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p I can still see him today as if he were standing there before me ahve. A tall man with his silver-grey head thrown slightly back’ slender and erect, with cold grey eyes. His erect bearing was not that of an officer. It was the attitude of a proud man with a keen feeling for beauty, a man who felt elevated by the ideas he served. I first met him in 1927 when he came to Moscow from Rostov (where he worked on the newspaper Sovietsky Yug) with the 87 manuscript of his novel The Rout. This novel holds a place apart in the history of Soviet literature. It marked the ascent of Soviet literature to a new level. The fact that The Rout was acclaimed so unanimously is not surprising: it was the first real success on the road to achieving what we now call the art of socialist realism.

p What was so basically new in this novel of modest length? First of all, Fadeyev’s approach to the portrayal of the real makers of Russia’s new history. He made a profound psychological study of their characters and, what is more, showed them “from below”, from the point of view of the popular masses who accomplished the Revolution.

p Before Fadeyev, portraits of Bolsheviks were made more in the nature of tentative pencil drawings or rough sketches. They were men modelled on a single pattern, all dressed in leather jackets (as with Pilnyak). Ilya Ehrenburg in his story Impcomman ( abbreviation of Improved Communist Man) drew a cartoon of such a schematic Bolshevik. In his novel The Grab-All, where he described how people’s private-ownership instincts ran riot in the early 19205, he portrays a communist whose characteristic feature is an absence of any private life. “At the very mention of Artem (the positive hero—K.Z) we involuntarily begin to speak in journalese, simply because the wealth of this man’s inner world (like that of many others of his age) was derived from the frankly appalling paucity of his so-called private life.” What was to be done? “For Artem to become a story hero, he had to stop being just a hero and, following the example of his younger brother, liven up his days by going in for rape, robbery, maudlin tears and savage debauchery. Modifying the well-known saying, we make bold to assert that good Communists have no biographies.” And so Ehrenburg paints his “heroes”-Nikolai Kurbov, Mikhail Lykov and other Communists—in the “good, old style”, with sentimental words, spiritual debauches and psychological self-rape. In an effort to dilute the new hero’s dry rationalism he poured all sorts of emotional and psychological elements into him (in doses large enough to kill a horse), but even this method failed to give the reader a real image of the new man. But at least a bridge was thrown across to the old hero. This familiar hero, for whom literary tradition had already evolved its definite forms and methods of portrayal, became so widespread in the NEP period mainly because of the writers’ inability to probe deep into reality and bring out its essence. All these linear sketches of the new man symbolise, above all else, his historical function: organisation, planning, and a strong-minded, sensible intrusion into the order of things. In one of Leonid Leonov’s earliest stories (The Petusbikbino Breakthrough, 1920) we also read an episode written along these lines: “...A leather man with a gramophone 88 arrived at Petushikhino. He showed the chairman his mandate and his revolver, called all the available men and women together, wound up the gramophone, and it began to speak.” The gramophone instead of human speech, the revolver, the leather coats—all these were external signs of the obdurate and the mechanically coercive. Readers today will find it difficult to sort out all these symbols, so numerous in early Soviet literature, and see where the author, subjectively sympathising with the revolution, got over his misapprehension and began to voice his protest or to caricature its motive forces in the manner of a bourgeois lampoonist. Seven years later Leonov, in his novel The River Sott, already painted the solid figure of a builder of Soviet industry, the Bolshevik Uvadyev, with bold brush strokes and vivid colours, describing the man’s energy, broad-mindedness and the American scale of his ambitions. But, alas, even here: “he saw everything except the coming construction in its extremely simplified form, and love itself was just fuel that would double his strength for tomorrow’s effort.” As a human being Uvadyev is a narrow-minded utilitarian like Babichev in Olesha’s Envy. Uvadyev himself says that he is simply a “machine, adapted for independent existence”. Emotion or tenderness—whatever is kept under the hard shell of his common sense—is all supposed to be foreign to the rationalistic hero of the new world.

p In complete contrast to these one-dimensional images of the new hero, there came a long file of devil-may-care atamans (in Vyacheslav Shishkov’s story The Band, in Artem Vesyoly’s novel Blood-Washed Russia, and many, many other books). Such an ultra-romantic interpretation of the new hero showed that deep down the author saw the proletarian revolution as the elemental “muzhik” forces running riot. In books of this type the picturesque portrayal of the leaders always went together with naturalism in language and a play on dialect.

