I N TROD U C T I
ON
357
tion of the Zhdanov scandal of 1946 would hav.e been inconv.en–
ient at this moment. So the covert campaign for freedom went .Qn
and at the second Congress of the Union .of Soviet:
Writers
10
December, 1954, there were some notable,albeit : cautiously–
worded pleas-particularly from A. Yashin, Benjamin Kaverin
and
Ehrenburg-for a more reasonable approach to the
prob~
lerns of literature. It was clear, however, that the diehards were
still overwhelmingly strong and could count on decisive political
support, even though they were not allowed to destroy theirop–
ponents as they would have done in former days. In the next two
years there was an uneasy truce between both camps, neither side
going out of its way to be unduly provocative. After Khrush–
chev's "secret speech" at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, there
was a renewed outburst of "oppositional" writing, similar to the
one after Stalin's death. In fact 1956 was the
anno mirabilis
of
post-War Soviet literature. Apart from Dudintsev's
Not by Bread
Alone,
with its indictment of the Soviet bureaucracy and, even
more important, its emphasis on the need for intellectual inde–
pendence, there was the second volume of the almanac
Literary
Moscow/
from which we have taken Julia Neiman's poem.
What she says in this about 1941 applied with even greater force
to 1956, but unfortunately
Literary Moscow
was published only
a few weeks before the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution.
The Party's fear ·of "revisionism" and the neo-Stalinist exploita–
tion of this fear-they could now say in triumph "We told you
so!"-led to a setback which at first looked even worse than
in
1954. Khrushchev himself, at a famous meeting in a country
villa near Moscow, gathered the writers together and admonished
them to adhere more strictly to the principles of sO<,:ialist realism
and never to forget that they were the servants of the Party. A
hitherto little known writer from Leningrad, Vsevolod Kochetov,
wrote an "anti-revisionist" novel,
The Brothers Ershov,
which was
7. ·The·best and most revealing story in this collection, -''The Levers," ,by A,
. Yashin,was published in the· Summer, 1958 :issue
.ofPartiran Remew. ',
