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p What characterises Soviet literature of the 19205 as a whole? How did it develop in those years? In the West, this period is not infrequently described as a sort of golden age in Soviet literature. True, in those years Soviet literature was mostly judged from hearsay—I remember this well and all the better for living almost the whole of 1926 in Paris. People had a very vague knowledge of it. Those newspapers which were hostile to us spoke of Soviet literature with biting irony. Translations into foreign languages were made of books in which the West-European readers could find some criticism of Soviet society and the new way of life. To be sure, Russia in those days did present a picture of backwardness and poverty. One had to have a progressive, revolutionary world outlook to be able to penetrate the outward shell into the essence of the historical processes and see the forces which had undertaken to completely transform the old, backward Russia. The majority of the literary intelligentsia of the time and the writers of the older generation had not prepared themselves for writing from this standpoint which would have enabled them to show the phenomena of the new life in the process of development and to give readers a glimpse into the future. This is why the West clutched at such works of literature as Mikhail Bulgakov’s plays and his story Fateful Eggs (1925), Pilnyak’s novels and Panteleimon Romanov’s Comrade Kislyakov which was published in France under the title Three Pairs of Silk Stockings. Does anyone still remember that dime novel? What the story boiled down to was that the intelligentsia had been reduced to such straights that a foreigner could buy any Russian woman for just three pairs of silk stockings. Plays like Valentin Katayev’s Squaring the Circle were translated. It is a witty play, but is faithfully modelled on the old French vaudeville comedy where everything hinges on misunderstandings, confusion and muddle between lovers, misaddressed remarks, and so on.

p The 19205 were the years when the foundations of Soviet literature were laid in conditions of sharp, ideological class struggle, when the new type of writer was shaped, and the first important 75 works of socialist realist literature were produced. Readers began to lose interest in many of those writers who (like Pilnyak) chiefly played up the seamy side of Soviet life. The novels of Serafimovich, Furmanov and Fadeyev, who had grasped the essence of the historical process, grew in popularity and importance.

p Last but not least, the 19203 saw the great poet of the revolutionary epoch, Vladimir Mayakovsky, in his prime. In the eyes of the whole world he came to symbolise those great and splendid changes which the socialist revolution had made in Russia.

p But let us return to the story of our literary life in those years. The problem of creating a new socialist culture and literature was not really tackled until after the end of the Civil War, when the armies of the tsarist generals Kornilov, Denikin, Kolchak and the various White atamans in the South of Russia, Siberia and the Far East, had been defeated, the intervention forces of the fourteen powers headed by Britain and France had been routed, and the new Soviet regime had been finally established. The entire life of the country was entering an important new phase. The immediate task was to prove the viability of the new principles of labour organisation and production relations.

p Methods of compulsion had prevailed in the preceding period, known as war communism, when war was on and the entire country resounded with the roar of guns. The new period was marked by the adoption, at the instance of Lenin, of a New Economic Policy, known as the NEP. Small private enterprises, shops, commercial agencies and publishing houses, were opened in the towns. Although all the key positions, such as large factories, banks and land, remained in the hands of the victorious proletariat, the New Economic Policy changed even the ordinary street scene. This apparent revival of the recently defeated enemy perplexed the romantically inclined poets from the Proletkult (Proletarian Culture) workshops.  [75•1  It also perplexed that part of the old literary intelligentsia who, like Blok, had allied themselves with the proletarian revolution for reasons of the highest moral order. Thus, for instance, Marietta Shaginyan said (in her article “How I Taught Weaving”, 1920) that the writers welcomed the Revolution in the first place because of the moral demands which it advanced. The maximalism of these moral demands appealed to the writers most strongly and evoked a response in their hearts. The New Economic Policy, on the other 76 hand, with its seeming renunciation of that heroic radicalism which marked the period of the Civil War was not understood by everyone.

p Lev Nikulin, a well-known author, later described this period picturesquely in his memoirs entitled Time, Space and Movement. He recalled how the signs of revived capitalism had shocked him after his front-line impressions.

