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p What kind of literature is the new world, the new communist society, creating? What will it be like? Who will it be intended for? What form will it take? What role will the literature of the past play in the aesthetic and intellectual life of future generations? Will literature be printed on paper or will it be microfilmed instead?

p Dozens of questions arise the moment we approach this subject which, actually, was first raised long ago. Plato, as we all know, proposed banishing poets from a republic governed by philosophers, because poets, he believed, could cause nothing but trouble.

p The Utopian socialists wrote about the future of literature and art. So did Marx, Engels and Lenin.

p Revolution releases all the hitherto fettered forces and gives them an outlet. The Russian Socialist Revolution freed the artists from the brunt of such prosaically oppressive conditions as the need to peddle their pictures and sculptures. The Soviet Government has become both their patron and their customer.

p Lenin said: “Art belongs to the people. Its roots should be deeply implanted in the very thick of the labouring masses. It should be understood and loved by these masses. It must unite and elevate their feelings, thoughts and will. It must stir to activity and the art instincts within them."  [266•1 

p In order to make literature more accessible to the people and the people more conscious of art, we naturally first had to raise our educational and cultural level. By achieving a cultural revolution, Soviet power prepared the soil in which a truly great communist art could be grown, the forms of which would suit the content. It was up to our intellectuals, Lenin said, to carry out this immensely important and noble task.

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p And so Lenin (like Marx and Engels), pondering on the future of literature, mainly saw it in relation to the masses, to those millions and millions of people who, in his lifetime, were for the most part still ignorant or semiliterate.

p Can Soviet literature be called the literature of the future? As more countries embark on the road to socialism they will obviously cultivate the ideas of communism and become imbued with its sentiments, and their literatures will also draw images of the makers of this new society.

p I naturally do not think that those specific features which are common to Soviet literature alone will necessarily be repeated in the literatures of other countries. The emergence of a new literature is a very complex process, and there are many sides to it. But I do not think I will be far wrong if I say that some traits typical of Soviet literature will undoubtedly be developed in the future literature of different nations.

p Two features, as I imagine it, will be assimilated in the next hundred years at any rate. One is the social directedness of Soviet literature, its desire to address millions of people and to portray life from the point of view of those ideals which appeal to the masses. It is a quality present in the trends of world historical development.

p The second feature is the multinational nature of Soviet literature. There is no doubt that the world will go through a stage of development and emergence of literatures among a whole number of newly literate or totally illiterate peoples. We have before us the example of India and Africa.

p What I imagine will obviously happen in literature in the near future should not be taken as an overestimation of the importance of Soviet literature or mere vanity. It is also the view of nonMarxists.

p In Charles Letourneau’s book L’evolution litteraize dans les diverses races humaines written in the eighteen-nineties, there is a chapter entitled “The Literature of the Future”. This well-known French anthropologist is the author of a series of books on the evolution of morality, marriage and the family, property and political institutions. He tried to make a sort of summing up from his survey of the literatures of African Negroes, Polynesians, the literatures of America, Peru, Mongolia, China, Japan, the literatures of the Egyptians, the Berbers, the Arabs, the Jews, the Hindus, the Greeks, the Romans and the Persians, of Mediaeval and 19 thcentury literatures.

p Comparing folk art with the refined writings produced in palaces and also with our modern literature, Letourneau arrives at the conclusion that ancient civilisations (Egyptian, Greek and Roman) 268 decayed because these societies were based on the system of slavery and their social ideals could not feed real literature.

p There are symptoms that European states have also reached a “critical age”, so to speak. Letourneau wrote about this long before Spongier, Toynbee, Berdyayev and many other apocalypticallyminded philosophers of our day, and like H. G. Wells, in those same years, he regarded the prospects of contemporary bourgeois civilisation with a good deal of scepticism. But unlike the “apocalyptics”, Letourneau looked to the future with confident optimism. He was certain that our descendants would see a genuine re-birth of literature which would not be a mere imitation of the Renaissance. Since aesthetics is always closely connected with the political and social organism which it reflects, it is obvious, Letourneau concludes, that some changes must first of all take place in the social sphere. The task facing society is to reconcile or establish some sort of balance between personal independence and the demands of society (or state, while it exists). In other words, it lies with the future to find how a “taste for anarchy" can combine with a “taste for aim".

p It must be said that artists in general have always demanded and will probably always demand unconditional personal independence and the right to an individual expression of their inner world. But at the same time, whether we like it or not, we shall not be able to deny society the right to organise itself as a society, as an aggregate of individuals. The increase of the population which promises to grow in geometrical progression as more of our planet is developed and as the two thousand-odd nations and tribes that people it achieve their cultural renaissance, will certainly make the problem of social organisation more and more acute. And this means that the problem of the social ideal will also grow in importance.

