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p Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don—one of the most monumental works of socialist realism—reflected and generalised on an epic scale the process of man’s settling with the past and overcoming the age-old views and habits inculcated by the old order; as well as the collapse of the old, outmoded system of social relations.

p The epic quality of the novel arose not only from the particular talent of the author, who is a born realist and sees man and nature, the human soul and the life of society, in their true, natural form, undistorted and retaining all the sensual, plastic beauty of real life. The fact is that the author’s thinking was based on conscious historicism, enabling him to perceive and transmit an accurate picture of the social contradictions in old Russia that engendered the revolutionary explosion, the revolt of the masses, and to present the influence of major, 277 decisive historical events on the life of both the individual and the people.

p In And Quiet Flows the Don, even more than in The Rout, one feels the powerful breath of the Tolstoian tradition, demonstrating the continuity between the two creative methods, their inner connection and the uninterrupted evolution of realism, this major trend in world literature. This tradition finds expression in Sholokhov’s great attention to the “dialectics of the soul" of his characters, the exhaustiveness of his analysis of their psychological states and their inner world as a whole and the full-blooded, remarkably plastic, and tangible depiction of life. He portrays historical conflicts and irreconcilable contrasts and contradictions which determine the characters’ destinies, their interrelationships, and their place in the current of history, carrying everyone and everything along. The Tolstoian tradition in Sholokhov’s novel is not an imitation but an inheritance, a point of departure, from which the writer’s own independent thought starts the examination, from a new social and personal standpoint, of historical events and their influence on the mentality of the individual and the masses.

p Sholokhov perceives life’s contradictions and dramas, the psychology of his characters and the motives underlying their behaviour from the inside, as it were. This is not simply because he was in fact living amidst certain factual material that formed an essential part of his practical and spiritual experience, but also because he viewed life as a writer identified with the people, adhering to a revolutionary, socialist system of views and appraising history from the point of view of the masses and their revolution.

p Sholokhov begins his analysis of society entering the period of the collapse of the old exploiter order and the birth of new social relationships between people, his presentation of the socialist revolution, with a description of the personal lives of his heroes, an analysis of the position of the individual in the old social system that was on the way out. Sholokhov chose this approach to the depiction of the decisive turning point in the life of the people because he understood that the scale and 278 significance of the social changes that occurred as a result of the revolution could be presented with full force not only by depicting class battles into which the millions are drawn but also by examining the personal destiny of an individual, which is always linked by numerous threads to the destiny of society as a whole. This ability to reveal the general through the particular and fundamental social antagonisms through conflicts that appear to be of a personal nature is the most outstanding achievement of Sholokhov’s method.

p To begin with Sholokhov shows his heroes in the steady stream of everyday life, in the element of Cossack life, which is highly traditional and for all its original features similar in essentials to that of the ordinary peasantry. His characters’ interests and concerns do not extend beyond their own household and adding to it, the cycle of work on the land, requiring intense physical effort but at the same time animated by simple, healthy poetry, family matters, and the various requirements connected with service to the tsar which gave Cossacks a sense of occupying a special position among the social strata of tsarist Russia, a sense that was strengthened by certain privileges. Their outlook was limited by concepts of their military duty and a code of military valour cultivated over the centuries and which made it compulsory that the Cossacks should participate in all the military actions of the tsarist government, a concept which in the minds of the ordinary Cossacks was confused with the idea of defending their country. This illusion was carefully cultivated by the Cossack hierarchy and the Orthodox Church. The characters’ mental horizon was further limited by their hostility towards the non-Cossack peasants whom they regarded as a threat to their own welfare.

p The world in which the heroes of Sholokhov’s novel lived was not united and monolithic. Material inequality and its result—the different social interests of the poor and prosperous Cossacks—deprived it of unity, and Sholokhov showed with keen discernment how the knots of social contradictions were tightened in the set pattern of life that had held its own for centuries, contradictions, which were only to be resolved by the revolution and 279 the following years of building a classless society.

p Sholokhov adopted an historical approach to the factual material that forms the basis of his novel, refusing to tone down irreconcilable conflicts or make his heroes’ entry into the world of new social relations easier than it actually was. Conscious historicism, that fundamental principle of the new method of socialist realism, underlies the triumph of realism Sholokhov achieved with his novel.

p Basically, this principle consists in the author’s understanding of the basic, major trend in the development of social relations, in his conviction that the capitalist system based on the principle of private ownership is disintegrating, that it has outlived itself and is giving way, and indeed must give way, to a more perfect form of human relations—socialism. From this understanding of the course of social development other important features of socialist realism arise, such as new criteria of assessing people’s views, actions and behaviour, and an ability to combine analysis of the same with analysis of the social situation, which the socialist realist writer always views in the light of the general prospects of social development.

p This is why Sholokhov does not limit himself to depicting the vivid, colourful way of life and family relationships conforming to patriarchal customs. He studies the relationships between the individual and history, which has sprung into tumultuous, revolutionary motion, and shows how stifling is the society based on private ownership for the individual who does not wish to dissolve in the slow, regular stream of mundane existence, who refuses to submit to the power of mouldy traditions and the established morality called upon to bolster up the decaying old order and to be guided exclusively by selfinterest. The story of Grigory Melekhov’s and Aksinya’s passionate love for each other illuminates the stagnating and cruel old social order with a merciless clarity. Proud and noble in their love, they were prepared to flout the old customs and ossified traditions. Their relationship, their struggle for happiness together, laid bare the inability of the old order to satisfy the finer spiritual and moral requirements of the individual.

p This kind of conflict, the conflict between two people 280 and society, has never been regarded in major works of world literature as purely personal. In depicting such a relationship, the two lovers’ spiritual vicissitudes and their struggle to be the masters of their own destiny, great writers always presented major social contradictions, and criticised the imperfections of society. The fate of Romeo and Juliet, Manon Lescaut and de Grieux, Ferdinand von Walter and Louise Miller, Julien Sorel and Madame de Renal, Carmen and Jose, Anna Karenina and Vronsky, the lovers in Chekhov’s Lady with the Dog and so on, despite all the difference in character, the age they live in and the circumstances of their drama, all testify to the inability of society to solve the conflicts according to the natural inclinations of human hearts thirsting for happiness and endeavouring to defend their right to it in an unequal struggle against the opposing world. The fact that almost all the heroes of these dramas perish shows clearly that these conflicts, not socially crucial and apparently easy of solution, just could not be solved in the conditions of a social order based on private ownership.

p Grigory’s love for Aksinya descends on the Melekhov household like a major disaster. Their powerful, passionate feelings raised the lovers above their relations and fellow villagers for whom the prosaic demands of everyday existence were incomparably more important than wild, uncontrollable passions.

p Pantelei Prokofyich’s domestic calculations and plans become highly precarious, for they are built on the shaky foundations of his son’s heart which is in the grip of an all-consuming passion. The system of values Grigory and Aksinya are being pressed to submit to internally and objectively contradicts their aspirations, hopes and desires, and they rebel although life arrays against them its most tenacious and stultifying forces—habit, family traditions and the interests and requirements of the household economy and privately owned land. Actually, at the beginning the power of land over Grigory’s peasant mind is so great that he refuses to follow Aksinya’s bold, independent call to abandon everything and begin a new life somewhere far from his home hearth.