p “We came back to Moscow at the end of August, 1922. Myasnitskaya Street was gaudy with shop signs. ’Haberdashery. N. Zakharov and Isidor Krants’ ran across the whole frontage of the building which we had left bearing the laconic inscription ’ Glavbum’; the place where I had been issued with coupons for men’s hats (for the members of our mission) had the lettering on the sign, ’M. Mezheritsky. In Business since 1889’, freshly covered with gold paint. ’The Mutual Credit Society’ announced that it was in existence, and ’I. Majoffis, Jeweller’ was displaying an assortment of wedding rings and silver dippers painted with Vasnetsov’s bogatyrs and bogatyr steeds, on trays lined with cherry coloured velvet. To tell the truth, we were perplexed by this splendour, and it planted the seed of alarm in our souls.”

p Alas, all this splendour, or what the young writer fancied it was after life in the trenches, was rather shoddy. Those long years of war—World War I and the Civil War—left Russia looking pretty drab, or in other words the way it actually was. The Revolution had removed the thin veneer of wealth and well-being belonging to the aristocracy and the capitalists, and now that they had fled abroad the country was left with its miserable hovels, poverty-stricken towns, cobblestones, wretched, peeling houses badly in need of repair, and poor lighting.

p Wherever you turned you saw a picture of poverty and backwardness. It took a genius like Lenin to see through the years and visualise Russia ablaze with electric light, built up with splendid new houses lining broad, asphalt streets, and to trust in the people like he did, confident that they would be able to achieve all this with their heroic creative labour.

p H. G. Wells, who visited Russia at the time, wrote a book of impressions about the new revolutionary country and called it Russia in the Shadows.

p But life has an amazing ability to heal its wounds and sprout new corn and flowers where ruins still smoulder. This applies especially to life in socialist society with its system of planning and organisation of labour. With tremendous enthusiasm the working people set about restoring the old factories and plants. Fyodor Gladkov described the beginning of peacetime construction in his novel Cement (1925) which scored a great success with readers in 77 the Soviet Union and abroad. This success, however, was due not so much to the writer’s skill or the book’s artistic merits, as to its informative character.

p The period of rehabilitation was completed by the middle of the 19205, and the Fourteenth Congress of the Communist Party adopted a programme for Russia’s industrialisation which provided for the construction of new factories and plants, with priority given to heavy industry and the machine-tool building industry. This total re-equipment and reconstruction of Russia continues to this day. But it was then, back in the mid-twenties, that the slogan to overtake and surpass the developed capitalist countries was proclaimed, and it was then that the groundwork was laid for that rapid pace of development which made this a realisable ambition for the first time in Russia’s history.

p Looking back through the mist of time at the period I am describing, it appears as exciting and as full of contradictions as youth generally is. And indeed it was the youth of Soviet literature, the season of search, experiment, and budding talent. Early in the 19205 publication began of the first new literary magazines: Pechat i Revolutsia, Krasnaya Nov, Novy Mir, Oktyabr, Molodaya Gvardia and others.

p From the outset these magazines published articles and stories contributed by both the established authors of the pre-revolutionary generation and by gifted beginners. These young writers who had just finished fighting in the Civil War came to the editorial offices of our first magazines still wearing their army coats.

p The first question which confronted Russian literature immediately after the October Revolution was: to accept or not to accept Soviet power? After the end of the Civil War the question resolved itself. Those who did not accept Soviet power gradually drifted abroad. And the ones who did were faced with new ideological problems: how should they interpret the new hero, the historical tasks of the Revolution and its aims? What had actually happened in Russia and where was she heading?

p The prevailing genre during the years of the Civil War was poetry-rousing and satirical verses, or introspective poems that begged the reader to turn away from what was happening about him, withdraw into his inner world and find oblivion in poetic visions.

p The 1920s mark the birth of Soviet fiction. If we were to classify the writers according to trends, very roughly of course, we would find that actually they fall into just two major trends, despite the fact that the 19205 were notable precisely for their abundance of literary groupings and associations. There was the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), the “Kuznitsa” (Smithy) society, the Peasant Writers’ Society, Mayakovsky’s literary group 78 “Left Front" (LEF), and the constructivists whose programme was based on principles of organisation, of kulturträger-ship, which in conditions of our economic dislocation and poverty had an especially strong appeal.

p Nevertheless, I repeat, we shall not go far wrong if we divide the writers into two main trends. What distinguished the first group was that in their depiction of reality they never lost sight of the beckoning light ahead—the aim set before the new society by the Party and Lenin. The second group were more impressed by the many contradictions inherent in the life about them which, as I have said, was full of sharp contrasts in those years and not very attractive outwardly. The first saw Russia as “Washed with Blood"— the title of Artem Vesely’s romantic novel—but still advancing towards its historic goal. The second saw Russia devastated and in the shadows, and in their books the horizon was obscured by the dark clouds of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and corruption—all of which was really there but only as the negative, dark side of reality and not its decisive aspect.

