Center for Thaw Studies
presents TVARDOVSKY AXED !
Charge 1: On or about June 1953, A.T. Tvardovsky caused to be published an installment of his poem "Distance Beyond Distance" (Za daliu dal'), in which he lambasted the repetitive formula typical in Soviet novels. To quote from the poem:
Here's your novel, all in order
Showing the new method of laying bricks,
There's a backward assistant director, a progressive chairman,
And an old granddad, all marching to Communism.
There, too, are she and he--the leading workers,
The motor, started for the first time,
The Party organizer, the snowstorm, the breakdown, the crisis,
The minister inspecting the shops, the gala party.
Quite true, it all resembles
What is or might be,
But altogether, it's so indigestible
You feel like screaming.
Charge 2: A.T. Tvadovsky did aid, abet, and encourage and cause to be published in the December 1953 issue of Novy Mir the essay "On Sincerity in Literature" by Vladimir Pomerantsev. Said article attacked insincerity, the varnishing of reality, the glorification of objects and events over people, and the lack of genuine conflict in socialist realism. Pomerantsev said that people were sick and tired of "advocacy" (propoved') in fiction and wanted a more "confessional" (ispoved') approach by authors.
Further, Pomerantsev's article claimed that all books made to fit the mold of socialist realism are not only insincere, but they are also mind-numbingly monotonous. To quote from the article:
They have stereotyped heroes, themes, beginnings, and endings. They are not books, but twins; read two or three of them and you already know the look of the next one. They are full of well-known platitudes. You might think that they were produced not by man, but by assembly line. Read the first, and you're left indifferent; but by the third one, you're feeling insulted.Further, Pomerantsev did attack the integrity of and even challenge the necessity for the existence of the Soviet Writers Union, asserting:
Shakespeare didn't belong to any union, and he didn't write badly.Charge 3: A.T. Tvadovsky did aid, abet, and encourage and cause to be published in the February 1954 issue of Novy Mir the article The Diary of Marietta Shaginyan by Mikhail Lifshits. Said article was an attack on the writer Marietta Shaginyan, accusing her of artificiality and dishonesty. As explained by Dina R. Spechler in "Permitted Dissent in the USSR: Novy Mir and the Soviet Regime":
Lifshits excoriated [Shaginyan] for publishing a journal filled with rapturous comments on new feats of "innovators of production" and new techniques that would soon revolutionize the production process in the Soviet Union. This "passion for exclamation marks", the "habit of seeing a marvel in everything", did not encourage optimism, he insisted. The reader must suspect something false in so much effusiveness: a genuine faith in the future would be expressed more modestly.Lifshits mocked Shaginyan's seemingly endless trips around the Soviet Union, visits to construction sites, meetings with experts, etc., and he dismissed her glowing descriptions of her own activity and of Soviet society in general in this way:
. . . .
Lifshits was similarly angered by literary portraits of workers who refused to take time off and insisted on returning to their jobs on vacation days. An account so at variance with reality does not arouse national pride, but only annoyance, in the reader, he claimed.
Marietta Shaginyan is distinguished from Jules Verne by the fact that, while the latter author, sitting at home in his library, described many countries rather accurately, Marietta Shaginyan traveled around tirelessly, but...he who believes her will be mistaken.Charge 4: A.T. Tvadovsky did aid, abet, and encourage and cause to be published in the April 1954 issue of Novy Mir the article People of the Kolkhoz Village in Post-war Prose by Fyodor Abramov. Said article did accuse Soviet writers of producing boring works, indistinguishable from one another. To quote from the article:The similarity, bordering on monotony, lies in [this]: it seems as if the authors are competing with one another to see who can more easily and with less substantiation portray the transition of a kolkhoz from incomplete well-being to complete prosperity.The majority of post-war village prose, Abramov suggested, was untruthful and, thus, uninteresting.
In many of the works we are examining, the internal world of the heroes lacks richness. Living feeling is so fettered with tedious reason that, in reality, there is hardly any life in this feeling at all--only rarely does this feeling break free from its chains and declare its rights.
