The Thinking Reed

Analysis of literature is only part of an analysis of society.121 It is, of course, good to criticize outlived aesthetic norms: ‘But, we ask ourselves, what can be changed in reality, and not just in words, unless we have clarified the real situation in which these necessary changes have to be made?’ Finally, our analysis of society must be objective and truthful, otherwise the new art will create nothing of value: ‘when talent becomes entangled with falsehood, it is impoverished.’122 Simonov himself tried to appraise Stalinism in his work The Lessons of History and the Writer's Duty, but this was not published. Thus the need for collective endeavour was thrust upon the writers by the censorship: where one had not succeeded in ‘breaking through’, perhaps others might. To oppose the censorship apparatus a unified centre of literary endeavour was required.

Actually, the chief problem in this period was not the omnipotence of the censorship but, on the contrary, its lack of independence, the censors’ diffidence. An American observer wrote later:

the censors, be they editors in publishing houses or officials of the central censorship organ, tend to act less out of conviction than from fear — that ever-present element in Soviet society. Page after page is cut and passages sacrificed because ‘they’ (the Party authorities) would not want them to appear.123

It was impossible to negotiate as an individual with the Party bureaucracy. There had to be a writers’ society. The official Writers’ Union would not do. Novy Mir became, at the end of the fifties and in the sixties, the centre for studying Stalinism through literature. In this sense its role was unique. Under the leadership of Tvardovsky — and, to some extent, of Simonov — Novy Mir revived the tradition of the ‘thick journals’ of the nineteenth-century literary opposition — Sovremennik and Otechestvennye Zapiski. In a society where features of Stalinist totalitarianism were still present, the journal managed to defend its editorial independence. ‘Novy Mir’, writes Roy Medvedev, ‘never “fell on its knees”, but pursued its own line under extremely difficult conditions.’124 The first step on this plane, which was taken after the Twentieth Congress, was probably the publication in Novy Mir of V. Dudintsev’s novel Not By Bread Alone (even before the appearance of Simonov’s ‘Literary Notes’). In its day this novel enjoyed immense fame. The discussion of it held at Leningrad University resembled an anti-government meeting.125 The debate on the novel in the Writers’ Union also produced some highly instructive scenes. K. Paustovsky made a sharply anti-bureaucratic speech.126

In the same issue of Novy Mir in which the first part of Dudintsev’s novel appeared was also published D. Granin’s story ‘Private Opinion’, and in 1958 the journal carried G. Troepol'sky’s Kandidat nauk. All these works, though written very differently, were devoted to a single theme: the bureaucratization of science. But that was not all they had in common. They focused on ‘the new man’ engendered by the statocratic regime and its pseudo-communist ideology, studying and anatomizing him from every angle. The essence of these works was not the conflict between bureaucrats of science and scientists by vocation, as might seem at first glance, but the conflict between bureaucracy and science itself, their incompatibility.

M. Voslensky observes wittily about Dudintsev’s book:

From the Western point of view, the plot of the novel sounds like a farce: the nomenklaturist Drozdov, a factory manager, engages in vigorous intrigue to prevent the introduction of new machinery that will increase his output.127

In reality such a situation is very familiar to us and quite normal even now, a quarter of a century after Dudintsev’s novel. It was precisely the typicality of the conflict, the familiarity of the situation that enraged bureaucratic circles. Many people recognized themselves in Drozdov.

‘Bureaucratic man’ appears in a variety of avatars. Before us is a whole gallery of bureaucrats, ‘soft’ and ‘hard’, military and civil, but gradually the features they have in common become apparent: above all what Troepol'sky calls their ‘weather-vane quality’, when a change of purpose entails a change of principles. Troepol'sky’s hero first