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p In this chapter I want to show the contacts between Soviet Russian literature and the literatures of the other peoples of the U.S.S.R. A great deal has been written about the influence of Russian literature on the literatures of other Soviet peoples. As I have already said above, anti-communist propaganda is anxious to prove that the non-Russian Soviet literatures have become completely dissolved in Russian literature.

p I want to speak about something else: What have we Russian writers adopted from other peoples? These creative links were not made today, of course. They can be traced back to the I7th century.

p Pushkin was the first writer in whose works Russia was clearly recognised to be a multilingual and multitribal state. In his article about The Prisoner of the Caucasus Belinsky wrote that: “Pushkin’s Muse has sanctified, as it were, Russia’s kinship with this country, which has actually been in existence for a long time. . . .” In Pushkin’s poetry and then in Lermontov’s (Ismail Bey and others) the reference to Russia as a multinational country has such a progressive and sometimes revolutionary sound because it expressed the protest of the oppressed nations against tsarism and their desire for liberation.

p Pushkin’s behest to us was to think of ourselves in creative association with all the peoples of Russia. This is our Russian tradition which has been developed so gloriously in Soviet literature after the Revolution of 1917. Dostoyevsky had brilliantly divined in Pushkin’s capacity for world-embracing sympathy the “main aptitude of our nationality”. He noted in Pushkin a talent for identifying himself with other peoples (scenes from Faust, The Avaricious Knight, Don Juan, In Imitation of the Koran and others) as a peculiarly plastic characteristic of his artistic genius. Why did Pushkin turn to the life and images of other peoples? Dostoyevsky explains it as the great historical striving of the Russian people towards a “world-embracing humanity”. The Russians unite other peoples “on the field of peace 251 and brotherhood”. Dostoyevsky says: “Now it’s divination, now it’s prediction.” He put a mystic meaning into the Russian’s idea of “world-embracing humanity”, and linked it with Christianity, the main disseminators of which, he held, were again the Russian people.

p But the Russian people became the disseminators of another, more realistic and potent teaching of world-embracing humanity and unity. This teaching is communism which carries the idea of brotherhood of nations and the brotherhood of all working people. Traits of world-embracing sympathy, Pushkin’s traits, have long been part of our national character, and in the liberation struggle against tsarism and the bourgeois landlords, we Russians became fused into one family with our country’s other peoples. It was then that our curiosity in the life of other nations was kindled and our readiness to help them out was aroused. The Third Autumn by Valery Bryusov who, Gorky said, was always listening to the voices of Russia’s different peoples, Armenians especially, may have been inspired by this feeling. The poet envisaged new, Soviet Russia as a country that “leads all the world’s tribes".

p How could anyone fail to notice that it was precisely these traits of our national character that became developed after the October Revolution in socialist construction which was a melting pot of nations, and then in the war with nazi Germany which bound them more strongly still by ties of blood in defence of their common motherland? How could anyone fail to notice that our Russian Soviet literature in its entirety, all our better- and lesser-known writers, had adopted the Pushkin tradition of world-embracing humanity, developed it and given it a new meaning? By failing to notice this essential trait of Russian Soviet literature we minimise its value and gain an incomplete idea of its character.

p Take Sergei Yesenin. The most Russian of Russian poets. But perhaps it was precisely because he was so “completely Russian" (to quote Gorky) that he was able to express the poetic appeal of the East (in his Persian Themes} with such humaneness and such a subtle penetration into the spirit of another people. When you read this poetry you involuntarily remember Pushkin’s Songs of the Western Slavs and In Imitation of the Koran. Yesenin wrote in 1915: “Russia is lost mid the Mordva and Chud, and she knows not the meaning of fear”. Like Pushkin, Yesenin thought in terms of Russia, as one single entity, although the Mordva and Chud belong to the Finno-Ugrian family. Soon after the Revolution, in the December 1917 issue of Svobodny Zhurnal (Free Journal) published in Petrograd, Yesenin wrote:

p I’m not lonely in my constant roaming,
It’s not me alone who tramps this soil, 252
Over Russian fields and sprawling plainlands,
Over grass and snow and wilderness.
Were I a Chuvash or Lithuanian,
It’s all one, my cross is like the rest’s.

