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DARIUSZ TOLCZYK
own artistic philosophy. At a writers' meeting in Moscow, he said:
When I like one or another artist, I tend to exaggerate his merits and
to forgive him everything, as if believing that he cannot be wrong.
That is exactly how I felt about Shostakovich. And, suddenly, I read
in
Pravda
that Shostakovich's opera is "muddle instead of music."
This was said by
Pravda,
that is, the voice of the Communist Party.
What should I do with my attitude towards Shostakovich? If I was
delighted with Shostakovich, and
Pravda
said that his opera was
muddle, then either I am wrong or
Pravda
is. The easiest thing of all
would be to say to myself, "I am not wrong," and to reject for
myself, internally, the opinion of
Pravda .
In other words, being left
with the conviction that, in the given case, the Party is saying untrue
things, I would allow the possibility that the Party is wrong. What
does all of this lead to? Very serious psychological consequences.
These "psychological consequences" had already been suggested in
Olesha's character Kavalerov. In his desire for truth, Olesha now con–
demns the epistemological subjectivity of his original avant-guard poetics.
His choice of artistic forms is an integral part of his ideological assump–
tions. "Formalism," he said at the same meeting, "is born out of
emptiness. True art emerges when an idea, powerful but naked, requires
clothes. When the idea is well thought out, the words come running on
their own, like children."
The truth is expressed in the "party line."
If I disagree with the Party in anything, the whole picture should
grow dim in my eyes because all the elements and all the details of
this picture are connected; they spring up from one another, and not
one of them can be faulty.
Yet Olesha, in spite of his discovery of the truth in Pravda, did not
denounce his metaphors. "It is a typical feature of the intelligentsia," the
Soviet proletarian critic Elsberg observed in the 1930s, "to see one's own
error but not to be able to correct it." Elsberg was right. Olesha be–
longed to the rare category of writers who cannot write dishonestly.
Having chosen what he considered truth, however, he could not find the
new beauty that was supposed to accompany it. The later decline of
Olesha's literary capabilities seems to have been strongly influenced
by
his
ideological choices. For Olesha, the relationship between his artistic goals
and the options offered him by the world in which he functioned was a
contradictory and even tragic one. For Karamzin, truth and beauty were
