The Soviet Blunder With Pasternak
GEORCECIBIAN
C?rt?tma? Pook* The Soviet Blunder With Pasternak mH E Soviet mishandling of the 1 Nobel Prize award to Boris Pasternak seems such an egregious misjudgment of world opinion that one would...
...Professor of history, Harvard...
...Its publication even at the height of the "interval of freedom," in 1956, appears unthinkable...
...G. Bernard Noble, chief of the Historical Division of the Department of State, permits me to say that his stalf has examined the volumes, giving special attention to the correspondence exchanged before and during the Cairo, Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam Conferences...
...Noble points out, but these are understandable enough and affect phraseology rather than meaning...
...Leader...
...Why did they act like that...
...Soviet discussions of literature have lately been full of references to books which might serve as protivovesy, counterpoises, to the nauseatingly and repetitiously discussed negative prototypes...
...He is an unimportant tool of Western propaganda...
...A special issue of a Yugoslav magazine, distributed in 1957 in the Soviet Union in a Russian version, was particularly strongly attacked for its "openly revisionistic and modernistic positions...
...An earlier work by Kochetov...
...And this volume finally makes available the full texts of the two extraordinary messages Roosevelt sent to Stalin a few davs before his death in 1945...
...In the following characteristic definition of the Soviet artist's official role, the chain of mixed images illustrates how Russian authors are being urged to think of their function in society : "Our Academy of the Arts is the command post of our art, a faithful helper to the Party, the storasre battery of the will of the nation.' Symptomatic of the new line are also the pathetic recantations and confessions of error forced out of Margarita Aliger, Alexander Yashin and others, as well as the "anti-rehabilitation" campaign being waged against praise of the work of such post-1954 resurectees as Marina The Neu...
...Roosevelt, affable, optimistic, resolute...
...On a .number of points—• on the acceptance of the Soviet conquest of the Baltic States, on the Polish frontiers, on the transfer of Western support to Tito in Yugoslavia, on the acknowledgement of primary Russian interests in Eastera Europe—it was Churchill who took the lead in trying to meet Stalin's wishes and it wras Roosevelt who hung back...
...He makes in it numerous fundamentally anti-officialline statements, not in the name of a fictional Zhivago, but in his own person...
...while at the same time warning against excessive liberties...
...which endorsed socialist realism as the permissible literary method...
...2, which was collected and approved for publication before the Hungarian revolt, but appeared for sale in the changed conditions after the revolt...
...Dutton...
...The important task was held to be an unequivooal demonstration to the writers that the lid had been put back on again and that service of literature to Party goals was to be taken strictly...
...The messages from Roosevelt and Churchill appear, they say, "in their original wording" except for a few documents available to the editors only in Russian translation...
...but a great many of the messages have never been printed verbatim before, and the work provides for the first time a play-by-play account of the rise and fall of the Grand Alliance...
...Authoritative and typical is the article of Y. Eisberg, a prolific, trustworthy Party servant, in the Party's theoretical organ, Kommunist (Nov...
...The thoughts of Soviet literary officials were concentrated on preparations for the Third Writers' Congress, to be held in Moscow in December...
...He can do anything he likes...
...Selected to serve as deterrent examples are, of course, Vladimir Dudintsev, Yashin, Aliger, etc...
...Since then, the mamsigns of free creativity which had been jubilantly received in Russia as well as abroad have been attacked as "revisionism...
...The Nobel Prize, however, forced the authorities to take some public stand...
...firm line...
...Doctor Zhivago outdoes all the dissident, ".negative" Soviet works of 1954-56 in its fundamental onslaught on the Bolshevik program as well as fulfillment...
...Surprising is not its suppression in Russia so much as the publication of some of the poems from it in 1954 and the apparent intention at that time to publish it...
...Doctor Zhivago became a threat just as the liberal interpretation of de-Stalinization was being consigned to the dustbin...
...Failure to cope with Pasternak would have been inconsistent with the severity of the Party line on literature on the eve of the Third Writers' Congress...
...To demonstrate the falsity of what is being said By George Gibian Assistant professor of Russian...
...7.50...
...Eisberg goes through all the links of the usual chain of arguments: The task of literature is to "inspire the people toward new progress in building Commun ism": the writer must be close to the people and know7 the people's life...
...Leader Tsvetaeva, Ivan Kataev and Yuri Olesha...
...Hence, Soviet life appears in proper works with a Party-guided cheerfulness and positiveness...
...3. Most recently, an equally clear ly designated group of positive examples has been set up...
