Sholokhov and Non-Art

...Of course, Joyce's Ulysses is sold...

...Then Sholokhov, after having ridiculed those who complain about the harshness of the sentence inflicted on the two writers (five years of imprisonment for Daniel and seven for Sinyavsky), concluded by saying that if they had been sentenced during the '20s, when punishments were not rigidly fixed by the penal code but were inspired by a "sense of revolutionary justice," the sentence would have been much different...

...Notice, Sholokhov does not say how "one must" write novels...

...But we know that these novels have already been written, over the last 30 years at least, and that all of them, without exception, including Sholokhov's novels, belong to the category of non-art...

...And when you declare that the defenders of Sinyavsky and Daniel should be ashamed of themselves, we must tell you that you should be ashamed of yourself because, although you have always practiced non-art, you are nevertheless a writer-that is, you work with words-and some slight notion of what art is should have glimmered in your mind during all those many years you have wasted at your desk...

...3. Refined and cultivated societies which have a correct idea of art and, precisely because they have it, do not try to impose it, even if in other fields they do not prove too liberal (for example, the societies of the Italian Renaissance and of Europe fri the period immediately after the Renaissance...

...Sholokhov made viciously menacing remarks in the direction of Sinyavsky and Daniel [the two Russian writers who, shortly before the Congress convened, were sentenced to long prison terms for publishing abroad under the names of Abram Tertz and Nikolai Arzhak, respectively], and all those who had tried unsuccessfully to defend them...

...we are only interested in knowing what he thinks "must" be written...

...In other words, between the Revolution and the class that made it there has been, insofar as art is concerned, a conflict...

...Seen from this standpoint, the relations between art and society can be described in four ways: 1. Ignorant and crude societies that want to impose their conception of art by more or less coercive means (for example, the Stalinist society of yesterday and today, the Victorian societies of the 19th century...

...There is no difference so far as art is concerned simply between having one class or another in power-whether "revolutionary" or not...

...It means, in my opinion, different things in the West and the East, even if the end-result is the same...

...The Marxist diagnosis remains valid, however, at least as a point of departure...

...he only says how "one must not" write them...

...But in the long run it was not the Revolution which gave the citified peasants a correct idea of art...

...To return to Soviet Russia, at this point someone might well ask: What has become of the "humanist" revolution...

...And why is it that, instead, the Revolution has led to a form of non-art similar to that of Victorian England...

...of course, the moral values of War and Peace are those which almost any society can make its own...

...no matter how crude, vulgar, almost formless, it was nevertheless, in the broad sense, an esthetic product...

...but when the principles of saleability and positiveness are applied systematically and exclusively they lead in the first instance to detective stories, sentimental novels, pornography, and in the second to tendentious Socialist Realism, to propaganda...

...the difference, lies in the cultural quality of a class and in whether it wants or does not want to impose its own idea of art by coercive means...

...You are the worthy representative of an old ruling caste of citified peasants, of provincial petty bourgeois, of bureaucrats with stony behinds, of administrative dead souls...

...Clearly, therefore, the novels which still "must" be written are nonnovels or bad novels...

...The patrimony of prejudices, of traditions, of taboos, of received ideas, of backward attitudes, of fears is just as precious to a society as its economic or political management...

...Has there not been a revolution in the Soviet Union which the Communists have for years and years never tired of describing as "humanist...

...It does not seem, for example, that the ancient world knew the disconcerting and, in some ways, terrifying phenomenon of non-art...

...But confronted by this harshness, the real artist who defends real art has the duty to be just as harsh and to say to Sholokhov: "Your idea of art represents a danger for art not only in the Soviet Union but also in the enure world...

...the class has prevailed and thus one has had a class art, that is, non-art, directly and immediately tied to the interests of the society in power...

...What does this mean: "direct and immediate...

...2. Ignorant and crude societies that do not or cannot impose their point of view on art (for example, a great part of present-day Italian society and the society as a whole in the United States today...

...A previous contributor to these pages, Moravia's most recent book, Man As an End, was published this past January...

