5 - Postwar and Culture

Summary

HINSEY: We’ve just spoken about the political climate directly after the war. Let's now explore what was happening in the intellectual and cultural milieus—

VENCLOVA: In August 1946, when we were still living in Kaunas, a cultural crackdown started in Russia. One of Stalin's henchmen, Andrei Zhdanov, gave a speech in which he castigated two famous Leningrad writers, Mikhail Zoshchenko and Anna Akhmatova, for their work, which was, according to him, antipathetic to the heroic Soviet people. Even by Soviet standards, it was an exceptionally virulent attack. The abuse that Zhdanov poured on both writers’ heads was obviously dictated by the Great Leader himself. This marked the end of the relative cultural freedom I previously mentioned, and the onset of the Cold War.

Joseph Brodsky, who later became one of Akhmatova's disciples and heir apparent, says in his memoirs that he was unaware of Zhdanov's speech until his early youth, although he lived in Leningrad, where the event occurred. Yet he was three years younger than I was and had not grown up in a literary family. I knew what was happening, though I could not of course understand its full implications. At nine years old, I was able to read not only in Lithuanian but also in Russian, and I remember the journals and newspapers reviling the “decadent” Akhmatova and “cynical” Zoshchenko. Both names were well-known to my parents. Akhmatova's poetry and Zoshchenko's short stories (incredibly funny, by the way) were almost as popular in prewar Lithuania as in Russia itself. Petras Cvirka had even made friends with Zoshchenko in the Kazakh city of Alma-Ata (present-day Almaty) where he had stayed for a period during the war. Therefore, excerpts from their works were in Father's library, and I managed to get hold of them. They looked, well, quite interesting.

HINSEY: What were the repercussions of the Akhmatova-Zoshchenko affair in Lithuania?

VENCLOVA: As a general rule, every Soviet ideological campaign had to be imitated in each Soviet republic, and not only there, but also in the so-called people's democracies, such as Poland or Czechoslovakia—an old Russian custom, as Brodsky liked to call it. Thus, Lithuanian counterparts to Akhmatova and Zoshchenko had to be identified and discredited.