p Naturally enough, the theme of the Civil War had the strongest appeal for both the authors of the pre-revolutionary generation and, especially, for the young writers just back from the fighting fronts. It was the first great experience of the new society which had just established its right to existence, and it was natural that it should be the theme of the first novels. How was this experience to be interpreted? The writers belonging to the first group accentuated the heroism of the struggle. The others were affected most strongly by the spectacle of the “muzhiks’ war" with its brutality and filth: indeed, most of the Red soldiers had been “muzhiks”, peasants who had changed their antediluvian bast sandals and homespuns for the greatcoats and tall leather boots which the state had issued them with (and of which, incidentally, there were not enough to go around).

p One of the first novels about the Civil War which won immediate popularity was Dmitry Furmanov’s Cbapayev (1923). It is a semidocumentary and semi-autobiographical book. The author had served with Chapayev, the legendary hero of the Civil War, as his division commissar. Although Furmanov was a young writer (and he died as a young man in 1926) he succeeded in moulding a very impressive image of a truly popular hero, an embodiment of inexhaustible energy and purposefulncss in establishing the new state system. When you read his novel (which became widely known from the film of the same title made by the Vasilyev brothers) you see whom Lenin had in mind when he assured H. G. Wells, who was polite but doubting, that the Russian people would be able to rebuild their country.

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p The early short stories and novels of Sholokhov, Vsevolod Ivanov, Malyshkin, Vishnevsky, Leonov (Badgers), and Fedin (Towns and Years’) were all inspired by the events of the Civil War.

p This same theme, however, is rendered in an entirely different manner by Boris Pilnyak. He was unquestionably an original, talented writer, and in his collection of stories which came out in 1919 under the general title Past and Gone he presented the confusion of life in those years in the style of topical satire. He was indeed the first to write about the revolutionary events in Russia.

p Boris Pilnyak (1891-1938), whose real name was Vogau, was born into the family of a veterinary surgeon in a village near Saratov. His romantic infatuation with the Revolution was blended with his exaltation of dark, elemental “muzhik” forces which the Revolution is supposed to have released. He takes up this theme from various angles in many of his works, among them: The Deadly Fascinates, Machines and Wolves, The Barren Year, and The Third Capital.

p In Machine and Wolves he writes: “In 1917, Stepan Razin was at large in Russia again—hostile to towns, to statehood, to trains. He ravished Russia. ... A jolly and frightening snowstorm swept across Russia, howling, roaring with laughter, and wanting to ravish everything in its path.”

p Pilnyak gives this liberation of the muzhik elemental forces a peculiar admixture of sexual freedom and carnal anarchy. The people in his stories are always making love, greedily and hurriedly, falling into each other’s arms with casual abandon. The country is at war, there is hunger and devastation everywhere, but their sensual delight in life is only sharpened by the possible nearness of death. This blend of sensuality, death and revolutionary ardour attains its zenith in the story Ivan and Maria. The main character is a titled woman, a Princess, who becomes head of the CHEKA. She is an erotomaniac and executions give her a perverted thrill. She even says that the whole Revolution “smells of sex organs".

p The chaos of the Civil War epoch, the striking contrasts, the mass migration from one part of the country to the other in quest of food, and the desolate waiting rooms at the ruined railway stations where men, women and children, crawling with lice slept on their bundles, made the main theme of Pilnyak’s romantic canvases. All of this was presented in the manner of a romantic Grand Guignol. Pilnyak’s prose style is especially suited to his purpose of rendering the music of chaos. The plots of most of his stories are meant to stagger the reader with the paradoxes of revolutionary Russia. Pilnyak describes princesses and priests who turn Bolshevik; muzhiks who become governors and governors who become night watchmen; he describes Communists from among the anarchists; bears at large in 80 the streets; the torments of “Slav souls”; drunkards who dream of communism and Communists who become drunkards.

p It is not surprising that until the first industrial achievements under the five-year plan programmes made people abroad ponder on the reasons for these socialist accomplishments of backward Russia, Pilnyak’s books enjoyed considerable popularity with foreign readers, especially in the United States.