God forbid that the hero--a young man--would undertake this or that action under the influence of a suddenly flaring up love, and not under the pressure of a previously thought-out social and work consideration! You could easily predict that, in the last pages of the journal, things would turn out badly for such a hero."
Also, Abramov lashed out at topical novels in which political, technical, and economic facts abounded, but people and their experiences, thoughts, and emotions were neglected. Comrade Spechler again testifies:
Indeed, Abramov complained, Soviet novels have come to resemble encyclopedias. They bored the reader and utterly failed to reach him.Charge 5: A.T. Tvadovsky did aid, abet, and encourage and cause to be published in the May 1954 issue of Novy Mir the article The Russian Forest of Leonid Leonov by Mark Shcheglov. Said article did criticize Leonov's Russian Forest for its apparently blatant failure to come to grips with acute social problems. Shcheglov insisted that there are still many negative phenomena in Soviet society and that the bad features that remain are especially complicated and persistent.(1)
Support of these charges can be found in the following testimony:
V. Druzin. the main speaker at the Leningrad Writers Conference in June 1954, while denouncing Vera Panova for her work "The Span of Year" (Vremena goda), took time to criticize "a whole series of destructive, pot-boiling articles" published by Novy Mir which, Druzin noted, were aimed at "wiping out all the successes of Soviet writers."
In a speech to the Moscow Writers Organization in June 1954, publishing house director Lesiuchevsky accused Tvardovsky of "ideological immaturity" and of "arrogance" for ignoring the criticism directed at him.
In an article in Literaturnaya Gazeta, Aleksei Surkov, the chairman of the USSR Union of Writers, accused Novy Mir's editors of "no mere oversight", but a "premeditated line" opposed to the fundamental principals of socialist realism. "We must protect ourselves," Surkov said, "from the nihilistic whine of these petty-bourgeois panic-criers."(1)
Lastly, we have the words of the accused, A.T. Tvardovsky, himself, who, under tremendous pressure and knowing full well that his days at Novy Mir were numbered, finally confessed to the Presidium of the Union of Soviet Writers on 11 August 1954 that he had published "ideologically defective" articles. He took all the blame on himself in an (ultimately successful) attempt to avert retaliation against his fellow editors.
And now for the verdict: We present below the entire translated text of "On the Mistakes of the Journal Novy Mir" as published in Literaturnaya Gazeta, the official organ of the Soviet Writers Union, on 17 August 1954:
ON THE MISTAKES OF THE JOURNAL NOVY MIR
Resolution of the Presidium of the Board of the Union of Soviet Writers
On the pages of the press (Pravda, the journal Kommunist, Literaturnaya Gazeta, the journal Znamya and elsewhere), at writers meetings in Moscow and Leningrad, and at a series of congresses of writers of the fraternal literatures of the USSR, the crude ideological mistakes permitted on the pages of the journal Novy Mir have been subjected to serious criticism. Literary society has sharply condemned the pronouncements of the journal on questions of contemporary literature (the articles of V. Pomerantsev, M. Lifshits, F. Abramov, and M. Shcheglov) which demonstrate false and harmful tendencies, articles attempting to revise the basic principles of Soviet literature and to place in doubt the ideological content and the vital truth of Soviet literature.
V. Pomerantsev, in the article "On Sincerity in Literature", speculating on the legitimate dissatisfaction of readers and writers with some creative shortcomings in our literature, carelessly and without justification accused Soviet writers of insincerity. Under the guise of a struggle with time-serving and the varnishing of reality, he called into doubt the contemporary, wide-ranging thematics and problematics of Soviet literature, he called for the one-sided portrayal and the exaggeration of negative phenomena in our reality. In his article, V. Pomerantsev elevated the natural and necessary sincerity of the author of any genuinely artistic work to the level of the first and main criterion for evaluating a literary work, replacing in this way the ideological and social-class evaluations--which are generally accepted in our literature--with an atemporal and asocial moral criterion. In developing his position, which is hostile to the nature of the method of socialist realism, V. Pomerantsev contrasted advocacy (propoved')--that is to say, the defense by the writer of certain ideas and convictions--to so-called confession (ispoved')--that is, he lowered literature from its lofty position of teacher of the feelings and character of the builders of Communism to the role of a "confessional" registration of the "direct impressions" of a writing individual, separated from the struggle and social activity of society. Publishing Pomarantsev's article, openly revising the basis of the method of socialist realism in literature and literary criticism, the editorial board of Novy Mir took a stand for the reproduction of idealistic tendencies, which were long ago unmasked in our literature.
