This sort of thing was called "socialist realism" and nowadays it is universally mocked. But as is often the case with irony, mockery here considerably subtracts from one's ability to grasp how it was possible for a literature to plummet, in less than fifty years, from Dostoevsky to the likes of Bubennov or Pavlenko. Was this dive a direct consequence of a new social order, of a national upheaval that overnight reduced people's mental operation to the level where the consumption of garbage became instinctive? (Enter and exeunt Western observers salivating over the Russians' proclivity to read books while riding public transportation. ) Or wasn't there perhaps some flaw in the very literature of the nineteenth century that precipitated that dive? Or was it simply a matter of ups and downs, of a vertical pendulum pertinent to the spiritual climate of any nation? And is it legitimate to ask such questions anyway?
It is legitimate, and especially in a country with an authoritarian past and totalitarian present. For unlike the subconscious, the superego is expected to be vocal. To be sure, the national upheaval that took place in Russia in this century has no parallel in the history of Christendom. Similarly, its reductive effect on the human psyche was unique enough to enable the rulers to talk about a "new society" and a "new type of man." But then that was precisely the goal of the whole enterprise: to uproot the species spiritually to the point of no return; for how else can you build a genuinely new socicty? You start neither with the foundation nor with the roof: you start by making new bricks.
What took place, in other words, was an unprecedented anthropological tragedy, a genetic backslide whose net result is a drastic reduction of human potential. To quibble about it, to use political-science mumbo-jumbo here is misleading and unnecessary. Tragedy is history's chosen genre. Had it not been for literature's own resilience, we wouldn't have known any other. In fact, it is an act of self- preservation on the part of prose to produce a comedy or a roman a clef. Yet such was the magnitude of what happened in Russia in this century that all the genres available to prose were, and still are, in one way or another, shot through with this tragedy's mesmerizing presence. No matter which way one turns, one catches the Gorgon-like stare of history.
For literature, unlike its audience, this is both good and bad. The good part comes from the fact that tragedy provides a work of literature with a greater than usual substance and expands its readership by appealing to morbid curiosity. The bad part is that tragedy confines the writer's imagination very much to itself. For tragedy is essentially a didactic enterprise and as such it's stylistically limiting. Personal, let alone national, drama reduces, indeed negates, a writer's ability to achieve the aesthetic detachment imperative for a lasting work of art. The gravity of the matter simply cancels the desire for stylistic endeavor. Narrating a tale of mass extermination, one's not terribly keen to unleash the stream of consciousness; and rightly so. However attractive such discretion is, one's soul profits from it more than does one's paper.
On paper, such display of scruples pushes a work of fiction toward the genre of biography, this last bastion of realism (which explains this genre's popularity far more than the uniqueness of its subjects). In the end, every tragedy is a biographical event, one way or another. As such, it tends to exacerbate the Aristotelian art-to-life proximity, to the point of reducing it to a synonym. The common view of prose as being made in the likeness of speech doesn't help matters much either. The sad truth about this equating art to life is that it's always done at the expense of art. Had a tragic experience been a guarantee of a masterpiece, readers would be a dismal minority vis-a-vis illustrious multitudes inhabiting ruined and freshly erected pantheons. Were ethics and aesthetics synonymous, literature would be the province of cherubs, not of mortals. Luckily, though, it's the other way around: cherubs, in all likelihood, wouldn't bother inventing the stream of consciousness, being more interested in the steam of it.
For prose is, apart from anything, an artifice, a bag of tricks. As artifice, it has its o^ pedigree, its own dynamics, its own laws, and its own logic. Perhaps more than ever, this sort of thing has been made apparent by the endeavors of modernism, whose standards play a great role in today's assessment of the work of the writer. For modernism is but a logical consequence—compression and concision—of things classical. (And this is why one is hesitant to add to the list of modernism's properties its own ethics. This is also why it's not altogether futile to ask history those questions. For, contrary to popular belief, history answers: by means of today, of the present; and that's what perhaps is the present's main charm, if not its sole justification.) At any rate, if these standards of modernism have any psychological significance, it is that the degree of their mastery indicates the degree of a writer's independence from his material or, more broadly, the degree of primacy of an individual over his own or his nation's predicament.
It can be argued, in other words, that stylistically at least, art has outlived tragedy, and, with it, so has the artist. That the issue to an artist is to tell the story not on its own but on his own terms. Because the artist stands for an individual, a hero of his own time: not of time past. His sensibility owes more to the aforesaid dynamics, logic, and laws of his artifice than to his actual historical experience, which is nearly always redundant. The artist's job vis-i-vis his society is to project, to offer this sensibility to the audience as perhaps the only available route of departure from the known, captive self. If art teaches men anything, it is to become like art: not like other men. Indeed, if there is a chance for men to become anything but victims or villains of their time, it lies in their prompt response to those last two lines from Rilke's "Torso of Apollo" that say:
. . . this torso shouts at you with its every muscle:
"Do change your life!"
And this is precisely where the Russian prose of this century fails. Hypnotized by the scope of the tragedy that befell the nation, it keeps scratching its wounds, unable to transcend the experience either philosophically or stylistically. No matter how devastating one's indictment of the political system may be, its delivery always comes wrapped in the sprawling cadences of fin de siecle religious humanist rhetoric. No matter how poisonously sarcastic one gets, the target of such sarcasm is always externaclass="underline" the system and the powers-that-be. The human being is always extolled, his innate goodness is always regarded as the guarantee of the ultimate defeat of evil. Resignation is always a virtue and a welcome subject, if only because of the infinity of its examples.
In the age that read Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Musil, Svevo, Faulkner, Beckett, etc., it's precisely these characteristics that make a yawning and disdainful Russian grab a detective novel or a book by a foreign author: a Czech, a Pole, a Hungarian, an Englishman, an Indian. Yet these same characteristics gratify many a Western literary pundit bewailing the sorry state of the novel in his own language and darkly or transparently hinting at the aspects of suffering beneficial to the art of letters. It may sound like a paradox, but, for a variety of reasons—chief of which is the low cultural diet on which the nation has been kept for more than half a century—the reading tastes of the Russian public are far less conservative than those of the spokesmen for their Western counterparts. For the latter, oversaturated presumably with modernist detachment, experimentation, absurdity, and so forth, the Russian prose of this century, especially that of the postwar period, is a respite, a breather, and they rave about and expand on the subject of the Russian soul, of the traditional values of Russian fiction, of the surviving legacy of the nineteenth century's religious humanism and all the good that it brought to Russian letters, of—should I quote—the severe spirit of Russian Orthodoxy. (As opposed, no doubt, to the laxness of Roman Catholicism.)