The Thinking Reed

The characteristic feature of the first period of the history of the post-Stalin Novy Mir, as of the intelligentsia as a whole, was a fight on a broad front against literary stereotypes, against socialist-realist clichés and routine. The essence of this fight was the liberation of art forms from the fetters of dogma, a return to artistic quality. In itself this programme had nothing political about it; naturally, however, it met a hostile reception from the Stalinists. The ruling body of the Writers’ Union adopted a resolution ‘On the Mistakes of the Journal Novy Mir’. Pomerantsev was accused of all the mortal sins. Tvardovsky was charged with printing ‘incorrect and harmful articles’50

and removed from his post. It was declared that Pomerantsev had ‘called for a onesided portrayal and exaggeration of the negative phenomena of our reality.’51 At the same time sentence was passed on F. Abramov’s article ‘People of the Collective-Farm Countryside in Postwar Prose’ and Mikhail Lifshitz’s mocking review of the book The Diary of Marietta Shaginyan in which he said, in particular, that ‘the inflation of big words results in their losing all their value.’52

Later, as we know, Lifshitz reformed and began to engage in the exposure of ‘revisionism’. In those years, however, his article figured among the writings which censured the prevailing system of literary clichés and seemed incredibly bold.

Pomerantsev’s article provoked a storm of indignation from the conservatives, who at that time received — quite deservedly — the nickname of ‘right-wingers’. It was typical, though, that even A. Karaganov, while blaming Pomerantsev in the pages of Novy Mir on the grounds that his ‘sincerity is at odds with, or does not coincide with, Communist principles’, and his arguments about freedom were nothing but an expression of ‘petty-bourgeois subjectivism’,53 at the same time took up arms against ‘canons and clichés’. In the same article in which he said that ‘true freedom for the artist is born of the sense of organic union with the Party’54

— in other words, true freedom consists in voluntary slavery, in freedom from thought — the author called on his readers ‘to see the limits to all laws and not to carry them beyond bounds, through canonizing settled habits and influences or methods which are fashionable and therefore seem universally recognized.’55

The process of liberalization marched on. Under the leadership of K. Simonov, who temporarily replaced Tvardovsky, Novy Mir

held to the same course. Truth made its way increasingly into the pages of the press. Literature began more and more often to speak of the reality of life in our country. V. Ovechkin’s sketches appeared, telling of the actual situation in the villages, of the causes of hardship, of the need for democracy. Today the sketches of Ovechkin, G. Troepol’sky and V. Tendryakov, which were published immediately after Stalin’s death, do not make the same impression as they did earlier — they can occasionally be reproached for insufficient profundity — but in their day they brought about a real revolution, for in them, in the words of M. Shcheglov, a well-known critic of the period, ‘the countryside of our time stood before the reader as it really was’,56 instead of the popular-print ‘pictures from an exhibition’ to which Stalin’s publicity machine had accustomed the public. These reflections might often seem muddled and imprecise, but they disturbed people’s ideas and compelled them to look for answers.

The Impact of the Twentieth Party Congress

The critical tendency strengthened and was reinforced after the exposures carried out at the Twentieth Party Congress, the condemnation of the Stalinist practices which were delicately referred to as ‘the cult of personality’. In his secret report to the Congress Khrushchev talked about many of Stalin’s crimes, but he ascribed them exclusively to subjective causes. This version went into all subsequent textbooks, which repeated that the whole trouble was due to the fact that ‘Stalin believed in his own infallibility, began to abuse the Party’s trust, to violate the Leninist principles and norms of Party life, and to allow unlawful actions.’57 Consequently, the effect of the Congress exposures on the public — and especially on the intelligentsia — was twofold. On the one hand it was a gigantic step forward: ‘Whatever may have been N. Khrushchev’s aims when he made his report, that report will remain in the memory of descendants as his greatest service, and one that indisputably belongs to him alone,’ wrote Roy Medvedev in his Political Diary.58