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BOX-FOLDER-REPORT: 58-1-42
TITLE:             Pasternak and the Dilemma of Literary Policy
BY:                r.r.g.
DATE:              1960-5-31
COUNTRY:           Soviet Union
ORIGINAL SUBJECT:  USSR

--- Begin ---

Radio Free Europe/Munich
Evaluation and Analysis Department
Background information USSR
31 May 1960

PASTERNAK AND THE DILEMMA OF LITERARY POLICY

I. INTRODUCTION

II. Art vs. Ideology - The Dilemma of Soviet
Literary Policy	p..1

III. Reports and Commentaries - The Third USSR
Writers' Congress
(Soviet Studies, Volume XI, No. 3, January
1960)	p. 12

IV. Soviet Literature Toes the Line
(Bulletin of the Institute of the USSR,
November 1959
by A. Gaev)	p. 27

V. The Soviet Writers Congress - Along the
Middle Road
(Soviet Survey, No. 29, July-September 1959
by Ronald Hingley)	p. 34

VI. The Third Soviet Writers Congress: An
Appraisal
(New York, 31 May 1959
by Maurice Friedberg)	p. 41

VII. Party and Writers: 1956-1958 (Extracts)
(Soviet Studies,, April 1959
by Alfred Dressier)	p. 52

VIII. Organizational Changes in the Executive Organs
of the Soviet Writers0 Union (1954-1959)
(DIB, Radio Liberation, 22 May 1959)	p. 61

IX. Literature and the Peasant
(Problems of Communism, November-December 1959
by Tom Scriven)	p. 64

X. Soviet Youth in Life and Literature
(Problems of Communism, July-August 1959
by Vera Alexandrova)	p. 77

XI. Reflections on Soviet Novels
(World Politics, January I960
by Alexander Gerschenkron)	p. 88

XII. The Voltaire of October
(The New Leader, March 14, 1960
by Giovanni Radicati) p. 108

XIII. The Party Secretary in the Post-War Soviet
Novel
(Soviet Survey, January-March, l958
by Philip Bruce Cook)	p. 113

INTRODUCTION

The death of Pasternak, at a time when his best-known
work remains unpublished in his own country, recalls the
dilemma in which Khrushchev finds himself in the field of
literature. The fact that Pasternak died at his home,
instead of in a labor camp as might have been the case only
ten years ago, cannot obscure the continuing lack of
artistic freedom symbolized by the fate of "Dr. Zhivago."

The present Khrushchev policy is to attempt to persuade,
rather than force, his writers to maintain the framework of
socialist realism, even if this means a more tolerant
attitude on the part of literary critics than the neo-Zhdanovites
in the USSR think advisable. Yet in the case of "Dr Zhivago,"
perhaps because its merits were first recognized abroad,
Khrushchev's attitude has been as obstinate in continuing to
prevent publication as the worst of the dogmatists could have
hoped.

When Pasternak was expelled from the Union of Soviet
Writers in October 1958, the resolution claimed that his
work was "incompatible with the name of a Soviet writer,
directed against the traditions of Russian literature, against
the people, against peace and socialism." But in fact there
are not more than half a dozen pages in the 700 of the book
to which the literary censors could take exception, and
consequently it seems certain that the real reason for the
blinkered official attitude is the apolitical nature of the
work as a whole.

The realistic treatment by Pasternak of the early years
of the revolution, for instance, forms a considerable
contrast with the official propaganda on the period, which
suggests only heroism and self-sacrifice. It must have been of
some such discrepancy that Khrushchev was thinking when at
the Central Committee plenary session last June he exclaimed:

"We have individuals among the writers who ask what
sort of guidance is the Party guidance of literature?
We reply, you there, don't you recognize the Party's
guidance? But what is it? It is the will of millions,
the will of millions of minds, the collective wisdom of
millions. But one writer sits in his dacha somewhere,
once in a while produces some puny work, and hopes that
it will be recognized as an expression of the spirit of
the people of our time, of the entire people. Isn't
this a real cult of one's own personality which, as you
see, is unwilling to put up with the guidance of a
Party which expresses the will of millions...Such a
fellow wants to put himself above the Party, above the
people."

In other words, Khrushchev saw Pasternak as an
individualist who refused to accept the First Secretary's
instructions on what to write ("contemporaneity") and how to write

[Page ii]

-ii-

it ("socialist realism"). The exceedingly narrow limits of
the "thaw," after its initial warmth had ebbed away, have
seldom been more clearly revealed. Moreover Khrushchev's
words put an end to the somewhat naive speculation which had
been circulating in the West, crediting Khrushchev with a
liberal desire to rehabilitate the writer, or to have "Dr.
Zhivago" published in a limited edition.

Khrushchev and the Party remain more interested in
ideological propaganda in a literary wrapping than in
literature which would pass any objective critical test.
Therefore the tension between them and the liberal intellectuals
within the USSR will inevitably continue. These writers,
like Pasternak in the recent past, together with Ehrenburg[1],
Yevtushenko and the others today who attempt to make the
Soviet literary climate less stifling and oppressive, are
not likely to affect the Party's policies in the near future.
But, despite this tragic thinning of their ranks, they are
maintaining the long drawn-out fight for greater artistic
freedom.

A fortnight before Pasternak died, the editor of Oktyabr,
Fyedor Panferov, published his personal reply to the
neo-Zhdanovites. in Soviet literature. Writing in Literary
Gazette[2], he told of the pressures to which he is subjected by
the literary bureaucrats of the old school:

"We editors of Oktyabr are sometimes asked by those who
are quick to criticize, and even by some naive leaders
of the Union of Writers:

�What are you doing? You print novels by Bubennov,
Sholokhov, Konovalov, but beside them you also
print Paustovsky, Kazakov and Yevtushenko. That is
not consolidation, but lack of principle,
all-embracing Christian forgiveness (vsyeproshcheniye). What
is your program?'"

And Panferov's reply is firm as well as comprehensive.
"On the question of consolidation, I answer: our
program is to help all kinds of writers to work together
with the party and the people; do not turn the writers
into a regiment of soldiers all dressed in uniform, but
call on them to work for the life of today and tomorrow,
and let everyone use his own voice, provided only that
it is to the advantage of the Soviet people and all
honest people throughout the world -- here lies the
true meaning of real consolidation."

-----------------------------

1 For Ehrenburg's personal attitude to the Pasternak case,
see p. 108 below.

2 14 May 1960.

[page iii]

-iii-

Panferov, like Ehrenburg, is therefore probably one of
the many intellectuals who believe that "Dr. Zhivago" should
have been published in the USSR, It is to the Party's
eternal discredit that seven years after Stalin's death, the
official attitude to Pasternak should still be essentially the
bigotry shown by Semichastny[3] rather than even the carefully
muted liberalism of Panferov.

r.r.g.

-----------------------------

3 The ex-Komsomol official who once called Pasternak a pig.
N.B. For the documents of the Pasternak case, see Background
Information, 25 Nov. 1958, "Novy Mir 1956 and 1958, The Cases
of Polnyak and Pasternak."

[page 1]

ART vs.IDEOLOGY

THE DILEMMA OF SOVIET LITERARY POLICY

In order to gain the sympathies and support of Soviet
writers the Soviet regime has continued its policy of
moderation and restraint in the affairs of literature,
which has been particularly noticeable since the Third
Writers' Congress last May. It is clear from recent
events that literary criticism is expected to be carried
out in a "comradely fashion" and is intended to be a
responsible tool for instruction rather than a punishment
for past errors. The Party demands both esthetic value
and ideological conformity of Soviet writers; consequently
those who defend mediocre works solely for ideological
considerations have been criticized in the name of the
Party and of Khrushchev personally.

The works of several formerly criticized poets have
appeared, and a new novel by Dudintsev may be published
next year. Khrushchev has publicly praised the writer
Mikhail Sholokhov and has evidently resolved a dispute
between the writer and Party critics over the
publication of his novel. But despite these moderating trends,
there has been no recent evidence that the Party has
opened up a new era of freedom for Soviet literature.
The Party still maintains the sole right to criticize
socialist society.

Differences of opinion in ranks of Soviet writers
continue to be evident, as do differences between the two
main literary newspapers. Ilya Ehrenburg remains in the
forefront of those who espouse the freedom of creativity,
but his ideas are challenged in the name of "socialist
realism." Several collections of poems published in the
past few months suggest that, at least in the genre of
poetry, Party esthetic restrictions may have been eased.

Events in the past few months indicate that the
Soviet regime is continuing its moderate policy in the sphere
of literature. The Soviet leaders have always faced the
dual problem of encouraging writers and other artists to
produce good cultural works while at the same time
insuring the ideological content of these works. At the
present time, it seems clear that the regime is
soft-pedalling ideological conformity in favor of winning the
creative support of Soviet men of letters.

Removing the Sting of Criticism

An important aspect of this policy of moderation has
been the attempt to remove the sting from literary
criticism, to make it a tool of instruction instead of a weapon
of retribution for past errors. At the Third Writers'
Congress in May of this year, Khrushchev made it clear
that literary criticism was necessary for the further
development of good literature but counseled that it be
carried out in a "comradely" fashion. Since Khrushchev's

[page 2]

speech steps have been taken to prevent literary
criticism from being used in a manner which might antagonize
and discourage Soviet writers in their support of the
regime.

The editor of Literaturnaya Gazeta, S. S. Smirnov,
in the August 8 issue of that literary newspaper discussed
this new attitude toward literary criticism. He first
attacked those unsavory aspects of literary criticism. which
he felt were the result of the "cult of personality" --
the standardization of literary appraisals and the
transformation of the critics' opinions into sentences from
which there was no "court of appeal." He declared that
the situation is vastly different now. When writers
today are nervous about criticism directed at their works
or when editors consider criticism as a "signal to deal
violently with a book," these, Smirnov indicated, are only
"vestiges of the past literary life." He was obviously
arguing for a new concilitary attitude on the part of
writers, editors, and critics.

In the same article Smirnov appealed for less direct
Party interference in the affairs of literature. While he
did not dispute the principle of Party guidance in
literature, he claimed that it consisted "not in having Party
organs direct the work of writers, in prompting them as
to what and how to write, but in the fact that we Soviet
writers in all our work are consciously guided by the
ideas of communism." Consequently, he said, the Party
must carry out "constant ideological-educational work"
among writers as the basis of its guidance.

It is significant that this appeal for moderation
in literary criticism and for less Party interference was
voiced by Smirnov in his capacity as Literaturnaya
Gazeta's editor. During the early months of this year the
entire editorial board of this newspaper was replaced,
Smirnov taking the chief position from V. Kochetov,
arch-defender of conformist literature. At the Third Writers'
Congress Smirnov promised that his paper, which had in the
past treated writers with undue harshness, would mend its
ways and practice toleration.

These efforts to moderate literary criticism have
resulted in at least one rebuttal of a long-standing
attack on a literary work. The September 5 Literaturnaya
Gazeta printed an account of an interview with Valentin
Ovechkin, the author of "Against the Wind," a play which
received harsh treatment from the critics after its
publication in the March 1958 Novyi Mir. The interviewer
remarked that though this play had its defects as well as
its merits, some of it had been incorrectly evaluated by
the critics when it first appeared. He singled out a
Literaturnaya Gazeta article by Dorofeev for its "unjustly
harsh criticism." The latter critique, which appeared on
May 7, 1958, had Attacked Ovechkin, among other things,

[page 3]

for basing his play on "every sort of disorder in our
Soviet communisty life." Thus this severe denunciation
of Ovechkin, which stood unchallenged for a year and a
half, has now been met with criticism. It is clear that
under the present Party policy literary critics will be
as accountable for their words as the creative writers
are for theirs.

During the past year and a half Alexander
Tvardovsky, editor in chief of Novyi Mir, has written two
humorous poems ridiculing certain aspects of Soviet
literary controls and criticism. In a verse entitled "To My
Critics," which appeared in the July 1958 Novyi Mir,
Tvardovsky made fun of critics who instruct writers so
that they "can sing without hearing and seeing," and
then years later ask them. "Where have you been all this
time?" At the time of its publication this poem aroused
objections because of its "scornful and unjust attitude"
toward literary critics. In the March 1959 edition of
Novyi Mir Tvardovsky satirized editors who read works
from right to left in search of hidden meanings. Both
these poems received praise in an August edition of
Savetskaya Rossiya. It is perhaps an indication of the
present atmosphere that these two jibes at literary
criticism and controls, one of which evoked a negative
response in the past, now have been openly praised in the
press.

Stress on Quality and Ideology

When Khrushchev spoke out at the Third Writers'
Congress against those literary works that "cause your
eyelids to droop," he made it clear that the Party expected
literature with both a high artistic quality and a firm
ideological basis. Khrushchev, like many in the Soviet
literary world, does not acknowledge any conflict between
artistic perfection and ideological conformity. However,
in the past two months several writers have alluded to
such a conflict and have expressed different views as to
its resolution. The dominant Party policy at the present
time, nonetheless, seems to be to promote high-quality
literature without diminishing ideological demands.

In an August 16 Literatura i Zhizn interview article,
Ilya Ehrenburg once again identified himself as one of
those who feel that ideological conformity does interfere
with the achievement of artistic quality. He claimed that
the destruction of literature lay not in "the passion of
the writers" but rather in a neglect of the "truth of
life," He suggested that many contemporary works are weak
because their authors do not know what to write even if
they know how to write.

Ehrenburg proceeded to attack some of the most
common ingredients of "socialist realistic" literature. He

[page 4]

counseled creative writers to leave the description of
productive processes to engineers and technicians, not
to feel impelled to describe great events or important
eras, and not to attempt to instruct the reader. He
said the only area in which the writer was especially
competent was in the "secrets of the human heart," and
this was the only proper domain of literature.

Ehrenburg aroused comment from the proponents of
orthodoxy in literature. An article in the August 29
Literatura i Zhizn declared that Ehrenburg's views part
company with the trend of Soviet literature and "do not
correspond to the esthetic principles of socialist
realism." It seems clear that Ehrenburg's remarks do,
indeed, conflict with the goals which the Party has set
for Soviet literature. But there is evidence that the
Party agrees with Ehrenburg in a least one regard, the
elimination of descriptions of productive processes from
Soviet literature. In October Literaturnaya Gazeta
printed an open litter, supposedly reflecting the
opinions of 19,000 collective farmers, asking Soviet writers
to write more about man's "inner world" and less about
the "square method of raising potatoes" and other
productive processes. The letter declared that the farmers
said in the letter that they wanted to find human
beings in the literature they read. The letter implied
that while the description of productive processes may
have been necessary at one time, now the new generation
has different needs which must be reflected in
literature. Since Soviet literature, according to communist
ideology, is supposed to reflect the desires of the
people, this alleged expression of mass opinion is
tantamount to a directive to Soviet writers to dispense with
descriptions of productive processes in belles-lettres.

If writers like Ehrenburg are ready to support
artistic quality when ideological restrictions interfere,
there are those who openly support ideological
considerations at the expense of esthetic value. V. Druzin and
B. Dyakov in the September 6 edition of Literatura i
Zhizn argued that because the "mastery of writers"
varies, it is wrong for some publishing houses to reject
manuscripts "which in the opinion of the editors are not
outstanding." What is important, they said, is "that the
author should occupy correct ideological-political
positions in his work, clearly reflecting in his works the
great struggle of our people for communism." If this is
not so, the works harm "the cause of the nation's
political education and become shoddy literary goods."

This emphasis on ideological correctness in
literature to the detriment of artistic quality has in turn met
with criticism. Alexander Tvardovsky noted that
Khrushchev's speeches and the resolutions of the last two CPSU

[page 5]

congresses supported the "ideological-artistic"
development of literature. He stated that while there was no
point in calling Druzin and Dyakov "conscious opponents
of the Party's resolutions on the questions of literature,"
it was necessary to "elucideate the absurdity and
harmfulness of their brazen preaching of mediocrity and
dullness in art."

Literatura i Zhizn on September 18 countered with
two letters taking issue with Tvardovsky's stand on this
subject, one by Druzin and Dyakov and the other by a V.
Andreyev. Literaturnaya Gazeta in turn answered with an
editorial on September 22 supporting Tvardovsky's plea
for good artistic literature. The editorial criticizes
Andreyev's remark, "I think Comrade Tvardovsky is wrong,"
by printing a statement of Khrushchev's at the Third
Writers' Congress: "I think that Alexander Tvardovsky is
right when he announced in his speech at the Congress that
quality is of primary importance in literary work."

It is certainly unique on the Soviet literary scene
for men such as Tvardovsky., who in the past have been
known for their unorthodox views, to invoke the Party and
Khrushchev personally in support of their stand on
literature. However, present Party policy does emphasize both
artistic quality and ideological conformity, thus being
somewhere between the views of Ehrenburg and those of
Druzin and Dyakov. It is possible, therefore, for those who
desire higher quality literature to make use of the name
of the Party to condemn those who emphasize ideological
conformity above all else.

Division in the Literary World

This recent berbal clash over the subject of esthetic
quality versus ideological content points up once again
the basic division in the ranks of Soviet writers. At the
same time, it illustrates what appear to be basic
differences between the editorial policies of the two most
important literary newspapers, Literatura i Zhizn and
Literaturnaya Gazeta. As was pointed out above,
Literaturnaya Gazeta has been in the forefront of those urging a
policy of moderate freedom for Soviet literature. On the
other hand, Literatura i Zhizn has been the main platform
for those who wish to hold firmly the ideological line in
literature. Interestingly enough, it has been the former
members of the Literaturnaya Gazeta editorial board who
have been using Literatura i Zhizn as means to publicize
their views. V. Kochetov, the former chief editor, used
Literatura i Zhizn to attack a speech by Konstantin
Paustovsky given at the Third Writers5 Congress and all but
accused him of expressing "revisionist" ideas.
Paustovsky had stated that "perhaps we shout so much and so
ludly about truth in literature precisely because we lack
it." Another example is V. Druzin, who had been Kochetov's

[page 6]

deputy on the Literaturnaya Gazeta editorial board. His
recent articles in partnership with B. Dyakov illustrate
his use of Literatura i Zhizn to support ideological
conformity in literature at the expense of esthetic
considerations.

Literatura i Zhizn is the organ of the RSFSR Writers'
Union, which was created in 1957 to counterbalance the
outbreak of dissidence in the USSR Writers' Union and in
the Moscow writers' group. It now appears that the
newspaper is fulfilling the function assigned to it two years
ago -- that of providing an ideologically conservative
brake on the more progressive members in the Soviet
literary world. Under the present Party policy to encourage
the production of good literature, however, the editorial
board of Literatura i Zhizn and those who support its
views and practices may be dragging their feet more than
the Party would hope.

Writers Reappear in Print

Another aspect of the Party's current literary policy
has been illustrated by the reappearance in print of
several writers formerly in disrepute with the Party cities.
It has been clear in the past two years that criticism of
a writer's works does not necessarily ban the publication
of his future works. However, during this past summer
there has been such a noticeable reappearance of writers
formerly attacked by the Party that it clearly reflects
some basic policy changes. Presumably there have been
some directives from above concerning these publications.
At any rate, whatever has made the editors of the
literary press feel free at last to publish these writers'
works, their reappearance in print will certainly not go
unnoticed in Soviet literary circles and may help thaw
the "cold war" maintained by some writers against Party
cultural policies.

One of those who again has been found on the pages
of literary press is Margarita Aliger. This poetess had
been a member of the editorial board of the "infamous"
1956 almanac Literaturnaya Moskva II, which drew heavy
Party criticism for its inclusion of a number of
unorthodox works. It has been reported that after persistent and
harsh pressure, even from Khrushchev personally, Aliger
was forced privately to recant her sins. As far as is
known, Aliger's works have not appeared in print since
that time. In recent months, however, poems written by
her have been printed in at least three publications: in
the July 31 Izvestiya, the July issue of Oktyabr, and the
September edition of Novyi Mir.

One of Aliger's poems printed in Oktyabr expresses
not only her restiveness with the restrictions imposed on

[page 7]

Soviet literature but also her impatience with those
particular writers, "the grumblers," who use these
restrictions as an excuse for not creating. In this poem,
entitled "Write," Aliger implores other writers to write
courageously according to their own feelings and not to
worry about meeting publication requirements or about
being personally accepted. If you are your own
"honorable" law and your own "strict judge" and you commit your
"life to paper," Aliger said, you will sooner or later
hear "many good words" of approval. That Aliger is now
telling her fellow writers to create in spite of the
controls is particularly interesting because in the past few
years she herself has been considered by some observers
as one of those who maintained a "conspiracy of silence"
against the Party's cultural controls. Aliger's verse
in Izvestiya expressed a similar line exhorting writers
not to waste their time railing against hack works
written for the moment's purposes, but to save their energy
for creative work. Both these poems seem to carry the
optimistic message that, though there are restrictions
in the cultural world, there is still good reason for
artists to continue to create.

Of even more importance has been the appearance in
print of two other formerly criticized poets, Alexander
Yashin in the August Neva and Evgeny Eutushenko in the
September Oktyabr. The most unusual aspect of these
collections is the fact that some of the verses are far from
what could be called "socialist realism" intended for the
masses. The poetry is marked by its obscurity and vague
metaphors and is obviously intended for a rather limited
sophisticated audience. It is clearly not the type of
poetry that would have been allowed in literary magazines
a year ago.

As a poet, Yashin received the Stalin prize in 1950,
but later in 1956, his short story, "Levers," was harshly
criticized after its appearance in the Literaturnaya
Moskva II. One dominant theme seems to show through the
obscurity of his words, his present inability to deceive
the people any longer in his works. In one poem,
entitled "Dreams."[1] he affirms his loyalty but suggests that

-----------------------------

1 Excerpts from "Dreams":

I was, as it were, born anew.
It is easier to breathy I won't lie.
I cannot now deceive anyone
Either in one thing or in another,
Even if I wanted to, I could not.
The world in all its dimensions
For me is now on my shoulders:
Thus free are my movements
As if for the first time since birth
I shall fly in my orbit.
(continued on next page)

[page 8]

because he has "grown up" he is no longer able to
sacrifice the truth for the "hundred-mouthed glory." One
gets the feeling that Yashin is attempting to make amends
for his earlier works which won him praise and a Stalin
Prize.

Evtushenko's poems are even more obscure than
those of Yashin. In addition, they are marked by a lack
of the kind of optimism usually associated with
"socialist realism." The first four lines of a poem called
"Salesgirl of Ties" clearly conveys the tenor of his
work:

"When work is finished/
Pale from stifling fuss/
With the face of an exhausted child/
You leave the store."

This is scarcely a picture of the happy Soviet worker
finishing a glorious day at work. In this same poem
Evtushenko affirms his loyalty to the revolution and to
communism but finishes with a line which smacks of
disillusions "And what now, what now?"

The recent publication of Yashin's and Ebtushenko's
works suggest that the editors of Neva and Oktyabr have
felt bold enough to print a type of writing which is
clearly out of line with the main tenets of socialist
realism. So far there has been no press comment on these
works. However, if the publication of works similar to
these continues, it would suggest that at least in the
genre of poetry certain restrictions have been removed.

-----------------------------

(Footnote continued)

I am not a soothsayer
Nor am I old in my view.
Thus I don't take pride in righteous men
Nor in former times,
But I take pride in that
I don't envy successful ones,
For the unrecognized ones I don't fear.

More and more I feel a strange pain.
I cannot get drunk without wine.
And I study silence like an art.
I am not tempted by hundred-mouthed glory
Because it is useless for people.

My soul does not partake of faithlessness and doubt
Only my view has become keener.
My generation has grown up
And I have grown up with them.

[page 9]

Dudintesev's name has once again appeared before the
Soviet public, and there is a possibility that a new
novel by him will be published next year. At the Writers'
Congress last May Khrushchev clearly removed much of the
stigma of past criticism from Dudintsev's name when he
stated that this writer "has never been our enemy or
opponent of the Soviet order." In Pravda on July 5 a
letter in praise of Khrushchev's speech said that while
Dudintsev's book was marked with thoughtlessness, it
also had "a timely, fresh breeze," On August 1 Radio
Moscow carried an interview with Dudintsev, who announced
his plans for a new novel entitled The Unknown Soldier,
And, on a back-page subscription advertisement of the
September Oktyabr, this novel was listed among those
works which may be published in next year's issues of
that magazine.

Praise and Publication for Sholokhov

In late August Khrushchev visited the out-of-the way
village of Veshenskaya, home of the Soviet writer Mikhail
A. Sholokhov, and invited Sholokhov, to accompany him on
his US visit. In a speech there on August 30 Khrushchev
praised Sholokhov for the "party-mindedness" of his works
and for his depiction of the "most important and decisive
stages in the history of Soviet society." The meeting of
the two and Khrushchev's speech were hailed by the
cultural press in early September as though they marked the
dawn of a bright new day for Soviet literature and the
other arts. The pages of the cultural newspapers were
filled with letters of writers, artists, and composers
who had seen the great importance of Khrushchev's remarks
for the further development of Soviet culture.

It is difficult to say what Khrushchev's bow to
Sholokhov portends for Soviet literature as a whole. But
at any rate personal intervention by Khrushchev in the
affairs of literature, it appears, has brought about a
rapprochement between Sholokhov and Party critics
concerning the publication of the second part of his novel
Virgin Soil Upturned, During the past year there have
been rumors that Sholokhov had completed this second
book, which is about the collectivation of agriculture,
but certain Party critics, in particular A. Surkov,
prevented its publication because of its "pessimistic"
ending. Portions of the book have appeared in print at
various times since 1955, and in July of this year both
the magazines Neva and Don published the first half of
this second book. During his trip in the United States
Sholokhov announced to newsmen that he had completed his
novel and that it would be published soon.

That there had, indeed, been a controversy
concerning the ending of this navel seems to be borne out by an
article in an August 29 interview article in Sovetskaya

[page 10]

Kultura. The interviewer, obviously cognizant of the
dispute, asked Sholokhov how the novel ends. Sholokhov
answered: "Happy endings are not in my nature. It must
be written as life prompts it." This remark suggests
that Sholokhov has won out over the Party critics and that
his novel will be printed as he first wrote it.

If Khrushchev did actually intervene in the literary
world to bring about the publication of this novel, he
had good reasons to do so. There have been reports that
Khrushchev was greatly disturbed by the propaganda debacle
caused by the Doctor Zhivago incident last year and hoped
to avoid similar negative publicity in regard to
Sholokhov's novel. In addition, it has been also reported that
Sholokhov was greatly incensed over Pasternak's winning
of the Nobel Prize. He purportedly felt that because the
Soviet Government prevented him from publishing his novel,
both in the Soviet Union and abroad, he was greatly
handicapped in the, consideration for this honor. The impending
publication of his novel and his inclusion in Khriashchev's
entourage in the US may well be an attempt by the regime
to increase Sholokhov's chances for the Nobel Prize in the
future. If such an honor was bestowed upon a Soviet
writer whom the Soviet Goernment and Party praised, the
negative aspects of the Pasternak case could be substantially
countered. The regime could no longer be accused of
suppressing great literature and socialist society could be
pictured as proudly wearing the Nobel Prize.

Limitations to the Policy of Restraint

The foregoing comment has illustrated how the Party's
literary policy has been tempered in an attempt to win the
respect of Soviet writers. It is perhaps too early to
tell the full significance of these events, which have
happened in the main only since the Writers' Congress in
May of this year. However, the following seems to be clear.
Despite the regime's conciliatory moves, Soviet writers
have not been given license to write as they wish. At the
Writers' Congress Khrushchev criticized those who would
portray the darker aspects of Soviet life and asserted that
if anyone criticized, it would be the Central Committee.
Nothing has occurred in the past few months that would
suggest any change in this basic policy. If the Party is
allowing writers to declare openly their desire for truth in
literature, it is not allowing application of this
principle.

This policy of moderation may have within itself the
seeds of its own destruction. Writers may be encouraged
by the Party's policy of restraint to test the limits of
cultural controls. Editors and censors under the present
policy toward literary criticism may be unwilling to
condemn works of obvious literary merit even though they
contain ideologically unorthodox views. Under these circum-

[page 11]

stances the Party would be obliged to violate its present
policy. Despite the Party's desires to win approval among
writers, it has shown beyond doubt that it will sacrifice
popularity to protect those things it considers more 
important.

Thus the maintenance of a policy of moderation will
depend in a large measure on how sensitive the writers and
editors are to the desires of the regime. Restraint on
the part of writers and the editors is the only thing that
can now protect the few freedoms writers have been given.
it is likely that this restraint will be practiced by most
Soviet men of letters in an effort to defend what Alexander
Tvardovsky recently called the "new era of creativity."
However, it is more difficult to predict the actions of
those Soviet writers who in the past have been prone to
express unorthodox views.

[page 12]

REPORTS AND COMMENTARIES
The Third USSR Writers' Congress

Soviet Studies
Volume XI, No. 3
January i960

Thaw literature of "exposure" is a matter of the past as are the specific
historical conditions that gave rise to it. But the moral and artistic impetus
of the literary thaw has survived. The collapse of the anti-revisionist campaign
in the Writers' Union and the continued liberalization of Soviet life have made a
new modus vivendi for literature at once more necessary and more feasible.

Not everybody, either in the Writers' Union or the Communist Party, has
as yet recognized or accepted the need for further changes, and those who have
differ widely about ways and means. Outdated concepts and conventions, mistaken
suspicions, misunderstood motive, and a quaintly euphemistic terminology made
for indecision and confusion, often conceal basic conflicts and distort genuine
dilemmas. The clear-cut lines of the past between party authority and erring or
recalcitrant writer are blurred as a result of the easing of party controls and
the emergence of opposed groupings within the Union none of which can claim the
party's undivided support. The party itself vacillates and prevaricates in its
policy on literature -- if, indeed, it has such a policy.

In this situation the more permanent impulses of the Thaw are beginning
to take effect: creative writers have begun to explore new subjects and techniques;
in articles and speeches new issues are raised and discussed freely (often, it
is true, under the guise of disconcertingly stale formulas); the first steps are
being taken to adapt the activities and the structure of the Writers' Union to
new purposes and tasks.

The initial, tentative stages of this process, the issues involved and
the emerging alignments are reflected in the discussions prior to and during the
Third USSR Writers' Congress.

I

The announcement that the long-delayed Congress would be held in May was
made in the first editorial article on problems of Soviet literature to be
published by Kommunist since July 1957.[1] This article, together with E. A. Furtseva's
report on ideological work at the XXI Party Congress,[2] must be assumed to have
represented the official view on the state of Soviet literature and on its
ideological tasks.

The article begins by stressing that the transition from socialism to
communism initiated by the decisions of the XXI Congress requires not only the
creation of a "material and technological basis" but also the "all-embracing
development of the human personality." In well-worn clich�s, but with a new
intonation of urgency born of the growing conviction that the relaxation of
discipline and compulsion has enhanced the ideological and educative value of

[page 13]

literature, Kommunist appeals to writers to

make an even greater effort ... to educate the working masses in the
spirit of loyalty to the cause of socialism, of passionate love for
their socialist Fatherland, in the spirit of proletarian internationalism
and friendship between nations, and of hatred for the enemies of socialism.[3]

The article then goes on to formulate the "pre-conditions" which alone
will enable literature to keep abreast with its tasks:

1. The writer must be closely linked with the life of the nation, and
he must, in Khrushchev's words, "overcome his outdated ideas about our people,"
Only "direct participation in the nation's great creative experience" can forge
this link; writers are therefore enjoined to go forth

more boldly to the construction sites, into the factories, mines,
collective farms, laboratories, into the masses! There ... the writer will
find his source of inspiration, the themes and subjects for his creative
work....[4]

Writers' doubts about the artistic relevance of this procedure are countered
with references to past experience which, Kommunist claims, has shown that such
direct links with the nation can produce "great works of art" and not merely
"material for reportage" as our "ideological opponents" assert.

2. Soviet literature must draw its true, "positive"[5] hero -- the
traditional hero of Russian literature -- from the people, the builders of communism.
This "main character of Soviet literature" reflects "our socialist reality" and
the "true traits of the new man." Insistence on the positive hero must not be
taken, however, to be an oblique demand for the return to "varnished" and
"conflict-less" literature:

There are still quite a few bad people, burdened with the survivals
of the accursed past... The "theory of conflictlessness" was harmful
precisely because it ignored the negative phenomena in our life and
hindered the struggle against them... If a work criticizes short-comings
in our life, it also serves...the cause of communism because it clears
the way of everything that impedes our movement forward... If the author
castigates shortcomings by way of affirming communism, he also follows
the main line of our literature...[6]

3. The main task of Soviet literature -- to be affirmed byCongress - is
to "orientate itself towards contemporaneity." For Khrushchev in 1957 (and for
Sobolev in December 1958 at the RSFSR Writers' Congress) the term sovremennost had
meant no more than "close links with contemporary life": writers were expected to
"study life" and to write about topical subjects. Kommunist now introduces a
somewhat confused and artificial distinction the purpose of which, however, seems
clear. In the first place, there was the danger of Khrushchev's formula
encouraging writers to adopt (as some clearly had done recently) neo-realist methods in
dealing with "life", the "people" and their problems. Secondly, it was obviously
absurd to expect all writers to "go to the people." Lastly, "contemporary" bias
had been a distinctive but unwelcome feature of Erenburg's Thaw, Dudintsev's Not
by Bread Alone, Yashin's Levers, and of other works in 1956. An ideological
"directive" had to be devised which would discourage the first, provide a niche
in Soviet literature for the second, and re-emphasize the party-propagandist aspect
of Soviet literature:

[page 14]

Writers are called upon to apprehend and express in artistic terms the
greatness of the seven-year plan, to show that its fulfillment is the most
important pre-condition for the transition to communism, and that its
realization is an important revolutionary step in the development of our
society.

The distinction Kommunist wishes to make is further underlined by assigning
to the "main task of Soviet literature" -- i.e. the expression of sovremennost -- extra-literary
and purely journalistic genres. Earlier in the article writers had
been assured that "closer links with the people" could produce not only "reportage'
out "great works of art"; they are now told that the "most operative genres for
this purpose [i.e. sovremennost] are forms of artistic journalism": namely, the
sketch (ocherk)[8], the feature-story, and the "militant publicist poem."

4. A subject of special concern for the forthcoming Congress must be the
raising of "artistic skill and craftsmanship (masterstvo)". Higher artistic
standards are called for because "the nation expects great art"[9] and because

if a work is weak artistically even the most noble, the most progressive
ideological conception perishes; the idea of a work of art is inseparable
from its form...and without an appropriate form cannot be assimilated by
the reader and cannot influence him.[10]

The low artistic standards of works recently accepted by periodicals and
publishing houses are regretted; writers are once more invited to experiment
boldly in their search for more vivid and striking means of expression. "Formalism
is still to be condemned if it means the "primacy of sterile form" -- but it will
be welcomed if the search for new forms serves to "reveal more strikingly a lofty
ideological content."

The hollowness of Kommunist's championship of higher artistic standards is
revealed in the same article, Kommunist is prepared to make allowances for low
artistic standards provided the work is "contemporary" and, presumably, to
exonerate periodicals and publishing houses for printing such work0 Referring to some
"recent controversial works," it is granted that "artistically they were not
completely satisfactory", and yet

in spite of these shortcomings such novels arouse keen interest precise
because they portray our contemporaries ... in their daily struggles and
clashes... In these works the author's sympathies and antipathies are
clearly expressed although mere tendentiousness is avoided....[11]

The Kommunist editorial points to the desire of at least a section of the
party to nullify the writers" relative freedom by persuading them to confine
their work voluntarily to "contemporary" subjects and "operative" genres for the
popularization of the party's current policy and immediate aims. No marginal
qualifications about the "raising of artistic standards" can hide the fact that
Kommunist is indifferent to literary quality and anxious to win the support of the
Writers" Congress for a narrowly-circumscribed formula which would open the doors
of literature again to "literary bureaucracy" and the political hack-writer. At
any rate, this is how leading party officials - in their cruder and less guarded
comments -- interpreted the party line:

Speaking at the IV Congress of Belorussian Writers, and addressing himself
in particular to the dramatists, the First Secretary of the CC of the CP of
Belorussia, K. Mazurov, had this to say:

[page 15]

I think the point is not so much that some writers lack dramatic
skill but that they -- because of their poor knowledge of contemporary
life and of the problems that agitate our people -- are simply afraid
of writing plays about sovermennost; they are afraid to face the criticism
of their audiences... Comrades! Don't try to retire from the battle; be
so good as to fulfill your party command (zakaz) -- give us contemporary
plays....[12]

And I. Zhelagin, the First Secretary of the Stalingrad District Committee
of the CP, complains:

Stalingrad writers, although they have begun to write more often on local
themes, are still powerfully attracted to their native city's past history
Of course, the past should also be written about ... but the present must
not be forgotten. Some writers, however, shun contemporary themes and
rarely publish sketches about the heroes of our time.[13]

These official utterances also betray the growing concern felt over writers'
refusal to write according to old "prescriptions" spelled out in contemporary
slogans. As recently as the RSFSR Writers' Congress it had seemed that as a result of
the anti-revisionist campaign[14] little resistance was being offered to the
imposition on the Union of a new rigidity and conformity under the slogan of the "portrayal
of contemporary life." This had been reflected in the Congress resolution[15] and in
the fact that only one speaker, Fedin, had ignored the demand for sovremennost and
had emphasized Khrushchev's comments on masterstvo [16] (craftsmanship, virtuosity).
(Fedin complained that although everybody was paying lip-service to artistic
standards, in practice the prevalent tendency was the dangerous one of judging literature
only on the merit of contents.) But at the XXI Party Congress it became clear that
even writers who had backed Khrushchev in his destalinization campaign, and who
supported his reforms, were not prepared to sacrifice again their artistic and
professional integrity, and rejected the new line about themes, subjects and genres.