p Letourneau referred to Homer, who was understandable to all because it was the ideals of a slave-owning society, professed by the ruling section of the population, that he presented as social ideals. It was from Homer that Letourneau extrapolated the theses for the society of the future, proceeding from the inevitability of one or another social organisation and, above all, a social ideal that would influence the minds of the majority of the population. Marx, as we know, posed a more difficult problem for solution: how to explain the fact that much of what has been created in the slave-owning society (in sculpture and architecture) still appeals to us, modern men?

p It must be admitted that Letourneau displays acumen in many of his statements, although at times he may be accused of a racist approach. He is wrong in his extreme condemnation of the literature of the past. True, there are not so many books in the world that 269 are worth reading. But still there are enough to fill a man’s life. In any case, besides Homer and Marcus Aurelius, there are Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, Tolstoi, Dostoyevsky, Stendhal, Balzac and other writers whom we customarily think of as our life companions.

p Letourneau, however, is right in criticising the decadent trends that appeared at the end of the last century amid the moral degeneration of capitalist culture. We can also understand the Utopian socialists, starting from Thomas More, who placed their hopes in the future when great aesthetic and philosophical values would be created.

p Therefore, Sartre’s words about the great world novel of the future and similar hopes voiced by many other writers in the West (Ralph Fox, the English writer, once summed them up in his book The Novel and the People] are not unfounded. They hope and expect that a more perfect organisation of society will beneficially influence art as well. There is, of course, no direct dependence between the economic and technical development of society and literature. But nevertheless, Engels once said that, in principle, such a dependence does exist. In any case it is self-evident that pessimistic predictions like that of Renan on the imminent death of art (Guyau devoted a whole book to the refutation of these forecasts) have been proved false by life itself. In spite of the fact that all sorts of decadent perversions in art (from Dadaism to modern abstractionism) have become a staple product of the entertainment industry (Charles Snow wrote about this in the Times literary supplement) and have caused a certain amount of damage to literature as a whole, also foiling our expectations of new aesthetic values, the role and significance of serious fiction have remained undefeated. We might recall here what Yevgeny Baratynsky, a Russian poet and contemporary of Pushkin, said:

p Poetic visions, childish dreams,
Have vanished in enlightenment’s glare.
Our generation misses not the loss, it seems,
Engrossed in its industrial cares.

p No, the poets’ “childish dreams" have not vanished, but have on the contrary become filled with epic and lyrical visions of a new world.

p I am not going to speak of the other aspects of future literatureits relations with science, the role of the scientific theme, the development of literary genres and, last but not least, the problem of the artistic method. The thought of new technical means of popularising literature must engage more of our attention than the evolution 270 of literary genres and the character of romantic or realistic literature. Genres are slow to change, even the sonnet still grows in the soil of socialist realism, although some literary genres of the East, it is true, like the qasida, are losing their ideological and aesthetic significance. I want to speak of something else—of the correlation between the assertive and critical techniques in portraying reality. I am inclined to think that with time literature will acquire a more and more informative and analytic character. Of course, literature of a different kind—light reading, detective stories, and so forth—will continue to come out. And, naturally, “serious” literature—from Homer and Shakespeare to Hemingway and Sholokhov—which is characterised by its penetration into the depths of existence, the depths of the human soul.

p As I have already said, during the period of the Stalin personality cult the informative, truthful and analytic character of Soviet literature was somewhat jeopardised. But this was a passing phase and, it must be noted, it did not affect such important writers as Alexei Tolstoi (except for his Bread) or Sholokhov.

p I believe that the desire to explore the world aesthetically, which is an essential feature of literature, will develop further rather than wane.

p But might not the art of the future from some new curve of the spiral slide down to a sort of aesthetic syncretism, typical for infancy? In some foreign countries—Britain, France, Italy and the United States especially—where the technical means of spreading information are in the hands of private owners, there is the danger that information and light entertainment will elbow out literature. The question is raised at international literary congresses, and made the subject of polls and questionnaires.

