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SOVIET COMMENT
last tales, and Alexander Tvardovsky's poem
The House by the Road.
And, moreover, that this period saw the growth of the literature of all
the nationalities of the Soviet Union....
4. As I have said above, Max Hayward, like Struve, Simmons and
the like, try to present the best works of our literature as being alien
to the Soviet regime and Soviet culture. But they do this quite arbitrarily
and without adducing any proofs. It suffices to say that Hayward takes
the information about Blok from Zoshchenko's
Before Sunrise
while to
Leonid Leonov he attributes a religious messianism and makes of him a
follower of the traditions of Russian Orthodoxy. But perhaps the most
sensational of all Hayward's "discoveries" is to find in contemporary
literature a number of works that he calls "literary zubatovism," that is,
works aiming to neutralize the effect of the true writers of the "thaw."
In other words Hayward cannot admit that there are any honest writers
in the Soviet Union. Some adapted themselves, others wrote maliciously
on the sly, while a third group took the path of literary "zubatovism,"
and so on. In this context one cannot help remembering the "com–
mendable though rather short" remark of Sobakevich in Gogol's
Dead
Souls
about the officials of the provincial town of N.: "There is only one
decent man among them, the prosecutor, and he is a pig, to tell the
truth." It is with this attitude to our writers that Max Hayward takes
up his pen to write about Soviet literature. And in such a case what can
one expect from that pen besides slander and falsification?
Yes, Patricia Blake and Max Hayward chose to play unseemly roles.
Instead of contributing to the friendship and cultural links between
countries they are trying
to
sow enmity between them.
IN REPLY
Mr. Dementiev's article attacking the special issue of
Partisan
Review
on Soviet literature is reproduced here primarily as an interest–
ing specimen of a certain style of Soviet polemics, which is now happily
rarer than it used to be. The victims of such attacks in the Soviet Union
itself now fortunately have less
to
fear than was the case some ten
years ago when Mr. Dementiev and his like could rely on full support
from the "secular arm." The editors feel constrained to reply to a
few of the points, only in so
far
as their goodwill and competence as
observers of the Soviet literary scene are called in question. We may
hope that this comment will eventually reach some of those many Soviet
