SOVIET LITERATURE
99
If
many writers are going through a crisis at the moment ... it is
because they have to seek a compromise and unite what cannot be
united: the positive hero who logically lends himself to schemat–
ized, allegorical treatment-with psychological character-study; an
elevated, declamatory style-with description of prosaic, everyday
life; a sublime ideal-with verisimilitude to reality. This results in
a monstrous salad. The characters [of Soviet fiction] torment them–
selves almost
a
la Dostoevsky, grow sad almost
a
la Chekhov, ar–
range their family life almost
a
la Tolstoy and yet at the same time
vie with each other in shouting platitudes from the Soviet press:
"Long live peace in the whole world," "Down with the war–
mongers." This is
m~ither
classicism nor realism. It is semi-classical
demi-art of a none too socialist demi-realism.
In the author's view the only Soviet writer who has ever given
original artistic expression to the Soviet epoch was Mayakovsky. He
hated analysis and psychologism. He never described everyday life
(byt)
or nature. He did not try to imitate the Russian classics, but
devised a hyperbolic, homeric style of his own. Since his day Soviet
writers have been condemned to a ludricrous eclectric epigonism,
including,
if
they are poets, even elements of Mayakovsky. This
eclectism was imposed in the 1930's and was in line with other
extraordinary miscegenated forms
(e.g.,
the combination of one–
man rule with a "democratic" constitution) invented by Stalin.
The greatest source of contradiction and tension in Soviet in–
tellectual life since the famous 20th Congress of 1956 is that these
ideological hybrids have not been allowed to lapse with the partial
eclipse of their maker.
Free Content vs. Free Form
Students of communism have tended to ascribe all the ills of
Soviet literature and art to the principle of "partiinost"
(i.e.,
con–
formity to party guidance) with special emphasis on the restric–
tions that this places on
what
the writer says. As the author of the
Esprit
articles suggests, however, perhaps an even greater handicap
for the Soviet writer is the fact that party doctrine prevents him
from freely elaborating an original style. Freedom to express certain
ideas is less important in art than freedom in the choice of form. It
is only this latter freedom that is essential to art.
