38

p The Socialist Revolution of 1917 caused a deep political rift in the writers’ midst. The political “division” into those for and against the Revolution was only the beginning of a deeper ideological rift. The whole course of development of Soviet literature can only be understood if viewed as a struggle for the creation of a literature that would be “part of the common cause of the proletariat" to use the words of Lenin. In every successive decade the problem of bringing literature into closer contact with life and making it play a more active role in the communist education of the people was posed and solved in a different manner as dictated by historical conditions.

p At every stage of the development of Soviet literature the Communist Party acted as an important factor influencing the whole literary process. In this respect, it represents an entirely new phenomenon in the history of world literature. As I go on, I shall acquaint readers with decisions adopted by the Central Committee, the statements made by Party leaders and the various documents which had a specially strong influence on the ideological development of our writers. But before we go any further, we must examine the philosophical and theoretical principles on which the Party bases its policy in respect to literature. We must dwell on the main concept, that of partisanship, which makes the cornerstone in the edifice of the new art being created in the land of socialism.

p What is partisanship in art? Is it not directly opposed to the idea of artistic freedom? Does it not imply an order to engage in tendentious propaganda which may find itself at variance with the truth of life? This is precisely how bourgeois ideologists represent partisanship in our literature, and this is precisely what they aim their criticism and ridicule at, posing as defenders of individual freedom.

p A correct understanding of this problem will provide us with a key to the understanding of much that is peculiar to the literary life of the Soviet Union. It will also help us to understand why the 39 Central Committee of the Communist Party takes all deviations from the ideological principles of Marxism-Leninism in literature so close to heart.

p Lenin gave a comprehensive philosophical substantiation to the principle of partisanship in many of his works. His philosophical work Materialism and Empiric-criticism (1909) is permeated with the spirit of partisanship, as is also his article about Lev Tolstoi. In this connection, I can hardly do better than quote Lenin’s important statement on literature and the arts recorded by Clara Zetkin in her memoirs.

p ”. . . The important thing is not our opinion of art. Nor is it important what art gives to a few hundreds or even a few thousands of a population of millions. Art belongs to the people. It must be deeply rooted in the very thick of the working masses. . . . It must unite the feelings, the thoughts and the will of these masses."   [39•1  (Author’s italics.)

p That is why Lenin also said that: ”. . . We (i.e., CommunistsK.Z.) must not stand idle and allow the chaos to develop in whatever direction it pleases. We must systematically guide this process and shape its results."  [39•2 

p Thus, for Lenin the task of intervening in the literary process, that is giving the writers ideological assistance, stemmed directly from his understanding of partisanship in art. Marx’s words that formerly the philosophers only explained the world while now they had to change it are fully applicable to Lenin. Lenin was indeed a philosopher who changed the world. For him, the most abstract speculative philosophical constructions had a direct connection with reality, and above all with social struggle. This also applies to aesthetic categories, including the concept of partisanship in literature and the arts.

p For Lenin this concept was imbued with profound philosophical meaning. He tied up the idea with the nature of human thinking and with his teaching on the principal link. Our thinking combines the sensations which give us our first signals of the outside world, the development of concepts and abstract ideas about this outside world and, finally, our practical knowledge of it. At all these stages an essential role is played by a person’s ideological attitude, which organises his relations with the outside world and his social invironment, and is the guiding principle that shapes people’s behaviour, being connected with their social relationships and their life’s aims.

p From the flood of life’s impressions the artist selects that which he wishes to portray. In the broad philosophical sense this can be 40 called a committed selection. Partisanship in this case may be interpreted not only in its social sense (as devotion to a party), but also as an aesthetic category.

p Beauty is bound up in one way or another with the concept of those elements of which it is compounded. The partisanship of socialist realism will be revealed to us in its aesthetic aspect through the portrayal of the beauty of the socialist forms of life, through the portrayal of the spiritual beauty of people struggling for communism.

p Some people writing about the partisanship of socialist realism (both in this country and abroad) wrongly equate it with tcndentiousness in art. Tendentiousncss means championing through definite social and political ideals, and is to be found as far back as Aeschylus and Aristophanes, Dante and Cervantes. Schiller’s drama Kabale und Liebe is charged with a definite political bias. Engels, who also wrote about tendentiousness in the art of the past, linked the integrity and strength of the characters portrayed by the Renaissance artists with the fact that these artists wholly shared the interests of their age and took part in the political and social struggle of the time.

