A MAJOR DOCUMENT FROM RUSSIA:

ON SOCIALIST

REALISMIntroduction

The title of this article does not even begin to convey its importance as anintellectual and historical document. It is, we believe, one of the most significantPieces of writing to come out of contemporary Russia; and we take pride in pre-senting here the first full English translation.

The article was written in Russia by a Russian writer, 37 or 38 years old. Hemanaged to convey it to Paris, where the liberal monthly Esprit published a Frenchtranslation. It was written before the Pasternak affair, and has, of course, not ap-peared in Russia itself.

The version that follows has been translated from the Russian by Mr. GeorgeDelinis. Mr. Dennis notes:

"The style tells a good deal about the man. The article is written in poeticProse, the oldest type of Russian prose, whose persistence in Russia was recentlyrevealed to the West by the publication of Doctor Zhivago. This persistence maywell be news also to the Russians: this article should help to allay the fears re-cently expressed by Constantine Paustovski, a talented and humane Soviet writer,that the Russian language would be completely replaced by a party jargon.

"To a Western reader, Russian poetic prose does not always make easy read-ing. It is not only peppered with verse; it is also a series of lyrical outbursts. Ican assure the reader that the original contains even more question marks andexclamation points than the translation. Moreover, the prose is shot through withpoetic images, metaphors and rhythms. Fundamentally, it is a personal prose aswell as a product of its national environment.

"A closer stylistic analysis will reveal that the poetic prose of this article hasbeen formed by a process of historical accumulation. The succession of strata canstill be seen, as in a geological formation. Over the original Slav stratum is astrong layer of Byzantinism, mainly contributed by the Orthodox religion. Thencomes a layer contributed by the West, in this case mostly German idealistic phi-losophy and French literature. The top layer is Marxist or, if you wish, Com-munist. The Russian language has assimilated them all, just as, no doubt, it isnow engaged in assimilating American influences .. .

"The best clue to unravelling the ambiguities in which the author's attitudetoward Communism is inevitably involved," continues Mr. Dennis, "is the ironywhich sets the tone of the article. There is at least one example of it on everypage. This kind of irony has been the favorite literary weapon of Russian and,indeed, European writers .. .

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"It might help American readers to understand the outlook of the author ifthey recalled how Swift, savagely lashing out against the English Ascendency inIreland, remained part of that Ascendency. Our author has freed one of his feetfrom Communism. He uses it to kick Communism, and some of his kicks are prettyhard. But his other foot is still stuck in Communism—and stuck fast."

To these remarks very little need be added. We believe that this article pre-sents an incomparable portrait of a highly intelligent and cultivated man, whosesentiments, ironies, even confusions may well be shared by other literate Russians.For democrats and socialists in the West, it is a moral responsibility to listen tothe voice of this man with the greatest attention and sympathy.—Enrroxs.

What is socialist re-alism? What is the meaning of thisstrange and jarring phrase? Can therebe a socialist, capitalist, Christian orMohammedan realism? Does this ir-rational concept have a natural exist-ence? Perhaps it does not exist at all,perhaps it is only the nightmare ofa terrified intellectual during the darkand magical night of Stalin's dictator-ship? Perhaps a crude propagandatrick of Zhdanov or a senile fancy ofGorki? Is it fiction, myth or propa-ganda?

Such questions, we are told, are oftenasked in the West. They are hotlydebated in Poland. They are also cur-rent among us, where they arouseeager minds, tempting them into theheresies of doubt and criticism.

Meanwhile, the productions of so-cialist realism are measured in billionsof printed sheets, kilometers of can-vas and film, centuries of hours. Athousand critics, theoreticians, art ex-perts, pedagogues are beating theirheads and straining their voices tojustify, explain and interpret its ma-terial existence and dialectical charac-ter. The head of the state himself, theFirst Secretary of the CP, tears him-self away from pressing economic tasksto pronounce some weighty words onthe country's esthetic problems.•

• This refers to Khrushchev's speeches toSoviet intellectuals, collected and pub-lished in 1957 under the title, For aClose Link Between Literature and Artand the Life of the People.

The most exact definition of social-ist realism is given in a statute of theAssociation of Soviet Writers: "Social-ist realism is the basic method of So-viet Iiterature and Iiterary criticism.It demands from the artist a truthfuland historically concrete representa-tion of reality in its revolutionary de-velopment. Moreover, the truthfulnessand historical concreteness of the ar-tistic representation of reality mustbe linked with the task of ideologicaltransformation and education of work-ers in the spirit of socialism." (FirstAll-Union Congress of Soviet Writers,1934, p. 716.)

This innocent formula is the foun-dation on which the entire edifice ofsocialist realism was erected. It in-cludes the link between socialist real-ism and the realism of the past, as wellas its new and distinguishing quality.The link lies in the truthfulness of therepresentation; the difference, in theability to seize the revolutionary devel-

opment and to educate readers in ac-cordance with that development, in

the spirit of socialism. The old real-ists, or, as they are sometimes called,critical realists (because they criticizedbourgeois society), men like Balzac,Tolstoy and Chekhov, truthfully rep-resented life as it is. But not havingbeen instructed in the genius andteachings of Marx, they could notforesee the future victories of social-ism, and they certainly did not knowthe real and concrete roads to thesevictories.

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The socialist realist, armed with thedoctrine of Marx and enriched by theexperience of struggles and victories,is inspired by the vigilant attention ofhis friend and teacher, the CommunistParty. While representing the present,he listens to the march of history andlooks toward the future. He sees the"visible traits of Communism," invisi-ble to the ordinary eye. His creativework is a step forward from the artof the past, the highest peak of theartistic development of mankind andthe most realistic of realisms.

Such, in a few words, is the generalscheme of our art. It is amazinglysimple, yet sufficiently elastic to com-prehend Gorki, Mayakovski, Fadeev,Aragon, Ehrenburg and hundreds ofothers. But we cannot understand thisconcept at all as long as we skim thesurface of the dry formula and do notpenetrate into its deep and hiddenmeaning.

The gist of this formula—"the truth-ful, historically concrete representa-tion of reality in its revolutionary de-velopment"—is founded on the con-cept of Purpose with a capital P. ThePurpose is an all-embracing ideal, to-wards which truthfully represented re-ality ascends in an undeviating revolu-tionary movement. To direct thismovement towards its end and to helpthe reader approach it more closelyby transforming his consciousness—this is the Purpose of socialist realism,the most purposeful art of our time .. .

THE CONCEPT OF PURPOSE

Our art, like our culture and our so-ciety, is teleological through andthrough. It is subject to a higher des-tiny, from which it gains its title ofnobility. In the final reckoning we liveonly to speed the coming of Commu-nism.

A tendency towards purpose is part

of human nature. I extend my handto receive the coins. I go to a movieto spend some time with a pretty girl.I write a novel to earn glory and thegratitude of posterity. Each of myconscious moves is purposeful.

Animals do not have such long-range intentions. They are moved byinstincts. They bite to bite, and notfor the purpose of biting. They don'tthink about tomorrow, wealth, God.They live without facing any complexproblems. But man invariably wantswhat he has not got. This quality ofour nature finds its outlet in a feverishactivity. We transform nature intoour own image and turn nature intoan object. Aimless rivers become ar-teries of communication. Aimless treesbecome paper filled with destiny.

Our abstract thought is no less tele-ological. Man explores the world byattributing to it his own purposeful-ness. He asks: "What is the use of thesun?" and answers: "To give lightand heat." The animism of primitivepeoples is the first attempt to conquersenseless chaos by endowing it withmany aims, and to animate the in-different universe with a life usefulto man.

Science has not freed us from thechildish questions of "Why?" Behindthe causal relations that it establisheswe find the hidden and distorted pur-posefulness of natural phenomena.Science says: "man descends from themonkey" instead of saying: "the desti-ny of the monkey is to become man."

However man may have originated,his appearance and purpose are in-separable from God—that is, from thehighest idea of purpose which is ac-cessible to us, if not through our un-derstanding, then through our wishthat there should be such a purpose.This is the final purpose of all thatis and of all that isn't, and is the in-

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finite—and probably purposeless—Pur-pose in itself. For how could Purposehave purposes?

There are periods of history whenthe presence of Purpose is evident,when minor passions are absorbed inthe striving for God and He openlycalls mankind to Himself. Thus arosethe culture of Christianity whichseized the Purpose in what is, perhaps,its most inaccessible meaning. Thencame the era of individualism whichproclaimed the freedom of the indi-vidual as the Purpose and set aboutworshipping this purpose with the aidof the Renaissance, humanism, super-man, democracy, Robespierre, ban-quets and other forms of prayer. Andnow we have entered the era of a newworld-wide system—that of socialistpurposefulness.

A blinding light pours from thissummit of thought. "A world that wecan imagine, more material and bettersuited to human needs than Christianparadise"—thus was Communism de-fined by the Soviet writer Leonid Le-onov.

Words fail us when we try to talkabout it. We choke with enthusiasmand we use mostly negative compari-sons to describe the splendor that iswaiting for us. Then, under Commu-nism, there will be no rich and nopoor, no money, wars, jails, frontiers,diseases—and maybe no death. Every-body will eat and work as much as helikes, and labor will bring joy insteadof sorrow. As Lenin promised, we willmake toilets of pure gold . . . Butwhat am I talking about?

What words and what colors are neededTo describe these grandiose heightsWhere whores are as modest as virginsAnd hangmen as tender as mothers?

The modern mind cannot imagineanything more beautiful and splendidthan the Communist ideal. The best

that it can do is to restore to circula-tion old ideals of Christian love andthe liberty of the individual. But ithas been unable so far to set up a newPurpose.

