The Thinking Reed

We see now how naive were Shatrov’s technocratic-reformist illusions. Gel'man was different. His first play, A Meeting of the Party Committee, which was put on by Tovstonogov in Leningrad and by Yefremov in Moscow, was much discussed both here and in the West. Gel'man is free from naive technocratic illusions; he knows economic reality otherwise than by hearsay. But the conflict in his play is not economic in the narrow sense; this was the first fictional work to deal with the class struggle in the USSR. Not without reason did many people say, later, that A Meeting of the Party Committee was prophetic, presaging the strikes of summer 1980 and the workers’ movement in Poland.

The situation in the play, when the workers refuse to accept a bonus as a way of protesting against an action by the management — and, as is made clear in the course of the affair, against the whole system of economic leadership — is improbable in real life. The actual forms of the class struggle in the USSR are different. But the exceptional situation throws especially clear light upon typical conflicts. Herein lies the essence of Gel'man’s aesthetic. A Meeting of the Party Committee stands out from the general background not only through the ‘novelty’ of its conflict. Real people appear on the stage. Instead of Shatrov’s faceless technocrats we see live production-workers who turn out to be very different, unlike each other, complex, unexpected. Gel'man gives a precise answer to history’s question. He sees the only hope for society in the movement of the proletariat. Russian culture has actually performed a spiral circuit, and the conclusions at which social thought arrived at the beginning of our century have become significant for us once again.

Gel'man’s most recent plays — not including his less successful Feedback — localize the conflict, so to speak — confine it to a small group of people. More and more attention is paid to the conduct of particular individuals. The time and place of the action are confined within the unities of the classical theatre, and thus concentrated. Different types of people are put to the test in tense situations. The lovers of truth, the fighters for justice usually suffer defeat. Those who try to retain some vestiges of spirituality, or who try to restore that quality in themselves, rarely meet with success. There are no workers here. This is the world of lower and middle-ranking ‘chiefs’. Bureaucracy. A milieu in which honesty is impossible, unattainable, having been eradicated. Love for one’s job and confidence in one’s rightness are also unattainable. What prevail here are the rules formulated in the play We, the Undersigned:

If a man is sensible, they get rid of him all the same. And, incidentally, that is the right thing to do. Because being good and honest is, pardon me, a pleasure for the soul! Isn’t that so? It is. And if you are honest, and a chief as well, that’s too much pleasure! Life is just. To one it gives a conscience — and he’s happy. To another it gives a position — and he’s happy too. It’s necessary that things should be right for everybody!22

We behold the anatomy of the bureaucratic world, its mechanisms, the Mafia-like bonds among the bureaucratic cliques, the formation of a ‘clientage’, and all the relationships that result. In art like this there is no room either for hope or for illusions. Art — and this does not apply only to Gel'man — becomes ever harsher; in it we hear the voices of rage and despair sounding louder and louder. But this is itself a sign of hope. Liberation from illusions is painful, but a fine thing. What is happening now could be called an ideological catharsis. The downfall of the old ideology and the old morality certainly entails a crisis of all ideology and all morality, but at the same time it liberates. Art no longer shows the way out; it does not summon us in any particular direction. It does not confer hope, does not soothe. It analyses, judges, diagnoses. The way out has to be sought not in art but in life. Problems must be solved not in the pages of novels, not on the stage or the screen, but in reality. And the less artists comfort us, the greater is our wrath and our resolution. This art is uncompromising and for that very reason it looks towards the future.