p In these lines we find our truly Russian breadth, and that nationembracing feeling which was so very much alive in Pushkin. Yesenin made a journey to the Caucasus and upon return wrote in his poem To the Poets of Georgia (1924):

p The Russian tsars a stranglehold
On all the best kept hard and fast.
We finished that with action bold
And Freedom spread its wings at last.
And every tribe and every clan,
Each in his native tune and tongue,
We all give voice the way we can,
By human feelings overcome.

p This is the very essence of our national character. We love all goodness and beauty, but different poets and writers express it differently, revealing their artistic individuality in their approach to this theme.

p I must make three provisions which will help us to enlarge our knowledge of the subject dealt with in this chapter, and to clarify for ourselves the best method of approaching it.

p Firstly, it would be wrong to use the method of survey and enumeration: that is, to record where and what writer or poet has described or mentioned people of Soviet nationalities other than his own. This method would leave us little the wiser. Nor would it be right to look in the works of Russian Soviet writers for evidence of literary influence or reminiscences stemming from other Soviet authors. That, too, would narrow our field of vision.

p Admittedly, Shevchenko’s lyrical notes and the influence of Ukrainian folklore are easily discernible in Bagritsky’s poem Ballad of Opanas, and especially in the libretto for the opera based on it. But then this poem also sparkles with the reflected glory of The Lay of Prince Igor’s Host. The poet’s ties with the Ukrainian people and culture have much deeper roots than is indicated by outward signs. Numerous such examples could be adduced.

p It is not simply the penetration of themes that we must speak about, but mainly of how Russian writers treat foreign material. In genuine art, thought and feeling are more important than theme or material. For what purpose does a writer absorb some images or motives from the life of a foreign people? What purpose and 253 why? In the answer to these questions lies the key to the writer’s personality. One writer will treat foreign material casually, as a passing interest. For another it will be the medium in which he can best express himself as an artist.

p So much for the approach. But there are two other essential points of method that should be clarified.

p It would be narrow-minded and wrong to reduce all that we are receiving from other peoples of the U.S.S.R. to literary influences alone. Every nation is a collective entity, an aggregate personality, as it were. And just hearing this man sing one of his little songs out in the field somewhere or up in the mountains at sunrise, may so fire the imagination of a poet that it will immediately take flight on wings of fancy. We do not know what gave Lev Tolstoi the idea of ineradicable vitality—whether the folklore of the mountain people, or simply the sight of a broken Caucasian thistle—but it inspired him to create in Khadji Murat an image of enormous vital strength.

p If we pursue our theme in this direction it will bring us to yet a third important conclusion: real art makes no distinction between big and small nations, between peoples with an ancient or a young culture. All peoples are equal, all are equally interesting and important. Thirst can be quenched by drinking water from a large river or from a small spring. Our Russian Soviet literature has learnt the songs and absorbed the colours of all the peoples inhabiting our country—the large nationalities and the small, those who have settled down in our boundless steppes, those who have gone into the mountains and found shelter in the forests, those who lovingly tend their grapevines under the scorching sun, and those who herd reindeer in the tundra.

p Let us look at the work of Nikolai Tikhonov. He typifies most impressively a writer whose art is imbued with a spirit of friendship and communion between the different peoples of the Soviet Union. This communion is second nature to him. In this sense Tikhonov is a characteristic figure for Soviet literature. The friendly lyres of peoples, resurrected by socialism, accompanied his growth as a writer. He is a poet with a romantic vision and an ennobling emotional perception whose imagination is fired by his numerous encounters with people and his travel impressions. That is probably why Eastern, and especially Georgian imagery comes so naturally to him.

p Speaking in Leningrad at an evening devoted to the poetry of Titsian Tabidze, Nikolai Tikhonov said: “Georgia is a revelation as romantic as a poetic image. . . . The concept of poetry, or what we call poetic feeling, lives in the very nature of this country, in the soul of its people.”

