The English title is Progress Publishers' invention. The Russian title page, which survives in the copy this text was scanned from, reads Istoricheskiye sud'by realizma, the historical destinies of realism, and that is the more honest description, because this is not a history. It is three long essays: "Realism and Reality" (some 17,000 words on what realism is), "History and Realism" (54,000 words, from the Renaissance to Tolstoi), and "Contemporary Realism" (62,000 words on the twentieth century). A reader who opens it expecting a chronological survey will be disorientated for about ten pages and then will realise that Boris Suchkov is arguing a single thesis at book length, and that the thesis is worth arguing with.
Start with the date, because the front matter did not survive. The copy digitised for this edition was a Los Angeles Public Library copy; what reached the scanner was the borrower's slip, a fragment of the dust jacket, the Russian title page and the contents. There is no copyright page and no printing history, so the text has to be dated from inside. It dates cleanly. Lyndon Johnson appears as "US ex-president", which puts the writing after January 1969. Pitirim Sorokin is "the late", and he died in February 1968. The most recent editions Suchkov quotes from are Moscow printings of Anti-Dühring (1969) and the three-volume Marx and Engels Selected Works (1970) — quotation editions, not sources. There is no reference to any event after about 1970, and the latest literary matter in the book is a remark by the Italian novelist Guido Piovene at a symposium on the novel held in Leningrad. This is a manuscript closed around 1970 and published in English three years later: a book of the last Khrushchev afterglow, appearing in the Brezhnev settlement.
About its author the volume says almost nothing, and this series has been unable to establish more from the archives it holds. The name Suchkov returns nothing across the whole reply corpus — the Fourth International run, The New International, International Socialist Review, the 763 issues of Intercontinental Press, the Trotsky archive. What the jacket copy claims is that "In Boris Suchkov's book the reader will also find a fascinating analysis of the works of Gorky, Sholokhov, Fadeyev, Serafimovich, Leonov and other masters of Soviet literature", and the library card gives the patronymic, Leontevich. Nothing in this introduction rests on any biographical claim, because none can be sourced.
Take the scholarship first, and take it seriously, because a good deal of this book is very good and the criticism that follows is worthless if that is not said plainly.
Suchkov reads. He reads Balzac in a Brussels edition of 1831, Bulwer-Lytton in the original, Nietzsche in German, Sartre's L'être et le néant in the Paris edition of 1943 with a page number, Jaspers's Rechenschaft und Ausblick (Munich, 1951), Heidegger's Vorträge und Aufsätze, Stefan Zweig, Winckelmann, Thomas Mann's Zwei Festreden, and the proceedings of the 1938 Paris conference of the International Association of Writers for the Defence of Culture. When he attacks existentialism he attacks it out of its own books, and he concedes at the outset that "the existentialists have provided a pretty convincing description of the modern world and contemporary bourgeois society as it appears to the bourgeois perception." That is not a straw man; it is a thesis, and he then has to work for his objection. Progress volumes in this series have repeatedly been caught naming an opponent scores of times without ever citing a work of his — Adorno in Batalov, Habermas in Naletov. Suchkov inverts the pattern. The philosophers he is fighting are read in the original and quoted with references.
The comparative criticism is the best thing in the book. His long parallel between Balzac and Stendhal is genuinely illuminating: Balzac's heroes struggle inside the system and can be reconciled to it — the escaped convict Vautrin ends as a pillar of the society whose laws he broke — while the conflict between Julien Sorel and his social environment "cannot, for it is based on class antagonism, which will last as long as the existing system of social relations persists." He is exact about Balzac's method, "the penetration of self-interest into all spheres of private and public life", pursued "with a historian's thoroughness", and equally exact about its limit: Balzac saw social atomisation and missed capitalism's "unifying role", the way the new relations created "the objective conditions in the capitalist system for the poor to unite against the rich". He notices that Stendhal "compared the novel to a mirror placed along the highway and reflecting both the azure sky and the roadside mud", and observes that the same could be said of Stendhal's characters. He is good on Dickens's method of building character by heightening a single trait, on Walter Scott's placing of the individual at the intersection of class forces, on Pushkin's compression, on Tolstoi's inner monologue, and on the difference between Tolstoi's use of it and Joyce's. On Proust he is generous in a way Soviet criticism of the period rarely was — "undoubtedly one of the greatest bourgeois writers of the century" — and gives him twenty-nine pages of attention.
