Selected Books (3)
SOVIET LITERATURE YESTERDAY AND TODAY. Edited by Walter Z. Laqueur. (Survey, April-June 1961.)
This issue of Survey is a fantastically good five shillings’ worth. With the exception of a couple of ephemeral (though interesting) articles such as Gene Sosin’s account of talks he recently had with Soviet writers, these ninteen essays are scholarly as well as readable, and they give a clear and detailed picture of the present state of Soviet literature and how it got that way. The attitude of most contributors is rigorous but sympathetic. And though the collection would hardly claim to cover everything significant in the field, anyone who reads it will put it down with a greatly enrichened sense of both the qualities and the miseries of modern Russian writing. There are pieces on Sholokhov, Pilnyak and Zamyatin, Zoshchenko, Pasternak, Ehrenburg and Blok, as well as on ‘New Trends in the Novel’, ‘1960: the Literary Harvest’, ‘Kafka and the Communists’ and other fruitful themes.
The view of modern Russian literature which is commonly held in the West is an incomplete one. We tend to think of it as consisting in the main of (a) a number of untalented party hacks like Kochetov, or Surkov, sometimes but not always given their heads: (b) a number of writers with moderate talent like Tvardovsky or Fedin, clearly unwilling to produce what is required of them but willing to compromise: and (c) a number of younger ‘rebels’ producing, or having suppressed, work often more remarkable for its freshness than its skill. Over and above these we see Ehrenburg and Sholokhov — the latter surrendering with a poorish grace to the demands of the cultural bureaucracy and the former being more stubborn. And above them all, the towering genius of Pasternak.
It is not that some such division is not fairly accurate. But it gives a false idea of the energies at work. We all know that the great periods of Russian literature before the revolution, with Pushkin and Lermontov, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Chekhov, have not been equalled in Soviet times. We are all aware of such things as the banning of Doctor Zhivago, of the contemptible cruelty with which, as in the Ivinskaya case, the cultural bureaucracy wages its feud against independence of mind. We are inclined to underestimate the vigorous writing which, though spurned, attacked and occasionally silenced for years at a time, has nevertheless been a persistent and important current in Russian life. Soviet culture may have been hobbled, bridled and blinkered by the apparatchik, but it remains a fine animal, with enormous capabilities.
Since this collection came out Kommunist has printed a text of the speech made by Khrushchev to the writers last July. In it he put horribly forthrightly the view that: ‘The development of literature . . . proceeds plan-wise as directed by the Party,’ condemning writers who had, in 1956, ‘got out of step.’ The Polish Communist (though revisionist) philosopher Kolakowski has adequately commented on this sort of thing, naming as one of the stigmata of an un-Socialist country that in it the writers and philosophers always say the same as the politicians, but always later.
The Party’s view is short-sighted even on its own showing. Literature in any conceivable sense truly helpful to society has never been produced under the guidance of political leaders. But not even literature presenting their own politics in the creditable light could ever emerge that way. Moreover, none of this nonsense is a necessary concomitant of Soviet-type society as such. This can be seen in Poland. And two essays in the collection, ‘The Origins of Literary Control’, by Ernest J. Simmons and ‘Pilnyak and Zamyatin’, by Max Hayward (who fittingly quotes Gorki’s bold rebuke to the persecutors which doubtless postponed Pilnyak’s arrest and death) remind us how different things were in the twenties. Current political pretensions are among the stigma of Stalinism, of the control of party and state by the omnicompetent bureaucrat. It is significant that Khrushchev, in the speech quoted above, had to censure party branches among the intelligentsia. One of the most depressing things about the official attitude is that literature, like every other field, becomes a ‘front’, on which a political ‘struggle’ is always taking place. We get such niaiseries as the following (on the recent Dostoevsky jubilee), quoted here by D. L. Fangar in his essay ‘Dostoevsky Today’:
‘Soviet literary scholarship made a significant contribution to the cause of a genuinely scientific study of Dostoevsky’s work, and at the same time it has successfully won the battle against reaction in this area of culture. If before the jubilee, the reactionary press in the West felt itself master of the situation, set the tone, and obliged the Soviet press to take a defensive position, after the jubilee Soviet literary scholarship became dominant, carrying on an active, aggressive struggle.’
