The Revolt of the Moscow Writers
GIBIAN, GEORGE
The Revolt of the Moscow Writers By George Gibian In 1946 Leningrad was the vanguard of insubordination in Soviet literature. Andrei Zhdanov, in his pronouncements on deviations in art and...
...A group of Party members on a collective farm complain bitterly about people at the Party district office, their handling of the Communists on the grassroots level, their failure to understand the farmers' difficulties...
...Kazakevich, in a speech, and also M. Aliger and A. Bek, whose letters were read at the meeting, accepted the just criticism of errors committed by the editorial board of Literary Moscow and gave assurance that they will correct their errors through further work...
...In 1956 and 1957, however, the writers and editors of Moscow have rebelled, in the two volumes of a miscellany, Literary Moscow, and elsewhere.They have been most bitterly attacked by the watchdogs of the Communist party...
...The third painter portrays the ruler in profile, with one eagle's eye and one arm holding firmly a shield, so that one cannot see that there is no eye and no arm on the other side...
...Where the taste of one man becomes incontrovertible, a leveling down and a crude interference in the artistic process, a harmful tutelage which traumatizes talent but fully sets up craftsmen, are inevitable...
...And the innovator—in whatever era he lives—always outstrips the perceptions of his contemporaries in something and is not always immediately understood...
...She found herself persecuted and in 1941, Ehrenburg says laconically, "she ended her life by suicide...
...In fact, the material side of the evils they criticize seems to interest them far less than the intangible side...
...His hurried return to the safety of his office is a flight from reality back to the reassuring cliches of a Party career shielded from the harsh facts of real life...
...They were urged to stand up and recant...
...the nefarious effect Party life has on individuals, frightening some ("The Khazar Ornament"), metamorphosing others into mere tools...
...In his essay, "Notes of a Writer," he analyzes the consequences of Stalinism in depth...
...Even the cultish deification of the People with a large P has its reverse side—it lowers the individual man...
...Sergei Mikhalkov, playwright, author of fables, and favorite children's author, prints a versified version of a joke which has been circulating in various forms throughout the Soviet bloc, a comment on "socialist realism" with its obligatory untruths...
...Boris Pasternak, the difficult, modern, outstanding Russian poet whose lyrical poetry has often been repudiated by Soviet authorities, was also represented in the collection, but only by an article on his experience in translating Shakespeare's tragedies...
...The anthology also prints nine poems from various periods of her life, the latest from 1933...
...But the other hunter is a more significant character...
...Kaverin's image of Soviet science and technology is indeed unflattering...
...a fable...
...Yet, whatever the future brings, the writers' stand has already shown how deep- is Russia's thirst for truthfulness and human dignity...
...Literary Moscow (Literaturnaya Moskva) belongs to the crop of new anthologies which, together with several new magazines, have been promoted since the death of Stalin...
...Gibian is assistant professor of Russian and English literature at Smith College...
...he is chased away in disgrace as a patent lahirshchik, varnisher of reality...
...Ominous, however, was the July 23 Literary Gazette editorial linking the writers with the "anti-Party group of Malenkov, Kaganovich...
...The demand for them lo speak was clearly a demand for apology and disavowal of the heretical writings...
...Nagibin is calling attention to one product of the Soviet system hitherto unsung by its literature— although no doubt more typical than the smiling, tractor-driving heroes of the posters—the broken man winning his peace through yielding to his tright...
...The fantastic picture of life in the backward territory resembles a 19th-century Russian satire...
...Zhdanov's "Return Home" deals with the contrast between a Communist leader's view of life seen from his office and the conditions on a collective farm...
...Liberalization in Soviet writing and art strengthened steadily from the December 1954 Congress of the Writers' Union through Khrushchev's "secret speech" about Stalin at the 20th Party Congress in February 1956 to the publication of Vladimir Dudintsev's novel, Not by Bread Alone, in three installments in August, September and October 1956...
...The anthology was collected and edited while discontented writers felt most encouraged to speak openly...
...When the Party permitted a liberalization in literature, it presumably aimed at promoting writing critical of bureaucratic abuses, exerting a corrective effect on industrial and technological conditions...
...There were some poems by Margarita Aliger and Leonid Martynov—a young poet in vogue with the younger, somewhat modernistically inclined intellectuals of Russia—remarkable for their unabashed lyricism, absence of social involvement, technical expertise, and some bold linguistic devices...
...The editorial attacked Shepilov for a " 'streamlined' and unprincipled attitude toward clearly unhealthy phenomena," Kaganovich for "demagogically accusing good Ukrainian poets of nationalism," and Malenkov for "vulgarizing statements about the typical...
