Soviet Literature Today
Laqueur, Walter
SOVIET LITERATURE TODAY By Walter Z. Laqueur Writers' gains since Stalin's death have been limited A year has passed since the last Congress of Soviet Writers, and not a few people are wondering...
...He will marry a chaste woman, and all their children will also be chaste...
...He doesn't drink and he may even give up smoking...
...The Soviet attitude to emigre writers, as to "doubtful characters" in Russian literary history in general, has not been consistent...
...After so many years of intense effort and sacrifices, there is an overwhelming longing for privacy, and the rediscovery of sex is one aspect of this longing...
...Mikhail rubs her legs with alcohol...
...Mikhail, we are alone in the house," Tanya says...
...There has been one, and only one, discussion on basic issues in the Communist world during the past year...
...But, on the whole, the Soviet authorities are satisfied with the progress made by their movie industry, and there can be no doubt that there has been indeed a certain improvement...
...They did not know how to approach their subject...
...But she has also found supporters-which is rather more surprising...
...An Aristophanes would find these conditions difficult...
...They had poisoned the cattle in the villages, it was said, sabotaged trade and industry...
...There have been some interesting new phenomena, especially the emphasis on private lives and the "rediscovery" of love...
...Come to me...
...And this past July an edition of Crime and Punishment came out, the first in many years...
...But that it should be uttered at all indicates that not everyone is happy over some recent trends in Soviet culture...
...but since then there has been some improvement...
...If there has been a change for the better insofar as the subjects are concerned, there has been no such change with regard to approach and style...
...After all this, Yelena nevertheless emerges as a "positive hero" and it is not surprising that the author was violently attacked by the Komsomol newspaper for "glorifying moral corruption...
...And that's that...
...A Rumanian magazine thus characterized the positive hero of the postwar period in socialist realism: "He has penetrating eyes, flashing with lightning, he is husky, robust, with Herculean chest and muscles, he radiates strength and optimism...
...Soviet writers (with a few exceptions belonging to the older generation) had simply never written on love and sex...
...About half of this great volume (more than 800 pages) deals with Gorki, Gorki's pupils, and Lenin's influence on Russian literature...
...To be sure, there was always Maxim Gorki-but it is quite unthinkable that any Soviet novelist should write today as freely on the facts of life among the poor as did Gorky...
...Daniel Granin's Those Who Seek has been acclaimed as one of the best books of the past year...
...Mikhail holds the girl in his arms, kisses her lips, eyes and shoulders...
...On the face of it, the creation of such a magazine is a good sign, since it expresses an interest in what is being written outside Russia...
...His works were condemned as "decadent modernism," "lacking national spirit," "ugly," and so on...
...Viata Romineasca, March 1954) Soviet readers are used to putting up with a great deal, but the suppression of sex in literature was really too much for them...
...And he invites the writers of the whole world to comment on his proposal...
...It is still a far cry from the Soviet literature of the 1920s to the present relaxation from prudery...
...When expecting a child from her lover she has a road accident, another deus ex machina that eliminates a difficult dilemma...
...This sometimes ludicrous effort to appropriate as much as possible from the Russian literary heritage will probably have beneficial effects in the long run...
...For the pre-Revolutionary literary heritage, we have now a fairly accurate up-to-date yardstick of Soviet opinion...
...The warning is almost certainly superfluous...
...For there are new and significant features in the mainstream of Soviet literature...
...Again she sighed wistfully...
...I need you, I need you always, but I can't go on like this...
...Arecent issue of a Soviet literary monthly contained selections from the writings of Ivan Bunin, the only Russian ever to receive the Nobel Prize for literature...
...Nevertheless, its importance can be underrated...
...At the Writers Congress last winter, however, Veniamin Kaverin, a Soviet writer of the older generation, suggested a new performance of the play, and according to a recent report it is included among the repertoire of a leading Moscow theater...
...The article, originally prepared for Encounter, London cultural monthly, has been somewhat condensed in order that we might present it in a single issue...
...It is too early to find any coherent pattern of basic change in the Soviet literature of 1955...
...Both are too excited to sleep and the author prepares us for the worst...
...My parents are in the dacha...
