INTRODUCTION
339
the demoralization during N
.t.P.
of
ail
idealistic communist
who
had fought in the Civil War; Sholokhov described in-the first two
voiumes of
And Quiet Flows the Don
(1928), with an impartial–
ity quite impermissible by.later standards, the complicated clash
of loyalties-by no means explicable only in terms of class-war–
fare-which the Revolution produced among simple people. Al–
most all the human problems which arose in the aftermath of the
great upheaval-the conflict between town and country, the
collapse of utopian illusions, the inner doubts of the intellectuals,
the material hardships of the population as a whole-all these and
many other problems were presented truthfully,
if
not always
sympathetically, in early Soviet literature. Most of the best writers
of the period belonged to the category dubbed by Trotsky as the
"fellow-travelers." For the most part intellectuals by origin, they
varied considerably in the degree ·of their loyalty to the new
regime, but like "bourgeois specialists" in other fields, they were
endowed with special skills which made them indispensable to
it and they were, therefore, at first protected from excessive in–
terference by the so-called "proletarian" writers. The latter were
as vociferous as they were untalented, but their attempts to force
the "fellow-travelers" into absolute conformity were given little
official encouragement until 1929. Until this year general Party
sUpervision of literary and artistic affairs had been the responsi–
bility of Anatoly Lunacharsky, one of the most cultivated of the
Old Bolsheviks and himself a writer of standing, who exercised
great tact in his handling of cultural problems. Under his aegis
there was an uneasy coexistence between the "fellow-travelers,"
grouped mainly in the All-Russian Union of Writers and the
"proletarians" of the Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP).
In
another part of the memoirs excerpted in this issue, Ilya
Ehrenbtirg writes of Lunacharsky:
_.- ."In
their reminiscences of him people have spoken about
his
'enormous erudition' and his 'many-sided culture.' I was
struck by something different: he was not a poet, he was ab–
sorbed
ill
his political activities, but he had an extraordinary love