p Partisanship in art can be considered as a further development of tendentiousness. It implies the artist’s deeper understanding of the philosophical meaning of his art, of its social purpose and his own role in the social struggle.

p Lenin’s theory of partisanship in literature is an offshoot of Marx’s and Engels’s views on the subject, and represents an elaboration and development of these ideas. His article “Party Organisation and Party Literature”, published in 1905, expounds the basic principles of this theory. Although written more than sixty years ago, the article is still frequently referred to in discussions on the nature of art, artistic freedom, and so on. This alone goes to show how vital the problems raised by Lenin were and the importance of the conclusions drawn by him for the development of world literature. In any case, none of the books published abroad on the subject of Soviet literature fail to bring this article up.

p Attempts have been made by critics and writers both at home and abroad to interpret Lenin’s article “Party Organisation and Party Literature" as simply referring to those practical aims which Lenin pursued in his desire to bring order into the Party press. This view is definitely erroneous. Lenin’s aim was not merely to settle the contradictions and the difference of opinion among the Party workers and help them to organise their activities more efficiently in the interests of the Party. In this article Lenin examined such problems of fundamental importance as: can an artist or a writer be entirely free and independent of society? If he cannot, then what 41 is he dependent upon in capitalist society? What will literature be like in socialist society?

p The best way to answer these questions is to quote Lenin himself: “One cannot live in society and be free from society. The freedom of the bourgeois writer, artist or actress is simply masked (or hypocritically masked) dependence on the money-bag, on corruption, on prostitution.

p “And we Socialists expose this hypocrisy and rip off the false labels, not in order to arrive at a non-class literature and art (that will be possible only in a socialist extra-class society), but to contrast this hypocritically free literature, which is in reality linked to the bourgeoisie, with a really free one that will be openly linked to the proletariat.

p “It will be a free literature, because the idea of socialism and sympathy with the working people, and not greed or carcerism, will bring ever new forces to its ranks. It will be a free literature, because it will serve, not some satiated heroine, not the bored ’upper ten thousand’ suffering from fatly degeneration, but the millions and tens of millions of working people—the flower of the country, its strength and its future. It will be a free literature, enriching the last word in the revolutionary thought of mankind with the experience and living work of the socialist proletariat, bringing about permanent interaction between the experience of the past (scientific socialism, the completion of the development of socialism from its primitive, Utopian forms) and the experience of the present (the present struggle of the worker comrades)."  [41•1 

p This statement is perfectly applicable to modern Russian literature as well. One might say that it is an embodiment of Lenin’s idea of what the literature of the future should be. Soviet literature reflects the interests not of the “top ten thousand" but of millions and millions of working people who represent the country’s elite. It draws its sustenance from the activity of the people building communism, describing that activity and expressing the ideals of the progressive sections of society which lead the country along the road to communism.

p When planning a new book, the Soviet writer—just like any other—is faced with a number of problems involving the selection and the aesthetic arrangement of his material (plot, imagery, style, etc.). In solving these problems the Soviet writer feels and regards himself as a participant in the people’s struggle for communism. He finds that his aesthetic problems are intrinsically bound up with his ideas and his world outlook. As Sholokhov put it, a Soviet author writes at the bidding of his heart and his conscience. And his heart 42 beats in unison with all that he serves, with that for which the Communist Party is struggling.

p The stream of images and life’s impressions crowding the mind of the artist is always organised into a pattern by a definite idea. The attempts of some writers to give a sort of tape-recording or a shorthand report of the fleeting thoughts and impressions streaming through their mind (for instance, James Joyce or Dos Passos), or in other words, attempts to demonstrate raw, unorganised material, can make no claim to any great aesthetic significance. This way could well lead to the tape-recording of delirious ravings (of someone sleeping, drugged or demented) being passed off for an artistic achievement. But this means a withdrawal from Man. It means dehumanising art. However, abandoning all ideological positions in art is in itself a sort of ideological position, negative though it is. Asserting chaos as an alternative to organisation is also a world outlook of sorts. But this is a stand worthy of an ostrich, the position of a creature which hides its head in the sand when it senses trouble, instead of squarely facing the truth. Agnosticism is neither an evasion nor a renunciation of philosophy. It is another philosophy, a defeatist one.

