On Socialist Realism
The title of this article does not even begin to convey its importance as an intellectual and historical document. It is, we believe, one of the most significant Pieces of writing to come out of...
...It gravitates towards the ideal, makes our wishes pass for the truth, likes pretty knick-knacks, is not afraid of bombast...
...He finds us and comes upon us...
...Neither did it know the destructive laughter that was the chronic disease of Russian culture from Pushkin to Blok and reached its climax among the decadents...
...For all the originality of his talents he remained an orthodox Soviet writer, perhaps the most orthodox Soviet writer—and this did not stop him from writing good poetry...
...We transform nature into our own image and turn nature into an object...
...He makes Communist assertions at home and at work, in friend's homes and on lonely walks, on the love couch and on the death bed...
...It takes the wish for the reality...
...But not having been instructed in the genius and teachings of Marx, they could not foresee the future victories of socialism, and they certainly did not know the real and concrete roads to these victories...
...What is beyond dispute is that they are consistent...
...He was white and now he's red— The blood reddened him...
...Compared with the fanatical religiosity of our time, the 19th century seems atheist, tolerant, disoriented...
...a purposeful, a religious art cannot be produced with the literary method of the 19th century called "realism...
...It is amazingly simple, yet sufficiently elastic to comprehend Gorki, Mayakovski, Fadeev, Aragon, Ehrenburg and hundreds of others...
...a remarkable purposefulness...
...Yes, we believe, we must believe That truth exists—this is our stand...
...The course of time, working its way towards the Purpose, works for us...
...George Delinis...
...Fulfilled Wishes (Kaverin...
...When Western writers deplore our lack of freedom of speech, their starting point is their belief in the freedom of the individual...
...Under no circumstances, even to further his task, does the positive hero dare so much as to look negative...
...I preferred to use its synonyms, like "our state," "the socialist system" and so on...
...Thus arose the culture of Christianity which seized the Purpose in what is, perhaps, its most inaccessible meaning...
...Lost illusions, broken hopes, unfulfilled dreams, so characteristic of literature of other eras and systems, are contrary to socialist realism...
...They are also current among us, where they arouse eager minds, tempting them into the heresies of doubt and criticism...
...They want to talk about everything, they want to discuss everything, they want to debate everything— and they come to totally differentconclusions...
...It is easier for us to grant that everything that happened after the Revolution was its betrayal than to insult its memory by reproaches and suspicions...
...This was the woman that the 19th century found most to its liking...
...O Lord, 0 Lord—pardon us our sins...
...Let us hope that this is not so and that our need for truth will not interfere with the work of thought and imagination...
...First he spread in every direction, until he filled all our literature...
...Lenin is too much like an ordinary man and his image is too realistic: small, bald, dressed in civilian clothes...
...Instead of sentimental sighs, individual peg fection and amateur dramatics for the benefit of the hungry, we set about to correct the universe according to the best of models, the shining model of the Purpose which we approached ever more closely...
...The death of Stalin inflicted an irreparable loss upon our religiously esthetic system...
...Look: soldiers...
...Fedor Sologub, a poet of the turn of the 20th century, with decadent tendencies.] Everything is confused, as in a tavern or a fog...
...positive heroes were created to present to the world, on every suitable and unsuitable occasion, a model of purposefulness: Measure Each detail By the great Purpose MAYAKOVSKI Only men who are as straight and hard as swords will cut their way through...
...Fedin, Fadeev, Ehrenburg, Ivanov and many others have written worse and worse with the years...
...So that if a book about the present deals not with the fight against the enemies but with, say, a model collective farm, then all its characters can and must be positive...
...The solemn eloquence of the ode suited us...
...It includes the link between socialist realism and the realism of the past, as well as its new and distinguishing quality...
...Like ourselves, the 18th century had the idea of political purposefulness, the feeling of its own superiority and a clear consciousness that "God is with us": Hark, hark, 0 Universe To vict'ries beyond human power...
...Gorki wrote much about the links between romanticism and socialist realism...
...The folly of the brave is the wisdom of life," the young Gorki assured us...
...In this way, we will get neither psychology nor hero...
...but it was only in Eugene One gin that he unfolded the theme in its full amplitude...
...He holds firmly Works produced by socialist realists vary in style and content...
...He managed to convey it to Paris, where the liberal monthly Esprit published a French translation...
...It is laughter with a serious face and with a pointing finger: "This is not the way to do things...
...But whoever follows the party line knows that these are heterogeneities within a homogeneity, differences of opinion within a single opinion, conflicts within a basic absence of conflict...
...Derzhavin simply cannot imagine that these "savages," the Huns, Finns and other peoples that surrounded the Russian throne somewhat in the manner of the Internationale, should reject this flattering offer and not wish to submit at once to Catherine, who is, after all, "celestial grace incarnate...
...The specific teleology of Marxist thought consists in leading all concepts and objects to the Purpose, referring them all to the Purpose and defining them all through the Purpose...
...does not let us sleep in peace...
...When He has found us, we cease to search and start to act, doing His will...
...All these arguments, mostly voiceless and unconscious, gradually dried up the hot current of romanticism...
...He knew that all that is not God is Devil...
...with toleration applied to the past...
...But if you ask any Soviet schoolboy—to say nothing of the beneficiaries of our higher education—you will invariably receive the correct and exhaustive reply: the French Revolution was needed to clear the way to Communism...
...As soon as the literary character becomes fully purposeful and conscious of his purposefulness, he can enter that privileged caste which is universally respected and called "positive heroes...
...Babaevski and Surkov have not deviated from the sacred principles of our art, but have rather developed it logically and organically...
...It must give up the "realism," renounce the sorry and fruitless attempts to write a socialist Anna Karenina or a socialist Cherry Orchard...
...Romanticism is our past, our youth for which we long...
...And so the leaders of the past like Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great or the peasant rebel Stenka Razin, though they did not know the word "Communism," still know quite well that our future will be brilliant...
...Polya's behavior may seem stupid from the point of view of common sense...
...He declared that in his Mystery Bouffe—his first major post-revolutionary work—Mayakovski "ceased to be a romanticist and became a classicist...
...This direction may exhibit variations in accordance with time, place, conditions, etc...
...They do it because they base their judgments on the literary criticism of the 19th century, which is farthest away from us and most foreign to us...
...Where is the free personality of the superman that you promised...
...Man explores the world by attributing to it his own purposeful ness...
...Blok, Irony, 1908...
...No, an ordinary club in a provincial town...
...The article is written in poetic Prose, the oldest type of Russian prose, whose persistence in Russia was recently revealed to the West by the publication of Doctor Zhivago...
...I write a novel to earn glory and the gratitude of posterity...
...The twenties, of which Mayakovski wrote that "Only poets, alas, we have none," now seem to be the years in which poetry flourished...
...Over the original Slav stratum is a strong layer of Byzantinism, mainly contributed by the Orthodox religion...
...He was an exception to general rules, but mostly because he observed these rules more strictly than others...
...He is our Commander, our Ruler, our High Priest...
...Thus a new hero was born, never seen before...
...As long as its famous author lived, the Short Course was the bedside book of every Soviet citizen...
...So that prisons should vanish forever, we built new prisons...
...the rifle-"saber...
...Having lost our faith, we have not lost our enthusiasm about the metamorphoses of God that take place before our very eyes, the miraculous transformations of His entrails and His cerebral convolutions...
...I caught myself trying to avoid the phrase "Soviet power...
...he constantly raises the level of his political morality, possesses all the virtues and tells everybody just what to do...
...Dostoevsky regretted that the Russian was so broad—he should be narrowed, he felt...
...As Lenin promised, we will make toilets of pure gold . . . But what am I talking about...
...But it is filled with an immense religious and esthetic significance...
...This advice was timely when the Revolution was made: fools were necessary then...
...And though the Marxists call themselves historical materialists, their historicism is actually reduced to a desire to regard life as a march towards Communism...
...True, since the Twentieth Congress—one hardly knows why—our attitude towards them changed somewhat and we apply to them the contemptuous adjective "conflictless...
...It is quite beautiful as it is, we are not out to embellish it, we just want to show the germs of the future it contains .. . EARLY ROMANTICISM All this talk is merely our usual literary politics...
...True, there are still disagreements between the vanguard and the backward and there is still the sharp conflict with the capitalist world that • One cannot but recall in this connection Khrushchev's cri de coeur against the Jews: "They are all individualists and all intellectuals...
...To the positive hero of the new era he was strange and incomprehensible...
...In his poetic practice he carried out the demands of socialist realism more radically and more consistently...
...But we do not doubt for a single moment that all these contradictions will be resolved, that the world will become unified and Communist and that the last, by competing with each other, shall become the first...
...He does not search for lost time...
...He who has, who really believes, does not search...
...As a camouflage she is supposed to collaborate with the Germans...
...But the superfluous man was a creature of different psychological dimensions, inaccessible to computation and regimentation...
...It can therefore hardly surprise us that, in another religious system, ancient Rome has become an indispensable stage on the road to Communism...
...The central hero of this literatureOnegin, Pechorin of Lermontov's Hero of Our Time, Beltov of Herzen's Whose Fault?, Lavretski of Turgenev's Nest of Gentlefolk and Rudin of his novel of that name—is usually called "the superfluous man...
...This is the final purpose of all that is and of all that isn't, and is the inLE finite—and probably purposeless—Purpose in itself...
...A Tsar's palace...
...Am I a monster...
