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WINTER’S TALES (7). Edited by C. P. Snow and Pamela Hansford Johnson. (Macmillan.)

This is a collection of modern Soviet short stories. It is poor, unrepresentative, and in the main very dull. The dullness is quite unnecessary. 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 a British audience as representative of what is published in present-day Russia. Even politically it does the Russians a bad service: for it is bound to give the impression that the régime grants less freedom of expression to its writers than it actually does. The only person one can think of it satisfying is Surkov. (Whom the editors evidently admire. 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 — Pasternak for example.)

     The phrase ‘cold war’ occurs frequently in the Introduction. It means drawing attention to any facts, or expressing any opinions, unpalatable to the Soviet leadership. It is wicked, they assure us, to look at Soviet literature with any political considerations in mind, since we would not do so with literature of other cultures. This really is fantastic impudence! 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’.

     In a country where a good deal remains unpublished for political reasons, it is impossible to look at what is published without some consideration of what makes it acceptable. 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 just blind oneself. But of course, the Snows do not mean what they say. They would have us accept Russian literature as indicating the hearty adherence of Soviet writers to the Soviet Establishment. The political message is all right, you see, as long as it is on your side.

     The Snows represent attention to unorthodox literature as a search for a mood opposed to ‘Communism’. Of course, that is not the point: it is not the social system that the humanist writers object to, it is the bureaucracy and the lack of freedom of expression. The Hungarian writers who led the revolt against Rakosi were all good Communists too. These editors represent Soviet literature as 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. 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’. And that is all the editors have to say about the troubles of literary men in a country where numbers perished in labour camps or before firing squads, or committed suicide; where, just recently, its greatest writer has been, as Edward Crankshaw puts it, ‘hounded to death’, and where his literary executor is even now in jail for, in effect, attempting to secure the publication of his surviving works.

     Not that we should transfer to most of the writers in this collection any blame for the attitudes of the editors. Most of them, if less than their colleagues, have shown signs of wanting more liberty. 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 writers, for obvious reasons, are not. Paustovsky is now an old man. He has always been a moderate and modest writer. It is unpleasant to find Snow representing him, among the others, as a devoted adherent of the apparat. Paustovsky, who appeared at Pasternak’s funeral with Olga Ivinskaya on his arm, has spoken up bravely in the last few years. In 1956 he strongly attacked the bureaucrats who, as he put it, had murdered Meyerhold and Babel and still ruled the country, ignoring culture and spending their time cracking anti-semitic jokes. 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.

     The introduction is worse than the selection. The editors have sought stuff to suit their theme, but fortunately they have sometimes misunderstood the material. Tendryakov is represented not by his most celebrated and most moving story, Three, Seven, Ace, but by the much less striking Potholes. Even here he describes a situation which does not fit properly into the official picture. But, when he concludes that a character is a ‘bureaucrat turned murderer’ the Snows hasten to point out that the Government too attacks bureaucracy. and that Tendryakov thus associates himself enthusiastically with official policy. Naturally, in a published piece, Soviet writers do not say overtly ‘and that means you too, Comrade Minister’: 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, let us say, Kochetov’s unreadable hack novels and Dudintsev’s much censured Not By Bread Alone. The official attacks are part formality, part demagogy. The literary attacks are (and are heartily denounced as) implicit assaults on the whole bureaucratic set-up. It is not that Tendryakov is the most critical of the new writers, nor does he nourish any hostility to Communism as such. But it is evident to both factions in the dispute that his writing by its mere humanism induces political ‘confusion’. 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?’— and guess who was!

     There are numbers of other young writers who are just as skilled, and far fresher than most of the Snows’ favourites. One thinks of Dubov, Voronin, Nagibin, V. Nekrassov and above all of Yuri Kazakov (greatly praised by Paustovsky, incidentally) whose absence is an undoubted blemish on any view whatever. But not for the Snows, except marginally, the literature of the Thaw. Burin tern solidarity forbids.

     The editors rightly remark that the war was a terrific Russian experience, and that Russian losses were incomparably greater than our own. Yet the census figures published last year show a population deficit of males even higher in the age groups that were adult in the thirties than among the young men who were in their twenties in the war. The purges, even physically, were thus at least as humanly destructive as the war itself. Psychologically they were much worse: 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). 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 forty years of Soviet life.’ Nothing about that here. Nor, even on the war, the truly pitiful stories like Nekrassov’s The Second Night: bad for morale.

     This sort of thing is simply a gross and insensitive insult not just to common humanity, but to Soviet literature; an attitude it would be charitable to call obtuse. Snow has consciously aligned himself not only with our own Establishment, which is bad enough, but with the worst foreign one he could turn up. One is reminded of the controversy between Lord Acton and Bishop Creighton, when the Anglican was inclined to excuse the Innocent III’s persecutions on administrative grounds, while the Catholic condemned them absolutely for reasons of inhumanity. Each of these solidarities in fact — the bureaucratic and the humanist — transcend mere political and religious allegiance. On any barricade I can think of, there is many a Communist I should prefer to have on my side than Sir Charles.