p Modernistic literature, literature “without ideas”, without plot, theme or even sense (like abstract paintings) may still be of some interest to a comparatively small circle of bourgeois readers, those “top ten thousand" mentioned by Lenin. It may give them a thrill and even amuse them with its absurdity. But the reading public at large, the majority who seek aesthetic pleasure and enlightenment in books, are left completely unimpressed by the sort of literature which is manufactured for the “top ten thousand”. It is socially alien to them.

p Contrarily, books which by their aesthetic pattern and the ideals they champion show their affinity with the interests of the masses acquire nation-wide significance. They are not “just something to read”, to kill time. They become part of the people’s spiritual life. They inspire people, give them solace, advice, and aesthetic delight.

p Because of its partisanship, ours is a literature of the people and for the people. Partisanship and affinity with the people are interrelated features of the new world’s free literature. This is how Lenin understood it; and such is Soviet literature.

p The desire to address the widest circle of readers and to embody the vital interests of the people in their books was common to all the greatest writers of pre-revolutionary Russia as well.

p But affinity with the people meant one thing to the Russian classics and something quite different to modern Soviet writers. In his article about Lev Tolstoi, Lenin wrote that it took a revolution to make his works known to the entire nation. The same can be said about Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgcnev, Nekrasov, Herzen, 43 Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and other Russian authors, who did not actually become known throughout the country until after the Revolution of 1917. This was due partly to the fact that two-thirds of the population were illiterate, partly to the fact that the classics were brought out in insufficiently large editions.

p The very notion of affinity with the people was different in the ipth century because the people’s life was different. Lenin divided the revolutionary movement in Russia into three stages, and the concept of affinity with the people underwent a change with every stage. At the first stage, its spokesmen were revolutionary noblemen like Pushkin and Lermontov. In the second stage, revolutionary democrats came to the fore. Their works were already closer in spirit to the people, whose life they reflected more fully. This new stage is best expressed in the works of Nekrasov, Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov and Saltykov-Shchedrin. The third and last stage is distinguished by the historical rise of the working class which, in alliance with the peasantry, won political power in 1917. The proletarian revolution brought radical changes into Russian life, and under Soviet power the people themselves rose to a new level of social consciousness and culture, which even affected the Russian character, as we have already seen. In the works of Soviet writers from Gorky and Mayakovsky to Sholokhov, affinity with the people is displayed in a new aspect, illumined by party spirit in the struggle for communism.

p In Soviet literature we find an alliance of life’s truth with the social ideals of the writer. In the old society, a realist writer who wanted to be faithful to the truth of life, often found himself contradicting his own political sympathies. Thus, although Balzac and Gogol were monarchists they actually served the cause of revolution with their writings.

p The ideals of kinship with the people upheld by the Russian writers of the past were varied in their historical meaning, and Soviet literature rests upon the more progressive and democratic traditions of our classics.

p A word about these traditions. The Russian classics had a keen sense of responsibility to the people. All the great Russian writers—Pushkin, Lermontov, Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, Nekrasov, Turgenev, Herzen, Lev Tolstoi, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and Gorky—believed that the purpose of their work was to reflect the pain and anger, the joy and hopes and the sense of beauty which they drew from the life of their people. Suffice it to recall Lev Tolstoi’s famous treatise What is Art? (1898). For all the ideological contradictions contained in this work, when it came to the most important thing—that is, stating his own social standpoint and his views on the relation of art to life and the role of the individual—the first principle Tolstoi 44 invariably stressed was that a writer must not forget his responsibility to the people.

p In this treatise Tolstoi writes that the art of the future will not simply continue today’s art, but will emerge on the basis of new and entirely different principles that will have nothing in common with the ones by which the art of the upper classes is guided today. The judges of this art will be the entire people and not just the wealthy class alone, the way it is now. For a work of art to be considered good, to be approved and popularised, it will have to satisfy the requirements not of the few who live in identical and often unnatural conditions, but of the whole people, of the large mass of people living a natural life of toil. Nor will the works of art be produced merely by those few men from the elite minority who either belong to the propertied classes or are closely connected with them, but by gifted men from the entire population, who ever will show an ability and aptitude for artistic activity.

