MAX HAYWARD
written it.
In
literature-with consummate
skill
it must be
ad.
mitted-the fonner count Alexei Tolstoy showed that
his
master
had a not unworthy forerunner
in
Peter the Great.
To be a writer one now not only had to be a member of the
Union of Soviet Writers but also one had to subscribe to the
"method" of socialist realism.
This
method-the question as to
whether it is a "method" or a "theory" has never satisfactorily
been resolved by the pundits-was elaborated in open debate
during the two years between the Party decree of 1932 and the
first Congress of Soviet writers
in
1934 when the doctrine
was
promulgated by Zhdanov, who made his debut on
this
occasion
as Stalin's great Panjandrum in cultural matters. The theory ap–
pears to have been devised by Gorky in consultation with Stalin.
For Gorky the principal intention was no doubt to keep
Soviet
literature
in
the mainstream of the classical realist tradition of
which he himself was the last great representative, but for Stalin,
as well as being in keeping with his own pedestrian tastes, it must
have seemed an attractive way of subordinating literature
and
the
arts
to his purposes. Essentially an attempt to combine
in- I'
compatible elements, it was from the first riddled with contradic–
tions and was hence rarely satisfactorily applied from the official
point of view. The inherent contradictoriness of the theory
has
best been described by the anonymous Soviet author of an
essay
on socialist realism first published in the French magazine
Esprit
in February 1959:
If
many [Soviet] writers are going through a crisis at the moment
, . . it is because they have to seek a compromise and unite
what
I
cannot
be
united: the 'positive hero,' who logically lends
himseH
I
to schematized, allegorical treatment-with psychological character
I
study; an elevated declamatory style-with description of prosaic,
everyday life; a sublime ideal-with verisimilitude to reality.
This
results in a monstrous salad. The characters [of Soviet fiction]
t0r–
ment themselves almost
a
la Dostoevsky, grow sad almost
a
la
Chel–
hoy, arrange their family life almost
a
la Tolstoy, and yet at
the
same time vie with each other in shouting platitudes from the
Soviet
