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p The globe looks different to us today from what it did fifty years ago. Radio and modern aviation have brought the different parts of the world closer together somehow. The word “mankind” has acquired a peculiarly weighty, tangible meaning in this age of the atom and communism. Countries and peoples have become intercommunicating vessels, as it were. The days of regional self- consciousness are over. The time has come for global self-awareness.

p In 1961, in the course of a conversation I had with an Australian author we came round to the subject of the staggering contrasts that characterise the world of today.

p He gave me an illustrated booklet in which the life of the Australian aborigines is shown as it must have been thousands of years ago. Native tribes, he told me, live on a primitive level of development in their desert reservations. And nobody cares.

p I told him about the book I had just read by Nicholas Guppy, a botanist and explorer, who managed to make his way into the unexplored jungles of British Guiana and Brazil along the Amazon. In this book Wai-Wai (the name of an Indian tribe) which was published in London in 1958, the facts adduced speak for themselves. The author, who is no Communist, writes that the methods of introducing the natives to modern civilisation are absolutely outrageous. Guppy, it must be said, has met Indians who had never seen a white man before. He was especially disgusted with the missionaries who garnish their trade in baubles and beads with the propaganda of Christianity. They intimidate the Indians with the notion of sin, instill in them a contempt for their native customs, and do everything to obliterate their national identity and belittle the proud sense of dignity which is so common to them.

p Thousands of examples can be cited to prove that the colonialists in Africa, Asia and Latin America cared little for the interests of the peoples they ruled. Jawaharlal Nehru wrote in his Autobiography: “The British conception of ruling India was the police conception of the State. . . . The economic needs of the citizens were not 234 looked after, and were sacrificed to British interests. The cultural and other needs of the people, except for a tiny handful, were entirely neglected.”

p Marx in his time had written about British rule in India with ruthless directness. It left the country’s masses as illiterate as ever. Development of the national cultures of the numerous peoples and tribes inhabiting the earth is one of the most acute and urgent problems of our time. The urgency is caused by the mounting revolutionary protest against colonialism. The oppressed peoples and tribes refuse to live any longer in slavery, poverty and humiliation, to die out from epidemics and insupportable labour conditions, serving a “race of masters"—owners of the monopoly capital. People want to live like human beings whether they dwell in the jungles of Africa and Latin America, or in the deserts of Australia. All people throughout the world want to breathe the air of freedom, to benefit from the achievements of science and engineering, to send their children to school, to enjoy works of art and themselves write poems and stories in their native tongue. The colonial peoples will no longer stand for the looting of the land of their fathers, they refuse to be kept in ignorance and destitution any further.

p The whip and the hunting gun are not the only weapons of the slaveowners today. They have all the most sophisticated means of mass killing at their disposal, but for all that the examples of the Congo, Angola, Algeria and other countries show that the ground is burning beneath their feet. The example of Cuba proves that a revolutionary people, inspired by the idea of national freedom, the idea of socialism and the prospect of creating their own national culture, can break free of the spider’s web of imperialist exploitation.

p The words “Moscow”, “Lenin”, and “Soviet Union" shine against the background of these events from thousands of miles away, through the haze of storms and sufferings. All the peoples inhabiting the U.S.S.R. are building up their national culture and literature. Kumar Goshal, the Indian writer, said in his book People in the Colonies (published in New York in 1948) that the leaders of colonial peoples were greatly impressed by the rapid economic and cultural development of Kazakhstan and the other Central Asian republics. This example, he went on to say, demonstrated to the still backward peoples with neither a written language nor a literature of their own that astonishing results could be achieved in a short, historically speaking, space of time.

p Roughly two thousand five hundred languages are spoken in the world today. But a good half of the nations and tribes peopling the earth have no written language and, consequently, no means of recording their oral art.

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p The question arises: what course will world literature take if it develops in two and a half thousand languages? Will the number decrease or increase? Will the writers of the future address just their own “family circle"? This “family circle" will perhaps include tens of millions of people, but it will anyway remain a “family circle”, a particle of mankind. The radio and modern aviation have removed the once insurmountable barrier of distance. People today have a different awareness of distance and of mankind in general. And so we naturally see literature against the background of and in connection with the growing contacts between the peoples of the world.

p I believe that we shall find the answers to many of the questions the linguistic atlas and modern history pose before us in those processes of cultural development which took place in Russia after the Socialist Revolution of October 1917.

p The development of national literatures in the U.S.S.R. was envisaged by and resulted from the nationalities policy adopted by the Government.

