p From the point of view of actual development and the range of problems covered, the war against Hitler Germany brought literature nothing essentially new in the ideological sense, but it did bring out more clearly certain latent features and accentuated its achievements.

p The total mobilisation of society in wartime was fully justified. The people of their own accord made heroic, supreme efforts to destroy the aggressor, liberate their country and defend the gains of the Revolution. Naturally enough all this was reflected in literature. It became especially clear in the war years that Soviet writers were ideologically united, that the interests of the people were their own, and that they were prepared to defend their country against the enemy not only with their talent but with their lives. Suffice it to say that more than a third of the membership of the Union of Soviet Writers, irrespective of age, went off to the front as privates, officers, political officers and war correspondents. Of the 900 who were at the front, 345 died in battle. Among them were such well-known writers as Arkady Gaidar, Yuri Krymov, author of Tanker Derbent, and Yevgeny Petrov, essayist and satirist. Ten writers received the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

p Life in the trenches among the soldiers gave writers a deeper insight into the heart of the people, inspiring them to produce outstanding works. It was in field conditions that Alexander Tvardovsky conceived his Vastly Terkin which has become a national poem in the true sense of the word. It was published in the front-line papers, and people learnt it by heart. The image of the jolly, brave and modest peasant, Private Vasily Terkin, might well have been created by the soldiers themselves, and they loved him like a living person.

p Another of Tvardovsky’s poems, called A House by the Roadside, has always had a tremendously powerful impact on my imagination by virtue of its tragedy and truth. In this house a soldier left his wife and baby, and while he was away fighting a second child was born to his wife in a German prison camp.

p It was at the war that Nikolai Tikhonov, Konstantin Simonov, Alexei Surkov, Mikhail Svetlov, Alexander Prokofiev, Ilya Selvinsky and Mikhail Isakovsky wrote their memorable poetry.

p When the American exhibition was on in Moscow in 1959, one of the lady guides came up to Alexei Surkov and asked: “It was you, wasn’t it, to whom Simonov dedicated his poem Remember, Alyosba...?" This poem, like Isakovsky’s Katyusha and other songs have virtually flown across the ocean—ample proof that they came straight from the heart.

p Literature was enriched during the war by the essays of Vasily Grossman and Pyotr Pavlenko, by Alexei Tolstoi’s Ivan the Terrible, Vadim Kozhevnikov’s stories, and the contributions of many, many other authors.

p Sholokhov, Fadeyev and Korneichuk were all at the front. Even Pasternak, a poet who appeared to keep so well away from any kind of storms, even he felt an inner urge to go to the front. In a book of poetry he gave me he wrote that he would never be able to forget the people he met there and the hearty welcome he was given in General Gorbatov’s units.

p No man or woman in the country could have remained on the sidelines or failed to appreciate the historical significance of the struggle.

p Vera Inber, a woman getting on in years, remained in besieged Leningrad with her husband who was in charge of a hospital, and attended literary meetings regularly, undaunted by enemy bombardment. In The Pulkovo Meridian she describes life in the besieged city in tragic and heroic pictures. The poem is inspired by the idea of humanism, and in it Vera Inber says:

p We’re humanists.
And we,
The scores and hundreds of us,
In Leningrad’s alerted darkness,
Felt suddenly that we were huge.
We were a force.
The glory of the people we were with
Was deathless.
So never mind the night.
No matter that we cannot see as yet
The face of Victory, her features.
The rays of her gold crown
Are rising in the sky already. . . .

p The two literary genres which flourished equally in wartime were publicist articles and lyric poetry. Worthy of special mention are 148 those poets who lived and wrote in besieged Leningrad: above all Olga Bcrgoltz for her tragic lyricism, and Alexander Prokofiev for the lyrical evocativeness of his Motherland images in Russia. This poem is like a song, or rather a stream of songs flowing into one another.

p In his report “The 25th Birthday of Soviet Literature" addressed to the general meeting of the Academy of Sciences in November 1942, Alexei Tolstoi said that the remarkable thing about Soviet literature was that it did not confine itself to the “slit of a trench”. In other words, it did not confine itself exclusively to propaganda, calling on the population and the soldiers to perform their patriotic duty. Far from it. Under the stress of war, literature could not hold back its tears, which were perhaps more bitter than those shed in the nineteen-thirties. Lyricism softened it, emotions became more expansive and free, and literature rang with passionate humanism. In this sense, Soviet literature sharply differed from the literature of fascist Germany where the utterings of Goebbels were repeated in variations in hundreds of books. Soviet literature made a stand against fascism with the whole of its ideological essence.

p Some gifted writers who seemed to find themselves anew in the war theme came to the fore during the war years and immediately afterwards. The first to spring to mind is Konstantin Simonov. His Days and Nights, a novel about the defence of Stalingrad, was one of the most widely read books at the time and was immediately translated into all the world’s major languages. The author, who in this novel “handled hot material coolly”, found for it a unique narrative tone (stemming from Lev Tolstoi to a certain extent) which has both the austerity of a formal account and the throbbing pathos of the underlying drama.