Where socialism is concerned, theWestern liberal individualist or Rus-sian sceptical intellectual is about inthe same position as the cultured andintelligent Roman with regard to vic-torious Christianity. He called thenew faith of the crucified God barba-rious and naive, laughed over the luna-tics that worshipped the cross—thatRoman guillotine—and believed thatthe doctrines of the Trinity, the Immac-ulate Conception, Resurrection, etc.,made no sense whatsoever. But it wasquite above his powers to advance anyserious arguments against the ideal ofChrist as such. True, he could say thatthe best parts of the moral code ofChristianity were borrowed from Pla-to, just as contemporary Christiansassert here and there that Communismtook its noble aims from the Gospel.But could he say that God conceivedas Love or Goodness was evil or mon-strous? And can we say that the uni-versal happiness, promised for theCommunist future, is evil?

For don't I know that blindfold thrustsWill not make darkness yield to light?Am I a monster? Is not the happiness

of millionsCloser to me than empty luck for a few?

PASTERNAK

We are helpless before the enchant-ing beauty of Communism. We havenot lived long enough to invent anew Purpose and to go beyond our-selves—into the distance that is be-yond Communism.

It was the genius of Marx that heproved the earthly paradise, of whichothers had dreamed before him, wasactually the Purpose which Fate des-tined for man. With the aid of Marx,

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Communism passed from moral effortsof isolated individuals—"Oh, where areyou, golden age?"—into the sphere ofuniversal history, which became pur-poseful as never before and turnedinto mankind's march toward Com-munism.

At once, everything fell into place.An iron necessity and a strict hierar-chical order harnessed the flow of cen-turies. The ape stood up on its hindlegs and began its triumphant pro.cession towards Communism. The sys-tem of primitive Communism arosebecause it was fated to grow intoslavery; slavery, to give birth to feu-dalism; feudalism, towards capitalism;and finally capitalism, so that it couldgive way to Communism. That is all!The magnificent aim is achieved, thepyramid is crowned, history at an end.

A truly religious person relates allthe splendid variety of life to his di-vinity. He cannot understand anotherfaith. He believes in the Purpose sothat he can despise other purposes.He shows the same fanaticism—or ifyou prefer, printsipialnost'—with re-gard to history.* A consistent Chris-tian views the entire history previousto the birth of Christ as the prehistoryof Christ. From the point of view ofthe monotheist, the pagans existedonly to call upon themselves the willof the only God and, after a suitablepreparation, to become monotheists.

It can therefore hardly surprise usthat, in another religious system, an-cient Rome has become an indispen-sable stage on the road to Communism.Or that the Crusades are not ex-plained by their internal dynamics, bythe ardent efforts of Christians, but by

• Printsipialnost' is a Russian wordwith no English equivalent. It describesthe mental habit of referring every mat-ter, however small, concrete or trivial,to lofty and abstract principles.

the action of the omnipresent forcesof production that are now ensuringthe collapse of capitalism and the tri-umph of socialism. True faith is in-compatible with toleration. Neither isit compatible with historicism, i.e. withtoleration applied to the past. Andthough the Marxists call themselveshistorical materialists, their historicismis actually reduced to a desire to re-gard life as a march towards Com-munism. Other movements are oflittle interest to them. Whether theyare right or wrong is a matter of dis-pute. What is beyond dispute is thatthey are consistent.

If we ask a Westerner why theFrench Revolution was necessary, wewill receive a great many differentanswers. One will reply that it hap-pened to save France; another, thatit took place to lead the nation intoan abyss of moral experiments; athird, that it came to give to theworld the great principles of Liberty,Equality and Fraternity; a fourth, thatthe French Revolution was not neces-sary at all. But if you ask any Sovietschoolboy—to say nothing of the bene-ficiaries of our higher education—youwill invariably receive the correct andexhaustive reply: the French Revolu-tion was needed to clear the way toCommunism.

The man who received a Marxisteducation knows the meaning of bothpast and future. He knows why thisor that idea, event, emperor or mili-tary leader was needed. It is a longtime since men had such an exactknowledge of the meaning of theworld's destiny—not since the MiddleAges, most likely. It is our great priv-ilege to possess this knowledge oncemore.

The teleological nature of Marxismis most obvious in the works of itslatest theorists. They brought to Marx.

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ism the clarity, strength and rigor ofmilitary orders and economic decrees.A good example is Stalin's judgmenton the role of ideas, taken from thefourth chapter of the Short Course ofHistory of the Communist Party ofthe Soviet Union:

"There exist different ideas andtheories. There are old ideas and theo-ries which have outlived their timeand serve the interests of outdatedforces of society. Their significancelies in their hampering the growthof the society and its forward march.There are also new, advanced ideasand theories which serve the interestsof the advanced forces of society.Their significance lies in facilitatingthe growth of the society and its for-ward march."

As long as its famous author lived,the Short Course was the bedside bookof every Soviet citizen. The entireliterate population was constantlyurged to study it and in particular itsfourth chapter, containing the quint-essence of the Marxist creed and writ-ten by Stalin himself. A quotationfrom V. I1'enkov's novel The GreatHighway illustrates the universal va-lidity that was attached to the ShortCourse:

"Father Degtyarev brought in asmall volume and said: 'Everything issaid here, in the fourth chapter.' Vin-kentii Ivanovich took the book andthought: 'There is no book on thisearth that contains everything that aman needs ..: But Vinkentii Ivano-min [a typical sceptical intellectual]soon realized that he was wrong andaccepted Degtyarev's view, which wasthat of all advanced people: This book`contains everything that a manneeds.' "

Every word of this quotation is per-vaded by the spirit of purposeful.ness. Even the ideas that do not favor

the movement towards the Purposehave their destiny: to hamper themovement towards the Purpose (once,no doubt, the destiny of Satan). "Idea,""superstructure," "base," "law of na-ture," "economics," "forces of produc-tion"—all these abstract and imper-sonal concepts suddenly come to life,are covered with flesh and blood andbecome like gods and heroes, angelsand devils. They create purposes andsuddenly, from the pages of philo-sophical treatises and scientific investi-gations, there resounds the voice ofthe great religious Mystery: "The baseproduces the superstructure so thatit can serve the base." (J. Stalin:Marxism and Linguistic Questions.)

THE PURPOSE OF THE CREATION

This is not the only happy turn ofphrase by Stalin which the author ofthe Bible might envy. The specificteleology of Marxist thought consistsin leading all concepts and objects tothe Purpose, referring them all to thePurpose and defining them all throughthe Purpose. The history of all epochsand nations is but the history of hu-manity's march towards Communism,and the history of the world's thoughthappened, so to say, in order to bringforth "scientific materialism," i.e.Marxism, i.e. the philosophy of Com-munism. The history of philosophy,proclaimed Zhdanov, "is the historyof the birth, rise and development ofthe scientific world view and its laws.As materialism grew and developedin the struggle against idealism, sothe history of philosophy is the historyof the struggle between materialismand idealism." (A. A. Zhdanov, "Con-tribution to the Discussion of G. F.Aleksandrov's History of Western Eu-ropean Philosophy," June 24, 1947.)These proud words seem like the voiceof God Himself exclaiming: "The

whole history is My history, and sinceI assert myself in the struggle withSatan, world history is also the his-tory of My struggle with Satan."

And so it rises before us, the solePurpose of all Creation, as splendidas eternal life and as compulsory asdeath. And we fling ourselves towardsit, breaking all barriers and rejectinganything that might hamper our fran-tic course. We free ourselves withoutregret from belief in an afterlife, fromlove of our neighbor, from freedomof the individual and other prejudices,by now rather shopworn and lookingall the sorrier by comparison with thegreat Ideal before us. Thousands ofmartyrs of the revolution gave up theirlives for the new religion and sur-passed the first Christians by their suf-ferings, their steadfastness and theirholiness:

Polish commandersBranded our backs with

Five-pointed stars.Mamontov's bands

Buried us aliveUp to our necks.

The JapaneseBurned us in fireplaces

Or railroad enginesAnd poured lead and tin

Into our mouths.They all roared:

"Abjure!"But from our burning throats

Only three words came:"Long

LiveCommunism!"

MAYAKOVSKI

To our new God we sacrificed notonly our lives, our blood and ourbodies. We also sacrificed our snow-white soul, after staining it with allthe filth of the world.

It is fine to be gentle, to drink teawith preserves, to plant flowers andcultivate love, non-resistance to eviland other philanthropies. But whom

did they save and what did theychange in this world, these ancient vir-gins of both sexes, these egoists ofhumanism who bought themselves ineasy conscience penny by penny andrented themselves a cozy corner inthe heavenly almshouses?

We did not want salvation for our-selves but for all of humanity. Insteadof sentimental sighs, individual pegfection and amateur dramatics for thebenefit of the hungry, we set aboutto correct the universe according tothe best of models, the shining modelof the Purpose which we approachedever more closely.

So that prisons should vanish for-ever, we built new prisons. So thatall frontiers should fall, we surround-ed ourselves with a Chinese wall. Sothat work should become a rest anda pleasure, we introduced forced la-bor. So that not one drop of bloodbe shed any more, we killed and killedand killed.

In the name of the Purpose weturned to the means that our ene-mies used: we glorified Imperial Rus-sia, we wrote lies in Pravda [Truth],we set a new Tsar on the now emptythrone, we introduced officers' epau-lettes and tortures ... Sometimes wefelt that only one final sacrifice wasneeded for the triumph of Commu-nism—the renunciation of Commu-nism.

O Lord, 0 Lord—pardon us oursins!

Finally, it was created, our world,in the image and likeness of God. Itis not yet Communism, but it is al-ready quite close to Communism. Andso we rise, stagger with weariness, en-circle the earth with bloodshot eyes,and do not find around us what wehoped to find.

Why do you laugh, scum? Why doyou claw with your well-cared nails

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the spots of blood and dirt that havestuck to our jackets and uniforms?You say that this is not Communism,that we took the wrong turning andthat we are further from Communismnow than when we started. Well then,where is your Kingdom of God? Showit! Where is the free personality ofthe superman that you promised?