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p Grigory and Aksinya’s love brings nothing but suffering to those around them. For Stepan Astakhov, Aksinya’s departure is a hard blow, for all that he never understood her passionate independent nature. For Natalya, at first far removed from Aksinya and Grigory’s relationship, her marriage to Grigory, arranged by their parents for material, economic considerations, became a great human tragedy that ruined her life and her rich personality. She was capable of great unselfish love, and eventually made an effort to revolt in her own way against misfortunes and injustices that plagued her and her family. Natalya is a truly poetic and tragic figure. Her sad plight confirmed the inhumanity and ruthlessness of the world order in which she lived, an order in which human dignity and the individual’s real needs were subordinated to self- interest. The hero and heroine, too, Grigory and Aksinya, by abandoning themselves to their powerful feeling such as is only given to a man to experience once in a lifetime also drink the cup of sorrows to the full.

p Grigory and Aksinya’s drama arises from the objective conditions of their life. Following the dictates of their hearts, they ran counter to established ways, customs and traditions of the society they lived in. Sholokhov makes no attempt to idealise them. They both contain within them many features from the psychology of their environment and the social morality against which they have revolted. They become the victims of this morality, and occasionally submit and subscribe to it, renouncing their inner freedom and only finding themselves again by rejecting this morality, rejecting all that binds them to the way of life based on material interests. But they are incapable of resolving their conflict on their own. They cannot defend their love and dignity within the existing system of social relations, and often bow to circumstances and forego both. But the fact that they sometimes compromise with life, themselves and their conscience, does not mean that their conflict with society can never be resolved. If society fails to give people the opportunity to live a full life worthy of man, then society must be changed and rebuilt. The conflict between Aksinya and Grigory and society can only be resolved outside the old system of social 282 reiations. It will be resolved when these people and others like the macquire freedom, when everything that mutilates the human spirit has been rejected, and man liberates himself from the cancer of the past and overcomes the views, habits, concepts and norms of behaviour he has inherited from the old order. Thus Sholokhov presents in the relations between two individuals—and this is a characteristic feature of socialist realism and the criteria by which it judges life’s phenomena—a major social problem of the age, confirming the incompatibility between the old social order and a human being’s real needs.

p But transforming society is a complicated painful business involving fierce struggle. Sholokhov presents all the real drama of the process, by placing his heroes face to face not only with the moribund, obsolescent traditional way of life, but with the movement of History itself.

p In the words of the nineteenth century Russian critic Belinsky, the inner qualities of human nature become particularly evident at critical moments in history. Such a major event as the October Revolution revealed down to grass-roots level all the irreconcilable conflicts and antagonisms of the class society of bourgeois-landowner Russia, set in motion the best aspects of the spirit of the masses and raised the awareness of the masses to a qualitatively new stage, by introducing to it in practice the ideas of socialism, social equality and freedom.

p Not a single person was able to stand aside from and remain uninfluenced by the revolutionary processes that changed the old world in the face of its fierce resistance. The events of those years had a profound impact on human nature. The importance of Sholokhov’s novel as a work of the new realist method consists in his investigation and presentation of the socio-psychological changes in the awareness of the masses not only in the sociohistorical aspect but also in the sphere of the personal life of the individual, since for Sholokhov man is not the object of history, but the subject, the active principle at work in it, the maker of history.

p Thus, in Sholokhov’s novel characters are presented as existing and developing in the unity of the individual and the historical, the personal and the social. This is 283 why the two major threads of the narrative—the historicoanalytical and the personal vicissitudes of the heroes— are not opposed or parallel to one another, but merge into a single stream, powerful and deep. This ability to perceive the individual and the social as interrelated and interdependent enables Sholokhov to portray both the course of the revolution and at the same time the life of ordinary people who became participants in historical events, which determined their destiny.

p Like millions of others, Grigory goes through the hard school of the First World War, a war that was imperialist and expansionist on both sides.

p To begin with, like his parents, grandparents and greatgrandparents before him, Grigory did not pause to reflect on what was happening and, accepting everything that came into his life and the lives of his near and dear ones as a result of the war as an inevitable evil, as part of the normal pattern of existence, faithfully served the interests of the Empire. Brought up to honour duty and obey authority, he performs his military obligations, without bothering to ask himself the fairly obvious question of why he was fighting, in whose interests he was called upon to continually risk his life, rot in trenches and make desperate assaults on a better-equipped enemy. Grigory’s awareness is at the same level as that of millions of Russian muzhiks thrown by the tsarist government against the Kaiser’s armies and Krupp guns. He is a typical representative of the masses, who were to come to understand the futility of the imperialist war through their own bitter and bloody experience, learn that the war was contrary to the interests of the people and cast off the illusions which still persisted after the 1905 revolution and the following years of fierce reaction. Thus, Grigory’s vacillations and his painful reflections in the interludes between battles largely reflect the vacillations and changes in the consciousness of the masses, who advanced from disillusionment with the tsarist government and rejection of tsarism to revolutionary ideas.

p In accordance with his creative method, Sholokhov presents the growth of the awareness of the masses through highly individualised characters, projecting, as it 284 were, historical events onto human hearts and minds, focussing the profound historical significance of events in the personal destinies and emotions of his heroes.

p In his very first battle, while overcoming his horror of death and doing what the other soldiers do, Grigory at once senses that the war which has the blessing of official morality and the Church is a terrible, inhuman business. Illusions about heroism and patriotisme instilled in soldiers by officers and the Church are dispelled for Grigory and others like him when they realise the falseness of the official ideology that glorified war and called upon the masses to patiently bear the misery and hardships that iell their lot.

p The human suffering and the violence and injustice committed in the name of war bring Grigory to the realisation of the bitter truth that the imperialist war entailed the brutalisation of man and confusion of the concepts of good and evil, justice and injustice. He could smell the mould and decay that accompanied the death agony of the Russian Empire. He was aware of the rusing tide of wrath of the masses and was himself full of hatred he had developed during his years at the front for the order that cast people into senseless, futile sufferings and refused to take into account man’s real needs.

p Grigory was unable to determine with the necessary clarity who was to blame for the misfortunes of his people, himself and his near and dear ones. But he meets with people of greater social awareness than he himself possessed, and from them—from Garanzha, for example— learns to evaluate events correctly. Garanzha’s forthright, empassioned words about the war and those who brought all these sufferings on the people bring home to Grigory the horrifying truth and teach him to grasp the social, class nature of the events he is taking part in. Grigory takes the first step towards spiritual freedom, towards shaking off the burden of views and concepts that society has instilled in him. But this step did not make him a fighter for the people’s cause. He cast off many of his illusions but not all of them, for habit and tradition were still too strong. Thoughts of his own land had a tenacious hold on his mind, arresting his ideological development and 285 confining him to private interests and preventing him from understanding the common interest being born in relentless struggle with the forces of the old society. Having broken with the past, Grigory had no clear idea about what the future offered him and did not really believe that it would bring him any good.

