PROGRESS PUBLISHERS
MOSCOW
[1]Translated from the Russian by RONALD VROON
Designed by VLADIMIR AN
J1HTEPATVPA CUIA XX BEKA
COBETCKHH BSFJIHfl C 6 o p H H K c T a T e ft
Ha amMi&CKOM H3biKe
__COPYRIGHT__ First printing 197670202---1005 1/1 014(01)-76~^^73^^~^^76^^
[2] Contents Section I Page PREFACE by Y. Kovalev.............. 7 AMERICAN LITERATURE AND TWO REVOLUTIONS . 19 THE CONTEMPORARY WAR NOVEL by M. Koreneva . . 48 HOPES AND FALSE HOPES by N. Anastasycv..... 70 CRITICAL REALISM IN THE POSTWAR AMERICAN NOVEL by A. Mulyarchik............ 100 THE MOST AMERICAN GENRE by M. Tugusheva ... 121 EUGENE O'NEILL AND THE TRADITIONS OF AMERICAN DRAMA by M. Koreneva.......... 143 OPENING THE DOORS OF ASSOCIATION: ON CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY by A. Zvcrev .... 160 AMERICAN LITERARY CRITICISM: A PERSONAL VIEW by A. Anikst.............. 181 Section II A SOCIALIST OF THE EMOTIONS: UPTON SINCLAIR by B. Gilenson................199 ' THEODORE DREISER'S AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY by Y. Zasursky..................223 A LOVER'S QUARREL WITH THE WORLD: ROBERT FROST by A. Zverev..............241 SINCLAIR LEWIS AND HIS BEST NOVELS by T. Motylyova....................261 A STRUGGLE AGAINST TIME by G. Zlobin.....285 FAULKNER'S CREATIVE METHOD IN THE MAKING by M. Landor.................306 DOS PASSOS' EXPERIMENTAL NOVEL by Y. Zasursky 331 THE COLOR OF TRAGEDY by E. Solovyov......351 RICHARD WRIGHT: WRITER AND PROPHET by R. Orlova 384 FROM THE GRAPES OF WRATH TO THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT by M. Mcndclson........411 Section III A NEW QUEST by M. Tugusheva........ FROM WHITMAN TO HEMINGWAY by M. Landor . A PANORAMA OF AMERICAN SATIRE by B. Gilenson AN EXERCISE IN KANTIANISM by G. Zlobin . . . MR. SAMMLERS PLANET by I. Levidova..... 429 433 43S 443 449 [3] ``FICTION" AND FICTION by V. Skorodenko..... 453 THE LESSONS OF ARCHIBALD MACLEISH by I. Popov 45G IN CRISIS by N. Paltsev............. 462 \ FAITH IN THE GOOD by A. Zverev........ 407 ' TOM WOLFE AND THE "NEW JOURNALISM" by T. Rotenberg................. 472 JONATHAN LIVINGSTON SEAGULL by M. Turovskaya 47S THE APOCALYPTIC FANTASIES OF ALLEN DRURY by A. Mulyarchik................. 484 AWAKENING by N. Anastasyev........... 487 TODAY ABOUT THE PAST by T. Golenpolsky..... 492 THE RICHEST LIFE by R. Orlova......... 496 Publications in the USSR.............. 503 Biographical Notes on the Contributors......... 512 Name Index................... 519 T [4] __ALPHA_LVL1__ I __ALPHA_LVL2__ Y.~KOVALEV ^^*^^ © HaflarejibCTBo «nporpecc», 1976
© Translation into English. Progress Publishers 1976
The study of classical and contemporary American literature is a recent but rapidly developing branch of Soviet philology. In January 1975 Moscow witnessed the first all-Union conference on American studies devoted to American literature and journalism. For the first time Soviet scholars and critics in the field of American literature convened to evaluate the results, primary goals and perspectives of their work. It was an inspiring sight. With satisfaction and perhaps some astonishment they realized how numerous were their colleagues and how great the scope of classical and modern American literary studies in the universities and scholarly institutes of the Soviet Union.
A characteristic and, as I see it, encouraging feature of the conference was that the bulk of its participants were not venerable professors approaching the end of their academic careers but young graduate students whose scholarly path is only beginning. Evidently a fruitful future awaits American studies in this country.
Soviet scholarship in the field of American literature is a relatively young phenomenon. For all practical 7 purposes its planned energetic development began in 1947 when a group of scholars from the Academy of Sciences' Gorky Institute of World Literature collaborated on the first Russian History of American Literature, and Professor M. P. Alekseyev offered a special course on early American literature at Leningrad University.
This is not to say that Soviet critics had never before studied the works of American writers. Today we recall with gratitude the efforts of such pioneers in Soviet American studies as S. Dinamov, A. Startsev, A. Elistratova and I. Kashkin, among other critics and translators. During the twenties and thirties they strove to keep Soviet readers informed of events in the American literary world. They never tired of writing critical surveys, essays and reviews on the latest phenomena of American literature while at the same time attempting to discern major trends in its development. Their interest was almost exclusively concentrated on contemporary literature although from time to time they penned short studies of the classics.
These critics and translators wrote neither general studies nor fundamental monographs. This was only natural. Soviet literary scholarship in difficult times forged a new methodology based on Marxist-Leninist philosophy. As we all know maturity does not come quickly. Furthermore the epoch called for scholars to focus their attention on the literary life and its struggles going on around them.
One could count the books on American literature and writers written in Russia during the preceding 150 years on the fingers of one hand. There simply was no purposeful systematic study of the historical process of America's literary development. American studies was not a recognized university discipline.
After the Second World War this state of affairs underwent a decisive change. Today books on the history of American literature and monographs on the most significant American writers written by Soviet specialists are reckoned in dozens, and articles---in hundreds. A 8 significant percentage of candidate and doctoral dissertations are being written on problems of the history of American literature. Hundreds of students throughout the country are writing bachelor's theses dealing with American writers and works. Almost all universities and pedagogical institutes with an English department offer general and specialized courses in American literature. Specialized publishing houses regularly supply students with textbooks on the history of American literature and anthologies of the works of American writers not only in translation but in the original. Among the centres for the study of American literature that have arisen are the Institute of World Literature, Moscow University, Leningrad University and the University of the Kuban (in Krasnodar). Of course the study of American literature is not restricted to these centres. Specialists in American literature work at many other institutions. But these centres have each taken on distinctive features of ``schools'' and their research is more specialized.
The rapid ascent of American studies in the Soviet Union would be unthinkable without a firm basis; this is provided by the longstanding interest taken by Russians in America---its people, history, culture and literature. The root of this interest lies in the eighteenth century, the epoch of the American bourgeois revolution and the War of Independence: events which first drew the attention of progressive Russians to the young republic across the sea, to its struggle and the activities of its most prominent citizens. The distance between Russia and America was great: all Europe and the Atlantic Ocean. There were no means of communication. For a time Russian society was obliged to content itself with obscure rumors and information gleaned from England and France. Eventually Russia began to receive more trustworthy and extensive reports. The fundamental documents of the American revolution, the works of Franklin, Paine and Jefferson, became accessible. Russian proponents of enlightenment evaluated the works of their American colleagues. Radishchev, for example, characterized Franklin's political and 9 scholarly achievements paraphrazing the well-known sterling phrase: "He who hath wrested the thunder from the sky and the scepters from the hands of kings."
The initial interest in life in the United States came to a head in the nineteenth century. With the establishment of diplomatic relations the Russian public began to receive firsthand information. Today, apart from specialists and historians, few people recall the work of the first Russian diplomats in America. Nevertheless it is worthy of note. Among them were men who saw their duties not only in terms of diplomatic service but primarily in terms of acquainting their countrymen with America and Americans. One such figure was the artist and writer P. P. Svinyin who served first as a translator and subsequently as secretary to the Russian General Consul in Philadelphia (1809--1813). As a result of his four-year stay in the United States there appeared a series of essays, watercolors and a book A Pictorial Journey through North America published in St. Petersburg in 1815. His colleague P. I. Poletika made two trips to the United States, initially in the capacity of an adviser to the Russian mission in Philadelphia (1810--1811) and subsequently as ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary in Washington (1819-- 1822). Poletika wrote a book about the internal affairs of the United States and a ``memoir'' about Russo-American relations. His book was translated into English and published in Boston in 1826. Poletika's essays were published in Russian periodicals and were extremely popular among readers. His contribution to the development of Russo-American relations was acknowledged not only in Russia but in America as well where he was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society established by Franklin. J. A. Wallenstein, adviser to the Russian mission in Washington, was also an extraordinary man. This diplomat, historian, meteorologist and writer enjoyed great popularity among Americans. For his scholarly and literary contributions he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston in 1828 and a member of the 10 Philosophical Society in Philadelphia in 1830. Wallenstein contributed to the North American Review and the American Quarterly Review and corresponded with such American historians and political figures as Daniel Webster, Jared Sparks, and Edward Everett. Interested American scholars can examine Wallenstein's manuscripts, such as Sketches of a Diplomatic History of the American Revolution or Remarks on the Causes and Principles of the Alliance Between France and the United States, 1778 in the Houghton Library at Harvard University.
Gradually Russian readers attained a more detailed and precise idea of the realities of American life. They came to realize the sharp contradictions and profound internal conflicts inherent in American society. Pre-reform Russia moving toward the abolition of serfdom followed the activities of American abolitionists with interest and sympathy. Oddly enough 1861 was a turning point in the history of both states: Russia adopted reform leading to the abolition of serfdom and the American Civil War, also to lead to the abolition of slavery, began.
There are many testaments to the Russians' keen interest in developments in the United States toward the mid-nineteenth century. One of the most vivid documents is the series of essays and surveys written by the leader of the Russian revolutionary democrats N. G. Chernyshevsky and published in the journal Sovremennik, an attentive analysis of the political struggle in America, the measures taken by President Lincoln and the military operations at the Civil War front.
Russia sympathized actively with the North in its struggle to liberate the slaves. It refused to take part in a military expedition organized by England and France to aid the South. In 1863, two Russian naval squadrons paid a friendly visit to New York and San Francisco demonstrating Russia's open support for the North. Many Russian volunteers fought in the Northern ranks and one of the Illinois volunteer corps was commanded by the Russian colonel Ivan Vasilyevich Turchaninov who entered 11 American war annals under the name of John Basil Turchin.
It is hardly necessary here to go into the further history of Russo-American relations or the Russian view of America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This is all recent history and its particulars are more or less well known. Our main intent here was to establish the sympathetic interest on the part of Russian society with regard to life in the United States, and the fate of the American people; this was the basis for their concentrated attention to the literary life of the United States.
The Russian reading public and literary critics manifested an interest in American literature at the moment when American writers were first acknowledged by Europe. It could be put in another way: when the first serious works of art constituting the cornerstone of American national literature appeared. We find evidence of this interest on two levels: in publications of the works of American authors in Russian journals and in separate editions, and in the writings of Russian poets and critics fascinated by the literature of the New World.
