THE MARIGOLDS have been frozen corpse-stiff by an early October snow and a solitarypigeon sits on the head of Tolstoy`s statue, fighting the wintry winds. The19thcentury chateau on Vorovskogo Street in central Moscow presents the usualgloomy facade that the city itself shows, but inside the building there ispassion. The heat therein is born from a process taking place everywhere in theold Soviet Union. The old and new orders are fighting it out, their conflictslaid bare by the failed August 1991 putsch that catapulted Boris Yeltsin intothe limelight through his stagy defence of the Russian parliament. This weather-beaten chateau, so goes thelegend, served as a model for the house of Natasha Rostov in War and Peace hencethe seated bronze Tolstoy in the cour d`honneur. In calmer, morepredictable days, the building housed a single writers`union, the only oneallowed to exist. Now it houses two. The two are separated by a heavy, paddedoak door, and about a million kilometres of ideology. To the right of that padded door,politically and physically, is the old guard: the heirs of the Stalinist SovietWriters` Union. In bygone, Soviet times, a commission of functionaries wouldeither accept or reject writers` applications to the union on the basis of thepolitical validity of their works. For anyone who wanted to be a writer,gaining admittance to the union was essential. The reasons were more thanpolitical: you could be subject to arrest and prosecution if you did not work,so for a writer, a union card equalled an exemption from the factory. Stalin`spyramid system kept writers in check through unions in every city and everyrepublic, all the way up to the summit in Moscow, on Vorovskogo Street. To the left of the padded door, thedirection I took, are those who manned the barricades in August 1991 in frontof the Russian parliament (the Bieli Dom, or White House), and who stayed evenas the tanks rolled in. They were part of the original 50,000 who defied thepower of the attempted coup, and not just among the million who celebrated inthe streets once the danger was past. With the disintegration of Soviet power,these writers seized the occasion to declare the old union null and void, andlaunch their own renewed, democratic version. What`s at stake inthe fight between these two sides is a lot more than ideology. The spoils aredistinctly material, starting with the building itself, replete with classicalstatuary, curving marble staircases, elaborate chandeliers, and the like. Notto speak of the decor, most unusual in a writers` union: a Kalashnikovmachinegun under pink Plexiglas, a fleet of Lenin paperweights, a vase withStalin`s moustache dominant. More important kinds of real estate are involvedtoo, including that most precious of resources, the printing press. There arethe dachas in the Crimea, the Caucasus, and around Moscow, where officialwriters once sojourned in search of their muse. There is the literary fund,created at the beginning of the 20th century, to come to the material aid ofwriters and their families. There is the publishing house Sovietski pisatiel(Soviet Writers), along with the thick journals and weekly bulletins. Since theupheaval of August 199 1, all this is up for grabs. The material stakes are sohigh you have to wonder whether some writers have aligned themselves with thereactionary side simply out of nostalgia for the days when to be an officiallyaccepted writer meant a permanent, miraculous holiday from financial worries. The August 1991 putsch not only made itpossible for a renegade, democratic Writers` Union to get started, it also setthe stage for the political instability and hyperinflation that make life inMoscow incredibly chaotic. On a Thursday night train to Leningrad (now againcalled St. Petersburg by the ceaselessly busy rewriters of history), thebedding cost 2 5 rubles (in late October, there were some 390 rubles to anAmerican dollar; who knows where the currencies are by now?). On the trainreturning to Moscow later in the weekend, the same chlorinated sheets cost 50rubles. Chicken feed by our standards, perhaps, but not for the otherpassengers. Hyperinflation has affected a lot morethan the cost of bedding on the night train. The price of paper, printing, andpostage has gone sky-high. Add to that an increasingly impoverished populationthat is finding it harder to support the journals, magazines, and books. ArtyomAnfinoguenov, novelist and secretary of the democratic writers` union, reelsoff the litany of journals and publishing companies that have closed theirdoors. "Progress Publishers fell apart in a matter of days. They tried tosalvage their existence by publishing detective novels and erotica, but theywere too late. The market was already saturated. They couldn`t adjust." Atfirst glance, the shift from publications officially sanctioned by the SovietWriters` Union to a scene in which independents dominate seems to be a step inthe right direction. On paper, yes, perhaps. In practice, no. For it`s a caseof freedom of expression, but no paper. Yet at first it seemed that the greatwave of glasnost literature, which electrified millions of readers in the yearsfollowing Gorbachev`s post- 1986 reforms, would be the salvation of Russianwriting. When Anatoli Rybakov`s Children of the Arbat was firstpublished, the journal in which it appeared jumped from a circulation of120,000 to some two to three million copies (in Russia, new works come outfirst in literary journals, which are often as thick as big-city telephonebooks; publication in book form comes later). The same phenomenon greetedGygouline`s Tchornya kahmni (available in French as Les pierres noires, Acres Sud/Lemeac),an account of life in Stalin`s Siberian prison camps. The reasons were obvious:for the first time, Russians were being allowed to read stories of what hadhappened in their own country, stories everyone knew of,but no one dared tell. Of course, among some members of the intelligentsia,illegal copies of these and other works had already circulated. But underGorbachev`s glasnost, for the first time the public was given access to its ownhistory, very often works that were already