Achievements are never identicalwith the original aim. The means usedto reach the aim change its originalappearance into something unrecog-nizable. The stakes of the Inquisitionhelped to establish the Gospel; butwhat is left of the Gospel after thestakes have done their work? Yet allof them—the stakes of the Inquisi-tion and the Gospel, the night ofSaint Bartholomew and Saint Barthol-omew himself—add up to one greatChristian culture.

Yes, we live in Communism. It re-sembles our aspirations about as muchas the Middle Ages resembled Christ,modern Western man resembles thefree superman, and man resemblesGod. But all the same, there is someresemblance, isn't there?

This resemblance lies in the subor-dination of all our actions, thoughtsand longings to that sole Purpose,which may have long ago become ameaningless word but still has a hyp-notic effect on us and pushes us on-ward and onward—we don't knowwhere. And, obviously, art and liter-ature could not but get caught in themeshes of that system and become, asLenin predicted, "a small wheel anda small screw" of the gigantic statemachine. "Our magazines, both scien-tific and artistic, cannot be apoliti-cal... The strength of Soviet litera-ture, the most advanced in the world,is that it is a literature for whichthere can be no other interests thanthose of the people and of the state.

(Decree of the Central Committee ofthe CPSU (b), August 14, 1946.)

It must be remembered, when read-ing this decree of the Central Com-mittee, that the interests of the peo-ple and of the state—which, inciden-tally, are exactly the same from thepoint of view of the state—have buta single aim: the all-pervading andall-absorbing Communism. "Literatureand art are part of the whole people'sstruggle for Communism... The high-est social destiny of art and literatureis to mobilize the people to the strug-gle for new advances in the buildingof Communism." (N. S. Khrushchev,"For a Close Link Between Literatureand Art and the Life of the People,"Kommunist magazine, number 12,1957.)

When Western writers deplore ourlack of freedom of speech, their start-ing point is their belief in the free-dom of the individual. This is thefoundation of their culture, but it isorganically alien to Communism. Atrue Soviet writer, a true Marxist, willnot accept these reproaches, and willnot even know what they are allabout. What freedom—if the compari-son be permitted—does the religiousperson require from God? The free-dom to praise God still more ardently?

Contemporary Christians, who havebroken their spiritual fast and accept-ed the spirit of individualism, with itsfree elections, free enterprise and freepress, occasionally abuse the phrase"freedom of choice" that Christ issupposed to hale bequeathed us. Thissounds like a dubious borrowing fromthe parliamentary system to whichthey are accustomed, for it bears noresemblance to the Kingdom of God,if only because no president or primeminister is ever elected in paradise.Even the most liberal God offers onlyone freedom of choice: to believe or

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not to believe, to be for Him or forSatan, to go to paradise or to hell.Communism offers just about the sameright. If you don't want to believe,you can go to jail—which is by nomeans worse than hell. And for theman who believes, for the Soviet writ•er to whom Communism is the pur-pose of his own and humanity'sexistence (and otherwise there is noplace for him either in our literatureor in our society), there can be nosuch dilemma. For the man who be-lieves in Communism, as Khrushchevcorrectly noted in one of his latestcultural pronouncements, "for the ar-tist who truly wants to serve his peo-ple, the question does not arise ofwhether he is free or not in his crea-tive work. For him, the question ofwhich approach to the phenomena ofreality to choose is clear. He need notconform or force himself; the truerepresentation of life from the pointof view of Communist partiinost'* isa necessity of his soul. He holds firmly

to these positions, and affirms and de-fends them in the work."

It is with the same joyous facilitythat this artist accepts the directivesof the party and the government, fromthe Central Committee and its FirstSecretary. For who, if not the partyand its leader, knows best what kindof art we need? It is, after all, theparty that leads us to the Purpose inaccordance with all the rules of Marx-ism-Leninism, the party that lives andworks in constant contact with God.And so we have in it and in its lead-er the wisest and most experiencedguide, who is competent in all ques-tions of industry, linguistics, music,philosophy, painting, biology, etc. Heis our Commander, our Ruler, ourHigh Priest. To doubt his words isas sinful as to doubt the will of God.

These are the esthetical and psy-chological concepts the knowledge ofwhich is indispensable to anyone whowould penetrate the secret of socialistrealism.

Works produced by socialist realistsvary in style and content. But in allof them the Purpose is present, wheth-er directly or indirectly, open orveiled. They are panegyrics on Com-munism, satires on some of its manyenemies, or descriptions of life "inits revolutionary development," i.e.life moving towards Communism.

Having chosen his subject, the So-viet writer views it from a definiteangle. He wants to discover what po-tentialities it contains that point tothe splendid Purpose. Most subjectsof Soviet literature have in common

* Partiinost' is the point of view thatconsiders everything in terms of the cor-rect party line.

a remarkable purposefulness. They alldevelop in one direction, and a direc-tion well known in advance. This di-rection may exhibit variations in ac-cordance with time, place, conditions,etc.; but it is invariable in its courseand its destiny: to remind the readeronce more of the triumph of Com-munism.

Each work of socialist realism, evenbefore it appears, is thus assured of ahappy ending. The ending may besad for the hero, who runs every pos-sible risk in his fight for Communism;but it is happy from the point ofview of the superior Purpose; and theauthor never neglects to proclaim hisfirm belief in our final victory, eitherdirectly or through a speech of his

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dying hero. Lost illusions, brokenhopes, unfulfilled dreams, so charac-teristic of literature of other eras andsystems, are contrary to socialist real-ism. Even when it produces a tragedy,it is an Optimistic Tragedy, the titleof Vishnevski's play in which the hero-ine dies at the end but Communismtriumphs.

A comparison between some repre-sentative titles of Soviet and Westernliterature is revealing. Journey to theEnd of the Night (Celine); Death inthe Afternoon and For Whom the BellTolls (Hemingway); Everyone DiesAlone (Fallada); A Time to Live anda Time to Die (Remarque); Death ofa Hero (Aldington) are all in minorkey. Happiness (Pavlenko); First Joys(Fedin); It is Well! (Mayakovski);

Fulfilled Wishes (Kaverin); Light overthe Earth (Babayevski); The Victors(Bagritski); The Victor (Simonov);The Victor (Chirikov); Spring in theVictory Collective Farm (Gribachev),and so on, are all in a major key.

The splendid aim towards whichthe action develops is sometimes pre-sented directly at the end of the work.This method was brilliantly used byMayakovski. All his major works afterthe Revolution end with passagesabout Communism or with fantasticscenes describing life in the futureCommunist state (Mystery Bouffe;150,000,000; About This; VladimirIl'ich Lenin; It is Well!; With a FullVoice). Gorki, who during the Sovietera wrote mainly about the days be-fore the Revolution, ended most of hisnovels and plays—The Artamonov Af-fair; The Life of Klim Sam gin; EgorBulichev and Others; Dostigaev andOthers—with a vision of the victoriousRevolution, which was a stage on theway to Communism, and the conclud-ing gesture of the old world.

Even when the book does not end

with such a grandiose denouement, itstill exists implicitly and symbolically,commanding the development of char-acters and events. For example, manyof our novels and stories deal withthe work of a factory, the building ofan electricity work, the application ofan agricultural decree and so on. Aneconomic task is carried out in thecourse of the action (e.g. the start ofbuilding introduces the plot; the endof building—the denouement). But thetask is presented as an indispensablestage on the way towards a higherpurpose. In such a purposeful view,even technical processes acquire dra-matic tension and can be followedwith great interest. The reader findsout step by step how, against all kindof obstacles, the plant was put towork, the "Victory" collective farmgathered a good crop of corn and soon. He closes the book with a sigh ofrelief and realizes that we have madeyet another step towards Communism.

Since Communism is for us the in-escapable outcome of the historicalprocess, many of our novels have madethe impetuous course of time the main-spring of their action. The course oftime, working its way towards thePurpose, works for us. The Sovietwriter does not think in Proustianterms. He does not search for losttime; his motto is rather: "Time,march on!" He hastens the course oflife and affirms that each day lived isnot a loss but a gain for man—becauseit brings him closer to the desiredideal, even if only by one millimeter.

This purposefulness of the historicprocesses is linked with the great in-terest our writers show in history,both recent and remote. Recent his-torical events like the Civil War andcollectivization are landmarks on theroad we chose. In more remote erasit is, alas, harder to find the move-

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ment towards Communism. But if thewriter concentrates hard enough hewill uncover, even in the most remoteof times, some phenomenon thatmight be called progressive because,in the final account, it aided in someway our victories of today. The writ-ers merely anticipate somewhat andgive these events the Purpose that theydid not yet have. And so the leadersof the past like Ivan the Terrible,Peter the Great or the peasant rebelStenka Razin, though they did notknow the word "Communism," stillknow quite well that our future willbe brilliant. They never cease to cel-ebrate this future from the pages ofour historical novels, and they con-staritly gladden the heart of their read-ers by their astounding perspicacity.

Another subject is offered to ourliterature by the internal world ofman's psychological life. This inter-nal world moves towards the Purposeby dynamics of its own, fights against"the traces of the bourgeois past inits conscience," and re-educates itselfunder the influence of the party andof surrounding life. A large part ofSoviet literature is an "educationalnovel" which shows the Communistmetamorphosis of individuals and en-tire communities. Many of our booksturn around the representation ofthese moral and psychological proc-esses, which aim at producing theideal man of the future. One such isGorki's Mother, where an ignorantwoman, defeated by life, is transformedinto a conscious revolutionary. Writ-ten in 1906, this book is generallyconsidered the first example of social-ist realism. Or there is Makarenko'sPedagogical Poem about the youngcriminals who take the road to hon-est work, or Ostrovski's novel Howthe Steel Was Tempered, i.e. how thesteel of our youth was tempered in

the fire of the Civil War and the coldof early Communist construction.

