Open Letter to Sholokhov

...he only says how "one must not" write them...

...Clearly, therefore, the novels which still "must" be written are non-novels or bad novels...

...Then Sholokhov, after having ridiculed those who complain about the harshness of the sentence inflicted on the two writers (five years of imprisonment for Daniel and seven for Sinyaysky), concluded by saying that if they had been sentenced during the '20s, when punishments were not rigidly fixed by the penal code but were inspired by a "sense of revolutionary justice," the sentence would have been much different...

...It does not seem, for example, that the ancient world knew the disconcerting and, in some ways, terrifying phenomenon of non-art...

...Admittedly, besides being so many different things and having so many different aspects, art can also be commercial, can also be "positive," yet these properties certainly do not define a work of art...

...no matter how crude, vulgar, almost formless, it was nevertheless, in the broad sense, an esthetic product...

...Art in the ancient world seems always to have been, if not actually art, at least artisanship...

...I would reply that there has been a revolution and that it could and should have given a real art to the citified peasants who made it...

...In other words, Sholokhov's theory of the novel has only been half communicated: "One must not" write—if he wants to avoid prison—novels in which there is a hatred for everything that is Soviet, for everything that is dear (to the State) , for everything that is sacred (to the State) . But we are primarily interested not in knowing what sort of novels, according to Sholokhov, "must not" be written...

...Among other things, Sholokhov said: "There are scribblers who publish one sort of writing at home and another, completely different sort abroad...

...Translated by RAYMOND ROSENTHAL and reprinted with permission of The New Leader...

...And when you declare that the defenders of Sinyaysky and Daniel should be ashamed of themselves, we must tell you that you should be ashamed of yourself because, although you have always practiced non-art, you are nevertheless a writer—that is, you work with words—and some slight notion of what art is should have glimmered in your mind during all those many years you have wasted at your desk...

...And why is it that, instead, the Revolution has led to a form of non-art similar to that of Victorian England...

...in the East "direct and immediate" means "positive...

...Seen from this standpoint, the relations between art and society can be described in four ways: 1. Ignorant and crude societies that want to impose their conception of art by more or less coercive means (for example, the Stalinist society of yesterday and today, the Victorian societies of the 19th century...

...This, I think, explains why the "positiveness" of art in the Soviet Union is enforced by trials and prison sentences...

...Notice, Sholokhov does not say how "one must" write novels...

...So the Marxist idea of art as a superstructure in a deterministic relation to the economic structure proves to be correct by half: Only non-art, Western kitsch and Eastern Socialist Realism, are indeed superstructures tied in a "direct and immediate" way to this structure...

...but when the principles of saleability and positiveness are applied systematically and exclusively, they lead in the first instance to detective stories, sentimental novels, pornography, and in the second to tendentious Socialist Realism, to propaganda...

...Of course, Joyce's Ulysses is sold...

...it was the peasants who gave the Revolution their idea of art, which in fact was non-art, based precisely on their crudity and ignorance...

...of course, the moral values of War and Peace are those which almost any society can make its own...

...But confronted by this harshness, the real artist who defends real art has the duty to be just as harsh and to say to Sholokhov: Your idea of art represents a danger for art not only in the Soviet Union but also in the entire world...

...3. Refined and cultivated societies which have a correct idea of art and, precisely because they have it, do not try to impose it, even if in other fields they do not prove too liberal (for example, the societies of the Italian Renaissance and of Europe in the period immediately after the Renaissance...

...What does this mean: "direct and immediate...

...The novels which "must" be written are those in which there is love for everything that is Soviet, that is, everything dear and sacred to Sholokhov, to the judges, to the delegates to the Communist Party Congress, in short to the ruling class of the Soviet Union...

...The Marxist diagnosis remains valid, however, at least as a point of departure...

...You are the worthy representative of an old ruling caste of citified peasants, of provincial petty bourgeois, of bureaucrats with stony behinds, of administrative dead souls...

...They use the same language, Russian, but in the first instance they use it to disguise themselves and in the second to offend this language by their maliciousness, expressing a hatred for everything that is Soviet, for everything that we possess which is most dear and sacred to us...

...It should not surprise one that Mikhail Sholokhov—who belongs with all the appropriate honor to the Stalinist ruling class, who throughout his career has directly and immediately practiced "positive" non-art—attacked Sinyaysky and Daniel so violently...

...4. Refined and cultivated societies which, while having the correct attitude toward art, wish to impose it with coercive means for ritual, ceremonial, governmental or religious reasons (for example, ancient China, ancient Egypt, Byzantium...

...2. Ignorant and crude societies that do not or cannot impose their point of view on art (for example, a great part of present-day Italian society and the society as a whole in the United States today...

...we are only interested in knowing what he thinks "must" be written...

...His harshness, one can be sure, is spontaneous and natural, as automatic and reflexive as that of the judges who handed down the sentence...

...From such a revolution shouldn't there have come, according to the logic of their own ideology, an unprecedented flowering of art in the highest sense of the word...

...It means, in my opinion, different things in the West and the East, even if the end-result is the same...

...Has there not been a revolution in the Soviet Union which the Communists have for years and years never tired of describing as "humanist...

...These interests do not only involve matters of economics or power...

...Non-art—the kitsch of the West and the State Art or Socialist Realism of the Communist countries—is a new phenomenon divorced from art, and must be judged from a new standpoint...

...the difference lies in the cultural quality of a class and in whether it wants or does not want to impose its own idea of art by coercive means...

...But we know that these novels have already been written, over the last 30 years at least, and that all of them, without exception, including Sholokhov's novels, belong to the category of non-art...

...There is no difference so far as art is concerned simply between having one class or another in power—whether "revolutionary" or not...

...I believe that a rather easy answer can also be given to these questions...

...the class has prevailed and thus one has had a class art, that is, non-art, directly and immediately tied to the interests of the society in power...

...In other words, between the Revolution and the class that made it there has been, insofar as art is concerned, a conflict...

...But what about the Soviet Union...

...The patrimony of prejudices, of traditions, of taboos, of received ideas, of backward attitudes, of fears is just as precious to a society as its economic or political management...

...Viewing non-art in its totality, as a world phenomenon, one sees that while art has only an indirect and mediated relation to the social and economic structures, non-art has a direct and immediate relation to them...

...For example, it is quite clear that Victorian non-art was in fact a product of the direct and immediate application of the principle of "positiveness" of art on the part of a society accomplishing the industrialization of the country with the methods proper to economic liberalism: Because there existed in England and generally in Europe a massive alienation, it was possible to mistake non-art for art in perfectly good faith...

...The atmosphere in which the non-art of the Eastern countries was born is reflected in Mikhail Sholokhov's speech against his colleagues Andrei Sinyaysky and Yuli Daniel at the recent Russian Communist Party Congress at Moscow...

...But in the long run it was not the Revolution which gave the citified peasants a correct idea of art...

...In the West, "direct and immediate" means "commercial...

...To return to Soviet Russia, at this point someone might well ask: What has become of the "humanist" revolution...

...The modern world is full of things which, contrary to what we tend to think, have never been seen before today...

...And at this point the phenomenon of non art intervenes...