p Socialist realist writers present real history as a battlefield of social forces in constant movement, whose nature the writer can perceive, just as he can perceive—not in its concrete forms but in social perspective—the final outcome of the struggle between these forces. Singling out the main, determinant trend of history, in accordance with the objective course of historical development, the writer does not isolate it from other aspects and trends of the social process but presents their mutual influence and the resistance of the reactionary social forces to the main trend, that of social progress. For this reason, the picture of life is not one-sided. It is shown in all its colours and facets, all the interplay of light and shade, and not through rose-coloured spectacles or dark glasses. Thus Sholokhov showed how the power of the past weighed heavily not only on Grigory’s spirit, but on Aksinya’s life too. Submitting to circumstances, unable to resist them, she shifted with the tide allowing humdrum existence to overshadow her love for Grigory, that great unruly passion that had filled her whole being and enabled her, an illiterate woman, deprived of all rights, to revolt against the power of her husband, the power of custom and the social order.

p But the past does not only fetter and enslave people’s inner world. It is never passive in the face of historical changes. At an historical moment, when the masses led by the vanguard of the working class, the Bolshevik Party, were rising to conscious historical activity, breaking the machinery of state by revolution, reviewing and rejecting fundamental ideological principles of the old society, the scions of the old society—deprived by the revolution of their former privileges and the possibility of living as parasites on the masses—took up arms to crush the forces of the future in a desperate effort to retain their power. Sholokhov gives a broad, comprehensive picture of the 286 forces of counter-revolution—the White officers, brutalised in the trenches of the First World War, morally degenerate and spiritually bankrupt men, for whom their own people have become a more dangerous and hated enemy than the German imperialists, since they have arisen against the age-old privileges of the ruling classes with the demand for rights for the masses instead of rights for a few. The Cossack autonomists, their leaders and inspirers, are also presented with realistic completeness and differentiation, as the Cossack wealthiest who waged a fierce struggle against the new people’s rule and the poor Cossack masses, who have begun to realise that only Soviet power can lead them out of the chaos of war, to real freedom. Sholokhov needed to present these antipopular forces in his novel in order to make it perfectly clear that the ideas guiding the Russian counter- revolution were doomed and futile, and also because without defining and describing the social environment and the antagonisms at work there, it is impossible to show the evolution of the human spirit, man’s inner struggle, vacillation and development objectively and in the spirit of real historicism.

p Grigory has already broken away from the old views and concepts inculcated in him by the old society: he hates the ruling classes who have led the people into a senseless war and are preventing them from choosing their own future. He longs for peace and tranquil, constructive civilian life, but the idea of people’s rule, in the name of which the revolution was accomplished, the only valid idea of the age, expressing its wisdom and concentrating in itself all the positive, constructive aspirations of the time, remains unacceptable to him, for, as he and his fellow villagers, and other Cossacks who have taken up arms against Soviet power, understand perfectly well, this idea will totally demolish the old way of life which to Grigory and his fellows seemed the only possible, natural, time-hallowed form of human society. Grigory fights for its preservation, devoting his life to the defence of an historical illusion and gradually becoming aware of the futility of this struggle. As the result he suffers a shattering inner defeat and pays for his errors the terrible price 287 of losing his family, losing Aksinya, losing his faith in the old world, its power and its promises. Ever since Grigory, a son of the working Cossacks took up arms against Soviet power, against the people, against the creative forces of history, a continuous reappraisal of the thoughts, sentiments, hopes, which had once seemed indisputably correct, was going on in his mind until he gradually came to appreciate their real worth.

p The image of Grigory Melekhov in all justice can be called a triumph of socialist realism for its comprehensive content, significance and exceptional psychological authenticity. For Grigory’s tragic destiny reveals naturally and vividly the crisis and obsolescence of the private ownership outlook, the fact that it is historically doomed and the difficulties a person has to overcome in order to free himself from the power of the views and concepts inculcated by the world of private ownership. Before Grigory’s mind could be freed, his own inner aspirations, which had not yet fully crystallised, had to fall into line with the movement of history, which was largely obscure to him, but of which he could perceive the salient, determinant features. It was the joint action of these two factors—the inner, subjective, and the external, objective— that brought Grigory to the decision to break with the past which had such a tenacious grip on his heart and mind. From the crucible of the Civil War, where everything that had led him astray along the tortuous paths of history was consumed, Grigory emerges to reassess his past, and hoping he can still begin a new life and perhaps even make amends to the people. The path ahead through the virgin lands of history will be long and difficult for him, he will have to wage a hard struggle with himself, for the new life he is embarking upon is based on very different principles from those by which he has hitherto been guided. He renounces everything that had made him renegade, and this new Grigory undoubtedly deserves our sympathy.

p Grigory, like other misguided representatives of the masses, begins to understand that the truth is on the side of those against whom he had fought so long and unsuccessfully. He becomes convinced—and this is presented 288 in the novel very strikingly—that the erstwhile masters of Russia, the scions of the ruling classes, could only advance a conservationist, defensive idea in the new historical conditions, one in defence of a doomed, moribund, unjust and obsolescent social order. The new revolutionary forces brought into the world an idea transforming life. The light of this new truth, like a light from the future, illuminates the tragic events of the novel, the destiny of the characters, introducing new, higher criteria of assessing historical events and human actions. The torch of this new truth is carried by people of a higher social awareness, the Communists Stockman, Podtyolkov, Koshevoi and others, many of whom pay with their lives for their dedication to the revolutionary cause. Sholokhov does not idealise them: he shows both their qualities and their defects. But their thoughts and deeds are devoted to active and selfless defence of the new.

p These characters give the necessary perspective to the generalised picture of life the novel presents, reflecting the main tendency of the historical process by the very fact of their presence in the narrative. They define the true scale of Grigory’s personal drama, the degree and depth of his errors, and indicate the spiritual heights he must reach. They also show that the solution of these seemingly eternal and insoluble social conflicts is possible and can only be achieved through transforming the whole social system that engenders war, property inequality, the enslavement of some men by others, and all the manifold aspects and forms of oppression and social injustice. These characters bring into the novel the new socialist ethics, new principles of behaviour towards people, dictated by love for the working masses and concern for their interests.

p For a long time Pantelei Prokofyich, Grigory’s father, tried to oppose the advance of time, protecting his family and farm from its destructive influence. His son Pyotr died defending the existing order, and his other son Grigory was torn between the two conflicting camps, going from one side to the other. The old family, based above all on property interests, was unable to withstand the pressure of the changes and a new morality that overcame the 289 power of prejudices asserted itself—the free love of free people, of Dunya and Mikhail Koshevoi.

p The new social ethics revealed the inhumanity of the opposition to the popular masses put up by their numerous enemies like generals Kaledin and Krasnov, Fomin and others, and reflected the creative, constructive aspirations of the masses who long for peaceful labour, for work for the benefit of man and society. The new social ethics, its ideas, hopes and ideals the socialist revolution has brought into life become the foundation of the criticism inherent in the new literary method.

p In socialist realism, which investigates and presents the real contradictions of society and man’s inner world, criticism is inseparable from the affirmation of the positive social ideal introduced by the socialist revolution, the tasks of building socialist and communist social relations. Socialist realism subjects to uncompromising, comprehensive and substantiated criticism the social relations based on private ownership and the consciousness they give rise to, and also everything that impedes the advance of the free socialist world towards communism. Socialist realism is partisan for the simple reason that it forthrightly rejects capitalism and the phenomena of mankind’s societal and spiritual life engendered by capitalism. Socialist realism forthrightly defends and expresses the ideas of communism, and therefore combats all expressions of bourgeois ideology in socialist society. Socialist realist literature assesses and examines real life in the light of the tasks of building communism, and therefore criticises those forces and phenomena that hinder the process of socialist construction and interfere with the strengthening and improvement of the socialist system.

