[BEGIN]
K.ZELINSKY
__TITLE__ SOVIET LITERATURE.PROGRESS PUBLISHERS
MOSCOW
[1]Translated from Ihe Russian by Olyti Sharlse
Edited by Bryan Bean
Designed by V. Ilyushchenko
K. 3EJ1HHCKHH COBETCKA3 J1HTEPATVPA. HPOBJIEMbl H J1K3AH __COPYRIGHT__ First printing 1970In this book I have tried to present Soviet literature to the reader in its three main aspects. First, the stages of its development, and the general laws and factors governing this development. Second, the problems posed by the development of Soviet literature. For instance, the problem of inherited traditions and their influence on Soviet literature; the problem of socialist realism, and partisanship in literature; the role of the Communist Party in the development of Soviet literature; and problems of content, form and method. Third, the outstanding personalities in Soviet literature. As I go along I shall also examine those books which for one reason or another had aroused the interest of critics and stirred public opinion.
This book is not a history of Soviet literature in the true sense of the word, nor did I make it my aim to set out the material systematically, the way it is done in text-books or historical reviews of an academic nature. Nevertheless, I did try to give a sufficiently comprehensive account of modern Soviet literature and its historical background from its genesis to the present time.
Two reasons prompted me to make a survey of Soviet literature intended not just for specialists but for the general reader. The first is a personal reason. As a literary scholar and critic, I grew up together with Soviet literature. My youth coincided with the first years of the Soviet state. On graduating from the philosophical section of the department of history and philology at Moscow University in the spring of 1918, I plunged straight into public activity, and throughout most of the Civil War and foreign intervention, I worked as a war correspondent, travelling all over the country. When I finally returned to Moscow in 1922, I devoted myself wholly to literature. I wrote for the first literary magazines to come out after the Revolution, took part in the first literary battles, joined the constructivist group, attended all the congresses of Soviet writers as a delegate, and so on and so forth.
I saw and heard Mayakovsky, Yesenin, Selvinsky, Fedin, Paustovsky, Leonov, Ehrenburg, Fadeyev, Alexei Tolstoi, Serafimovich, Ostrovsky, Makarenko, Pasternak and many other writers, who were either my literary colleagues or opponents. I was one of the 5 first readers of their first works about people of the revolutionary Soviet epoch. It was not only from their books that I formed my impressions of most of these Soviet writers. I also knew them personally, meeting them at conferences and in editorial offices.
I have pondered over my own past and that of my literary friends. I feel that anyone who has lived for almost fifty years in the thick of revolutionary events, anyone who has not merely witnessed but taken part in the social reconstruction of Russia, has a right to cast a retrospective glance over the road he himself and his literary contemporaries have travelled in the light of history. To look at oneself from outside, so to speak. And that is what I have attempted to do in my book.
When the Socialist Revolution took place in October 1917, Marxism meant little to me. By virtue of my upbringing and education I was far removed from politics and took no part in the revolutionary struggle. But after the Revolution, everyone in our country, each in his own way, began to join the struggle for the new life. The same thing happened in literature. We were parting with old illusions and assimilating new ideas and views. It did not come easily. But I am not going to dwell on my personal emotions here. They are beside the point. The theme of this book is the ideological course of Soviet literature.
I cannot say that acceptance of the new truths came easily, without any inner struggle at all, to someone like me who in the 19205 belonged to the literary group of the constructivists. But once I had understood these new truths, I became a convert of socialist realism, and have been one ever since the early 19305. And for some time now I have felt an urge to sum up my own experience and, as far as I am able, that of Soviet literature as a whole, in which I have been working now for close on fifty years.
I am afraid I have not been able to avoid a subjective approach to my literary colleagues and their works. But then, a literary critic reserves the right to give his own evaluation of writers and writings.
So, the first reason which prompted me to write this book was the desire to sum up my recollections and impressions of Soviet literature which has constituted the essence of my life.
My second reason is a polemical one. I felt the urge to write this book after reading some of those works on Soviet literature published in the West, mainly in the United States, then in England, and to a lesser extent in France and Italy. Most of them came out at a time when many were blinded by the whitish neon glare of the cold war.
In one American book about Soviet literature, entitled The Cult of Optimism, published in 1963 by the University of Indiana Press, I came upon a very sensible line of reasoning. The author writes 6 that people in the West love to play a sort of intellectual parlour game where the idea is to search Soviet literature for all kinds of ``evils and vices" in the ``Soviet system''. They use the word `` system" as if they were speaking of a rare make of car. But these people, the author goes on to say, are forgetting that the shortcomings and vices exposed by Soviet writers are by no means a monopoly of Soviet society, and it is therefore absurd to state, as some anti-Soviet Western authors do, that the capitalist way of life is superior in every way to the Soviet.
It is true that people in the West, who feel hostile to the Soviet Union, read our writers from a peculiar angle, hunting for facts, characters and situations that might cast aspersions on the U.S.S.R. But indulging in this pastime is no better proof of the players' intellectual powers than doing the crossword in the Sunday paper.
There are also authors who strive to denigrate Soviet literature in a different way. They ``pity'' the Soviet writers because, they say, they are forced to balance on a tight rope, like circus acrobats. A Soviet writer must not show reality in a rosy light, nor dare he paint it black. He must not gloss over the difficulties, nor can he brood too much on the gloomy sides of life. At one time, he was obliged to sing praises to Stalin, and although he has now been relieved of this duty, he still feels constrained to sound optimistic whatever the circumstances.
I am not going to set about refuting this nonsense, nor am I going to enumerate the other incongruities and mistakes in all those tendentious books about Soviet literature published in the West. By and large, I have no intention of devoting this book to the refutation of all sorts of mistakes and misconstructions, for this would only involve me in an endless examination of particular instances.
My book is devoted to something else---to reflections on Soviet literature based on my personal experience and the experience of my fellow writers. I should like my book to guide the reader to that main source which gives Soviet literature its inner power, and to explain why it is that Soviet writers have no wish to denigrate the life they describe, and why this life needs no embellishing. I also want to give an answer to the question why we really are so full of optimism, why we have such faith in our future, and why we believe in the cause served by the whole country with such enormous dedication. Why indeed? Does it never occur to those people who feel hostile to the Soviet Union that writers like Mayakovsky, Alexei Tolstoi and Sholokhov are hardly the sort of men who would think and write only as the Party leadership ordered them, as second fiddles obeying the wave of the conductor's baton? Let us take a closer look at Soviet writers and try to 7 understand their books, bearing in mind the ideological and artistic aims they themselves had chosen to pursue. Let us try to understand what they have tried to tell the world, and how they have gone about it.
These are the questions I set out to answer in my book.
The main subject of this book is Soviet Russian literature. I regret to have been unable to give a wider and more detailed account of the other Soviet national literatures. After all, the multinational character of Soviet literature is certainly one of its main features. It is a law of socialism that the national cultures and literatures of all the peoples inhabiting the country should come to flourish. Even of those peoples who fell badly behind in their historical development and were cruelly oppressed by tsarist colonialism. Even of those who had only a rudimentary written language or none at all.
Soviet multinational literature makes an extremely interesting object of study. One will find in it all the known kinds and genres of writing. From the simplest to the most modern forms. From the unpretentious little song or the recitative of a folk bard-like the Armenian and Azerbaijan ashug, or the Kazakh and Kirghiz akyn-to the sophisticated and complex socio-psychological novel. All this lives thrives and interacts because the Revolution rallied to the task of creating a socialist culture involving not only the large and culturally developed nations, who had already gone through the stage of industrial capitalism, but also the small national groups and tribes living in the deserts of Central Asia and in the Far Eastern taiga.
I felt it would be impossible to embrace all this in one small book. But I do realise that by keeping to Russian literature alone, I am narrowing down my field of vision and failing to do full justice to all the aspects of Soviet literature.
Nevertheless, the concluding chapters of this book are wholly devoted to the theoretical side of this question which, I am convinced, is of tremendous importance to many nations in the world. Especially in this age of national liberation struggle and the consequent establishment of new independent states in Africa, Asia and America.
The young writers of many of the newly independent states are confronted by problems of fundamental importance: the ideological aims of young literatures, political freedom, artistic means and forms, the role of national tradition, identification with the people, and many others. The experience of Soviet Russian literature, which is one of the most prominent literatures in the world, may be found useful and, I sincerely hope, of interest to the reading public in general.
Moscow, 1970
[8] __NUMERIC_LVL1__ Chapter 1 __ALPHA_LVL1__ The Revolution and LiteratureWhat exactly do we mean when we speak of the literature of a particular country or people?
As a rule we mean two things: all the works of literature produced by the country or people in question, and---more frequently--- the literary life, the discussions important new books trigger off, and the conditions in which literature develops there.
Multinational Soviet literature is too vast a subject for one man to review. In the more than fifty years since the Revolution of 1917, Soviet authors, Russian and non-Russian, have written an enormous number of books. Fiction is published in more than seventy languages spoken in the U.S.S.R., and over a million titles have come out to date.
In order to study and critically evaluate the literary merits of this profusion of books, special institutes have been set up in Moscow, Leningrad and twenty-odd towns in the non-Russian republics and regions. Our literature is also studied in many institutions abroad (though not always with equally good intentions). In the U.S.A., for instance, there are two institutes engaged in the study of Soviet and, mainly, Russian Soviet literature. Libraries in all the large cities of the world devote whole sections in their catalogues to translations of Soviet literature.
A profound study of numerous books made over the course of years is not how the ordinary reader usually forms his opinion of a national literature. More often than not his judgements are based on the impressions he gains from reading its most outstanding authors. Maxim Gorky used to say that Lev Tolstoi was in himself a whole world, and that to know Russia one had to read Tolstoi. Readers today also tend to judge Soviet literature---and quite rightly---from the works of such outstanding and strikingly individual authors as Mayakovsky, Alcxei Tolstoi, Sholokhov, Fadeyev, Fedin and Leonov. And this is only natural. For literature is not statistics. As in all other forms of art, it is talent and not numbers that counts.
9Readers are also influenced in their judgements by literary critics whose articles provide a survey of a country's literature and, more especially, an analysis of the various schools of thought, the individual writers' artistic methods, and their aesthetic quests.
In speaking of Soviet Russian literature I shall do both: I shall make a general critical survey and describe the most representative writers.
Every national literature has its own distinctive character according to the range of ideas and images it embraces and the artistic method it has adopted for its own. Literature mirrors the life of a country, its creeds and customs, the character of the people and their ideals and aspirations. Just as we can speak of a people's national character, so we can speak of a literature having its own distinctive character, in the sense that the works of different authors share certain features.
Soviet literature was born of the Socialist Revolution of 1917, and its roots are in the victory of the workers and peasants and the victory of Lenin's ideas about the building of a communist society. The Revolution gave it voice, ideas, images and songs, and therefore if we are to begin to appreciate Soviet literature, we must first understand just what the October Revolution did for the development of Russian and, for that matter, of world progressive literature in general. In the first place, this means understanding the ideas of the Revolution: and not just the ideas alone, but the process by which the new society was established as well.
The entire history of Soviet society has found its reflection in Soviet literature: the overthrow of the bourgeois government by the workers and peasants in 1917, the Civil War and the defeat of the foreign intervention, the creation of new industry and agriculture under the first five-year plans, the Great Patriotic War against nazi Germany, and post-war construction. Literature has reflected the life of all strata of society, the life of the Party, the Armed Forces, and the Komsomol. Last but not least, it has reflected that which most of all promoted its development---the establishment and consolidation of the new state, and the guidance and influence of the Party and Government.
Alexander Fadeyev, addressing an audience of scholars, writers and students in Paris in 1949, said: ``How did Soviet literature begin? It was started by people like us. When, after the Civil War, we began to converge from all over our vast country---young Party members, and even more non-Party people---we were amazed to find how similar our life stories were, although each one of us had travelled his individual road. It was so with Furmanov, the author of Chapayev, the screen version of which was even more famous than the book. It was so with Mikhail Sholokhov, the youngest 10 and probably the most gifted among us. And it was so with Nikolai Ostrovsky, whose life was nothing short of heroism. Blind and totally paralysed as a result of the wounds he had received in the war, he wrote an immortal book about our generation-How the Steel Was Tempered. We came into literature wave upon wave, there were many of us then. Each brought with him his own personal experience, his own individuality. We were united by a sense of belonging to the new world and by our love for it.''