Pushkin, as is well known, was quite attentive to American authors and particularly praised Washington Irving. Irving's influence is easy to trace in "The Tale of the Golden Cockerel'', and "The Story of the Village of Goryukhino''. Lermontov loved and respected James Fenimore Cooper and preferred his works to the novels of Walter Scott. One of the most outstanding Russian critics and thinkers of the nineteenth century, Vissarion Belinsky, was of a similar opinion. Belinsky wrote a series of essays giving a superb analysis of Cooper's creative principles and of the genres in which he wrote. Accordingly Belinsky was drawn into the polemic on the correlation between the works of Cooper and Scott which raged in American and European literary periodicals. Scott's work, as the reader will recall, was extraordinarily popular in Europe and America. American critics were proud to call Cooper "the American Scott''. This enraged Cooper. He had no intention of imitating 12 his colleagues and insisted on the originality of his novels. He went so far as to write several novels based on European history so as to demonstrate his distance from the Scottish novelist. Today there can be no doubt that Cooper was right, although he did learn a great deal from Scott. Cooper was, however, obliged to wear himself out in order to prove his independence. It is interesting to note that Belinsky supported Cooper in this dispute. In his review on The Bravo he writes: "Cooper appeared after Walter Scott and is considered by many people to be his imitator and disciple. This is absurd: Cooper is an utterly original writer and is just as great a genius as the Scottish novelist. As one of a few first-rate, great artists he has created the sort of characters who will forever remain artistic types. . . . Furthermore as a citizen of a young nation that has arisen in a young land that does not resemble our old world he has been in a position to create a new kind of novel: the American saga of the prairies and the sea.''^^1^^
In another essay Belinsky stresses that Walter Scott should not be compared to Cooper, nor should Cooper be compared to Scott: each of them is great in his own way, each highly original, and the works of each belong to the great art of the world.^^2^^
Belinsky often got carried away. One can hardly agree today with his evaluation of The Pathfinder as "a Shakespearian drama written in novel form''. But on the whole he was correct in representing the works of Cooper and Irving as part of American national literature to the Russian reader. We should note that at that time the majority of European critics continued to view Irving as an English writer and to dismiss Cooper's novels as imitations of Scott's historical novels; American critics were far from convinced of the existence of American national literature.
In the mid-nineteenth century Russia was already wellinformed on the state of literature in the United States and in the future continued to follow the literary development of America with great attentiveness. For the Russian 13 reader in the first half of the nineteenth century American literature consisted mainly of the works of Cooper and of other romantic writers. The second half of the century was dominated by Mark Twain and the realists.
There is a certain parallelism in the literary development of Russia and America; naturally there could be no total coincidence. Both literatures evolved aesthetically and stylistically from enlightenment and classicism to romanticism and then to critical realism, a fact which made it far easier for the Russian reader to appreciate the artistic values of American writers' work. This is further justified by the fact that the Russian artistic consciousness was always somewhat ahead of the American with regard to methodological questions, and while American romanticism was at its zenith, Russia was already reevaluating romantic aesthetics from a realistic perspective.
This explains the acutely critical attitude of Chernyshevsky toward Cooper. He judged Cooper's works from the position of realist aesthetics and found no artistic merit in them whatsoever. Here he was in complete agreement with Twain who judged Cooper from just such a perspective and came to the same conclusions.
By the beginning of the twentieth century the interest of the Russian reading public and critics in American literature became as constant and traditional as their interest in French, English or German literature. Now American literature is no longer apprehended as something new, unusual or exotic but as one significant phenomenon among other national literatures of the world. This is evidenced by the many translations and lively interest taken in any new work published in the United States as well as by the efforts to fill in the gaps of the past. Russian readers missed the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe and Longfellow; their knowledge of Hawthorne was extremely limited. In the early twentieth century Ivan Bunin made a magnificent translation of The Song of Hiawatha, and Konstantin Balmont dedicated several years of his creative life to preparing the first collected works of Edgar Poe in Russian. To this day no one has surpassed his 14 translations of Poe's verse. Indeed they may be among the poet's finest works. At this time Russian translations of some works of Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman also appeared.
The Great October Socialist Revolution marked a turning point in the Russian view of American literature. The swift, total elimination of illiteracy, the abrupt elevation of the cultural level of the masses and the new democratic politics in publishing had important consequences. The audience quickly expanded, and this inevitably led to the expansion and intensification of publishing.
From that time on large editions of the works of major American authors were issued. Today it is difficult to count the Soviet editions and re-editions of the books of Cooper, Twain, Jack London, Dreiser, Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, O. Henry, Steinbeck and other American writers. A bibliography of Russian translations of American literature would fill a whole volume. It would not be amiss at this point to mention such Soviet literary journals as Novy Mir, Zvezda, Znamya, Oktyabr and Neva; it would be hard to find a thick monthly periodical which had not published the works of American authors and critical essays on American literature. A special part is played by the journal Inostrannaya Literatura already celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. Soviet readers are acquainted with the latest American literature primarily through this journal. Recent years have witnessed a new trend towards greater interest in American literature. Now the Russian reader is not only attracted by artistic works of American writers but by the interpretations of the literary process made by American critics. Recently Russian editions of Main Currents in American Thought by Vernon Louis Parrington, some works of Van Wyck Brooks, selected essays of Francis Otto Matthiessen and Philip S. Foner's monograph on Mark Twain have been published among others. As far as I know Soviet publishing houses plan to issue Russian translations of Robert Spiller's Literary History of the United States, and Francis Otto Matthiessen's American 15 Renaissance. The Russian public is known for its broadminded internationalism based on the assimilation of the riches of world culture, and this is one source of the profundity and significance of Russian national culture, literature and art.
Russians respond to American or any other foreign literature in a special way which, while not exclusively Russian, does characterize the Russian public on the whole. There are two stages: acquaintanceship, the first contact, and then assimilation, the transformation of an artistic phenomenon born of alien soil into a fact of the Russian consciousness and of Russian spiritual life.
We often speak of the "Russian Shakespeare'', the "Russian Dickens'', the "Russian Twain'', which is not the same thing as when American critics called Cooper "the American Walter Scott''. "The Russian Jack London" is not a Russian writer whose works are similar to Jack London's but the history of Russian translations, of stagings, screenplays and critical reviews of London's works. In other words this takes in the entire complex of their existence in the Russian national milieu. In that sense we also have a Russian Cooper, a Russian Twain, a Russian Poe, a Russian Melville and a Russian Hemingway.
The ideas and images of American literature, as of any literature, become part of the spiritual world of Russians. One could find many examples of this. We will confine ourselves to citing the words of Gorky: "As we read the memoirs of, for example, Russian revolutionaries, we often find indications that the books of Cooper fostered in them certain emotions, honor, courage and a love of action.''
American literature has often been so intensively assimilated that some American writers are ``resettled'' in Russia. I haven't the slightest doubt that Cooper, London, Twain and perhaps even Hemingway have more readers in Russia now than in the United States. The bibliography appended to this book will bear witness to that.
All I have said above should clarify the reasons for the possibilities of swift development of American studies and 16 show how the study of American literary history and of contemporary American literature has become an important area of Soviet philology.
Naturally this book cannot give its readers a total awareness of Soviet scholarship on American literature if only because it is limited to research on twentieth-century American literature. The authors of the essays here presented are only a few of the specialists studying American literature in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless it does give some idea of the current state of Soviet American studies.
Among the contributors is the ``elder'' of Soviet American studies, one of the pioneers of the study of American literature in this country, the author of many books and essays on the history of American literature, scholar, critic, and translator M. O. Mendelson. He is the sole representative of the old guard of scholars in American studies. Others who might have been included are A. Anikst, M. Alekseyev, A. Startsev, and the late A. Elistratova and R. Samarin.
The next generation of Soviet scholars in American studies now, alas, already called ``older'' includes R. Orlova, Y. Zasursky, and G. Zlobin among other contributors to the book. A. Mulyarchik, N. Anastasyev, A. Zverev and B. Gilenson represent the younger generation. Naturally the concepts of ``older'' and ``younger'' are relative and one cannot always establish a clear boundary between generations. This is further complicated by the fact that many of those belonging to the younger generation are not young and many of the older generation not all that old. In a few years the members of the ``younger'' generation will become the ``older'' generation. In a certain sense they could be already considered part of the ``older'' generation since a new generation is growing up which has let itself be known through books and essays, some of them quite praiseworthy.
There are three sections to the collection. The first contains more general essays dealing with the genres and movements of contemporary American literature. The second section includes historical studies of single works, __PRINTERS_P_17_COMMENT__ 2---208 17 cycles of works and at times the complete works of certain American writers of the first half of our century. The third section contains reviews. Some of them deal with books written by Soviet scholars of American studies. The rest deal with recent works of American writers.
As it happens all these essays were written by Muscovites. This was not intentional. But the majority of scholars specializing in American literature live in Moscow. Moscow is the location of the academic Institute of the Vnited States and Canadian Studies, the Institute of World Literature, Moscow University, and two pedagogical institutes---there are specialists in American studies everywhere. Moscow publishes the major literary journals and publishing houses are concentrated in Moscow ( including Progress Publishers who put out this collection). Moscow is the largest center in the country for the study of American literature and a collection of the works of Moscow specialists on that subject is quite accurate in its representation of the field. But let the American reader not forget that specialists on American literature may be found in cities other than Moscow, that there are other centers and other schools also mentioned, by the way, at the beginning of this brief preface.
NOTES
~^^1^^ V. G. Belinsky, Collected Works, Moscow, Academy of Sciences, 1954, Vol. Ill, p. 158 (in Russian).
~^^2^^ Ibid., Vol. IV, p. 458.
[18] __ALPHA_LVL2__ AMERICAN LITERATURE AND TWOFrom time immemorial mankind has dreamed about happiness. Many centuries before Christ the poets of Babylon and ancient Egypt sang of man's efforts to reach out toward the sun and its light. Beginning with Hesiod and his idea of a "golden age'', the poets of antiquity glorified the struggle for happiness as the deepest expression of man's very essence. The literature of the Renaissance, an epoch which, as Engels wrote, "called for giants and produced giants"---giants in power of thought, passion and character, was imbued with the idea of the individual's emancipation on the road to happiness and perfection. Finally, the great French representatives of the eighteenth century Enlightenment assigned a central role in their philosophy to the idea of the "natural man" and his efforts to understand the character of truth and justice. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's famous treatise, "Si le retablissement des sciences et des arts a contribue a epurer les mceurs'', one of the earliest proclamations of the French Enlightenment, begins with lines that are echoed in pamphlets and speeches composed during the American and French revolutions:
``What an exquisite and majestic sight---to see man arising, as it were, out of non-existence through his own _-_-_
^^*^^ © HaflarejibCTBo «nporpecc», 1976 © Translation into English. Progress Publishers 1976
19 efforts, sending forth the light of reason to dispel the darkness that nature has shrouded around him, rising above himself, striving in spirit toward the heavens, tran scending in thought the great expanses of the universe with the speed of a ray of sunlight, and, what is still grander and more difficult, delving deep into himself in order to study man and his nature, his obligations and his role in life.''^^1^^Two hundred years have passed since Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, in which we find the embodiment of man's ancient dream of a free people living in happiness and plenty, a dream which has subsequently been rather grandly termed "The American Dream''. To this very day historians and jurists, writers and critics quote the words of this declaration, which have had such an impact on social and political thought throughout the world:
``We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.''^^2^^
In that distant epoch which saw the first settlers establishing themselves on the American continent, and then in the heroic epoch of the American Revolution, the dream arose of that special path which fate had in store for America.
If in the past century the "American Dream" had some historical and social foundation in fact (though even then the most perspicacious minds saw how illusory the dream really was), in our time the Utopian essence of this idea is beyond question. Recall Norman Mailer's headline-making novel, An American Dream, or Edward Albee's play, The American Dream, both of which demonstrate the evolution which the dream has undergone in modern times. In his book, The Greening of America, the well-known American sociologist, Charles Reich, expressed his views 20 on this subject with perfect frankness and clarity: "To the American people of 1789, their nation promised a new way of life; each individual a free man, each having the right to seek his own happiness; a republican form of government in which the people would be sovereign; and no arbitrary power over people's lives. Less than two hundred years later, almost every aspect of the dream has been lost.''^^3^^
But we are interested primarily in the manner in which American literature reflects this dramatic evolution.
