This is not a committee book. Soviet Literature: Problems and People was written by one man, Kornely Zelinsky, who signs his preface "Moscow, 1970" and who breaks into his own text often enough — inserting "—K.Z." into quotations to gloss them — that the reader never loses sight of him. Progress issued it in English translation, but for once the date on the spine is close to the date of the text: the most recent books discussed are Sergei Zalygin's Solyonaya Pad of 1967–68, and Konstantin Paustovsky, who died in 1968, is spoken of as newly dead. Twenty-four chapters run from "The Revolution and Literature" to "Literature of the Future", with the middle of the book given over to portraits: Gorky, Mayakovsky, Yesenin, Fadeyev, Alexei Tolstoi, Pasternak, Fedin, Leonov, Ehrenburg, Paustovsky, Sholokhov. It is a personal survey addressed, as Zelinsky says, "not just for specialists but for the general reader", and its second purpose is polemical: he wrote it, he explains, after reading "some of those works on Soviet literature published in the West, mainly in the United States". It is, in other words, an export product with a job to do.
Zelinsky's credentials for the job are the most valuable thing about the book, and he states them himself. He graduated from Moscow University in 1918, worked as a civil war correspondent, returned to Moscow in 1922 and "joined the constructivist group, attended all the congresses of Soviet writers as a delegate". He knew Mayakovsky, Bely, Pasternak, Fadeyev and Ehrenburg personally. And he tells us: "once I had understood these new truths, I became a convert of socialist realism, and have been one ever since the early [nineteen-thirties]." A man who converted in the early thirties and was still writing the official survey in 1970 has lived through everything this book declines to describe. The introduction that follows is not written to catch him out. It is written because the silences in a book by a witness are evidence of a different order from the silences in a book by a compiler.
Consider what a Moscow literary critic knew in the year he finished this manuscript. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had been expelled from the Ryazan branch of the Writers' Union on 4 November 1969, the expulsion confirmed nationally three days later and announced in Literaturnaya Gazeta on 12 November. In February 1970 Aleksandr Tvardovsky was forced out of the editorship of Novy Mir, the journal that had published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In October 1970 Solzhenitsyn would be awarded the Nobel Prize. Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel had been tried in February 1966 and were serving their sentences in the camps. Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita had appeared, cut, in the magazine Moskva across the winter of 1966–67 and was the literary event of the decade.
Here is what the book contains on all of it. "Solzhenitsyn" appears zero times. "Sinyavsky" zero. "Daniel" zero. The year 1966 appears zero times — it is the only year between 1950 and 1965 that the book never once names. Novy Mir is mentioned exactly once, in a list of magazines founded in the early 1920s; Tvardovsky is discussed at length and warmly, twenty times, always as the author of Vasily Terkin and Space Beyond Space, never as an editor. "Zhdanov" appears zero times, and so the Central Committee decree of August 1946 against the journals Zvezda and Leningrad — the decree that destroyed Zoshchenko and Akhmatova — has left no trace whatever. Zoshchenko appears five times, always as a satirist of the 1920s. Akhmatova appears three times, twice as a name from forty years ago that we should be careful not to let "block our view of the floodtide of popular artistic endeavour". Czechoslovakia is named once, as a place people emigrated from after a revolution.
This is not a book that argues against the dissidents. It is a book in which they have never existed. That is a harder thing to do, and it required the author to write a twenty-four-chapter survey of Soviet literature in 1970 in which the central literary fact of the preceding eighteen months does not occur.
And yet this is also a book that contains something no anti-Stalinist critic could have supplied, and which is worth the price of the volume. Describing the dissolution of the literary groupings by the Central Committee decision of 23 April 1932, Zelinsky writes:
In October 1932, that is several months after a committee had been elected to organise the first congress of Soviet writers, a meeting was held in Gorky's house which was attended by Stalin and other Party and Government leaders. I was present at that meeting and was one of the speakers there. It was then that Stalin gave the Soviet writers' artistic method the definition of socialist realism.
He immediately softens it — "Actually he merely formulated what was already in the air" — but the sentence stands. The doctrine that would govern every Soviet writer for fifty years was named by the general secretary of the party at a private evening in a novelist's house, and one of the men in the room has told us so in print.
Set beside it Trotsky, writing in exile on 18 June 1938, in "Art and Politics in Our Epoch", the essay that remains the sharpest thing written on the subject:
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.
Trotsky was guessing, and guessed slightly low. Zelinsky, thirty-two years later, supplies the missing name and does not notice that he has done so. In the same essay Trotsky wrote that "a truly revolutionary party is neither able nor willing to take upon itself the task of 'leading' and even less of commanding art" — a proposition Zelinsky's whole book exists to deny, and denies with the single argument that the writers wanted it: "It was not the dictates of the Central Committee which 'planned' literature... It was by the inspired, heroic atmosphere reigning in the country."
