125

p Events of such magnitude were taking place in the country that under their impact the entire character of Soviet literature changed practically overnight, although fighting was still going strong among the RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) members and themes of the NEP period were still alive. Probably never in world literature did a mere two or three years work such a profound change. The launching of the first five-year plan in 1928 was 126 an enormously thrilling experience. The general enthusiasm swept up literature too, and took its mind off itself, so to speak. Ilya Ehrenburg wrote in his short novel On the Second Day. “That was the year when the country started up with a jolt. Engines screamed from the strain of pulling heavy trains. Overnight, as if by magic, the railway platforms became piled with mountains of bundles, baskets and bales—a motley heap of belongings, all crawling with lice. Settled life had come to an end. People had started up, they were on the go, and nothing could stop them now.”

p Something similar was happening in literature. Something gave it a jolt and set it in motion. The motley baggage of the NEP period (like Panteleimon Romanov’s novel Comrade Kislyakov), all that reflected the commonplaceness of life or described the psychological broodings of the intellectuals, lost its glamour in the new atmosphere and was replaced, with lightning speed, with themes of the socialist offensive which stirred minds and fired them with genuine poetic inspiration. That period marked the beginning of a rapid decline in such specifically intellectualist themes as Pasternak’s “But what about that thing that in my chest I treasure, the diehardness, the hardest one to die?”, characteristic of the preceding stage in Soviet literature.

p This change of theme showed first of all that the intellectuals, the writers among them, were attaining ideological maturity and whatever vacillation there may have been was definitely over. These years marked a new stage in the development of Soviet literature. Whereas in the NEP period many writers still found no answer to the question: where does the revolution go from here?-and consequently peopled their books with heroes who (in various different guises) embodied retreat, the answer had now become self-evident. The struggle between socialist and capitalist elements that had gone on within the revolutionary process, making it a two-way, contradictory process was at an end. There was no longer any doubt: the country was heading for socialism, advancing with the irresistible force of an avalanche. “The Great Turning Point" had been reached. Writers were now anxious not to miss anything of these unique historical events, not to be found lacking at the time of this great assault, as Leonov later described it in his novel Skutarevsky. The question now was how to reach the “fighting front" first and see its heroes. Reality drew literature to it with the force of its romantic attraction. Everything appeared in a new, historic lightabsolutely everything, people and things which only the day before had seemed to symbolise poverty, backwardness and everything that went with the “old Russia”, evoking irony or pity. Valentin Katayev exclaimed in his novel Time, Forward] (1933): “Are not 127 the kerchief and cheap slippers of a girl from the Komsomol, the singlet of a shock-worker, the challenge banner of a shock brigade, a children’s poster adorned with the painting of a turtle or a steam engine, and ragged canvas trousers a thousand times more precious to us than Danton’s brown dress-coat, Demoulins’ overturned chair, or a Phrygian cap. . . .”

p In those years there was already a relatively large number of established and budding writers working in Soviet literature. All of them, let alone the non-proletarian writers who had reason to feel behind the times, were drawn into the powerful current of the country’s life. One of the RAPP groupings called “Zakal” ( Hardening) came out against Fadeyev, who was then writing his The Last of the Udeghes, because they believed that the main distinction of proletarian art was its efficiency in portraying the daily changing forms of reality, and that Fadeyev, at the rate at which he was writing, was in danger of “sleeping through socialism”. Alexander Bezymensky proclaimed the slogan:

p Forget about losing a couple of rhymes,
Just see that you don’t fall behind the times.

p Mikhail Sholokhov, who took a hand in accomplishing the collectivisation of farming in his home village of Vyeshenskaya, put aside the third part of And Quiet Flows the Don on which he was then working, and (in 1930) while the impressions were fresh in his mind began to write his Virgin Soil Upturned. But people had such a heightened awareness of the importance of the very latest achievements, that Sholokhov, too, no sooner had he finished this book felt that he had fallen behind the times again. He wrote: “The dilemma which confronted me was how to keep pace with the key problems of the day. Here you would be writing about the setting up of collective farms, and the question at issue would already be work-day units. Events outgrow and outpace people, and this is what makes our task so difficult.”

p Hundreds of writers gave their whole attention to the most burning problems of the day. Writers adopted a style which was a mixture of rapportage and a romantic idiom, suited for conveying the general mood of exultation. Critics began to speak of “ neo-romanticism" which resembled the pathos of the Proletkult poetry during the Civil War. Military metaphors were used quite naturally in numerous novels, essays and poems, by everyone from Gladkov to Ilyin, and from Leonov to Mayakovsky. Boris Agapov who renounced his constructivist poetry to become an essayist in the great army of fighters for socialism, wrote: “Actually, it was the front. In mud and cold men dug the trenches for the foundations, 128 adjusted and re-loaded their weapons, the concrete mixers, and startled everyone with the machine-gun rattle of their drop hammers. They lived the life of the army (people from Perekhodnikov’s Commune)-the bugle at the break of dawn, then a roll call, and off to the front. It was the second revolutionary generation going to war, this time in a smoke screen of cement dust. The excavator-tanks cleared the way for them, the concrete guns covered their advance with artillery fire, later reinforcing with cement the trenches they had seized. Lucky were the men who had the courage not to take cover in the rear, who threw themselves into the most difficult battle then being fought in the country, who all their lives will carry this memory in their hearts, treasuring it like a medal, 129 a memory which will never let them slip or take to flight" (from “Technical Stories”).