A. Tvardovski was the only writer to speak at the XXI Congress although
A. E. Korneichuk, A. A. Surkov, V. T. Latsis and M. N. Sholokhov also attended as
delegates. Ture literature, Tvardovski said,[17] can "confirm" only the "truth and
essence" of life: dogmas and preconceived schemes superimposed on life are alien
o the spirit of art. Khrushchev's call to writers to write about real life
releases them from the prescriptive dogmas of the Stalin era. But there is too
much talk about "contemporaneity", he complains -- in an obvious reference to
Furtseva's report. Any indifferent, hurriedly-produced piece of writing with a
"contemporary" or topical title is accepted by editors, publishers and critics. This
impedes and distorts the progress of Soviet literature and causes grave misgivings
to the writers in whose name Tvardovski claims to speak:

I am bound to say that many of our best writers -- some already
well-established, others as yet unknown to the reader -- are deeply and anxiously
aware of this deplorable position; in our everyday contacts we discuss
this often and passionately. But as soon as we take the, platform at our
writers' meetings and congresses, we change to a completely different
language rather like priests ... who in their domestic and everyday life
speak colloquial Russian but in the pulpit change to Church Slavonic,
the obligatory language of their ritual.[18]

[page 16]

In conclusion Tvardovski expresses "our (i.e. the best writers')" hope that, in
contrast to the official desire to see sovremennost as the main theme, the Third
Congress would concentrate on problems of form and masterstvo.

In their contributions to the discussions preceding the III Congress many
writers took their cue from Tvardovski and endorsed or further elaborated his views.

Of some importance is the statement made by L. Leonov[19] on the eve of the
III Congress, both for what he said (he supported Fedin and Tvardovski by suggesting
that Congress should discuss the "writer's craft -- this would really be a
discussion on the main theme") and for the fact that Leonov, one of the most outstanding
of Soviet writers and a member of the Board of Management of the USW for many years,
has in the past avoided all direct participation in literary controversies.[20]

M. Shaginyan in an article in Oktyabr[21] referred tothenineteenth-century
writer Boborykin as a "topical" writer whose work had been "useless" to his
contemporaries and who is completely forgot ton now. Only a writer who deeply understands,
feels and experiences his age can be truly "contemporary". But such a writer's
work will not "trail behind the topical event", he will "blaze a trail through ??
virgin soil of life, he will participate in the creative processes of life itself."

In an interesting contribution to the debate Abdulla Kakhkhar[22] expressed
the views of many of his fellow-writers in the Republican Unions:[23]

Unfortunately, problems of artistic craftsmanship are still pushed into
the background. If our central organs from time to time -- although also
rarely and, as it were, stealthily - discuss masterstvo, our Republican
publications remain stubbornly silent on the subject of the quality of
our literature and the secret of our craft. The time has come -- and after
the III Congress this general desire is bound to be fulfilled -- eradicate
the evil which allows critics to take under their protection obviously
unsuitable works. For some critics it is sufficient for a book to be.
about a topical theme; the rest neither interests nor concerns them.[24]

II

The Third Congress was to be demonstration of the restored unity of Soviet
writers, the "Congress of Consolidation" around the kind of program enunciated by
the Kommunist editorial. "Consolidation" been one of the themes of Khrushchev's
speeches as early as June 1957:

We want consolidation, unity of all the forces of literature and art on a
principled basis, and not by concessions and deviations from the principles
of Marxism-Leninism. In the interests of this consolidation principled
criticism and self-criticism is being unfolded... Every man can make
mistakes, but it is necessary to see not only what the man did yesterday, but
also what he is capable of doing tomorrow, and that is the most important
thing; we must help such a man to realize shortcomings and as quickly as
possible eliminate them and rectify mistakes.[25]

Surkov, on the eve of the RSFSR Writers' Congress, had proclaimed his
belief that thanks to Khrushchev's intervention the split in the USSR Writers'
Union had already been healed:

[page 17]

The party document became the basis on which progressively -- not without
great difficulties and much effort to overcome the survivals of cliquishness
and the reluctance of some erring writers to re-appraise their false
revisionist positions -- there was. erected the structure of that ideological
and creative consolidation without which the flowering of Soviet literature
in this new stage of our struggle for communism would have been unthinkable.[26]

Neither the results of the RSFSR Congress nor the renewed controversy after
the party's XXI Congress confirmed Surkov's optimism. Old issues, it is true, were
no longer fiercely debated, and even terminology was changing ("revisionists" were
turning into "neo-realists" and "varnishers" into "followers of the Dovzhenko
school")[26] but the Union remained deeply divided about the place of literature in
Soviet, society, its character and its function. In his report to the Third Congress
Surkov made no secret of the failure to achieve the unity that six months earlier
he had proclaimed as accomplished.

After enumerating all the dangers against which Soviet writers still have
to remain on their guard (such ass revisionism, dogmatism, vulgar sociologism,
sectarianism, manifestations of bourgeois nationalism and of all forms of cliquishness),
added abruptly and sternly that

conditions are now favorable, comrades, to achieve a broad consolidation
of all our forces. This is one of the most important conditions for
successful creative work in the service of communism.[28]

Khrushchev himself, addressing Congress on 22 May, confirms that his appeals
for unity had fallen, so far, on at least some deaf ears:

The aftermath of the struggle which not so long ago was of a quite sharp
nature is still making itself felt in your midst.

But unlike Surkov, he claims that

now this struggle is a past stage. The carriers of revisionist views and
sentiments have suffered total ideological defeat. The struggle is over
and now, as they say, "conciliation angels" are already flying in the air.
A process of healing the wounds, if we can put it that way, is going on at
present....[29]

Concolidation on the conditions offered by Kommunist and faithfully echoed by
Surkov had proved unacceptable. Attempts at re-imposing controls through
ideological manipulation threatened to perpetuate the deadlock between the party and
what Tvardovski called the "best writers" whose own terms were stated by
K.Paustovski in an article that has attracted much attention in the West:

The writers' congress is approaching. Will it affirm that free and daring
scope for writers which is the one thing that will make of Soviet literature
the greatest literature of our time? Or will the congress rather take up
matters of petty tutelage and long-term quarrels? If it does, it will be
useless. We must at last cause calling friends enemies simply because they
tell us unpleasant truths, are not hypocritical, and, while giving their
selfless devotion to the people and their country, do not demand a monopoly
of such devotion, or a reward for it.

There are two paths open to the Congress, the noble path of
Consolidation, and the other, the destructive path of disagreement.[30]
[page 18]

III

Congress was attended by 497 delegates representing 4,8O1 members, an increase
of 1,100 over 1954.[31] In the debate 59 delegates are reported to have participated
some 37 guest speakers (including the Minister of Culture, the secretary of the
Komsomol, and Khrushchev) also addressed the Congress.[32]

Although Congress debates in general continued -- in a minor key -- the
controversies begun earlier and although, clearly, the unity desired by Kommunist
and Surkov was not achieved, some form of consolidation, probably unforeseen and
unplanned,[33] did emerge. Congress proceedings confirm that, at least within the
Union, the initiative has passed from the revisionist-baiters and "literary official
dom" to the creative writers. V. Druzin, the Deputy Editor, and V. Kochetov, the
Editor-in-Chief, of Literaturnaya gazeta had resigned in March; Congress confirmed
the appointment of S. S. Smirnov as Kochetov's successor; A. Surkov was replaced
by K. Fedin as General Secretary of the Union: these personal changes and even,
it would appear, the changes in the Union's constitution, ratified this shift in
the control of the Writers' Union.[34]

Surkov's report, which was largely ignored by speakers in the discussion,
was a more than usually longwinded hotchpotch of commonplaces and the kind of
reasoning that had been employed in the 1956-7 Thaw, but was felt to be irrelevant
to the problems and dilemmas writers faced in 1959. The main lines of the debate
have already been indicated; the following quotations and brief summaries are
intended to illustrate some typical reactions to the two most important aspects
of official policy - "close links" and sovremennost.[35]

Khrushchev's slogan "Closer links with the people", implying the
much-resented suggestion that the Soviet intelligentsia forty years after the
revolution was still alienated from the masses, had led in late 1958 and early 1959 to
the revival of "creative assignments" undertaken by members of the Union either
on behalf of the Union or at the instruction of literary journals and periodicals.
For a period most of these featured prominently articles, travel-notes and
writers' diaries dealing with the impressions these roving reporters had gathered
in their more or less fleeting visits to the "construction sites of the seven
year plan"[36] The overtly and often crudely propagandist character of these
assignments and the attempt at proclaiming journalistic techniques as the Soviet
writers' most operative contribution, provoked some of the strongest comments at
the Congress. That writers could argue against the line laid down by Khrushchev
himself in 1957 confirms convincingly that the anti-revisionist campaign has
failed to put the clock back, and that persuasion and reasoning have largely
replaced "petty tutelage" and intimidation in the party's relations with the
writers.

K. Paustovski

A rather strange concept of the tie connecting the writer with the people is
current among us today. This bond obviously cannot be created artificially. No
special writers' expedition will help to do this, if those taking part intend to
use it merely to play an "observer's" role, to study the life of the people with
due deliberation, asking all the proper questions about their activities and
jobs, sitting in at their meetings, and doing the rest of the things the other
"amateurs" and tourists do, so as to gather copy....

At all times and in all lands true and genuine writers have learned from
the people and been linked to them organically... Try naming even a dozen writers
of the 19th and 20th centuries who had no ties at all with the people. I am
speaking of writers in general, not dividing them into "our" and "alien" writers,
into positive and negative. Is there one of them that has no shred of his roots

[page 19]

in the people, "no feeling of social responsibility" as they called it in the
last century?

There are almost no such writers. And if in recent years there has been
talk about the complete divorce of writers from the people, we should clear up
the question as to whether such individuals were really writers at all.[37]

M. Rylski

...to be able to write about miners, blacksmiths, gold-prospectors,
gardeners, etc. it is not at all necessary for the author to be himself a miner,
blacksmith, etc. Moreover, even a thorough and detailed knowledge of a trade, or of
the way of life of a certain milieu will not help one to do more than portray
petty details, external features of a way of life and not life in its complexity.

Rylski goes on to remind his colleagues that Tolstoy created not only the
characters of Natasha, Levin, Anna Karenina but also the horse Kholstomer and the dog
Laska. A writer in addition to personal experience needs powers of observation,
and "creative imagination." "Knowledge of life" is necessary but a true work of
?rt cannot do without "deep love for life."[38]

Anver Bikchentayev

...Our writers, it is said, have insufficient knowledge of life... I must
confess that all Azerbaidzhani and Bashkir writers who describe e.g. the life of
workers in the oil industry, have a remarkable insight into production processes...
they are quite capable of presenting dissertations on the subject...what we lack
is a deep, fundamental knowledge of people's psychology, of what our classics used
to call simply and accurately -- the human soul.[39]

M. Dudin reminded his colleagues of Leskov's words:
"I have never understood, and still cannot understand those journalistic
sermons that the people must be studied. The people one must simply know, as one
knows one's own life by living it...that is how I knew the people -- from
childhood without effort and strain; and if I sometimes failed to recreate the people
in my works, then this was due solely to my lack of ability."[40]

Rasul Gamzatov

...The very fact that we talk so much about the writers' link with life
proves that not all the members of our Union are genuine writers... Many
comrades are only now beginning to find it necessary to study life and to "invade
it actively" during long months of creative assignments... To share the life
of one's nation ought not to be an obligation but an inner need for us...[41]

V. Soloukhin

For a writer it is vitally important to live in a highly intellectual
milieu...and the greater the intellectual culture of his milieu, the better the
chance for the writer to develop his own powers...[42]

Khrushchev's own comment on this subject in his reply to the debate was
light-heartedly flexible, and double-edged to a degree that must have caused surprise
and consternation to many delegates:

Why shouldn't a writer who wants to write about workers go where workers
live and work, to study how they work? Shouldn't he live with them? Is
that bad? Then he needn't waste time of "author's trips."

Comrades, naturally I am not suggesting that writers from the capital
be settled all over the Soviet Union at mines, factories and collective

[page 20]

farms. That would be unreasonable. What I do want to say is that writers
must invade life more deeply, study it, translate into artistic images all
that is new in the life of the land of the Soviets, to get greater depth
into their portrayal of man, the creator of all material and spiritual
values of our society.

Khrushchev then went on to relate to the delegates a pre-war incident when he had
refused help in procuring a flat in Kiev for a "woman poet, a poet from the people,
a peasant woman". He preceded his narration with remarks which were directed
against the transplantation of young writers from their "natural milieu" into
metropolitan "hot-house" conditions but which could be read as a refutation of
Kommunist and even as support for Soloukhin's definition of the writer's
"natural milieu":

Is it really of any benefit to uproot people from the
environment -- collective farm, factory, office -- in which they have grown up and live
and which nurtures them, and to transplant them into artificialhot-house
conditions? If that is done, the ground can slip from under their feet,
they will be deprived of their life blood and feel as plants torn out of
the ground...in time they may strike root, get on their feet, but they
may also wilt.[43]

Lack of support for Kommunist's line on sovremennost is the most noteworthy
feature of Congress debates. In fact only Surkov, Mikhailov (Minister of Culture)
and L. Sobolev (Chairman of the RSFSR Writers' Union) back what appeared to be
official policy. The writers in their message to the Central Committee -- and
Khrushchev in his speech -- studiously avoid even the term sovremennost:[44]

N. A. Mikhailov

Speaking about the contemporary theme from the point of view of the
international obligations of Soviet literature, it must be pointed out that Soviet writers
are called upon to tell mankind -- using the means characteristic of literature, i.e
artistic images -- about the construction of a new world in our Soviet country. In
this manner the demand for the contemporary theme in literature is the expression
of ideinost and partiinost in literature... To write about contemporaneity or, in
other words, about the historic and universal struggle of our people, means to
work for communism, to realize in practice the principle of linking literature with
life, to helping the party, by means of artistic works, in the construction of
communist society.[45]

L. Sobolev

...why then is it that talk about the need for contemporaneity in literature
provokes some writers in the way in which a red rag provokes a bull? One can
understand why the party's call to write about sovremennost worries and irritates
writers of the older generation for whom it is really difficult to enter fully
into the new life...but it is completely incomprehensible why some young writers
should run away from contemporaneity.

He goes on to attack Paustovski for praising the young prose-writer Yu.
Kazakov who instead of following the true path "writes about cruel and stupid
lads who leave the villages and their girl-friends in search of a sports career
in town." Kazakov had recently been admitted to a Seminar held for young writers
by the RSFSR Writers' Union in the hope that he would produce a story on a
"contemporary theme." "This was a sine qua non for admission to the Seminar." Instead
Kazakov shocked his tutors by presenting a story on a nineteenth-century theme.[46]

[page 21]

N. N. Mesyatev

The secretary of the Komsomol is more cautious than other official speakers
in demanding that writers should focus their attention on "contemporary" themes.
Soviet youth must not be allowed to grow complacent and to feel that there is
nothing left to do but "to reap the fruits of the labor of past generations."
Although he wants writers to "reflect the participation of youth in social labor,
and to show that their work is essentially part of the process of revolutionary
action," he insists that "one of the important problems [i.e. for literature] is
the education of young people in the revolutionary traditions of the past.[47]

K. Paustovski

The arbitrary and vulgar interpretation which criticism has given to the
simple concept of "the contemporary" does not allow our literature the diversity
and breadth it needs.

I am profoundly convinced that the contemporary in literature and in the
arts as a whole includes everything that serves to form and develop man in
communist society. This is a crystal-clear formula. But opposing this all-embracing
interpretation is another one, which holds that only what is linked to today and
??s aims, only the topical is, in actual fact, contemporary.

This approach to the contemporary in literature discards all the age-old
-- and especially the revolutionary -- history of our land, consigns to oblivion
its great culture, one of the bases for the erection of a culture new and purely
socialist.

In any accurate conception of the contemporary Taras Bulba exists
alongside The Silent Don, and War and Peace by the side of The People Are Immortal by
Vasili Grossman, with the same immediate impact on people's minds.

If the writer is really persuaded to substitute the topical for the
contemporary, we shall no longer have a literature in the full sense of the word.
We shall have news reports, efficient journalism, a newspaper with literary touches,
hurriedly written stories, or a novel ripened fast and so spoiling soon thereafter.
Have we really such a dearth of writers, and are we so helpless that our literature
lacks the strength to produce numbers of excellent books in all genres and dealing
with all periods but at the same time contemporary in spirit and ideas? Why
should we consciously act to impoverish our literature?[48]

O. Gonchar

The "contemporary" theme ... cannot be treated narrowly, it cannot be
reduced to the topicality of a feature-article... The concept includes everything
that is of interest to our contemporary, all the important problems of our age,
the whole of our Soviet period and its heroic feats...[49]

V. Luks

...some go so far as to date contemporaneity -- or, at least, its
beginnings -- from 1956, others have decided on even later dates... Sovremennost is
not a short interval of time framed between calendar dates, it is our age in its
movement and development...[50]

D. Granin

...our Congress, it seems to me, is beginning to show a deeper and more creative
understanding of contemporaneity -- a concept which fetters the writer neither by
insisting on ... topicality nor by narrowing his thematic choice... It is an
insult to Soviet writers if their efforts are suddenly to be classified as
second-rate by the application of merely chronological criteria... Such a vulgar
interpretation of sovremennost only serves the hack-writer.[51]

[page 22]

A. Tvardovski

That Tvardovski in his contribution should mock at the statistical approach
to literature which measures its progress in quantities published during a "given
period", caused no surprise. That he should brush aside the demand for sovremennost
and assert that in literature "quality is first and foremost in importance", was to
be expected. His conclusions, however -- if not startingly new -- imply an emphatic
challenge to traditional Soviet concepts of the writer's responsibilities and duties
and of the ideological malleability of literature through "organizational methods":

The task of the literary education and creative development of our writers
stems directly from the great overall task which is the main theme of our
Congress: the task of improving the quality of our literature. I shall
not dwell on how imperfect and even harmful at times the various
organizational methods taken toward this end seem to me personally.

In our work as writers it is obviously not "organizational methods"
that are of decisive significance, but examples, specific examples of high
artistry. The example is indispensable and of primary significance...

The reason I have stressed the necessity of a profoundly individual
understanding of the task facing literature on the threshold of communism
is that I thereby wish to underline an even more emphatic assertion.

We frequently speak of collective responsibility for the fate of
literature, about the responsibility of each of us for "literature as a
whole", etc.

I should like to say here -- I have already spoken of this in part --
that no matter how paradoxical it may seem at first glance, the highest
form of collective responsibility in our work is a genuine awareness of
one's responsibility for oneself, and not "for literature as a whole."
Let us note that there are not so many among us who cope with this kind
of responsibility. There are probably more who quite readily offer to
answer for "literature as a whole," to guide it, to manage it, and direct
it...

A writer can produce genuine literature only if it is not external
considerations that compel him, but his whole inner being -- (even if my
book should have no success, that is how I want to write it, that is how
it should be written) -- only then can his work be worth anything... I
want to speak of the personal, moral obligations and standards of a writer
work and how these are to be brought closer to the concept of communist
labor.

We will, naturally, take these moral and ethical standards from the
experience of the great masters of the past, our compatriots and others.
These lived in different times, set themselves different tasks, had
different world outlooks, in keeping with their times, but their selflessness
and noble dedication to great art still serve us as the highest example
and standard...

Write as your conscience dictates, as your knowledge of any given
sector of life permits you to write, and do not be afraid in advance of
editors and critics...[52]

If Tvardovski's views are shared -- as they probably are -- by many of his
colleagues in the new leadership of the Union, further changes in the status and
the activities of the Union will soon follow. Such changes cannot fail to uphold
and enlarge the already wide range of choice and experiment typical of a good
deal of recent Soviet writing.[53]

University of Leeds
Alfred Dressier

[page 23]

1. Kommunist 1959 no.6, p. 13.

2. Vneocherednoi XXI s'ezd KPSS. Stenograficheski otchet (Moscow, 1959) vol. I
pp. 262-275. Furtseva, in contract to Kommunist's conciliatory tone, calls in
question the writers' ideological reliability. In a reference to the demand for
"complete non-interference" by the party in literary affairs, contained in the
Draft Program of the Yugoslav League of Communists (Cp. the English translation,
London, 1959 PP. 191-192), she says: "But such non-interference amounts to
lending direct support to positions in literature and art that are hostile to
the working class and the peasantry" (ibid. p. 268.)

3. Kommunist 1959, no. 6, p. 13.

4. Ibid.

5. A terminological distinction is now often made between the post-Stalin
"positive" hero and the "ideal" (i.e. "varnished") hero of pre-1956 literature. Cf.
ibid. p. 18; also N. Maslin, "0 geroye v literature i zhizni", Moskva 1959 no. 2.

6. Kommunist 1959 no. 6, p. 18.

7. Ibid. p. 19.

8. In an interview published in Literaturnaya gazeta 5 September 1919, V. Ovechkin,
whose own Sketches are often quotea as models for this type of literature, draws
a distinction between what he calls the "documentary sketch" and the
"explorative sketch", which permits "free rein to the creative imagination."

9. The claim that" the [Soviet] reader is always right" and, by implication that
the party correctly interprets the reader's (or the nation's) mind, goes
unchallenged no longer. Many voices have recently been raised against the "cult of the
reader": the young poet A. Volkov (Literaturnaya gazata 25 April 1959) has suggested
that "the people love those works best which have been thoroughly premasticated for
them by the author..." (According to a note in Literaturnaya gazeta 30 September
1959 many letters both for and against Volkov had been received by the editor.)
V. Inber (ibid. 16 May 1959) is disturbed about readers' "Primitive approach to
literature" and their "lack of a sense of humor". G. Gulia (ibid. 14 July 1959)
complains that the development of literature is impeded by readers who "dislike
complexity and demand primitive simplicity", and who identify "truth" with the
"accuracy of a protocol." A. Makarov in a review of Ivanov's "Poviteli" praises
the novel as a "positive and outstanding contribution to our literature" but
expects that it will be received unfavorably by many readers (Znamya 1959 no. 3).

10. Kommunist 1959, no. 6, p. 19.

11. Ibid, p. 15.

12. Literarturnaya gazeta 17 February 1959.

13. Literatura i Zhizn 6 March 1959.

14. Attempts are now clearly being made to revise the results of the
"antirevisionist" campaign in literature and to remove misunderstandings and confusions.
Some writers had preferred to keep silent or to absent themselves from public
debates, others had paid lip-service (cf. Tvardovski's remark about writers'
"ritual language", infra) to what they believed to be the obligatory party line
because they either failed to understand or refused to believe in Khrushchev's
proclaimed willingness to permit changes in "party-control and leadership in literature".
This deadlock can only be resolved by convincing the writers that the party is no
longer dispensing instructions which is not an easy task in view of the statements
quoted above. But, as will be seen, progress has been made at the Congress and,
more recently, the subject has been discussed in a frank statement by the Editor
of Literaturnaya gazeta, S. S. Smirnov ("Zametki O kritike", 8 August 1959); in
the key passage he defines the character of party leadership in literature as
"constant ideological-educative work... amongst writers' and goes on to asks "Is it
really necessary to prove to anyone that the well-known party-document 'For closer

[page 24]

links....' was by no means a directive but an educative pronouncement?"

15. Literaturnaya gazeta 14 December 1958.

16. Ibid. 12 December 1958.

17. Vneocherednoi XXI s'ezd KPSS. Stenografichesko otchet (Moscow, 1959) vol. I,
PP. 558-565; cf. also Soviet Literature 1959 no. 4.

18. Vneocherednoi XXI s'ezd KPSS....vol. I, p. 564. The translation of this
passage in Soviet Literature (p. 150) differs slightly from my own.

19. Literaturnaya gazeta 7 May 1959.

20. However, in a little-noticed essay "Talarit i true" (Okyabr 1956, no. 3,
p. 166) Leonov had anticipated many of the propositions advanced in the present
controversy. Cf. also: A. Yugov and L. Leonov, "Dumy o yazyke", Literatura i
zhizn 26 April 1959. Many other writers have expressed their concern at the effect
on literature of the progressive debasement of the language.

21. Oktyabr 1959, no. 5, p. 136.

22. Literaturnaya gazeta 12 May 1959.

23. Even the scanty reports of Republican Writers' Congress published in
Literaturnaya gazeta indicate widespread articulate opposition to sovremennost. Cf.
Literaturnaya gazeta 15 January 1959 (Armenian Congress); 5 February 195
(Lithuanian); 17 February 1959 (Belorussian); 28 February 1959 (Tadzhik); 5 March 195?
(Kirgiz); 14 and 17 March 1959 (Ukrainian); 21 March 1959 (Turkmenian).

A central problem discussed at these Congresses was the difficulty of writing
on "contemporary" Soviet themes while preserving national and local literary
traditions and forms. Cf., for example, "[Uzbek writers] sometimes say: Is it
really necessary to search for and to emphasize distinctive national features in
the portrayal of contemporary life when all the nationalities in the USSR live in
identical social conditions..." (Askad Mukhtar, "Sovremennaya tema-eto i problema
masterstva", Druzhba narodov 1959. no. 2). Similar points were made but not
pursued very far at the III Congress; the composition of the new Secretariat (cf.
Note 34 infira) will probably ensure greater attention for the problems of national
literatures.

24. Cf, also e.g. V. Ketlinskaya's article in Literaturnaya gazeta 9 April 1959
and I. Erenburg's "Re-reading Chekhov" in Novy mir 1959 no. 5, P. 193.

25. Kommunist 1957, no. 12, p. 27. The translation is from Soviet Literature
1957, no. 10, p. 19.

26. Literaturnaya gazeta 19 May 1959.

27. The charge of "neo-realism" has been made e.g. against V. Panova for her r?el
A Sentimental. Affair "Lenizdat, 1958) and G. Baklanov for his story "An Inch ??
(Novy mir 1959, nos. 5,6). A. Dovzhenko (1894-1956) was posthumously awarded a 1959
Lenin Prize for his film-script "Pesnya o more" ("Poem of an Inland Sea", Soviet
Literature 1957, no. 6).

28. Literaturnaya gazeta 19 May 1959.

29. Ibid. 24 May 1959. The quotation is from Soviet Literature 1959, no. 8, p. 95.

30. Literurnaya gazeta 20 May 1959. Cf. also Mainstream 1959, no. 9, p. 43.
(Some slight changes have been made in the passages quoted from this translation.)

31. Literaturnaya gazeta 21 May 1959. The report of the credentials committee
claims that most of the new members are young writers; but only three delegates
were under 30, and sixty-nine under 40 (352 delegates were over 50); twenty-three
had joined the Union since the II Congress; all had started publishing before 1954.

32. Among writers who, apparently, made no contributions were: Sholokov, Simonov,
Erenburg, Leonov, Kochetov, Aliger, Ovechkim, Panova, Shaginyan, Pogodin, Korneichuk
and Tendryakov.

[page 25]

33. One wonders whether this is the reason why Khrushchev discarded his prepared
brief. The many self-contradictory passages in his improvised statement lead one
to believe that he was taken by surprise by the views expressed by many delegates.
That Kommunist failed to print the speech is probably less significant than
Khrushchev's much-publicized post-Congress pilgrimage to Sholokhov (reported in
Literaturnaya gazeta 1 September 1959). This visit to the author of "The Pate of
a Man" (Molodaya gvardiya 1957; translated in Soviet Literature 1957, no. 5) and
"They Fought for Their Fatherland" (Molodaya gvardiya 1959; Soviet Literature 1959,
nos. 7, 8) -- war-time stories written without undue haste -- may be regarded as a
belated gesture of support and encouragement for the policy of greater artistic
independence pursued by Fedin, Tvardovski, etc. This seems to be confirmed by the
uninhibited attack by Tvardovski and the Editor of Literaturnaya gazeta on
V. Druzin (the paper's former Deputy Editor) and B. Dyakov who in Literatura i
zhizn defended, as Kommunist had done, poor artistic work if it was ideologically
"correct", and who criticized editors and publishing houses for insisting on high
artistic standards (cf. Literatura i zhizn 6 and 19 September 1959; Literaturnaya
gazeta 10 and 22 September 1959).

Other commentators on the Congress unanimously disagree with this assessment.
Mr. R. Hingley, writing in Soviet Survey 1959 July-September, considers
Khrushchev's speech to have been "the second most important event of the
Conference" (i.e. the other was the change in the secretaryship of the Union) while
speakers who preceded him "took trouble to conform to the ritual of servility".
Mr. M. Hayward in Problems of Communism 1959, no. 4 thinks that "apart from
Khrushchev's address, the only other notable contribution to the Congress came in
the shape of an article by K. Paustovski".

Mr. J. Lindsay who attended the Congress suggests in Mainstream 1959, no. 9
that "Khrushchev's long impromptu speech in many ways made the Congress, gave" it
its distinctive note....it may be taken to represent both a personal victory and
a defeat for the cliques. Many of the older writers have opposed him for his
revelations; one of these at least was moved to tears by his speech and went
afterwards to him, saying 'I make my peace with you'."
34. A number of verbal changes and amendments were made, the most important of
which seems to have been the re-insertion in the Rules of the "demand" for the
"historically concrete portrayal of reality." More significant are the changes
in the organization of the Union: the presidium has been abolished, and the
Board of Management (144 members) has been given the right to re-elect the
secretariat (27 members, including representatives from all Republican Writers'
Unions) biennially. The right to confirm enrolment of new members and expulsions
will now devolve on Republican Unions (Literaturnaya gazeta 22 May 1959).

It may be worth recording that S. S. Smirnov reported to Congress
(Literaturnaya gazeta 26 May 1959) that under his predecessor the paper had "lost a
considerable part of its subscribers and contributors." Mr. J. Lindsay in
Mainstream 1959, no. 9, p. 22 adds that "all remarks to the discredit of Kochetov
evoked applause." Some literary periodicals seem to have fared not much better
than Literaturnaya gazeta: Partiinaya zhizn 1959, no. 20, p. 33 discloses that
official subscriptions, i.e. by party and state organs (excluding libraries,
clubs etc.) account for 40-50% of the circulation figures of the following
periodicals s Zvezda, Znarnya, Oktyabr, Novy mir, Inostrannaya literatura, Druzhba
narodov. Publication figures for three of the most important literary periodicals
are as follows:

	Novy mir	Znamya	Oktyabr
1957 no. 12	140,000	130,000	130,000
1959 no. 1	140,000	100,000	168,100
1959 no. 5	140,000	102,000	173,200
1959 no. 10	140,000	99,000	169,100

[page 26]

35. Only two or three speakers dwelt on the theme of the "positive" hero.

36. This is not to deny, of course, that "creative assignments" did produce a
few interesting and informative reports. Cf. e.g. A. Zlobin, "Na sibirskoi
magistral", Novy mir 1959� no. 1.

37. Literaturnaya gazata 20 May 1959; Mainstream 1959, no. 9, pp. 37-38.
38. Literaturnaya gazeta 22 May 1959.
39. Ibid. 26 May 1959.
40. Ibid. 22 May 1959.
41. IMA. 26 May 1959.
42. Ibid. 23 May 1959.
43. Ibid. 24 May 1959; Soviet Literature 1959, no. 8, pp. 102-103.
44. Literaturnaya gazeta 24 May 1959; also in Soviet Literature 1959, no. 8,
p. 109. A resolution on Surkov's report was adopted but appears not to have
been published.
45. Literaturnaya gazeta 23 May 1959.
46. Ibid. 28 May 1959; L. Nikulin, one of the tutors at the Seminar, had
condemned this principle for selecting young writers (in ibid. 16 May 1959): "To
me, a writer of the older generation there was something unnatural and
farfetched in the way the Seminar was organized... Let us assume a no less (and
maybe, even more) gifted young author had written his first atory about the
Civil War or the construction of Magnitogorsk, what then? In any case, can we
rear a new generation of writers 'classified according to theme'?" Cf. also
his post-Congress article, ibid. 30 June 1959.
47. Ibid. 23 May 1959.
48. Ibid. 20 May 1959; Mainstream 1959, no. 9, PP. 39-4O.
49. Literaturnaya gazeta 20 May 1959.
50. Ibid. Alexander Chakovski, for instance, has very precise ideas about the
character and "calendar dates" of the "contemporary" novel (cf. his article,
"Sovremennost -- eto glavnoye", ibid. 19 March 1959); it should be "about Soviet
man of the period between the XX and XXI Congresses. About his complex, often
excruciating reflections related to the exposure of the cult of the personality.
About his faith in the party's strength and wisdom. About his hatred for those
who tried to use the decisions of the XX Congress to harm our regime...and about
how this Soviet man -- grown in understanding and matured by experience 
welcomes the XXI Congress of the Builders of Communism enthusiastically, imbued with
deep faith in the future, and ready to continue the struggle."
51. Ibid. 28 May 1959.
52. Ibid.; Mainstream 1959, no. 9, pp. 32-36.
53. E. g. Panova's "Sentimentalny roman" and Bakalov's "Pyad zemli"(cf. Note 25
supra); A. Kalinin's "Surovoye pole" (Molodaya gvardiya 1958, no. 2); A. Ivanov's
"Peviteli" (Sibirskiye ogni 1958, nos. 2-4); Yu. Kazakov's "Otshchepenets"(Oktyabr
1959, no. 7). It is hoped to discuss these, amongst other works, in a further
article.

[page 27]

SOVIET LITERATURE TOES THE LINE

Bulletin of the
Institute of the USSR
November 1959
by A. Gaev

In the six months that have passed since the Third Congress
of Soviet Writers there have been unmistakable signs that, in
spite of the marked demonstrations of democracy on the part of
the present Soviet leaders, the subjection of art to policy is one
of the Party's foremost aims. The narrow limits of the official
role played by art exclude any manifestations whosoever of free
thought or deviations from the directive contained in Khrushchev's
article "For a Close Link Between Literature, Art and Human Living".
The Third Congress itself passed quietly along the lines expected
by the Party without any surprises. The three postponements
had apparently been utilized to work out every little detail,
assign the roles, and fix the conclusions. The few awkward moments
took place minaly behind the scenes. Even the replacement of the
reads of the Union of Soviet Writers passed without the normal
Tuss and criticism. At the previous congress, for example, the
Union's heads had been subjected to charges of following an
incorrect line. The replacement of A. Surkov as head of the Union
of Soviet Writers had been decided in beforehand. He read the
main report, but did not make the final speech.

Presumably the problem of the provocative literature of the
younger generation had been examined in detail; writers under the
age of thirty were hardly represented at all at the Congress, only
three delegates out of 497. This remarkably low figure is explained
by the fact that most young writers are regarded as "seditious
free-thinkers", engaged in the search for new forms and new subject
matter. Some thorny problems arose during the Congress; but here
again action took place behind the scenes. There was, for example,
the case of Konstantin Simonov. On May 23, Radio Moscow reported
during the Congress' last session that "Konstantin Simonov is on
the tribune. He is reading out the greeting from the Congress
participants to the Party Central Committee." Apparently Simonov's
earlier mistakes had not yet been forgotten and it was decided
not to mention him in connection with the publication of such an
important document.

As far as purely literary problems are concerned, special
artention must be paid to a statement made by the writer Konstantin
Puastovsky, not at the Congress itself, but in the newspaper
Literaturnaya gazeta during the course of the Congress. Entitled
"Undebatable and Debatable Thoughts", it by no means paid lip
service to the Party line.[1] The article ended by pointing to
the two paths open to the Congress:

The writers' Congress is being held. Will it affirm for
writers the free and courageous sweep of creation which alone
will create the most important of the literature of our
century, Soviet literature. Or will the Congress busy itself
with petty supervision of writers and with old discords.
In the latter case it will have served no purpose.

-----------------------------

[1]Literaturnaya gazeta. May 20, 1959.

[page 28]

Speaking of the unfavorable situation on the literary from
he indignantly asked:

Why are persons admitted to literature and even accept
into the Writers' Union who do not know the Russian language
and are completely indifferent to it? Why are we content with
the monotony of a bureaucratic and philistine language, with
its beggarliness and phonetic ugliness? What right have we got
to cast the classic and powerful speech created by a
generation of our great predecessors into the backyard?

This appeal for a struggle for the purity of the Russian
language ought, in Paustovsky's opinion, to find some expressions
in the decisions of the Congress, In spite of the situation 
prevailing at the Congress as regards young writers, Paustovsky for
the courage to say in his article:

There is a (young generation). And a fine one at that.
There are Yury Kazakov, Sergei Nikitin, Nataliya Tarasanko
Vladimir Tendraykov, Yury Trifonov, Richy Dostyan, Yu?
Bondarev, Iosif Dyk, and many more young writers.

Not only did he mention names, he even emphasized that one
should not be alarmed by the militant enthusiasm of young write
"Youthful enthusiasm is useful."

Ilya Ehrenburg's appearance in the press was just as 
unexpected and out of tune with the spirit of the Congress. His article
in Novy mir, entitled "Rereading Chekhov," appeared shortly before
the Congress, Apart from the fact that Marx, Engels and Lenin are
not mentioned, the article advances numerous extremely "independence
concepts. Ehrenburg writes, for example, that love for writers
"is primarily dependent on their proximity to the spiritual work
of the reader":

A witness in court who relates what everybody knows is
no use to anybody, neither to the prosecution nor to the
defense. Any writer deserving of the name sees things that
escape the eye of the average observer. Isn't it time
repudiate observation as the main quality of a writer?

