The Wingless Icarus

Peter Ustinov

EVERYONE at the Writers’ Union was surprised at the extent of Comrade Zotin’s applause when the novelist, Efim Grigovievitch Grigalka, saw fit to compare Pasternak to a hyena; everyone but the historian, Zasyadko. Grigalka, who had some juicy phrases coming about the accursed Pasternak, all of them culled from the world of farm and wildlife to form the kind of agrarian invective which any village idiot could understand, interrupted his diatribe to study Zotin, who was still clapping energetically when all the others had stopped. Could this be a form of irony?

Grigalka’s pince-nez glinted as the lenses caught the lights from the chandelier, and the sudden coming and going of those fierce little bulbs seemed to accentuate his annoyance. The faces of the other great writers of the Soviet Union were all turned toward Zotin, expressing puzzlement rather than enthusiasm. “Sit down,” hissed Zasyadko.

Zasyadko knew what was coming. When Grigalka spoke, it was always the same. It was always the same when Grigalka wrote, and he wrote often and profitably, about cement, about pipelines, about power stations and hydroelectric plants. Every time he opened his mouth, it seemed to Zasyadko that it disgorged a stream of verbal cement. The historian stared at the ceiling and began to daydream.

He remembered Zotin as a young man, a misfit, a man in love with an illusive mistress, literature, who would court her till the end, never admitting defeat. Zasyadko had married young and happily, and like so many serene, uncomplicated couples, he and his wife found they were practically forced to adopt the unhappy Arkady Petrovitch Zotin and regarded sheltering him as a kind of debt to pay destiny for their own concord. Even when young, Zotin cultivated the tousled air of rebellion, the pointed beard of the aesthete, and the bad teeth of one whose thoughts are too elevated to stoop to toothpaste. He published a slim volume of futurist poetry in 1913 and cherished a letter of encouragement from Mayakovsky, who was one of the few people to have read it. He spent his time arguing in cellars and in attics, but was rarely seen in the rooms in between. Zasyadko had private means, and he smilingly supported his freakish friend, who attacked all opposition as a terrier attacks a bone.

In 1914, Zotin enjoyed a moment of notoriety when he was arrested by the Czarist police for allegedly writing a scurrilous pamphlet attacking the autocracy. He was released a week later when, with the characteristic zeal of the inefficient, the police discovered that the culprit was another author of the same name. Still, Zotin did not regret this error, since it gave him an intoxicating feeling of belonging to his time and to his people. Messages from liberal and radical writers poured in, and some of the more daring of them even published articles about the outrage, one entitled “When Will This End?” appearing over the signature of none other than Maxim Gorky. Certainly the error of an illiterate detective had given Zotin more notoriety than the poems without rhyme or reason.

He volunteered for the war, knowing full well that he would be rejected on physical grounds, since he suffered from asthma. Leonid Andreyev congratulated him for his patriotic gesture and included his name in a fiery article on the contribution of the Russian artist to the war effort. Zasyadko, whose name was not mentioned since his first works had not yet been published, was meanwhile with his unit, lobbing shells at the Austrians.

THE next time the two friends met was in the turmoil of 1917, when Zasyadko struggled home and Zotin repaid his debt by introducing the mild-mannered officer-on-the-run to Lunacharsky, the Soviet commissioner for education.

“Anatoli Vasilievitch, I wish to present to you Nil Lvovitch Zasyadko,” Zotin had said. “Nil Lvovitch was forced to go to war, and he became an officer owing to his superior intelligence and his knowledge of men. Even the Imperial Army was not entirely blind to elementary virtues. But at heart, Nil Lvovitch is a revolutionary, and always was one. He helped me materially when the Czarist police arrested me for writing an article attacking the autocracy, and he has always been a close friend of the toiling masses.”

