no clear lines as to where the reality of the traditional, practical sort blends into the emancipatory reality of the Aksenov philosophic idealism.

Another story that returns to his life in the former residence of industrial engineer Zherebtsov, in Kazan, is "On the Square and Beyond the River" (1966). On the surface it is a memory of the last day of World War II. But then there is the addition of a Gogolian or Hoffmannesque fantasy tale which is given at an ambiguous moment that allows it to be interpreted as a dream, or as one critic called it, a nightmare. When the message comes over the radio declaring victory over Hitler's Germany, the square becomes filled with jubilant people including a circus troop, which because it is real yet somehow imaginary, sets up the dream sequence which is imaginary yet somehow real. The dream sequence begins with the appearance of an unknown man seeking refuge. The young hero senses an evil creature and begins a chase onto the square and beyond the river. The creature flies off making sounds like a metallic bird and plunges into a lake. It is the symbolic death of Hitler.

Strange symbolic birds making metallic sounds were not new to Aksenov. In 1965 Aksenov had already written one of his most successful fantasy tales with these same characteristics, called The Steel Bird (1965). For over a decade he attempted to get the text published in the Soviet Union, but to no avail. A short excerpt called "The House on Lamplight Alley" (1966) was published in The Literary Gazette but since it only concerned one of the minor characters of the story, it was irrelevant to the main plot. The Russian text was published by Ardis last year in the inaugural issue of a new Russian-language literary almanac and the first English translation is available in this volume.

Anatoli Gladilin, a close friend of Aksenov and a writer who is mentioned in passing in the text of The Steel Bird, has written in the Western press about the first reading of the short novel. In those days a group of short story writers would meet regularly in the Central Club of the Writers' Union in Moscow to preview and critique the members' newest works. The reading of The Steel Bird attracted a "standing room only" audience and instead of reading only the thirty or forty pages scheduled, Aksenov was encouraged to read the entire work of over a hundred pages which required several hours and set a new time record for such readings. "Everyone was absolutely certain," wrote Gladilin, "that the story would, naturally, be published, the disagreements arose only concerning the literary journal: where to send it—to New World (Novyi mir) or to Youth?" However neither journal, nor any Soviet journal for that matter, dared to take that step.

The editors felt, perhaps justifiably, that the allegory was dangerous, that the satire on Soviet society was too clear. Aksenov felt that the satire was not on any specific society but on mankind as a whole and more specifically on the nature of man in a totalitarian society. He challenged the decision against printing the work on the grounds that to see Soviet society implied was to take the position that Soviet society was totalitarian and oppressive. Aksenov and Gladilin both have expressed the attitude that the work should be considered "pro-Soviet," that it points out the pitfalls of the improper path to communism, the cult of personality, and is not critical of a properly run Soviet government. The editors apparently saw something in their society that Aksenov hoped was not there and in rejecting the work gave support to that impropriety by refusing to expose it.

The story itself was inspired by poetic lines which are repeated in the book as the theme of a cornet-a-pistons: "reason gave us steel wing-like arms / and instead of a heart, a flaming motor." The name, The Steel Bird, came later from the text of a 1930s aviation song that included the following stanza (in my translation):

     There, where the infantry can not pass
     Where there are no rushing armored-trains
     No heavy tank crawls through the grass
     That is where the steel bird reigns.

The book opens in Moscow in Lamplight Alley in the spring of 1948 with the appearance of the ultimate of Aksenov's deviants, Veniamin Fedoseevich Popenkov. Popenkov is bearing two sacks from which something dark continues to drip. Because he understands the metallic language of the cornet-a-pistons which the housing manager plays, he is able to convince the manager to let him move into the elevator of the house at number 14 Lamplight Alley. At first he only occupies the elevator after all the residents are in bed, hiding in dark corners during the daytime. Significantly, all the residents get used to his presence and they begin to accept him. As the book progresses, there are constantly hints that he can fly, that he is not really human, that he speaks a strange metallic language and that he is changing from a weak "street rat" to a strong commanding "man of steel." One night Popenkov goes into convulsions in the elevator. As he is nursed back to health, the residents vote to shut down the elevator for his comfort. Gradually he takes over the entrance way and the staircase is blocked off. The residents accept this and get used to using the emergency stairwell to the rear. Popenkov gains more and more power until he has a number of the residents working for him, making counterfeit French tapestries. The wife of a Vice Minister who lived at number 14 leaves her husband for Popenkov and brings her apartment full of antiques to his vestibule residence. By this point his power becomes seemingly immense.

