In March 1979, Moscow Literator, the newspaper of the Moscow Writers’ Organization, contained a short news item: the Secretariat of the RSFSR Writers’ Union, it said, had ‘suspended’ their previous decision to admit Victor Yerofeyev and Yevgeny Popov to the USSR Writers’ Union owing to “behaviour unworthy of the calling of a Soviet writer”. (No details were given of this behaviour, and the Metropol almanac was not mentioned, CCE 52.14.)
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LETTERS
Yerofeyev and Popov received no official notification of this ‘suspension’, and therefore wrote to the Secretary of the USSR Writers’ Union, stating that they considered it illegal and they were as before members of the Union, since they had not violated its Constitution.
The other compilers of the almanac — Vasily Aksyonov, Andrei Bitov and Fazil Iskander, and its contributors Semyon Lipkin and Inna Lisnyanskaya — stated in an Open Letter to the Union Secretariat that they would leave the Union if the decision to not admit Yerofeyev and Popov was not reversed and they were denied union cards. At the same time Bella Akhmadulina wrote a similar letter to the Union.
Shortly afterwards they all received letters of roughly the same content from the Union Secretariat: it was suggested that they should concentrate on their literary activities and “cease their politicking”.
At a number of ‘chats’ in the Union Secretariat Yerofeyev and Popov were told the conditions of their readmittance to the Union: “to dissociate themselves from the Almanac, which was pursuing purely political aims which had no connection with literature”. (The role of persuaders was taken by Yu. Verchenko and Sergei Mikhalkov.) Yerofeyev and Popov insisted that Metropol was a purely literary venture, and that its publication could not be considered a violation of the Constitution of the Writers’ Union.
When the Union Secretaries claimed that “they did not want confrontation,” Yerofeyev and Popov replied that in no way could confrontation be considered their aim either.
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“CIEL”
In May it became known that all five compilers of Metropol had been admitted to the European CIEL organization (“Comita des Intellectuels pour Europe des Libertas”).
This provided the Secretaries with reason to remark, during a routine ‘chat’, that the compilers had contradicted their allegedly purely literary aims, since CIEL was not a literary but, on the contrary, a political organization; it was moreover, of anti-Soviet tendency. (The Committee includes several recent emigres, e.g. Vladimir Maximov and Leonid Plyushch.) The compilers of Metropol informed CIEL that as their interests were literary, and not political, they found it necessary to decline the invitation to join the organization.
The question of the readmittance of Yerofeyev and Popov to the Writers’ Union, so the Union administration has promised, is due to be decided on 20 December. Meanwhile the ‘repressive sanctions’ against the Almanac’s contributors have somewhat diminished.
In particular, the Sovietsky Pisatel [Soviet Writer] publishing house has published a collection of short stories by Fazil Iskander (in a severely limited edition); also, a number of public appearances have been authorized, although not as many as had previously been arranged. Popov has been promised the previously delayed publication of his short stories through a Krasnoyarsk publishing house; Vasily Aksyonov has been promised a long (two-year) foreign tour. In an interview with the New York Times Aksyonov stated that if the harassment he was suffering as a result of the publication of Metropol did not cease, he would be forced to remain outside the USSR.
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IN THE WEST
The US publishers Ardis, which previously published a number of facsimile copies of Metropol, have now published the almanac in a typeset edition. The French publishers Gallimard have prepared a French translation of the almanac.
Cover of Ardis edition, 1979
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In August five American writers, Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, William Styron, John Updike and Kurt Vonnegut sent a telegram to the Moscow Writers’ Organization in protest at the banning of the almanac and at the official action taken against its compilers.
On 22 August 1979, Felix Kuznetsov, First Secretary of the Moscow Section of the RSFSR Writers’ Union, sent them a reply, On 19 September this reply, with an editorial foreword and an afterword by its author, appeared in the Literary Gazette [Literaturnaya Gazeta] under the tide “What’s all the fuss about?”
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NOTES
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