As soon as the literary character be-comes fully purposeful and consciousof his purposefulness, he can enterthat privileged caste which is univer-sally respected and called "positiveheroes." This is the Holy of Holiesof socialist realism, its cornerstone andmain achievement.

THE POSITIVE HERO

The positive hero is not simply agood man. He is a hero illuminated bythe light of the most ideal of allideals. Leonid Leonov called his posi-tive hero "a peak of humanity fromwhose height the future can be seen."He has either no faults at all or elsebut a few of them—for example, hesometimes loses his temper a little.These faults have a twofold function.They help the hero to preserve a cer-tain likeness to real men and theyprovide something to overcome as heraises himself ever higher and higheron the ladder of political morality.However, these faults must be slightor else they would run counter to hisbasic qualities. It is not easy to enu-merate these basic qualities of thepositive hero: ideological conviction,courage, intelligence, will power, pa-triotism, respect for women, self-sacri-fice, etc., etc. The most important, ofcourse, are the clarity and directnesswith which he sees the Purpose andstrives towards it. Hence the amazingprecision of all his actions, thoughts,tastes, feelings and judgments. Hefirmly knows what is right and whatis wrong; he says plainly "yes" or "no"and does not confuse black with white.For him there are no inner doubtsand hesitations, no unanswerablequestions and no impenetrable se-crets. Faced with the most complexof tasks he easily finds the solution-

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by taking the shortest and most directroute to the Purpose.

The positive hero first appeared insome books of Gorki written in thefirst decade of the twentieth century.He started by proclaiming to theworld: "One must say firmly yes orno!" Many were shocked by the self-assurance and straightforwardness ofhis formulations, by his tendency topreach at everyone around him andby his pompous monologues celebrat-ing his own virtues. Chekhov, whenhe managed to read through The Pet-ty Bourgeois, frowned with embarrass-ment and advised Gorki to soften theloud proclamations of his hero. Che-khov feared pretentiousness worse thanfire: he viewed such purple passagesas a boastfulness foreign to the Rus-sian character.

But Gorki was deaf to such advice.He did not fear the reproaches andsneers of the shocked intelligentsiaand its repeated assertions that thenew hero was dull-witted and narrow-minded. He knew that his hero wasthe man of the future and that "onlymen as pitiless, straight and hard asswords will cut their way through."(The Petty Bourgeois, 1901.)

Since then the posotive hero hasgone through many changes and pre-sented himself in many guises. He un-rolled his positive qualities in manyways, grew big and sturdy, and finallydrew himself up to his full stature.This happened already in the 1930s,when the Soviet writers dropped theirlittle cliques and their literary ten-dencies, and accepted, almost unani-mously, the best and most advancedtrend of all: socialist realism.

To read the books of the last twen-ty or thirty years is to feel the greatpower of the positive hero. First hespread in every direction, until hefilled all our literature. There are

books in which all the heroes are pos-itive. This is but natural, once weare coming ever closer to the Pur.pose. So that if a book about thepresent deals not with the fightagainst the enemies but with, say, amodel collective farm, then all its char-acters can and must be positive. Toput negative characters in such a situ-ation would, to say the least, bestrange. And so we get dramas andnovels where all moves smoothly andpeacefully. If there is a conflict be-tween the heroes, it is a conflict be-tween good and better, model andsupermodel. When these books ap-peared, their authors—men like Ba-baevski, Surkov, Sofronov, Virta, Gri-bachev, etc.—were highly praised andset up as examples for others. True,since the Twentieth Congress—onehardly knows why—our attitude to-wards them changed somewhat andwe apply to them the contemptuousadjective "conflictless." Once Khrush-chev came out in defense of thesewriters, such reproaches were stilledsomewhat but they are still levied hereand there by intellectuals. They areunjust.

Since we don't want to lose facebefore the West, we occasionally ceaseto be consistent and declare that oursociety is rich in individualities andembraces many interests. And that ithas differences of opinion, conflictsand contradictions, and literature issupposed to reflect all that.

True, we differ from each other inage, sex, nationality and even intelli-gence. But whoever follows the partyline knows that these are heterogenei-ties within a homogeneity, differencesof opinion within a single opinion,conflicts within a basic absence of con-flict. We have one aim—Communism;one philosophy—Marxism; one art—socialist realism. This was well put

50

by a Soviet writer of no great literarygifts but politically irreproachable:"Russia took its own road—that ofunanimity ... For thousands of yearsmen suffered from differences of opin-ion. But now we, Soviet men andwomen, for the first time agree witheach other, talk one language that weall understand, and think identicallyabout the main things in life. It isthis unanimity that makes us strongand superior to all other people inthe world, who are internally torn andsocially isolated through their differ-ences of opinion." (V. Il'enkov, TheGreat Highway, a novel which ap-peared in 1949 and was awarded theStalin Prize.)*

Beautifully put! Yes we really areall alike and we are not ashamed ofit. Those of us who suffer from super-fluous differences of thought we pun•ish severely by excluding them fromlife and literature. There can be nosubstantial differences of opinion ina country where even the anti-partyelements confess their errors and wishto rectify them as soon as possible, andincorrigible enemies of the people askto be shot. Still less can there be suchdifferences among honest Soviet peo-ple and least of all among positiveheroes who think only of spreadingtheir virtues all over the world andof re-educating the few remainirtg dis-sidents into unanimity.

True, there are still disagreementsbetween the vanguard and the back-ward and there is still the sharp con-flict with the capitalist world that

• One cannot but recall in this con-nection Khrushchev's cri de coeur againstthe Jews: "They are all individualistsand all intellectuals. They want to talkabout everything, they want to discusseverything, they want to debate every-thing—and they come to totally differentconclusions!"

does not let us sleep in peace. But wedo not doubt for a single momentthat all these contradictions will beresolved, that the world will becomeunified and Communist and that thelast, by competing with each other,shall become the first. This great har-mony is the final Purpose of Creation,this beautiful absence of conflict isthe future of socialist realism. And sowe can hardly reproach those over-harmonious writers who have indeedwithdrawn from contemporary con-flicts but only to glance at the future,i.e. to find out how they can best paythe debt which, as writers, they oweto socialist realism. Babaevski and Sur-kov have not deviated from the sacredprinciples of our art, but have ratherdeveloped it logically and organically.They embody the higher stage of so-cialist realism and the embryo of thecoming Communist realism.

The growing strength of the posi-tive hero is shown not only in his in-credible multiplication—he has farsurpassed other kinds of literary char-acter in quantity, put them into shadeand sometimes replaced them alto-gether. His qualitative growth has al-so been remarkable. As he approachesthe Purpose, he becomes ever morepositive, great and splendid. He alsobecomes more and more persuaded ofhis own dignity, especially when hecompares himself to contemporaryWestern man and realizes his immeas-urable superiority. "But our Sovietman has left them far behind. He isnow close to the peak while they arestill wandering in the foothills"—thisis the way simple peasants talk in ournovels. And the poet runs out of wordswhen he tries to describe this superior-ity, this incomparable positiveness ofour positive hero:

Nobody rose so highFor centuries and centuries.

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You are above all glory,You are beyond all praise.

M. ISAKOVSKI

The novel Russian Forest by LeonidLeonov, the first writer to be award-ed a Lenin prize—which replaced theStalin prize—is the best work of so-cialist realism for the last five yearsor so. It contains a remarkable scene.The brave birl Polya, entrusted witha dangerous mission, makes her wayto the rear of the enemy—the actiontakes place during the Patriotic War.As a camouflage she is supposed tocollaborate with the Germans. Sheplays this part for a while in talkingto a Nazi officer, but with great diffi-culty: it is morally painful to her totalk the enemy's language. Finally shecannot stand it any more and revealsher true self and her superiority tothe German officer: "I am a girl of mytime. . . maybe just an ordinary gui,

but I am the world's tomorrow...,and you should stand up, yes, standup when you talk to me, if you havea trace of self-respect left! But thereyou sit, only because you are nothingbut a horse that the Chief Hangmanputs through its paces ... Well, don'tjust sit there, do something! ... Getup and show me the place where So-viet girls are shot!"

DETERMINATION A SECOND POWER

The fact that by this pompous tiradePolya betrays herself and moreoverharms the mission with which she hasbeen entrusted does not disturb theauthor in the least. He finds an easyway out of the resulting situation. Thenoble purity of Polya's heart convertsa starosta* who happened to listen tothe conversation. His conscience sud-denly awakens, he shoots at the Ger-man, loses his life and saves Polya's.

But this is not what matters. It does

* A peasant official put in charge of thevillage by the Germans.

not matter so much that the starostamoved, within the batting of an eye-lid, from the rearguard to the van-guard. What matters very much moreis that we have here the straight andimmutable determination of the posi-tive hero raised, we might say, to thesecond power. Polya's behavior mayseem stupid from the point of view ofcommon sense. But it is filled with animmense religious and esthetic signifi-cance. Under no circumstances, evento further his task, does the positivehero dare so much as to look nega-tive. Even in the face of the enemywho must be outwitted and cheatedhe must demonstrate his positive qual-ities. They cannot be hidden or cam-ouflaged: they are written on his browand they sound in his every word. Andso he defeats the enemy not by clever-ness, wits or physical strength but byhis proud attitude alone.

Polya's deed is the key to much thatto the non-believer appears grosslyexaggerated, stupid and false—especial-ly the positive hero's propensity topontificate on elevated themes. Hemakes Communist assertions at homeand at work, in friend's homes andon lonely walks, on the love couch andon the death bed. But this is not acontradiction; positive heroes werecreated to present to the world, onevery suitable and unsuitable occa-sion, a model of purposefulness:

MeasureEach detail

By the greatPurpose

MAYAKOVSKI

Only men who are as straight andhard as swords will cut their waythrough.

