PARTISAN REVIEW
261
of reducing it to despair and causing it to doubt its
powe~,
an
awareness of its own defects should give it new strength and spur
it on to new achievements.
Further, Belinsky writes:
A writer describes a drunkard in a story, and the reader
says
"How dare he bring shame on Russia by making out that we are
nothing but drunkards?" Let us presume that the reader is an
intelligent, even a highly intelligent person; even so, to draw this
sort of conclusion from the story is ridiculous. Again, we will be
told that art should generalize from the particular and that if it
depicts nothing but chance phenomena then it is not art at all.
True, but the nature of society, and especially of the common
people, is so multifarious that it cannot be adequately depicted by
a whole literature, much less by a single story.s
I apologize for such a long quotation, but I believe that what was
said by the "furious Vissarion" is most directly relevant not only to
Gogol but to our literature as it is practiced today.
If
our publishers and critics were to read Belinsky more often and
looked upon him as an authority, they might begin to realize the
absurdity of many of the demands they make on literature - demands
which were exploded over a century ago by the great liberal critic.
Obviously not much has changed since
10847,
when those words were
written: exactly the same charges are being leveled against literature
to this day. A writer only has to depict a slightly unpleasant general for
there to
be
an instant chorus of protest against this undermining of the
prestige of the Soviet officer corps; one only needs to create a negative
character who happens to
be
a railwayman, and at once there will be
an outcry against this slander on the glorious corps of Soviet milway–
men.
In fact, protests against insulting the Soviet uniform have lately
taken on quite a threatening character. I could cite some eloquent
examples from my own experience,9 or from the experience of Alexei
Karpyuk,1° who is known to us all. For his naive attempt to write
a truthful account of his, in my view, blameless and heroic life, he has
had to pay a heavy price and will doubtless continue to pay it. I will
8. Further quotation from same article by BelilUky as above.
9.
Refers to attacks made on Bykov
by
Soviet Army leaders, offended by
what they regarded
as
insulting treatment of the anny in Bykov's novel
The Dead Feel No Pain,
published in the January
1966
issue of
Novy Mir.
lO. Alexei Karpyuk. Byeloruuian writer condemned for an overfrank expase of
Stalinism.
