SOVIET LITERATURE
103
ism. Everybody will have thought back to the period just after
Stalin's death when the party launched an appeal for "boldness"
and when those who responded were soon being charged with
"pseudo-boldness."
A Plea for Growing-Room
It was one of the older writers, Vsevolod Ivanov, who gently
pointed out the absurdity of asking people to experiment without
allowing them to do so. In what was almost the only noteworthy
speech from the floor, he made a plea that the younger writers
be
given their head in this respect:
Young writers must be allowed and helped to experiment to find
their own style, their own manner of writing. .. . It would occur to
nobody to dispute the fact that a progress in science is unthinkable
without experiment. Yet attempts to experiment in literature are
not met with approval and the experimenter risks being classed as
a formalist. In my opinion this is nonsense. There is not and can–
not be any danger of formalism in our literature because formalism
was a short and by-gone stage
in
the lives of certain literary critics
and it by no means embraced the whole of Soviet literature.
The last sentence makes an important and obvious point that
has probably never been publicly made before, namely that the very
use of the term "formalism" (as in the Central Committee's mes–
sage to the Congress) is an unwarranted extension of its original
meaning. In the 1920's it was the term chosen by a small but very
influential group of literary critics to describe their method of
analyzing the linguistic and structural aspects of works of literature.
Its pejorative application to writers was a misappropriation of the
term.
Apart from Khrushchev's address, the only other notable con–
tribution to the Congress came in the shape of an article by Kon–
stantin Paustovsky, one of the more outspoken and rebellious of the
older writers.
2
He discusses with notable frankness some of the fac-
2. About two years ago, using the comparative immunity of old age, he
made a sensational speech at a public discussion on Dudintsev.
It
was
never printed in the Soviet press, but a transcript appeared in a
French newspaper.