p The changes which the first five-year plan wrought in literature were manifold and profound. Four features stood out against the general background. The first, which I have already mentioned, was the switch over to new themes dealing with production and construction. The second was a heightened interest in history. The third was the spread of the essay genre. And the fourth—the availability of more material than could possibly be digested.

p The first feature has a direct bearing on that unique form of Soviet literary life, engendered by the first five-year plan, known as the writers’ brigades. As early as 1923, a group of writers visited the collective farms and then described what was happening in the countryside. It was much later, however, that the practice of organising such trips for on-the-spot reports became adopted on a really large scale. In 1930, a team of six well-known writers—Nikolai Tikhonov, Leonid Leonov, Vladimir Lugovskoi, Vsevolod Ivanov, Pyotr Pavlenko and Grigory Sannikov—went to Turkmenistan at the invitation of the Turkmenian Government. Most of them left unfinished manuscripts on their desks in Moscow, books dealing mainly with the past. The task set before them was of immediate, vital importance: through the medium of their own particular artistic means and methods they were to portray the new, Soviet Turkmenistan in literature. Socialist realism was the method that naturally suggested itself to the writers. They chose several themes—cotton, collective farms, irrigation, Party work, the Komsomol, the Red Army, the status of Turkmenian women, and nomads—and divided them up among themselves. The original intention was to produce a single book which would give the reader a complete picture of Turkmenistan. Nikolai Tikhonov later wrote: “We did not manage to put it all into one book. We wrote ten instead. Vsevolod Ivanov wrote The Stories of Team Leader Sinitsin and a play Naib-Khan’s Compromise; Leonid Leonov—a short novel Saranchuki; Vladimir Lugovskoi—two volumes of verse (one entitled To the Bolsheviks of the Desert and the Spring); Pyotr Pavlenkothe novel Desert and a book of essays under the title A Journey to Turkmenistan; Grigory Sannikov—a poem about cotton; and I myself wrote a book of stories under the title Nomads and a book of poems Yurga which is included in Volume z of my collected verse.”

p These books provide interesting material for literary research. It transpired, for instance, that the power of belles lettres traditions was still rather strong, and so was the influence of long-established forms and techniques firmly linked with old themes and viewpoints. The new content tended to clash with these techniques and was at 130 odds with them: this applies in particular to the aestheticism of Pavlenko’s style in Desert, and Vsevolod Ivanov’s adventure-story plot and ironic tone in The Stories of Team Leader Sinitsin. But on the whole the trip was a great success, especially if we regard it from the writers’ point of view. They made progress in mastering the method of socialist realism, gained a better understanding of reality, and had the useful experience of working on set themes. Each felt the richer for this experience. The best stories giving the most realistic picture of Turkmenistan in that period were Tikhonov’s Nomads (which was aik^u the socialist changes in the life of Turkmenia’s nomadic tribes—the Belujas and the Djemshids, and about life on the collective farms in the mountains) and Leonov’s Saranchuki (about an invasion of hordes of locusts and how the people dealt with it). The poetry of Tikhonov and Lugovskoi, the former full of quiet courage, and the latter emotionally lyrical, is also interesting.

p All these examples shed some light on a problem which worried many people, namely the problem of “planned” literature. There is a widespread view in some Western circles that socialist realism is, in effect, the dictate of the Party ordering the authors what to write and in what spirit.

p As I have already said, Lenin did not refuse to give the artists counsel on behalf of the ruling party, but his own point of view was that fiction was a delicate business and thus could not be influenced directly and, even less so, in a rough, heavy-handed manner.

p After the decision on the Proletkults, the Central Committee of the Communist Party held two more discussions on the state of Soviet literature and the course of its development, and adopted pertinent decisions.

p The resolution adopted in July 1925 allowed the literary groupings and trends freedom of competition in the matter of form, and stipulated that in the meantime the Party would help the writers to make the transition to socialist ideology in their work. By 1930 this transition could be regarded as accomplished on the whole, and the Central Committee adopted a new decision on the need to set up a Union of Soviet Writers. Since then all Soviet writers have been united by this organisation. The existing literary groupings, among them the All-Union Association of Proletarian Writers which claimed supremacy over the rest, folded up. All of them were disbanded by the Central Committee’s decision adopted on April 23, 1932. Eventually, the Union grew into a regular association administered by members of the writers’ unions in the national republics and regions. In 1965, the Union of Soviet Writers had more than six thousand members.

