The Thinking Reed

not only in religion, but also in art. Iconoclasm died with the worship of icons. But does this mean that the desire to say new things in a new way has disappeared? Recently I read in a certain journal the words ‘modest pioneering’. At first they made me laugh, then they made me very sad. An artist must be modest in his behaviour, but never moderate, lukewarm, limited in his creative ambitions. I am sure that it is more worthwhile to scrawl something that is one’s own, in one’s own way, than to write out old adages in a copperplate hand. I do not believe that collective farmers painted in the manner of the academic (Bolognese) school can give many people pleasure, nor that it is possible to convey the rhythm of the second half of the twentieth century by that profusion of subsidiary clauses which Leo Tolstoy used so brilliantly.164

As the sixties advanced, however, the orthodox socialist realists tried to launch a counter-offensive. But they failed to receive the support from above which they had counted on: the ruling class was, for the time being, trying to avoid unnecessary conflicts and displayed a certain liberalism. This can be explained, above all, by the unwillingness of the rulers to return to the use of Stalin’s methods, which had often meant ‘firing on their own people’. Consequently, in the literary disputes of those years the authorities often preferred the role of arbiter between Rights and Lefts, while leaning, naturally, towards the former rather than the latter. For example, Khrushchev did not like Ehrenburg’s memoirs: ‘It appears that the author of the memoirs has great sympathy for the representatives of the so-called “left” art, and assumes the task of defending this art.’ Khrushchev did not share this sympathy, and concluded: ‘Comrade Ehrenburg is making a gross ideological mistake, and it is our duty to help him to realize this.’165 He did not like, either, the pronouncements made by the young poets, cinéastes and artists, which he saw as an attempt ‘to set youth against the older generations’.166 He himself was firmly convinced that in our society there are ‘no contradictions between generations. There is no “father and son” problem in its old sense. It has been invented.. ’,67

What the Rights needed above all, however, was administrative support in the form of bans, exilings and arrests. But for the time being that support was not to be had. Although the Stalinist journal Oktyabr printed, in issue after issue, spiteful anti-intellectual novels and denunciatory articles, it achieved nothing by these methods, and the critics writing in Novy Mir were merely supplied with fuel for their witticisms.

The most interesting attack on the left-wing intelligentsia was I. Shevtsov’s novel The Louse. Its preface was contributed by A. Laktionov, a member of the Academy of Art. Quite a large number of copies were printed. In this novel the author, a well-known reactionary and anti-Semite, wrote that in the world of art were operating ‘the elusive forces of an obscure but well-knit, single-minded group’ — ‘not numerous but amazingly active’, ‘fanatics of modernism’, ‘cosmopolitans’, ‘incendiaries’(!), ‘aesthetes and formalists of every stripe’. They ‘sneer with impunity’ at honest artists and give them advice in which ‘there is something diabolically seductive, or, rather, scheming’; they ‘bring in devil-worship’; they try to ‘insinuate their own people’ everywhere; they propagate ‘sedition’.168 Shevtsov was answered in Novy Mir by Sinyavsky who, as ‘A. Tertz’, was the author of an essay published in the West under the title What is Socialist Realism ?: