p The qualities I find most appealing in Fedin as both a person and a writer are his chastity, seriousness and honesty. What is chastity in a writer? It is the quality which guides him in his approach to his theme, to his material, and his interpretation of it. A superficial talent simplifies his task and rounds off the corners. But a genuine artist who is honest with himself and has a strong sense of responsibility never tackles any of life’s problems head-on. A genuine 119 artist is always a researcher at heart. He does not draw hasty conclusions because he knows that life may prove him wrong. He is motivated by his fidelity to truth and his respect for people.

p In one of his articles Fedin said that he did not think it right to make any changes, from positions of today, in what he wrote twenty or thirty years ago. In 1947, when the Sovietsky Pisatel Publishing House announced its intention to re-publish the best works of Soviet writers, some of the authors (Seifulina, Shaginyan and Selvinsky among them) made fundamental changes in their books written in the 19208. They gave a new interpretation to events and the actions of their heroes. Selvinsky, for instance, when revising his Ulalayevshchina weeded out his glamourised attitude to anarchic free-living, and produced what amounted to a completely new book. Alexei Tolstoi was forever changing his novels. His Black Gold was re-made into Emigres, and the result was two different books on the same subject. Leonov re-wrote his novel The Thief (1927) and even gave it a different ideological message.

p Konstantin Fedin is a writer of a different mould. His moral tact and his tendency to regard life in its philosophical aspect seem to protect him from the poet’s susceptibility to romantic infatuations with life’s ever new and inimitable colours and sounds.

p I am far from saying that Fedin became the man we know today all at once. He went through the same, complex ideological evolution as all the other Soviet writers. And in a way, Fedin is a living embodiment of the history of Soviet literature.

p But there was in him a sort of axis which controlled the evolutionary process in his case: first—his loyalty to the ideals of a revolutionary transformation of the world on principles of humaneness and justice; and second—his moral integrity. There was also one other circumstance which was very fortunate for Fedin, and this was his friendship with Maxim Gorky. Young Fedin’s very first literary ventures endeared him to Gorky who thereafter treated him with big-brotherly affection, telling him about his plans, his thoughts on Soviet and world literature, and his more general philosophical reflections. The whole of that first generation of Soviet writers owes a great deal to Gorky. None of my contemporaries that I know of were ever denied his attention, kindness and helpful criticism. Yet, I dare say, he was fondest of all of Fedin, liking him especially for his seriousness and honesty.

p Konstantin Fedin was born in 1892, and grew up in Saratov in an intellectual milieu to which his parents belonged. His mother came from a family with revolutionary traditions. Fedin was educated at the Commercial Institute in Moscow. He was in Germany when World War I broke out, and was interned there. On his return to Russia—already Soviet Russia—in 1918, he first worked 120 on a newspaper in Syzran, then in 1920 went to Petrograd at the invitation of Gorky who wanted to meet this budding writer who had sent him one of his first stories to read (“Garden”). This is what Fedin himself has said about his first collection of short stories Waste Plot: “I was for many years especially attached to the little man who is the hero of Waste Plot. I had to unburden myself of this load which had weighed down on me for ten whole years. It was the fruit of my life in the old literature, the fruit of my isolated, shut-in school years, and my secret dream. . . . My prose lagged behind my development as a whole and my state of mind. This, I believe, is a purely psychological matter. On the other hand, it was not until 1922-1924 that I felt I had stored up enough means to seriously tackle modern (and extremely complicated) material; I could not have coped with it before, but now I could take it up in earnest.”

p Fedin’s first large novel Towns and Years (1924), which brought him wide renown both in Russia and abroad, is a highly original work. First of all, in composition and form. The plot develops in reverse, as it were, from the end to the beginning. The scene is set in Germany in 1915-1916 during World War I, and in Soviet Russia. In parts the story is autobiographical, and Fedin is describing his personal impressions. The two central characters are Andrei Startsov and Kurt Van. Andrei is the sort of man who shrinks at the touch like a mimosa leaf. He is kind-hearted and soft. He lives by love, but his love is shallow. First he loves Marie Urbach, then Rita. Actually, he betrays everyone. His antithesis is the Bolshevik Kurt Van, the embodiment of abstract hatred. Fedin sees everything in its philosophical aspect, but somehow removed from reality. Startsov, the “kind soul”, saves Markgraf Schenau—an enemy of the revolution. Kurt kills Andrei. The author concludes the novel with these words: “We look back over the road we have travelled, a road of cruelty and love, a road spattered with blood and bright with flowers. He traversed that road without smearing himself with a drop of blood, without crushing a single flower. Oh, if only he had taken upon himself one spot of blood, no more, or crushed one, if only one flower! Maybe then our pity for him would have grown into love, and we would not have let him die so painfully and so wretchedly.”

