348
MAX HAYWARD
expected to employ the realist style of the nineteenth-century
classics in a spirit which was quite alien to its creators. An -essen-
tial feature of the new doctrine was the sharp distinction to
be
drawn between "socialist" realism and the '-'criticial" realism of
the classics. The latter, it was said, had used the realist method
to
negate
the society in which they lived, whereas the Soviet
writer was required by the same method to
affirm
the new so-
I
cialist order which was
ex hypothesi
the most benevolent and the
most nearly perfect ever established on earth. It was therefore
incumbent on the writers not only to describe it "realistically in
its revolutionary development" (Zhdanov's phrase), but also to
assist the Party
in
its
task
of completing the social transformation
now in progress, of consolidating the gains already made and of
educating people in the ways of virtue. Since, in Marxist theory,
I
consciousness always lags behind economic and social change,
there were still admittedly many wayward citizens who were slow
to realize the benefits of the new order, their minds being infected
by "survivals of capitalism." One of the writers' principal duties
was to expose and hold up to scorn these "survivals," and thus
hasten the day when all would model themselves on the New
Man. In the words of Stalin's famous
obiter dictum,
writers wert
to be "engineers of human souls."! A sanction for this total
sub–
jection of literature to the will of the Party was found in an essay
of Lenin's, "Party Literature and the Party Organization,"
written in 1906. In it Lenin insisted that anybody who wrote for
social-democrat journals should express the general line of the
Party. In post-1905 conditions, when journals of different
politi·
cal complexions could be published more or less freely
in
Russia,
this was a perfectly reasonable and legitimate demand to make,
being designed to exclude interlopers from rival parties. It should
be noted, furthermore, that in talking of "literature" in this con–
nection, Lenin was not specifically referring to "belles-lettres."
At the first Congress of Soviet writers in 1934 Zhdanov, however,
3. When and where he laid this has never been revealed.