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p There is no gainsaying that the view from the top of a mountain is always thrilling and the call of distances is very strong. But there is a peculiar poetry of its own in our gentle Russian lowlands—in Ycsenin’s village world, in the taiga of Yakutia, in the roar of the Angara’s rapids, in the revolving hydroturbines at Bratsk, and in the silence of the tundra illumined by the northern lights. And the people themselves. Poetry has always been alive in the heart of every people.

p But Georgia, the Caucasus and the East gave Tikhonov what he was seeking, what answered the essence of his poetic gift, and that was: the romance of the sublime.

p I can understand why Tikhonov wanted to translate Georgian poets and why he wrote that book of poetry entitled Georgian Spring. One cannot remain unmoved by the enchantment of Georgian poetry. I, too, love Georgian verse, which has come to us in the excellent translations of the Russian poets Nikolai Tikhonov, Boris Pasternak, Pavel Antokolsky, Nikolai Zabolotsky, V. Derzhavin and A. Mezhirov. One splendid quality of modern Georgian poetry is that its civic character is rendered with a genuine warmth of feeling. Another is that it is addressed, without unnecessary rhetoric, directly to that delicate apparatus of human perception which we call the soul. Just as the taste of wine is enhanced for us by its fragrance even before we have sipped it, so is the message contained in poetry disclosed more revealingly by its colours and moods.

p Irakly Abashidze wrote in one of his poems (Inspiration) that rationalism and loss of ingenuousness are the most deadening things for a poet. Boredom sets in when “his pen ceases to respond alertly to the murmur of the grass in spring and the rustling of the wheat in autumn. . . .” This feeling of the fullness of life is common to most Georgian poets. This feeling, combined with youthful candour and the awareness of our revolutionary times, is amazingly well expressed in Georgy Leonidze’s poem To a Poet written in 1930 and published in Russian translation a few years later. This poem will have the lasting glory of being one of the masterpieces not only of Georgian but also of Russian poetry, thanks to Nikolai Tikhonov’s brilliant translation.

p We call the loveliest, the most divine,
Only that which is ripe and strong:
A river in spring, or a mighty vine,
A woman, say, or a field of corn.

p Tikhonov’s translation is a fusion of his own personal perception of life, Russian expansiveness and Georgian romanticism. In his 255 own poetry about Georgia—Verses About Kakhetia, Georgian Spring, his poems about Tbilisi and Abkhazia and the cycles Mountains and Rainbow Over Saguramo—this fusion is there, and everywhere we can feel what Georgia has given the poet.

p The “Eastern theme"—not Georgian alone—has come to play a large part in Tikhonov’s work. In his book about Pakistan and Afghanistan called Two Streams (1951) he says:

p I walked into a dusky shack
When in this country, far from home
(This not in dreams, but actual fact),
A friend-who had the right to come.

p His poetry about Pakistan has been translated into Urdu and greatly admired in that country. Tikhonov first wrote about India forty years ago, in 1919, before he had ever been there. The poem is about Sami, an Indian boy, to whom the name of Lenin held promise of ultimate deliverance from poverty and exploitation. Sami was the first poem about Lenin in the history of Soviet literature. And it is significant that the poet was so Russian in his understanding of the soul and the plight of another nation.

p I have dwelt at such length on Tikhonov’s work because it is easiest to trace from his example just what was absorbed by Russian poetry from the literatures of other Soviet peoples and why, in the case of Tikhonov, his poetic gift was most fully revealed in the Caucasian theme which happened to be closest to him in spirit.

p Tikhonov’s short stories as well as his poetry reflect these Eastern themes in numerous variations. His most successful prose work was his collection of stories and essays published in 1921 under the general title of Nomads. I have already mentioned earlier in this book how a group of Soviet writers (Tikhonov, Leonov, Ivanov, Lugovskoi, Pavlenko and Sannikov) went to Turkmenia in 1930 and what they contributed to Soviet literature as a result. Nomads was Tikhonov’s contribution. All these writers differ in manner and points of interest, and so what would appear to be the same material is presented in their works through the prism of their different artistic vision. Each borrowed from the foreign nation he was describing that which best answered his psychological and artistic aims.

p Today, reviewing the books written at the time in their historical aspect, we see their shortcomings but we also see what Turkmenia and Kazakhstan have given Russian Soviet literature.

p Take, for example, the picture they painted of the Turkmenian desert or the Kazakh steppe. In his Nomads Tikhonov painted the desert in elusive pinks and mauves behind a shimmering haze, as a background on which he drew scenes from the life of the Belludjas 256 and Djemides, the Turkmen tribes who farm the mountain regions. Vsevolod Ivanov lavished a wealth of colours and emotions on the Kazakh steppe. His heroes are Kazakhs, Kirghizes, Altai, Chinese and Russians—a community of friends. In his Coloured Winds he writes: “He wept and laughed with every heart.”

