The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

222 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

had been weeded out of libraries and banned from school reading lists. In 1955, Dostoevsky was officially recognized as a “great classic Russian writer” and his collected works reissued to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of his death.

It became somewhat easier for Russians to see, and be seen by, the outside world. More translations into Russian appeared, many of them on the pages of the newly founded journal Foreign Literature. Russian readers began to get a taste of non-Russian writers other than those judged to be “progressive” or communist fellow-travelers. Famous e´migre´s were invited back to visit their birthplace. Among these celebrants were the linguist Roman Jakobson in 1956 and the composer Igor Stravinsky in 1962, both of whom had departed for the West in the 1920s. It was proof of life before the freeze. Each was rapturously received by Russian audiences.

Encouraged by the indifference, or disgust, shown toward the Soviet literary establishment by its more sophisticated colleagues in Eastern bloc countries, some Russian writers began to question the very idea of a single authoritative definition for what literature should do. Initial discussions about socialist realism were guarded and painful. All the “-mindednesses” proclaimed in 1934 (party-, idea-, class-, people-) now seemed tainted. Perhaps writers did not need a “basic method” or a unified goal at all? But the best Russian writers – and their critics, the public intellectuals who wrote about literary art – had always served some higher thing. It was part of their professional definition, that which set Russian literature apart from the rest of the world. Usually this service had been rendered to a collective abstraction: the Russian God, Russian historical destiny, the Russian Word, the People, the good of the nation, the international proletariat, humanity’s moral improvement, a Higher Beauty. Neither self-expression nor market demand seemed a satisfactory substitute. If a socialist realist definition of literary purpose was no longer adequate, should it not yield to some other, more worthy priority?

Moreover, socialist realism, however weird and harsh by Western standards, was Russia’s own invention. With that doctrine in place, she did not have to compete. She was blazing a different path. Reformist calls for more “variety” in plot or character development sounded suspiciously like a defense of those decadent bourgeois novels that Gorky had exhorted Soviet writers to discard. Those novels were still the sop and opiate of the Western world, inclining their readerships to value private life over public duty, illicit love over fidelity, pleasures over economic productivity, doubt and weak closure over faith in the future, and an obsessive curiosity about the darker human impulses. Of course in literature one wanted to hear “confessions rather than sermons” – as one bold essay put it in 1953 – but what was to keep those confessions from becoming

From the first Thaw to the end 223

the cruel, indulgent ramblings of an Underground Man? Or worse? To be sure, dialectical materialism and “reality in its revolutionary development” were dry slogans when hacks and toadies applied them to art, but they were more than political opportunism. They implied that human beings could improve themselves by taking the high road. No one at the Writers’ Congress doubted the enormous benefits of the Thaw for “freedom from”: from arbitrary violence against writers, from a corrupt bureaucracy, from a moronic social command. But about “freedom to,” there was no consensus. From inside the profession, these troubled debates concerned not only “Stalinism versus freedom” (that simplistic and persistent binary) but also “Marxist-Leninist humanism” versus triviality, self-indulgence, and despair.