The literary heritage of the United States remains a vital factor in the artistic development of the country. The traditions of national American culture and literature have been in existence from the epoch of the American Revolution. In posing the question of the essence of a national literature and culture in the United States, contemporary American critics occasionally revert to the conservative opinions expressed by men of letters in the distant and not-so-distant past. Hence the wide circulation given to the views of Ezra Pound in his literary manifesto on national culture written in 1938 and several times reprinted. Pound maintains that the national culture of the United States existed from 1770 to 1861, and perished in the course of the Civil War. He views American culture as Anglo-French in origin, and thus holds that when this European source dried up, being replaced by realistic and democratic tendencies which developed as a result of the Civil War, national American culture ceased to exist. The flowering of realism as manifest in Walt Whitman's and Mark Twain's works for Pound could only signify the demise of American literature and culture, and American writers would henceforth have no choice but to emigrate to Europe, as Pound himself did: "After the debacle of American culture individuals had to emigrate in order to conserve such fragments of American culture as had survived.''^^4^^
From its very inception American literature and culture developed along two lines, reflecting two fundamental tendencies of national historical development.
21At the wellsprings of American democratic literature we find the works of Philip Freneau, a heroic figure surrounded by the romance of the War of Independence. Among the outstanding representatives of this line of development are James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, John Reed, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and many others who rank among the best sons of the American people.
America's other culture also had its own tradition, represented by the literature of the Loyalists during the American Revolution and that of the Federalist-- aristocrats in the post-revolutionary period. This culture is also represented by the literature of the Southern rebels of the Civil War period. And just as the democratic quality of Freneau's works provoked the open hostility of those who represented the opposing culture, so too the works of John Reed and Theodore Dreiser were slighted by the McCarthies of the literary world.
American critics love to quote the words of J. Hector Saint-John (de Crevecceur), a naturalized American from France, who two hundred years ago, during the revolution, set forth the following definition of the true American: "What, then, is the American, this new man? He is an American who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced.'' Saint-John's idea formed the basis for a sense of national self-awareness, of the " American Dream'', though the concept as such crystallized only in the thirties of our century.
A truly national poetry was born when the farmers and soldiers of Washington's army saw that the thoughts and aspirations expressed by Freneau and the whole galaxy of American revolutionary poets were similar to their own thoughts and aspirations. A truly national prose was born when the simple American man started reading Cooper's novels and when other works of American romanticism also entered the consciousness of the newly arrived voyager.
The problem of the American literary tradition has long 22 attracted the attention of writers and critics. Cooper once described in precise terms the meaning and the task of his historical novels set in medieval Europe (The Bravo, The Heidenmauer, or the Benedictines, The Headsman, or the Abbaye des Vignerons}: he intended them, he said, as an attempt to discuss European facts from an American point of view. In his essay on Pushkin, N. V. Gogol, as we know, made a similar observation in defining the essence of a truly national poet: "A poet may be called national in character even when he describes a completely alien world, but looks at it from the perspective of his national element, the perspective of the people, when he feels and speaks in such a way that his compatriots experience the illusion that they themselves are feeling and speaking.''
By no means all critics, either past or present, have been able to comprehend the unique national character of American romanticism. In his introduction to an anthology of American literature of the "golden age" (which for the writer means American romanticism), the well-known American literary critic Perry Miller asserts: "Irving . .. was wholly derived from eighteenth century English writers and he offered little in style or tone which could be called uniquely American, even though he did deploy the landscape of the Hudson River in 'Rip Van Winkle'. .. . Though he used American scenery, Cooper owed his whole conception of the narrative function to European romances. Though he fumed when he was called 'the American Scott' we can readily discern that without Scott's border and medieval tales we should never have had Natty Bumppo. In this decade William Cullen Bryant published his most energetic verses. Though these resolutely portrayed American scenery---'Monument Mountain' instead of Helvellyn---they exhibited toward the countryside attitudes that might have been formed in the Lake Country.''^^5^^
While taking note of the actual ties between American and English literature, Perry Miller fails to note what is specifically national in the works of Irving, Cooper and 23 Bryant. The traditional parallels and general similarities seem more important to the critic than what is inherently American about the works under discussion.
The processes involved in the creation of a national literature and the establishment of literary self-awareness, despite all the interconnections between these phenomena, are not identical processes and they do not always take place simultaneously. It would hardly be just to suppose that the appearance of the greatest works in American literature (Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Melville's Moby Dick, Thoreau's Walden or Whitman's Leaves of Grass) in and of itself mechanically resolved the problem of the rise of literary self-awareness in the United States. Aesthetic self-awareness began forming already during the War of Independence; it continued to take shape throughout the nineteenth century and it was only in the second decade of our century that it assumed its definitive form on a large scale.
Let us remember that for an extended period of time American literature was regarded abroad as simply a branch of English literature. Soviet Academician M. P. Alekseyev remarks that the very term "American literature" arose fairly recently. At least until the eighties of the past century European literary criticism employed this designation infrequently and haphazardly. In the second decade of the past century the American man of letters Samuel Knapp testified in his introduction to Lectures on American Literature that foreigners did not acknowledge the existence of a literature one might call ``American''. And even a century later the American critic Barrete Clark wrote in Maxim Gorky's journal, Beseda: "Right up until before the war the attitude of educated Europeans toward American attempts to establish a national culture of their own was at best kindly condescending, if not even openly unsympathetic.''
The fact that American literary criticism conclusively affirmed the notion of American literature as an independent entity was due in large measure to the works of Van Wyck Brooks and V. L. Parrington. Brooks' America's 24 Coming of Age (1915) together with Parrington's threevolume opus, Main Currents in American Thought (1927-- 1930) laid the foundation for the scientific investigation of the specifically national character of American literature.
But even today one can hear statements similar to that once made by a French critic. He saw among the definitive qualities of American literature its energetic character, its glorification of physical strength and a dramatic form of narration, by which he meant the depiction of characters by means of actions and direct speech, without authorial commentary; on this basis he declared that " ' American' is not so much a nationality as a style".^^6^^ Some English critics also speak of the current existence of a national American literature with a certain degree of reservation. "The English reader may accept my assumption that there is such a thing as American literature, and concede that American writers . .. have managed surprisingly well with their mixed-up heritage"^^7^^---such is the rather odd sounding sentence which introduces one of Marcus Cunliffe's arguments in his essay on the history of American literature, published in 1954 and reprinted more than once.
Already at the time of the American Revolution poets and publicists of the young nation were dreaming about the creation of a national epos, an American Iliad or Chanson de Roland. It was fated to some degree that these aspirations be fulfilled in the American novel. It is significant that in 1820---the very year that Sidney Smith, founder of the Edinburgh Review, was ironically asking, "Who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue?"--- Cooper's first novel was published, and within only a few years American novels were being read throughout Europe, from Petersburg to Madrid.
There is a tendency in American criticism to assign the beginnings of a national literature only to the period of Irving, Cooper and Bryant. Occasionally, the names of lesser writers---James K. Paulding, John Neal, Fitz-Greene 25 Halleck and others---are added to this ``trinity'' of American romantics who began to write earlier than Hawthorne, Melville and Poe, and are therefore called "early romantics''.
This sort of periodization is reflected in the massive Literature of the American People (1951), edited by Arthur Hobson Quinn. In this work---designed, according to the editor's express intention, for the widest possible audience---the literature composed during the Revolutionary War years is assigned to the colonial period, i.e., to the period before the United States achieved nationhood. The vital threads which tie the American romantics to the literary tradition of revolutionary times are artificially broken, which makes the flowering of romanticism on American soil look like an inexplicable caprice, an unexpected miracle in the literary life of the United States.
This sort of tendency can be seen in the Macmillan anthology, Literary Heritage, published in several volumes. In the first, The Early Period of American Literature, the beginnings of national literature are connected only with the works of Irving, Cooper and Bryant, who are called "the first American writers''. In one of the most influential books of contemporary American criticism, Howard Mumford Jones' The Theory of American Literature, we also find the author bypassing the historical role of American Revolutionary literature, and especially that of Freneau's works, in the formation of a national literature.
This position---one which characterizes many representatives of contemporary bourgeois literary studies---should be set off against consistently historical view of the complex fate of American literature, which was born amidst the fires of the War of Independence.
At the dawn of American literature, when the term itself first entered the vocabulary of those living in the former English colonies who had just cast off the authority of the British crown, the poet of the American Revolution and the first truly national poet, Philip Freneau, 26 was speaking of the great task of battling for literary independence. Foreseeing the countless difficulties that would be encountered on the way, Freneau wrote with sorrow that he would not live to see the day when American literature would be truly free. "A political and literary independence of this nation being two very different things,'' he wrote in his "Advice to Author'', "the first was accomplished in about seven years, the latter will be completely effected, perhaps, in as many centuries.''
As the national character of American literature came to be recognized, a new, romantic tendency began to develop. For that reason discussions about national literature in fact often proved to be polemics about American romanticism, its virtues and faults, its right to an independent existence. Romanticism became the whetstone on which the specific national character of the literature was sharpened. In the post-revolutionary period, when the foundations of the American political system were being laid, American romantics were the first to feel and reflect in their works their uneasiness regarding the social imperfections of the new state.
A characteristic feature of early romanticism in the United States was the complex interweaving of revolutionary classical and romantic tendencies. During the entire period that marked the establishment of a national American literature, the synthesis of classicism and romanticism was the most important problem of artistic development.
The romantic century in America begins with Freneau. As the romantic tradition develops in the United States, we observe discontinuities which divide Freneau's early romantic poetry and the works of Bryant, Irving and Cooper.
In the course of its almost century-long existence, American romantic art evolved in a complex fashion, from the patriotic declarations of the colonists who rebelled against the English yoke to the programs for a democratic revolutionary art written by the most consistent 27 supporters of abolitionism and by uncompromising critics of the bourgeois American system. Despite their wide range of styles and their varying attitudes to American public life, the romantics each in their own way criticized the antihuman aspects of the social order established with the victory of the American Revolution.
Cooper and Poe, Irving and Melville, Thoreau and Emerson---how dissimilar these writers are, how contradictory at times their views on many vital problems confronting Americans in the first half of the nineteenth century. But there is one feature fundamental to each of these writers which permits us to view their works as phenomena representing a single movement in art and literature. That feature is the romantic protest against capitalist America, the tendency to " idealize the negation of the bourgeois way of life'', as the Russian Marxist G. V. Plekhanov called the art of romanticism.
Many books and essays have been written in which American and English critics search for the features common to romantic writers in their Christian outlook on life (American Classics Reconsidered. A Christian Appraisal, edited by H. C. Gardiner, New York, 1958); the "new criticism" finds similarities in the formal devices used by American writers in the first half of the nineteenth century.
But these are not the most important similarities. The most important is the great dream which inspired the work of the romantics. For Thoreau the dream found its embodiment in the image of Walden; Melville led his hero into the open spaces of the Pacific Ocean; Cooper searched for his ideal hero in the wild forests of the American West; Poe's lyrical hero struggled to find beauty and justice. And they all experienced failure and disappointment, for the dream was as distant from reality as Eldorado was for Poe's knight:
But he grew old---
This knight so bold--- 28
And o'er his heart a shadow
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Fell as he found
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.
When Cooper came out with his famous pamphlet, The American Democrat, he was accused of being unpatriotic. It was not by chance that H. L. Mencken, in his preface to one of the editions of The American Democrat, noted how up-to-date this great writer's work sounded in its condemnation of pseudo-democracy: "His warnings were gloomy, but the event was always gloomier still. He was dead ten years when the Civil War finally blew the old Republic to pieces, and brought in that hegemony of the ignorant and ignoble which yet afflicts us.''^^8^^
On the eve of the Civil War, the increasingly acute situation on the social and political front and the growth of the democratic movement were accompanied by a rise in national literature. On the other hand, chauvinistic tendencies were growing more and more persistent on the southern plantations. Advocates of regional or ``sectional'' literature proclaimed that the only true American literature was that of individual localities. Even an original literary motto made its appearance in the South: "To be American means to be sectional.''
