THE SOVIET LITERARY PURGE
bureaucracy (and a good part of the intelligentsia) are not really so
different from those of the New York or London public.
It is not hard to understand the reason for this struggle against
Westernism. The official ideology-Soviet patriotism and Russian
national pride-does not leave room for foreign influence. "Thou
shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord
thy God am a jealous God."
(2) The case of Zoshenko. In his pamphlet,
Twenty-five Years
of Soviet Literature,
Alexey Tolstoy made some apt remarks about
Zoshenko. "The crafty, clever, and charming prose of Zoshenko,
with his self-abasing hero-philistine, mocked and pitied by the author,
was born in the atmosphere of the contradictions of the NEP. Only
yesterday, we saw Zoshenko's hero in the restaurant and in the street–
car: the NEP merchant, this caricature of the European bourgeois,
this cunning rascal of an opportunist. Today, he does not exist any
more." Alexey Tolstoy only forgot to mention one small fact: the
NEP merchant was not Zoshenko's only object. Thus, Zoshenko loved
to describe the early type of Soviet bureaucrat: deceitful, bootlicking
to his superiors, unbearable to his subordinates. Does this type still exist
today? Of course it does, but it has matured, developed, and multi–
plied. It is no longer permissible to criticize the bureaucrat of today....
This leads us to a central problem of Soviet literature: govern–
ment-licensed satire. Satire (e.g., magazines like
Krokodile)
serves
as a safety valve for popular dissatisfaction with the general short–
comings. However, there are certain rules in this game which it is
dangerous to disregard :
(a) If
you critize, your attacks should be
aimed against anything foreign; (b) It is foolhardy to expose your–
self too much. Never be the first to say anything; (c) Never attack
anyone in an influential position without making sure that there is
no objection from someone still higher up.
Zoshenko is a satirist by nature, and he seems to have had too
much backbone; he could not stick to all the rules of the game. He
wrote a play and a novel about the GPU:
The Story of One Life
and
Restored Youth.
Both were not above the average, but were warmly
praised by Soviet critics. One can easily imagine that Zoshenko suf–
fered because he could not write as he really wanted to. He could
not bear his fate quietly-something very unhealthy in the Soviet
Union. Result: a bad "relapse"-a pessimistic, slightly psychoanaly"
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