GORKI

Never before have there been heroeslike this. Though Soviet writers areproud of the great traditions of 19thcentury Russian literature which they

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want to follow in every possible wayand sometimes actually do follow (eventhough they constantly upbraid West-ern writers for slavishly imitating out-worn literary canons) the positive he-ro of socialist realism is a break withthe tradition, not its continuation.

A very different type of hero pre-vailed in the last century, and Russianculture lived and thought differentlythen. Compared with the fanatical re-ligiosity of our time, the 19th centuryseems atheist, tolerant, disoriented. Itwas soft and shrivelled, feminine andmelancholy, full of doubts, inner con-tradictions and pangs of conscience.Chernyshevski and Pobedonostsev, thegreat radical and the great reactionary,were perhaps the only two men of thecentury who really believed in God.Of course, an incalculable number ofpeasants and old women also believedin God; but they were not the makersof history and culture. Culture wasmade by a handful of mournful scep-tics who thirsted for God simply be-cause they had no God.

But you might object: How aboutTolstoy and Dostoevsky, how aboutthe thousands of other "seekers afterGod," from the Populists to Merezh-kovski, whose search of God has lastedwell into the middle of our cen-tury? I assume that to search meansnot to have. He who has, who reallybelieves, does not search. And whatshould he search for, if everything isclear and all that he has to do is tofollow God? God is not found; Hefinds us and comes upon us. When Hehas found us, we cease to search andstart to act, doing His will.

The 19th century was a century ofsearching, of ardent or calm aspira-tions, unwilling or unable to find asolid place under the sun, torn byuncertainties and dualism. Dostoev-sky regretted that the Russian was so

broad—he should be narrowed, he felt.But Dostoevsky was so broad himselfthat he could embrace within himselfboth Orthodoxy and nihilism. Hecould find room in his soul for all theKaramazovs—Alyosha, Mitya, Ivan, Fe-dor (some would add Smerdyakov).We don't know to this day which ofthem predominated. For breadth ex-cludes faith: no wonder we narrowedourselves down to Marxism, thus ful-filling Dostoevsky's wish. Dostoevskyfully understood the temptations ofbreadth, eternally disputed with him-self and passionately wished to endthese disputes, offensive to the oneGod.

This thirst for God, this wish to be-lieve arose—as did the search—in aspiritual desert. It was not yet faith,and if the wish preceded faith—Bless-ed are they who thirst!—it is like hun-ger preceding a meal... The greathunger of the 19th century perhapsconditioned us Russians to throw our-selves so greedily upon the food pre-pared by Marx and to devour it evenbefore we had time to analyze itstaste, smell and consequences. But thishundred years' hunger was itself causedby the catastrophic absence of food:it was a hunger of godlessness. Thatis why it proved so exhausting andfelt so unbearable, making us "goamong the people," turn radical andrenegade and suddenly remember thatwe are, after all, Christians. ... Butthere was no relief anywhere:

I want to make peace with heaven,I want to love, I want to prayI want to believe in the good.

THE RUSSIAN DEMON

But who is it that cries so anxious-ly for faith? None other than the De-mon of Lermontov's poem.* It is the

* Lermontov, the great romantic poet,wrote this work in 1842 —TR.

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very "spirit" of doubt that has tornus so long and so painfully. He con-firms that it is not the saints thatthirst for God but those who have noGod and have left Him.

It is a very Russian Demon. He istoo inconsistent in his passion for evilto figure as a full Devil and too in-consistent in his repentance to makehis peace with God and rejoin theobedient angels. His tone is notstraightforward but ambiguous—"notday and not night, not light and notdark." There are only semi-tones, thesecret glitter of twilight that was laterglimpsed by the symbolist poet Blokand the symbolist painter Wrubel.

A consistent atheism, an extremeand inflexible denial of God, resem-bles religion more than this vague in-certitude. For this is the crux of theDemon's problem: he has no faith andhe suffers from lack of faith. His isthe eternal motion upwards and down-wards, backwards and forwards, be-tween heaven and hell.

Remember what happened to theDemon? He fell in love with Tamara,that divine beauty incarnated in aravishing woman, and decided to be-lieve in God. But as soon as he kissedTamara she died, killed by his touch.She was taken from him, and he wasonce more alone in his anguished un-belief.

For a century this was also the storyof Russian culture, which had beenpossessed by the Demon even beforeLermontov. Russia went into a fren-zied search for an ideal; and no soon-er did she touch heaven than she fell.The slightest contact with God ledto denying Him, and with the denialcame the anguish of unrealized faith.

The universal genius of Pushkintook note of this collision in The Pris-oner of the Caucasus and other earlypoems; but it was only in Eugene One-

gin that he unfolded the theme in itsfull amplitude. The plot of Oneginis a simple anecdote: as long as Ta-tiana loves Onegin and is willing tobelong to him, he is indifferent to her;but when she marries another, hefalls in love with her passionately andhopelessly. Embedded in this banalstory are contradictions on which Rus-sian literature has dwelled to the daysof Chekhov and Blok: contradictionsof a spirit without God and of a Pur-pose irrevocably lost.

The central hero of this literature-Onegin, Pechorin of Lermontov's He-ro of Our Time, Beltov of Herzen'sWhose Fault?, Lavretski of Turgenev'sNest of Gentlefolk and Rudin of hisnovel of that name—is usually called"the superfluous man." For all hisgenerous impulses he is unable to finda destiny and he presents a lamenta-ble example of a purposelessness thatis of no use to anybody. He is, as arule, a reflYxi've character, with ten-dencies to self-analysis and self-flagel-lation. His life is full of unrealizedprojects, and his fate is sad and slight-ly ridiculous. A woman usually playsa fatal part in it.

Russian literature is full of lovestories in which an inadequate manand a beautiful woman meet and partwithout achieving anything. The fault,of course, lies with the man, who doesnot know how to love his lady as shedeserves, actively and with a purpose.Instead, he yawns with boredom, likeOnegin and Rudin, or else he killshis beloved, like Aleko in Pushkin'sGypsies or Arbenin in Lermontov'sMasquerade.

If only the hero were at least a lowfellow, incapable of higher feelings!But no, he is a noble creature andthe most attractive woman boldly of-fers him her heart and hand. But in-stead of rejoicing and taking life with

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a song, he commits some irresponsi-ble acts and, against his own desires,does everything he can to ensure thathis beloved shall not become his.

Judging by the literature of thetime, all hearts were broken in 19thcentury Russia and no children wereborn for a while. But the writers werenot describing the actual life and cus-toms of the Russian nobility; theywere engaged in depth metaphysics ofan aimlessly agitated spirit. In thisliterature, woman was the touchstoneof man. His relations with her barehis weakness and, compromised by herstrength and beauty, he descends fromthe stage on which a heroic action wasto be played, bows to fate and sneaksout into nothingness with the shame-ful cry of a base, useless, superfluousman.

The women, those innumerable Ta-tianas, Lizas, Natalias, Bellas andNinas [Tatiana is the heroine of Eu-gene Onegin; Lisa of A . ,Test of Gen-tlefolk; Bella of A Hero of Our Time],shine like an ideal, chaste and beyondthe reach of Onegins and Pechorins,who love them so clumsily and unsuc-cessfully. For Russian literature theyserved as a synonym of the ideal, assymbol of a higher Purpose.

For woman is generally considereda beautiful, pure and nebulous crea-'ture. Not too much is asked from her:she need not be concrete and definiteto save man; it is enough that she bepure and beautiful. And since she oc-cupies, like every Purpose, a passiveand waiting position, her beautiful,magical, mysterious and not too con-crete nature permits her to representa higher stage of the ideal and to serveas a substitute for the absent and de-sired Purpose.

This was the woman that the 19thcentury found most to its liking. Sheimpressed it by her vagueness, her

mysteriousness and her tenderness.Pushkin's dreamy Tatiana opened upan age; the "Beautiful Lady" to whomBlok dedicated his first collectedpoems closed it. Tatiana was indis-pensable so that Onegin should sufferthrough the absence of somebody.And, concluding a love story thatlasted for a century, Blok took theBeautiful Lady as his Bride, only tobetray Her and to lose Her and totorment himself all his life by the pur-poselessness of his existence.

Blok's poem The Twelve—a workat the boundary between two hostileand mutually exclusive cultures—con-tains an episode that puts a full stopto the love theme of the 19th cen-tury. The Red Guard Petka kills,against his will and in a fit of anger,his sweetheart, the prostitute Katka.The tragic murder and the sorrowsof lost love resuscitate the old drama,known to us from the days of Ler-montov's Masquerade and Demon.Blok himself used it in many varia-tions—did not the fool Petka and big-mouthed Katka, with her new boyfriend Harlequin-Vanka, issue fromBlok's own Pierrot and Columbine?But if the old heroes, the Demons andArbenins, just turn their emptied soulinside out and freeze into a hopelesssorrow, Petka, who followed in theirfootsteps, is not allowed to do it. Hismore politically conscious comradesrouse him and re-educate him:

You sure go on and on, youbastard,

What are you? A little girl?Sure, you want to turn your soulInside out for us to see? O.K.Come on, snap out of it, look

smart,Get yourself under control!................

And Petrukha soon slowed downHis hurried steps................

He threw back his headAnd became gay once more.

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Thus a new hero was born, neverseen before. In bloody battles againstthe enemy—"I will drink blood for myblack-browed beauty!"—and in theworks and pains of the new era—"Thisis no time for babying!"—he cureshimself of sterile reflections and use-less pangs of conscience. He lifts hishead proudly, cheers himself up andenters Soviet literature under the flagof the new God whom Blok, from oldhabit, cails Jesus Chist:

Forward, forwardWorking people!