William Gilmore Simms emerged as an advocate of the Southerners' literary and social ideas, both of which based on separatist tendencies. Simms reduces the problem of national literature to the task of creating a sectional literature: "If we do not make our work national, it will be because we shall fail in making it sectional.''
Other moods held sway in the North. Writers here did not presume to create a separate literature for Massachusetts, Pennsylvania or even New England, for they believed that their works extended beyond the narrow framework of these regions and expressed common features of the national character.
The years 1837--1855 stand out as one of the brightest periods in the struggle for a national American literature; 29 they span the period between the time when Emerson delivered his famous speech, "The American Scholar'', to the appearance of Whitman's preface to Leaves of Grass, where the problem of national literature acquires a more pronounced democratic ring.
American literary historians call Emerson's "The American Scholar" the "declaration of American literary independence''. Basing his views on the history of mankind's development, Emerson calls on Americans to create their own national poetry.
Emerson's speech made an unforgettable impression on his literary descendants and played an historical role in the formation of the literary self-consciousness of the American nation. This was due above all to the fact that Emerson rejected dead literary traditions, turning instead to a live, effective principle in American life. He affirmed that the birth of literature in America must reflect the people's faith in their own powers of creation: "We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat.''
The fate of American literature constantly excited the transcendentalists---Emerson, Thoreau and others. Their literary and critical theories reflected the tremendous creative possibilities that lay at the foundation of America's new literature. Even before Whitman we find a distinguished participant in the transcendentalist circle, Margaret Fuller, noting the relationship between the problem of national literature and the state of American society, especially with respect to its degree of democratization.
The development of a national literature in the nineteenth century is closely bound up with the whole democratic struggle, with the abolitionist movement and the growth of the farmers' movement. It is true, of course, that the Mexican-American war, territorial expansion and the Spanish-American war---all of them marking the beginning of the epoch of American imperialism---- 30 occasioned the rise of chauvinistic sentiments in certain literary circles. At the same time anti-militaristic tendencies grew and began to spread. Consider the angry, anti-- imperialistic pamphlets of Mark Twain. The expansion of the American frontier to the West, accompanied by the ravaging and exterminating of Indian tribes, was identified in chauvinistic criticism, and with particular success in the religious and missionary press, as the victorious march of American civilization, culture, and literature as a part of that culture.
After the Civil War realistic tendencies gain an ever firmer hold on literature in the United States. The whole romantic epoch becomes a thing of the past in the history of American literature, having passed under the sign of the War of Independence and the social cataclysms of the nineteenth century. The comparatively late development of critical realism in the United States determined the specific features of this artistic method as well as the role which naturalism played under these circumstances, imparting a new quality to the literature of realism around the turn of the century and to a certain degree promoting the success of the new realist movement.
The realists were ceaselessly engaged in a polemic with romanticism, deriding its artistic devices and imagery. Recall Mark Twain's well-known essay, "Femmore Cooper's Literary Offences" (and the sequel, "Fenimore Cooper's Further Literary Offences''), in which the creator of the celebrated Natty Bumppo is accused of transgressing against all the laws of literature. Mark Twain's essay was an expression of the whole anti-- romantic program, the expression of a new, realistic conception of literature and creativity.
But even so great a realist as Mark Twain, while coming out against the literature of romanticism, paid tribute to the romantic tradition in one of his brightest artistic creations---the eternally young figure of Tom Sawyer; the author's idealization of the "good old days'', set in opposition to contemporary bourgeois society, makes him akin to the romantics.
31The Russian classical realism of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov played a significant role in the development of realism in twentieth-century American literature. Whitman speaks with great pathos of the features uniting our nations; in an open letter designed to serve as the preface to the Russian translation of Leaves of Grass, he writes: "You Russians and we Americans: Our countries so distant, so unlike at first glance---such a difference in social and political conditions, and our respective methods of moral and practical development the last hundred years;---and yet in certain features, and vastest ones, so resembling each other. The variety of stockelements and tongues, to be resolutely fused in a common identity and union at all hazards---the idea, perennial through the ages, that they both have their historic and divine mission---the fervent element of manly friendship throughout the whole people, surpass'd by no other races---the grand expanse of territorial limits and boundaries---the unform'd and nebulous state of many things, not yet permanently settled, but agreed on all hands to be preparations of an infinitely greater future--- the fact that both Peoples have their independent and leading positions to hold, keep, and if necessary, fight for, against the rest of the world---the deathless aspirations at the inmost centre of each great community, so vehement, so mysterious, so abysmic are certainly features you Russians and we Americans possess in common.''^^9^^
Not only American writers, of course, but critics as well have long been discussing the problem of what it means to be a genuinely American writer. The works of Henry James, who was proclaimed a cosmopolitan writer, were often set in opposition to the works of William Dean Howells, who was seen as a truly American writer in his understanding of the American way of life. Howells was one of the first champions of realism in America; critics, though, usually bring up his name in connection with his statement calling on writers to depict the " smiling aspects" of life as something truly American. This careless remark by Howells led American critics to speak 32 of two traditions in literature: that cheerful, self-satisfied practicality supposedly proclaimed by Howells (which in fact does not encompass Howells' significance in the history of American literature), and "the other American tradition" (the title of an essay on the subject by University of California Professor Henry F. May), i.e., the critical tradition. Henry James, it goes without saying, was not the leading representative of this tradition.
The atmosphere of unclouded optimism which, according to certain literary critics in America, reigned during the "Howellsian epoch'', was destroyed after 1917. Actually the fading of optimism was reflected in the works of Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Hamlin Garland, Jack London, Upton Sinclair and Theodore Dreiser already at the turn of the century. In the opinion of these American critics, the myth of America as a social and political Utopia exploded in 1917.
The Great October Revolution opened up a new epoch of world history, a new page in world culture and literature.
The 1917 Revolution exerted a strong and productive influence on the development of American literature. It would be difficult to name one major author who witnessed these events and did not in some way respond to them. One must understand this influence in all its complexity, diversity and profundity. In 1938 Dreiser delivered a speech in Paris, in which he said that the socialist revolution altered the course of American literature, that it set in glaring relief the social inequality in America, arousing dissatisfaction and promoting the publication of books which supported the idea of reconstructing society. In The Days of the Phoenix (1957) Van Wyck Brooks described the climate of the initial post-war years among the literary intelligentsia and affirmed: "Every writer I came to know called himself a radical, committed to some program for changing and improving the world.''^^1^^"
October gave rise to an unprecedented torrent of documentary literature; there appeared a whole series of __PRINTERS_P_33_COMMENT__ 3---208 33 eyewitness accounts of the stormy events taking place in distant Russia.
The best of these accounts is John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World.
John Reed was not alone. Albert Rhys Williams, the first in the West to draw a vivid portrait of Lenin (in Lenin: the Man and His Work, 1919), made a great contribution in his elaboration of the Russian theme. A second book by Williams, Through the Russian Revolution (1919), has every right to occupy a place next to Reed's Ten Days; where Reed portrays "a slice of intensified history'', the culmination of revolutionary events in Petrograd, Williams depicts the nation-wide scale of the historical rift and the rising up of the only recently dormant peasant masses in the limitless expanses of Russia. There are other accounts that are equally outstanding and filled with sympathy toward the socialist revolution: Louise Bryant's series of sketches, Six Red Months in Russia (1918) and Mirrors of Russia (1923); Bessie Beatty's The Red Heart of Russia (1919), Ernest Poole's essays on the Russian peasantry; the memoirs of Colonel Raymond Robins; and many others. Lincoln Steffens, a veteran of the muckraker school, wrote an account which had wide repercussions; returning from Russia in the spring of 1919, he uttered the legendary phrase, "I saw the future, and it works.''
In the following years American writers showed no less interest in the new world, the process of socialist construction, in the people who were creating new forms of socio-economic relations. In the first post-war decade Albert Rhys Williams continued to explore the theme of the Russian peasantry setting out on a new path (his book of essays, The Russian Land, 1928); A. L. Strong wrote of the great reforms taking place in Central Asia, that onetime backward hinterland of tzarist Russia (Red Star in Samarkand, 1929; The Road to the Grey Pamir, 1931). Dreiser's express approval of the building of socialism (Dreiser Looks at Russia, 1927) had repercussions throughout America.
34During the "red thirties" America manifested an ever greater interest in the Soviet Union, whose successes were set in sharp relief against the background of the severe economic crisis that struck the West. Many authors expressed their sympathy toward socialism and the new world order: Langston Hughes (A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia, 1934), Waldo Frank (Dawn in Russia, 1932), Edmund Wilson (Travelling in Two Democracies, 1935) and Genevieve Taggard (a cycle of poems about the USSR). The first belletristic work on the Soviet Union appeared at this time: Myra Page's A Yankee in Moscow (1935), about American specialists working at a Moscow factory. A. R. Williams' The Soviets (1937) came to serve as a unique encyclopedia of "the Soviet way of life''.
Many leading exponents of American culture manifested an open sympathy toward our country in the years of World War Two and our common struggle against fascism. Among them were Theodore Dreiser and Carl Sandburg, Charlie Chaplin and Ernest Hemingway, Erskine Caldwell and Clifford Odets, Lillian Hellman and Rockwell Kent. Equally renowned are the accounts of those American writers and journalists (E. Caldwell, Ella Winter, Jerome Davis, Richard Lauterbach and others) who were in the Soviet Union at the time and dispatched reports from the Soviet-German front. They saw the heroic feats of the Soviet Army and the people in the fight against fascism as an expression of the fundamental characteristics of the socialist system. As A. R. Williams wrote, the "secret weapon" of the Russians was the new man being shaped under new social and economic conditions.
The results of the war, as Richard Lauterbach testified in his book, These Are the Russians (1946), spoke for "the triumph of the socialist system''.
But---and this is particularly important---the influence of the October Revolution made itself felt not only in the direct, immediate responses of writers to the events in Russia, and not only in books on the Russian theme. The shock of the First World War followed by the victory of 35 the Socialist Revolution in Russia made many writers feel the instability of the established order and permitted them to view with a critical eye certain values which had seemed stable and eternal. Many elements of American life came to be interpreted in light of another alternative, socialism, which had made its first concrete appearance.
Under these conditions American writers, though their literary aspirations might at times diverge, keenly felt the wrongs afflicting society and experienced the need to unite on the basis of some common ideological and aesthetic platform. The journal Seven Arts (1916--1917) became such a unifying center. Later a large group of literary men, authors of the collection Civilization in the United States (1922), edited by Harold Stearns, ascertained the alarming gap between successes in the field of material production and a lag in the spiritual and cultural field under the dominance of "the wallet''; the publicistic works of Upton Sinclair (the series, The Dead Hand] and Waldo Frank (Our America and The Rediscovery of America] carried out a "frontal attack" on the spiritual life of America.
The influence of the October Revolution was even more profoundly reflected in the fact that the decade following the First World War marked a qualitatively new stage in the development of critical realism in America. Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson and Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passes and Eugene O'Neill--- "writers of the twenties'', as they are often called---all of them very different artists, of course, each dealing in his own way with his own theme, his own sphere of life, expressed a general mood of rebellion, dissatisfaction and decisive rejection of "the dollar civilization''.
This manifested itself in various ways. We see it in the depiction of the modern, conformist philistine immortalized in the person of Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt; we see it in the confused, muddled strivings of the residents of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, in the fierce rebelliousness of the worker Yank in O'Neill's The Hairy Ape and in the fiery protest against the callousness of the war 36 machine in Dos Passes' early novels; we see it in the protest against the system of private enterprise which permeates all of Upton Sinclair's novels, from Jimmie Higgins and King Coal to Boston; and we see it in the feeling of profound enmity between the individual and society which Dreiser described in his formula: "an American tragedy''.