The doctors now decide that he is not a human, not exactly an airplane, nor a bird but a combination: a steel bird. Then in 1953, when Stalin dies, Popenkov somehow is among the close, privileged mourners. However his private plans for the house at number 14 Lamplight Alley are to get everyone involved in work, to forget their sadness by labor. His new wife does not approve of his using Tsvetkova, her former husband's mistress, for such productive work.

"Ha-ha-ha, you need Tsvetkova do you?" patronized Popenkov with laughter. "Take her, baby."

"Thank you," mysteriously smiled Zinochka.

"What do you want to do with her? Fuchi elazi kompfor trandiratziyu?" asked Popenkov.

"Fuchi emazi kir madagor" said Zinochka.

"Kekl fedekl?" laughed Popenkov.

"Chlok buritano," giggled Zinochka.

"Kukubu!" exclaimed Popenkov.

His wife who now spoke his language learned that there were steel birds all over the world but that he was the head of all of them. In the night he flies off to digest the metal statues of the world, from the Bronze Horseman to Abraham Lincoln. He is symbolically now in control of history: "There will not be a past, there will not be a future and I've already eaten the present," he announces. The weight of his body increases (caused by his midnight snacking) and the house at number 14 begins to tilt. When the walls begin to crack, the residents finally revolt, eventually conquering the steel bird. At this point the housing manager returns like the cavalry on a white steed to announce that the residents have been given a new apartment building. It should be noted that it is not the infantry, nor an armored-train, nor a heavy tank that penetrates the realm of the steel bird but a horseman. The new building that he promises will be almost entirely glass and plastic, with light-blue bathtubs, garbage disposals, swimming pools for everyone. So the residents leave. A few moments later the house at number 14 collapses, leaving only the elevator shaft upon which sits the steel bird. Months later he alights from his perch and flies over Moscow. Behind him stretch two dark trails, like the earlier droppings from his sacks, which are then scattered in the wind.

Clearly Aksenov means to say that human beings must avoid accepting and getting used to their oppression. He clearly is saying that such criticism is not only of Soviet society but of all totalitarian societies. There are steel birds everywhere, perhaps the image of Hitler in "On the Square and Beyond the River" is one of them. For the present time it seems that the Soviet one is the chief one. Popenkov is not Stalin, as some would guess, but in the tradition of Stalin. Popenkov mourns the death of Stalin but goes on to oppress his people and to establish his own cult of personality. Technology has helped him to bolt down the fates of men. Stalin once called the true Soviet man a screw in the machine of society. Man's emotions and his spiritual side have in this way, and by this type, been neglected, while reason and technology have turned his arms into steel wings, his heart into a flaming motor. He has judged his progress by trips to the moon and steel birds in the sky, leaving human beings to be dominated by computers and mechanical men. A computer language is, perhaps, no more intelligible to the soul than the ravings of the steel bird. Aksenov has every right to be disgusted that such a work can not be printed in all countries, for it is written for the sake of all human beings in all political systems.

Ironically one of the several things that Aksenov had published in those years included "The Dotted Line of Progress" (1966) which is a short statement praising the progress of man when the Soviet apparatus lunakhod was landed on the moon.

Less ironically and more tragically Aksenov was among the protesters arrested in 1966 on Red Square. The group had been against the unveiling of a bust of Stalin which now marks his grave-site behind Lenin's mausoleum. Many of those who suffered needlessly due to the cult of personality, as Aksenov's family did, felt that the raising of any monument to Stalin was a symbolic gesture, beginning an attitude of acceptance of his crimes.

There were also some good events in those years such as the release of The Journey (1966), a film based on three short stories by Aksenov: "Papa, What Does It Spell?," "The Lunches of '43" and "Half-way to the Moon." He also traveled a great deal: Rome, to a writers' conference, and Yugoslavia in 1965; Japan, Austria, Switzerland and Munich in 1966; Bulgaria and London in 1967. This last trip would prove to be his last chance to travel to the West for eight years. Another good event was the award of first prize in a literary contest sponsored by Trud newspaper. The story that won was called "The Light-blue Sea Cannons" (1967). It is a story told from the point of view of a young boy concerning his uncle's ironical service during World War II.

