Visiting Soviet Literati: Glasnost With Gusto

Surrounded by the Polo Lounge’s busy breakfasters, Tatiana Tolstaya lit another cigarette and fired off another sharp-tongued comment about the differences between East and West.

“Russians like to suffer because they are used to suffering,” she said, eyes focused somewhere beyond the famous restaurant’s green and pink decor.

“Here, everyone is offended if he suffers--you go to a psychiatrist. I think that’s nonsense,” she continued. “If you go to a psychiatrist, then you spoil your soul. If you feel awful, if you feel just irritated, if you feel depressed, Americans run to the doctor. But we never (do) because I think if you feel that state of mind, your soul is growing . . . when you feel pain something is growing.”

Welcome to glasnost in America.

Novelist’s Descendant

Tolstaya--a 36-year-old short-story writer and descendant of the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy--was one of six Soviet writers and literary executives who paid an official visit, co-sponsored by the Esalen Institute, to Los Angeles last week, the first such group to come here since Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed his much publicized policy of “openness” in the Marxist state. The trip was the first under the auspices of an unusual 1986 agreement between Esalen and the Soviet government calling for long-term reciprocal exchanges of writers.

And before they left on Saturday--ending their two-week trip to both coasts with a visit to Disneyland--delegation members had ample opportunity to demonstrate the impact of the new policy on their tongues and brains. In interviews and during an appearance at UCLA they proved to be an acerbic bunch, seemingly capable of attacking--and offending--anyone and anything without fear or favor.

Vladimir Karpov, first secretary of the U.S.S.R. Union of Soviet Writers, delivered perhaps the most sweeping criticism of his own country when he told the UCLA audience that glasnost and perestroika (restructuring of the Soviet economy and society) were absolutely necessary because “things had to be changed. . . . We couldn’t continue to live that way any longer.”

He also said that writers “have received more benefits from perestroika and glasnost than industry and agriculture.” Gorbachev has held five meetings with writers delegations in the last 18 months to discuss internal reforms and literature. The last meeting was Jan. 8 and lasted seven hours, Karpov said. An apparently jealous American responded, “I think it would be very interesting if we could arrange the same thing with Mr. Reagan.”

But it was on specific topics--often their own countrymen--that the writers were most scathing and most personal.

Poet Vyacheslav Kuprianov, for example, unleashed an attack on Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who has often visited Los Angeles, and other internationally known Soviet poets that he dubbed “self-publicity poets.”

“I simply mean that their prominence in people’s minds far exceeds their significance as poets,” Kuprianov said through a translator during an interview. “People know them as people better than they know what they actually write . . . I call them made-in-America poets because very often they got their reputations because, if they were popular in the United States, how could we fail to recognize them ourselves?”

He added: “The thing that is really amusing is that poets who were doing beautifully before perestroika have adjusted and are doing fine now.”

Kuprianov also seemed to minimize the widely hailed official publication of such previously banned writers as poet and novelist Boris Pasternak, author of “Dr. Zhivago.”

“It’s the kind of stuff that cultured readers will have read a long time ago,” he said, apparently referring to the widespread underground circulation of censored books in his country.

Taking direct aim at Yevtushenko, Kuprianov claimed that one of the famed poet’s works--”Mother and the Neutron Bomb”--was so bad that no one in Russia would agree to translate it.

“So it finally ended up that the poem was translated by someone in East Germany who had never translated anything and was not a poet himself,” he explained. “So it’s the kind of thing that it didn’t even take a poet to translate.”

On the same poem, he recalled, “I was asked in West Berlin one time what I thought of this poem, for which Yevtushenko got a state prize. I told them I thought this poem was terrible but since the neutron bomb is even more terrible, I guess it does deserve a state prize.”

Meanwhile, Georgi A. Andjaparidze , editor-in-chief of a top fiction publishing house, compared the exiled Nobel Prize-winning writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn with Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini.

Criticizes Solzhenitsyn

“I don’t publish Khomeini and he’s a Khomeini,” Andjaparidze declared in an interview. “I don’t think he would let us have any democracy if he was in charge. . . . Spiritually and mentally he’s so reactionary. His constructive criticism (of the Soviet Union) is to restore the czar and the church and so on, which is a bit ridiculous. . . . If he came to power, it would be like Stalin’s time, with some variance.”

Solzhenitsyn, who was imprisoned under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin, was expelled from the Soviet Union because of his lengthy books about the country’s forced labor camps for political prisoners. His books, including the multi-volume “The Gulag Archipelago”--are still banned in the Soviet Union.

During the UCLA appearance, Andjaparidze enlarged his attack on Solzhenitsyn by seeming to compare the writer with German dictator Adolf Hitler.

Asked to clarify his comparison, he responded: “Solzhenitsyn is in my opinion an enemy of socialism, as was Hitler. Why should I publish an enemy when I haven’t published all my friends?”

Writers union secretary Karpov also proved to be on the attack. In an interview he reported that he is at work on a revisionist history of World War II, one that will paint a new, critical picture of Stalin’s leadership during that conflict. Karpov, a veteran of that war who was imprisoned for two years during Stalin’s reign, said the four-volume work--which should begin appearing later this year or early in 1989--is based on extensive research of both German and Russian archives.

“A lot of people aren’t going to agree with me, especially the leftover Stalinists,” he said. “I think I’m going to get it in the neck from a lot of people.”

Tolstaya, for one, understood that blunt talk about the United States probably wouldn’t be reprinted by any chamber of commerce.

“I feel that it irritates people because I am trying to give my own analysis and not only say, ‘Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful,’ ” she explained.

One person who didn’t impress her, Tolstaya said, was Jacqueline Onassis, who works as an editor at a New York publishing firm. She met the widow of President John F. Kennedy while the group was in New York a week ago, she said.

“She had quite absent-minded eyes,” Tolstaya said.

On a less personal level, Tolstaya, who lives with her husband and two young sons in Moscow, was amazed by the amount of food the group had been served, whether they were being entertained by Norman Mailer in New York or at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur.

“Where do you get all these quantities of food?” she asked. “What has been thrown away since we came here, it would be enough to feed thousands of people who are dying of hunger.”

Tolstaya’s first volume of short stories, “They Sat on a Golden Porch,” will be published here this spring by Alfred A. Knopf.

Mikhail Zugnetsky, a political satirist and playwright, appeared to be the only lighthearted member of an otherwise serious group.

The major change brought by glasnost , he joked, is that “I’m still afraid to scold the Soviet Union but not afraid to praise the United States.”

Before glasnost , he told the UCLA audience, “it was quite easy for a person to become a humorist in my country--all he had to do was tell the truth.”