VIEWSnBIANCA AND THE COMMISSAR by Andrei NavrozovnIwas reading at the Periodicals Room of Yale’s SterlingnMemorial Library the other day. The magazine I happenednto pick up was called Soviet Literature, subtitled “AnMonthly Journal of the Writers’ Union of the U.S.S.R.npublished in English, French, German, Spanish, Hungari-nrMic&k^^unan, Polish, Czech, and Slovak.” The issue, for Marchn1985, “marked the occasion,” as its editors put it, “of then8th of March, the International Women’s Day,” andncontained poems inspired by that famous holiday. I sharenwith you several lines from the first poem:nAndrei Navrozov, who emigrated from Russia in 1972, isneditor of The Yale Literary Magazine and a contributingneditor o/” Harper’s.nt8/CHRONICLES OF CULTUREnnnYouth—a concept which I believenActual years do not really explain.nIf you seek no idle repose and restnThen your youth you still surely retain.nIf you still believe that you cannClimb up any mountain crestnYou are surely twenty years lessnThan your document may profess.nIt goes on like that for a bit.nNext to Soviet Literature, alphabetically, lay the currentnissue of the quarterly Southern Review, published bynLouisiana State University (mercifully, I should say, in onlynone language, English, and with a net press run of onlyn2,968 copies). It, too, contained poetry by and aboutnwomen. I’ll share several lines from the first poem:nHere on the prison lawns, a veilnof sunlight weights the grass.nI walk here, while my brothernis visiting the warden who is his friend.nI am never to understand why my brothernwants to bring his troupe of actors.nThe mesmerist who leads them intonthe lives of fictions, and leaves them there.nThis goes on for six pages.nThe experience of trying to decide which of the twon”randomly” chosen poems, the Soviet or the American, isnactually more terrible, and why, has animated what I havento say on the subject of moral—or cultural—equivalence,nI’ll begin with a passage from a biography of BenjaminnWest, the 18th-century American painter:n”But what do you intend to be, Benjamin?” Westnanswered that he had not thought at all on thensubject, but that he should like to be a painter. “Anpainter!” exclaimed the boy, “what sort of a trade isna painter? I never heard of such a thing.” “Anpainter,” said West, “is a companion for kings andnemperors.” “Surely you are mad,” replied the boy,n”for there are no such people in America.”nIt may seem to some of us, particularly in moments ofndespair, that if American culture had a tomb, the abovenpassage from John Gait’s Life and Studies of Benjamin Westnwould doubtless make a suitable epitaph. We despair, ofncourse, not because little Benjamin grew up to be an