The generation preceding Fadeyev's, brilliantly represented by Alexei Tolstoi, and the next, war-time generation which produced Konstantin Simonov and Alexander Tvardovsky, and the post-war one, and the younger writers like Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Vasily Aksyonov who entered the literary scene in the 19505, and the writers who have appeared just recently-all of them, each new wave added its own new experience to Soviet literature. Personal experience---ideological and artistic---was derived from the historical experience of the whole people fighting for communism. Because the internal life of the country---what with the class struggle, the consolidation of the state, the economic development and social reorganisation---was so dynamic and wrought such a change in the mentality of the people, Soviet writers were faced with philosophical tasks of the first magnitude. It can be said without exaggeration that Russian literature had never had to face anything like the demands of those first decades following the Revolution. The Soviet epoch is one of the most exciting in world history for the scale and drama of its events in which passions ran so high. The power of renovation had probably never been so all-enveloping. Literature's judge and guide at the decisive revolutionary turningpoint was the Leninist Party and Marxist-Leninist ideology.
Not all the Russian writers were able to keep their balance at this sharp turning-point in history. Some refused to accept the Revolution and emigrated (physically or emotionally). Others bore up and manfully faced the storms of the new times. Not all found it easy to readjust themselves either ideologically or aesthetically. They had to overcome delusions and mistakes. But perhaps never before did life hold such an irresistible attraction for literature as it did at this ``sharpest of sharp turning-points in history" (Lenin).
In everything that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union says today about literature and the arts we recognise a further development of those ideas which Lenin expounded at the time of the Revolution. Our revolutionary yesterday and communist today are linked by the same Party line, which is the guiding principle in all our undertakings and achievements.
Owing to the revolutionary development of the country and by force of circumstances, Soviet literature was obliged to embark on a 11 road of constant and indefatigable search. History imposed on it the task of telling the world ``with its yet childish lips" (Fadeyev) about events, people and plans of a magnitude unknown in old Russian literature, for all the greatness of its classics. Soviet writers were called upon to express the new communist truth of the 2oth century, the Atomic Age, the age of communism. I recall Gorky's words pronounced long before the Revolution. They were aimed against art that was shallow or too individualistic, against circumscribed truths that disunited men: ``People become wholly absorbed in the truth of the day, and they cannot see the great truth which is crystallised from the blood and brain of living men and is immortal!''
I should say that Soviet literature as a whole is characterised by a struggle to break free of the cramping confines of the circumscribed truth of the day and express the great truth of our age by presenting real, living people who have grasped this truth and are heroically building a new world.
Such is the essence of Soviet literature. Its new ideological content is a result of the new revolutionary essence of life itself, for all its contradictions, difficulties and negative sides. But while the literature of socialist realism is called upon to detect and generalise in artistic images all that is new in the creative endeavour of the people building communism, this does not at all mean that Soviet literature is renouncing its national heritage. Just as the Russian people in building communism today draw on progressive national traditions and display such traits of the national character as Russian revolutionary enthusiasm, so does Soviet literature follow the progressive traditions of Russian realism which gave us the great 19th-century novels, and the traditions of universal humanism inherited from Tolstoi, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin and Chekhov.
[12] __NUMERIC_LVL1__ Chapter 2 __ALPHA_LVL1__ Problems of Inherited TraditionsRussian classical literature was formed mainly in the I9th century, in other words under the tsars. What ideas fed it, and whence did it draw its remarkable strength and humanism?
No one would dispute the tremendous contribution of Tolstoi and Dostoyevsky to world culture. Wherein does their greatness lie? The answer to this question must be sought in the particularities of Russian history.
It is, of course, wrong to think that any one nation, endowed with elite biological qualities, is capable of producing geniuses from its midst, while other nations of ``inferior'' blood (the nazis in Germany pointed to the Jews in particular, and the reactionaries in the U.S.A. to the Negroes) are incapable of higher spiritual activity. No one would deny that different national characters do exist. Only the difference between them is not biological; it is conditioned by their history, geography and climate, and, especially, by social struggle and the development of the productive forces.
For centuries Russian history seemed to hold out a sort of challenge to every Russian and to the nation as a whole. Russian history always mobilised the population of the vast Russian land and demanded the utmost effort from the people. Chaadayev, a friend of Pushkin and Herzen, once wrote that Russia, unlike the vale of Kashmir, was constantly hardening and not softening man.
If I dwell on this question for a while, it is because I believe it to be of help in understanding the Soviet period.
What gave the Russians strength on the one hand, and caused Russia's economic backwardness on the other?
In his book History of Russia (1863--1864), the famous Russian historian S. M. Solovyov gave a general outline of the course of ancient Russian history, and in the chapter entitled ``Russia Before the Age of Great Reforms" spoke as follows of the difference between Western and Eastern Europe:
``Looking at the map of Europe we are amazed first of all by the dissimilarity of its two uneven halves---the western and the eastern. Geographically and climatically, Europe has the advantage over other parts of the world, and these beneficial conditions are given 13 as the reason for the brilliant development of the European nations and their domination of other peoples. When speaking of these beneficial conditions, however, one must have only Western Europe in mind, for Eastern Europe has not been endowed with them. Nature has been a loving mother to Western Europe, and a mean stepmother to the nations fated to live in Eastern Europe. Thus we observe European civilisation gradually spreading from the West to the East as decreed by Nature, since it was in the West that the most favourable conditions for its early successes were created, growing less and less favourable as one moved East. In this connection, it is interesting to note the limits of the invasion of the wild Asiatic hordes in Europe, the point where it was stopped. . . . How many centuries separated Attila's defeat at Chalons and Catherine the Great's conquest of the Crimea which was finally to put an end to Asiatic domination on European soil! Think of the advantage, measured in centuries, which history gave Western Europe over Eastern Europe!''
I have quoted this long paragraph from a mid-19th-century Russian historian in order to show that Russia had long been aware of the need to catch up with the capitalist states in science and culture---a task which the Soviet Union is successfully tackling today. These words of Solovyov are also repeated, without mention of his name, in Pierre Pate's book Phenomene sovietique. The author points out how the inequality of Western and Eastern Europe's potential was fully appreciated by Russian statesmen several centuries ago. After the overthrow of the Tatar yoke, which lasted for more than two centuries and was the main reason why Russia fell behind Western Europe in her development, two of Russia's tsars made Herculean efforts to give Russian history a great thrust forward. The first was Ivan the Terrible who united the Russian state and extended its boundaries, and the second was Peter the Great who, to use the words of Lenin, attempted to put an end to Russian barbarity by barbarous means. But it took another two centuries, the book goes on to say, for historical conditions to ripen to the point at which Lenin, backed by Russia's progressive working class, tackled anew the problem of overcoming Russia's backwardness by introducing a socialist system of planning and socialist principles of labour organisation.
There are two points I want to make quite clear here. The first is that both Sergei Solovyov in his view of Russia's historical development and those historians and publicists in the West who (like Pierre Pate) a hundred years later, turn to the same view again, completely overlook the main factor---the development of production and the class struggle. In this respect the same laws of development apply to East and West. But the ``East is East, and West is West" 14 idea is the favourite argument of bourgeois historians, and it is on this aphorism that Hans Kohn, author of Basic History of Modern Russia. Political, Cultural and Social Trends, bases his ``scientific'' reasoning. Actually, neither the climatic and geographical contrasts nor even the tragedy of being dominated by the Tatars for more than two centuries, set Russia outside the general laws governing the world's cultural development. These laws, which were discovered and elaborated by Karl Marx, apply to all nations and historical formations without exception.
The second point concerns national and historical traditions and their role in shaping national character. This is also frequently misinterpreted in the West (by the same Hans Kohn, for one), and we find the following line of reasoning. Say what you will, but you Russians, even in your new shell, are exactly like you were a hundred years ago. No revolution can break the hold of the past. In saying this they sometimes refer to Marx's famous work The Eighteenth Brurnaire of Louis Bonaparte in which he says: ``The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living."^^1^^ But Marx was referring to bourgeois revolutions. Of the proletarian revolution he said that in order to arrive at its own content it ``must let the dead bury their dead".^^2^^ This content is the building of a new society where there will be no exploitation of man by man and where production forces will develop to the full.
It is rather amusing to find Western apologists of capitalism and critics of Soviet Russia's new, socialist system going so far as to call in the ghost of Guizot and say: ``You may fly to the stars in your spaceships, but you'll never shake off your Oblomov. Our Western civilisation is anyway ahead of yours. As Kipling has said: `East is East, and West is West, and ne'er the twain shall meet.'~"
Francois Guizot in his History of the English Revolution (1854-- 1856) was trying to prove that revolution, no matter how bold and powerful, is incapable of destroying old national traditions. Thus Guizot, who was the first bourgeois historian to advance and develop the idea of class struggle (actually borrowed by him from SaintSimon), ascribed the greatest importance to the role of national and historical traditions.
These traditions, certainly are important in shaping a people's character and its literature. But in the West people often make the mistake, when discussing Russia and the character of the Russian people, of overestimating the importance of those old national _-_-_
~^^1^^ Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, p. 247.
~^^2^^ Ibid., p. 250.
15 traditions which grew up under tsarism, and of carrying forward the past into the present. What was true in Guizot's time, and the age of the bourgeois revolutions, no longer applies in the conditions of the proletarian socialist revolution. The Russian Revolution of October 1917 did not simply sweep away the vestiges of feudal relations, thereby finishing what the February bourgeois revolution had not accomplished: it actually went much further.In solving the problem of Russia's backwardness and of ``catching up with the West and overtaking it'', the Soviet people have left their past far behind them. In the process of building socialism, Russian people are determinedly shedding those negative traits in their character produced by their country's historical backwardness.
I always remember what Ivan Pavlov said about the Russian character in one of his scientific works, Reflexes of Aim (1916).
``Whenever I am depressed by such negative traits of the Russian character as laziness, lack of initiative, and an indifferent or perhaps even a careless attitude to every kind of work, I always tell myself: nOj these are not our native traits, it's just dross, a cursed legacy of serfdom. It turned the serf-owner into a drone, relieving him of the need to exercise such normal human desires as a striving to provide himself and his dear ones with their daily bread, or to win himself a place in life, and leaving his reflex of aim with nothing to do on life's main lines. It turned the serf into an utterly passivecreature with nothing to look forward to, since his most natural desires were always thwarted by the insurmountable obstacle presented by the absolute power of his master or mistress's will and pleasure. My thoughts run further. A ruined appetite and undernourishment can be cured by careful nursing and special hygiene. The same can and must be done for the reflex of aim which has been downtrodden by history on the Russian soil. If each one of us will cherish this reflex in himself as a most precious part of his being, if parents and teachers of all ranks will set themselves the task of fostering and developing this reflex in their charges, and if our public organisations will provide generous opportunities for exercising this reflex, then we shall become what we must and can become, judging from many episodes in our history and from some of our bursts of creative strength.''
We Russians, and all the other peoples of the U.S.S.R., have now become what we must and can become. By carrying out the Great October Socialist Revolution and by adopting Lenin's aim of collectively building communism, our people have opened, as it were, a vast historical school for the cultivation of a taste for aim in every person, a school for re-education. Look at the main characters in Soviet literature-Furmanov's Chapaycv, Fadeyev's Levinson, Ostrovsky's Korchagin, Fedin's Izvekov, Polevoi's Mcresycv, and 16 Tvardovsky's Vassily Tyorkin---personal and social aims merge into one for all these men whose characters were shaped by the reflex of aim.
In his novel Mother (1907), Gorky showed how a ``taste'' for a revolutionary aim ennobled people. Looking back over the last fifty years in the history and the development of literature both of Western Europe and the U.S.S.R., one is forced to reject the idea that the way to freedom lies through anarchy, through ``throwing off the fetters" of civilisation. The way to freedom and ``natural man" lies through the cultivation of noble, humane aims and the setting up of a society---a communist society---where people will not feel stifled by exploitation and where their creative powers will unfold to the full. Such is the logic of history.
