Post-Stalin Trends in Russian Literature

Post-Stalin Trends in Russian LiteratureAuthor(s): Victor ErlichSource: Slavic Review, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Sep., 1964), pp. 405-419Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2492679 .

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Discussion SLAVIC REVIEW

POST-STALIN TRENDS

IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE

BY VICTOR ERLICH

I Writing about recent Soviet literature is a hazardous occupation. A Western chronicler of the post-Stalin literary ferment is as likely to overestimate an ephemeral trend as he is to miss a significant cue. He must be equally wary of premature euphoria and premature impa- tience. Last but not least, he has to do his best to maintain a viable balance between literary and political considerations.

The latter question was raised sharply by Mr. Andrew Field,1 a keen if somewhat petulant student of modern Russian literature. Mr. Field deplored the tendency prevalent in the West to discuss recent Soviet imaginative writing sub specie of its alleged ideological heterodoxy rather than of its literary texture. To do so, he argued with some cogency, is to fall prey to the Soviet fallacy we are so fond of decrying, notably to the habit of treating literature as a political weapon.

Mr. Field has a point, but it is one which can be easily misstated. To be sure, any body of literature worthy of the name-a rather important qualification, as we will see-deserves to be described and evaluated in literary terms. Granted, too, that some of the Western observers of the Soviet literary scene have precious little interest in literature. Yet the fact remains that while few literary manifestations of the post-Stalin "thaw" will repay close aesthetic analysis, many of them yield significant glimpses of the human reality hidden by the bland official fapade -of unauthorized attitudes or hitherto unpublicized tracts of Soviet experience. And when, as in Solzhenitsyn's quietly harrowing tale, the taboo subject has the explosiveness of a long-denied nightmare, "no sane person," to quote Irving Howe,2 "can be expected to register a purely literary response."- MR. ERLICH is Bensinger professor of Russian literature and chairman of the Depart- ment of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University.

1 Andrew Field, "The Not So Dissonant Voices in Soviet Literature," The New Leader, Dec. 24, 1962.

2 Irving Howe, "Predicaments of Soviet Writing," I, The New Republic, May 12, 1963.



406 Slavic Review

Clearly what is needed here is not literary purism but respect for the autonomy of literary criteria. In many instances the literary judgment and the socio-political diagnosis are bound to be interrelated. Yet the former should not be confused with, or inferred from, the latter. We will do well to resist the temptation of proclaiming a nonconformist Soviet story or novel a literary masterpiece simply or largely because we have found it a major political event or a moving human testimony.

But then, one may interpose, what are the literary yardsticks that can be safely used in dealing with Soviet writing? Are we justified in applying Western criteria to a cultural situation so different from our own? I see no alternative to doing just that. To be sure, after two decades of stringently enforced sterility, it would be naive and "ethno- centric" to expect a sudden literary resurgence, and ungracious not to take heart at whatever symptoms of a literary quickening come to the fore. But I submit that to measure the performance of Soviet writers by any other standards than the "Western" ones would be a sign of condescension rather than of understanding.

II

The post-Stalin literary discontent reached its first significant peak in 1956, a year described variously as the "interval of freedom" and the "year of protest."3 The faltering plea for a measure of creative integrity, heard during the first year after the tyrant's death, was vigorously re-echoed in the wake of Khrushchev's "secret" speech at the 20th Party Congress. The new leader's sensational attack on the "cult of person- ality" was seized upon by relatively independent-minded Soviet writers as a long-overdue occasion for some plain speaking, for an airing of accumulated grievances. The best-publicized and most characteristic symptom of this process was, of course, Vladimir Dudintsev's Not by Bread Alone. In some respects this drab but honest fictionalized tract hews quite closely to the conventions of the Soviet production novel. Suffice it to mention the puritan treatment of the "love interest": that strong-minded Russian woman Nadezhda Drozdov, who abandons her successful bureaucrat-husband to become the helpmate of the dedicated inventor Lopatkin, has to stand around for quite a while before she is taken note of by the scientist devoted single-mindedly to pro- ducing bigger and better iron drainpipes. Nor is the central theme of the book a novel one. The conflict between bureaucratic business-as- usual and individual initiative had served time and again in Soviet industrial fiction as a vehicle of "Bolshevik self-criticism," properly emasculated, to be sure, by the inevitable happy ending-a last-minute

3 George Gibian, Interval of Freedom: Soviet Literature during the Thaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1960); Hugh McLean and Walter Vickery, eds., The Year of Protest: 1956 (New York, 1961).



