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p Following the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956, serious changes took place in the ideological life of Soviet society and in Soviet literature too. These changes meant greater democratisation, in the Leninist sense of the term, and an upsurge in the development of the people’s creative powers.

p As we have seen from the foregoing, literature as a whole successfully weathered the difficult years of inhibited spiritual activity. To prove this point, there was Leonid Leonov’s novel The Russian Forest (19$}) with the odious character of Professor Gratsiansky, the stories of Valentin Ovechkin On a Collective farm, Difficult Spring (1952-1956), and others. Ovechkin describes Borzov, a village official whose bureaucratic methods of work and indifference to people ran counter to the principles of communism.

p Even before the Twentieth Party Congress stories of a satirical or critical nature had been appearing in the literary magazines. For instance, G. Troyepolsky’s From the Notes of an Agronomist in which prominence was given to the exposure of characters who were alien to the entire pattern of Soviet life.

p An element of criticism also characterises the works of the young writer Vladimir Tendryakov whose main theme is modern Soviet village life. In his story The Fall of Ivan Chuprov he shows how this energetic collective-farm chairman changes in character as he becomes more and more addicted to money-making in shady deals. Or take his story Rainy Weather which criticises the secretary of a district Party committee who, by giving unreasonable orders with an utter disregard for the actual situation, causes the collective farm serious material and moral damage. Vladimir Tendryakov, who entered the literary scene after the Second World War, bases all his stories (Ruts, A Tight Knot and others) on sharp psychological conflicts.

p The same is true of Pavel Nilin whose story Cruelty is well known. He is another writer who became popular in the post-war 211 years. More often than not the principal characters in his stories are criminals and those engaged in fighting crime, of which he has a first-hand knowledge, having worked in the criminal investigation department in his youth. Nilin’s exciting stories have nothing in common with those murder stories, so current in the West, full of horror and gory killings. With Nilin, the important thing is not so much the crime itself as those psychological and philosophical problems which arise from instances of law-breaking by different types of people.

p Vasily Azhayev’s novel Far From Moscow gives a panoramic view of a construction project in the Far East where an oil pipe-line is being built. Against this background, people stand out in their true colours. For instance, Batmanov, who is in charge of the project, proves to be a strong-willed man who likes to give the orders and who believes in keeping a distance between himself and others. Engineer Grubsky, for all his training, turns out to be a man of backward views and because of him construction is held up. Azhayev’s novel throbs with the tension of those years. The plot also follows a pattern typical for that time: the pivot is the construction project, and all the happenings are determined by it. The “hero” is the collective of workers with whom the construction project comes first, mattering more to them than individual desires or ambitions. It is remarkable that Azhayev managed to give a dramatic rendering of such things as a Party conference, discussions of purely technical matters, and so forth, which one would imagine could hardly be described artistically and even less so entertainingly.

p Galina Nikolayeva’s novel The Battle (published in 1954, although it was written much earlier) is also about people working at a large plant. It is a story of conflicts in the staff’s business and personal relations. The central theme is the battle fought by Bakhirev, the chief engineer, against the director Valgan for the reconstruction of the plant on more progressive lines, and his battle for happiness with the woman he loves. He wins the first battle but loses the second.

p Thus, there are numerous examples to prove that shortly before the Twentieth Party Congress Soviet writers were already dealing with these historical contradictions in their novels, presenting them from the viewpoint of the Party’s and the people’s struggle for communism.

p Still, the main tendency in those years was to pile up the eulogies and further romanticise the “positive” characters and situations. Some writers really “wallowed in ode-singing" to use Belinsky’s expression. What is more, this eulogising reduced the informative merits of the books. Critics then evolved a theory of “art without 212 conflict”, although a conflict between the excellent and the more excellent was considered quite all right. Thus, for instance, in Alexander Korneichuk’s play In the Steppes of the Ukraine the conflict is between Galushka, a good collective-farm chairman who says that “life is fine enough under socialism" and he is thus in no hurry to attain communism, and Chesnok, a better collective-farm chairman who is anxious to change life on communist principles as soon as possible.

p It would be wrong to attribute all the tendencies to embellish reality which originated during the Stalin personality cult to that cult alone, or to put them down to the spread of a dogmatic and unrealistic approach to life.

p The Soviet people themselves having shown such heroism and self-sacrifice in realising the ideals set before them by the Party, radiated romantic fervour and enthusiasm. And this naturally left its imprint on literature.

p However, an unhealthy tendency attached itself to this healthy and understandable one, namely an evasion of historical contradictions, a shirking of the subject even from progressive ideological positions, and a proneness to round off all the corners. This came from an erroneous understanding of the purpose of literature. Some writers imagined that their books would have a greater effect on the readers if they only described achievements and happy occasions. This faulty tendency appeared in many books published soon after the war about the life of collective farmers, industrial workers and intellectuals.

p The new course set by the Twentieth Party Congress was naturally very important for the development of socialist realism, an artistic method based on truth to life and inviting the writer to state this truth without any embellishments or pure eyewash.

p Clearly, this reappraisal of values must apply to everything that was connected with the Stalin personality cult and its manifestations, to questions of dogmatism, embellishment, etc. However, there can be no reappraisal of values in the main thing, which in Soviet literature is to present the people as the guiding force in history, and to show how all people become spiritually renovated through creative endeavour and the struggle for communism, resulting in the emergence of a new type of man. Thus the main thing in the aesthetic code of the new society’s literature is the Leninist principle of partisanship, which requires that all artistic, descriptive and stylistic means be subordinated to the idea promulgated by a literary work.

p The view that the aesthetic means of literature and the writer’s skill must meet the ideological aims of a given book is the 213 underlying theme of Fedin’s treatise The Writer, Art and Time (1961). Together with Maxim Gorky and Alexei Tolstoi, Konstantin Fedin is one of those writers who have given a most complete and profound exposition of the principles of Soviet literature. Fedin writes: ”. . . writing is worthwhile only if it is an activity that serves society and the people. History has confirmed that longevity and immortality come only to those works of art which are rooted in the same soil as their authors’ thinking and which embody this thinking in images.” Gorky, Alexei Tolstoi, Fedin, Sholokhov, Fadeyev and Leonov—all these leading Soviet writers held that the main purpose of Soviet literature was to embody in artistic images the heroism of the people in its struggle for communism.

p What then were the new features which appeared in literature after the elimination of the Stalin personality cult? What were the consequences of the new policy?

p The consequences were manifold. The first problem which loomed before the writers was how to interpret the capabilities of the method of socialist realism in view of this reappraisal of the aims of literature. It was obvious that writers had more right and opportunity to present reality in a critical light. But the question was: what measure of criticism and what methods of criticising events and people were appropriate in Soviet literature? What new artistic means were demanded by the new tasks, by the new tendencies in the country?

p Different solutions were found, and several distinct trends gradually took shape. One was characterised by a heightened interest in all that was until then taboo. The writers who adhered to this trend (let us call it a “critical trend" as a convenient term of reference) focussed their attention mainly on the contradictions and the negative aspects of Soviet life. They described scenes of mental cruelty, indifference, bureaucracy and violations of the law as if they wanted to say to the reader: “Look at this. It is all foreign to man whom we want to defend. It is contradictory to communism.”

p Writers adhering to the second trend (which we shall call “heroico-publicistic”) on the other hand, gave prominence to the figures of Communists and workers.

p Writers who followed the third, lyrico-romantic, trend sought living images through which they might unburden their hearts of their infatuation with life and their gladness that there were, after all, good people in the world whom they called “daylight stars”. (Daylight Stars is the title of a book by the poetess Olga Bergolts). The element of the tragic, in which, alas, our life still abounded at the time, is present in the books of these writers as well. But the tragic is wrapped, as it were, in the happiness of the authors’ knowledge that they are living in this world and participating in the great 214 events of the age. As the nineteenth-century poet Tyutchev once said:

p How fortunate the man K’bo visited this world at fateful
                    hour!
The gods have summoned bun to converse with them
                    at their least.

p Naturally, my division of the Soviet literature of that period into several trends is quite arbitrary. They cannot in fact be delineated exactly. Elements of all of them will be encountered in different works. Besides, all these distinctions, shades and trends are embraced by the general concept of socialist realism.

p The new and even more widespread trend in literature was the general interest in moral problems. I do not simply mean the appearance of a whole series of books raising questions of ethics and conscience—as, for instance, Vladimir Tendryakov’s story Jugdment which tells how the accidental killing of a man on a hunting trip aroused the conscience of all the people involved in it, or Pavlova’s novel and play Conscience. There can hardly be a modern work of literature which does not touch in some way upon the subject of conscience—that control mechanism of human behaviour.

p The liquidation of the consequences of the Stalin personality cult took a weight off the people’s hearts. Alexander Tvardovsky wrote about this in his poem Space Beyond Space -.

p While on the subject, I have noticed
Throughout the country, south and north,
That men are growing kinder, less self-wronging,
And smiles appear more often than before. . . .

p It is thus quite natural that the new Party programme, adopted by the 22nd C.P.S.U. Congress in October 1961, should have devoted a special section to the moral code of people building communism. The code is based on principles of socialist humanism and mutual respect between people, and not simply on the idea of serving society. “Man is to man a friend, a comrade and a brother.” These words make one ponder on the diametrically opposite thesis of private-property society, expressed in the well-known Latin saying and proclaimed in the iyth century by Thomas Hobbes: “Homo homini lupus est."

p The idea of good as a creative force awakening in men a desire to work for the good of society, serving it honestly and conscientiously, are themes which have been embodied in hundreds of books published in the last few years.

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p In this connection I should like to mention Meet Baluyev, a novel by Vadim Kozhevnikov, a prominent figure in the Union of Soviet Writers, editor of the literary magazine Znamya, and author of several collections of short stories and an autobiographical novel. The hero of Kozhevnikov’s last novel Meet Baluyev typifies a Soviet official and a Communist who directs the building of a gas pipe-line, an important construction project. He is not a young man, and his character as a person and an official was shaped in another time. It is obvious that an overweening, bureaucratic manner was common to him in the past. But he has become a different man. The new demands made on everyone, and communist leaders in the first place, after the 2oth Party Congress, are expressed most accurately by Baluyev, when he says: “It’s hard to be a man nowadays. So much is expected of one in the line of unwritten moral duties, apart from one’s work and professional competence. . . . We have so overstated the norms of human behaviour that nowadays everyone demands the heights of virtue from his fellow men.”

p Baluyev tries to meet these new moral demands in his work. He takes a personal interest in the people working for him, and teaches the beautiful radio-telegraph operator to be more congenial and less self-conscious of her looks. “ ‘Smile at a man! Well, as a sign of friendship, or something. Let him like you and trust you.’ And then he added angrily, in the tone of an order: ’Stop being afraid of yourself because you’re beautiful. The sight of a beautiful thing makes men want to do something noble. He’ll look at you, then at the seam (he is talking of welders here.-K.Z.), and he’ll see the glaring discrepancy and want to do a more beautiful job.’ "

p True, Olga Dmitriyevna Terekhova, one of the characters in the book, says this to Baluyev: “You are kind not because you’re like that, but because you believe it’s most important and right to be kind just now.”

p A curious remark. Men like Baluyev were probably different in the past. But is it a bad thing that they have grown kinder? Baluycv’s story, as told by Vadim Kozhevnikov, testifies to the allembracing educational importance of the Leninist policy pursued by the Party.

p How must we classify this novel if we regard it in its purely artistic aspect? The question is a valid one because every work of literature is judged not merely for its content but also for its form, not just for its philosophising or its descriptions but also for its emotional content, imagery, expressiveness, style and language. Nor must a novel be classed with publicistic writings, and it would be wrong to treat it as embodying stylistic aims alone. “The novel is omnipotent" as Boris Rurikov, editor of the literary magazine 216 Inostrannaya Literature. (Foreign Literature), said at the symposium of the European Writers’ Association held in Leningrad in August 1963. The novel is capable of embracing the whole stream of life and it is free to use any of the aesthetic means evolved during the entire history of world literature.

p I remember the meeting of Italian and Soviet writers held after the Rome congress in 1961. The Italian novelist Pasolini appraised the books of Soviet authors from Croce’s angle of “stylistic criticism" as it is called. Roughly, he said the following: take Aksyonov who wrote A Ticket to the Stars, take Yevtushenko. Stylistically, Aksyonov’s novel maintains a good-humoured tone throughout, a tone which too often verges on sentimentality. Yevtushenko’s poetry is also profoundly sentimental in colouring. The basic tone of his poems is a vague discontent, and irrational criticism of some “ inessential aspects of Soviet reality" as Pasolini puts it. But by means of stylistic operation—of very dubious quality, according to Pasolini—this irrational discontent turns into rationalism which, on the contrary, defends the kindness of Soviet society.

p Pasolini arrives at the conclusion that on the whole Soviet writers are trying to overcome the difficulties of this period by leaping over—quite rightly, too—what for the West is the experience of decadence. But, by leaping over the experience of decadence, they land in the romanticism, pure and innocent, which really went before it. This romantic, blissful, good-natured, good-humoured and, at best, classically nai’ve and chaste atmosphere can no longer satisfy European readers.

p This is the impression made on the Italian novelist by the more recent Soviet literature. I mention it here because this view is a very wide-spread one in the West. Pasolini was right about some of the faults common to Soviet literature, such as a certain tendency towards sentimentality. But his approach taken as a whole is wrong. For a start, as we have seen, there is no question of the impasse which allegedly Soviet literature came to at one time. There were shortcomings, to be sure, but never an impasse. Can Leonov’s The Russian Forest or the second part of Sholokhov’s Virgin Soil Upturned be called the products of an impasse? And then, why does a “classically nai’ve and chaste atmosphere" not satisfy the West-European reader?

p This obviously speaks of an insufficient knowledge of Soviet literature and a lack of taste for those heroic and moral motifs which prevail in the books of Soviet authors.

p The writers who adhere to the heroico-publicistic trend are not at all alike. All they have in common is their striving to express the main thing, that is the heroism which became part of the Russians’ life after the October Revolution.

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p Take Boris Polevoi, for instance. He is, I think, one of the most consistently typical representatives of this trend. His is the selective principle. He chooses the most commendable examples from real life, trusting in their educational influence. In this sense, Boris Polevoi is a preacher of heroic conduct. You cannot criticise his characters on the grounds that “there aren’t any such people”. Boris Polevoi’s plots are documentary, his stories are true. This being so, his characters are naturally bound hand and foot to the fact, to the documentary evidence. The method has its limitations, but then the “law of authenticity" comes into effect. The reader, in spite of himself, becomes spellbound by the beauty of heroism. Overwhelmed by the hero’s deeds he is prepared to forgive or overlook the artistic weaknesses of such novels as Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered. The hero of Polevoi’s The Story of a Real Man is a flesh-and-blood person. His real name is Maresyev, changed in the book to Meresyev. During the Second World War his plane crashed on enemy territory. Wounded in both legs he crawled through the snow and managed to get across the front line. His legs had to be amputated. He had artificial limbs made for him, and by sheer effort of will and urged on by his impatience to go back and fight for his country, he learnt to use them amazingly well. And he did make a comeback. He was to fly again, and bring down more enemy planes. It is the living fire of his soul that Boris Polevoi communicated to his book The Story of a Real Man.

p Dazzled by the victories of the Romans, Polybius wrote in his famous Universal History that it was enough for him to recount an event without the slightest bit of fabrication to arrest the attention of his readers. It is enough for some Soviet writers (Boris Polevoi, for one) to recount the events of the Revolution or the last war to captivate the reader with the example of its heroes.

p This can be a successful method, but it is nevertheless a one-sided solution. Alexei Tolstoi voiced a passionate objection to it in one of his 1924 articles. He wrote: “So that’s what it is! A modern novelist describes events, he collects material for his descendants. He has studied the styles excellently, he has jotted down some telling little words, taken an instance from real life and concocted a story. What for? So our grandchildren might know how we lived, talked and suffered. A splendid aim, I agree. But when our grandchildren come to read these chronicle stories they will not learn anything from them except particular facts, facts, facts; that and what words we, their grandfathers, used.”

p Alexei Tolstoi dreamed of creating literary types of the new man. He believed that every creative person should be alive to the grandeur of what was taking place, and then he would conceive the idea of a heroic novel. Let there be sweeping gestures, because 218 life takes great swings and says piercing, cruel words. Cumbersome descriptions, prolixity and boring characterisations were nothing to be afraid of, he said. And indeed, features of epic monumentality are common in Soviet novels. The art of socialist realism is like a crystal reflecting a multitude of lights, of which heroism shines the brightest. It has an appealing, magnetic power. As the trend which I have called heroico-publicistic develops, we may still encounter books whose artistic merits will not quite satisfy us. We will go on complaining that their range of verbal colours is poor, that they lack Shakespearian characters and a feeling of grandeur equal to the epoch. But while placing these demands before ourselves we have no right to ignore those discoveries in Soviet literature which, for all the shortcomings that can be found in them, express the new features and feelings characteristic of Soviet life.