The fact that tsarist Russia, both technically and economically, was about a hundred years behind Germany, France, Britain and the U.S.A. was a challenge to Lenin's Russia. Hence the urgent appeal of the slogan ``to catch up and surpass'', which was reflected both in the speed of socialist construction and also in the country's cultural life. As for the reasons for Russia's backwardness they were best explained by Lenin in 1913, in his article ``How Can Per Capita Consumption in Russia Be Increased''. He asked: ``Why is the development of capitalism and culture proceeding at a snail's pace? Why are we falling farther and farther behind? Why does this increasing backwardness make exceptional speed and 'strikes' necessary?" His answer was: ``Our industrial satraps are afraid to answer this question, which is quite clear to any politically conscious worker, because they are satraps. They are not the representatives of capital that is free and strong, like that of America; they are a handful of monopolists protected by state aid and by thousands of intrigues and deals with the very Black-Hundred landowners whose medieval land tenure (about 70 million dessiatines of the best land) and oppression condemn five-sixths of the population to poverty, and the entire country to stagnation and decay."^^1^^
Such then were the historical conditions which, compounded of acute class struggle, geographical and climatic factors, and contrasts in the whole pattern of Russian life, had influenced the shaping of the Russian national character. How were they reflected in classical literature?
Like a lake that mirrors the sky, the Russian spirit mirrors the endlessness of the rolling Russian plains, and the severe climate. The very conditions of their existence conspired to produce in the Russians a strong sense of duty towards their fellow men and an elementary human decency. In their life of hard toil which required _-_-_
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 19, p. 293.
17 unspectacular, everyday heroism, they were constantly reminded of the importance of a helping hand. Forever warding off the attacks of their bellicose neighbours, they lived patiently tilling the soil and building their log houses which in winter were buried so deep in snow that often only the plume of smoke trailing from the chimney identified them as human habitations.Bismarck was fond of repeating that ``the Russian takes a long time to harness his horse, but he drives quickly''. And this applies both to Russian history and to the Russian character.
How then was this ``everyday heroism" of the Russians, their inherent humaneness and their sober appraisal of their harsh existence with its sharp turns from cruelty to kindness and back, portrayed in literature? In the first place these features were reflected in the profound realism of Russian literature, in its honest, unvarnished depiction of life.
Georg Brandes, who visited Russia at the end of the last century and wrote numerous articles about it, observed that ``intellectually the Russians often amaze foreigners by that realism, that sense of reality which made them a great nation and proved so victorious in their life's struggle''. I think this is one of the most accurate remarks about Russia and Russian literature made by a foreign observer. A keen interest in life's truth was always a basic feature of Russian literature. This was why even trends like decadence which led literature away from social interests acquired a rather different character in Russia from that they had in the West. Awareness of social contradictions and the imminence of a revolutionary crisis was always pronounced in Russian literature, even in the work of the symbolists. This insistence with which life forced its way into literature, giving it no chance to indulge in purely aesthetic problems and interests, was also a feature of literature in the Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, where the national liberation movement left its imprint on such fashionable pre-revolutionary trends as decadence and modernism, imported from France and Russia. This is why the Armenian and Georgian symbolists (for example, Vaan Teryan and Galaktion Tabidze) little resembled their West European counterparts and why, after the establishment of Soviet power in the Caucasus, they entered the mainstream of the country's multinational literary world with its new themes and moods easily and naturally enough.
Thus realism, a strong sense of reality, was always the main feature of classical Russian literature. It was this realistic approach to the portrayal of Russian life and people which gave Russian literature its particular position and influence in world culture. The Russian 19th-century classics---the poetry of Pushkin, the novels of Turgenev, Herzen, Tolstoi and Dostoyevsky, the stories of Chekhov, 18 and later the writings of Gorky---won recognition and popularity in many countries of the world. Hundreds of works in different languages have been devoted to the influence of the Russian novel on the development of the European and American novel.
Russian literature began to play this important role around the turn of the century when translations became widespread in Europe. Gradually 19th-century Russian literature came to be used as a sort of yardstick of the literary merits of books everywhere.
In the West, Russian literature is far from always acclaimed for its realism. What critics and readers tend to look for mainly in it (especially in Dostoyevsky) is an explanation of the now legendary ``enigmatic Russian soul".
For many people in the West ``the Russian soul" has come to mean a penchant for mysticism, violent action, anarchism and melancholy songs. According to some philosophers, like Jules Leger, a professor at the Sorbonne who wrote a book on this subject before the war, the ``Russian soul" is something dark, with the most unexpected things lurking in its depths. It is a tangle of contradictions, and its natural elements is vast Russian spaces, log houses, snowdrifts, bears and vodka. This myth, which attributes to the Russians all sorts of barbaric habits and irrational behaviour, is centuries old. Foreigners who visited Muscovy in the ijth-iyth centuries (mainly Germans like Olearius, Herberstein, and others who came later, like de Custine in the i9th century), tried to present Russia to the Western rulers as a backward country which was just waiting to be colonised. And although the mysterious ``Russian soul" had actually very little to do with the real Russian national character, and although Russia's history and way of life gave no reason to place it in a class of its own as a barbarous and exotic land radically differing from countries in the West, the legend nevertheless struck firm root and was invariably to be found in the various philosophical and historical Baedekers published in Europe. It was a convenient myth because it obviated the need to study facts and added exotic glamour to the whole subject.
This myth has been played up greatly by the enemies of the new Soviet system as a useful ``confirmation'' of the irrelevance of the Russian experience for Europe. Besides, this allegation of the exclusiveness and psychological barbarity of the Russians fitted into racialist theories splendidly. No wonder nazi ``philosophers'' (like Rosenberg, for instance) seized upon the myth of the ``enigmatic Russian soul" to prove the necessity of exterminating a few dozen million of the said souls.
A large number of Western propagandists of anti-communism are at present engaged in elaborating this colonialist myth about Russia and the traits of ``the Russian soul" which, they allege, is __PRINTERS_P_20_COMMENT__ 2* 19 barbarous and inclined to totalitarianism. Among these scholars, Professor Hans Kohn, whom we have already had occasion to mention, surely occupies the place of honour. Professor Kohn is the author of over a dozen books in which he investigates ``the national spirit" of different peoples.^^1^^ In 1960, he was elected president of the International Society for History of Ideas, founded in the U.S.A. In his books about Russia and the Russians (one of them called The Mind of Modern Russia which gives excerpts from Chaadayev to Berdyaev and from Tyutchev to Lenin, and the other entitled Basic History of Modern Russia} Professor Kohn advances the thesis that there is not much difference between tsarist and Soviet Russia. Both are barbarous and totalitarian. There was hope, he says, that the Russians would join the liberal and humane West. There was a glimmer of this hope in the reign of Nicholas II, when the bourgeois-landowner party, the Constitutional Democrats, entered the scene. But everything collapsed in 1917. Lenin came to power, and once again he faced Russia round to the East, tearing up by the root the tender shoots of liberty and western civilisation.
I do not propose to make a detailed analysis of Hans Kohn's mythopoetic activity. It is based on garbled quotations, an arbitrary interpretation of facts and, of course, a complete disregard for the class approach. The unscientific nature of his method could be easily and convincingly proved. The aim of a bourgeois ideologist is clear from the whole pattern of his reasoning, which is that of a typical Western propagandist of anti-communism.
This aim is to discredit Russia and the Russians for taking the road to communism. The idea of presenting Lenin as a successor to Nicholas II! Yet this is what Professor Kohn tries to do. Both, he says, opposed ``the freedom of the individual" and were for ``a totalitarian state"!
I have quoted this example for its curiosity value rather than anything else, as an instance of the lengths to which anti-communist propaganda in the West can go in its blind frenzy.
Naturally, nations differ from one another in certain traits of character, formed in the course of their history. Lenin wrote of this too. We speak, for instance of the revolutionary spirit of the Russians, of the business acumen of the Americans, of the Englishmen's reserve, of the methodical and punctilious Germans, the clearheaded Frenchmen, the industrious Chinese, and so on. But these qualities do not come from biological differences between races. _-_-_
~^^1^^ H. Kohn, The Mind of Modern Russia (Historical and Political Thought of Russia's Great Age}, New Brunswick, 1955. Basic History of Modern Russia, Political, Cultural and Social Trends. Princeton (N.Y.), 1957. World Order in Historical Perspective, Cambridge, Mass., 1942. Revolutions and Dictatorships. Essays on Contemporary History, Princeton, 1955, etc.
20 They are historically formed traits and are subject to evolution. The character of a nation must be examined only in development. It is not a static or immutable thing. Especially in the case of the Russian nation, which has undergone such great revolutionary changes in the last fifty years.Literature reflects the life and character of a people; it does not simply reflect the writer's individual psychology but actually interprets history and shows the peculiarities of a people's development.
The greatness of Russian literature must be attributed not only to the fact that it happened to be a sphere in which the Russian genius manifested itself so splendidly. Russian literature does indeed illustrate the giftedness of the Russian people: but it also owes its greatness to the eventful life and history it reflects.
Tolstoi is a great writer not only because he is Tolstoi, but also because his genius sprang from and was nourished by a great people. When Lenin called him the ``mirror of the Russian revolution'', he had in mind Tolstoi's ability to absorb and truthfully reflect the peasant life in its entirety, with all its contradictions and its protest against oppression and injustice, and to impart to it a universal meaning and significance.
Russia's history happened to run such an unusual course that it was always providing an object lesson for the rest of the world. The struggle of the Russian people against serfdom and tsarism, against exploitation by those who owned the land and the factories, their struggle to defend their country against Tatars, Mongols, Germans and other invaders---all this fed literature with lofty ideas and epic images, and accounted for its dream of freedom and determination to stand up in defence of human rights.
Russian literature derives its main qualities from the deep involvement of the 19th-century classics in the life and interests of the different strata of the country's population. These qualities are: first, its closeness to the people (as regards both form and content); next, its earnest yet romantic patriotism; and, last but not least, its constant defence of human rights, its profound humanism. It is this last and most pronounced quality of Russian literature which is responsible for its social and ethical spirit, its tendency to preach, and its invariably critical attitude to life in old Russia. Such are the traditions of the Russian literary heritage.
[21] __NUMERIC_LVL1__ Chapter 3 __ALPHA_LVL1__ Russian Literature AfterConditions for a socialist revolution ripened earlier in Russia than in other countries. A progressive revolutionary class---the Russian proletariat---grew up at the factories and plants built at the end of the last and the beginning of this century. It was headed by Lenin's monolithic party armed with a revolutionary theory. The positions of the bourgeoisie were shaky. The mounting crisis, the imminent revolutionary explosion, the tense ideological and emotional atmosphere that prevailed at this point in Russian history, were reflected widely and from different angles in the literature of those years, producing new images and views in the writings of people who belonged to such apparently opposed aesthetic movements as realism, symbolism and futurism.
Alexei Tolstoi, describing the situation in his novel The Ordeal wrote: ``In the last ten years, huge enterprises were built up with extraordinary speed. Millions were made as if by magic. Banks were erected from glass and concrete, and so were new music halls, skating rinks and gorgeous night-clubs where people were deafened by the music, and dazzled by the reflections in the mirrors, the halfnude women, the brilliant lights and the champagne. Gambling houses, brothels, theatres, cinemas and amusement parks were hastily opened.'' But at the same time ``the spirit of destruction was felt everywhere; it seeped like a deadly poison into the fabulous stock-exchange deals of the notorious Sashka Sakelman, into the sullen resentment of the steel workers, and the twisted dreams of the fashionable poetess brooding till five in the morning in a bohemian basement cafe. . . . Destruction was considered good taste, and neurasthenia a sign of refinement. This was preached by the fashionable writers who sprang from nowhere and became celebrities overnight. To breathe the smell of the grave and feel beside you the trembling of a woman's hot body, excited by morbid curiosity---such was the mood of poetry written in those last years: death and lechery".
