Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Konstantin Simonov was another witness to Stalin’s ruminations. A renowned poet, writer and journalist, he was deputy head of the Writers’ Union as well as the chief editor of the ‘thick’ Soviet literary journal Novyi Mir (New World). According to Simonov, Stalin said of Kruzhilikha, Panova’s novel about factory life during the Great Patriotic War: ‘Everyone’s criticising Panova for the fact that in the novel there’s no unity between the personal and the social. . . . But surely in life things are not . . . so easily combined? It happens that they are not combined. . . . Her people are shown truthfully.’⁵¹

A novel by the Belorussian writer Yanka Bryl’, Light beyond the Marshes, Stalin characterised as ‘conflictless’.⁵² ‘We are so bad at drama,’ said Stalin. ‘It’s as if we have no conflict, no bastards. It turns out that our dramatists think they are forbidden from writing about negative stuff. Critics demand of them ideals and the ideal life. If someone shows anything negative in their work they are immediately attacked . . . but we do have bad and nasty people. We have more than a few fakes and bad people and we need to combat them. Not to depict them is a sin against the truth. . . . We have conflict. There are conflicts in life. These conflicts have to be reflected in drama, otherwise it’s not drama.’⁵³

Stalin was particularly interested in historical dramas about events in which he had played a part. In the December 1949 issue of Novyi Mir, dedicated to him on his seventieth birthday, it was a play about ‘The Unforgettable Year 1919’ that caught Stalin’s eye. He decided to edit it, striving mainly to improve playwright Vsevolod Vishnevsky’s prose but also correcting historical inaccuracies such as characters referring to Lenin and Stalin by the patronymics rather than calling them comrade, and changing ‘embassy’ to ‘diplomatic mission’.⁵⁴

Stalin’s dissatisfaction with the work of the Art and Literature Committee was evidenced by a critical central committee report of May 1952. Of the 133 works nominated for awards in 1951, fifty had been turned down by the government and nineteen other works given prizes had not even been considered by the committee. The committee had made serious mistakes in excluding from consideration novels such as Vilis Latsis’s Toward New Shores, Orest Mal’tsev’s Yugoslav Tragedy, and Dmitry Eremin’s Storm over Rome – all highly political works. Members of the committee, including Simonov, were criticised for not attending meetings and for cavalier attitudes when assessing submitted works, for example, Wanda Wasilewska’s novel The Rivers Are Burning. The committee was also accused of parochialism and cronyism when it came to selecting works for consideration. The report concluded that the committee’s personnel should be changed and steps taken to ensure that new members were conversant with different artistic styles and familiar with all significant works of literature, including the theory and history of art and literature.⁵⁵

That report had been preceded by one of Stalin’s weirder interventions in the cultural arena: an anonymously published defence of Latsis’s Toward New Shores, which was prompted by an article in Literaturnaya Gazeta that had reported criticisms of the novel in the writer’s native Latvia.⁵⁶

Latsis was chairman of Latvia’s Council of People’s Commissars, but that didn’t protect him from the severe criticism of high-ranking officials in the country’s cultural bureaucracy. Latsis’s novel was about Latvia’s path to socialism, said his critics, but its main hero was a peasant who was a kulak and, therefore, an enemy of the people.

Stalin’s article, published anonymously in Pravda on 25 February 1952, expressed a different opinion: if the novel had an individual hero, it was an Old Bolshevik character. More importantly, the true hero of the book was the Latvian people and their epic struggle for socialism. ‘We think that V. Latsis’s Toward a New Shore is one of the great achievements of Soviet artistic literature, and is ideologically and politically mature from beginning to end,’ concluded the unnamed ‘group of writers’ who had supposedly authored the article.⁵⁷

As this episode shows, politics generally trumped all other considerations in Stalin’s reading of literature. He preferred writing that captured complexity, conflict and contradiction and was reluctant to impose a party line on literature, but only fiction that depicted socialist progress did he consider to be really ‘true to life’.