The revolutionary impulses running through the literature of the thirties determined the qualitatively new features of critical realism of the time. Maxwell Geismar uses the term "social realism" to describe the writers of this decade. John Howard Lawson, a dramatist and theoretician of drama, writes, "Lenin's influence permeated the art and life of the thirties in subtle and half-- acknowledged ways. Perhaps his greatest contribution was to give us back a sense of our history.. .. The preoccupation with history in the thirties is not solely a matter of formal scholarship. We find it in all the arts.''^^11^^ In further comments on "Lenin's influence" and "a sense of history'', Lawson cites such writers as Steinbeck and Dos Passes (author of the trilogy, U.S.A.) as well as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner.
And he is quite right. A clearly expressed historicism is one of the characteristic features of the literature of the thirties.
It is significant that Faulkner began to work on his trilogy about the Snopes family toward the end of the twenties. Not only did he make the Communist Linda a unique counterbalance to the Snopes family, but also felt that their way of life was by its very nature doomed. Thomas Wolfe's sympathy toward socialism at the end of his life evidently led him to acknowledge the inner tragedy of American reality, an attitude particularly manifest in his novel, You Can't Go Home Again, especially in the striking finale. Caldwell, who had close ties with Left groups in the thirties, described the scandalous poverty that existed in the South and the rising protest of the poor.
Sinclair Lewis not only did pioneering work on the anti-fascist theme (It Can't Happen Here), but also 37 worked with great intensity on his novel about the workers' movement. Sherwood Anderson turned to the theme of industry and factory life, as reflected in his book Beyond Desire, a novel about a textile workers' strike. In his trilogy, U.S.A., John Dos Passos creates an impressive panorama of American society in its historical development. In turning to the Faustian theme of the search for life's meaning, Waldo Frank creates a character typical for the bourgeois of that period, a man "divesting himself" of his class and searching for a way back to the people (The Death and Birth of David Markand). John Steinbeck writes his best book---his vivid, exciting tale about the Joads. Hemingway, who had long proclaimed his hostility toward politics and his distrust of all forms of ``involvement'', became a fierce anti-fascist during the course of events in Spain; moreover, in For Whom the Bell Tolls---written in Hemingway's inimitable manner--- the author views the war and the revolution in Spain from a broad historical perspective, responding in his own way to the political and aesthetic questions of "the red decade''.
The social novel of the thirties undoubtedly acquired new conceptual and artistic dimensions by comparison with the preceding decade. Malcolm Cowley in his article "Thirties Were the Years of Hope" was right in saying that ``we'' replaced ``I'' and ``ours'' replaced ``my'' in the vocabulary of this period.^^12^^ The very concept of man as reflected in literature underwent a change, with writers turning away from Freud to Marx.
During the first post-war decade the attention of many writers attracted to psychoanalysis was focused on the internal world of the personality, which was often divested of broad social ties, whereas the "red thirties" graphically demonstrated the significance of social and economic factors, both in the life of society as a whole and in the life of the individual. Social determinism with respect to human behaviour and personality became an object of intense authorial interest, though this was accompanied by certain extremes and distortions as a result 38 of sketchiness and oversimplification; this does not give us the right to suppose, however, that the literature of this period was dominated by some sort of "economic man'', one-sided and devoid of any psychological complexity. And although the writings of Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe and Fitzgerald during this period are marked by considerable achievements in the field of psychological analysis, the major tendency of this literary epoch was the desire of writers to place their heroes in the broad stream of historical events, to correlate their fate with that of society as a whole, to show them in their development, in the process of spiritual and moral growth. The spirit of collectivism and the idea of solidarity defined the new conception of the hero as a character endowed with positive principles; this was true not only of writers with an open revolutionary bent, but also of the masters of critical realism, in whose work the "rediscovery of America" was taking place during these years, to use Michael Gold's concise phrase.
Their heroes strike through to revolutionary truth like Steinbeck's Tom Joad; they search for a path to the working class like Waldo Frank's David Markand; they join ranks with those who actively oppose the existing system, like Dos Passos' Ben Compton and Faulkner's Linda; they go over to a position of active resistance to fascism, like Sinclair Lewis' Doremus Jessup and Upton Sinclair's Rudy Messer. The idea of collectivism which indeed became a "sign of the times" during these years was not simply a literary fad or an abstract slogan; it grew out of the practical requirements of the epoch. It embodied a new phase in that tradition of national literature which was heralded by Walt Whitman, who sang paeans to "The City of Friends''; by Bellamy, who preached the "religion of solidarity''; by William Dean Howells, who dreamed of the triumph of altruistic principles in the sphere of human relations. The typical heroes of the literature of the thirties include a working class leader, a communist, a bourgeois who has broken with his class, an apolitical member of the intelligentsia who 39 becomes an anti-fascist, a representative of "black America" defending his dignity.
The horizons of literature broaden in both a thematic and geographic sense. The theme of "the other Europe" joins that of "the other America''. The problem of "their revolution" acquires exceptional poignancy.. As a result writers start paying attention to "the Soviet factor" ( Dreiser, A. R. Williams, Waldo Frank and others), to the struggle against fascism in Germany (Rice, Hellman) and to the war and revolution in Spain (Hemingway, Sinclair, Hughes and others).
Of course, not all the works dealing with the new themes were successful in an artistic sense. But by the same token one cannot accept the notion that the whole literary output of this decade is somehow devoid of artistic value or is purely utilitarian or propagandistic in nature. Many works of lasting aesthetic value were written in the course of this decade.
The basic forms of documentary literature began to take shape and crystallize; the literary sketch and reportage---genres which are mistakenly assigned to the periphery of the literary process---achieved a high level of sophistication. Documentary and publicistic elements ``twined'' themselves into the fabric of literary prose, and the fusion produced innovative patterns (Steinbeck and Dos Passos). The psychological novel, one of the most important achievement of American literature in the twenties, acquired greater social motivation. The best prose works of the "red thirties" include brilliant examples of the social novel with its surprising wealth of genres and stylistic forms (the political novel, the philosophical novel, the lyrical, historical, and documentary novel, etc.). Such masters as Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, and William Faulkner were attracted to life portraiture of epic proportions.
In all this---in the movement of social and political problems to the forefront of authorial attention, in the new conception of the hero and the masses, in the deepening sense of history, in the enrichment of genres and 40 structural forms---we see reflected a new vision of American reality in its social aspects. The greatest achievements of socialist realism in American literature fall precisely in this period of time.
In examining this problem, which is complex enough, we must take issue with the claims of certain American scholars---M. Himmelstein, for example---who believe that socialist realism is a ``style'' representing the conjunction of revolutionary ideology and traditional melodramatic form (as applicable to drama), that it was "invented in Moscow" and virtually ``thrust'' on American critics, who started to ``practise'' it on American soil.
Although the term "socialist realism" appeared at the beginning of the thirties, the method it represented took shape considerably earlier, both in Soviet and non-Soviet literature. Its formation was part of the objective, natural revolutionary process on a world-wide scale, the result of the artist's quest for means of expression suited to new forms of life.
In America the distinctive quality of the development and genesis of socialist realism was determined by concrete, national, historically stipulated features in the development of the country. And here, in our opinion, two factors play a decisive role.
On the one hand, the historical process in America has been marked by extremely sharp contrasts and contradictions; hence the exceptional pungency of social criticism in the works of many American writers and the appearance of such specifically national forms as "the literature of protest" or "the novel of protest''. Despite their `` protest'', however, many writers retain a belief in the power and possibility of reform as well as democratic procedure as a way of overcoming social contradictions. On the other hand, even Marx and Engels noted the specifically Anglo-American trait of "dislike for theory''. Lenin called Upton Sinclair a "socialist of the emotions without any theoretical training''. Certain other American writers could also be called "socialists of the emotions'', among them Jack London, Carl Sandburg and Randolph Bourne. 41 In America prevailing ideas are likely to exert particular pressure on writers. And this, in our view, explains that surprising unevenness which marks the artistic development of many American writers---Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Waldo Frank, Sherwood Anderson, Clifford Odets, Richard Wright, John Steinbeck and John Dos Passes. One moment they affiliate themselves with the socialist and workers' movement, proclaim their leftist views and compose works filled with social critical content; and then suddenly they begin to worship what they had previously condemned and pay tribute to conformist tendencies. But one thing is indisputable: the period when they tackled the problems of "the other America" proved for each writer to be the most striking, most fruitful, and the most significant in an artistic sense.
The problem of the new method in Western countries, and especially in America, should be resolved in full view of the complexities inherent to it; one should avoid the tendency to narrow down or impoverish material without justification. In American literature there were not all that many artists who steadfastly and consistently adhered to socialist ideology. Besides the works-of those writers who could be called socialist realists one must take into account the substantial transitional phenomena and forms, the individual works and tendencies which reflect a general movement toward the new method.
The appearance of the new method was necessarily preceded by the development in American literature of the theme of conflict between labor and capital and the first attempts to portray the American proletariat. The theme of class conflict entered into American literature already in the seventies and eighties of the past century, especially in connection with the Haymarket affair, W. D. Howells' novels, for example. The beginning of the twentieth century is in principle significant for the genesis of socialist realism, for it was marked by the flowering of literature connected with the workers' and socialist movement. It produced prosaists (London, Sinclair, Poole), critics (R. Bourne), and poets (Joe Hill), whose best works 42 prove in many respects to be forerunners of the new method. Mass proletarian poetry also had its own role to play here, partly in connection with the IWW movement. During these years a new, proletarian hero emerged in literature, though his depiction was at times sketchy and one-sided (Jack London's Everhard, for example). The life and labor of the working masses was now far more concretely displayed (Upton Sinclair). The author of The Jungle and King Coal prepared the way for the " proletarian novel" of the thirties.
The originator of socialist realism in America was John Reed, a writer of the new type uniting "thought and action''. In his outstanding work Ten Days That Shook the World, the October Revolution is artistically interpreted as a new page in world history. The book is completely original and innovative in form; vivid pictures, scenes and episodes are daringly fused with publicistic digressions and documentary elements which are interspersed throughout the text. This principle of ``fusion'' later came into widespread use in American literature. And not only in American. In his preface to the book V. I. Lenin wrote, "With the greatest interest and with never slackening attention I read John Reed's book, Ten Days That Shook the World. Unreservedly do I recommend it to the workers of the world. Here is a book which I should like to see published in millions of copies and translated into all languages. It gives a truthful and most vivid exposition of the events so significant to the comprehension of what really is the Proletarian Revolution and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. These problems are widely discussed, but before one can accept or reject these ideas, he must understand the full significance of his decision. John Reed's book will undoubtedly help to clear this question, which is the fundamental problem of the international labor movement.''^^13^^ And in fact, Reed's book did have world-wide impact; it has been published and republished in every corner of the globe, and serves as an example of the inexhaustible, vitality of revolutionary art.
43In the thirties socialist realism was already a definite trend in American literature. It was represented in the works of a whole group of writers standing on a new conceptual and aesthetic platform (Steffens, Maltz, Gold, Lawson, Mike Quin, etc.). In our estimation the critic Gaylord Le Roy is right in saying that the proletarian literature of the thirties is of greater artistic significance than acknowledged by the critics of the fifties and sixties, and insofar as the battle for socialism is still continuing, there exists a foundation for the literature of socialist realism.
Steffens, composer of an outstanding Autobiography, written against a broad social historical background; Dreiser, author of Tragic America and his crowning works, the novels The Stoic and The Bulwark helped to give shape to the new method during the thirties. Offshoots of the method produced by the growth of the workers' theme in the American theatre appeared in the drama of Maltz, Peters, Lawson and Gold. Qualitatively new features were manifested in the poetry of Langston Hughes and Edwin Rolfe.