p Take Vsevolod Kochetov, for example. Born in Novgorod in 1912, he started out in life as an agronomist at a state farm, and took up professional writing after the war. His novels Under Native Skies (1950), Our Youth Is With Us (1954) are in a sense a chronicle of the events of the last twenty years in this country. In the Zhurbins (1952), and The Yershov Brothers (1958) Kochetov portrays the people who make the bulwark and mainstay of Soviet power: skilled industrial workers. In The Zhurbins they are workers employed at a shipbuilding plant. The reader is taken into their homes. He is introduced to their way of life and their spiritual, political and cultural interests. The life of the industrial workers (especially in The Yershov Brothers) is shown in connection with (and sometimes in contrast to) the life of the white collar workers and the technologists. The author raises various topical problems of the theatre, the cinema and literature by making them the objects of debates between his characters.

p Kochetov’s latest novel The Secretary of the Regional Party Committee (1961) belongs to the moral-and-political genre. The author seems to be telling the reader: this is the way to think, and this is the way to act. The novel is unquestionably informative because it elucidates the alignment of the motive forces of Soviet society.

p Pasolini says that he is not satisfied with literature which gives too straightforward an answer to the question: how must a man live in today’s world. And we, for our part, are not satisfied with literature of the kind produced by the existentialists or the disciples of the French “new novel”. The writers who adhere to these trends (Camus, Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet) are really competing with the tape-recorder in registering the movement of all the currents in the stream of consciousness. Art, after all, is not an electrocardiogram of the human soul.

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p People in the bourgeois countries may like or dislike the Soviet type of literature because its heroes are held up as models for emulation. But such heroes really do exist. Millions of Soviet people take the keenest interest in problems concerning the choice of a road in life, and this interest is naturally reflected by Soviet writers. Mayakovsky dealt with these problems too, and his advice to young men starting out in life was to model themselves on Felix Dzerzhinsky. In another poem dedicated to Comrade Nette, a diplomatic courier who was killed on the train near Riga in February 1926, heroically defending the diplomatic mail, Mayakovsky wrote:

p I’d live on and on,
                    and let the years race,
But I want at the end
                    —no other behests—
My end on this earth I want to face
Like Comrade Nette met his death.

p This was written 40 years ago. But to this day, in the nineteensixties, the question still remains unsolved for some whether to devote their lives to the “sheep pen"—meaning the petty joys and comforts of a Philistine existence—or to answer the call of history and join in the struggle for a new world.

p Here is a novel, written in 1962, whose very title contains a socio-moral maxim: The Roads We Choose. The pronoun “we” is used in a broad meaning, and is pronounced on behalf of the whole post-war generation of Soviet intellectuals by the young engineer Arefycv and the other heroes of the novel ranging in age between 30 and 40. The author of the novel is Alexander Chakovsky (b. 1913), a board member of the Union of Soviet Writers, who was the first editor of the magazine Inostrannaya Literatura (Foreign Literature) and is now editor of Literaturnaya Gazeta (Literary Weekly).

p The scene is set in the north of Russia where a railway tunnel is under construction. By a curious coincidence, one of the characters —the secretary of the Regional Party Committee—is called Baulin (which sounds a little like Baluyev from Vadim Kozhevnikov’s novel), who also shows signs of mellowing and growing kinder to people. Arefyev notices that the manner of officials has changed—they have relaxed their sternness and no longer use their former peremptory tone. But in Arefyev himself this constraint, emotional rigidity and gloominess remain unrelieved. This young engineer, a Communist, has consciously chosen his difficult road in life. He lives in a bleak room with unadorned walls and furnished with nothing but a camp bed. Early every morning he puts on miner’s overalls, tall rubber boots and a raincoat, and climbs down into the shaft, 220 to work underground in the tunnel. The wet walls glimmer darkly in the glare of the solitary electric light bulb. And the tunnel itself, independently of the author’s intention, grows into a symbol of the road into the radiant future. This road lies through darkness, dampness and stone, through the perplexities of workaday life. Arefyev is thinking: “What do the workmen care, give them machines and material, and the rest is not their headache. Let the bosses worry, they get paid for it.”

p The situation in the country has changed. But there will always be different people, of course. And they accept the change that has come into life in different ways too. In Baulin (like in Kozhevnikov’s Baluyev) this change prompts him to take a personal interest in people. With Arefyev the construction project and fidelity to the ideological line come first. Perhaps this is why the novel breathes of rationalism, and the faces of the people in it seem to be covered with a film of graphite powder.

p Daniil Granin’s novel Into the Storm is about the life of physicists, one of the pet themes in West-European literature. Daniil Granin’s book in a way belongs to this sort of literature, but it is difficult to “docket” him exactly. The heroic element is very strong in his novel, whose chief characters in their bold experimenting are prepared to brave the hazards of flying into a thundercloud to investigate the nature of its formation. But at the same time this novel, like Leonov’s, has a philosophical aspect. The purely publicistic element (in the dialogues, for instance) is pushed into the background by the heroes’ psychological characteristics. It is a realistic, intellectual novel, and in my opinion one of the achievements of Soviet literature. It might have been more impressive if the fabric of the novel had been linguistically richer and its whole pattern more strongly permeated with philosophical thought.

p When it comes to criticism of the numerous books of the heroicopublicistic genre, like the novels of Kochetov, Chakovsky and others, I would say that what I personally miss in them is poetic charm. The positive heroes follow their straight road. The correctness of the road they have chosen is defended very well by Arefyev in his argument with a foreigner at a Moscow restaurant. But it is arrived at by common sense rather than feeling (when the heroic and lyrical elements are fused).

p Let us now examine another trend in modern Soviet literature, the one we have termed lyrico-romantic. In the numerous novels of this type the problem of choosing one’s road in life, moral problems, the eternal themes of love and death, are also raised. The publicistic element is present, but the rational is accompanied by the emotional. One senses a stronger infatuation with life, its pulse beats, its passions, its greatness and infiniteness reflected in a 221 drop of dew at sunrise, in the stars and in the glimmer of people’s eyes.

p Young writers who emerged on the literary scene in the post-war years were especially keen on this lyrico-romantic style. There are so many examples that we cannot possibly even name them all (let alone examine them). It would mean mentioning at least a hundred authors who have one or two books of short stories or poems in print.

