INTRODUCTION
351
Flows the Don,
written well before the promulgation of the new
doctrine, offends many of the canons of socialist realism, not least
by the comparative objectivity of its treatment of history, its na–
turalistic language in scenes involving violence or sex and the
moral ambiguity of its hero. A year or two ago, addressing a
group of Czech writers in Prague, Sholokhov said that he had
not the faintest idea of what was meant by socialist realism.
What it meant in practice, particularly in the post-war
years, was an extreme schematism in the presentation of char–
acter which would scarcely be tolerated in even the most fourth–
rate cowboy film, a falsification, blatant beyond belief, of native
and foreign realities, both past and present, and a drab emascu–
lated language reminiscent of Tolstoy and Gorky at their worst.
The latter conducted a campaign in the middle 'thirties for the
"purity" of the Russian language and Soviet writers, in their
anxiety to avoid being charged with "naturalism" (a cardinal
offense against "realism") began to use a sterilized language
carefully shorn of all the expressive slang and dialect which had
been
characteristic of Russian writing in the 'twenties. Plots
became more and more simple and their outcome more and more
predictable. Optimism reigned supreme and all endings were
happy, except of course, in capitalist countries!
The outbreak of war in 1941 made an immense difference.
In a memorable passage at the end of
Dr.
Zhivago
Pasternak has
described how the war "broke the spell of the dead letter." The
almost universal sense of liberation from the unbearable terrors
and shams of peacetime is also conveyed in the poem by Julia
Neiman in this issue. The Stalinist terror- and this may well
have been one of its principal aims--had so atomized society,
mistrust among people (even among members of the same
family) was so intense, and the public obligation, again in Paster–
nak's words, "to praise what you hate most and to grovel before
4. Frightened editors were often as much to blame as the writers for this
state of affairs as readers may judge from Polyakov's
Fireman Pro–
- khorchuk.