The process of formation of the new method can be traced most clearly by examining the most important and successful proletarian novels of the thirties. Undergoing complex development, overcoming the difficulties of growth, the problems of sketchiness and narrow thematic range, it found its most felicitous expression in the works of Gold and Maltz, as well as Dalton Trumbo, Conroy and Cantwell. It was distinguished by a profound historicism and a tragic element tinged with optimism (in The Land of Plenty by Cantwell and Underground Stream by Maltz) where the temporary setback affecting a strike, or the death of a hero, is perceived in the light of inexorable historical processes. In the literature of the turn of the century workers were still portrayed as "men of the abyss'', as poor people who evoked feelings of sympathy; in the thirties the figure of the proud proletarian appears, a man fully aware of his own dignity.
And in the post-war years, despite all the difficulties 44 of literary development, socialist realism continued to develop, as evidenced by Lars Lawrence' cycle of novels The Seed, the poetry of Walter Lowenfels, who in his last years experienced a veritable second youth, W. E. Du Bois' trilogy The Black Flame, and by other works.
In studying the spiritual and artistic wealth of nations, we proceed from Marx's teaching on two cultures. We consider of utmost importance the proposition advanced by V. I. Lenin, namely, that in every national culture there are, if only in rudimentary form, the elements of democratic and socialist culture, "since in every nation there are toiling and exploited masses, whose conditions of life inevitably give rise to the ideology of democracy and socialism".^^14^^ This thesis is extremely important if one is to understand the ways in which American culture and literature have developed.
In his "Letter to American Workers" (1918) Lenin wrote: "The American people have a revolutionary tradition which has been adopted by the best representatives of the American proletariat, who have repeatedly expressed their complete solidarity with us Bolsheviks. That tradition is the war of liberation against the British in the eighteenth century and the Civil War in the nineteenth century.''^^15^^
The American Revolution and its great documents---the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights---- exercised tremendous influence, especially on democratic American literature. Its development was inspired by the high democratic ideal embodied by Jefferson and Lincoln, by the idea of freedom, independence, equal opportunity for all, and the unlimited development of each individual's talents and potentials. This democratic ideal was embodied with particular forcefulness in the literature of the abolitionist period, and above all in the works of Walt Whitman.
It is no accident that at every stage of American history a certain tradition has manifested itself, one which is called the "literature of protest''. Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Edward Bellamy, author of 45 Looking Backward, the ``muckrakers'' and Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle, Sinclair Lewis, author of Main Street and Babbitt, John Steinbeck, author of Grapes of Wrath, and many other authors repeatedly raised their voices against all forms of injustice, defending man and his freedom.
The democratic tradition undoubtedly determines the fundamental national traits of American literature.
And at the same time the very historical process with the contradictions and profound contrasts that inevitably reveal themselves forced the most perspicacious writers to go beyond the limits of bourgeois democratic ideals and to search for answers to social problems in socialist transformation.
The October Revolution provided a new, powerful stimulus for the development of a socialist tradition in American literature which, as we have already stated, had deep national roots. This tradition declared itself with particular forcefulness during the "red thirties''. The democratic and socialist traditions do not conflict; the second is the further development of the first.
The rise of the anti-war, black and democratic movements in the United States during the late sixties and early seventies and the growing interest in Marxism on the part of a large segment of American society, particularly the country's youth, including both students and workers, give one reason to hope that the literary traditions inspired by socialist ideas---which have such deep historical roots in the United States---will receive new live-giving impulses.
NOTES
~^^1^^ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Collection Complete des ceuvres de J.-J, Rousseau, Citoyen de Geneve, t. 7, p. 28.
~^^2^^ The World Almanac, Declaration of Independence, 1949, pp. 153-- 54.
~^^3^^ Charles A. Reich, The Greening of America, N.Y., 1970, p. 21.
~^^4^^ Ezra Pound, Impact. Essays on Ignorance and the Decline of American Civilization, Chicago, Regnery Co., 1960, p. 3.
46~^^5^^ "the Golden Age of American Literature, cd. by Perry Miller, N.Y., 1959, pp. 1-2.
^^6^^ Literary History of the United Slates, N.Y., 1957, p. 1391.
^^1^^ Marcus Cunliffe, The Literature of the United States, 1954, p. 10.
~^^8^^ James Fenimore Cooper, The American Democrat, N.Y., 1956, Introduction, p. XIV.
^^9^^ Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose, Berlin, 1958, pp. 542--43.
^^1^^ Van Wyck Brooks, The Days of the Phoenix, N.Y., 1957, p. 17.
~^^11^^ Lenin's Impact on the United Stales, ed. by D. Mason and J. Smith, A New World Review Collection, N.Y., 1970, pp. 216-- 17.
~^^12^^ New York Times Book Review, December 13, 1964, p. 5.
^^13^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 36, p. 519. K
^^14^^ Ibid., Vol. 20, p. 24.
^^15^^ Ibid., Vol. 28, p. 69.
[47] __ALPHA_LVL2__ M. KORENEVASince 1865, when the Civil War came to an end, not a single shell has exploded on American soil; not one bomb dropped from a hostile plane has destroyed a single home; America has not groaned under the heel of one foreign soldier's boot. Even the tempest of the two world wars which ravaged Europe did not touch her territory. There were no ruined cities, no blood-soaked fields, no Auschwitz or Dachau; no countless war dead, no casualties among old people, women, and children. One could go on listing the terrible calamities that America has been spared (though here, too, the wars took its toll) because the country experienced neither an enemy invasion nor even the proximity of an enemy force. That is why the consistent and ever-growing interest of American writers in war themes and the depiction of man at war seems inexplicable at first glance.
Critics have long noted the fact that in order to write about twentieth century America, many authors found it necessary to look at it from a distance, and extract the essence of the country's historical experience from the _-_-_
^^*^^ © HaflaTCJibCTBO «nporpecc», 1976
© Translation into English. Progress Publishers 1976
The number of American works dealing with the war theme grows with each passing year. Quantity, it goes without saying, is not the major factor here. It is, rather, that some of the outstanding examples of post-war American prose deal with war. Such writers as Norman Mailer, James Jones, Irwin Shaw, Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut used war as a means to find and expose the tangle of contradictions that reflect the most essential aspects of contemporary American reality.
This is not to imply that treating the theme of war is sufficient to guarantee the significance of a work. The majority of war novels are neither profound nor accurate in their evaluation of war; on the contrary, some of them present a distorted image of war and men at war. They follow the traditions of jingoism and depict gallant soldiers who know no fear as they perform astounding feats of heroism. In such sugary accounts, the great battle of nations, the incredible suffering and deaths of tens of millions of men, the heroic struggle to break free of the fascist plague with its crimes unprecedented in scale and monstrousness, are made to look like a pleasant little outing which acquires higher meaning and interest only because it is connected with a certain risk. In the final analysis, all such inferior works, devoid of any evident __PRINTERS_P_49_COMMENT__ 4---208 49 ideology but claiming to give an authentic, documentary picture of war, are often apologias for violence.
Alongside the above-mentioned works, however, we find works of another sort. They are rarer, but there are enough of them to constitute a whole movement. Their authors take a serious and profound interest in the fate of mankind, the essence of human nature and of society; they strive to understand the underlying causes of war. To achieve this, they are compelled to speak the cruel, ugly truth about war.
In the preface to the edition of his World War II reportage, published in 1958 under the title Once There Was a War, John Steinbeck writes that war correspondents did not and could not tell the whole truth about the war. "There was no cowards in the American Army,'' notes Steinbeck, not without irony, "and of all the brave men the private in the infantry was the bravest and noblest ... we had no cruel or ambitious or ignorant commanders. .. . We were all a part of the War Effort. We went along with it, and not only that, we abetted it. Gradually it became a part of all of us that the truth about anything was automatically secret....'' Further developing this idea, Steinbeck continues: "By this I don't mean that the correspondents were liars. They were not.... It is in the things not mentioned that the untruth lies.''^^1^^
Such lacunae were permitted in wartime, but Norman Mailer, James Jones, John Hersey, Kurt Vonnegut and Irwin Shaw---to mention only the most prominent writers---felt that they had to speak the whole truth about the war. Naturally they do not so much quarrel with the war correspondents as polemicize with those who glorify war. Continuing the tradition of Dos Passos and Hemingway, they depict war as pitiless carnage which brings incalculable physical and moral suffering to mankind and transforms a man into a fanatic, a sadist, a beast. To show the great evil of war they strive to stun the reader with pictures of its horrors. At the same time they affirm--- though not always consistently or clearly---that World 50 II was necessary in order to strike down an evil greater than war itself: fascism.
But while recognizing the justice and necessity of the war against fascism, the most thoughtful and serious American novelists felt obliged simultaneously to show the paradox inherent in the fact that the struggle against fascism was led by men who, to a certain extent, shared the reactionary ideology of the enemy.
The American scholar Joseph J. Waldmeir is profoundly mistaken when, in comparing the novels of the First and Second World Wars, he affirms that the latter "were all, implicitly or explicitly, pro-war novels; that is, their authors clearly were committed to the war, sufficiently at least that in no novel was it condemned as useless or senseless as the first World War had frequently been condemned by its chroniclers"^^2^^ (Italics mine---M.K.).
The novels of James Gould Cozzens, Herman Wouk, R. Powell and other similarly minded writers were unreservedly ``pro-war''. Turning to the Second World War for material, they were least of all concerned with exposing the ideological basis of the greatest and bloodiest of wars, its goals and its nature. They had no doubt that the war was necessary, but for entirely different reasons: they seemed most intent on affirming and glorifying militaristic ideas. Everyone knows that such novels as The Soldier by R. Powell or The Caine Mutiny by Wouk brought no real glory either to their creators, or to American literature.
With regard to the best realistic war novels---Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, James Jones' From Here to Eternity, John Hersey's The War Lover, Mitchell Goodman's The End of It, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children's Crusade and certain others--- Waldmeir's observations are applicable only in the narrowest sense of the word. The authors of these novels concede the necessity of the war as a means of ending fascism. At the same time they condemn war in general as unjustified mass murder, as the source of incalculable human suffering and privation; in this sense their works __PRINTERS_P_51_COMMENT__ 4* 51 are not pro- but anti-war, continuing the tradition of the twenties.
Their picture of the war, complicated enough as it is, is supplemented by the depiction of the growth of open reactionary tendencies in certain circles of the American army. It must be said to the credit of Mailer, I. Shaw, Hersey, Vonnegut and Heller, that they manage, with more or less continuity and depth, to condemn such dangerous tendencies which threatened to spread from the army into American society as a whole. In this respect as well these are anti-war novels.
A writer's powers of penetration sometimes permit him to discern the perilous offshoots of reactionary ideology, and not merely the contrivances of cynical priests of the God of war, when American generals speak in lofty, demagogic phrases about the superiority of American democracy, the need to forget all differences and join to create a powerful striking force. In the final analysis, such insights determine the success of a work and the significance of its contribution to literature.
The most important artistic revelation of the American war novel, and its definitive feature, is its recognition of the contradictions inherent in America's position in the war. This recognition is expressed with varying degrees of clarity and understanding of the social and political roots of this dramatic internal conflict. As the development of the post-war novel in the United States demonstrates, however, no novel claiming to create an accurate picture of reality can fail to recognize these contradictions.
This realization of America's contradictory role in the Second World War is fixed in the artistic construction of the American war novel: we find it in the striking presence of negative characters, common to almost every work, who personify the reactionary forces within the American army---"the second face of villainy"^^3^^ as Joseph J. Waldmeir puts it; and we find it in the war novel's particular structure, which is based on the contradiction between internal and external events, whose juxtaposition serves as the major source of conflict.