p The national liberation movement will continue to give rise to hundreds of new national cultures and literatures. In the case of some peoples it will mean creating a written language to begin with, and the evolvement of a literary idiom. For most of the colonial peoples the process of shaping a national literature is complicated by the accumulated deposits of the colonialists’, or the conqueror-nation’s language and culture.

p There are two ways of developing the world’s national literatures. Nationalistic isolation is one way. In conditions of capitalism it is the inevitable way. The alternative is to develop the national identity and at the same time strive to overcome the language barrier by cultivating a community of human interests and an ideological closeness between the peoples. Such is the socialist way. And such has been the Soviet experience. From the example of the Soviet Union’s multinational literature it is possible to picture the ways by which the world’s incredible linguistic divergency is going to be overcome. Socialism ensures the efflorescence of national forms, their rapprochement and interaction. The new C.P.S.U. Programme contains the following: “The big scale of communist construction and the new victories of communist ideology are enriching the cultures of the peoples of the U.S.S.R., which are socialist in content and national in form. There is a growing ideological unity among the nations and nationalities and a greater rapprochement of their cultures. The historical experience of socialist nations shows that national forms do not ossify; they change, advance and draw closer together, shedding all outdated traits that contradict the new conditions of life. An international culture common to all the 236 Soviet nations is developing. The cultural treasures of each nation are increasingly augmented by works acquiring an international character.”

p National form (in the first place, language) is an historical development, an historical category. It is one of the manifestations of a people’s historical community of interests resulting from generations of the same group of people living a communal life. National identity means the people’s individuality, their personal “self”.

p In this epoch when dozens of nations are emerging on the historical scene in order to assert their identity, the method of socialist realism appears to suit the new literatures best. And indeed, is there a better way of declaring one’s national “self” than this truthful artistic method in which the powers of the peoples fighting for the development and strengthening of socialism are fully revealed?

p Pushkin brought into Russian literature the awareness of the fact that Russia is a multinational country. “And they will say of me in all the languages spoken here. . .” he wrote. And yet, a hundred years ago Taras Shevchenko said in his poem The Caucasus that in tsarist Russia: “From the Moldavian to the Finn, all silent are in all their tongues.”

p This country’s literary map has changed beyond recognition. The once silent people have all “found their tongue"—those who had no written language of their own before the Revolution (there are over forty such nationalities in the Soviet Union), and those who had been literate since ancient times—like the peoples of Trans-Caucasia.

p There were no blank spots any more on the literary map because all the nations, even the smallest tribes and national groups, took part in building up the new socialist economy and culture. There was no discrimination, they were all equals. The peoples living in what used to be called the fringelands of the Russian empire and who were retarded in their development because of the tsarist policy of oppression, received unlimited moral, material and political assistance from the Soviet Government in conformity with the nationalities policy proclaimed by Lenin. The implementation of this policy resulted in an amazingly rapid development of the formerly downtrodden peoples. A creative intelligentsia of their own emerged, gaining maturity in the post-war years. Books began to be published in the national languages, and since illiteracy has been eliminated in the Soviet Union and a compulsory eight-year education introduced, writers from all tribes and nations soon found their readers.

p A bibliography of non-Russian books translated into Russian in the course of only twenty years (1934-1954) fills a volume of 750 pages. 237 However, the location of these literatures and the direction in which they develop is more illustrative than mere facts and figures.

p All the fifty non-Russian literatures of the Soviet Union originated in different historical conditions and were rooted in different national traditions. A young writer faced with the task of rendering in words the new meaning of life and his own feelings, inspired by the revolutionary events, would naturally turn to the experience of his national literature for support. Even if it was only oral folk art he would anyway use it as a basis. Poetry was the prevalent genre almost everywhere—in Siberia, Central Asia and the Northern Caucasus.

p I have an especially warm regard for those writers who responded so enthusiastically to the launching of the five-year plans from the remoteness of the Siberian and Far Eastern taiga and tundra. One of these writers is Djansi Kimonko, an Udeghe, the author of the charmingly poetic stories Glow Over the Forest and Where the Sukpai Flows. The Udeghes are a small hunting tribe who live in the Sikhote-Alin Mountains in the Soviet Far East. After finishing school in Khabarovsk, Kimonko was educated at the Institute for Northern Peoples in Leningrad. He came home after graduation and was elected chairman of the village Soviet and then chairman of a hunters’ collective farm. He was killed on a hunting trip.

p Or take Yuvan Shestalov, a young Mansi poet who has already published three books of verse. The Mansis (of whom there are less than seven thousand) live beyond the Urals in north-western Siberia in Khanti-Mansi National Area which covers a territory larger than, say, Finland. The Mansis and the Khantis have preserved their beautifully poetic folk traditions, but they remained illiterate and unknown until after the Revolution. Today, Yuvan Shestalov, moved by his sense of personal involvement in the world’s revolutionary events, addresses the peoples of Africa: “Arise, arise, and take Lumumba’s thorny path!”

p Yuvan Shestalov’s poetry combines the picturesqueness and lyricism of national Mansi oral art with the intelligence and breadth of vision of an educated Soviet person.

p Where the lichen grows, and dwarf pines
Hide their roots among the shadows
Old wives’ tales and superstitions
Called us savages and wild men.
Oh you, lying superstitions,
Don’t spread tales about my people!
Would I sing this song of glory
With the forest winds in chorus,
Could I have become a poet
If I’d grown up with the wild men?

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p Akim Samar, a Nanai, is another example. He lived by hunting and fishing and wrote poetry. When the war broke out he volunteered for the front and died a hero’s death in the battle for Stalingrad. His poetry was published posthumously. The Nanais are a small national group who live on the banks of forest rivers in the Far East. In translation the word Nanai means “man”. This reminds me of a poem by Yanka Kupala, a Byelorussian poet, which Gorky liked very much and called a “Byelorussian hymn”. I only know a few lines by heart, but I remember it said that the dream of a Byelorussian was “to be called Man".

p These words were written in tsarist Russia, before the Revolution, but they are acquiring a new meaning today for those hundreds of peoples who are freeing themselves from colonial dependence. And it is not surprising, therefore, that the 2,500,000 copies of The End of a Big House, a novel by Grigori Khodzher, a Nanai, were sold out at once.

p The destinies of the small national groups and tribes are proof of the correctness of the principles and creative character of our nationalities policy. No unbiassed person will deny the fact that this policy, proposed by Lenin, has fully justified itself. It is undisputed even by people who are far from being Communists.

p Let us take Daghestan, a small republic in the Caucasus. The population numbers hardly more than a million, but they speak in more than thirty languages. There are villages where several different dialects are spoken. Daghestan is probably the most multinational spot on earth. I am not going to examine in detail the reasons for this here. What happened, apparently, was that the small tribes which settled along the shores of the Caspian Sea were compelled to go into hiding in the folds of the mountains so as not to be enslaved by the stronger peoples during their migrations, and as a result these small tribes perforce became isolated. They raised sheep and tilled the land, exerting themselves to cultivate tiny patches of arable land on mountain ledges. Many of these tribes were skilled in various crafts—especially silver chasing. Their work is displayed in some West-European museums, in London, for example. Especially famous for its silver chasing is Kubachi, a village perched like an eagle’s nest on the top of a mountain. Kubachi has its own language in which it now publishes a local newspaper.

p Daghestan is a veritable Babel. School instruction is in seven languages, among them Avar, Lezghin, Kumyk and Dargwa. Daghestan poets, in their Russian translations, have earned renown in the Soviet Union and in countries abroad as well. The best-known poets writing in Avar (the largest Daghestan national group of more than 200,000 people) are Gamzat Tsadasa and his son Rasul 239 Gamzatov. The pride of the Lezghins is Suleiman Stalsky, a folk bard or asbug, whom Gorky called the Homer of the 2Oth century.

p It is a most curious fact that in this age of radio and printing plants the tradition of oral folk poetry has been revived. Some strikingly picturesque figures have emerged from the midst of those travelling folk bards who sang their ballads to the accompaniment of the simplest of string instruments like the Kazakh dombra or the Uzbek and Tajik dutara. One was the Kazakh akyn Djambul, known for the ballads he sang about Soviet achievements and for his denunciation of the feudal customs of the past.

p Prose writing, however, especially the novel, is justly regarded as the most important form in the progressive evolution of literary genres. In the Soviet Union the modern socio-psychological novel is not the exclusive province of Russians, Ukrainians, Armenians, Georgians, Azerbaijanians, Latvians and Estonians, with whom the genre has long been developed. The names of the Latvian writers Vilis Lacis and Andrej Upit, the Estonians Rudolf Sirge and Aadu Hint, the Georgians Leo Kiacheli and Konstantin Gamsakhurdia, the Armenians Derenik Demirchyan and Stepan Zoryan, and Aksel Bakunts are sufficiently well known. The genre developed very quickly with the peoples of Central Asia where it was completely unknown before the Revolution. Prose writing appeared in Buryatia and Tuva, the latter only having acquired a written language of its own in the early nineteen-thirties.

p The rapid development of prose among the once backward peoples can best be judged from the work of Chinghis Aitmatov, a Kirghiz writer. His ]amila has aroused interest both in the Soviet Union and abroad. It is a subtly psychological story of love written by an author who has complete command of all the modern literary means. Yet the Kirghizes had no written language of their own before the Revolution (if we discount the Arabic script in which the Turkic languages used to be written, which was totally unsuited for rendering the Kirghiz sound system, and which anyway was never a truly national medium, the little instruction there was being largely Moslem religious instruction). This totally illiterate small nation (numbering about a million people) led a nomadic existence, driving their herds from one mountain pasture to another, and maintaining vestiges of the tribal system in their way of life until well into the nineteen-twenties.

p Colonial oppression was so hard under tsarism that many tribes and peoples (the Gilyaks, the Lamuts, the Udeghes, the Chukchees, and others) were brought to the verge of physical, let alone, cultural extinction. Scores of peoples led a patriarchal, nomadic way of life and their cultural level was so low that the thought of creating a written literature would never have occurred to anyone. In tsarist 240 Russia the persecution of national creativity and the ruthless bureaucratic Russification spared none of the peoples living in this “prison of peoples" whether illiterate or highly developed with millennial cultural traditions like the Georgians, Azerbaijanians and Armenians. Once their fetters were smashed they hastened to make up for lost time, fervently developing their literature and culture, setting up printing houses, libraries and theatres, re-discovering masterpieces of classical national art, creating their own dramaturgy and music, gaining in momentum with every year and continually increasing the social significance of what they were doing.

p The themes prevailing in the national literatures and the manner in which these literatures developed will be easier to appreciate if one bears in mind that they were re-born and blossomed out for the second time after long years of silence and repression.

p Hassem Lahuti, an Iranian revolutionary who became a Tajik poet, said at the Paris congress in defence of culture in 1935 that: “It is a legend, of course, a myth that people had been brought back to life by Mohammed and Christ. But parables were composed about them, they were talked about, and poets wrote verses about them. There are peoples who have been brought back to life by the October Revolution. It is a fact, reality. But no one talked about them. Even their names could not be found in the dictionaries. They lived in the steppes and the tundra, in the mountains and valleys, all those unknown and forgotten, small and large, nomadic and settled peoples like the Turkmenians, Karelians, Tajiks, Nenets, Uigurs, and Kara-Kalpaks.”

p Hundreds of examples illustrating this genuine revolution in the development of national cultures could be adduced. In the libraries of Kazan, the capital of Tataria, no more than a hundred books in Tatar were indexed in the course of fifty years, from 1845 to 1917. As many as 145 works of fiction were published in 1934 alone, and 2,057 books with a total printing of 24,000,000 copies came out in 1961. Even the works of Galimjan Ibragimov (the story The Cossack’s Daughter and the novel Our Days), a prominent Tatar writer who was by no means a revolutionary and whose books were imbued with nationalistic motifs rather than any other, even his works were banned by the tsarist censorship and did not come out until after the Revolution. It was the same with other old writers, for instance the Bashkir author, Gafuri.

p M. Djavakhshvili, a Georgian author, in an article on Georgian Soviet literature published in Literaturnaya Gazeta (No. i) in 1937, wrote: “The scale on which our culture is developing may be judged from this one fact, if nothing else, that many times more Georgian books have been printed in the last fifteen years than in the 241 preceding three hundred years of the Georgian people’s history. There was hardly a professional writer among us before the Revolution. Writers lived on the salary they earned in some office or on a private income. . . . The Revolution has built up large cadres of professional writers, and literary output has increased many times over. . . . Om poets have reformed the technique of poetry writing, and our prose writers have achieved a florescence of the Georgian novel which was on the decline before the Revolution.”

p The same may be said of Armenian literature. Avetik Isaakyan, the greatest Armenian lyric poet of the late I9th and early 2oth centuries, gained new eminence in Soviet Armenia where he was awarded the title of People’s Poet. He is indeed the favourite poet of the Armenians. His poems, translated into Russian by our best poets, have been included in Russian school readers.

