Word: aksyonov
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Within the church, government control is pervasive. The appointment of every cleric, from Patriarch Pimen on down, must be cleared by the Council for Religious Affairs, a government agency that supervises all religious matters. Under these circumstances, contends Father Michael Meyerson-Aksyonov, a convert to Orthodoxy who tried unsuccessfully to enter a Soviet seminary and is an émigré now living in the U.S., "the priest is not the spiritual or moral leader of the community. He is a performer of rites and nothing more...
...What is amazing," notes Father Meyerson-Aksyonov, "is not that the church leadership is corrupt but that it is not so corrupt." In a possible sign of new independence, the Soviet delegates to the W.C.C. Executive Committee did not register opposition to a resolution expressing "serious concern" over the Soviet "military action" in Afghanistan, and other world conflicts...
...short story writers to emerge since Stalin's death, Vasili Aksyonov, 47, continues to display the greatest virtuosity. Although he has written enormously popular stories in a realist vein, Aksyonov has gone on to explore a variety of modes and permutations of language, entering the 1980s as the Soviet Union's only truly modern prose writer. His evolution is instructive. Aksyonov's first fiction dealt with a previously unheard-of theme: the real life of Soviet teenagers...
...novella Starry Ticket, for example, a group of Muscovite dropouts run away to the Baltic beaches to escape the crushing conservatism of their elders. Old guard critics were scandalized, as much by the "uncivic" behavior of Aksyonov's heroes and heroines as by their use of colloquial speech, mixed with underworld and concentration-camp slang, invented words and such Americanisms as gudbai, Brodvei and bugi-vugi. Funny, fresh and richly expressive, Aksyonov's idiom has been his contribution to the larger effort of modern Russian poets to rescue the Russian language from deadening officialese...
...Much of Aksyonov's fiction has a dark and enigmatic cast that is the shadow of the Gulag. Like many other contemporary Soviet writers, he is the child of Stalin's victims: Aksyonov was brought up in one of the infamous orphanages called Homes for the Children of Enemies of the People. Few writers can reproduce the lingering stench of brutality and fear better than he. In his story Victory, a gem of Russian short fiction, a chance game of chess on a train between a brutish but canny player and an intellectual becomes a moral life...