ABSTRACT
The poet Andrei Voznesensky has been given prizes and distinctions, enjoys special privileges, and may well be read in the Taiga by wandering geologists. Yet there is a deep difference between politicians in literature, and litterateurs in politics. In the struggle over the recent anthology, Metropol, prose and poetry pieces collected by a number of leading Soviet writers on non-political but still critical themes in everyday Russian life, the power-political scene takes on unusual colors. The prose is the man, and the man is not a sovereign force above and beyond the State bureaucracy but is only a part of that vast gray apparatus, and reflects its style, ambitions, and utter grayness. The members of the Lenin Jury, which awarded the prize, needed no long-sessions to discuss and evaluate. They knew only too well the vanities of the new ruling class and its elite figures, their literary longings, their penchant for prizes, their dreams of longevity and ubiquity.