p The process of collecting Armenian, Georgian and other literatures followed the same course: the growth of the new generation of writers went hand in hand with the assimilation of the classical heritage which had been suppressed and belittled before. Sundukyan, Proshyan and Nabaldyan of Armenia, the Georgians Ilya Chavchavadze, Akaky Tsereteli, Nikoloz Baratashvili, Vazha Pshavela and Shota Rustaveli, the famous author of the magnificent epic poem The Knight in the Tiger Skin, the Ukrainians Ivan Franko, Lesya Ukrainka and Mikhail Kotsubinsky, and scores of other excellent writers of the past have regained their rightful positions in their respective national literatures and in Soviet literature as a whole.

p When speaking of this cultural advance of Soviet nationalities one is tempted to quote Hafiz: “The child is only a day old but it has already traversed a road that would take another a hundred years to cover.”

p All these circumstances make the picture of literary development in the U.S.S.R. appear extremely involved and varied. The Soviet Union’s national literatures may be divided into three groups. In the first we shall put those whose forms and traditions developed more or less similarly to Russian literature. These are Ukrainian, Byelorussian, Georgian, Armenian, Azerbaijan, Latvian, Estonian, Lithuanian, Tatar and Jewish literatures. They follow the generalEuropean pattern in which the prose novel has become the predominant form of epic writing. They have their traditions, their pre-revolutionary intellectual background, and so on. The character of their development, the formation of groupings and their social struggle have much in common with what has been happening in Russian literature during the last twenty years, with certain national peculiarities and deviations, of course. They show a preference for prose and dramaturgy.

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p In the second group we shall put literature of a mixed or a. marginal type with a prevalence of poetry and subjective forms. Here, prose originated only in the last few decades, and the influence of oral folk poetry and folklore is still very strong. These are the literatures of peoples who were least affected by urban capitalist culture, and consequently had not developed. In this group we may include the following: Turkmen, Uzbek, Tajik, Kazakh (in part), Kirghiz, Chuvash, Kara-Kalpak, Mari, Komi, Karelian, Buryato-Mongolian, Yakut, the majority of literatures of Daghestan, including Avar, Lak, Lezghin, and others. All of them developed as literatures, in our understanding of the term, mainly in Soviet times.

p The third and last group comprises the literatures of the recently nomadic tribes and peoples, the vast majority of which had no written language before, and so by “literatures” we really mean oral art in most cases. Whereas the ashug or akyn was a figure who enjoyed equal rights with the authors in the literary development of peoples we have placed in the second, and even the first group, in the case of such tribes as the Nenets, Gulyaks, Ossetes, Gypsies and others, oral art (intertwined with ancient songs, tales, legends and so forth) was just a form of artistic expression. But with these tribes too, thanks to the establishment of a written language and the rapid development of the system of public education after the Revolution, we observe an astonishingly quick emergence of all the European forms of literature. Suffice it to recall the world’s first Ossetian novel.

p Our division of literatures into three groups, for the sake of convenience, is rather arbitrary. The affirmation of the new “positive” hero, a realistically truthful representation of life in all its contradictions, and the struggle against any distortions of the artistic truth with the help of historical analogies or by resorting to naturalistic or formalistic means—this makes the content of all Soviet literatures. The main characteristic of Soviet literature as a whole is that it is multinational in form, socialist in content and follows the method of socialist realism.

p Let us examine this subject from another angle, by trying to define those common features which emerged as a result of the development of national literatures in their native languages. On the one hand, Soviet literature is multilingual, and on the other the language barrier is surmounted by its spiritual closeness.

p The Programme of the C.P.S.U. states:

p “The exchange of material and spiritual values between nations becomes more and more intensive, ’and the contribution of each republic to the common cause of communist construction increases. Obliteration of distinctions between classes and the development 243 of communist social relations make for a greater social homogeneity of nations and contribute to the development of common communist traits in their culture, morals and way of living, to a further strengthening of their mutual trust and friendship.”

p The question we want to dwell on is how these principles are implemented in literature simultaneously with the development of national traditions and forms.

p Themes of friendship between peoples, of socialist construction, and so on, naturally link all Soviet literatures. But they have also much in common in the changes which their national forms undergo, and in the development of genres and styles. In other words, the spiritual community of all Soviet nationalities and tribes influences the very nature of artistic creativity on the basis of socialist realism, engendering new aesthetic forms. It is important as a point of principle that this process of renovation and modification of national forms and traditions for the purpose of rendering the new communist content of life, involves in equal measure those literatures which have an ancient written language and those that had no written language at all.

