The Thinking Reed

Although ‘war is war’, there are, obviously, different forms and methods in the waging of it. The war that Ivan Shevtsov wages in his book verges, in my view, on such non-literary forms as street brawling, squabbles in trams, rows in flats… To join in this polemic under the conditions offered would be shameful, degrading, and to answer his arguments with passion would be a joke.169

Actually, Sinyavsky did not need to argue with Shevtsov. He merely paraphrased — and sometimes quoted — some passages from the novel which betrayed the author’s utter ignorance in matters of art:

Puzzling, too, is Shevtsov’s interpretation of realism. In realism particular importance is ascribed to the painstaking depiction of details, even to the extent that, in the genre painting ‘At the Registry Office’, which is presented here as a masterpiece, the feelings of the bridegroom ‘can be read in the quivering of his long eyelashes’, and on the desk we see ‘a blank form’ on which ‘lay a pen’, ready to register the marriage. If we consider that all this, with a mass of other details, ‘is shown on a small canvas’, it becomes clear how laboriously the artist has toiled at giving the finishing touches to trifles, seeing in this the true triumph of realism.170

Uproar ensued. The Louse was condemned by all the publications, the right-wing ones included — by Ogonyok, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Literaturnaya Gazeta. Of no little importance here was the fact that Shevtsov had naively ‘blown’ his own side, exposing the mode of thought of the orthodox ‘socialist realists’, the hostility of their system to art. Unintentionally, he had let his friends down. Laktionov repudiated his own preface, saying that he had neither read the novel nor written the article. Thus Shevtsov found himself under fire from all sides. ‘Such unanimity is a matter for rejoicing,’ wrote Sinyavsky,

although it seems to me that sometimes criticism of The Louse such as appeared in Ogonyok descends, in its tone, to the level of the novel under discussion, and offers the author a testimonial by reminding us of his sort of art.171

In the course of the sixties traditional ‘socialist realism’ was completely discredited. On the one hand it had virtually ceased to exist; while on the other, it was impossible for some time to give up using the obsolete and empty expression. This paradoxical situation in which ‘socialist realism’ was being eroded was described by G. Nedoshivin in an article in 1969 which tried to present the balance sheet of a decade of struggle. Examining one after the other the principles of socialist-realist aesthetics, he showed their inapplicability to the art of the sixties. ‘What is a landscape painting according to socialist realism?’ he asked,