p Alexander Blok defined romanticism as an avid desire to live ten lives in one. This is a conditional designation of the sixth sense in its untarnished and unalloyed form, so to speak. If we take it to mean not simply one of the categories of literary criticism but interpret it as an imaginary veil with which the artist covers up that which he correctly senses but finds difficult to put into words, then we shall see that this sixth sense, born in us by the Revolution, is expressed in Vsevolod Ivanov’s romantic prose, especially in his Partisan Stories which exhale the poetry of the Kazakh steppe. He writes: “We welcome your re-birth, land, your re-birth! Embrace the rains and the fields, and rejoice! Here is a handful of my native soil—it is in flower!”

p In Vsevolod Ivanov’s earlier works this gladness of revolutionary rejuvenation is expressed in the beautiful riot of colours with which the Kazakh steppes sparkle under his pen. Even the winds arccoloured, and the sand is blue. But on the other hand there is the merciless desert, turning on man with all the fierceness of its desperate poverty. Gladness and cruelty go hand in hand. Let us remember his story Encounter with its tender opening tune: “My springtime thawing. . .”. The Kara-Korum desert. . . . The yellowblue evening, moist with dew, is licking at the stirrups of the Russian horseman. A Kirghiz, whose wife has been killed by the Whites, steps out of a bush and says: “Hand over your rifle, Russian. I’ve carried Kyzymil for twenty versts.” And the Russian hands his rifle over to Kyzymil’s husband.

p The end of this encounter: “The time of spring—my thawing, it’s time to light the fires of wisdom.” It is like a poem in prose. Another story Temerbei, a Kirghiz is all cruelty, and cruelty alone. Two Red Army men are shot by a squad of White Cossacks. The bodies of the two men are covered with earth, but the yellowish arm of one of them sticks out. Temerbei touched this arm as soon as the executioners had gone, and the feel of it sent him blindly into the merciless desert.

p From his work we can trace what Vsevolod Ivanov sought and found in the Kazakh steppes and the foothills of the Altai Mountains among the peoples living there; how his concepts of the country and the inhabitants changed; how life’s contrasts influenced his thinking and his choice of descriptive means; how these contrasts gradually lost their sharpness and also—regrettably—some of their vividness; and how the author arrived at his novel We’re 257 Going to India. He also arrived at realism, both ideologically and artistically, but with certain losses to his talent. After all, experimenting was his life, he was forever seeking, “weeping and laughing with every heart".

p Vladimir Lugovskoi took something entirely different from the Turkmans and Uzbeks. His first book To the Bolsheviks of the Desert and the Spring was an expression of the turning point in his own thinking. What he sought in the East was more than local colour—it was the embodiment of revolutionary ideas. He sought facts showing how the socialist system had transformed the son of a Kulyab beggar into the owner of the earth and a master of his own destiny. The poet’s oratorial voice was addressed to the epoch itself, as it were. He chose an extremely apt epigraph for his Uzbekistan Poems (1930-1947):

p Men, moving water, soil and sands,
The weight you’ve lifted with your hands!
What strength our one and only state
Has lent you to heave up that weight!
I’d give my life for every one of you,
The toilers building life anew.
From you we should be learning everything,
The steppeland Bolsheviks of spring!

p Lugovskoi’s poetry about the people of the Soviet East is a combination of a rousing call to action, a chronicle and philosophical reflections, fused together by the feeling of the Soviet peoples’ steady advance along the road of communism. Every line of his poetry is a step on the staircase leading to the top of the philosophical edifice which the author has called The Middle of the Century, his latest work.

p I have shown three or four kinds of approach to foreign material taken by a Russian writer. The example of Pavel Luknitsky is an instance where a Russian writer has found in the life of another fraternal people everything from which a literary work is compounded: material, theme, situations and images. Luknitsky’s work is devoted wholly to Soviet Tajikistan. He lived there for years at a time and has travelled the country far and wide. His Tajikistan in English translation represents one of the main sources of information for readers abroad about this once backward country which, under Soviet power, has been wonderfully transformed both economically and culturally. I have heard praises of this book from Englishmen, and also from the English-writing Indian author Mulk Raj Anand.

