This is a book about conscience written by a man whose job was to punish it. Of Human Values is a volume of literary criticism — seven essays on the best Soviet prose of its day, on Valentin Rasputin and Vasily Shukshin and Fyodor Abramov, on the moral seriousness that ran through the "village prose" of the 1970s — and much of the criticism is genuinely good. Its author, Felix Kuznetsov, could read. He could also, in the same years, sit across a table from writers he judged to have stepped out of line and see them expelled, unpublished, and broken. To read the book without that second fact is to miss what it is. To read it with that fact in mind is to watch a professional custodian of literature explain, at length and often movingly, why literature matters — and never once let the word "freedom" touch the writer.
Progress Publishers issued the English text in Moscow in 1980, translated by Evgeni Filippov from Kuznetsov's Horizons of Humaneness (Gorizonty chelovechnosti). The date on the imprint is, for once, the real date of the argument. The latest work Kuznetsov cites is Sholokhov's Virgin Soil Upturned in a 1979 Moscow printing; his organising authority is the 25th Congress of the Communist Party (1976), which he quotes on the first pages; nothing in the book postdates the decade it appeared in. This is not one of the Progress titles that carries a fresh jacket over a text years older than its spine. It is a book of 1980, and that matters, because 1980 is the year immediately after the episode that tells us who Kuznetsov was.
Felix Kuznetsov (1931–2016) was, by the time this book appeared, First Secretary of the Moscow branch of the Writers' Union of the Russian Federation — one of the most powerful literary-administrative posts in the country. The Union was not a professional association in any Western sense. It controlled who could publish, who received an apartment or a dacha, who was translated and paid, and — through its power to expel — who ceased, officially, to be a writer at all. Kuznetsov ran its Moscow organisation. He was an apparatus man of literature, and he was very good at it.
In January 1979 a group of writers, among them Vasily Aksyonov, Viktor Yerofeyev, Andrei Bitov, Fazil Iskander and Yevgeny Popov, assembled an uncensored literary almanac called Metropol — not a political tract, but an anthology of work that had not passed, and would not pass, the censor. It was offered openly to the authorities; the point was to publish outside the machinery, not underground. The machinery answered. Kuznetsov summoned the younger contributors to the Secretariat, and it was Kuznetsov who supplied the public verdict. At a meeting of the Central Writers' Club on 22 January 1979 he called the almanac's contents "pornography of the spirit"; in Moskovsky Literator on 7 February he wrote that its authors were playing "a filthy political game that has nothing to do with literature." Popov and Yerofeyev were expelled from the Union. Aksyonov resigned and, the next year, emigrated. The affair became a small international scandal, and Kuznetsov was its Moscow face.
That is the man writing here that the highest task of literature is "the significance of genuine human values for man and our society," and that Soviet writing at its best fosters "human kindness, compassion and empathy, fine sensibilities and intolerance of evil." The book and the expulsions are not separated by a decent interval. They are the same year, the same desk, the same signature.
It helps to know what the book was for. Its governing frame is razvitoi sotsializm, "developed socialism" — the Brezhnev-era doctrine, formalised around the 25th Congress, that the Soviet Union had reached a settled, mature socialist stage in which the urgent business was no longer transformation but consolidation, and above all the moral and cultural cultivation of the citizen. Kuznetsov's opening pages recite it exactly: at "the mature stage of socialism" the country's "spiritual potential is ever more fully realised," and concern for the individual's moral values has become "a duty of the State." Literature's assigned task within that doctrine is the shaping of "moral attitudes," which is why the 25th Congress's attention to "the topic of morality and moral quests" matters so much to him and why he quotes Brezhnev on it directly. The book, in other words, is not idle criticism; it is criticism performing a commissioned function within a Party programme — and its English publication by Progress adds a second audience to the first. To the Soviet reader it modelled correct literary judgement; to the Western reader it advertised a Soviet literature morally serious enough to answer the "consumer society," a respectable face for détente-era export. Both audiences were to be shown the same thing: that in the USSR the life of the spirit was in safe, cultivated hands. The hands were Kuznetsov's.
The house rule of this series is that a book is not to be dismissed wholesale, and Of Human Values earns the credit honestly on one front: Kuznetsov is a real reader of the writers he most admires, and those writers were among the finest the Soviet Union produced. His subject is the generation that turned, in the 1960s and 70s, from public themes to the inner life — to conscience, memory, death, the moral weight of ordinary rural existence — and he tracks their achievement with attention and, at moments, with tact.
His pages on Rasputin are the strongest. Writing on Live and Remember — the story of Nastena, whose husband deserts from the front and hides near his own village — Kuznetsov catches the thing that makes the novella unbearable and great: that Nastena takes her husband's crime into herself as guilt, and that Rasputin refuses to let her off. "Rasputin is kind and truthful," he writes, and then, refusing sentimentality, notes how the writer "shows without a single false note" both the grief and the shabbiness of the children in The Last Break who "poison the last days and hours of the dying mother." When he concludes that this "menace of lack of spirituality that dehumanises people" is "what makes Rasputin's story valuable," he is not wrong, and he has done the reading to earn it.
