Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

In August 1946 Zhdanov received a report from his officials on the ‘unsatisfactory state’ of the literary-artistic journals Leningrad and Star – both published in Leningrad. ‘Over the last two years, these journals have published a number of ideologically harmful and artistically very weak works,’ they informed Zhdanov. Among those singled out for criticism were Anna Akhmatova’s poem ‘A Kind of Monologue’, and the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko’s children’s story ‘Adventures of a Monkey’.³⁸

The next day, during the same Orgburo meeting at which Stalin lambasted the cinematographers for their lack of professionalism, the editors of the two journals were hauled over the coals. Stalin emphasised the political responsibilities of the two journals and their role in the patriotic education of Soviet youth.³⁹ He wanted to know why Zoshchenko’s story had been published in the Star rather than in a children’s journal: ‘This is the silliest piece, it has nothing for the mind or the heart. It’s a puppet-show anecdote.’ Another concern was the two journals’ deference to foreigners: ‘You walk on tiptoe in front of foreign writers. . . . This is how you cultivate servile feelings, this is a great sin.’ But Stalin’s harshest words were reserved for Zoshchenko: ‘A whole war went by, all the peoples were soaked in blood, and he didn’t give us a single line. He writes some nonsense, it’s an absolute mockery. The war is in full swing and he doesn’t have a single word for or against, but he writes all kinds of cock-and-bull stories, nonsense that offers nothing for the mind or heart.’

When Leningrad’s editor pleaded for his journal because it was dear to the city’s heart, Stalin responded: ‘If the journal goes, Leningrad will remain.’

Zoshchenko had been a bad boy before. His 1943 novella Before Sunrise was banned for being too satirical. He pleaded with Stalin to allow publication of his book on grounds that it demonstrated ‘the might of reason and its triumph over the basest of forces’, but received no reply to his entreaties.⁴⁰

In accordance with Stalin’s wishes, Leningrad was banned, while the editorial board of Star was replaced.⁴¹ The Orgburo passed a resolution on the two journals in which Zoshchenko and Akhmatova once again came under fierce fire. Zoshchenko was described as having ‘long specialised in writing vapid, contentless, vulgar pieces, in the advocacy of rotten unprincipledness, vulgarity and apoliticalness calculated to disorient our young people and poison their minds’, while Akhmatova’s poetry was condemned for its ‘pessimism and decadence’. ‘The Soviet order’, stated the resolution,

cannot allow youth to be educated in the spirit of indifference to Soviet policy. . . . The strength of Soviet literature . . . consists in the fact that it is a literature that does not and cannot have other interests besides the interest of the people, the interests of the state. The aim of Soviet literature is to help the state correctly educate young people.⁴²

Both authors were expelled from the Writers’ Union and publication of their poetry and prose prohibited. By the early 1950s, however, they were back in favour. In April 1952 Zoshchenko was wheeled out to meet a British writers’ delegation that included the future Nobel laureate Doris Lessing, who was then still a communist. Asked by Arnold Kettle, another British communist, about the impact of the Zhdanovshchina on him personally, Zoshchenko replied:

For me it was strange that my comic stories had made such a painful impression, and in the direction of telling me this, the criticism was useful. It was unpleasant. I felt bitter and offended, but I love literature more than anything in life, and that is why I will listen to anything for the sake of literature. If the criticism had offended me as a person, it would have been bad. But it was to me as a writer. And so it was very good.⁴³

DOSTOEVSKY AND GOGOL

Fedor Dostoevsky was another writer Stalin believed was a bad influence on Soviet youth. He was a great reactionary as well as a great writer, Stalin told the Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas in January 1948.⁴⁴ This was not the first time that Dostoevsky’s name had come up in conversation between Stalin and Djilas. ‘You have, of course, read Dostoevsky?’ Stalin asked him in April 1945, in response to the Yugoslav’s complaints about the behaviour of invading Red Army troops:

Do you see what a complicated thing is man’s soul, man’s psyche? Well, then, imagine a man who has fought from Stalingrad to Belgrade – over thousands of kilometres of his own devastated land, across the dead bodies of his comrades and dearest ones! How can such a man react normally? And what is so awful in his having fun with a woman, after such horrors. You have imagined the Red Army to be ideal. . . . The Red Army is not ideal. The important thing is that it fights Germans.⁴⁵