p Vasily Aksyonov is one of the most sensational young prose writers and a strikingly gifted one. He began with a long-short story entitled Colleagues (1960). Here there are three young men starting out in life, this time after graduation from medical school. His idiom, his rhythmic patterns and emotional colours convey the freshness of the young men’s sensations and attitudes to life. Two lines from Yesenin come to mind:

p The first snow falls,
          I tramp upon it with my dragging feet,
And strength like snowdrops bursts in flower in my heart.

p One of the three young doctors, Sasha Zelenin, a shy man who is helpless when faced with the trivial of everyday life but is brave and strong in spirit, says: “What about our generation? The question is: can we pass a test like that for courage and loyalty? We, city boys, who take everything in the world with a pinch of salt, who love jazz, sports, stylish rags, we who occasionally strike the most weird poses but never cheat, never worm our way into anyone’s confidence, never toady, and, shying away from high-sounding words, try to keep our souls clean, are we capable of anything like that? Yes, we are.”

p In this, Aksyonov’s first story, the lyrico-romantic element predominates (even though the author does overdo the naturalistic fidelity to the slang used by teddy boys). In his later works, A Ticket to the Stars (1961) and Oranges from Morocco (1963) his heroes grow out of their romantic dreaminess and moral idealism. They develop anarchic and bohemian moods (as a way of selfexpression). The boys and girls become casually intimate. Their walk grows careless, and their conduct reckless. The meaning of loftysounding words is almost wholly dissipated. And the style itself shifts towards naturalism.

p What happened? I shall give a more detailed answer to this question at the end of the chapter. It was as if a wind-borne infection had swept through a certain part of the literary youth, settling in dust on all that is lofty and romantic, and resulting in a game of defiance and indifference.

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p But still the lyrico-romantic trend is probably the most widespread in modern Soviet literature, uniting writers of different generations. Take Summer Holiday Time and Young and Green by Alexander Rekemchuk, a newcomer to literature. These stories also depict the modern scene—a construction project and an industrial enterprise somewhere far away from Moscow. There are enormous difficulties, and people, always people who do not know the meaning of self-interest, who live by the lofty poetry of Lenin’s ideas. It has become natural to them. And that is why the heroine of Summer Holiday Time foregoes her holidays when the chief engineer goes away and stays behind to make sure that the rate of production does not drop and the pulse of the enterprise continues to beat as rhythmically as before.

p In his story A Drop of Dew Vladimir Soloukhin paints a lyrical landscape of a small village in Central Russia. Olepino, as this village is called, is the author’s birth-place, and to him it is a sort of magnifying glass of love through which he sees the world. “I love looking at my village with both an ordinary and an inner look, just as I love looking at the tiny, round drop of crystal water which has gathered in the green palm of a leaf in the midst of a huge, lush meadow, at the tiny sun, reflected in this drop, at the tiny surrounding objects and at tiny me reflected in the same drop.”

p What nourishes the lyrico-romantic strain in literature? The author’s infatuation with life, his love for people, for his country, and the new in it, built in accordance with Lenin’s plans. This lyrical mood may well coexist with criticism, satire, or a sense of bitterness engendered by the negative aspects of our life.

p Many of the books written in this lyrico-romantic key have been very popular with Soviet readers. Among them, Great Ore, a novel by Georgy Vladimov, Vil Lipatov’s long-short story Mainstream, Konstantin Paustovsky’s autobiographical trilogy, Efim Dorosh’s Village Diary, Vladimir Fomenko’s Memory of the Earth, Sergei Antonov’s novelettes, Vasily Smirnov’s novel Discovery of the World, and Georgy Markov’s two novels Salt of the Earth and Father and Son. All these books differ in subject matter and mood, but what they have in common is a lyrical approach to the working people.

p The stylistic means used in the lyrico-romantic trend bring a subjective touch into the realistic portrayal of life. A stream of definitions (like in satire, except that there they mean the opposite) illustrates the author’s attitude to the objects portrayed. The romantic element, just like the satirical, is rather one-sided. And so among the socialist realists we find writers of different generations who avoid using those stylistic means (publicist, romantic and any other) which immediately betray the author’s position. There are 223 writers who want to hide behind their heroes, who want life itself to speak for them, and the reader to draw his own conclusions. There are also writers inclined towards an objective style. Such, for instance, is Konstantin Simonov in his war novels.

p This “cool” manner of a chronicler dispassionately recounting soul-scorching, tragic happenings lends his narrative a peculiar eloquence. A fine example is Simonov’s Days and Nights (1942). It is an idiom which Lermontov, Stendhal and Prosper Merimee charged with remarkable dramatic power. Simonov’s Comrades in Arms (1957), The Living and the Dead (1960) and Men Are Not Born Soldiers (i964)—the last two especially—hark back to Tolstoi’s War and Peace. With Fadeyev, for instance (in his novels about the Civil War—The Rout and The Last of the Udeghes) features of Tolstoi’s style emerged in the course of his search for the right stylistic key in which to render the complexities and conflicts in the spiritual life of the fighters for Soviet power and communism. With Simonov it was quite different. He found himself best attuned to the great Russian writer where (as in War and Peace} he describes the course of human destinies in the general stream of millions of people who have risen in defence of their country.

p Konstantin Simonov’s novels make an enormous epic canvas depicting the Soviet people’s great struggle against nazi Germany. The historical material is presented from different angles, from above and from below, as it were. Together with the heroes the reader visits all the fronts, from Murmansk to the Crimea, and from Moscow to Poland and Germany. The author’s central observation post has been entrusted to Captain Sintsov, an “average” army officer. Sintsov—a Communist, a political officer in the army—goes through the same experience as the other soldiers and officers in their thousands and hundreds of thousands. He suffers all the hardships of those first months of defeat and retreat. Wounded, he falls into enemy encirclement, and when he regains consciousness he discovers that his Party card is gone. For this he is expelled from the Party. He has to surmount enormous difficulties and go through incredible moral tortures to rehabilitate himself. Gradually he grows into a hero in our eyes, even a judge, developing not simply as an individual but also as an observer of history. Tvardovsky’s Vasily Terkin is a collective image of the people, or rather of the peasantry, in war. In Simonov’s Sintsov we see the features of the new communist intelligentsia.