Post-Stalin Trends in Russian Literature 407

intervention of an aroused party secretary. On the face of it, Not by Bread Alone meets this requirement, too. After years of harassment and actual persecution, Dudintsev's lone-inventor hero is vindicated. His design for a pipe-casting machine is finally accepted.

What then, one may properly inquire, was all the shouting about? The fact of the matter is that at closer scrutiny the finale of Dudintsev's novel turns out to be less than reassuring. The villains of the piece, the self-serving bureaucrats who at the peak of their influence were power- ful and unscrupulous enough to have the challenger sent to a forced labor camp-this was, incidentally, one of the first references to that uninstitution!-fail to receive their due. Though in effect they stand condemned of personal ruthlessness and of industrial sabotage, they are not fired but merely transferred to another branch of the system. The conclusion which suggests itself rather forcibly seems to be that the Drozdovs are too firmly entrenched in the apparatus to be easily dislodged. Dudintsev never says, nor does he appear to believe, that the system is rotten. Yet his narrative hints very broadly at the possibility that the rot had eaten deeply into the system.

Who are the Drozdovs? The portrayal of the chief antagonist of Dudintsev's embattled hero is sociologically the most revealing aspect -and the only literary success-of Not by Bread Alone. A local boy who made good, a driven, hard-boiled, wily Soviet organization man, Drozdov epitomizes the "new class," grasping, status-minded, and power-loving, glorying unabashedly in its material advantages and ever ready to invoke the "tough" Marxist-Leninist lingo as an alibi for its moral callousness. "This is not Turgenev for you," says Drozdov to his high-minded wife, "I am building the material base of Socialism."4

I am reminded here of a passage from a little-known but remarkable novel by V. Kaverin, Artist Unknown (1930), built around the conflict between a single-track-minded Communist man of action, Shpektorov, and an engagingly quixotic painter, Arkhimedov. When the latter flamboyantly demands that the claims of Socialist morality be incorpo- rated into the Five-Year Plan, Shpektorov retorts: "Morality! I have no use for the word. I am building Socialism. If I had to choose between morality and a pair of trousers, I would choose a pair of trousers." However, the similarity of phrasing should not blind us to the crucial difference between Kaverin's rough-and-ready pioneer of "Socialist construction" and Dudintsev's smug, latter-day apparatchik. As the process which Arthur Koestler had dubbed a breakdown of revolutionary incentives5 proceeds apace, what had been a rhetoric of crude yet genuine ideological commitment becomes a threadbare ra- tionale for crass personal materialism. Perhaps Dudintsev said more than he knew.

4BaAnanmp AyAHIgeB, He x.e6o0 eauniu (Munich, 1957), p. 17. 5 The Yogi and the Commissar (New York, 1946), pp. 186-92.



408 Slavic Review

Some of the implications of Not by Bread Alone were spelled out during a heated controversy which ensued. Predictably, the bureaucrats accused Dudintsev of slandering Soviet reality, while one of his most outspoken defenders, venerable and humane K. Paustovsky, de- livered an impassioned attack on the insidious blight of "Drozdovism."

Dudintsev's profound distrust of the Soviet organization man was echoed in A. Yashin's story "The Levers," which shows how the party meeting ritual turns a group of humane and sensible men into unthinking robots. Another important theme of Not by Bread Alone- that of a chasm between bureaucracy and the "people"-found its way into many 1956 stories, most conspicuously "The Journey Home" by N. Zhdanov. While fiction was thus bringing to light some of the ten- sions and resentments smoldering- within the allegedly harmonious Soviet society, the poets were rediscovering the need for emotional spontaneity, and the critics reaffirming the proposition ventured timidly in 1954 that in literature "sincerity" might be a more essential yardstick than political right-mindedness.

All this was more than the party was willing to countenance. Though no one had dared to question the validity of the system, to attack the fundamentals, the very volume and spontaneity of social criticism undertaken by honest Soviet writers posed a potential threat to the stability of the regime. The picture of Soviet reality which was emerging from 1956 Soviet fiction was too blatantly at variance with the official cliches. The cleavages and contradictions highlighted by the "thaw" writers were too profound and ubiquitous to be palmed off as mere bourgeois survivals or, for that matter, as residues of the Stalin era. In May, 1957, N. S. Khrushchev moved into the breach. In his first extended pronouncement on literature and the arts he took to task Dudintsev, et al., for exaggerating the shortcomings of Soviet society and reminded the "ideologically confused" writers that their prime duty was to accentuate the positive. The defendants executed an orderly retreat, without, however, stooping to abject recantations, which had been part and parcel of the chastisement ritual in the Stalin days. The immediate effect of the unequivocal reassertion of the principle of party control over literature was a retrenchment rather than a rout, a muting of the attacks on the Establishment rather than a throw- back to the bleak uniformity of Stalinism.