p Luknitsky’s prose, especially his collections of stories and essays Beyond the Blue Rock, Time Is on Our Side, A Journey to the 258 Pamirs, and his novel Nisso, describe the life of the Tajik people in different aspects from the early nineteen-twenties (Luknitsky, then a budding writer, had himself taken part in the struggle against the basmatch bands) to our own day. The book I like best is Nisso which presents in impressively written scenes the establishment and consolidation of Soviet power in the frontier regions of mountainous Tajikistan. Nisso, a beautiful and courageous girl whom the Revolution released from the parandjah and all it implied, is a romantic, charming and psychologically convincing character.

p I see in the work of Luknitsky and other writers of the same cast a literary expression of what the Russian people in generaldoctors, teachers, engineers, geologists and Party officials—contribute to the cause of friendship with the other peoples of the U.S.S.R.

p All that I have said above can also be applied to Pyotr Skosyrev, author of the novels Your Humble Servant (about Kemineh, the poet) and Farkhad and Shirin, whose writing was devoted entirely to Central Asia, Turkmenia in particular.

p Take a look at the population map of the U.S.S.R. issued in 1963 by the Institute of Ethnography. More than a hundred nationalities are shown, and you will see for yourselves that throughout the country—in the east, north, south and west, in the deserts and forests, and along the great Siberian rivers Lena, Yenisei and Ob—Russians live in close proximity and association with all these peoples allied both economically and politically.

p Tsarist Russia had its colonies within the country, but progressive Russian literature did not create the genre of “colonial novel" such as developed in England or France, for example. It would be wrong, of course, to reduce the traditional British attitude in relation to other peoples to Rudyard Kipling alone. There is another tradition stemming from Byron. And it may be that in India today people no longer remember Rudyard Kipling with his racial “iron curtain" between the East and West, a twain that never shall meet, but that they read instead, say, Jim Corbctt, that hunter, nature lover and writer, author of My India, Man-eaters of Kumaon and others. In Africa, too, Albert Schweizer is more popular than all those English and French authors of exotic novels about Negroes.

p Any chauvinistic writers there may have been in tsarist Russia were defeated by their own mediocrity. The great Russian writers were never inspired by the glamour of dominant-nation superiority, and so no Kiplings grew in this soil. Nor could anti-Semitism have ever become the object of poetry.

p Our Russian tradition is entirely different: to love other peoples as ourselves and to approach all with an open heart.

p Far be it from me to underrate the books of progressive Western writers about the life of peoples foreign to them. This is a large 259 theme and it goes beyond the scope of my book. But we cannot overlook the experience of Russian, and especially of Soviet literature which is important in principle and has an international significance as regards both approach to the portrayal of the life of fraternal peoples and the very method of assimilating the fruit of this friendly association.

p In this respect, the Russians have presented to the world a new attitude which is vividly embodied in Russian Soviet literature, the literature of socialist realism. Our inner need to understand the soul of other peoples and create their images, and the aesthetic pleasure we take in the language and national features of other peoples is reflected in our own novels, poems, plays, and in translations of foreign literature. Among the leading characters in the majority of Russian books we arc certain to find people of other Soviet nationalities. And very many Russian writers are authors of cither a novel or a story describing the life of non-Russian people.

p In Konstantin Paustovsky’s autobiographical trilogy the images of the Ukraine, her people and scenery, are very poetic. Was the Ukraine, perhaps, responsible for that gentle lyricism which is such a charming feature of Paustovsky’s writing? This lyricism is blended in Paustovsky with his profound respect for man, his admiration and pain for this man. I would call it ethical lyricism. The moral and poetic principles are merged in his style as closely as are the different national currents in the mainstream of his art—Russian, Ukrainian, Kazakh, Turkmenian (in Kara-Bugaz) and Georgian (in Colchis). Paustovsky glows with humanity, and reading him you envy him the happiness of esteeming his fellow men so profoundly, and of feeling an equal among equals.