The superfluous man of the 19thcentury became even more superfluousin the 20th. To the positive hero ofthe new era he was strange and in-comprehensible. The superfluous manseemed to him much more dangerousthan the openly negative enemy. Af-ter all, the enemy was like the posi-tive hero—clear, straightforward and,in his own way, purposeful. Only hissignificance was negative—to hinderthe movement to the Purpose. Butthe superfluous man was a creatureof different psychological dimensions,inaccessible to computation and regi-mentation. He is neither for the Pur-pose nor against the Purpose—he isoutside the Purpose. Now this simplycannot be, it is a fiction, a blasphemy.While the whole world, having defineditself with regard to the Purpose, isdivided into two antagonistic camps,he feigns not to understand this andkeeps mingling his colors in vagueand ambiguous schemes. He proclaimsthat there are no Reds and no Whitesbut simply people, poor, unfortunate,superfluous people:

They all lie in a row—No line between them.Look: soldiers!Who's ours? Who's theirs?He was white and now he's red—The blood reddened him.

He was red and now he's white--Death whitened him.

M. TSVETAYEVA*

In the religious struggle, the super-fluous man proclaimed his neutralityand expressed his sympathy with bothparties, as in these verses of the sym-bolist poet Voloshin:

Both here and there, among theranks

One voice alone can be heard:"Who is not for us, is against us.There are no neutrals. Truth is

with us."

And I stand alone among themIn the roaring flame and smokeAnd with all the strength that I

haveSay a prayer for them both.

Such words, as blasphemous as asimultaneous prayer to God and Sa-tan, could not possibly be permitted.It was more correct to proclaim themto be a prayer to the Devil: "Who isnot for us, is against us." And this iswhat the new culture did. If it turnedagain towards the superfluous man, itwas only to prove that he was not atall superfluous but rather harmful,dangerous and negative.

Naturally, the leader of the newcrusade was Gorki. In 1901 he sketchedthe first model of the positive heroand attacked those "who were bornwithout faith in the heart," who "nev-er felt that anything was true," who"forever wandered between yes andno."

Gorki roared "No!" at these super-fluous men, who roused his ire by theirindefiniteness, and called them "pettybourgeois." Later he extended the con-cept of "petty bourgeois" far and wideand cast into it all who did not be-

0 Marina Tsvetayeva returned to Russiain 1940 after a long exile and committedsuicide two years later. She has beenposthumously "rehabilitated" recently andher work republished.—Tit.

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long to the new religion: propertyowners large and small, liberals, con-servatives, hooligans, humanists, deca-dents, Christians, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy.Gorki was a man of printsipialnost';G. Chulkov called him the only trulybelieving writer of his time. He knewthat all that is not God is Devil.

The literary revaluation of the su-perfluous man and his rapid transfor-mation into a negative figure was in-tensified in the 1920s, the formativeyears of the positive hero. When theywere placed side by side, it becameobvious to everybody that there areno heroes without Purpose, but onlyheroes who were for or against thePurpose and that the superfluous manwas, when all is said and done, a cam-ouflaged enemy, a base traitor whoshould be unmasked and punished asquickly as possible.

Thus wrote Gorki in The Life ofKlim Samgin, Fadeyev in The Deba-cle, and many others. In The Townsand the Years Fedin purged his heartof the last drop of pity for the super-

fluous hero, formerly so enchanting.The only dissonant note was perhapsstruck by Sholokhov in his QuietFlows the Don. Having shown the trag-ic fate of that superfluous man, GrigoriMelekhov, he bade him an affectionatefarewell. Since his hero belonged tothe simple people and not the intel-ligentsia, it was possible to close aneye to Sholokhov's behavior. Todayhis novel is considered a model of so-cialist realism. But it is a model that,for obvious reasons, has found noimitators.

Meanwhile, other superfluous men,wishing to save their lives, renouncedtheir past and duly transformed them-selves into positive heroes. One ofthem recently said: "There is nothingin the world more disgusting thanfence-sitters ... Yes, yes, I am a Red.A Red, the devil take you." (Fedin'sAn Extraordinary Year, 1949). Thecurse was addressed, of course, to theWhites.

Thus did the hero of 19th centuryRussian perish ingloriously.

In its content and spirit, as in itscentral figure, socialist realism is muchcloser to the 18th century than to the19th. Without realizing it, we jumpover to the heads of our fathers andrevive the tradition of our grandfa-thers. Like ourselves, the 18th centuryhad the idea of political purposeful-ness, the feeling of its own superiorityand a clear consciousness that "Godis with us":

Hark, hark, 0 UniverseTo vict'ries beyond human power;Listen, 0 astounded EuropeTo the exploits of these Russians.Peoples, know and understand,Believe ye that with us is God;Believe that, aided by His hand,A single Russian can defeatAll your abysmal evil forces.

Peoples, know this dread Colossus:God is with us, so honor ye the

Russian.

These verses of the 18th centurypoet Derzhavin have a very contem-porary ring, though the languagewould, of course, need modernizing.Like the socialist system, so 18th cen-tury Russia conceived of itself as thecenter of Creation. Inspired by theplenitude of its virtues—"self-createdand self-fortified"—it proclaimed itselfas an example to all peoples and alleras. Its religious self-conceit was sostrong that it did not even admit thepossibility of the existence of othernorms and ideals. In his Portrait ofFelitsa, Derzhavin, praising the ideal

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reign of Catherine II, expressed thedesire that

Peoples savage and remote,Covered still with wool and scales,Dressed only with leaf and bark,And adorned with wings of birds,Should all gather at Her throne,Hear the gentle voice of Law,So that tears should run in torrentsDown their swarthy, sunburned

faces.They should cry and understandThe bliss of living in our time,Should abandon their equality,And all subject be to Her.

Derzhavin simply cannot imaginethat these "savages," the Huns, Finnsand other peoples that surroundedthe Russian throne somewhat in themanner of the Internationale, shouldreject this flattering offer and not wishto submit at once to Catherine, whois, after all, "celestial grace incar-nate." For him, as for our writers, any-one who does not wish to become likethe model proposed to him and doesnot hasten to forget his barbarous"equality" and accept the proferredgift of "bliss" falls into one of twocategories. He either is so stupid thathe does not understand his own in-terests, in which case he must be re-educated. Or he lacks virtue and is,to use one of our words, a "reaction-ary," in which case he must be li-quidated. For in our world there isnothing finer than this state, this faith,this life and this Empress. So Derzha-vin believed, just as a contemporarypoet who celebrates the new reign inDerzhavin's language:

There is no country like vastRussia,

No flowers grow as bright as ours,Great is our people, free and

deathless,Our proud, eternal Russian people.

It stemmed attacking hordes ofBatu

And broke all chains that held itdown,

It made Russia and it raised herTo heights of stars and crests of

time.A. PROKOFIEV

Eighteenth century literature pro-duced its own positive hero. He is "thefriend of common good"; he "strivesto surpass all in courage," etc.; i.e. heconstantly raises the level of his po-litical morality, possesses all the vir-tues and tells everybody just what todo. This literature knew nothing ofthe superfluous man. Neither did itknow the destructive laughter that wasthe chronic disease of Russian culturefrom Pushkin to Blok and reached itsclimax among the decadents. "All themost lively and sensitive children ofour century are stricken by a diseaseunknown to doctors and psychiatrists.It is related to the disorders of thesoul and might be called 'irony.' Itssymptoms are fits of an exhaustinglaughter which starts with a diabolicmockery and a provocative smile andends as rebellion and sacrilege." (A.Blok, Irony, 1908.)

Seen in this way, irony is the laugh-ter of the superfluous man who de-vides both himself and everything sa-cred in this world. "I know men whoare ready to choke with laughter whenthey learn that their mother is dying,that they are starving to death, thattheir fiancee has betrayed them.Through this accursed irony, every-thing is the same to them: good andevil, the blue sky and the stinkingpit, Dante's Beatrice and Sologub'sUntouchable Lady. [Fedor Sologub, apoet of the turn of the 20th cen-tury, with decadent tendencies.] Every-thing is confused, as in a tavern ora fog." (Blok, ibid.)

Irony is the faithful companion ofunbelief and doubt; it vanishes as soonas there appears a faith that does nottolerate sacrilege. There was no irony

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in Derzhavin, nor in Gorki—exceptfor a few early tales. In Mayakovskithere are a few examples, mostly fromprerevolutionary times. Mayakovskisoon found out what he could andwhat he could not laugh about. Hecould not permit himself to laugh atLenin, whom he praised to the skies,any more than Derzhavin would laughat his Empress. Pushkin, by contrast,addressed indecent verses even to thechaste and modest Tatiana. Pushkinwas the first to taste the bitter joysof self-negation, even though he wasgay and had a balanced character. Asfor Lermontov, he almost seems tohave imbibed the poison in his child-hood. In Blok himself and in his con-temporaries Sologub and Leonid An-dreev, destructive laughter became anelemental force sweeping everythingbefore it.

As in the 18th century, we becamesevere and serious. This does not meanthat we forgot how to laugh; butlaughter ceased to be indecent anddisrespectful; it acquired a Purpose.It eliminates faults, corrects manners,keeps up the brave spirits of youth.It is laughter with a serious face andwith a pointing finger: "This is notthe way to do things!" It is a laugh-ter free from the acidity of irony.

Irony was replaced by pathos, theemotional element of the positivehero. We ceased to fear high-soundingwords and bombastic phrases, we wereno longer ashamed to be virtuous.The solemn eloquence of the odesuited us. We became Classicists.

When Derzhavin, in his old age,wrote the ode "To the great boyarand military commander Reshemysl,"he gave it a subtitle "or the image ofwhat a great lord should be." Theart of socialist realism might be giventhe same subtitle: it represents theworld and man as they should be.

Socialist realism starts from an idealimage to which it adapts the livingreality. Our demand "to represent lifetruthfully in its revolutionary devel-opment" is really nothing but a sum-mons to view truth in the light ofthe ideal, to give an ideal interpreta-tion of reality, to present what shouldbe as what is. For we interpret "revo-lutionary development" as the inevit-able movement towards Communism,towards our ideal, in the light ofwhich we see reality. We representlife as we would like it to be and asit is bound to become, when it bowsto the logic of Marxism. This is whysocialist realism should really be called"socialist classicism."

