p Comrade delegates,

p For us, Soviet writers and people engaged in the arts, these past five years proved to be years of rallying even closer to the banners of the Communist Party, of gaining an even clearer sense of responsibility for our political views, our aesthetic culture, and, most important of all, for the communist education of Soviet people—readers, spectators, listeners—all those to whom literature and the arts are addressed.

p Our literature, we can proudly confirm, has from the first days of Soviet power faithfully and honestly served the people; and its voice, to quote our great Russian poet, truly

p Rang like a tocsin for all men to hear,
On days of trouble and on days of cheer....

p As in the past, its voice is heard far outside our country, and as before it rouses toiling mankind and appeals to the heart and mind of every working man to struggle for genuine progress, for peace, and for communism—the most reliable of hopes for all thinking people on our planet.

p It may be said without any false modesty that we have made considerable headway in re-educating people by stimulating their moral and spiritual development through the medium of art. It is a generally recognised fact that no other literature carries as lofty an ideological message as ours. Could you name a country whose literature would rival ours in this respect? I can safely assert that there is no such country, and no such literature.

p The militant role played by Soviet literature and art in the world process of cultural development is determined, first of all, by the charge of communist ideology and partisanship carried in the best works of our artists. It is this quality that evokes fury in our ideological foes and their accomplices—the revisionists. They should like to persuade us to depart from our clear-cut positions of convinced fighters for socialism and communism, and to renounce our fundamental principles of serving the interests of the Party and people.

p Prominent among the would-be overthrowers of socialist realism is Fischer, former Austrian Communist. This reputed specialist on “absolute” and completely unrestricted freedom, anathematises our Soviet art with great fervour. He says that art in the USSR is shackled and “committed”, and this makes 221 him very sad. He’d love to unshackle our art and free it from partisanship, from its noble duty of serving society.

p Fischer man and other fishers abroad are casting their lines with rancid bait on the hooks in the hope of catching as many simple-hearted carp in the muddy waters of the so-called shoreless realism as they can.

p We have rather a shortage of these trusting carp, and so the clever fishermen will have a most disappointing catch.

p But in present-day conditions of extremely tense ideological struggle it is time we too went into determined attack and countered the efforts of the renegades and revisionists of all hues with our never failing weapon—the undimming Leninist truth! To do so is our immediate task.

p What I said at the beginning of my speech was not said for the purpose of boosting the importance of what we, writers, have accomplished. If it was not for the Party which assembled us here for this congress there would be no accomplishments in literature, and for that matter there would be no Soviet literature as such.

p Uniting together thousands of literary personalities, beginning with Gorky and ending with today’s young writers, and placing their talent in the service of the people and the interests of the people, was a task that could have been achieved only by our Party and the noble ideas which guide it. It’s really wonderful, comrades, when you really come to think of it!

p I’ll be honest with you, comrades. My almost epic and rather solemn introduction and the reference I made to my brother writers’ past services was a ruse on my part to put you in a more charitable mood before I went on to the gains and shortcomings we had in the last five years. Because from what some people said in the debates it seemed to me that you felt quite belligerent towards us.

p The Central Committee’s report gave an exhaustive appraisal of the present state of affairs in literature and the arts. We subscribe to this appraisal without any reservations.

p How do matters stand in our literary business? Let us not speak of those writers who deserve public scorn. One does not speak of people one despises, it’s beneath one’s dignity. Let us talk about writers who deserve our good attention, let us talk business. Sergei Narovchatov, Secretary of the Moscow writers’ organisation, speaking at the recent city Party conference said that there are not very many snipers among us but then we have quite a few Voroshilov sharpshooters who make 222 the backbone of the organisation. Such was roughly the meaning of his very apt poetic comparison. But what Narovchatov did not say was that among the sharpshooters there is a failnumber of people who never hit the target at all, let alone the bull’s eye.

p “The bullet’s gone for milk,” soldiers say about shots like these. And, indeed, strange things happen at the literary firing ground: the bullet which has missed the target comes back to the poor shot like a boomerang but does not hit him and actually brings him, if not milk quite literally, a fat author’s fee for his kiddies’ milk.

p Things would not be half so bad if these poor shots fired less often and not in a running fire. Quite a lot of expensive cartridges are wasted, and sometimes the loss borne—by our readers in the first place—is quite substantial. But try getting a rotten shot like that to leave the firing ground! He will insist that he is on active literary service, he assures everyone that he is a promising shot and that next time he’ll certainly hit the bull’s eye. Not that he means it, because he’s doing fine without ever hitting the target. At least he’s doing as well as a cat that lives in a sausage shop.

p What can be done about this? I think that the editors of publishing houses and magazines—the regional and central ones—should sharply raise the standards of their requirements. For who if not the editors of publishing houses and magazines should be the first to bar the way to an inferior book? Literary critics must forego the practice of keeping mum when it’s a book that can’t be praised: it is their duty to give an analysis and an appraisal of the book’s true worth. The writers’ organisations are also largely to blame for not holding back a useless book by the tails of its drab coat.

p There is yet another side to this matter, and I mean the author’s remuneration. For us, Soviet authors, writing has naturally never been and never could be a means of selfenrichment. It is a principle with us. In the West a writer receives a certain percentage of what his publishers collect from the sale of his book, and this system allows a celebrated or simply a fashionable author of best sellers to become a very wealthy person. And yet many progressive writers can hardly make ends meet. Obviously, this purely commercial system is absolutely unacceptable for us. Still, in our copyright there are also some points which are worth reflecting on. Paradoxical though it may sound, the author of a most widely read book— which with us means a book of the highest ideological and 223 artistic merits—receives less and less for every next edition, until finally the book is included in his collected works.