Zotin was a liar, but a goodhearted one. He had even deluded himself with believing that he had actually written the article attacking the Czar, but the times were not conducive to displays of gratuitous uprightness, and so Zasyadko eagerly shook the hand of the bearded Lunacharsky, who gave him a small, insignificant post in the ministry. Here he could work quietly on his first book of any consequence, a history of the Sumerian people. It was published in 1920 and attracted the attention of scholars, but it was Zotin who was in the limelight at that period. In the same year, the Commissar Lunacharsky wrote a play entitled Oliver Cromwell, which conveniently forced the notorious Roundhead into the socialist mold, and Zotin followed his chief’s example by bringing out a tragedy in verse about Joan of Arc called Comrade Joan, in which the voices the Maid of Orleans heard were the voices of the as yet unborn Marx and Engels.

Zasyadko went to the first night and thought it absurd, even blasphemous. Afterwards the two friends discussed the play through the night with that relentlessness which is characteristically Russian where art is concerned. Zotin was amused by Zasyadko’s reservations. He spoke at length, one crude cigarette after another occupying the slot between two brown teeth which nature had unknowingly designed for his comfort.

“You, my dear Nil Lvovitch, believe that history is static, whereas I believe that it is kissed to life by a variety of Prince Charmings for every succeeding generation. I know that to your conventional, conservative mind, a Prince Charming should be dressed in blue tights and an ornamented jerkin, but you must live with the times and realize that he is now Comrade Charming, a proletarian dressed in gray, his jacket stained with honest sweat.”

Zasyadko detested this manner of argument, with its dismal imagery, and he was also weary of the discrimination between honest and dishonest sweat, which to his tidy mind was just sweat, and entirely blameless, from whatever pores it had welled. “History is beyond your reach, Arkady Petrovitch,” he answered. “The Sumerian people have had their day, whether we like it or not. When I wrote my history, I had before me the facts, as closely as they can be ascertained. Their story had a beginning, a middle, and an end. If scholarship should cast a new light on them, the light is only illuminating something which is there in any case. It is a discovery, but not a creation. For you to suggest that Joan of Arc heard the voice of Karl Marx is as gross a piece of nonsense as I have ever heard, and even fills the civilized spectator with a feeling of distinct malaise. The poor girl suffered death at the stake for reasons which are absolutely private. It must have been a particularly uncomfortable form of death, but if she chose it, I regard it as entirely her affair. Consequently I consider it intolerable impertinence toward someone who actually lived to suggest that she was inspired to face an ordeal by fire simply because a stuffy German professor appeared to her in a dream, and I further consider it quite unfair to poor Karl Marx to blame him for her death.”

“You are wrong,” Zotin answered, his small eyes twinkling with self-assurance and with malice. “History is inherited like a furnished house, and we do with it what we wish. It is material which has only been left behind for us to use in influencing the present. If it will serve a political purpose for me to present Joan of Arc as a Marxist, or Martin Luther as a freethinker, I will not hesitate to do so. I am convinced that if Joan of Arc had lived now, she would have been one of us, because she was basically an intellectual in a period in which intellectuals did not exist as we know them and in which women did not carry arms as they often do now. She was an intensely modern, basically Soviet woman. Her allegiance was to a King and to her voices, faute de mieux. History belongs to the living, not to the dead.”

“Nonsense,” said Zasyadko. “You know that what success your play enjoyed tonight was not due to the characterization of Joan, which was negligible and naïve in the extreme, but to your caricatures of the priesthood, which are very much in fashion. What you perpetrated was not a distortion of history so much as a pure invention, a fantasy. Now, if we carry your thesis of the past’s subservience to the whims of the present to its logical conclusion, I should ask you how you would react if, in a thousand years’ time, during some great Christian revival within the framework of the Soviet state, some future Zotin writes a drama about Lenin hearing the voice of Moses, who encouraged bread rationing as the surest way of guaranteeing future milk and honey from the collective farms.”

“For goodness’ sake, be careful,” muttered Zotin. “You never know who may be listening. I regard history as a series of presents, piled on each other like plates. There is no past and no future. If the future Zotin decides that it is expedient to portray Lenin in such a way, then he will be entirely within his rights to do so.”

