Word: aksyonov
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Baryshniknov is not the first prominent defector to receive feelers from Soviet officials about returning. Last week Ballerina Natalia Makarova got a similar offer from Grigorovich. The Soviets have also approached Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, Novelist Vasily Aksyonov and Theater Director Yuri Lyubimov. Grigorovich noted that there is a new "atmosphere of openness" in the Soviet Union. Said he: "We now have a wise leader who is loved by the whole country...
...Aksyonov's first novel to appear in English since his exile is The Island of Crimea, published by Random House last
November. In the author's satiric fantasy, the Black Sea peninsula has become an island off the Soviet mainland, something like capitalist Taiwan in relation to Communist China. In broad strokes Aksyonov contrasts the glittering hedonism of the islanders to the squalid austerity that prevails on the Soviet mainland. In Aksyonov's fancy, Crimea is the hog heaven of the conspicuous consumer. Dom Perignon flows like vodka in the luxury cafés and restaurants. Ferraris and Cadillacs jam the freevays on veekends. (In the original, Aksyonov used the English words transliterated into Russian.) Glass-and-steel houses...
...Aksyonov's romp through nirvana ends on a cautionary note. Though the is land's 5 million citizens are wallowing in wealth, they still yearn for reunion with the motherland. Their petition is met with a classic Kremlin reply: full-scale invasion. The bewildered Crimeans can only watch the living-room war on TV until their broadcast facilities are crushed by Soviet tanks...
Beneath the satire, Aksyonov seems to be making a point in The Island similar to the one made by Fellow Exile Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his 1978 Harvard speech: materialism is softening up the West for the triumph of Communism. By contrast, there are no hidden homilies in Aksyonov's multilevel, 230,000-word novel, The Burn, which Random House will publish later this year. A denser, darker work than The Island, The Burn reflects the author's searing experience as the child of victims of Stalin's great purges. It also powerfully evokes another subject proscribed...