360
MAX HAYWARD
neo-Stalinists, who as a consequence have clearly been on the
defensive until the last few months. After the Congress the writers
immediately took advantage of Khrushchev's invitation to set
their own house in order and ousted Surkov as secretary of the
Union of Soviet Writers, appointing the moderate Konstantin
Fedin in his place. Furthermore, two former victims of Surkov,
Tvardovsky and Panferov, were adopted onto the board of the
Union.
In the improved atmosphere of the last two years a con·
siderable amount of interesting work, some specimens of which
are given in our collection, has appeared in the literary journals.
What is striking about much recent writing is its unorthodoxy,
in formal rather than political terms, by the traditional standards
of socialist realism. There has been no reversal to the openly
"critical" realism of 1956, but there is a new style in prose of
almost Chekhovian objectivity, and the once obligatory distortion
of Soviet reality, with the presentation of shortcomings in human
nature as transitory "survivals of capitalism" untypical of Soviet
society,
is
much less common than it was.
In recent months there have been ominous signs of a come–
back on the part of the neo-Stalinists. Last July Kochetov, writ–
ing in the popular illustrated weekly
Ogonyok,
described
Novy
Mir
as "that paltry little journal which spreads its nihilistic
poison among our intelligentsia," and his friend in Leningrad, V.
Arkhipov, writing in the neo-Stalinist
Neva,
attacked Ilya Ehren–
burg for undermining the principle of
partiinost
and denounced
Literary Gazette
for publishing an article by Norman Cousins,
described as "cosmopolitan balderdash." At the end of last year,
though probably not as a result of this attack, S. Smirnov was
dismissed as the editor of
Literary Gazette
and replaced by
his
deputy, Kosolapov. Worst of all, Kochetov was appointed at the
beginning of this year as the editor of one of the leading literary
monthlies,
Oktyabr,
in succession to Feodor Panferov, who
died