...At last they retire to the flat of Tanya's parents, who are currently staying at their dacha outside the city...
...and there have been indeed no great surprises in the literary field since then...
...It has taken place not in Russia, but in China...
...There may be important new departures in the working habits or foreign policy of the Politburo, but these are responses to political exigencies...
...He felt the pain he caused her by his rebuff...
...Hu Feng and some of his friends met the Presidium of the Chinese Writers and Artists Union last winter and proposed their recommendations...
...Mikhail spends the rest of the night in an imaginary discussion with Tanya's father, a learned paleontologist, who argues that his daughter is too young to marry...
...Hu Feng also proposed that absolute Party control of literary journals and publishing houses should be abolished...
...The outstanding pictures of the Zhdanov period were "Lenin Speaks on the Third Congress of the Komsomol," "Stalin Visits the Battleship Molotov," "The Triumph of the Victorious Fatherland," "Lenin and Stalin in the Headquarters for the Defense of Petrograd...
...Hu Feng, a leading Chinese literary critic, became a member of the Communist youth organization in the Twenties, but did not remain politically active very long...
...The same issue carried what purported to be excerpts from 34 of his "letters" over the last twelve years, according to which he had always been an "enemy of the regime and the Chinese people, an agent of Chiang Kai-shek," etc...
...Her small breasts were clearly outlined under the blouse...
...Stalin and Zhdanov are quoted time and again as final arbiters...
...Only those will feel disillusioned who were deceived in the first place by the irresponsible jubilation with which many observers welcomed the "thaw...
...Yet both are "positive heroes" in the modern Soviet sense and there is not a single Communist in the whole play...
...3) that he must undergo ideological reform and "re-education...
...Can't you yourself see how sordid it all is?' Rita lay back on the bed and placed her hands behind her head...
...but a few daring spirits among them did publicly hint they would be ready to discuss some of the "safer" of these issues...
...The Soviet reader will tend to compare Soviet literary output of the present day with the great chain of literature from Pushkin to Chekhov and Gorki, and this is bound to raise questions in their minds...
...There are built-in limits to this process, however, and one can observe them by reading the recent official prescription on how to create a comedy...
...But what makes it so difficult to estimate its significance is the fact that the very same issue of Foreign Literature carries an article, written in the true Zhdanov spirit, by Mao Tun, headed "The views of Hu Feng on literature and the arts should be unmasked, consistently and in all fields...
...When attention is paid to love and sex, individuals become important-even the inner lives of individuals...
...The "five daggers" are the following prerequisites: (1) that the revolutionary writer must accept the Communist ideology...
...I am afraid for our love...
...It means that certain standards of creativity are preserved...
...After Stalin's death, Dostoyevsky reappeared in the form of The Village Stepantikovo and its Inhabitants, a minor but vivid novel...
...The major purpose of Soviet film comedy, one is given to understand, is to ridicule all that impedes the forward movement of society...
...He enjoyed considerable prestige, both as a critic and as the star pupil of the late Lu Hsun, the most revered writer in present-day China...
...There was no great, stirring controversy-instead, a most cautious attempt to get some discussion under way...
...Walter Z. Laqueur, for many years our chief correspondent in the Middle East, is also a veteran student of Russian and Soviet politics and history...
...This year the following outstanding pictures from the annual exhibition are reproduced in the Soviet magazines: "Holiday," "After Work" (girls bathing in a river), "The Farewell" (a young man and his girl take leave of each other on the platform of a railway station), and so on...
...There is no consolation either for Antonina in the same novel, who loves Yasha, a young rascal, and even has a child by him...
...But they did go ahead and print him, and the very appearance of an emigre writer in a leading Soviet magazine throws light on the state of mind of those now setting the direction of Soviet literature...
...He repels the allurements of the beautiful sex, is chaste up to the day of his marriage...
...And yet, it would be equally wrong to say that Soviet literary development in past months represented "no change" or "back to 1952...
...2) that he must "feel his way into" the life of workers, peasants and soldiers...
...James Aldridge, etc., and there was only one contributor (Archibald MacLeish) outside that well defined circle...
...and-most notorious of all-Artzybashev's Sanin (1907...