The test of a Soviet literary history is not what it says about the living but what it can bring itself to say about the dead, and here the book is exact in a way that repays close reading. Rehabilitation restored the work; it did not restore the manner of the death.
Boris Pilnyak gets several pages and a set of dates — "Boris Pilnyak (1891–1938), whose real name was Vogau". The dates are printed. What happened in 1938 is not; Pilnyak was arrested in October 1937 and shot the following April. The reader is left to assume illness. Isaac Babel is treated at length, with real critical attention to his sentences — and given a birth year, 1894, and no death year at all. The chapter closes on the judgement that Babel's "very artistic method testified to his ideological weakness", because "only a writer whose imagination had run away with him could have compared a crowd of Russian peasants to a herd of lice". Babel was arrested in May 1939 and shot in January 1940. The criticism offered of a murdered man is that his metaphors were ideologically unsound.
Osip Mandelstam, who died in a transit camp near Vladivostok in December 1938, appears nowhere: zero occurrences. Yevgeny Zamyatin: zero. Vsevolod Meyerhold, tortured and shot in 1940: zero. Marina Tsvetaeva, who hanged herself at Yelabuga in August 1941, is named once, in a list of poets who liked "formalistic experimentation", alongside Semyon Kirsanov and "the French dadaists". Mikhail Bulgakov is named once, and the mention is hostile: "This is why the West clutched at such works of literature as Mikhail Bulgakov's plays and his story Fateful Eggs (1925)". Three years after the serialisation of The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov is a thing the West clutched at.
The exception is Andrei Platonov, and it is worth saying plainly that Zelinsky's pages on him are good criticism. He notes Platonov's standing among young writers, records that Hemingway admired him, and finds the right formulation: Platonov "did not dwell on the darker sides of Soviet life for their own sake, but on human pain", writing so that "the pain reflex keeps him remembering man". Nothing in these pages hints that Platonov was publicly destroyed in 1931 and lived out his last twenty years unable to print his major work. But the appreciation is real, and a reader who had been told everything in this book was worthless would be badly misled.
Zelinsky knew Mayakovsky and Fadeyev. He describes Mayakovsky's death on 14 April 1930 at length and honestly reports that "people often ask why he did it", quoting the suicide note before concluding: "We shall probably be nearest the truth if we put Mayakovsky's suicide down to extreme nervous stress."
The second is more remarkable. Alexander Fadeyev, novelist, theorist of socialist realism, and chairman of the Union of Soviet Writers through the years in which its members were being arrested, shot himself in May 1956, less than three months after Khrushchev's secret speech to the Twentieth Congress. Zelinsky's sentence:
Fadeyev's sad end (he shot himself through the heart on May 13, 1956, at his country home in Peredelkino) appears to lack a motive and clashes with the entire image of Fadeyev as writer and public figure.
Appears to lack a motive. It is the most self-indicting phrase in the book, and it is not written cynically; Zelinsky plainly cannot find the motive, because the search for it would have to run through territory he has closed to himself.
Trotsky, writing in 1936 in The Revolution Betrayed, in the chapter "Family, Youth and Culture", had already described the mechanism:
There has been created for all groups a general compulsory organization, a kind of concentration camp of artistic literature. Mediocre but "right-thinking" storytellers like Serafimovich or Gladkov are inaugurated as classics. Gifted writers who cannot do sufficient violence to themselves are pursued by a pack of instructors armed with shamelessness and dozens of quotations. The most eminent artists either commit suicide, or find their material in the remote past, or become silent.
Serafimovich and Gladkov are both praised in Zelinsky's pages, by name, in exactly the terms Trotsky predicted they would be. And of the three fates Trotsky lists, Zelinsky's book records instances of all three without ever connecting them: Mayakovsky and Fadeyev dead by their own hands, Alexei Tolstoi turning to Peter the Great, Pasternak taking his "emergency exit" into translating Shakespeare and Goethe. Zelinsky's own phrase for the late 1930s is "the difficult years of inhibited spiritual activity."
Nothing shows the machinery better than the book's handling of the Nobel. Of Pasternak, Zelinsky writes that the publication of his novel abroad and "the awarding of the Nobel Prize to the author (which Pasternak had declined)... created an unhealthy stir round the poet's name", making it "a trump card in the cold war, in the game of nerves". He then quotes at length Pasternak's letter to Pravda of 6 November 1958 — a document extracted under a campaign of public denunciation and the threat of exile — and presents it as voluntary testimony. The pressure, he explains, "which allegedly was brought to bear on him had nothing to do with this: Pasternak was too big a man to be influenced in his opinions and actions by such a despicable thing as cowardice." The compliment does the work of the denial. Twenty chapters later, on Sholokhov: "And the 1965 Nobel Prize came as a just reward."
