CENTRAL EUROPEAN WRITERS
AS A SOCIAL FORCE
659
social-minded critics, intelligentsia readers avidly scanned works of imag–
ination for the sorts of messages they wanted to find there (in this they
mimicked the censors), while the major writers were, by and large, pur–
suing quite a different set of agendas. It is, moreover, misleading to speak
of censorship as a constant factor withou t distinguishing the nineteenth–
century variety from its Soviet counterpart. Nineteenth-century censors
removed from literary works what they thought should not be there,
phrases deemed offensive to the official program of autocracy, or–
thodoxy, and nationalism. To their counterpart of those proscriptions,
Soviet censors added a whole set of prescriptions; their overriding and
much more intrusive concern with what
shollid be
there.
Still, Russian literature of the nineteenth century, as of the twentieth,
has tended to be surrounded - at home and abroad - by an aura that
might loosely be called political or (especially in the Soviet period)
ideological. That fact underlies the enormous and continuing interest of
French publishers and readers in literature from and about the Soviet
Union, an interest unmatched by their American counterparts, for whom
the intersecting myths about the Revolution and the avant-garde have a
less compelling fascination. On the other hand, McCarthyism and its lin–
gering aftermath had serious and still unstudied effects on the publishing
and public discussion of literature from Soviet Russia: I refer not to the
workings of simple anti-communism, but to the convolutions of anti–
anti-communism in the thinking of many American intellectuals. In any
case, the rise of the dissident movement in the late 60s only fostered a
new political interest in writing - this time unofficial writing - from
Russia.
The Double Standard: Belief in the singularity of Russian literature
led, all but inevitably, to the operation of a double standard, sometimes
unacknowledged, in assessing it. This was bound to occur, given the ex–
treme claims made for Soviet literature as being
sui generis.
In 1934, for
example, D.s. Mirsky supplied the chapter on Russia for an English book
entitled
Tendencies oj the Modem Novel.
There he insists that what sets
Soviet literature apart are "its conscious purposefulness and its conscious
coordination with a collective existence.... To understand what it is
the Soviet novelists are doing, the non-Soviet reader must make at least
some step towards understanding the new Socialist civilization that is
growing in the Soviet Union.... If he approaches it as just another
"national" literature, comparable to German, American, or French liter–
ature, he will find himself in the ridiculous position of a biologist who
would study a bird from the point of view of its adaptiveness to the life
of a fish."