In the same period as these stories Aksenov wrote three plays which he labeled as "satirical fantasies." Although they remain unpublished one of them, Always For Sale (1965), ran for a long time at the Contemporary Theater in Moscow. The play was very controversial and has been called a number of things from "Philistine fantasy" to "the study of Man." Speaking of this play, a critic said: "The question of his 'grown-up' generation has become for Aksenov the question of man. His heroes now live not only in a defined slice of history but in the history of mankind as a whole."

One light, humorous story of this period concerned one of Aksenov's sporting passions: boxing. "A Poem of Ecstasy" (1968) tells the story of a young boxer who becomes convinced by the example of Muhammad Ali's poetry that the fine arts, especially music and poetry, are the key to modern boxing success. In the amateur championships he is victorious thanks to his construction in the ring of a "symphonic poem of ecstasy."

A much longer story, "The Overloaded Packing-barrels" (1968) is, according to the subtitle, a "tale with exaggerations and dreams." In many respects it is the logical culmination of Aksenov's fantasy stories. It is an example of the Russian literary tradition of viewing the normal in a fresh, new, but inevitably strange way (ostranenie). Consistent with this appraisal the tale has been compared to the work of Bulgakov, Olesha and Gogol. The unconventionality of his point of view caused much misunderstanding, confusion and even anger.

The external plot of the story begins with the need to move a load of barrels from the village general store to the regional center. Various people who do not know each other, yet need to go to the regional center, end up on the truck as fellow passengers. There is a scholar from Moscow who is the world's foremost expert on the country of Haligaliya (cf. Eng. Hully-gully, a dance which in Russian is called hali-gali) to which he is unable to get a visa. The old timer, Mochenkin, specializes in complaints, recommendations, requests and other official forms. The teacher, Irina Valentinovna, who is going on vacation, is a beautiful young lady with no admirers except a fourteen-year-old schoolboy. The sailor, Gleb, is returning to his Black Sea assignment. The driver is Vladimir Teleskopov who is the boy-friend of Sima the woman in charge of the barrels. Sima does not travel with them but continues, nevertheless, to be a character throughout the tale. Along the way other people are added and subtracted from their group.

As these people travel with the packing-barrels, several unusual things happen. The sailor and the teacher become romantically involved. All of them, even the driver, fall asleep and their dreams are presented. At first they are all individual dreams, unified only by the appearance for each of them of the "Good Man" approaching in the morning dew. The sleep of the driver ends in a minor accident which is followed by an airplane crash caused somehow, it is implied, by the eyes of the teacher in her new powerful role of blossoming woman. They arrive in a village to learn that they are not on course and spend the first night there. The scholar learns that Teleskopov, the driver, has been by accident to Haligaliya and they are united by a love for the same girl who lives in this distant fairy-tale land. In the second round of dreams the new-found friends become characters in each other's dreams. Among the several days they spend completing this short trip, one is spent in a town where Teleskopov is thrown in jail by a former suitor of Sima's. His sentence is reduced to a fine for the sake of the packing-barrels. The fine is then cancelled by a kiss from Irina Valentinovna. The most important development is that they all become bonded together by mutual love and respect for the barrels. When the depot refuses the barrels for being overloaded, they all reboard the truck and drive off together. In the final, mutual dream, the barrels float off to sea, singing gaily on their endless journey. Somewhere on an island, the "Good Man" waits for them, forever.

What all this means is a subjective decision similar to the interpretation of a symbolic poem. There are some factual observations that deserve note, however. The "Good Man" represents an ideal, a noble goal for each and every one of them. But just as people in general use indefinable abstract words to communicate concepts such as "God," "freedom" and "truth," these people use the "Good Man" as a variable concept: for each one of them the goal is as individual and different as they are one from the other. They all are dreamers, a fact which extends their "truths" to emotional and spiritual concepts beyond the realm of the material and the physically possible. Aksenov's concept of reality, as has been shown above, is liberating and stretches beyond the borders of Soviet reality and of all human reality in free-flying thought waves. Lastly, the barrels begin in a normal, though overloaded, form and become first metaphorically humanized, then literally on their own, loved and respected by the people around them. "We," one of the characters says, speaking for the group, "are simply people of different views and different professions, voluntarily united on the basis of love and respect for our packing-barrels."