Though Khrushchev's harangue was boorish and occasionally grim, the official reaction was vastly outstripped in scurrilousness and un- abashed nostalgia for the "good old days" of Stalinist regimentation by what might be called the vigilante counteroffensive. V. Kochetov, who has since become the recognized spokesman of literary zealots, struck back in a remarkably crude and venomous production novel, The Brothers Ershov. Kochetov's polemic with Dudintsev had the literary and moral finesse of a police report. The formula of Not by Bread




Alone was stood on its head. In The Brothers Ershov the lone-Nwolf inventor who complains about being misunderstood and thwarted by the authorities turns out to be an embittered crackpot, while his chief ally is unmasked as a reactionary blackguard. Conversely, the plant manager is a paragon of integrity, and the party secretary a secular saint.

III

The rise of spontaneous literary bigotry underscored what has been since 1957 an essential facet of the Russian literary scene-notably the precarious coexistence of two camps which have been, somewhat mis- leadingly, labeled in the Western press as "liberals" and "conservatives." (The party has been shuttling uneasily between the two factions, trying to keep both in tow and to make alternate use of both without ever identifying itself with either position.) The die-hards, led by Kochetov, barricaded themselves in the literary journal Oktiabr (October), where they have been cultivating traditional Bolshevik pieties and pouring fire and brimstone on their "individualistic," "asocial," "aesthetizing" opponents. The "liberals" have found their chief outlet in Novy mir (The New World), which during the last years has featured, under the aegis of the resourceful poet-editor Tvardov- sky, some of the most significant works of Soviet prose. In 1960 Novy mir published Dudintsev's engaging, if somewhat naive, parable, A New Year's Tale. (In the West the story has been both overrated and overinterpreted. To my mind, it is neither the significant departure from the socialist-realist canon nor the subversive political allegory it was found to be by some overly excitable commentators, but simply an indication that Dudintsev has stuck to his guns: A New Year's Tale restates, this time in a safer, allegorical garb, Dudintsev's fundamental dichotomy of bureaucratic routine versus individual commitment.) A year later the journal opened its pages to an important story by Viktor Nekrasov, perhaps the most forthright present-day Soviet prose writer. "Kira Georgievna," an undistinguished but deeply humane and re- freshing narrative, owes its appeal to a sympathetic portrayal of a rather unedifying heroine and a candid treatment of a delicate subject -the painful readjustment of a returnee from a forced labor camp.

The conspiracy of silence was broken, but the full story was yet to be told. In November, 1962, Novy mir presented to the Soviet public, with Khrushchev's personal blessing, A. Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The taboo was lifted. The dread institution, hitherto ignored or timidly hinted at, was now exposed to public view. The grim routine of what David Rousset has called "l'univers concen- trationnaire," the unspeakable squalor and misery, the back-breaking labor, and the animal scrounging for scraps of food, is authenticated



410 Slavic Review

here by a wealth of detail and made more credible by the author's quiet, undramatic manner. One Day is not a horror story. Physical violence appears in the novel not as the central actuality but as an ever-present threat. When the shivering, hungry inmates start their forced march, the guards load their rifles: any false step will mnean death.

The long, gruelling sequence from reveille to "lights-out," chroni- cled in Solzhenitsyn's unhurried narrative, represents an ordinary, in fact a relatively "lucky" day in the life of the tale's hard-working, good- natured protagonist. As the story draws to its close, Ivan Denisovich muses thus: "He'd had a lot of luck today.... They hadn't put him in the cooler; he'd finagled an extra bowl of mush at noon.... Nothing had spoiled the day and it had been almost happy."6

The unwitting irony of this could not have been lost on Solzhenit- syn's readers. More broadly, one cannot help but wonder about the cumulative impact of this meticulously honest reportage in which thousands of Soviet citizens as innocent as Ivan Denisovich, as admirable as the brave naval officer Buynovsky, and as appealing as the gentle, devout Baptist Aleshka, are doomed to years of subhuman existence.7