...The proceedings of the fifth session of the Academy of Arts, which was convened shortly after Stalin's death, still makes sad reading...
...No such external compulsions exist in the cultural field, and the present pattern may well continue for years...
...5) that he is bound to work on subjects that have been declared obligatory by the Party...
...The Second Writers Congress brought clashes between certain personalities (such as Sholokhov and Simonov) who may have represented literary cliques or literary trends, but there was no open conflict of ideas...
...The reaction to decades of collectivization of private life seems to be in full swing in the Soviet Union, and the literary stirrings are but a faint reflection of it...
...They are, in an indirect fashion but quite literally, "enemies of the regime...
...It should be stressed that their views have reached us only through their adversaries...
...The vision of a "ferment of ideas," of a basic change in the quality of Soviet life, need not necessarily be a fata morgana...
...This room your friends...
...There are encouraging signs but they do not add up to much...
...For more than fifteen years, Soviet novels, poems and plays had been centered on industrial and agricultural production: They described the Soviet citizen at his work...
...Formalism, naturalism, impressionism" are still considered deadly sins...
...He tried not to look at her unbuttoned blouse, at her long, finely-shaped legs...
...Take, for instance, the new novel by V. Ashayev, whose Far from Moscow was the big success of the postwar period...
...Let us examine some of these trends...
...did not at all argue the issues that really preoccupied them...
...Perhaps most typical of the fate of such literature is Mikhail Bulgakov's play, The Days of the Turbins, which is based on a novel by the same writer written back in 1924...
...For the last twenty years or so, The Days of the Turbins has not been performed, nor has its author (who died in 1936) been mentioned in the Soviet press...
...In 1955, a total of 60 new Soviet movies are scheduled to be shown...
...SOVIET LITERATURE TODAY By Walter Z. Laqueur Writers' gains since Stalin's death have been limited A year has passed since the last Congress of Soviet Writers, and not a few people are wondering what has become of the "thaw" (as Ilya Ehrenburg put it...
...The Soviet movie industry has now recovered from the acute crisis of 1950-2...
...With a radiant smile he lays Tanya in her bed like a small child...
...and he joined the Communist party in 1948 or 1949...
...And it is not Utopian to hope that these questions will be asked each year with an ever greater emphasis...
...By Soviet standards it is quite risque: "Rita moved toward him, but he drew away, demanding an answer...
...The leaders had to comply, or at least compromise, with this deep urge...
...As a result, one meets the following complaints in the Soviet press: Among the 60 feature-length films to be released in 1955, there is not one about working-class life...
...Hu Feng and his friends were extremely distressed by developments on the Chinese literary scene...
...This again makes them excited...
...Here and there, under the conditions of increasing pressure by hostile propaganda, the protagonists of bourgeois views exploit every possibility of revenge...
...In the long run, the rediscovery of love and sex in the Soviet Union in 1954-5 may well enter history as an event more important than the Geneva Conference...
...It is the tenth volume of the History of Russian Literature, published by the Academy of Sciences some months ago...
...Let bygones be bygones, he goes on to say...
...Yelena is a scientist who is married...
...In the end, the Turbin brothers do change sides: They have become convinced that, as Russian patriots, they have to support the Communists, not the various Ukrainian atamans, because only the former stand for Russian unity...
...In the years that followed, he continued to play a leading role in Shanghai left-wing literary circles...
...The Hu Feng affair was followed with great interest in the Soviet and satellite press, and Kuo Mo Jo's long, extremely tedious exposes were reprinted in installments...
...But what is perhaps most significant in this book is the attempt, by fair means and foul, to adopt all the major pre-Revolutionary realistic writers, regardless of their political orientation...
...Here we present his analysis of post-Stalin literature in the USSR, an account we consider one of the most balanced yet to appear on this subject...
...While Ashayev's and Lvova's novels had a mixed reception...
...Tanya loves Mikhail and the two walk for many hours through Moscow at night...
...The present relaxation may well constitute the absolute limit for years to come...
...The official school of Gerasimov, Johanson, Nalbandyan, et al...
...During the war, the scene shifted to the front, but this too was heavy work of a sort...