And so it went on, aimlessly, irreconcilably, Zasyadko always founding his arguments on a logic which he believed to be basic, a structure of thought patterns which humanity had built up by a painful process of slow advances and eliminations over the centuries; Zotin always erratically insisting that a shriek in the dark has its own value, its own beauty, and that culture is not so much an architecture as a casual kaleidoscope.

ZOTIN continued to write essentially noisy and blatant poetry until about 1926, when even the futurists began to lose interest in him, since he obviously lacked any quality. What he turned out was careless in the extreme and about as illuminating as a neon sign which is made to flicker in order to catch the public’s attention. In 1927 the futurists themselves came under attack for formalism, and Zotin’s voice was one of the loudest in condemnation of his old colleagues. He wrote an open letter confessing his previous errors and declaring that socialism was positive and that in the future his writing would be marked by positive virtues instead of negative vices.

He applied for, and received, a grant to enable him to study tractor production with a view to initiating the new positive era of his creativity by a novel about the gratifying advances in the technique of mechanized agriculture, a subject about which he knew nothing and in which he had no great or compelling interest. He hoped, however, that his contact with a mode of living so different from his own would catapult him into some unknown stratosphere of thought and of creativity. His sojourn among the heroes of tractor production turned out to be unhappy beyond measure.

First of all, the factory was situated near the Siberian frontier, and nothing about the factory site or its environs was calculated to fire Zotin’s imagination. The half-finished vehicles, like huge, wounded insects, the streams of molten steel, the piles of slag, the shafts of pale sunlight breaking into the dark vault through broken windows, the pizzicato of sparks hammering the heavy air, the sullen faces of the workmen glistening with perspiration, the ancient gramophone balefully yawning rancid waltzes in the canteen, all these were powerful, monotonous, unutterably sad impressions, and they stultified his pen with their massiveness, their gracelessness. Then technicians explained their functions to him as though he were some inspector from Moscow in disguise. They rattled off endless figures with a show of dehumanized efficiency, they sent their fingers out in great arcs on the production charts, they gave him pieces of metal to hold and explained the advantages and disadvantages of the various grades in flat voices. He took nothing in, and the only reason he stayed awake was that he knew sleep would bring unpleasant dreams with it.

Eventually he returned to Moscow, several notebooks full of facts which were relevant to tractor production but irrelevant to literature in his brief case. In his room, he sat down before a blank sheet of paper, prepared his mind to make a start on an optimistic novel, and wept.

Over the weeks his unhappiness turned into a militant remorse. “Do you realize,” he told Zasyadko, “that there are people in this country of whose bitter lives we know less than nothing, you and I? How dare we go on vegetating in our furnished shelters while out there heroes, yes heroes, labor day and night in intolerable conditions to make the tractors which will till the soil, and bring in the bread which we eat without a thought of them? You should go out there, among the people, instead of writing your learned volumes on ancient civilizations which nobody reads — you should go out there to refresh yourself. Go into those steel cathedrals, with their altars of lava, their candles of sparks, their priests gleaming with honest sweat.”

Yes, Zasyadko was sure there was plenty of honest sweat, but however impressed he was by that old charlatan Zotin’s descriptions of the unknown world of industry, he found it absolutely impossible to read the first five chapters of the manuscript which his friend lent him.

Zotin had invented a love story between a pure socialist girl, Olga, who was supervisor of the department which fits the tracks to the tractors, and a pure socialist lad, Evgeni, who was chief of the testing team. Neither of these had any recognizable character, and the only discernible aim of their life appeared to be the raising of characterless and firmly optimistic children. They were initially thwarted in their noble plan by a riveter who was in fact a White Russian colonel bent on sowing dissatisfaction among the workers and raping Olga on the side, and by a so-called expert on industrial diesel engines who was a saboteur planted by the American Espionage Service and who studiously ruined tractor after tractor with apparent ease. There was no real light and shade in the story, since the dice were weighted heavily in favor of virtue from the very beginning, but what most thoroughly depressed Zasyadko were the long columns of statistics which Zotin had incorporated into the novel in the evident interest of authenticity. Fractions, square roots, decimal points jostled each other uncomfortably on every page, until the arithmetical symbols danced before the eyes.

