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undeniable proof of the truth. One can certainly speculate about whether
Olesha was naive enough to believe that the literary bosses at the
Congress would treat his words seriously. Did he expect them to forget
for a moment the five-year plan and rediscover the world while reading
his metaphors? His two goals as an artist - to contemplate the beauty of
nature in its hallucinatory revelations and to achieve some confirmation
for the true nature of his vision - stood in mutual contradiction. Olesha
could not overcome the terror of being seduced and deceived by
his
genuine but unverifiable experience of reality. Yet he could not resist the
powerful attraction of this experience and failed to capitulate in order
to
have his literary vision confirmed by society at large.
Like many of his contemporaries, Olesha seemed to believe, at least
before the First Congress of the Soviet Writers, that the post–
revolutionary period was an entirely new era of social history and that a
place for the artist-seer would be found in the new reality. If nature
could not be entirely trusted, then history would become the new au–
thority. The new world was to be built on a belief in the infallibility of
history. Nadezhda Mandelshtam, in her memoirs, described the atmo–
sphere of this belief in history, which dominated Russian intellectual life
in the twenties and thirties:
We had really been persuaded that we had entered a new era, and that
we had no choice but to submit to historical inevitability, which in
any case was only another name for the dreams of all those who had
ever fought for human happiness. Propaganda for historical deter–
minism had deprived us of our will and the power to make our own
judgments. We laughed in the faces of the doubters....
If history supported the artist with its authority, as many thought, it
would give to the artist's vision a new objective sense. Then the artist
could truly approach Paradise and not only take pleasure in the contem–
plation but also would know that his visions would find some
confirmation in the framework of the objective, historical concept of
reality. It was true that the "usefulness of the artist at the current stage of
historical development" did not equal the Karamzinian "aristocracy of
spirit," but nothing better seemed available and, after all, one had to
start with something. However, in order to be accepted by those who
were driving the locomotive of history, one had to appear serious, to
make an impression that one believed in what one saw and wrote and
that there was some link between one's vision and the "objective truth."
Olesha probably expected that he would be listened to at the First
Congress, when he came up with his vision of socialism:
