SOURCE: "Aksenov and Soviet Literature of the 1960s," in Russian Literature Triquarterly, No. 6, Fall, 1973, pp. 446-60.

[In the following essay, Meyer discusses several of Aksyonov's works and comments on the author's place in the "Young Prose" movement in Russian literature.]

After Stalin's death Soviet literature had no rich indigenous tradition to proceed from directly, but there was a wide variety of elements, both Russian and Western, from which a new synthesis could be drawn. The first change that took place after 1953 broadened the range of permissible subject matter, and the first Thaw produced a rash of stories attacking bureaucratization. Subsequently, translations of contemporary Western literature (the journal Foreign Literature began publishing in 1955) and later the republication of Russian literature of the first third of this century (Blok in 1963, Olesha, Tsvetaeva, and Pasternak in 1965, Bely in 1966, Balmont in 1969) provided material for stylistic innovation. Psychologically, Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" at the 22nd Party Congress in 1956 had an enormous effect on the generation from which the new readers and writers of the 1960s were to emerge: the opening up of possibilities produced a general sense of exhilaration, a sense that if you were honest, talented and even innovative, you could become successful. This drew a large number of people into literature, especially from the generation born in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The burst of new literary productions appeared in a raft of new literary journals: Iunost', Neva, and Druzhba narodov were founded in 1955, Molodaia gvardiia in 1956, Don and Voprosy literatury in 1957, Pod'em, Moskva and Russkaia literatura in 1958.

Soviet prose of the 1960s published within the USSR falls into three main groups: "war prose" (e.g., Baklanov, Bondarev, Astafiev), "village prose" (e.g., Abramov, Tendriakov, Soloukhin, Belov), and "young prose" (e.g., Aksenov, Gladilin, Bitov, Vladimov, Voinovich). Only Young Prose will be discussed here, because of the three groups, it most clearly reflected the changes in Soviet society that had taken place since World War II and triggered a great deal of controversy in which some central issues were raised.

The main subject of Young Prose, the "youth theme," is the adolescent's struggle to find his place in society. His problems are partly caused by his rejection of the values of his parents' generation, as epitomized by the work ethic. The maturational process is treated, as both Soviet and Western critics have remarked, in very personal terms. The explanation for this choice of theme and its treatment may be primarily sociological.

The Young Prose constituency came from the first Soviet generation that had never fought a war and had grown up during a period of increasing prosperity. In contrast to the Stakhanovite shock work mentality of the 1930s and 1940s, the years in which this generation attained awareness were characterized by a more relaxed rate of economic growth, the transformation of the country from an agrarian to an urban society, the spread of mass literacy, mass media and higher education, and increased leisure time. One of the consequences of all this was the creation of a new expanded urban intelligentsia, and it is this class which produced the authors of Young Prose. Their experience directly mirrored their middle class, small nuclear family origins: on finishing high school they were not forced to go to war or do hard labor, but rather had a wide range of possibilities open to them. Them main force acting on them was the pressure to individual achievement typically produced by nuclear families. Growing up under circumstances analogous to those of youth in the United States, they had similar problems choosing professions and life styles, and therefore took longer to mature than did their parents. This naturally had important implications for literature: while Socialist Realism was designed to motivate the unsophisticated masses to shock labor and therefore had to be simple, the problem of motivation in Young Prose was vastly more complex. To convince a hip Moscow teenager who spends his time listening to American jazz on his tape recorder of the rewards of becoming a useful member of society, literature had to appeal to him as an individual, not as a representative of a class; to spend years in educational institutions in order to become an engineer or a doctor, one had to be motivated internally, not externally by the demands of society. Accordingly, the focus in literature shifted from the social to the personal and Socialist Realism, which remained the dominant mode in the first half of the sixties, was modernized to accommodate social change. Once literature was freed from the necessity of making clear value judgements for the benefit of the lowest-common-denominator reader, stylistic experimentation began to creep in. Ambiguity, the obscuring of objective reality, the explicit exploration of the unconscious, and verbal play became increasingly important in the second half of the sixties, and this may be correlated with the shift in traditions influencing Young Prose: in the earlier period [William] Faulkner's multiple narrators, [John] Dos Passos' inclusion of documents into the text, and Salinger's adolescent hero who attacks Establishment phonies in a slangy first person became favorite devices, but with the maturation of the authors and the new input of the more sophisticated pre-1932 Russian tradition, Young Prose outgrew much of this and began to "reflect Soviet reality" less literally. The first influence was superficial; the American devices were mostly inserted into the Russian context intact. Young Prose also showed the general effects of Hemingway's terseness and Salinger's directness, while the overlap with Dos Passos' theme of generational conflict was probably the cause of his popularity rather than the result of his influence. The second set of influences will eventually prove more interesting to examine, but the reassimilation of early Soviet literature is only just beginning—a good example would be Olesha's influence on Bitov.

