POETRY IN EXILE
601
pecially in the blood-drenched decade of the 1930s, better than did those
writer-Bolsheviks like Babel and Platonov, who supported the revolution
yet were loyal as well to their own artistic standards. Yet even as the to–
talitarian regime decimated Russia's literary talent, there was an implied
respect. "They take poetry seriously in Russia," Osip Mandelstam re–
marked to his wife. "Where else do they shoot people for it?"
The bleakest times for Russian literature were those between 1934,
when socialist realism was proclaimed the ideology of the propaganda
state, and 1954, when, after Stalin's death, the labor camps began gradu–
ally
to disgorge the inmates who had survived. Although a gifted Soviet
scholar, Gukovsky, made a clever comparison between the state-encour–
aged literature of the eighteenth century, with its strong didacticism and
its tendency to apotheosize the ruler, and socialist realism, the compari–
son is malapropos. In the eighteenth century writers came to the state
freely, regarding it as the sponsor and harbinger of civilization, of a
revolution in manners and morals in which they sincerely believed. So–
cialist realism merely reduced literature to party propaganda .
By the end of the Second World War the outstanding writers whose
reputations had been established before they left Russia were all dead -
Bunin, Merezhkovsky, Gippius, Khodasevich, Georgii and Viacheslav
Ivanov. The greatest among them, Tsvetaeva, had returned to the Soviet
Union, and in 1941 she killed herself, joining the terrible swollen ranks
of the Stalin-dead - Mandelstam, Babel, Platonov, Pilniak, and all the
others. Nabokov, the most gifted among the younger writers, had
switched languages and moved to America, although he was not yet well
known.
Yet very shortly, even in the USSR, things began to stir. lIya Ehren–
burg's 1954 novel,
The Thaw,
without displaying anything so miraculous
as a fully resurrected talent, nevertheless showed traces of individual cre–
ativity and hinted at dissent. Later Ehrenburg began to write his memoirs
with the avowed intent of "building bridges" to a lost generation, of
crossing the abyss left by the disasters of the Stalin period. Then in
February of 1956, Khrushchev made his secret speech denouncing Stalin's
"abuses" of Party members. Although most Kremlinologists in the West
pointed out that neither institutions nor formal procedures had changed,
at least a few Western literary scholars realized that the genie was out of
the bottle and could never be stuffed back in. The Stalinist system could
not be maintained without Stalin. The de-Stalinization campaign
launched by Khrushchev and aided by the "men of the sixties," young
technocrats eager to cast off a rigidified and meaningless ideology,
nevertheless found themselves hamstrung by the collapse of the only
authority that had vested them with the power to act. It turned out that
there was still such a thing as literature in Russia. Boris Pasternak, one of