131

p In October 1932, that is several months after a committee had been elected to organise the first congress of Soviet writers, a meeting was held in Gorky’s house which was attended by Stalin and other Party and Government leaders. I was present at that meeting and was one of the speakers there. It was then that Stalin gave the Soviet writers’ artistic method the definition of socialist realism. Actually he merely formulated what was already in the air, and the combination of the two words—realism and socialist—had already appeared in the press. What it meant was that if a writer was depicting life truthfully he could not ignore the historical forces which guided this life to socialism, in other words, he could not ignore the role of the workers, Communists, peasants and intellectuals in re-building Russia on new principles. A few years ago I had a conversation on the subject with Bruno Romani, a correspondent of the Italian newspaper Messaggero.

p “Do you mean to say that what socialist realism actually demands of a writer is an honest attitude to reality?" he asked me.

p “Yes,” I replied. “I mean just that.”

p In one of his articles Gorky wrote that the new realism was compounded of facts from the new socialist experience. Every unbiassed writer, seeing the new life about him and wanting to describe it truthfully, will inevitably encounter the heroism of the masses. And this heroism is naturally reflected in literature. Consequently, not simply production relations but human relations become established in the process.

p In a recent conversation with a certain well-known English writer I heard the following argument from him: “But a writer is always a bit of a rebel, he has to be a rebel, that’s what keeps him going.”

p “Yes, of course,” I replied, “but the question is what he is rebelling against. Mayakovsky was a rebel too. I’ll give you an example which may perhaps sound too elementary to you: when a man is building a house it is senseless to take up arms because rubble is still heaped round the unfinished building and some parts of it are shrouded in lime dust. The thing to do is look at the blueprints, and try to appreciate the man’s efforts and the purpose of these efforts.”

p “Your example certainly is elementary. The writer’s business is to teach the man how to live in this house and to take a look into his soul.”

p “I quite agree with you there,” I said. “But when we look into the soul of this man, this maker and builder, let us not sow seeds of senseless rebellion in it, or seeds of despondency and unbelief in the job he has undertaken.”

p In the June 30, 1962 issue of the American magazine Saturday Review there was an article by Malcolm Bradbury, a British scholar, entitled “The Taste for Anarchy”, in which he said that 132 ”. . . the very word ’civilised’ seems to have taken on rather an unpleasant ring in England today. It offends in two ways. To some people it is associated with dilettantism and privilege; to others, it refers simply to what is separate and remote, to the things of high culture, which as a society the English arc inclined to avoid in favour of things more accessible and less demanding.”

p This reaction to civilisation characterises the sentiments of people in the capitalist world in general, and not just in England, where J. B. Priestley, for instance, spoke out against the radio, television, and other mass means of brainwashing. In Italy, the late Angioletti, the first chairman of the European Community of Writers, voiced a protest against vulgar TV programmes. Jet planes, cars, refrigerators and the rest are all very well, but some are afraid that machinery is getting out of man’s control and is beginning to exert too much pressure on the mind. H. G. Wells had spoken of this years ago in his novel Mind at the End of Its Tether. It is perhaps worth quoting him. “Man must go steeply up or down and the odds seem to be all in favour of his going down and out. If he goes up, then so great is the adaptation demanded of him that he must cease to be a man. Ordinary man is at the end of his tether.”

p These words were written under the impression of those gigantic stresses to which modern civilisation was subjecting the physiology and psychology of men in every sphere without exception: technology, science, public life, the exchange of information which has assumed a fantastic scale, and so on. A person begins to feel that he is in a room that he has cluttered with countless objects and devices, all useful in themselves but depriving him of space, freedom and air. And so he conceives a “taste for anarchy”; he wants to chuck out all this stuff and go back to nature. Now and again some group of young people does just that. A few years ago a group of young Americans left home to settle in the Galapagos Islands to relish the delights of a primitive life. They even had all their teeth pulled out and had dentures made instead since there would be no dentists on a desert island.

p I shall not go any deeper into the outlook for man’s relationship with the civilisation and machinery which he himself has created. One thing must be pointed out, though: these “stresses” have brought home to all the ideas developed by modern cybernetics and the teaching of Pavlov that psychology governs physiology and, by millions of contacts with the physical and social world, it also guides man. So no matter how much we may repel, however much we may cultivate a taste for anarchy, we know now from the findings of modern science that man is a planned and governed creature, and not simply the one who does the planning and the governing. This refers to all the spheres of human activity. The resultant force 133 of freedom or lack of freedom is in the hands of those who have discovered the laws of history and who understand the course of its development.

p It is sometimes said in the West that literary freedom ended in the U.S.S.R. in the nineteen-thirties, and literature began to be planned “from above" by the Party. I would put it differently—the planning of literature “from below" became intensified. Life itself had changed, carrying people along, in the same way that a strong wind fills out the sails of boats standing at anchor and carries them away into the open sea. To millions of people, the literary intelligentsia among them, the labour heroism displayed in fulfilling the first five-year plan was like that clean, strong wind. Many writers began to understand the erroneousness of their stand and some (like Pilnyak, Panteleimon Romanov, the LEF, the constructivists, and others) made public statements to this effect.

p It was not the dictates of the Central Committee which “planned” literature, or in other words guided it in its choice of themes and expressive means, and controlled its spirit and its moods. It was by the inspired, heroic atmosphere reigning in the first five-year plan period that literature was influenced, governed and planned. The Party expresses what the people feel, and in this lies the strength of what is known as Party guidance. The Party calls on the writers to speak of what the people want to hear about, to respond to the people’s spiritual needs.

