A History of Post-War Soviet Writing

...Once inside, he obviously cannot launch a frontal assault on the system, but he can use guerrilla tactics, getting his message across to the "perspicacious reader," to use Chernyshevsky's words, by obscuring it in a secondary theme, concealing it in a subtext, or tucking paintings were portraits of himself...

...With a surgeon's skill, they cynically search out and remove anything of merit that they can find...

...Soviet audiences greeted this episode with outbursts of laughter and applause because Khrushchev also once had found himself surrounded by his own portrait at an exhibition...

...it away in a subordinate clause...

...He asserts that Western analysts and Soviet emigres too often facilely divide the works of postwar Russian literature into two groups: those sanctioned by the government, tiresome paeans to Soviet ideology...

...The author's thesis is that this line is too blurred to be useful...

...Svirski's history is worth reading, even though one must endure legions of typographical and editing errors in doing so...

...Also, a familiarity with the history of the Khrushchev thaw and of the Soviet dissident movements would be helpful, for the organization of the book often obscures the chronology...

...On the other hand, he notes that Russia has always had the potential for explosive creativity, and its youth has been reared not on Stalinism but on samizdat...

...The valid distinction, Svirski believes, is not between conservatives who write the official literature and liberals who author samizdat works, but between "people of conscience and mercenaries—those who had their price...

...Soviet writers artfully slip a great deal of social commentary past their editors and censors in veiled messages to vigilant readers...

...It is a study of one of the strangest paradoxes of Communism: a bureaucracy in charge of creating literature...

...Like the blind man who develops an acute sense of hearing, the Russian reader can detect these Aesopian messages which are too obscure for others to pick up...

...The denouement of Svirski's book is ambivalent...

...One scene features Hitler attending an art show in which all the Literature has always been the ground on which the intelligentsia and the government—natural enemies throughout Russian history— squared off...

...Svirski, who for thirty years worked Marin Strmecki is a researcher in the Office of Richard Nixon...

...He describes them as mercenaries who on cue from the Central Committee will write whatever they are told to write and will denounce whomever they are told to denounce, not out of any true belief in the latest contortion of the Party line but in order to get ZIL limousines, Black Sea dachas, and Western travel visas—the perquisites of cooperation...

...If there is any confusion in censorship policy, men of conscience who have become editors or publishers will pedal whatever social and political commentary the traffic will bear...

...Ironically, the literary bureaucracy of the hatchetmen can often be the writer's best friend...

...Svirski writes that shortly before Fadeyev committed suicide he was quoted as saying, "I thought I was guarding a temple but it turned out to have been a latrine...

...They are the Mandlestams, the Ehrenburgs, the Solzhenitsyns of the postwar Soviet Union—idealists in a country whose rulers value ideals only as props for their facade of legitimacy...

...Svirski reveals these encrypted messages brilliantly...

...The famous "thaw" in the fifties, while in part a natural post-Stalin relaxation, was primarily the by-product of the confusing policies of the bumptious Nikita Khrushchev...

...The hatchetmen could simply hire pliable, if untalented, writers...

...When he failed, he shot himself...

...A HISTORY OF POST-WAR SOVIET WRITING Grigori Svirski/Ardis Books/$25.00 Marin Strmecki Grigori Svirski's book A History of Post-War Soviet Writing is a fascinating look into the workings of the Union of Soviet Writers...

...The dead hand of the petty and the routine rules in the province of the spirit and the imagination...

...Svirski despairs that officially sanctioned writing today ventures only rarely beyond insipid tracts exalting Russian chauvinism or singing praises to ever-greater steel production...

...On the one hand, he shows that the Politburo's satraps in the Union of Writers are in firm control—and news reports today indicate that their grip is tightening...

...within the Union of Writers before emigrating to Canada, argues that the West misunderstands the nature of Soviet literature...

...But the anecdotes and first-hand insights gleaned from thirty yedrs of working with members of the Union of Writers enliven his literary criticism and give this sometimes tedious volume the personal flavor of a memoir...

...If he persists, they throw him out of" the Union of Writers, pull his works from library and store shelves, and pulp the books themselves...

...In another example, Svirski cites the changing reactions of Soviet audiences when they saw Mikhail Romm's Everyday Fascism, a documentary film about the horrors of Hitler and Nazism released in the mid-1960s...

...As he writes, "In Russia there is neither shortage of talent nor shortage of hangmen...

...It is done by a bureaucracy of hundreds of publishing houses, with thousands of editors...

...and those of the samizdat, vivid, courageous condemnations of Soviet reality...

...Some years later, Fadeyev tried to deny complicity...

...For instance, he reads a veiled criticism of Stalin into this seemingly innocuous passage of Viktor Nekrasov's In the Trenches of Stalingrad (1946): "In a speech on 6 November Stalin made his prophetic promise: 'It will one day be our turn to celebrate!' On the 7th the allies landed in Algiers and Oran...

...Svirski compares the literature of moral opposition to a stream that may run shallow at times but can never be stanched...

...Svirski recounts how Fadeyev jocularly clinked vodka glasses with a writer that he knew was slated for liquidation...

...Both the official and the samizdat literature, he writes, compose one body of works, with the same authors addressing the same themes...

...Control of Soviet literature is not exercised by a single censor diligently reading everything, red pencil poised to delete...

...Svirski casts the story of these two forces as an epic struggle between Good and Evil, with the former outmanned and outgunned by the latter...

...But a Russian reader sees causality—a cautious suggestion that it was not Stalin's leadership but the opening of the African front that had stopped the Germans...

...A History of Post-War Soviet Writing, in fact, is perhaps best read as a military history of the battle between the writers and the state in the Soviet Union...

...His audiences turned somber and left their theaters sullen...

...On 13 November the Germans bombed Stalingrad for the last time, and flew away...

...More than a few of these writers crumble under the weight of the system's immorality...

...But Soviet leaders make their job more difficult because they want to be praised by literary geniuses as well as by hacks...

...The point about such works is that they must, above all, be subtle to be successful...

...Still, he seems pessimistic...

...When the film later vividly depicted Nazi atrocities, it became clear that Romm was using the analogy to imply that the Soviet leadership had committed similar sins...

...Svirski's protagonists are the writers who use literature as the last refuge for expressing social and political opinions and who are, in fact, the spiritual descendants of Belinsky, Herzen, and Chernyshev-sky...

...Svirski describes with a victim's knowledge how the hatchet-men go about their trade, negotiating with prominent writers, giving justifications for the deletion of political commentary in artistic terms, and often simply revising a work without consulting the author...

...Once the signal to freeze the thaw was given, it took more than a decade to root out the unrepentant writers, many of whom fought a valiant rearguard action, moving from one genre of literature to another...

...The portrayal of Alexander Fade.yev, who ran the Union of Writers in the most repressive years of Stalin's rule, is a case in point of a man affected, albeit tardily, by the stirrings of conscience...

...A Western reader sees only chronology here...

...If others dare to pick up where he left off, the authorities coldly return the manuscripts, noting in their rejections that there is a "lack of paper" to publish such works...

...This allows the writer of conscience to get his foot in the door of the Union of Writers...

...Svirski's antagonists, by contrast, are the "hatchetmen" who "administer" literature...

...If a writer causes problems, the authorities blacklist him...

...Whatever commentary the state excises is then re-channeled into samizdat works...