The First World War greatly enhanced the feeling of approaching crisis in literature. Illustrated literary magazines like Niva (The Field), Solntse Rossii (The Sun of Russia) and Stolitsa and Usadba 22 (The Capital and the Country Estate) were full of sentimental war stories, and there was a flood of songs on the ``all-is-over'' and ``everything-is-going-to-the-dogs'' theme, urging people to ``take it now while you can" as recommended by Artsybashev, Verbitskaya and company. The stream of pseudo-patriotic eulogies to the tsar (which carried away even writers of such stature as Leonid Andreyev and Sergei Gorodetsky), chauvinistic verses, boastful war reports, articles, plays, declarative announcements and invectives formed, for a time, something like a united front in literature (with the exception of Maxim Gorky, Mayakovsky, Serafimovich, Yesenin, Veresayev and a few others). On the eve of the Revolution the country's literary life, concentrated in the editorial offices of the literary journals and in St. Petersburg salons and circles, the whole intellectual atmosphere in the literary world throbbed with the excitement of capitalist enterprise and a desire to either gloss over the contradictions or flee from them. But it was a ``feast on a smoking volcano''. This is what Alexander Blok wrote in 1919, recalling Russian literary life just before the Revolution: ''. . .1 am becoming more and more convinced that such wonderful Russian magazines as, say, Stariye Cody (Times of Old) and Apollon (Apollo) were perfectly crazy undertakings; leafing through those gems of typographic art today, I quite seriously almost go mad trying to puzzle out how their editors could possibly have failed to feel what we would turn into, what we'd become in three or four years' time.'' From this one should not draw the conclusion that the whole of Russian literature had turned decadent and despondent on the eve of the Revolution. In fact, it was as rich in talents as before, as in the 19th century. Many outstanding writers who adhered to realism, the leading trend in literature which was headed by Gorky (with his Znaniye collections), produced works which are still the pride of our literature today.
Gorky's generation of writers included Korolenko, Leonid Andreyev, Sergeyev-Tsensky, Bunin, Veresayev, Kuprin and Serafimovich. All that was sound and healthy in literature, all that held promise of developing further, was at first connected in one way or another with the Znaniye group, and particularly with Gorky himself. Later, of course, the Znaniye group fell apart and these writers joined different camps. The ideological struggle waged by Gorky in his articles had a resonant public quality and was of extreme importance for the development of literature. The pessimism and morbidness which prevailed in the poetry of the time was countered by Mayakovsky's bold revolutionary spirit. Serafimovich and Valery Bryusov pursued a consistently democratic course.
Yet Gorky, who closely followed the literary life of those years and analysed various works and their main characters, especially 23 revolutionaries in a number of articles (``The Destruction of Personality'', 1909; ``On Modern Times'', 1912, and others), invariably drew the conclusion that ``the old literature freely reflected the moods, feelings and thoughts of all Russian democrats, while modern literature meekly submits to the persuasions of the small pettybourgeois groupings. . .inwardly demoralised and hastily clutching at whatever comes to hand....".
Further on, Gorky continues: ``A modern writer can hardly be suspected of worrying about the fate of his country. Even the 'elder greats', if asked about this, will probably not deny that their motherland is of secondary importance to them at best, that social problems cannot inspire their art as strongly as does the riddle of individual existence, and that the main thing for them is free art, objective art, which is superior to their country's destinies, politics and parties, and which lies beyond the interests of the day, the year, and the age.''
Such, in brief, was the ideological and political baggage with which the majority of the writers met the October Revolution.
The Revolution burst into this atmosphere like a great, cleansing storm. We know how difficult it was for many to grasp what was happening at first. Even Gorky did not correctly understand the events of the proletarian revolution immediately (see his ``Untimely Thoughts''). The bloodshed frightened Korolenko, a remarkably gentle, compassionate man, and confused Veresayev. Gorky's friend Stepan Skitalets left the country (to return in 1934). Ilya Ehrenburg wrote in one of his poems (included in the volume Fire}:
And in another:Rain falls on earth, a scorching rain.
My lonely heart is trembling.
~I do not know who's right, who's wrong.
They're flying different colours.
Indeed, many were stunned by the revolutionary storm, and some, voicing the despair of the defeated class, harped variously on the theme of universal doom. Alexander Blok poked sarcastic fun at them in his poem The Twelve. A long-haired character says in an undertone: ``Russia's finished'', and the author remarks: ``He must be a glib-tongued writer".... B. Sadovsky, whose name once adorned the pages of Apollon, Vesy and Stolitsa and Usadba, called his first book of verse published after the Revolution The Abode of Death. While Anna Akhmatova wrote:
~ 24All has been looted,
Sold,
Betrayed.
Literary life was undergoing the same radical changes as everything else in the country. Everything was changing---people, magazines, ideas, life itself.
Nor could it have been otherwise: to begin with, for political reasons. The Revolution divided the writers into those who voted for Soviet power and those who were against it. It swept aside the reptilian servants of capitalism and opened the way to new writers from the midst of the victorious people.
In the first years of Soviet power this revolutionary process was extremely intense. Yet many failed to grasp it at the time since the issue was confused by the complexity of the general situation in the country. The situation mixed all the cards in literature, and the crushing blows it suffered from famine, economic dislocation and war were seized upon by the enemies of the Revolution in their attempts to blame everything on Soviet power, making it out to be the original cause of literature's decline.
The first change to take place concerned the collapse of the prerevolutionary pattern of literary life. The people who came and went in the editorial offices of the magazines, attended the Wednesdays and Saturdays of Countess Kleinmichel in her St. Petersburg drawing rooms (where Yesenin and Klyuev sang their ditties), frequented the salon of Zinaida Gippius and her husband Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Vyacheslav Ivanov's ``tower'', or the Moscow house of Margarita Morozova, the Russian Madame Recamier, and those who belonged to the Society of Free Aesthetics in Dmitrovka Street or the Literary Circle---in short, that whole world where names were made, literary fashions set and sensations born, that world of small, cheap bourgeois newspapers and respectable publishing houses, of worthy and worthless writers who moved noisily through the labyrinths of the editorial offices from morn till night, filled the drawing rooms, the exhibition halls, and dined in private rooms at the restaurants, this world which was maintained by patrons of the arts and dealers in art, and which was essentially bound up with the old landlordist Russia began to disappear in the very first months following the Revolution and especially after the closing down of the bourgeois newspapers in the summer of 1918, gradually folding up and assuming unrecognisable forms.
The threadbare fabric of the life of the bourgeois intelligentsia soon wore through and fell apart. Their streets, mansions and de luxe apartments were taken over by the working people who made up the ``great-coat'' audience of Demyan Bedny, and whom Mayakovsky saluted and asked rhetorically in the Futurists' Gazette published in 1918: ``With what fantastic buildings will you cover the site of yesterday's fires? What songs and music will pour from your windows? To what Bibles will you open your souls?''
25They were the people who appeared to Valcry Bryusov as the implacable judges of the old world, whom Alexander Blok portrayed as the symbol of retribution in his poem The Twelve, and whose victory the proletarian poet Nikolai Poletayev (1889--1935) welcomed as happily as if it were a joyous family gathering.
The very elements that had fed the old literature disappeared. The Olympians and those who worshipped the Muses on Parnasus, famous lawyers and wealthy society ladies, hurried to the south of Russia, driven by animosity and fear, and from there made their way abroad. Bunin, Kuprin, Balmont, Zinaida Gippius, Merezhkovsky, Zaitsev and Shmelyov left the country. Alexei Tolstoi, swept up by the retreating wave, followed the fleeing White Army out of Russia at the end of 1918 though he was to return a few years later.
All these people were well known to the Russian reading public, and I remember how anxiously we asked each other when we met in Petrograd or Moscow immediately after the Revolution or later, during the Civil War, when we returned for a few days' leave from the front: ``What side is Bunin on? Where is Leonid Andreyev?" We wanted to know where they were and whose side they were on---Blok, Balmont, Shmelyov, Zaitsev and all the other writers whose names we were so used to seeing in the literary magazines, newspapers and playbills. And I remember how happy we were to learn that Blok was with the Revolution, and how painful it was to hear that Kuprin had left with Kerensky's cadets.
Soviet literature was born as the old world came crashing down and the class struggle reached an unparalleled intensity. The drama of the situation is well rendered in both Mayakovsky's and Blok's poetry written at the time.
The class split, the Civil War and the armed intervention of fourteen foreign powers headed by England and France, at first created a chaotic situation in Russia, causing people to flee the country en masse, and not just the aristocracy, the nobility, the big landowners and the court, but a large part of the intelligentsia too.
Altogether, about a million people emigrated, the majority belonging to the top strata of old Russian society. This was an unprecedented case in the history of the Russian state. Later, in other countries where socialist revolution triumphed we were to witness a similar emigration of a part of the population (in the Baltic states, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary, and China), but never on such a scale as after the Russian revolution.
New literary associations were formed abroad and magazines in Russian began to come out in Paris, Berlin, in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and, finally, in the United States. Although the scale on which the Russian emigre writers launched their literary activities was pretty ambitious (they set up their own publishing houses and founded 26 many magazines and newspapers), none---with the exception of Bunin and Kuprin---produccd anything serious that could claim a place in the history of Russian literature.
Ivan Bunin is a wonderful stylist and a subtle artist. His stories The Gentleman from San Francisco, Chang's Dreams, The Cup of Life and others, published in 1912--1916, have been translated into many languages and brought him world renown. He was elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences for his translation into Russian of Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha. Bunin left Russia in 1920 and settled in Paris. In his publicistic articles he often spoke out against communism. But they are not to be taken too seriously, any more than the majority of his recollections about his contemporary Russian writers---Chekhov, Mayakovsky, Yesenin and others. In his memoirs published in Paris in 1950, the subtlety of his observations and the beauty of his style are as remarkable as his spitefulness which is like the annoying and malicious grumbling of a doting old man. Bunin does not speak well of anyone, thus depriving his work of the poetry for which his prose is distinguished.
While abroad Bunin wrote three of his major works: The Life of Arsenyev, Mitya's Love and Leka, and also some of his best short stories including Light Breathing, Sunstroke, Shadowed Paths.
In 1933 Bunin was awarded the Nobel Prize---the first Russian writer to receive the honour.
Bunin's prose conjures up for us a picture of the old Russian countryside with its sprawling estates, its smell of wild flowers, in which the sweetness of gillyflowers mingles with the bitterness of wormwood. His own feelings are as conflicting, and with him sorrow and joy are always intertwined. His heart is as full of sadness as it is of admiration for all that is beautiful in the world. Bunin frankly extols the charm of the landed gentry's life, but at the same time he paints the grimness and crudeness of the peasants' existence with the merciless realism of Emile Zola.
Maxim Gorky thought very highly of Bunin, calling him a superb stylist who could make an image tangible, visible and evocative, whether he was describing the desperate longing of someone in love or the boredom of provincial life. In his letters to Teleshev, written just before he died in Paris in 1953, Bunin said that he wished to return home, but this never came about because he was too old and ill and there were some financial reasons, besides. After his death, his collected works were published in the Soviet Union twice, both times in large impressions. The second, 9-volume edition includes stories written by him as an emigre.
Another emigre writer who cannot be ignored is Alexander Kuprin, who was born in 1870, the same year as Bunin. Kuprin had a vivid, ebullient life-loving talent, but he was less profound than 27 Bunin. He returned home in 1937 (and died the following year). I met him at the Metropol Hotel immediately upon his arrival, and he struck me even then as a man who had spent all his life strength and had come home to die.
Kuprin lived an eventful life, moving from his early youth in Bohemian and fast-living officers' circles. But being a democrat, he liked the company of sailors, musicians and wrestlers just as well. He described all of them in his stories. When one reads his Emerald (the name of a race horse the story is about) one is reminded of Tolstoi's Kholstomer. Kuprin's Duel, which has been filmed in the Soviet Union, shows how empty and hopelessly dull life was for the officers of a garrison stationed in a small provincial town in tsarist Russia. It is a dramatic story which ends in tragedy. I also remember the popularity enjoyed by Kuprin's Captain Rybnikov about a Japanese spy who posed as a Russian officer.
