INTRODUCTION
359
space--it decided not to use Kochetov, Surkov and the other neo–
Stalinists
(by now a thoroughly discredited and very small group '
utterly despised by the majority of Soviet intellectuals) as an
instrument against the "opposition." Early in 1958 Kochetov
was removed from the editorship of
Literary Gazette
and re–
placed by S. Smirnov, the author of a "decent" (i.e. "non-zuba–
tovist") novel,
The Brest Fortress
J
which describes without the
usual embellishments the military debacle of the beginning of the
war. The third Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers which
took place in May, 1959, marked a very important stage of de–
velopment in Soviet literary affairs. In a good-humored and con–
ciliatory speech Khrushchev called upon the writers to settle
~eir
squabbles among themselves and not come running to the
"government" for the solution of their problems and to show
more tolerance for writers who had "erred" (there was a specific
reference to Dudintsev). Despite the usual ritualistic mention of
the dangers of "revisionism" and the cardinal importance of
partiinost
J
the effect of this speech was remarkably beneficial and
developments since the Third Congress have on the whole been
encouraging.s By failing to give them the decisive support for
which they evidently hoped, Khrushchev in fact disarmed the
8.
An
interesting sidelight at this Congress was the speech of Boris Polevoi
in which he settled accounts with his old friend Howard Fast. One of
Fast', reason, for breaking with the Communist Party was that Polevoi,
on one of his visits
to
America, had lied to him about the fate of Kvitko,
one of the twenty or so Soviet Yiddish writers who were shot in
1952-
a fact which was revealed in the Warsaw
Folkshtimme
in
1956,
but
which has still not publicly been admitted in the Soviet Union, where
Feffer, Bergelson and some of the other dead Yiddish writers are occa–
sionally referred to as having "died tragically." Polevoi said in his speech
that the defection of Fast from the ranks of "progressive" literature was
more than compensated for by the acquisition of Cunio Malaparte who,
according to Polevoi, had applied for membership in the Italian Com–
munist Party on his deathbed. Malaparte, a former Fascist and a corre–
spondent with the Italian division fighting the Russians during the war,
is
the author of
The Skin,
a novel,
in
which
it
is suggested, among other
things, that all communists are homosexuals.
