This is not a monograph but a committee. Problems of Modern Aesthetics is a collection of thirteen essays by thirteen Soviet specialists, translated from the Russian Problemy sovremennoy estetiki and issued by Progress Publishers in Moscow under the editorship of Professor S. Mozhnyagun — who also contributes the longest and most combative piece in it. The imprint is worth stating plainly at the outset, because five of the volumes drafted for this series so far have turned out on inspection to be Foreign Languages, Raduga or Prague books wearing a Progress jacket. This one is not among them: "Progress Publishers" is the only house named in the text, and the two occurrences are both the publisher's own back-matter — an advertisement and a request to readers. This is a genuine Progress export title, and the export purpose is stated in the Publishers' Note: "The book is intended for the general reader with an interest in the cultural problems of the present day."
A collection has to be read as a collection, and the first honest thing to say is that the quality varies from essay to essay — which is itself a finding, because it tells you the book is a real symposium and not a single voice in thirteen masks. Some of these pieces are apparatus prose; two or three are genuine philosophy; and one, the editor's own, is the sharpest polemic against Western modernism that this series has yet met from a Soviet pen. The contents, in order, are: Alexei Metchenko on the basic principles of Soviet literature; Anatoly Dremov on the ideal and the hero; Georgy Lomidze and Pavel Trofimov on the national cultures of the USSR; Nikolai Silayev on labour as a source of aesthetic feeling; Victor Romanenko on the beauty of nature; Ivan Astakhov on the origin of aesthetic feeling; Alexander Myasnikov on tradition and innovation; Mikhail Ovsyannikov on the artistic image; Mozhnyagun on modernism; Alexander Dymshits on realism and modernism; Nikolai Leizerov on the scope and limits of realism; and Boris Suchkov on the historical development of realism. Suchkov's presence is a bridge to the companion volume in this series: four years later Progress would publish his A History of Realism (1973), and his essay here is the seed of that book.
The sharpest instrument this volume hands you is its date. There is no copyright page in what survives of the scan and no printing history, so the text has to be dated from inside, and it dates cleanly and recently. The latest live matter in it is the debate over "realism without shores" that ran through the international writers' meetings of the mid-sixties — the Leningrad Forum of Writers of 1963 is discussed at length, Roger Garaudy's D'un réalisme sans rivages (1963) is attacked by name across three essays — and the freshest event in it is the affair of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whom the editor's essay treats as a present controversy rather than a settled one. The bibliographic years run out at 1968. This is a book whose Russian manuscript closed in 1968 and reached English in 1969, with almost none of the decade-long lag that misdates so many Progress titles. It should be read as exactly what its spine says: a book of 1969.
And 1969 is a precise place to stand. It sits in the narrow trough between two events that closed the Soviet cultural thaw. Behind it is the trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel in February 1966 — the first time since Stalin's death that writers were sent to the camps for what they had published abroad — and the crushing of the Prague Spring in August 1968. Ahead of it is the freeze: the expulsion of Solzhenitsyn from the Writers' Union in November 1969, the tightening that followed. A Soviet aesthetics collection of exactly this year is a document of the moment the thaw shut, and the interesting thing about it is that you can feel both the thaw and the shutting inside the same covers.
The first surprise, if you come to this book from the 1970s monographs in this series, is how much it will say. Avner Zis's Foundations of Marxist Aesthetics (Progress, 1977) never prints the name Stalin; Suchkov's A History of Realism (1973) never prints it either, in a book that covers the whole Stalin period of Soviet literature. This collection prints it eight times, and several of those are critical. Metchenko records that "The Stalin personality cult, which had begun to have an adverse effect on the arts by the end of the thirties, delayed the development and deepening of the idea of commitment"; he notes that "During the years of the Stalin cult some writers painted images of heroes so ideal that they towered above reality." Mozhnyagun goes further, and takes on Stalin's philosophy directly: discussing whether art belongs to the ideological superstructure, he treats Stalin's Marxism and Problems of Linguistics as a piece of dogmatism to be worked around, and writes that his Western opponent Ernst Fischer "'refutes' Stalin's dogmatism by resorting to dogmatism of his own." A book that can call Stalin's linguistics essay dogmatic in 1969 is a book of the Twentieth Congress settlement, still breathing the air of 1956.