p The image of Grigory was presented critically in the novel, the author being perfectly aware of the objective causes that brought him into conflict with the positive, constructive forces of history, and deeply sympathising with his tragic destiny. The tragic nature of And Quiet Flows the Don—one of the masterpieces of socialist realism—derived from the author’s understanding of the incompatibility of the individual’s aspirations and objective capabilities and demands with the obsolescent social 290 order, which not only impedes the spiritual and moral growth and enrichment of the individual, but can keep him in the bondage of its old illusions, habits, traditions, customs and views.

p Socialist realism does not reduce tragedy to a single formula, revealed in Vsevolod Vishnevsky’s Optimistic Tragedy, where we are shown the conscious self-sacrifice of heroes in the name of the common good, in the name of noble, supra-personal social interests. The tragedy in And Quiet Flows the Don, or to be more precise in the destiny of Grigory Melekhov, derives from the same sources as does the tragedy in the destiny of Andrei Startsov in Fedin’s Towns and Years or Dmitry Vekshin in Leonov’s The Thief. It arises from the conflict between the surviving power of the past in the consciousness of a man who has already broken with it, who realises that it is unjust and doomed, and a qualitatively different social and personal ideal which is irresistibly asserting itself. This tragic conflict is rooted in the objective contradictions of social life, of live history in the making, and will gradually be resolved as the structure of society is altered and society solves and overcomes the social contradictions that gave rise to such conflicts. Thus, historicism in understanding the drama and tragedy in the relationship between the individual and society is an important intrinsic feature of socialist realism.

p However, socialist realism never absolutises the tragic, never makes it metaphysical, for it always takes account of the fact that human tragedies are the product of the concrete social conditions in which people live, and that as society is transformed and reorganised on a rational, just principles, the sphere of tragedy will be reduced, since socialism and communism are capable of removing its root causes from life. But this can only be achieved on condition that man actually becomes the conscious creative, constructive maker of history.

p Bourgeois ideology regards tragedy as a natural element of life, just as it regards fear to be an essential, inalienable feature of human existence. This is a fundamental idea of the pessimistic trend in the bourgeois conscience, which has been expressed in differently shaded 291 formulas by numerous bourgeois ideologists from Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Hartmann and to contemporary pessimists who, reflecting the crisis of bourgeois society, regard the tragic as a universal, all-embracing form of man’s relationship with life and human existence in society. Thus, for the existentialists, existence in general is existence for death.

p Nobody, of course, would suggest that there is nothing dramatic or tragic about death. However, this does not mean that man realises his supreme potential in death or lives for death, rather than in order to express himself in life, in deeds, making his life, which has its natural beginning and end, meaningful and joyous, and a source of personal satisfaction and happiness. By treating tragedy metaphysically, existentialism deprives it of concrete substance, of social causality, and rejects the possibility of its removal from life. In these circumstances man is left with no other choice but to stoically bear all the hardships of existence, for, as Albert Camus wrote in Le mythe de Sisyphe, man’s awareness of the absurdity of existence, his inability to reconcile the irrationality of the world with his desperate longing to acquire clarity, leads him to admit the invincibility of the existing circumstances and to act like Sisyphus, that is, in conditions that render your actions perfectly futile and pointless.

p This idea is, diametrically opposed to the humanitarian fundamental idea of socialism, the conception of the individual as well as the masses ascending to constructive activity, and by this activity, making their life meaningful, changing life and themselves. This historically new process, pervading every sphere of life in socialist society, was perceived and presented by socialist realism truthfully and comprehensively.

p Among the most important results of the triumph of the socialist system in this country were a general acceleration of social development, the creation of the objective prerequisites for the removal of class distinctions socialist society inherited from capitalism, and progressive unification of heterogeneous social layers and groups in a classless society, devoid of class struggle or class antagonisms. The building of socialism and the erasure of class 292 distinctions went hand in hand with industrialisation, with the fundamental transformation and restructuring of the economy. This involved not only the creation and predominance of modern industry in a formely prevalently agrarian country, and the strengthening of ties between the working class—the most progressive and highly organised class—and the peasantry, but also the collectivisation of agriculture, and the creation of a uniformly socialist economy.

p Along with industrialisation, a cultural revolution was carried out, in the course of which literacy and culture were brought to the popular masses. The formation of a classless society—by no means a painless process, since it involved the reshaping of long-established views, habits and relationships, which the revolution had begun to break down—led to the closing of the gap between personal and societal interests, a process that had a tremendous impact on the social psychology of the masses and the individual.

p In his article How to Organise Competition?, Lenin wrote: “The workers and peasants are still ’timid’, they have not yet become accustomed to the idea that they are now the ruling class; they are not yet resolute enough. The revolution could not at one stroke instil these qualities into millions and millions of people who all their lives had been compelled by want and hunger to work under the threat of the stick. But the Revolution of October 1917 is strong, viable and invincible because it awakens these qualities, breaks down the old impediments, removes the worn-out shackles, and leads the working people on to the road of the independent creation of a new life."  [292•1 

p From their participation in work for a common cause of building socialism, the popular masses began to become aware that they themselves were the ruling force, capable of independent creativity. This development of awareness in the whole people and in individuals from the masses of their role and importance in the state building socialism was captured by socialist realism. 293 Illumination and explanation of various aspects of this process was for a long time a major task of the new literature, which investigated and presented the development of the ordinary man-in-the-street towards a higher level of social and civic consciousness.

p Pyotr Soustin and the former coffin-maker Ivan Zhurkin in A. Malyshkin’s People from the Backwoods flee from the depths of provincial Russia, from the changes that are breaking down the familiar way of life with its accustomed poverty and spiritual slough, flee through cold and night into the unknown, throbbing faraway where a gigantic new construction project is under way. Fear is their companion, fear of the irreversible changes, and memories of their life in their native Mshansk, which although far from easy was as familiar as the ABC they had learned in childhood. They were used to that life and the relations with the world and other people that were part of it, to the simple, hard relations of a world ruled by the simple mechanics of buying and selling, where the ideal was accumulation, and the supreme consummation of all dreams to have one’s own little business, lucrative if only in a small way, and one’s own little house isolated like an island in a river at flood time from everything that was going on around.

p Pyotr and Ivan flee from life in provincial Russia, nor is this comfortable, sated provincial life, as colourful as a Russian woman’s shawl, depicted by the artist Kustodiev, but that depicted by Gorky in his Okurov Town, with people wallowing in ignorance and superstition, prejudice and cruelty, concerned entirely with and ridden by the task of earning their daily bread, doped by vodka and church bells, informed about the great wide world only from the wild gossip of the womenfolk. It was a life where a major event was a fair and where shopkeepers and kulaks felt like fish in water, past masters at currying favour with the local authorities and endeavouring to outwit Soviet power itself.

p But the two men carry with them very different memories of the past. While Pyotr remembers above all the markets with the sharp aroma of bast baskets, the winy scent of ripe apples and the thrill of bargaining, Ivan 294 remembers the hungry eyes of his children and his wife’s patient submission. And it is quite logical that in the new life the cunning Pyotr who has not forgotten his trading habits should suffer defeat while, Ivan, freeing himself from the time-hallowed sense of his own inferiority should square his shoulders and become a rightful builder of life.

