The Thinking Reed

It is important to make clear that it was not only a question of allusions. I have already said that the view — widely held in the West, and even in some circles at home — that liberal scholars use material from the history of other societies merely as a pretext for throwing light on our own is quite mistaken. Serious research is not done like that, although a method of the sort may sometimes be employed in artistic creativity. When Tovstonogov put on a dramatization of Saltykov-Shchedrin’s A Present-Day Idyll at the Contemporary Theatre, it was clear that the satire was aimed not at nineteenth-century bureaucrats and deserters from the opposition camp of those days, but at their present-day successors. Similarly, Mother at the Theatre on the Taganka was essentially concerned not with a past revolutionary crisis but with one in the future. On the whole, though, as I have said, the true method of culture — especially theoretical culture — is not the ‘allusion’ or the ‘hint’, but broad philosophical generalization. Every genuine work of culture oversteps the bounds of its original task. Analogies and parallels are not only ‘read off’ by readers of philosophical works but also ‘read into’ them. Everyone finds there what he is looking for. On the other hand, the writer’s desire to speak about what concerns him obliges him to speak generally.

The theme of the publicists and theoreticians of Novy Mir in the period 1968 to 1971 can be called ‘the intelligentsia and the reaction’. This theme was pursued on the basis of various materials and by a variety of methods, but in the last analysis we arrive at a single system of conclusions. It may be that it is only at the beginning of the 1980s, ten years later, that we can evaluate fully the prophetic significance of those thoughts.

From the chronological standpoint, Granin’s article ‘A Sacred Gift’ closed the discussion, but for several reasons it would be best to start with this. Here the theme was presented sharply, Russian material used, and the general philosophical significance of the question clearly emphasized. What made this writer, the author of novellas and tales, appear in the role of historian? The article deals with something that happened in the nineteenth century. Most probably it was the need — the painfully acute need — to draw some preliminary conclusions from the spiritual history of post-Stalinist Russia. ‘A Sacred Gift’ is the story of Pushkin and Bulgarin, the Mozart and Salieri of Russian literature. It is both an article and a story. Granin appears here not only as a historian and a writer, but also as a biographer in the manner of Plutarch; this is a kind of ‘comparative biography’. In the foreground, however, we perceive not the concrete facts but the symbolic meaning of the relations between these two men. And, as might be expected, it is not Pushkin who interests Granin — we know a great deal about him — but Bulgarin, the informer and reactionary.

‘The history of Russian reaction is rich and instructive,’ observes Granin. ‘It had its own traditions, its own attempt at theory, its own heroes, from the time of Malyuta Skuratov right down to Katkov and Shul’gin.’47 The author traces, step by step, the path of development followed by culture and science in Russia, so as to establish the fact that in our country, spiritual life always took hold in spite of and in conflict with the state. The reader is horrified to find that that old society was so much like our new society: identical in many ways. But should he be surprised? Reaction is always and everywhere like itself. All that matters is to show its common historical features, to reveal the archetype of the reactionary and understand his logic.

In art, Granin says, the real struggle goes on not between tendencies but between talent and mediocrity: ‘Talent and mediocrity pursue different aims in art.’48 Mediocrities cluster round authority, making up for their lack of talent with an excess of trustworthiness. Reaction constantly replenishes the ranks of its defenders from among the intelligentsia. Mediocrities systematically betray their own people: ‘The former liberal easily turns into an extreme obscurantist.’49 So it was with Pushkin and Bulgarin; so it was, at the turn of the century, with Suvorin50 — and so it was with many who began in the 1950s by riding the wave of de-Stalinization.