p Simonov, if only because he is a poet, cannot restrict his writing to the “objective style”, and many of the tragic and psychological episodes in his novels are coloured in lyrical tones.

p Victor Nekrasov, who gained prominence in the post-war years, is probably the most consistent champion of literature “without 224 bravura”. Already in his first novel, In the Trenches of Stalingrad (i946)—the author was himself one of the defenders of that city—he made it clear that he believed in drawing his heroes from nature the way they are, without any bias. I do not think Nekrasov, any more than Stendhal, deserves blame for.naturalism. In spite of what Alexei Tolstoi said, extremely plastic characters (Julien Sorel, for instance) can also be created in the laconic manner of a chronicle. Nekrasov’s consistent objectivism is of a different kind. It comes from the fear of falling prey to romantic exaggeration; hence his deliberate refusal to embellish his heroes or reality. He defended this position in one of his temperamentally written programme articles aimed against effusively hyperbolic and romantic 225 techniques. The article met with protest from the critics, some of them countering Nekrasov’s theory with the romanticism of Alexander Dovzhenko, the writer and outstanding film director. To Nekrasov the films produced by Dovzhenko (Aerodty, Sbchors, Tale of the Fiery Years and others) are unacceptable because, he contends, this romanticised attitude to heroes produces an artificially formal, stilted impression.

p Whereas Alexei Tolstoi in his article written more than forty years ago urged writers not to fight shy of grandeur because the epoch itself, the tremendous scale of events and the size of the characters was all full of grandeur, Victor Nekrasov preaches the exact opposite: beware of grandeur! His striving for complete, scientific objectivity, motivated by his aversion to varnish, pushes him willy-nilly to the other extreme. The cold and the dark begins to prevail over the warm and the light, although in real life the two continually clash and struggle.

p In his last long-short story Kira Georgiyevna, Nekrasov begins the narrative with the return of this woman’s first husband from prison camp where, an innocent man, he has done a term of many years, convicted on false charges. He was isolated from the world as a very young man, and in the meantime, Kira Georgiyevna has married an artist much older than herself. She also has a lover. All this is told in such a way that we find ourselves looking at everything with the eyes of the first husband who has suffered terribly and who, involuntarily, becomes the judge. This man from the “nether world" has preserved his moral purity, strictness of judgement and keenness of emotional perception, which have dulled so badly in the heyday of Stalin personality cult among the people surrounding Kira.

p Vera Panova’s works are also characterised by a lack of stress on heroism. The men and women workers in her novel Kruzbilikba, the doctors in Fellow Travellers, and the characters in her numerous stories perform no spectacular feats of heroism. It would be more correct to say that they make no claim to heroism, although in actual fact the things they do cannot fail to stir the reader. At the same time, her most typical stylistic feature is the presence of lyricism in all her writings. It is engendered by her affection for her fellow men, and her desire to surround them with kindness. Vera Panova’s humaneness and lyricism are inseparable from her moral convictions.

p She has a gift for drawing child characters as we know from her stories Valya, Seryozha and Volodya.

p In the first story, set in wartime Leningrad, Valya’s father is killed in battle and her mother is killed in an air raid. The little orphan finds a friend in Dusya, a factory worker, a lonely woman 226 who becomes attached to Valya with all her heart and soul, the way Andrei Sokolov in Sholokhov’s The Fate of a Man became attached to the homeless little boy he adopted.

p Vera Panova’s characters are guided in their actions by their natural moral impulses. And the fact that in her latest stories attention is focused on this aspect of Soviet life shows more convincingly, perhaps, than do any other examples the change in the moral attitudes of Soviet society.

p Alexander Fadeyev always said that ours must be a “winged” literature, for such is Soviet reality itself with its ideas that stir the imagination and its ambitious plans for building up a new industry, a new culture, science, literature and art. Maxim Gorky once wrote that the old way of life was easier to portray, and that the unexampled new reality compelled Soviet writers to look for new expressive means, genres and styles, none of which the classics of the past had ever had to do.

p But the magic spell of such great writers as Tolstoi, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and Bunin, the aesthetic appeal of the masterpieces of West-European and American literature, old and modern, remains as strong as ever. And building a new pyramid from new stones when there are such edifices of human genius towering beside and behind it is not very easy to do. The temptation to simply assimilate what has already been achieved is there, of course. And after all talents differ. It is not given to all to blaze new trails, or venture out on an unchartered course. Mayakovsky once wrote:

p Poetry-all of it,
Is a ride into the unknown.

p In modern Soviet literature there are still writers who cling firmly to old traditions. In poetry, for instance, traditionalism is rather widespread. And indeed, when you come to think of it, there are certain limits to which one can go in attempting to change poetic form, to devise new rhythms, rhymes and intonations, because, after all, the real muse of poetry is thought. If a poem carries no thought, it becomes mere juggling with words. This applies to poetry in all languages. Mayakovsky’s acute urge for innovation and his ardent temperament of a sculptor made him mould amazingly expressive rhythms, rhymes and neologisms. Only after an interval of thirtyodd years was another attempt made to change the verbal form of poetry. This was done by Andrei Voznesensky, a young poet whose talent was equal to his boldness. He undertook to remodel poetry according to the West-European pattern but, alas, he got carried away and was unable to avoid formalistic acrobatics.

p Traditionalism in form is no great calamity. After all, the traditions of Pushkin and Nekrasov, assimilated so well by Tvardovsky, 227 helped him rather than hindered him to express his truly revolutionary message and to speak in a language of humanism and love for the working people. It is too bad, however, when a writer who lives in the “midst of the revolutionary doings" (to quote Mayakovsky) fails to perceive these “doings” aesthetically and dwells in a world of past impressions. Books written in this key are usually translated with alacrity in Western Europe for the very reason that they bring back memories of something familiar. But it is the new, unfamiliar features that readers should look for in literature if they want to know and understand modern Russia.