...The reasons for the choice of The Yershov Brothers as a model of the "positive" and approved school become clear in Elsberg's analysis of the novel...
...On the basis of this check," Dr...
...heralded the "thaw...
...which sounds as if it was intended to strike the keynote for the coining Third Writers' Congress...
...The first explanation is that the authorities decided to ignore any unfavorable consequences abroad and addressed themselves solely to the domestic repercussions of the Nobel Prize incident...
...the policy of the Communist party expresses the deepest interests of the people...
...Youth Is On Our Side, met with favor at the February 1958 meeting of the plenum of the Writers' Union, which called the general meeting for December...
...iho second, in 1954...
...They now view the period from 1954 through the fall of 1956 as an era when culture almost went out of control...
...It is, of course, a remarkable and stirring story...
...All through 1958, Soviet authorities have been consolidating a .new...
...So far as one can tell, the editorial work is scrupulous and on a high technical level...
...The problem of what to do about Pasternak became acute at this most inopportune moment...
...Next: "Never before was the life of the nation sso full of principle, so fully saturated intellectually, so aware, so manysided...
...2, the poems of Margarita Aliger and Semyon Kirshon, and the stories of Ale'•:ander Yashin...
...A similar problem in timing played a part in the violent reaction to Literary Moscow, Vol...
...the martyrology of Russian literature has grown by one chapter to sadden, yet also to inspire, those men in Russia who openly or secretly thirst after literature less "saturated" by official cheerfulness and less guided by the Party's "infallible compass...
...The Hungarian Revolt was the danger signal...
...The consequences are that the whole world has been aroused by the brutal onslaught of a monolithic state against one brave writer...
...Pasternak's autobiography, recently published in France, may be as harmful to him m the eyes of the Party as his novel...
...Instead, the Soviet authorities preserved complete silence for a couple of days and then opened a series of barrages against Pasternak which served to draw the whole world's attention to the brave novelist's fate and proved once more how risky and circumscribed the life of a Soviet author really is...
...But these variations do not affect the substance of the publication...
...THIS fascinating work was published a year ago in Moscow...
...The Third Congress, from all indications, is to drive the final nail into the coffins of such works as Not By Bread Alone...
...No measures will be taken against him...
...Future developments will show whether the course they have chosen does not bring on them domestic difficulties as well as opprobrium abroad...
...A myth has grown up in which the wily Stalin is depicted beguiling the trusting Roosevelt into "giving away'" essential Western positions, while the far-seeing Churchill plucks vainly at the President's sleeves and tries to com municate his knowledge of the wickedness of Soviet intentions...
...But to say this is merely to restate the question: Why did the domestic consequences seem so important to them that they eclipsed the consideration of Soviet reputation abroad...
...What is and what is not per missible in the arts is being made clear to Russian intellectuals in three main ways: 1. Doctrinal underpinnings are being strengthened...
...Khrushchev's speeches on art and literature in the Spring of 1957 recalled the artists to their duty of toeing the Party line...
...It was possible (although difficult) to give it the silent or at least the quiet treatment for a while, for in Russia, we must remember, Pasternak is very well known as a poet to literary intellectuals (many of whom learned by heart his poems "written for the drawer" and circulated in manuscript), but to the general public only as a translator of Shakespeare...
...In an ess3y entitled "The Writer and the Life of the Natio,n...
...Stalin, blunt, gruff, suspicious, but not incapable of the generous gesture...
...The reasons for the decision to deal with Pasternak loudly and ruthlessly were cogent...
...It contains, its unidentified editors state in the foreword, "the full texts of all the documents available in the Soviet Union" of Stalin's correspondence with the British and American leaders from 1941 to 1945...
...Obviously, the Soviet editors could hope to gain little by putting out a dishonest version of the correspondence...
...Similarly, they have retranslated Stalin's messages, apparently unaware of the fact that the United States Government accepted as official the translations provided by the Soviet Embassy in Washington...
...the documents are available in American and British archives, and exposure would be inevitable...
...They would have been buying foreign good will at the price of some domestic confusion, but the Party officials are usually quite capable of dealing with uncertainty at home...
...Noble says, "our tentative conclusion is that the editors have done a complete and honest job...
...The personalities of the three towering figures come vividly through the cables: Churchill, romantic, proud, magnanimous...
...One sees the initial concentration on military questions, then the emergence (much earlier in the Stalin-Churchill than in the Stalin-Roosevelt correspondence) of political themes, until finally politics rises to crescendo and drowns everything else out...