The survey of post-war Western writing in the last essay is wider than anything else of its kind published in English by this house. Böll, Grass, Koeppen, Hans Werner Richter, Kirst, Schalluck, Andersch, Weisenborn; Amis, Wain, Osborne and C. P. Snow; Greene, Čapek, Feuchtwanger, Mann's Doktor Faustus; Lanoux, Hériat, Pierre de Lescure; Pavese, Moravia, Calvino, Cassola. Much of this is read at first hand and some of it is acute — the reading of Doktor Faustus as Mann settling accounts with the German cultural inheritance that prepared fascism is a real piece of criticism, and the verdict on the Angry Young Men, that they "had nothing to oppose to the society which they hated, except their own anger", is a fair judgement fairly earned. He also gets things wrong: he calls Kingsley Amis's Jim Dixon "Jimmy Dixon" and a postgraduate student, which he is not. The errors are the errors of a man reading very widely at a distance, not of a man reading nothing.
So this is a serious critic. Now the thesis.
Suchkov's argument is that realism is a method of cognition, that the great critical realists of the nineteenth century achieved a "synthetic" grasp of society which no other method could achieve, that they were nonetheless limited by their inability to see the masses as an active historical force, and that socialist realism is the resolution of that limitation and therefore realism's continuation and culmination. What defines it is not subject matter and not style but what he calls conscious historicism: "conscious historicism is the main, determining feature and sine qua non of socialist realism and its creative method."
That is a real definition, and it should be credited as one, because the alternative doctrine on offer at the time was worse. The companion volume in this series, Avner Zis's Foundations of Marxist Aesthetics (Progress, 1977), founds socialist realism on Lenin's 1905 article "Party Organisation and Party Literature" and completes it with commitment and Party guidance. Suchkov does no such thing. In 134,000 words the phrases Party guidance and Party leadership do not occur; neither does partiinost; the word commitment occurs once, in an unrelated sense; Lenin's 1905 article is never cited at all. He insists instead, more than once, that the method prescribes nothing: "The new literary method is based on the individual freedom of the writer in understanding and hence depicting those aspects of life he examines and submits to aesthetic interpretation." And: "Without prescribing any rules or any particular expressive devices to the writer, or restricting him in any way in his quest for new expressive means, socialist realism enables him to perceive and understand the truth of history."
That is the strongest form the case can take, and it is worth putting to the reader in its strongest form. It is also, precisely because it is epistemological rather than administrative, a doctrine that can be stated without any institutional history whatever. And that is what happens.
Where did socialist realism come from? Suchkov's answer is four words: "Socialist realism was born in Russia." It was born of Russian literature's tradition of service to the masses, of the accumulated revolutionary energy of centuries, and above all of one man: Gorky is "the founder of socialist realism", named as such twice. That is the whole genealogy.
Now the counts, which are the finding. In this book the year 1934 does not appear. The First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, which in August 1934 wrote socialist realism into the statutes of a single compulsory Union, is not mentioned. The Union of Soviet Writers is not mentioned — the phrase does not occur, nor does "Writers' Union". The Central Committee decree of 23 April 1932 dissolving the literary groupings is not mentioned. RAPP: zero. The decree of 14 August 1946 against Zvezda and Leningrad: not mentioned. Zhdanov: zero. Stalin: zero — not once in a book that covers the whole Stalin period of Soviet literature. Mayakovsky: zero. Meyerhold: zero. Babel: zero. Mandelstam: zero. Pilnyak occurs once, in a list. Trotsky: zero.
Set this beside the two neighbouring volumes on the same export list. Zis in 1977 at least prints his opponents' question — "where and in which works did Marx, Engels and Lenin write that the creative method for socialist literature should be socialist realism?" — and answers that the search will fail but the method is vindicated "by the whole philosophical structure of Marxist-Leninist theory". Kornely Zelinsky, in Soviet Literature: Problems and People (Progress, 1970), was in the room and said so: "In October 1932... 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." Suchkov's book was written in the same years as Zelinsky's and never lets the question arise at all. Where Zis argues that nothing was prescribed, Suchkov simply never mentions that there was an occasion on which anything could have been.
The anti-Stalinist left had the story, in outline, thirty years earlier and from two directions. Writing to Partisan Review on 18 June 1938, Trotsky observed that "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" — a guess, and slightly low; Zelinsky supplies the functionary. Four months later, reviewing Kurt London's The Seven Soviet Arts in The New International for October 1938, Edna Margolin reported a version of the same scene: "a delegation of writers and critics visited Stalin and promised that henceforth the approach to art would be based on realism. He replied: 'Say, rather, Socialist Realism.'" (That issue is from the run of The New International which was still Trotskyist; the magazine went to Shachtman's minority in April 1940.) Margolin's account is second-hand and should be read as such. What is not second-hand is her diagnosis of the consequence: the name arrived "from on high without any definition or clue for its meaning", and "unformulated, it makes a better weapon against those who fall from grace. It can be woven to fit any figure."
Suchkov's book is, among other things, the eventual answer to that charge. He does formulate it. He gives socialist realism a content — conscious historicism — which is arguable, falsifiable in principle, and free of the police. He has supplied the definition Margolin said would never be supplied. He has simply left out the thirty-eight years during which the undefined term did the work she described.
