p What exactly do we mean when we speak of the literature of a particular country or people?

p As a rule we mean two things: all the works of literature produced by the country or people in question, and—more frequently— the literary life, the discussions important new books trigger off, and the conditions in which literature develops there.

p Multinational Soviet literature is too vast a subject for one man to review. In the more than fifty years since the Revolution of 1917, Soviet authors, Russian and non-Russian, have written an enormous number of books. Fiction is published in more than seventy languages spoken in the U.S.S.R., and over a million titles have come out to date.

p In order to study and critically evaluate the literary merits of this profusion of books, special institutes have been set up in Moscow, Leningrad and twenty-odd towns in the non-Russian republics and regions. Our literature is also studied in many institutions abroad (though not always with equally good intentions). In the U.S.A., for instance, there are two institutes engaged in the study of Soviet and, mainly, Russian Soviet literature. Libraries in all the large cities of the world devote whole sections in their catalogues to translations of Soviet literature.

p A profound study of numerous books made over the course of years is not how the ordinary reader usually forms his opinion of a national literature. More often than not his judgements are based on the impressions he gains from reading its most outstanding authors. Maxim Gorky used to say that Lev Tolstoi was in himself a whole world, and that to know Russia one had to read Tolstoi. Readers today also tend to judge Soviet literature—and quite rightly—from the works of such outstanding and strikingly individual authors as Mayakovsky, Alcxei Tolstoi, Sholokhov, Fadeyev, Fedin and Leonov. And this is only natural. For literature is not statistics. As in all other forms of art, it is talent and not numbers that counts.

p Readers are also influenced in their judgements by literary critics whose articles provide a survey of a country’s literature and, more especially, an analysis of the various schools of thought, the individual writers’ artistic methods, and their aesthetic quests.

p In speaking of Soviet Russian literature I shall do both: I shall make a general critical survey and describe the most representative writers.

p Every national literature has its own distinctive character according to the range of ideas and images it embraces and the artistic method it has adopted for its own. Literature mirrors the life of a country, its creeds and customs, the character of the people and their ideals and aspirations. Just as we can speak of a people’s national character, so we can speak of a literature having its own distinctive character, in the sense that the works of different authors share certain features.

p Soviet literature was born of the Socialist Revolution of 1917, and its roots are in the victory of the workers and peasants and the victory of Lenin’s ideas about the building of a communist society. The Revolution gave it voice, ideas, images and songs, and therefore if we are to begin to appreciate Soviet literature, we must first understand just what the October Revolution did for the development of Russian and, for that matter, of world progressive literature in general. In the first place, this means understanding the ideas of the Revolution: and not just the ideas alone, but the process by which the new society was established as well.

p The entire history of Soviet society has found its reflection in Soviet literature: the overthrow of the bourgeois government by the workers and peasants in 1917, the Civil War and the defeat of the foreign intervention, the creation of new industry and agriculture under the first five-year plans, the Great Patriotic War against nazi Germany, and post-war construction. Literature has reflected the life of all strata of society, the life of the Party, the Armed Forces, and the Komsomol. Last but not least, it has reflected that which most of all promoted its development—the establishment and consolidation of the new state, and the guidance and influence of the Party and Government.

p Alexander Fadeyev, addressing an audience of scholars, writers and students in Paris in 1949, said: “How did Soviet literature begin? It was started by people like us. When, after the Civil War, we began to converge from all over our vast country—young Party members, and even more non-Party people—we were amazed to find how similar our life stories were, although each one of us had travelled his individual road. It was so with Furmanov, the author of Chapayev, the screen version of which was even more famous than the book. It was so with Mikhail Sholokhov, the youngest 11 and probably the most gifted among us. And it was so with Nikolai Ostrovsky, whose life was nothing short of heroism. Blind and totally paralysed as a result of the wounds he had received in the war, he wrote an immortal book about our generation-How the Steel Was Tempered. We came into literature wave upon wave, there were many of us then. Each brought with him his own personal experience, his own individuality. We were united by a sense of belonging to the new world and by our love for it.”

p The generation preceding Fadeyev’s, brilliantly represented by Alexei Tolstoi, and the next, war-time generation which produced Konstantin Simonov and Alexander Tvardovsky, and the post-war one, and the younger writers like Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Vasily Aksyonov who entered the literary scene in the 19505, and the writers who have appeared just recently-all of them, each new wave added its own new experience to Soviet literature. Personal experience—ideological and artistic—was derived from the historical experience of the whole people fighting for communism. Because the internal life of the country—what with the class struggle, the consolidation of the state, the economic development and social reorganisation—was so dynamic and wrought such a change in the mentality of the people, Soviet writers were faced with philosophical tasks of the first magnitude. It can be said without exaggeration that Russian literature had never had to face anything like the demands of those first decades following the Revolution. The Soviet epoch is one of the most exciting in world history for the scale and drama of its events in which passions ran so high. The power of renovation had probably never been so all-enveloping. Literature’s judge and guide at the decisive revolutionary turningpoint was the Leninist Party and Marxist-Leninist ideology.

p Not all the Russian writers were able to keep their balance at this sharp turning-point in history. Some refused to accept the Revolution and emigrated (physically or emotionally). Others bore up and manfully faced the storms of the new times. Not all found it easy to readjust themselves either ideologically or aesthetically. They had to overcome delusions and mistakes. But perhaps never before did life hold such an irresistible attraction for literature as it did at this “sharpest of sharp turning-points in history" (Lenin).

p In everything that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union says today about literature and the arts we recognise a further development of those ideas which Lenin expounded at the time of the Revolution. Our revolutionary yesterday and communist today are linked by the same Party line, which is the guiding principle in all our undertakings and achievements.

p Owing to the revolutionary development of the country and by force of circumstances, Soviet literature was obliged to embark on a 12 road of constant and indefatigable search. History imposed on it the task of telling the world “with its yet childish lips" (Fadeyev) about events, people and plans of a magnitude unknown in old Russian literature, for all the greatness of its classics. Soviet writers were called upon to express the new communist truth of the 2oth century, the Atomic Age, the age of communism. I recall Gorky’s words pronounced long before the Revolution. They were aimed against art that was shallow or too individualistic, against circumscribed truths that disunited men: “People become wholly absorbed in the truth of the day, and they cannot see the great truth which is crystallised from the blood and brain of living men and is immortal!”

p I should say that Soviet literature as a whole is characterised by a struggle to break free of the cramping confines of the circumscribed truth of the day and express the great truth of our age by presenting real, living people who have grasped this truth and are heroically building a new world.

Such is the essence of Soviet literature. Its new ideological content is a result of the new revolutionary essence of life itself, for all its contradictions, difficulties and negative sides. But while the literature of socialist realism is called upon to detect and generalise in artistic images all that is new in the creative endeavour of the people building communism, this does not at all mean that Soviet literature is renouncing its national heritage. Just as the Russian people in building communism today draw on progressive national traditions and display such traits of the national character as Russian revolutionary enthusiasm, so does Soviet literature follow the progressive traditions of Russian realism which gave us the great 19th-century novels, and the traditions of universal humanism inherited from Tolstoi, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin and Chekhov.