The de-Stalinising candour reaches even to the founding events the later monographs bury. Where Zis performs the origin of socialist realism as an assurance and Suchkov never lets the question arise, Myasnikov simply dates it: "The term 'socialist realism' was first coined in 1932 and the first detailed exposition of the basic principles underlying it was given at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934." That single sentence names what neither monograph would name — the year, the congress, the institution. This is the most forthcoming any book in this cluster has been about where the doctrine came from.
And yet watch what the sentence does even as it concedes. The term "was coined" — by no one; the exposition "was given" — by no one. The origin is dated and de-agented in the same breath, and the missing agent is precisely the one a sibling Progress volume supplies. In Soviet Literature: Problems and People (Progress, 1970), Kornely Zelinsky, who was in the room, recalled the meeting at Gorky's house in October 1932 and wrote: "It was then that Stalin gave the Soviet writers' artistic method the definition of socialist realism." Myasnikov knows the counter-charge and rebuts it: he cites an American study by G. Yermolayev (1963) that "attempts to prove that socialist realism was decreed by Stalin and foisted upon the art of other countries," and answers with sarcasm — "What a strange belief Mr. Yermolayev has in the omnipotence of a decree!" One Progress author denies the doctrine was decreed by Stalin; another Progress author, printed a year later, prints an eyewitness saying Stalin named it at a private evening. The house that published both did not mind. The dates are given here; the man who spoke them is what has been removed.
Where the origin is dated but de-agented, the doctrine's genealogy is asserted in the usual place. Metchenko's essay is the partiinost essay of the collection — though the English never uses the Russian word, translating it throughout as "commitment," which softens it. And Metchenko derives commitment exactly where Zis would derive it eight years later: "The Leninist principle of the commitment of literature and the arts to party ideals was first formulated concisely but penetratingly in the article 'Party Organisation and Party Literature' written in 1905." Lenin's article was written in November 1905, in a few weeks of legal press, about the publications of a political party that was illegal and had no state. Seventy years of Soviet cultural administration are made to rest on it. To his credit, Metchenko quotes the restraining half of the article too — that literature is "least of all subject to mechanical adjustment or levelling" — which is the half most Soviet citations drop; he performs the expansion of scope openly rather than by suppression. But the expansion is still performed, not argued.
The candour has a hard limit, and the limit is the standing test of this whole series: a Soviet may be recorded as having erred, but the category of the enemy is never turned inward, and the people the doctrine destroyed are erased at the point of their destruction. Here the erasure is legible against the book's own inclusions.
Anna Akhmatova is in this book. Dymshits names her three times, and warmly: he sets her above the modernists she was grouped with, and reports that Blok "saw that Anna Akhmatova did not 'fit in' this school, sensing warm, vital impulses in her poetry." That is a rehabilitation — the poet restored to the canon. What is nowhere in the book is what was done to her. Zhdanov: zero. The Central Committee decree of 14 August 1946 against the journals Zvezda and Leningrad, which named Akhmatova and drove her out of print: absent. The Fourth International had the scene at the time. Writing as Ernest Germain in "Purge of Soviet Culture" (Fourth International, vol. 10 no. 11, December 1949), Ernest Mandel reported that "the editors of two periodicals were removed from their positions for having permitted the poetess Akhmatova to express 'the emotion of loneliness ... foreign to Soviet literature'" — Zhdanov's report on Zvezda and Leningrad. Dymshits can praise Akhmatova's warm vital impulses in 1969 precisely because a decree he does not mention had made her name unspeakable for a decade. The praise is the measure of the silence.
The pattern holds across the cast, and it is at its most revealing in Dymshits's essay, which names almost the whole silenced modernist generation — but only as poets. In one sentence he lists "Osip Mandelshtam, a prominent acmeist, Boris Pasternak or Marina Tsvetayeva" together with Bely and Khlebnikov as modernist writers whose best work came when they tried to free themselves from modernism. Every name in that sentence is a wound the book does not touch: Mandelstam died in a transit camp near Vladivostok in 1938; Tsvetaeva hanged herself in 1941; Pasternak and Akhmatova were driven from print. Dymshits gives Pasternak eleven mentions and a real critical judgement — "The legacy of Boris Pasternak has not, unfortunately, been the subject of critical research to date" — without one word about Doctor Zhivago or the Nobel scandal of 1958 that made him a non-person. The poets are admitted to the canon; the persecution that emptied it is not. Around them the enforcers are simply gone: Meyerhold, arrested and shot in 1940, zero; Zoshchenko, the co-target of the 1946 decree, zero; Isaac Babel, shot in 1940, absent. And the theorist whose vocabulary the realism essays borrow — Georg Lukács, the major Marxist theorist of realism in the century, alive while the book was written — appears not once, in either spelling, exactly as in Suchkov's monograph, which is built on his architecture without his name. The music resolution of February 1948, which broke Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Khachaturian for "formalism," is absent too, though "formalism" is a live word in the book, used twenty-two times as a charge against the living.
