304
SOVIET COMMENT
1961. This too was a special edition devoted to Soviet literature, but
how strikingly different it was than the special number of the
Atlantic!
It was titled "Dissonant Voices in Soviet Literature" and while in the
Atlantic
we find the truth (even if not the whole truth), in
Partisan
Review
we find nothing but falsehood.
When one comes across a publication like this special number of
Partisan Review
one usually finds oneself in an embarrassing situation.
What is one to do? Argue, take issue with the writers? But how can one
refute deliberate and biased fabrications which pursue aims that are
obviously malicious and which have nothing in common with literature?
On the other hand one has a natural desire to raise one's voice against
the falsifying and distortion of Soviet literature, a desire to assist the
foreign reader to remove the blinkers which people like the publishers
of
Partisan R eview
and the notorious "literary critics" Patricia Blake
and Max Hayward, who compiled this special number, try to keep over
his eyes.
In an introduction to the material compiled in this magazine we
read that the main task of the editors is to show "that the Soviet period
has been by no means as barren in literary achievement as is often
supposed," that "there has been a steady output of work, some
of which is not unworthy of the great tradition from which it ultimately
springs."
Such intentions might seem to be of the best, but let the reader not
leap to hasty conclusions. The editorial declaration has a special signi–
ficance, hostile to Soviet literature, which is apparent to the reader the
moment he examines the selection of material published in the magazine.
What are the works which are worthy of the great tradition of the
Russian classics? One would naturally expect this to be the writings of
such authors as Gorky, Mayakovsky, Alexei Tolstoy, Fadeyev. But this
is not what the editors of
Partisan R eview
think. There is nothing in the
magazine either of the prominent present-day Soviet writers whom the
editors of the
Atlantic
considered it fully reasonable to include: Mikhail
Sholokhov, Alexander Tvardovsky, Konstantin Fedin, Leonid Leonov,
Samuel Marshak, Valentin Katayev, etc. Yet how can a picture of Soviet
literature be presented without them?
On the other hand, the magazine prints Boris Pasternak's decadent
study
Without Love
which passed quite unnoticed when it first appeared
in 1918 and has since been deservedly forgotten but which appealed to
Max Hayward and Patricia Blake for containing in embryo the central
idea of
Doctor Zhivago;
a short article by Evgeni Zamyatin entitled
''On
Literature, Revolution and Entropy"; Boris Pilnyak's notorious story