...Since we don't want to lose face before the West, we occasionally cease to be consistent and declare that our society is rich in individualities and embraces many interests...
...We don't know to this day which of them predominated...
...They cannot be hidden or camouflaged: they are written on his brow and they sound in his every word...
...but, realizing that there is nothing to be done about it, we start to think, to set riddles, to make assumptions...
...The 19th century was a century of searching, of ardent or calm aspirations, unwilling or unable to find a solid place under the sun, torn by uncertainties and dualism...
...Embedded in this banal story are contradictions on which Russian literature has dwelled to the days of Chekhov and Blok: contradictions of a spirit without God and of a Purpose irrevocably lost...
...That is why it proved so exhausting and felt so unbearable, making us "go among the people," turn radical and renegade and suddenly remember that we are, after all, Christians...
...In the final reckoning we live only to speed the coming of Commu nism...
...The succession of strata can still be seen, as in a geological formation...
...elevated style, declamation—and prosaic descriptions of ordinary life...
...For this is the crux of the Demon's problem: he has no faith and he suffers from lack of faith...
...but it is not all of it...
...Some theoretical books and articles by Soviet writers and critics use the terms "romanticism" and "revolutionary romanticism...
...Art is elastic enough to fit into any bed of Procrustes that history presents to it...
...He cannot understand another faith...
...They are unjust...
...None other than the Demon of Lermontov's poem.* It is the * Lermontov, the great romantic poet, wrote this work in 1842 —TR...
...He fell in love with Tamara, that divine beauty incarnated in a ravishing woman, and decided to believe in God...
...The literary revaluation of the superfluous man and his rapid transformation into a negative figure was intensified in the 1920s, the formative years of the positive hero...
...They don't think about tomorrow, wealth, God...
...It must be remembered, when reading this decree of the Central Committee, that the interests of the people and of the state—which, incidentally, are exactly the same from the point of view of the state—have but a single aim: the all-pervading and all-absorbing Communism...
...Most subjects of Soviet literature have in common * Partiinost' is the point of view that considers everything in terms of the correct party line...
...Tall silvery columns supported a blindingly white cupola, decorated with necklaces of electric bulbs...
...This is neither classicism nor realism...
...And since she occupies, like every Purpose, a passive and waiting position, her beautiful, magical, mysterious and not too concrete nature permits her to represent a higher stage of the ideal and to serve as a substitute for the absent and desired Purpose...
...Truth is with us...
...After the loss it suffered it is no longer able to fly towards the ideal and to sing the praises of our life in a sincere and high-flown style, presenting what should be as what is...
...Only his significance was negative—to hinder the movement to the Purpose...
...But classicism is more prone than other styles to impose its mark, to observe pedantically definite canons and norms, to be conservative as to form...
...The superfluous man seemed to him much more dangerous than the openly negative enemy...
...ness...
...He called the new faith of the crucified God barbarious and naive, laughed over the lunatics that worshipped the cross—that Roman guillotine—and believed that the doctrines of the Trinity, the Immaculate Conception, Resurrection, etc., made no sense whatsoever...
...I know men who are ready to choke with laughter when they learn that their mother is dying, that they are starving to death, that their fiancee has betrayed them...
...Fedin's An Extraordinary Year, 1949...
...For in our world there is nothing finer than this state, this faith, this life and this Empress...
...It is not yet Communism, but it is already quite close to Communism...
...His relations with her bare his weakness and, compromised by her strength and beauty, he descends from the stage on which a heroic action was to be played, bows to fate and sneaks out into nothingness with the shameful cry of a base, useless, superfluous man...
...There are only semi-tones, the secret glitter of twilight that was later glimpsed by the symbolist poet Blok and the symbolist painter Wrubel...
...He shows the same fanaticism—or if you prefer, printsipialnost'—with regard to history.* A consistent Christian views the entire history previous to the birth of Christ as the prehistory of Christ...
...And so we rise, stagger with weariness, encircle the earth with bloodshot eyes, and do not find around us what we hoped to find...
...Marxism, i.e...
...Once Khrushchev came out in defense of these writers, such reproaches were stilled somewhat but they are still levied here and there by intellectuals...
...And now we have entered the era of a new world-wide system—that of socialist purposefulness...
...Later he extended the concept of "petty bourgeois" far and wide and cast into it all who did not be 0 Marina Tsvetayeva returned to Russiain 1940 after a long exile and committedsuicide two years later...
...The universal genius of Pushkin took note of this collision in The Prisoner of the Caucasus and other early poems...
...it vanishes as soon as there appears a faith that does not tolerate sacrilege...
...Even in the face of the enemy who must be outwitted and cheated he must demonstrate his positive qualities...
...Thousands of martyrs of the revolution gave up their lives for the new religion and surpassed the first Christians by their sufferings, their steadfastness and their holiness: Polish commanders Branded our backs with Five-pointed stars...
...He knew that his hero was the man of the future and that "only men as pitiless, straight and hard as swords will cut their way through...
...The ending may be sad for the hero, who runs every possible risk in his fight for Communism...
...In Blok himself and in his contemporaries Sologub and Leonid Andreev, destructive laughter became an elemental force sweeping everything before it...
...He knows why this or that idea, event, emperor or military leader was needed...
...Moreover, the prose is shot through with poetic images, metaphors and rhythms...
...From the point of view of the monotheist, the pagans existed only to call upon themselves the will of the only God and, after a suitable preparation, to become monotheists...
...If we ask a Westerner why the French Revolution was necessary, we will receive a great many different answers...
...There are also new, advanced ideas and theories which serve the interests of the advanced forces of society...
...He is, as a rule, a reflYxi've character, with tendencies to self-analysis and self-flagellation...
...into the sphere of universal history, which became purposeful as never before and turned into mankind's march toward Communism...
...Submitting to its cruel rules, we are yet afraid to follow to the end the road that we ourselves have chosen...
...Gorki was a man of printsipialnost...
...And if Communism promising us golden mountains and representing the inevitable logical outcome of all human history imperiously pulls us forward, the past too pushes us in the back...
...First Joys (Fedin...
...it acquired a Purpose...
...Another subject is offered to our literature by the internal world of man's psychological life...
...The best that it can do is to restore to circulation old ideals of Christian love and the liberty of the individual...
...But Gorki was deaf to such advice...
...His tone is not straightforward but ambiguous—"not day and not night, not light and not dark...
...Blok's poem The Twelve—a work at the boundary between two hostile and mutually exclusive cultures—contains an episode that puts a full stop to the love theme of the 19th century...
...But to victorious Moscow fell Berlin...
...A large part of Soviet literature is an "educational novel" which shows the Communist metamorphosis of individuals and entire communities...
...Romanticism is too anarchical and too emotional, while we are becoming ever more disciplined rationalists...
...And children, before going to bed, would have kneeled by the window and addressed their prayers to the cold and shining stars of the Celestial Kremlin...
...not matter so much that the starosta moved, within the batting of an eyelid, from the rearguard to the vanguard...
...Our demand "to represent life truthfully in its revolutionary development" is really nothing but a summons to view truth in the light of the ideal, to give an ideal interpretation of reality, to present what should be as what is...
...He broke with "the great traditions of the great Russian literature" and, though he loved Pushkin and Chekhov, he did not try to imitate them...
...No, no, God forbid...
...But the writing of so many other writers is in a critical state right now precisely because, in spite of the das sicistic nature of our art, they still consider it realism...
...Here every point is thought through, rationally foreseen and subdivided into corresponding paragraphs...
...Our abstract thought is no less tele ological...
...Hm, comrade Gorki, you obviously haven't read your Marx...
...When it abandons its effort to achieve verisimilitude, it will be able to express the grand and implausible sense of our era...
...Come on, snap out of it, look smart, Get yourself under control...
...These verses of the 18th century poet Derzhavin have a very contemporary ring, though the language would, of course, need modernizing...
...The characters torment themselves not quite like Dostoevsky's, are mournful not quite like Chekhov's, found their happy families not quite like Tolstoy's, and, suddenly becoming aware of the time they are living in, scream at the reader the copybook slogans which they read in Soviet newspapers, like "Long live world peace...
...The highest social destiny of art and literature is to mobilize the people to the struggle for new advances in the building of Communism...
...The events of the last few years are dragging our art on a road of half-measures and half-truths...
...His is the eternal motion upwards and downwards, backwards and forwards, between heaven and hell...
...The growing strength of the positive hero is shown not only in his incredible multiplication—he has far surpassed other kinds of literary character in quantity, put them into shade and sometimes replaced them altogether...
...But Mayakovski provides a refutation, to start with...
...But the task is presented as an indispensable stage on the way towards a higher purpose...
...Behind the causal relations that it establishes we find the hidden and distorted pur posefulness of natural phenomena...
...Yes we really are all alike and we are not ashamed of it...
...Right now I put my hope in a phantasmagoric art, with hypotheses instead of a Purpose, an art in which the grotesque will replace realistic descriptions of ordinary life...
...Who's ours...
...Our magazines, both scientific and artistic, cannot be apolitical...
...This does not mean that we forgot how to laugh...
...but it is happy from the point of view of the superior Purpose...
...Or, indeed, Communism itself, inevitably prepared by the logical course of history...
...Even the most liberal God offers only one freedom of choice: to believe or not to believe, to be for Him or for Satan, to go to paradise or to hell...
...When they were placed side by side, it became obvious to everybody that there are no heroes without Purpose, but only heroes who were for or against the Purpose and that the superfluous man was, when all is said and done, a camouflaged enemy, a base traitor who should be unmasked and punished as quickly as possible...
