Literature of the 'Thaw'
FRIEDBERG, MAURICE
Literature of the 'Thaw' Interval of Freedom. By George Gibian. Minnesota. 180 pp. $4.25. Reviewed by Maurice Friedberg Assistant Professor of Russian, Hunter College IN THIS THOUGHTFUL,...
...The book mentions many familiar names—Vladimir Dudintsev, Daniel Granin, Galina Nikolayeva, Boris Pasternak, Ilya Ehrenburg, to mention but a few—and includes detailed plot summaries of several works, an annoying but inevitable practice when one discusses books most readers do not know...
...But there is nothing annoying about Gibian's analysis...
...Reviewed by Maurice Friedberg Assistant Professor of Russian, Hunter College IN THIS THOUGHTFUL, concise volume George Gibian, Associate Professor of English and Russian at Smith College, offers an overall view of Soviet literature during the four years following Stalin's death...
...As soon as they had decided that this might be done with relative impunity, they abandoned the shibboleths of "Communist morality" in favor of the paths of their great ancestors...
...Yet at the first opportunity that came, with Stalin's death, this desire expressed itself...
...The two best-known recent examples are the heated literary polemics and unorthodox works of fiction that preceded Gomulka's coup d'etat in Poland and the revolution in Hungary...
...While wisely noting the presence of scores of "Stalinist" works even at the height of the "thaw," he discerns several basic features of Soviet literature of 1954-57: denunciation of social evils, with the insinuation that these are not to be regarded as survivals of "bourgeois past" but as byproducts of the Soviet system itself...
...During the 1954-57 "interval," Soviet writers had returned, for a limited time, to the humanist traditions of 19th-century Russian literature...
...This, however, does not diminish the importance of investigating the thoughts of Soviet men of letters—"the engineers of human souls" as Stalin allegedly called them—during a period of comparative freedom...
...In the USSR there were no comparable repercussions...
...Outward signs of it had not been permitted for years...
...One might have thought it had been extirpated...
...it had not even diminished...
...frequently literature is the most reliable barometer of a nation's spiritual and political moods...
...As any student of Eastern European affairs has learned to appreciate, in that area of the world the significance of literature traditionally transcends by far that of letters in the West...
...For example, "Abram Tertz," the anonymous Soviet author of The Trial Begins, a short story published only in the West, makes some efforts to imitate Kafka, while Soviet journals attack periodically those who in word or deed violate the canons of the old-fashioned realism known in the USSR as narodnost', one of the three whales on which the universe of socialist realism rests...
...Soviet literature of the years 1954-57 taken collectively is a document of particularly great historical significance...
...some attempts at innovation were also made after Stalin's death in 1953...
...My only quarrel with Gibian has to do with the twice-repeated statement that even during the "thaw" Soviet writers "made little attempt to escape the confines of socialist realism in style or manner" and that "in 1958 as in 1952, it was still true that Joyce, Proust, Kafka and Freud might as well have never existed...
...The adjective "comparative" should be stressed, for the degree of latitude permitted, or even tolerated, was indeed limited...
...It is interesting that the culprits (who, for obvious reasons, insist that such innovation is possible within the overall doctrine of socialist realism) are frequently very young writers...
...revolt against the subjugation of the happiness of an individual to the alleged welfare of the community (the chapter is imaginatively entitled "Love versus Steel Production") ; and implied repudiation of the vision of Man as an essentially political being...
...in fact, it was narrower than that allowed during an earlier Soviet "thaw" in the 1920s...
...Gibian writes...
...It shows that after decades of Stalinism, the desire for human values flouted by the country's system had not disappeared...
...This point is but a minor flaw in an otherwise lively and serious study...
...Even in the 1930s, according to Gleb Struve, Joyce fascinated many Soviet writers...
...It is consistently lucid and penetrating...
Vol. 43 • October 1960 • No. 40