p Scrafimovich (The Iron Flood) and Malyshkin (The Fall of Dahir) are writers of a different trend. In contrast to Pilnyak’s characters, the commander in The Iron Flood is an embodiment of self-discipline and purposefulness. Serafimovich describes the march of an insurgent army, surrounded on all sides by General Pokrovsky’s Cossacks. This army was not a regular military unit, but a disorganised, semi-anarchic mob, capable of killing even the commander they had themselves elected. The story is constructed as an epic narrative, the mood changing now to romantic lyricism now to tragic rhetoric. The human avalanche presents a picture of spontaneous heroism, suffering, terror and strength: exhausted, barefooted men and women, children dying in their mothers’ arms, scenes of madness, despair, love and cruelty. . . . On the other hand there is Commander Kozhukh—proletarian staunchness, composure and purposefulness personified. Kozhukh is a gifted organiser, and does not have to use coercion all the time because he knows how to appeal to the best in men. So, at the end of the march, when this insurgent army breaks through the enemy encirclement, the men carry their commander on their shoulders and the women cry out in admiration, enthusing over Kozhukh’s blue eyes as though they had never noticed them before.

p The Iron Stream is rather naturalistic in its idiom, and yet I would call it a romantic novel.

p Another prominent prose writer of that period was Isaac Babel. His style was a blend of extraordinary emotionality and vividness of expression with the terseness and lightness of French prose.

p Isaak Babel was born in Odessa in 1894 into the family of a tradesman. He was brought up on the Talmud in a Jewish school, and at the same time studied the French language and literature. (His first stories were written in French.)

p Babel’s literary legacy is not very large: two collections of stories Odessa Stories and Konarmia and two plays: Sundown and Maria.

p In his earlier stories he gives free rein to his apparently inexhaustible imagination. The following sentence from his Italian Sun should show what I mean: “Sidorov, the bored murderer, tore the pink wool of my imagination into shreds and dragged me into the corridors of his rational madness.”

p His word-painting evokes tangible images which you can smell, 81 see and feel. There is a concentration, a dreamy earnestness in his manner. “The blue roads flowed past me like sprays of milk squirting from many breasts,” he writes in Italian Sun.

p In most of his stories we find such “physical” comparisons as: “the wine smelt of sunlight and bedbugs”, or “the girl’s feet had the sweetish stench of slaughter-house beef.”

p The chief characters of his Odessa Stories are the local apaches and picturesque gangsters speaking a peculiar solemnly-ironical jargon.

p Babel’s Konarmia (Cavalry) is composed of scenes and episodes from the march of Budyonny’s Red Cavalry in the war with Poland in 1920. Babel served in the Cavalry and describes the campaign from personal experience. The fabric of these stories is woven of an original mixture of pride in and admiration for the Soviet soldiers, with superimposed pictures of violence, hand-to-hand fighting, and the execution of spies. The peasant masses are portrayed thus: “Monstrous, unbelievable Russia shuffled in her bast shoes on either side of the train, stamping like a herd of lice.” And again: “The typhus-ridden rustics pushed before them the hearse bearing the customary soldiers’ death.” (The Son of the Rabbi).

p However, it should not be imagined that such morbid notes prevail in Konarmia. The battle scenes are rendered emotionally: “Their gorgeous flags mounted on guilt poles, adorned with heavy velvet tassels, swayed in the clouds of orange dust. The riders had an air of regal and arrogant coolness.” (From Afonka Bida).

p His art had strong inner links with the Russian revolution, with its great aims, its dream of mankind’s revival, and its thirst for beauty. But his manner of presenting life, his style packed with romantic hyperbole, his very artistic method testified to his ideological weakness. After all, only a writer whose imagination had run away with him could have compared a crowd of Russian peasants to a herd of lice, and because he was so carried away by his flights of fancy the historical meaning of this crowd eluded him entirely.

p Many of the young and gifted writers appearing on the literary scene in the 19205 were unduly fascinated by the country’s backwardness, poverty and the negative aspects of life generally. And life, alas, did abound in negative aspects then. When a new house is being built, and even more so when an old one is being reconstructed, the first thing that strikes the eye is the rubble heaped round the building site. But if you know what the architect has set out to construct you will be able to envisage the future palace from the bare framework alone. At least you will be able to appreciate the architect’s idea, and want to know more about the project. A writer who cannot see beyond the rubble will, in spite of himself, adopt a contradictory attitude to the actual process of realising the project.