Kuprin paints his canvases in bold strokes and vivid colourshis sunlight is brilliant, his shadows deep. One is constantly aware of his passionate nature. His books make interesting reading, and they are reprinted again and again in the U.S.S.R.
Bunin and Kuprin, both realist writers of the old school, were inheritors and continuators of the traditions of Russian classical literature.
But the best writers of the older pre-revolutionary generation either stayed in the U.S.S.R. or soon returned home. One such was Alexei Tolstoi. Another was the poet Valery Bryusov. Strange as it may seem, this pillar of pre-revolutionary decadence, this exponent of symbolism and friend of Verhaeren, who was bound by a thousand ties to West-European literature, showed no intention of quitting Moscow and, what is more, was very active in promoting the cultural undertakings launched by the Soviet government and immediately after the Revolution joined the Communist Party.
Another writer who stayed behind and accepted the Revolution was Alexander Blok (1880--1921), one of the most important early 20th-century Russian poets, who can be ranked with Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov and Tyutchev. No other Russian poet ever succeeded in expressing with such sincerity, subtlety and depth the torments of a man's soul which, straining towards everything radiant and splendid in life, stumbles into the filth and sordidness of the surrounding world. Blok's lyricism has a spell-binding power. His love poems, which throb with an anguished dissatisfaction with life, have an irresistible appeal.
Blok's poetry, as distinct from Pasternak's idyllic lyricism, is
profoundly historical. It is filled with sensations arising from the
poet's responsiveness to social reality. Block despised the Russian
bourgeoisie. A dreamer and a romantic, he longed for great
28
upheavals and great changes in this sinful life. He called old
Russia a ``frightful world''. This is why he welcomed the October
Revolution with gladness and hope. His famous poem The Twelve
written in January 1918 can be justly called the first major literary
__CAPTION__
Alexander Blok. 1907.
work about this great turning-point in the history of Russia. The
whole poem is permeated with a deep-felt acceptance of the
Revolution and sympathy with it. It is significant that at the time certain
lines from it were used as slogans.
Andrei Bely (the pen-name of Boris Bugayev, 1880--1934), was another pre-revolutionary pillar of symbolism who took up the cause of the new, revolutionary Russia. I saw a lot of Bely. Baldheaded, his movements somehow elusive, he was really impressive. 29 Some people considered Andrei Bely to be a writer with flashes of genius. I don't know about that. But I do know that there was no other poet in the world who could have expressed the premonition of an imminent revolutionary cataclysm as powerfully and originally as Andrei Bely. His style is unconventional, somewhat jerky, and based on phonetic associations, yet it conveys remarkably well the psychology of a man who is awaiting a world-wide explosion. In one of his verses he actually predicts the invention of the atomic bomb. He referred to himself as a man ``with a forever staggered mind''. His most important work is the novel Petersburg written in 1913--1914 and revised somewhat in 1922. This is indeed a poem of fear. The characters of the novel, bomb-throwing terrorists, a senator and his son playing at revolution, are more like phantoms than real people, and there is something about them that reminds one of Maeterlinck. Senator Ableukhov (the name is a distortion of slap-in-the-face) paints a magnificent mental picture of the indestructible tsarist Empire where everything is divided into cubes and squares, while his son, who puts on a red domino to go to a masked ball, has already become involved with terroristrevolutionaries, and has actually planted a bomb in an empty sardine tin on his father's table.
To be sure Andrei Bely was a poet of crises, a medium of horrors, and yet he accepted the socialist revolution and stayed on to work in the Soviet Union.
What is the explanation for all this? How can we explain the fact that Bryusov, Blok, Bely and others (to name but a few)--- people who stood so far removed from the Revolution---welcomed it as a deliverance? The explanation must be sought in Russia's unique historical conditions.
No thinking person could help feeling the stirrings of a guilty conscience as he pondered on the contrasts then existing in Russia where the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie lived in gorgeous mansions and splendid country estates while the peasants suffocated in wretched log huts and the workers froze in clapboard barracks, and where people, children too, slaved at the factories from ten to twelve hours a day. Writers were also influenced in this by the traditions of Russian literature. After all, Russian literature has always been a ``literature of great compassion" as Rosa Luxemburg once so aptly described it. Another circumstance of no little importance was that Russian capitalism began to rot, unable to compete with its West-European rivals, before it had developed sufficiently to give factory and office workers such relative benefits as they were already receiving in England and the United States.
This is why even those who were entirely dependent on the patrons of the arts and the prosperous publishers, and whose 30 livelihood actually came from the capitalists' profits (Andrei Bely put this very well in his memoirs At the Turn of the Century, 1930)--- even these people, or at any rate many of them, renounced the bourgeoisie when the Revolution came.
But in order to picture what happened to Russian literature immediately after the Socialist Revolution of October 1917, one must bear other and probably more important things in mind. One is the fact that such well-known writers as Mayakovsky, Yesenin, Veresayev, Alexei Tolstoi, Fedin and most of the young authors whose works had begun to be published before the Revolution sided with Soviet power. Another and perhaps even more important fact is that those revolutionary years witnessed an extraordinary upsurge in artistic creativity among the literate workers and peasants. Dozens of new magazines and newspapers were started. They printed poems and stories by Gladkov, Bakhmetyev, Lyashko, Bezymensky, Gastev, Gerasimov, Kirillov, and many other beginners.
At first, much of what the working and peasant youth produced had slight intrinsic literary value. But from the point of view of its social and cultural worth, this upsurge in the artistic creativity of the masses was an extremely important phenomenon which cannot be ignored if we want to understand just what was happening to Russian literature in those years. By focusing all our attention on the outstanding writers of the time, such as Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak, of whom I have more to say later on, we are liable to let these names block our view of the floodtide of popular artistic endeavour and fail to appreciate the historical process itself. Naturally, what Pasternak wrote in those years is far greater in terms of artistic merit than the poetry written, say, by Nikolai Poletayev, one of the first working-class poets. Although Pasternak did not remain aloof from the historic events of his time, in those first years his poetry was mainly concerned with the past.
The poems of Alexei Gastev and Nikolai Poletayev, on the other hand, expressed entirely new and unusual emotions, then being experienced by millions of people. Poletayev described the feelings of the basement dwellers who, after the Revolution, moved into the apartments vacated by the fleeing aristocrats and capitalists.
Alexei Gastev was a veteran industrial worker, a Communist who had been sentenced to hard labour by the tsarist government. He wrote an amazingly original book of verse entitled The Poetry of a Worker's Blow (1918), which in rhythm is vaguely reminiscent of Walt Whitman. By means of form and intonation Gastev sought to render the rhythms of the Revolution itself: the rhythms of movement, explosions and blows. He renounced rhyme. In his blank 31 verse he tried to create original, eloquently expressive portraits and sketches that would convey through their romantically enlarged and generalised features the thoughts and sentiments of the proletarian operating a machine. His poetry is slightly abstract, tending to draw symbolic images portraying the life of a work team, the working class as a whole, or even whole historical epochs. Man with his warmth, his soul and his anger, does not figure as a person in Gastev's poetry. His epic studies: We Have Dared, My Life, We Are Coming, Come Out and others are extremely original works. Later, Gastev became the director of the Institute of Labour, gave up poetry writing, and devoted himself to the task of raising Russia's technical efficiency. I should very much like to quote a passage from one of Gastev's articles inspired by Lenin's plan for the electrification of Russia. In 1920, when Gastev wrote this article, he was merely putting down on paper the dreams of a poet, and now more than fifty years later we find that most of these dreams have come true.
``Although the West European and American countries surpass us in technical accomplishments and economic scale, Russia has one fortunate peculiarity which may in a relatively short space of time turn the dream of electrification into a very tangible reality. We are a semi-nomadic, semi-civilised country. We have peoples who believe in witch doctors, and intellectuals whose theories create sensations in Europe; we have vast stretches of virgin tundra, but we also have whole areas virtually encased in steel which can rival even the United States in machinery. We are a country that has not gone rusty under the pressure of traditions, while the vastness of our land and the constant movement of the population from one region to another lend us a peculiar freshness of outlook, unknown in the West. Much of what we do is started from scratch. Ten years ago the residents of Petrograd travelled in a rattling horse tram, and then suddenly a fast, new tram came speeding down Sadovaya Street, Nevsky and Kamenno-Ostrovsky prospekts, which made the trams in Paris look ridiculous and ugly in comparison. Swamps and woods surrounded Petrograd and Moscow, the Urals and Siberia on all sides, and suddenly, one fine day, factory chimneys shot up everywhere, like bolts from the blue, and machinetools which were considered rarities in the United States and Germany were installed where once the quag sucked people under. Does anyone need reminding that during the war Russia managed to raise such factory buildings in the wildest of wildernesses and set up such machine-tools which now stagger foreigners, fed on tales of Russian bears, into open-mouthed stupefaction. We are glad that we have not yet entrenched ourselves so deeply in stone and iron as Europe, we are glad that we have not entangled our land 32 in railways and are free to draw straight, long roads across Russia, covering it with a new pattern of meridians and parallels.''
Much of this may sound naive and rhetorical, but all of it was projected into the future like an arrow on a taut bow-string.
The colourful figure of Demyan Bedny loomed large during the turbulent period of the Civil War and the first years of socialist construction. Demyan Bedny (the pcn-name of Yefim Alexeyevich Pridvorov, 1883--1945) came from a poor peasant family, but was educated at the university of St. Petersburg. He wrote political poetry imbued with civic ardour, much of which appeared in Pravda, a Bolshevik newspaper founded by Lenin in 1912. Demyan Bedny's association with Pravda, which lasted all his life, had a decisive influence on the shaping of his talent. His work was addressed to the popular masses, and his poetry came across even to the completely illiterate listeners. This explains why his writings acquired such importance in the first post-revolutionary years. That was the time when the peasants and workers, aroused by the Revolution, badly needed the vital questions of political struggle to be answered for them in clear, easily understandable terms. And in Demyan Bedny's poetry, the mass reader and listener found an explanation to the political situation of the moment, offered in an easily assimilable form and in a language that appealed to them with its plebeian coarseness, wit, idiomatic turns of speech and popular slang.
However, Demyan Bedny's poetry had its weaknesses too. He did educate his mass audience politically, but at the same time he played up, to a certain extent, to their backwardness. In his reminiscences Gorky wrote: ``Lenin repeatedly and insistently emphasised the importance of Demyan Bedny as an agitator, but said that he was rather course. 'He follows the reader when he should be a little ahead of him.' "
But in the first years after the Revolution the weak points of Demyan Bedny's aesthetics went unnoticed, because what mattered more was his excellent knowledge of the people, their life, their vocabulary, their tastes and their sayings. He certainly made remarkably good use of all this knowledge for rousing people to struggle. The song How My Mother Saw Me Off to War, written in 1918, won Bedny truly nation-wide popularity.
In his poetry he combines narrative with a popular exposition of the Party's appeals, citations from newspapers with lyrical digressions, and ardent publicism with virulent satire. Mayakovsky in his article ``How to Make Poetry" (1926), remarked on the power of Bedny's ``fable-like style" and the ``precision of his aim".
During the Civil War Bedny lived among the soldiers, sharing their front-line hardships, travelling with them in troop trains, 33 bivouacking with them and sleeping in their barracks. I remember the first time I saw him. In the summer of 1919 I was escorting a freight car carrying literature from Moscow to the southern front. At one of the stations I pushed back the door a little to let in the early morning air, and a hubbub of excited voices tore in. A troop train was standing alongside ours, and I saw a crowd of soldiers making their way towards the Revolutionary Military Council train some distance away. On enquiring the cause of the excitement, I discovered that Demyan Bedny was in that train. He came down the steps of the carriage to meet the crowd of soldiers---a stoutish, portly man wearing the famous Budyonny pointed cap, a tunic with wide red collar insignia, and baggy trousers tucked into knee-high boots. He looked like a Russian bogatyr from Vasnetsov's painting.