p Take F. Knorre’s Forever, a novel which describes Lithuania just before it became re-united with the U.S.S.R. and then during the war years. As in Luknitsky’s Nisso, the central character, a Lithuanian girl, is in love with a Russian. Or take Y. Lebedinsky’s novel Batash and Batai which is “built on" Kabardino-Balkarian material. Or P. Pavlenko’s novel A Caucasian Tale about Shamil and Khadji Murat.

p I also know a case where the author thought little of his book, or at any rate did not fully appreciate the artistic and social importance of his work for which he had drawn his facts and images from the life of a non-Russian people. And it turned out to be the greatest thing he had ever written. During the war I made a short stay in Ufa and there I met this writer, N. Krasheninnikov. Until then I had only thought of him in connection with his Virginity, a novel of rather dubious merits although it had caught the attention of critics at the time of publication. Krasheninnikov felt that his novel 260 was a challenge to Artsibashcv’s Sanin whose hero championed the right of every healthy male to sexual anarchy.

p To tell you the truth I was somewhat puzzled by the attention lavished on Krasheninnikov by the government of the Bashkir Autonomous Republic and the Regional Party Committee in Ufa. And then I learnt something I had not known until then, to my regret. It appears that in 1907 Krasheninnikov had published a collection of essays and stories under the general title The FadeOut of Bashkiria in which (as in his earliest novel Amelya, an Academy of Sciences prize winner) he told quite boldly for that time about the persecution and shameless robbery of the “Bashkirs, a voiceless country”. Now that the “voiceless Bashkirs" have found voice, lifted their Heads and acquired their human rights and their autonomy, they gratefully remembered what that old Russian author had written about their country.

p Now a few words about that gift of artistic self-identification which, according to Dostoyevsky, made Pushkin “a phenomenon the like of which had never been seen or heard of before”. But Pushkin, Dostoyevsky goes on to say, embodied in this gift a virtue common to our nation. If we strip Dostoycvsky’s statement of its Messianic apparel, we shall see that there is something in the life of the Russian people that might well give grounds for such conclusions. Belinsky has also written about the peculiar sensibility of the Russians. It must be ascribed to the historical conditions of our existence and the closeness with which the life of the Russians was bound up with the life of the other nationalities inhabiting the country, a closeness that prompted us, while retaining our own identity, to penetrate this foreign atmosphere and try to understand it. When after the October Revolution all the dividing barriers were shattered, the non-Russian peoples began to develop culturally and the “exchange of spiritual treasures" (Belinsky) developed at an ever-increasing pace, the gift of self-identification with other nations was called to action in the new socialist conditions.

p There is’no need to remind readers of what Gorky, Bryusov and Blok had done in their time for this brotherly exchange of spiritual treasures. All I shall say is that most of the Soviet poets are making translations from the languages of our brother nations, and that translations into Russian have acquired an unprecedented scale, incomparably greater than was ever the case in the United States, Britain, France or Germany.

p Today, we have the perfect right to speak of our own Soviet school of translation.

p The social duty of the Soviet poet-translator is to forge a link of friendship between nations. But as a poet and artist he must also possess the gift of self-identification. In reproducing the original in 261 his own language, the Russian poet discloses his own personality, though in the guise of another, by his choice of poem for translation. Translating poetry is the first step to Pushkin’s gift of self- identification. And so very often translations lead to original poetry on the same themes: remember the poems of Nikolai Tikhonov and Yevgeny Yevtushenko about Georgia. It is no accident that translators are most successful with poets who are closest to them in manner. For example, take Mikhail Isnkovsky’s translations of Byelorussian poets, and Sergei Vasilyev’s translation of P. Voronko.

p But in no Russian poet’s work have we ever heard such a chorus of nationalities as in the poetry of Ilya Selvinsky. This polyphony comes from the wonderful vitality of his talent, from his love of colour, this acute alertness to languages, dialects and accents, from the wealth of his expressive means and techniques of reproducing the slightest nuances of speech. Selvinsky’s breadth of vision is displayed in this kaleidoscope of foreign pictures, landscapes, countries, cities and people. He urges us to see beyond the visible horizon and tries to enlarge for us our world of emotions, concepts and thoughts. He gives us a truly panoramic view of life and a glimpse of men and women of many different nationalities: Americans, British, Frenchmen, Italians, Germans, Poles, Rumanians, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Norwegians, Arabs, Persians, Spaniards and others.

