ROGER SHATTUCK
401
Nowhere in the invitation does fascism or any political term
appear.
The vagueness of the invitation was clearly a tactic to appeal to
as wide a group of writers as possible. But how did the whole thing
start? The explanation seems relatively simple. In August 1934 the
First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers was held in Moscow.
Though a few independent voices were raised (soon to be silenced),
the huge meeting served primarily as the occasion on which to pro–
mulgate the official doctrine of socialist realism -later called Zhda–
novism after the Central Committee member who made the prin–
cipal speech at that congress. A number of foreign writers were
invited to attend, including Aragon, Jean-Richard Bloch, Paul Ni–
zan, and Malraux from France. They returned to Paris with varying
degrees of enthusiasm for the new doctrine, yet all apparently eager
to stage a similar mass meeting of writers in Paris. The Comintern,
having just shifted a few months earlier to a new policy of alliances
and popular fronts, gave support. A number of other writers were
brought in to help plan the congress, including Andre Chamson and
Louis Guilloux. Guilloux, who was one of the secretaries and handled
a large part of the correspondence, stated that the man who supplied
the funds was Mikhail Kolzoff, Comintern agent and commissar of
the Soviet delegation. In France, of course, the Party had no official
or legal control over writers. But it could now browbeat and shame
them with the issue of antifascism, even though the Party itself had
been trying to ignore Hitler and Mussolini for five years. In an era
of peace conferences and huge international assemblages, the Con–
gress could be turned into an instrument of policy.
Of the twenty-four signers of the invitation, four out of the first
five in alphabetical order (Abraham, Alain, Aragon, Barbusse,
Bloch) were known communist militants - though Barbusse was
allowed a very long tether. Alain on the other hand was the very
voice of the radical party, a widely respected writer and philosopher
who had taken an active part in left-wing groups after the February
riots. (His name disappeared from later lists; he refused to par–
ticipate in the Congress.) Other names that would be immediately
recognized were those of Andre Gide, Andre Malraux, and Romain
Rolland.
It
would be hard for leftist writers to resist this call, even
though its terms were very vague. But quite a few were in fact mis–
sing. Neither Thomas Mann nor Bernard Shaw nor H . G. Wells
attended, though the first two were subsequently named to the
twelve-man praesidium. Upton Sinclair, considered the model writer