...A report about the May meeting was read, accusing Kaverin of being "impatient of criticism," and the editorial board of Literary Moscow of persevering in their errors...
...Kron's "Notes of a Writer" were accused of improperly suggesting that the Party leadership and the Government were the main causes of the difficulties of the Russian theater...
...They attack the villainy of powerful men entrenched in positions of power, abusing them for personal aims...
...The story may be partly redeemed, for a Soviet critic, by the fact that one of the hunters turns out to be the new Party secretary in disguise, who has resourcefully used this ruse in order to find out the truth about the region and who presumably will reform things in the future...
...This meeting of the plenum was very different from the relatively free-wheeling debates of the Writers' Union congress in December 1954, the discussions of Dudintsev's novel in October and in December 1956, at which his supporters dared to stand up and defend him, or the March 1957 meeting of the Moscow branch of the Writers' Union [see " 'Disturbances' Among Soviet Writers," NL, May 20], The reports of the May meeting of the plenum read more like the proceedings of a Star Chamber arraigning a culprit than a free deliberation...
...The meetihg is justifiably awaiting speeches by those writers [the novelist Vera Panova among them] clarifying their position in relation to the results of the third plenum...
...he visits the village where she lived and is overwhelmed by the poverty of the farmers, their just complaints, and his inability to defend the city-based bureaucracy's mistreatment of the farmers...
...The report also attacked "ideological wavering" and "straggling," and affirmed that "after the not-yet-liquidated danger of varnishing and lack of conflict, there arises the danger of one-sided negative representation of reality...
...Its editorial board, which has since come under devastating attack, consisted of nine writers, including the novelist Venyamin Kaverin, the poetess Margarita Aliger, Emilyan Kazake-vich, A. Bek and V. Tendryakov...
...He makes fun of all the titled aristocrats of Soviet art—the poets laureate, meritorious artists, national artists, national artists of constituent republics—and compares them with the Tsarist proliferations of honors and titles satirized by Chekhov...
...Kron is the only contributor who made his critical comments in broad ideological terms...
...Original and valuable as they are, the first reaction to them is one of pleased acknowledgement of tangible evidence that Olesha is alive and being published again...
...The recalcitrant writers and editors were charged with helping the West, which was alleged to be reaching out to them "a friendly hand with poison in it...
...Kaverin, in a section of a novel, Searches and Hopes, follows the tribulations of a woman biologist in her efforts to develop a Soviet process for the manufacture of penicillin...
...It is surrounded by swamps and forests, has almost no contact with the outside world, and ignores laws and regulations of Soviet life...
...They would not...
...On June 11, at a general meeting of the writers of Moscow, the editors capitulated...
...She succeeds in the end, but not before she has been obstructed by many powerful officials, her husband has been condemned to forced labor on trumped up charges, and she and the reader have had their eyes opened to the travesties on justice perpetrated by bureaucrats...
...Years have gone by since such a firm defense of freedom was heard in public in Russia...
...Yashin's Party abuses individuals, treats them impersonally, bosses them, and, like the authorities in Zhdanov's story, has little information about or interest in their problems...
...by an equally innocent story about the painting of Tolstoy's portrait by the great painter Kramskoy...
...Nagibin's second story in the anthology, "Light in the Window," does in the form of fiction what Kron does in his essay—probe the consequences of what is euphemistically designated as the "'cult of personality...
...In May 1957, at a plenary meeting of the board of the Writers' Union, a report of the secretariat emphasized at length the beneficial role of the Party in all aspects of life, especially in literature...
...A footnote announces a forthcoming one-volume edition of her work...
...Kron summed it up in the phrase: "One cannot look ahead when one's head is bowed down...
...Most inhabitants support themselves by year-round hunting and fishing...
...Otherwise the anthology was hardly outstanding...
...According to the date listed in it, the type-setting was begun on October 1, 1956, and the printing on November 26...
...He defended works published in' the second volume...
...Taken as a group, the eight or nine iconoclastic works in Literary Moscow, Vol...
...Moldtov and Shepilov," which it accused of '"confused and false directives about the theory and practice of literature...
...it was sold early in 1957...
...The Moscow writers bad the courage to remain silent...
...Yet, significantly, it admits a boycott took place...
...They are crying out against a spiritual degradation...
...it was received on the whole favorably by the Soviet press...
...The last year has seen the emergence of literary opposition in the Soviet Union...
...the "thaw" was being overcome by a returning frost...
...The mood of the highest authorities changed...
...Two stories by Nagibin deal with related themes...
...The official answer to the courageous rebels of Literary Moscow came soon...
...Some resistance was still offered...
...The confessional thus thrust on deviating writers could no longer be avoided...
