108 .
MAX
HAYWARD
I saw some Americans three days ago. Among them was an old
man, a judge. At the end of our talk he said ... "I fear that when
I get back and tell my friends about my impressions, some of them
will say, 'The Russians have washed the old judge's brains.' " That's
literally what he said. Not a bad expression. So there you are, com–
rades, you should wash people's brains with your works.
Despite the ominous reservations in Khrushchev's speech, it
gives some hope that the life of the writers may now be easier. It
may encourage editors to take greater risks in publishing ambigu–
ous works, and it may give a weapon to the opposition against the
hacks.
If
this comes to pass, the latter will feel much less sure of
their ground in exposing "mistakes" and they will have to fight out
their battles within the writers' organization instead of appealing
for the Central Committee's arbitration. The composition of the new
Secretariat of the Writers' Union, elected immediately after the
Congress, shows that the conservatives will now have to contend
with formidable opposition from liberals who wish to free literature
from the trammels of the past. It now includes Tvardovski and
Panfyorov, the editors of
Navy Mir
and
Oktyabr
respectively, both
of whom were temporarily relieved of their posts
by
Surkov a few
years ago for pursuing an overly independent line in their editorial
policies. Surkov himself was dismissed as First Secretary of the
Union and replaced by K.
A.
Fedin, who takes a rather cautious
but tolerant view of the new moods among the writers. In his
speech at the Congress he in fact came out on the side of freedom
to experiment in form: "We value and respect innovators in sci–
ence, industry and agriculture. The question is, may a writer rest
content with the working methods of the nineteenth century?" It
seems highly likely that under this new leadership there may at last
appear in the Soviet Union some literary works of lasting and dis–
tinctive artistic quality. We may see the emergence of a new style
which will give adequate expression to the age. It is idle to specu–
late what new forms might arise, but the author of the
Esprit
article offers one intriguing suggestion:
I put my hope in a phantasmagorical art, with hypothesis instead