...The Victor (Chirikov...
...At once, everything fell into place...
...Whether they are right or wrong is a matter of dispute...
...The Japanese Burned us in fireplaces Or railroad engines And poured lead and tin Into our mouths...
...This internal world moves towards the Purpose by dynamics of its own, fights against "the traces of the bourgeois past in its conscience," and re-educates itself under the influence of the party and of surrounding life...
...Yes, yes, I am a Red...
...The river of art was covered with the ice of classicism...
...They live without facing any complex problems...
...The top layer is Marxist or, if you wish, Communist...
...In his Portrait of Felitsa, Derzhavin, praising the ideal reign of Catherine II, expressed the desire that Peoples savage and remote, Covered still with wool and scales, Dressed only with leaf and bark, And adorned with wings of birds, Should all gather at Her throne, Hear the gentle voice of Law, So that tears should run in torrents Down their swarthy, sunburned faces...
...But there was no relief anywhere: I want to make peace with heaven, I want to love, I want to pray I want to believe in the good...
...Believe that, aided by His hand, A single Russian can defeat All your abysmal evil forces...
...The tragic murder and the sorrows of lost love resuscitate the old drama, known to us from the days of Lermontov's Masquerade and Demon...
...His life is full of unrealized projects, and his fate is sad and slightly ridiculous...
...But his other foot is still stuck in Communism—and stuck fast...
...One such is Gorki's Mother, where an ignorant woman, defeated by life, is transformed into a conscious revolutionary...
...Since the writers accepted socialist realism en masse— the beginning of the thirties—literature has gone down and down...
...Efros, The Messenger on the Doorstep, 1922...
...Yes, we are all romantic with regard to our past...
...But we went to school, read all kinds of books, and learned only too well that there were great writers before us—Balzac, Maupassant, Tolstoy and, yes, what's his name?—Chekhov...
...he "strives to surpass all in courage," etc...
...A blinding light pours from this summit of thought...
...The memory of the revolution is as sacred, both to those who took part in it and those who were born after it, as the image of a dead mother...
...These proud words seem like the voice of God Himself exclaiming: "The whole history is My history, and since I assert myself in the struggle with Satan, world history is also the history of My struggle with Satan...
...He avoided like a plague descriptions of common life and rural nature...
...This was well put by a Soviet writer of no great literary gifts but politically irreproachable: "Russia took its own road—that of unanimity...
...When necessary, art can be narrowly religious, dumbly governmental, devoid of individuality —and yet good...
...A Time to Live and a Time to Die (Remarque...
...Beginning with the 1930s, the passion for solemnity finally imposes itself and a pompous simplicity of style...
...He firmly knows what is right and what is wrong...
...So Derzhavin believed, just as a contemporary poet who celebrates the new reign in Derzhavin's language: There is no country like vast Russia, No flowers grow as bright as ours, Great is our people, free and deathless, Our proud, eternal Russian people...
...Then comes a layer contributed by the West, in this case mostly German idealistic philosophy and French literature...
...How then can we blame it or blaspheme against it...
...Ah, if only we had been intelligent enough to surround his death with miracles...
...A true Soviet writer, a true Marxist, will not accept these reproaches, and will not even know what they are all about...
...For him, as for our writers, anyone who does not wish to become like the model proposed to him and does not hasten to forget his barbarous "equality" and accept the proferred gift of "bliss" falls into one of two categories...
...Hence the amazing precision of all his actions, thoughts, tastes, feelings and judgments...
...Pushkin, by contrast, addressed indecent verses even to the chaste and modest Tatiana...
...It is with the same joyous facility that this artist accepts the directives of the party and the government, from the Central Committee and its First Secretary...
...Although his forecast proved remarkably correct—and not only as regards Mayakovski—the term "classicism" did not take hold in a Soviet literature that kept becoming more clearly classicist...
...In reality—as Gorki knew—romanticism suited our tastes only too well...
...There is at least one example of it on every page...
...He wants to discover what potentialities it contains that point to the splendid Purpose...
...It is, we believe, one of the most significant Pieces of writing to come out of contemporary Russia...
...The old realists, or, as they are sometimes called, critical realists (because they criticized bourgeois society), men like Balzac, Tolstoy and Chekhov, truthfully represented life as it is...
...The positive hero first appeared in some books of Gorki written in the first decade of the twentieth century...
...The most exact definition of socialist realism is given in a statute of the Association of Soviet Writers: "Socialist realism is the basic method of Soviet Iiterature and Iiterary criticism...
...M. ISAKOVSKI The novel Russian Forest by Leonid Leonov, the first writer to be awarded a Lenin prize—which replaced the Stalin prize—is the best work of socialist realism for the last five years or so...
...Why do you laugh, scum...
...What freedom—if the comparison be permitted—does the religious person require from God...
...We call our state "the Power...
...It is subject to a higher des tiny, from which it gains its title of nobility...
...Words fail us when we try to talk about it...
...THE PURPOSE OF THE CREATION This is not the only happy turn of phrase by Stalin which the author of the Bible might envy...
...They create purposes and suddenly, from the pages of philosophical treatises and scientific investigations, there resounds the voice of the great religious Mystery: "The base produces the superstructure so that it can serve the base...
...His creative work is a step forward from the art of the past, the highest peak of the artistic development of mankind and the most realistic of realisms...
...In its mature period—the last 20, 30 years —socialist realism has had a comparatively slight romantic tinge...
...There are old ideas and theories which have outlived their time and serve the interests of outdated forces of society...
...This is why socialist realism should really be called "socialist classicism...
...The slightest contact with God led to denying Him, and with the denial came the anguish of unrealized faith...
...For don't I know that blindfold thrusts Will not make darkness yield to light...
...feudalism, towards capitalism...
...but it is invariable in its course and its destiny: to remind the reader once more of the triumph of Communism...
...felt that only one final sacrifice was needed for the triumph of Communism— the renunciation of Communism...
...Contemporary Christians, who have broken their spiritual fast and accepted the spirit of individualism, with its free elections, free enterprise and free press, occasionally abuse the phrase "freedom of choice" that Christ is supposed to hale bequeathed us...
...While representing the present, he listens to the march of history and looks toward the future...
...The superfluous man of the 19th century became even more superfluous in the 20th...
...So that work should become a rest and a pleasure, we introduced forced labor...
...The fault, of course, lies with the man, who does not know how to love his lady as she deserves, actively and with a purpose...
...What matters very much more is that we have here the straight and immutable determination of the positive hero raised, we might say, to the second power...
...Journey to the End of the Night (Celine...
...Peoples, know and understand, Believe ye that with us is God...
...He longed for "the illusion that exalts" and defended the artist's right to embellish life and to present it as better than it is...
...They are moved by instincts...
...Maybe He will have to be supplemented by other stakes of the Inquisition, by further "personality cults" and by new terrestrial labors, so that after many centuries a new Purpose will rise above the world...
...He wrote coarsely, poster-style, homerically...
...Maybe even sweeter...
...But no, he is a noble creature and the most attractive woman boldly offers him her heart and hand...
...Such words, as blasphemous as a simultaneous prayer to God and Satan, could not possibly be permitted...
...Meanwhile, other superfluous men, wishing to save their lives, renounced their past and duly transformed themselves into positive heroes...
...He threw back his head And became gay once more...
...Where socialism is concerned, the Western liberal individualist or Russian sceptical intellectual is about in the same position as the cultured and intelligent Roman with regard to victorious Christianity...
...ally, like love or inspiration...
...the mujik—"cultivator of the bread...
...I assume that to search means not to have...
...Those who want to follow in his footsteps copy his mannerisms but are unable to grasp what is essential in him—his boldness, inventiveness and passion...
...But there is one thing it cannot stand: eclecticism...
...I see the taking of the Winter Palace, the cracking motion of machinegun belts, the bread cards for one eighth of a pound, the defense of Red Petersburg...
...True faith is incompatible with toleration...
...But if the old heroes, the Demons and Arbenins, just turn their emptied soul inside out and freeze into a hopeless sorrow, Petka, who followed in their footsteps, is not allowed to do it...
...It is Well...
...A socialist, i.e...
...Mayakovski...
...After all, the enemy was like the positive hero—clear, straightforward and, in his own way, purposeful...
...And that the good is not defenseless And conquers evil in the end...
...We choke with enthusiasm and we use mostly negative comparisons to describe the splendor that is waiting for us...
...This resemblance lies in the subordination of all our actions, thoughts and longings to that sole Purpose, which may have long ago become a meaningless word but still has a hypnotic effect on us and pushes us onward and onward—we don't know where...
...And what should he search for, if everything is clear and all that he has to do is to follow God...
...Written in 1906, this book is generally considered the first example of socialist realism...
...But whom did they save and what did they change in this world, these ancient virgins of both sexes, these egoists of humanism who bought themselves in easy conscience penny by penny and rented themselves a cozy corner in the heavenly almshouses...
...Culture was made by a handful of mournful sceptics who thirsted for God simply because they had no God...
...It contains a remarkable scene...
...The brave birl Polya, entrusted with a dangerous mission, makes her way to the rear of the enemy—the action takes place during the Patriotic War...
...And this is what the new culture did...
...Everybody will eat and work as much as he likes, and labor will bring joy instead of sorrow...
...he says plainly "yes" or "no" and does not confuse black with white...
...I go to a movie to spend some time with a pretty girl...
...They present every detail "correctly" and "in the best of tastes...