p The extremely tense atmosphere of the nineteen-thirties (we must remember that the Soviet Union had to step up industrial construction if only because Hitler had already come to power in Germany) shaped its own talents of a heroic cast.

p The first of these talents to be dwelt upon is Nikolai Ostrovsky. Ostrovsky entered the literary scene with his more or less autobiographical novel How the Steel Was Tempered (i932-i934)-onc of those remarkable human documents that shed light on whole historical epochs.

p I would include it among the most interesting books ever written. The title How the Steel Was Tempered is symbolic. It is the story of how a man was hardened to become as strong as steel. Apart from its artistic merits, the book is important for its historical truth, as proved by the life of the author himself.

p Nikolai Ostrovsky (1904–1937) was born into a working-class family in a small Ukrainian town. He was one of the first boys there to join the Komsomol. At 15 he ran away from home to the Civil War front and fought in the ranks of the legendary Kotovsky brigade. Next he joined Budyonny’s First Cavalry, and it was there that the character of this courageous, strong-minded boy of 16 began to be tempered. He was seriously wounded, which resulted in the 134 loss of his right eye, and was demobilised. Yet he still tried by every possible means to participate in the struggle for communism. There is an episode in the novel in which he describes how he chopped wood in the forest with a Komsomol team. A wet, heavy snow was falling, they had no boots, no place to sleep, nothing to eat, and it seemed that human strength could not endure all the misfortunes which befell him. But he found the strength. It gushed forth from an inexhaustible source: his enthusiasm and his boundless faith in communism.

p Ostrovsky fell ill with a rare disease—ankylose polyarthritis, which takes the form of a gradual stiffening of the joints and general paralysis. At the age of 22 he was completely bed-ridden.

p I met him in Moscow when he had already finished writing How the Steel Was Tempered, which I was editing. He lay stretched out on his bed, blind, and only able to move his fingers. He had a mobile device supporting his outstretched arm, with the aid of which he could trace out letters slowly and painstakingly. He still had a ringing voice. It sounded unexpectedly young and strong coming from this crippled, emaciated body.

p In his remarkable book Ostrovsky told the story of his life. It is not merely a tale of struggle, but afso a story of love. It presents the spiritual landscape, the spiritual panorama of a hero of our time. Ostrovsky says that life is only given to a person once, and he must live it in such a way as not to burn with shame for his past. He must live intensely in a constant endeavour to achieve mankind’s great aims.

p There is an irresistible moral appeal in this book, just as there was in Ostrovsky himself. This appeal is compounded of more than just courage and fortitude. More important is that fine human quality of stubborn refusal to be beaten by physical handicaps, the fighting spirit that endeavours to overcome adversity, whatever the odds. There are many examples of people like this in many lands, people like the American girl Helen Keller who was blind and deaf from infancy, yet became a writer, or the Soviet mathematician L. Pontryagin who has been blind from birth and is now a member of the Academy of Sciences. Ostrovsky’s moral triumph over his physical handicaps is a manifestation of this quality, and is thus just one of the links in the chain of his heroic life.

p This is what Alexander Fadeyev wrote to Ostrovsky about the hero of How the Steel Was Tempered, Pavel Korchagin: “I think that in the whole of Soviet literature there has not yet been a character as true-to-life and as enchanting in his goodness.”

p Ostrovsky once said to me: “A man becomes a real man if he is dedicated to some real idea, because then he lives as an integrated whole and not in parts.”

135

p I think that Pavel Korchagin is probably the most heroic character in Russian literature, crowning a whole gallery of heroes like Rakhmetov in Chernyshevsky’s What Should Be Done?, Pavel Vlasov in Gorky’s Mother, Commissar Klychkov from Furmanov’s Chapayev, and Levinson from Fadeyev’s The Rout.

p Ostrovsky’s hero shines like a star above the heroes of subsequent years, among them the main character in Kazakevich’s The Star. Pavel Korchagin is the elder brother of Meresyev in Boris Polevoi’s Story of the Real Man. He is the elder brother and guiding star of the heroes of the last war, of those who carried through the first five-year plans, who built Komsomolsk-on-the-Amur, who searched for diamonds in the taiga, who reclaimed the steppes and developed the virgin lands, and who manned the first space ships. We have a perfect right to call all these people heroes. They differ from the ancient heroes described by Homer, Pindar and Lucretius. Nor are they like the hero in whom Carlyle saw the basis of human development. They are even less like Nietzsche’s superman. The supertasks which the Soviet hero has to solve link him as an individual with the collective, with the people. If this hero were deprived of his aim—communism, if he were denied contact with the collective, he would fade out like a lamp that has been switched off.

p Remain Rolland understood this very well, as we can see from a letter to Ostrovsky in which he wrote: “You make one whole with your great resurrected and liberated people, you are linked with its enormous triumph and its irrepressible energy. You are in it, and it is in you.”