All Zasyadko could say was that he never realized how adventurous the making of tractors could be. The book, entitled The Tracks Lead to the Horizon, appeared and was warmly welcomed by the more doctrinaire critics, who were apparently impervious to boredom, one of them even acclaiming the book as a valuable contribution to the literature of Soviet industrialization. Unfortunately there is a final arbiter of taste even in the Soviet Union, and sales were depressingly small, especially in industrial centers. The only people who really seemed to enjoy it were the tribes in Kazakhstan. This mystery was never explained, but Zotin planned to visit that republic to pay his respects for its judgment.

Meanwhile Zasyadko, who always presumed gratefully that the very nature of his occupation would take him almost out of reach of controversy, was having his own troubles. His history of the Roman Empire was bitterly attacked by another distinguished historian on the grounds that Spartacus and the revolt of the slaves were accorded quite inadequate space in the general pattern of Roman history. Zasyadko declared that he respected every point of view but reserved the right to write what he felt to be the truth. Two other writers, neither of whom had made a particular study of Roman history, then proceeded to assault Zasyadko for “being more interested in his own opinions than in history.”

During this unpleasant period, Zasyadko tended to withdraw from circulation. For a time he was tempted to write about the French Revolution, an upheaval which had interested him deeply ever since his youth, but then he thought better of it, since he had no desire to glorify an unscrupulous villain like Marat, after whom the Russians had named a battleship. Instead he turned his attentions to Charlemagne, about whom there had been very few proletarian theories. Living quietly in a little dacha with his devoted wife, he worked painstakingly and all but lost sight of Zotin.

TIME passed, and Zotin, frustrated by his inability to be realistic, optimistic, and commercial at the same time, took refuge where so many Soviet writers have sought a haven, in translation. Unfortunately his knowledge of foreign languages was very incomplete, and it was consequently particularly rash of him to make an attempt at the works of Rabindranath Tagore. After struggling for eight months with the aid of three dictionaries and an Indian student, he published a short poem in a magazine, but it was brutally attacked on the grounds of “decadent mysticism.” Russia was not yet interested in Indian culture, since the British were still in possession, and Zotin gave up the unequal struggle. Briefly he explored the other escape road of Soviet literature and wrote a book for children, The Kulak and the Big Red Bear, but since he knew nothing of children and in fact detested them, the children could hardly help sensing this and invariably burst into fitful tears when the garish, angular morality was read to them at bedtime.

Criticism and neglect produced quite the opposite effect on Zotin than on Zasyadko. Far from retiring, he attended every writers’ meeting wherever it was held and was more evident in person than in print. His hair had turned white, his face was a mass of contradictory wrinkles which gave him an ambiguous expression, somewhere between grief and savage joy, his mouth had but one tooth left in it, like a rusty buoy in a dark estuary. His fingers, his beard, and his lips were stained with nicotine, and the glasses he now wore did not seem to help him see any better, since his eyes were always screwed up as though he were in pain. Like an old dog, he sniffed the wind, recognized the scents, but refrained from barking.

Just after the outbreak of the so-called Patriotic War, Zasyadko published the book which was to bring him fame, a history of the Teutonic knights. He had finished it in 1940, but he could hardly let it appear at a time when Russia and Germany were allies and the conflicting creeds of Communism and Fascism were linked in an awkward and callous liaison. Zasyadko showed surprising practicality in biding his time, for no sooner had Hitler embarked on his invasion of Russia than this thick volume about German territorial ambition and brutality in the thirteenth century became a best seller, full of a gratuitous symbolism which the times themselves supplied. He became an academician, was heaped with honors, and had an agreeable chat with Stalin.

