p In this book I have tried to present Soviet literature to the reader in its three main aspects. First, the stages of its development, and the general laws and factors governing this development. Second, the problems posed by the development of Soviet literature. For instance, the problem of inherited traditions and their influence on Soviet literature; the problem of socialist realism, and partisanship in literature; the role of the Communist Party in the development of Soviet literature; and problems of content, form and method. Third, the outstanding personalities in Soviet literature. As I go along I shall also examine those books which for one reason or another had aroused the interest of critics and stirred public opinion.

p This book is not a history of Soviet literature in the true sense of the word, nor did I make it my aim to set out the material systematically, the way it is done in text-books or historical reviews of an academic nature. Nevertheless, I did try to give a sufficiently comprehensive account of modern Soviet literature and its historical background from its genesis to the present time.

p Two reasons prompted me to make a survey of Soviet literature intended not just for specialists but for the general reader. The first is a personal reason. As a literary scholar and critic, I grew up together with Soviet literature. My youth coincided with the first years of the Soviet state. On graduating from the philosophical section of the department of history and philology at Moscow University in the spring of 1918, I plunged straight into public activity, and throughout most of the Civil War and foreign intervention, I worked as a war correspondent, travelling all over the country. When I finally returned to Moscow in 1922, I devoted myself wholly to literature. I wrote for the first literary magazines to come out after the Revolution, took part in the first literary battles, joined the constructivist group, attended all the congresses of Soviet writers as a delegate, and so on and so forth.

p I saw and heard Mayakovsky, Yesenin, Selvinsky, Fedin, Paustovsky, Leonov, Ehrenburg, Fadeyev, Alexei Tolstoi, Serafimovich, Ostrovsky, Makarenko, Pasternak and many other writers, who were either my literary colleagues or opponents. I was one of the 6 first readers of their first works about people of the revolutionary Soviet epoch. It was not only from their books that I formed my impressions of most of these Soviet writers. I also knew them personally, meeting them at conferences and in editorial offices.

p I have pondered over my own past and that of my literary friends. I feel that anyone who has lived for almost fifty years in the thick of revolutionary events, anyone who has not merely witnessed but taken part in the social reconstruction of Russia, has a right to cast a retrospective glance over the road he himself and his literary contemporaries have travelled in the light of history. To look at oneself from outside, so to speak. And that is what I have attempted to do in my book.

p When the Socialist Revolution took place in October 1917, Marxism meant little to me. By virtue of my upbringing and education I was far removed from politics and took no part in the revolutionary struggle. But after the Revolution, everyone in our country, each in his own way, began to join the struggle for the new life. The same thing happened in literature. We were parting with old illusions and assimilating new ideas and views. It did not come easily. But I am not going to dwell on my personal emotions here. They are beside the point. The theme of this book is the ideological course of Soviet literature.

p I cannot say that acceptance of the new truths came easily, without any inner struggle at all, to someone like me who in the 19205 belonged to the literary group of the constructivists. But once I had understood these new truths, I became a convert of socialist realism, and have been one ever since the early 19305. And for some time now I have felt an urge to sum up my own experience and, as far as I am able, that of Soviet literature as a whole, in which I have been working now for close on fifty years.

p I am afraid I have not been able to avoid a subjective approach to my literary colleagues and their works. But then, a literary critic reserves the right to give his own evaluation of writers and writings.

p So, the first reason which prompted me to write this book was the desire to sum up my recollections and impressions of Soviet literature which has constituted the essence of my life.

p My second reason is a polemical one. I felt the urge to write this book after reading some of those works on Soviet literature published in the West, mainly in the United States, then in England, and to a lesser extent in France and Italy. Most of them came out at a time when many were blinded by the whitish neon glare of the cold war.

p In one American book about Soviet literature, entitled The Cult of Optimism, published in 1963 by the University of Indiana Press, I came upon a very sensible line of reasoning. The author writes 7 that people in the West love to play a sort of intellectual parlour game where the idea is to search Soviet literature for all kinds of “evils and vices" in the “Soviet system”. They use the word “ system" as if they were speaking of a rare make of car. But these people, the author goes on to say, are forgetting that the shortcomings and vices exposed by Soviet writers are by no means a monopoly of Soviet society, and it is therefore absurd to state, as some anti-Soviet Western authors do, that the capitalist way of life is superior in every way to the Soviet.