The center of Young Prose activity was the journal Youth, founded by Valentin Kataev and co-edited by, among others, his proteges Aksenov and Gladilin. It was the publication of Gladilin's "Chronicle of the Times of Viktor Podgursky" in 1956 that first called attention to the journal and that initiated Young Prose. The story elicited no response from the press, but caused great excitement among youth of Gladilin's age (he was then twenty) because it reflected their own experience honestly and directly, without the traditional "varnishing." It is important to realize that it was this desire to "write about my friends in the language they themselves spoke, and not to create some romantic directive ideal which nauseated me" that motivated the authors of Young Prose, the desire to establish their own identities, and not any specifically political considerations: "I was then still very naive and didn't pose any of the larger questions." Aksenov's oft-quoted pronouncement that "a writer must have the same blood-type as his contemporaries" in order to be understood displays a similar attitude. Aksenov developed the "youth theme" most fully and interestingly of all the young writers, and caused the most critical furor. His growth as a writer parallels the evolution of the "New" literature of the sixties as a whole, so a survey of his work provides a good sense of the period.

Aksenov's writing may be divided into two main periods, of which the first (1958–1964) is largely autobiographical. Born in 1932 of parents who were intellectuals and leading members of the Communist Party, Aksenov graduated from the Leningrad Medical Institute in 1956, whereupon he went to work as a seaport quarantine doctor, and then as a general practitioner in the Far North. During the last two years of his medical practice, he specialized in tuberculosis and began to write, publishing his first story in Youth in 1959. With the success of his novella (povest') Colleagues, published in Youth in 1960, Aksenov left medicine to become a professional writer.

In the earliest group of stories written between 1958–1960 the medical profession is used to examine the work ethic. The traditional ideals of heroes wholly dedicated to the medical needs of provincial villages are juxtaposed to the desire for self-fulfillment which is connected to the cultural and educational attractions of the city. In Colleagues, the hero converts his cynical friends into idealistic doctors; in "A Medical Unit and a Half" the heroine refuses the temptation of a job in the city because of her sense of duty to her patients; and in "From Dawn 'til Dusk" a young lab worker comes to appreciate the value of his work when he discovers that his girlfriend's father has lung cancer. While stylistically and thematically these stories are still very close to Socialist Realism, the right of the individual to personal development is given serious weight, and the conflict is only resolved (rather than suppressed) in one story, "Samson and Samsonella," and then by rearranging the elements so that professional concerns are located in the city and personal pleasures in the village: the young doctor abandons a burgeoning romance in the village to become a medical researcher in Leningrad.

Aksenov's second novella, A Ticket to the Stars (1961), also endorses the work ethic, and yet it provoked a barrage of criticism. The story about four Moscow teenagers who run away to Estonia rather than enter the university offended the Old Guard: the "star boys" had received all the educational and material advantages only to throw them away for a frivolous existence. Furthermore, they spoke a slangy lingo studded with Westernisms. Aksenov's polemic was lost on the very people he was addressing. As in Colleagues, Aksenov wanted to show that while contemporary youth may look and talk like stiliagi ("beatniks"), they nonetheless shared the ideals of the previous generation. Seventeen-year-old Dimka joins a fishing cooperative and gains maturity through his exhilarating experience of collective labor, but at the same time he shares Holden Caulfield's hatred of phonies and rhetoric, and the fresh directness of tone plus the jazzy portraits of contemporary teenagers made A Ticket to the Stars enormously successful among Soviet youth.

