OTHER VOICES
307
slight inaccuracy, as to whether he referred to
((belles-lettres"
or not, let
the reader judge for himself. "Are you free in relation to your bourgeois
publisher, Mr. Writer?" Lenin asks. And he replies: "One cannot live
in society and be free of society. The freedom of the bourgeois writer,
artist or actress is simply masked (or hypocritically masked) dependence
on the money-bags, corruption, on prostitution." Let the reader read
this short essay of Lenin's attentively and he will see that the view of
it, which Hayward has borrowed from the revisionists, is quite incorrect.
2. A very important role was played in the history of Soviet literature
by the Central Committee's decree of April 23, 1932, on the reorganiza–
tion of literary and artistic organizations. As we know, this decree was
connected with the growth of Soviet society, the strengthening of the
moral and political unity of the Soviet people and the transition of all
our intelligentsia to a socialist position. In such conditions there was no
longer any need
to
preserve the Association of Proletarian Writers
(RAPP). This association was disbanded and in its place a single Union
of Soviet Writers was founded . The disbanding of RAPP was preceded
by severe criticism of it on the pages of the Party press-beginning in
1929-1930. Max Hayward either does not know this or deliberately
keeps his knowledge to himself. He writes in his article that the Central
Committee's decree was unexpected, in other words, that the Party had
been hitherto giving RAPP its unqualified support. Of the reasons for
disbanding RAPP he has nothing to say except to advance the fantastic
theory that the members of RAPP were not to Stalin's liking for tempera–
mental reasons. Such nonsense is passed off as the history of Soviet
literature.
3. Max Hayward asserts that after the Central Committee's decree
about the magazines
Zvezda
and
L eningrad
Soviet literature more or
less ceased to exist and that the period 1947-1953 was known in the
history of Soviet literature as one of "utter sterility." The same thing,
we note, is said by George Gibian. But if we put these assertions to the
test we discover that it was precisely during that period that the follow–
ing writers made their way into Soviet literature: Vera Panova, Galina
Nikolayeva, Mikhail Bubennov, Vasili Azhayev, Boris Polevoy, Victor
Nekrasov, Valentin Ovechkin, Vsevolod Kochetov, EmmanuiI Kazake–
vich, Sergei Antonov, Daniil Granin, Mikhail Lukonin, Alexei Nedogo–
nov, Sergei Orlov, Konstantin Vanshenkin and many other writers well
known both in the Soviet Union and abroad, that it was in those very
years too that were published Konstantin Fedin's two-volume novel
First
Joys
and
No Ordinary Summer,
Leonid Leonov's
Russian Forest,
Fyodor
Gladkov's trilogy, several of llya Ehrenburg's novels, Mikhail Prishvin's
