The Thinking Reed

the ideological content of a work, its civic spirit, cannot be ‘one problem among others’ for the artist. It is the basis, the premiss — here the work of art either begins or does not begin. One can possess refined technique and even talent and yet not be an artist, for if a person is not sensitive, with the keenness of a perfect barometer, to the pulse of life, the breathing of the age, his creation will be, all in all, an intellectual trick, a game of fantasy and nothing more.118

The renewal of social ideas and the renewal of artistic forms have always been closely connected, and the ‘children of ’56’ understood that connection.

Desire to tell the truth implies hatred of those who defend lying. For people who think like this, moral and political principles are inseparable. The one implies the other — more: each is the other. There is political significance in the fight for the artist’s creative individuality, his right to speak for himself. These elementary truths were struggling to break through. When B. Runin said that ‘self-expression by the artist is the necessary precondition for any creative work’,119 the right-wingers responded by practically accusing him of an attempt to subvert the Soviet order. Since he had referred to the views of Marx and Lenin, they charged him with distorting those views. So the battle went. However, the Left conquered one position after another.

As a result, the change effected in the type of thinking on artistic questions led to political conclusions and compelled people to take up the position which later, in the seventies, came to be called ‘dissidence’. The counterposing of ‘idea’ and ‘reality’ was only the first step. It was not hard to see that the bureaucracy’s practice contradicted the theory which they claimed to be correct (whether Marx’s or Stanislavsky’s), but it still had to be understood why and how this ‘false practice’ had developed, what its sources and laws were, and what was the nature of those who carried it out. So it could be said that thinking Russia passed from an attitude of rejection, albeit by a long and difficult process, to analytical criticism.

In December 1956 K. Simonov, who took over the editorship of Novy Mir after Tvardovsky’s dismissal, published ‘Literary Notes’, in which he called for an investigation of the nature of Stalinism:

We cannot define all the influence that the cult of personality exercised upon literature by means of a formula that fits into a single phrase. We need to examine, by joint effort, just how the cult of personality affected literature and, concretely, how that effect was expressed. Unless mistakes are analysed it is hard to correct them.

It is not a matter of repentance, of purging oneself of ‘sins’, or of casting blame off one’s own back on to others. The point is that, without such analysis, all our future work will be made difficult. Without it we cannot write a truthful history of literature, nor is genuine literary criticism conceivable. Such analysis is needed by all writers. Every one of them, when working on new books and remembering the past of literature, evaluating his own former work, is undertaking analysis of this sort on his own account. But would it not be more useful to carry out this analysis, which is going on anyway, not separately but collectively?120