102
MAX HAYWARD
We have many truthful and talented books about the life of the
people, but what one of our great writers said ten years ago about
our literature not being sufficiently
winged
is as valid now as it was
then. Indeed, we seem to have difficulty in poeticizing the people
of the present day.
Earth and air, it seems, mix no better in Soviet literature than they
did in medieval alchemy. Surkov goes even further when he says:
"We often forget that the portrayal of what is new in life demands
innovation
(novatorstvo)
in form."
What would be simpler, then, than to encourage writers to go
ahead and experiment? The answer is that it cannot be done be–
cause freedom to experiment might lead to formalism and "pseudo–
innovation." Surkov's argument at this point is quoted in full be–
cause nothing could better illustrate the crabbed, infantile per–
versity of pseudo-dialectical logic:
In the 1920's and the beginning of the 1930's there was often heat–
ed discussion among writers about the novelty of Soviet literature
in general, and innovation was understood as the search for a new
form, for new linguistic possibilities of expressing the new material
of revolutionary reality. Admittedly there was much that was false
and pseudo-revolutionary in the debates of those days. Formalist
quirks were often passed off as innovation .. . The struggle against
these false interpretations of the idea of innovation was success–
fully concluded about a quarter of a century ago, because the rich
literary practice of the Soviet epoch mercilessly destroyed all the
inventions of the pseudo-theoreticians. Formalism now manifested
itself only in certain cases of recidivism. But now it has come about
that serious discussion of innovation in our literature has ceased
altogether. Our literature is not subjected to a profound analysis
from the point of view of the compatibility of the form of literary
expression with the new material of reality.1
The older writers at the Congress will have remembered sadly
that in many cases the pseudo-theoreticians were destroyed together
with their inventions. They
will
also have wondered how it is pos–
sible to seek for new forms without courting the charge of formal-
1.
Surkov's reference to recidivism is a fascinating example of how the
language of criminology has become commonplace in Soviet literary de–
bate. It is quite natural to talk of an "amnesty" for erring intellectuals.
