HORTATORY ANALYTICS

As a point of interest, a book I've recently been perusing on Russian literature under the impact of 'glasnost' and 'perestroika' and before the confrontation of adapting to estern liberal capitalism moved into its critical phase, "The Last Years of Soviet Russian Literature: Prose Fiction 1975-1991" by Deming Brown (Cambridge University Press 1993), has some aware and illuminating remarks that can be directed at the wider situation of poetry.

The author recollects, to begin with, that a "colourful, hortatory" kind of poetry had been highly valued during the hiatus of the late '50s post-Stalinist 'Thaw', exemplified by, for instance, Evtushenko and Voznesenskii, but that in the ensuing period of 'stagnation' with the Cold war poetry effectively conceded or found diminished "its *civic* importance which entered a period which one critic characterized as 'quiet lyricism'" (Brown p.7).

The guiding momentum for this shift of emphasis, content and tone, it is intimated, is that "What was needed" in the anticipatory lead-in to 'glasnost' and market capitalism was not so much resolute or polemicised "emotion, not exhortation, not flashes of poetic insight, but *analysis* of what was going on in society and in the lives and souls of its members. The public wanted information and evaluation that would help them to understand the profound changes that were taking place and that would affect their existence in fundamental ways. A precondition for such understanding was a full and truthful account of the national past, free of the heretofore dominant official formulations, distortions, omissions, and pure inventions which, they now increasingly realized, had warped their understanding of their situation. Only detailed and analytical prose, it was felt", as Deming Brown surmises "could lead to the kind of evaluation that was" then realised to be "urgently needed." (Brown p.7)

I'd intuit, not entirely concurring with Brown's diminished role for an intelligently if not by turns stylish and critically realised poetics, that a pronounced redirection in the sense of poetry's congruence of purpose and audience is involved here, and though I find this summary critique persuasive and convincing as a partial description of what has happened to Russian and East European literature in the 1980s and since, as yet elaborative and comparative detail of the picture seems some way from emerging, where illustrative examples might round out the grasp of cultural and political events and shifting prerogatives.

Part and parcel of this political sea change is that the broader reading public in Russia outside the privileged circle of the literati are themselves now evidently in a position to catch up on literature prohibited an internal circulation that is nevertheless well known to audiences in the West by such prominent authors as Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Akhmatova and Mandelstam.

Given that Khruschev, no partisan of the literary arts, is credited in a bold gambit with sponsoring publication of Solzhenitsyn's openly critical "Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" back in 1962, something of a gulf separating social and political consciousness of the prevailing actualities seems, in the interim, to have rendered many 'insiders' in Russia blithely or resistantly unaware of what dislocated emigres and 'outsiders' profess themselves to value, know or believe about poetics.

So that when I now pick up a work of 'quiet lyricism' instead of, say, Evtushenko, I do so with a certain elusive uncertainty.


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