This is not to say, however, that One Day is an overt indictment of the system or that, as some overenthusiastic Western exegetes have argued, it implies the notion of the forced labor camp as a microcosm of Soviet society. For one thing, no work of fiction which could be legitimately interpreted thus would ever secure Khrushchev's personal authorization. For another, Solzhenitsyn's central narrative strategy obviates the need for, indeed eliminates the possibility of, an explicit verdict. Though technically One Day is a third-person narrative, the point of view is provided here by a "simple" peasant, whose potential for survival is considerably greater than his ratiocinative powers. This device, skillfully and consistently employed, is both a strength and a built-in limitation. The language of One Day-an effective blend of the earthy peasant vernacular with the harsh camp jargon which occasionally lapses into profanity-is a far cry from the colorless, timidly puritan prose of socialist-realist fiction. It is also testimony to Sol- zhenitsyn's sturdy sense of style-a quality which has not been very much in evidence in Soviet prose. Yet the sustained "folksy" stylization which lends solidity and color to the verbal texture of One Day limits the novel's scope and import. A reputable and well-wrought piece of writing as well as a major human and political event, One Day, as

6 One Day in thle Life of Ivan Denisovicli, trans. Max Hayward and Ronald Hingley (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1963), pp. 209-10.

7 Why did Khrushchev authorize publication of so explosive a document? My guess is that he chose to use Solzhenitsyn's novel as a club with which to beat his "Stalinist" opponents. He may have well realized since that he had been playing with fire. If so, this was not the first time Khrushchev's impetuosity boomeranged.




Irving Howe has acutely observed, is ultimately too "constricted" an affair8 to deserve some of the fulsome accolades that were heaped on it in this country.9

Solzhenitsyn's keen ear for the leisurely rhythms of the Russian folk speech and his thoroughly un-Soviet affinity for Alesha Karamazov-like meekness are writ large in wvhat is perhaps his most accomplished work to date, "Matryona's Home." The narrator of the story, who, not un- like its author, is a former political prisoner and a teacher, decides to "'cut loose and get lost in the innermost heart of Russia, if there is any such thing." The phrase seems to suggest a hankering for some traditional Russian ambiance. In fact, both the language and the moral climate of "Matryona's Home" have a strikingly old-fashioned quality. The central figure in the story, a selfless, gentle, pure-of-heart peasant woman, makes one think of the quiet radiance of that chastened village belle Lukeria in Turgenev's "The Living Relics." When Matryona dies, a victim, symbolically, to her neighbor's brutal, unthinking ac- quisitiveness, the narrator is moved to comment: "We all lived beside her and never understood that she was the righteous one, without whom no village can stand nor any city. Not our homeland."

None of this was likely to please the official critics. Owing to Khru- shchev's personal imprimatur, One Day enjoyed, at least until recently, a measure of immunity. But "Matryona's Home" was fair game. The story was promptly attacked for offering a distorted picture of the Soviet village. The implication that such "capitalistic" attitudes as competitiveness and greed were still rampant in the Soviet countryside was bound to be resented. Nor was Solzhenitsyn's positive message- his emphasis on personal "righteousness," on unaggressive goodness, so clearly at odds with the "struggle"-oriented and stridently public Soviet ethos-any less objectionable.

Both as revelation and as literature, Solzhenitsyn's best works represent the high point of present-day Russian fiction. Yet some of the younger Soviet prose writers have sounded notes that are both refresh- ing and symptomatic. Vasilii Aksenov's main significance thus far lies in his having tackled a phenomenon whose existence is strenuously denied by the regime's spokesmen-the cleavage between "fathers" and "sons." His lively, though occasionally banal, novel, A Ticket to the Stars, portrays with a degree of candor and sympathy the moral rest- lessness of Soviet teenagers. Characteristically, their adolescent rebel-

8 Howe, op. cit. 9 In the otherwise admirable introduction to the Praeger version of One Day, the novel

is referred to as a "literary masterpiece." Writing about Solzhenitsyn in The Kenyon Review, F. D. Reeve found it possible to proclaim his book one of the greatest works of twentieth-century European fiction. Such extravagant assertions are both misleading and self-defeating. Blatant overestimates of the literary worth of "dissonant" Soviet writings serve only to confirm the preconceptions of such critics as Mr. Anthony West. His recent New Yorker review of A. Tertz's Fantastic Stories is one of his snootiest performances since that high-handed attempt to reduce Orwell's disturbing insight to personal morbidity.