Some theoretical books and articlesby Soviet writers and critics use theterms "romanticism" and "revolution-ary romanticism." Gorki wrote muchabout the links between romanticismand socialist realism. He longed for"the illusion that exalts" and de-fended the artist's right to embellishlife and to present it as better thanit is. These calls did not remain un-heeded, though many of Gorki s for-mulas are now veiled by an embar-rassed silence or interpreted pharisai-cally: it is obviously not easy to admitthat what we really need are somepretty lies. No, no, God forbid! Weare against illusions and against ideal-ization, we write only the truth andat the same time present life in itsrevolutionary development ... Whyshould we embellish life? It is quitebeautiful as it is, we are not out toembellish it, we just want to showthe germs of the future it contains .. .

EARLY ROMANTICISM

All this talk is merely our usual lit-erary politics. In reality—as Gorkiknew—romanticism suited our tastesonly too well. It gravitates towards the

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ideal, makes our wishes pass forthe truth, likes pretty knick-knacks, isnot afraid of bombast. This is whyit had its well-known success amongus. Yet romanticism has played a lessimportant part in our art than mighthave been expected. It made its pres-ence felt mostly in the prehistory andinitial period of socialist realism. Inits mature period—the last 20, 30 years—socialist realism has had a compara-tively slight romantic tinge.

Romanticism is intimately connectedwith the Sturm and Drang period ofSoviet literature, the first five yearsafter 1917, when life and art wereflooded with sentiment, when theblazing elan towards a happy futureand the world-wide significance of therevolution were not yet regimented bya strict political order. Romanticismis our past, our youth for which welong. It is the ecstasy of swollen ban-ners, the explosions of passion andrage, the rattling of sabers and theneighing of horses, the shootings with-out judgment and without conse-quences, the "On to Warsaw!", thelife, sleep and death under the nakedsky lit by the fires of regiments asnomadic as the Tartars of old:

Youth that led usTo the march of sabers,Youth that threw usOn the ice of Kronstadt.

Battle horsesCarried us off,On city squaresThey massacred us.

E. BAGR TSKI

These are not just the sentimentsof revolutionists who have survivedand grown fat. The memory of therevolution is as sacred, both to thosewho took part in it and those whowere born after it, as the image ofa dead mother. It is easier for us togrant that everything that happened

after the Revolution was its betrayalthan to insult its memory by reproachesand suspicions. Unlike the party, thestate, the Ministry of State Security,collectivization, Stalin, etc., the Rev-olution needs no justification by theCommunist paradise that awaits us. Itis self-justified and justified emotion.ally, like love or inspiration. Andeven though the Revolution wascarried out in the name of Commu-nism, its name does not sound lesssweet to us for that. Maybe evensweeter...

We live between past and future,between the Revolution and Commu-nism. And if Communism promisingus golden mountains and represent-ing the inevitable logical outcome ofall human history imperiously pullsus forward, the past too pushes us inthe back. For it is we who accom-plished the Revolution. How then canwe blame it or blaspheme against it?We are caught in this psychologicalsqueeze. In itself, we may like it ornot. But both before us and behindus stand temples so splendid that wecould not bear to attack them. Andwhen we remember that, should ourenemies win, they would make us re-turn to the prerevolutionary mode oflife (or incorporate us in Westerndemocracy, it hardly matters), then,I am sure, we will start once morefrom where we started. We will startfrom the Revolution.

While working on this article Ihave caught myself more than oncedropping into irony—that unworthydevice! I caught myself trying to avoidthe phrase "Soviet power." I preferredto use its synonyms, like "our state,""the socialist system" and so on. Nodoubt this was due to the fact thatwhen I was young, the words of oneof our Civil War songs went straightto my soul:

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All of us into the fightFor Soviet powerAnd as one man we'll dieFighting for it.

It is enough for me to pronouncethe words "Soviet power" to make mesee the Revolution with my mind'seye. I see the taking of the WinterPalace, the cracking motion of ma-chine-gun belts, the bread cards forone eighth of a pound, the defenseof Red Petersburg. In a strictly logi-cal judgment, "Soviet power" and"the socialist state" are the samething. But if I have a few thingsagainst the socialist state—trifles, allof them—I have absolutely nothingagainst the Soviet power. Ridiculous?Maybe. But this is also romanticism.

Yes, we are all romantic with re-gard to our past. But the further awaywe are from our past and the closerwe come to Communism, the weakerbecomes the romantic halo that arthas bestowed upon the Revolution.This is understandable: romanticismis, indeed, part of our nature; but itis not all of it. Sometimes it evenviolates our nature.

Romanticism is too anarchical andtoo emotional, while we are becomingever more disciplined rationalists. It isat the mercy of turbulent feelings anddiffuse moods, forgetting logic, com-mon sense and law. "The folly of thebrave is the wisdom of life," the youngGorki assured us. This advice wastimely when the Revolution was made:fools were necessary then. But can wecall the Five Year Plan "folly of thebrave"? Or the guidance of the Party?Or, indeed, Communism itself, inevit-ably prepared by the logical course ofhistory? Here every point is thoughtthrough, rationally foreseen and sub-divided into corresponding paragraphs.What folly is this? Hm, comrade Gorki,you obviously haven't read your Marx!

Romanticism is powerless to expressour clarity and precision. Composedgestures and even moderately solemnspeech are foreign to it. It waves itsarms, gets excited and dreams distantdreams of the time when Communismis all but built and will be seen anymoment.

In affirming an ideal, romanticismis not binding enough. It takes thewish for the reality. This is not badin itself, but it smells of subjectivismand lack of self-restraint. The wish isthe reality, because it must be, Ourlife is beautiful not only because wewant it to be beautiful but also be-cause it must be so: it has no choice.

All these arguments, mostly voice-less and unconscious, gradually driedup the hot current of romanticism.The river of art was covered with theice of classicism. As art became moreprecise, rational and teleological, itsqueezed out romanticism.

THE SHIFT TO CLASSICISM

The cold breath and ponderousheaviness of classicism was felt by uslong ago, but few men dared to beoutspoken on this subject. "The spir-it of classicism blows upon us fromall directions. All breathe it; but theyeither cannot distinguish it or don'tknow its name or simply are afraidto speak about it." (A. Efros, TheMessenger on the Doorstep, 1922.)

The most daring of all was N. Pu-nin, a fine art critic. At that time hewas connected with futurism; he iscompletely forgotten now. Already in1918 he noted "the marked classicismof Mayakovski's verses." He declaredthat in his Mystery Bouffe—his firstmajor post-revolutionary work—Maya-kovski "ceased to be a romanticist andbecame a classicist." He forecast that"much as he would like to, Mayakov-ski will never again rebel as impetu-

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ously as he did in the past."Although his forecast proved re-

markably correct—and not only as re-gards Mayakovski—the term "classi-cism" did not take hold in a Sovietliterature that kept becoming moreclearly classicist. It was, perhaps, tooembarrassingly frank. Also, it recalledcertain undesirable associations thatseemed to lower our dignity. We pre-ferred to call ourselves modestly "so-cialist realists" and hide our nameunder this pseudonym...

Beginning with the 1930s, the pas-sion for solemnity finally imposes it-self and a pompous simplicity of style.the hallmark of classicism, becomesfashionable. We call our state "thePower"; the mujik—"cultivator of thebread"; the rifle-"saber." We cap-italize a great number of words. Al-legorical figures and personified ab-stractions invade our literature, andwe speak with slow solemnity andgrandiose gestures.

Yes, we believe, we must believeThat truth exists—this is our stand;And that the good is not defenselessAnd conquers evil in the end.

A. TvAxnovsxu

The time has come! In vain withcruel fate

The Fascist Lord has Moscowthreatened long.

But to victorious Moscow fellBerlin.

M. Isnxovsxt

The first heroes of Soviet literaturestormed the fortresses of capitalismwith torn bast shoes on their feet andsexual oaths on their lips. They werecoarse and unrestrained: "Vankal Putsome paper rubles in your shoes!You can't scoot barefoot to the meet-ting!" (Mayakovski). But now they ac-quired good looks, elegant clothes andrefined manners. If they are some-times lacking in taste, this is the na-

tional and social trait of our classi-cism, born as it was of Russian democ-racy. But neither the heroes nor theirauthors ever suspect that they are inbad taste. They try with all their pow-er to be beautiful, polite and cultured.They present every detail "correctly"and "in the best of tastes."

"Under the white ceiling sparkledan elegant chandelier, fringed withtransparent glass pendants, as withicicles ... Tall silvery columns sup-ported a blindingly white cupola, dec-orated with necklaces of electricbulbs."

What is this? A Tsar's palace? No,an ordinary club in a provincial town.

"On the stage, by the polished wingof the grand piano stood Rakitin,dressed in sober gray. Like a blueriver, a necktie flowed down hisbreast."

A singer? A fashionable tenor? No,a simple party worker.

And now let's look at the people.It does not curse, it does not fight, itdoes not drink itself senseless the waythe Russian people used to do. Andif takes a drink at a wedding tablecovered with exquisite foods, it is onlyas an accompaniment of toasts:

"Terentii raised his eyes, lookedat the round of guests, rumblinglycoughed into his fist, caressed thesilver flow of his beard with atrembling hand, and said:

'First of all let us congratulatethe young couple, may they behappy and embellish the earth bytheir presence.'

The guests followed him withtheir toasts, among the melodiousclinking of the wine glasses:

'May they honor their parents!''May they have healthy children!''And not injure the glory of the

kolkhoz!' "

The quotations are taken from thenovel From the Whole Heart by E.Maltsev, published in 1949. It is like

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dozens and hundreds of other novels.It is a sample of classicist prose ofaverage literary quality. The style haslong become a commonplace of ourliterature, and passes from author toauthor without undergoing any sub-stantial change.