...And if takes a drink at a wedding table covered with exquisite foods, it is only as an accompaniment of toasts: "Terentii raised his eyes, looked at the round of guests, rumblingly coughed into his fist, caressed the silver flow of his beard with a trembling hand, and said: 'First of all let us congratulate the young couple, may they be happy and embellish the earth by their presence.' The guests followed him with their toasts, among the melodious clinking of the wine glasses: 'May they honor their parents!' 'May they have healthy children!' 'And not injure the glory of the kolkhoz!' " The quotations are taken from the novel From the Whole Heart by E. Maltsev, published in 1949...
...Seen in this way, irony is the laughter of the superfluous man who devides both himself and everything sacred in this world...
...Composed gestures and even moderately solemn speech are foreign to it...
...M. TSVETAYEVA* In the religious struggle, the superfluous man proclaimed his neutrality and expressed his sympathy with both parties, as in these verses of the symbolist poet Voloshin: Both here and there, among the ranks One voice alone can be heard: "Who is not for us, is against us...
...He asks: "What is the use of the sun...
...Each of my conscious moves is purposeful...
...Happiness (Pavlenko...
...She has beenposthumously "rehabilitated" recently and her work republished.—Tit...
...it cannot be resuscitated through the now revived cult of Lenin...
...He could find room in his soul for all the Karamazovs—Alyosha, Mitya, Ivan, Fedor (some would add Smerdyakov...
...But we did not listen to the voice of our conscience...
...He need not conform or force himself...
...But there you sit, only because you are nothing but a horse that the Chief Hangman puts through its paces...
...But now we, Soviet men and women, for the first time agree with each other, talk one language that we all understand, and think identically about the main things in life...
...Dennis notes: "The style tells a good deal about the man...
...Having shown the tragic fate of that superfluous man, Grigori Melekhov, he bade him an affectionate farewell...
...150,000,000...
...As art became more precise, rational and teleological, it squeezed out romanticism...
...Who's theirs...
...With the aid of Marx, Communism passed from moral efforts of isolated individuals—"Oh, where are you, golden age...
...And when we remember that, should our enemies win, they would make us return to the prerevolutionary mode of life (or incorporate us in Western democracy, it hardly matters), then, I am sure, we will start once more from where we started...
...And so it rises before us, the sole Purpose of all Creation, as splendid as eternal life and as compulsory as death...
...A consistent atheism, an extreme and inflexible denial of God, resembles religion more than this vague incertitude...
...And for the man who believes, for the Soviet writ• er to whom Communism is the purpose of his own and humanity's existence (and otherwise there is no place for him either in our literature or in our society), there can be no such dilemma...
...long to the new religion: property owners large and small, liberals, conservatives, hooligans, humanists, decadents, Christians, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy...
...In The Towns and the Years Fedin purged his heart of the last drop of pity for the superIn its content and spirit, as in its central figure, socialist realism is much closer to the 18th century than to the 19th...
...And can we say that the universal happiness, promised for the Communist future, is evil...
...Chekhov feared pretentiousness worse than fire: he viewed such purple passages as a boastfulness foreign to the Russian character...
...About This...
...THE RUSSIAN DEMON But who is it that cries so anxiously for faith...
...They help the hero to preserve a certain likeness to real men and they provide something to overcome as he raises himself ever higher and higher on the ladder of political morality...
...It is a slow and inconsistent process, it lacks perspectives, and the inertia of both past and future lie heavy on it...
...DETERMINATION A SECOND POWER The fact that by this pompous tirade Polya betrays herself and moreover harms the mission with which she has been entrusted does not disturb the author in the least...
...He sees the "visible traits of Communism," invisible to the ordinary eye...
...But today no one yet knows its name...
...A. TvAxnovsxu The time has come...
...And I stand alone among them In the roaring flame and smoke And with all the strength that I have Say a prayer for them both...
...For how could Purpose have purposes...
...Like the socialist system, so 18th century Russia conceived of itself as the center of Creation...
...This quality of our nature finds its outlet in a feverish activity...
...When these books appeared, their authors—men like Babaevski, Surkov, Sofronov, Virta, Gribachev, etc.—were highly praised and set up as examples for others...
...To doubt his words is as sinful as to doubt the will of God...
...slavery, to give birth to feudalism...
...Does this irrational concept have a natural existence...
...A little girl...
...We have not lived long enough to invent a new Purpose and to go beyond ourselves— into the distance that is beyond Communism...
...Communism offers just about the same right...
...But is the dream of the old, good and honest "realism" the only heresy to which Russian literature is susceptible...
...Irony is the faithful companion of unbelief and doubt...
...Instead of intoning devout prayers, we set about dethroning the "cult of personality" that we ourselves had created...
...Mayakovski soon found out what he could and what he could not laugh about...
...Unfortunately, this is unlikely to happen...
...It is a half-classicist half-art, which is none too socialist and altogether not realism...
...It is at the mercy of turbulent feelings and diffuse moods, forgetting logic, common sense and law...
...They say that great art cannot be written under it and even that it is the death of all art...
...It eliminates faults, corrects manners, keeps up the brave spirits of youth...
...Its religious self-conceit was so strong that it did not even admit the possibility of the existence of other norms and ideals...
...But in all of them the Purpose is present, whether directly or indirectly, open or veiled...
...Can there be a socialist, capitalist, Christian or Mohammedan realism...
...In vain with cruel fate The Fascist Lord has Moscow threatened long...
...he is completely forgotten now...
...Now this simply cannot be, it is a fiction, a blasphemy...
...A tendency towards purpose is part of human nature...
...This kind of irony has been the favorite literary weapon of Russian and, indeed, European writers .. . "It might help American readers to understand the outlook of the author if they recalled how Swift, savagely lashing out against the English Ascendency in Ireland, remained part of that Ascendency...
...Light over the Earth (Babayevski...
...Unlike the party, the state, the Ministry of State Security, collectivization, Stalin, etc., the Revolution needs no justification by the Communist paradise that awaits us...
...Or that the Crusades are not explained by their internal dynamics, by the ardent efforts of Christians, but by • Printsipialnost' is a Russian word with no English equivalent...
...He confirms that it is not the saints that thirst for God but those who have no God and have left Him...
...The Victor (Simonov...
...a third, that it came to give to the world the great principles of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity...
...We live between past and future, between the Revolution and Communism...
...They bite to bite, and not for the purpose of biting...
...To read the books of the last twen ty or thirty years is to feel the great power of the positive hero...
...Decree of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b), August 14, 1946...
...Moreover, the truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic representation of reality must be linked with the task of ideological transformation and education of workers in the spirit of socialism...
...He lifts his head proudly, cheers himself up and enters Soviet literature under the flag of the new God whom Blok, from old habit, cails Jesus Chist: Forward, forward Working people...
...Listen, 0 astounded Europe To the exploits of these Russians...
...In Mayakovski there are a few examples, mostly from prerevolutionary times...
...And meanwhile our art is marking time between an insufficient realism and an insufficient classicism...
...Sometimes it even violates our nature...
...Or he lacks virtue and is, to use one of our words, a "reactionary," in which case he must be liquidated...
...The head of the state himself, the First Secretary of the CP, tears himself away from pressing economic tasks to pronounce some weighty words on the country's esthetic problems.• • This refers to Khrushchev's speeches to Soviet intellectuals, collected and published in 1957 under the title, For a Close Link Between Literature and Art and the Life of the People...
...In the name of the Purpose we turned to the means that our enemies used: we glorified Imperial Russia, we wrote lies in Pravda [Truth], we set a new Tsar on the now empty throne, we introduced officers' epaulettes and tortures Sometimes we...
...pose...
...As he approaches the Purpose, he becomes ever more positive, great and splendid...
...Battle horses Carried us off, On city squares They massacred us...
...It is not only peppered with verse...
...Inspired by the plenitude of its virtues—"self-created and self-fortified"—it proclaimed itself as an example to all peoples and all eras...
...This is the foundation of their culture, but it is organically alien to Communism...
...He forecast that "much as he would like to, Mayakovski will never again rebel as impetu ously as he did in the past...
...There are periods of history when the presence of Purpose is evident, when minor passions are absorbed in the striving for God and He openly calls mankind to Himself...
...Dennis, "is the irony which sets the tone of the article...
...True, we differ from each other in age, sex, nationality and even intelligence...
...It is the ecstasy of swollen banners, the explosions of passion and rage, the rattling of sabers and the neighing of horses, the shootings without judgment and without consequences, the "On to Warsaw...
...Not too much is asked from her: she need not be concrete and definite to save man...
...to these positions, and affirms and defends them in the work...
...Show it...
...It is, after all, the party that leads us to the Purpose in accordance with all the rules of MarxismLeninism, the party that lives and works in constant contact with God...
...Under the white ceiling sparkled an elegant chandelier, fringed with transparent glass pendants, as with icicles...
...What is socialist realism...
...E. BAGR TSKI These are not just the sentiments of revolutionists who have survived and grown fat...
...It is not easy to enumerate these basic qualities of the positive hero: ideological conviction, courage, intelligence, will power, patriotism, respect for women, self-sacrifice, etc., etc...
...Already in 1918 he noted "the marked classicism of Mayakovski's verses...
...But this is not a contradiction...
...For the contradiction between socialist realism and literary quality, the blame must fall on literature, i.e...
...It was not yet faith, and if the wish preceded faith—Blessed are they who thirst!—it is like hunger preceding a meal...
...In our works of glorification resound ever more openly the notes of baseness and hypocrisy...
