OTHER VOICES: SOVIET COMMENT
ON PR'S ' SPECIAL RUSSIAN ISSUE
(The December
1961
English-language edition of the Moscow
journal
Soviet Literature
contains two comments on the special issue of
Partisan Review,
"Dissonant Voices in Soviet Literature
n
(Edited by
Patricia Blake and Max Hayward,
3-4,1961).
The first is an interview
with Leonid Leonov. In it the novelist does not appear to disagree with
most of Hayward's analysis of his work in the introduction to "Dissonant
Voices
n
:
"Leonid Leonov, easily the most distinguished and subtle of the
surviving Soviet novelists, and an avowed disciple of Dostoevsky, con–
tinued to write well all during the worst period (the '30's) without un–
duly compromising his artistic integrity. But this was an isolated case.
Leonov's rationalization of his position was based on the same sort
of mystic nationalism, and probably combined with the same religious
messianism, as one finds in Dostoevsky's
Diary of a Writer.
For Leonov,
bolshevism is only one episode in the eternal destinies of Russia. He
may have even been intrigued by the special problems of writing within
the cramped confines of socialist realism and he may well have regarded
his work in these conditions as a kind of
podvig
(spiritual feat) in the
Russian Orthodox tradition."
The second comment is a lengthy attack on the special issue, which
also appeared in
Novy
Mir,
December,
1961,
by the critic Alexander
Dementiev. A reply by Max Hayward follows .-Patricia Blake.)
INTERVIEW WITH LEONID LEONOV
We arranged our meeting by telephone and I found Leonov
waiting for me
in
the garden. He had a healthy tan and was wearing a
check-patterned summer shirt.
"Have a look round my garden," he said, "while I read the
magazine. Remember, everything here has been planted by my own
hands, even that birch-tree. This used to be a potato field ."
Leonov settled down on a bench beside a little table while I walked
off to roam through his garden- a gorgeous riot of autumnal colors. At
last I heard Leonov call me gaily: "Ready."
He
asked me to sit down on the bench beside him and, tracing a
pattern on the sand with a twig, said:
''Well, I think there's no sense in entering into polemics over details
or of refuting
this
or that formulation and statement. The important
thing here is the authors' general approach, their attitude to us, to our
