258
VAS I L' ·
8 ,Y~OV
What is in question is not merely the ability to paint a
~C!lling
pic–
ture of the sordid aspects of life, but something more - the ability
to portray the fullness of life in all its reality and truth.· -
Art
is not a caprice of the artist, nor is it the planned product of
a society: it is the essence of that society. It is impossible to extract
that essence and refashion it in conventional terms without altering
the nature of the society itself. Both exist in a form of symbiosis,
in
a single interdependent whole. Therefore art cannot flourish in a bad
society, nor can a 'highly developed society produce refrograde art.
Aside from theory, literature is also beset with difficulties ot a
practical nature. We have seen plenty of instances in our time where
the excellent theoretical principles of Socialist Realism turn out in
practice to resemble something like neoclassicism.
6
It is not thought
proper to mention it, but it is no secret that all the symptoms of just
such a development in our literature are becoming more and more
obvious - when realism loses all substance, truth to life is flouted
and reality is abandoned for blatant wishful thinking. I readily agree
t'hat defects such as ideological poverty, lack of class sense and abstract
humanism are inexcusable in socialist-realist literature. But it is incon–
testable that their opposites, if
raised
to the status of a categorical abso–
lute, are also an evil, only in a reverse sense. It is precisely
this,
evil
which has done so much harm to socialist realism. And one can see
why, if one bears in mind the very apt words which Lenin wrote
in
" 'Leftism' - an Infantile Disorder of Communism"·:
The surest way of discrediting a new political idea (and not only
a political idea) and to damage it while claiming to defend it,
is to carry it to the point of absurdity.
[Applause]
4. Quotation from an article published in the November 1847 issue of the
journal
Sovremennik
(''The Contemporary"). Entitled "An Answer to the
'Moskvityanin,''' it is a rejoinder to an attack on Belinsky's views: by
Yury
Samarin, a distinguished Slavophile publicist, that appeared in the Slavophile
journal
M oskvityanin
("The Muscovite"). Belinsky's article is mainly con–
cerned with the "Slavophiles venus Westernizen" argument, but also con–
tains an attack on the criteria and methods of "official" literary criticism
and was heavily cut by the czarist censor. It is Belinsky's impeccable
antecedents as a precunor of Russian revolutionary political thought that
make
him
such an apt choice for Bykov's text with which to castigate the
present regime.
5. The view that Socialist Realism has ossified into a kind of neoclassicism
was fint put forward
by
Andrei Sinyavsky
in
his critical essay entitled
"What is Socialist Realism?"
6. Pamphlet published by
Lenin
in June 19.20, condemniI)g
ex~e,
ultra–
revolutionary romanticism
in
the Ruuian and other Communist
parties.
