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Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5KB | 117 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 58

A Poet's Praise for a "Czar"


By ANDREI VOZNESENSKY

    -- Translated by Antonina W. Bouis


    One of Russia's best-known poets, Andrei Voznesensky is
also an artist and a songwriter. He wrote this essay while
visiting New York City for an exhibition of his work at the
Sperone Westwater Gallery.



    What feelings did I experience watching the Soviet flag
being lowered over the Kremlin?

    Was it gloating over the demise of the flag that waved
over the Gulag and over the tanks crushing Prague, Afghanistan
and Moscow itself -- the flag in whose name the recent
putschists ordered 250,000 handcuffs to be ready?

    Or anguish for the single country, forged over a
millennium, beautiful, horrible, yet spiritual and poetic,
created and lived in by my forefathers, grandfather, father and
mother?

    Or horror at the possible death of a culture, as fragile
as the ozone layer, the culture of Dostoyevsky and Pasternak?
Damn the totalitarian empire, but will this be the end of the
only country in the world where millions of people recite
poetry by heart, like a prayer, where they listen to poetry
readings in stadiums, where a book of verse can still sell
250,000 copies?

    Where will the centrifugal disintegration end? Will the
Crimea separate itself the way The Nose did in Gogol's story?
Will the nuclear button be divided too? Instead of just one --
four, or a whole keyboard? And then what about nuclear civil
war?

    Will the rise of nationalism lead to anti-Semitism and
racism? Yes, but standing at the funeral for three victims of
the coup last August (one of whom was Jewish), I saw a crowd of
100,000 listen to the Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer of mourning.
Just last winter, the reading of my translation of Bernstein's
Kaddish at the Moscow conservatory seemed extraordinary. But
what about the demons of democracy who sell anti-Semitic
literature like Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion in
Moscow underpasses?

    How will democracy continue without Gorbachev? As a
supporter of his changes, I never praised him while he was in
office -- a poet must not praise a czar, even a good one. But
now I will say that this great man, one of the men of the
century, turned around global consciousness, broke the back of
totalitarianism and gave us glasnost.

    I wrote only two letters to him in my life: once to get
permission for an exhibition of paintings by the banned Marc
Chagall, and the second time for the rehabilitation of the
novelist Boris Pasternak and the creation of a museum in his
honor. Gorbachev helped both times. I never mentioned this
before, so as not to damage his standing with the conservative
wing. And when demonstrators call for "Gorbachev on trial!,"
this is also a victory for him. He was the first Russian ruler
to allow himself to be mocked. Why was there never a
demonstration calling for trials of Stalin and Khrushchev and
Brezhnev in their lifetimes?

    My economic dream is post-capitalism -- a market economy
plus civic responsibility, and a safety net plus spiritual
contentedness. But what salvation will the free market bring to
our elderly neighbor in Moscow, whose annual pension now equals
a few dollars? What is freedom to travel if the lifting of price
controls (as planned for the new year) raises the cost of a
ticket to New York to more than twice Gorbachev's annual
retirement pension?

    With today's pace, there is no time for lamenting and
weeping. We must build the new structure of Russia before chaos
overtakes us. Intellectuals have to build spiritual hopes for
hopeless people. I believe in the new Russians. I mean people
like the eye surgeon Svyatoslav Fyodorov and the other Fyodorov,
who opened the first private restaurant in Moscow and the first
Muscovite restaurant in New York. I mean Mstislav Rostropovich,
the great cellist who, mingling with the pro-democracy crowds in
Moscow, was like a new Orpheus descended in the hell of the
coup. I mean the 10- and 12-year-old boys, Muscovites of the
21st century, who are earning their first money by wiping
windshields of cars stopped at red lights.

    The best minds are on Yeltsin's team now, and his courage
saved democracy during the coup. People have to forget their
quarrels in facing the coming chaos. And of course the
commonwealth is now the only way to save the economy and to
unite countries. The future depends on economics, not politics.

    Going back to Moscow, I don't know what the new year will
bring. Interested in numerology, I note that the sum of the
figures in 1992 add up to 21, the winning number in the American
card game blackjack and the Russian card game ochko. I doubt
that we will be lucky in the new year, but I wish you luck in
yours. Maybe we'll both be lucky?