94
PARTISAN REVIEW
are practical men. And so they bear no malice towards the artists
they have brought to heel at last, after so many years of struggle.
Eisenstein's new film,
Alexander Nevsky,
properly chauvinistic in con–
tent and purged of all formalist tendencies, seems to have restored
him
to full official favor-just as Shostakovitch has returned to grace
now that he has taken to writing 'tunes you can whistle'. It is even
reported that, after the preview of
Alexander Nevsky
in the Kremlin,
Comrade Stalin himself clapped Eisenstein on the back and told
him: "You're a good Bolshevik.m
27
*
*
*
To men of more good will than political acumen, there seems
to be a baffling contradiction between what they call 'the Russian
experiment' in general and what has been happening in the cinema
and other arts. Thus in
The Seven Soviet Arts-on
the whole a
most intelligent and valuable collection of data-Kurt London writes:
"It is a fact that new revolutionary political ideas are faced with
reactionary stylistic principles in art. The same Government that
is
so courageously piloting the ship of state through the uncharted seas
of socialistic practice is enjoining its artists to stay behind in safe
haven ... Everything that we members of the Western orbit of cul–
ture call 'modern art' is today emphatically rejected in the U.S.S.R.
On the other hand, that which seems to us obsolete, antiquated, even
reactionary, is encouraged."
As Stalinist critics of his book have not failed to point out, this
is
an impossible contradiction. They resolve it, of course, by saying
that Soviet art
is
progressive. Mr. London, who seems to be a liberal
of the unreconstructed variety, tries to resolve it by the
argumentum
ad hominem
so dear to liberals. "In Moscow," he writes, "these
men, so clever in other respects, did not know the meaning of modem
music, modern literature, modern painting, modern architecture.
Because they did not understand it they negatived it." But we have
already seen that the Old Bolsheviks did not understand such things
either-granted that their benightedness did not approach the Stygian
blackness of their successors !-and yet their cultural policy was ad–
mirably tolerant. The key to the riddle, as I have tried to show, lies
not in individual shortcomings, but in a general Thermidorean
reaction spreading out from the political sphere to corrupt and
paralyze all culture. The Soviet ship of state, far from sailing 'the
uncharted seas .of socialistic practice', lies rotting at anchor in the
same stagnant harbor-how 'safe' is another question !-to which it
has confined its artists.
