The Thinking Reed

In the first place, Pomerantsev directed attention to the almost complete absence of truth and sincerity in the literature of the Stalin period. ‘Insincerity does not necessarily mean lying’,37 he wrote. It meant everything artificial, contrived, made up and not born in the creative process, not achieved through suffering. Writers had not been speaking their own thoughts — they had been, as it were, making statements ‘in the name and under the instructions of’. Genuine art is not only preaching, it is confession.

The simple idea that a writer has the right to speak in his own name and set forth his own thoughts became the subject of a most impassioned discussion during the period of liberalization, immediately after Pomerantsev’s article appeared. Such a principle, it became clear, subverted the very foundations of the system of ‘socialist realism’, but precisely this fact that ‘socialist realism’ had proved inimical to the elementary laws of art said a great deal. When, later, the Stalinists reacted against Pomerantsev and his followers, they revealed once more their hostility to culture in general — to any culture at all.

Pomerantsev called for an end to the prettifying of reality:

Life is embellished in a dozen different ways, and not always deliberately. These ways are so firmly established that some people employ them almost unconsciously: they have become, so to speak, a style of writing.38

These ways amounted, briefly, to the pretence, in the first place, of allround well-being. In a period when the whole country was going hungry, films were made such as Kuban Cossacks, Tales of the Siberian Land, and so on, ‘in which people were seen banqueting on plentiful and tasty food, whole collective farms of them.’39

Another device that was used was elimination. ‘Nothing’ was added to life, but instead all unpleasantness was removed. A third way was the selecting of ‘safe’, serene subjects. The heroes of the socialist-realist novel were typical one-dimensional people such as the bureaucrats wanted everyone to resemble: ‘Their very dreams were always consistent. Ordinary chaotic dreams were out of the question for them.’40

It is interesting that Pomerantsev, whom we must assume to have been perfectly sincere, spoke out at the same time for ‘Party truth’, against ‘subjectivism’, and saw his article as merely giving support from below to the official self-criticism which some groups in the leadership needed to initiate in the course of their struggle for power. The subsequent charges against Pomerantsev, accusing him of being almost an enemy of the Party and the regime, were absolutely false. In fact, Pomerantsev and the other liberal intellectuals of the Khrushchev period regarded themselves as supporters of the system, and hoped merely to promote its evolution towards greater democracy. The fact that Stalinism was being criticized from above filled them with many hopes and illusions.

At the same time, Pomerantsev attacked quite sharply the bureaucrats’ policy in the sphere of literature and the established institutions in that sphere. He criticized the editorial and publishing apparatus of the Writers’ Union, but showed that responsibility for the crisis in art lay chiefly with the workers in that field themselves, who submitted to this apparatus:

As for the apparatus of the Writers’ Union, the ‘creative sections’ and the rest, what has all that got to do with me, as a reader? Things arc in a bad way in the Union? Well, change them. I’m only afraid that, in your Union, though everybody thinks the present system is bad, nobody knows what improvement should be made. And I don’t understand why this prevents you from writing interesting books. I’ve heard that Shakespeare did not belong to any union, yet he wrote pretty well.41

Some changes, said Pomerantsev, could already be observed, but these were by no means always for the better. Interest in the individual, which was being proclaimed officially with increasing frequency, sometimes implied a new form of ‘absence of conflict’: ‘Will not the importunate whispers of lovers prove irritating to me, even as hitherto I have been deafened by the sound of tractors?’42