p The strongest similarity between Soviet literatures is to be found in their approach to the depiction and characterisation of life’s phenomena. There is nothing dogmatic in this approach: it has been prompted by Soviet reality itself. Writers focus their attention on those social forces which are aimed at building communism, in other words the people and their new relations in socialist society, formed in conditions of a revolutionary break-up of the old way of life. One observes the same regularity in books about the past: attention is focused on the principal motive forces of history—the people and the class struggle.

p The similarity of themes, observable in many national literatures which follow the method of socialist realism, results in a similarity of plot and pattern of construction. For instance, a popular theme is how an illiterate hunter from a primitive tribe develops into a Soviet intellectual: an engineer, a doctor, or a scientist. The reason for this similarity is that in the Soviet Union all nations and national groups participate in all the spheres of endeavour: economy, industry and culture.

p The third common feature is the tendency of national Soviet literatures to develop narrative prose and, ultimately, the monumental epic novel as they gain greater and greater command of the method of socialist realism. The transition from capitalism or feudalism to the new socialist system usually forms the background in these novels. This tendency is clearly pronounced in many literatures—in Russian (Alexei Tolstoi, Sholokhov, Fadeyev and Fedin), in Ukrainian (Gonchar and Stelmakh), in Latvian (Upits 244 and Lacis), in Azerbaijanian (Ragimov), in Kazakh (Auezov), to give but a few examples.

p These literatures also have much in common in the development of style, idiom and imagery. One tendency was to experiment with style in order to discover a new vocabulary and new rhythms, in other words to create new forms that would be equal to the epoch and would adequately express the revolutionary transformation. In Russian literature one immediately associates these seekings with Mayakovsky. His experience—his example—was enthusiastically copied by all the national literatures, especially by those of the Soviet East where the obsoleteness of the feudal tradition made itself felt most acutely. The other tendency—most pronounced in prose—was to develop the stylistic traditions of the classics with their clear and expressive language. As they gained maturity, national literatures shed those traditional peculiarities which were already becoming an obstacle to their development as socialist realist literatures.

p Thus we see that what unites Soviet national literatures is not just their ideological content but also some general tendencies in the development of form.

p Such, in outline, is the dialectically complex process of formation of the communist society’s new culture and literature. Under socialism there is no opposition between the national and the universal.

p But not so in the camp of capitalism. Our ideological opponents in the capitalist camp present a distorted view of the development of Soviet multinational literature, and give it a bourgeois- nationalistic bias.

p Their objections allege the same thing basically: that in the Soviet Union literatures are trimmed down to a pattern, and writers are deprived of individuality by being “forced” to write according to the method of socialist realism, in other words, to sing praises to everything that happens in the country. The national character of literature is allegedly becoming obliterated because the Russian language is being all but forcibly implanted in the usage of all the other nations peopling the U.S.S.R.

p As for the writers being deprived of individuality, I shall name just a few examples (the size of this book will not, unfortunately, allow me to dwell on them in detail) which will serve to refute such allegations completely.

p First of all, let us take the Ukrainian playwright Alexander Korneichuk. His plays, beginning with The End of the Squadron, have won the widest popularity and are enjoying long runs not just in the Soviet Union but in theatres abroad as well. They are always modern in impact and in the problems they raise. For instance, Front, which criticised the army leaders of the old Soviet 245 school, was published in Pravda at the height of the Second World War. In his plays about the collective farms—In the Steppes of Ukraine and others—Korneichuk touched upon some rather acute problems connected with the further development of the collectivefarm system in the U.S.S.R. All these plays carried a message of warning against resting on one’s laurels, to put it bluntly.

p Or take the Kazakh writer Mukhtar Auezov. His novel Abai which has for its central character the figure of Abai Kunanbayev, the 19th-century founder of Kazakh literature, can justly be called an epic poem of the Kazakh steppes. This powerful realistic novel shows the involved and, if you like, refined relations between the heads of the ancient clans. For depth of psychological analysis Abai may be ranked with the best works of Russian and world literature. I hesitate to name another modern novel where the author, who had himself leapt over several centuries, as it were, has used such a modern approach and such modern expressive means to describe events which must appear fantastic and exotic to the West European reader. The realistic power of Abai is especially evident when you compare it with many of the novels by modern Latin American and African writers who also describe “primitive life”. In the latter books, alas, the exotic is more often than not played up to the detriment of artistic merits.

p Vilis Lacis, the Latvian author, gives a highly entertaining plot to his novels Storm and To New Shores, which deal with the serious, modern theme of Latvia’s transition to socialism.