p Thereafter, Konstantin Simonov devoted all his prose to the theme of war. His latest novels The Living and the Dead and Men Are Not Born Soldiers are a chronicle of human destinies in those years. They are fine novels and extremely popular with Soviet readers.

p Vasily Grossman in his story The People Are Immortal. (1942) takes a different approach to the war theme. The story can be called a tragic legend in prose. This is how he tells it:

p “Soldiers were dying. Who will tell others about their feat? Only the quickly skimming clouds saw how private Ryabokon fought to his last bullet, how political officer Yeretik, after shooting ten Germans, blew himself up with a hand already turning cold; how Glushkov, surrounded by the enemy, went on firing until he drew his last breath; how machine-gunners Glagolev and Kordakhin, bleeding to death, went on squeezing the trigger while there was 149 strength in their stiffening fingers, and while their failing vision could discern the enemy in the hot, thickening haze.

p “Great is the nation whose sons die with honour and dignity on its boundless fields of battle. The sky and the stars know about them, the earth has heard their last sighs, the unreaped rye and the roadside trees have witnessed their heroism.”

p Later Vasily Grossman was to abandon this emotional style. But in the wartime it was very widespread, and is to be found in Leonid Leonov’s The Battle for Velikosbumsk, Leonid Sobolev’s The Soul of a Seaman, Nikolai Tikhonov’s Leningrad Stories, Alexei Tolstoi’s Ivan Sudarev’s Stories, Boris Gorbatov’s The Unconquered, and other romantically dramatic works.

p We find quite a different style in Alexander Bek’s Volokolamsk Highway. In this book he exposes the cruel logic of battle and the preparation for battle. Momysh-Uly, the hero of the story, says indignantly to the political officer: “Why do you speak in those ready-made phrases, Dordia? Not steel alone, but words too, even the holiest words, get worn down and begin to ’skid’ like a gear with blunted teeth if you don’t give them a fresh edge.”

p Alexander Bek does not make his heroes hold lengthy discourses or digress from the matter in hand. He shows the implacable ruthlessness of battle. If a man is making ready to kill another man, he must be suitably prepared for it. No need to describe any scenic beauty then, or the pathos of heroism. “Do not expect me to describe the scenery, for I don’t know whether the view spreading out before us was beautiful or not. The surface of the sluggish, narrow Ruza was like a dark mirror, and on it sprawled some large, artificial-looking leaves on which white water lilies no doubt grew in summer. Maybe it was beautiful, but I made a mental note: it’s a rotten little river, it’s shallow and easy for the enemy to ford.” Bek describes the everyday prose of the heroic life of General Panfilov and his men, but all their actions are ruled by the war’s implacably frightening logic which determines the soldier’s every step.

p The spokesman for this logic is Momysh-Uly. I do not know what to call this story—heroic or tragic. It is somewhat reminiscent of Simonov’s Days and Nights, yet it goes much further. The principal hero is the logic of circumstances or the mechanism which determines human actions. Bek has taken the war—the most brutal of all possible situations, where the human in men clashes with that which denies all that is human. Here heroism becomes the fuel which gives the human stream the power to move across a mine field.

p Alexander Bek’s Volokolamsk Highway is one of those books which make you ponder on the cruelty of human reason when, in an 150 attempt to find the ultimate truth, it rips away life’s last, protective veil.

p These two trends—one addressed to the senses and inviting a romantically emotional response, and the other relentlessly demanding that we should know the naked truth—were further developed in a whole series of books written after the war. Among those writers who followed the first trend was Boris Polevoi, the author of The Story of a Real Man. The second trend is represented by such well-known writers as Victor Nekrasov and Vera Panova who elect to underplay the drama in their narrative, describing the obverse side of events involving the destinies of rank-and-file people.

p Emanuel Kazakevich’s story The Star whose heroes are scouts (joining the army as a volunteer, Kazakevich himself was a scout in the last war) abounds in extremely tense situations, but the dramatic narrative is mellowed by the author’s gentle lyricism which somehow reconciles you to the relentless logic of war. What is a scout? A man who “no longer belongs to himself, nor to his commanders, nor even to his memories”. “He is as nameless as a bird in the woods. He could easily forego articulate speech and just imitate the whistling of birds to give signals to his comrades. He grows into the fields, the forests and the gullies, he becomes the spirit of these parts—a dangerous, watchful spirit, nursing one thought alone in his head: how to carry out his task.”

p The question confronting literature after the war was whether socialist realism, that is realism based on the socialist experience, would develop the tendency to analyse and reveal the psychology and characters of men, in other words encourage realism’s aptitude for investigation, which presupposes the showing of life’s contradictions as well, or whether the emotional would prevail and preoccupation with the romantic and the heroic would more or less eclipse the desire, natural to all genuine art, to render life the way it is.

The war years showed that literature had good use for such genres as lyricism and even simple songs which, it transpired, also contained something that cemented people together. They also showed that humanism, which was clearly the general principle of wartime literature, could be quite lawfully rendered in a new manner, as witness the books of Victor Nekrasov and Vera Panova.