p Speaking of writers of the heroic cast who best represent the literary atmosphere of the nineteen-thirties, I would mention Arkady Gaidar (Arkady Petrovich Golikov, 1904–1941) second to Ostrovsky. Even his early life story bears comparison to Ostrovsky’s. In 1917, Gaidar was a thirteen-year-old pupil at an Arzamas school. At 14 he joined the Red Army. At 15 he was already in command of a company, and at 17 of a special regiment assigned to fight counter-revolutionary bands. He fought in battles on the approaches to Kiev, in the Caucasus, on the Polish front, and in Tambov country against Antonov’s counter-revolutionary bands. He used to say that he loved the Red Army and meant to remain in the service all his life. At the beginning of World War II, Gaidar found himself in enemy encirclement, but he fought his way out and, refusing to be evacuated to the rear, joined the partisans and died a hero’s death in a battle in the Ukraine on October 26, 1941. He was buried next to the Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko, on the high bank of the Dnieper.

p At a meeting of the Central Committee of the Komsomol Gaidar said: “Let people think one day to come that we called ourselves 136 children’s writers out of cunning, because actually we were training a strong Red-starred guard.” Gaidar wrote about youngsters, but his books, especially his School, are read by young and old alike. The idea behind all his plots is to help shape strong characters with a clearly defined purpose in life. His heroes are complex natures. Not infrequently they find themselves in opposition to their environment. And sometimes they have to suffer defeat.

p In his story The Fate of a Drummer Gaidar wrote: “ ‘Stand up straight, drummer,’ the same voice kept telling me. ’Stand up straight before it’s too late.’ I opened my eyes and reached for my revolver. And as I closed my fingers round it everything became very, very quiet. The air itself grew still. And suddenly I heard a 137 clear, strong sound, as if someone had touched a long, melodious string and, glad that someone had touched it at last, the string quivered and sang, astonishing the whole world with the amazing purity of its tone.”

p These words make a fitting epigraph for the whole of Gaidar’s work. The appeal of his stories lies in their amazing moral purity. When you read Gaidar you want to straighten up morally. Nikolai Ostrovsky made you feel like that too. I remember when I spoke with him I felt ashamed for human infirmity.

p One of Gaidar’s best books was the story Timur and His Squad which came out just before the war. Timur was a youngster who might well have been the younger brother of Pavel Korchagin from How the Steel Was Tempered and of Oleg Koshevoi from Fadeyev’s The Young Guard. He organised his friends to help the families of soldiers and to try and reform the local hooligans. Timur is a romantic hero, but he is the kind you believe in, even though the author may have exaggerated his virtues somewhat.

p Gaidar experimented with new artistic means, combining realistic techniques with romantic fancy. In this respect he borrowed a great deal from Gorky.

p Another writer of the same heroic cast was the playwright Vscvolod Vishnevsky (1900–1951) who also emerged upon the literary scene in the nineteen-thirties. “I am a soldier-writer,” he used to say about himself. He also left home when he was fourteen years old and enlisted as a ship’s boy in the Baltic fleet. His plays The First Cavalry Army and, even more so, An Optimistic Tragedy arc infused with extraordinary pathos, drawn from the crucible of history itself. The narrator in An Optimistic Tragedy says:

p “Welcome, new generation. The fighters did not demand that you should be sad after their death. In none of you did the bloodstream stop because several armies of men were buried in the ground during the Civil War. Life does not die. People are able to laugh and eat at the graves of their dear ones. And it’s just fine that they are! ’Be kinder,’ the soldiers said, dying. ’Chin up, Revolution!’ The regiment is addressing this to posterity, you see. You do not have to hold a wake. The regiment invites you to think in silence and try to understand what is the true meaning of struggle and death to us.”

p I heard Vishnevsky speak at meetings many times, and I was invariably astonished at the spell-binding, hypnotising power of his voice. During the war, his radio broadcasts and his personal appearances in the city squares of besieged Leningrad where he spoke under fire, played an enormous role in boosting the population’s morale.

138

He was one of those people to whom one can apply the expression: “he blazed like a torch”. No wonder he was so attached to Mayakpvsky. He saw the tragic in life, but he realised that the heroic in people was what led history forward.

p I have mentioned just three writers, but I believe they are so typical for their time that readers will be able to understand those new features and moods which distinguished Soviet literature of the nineteen-thirties.

p The nineteen-thirties saw the emergence of a new generation of writers. It was in those years in fact that we really came to know Sholokhov, the plays of Nikolai Pogodin, the poetry of Alexei Surkov and Konstantin Simonov, the novels of Panferov who specialised in portraying the development of the Soviet village, and 139 the works of many other poets and prose writers. It was also then that Ilya Ehrenburg gave up writing his ironically sentimental pamphlet-novels, and produced his On the Second Day and Without Drawing Breath filled with the pathos of the times. Writers signed up as volunteers to fight Franco’s fascism in Spain. But probably the most important phenomenon of the time was the new attitude to the hero, a new approach to the problem of the hero.