p Aadu Hint, the well-known Estonian author, on the contrary has a tendency for psychological probing.

p It is a pity that some of the magazines published in the West which claim to be the research centres of modern Soviet culture distort the true picture of Soviet literature’s development as a multinational literature. For example, there was an article in Survey, a London magazine, whose author George Lutsky (a Ukrainian emigre who settled in Canada) arrived at the conclusion , that all the national literatures in the U.S.S.R. are made of Russian stuff. He is annoyed not only by the spread of the Russian language in the U.S.S.R. but also by the school law according to which parents in any national republic have the right to decide what language their children will be taught in—their own or Russian. The author of this article hates everything Russian so much that he is prepared to turn Gorky—of all people!—into a rabid Russifier and a persecutor of non-Russian literatures. Yes, even Maxim Gorky is presented as a great-power chauvinist and Russifier. Maxim Gorky, who, even before the Revolution, stood up in defence of nations oppressed by the tsarist government (Finns, Latvians and Jews), and who, after the establishment of Soviet power, became 246 a living symbol of friendship between the Soviet literatures, and who rallied the non-Russian writers together! Gorky, who in his speech addressed to the First Congress of Writers spoke of the need to make a deeper study of the classical heritage and experience of Soviet national literatures! Gorky, who declared to the whole world that Soviet literature did not mean literature written in Russian alone!

p Are any comments necessary? This one example should be enough. The Canadian Ukrainian nationalist professor’s attitude to all things Russian must be explained by his class outlook. In the eyes of all the world today, the Russian language is the vehicle of the ideas of socialist revolution, the spokesman for the unquestionable gains of the Soviet Union, and therefore all things Russian are hateful to this emigre. Even in the remotest African jungles the word “Russian” sounds like “brother” today. Many Russian words —soviet, kolkhoz, sputnik, and others—have come to stay as new concepts in most of the world’s languages. Paul Robeson, the American singer, has learnt Russian in order to sing Soviet songs which, performed by him in concert halls throughout the world, sound like a symbol of brotherhood between peoples. And here is George Lutsky urging non-Russian Soviet writers to run from all that is Russian!

p There is another article in Survey by G. Morris, entitled “The Literature of Central Asia”, which is also extremely anti-Russian. The author used to work at the Central Asian Research Centre and is now on the staff of the British Museum. But the quality of his work is in sharp contrast to his “academic” titles, as in the case of G. Lutsky. Their articles have the same basic thesis that Central Asian literatures are subordinated to Russian literature. But G. Morris goes even farther and declares that modern Central Asian literature is a spurious growth. He does not notice that by using the term “Central Asian literature" he dumps Kazakh, Uzbek, 4 Kirghiz, Turkmen, Tajik, Kara-Kalpak, Uigur and the literatures of all the other peoples living in Central Asia into one heap.

p His basic argument “proving” the spuriousness of Central Asian literature is that realism is not natural for Central Asia, whose native tradition, he believes, is a high-flown, rhetorical style. And so, he states flatly, the future holds little promise for Soviet literature in Central Asia. In his opinion, from the professional point of view, the literature of Soviet Central Asia is altogether inferior to the Soviet Union’s other literatures.

p When you read supercilious statements of this kind you involuntarily picture those British and other colonial officers described rather realistically and quite often spitefully in some modern American and English novels (like Graham Greene’s The Quiet 247 American). G. Morris simply cannot imagine how any “natives” (by the way, he also looks down on the literatures of India, Iran and Turkey, for being little acquainted with the literary tradition of West Europe) and even less so Soviet ones (doubly barbaric, in other words) could be capable of creating a literature in their own native tongue, not inferior in artistic merits to books by Russian and English authors. G. Morris does mention the name of Mukhtar Auezov, but obviously he has not bothered to read his Abai, otherwise he would hardly have ventured to write off the literatures of Central Asia and Kazakhstan so lightly. Readers abroad can easily form their own opinion because quite a number of books by Central Asian writers have been translated into English.

p People who write for the magazines like Survey and who are so obviously guided by the spirit of national exclusiveness and the sense of their race’s or colonialist nation’s superiority over other races and nations, depart from genuine science by letting themselves be thus guided. These people either ignore facts or distort them and fail to see the real problems advanced by modern history.

p And yet it is precisely now, when a new mankind is being born and when the entire planet is seething with contradictions, that these problems—national, linguistic, and, above all, social—simply clamour for attention.

