Now, on the other hand, the immensely influential radical critics, who in spite of absolute monarchy managed to voice their revolutionary opinions and hopes in widely read periodicals—these radical critics who blossomed forth in the last years of Pushkin's short life, were also madly irritated by this man who instead of being a good servant of the people and of social endeavor wrote extremely subtle and extremely independent and extremely imaginative verse about all things on earth, the very variety of his interests somehow lessening the value of revolutionary intention that might be discerned in his casual, too casual, pokes at minor or major tyrants. The audacity of his versification was deplored as being an aristocratic adornment; his artistic aloofness was pronounced a social crime; mediocre writers but sound political thinkers dubbed Pushkin a shallow versificator. In the sixties and seventies famous critics, the idols of public opinion, called Pushkin a dunce, and emphatically proclaimed that a good pair of boots was far more important for the Russian people than all the Pushkins and Shakespeares in the world. In comparing the exact epithets used by the extreme radicals with those used by the extreme monarchists in regard to Russia's greatest poet, one is struck by their awful similarity.
Gogol's case in the late thirties and forties was somewhat different. First let me say that his play The Government Inspector and his novel Dead Souls are products of Gogol's own fancy, his private nightmares peopled with his own incomparable goblins. They are not and could not be a picture of the Russia of his time since, apart from other reasons, he hardly knew Russia; and indeed his failure to write a continuation of Dead Souls was due to his not possessing sufficient data and to the impossibility of using the little people of his fancy for a realistic work that would improve the morals of his country. But the radical critics perceived in the play and in the novel an indictment of bribery, of coarse living, of governmental iniquity, of slavery. A revolutionary intention was read into Gogol's works and he, a timorous law-abiding citizen with many influential friends in the conservative party, was so appalled at the things that had been found in his works that in his subsequent writings he endeavored to prove that the play and the novel, far from being revolutionary, had really conformed to religious tradition and to the mysticism which he later evolved. Dostoevski was banished and almost executed by the government in his youth for some indulgence in juvenile politics; but when afterwards he extolled in his writings the virtues of humility, submission, and suffering, he was murdered in print by the radical critics. And these same critics fiercely attacked Tolstoy for depicting what they called the romantic romps of titled ladies and gentlemen, while the church excommunicated him for his daring to evolve a faith of his own making.
14
Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature
These examples will I think suffice. It can be said without much exaggeration that almost all the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century went through this strange double purgatory.
Then the marvelous nineteenth century came to a close. Chekhov died in 1904, Tolstoy in 1910. There arose a new generation of writers, a final sunburst, a hectic flurry of talent. In these two decades just before the Revolution, modernism in prose, poetry, and painting flourished brilliantly. Andrey Bely, a precursor of James Joyce, Aleksandr Blok, the symbolist, and several other avant-garde poets appeared on the lighted stage. When, less than a year after the Liberal Revolution, the Bolshevik leaders overturned the Democratic regime of Kerenski and inaugurated their reign of terror, most Russian writers went abroad; some, as for example the futurist poet Mayakovski, remained. Foreign observers confused advanced literature with advanced politics, and this confusion was eagerly pounced upon, and promoted, and kept alive by Soviet propaganda abroad. Actually Lenin was in art a philistine, a bourgeois, and from the very start the Soviet government was laying the grounds for a primitive, regional, political, police-controlled, utterly conservative and conventional literature. The Soviet government, with admirable frankness very different from the sheepish, half-hearted, muddled attempts of the old administration, proclaimed that literature was a tool of the state; and for the last forty years this happy agreement between the poet and the policeman has been carried on most intelligently. Its result is the so-called Soviet literature, a literature conventionally bourgeois in its style and hopelessly monotonous in its meek interpretation of this or that governmental idea.
It is interesting to ponder the fact that there is no real difference between what the Western Fascists wanted of literature and what the Bolsheviks want. Let me quote: "The personality of the artist should develop freely and without restraint. One thing, however, we demand: acknowledgement of our creed." Thus spoke one of the big Nazis, Dr. Rosenberg, Minister of Culture in Hitler's Germany. Another quotation: "Every artist has the right to create freely; but we, Communists, must guide him according to plan." Thus spoke Lenin. Both of these are textual quotations, and their similitude would have been highly diverting had not the whole thing been so very sad.
"We guide your pens"—this, then, was the fundamental law laid down by the Communist party, and this was expected to produce "vital" literature. The round body of the law had delicate dialectical tentacles: the next step was to plan the writer's work as thoroughly as the economic system of the country, and this promised the writer what Communist officials called with a simper "an endless variety of themes" because every turn of the economic and political path implied a turn in literature: one day the lesson would be "factories"; the next, "farms"; then, "sabotage"; then, "the Red Army," and so on (what variety!); with the Soviet novelist puffing and panting and dashing about from model hospital to model mine or dam, always in mortal fear that if he were not nimble enough he might praise a Soviet decree or a Soviet hero that would both be abolished on the publication day of his book.
In the course of forty years of absolute domination the Soviet government has never once lost control of the arts. Every now and then the screw is eased for a moment, to see what will happen, and some mild concession toward individual self-expression is accorded; and foreign optimists acclaim the new book as a political protest, no matter how mediocre it is. We all know those bulky best-sellers All Quiet on the Don, Not by Bread Possessed, and Zed's Cabin —mountains of triteness, plateaus of platitudes, which are called "powerful" and "compelling" by foreign reviewers. But, alas, even if the Soviet writer does reach a level of literary art worthy of, say, an Upton Lewis—not to name any names—even so the dreary fact remains that the Soviet government, the most philistine organization on earth, cannot permit the individual quest, the creative courage, the new, the original, the difficult, the strange, to exist. And let us not be fooled by the natural extinction of elderly dictators. Not a jot changed in the philosophy of the state when Lenin was replaced by Stalin, and not a jot has changed now, with the rise of Krushchev, or Hrushchyov, or whatever his name is. Let me quote Hrushchyov on literature at a recent party reunion (June 1957). This is what he said: "Creative activity in the domain of literature and art must be penetrated with the spirit of struggle for communism, must imbue hearts with buoyancy, with the strength of convictions, must develop socialistic consciousness and group discipline." I love this group style, these rhetorical intonations, these didactic clauses, this snowballing journalese.