p There are a number of other points that want looking into in the work of our Writers’ Union, but I feel I should not take up too much of your time and therefore I shall not speak about them now. An All-Union congress of writers is to be held in June, and we gladly invite all the zealots of literature to attend. That’s where we’ll really beat all our literary rugs! And choke with the dust.

p Our books come out in truly gigantic impressions. Still, the demand exceeds production. Even the public libraries are on a hunger ration. Only one in every five, if that, gets a copy of the more popular books. And then we must also reckon with the legitimate desire of a worker, a collective farmer or an intellectual to buy the books he’d like to re-read some day and have them at home. That’s when you begin to sympathise with the comrades from the city or district Party committees who have to distribute books as though they were the most essential commodities. And all because we have not enough paper!

p I remember how heartily Konstantin Ivanovich Galanshin supported fiction at the last congress. At the time he was the first secretary of the Perm regional committee, and he virtually made us a declaration of love! He is now the Minister of the Pulp and Paper Industry, and he does not say a word.

p Dear Konstantin Ivanovich, we did believe in your love, and now we are accusing you of inconstancy. Look how the lady delegates pricked up their ears at the word “inconstancy”! Like all the women in the world they bristle at this word. I’ll find loyal allies in them, I know. And anyway, what sort of love affair is this? A love affair, as everybody knows, means pretty speeches, and some sort of outlay, if not sacrifice. We do not expect any carnations or any sweet and manly smiles from you, Konstantin Ivanovich. Give us more paper! Paper! Paper above plan, which fortunately for us you are fulfilling, and of a better quality too. Give us paper and then we shall really believe that you love us. And then we, prose writers, will send a hat round and present you with a gorgeous bouquet wrapped in equally gorgeous wrapping paper, and perhaps a youthful poetess— stranger things happen!—will write a love madrigal in your honour. Imagine getting a love madrigal! Fascinating stuff, that. Even I wouldn’t mind it in my old age, and as for you, dear Konstantin Ivanovich, you should really give yourself a chance.

p You see, comrades, the lengths one has to go to for the sake of paper? Here I have appealed to love, pressed my hands to my heart, and promised things with such impossible gallantry.... But, joking apart, I have to say that even the paper we have is not put to rational use. Neither Comrade Galanshin nor we, writers, are to blame for this. It’s squandered on anything and in any amount. Paper, as everyone knows, will endure whatever’s written on it. Just think of it—almost half of the book titles published in the country last year were “departmental literature”, as it is called. What is hiding behind this screen? Just anything. Plump office reports, memoranda of the same fantastic size, all manner of gift almanacs—albums devoted to one or another enterprise which immediately upon publication are deposited in the archives for the mice to nibble on. And everyone tries to give his particular volume a cloth binding, a shiny, colourful dust jacket, and simply must have it printed on glossy paper. This matter wants putting in order, comrade delegates, it has got very much out of hand. A stern approach must be taken to this business if it is to be set right, because the tendency to publish departmental literature is growing, and there is every cause for anxiety.

p Before concluding this conversation, let us go back to its beginning. Comrade Narovchatov was right when he said that the main brunt of creating literature was borne by the people whom he called Voroshilov sharpshooters.

p We have a gifted young generation growing up to replace us. The older writers are placing great hopes in this replacement. It can be safely said that a sound reinforcement is coming into literature. These young writers are needed by our society, and we are happy to entrust the future of our literature to them. They are interesting people whose thinking is patriotic and who have an urge to peer into the depths of life. The young are apt to be cocky and perhaps rather blunt in their opinions, but there is no indifference in them, they are continually seeking. To be sure, they lack experience, but that will come. The future of our literature belongs to these young writers, it is they who will build it and they who will be answerable for it. You understand, of course, that I am speaking of our youth as a whole, of our reinforcement, the fresh forces of Soviet literature, and I am not dividing them into the “clean” and the “unclean”.

p But I beg you to bear in mind that we, writers of the older generation, are still worth something too. As you know, writers just like all the other citizens of our great Soviet Union are on the military service register and since Comrades Grechko and 225 Photograph taken in 1966 A Japanese schoolgirl asks for an autograph At the Nikko waterfall A jaunt across the steppe On the Don with Yuri Gagarin Young writers from different countries visit Veshenskaya at Sholokhov’s invitation Sholokhov chats with his young colleagues Sholokhov and Yuri Gagarin among writers Sholokhov meeting publishers Sholokhov plays host to Ivan Popov, director of the Bulgarian Publishing House Narodna Mladezh Rostov-on-the-Don. Meeting members of the Bulgarian-Soviet Club of Artistic Youth Sholokhov receives a group of young writers who have taken part in the Fifth All-Union Conference. Yepishev are not discharging us from the reserve, it means that they count on us still being useful, old soldiers who can be trusted in any exigency and under any circumstances. Isn’t this sufficient proof, very flattering proof for us, that we are still needed not only in work but also in defence!

p You will appreciate that I cannot use the language of figures and percentages when speaking of the new five-year plan. If you were to ask me how many big, middling and small books were expected to come out in the next five years, I would have to reply that even the whole secretariat of the Union of Soviet Writers would not be able to tell you this.

p But, after all, what matters most is quality and not quantity. We firmly believe that in the coming five years we shall produce significant works of literature fully answering the higher artistic and ideological standards now set by our readers.

p Our promise is guaranteed by our dedication to the cause of the Party and the people, and our sincere desire to serve the great ideas of communism with the whole of our strength and our abilities.

1971