Perhaps, in speculation, these people are then symbolic of the people of the world and the barrels are the "teeming" overloaded populations of humanity as a whole. Humanity to the individual is sometimes animate, sometimes remote and seemingly inanimate. The more people strive for the ideal, the "Good Man" as each individual interprets him, the more love and respect each has for humanity, whether that humanity in its overloaded, overpopulated mass is acceptable to others or not. The planet Earth bearing humanity, like an uncontrollable truck, goes on its way wherever it wants to, whenever it wants. "I don't know when we'll see each other again," Teleskopov writes to Sima, "because we are going where our dear packing-barrels want to, not where we want to. Do you understand?" (p. 58) Its goal in its random course is not always in conjunction with the ideal, and so people must unite and help each other bring it there. If this is impossible, then they, with the wisdom of the philosophies of the East, must accept their fate and ride along.

Also in speculation note that there are corrupt officials in this story who use their power to jail the innocent (Teleskopov). However the corrupt are here eventually softened by philos, love for humanity (the barrels) and set straight by eros, love for an individual (Irina Valentinovna). Note also that the pilot who spreads manure on the earth (a propagandist of any political view) is brought down by eros and philos together. In his dream sequence there is a hint that even agape, love for God (the angel), may be involved as well. Remember he never rides with the people (he is towed behind in his plane) and so he is never more than remotely connected with the people and with humanity. In time, without having learned from humanity, he returns to the skies to fertilize the earth with his manure.

Another excellent story and one of Aksenov's favorites is "The Rendezvous" (1969) published in 1971. It is the story of a most popular and talented individual: a poet, hockey star, mathematician, a Soviet Renaissance man and jet-setter. Feeling unloved, he goes off on a mysterious rendezvous that puts an end to his search but only at the price of his life.

During the next several years Aksenov experimented with various types of prose. He also wrote a number of humorous feuilletons for The Literary Gazette which included several stories about a character called Memozov. Memozov is a playful character device Aksenov likes to refer to as his anti-author.

One type of genre which he tried was the "chronicle novel" which was a popular form of writing in the early 1970s. For a series on famous revolutionaries he was asked to provide a book on Leonid Krasin, an electrical engineer and bolshevik revolutionary. The novel, Love For Electricity (1971), uses actual documents from the period intertwined with fictional embellishment. Even though it is basically about the tragedy of the revolution for the intellectuals who started it, that fact is generally misunderstood and so it is currently on the list of recommended books for school children.

A less serious experiment was an adventure novel, Gene Green-The Untouchable, which he participated in with two other authors. The book is the story of CIA agent No. 014 (twice what 007 was!). The pseudonym given as author, Grivady Gorpozhaks, actually represents a combination of the names of the three authors together who are identified only as translators of individual chapters. Of the thirty-two chapters, Aksenov wrote eight and collaborated on another four.

Another type of prose which he attempted is the children's book. My Granddad the Monument (1972) and its continuation, The Box in Which Something Rattles (1976), are highly adventurous tales based around the Leningrad Pioneer (like a Boy Scout) Gennady Stratofontov.

In 1975 Aksenov came to America as a Regent Lecturer for the University of California. After a long series of lectures at UCLA he made a short lecture tour to Stanford and Berkeley, and then visited the University of Michigan and Indiana University on his return to New York City. On his way back to Moscow he also spent time in London, Venice and Milano. From this prolonged stay abroad came the shorter works "The Asphalt Orangery" (1976) and "About That Similarity" (1977) and a long work about his impressions of America called 'Round the Clock Non-Stop (1976). This last work which includes the anti-author Memozov is an important work in that it sums up and explains many of his previous writings.

Meanwhile in 1976 one of his older stories was dug from the files and printed. "Swanny Lake" (1968) is an autobiographical piece with little "Whale" and his father joining "Whale's" grandfather, obviously based on Aksenov's real-life father, for a day at the lake. The internal thoughts of the three generations are artistically interwound to provide a charming yet meaningful message.

Two other short stories of that year "Out of Season" (1976) and "The Sea and Tricks" (1976) are actually parts of a longer work, In Search of a Genre, which was published in full in January of 1978.

Recently Aksenov has traveled a great deal in Europe, to Germany, Paris, Corsica and Bordeaux. He presently lives in Moscow with his wife Kira, his son Alyosha, who is no longer "little Whale" but an eighteen-year-old art student, and his dog Ralph Emerson Klychin. He recently began filming A Center From the Skies, a filmscript he wrote about a basketball player. Currently he is translating E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime into Russian.