A bizarre encounter: о влиянии прототипа Порции Браун на роман Вс. Кочетова "Чего же ты хочешь?"

Новое литературное обозрение. 2018. Т. 152. № 4. С. 146–158.

Kukulin I.

Vsevolod Kochetov’s (1912–1973) novel What Do You Want Then? (1969) was perceived in the USSR and the West as a manifesto for far-right, neo-Stalinist forces. This opus was an extended lampoon of the “liberals of the sixties” — those poets and authors who, while maintaining quite conformist public behavior, strove to make the Soviet regime and Soviet literature more democratic and (in their view) contemporary. In this novel, Kochetov essentially accused the “liberals of the sixties” of being involuntary agents of the West. This article shows that Kochetov gathered information about the private lives of the “liberals of the sixties” from an unexpected source: the American reporter Patricia Blake’s articles in Encounter magazine. While working on this article, Blake met with many “liberals of the sixties” and separately with Kochetov. The poet Andrei Voznesensky has previously shown that Patricia Blake was the prototype for Portia Brown, the main negative heroine of Kochetov’s novel. This article also proposes to refine notions about the place occupied by the “roman à clef” in Soviet literature.

Keywords: "оттепель", «холодная война», The Cold War, Vsevolod Kochetov, roman a clef, the “Thaw”, Marlen Khutsiev, Patricia Blake, the journal "Encounter", the film "Ilyich's Gate", Всеволод Кочетов, roman a clef, Марлен Хуциев, фильм "Застава Ильича", Патриция Блейк, журнал “Encounter”

Publication based on the results of: War, Power and Society in the USSR, 1930-50s: Transformations of the Soviet System (2019)