p In People from the Backwoods, A. Malyshkin gave an extremely accurate portrayal of the process of man’s moral enrichment by socialism, of the struggle of new ideas and new experiences people acquired during the building of socialism with their previous experience of life that isolated them from the mainstream of history. Their erstwhile conceptions gradually gave way to an understanding of the new forms of relationship with the world in which they live and act. Socialism enabled them not only to accede to a higher level of material welfare but widened their spiritual horizon, aroused their intellect from slumber, and made them aware both of their rights and of their responsibilities towards society.

p For Ivan Zhurkin the giant construction project becomes far more than a place where he earns his living. It gives him something else besides money and material benefits: he comes to realise the importance of the project for the people as a whole, its historical importance, if you like. The dam rising higher and higher above the clayey ground represents for him the power of the new life that is erecting barriers against the past, and since he hates that past, he rejoices in the fact that his labour has contributed to this dam built at the watershed between the streams of the past and the future.

p Awareness of the fact that his work is part of a collective effort, that it is for the common good, changes Zhurkin’s psychology, giving him a formerly unknown sense of responsibility for the common cause of socialist construction. This growing awareness of the importance of their own work as an essential part of the work of all leads other characters to throw off the burden of old concepts. Among them is Tishka who chucks away a secondhand priest’s furcoat he had bought for show and takes the wheel of a lorry, Polya, who escaped from female bondage to lead a life of her own, and the seasonal 295 labourers who shaved off their luxuriant beards and became permanent workers. Their new attitude to their own work opens up to them a rough but wide road forward.

p The historicist approach characteristic of socialist realism is also based on an understanding of the prospects of social development. Historical perspective is thus one of the major socialist realist criteria of assessing the events, conflicts and phenomena that characterise a particular stage of development of society and relationships between people, and hence relationships between the characters of a literary work. This perspective makes possible a correct analysis of the essence, features and potentialities of the characters and their conformity with reality.

p Ivan Zhurkin and the other characters in Malyshkin’s novel were perceived and presented by the author in historical perspective. What Zhurkin achieved was not the final result but simply the point of departure of man’s development in socialist society. Zhurkin is a man who makes very modest demands on life, despite the fact that he has accomplished so much, casting off the fetters of his provincial past. Although his demands are limited, he has already traversed one stage on the road the masses had to traverse in their irresistible advance to knowledge, culture and a life worthy of man.

p The many-sided investigation of the profound changes taking place in human psychology, the new understanding of man’s potential, and the presentation and explanation of the objective changes that socialist construction had brought about in life revealed the strength of the new creative method, which made it possible to analyse the relationship developing between the individual and the socialist life that was taking shape and reveal the new conflicts engendered by history in the making.

p Socialism not only presented man and society with new great aims, but changed the underlying stimuli of human behaviour and activity. Personal motives were gradually relegated to the background and man’s mentality changed under the impact of social interests, the impulses inculcated by the new socialist order that was being affirmed through the work and activities of the masses.

p Ivan Zhurkin begins to realise the need for the 296 individual to take account of social needs, the moral demands of society. Between his former total absorption in his own petty affairs and his present work on the construction site lies a whole historical epoch, which the Soviet people has passed through with extraordinary rapidity, accelerating the course of time, as it were, creating a powerful industrial base, collectivised agriculture, a new intelligentsia, and a new socialist culture.

p Socialist realism perceived and depicted how the actual process of labour and construction instils in man social motives for his activities. The description of a single day on a giant construction site in Valentin Katayev’s novel Time, Forward! shows how creative, constructive activity becomes the main content of life for the builders. The cement-layers, the engineers and the management are all engaged in ceaseless search for solutions to the problems that arise every day, every minute, to complex organisational and ethical questions. They are all involved in the conflict between moribund habits and methods of work, views of life and human relations on the one hand, and the new life on the other, or in other words, between the old traditions that no longer correspond to the pace or scale of the epoch, and the traditions born in the course of building socialism. The most advanced people working on the project are engaged in creative exploration. The depiction of their work process as a creative process—the powerful, innovatory feature of the novel—reflects the changes that have taken place in the awareness of the masses, in their social psychology. Socialist realism never treats man as an abstraction or extracts him from social relations, but always makes man reveal himself, his essence and his personality, through his actions, through his active relationships with society, environment, time and history. Labour in socialist society is one of the major spheres in which a man reveals his essential features, his personality, his moral and ideological content, for labour crystallises many of a man’s qualities, enabling him to renew himself, enrich and improve his own personality, in the process of transforming life.

p Lenin wrote: “...the proletariat represents and creates a higher type of social organisation of labour compared with 297 capitalism.”   [297•1  Further on, he stressed: “The communist organisation of social labour, the first step towards which is socialism, rests, and will do so more and more as time goes on, on the free and conscious discipline of the working people themselves who have thrown off the yoke both of the landowners and capitalists."  [297•2 

p Socialist realism, in accordance with the truth of life and history, showed that major, decisive changes in the life of socialist society, in its economic and social structure, take place on the initiative of the Party with the conscious support of the masses, for these changes are intended to ensure a fuller satisfaction of the people’s material and spiritual requirements. That major turning point in the history of socialist society, the collectivisation of agriculture, was accomplished successfully because it was in accordance with the needs of socialist economy and the fundamental interests of the working peasantry, who had begun to realise that collective economy was the only way to eliminate want, close the gap between town and countryside and produce the material values necessary for the building of socialist and communist society. Collectivisation dealt a blow at the main carrier of non-socialist and anti-socialist views, illusions and aspirations, the property owner, and brought the peasantry out of the circumscribed world of the private economic interests to take part in collective labour for the community, enabling them to combine personal and community interests. It brought the peasantry to a higher stage of economic activity, to technical progress, changing the face of the countryside by introducing urban culture, and fostering the development of a new rural intelligentsia. Transformation of the countryside and the closing of the gap between town and country is one of the most complex processes in socialist construction, involving the solution of a multitude of economic, organisational, psychological, moral and ethical problems. It has been a constant theme of socialist realist, literature right down to the present day when elaboration of today’s problems of country life is combined with historical study of the 298 various stages of collective-farm construction and assessment of past successes and mistakes. This theme will naturally be developed in depth and breadth as the literature of socialist realism as a whole develops, but the main question—why was it that the system triumphed?—has already been answered in the works dealing with the emergence of the collective-farm system.

p It triumphed because collectivisation was supported by the whole Soviet people, because of the firm union, welded by the revolution, between the working class and the working peasantry. It triumphed because the basic classes of Soviet society agreed about the ways of establishing socialist relations in the countryside.

p Davydov, the hero of Sholokhov’s Virgin Soil Upturned, symbolises this union. A worker, he learns through his own experience and daily search how to lead the peasant masses to acceptance of the ideas of collectivisation and an understanding of the advantages of the collective-farm system. The author shows Davydov grappling with the real difficulties and conflicts that arose in the countryside in the process of collectivisation, and shows how he surmounted these difficulties. As the result he achieved a remarkably complete and authentic character which generalised the actual experience of foremost promoters of collective-farm construction.