He is nearly as good on Shukshin, and here something more interesting shows through. Kuznetsov quotes Shukshin's drunken village priest — "there is no God... God is Life. I believe in that god" — and grants that "the reflections of the weird drunken priest are the author's own thoughts," that here Shukshin "utters important, confessional truths in his own voice." He notices the "soul ache" that runs through the stories, the failed lives, the men who drink because "there is at least some meaning" that way. This is close observation of a difficult, spiritually restless writer. On Trifonov, whose spare Moscow stories of shabby compromise offered the least "positive" material of any writer he treats, Kuznetsov is generous and accurate: "War against desert in human souls runs through the whole of Trifonov's prose," he writes, crediting the very understatement — "little or no social comment" — that a cruder official critic would have called a failing. And when he judges that Bondarev's The Shore falters because "the Great Patriotic War is something the author has lived through, while the modern West is something he has only seen," he is making a genuine critical discrimination, the kind that comes from a real eye and not from a checklist.
None of this should be waved away. A reader who wants an intelligent guided tour of Soviet village and moral prose at the end of the 1970s — who Abramov's Pryaslins are, why Farewell to Matyora mattered, what Belov was doing in All in a Day's Work — will find one here, written by someone who had read all of it closely. The problem is not that Kuznetsov cannot see literature. It is what he does with the seeing.
Watch what happens the moment Shukshin's material becomes awkward. His film The Red Snowball Tree had won a prize abroad, and Kuznetsov reports that "some foreign critics raised their eyebrows: they wondered how a film promoting Christianity, and the Russian Orthodox elements of the peasant soul, could not only have been released in that mysterious USSR, but even won official support." A critic free to follow the evidence might pause on that — on the plainly religious grain of Shukshin's imagination, on the "soul ache" and the "I Believe!" he has just been quoting. Kuznetsov does the opposite. He reaches past Shukshin to a letter Belinsky wrote to Gogol in 1847 and produces it as a ruling: the Russian people is "profoundly atheistic people by nature." The awkward fact is not examined; it is administered. This is the gatekeeper's reflex inside the critic's prose — the reflexive step from asking what the writer means to deciding how to keep the writer on the right side of the line.
Once you see it there, you see it everywhere, and it comes to a head on the one word the book cannot afford. Of Human Values is saturated in the vocabulary of conscience, honour, truth, and moral choice. Kuznetsov even insists that "the Marxist-Leninist conception of morality, which is based on the theory of social classes, does not abolish freedom of moral choice or human conscience, as Lenin stressed." Freedom of moral choice: the phrase is right there. But it is the freedom to arrive, by an inner path, at the conclusions already held; it never becomes the freedom of the writer to publish what the Union will not pass. Every value in the book is a value that terminates in agreement. The frame is stated openly: literature is the field of "the unprecedented ideological battle for man's soul and mind which the world is witnessing," and the highest praise Kuznetsov can give any of his writers is to enrol them in socialist realism — to certify that their conscience came out where the Congress said it should. When Bondarev's fictional Soviet writer wins a televised argument against a West German critic, Kuznetsov underscores it as a verdict: "Nikitin, and with him, the Soviet writer Yuri Bondarev, win the argument." The moral drama is real to him only when it is also a scoreboard.
And then the silences, which in this series are themselves the finding. In a 1980 book about the conscience of contemporary Soviet literature, written by the First Secretary of the Moscow Writers' Organisation, the following words do not appear: Solzhenitsyn. Samizdat (the underground circulation of banned manuscripts). Metropol. Censorship. Sinyavsky, Daniel, Brodsky — the writers tried, jailed or exiled in the two decades the book surveys — are absent to a man. This is not the ordinary silence of a critic with a chosen subject. Kuznetsov is not an outsider who happened not to mention these things. He is the official who, twelve months before the book appeared, had personally pronounced the Metropol writers guilty of "a filthy political game that has nothing to do with literature." The absence is not ignorance. It is the same act as the expulsions, performed in a different room: the drawing of the line that decides what "literature" and "human values" are permitted to contain. A book that defines conscience so as to leave out every Soviet writer who paid for having one has told you exactly where its own conscience stops.
The mechanism that makes all this feel like generosity rather than control is the book's steady polarity against the West. Kuznetsov's values are almost never defined on their own terms; they are defined against a foil — the bourgeois "consumer society," the "philistine petty-bourgeois mentality," the "black holes" in man's consciousness, the West German critic in Bondarev's novel who predicts that the Soviet Union too will "grow fat" and let its spiritual life die among the refrigerators. Set against that, orthodoxy reads as humanism: to affirm conscience becomes an act of resistance to consumerism, and the reader is invited to feel that the Party and the human spirit are on the same side of a single front. It is an effective move, and it quietly does the book's hardest work, because it locates every threat to the inner life outside — in Hamburg, in the marketplace, in the enemy — and so leaves no room to ask whether the deeper threat to a writer's conscience might sit in Moscow, in the Secretariat, in the man drawing up the expulsion list. The enemy of the soul is always the West; it is never the Union.