...she also has a lover...
...I do not want to do this to them...
...The Days of the Turbins (which, incidentally, includes a playing of God Save the Tsar) was a big success in Moscow in the late Twenties, but was soon forbidden...
...It should be stressed that Dostoyevsky or Bulgakov are "border-line" cases for the Communists...
...In the following days, 67 more "letters" were published, written allegedly by his sympathizers who were thus unmasked as "gangsters" and "saboteurs...
...These were not accepted...
...It was, however, given wide publicity in the Soviet Union and its European satellites, and clearly has more than local significance...
...For the last two years, there has been not a single good film about the struggle of the progressive-forces-of-world-peace against the warmongers...
...During the "thaw" of 1953-4, Soviet readers and writers reacted fairly sharply against that particular aspect of socialist realism, and this opposition has continued to this day...
...Hu Feng's deviation was officially condemned at a session of the Presidium executive early in February 1955...
...What are you afraid of in me...
...Yasha belongs to the "stifyagi," the Soviet jeunesse doree, who dress smartly, smell of eau de cologne, drink heavily, and prefer the fox-trot to the polka: "The polka is only for the nursery...
...To set about editing Tribuna properly...
...He was the spokesman for a group of young writers and critics, some of them Communists, others non-Party men, but all in favor of the present regime...
...The scene is the Ukraine in 1918...
...One need not be a Marxist to regard the present unsettled state of the Soviet arts as a reflection of the state of Soviet society in 1955...
...The Turbin brothers are officers in the White armies during the Civil War...
...The Second Soviet Writers Congress made it quite clear that there would be no quick and major changes...
...All of these are...
...for Bunin, after all, is the greatest of those writing in the classical tradition of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky...
...The People's Daily said: "Up to May 13 many people thought that Hu Feng's erroneous ideas had been of an ideological character...
...At the moment when she has to choose between lover and husband, she is spared by being transferred to some remote part of the Soviet Union...
...The change is perhaps above all marked in the different subjects chosen by the artists...
...The Soviet editors, in a short introduction, observed that Bunin had never understood the Communist revolution and that his political views and writings were unworthy of him...
...the press demands that this be cut by two-thirds...
...They contemplated ways and means of approaching Chou En-lai and the Central Committee of the Party, circumventing Kuo Mo Jo, who was opposed in principle to any relaxation or liberalization...
...Has the post-Stalin "ferment of ideas" continued, or has it slowly petered out...
...In future issues, we hope to return to the subject...
...But in that month Hu Feng, his friends, and some writers who had not even been his open sympathizers officially became "enemies of the people...
...People outside a totalitarian regime too easily forget that love and sex are "discouraged" there because they impede the atomization of society...
...Most writers have taken little notice, so far, of the changes in the official line and go on writing as they did a year ago-or fifteen years ago...
...the whole people is boiling with rage and demands that this gang of infamous imperialist traitors be punished...
...The situation is much the same in the other Soviet arts...
...Yelena, by K. Lvova, is probably the most discussed Soviet novel of the year...
...The first issue consisted mainly of articles by Communists and fellow-travelers, such as Anna Seghers, Roger Vaillant...
...and, further, there cannot be the slightest doubt that the books of the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century are some kind of an antidote to totalitarian ideology...
...but Iskusstvo, organ of the Soviet Artists Union, admitted at the same time that Soviet youth was showing a great and unhealthy interest in the work of Ersya...
...A whole chapter is dedicated to Bunin (but only ten lines to his many works after 1917, thereby omitting to mention some of his most important writings...
...But if one hopes that the vision will come true one day, there is no reason on the basis of the evidence available to place that day in the immediate future...
...He feels a burning choke in his throat...
...progressive" writers who accepted the Communist regime would be allowed to express their personal opinions in new and independent magazines, on condition that they had something "qualitatively valuable" to say...
...It is an event one should not underestimate...
...Last year, the pictures singled out for praise in the All-Union Exhibition were "Sasha the Tractorist," "Work on the Road," "Portrait of the Surgeon S. D. Popov," as well as half a dozen depicting the "Awakening Steppe" and the agricultural resettlement schemes in Soviet Asia...