p Novels written in a critical vein, especially if they deal with formerly forbidden subjects, arouse a heightened interest in the West. Even if such a book has little artistic merit, anti-communist propaganda will build it up into a sensation, as was done with Pasternak’s Doctor Zbivago and with Alexander Solzhenitsin’s Cancer Ward and Round One. These three books are frankly directed against Soviet power and this being so were naturally not published in the U.S.S.R. But the enemies of Soviet power clutched at them and printed them abroad. In such cases there is no room for serious, aesthetic appraisal. Only political aims are pursued and the book is used as a means of denigrating communism and the Soviet system. Socialist realism is treated as a state-sponsored method of producing laudatory works of a sterile uniformity.

p But there is no uniformity about the best Soviet novels. Furmanov’s Chapayev (1923), Serafimovich’s The Iron Flood (1924) and Fadeyev’s The Rout (1927) which can be called the classics of socialist realism, have all stood the test of time precisely because they showed life and revolutionary struggle in all their contradictions. In “form”, in outward appearance, the Red partisans are not attractive, but in content, in the purpose of their activity, they are much superior to Mechik, the immaculate intellectual. In his speech addressed to the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, Fadeyev, it will be remembered, laid particular stress on the importance of the critical element in socialist realism.

p Practices connected with the personality cult were criticised with particular sharpness by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Yaroslav Smelyakov, Boris Slutsky, Vladimir Lugovskoi and a number of other poets.

p Alexander Tvardovsky’s Space Beyond Space (1950-1960) was the most serious attempt at a comprehensive and historically truthful assessment of the foregoing period. This poem reflects the life impressions of the poet—his childhood, his travels, his recollections of the Urals and Siberia. There are discourses on literature, and pictures of the people’s endeavour in constructing the Siberian electric power stations, and in damming the Angara near Bratsk.

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p In the chapter entitled “Childhood Friend" the poet describes his meeting with this man who has just been released from prison camp. Walking about without a guard still feels strange to him, but he is free. Anguish grips the poet’s heart, and he says:

p He was a bit of my own soul,
A pain and grief that was taboo,
between us to erect a wall
The years were powerless to do....

p His childhood friend has remained loyal to his country, so:

Whom shall I blame for my mute grief?
The country? No.
The country can’t be blamed.

and further on:

Or shall I blame it on the cruel people?
The people?
What had they to do with it?

 

p As the poem develops, flowing in admiration for the heroic deeds of the people (sketches of people encountered on the way follow one another), ironic remarks aimed at the critics are inserted into the fabric, then lyrical notes begin to prevail again, and finally, towards the end Stalin enters the scene. The chapter is called: “That’s How It Was”. The poet draws a life-size portrait of Stalin and ponders on his role in the life of the Soviet people during the last ten years before he died.

p Andrei Platonov (1899-195i)-a trained engineer whose father was a locomotive driver, began to publish his stories at the end of the nineteen-twenties (the first collection was entitled Origin of a Master) and became especially well-known in the nineteen-thirties and in the war years. His popularity and fame grew, and young writers today have a great regard for him and learn whole pages by heart. Many of his stories have been translated into English and other foreign languages. Ernest Hemingway once said that Andrei Platonov had made an enormous impression on him, and that he had learnt a great deal from him. Although Platonov is one of those writers who followed the critical trend, he did not dwell on the darker sides of Soviet life for their own sake, but on human pain. Chekhov wrote about one of his heroes that he was exceptionally sensitive to pain “in general”, and since Sergei Yesenin there has been no writer as generously endowed with this quality 229 as Andrei Platonov. The anguish he feels for man, inhibited by all the circumstances of his existence, grows into a powerful symphony performed by thousands of instruments and voices. He has an inexhaustible resourcefulness in inventing situations in which grief and suffering merge with the sky, with youth and even with the sun itself. His style is an amazing combination of lyricism, satirical grotesquerie and intellectualism. By his very choice of words, his epithets and constructions he compels the reader to reconsider his old notions of every object and action. He compels the reader to think. He uses all the expressive means he knows and the power of his talent to put his reader in a state where the pain reflex keeps him remembering man. Maybe this was why Hemingway thought so much of Platonov. After all, Hemingway’s heroes have a fajade of manliness, behind which lurks disappointment in life, and even despair, because the net result is death.

p In recent years, an especially rapid progress has been made in the literature of the non-Russian republics and the national areas. I cannot even name all the new writers and their books, which I am sure would fill a whole volume. A great many of these writers have earned renown in the East and the West. In the last twenty years more than 25,000 books by Soviet authors were published abroad in more than fifty foreign languages. In most countries people are able to read Soviet literature in their own language. In India, for instance, Soviet books are published not just in such more widespread languages as Hindi, Urdu and Bengali, but also in Kannada, Gujarati, Malayalam, Panjabi, Marathi, and Telugu. Sholokhov’s The Fate of a Man came out in Oriya and Singhalese.

p Abai (Abai Kunanbayev, 1845-1904, the founder of Kazakh literature), a two-volume novel by Mukhtar Auezov, a Kazakh writer, has been published in France and elsewhere. One cannot imagine anyone in a capitalist country writing of his recent, nomadic past in a manner that answers the standards of a European novel. Mukhtar Auezov gave modern readers a close-up of that life with the nomads’ greatly involved relationships and psychology.