...A Soviet Army officer who traveled in the same compartment with me on a train between Odessa and Kiev in 1956 passed my copy of Literary Moscow to everybody within reach with the whispered comment: "They are printing Akhmatova...
...Meanwhile, nobody is allowed to enter the rooms...
...The conflict between the pre-Soviet and the new man was presented in it in so skilful a manner that Soviet critics at first believed it an attack on the decadent past...
...Yashin leaves no doubt about where his sympathies lie...
...Most daring of all the works in the collection are those of A. Kron, Ven-yamin Kaverin, Yuri Nagibin, Alexander Yashin and Nikolai Zhdanov...
...the Party and governmental authorities' ignorance of their subjects' lives...
...Its first volume, 827 pages long, contained a novel, a play, poems, stories, memoirs and sketches by 39 authors of various ages and reputations, and appeared in the summer of 1956...
...A. Yashin acted a^ if even by this time he could not be certain what was wrong with 'Levfers.' " Serious threats were made...
...To the general public, if not to the initiated, her re-emergence in print was shocking...
...A chapter of the breakthrough of freedom in Soviet literature is closing...
...Even in scholarship, he chose an area infinitely removed from actual life: He studied ancient Khazar ornaments...
...Literary Moscow printed extracts from his "Literary Diaries"—little sketches, notes, thoughts on literature, recollections and portraits of various authors...
...A successful official learns that his mother has died in the country...
...the resulting gulf between rulers and ruled...
...They are sensitive, lyrical, subjective, quite the contrary of the usual "socialist realism...
...While it was being printed, the Hungarian Revolution took place...
...According to the Literary Gazette, Kazakevich in a last-ditch stand "spoke extremely one-sidedly about the work of the editorial board of Literary Moscow...
...He shows himself to be a vigorous advocate of freedom and enemy of authoritarianism: "Where cult is present, scientific thought must give way to blind faith, creativity to dogma, public opinion to caprice...
...One symbolic rehabilitation is Ilya Ehrenburg's eulogistic essay on Marina Tsvetayeva, a poetess who emigrated from Russia in 1922 and returned to Moscow in 1939...
...Dudintsev and other writers were attacked, but before the turn of the year still felt it possible to defend their work...
...the main culprits among the editors, not the contributors, have been forced to recant...
...the poverty of goods pains them less than the poverty of spirit...
...Yet when they constitute themselves into a Party meeting, the same men immediately change and actually do become mere tools: They repeat what they had been told to say by the district headquarters, losing the genuine humanity they had shown in their earlier, informal session...
...Nagibin applauds the trivial but symbolic revolution against the privileges of the new Soviet ruling class...
...The other rehabilitee is still alive —Yuri Olesha, who came into disfavor by his short novel, Envy, published in 1927 and considered by many the best of all Soviet novels...
...Yashin's story was included on a list of examples of had works—those which "showed shady sides of life but were unable to reveal the activity of the masses and hence gave a one-sided representation of reality," failed to show that "the new in our society is gaining a victory over the old, the progressive over the backward...
...Early in June, a joint meeting was held of the Moscow writers' Party organization and the board of the Writers' Union...
...As at the earlier meeting in Moscow, "many important writers-simply did not honor our meeting with their presence...
...and a novel and several short stories...
...an essay in literary criticism...
...The writers went far beyond that aim...
...The cult is incompatible with criticism...
...In the best Russian tradition of Krylov, Mikhalkov resorts to allegory to make his comment on the fate of artists under a "khanist" regime...
...He has written on Soviet literature for the JVew Republic as well as academic journals, and is now preparing « study of that literature since 1953...
...The leader was the servant of the People, but when millions of masters arose at the mere mention of the servant's name, there was in it something alien to those democratic traditions in which we were brought up by the Revolution and the Soviet social order...
...Condemnation of the "rotten skepticism'' in literature, exemplified by Not by Bread Alone and Yashin's story, was demanded...
...Only minor improvements take place at the end of the book...
...It took them several months to realize the shoe was on the other foot...
...The rebellious writers were accused of "cheap demagoguery," of supplying ammunition to Soviet enemies, of being a "splinter group," of secretly holding to a political platform "not in agreement with the policy' of the Party in the area of literature," In the following few weeks, similar meetings of writers were held in Leningrad, Rostov and many other cities...
...As soon as the Party meeting is over, they drop the Party roles and begin complaining again...
...The Literary Gazette reports: "E...
...Where one man owns the truth uncontrolled, artists are relegated to the modest role of illustrators and ode-singers...
...Yashin reverses the stereotypes of the Soviet dogma according to which the Party uplifts people and guides them wisely in their personal and collective affairs...