So the two questions this series learned to ask of any such volume answer themselves here. Does "human values" ever extend to the freedom of the writer? No. Could the book's own category — the moral courage it celebrates, the refusal to live a "stolen life," the "civic courage" it demands of its heroes — ever be turned on the author's own institution, on a Writers' Union that broke careers for a manuscript? The book is built so that it cannot. Its heroes are brave against kulaks (well-to-do peasants), against wartime cowardice, against Western consumerism, against the "philistine petty-bourgeois mentality" the Congress warned of. They are never brave against the apparatus, because the apparatus is holding the pen.
The tradition this series writes from did not have to wait for the Metropol affair to answer Kuznetsov. It answered the whole type of official he was, three times over, decades before, and — most usefully — it did so from inside Marxism, so that the objection cannot be dismissed as bourgeois complaint about "free expression."
Start with the writer the Soviet state itself canonised as the father of its aesthetics, Georgi Plekhanov, whose own Selected Philosophical Works this series republishes. In Art and Social Life (1912–13), reprinted by Progress in Volume V of that edition (1981), Plekhanov set down the sentence Kuznetsov's whole enterprise depends on not quoting. Political authority, Plekhanov wrote, "always prefers the utilitarian view of art" — the demand that art serve a purpose set for it — because "it is to its interest to harness all ideologies to the service of the cause which it serves itself"; and, he added, since such authority "is most often conservative and even reactionary," the demand for commanded art is generally a reactionary reflex, one that "can just as well cohabit with a conservative, as with a revolutionary attitude of mind." Plekhanov's aesthetics rules out precisely the thing Kuznetsov administered. On his account the artist thinks in images that arise, as he put it after Belinsky, unbidden — and images cannot be issued to order like a directive. To command the image is to abolish it. The founder Progress kept on its shelf had already convicted the Writers' Union of the oldest habit of power.
Trotsky put the same case in the register of the revolution's own quarrels. On 9 May 1924, in a speech to the Press Department of the Party's Central Committee — printed as "Class and Art" — he faced down exactly the men who were then trying to turn literature into an arm of policy, the critics of the journal Na Postu ("On Guard") who policed writers by their politics and denounced the editor Voronsky for approaching literature "from the literary point of view." Trotsky's answer was blunt: "art has to be approached as art, literature as literature, that is, as a quite specific field of human endeavour." A class criterion in art was legitimate, he granted, but "this class criterion must be refracted artistically" — and the Na Postu method, judging a book by which émigré paper had praised or damned it, he called "not tactics but a disgrace." Kuznetsov's Belinsky-against-Shukshin manoeuvre — reaching past the work to a ruling that settles it — is the Na Postu method in a smoother suit. The tradition named it, and named it as a betrayal of Marxism, in 1924.
By 1938 Trotsky was writing about what that method had built. In "Art and Politics in Our Epoch," a letter to the American Partisan Review, he set the October revolution's early flowering of art against what the bureaucracy had made of it: "The bureaucratic reaction, on the contrary, has stifled artistic creation with a totalitarian hand." Official Soviet art, "based on lies and deceit," existed to "exalt the leader" and manufacture a myth. And against the whole idea of a Kuznetsov — the state officer of literature — Trotsky stated the principle that the Metropol expulsions violate to the letter: a genuine revolutionary party "is neither able nor willing to take upon itself the task of leading and even less of commanding art... Art, like science, not only does not seek orders, but by its very essence, cannot tolerate them." Such a pretension, he wrote, "could only enter the head of a bureaucracy — ignorant and impudent, intoxicated with its totalitarian power." Art "can become a strong ally of revolution only in so far as it remains faithful to itself." The First Secretaryship Kuznetsov held was, in this account, not an instrument of socialist culture but the precise thing that suffocates it.
The point of setting these texts beside Of Human Values is not to deny that literature has social content — Plekhanov, Trotsky and Kuznetsov all insist that it does, and the tradition answering this book has always expected art to take the side of the oppressed. The distinction, and it is the whole distinction, is between a writer who freely finds that his images and his convictions run together, and an authority that supplies the convictions and requires the images to match. The first is the condition of all committed art, Rasputin's and Shukshin's included. The second is the Metropol Secretariat. Kuznetsov's book is an extended, cultured, sometimes beautiful argument for the first, produced by the operating hand of the second.
Read Of Human Values, then, for what it honestly contains: an able critic's account of a remarkable body of writing, by an insider who had read every page and who genuinely loved some of it. On Rasputin, on Shukshin's ache, on Trifonov's buried moral seriousness, Kuznetsov is worth having, and this series does not pretend otherwise. But read it knowing what it is doing with that love. The book's recurring word is conscience, and its governing act is the suppression of it. It was written by the man who, in the same twelve months, told the country that an anthology of uncensored fiction was "pornography of the spirit," and it is built so that the courage it praises can never be aimed where courage was actually required. The constraint is not in Kuznetsov's eye, which was good. It is in his office, which decided in advance what a Soviet writer's conscience was permitted to conclude — and expelled those who concluded otherwise. That is why a book so full of human values has no room in it for the freedom of a single human being to write.