To examine the problem of maturation, Aksenov retraced his steps to the point of high school graduation, and A Ticket to the Stars demonstrates why one shouldn't be expected to decide one's future at this early stage, but the question "a ticket to what?" remains unanswered. Aksenov's later heroes are older but no more able to answer this than Dimka, and delayed adolescence is the dominant theme of several stories written between 1960–1962. In "Surprises" (1960) Mitia returns to Moscow after three years' absence to find his friends married and with children, while he at twenty-six is still stuck in adolescent patterns; in "A Change of Life Style" (1961) Genia at thirty-one hides behind his work to avoid marrying the woman he loves out of fear of abandoning his student way of life.

Kirpichenko, the hero of "Halfway to the Moon" (1962), is psychologically akin to Mitia and Genia, but the story was probably selected for translation into English because of its metaphoric level. Kirpichenko spends his vacation flying back and forth between Moscow and Khabarovsk trying to find a stewardess he's fallen in love with on sight. His epic quest ends when he finally glimpses Tania in the Moscow airport as he is returning to Khabarovsk for good. He makes no attempt to approach her, only imagining how he will preserve her in memory. Kirpichenko, a belligerent worker who avoids sentiment in his routine sexual encounters, is transformed by his exposure to Tania, "a woman of the kind that doesn't really exist, the kind that's as far away from you as the moon." He starts reading Chekhov, he learns to think, to cry, and begins to understand "everything he hadn't understood in his … youth—the Siberian hillocks standing out in the pink light of dawn, and melting snow, and tiredness after work …—all these things were Tania." Tania is a Russian proletarian's Muse, Kirpichenko's Lolita. A metaphoric synthesis of Love and Art, she can only be possessed mentally. While this interpretation is the most interesting (speculations about Kirpichenko's salary notwithstanding), the hero's passion for an inaccessible woman should also be noted, as it allies him with Aksenov's stunted men who are unable to establish happy love relationships.

Aksenov had first proposed the work ethic, and then self-fulfillment through love, as means of outgrowing adolescence. When both solutions fail, he moves on to the next stage of life—parenthood. Sergei of "Papa, What Does It Spell?" (1962)—this and "Halfway to the Moon" are Aksenov's best early stories—is thirty-two, married, and has a six-year-old, he lives in an artificially preserved past with his former teammates. In the course of the story he moves from resenting Olia for requiring adulthood of him to finding the whole meaning of his life in her existence. During the summer Sunday they spend walking around Moscow, Sergei's growing awareness of his arrested development is nicely brought out by little incidents which occur against the background roar of the radio broadcast of the soccer game Olia's presence has kept him from attending: they pass a mirror which is hung too high to reflect Olia; they meet a factory colleague at the carousel who irritates Sergei by acting the proud father—the model Sergei knows he should emulate; they see a tall schoolboy who recalls Sergei's youth. Sergei is not fulfilled either at work or in his marriage. His sudden decision to live for his daughter represents an escape, a reversion to a still earlier stage of childhood through identification with his child, and not a solution. This interpretation is confirmed by a later story, "Little Whale, Varnisher of Reality" (1964) in which the father avoids the stresses of his own reality by joining his three-year-old son in the child's rosy world of fantasy.

Aksenov's third novella Oranges from Morocco (1962), a free-for-all occasioned by the arrival of a shipload of oranges at a Far Eastern seaport, abandons the problems of maturation to play (rather unsuccessfully) with a variety of first person narrators a la Faulkner, and his next long work, It's Time, My Love, It's Time (1963), along with "Little Whale," is the last treatment of the youth theme. At twenty-five Valia Marvich also suffers from delayed adolescence. He can't commit himself to a career or live happily with his wife, a dazzling movie actress (the adoring young man spurned and tormented by a glamorous dominating woman is an uncommonly prominent feature of Young Prose).

