INTRODUCTION
355
hard, but we
shall
never again be afraid." The course of events
since Stalin's death may be summarized as follows:
At the end of 1953 two articles published
in
Nov) Mir
cast
doubt on socialist realism and the Party's guidance of literature.
In his article "On Sincerity in Literature" V. Pomerantsev sug–
gested that the only criterion for a writer should be his own inner
convictions. V. Shcheglov, in a review of Leonov's
Russian
Forest,
said that the novel's only major defect was that the
"negative hero" was not clearly shown to be a product of the
Soviet system. Leonov had of course covered himself (or "re-in–
sured" in the writers' argot of those days) by tracing the vil–
lain's original sin to the pre-revolutionary conditions
in
which he
grew up. One of the particularly constricting demands of social–
ist realism is that there can never be the slightest implication that
Soviet society might generate its own specific defects. It always
had to be made plain that such shortcomings as exist are un–
typical "survivals of capitalism." Early in 1954 there was a crop
of stories and plays which for the first time dealt with certain
ugly phenomena in Soviet life. Ehrenburg's
Thaw
hinted at the
true nature of the pre-war purges and openly referred to the of–
ficially inspired anti-Semitism of the last years of Stalin's life.
1.
Zorin in his play
The Guests
described a police frame-up, on
the lines of the "doctors' plot," and the degeneration of the cyni–
cal Soviet bureaucrat responsible for it. Komeichuk's
Wings
was
similarly concerned with a deliberate perversion of justice, this
time involving the wife of a high Party functionary who had
been left behind on enemy-occupied territory during the war and
who was, consequently, like so many others in this category, re–
garded as a traitor. The play is remarkable for the first use
in
print of the word "concentration camp" instead of the usual
euphemistic "corrective labor camp" and for a highly artificial
"optimistic" ending (strikingly different from the denouement
of Zorin's play). In
Wings
the victim of the outrage renders
im–
passioned thanks to the Central Committee (at this time headed
by
Malenkov who, in the pursuance of power after Stalin's death,