...S. Khrushchev, "For a Close Link Between Literature and Art and the Life of the People," Kommunist magazine, number 12, 1957...
...Death in the Afternoon and For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway...
...I can assure the reader that the original contains even more question marks and exclamation points than the translation...
...But as soon as he kissed Tamara she died, killed by his touch...
...For thousands of years men suffered from differences of opinion...
...This is the Holy of Holies of socialist realism, its cornerstone and main achievement...
...There was no irony in Derzhavin, nor in Gorki—except for a few early tales...
...The modern mind cannot imagine anything more beautiful and splendid than the Communist ideal...
...He was red and now he's white-Death whitened him...
...Meanwhile, the productions of socialist realism are measured in billions of printed sheets, kilometers of canvas and film, centuries of hours...
...MAYAKOVSKI To our new God we sacrificed not only our lives, our blood and our bodies...
...Or there is Makarenko's Pedagogical Poem about the young criminals who take the road to honest work, or Ostrovski's novel How the Steel Was Tempered, i.e...
...The most daring of all was N. Punin, a fine art critic...
...Pushkin was the first to taste the bitter joys of self-negation, even though he was gay and had a balanced character...
...Recent historical events like the Civil War and collectivization are landmarks on the road we chose...
...It is among the most stable of styles...
...The most successful writers are those who can present our achievements as truthfully as possible and our failings as tactfully, delicately and untruthfully as possible...
...They all roared: "Abjure...
...A very different type of hero prevailed in the last century, and Russian culture lived and thought differently then...
...to find out how they can best pay the debt which, as writers, they owe to socialist realism...
...She was taken from him, and he was once more alone in his anguished unbelief...
...This is but natural, once we are coming ever closer to the Pur...
...But this is also romanticism...
...Aimless trees become paper filled with destiny...
...Pushkin's dreamy Tatiana opened up an age...
...And so we get dramas and novels where all moves smoothly and peacefully...
...To this day he is accepted politically rather than poetically...
...Literature and art are part of the whole people's struggle for Communism...
...These are the esthetical and psychological concepts the knowledge of which is indispensable to anyone who would penetrate the secret of socialist realism...
...But from our burning throats Only three words came: "Long Live Communism...
...We became Classicists...
...Il'enkov, The Great Highway, a novel which appeared in 1949 and was awarded the Stalin Prize...
...Tatiana was indispensable so that Onegin should suffer through the absence of somebody...
...but what is left of the Gospel after the stakes have done their work...
...Mandelshtam, who rebelled against the symbolists, died after depor tation...
...Russian literature is full of love stories in which an inadequate man and a beautiful woman meet and part without achieving anything...
...ism the clarity, strength and rigor of military orders and economic decrees...
...A singer...
...It made its presence felt mostly in the prehistory and initial period of socialist realism...
...These calls did not remain unheeded, though many of Gorki s formulas are now veiled by an embarrassed silence or interpreted pharisaically: it is obviously not easy to admit that what we really need are some pretty lies...
...The teleological nature of Marxism is most obvious in the works of its latest theorists...
...Instead of following the road of conventional forms, pure fantasy and imagination which the great religious cultures always took, they try to compromise...
...Dostoevsky fully understood the temptations of breadth, eternally disputed with himself and passionately wished to end these disputes, offensive to the one God...
...It is enough for me to pronounce the words "Soviet power" to make me see the Revolution with my mind's eye...
...We free ourselves without regret from belief in an afterlife, from love of our neighbor, from freedom of the individual and other prejudices, by now rather shopworn and looking all the sorrier by comparison with the great Ideal before us...
...or "Down with the Warmongers...
...We wanted to become famous and to write like Chekhov...
...Their significance lies in their hampering the growth of the society and its forward march...
...and in the works and pains of the new era—"This is no time for babying...
...seems satisfactory to contemporaries...
...Beautifully put...
...Geniuses, of course, are not born every day, and the state of art rarely * A. F. Khlebnikov, who died in 1922, was one of the founders of Russian futurism...
...The history of all epochs and nations is but the history of humanity's march towards Communism, and the history of the world's thought happened, so to say, in order to bring forth "scientific materialism," i.e...
...Stalin: Marxism and Linguistic Questions...
...Even when the book does not end with such a grandiose denouement, it still exists implicitly and symbolically, commanding the development of characters and events...
...He unrolled his positive qualities in many ways, grew big and sturdy, and finally drew himself up to his full stature...
...But the writers were not describing the actual life and customs of the Russian nobility...
...No doubt, if we were less educated, it would be easier for us to attain the integrity that is in• dispensable to a writer...
...but they were not the makers of history and culture...
...And, obviously, art and literature could not but get caught in the meshes of that system and become, as Lenin predicted, "a small wheel and a small screw" of the gigantic state machine...
...but laughter ceased to be indecent and disrespectful...
...Judging by the literature of the time, all hearts were broken in 19th century Russia and no children were born for a while...
...It is self-justified and justified emotion...
...The Red Guard Petka kills, against his will and in a fit of anger, his sweetheart, the prostitute Katka...
...The article was written in Russia by a Russian writer, 37 or 38 years old...
...The ape stood up on its hind legs and began its triumphant pro...
...Thus did the hero of 19th century Russian perish ingloriously...
...This is not bad in itself, but it smells of subjectivism and lack of self-restraint...
...This thirst for God, this wish to believe arose—as did the search—in a spiritual desert...
...He is now close to the peak while they are still wandering in the foothills"—this is the way simple peasants talk in our novels...
...Mayakovski...
...The great hunger of the 19th century perhaps conditioned us Russians to throw ourselves so greedily upon the food prepared by Marx and to devour it even before we had time to analyze its taste, smell and consequences...
...the action of the omnipresent forces of production that are now ensuring the collapse of capitalism and the triumph of socialism...
...We go into esthetic raptures over the stereotypes of Egyptian art, Russian icons and folklore...
...To put negative characters in such a situation would, to say the least, be strange...
...I extend my hand to receive the coins...
...A thousand critics, theoreticians, art experts, pedagogues are beating their heads and straining their voices to justify, explain and interpret its material existence and dialectical character...
...She impressed it by her vagueness, her mysteriousness and her tenderness...
...He could not permit himself to laugh at Lenin, whom he praised to the skies, any more than Derzhavin would laugh at his Empress...
...We ceased to fear high-sounding words and bombastic phrases, we were no longer ashamed to be virtuous...
...Vladimir Il'ich Lenin...
...The stakes of the Inquisition helped to establish the Gospel...
...We also sacrificed our snow white soul, after staining it with all the filth of the world...
...It is this unanimity that makes us strong and superior to all other people in the world, who are internally torn and socially isolated through their differences of opinion...
...And now let's look at the people...
...But it has been unable so far to set up a new Purpose...
...He is too inconsistent in his passion for evil to figure as a full Devil and too inconsistent in his repentance to make his peace with God and rejoin the obedient angels...
...Still I must sadly confess, with other of my contemporaries, that our literature has become progressively impoverished in the last two or three decades...
...The most important, of course, are the clarity and directness with which he sees the Purpose and strives towards it...
...the philosophy of Communism...
...In more remote eras it is, alas, harder to find the move ment towards Communism...
...To direct this movement towards its end and to help the reader approach it more closely by transforming his consciousness— this is the Purpose of socialist realism, the most purposeful art of our time .. . THE CONCEPT OF PURPOSE Our art, like our culture and our so ciety, is teleological through and through...
...Socialist realism starts from an ideal image to which it adapts the living reality...
...G. Chulkov called him the only truly believing writer of his time...
...Irony was replaced by pathos, the emotional element of the positive hero...
...We preferred to call ourselves modestly "socialist realists" and hide our name under this pseudonym...
...on the writers who accepted the rules of socialist realism but did not have sufficient artistic consistency to embody them in deathless images...
...The Petty Bourgeois, 1901...
...how the steel of our youth was tempered in the fire of the Civil War and the cold of early Communist construction...
...The version that follows has been translated from the Russian by Mr...
...He has either no faults at all or else but a few of them—for example, he sometimes loses his temper a little...
...Since then the posotive hero has gone through many changes and presented himself in many guises...
...Mayakovski was too much of a revolutionary to become a traditionalist...
...What folly is this...
...It is impossible, without falling into parody, to produce a positive hero in the style of full socialist realism and yet make him into a psychological portrait...
...All his major works after the Revolution end with passages about Communism or with fantastic scenes describing life in the future Communist state (Mystery Bouffe...
...Fundamentally, it is a personal prose as well as a product of its national environment...
...But can we call the Five Year Plan "folly of the brave...
...Yes, we live in Communism...
...The strength of Soviet literature, the most advanced in the world, is that it is a literature for which there can be no other interests than those of the people and of the state...
...This happened already in the 1930s, when the Soviet writers dropped their little cliques and their literary tendencies, and accepted, almost unanimously, the best and most advanced trend of all: socialist realism...
...Without realizing it, we jump over to the heads of our fathers and revive the tradition of our grandfathers...
...Well then, where is your Kingdom of God...
...As in the 18th century, we became severe and serious...
...For breadth excludes faith: no wonder we narrowed ourselves down to Marxism, thus fulfilling Dostoevsky's wish...
...The style has long become a commonplace of our literature, and passes from author to author without undergoing any substantial change...
...No doubt this was due to the fact that when I was young, the words of one of our Civil War songs went straight to my soul: All of us into the fight For Soviet power And as one man we'll die Fighting for it...