Once again it was his turn to take Zotin under his wing, and, using his now considerable influence, he procured his old friend some commissions to write patriotic poems for the newspapers. Zotin managed this quite well, since critical standards are subservient to emotion in times of peril. After the war, Zotin attempted to write a book about the war against the Germans and the Finns, but although the facts in it were accurate, he had never served in the army, nor had he ever been north of Leningrad, and a certain woodenness inevitably resulted. The rapid restoration of normal relations with Finland did not help him either, and for these many reasons On to the Baltic, Comrades was a failure.

It was a bitter man who vociferously applauded the degrading stipulations of Comrade Zhdanov at the 1946 Congress, when that acrid and talentless theorist demanded a literature saturated with enthusiasm and heroism. Zotin was now sixtyseven years old, and he determined to go out in search of those elusive qualities if it was the last thing he ever did.

“What Zhdanov says is quite true,” he explained to Zasyadko, while sipping a glass of kvass on the latter’s veranda, “and he explains it well. There can be no more conflict in our Soviet literature, since conflict suggests good and evil, and evil is now so rare that there is no point in showing it. It is untypical, you understand. The only conflict which can possibly exist is a conflict between good and better. Consequently, since the aim of our new literature is enthusiasm and heroism, it stands to reason that the only conflict can be between enthusiasm and ecstasy, bravery and heroism. It certainly opens up entirely new panoramas to us.”

Zasyadko laughed. “For an intelligent man,” he said, “you are a remarkable ass.”

Zotin looked offended. “I did not say that. It was Comrade Zhdanov.”

“That surprises me less,” said Zasyadko.

Zotin smiled. “You were clever to bring out your book on the Teutonic knights when you did.”

“How sad that we should have to think in terms of expediency in such matters.” Zasyadko sighed. “I could not have published it before, and who knows, soon it may be out of date once again. It depends not on historical truth, but on which way our friends the Germans jump.”

Zotin smiled childishly. “Nil Lvovitch,” he said, “help me to find a subject.”

“One which is both enthusiastic and heroic?”

“Yes.”

Zasyadko’s wife had died in 1943, and since her death the two aging men had seen a great deal of each other. They reminded each other of so much that was now lost irretrievably. Zasyadko laughed. In spite of the fact that he found much in Zotin to despise, he could not help liking him.

“How about an autobiography?” he asked.

“Now you are laughing at me.”

“Yes.”

“I am a great coward, both morally and physically — yes, and even artistically — but that will not prevent me from writing a most enthusiastic, most heroic book, which will surprise you.”

“I wait with bated breath.”

Zotin made six different beginnings, but abandoned them all because he felt they were deficient in those properties which were officially demanded of them. He found it extremely difficult to write without conflict and began to hanker after that lost galaxy of saboteurs, spies, and counterrevolutionaries which had been so useful to Soviet writers before. “What on earth would Pushkin have done?” Zotin asked Zasyadko.

“I’ll tell you exactly,” came the reply. “Pushkin would have translated all of Shakespeare, all of Byron, all of Keats, all of Shelley, and if he ever ran out of material, he would have taken his own life after shooting Zhdanov.”

“You can afford to talk like that, you’re an academician,” Zotin said ruefully.

“Not because I am an academician, but because I am alone with you.”

IN 1953, when Zotin was seventy-four and Zasyadko seventy-six, Stalin died. Suddenly everyone could breathe again, but as they were not used to it, relief took time to become apparent. The next year, the journalist Ehrenburg published his book, The Thaw, and it looked as though a new era in Soviet letters was beginning, more especially since the vituperative Ehrenburg is really a cautious man, a professional survivor disguised as a firebrand, a man whose brilliant intelligence, pressed into devious and diplomatic channels, wears only the outer mask of frankness and whose steady eye hides a nervously opportunistic mind.

Zasyadko saw less of Zotin during this time of emancipation, and it was clear to him that the old rascal was engaged in some creative activity or other. Then the arteries of freedom hardened once again, and the creative blood congealed. Zotin seemed to be a broken man. He talked very little, he was hard up, he was sullenly impatient for death. Nothing that Zasyadko could say or do would cheer him up.