Marvich, like Dimka, allegedly solves his problems by joining a construction collective, but his enthusiasm for simple laborers (he is an intelligent and would-be writer) really stands the work ethic on its head: the conditions of collective labor allow the intelligent (Russian word meaning a member of the intelligentsia) to avoid the problems posed by individual interaction. Work becomes a means of therapy for Marvich rather than the object of his dedication. It is difficult not to internalize a dominant social myth, the literary expression of which will call forth its own parody as the myth loses its viability, and Marvich's idealization of labor betrays literary origins. It is only the intellectual who can long for the life of the noble savage. Village life is similarly romanticized in stories written by the urban intelligentsia. The contrast with the depiction of the decaying provinces prevalent before the revolution suggests that, like Young Prose as a whole, this kind of idealization should be examined in the context of urbanization.

Almost all Aksenov's stories written before 1965 reflect the problems of his contemporaries in a style that differs from Socialist Realism mainly in its racy diction. In his later stories, Aksenov waxes increasingly literary; as he loses interest in problem-solving, he becomes more involved in fantasy and stylistic play. Many of these stories are little more than entertaining anecdotes, like "The Beautiful Comrade Furazhkin" (1964) in which an Odessa cab driver and smuggler marries his daughter to a cop to avoid arrest (despite its humor, the story was greeted by an indignant letter in Pravda from some real Odessa hackies). But Aksenov uses the humorous stories to experiment with narrative devices. In "Where the Rhododendrons Grow" (1967) the anecdote (two lexicographers—Ozhegov and Ushakov—are chased up a tree by a wild boar during their vacation in the Caucasus) is only an excuse to play with the authorial persona:

It would have long ago been time for me to throw this story into the bottom of the basket or stick it in the pillow-case, for what can be the purpose of telling about the absurd vacation of two completely absurd (although personally likeable) people …

And to parody Gogol:

Such is the Russian man. He has only to pull out of his usual circle when he will immediately begin to grieve over this circle, and he will throw himself at any member of "his" group with verbal outpourings, with an open, responsive, throbbing soul. This becomes particularly acute in a foreign country. I remember in one … little town in the wilds of Central Europe I met a man from Moscow, whom I knew very little, and not even a very pleasant man, actually disgusting, vile. Well, we embraced, and got drunk, and talked, and in Moscow later only bowed to each other from a distance.

Aksenov's latest story of this genre, "Rendezvous" (1971), is a satiric allegory with a grotesque finale in which the hero, an hyperbolic embodiment of popular success modeled, rumor has it, on Evtushenko, is confronted by his whorish Muse on a construction site at the outskirts of Moscow. Here the Gogolian influence, as well as its Bulgakovian variant, is more profound. The grotesque is not merely verbal, but inheres in the vision of society.

The anecdotal stories develop a device that is important for the more substantial works, the injection of pure fantasy into an ostensibly realistic (if absurd) narrative. Pale-blue fauns and green-braided maidens flit by Ushakov and Ozhegov, the first-person narrator of "Furazhkin" continues to report events he can't be witnessing, and in "Rendezvous" a school chum suddenly ascends thirty meters into the air, as does a dream Hitler in the reminiscence "On the Square and Across the River" (1967).

Objective reality is destroyed in the serious stories initially in more traditional ways. First it is fragmented by shifting narrative times. Both "Lunches of 1943" (1962) and "Oddball" (1964) begin with the hero's memories of childhood which are interspliced with the narrative present in a way designed to maximize the shock of transition. However, there is no confusion of past and present, and the flashbacks are basically expository. The stories remain fully realistic, although "Oddball" has a fantastic element. An old Bolshevik returns to his native village after an active life to find that his oddball childhood classmate has built an elaborated version of a machine he first invented as a boy. The machine, a metaphor for the waste of potential, is utterly functionless, it merely runs.

"What is it, a perpetual motion machine or what?"

He turned to me, and his eyes sparked terrifyingly not now in the electric light, but in the light of the early moon.

"Seems to be," he whispered, "seems to be."

The story is only about motion, and then about motion through time, inasmuch as motion underscores the waste of human talent in backwaters. Jets keep flying over the village; technology, an ambiguous symbol of progress, defines Oddball's backwardness.

