By Brooke Hindle. Norton, 1983.
162 pp. $5.95
the Soviet Union's status as an adversary and super- power, and severely constrained Moscow's tight controls on foreign journalists. Typically, daily news stories focus on politi- cal ups and downs in the Kremlin, on a handful of Soviet dissi- dents, on Soviet economic gains and losses, on Moscow's diplomatic coups and setbacks around the world. So familiar have the big issues become that a shorthand list suffices to bring some particulars of each to mind: "Poland," "detente,"...
Over the years, independent Soviet writers, artists, and intellectuals have used Cervantes's hero to symbolize their own high-minded "tilting at windmills." The tragi-comic, self-deluding aspect of the role is accepted, even flaunted. "The sole advantage of Don Quixote's," Soviet writer Fridrikh Gorenshtein wryly observed in a recent story, "is that they're ridiculous and go unrecognized."
In 1946, Winston Churchill declared that an Iron Curtain was descending on Europe, dividing East from West. The metaphor was apt.
As Stalin saw it, the curtain of isolation had two functions. First, it was to shelter the people of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe from the disruptive influence of the West. Second, it was to provide a secure environment in which ordinary mortals could be transformed into exemplars of the New Soviet Man.
The next time you are in an American bookstore, take a look at the science-fiction section; in some stores, it is almost as big as all of the other fiction categories put together. Walk into a So- viet bookstore these days, and you'll find . . . probably no sci- ence fiction at all. Go to a Soviet secondhand bookshop, and your chances of finding science fiction there will be equally slim. But take a stroll past the Moscow Art Theater to where Pushkin Street intersects Kuznetskii Most, and you'll...
Aksyonov and four fellow writers. It was published in the United States and France in 1982, after officials in the USSR banned the collection.
An eclectic anthology of poetry and prose 23 Soviet writers, Metro-pol represented yet another attempt by established literary figures to move beyond the constraints of offi- cial literature. The harsh reaction from the Kremlin was due as much to the unsanctioned nature of the group effort as it was to the content of individual pieces of writing. Ak- syonov...
IN DEFENSE
OF HENRY ADAMS
In a recent essay, critic Alfred Kazin praised Henry Adams for
possessing a "a mind so fine that no 'practical' ideas about any-
thing could violate it." But when similar judgments were voiced
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by Adams's contemporaries, they were not intended as compli- ments. Judged by the pragmatic standards of the 1890s, Adams, the descendant of American presidents, appeared to be a failure. And in some of his own writings, this troubled Bostonian criti- cized himself...
the passion for the development of natural resources, is a feeling of regret that a West European race, powerful its numbers and its skill . . . has not, to use the familiar phrase, got the thing in hand.'" That was how Lord Bryce appraised the Brazilians in 1912, and it is probably what he would say if he visited their country today. On the one hand, Brazil boasts the world's 10th largest economy and manufactures everything from computers and jet aircraft to tanks and rockets. On the other,...
During the 1950s, a few years before the suspension of dem- ocratic government by Brazil's military, the citizens of S5o Paulo on one occasion went to the polls and, after considering the choices, elected a hippopotamus, a write-in candidate, to the city council.
The hippo, a popular attraction at the city zoo, was never sworn in. But the episode illustrates the streak of good-humored cynicism that has helped Brazilians endure a century of politi- cal ups and downs. Over the past 95 years, the...
. Word of a major find in the eastern Amazon spread throughout the country. There were rumors of men unearthing gold rocks as big as their fists, of men who could not read or write turning into millionaires overnight and signing their checks with a thumbprint.
Soon the rumors were confirmed.
Three centuries after the gold strikes that had first lured thousands of men into the interior, Brazilians descended on Serra Pelada (Naked Mountain), the place where the discovery had been made, a small hill...