Developing his thought further, Ehrenburg quotes Chekhov
on the basic demand of art:

Art is unique and admirable in that one cannot lie in
it...One can lie in love, in politics, in medicine, one c?
deceive people and even God himself - there were such case
but one cannot deceive in art.

Ehrenburg lists various critical remarks about Chekhov in
his time, remarks which could easily apply today. There is the
astonished cry, "Why this decadence?"; the remark that Chekhov
is not as great as many people believe; and so on. An excerpt
from a letter of Chekhov's written at the time of his trip to
Sakhalin also has a meaning for the present: "We are letting
millions of people rot in prisons, now for nothing, without
reason, barbarously...And all this is dumped on the red nosed
prison warders." Finally, touching upon the basic principle of
art, Ehrenburg emphasizes that contemporary works contain "an

[page 29]

assiduous blend of colors, a variety of nuances. The world 'realism'
means nothing in itself..."

A further article which appeared at the time of the Congress
was V. Nekrasoy's critical review of A. Dovzhenko's motion picture
A Poem of the Sea, which was awarded a Lenin prize three weeks prior
to the opening of the Congress. Although the article only
discusses the motion picture, it broaches questions directly related
to Soviet art as a whole and, of course, to literature. Nekrasov
writes:

...against a background of gigantic construction work
conventional persons symbolizing particular ideas move about, not
doing very much and talking garrulously, or rather thinking
alound in conventional journalistic...language...Pathetic...

One must bear in mind that A Poem of the Sea is build around
the creation of the Kakhova Water Reservoir, when dozens of villages
ere submerged and their inhabitants compelled to leave their homes.
Nekrasov is disturbed not so much by this fact as by the
stereotyped characters. He is, for instances, indignant about the
character known as General Fedorchenko who says of himself in the motion
picture: "I'm a famous, happy chap and what I feel and do is fine."

Nekrasov writes bitterly about this:

But do you have the right to talk like this, Comrade General?
You arrived at your kolkhoz after the war. And you arrived
as though you were on holiday. But had you been there earlier?
In the difficult postwar years? Oh, Comrade General, is every
thing you feel and do really so wonderful?

Such thoughts about this motion picture can be applied to many
literary works in which cheap pathos takes the place of truth.

The Soviet leaders carefully noted all the signs of dissent
and took steps to "reestablish order in the literary household. "The
congress decisions were intended to root out all undesirable
elements in literary life and to subject writers to the Party, They
were put into effect immediately after the Congress. Khrushchev's
speech at the June Party Central Committee plenary session
contained an additional directive. In the concluding section of the
speech he stated: "We must, comrades, put more effort into the
attainment of planned goals, criticize more boldly, display a
Bolshevist implacability toward evident faults." Further one
the implacability and just what is meant by failings are expressed
more concretely:

We have individuals among the writers who ask what
sort of guidance is Party guidance of literature? We reply,
you there, don't you recognize the Party's guidance? But
what is Party guidance? It is the will of millions of people,
the will of millions of minds, the collective wisdom of
millions of people. But one writer sits in his dacha somewhere,
once in a while produces some puny work, and hopes that it
will be recognized as an expression of the spirit of the
people of our time, of the entire people. Isn't this a real
cult of one's own personality, which, as you see, is unwilling
to put up with the guidance of a Party which expresses the will
of millions...Such a fellow...wants to put himself above
the Party, above the people.

[page 30]

It is quite obvious who is meant: Khrushchev is attacking
Pasternak as a warning to other would-be rebels.

The line given was immediately adopted. The June issue of
the magazine Inoatrannaya literatura contained an article by E.
Trushchenko on a review of Doctor Zhivago published in the
Parisian journal Nouvelles Critiques. Trushchenko quotes the remarks
made by the journal about Pasternak:

"Soviet literature has advanced, moving in step with the
people. Pasternak has remained alone. His books cannot be
considered the books of a Soviet writer.

...Pasternak has betrayed the society in which he lives
and as a result has alienated himself from the people, the
(Parisian) review concludes,, Neither the talent nor the formal master
of such a writer can create respect for him."

The literary critic V. Shcherbina ttacked Nekrasov's censure
of A Poem of the Sea in the newspaper Sovetskaya kultura:

All of Nekrasov's judgements on Dovzhenko's motion
picture are intended to show that what is called romance,
inspiration,...opathos is nothing more than lifeless convention

Shcherbina accuses Nekrasov of an inability to believe in the
sincerity of romantic pathos, and compares Dovzhenko's work with
Nekrasov's criticism as follows? "One can also say that Dovzhenko
has created the romantic and heroic image of Soviet man at war,
while .V. Nekrasov (is) deliberately earthbound and uninspiredo"
Earlier the magazine Iskusstvo kino had carried an article by Y?
Varshavky entitled "One Must Look Into Things," which alleged the
Nekrasov "belongs to a particular artistic school" and that he
has no right to maintain that his is the only school. In the s?
issue, the Ukrainian poet M. Rylsky accused Nekrasov of ignoring
the national factor in A Poem of the Sea.[2]

The Soviet press set about Konstantin Paustovsky for his
above-mentioned article. It was represented on this occasion by
a former editor of Literaturnaya gazeta, the author of the novel,
The Brothers Ershov, V. Kochetovo His lengthy article "On Truth
and Untruth" was published in Literatura i zhizn, the official
organ of the Union of Writers of the RSFSR.[3] First, he expressed
his amazement at the fact that there had been no objections to
Paustovsky's article. Addressing Paustvosky, he exclaimed:

So, "we lack the truth". In the fall this thesis will
be 42 years oldo Earlier we became extremely agitated when
Our literature was accused of untruth. In 1956 and 1957,
Soviet writers mercilessly fought against this thesis which
keeps on popping up, fought since international revisionism
attempted to use it as its weapon for attacks on us.

Thus, Paustovsky is tagged with the label of revisionism.
Kochetov then endeavors to prove that Paustovsky's assertion that

-----------------------------

[2]Iskusstvo i kino, No. 5 (1959).

[3]Literatura i zhizn, June 19, 1959.

[page 31]

Soviet writers lack the truth is a "complete falsehoods " In
particular, sharp attacks are provoked by Paustovsky's reproach that
writers portray straightforward, primitive persons and drag
colorless, stereotyped personalities into their works.

Next in line for attack was Ilya Ehrenburg for his article
"The Laws of Art" which appeared in Literatura i zhizn of
August 16, 1959. In this essay he had asserted that a society
which is only interested in technical progress and neglects arts
can never resemble the society which is anxious to create. A.
Dymshchits, a member of the editorial board of the magazine
Zvezda and one of the foremost antirevisionists, countered":
"Ehrenburg's (work) contains, alongside some correct
observations, incorrect thoughts which bewilder the reader. The advcie
which he gives to writers cannot but give rise to objections."
The objections, or more exactly accusations, made by Dymshchits
are; [1] The tasks of literature are being interpreted far too
narrowly; [2] nothing has been said of the positive experience
of Soviet literature; [3] Ehrenburg does not examine the faults
? Soviet literature objectively; [4] he regrets that the word
"inspiration" has been buried to no purposeo The following
accusation is indicative of the general approach of the attack on
Ehrenburg:

He sees the main task of literature as the training of
his feelings, and considers the "management of the heart"
to be the writer's main field of activity. "There is only
one field," asserts I. Ehrenburg, "in which the writer is
mote informed than the politician, the engineer, the
physicist, the astronomer, or the agronomist, this is the secret
of the human hearts the sphere of the feelints..."However,
the experience of our country's history does not
substantiate this judgments politicians, builders of (gigantic)
industrial (enterprises) are more informed in psychology
than writers.

The critic cannot understand how Ehrenburg cany deny that
?y work can be written to order. To prove his point, Dymshchits
citizens of works which, in his opinion, are exemplary, although
written to order. These includes Mother by Gorky; the Iron Torrent, by
Serafimovich; Chapayev by Furmanov; Seeds of Tomorrow[+] by Sholokhov;
That's How Steel was tempered by N. Ostrovsky; The Young Guard,
by jfadeev; Je brule Paris by Jasienski; and, surprisingly enough,
The Second Day and The Fall of Paris by Ehrenburg. Then, the view
that art must have a particular line is discussed and Ehrenburg's
opinions on the subjects simply dismissed as unclear. There have
been numerous signs that Soviet writers are taking note of
Khrushchev's directives on art. Sholokhov has recently revised his
Seeds of Tomorrow and They fought For Their Country; Leonov has
revised his novel The Thief; while Valentin Kataev has reported
in Literaturnaya gazeta that he is revising the novel Jot the Power

-----------------------------

[+]Also known as Virgin Soil Upturned.
[Page 32]

of the Soviets, which is apparently to be retitled In the
Catacomb. Referring to this work, Kataev asserted that the
revision is "proceeding well and gives him real artistic pleasure"[4]

From time to time the Party theoretical organs Kommunist
has something to say about art. A recent issue contained the
article "What is Abstractionism in Art?" by Y. Kolpinsky and
F. Kaloshin.[5] Although it discussed mainly painting and
sculpture, it touched on all forms of art. All formalistic
tendencies came under fire as the work of "decadent intellectuals".
The political tone of the article is revealed by the very first
sentences "The main aspect of contemporary history is the
competition of the two systems, the capitalist and the socialist."
In general, the article is another milestone in present policy
in the field of art; it issues a strict warnings artists and
writers must avoid abstract creation. A propaganda campaign
in support of the decisions of the Third Congress of Soviet
Writers is also being waged by the magazine Literaturnaya gazeta.
Almost every issue contains a section entitled "Writers' Diary"
in place of an editorial. Extracts from this "Diary" are
extremely revealing:

The conept "modern writer" signifies not only that the
writer responds to the basic themes of the present, but
also how he responds (V. Lidin)

Contact with the people is one of the chief and
constant features of Soviet literature. (Y. Lebedinsky)

Now the writer has no need to walk about with a
notebook and to note down questionnaire data on outstanding
workers. They go to him. . . He is happy, seeing, in this,
his own civil contribution to the great life of the people.
(S. Grakhovsky)

These are the main thoughts found in the statements of
writers and they are in full accord with the aims of the Congress
or rather of the Party leaders.

An event such as Khrushchev's visit to Mikhail Sholokhov in
the village of Veshenskaya and his invitation to the writer to
accompany him to the United States must not be overlooked.
Although various writers accompanied Khrushchev to the United State
the invitation to Sholokhov is of special importance. There can
be no doubt that the Kremlin is extremely anxious to have a Nobel
Prize won by a Soviet writer who is a Communist. With this aim
in mind, Sholokhov was sent on a mission to Scandinavia shortly
before the 1958 awards were made. However, the prize for
literature went to Boris Pasternak for a work which was rejected by
Soviet publishers and has been harshly condemned in the USSR.
These facts explain Khrushchev's efforts to put Sholokhov in a
position to gain a Nobel Prize. The fact that the writer has
not produced any important work in recent years is immaterial
in the eyes of the Soviet leaders. Khrushchev set out to
advertise a really great writer irrespective of his current literary
efforts. The Soviet press treated the visit to Veshenskaya as an

-------------------

(4) Literaturnaya gazeta, July 18, 1959.

(5) Kommunist, No. 10, 1959.

[Page 33]

an event of unusual importance and produced the usual Soviet
propaganda falsification. At a meeting held in Veshenskaya Khrushchev
told the villagers: "We are meeting you today in Veshenskaya, to
which I have come at the invitation of your countryman." Of course,
the affair was not quite so simple. Sholokhov could not invite
Khrushchev under normal circumstances as a good friend. The visit
was specially organized. Khrushchev did not spare the compliments
when speaking of the writer and the Soviet press echoed him. The
writer Sergei Voronin wrote in an editorial in Literaturnaya gazeta:

In these days the attention of the Soviet people is focused
on the important event which took place in the village of
Veshenskaya. The head of the government Nikita Sergeevich
Khrushchev was there as a guest of the favorite writer of our land,
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov.[6]

The article went on that the meeting had become a national
holiday and that Veshenskaya would henceforth be known as the
"literary village". Literaturnaya gazeta of September 5 mentioned
Sholokhov in an editorial blatantly entitled "An Artist who
Enriches the World" and five days later published a further
editorial entitled "The Master." A week after the visit Khrushchev's
speech at Veshenskaya was issued in pamphlet-form. However, the
publicity about Sholokhov did not gain him a Nobel Prize.

While Khrushchev was visiting Sholokhov, another important
event was taking place in the Soviet literary world - the Swedish
writer Henrik Birnbaum visited Pasternak. The meeting was rather
unusual. At first the visitor had difficulty gaining admission
to the disgraced writer, but finally Pasternak appeared and
spent several minutes with the visitor in his garden. When
Birnbaum was leaving, Pasternak said to him: "...don't forget, I beg
you, that you weren't with me long. You know they don't like me
to receive foreigners now." All sorts of assumptions can be made
on the basis of such a brief meeting, but this remark in itself
gives a good idea of the present circumstances of the fall writer.

There are thus enough facts available to illustrate the
position of writers in the Soviet Union and Party policy in the field
of art. The short period of the "thaw" is long past. One can only
reminisce oil it like Ilya Ehrenburg in his poem, Northern Spring,
which appeared in Literaturnaya gazeta 2 months after the
Congress and is clearly symbolic in character.[7] The author of the
Thaw wrote: "What does it mean in the March frost,/ When gripped
with desperation,/ To wiat and wiat /Until the awkward massive
ice begins to move. / But we have known such winters,/ Have endured
such cold./ That there was not even sorrow,/But only pride and
misfortune./ And with firm, icy malice,/Dazzled by a dry blizzard/
We saw, while not seeing,/ The gree eyes of Spring." Yet the
works which are cultivated are those which fit in with the program
proposed for the Congress by the Central Committee greeting.
One example is a poem by Konstantin Simonov who has "slipped" so
often in the past: "Prize our peaceful efforts,/ I was in the
wars - but I live by belief in peace./ May the wind of peace
bear the head of our state/ To you on its wings."

-------------------

(6) Literaturnaya gazeta, September 8, 1959.
[Page 34]
 
THE SOVIET WRITERS CONGRESS

Along the Middle of the Road

Soviet Survey
No. 29
July-September 1959
Ronald Hingley

The most important event of the Third Congress of the
Union of Soviet Writers (Moscow, 18 to 23 May) was the removal
of Alexey Surkov from the powerful post of First Secretary and
his relegation to the relatively obscure position of Secretary
so that he is now no more exalted in rank than twenty-five ot[??]
equal-ranking Secretaries. Surkov is an energetic and forcef[??]
man whose name has become identified with the practice of
planning too much emphasis on committee work and administration, o[??]
interfering with authors' manuscripts and allotting them
'creative assignments' (tvorcheskie Kommandirovki). This latter
phrase--not surprisingly--has acquired an ironical flavour am[??]
Soviet writers.

To those who have kept their ear close to ghe ground,
Surkov's demotion will have come as no great surprise. For some
time there have been indications that he has made powerful
enemies among his fellow-writers and that these have been
intri[??]ing to accomplish his downfall. Since Surkov took a leading [??]
in the recent campaign against Pasternak, some Western observers
have interpreted his demotion as part of a move to reinstate
Pasternak in the Union. But it is unlikely that this motive [??]
been a factor. Among the people who have got rid of the First
Secretary it is probable that only a minority--if any--hold an
active brief for Dr. Zhivago. The rest have just got tired o[??]
being pushed around.

Fedin, who succeeds Surkov, will certainly push them around
a great deal less. Like Leonid Sobolev, who heals the RSFSR
branch of the Union, he is not a Party member. What is more
important, he is not by temperament a leader or
organiser--probably this is the very reason why he has been chosen. As
one of the most distinguished living Soviet novelists he bring
great literary prestige to his new office, while as an
intellectual (and leading chronicler of the Soviet intelligentsia's
evaluation) he offers a striking contrast to his predecessor. Su[??]

[Page 35]

is by no means a negligible poet, but in recent years
everyone has come to regard him as a literary apparatchik.

The manner of Surkov's removal has been interesting. He
has not been in any way disgraced and the whole matter has
been handled with the greatest possible decorum. During the
proceedings of the Congress we had hardly any hints that he
was about to go. He was simply voted out of office when the
Congress was over. On the first day he had presented a long
report: "The tasks of Soviet literature in the building of
Communism." This report formed in theory the theme of the
majority of the speeches which followed during the next five days.
But very few of the speakers referred to Surkov by name. By
those who did mention him he was not greatly abused, but he
got absolutely no bouquets--in contrast, for example, with
Tvardovsky and Sholokhov.

This report of Surkov's was long, boring, and heavily
larded with Soviet literary cliches. That was to be expected.
What was surprising was that some of the later speakers
criticised it precisely because it was boring, thus introducing a
dangerous new principle into the conduct of Soviet congresses
and one which, if it became established, might ultimately prove
entirely fatal to them. For example, Valentin Katayev, after
mentioning the names of three promising young prose-writers,
went on to say: "I could also mention a lot of other names,
but I don't want to turn my speech into the monotonous reading
of the traditional litany which has already become so painfully
boring to everyone." This was a back-handed reference to the
enormous catalogues in Surkov's report--catalogues of authors
who, he claimed, had served Soviet literature in various ways.

One of the more outspoken attacks on Surkov was made in
an interesting speech by Anatoly Kalinin from Rostov-on-Don.
He complained that the Union had "caught a disease" which caused
many writers to spend most of their time in committee meetings
instead of at their own desks--a theme which was echoed by many
other speakers. He also said that: "The poet Alexey Surkov
is in some sense a victim of the Secretary of the Union Alexey
Surkov. If one half of all those emotions which he has
scattered with lavish hand on committee tables had gone to the
building of his poetical strophes, then perhaps today readers might
be enjoying more than one long poem produced by his pen."

Kalinin's speech contains several lyrical and almost
sycophantic references to Sholokhov, and raises some interesting
questions. Why did Sholokhov himself not speak at the Congress?
He had made a memorable contribution to the Second Congress in
1954 with his vicious attack on Simonov. He is everywhere
acknowledged as Soviet Russia's greatest writer, so that his
failure to perform at the Third Congress could not fail to excite
comment. Was he even in Moscow? Or sulking in his stanitsa?
He is probably no friend of Surkov, and it seems to me quite
possible that he "put up" Kalinin to make this speech. In an
unpolemical conference it was one of the most polemical
contributions and may well reflect His Master's Voice.

[Page 36]

A speech by the Moscow poet Nikolay Gribachov contained
an even more outspoken condemnation of Surkov's opening report.
He said that such reports "degrade our literature, insult and
oppress our writers. At the First Congress of Writers of the
USSR Leonid Sobolev said that the Party and the Government
had given us all rights and had taken from us only one
right--that of writing badly. It would have been a good thing if
we had at the same time been deprived of the right to such
reports as that with which our Third Congress began."

Gribachov speaks with satisfaction of the atmosphere of
businesslike calm in which the Third Congress is proceeding
"after a serious ideological struggle, complicated by the
unprincipled racket and unhealthy hullabaloo kicked up by
little-talented and para-literary (okololiteraturny) persons."
This is rather tantalising. Gribachov may of course be
referring to the well-known series of rows about Dudintsev's Not
By Bread Alone and the two Literary Moscow compilations." But
it seems possible that he is referring to much more recent
squabbles which preceded the Congress, of which we have little
knowledge and which have hardly been allowed to erupt into
its decorous atmosphere or into the rather less decorous
atmosphere of the preliminary Congresses of Republican Unions.

This atmosphere of decorum forms a strong contrast between
the present Congress and its more hard-hitting predecessor
in 1954, when many harsh words were exchanged. It is perhaps
the price which writers have had to pay for the removal of
Surkov. It is not often that the Party permits a leading
figure to be removed in this way from below, and the procedure
has been entirely different from that of more familiar Soviet
demotions. Surkov has not been humiliated. In fact he is
still waiting in the wings. If necessary he can be reinstated
He may even become more useful to the Party as a threat than
he was as a boss.

However this may be, the replacement of Surkov by Fedin
remains a step away from illiberalism in the affairs of the
Union. An element of greater tolerance is also to be found
in what I judge to be the second most important event of the
conference--Khrushchev's address which took place on the last
day and has been interpreted by some commentators as offering
an "olive-branch" to the writers. It certainly offered them
a respite from boredom. He spoke impromptu. Although his
speech, as reported in Pravda, may have been doctored after
the event, it still makes very lively reading. It appears to
especial advantage after the dull and incantational harangues
which had preceded it.

This was of course far from being Khrushchev's first
irruption into the literary world. He took a vigorous part in
suppressing the 1956 movement of writers towards greater
freedom of expression. Having handled these freedom-writers
somewhat roughly, and having successfully stamped out the
"revisionist" heresy for which they stood, he has now slightly shifted
his position to one of armed benevolence. He spoke almost with
approval of Dudintsev's Not by Bread Alone. Although "certain

[Page 37]

ill-wishers abroad" (a common formula at the Congress) had
been wrong in claiming that Not by Bread Alone was very nearly
the greatest work of Russian literature, it did contain
"certain pages deserving of attention." Indeed, Mikoyan had once
remarked that in places Dudintsev's arguments were an exact
repetition of Khrushchev's own. Dudintsev's error had been
to exaggerate and to generalise. "But he was never our enemy
and was not an opponent of the Soviet System." This drew
applause from the delegates.

Does this graciousness imply that Khrushchev is now
prepared to allow greater latitude to writers? Scarcely. He
compared the present status of the heretics of 1956 with that
of a reformed thief--they had better not lapse into crime again.
"There is a correct proverb" (another typical turn of phrase)
"one doesn't kick a man when he's down." Khrushchev made it
quite clear that these writers had been kicked into a posture
of submission, and that they would be well advised to remain
prone. Otherwise they would get kicked again.

One abiding feature in Khrushchev's attitude to the writers
is the ingrained contempt for intellectuals felt by the "worker"
or practical man with mud on his boots or machine-oil on his
hands. He revealed this in the genially patronising manner of
his whole address, and also in his preamble, where he was
careful to put writers in the same class not merely as composers
and artists, but also as film executives and other "equally
remarkable branches of the Soviet creative intelligentsia."
And he went on to point out that "life is always incomparably
richer, deeper, and more full-blooded than the very best
artistic production."

Perhaps Russian writers particularly need this douche of
cold water, since when given the slightest chance, they tend
to adopt the postures of major prophets or arbiters of destiny
no less easily than they adopt the postures of servility. In
particular, Khrushchev is anxious that they should not usurp
the function of the Central Committee by taking too seriously
their role as critics of Soviet society. "Listen, friends, if
there's anyone who reveals and lays bare deficiencies and vices,
whose hand will not tremble when doing this--these matters (I
have retained Khrushchev's "impromptu" syntax in my translation)
are the affairs of the Party, they're handled by its Central
Committee." One feels that Khrushchev's ideal of a writer is
a man who devotes his days to some man-sized job with lathe or
tractor, and spends his evenings helping to compile a collective
illustrated brochure about youth in the Virgin Lands. Even the
most pliable of Soviet writers will not quite stand for this.
As a reasonable man, Khrushchev is prepared to humour his
writers to some extent. But he feels that they need to be
repeatedly reminded of their true place.

Few of the preceding speakers at the Congress needed such
reminders, to judge from the trouble they took to conform with
the ritual of Servility. But at least four senior figures did
not speak at all. Apart from Sholokhov, whom I have already
mentioned, these were Leonov, Ehrenburg, and Simonov. These
four had all taken a prominent part in the Second Writers
Congress. Is their failure to speak at the Third Congress to be

[Page 38]

interpreted as an example of "the heroic feat of silence" (the
form of passive resistance often adopted by disgruntled Soviet
authors) or are they in disgrace? Of the four Leonov, at least
cannot be much in disgrace, since he has been elected to the
Secretariat.

Of the remaining speeches at the Congress (which had 89
speakers in all) there is on the whole not very much that need
be said, owing to their conformist character. Not surprisingly
the most independent and interesting contribution was that of
Tvardovsky. Tvardovsky complained that "we still seem to be
paying a certain tribute to the inertia of our existence of
yesterday." He criticised the "lifeless phraseology" of
certain speeches and their preoccupation with boring statistics.
As any visitor to the USSR knows to his cost, Soviet citizens
in all walks of life are obsessed with figures, the recital of
which obviously has on them some mysterious therapeutic effect
Nowhere is this obsession more ridiculous than in the sphere
of literature, where, as Tvardovsky points out, quality me[??]s
everything and quantity nothing. He said that he would rather
have seven decent plays which he would like to see again and
again than seven hundred plays "written in the period under
review." The important task was the raising of quality. There
were all too many writers willing to take responsibility for
"literature as a whole." It was time some of them began to
think more of taking personal responsibility for their own
individual work. The most provocative sentence in his speech
was a blow against the self-congratulatory complacency of many
other speakers: "We must say to our literary Yesterday, and
even to our Today. "We can't go on living like this and we
shan't go on living like this."

Tvardovsky's speech was not calculated to set the Moskva
River on fire, but it was a healthy sign. As some of his
previous escapades show, he is a loyal but liberal-minded Party
member who believes that the Party can afford to allow writers
more latitude than it at present contemplates. He recently
published an interesting poem in Novy Mir in which he complain
against an act of censorship carried out against hiw work in
Pravda. He is a loyal communist, but one whose fortunes serve
as a useful barometer of the state of Soviet letters.

No Russian public function is complete without some sort
of skandal. The skandal in this instance was provided by
Paustovsky. He did not speak at the Congress, probably because wh[??]
he had to say struck too violently against the predetermined
atmosphere of decorum. But he published an article in the
Literary Gazette of 20 May, one of an otherwise undistinguished
collection by various authors issued "a propos of the Congress
This takes a position far in advance of Tvardovsky and shows
Paustovsky as a courageous and unrepentant rebel. It says much
for the relative state of freedom of Soviet letters, when
compared with their darker days, that such an article was printed
at all.

Paustovsky gives a warning to those writers (including man
of the speakers at the Congress) who take it upon themselves

[Page 39]

to speak in the name of the people. He warns them that readers
are very well able to distingusih sincerity from an ability to
adapt oneself (prisposoblenchestvo) and that they can
differentiate a genuine from a merely "shouting" link with the people.
He speaks with distaste of various literary "isms," and though
he does not mention Socialist Realism among these, he was
writing for people trained to read between the lines. He deplored
the tradition that novels must always have a falsely happy
ending and a balance between light and dark colours nicely
calculated in favour of the former. Thank goodness Anna Karenina
had been written before the appearance of this tradition. He
wondered why, in the forty-first year of the existence of the
Soviet system, it was still necessary to give the appearance
of proving its superiority to the capitalist system "as if we
ourselves doubt this and marvel at it as at some incredible
miracle."

Paustovsky's most outspoken sentence reads: "Perhaps the
reason why we shout so much and so loudly about truth in
literature is because truth is what we haven't got enough of." He
also made an eloquent plea for the use of good Russian and the
abandonment of jargon. "The language is being bureaucratised
from top to bottom, beginning with the newspapers and radio and
ending with our ordinary everyday speech." Would the Congress,
secure freedom for the writers? Or would it occupy itself with
submitting them to petty-minded interference and raking up old
quarrels? It was time to stop calling one's friends enemies
just because they spoke unpleasant truths and did not play the
hypocrite.

One or two of the later speakers at the Congress took
Paustovsky to task for writing this article, but considering its
explosive quality he got off very lightly. The criticisms
levelled against him were vague and half-hearted.

The appearance of Paustovsky's article raises an
interesting and mildly comforting speculation. We tend all too easily
to think of recent Soviet literature as divided into two quite
distinct and opposing categories: (a) run-of-the-mill
"Socialist Realism" of a drearily conformist type; (b) protest
literature such as that associated with the year 1956. In fact,
however, a third type of writing has been quietly gaining ground.
This consists of works which either avoid politics altogether,
or at least dodge the sharper implications of politics. They
naturally make fewer headlines in the West, but they include
much interesting writing nevertheless. To this "neutral"
category belongs some of Paustovsky's own work, the stories of
Antonov and such works as Nilin's Cruelty and Panova's Sentimental
Novel. The appearance of such works would have been almost
unthinkable under Stalin. What hopes does the Third Writers
Congress offer for their future?

The other two categories have had their fates settled
decisvely. Run-of-the-mill Socialist Realism will continue to
struggle on. Protest literature is out. As for "neutral"
writing--that too has been under attack. But the attack has

[Page 40]

taken a very devious form. The opponents of the "neutral"
school have framed their attack on it as a plea for greater
"contemporaneity." It so happens that the "neutral" writers
are more at home describing either pre-revolutionary events
or dealing with Soviet society of the twenties, for which the[??]
now seems to "be a general feeling of nostalgia. The supporter
of "contemporaneity" attack this approach under the label of
the "theory of distance," that is, the idea that a writer can
most effectively treat events with which he is not in too
direct contact. Many words were spilled on this subject at the
Congress. But these fulminations remained abstract.
Individual practitioners of "neutral" writing were not pilloried.
This clearly means that they are to be allowed to continue, as
of the various signs of "liberalism" for which one searches
in the Third Congress this is the most important.

One important result of the Congress has been a radical r[??]
organization of the Union's administration. As set up at the
Second Congress of 1954, this consisted of three main bodies:

1. A Board (pravleniye), consisting of well over a hundred
members.

2. A Presidium of about 40 members.

3. A Secretariat of 11 members.

As the result of changes now adopted at the Third Congress
the Board remains, but the Presidium has disappeared entirely
while the Secretariat has been expanded to include 28 members
(26 Secretaries in addition to the First Secretary, Fedin, and
the Organizational Secretary, K. Y. Voronkov). Fifteen members
of the new Secretariat are the heads of Republican Unions of
Writers. Since these are not normally resident in Moscow, it
seems that the affairs of the Union will now generally be
decided by a small Inner Secretariat, consisting at the most of
13 members.

One effect of this change has been to reduce the
participation of senior writers in the administration of the Union.
Sholokhov, Ehrenburg, Simonov, V. Katayev, Panova, and Pogodi[??]
were all members of the old Presidium. With its abolition the
inevitably lose influence. As already suggested above, some
of these writers may be boycotting the Union at the
moment--or they may be being boycotted by it on Party instructions.
is difficult to tell.

To judge by the contributions of the minority nationalities
to the Congress, few of their new representatives on the
Secretariat are likely to lend distinction to its work. As each
trundled out his pathetic bundle of painfully mastered
ritualistic jargon, a vista began to spread before one's eyes of a
far-flung literary empire from which the dust shall never ris[??]
Although they had nothing interesting to say, at least some of
these "funnies" lent a certain wild poetry to the proceedings
through the medium of their extraordinary names. However
ephemeral his actual contribution may have been, no one is likely
to forget entirely a man called Toktobolot Abdumomunov.

[Page 41]

THE THIRD SOVIET WRITERS CONGRESS: AM APPRAISAL

by Maurice Friedberg
New York, 31 May 1959

The Third Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers is over.
Originally shceduled to begin late in 1958, it was postponed several times
and did not open until May 18, 1959.

The timing has not been conducive to great amounts of publicity
and the five days deliberation of the Congress received comparatively
little attention in the newspapers which had to devote a large part of
their four, or at the most, six pages to coverage of the Foreign Ministers'
Conference in Geneva. But then, in all likelihood, the editors might have
decided that the present Congress has not merited the publicity of its two
predecessors - the first, in 1934, at which the now famous doctrine of
Socialist Realism was proclaimed, and the second, soon after Stalin's
death.

Nevertheless, one should not minimize the importance of the 1959
Congress. Not only because the speeches of its participants offer some
hypotheses regarding the destinies of belles lettres of a country in which,
as the nineteenth century critic Belinsky pat it, literature is almost the
sole expression of culture; but also because, decades of regimentation
notwithstanding, Soviet writers remain the most courageous, and certainly, the
most eloquent segment of the Soviet intelligentsia. As writers in a country
where men of letters have traditionally been regarded as teachers and
spiritual guides, they are also the most influential living molders of the
nation's moods - much more so, undoubtedly, than the official spokesmen
for the Party. When, as the apocryphal tale has it, Stalin called the
writers "engineers of human souls", he did not advance a program: he was
merely stating facts.

The 1959 Congress itself was a rather ceremonial affair. True,
there were speeches and objections at these speeches, there were even
elections and disputes. But most of the serious work had been accomplished in
preceding months in the frequently embittered battles waged in the pages
of the writers' newspaper, Literaturnaya gazeta, in the literary periodicals
such as Novyi mir, Zvezda, Moskva, as well as those appearing in the
minority languages. Simultaneously, the seemingly smooth transition of power
from the old to the new board of the Union of Soviet Writers may have
concealed a struggle for power, the outcome of which is not yet completely
clear.

For while the Party stalwart Alexei Surkov, a symbol of Communist
orthodoxy, a mediocre poet and for some years head of the Union of Soviet
Writers, had nominally been removed from his post, it was Surkov who
delivered the main report entitled "The Tasks of Soviet Literature in the
Building of Communism". Furthermore, while Surkov's speech did not go
unopposed, the last important speaker, Nikita Khrushchev, threw his weight
behind most of Surkov's premises. And Surkov's oration, while containing
the customary reports of successes of Soviet literature, disclosed a
number of dangers which, while officially no longer in existence, seem
to haunt the Soviet leadership.

Thus, Surkov was able to announce proudly that between the last
and the present Congress, the membership of the Union of Soviet Writers

[Page 42]

grew from 3695 to 4801. Similarly, as usual on such occasions, it was
disclosed by Surkov and a number of others that the translations of Soviet
literature into foreign languages had greatly expanded and that the prestige
of Soviet literature abroad had increased; in short, that Soviet literature
is bigger and better than ever.

As far as can be ascertained, there were no objections to the
first part of the above statement, but some vigorous exceptions were taken
to the latter.

A few months before the Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers
had opened, the well-known poet Tvardovsky, whose series "Vasili Tyorkin"
gained tremendous popularity during World War II, had declared in his speech
at the 21st Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that the
customary Soviet literary statistics are quite meaningless, because he,
for one, would rather have six or seven works which he would want to
reread again and again, rather than several hundred dull ones. And no one
would deny that the great bulk of recent Soviet literature has, artistically
been quite mediocre and, above all, artificial in inventions of heroes and
situations. We should stress that this has been equally characteristic of
both the orthodox and the "revisionist" works, for the latter -- with but
a few exceptions -- have been constructed according to the same formulae;
the positive hero, the villain, the clash between the absolete and the
progressive, and the usual denouncement of the victory of good over evil. The
most important shortcoming of the literary output of both camps has been
the lack of psychological depth and the examination of the conflict from
a narrowly politico-economic view. It is this approach that links such
seemingly irreconcilable novels as Vladimir Dudintsev's "revionist" Not By
Bread Alone with Vsevolod Kochetov's "anti-revisionist" Brothers Yershov.
And it is no mere accident that at the Third Writers Congress Khrushchev
reiterated his belief that the much-criticized Dudintsev "is not an enemy
of the Soviet regime," (indeed, he had some praise for the novel and quote
Mikoyan as saying that some of Dudintsev's opinions sound very much like
Khrushchev's own). In contrast, Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, which examine
human destinies quite outside of politics, is not at all likely to be ever
partly "rehabilitated".

The lack of appeal of recent Soviet writing is, no doubt,
aggravated by the fact that, for the first time in many years, Soviet readers
have access to a substantial body of non-Soviet literature -- not only the
Western and Russian classics, but modern Western literature as well. Thus
the journal Inostrannaya Literatura enjoys an ever-increasing number of
readers, and even the journals devoted to Russian literature not infrequent
print Western European and American novellas and short stories -- and these
are by no means limited to works by left-wingers, which would owe their
appearance to their authors' political sympathies rather than artistic
merit. Writers of the stature of Hemingway, Faulkner, Moravia, and Thomas
Mann are now quite readily available to Soviet readers. The Old Man and
the Sea, for example, seems to be enjoying great popularity with the more
intellectual stratum of the public. It is understandable, therefore, that
Soviet literateurs experience serious difficulty competing with these
masters for the favor of Soviet readers, and that some Soviet writers
exhibit a tendency to imitate the artistic devices of Western men of
letters.

What has been the reaction to this at the Writers Congress?

[Page 43]

Surkov, in his speech, was quite willing to concede the
desirability of such anicent techniques as the introduction of love stories
and even marital "triangles". But these, he emphasized, have no place
in Soviet literature except within the framework of presentation of the
total picture of Soviet society on the threshold of Communism. In other
words, it appears -- and several of the recent works of Soviet literature
verify this hypothesis -- that Surkov's demands can be reduced to a replica
of what Soviet literature had so often presented in the post-Zhdanov period:
the outcome of the love story, and indeed its progression, was to depend on
indices of labor productivity. Except, perhaps, that Surkov would acquiesce
to extra-marital love, a taboo in the late 1940's and early 1950's.

As for some of the other Western techniques, objections were
raised by the ideological purists well in advance of the Congress: literary
devices, they claimed, must express the spirit of the epoch, and therefore
Soviet writers must develop their own rather than copy from Western writers.

Most of the discussion at the Congress, however, centered around
the familiar socio-ideological problems. Thus, a good deal of attention
was devoted to the problems of the "positive hero" -- a dilemma that has
plagued Soviet literature since its inception and which, indeed, has roots
going back to the Russian radical critics of the nineteenth century --
Dobrolyubov, Pisarev and Chernyshevsky (see, e. g., Ruffus W. Mathewson's
fine study The Positive Hero in Russian Literature, Columbia University
Press, 1958).

