SOVIET LITERATURE
105
appearance of this tradition. He did not have to "bow" to anybody,
even the publisher, and he allowed Anna to disrupt her family and
die for purely personal and, therefore, impermissible, reasons. It is
not acceptable to write about defects, however harmful they may
be for the life of our society, without first making an exculpatory
"bow" by mentioning our achievements. . .. Another useless and
burdensome tradition is the reluctance to write about suffering, the
fear of any suggestion of sadness, as though our lives should take
place under a sugary sky to the cheerful laughter of "militant"
men and women ...
This article by Paustovsky amounts to a manifesto, audaciously
close in spirit and tone to the demands for freedom (at least free–
dom from the absurd formulas bequeathed by Stalin and Zhdanov)
which caused such a furor when they were first enunciated in 1953-
54 and again with even greater insistence, in 1956. The fact that
these demands could be reiterated at the Congress by a writer who
previously had compromised himself as their ardent champion
shows very clearly that, surface appearances to the contrary, the
movement towards the emancipation of literature (and hence of
intellectual activity in general) is stilI strong and undefeated. Talk
in the West about the end of the "thaw" has been grossly exagger–
ated. The current flows even more strongly than before, but under
a thin covering of ice. In a curious negative way the Writers' Con–
gress indeed bears·witness to the victory of the opposition. The lack
of controversy, the calculated absence (or at least failure to partici–
pate) of all those writers who could have injected a spark of life
into the proceedings, turned the Congress into a rather pathetic
parade of old-timers.· It was all reminiscent of a demonstration by
some dwindling political group whose members turn out to keep the
flag flying, but whose arguments and slogans are so irrelevant that
nobody bothers to contradict them anymore.
4. Mikhail Sholokhov, who arrived back in Moscow from his foreign tour
two days before the opening session, did not speak, even if he attended.
At the last Congress in 1954 he spoke scathingly of the "Olympian calm"
of the proceedings and all but disrupted them by a series of scurrilous
personal attacks on various conformist colleagues.
It
would be interest–
ing to know what he thought of this Congress.