There is one omission inside the scholarship that shows how the operation runs at the level of a footnote. Suchkov twice cites Engels's letter to Margaret Harkness — "a famous letter on realism", he calls it — and both times he quotes exactly one thing from it, the sentence about City Girl in which "The working class figures as a passive mass, unable to help itself and not even showing (making) any attempt at striving to help itself." That sentence supports his thesis: it shows the limit of critical realism, which is exactly what socialist realism is said to transcend. The rest of the letter, which is the reason anyone remembers it, is the passage on Balzac — that Balzac's political sympathies ran against the grain of what his novels actually showed, and that this is realism's triumph over the author's own opinions. Michael Harrington, writing in The New International for Spring 1956, quoted the letter's governing dictum: "The more the opinions of the author remain hidden, the better the work of art." (Harrington was by then writing for Shachtman's magazine, not for the tradition this series writes from; the quotation is his rendering and is used here for that reason with the label attached.) Suchkov uses the phrase "triumph of realism" three times in his own voice, without attribution, and never once about Balzac, and never quotes the paragraph the phrase comes from. He could not. His whole book argues that the decisive thing about the modern writer is a conscious socialist outlook. Engels's sentence says that the less of the author's opinion shows, the better. The letter he cites twice contains the strongest available objection to his thesis, and he takes from it only the half that helps.
The larger version of the same absence is a person. Georg Lukács is not in this book: not under that spelling, not under any, not once in 134,000 words. He was the major Marxist theorist of realism in the twentieth century, he was alive while Suchkov was writing and died in June 1971, and the architecture of this book is his — Walter Scott and the historical novel, Balzac against Flaubert and Zola, critical realism as a cognitive achievement, the passage from critical to socialist realism, "typicality" as the central category. It is not that Suchkov agrees with Lukács on everything; nobody had to. It is that the argument is conducted in a vocabulary Lukács largely made, against opponents Lukács largely chose, without the name. What made him unmentionable is not obscure. He had recanted publicly more than once — his self-criticisms were notorious enough that Michael Harrington, introducing the first English translation of "What Is Orthodox Marxism?" in The New International for Summer 1957, could note that the most recent of them had come "only some seven or eight years ago", and consisted of "the confession of not having been sufficiently aware of contemporary Russian literature". Then, in October 1956, he joined Imre Nagy's government; when it fell he "went into exile along with Imre Nagy", as Harrington put it in the same note.
The Fourth International's assessment appeared within weeks of his death, and it is not an obituary tribute. Alan Jones, in Intercontinental Press of 12 July 1971 (reprinted from The Red Mole, London, 15 June), granted him "perhaps the most significant question asked in Marxism, outside the writings of Lenin and Trotsky" and then convicted him on the aesthetics: from the late 1920s his writings became "tinged with another theme, which was to lead to intellectual decay and compromise with Stalin and the bourgeoisie. This was the theory of phenomenal, as opposed to structural, realism in art, which is made most explicit in The Historical Novel. This theory was used in an attempt to show how the products of high bourgeois art and the art of Stalinist Russia, with its 'socialist realism,' its threnodies to departed tractors, the struggle for production on a collective farm, etc., could be combined." Jones's conclusion — that Lukács "was, of course, far too intelligent to accept all the grosser aspects of Stalinism, but all he was prepared to do about it was to keep up an irregular sniping fire at some of its aspects in the aesthetic field" — is a hard judgement on a man who had by then been deported once and recanted repeatedly, and it should be read with that in mind. But the analytical charge is the one that matters here, because it is a description of Suchkov's book written the year Suchkov finished it, by someone who had never heard of him. The continuity thesis — high bourgeois art and Soviet official art as two stages of one method — is exactly what A History of Realism exists to establish.
What Suchkov does concede is worth setting out, because it is more than most and because it shows precisely where the line runs. He is candid about the Stalin years' damage to literature. The revival of the "hero and the crowd" theory, he writes, "which is totally alien to Marxism, as a result of the personality cult, had an extremely adverse effect on the historical novel, as indeed on the development of other genres in Soviet literature", producing an idealisation of even Ivan the Terrible. He names and condemns the no-conflict doctrine: it "banished class conflicts from the historical novel and adjusted the past to the burning topics of the day: the role of the State was excessively idealised" and "the masses, the makers of history, were relegated to the role of executors of the designs of individual personalities towering above them." That is a sharper sentence about Stalinist culture than anything in Zis, who seven years later would rebuild the no-conflict theory as philosophy, holding that socialist society "provides no scope for tragedies resulting from the struggle of the exploited against the exploiters."