...It is a long time since men had such an exact knowledge of the meaning of the world's destiny—not since the Middle Ages, most likely...
...Such, in a few words, is the general scheme of our art...
...the start of building introduces the plot...
...Neither is it compatible with historicism, i.e...
...Even when it produces a tragedy, it is an Optimistic Tragedy, the title of Vishnevski's play in which the heroine dies at the end but Communism triumphs...
...The socialist realist, armed with the doctrine of Marx and enriched by the experience of struggles and victories, is inspired by the vigilant attention of his friend and teacher, the Communist Party...
...Leonid Leonov called his positive hero "a peak of humanity from whose height the future can be seen...
...They all develop in one direction, and a direction well known in advance...
...It is a sample of classicist prose of average literary quality...
...It resembles our aspirations about as much as the Middle Ages resembled Christ, modern Western man resembles the free superman, and man resembles God...
...This is what happened with Dudintsev's novel Man Does Not Live by Bread Alone, which stirred up a lot of noise and was publicly anathemized for blackening our bright socialist reality...
...But all the same, there is some resemblance, isn't there...
...Since Communism is for us the inescapable outcome of the historical process, many of our novels have made the impetuous course of time the mainspring of their action...
...should we embellish life...
...He closes the book with a sigh of relief and realizes that we have made yet another step towards Communism...
...The writers merely anticipate somewhat and give these events the Purpose that they did not yet have...
...For we interpret "revolutionary development" as the inevitable movement towards Communism, towards our ideal, in the light of which we see reality...
...While the whole world, having defined itself with regard to the Purpose, is divided into two antagonistic camps, he feigns not to understand this and keeps mingling his colors in vague and ambiguous schemes...
...Our author has freed one of his feet from Communism...
...What words and what colors are needed To describe these grandiose heights Where whores are as modest as virgins And hangmen as tender as mothers...
...The curse was addressed, of course, to the Whites...
...Many of our books turn around the representation of these moral and psychological processes, which aim at producing the ideal man of the future...
...Is it fiction, myth or propaganda...
...All the most lively and sensitive children of our century are stricken by a disease unknown to doctors and psychiatrists...
...In this literature, woman was the touchstone of man...
...It was written before the Pasternak affair, and has, of course, not appeared in Russia itself...
...Get up and show me the place where Soviet girls are shot...
...Blok himself used it in many variations— did not the fool Petka and bigmouthed Katka, with her new boy friend Harlequin-Vanka, issue from Blok's own Pierrot and Columbine...
...And the poet runs out of words when he tries to describe this superiority, this incomparable positiveness of our positive hero: Nobody rose so high For centuries and centuries...
...This sounds like a dubious borrowing from the parliamentary system to which they are accustomed, for it bears no resemblance to the Kingdom of God, if only because no president or prime minister is ever elected in paradise...
...No, a simple party worker...
...Today's children will scarcely be able to produce a new God, capable of inspiring humanity into the next historical cycle...
...The history of philosophy, proclaimed Zhdanov, "is the history of the birth, rise and development of the scientific world view and its laws...
...He started by proclaiming to the world: "One must say firmly yes or no...
...Then came the era of individualism which proclaimed the freedom of the individual as the Purpose and set about worshipping this purpose with the aid of the Renaissance, humanism, superman, democracy, Robespierre, banquets and other forms of prayer...
...It is our great privilege to possess this knowledge once more...
...It is related to the disorders of the soul and might be called 'irony.' Its symptoms are fits of an exhausting laughter which starts with a diabolic mockery and a provocative smile and ends as rebellion and sacrilege...
...For who, if not the party and its leader, knows best what kind of art we need...
...In itself, we may like it or not...
...they were engaged in depth metaphysics of an aimlessly agitated spirit...
...He believes in the Purpose so that he can despise other purposes...
...Dostigaev and Others—with a vision of the victorious Revolution, which was a stage on the way to Communism, and the concluding gesture of the old world...
...But this is not what matters...
...They brought to Marx...
...But you might object: How about Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, how about the thousands of other "seekers after God," from the Populists to Merezhkovski, whose search of God has lasted well into the middle of our century...
...the end of building—the denouement...
...Such questions, we are told, are often asked in the West...
...A Red, the devil take you...
...Yet romanticism has played a less important part in our art than might have been expected...
...fluous hero, formerly so enchanting...
...It is a very Russian Demon...
...An iron necessity and a strict hierarchical order harnessed the flow of centuries...
...At that time he was connected with futurism...
...If they are sometimes lacking in taste, this is the na tional and social trait of our classicism, born as it was of Russian democracy...
...The Victors (Bagritski...
...There can be no substantial differences of opinion in a country where even the anti-party elements confess their errors and wish to rectify them as soon as possible, and incorrigible enemies of the people ask to be shot...
...For woman is generally considered a beautiful, pure and nebulous crea' ture...
...one philosophy—Marxism...
...We thus blew up the foundations of that classicist colossus which, if we had waited but a little, would have joined the Pyramid of Cheops and the Apollo of Bel vedere in the treasury of world art...
...Faced with the most complex of tasks he easily finds the solution by taking the shortest and most direct route to the Purpose...
...After the death of Stalin we entered upon a period of destruction and re-evaluation...
...He is a hero illuminated by the light of the most ideal of all ideals...
...We could have announced on the radio that he did not die but had risen to Heaven, from where he continued to watch us, in silence, no words emerging from beneath the mystic moustache...
...They are panegyrics on Communism, satires on some of its many enemies, or descriptions of life "in its revolutionary development," i.e...
...For democrats and socialists in the West, it is a moral responsibility to listen to the voice of this man with the greatest attention and sympathy.—Enrroxs...
...Idea," "superstructure," "base," "law of nature," "economics," "forces of production"— all these abstract and impersonal concepts suddenly come to life, are covered with flesh and blood and become like gods and heroes, angels and devils...
...Chernyshevski and Pobedonostsev, the great radical and the great reactionary, were perhaps the only two men of the century who really believed in God...
...Thus wrote Gorki in The Life of Klim Samgin, Fadeyev in The Debacle, and many others...
...Our misfortune is that we are convinced socialist realists but not convinced enough...
...Gorki roared "No...
...We don't know where to go...
...A quotation from V. I1'enkov's novel The Great Highway illustrates the universal validity that was attached to the Short Course: "Father Degtyarev brought in a small volume and said: 'Everything is said here, in the fourth chapter.' Vinkentii Ivanovich took the book and thought: 'There is no book on this earth that contains everything that a man needs ..: But Vinkentii Ivanomin [a typical sceptical intellectual] soon realized that he was wrong and accepted Degtyarev's view, which was that of all advanced people: This book `contains everything that a man needs.' " Every word of this quotation is per vaded by the spirit of purposeful...
...Like a blue river, a necktie flowed down his breast...
...PASTERNAK We are helpless before the enchanting beauty of Communism...
...maybe just an ordinary gui, but I am the world's tomorrow..., and you should stand up, yes, stand up when you talk to me, if you have a trace of self-respect left...
...THE SHIFT TO CLASSICISM The cold breath and ponderous heaviness of classicism was felt by us long ago, but few men dared to be outspoken on this subject...
...And so we can hardly reproach those overharmonious writers who have indeed withdrawn from contemporary conflicts but only to glance at the future, i.e...
...For example, many of our novels and stories deal with the work of a factory, the building of an electricity work, the application of an agricultural decree and so on...
...These faults have a twofold function...
...He also becomes more and more persuaded of his own dignity, especially when he compares himself to contemporary Western man and realizes his immeasurable superiority...
...First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, 1934, p. 716...
...This is why it had its well-known success among us...
...They try with all their power to be beautiful, polite and cultured...
...But man invariably wants what he has not got...
...his motto is rather: "Time, march on...
...God is not found...
...Bella of A Hero of Our Time], shine like an ideal, chaste and beyond the reach of Onegins and Pechorins, who love them so clumsily and unsuccessfully...
...Naturally, the leader of the new crusade was Gorki...
...Since his hero belonged to the simple people and not the intelligentsia, it was possible to close an eye to Sholokhov's behavior...
...Mayakovski had that consistency...
...and answers: "To give light and heat...
...the life, sleep and death under the naked sky lit by the fires of regiments as nomadic as the Tartars of old: Youth that led us To the march of sabers, Youth that threw us On the ice of Kronstadt...
...A fashionable tenor...
...But neither the heroes nor their authors ever suspect that they are in bad taste...
...It waves its arms, gets excited and dreams distant dreams of the time when Communism is all but built and will be seen any moment...
...Zabolotski is among the most talented Soviets poets today.—Tx...
...Every style has its distinctive quality...
...Perhaps a crude propaganda trick of Zhdanov or a senile fancy of Gorki...
...As materialism grew and developed in the struggle against idealism, so the history of philosophy is the history of the struggle between materialism and idealism...
...Mamontov's bands Buried us alive Up to our necks...
...but it will no longer be socialist realism...
...Death of a Hero (Aldington) are all in minor key...
...However, these faults must be slight or else they would run counter to his basic qualities...
...The Life of Klim Sam gin...
...the difference, in the ability to seize the revolutionary development and to educate readers in accordance with that development, in the spirit of socialism...
...and no sooner did she touch heaven than she fell...
...His more politically conscious comrades rouse him and re-educate him: You sure go on and on, you bastard, What are you...
...He hastens the course of life and affirms that each day lived is not a loss but a gain for man—because it brings him closer to the desired ideal, even if only by one millimeter...