...Heroic writing, succeeded by heroic silence, seems to have been overcome, although there is still some slight hope in the fact that Alexander Yashin, Vladimir Dudintsev and others have not yet publicly surrendered, as far as is known at this time...
...The first paints him with both eyes and both arms...
...The clever evader, who is rewarded by decorations, fame and money, Mikhalkov implies, is the successful artist of Soviet Russia—the type of a Kon-stantin Simonov—feathering his bed by politic shutting of his eyes to the seamy side of things...
...the healthiest criticism is easily twisted into a heresy...
...The director then realizes that the welfare of simple people should not be sacrificed to their superiors...
...The poem, "Three Portraits," tells of a great khan who has only one eye and one arm and orders three artists to paint his portrait...
...Under those conditions, not to be understood means to be condemned...
...In one, two hunters arrive in a region of Russia which seems to have been by-passed by both the 20th century and the Soviet system...
...Andrei Zhdanov, in his pronouncements on deviations in art and writing, at that time picked out the lyric poet Anna Akhmatova, the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko and the Leningrad journal Zvezda as the chief offenders...
...The dates are important, for a great deal happened between the period of preparation and that of sale...
...II, was so much more provocative than the first volume that it is already assured a place in the history of Russian literature...
...there is no obligatory happy end...
...A newspaper account says that Leningrad writers repudiated" "the notorious "heroism of silence' " of the Moscow authors...
...The anthology, an attack on Stalinism which seeped down through the various strata of Soviet life, is also proof of a renascence of humanism —a plea for conditions of life in which powerful officials would not be worshipped and supplied with special wings of rest homes, in which people would be human beings, not slaves, frightened scholars, or ostrich-like officials...
...The contents of this first volume were only mildly upsetting...
...Olesha made courageous speeches in 1932 and 1934 in defense of the writer's integrity, and was silenced...
...lengthy counter-arguments were advanced...
...He does not dare to criticize or listen to criticism: "He was a man once and for all frightened...
...The second one paints the khan as he is...
...The editors were perhaps holding their fire until the second volume...
...Here George Gibian, who visited and spoke with Moscow writers last spring, brings their story up to date...
...A shift toward renewed strict controls over all spheres of culture was taking place gradually...
...It contains, besides conventional Soviet writing, the following unusual material: two "rehabilitations," one posthumous, the other pre-sepulchral...
...The Party secretaries supposedly in charge of the region have all failed to do anything about the situation...
...His one pronounced characteristic is fear...
...This refusal was criticized as a deplorable attempt at the "heroism of silence...
...Moreover, by assuming the role of Party members, the men descend to the low level of parrots lacking thought and initiative...
...He equips it with a billiard table and TV set, orders a cleaning woman to look after it, locks it up and settles down to a long wait...
...They dislike being treated like "levers," mere tools of the Party officials one step higher...
...In the speech of E. Kazakc-vich there was no sign of a wish to admit honestly the errors committed...
...The pattern was to explain to local authors the new "atmosphere of unanimity, the desire to insure a consolidation of all forces of Soviet literature on the basis of Party principle...
...The cult gives birth to a hierarchy of servants of the cult—the deity must have worshippers and obsequiousness...
...It was this volume which was to provoke fierce attacks and which helped to give the writers of Moscow the reputation of being the most daring and rebellious of the whole Soviet Union...
...His concluding sentence describes the farmers who reassumed their plain selves: "Again they were pure, cordial, direct people, people, not levers...
...the khan becomes enraged, accuses him of emphasizing his deficiencies to the joy of all enemies, and the "naturalist" perishes...
...There were two poems by Anna Akhmatova, one of her first appearances in print since Zhdanov attacked her...
...Literary Moscow, Vol...
...The repressions which followed are still remembered in Leningrad, today comparatively docile...
...Although at this point the repressors appear to have the upper hand, the interval of literary courage tells us much about the Russian people...
...The main villain happens to die, but he had been in power and generally honored up to his death and countless others remain in the saddle...
...the social system which has made all these conditions possible...
...II represent a comprehensive indictment of Soviet life...
...The head of a rest home sets apart a suite of rooms just in case "an important personage" from a ministry should some day visit his establishment...
...Finally, the cleaning woman rebels and ensconces herself in the special quarters without permission...
...The high official does not come...
...The story is entitled "Khazar Ornament," underlining the significance of this detail...
...Viktor Shklovsky, another famous "formalist," was represented In the spring of 1955, the revolutions to come in Poland and Hungary were foreshadowed by a revolt of Communist writers against Party dictation...
...Artistic creativity is inseparable from social initiative, from innovating experiments...
...An equally bold exposure of country life is Alexander Yashin's "Levers...
Vol. 40 • August 1957 • No. 34