After Bedny's ``man-to-man'' chat with the soldiers, the brochures with his verses were literally snatched out of my hands, I remember. His poetry took the mass reader into a familiar world of customary names and notions: Grandad Sofron, Brass-Buckle Yashka the Soldier, the Mother-in-Law who has more Spite than Right, the Ivans, Kuzmas, Provs, Klims and scores of others straight out of their own lives. Each poem described some topical theme or exciting event in real life: a peasant going off to war, a deserter seeking asylum in his home village and dying at the hand of his own father, a Menshevik revealing his traitorous soul, a White general using flattery to make the peasants more tractable, and the Red Army routing the Polish interventionists. All the vital themes of the day, political, historical and moral, found some sort of reflection in Demyan Bedny's works. Taken together they form a poetic chronicle of the period.
Although the work of Demyan Bedny and Mayakovsky followed the same general trend, and had a somewhat similar content, these two poets had an entirely different style and approach. It is not simply that Mayakovsky was exclusively a town poet, while Demyan Bedny's poetry drew its nourishment from rural sources. The differences were fundamental. Mayakovsky's work presents a poetic image of the epoch. Demyan Bedny's verses (taken in their chronological order) are more like a record of events. With Mayakovsky man is inseparable from history, he is bound up with it entirelyfrom his most intimate emotions to his ideas on the communist transformation of the world. The poet achieves this by blending personal and social themes into one, by combining the lyrical element with the epic, and by rendering his poetry in an extremely novel manner. With Demyan Bedny, on the other hand, the purely didactic principle prevails over all else. He captivates the reader with his original manner in order to teach him. Mayakovsky awakens lofty emotions in his reader; he also teaches, but he does 34 it in such a way as to inspire the reader with the universal aims of communism. (``Realists we are, but not grazing the grass at our feet, not bending our snouts to the ground.'') His poetry is romantic. Demyan Bedny's is down to earth, and not infrequently this tendency leads to an unnecessarily utilitarian attitude to reality. Hence that preponderance of naturalism in his poetry. It is not surprising, therefore, that Lenin (according to his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya) liked his lofty dramatic poetry more than his satirical verses.
In his best poems, Bedny showed himself to be an heir to the finest revolutionary traditions of Russian literature. Bedny understood the soul of the Russian people well and, moreover, he had an excellent knowledge of Russian history, literature, and popular speech. He was probably the keenest bibliophile in Soviet Russia, owning a personal library of over a hundred thousand books.
As one of the representatives of militant revolutionary art, Demyan Bedny holds a prominent place in the history of Soviet literature. His popularity waned within a few years, and not only for political reasons (Stalin's dislike of him). This was mainly due to the aesthetic rift between the intellectual level and tastes of the new generations of readers and those feuilleton and pamphlet genres which Bedny cultivated and which were wholly geared to the current, day-to-day politics. Besides, a poet is bound to produce verbal dross eventually if he goes on writing didactic tales or feuilletons for the daily newspapers as a matter of routine, year in year out.
I once had a conversation with Bedny about this. It was some time in 1939. I ran into him in the street outside his house, and so we had a chat, remembering the old days.
``Oh well,'' he said, ``I, too, can scrape together enough poetry to fill a volume that will be as good as anyone else's and will be here to stay. Now, you're supposed to be an aesthete. Go ahead and select what you think should stay. Let it be a volume to suit your taste.''
``Very well,'' I replied, in the same bantering tone. ``But you won't let me do the choosing in peace anyway. You'll never trust me entirely. You're sure to leave something in.''
``I suppose so,'' he agreed. ``I'll meddle in something. It's too late for me to change now. But still my star will continue to shine in your sky too.''
He was right. His star shone brightly in the years of the Civil War, and it still shines for us today across the years.
Radical changes took place in Russia's literary life after the socialist revolution. Petrograd and Moscow stopped publication of such old Russian literary magazines as Vestnik Yevropy, Russkaya __PRINTERS_P_35_COMMENT__ 3* 35 Mysl, Mir Bozhy and others which had been coming out for decades. Some of these magazines were true masterpieces of printing, for instance Apollon maintained by the millionaire Ryabushinsky. The large publishing houses also closed down and the old literary life was paralysed partly due to the shortage of food, fuel and transport, but mainly because the owners of the publishing houses, print shops and magazines refused to accept Soviet power, its policy and its ideology and were leaving the country.
Dozens of dwarfish private publishers sprouted on the ruins of the past, and as early as 1919 the world's first publishing house owned by workers and peasants was opened in Petrograd. This was the State Publishing House of the Russian Federation. New Soviet magazines also began to appear in 1919--1920, among them Kniga i Revolyutsia (Book and Revolution) to which Konstantin Fedin contributed, and Khudozhestvennoye Slovo (Literary Word) published by the Commissariat for Education, with Valery Bryusov playing the leading role.
Among the magazines which acquired the greatest importance were those published by Proletarian Culture, the new mass organisation generally known as Proletkult. Printed in many cities they were more than just a haven for budding poets and writers from the masses. The leaders of Proletkult, Bogdanov and Pletnyov, expounded on the pages of Proletarskaya Kultura (Proletarian Culture), Corn (Bugle) and other magazines their theories on the creation of a new proletarian culture. These theories ran counter to Lenin's idea that the new culture of a socialist society should be a nation-wide and not a narrow class culture.
The leftist theories of the Proletkult leaders have long been forgotten. But then they never influenced the development of Soviet literature enough to matter. Still, we might remember them if only because the Proletkult leaders attracted the notice of Lenin who found the time to criticise their ``guild'' attitude. In December 1920, on Lenin's initiative, the Party adopted the letter of its Central Committee on the subject of the Proletkult. This letter is interesting in that it gives an example of the way the Party strove to influence the artistic intelligentsia by persuasion. Pointing out the fallacy of the leftist approach to problems of art, the Central Committee addressed the writers as follows: ``Far from wishing to fetter the initiative of the working intelligentsia in the sphere of artistic endeavour, the Central Committee, on the contrary, wants to create a healthier and more normal atmosphere that will be beneficent for artistic endeavour as such. The Central Committee fully realises that with the war coming to an end workers will be taking a greater interest in problems of art and proletarian culture. The Central Committee appreciates and respects the desire of the front-rank 36 workers to place on the agenda the question of the individual's greater spiritual development.''
Looking back over the past now, we see that both the Letter on the Proletkults and Lenin's public speeches about the creation of a communist culture, made in the first years after the Revolution, already contained those principles on which the Party has since based its policy as regards literature. After the October Revolution, Soviet literature developed under the influence of this new and fruitful factor, guided by the Communist Party's ideas, organised and aided by it in every respect. By rendering this aid, the Soviet state was performing its new educative function. Reviewing the course followed by Soviet literature we sec how our art absorbed the historical experience of the working class in its struggle for socialism, how little by little it began to express this experience, thereby becoming an active participant in the struggle. It was precisely along this road that Lenin tried to direct the development of Soviet literature from the first.
Before going any further, we would do well to examine what Lenin had in mind when he spoke of ``the road of development" of the new literature, and first and foremost, we should consider the principle of partisanship in socialist realism in the light of Lenin's teaching.
[37] __NUMERIC_LVL1__ Chapter 4 __ALPHA_LVL1__ Lenin on the PrincipleThe Socialist Revolution of 1917 caused a deep political rift in the writers' midst. The political ``division'' into those for and against the Revolution was only the beginning of a deeper ideological rift. The whole course of development of Soviet literature can only be understood if viewed as a struggle for the creation of a literature that would be ``part of the common cause of the proletariat" to use the words of Lenin. In every successive decade the problem of bringing literature into closer contact with life and making it play a more active role in the communist education of the people was posed and solved in a different manner as dictated by historical conditions.
At every stage of the development of Soviet literature the Communist Party acted as an important factor influencing the whole literary process. In this respect, it represents an entirely new phenomenon in the history of world literature. As I go on, I shall acquaint readers with decisions adopted by the Central Committee, the statements made by Party leaders and the various documents which had a specially strong influence on the ideological development of our writers. But before we go any further, we must examine the philosophical and theoretical principles on which the Party bases its policy in respect to literature. We must dwell on the main concept, that of partisanship, which makes the cornerstone in the edifice of the new art being created in the land of socialism.
What is partisanship in art? Is it not directly opposed to the idea of artistic freedom? Does it not imply an order to engage in tendentious propaganda which may find itself at variance with the truth of life? This is precisely how bourgeois ideologists represent partisanship in our literature, and this is precisely what they aim their criticism and ridicule at, posing as defenders of individual freedom.
A correct understanding of this problem will provide us with a key to the understanding of much that is peculiar to the literary life of the Soviet Union. It will also help us to understand why the 38 Central Committee of the Communist Party takes all deviations from the ideological principles of Marxism-Leninism in literature so close to heart.
Lenin gave a comprehensive philosophical substantiation to the principle of partisanship in many of his works. His philosophical work Materialism and Empiric-criticism (1909) is permeated with the spirit of partisanship, as is also his article about Lev Tolstoi. In this connection, I can hardly do better than quote Lenin's important statement on literature and the arts recorded by Clara Zetkin in her memoirs.
''. . . The important thing is not our opinion of art. Nor is it important what art gives to a few hundreds or even a few thousands of a population of millions. Art belongs to the people. It must be deeply rooted in the very thick of the working masses. . . . It must unite the feelings, the thoughts and the will of these masses."~^^1^^ (Author's italics.)
That is why Lenin also said that: ''. . . We (i.e., CommunistsK.Z.) must not stand idle and allow the chaos to develop in whatever direction it pleases. We must systematically guide this process and shape its results."^^2^^
Thus, for Lenin the task of intervening in the literary process, that is giving the writers ideological assistance, stemmed directly from his understanding of partisanship in art. Marx's words that formerly the philosophers only explained the world while now they had to change it are fully applicable to Lenin. Lenin was indeed a philosopher who changed the world. For him, the most abstract speculative philosophical constructions had a direct connection with reality, and above all with social struggle. This also applies to aesthetic categories, including the concept of partisanship in literature and the arts.
For Lenin this concept was imbued with profound philosophical meaning. He tied up the idea with the nature of human thinking and with his teaching on the principal link. Our thinking combines the sensations which give us our first signals of the outside world, the development of concepts and abstract ideas about this outside world and, finally, our practical knowledge of it. At all these stages an essential role is played by a person's ideological attitude, which organises his relations with the outside world and his social invironment, and is the guiding principle that shapes people's behaviour, being connected with their social relationships and their life's aims.
From the flood of life's impressions the artist selects that which he wishes to portray. In the broad philosophical sense this can be _-_-_
~^^1^^ Lenin on Literature and Art, Russ. ed., Moscow, 1957, p. 583.
~^^2^^ Ibid., p. 582.
39 called a committed selection. Partisanship in this case may be interpreted not only in its social sense (as devotion to a party), but also as an aesthetic category.Beauty is bound up in one way or another with the concept of those elements of which it is compounded. The partisanship of socialist realism will be revealed to us in its aesthetic aspect through the portrayal of the beauty of the socialist forms of life, through the portrayal of the spiritual beauty of people struggling for communism.
Some people writing about the partisanship of socialist realism (both in this country and abroad) wrongly equate it with tcndentiousness in art. Tendentiousncss means championing through definite social and political ideals, and is to be found as far back as Aeschylus and Aristophanes, Dante and Cervantes. Schiller's drama Kabale und Liebe is charged with a definite political bias. Engels, who also wrote about tendentiousness in the art of the past, linked the integrity and strength of the characters portrayed by the Renaissance artists with the fact that these artists wholly shared the interests of their age and took part in the political and social struggle of the time.
Partisanship in art can be considered as a further development of tendentiousness. It implies the artist's deeper understanding of the philosophical meaning of his art, of its social purpose and his own role in the social struggle.