...It is like dozens and hundreds of other novels...
...It is fine to be gentle, to drink tea with preserves, to plant flowers and cultivate love, non-resistance to evil and other philanthropies...
...Or the guidance of the Party...
...They should cry and understand The bliss of living in our time, Should abandon their equality, And all subject be to Her...
...He either is so stupid that he does not understand his own interests, in which case he must be reeducated...
...They imitate his verses but don't follow his example...
...Gorki, who during the Soviet era wrote mainly about the days before the Revolution, ended most of his novels and plays—The Artamonov Affair...
...Having chosen his subject, the Soviet writer views it from a definite angle...
...The entire literate population was constantly urged to study it and in particular its fourth chapter, containing the quintessence of the Marxist creed and written by Stalin himself...
...A good example is Stalin's judgment on the role of ideas, taken from the fourth chapter of the Short Course of History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: "There exist different ideas and theories...
...Though Soviet writers are proud of the great traditions of 19th century Russian literature which they want to follow in every possible way and sometimes actually do follow (even though they constantly upbraid Western writers for slavishly imitating outworn literary canons) the positive hero of socialist realism is a break with the tradition, not its continuation...
...Some few glimmers of light during the Pa triotic War did not save it...
...very "spirit" of doubt that has torn us so long and so painfully...
...and finally capitalism, so that it could give way to Communism...
...We are caught in this psychological squeeze...
...it is also a series of lyrical outbursts...
...If you don't want to believe, you can go to jail—which is by no means worse than hell...
...And a really faithful representation of life cannot be achieved in a language based on teleological concepts...
...She plays this part for a while in talking to a Nazi officer, but with great difficulty: it is morally painful to her to talk the enemy's language...
...But it was quite above his powers to advance any serious arguments against the ideal of Christ as such...
...Why do you claw with your well-cared nails the spots of blood and dirt that have stuck to our jackets and uniforms...
...The gist of this formula—"the truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development"— is founded on the concept of Purpose with a capital P. The Purpose is an all-embracing ideal, towards which truthfully represented reality ascends in an undeviating revolutionary movement...
...Still less can there be such differences among honest Soviet people and least of all among positive heroes who think only of spreading their virtues all over the world and of re-educating the few remainirtg dissidents into unanimity...
...It was, perhaps, too embarrassingly frank...
...To these remarks very little need be added...
...In a strictly logical judgment, "Soviet power" and "the socialist state" are the same thing...
...All this helped Mayakovski to lift himself to the level of his epoch and to express its spirit fully and clearly, without alien admixtures...
...His qualitative growth has also been remarkable...
...On the stage, by the polished wing of the grand piano stood Rakitin, dressed in sober gray...
...Mayakovski knew this and, hating psychological analysis and details, wrote in proportions that were larger than life...
...GORKI Never before have there been heroes like this...
...A. PROKOFIEV Eighteenth century literature produced its own positive hero...
...Their significance lies in facilitating the growth of the society and its forward march...
...We did not want salvation for ourselves but for all of humanity...
...It stemmed attacking hordes of Batu And broke all chains that held it down, It made Russia and it raised her To heights of stars and crests of time...
...However man may have originated, his appearance and purpose are in separable from God—that is, from the highest idea of purpose which is ac cessible to us, if not through our un derstanding, then through our wish that there should be such a purpose...
...In this contradiction between the victory of socialist realism and the low quality of literary production, many are inclined to blame socialist realism...
...Perhaps it does not exist at all, perhaps it is only the nightmare of a terrified intellectual during the dark and magical night of Stalin's dictatorship...
...and the author never neglects to proclaim his firm belief in our final victory, either directly or through a speech of his dying hero...
...We believe that this article presents an incomparable portrait of a highly intelligent and cultivated man, whose sentiments, ironies, even confusions may well be shared by other literate Russians...
...THE CONTRADICTION It seems that the very term "socialist realism" contains an insoluble contradiction...
...But we cannot understand this concept at all as long as we skim the surface of the dry formula and do not penetrate into its deep and hidden meaning...
...Stalin seemed to be specially made for the hyperbole that awaited him: mysterious, omniscient, all-powerful, he was the living monument of our era and needed only one quality to become God—immortality...
...He uses it to kick Communism, and some of his kicks are pretty hard...
...Egor Bulichev and Others...
...They embody the higher stage of socialist realism and the embryo of the coming Communist realism...
...the "Beautiful Lady" to whom Blok dedicated his first collected poems closed it...
...It is Well...
...He did not fear the reproaches and sneers of the shocked intelligentsia and its repeated assertions that the new hero was dull-witted and narrowminded...
...So that not one drop of blood be shed any more, we killed and killed and killed...
...Also, it recalled certain undesirable associations that seemed to lower our dignity...
...In bloody battles against the enemy—"I will drink blood for my black-browed beauty...
...For all the peans written to his glory, his rhythms, images and language seem overbold to most of our poets...
...Is not the happiness of millions Closer to me than empty luck for a few...
...And Petrukha soon slowed down His hurried steps...
...Many were shocked by the selfassurance and straightforwardness of his formulations, by his tendency to preach at everyone around him and by his pompous monologues celebrating his own virtues...
...We have one aim—Communism...
...This is why it rejected the talents of many poets who wanted to embrace it but retain their personality: V. Khlebnikov, O. Mandelshtam and N. Zabolotski among them.* Even Mayakovski, whom Stalin called "the most talented poet of our Soviet era," remained in it a tragically solitary figure...
...A truly religious person relates all the splendid variety of life to his divinity...
...But this hundred years' hunger was itself caused by the catastrophic absence of food: it was a hunger of godlessness...
...If only the hero were at least a low fellow, incapable of higher feelings...
...This persistence may well be news also to the Russians: this article should help to allay the fears recently expressed by Constantine Paustovski, a talented and humane Soviet writer, that the Russian language would be completely replaced by a party jargon...
...Is it possible that all the lessons that we received were taught in vain and that, in the best of cases, all we wish is to return to the naturalist school and the critical tendency...
...The only dissonant note was perhaps struck by Sholokhov in his Quiet Flows the Don...
...Allegorical figures and personified abstractions invade our literature, and we speak with slow solemnity and grandiose gestures...
...Today his novel is considered a model of socialist realism...
...The women, those innumerable Tatianas, Lizas, Natalias, Bellas and Ninas [Tatiana is the heroine of Eugene Onegin...
...one art— socialist realism...
...a fourth, that the French Revolution was not necessary at all...
...We may thus invent something marvelous...
...This is what has undone us...
...Each work of socialist realism, even before it appears, is thus assured of a happy ending...
...Translated from the Russian by GEORGE DENNIS...
...May the fantastic imagery of Hoffmann and Dostoevsky, of Goya, Chagall, and Mayakovski (the most socialist realist of all) and of many other realists and non-realists teach us how to be truthful with the aid of the absurd and the fantastic...
...The spirit of classicism blows upon us from all directions...
...It does * A peasant official put in charge of the village by the Germans...
...And that it has differences of opinion, conflicts and contradictions, and literature is supposed to reflect all that...
...His conscience sud denly awakens, he shoots at the German, loses his life and saves Polya's...
...The result is a loathsome literary salad...
...Everyone Dies Alone (Fallada...
...life moving towards Communism...
...You are above all glory, You are beyond all praise...
...The strength of a theological system resides in its constancy, harmony and order...
...The plot of Onegin is a simple anecdote: as long as Tatiana loves Onegin and is willing to belong to him, he is indifferent to her...
...Blok, ibid...
...An economic task is carried out in the course of the action (e.g...
...But it is a model that, for obvious reasons, has found no imitators...
...Then, under Communism, there will be no rich and no poor, no money, wars, jails, frontiers, diseases—and maybe no death...
...This purposefulness of the historic processes is linked with the great interest our writers show in history, both recent and remote...
...It was the genius of Marx that he proved the earthly paradise, of which others had dreamed before him, was actually the Purpose which Fate destined for man...
...You say that this is not Communism, that we took the wrong turning and that we are further from Communism now than when we started...
...another, that it took place to lead the nation into an abyss of moral experiments...
...Art is not afraid of dictatorship, severity, repressions, or even conservatism and cliches...
...While working on this article I have caught myself more than once dropping into irony—that unworthy device...
...The freedom to praise God still more ardently...
...They lie, they maneuver and they try to combine the uncombinable: the positive hero, who logically tends towards the pattern, the allegory—and the psychological analysis of character...
...In such a purposeful view, even technical processes acquire dramatic tension and can be followed with great interest...
...and we take pride in presenting here the first full English translation...
...Such an art corresponds best to the spirit of our time...
...The title of this article does not even begin to convey its importance as an intellectual and historical document...
...What is this...
...There are no neutrals...
...But our Soviet man has left them far behind...
...This innocent formula is the foundation on which the entire edifice of socialist realism was erected...
...Ridiculous...
...It was soft and shrivelled, feminine and melancholy, full of doubts, inner contradictions and pangs of conscience...
...Animals do not have such longrange intentions...
...This unnatural liaison produced monsters...
...It describesthe mental habit of referring every matter, however small, concrete or trivial, to lofty and abstract principles...
...We capitalize a great number of words...
...Achievements are never identical with the original aim...
...at these superfluous men, who roused his ire by their indefiniteness, and called them "petty bourgeois...
...In 1901 he sketched the first model of the positive hero and attacked those "who were born without faith in the heart," who "never felt that anything was true," who "forever wandered between yes and no...