And yet, at the same time, excellent criticism is being written, sound scholarship is being pursued, and — even more surprising — a certain amount of fresh and interesting fiction and poetry is being published. Vera Alexandrova writes here of ‘Voices of Youth’ and George Gibian of ‘New Trends in the Novel’. British readers will already have noted how enormously Dudintsev, whose first book was more remarkable for its boldness than for its talent, has developed. Although on the whole the second-generation Stalinist poets who sought greater liberty in 1956 are notably inferior to their opposite numbers in Eastern Europe, the young Evtushenko, with his high-spirited handling of language, has already impressed us as one of the most vigorous of Europe’s poets. And there are half a dozen other writers such as Kazakov, Nagibin and V. Nekrasov with talents that are tough, sensitive and honest.
All this does not spring from nothing. Independent traditions have been maintained until quite recent times by other of the older writers than Pasternak. Zoshchenko, who was rightly popular in this country for his short stories, is considerably more than a shock humorist. In his longer work, a tragic levity carried the true and deep feelings of traditional masculine humanism before the often puzzled censors. Mr Hugh McLean writes of Zoshchenko’s unfinished novel ‘Before Sunrise’. The book is only unfinished in the sense that a mere two instalments appeared before it came in for public denunciation. And that is another reason for the queer appearance Soviet writing presents us. Missing work, much of it in the files of the KGB, is probably at least as important as what we have been allowed to see. Maxim Gorki’s last note books, Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems, Pasternak’s last play, must be among the most interesting creations of our time.
The decline in published Soviet humour has, naturally enough, been notable. But, as Maurice Friedburg points out in ‘A Note on Soviet Satire’, the one genre in which it flourishes is the newspaper feuilleton. A Soviet critic explains this as being due to the fact that these squibs about real events are taken to be merely particular: presented as short stories they would be regarded as generalizations slandering Soviet reality. The feuilletons tons are often extremely lively and well done. But again the important point is that they show continued potentialities: as with the rest of Soviet writing, the fact that the great moods of literature are not published does not mean that they are extinct.
Yet the present relaxation is a real one within its limits. As ever, the trouble is that the power to decide what should be done remains with the authorities. One poet to whom Sosin expressed his pleasure at the present atmosphere said: ‘Today, yes. But what about yesterday and tomorrow?’
Two considerations have influenced Soviet politicians in their current comparatively liberal interpretation of a narrow view. In the first place, the insistence on a rigid orthodoxy led to works recognizable even to the politicians themselves as particularly worthless. The more important point is that the Soviet literary world has been the one element in Russia which it was impossible completely to gleichschalt. The literary standards, even of the most Communist-minded of the genuine writers, were persistent, and unassimilable to the Party scheme. There are frequent attacks, even now, on the solidarity of a ‘public opinion’ associated with literary circles in Moscow. Even among the picked students of the Literary Institute, admiration for ‘decadent’ poets like Biely, and for Pasternak himself, are constantly denounced. It is true that the Party finds it possible to promote and extol hacks like Surkov: but it is beyond its power to get him accepted by the literary world.
Khrushchev’s remarks are crude. But we need not see in them only a doctrinaire notion of how to produce a Soviet literature. He clearly realizes something else: that the humanist tradition in Russian literature, the search for candour and for charity which has been found in writers of all opinions since it emerged so equally in the works of the anarchist Tolstoy, the religious Dostoevsky and the liberal Turgenev, is a rival to the Party’s view. Pasternak foresaw the eventual triumph of the ideas of the Russian Enlightenment. When Khrushchev said in 1957 that his finger would not tremble on the trigger if it became necessary to handle the writers the hard way, he was in a sense facing up to a real threat. But if Stalin himself was unable to eradicate it, it is one which is ineradicable. Herbert E. Bowman writes here (of Pasternak) ‘no sharper judgment of political realities is made than by the observer who insists on remaining human’. That is what the Soviet writers, Communist and non-Communist, have mostly done. The preservation of such a tradition is no small thing, and may in the long run do much to save Russia, and the world, from a barren cul-de-sac. Meanwhile Soviet literature, even with many of its best branches lopped and pruned, is worth watching for its own sake — as much so as any other contemporary foreign writing.
Postscript: The July-September issue of Survey carries a few more articles on the theme. Meanwhile Partisan Review No. 3-4, 1961, is devoted to a collection of Soviet writings from the time of the Revolution to Ehrenburg’s latest reminiscences, which is a singularly well-chosen conspectus of the whole field. Mr Hayward, one of the editors, significantly reminds us that it was not the writers of left-wing convictions and experience who welcomed the regime, but those addicted to some vague apocalyptic notions. Compare literary ‘commitment’ in present-day Britain.
Page(s) 80-83
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