262
VASIL'
IYKOV
not presinhe on your kind attention by' dwelling on this; part of what
I might have told you is known to many, of ,you already, and the rest
is easily imagined.
'
In every profession, the skill of the master craftsman in that part.
icular trade is accorded a decisive significance; but not in literature.
Where literature is concerned, the nile
is
that ' truth flows from
the
hierarchical principle. Might, as they ' say, ' is right; or, the higher
you are up the ladder the closer you are to God. At. the end of the
fifth decade of Soviet power we are stilI longing for the same thing
that concerned Lunacharsky when he said
as
long ago as 1931:
It should :not
be
a question of the Central Committee writing the
slogans arid writers striving to illustrate them, but rather of the
Central Committee t'reating' the views of both writers and their
readers as just one c;>f many sources of information and drawing
from them the impulse to compose their slogans and decrees.
ll
, [Applause]
I fear, alas, that the Central Committee does not read us much now–
adays, or
if
it does then its intentions in doing so are far removed from
those envisaged by Lunacharsky.
Writing a good book is a hard job in every way; but getting it
published is even harder. The fact is that in this country the only
works which are easy to have ' published are mediocre ones, books
which have nothing to say and which are exactly like the hundreds of
previous ones already familiar to critics and publishers. Anything which
does ' not exactly conform to official canons' is, greeted with suspicion
and inevitably meets violent resistance from ,all quarters. In practice
the author is faced with the dilemma: either he must accept the
publisher's demands or his book will never see the light of day. Often
in the published 'version little remains of the author's original concep–
tion~
To me, this inbuilt, legitimized mistrust of talent is something
amazing ,and incomprehensible; indeed, I believe it to be an absolute
disgrace, and' what 'is more it is fatal to literature.
(Applause)
And yet-we must keep on and work. We are on the threshold of
a great date in our history. We have plenty to write about and talent
should never shirk its responsibility. Literature did not start yesterday
and will not end tomorrow. There
is
more to Byelorussian literature
than what appears
un~er
the imprint of the state publishing house. The
U. ' Anatoly Vasilievich Lunacharsky
<
1873·1933}. Early Bolshevik; playwright,
critic, journalist. First People's Commissar for Education, 1917·1929.
Removed from office by Stalin for his liberalizing, heterodox views,
or
which the remark cited is a typical example.