p Furmanov’s Chapayev, Seifulina’s Virinea and Serafimovich’s The Iron Stream were the first novels to portray the new hero realistically. Fadeyev’s The Rout went a step further. As a boy Alexander Fadeyev lived in the Far East where he later joined a partisan unit to fight against the White Cossacks and the Japanese interventionists. It was on this personal experience that he based his first novel which answered all the vital questions posed to our young Soviet literature by life itself. These questions concerned the new hero and his human qualities, the part played by the peasantry in the proletarian revolution, and the organisation and guidance of the masses.

p From the very first pages of the novel the reader finds himself in a strangely ordinary, everyday world which clashes with the 89 romantic notion of the revolution, then popular in literature, as a sort of splendid procession of the masses, striding forward with shining eyes, amid a glorious orgy of the elements, and so on. The Rout is written as a simple, truthful narrative, the straightforward tone of which holds a challenge to the sham picturesqueness and the sham romancing common to a whole number of books about the Civil War.

p Fadeyev planned to show the role of the people at the bottom of the social ladder in the proletarian revolution without embellishing anything. The young writer, a mere beginner, went bravely towards his goal, unafraid of showing the sharpest contradictions and the most difficult impasses. The title itself speaks of the author’s approach. The partisan unit is routed. Almost all the men are killed. And yet, on closing the book, the reader does not have a feeling of hopelessness, but, on the contrary, is filled with profound faith in the invincibility of the revolutionary movement. The fairness of the people’s life and struggle stands out in all its splendour in spite of the fact that the men who personify it are in their majority still ignorant, illiterate, and not yet free from many prejudices and vices.

p The everyday prose of revolutionary struggle makes the fabric of the novel: the partisan hospital in the taiga, the village, encounters between the partisans and the peasants, partisans on the march, scouting, men dying, internal affairs of the unit—quarrels, fights, everyday conversation, and the hardships of forest life during the partisans’ retreat.

p The heroes of the novel are the peasants from the Suchan villages. The author intentionally makes no saints of his heroes—those former miners and farmers. For instance, one of them-Morozko—steals melons from the kitchen gardens. But at the same time Fadeyev stresses the historic importance of what these people are accomplishing. The main conflict is rendered in the psychological clash between two characters—Levinson, the commander of the partisan unit, and Mechik, an intellectual who belongs to the Socialist-Revolutionaries.

p Levinson loves people. His humanism is exacting, it compels people to take up arms, an axe or a shovel, and become fighters for the most just social relations worthy of man, for communism. After his conversation with Mechik one night, Levinson decides that such worthless characters, as poor in spirit and will power as Mechik, can only sprout where men are exploited, where there is poverty, laziness, ruin and spiritual emptiness. The purpose of Levinson’s existence on earth is to overcome all this wretchedness and the “leaden ugliness" of life (as Gorky put it). “But what talk can there be of a new, splendid man,” he says to himself, “as long 90 as millions of people are forced to lead such a primitive, sorry, and incredibly frugal existence?”

p This explains Levinson’s hatred for falsity of any kind. It also explains the strict demands he makes upon himself and others, the way he will stop at nothing if the people’s goal is at stake.

p Mechik, the intellectual, is quite different. He is a romantic, poetic nature, with inbred courtesy and gentleness. In different circumstances, not requiring a person display courage, will power, perseverance, and other such qualities every day, he might have become known for a good fellow, as “not a bad sort at all”. He joined the revolutionary movement and the partisans not because he was called up, but from an inner craving for romantic adventure. His habit of posing even when alone developed into a vital need to live in a world of romantic conventionalities, and people the life about him with them.

p In Lenin’s works we can find not just a political but also a psychological analysis of different human types who, in Lenin’s opinion, are suitable or not suitable for the proletarian revolutionary movement. This is what he wrote as far back as 1908 about the vacillations of the Socialist-Revolutionary maximalists (and Mechik, it must be remembered, belonged to this party too): “It is the logic of the keyed-up intellectual, of hysteria, of incapacity for steady, stubborn work, of inability to apply the basic principles of theory and tactics to altered circumstances, of inability to carry on the work of propaganda, agitation and organisation in conditions sharply differing from those which we recently experienced.”