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p This is what happened to the gifted writer Mikhail Zoshchcnko. There is no gainsaying that his satirical storics—and Zoshchcnko was above all a satirist—have their great merits. He has a fine contempt for Philistinism. But there are two planes to all his stories—one shows his “little man’s" absorption in petty cares and trivial interests, and the other—the way his human dignity is hurt by this philistine form of existence. Zoshchenko displays the same warm affection for his characters as Chekhov. But his humanism has a dual nature: he ridicules sentimentality, yet he waxes sentimental on the subject of ridicule. He satirises the “little man" and yet he also wants to console him.

p Zoshchenko’s funny little man of the nineteen-twenties is usually a junior clerk. There is nothing dramatic about his plight, nothing claiming the attention of society (unlike the tragic poverty described by Yuri Olesha). He is quite willing to laugh at the ridiculous situation he has landed in, and will dismiss his troubles by making a joke of them. Zoshchenko’s racy style suits these stories perfectly. But his attempt in The Blue Book to render some scenes from world history in the same “glib patter" (to quote Gorky) was a complete fiasco. The form clashed with the content, and the result was an anecdote.

p Passive lyricism is the underlying mood in Zoshchenko’s writings; both his satire and his mocking language are no more than a screen for his vulnerable heart.

p This was also the period of Yuri Olesha’s rise to fame with his novel Envy (1927). Olesha makes a philosophical study of the clash between two truths, two worlds—the old and the new. The new world is personified by Babichev, director of a food industry trust, a “great sausage-maker, confectioner and cook”. Babichev is full of animal spirits, he is an optimist, he loves a good business deal, and believes in calling a spade a spade. Ranged beside him are Volodya and Valya, a young student and his girl, healthy young people who happily bask in thoughtlessness.

p The old world wears a shabby look—it is personified by Andrei Babichev’s dissipated brother Ivan, an ace among the rakes, a crank bordering on idiocy who walks about the streets hugging a pillow, and another young man of no fixed occupation, Cavalierov by name. But then the whole rainbow of human emotions and feelings, all the subtleties of perception which Olesha describes with such brilliance, belong to them, to the people of the old world. According to the plot of the story they meet their end, and the people of the new world triumph. But only according to the plot. The entire “music” is so constructed that the new world plays tunes on a sausage, and a whole symphony departs with the Cavalierovs. Olesha’s underlying theme is a sort of Chaplin series about a 83 little, defenceless man, with an individualistically blossoming soul and dreams of happiness, who is denied understanding by the soulless, machine world of big business, by a state in love with pork. Envy is an ethical novel, probing and laying bare the deepest conflict of our epoch, the conflict between a man’s right to personal happiness and the general weal. But here the plea for the individual, for the small man, is voiced more loudly and more convincingly. At that time Pasternak wrote in his poetry To a Friend dedicated to Pilnyak:

p Do I not use the five-year plan for measure?
Do I not jail with it and rise?
But what about the thing that in my chest I treasure,
That die-hardness, the hardest one to die?

p As if in answer to the poet’s question, Olesha replied that emotionally, as an artist, he could not really feel yet the heroic poetry of socialist construction. The romance of the personal was stronger in him than the romance of the state’s cause. Gorky said in one of his articles that in his opinion many of the writers suffered from a sort of “emotional illiteracy": in their minds they understood and fully sympathised with socialist revolution and approved of the revolutionary changes in general, but their emotions lagged behind their reason.

p Last but far from least among the writers of the 19205 we should mention Mikhail Prishvin, a superb artist who chose for himself the neutral theme of nature and life in nature. It cannot be said of him that he withdrew from politics altogether, but nonetheless when the entire country was subordinated to the main task of asserting the new ideas and consolidating the new statehood Prishvin always kept away from the topical questions and major issues. Still, Prishvin’s books are genuine works of art, inspired by his love of man and all that is beautiful in nature, and imbued with a faith in life. In the same way as the classics influence the shaping of our minds and emotions, so will Prishvin, with his exquisitely subtle appreciation of nature—its springs, dawns, sunsets, rivers, lakes, fields and skies, help our young people to start out in life the richer in spirit for this feeling for beauty.

