Soviet Literary Politics
CONQUEST, ROBERT
Soviet Literary Politics POLITICAL CONTROL OF LITERATURE IN THE USSR By Harold Swayze Harvard. 301 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by ROBERT CONQUEST Author, "The Pasternak Affair," "Power and Policy...
...It does not apply, of course, only to literary freedom...
...But more important, the story plainly speaks for feelings outside the Party's control, feelings, moreover, which must give the reader the impression of being more important than those involving the Party...
...Yet here, as in every other question raised in current Soviet literature, one is faced by the difficulty Gene Sosin, an American writer on Soviet children's literature, reported last year from a conversation he had in Moscow with a Russian author...
...A classic case of the charge of "pornography" can be seen in the condemnation of a story of Mikhail Zoshchenko's back in Zhdanov's time...
...The machinery is available...
...There is absolutely no guarantee that all the improvements in the Soviet Union will not be revoked...
...If these reflections on Swayze's theme do not amount to much in the way of criticism of his book, it is because there is little to criticize...
...One of Abraham Tertz's characters, a writer, explains his presence in a Siberian labor camp as based on three charges: betraying State secrets, slandering Soviet reality, and pornography...
...Under Soviet conditions, according to this view, it is the recommendation for action, rather than the particular phrasing, which counts...
...The slandering of Soviet reality and the practice of pornography are still widely used in censure...
...But it is not necessarily that simple...
...Sholokhov's remarks can equally be interpreted as a plea for tolerance...
...One significant sign of the recent improvement in the literary atmosphere is that works have been published openly urging that even a Party member can have a private life into which the Party should not intrude...
...This combination is, in fact, a natural one for the cultural bureaucrat to find in almost any creative work...
...And it is certain that there is no faction within the Committee which is attached even to the present degree of liberalization for its own sake...
...A peasant girl bares her breast and lays his hand on it, then the old man dies easily and peacefully...
...But what about yesterday and tomorrow...
...But Swayze has carried out his exact aim, providing a clear and scholarly, yet unpretentious and well written general account of his subject, with enough selected detail to get us right into the intimacies of the matter...
...This is the basic trouble in Russia...
...It seems to me to be much the best book of its sort I have seen...
...At present, the routine accusation against intellectuals, on the much rarer occasions when it is still desired to deport them, is, of course, currency offences...
...The reply was, "Today, yes...
...To an audience like the delegates to the Party Congress it would not be possible actually to defend the new styles, so a plea could only be concealed in terms hostile to the phenomenon to be tolerated...
...Tertz's writer is undergoing his sentence in Stalin's time, not now: It would no longer be normal for the State secrets charge to be pressed...
...It is not, indeed, encyclopedic and a very much larger work could be written...
...The point is, quite simply, that the Central Committee has the power to re-enforce Zhdanovism or Stalinism at any time it thinks fit...
...Swayze has fulfilled a hard task with rigor and clarity...
...Reviewed by ROBERT CONQUEST Author, "The Pasternak Affair," "Power and Policy in the USSR" Harold Swayze's book is invaluable...
...Merely interpreting Soviet literary politics presents great difficulties, as the following recent instance shows: At the 22nd Party Congress last autumn, Mikhail Sholokhov spoke of young poets who had become conceited and shown off with silly experimentalism to audiences of hysterical young girls...
...Though he went on to say that this is doubtless only a phase and too much attention should not be paid to it, many in the West took his words simply as an "attack" on Yevgeny Yevtushenko and others...
...Sosin had spoken to this man about the increased freedom for writers that has been apparent in the last few years...
...They merely reflect the typical concerns of the cultural bureaucrats-defense of the State and Party from criticism, and protection of the prudishness which Ilya Ehrenburg has accurately referred to as "that curse of Russian literary life, Soviet puritanism...
...In addition to carefully and judiciously tracing the vagaries of Soviet literature's relations with authority from 1946 to the present day, he discusses the theoretical bases of literary control in Russia, and considers the organizational and administrative methods of the present control machinery...
...This touching story has yet to be reprinted in the Soviet Union: Bureaucratic puritanism is very literal-minded...
...But the two accusations do not amount to actual administrative sanctions...
...True, a powerful public opinion exists against such revocation, but if, for example, the economic plan-already in difficulties-were to get into really serious trouble, the suppression of such opinion might well appear essential to the regime...
...He wrote of an old peasant, dying with difficulty, who is heard to murmur something about "breasts...
...The "liberals" are just apparatchiks who think current tactics are best suited to perpetuate their rule...
Vol. 45 • November 1962 • No. 23