...As these messages amply prove, it was all a good deal more complicated than that...
...He discusses a number of Soviet writers who committed suicide, ridicules Stalin's famous slogan that life in Russia had become "better and more cheerful," and takes his stand on an artistic creed antithetical to the Party's view of the artist's role: "I did not understand [Mayakovsky's] propagandist's zeal, the forcible integration of himself and his comrades in social consciousness, this comradeship, this cooperative spirit, this submission to the voice of actuality...
...Most usefully, perhaps, this publication furnishes a refutation of the simplistic theories of the wartime relations between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies...
...Literary Moscow Vol...
...2. Examples of the bad, rejected kinds of writing are identified...
...The first question in many minds will be that of the authenticity of the publication...
...these have been retranslated into English...
...Smith Col 'r?c abroad about the enslavement of Soviet writers, however, we wish it to be known that Pasternak is free to go to Stockholm to receive the prize and then either to return to Russia or to remain abroad, just as he wishes...
...Now the habitually anti-Soviet Swedish committee has awarded Pasternak the Nobel Prize, another act of provocation...
...the Soviet public has been alerted to the existDecemher S, 195P, ence of the provocative novel...
...Pook* The Soviet Blunder With Pasternak mH E Soviet mishandling of the 1 Nobel Prize award to Boris Pasternak seems such an egregious misjudgment of world opinion that one would expect heads to toll in the Moscow propaganda offices, replacements of top officials to be u,nder way in the Union of Writers, and hasty efforts being made to salvage some reputation by a rapid change of line...
...As for the text itself, it contains no great revelations...
...From Pearl Harbor to Potsdam Stalin's Correspondence with Churchill, Roosevelt and Truman, 1941-45...
...author, "The Age of Jackson," "The Crisis of the Old Order" of the hopes of postwar collaboration under the hammerjblows of the Russian determination to miss no opportunity to advance Communism...
...It seems to me that by treating Pasternak with a show of magnanimity, the authorities might have stood to gain more than they would have been risking to lose...
...The first Congress was a relatively freewheeling discussion in 1934...
...How much more effective a coup it would have been, then, if the day after the long-expected announcement that the Nobel Prize had been given to Pasternak, Moscow had issued a statement reading in some such way as this: "Boris Pasternak is an excellent translator, a decadent, minor poet of the worst pre-1917 kind, and the author of a slanderous, anti-Soviet novel which he helped to smuggle abroad, against the best interests of his country...
...The mere fact that Pasternak had written Doctor Zhivago and published it abroad (although not within Russia) had been taken by some Western observers (for example, the reviewer in the London Times Literary Supplement) as an indication that the lack of artistic freedom in Russia had been greatly exaggerated...
...Certain textual discrepancies remain, Dr...
...The decision was taken—the guns opened fire on Pasternak...
...One sees, too, the breakdown Reviewed by Arthur Schlesinger Jr...
...His movements are of no interest to us...
...On the other hand, the hostile tendencies are defined by Eisberg as pessimism, subjectivism, naturalism, and imitation of Western decadent modernism...
...The blow to Soviet prestige abroad is great...
...To answer this question, we have to take a look at the literary situation in Russia—what was looming on the horizon as well as what was happening immediately before the events of October and November...
...He praises the hero, a self-sacrificing, "truly conscious" builder of Communism: "We see that Dmitry is politically vigilant (zorky) during the months which followed the 20th Party Congress, when certain individual unstable elements tried to interpret the decisions of the Congress in a revisionistic spirit...
...The novel has not even been published in Soviet Russia since it is so preposterous that no market would exist for it in the LSSR and the few people who might buy it would only be outraged by it...
...12, 1958...
...Therefore the Soviet writer, a faithful supporter of the Party's work, has at his disposal an infallible compass which helps him to orient himself correctly in the complex problems of studying and artistically representing the nation's life...
...Dr...
...Thus, the Russians have printed Roosevelt's messages to Stalin, not in their original wording, but as decoded and paraphrased by the American Embassy in Moscow...
...720 pp...
...On April 1, Roosevelt cabled : "I cannot conceal from you the concern with which I view the development of events of mutual interest The Neu...
...The champion of all the official protivovesy now seems to have been chosen and enthroned...
...Zhivago became no longer avoidable just when the pendulum had swung far in the other direction...
...Vsevolod Kochetov's novel The Yershov Brothers...
...Stalin's messages, of course, have been translated for this edition...
Vol. 41 • December 1956 • No. 45