...At about the same time, a violent press campaign was launched against Hu Feng and his literary friends...
...Recently he had worked without enthusiasm...
...The second issue, which has just reached us, is more interesting...
...That is the Hu Feng affair, more dramatically known as "The Case of the Five Daggers...
...Some of the exceedingly third-rate writers of the time who later became Communists are inflated out of all measure and made into leading literary figures...
...But then, Tanya suddenly gets a nettle rash...
...Gorki is described as a disciple of Lenin who occasionally strayed...
...They were convinced that absolute regimentation of thought under the direction of Kuo Mo Jo, the cultural commissar, was causing the ruin of Chinese literature...
...Sucharevitch, a literary critic writing in Literaturnaya Gazeta (August 13, 1955), asserted that Soviet literature had described all the spheres of human struggle and toil, but "however great an effort we make, we cannot remember any characters in love, with the possible exception of Grigori and Axinia from Sholokhov's Quiet Flows the Don and a very few others...
...Bunin left Russia in 1918 and died in France in 1954...
...People were in love, married, and begot children somehow, but these were mere trifles-a premium for hard work in many cases...
...Come, dear...
...Some of these movies are gently critical of some aspects of society, but most avoid anything even quasi-political like the plague...
...We have to increase our vigilance and prevent their attempts at sabotage...
...On May 13, the People's Daily of Peking published Hu Feng's recantation and self-criticism...
...went on to compete unsuccessfully with Soviet color photography...
...The whole Chinese people was seized by a wave of holy wrath," cabled the Peking correspondent of the Moscow Literary Gazette...
...But somehow or other, often with considerable ingenuity, the editors do succeed in laying claim to most of the important writers of the Russian and Soviet past...
...of course, utterly outside the Soviet pale from a political point of view...
...And yet Lyuba, the girl he loves, marries somebody else and there is no consolation for Andrei but work...
...Also republished were some of the minor writers of the 1870s and '80s, and the writings of some of the "reactionaries" of the '60s such as the Aksakov brothers...
...How ungrateful of you...
...It describes, among other things, the affair of Andrei Lobanov, an engineer, with Rita, a married woman...
...It was comparatively easy to ridicule the Stakhanovist-marries-shock-worker books of the last fifteen years, but it has been far more difficult to improve things...
...Only two deal with the efforts of the Soviet people to carry out the Party line in agriculture...
...The play was again permitted for a short time in the early Thirties, but was once more banned after about a year...
...Painting and sculpture were in a bad way even before Zhdanov came along, and the 1946 reforms just about finished off Soviet painting for the time being...
...There was no naturalist school in Russia in the late nineteenth century which could have suggested to Soviet writers that a frank discussion of sex could be connected with "progressive" politics...
...Up to May 1955, "Hu Fengism" was a venial, not a mortal sin...
...Unfortunately, this very way of putting the question is misleading...
...The crisis of 1950-2 was the direct outcome of the Zhdanovchina in the field of movies...
...As for party affiliations, it seems generally that the Soviet editors prefer sympathizers of bourgeois parties to Social Revolutionaries, and SRs to Mensheviks...
...The volume of the History is full of crying injustices and distortions...
...After 1946 such publication ceased, and the literary critics again attacked the reactionary and confused character" of Dostoyevsky's writings...
...There was also an additional difficulty: Russian classical literature on the whole lacks any tradition of writing about physical love...
...Andrei, in Yelena Katerli's Long Road, is a nice chap, a good Communist, a competent editor of the local newspaper...
...The highlight is a letter to the editors, signed by Mikhail Sholokhov, stressing that the Soviet Government has always stood for international cultural collaboration...
...Addressing movie directors this summer, one official spokesman thought it necessary to advise them that "work does not fill up the life of the people...
...What actually was going on during 1953-4...
...Now this is a very heartening symptom...
...The average Soviet film takes eleven months to make, the major films of 1954-5 took up to two years...
...Most of the great Russian writers are thus saved for Communist posterity...
...The implication of the case for Soviet Europe is, therefore, that however much the Party may relax its reins over culture, there are fixed limits that may not be transgressed...