52The external action proceeds toward a victorious finale, in correspondence with the objective course of the historical process. Regardless of whether the author concentrates on the wide theatre of war where hundreds of thousands take part, or focuses on comparatively inconspicuous military operations---one is always aware of the imminent defeat of fascism. This is rarely stated outright, but it can be more or less deduced from the work's context. Insofar as the works under discussion were written after the war, the author often considered it superfluous to dwell on the outcome at any great length. This way the more or less clear implication of the imminent rout of Hitlerism above all expresses the author's conviction that the Second World War was just and therefore necessary.
The internal action, as opposed to the external action, is accompanied by the accumulation of negative rather than positive emotions and impressions. Simultaneously the conflict shifts more and more clearly from the province of external action to that of internal action. This is reflected in the alignment of characters. The enemy becomes ideological rather than military and often enough the enemy turns out to be in one's own ranks; for it is in the internal action that the writer expresses his condemnation of war as the source of cruel and senseless suffering. The external action is most often conveyed in the terrible battle scenes, the description of murders and inhuman torments of the wounded, and in various subplots; the internal action is conveyed primarily in the delineation of characters.
In their unity these components, reflecting the actual contradictions of history, gave birth to the American realistic war novel, and only the totality of these features can define its particular and exclusive qualities. Calling on writers to chronicle the Second World War, history demands that they resolve a threefold task: 1) to establish the image of this war as a just war, to the extent that it involved the fight of all peoples against German fascism; 2) to totally expose the dangers of fascism and its ideology, as well as the militaristic philosophy of 53 imperialism, whatever form it may take; 3) finally, in the interests of the welfare and redemption of humanity, to instill in men a hatred of war. The American novelists do not always manage to retain a proper perspective and accordingly their works may lean, from time to time, to one or the other side. But despite philosophical and artistic shortcomings, every honorable attempt to grasp so extraordinarily complex and historical phenomenon as the Second World War was for the United States, deserves serious attention and study.
These general considerations have been confirmed by an analysis of many works of American literature written in the last three decades. The uniqueness of the American war novel is reflected most clearly and consummately in Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948) which, if not the best work of this genre, without doubt ranks among the highest achievements of post-war American prose (Mailer himself considers the best war novel to be James Jones' From Here to Eternity, 1951).
The external action of Mailer's novel is focused on a military operation which takes place on a small island in the Pacific. It opens with the landing of American troops, under the command of General Cummings, on the island of Anopopei, and concludes with the total defeat of the Japanese detachments. Any reader sufficiently informed of the course and outcome of the war would have no difficulty perceiving this as one episode, albeit a very minor one, in the common struggle against fascism. But the victory is depicted as purely military. Positive notes are muffled and this in itself prepares us for the evaluation of events that constitute the internal action, based on the conflict between Cummings and Lieutenant Robert Hearn, and on the counterplot connected with Sergeant Croft's reconnaissance mission behind enemy lines.
The external action in other novels is structured in much the same fashion, though the accent may be different. Much depends on the setting. Thus, in those novels dealing with the European front, the image of the war as a war of liberation conducted by peoples striving to 54 cast off the yoke of fascism is presented with much greater clarity and allows the author to reveal more precisely the positive aspects of the struggle (as in Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions or even John Hersey's The War Lover] Here we are speaking not so much of the character's realization of their mission, but rather of the construction of the action itself. In Mitchell Goodman's The End of It (1961), a less significant work, we follow the movements of the American army in Italy, where the success of the military operations entails the actual overthrow of fascism and the liberation of the Italian people. The same cannot be said for The Naked and the Dead, where the external action is portrayed as a purely military clash in which liberation and the liberated are not present at all.
But even in the ``European'' war novels, the basis of the conflict remains the opposition of internal and external action. In The War Lover, it is the contrast between the approach of victory and the growing sense of doom that marks Boman's and Marrow's last flight. In Goodman's novel the action reaches its apogee at the moment when the ``liberators'' deliberately shoot the unarmed Italian prisoners who had been driven by the Germans to labor camps in Germany. The contrast between internal and external action is perhaps most pronounced in Slaughterhouse-Five, whose hero, Billy Pilgrim, is captured on the eve of the war's end and brought to Dresden, which was levelled by American bombers. The number of victims from this operation which was directed against the civilian population exceeded the number of victims in Hiroshima.
A noteworthy feature of James Jones' From Here to Eternity which distinguishes it from the majority of war novels is the fact that its positive underlying principle is embodied in America's entry into the war rather than the successful completion of some military operation. The trying waiting period ends and things start moving when America's promises, made to a Europe exhausted by the struggle with fascism, are finally backed up with action. Written some years earlier, The Naked and the Dead shows where these promises led. Jones also introduces 55 elements of irony into the ending of his novel, which closes with a conversation between a seven-year-old boy and his mother. The boy is worried that there won't be any more wars left when he grows up. His mother comforts him with the assurance that he has nothing to fear on that account.
The basic conflict in The Naked and the Dead is ideological and, as has already been noted, it does not coincide with the framework of the military conflict, the external action. Already at the start of the novel Hearn remarks that the general, considered by many to be the most amiable member of division headquarters, is "a tyrant, a tyrant with a velvet voice, it is true, but undeniably a tyrant".^^4^^ This is confirmed by his savage and derisive attitude toward his subordinates, particularly toward Hearn. But Mailer does not leave this conflict on a level where it might be attributed to the general's personal sadistic tendencies. He transfers it to an ideological plane, outlining a profascist philosophy behind the general's actions. Mailer endows Cummings with a tenacious and sober analytic mind, capable of objectively evaluating facts, although his interpretations of these facts are far from the truth: "We have the highest standard of living in the world and, as one would expect, the worst individual fighting soldiers of any big power. Or at least in their natural state they are. They're comparatively wealthy, they're spoiled, and as Americans they share most of them the peculiar manifestation of our democracy."^^5^^ One of the most important features attributed by many war novelists to Americans who have accepted the fascist ideology is their openly hostile attitude toward democracy, their conviction that democracy, rather than fascism, is the root of all evil. The most biting and detailed portrayals of such characters, apart from Mailer's, can be found in James Jones' From Here to Eternity.
In the iron logic of Cummings we can see all the vices of rationalism, devoid of any moral foundation. He acts as an apologist for the cult of strength and power, declaring that war and politics are beyond human morality: 56 ``Robert, politics have no more relation to history than moral codes have to the needs of any particular man.''^^6^^ In Cummings' interpretation of the war there is not the slightest hint of an acknowledgement of the noble goals implicit in the overthrow of fascism. He sees no need to do this, even for the sake of camouflage. ``You're misreading history if you see this war as a grand revolution,'' he tells Hearn. "It's power concentration.''^^7^^ ".. .The only morality of the future is a power morality,"^^8^^ he exclaims at one point later on.
The trouble with fascism for him is not its bestial philosophy of violence and destruction maintained only by force of arms, but the fact that it "started in the wrongcountry,, in a country which did not have enough intrinsic potential power to develop completely".^^9^^ In his opinion, the country where fascism can and should triumph is the United States. In this vein he regards his own actions and, no doubt, the actions of the American army as the clearing of land for the cultivation of a new fascist empire.
The principle of "trampling down the weak" which Cummings espouses with regard to international relations, is seen by him as the basis of an army structure ideally suited to his purposes. He sees no need for high ideals in a soldier, nor does he want men conscious of their civic duty. What he needs are persons who obey without thinking, and the fear which allows men like Cummings to manipulate their subordinates as they please. To smash and trample a man is for Cummings synonymous to the creation of an ideal soldier-assassin, one who will unquestioningly execute the orders of his superiors. The cornerstone of his methods is the instillment of fear: ".. .Break them down. Every time an enlisted man sees an officer get an extra privilege, it breaks him down a little more.... Every time there's what you call an Army injustice, the enlisted man involved is confirmed a little more in the idea of his own inferiority.... To make an Army work you have to have every man in it fitted into a fear ladder. ... The Army functions best when you're frightened 57 of the man above you, and contemptuous of your subordinates.''^^10^^
Hearn reminds him of that sort of hatred which may in the end compel soldiers "to turn their machine-guns around''. But even this hatred does not alarm Cummings, who is convinced of his own power; Hearn's warning is parried by the general's theory that such hatred is useful: "The time soldiers start doing that is when an Army is about defeated. Until then, the hate just banks in them, makes them fight a little better. They can't turn it on us, so they turn it outward.''^^11^^ Cummings confirms his theory in a rather curious way, through personal example. After pitilessly settling accounts with his subordinates and, in particular, after sending the unyielding Hearn to certain death in a reconnaissance detachment, the omnipotent, invincible Cummings trembles at the thought that his decisions may displease his superiors who have the power of relieving him of his command and depriving him of his next star.
If, in the character of Cummings, sadism assumes the guise of intellectualism, in Sergeant Croft it takes on the form of a purely physical threat to human existence. There would seem to be little in common between the polished general, who constructs a complex chain of deductions on the essence of humanity's present state of development and the role designated to the doctrine of power, and the dull Croft, who can hardly put two words together without inserting an expletive, who violently hates any sort of ``learning'' and believes that problems can be solved only through the use of fists. In fact they adhere to the same doctrine and are no more than opposite sides of the same coin. Croft cannot theoretically grasp the barbarous laws by which he lives, but like the general he rigorously affirms the cult of violence in his daily behavior. He hates the men in his detachment, he hates his superiors for their position of superiority, and those who are weaker than himself for that weakness; he hates blacks: "Ah jus' looked at that nigger after that, an' Ah said, Boy, you no-good black bastard, an' Ah jus' 58 picked up that hatchet an' let him have it right across the head.''^^12^^ This is the voice of his family, whose lessons Croft has absorbed and enlarged upon. In fact Croft hates everything living on the earth (``I hate Everything Which is Not in Myself,"^^13^^ he says, and this is his own voice, in the "Time Machine''). Eaten away by this violent hatred, Croft finds satisfaction only in the suffering he inflicts on others and in the sight of blood. Mailer makes Croft the personification of a bestial, and maniacal passion for killing. One of the most impressive episodes illustrating the essence of Croft's character is the scene where a Japanese prisoner is executed. Croft treats him with the finesse of a seasoned sadist. First he convinces the Japanese that his life will be spared; when the prisoner demonstrates his gratitude and good will by showing Croft a photograph of his wife and children, the latter shoots him pointblank, to the amazement of even his buddy Gallagher---a man not easily moved to pity, having himself participated in pogroms against Jews at home. The voluptuous pleasure experienced by Croft each time he pulls the trigger is akin to the pleasure the general feels when he torments his adversary Hearn by fully exercising his superior rank. On learning of Hearn's death, Cummings "would feel a mingled pain and satisfaction".^^14^^
In the images of Croft and Cummings, Mailer discerns the roots of fascist ideology, although he excessively emphasizes biological motives. His ``strong'' characters suffer from sexual neuroses which they strive to compensate for by "concentrating their power" in other areas. Although for Mailer this disorder is also the result of a civilization which is spiritually imperialistic and therefore hostile to man, his analogy is too one-sided. Another, healthy America is, in essence, beyond his field of vision.
In almost all serious war novels we find analogous figures through whom, with varying degrees of specificity, we can examine the reactionary tendencies which were gaining ascendancy in the American army. These may be minor characters, like the general who addresses the soldiers in M. Goodman's The End of It---a 59 ridiculous figure, posing as a straightforward fellow with his heart on his sleeve. His speech, however, contains not one word of truth; it is sprinkled with expletives and obscene "soldier`s'' jokes in order to gain the trust of his audience, but throughout the vulgar clownish chatter rings a chauvinistic and offensive note: "Americans love to fight, traditionally. Any American worth a good goddamn that is. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. America loves a fighter, just like America loves a winner. We're Americans, we're here to keep America on the map. OK. America will not tolerate a loser. Hell no! Why should she, she's the greatest nation on the face of the earth. Americans despise a fucking coward. Americans play to win. That's why America has never lost a war and will never lose a war.''^^15^^ Reading these lines, one recalls the instinctive distaste felt by Hemingway's heroes for the lofty rhetoric wielded by politicians who, for their own selfish purposes, use them to throw men into the imperialistic slaughterhouse.