This is the reflexivity test in its sharpest form. Error is admissible: the cult "delayed" the idea of commitment, some writers "painted images of heroes so ideal that they towered above reality." The category is not: nobody who stayed inside is ever an opportunist, a formalist or an enemy, and the machinery that enforced the doctrine — the decree, the report, the resolution, the arrest — is simply outside the covers. The doctrine is dated to 1932 and 1934; the terror that carried it is dated to nothing.
Where the 1970s monographs read as retrospective, this collection reads as a book in a live fight, and the fight is the thing that dates it more precisely than any bibliography. Its real antagonist is the argument, then current across the European left, that socialist realism was too narrow and should be widened to admit Proust, Joyce and Kafka — Garaudy's "realism without shores." The collection engages this at first hand and in detail. Kafka is named fifty-two times, most of them in Mozhnyagun's essay, which quotes Fischer's From Grillparzer to Kafka on Kafka's Prague as a "town of alienation" and argues the case out rather than dismissing it; Fischer himself is named forty-four times and read in his own books. This is the credit the book has genuinely earned: unlike the Progress volumes that name Adorno sixty times and cite him only through Soviet intermediaries, this collection reads its opponents in the original and quotes them with references. It takes modernism seriously enough to attack it properly.
And two of those live fights fix the year exactly, because history answered them while the ink was wet.
The first is Czechoslovakia. Myasnikov's essay engages, with unusual directness, the Czechoslovak aestheticians who held that "the term 'socialist realism' is not broad enough to cover all the riches of contemporary progressive art in Czechoslovakia," and who proposed instead a broader "socialist art" that "combines both progressive modernism and, as one of the trends in modern art, socialist realism." This is the aesthetic theory of the Prague Spring — the reform Marxism that wanted to open the doctrine — argued against on the page. The book contests the Czechoslovak position with words. In August 1968, five Warsaw Pact armies contested it with tanks. And here the silence is total in the way the brief predicts: the Prague Spring and its suppression are absent from the book. The single occurrence of "Prague" in the volume is Kafka's city; the invasion that settled the argument Myasnikov is having does not appear. A book that debates Czechoslovak aesthetics in the very months the debate was being closed by force, and mentions only the debate, is a document of a particular kind of blindness.
The second is Solzhenitsyn. Mozhnyagun's essay attacks the Western critics who "consider Alexander Solzhenitsyn's works an important contribution to art," and dismisses Solzhenitsyn's "righteous people" as "preachers of Christian obedience." This is the official line, taken up at the exact moment it was being enforced. On 4 November 1969 Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers. The Fourth International's press printed the record: Intercontinental Press of 1 December 1969 (vol. 7 no. 40) ran both "Solzhenitsyn's Denunciation of His Expulsion" and his defence at the Writers' Union meeting, in which he protested that the union had acted "in my absence, without even sending me a warning telegram, without even giving me the four hours to travel from Ryazan to be present." While this collection was being readied for foreign readers with a paragraph explaining why Solzhenitsyn was overrated, the writer himself was being thrown out of the institution that administered the doctrine the collection defends.
None of this is a reason to throw the book away, and a reader told everything in it is worthless learns nothing. There is real philosophy here, and it should be credited concretely, essay by essay.
The best of it works on the specificity of the aesthetic — the question of what art does that nothing else does. Ovsyannikov's essay on the artistic image is a genuine engagement with the whole field of mid-century Western aesthetics; it opens by naming its opponents accurately — "phenomenology, existentialism," neo-positivist "semantics," "neo-Freudism and the modern forms of experimental psychological aesthetics influenced by information theory" — and defends the thesis that thinking in images is the specific characteristic of art against those who would dissolve it. Astakhov's essay on the origin of aesthetic feeling is a serious history that begins with Darwin and the biological theories and works forward; it is philosophy of a recognisable kind. Silayev's essay on labour as a source of aesthetic feeling opens a genuinely interesting front — the aesthetics of production and everyday life, beyond the fine arts — and states its case against Hegel with some point: "Hegel — that eminent thinker of the past — set down a rigorous demarcation line for this branch of philosophy, naming the fine arts as its sole subject," a limit Silayev wants to break. Romanenko's essay on the beauty of nature takes up, with care, the hard problem of whether natural beauty is objective. These are not catechism; they are contributions to arguments that were live in Western aesthetics too.