...Viewing non-art in its totality, as a world phenomenon, one sees that while art has only an indirect and mediated relation to the social and economic structures, non-art has a direct and immediate relation to them...

...For example, it is quite clear that Victorian non-art was in fact a product of the direct and immediate application of the principle of "positiveness" of art on the part of a society accomplishing the industrialization of the country with the methods proper to economic liberalism: Because there existed in England and generally in Europe a massive alienation, it was possible to mistake non-art for art in perfectly good faith...

...Art in the ancient world seems always to have been, if not actually art, at least artisanship...

...in the East "direct and immediate" means "positive.' Admittedly, besides being so many different things and having so many different aspects, art can also be commercial, can also be "positive," yet these properties certainly do not define a work of art...

...In the West, "direct and immediate" means "commercial...

...And at this point the phenomenon of non-art intervenes...

...I would reply that there has been a revolution and that it could and should have given a real art to the citified peasants who made it...

...His harshness, one can be sure, is spontaneous and natural, as automatic and reflexive as that of the judges who handed down the sentence...

...This, I think, explains why the "positiveness" of art in the Soviet Union is enforced by trials and prison sentences...

...It should not surprise one that Mikhail Sholokhovwho belongs with all the appropriate honors to the Stalinist ruling class, who throughout his career has directly and immediately practiced "positive" non-artattacked Sinyavsky and Daniel so violently...

...In our April 25 issue Richard Pipes, analyzing the developments at last month's 23rd CPSU Congress that related to the Russian cultural scene, observed: "The low-point was reached by the author of Quiet Flows the Don, Mikhail Sholokhov, who after Ivan Bunin and Pasternak is the third Russian novelist ever to receive the Nobel Prize...

...The novels which "must" be written are those in which there is love for everything that is Soviet, that is, everything dear and sacred to Sholokhov, to the judges, to the delegates to the Communist Party Congress, in short to the ruling class of the Soviet Union...

...In other words, Sholokhov's theory of the novel has only been half communicated: "One must not" write-if he wants to avoid prison-novels in which there is a hatred for everything that is Soviet, for everything that is dear (to the State), for everything that is sacred (to the State...

...From such a revolution shouldn't there have come, according to the logic of their own ideology, an unprecedented flowering of art in the highest sense of the word...

...But what about the Soviet Union...

...Among other things, Sholokhov said: "There are scribblers who publish one sort of writing at home and another, completely different sort abroad...

...These interests do not only involve matters of economics or power...

...But we are primarily interested not in knowing what sort of novels, according to Sholokhov, "must not" be written...

...In the essay that follows, which appeared originally in the Italian libera] weekly L'Espresso and is translated here by Raymond Rosenthal, Alberto Moravia not only responds to Sholokhov's attack but goes on to discuss the debilitating effect of Soviet politics on Russian culture...

...They use the same language, Russian, but in the first instance they use it to disguise themselves and in the second to offend this language by their maliciousness, expressing a hatred for everything that is Soviet, for everything that we possess which is most dear and sacred to us...

...4. Refined and cultivated societies which, while having the correct attitude toward art, wish to impose it with coercive means for ritual, ceremonial, governmental or religious reasons (for example, ancient China, ancient Egypt, Byzantium...

...Non-art-the kitsch of the West and the State Art or Socialist Realism of the Communist countries-is a new phenomenon divorced from art, and must be judged from a new standpoint...

...I believe that a rather easy answer can also be given to these questions...

...So the Marxist idea of art as a superstructure in a deterministic relation to the economic structure proves to be correct by half: Only non-art, Western kitsch and Eastern Socialist Realism, are indeed superstructures tied in a "direct and immediate" way to this structure...

...The atmosphere in which the non-art of the Eastern countries was bom is reflected in Mikhail Sholokhov's speech against his collagues Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel at the recent Russian Communist Party Congress at Moscow...

...it was the peasants who gave the Revolution their idea of art, which in fact was non-art, based precisely on their crudity and ignorance...