At times such a character will play a central role in a novel, as does Buzz Marrow in Hersey's The War Lover (1959), a man possessed by a passion for destruction. Like Cummings and Croft, Marrow goes into ecstasies when his plane shakes as rounds of bullets are fired from it. He openly confesses that during the bombing, ".. .he, Marrow, had had the best feeling he'd ever had in his life outside of intercourse".^^16^^ (Once again the theme of sex appears. The biological interpretation of Marrow's motives is based on his unhappy childhood where the hostility of those around him drove him to seek compensation by asserting his own superiority. Such an approach betrays the limited horizons of the author.) In the end the second pilot Boman recognizes the terrible essence of his friend Marrow's ``heroism'' and comes to the tragic conclusion that: "War equaled s---, and peace equaled s---. There would never be peace so long as there were men with Marrow's taint.''^^17^^ Despite his great aversion to Marrow, Boman can only counter Marrow's ``taint'' with the prospect of "a separate peace" and a determination to survive. His 60 enmity toward Buzz is purely emotional. Only towards the end of the novel does he begin to perceive the true reasons for his hatred of a man whom he once admired. But he cannot abstract Buzz's negative qualities and formulate a general principle on this basis. He cannot fathom what forces gave birth to Marrow, nor what forces can be brought to bear against him.
In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut writes: "One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.''^^18^^ These words might serve as an epigraph to many American war novels. They may be interpreted in various ways, but certainly they imply a protest against the senseless cruelty of war as expressed in the monstrous degeneration of heroism in such men as Croft, Marrow, Cummings and Slater. Such ideals as ``courage'', ``selflessness'', and "military valor" are purely negative traits in these men. Strength becomes violence, courage---cruelty. The projection of such traits, which are characteristic of the cruel military machine, onto human nature itself---as though heroism were alien to man---and the inability to distinguish between false and genuine heroism, to comprehend and depict heroic feats, must be considered a major weakness of the contemporary American war novel.
The most convincing debunker of fascist ideology--- even taking into account General Slater in From Here to Eternity, a man who shares Cummings' profession of the cult of power---is Norman Mailer. Noting the dangerous social tendencies exhibited by Cummings and Croft, Mailer warns that in time these may develop and lead to the establishment of a totalitarian regime. Mailer's pitiless denunciation of attempts to cultivate a new breed of fascists on American soil, demonstrated his proximity to progressive movements and leftist forces; later he gave up many of his progressive ideas.
In the American war novel attempts to repulse fascism are not limited to a critique of the dangerous tendencies ripening in the American army. Although positive characters, both in richness of ideological content and artistic 61 expressiveness, lose out to negative ones, any attempt on the part of American writers to find and affirm values worthy of preservation deserves sympathetic attention and scholarly research. Mailer, for example, does not simply depict people who suffer at the hands of Cummings and Croft; in other words he does not limit himself to the emotional-moral sphere. Rather, he transfers the conflict to the moral-intellectual sphere, emphasizing the ideological differences of adversaries. Lieutenant Hearn, Cummings' foil, is the scion of a wealthy family who became attracted to Marxism, broke with his family and actively participated in the labor movement. But in the end he loses the duel. There are of course a number of subjective causes which receive considerable attention: an insufficiently deep grasp of Marxism (``I've played around with it,"^^19^^ confesses Hearn), the absence of firm conviction in the righteousness of his ideals, a psychological imbalance, a hot temper. On the whole, however, there are objective causes stemming from the character of the war as waged by the Americans. Hearn himself is perfectly aware of this. When Cummings asks why the war is being waged, Robert answers: "I don't know, I'm not sure. With all the contradictions, I suppose there's an objective right on our side. That is, in Europe. Over here, as far as I'm concerned, it's an imperialist tossup.... We might easily go Fascist after we win, and then the answer's really a problem"^^20^^ (Italics mine---M.K.}.
To counter Cummings actively and effectively, Hearn must define for himself his own role in the war, but this proves impossible. There is no exit from his situation through "a separate peace''. Hearn is sufficiently aware of his position to understand that this would inevitably be taken as a refusal to join in the routing of fascism. History confirmed this; the leftists' capacity for opposition was weakened by the doubt and disillusionment felt when the forces of reaction assumed the offensive; the contradictoriness of the United States' position during the war led in the immediate post-war period to a policy which for many years appeared to reflect Cummings' own ideas. 62 At the time when Mailer was writing The Naked and the Dead, he was probably not cognizant of this, but the very fact that he was able to sense the direction of American social development in the post-war period speaks I
for his vision as a writer.
The hero of the war novel, like Hearn, has nowhere to go. War on two fronts has drained his strength and can lead only to the hero's death (Prewitt, in From Here to Eternity] or to a state approximating death (Billy Pilgrim, Boman). For a time, it is true, Boman indulges himself with the idea of "a separate peace''. Had he achieved this, he would no longer be a character embodying positive values. But in the end, he begins to comprehend the narrowness of this position.
The aforementioned characters are war victims, a fact which is essential in determining the writer's views. By depicting them in this way, Mailer, Vonnegut, Jones, and Hersey stress the senselessness of war and its inhuman nature. This is most obvious in Slaughterhouse-Five. Everything about Billy Pilgrim, including his attire---the too short jacket splitting at the seams, and later the absurd azure cloak and silver boots---forces the reader to conclude that before him is a lost child, tossed into the whirlwind of events which he cannot understand and therefore cannot control. He is, in the full sense of the word, a prisoner of circumstances which find their ultimate expression in the bombardment of Dresden, where the crushing might of the air force---``his'' air force---descends on thousands of people who are as defenseless as he. In this way, Billy becomes the personification of suffering humanity in the war.
A rather recent creation, this character is rooted not only in the terrible experiences and disillusionment of the war years but in the post-war bitterness of many Western writers who, in pondering the fate of humanity, came to acknowledge man's impotence in the face of the crue,lty of his environment. Billy's ability to foresee the future is full of significance here. But knowledge, like ignorance, leaves him a prisoner, deprives him of his will 63 and subjects him to the free flow of things. In Vonnegut's world there can be no transition from suffering to action, from victim to fighter.
The hero of The End of It, Lieutenant Freeman, actually passes through death. Shaken by the sight of a mass execution of Italian prisoners by American artillery (the retreating Germans had forced them to work in the North), he sinks into a long period of unconsciousness: when he comes to, he is convinced that he is indispensable to the unfortunate people of Italy. But first he must break with America. Here we see both the reflection of objective aspects of reality, and the weak ideological position of these writers. The weakness of the protagonist is at the same time the result of the debilitating influence of the war, and this is precisely the way that most realistic writers portray the positive hero. Reviewing Hemingway's novels A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises, the Soviet writer Andrei Platonov noted that all genuinely human qualities shrivelled "under the fatal influence of imperialism''; in these novels, Platonov says, a man manages to defend only the simplest, almost animalistic rights. When we compare Hemingway's novels with contemporary works, it becomes evident that in contrast to the world of Hemingway's heroes, a world which, however limited, still embodies sought-after human values, the world of the hero of the Second World War has shrunk catastrophically. Almost none of the latter-day heroes manage, if only for a moment, to tear free of the power of "death and despair in war" as did Lieutenant Henry; not one is able to rise to the heights of a free, selfless emotion. This has a peculiar impact on the style of these novels as well. The speech is simplistic and often confined to a narrow part of the lexicon, built---especially in characterizations of soldiers---on incessantly repeated expletives which testify to the total loss of individuality. A monstrous depersonalization of man is yet another charge which American writers levy against the war.
In conclusion we have yet to touch upon those aspects of the war novel where the protest against war as the 64 source of immeasurable human suffering, sounds forth most strongly. This is achieved mainly through scrupulously detailed descriptions designed to evoke horror at the effects of war. The writer takes on the role of a reporter, inspecting every inch of the battlefield and recording everything that falls into his field of vision. The cruel, exact depiction of war, intended not to elevate reality but rather to approach it as closely as possible, reveals that Hemingway and Dos Passes have been well studied. Mailer, moreover, uses many of Dos Passes' devices, particularly the broad sociological commentary made possible by "the Time Machine''; this intensifies the publicistic qualities of the novel.
Often the narrative seems to be overloaded with naturalistic detail. But we should not judge it on the basis of how distressing or offensive such descriptions may be---the author deliberately wishes to evoke horror and revulsion. Rather we are concerned with how effectively these details lead the reader to ponder the prime cause of this human tragedy---the war as a means of destruction and death. And if, as we read, we shudder from pain and horror, we must remember that the writer expected even more from us.
The depiction of the horrors of war, the cities razed to the ground, the mutilated bodies, the wounded earth, the burdens and perils of life on the front, is part and parcel of the contemporary war novel. But in the literature of different countries, the accent differs in accordance with historical experience. Thus one writer will stress the need for revenging the sufferings of the victims, another will stress that the triumph over evil is achieved at a high cost or he will try to rouse the people to a selfless purging of that evil in order to save life itself.
In the American war novel the idea of the senseless cruelty of war is most prominent. For European and particularly for Soviet readers who have survived the horrors of the fascist invasion, the concentration camps and Gestapo torture chambers, this emphasis seems strange if not shocking, just as the idea of "a separate peace" __PRINTERS_P_65_COMMENT__ 5---208 65 invariably gives rise to perplexity. But one must recall that although the name was the same, in America this was an utterly different war.
Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961), generally considered by American critics as "black humor'', is one of the novels structured on the theme of the senselessness of war. Through the entire novel, its protagonist, Yossarian, is busy inventing reasons for staying out of the air and avoiding missions. Much of this may be attributed to the thickheadedness of generals who are exclusively occupied with intriguing against each other and writing denunciations, to the venality of all ranks from the highest to the lowest, the stupidity of the whole war machine, and finally to outright treachery. What else could one call Milo's business concern, which not only makes incredible profits, openly trading on both sides of the front, but takes contracts for the bombing of Milo's own airbase---which his business concern carries out in the best way? One could hardly find a blacker picture to convey the imperialistic character of the war, which openly ignores the interests of humanity in the pursuit of business. A strong point of this book is its pitiless mockery of the vices inherent in the structure of the American army. Its hero is somewhat more complex a problem. Although there is no evidence to support the fact that Heller had the good soldier Schweik in mind when he created Yossarian, we can assume that he had something similar in mind. However, an insufficient understanding of the essence of World War II has had a negative effect on this novel. While Schweik displays the healthy common sense of the simple folk in his refusal to participate in an imperialistic war, Yossarian remains a philistine, unable to rise above personal concerns and anxieties in times of trouble. But in spite of all this Heller's obstinate hero is right in many respects. When Major Danby tries to persuade him not to run away and advises him to "look up at the big picture'', Yossarian with good reason replies: "When I look up, I see people cashing in. I don't see heaven or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent impulse 66 and every human tragedy.''^^21^^ There is a challenge in his refusal to serve the war machine and eventually become its victim; and Heller obviously insists that the reader consider Yossarian's refusal only in these terms. But at the same time it illustrates the total indifference of this complete individualist to those very human tragedies to which he so passionately refers. It is this lack of principle that transforms Yossarian, in a certain sense, into the accomplice of those he condemns. His efforts to save himself, even at the price of desertion, speak of the extreme narrowness of Yossarian's horizons. His passivity reveals the absence of any personal score with fascism; his vision is fixed at the le