IN DEFENCE OF DICKENS

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25300, 27 September 1947, Page 7

IN DEFENCE OF DICKENS

tA sub-leader from the "Manchester Guardian” of September 6.] In an interesting article in this week’s “New Statesman” Mr Raymond Mortimer points out how the present rulers of Russia, in their puritanical zeal, forbid all writing, painting, or music which does not conform with their rigid political views. In the Soviet Union to-day, as in Western Europe in the Dark Ages, “secular art” has almost disappeared. But though all Russian writers and artists are torced to swallow that unpalatable mixture of “Socialist realism,” oldfashionea patriotism, and scientific opwhich alone is considered orthodox, a certain number of foreign authors who do not notably exhibit these qualities (like Shakespeare and Dickens) are approved and even encouraged by the State. This obvious inconsistency leads to desperate efforts to prove that these eminent exceptions were also Socialists, patriots, and optimists in their own way, even though this aspect has been neglected—or deliberately suppressed—by bourgeois critics. For instance, the “Literaturnaya Gazeta’’ recently exploded in because Mr Humphry House, in a 8.8. C. talk, had suggested that “the most striking characters in Dickens’s novels are the outcasts, the misanthropes, murderers, and degenerates” and that Dickens “has a strange attraction for the terrible, the evil side of human nature.” What, said the writer, was Mr House speaking of, the Dickens who created “good old Mr Pickwick, Sam Weller, Micawber,” who depicted “the high moral qualities of the plain people”? Impossible! There must be “reactionary implications.”

Why, you ask, should Mr House want to distort the picture of his great countryman? To disguise his democratic ideas, we reply. Mr House may be under the illusion that his views are free, but we find they are dictated by the whole reactionary trends in Western ideology. He is marching in goose step with the whole demoralising and sadistic style in Western thought. One could hardly find a more flagrant example of tendentious distortion of the truth in the interests of reU?’ ? r a rnore striking confirmation of the degradation of modern bourgeois thought.

It seems a rather disproportionate fuss, but one can sympathise if the only way to read Dickens in Russia is to keep him firmly on the party line.

RUSSIA Of the three books noted below two are avowedly hostile to the present Soviet regime; the third is a notably level, objective piece of description. RENOUNCING ALL THAT Victor Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom (Robert Hale. 496 pp.) is the lifestory and self-defence of that wellknown Russian official who, in 1944, seized the opportunity of his being in the United States as a member of the Soviet Purchasing Commission to renounce his service and his Government. which he condemns as a monstrous tyranny, maintained by force, terror, and a pervasive secret police, using slave labour on a vast scale, and so on. There is no doubt that Mr Kravchenko’s charges against the regime are soundly based—“inhumanity, violence, and murder,” power-greedy leadership, corruption, inefficiency, and all the rest. But they leave out too much. Why, for example, does Soviet Russia in all this, merely renew With the greater instrumental power available to it the worst that was known of Tsarist Russia, as characteristic of it and as widespread? What evidence is there that, if the present tyranny could be dissolved, the mass of Russians would know what to substitute for it, except another? If .there is any such evidence, Mr Kravchenko does not give it. That it does not exist is at least suggested by the extent oflhe approval, or tolerance, that the mass of Russians have for the regime. They have known no other sort; they understand this sort; the principle of an opposition, or alternative government, is unknown in Russia and therefore not trusted. Mr Kravchenko’s book need not be recommended to readers who, like him. look no further in Russia than the Kremlin and fear and detest what they see there; but it is recommended reading for the idolaters for whom the distant view of Russia is that of a demi-paradise. OBSERVER

John Lawrence spent three years in Russia during the war as press attache in Moscow and Kuibishev, he directed British publicity, he edited the “British Ally,” and he could speak Russian fluently enough to talk profitably with Russians of all ranks and conditions. This makes a good equipment for the writing of such a book as Life in Russia (Allen and Unwin. 245 pp.); he adds to it an honest, realistic mind, and he writes, not with a political purpose (“except in the sense that human understanding of the Russians may help to resolve some of the problems that vex mankind”), but to answer ‘‘those questions about everyday life” which assail every traveller returning from the Soviet Union. If the distinction is not too fine, this is a book about the Russians, not about Russia or the Russian Government; and it is excellent, copious, wideranging, and discerning. There are, indeed, pointed political observations:

The casualness of Russian administrators and bureaucrats, when they do not see the immediate problem in human terms, is beyond belief The Greek maxim, “nothing in excess,” has no meaning for Russians. They go the whole hog or they do nothing and they are seldom deterred by the consequences of an extreme application of whatever doctrine they embrace for the time being. Some British engineers once tried to explain to some Soviet acquaintances what our constitutional opposition was. The Russians, who were plainly mystified, said: “Do you really mean that in your country you deliberately allow people to try to stop the Government doing what the Government knows ought to be done?”

These few sentences alone cast their beam far into the darkness beyond the lurid circle of Mr Kravchenko’s fire. But the purpose indicated in such chapters as “Clothes,” “Shopping and Food,” “Doctors,” and “The Russian Character”—four of the 16—is the one steadily pursued and admirably attained. EXILE-

David Dallin’s The Real Soviet Russia (Hollis and Carter. 302 pp.) is the work of a Menshevist politician—Which explains the publishers’ somewhat misleading description of him as ‘a member of the Moscow Soviet”—who has been an exile for 20 years or more and bitterly opposes the Lenin-to-Stalin regime. His account of its internal policy is designed to demonstrate that the early social and economic principles of the revolution have been betrayed, but the demonstration attempts too much, not in point of fact, but in interpreting it. (The error is much the same as Kravchenko’s.) Dealing with Russian foreign policy. Dr. Dallin insists that Stalin’s abandonment of world revolution as an aim is pure pretence, the real object being still to subvert and overthrow. . . . His last word is a vague prediction of “great internal changes—greater changes than some are inclined to expect.” This is in many ways, and for much of its substance, a book that well repays careful study; but care and caution are here synonyms.