p Davydov had personal experience of the opposition of the kulaks; he had to crush the sabotage by some of the wealthier peasants and help the middle peasants to overcome their doubts. He had to struggle against ignorance and prejudice, and in practice evolve methods of organising the collective farm management. He and his helpers and comrades-in-arms—Maidannikov, Nagulnov and Razmyotnov—had to resolve problems that had never confronted anybody before, correcting their mistakes as they went along. The collective-farm system triumphed because the idea of collectivisation brought forth a host of gifted, dedicated organisers and leaders, who, like Kirill Zhdarkin in Panferov’s Bruski, Ivan Sipayev in Makarov’s Blue Fields or Ivan Fedoseyevich in Yefim Dorosh’s Village Diary, swayed the waverers and doubters and led them along. The collective-farm system triumphed because, 299 despite mistakes and extremes, the mass of poor and middle peasants realised the advantages of the new economic system, which enabled people who had hitherto been oppressed by want and harassed by petty worries over their unproductive private economies, to enter the mainstream of life and to see the connection between the country’s economic development and their own prospects, and to recognise opportunities for society as also opportunities for themselves. The social changes that took place produced corresponding changes in the outlook and sentiments of millions of people, and the images in Virgin Soil Upturned (Ustin, Dubtsov, Arzhanov, Shaly and Varya Kharlamova) reflected typical processes taking place in the consciousness of the masses as they arose to constructive social activity.

p Socialist realist literature has observed and presented one of the most important of conflicts, and one of the most difficult to eradicate—the contradiction between the property instinct and the needs and demands of a collective society for which private ownership and the whole system of views, concepts and habits it engendered are a negative factor which society combats with all the spiritual and material means at its disposal. The power and tenacity of the property instinct, its capacity to transform and adjust itself was presented by socialist realist literature in its various aspects. It has captured both the craven cruelty and hostility to the new system of people like Ostrovoy, and the callous selfishness and mean calculating attitude to others of people like the Ryashkin couple in Tendryakov’s A Misfit. If Ostrovoy’s conflict with the new society should only have ended, as it did, with his downfall, the Ryashkins, while not being actively hostile to Soviet society are exposed as carriers of ideas that are opposed to its ethics and moral norms.

p Fyodor, the son-in-law who enters Ryashkin’s household, rebels against the psychology of the Ryashkins and their way of life not because he fully understands the sources of their views or the fact that their way of life represents a survival of property relationship in socialist society. He condemns this alien way of thinking from the standpoint of ideological and moral criteria that have 300 become a part of himself, which he has acquired from his own experience of life in Soviet socialist society. Different criteria of assessing moral and ethical qualities of man and his goals, different stimuli to activity hold sway in Fyodor’s everyday environment than those which govern the little world of the Ryashkins and others who have not broken their spiritual links with money-grubbing.

p Socialist realist literature has not only investigated and depicted such new motives of human behaviour but has shown how they are established in life as an organic part of man’s practical experience and his personal life, gradually ousting moribund views and concepts from his consciousness. This process has not proceeded without a struggle. It is complicated and fraught with conflicts, sometimes extremely acute ones: but it is irrepressible, ensuring as it does that the consciousness of the individual and the masses does not lag behind the development of society and its economy. Socialist realism has reflected the new conflicts whose nature is determined by the energetic strengthening and affirmation of the ideological and ethical principles of socialism in all spheres of life. Sometimes these conflicts develop in a dramatic manner, but, in accordance with historical truth, the principles organically connected with socialism and most fully expressing its active, creative, constructive essence invariably triumph in the end, despite all the difficulties.

p Such new conflicts, deriving as they do from the very nature of socialist relations and hence only possible once the new social order has emerged, have been scrupulously examined by socialist realist literature. Typical features of the new ideological and ethical principles determining relationships between people and between the individual and society were vividly expressed in, for instance, Yuri Krymov’s novel The Tanker Derbent, which analyses the psychological effects of the change in a man’s attitude to his own work and his personal duty to the collective and hence to society.

p The hero of the novel, the mechanic Basov, is presented in sharply conflicting re^tionships with many people, with his work-mates and the factory management, and the general consensus is that he is rather a misfit. Assigned by 301 the factory management to the shabby oil tanker Derbent, he still refuses to resign himself to routine and indifference and his behaviour and views of man’s duty and purpose remain unchanged. But his discord with his fellows has far-reaching effects: his personal life is disrupted, his wife whom he loves dearly left him and he finds himself alone among strangers, who comprise the crew of the Derbent, alone with the inhospitable Caspian Sea and monotonous work, with nothing to break the endless tedium of routine repetition. On the surface the conflict of the novel is somewhat similar to the typical conflicts of non-socialist literature, describing man’s loneliness in the world, in society.

p Bourgeois ideology, art and literature tend to treat human loneliness as total and unamenable to the meagre means of communication—fear, sex, the thirst for violence, the urge to command or obey—the kinds of ties that allegedly dominate the whole system of human relationships. Democratic literature has often treated the theme of human loneliness for the purpose of showing the incompatibility of man’s moral and spiritual aspirations with the opportunities provided by society. In presenting the tragedy of human loneliness, democratic literature was criticising society itself.

p Basov’s loneliness is fundamentally different in character. He is not at odds with society, with the social system in which he lives and acts. His philosophy of life, his social views, his very feelings, are rooted in socialism and his character has been moulded, shaped and tempered by the socialist system. What we have here is the apparent loneliness of the man who rebels against routine and apathy, against the inability and refusal to keep up with the rhythm of the time with its changing, growing demands. Basov enters into conflict with his work-mates and the management because he represents a new, higher level of socialist awareness, and his actions are stimulated by the desire to make fuller and more active use of the opportunities the socialist system offers people, above all in the sphere of work, which is transformed from fulfilment of a task to a creative act. A special feature of this conflict is that Basov’s opponents are not at loggerheads 302 with the social system either and are convinced that they are acting for its good. However, Basov undoubtedly renders greater real service to society with his work than his opponents, so that the objective conditions are there for Basov to emerge the victor in the struggle of views and attitudes to duty he has embarked upon, responding to the demands of the time.

p For a creative attitude to work to be implemented in practice, it is essential to fight routine, and keep up creative ardour at all times. This is a difficult task, demanding constant spiritual uplift and necessitating the struggle of a man with himself to resist the temptation to take it easy, as well as with many people around him. Basov has a hard time, because not only his work-mates but his wife too regard this attitude to duty and work as exaggerated and excessive. But the logic of events shows that his understanding of personal responsibility should become the general principle of behaviour in socialist society. Basov could never have emerged victorious in the conflict had he really been alone. But many other people share his attitude* to life and Basov merely reflects and expresses in his behaviour a widespread spiritual process. He could not have won had he been isolated from the collective which took shape aboard the Derbent, where people gradually came to understand the meaning of their work and its social importance and adopt a creative approach to it.

p Basov is the carrier of a new social ethic, a new socialist attitude to duty and work, and the ethical principles by which he is guided contrast sharply in their humanitarian essence with the individualist ethics to which those two relics of the past adhere—the Captain Kutasov and the navigator Kasatsky, who abandon drowning men to save their own skins.

