FATE OF ARTISTRY

...His novels show "a progressive relinquishment of fantasy of the personal vision, of independent speculation...

...they instructed...

...Mayakovsky, however, had much to give up...

...Pathetic rather than tragic is the artistic failure of Gorky, who did much social good by finding shelter and fuel for writers in the harsh years of early Communism and continued to help them, in every way possible, after his return to the U.S.S.R., but whose own productions, Miss Muchnic states frankly, are boring, verbose, and deficient in the indispensable quality of a wouldbe novelist—the understanding of human psychology...

...In a letter to Romain Rolland in 1933, he admitted: "I have written ponderously in the extreme, tediously, and altogether—badly...

...and endowed literature with the eloquent utterance of his pain and his will...

...Reviewed by George Gibian In 1925, Vladimir Mayakovsky demanded: "I want the pen to be on a par with the bayonet...

...To Pasternak the highest task of a poet was to devote himself to seeking the most perfect incarnation of his own personal vision of the world—a vision which may I* (and, in Miss Muchnic's opinion, in a great artist always is) the upshot of a subjective, inner search for beauty and truth, rather than of the public humanitarian, external commitment of a Marxist bard...

...Mayakovsky "made himself a tragic hero...

...She displays her deepest critical insights in analyzing Alexander Blok and Boris Pasternak...

...Mayakovsky made a titanic effort to write poetry which "the age demanded," and after a decade of doing violence to his poetic genius he committed suicide...

...Nothing has yet been written on the writers whom she studies which is comparable to this book in literary sensitivity and general intelligence...

...Alexander Blok died exhausted and ill a few years after the Revolution...

...She has particular contempt for "the solemn common-placeness" of Leonov's views...

...They propagandized...

...Gorky's own admissions of his weaknesses are touching but sadly true...

...A well meaning man of generosity and courage, and devoted to the public good, Gorky was "prevented from making the most of his unquestionable gift by his very zeal for men...

...He said himself that he "stepped on the throat of his own song," suppressing the complex, original poetry in which his response to life—primarily an emotional reaction of pain—demanded to express itself, and substituting a simple, oratorical paen to Soviet ideals...

...Her allusions to writers in many lands are never mere ostentation but, in bringing out the finest differences and generic similarities, serve to illuminate and define...

...If one sees him as having been persuaded by the enticement of a popular philosophy to reverse his views and interests, one is also bound to recognize that what he gave up never constituted that imperative necessity which rules genuine artists...

...Stalin called writers "engineers of the human soul...

...Miss Muchnic recognizes the power of Sholokhov at his best, but she also points out the narrow limits of his emotional and intellectual scope...

...They eagerly devoted their works to the task of molding the minds of their audience in accordance with what the Party at the moment considered the desirable shape...

...Boris Pasternak, however, called those same years of Mayakovsky's life between 1925 and 1930 a period "when all poetry ceased to exist, his or anybody else's" and confessed: "I could not understand Mayakovsky's propagandist zeal...

...The veteran student of Russian literature will read with fascination Miss Muchnic's penetrating, original analyses and her conclusions about one of the cardinal problems of our age—the fate of artistic sensibility in an all-demanding state...

...They made their works simple enough to be intelligible to a newly literate mass audience...

...It is the dispute over the proper function of art, over the writer's mission...

...She demonstrates that two of of them, Maxim Gorky and Leonid Leonov, who eagerly devoted themselves to the service of the Communist cause, failed to produce works of artistic quality, although she exempts from her strictures Gorky's autobiography, his reminiscences of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and some early stories...

...his complete subordination to the demand for topical subjects...

...Miss Muchnic studies in detail the works and careers of six Soviet writers...

...Some writers, like Mayakovsky, welcomed the public role thrust up on literature...

...Four of the authors were tragic figures...

...Their negative characters were designed to be deterrent examples of what the population ought to wish to avoid, their heroes positive characters of the Soviet New Man type...

...The neophyte will find here detailed exposition and summaries of the works of the major Twentieth Century Russian authors...

...In 1930, the year in which he was to commit suicide, Mayakovsky announced triumphantly: "By way of my Bolshevik party card, I'll raise above the heads of a gang of self-seeking poets and rogues all the hundred volumes of my Communist-committed books...

...Others, however, spurned the civic-minded, Party-dominated mission imposed upon them by the new society...

...Pasternak's recent tragedy has been witnessed the world over...

...And Stalin to deliver his Politbureau reports about verses in the making as he would about pig iron and the smelting of steel...

...Through his drive to make himself into a public servant of the Communist Party, Mayakovsky became "worthless, that is, non-existent...

...Throughout the book, the author brings to her task a keen sensibility and a wide knowledge of world literature...

...The disagreement between Pasternak and Mayakovsky expresses in brief one basic issue of Soviet literature which divided Russian writers in their public and personal lives, over which they have fought in meetings and private conversations, and with which they are still wrestling in their own consciences...