p In his famous predictions for the loth century, The Shape of Things to Come published in England in 1900, H. G. Wells believed—drawing his conclusions from the experience of England and France as colonial powers—that European languages (English and French, and then German) had a chance to play a leading role in the world as a means of uniting peoples. But he had the circumscribed bourgeois world outlook, and so he was unable to picture how the development of social revolutions would really go in the 2oth century.

p Our revolutions changed the whole picture. Owing to the Soviet Union’s social, scientific and technical achievements, the role of the Russian language as a means of uniting peoples is visibly growing at an ever increasing pace. In Western Europe and the U.S.A. it is not just the scholars who are learning it now for reading special literature. Russian, apart from being the language of a great literature, is now esteemed as the language of revolution, of Lenin’s ideas, and of the achievements of the Soviet people. At the same time those languages which, like English and French, had indeed assumed importance at the turn of the century and had become the languages used in international relations, have now encountered opposition to their further spread. This opposition comes from the former British and French colonies. During the two hundred years of British rule in India, English became the lingua franca for the intellectuals of 248 the numerous nationalities and communities. True, in India to this day English is spoken at congresses and conferences, and English is the language in which scientific journals are published. But at the same time, the new intelligentsia is already being educated mainly in Hindi, Urdu or Bengali, the more widespread languages of India, spoken by more than 220,000,000 people.

p Today, the peoples of Africa speak approximately 120 languages (not counting dialects) belonging to eleven language groups. The trend towards African unity will possibly lead to an advancement of languages capable of becoming the linguistic basis for the further development of the African peoples’ cultures.

p Thus, national liberation movements and social revolutions stimulate the shaping of national cultures and literary languages. At the same time they engender feelings of closeness and unity in the hearts of millions of people. And the writers in all the liberated countries are tremendously interested in the theory and practice of the Soviet experience, where a harmony has been achieved between the revival of national languages and the cultivation of common ideas and a common realistic approach to the interpretation of life, uniting writers of different nationalities under the banner of socialist realism.

p The questions which invite the closest study of these writers and scholars are the conditions in which the literary intelligentsia is reared, the pace of literary development, the character and style of poetry and prose, the formation of genres, the emergence of plots and the metaphoric system, and the balance between national traditions—folklore in particular—and the demands of modern literature.

p The experience of Soviet national literatures has, unquestionably, an international importance not only because of the ideological message it carries but also because of its wealth of artistic forms.

p At the Third Congress of Soviet Writers in May 1959, I met Jacques Alexis, a Haitian author, who was later tortured to death by the ton-ton macoutes of Doc Duvalier. Jacques Alexis and his friends, Haiti’s progressive writers, set up a national theatre wholly devoted to folklore subjects but at the same time adapted to modern demands. They wanted to withdraw from the imported modernistic literature which seeped in from the United States and Europe. And they managed to do it, winning extraordinary popularity for their theatre.

p During a conversation I had with some Vietnamese writers at the Gorky Institute of World Literature I was struck by the keenness of their interest in the coming Soviet publication of folklore material and the principles of compiling epic songs and poems.

p Survey asserts that association with the Russian language and 249 Russian literature threatens ruin to the cultures of the other peoples in the Soviet Union, leading to the destruction of the specific national character and the loss of national form. This is just not true. National form (local colour and all that is specific and particular) has no independent value if judged as a separate entity, divorced from content. Whether we render it in architecture, painting or films, national form is anyway a derivative of human activity, even though it does have a large reciprocal influence on the content. It is as senseless to cultivate “national form for the sake of national form" as it is to defend the existence of “art for art’s sake" and “science for the sake of science”. Because then national form (like “art for art’s sake”) will become a weapon of nationalism and a means of disuniting people.

p We follow a different course. We develop national form and use it only in so far as it furthers the development of intellectual, beauty-conscious people, and helps to unite nations embarked on building a new communist world. But as soon as an outdated form becomes an obstacle in our way, holding us up, we stop cultivating it. For us, national form is not a fetish. It is one of the manifestations of human community which took shape during the long course of mankind’s development. And mankind today, it must be borne in mind, numbers 2,500 nations and tribes.

p The history of the Old World, going back several millennia, is responsible for the confusion of colours on the literary map which brings to mind the Biblical legend about the tower of Babel.

We are standing on the threshold of the new world, about to take the leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom. We have now seen the map of the world with new eyes, just as the cosmonauts, looking down from a height of three hundred kilometres, have seen the earth in a completely new aspect. The new world of communism will also create its new literary atlas.