Developing the line of a nihilistic relation to the experience and achievements of Soviet literature, the editors of the journal printed in the No. 4 issue for 1954 F. Abramov's article People of the Kolkhoz Village in Post-war Prose. Instead of evaluating as a whole--in light of the upcoming congress of writers--works about the kolkhoz village written in the post-war years, looking at them from the point of view of the new tasks set in the recent decisions of the Party and the government on the questions of agriculture, both the author of the article and the editors unleashed a tirade against all the most notable works of Soviet prose dedicated to the life of the kolkhoz peasantry in the war- and post-war years. Instead of objectively uncovering the real merits and deficiencies of the works being considered, instead of showing--on the basis of a thorough analysis of the images, behavior, and actions of the people of the kolkhoz village as created by writers--how in a series of instances the development of living and true images suffered from an author's relaxed approach to the resolution of life's conflicts and collisions, F. Abramov crosses out works which have played a serious role in the spiritual life of the Soviet people, giving, in this same way, an inaccurate, distorted picture of the state of one of the most important divisions of Soviet literature. Tendentiously ignoring what is new and foremost in life and literature, F. Abramov, in his article, openly comes out in defense of the stagnant and backward, pays tribute to spiritual skepticism, scoffing at writers who have engraved in our memories the new aspects of the people of the kolkhoz village and the progressive phenomena in the life of the Soviet peasantry.
F. Abramov's article has shown that both the author and the editorial staff who printed his article have incorrectly understood the decisions of the September and February-March Plenums of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in which a severe, merciless criticism of the deficiencies in the development of agriculture was based on the firm foundation of the acknowledgment of the tremendous successes and the unshakable strength of the kolkhoz system and was directed toward the swift elevation of the material well-being of the workers.
M. Lifshits, in the article The Diary of Marietta Shaginyan, sorting out the shortcomings of M. Shaginyan's book--from the position of a landlord's aesthetics--comes down on writers who are actively striving to involve themselves in life; he casts doubt on the importance of writers turning to the themes of labor, industrial activity, and other topical themes of our reality. The insulting-mocking tone of the author, who with joy drags out for show real and imagined shortcomings of the works being evaluated and who has no desire to note the positive aspects of the book, is unworthy of a Soviet critic and deserves harsh condemnation.
The critic M. Shcheglov, in his article about O. Cherny's novel Snegin's Opera, scoffs at the fact that the author of the novel showed the influence of the Party on questions of music as well as on the consciousness and creative activity of the artistic intelligentisa. In another one of his articles, concerning L. Leonov's novel The Russian Forest, Shcheglov puts forward the false idea that the Soviet system is a breeding ground for decadent types such as the novel's character Gratsiansky, and he criticizes L. Leonov for exposing Gratsiansky's behavior and mentality as a phenomenon of holdovers from the past.
All these facts demonstrate that a line contradictory to the directives of the Party in the sphere of artistic literature was taking shape at the journal Novy Mir.
The leaders of the journal Novy Mir, in printing the above enumerated articles, forgot that the journal, as an organ of the Union of Soviet Writers, is required to systematically and in a timely manner fight against deviations from the principles of socialist realism, and against attempts to divert Soviet literature away from the life and the struggle of the Soviet people, away from topical questions on the policy of the Party and the Soviet government; the journal is required to struggle against attempts to cultivate decadent attitudes; it is required to rebuff unfounded nihilistic criticism of everything positive that has been accomplished by Soviet literature.