The problem could be summarized thus: since the primary purpose
of Soviet literature is a didactic one, namely the molding of human psyches
into an image desired by the Party, works of Soviet literature must be
centered around a positive protagonist whose actions should present the
reader with an example to be emulated. In this respect, Soviet literature
departs even from the traditions of didactic literatures, both Russian and
non-Russian, where the true moral is provided by the negative example of
the villain or the hero who strays from the path of righteousness, with
the positive hero remaining on the fringes of action - not to speak of
great literatures of all nations where the tragic element predominates,
where the protagonists' downfall, while in itself instructive, is depicted
as having taken place in spite (or in the absence) of his own free will.
Some of these protagonists, by the way -- Oedipus, Anna Karenina, Don
Quixote, Raskolnikov, Othello, Madame Ranevskaya, to mention but a
few -- have to this very day a magnetic appeal to Soviet readers. Instead, works
of Soviet literature are centered around the descendants of the artificial
"positive" heroes of the pseudoclassical raisonneurs of the type of Pravdin
and Starodum in the works of the eighteenth century Russian dramatist
Fonvizin; or the notoriously purposeful revolutionary Rakhmetov in
Chernyshevsky's moralizing radical novel What Is To Be Done?; or of the active,
well-meaning and rather two dimensional Stoltz from Goncharov's Oblomov.

The emphasis on the "positive hero" has become noticeably stronger
since the end of World War II, and it is this emphasis which accounts for
the deadeningly dull quality of many of the post-war Soviet literary
creations. This is not an opinion of an individual Western writer hostile
to Soviet literature -- at the Writer's Congress, Khrushchev himself
complained that he must frequently rub his eyes and prick himself with a
pin in order to keep awake while reading many a Soviet "masterpiece".

[Page 44]

In the post-war years, Soviet novels, plays and poems came to
be dominated by stuffy paragons of Communist virtue shown while carrying
out the commandments of the Central Committee -- over-fulfilling
production quotas, settling on virgin soil, improving the battle-preparedness of
the armed forces, or excelling in studies at a university. To conform
with the narodnost' requirement of the post-war interpretations of
Socialist Realism, these protagonists spoke, more frequently than not,
in the colorless, drab language of Pravda editorials; the postulate of
ideinost' made them true believers in the Communist articles of faith;
the demand of tipichnost required that their opponents be shown as either
agents of foreign powers, backward "survivals of the past" or other villain
whose arguments have no real merit -- and who are, above all, doomed to
extinction, while the upright Communist hero was, inevitably, to remain
victorious.

Aside from the dullness, these works suffered also from the
fact that they were so unbelievable -- their description of life under
the Soviet regime were so unlike the experiences of the Soviet reader.
Little wonder that one of the chief demands of the post-Stalin literary
rebels was that an end be put to the "idealizers" and "embellishers" --
lakirovshchiki was the Russian term -- and that Soviet literature pay some
attention to the realities of Soviet life. The expressions of this revolt
are well-known by now -- these included admissions of gruesome poverty and
drunkennes in the poems of Yevtushenko; of blind obedience to the authority
coupled with deep-seated indifference in the novellas of Granin; of
state-condoned anti-Semitism and regimentation of the arils in Ehrenburg's Thaw;
of an all-powerful bureaucracy in Dudintsev's Not By Bread Alone, and so
forth. All those came to be known by the rather meaningless label of
"revisionism" and were violently attacked in the years preceding the 1959
Congress. The dispute seems to have been resolved by Khrushchev himself.
After stating that the term "embellishers" had been applied to abuse
honest writers "show show the life-affirming strength of the new, of the
Communist", Khrushchev went on to declare himself to be an "embellisher"
of sorts whose sympathies are on the side of the traditional practitioners
of Socialist Realism, Khrushchev continued:

Some of them ("anti-embellishers") say that the central task
of literature consists of discovering all sorts of vices and
shortcomings, while ignoring the great achievements of the
Soviet society. Now hear this, dear friends: if there is
anyone who unmasks and unfolds vices and shortcomings, and
whose hands don't tremble at doing this, then this is the
Party and its Central Committee.

Let us turn to life itself. Did anyone twist our arm to compel
us to make the report at the 20th Party Congress on the cult of
personality and its consequences, to make public the mistakes
committed in connected with this phenomenon?

(Pravda, May 24, 1959, P. 1. NOTE: This appears to be
the first public admission of Khrushchev's "secret"
speech condemning Stalin, the existence of which had
previously been denied by the Soviet authorities and
the text of which is still not to be obtained by Soviet
citizens -- M.F.)

[Page 45]

The historical genre is a bona fide variety of the literature
of Socialist Realism and, indeed, there have been periods when it has
enjoyed preeminence over the others. By projecting into the past some of
the problems confronting the present, writers of historical novels and
dramas have served the Soviet cause well. Works such as Konstantin Trenyov's
The Pugachev Uprising, Alexei Chapygin's Stepan Razin, or Alexei Tolstoy's
Peter the Great, identified current Soviet policies with everything that
was noble and progressive in Russia's past, and suggested to their readers
that the present-day enemies of the Soviet regime are the direct descendants
the villains and oppressors of the days of yore. Soviet citizens have shown
themselves to be very susceptible to this sort of propaganda, particularly
during World War II, when Russo-German conflicts of past centuries were
resurrected in Soviet fiction with the express purpose of strengthening
the population's anti-German sentiments.

Very recently, however, many writers, for reasons of their own,
became attracted to the historical genre. It appears that in the
publication of novels, poems and dramas dealing with the past -- not only distant
but quite recent as well -- the current requirements of Socialist Realism
are enforced less strictly. It works dealing with eras gone by, the heroes
need not be the virtuous automatons which are expected to inhabit a novel
set in present-day Russia; further, one can also draw life-size and eloquent
villains; finally, the situations can be livened up with exotic costumes,
archaic language, as well as scenes showing the corruption of the exploiting
classes and the backwardness of the enslaved, though noble, masses. Mutatis
mutandis, the same can be accomplished in a novel dealing with the Civil
War or even the period of the New Economic Policy in the 1920's and the
first Five-Year Plan. The rationale recently used by Soviet writers who
preferred to shun contemporary topics has been that of the "pathos of
distance": only when the writer is sufficiently removed from the period
he describes does he, it was claimed, gain the necessary perspective and
insight.

This theory was resolutely rejected at the 1959 Congress of the
Union of Soviet Writers as unsound: Pushkin and Tolstoy, declared the
opponents of the "pathos of distance" theory, wrote about men of their
own generations. Further, it was added, even a fine Soviet novel set in
the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries is no substitute for one describing
the glory of the building of Communism. And the primary task of the
Soviet writer is to reflect this glory in his works, thus inspiring his
readers to new heroic deeds of labor. It is interesting that both the
proponents and opponents of the "pathos of distance" argument thought it
wiser to bypass in discreet silence the real reasons for the controversy,
which are to be sought in the narrow limitations imposed on the writer's
autonomy by the current formulae of Socialist Realism.

A frequent point of disagreement among Western students of Soviet
affairs is the extent to which Communist dogma influences Soviet actions.
There are those who claim that the importance of theory is paramount and
those who object to it, pointing to numerous instances in which dogma has
been reinterpreted to provide theoretical justification for Soviet policies.
The latter view is certainly to be preferred when examining certain aspects
of discussion at the Third Writers Congress.

[Page 46]

The evaluation of the work of Mikhail Sholokbov is a case in
point. Usually considered the Soviet Union's greatest novelist, the
politically untroublesome Sholokhov seems, artistically, to violate all
principles of Socialist Realism. Certainly, he is a practitioner of the
"pathos of distance" theory: his most recent works, the long-awaited
chapters from the novel They Fought for Their Country and even the
novella The Fate of A Man, are set -- the first completely and the latter
for the most part - in the days of the second World War and not in the
late 1950's. The protagonists of Sholokhov's works are not the ikon-like
idealized Communists who are to be found in most of the orthodox Soviet
literary output. None of his works has the almost mandatory Soviet
cheerful ending -- indeed, the tragic denouncement of his Silent Don has been
the literary cause celebre for many years. Even the language spoken by
his protagonists has been very much unlike that found in other Soviet
books -- Sholokhov's is more colorful, varied, spiced with folksy and,
on occasion, quite obscene vocabulary.

And yet, at the Third Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers
many speakers, including Khrushchev himself, referred in glowing terms
to Sholokhov's work, pointing to him as a model of fine Soviet literature.
It appears that Sholkhov is gradually achieving the status accorded in
the Soviet Union to literary classics of the past -- men whose works are
to be read, discussed, admired, but not really imitated.

In connection with the classics, it should also be noted that
their ghosts continue to haunt the Soviet literateurs. In his speech at
the 21st Party Congress, which convened several months prior to writers
conclave, the poet Tvardovsky noted the not unknown fact that among the
present-day Soviet writers there are no Pushkins, Tolstoys, or even
Gorkys.

The question may well arises why should the literature of a
nation living under the yoke of reactionary monarchs be go superior to
that of the most progressive society in the history of mankind?
Occasionally Soviet writers themselves hint at the real reasons. These are
not only the accidents of literary genius, but also the fact that even
during the most oppressive periods of tsarist rule, the government did
not interfere in the writer's professional problems. True, there was
censorship, which made it impossible to write on some topics and difficult
to speak one's mind on others. But at no time did Russia's emperors
institute a state-sponsored organization which would dictate to artists not
only what to create but also how to create. Konstantin Paustovsky, a
veteran Soviet author, hinted at this fact in his speech at the Congress
when he suggested that Leo Tolstoy might not have been very comfortable
in the Union of Soviet Writers. And some years ago Ilya Ehrenburg wrote
in his novella The Thaw that Leonardo da Vinci might have had serious
difficulties obtaining membership in the Union of Soviet Painters.

Judging by the regional writers meeting in the fifteen constituent
republics, it appears that the recent All-Union Writers Congress was
envisaged by the literary authorities as a triumphant meeting celebrating
the victory over "revisionism" in literature. It may well be that the
announcement of complete victory is somewhat premature, for only weeks
before the opening of the Congress, reports from the republic meetings
indicated that "revisionists" moods had not been completely uprooted among

[Page 47]

the writers, particularly the younger ones. This, by the way, may offer
some clues to the real reasons behind Khrushchev's insistance that young
writers spend some time writing as amateurs before joining the Writers
Union as full-time members; the same topic was discussed at length in
numerous articles in the Literaturnaya gazeta shortly before the Congress.
It is also of some interest to note that the "revisionists" are to be
found in special abundance in the newly acquired Soviet territories,
particularly in Lithuania.

And yet, it appears that many of the delegates arrived at the
Congress full of hope that something might be salvaged from the relative
freedom enjoyed by them during the short-lived "liberal" period after
Stalin's death. To be sure, it seemed unlikely that the Soviet authorities
might yield where the content of literature was concerned. The Party
leadership was still much too worried about the subversive potentialities of the
"revisionist" writing and criticism produced in Poland and Yugoslavia and,
since the Moscow International Congress of Slavists in the fall of 1958,
about the literary scholarship in the Slavic field produced in the United
States. The frequent violent attacks on all of these in the Soviet literary
periodicals attest to the existence of this fear. But there was a
possibility of concessions in matters pertaining to literary form.

The importance of this problem has long been felt by many Soviet
writers whose creative individualities were gradually being obliterated
by the uniform demands imposed on their output by the official interpreters
of Socialist Realism. It was almost universally agreed that recent Soviet
writing has been characterized by a tedious uniformity of language and
style. The former could be neither too difficult for the "average"
reader - failure to comply with this requirement would invite accusations of
"formalism" - nor too folksy, a deviation known as "crude naturalism". As for
style, and excessive innovationist zeal would almost immediately be
interpreted as an instance of "modernism", which is a very dangerous charge,
since - by logic comprehensible only to Soviet critics - "modernism" is
considered a literary manifestation of political "revisionism".

Shortly before the Congress one of the Soviet Union's most
sophisticated poets, Ilya Selvinsky, wrote in an article in Literaturnaya
gazeta that only the poetry of Surkov, the then secretary of the Union of
Soviet Writers, of Tvardovsky and of Isakovsky, the writer of lyrics for
Soviet marching songs, is looked upon with favor by the literary pundits.
As for the writers of "difficult" poetry (i.e., men like Pasternak and
Selvinsky himself), their lot is scorn and reproaches. Soviet music,
Selvinsky continued, permits the coexistence of military songs and popular
tunes on one side, with the serious music of Prokofiev, Shostakovich and
Khachaturian. Why then could not Soviet poetry do the same? Why cannot
there be light verse side by side with difficult poetry which may not
necessarily be comprehensible to everyone, but which - just as serious
music - brings enjoyment to a select audience?

While Selvinsky's article has been attacked at the Congress,
there is hope that writers shall be given somewhat larger latitude in
their choice of artistic devices. A. Dymshits, one of the last speakers
at the Congress, recalled Mayakovsky's dream of a time when poets, while

[Page 48]
 
ideologically unanimous, would engage in professional polemics on problems
of language and style. Said Dymshits, "This time has come".

An interesting by-product of the intensification of emphasis on
contemporary themes have been the suggestions in the speeches of both
Khrushchev and Surkov - and also in a newspaper article by David Zaslavsky
who specializes in "timely" topics - that writers would do well to devote
more time to publicistic writing on important issues of the day. It also
appears likely, on the basis of the speeches at the Congress, that writers
eager to cultivate "contemporary" themes will now favor short stories and
novellas over full-length novels. A humorous account of tribulations of
one writer has recently appeared in a literary monthly: the author, it
seems, responded to the call for "contemporary" themes now in favor by
writing a novel about the planting of kok-sagiz, a rubber-producting
Vegetation. When his novel had finally been completed, the hapless author
learned that Soviet scientists have in the meantime perfected a method of
symthetic rubber production - thus making both kok-sagiz and his novel
obsolete. Similar disappointments would, of course, be less likely to
occur in the writing of shorter works.

It is also probable that shorter works will help solve the
apparent conflict of interests between Russia's writers and readers.
The reasons for the clash are of rather capitalistic natures the
royalties of Soviet writers are calculated on the basis of their works'
length - with obvious results (indeed, a Soviet lawyer has recently demonstrated
that certain greedy poets favor the meter used by Mayakovsky - one word
in each line). Soviet readers, on the other hand, have only limited time
at their disposal and Khrushchev pointed out that many of them - including
himself - shy away from thick volumes. Indeed, in view of the above
complaints one might venture the guess that the time is not too far off when
Soviet publishing houses will begin to bring out book digests which are as
yet unknown in the Soviet Union.

The Third Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers bore little
resemblance to the preceding one which took place at a time when the leader
ship of the country was still more or less collective. The Second Congress
was a gathering of great expectations and a good deal of freedom. The old
dictator was dead and a new one had not yet appeared. And, to paraphrase
Dostoyevsky, when there is no God, everything is permitted.

But the recent Congress was in many respects reminiscent of the
first one which was held in 1934, or exactly a quarter of a century earlier

Both were held at a time when the struggle for power had ended
and when the transfer of authority from one dictator to the other had
been completed.

Both Congresses heralded the establishment of the new dictator
as a guide and mentor of the nation's writers. Thus, e.g., Pravda
reported on May 23, 1959:

Comrade Khrushchev's (extemporaneous) speech was
frequently interrupted by impassioned, prolonged applause.

[Page 49]

Overcome with joyful and noble feeling, the writers
expressed their heartfelt gratitude to the Party for
this new manifestation of its paternal solicitude for
the growth and blossoming of Soviet literature, for
the wise directives which brighten the path of Socialist
Realism during the expanded building of Communism,
directives which inspire writers to serve the Soviet
people with their work.

Both Congresses reaffirmed the primacy of the utiltarian aspect
of imaginative literature. Thus Khrushchev repeated the Stalinist
appellation of writers - "engineers of human souls" -- while the Central Committee
of the Communist Party in its message to the Congress (Pravda, May 23, 1959)
stressed that

The high calling of the Soviet writer is to unfold
truthfully and imaginatively the beauty of the heroic toil of
the people, that grandeur and majesty of the struggle for
Communism, to be an impassioned propagandist (!) of the
Seven-Year Plan. to uproot the survivals of capitalism
in the consciousness of the people, to assist in the
removal of everything that still hinders our movement forward.

Both Congresses were held in the wake of an embittered struggle
between the "liberals" and the Party "militants"; both promised the
liberals a somewhat more lenient treatment and both restrained the overly
zealous militants. Thus the 1934 Congress was held after the dissolution
of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, and the newly-formed
Union of Soviet Writers was to admit all writers, including the so-called
fellow-travelers whose support of the regime had been lukewarm and whose
ideological mistakes were many. At the 1959 Congress Khrushchev proposed
that the prodigal sons -- the "revisionists" -- be readmitted into the
fold, and that their mistakes be forgiven, though not at all forgotten:

In my view, it is necessary to help these comrades to
go over from their mistaken views to correct, principled
positions. One must not reproach them for their past
errors, one must not constantly point one's finger at
them. This will only benefit our common cause. (APPLAUSE).
One must not remind them, but one must not forget, either.
(APPLAUSE). As they say, one must "tie a knot", just in
case, so that, when necessary, to be able to take a look
at it and see how many knots were tied and to whom they
belong. (ANIMATION IN THE HALL).

At both Congresses a militant Party hack was replaced as head of
the writers' organization by an elderly, respected, benign and essentially
apolitical writer. In 1934 the change was from Leopold Averbakh, who had
headed the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, to the venerable
Maxim Gorky. In 1959 Alexei Surkov was replaced by Konstantin Fedin,
67 years old, former member of the non-political literary organization,
The Serapion Brothers, one of the very few Soviet writers who had ever
lived abroad (during World War I Fedin was interned in Germany), and author
of a number of distinguished works, including Cities and Years (1924), the

[Page 50]

story of a Russian intellectual who cannot make peace with the Soviet
regime; Transvaal (1928), an interesting study of a greedy, cruel but
respected kulak, reminiscent of some of the self-made businessmen in
the works of Gorky; The Brothers (1928), which depicts the conflict
between an artist's yearning for independence and his obligations to the
Soviet state; The Rape of Europe (1934-35), a rather involved tale about
Western capitalists, Soviet trade officials and several "international"
love affairs; and The First Joys (1945-46) and An Unusual Summer (1948)
which show a small town on the Volga, the first novel on the eve of
World War I, and the second in 1919, i.e., after the Revolution. Several
years ago Fedin had been attacked for his volume of non-political memoirs.
The only English-language evaluation of Fedin's works in English seems to
be the recent volume by Ernest J. Simmons (Russian Writers and Soviet
Ideology, Columbia University Press, 1958).

Finally, at both Congresses the conciliatory attitude toward
the non-conformists was conditioned by the demand that they mend their
ways. Furthermore, the desire to bring them back into the fold of a
single writers' organization was prompted by the desire to enable the
Party to supervise their activities in the future. The results of the
1934 "amnesty" of the persecuted "fellow-travelers" are well-known -- many
of the formerly independent have, indeed, become efficient "engineers of
human souls". At the 1959 Congress Khrushchev noted that the "angels of
reconciliation" are already in the air, but then, after warning that the
Party forgives but never forgets, added:

You may ask -- what am I appealing for? Am I inflaming
passions in a struggle, or am I appealing for
reconciliation? I shall say this: I am appealing for a consolidation
of forces on a principled base.

Indeed, it was Khrushchev himself who admitted at the 1959 Congress that
the status of the Soviet writer had not really been altered in the
twenty-five years since the First Writers' Congress, that the Soviet writer is
still in no sense an independent artist:

Comrades! Can one speak of a "writer's right to mistakes",
of a "writer's right to failures"? I think that the writer's
very position and role in society deprive him of such rights.
Leonid Sergeyevich Sobolev put it well at the First Writers'
Congress in 1934: the Party and the Government gave the
Soviet writers absolutely everything and took away from him
only one thing -- the right to write badly. In my view, the
people took away from the writer not only the right to write
badly but, above all, the right to write incorrectly.

Khrushchev's memory had failed him. The statement was made in
1934 not by Sobolev, who presently listened to Khrushchev's speech, but
by a writer who in the late 1930's disappeared in a Soviet concentration
camp. The name of the writer was Isaac Babel. And the quotation given
by Khrushchev was not complete, either, for after making the above
observation Babel continued:

[Page 51]
 
Comrades, let us not fool ourselves: this (the right
to write badly, to write incorrectly) is a very important
thing, and to take it away from us is no small thing.
Let us give up this right, and may God help us. And if
there is no God, let us help ourselves. . . .

[Page 52]

PARTY AND WRITERS: 1936-1958

Soviet Studies
April 1959
by Alfred Dressier
(extracts)

I

The renewed crisis - after a brief superficial consolidation
of Soviet literature between the XX Congress and the publication
in May 1957 of Khrushchev's statement on 'Closer Alliance of
Literature and Art with the Life of the People,'[1] was part of the politics
and social processes of that period. It was part of the ambiguous
and confused interpretation of the decision to liquidate the cult
and its results, and of the increasingly obvious disunity within
the collective leadership which extended to the forms and limits
of party control over literature.

The crisis manifested itself in the temporarily unchecked
demands of writers and critics for more freedom in the choice and
treatment of subjects, in the rehabilitation of the literature of the
'20s and of writers and critics victimized during Stalin's purges,
in a disregard for political taboos and literary conventions, and
in the publication of works that pleaded the case of the 'small man�
against the bureaucratic rule of party and state.

Even the events in Poland and Hungary passed almost unnoticed
Literary controversies continued in the absence of immediate official
reactions. The second volume of Literaturnaya Moskva was published
at the end of 1956.[2] In December E. Simonov published his controversies
'literary Notes'.[3] At the Plenum of the Managing Committee of the
Union of Ukrainian Writers, A. Surkov confessed his reluctance
to write poems of 'affirmation' for fear of being daubed a 'varnished
of reality.'[4] As late as March 1957, at what seems to have been a
stormy meeting of the Board of Management of the Moscow section
of the Union of Soviet Writers, Dudintsev, Evtushenko, contributors
to Literaturnaya Moskva and its editors defended their positions
and refused to yield.[5]

By the time of the Moscow meeting, the writers seemed to have
gained a fair measure of freedom of expression (Pasternak's novel,
however, had been rejected by Novy mir in September 1956) and an
unwonted immunity from reprisals. They had been encouraged to
settle their conflicts by free discussion within the Writers' Union,
and measures had been taken to enable publishing houses to decide
their policy without outside interference.[6] But the party appeared
to be speaking with two voices: while hopes that yet more irksome
restrictions might be swept aside had been fed by Shepilov's
unorthodoxy ('eager for personal popularity, he began to flirt with
the demagogues')[7], the faction in control of Pravda, Kommunist and
Titeraturnaya gazeta refused to abdicate the party's mentorship
over literature, and their emphasis on ideological conformity had
grown more urgent and menacing recently.[8]

These inconsistencies and the absence of the customary lead
from the Central Committee were reflected in the sharp divisions at
the Moscow meeting and in the non-participation at this meeting of
'eminent writers' and 'leading officials of the Union.'[9] The writer
left to their own devices, had reached a deadlock that could only
be resolved by the Central Committee's intervention.

The timing of Khrushchev's statement must be stressed against
this background: it was published only in August as an abridged
[Page 53]

summary of speeches made on 13 May (at a Joint session of the writers
with the Central Committee), on 19 May (at a reception of writers,
artists, sculptors and composers), and at a meeting of active party
members in July 1957. When Khrushchev met the writers on 13 May,
the showdown with the 'anti-Party group' was emminent, and when he
addressed the active party members in July, the dismissal of Molotov
etc. from the CC was an accomplished and published fact. For the
first time since the XX Congress the formulation of a monolithic
party line in literature had become possible.

The writers had gathered in Moscow for the third (extended)
plenary session of the Union of Soviet Writers, which had been
postponed from February and took place 14-18 May. What impressions
about the split in the collective leadership they had taken away
from their meeting with the members of the CC on 13 May, is a
matter for conjecture. One gathers that they had been confronted
by a divided CC: it is claimed that the anti-party group 'tried
to disparage and discredit the importance of this meeting...which
played such an important part in creating a healthier atmosphere'
in the Union, and that some writers had frankly accused Shepilov
o[??]� disorienting writers and their press by his double-dealing.'[10]
The reports of the proceedings of the plenary session[11] leave
little doubt, however, that the conservative, anti-revisionist
elements in the Writers' Union had regained the initiative. The
attacks on Yashin, Aliger, Dudintsev and other critics, and on the
Moscow section of the Union are cantankerous, belligerent,
intimidating; their refusal to recant or even participate in the debates
is angrily denounced as a 'conspiracy of silence' instigated
by the enemies of the Soviet Union abroad.[12]

Endorsement of the new alignment in the Writers' Union is
given by Kommunist 1957 no. 10 (July). Molotov, Malenkov and
Kaganovich are denounced in the first leader for having worked for 'a
return to the incorrect methods of leadership and control condemned
by the XX Congress'; the second leader, dealing more specifically
with literature, accuses Shepilov of attempting to replace party
leadership and control over literature with 'bourgeois-idalistic
ideas of creative freedom'. The artists are again assured of their
r[??]t to settle their 'ideological and creative problems' freely
within their professional unions but a reference to Benin's attitude
to Proletkult makes nonsense of this right.[13] A brief summary of
Khrushchev's statements of 13 and 19 May differs (as does the
whole article) considerably in tone and emphasis from the fuller
version.

The purpose of Khrushchev's statement was to reconcile both
the 'conservatives' and the 'critics' to his current policies, and
to formulate the conditions for a truce between the warring factions
in the Union. Even if short-lived, an arrangement along these lines
would prepare the ground for either a more stable compromise in the
future or the emergence of a new, loyalist grouping. The impending,
or already accomplished, eclipse of the 'anti-party group' made
it desirable to gain the support of, or at any rate, not to
antagonize further, their literary sympathizers who were well entrenched
in leading positions in the Writers' Union. The reiterated partial
rehabilitation of Stalin' in whom we all sincerely believed' is
linked with the rehabilitation of the 'varnishers of reality', Stalin
Prize winners, and those writers who stood 'closest to Stalin'. In
dealing with the 'critical' writers, Khrushchev is anxious to call
to order those (he names Dudintsev and Aliger) who have gone too
far in their one-sided condemnation of past mistakes (they are
'ignorant of life, lack adequate political experience and the

[Page 54]

ability to understand the main determining factors in life');
his harshest remarks are addressed to 'unreliable' editors and
heads of publishing houses who 'succumbed to the strong influence
of men holding wrong positions and. . . became vehicles for unhealthy
moods and tendencies.'[14] At the same time he makes it clear that
a return to the monochrome literature of the Stalin period is
undesirable, and that constructive criticism will be encouraged;
glorification through embellishment is no longer incumbent on
the Soviet writer, criticism is welcomed if it leads to
affirmation. No excommunications are announced, and even the indicted write
are not to be ostracized, the door is to be left wide open for
their return to the fold.[15]

The short-term result of this policy statement was a
temporary freeze-up. The long-term results are still in the making.
Editorials and letters of welcome and endorsement seized on
Khrushchev's denunication of the thaw-writers and on his demand for
partiinost - overlooking the fact that he had not only confirmed
new methods of party control, but that his new policy (as he had
presented it to the writers) promised to modify the meaning of
partiinost, and was meeting many of the criticisms made in 1956.
Literary journals began to play safe again ; Novy mir, in
particular, filled its pages with translations, memoirs and historical
and documentary material devoted to the 40th anniversary of the
revolution. The intensified political campaign against Yugoslav
and international revisionism created a situation in which even
the freedom granted by Khrushchev seemed to weight heavily on the
writers, and to give added advantages to the conservatives. No
major work was published in 1957 (after G. Nikolayeva's Struggle
Along the Road, Oktyabr nos. 3-7); critics were preoccupied with
repulsing Yugoslav and Polish attacks on Socialist Realism, and
with trying to repair the damage done in 1956. The fourth plenary
session of the Board of Management of the Writers' Union (11 to
13 February 1958)[16] confirms the predominance of the die-hards
whose claim that the 'party-document' (i.e., Khrushchev's speeches)
has played and is playing an important part in the struggle
against revisionist tendencies' is unchallenged: the 'critics'
(Aliger, Kazakevich, Rudny - co-editors of Literaturnaya Moskva
and Ovechkin[17] are named) are absent or ignore the appeal to
'break their silence and disarm.' The debate is remarkable mainly
for its avoidance of theoretical and programmatic pronouncements.
Commonplace appeals to the traditions and achievements of Soviet
literature reveal a singular lack of ideas on how to solve the
impasse. S. Babayevski seemed to hint at the uneasiness felt
by many writers, on both sides, when he called for a halt to
'banging writers' head together. . . let us concentrate on our main job,
our literary work.' But nobody undertook to answer the implied
question as to what 'new contents and appropriate form' (S. Smirnov)
should take the place of the 'literature of denunciation'. The
failure of the die-hards to exploit their apparently undisputed
control is evidence of the efficicy of non-cooperation on the
part of leading writers and members of the Moscow section. The
Central Committee, too, cannot have failed to be impressed by
his demonstration of 'absenteeism' which proved once more that
cooperation could only be bought by further concessions.
Behind-the-scenes intervention, even prior to the Plenum, to restrain the
anti-thaw faction cannot be excluded in view of the fact that its
political and literary platform, The Yershov Brothers,[18] written
in 1956-1957, was published only in the summer of 1958. . .

[Page 55]

Since Khrushchev's statement, the party had studiously
abstained from direct and open intervention - e.g. not a single
editorial on literature appeared in Kommunist from August 1957
to December 1958. Significantly, neither the government nor the
Central Committee intervened in the Pasternak affair. [44] Its own
anti-revisionist campaign appeared to identify the party with
the conservative writers' group of which the author of Yershov
Brothers, as editor of the official organ of the Union of Soviet
Writers, was an important member. The apparently delayed
publication of his novel and its far from unanimous reception by critics,
together with other developments in 1958, betrayed the Central
Committee's anxiety to dissociate itself from its embarrassing
allies.

The XX Congress, it will be remembered, had instituted eight
annual Lenin Prizes for Literature and Art. In 1957, five prizes
had been awarded, including two for works of literature. In 1958
four prizes were awarded but none for literature. Kochetov, whose
novel The Zhurbins had been recommended for an award by the Union
in 1957 (his Yershov Brothers is recommended by his publishers
for a 1959 award), in a signed article in Literaturnaya Gazeta
(24 April 1958) protested against the Lenin Prize Committee's
failure to encourage the development of Soviet literature. The
recommendations of the professional Unions, he complains, have counted
for less in the award of prizes than 'the black and white balls used
in the committee's secret vote'. In its reply the committee
referred to the 'well-known fact' that 'Stalin Prizes were often
awarded with underserved generosity and unbecoming haste; the
result was that, alongside with really good work, insignificant and
often downright bad work was given awards. This year's awards,
to be published in April, are unlikely to reveal any changes in
the committee's policy.

Even more significant (in its wider implicatons) was the
announcement - a belated response to widespread demands in 1956
for the revision of the 1946-48 policy - of the Central Committee's
decision 'On the correction of mistakes in appraisal of the operas
'The Great Friendship,' 'Bogdan Khmelnitski' and 'With all my Heart'.[45]
The Central Committee still goes through the motions of defending
the principles and intentions of the 1948 resolution but if firmly
repudiates the practical applications of these principles as
'incorrect, unfounded, unjust', due to the cult and to the influence
of Molotov, Malenkov and Beria on Stalin. The motivation and even
wording of this decision had been foreshadowed as early as February
1957 in a leading article in Kommunist[46] but its release at the
height of the anti-Yugoslav campaign and simultaneous with the
publication of Kochetov's novel, was calculated to affect, sooner
or later, the outcome of the struggle for control of the Writers'
Union.

The recently formed Union of Writers of the RSFSR[47] will,
no doubt, play an important part in determining future policy. It
is to comprise more than half of the total membership of the Union
of Soviet Writers: 2,539 members (including 1,200 in Moscow) in
48 branches. The decision to form it was taken at the third plenary
session in May 1957, and confirmed by Khrushchev in his speech on
19 May. Three main functions have been assigned to this body: (1)
to stimulate literary and cultural developments in provincial
centres affected by Khrushchev's economic and administrative
decentralization;[48] (2) to work out and put into operation plans
for a New Deal for provincial writers: to negotiate a re-allocation

[Page 56]

of paper supplies, to start new journals, to remove inter-regional
barriers that artificially restrict the sale of a writers' book
to his native region, to improve welfare services such as housing
and provision of clubs for writers, to put the underpaid and
'underdeveloped' provincial writer on a more equal footing with his
metropolitan colleague, and to attract new cadres;[49] (3) to provide
an organizational counterweight to the influential and (as events
in 1956-57 had shown) less reliable and less controllable Moscow
section.[50]

The result of the RSFSR Union's efforts on behalf of the
provincial writer cannot yet be assessed; but it is clear that the
intended anti-Moscow bias of the Union had to be shelved.[51] The
Board of Management, with 123 members, seems to be fairly well
balanced and includes a large number of Moscow writers (but the
non-election of Ehrenburg and Simonov should be noted); the Bureau
of the Board has 20 members of whom 13 live in Moscow.[52] The Board
is to meet annually (in one of the capitals of the Autonomous
Republics), the Bureau monthly; day-to-day decisions will be taken
by the chairman (L. Sobolev) and vice-chairmen; the detailed control
of local activities, however, will be in the hands of an 'itiner??t'
committee (suggested by the chairman) the composition of which is
not clear.

Little need be said about the discussions at the Congress
of the RSFSR Union of Writers. Most speakers dealt with the practical
aim and tasks of the new Union, with the situation in the provinces,
with children's literature, with the puzzling problem of recruiting
to the ageing ranks of the Union a generation that has shown little
respect for the traditions of their 'fathers'.[53] Sobolev's keynote
speech and some contributions reflect the inconclusive pre-Congress
discussion around Khrushchev's appeal in 1957 to the writers to
deal with contemporary life and problems' (sovremennost)and to
improve and perfect their 'artistic craftsmanship' (Maserstvo).
Attempts at defining these new slogans revealed the old dilemmas.
Critics found themselves wrestling again with the 'pernicious theory
of artistic distance'; sovremennost, it is held by some, is an
attitude of mind that can be brought to bear on any subject,
historical or contemporary; others will sanction only works
reflecting recent events and a 'new hero: evasion of 'burning contemporary
problems' is perversely branded as a 'variety of revisionism.'[54]
Emphasis on masterstvo has invoked again the ghost of formalism,
and the discussion has run into difficulties over the priority
of content over form (Fedin has referred to this as 'inverted
formalism'), and the elusive meaning of socialist realism.[55]

On the eve of the Third USSR Writers' Congress (it was,
originally, to have been held in December 1953) there are signs to
suggest the resumption of the literary thaw[56] but it is too early
yet to assess the modifications that will, undoubtedly, change its
character. The prevailing mood (end of January 1959) is one of
wait-and-see: the future direction of Soviet literature will
probably be decided by the Congress, and much will depend on the
nature of the changes in the control of the Union and its
publications.

FOOTNOTES

(1) Kommunist, 1957 No. 12. Translated in Soviet literature
1957, No. 10 and The Current Digest of the Soviet Press 9 October
1957.

(2) Literaturnaya Moskva, Sbnorik vtoroi, 1956. Cf. Soviet
Studies, vol. IX pp. 322-345.

[Page 57]

(3) K. Simonov, 'Literaturniye zametki' Novy mir 1956, No. 12.

(4) Literaturnaya gazeta, 15 January 1957.

(5) Ibid. 19 March 1957.

(6) Kommunist 1957, No. 3, p. 24; for a summary of this article
cf. Soviet Studies, vol. IX p. III.

(7) Kommunist 1857, No. 10; cf also Novy Mir 1957. no. 8.

(8) In November 1956 B. Rurikov, the former editor of Literaturnaya
Gazeta, had still tempered his stern reminder that Lenin had not
hesitated to demand the closing down of a Menshevik paper (during
the civil war) with the tentative suggestion that 'the state and
its organs' should confine themselves to supporing 'flexibly,
tactfully, sensitively - without interfering in details, without
thrusting their tutelage upon the artist, and without dictating
artistic solutions - all progressive manifestions; (they should)
create conditions for the forging of close links between art and
life, for daring artistic searches etc.' (Kommunist, 1956, No. 17,
P 43, 48, 55). A more bellicose and dogmatic tone against the
'nihilists' and loud mouthed demagogues' is adopted by L. Novichenko,
D. Eremin and the editors of Kommunist. Condemnation of the 
critical school' is now linked with the defence and reaffirmation of
the 1946-48 decisions (Literaturnaya gazeta, 15 January 1957 and
5 March 1957; Kommunist 1957, no. 3). Only hoplessly backward people
'can take it upon themselves to defend the individual against the
state in a socialist society' (N. Shamota in Kommunist 1957 no. 5,
p. 87; cf. also Soviet Studies vol. VIII pp. 437 and 458). An
important straw in the wind was the implied self-criticism in
Simonov's censure of Dudintsev at the Moscow Writers' meeting
(Literaturnaya gazeta 19 March 1957), and his implicit disavowal
of views he had expressed as recently as December 1956, in a
polemical article against the Polish revisionist writers Kott and
Toeplitz Novy mir 1957, no. 3). Simonov�s chief critics, however,
were not satisfied. Even his recantation at the fourth
Plenum - cf. Literaturnaya gazeta 21 May 1957 - fell short of their
requirements. Simonov lost the editorship of Novy mix in July 1957.