...Science says: "man descends from the monkey" instead of saying: "the desti ny of the monkey is to become man...
...For the man who believes in Communism, as Khrushchev correctly noted in one of his latest cultural pronouncements, "for the artist who truly wants to serve his people, the question does not arise of whether he is free or not in his creative work...
...They were coarse and unrestrained: "Vankal Put some paper rubles in your shoes...
...the true representation of life from the point of view of Communist partiinost'* is a necessity of his soul...
...It was more correct to proclaim them to be a prayer to the Devil: "Who is not for us, is against us...
...Instead, he yawns with boredom, like Onegin and Rudin, or else he kills his beloved, like Aleko in Pushkin's Gypsies or Arbenin in Lermontov's Masquerade...
...Spring in the Victory Collective Farm (Gribachev), and so on, are all in a major key...
...Through this accursed irony, everything is the same to them: good and evil, the blue sky and the stinking pit, Dante's Beatrice and Sologub's Untouchable Lady...
...What is the meaning of this strange and jarring phrase...
...Those of us who suffer from superfluous differences of thought we pun• ish severely by excluding them from life and literature...
...But could he say that God conceived as Love or Goodness was evil or monstrous...
...Maybe...
...but when she marries another, he falls in love with her passionately and hopelessly...
...With a Full Voice...
...The link lies in the truthfulness of the representation...
...But Dostoevsky was so broad himself that he could embrace within himself both Orthodoxy and nihilism...
...Other movements are of little interest to them...
...So that all frontiers should fall, we surrounded ourselves with a Chinese wall...
...If it turned again towards the superfluous man, it was only to prove that he was not at all superfluous but rather harmful, dangerous and negative...
...It brings and accepts new elements mostly in its formative period, but later tries to follow established models faithfully and is hostile to researches in form, experimentalism and originality...
...His relics would have cured men struck by paralysis or possessed by demons...
...We represent life as we would like it to be and as it is bound to become, when it bows to the logic of Marxism...
...True, he could say that the best parts of the moral code of Christianity were borrowed from Plato, just as contemporary Christians assert here and there that Communism took its noble aims from the Gospel...
...Remember what happened to the Demon...
...The animism of primitive peoples is the first attempt to conquer senseless chaos by endowing it with many aims, and to animate the in different universe with a life useful to man...
...The man who received a Marxist education knows the meaning of both past and future...
...And so we have in it and in its leader the wisest and most experienced guide, who is competent in all questions of industry, linguistics, music, philosophy, painting, biology, etc...
...Yet all of them—the stakes of the Inquisition and the Gospel, the night of Saint Bartholomew and Saint Bartholomew himself—add up to one great Christian culture...
...The wish is the reality, because it must be, Our life is beautiful not only because we want it to be beautiful but also because it must be so: it has no choice...
...To a Western reader, Russian poetic prose does not always make easy reading...
...For it is we who accomplished the Revolution...
...This is understandable: romanticism is, indeed, part of our nature...
...One will reply that it happened to save France...
...Once we admit that God carelessly sinned with Eve and, becoming jealous of Adam, sent him off to labor at land reclamation, the whole concept of the Creation falls apart, and it is impossible to restore the faith...
...The noble purity of Polya's heart converts a starosta* who happened to listen to the conversation...
...A world that we can imagine, more material and better suited to human needs than Christian paradise"—thus was Communism defined by the Soviet writer Leonid Leonov...
...It demands from the artist a truthful and historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development...
...Lisa of A . ,Test of Gentlefolk...
...A comparison between some representative titles of Soviet and Western literature is revealing...
...But now they acquired good looks, elegant clothes and refined manners...
...Finally she cannot stand it any more and reveals her true self and her superiority to the German officer: "I am a girl of my time...
...but they either cannot distinguish it or don't know its name or simply are afraid to speak about it...
...The Soviet writer does not think in Proustian terms...
...M. Isnxovsxt The first heroes of Soviet literature stormed the fortresses of capitalism with torn bast shoes on their feet and sexual oaths on their lips...
...He is neither for the Purpose nor against the Purpose—he is outside the Purpose...
...We are against illusions and against idealization, we write only the truth and at the same time present life in its revolutionary development Why...
...For all his generous impulses he is unable to find a destiny and he presents a lamentable example of a purposelessness that is of no use to anybody...
...The means used to reach the aim change its original appearance into something unrecognizable...
...Romanticism is powerless to express our clarity and precision...
...And we fling ourselves towards it, breaking all barriers and rejecting anything that might hamper our frantic course...
...the hallmark of classicism, becomes fashionable...
...But if I have a few things against the socialist state—trifles, all of them—I have absolutely nothing against the Soviet power...
...It is a laughter free from the acidity of irony...
...Of course, an incalculable number of peasants and old women also believed in God...
...We will start from the Revolution...
...It does not curse, it does not fight, it does not drink itself senseless the way the Russian people used to do...
...They never cease to celebrate this future from the pages of our historical novels, and they constaritly gladden the heart of their readers by their astounding perspicacity...
...He proclaims that there are no Reds and no Whites but simply people, poor, unfortunate, superfluous people: They all lie in a row— No line between them...
...All breathe it...
...But if the writer concentrates hard enough he will uncover, even in the most remote of times, some phenomenon that might be called progressive because, in the final account, it aided in some way our victories of today...
...Science has not freed us from the childish questions of "Why...
...Sure, you want to turn your soul Inside out for us to see...
...Even the ideas that do not favor the movement towards the Purpose have their destiny: to hamper the movement towards the Purpose (once, no doubt, the destiny of Satan...
...In affirming an ideal, romanticism is not binding enough...
...THE POSITIVE HERO The positive hero is not simply a good man...
...Well, don't just sit there, do something...
...A woman usually plays a fatal part in it...
...But instead of rejoicing and taking life with a song, he commits some irresponsible acts and, against his own desires, does everything he can to ensure that his beloved shall not become his...
...This great harmony is the final Purpose of Creation, this beautiful absence of conflict is the future of socialist realism...
...Peoples, know this dread Colossus: God is with us, so honor ye the Russian...
...You can't scoot barefoot to the meetting...
...They are hotly debated in Poland...
...And so he defeats the enemy not by cleverness, wits or physical strength but by his proud attitude alone...
...One of them recently said: "There is nothing in the world more disgusting than fence-sitters...
...This literature knew nothing of the superfluous man...
...A. Zhdanov, "Contribution to the Discussion of G. F. Aleksandrov's History of Western European Philosophy," June 24, 1947...
...And, concluding a love story that lasted for a century, Blok took the Beautiful Lady as his Bride, only to betray Her and to lose Her and to torment himself all his life by the purposelessness of his existence...
...The reader finds out step by step how, against all kind of obstacles, the plant was put to work, the "Victory" collective farm gathered a good crop of corn and so on...
...Chekhov, when he managed to read through The Petty Bourgeois, frowned with embarrassment and advised Gorki to soften the loud proclamations of his hero...
...he cures himself of sterile reflections and useless pangs of conscience...
...If socialist realism really wants to rise to the level of the great world cultures and produce its Communiad, there is only one way to do it...
...A closer stylistic analysis will reveal that the poetic prose of this article has been formed by a process of historical accumulation...
...Finally, it was created, our world, in the image and likeness of God...
...For him, the question of which approach to the phenomena of reality to choose is clear...
...The system of primitive Communism arose because it was fated to grow into slavery...
...cession towards Communism...
...Russia went into a frenzied search for an ideal...
...If there is a conflict between the heroes, it is a conflict between good and better, model and supermodel...
...There are books in which all the heroes are positive...
...For Russian literature they served as a synonym of the ideal, as symbol of a higher Purpose...
...The Russian language has assimilated them all, just as, no doubt, it is now engaged in assimilating American influences .. . "The best clue to unravelling the ambiguities in which the author's attitude toward Communism is inevitably involved," continues Mr...
...That is all...
...But both before us and behind us stand temples so splendid that we could not bear to attack them...
...For him there are no inner doubts and hesitations, no unanswerable questions and no impenetrable secrets...
...He is "the friend of common good...
...When Derzhavin, in his old age, wrote the ode "To the great boyar and military commander Reshemysl," he gave it a subtitle "or the image of what a great lord should be...
...As for Lermontov, he almost seems to have imbibed the poison in his childhood...
...But the further away we are from our past and the closer we come to Communism, the weaker becomes the romantic halo that art has bestowed upon the Revolution...
...Polya's deed is the key to much that to the non-believer appears grossly exaggerated, stupid and false—especially the positive hero's propensity to pontificate on elevated themes...
...The art of socialist realism might be given the same subtitle: it represents the world and man as they should be...
...He finds an easy way out of the resulting situation...
...it is enough that she be pure and beautiful...
...Perhaps...
...The magnificent aim is achieved, the pyramid is crowned, history at an end...
...The splendid aim towards which the action develops is sometimes presented directly at the end of the work...
...For a century this was also the story of Russian culture, which had been possessed by the Demon even before Lermontov...
...a high ideal—and truthful representation of life...
...This method was brilliantly used by Mayakovski...
...And even though the Revolution was carried out in the name of Communism, its name does not sound less sweet to us for that...
...Aimless rivers become arteries of communication...
...Romanticism is intimately connected with the Sturm and Drang period of Soviet literature, the first five years after 1917, when life and art were flooded with sentiment, when the blazing elan towards a happy future and the world-wide significance of the revolution were not yet regimented by a strict political order...
Vol. 7 • January 1960 • No. 1