p Mechik is not suited for the role of a proletarian revolutionary, as Fadeyev proves in a number of episodes. Needless to say, it was entirely his own idea. He may well not have read that particular work of Lenin’s from which the above paragraph comes. Fadeyev took his examples from life. As a participant in the revolutionary movement in Primorye and as a partisan he met a great number of people with vastly dissimilar spiritual qualities, abilities and opportunities. Now, as an artist, he drew generalisations from this material in the light of the ideas which had made him join the ranks of the proletarian revolutionary fighters. Levinson, being one of the leaders in the revolutionary struggle, is portrayed as a very complex personality. He has his moments of doubt, and by and large no human emotions are foreign to him (unlike the portrayal of the Bolsheviks in Pilnyak, the early Ehrenburg, and other writers); but Fadeyev stresses the main, essential features which must be in character with a man who has undertaken the revolutionary reconstruction of the world.

p In his The Life of Klim Samgin Gorky says: “We have to say goodbye to those heroes for an hour, because what we want now 91 is heroism for life, the heroism of a labourer, toiling for the revolution. If you are not capable of such heroism, step aside.”

p Through Mechik’s spiritual conflict with the partisan unit Fadeyev reveals the weakness, the bankruptcy of the old moral principles. In this sense Mechik holds a place of supreme importance in the plot. The author does not present him as an outright enemy of the socialist revolution. Mechik’s sympathies do lie with the people, and he believes that he is prepared to die for them. But Fadeyev shows by accurate artistic characterisation that Mechik has not got what it takes to become a fighter for the people’s just cause. His entire background has prepared him for something quite different. He has absorbed the philosophy and psychology of the exploiter classes. He is an individualist, an egotist. For him the revolution is just a beautiful, romantic opportunity to manifest his “inimitable personality”. He approaches everything from the point of view of his own personal interests.

p A believer in realism, Fadeyev copies much of Lev Tolstoi’s manner although he does not, of course, attain Tolstoi’s plastic force and depth in his portrayal of people. In Tolstoi’s novels and stories the people seem to live their lives independently of the author’s will. Even though, quite naturally, his interpretation of some characters was somewhat biassed (for instance, Napoleon in War and. Peace) he nevertheless always looked at a person out of a hundred eyes, as it were, catching the very flux of existence and thus attaining an extraordinary plasticity of moulding.

p By using Tolstoi’s techniques of realistic portraiture, Fadeyev created psychologically convincing and significant characters. But at the same time, he belongs to Gorky’s school, for his writing is more tendentious, and the ideological bias is more overt. Thus, his books have a more obvious and direct educational influence—like Gorky’s Mother, which has exerted a political and moral influence on workers in Russia and throughout the world.

p I may have devoted a disproportionately large number of pages to this not very large book, but I had my reasons. The Rout has been translated into twenty foreign languages and fifty-eight languages spoken in the Soviet Union, and since it is so popular all over the world, it can serve as a fine example of the method of socialist realism. Readers will gain from it a tangible idea of what this method means, and they will be able to see how their own impressions of one of these earliest works of Soviet socio-psychological prose compare with my analysis and conclusions.

p Anti-communist propaganda loves to misrepresent the method of socialist realism as a sort of Party directive which our writers must blindly follow. The Rout serves to show how the ideas and 92 images which make the basis of Fadeyev’s writings as a whole were conceived.

p In his speech, addressed to a large gathering of intellectuals in Paris, in 1949, Fadeyev said, recalling the time when his world outlook was taking shape and the first poetic images were born in his heart and mind:

p “People will always remember it as the time of the Civil War. It is also called the time ’when fourteen foreign powers marched on Soviet Russia’. We had to choose whose side to take. ... It was not difficult for us to choose. The life of the workers and the peasants was closer to us.

p ”. . .We joined the Revolution, full of youthful hopes, and carrying a small volume of Gorky and another of Nekrasov in our school bags.

p “We were full of a liberating fervour because by that time Admiral Kolchak’s power had become established in Siberia and the Russian Far East, and it was more cruel than the old regime. We were full of a patriotic fervour because our native soil was being trampled upon by the hob-nailed boots of the interventionists.

p “I owe my birth as a writer to that time. I came to know the finest qualities of the people to whom I belonged. I was with the partisans for three years, we shared an army coat at night and the gruel in our mess tins, and together we covered thousands of kilometres of road.”

p So much for “directives” and “instructions” in those days when socialist realism as a term had never yet been mentioned in Soviet critical reviews, or in the press generally.

p In the 19305 (and then after the war, too) Fadeyev worked on his novel The Last of the Udeghes. The novel remained unfinished (five out of the six parts intended were written). The author himself was not satisfied with his book and he meant to revise it completely and, among other things, write in the figure of Sergei Lazo, one of the great heroes in the struggle for Soviet power in the Far East. Lazo was captured by the Japanese interventionists and, together with Fadeyev’s cousin Vsevolod Sibirtsev, burnt alive in the furnace of a locomotive.