412 Slavic Revietv

lion is primarily a matter of an instinctive recoil from bureaucratic cant, from inspirational rhetoric. The novel's plot shuttles between two brothers, the dedicated and uncompromising young scientist Vik- tor and the "mixed-up" Dimka. Toward the end of the novel Viktor dies in a plane crash and Dimka vaguely reaches toward his older brother's "ticket to the stars." Curiously enough, the author allows him to do so, without protest, though at the moment the boy's only credentials are a distrust of "phonies," which makes one think of the hero of Catcher in the Rye, and a dogged insistence on personal hon- esty and authenticity.

In Iurii Kazakov, this undoctrinaire sense of individuality is coupled with a more finely modulated awareness of the emotional nuance than Aksenov seems capable of achieving. Kazakov's short stories have been compared to Chekhov's. The difference of stature between the two need not be insisted upon. Though possibly the most gifted and skill- ful among the young Soviet prose writers, Kazakov is a minor figure rather than a budding master. Yet there is something Chekhovian about the blend of sympathy and detachment in Kazakov's narratives and his steadfast refusal to moralize. To the considerable displeasure of the hacks, Kazakov shuns like the plague edifying themes and "positive heroes." The protagonists of his most characteristic tales (e.g., "Adam and Eve," "The Outsider") are loners, deviants, "offbeat" and unadjusted men. Their predicament is epitomized by the sullen and indolent buoy-keeper Egor in "The Outsider," who only in rare moments of shared bliss manages to rise above his usual torpor and break out of his isolation. Kazakov is a poet of brief but fateful personal con- frontations, of fleeting yet significant moments. Apparently a faithful disciple of both Chekhov and Turgenev, Kazakov is finely attuned to subtle, barely perceptible shifts in interpersonal relations, to small cues which often make the difference between success and failure, between frustration or fulfillment in a long-awaited, hesitant encounter. This fundamentally un-Soviet sense of the fluidity and complexity of personal emotions goes hand in hand with a lyrical-descriptive evocative- ness. Kazakov's protagonists typically have more rapport with nature than with society. The Russian countryside is a compelling presence in these stories, where a sudden radiance of Northern Lights breaks upon an encounter, now to illuminate a moment of shared joy, now to lend a wistful poignancy to the finale of a romance gone awvry.

Yet when all is said and done, it is poetry rather than fiction that, in the last five or six years, has articulated most clearly the long-debased and ignored claims of the Self and projected most forcibly the sensitive young Russian's hankering for a life m.nore varied, more open and ven- turesome than the one he had inherited. Inevitably the name of Evgenii Evtushenko comes to mind. Evtushenko has been described in the West alternately as Russia's angry young man and as Khrushchev's




court poet. Both labels are misleading. A facile, derivative, often rhetorical versifier, Evtushenko is important and somewhat encourag- ing not because of the intrinsic value of his poems or his ideas, but because through his weaknesses as well as his strengths-his flamboyant vanity as well as his spontaneity-he has managed to dramatize the instinctive protest of his generation against the oppressiveness and bleak- ness of a world they never made. Though he has acted on occasions as the mouthpiece of the regime and will do so again, he has sincerity, elan, and the courage of his convictions or, if one will, of his confu- sions. This courage was or seemed to be contagious. Evtushenko's much publicized attack on anti-Semitism, "Babi Yar," is a brave, deeply felt poem. But what made it an important public act was the vigorous response of Evtushenko's large and enthusiastic audiences. The roar of approval which, according to Patricia Blake's brilliant reportage,10 would greet every reading of "Babi Yar" in the packed Mos- cowv auditorium was not merely a dramatic indication of how sensitive young Russians felt about the Jewish tragedy. More broadly, it wias a measure of their eagerness to take a vigorous stand on an issue evaded, indeed denied, by the regime, a gesture toward moral autonomy. The poetry readings, dominated by Evtushenko and the considerably more gifted Voznesensky, were generating a new sense of solidarity and dedi- cation among the young, a harking back to some of the traditional ideals of the Russian intelligentsia.

Here, it seems to me, lay one of the major reasons why the Commu- nist hierarchy chose to intervene once more. The threat of an independent public opinion did much to provoke Khrushchev's recent raid on the intellectuals. Another important factor was the resurgence of formal experimentation in poetry and the arts. It is noteworthy, and perhaps symbolic, that Khrushchev's spring campaign against the "liberals" was triggered by his visit to the exhibition of Soviet modernist artists. It seems that when confronted by abstractionist paintings, Khrushchev flew into a rage and declared war on the "filthy Formalist mess." The bureaucratic onslaught reached its peak in Khrushchev's March 8, 1963, tirade, in which he arraigned Evtushenko and Ehren- burg, Nekrasov and Aksenov, the poet Voznesensky and the sculptor Neizvestny.

