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PARTISAN REVIEW
Mirsky wrote as a recent convert to Soviet Communism; his fommla
openly brands the sort of nuanced thinking that had distinguished his
earlier work as irrelevant to the task of criticism. More independent but
no less exemplary is Edmund Wilson's struggle with the double standard
in a wartime article, "Leonid Leonov: The Sophistication of a Formula"
(1944), reprinted in his book,
Classics and Commercials.
Using
"sophistication" in its original sense of "adulteration," Wilson compares
the Soviet writer Leonid Leonov's novel
Road to the Ocean
with emigre
Mark Aldanov's
The Fifth Seal.
Ultimately he finds Aldanov superior,
thanks to the "advantage of freedom: he can write what he observes and
feels." But what is most striking is Wilson's agonized reluctance to reach
that conclusion: "[To] consider the two books side by side . .. is to put
to ourselves
problems about which it is rather diffiwlt to arrive at allY dljlllite
collel,/siollS.
Is Aldanov 'better' than Leonov because he ... can choose
his effect and achieve it? . .. Or is Leonov 'better' than Aldanov, both
because of his more abundant material
alld because he has bem able to asso–
ciate himself with a great creative social purpose
[my italics - D.
F.F"
After
Stalin, of course, the "association" could as well be negative, as in the
novels of Solzhenitsyn, Trifonov, Granin, Dudintsev, and
tutti quallti.
Of
whatever kind, however, the consideration of the work of literature
principally in terms of its cultural-political provenance and significance is
what gives rise to what I am calling the double standard.
It prevailed, for sufficient and probably inescapable reasons, in
American reviewing of Russian fiction and in American academic publi–
cations, just as it did in the reactions of the educated Russian reading
public. I quote an excellent characterization of this process from last
October's issue of the Moscow magazine
ZlIalllia:
Earlier - Ict us be frank - there was a general excitement that came, as
a rule, not so much from
the q/lality
of a work that 'everyone
suddenly was talking about' as from the f:lct that that work had man–
aged to get published, had managed to break through the powerful
bureaucratic screens and barriers and by that very fact managed to
challenge the autocratic regime with its pretensions to an undivided
ideological and esthetic monopoly. The news of such a victory, of
the fact that someplace someone had managed to print a word of
truth, a word that differed from the official, spread across the country
in a flash, often in advance of and sometimes in the stead of any
direct acquaintance with the text....
Every publication of a work that was authentic, true,
or merely
/Inofficial
was received as a breach in the Berlin wall. ...
Is it surprising that an author making his debut with a striking
and honest book in fact had a chance of waking up to find himself