...Mikhail is up to the situation...
...The new journal should publish "everything that is talented, that helps people to live a life worthy of human beings...
...They did not realize that it was a thoroughly counter-revolutionary conception...
...not a single major Soviet writer who fell victim to the big purges (e.g., Pilnyak or Babel) has been posthumously rehabilitated...
...In a sense, Bunin is nearer to socialist realism than Gorki, especially the early impressionist and violent Gorki...
...Jean-Paul Sartre...
...In the summer of 1954, they formulated what has now become known as the theory of the "five daggers" that threaten Chinese culture...
...so is any form of modernism...
...The same vacillations can be noted vis-a-vis writers and books of the earlier periods of Soviet literature...
...There was a similar magazine, International Literature, which came to an unlamented end during the early years of the Second World War...
...The heroes of the Soviet comedy must be genuine heroes, for these pieces have not only to attack the "remnants of the past" but also poetically to describe the new and progressive in Soviet society...
...And so the Soviet writers move quite awkwardly, like people who have not seen the sun for a long time and have to get accustomed to the light...
...Anna Karenina is a novel about adultery, to be sure, but intimacies are only seldom described, and anything pertaining to the physical act is never mentioned...
...But it may be interesting to note that the few transgressors from socialist realism have been quite popular-particularly the sculptor Stepan Ersya, a Ukrainian and a former emigrant who returned to the Soviet Union only in the early Fifties...
...Love and sex have been "rediscovered" in the Soviet Union...
...Their first steps in the new direction were very unsteady and frequently slightly comic...
...During the Second World War, novels by Dostoyevsky and Leskov were freely published...
...Since 1954 most of the published novels prominently feature a love story, side by side with the familiar production angle: Some even enthusiastically describe two, three or more love stories...
...Broadly speaking, it can be said that more cultural latitude is given to the publishing houses whenever a more liberal political line prevails, as in 1934-5 and 1942-5...
...A big, exquisitely produced volume, it deals with the period most interesting in this context: 1890-1917...
...In July 1955 the first issue of another new monthly appeared, Inostrannaya Literatura?Foreign Literature...
...The "after work," privacy theme has emerged at last, paralleling the trend in Soviet writing...
...Somehow it has been realized that, with Stalin's death, an epoch has come to an end, but it is not yet at all clear what the new era will be like and whether it will be so very different from the old...
...Usually, one can also find in his lifetime some mild protest against the powers-that-be, which can now be cited as an indication of how the spirit of progress permeated that particular writer...
...Mayakovsky owes his place in this history to a chance remark by Stalin, while Plekhanov survives-despite his unsavory political record from the Communist point of view-because he received a good notice in Zhdanov's famous speech in 1946...
...The book ends: "As Andrei walked along the street he thought about the things he had to do...
...Typical of satellite comment is the following by Jerzy Putrament, a Polish theoretician: "It is interesting to observe that some of Hu Feng's reactionary theories have been in currency in a somewhat different form in our country, too...
...Scientists, men of letters, etc...
...In 1951, the worst year, exactly nine films were released, in comparison with more than 150 back in 1935...
...A few weeks later a "White Book" was published in more than a million copies, and the campaign to weed out "Hu Fengists" was in full swing...
...A change came only after the turn of the century, when various modernist schools spread in Russia, and the first "discovery of sex" in Russian literature coincided with the prevalence of decadent trends: Mikhail Kuzmin, Anastasia Verbitzkaya...
...It is a good sign, however, that new writers are appearing on the literary scene and that two new monthly magazines had to be started this year to find space for the newcomers...
...the last issue was dull...
...If the writer in question was an incorrigible individualist, he can now be safely described as a "great Russian patriot...
...After 1953 there was some relaxation, and scenario writers took out of their trunks (as they openly admitted) all kinds of scenarios written over the last twenty years...
...4) that he is obliged to give his works a form prescribed by the Party...
...But virtue is not always rewarded in recent Soviet novels...
...And Grigori, horribile dictu, was a "White Guard...
...In the end Andrei finds the inner strength to put an end to that sordid affair and virtue is suitably rewarded by the author...
Vol. 38 • November 1955 • No. 47