Why was Khrushchev more exercised over a nonrepresentational painting than an explosive topical novel? Why is a lack of content deemed more objectionable in the Soviet Union than politically dan- gerous content? Perhaps what is involved here is a combination of a relentlessly instrumentalist approach to art with a totalitarian urge to control it. Though admittedly a gamble, an exposure of Stalin's con- centration camps can be utilized by the party in furthering definable political objectives. Nonobjective art, as Khrushchev himself made

10 "New Voices in Russian Writing," Encounter, Apr., 1963.



414 Slavic Review

clear in his March 8 harangue, cannot be used by "the people ... as a tool of their ideology.""1 For a Communist apparatchih, an art forlm which refuses to serve as a vehicle of propaganda is worse than useless. It is difficult to control what one does not understand. Hence, perhaps, the accents of genuine intellectual panic which crept into Khrushchev's nearly obscene outburst at the art exhibit of December, 1962.

Be that as it may, in spring, 1963, the nonconformist Russian intellectuals found themselves once again on the defensive. With the significant exception of undaunted Nekrasov, the culprits offered inevitable apologies, though some of these were hedged and ambiguous. The literary spokesmen of the young intelligentsia were scattered, with Voznesensky and Aksenov persuaded to learn the facts of life by im- mersing themselves in industrial practices in the outlying provinces. After several months, the new bureaucratic campaign ground to a halt. The "conservatives" who clamored for a pound of "liberal" flesh were disappointed. Novy mir has announced another installment of Ehren- burg's memoirs and a new story by Nekrasov. The present situation has all the earmarks of an uneasy stalemate. The literary and aesthetic ferment which had reached its new peak in 1962 has been impeded, if not altogether arrested. At least for a while, the pacesetters will have to watch their step, but some of the stirring phrases uttered in 1962 are not likely to be forgotten.

IV

The two crack-downs have defined the limits of the party's tolerance of literary heterodoxy or, more broadly, of the concessions which present- day Soviet totalitarianism can make without changing its nature or losing its grip. Although the boundaries are more fluid than they used to be, and the hierarchy more vulnerable to societal pressures than it was under Stalin, the regime seems determined to block (a) explicit criticism of the bureaucratic Establishment,'2 (b) a search for new, nonrealistic modes of expression, and (c) any literary movement or ferment which is likely to develop into an autonomous source of moral authority. For a full-scale repudiation of official ideology and aesthet- ics, one would have to turn to whatever samples of "underground" Soviet literature have come our way. It is only in a novel or story written, to use the Russian phrase, "for the drawer," or in the hope of being smuggled out abroad, that one can find a reference to the Stalin era as a "quarter of a century of tyranny unprecedented in the history of the world."'13 By the same token, no narrative which has gotten past

11 Cf. "Khrushchev on Culture," Encounter, Pamphlet No. 9, p. 30. 12 For a lucid discussion of this point see George Gibian, "Soviet Literature during the

Thaw," in Max Hayward and Leopold Labedz, eds., Literature and Revolution in Soviet Russia, 1917-62 (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), esp. pp. 135-37.

13 V. Tarsis, The Bluebottle (New York, 1963), p. 55.




the Soviet censor could match the savage bitterness of N. Arzhak's "This Is Moscow Speaking," where the narrator and his friends are apprised by the Soviet radio that "Sunday, August 10, 1960 is declared the Public Murder Day on which all citizens of the Soviet Union are given the right of extermination of any other citizen, with the exception of any persons mentioned in the first paragraph of the annex to this decree....l14 (Perhaps the most damning aspect of this parable lies in the fact that after the initial shock, the group managed to ration- alize the gruesome announcement away and absorb it somehow into the fabric of everyday Soviet reality.) Finally, only "underground" could one stumble into the quasi-Orwellian vision of A. Tertz's The Trial Begins and the corrosive irony of his remarkable essay On Social- ist Realism, an irony which testifies to a near-complete estrangement from the official ideology as well as a residual fear of abandoning it altogether.

It is in "Abram Tertz," whoever he may be, that one can see most clearly both the ideological and literary opportunities of underground Soviet writing and its apparent pitfalls. The Trial Begins is a remarkable, yet flawed story-an odd and perhaps not uncharacteristic mixture of nearly surrealistic suggestiveness with clumsiness and naivete. Tertz achieves chillingly grotesque, Georg Grosz-like effects in the scene of an NKVD party. But the voyeurish eroticism of The Trial Begins strikes me as a rather adolescent and strained exercise in risque sensu- ality, as a somewhat programmatic defiance of Soviet puritanism.