p At the Penclub Congress in London in 1956, the American author Elmer Rice made a speech, the gist of which was as follows:

p In the U.S.A. a successful play or a good novel will be seen and read by 300,000-400,000 people at best, while a film or a television show will be viewed by millions and even scores of millions. The potential TV audience numbers approximately a hundred million people. The fact that a writer’s words reached a hundred million people simultaneously radically changed the material and methods of his work. An industrialisation of the writer’s work could be observed. Whereas before the writer first composed his poems, plays and novels, and then sought a publisher or a producer for them, the process has now been reversed: in the U.S.A. there is a large industry engaged in distributing the material, and the writer is no more than a tiny cog in this huge industrial machine whose position differs little from that of the camera-men and technicians, decorators and so on. With only a few exceptions, writers are compelled to 271 do a given job of work. The monopolies are growing, and the means of production and communications are concentrated in the hands of a few. This is big business, and not a small private enterprise.

p In the West today one can hear it said that the new barbarians had exchanged the club for the atom bomb, and that they read Dickens, Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare in the cinema. Read them, mind you. They read the classics in condensed form and wonder why these authors did not write like that in the first place to save the future generations the trouble of condensing them. Readers are going to become as rare as pedestrians.

p It must be said that America is putting out the greatest number of condensed books. For a few dollars you can buy a volume in which almost 2,500 of the world’s best works are told in brief. These condensed books are also assuming popularity in France and partly in England. All this shows that in the given case art is being substituted by simple information. Perhaps the French author Denis Sorat is really right in saying that the writer will be gradually relieved of all free communion with his readers. The experts, whoever they are, will take care of this. They will be the experts of cybernetics, which is in fact the science of communication.

p Burns Singer wrote roughly the following in his article Mass Solitude which was published in the London Times literary supplement (August 15, 1958): Instead of conventional literary works, created by a few, a mass production has now been started of “languages” invented by psychologists, engineers, and mathematicians, and calculated to communicate with the public by means of special signals. Thus, some commercial television programmes are calculated to evoke a response among those sections of the population which American advertising specialists title the “average majority”. This language will find no echo in those who have a different social standing either higher or lower. The inventors of the means of mass communication are attacking the very concept of form which has always been bound up with conventions.

p I should like to paraphrase yet another article printed in that same Times supplement because it expresses most strongly the pessimism with which certain writers in the Western world view the future of literature.

p In this article entitled No Room for the Book Christopher Logue, a young poet, says approximately the following: Let us face facts; the book is doomed. Some books, of course, will survive in museums visited by cranks. But as a product of the publishing industry, as a product of culture, the book will go out. And it will happen for technical and economic reasons, and not for aesthetic or social ones. 272 With the appearance of better technical means of communication than the printing press, a book of prose becomes a thing of antiquity. Who will inherit prose, then? The poets. ... As for prose, it would be better to record it now by means other than a printing machine. The thing to do is build a comfortable villa where generals, diplomats, bishops and others could live and memorise books by heart. Instead of saying, “there goes the Right Rev. So and So,” we will say, “there goes old War and Peace, or Ulysses. ...”

p “Reading is becoming an unpopular pastime. Soon rich young ladies will be taught it the way they are now taught singing and playing the harp. The time is not far off when a person who can read will be invited to parties to amuse the guests.

p “What books will remain? The telephone directory, guides and various timetables. The large combines of ’Sound and Television’ will arrange annual hunts for the other books. A child who gathers and hands in more than six books in six days will receive a huge TV set for a prize.”

p There is, perhaps, more spite than logic in this reasoning, but still we cannot deny the young English poet a certain amount of vision in forecasting what may happen when books—born of the writer’s heart and mind, the product of human genius in all its individual complexity—will stand in the way of money-making. It will be just hard luck on the books. Marx and Lenin, having discovered the laws of social development, looked at the future with the eyes of scientists and builders of a new world, and it is obvious that they were right in their predictions. In the new socialist world, which now embraces more than a thousand million people, literature has become an enormously important factor of spiritual education, and technical progress merely facilitates this process of spiritual rebirth. The fact that in Bombay and Calcutta today people can see Anna Karenina, a screen version of the great Russian novel made in the U.S.A. by a German director with a Swedish actress in the star role, and the fact that this film brings tears to the eyes of Indian women, is hardly incompatible with the nature of art. Roger Caillois (of France) recalls that once, in the very heart of the Andes, at a height of 3,500 metres, he went into a cinema where Hamlet was showing. The spectators—South American Indians—were fascinatedly watching the acting of Sir Lawrence Olivier who played a Danish madman from a poem by an English sixteenthcentury writer. I remember another story in this connection. Once, in Riga, I saw a book of Shakespeare’s sonnets in Samuel Marshak’s Russian translation on the desk of the duty militia officer in the outer office of the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Latvian S.S.R. I asked the man to tell me why he was reading this 273 book, and he replied: “I’m learning the sonnets by heart, because the girl I love wants to hear real poetry from me and not an account of how I caught a thief.”