p In this novel, crowds of people, incidental and major characters, pass in review before the reader. There are scenes of war and of Russia rearing up in revolution. There are personal tragedies, love stories, lyrical passages, and philosophical reflections.

p Perhaps Fedin did not succeed in revealing the psychology of the new hero—a Communist—as fully as Fadeyev was to do in The Rout three years later, or as Furmanov had done earlier in Cbapayev. 121 But, on the other hand, he displayed great perspicacity in rendering the anti-human essence of the German Philistine, the German Burgher, the ugly cruelty and the profoundly amoral militarist psychology of the so-called “average German”, with all of which we were to become so well acquainted later, in the war with nazi Germany. In Towns and Years Fedin describes how a German doctor tests new anaesthetics on Russian prisoners of war. One of his victims is Fyodor Lependin, a private. This is a very likeable character, a hard-working, good-natured Russian peasant with a poetic soul (reminding us of Tolstoi’s Karatayev in War and Peace). In prisoner-of-war camp Lependin has both his legs sawn off. And then, when he comes home to Starye Ruchyi, he is hanged on an apple tree (the apple trees he had dreamed about while in prison) by the mutinous German prisoners-of-war led by the same Schenau whom Startsov had once rescued. Some of Lependin’s fellow villagers also joined the mutineers.

p The novel certainly abounds in human tragedies. It is a romantic novel in mood. Yet at the same time it is a work of philosophical reflections on who is to blame for all that has happened, what must a person do, and which road to take.

p Thus, the essential nature of Fedin’s talent had already become crystallised as long as forty years ago. The direction in which he conducted his artistic seekings is very typical for a Soviet writer. From Fedin’s novels you can easily trace how the method of socialist realism took shape, why Soviet literature did not take the Bergson road of analysis (like James Joyce or Marcel Proust), or become absorbed in the irrational world of Freud. Revolutionary reality attracted the writer like an irresistible magnet, commanding attention and forcing him to face it squarely. Alexei Tolstoi wrote in 1925 (a few years after his return to the U.S.S.R.): “The time has come to study the Revolution and for the artist to become an historian and thinker.” This is why the “existentionalist” approach (in the manner of, say, Camus) proved unsuitable to Soviet writers. With both Freudians and existentialists a man becomes a kind of “drifting personality”, a unit deprived of will carried along in a stream of life’s senseless incidents (someone like Meursault in Camus’ VEtranger).

p Soviet literature takes the very opposite approach to life. It does not go out “in search of lost time" like Proust (“A la recherche du temps perdu”) but tries to trace the interaction of time and man, philosophising on the problem of time and man generally. Soviet writers—Serafimovich, Furmanov, Fedin, Fadeyev, Leonov, Alexei Tolstoi, Sholokhov, Pogodin, Paustovsky and others—use factual material taken from life in the post-revolutionary period to show how the concept of good and evil is cultivated, how people develop 122 their sense of friendship, their awareness of the interrelation between the individual and society, the meaning of life’s purpose and the importance of will power. Moreover, they show the standpoint from which the new Soviet man cognizes reality.

p Fedin’s portrayal of man in interaction with his time, is the main feature of his artistic method which characterises him as a socialist realist. Among his writings of the 19205 there are many short stories describing the developments in the life of the peasantry after the Revolution (Transvaal, Peasants and Morning in Vyazhnoye}. His novel Brothers (1928) deals with the ideological seekings of the intellectuals. The scene is set in Volga country and then further East—in Uralsk. It is the story of two brothers, Nikita and Rostislav Karev. Nikita is a composer who wants to find his place among the workers of the new world and participate in the Revolution with his symphonies. But psychologically he is still closer to Startsov; he is unlucky in life and love, and part of his soul is steeped in Dostoyevskian morbidness. As a matter of fact, this morbidness inherited from Dostoyevsky (the sorry cripple in Brothers for whom Varenka, the beautiful daughter of a wealthy merchant, has a perverse attachment could well be the twin of Smerdyakov in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov) was also common to Leonov and several other Soviet writers. In the 19205, however, Dostoyevsky was taken one-sidedly and admired mainly for his irrational contradictions, which still appeal to his existentionalist admirers in the West. But the greatness of Dostoyevsky’s genius lies in something else—in his infinite compassion for the humiliated and the insulted, and in his superb ability to show the dialectics of the workings of the human soul. An example of this was well presented by E. Golosovker in his book Dostoyevsky and Kant where he makes a subtle analysis of Dostoyevsky’s polemic with Kant’s theory of antinomies, in defence of feeling.