p It is well in keeping with the character of Selvinsky’s work that he should present Russia and the Russians in the spirit of the Pushkin tradition as the medium of uniting nations. His Russia, like Valery Bryusov’s, “leads the tribes of the world”. But Selvinsky gives a modern interpretation to Russia’s historical significance, and says: “You’re more than just a country: you’re the world! The planet’s fate is in your hands. . . .” These words come from the Prologue to his trilogy Russia which comprises three plays: “The Livonian War" (during the reign of Ivan the Terrible), “The Rebel Tsar" (during the reign of Peter the Great), and “The Big Kirill" (during the period of the February and October revolutions).

p The Russian people “made the Tatars and the Byelorussians sing again and gave them hope. . . .”

p The trail to the all-planet congress
The Bolsheviks have blazed.
                              That’s why
The Russians’ course is of such great importance.
To every nation, every tribe.

p It is with the sympathetic curiosity of a Russian poet that Selvinsky studies the foreign scene. His poetry in all its diversity of genres 262 is an eloquent example from which one can see how Russian Soviet literature can be enriched by its contacts with the other Soviet peoples. In Sclvinsky’s books we meet big and small nations, peoples with an ancient culture and nomadic tribes, Ukrainians, Chukchis, Armenians, Kirghizes, Karaims, Evcnks (or Lamuts), Jews, Estonians and many, many others.

p The life of those small tribes that had settled down in the Far Eastern taiga, the tundra and on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean is rendered rather extensively in Russian literature. Before their national writers could tell about themselves in their native language, progressive Russian authors acquainted the world with many of Russia’s nationalities and ethnic groups, always writing of these small oppressed peoples with sympathy, concern and the Russian all-embracing humanism. This tradition was further and more widely developed in Russian Soviet literature. Even the pre-revolutionary past has been described from positions of socialist realism: Soviet writers, alive to the prospects opening before these ethnic groups and nationalities under socialism, examined their national peculiarities, psychology and inter-tribal struggle with particular attention. This can be seen from Nikolai Zadornov’s novels Remote Country and The Old Amur which give a true picture of the local scene with people of different nationalities living together—Nanais, Russians, Yakuts, Evenks, Chinese and others. This new approach is made even clearer in Zadornov’s Mogusyumk and Guryanich, a story which tells how the Bashkirs get on with the Russian workers in the Urals.

p Tikhon Semushkin found in the life of the Chukchis what Skosyrev found in Turkmenia and Luknitsky in Tajikistan—the material, the imagery and the inspiration for his work. He travelled all over the Chukotka Peninsula in the middle nineteen-twenties during the all-Union census, and rode in a dog-sleigh along the Atlantic seaboard explored by Nordenskjold’s expedition. And then he returned to live among the Chukchis as a school-teacher. Semushkin entered the literary scene with his book Chukotka, and then came his novel Alitet Departs for the Mountains, which tells how the Chukchis embarked on their extraordinary road in the nineteen-twenties, leaping across whole centuries, straight from the tribal system to socialism. When the first Russian Bolsheviks came to the Chukotka Peninsula they began by persuasion and material aid to free the Chukchis from the tenacious hold of superstition, tribal chiefs like Alitet, and from the American and other smugglers and profiteers who had for years been robbing this strong and courageous people. The story told by Semushkin immediately attracted the attention of the world reading public. It has been translated into at least twenty foreign languages. Katharine Prichard, the well-known 263 Australian authoress, wrote to the Union of Soviet Writers that she would like Scmushkin’s book to be read by as many people abroad as possible.

p The Fleet-Footed Reindeer by N. Shundik, another Russian writer, comes as a sort of sequel to Semushkin’s novel and deals with a later period.

p Now at last the Chukchis have been able to tell their own story through their spokesman Yuri Rytkhcu in his collection entitled People on Our Shore, The Chukot Saga, the long-short story The Season of Melting Snows and his novel The Valley of Little Hares -books which have evoked a lively interest among readers abroad.

p In Azhaycv’s Far From Moscow we are introduced to the Nanais and other Far Eastern nationalities in association with Russian Soviet people whose ancestors figure in Zadornov’s Remote Country.