Zasyadko worked quietly on his book about the Assyrians, and once again Zotin drifted away from him until one memorable day when an old, old man suddenly arrived at the dacha, haggard, wizened, yet reinvested with all the mischief of his youth. Zasyadko hardly recognized him.

“Nil Lvovitch, some most surprising news!”

“Good God, Arkady Petrovitch, where do you spring from? I thought you were dead.”

“I have been pretending to be dead.”

“Judging from your appearance, you have pretended very convincingly.”

“Yes, I lost my tooth.”

Over a cup of tea, Zotin explained that there was a rumor that Pasternak had written a book, entitled Doctor Zhivago.

“That’s nothing new,” Zasyadko answered. “Boris Leonidovitch has been working on it for years.”

“It has been refused.”

“That’s nothing new either.”

“No, but it has been accepted by an Italian publisher, and sold to France, England, and America! America!”

“Why should that excite you?” asked Zasyadko. “It won’t do Boris Leonidovitch any good. On the contrary.”

“Nil Lvovitch, I am seventy-nine years of age,” pleaded Zotin. “I don’t care any more for my safety, and as for my reputation, you know as well as I do that I have none to lose. All my life I have vacillated. I was a false futurist, a false realist, a bad poet, a hopeless translator, an impossible writer for children, but I am not stupid, Nil Lvovitch. I am not stupid.”

There were tears forming in Zasyadko’s eyes as he echoed, “No, you’re not stupid.”

“I have seen a great many things in my time.

I have a good memory, and I love writing. It is my only passion. I never even married, because I formed a monastic attachment to my desk. Well, let me tell you something. You didn’t see much of me after Stalin died. I wrote the only important work I had it in me to write: my confessions, the confessions of a timeserver, of a coward, of a crank. I put it all down, all. I spared myself no humiliation in the interest of truth. I exposed myself, and with it I exposed the futurists, the formalists, the petty theorists, Zhdanov, Stalin, the whole odious conspiracy which has made a mockery of Russian letters and the Russian language, that which should be finest, that which Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy used to spin their magic webs of sound and meaning. Alas, I am old. I could not write fast enough. Before I had finished, the freedom was gone again, and the outlets were sealed. Now, if I could have it published in Italy . . .”

There was a pause, and then both old men began crying bitterly, like children.

Before long, the news of Pasternak’s success abroad began to filter through to Soviet writers, and this was followed by the award of the Nobel Prize, gracefully accepted. The consternation in Moscow was followed by an equally graceful, but far sadder refusal of the honor by the author, and there was a large meeting at which a young functionary, by name Semichastny, compared Pasternak to a pig. Khrushchev, who was present, was seen to clap loudly at this scintillating display of subtlety, along with everyone else. It was a striking demonstration of party solidarity in the face of the grim menace of quality and international approval.

Afterwards, Zotin went to visit Zasyadko and said, “Glory to Boris Leonidovitch. He has really demonstrated that the pen is mightier than the sword. Zhukov went without a murmur, Molotov disappeared overnight, God only knows what has happened to poor Bulganin, Beria vanished like a raindrop in the sunlight, but here’s a mere author, and what a rumpus he has created with nothing but his vision, a tiny pen five inches long, and a few sheets of paper. I tell you, Nil Lvovitch, it is a victory of the individual over the amorphous crowd.”

“I agree,” said Zasyadko. “For a country which has condemned the cult of personality, we are curiously paradoxical. We are practically the only nation which names ships, streets, automobile factories, and even towns after living people. If that isn’t a cult of personality, then what is?”

“That’s why they have to keep changing the names of our streets, ships, and cities so often,” Zotin added. “But to return to the meeting. It was really quite degrading. Considering that Boris Leonidovitch’s book has never been published here, an awful lot of people seem to have read it. Even our revered secretary applauded loudly when that young fellow Semichastny called Boris Leonidovitch a pig, and I somehow don’t believe that he would have had time to read the manuscript, since he is so busy writing letters to Eisenhower himself.”

“The standards of Russian criticism have never been high.”

