BOOK REVIEWS : The Universality of Art and Experience

The Human Experience: Contemporary American and Soviet Fiction and Poetry, edited by the Soviet/American Joint Editorial Board of the Quaker U.S./U.S.S.R. Committee (Alfred A. Knopf: $19.95; 384 pages)

“Art is a means of moving the greatest number of people by offering them a privileged picture of common sufferings and joys. Art therefore obliges the artist not to isolate himself.” Albert Camus’ sentiment, on accepting the 1957 Nobel Prize for literature, eloquently describes the grand design of “The Human Experience,” an anthology of contemporary American and Soviet fiction and poetry, a collaboration against isolation.

Here is an inspired and original venture, a departure from the climate of “best-sellerism” that is stifling our nation’s writing.

When Wendell Berry, in “To a Siberian Woodsman,” exults in his Kentucky roots: “I am the outbreathing of the ground. / My words are its words as the wren’s song is its song,” he echoes Siberia’s native son, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whose poem “On Borders” invokes spiritual unity: “ . . . invisible threads joining each self / with millions of selves.” Yevtushenko denounces the mental borders created by “our prehistoric ancestor” whose bloodied “stone spearhead . . . marked out the first-ever border on the face of the earth.”

Similarly, in Adrienne Rich’s poem, “For the Record,” we are perpetrators and victims of our own devices of estrangement, “. . . miles of barbed wire / . . . designed to keep the unwanted / . . . out of sight . . .” The ward patients in Bella Akhmadulina’s “The Hospital Christmas Tree” stuff their brains “with the bones of a system picked clean.”

Imagine, then, the power of metaphor contrasted with the roguish vernaculars hyped by what William Styron’s introduction calls “the synthetic grammar of technocracy.” “Trust requires openness,” continues Soviet novelist Daniil Granin. Even the introductions are shared.

Without promoting U.S.-Soviet cultures as parcels of a global village, this extraordinary book exudes a “nervous excitement” (to borrow Georgy Semyonov’s phrase in “A Play of Fancy”), “the pairing of two incompatibles” made compatible by the commonality of human existence.

Humor galvanizes opposites. In “Whoever Was Using This Bed,” Raymond Carver juxtaposes a couple’s laugh-inspiring hypochondria with the pathos of a quadriplegic, denied the right to die with dignity by refusing a life-sustaining device. “Now she’s mad and looking to sue everybody. . . .”

Paradox characterizes Henry Taylor’s “Master of None.” A father, weighing “the consequences of ignorant choices,” waits for a welder half the day, wondering:

. . . how hard welding was,

and the shop foreman said,

“That dumb son of a bitch out there learned to do it.”

Yevgeny Vinokurov’s poem, “I Know Life Well,” pits the wise, experienced father, knocked “senseless / puzzling it out,” against a rebellious son, unwilling to puzzle.

“ To him what I did is water over the dam.

Gritting his teeth,

he’s going to dig it all up

again.”

In matters of human nature, everything appears simple and complex all at once. In John Updike’s story, “Still of Some Use,” a divorced father, discarding old games from his attic, finds that through cowardice and inertia he himself has been discarded.

When the child in Valentin Rasputin’s “French Lessons” upholds the truth that a classmate cheated during gambling, we all share the pain of alienation that his subsequent humiliation brings.

Similarly, alienation underscores Joyce Carol Oates’ father-daughter clash over a black prisoner’s execution in “Capital Punishment.” Oates has a way of one-lining character and plot into the reader’s consciousness. Of the father, “people naturally make way for him, the way smaller dogs defer to larger.”

Whether a “happy train” in Bulat Okudzhava’s “Girl of My Dreams” unites lost war families, or a wife in Alice Walker’s “Abortion” disunites a family after enduring an abortion and the racist murder of a girl “aborted on the eve of becoming herself,” there exists, in both nature and human nature, the elemental force of instinctive freedom. Perhaps none so morally moves us as Anatoly Kin’s “Road Stop in August,” a tale about a soldier being court-martialed for refusing to kill a convicted murderer escaping from a guardhouse.

Other themes exploring what Henry James called “the terror of the usual” include loneliness, crime, aging, alcoholism, corruption and nuclear threat. And their creators include Robert Penn Warren, Donald Barthelme, Sharon Olds, Garrison Keillor, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Rozhdestvensky, Tatyana Tolstaya, Yury Kuznetsov, Anatoly Shavkuta and Vladimir Sokolov, among others equally compelling.

Ragan’s poetry and drama have been translated and produced in the Soviet Union. Author of “In the Talking Hours,” he directs USC’s Professional Writing Program.