p The time of which Tolstoi was writing has now come. No one can fail to see how close the traditions of the Russian classics are to us today. And they are further developed by our Soviet literature. I could cite hundreds of statements made by other Russian authors, besides Lev Tolstoi, on the importance of books being written by, of and for the people, but I shall limit myself to quoting a passage from Saltykov-Shchedrin, a great Russian satirist of the 19th century. His statement, besides proclaiming the popular principle in literature, also speaks of the educational role of literature, and in this sense he is not shy of using the word “ propaganda”. Such concepts as “literature” and “the people" are used with a very precise meaning.

p This is how this revolutionary-democratic writer reasoned in 1869, a century ago: “Literature and propaganda are one and the same thing. This may be an old truth, but literature itself is still so little aware of it that there is good reason for repeating it. Every great, bright thought that literature voices and every new truth it discovers wins it so many converts that we must not fail to treasure this precious quality it has to conquer darkness and win over the most stubbornly prejudiced people. Roughly, the same can be said about delusions as well. Literature which propagandises a carefree, happy-go-lucky existence has no chance, of course, of imposing its everlasting influence on the world, but it may retard progress considerably and from time to time deal it such blows as will be all the more painful because the agents of progress are mere men, after all, and as such are not always indifferent to blows received.”

p Five years earlier Saltykov-Shchedrin had written that ”. . . Literature undertakes to call forth these new forces from the darkness, point them out to society and convince it that thereafter its existence 45 will be fatalistically bound up with them. Literature can have no other duties and no right to give society anything other than that which lies latent within itself.”

p I trust my readers will excuse me for this slight digression in order to present the views of a Russian writer who was not as well known, perhaps, to the general reading public abroad as Lev Tolstoi and Dostoyevsky and who, moreover, lived a hundred years ago. But Saltykov-Shchedrin did more than play an important role in cultivating a revolutionary self-awareness among the Russian intelligentsia. His views, like the views of the revolutionary democrats Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov and Herzen who lived earlier, show how deeply rooted were those traditions in Russian literature according to which a writer could not be regarded as a person wholly preoccupied with himself alone. The Russian classics were always aware of their responsibility to the people, and this is why the thesis “art for art’s sake" always went against their grain.

p The thesis of partisanship as one of the basic elements of socialist realism means a continuation and development of these traditions in the new historical conditions. The task which Soviet literature has set itself is to point out the new forces to society and convince it that its very existence is inevitably bound up with them.

p In his essay Lev Tolstoi Maxim Gorky records what Tolstoi once said against anarchism and the so-called “absolute freedom of the individual”. Here is an excerpt from Gorky’s account:

p “I remember how Sulerzhitsky got hold of Prince Kropotkin’s puny little brochure, got inflamed by it and for the rest of the day told everyone about the wisdom of anarchism, philosophising ruefully on the subject.

p “Tolstoi said to him with some annoyance: ’Oh, stop it, Lyovushka, you make me tired. You’re like a parrot, harping on this word freedom, freedom. But what does it mean? For if you were to attain freedom in your sense of the word what, do you imagine, would happen? In the philosophical sense, there’d be a bottomless void, and in life, in actual life you’d become a sluggard, a beggar. What ties will you, a free man in your sense of the word, have with life, with people? Look at the birds, they’re free but still they build nests. You won’t even bother to build a nest, you’ll satisfy your sexual urges just anywhere, like a dog. Think about this seriously and you’ll see, you’ll feel that freedom in the final sense is emptiness, an infinite void.’ He frowned angrily, and after a minute added a little more calmly: ’Christ was free, Buddha was too, yet both took upon themselves the sins of the world and of their own free will surrendered to the bondage of earthly life. No one went further than that, no one. And you, and we—oh, what’s the use of 46 talking! We, all of us, seek freedom from our duties to our neighbour, whereas it was precisely our awareness of these duties that made us human in the first place, and if it had not been for this awareness we’d be living like animals.

p This was Tolstoi. But even Dostoyevsky, who saw no creative force in revolution and wrote his anti-revolutionary novel The Possessed, even Dostoyevsky, a religious man who was against social transformations, hated the system of bourgeois exploitation. Even Dostoyevsky realised the falseness of the slogan of freedom in capitalist conditions. In the chapter entitled “About the Bourgeois" in his book Winter Notes on Summer Impressions he wrote: “What is liberte? Freedom. What freedom? Equal freedom for all to do what they please within the limits of the law. When can you do anything you please? When you have a million. Does freedom give everyone a million? No. What is a man without a million? The man without a million is not a man who does whatever he pleases but the one to whom anything anyone pleases is done.”