p There is much that appeals to me personally, as a reader, in this novel. There are many pages which, in my opinion, surpass The Rout and The Young Guard in artistic merits. Thus, the Bolsheviks Pyotr Surkov and Alyosha Malenky are deeper and more convincing than even Levinson in The Rout, let alone Protsenko, Lyutikov or Barakov in The Young Guard. The aim of the novel was to show the development of modern society from capitalism to Soviet power via the proletarian revolution. Not back to nature (in the spirit of Rousseau, which misdirected Knut Hamsun to the adoration 93 of the “strong man" and eventually, towards the end of his life, brought him to the dead-end of Hitlerism), but forward, to industrial communism. The Udeghes, a small hunting people in the Sikhote-Alin Mountains, who had preserved the features of primitive communism in their way of life, were meant to play a prominent part in the story. But very soon they were overshadowed by scenes from the class civil war in the Far East. Yet it is a unique sort of “book of life”. The main hero in the first part is Seryozha, a young man endowed by Fadeyev with certain autobiographical features. Then the circle of characters widens. The reader is led into the drawing rooms of the Vladivostok rich society (the story begins in pre-revolutionary days), into the birch-bark wigwams of the hunting tribes, workers’ hovels, factory shops, and the town’s dives; to meetings, the partisans’ campfires in the taiga, the military port of Vladivostok, the meeting of the Revolutionary Committee, the Korean congress, the headquarters of the hun-hudses, and the military units of the Japanese and American interventionists. Fadeyev paints a whole gallery of portraits: Vladivostok businessmen, Udeghe hunters, White scouts, officers and civilians, political figures, and Communists. The Last of the Udeghes is a wide epic canvas which makes the background for the artist’s ethical and psychological investigation of those social forces which came to the forefront of history in the twentieth century and also those which remained bound up with the past both spiritually and economically. Although on the way out, the latter forces were still capable of poisoning everything round them and striking out at the new world emerging from the great revolutionary cauldron.

p In The Rout neither the partisans nor even their commanders discuss politics, the word Party is never mentioned, and the author’s whole attention is focused on problems of ethics, the purpose of life and human psychology. In The Last of the Udeghes, on the contrary, it is the Party interests of the Communists which are given prominence. It is precisely in this light that the two main heroes—the Communists Pyotr Surkov and Alyosha Malenky—are portrayed. The former is a leader of the Party movement behind the Japanese interventionist and White army lines. The latter is a representative of the regional Party Committee who has made his way to the fighting front from Vladivostok. One of them has a working-class background, and the other comes from the democratic intelligentsia. The idea is that communism does not reduce people to schemes, does not encase their spirit in a uniform. Fadeyev presents in detail how differently Party directives are assimilated by different individuals, in this case Pyotr and Alyosha. He shows how people argue and what they disagree about; how they make friends, and what they quarrel about; how they love and what they dream of. One 94 particular dialogue between Alyosha Malenky and a peasant who has a strong private-property instinct and is nobody’s fool, is worth describing. What Fadeyev himself once dreamed about was to come true some thirty years later. Alyosha says (the year is 1919) that after victory the workers will make good use of the iron ore, copper and zinc lying uselessly in the bowels of the surrounding mountains. They might even look farther ahead and picture the day when the Communists will harness atomic energy.

p “The peasant gave Alyosha a surprised, sidelong glance, wondering if he was making fun of him, but Alyosha’s face was perfectly straight. It wasn’t fancy talk either—he spoke of travelling to other planets as calmly and casually as though the matter had long been decided, and so the peasant began to listen to him attentively again, his expression turning glummer and glummer. ’Now if we could utilise atomic energy, for instance,’ Alyosha continued. ’Think of the power! It gives you the creeps just to think of it, and yet some day it will be utilised. Atomic energy, eh?’ he shouted, looking merrily at the peasant.”

p This was written at the beginning of the thirties. Today, when we have atomic reactors, the Lenin icebreaker, atomic submarines and atomic power stations, these words acquire a prophetic meaning, linking the dreams of the people who fought for Soviet power with the achievements of their grandchildren who are already building up the material base of communism.