Lenin's theory of partisanship in literature is an offshoot of Marx's and Engels's views on the subject, and represents an elaboration and development of these ideas. His article ``Party Organisation and Party Literature'', published in 1905, expounds the basic principles of this theory. Although written more than sixty years ago, the article is still frequently referred to in discussions on the nature of art, artistic freedom, and so on. This alone goes to show how vital the problems raised by Lenin were and the importance of the conclusions drawn by him for the development of world literature. In any case, none of the books published abroad on the subject of Soviet literature fail to bring this article up.
Attempts have been made by critics and writers both at home and abroad to interpret Lenin's article ``Party Organisation and Party Literature" as simply referring to those practical aims which Lenin pursued in his desire to bring order into the Party press. This view is definitely erroneous. Lenin's aim was not merely to settle the contradictions and the difference of opinion among the Party workers and help them to organise their activities more efficiently in the interests of the Party. In this article Lenin examined such problems of fundamental importance as: can an artist or a writer be entirely free and independent of society? If he cannot, then what 40 is he dependent upon in capitalist society? What will literature be like in socialist society?
The best way to answer these questions is to quote Lenin himself: ``One cannot live in society and be free from society. The freedom of the bourgeois writer, artist or actress is simply masked (or hypocritically masked) dependence on the money-bag, on corruption, on prostitution.
``And we Socialists expose this hypocrisy and rip off the false labels, not in order to arrive at a non-class literature and art (that will be possible only in a socialist extra-class society), but to contrast this hypocritically free literature, which is in reality linked to the bourgeoisie, with a really free one that will be openly linked to the proletariat.
``It will be a free literature, because the idea of socialism and sympathy with the working people, and not greed or carcerism, will bring ever new forces to its ranks. It will be a free literature, because it will serve, not some satiated heroine, not the bored 'upper ten thousand' suffering from fatly degeneration, but the millions and tens of millions of working people---the flower of the country, its strength and its future. It will be a free literature, enriching the last word in the revolutionary thought of mankind with the experience and living work of the socialist proletariat, bringing about permanent interaction between the experience of the past (scientific socialism, the completion of the development of socialism from its primitive, Utopian forms) and the experience of the present (the present struggle of the worker comrades)."^^1^^
This statement is perfectly applicable to modern Russian literature as well. One might say that it is an embodiment of Lenin's idea of what the literature of the future should be. Soviet literature reflects the interests not of the ``top ten thousand" but of millions and millions of working people who represent the country's elite. It draws its sustenance from the activity of the people building communism, describing that activity and expressing the ideals of the progressive sections of society which lead the country along the road to communism.
When planning a new book, the Soviet writer---just like any other---is faced with a number of problems involving the selection and the aesthetic arrangement of his material (plot, imagery, style, etc.). In solving these problems the Soviet writer feels and regards himself as a participant in the people's struggle for communism. He finds that his aesthetic problems are intrinsically bound up with his ideas and his world outlook. As Sholokhov put it, a Soviet author writes at the bidding of his heart and his conscience. And his heart _-_-_
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 10, pp. 48--49.
41 beats in unison with all that he serves, with that for which the Communist Party is struggling.The stream of images and life's impressions crowding the mind of the artist is always organised into a pattern by a definite idea. The attempts of some writers to give a sort of tape-recording or a shorthand report of the fleeting thoughts and impressions streaming through their mind (for instance, James Joyce or Dos Passos), or in other words, attempts to demonstrate raw, unorganised material, can make no claim to any great aesthetic significance. This way could well lead to the tape-recording of delirious ravings (of someone sleeping, drugged or demented) being passed off for an artistic achievement. But this means a withdrawal from Man. It means dehumanising art. However, abandoning all ideological positions in art is in itself a sort of ideological position, negative though it is. Asserting chaos as an alternative to organisation is also a world outlook of sorts. But this is a stand worthy of an ostrich, the position of a creature which hides its head in the sand when it senses trouble, instead of squarely facing the truth. Agnosticism is neither an evasion nor a renunciation of philosophy. It is another philosophy, a defeatist one.
Modernistic literature, literature ``without ideas'', without plot, theme or even sense (like abstract paintings) may still be of some interest to a comparatively small circle of bourgeois readers, those ``top ten thousand" mentioned by Lenin. It may give them a thrill and even amuse them with its absurdity. But the reading public at large, the majority who seek aesthetic pleasure and enlightenment in books, are left completely unimpressed by the sort of literature which is manufactured for the ``top ten thousand''. It is socially alien to them.
Contrarily, books which by their aesthetic pattern and the ideals they champion show their affinity with the interests of the masses acquire nation-wide significance. They are not ``just something to read'', to kill time. They become part of the people's spiritual life. They inspire people, give them solace, advice, and aesthetic delight.
Because of its partisanship, ours is a literature of the people and for the people. Partisanship and affinity with the people are interrelated features of the new world's free literature. This is how Lenin understood it; and such is Soviet literature.
The desire to address the widest circle of readers and to embody the vital interests of the people in their books was common to all the greatest writers of pre-revolutionary Russia as well.
But affinity with the people meant one thing to the Russian classics and something quite different to modern Soviet writers. In his article about Lev Tolstoi, Lenin wrote that it took a revolution to make his works known to the entire nation. The same can be said about Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgcnev, Nekrasov, Herzen, 42 Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and other Russian authors, who did not actually become known throughout the country until after the Revolution of 1917. This was due partly to the fact that two-thirds of the population were illiterate, partly to the fact that the classics were brought out in insufficiently large editions.
The very notion of affinity with the people was different in the ipth century because the people's life was different. Lenin divided the revolutionary movement in Russia into three stages, and the concept of affinity with the people underwent a change with every stage. At the first stage, its spokesmen were revolutionary noblemen like Pushkin and Lermontov. In the second stage, revolutionary democrats came to the fore. Their works were already closer in spirit to the people, whose life they reflected more fully. This new stage is best expressed in the works of Nekrasov, Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov and Saltykov-Shchedrin. The third and last stage is distinguished by the historical rise of the working class which, in alliance with the peasantry, won political power in 1917. The proletarian revolution brought radical changes into Russian life, and under Soviet power the people themselves rose to a new level of social consciousness and culture, which even affected the Russian character, as we have already seen. In the works of Soviet writers from Gorky and Mayakovsky to Sholokhov, affinity with the people is displayed in a new aspect, illumined by party spirit in the struggle for communism.
In Soviet literature we find an alliance of life's truth with the social ideals of the writer. In the old society, a realist writer who wanted to be faithful to the truth of life, often found himself contradicting his own political sympathies. Thus, although Balzac and Gogol were monarchists they actually served the cause of revolution with their writings.
The ideals of kinship with the people upheld by the Russian writers of the past were varied in their historical meaning, and Soviet literature rests upon the more progressive and democratic traditions of our classics.
A word about these traditions. The Russian classics had a keen sense of responsibility to the people. All the great Russian writers---Pushkin, Lermontov, Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, Nekrasov, Turgenev, Herzen, Lev Tolstoi, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and Gorky---believed that the purpose of their work was to reflect the pain and anger, the joy and hopes and the sense of beauty which they drew from the life of their people. Suffice it to recall Lev Tolstoi's famous treatise What is Art? (1898). For all the ideological contradictions contained in this work, when it came to the most important thing---that is, stating his own social standpoint and his views on the relation of art to life and the role of the individual---the first principle Tolstoi 43 invariably stressed was that a writer must not forget his responsibility to the people.
In this treatise Tolstoi writes that the art of the future will not simply continue today's art, but will emerge on the basis of new and entirely different principles that will have nothing in common with the ones by which the art of the upper classes is guided today. The judges of this art will be the entire people and not just the wealthy class alone, the way it is now. For a work of art to be considered good, to be approved and popularised, it will have to satisfy the requirements not of the few who live in identical and often unnatural conditions, but of the whole people, of the large mass of people living a natural life of toil. Nor will the works of art be produced merely by those few men from the elite minority who either belong to the propertied classes or are closely connected with them, but by gifted men from the entire population, who ever will show an ability and aptitude for artistic activity.
The time of which Tolstoi was writing has now come. No one can fail to see how close the traditions of the Russian classics are to us today. And they are further developed by our Soviet literature. I could cite hundreds of statements made by other Russian authors, besides Lev Tolstoi, on the importance of books being written by, of and for the people, but I shall limit myself to quoting a passage from Saltykov-Shchedrin, a great Russian satirist of the 19th century. His statement, besides proclaiming the popular principle in literature, also speaks of the educational role of literature, and in this sense he is not shy of using the word `` propaganda''. Such concepts as ``literature'' and ``the people" are used with a very precise meaning.
This is how this revolutionary-democratic writer reasoned in 1869, a century ago: ``Literature and propaganda are one and the same thing. This may be an old truth, but literature itself is still so little aware of it that there is good reason for repeating it. Every great, bright thought that literature voices and every new truth it discovers wins it so many converts that we must not fail to treasure this precious quality it has to conquer darkness and win over the most stubbornly prejudiced people. Roughly, the same can be said about delusions as well. Literature which propagandises a carefree, happy-go-lucky existence has no chance, of course, of imposing its everlasting influence on the world, but it may retard progress considerably and from time to time deal it such blows as will be all the more painful because the agents of progress are mere men, after all, and as such are not always indifferent to blows received.''
Five years earlier Saltykov-Shchedrin had written that ''. . . Literature undertakes to call forth these new forces from the darkness, point them out to society and convince it that thereafter its existence 44 will be fatalistically bound up with them. Literature can have no other duties and no right to give society anything other than that which lies latent within itself.''
I trust my readers will excuse me for this slight digression in order to present the views of a Russian writer who was not as well known, perhaps, to the general reading public abroad as Lev Tolstoi and Dostoyevsky and who, moreover, lived a hundred years ago. But Saltykov-Shchedrin did more than play an important role in cultivating a revolutionary self-awareness among the Russian intelligentsia. His views, like the views of the revolutionary democrats Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov and Herzen who lived earlier, show how deeply rooted were those traditions in Russian literature according to which a writer could not be regarded as a person wholly preoccupied with himself alone. The Russian classics were always aware of their responsibility to the people, and this is why the thesis ``art for art's sake" always went against their grain.
The thesis of partisanship as one of the basic elements of socialist realism means a continuation and development of these traditions in the new historical conditions. The task which Soviet literature has set itself is to point out the new forces to society and convince it that its very existence is inevitably bound up with them.
In his essay Lev Tolstoi Maxim Gorky records what Tolstoi once said against anarchism and the so-called ``absolute freedom of the individual''. Here is an excerpt from Gorky's account:
``I remember how Sulerzhitsky got hold of Prince Kropotkin's puny little brochure, got inflamed by it and for the rest of the day told everyone about the wisdom of anarchism, philosophising ruefully on the subject.
``Tolstoi said to him with some annoyance: 'Oh, stop it, Lyovushka, you make me tired. You're like a parrot, harping on this word freedom, freedom. But what does it mean? For if you were to attain freedom in your sense of the word what, do you imagine, would happen? In the philosophical sense, there'd be a bottomless void, and in life, in actual life you'd become a sluggard, a beggar. What ties will you, a free man in your sense of the word, have with life, with people? Look at the birds, they're free but still they build nests. You won't even bother to build a nest, you'll satisfy your sexual urges just anywhere, like a dog. Think about this seriously and you'll see, you'll feel that freedom in the final sense is emptiness, an infinite void.' He frowned angrily, and after a minute added a little more calmly: 'Christ was free, Buddha was too, yet both took upon themselves the sins of the world and of their own free will surrendered to the bondage of earthly life. No one went further than that, no one. And you, and we---oh, what's the use of 45 talking! We, all of us, seek freedom from our duties to our neighbour, whereas it was precisely our awareness of these duties that made us human in the first place, and if it had not been for this awareness we'd be living like animals.
This was Tolstoi. But even Dostoyevsky, who saw no creative force in revolution and wrote his anti-revolutionary novel The Possessed, even Dostoyevsky, a religious man who was against social transformations, hated the system of bourgeois exploitation. Even Dostoyevsky realised the falseness of the slogan of freedom in capitalist conditions. In the chapter entitled ``About the Bourgeois" in his book Winter Notes on Summer Impressions he wrote: ``What is liberte? Freedom. What freedom? Equal freedom for all to do what they please within the limits of the law. When can you do anything you please? When you have a million. Does freedom give everyone a million? No. What is a man without a million? The man without a million is not a man who does whatever he pleases but the one to whom anything anyone pleases is done.''