Zelinsky is not obliged to like Doctor Zhivago, and his critical objection — that the novel's Christian pathos left its author unable to grasp "the humanism of revolution as such" — is at least an argument. But he cannot hold the two prizes in one hand. When the Swedish Academy honours a writer the state approves of, the award is a just reward; when it honours one the state does not, the award is an operation of the cold war. That is not criticism. It is the position of the state, rendered into criticism.
Point by point, this book is more useful than its politics. Zelinsky is an eyewitness to the 1920s and his chapters on that decade have texture no later scholar could manufacture: the founding of Krasnaya Nov and Oktyabr, the constructivists and LEF, the disputes he was personally party to, Bely "baldheaded, his movements somehow elusive". His account of the "no-conflict" theory of the late Stalin years is candid and specific — critics evolved a doctrine in which "a conflict between the excellent and the more excellent was considered quite all right", and some writers "wallowed in ode-singing", Belinsky's phrase. He states outright that "it was after 1935 that the oppressive consequences of the Stalin personality cult began to manifest themselves with particular force" and that the resulting pressure on literature "was very hard indeed". He gives a fair account of the thaw's real range — Ovechkin, Tendryakov, Nilin, Panova, Zalygin, Victor Nekrasov's war writing "without bravura" — and he does not pretend that the young poets were docile.
The two chapters on the non-Russian literatures are the best-researched in the volume and the least often read. The figures are concrete and checkable: a bibliography of non-Russian books translated into Russian in 1934–1954 filling 750 pages; "no more than a hundred books in Tatar" indexed in the libraries of Kazan in the decades before 1917, against 145 works of fiction in 1934 alone. He introduces Yuri Rytkheu, the Chukchi writer; Djansi Kimonko, the Udeghe; Yuvan Shestalov, writing in Mansi, a language with fewer than seven thousand speakers; the Daghestani poets writing in Avar and Lezghin. The framing is triumphalist and the account of what happened to the Ukrainian and Central Asian intelligentsias in the 1930s is absent. But the literary information is real, and much of it is still not easily found in English.
The Fourth International answered this literature as it appeared, and the reader who wants the other side has a specific shelf to go to. Trotsky's "Art and Politics in Our Epoch" (18 June 1938) and chapter 7 of The Revolution Betrayed (1936) are the foundational texts. For the machinery of the Writers' Union at work, L. Yakovlev's "The Blind Alley of Soviet Literature", Fourth International vol. 2 no. 6, July 1941, reported from the Soviet literary press itself that it was "no simple task to provide a realistic depiction of the civil war without once mentioning the name of Leon Trotsky… and always portraying Stalin as a genius." For the Zhdanov years that Zelinsky cannot name, Ernest Mandel — writing as Ernest Germain — gave the fullest contemporary account in "Purge of Soviet Culture", Fourth International vol. 10 no. 11, December 1949, quoting the decree against Zvezda and Leningrad for permitting Akhmatova "the emotion of loneliness … foreign to Soviet literature", and setting down the axioms of the resulting criticism, among them: "There are no conflicts in a classless society." That is the doctrine Zelinsky, seven years later, would describe as the "theory of 'art without conflict'" without saying where it came from.
For the year of this book, there are two documents. Intercontinental Press of 1 December 1969 printed the Ryazan expulsion meeting nearly verbatim, and it is the necessary companion to Zelinsky's chapters on the Union — the provincial writers speaking one after another, including the one who said of Solzhenitsyn's recent work: "We, of course, are not familiar with his latest works. We have not read them. But they run counter to what we are writing." And on 6 April 1970, in the same paper, Gerry Foley reviewed a new Soviet novel that revived the Moscow trial charges against Trotsky in anti-Semitic form, noting that "the recent expulsion of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the apparently forced resignation of the mildly independent Aleksandr Tvardovsky from the editorship of Novy Mir show the role the Kremlin has assigned to official 'literature.'" That review was published while this book was in production.
One last thing. In 113,000 words on the literature of the Russian revolution, the name of the man who organised the Red Army appears exactly once — inside a quotation from Virgin Soil Upturned, in the mouth of Sholokhov's Makar Nagulnov: "We grew attached to the Party not with our learned gristle, like Trotsky, but with our hearts and the blood we shed for the Party." A history of the literature of October in which Trotsky survives only as a term of abuse in a novel is not a history that has been argued with. It is one that has been arranged. Zelinsky was in the room in October 1932 when the arranging began, and he was still working when this book went to Progress. That is why it is worth reading: he tells you more than he intends to, and everything he cannot say is legible from the shape of what he does.