The leaders of the journal Novy Mir, in printing the incorrect and harmful articles, forgot that every weakening of the influence of socialist ideology means the strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideology.
The leaders of the journal Novy Mir and the authors of the incorrect and harmful articles spoke out in the pages of the journal from positions contradictory to the directives of the Party contained in its decisions of 1946-48 on the questions of literature, drama, theater, film, and music; and they did not draw conclusions from the criticism expressed in the decisions of the CC VKP(b) against the activities of the editorial boards of the journals Zvezda and Leningrad.
The mistakes tolerated by the editors of the journal Novy Mir bring to mind with particular sharpness the instructions of the Party about the duty of those who work in the art of socialist realism to be led in all their creative activity by the policy of the Party and the Soviet government and to give a merciless rebuff to all manifestations of political indifference, formalism, and ideologic apathy.
The Presidium of the governing board of the Union of Soviet Writers of the USSR notes that the situation arising in the editorial offices of the journal Novy Mir can be explained, to a large extent, by that fact that neither the Presidium nor the secretariat of the board of the Union of Soviet Writers, until recently, were sufficiently involved in the question of the ideological direction of the journal Novy Mir and other press organs of the Union of Soviet Writers, whereas the leading organs of the Union of Soviet Writers should give their chief attention to the ideological direction of Soviet literature and to questions of the ideological education and the growth of the artistic mastery of Soviet writers.
In the work of the editorial boards of journals, the required collegiality is lacking; the editorial boards meet irregularly, many members of these boards systematically take no part in the work of the boards, several chief editors have not given sufficient attention to the observations and suggestions of members of the boards concerning this or that material, and the members of the boards themselves have not demonstrated a collective influence on the ideological direction of the press organs.
All these shortcomings are particularly intolerable at this moment, when the role of the Union of Soviet Writers, as a social writers organization, assisting the active participation of writers in Communist construction, in the moral-political education of the builders of Communism, and in overcoming the left-over elements of capitalism in the consciousness of people, is significantly on the rise.
Relying on the assistance of the editorial boards of the press organs and the activity of all creative cadres, the governing boards of the Union of Soviet Writers of the USSR, of the fraternal republics, of krais and oblasts can and should: cause to occur a wide-ranging, systematic discussion of the basic questions of the development and improvement of Soviet literature; engage in fruitful discussion of individual works to assist the political and artistic growth of writers by means of comradely criticism and comradely explanation.
The Presidium of the governing board of the Union of Soviet Writers resolves:
1. To discuss the incorrect line of the journal Novy Mir in questions of literature;
2. To relieve comrade Tvardovsky A.T. from responsibilities as chief editor of the journal;
3. To name as chief editor of the journal Novy Mir comrade Simonov K.M;
4. To direct the secretariat of the governing board to, within a two-week period, develop and distribute for discussion by members of the Presidium recommendations for the radical improvement in the leadership of the press organs by the Presidium and secretariat of the Union of Soviet Writers of the USSR;
5. To direct the secretariat of the board to adopt all measures for the more active participation of the press organs in the preparation for the Second All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers and the development of an extensive pre-Congress creative discussion on the basis of comradely criticism of the works of writers and comradely explanation;
6. To require the editorial boards of all press organs of the Union of Soviet Writers to restructure their activity so that it is based on the creative assistance and support of an active group (aktiv) of writers brought together by the journals. By regularly bringing together a writers aktiv of journals, it is possible to turn these meetings into a living platform for the discussion of new literary works and the most stirring common creative questions of the development of Soviet literature.
Translated by Eric Konkol
P.S.: Don't worry. Tvardovsky gets the job back again in 1958.
|
|
| Mini-Summaries | Encyclopedia of Soviet Writers | Soviet Literature Links | Site Search |
|
Subscribe to the SovLit.com Mailing List. Send e-mail with the word SUBSCRIBE in subject field to: sovlit-subscribe@yahoogroups.com |