(9) Literaturnaya gazeta 19 March 1957.

(10) Kommunist 1957, no. 10.

(11) Literaturnaya gazeta 16, 18, 21, 22 May 1957.

(12) Cf. L. Sobolev's speech, reported in Literaturnaya gazeta
22 May 1957.

(13) Kommunist 1957, no. 10, p. 20. Kommunist here refers to
Lenin's draft resolution for the 1920 Proletkult Congress: '. . .all
Proletkult branches must consider themselves as subsidiary
organizations of the National Commissariat of Enlightment. . .and carry
on their activities under the control of the Soviet government. . .
and the Communist Party. . .' (Collected Works vol. 31, p. 292).

(14) Soviet Literature 1957, no. 10 pp. 15 and 16.

(15) Cf. Khrushchev s references to Tvardovski and Panferov - ibid,
p. 19. Tvardovski had been removed from the editorship of Novy mir
in 1954 for publishing articles by Pomerantsev, Shcheglov, etc.; he
was reinstated in July 1958. Panferov was appointed editor of
Oktyabr in November 1957.

(16) Reported in Literaturnaya gazeta, 13, 15, 18 Feb. 1958.

[Page 58]

(17) In September 1956 Ovechkin had joined the editorial
board of Literaturnaya gazeta from which Paustovski and Pogodin had
recently be removed. He ceased to be a member of the Board in
September 1957. In July 1958, on the re-appointment of Tvardovski
to the editoriship, he became a member of the Editorial Board
of Novy mir. His play 'Navstrechu vetru' (Novy Mir, 1958, no. 3)
presses the case (already widely discussed at the time of
publication) for the handing over of the MTS machines to the collective
farms, and illustrates the pernicious influence that the Borzovs
are still allowed to exert, even after retirement, He is severely
taken to task by V, Dorofeyev in Literaturnaya gazeta 6 May 1958
for failing to show 'how the victories of the kolkhoz system, the
immense economic, social and political achievements of socialism
and the great changes in people's consciousness require new forms
for the organization of the national economy. . .' Ovechkin ascribes
the need for 'new forms' to the lack of incentives and the conflict
of interests between MTS and kolkhoz: 'We MTS-workers (his hero
explains) hold the fate of the kolkhoz harvest in our hands, and
to tell the truth, it doesn't matter to us whether it turns out to
be a good or a bad harvest...altogether, we aren't hurt even it
if a very bad harvest. . .�

(18) V. Kochetov, Bratya Yershovy, Neva, 1958, Nos. 6-7.
All references in this article are to Romangazeta 1958, no. 15 (171)
for Part I, and 1958, no. 16 (172) for Part II. The English
translation announced by Soviet Literature (for nos. 1,2,3, 1958) was
not yet available at the time of writing.

(44) This shortlived hysterical campaign against Pasternak
strikes one as an attempt to discredit and split the obstreperous
Moscow section of the Union by associating it with an obnoxious
decision. While feeling was being whipped up in the country,
the decision to expel Pasternak from the Union was taken by the
presidia of the Union of Soviet Writers, of the Preparatory
Committee of the Union of Writers of the RSFSR, and of the Moscow section.
More than 30 members spoke at this meeting in support of the motion
(Literaturnaya gazeta 28 October 1958). At the general members
meeting of the Moscow section, 13 members are reported to have spoken
from the floor (Literaturnaya gazeta 1 November 1958) but no
indication was given of how many members attended. The resolution
demanding what amounts to Pasternak's deportation from the USSR was
passed unanimously.

(45) Literaturnaya gazeta 10 June 1958. In English: Supplement
to Soviet Literature 1958, No. 6; also The Current Digest of the
Soviet Press 16 July 1958.

(46) Kommunist 1957, no. 3; cf. also Shepilov's speech at
the Second Congress of the Union of Soviet Composers in Literature
gazeta 4 April 1957.

(47) Reports on the Foundation Congress (7-13 December 1958) of
the Union of Writers of the RSFSR held in Moscow are in Literaturnaya
gazeta 8, 10, 12, 14 December 1958. Khrushchev is reported to
have addressed the writers after the Congress but his speech has
not yet been published.

(48) Viz. Congress reports. Cf. also e.g. M. Bazhan's speech
at the third plenum, Literaturnaya gazeta 21, May 1957.

(49) Viz. Congress reports. Cf. also on publishing and
distribution: A. Petrashik, 'Oblastnoye izdatelstvo i evo produktsiya

[Page 59]

Kommunist, 1956, no. 9, and an unsigned article in Kommunist 1957
no. 17 'Uluchshit rabotu mestnykh izdatelstv'; on royalties, etc.:
N. Rylenkov's contribution at third plenum, Literaturnaya gazeta
21 May 1957; Khrushchev, 'Closer Alliance..., Soviet Literature,
1957, no. 10, p. 21, and V. Sokolov, 'U literaturnoi karty Rossii,
Novy mir 1958, no. 11.

(50) Cf. Khrushchev, 'Closer Alliance. . .' Soviet Literature,
1957, no. 10, p. 20.

(51) Cf. leader in Literaturnaya gazeta 4 December 1958.
This could, of course, mean that the Moscow writers had capitulated
(cf. 44 above) or, more likely, that a modus vivendi has been
agreed.

(52) A notable absentee from the Bureau is N. Gribachov who had
been in charge of Russian provincial literature (cf. Soviet Studies,
vol. VI p. 439.

(53) Already at the Second Congress in 1954 Surkov had reported
that the average age of members was 10 to 15 years higher than in
19?4, and the proportion of members under 30 much smaller. Cf.
Soviet Studies vol. VI p. 410.

(54) Cf. Congress reports and e.g. V. Nikonov's article in
Literaturnaya gazeta 10 June 1958; A. Elkin, 'Dykhaniye zhizni,
dykhaniye sovremennosti', Znamya 1958, no. 11; Novy mir 1958
no. 11, p. 201.

(55) Viz. Congress debates and cf. e.g., V. Ivanov, 'Zametki o
spetsifike iskusstva', Kommunist 1958 No. 12; 0. Iygi's article
in Literaturnaya gazeta 18 December 1958.

A cryptic reference to the 'principles of socialist realism
in the message sent to Congress by the Bureau of the Central
Committee (Literaturnaya gazeta 8 December 1958) must have caused
some surprise among delegates. Of course, it could have been a
slip but it could also have been a hint of the Central Committee's
attitude, in keeping with recent developments. The substitution,
in the Rules of the Union of Soviet Writers of the term 'method'
(in the phrase 'Socialist realism is the basic method of Soviet
literature. . .') by 'principle' was discussed by Simonov in Novy
mir 1956 no. 12, p. 253. Many feel, he writes, that the term
restricts 'stylistic variety' and is exploited by critics to demand
uniformity p. 254). Simonov attributes little importance to this
'terminological quarrel' but suggests the adoption of 'principle'
because it would define socialist realism as an ideology rather than
a technique. Others (e.g., L. Novicheko at the Ukrainian Writers'
Congress, Literaturnaya gazeta 15 January 1957) cling to the
paradox that the specifically 'artistic cognition of reality' can only
be achieved through the socialist-realist method of expressing it.
Congress ignored the Central Committee's formula; Sobolev speaks
of the 'method' of socialist realism 'expressing partiinost in
Literature' and the Congress resolution proclaims that Soviet Russian
writers will remain 'faithful to the principles of partiinost in
literature and to the method of socialist realism.'

(56) E.g. the resumed controversy on the rehabilitation of
A. Vesely, I. Babel, I. Katayev, etc has led to frank exchanges
and bitter recriminations. Cf. M. Charny on A. Vesely in Oktyabr
1957, no. 9; A. Markarov 'Razgovor po povodu...' Znamya 1958, no. 4;
and an article by 'Literator' in Literaturnaya 24 April 1958,
and Panferov's reply in Oktyabr 1958 no. 5; Or the outspoken
discussion on the state of Soviet comedy opened by B. Frolov with the

[Page 60]

article 'Pochemu plokho na khoroshem meste?' in Oktyabr 1958, no, 3
(Promptly denounced "by 'Literator' in Literaturnaya gazeta 17
April 1958), Fourteen contributions are published in Oktyabr
1958, no. 6. Many contributors agree with Frolov that the decline
of the Soviet comedy is due to the 'outraged feelings' of
influential individuals who 'recognize themselves in characters' held up
to ridicule. Their unobtrusive intervention with 'cautious'
directors may prevent the production of a good comedy or its withdrawal.
Writers are discouraged and turn to other genres, Playwrights
must 'stand together' and 'speak up'. Earlier charges of
bureaucratic violations had been denied by A. Sokolova in Kommunist
1958,. no. 3.

[Page 61]

BID, Radio Liberation
22 May 1959

ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGES IN THE EXECUTIVE ORGANS OF THE SOVIET
WRITERS' UNION (1954-1959)

On May 12, a few days before the opening of the All-Union Writers'
Congress, Literaturnaya Gazeta published two contributions by republican
writers on proposed changes in the executive organs of the Soviet Writers'
Union. In this way the readers of Literaturnaya Gazeta who are without
access to inside information in the Writers' Union learned for the first
time about the existence of such a problem and its impending discussion
at the Writers' Congress.

Although both contributions are hedged in the usual way as a "basis
for discussions," etc., there can be little doubt that the rails have
already been switched into a definite direction: towards greater
representation of the Union republics in the Secretariat and Presidium of the
Board of the Soviet Writers' Union.

Briefly, the proposed changes are as follows: Vilis Lacis, writer
and Chairman of the Latvian Council of Ministers, would like to reduce
the size of the "unwieldy" Presidium of the Board, but at the same time
increase republican representation by making all chairmen of the boards
of the 15 republican writers' unions ex officio members of the Presidium.
The latter should include also the Secretaries of the Board and "perhaps
2-5 comrades from among the most respected, authoritative masters of
literature." As regards the Secretariat, this should be composed of
the First Secretary, as hitherto, plus three "permanent" and three
"alternate" (smenniy) Secretaries, who would be delegated to Moscow from
the Union republics for a definite period.

The other contribution, by the First Secretary of the Board of
the Azerbaydzhani Writers' Union Mekhti Guseyn, limits itself to
suggesting that the Secretariat of the All-Union organization should be organized
"by shrubs" ("po kustam"), i.e. along regional lines, with Secretaries
responsible for the literatures of the Transcaucasian republics, the
Baltic area, Central Asia, etc.

Both Lacis and Guseyn seem to be agreed, therefore, that there
should be at least 3-4 Secretaries representing the Union republics in
the reorganized Secretariat of the Soviet Writers' Union.

In order to realize the significance of the proposed changes we
will have to look first at the executive organs of the Union of Soviet
Writers as elected at the first plenary session of the Board of the
Soviet Writers' Union following the Second Writers' Congress in December
1954. At that time a 42-member Presidium was elected, composed of 40
writers:

[Page 62]

ABASHIDZE, I.V.		KATAYEV, V.P.		SMIRNOV, V.A.
ANTONOV, S.P.		KORHEYCHUK, A.Yo.	SMUUL, I. Yu.
AUEZOV, M.O.		LATSIS, V.T.		SOBOLEV, L.S.
AZIAYEV, V.N.		LAVREUEV, B.A.		SURKOV, A.A.
BAZHAN, N.P.		LEONOV, L.M.		TIKHONOV, N.S.
BEOVKA, P.U.		MAEKOV, G.M.		TURSUN-ZADE, Mirzo
CHUKOVSKIY, U.K.	MARSHAK, S.Ya.		TVARDOVSKIY, A.T.
EHREUBURG, I.G.		PANOVA, V.F.		TYCHINA, P.G.
FADEYEV, A.A.		POGODIN, N.F.		VENTSLOVA, A.T.
GLADKOV, F.V.		POLEVOY, B.N.		VURGU1T, S. (VBKILOV, S
FEDIN, K.A.		PROKOF'YEV, A.A.	YEMILOV, V.V.
GONCHAR, A.T.		SHCHIPACHEV, S.P.	ZAR'YAN, N. Ye.
KAKHKHAR, A.		SHOLOKHOV, M.A.
KARAVAYEVA, A.A.	SIMONOV, K.M.

and 2 Party apparatchiki:	POLIKARPOV, D.A. and
RYURIKOY, B.S.

Four writers have died: Samed Vurgun (S. V. Vekilov), A. Fadeyev,
F. Gladkov and B. Lavrenev.

One Party apparatchik (D. A. Polikarpov) may have been replaced by
another Party apparatchik (K. V. Voronkov) when the former was appointed
Chief of the Culture Department of the CPSU Central Committee early in
1956. But this is far from certain.

Unless there have been cooptions to the Presidium which were not
announced in the Press, we must assume that the Presidium of the Board is
composed at present of 38 members.

While most of the writers serving in the Presidium are well known,
a few remarks may be needed to elucidate the background of the Party
apparatchiki.

D. A. Polikarpov, a member of the Central Auditing Commission of
the Party, was Secretary of the Moscow City Party Committee before being
appointed Secretary of the Board of the Writers' Union.

B. S. Ryurikov has been Deputy Chief of the Culture Department of
the CPSU Central Committee since 1955. He entirely owes his career,
which he began as a little known literary critic to sycophancy,
swashbuckling, and Simonov's protection (according to Sholokhov's testimony
at the Second Writers' Congress, rpt. Literaturnaya Gazeta, Dec, 26, 1954)

The present functions of Konstantin Vasil'yevich Voronkov (apart
from those as Secretary of the Board of the Writers' Union) have not been
revealed, but he is known to have made his career as Komsomol apparatchik.
He has not gained any literary laurels, but already in 1948 when many of
his present colleagues were still waiting for their Stalin prize on
literature, he was awarded the Order of Lenin in connection with the 30th
anniversary of the Komsomol. At that time he was Department Chief of the
Komsomol Central Committee. (rpt. Pravda, October 29, 1948).

The Secretariat as elected in December 1954 was composed of 11
members:
[page 63]

SUBKOV, A,A,	first Secretary
AZHAYEV, V.N.	Secretary
BAZHAIT, H.P.	Secretary
FADEYEV, A.A.	Secretary
FEDIH, K.A.	Secretary
LEONOV, L.M	Secretary
POLEVOI, B.N.	Secretary
POLIKARPOV, D A	Secretary
SIMGNOV, K.M.	Secretary
SMIENOV, V�A.	Secretary
TIKHONOV, N.S.	Secretary

It is certainly worth recording that in the four and a half years
that have elapsed since the Second Writers' Congress no Secretary of the
Writers1 Union has been ousted? a truly remarkable record at a time when
all central Party and Government organs were subjected to more or less
severe purges.

But three Secretaries were newly appointed: K, V. Voronkov
(replacing D. A, Polikarpov upon the latter�s promotion in the Party
hierarchy) and the writers G. M. Markov and S, V, Smirnov (following Fadeyev's
suicide). As a result of these minor changes membership in the Secretariat
increased from 11 to 12 Secretaries,

Now, what would the Presidium of the Board of the Writers' Union
be like of Lacis' proposals were to be adopted?

First of all we would have 15 ex officio members, viz. all the
chairmen (or first secretaries) of the republican writers1 Unions.

They are:

SGBOLEV, L.S.	Chairman,	Board,	RSFSR	Writers'	Union
GONCHAB, A.T.	"	"	Ukrainian	"	"
BEOVKA, P.U.	"	"	Belorussian "	"
YASHEH, Kamil	1st Secy.,	"	Uzbek	"	"
USREPOV, G.M.	1st Secy.,	"	Kazakh	"	"
foASHIDZE, I.V.	1st Secy.,	"	Georgian	"	"
GUSEYN, Mekhti	1st Secy.,	"	Azerbaydzh.	"	"
VEFTSLOVA, A.T,	Chairman.	"	Lithuanian	"	"
LUPAU, A.P9	"	"	Moldavian	"	"
UPIT, A.M.	"	"	Latvian	"	"
ABDUMQMOTOV, T.	1st Secy.,	"	Kirghiz	"	"	
TUESUN-ZADE, M.	Chairman	"	Tadzhik	"	"
TOPCHIAN, E,S.	Resp. Secy.,	"	Armenian	"	�
KEfiBABAIEV, B.	Chairman,	"	Turkmen	"	"
SMUUL, I. Yu.	Chairman,	"	Estonian	"	"

Secondly, all the Secretaries of the Board would likewise become ex
officio members of the Presidium.

[page 64]

LITERATURE AND THE PEASANT

Problems of Communism
November-December 1959
by Tom Scriven

Whatever our view of the Bolshevik Revolution, one thing is
certain - seldom have the mass of participants in such a decisive
historical event so little understood the import of their actions.

The Russian intelligentsia for over a century had been
debating whether the peasant was to become the subject of Russian
history or to remain an object, the raw material to be worked up by
other existing or emergent forces. Was he a natural communist,
destined to outsoar the West in social development if protected
from its debauching influence? Was he even perhaps the humble
vessel of define grace for the renewal of a. world -relapsed into pagan
ism? Or was he a barbarous anachronism, to be swept; away by the on
rush of industry and bourgeois civilization? Lenin's revolutionary
strategy demanded that the peasant should briefly become the
subject of Russian history, or at least the deuterogamist at its moat
critical turning-point, and should then be remolded by the
portrait in its own image.

The depth of the peasants' misunderstanding of this alloted
role - leading to their later profound disillusionment - was
evidenced in the distinction which they so often drew in the 1920's
between "Bolsheviks" and "Communists." The Bolsheviks had given
the land to those who worked it, decreed peace, set up local
organs of peasant self-government. They were obviously not to be
confused with those inexorable and incomprehensible fanatics who
came down from the towns to raid the peasant's barn, conscript his
sons, and seduce him into a new, weird form of propertilless
servitude. The literature of the 1920's copiously testifies to the
peasant's bewilderment, his ludicrous and pitiful insistence that
the revolution meant what he had wanted it to mean. In Artem
Vesyoly's Native Land (1924) the leader of a peasant uprising
proclaims: "I hereby annul the Soviet powers ... Death to
Communists! Long live the Bolsheviks and all the common people!" And
Boris Pilnyak, in The Bare Year (1922), makes one of his
characters expound the "muzhik"(peasant) view of the revolution:

So I say at the meeting - there's no international, there
The Russian people's revolution, a bunt (peasant revolt) and
nothing more...What about Karl Marx, they ask. A German, I
Land for the peasants! Down with the landowners! Down with
the skin-em-alive Constituent Assembly! We want a Soviet
for the whole land, so that everyone who wants to can come
and decide under the sky ... Down with the Communists as well
the Bolsheviks, I say, can ,manage on their own.1
-----------------------------
(1) For a recent reference to this distinction see N. Virta in
Literaturnaia Gazeta, March 21, 1959.

[page 65]

This confusion of thought, or rather this typically Russian
my-thopeic self-delusion, has persisted. In the late 1940's for example,
fantastic rumors reportedly spread through the countryside that at
last the Communists, chastened by the experience of the war, were
about to yield some of their usurped power to a peasant party,
perhaps with alenkov - Lenin's son, some said - at its head And even
now there are peasants, not all of them very old, who execrate the
regime and venerate Lenin the land-giver.

Errors in Retrospect

That writers of the 1920's, even Bolsheviks like Vesyoly,
candidly described the hostile and uncomprehending attitude of the
country towards the towns was not always, as later Soviet critics
claimed, a sign of ideological instability. More often it was
because the writer shared the new rulers' contempt - sometimes
fanatical and heartless, sometimes humorous and half-affectionate - for
unlettered, drunken, starving and greedy, frightened and
treacherously violent muzhik Russia. The ideology of the peasant, along with
t it shoes and wooden ploughs, was part of the paraphernalia of
backwardness. So one could write about him factually, and even with
a touch of sentiment for his romantic wildness, such as one might
feel for a picturesque bog which none the less must be drained.

Scholars of the period made the same "mistake", viewed
retrospectively, as the imaginative writers. They "failed to overcome
the Menshevik-S.1. (Socialist-Revolutionary) view of the peasant
movement and the agrarian revolution," "considered the peasant
movement in isolation from the actions of the workers," "exaggerated the
spontaneity of the seizure of landlord estates," "inadequately
displayed the political and organizational role of the party in winning
over the peasant mass."2 In short, they wrote objectively. At the
same time, failing to anticipate the demands of socialist realism
and the Stalin school of history, novelists and scholars neglected
to show the middle and poor peasant masses as from the start
natural and loyal allies in the building of socialism except when foreign
agents, kulaks (the richer peasants) or enemies of the people
hiding behind party cards misled them. Many of the best early
Soviet writers on peasant themes fell into disfavor in the 1930's,
and some of them paid the supreme penalty for theier "Historical
misunderstanding." Vesyoly, and more precariously Pilnyak, seem
to have regained a modest place in Soviet literary history, but
it is uncertain which of their works will be republished.[3]
-----------------------------
(2) See review of P.N. Sobolev, "Bedneishee Krestianstvo" (The
Poorest Peasants), Voprosy Istorii, March 1959.
(3) Another posthumously rehabilitated writer on peasant themes
is Ivan Makarov, purged in 1936, died 1940. His interesting novel
about collectivization in a flax-growing region, Golubye Polia
(Blue Fields), was serialized in Znamya, Nos. 1-3, 1959.

[page 66]

The difficult early years of the kolkhoz set an
Attractively baited trap for writers. Some of them felt a fresh access of
revolutionary enthusiasm after the debilitating stagnation of NEP. For
the first time since the civil war they had a truly dramatic theme
the martyrs and heroes of the Komsomol and the "twenty-five
thousand" (the contingent of urban activists sent to help enforce
collectivization) ; kulak terrorism and sabotage; the desperate struggle
of Communist devotion and principle against peasant suspicion and
instability. Then too, the horrific tale of rural backwardness had
to be retold, to heighten the heroism of the civilizers and to off
set the splendor of the new life they were building. But those
writers who rose to the theme found that it bristled with
vexatious problems. For' one thing, if they painted a satisfyingly
dark picture of the village and its inhabitants it was extremely
difficult to make a rapid transformation plausible. And to make
matters worse, it soon became obvious that the immediate result
of collectivization was a deterioration in the material condition
and morale of the peasants.

Literature of the 1930's

Two novels relating to the period are of lasting importance:
Mikhail Sholokhov's Virgin Soil Upturned (Part I, 1931) as a liter
ary masterpiece, and Fedor Panferov's Whetstones (Bruski, Part I-I
1928-1937) as a precious historical documents

Both books bear the stamp of sincerity. In Sholokhov's case,
it is perhaps no more than a rapt exultation in violent action,
intoxication with the "music of revolution," and at time merely,
the hypnotizwd single-mindedness of a master storyteller. Panferov
is simpler: there is no mistaking the genuineness of his loathing
for the milieu from which he had escaped, and his yearning to
rescue his kin from age-old misery and barbarism, Yet i was Panfer
who crashed through the obstacles which reality raised in the path
of "kolkhoz literature," and Sholokhov who balked at them.

Sholokhov, by choosing the Cossack Don as his setting, might
seem to have complicated his task. In fact, he turns the specific
difficulties of this theme to good account, is Cossacks are not
so ignorant and superstitious, not so abased and perverted by
centuries of want and oppression as the benighted Russian peasant.
Thi ir very spirt of independence - they boast that they did not
stand too much nonsense from landowners in the old days - is a vir
tue they have in common with Shololkhov's idealized proletarian,
and brings the two classes closer together. At the same time,
Sholokhov is able, not implausibly, to focus resistance to
collectivization around the White Cossak officers Polovtsev and Lyatevs
and their kulak stooges. His collectivizers have a hard and danger
ous, but not, as Shololkhov represents it, a prohibitively
difficult task.

Panferov was more ambitious. His village is a rural slum in
the drought-strike en Middle Volga region, his peasants brutalized
by an existence in which only ruthless selfishness can lift a man,
and then not securely, out of reach of famine, people crippled
and stupefied by their almost bare-handed struggle for life agains
poor soil and a baleful climate, unable even to sleep at sowing
and harvest times when they must feed their draft-animals through
the night, lapsing into fatalistic lethargy when crop failure
threatens, their only relief in drunknness and murderous brawls.

[page 67]

The middle peasants and the least miserable among the poor peasants,
dread collectivization, which they believe will level them all in
destitution. Without a horse or an ox, and a few barnyard animals,
a man has only a slippery hold on life. Panferov, unlike Sholokhov
shows the enormous psychological problems of collectivization in
their true dimensions.

Story Without an End

There is a further startling difference in the reactions of
the two writers to the realization that collectivization had not
brought about a quick improvement in the lot of the peasants.
Sholokhov simply fell silent after completing his Part I leaving
the White conspirators undiscovered, the saboteur Ostrovnov still
adviser on husbandry to the kolkhoz organizer Davydov (hero of the
novel), and the Cossacks by no means fully converted to the new
way of life. Headers have had to wait over a quarter of a century
for the next instalment.[4] It would be presumptuous to claim any
certain insight into the reasons for his silence, but there are

A compratively obscure literary journal,[5] in a very unusual
article, recently informed us that Sholokhov had been deeply
distressed by "absurd and monstrous" charges of Communists, who, like
his Davydov, had been "twenty-five thousanders" and founders of
kolkhozy. He was, we read, so overwhelmed with anxiety that he had
stopped writing; even with his writer's imagination he could not
foresee the future of the rural community and the characters he had
created. This evidence lends some credibility to the rumor, at
first sight fantastic, that when Sholokhov finally returned to his
story in recent years, he had to be dissuaded from making Davydov
perish in the great purge - a disaster which would have disturbed
Russian readers as powerfully as anything in the work of the
revisionist writers.

The same article reminds us that in the years..1932-1935
there was an acute grain shortage in the Cossack lands, which
holokhov himself ascribed (in 1937) to Trotskyist sabotage. Is
It not possible that in the middle 1930ss he could see no way
ahead for his politically vulnerable heroes - Davydov, the
greenhorn whom a disguised kulak could mislead into strewing an
ox-stall with sand instead of straw; and Nagulnov, the peasant
fanatic painfully learning English in anticipation of the world
revo-

-----------------------------
(4) The first "new chapters" appeared in Pravda in 1955. Part
II was published in full in Neva, July 1959* It is a prolongation
rather than a development of Part I, and although Sholokhov cannot
write boringly, this latter-day work seems - perhaps not
surprisingly - rather half-hearted.

(5) M. Soifer, "Shololkhov in Veshenskaia," in Zvezda Vostoka,
Tashkent, No. 8, August 1959.

[page 68]

lution, and impatiently resorting to the readiest argument against
local; obstacles, the fist or the gun ("if every contra I clubbed
gave up a hundred poods [of grain] I'd spend all my time at it.")
Davydov and Nagulnov are ready-made deviationists - of the right
and left respectively. And what of the inchoate kolkhoz - how
would it weather the years of Tortskyist sabotage and
non-fulfilment to come? Recently if has been said of Sholokhov that he ca
write only the truth; the remark was made at the 1955 Conference
of Writers on Kolkhoz Themes (about which more later) by a speaker
who, perhaps coincidentally, went on to mention the great purge
as an example of hushed up "negative phenomena,"6 It certainly
seems likely that SholoMiov could see no end to his story which
would satisfy both is conscience and the political exigencies of
the time.

Retreat from Reality

Panferov did not choose silence, but hurried ostentatiously
after-every swerve in the line. The result is a nightmarish
dis??tinuity. The thousand pages of Whetstones, composed over 10 f???
years, epitomize the degeneration of Marxist idea and the failure
of Soviet literature in its middle period. Panferov so admirably
down-to-earth in his early chapters, takes flight - as the story
grows more difficult and dangerous to the teller - into the
dizzying air of paranoiac fantasy. The last outbreak of peasant
resistance is provoked by a conspiratorial group uniting Trotskyists,
Bukharinists, Zinovievites "and other oppositionists." They aim at
the "physical destruction of Stalin" and the restoration of capita
ism. To discredit the regime and raise the whole people in arms
against it, their agents in "the agricultural organs, the People's
Commisariat of Education, cooperative establishments and the Acade
introduce shallow ploughing ("citing American experience"), so
that the following year's crop is weed-choked. They blacklist
unstable villages, condemn them to starvation, and spread panic
through the countryside by sending peasants near death from hunger
on errands to other villages. Some villages they sweep clean of ev
last grain,, rewarding them with honorific red banners, and their
native local Communists with rest-cures and scholarships, and 
???aving the peasants without bread. At the same time defaulting kolkho
those who were given banners of matting as a mark of disgrace, have
enough to eat. In one village members of the conspiracy sprinkle
millet in the ears of the horses, which run amuck, are declared
mad by the veterinary (a conspirator) and are destroyed. And all
this because the conspirators, who did all their deeds under the
party flag, but "just a little bit to the left," never realy share
the ideals of the proletariat, but wanted, when the landowners
were driven out, "to occupy their mansions and live in them with
the same rights."

Panferov's attempts to show the transformation of the peasant
character as a result of cooperative effort in the kolkhoz are
equally facile and feeble. In one astounding espisode a peasant who
just a few chapters back had sat on his last sack of grain,
feeding-himself and giving his starving daughter not a mouthful, demonstrate
his reform by ceremoniously returning to the kolkhoz the four cart
loads of grain given to him as a prize.

(6)N. Satyan, quoted in Literaturnaia Gazeta, November 1, 1955.

[page 69]

Because they could not resolve their stories satisfactorily,
what Sholokhov and Panferov leave most clearly imprinted on our
minds is the picture of peasant fears, suspicions and resentment
in the early days of collectivization, A Davydov may see the
peasants are parasites: "They have lain down under the Soviet power
like a lousy calf under a cow They can suck all right, "but they
won't grow," But the peasant feels that he is the victim.
Collectivization is like "giving your wife to uncle and going to a whore.
The government is so exacting that you "pay for the smoke out of
your chimney," The peasant is so attached to his horse - without
it he is a "fly without wings" - that he stands about the kolkhoz
stable watching it with anxious yearning, and even finds it a
little extra feed. Perhaps, after all, the government will disband
the kolkhoz when they find that it is a failure. Who is likely to take
good care of what belongs to everyone - and no-one? What respectable
hardowrking peasant is going to work for the benefit of loafers
who: have spent their lives on the sovket, dreaming of a tasty
piece? Even the "good lads" hang back, waiting to see how the kolkhoz
wall turn out, and "mostly digging their own gardens." There is
hope - ??ter all, the Communists had to disband the "hens' kolkhoz,"
because the "consciousness" of those birds had not yet "grown up to
it. "[7]

The usual absurd rumors fly around; the women will be made
to sit on nests and hatch out eggs, and very likely they will be
"driven into one yard" and held in common. There is
violence - both Davydov and the Communist; Ognev are terribly .beaten, not by
kulaks but by the peasant mob. And in Whetstones there is a
vivid presentation of the prelude to the great famile of the early
1930's: the senseless, reckless, panic massacre of the animals,
when "the whole muzhik kingdom gorged itself on meat." You can't
go into paradise, says a cynic, with property.

The Heyday of Stalinist Literature

That "socialist realism" from the 1930's on paradoxically
produced a literature that was both unrealistic and socially

harm is the unanswerable charge against it. Singificantly, at the
aforementioned Conference of Writers on Kolkhoz Themes, the eminent
author Valentin Ovechkin mentioned the use of the term "critical
realists" to distinguish the post-Stalin school from their
discredited predecessors. After collectivization the party would not
discuss frankly the true nature of its agricultural policies or
the extent of its difficulties in the countryside. Writers could
only copy the complacent prevarications of officialdom,, It is
sometimes said that Stalin, sealed off from reality by the triple ring
of dogma, sycophancy and sedentary routine, came at last to believe
his own propaganda Can he really have watched that favorite film
of his, Cossacks of the Kuban, renamed Eldorado by some Soviet
cinemagoers, with infatuated self-congratulation? However this may be,
the unrealistic Stalinist literature on the countryside reached
its apogee and the bankruptcy of Stalin's agricultural policy became

(7) A reference to the unsuccessful attempt to socialize all
livestock undertaken by collective izers "dizzy with success"; later
poultry and other species were restored to peasant ownership.

[page 70]

frighteningly obvious at the same time - in the last five years of
Stalin's life.

Subsequent critics of this literature concentrated their
attacks on the most recent and readable culprits, Semyon Babaevsky
and Galina Nikolaeva.8 As always in Stalinist writing, the work
of these authors is twisted and vitiated by their efforts to
ignore or conceal all-important but unmentionable facts: that the
kolkhoz was unpropitious and unpopular because the state took too
much from it and paid too little; and that the Stalinist
conception of the agricultural year as a campaign of two bureaucratic
offensives (for sowing and for harvesting) against the peasant was
obsolete and counterproductive. Writers could only spin fables
about the magical results to be obtained from mechanization,
organization and political education, and they were as glib and vague
about the practical workings of these panaceas as Stalin himself.
If Babaevsky's farm is backward he builts it a power station - new
mind where the money comes from, even if last year's harvest was
poor. If the farm needs new buildings he sends a large part
his labor force timbering in high summer, confident that the
harvest will be gathered in somehow, In fact, nothing can go wrong,
because the hero is a demi-Stalin complete with magical powers,
with his local "personality cult, ' with his own sickening pose
of modesty and respect for the masses. There is no difficulty
in mechanizing, says Babaevsky. "It's not hard to get a turbine,
but how will you get your people on their feet?" "Cadres" and "con
sciousness" - that's the infallible recipe. Replace incompetent
raikom (district committee) secretaries and dishonest kolkhoz 
chairmen - and don't forget to send reapers into the fields with their
textbooks on Marxism-Leninism.

The results are, indeed, remarkable: "Only half a year had passed
and how much had been done!" says Nikolaeva, with the air of the
serial writer who delivers his hero from a hopeless predicament
with a twist of the pen, a la Edgar Wallace's "One might bound and
Standish was free." As for the trifling problem of peasant
incomes - this, let us remember, at a time when kolkhozy paid misera?
little, less than a ruble in cash and half a kilo of grain for
a day's labor - if incomes are low it must be because the work-day
has "not been teamed up with the machine" (Babaevsky), or because
the agronom (agronomist) is not abreast of the latest methods of
cultivation, or most likely because the peasants, discouraged
by the mismanagement or speculation of their chairman dodge work
in the communal fields.

One of the most irritating features of such books is their
abuse of hindsight. An innocent reader might think that Nikolaeva,
in Harvest, was fertile in interesting practical suggestions: in
fact she was only cataloguing measures which the party had already
promulgated, disguising them as spontaneous deductions from her

story and avoiding discussion of their application or efficacy.

In particular, Babaevsky's Kavalier Zolotoi Zvezdy (The
of the Gold Star),1947 , (A Stalin prize winner for 194o), and
Svet nad Zemlei (Light over the Land), 1949; and Nikolaeva's
Zhatva (Harvest), 1950.

[page 71]

Heroes. and Villains

Worst of all, however, is the superficial treatment of human
beings. Characters were merely conventional stereotypes for
progressive or retrograde attitudes. Family relations became incidental
to productive activity. ("Because they had started talking about
great matters [Husband presumed dead, comes home to find wife
living with another man] seemed to become less important."[9]) Lovers
meetings were the occasion for bickering about sowing times. Woe
betide the lad who acted on an emotional impulse, and not at the
dictates of civic conscience and business-like calculation! Not
that there was much room from convincing practical discussion or
ratiocination, Babaevsky was later criticized for finding �no 
forgiveness for such an offense as sober, businesslike calculation in
the management of the economy," viewing those who attempted it as
potential "enemies of the people."[10]

These were the limitations imposed on the main characters,
usually drawn from a standard dramatis personae; Raikom secretary,
Lkhoz chairman, agronom, brigadiers, team leaders, ;kolkhoz
specialists. Where were the ordinary peasants? They were a crudely sketched
background - a ballet chorus of "paysans" drifting in groups
behind the solists, "positive" or "negative" as the case might be.

This literature in effect reduced the problems of the
countryside to a struggle between good and bad elements in rural cadres.
It excluded from its view the desperate financial plight of the
kolkhoz, the costly absurdities and injustices of agricultural
planning and administration, the effects on the peasant of natural
and certainly of political disasters. What could it say about
the drought of 1946, or the currency reform of 1947, or the
premature attempt to transfer the peasant's cow into the kolkhoz herd?
Not until after 1953 did any Soviet writer dare to describe that
"difficult time at the beginning of the 1950's" when a kolkhoz
chairman could wake up to find another peasant family had fled
in the night:

The kolkhoz was "burning". People, people, he thought,
where is your consciousness? But he himself understood; how
did your consciousness come into it when the labor-day was
"gramm da grosh - zhiyi kak khosh" (a gram and a
farthing - live as best you can.)[12]

Pastoral Thaw

The great change in Soviet literature on the kolkhoz
theme - and this is an important and difficult point for interpreters
of Soviet domestic politics in that puzzling period - began in
the last year of Stalin's life, with the first instalment of

-----------------------------
(9) Nikolaeva, op. cito
(10) See P. Abramov, "Lyudi Kolkhoznoi Derevni v Poslevoyennoi
Proze" (People of the Collective Village in Postwar Literature),
Novyi Mir,April 1954.

(11) See Abramov, op. cit,and I. Vishnevskaia, quoted in
Literaturnaia Gazeta, October 27, 1955.
(12) M. Zhestev, "Communism Comes to Alexandrovka," Literaturnaia
Gazeta, March 5, 1959.