p It is true that people in the West, who feel hostile to the Soviet Union, read our writers from a peculiar angle, hunting for facts, characters and situations that might cast aspersions on the U.S.S.R. But indulging in this pastime is no better proof of the players’ intellectual powers than doing the crossword in the Sunday paper.

p There are also authors who strive to denigrate Soviet literature in a different way. They “pity” the Soviet writers because, they say, they are forced to balance on a tight rope, like circus acrobats. A Soviet writer must not show reality in a rosy light, nor dare he paint it black. He must not gloss over the difficulties, nor can he brood too much on the gloomy sides of life. At one time, he was obliged to sing praises to Stalin, and although he has now been relieved of this duty, he still feels constrained to sound optimistic whatever the circumstances.

p I am not going to set about refuting this nonsense, nor am I going to enumerate the other incongruities and mistakes in all those tendentious books about Soviet literature published in the West. By and large, I have no intention of devoting this book to the refutation of all sorts of mistakes and misconstructions, for this would only involve me in an endless examination of particular instances.

p My book is devoted to something else—to reflections on Soviet literature based on my personal experience and the experience of my fellow writers. I should like my book to guide the reader to that main source which gives Soviet literature its inner power, and to explain why it is that Soviet writers have no wish to denigrate the life they describe, and why this life needs no embellishing. I also want to give an answer to the question why we really are so full of optimism, why we have such faith in our future, and why we believe in the cause served by the whole country with such enormous dedication. Why indeed? Does it never occur to those people who feel hostile to the Soviet Union that writers like Mayakovsky, Alexei Tolstoi and Sholokhov are hardly the sort of men who would think and write only as the Party leadership ordered them, as second fiddles obeying the wave of the conductor’s baton? Let us take a closer look at Soviet writers and try to 8 understand their books, bearing in mind the ideological and artistic aims they themselves had chosen to pursue. Let us try to understand what they have tried to tell the world, and how they have gone about it.

p These are the questions I set out to answer in my book.

p The main subject of this book is Soviet Russian literature. I regret to have been unable to give a wider and more detailed account of the other Soviet national literatures. After all, the multinational character of Soviet literature is certainly one of its main features. It is a law of socialism that the national cultures and literatures of all the peoples inhabiting the country should come to flourish. Even of those peoples who fell badly behind in their historical development and were cruelly oppressed by tsarist colonialism. Even of those who had only a rudimentary written language or none at all.

p Soviet multinational literature makes an extremely interesting object of study. One will find in it all the known kinds and genres of writing. From the simplest to the most modern forms. From the unpretentious little song or the recitative of a folk bard-like the Armenian and Azerbaijan ashug, or the Kazakh and Kirghiz akyn-to the sophisticated and complex socio-psychological novel. All this lives thrives and interacts because the Revolution rallied to the task of creating a socialist culture involving not only the large and culturally developed nations, who had already gone through the stage of industrial capitalism, but also the small national groups and tribes living in the deserts of Central Asia and in the Far Eastern taiga.

p I felt it would be impossible to embrace all this in one small book. But I do realise that by keeping to Russian literature alone, I am narrowing down my field of vision and failing to do full justice to all the aspects of Soviet literature.

p Nevertheless, the concluding chapters of this book are wholly devoted to the theoretical side of this question which, I am convinced, is of tremendous importance to many nations in the world. Especially in this age of national liberation struggle and the consequent establishment of new independent states in Africa, Asia and America.

p The young writers of many of the newly independent states are confronted by problems of fundamental importance: the ideological aims of young literatures, political freedom, artistic means and forms, the role of national tradition, identification with the people, and many others. The experience of Soviet Russian literature, which is one of the most prominent literatures in the world, may be found useful and, I sincerely hope, of interest to the reading public in general.

Moscow, 1970