p Speaking in terms of the whole globe, which has become a more tangible and visible thing after being orbited by cosmonauts in their spaceships, it will take a few centuries before it is confronted by those critical problems which are today so mournfully discussed in the British and American press and which Andre Maurois broods upon in his famous book “Dialogues des Vivants" (1959).

p I recall a conversation I had with the late Angioletti, then the chairman of the European Association of Writers, at the First Constituent Congress which was held in Naples in the autumn of 1958. It worried Angioletti that even the large Italian publishers were retreating before the onslaught of the television companies which filled their programmes with entertaining material of little artistic merit. “Look at our newspaper kiosks,” he told me. “What kind of literature is popular with customers? Detective stories, the adventures of gangsters, and stuff like that. The other day I picked up one of those books: the picture on the cover showed a half-naked woman killing another half-naked woman in bed. The curious thing was that among the obviously trashy stories which packed that volume there was one story by Edgar Allan Poe. Everything was mixed up. Before long readers will no longer be able to tell good from bad.”

p Angioletti regarded it one of the main tasks of the European Association of Writers, apart from rallying the progressive anti-fascist-minded writers of Western and Eastern Europe, to defend literature from the onslaught of commercial dealers who were adapting it to their own aims.

p In the West-European capitalist states this problem is extremely urgent. It is less so if we take the world as a whole. Real literature is treated quite differently not only in the vast socialist camp but also in dozens of other countries (especially in Africa), the one-time colonies of old West European powers—Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Holland, Portugal and Spain. To begin with, writers in socialist and newly independent countries are ambitiously striving to build up a truly great, significant literature not below the level of such peaks as Shakespeare, Tolstoi and Dostoyevsky. This literature may also become the ideological and aesthetic ideal for peoples engaged in reconstructing their life on new principles. In other words, it will be a factor of social life, a vehicle for the shaping of minds. A number of aesthetic problems connected with the character of realism, the use to be made of the classical heritage and so forth will arise. But they are of secondary importance. The main thing is what literature itself will bring into the future, say in the next 274 two or three hundred years, and how essential a factor it will be in men’s intellectual and emotional world.

p Secondly, what I have said above about the development of technical communication and the triumph of information, in terms of the whole world will not be as visualised by some of the authors in the literary supplements of Times or by Penclub members.

p After all, our main worry today is not that the masses are oversated with literature but, on the contrary, that they should be given access to it. In this respect a great deal could be drawn from Soviet experience. The extraordinary keenness on amateur art activity—music, drama and literary circles—and the fact that the country’s more than 400,000 public libraries have their hands full, are proof of the Soviet people’s avid interest in both art and science. The radio and television do not make books redundant, but rather—as Soviet experience has shown once again—prompt listeners and viewers to reflect more deeply on the book they have heard excerpts from or seen a screen version of.

p Television is a new form of art. There is no doubt that it will develop in the future in forms that would probably appear inconceivable to us today. There is also no doubt that TV will absorb a part of the writers who could only have expressed themselves in books before. But surely this does not mean, as Renan saw it, that there will be no room for literature—the most impressive product of a man’s preoccupied reflection on the surrounding world in artistic images—in the future.

p The Soviet experience shows that the masses are increasingly drawn to literature. There is no ebb. Someone may say, of course, that we are only at the initial stage of this process and that the people who read books so enthusiastically are the ones who were denied the chance before. That’s true enough. Long before the Revolution Lenin wrote that Russia did not know her Lev Tolstoi and it took a revolution for the whole country to become acquainted with him. People are now discovering riches to which they had no access in tsarist Russia. This applies to the non-Russian republics especially. These people are really making their first discoveries of the classics the way to whom was barred for them before by mountains of illiteracy and oppression.

p Speaking in London before the war Alexei Tolstoi said that being a writer was a hard job because he had hundreds of thousands of readers constantly assaulting him. At the conference of cinema producers in 1939 he said: “Take a look at the library records. See whose books are most widely read in the Soviet Union. Pushkin’s. Does this not speak of excellent taste? A few years ago I saw Oedipus staged in the open-air for an audience of several thousand 275 Leningrad workers. What do they play in the provinces, the backwoods so to say, the collective-farm theatres and the drama circles? They play the classics and they are eagerly awaiting a truly popular Soviet play. . .. The land has been ploughed, the seeds have been sown, they have now sprouted and are ready to flower.”

Yes indeed, Soviet experience shows that literature is going to flower on the soil upturned by the communist revolution.