p The new ethics fosters a creative attitude to labour and lies at the root of the collective feat performed by the crew of the Derbent, when they rescue their fellow sailors from the flames of the blazing tanker.

p Basov was the moving spirit of this feat, Basov, who embodies many features of the Soviet character. It was men like him—people who did not lose heart in the gravest circumstances, who were entirely dedicated to the 303 cause of socialism, who never evaded personal responsibility—that became commanders of companies, battalions and regiments during the Great Patriotic War, bearing on their broad firm shoulders the colossal weight of the initial defeats and the daily hardships of war, which paved the way to Victory.

p Socialist ideology, like socialist art and literature, are profoundly and organically international by nature. Soviet literature, a multi-national literature, reflects the integrated process of establishment of socialist relationships and concepts within the nations that once stood at very different levels of social and cultural development. The affirmation of socialism, an integrated process for all the nationalities inhabiting the Soviet Union, is effected through the development of the democratic cultural traditions of each people, so that Soviet socialist culture is really a harmonious confraternity of interrelated cultures mutually enriching one another. This new form of relationship between peoples is reflected in socialist realist literature, which wages an uncompromising struggle against all kinds of ultra-nationalism and chauvinism, those inherent features of bourgeois ideology and the bourgeois concept of international relations.

p Socialist realism regards contemporary socialist life as a sphere where personal requirements for action and creativity are achieved, as a sphere offering ample opportunities for the satisfaction of human material and spiritual demands. At the same time, the new socialist reality is regarded as the historically-conditioned consequence, and direct logical outcome of the previous development of society, as the triumph of constructive, democratic forces of history within every national culture. Therefore, along with works reflecting the contemporary historical process, history in the making, socialist realism has organically engendered works presenting the significant events and contradictions of the past that illuminate and explain the path trodden by the masses during their historical existence. The spirit of historicism, inherent in socialist realism, has determined the approach of socialist realist writers to past.

p A central theme of Soviet historical novels has naturally 304 and logically been popular movements, events connected with peasant uprisings in Russia, with the struggle of the masses for social and national emancipation. A great deal of attention has been devoted to analysis of the relationship between the individual and history, the complex problem of the individual’s perception of the historical process, the relationship between the individual and the State, the development in the consciousness of advanced people of the past of emancipatory ideas and aspirations. Chapygin’s Razin Stepan and Vyacheslav Shishkov’s Yemelyan Pugachov, the novels of Olga Forsh, Alexei Tolstoi’s Peter the First, Mukhtar Auezov’s Abai, S. Borodin’s Dmitry Donskoi and V. Van’s cycle of novels about the Tatar invasion all contained a new view of history as the collective creative activity of the popular masses and the arena of their struggle for freedom against oppressors. In the bourgeois historical novel history as a rule has been regarded either as a vast theatre wardrobe from which historical costumes were borrowed for characters who bore no relation to real history except for the external attributes of the past, or as an irrational, inscrutable sphere in which the powerful isolated individual pursued his personal interests, regarding all others as instruments to be used for their attainment. The socialist realist historical novel is opposed to this kind of view and refutes the idea of individual wilfulness and the various theories justifying cruelty committed in the pursuit of personal goals. V. Van’s novels are typical in this respect, providing as they do a comprehensive picture of the Mongol invaders savaging civilised lands, wiping whole cultures from the face of the earth and destroying and enslaving peoples, in many cases arresting their general cultural development. The brutality and inhumanity of Jenghiz Khan and his successors—a feature common to other conquerors—was presented by the author as the result of a supreme indifference to the value of human life and the benefits of civilisation, which makes for more human relationships among people and provides opportunities for the development of the human personality. The humanitarian idea that is the keynote of the novels throws in starker relief the destructive, disruptive role of Jenghiz 305 Khan in history, the illusory grandeur of his dark deeds, the barbarous cruelty that accompanied his conquests.

p While the critical realist historical novel regarded the lone individual and his humanitarian aspirations c.s the prime mover of the historical process, socialist realist literature shows that he who wants to leave his trace in history must defend the progressive ideas of his age and express the aspirations of the masses. The critical realists sought in history the confirmation of their views of life, society and man. They frequently presented history as a collection of facts and events through which they were able to express their attitude to their own time, to contemporary life. For them past and present were essentially similar, not because the present was regarded as inheriting certain traditions from the past, but because they looked upon both as the scene of an eternal struggle between reason and unreason, humanity and inhumanity. This was the approach of Lion Feuchtwanger, as a logical result of which his historical hero—the bearer of reason and humaneness—was isolated from the masses, since the latter, lacking the culture and education of the individual humanist, were prey to prejudices that closed their minds to historical reason.

p The revival of “the hero and the crowd" theory, which is totally alien to Marxism, as a result of the personality cult, had an extremely adverse effect on the historical novel, as indeed on the development of other genres in Soviet literature. In many cases the masses faded into the background, historical conflicts were simplified and the spotlight was on the idealised figure of this or that historical personage, even such as Ivan the Terrible, who, as his name implies, did not earn the affection of posterity.

p The “no conflict" theory, whose influence was to be felt especially oppressively in novels on contemporary themes, banished class conflicts from the historical novel and adjusted the past to the burning topics of the day: the role of the State was excessively idealised and the masses, the makers of history, were relegated to the role of executors of the designs of individual personalities towering above them. But these views that are alien to Marxism and socialist realism were opposed by the entire 306 experience of Soviet literature and the live traditions of the October Revolution, which continued to be a powerful source of inspiration. Nikolai Ostrovsky’s novel How the Steel Was Tempered had a powerful ideological and aesthetic impact for it not only contained a character whose passionate, wholesome nature and view of life were moulded in the crucible of the revolution and the struggle for the establishment of Soviet power, but presented through episodic characters, a collective portrait of the heroes of the revolution years, whose life and deeds served as a vivid moral example to the succeeding generations.

p The hero of the novel—on the surface a simple straightforward story, but really a most profound and complex work—won people’s hearts above all with the purity of his ideals and convictions, in the name of which he was prepared to perform, and did perform, great deeds of self-sacrifice, as well as with his fairness to other people. For Pavel Korchagin the world consisted of clear, straight lines, and not because he simplified the real complexity of life, but because he was able to grasp the essence of things, to tell the important from the secondary, and to perceive the true nature of the conflicts he was involved in. Thanks to his integrity, his clear-cut, partisan views, he would never compromise with views and behaviour that were alien to him, and never allowed himself to be misled by Left-wing pseudo-revolutionary phrases or the ideological and other enticements of the old order.

p Korchagin was a man of a heroic bent, and his heroism was not the product of irrational, reckless courage, but arose from his selfless voluntary service to the great revolutionary cause. Awareness of the great aims of socialist society was an organic part of the outlook of people of the age of socialism and produced that remarkable phenomenon that came to be known as mass heroism which was a major factor which contributed to the Soviet people’s victory in the Great Patriotic War.

p Nikolai Ostrovsky’s novel was an early and successful attempt to present in full dimension this new social phenomenon brought about by the great movement of the masses, their awakening to conscious historical activity. 307 Ostrovsky constructed his novel as a generalised description of the life of the ordinary rank-and-file participant in the revolution, with a main current connected with Pavel Korchagin and interspersed with numerous episodes providing a glimpse of fighters for the revolution some of whom were of the same cast as Korchagin and some showed features testifying to a more mature experience of life and political struggle. The revolution’s fighters of whom the novel provides a collective portrait, were, like Korchagin, distinguished by lucidity of views and an ability to orientate themselves in the changing political and social circumstances. They were all engaged in conscious creative historical ability and not simply executing the will of some superior, supposedly infallible mind.