p I may be asked: precisely how did these peoples influence the development of Russian Soviet literature? After all, do not all these peoples and ethnic groups play a passive role in Russian literature, merely serving as an object of description? After all, they had no literature of their own; so what could anyone learn from them?

p If you study Russian fiction closely you will sec what the authors sought and found in the life of these ethnic groups. The inverse influence was far from passive. Sometimes it implanted the seed of a story in the writer’s mind, as in the case of Lev Tolstoi’s Kbadji Murat.

p Take Fadeyev’s The Last of the Udeghes. The title immediately brings to mind Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. But Fadeyev’s novel has an entirely different meaning. Fenimore Cooper’s story is about the fighting adventures of honourable, proud and courageous Red Indians. The Udeghes inspired the Russian writer with a different idea, the embodiment of which he sought in the image of this small, hunting tribe numbering no more than fifteen hundred people who, in those years, led a nomadic existence in the forests of the Sikhote-Alin. Incidentally, V. Arsenyev has devoted a special ethnographic essay to the Udeghes, a fascinatingly written work, it must be said. In the mode of this tribe’s life and in the Udeghes themselves Fadeyev saw the noble traits of primitive communism. These were the traits of which Engels wrote so enthusiastically in his book The Origin of Family, Private Property and State. As readers of the older generation will probably remember, the first edition of The Last of the Udeghes had the following lines from Engels’s book for an epigraph: “What an amazing organisation in all its infancy and simplicity is this tribal system....”

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p While Uncas, the last of the Mohicans, is a living proof of the extinction of Red Indians in conditions of capitalist civilisation, Sari—one of the main characters in The Last of the Udeghes— personifies his primitive tribe’s ascent to a higher level of culture. The similar titles of the two novels thus acquire a dissimilar meaning. Sari is the last of the Udeghes as a primitive tribe, and with men like him a new life will begin.

p But being a writer with a realistic vision Fadeyev was compelled to remove the film of romance that both glamourised and obscured the pattern of this tribal society’s life. And then, of course, he could not be satisfied with simply counterposing capitalism to those splendid qualities which it had destroyed and which had once been common to people living in clans under primitive communism. This has been already done by many progressive authors of the Western world in their books about African Negroes or American Red Indians.

p In Fadeyev’s novel, Sari and the other Udeghes very soon become characters of secondary importance. This is only logical. In keeping with the historical truth, prominence is assumed by the representatives of those social forces and those classes which are called upon to overthrow capitalism and restore to mankind that which it has lost. In the foreground we sec two Bolsheviks—Pyotr Surkov and Alyosha Malenky. In Fadeyev’s novel the Udeghes were not simply an object of description. Far from it. Fadeyev came to know them in partisan warfare during the Civil War in the Far East, he read about them, and let his imagination carry him away into the radiant future which the Soviet people were building up in hard toil. In this sense, The Last of the Udeghes may be called a philosophical epic, in Gorky’s meaning of the word.

p In later years, when Fadeyev was chairman of the Union of Soviet Writers, his post obliged him to make a closer and more systematic study of the non-Russian national literatures. He did it with the eagerness and earnestness which were part of his nature. It must also be remembered that he was a theoretician of socialist realism, apart from being a writer of fiction.

p Shortly before the war I went with a delegation of Russian writers to Elista to attend the 500-year birth anniversary of “Djangr”, the Kalmyk epos, and then to Orjonikidzc for the celebrations of Kosta Khetagurov’s 9Oth birthday. I liked Fadeyev’s speech about this Ossetian classic, and I took pleasure in telling him so.

p Fadeyev said to me in reply: “It is a delight to study the literary treasures of other nations. I do not only learn in the process but take great pleasure in it. And the remarkable people we discover 265 for ourselves! I’m sorry I did not take all this up earlier. I have to make up for lost time now.”

p Everybody knows from Fadeyev’s articles with what singlemindedness and force of conviction he tried to prove that our literary development is a single process of a multinational literature.

The florescence of Soviet national literatures is there for all the world to see. But we must not think of our Russian literature as an isolated entity. We would be doing it an injustice. If we ignore those values which Russian literature draws from the numerous national sources, we shall fail to understand what new contribution it has made to modern world literature and, furthermore, fail to appreciate the revival of the Pushkin tradition in Soviet literature as a whole.