p From Fedin’s novels we can trace how gradually the images of the leading forces of the Revolution became more full-bodied in Soviet literature, and how much more philosophically profound the criticism of features of the old way of life became. The evolution of Fedin’s communist characters mirrors his own ideological and artistic development. This makes a most interesting theme, and we could quite well review the entire history of Soviet literature from this angle. Its achievements must be put down, in large measure, to the philosophical and psychological study it has made of those social forces which guided Soviet life along the road of communism. How were these forces to be represented? What kind of men were they? At first they were represented schematically, this scheme merely showing the role played by the commissar as a military and political leader. Fadeyev, as I have mentioned earlier, was the first 123 writer to make a profound psychological and ethical study of a Communist (The Rout). Fedin in his trilogy Early Joys (1943-1945), No Ordinary Summer and Conflagration (1963) gave a many-sided and in many ways novel rendering of Communists, revealing their human strengths and weaknesses. His main heroes, both Communists, are Pyotr Ragozin and Kirill Izvekov. They have a different background: Ragozin comes from a working-class family and Izvekov from a family of intellectuals. The two characters develop gradually against a vast panorama of Russian life, involving a great number of people from different social strata, and covering a period of many years—from before the Revolution to the war against Hitler’s Germany. Fedin modelled his heroes on the Leninist type of revolutionary. His Ragozin has suffered the hardships of persecution and tsarist prison for his political views and has been tempered in class struggle; he is a man of high principles, he can be both hard and gentle and has the capacity to love and hate. Fedin writes: “Ragozin’s rule to make immediate but never hasty decisions justified itself once more.”

p Lenin’s notions of revolutionary militancy and the Communist’s urge to transform the world were not abstract concepts. In his own character these traits were combined with an ability to appraise the historical situation soberly and realistically. He criticised hastiness because it showed a non-realistic approach to reality. It is therefore significant that in the character of Ragozin, a Russian revolutionary, Fedin stressed such positive qualities as speed without haste in his well-considered actions and decisions.

p We find these same qualities in Kirill Izvekov, but they are given a different colouring in view of this man’s more complex nature.

p Fedin’s novels of the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties, such as The Abduction of Europa and Sanatorium Arktur, his short stories, his plays, and his trilogy (1943-1963) give us a large portrait gallery of Soviet people. His interpretation of the representatives of different classes and social strata—the peasantry, the working class, the intelligentsia and the bourgeoisie—was beneficially influenced by those ideological and social changes which took place in Russia, transforming it from a poor and semi-illiterate country into a spiritually close-knit and politically monolithic society with a rapidly developing economy. Fedin himself matured ideologically in the process. After the war he became a prominent figure in the country’s public life, and was elected head of the multinational Union of Soviet Writers, a post held before him by Gorky and then Fadeyev.

p In his trilogy Fedin once again showed his masterly ability to paint a psychological portrait and his profound knowledge of the 124 intellectual milieu (the image of the playwright Pastukhov proves this).

p Fedin may be called a writer of ideas and reality. In the latter sense he is also a historian of Soviet society. At the same time, the philosophical, ideological aspect in which he examines historical events and people has lent a certain coolness to his manner of narration. It is the coolness of a researcher, although the material which he is examining should scorch the reader. The leisurely pace at which his narrative flows also tends to make his style somewhat axiomatic. There is no suspense in his plot development. He does not build his stories on adventure or emotional tragedy (like Dostoyevsky), and his plots, though based on dramatic events, do not carry the reader away. He prefers to render the epic of life, and in some of his books (for instance, The Abduction of Europa) he speaks out as a political writer who investigates through his artistic imagery the main conflicts of the age between capitalism and communism. Still, politics in its pure state is not Fedin’s province. With his lyrical digressions and his detailed description of the times and the people, he invites the reader to pore over these pages of life and not leaf through them casually.

Fedin himself, an artist and a thinker, has read the history of our turbulent times very carefully and without haste; he thought over each page and, protecting himself from the fire of the events by reflecting on them coldly, described them in a manner that appears over-complicated in a desire to make the honesty of his statements convincing to the reader. The most winning thing about Fedin, I think, is his honest approach and his moral certainty of the truthfulness of all he writes.