The Snows and Burintern Solidarity

...Konstantin Paustovsky is now an old man...

...One thinks of N. I. Dubov, F. A. Voronin, Yury Nagibin, Victor Nekrassov and, above all, of Yury Kazakov (greatly praised by Paustovsky, incidentally) whose absence is an undoubted blemish on any view whatever...

...For it is bound to give the impression that the regime grants less freedom of expression to its writers than it actually does...

...Paustovsky, who appeared at Pasternak's funeral with Olga Ivinskaya on his arm, has spoken up bravely in the last few years...

...Even here he describes a situation which does not fit properly into the official picture...

...Yet the census figures published last year show a population deficit of males even higher in the age groups that were adult in their 30s than among the young men who were in their 20s in the War...

...and where his literary executor is even now in jail for, in effect, attempting to secure the publication of his surviving works...

...where, just recently, its greatest writer has been, as Edward Crankshaw put it, "hounded to death...

...It is unpleasant to find Snow representing him, among the others, as a devoted adherent of the apparat...

...Any Soviet reader concerned with the reputation of his country's literature—its reputation as literature, that is, not as political piety —must shudder at the thought of this stuff being put before American and British audiences as representative of what is published in presentday Russia...

...Snow has consciously aligned himself not only with the British Establishment, which is bad enough, but with the worst foreign one he could turn up...

...Not that we should transfer to most of the writers in this collection any blame for the editors' attitudes...

...The writers, for obvious reasons, are not...

...He later wrote what is still described as "Paustovsky's unfortunate article," which put the theme of intellectual liberty in less provocative, but evidently still provocative, terms...

...One is reminded of the controversy between Lord Acton and Bishop Creighton, when the Anglican was inclined to excuse Innocent Ill's persecutions on administrative grounds, while the Catholic condemned them absolutely for reasons of inhumanity...

...it is the bureaucracy and the lack of freedom of expression...

...The Hungarian writers who led the revolt against Matyas Rakosi were all good Communists, too...

...But there is a big distinction between attacks on bureaucracy of the type officially approved and those which are just barely got away with by the younger generation, as can be seen by comparing, say, Vsevolod Kochetov's unreadable hack novels and Vladimir Dudintsev's much-censured Not By Bread Alone...

...And that is all the Snows have to say about the troubles of literary men in a country where numbers perished in labor camps or before firing squads, or committed suicide...

...C. P. Snow and his wife, Pamela Hansford Johnson, assure us it is wicked to look at Soviet literature with any political considerations in mind, since we would not do so with literature of other cultures...

...There are numbers of other young writers who are equally as skilled and far fresher than most of the Snows' favorites...

...It is not that Tendryakov is the most critical of the new writers, nor does he nourish any hostility to Communism as such...

...It is poor, unrepresentative, and in the main very dull...

...Pravda does not often intervene directly against individual writers, but it found it necessary to produce an article on "Three, Seven, Ace" under the heading, "Who is being accused...

...The political message is all right, you see, as long as it is on your side...

...The editors have sought stuff to suit their theme, but fortunately they have sometimes misunderstood the material...

...It means drawing attention to any facts, or expressing any opinions, unpalatable to the Soviet leadership...

...nor, even on the War, the truly pitiful stories like Nekrassov's "The Second Night": bad for morale...

...This really is fantastic impudence...

...As a character says in Doctor Zhivago, the War with all its horrors came as a blessing compared with the "reign of the lie" which preceded it (and which of course succeeded it, too...

...Vladimir Tendryakov is represented not by his most celebrated and most moving story, "Three, Seven, Ace," but by the much less striking "Potholes...

...But it is evident to both factions in the dispute that his writing by its mere humanism induces political "confusion...

...The editors rightly remark that the War was a terrific Russian experience and that Russian losses were incomparably greater than our own...

...That is not the point, however: It is not the social system that the humanist writers object to...

...Nothing about that here...

...The dullness is quite unnecessary...

...Again, the fact that when the cultural bureaucrats relax a little, a literature of moderately outspoken revolt immediately starts getting published is something to which one cannot simply blind oneself...

...On any barricade I can think of, there is many a Communist I should prefer to have on my side than Sir Charles...

...Though the older ones have lived through difficult history and had bad times, "they were always respected by their colleagues, even in the middle of bitter disagreement...

...They write, "the front line soldiers in their dug-outs sang the war poems of Surkov...

...Perhaps some of them did, but the astonishing phenomenon of the War was the immense circulation in manuscript of poems by poets: Boris Pasternak, for example...

...The official attacks are part formality, part demagogy...

...For the editors, Soviet literature is produced by writers "devoted to" their country's political system and, in spite of disputes among themselves, in general accord with the Party and with each other...

...In a country where a good deal remains unpublished for political reasons, it is impossible to look at what is published without some consideration of what makes it acceptable...

...The only person one can think of it satisfying is Aleksey Surkov, whom the editors evidently admire...

...He has always been a moderate and modest writer...

...Naturally, in a published piece, Soviet writers do not say overtly, "and that means you too, Comrade Minister...

...Psychologically, they were much worse...

...Soviet literature, as we are told day in and day out by Russian politicians, cultural bureaucrats and orthodox writers, is (or should be) "a weapon for Communism...

...Burintern solidarity forbids...

...Even politically it does the Russians a bad service...

...author, "The Pasternak Affair," "Power and Policy in the USSR" This is a collection of modern Soviet short stories...

...The phrase "cold war" occurs frequently in the introduction...

...This sort of thing is simply a gross and insensitive insult not just to common humanity, but to Soviet literature...

...They would have us accept Russian literature as indicating the hearty adherence of Soviet writers to the Soviet Establishment...

...But of course, the Snows do not mean what they say...

...an attitude it would be charitable to call obtuse...

...and guess who was...

...The literary attacks are (and are heartily denounced as) implicit assaults on the whole bureaucratic setup...

...But not for the Snows, except marginally, the literature of the Thaw...

...Each of these solidarities—the bureaucratic and the humanist—in fact transcend mere political and religious allegiance...

...Most of them, if less than their colleagues who are not represented in the book, have shown signs of wanting more liberty...

...In 1956 he strongly attacked the bureaucrats who, as he put it, had murdered Vsevolod Meierhold and Isaac Babel and still ruled the country, ignoring culture and spending their time cracking anti-Semitic jokes...

...But, when he concludes that a character is a "bureaucrat turned murderer," the Snows hasten to point out that the Government also attacks bureaucracy, and that Tendryakov thus associates himself enthusiastically with official policy...

...The purges, even physically, were thus at least as humanly destructive as the War itself...

...The introduction is worse than the selection...

...A Soviet critic wrote of the purges, during the 1956-57 Thaw, "Many are aware of this theme much more strongly than any other theme that has blossomed in the poetry and prose created by the reality of 40 years of Soviet life...

...The Snows (who find it possible to maintain that Russian writers can reproach English ones with "being too willing to distort the truth for the sake of the drama") are free agents: More shame to them...

...The Snows represent attention to unorthodox literature as a search for a mood opposed to "Communism...