The dangers of writing by formula, or rather "counter-formula" (I. Howe),15 are still more apparent in Tertz's recent volume Fantastic Stories. Aside from several brilliant passages, it is a disappointingly contrived book. Clearly, Tertz was trying to implement here his own much quoted plea for "a phantasmagoric art in which the grotesque will replace realistic description of ordinary life" (On Socialist Real- ism). Are we to conclude from this partial failure that there is something wrong with Tertz's program, or rather that he was not well equipped to carry it out? Or should we view the somewhat mechanical quality of Tertz's plots, shuttling as they do between science fiction and surrealism, between H. G. Wells and Kafka, as one more reminder that totalitarian thought control warps not only the conformist but the dis- senter as well? Ironically, the very compulsion to protest, to say "no" in an underground rumble, which testifies to the writer's moral autonomy, can become a threat to his aesthetic freedom. Where thematic emphases are decided upon, in large measure, not as a matter of personal vision or of structural necessity but as one of political intransi- gence, the system, so bravely and stridently defied, asserts its presence

14 Patricia Blake and Max Hayward, eds., Dissonant Voices in Soviet Literature (New York: Pantheon Books, 1962), p. 265.

15 Howe, op. cit.



416 Slavic Review

and retains its hold by effectively restricting the range of the artist's moral and aesthetic choice.

V

In summing up, I would like to offer a few tentative conclusions and still more precarious prognoses.

1. During the last six or seven years there has been more variety, candor, and plain speaking in Soviet literature than had seemed con- ceivable from the vantage point of, say, 1950. What with the tug-of- war between two factions, the literary scene has become less monolithic than it had been under Stalin. Some sovietologists are so encouraged by these developments as to anticipate a return to the high degree of cultural pluralism and relative party tolerance that prevailed during the so-called NEP period back in the twenties. These hopes do not seem warranted. Analogies between a pretotalitarian situation and a mellower variant of totalitarianism are bound to be somewhat misleading. Need one insist on the difference of tenor between the party's 1925 resolution on literaturel6 and the most "liberal" recent pro- nouncements of Khrushchev's bearing on literary policy?

Clearly, the gap revealed by such a juxtaposition is a cultural as well as an institutional one. It goes without saying that men such as Trotsky, Bukharin, and Kamenev had more intellectual and aesthetic sophistication than can be credited to Khrushchev or Ilyichev. More- over-and perhaps more important-in the mid-twenties the regime had not yet devised the elaborate mechanism of control over literature which has been at its disposal ever since 1932.

It is true that in the last few years the party has countenanced, in pursuing definite objectives of its own, potentially explosive utterances. But it has been able to reimpose controls and reaffirm the sacrosanct principle of "party-mindedness" whenever it deemed it necessary and urgent to do so. By and large, the regime has been in a position to secure the wvriters' overt loyalty without resorting to the brutal police methods of the previous era. A regression to the Stalinist cultural policies is highly unlikely. But so is, in the foreseeable future, a return to the gaudy variety of literary creeds and manifestoes which character- ized the turbulent twenties.

2. As soon as the Soviet writer was granted a measure of self-expression, "old-fashioned" human values came to the fore. The ethical leit- motiv of the "thaw" was a hankering for moral absolutes, a revulsion from the pseudo-dialectical "double-think." After over two decades of Stalinist brainwashing, a number of writers were heard opting for hon- esty, common decency, emotional privacy, integrity of the self, a measure of personal and creative freedom, or, as one of them put it recently

16 Gleb Struve, Soviet Russian Literature, 1917-1950 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951), pp. 83-85.




in an anonymous message to the West, for "elementary tolerance, curi- osity and goodwill."17 It may be argued that literary nonconformism of the first post-Stalin decade is both more and less than a consistent opposition to the regime. More, since at its deeper levels it seems to represent a moral uneasiness, a spiritual ferment which some day may call into question the entire Soviet world-view. Less, since for obvious reasons, the "thaw" writers are not capable of effective political action. They have no organization, no coherent political program or social vision. For all we know, many of them may have no fundamental quarrel with the system. Their ostensible objective is not to change it but, if possible, to humanize it-to make it less monolithic and bureaucratic, more egalitarian and more responsive to individual needs.

