352
MAX HAYWARD
what makes you unhappy" had become so intolerable, that the
ordeal of the war came as a blissful relea.se.
In that year of "camouflage," as Julia Neiman says in her
poem, people saw each other without masks. Human bonds
were restored in the face of death and suffering, and in the
camaraderie of war people began to trust each other again. Most
Soviet writers seIVed at the front as war correspondents and
many were killed. Freed of the enforced hypocrisies of peace–
time, they wrote about people and things with relative truth and
sincerity. Apart from excellent war-reportage there was a number
of novels and poems of high quality which will sUIVive. Simon–
ov's
Days
and Nights
and
Russian People,
Korneichuk's
Front,
Vasily Grossman's
The People
is
Immortal,
Fadeyev's
Young
Guard
(before he rewrote it on the instructions of the Party )
and particularly Vershigora's unfinished
Men with a Clear Con–
science,
a remarkable account of partisan warfare in the Ukraine,
are real works of literature. Surkov and Simonov
will
be
remem–
bered for their wartime lyrics. The new-found feeling of solidar–
ity and relative freedom from fear made it possible for editors to
publish work which could scarcely have appeared in print before
the war. Perhaps the most extraordinary example is Zoshchenko's
Before Sunrise,
extracts from which appear in this issue. Poets
who had long been silent, such as Boris Pasternak and Anna
Akhmatova, were published again.
The wartime solidarity which had sprung up among Rus–
sians was intolerable to Stalin. He regarded mutual trust among
people as tantamount to a conspiracy against himself and he
hastened to bring it to an end. The greater freedoms which the
writers had enjoyed during the war were abruptly destroyed
in
August, 1946. The technique was very much the same as in the
case of Pilnyak and Zamyatin eighteen years before. This time
the chosen scapegoats were Zoshchenko, Akhmatova and Paster–
nak. In a denunciatory speech of unparalleled scurrility Zhdanov
accused Zoshchenko and Akhmatova (whom he described as
"half-nun and half-whore") of disarming the Soviet people
in