p In order not to bewilder the reader with too many names, I shall dwell in greater detail on this essential problem—the problem of the new hero. What is he like, this man who has to make new history? Is he simply a man who exists, or is he a teleological man pursuing a definite aim? What are the forces that shape the purposeless and the purposeful man? Where does freedom end and non-freedom begin? Why do men acquire either a taste for anarchy or a taste for purpose? These were the problems which Russian life and literature had to solve.

p The greatness of the cause itself makes the essence of Soviet heroism. In characterising Chapayev, Furmanov stresses that he did not possess any extraordinary, superhuman qualities which gave a man the undying glory of a “hero”; his qualities were very ordinary and human; he lacked many valuable qualities altogether, but the ones he did have were amazingly strong, vigorous, and clearly defined. The same description could equally well apply to Pavel Korchagin from Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered, or Surkov from Fadeyev’s The Last of the Udeghes. Chapayev, Furmanov says, was given the aura of a bogatyr by the legends woven round him by his officers, his men, and the local peasants. He became a folk hero like Svyatogor or Mikula Selyaninovich. But a folk hero is always democratic, he always stands up for the people and embodies the people’s finest qualities.

p A folk bogatyr has something out of the ordinary too, for he performs feats which are beyond the power of ordinary mortals. This extraordinariness, however, is diametrically opposed to the exclusiveness of Nietzsche’s superman, that bourgeois hero who is a being apart, who alienates ordinary men and dominates their lives for his own ends.

p The most important thing in the evolution of the hero in Soviet literature is that the features which set this hero apart from the masses lose their prominence and it is the typical qualities common to socialist society, to the people as a whole, that are emphasised. It is not the hero who has been reduced to the size of the “little man”, but on the contrary the “little man" who has risen to the stature of a hero. In the early years the shock-workers or the Bolsheviks—men who embodied the heroic in life—were as yet in the minority, they stood out as exceptional phenomena amid the 140 mass of people still obsessed, to a large extent, by private-property interests.

p This change had to find its reflection in literature. In the following years the prevailing motif in the work of Soviet writers was to become the mass heroism displayed by the people in their labour. Life itself set literature the task of portraying the new character of the people shaped in the struggle for socialism.

p Russian 19th-century classics invariably turned to the theme: what is a Russian, and what is the Russian national character? Just as invariably the conclusion they arrived at was that for all the splendid qualities of the Russian character its most salient features were passivity, anarchy, the inevitable Russian “leave it to luck" and “everything will work out somehow.” Lev Tolstoi’s Platon Karatayev, Turgenev’s Kalinich, Goncharov’s Oblomov, and Korolenko’s Tyulin are akin to one another in their attitude to life: they regard it as fate which they must humbly accept in order to feel the poetry of being. Oblomov is a nobleman and landowner, while Tyulin is a peasant ferryman, and yet, apart from the infinite indolence and indifference to their condition which they share, they have many excellent qualities in common as well, such as tolerance, humaneness, a readiness to help, and a poetic perception of life and nature. Oblomov is by no means a “negative” character. By and large, this mechanical classification of characters into “positive” and “ negative" is inapplicable to great artists. A great writer always represents the human in its concrete, temporal, historical form. If he wants to give a truthful picture of reality he cannot help noticing that it is the backward social forms and relations (feudal and capitalist) which are to blame for the ugliness in man, and that it is natural for man to aspire to rise above his social position.

p For Tolstoi, Anna Karenina was a “positive” type of Russian woman, just as Tatyana in Eugene Onegin was for Pushkin. The national Russian character at its best shows through their gentlewomen’s qualities, breaking through to the surface, as it were. Gorky also portrays many of his characters—merchants and capitalists like Artamonov, Yegor Bulychev and Vassa Zheleznova—in precisely the same way: not simply as money-makers, but also as victims of power and wealth.

p The old-world serenity of the background against which Korolenko paints his Tyulin (in The River Splashes) enhances the appeal of this melancholy hero of the old patriarchic Russia. It is a hot summer’s day. It has been raining hard in the upper reaches of this broad river, and now it splashes and plays as it swells with more and more water pouring into it. Tyulin’s philosophic composure is unperturbed, and he merely acknowledges the requests of the passengers he takes across and the rising water which washes boats 141 ashore. And life passes him by. “Dear Tyulin,” Korolcnko concludes his story on this good-natured exclamation. “Dear, gay, naughty, playful Vetluga! Where and when have I seen you before?”

p In the old days the Russian writers often came across such attractive, placid scenes, and there was always a great temptation to interpret them as symbolic of the Russian people’s nature. There are countless examples of such interpretations in pre-revolutionary Russian literature, where attempts were even made to make religious contemplation a central feature of the Russian national character. Dostoyevsky wrote to Maikov in 1870: “I will confess it to you alone, Apollon Nikolayevich: I want to make Tikhon Zadonsky the main character in my second story, under another name, of course. Who knows, maybe I shall succeed in drawing an imposing, virtuous, saintly figure. How do we now: maybe it is Tikhon who is that positive Russian type which our literature is trying to find.” And Pyotr Kropotkin said about Oblomovsbcbina—the passivity and indolence personified by Oblomov, the main character in Goncharov’s famous novel of the same name—that the whole of Russian life, the whole of Russian history bore traces of this disease. But was it in fact a disease? Kropotkin, the anarchist, and author of Mutual Assistance, spoke of it with sympathy: “The absence of aggressive virtues, non-resistance and passive obedience, all these traits of character are in large measure common to the Russian race.”