But watch the next clause, because it is the whole mechanism in nine words: "these views that are alien to Marxism and socialist realism were opposed by the entire experience of Soviet literature." The damage is admitted; the category is protected. The no-conflict theory was not a corruption of socialist realism, it was socialist realism's official doctrine, promulgated by the men who ran the Union; but by the time Suchkov writes, it has been reclassified as something alien that socialist realism resisted. The rule this series keeps meeting holds here exactly: error is admissible, the category is not. A Soviet writer may have been wrong, a period may have been bad, the personality cult may have done "extremely adverse" damage — and the method itself is never in the dock, because everything done in its name that failed is retrospectively defined as not having been it. The single reference to the Twentieth Congress does the same work in the opposite direction: its decisions "removed the vestiges of the personality cult and restored the true Leninist norms of social life", and the consequence in literature is stated as an increase in "the objective value of the individual". The problem is closed by having been solved.
Which brings the argument to the year the manuscript was finished, and to the last silence.
Contemporary Soviet literature is barely in this book. The Soviet writers Suchkov discusses are Gorky, Serafimovich, Fadeyev, Nikolai Ostrovsky, Sholokhov, Tvardovsky's Vasily Tyorkin, and the novelists of the war — Bek, Kazakevich, Panova, Leonov, Simonov. Of the generation that made Soviet literature an argument again after 1956 there is almost nothing: Solzhenitsyn zero, and the roll of the thaw and after — Aitmatov, Bondarev, Trifonov, Abramov, Yevtushenko, Voznesensky, Zalygin, Granin — is empty or nearly so. Tvardovsky is quoted three times, always as the poet of Vasily Tyorkin, never as the editor of Novy Mir. The manuscript was being closed in the months around February 1970, when Tvardovsky was forced out of that editorship.
And the doctrine this book defines as a cognitive achievement was, in those same years, being used as an administrative instrument in the way Margolin had predicted in 1938. Intercontinental Press of 24 March 1969 printed the record of the Writers' Union Secretariat session of 22 September 1967, chaired by Konstantin Fedin, which considered Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward. One secretary after another spoke against the book; one of them concluded: "Even if this novel were put into some kind of shape, it would not be a novel of socialist realism, but only an ordinarily competent work." Intercontinental Press's own comment, two years before Suchkov finished writing, was this: "Although realism is the official literary canon in the Soviet Union, it is seldom to be found in the works the bureaucracy allows to be published. The official realism is only cardboard decoration for the bureaucratic system."
That is a hard sentence and it is not fair to the whole of this book — Suchkov's realism is not cardboard, and his pages on Balzac and Stendhal are not decoration. But it names what the term had become as an operative category in Moscow while he was defining it as a method of knowledge, and he does not mention that it had any operative existence at all.
The reply this series rests on is older and goes to the root rather than the practice. In the letter of 18 June 1938 Trotsky set against the whole enterprise a rival first principle — that "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 from it the conclusion that Suchkov's third essay exists to deny without ever engaging: "a truly 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... Art, like science, not only does not seek orders, but by its very essence, cannot tolerate them." Honesty requires adding that in the same essay Trotsky wrote that it was "impossible to read Soviet verse and prose without physical disgust" and consigned the art of the Stalin period wholesale to the record of decline. That verdict does not survive And Quiet Flows the Don, which Suchkov reads well, or Vasily Tyorkin, which he reads better. A tradition that holds Progress Publishers to the evidence has to hold itself to it. Trotsky's own book on these questions, Literature and Revolution (1923), written by a member of the Politburo and published in Moscow, is the great suppressed Soviet work on exactly the ground Suchkov's first essay covers — what art is for, what a party may and may not do to a writer, whether a class can be handed a method. It had been out of Soviet intellectual life for forty years by the time this manuscript was finished, and its absence here is not an argument that failed but a book that could not be picked up.
What, then, is this volume?
It is the most intellectually respectable statement of the continuity thesis available in English from this publisher, and it is worth reading for the nineteenth-century essay alone. Suchkov was a real critic with a very large library and an ear. He wanted socialist realism to be a claim about knowledge rather than a set of instructions, and he wrote 134,000 words in which it is treated as one, with no Party guidance, no partiinost, no decree, no congress and no Stalin. That is not evasion in the ordinary sense; it is closer to a rescue attempt, conducted by a man who plainly believed the method could be stated as an intellectual position and survive. The cost of the attempt is measurable, and the measure is what had to be left outside the covers: the year the doctrine was named, the institution that enforced it, the decrees that gave it teeth, the writers it destroyed, and the theorist whose argument it is. He ends with a sentence he means: "Man liberating himself from the fetters of captivity, injustice, and exploitation, to achieve real freedom—this is the hero to whom the future belongs." Read it against the roll of names that are not in his index, and it is the truest thing in the book and the least defended.