celebrated in the West. An elderlywoman, a cousin of mine who lived through the worst years of Stalinism,remembers, "When the books came out, all we did was read. Day and night.We had years of catching up to do." The perfect ingredients for a healthypublishing sector, right? Wrong. Quite suddenly, interest waned. The shock ofthe documents had worn off; the forbidden fruit lost its savour. Anfinoguenov,a man with a weathered face and a great crown of white hair, and AlexandrRekemchiuk, a novelist and creative-writing teacher who looks something like amelancholy street tough with his leather vest and enormous sad eyes, agree onwhat the problem was. "People were saturated by the documentary side ofworks like Rybakov`s. The shock of the new was quickly dispersed. Andconsidering how quickly prices rose, it wasn`t hard for the readership to turnaway from such works." After a little urging, both men admitthat literary quality was a consideration; the documentary aspect of muchglasnost literature was stronger than the quality of the writing. The novelistand activist Anatoli Pristavkine, a middle-aged scrapper in a short leatherjacket whose bestknown work speaks of the orphans created by war and forcedinternal exile, is less delicate than his two colleagues. "Take VassilyGrossman`s Life andFate. It`s roughly the same subject as Rybakov`s books, but the quality isvastly superior. You wouldn`t get tired of Grossman any more than you would ofTolstoy. The public backed off from the demagogic tone that Rybakov represented.They got tired of politicized literature altogether. What are people readingnow? Hard-boiled novels, soft-core porn But glasnost literature opened doors tomore than just the documents of the Soviet past. For the first time, Russianreaders could freely discover the best writers of their century, such as AndreiPlatonov, unknown to us despite being lavishly praised by Joseph Brodsky, orMikhail Bulgakov of The Master and Margarita. Platonov, who was harried out ofthe official writers` union and has remained largely untranslated, was one Ofthe first to see through the Soviet myth of progress, and considered therevolution merely an attempt by isolated, lonely individuals to escape their fate. In a class at theInstitute of World Literature (now part of Moscow University), a student askedthe professor to name the best Russian writer of the century. "That manpushing the broom in the comer," came the answer, for that was howPlatonov ended his days, as indeed his characters did, in a political andpersonal impasse. Is that story true? Let me give you aRussian answer. Of course it`s true! And if it wasn`t before, it is now. Imagine the plight of Russian readerstoday: they haven`t even had time to assimilate their own past, the classics oftheir own country, and they have to take on the entire corpus of Westernliterature Work by Kafka, Musil, Miller, Patrick Suskind, Amos Oz have allstreamed into the country, with or without proper permissions or royaltypayments. Debates on postmodernism have flared up in the universities, thoughin Russia right now, postmodernism is more or less defined as that which isdifferent from what has come before. With all this tumult, it`s no surprisethat certain writers` identities have been shaken up. Once upon a time, in asimpler era, the task of the courageous writer in Soviet society was to saywhat no one else was brave enough to say. Now that censorship has fallen away -at least temporarily - the role of writer as resister is no longer available.As Alexandr Rekemchiuk says, "Any streetcomer rag can tell as much truthas our greatest writers." With their identities shaken, some writers, suchas Anatoli Rybakov, have opted for exile. The reasons are complex, and it`sdifficult to imagine them happy abroad. That political feeling should be soquickly demobilized, especially after years of censorship, seems astounding anddisheartening. How could the public become saturated, so rapidly, with enormoushistorical truths and turn to detective novels? Part of the problem is the rush towards things Western: aRussian film such as An Independent Life, which wins awards internationally, isnowhere to be seen on its native ground, while most Moscow screens feature theerotic disporting of 9112 Weeks. Though younger writers claim to disdainpolitical subjects, writing apolitically is made impossible by the moment. BothPristavkine and Rekemchiuk teach creative writing. "In my seminars,"says Pristavkine, "one of the stories was about the sexual relationsbetween a man and a dolphin. Apolitical? Not quite, since the love affair takesplace during the August 1991 putsch. And I ran into some of my supposedlyapolitical students at the barricades around the Bieli Dom. Apolitical? So theysay. But they were there when it counted!" One of my young cousins, theage of Pristavkine`s students, pointed out, "Even when it`s apolitical,you feet that it`s apolitical. So it`s not!" Rekemchiuk believes that those young menand women who are going to make postglasnost literature are already waiting inthe wings. "Last year," he says, "we thought no one would wantto sign up for the writing program because of the great rush to capitalism andMoscow dollarmania. But, surprise, this year we had five or six applicants forevery available spot. The works they bring in are ironic without being cynical,ironic about everything, including life on the barricade around the WhiteHouse. They`re trying to find a way to talk about sex that uses neither gutterlanguage nor anatomical manuals, which hasn`t been done yet in Russian. Oftenthey have other jobs. They`re economists, they work at McDonald`s, they`redoormen at a cooperative (read: privately owned) clothing store. These are allgood literary professions." If Alexandr Rekemchiuk ends on anoptimistic note, it`s because he really has no choice. It`s that, or a shortrope from the chandelier. As I write this, the right wing is marshalling itsforces against Yeltsin, whom the population must support while simultaneouslyholding its nose. "A very interesting historical moment," a Muscovitefriend of mine says. "Too bad I can`t study it a hundred years fromnow."