[page 72]

Valentin Ovechkin's Raion Weekdays,a work which contained
refreshing if still cautious signs of a shift toward a new realism.13
Landmarks on the new course were the subsequently condemned
articles of Pomerantsev, "Sincerity in Literature" (1953) and
Abramov "People of the Collective Village in Postwar Prose (1954);
the Conference of Writers on Kolkhoz Themes in December 1955;
and Ovechkin's article based on his speech at that conference
("Collective Life and Literature").[14] Important representatives
of the new trend, besides Oveehkin, are Tendryakov, Ivanov,
Troyepolsky, Vinnichenko, Dorosh and Solukhin. Some of these writers
are bolder and mor radical than others. Some are primarily
interested in human beings, others in technical matters. What unites
them is their realistic approach to the question which their
predecessors handled so gingerly: the relationship between
officialdom and the peasant, the interaction between state policies and
peasant attitudes.[15]

Their works trace many kolkhoz troubles to faults in the
system itself, aggravated by the inadequacies of those who administer
it. Stereotyped, inflexible planning, without regard to locate.
conditions or allowance for unforeseen circumstances, is a favorite
target. A farm which could make a good profit from flax might
have to grow grain, at production cost three times its selling pr
Farms on the Komi border were made to grow corn, at the incredible
expenditure of 25 work-days per stem. Essential pasture was ploug
up to fulfil the plan for developing virgin land, milch cows
slaughtered to complete a meat delivery quota . Officials lived from ca
paign to campaign: seed might be sunk in mud - but the raion
(district) must be able to report to the oblast (region), the oblast
to the republic, and the republic to the "center" that sowing was
completed by the appointed date.

[13] V. Oveehkin, Raionnye Budni, 1952.

[14] V. Pomerantsev, "0 Iskrennosti v Literature", Novyi Mir,
June 1953; Abramov, op. cit.; Proceedings of the All-Union
Conference of Writers on Kolkhcz Themes, Literaturnaia Gazeta,
October 27-November 1, 1955; V. Ovehckin, "Kolkhoznaia Zhizn i
Lituratura", Novyi Mir, December 1955-

[15] Generalizations as well as specific examples and quotation:
in this part of the discussion are drawn from the following work;
Abramov, op. cit. Proceedings of the Conference on Kolkhoz Theme
loc. cit. Ovehckin, both works previously cited and "Trudnaia
Vesna" (Difficult Spring), Novyi Mir, March 1956. Vladimir Tendr
kov, "Nenaste" (Dirty Weather), ibid., February If54;"Ne ko Dvor
(Not Suited), ibid., June 1954; and Sasha Otpravliaestsya (Sasha
Sets Out), serialized in ibid., February and March 1956. G. Troy
epolsky, "Aspiski Agronoma" (Notes of an A ronomist), "Odin Den"
(One Day), "Sosedi" (Neighbors), and "Kruttfi Yar" (Steep Bank),
ibid. , respectively in March 1953, and January, April and Septeir
ber issues, 1954. Ivan Vinnichenko, ."Na Vzlyote" (At the
Take - Off), Oktyabr, June 1958, Yefim Dorosh, Derevenskie Zametki"
(Village Notes), Literaturnaia Gazeta, No 27, 1955; "Derevenski
Dnevnik" (Village Datry), Literaturnaia Moskva, 1956; and "Dva I
v Raigorode" (Two Days in the District Town), Novyi Mir,
July 1958.
[page 73]

Local officials believed "not our own eyes, not the peasant,
but bits of paper?" The plan which "the government has sent down"
was sacrosanct, and those who criticized it "almost enemies of the
people." If it were in principle permissible to modify the plan,
the badkward farms would take advantage and dodge their obligations.
Officials were so intent on often illusory-tactical-gains that they
lost sight of the strategic objective - bigger harvests. Thus, the
peasants of a prosperous farm might be little better off than their
laggard neighbors, because they would have to make extra deliveries
above plan to cover any shortage in the district quota. At the same
time relentless insistence on the recovery of arrears from the
weak farms often drove the latter into bankruptcy. The
machine - tractor stations (MTS) - "organizers of the socialist
countryside" - also passed on their difficulties to the kolkhoz. At one
time, for instance, they found it easier to fulfill harvesting
and fuel economy plans if they sowed sparesely and kept down yields.

The multitudinous bureaucratic authorities concerned with
agriculture Were ill-coordinated, so that a kolkhoz might receive
mach, which it perhaps did not need, and be denied the materials
to build, sheds for them Skilled personnel were distracted from
practical work. The agronom could not get into the fields because
he was too busy with absurd forms, ("Average number of bugs on
each stem. How can I coutfit them - they jump,") Often the critical
period in the agricultural year was the occasion for a marathon round
of meetings, at which all key personnel were immobilized for days
on end, while they listened resignedly to ignorant windbags
pointing out how important it was to hurry into the fields and
belaboring such themes as "the pig is a useful animal."

Frank Portraits, Fair Criticisms.

The new literature turns a clearer eye on the peasant as well
as on the bureaucrat, "Survivals of the past" and "contradictions"
are more vigorous in the country than in the towns. Everyone has
always admitted it, in theory. But the Stalinist writers had been
very coy about it. They did not know, for instance, what to say
out the private plot - so they made the peasant speak scathingly
of it, knowing surely that nobody would be fooled The new school
has rejected the ridiculous oversimplification that if the
collective farmer is poor, it is because he does not work hard Only
higher incentives could attract the peasant from his plot to the
communal sector and, equally important, check the drift of young
people and able-bodied males to the towns. Peasant incomes and
the capital-funds of farms have been reinforced by higher state
prices for produce: they must be protected against the
encroachment of bureaucratic bunglers and tyrants. Rural life must be made
easier and more secure. A speaker at the 1955 Conference quoted
a peasant as syaing that his village sometimes received three or
four "plenipotentiaries" a day - and never one who wanted to know
what the peasant ate, where he slept, whether his roof leaked.
And then there was the glaring fact that only wealthy farms operated
social insurance schemes. Officials should stop treating the
peasants either as follows - imagining that they cannot put a horse
between the shafts without instructions - or as an alien, almost
hostile class, after the fashion of Ovehckin's party secretary
who says: "You carry on managing people with your peasant justice,
I'll do it the proletarian way."

[page 74]

The "proletarian way" was the way of several of Tendryakov's
negative characters: the raikom secretary who forces the peasants
to waste their precious seed "because he dare not risk a rebuke
from above ("Dirty Weather"); Katya, the rural komsomol who goes
straight from school into the party offices, identifies the party
with its apparat and cannot understand anyone working on the
kolkhoz from choice (Sasha Sets Out); above all, Mansurov, the
raikom secretary whose over-ambitious miscalculstions and
inhumanity drive the kolkhoz chairman Margin - one of the
best-drawn peasant characters in Soviet literature - to suicide (also
in Sasha).

But sensational dramas like the story of Murgin are rare. For
the most part the new literature of the countryside is busy with
more prosaic matters: painstaking discussion of kolkhoz problems,
minute and sumpathetic description of the way in which the
peasant lives, and exploration of historically and geographically
conditioned regional peculiarities. Yefim Dorosh, in his story of a
North Russian area not very far from Moscow, perhaps Rostov
Yaroslavsky, exhibits all three preoccupations, and gives an excellent
account of the collectivized countryside. Dorosh writes well, "but
it is an extraordinary reflection on previous Soviet literature
that his work... should be as impressive as it is. It
is exciting mainly because he describes things as they are,
honestly admitting the conditions and problems which were almost know
to exist.

If our interest is in the size of the kolkhoz labor force for
example, Dorosh will tell us that "the village has grown poor in
people"; it is a long time since he saw a large peasant family of
three generations filling their wooden home with noise and
merriment. Most of the kolkhoz peasants are war-widows, or younger
women who cannot find husbands but often have illegitimate
children to keep. Their lives are hard: what with work in the fields an
on their own plots, looking after homes and children, and taking
produce to market, women are old at forty. Of course, it would be
better if the communal sector guaranteed them a good wage, so that
they need not bother about the private plot or the market. But at
the time of writing, the "private sector" was both the surest sour
of income for the peasant and the only reliable supplier of
certain fruits and vegetables to the local towns. Moreover "the kolkho
as yet cannot compete with the high agricultural technique of
the plot"; for Dorosh's peasants, unlike most of their brothers
in Soviet literature, are allowed to demonstrate a remarkable
heritage of agricultural lore, accumulated through ages of intelligent
husbandry on once poor soil which they have made rich themselves,
they would "waste" less time if local trade were better organized;
if the rural cooperative did not feel that it could. do well enough
out of "vodka and short measure" without handling peasant produce;
and if the peasants did not have to go into Moscow for such goods
as roof iron, lamp chimneys, felt boots and soap, crowding trains
on these excursions and creating "harmful irritation" against then
selves.

What about time wasted on religious holidays - in practice
the excuse for drinking and jollifications in the streets? The
village, Dorosh shows, offers little in the way of. entertainment
or cultural activity, and the lives of manh of its female
inhabitants are laborious and lonely. Can they be blamed if, as soon
as they can spare the money, which may be at the height of the
harvest, they club together to buy drink and finish work early

[page 75]

to have a party? And how do the youngsters spend their leisure?
Well, there is always the street gathering, with singing and
dancing to an accordion. There the girls will being their
"rather absurd" dance the yeletsky. Two or four of them step
into the middle of the ring and start slowly circling about,
frantically stamping their feet, their arms limply dangling,
their faces deliberately expressionless. Soon one of them yells
out a chastuska (peasant ditty) with a significant refrain which
could be translated, in doggerel not much worse then the original

They miscall us and they bawl us
out, but still we ;jog along;
Whatever names they like to call us,
We're so tough we can't go wrong.

The town, of course, must raise the village up to its own level.
But rather startlingly, the inhabitants of Dorosh's raigorod,
(district town), except for the workers in its one factory, are
provincial philistines and parasites not very different- he says himself
in their counterparts before the revolution. Other emissaries
of urban civilization include an incompetent and time-wasting
ministerial investigating commission, led by a '"self-sacrificing
blockhead"L and a blustering, shifty MTS director who stands on
a platform as though it were a fortified position from which to
bombard his audience. Dorosh praises his raikom secretary for
learning to behave not. like the usual urban bureaucrat come to
reform the ignorant but rather like the old�style, country�bred
farm chairman:" I think that we should have more confidence in
the peasants - their common cense, their experience and last but
not least their desire to have something to eat."

Limitation of the New literature

To sum up, the recent work on rural themes deserves respect
because it is informed with a refreshing common-sense and
down to-earth humanity unknown in the Stalin era and still rare in
other reaches of Soviet literature. But its importance should
be exaggerated, whether one is looking for evidence of a change
of heart towards the peasant or signs of literary rejuvenation.

The new trend in kolkhoz literature has been the product. of
Khrushchev's break with the discredited agricultural policies of
his predecessors, and of that practical. undogmatic approach to
rural problems which, he has told us, once provoked Stalin into
calling him a "Narodnik." Unlike the Babaevsky and Nikolaevas,
Ovechkin and his fellows have not always trailed along behind
party decisions? sometimes, indeed they have anticipated official
policy. It is nonetheless true that their work is for the most ,
part an artistic elaboration of the critical observations and
practical deductions which are embodied in the party's enactments
on agriculture in the period 1953-1958. Since the party itself
has recognized and prescribed reforms against the abuses and
absurdities with which the writers are largely concerned, most of
their work is inevitably ephemeral. Obviously, they cannot
discuss the results of Khrushchev's innovations as frankly as they
have discussed those of his predecessor's mismanagement Similarly
they will have to turn from examination of the peasant's
grievances, which the party now regards as a thing of the past , and
portray his progressive assimilation of the Communist ideal. In

[page 76]

short, a new stabilization of agricultural policy may mean a new
stagnation in kolkhoz literature.

The recent work considered here is essentially journalistic: it
preferred forms are the essay, travel notes, the journal,
the short story, the conte. This is partly "because the writers
were urgently concerned with matters of topical importance, but
perhaps also because by avoiding large rounded forms they spared
themselves the problems of balance between "positive" and
"negative" which bedevil the Soviet novel. In any event, the
sket??iness of the work makes it a very flimsy foundation for a new
literature on rural themes. The spirit of Ovechkin, Tendryakov
and Dorosh is admirable, but its embodiment is -boo insubstantial
to preserve it.

Soviet literature on rural themes has passed through four
phases. In the 1920's the writers, though often ideologically
committed, were artistically free. With the beginning of mass
collectivization they were forced into the smuggle to reconcile
realistic art with political expediency - a struggle which Shookb
abandoned, but which panferov pursued to the ruin of what might
have been a great book. Art and truth alike disappeared from
mature Stalinist literature, Finally since Stalin's death, what
we have seen is a new, humble and perhaps not very hardy
flowering.

The lesson which should be evident - and many good Soviet
writers are aware of it - is that a literature whose themes and aims
are purely sociological can create work of high artistic and society
value only if writers can freely range the historical and
psychological depths of their subject matter. The Soviet writer has no sue
freedom. He is limited to his treatment of "what is" by taboos
on the discussion of "what has been" and a rigid prescription of
"what must be". Soviet literature can securely restore its credits
for the future only if it pays its debts to the past, and many
of the writers know this. Those who subscribed to the condemned
"theory; of distance" - the idea that literature can best make
valid comments on reality in distant retrospect - were probe.
not all simply anxious, as official critics suggest, to avoid
the difficult "actual themes" of the present. Some of them
surely were motivated by the desire to reopen the awkward
questions of yesterday, of the sort which the newly published party
history so blandly evades. Not the least important of these
questions is the fate dealt out to the Soviet peasant seen in
historical perspective. The starting point for a new,
artistically powerful and socially useful literature of the countryside
could only be a novel such as Sholokhov or Panferov might have
written but for Stalin.

[page 77]

SOVIET YOUTH IN LIFE AND LITERATURE

Problems of Communism
No. 4 Vol. VIII
Jul-Aug 1959
Yera Alexandrova

Editors' Note; Miss Alexandrova'3 article is the second in
our series of reports on current Soviet literature as a
reflection of Soviet reality (see "The Factory Manager in Soviet
Fiction," by George Gibian, in the March-April, 1959 issue),
The next two articles will deal with agriculture and the

status and position of Soviet women.
In stormy historical epochs youth always regards itself as
a "new generation," ready to replace its elders� One of the
Soviet Union's most talented young poets, Evgeny Evtushenk.,
wrote in an article on "Two Poetic Generations" in early 1955:

New posts do not appear in literature singly. We
connect the image of every poet with a specific poetic
generation,...only a post who is profoundly related to
his generation can later become the spokesman for the
intellectual moods of the entire people...."1

Evtushenko classified himself as a member of a generation
distinct from that which was old enough to take an active part
in World War II, and whose poets' works directly reflected that
experience. The new generation is also and profoundly a
product of the war, but only a few of its eldest fringe actually
joined in the final stages of fighting. Most were children
at the time (Evtushenko himself was about eight when the war
broke out) and they felt the war's impact in a different way.

Glimpses of this generation in its childhood are furnished
by some of the writings of the war period, A common
characteristic of the children is enforced self-reliance beyond their
years. There is the boy Yova, in Tatyana Ocks' "On the Petrograd
Side" (1942), who is the a son of a Red Army soldier fighting at
besieged Leningrad. Vova's mother works in a defense plant.
The boy takes care of the home, and in the evenings goes to
meet his mother, so that she need not be afraid coming home
alone. Similar self-sufficient personalities are exhibited by
Olya in Nikolai Tikhonov's "The Family" (1942) and Petrusha in
the late Andrei Platonov's "Ivanov's Family"' (1946). These
children became accustomed from their earliest years to live
by themselves, concealing from their elders their thoughts,
sorrows and dreams. Petrushafs father, home from the front,
catches himself in the feeling that he has lost touch with his
family, that he feels no real tenderness for the boy: "Talks
like a grandfather, but I'll bet he cannot read," It is only

[page 78]

It is only when Petrusha speaks in his sleep, "tenderly and
piteously" � "mama, mama, pick me up in your arms, I am so
tired" � that we realize how young he still is, what a
"childish soul is in him when it is untouched by care."

That the theme of childhood looms large in the latter day
creative works of this generation is thus understandable. The
young writer Korenev muses:

"The spirited boy may not remember
Those days; that road, and that heavy burden.
But childhood knows
With its special sense
Of the most important...."2

And with the same acuity these children "saw their elders
without masks," says the young poetess Yulia Neiman,
recollecting a child's view of the war in her poem "1941."[3]

Life "Without Embellishments"

The war's formative influence on the new literary
generation is summed up by the Soviet writer Vassily Azhaev (author
of the novel Far From Moscow, 1952) in an article entitled "The
Young Forces in Soviet Prose."[4] Azhaev asks: "What is the
common feature in the lives of the youngest generation?...how
do its writers differ from the young writers of preceding
generations?" and he answers:

"They were formed by the war...whether they fought in it
or were merely torn away from their homes and sent into
evacuation. In either case they felt the impact in
childhood and youth of a life full of trials and hardships;
they came, to know (life) not from books but from experience,
and certainly without embellishments."

Azhaev apparently felt impelled to add that this 
acquaintance with life as it was�not "from books" (in other words, not
according to the official stereotype) � "did not prevent the
children of this generation from absorbing with their mothers'
milk a deep love for their socialist homeland." Yet the
literature produced by the new generation reveals that whatever its
feelings for country may be, they are something quite apart front
the hackneyed depictions in earlier writing of youth's
enthusiastic "socialist patriotism."

Among recent writings which have probed youth's attitudes
is Nikolai Pogodin�s sketch, "Kustanai Meetings," portraying
the young people lately mobilized for developmental work on the
virgin lands.[5] Noting that these youths bear "very little
resemblance" to the zealous contingent which undertook the
building of the city of Komsomolsk in the 1930's, Pogodin remarks:

[page 79]

"The times are different. The romanticism and novelty
of the first five-year plans are things of the past.
There has been a great national war, and the work itself
on the virgin lands is not the building of a romantic
city."

The virgin-lands workers, he goes on, are mostly "fellows"
who have left secondary school before graduating. Many of them
have lost their families. They are sparing of words and smiles,
and their speech is frequently punctuated by "uncultured"
expressions. They all share a dislike of pompous slogans:

"Some quiet-eyed boy will listen in silence when you call
him an emissary of his homeland. The truth, it turns out,
is that he has come here to change his life .... There are
young people here whose lives in some factory, in some
collective did not work out, cracked somewhere. And so,
as one told me, they went to look for...a new place where
they were not known, where they would not be condemned for
old mistakes, and where, discarding their past, they could
start life over again."

There are very few "hopeless cases, incorrigibles or
hooligans" among the new settlers on the virgin lands. But if some
of them are still unsuccessful in reordering their lives, then
the blame, says the writer, can often be laid to a lack of
helpful understanding and interest on the part of local authorities.

Bureaucratic Blinders

Some instances of this soulless approach of the party
officialdom are described in a sketch by Leonid Volynsky, also titled
"Kustanai Meetings." 6 He relates, for example, the cases of
Tolya Kostiuchenko, a boy who was unable to finish school and
left home to go to work in a factory in Kazakhstan. At first
everything went well. But later Tolya began staying away from
work and drinking to excess. Called to the office for a talk,
"he honestly admitted that he could not restrain himself, and
asked that his mother come to live with him" (Tolya's father
was killed in the war). The mother wanted to come, but was given
no help in arranging for work. Eventually Tolya fell into bad
company, was caught stealing and sent to prison, Seeking help
for him, the mother came and appealed to the district committee
of the Communist Youth League (Komsomol) , Too late, they
realized that they themselves had failed the boy. The author muses
a good deal about "how deeply injustice wounds the yough
defenseless heart, and how little the people whose task it is to teach
and educate concern themselves with the problem,"

This idea finds further illustration in a play by the young
writer Alexander Volodin, "Factory Girl83 (1956"). The simple
plot centers around a young spinning mill worker named Zhenka
Shulzhenko, A motion picture director comes to the mill to film

[page 80]

NOT TO BE M1CROFICHED

a group of the women workers, showing what a "cultured" life
they lead. In an amusing scene at the dormitory�where the girl
hasten to clean up the disarray and to exhibit hooks from what
they call the "Red Corner" � Zhenka stands out for her
prettiness, high spirits and impish frankness. Later, at the staging
of a party in the workers' club, Zhenka is asked to leave the
dance floor "because she "behaves too boisterously and merrily.
A party organizer named Bibichev then scores her in the local
newspaper as a typical example of workers who "spoil the
reputation of the whole group" by their conduct, Zhenka is "taken
to task" and almost loses her job; her friends intercede for
her, however, and the play ends happily.

It is highly interesting that this play, dramatically weak
as it is, has enjoyed great success at public presentations
The critic M. Stroev in a commentary entitled "Critical Turn
of Mind" [7] (an attribute which Zhenka gaily claims in
describing herself), states that he does not recall an equal success
since "Pavel Grekov" by Voytekhov and Lench, in 1939. "The
cheeky, merry girl" has conquered the young viewer by her
truth." At the theater, filled with young people, "you are
carried along by the passionate and attentive reaction of the
public, you will hear the soldier or officer in front of you
mutter encouragement and approval to the mischievous Zhenka..."

Other recent plays which have been received favorably by
the public are Rozov's "Bon Voyage" (1955) and Shtein's
"Personal Affair" (1954) and "Hotel Astoria" (1957). These, like
"Factory Girl," are theatrically weak yet seem to have evoked
a sympathetic response through the ^portrayal of youthful char
actors who tend to be critical of petty party authority.

Apathy and Honesty

A valuable source of clues to young people's attitudes was
a collection of commentaries entitled "Today, September 1st,"
published in Novy Mir in connection with the opening of the
1955 academic year.8 Of particular interest was a piece by L.
Rozanova, secretary of a Komsomol unit at Moscow Universit we
reported the results of interviews with uoung Communist
freshmen. One Komsomil member, when asked what "social" activities
he would like to participate in, replied:

"You know, I have decided to stay away from social
activities here."
"Why?"
"Well, you know...I did quite a bit at school. I think
its enough. I am tired. There is too little free time..,
Then, after some thought, he adds calmly: "Besides,
honestly speaking, there is no point to it all."
"No point to what?"
"Oh, Komsomol work..."

The writer records that these ideas are familiar to her;
she has heard the same talk�"theories about fatigue, and,
"honestly speaking, fthe uselessness' of social activities"
from other students. She remarks:

"Of course, we have met such people in the past. They ma;

[page 81]

not have expressed these "theories" with so much
frankness, but they certainly practiced them. Yet I have
never "before encountered such coll skepticism in a
freshman, a "boy just., graduated from secondary school."

The conclusions reached by Rozanova are not too flattering
to party methods of youth training. It appears that those
students who entertain the "correct5' ideas generally "think
in stock phrases," while the genuinely interesting young
people are either disillusioned in Komsomol work or are not members
of the Komsomol at all.

The remarks of the student quoted above call attention to
a notable characteristic of the young generation, its tendency
to adopt favorite phrases or words and to invest them with a
special meaning. "Honest" and "honestly speaking3' join with the
commonly-heard expressions, "wholeness" and "of a piece," key
words used to assert and to defend individuality. Evtushenko
devoted an entire poem to the theme of "Wholeness" (its title),
concluding it with the lines "Yes/This is very difficult--]
becoming happy [Yes, first one must/become himself ."g) And Nelly
Ivanova, in Leonid Volynsky's story mentioned earlier, says to
the writers "A person must be whole and honest, don8t you
think? And first of all honest with himself,," The main
concern of the young man Andrei in Rozov's "Bon Voyage" is being
thus "honest with himself,," Other terms in the special
lexicon of youth similarly express a groping effort to discover and
to assert individual personality.

An interesting sidelight of the young generation is the
curiosity exhibited by some of its members about literature that
has been criticized or banned by the authorities. A case in
point emerges in "Letters from a Young People's Dormitory," by
V. Mikailpv, a writer who went to live for a time at a factory
dormitory in the Urals.!L His roommate was a young rolling-
mill worker named Sasha who loved literature, especially poetry.
One day he surprised Mikhailov with the question, "Where can
you get rare...forbidden books�say, Essenin or Pushkin?" He
revealed that he already had a small collection of such books
and that he made a practice of copying obscured poems to his
taste when he was able to find them. On another occasion Sasha
commented on the stupidity of rejecting Mayakovsky or Essenin,
since both, in his opinion, had written some remarkable poems.
And thoughtfully he quoted a line from Mayakovsky: "When the
soul has frozen to the rib, then see if you can thaw it off..."

The Appeal of Revisionism

The above discussion necessarily provides only a few clues
to the thinking and attitudes of the young Soviet generation;
yet those characteristics which have been underscored are
important ones, for without understanding them, we cannot understand
the emergence and persistence of the phenomenon of "revisionism"
on the Soviet scene. In the field of literature�which is the
particular concern here---the label of "revisionism" has been
applied by the authorities to stigmatize the effort of a notable
sector of the intellectuals to break away from certain esthetic
and literary values of the Stalin era, expressed in the precepts
of socialist realism"

[page 82]

There have been other instances in Soviet history when
"oppositional" moods developed within the society. As a rule,
the authorities quickly dissipated such moods by the simple
expedient of disposing of the people suspected of harboring them.
This time, however, the regime has fouriid its task much more
difficult and protracted. While it has put a stop to the
publicizing of "revisionist" ideas and workL, it has by no means
vanquished the spirit which produced them, as its own persisting
complaints have attested* The intensity of the anti-revisionism
campaign is indeed the surest index of the widespread support
these ideas have evoked among literary people and the general
reading public�particularly in the ranks of the younger
generation.

So much has been written concerning the causes, emergence
and course of the revisionist trend in literature that it would
be neither possible nor profitable to dwell on its history here
Yet in the context of the present paper it might be interesting
to recall the positions taken by some of its protagonists we
are still fairly young in years themselves, and whose viewpoint
represent the most articulate expression of that yearning for
"truth" in literature�and in life�which has been under
discussion here.

One of the memorable forums for such ideas was the Third
Plenum of the Moscow section of the Writers1 Union held in Marc
1957, which formally marked the onset of the authorities' crack
down on the revisionists and which in turn evoked some vehement
speeches in defense of the ideas and works under official
criticism. 11. Notable among the speakers was Vladimir Dudintsev,
whose novel Not By Bread Alone (published in 1956) was a prime
target of the "orthodox" critics1 wrath.

Pleading openly for "the possibility of creative
discussion," Dudintsev returned his censurers fire by likening the
critic to a cripple who "threateningly bangs his crutch." And
in another analogy, he maintained that the time had come wh
Soviet writers

"...might be allowed, like young swimmers, to try their
skill at swimming on their own. Perhaps we might not
drown, after all! But alas, I constantly feel the pressure
of that leash, which is sometimes used to lead children.
And it hampers me in swimming."

In a separate address to the Plenum Dudintsev referred to
the circumstances under which his novel came to be conceived,
in a story which has cogency for our earlier discussion
concerning the war's influence:

"I remember the first days of the patriotic war. I was
lying in the trenches, and over me an aerial battle was
going on. Messerschmidts knocking down our planes. At
that moment something began to give in me, because until
then I had always heard that our air force was faster and
better than all the others. Some people say that I
express 'derogatory' tendencies. This is not true. I simply
want to prevent a repetition of what I have experienced.
And I have a right to want it!"

[page 83]

Another speaker at the Plenum was the young poet Semyon
Kirwhose scathing poetic allegory "Seven Days of the Week"
(1956; roused the authorities' anger as much as had Dudintsev.
Kirsanov, too, pleaded that literature had entered "a new phase
of development" � a phase that "does not deny the past but
that should allow greater creative license to do things that we
were not always able to do in former time." The principle
shortcoming of literature in the past, he went on, was the attempt
to depict Soviet life as if it were devoid of conflicts. "In
its more crass manifestations, it was a varnishing of reality."
Instead of showing life as a struggle of contradictions, writers
showed "only its positive aspects."

Among others who protested the regime view at the Plenum
were Evgeny Evtushenko, the poet of the "new generation"
mentioned at the start of this article, and Veniamin Kaverin, a
member of the editorial board of the journal Literaturnaia
Moskva, which had come under attack for its publication of
so-called "revisionist" writings. Both of these men were sharply
rebuked in the official report of the Plenum for their stubborn
defense of their ideas. 12

Not all critics, of course, are in the ranks of the
conformists. One of the most vivid talents among the younger literary
critics was the late Mark Shcheglov, whose views have been a
vital element in the controversy over revisionism although he
himself died in 1956 (at the age of 30) . 13. A recurrent theme
in Shcheglov's writing was an attempt to define the essence of
truth in art. The aim of art, he felt, should not be the mere
reflection of life, but the expression of the truth of life by
artistic means, creating the irresistible and eternal truth of
art. This truth could be created and projected most graphically
in the theater. He minced no words in expressing what he felt
was wrong with Soviet theater, as stated most clearly in his
article "Realism in Contemporary Drama":

"Despite their modern clothes, the heroes of many of our
current plays resemble living people, our contemporaries,
only in a most general way....For a genuine resemblance
they lack too much: they lack a vital plenitude of
emotions, intensity, simplicity and irony....They are not
endowed with the ability to think about anything except
'the business at hand,8 they have no philosophy and no
values of their own in appraising the pheonomena of life....
They are severely ill with pathetic and rigorism; without
a penny's worth of thought or feeling,, they are insanely
spendthrift of pompous and loud words. This is why one is
so often overwhelmed with a sense of falseness and untruth
in the most elevated scenes,"14

The Repercussions

It is not hard to see in these ideas of the younger
intellectual elite a reflection, in a highly articulate and positive
form, of the characteristics and attitudes of Soviet youth
analyzed earlier. And so it is no surprise that some of the
staunchest and most fervent support for the "revisionist" works

[page 84]

and ideas came from the young generation, particularly the
student populace at the universities, in the short months of
1956 and early 1957 when open debate was still permitted.

The new intellectual trend was, of course, a product not
o41y of the representatives of the young intelligentsia "but of
many established talents � Ilya Ehrenburg, Konstantin Simonov
Anna Akhmatova and others � and its appeal spread to all of
the more educated layers of Soviet society. Indeed, combined
with other events, the initial widespread reaction to the "new
look" in literature made the 1956 period and it immediate after
math one of the most dramatic in Soviet history.

Yet the real proof of revisionism's profound impact is to
found in the sequel to those dynamic days � that is in
veiled yet stubborn resistance of the revisionist spirit to the
authorities' efforts to extirpate it. The seriousness with when
the regime viewed the situation became eminently clear when
Khushchev personally intervened in literary affairs with his three
speeches of the spring and summer of 1957 (published in 
September of that year under the title, "For Close Ties between
Literature and Art and the Life of the People" 3J5), which bluntly
warned the intellectual world that it must bow to the dictates
party-determined orthodoxy. That the reaction to this
attack from highest authority fell far short of its intended
effect became vividly apparent in succeeding months

The Voice of Silence

In February 1958 a Plenum of the Executive Board of the
Soviet Writers1 Union was called at which the dominant theme
was a complaint against the persistence of revisionism. 16 On
of the key speakers was Sergei Smirnov, a regime-line
spokesman who recently (March 1959) was appointed editor-in-chief of
the Union's organ, Literaturnaia G-azeta. He offered the
opinion that those of the "revisionists" who were disposed to
regard their recent "enthusiasms" as mistaken or accidental should
be given some attention and help in returning "to the correct
path" -- for them, let bygones be bygones. But, he added:

"...what is to be done if some of our writers cherish thes
bygones' as something sacred, and reply with dead silence
to the demand of literary public opinion that they
re-evaluate their recent positions? If at the (aforementioned)
Third Plenum their silence evoked 'concern,' today this
stubborn silence rouses not concern, but indignation, for
theirs is the pose of men who have not disarmed..."

Others extremely aggressive in their criticism of the
"revisionists" were the writers Nikolai Gribachev and Alexander
Chakovsky. Gribachev deplored the persistence of revisionist
manifestations both at home and in the people's democracies and
complained that Soviet publicists were not waging a sufficient
energetic campaign against them. He declared in summary:

"The principal danger to our literature is revisionism,
which appears in many forms�from vilification of every thing

[page 85]

we have done, to attempts to dance rock and roll on the.
backs of the dead and the living, down to cunning attempts.,
with the aid of theoretical acids, to undermine the
foundation of our literature � its Marxist-Leninist esthetics."

Chakovsky similarly summed up the results of the struggle
against revisionism with the statement:

"The soap bubbles of revisionism are bursting...But it
would be naive political simpering to assert that the
struggle with revisionism is finished. It is not finished either
in the Soviet Union or internationally...."

A Sea of Troubles

In the same month that this meeting was held, a revealing
Article entitled �When the Compass is Lost,� by the writer E
Surdov (not to be confused with Alexei Surkov, First Secretary
of the Executive Board of the Writers' Union), was published in
the journal Znamia.[17] The article constituted a
in he same month that this meeting was held, a revealing
article entitled "When the Compass is lost," by the writer E.
Surkov (not to be confused with Alexei Surkov, First Secretary'
tack on the entire" "revisionist" front, but in particular on
its tenacious influence in the sphere of drama. Among Surkov's
targets were a number of the young drama critics of the magazine
Teatr (N. Velekhova, V. Kardin, A. Ariastasiev and others( as
well as the Georgian tragedienne Veriko Andzhaparidze (in
connection with her public remark at a theater-union gathering that
"The divine is gone from the theater1') ."? The late Shcheglov and
his aforementioned article, "Realism in Contemporary Drama," also
were dragged out anew for criticism.

Surkov's main complaint against the Teatr staff was tied
up with his fury against the "not-unknown" Polish writer Jan
Kott and his article,� Hamlet After the Twentieth Congress,"
an interpretive critique of a Cracow production of "Hamlet" which
had caused a stir in Polish literary circles. What incensed
Surkov was Kott's view that the production was "built on
political allusions to contemporary facts....This Hamlet is all
action, instead of reflection, He is rabid, this young
intransigent, drunk with his own indignation, suddenly finding an
opportunity for action. It is Hamlet after the Twentieth Congress,
one of many Ominously, if somewhat ambiguously, Surkov
complained that instead of exposing "this frankest of the Polish
revisionists," the �Political infants" of Teatr " have with great
interest paraphrased in its pages �Kott's original
interpretation,' little suspecting into whose arms (his italics) it is
possible to fall once the Marxist-Leninist party compass is lost.
This is whose shores you can drift to, if you passively submit
will of the waves 

Throughout 1958 regime pressures of this sort continued.
At the year's end, just last December, the First Congress of the
newly-constituted Writers Union of the RSF SR again took up the
cudgels. The greater part .of a keynote speech by Alexei Surkov
was devoted to "revisionist attacks against us." Though he
concentrated his remarks on the revisionist danger in Eastern
Europe, he urged Soviet writers to re-examine carefully their
"ideological weapons... .to make sure there are no nicks of
revisionism nor rust of dogmatism or sectarianism on them, 18

[page 86]

In very recent weeks, as this paper was "being written,
there was evidence from Moscow that the current year may "bring
a new and milder phase in the anti-revisionist campaign. At ??
May Congress of the Writers' Union, regime spokesmen seemed to
make a special effort to inject a more conciliatory note into
their speeches, to stress�in the words of the aforementioned
Smirmow�the theme of "let bygones bye bygones," But if the
tone of speeches was friendlier, they made clear that the
regime still considered "revisionist" ideas and critical attitude
toward the new orthodoxy dangers to be guarded against with
utmost "vigilance." [19]

Today Soviet writers who sympathize with "revisionism" are
unable to come out in open defense of their ideas. Yet evidence
as well as logic strongly suggest that the "silent"
revisions�to borrow again from Smirnow�continue to cherish their views
as "something sacred."

That a great deal of the vigor and originality, as well a;
the tenacity, of revisionism has been attributable to the role
of the younger Soviet intelligentsia is, in the present context"
perhaps its most significant aspect, and warrants some
concluding reflections. For the first time in Soviet history, the
Communist Party's effort to stamp out what it has considered a
form of intellectual heresy has met with protracted resistance
from a leading element of the younger generation. For the fir
time this active and socially valuable sector of the society hi
not "been moved by the party's appeals that it adapt itself who:
heartedly to the official orthodoxy. It has instead resolutely;
asserted itself against conformism, perhaps without even real
ling that it has thereby challenged the very "basis of Communist
dictatorship. That this intellectual element is, in the poet
Evtushenko�s words, "profoundly related to its generation, se
clear enough; whether it has actually been or will ever become
"the spokesman for the intellectual moods of the entire people
remains a question for the future.

[page 87]

Footnotes

1 Literaturnaia Gazeta, January 25, 1955.
2 A. Korenev, Octyabr, (October), 1956.
3 Literaturnaia Moskva, Vol. 2, 1956.
4 Novy Mir, March 1956.
5 Znamia, November 1955.
6 Novy Mir, November 1958. 
7 Teatr, June 1957.
8 September issue, 1955.
9 Novy Mir, March 1956.
10 Literaturnaia Gazeta, October 1, 1955.
11 Proceedings published in ibid., March 19, 1957.
12 Ibid.
13 See the collection of his "Literary-Critical Articles," post-
humously published in Sovetskii Pisatel (Soviet Writer),
Moscow, 1958.
14 Literaturnaia Moskva, Vol. 2, 1956.
15 Kommunist, No. 12, 1957.
16 Proceedings published in Literaturnaia Gazeta, February 13
and 15, 1958.
17 February issue, 1958.
18 Literaturnaia Gazeta, December 14, 1958.
19 For more information on the Congress see Max Hayward's
article in this issue�Ed.