Actually, Dostoyevsky's writings, motivated by his love for the ``insulted and the humiliated'', was a protest against this situation where anything at all could be done to a man.
Such were the views even of Tolstoi and Dostoyevsky, the authors whom Gorky rebuked for poeticising the ``Asiatic'' anarchic traits in the Russian character.
Before and after Tolstoi similar thoughts against the so-called ``absolute freedom of the individual" were voiced by many writers: Gogol, Herzen, Saltykov-Shchedrin, the revolutionary-democrat critics Belinsky and Chernyshevsky, the poet Nekrasov and others. And, of course, Gorky, who wrote more than anyone else on the subject, and who sarcastically called the claims to this so-called absolute freedom ``a tape-worm of individualism".
From the philosophical and theoretical point of view absolute freedom is unattainable because man, whatever his level of cultural development, has always been and still is a creature of historical determinism compelled to reckon with the objective conditions of life.
This explains why the Soviet press spoke out so sharply against abstract paintings and sculpture, and also against certain films and books which give a distorted picture of real life.
Would you call this meddling in the artist's work? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that artists are set certain limits for the manifestation of their anarchistic self-will which might otherwise threaten to violate the natural norms of the community. Such limitations also exist under bourgeois democracy, for instance with respect to pornographic films and literature (unfortunately, this is not practised everywhere and not always consistently even where it is). There are 46 also other restrictions in capitalist society, restrictions of a political nature, for instance.
In Soviet society where the policy in respect to literature as ``a part of the general proletarian cause" (to use Lenin's expression) is more frank and more consistently implemented, the criticism of anything that goes against the interests of the people is also more frank than in the West.
The ideologists of bourgeois democracy in the West are trying to present the Communist Party's policy in respect to literature as a violation of the very principles of democracy. This surely invites the question: what sort of democracy? The people who are straining all their efforts to build up a new economy and a new culture in the Soviet Union, determined to eliminate centuries of backwardness, these people can hardly be expected to settle for the kind of ``freedom'' which serves as a breeding ground for semi-pornographic films, strip-tease, trashy comics and literature devoid of all ideas.
Art that is wholly preoccupied with entertainment and sex is obviously unsuitable for Soviet conditions where the struggle for communism is being waged on a nation-wide scale. Naturally, each society creates and cultivates the sort of literature and art which best answers its spiritual requirements and fits into the pattern of its life. The question of the Party interfering in their work never occurred to either Mayakovsky, Sholokhov, Fadeyev or Alexei Tolstoi. They felt no discrepancy between their creative plans and the Party's interests. Mayakovsky, for instance, wanted ``the pen to be given the status of a bayonet" and poetry to be discussed as seriously at Party congresses as the output of iron and steel. Alexander Fadeyev, speaking at the Writers' Union in 1951 on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday said that he still dreamed of writing his major work, that he still had to sing the main song of his life: a song about the Communist Party.
All this goes to show that there have always been and always will be different types of writers, taking their dependence on outside circumstances, their determinism, in various ways. Pushkin wrote:
I need another, better freedom.
Dependent on the tsar, dependent on the people,
What difference? It's all the same.
1 want to be subservient to none,
I want to serve and please myself alone,
And not prevaricate or cower
To gain a higher rank or power. . . .(From ``Pindemonti''.)
Of Mayakovsky it can also be said that it was himself he served and pleased when he extolled Lenin and the Party. Pushkin, too, 47 was a people's poet. Yet his sense of involvement in the people's struggle was different. He extolled freedom and between the lines revolted against Nicholas I. Mayakovsky, by extolling Lenin, extolled freedom. Herein lies the historical distinction and the historical connection between these two Russian poets.
The principle of partisanship advanced by Lenin in the literature of the new society answers the new historical conditions. In order to make the leap from the ``kingdom of necessity" to the ``kingdom of freedom" (to use Engels's expression) it is imperative for the new society to mobilise all its forces, tense itself for the effort and exercise the strictest self-discipline. It is to this sharpest of sharp turning-points in history, this tensest of periods that Lenin's principle of partisanship in literature corresponds. The old bourgeois world may not like this principle, but then that is only natural. After all, it was born of the renunciation of the old world, and it is one of the weapons used in the battle with the old world.
[48] __NUMERIC_LVL1__ Chapter 5 __ALPHA_LVL1__ Maxim Gorky
__CAPTION__
Maxim Gorky. 1928.
In 1928, soon after his return to the Soviet Union from Sorrento after his long stay abroad, Gorky invited the poet Selvinsky and myself to come and see him at his place. The house in Malaya Nikitskaya Street which the Soviet Government gave Gorky for his private residence, had once belonged to Ryabushinsky, a millionaire who had fled abroad after the Revolution.
I felt a touch of panic as I crossed the gravelled fore-court adorned with flower beds and entered the house. The world fame 49 of our host made me apprehensively tongue-tied during the first few moments of our meeting. When speaking with cclebrities---and I have met many famous people in my life: actors, writers and political leaders both at home and abroad---you often find your illustrious interlocutor trying to impress you with his superiority. And this always has the effect of inhibiting both the conversation and your memory of it. But I have had the great fortune in my time of meeting two men who had the gift of instantly lifting this embarrassment---the gift of natural democracy. These two men were Lenin and Gorky.
Lenin was amazingly democratic by nature and there was not the slightest hint of affectation in his manner. There was more of the actor in Gorky and he could turn on his charm at will. One felt irresistibly drawn to him, fascinated by his wisdom and experience.
Gorky, a tall man wearing a blue shirt, with the typical face of a Russian craftsman and a smile which lifted up his moustachewelcomed us at the dining-room door. We fell into conversation there and then, standing as we were. Gorky began by asking Selvinsky and me to explain constructivism to him (we both belonged to this literary group at the time) and to tell him our literary news. Perhaps no other Russian writer had ever had such a strong sense of proprietorship over the Russian Muses or of responsibility for them. Gorky felt he had to know all that was happening in Russian literature, and world literature too, for that matter. His sense of responsibility for literature was really quite astonishing.
Gorky was a truly remarkable figure. The enormous range of his interests and the insatiable curiosity with which he studied life in order to re-organise it had no parallel among his contemporaries and bring to mind the legendary giants of the Renaissance, men like Leonardo da Vinci. Gorky took an interest in all the spheres of Russia's art, science, technology and economy. As a novelist, publicist, critic and organiser of a literary movement, he established contact with thousands of his contemporaries, writers, scientists and workers (he penned no less than 8,000 letters in his time), and with millions of readers for whom he embodied their dream of a better future and whom he gave confidence in their own strength. One may say that the Russian people made of Gorky a symbol, a means of self-cognisance, an expression of their latent powers and talent.
Maxim Gorky (the pen-name of Alexei Maximovich Pcshkov, 1868--1936) rose to the pinnacle of fame from the lowliest beginnings. His father, a cabinet-maker, died when Alexei was still very young, and he was brought up by his grandfather, an upholsterer, who was a morose and cruel man. Gorky began to earn his living very early in life, working as a dishwasher, then a 50 scribe and then a baker, and knew well what manual labour meant. As a young man he went wandering about the country, from the middle reaches of the Volga right down to the Caucasus. He stored up a wealth of impressions from his travels and came to know the life of the people intimately.
His rich personality and penchant for fantastic and romantic imagery were not the main source feeding his art. He first gathered impressions and experience on his travels, and only then took up the pen to tell the world about Russia and her people, their life and their hopes, and the meaning of happiness. That is why philosophical reflections and description occupy so much space in his works.
It so happened that Gorky embarked on his literary career at the same time as the Leninist party emerged on the historical scene in Russia. It was a period marked by a sharp upswing in the workers' movement and a rapidly mounting revolutionary situation. Gorky's stories reflected the psychology of a people roused to energetic action. In his early works he portrayed the lowest strata of society---artisans, tramps, dreamers and rebels---presenting them in vividly romantic images. His characters tend to argue about the purpose of life, to pose questions to the reader and answer them themselves.
In a letter to Chekhov, Gorky wrote that a writer's excessive fidelity to facts ``kills realism''. The old method of realism no longer satisfied him. He was even less inclined to render the drab colours of life by naturalistic means. What he needed was to find a new method that would render life more romantic, that would raise the readers above drabness, awaken in them an interest in the beauty and goodness of life and spur them on to action. He began to introduce this romantic element in his works, especially in his revolutionary parables, poems and legends (The Song of the Falcon, The Stormy Petrel and others). It is always present when he is depicting characters from the ``lower depths" of society, which as a rule have a fantastic appeal to the imagination.
Gorky's famous play The Lower Depths (1902) is alive with this spirit of revolutionary romance. It has been staged by theatres in all the world's largest cities. In Russia, the tsarist censors put up a stubborn opposition to the staging of the play although none of the characters in it actually call for the overthrow of the established order. But in his portrayal of the ``lower depths'', Gorky showed such a thirst for beauty along with crushing poverty that his play became an indictment of a society where such conditions were possible. The main characters---thieves, prostitutes, a declasse Baron, a former actor---these dregs of society living in the stench of a basement doss-house, all seemed to cry out to the audience: ``This mustn't go on!" Small wonder that Luka, the old man preaching __PRINTERS_P_52_COMMENT__ 4* 51 meakness and acceptance is disliked by most of the inmates and especially by Satin, the rebellious drunkard who refuses to take his fate lying down.
Gorky's equally famous novel Mother is permeated with the same romantic spirit. The novel is about working-class life and the class struggle waged by the Russian workers at the beginning of this century. Gorky's purpose was to show how people developed spiritually in the course of revolutionary struggle. In this respect, the book is of basic importance, for it enables us to see how the method of socialist' realism drawing its material from life itself was originally conceived. Prior to Gorky, beginning with Schiller's Die Rduber, revolutionaries had usually been portrayed in literature as destroyers of society. Gorky presented an entirely new view that: initiation into revolutionary struggle enriches and straightens out a man spiritually. It is on this principle that he moulded the characters of Pavel Vlassov and his mother Nilovna. It is interesting to note that the main characters had real, living prototypes. Pavel Vlassov, for instance, was based on Pyotr Zalomov, a Sormovo worker, who died only recently.
Gorky's role as a sort of live bridge between Russia's two literary epochs is perhaps most evident in Mother. The basic idea of the novel is that the aim of historical progress should be the good of man. In this sense Gorky was following the emancipatory traditions of 19th-century Russian literature. But there is a new angle in his treatment of the theme: he does not only show suffering men (as Dostoyevsky did) but also men who work changes in the world and become all the more human for it.
Gorky's Mother has proved to be one of his most popular works with workers both in Russia and abroad. It has been reprinted time and again in millions of copies. Gorky wrote it during his American trip in the summer of 1906, and it was first published in English in the Appleton Magazine in 1906--07. In May, when Lenin met Gorky at the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party in London, he congratulated him on the novel which he had read in manuscript. Gorky records this conversation in his reminiscences of Lenin. ``I told him that I had been in a hurry to write the book, but before I could explain why, Lenin nodded and himself explained the reason: it was very good, he said, that I had hastened to write it. It was a much needed book. Many workers had joined the revolutionary movement spontaneously, instinctively, and would find reading Mother very useful. 'It's a very timely book,' he said. That was all the praise he gave me, but it was extremely valuable to me.''
Gorky devoted a large place in his works to the portrayal of the former masters of Russia---factory owners, merchants, and 52 intelicctuals linked economically and spiritually with the wealthy classes. During his wanderings Gorky came close to understanding those ``men of iron" or ``masters of life'', as he called them. Very often they were interesting, gifted people, self-made men in many cases. Gorky was by no means prejudiced against them simply because they were capitalists. If anything, he actually showed something like admiration for those heroes of his, whose seething vitality found an outlet in drinking orgies, eccentricity and frenzied moneymaking. But he showed the harmful effects of th