p Mikhail Prishvin (1873-1954) was a trained agronomist, and having stored up some interesting observations on the habits of birds in the Karelian lake district, he put them down in a book The Land of Undisturbed Birds which came out in 1906. He made no claim to any artistic merits, but the book was immediately recognised as the work of a first-class writer and it served to launch him on his literary career. He took shape as a writer in the period of the first Russian revolution of 1905, and the years following its defeat. 84 At this time many intellectuals and writers who like Prishvin had taken part in the revolutionary movement renounced it and turned to mysticism, decadence, intellectual emotionalism (like Leonid Andreyev) and so forth. Whatever Prishvin had of the petty- bourgeois intellectual in him would not let him become a proletarian writer, but then his wholesomeness as a realist artist, which was strongest in him, kept him safe from the putrid forms of bourgeois art. Later, Prishvin wrote in The Home of Cranes: “I solved my own problem by admitting that it was not the revolution but myself who was ’redundant’, and by withdrawing not into the world of petty, everyday cares with Chekhov’s heroes, but into that life where poetry is born, where there is no essential difference between man and beast. What guided me there was my long dormant instinct of a pathfinder and hunter.”

p Prishvin describes his escape into this depersonalised world and his gradual return to the life of men in his autobiographical novel The Ogre’s Chain (1923-1930). The main character is Alpatov, an engineer. He matures “between the cross-currents of decadent aestheticism and revolutionary asceticism" to gradually arrive at the “open sea of natural creativity" where all living things obey the supreme law: “if you think the time has come for you to die, plant rye for those who will come after you”. The whole novel is written in the tone of a confession and has two distinct converging lines: the author’s growing acceptance of the new reality, and the legend about Alpatov. But once again this reality is not a historical, social reality, but an awareness of the new creativity going on all about him, with the proletarian revolution as its highest expression.

p The temporal and the eternal, the historical and the natural are combined in Prishvin’s work. His main theme is nature, the scene of infinite creativity, to which he devoted his best works: Berendey’s Springs, The Home of Cranes, Gin-seng and Spring Is Coming. No other writer in Russian literature has ever spoken of nature with such poetic power and understanding. He wants to discover the human in nature, in its creative genius. He wrote that he was obeying an inner urge to discover “the myth of things created in the innermost depths of nature".

p In his stories and charming thumbnail sketches he writes about the early morning frost, the migration of birds, the taming of a hedgehog and the habits of a field mouse as if they were the most exciting myths of nature. All that is human dissolves in this “sea of natural creativity”. Occasionally the author himself says: “I carried all that inside me, I wondered about it, and saw myself in my origin.”

p With Prishvin these myths of nature merge into a sort of social myth about the happiness of man dissolving in nature and wisely 85 acting in unity with its creative processes. There is no denial of civilisation a la Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Prishvin’s myth. A person’s understanding of the world is enhanced by the experience of all human culture, he says. For him this meant mainly technical experience. Social experience and social creativity were still foreign to his art—a consequence of his withdrawal from the revolution. But for all that, it was after the socialist revolution, in the years of socialist construction that Prishvin’s talent blossomed to the full. This happened because the poetry of Prishvin’s writing and his researcher’s attitude to nature fell in with the socialist idea of emancipating endeavour in all spheres and treating nature as a field of the entire people’s creative drive. Unlike certain American writers (Henry Thoreau, for instance), Prishvin does not rise in protest against the town and the established pattern of life. He extols creation and Man—the creator.

p Prishvin evolved his own peculiar narrative style. It has the lyrical quality of a diary (the story is often told in the first person singular) with little stories apropos intricately woven into it; there is always a central theme—a myth or an image, told in parts. Frequently Prishvin turns to folk mythology as well. His idiom is wonderfully limpid, evocative and precise. Maxim Gorky used to call Prishvin his teacher.

Prishvin turned to nature as an escape from bourgeois society and its false intellectual values. But socialism restored nature to people, so to speak, and with it Prishvin returned to society. There is no doubt that Soviet writers will yet develop Prishvin’s theme on the sources of creativity in nature, re-interpreted as a theme of socialist creativity.

p Thus the 19203 were the years when the foundations of Soviet literature were laid, and when the first young Soviet writers entered the literary scene. Those were also the years when the basic problems of Soviet literature, later to be developed or amended, were first outlined.

I shall speak of four more writers whose work reflected most vividly the different and conflicting trends of our age: they are Fadeyev, Alexei Tolstoi, Pasternak and Fedin. These writers truly belong to the 19205, despite the fact that they continued to attract as much of the readers’ and critics’ attention in the 19303, and indeed in subsequent years as well.