In the next step away from representing objective reality, the categories of past and present in the hero's interior monologue are replaced by those of the unconscious and the conscious, and in "The Victory" (1965) subjective reality acquires primacy for the first time. Although the early works deal with underlying psychological truths, these are conveyed only through externals (e.g., Sergei's encounters in "Papa!"), not through a stream of associations as in "The Victory" where the chessgame becomes a Rorschach onto which the grandmaster projects his fantasies. The levels of fantasy and reality merge; the narrative makes no distinction between the grandmaster's thoughts and actions:

Standing up from behind the terrace for a second, he saw that G. O. had taken his rook.

It is no longer possible to tell, as it was in "Lunches" and "Oddball," whether the hero's thoughts represent fantasies or memories of real events, nor is it important. The primary level of reality is the grandmaster's psychology, the symbolic significance of which is underscored by the fantastic ending. The shy, insecure grandmaster, so passive that he "can't avoid at least two games," is unable to counter aggression. He protects himself by withdrawing into fantasy, priding himself on never having committed any "really treacherous acts." The irony of the story is that there is no irony to G. O.'s victory: on the psychological level the grandmaster does lose the game by "running" from conflict with G. O. The same paradigm is followed by Marvich in "It's Time." He also prides himself on never having committed any treacheries, realizes that "myths of youth will not suffice," and fails to defend himself against a bully. The larger significance of the story lies in the meaning that the game, a metaphor of life, holds for each of the characters. For the grandmaster, chess is literary: it evokes associations, thoughts of love, life, death, creativity, and he finds an aesthetic "magic" in mating his opponent. For G. O. (Makarov suggests the initials stand for Glavnaia Opasnost'—the Main Danger) the game is an expression of hostility, a means of waging war ("Khas-Bulat the brave …") The grandmaster, a "runt" (the Russian khiliak carries the overtone of "Jew" as well, which casts some light on the exchange about Jewish chessplayers), prepares a supply of gold medals because he, the intellectual and aesthete, will always lose to the practical man of action, and the best he can do is buy off the aggressor.

In The Shop-worn Tare of Barrels (Zatovarennaia bochkotara, 1968) Aksenov synthesizes elements from all types of his earlier stories. The premise is taken from an autobiographical incident …, and fantasy, humor, parody and narrative play are integrated into an allegory. Even the early didacticism is present, but in general abstract moral terms rather than special prescriptive ones. The story of a trip to Koriazhsk becomes a Pilgrim's Progress toward the goodness in the characters, each of whom finds he is having the same collective dream of the Good Man. In the course of their journey, the bochkotara, a collection of empty barrels which is to be delivered to the railway station in a pick-up truck, becomes a symbol of the communality of mankind, and as such unites the disparate passengers. Grampa, Mochenkin, an old pisser who writes daily denunciations, the naive schoolteacher Irina, Vadim Afanasievich, the tweedy intellectual and others, mellowed by their common love for the bochkotara, are equally outraged when they turn it in at the station only to have it refused, and are condemned to journey onward together towards the Good Man forever. The chance assortment of representative types a la Dead Souls (Aksenov likes the grand hotel device and used it the same way in Oranges from Morocco) provides material for satire and parody. The Intellectual knows every detail down to the nicknames of all the animals of "Khali-Gali", a South American country no one has ever heard of, and Volodia the worker recounts his adventures in a style parodying proletarian speech and Soviet official jargon at once:

… in short me and Edik dropped in to the division of labor and hiring and there one mug six by six shoots us to the general committee of the roadworkers' union and with us was that I don't remember now Ovanesian-Petrosian-Oganesian a blond we played with as forwards on "Vodnik" in Krasnovodsk well someone leaned on the counter boo-hoo he says I'll send you to a work colony well who needs that lucky I knew the guy from the farm brigade you he says Volodia listen to me and apply your forces to writing an application moved by emotion well of course rev rev rev and Edik and me were chasing rafts down the Amur let's go he says to the Komsomol lake we dug it ourselves we'll boat on it ourselves …

Bochkotara contains wildly eclectic ingredients; the folk element, including a triadic structure and a regular refrain, mixes with the ads, slogans and songs of pop culture. The central metaphor is based on the current custom of redeeming beer bottles in order to buy more beer with the deposit money, so Soviets immediately associate the symbol of brotherhood with the drinking bout. Literary influences also contribute to the borshch. The characters' personalities are revealed through their dreams and letters which are recorded under headings ("Irina's Second Dream," "Volodia's letter to Sima," etc.) in the Dos Passos (via Gladilin?) manner. One interview with a pilot

"Do you see God, Comrade Kulachenko?"

