The Thinking Reed

The critics, too, received Pomerantsev’s attention. Their articles ought to have constituted a programme, but instead they provided only a list of facts — and that was true only of the best of them. There was also another breed of critic: ‘These are professional unmaskers, nit-pickers, exposers.’43 In any case, criticism was not fulfilling the most important task:

What is wanted is not the creation of literary Highnesses, not selecting for immortality, nor the passing of sentences without right of appeal, but study of the characteristic features of our writers’ creativity, their role in the progress of literature — and telling the truth about all this.44

In place of standardized and empty literature there should come a new sort — truthful, individual, variegated: ‘The writer will clarify life for us, and change it.’45 What was needed was to tell the truth, only the truth, nothing but the truth. Under conditions of liberalization the officials sometimes allow art to show the dark sides of life, but call for ‘a sense of proportion’. On that point Pomerantsev observes:

People who introduce

‘an element of the negative’ into their books do not deserve respect. One can, of course, find the equilibrium between ‘prettifying reality’ and ‘a gloomy picture’, but the very quest for that, the mere calculation, condemns a work to lack of artistic merit. That way of looking at things can produce compilations, but not writings, because it is not the viewpoint of art. When a writer takes to calculating what is in his novel — a third of this, a half of that, a quarter of the other — he is not giving his artistic heart to the work.46

In Pomerantsev’s view the literature of the Stalin era was bad primarily because the spirit of the age is not discernible in it. On that he was, of course, not altogether correct. It is precisely in the soulless socialist-realist novels and plays, in their lack of artistry and their monotony, that the ‘spirit’ of the Stalin era is best discernible. On the whole, though, Pomerantsev’s idea was quite correct. Literature can reflect the spirit of a new age, can feel the breath of the wind of freedom. The age of Stalin had passed away, and with that age its art. After 1953 one needed to write differently. ‘Only what is actual is lasting,’ said Pomerantsev, ‘but what is actual is not what is fleeting. True actuality does not fade with the passing of time.’47

I have dealt with Pomerantsev’s article in so much detail because it was undoubtedly the first manifesto of the post-Stalin liberal intelligentsia, and was seen as that by friends and foes alike. Mark Perakh wrote that Pomerantsev’s work also influenced the young people who, at the end of the 1950s, formed the first underground socialist groups.48

The influence of Pomerantsev’s article on the ideological protest of the late fifties and early sixties was indeed very great. It gave expression to something very important for an entire cultural epoch. Its ideas retained their significance to the end of the Khrushchev era, as the distinctive minimum progamme of the radicals. The universal favourite of those years, Yevtushenko, answered a question about ‘the voice of the young writer’ by saying that ‘this voice must, above all, be sincere. It is not a matter of sounding sincere but of being sincere, being honest. The young poet and writer must write as he thinks, as he feels.’49

It was just that simple honesty that compelled Tvardovsky to support Sats in the Pomerantsev affair. Honesty became the initial principle of the democratic ideology. Sincerity, as we see, can be not only an artistic but also a political category. The article evoked many responses. Komsomolskaya Pravda published a letter from students, supporting the writer. (Later on, that put the paper in an awkward position.) The Stalinists, too, ‘responded’ to Pomerantsev’s article — with a torrent of abuse.