p But all those traits (sluggishness, in the first place) which were from time immemorial attributed to the Russian race simply had their roots in the underdevelopment of the production forces and social relations, and in the slave labour system. The indolence of the Tyulins was merely their way of responding to the futility and indifference with which they were surrounded from infancy, for such was the Russian reality of the time. Behind this form of unresistance lay enormous untapped reserves of creative energy. It is an interesting thing that in folklore this Oblomov-like character never appears as the hero. The people had a better opinion of themselves, because in actual fact they were always rising in rebellion and seeking revolutionary ways of resolving life’s contradictions. Ilya Muromets, the bogatyr who “did nothing but sit" until he was 33 years old, was in fact rallying his strength for his future exploits.

p For obvious reasons, the Oblomov trait in the national character did not find a broad, generalised reflection in Soviet literature. Oblomovshchina, the symbol of inactivity, is entirely foreign to the very nature of revolution. And the first thing the people did in the revolution was shake themselves free of Tyulin’s indifference to the world about him. Oblomov shchina became a term used to characterise those who resisted the new and were hostile to the 142 revolution. This will be found in a number of novels (Gladkov’s Energy, Ilyin’s The Great Conveyor and others). Contrarily, such Stolz  [142•1  qualities as energy and initiative became the principal features of the people’s, or more precisely, the peasant’s character. Energy, passion and dedication are the chief characteristics of, say, Kirill Zhdarkin (the peasant hero of Bruski-Panterov’s four-part novel about the Russian peasantry in the Revolution), that antipode of Tyulin. A decisive turn was taken in the shaping of the Russian national character; the process went according to a reversed pattern, as it were, and followed the finest folk traditions.

p The evolution of the type of activity, the type of revolutionary protest, and the type of work effort was a more complicated process. Old Russian literature sought traits of the national character in this evolution as well. Acquisitive activity in pursuit of private– ownership interests was absolutely incompatible with the notion of the type of activity common to millions of people, and so the question was posed differently: what national traits did the Russians lend their activity in general, be it commerce or revolution? V. Rozanov, an interpreter of Russian life and one of these would-be philosophers, wrote: “Let us take capital and capitalism, and we shall see that even our methods of accumulation are profoundly different from those practised in the West. Our masses are poor and clumsy in self-enrichment, even when they desire it very badly. Our rich man is an extraordinary character: ’He clips his coupons’. And once again we observe a disinclination to bustle and a love of tranquility common to river pilots and roofers.”

p As examples of the “active” Russian character the literature of the past gave us, first of all, the image of a daredevil, and descriptions of dashing escapades, wild abandon, Russian generosity and broad-mindedness, unrestricted by any reasonable limits and ending in self-sacrifice and self-destruction. Dostoyevsky in his A Writer’s Diary (1873), telling about a man who displayed Russian daring when he made up his mind to “fire at the Communion cup”, says: “We have before us two national types which are extremely representative of the Russian people as a whole. In the first place, it is a forgetfulness of all measure in everything. It is an inner need to go too far, to taste the thrill of walking to the edge of a precipice, hanging over the side, peering into the depths, and in some cases, far from infrequent, plunging down madly, head first. It is an inner need to deny, sometimes felt by the most undenying and worshipful people, a need to deny the most undeniable and revered, to deny everything, the thing held most sacred in one’s heart, one’s most 143 perfect ideal, the sacrament of the whole nation in its entirety, before which one has just stood in adoration and which has suddenly become an unbearable burden. What is most amazing is the hastiness, the impulsiveness with which a Russian sometimes hurries to declare himself in specific moments of his own or the nation’s life, to declare himself in either the good or the despicable. There is no holding him sometimes. When it comes to love, drink, dissipation, hurt pride or envy, a Russian is capable of almost utter selfabandon, he is prepared to sever all ties, to renounce everything: his family, his conventions, and God, once he is caught up in this whirlwind, a whirlwind of convulsive and instant self-negation and self-destruction, so common to the Russian national character at certain fateful moments of life.”

p Yet all these features, discerned by genius and shaped into a single image, do not reflect the essence of the Russian national character as a whole. It is but a temporal form in which the inexhaustible creative powers of the people manifest themselves, a form created for the same reasons as Oblomovshchina, not common to all and not imperative, though widespread. Chaadayev in Philosophical Letters (1823) said: “What all of us lack is some sort of solidness, method, or logic.” Under capitalism the Russian people could not have cultivated this solidness, or this logic in their creative self-expression. Only a proletarian socialist revolution could have developed this new kind of creative behaviour in people, a fact which has been extensively shown in Soviet literature, but nowhere as compellingly and clearly as in Furmanov’s Chapayev. Much of what• Dostoyevsky has noted was also common to Chapayev: the inner need to go too far in anger, in joy or in dedication to the common cause, the impulsive desire to declare himself, to exaggerate a little, to brag and even to get caught in the “whirlwind of convulsive and instant self-negation.” Thus, after a slight quarrel with the division commissar, Chapayev decides to hand in a report requesting to be “removed from office”. Furmanov remarks: “The strange thing is that Chapayev did not seem to treasure his division at all, and yet it comprised all those heroic regiments with which he was so close. The main trait of his character took the upper hand here: this trait was to sacrifice the dearest thing he had without a moment’s consideration or hesitation, at the slightest, even a trifling, provocation.”