Every style has its distinctive quali-ty. But classicism is more prone thanother styles to impose its mark, to ob-serve pedantically definite canons andnorms, to be conservative as to form.It is among the most stable of styles. Itbrings and accepts new elements mostlyin its formative period, but later triesto follow established models faithfullyand is hostile to researches in form,experimentalism and originality. Thisis why it rejected the talents of manypoets who wanted to embrace it butretain their personality: V. Khlebni-kov, O. Mandelshtam and N. Zabolot-ski among them.* Even Mayakovski,whom Stalin called "the most tal-ented poet of our Soviet era," re-mained in it a tragically solitary fig-ure.

Mayakovski was too much of a rev-olutionary to become a traditionalist.To this day he is accepted politicallyrather than poetically. For all thepeans written to his glory, his rhythms,images and language seem overbold tomost of our poets. Those who wantto follow in his footsteps copy hismannerisms but are unable to graspwhat is essential in him—his boldness,inventiveness and passion. They imi-tate his verses but don't follow hisexample...

Geniuses, of course, are not bornevery day, and the state of art rarely

* A. F. Khlebnikov, who died in 1922,was one of the founders of Russian fu-turism; Mandelshtam, who rebelledagainst the symbolists, died after depor-tation; Zabolotski is among the most tal-ented Soviets poets today.—Tx.

seems satisfactory to contemporaries.Still I must sadly confess, with otherof my contemporaries, that our litera-ture has become progressively impov-erished in the last two or three dec-ades. Fedin, Fadeev, Ehrenburg, Iva-nov and many others have writtenworse and worse with the years. Thetwenties, of which Mayakovski wrotethat "Only poets, alas, we have none,"now seem to be the years in whichpoetry flourished. Since the writersaccepted socialist realism en masse—the beginning of the thirties—litera-ture has gone down and down. Somefew glimmers of light during the Pa-triotic War did not save it.

In this contradiction between thevictory of socialist realism and thelow quality of literary production,many are inclined to blame socialistrealism. They say that great art can-not be written under it and even thatit is the death of all art. But Maya-kovski provides a refutation, to startwith. For all the originality of his tal-ents he remained an orthodox Sovietwriter, perhaps the most orthodox So-viet writer—and this did not stop himfrom writing good poetry. He was anexception to general rules, but most-ly because he observed these rulesmore strictly than others. In his poet-ic practice he carried out the de-mands of socialist realism more radi-cally and more consistently. For thecontradiction between socialist realismand literary quality, the blame mustfall on literature, i.e. on the writerswho accepted the rules of socialistrealism but did not have sufficient ar-tistic consistency to embody them indeathless images. Mayakovski had thatconsistency.

Art is not afraid of dictatorship, se-verity, repressions, or even conserva-tism and cliches. When necessary, artcan be narrowly religious, dumbly

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governmental, devoid of individuality—and yet good. We go into estheticraptures over the stereotypes of Egyp-tian art, Russian icons and folklore.Art is elastic enough to fit into anybed of Procrustes that history presentsto it. But there is one thing it can-not stand: eclecticism.

Our misfortune is that we are con-vinced socialist realists but not con-vinced enough. Submitting to its cruelrules, we are yet afraid to follow tothe end the road that we ourselveshave chosen. No doubt, if we wereless educated, it would be easier forus to attain the integrity that is in•dispensable to a writer. But we wentto school, read all kinds of books, andlearned only too well that there weregreat writers before us—Balzac, Mau-passant, Tolstoy and, yes, what's hisname?—Chekhov. This is what has un-done us. We wanted to become famousand to write like Chekhov. This un-natural liaison produced monsters.

It is impossible, without falling intoparody, to produce a positive hero inthe style of full socialist realism andyet make him into a psychologicalportrait. In this way, we will get nei-ther psychology nor hero. Mayakovskiknew this and, hating psychologicalanalysis and details, wrote in propor-tions that were larger than life. Hewrote coarsely, poster-style, homerical-ly. He avoided like a plague descrip-tions of common life and rural na-ture. He broke with "the great tra-ditions of the great Russian litera-ture" and, though he loved Pushkinand Chekhov, he did not try to imi-tate them. All this helped Mayakovskito lift himself to the level of his epochand to express its spirit fully andclearly, without alien admixtures.

But the writing of so many otherwriters is in a critical state right nowprecisely because, in spite of the das-

sicistic nature of our art, they stillconsider it realism. They do it becausethey base their judgments on the lit-erary criticism of the 19th century,which is farthest away from us andmost foreign to us. Instead of follow-ing the road of conventional forms,pure fantasy and imagination whichthe great religious cultures alwaystook, they try to compromise. Theylie, they maneuver and they try tocombine the uncombinable: the posi-tive hero, who logically tends towardsthe pattern, the allegory—and the psy-chological analysis of character; ele-vated style, declamation—and prosaicdescriptions of ordinary life; a highideal—and truthful representation oflife.

The result is a loathsome literarysalad. The characters torment them-selves not quite like Dostoevsky's, aremournful not quite like Chekhov's,found their happy families not quitelike Tolstoy's, and, suddenly becomingaware of the time they are living in,scream at the reader the copybookslogans which they read in Soviet news-papers, like "Long live world peace!"or "Down with the Warmongers!"This is neither classicism nor realism.It is a half-classicist half-art, which isnone too socialist and altogether notrealism.

THE CONTRADICTION

It seems that the very term "social-ist realism" contains an insoluble con-tradiction. A socialist, i.e. a purpose-ful, a religious art cannot be pro-duced with the literary method of the19th century called "realism." And areally faithful representation of lifecannot be achieved in a languagebased on teleological concepts. If so-cialist realism really wants to rise tothe level of the great world culturesand produce its Communiad, there is

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only one way to do it. It must giveup the "realism," renounce the sorryand fruitless attempts to write a so-cialist Anna Karenina or a socialistCherry Orchard. When it abandons itseffort to achieve verisimilitude, it willbe able to express the grand and im-plausible sense of our era.

Unfortunately, this is unlikely tohappen. The events of the last fewyears are dragging our art on a roadof half-measures and half-truths. Thedeath of Stalin inflicted an irrepara-ble loss upon our religiously estheticsystem; it cannot be resuscitatedthrough the now revived cult of Le-nin. Lenin is too much like an ordi-nary man and his image is too realis-tic: small, bald, dressed in civilianclothes. Stalin seemed to be speciallymade for the hyperbole that awaitedhim: mysterious, omniscient, all-pow-erful, he was the living monumentof our era and needed only one qual-ity to become God—immortality.

Ah, if only we had been intelli-gent enough to surround his deathwith miracles! We could have an-nounced on the radio that he did notdie but had risen to Heaven, fromwhere he continued to watch us, insilence, no words emerging from be-neath the mystic moustache. His relicswould have cured men struck by pa-ralysis or possessed by demons. Andchildren, before going to bed, wouldhave kneeled by the window and ad-dressed their prayers to the cold andshining stars of the Celestial Kremlin.

But we did not listen to the voiceof our conscience. Instead of intoningdevout prayers, we set about dethron-ing the "cult of personality" that weourselves had created. We thus blewup the foundations of that classicistcolossus which, if we had waited buta little, would have joined the Pyra-mid of Cheops and the Apollo of Bel-

vedere in the treasury of world art.The strength of a theological sys-

tem resides in its constancy, harmonyand order. Once we admit that Godcarelessly sinned with Eve and, be-coming jealous of Adam, sent him offto labor at land reclamation, thewhole concept of the Creation fallsapart, and it is impossible to restorethe faith.

After the death of Stalin we en-tered upon a period of destructionand re-evaluation. It is a slow andinconsistent process, it lacks perspec-tives, and the inertia of both past andfuture lie heavy on it. Today's chil-dren will scarcely be able to producea new God, capable of inspiring hu-manity into the next historical cycle.Maybe He will have to be supple-mented by other stakes of the Inqui-sition, by further "personality cults"and by new terrestrial labors, so thatafter many centuries a new Purposewill rise above the world. But todayno one yet knows its name.

And meanwhile our art is markingtime between an insufficient realismand an insufficient classicism. Afterthe loss it suffered it is no longer ableto fly towards the ideal and to singthe praises of our life in a sincereand high-flown style, presenting whatshould be as what is. In our worksof glorification resound ever moreopenly the notes of baseness and hy-pocrisy. The most successful writersare those who can present our achieve-ments as truthfully as possible andour failings as tactfully, delicately anduntruthfully as possible. This is whathappened with Dudintsev's novel ManDoes Not Live by Bread Alone, whichstirred up a lot of noise and was pub-licly anathemized for blackening ourbright socialist reality.

But is the dream of the old, goodand honest "realism" the only heresy

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to which Russian literature is suscep-tible? Is it possible that all the les-sons that we received were taught invain and that, in the best of cases,all we wish is to return to the natural-ist school and the critical tendency?Let us hope that this is not so andthat our need for truth will not in-terfere with the work of thought andimagination.

Right now I put my hope in a phan-tasmagoric art, with hypotheses insteadof a Purpose, an art in which thegrotesque will replace realistic de-scriptions of ordinary life. Such anart corresponds best to the spirit ofour time. May the fantastic imageryof Hoffmann and Dostoevsky, of Goya,Chagall, and Mayakovski (the most

socialist realist of all) and of manyother realists and non-realists teachus how to be truthful with the aidof the absurd and the fantastic.

Having lost our faith, we have notlost our enthusiasm about the meta-morphoses of God that take place be-fore our very eyes, the miraculoustransformations of His entrails andHis cerebral convolutions. We don'tknow where to go; but, realizing thatthere is nothing to be done about it,we start to think, to set riddles, tomake assumptions. We may thus in-vent something marvelous? Perhaps;but it will no longer be socialistrealism.

(Translated from the Russianby GEORGE DENNIS)

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