p Actually, Dostoyevsky’s writings, motivated by his love for the “insulted and the humiliated”, was a protest against this situation where anything at all could be done to a man.

p Such were the views even of Tolstoi and Dostoyevsky, the authors whom Gorky rebuked for poeticising the “Asiatic” anarchic traits in the Russian character.

p Before and after Tolstoi similar thoughts against the so-called “absolute freedom of the individual" were voiced by many writers: Gogol, Herzen, Saltykov-Shchedrin, the revolutionary-democrat critics Belinsky and Chernyshevsky, the poet Nekrasov and others. And, of course, Gorky, who wrote more than anyone else on the subject, and who sarcastically called the claims to this so-called absolute freedom “a tape-worm of individualism".

p From the philosophical and theoretical point of view absolute freedom is unattainable because man, whatever his level of cultural development, has always been and still is a creature of historical determinism compelled to reckon with the objective conditions of life.

p This explains why the Soviet press spoke out so sharply against abstract paintings and sculpture, and also against certain films and books which give a distorted picture of real life.

p Would you call this meddling in the artist’s work? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that artists are set certain limits for the manifestation of their anarchistic self-will which might otherwise threaten to violate the natural norms of the community. Such limitations also exist under bourgeois democracy, for instance with respect to pornographic films and literature (unfortunately, this is not practised everywhere and not always consistently even where it is). There are 47 also other restrictions in capitalist society, restrictions of a political nature, for instance.

p In Soviet society where the policy in respect to literature as “a part of the general proletarian cause" (to use Lenin’s expression) is more frank and more consistently implemented, the criticism of anything that goes against the interests of the people is also more frank than in the West.

p The ideologists of bourgeois democracy in the West are trying to present the Communist Party’s policy in respect to literature as a violation of the very principles of democracy. This surely invites the question: what sort of democracy? The people who are straining all their efforts to build up a new economy and a new culture in the Soviet Union, determined to eliminate centuries of backwardness, these people can hardly be expected to settle for the kind of “freedom” which serves as a breeding ground for semi-pornographic films, strip-tease, trashy comics and literature devoid of all ideas.

p Art that is wholly preoccupied with entertainment and sex is obviously unsuitable for Soviet conditions where the struggle for communism is being waged on a nation-wide scale. Naturally, each society creates and cultivates the sort of literature and art which best answers its spiritual requirements and fits into the pattern of its life. The question of the Party interfering in their work never occurred to either Mayakovsky, Sholokhov, Fadeyev or Alexei Tolstoi. They felt no discrepancy between their creative plans and the Party’s interests. Mayakovsky, for instance, wanted “the pen to be given the status of a bayonet" and poetry to be discussed as seriously at Party congresses as the output of iron and steel. Alexander Fadeyev, speaking at the Writers’ Union in 1951 on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday said that he still dreamed of writing his major work, that he still had to sing the main song of his life: a song about the Communist Party.

p All this goes to show that there have always been and always will be different types of writers, taking their dependence on outside circumstances, their determinism, in various ways. Pushkin wrote:

I need another, better freedom.
Dependent on the tsar, dependent on the people,
What difference? It’s all the same.
1 want to be subservient to none,
I want to serve and please myself alone,
And not prevaricate or cower
To gain a higher rank or power. . . .

p

(From “Pindemonti”.)

p Of Mayakovsky it can also be said that it was himself he served and pleased when he extolled Lenin and the Party. Pushkin, too, 48 was a people’s poet. Yet his sense of involvement in the people’s struggle was different. He extolled freedom and between the lines revolted against Nicholas I. Mayakovsky, by extolling Lenin, extolled freedom. Herein lies the historical distinction and the historical connection between these two Russian poets.

The principle of partisanship advanced by Lenin in the literature of the new society answers the new historical conditions. In order to make the leap from the “kingdom of necessity" to the “kingdom of freedom" (to use Engels’s expression) it is imperative for the new society to mobilise all its forces, tense itself for the effort and exercise the strictest self-discipline. It is to this sharpest of sharp turning-points in history, this tensest of periods that Lenin’s principle of partisanship in literature corresponds. The old bourgeois world may not like this principle, but then that is only natural. After all, it was born of the renunciation of the old world, and it is one of the weapons used in the battle with the old world.