p Such inconsistent and erratic behaviour, and this “absence of method or logic”, reflected the undeveloped state of Russia’s social life. At the same time, circumscribed though this form may be, Chapayev is ebullient with a powerful creative urge, he is full of revolutionary protest, he displays genuine heroism in revolutionary struggle, and Russian revolutionary enthusiasm. Socialism, or rather 144 the proletarian revolution, separates this heroic self-expression from its anarchic form and thus reveals the human meaning of heroism, strengthens the hero’s sense of dignity, his faith in himself and his desire to live, and restores this man to his original self. “And another thing,” Chapayev says to his commissar, “the higher I rise, the more I treasure life. You develop such conceit, you know: you’re no louse, you say to yourself, you’re a real man, damn you, and you want to live properly, the real life. It’s not that I’m turning coward, I’ve got more sense, that’s all.”

p Under socialism the Russian national character is being purged of these traits forever. This purging process has been reflected by many socialist realist writers—Fadeyev, Sholokhov, Furmanov and Makarenko among them. The Revolution has corrected the legends about the moral qualities of the Russian national character. The Russian people’s attitude to work has also changed. Russian literature from Saltykov-Shchedrin to Gorky has variously represented, besides the indolence known as Oblomovsbcbina, the headlong rush into frenzied work without method or constancy, its romantically impulsive character, and the infatuation with the exciting scale of the job undertaken with complete disregard for the details, the purpose and the results.

p The Russian national character has changed considerably since the Revolution. And so have all the above-mentioned traits which for decades and even centuries have been attributed to the Russian people, and which have been described by 19th-century writers like Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov. The process of transformation was particularly intensified in the 19305, and this found its due reflection in Soviet literature.

p Malcolm Bradbury, whom I have mentioned earlier, wrote in an article that people in England (and in other old civilised countries as well) were developing a taste for anarchy and were dissatisfied with the modern civilisation created by capitalism. He refers to Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. The institutions of civilisation do not live up to their purpose. What is more, they restrict the freedom of the individual and exert increasingly strong pressure on him, depriving him of perspective. That is why, Bradbury thinks, people—meaning above all scholars and intellectuals—begin to remember a duty to anarchy. This is reflected in literature. Irresponsible, spontaneous, unreasonable actions, motivated not by the interests of society but more often than not by ultra-individualistic and sexual desires, are given prominence. This is particularly apparent in many French novels, in the books of Frangoise Sagan, for instance. Even if her heroes do agree to submit to the influence of the codes of society and established morals, they show no more grace than a ship which is obliged to drift because it has lost 145 control and gone off course. In a sense it is a drifting society, and literature reflects this state of drifting which results from the anarchy of the capitalist method of production and the anarchy of sex. The strong influence exercised by Freud on the literatures of Italy, Britain and France for several decades now is self-evident.

p In Russia we observe an entirely different picture which, I repeat, unfolded most impressively in the late nineteen-thirties when society was mobilised for concerted endeavour. Admittedly this mobilisation had its negative side too, for it was after 1935 that the oppressive consequences of the Stalin personality cult began to manifest themselves with particular force. But it must not be imagined that the practice of extolling official well-being or fanatical heroism characterised the whole of the literature of that period. It was in those years that Ilf and Petrov entered the scene with a new kind of satire, quite different from that of Zoshchenko. Ilf and Petrov also levelled their satire at the Philistinism which existed then and has partly survived to our day, but the whole idea of the Golden Calf raises the problem to a different, I should say, a historical plane. This idea is that there’s no room for millionaires in the Soviet Union, money won’t buy them anything, there’s nowhere for them to make a splurge, no chance to paint the town red. By developing this idea in the scenes with Koreiko, a millionaire by chance, the authors are able to show Soviet life from a peculiar angle. Their main barbs are aimed against red-tape which was so hateful to Lenin who regarded it as one of the most dangerous practices for the socialist system.

p Thus the nineteen-thirties, just as the nineteen-twenties, advanced their own special problems which were reflected in the literature of the time. The positive aspects of that period recorded by literature included the changes which had come into the national Russian character: better organisation, self-discipline and efficiency. The shady side was the way the Stalin personality cult exerted its pressure on literature, particularly in the years just before World War II. This pressure was very hard indeed.

But for all that, it was not the personality cult which “planned” literature, but the heroic labour exploits of the masses who carried through the five-year plans. “Man is Created Here" (from Goethe’s Faust} are the words chosen by Fyodor Gladkov as an epigraph for his novel Energy describing the construction of the hydroelectric power station on the Dnieper. It was indeed in the great effort of construction, in the process of life as it produced new forms that a new type of man and a new national character were created.