p All the episodic characters in the novel, despite the differences in their personal fortunes and individual natures, were ruled by the same social dominant, rooted in organic heroism. Yet in presenting heroism as an inalienable featuje of people who have taken up the standard of revolution Ostrovsky never separated the heroic from the real-life conditions and circumstances, the historical situation in which his characters lived and acted—thereby revealing the historicism of his aesthetic thought, which is an essential attribute of socialist realism.

p The extraordinarily acute sense of reality that is present in the author’s portrayal of even the most unusual, exceptional situations in which the revolutionary period abounded, enabled Ostrovsky to convey the objective movement of life, to depict the genuine contradictions that Korchagin was called upon to resolve and the real obstacles he had to surmount. The real-life background of the novel—and this is one of its chief merits—has the maximum authenticity while at the same time radiating a powerful energy that inspires men to great deeds. The fine thoughts and feelings of the hero and secondary characters derive from the struggle for socialism in which they were engaged. The novel taught readers courage and fortitude and the ability to defend one’s views. The hero belonged to the galaxy of fighters for the revolutionary cause who arose in full awareness to defend and affirm its ideas, having been prepared for this by their whole 308 experience of lite. They measure people’s actions, their own included, against the yardstick of the revolution and its ideals, valuing above all independent thought, and the ability to constantly feel one’s own responsibility for the success of the cause. Adhering unswervingly to the new socialist ethics, they regarded it as one with the interests of the State, realising that in the conditions of socialist construction the State principle must serve to strengthen and develop the socialist ethics, making it the ethics of the whole people, part and parcel of the spiritual experience and moral world of people at different levels of social awareness, including some starting right at the bottom of the ladder.

p Ostrovsky’s novel revealed with tremendous power the intrinsic heroism of people making history and remaking life. This was in accordance with the spirit and purpose of socialist realism, which affirms the noble lealures of human nature, the qualities that enable man to free himself from base instincts and habits implanted iu him by the society based on private ownership.

p Like other socialist realist works, Ostrovsky’s novel was pervaded with deep patriotism, as is only natural, since the socialist revolution, investing state power in the people, destroyed, among other myths of the old society, the myth that patriotism automatically unites the interests of the ruling and oppressed classes—a false thesis used to justify chauvinism and imperialist annexation and oppression. The socialist revolution brought forth the profoundly internationalist idea of defence of socialist society and the gains of the revolution. This was also an essential idea of socialist realist literature, which took part in the patriotic education of the masses and prepared them to bear the unparalleled hardships and trials that fell to their share during the Great Patriotic War.

p The events of the war, which decided the question ol the very existence of socialist society, greatly strengthened Soviet man’s sense of unity with his socialist homeland. This found reflection in the literature of the time which presented the intense and dramatic experiences of the people fighting for their freedom.

p The socialist realist method made it possible to capture 309 and reflect new features in the consciousness of the masses called forth by the tragic events of the war years. Literature was thereby able to examine the growth of the people’s awareness of their historical responsibility for the destiny of the nation. In the process Soviet people acquired a deeper understanding of the basic organic links between the aspirations of the masses for freedom and the quest for social justice that had inspired progressive people in the past, and the revolutionary experience of the Soviet people who made the first attempt in history to put the ideals of socialism into practice. Thus, the idea of defence of the socialist homeland was organically fused with the ideas of defence of national cultural achievements, which greatly enriched the people’s understanding of themselves and their historic mission and intensified their feelings for their homeland. Soviet patriotism, an organic compound of the progressive traditions of the past and the traditions that had become established in the life and consciousness of the masses during the years of socialist construction, was the seedbed of the heroism with which the Soviet people defended their achievements.

p The aim of the war was perfectly clear to Soviet people, as were its causes. They were perfectly aware that it represented a clash between two fundamentally different social systems.

p To fascist ideology, based on theories of racial superiority and intended to perpetuate class inequality, and the fascist morality, really a form of amorality, justifying all kinds of cruelty, unleashing base passions and instincts, encouraging violence and coercion and devaluing man, reducing him to the level of a beast, the socialist morality opposed high ethic and moral values and the idea of social and personal freedom materialised in the course of socialist construction.

p Socialist realism, which absorbed the complex system of thoughts and feelings of Soviet people and spoke with tremendous sincerity and warmth of the people who took part in the greatest struggle in history, while conveying the burning hatred of society as a whole for the enemy, not only did not forego the principle of the international brotherhood of the working people but expressed the 310 most humane ideas of the age—the ideas of human freedom.

p Socialist realism expanded the sphere of investigation of life and penetrated the spiritual world of its heroes who defeated the enemy in fierce combat, focussing attention on those features and qualities of Soviet man’s spiritual world in which the social experience of the builders of socialism, the sons of the new civilisation, was crystallised.

p During the war years one of the major themes of Soviet literature was, as it were, brought to completion, the theme of the struggle of the masses and the individual for the ideals of the revolution, characterised by a study of the process of man’s entry to the new life, which he created with his own hands, by his own labour. The literature of the war years, which, like all aspects of Soviet ideology at the time, was mobilised to accompany the soldiers on the battlefields, and to extol their feats of valour, took stock of Soviet man’s moral progress made during the period of socialist construction, for in those harsh years history put to the test both the material and moral achievements of socialism. Soviet literature passed this test with flying colours, for it presented in all genres, as did socialist realist art as a whole, the hero equal to historical events of unprecedented complexity and gravity, the hero whose spiritual world and experience were adequate to the experience of history and enabled him to understand the essence of what was happening, its historical meaning and character.

p The hero of Soviet literature—and this was one of the most telling qualities of the new literary method—felt his own actions to be a part of the historical action of the whole people, but he retained his individuality and vital authenticity never becoming a mere personification of an abstract idea. The sharp, blown-up characterisation, often dispensing with the detail found in the war years literature did not contradict either the psychological or the social truth of the time. This applied to many characters— the complicated Panfilov and Momysh Uly in Bek’s Vo7 okolamsk Highway, the scouts in Kazakevich’s Star, the soldiers in Platonov’s and Dovzhenko’s stories, the 311 partisans and popular leaders in P. Vershigora’s Men with a Clear Conscience, the tankmen reflecting on the destiny of their country and the world and nature of good and evil in Leonid Leonov’s The Capture of Velikoshumsk, Konstantin Simonov’s and G. Beryozko’s portraits of military commanders, and the doctors and nurses in Vera Panova’s Fellow Travellers.

The close attention paid to man’s inner world in the literature of the war years, the study of man’s moral nature and the roots of his character, link the Soviet literature of that period with contemporary literature in a single, uninterrupted tradition not only in subject matter —the war theme still occupies an exclusively important place in socialist realism today—but in the way it presents the growth and strengthening of communist features in Soviet man. There are of course obvious differences in the scope and degree of reproducing these features and the moral questions facing man found in the literature of the war years and today, but the difference is to be ascribed to historical experience and not to the approach to the subject, which is the most important for socialist realism.