3. With the partial exception of the best of Solzhenitsyn, Kazakov, and Voznesensky, the major literary products of the "thaw" have been heartening moral symptoms rather than significant literary achieve- ments. Years of socialist-realist aridity must have taken a heavy toll. Moreover, aesthetic standards may well be more perishable, or may require a more systematic cultivation, than the basic human values. The bulk of Soviet prose fiction remains parochial, drab, and painfully dull. The writers whom I was discussing are a minority, though a vocal and, one hopes, a fairly influential one. And even here, more often than not, the level of performance and the degree of literary sophistication are far from impressive. It will take years, if not decades, until Soviet literature manages to repossess its own "modern" tradition, until it recaptures the vitality, the inventiveness, the free-wheeling experimentation of the twenties. Yet this is only part of the story. The reassertion of "old-fashioned" moral absolutes has found its correla- tive, as well as its vehicle, in the resurgence of what one might call elementary literary values.

A striking passage which occurs toward the end of N. Arzhak's "This Is Moscow Speaking" points up this connection more poignantly than any of the legal "dissonant" utterances. The narrator brings his girl friend to a reunion of the group who at the beginning of the story listened in stunned silence to the amazing radio announcement. They had not seen each other since that traumatic experience. The party bumps along, with the predictable amount of rowdy conviviality, until a casual mention of the "Public Murder Day" triggers a spate of nerv- ously euphoric yakking. The narrator's companion is taken aback: "Why are they so pleased about it?" she whispers. "They are pleased that they are still alive, Svetlana," he answers sensibly. But the girl is still upset, "But they all went into hiding! They have been -." Svet- lana breaks off, searching for the right word-"They have been terrorized!"

Svetlana's "right word" has an exhilarating effect upon the narrator: 17 Cf. "Letter from a Soviet Writer," The New Leader, Dec. 9, 1963.



418 Slavic Review

"Terrorized? He took hold of her by the shoulders-Svetlana, do you understand?. .. No she didn't. She didn't know this one word of hers had answered the question which millions of bewildered people had been asking themselves and each other. She had challenged the unani- mous roar of big rallies and all the diabolic clatter of tanks carrying gaping muzzles of guns to ceremonial parades."18

The import of the above is all too clear. When bureaucratic euphe- misms displace the unbearable actuality and explain it away, the simple act of calling a spade a spade, of naming the unspeakable, becomes an epiphany. When fraudulent official semantics distorts the normal relations between the sign and the referent, responsible and accurate use of language is a blow for personal dignity. Conversely, the uphill fight for elementary decency, once again undertaken by the Russian writer, helps to create the essential precondition of a literature worthy of the name, by restoring a reliable connection between words and things, between language and the facts of experience.

What is true of the genuine writer's attitude to language applies with equal force to the view of human nature which informs the best Soviet fiction of recent years. Orwell's memorable phrase "literature of edification," a remarkably apt label for the bulk of Soviet writing in the Stalin era, was, deliberately, a contradiction in terms. Even when it is not major discovery, literature is search, exploration, reconnais- sance. A novel, a story, or a play which peddles ready-made formulae subverts the essential purpose of imaginative writing. By the same token, a work of fiction which deals in melodramatic stereotypes sur- renders one of the modern novelist's hard-won victories, his imaginative command of the complexity, the intractability, the opaqueness of human reality.

Now this is precisely the quality which the best present-day Soviet writers are falteringly, awkwardly, precariously recapturing as they are straining after what a Soviet drama critic aptly dubbed "emotional literacy." In view of the dearth of actual accomplishments, it would be misleading, or at least premature, to talk about a "literary revival" in present-day Russia. What we are witnessing is a more limited, yet a significant process which may well serve as a prelude to such a revival, notably a conscious attempt to re-establish the minimum requirements of a genuine literary enterprise, to restore to imaginative literature its proper role, its natural function.

In this brave endeavor, the honest Soviet writer will have to contend not only with the ossified literary conservatives but with the party hierarchy as well. The post-Stalin bureaucrat may well have fewer illusions than did his forerunner about the propagandistic effectiveness of pseudo literature. Yet he is profoundly, and rightly, apprehensive

18 Blake and Hayward, op. cit., p. 305. (In several instances I have found it necessary to tamper with the translation.)




about the subversive potential of the creative imagination. The struggle has just begun. To predict its outcome would be foolhardy. In the meantime, it is good to know that a number of Soviet writers and poets know the difference between "literature of edification" and genuine literature and are prepared to take considerable risks in dramatizing the possibility of the latter.



Documents

Post-Stalin Trends in Russian Literature