Word: volpin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Russia each month comes a trickle of contraband manuscripts. Usually handwritten in loose-leaf notebooks by pseudonymous authors, the books are smuggled to Western publishers via an intellectual underground. Last week two of these recently published volumes. Abram Tertz's On Socialist Realism and Aleksandr Sergeyevich Yesenin-Volpin's The Leaf of Spring, gave Western readers a look at Russian intellectuals' bitter disenchantment...
Whores & Hangmen. Already noted for a brilliant satirical novel on Communism. The Trial Begins (TIME, Oct. 3, 1960). the author who hides behind the pseudonym Abram Tertz has been variously reported to be a professor in a Russian university, a prominent Russian novelist, or Poet Yesenin-Volpin himself. In his new work (Pantheon; $2.95). he lashes out against the state-dictated code of "socialist realism," which reduces authors to mere copywriters of Communist propaganda, beholden to "Purpose with a capital P." Writes Tertz: "A poet not only writes poems, but helps, in his own way, to build Communism...
Bleak Notations. The hypocrisy of the code of socialist realism is equally repellent to Yesenin-Volpin. His Russia is one of pain ("The only beauty that I know"), drugs, suffering, alcoholism, prison; many of the poems in The Leaf of Spring (Praeger; $3) bear such bleak notations as Lubyanka, Karaganda and Prison of Chernovtsy-the jails, mental institutions and concentration camps where Yesenin-Volpin has spent most of his adult life...
...like the prose-in conventional forms. New poets like X. J. Kennedy, Daniel J. Langton, James Wright, established poets like Donald Davie, Howard Nemerov, Louis Simpson are well represented by well-wrought verse. One newsworthy item (in Evergreen Review): a strong anti-oppression poem by jailed Soviet Poet Yesenin-Volpin, natural son of the Yesenin who was one of Isadora Duncan's lovers...