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104
MAX HAYWARD
tors that "impede the free development of literature." The first
is
the lack of tolerance towards various, as he puts it, "isms."
He
speaks of them with unprecedented indulgence:
All these
isms
are the children of extravagant Paris and America.
Beyond the outer ring of the Paris fortifications they lose their
glamor, the soil that feeds them and they look far-fetched and un·
natural. But even these extravagances (surrealism, decaphonism,
dadaism and other
isms)
are essentially a completely normal ex·
pression of youthful impetuosity. There is no reason whatsoever
to
sound the tocsin and shout with panic, for the recklessness of youth
is useful-it prevents the older generation from going to seed
and
regarding itself as infallible and "untouchable."
His second point is even more radical. Flying in the face
of
"anti-revisionist" orthodoxy, he disputes the standard charge
that
writers who fail to make a judicious balance between "negative"
and "positive" have lost contact with the people. In a cautious
phrase which could well refer to Pasternak as well as Dudintsev, he
asks whether those writers accused of "isolation from the people"
are really the ones guilty of it.S His answer, in so many words,
is
that the writers who are alien to the people are rather those
who
try to combine realism with phony optimism
(bodryachestuo)
,
who
lace their work with high-minded sentiment, insert saving clauses
and devise happy-endings. "Perhaps," he writes, "we shout so much
and so loudly about truth in literature just because there is lack
of
it. . . . The people see everything and understand everything
and
they will never excuse falsity and deceit in a writer, however talent·
ed he may be." Comparing the saving clauses and the happy end·
ings to the bows which a clown makes to the spectators before he
leaves the ring, he comments:
It is well that Tolstoy
was
able to write
Anna Karenina
before the
3. The Pasternak affair was scarcely mentioned at the Congress. Only Sur–
kov saw fit to refer to his "treacherous activities." But none of the other
speakers took up the subject. The only other reference is by Galina
Ni·
kolaeva in an article published in
Literaturnaia Gaz:.eta
on May 18, the
opening day of the Congress. In a strikingly different tonality to Sur–
kov's remark, she speaks
en passant
of Pasternak's "mistake."
