RUSSIAN WRITERS ONCE AGAIN TOE PARTY LINE

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27401, 14 July 1954, Page 10

RUSSIAN WRITERS ONCE AGAIN TOE PARTY LINE

LITERARY LIBERTY ENDS

IBy

PAUL WOHL

in the “Christian Science Monitor”)

(Reprinted by Arrangement)

Soviet writers and artists once again are being told that their choice of subjects and their approach must be determined by what is significant for the building of communism, and not by what is going on in the hearts and minds of men. Their heroes must be party heroes; their villains deviationists headed for inevitable defeat. After one year of sallies against the artificiality of Communist cliches, the same old ideological rules in behalf of those very cliches are about to be reintroduced. A muffled purge of literature and of the arts is, in the making. In the first week of June the Kremlin’s counter-offensive found its expression in the ouster of Fyodor Panferov as editor-in-chief of the influential magazine “Oktyabr,” a monthly of the Soviet Writers' Association. Mr Panferov has been identified with “Oktyabr” for 15 years. What is the meaning of this new tightening of the reins after so many Soviet writers, including such talented literary spokesmen of the regime as Ilya Ehrenburg, the recent Stalin-Peace-Prize winner, and Konstantin Simonov, novelist-playwright, had been allowed, or even encouraged, to demand more sincerity and more creative leeway for the individual artist and writer? Zhdanov Recalled

The well-known literary historian and sociologist of literature, Mrs Vera Alexandrova, whom this writer recently had an opportunity to consult, says that there is a certain similarity between the present purge and what happened in 1946-48, when Andrei Zhdanov, then Stalin’s heir-presump-tive, lashed out against those who thought that the war had changed the spiritual climate of the country, and that it was their duty to speak the truth. In that earlier period, when leading Russian writers and artists assumed that friendly relations with the West would continue, Mrs Alexandrova recalls how so prominent a Russiati writer as Konstantin Simonov, in his novel “The Smoke of the Fatherland” (1947), could engage one of his heroes in the following conversation: “Three wars? ... I had enough with two. ... If I were asked, I would say —One system, two systems . . . there have been various systems, but people always managed to live somehow. The war ought not to be, you understand. At any price. . . . Maybe (our) system is good, but if I am dead, I have nothing from it. .. . Why are you

looking at jne? ... You think that I dare to say that only to you? If Stalin sat here. I would say the same thing to him. looking him straight in the eye. . . .” Brief Freedom This short period of relative freedom during and immediately after the war enabled the government to find out what the people really thought and how far the individual artist and writer could be trusted. The “decadent westerners” and “liberals,” as Simonov himself called them later, either capitulated or were placed on the “index.” Mrs Alexandrova, who is editor-in-chief of the Chekhov Publishing House in New York City and for more than a quarter of a century has tried to explain what is going on inside Russia through the medium of arts and letters, holds that, after Stalin’s passing, the Kremlin followed a somewhat similar course. High points of the new campaign for literary and artistic freedom were the All-Union Conference of Young Critics in September and, in the following month, a “plenum” of the board of the Soviet Writers’ Association. Then the sluices were open. Writers and critics began to describe life as the people really saw it. A mediocre novel, “Mother Volga.” by Fyodor Panferov. went far in depicting the seamy side of bureaucracy. It contrasted a good bureaucrat, supposedly Guided by Prime Minister Georgi M. Malenkov himself, with a party secretary who had gone to -seed, a boastful, hollow, one-time war hero, surrounded by leeches, flatterers, and incompetents. “Restless Communist” Despite the poor writing, some of its scenes made a deeo impression. Another signpost of the new “freedom" was a 30-page article by V. Pomerantsev. a younger critic, in the December issue of the literary monthly, “Noviy Mir.” The author took a good look at the hero of one of the most highly nraised kolkhoze novels, the “restless Communist.” Sergei Tutarihov, and concluded that he was as artificial as a little angel painted in sugar on a cake. In January the first counter-attacks set in. In “Literaturnaya Gazeta,” Mr

Pomerantsev’s ideas were called not only naive and commonplace but “theoretically unfounded and simply wrong.” Once again examples from life were refuted with a Lenin quotation. The old dogmatism was trying to come back, but it was not so easy to reclose the sluices. There was no Stalin or even a Zhdanov to lay down the literary and artistic law. It is possible too, that the leaders themselves were engaged in a tug-of-war. In any case the spokesman of “truth an< j simplicity” were not peremptorily silenced as in Zhdanov’s day. As late as April, another young critic, F. Abramov, could take up the cudgels for Mr Pomerantsev in “Noviy Mir.” Comparing the two principal characters of the same kolkhoze novel, he went so far as to state that the real hero was Tutarinov’s antagonist, the “practical” Communist Khokhlakov, who in the novel eventually became an “enemy of the people.” The “down-to-earth” Khokhlakov tells the people to bring in the crop they had planted rather than to talk about exceeding plan targets and building new power plants. “Practical” Khokhlakov When it was first conceived, Mr Abramov’s juxtaposition of the “restless” Tutarinov and of the “practical” Khokhlakov seemed to fit neatly into First Party Secretary Nikita S. Khrushchev’s exhortations at the September session of the party’s central committee. But things had changed by the time the article appeared. The party seemed to have entered a blind The difficult food situation called for quick solution. Once again the banner of “Communist heroism” was unfurled. As in Lenin’s and Stalin’s day, there allegedly were “no fortresses Communists cannot take.” In the fastnesses of Kazakhstan and Siberia, Mr Khrushchev’s “volunteers” were supposed to take by storm millions of acres of virgin and fallow land and to open them up and to sow them enthusiastically. The mental climate was not suited for these who suggested that literature should tell the plain, pedestrian truth. On June 3, “Pravda” and “Izvestia" fired shattering broadsides against the spokesmen of the new sincerity, the Panferovs, Pomerantsevs, and Abramovs. This time they were not branded as “liberals” but as “philistine," mediocre, low, incompatible with that heroic banner-bearer of true greatness, the fictitious “restless Communist,” •as Mrs Alexandrova describes him. High Living Denounced In contrast to 1948, party and government this time are striking out in several directions at once. Thus writers like Nikolai Virta and Anatoli Surov, authors of some of the most violent anti-American plays, were first to be ousted from the Soviet Writers’ Association, allegedly for high living, although, according to many eyewitnesses. this is nothing exceptional among successful Soviet writers. Such contradictions are attributed by long-time students of Soviet affairs to conflicts and uncertainty within the ruling circle. However that may be, three general features of the new policy are apparent: 1. Acceptance by the men in the Kremlin that, whether they like it or not, they cannot step outside Stalin’s shadow. The dead dictator, once again referred to as “Great Stalin,” has been largely rehabilitated in recent weeks and months. 2. Absolute supremacy of the party machine over the state administration, whose spokesmen on the grass-root level, by the very nature of their duties, occasionally have to make allowance for what the people want. It can be no mere coincidence that the major literary characters branded as a compromiser and a “philistine.” ot suspected to be an “enemy of the people,” were depicted as chairmen of regional governments. Cliches Again Rule 3. War heroes and guerrilla leaders, such as Mr Khrushchev, once again are idealised and glorified in cliches. One thing is now certain, according to Mrs Alexandrova, the leaders m the Kremlin did not exoect that the softening ideological restraints would disclose so much criticism and so lively an opposition on the popular level. That may explain why old literary henchmen of the regime, like Virta and Surov, were among the first to be purged. New literary voices are apparently required to restore the theme of adventurous Communist heroism and iingo-patriotism needed by the Kremlin to .back up its foreign and domestic policies.