[page 88]

REFLECTIONS ON SOVIET NOVELS

By Alexander Gerschenkron
World Politics
January 1960

There is every likelihood that future historians of
the Russian novel will praise the Soviet period for the
record number of volumes produced and blame it for an equally
unprecedented decline in artistic standards. Yet one may
hope that the twenty-first-century critic, in fairness to
an unhappy past, will not overlook a redeeming feature of
the Soviet novel, i.e. its considerable anthropological
value. The present reflections about a few recent or
fairly recent Soviet novels do not deal with their literary
qualities. They are concerned exclusively with the light
these novels cast upon various aspects of everyday life
Soviet Russia, including, it may be added, the life of the
novel makers themselves.

I

Leonid Leonov's Russian Forest, 1 written between 1950
and 1953, provides perhaps more illumination and more food
for thought than any other Soviet product in the field
since the end of the last war. (Because of its public
repudiation in Russia, if not for other reasons, Pasternak's
may be safely excluded from the list of
viet novels.) So Russian Forest has both an apparent and a
real theme. While the latter is much more important, the
former is by means without interest. In addition, there
are a number of political judgments strewn over the pages
of the novel, some of which are worth noting.

The theme apparent is writ large over the title
it is the problem of Soviet forestry politics. The hero of
the novel, a professor of forestry, loves the forest and
wishes the forest-covered areas of the country to be
maintained unreduced and unthinned. He would not only preserve
the aggregate extent of the forest5 but also freeze the
existing geographic distribution of forest lands. In
defending his position, the professor adds to the long list
of Soviet claims to invention by asserting that the concept
of "sustained yield" (i.e., the concept of a forest which
is "normal" as to age structure and produces year in, year
out, a harvest maximized in some rational fashion) was
developed by Russian students of forestry (p. 318).

In temperament and Weltanschauung, our professor � his
name is Virkhov � is a direct descendant of Doctor Astrov

(1) Russkii les; the page references below are to Sobraniye
sochinenii (Collected Works), vol. vi, Moscow, 1956

[page 89]

in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, except that Chekhov's m�decin de
campagne expressed himself simply, using good Russian, while
the Soviet professor prefers a dubious jargon. "The forest,"
he teaches and preaches, "is the sum of productive forces
and not of production forces" (p. 251). This obscure
formulation in pseudo-scientific style sounds very much like
a quotation from the official Soviet textbook of economics.
But the tenor of the professor's pronouncements does imply
some criticism of Soviet policy, The official Soviet line
consists, first, of accusing the pre-revolutionary
government of barbarous" destruction of forests and, second, of
demonstrating how after the revolution the traditional
prerevolutionary principles of forest conservation prevented,
for a number of years9 full utilization of timber resources.
This is not a very consistent position, but it is a fact
that in 1929, when Soviet policies were radically revised,
forest utilization was completely subordinated to the
general policy of high-speed industrialization and the amount
of lumber cut for domestic use and for export came greatly
to exceed natural growth

Thus Professor Virkhov may be regarded as a critic of
Soviet policy. To be sure, the criticism is very mild.
First of all, except for charges of poor workmanship, it
never is made quite explicit Nor are the Soviets likely
to be very sensitive to strictures in this area. 

Considering the extent of their general trespasses upon sound
principles of resource conservation, the predatory use of
forests would seem the least grievous of Soviet sins. Some
permanent reduction in extent or density of forests, of
course, may well have been justifiable. The problems of
rational forest utilization are in general much more complex,
and the choices to be made involve many more factors than
Leonov and his professor seem to grape Not that there is
any evidence that the Soviet government was guided by an
accurate calculus. On the contrary, some of the elements
involved, such as a reasonable "forest per cent" (i.e., an 
interest rate with- the help of which the optimum rotation, or
felling age can be determined), were proscribed in Soviet
Russia for ideological reasons. The Soviet ideas of forest
exploitation were gross and crude. Still, quite appart from
permanent changes in rotation that can be quite sensible,
temporary deviations from "normalcy" are a regular phenomenon
in forestry policies and can be as rational as "normalcy"
itself. At any rate, the losses suffered need not be
irreparable. Some of them can be remedied by afforestation. A
log is not like a chunk of iron ore. It can be replaced,
even though at some cost. It is also quite possible, and
in fact likely, that by the beginning of the 1950's, when
Leonov wrote his novel, the Soviet government was getting
ready for a change in its forestry policy and Leonov's novel

(2) Cf., e.g., V. A, Popov, Lesnaya promyshlennost' S.S.S.R.
(The Forest Industry of the U.S.S.R), Vol 1,
Lesoekspluatat-siya (forest Exploitation), Gosles"bumizdat, 1957, pp. 15 and
33.

[page 90]

was a welcome � if not a government-inspired � vindication
of the new policy.
vindication of the new policy.

However this may be, the wish to protect the Russian
forest is painted over in the novel with such a heavy coat
of Soviet patriotism that the light touches of criticism
tend to disappear beneath it. Some of Leonov's
interpretations of recent events are gems of Soviet metaphysics
and or historical accuracy and should not be overlooked.
We are treated, for instance, to an analysis of the feelings
of the Soviet population in the summer of 1941 after Hitler1s
attack upon Russia? "Behind regrets about construction work
that had to remain unfinished, one could discern contempt
for the enemy � for this immediate enemy and also for the
other -- : the main and hidden enemy who got scared of
peaceful competition between the two system" (p. 105; italics
added). "Apparently the reference is to the mythical
known as "capitalism." Or is it to the United States? The
ambiguity seems intentional and purpose is to suggest,
subtly and darkly, that the United States had stood behind
Hitler�s aggression and that, in doing so, it was moved by
fears of Soviet achievements,, In this connectionalso, a
perceptive view of American national character is helpful.
In a conversation between Professor Virkhov and a friend
who is an old Bolshevik and a model of a revolutionary hero,
the latter describes some uncivilized acts which, he says,
have been committed by the American army. The professor,
duly horrified, asks the deeply probing question: "Who are
they then? � soldiers or robbers?11 and promptly receives
an illuminating answers "They are merchants. Soldier is
the great title of a man who knows how to die for an idea.
...But name for me at least one idea which in the course of
the last hundred years has emerged from the merchant class
and was implemented in the name of life (sic).... Merchants,
at the very best, grow to be pirates" (p.680).

One must wonder whether Leonov himself realized that
his perfect Communist repeated almost verbatim ideas from
Werner Sombart's Haendler and Helden (Merchants and Heroes),
a book of "patriotic cogitations" written in Germany during
World War I and directed against England (Munich, 1915)
Even Leonov1s style in those paragraphs with its nebulous
haecceities sounds very much like a rendition into Russian
of reactionary German writings.

In view of these deplorable characteristics, it is not
surprising to learn how despicably the Americans acted
during the war. Day in, day out, Professor Virkhov and his
neighbors wonder where the second front will be opened;
they continue to speculate for nine hundred days, until on
the nine hundred and first, when the Germans attack in the
Ardennes, the Muscovites smilingly read the telegraphic
prayers for help which come from their allies (p. 718). Thus
the Anglo-American forces apparently managed to get to the

[page 91]

Ardennes without ever opening a second front. The moronic
effrontery of this presentation of the course of World War
II in the West would be difficult to surpass. It is also
hard to "believe that the average Soviet reader is � or that
Leonov believes him to be so stupid, ignorant, and
gullible as to accept Leonov's counterfeits for true coins.
In general9 it is probably more reasonable to assume that
statements of this -sort are to be taken within the context
of Soviet mores as part of a ritual5 as a somewhat pompous
affirmation that is9 of loyalty to the regime. But Leonov
does seem to go further than is required by the Soviet code
of proper behavior for a writer. In addition to
mistreatments of the past, his novel also contains some glimpses
of future history. Varya, the ideal heroic figure of a
young Soviet girl who loses her life fighting the Germans,
places the last war in its proper historical perspective:
"You see," she explains to her friend, the professor's
daughter, "the fascists are just an episode in a great
historical competition...Remember your histories if it took
full thirty years to settle the trifling dynastic conflicts
between the Red and the White Roses, then it should not be
surprising if it takes a century to decide the great
argument between the Red and White halves of mankind. But you
may assume that we have done the first twenty per cent of
the job" (p. 129).

This is very strong stuff indeed, and one can only
conclude that the insurance premiums, which Soviet writers
must pay are high. Still9 it seems advisable to be
overinsured rather than underinsured. A writer who shows such
fervent loyalty in magnis surely must be permitted a
fleeting moment of eccentric independence of judgment in parvis
silvanis. Leonov is widely regarded as one of the foremost
Soviet novelists, It is almost frightening to see a man
who aspires to the reputation of a great Russian writer cast
aside all pretenses at historical veracity and common sense
and common decency. The, Soviet novel does reveal the
predicament of the Soviet writer and, through him., that of the
Soviet system.

All this is by no means devoid of interest. There is
more to Leonov's novels however, than cheap sentimentality
in the style of Otto Ludwig's Erbof�rster or semi-literate
ideas about rational calculus of forest utilization, or
shameless distortions of historical truth. It is only in
a very superficial sense that Leonov's novel deals with the
vicissitudes of the Russian forest. Its actual subject is
the vicissitudes of Soviet man. For it is novel about the
Lebenslauf, the span of life, the human biography in Soviet
Russia. This is the real theme of the novel and a much more
rewarding one.

Professor Virkhov's forestry theories may be flat, but
his view of human biography probes deeply into the very core

[page 92]

of the Soviet social system. Progress, our professor
believes, consists in an increase of moral duties which must
proceed pari passu with an increase in the volume of
material goods; only the perfect man can achieve perfect
happiness. "Hence everybody must make it his business to have
a perfect biography" (p, 59; italics added). This is indeed
a sentence full of significance. Unfortunately its
translation in English does not do justice to the Russian style,
which uses a phrase taken from the archaic language of the
Tsarist ukazy. In fact, for a moment the reader hesitates,
not knowing whether Leonov and his hero really mean what
they say. The concept of perfect biography and the way in
which it is expressed are irresistibly reminiscent of
Shchedrin's celebrated satirical sallies against Imperial Russia
in which he glorified yedinomysliye, perfect confirmity in
thinking, as the great ideal of the rulers of Russia. But
the reader's doubts are out of place, for Leonov is very
in earnest. The problem of perfect biography is indeed a
crucial problem of Soviet society. Not that it originated
in Soviet Russia, but it is there that it acquired an extent
and a weight and. a significance which it had never possessed
before. It would seem, useful therefore to clarify the
concept, before examining its application in Leonov's novel

There are many possible criteria for classifying
societies and civilizations. But the prevailing attitude
toward a man's biography is far from the least important among
those criteria. For it is related to another and perhaps
more widely noted distinction, that between settled and
migratory or immigration societies. The settled society, as
the term is understood here, is one in which the whole life
of an individual as a rule is passed within one fairly
narrow social circle. In such societies there is no caesura in
a man's ideal biography. His biography is perfect" in the
very specific sense in which a settled society values
perfection; it achieves a unity of life. According to
Russian proverb, no word can be thrown out of a song. No
part, however small, can or need be thrown out of a man's
biography in a settled society.

The values of a migratory society are radically
different. This is a society in which the process of the
stranger's losing his alien quality is perennially undone or
renewed by the influx of new strangers. The migratory society
may coincide with one growing industrial city; it may
comprise a region like the valley of the Ruhr, or a huge
country like the United States. A society can be more or less
"migratory" depending inter alia on its geographic extent
or its rate of growth, or on the distance separating it from
the areas whence the migrants come and the degree of irrever
sibility inherent in the act of migration. But the
likelihood is that the attitude to a man's life of such a society
will tend to differ greatly from that of a settled society.
Naturally, such an attitude does not emerge instantaneously.

[page 93]

In a sense the puritanism of New England in several of its
aspects was an attempt to negate the basic experience of
migration. To become fully migratory9 the American society
had to shed much of puritan provincialism,. Just because
the ideas of the "old country" travel with the migrants and
are brought in as a specific "brain-case11 imports,
establishment of a migratory society is a long process even in a young
country such as the United States. Once such a society has
been established however, and a new ideology peculiar to
it has developed, the migratory society acquires easily
discernible traits. In such a society a unit of life, a perfect
biography, cannot be regarded as the ideal The very fact
of the migration, the very transformation of a peasant into
a city dweller, of a European into an American, create a
hiatus in biography. They tear it asunder and force the man
to begin a new life. It is not an accident that it was an
American philosopher who emphasized the moral characteristics
of the "twice-born.113 In a sense, emigration is death. The
emigrant, as the Parisian argot has it, ravale son bulletin
de naissance; the naturalization certificate attests the
second birth.

The newcomer to a migratory society may have very
weighty reasons to forget his past. By suppressing the
memory thereof he liberates himself from a record Of failure
or crime or humiliation,, He may want to dismiss his past
simply because the burden of nostalgic sentiments is too
heavy to carry; or because he feels that the memories lame
his energies and thwart his will in an environment that
invites action aid places high value upon the will to act. In
stich circumstances, the scriptural injunction against
looking backward is filled with new significance. Goethe's
urgent advice, "Stirb und werdel" should be written over the
gates of immigration societies,, The immigrant must obey it
or pay the penalty of becoming, again in Goethe's words,
"ein trueber G-ast auf der dunklen Erde."

The specific "migratory" attitude toward unity of life
affects many areas of behavior and endeavor. Examples are
ndt far to seek. The manners of an immigration society do
not favor inquiries into a man's past. One of the causes
for the temporary success of Senator McCarthy must have lain
in the pleasure of overstepping in public an ancient taboo,
a well-established rule of private life. Business life
provides many an instance of differences between settled and im
migration societieso In the former, bankruptcy is likely
to end a businessman's careers Even a protested bill of
exchange is extremely hard to live dowrio In an immigration
milieu, failure does not block the road to subsequent
success and, in fact success, once achieved either obliterates
the memory of the failure or even tinges with glory. In
3 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
York, 1903, particularly ppL 166 at seq.
[Page 94]

a settled society, the Jack-of-all-trades is presumed --
has been presumed since the days of the Homeric or
pseudo-Homeric Margites -- to be a tyro in all and is looked upon
with disdain. The man who keeps changing from one trade
to another is expected to fail; indeed, given the
prevailing attitude, he is most likely to fail. In a migratory
society, the virtues of specialization tend to remain
unrecognized and unrewarded. The feeling of being up to any
task, of being "a man and not a mollusc," is the specific
attribute of a man in such a society, as was discovered by
the French worker whose report about his downright
un-French experience in California was quoted by Marx.[4] It
is another matter that the organization of modern factories
often requires the worker to perform a single recurring
operation. Such operations are quickly learned and, in a
growing and mobile society, they are as quickly abandoned
and forgotten.

In an immigration society, a second marriage is much
more likely to repair a previous marital failure. At any
rate, the milieu does not diminish the second marriage's
chance of success by refusing to accept it. (It may be
easily ascertained by appropriate comparisons that
specific religious injunctions are quite insufficient to explain
the difference in attitudes.) An even clearer case is
provided by marriages of widowed persons. They are frowned
upon and viewed as attestations of disloyalty in a settled
society and greeted with gladness in a migratory society.
To be sure, differences in family structure, the resulting
differences in the position of aged people, fear of
loneliness in one case and social approval of solitude in the
other -- all these affect the social judgment of remarriage
Still, it is the willingness to forget -- i.e. the refusal
to place a high value upon unity of life -- that makes
possible the position assumed in immigration societies. It is
not surprising, therefore, that the propensity to write
memoirs is so much more widespread in a settled society
than in a migratory society. At the same time such memoirs
as do get written in an immigration society are much less
in the nature of autobiographies in the proper sense of
the word. They tend to deal with events, not with the span
of a unique life. Maeterlinck once said that is memory
that presupposes and constitutes the unity of life. In the
settled society it is the memoirs that as a rule are
concerned with revealing a man's life as a straight line place
within limits that are both narrow and predetermined by the
fixed co-ordinates of birth, family, social set or class,
and professional endeavor.

These are significant differences which penetrate
deeply into man's customs and feelings. They are the threat
from which the fabric of everyday life is woven. They stem

-------------------

(4) Das Kapital, Volksaugabe, Moscow, 1932, p. 513.
[Page 95]

from the nature of the society in which they exist and
they themselves exert a powerful influence upon the
mobility and fluidity of social bodies. There is little doubt
that these have direct bearing upon much of modern economic
history. An immigration society and an industrial society
are not coterminous. Obviously, there were immigration
societies that had nothing to do with modern industry. On
the other hand, a developed industrial society may have
shed most of the qualities of an immigration society.
Certain elements of such a shedding process have been clearly
perceptible in the United States over the last quarter of
a century or so. This is particularly true with regard to
some of the aspects mentioned in the foregoing. And yet,
one way of looking at the industrial evolution of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is to regard it as a
charge from a settled society to an immigration society.
Every industrialization which was more than a mere
development of manorial handicraft or a growth of cottage industry
almost naturally tended to partake of the elements of an
immigration society. Industrialization was destructive of
provincialism. It metropolized the society. It broke the
unity of man's life and, by so doings tended to reduce the
value attached to it.

It is true, of course, that within the old established
political entities the transformation was slower and often
less complete. To some extent, pre-industrial values have
been adjusted to new conditions rather than abandoned
altogether. Still, no one can compare the habits of the
population, say, in the teeming cities of the Ruhr valley with
those of the little towns in Mecklenburg or in any two
similarly comparable areas in Prance, Italy, or any other
European country without registering a profound difference ill
attitude toward a man's life. What is so peculiar about
the Soviet type of industrialization is that it represents
an attempt to build up an industrial society while preserving
the basic features of a settled society. Revolutions,
civil strife, and foreign wars have convulsed the land. The
countryside has disgorged millions and millions of muzhiks
into industrial employment. Large cities have been built
in places where not even a tiny hamlet had anticipated the
urban future. Tremendous migrations over the face of the
enormous country have taken place. And still throughout
this period of unprecedented change the government which
has been responsible for most of the change has refused, as
it were, to recognize its impact upon the course of
individual lives. To repeat, this refusal is the real theme of
Leonov's novel, to which we may now return.

In accordance with the established custom in Soviet
novels, the "positive" hero, Professor Virkhov, has an
antagonist, Professor Gratsianski. This bearer of a family
name which was chosen to indicate descent from the Russian
clergy bitterly attacks Virkhov's views on forestry
policies. While Virkhov is a conservationist, his opponent is

[Page 96]

in favor of placing the forest at the service of
industrialization. This is clear enough. The substantive arguments
used are much less so. Some of them are mere abuse and
inconsistent abuse at that. While Virkhov accuses the
bourgeoisie of destroying the Russian forest, Gratsianski
refuses to be "scared" by the conservative rules of forest
utilization invented by the bourgeoisie for its own purposes
(cf. p. 421). But there is no need to seek for clarity.
For arguments do not matter in reality. It is not by
puncturing the opponent's logic or erudition that an argument
can be won, but by puncturing his biography. Gratsianski
derives most of the support for his point of view from the
fact that Professor Virkhov as a boy had received a present
of twenty-five rubles (about $12.50 in pre-1934 world dollars)
from a big businessman (p. 143). Furthermore, while he was
a student, several payments of twenty-five rubles were made
to him from a source that remained unknown, Gratsianski
explains that it would be unrealistic to believe in pure
philanthropic motivations on the part of the mysterious
donor; it is much more natural to assume that he had some
long-term designs and hoped to be recompensed at the cost
of national properties at some remote future time when the
former student would be holding a responsible position in
forest administration Furthermore, Virkhov had married a
girl who had been raised on a gentry estate, and this
circumstance, too, is used to refute Rivkhov's ideas on what
to do with the forests. Finally, there is an even more
potent, seemingly incontrovertible argument which Gratsianski
is holding in reserve as a secret weapon for the moment of
the real showdowns this is knowledge of the fact that
Virkhov had adopted and raised the child of a "dekulakized"
peasant.

This array of far-fetched nonsensicalities may be
quite irrelevant to the point at issue. Yet they are take
seriously. Professor Virkhov's young and virtuous daughter
when informed of her father's dubious past, and particularly
of the unexplained twenty-five ruble, is plunged into
black despair. She tries to change the pronunciation of
her name by shifting the accent to the first syllable so as
to dissociate herself from her father; and she wonders
whether acquaintance with the daughter of a tainted man will
not be detrimental to her friend, Varya. The technical
expression used throughout the novel for damaging a person's
reputation by associating with him or her is "to cast a
shadow upon somebody."

It would be pleasant, and in fact almost liberating,
if one could regard all this as a satire directed against
the Soviet attitudes to biography. But unfortunately this
is not possible. First of all, because Leonov's "positive"
character himself is the inventor of the concept of perfect
biography. Second, because the plot of the novel, divested
of the incidentals of partisan fighting and air raids on
Moscow, consists of nothing but the gradual unmasking of

[Page 97]

Gratsianski. His theories of forestry are confounded by
showing that in his student days he had seduced and then
heartlessly abandoned a girl and her child that was also
his. And the coup de grace falls when, through a series
of contrived coincidences, it transpires that Gratsianski,
again in his student days, stood up an audience of workers
to whom he was supposed to deliver a lecture and, in
addition, betrayed to the police (somewhat unwittingly, it
appears) a mutual friend of his and Virkhov's, the great
revolutionary, who, as we have seen, later on was to become
a student of Werner Sombart's theories. Once these events
of some thirty years ago have been revealed or are close
to being revealed, Gratsianski is finished. A richly
deserved punishment is in store for him while Virkhov is
rewarded by a medal and in addition recovers the wife who had
left him many years earlier. (The separation, incidentally,
had seemed final; still, mindful of the unity of their
respective biographies, neither the professor nor his spouse
permitted themselves to enter into any new relationships.)
But a man with Gratsianski's biography does not even know
how to wait patiently for just retribution from the society,
as represented by the appropriate organs of the Soviet
government. He remains an obdurate individualist and, after
having composed a monograph on suicide, he himself chooses
this "most despicable way of deserting from life" (p. 673).
Thus virtue has triumphed and the battle of biographies has
been satisfactorily decided by the victory of the less
imperfect life story.

To summarizes this is an unattractive book. It
contains half-baked disquisitions on forestry, brazen
distortions of historical truth in supine obedience to the wishes
of the dictators, a preposterous search for closets filled
with skeletons, and characters drawn with the tritest means,
And all this is presented in a pretentious, perfectly
unnatural style and is spread thinly over nearly eight hundred
pages of dense print -- with frank disregard of all counsels
of artistic economy. And yet it is an important book which
makes a real contribution to our understanding of Soviet
society. In dealing with the curiosities of imperfect
biographies, it actually reveals the imperfections of Soviet
industrialization.

It is not the first time in Russian history that
economic development designed to close the gap between Russia and
the West has westernized Russia in some respects while
keeping it oriental or even "orientalizing" it in others. The
reforms of Peter the Great were a great step toward
westernizing the country. But the simultaneous curtailing of the
liberty of all classes of the population was a step away
from the West. The unevenness of Soviet progress is its
most outstanding trait. Soviet industrialization conducted
under the auspices of a ruthless dictatorship has not received
its economic consummation: the Soviet government cannot
afford to let its population enjoy the fruits of industriali-

[Page 98]

zation in the form of a rapid increase in the levels of
consumption. But just as consumption is kept close to
pre-industrialization levels -- thus, in effect, ignoring
the changes that have taken place in the size of capital
stocks, in the knowledge of technological processes, and
in the skill of the workers -- so the evaluation of human
beings is still kept at a level consonant with small and
stable pre-industrial settlements rather than with the
large and rapidly growing industrial centers. These
provincial attitudes have been perpetuated with a vengeance.
Just as serfdom in Russia was conjoined with a modern police
state and hence approached outright slavery to a degree
unknown in the West, the ubiquitousness of the Soviet
dictatorship has raised provincialism to the level of a national
dogma and, in so doing, has made it more destructive of
individual freedom and happiness than genuine provincialism
ever was.

It is the essence of pre-industrial societies to stand
upon traditionalism, to live in the past and according to
the past, and to value it highly. It is the essence of
industrial, or at least industrializing, societies to let
bygones be bygones, to live in the present and to think of
the future. It is paradoxical indeed that the Soviet
society, which is so strongly bent upon change, has shown such
a high rate of economic growth, and claims to live for the
future, should unceasingly probe into the past of its
individual members; it is strange that a system which has
discovered for itself that only falsifying the past yields
perfect history should persist in clamoring for perfect
biography. If the Soviet writers were allowed to notice these
inconsistencies and to discuss them publicly, they might
well be tempted to speak of "dialectics" and "historical
contradictions." As it is, they prefer to think in absolutes
The government establishes a categorical distinction between
good and evil in a man's past and makes it operational through
the instrument of the questionnaire -- the Soviet substitute
for, and improvement upon, memoir writing. Perfect memory
is enforced by law. The Ivany Nepomnyashchiye, the
non-remembering Ivans, who used to roam over the Russian plain
and were the bane of the Tsarist police, are still not
allowed to plead poor memory. They have been taught to read
and write. Accordingly, they must read the questions and
write the answers, weaving the flimsy web of a flawless life
story.

One did not need Leonov's book in order to know that
the life of the average Russian citizen is dominated and
kept in perennial jeopardy by the questionnaire -- this
embodiment, of, and the perennial menace to, perfect biography.
But Leonov's novel does show how the institution of the
ubiquitous questionnaire translates itself into men's thinking
about men, and how it becomes an institutionalized and
internalized piece of social ideology, and, as such, an

[Page 99]

instrument of domination. It is perhaps not pretty to see
a writer of reputation extol and glorify the tools of police
oppression. But whatever our judgment of Leonid Leonov,
his book has both clarified and enriched our judgment of the
social system that exists in Soviet Russia.

II

Relations between the sexes present an obvious field
for exercises in perfect biography. Marital fidelity is
of course well suited to epitomize the unity of life and to
stress the stability of a provincial society. Accordingly,
Soviet literature as a rule has shown no interest in
matrimonial deviations and sexual irregularities. For a long
time the novelists went on mass-producing cheap figurines
of Baucis and Philemon, dressed up in Soviet style, and
sometimes even had recourse to the Soviet Olympus for
appropriate substitutions for the roles of Zeus and Hermes in the
Greek story. It is one thing, however, to track down and
to expose the possessor of an impure biography. It is
another thing blandly to deny his existence. By depicting
Soviet citizens, male and female, either as fierce virgins
or monogamous maniacs, Soviet novels inevitably came into
conflict with reality, which, in these particular areas,
was neither fierce nor maniacal.

Fortunately, there are limits to this decline of Russian
literature to the level of penny -- or kopek -- novelettes.
Presumably, the tradition of the Russian novel -- which
means its competition with the Soviet novel for the
interest of the modern reader -- is a strong force in keeping
the Soviet novel within the bounds of verisimilitude. As
a result, there have been two or three ethnographically
more valuable treatments of marriage in Soviet Russia. First,
the novel Ivan Ivanovich by Antonina Koptyayeva (Moscow,
1949) produced surprise among Soviet readers by
demonstrating the incredible fact that a marriage of two perfectly
decent people can fall apart; and that even an energetic
intervention on the part of the local party boss (first secretary
of the Raykom) may fail to put it together again. Koptyayeva
then wrote a second novel, Druzhba (Friendship -- Moscow,
1956), in which the tradition of the happy ending -- even
more deeply rooted in the Soviet novel than in the Hollywood
movie -- emerged triumphant. In the inferno of besieged
Stalingrad, the hero, Ivan Ivanovich, a surgeon by trade and
an abandoned husband by misfortune, manages to form a new
attachment after having saved the life of his former wife
through a skillful operation and having wavered for some
time among several attractive candidates. These novels,
too, contain some expressions of opinion on international
politics and the course of world history. Such cogitations
fully deserve to be placed beside those of Leonov which have
been quoted earlier. The two books provide some sidelights

[Page 100]

on the grasping arrogance of the local party boss, who
even tries to prescribe the types of operations which a
surgeon may or may not perform in the local hospital; the
way in which these ambitions are curbed by a successful
appeal to higher party authorities is no less instructive
than the threat of criminal prosecution to which a wrong
diagnosis seems to expose the physician. But the novels�
main interest stems from their having blazed the trail for
a fuller and freer treatment of Soviet marriage.[5]

Such a presentation is contained in Galina Nikolayeva's
Bitva v puti (Battle on the Road), a novel which appeared
seriatim in 1957 in the journal Oktyabr'.[6] This no doubt
is one of the most revealing products of recent Soviet
belles-lettres. It is not simply a novel about the risks
of Soviet matrimony. Like most Soviet novels, Battle on
the Road provides valuable insights into aspects of Soviet
life which, although unflattering, are so common within the
Soviet system that they are considered perfectly natural,
and their inclusion in a work of fiction is simply a sort
of Kleinmalerei. For the same reason, they escape the
blades of the censor's scissors. But Nikolayeva's novel
offers a good deal more than a collection of obiter pincta.
It bears the clear stamp of having been written after the
Twentieth Party Congress, at the apogee of the rebound from
the restraints of the Stalinist era. Both in being
deliberately critical and in disregarding taboos, this novel is
quite unusual and probably much more significant than
Dudintsev's Not by Bread Alone, which happened to catch the eye
of the reading public within and without Soviet Russia.

The novel supplies a broad canvas of Soviet life. In
many respects, it confirms impressions previously gained
of the way Soviet factories and collective farms operate,
We have heard before about the problem of managerial honesty
Still it is interesting to note that the successful factory
manager, in reporting the percentage of flawed goods in
total output, deducts the permissible amounts, thus producing
a more favorable picture by false means (No. 7, p. 120). A
chairman of a Kolkhoz caught in various prevarications
insists that it is his honesty that makes him lie: "Honesty
requires me to manage the Kolkhoz in such a way as to yield
profit to the State and to the Kolkhozniki (the Kolkhoz
farmers). But planning sometimes is plainly directed against
profit." And the writer dots the "i's" by adding that "the

-------------------

(5) In what appears to be her latest novel, Derzaniye (Daring
-- Moscow, 1959), Koptyeyeva proceeds to wreck the second
marriage of the surgeon, who leaves his wife in order to
correct an error of choice made in Stalingrad a decade
earlier. Fortunately for the abandoned wife, she too is put or
the road to an alternative happiness.

(6) Nos. 3-7; in subsequent references, only the issue and
page numbers will be cited.

[Page 101]

errors of planning and the trammels upon initiative" make
it necessary for alert and dedicated men "to lie and to
act deviously" (No. 5, p. 43). This is not in any sense
novel information. We have known for a long time that
illicit activities of the managers are designed both to evade
the plan and to make its operation possible. But it is
perhaps the first time that a Soviet writer has stated the
complexity of the situation so sharply and so frankly.

The factory manager has an "exchange fund," that is
to say, concealed stacks of goods which he can offer to
the railroads as a consideration for extra-quick service;
alternatively, he lets his factory shops perform special
and quite unscheduled repair work for the railroads (No. 5,
pp. 26,27,92). This again is a well-known phenomenon -- a
part of the Soviet concept of blat or blatmeysterstvo, terms
which originally referred to the underworld and underworld
operations, but in Soviet Russia have come to connote
illicit economic operations.[7] But the description of these
conditions is given a very modern, post-Stalin twist in the
novel. (the director of the factory, which manufactures
tractors, returns from Moscow to announce that the factory will
henceforth contribute its share to the output of consumers�
goods by establishing workshops producing beds, frying pans,
stove parts, and similar commodities. The decision reflects
the promises to improve the levels of consumption made first
by Malenkov and then by Khrushchev. But the reason for the
director's readiness to add output of pots and pans to that
of tractors should be noted: to have consumers' goods at
his disposal will greatly increase his bargaining position
in various blat operations. And equally enlightening is
the fact that the director's opponent in the factory, the
chief engineer -- the "positive" hero of the novel --
combats inclusion of consumers' goods in the production program
because what Soviet factories need is efficient
specialization in a few well-defined operations rather than dissipation
of energies in attempts to produce a wide variety of
articles. According to the chief engineer, it is bad enough that
the factory must continue to produce the smallest and
simplest parts that go into a tractor engine instead of receiving
them from the outside (No. 5, p. 67). The difficulties in
organizing efficient inter-factory co-operation have long
been a very sore point in Soviet industrialization. It is
quite instructive to see how the half-sincere attempts to
satisfy the consumers by make-shift arrangements, while
avoiding the requisite structural changes, are received
within Soviet factories.

-------------------

(7) Etymologically, the term blat comes from the German
Platte -- i.e., gang (of criminals or rowdies). It probably
fits well into the Russian language because of the
subconscious association with the Church-Slavonic blato, swamp or
filth.

[Page 102]

Nikolayeva's critique does not confine itself to the
relative safety of local conditions in the factory. The
target has been widened to include the powerful first
secretary of the Obkom, the virtual boss of a huge region and
of the Ministry to which the tractor factory reports and
which is accused of having lost its grasp of the enormously
expanded productive machinery. In the end, the struggle
within the factory is satisfactorily resolved. Both the
director of the factory and the first secretary of the
regional party committee are exposed and demoted. The
secretary, who is described as having worshipped the infallible,
mysterious, incomprehensible power of one man, the chosen
vessel of wisdom (No, 6, p. 44), tries to speak of the
"magnificent constructions of our era" which make it inevitable
for the Ivan Ivanovich Ivanovs to restrict themselves and
even to make some sacrifices (No. 7, p. 115). But the
chairman of the Central Committee meeting which sets everything
right cuts the secretary short; "But some people regard
those sacrifices as a grave and temporary necessity which
must be terminated as quickly as possible; others regard them
as a natural law which it does not pay to think about and
which it is harmful to talk about" (Ibid.). The practical
effect of the two positions may be identical. But this
remark spells the doom of the secretary and the director. The
chief engineer becomes the director of the factory, eager to
remedy past errors and omissions and in particular to do
something about the main evil of Soviet factories and
collective farms: "the mechanization without organization"
(No. 4, p. 73; No. 5, p. 113; No. 7, p.l29), which certainly
is an aphoristically felicitous way -- thrice repeated -- of
pointing to a crucial problem of Soviet economic development,
a disability to which much attention is likely to be devoted
in the next few years.

To appreciate the full breadth of Nikolayeva's
criticism, add to the foregoing, first, the fact that the husband
of the heroine, a devoted party member, is arrested and
executed as an "enemy of the people"; then the description of
the general atmosphere of shivering cowardice, including the
suggestion that members of the secret police are not above
taking advantage of the wives of arrested men; and, finally,
the expulsion of the heroine, even prior to her husband's
execution, from the Communist youth organization on charges
of being overdressed at a meeting and of having failed to
greet her fellow members properly (No. 4, pp. 28-33).

Some of Nikolayeva's strictures simply justify certain
reforms of the Khrushchev era. The attacks upon economic
ministries which adumbrate Khrushchev's decentralization are
of this kind. But, on the whole, her criticism has been bold,
comprehensive, and far-reaching. To be sure, she has remained
true to the Soviet tradition and has served up a happy
ending in which rewards and retributions are distributed to each
according to his or her deserts. The reader is left with the

[Page 103]

strong suggestion that the change for the better within
the tractor factory is bound to be duplicated over the
whole range of the Soviet economy. The fateful knocks on
the door in the dead of night belong to the past. The
Soviet citizen can sleep quietly, and the future seems bright.

And yet, the peculiarity of Nikolayeva's novel is that
her happy ending is confined to the public sphere, as it
were. At the level of private relations and in terms of
individual happiness, the novel ends in gloom and despair.[8]
It is at this level that Nikolayeva's novel represents a
real innovation in Soviet literature, being the first whose
central theme is adultery. The subject is introduced and
treated with circumspection. "Socialist people are not made
for adultery,'1 says the hero (No. 7, p. 93). There is no
description of the pleasures of the flesh. But there is
human truth in the irresistibility of the attraction which the
hero -- the chief engineer -- and the heroine -- an engineer
in the same factory -- feel for each other. An oft-told
story is related with simplicity and dignity, and the long
years of spinsterly modesty enforced upon literature by a
government that trod under foot all laws of decency elevate
the appearance of this story to the rank of a political
sensation.

Its primary significance, however, does not lie in
providing a high point on the gauge by which fluctuations
in post-Stalinist liberalism can be measured. Much more
important is the unusual glance into the more permanent and
more stable structure of the Soviet value system which
Nikolayeva's story affords. The happiness of the lovers
finds a sudden termination in the fashion standardized by
the second-rate French novel of the nineteenth century. By
accident, the deceived wife surprises the sinful pair in the
pied-a-terre which they have rented on the periphery of the
town. By the next morning the story is the talk of the town.
The party cannot remain indifferent, and the new first
secretary of the Obkom hastens to the factory to comfort the
new director, who bravely exhibits the "face of a fighter."
And the woman? Alas, no one comforts her. She cannot
return to the factory and must leave town, which she promptly
does, after having confessed her sin to her husband and
having received from her lover 300 rubles for travel expenses.

Once more the provincialism of the Soviet value system
has been exposed. A settled society has little respect for
privacy. Neither the town, nor the factory, nor the party
boss is willing to regard the episode as the private affair

-------------------

(8) In this respect, the present novel is very different from
Nikolayeva's earlier novel, Zhatva (Harvest), for which, in
1950, she received the Stalin Prize. The high award was
richly deserved. For in that fully standardized and
altogether uncritical presentation of a life on a postwar
collective farm, public and private happy endings were indeed one
and indivisible.

