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PARTISAN REVIEW
to work in the full glare of the political spotlights. Esthetics agaw
be·
came the province of the censor and the police agent.
Pravda
violently abused Shostakovitch's music as "un-Soviet, unwhole·
some, cheap, eccentric, tuneless, and leftist" and advised him to emulate
Glinka and write tunes that could be whistled.
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The attack was entirely
unexpected-Shostakovitch for several years had been considered, inside
as well as outside the Soviet Uillon, its greatest living composer-and
evidently planned quite deliberately as the opening gun in a new offensive
along the entire artistic front. At once a hurricane onslaught on leftism and
formalism burst out in the press.
Pravda
denounced modern architecture as
"monstrous trick architecture"
62
Komsomolskaya Pravda
described Joyce's
Ulysses,
then running serially in another Soviet magazine, as "written in
English that can hardly be understood by Englishmen .. .Its style reminds
one of the delirious babblings of a mad philosopher who has mixed all the
known languages into one monstrous mess."
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Et cetera, et cetera.
Since 1936, in every cultural field, the socialIst-realist line has been
enforced more ruthlessly than the RAPP line ever was. Besides Shostakovitch,
the victims have included Eisenstein and Vertov in the cinema, Tairov and
Meyerhold in the theatre, even such harmless figures as Natalie Satz, creator
and director of the well-know Moscow Children's Theatre. Pashukanis, for
many years the all-powerful arbiter of Soviet legal theory, has been de–
throned as "a counter-revolutionary and. class enemy."* Pokrovsky, whose
history of Russia Lenin recommended as a textbook, who in 1930 was de–
scribed by the
Soviet Encyclopedia
as "the greatest Marxist historian not
only in the USSR but also in the world", whose funeral in 1932 was at–
tended by Stalin-Pokrovsky has now
bee~
posthumously purged, his work
stamped 'heresy', and his disciples described by
Pravda
as "Japanese-German–
Trotskyist agents of Rightist dissenters". His chief sins seem to be his "ultra"
materialistic interpretation of history and his low estimate of such great
national leaders as Peter the Great.
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In literature, by its nature the most
dangerous sector of all, the toll has reached massacre proportions: the poets
Byedny and Pasternak, the dramatists Kirshon and Afinogeniev, the novelist
Pilnyak, and dozens of lesser writers have been denounced for formalism
and sometimes even arrested for the corresponding political heresy, Trotsky-
• Pashukanis was disgraced because he held that law is a product of the bourgeois state
and that, consequently, as the state withers away under socialism, so will its legal
structure. But the 1936 constitution, which declared in its first article that socialism
had been achieved, in later articles set forth an elaborate code of laws which Pashu·
kanis himself had drawn up. Thus either Stalin or Pashukanis was at fault as a
theoretician. It turned out that it was the latter. The dangerous political tendency
of Pashukanis' theory became clear when he predicted that at the end of the second
five year plan, in 1937, the withering away of the state would reach "a qecisive stage.'·
But when 1937 arrived, the state was obviously blooming more lustily than ever.
Stalin had scored another theoretical victory over Pashukanis, who had failed to heed
the Beloved Leader·s words at the Sixteenth Party Congress: ··Any dialectical thinker
must understand that to eventually wither away, the state must first grow stronger...·
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