"I don't see God!"

"Hurray! There is no God! Our prognoses have been confirmed!"

"And do you see angels?"

"I just saw one."

recalls Kataev's play with Communist ideology in The Embezzlers:

We are flying … higher, higher. Perhaps further on we'll find angels and God? But no, they're not there either … But where are the angels? Where then is God? It's all just an ignorant lie of the priests …

In Bochkotara Aksenov finally achieves what he was attempting in Oranges, a novel critics justifiably faulted for not differentiating the speech of the multiple narrators. In the later novel, social classes are vividly differentiated by their dialogue as well as their world views, and the adventure is more than a mere pretext to assemble comic figures. Furthermore, the language of Bochkotara is rich, zany and largely untranslatable, as illustrated by the epigraph "from the newspapers," a nonsensical sentence composed of slang and made-up words which are chosen chiefly for their alliterative value:

Zatovarilas' bochkotara, zatsvela zhltym tvetkom, zatarilas', zatiurilas', is mesta tronulas'.

Although Aksenov is most interested in pursuing this self-consciously literary tack, his latest work is a documentary biography of Lev Krasin which was commissioned for the series "Flaming Revolutionaries," a series which includes Gladilin's Robespierre. Basically an historical dramatization of the 1905–1908 period, Love of Electricity nonetheless incorporates many of Aksenov's favorite themes and devices. His fascination with technology is a propos, since Krasin was simultaneously a Bolshevik and a respectable electrical engineer, and the title contains the central metaphor of the book, revolution as electricity. One review complained that Aksenov chose Krasin not for his historical significance but for artistic purposes, and that the fictional Viktor Gorizontov is given as much attention as Krasin. The novel's seriousness is in fact undercut by Gorizontov, a comic bogatyr dedicated to revolution, whose improbable adventures betray Aksenov's love of the fantastic, the incongruous and the absurd. In addition, the scraggly image of the bee-keeper, a symbol of the Little Man, recurs throughout the novel undermining its realism. The bee-keeper keeps appearing like Hitchcock from behind the newspapers of various European countries to ask the meaning of the world turmoil he's reading about, which makes one question the larger meaning of the events described. Aksenov very competently sustains a multi-centered narrative, challenging the reader to assemble a variety of subplots which ultimately merge into an impressionistic but comprehensive picture of the 1905 revolution. "The Victory," Bochkotara and Love of Electricity indicate that Aksenov is now ready for work on a bigger scale and in greater depth.

Aksenov moved from being strictly realistic to focussing on unconscious reality, and most recently has used allegory and metaphor to destroy objective reality altogether. It's significant that this same line of development has been followed by others as well, notably by Andrei Bitov, whose recent story The Wheel. Notes of a Novice uses the extended metaphor more subtly.

Over the last ten years Soviet fiction has grown less preoccupied with narrowly local problems and become enriched partly through greater awareness of other literatures. Socialist Realism was a significant influence on the fiction of the early sixties, and it is important to appreciate that tradition for its value as social myth before attempting to understand the nature of the transition that Young Prose effected. The study of recent Soviet literature has been weakened by its lack of a theoretical basis. The assumption that Soviet and Western fictions fulfill the same functions in their respective societies has contributed to the trivialization of the texts. Young Prose has produced a literature that fulfills Western criteria better than did Socialist Realism, but the implications of that statement are complex and have not yet been explored.

The literature of the 1960s is immature, but it presents an excellent opportunity for studying problems of literary evolution. The period is short, and there is a small core of central authors, all of whom have grown up under Soviet rule. Most important, one can follow the tradition of Young Prose from its inception and ascertain with unusual precision what influences have been introduced. This closed system with its finite and easily traced inputs may prove too simple a test case to provide useful insights into instances where the interaction of literary traditions is more complex, but the literature of the 1960s cannot be understood without such an approach.