[Page 104]

of those immediately concerned. But what is even more
striking is that in this case Soviet provincialism has not
only the same form but also the same substance as the
time-honored provincialism of the so-called bourgeois societies.
It is the woman whose biography has received the indelible
stain. The man can escape unscathed? the beauty blemish
hardly affecting the perfection of his biography. His
marital life will go on as before and the unity of his
life will remain unbroken, Again, one can only marvel at
the paradoxical complexity of Soviet society. It has
allowed women to become engineers in steel mills and to
perform physical jobs which in less socialistic countries are
entrusted to men, and preferably to machines. But right
and wrong in sexual relations are still distributed in
patterns that were formed in the days when the village
blacksmith was the main exponent of industrialization. Thus
when the provincial quest for perfect biography is somewhat
relaxed, the underlying provincialism of the value system
becomes even more apparent and even more surprising.

III

Thanks to Nikolayeva's critical attitude, the curtain
has been lifted to allow at least a glance at some hitherto
concealed sides of Soviet life. It would be quite
erroneous, however, to assume that novels lacking in critical
spirit are necessarily uninformative and unilluminating.
Vsevolod Kochetov's novels, including his recent bestseller,
are a case In point. Here is a writer raised and steeped
in the atmosphere of Soviet conformity. Through his novels,
beginning with Pod nebom. rodiny (Under the Sky of the
Fatherland -- Leningrad, 1955), which was written between 1947 and
1950, usually passes a member of the secret police who is a
truly a fine chap, possessed of all kinds of virtues. Even
in a discussion between two agronomists on the structure of
relative prices in the United States and Soviet Russia --
the price ratio of cars and horses in the two countries is
at issue -- the hero quickly confounds his adversary by a
thinly veiled threat of denunciation to the GPU (Pod nebom
rodiny, p. 124). It is natural for Kochetov to deprecate
increases in the standard of living of the Soviet
population: what matters, he says, is increase in the
productivity of labor (ibid., p. 259).

In pre-revolutionary Russia there was a type of writer
generally characterized as belonging to the school of chego
izvolite? -- "What can I do for you, sir?" Kochetov's
servility has been remarkable even under Soviet conditions.
In his second novel, Zhurbiny (The Zhurbins -- Leningrad,
1953), published in the last year of Stalin's life, the
novelist was quick to notice the rising tide of Soviet
anti-Semitism, and he obliged by assigning to a Jew the role of

[Page 105]

the only unreformed scoundrel in the book. Some scholars
have preferred to withdraw from the pressures of life in
Soviet Russia into pure theory. Again, Kochetov's
watch-fulful eye is upon them -- and in his third novel, Molodost'
s nami (Youth Is with Us -- Moscow, 1957), this contemptible
behavior is appropriately castigated (p. 93). In the fourth
novel, Brat'ya Yershovy (The Yershov Brothers), which is
said to have sold several hundred thousand copies, Kochetov
rushed to the defense of the dictatorship against the
critics of the post-Stalin era.[9]

In a sense, the book is a deliberate retort -- novel
for novel -- to Dudintsev. If the latter tried to show how
factory management, government bureaucracy, academic experts,
and even judicial organs conspired in order to suppress an
invention and punish the inventor, Kochetov puts the
conspiritorial shoe on the other foot, and serves up a
fraudulent inventor who is engaged in criminal intrigues directed
against the factory director and the party bosses. In
addition, he also manages to insert into his novel (No. 6, p.
97) some brief mockery of Erenburg's The Thaw, which was one
of the first, if not the first, literary expressions of
dissatisfaction with Stalin's era. He is anxious to issue
warnings against the tendency to accept with open arms the
returnees from jails and forced labor camps: "One must
distinguish between those who suffered innocently and those
who were released out of generosity.... The Soviet
government has a generaous soul...It is generous because it is
strong..." (ibid., p. 20). In short, Kochetov is a
faithful servant of the regime, its willing mouthpiece. And
still his novels contain much more than just a few grains
of useful information, the value of which is all the greater
since one must assume that it has been imparted quite
unwittingly. A few examples may be in order here.

It is Brat'ya Yershovy that most impressively and quite
effortlessly gives the reader some feeling of the extent of
informing and denouncing which thicken the air in Soviet
Russia. The city boss, the first secretary of the Gorkom,
Gorbachev, is presented as a person of excellent standing
and impeccable reputation. But the enemy is on the march.
The wily and false inventor composes a denunciatory epistle
in which Gorbachev is accused of having used city snow ploughs
in order to clear the street in front of his daughter's house
on the day of her wedding. The denunciation goes to the next
higher party authority, the first secretary of the Obkom,
i.e., the regional committee. The latter knows that the
maligned person has a weak heart; there is no doubt about
the trifling character of the complaint. But the Soviet
code of action prescribes paying full attention to every
accusation. Gorbachev is shown the letter, suffers a heart

-------------------

(9) Brat'ya Yershovy appeared in 19 58 in Neva, Nos. 6-7; in
subsequent references only the issue and page numbers will
be cited.

[Page 106]

attack, and dies (No, 7, pp. 119 et seq.). It is truly
impressive to observe Kochetov's uncharming naivet� which
makes him believe and make believe in his turn that it is
the anti-Soviet inventor who has killed Gorbachev rather
than the defenselessness of the dictatorial police state
against informers.

That informing is a problem not even Kochetov can
pretend to ignore. Another member of Kochetov�s collection of
ideal GPU men suddenly breaks out in a long tirade against
the "slanderers, careerists,...whose denunciations clog
the machinery of the party, of the Soviets, and of the
judiciary." He adds, "I am afraid of them" (Molodost's nami,
p. 433). The colonel's further suggestion that "there
should be a law against informing" may be a helpful one,
provided that the law also institutes a different attitude
to human biography.

It is in the same novel that incidentally, by way of
explaining the weakness of a character, Kochetov refers to
an earlier episode in his life. The character, a professor,
in filling out a questionnaire, had represented himself as
the son of an artisan when in reality he was the son of a
miller. An amateur hunter for inconsistencies in
questionnaires discovered and denounced the falsification. A long
investigation followed in which an unbelievable. number of
various government agencies and party authorities
participated. It was the professor's wife whose boundless energy
and perseverance beat off the attack, but not before she
had gone to the Central Committee of the Communist Party.
Her husband was saved, but he never recovered from the
experience (ibid., pp. 218-19).

Nor is it merely the state and the party that are on
the lookout for biographical chinks. The private citizen
is well trained to do his own private investigating, as i[??]
were, in a supplementary fashion. One of the brothers of
the Yershov family was a prisoner of war of the Germans.
After his return to Russia he spent years in a forced labor
camp. When, finally, he is allowed to return to his home
town, his own brothers subject him to a grueling,
humiliating, and pointless cross-examination (Brat'ya Yershovy --
No. 6, p. 80). These are indeed useful illustrations of
Leonid Leonov's ideal of a perfect biography and of what
it means when the concept is shifted from abstract theory
to everyday life. Soviet novels explain both Soviet life
and Soviet novels. With the help of Kochetov's novels one
can place Leonov's ideal of a perfect biography in a
perfect society in its proper perspective and learn to
distinguish more clearly between the mechanics of power exercised
within a dictatorial system and the trappings of an outworn
ideology.

[Page 107]

There is much said in Brat'ya Yershovy about art and
literature. One gets some idea as to how far-reaching has been
the dissatisfaction with the offical art and offical
literature, and how important was the wave of fresh air that came
rushing in from Poland and Hungary. "They say in Poland
that socialist realism is good for nothing but plywood
constructions," says one of the heros in Kochetov's novel (No. 7,
p. 84), possibly one of those who, again according to Kochetov,
kept their mouths shut for decades and now after Stalin's
dethronement have been emboldened to raise their voices in
criticism (ibid., p. 94). Will this movement of
long-suppressed protest bear some permanent fruit? Or will the
Kochetovs and those behind them -- and above them -- continue to
keep Russian literature within the pinfold of socialist
realism under the watchful eye of dictatorial censorship? The
prospect may be as cheerless as the retrospect. There is
no doubt that the Soviet government can effectively preclude
the revival of the Russian novel. But it is quite unlikely
that it can fully succeed in obstructing the Soviet novel's
revelatory function. This is the conclusion that emerges a
minori ad maius from Vsevolod Kochetov's literary exercises.

[Page 108]

'THE VOLTAIRE OF OCTOBER'

The New Leader,
March 14, 1960
by Giovanni Radicati

According to a brief biography accompanying the Italian
translation of one of his early books, Ilya Ehrenburg must now
be 68 years old. He seems younger, although he stoops a little.
He walks with a slightly rolling gate; his grey suit is faded
and somewhat threadbare and he wears heavy red boots.

We met in the little reception room of the Italy-USSR
Association, where a number of journalists and writers had been
invited to a press conference on "the most topical" problems of
Soviet culture, as the invitation card put it. The Communist
press had already published articles and interviews describing
Ehrenburg's visit to Italy as an instance of d�tente in the
sphere of cultural relations. In the front row of
chairs - which were upholstered in red plastic - sat Mme. Ehrenburg,
comfortably dressed, in an elegant fur coat, with a smart serf.
Ehrenburg nonchalantly faced a barrage of photographers'
flash-bulbs and then took his seat at the table, between the Russian
interpreter - a tall, curly-haired young man - and Senator
Barbieri, secretary of the Association. Barbieri introduced the
Soviet writer as "the man who opened the dialogue between East
and West at a difficult moment," adding that circumstances had
now become more favorable.

As soon as Barbieri finished speaking, Ehrenburg rose,
with a mischievous smile, and began to speak in French,
twisting the stub of a pencil in his short fingers as he spoke.
"People talk endlessly about culture," he declared, "whereas
what's needed is to create culture." He spoke rapidly, in the
offhand manner of one accustomed to public speaking. His style
was lively and his speech studded with the quips of a brilliant
causeur. Listening to him? one remembered how some Russian
intellectual had declared that Ehrenburg's great dream - crushed
without difficulty by Stalin - had been to become the "Vol[??]ire
of the October Revolution". It would perhaps be more accurate
to say that Ehrenburg resembles certain characters in Russian
literature who had an urge to identify themselves with the
French novels which they so admired.

"I have always been accused of pessimism," he went on
to say, �but now I feel optimistic about the international
situation." He introduced his theme with a metaphor that had
the quality of a syllogisms "They say one swallow doesn't
make a summer. But there are a number of swallows flying
around nowadays - Macmillan, Khrushchev and Gronchi too.
And swallows are no fools - no one ever saw a swallow arriving
in a northern country in autumn." He went on to make the point
that "proverbs are the wisdom of the nations. But they aren't
always logical, in fact they are sometimes silly and inaccurate
Then they have to be turned back to front, to recover their
meaning." Thus, with respect to the proverbs about the swallows
"It is summer that brings the swallows. They (the politicians)
took to the wing, but it was the promise of summer - the d�tent
that made them do so."

[Page 109]

Ehrenburg seemed to be implying that the d�tente is an
irresistible imperative. With that as his starting-point, he
launched his appeal for an end to be put to cultural
isolation. In themselves, his arguments were neither novel or
unusual. Their one original feature was the fact that they were
advanced with such cordiality by an official representative
of Soviet culture.

Ehrenburg acknowledged immediately that isolation results
in stagnation and is fatal to scientific and cultural
development. This had become obvious in the field of science where
cooperation had been facilitated by the absence of ideological
barriers. He went on to declare - in the tone of someone
venturing upon an unconventional truth - that no one would
suggest that it was Marxist ideology which had enable man to
reach the stratosphere. Cooperation, he then added, was more
difficult in the literary, artistic and cultural fields because
of ideological differences. He gave an example to show that
ideologies cannot be adapted to the requirements of art. "I
have often been asked for my opinion about bourgeois
literature. My reply is that great literature has never been bourgeois
or served as an apologia for capitalism. Balzac was a
reactionary, but in his art he destroyed what he wanted to preserve in
life. All genuine literature serves to defend mankind and human
values."

The intellectuals present were naturally gratified by this
statement. Although Ehrenburg did not actually say so, he was
letting it be understood that just as there could be no such
thing as bourgeois literature, there could be no such thing
either, as Marxist literature singing the praises of the Soviet
"positive" hero. And if that was what Ehrenburg believed (that
literature is independent of ideologies), he might well be
allowed to confine his example to bourgeois literature.

As an illustration of the felicitous results of
cooperation in the cultural sphere, Ehrenburg inevitably mentioned
the Italian cinema. For several famous Italian directors have
admitted the influence of the great Russian films made at the
beginning of the Revolution, while the Italian cinema, in
its turn, helped the Russian filmmakers to get rid of their
remaining servitude to the traditions of the theater. At this
point ,Ehrenburg, abandoning the chatty manner and the display
of Russian vivacity he had shown hitherto, embarked upon a
species of peroration. "Without exchanges", he affirmed gravely,
"culture cannot survive. Are we to suppose that artists are
less sensitive and competent than businessmen? It is our turn
now to set aside ideologies and talk about our joint task, about
the possibility for extending reciprocal contacts in the sphere
of art. This is all the more urgent because science and
technology are beginning to dominante the scene."

This was the most original point that Ehrenburg made. He
was there as the cultural representative of the country that
had reached and photographed the moon; but he was calling
upon artists and writers throughout the world to form a united
front, in the name of art, against scientific materialism.
Moreover, his appeal was indicative of the situation which is
tneding to develop in Russia, where artists regard the current
passion for science as a danger whose consequences are not

[Page 110]

fully grasped. Ehrenburg, a skillful interpreter and promoter
of this attitude, was reaffirming the belief that culture is
on a higher spiritual level than technology. "I don't so much
care," he said, "who the first man to set foot on the moon will
be; I want to know what kind of man he will be. I am more
interested in the diversity of human hearts than in the diversity
of worlds. Without the sputniks of poetry our lives would be
very drab!" He recalled the fact that Nazi Germany had been
in the forefront in technology, but that it had been a
barbaric community nevertheless. The example, he said, deserved
thought - scientific achievements were not enough, art was
necessary as training for the feelings.

In conclusion, Ehrenburg repeated his earlier
encouragement to the listeners, as though rather anxious to convince
them that he was being absolutely candid: "Ask me whatever
you like, quite frankly, quite bluntly; if I know the answers
to your questions I'll tell you." For a moment the audience
seemed to hesitate, After all, everything Ehrenburg had said
had been fairly obvious. But there had been something ingenious,
almost wistful, in his appeal for new relationships. The fact
is that the Russian intellectuals, even if they may not admit
it, are clearly hoping that the political d�tente will lighten
the atmosphere a little, give them a chance to slip into the
international circuit and shake off the fetterrs of bureaucracy
to a certain extent. At the same time, the listeners could not
quite suppress certain doubts; how did Ehrenburg think that
exchanges could take place without ideological questions
intervening? Was he genuinely convinced that artists should be
allowed to work in complete freedom?

These reflections, doubts or objections were summed up in
the first question, put by the journalist Giovanni Russo, who
said: "Cultural exchanges are desirable and needed. Your appeal
for frankness is gratifying, too. So we would like to ask you
whether, as one who thinks that a stop could be put to cultural
isolation, you consider it right for a book by a Russian writer
to be barred from publication in the Soviet Union?"

Ehrenburg's tone in answering this question was rather
irritable, and suddenly revealed the "limits" set by the Soviet
leaders to the extent of cultural exchange. "You are thinking,
he said aggressively, "that I shall turn pale when you allude
to Pasternak.[2] (This was the last idea that would have occurred
to anybody who knew anything about Ehrenburg). "As a matter of
fact, I am not in the least afraid to reply and you needn't
have put it so tactfully. You want to know what I think about
the Pasternak affair. I consider that it was an episode in the
cold war. . . At this distance of time it's impossible to say which
side shouted loudest. I regard Pasternak as a great Russian
poet, lyrical and egocentric; but I think he is a bad novelist,
because a novelist has to depict other people and Pasternak is
too egocentric to get inside the skin of another person. Dr.
Zhivago is rat�, a failure, and it depressed me. The fact that
it was not published was due to the unfavorable atmosphere.
Personally, I wouldn't attribute too much importance to the
episode, though it started so many sputniks flying in the
West. But I rather think a lot of people are beginning to
get tired of the business, and that the atmosphere is becoming
more normal again for Pasternak's true friends and his phony
ones."

[Page 111]

Ehrenburg then went back to the subject of cultural
exchanges. "The review, Tempo Presente, has published essay's
by Silone," he said, "Those essays are not to be published
in Russia, and neither are Spender's books. When something comes
along that you don't like, you keep it out of your house, If
I'm asked whether I want a dialogue with Silone, my reply is
that I do not, unless he says he is in favor of a dialogue and
of the d�tente. "This mention of Ignazio Silone rather
surprised Ehrenburg's audience, if only because it seemed
irelevant. It becomes understandable, however, if we remember that
Ehrenburg regards any reminder of certain fundamental truths
as the most serious threat to attitudes based on propaganda.

Ehrenburg was about to sit down again, when Anna Garofalo
pointed out that he had not answered Giovanni Russo's question,
and asked whether it would not have been better for Pasternak's
book to be published, even if the critics had treated it
severely afterwards. A few communists in the audience protested
against what they regarded as exaggerated and rather
impertinent persistence. Ehrenburg again replied evasively saying that
"we have to get rid of that atmosphere." Then he counter-attacked:
"Do you want me to say it was a mistake not to publish
Pasternak's novel? If you want me to say that, I will."

Ehrenburg went on to declare that the affair was an
instance of "collective madness" and that the West made the
mistake of using Pasternak as a weapon in the cold war. He
defended the Soviet attitude by saying that "the matter
became terribly complicated in Russia owing to the book being
handed to the Italians." He reiterated his unfavorable opinion:
"I don't think the novel is anti-Soviet, I think it is a-Soviet.
Pasternak describes events that made no impression on his
feelings, events he didn't understand." But, asked somebody again,
did he think that now ("now that the cold war is coming to an
end") Pasternak's book will be published? Ehrenburg said he
couldn't foretell the future, but he though it would be
desirable.

Senator Barbieri suggested that no furthter questions
should be asked about Pasternak, as other matters might then
be discussed. But then Senator Spano, a Communist, suddenly
leaped to his feet and demanded: "How much money has been
sent to Pasternak, out of the large sums he has earned in the
West?" Spano thought, perhaps, that the Western publishers
had been keeping all the money without bothering to send
Pasternak his royalties. But Ehrenburg evidently was not sure
that that was the case, for he obviously found the question
ill-placed, and rejected it, saying drily, "I can't answer
that question."

Ehrenburg's replies about Pasternak had a decisive effect.
It was pointless to object to questions concerning this "affair",
for no other subject would have shed such clear light on the
"limits" that Ehrenburg and the Soviet leaders would like to
fix for what are referred to as cultural exchanges, or on
their views concerning international cooperation. The short
discussion revealed those limits which - it should be stated
at once - have to be transcended and certainly not accepted;
the "dialogue" will always be to the advantage of the
participant who sincerely believes in freedom.

[Page 112]

Avove all, it is evident that art is still regarded as
subordinate to other extraneous factors, such as public taste
or Marxist theories. This is very far from the notion of
artistic autonomy. It is still a functional concept, required,
at best, to illuminate or to inculcate a moral lesson. So
far as the Pasternak affair is concerned, it may be admitted
that certain Western circles were impelled by considerations
prompted more or less directly by the cold war; but to what
is it really to be attributed, except to the complete lack of
freedom suffered by Russian writers and to the atmosphere of
intimidation created around Pasternak (whose friend Ehrenburg
claims to be) by his fellow writers?

In speaking of Pasternak, Ehrenburg contradicted everything
he had said previously. He asserted that the Soviet authorities
were entitled to ban certain writings from publication, and
showed himself to be confusing aesthetic judgment with
political disapproval. Even if we admit, for the sake of argument,
that Pasternak's novel is extremely bad (a view taken by s[??]e
writers even in the West, among them Vladimir Nabokov, himself
a Russian), the fact remains that cultural freedom consists
essentially in the liberty to publish even bad novels.

On the other hand, it is highly probable that in advocating
a breakout from cultural isolation, Ehrenburg was speaking for
a considerable number of Russian intellectuals. And the
very fact that this tendency is becoming apparent while the
principles invoked in the Pasternak affair still continue to
apply reveals the deep seated contradiction in which the
Communist intellectuals find themselves involved when the question
of a real d�tente or "liberalization" of culture arises.
Ehrenburg uttered some eloquent phrases and put forward some flatten
invitations, but he did not explain how the Russians expect to
solve the contradiction on the aesthetic, philosophic and
artistic-levels. How can the East-West "dialogue" to which Ehrenburg
invites us begin while so many impediments to freedom of the
mind still persist on the Soviet side? We may agree that
ideologies can easily be set aside in the scientific sphere. But
what does it mean to set them aside when it comes to matters
of culture, art and philosophy?

From that point of view, indeed, Ehrenburg's proposal is
quite meaningless. Free intellectuals have always called for
the "liberalization" of cultural exchanges; they have always
fought for it against every form of totalitarianism, including
Communism; they know that in the cultural sphere there can be
no cooperation without complete freedom to judge, discuss and
create, though with due respect for the views of others.

On the other hand, for Ilya Ehrenburg, cooperation is a
question of private or official visits by delegations of writer
and artists from East to West and vice versa,, If that is really
what he means, we can assure him that we have no objection to
such trips, but that meetings of that kind serve no purpose
whatsoever beyond an empty exchange of courtesies. We shall
wait for Pasternak's novel to be published in Russia, even if
the critics declare it to be a very bad book; we should then
say that the Russians have taken their first step toward
breaking out of cultural isolation. For the time being, however, it
is easier for the Communists to send a rocket to the moon, or
perhaps even to Mars, than to grant poets, writers and artists
the freedom to be themselves.

[Page 113]

THE PARTY SECRETARY IN THE POST-MAR SOVIET NOVEL

By Philip Bruce Cook
Soviet Survey
January-March 1958

Every party organisation in the Soviet Union has its Party Secretary.
He transmits the Party policy to his organisation as he receives it from higher
echelons of the Party. He supervises his own organisation in accordance with
this policy, and serves as the Party's link with the masses, especially at the
level of the primary, the district, and the city organisations. He is, perhaps,
the key figure in Soviet life.

What kind of person should a Party Secretary be? The Soviet novel from
1945 to the present day provides an unambiguous answer. In most of these novels
he appears as a type--clearly defined and easily recognisable, although there
are some deviations that will be worth noticing. Once the type is established,
the significance of the deviations from it will be made clear.

Leadership is the quality authors emphasise in the Party Secretary.
Nearly always he is shown with people over whom he is in authority. Rarely is
he represented as a subordinate, even when meeting with a Party Secretary of a
higher organisation than his own. This quality of leadership is deliberately
constructed from certain recurrent elements, the first of which is physical
appearance. Physical appearance within the type is not uniform, but its
delineations give a uniform impression--one of force and insight. Striking, piercing
eyes are a familar feature, and the portrait as a whole might be described as
that of a 'leader of the people.'

Perceptiveness and personal sympathy are indispensable to the fictional
Party Secretary. He has an intuitive grasp of people's personal problems, and
takes a personal interest in them. In so doing, he displays impressive knowledge
and vision.

The type normally exercises firm control over his own emotions (occasionally
he is just plain inscrutable). But usually his great joy of living and involvement
in his work are uppermost. They drive him on steadily in his determined tasks.
This devotion to his job is reinforced by a built-in sense of responsibility and
the habit of leadership. Geniality and friendliness in him are tempered with a
firmness born of the necessity to lead the advance towards the specific goals of
the Party.

Occasionally he is afflicted with what would be called in Western novels
'the loneliness of command,' the result of a hard family life, long hours of work,
protracted absences from home, and the constant sense of urgency and crisis that
infects his labours. The great personal sacrifices he often makes for the sake
of his Party work are made willingly.

In spite of his hard personal lot and exacting daily routine, the Party
Secretary type retains the same attitude towards work that he has towards life,
a positive and enthusiastic one, because, especially for this type of Soviet man,
his work is his life* He brings to it a front-line attitude and a sense of power.
The enemy is uncontrolled nature, whose allies are men habouring 'capitalist
survivals' in their consciousness.

[Page 114]

Within the collective struggle, the Party Secretary still encourages an
praises individual successes and skills. The need for trained workers dictate
a positive and practical attitude towards study and culture. He is constantly
urging people of all ages in his organisation to study, although usually in a
technical and limited field, for example, agronomy, tractor-driving, animal
husbandry, or lathe operation. That the Party Secretary is most concerned wit
political education probably goes without saying. He is normally shown to have
a great thirst for books and an interest in art because of its ability to
influence people; and he, too, studies as much as possible.

The Party Secretary in these novels understands the work problems of his
organisation's members because he is himself a worker. He is technically
proficient, and, in the primary Party organisations, works at a job as well as being
Party Secretary. In higher Party echelons he reveals his practical knowledge,
and often asks technical questions of baffled workers in the Socratic manner;
their answers then help them to see their tasks more clearly.

Most often, however, the Secretary prefers more forceful methods. The
agitator is the modern gadfly--an adept at exhortation, inspirational meetings
public addresses, publicity campaigns, and work challenges. His criticism is
frank and open as his agitation, and although normally quite sharp in tone, it
is in this criticism that the Party Secretary is most inclined to use ironic
humour as a stimulant.

The virtue called 'Party tact' is the quality of using absolute truth a
frankness in delivering constructive criticism. More laudable, however, than
receiving criticism in a true Party spirit is the ability to criticism one's s[??]
Oddly enough, the Party Secretary is rarely depicted applying self-criticism,
is frequently heard recommending its practice to someone else. When he does
apply it, the Secretary's offence is either a peccadillo or an error shared by
a whole group.

Although the type is a worker or ex-worker and has the common touch, he
is still the object of special respects He has both earned it by his knowledge
and work, and been given it as a result of his official position. He is
constantly asked for personal and technical advice. From his position he teaches
others the Communist way and trains new Party members, by example as much as b[??]
precept.

The Party Secretary serves as the driving force in Soviet society by
example, by agitation, by personal help, and by planning, Azhayev, in Far, from
Moscow, characterises the Party Secretary as the conscience of Soviet man. The
object for which the Party Secretary works is to gain effective mass support for
the Party and its programme. Harvest, by Nikolaeva, and Fleetfooted Deer. by
Shundik, give a detailed exposition of the type's qualities of leadership�phy[??]
and emotional strength, sympathy, insight, devotion, a positive attitude toward
work and study, technical proficiency, activity as an agitator, teacher, and g[??]
and a gift for the constructive use of criticism and self-criticism. Light Ov[??]
The Earth, by Babaevsky, Heart and Soul, by Maltsev, and Floating Stanitsa, by
Zakrutin, show the type clearly, but in somewhat less detail. The Party Secretary
is not usually the leading character in a novel, but in Harvest a married coup
who are both Party Secretaries are major figures, and in Fleetfooted Deer the
Party Secretary is the leading character. A concise portrait of the type is f[??]
in Apsheron, by Hussein, in which the Party Secretary, though present only nine
pages of the novels embodies every important element of the type. In many nov[??]
the Party Secretary, as a minor character, presents only a few typical feature
These figures do not depart from the type5 they are merely fragments of it.
[Page 115]

The Party Secretary's relationship with superiors is described in a scene
in Apsheron as being that with 'an intimate older friend.' His Party feeling of
loyalty and 'togetherness' is not called into doubt, but it is not emphasised so
much as his role of leader. Re submits to orders and adheres to policy voluntarily.
'The plan' and his will are inseparable. He is shown directing the execution of
the plan, not criticising or revising it. The actual process of making policy is
not described in the novels of the period from 1945. Subordination of the Party
Secretary to higher authority is obscured by his leadership activities in carrying
out Party policy. The discipline and subordination demanded of him as a Party
member account for roughly ten per cent of the total space devoted to portraying
the type in the novels upon which this article is based. The other ninety per
cent refer to leadership and its tributary qualities.

It is not without interest to examine, in this connection, The Rules of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, section I, paragraph 3; duties of a Party
member. Paraphrased and condensed, they are as follows: (a) defend the Party's
unity,(b) be an active fighter for carrying out Party decisions, (c) get an
example in work, (d) strengthen ties with the masses, (e) increase one's own
knowledge of Marxism-Leninism, (f) observe Party discipline, (g) develop
self-exoticism and criticism from below, (h) inform Party leaders of shortcomings in
work, (i) be honest with the Party, (j) guard Party secrets, (k) observe the
Party's injunctions on selection of personnel. Here the stress falls on obedience
and discipline. The stress in the literary type of the Party Secretary falls on
his leadership and initiative. Authors underline his capabilities rather than
his limitations. It is this special obligation to lead that sets the Party
Secretary apart from the rank-and-file Party members, and this is the distinctive
characteristic of the literary type.

The Party Secretary is also used as a literary device. From his special
position he cuts administrative Gordian knots which threaten the work of the main
characters, and in such novels as Floating Stanitsa, Living Water, by Kozhevnikov,
Students, by Trifonov, and Those Who Seek, by Granin, he serves as a deus ex machina.

Of forty-one Party Secretaries noted in 23 selected novels written since
1945, ranging from fully portrayed characters to those mentioned only casually, 13
Secretaries show some noticeable variation from the type.

The largest group of variants are those who are ugly or in poor physical
condition; Dudin, in Far From Moscow, is 'corpulent, though still young.' Savin,
in Those Who Seek, has the 'unhealthy corpulence of a man obliged to lead a
sedentary life.' Borisov, from the same novel, has an inexpressive face, no eyebrows,
and a potato nose. He is saved from complete ugliness by his bright blue eyes,
which shine with 'a kind of joyrful eagerness.' In Kruzhilika, by Panova,
Makarov is drawn with 'clever, slightly malicious eyes.' He is stopped and seems
small, and has the 'well-kept hands of a man who has not done manual work for a
long time.' In the cases of Dudin, Savin, and Makarov, these bad features are
shown as their only faults.

Another variation from the type is the Party Secretary who goes wrong at
his work through lack of experience. This classification includes Bekishev, in
Bright Shore, by Panova. He feeds some cattle incorrectly, thus showing himself
to be a better Party Secretary than a farmer, but redeems himself by work and
study. Potato-nosed Borisov's path is harder than Bekishev's, because Borisov is
inexperienced in Party work itself. Lacking confidence, he is often ineffectual,
and is easily deceived, but by the end of Those Who Seek he has mastered his short-

[Page 116]

comings and evolved squarely into the regular Party Secretary type. This is t[??]
only example of such gradual development shown in the 23 novels mentioned.

If Borisov and Bekishev faltered through inexperience, Korytov, in
Pavlenko's Happiness, does so through too much experience. Overworked, he is
presented as played-out in his job. Strain shows in his repellent face, which
is sallow, wrinkled, and sickly. But finally assistance comes, both physical
moral, and enables him to carry on without succumbing to his impulse to Become
phrasemonger and a bureaucrat.

Zorin, Those Who Seek, is a Party Secretary who does not want to be one
He would prefer to devote himself to full-time engineering and drop Party work
Out of apathy he loses his authority to a scheming careerist.

In contrast to Zorin, the only fault ascribed to Andrey, in Harvest, is
his too impetuous and unrelenting driving power. For a moment he indulges in
selfish thoughts, when his wife chooses to continue her Party activities at the
expense of their home-life but both Audrey and his wife are dedicated to the
Party, and resolve the dilemma in favour of Party activity.

Problems of physical well-being, experience, and motivation involve the
lesser deviations from the type. Major catastrophe has befallen the Party
Secretary who becomes a bureaucrat. Julian H. Franklin, in his article The
Democratic, Approach to Bureaucracy, suggests that bureaucratic behavior is
characterised by a depersonalisation of authority, with decisions becoming
routine, habitual responses Franklin writes: 'The opposite of bureaucratic
behavior is discretionary, creative choice, ideally the monopoly of the political
authority." The Party Secretary is a representative of political authority, a
within the limits of Party policy can act or forcefully recommend action to ot[??]
Since as a type he is presented as sympathetic and personally involved with ot[??]
in order to aid them in their work for new and rapid results, ideal behavior f
the Party Secretary would be the opposite of bureaucratic.

In Chakovsky's novel, A Year of Life, has to sneak into the Re[??]
Party Secretary's office in order to get to see the Secretary. He is then dry
reproved by the Secretary, who declines to consider his request for between word
housing because it is an economic matter and the Secretary is a political official
Throughout the novel there are disparaging references to bureaucrats and when
Baulin, the Regional Party Secretary, suddenly reconsiders the question and pu[??]
through approval for the new housing, he explains that he is 'not such a bureau
as all that.' Baulin had been in danger of becoming a bureaucrat through though
lessness, but caught' himself in time. Chakovsky follows this up with a speech
which one character condemns a hypothetical Party Secretary whose vision is li[??]
to his superiors, to the letter of the law, who lives by bureaucracy.

A Year's Span by Panova, depicts a Party Secretary who has become a fu[??]
fledged bureaucrat. Golovanov is an ordinary middle-aged man; good-hearted an
ashamed, who, having been removed from his post, sincerely admits his fault an
expresses remorse. Power had corrupted him. While he was the Party Secretary
Golovanov put on airs of importance, go that no one could get to see him. He
accused of riding too often in an official automobile, and basking in the resp[??]
shown him, which was really intended for the party he represented. Golovanov'
speech had turned into the mouthing of commonplaces.

[Page 117]

Another who became a bureaucrat is Kovalevsky, a second Secretary of the
District Party Committee in Those Who Seek. He slights petitioners and avoids
responsibility. A one-sentence allusion is made to a certain Ivan Ivanovich
in Light Over the Earth, showing him to have been a bureaucrat and careerist
of the same type. The passages dealing with Kovalevsky and Golovanov are also
quite brief, though vivid.

Skorobogatov, from Koptaeva1s Ivan Ivanovich. is the most completely
portrayed atypical Party Secretary. He is shown to have given valued service to
the Party in the past, but in the novel he appears throughout as a completely
negative man. 'Keenly conscious of his own superiority,' and habitually
domineering, Skorobogatov is rude, tactless, supercilious, technically ignorant, and
thoroughly disliked by the people. He is fat and has ugly eyes. He threatens.
He goes to extremes in behavior and falls behind the times. Opposition to himself,
Skorobogatov interprets as opposition to the Party and declares that his job is
to 'penetrate into the very essence of a person's soul, not his work.' Without
doing anything to help other people in their work, either with thought, money, or
materials, Skorobogatov (which means 'get rich quick') attempts to meddle in their
private lives. He is, above all, unjustly suspicious of everyone. When charges
are at last preferred against him for his ruinous practices he is genuinely
surprised; so out of touch with the masses has he become. Skorobogatov has gone to
the very worst limit and is branded as a dictator. As a literary figure he is
not particularly interesting. There is nothing good about him and he is as
incomplete a personality as the Party Secretary type who has nothing bad about
him. Koptaeva makes no attempt to explain or comprehend his character; she gives
no hint of how Skorobogatov became such a villain, but is most concerned to judge
him, and carefully points out that Skorobogatov is only 'a tiny dot' on the
enormous surface of the Party. The interesting thing about Skorobogatov is that a
Soviet writer finds it necessary to recognise the possibility of his existence.

In all cases considered here where a Party Secretary has gone wrong, the
authors have dramatised his exposure or reform, usually by the hand of another
and senior Party Secretary.

Significant as the antithesis of the Party Secretary type is a Chukchi
shaman drawn by Shundik in Fleetfooted Deer. This superstitious old witch-doctor
attempts to dominate his people by fear, and to murder their Party Secretary. He
dies in a fit, after an excess of rage and superstitious fanaticism.

Panova, Chakovsky, Granin, Koptaeva, and Pavlenko are the writers who have
dealt most extensively with atypical Party Secretaries. On the whole, they do at
least attempt a full psychological portrayal of their characters more often than
the authors of such works as Far From Moscow. Light Over The Earth, or Light in
Koordi. In these last three works the figures are flat and uncomplicated.
Psychological complexity, on the other hand, is characteristic of the literary
method of Panova particularly, of Chakovsky and Granin to a large degree, and also
of Koptaeva (notwithstanding Skorobogatov1s flatness), and of Pavlenko to a lesser
extent. Of the novels dealing with atypical Party Secretaries, the best,
artistically, have appeared since Stalin1s death. These are A Year1s Span (1954), Those
Who Seek (1955). and A Year of Life (1956). Here the characters-not only of
Party Secretaries-are more fully delineated. Ideologically they attack nothing
that Pavlenko did not attack in Happiness (1957), that is, bureaucracy, and their
remedies are the same way. that is, other Party members, other Secretaries, and
self-criticism. The distinction of Panova, Granin, and Chakovsky is that their
work is better literature. They present no brief against the Party and its
Secretaries in their novels, but rather against bureaucratic corruptions of them.
Bureaucracy is apparently recognised as the chief occupational hazard of the Party
Secretary's job, and the purpose of presenting atypical Party Secretaries in novels
is to alert others to the danger, and so help them to avoid it.

[Page 118]

The type of the Party Secretary hag been consistent and persistent in
novels since 1945. It appears to resist literary change, and no variant Party
Secretary is left uncorrected at a novel's end. He is, after all, the pillar
of society and Soviet Ibsens, exposing the pillars and undermining society, ar[??]
clearly unwanted.

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