The book's honesty about its own discipline extends, as Zis's would, to admitting that Soviet aesthetics contained open questions — the essays disagree with one another, on the aesthetic in nature and on the boundaries of realism, and the disagreement is printed rather than hidden. That is the mark of a real symposium.
The tradition this series writes from answered these questions at the root, and the root argument is older than the book by thirty years. Trotsky's "Art and Politics in Our Epoch," written to Partisan Review on 18 June 1938, is the text to set against the whole enterprise. On the origin of the doctrine Myasnikov dates so carefully, Trotsky guessed the mechanism before the archives could confirm it: "The style of present-day official Soviet painting is called 'socialist realism.' The name itself has evidently been invented by some high functionary in the department of the arts." He was guessing, and Zelinsky in the sibling volume supplies the functionary. But the deeper reply is at the level of first principles. Where the collection derives art from commitment, Trotsky derived it from unrest — "a protest against reality, either conscious or unconscious, active or passive, optimistic or pessimistic, always forms part of a really creative piece of work" — and drew the conclusion that Metchenko's whole essay exists to deny: that a revolutionary party is "neither able nor willing to take upon itself the task of 'leading' and even less of commanding art, either before or after the conquest of power," because art "not only does not seek orders, but by its very essence, cannot tolerate them." Trotsky's own book on exactly these questions, Literature and Revolution (1923) — written by a member of the Politburo and published in Moscow, then removed from Soviet intellectual life so completely that Metchenko can attack "the Trotskyite slogan 'the methods of Marxism are not the methods of art'" without acknowledging that the book making the argument exists — is the great suppressed Soviet work on the ground these essays cover. It is not held in any corpus this series can quote from, and it is cited here only by its argument.
There is a still more exact reply to what this particular collection is trying to do. Its labour, across Metchenko, Dymshits and Leizerov, is to supply socialist realism with a definition — to make it an arguable method rather than a police category. Reviewing Kurt London's The Seven Soviet Arts in The New International for October 1938 — the pre-split, Trotskyist New International, before the magazine went to Shachtman's minority in 1940 — Edna Margolin had already said why that labour would fail. The name, she wrote, "was delivered from on high without any definition or clue for its meaning," and would stay undefined on purpose: "unformulated, it makes a better weapon against those who fall from grace. It can be woven to fit any figure." Thirty-one years later, this collection is the attempt to weave the definition Margolin said would never be supplied — and it is being published in the same season the weapon was used to expel Solzhenitsyn and to answer the Czechoslovaks. For the Zhdanov machinery the book erases, Mandel's "Purge of Soviet Culture" (December 1949) and George Sanders's "J. Stalin, Music Critic" (Fourth International, vol. 9 no. 2, March–April 1948), on the 1948 resolution that broke Shostakovich, are the contemporaneous accounts.
Honesty requires holding our own side to the same standard. In the same 1938 essay, Trotsky wrote that it was "impossible to read Soviet verse and prose without physical disgust," and consigned the whole art of the Stalin period to the record of decline. That verdict does not survive the century's evidence, and it does not survive this book: the essays here read Western modernism with real attention, and two or three of them do philosophy that any aesthetician could argue with. The tradition that holds Progress Publishers to the standard of the evidence has to meet it too.
It is the most openly argumentative of the Soviet aesthetics volumes in this series, and the one caught most exactly in the act of a door closing. Because it is a symposium of 1968–69 and not a monograph of the settled seventies, it still says things the later books would learn not to say — it names Stalin and the cult, it dates the doctrine to 1932 and the 1934 Congress, it reads Kafka and Fischer in their own words and argues with them. And because it is a book of exactly 1969, it carries the freeze in its silences: it debates the aesthetics of the Prague Spring without the tanks, dismisses Solzhenitsyn in the month of his expulsion, rehabilitates Akhmatova without the decree that had silenced her. It is, in the end, thirteen serious and semi-serious people trying to give a police category the dignity of a philosophy, at the precise moment the police were using the category to do their work. Read it for Ovsyannikov and Astakhov, who are doing real philosophy; read Mozhnyagun for the best case the doctrine could make against modernism; and read the whole of it for the year, which it wears more plainly than any book in this cluster.