p At the end of the Second World War Fadeyev wrote his novel The Young Guard, telling the true story of the underground struggle waged by a group of young patriots against the German occupation forces in the town of Krasnodon in the Ukraine. The novel is based on factual material, and not even the names are fictitious. The five leaders of this group—Oleg Koshevoi, Ivan Zemnukhov, Ulyana Gromova, Lubov Shevtsova and Sergei Tyulenin—had the title of Hero of the Soviet Union conferred on them posthumously.

p Fadeyev’s characterisations are as powerful as they are convincing. The idea of the novel was to reveal the romantic faith in the triumph of justice, natural to very young people, and cultivated by the Soviet school and the Komsomol, as it was manifested by the Young Guard in the struggle against the nazis who had seized their home town. Here Fadeyev gives the ghastly picture of the atrocities committed against the Soviet people by the nazis. In the original version of the book Fadeyev, romanticising the patriotic fervour of Krasnodon’s youth, left the older generation altogether in the shade although in actual fact the Young Guard’s underground activities were directed by older, experienced men. The novel was criticised for this and rightly so because an historical novel on a modern theme cannot ignore historical facts.

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p After Stalin’s death (and especially after the death of Fadeyev himself who had defended the second version of his book) a heated polemic began about this in the press. Some critics and writersKonstantin Simonov, for one—supported the first version where the poetic accent was on the young patriots. It does not seem right to me at this late date to re-examine the amendments made by the author and to blame everything exclusively on the cult of Stalin’s personality. Objectively it must be agreed that there was more to it than Stalin bringing pressure to bear on Fadeyev. I am inclined to think that Fadeyev was persuaded to change his mind by the new facts that came to light, and that his amendments, which lent the novel greater breadth and depth, were made in precisely the same spirit as he wrote of Communists in his earlier books.

p The Young Guard is a beautiful poem in prose, a dramatic affirmation of all that is young and fine. Like The Rout, it emanates confidence and hope in spite of the fact that it describes such tragic events. A tendency to poetise life, which became especially pronounced in the late forties, was already evident in The Young Guard.

p Fadeyev’s artistic method, practised by all Soviet writers, tended, on the one hand, to intensify the romantically affirmative means of expression when describing good characters and, on the other, to make wider use of scathing satire and grotesquerie when portraying bad characters. This general tendency was most apparent in The Young Guard. But the results can be unfortunate if this tendency is followed dogmatically: one has only to recall some of those novels about kolkhoz life written in the early fifties.

p The very nature of Fadeyev’s talent urged him to write for young readers. And youth has always been in need of poetry and romance. His most essential quality was the way he glorified with such generous warmth not just the exceptional heroes whom history, or even more so they themselves by their deeds, had placed upon a pedestal, nor even Soviet society as such, but the ordinary working people.

p His commitment to the people and the Party was an organic part of his creative personality, and in this sense Alexander Fadeyev is a typical figure in Soviet literature—a writer reared by the Communist Party and the Soviet reality.

p In his article “On Lu Hsin" printed in Peking and Shanghai newspapers on October 19, 1949, Fadeyev wrote: “In Western Europe and the United States there still exist writers who are extreme individualists, dwelling in ivory towers and championing art for art’s sake.

p “They are liar-writers. They know perfectly well whom they arc serving.

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p “Art which does not influence men’s souls, art ’without man’ is a degenerate art; indeed it is no longer art. The personality of a real writer is shaped by the people that gave him birth . . . and the better he serves his people, the nobler and the richer his personality will be and the greater writer he will become.”

p These last words can be regarded as Fadeyev’s own ideological action programme. As a writer he consciously served the people and the Communist Party, the people’s advance guard and leader. As a citizen he engaged in useful, many-sided public activity. In this respect Fadeyev represents the new type of writer bred in the Soviet Union.

p Fadeyev was a prominent figure in the country’s public life: he was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, a deputy to the Supreme Soviet, and head of the Writers’ Union. He represented Soviet public opinion at peace congresses, beginning from the congress in Wroclaw, and was elected vice-president of the World Peace Council. He was a critic of merit and a competent theorist of socialist realism. A sizeable volume of his critical and theoretical articles was brought out after his death. Fadeyev introduced a number of original ideas into the theory of socialist literature and art. One of his pet ideas was blending realistic and romantic colours in portraying the revolutionary struggle for communism.

Fadeyev’s sad end (he shot himself through the heart on May 13, 1956, at his country home in Peredelkino) appears to lack a motive and clashes with the entire image of Fadeyev as writer and public figure. But it does not repudiate the truth of his writings and all his work. His novels and the characters he has created continue to stir readers with the beautiful passion of his very human heart.