“Hang the critics,” said Zotin excitedly. “Think of Pasternak’s glory — to be called a pig and to have that opinion endorsed by a gathering of our greatest, most heroic, most enthusiastic leaders, who, on top of everything, have never read the book in question. My dear Nil Lvovitch, that even transcends glory, that is martyrdom.”

“And you’re jealous?”

“Yes, I am,” admitted Zotin.

A FEW days later, Zotin presented himself at the Italian embassy. To the surprised cultural attaché he revealed his whole extravagant story. The attaché, being both cultural and Italian, was extremely courteous and promised to dispatch the huge and disheveled manuscript to the publisher who had so nobly set Pasternak on his road to Calvary. Zotin left in high spirits, and he seemed to become younger by the day. In case anyone had seen him visit the Italian embassy, he told everyone that he was embarking on a vast trilogy about the Risorgimento and that he had gone for some technical books.

There was no trouble of any sort, and the days passed in eager anticipation of news. Then one morning it was no longer the impish Zotin who appeared at the gate of Zasyadko’s dacha, but a broken man, clutching a huge manuscript which seemed far too heavy for him to carry.

“What’s the matter?” Zasyadko cried.

“Read this. You’re good at languages,” Zotin answered in a small, dull voice.

Zasyadko took the letter which was attached to the manuscript, and read it. It was in French.

“It doesn’t really matter what it says,” Zotin murmured as Zasyadko was reading. “They sent the manuscript back, and that’s enough.”

“It says that it isn’t the kind of book they’re looking for,” Zasyadko said. “They find it interesting, but too diffuse and too violent in parts to be effective.”

The color came back to Zotin’s face. “Damn them, damn them, damn those Westerners with their haughty ways. Who the hell do they think they are?”

“It is unfortunate,” said Zasyadko.

“Unfortunate,” howled Zotin. “I am a Russian writer, d’you hear me? A Russian writer, worth ten Gabriele d’Annunzios. How dare they treat me like some local upstart! How dare they explain their rejection at all!”

“You are making the classical mistake of all of us Russians,” said Zasyadko firmly, even angrily. “Either we fawn toward the West or we insult it. We can never treat it as an equal. Either we all talk bad French to each other, as in the old days, or we call French an inferior language. Either we imitate their technology, or we consider it beneath contempt. We accept the Nobel Prize for our scientists and refuse it for our author. When will this ridiculous complex end? In the past we attacked Tchaikovsky because he was not Russian enough and scoffed at Glinka because he was too Russian. We have not changed a bit. To be Russian is no better and no worse than to be anything else — it is just different. Why can’t we accept it?”

Zotin was furious. “To be Russian is to be better than anything else,” he cried.

“Yesterday it was to be worse than anything else, according to you. You couldn’t wait until you were recognized abroad.”

“You are a Westerner and a traitor!” Zotin sobbed.

“No, Arkady Petrovitch, the trouble is in yourself, you good, foolish man. There is one thing you never learned, and that is to take your time. To be in a hurry is to kill your talent. Dear friend, to reach the sun it is not enough to jump into the air.”

Zotin looked at Zasyadko reproachfully, and left.

Zasyadko became aware of a silence, and his daydream ended. Looking round, he noticed that the eyes of everyone in the room were on him. Comrade Grigalka was still on the podium, and it was clear that the diatribe against Pasternak had just ended. Everyone, including Grigalka, was staring at him because he must have been the only one who had not joined in the storm of applause which traditionally greets a speech of high moral tenor.

“Well,” he thought, “I’m eighty-one, after all. They’ll have to excuse me on account of my age.”

The pause continued with unabated intensity, and Grigalka’s glasses glittered once again. Zasyadko was even less for controversy in his old age than he had been when he was younger. He had only come to this accursed meeting in order to make sure that poor Arkady Petrovitch didn’t make a fool of himself. He was too old and too tired to care whether Boris Leonidovitch was a pig, or a hyena, or not. In any case, he preferred animals to human beings on the whole. He made one last concession by bringing his two hands together like a pistol shot, once. Then he stared at Zotin from under his white eyebrows, but Zotin looked away.