p The years following the war witnessed the development of national literatures and also the emergence of many gifted Russian Siberian writers. In Soviet literature, Siberia had already been represented by such tainted writers as Lydia Seifulina, author of the widely known play Virineya, and Vsevolod Ivanov, author of an equally popular play Armoured Train 14-69 (both plays are about the Civil War) and a number of short stories. Since the war, and especially in the last ten or fifteen years, a large number of Siberian writers have entered the literary scene. Most of them are not very young people with a store of experience in different fields, and most of them begun writing rather late in life. Such is 230 Konstantin Sedykh, author of Dauria, a novel about the Civil War; such is Georgi Markov, the author of Salt of the Earth and Father and Son; such is Sergei Sartakov, the author of the novel Don’t Sacrifice the Queen and Frants Taurin. The novel by Frants Taurin which appeared in the 19505 was called Towards a Common Goal and told about people who in transforming nature became transformed themselves. The author worked for a number of years at industrial plants in the Urals, after that he worked for more than ten years in Yakutsk, and then in Irkutsk, and is naturally perfectly familiar with the life of industrial workers, to whom he has dedicated his trilogy In Irkutsk Country (1964).

p Sergei Zalygin, a Novosibirsk agronomist, is a writer of talent with an idiom and narrational manner entirely his own. He, too, is over 50, and he, too, first took up the pen ten or maybe fifteen years ago. In his story On the Irtysh he describes the collectivisation of farming in Siberia. In Virgin Soil Upturned Sholokhov described the collectivisation of farming in the Don country from the point of view of Davydov, an industrial worker who had come to help achieve it; and in Zalygin’s book the spokesman is Stepan Chauzov, a middle peasant. In this sense, On the Irtysh complements Virgin Soil Upturned.

p Solyonaya Pad (1967-1968), Zalygin’s major work, is based on historical material and tells how a partisan republic became formed in Kolchak’s rear, in Siberia, in the years of Civil War. A remote little village was the centre of this Soviet peasant republic. Zalygin draws an impressive portrait of Yefim Meshcheryakov, a man of peasant stock who is devoted to his family, a strong character who is an indomitable commander in the revolutionary struggle.

p The appearance of new books usually started debates and discussions in the literary press of the Ukraine, Minsk, Tbilisi, Yerevan, Baku, Novosibirsk, Alma Ata, and finally in Leningrad and Moscow.

p An interesting discussion on tradition and innovation in modern literature was started in the magazine Voprosy Literatury (Problems of Literature) in November 1961, and went on for eighteen months. Thirty-two young writers took part in this discussion. Their declared literary “policies”, however, must not be confused with their actual writings. It is curious that in their statements many of them showed a desire—a not very serious one for our times, and the more so for Soviet literature—to shock by using startling phrases and naming ill-assorted, mutually exclusive sets of writers as their teachers.

p Andrei Voznesensky, speaking of assimilating the experience of predecessors and of past literary trends in general, said: “I doubt that closeness to his literary predecessors is good for a writer. . . . Incest results in degeneration. I learnt less from Byron than I did 231 from Andrei Rublev, Jean Miro and the later de Carbusier.” This, to say the least, is hardly serious. Another young prose writer named Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Hemingway, Remarque and Biille as his predecessors. Some called Boris Pasternak their principal teacher. Seeing that Pasternak had just been condemned for his Doctor Zhivago, this statement was probably made more from a spirit of defiance and opposition than from genuine regard for the poet’s talent. One of these young prose writers when asked what he thought of form and style replied: “The most promising in the search for new forms, as I see it, is the search itself.” The majority of the writers, of course, gave due credit to the truly revolutionary traditions of Soviet literature and the contribution it has made to world culture.

p Ilya Ehrenburg wrote in his memoirs People, Years, Life that he would like to speak in defence of the remote past (the nineteentwenties) when there were so many literary schools: imagism, Proletkults (Proletarian Culture), expressionism, subjectless art, and even the “nichevoki” trend (the nothing-nothing art). But this would mean recognising the coexistence of socialist realism and formalism.

p The incompatibility of two different ideologies, the socialist and the bourgeois, and the impossibility of their peaceful coexistence is of decisive importance not only in our literary policy but in all the relations between the two camps.

p The campaign against ideological distortions and, in particular, against certain departures from the method of socialist realism was concluded at the June 1963 Plenary Meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, specially convened to discuss ideological problems. Speaking at this meeting, Konstantin Fedin, First Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers (who was invited although he is not a Party member), admirably expressed the thoughts and feelings of all Soviet writers, whether members of the Party or not. He said: “The positions from which modern Western critics attack Soviet art—whether it is our views on the role of literary tradition, our themes, problems of form, and sometimes just idiom—are for the most part built on formalistic foundations. But whatever aspects of our art are discussed, nothing irritates and annoys the critics so much as the closeness of the Soviet writers to the Communist Party. The very thought that the Party might directly influence literature is considered inadmissible. By proclaiming indifference to politics as the artist’s ideal, these Western critics apparently find their objections to the Party spirit in Soviet literature a good example of indifference to politics!

p “This provides a free opportunity for cunning, but a misunderstanding might also occur.

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p “For instance, that recent case of proclaiming ’Soviet avantgardism’ which created a sensation in the West, can be attributed to nothing else but cunning. The myth was exploded as too obvious a bait for popularity, but unfortunately two or three of our young poets fell for it. But myths are created and destroyed. Avantgardism remains in historical development of the West. And Soviet literature remains its own self.”

p Yes, Soviet literature remains its own self with its diversity of idioms and styles, with its humanism’, and its discovery of a new world. In December 1920, with the approval of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin the Central Committee published a letter on the Proletkults. The letter, I remember, said that the Central Committee had no intention whatsoever of restricting the activity of the working intelligentsia in the field of artistic endeavour. On the contrary, the Central Committee wished to create healthier conditions for work.

p The same aim was pursued by the above-mentioned 1963 Plenary Meeting of the Central Committee, and by the Party’s criticism of certain faults and distortions in matters concerning aesthetics, literature and art.

Soviet literature remains its own self, and it draws its strength from those achievements of socialist realism which like Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don and poetry of Mayakovsky and Yesenin, are undeniably a valuable contribution to the treasure house of world literature.