Hence the special role played by art as a means of cognition and generalization. As I have already said, a work of art is less easy to censor. The specific feature of art lies precisely in the fact that its content is never on the surface: that it is not formulated but shaped. It is ‘encoded’ in artistic images. This is a law of creativity which has nothing in common with the censor’s rules, but that makes it all the easier, consciously or unconsciously, to get round those rules. The reader or the viewer draws his conclusions under the influence of the artistic whole. The censor can delete a phrase from a book about the history of the ‘Third World’, but it is much harder to correct a novel or a play. There may be nothing ‘seditious’ in any particular line. A work of art influences through its mood, its atmosphere, and here even the most skilful censor is helpless. As the saying goes, you can’t leave any words out of a song. This strange ability of some works of art to resist censorship was noticed as early as the nineteenth century. ‘La censure’, wrote Herzen, ‘est une toile d’araignée qui prend les petites mouches et que les grandes déchirent.’108
The censorship does not allow political conflicts to be directly depicted in art, but that does not mean that the artist is any the less politicized. Without wishing to, the censor does art a good service. For an idea to ‘get across’ it must be expressed in the most generalized form possible. Thoughts about society, a picture of our country’s life, must be presented to the reader as a story about one household, or to the viewer as a film about the work of one brigade. But this is a truly artistic task! The law of art proclaims that social and political conclusions have to be drawn at the level of high philosophical generalizations, for otherwise what we have is not art but, at best, illustrations to theoretical works. Well, the censor always keeps that law in mind. The state censorship has not only ruined our literature: as Sinyavsky observed, ‘up to a certain point it has also helped to make that literature more interesting.’109
We should not, however, see the censor as the artist’s friend. Bureaucratic restrictions cannot avoid constraining creative people. But the censorship is not confined to politics alone — its second level is the censorship of subjects. A former Soviet newspaper editor, L. Finkelshtein, has spoken in the West of ‘a 300-page index of banned subjects, known informally as the Talmud’.110 Glavlit takes its decisions on the basis of this list.
Western scholars are often puzzled as to why a certain work has been banned. After all, some things that are sharper politically have been published! Many speak of a bureaucratic lottery, explaining such phenomena by mere chance. As a rule, though, bans are well motivated. There is method in this madness.111 ‘In most cases,’ writes Claude Frioux, author of one of the best works on the Soviet intelligentsia published in the West, ‘these works do not contain direct attacks on the regime. But they contain evidence of those aspects of history and reality which the censorship does not allow to be mentioned.’112 As an example we can take the play The Sailor's Rest, by Alexander Galich, in which there was nothing anti-Soviet. The subject was the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis during the Second World War. For some time this had been a proscribed subject for writers, as the authorities considered that mention of such facts would arouse sympathy for the Jews and so hinder the pursuit of their anti-Semitic policy (restriction of access to institutions, to jobs, and so on). The play was banned. Galich became a dissident, and died in emigration.113
The censorship of subjects — or, more precisely, the index of forbidden subjects — decides what can and cannot be talked about. This ‘taboo’ often affects art more painfully than direct political censorship. But there is yet a third censorship — the censorship of form. The state declares that art must be accessible to the masses. Since the masses are unable — because they are not allowed — to express their views for themselves, the nomenklatura speaks on their behalf. In this way the aesthetic concepts of the ruling elite become the general norm. Accessibility to ‘the masses’ is in reality accessibility to the ruling circles, although it must be said that the artistic taste of the actual masses changes and develops rapidly, whereas the ruling statocracy shows bureaucratic conservatism in this sphere as well. This means that what is pursued in the guise of a struggle for ‘popularity’ in art is an anti-popular policy, a policy of imposing certain aesthetic norms and views on the people. Ilya Ehrenburg wrote of the bureaucrats that ‘the tastes of the pre-revolutionary petty bourgeoisie seemed to them to be the canons of beauty.’114 There is nothing surprising in that if we consider the petty-bourgeois origin of the present ruling elite. The stability of the statocracy’s artistic principles is also quite natural, for owing to its well-defined organizational structure and artificial selection (only ‘people of the same sort’ are accepted into the nomenklatura), the mentality of this class has changed a great deal less in forty years than the consciousness of society as a whole. This results in exacerbated conflict between the higher and lower orders, in the cultural sphere as well.
The bureaucracy has its own notion of ideal form and of accessibility — of what is more and what is less admissible, both for artists and for viewers or readers. Consequently, the creative intelligentsia (except for the bureaucrats’ servants who consciously work to please them) fight for their rights in constant conflict with the censorship of form. It is in this very sphere that the bitterest battles have been waged. In the post-Stalin period this censorship has weakened considerably, but this was achieved only after prolonged struggle.
In the Stalin era the attitude to art was totalitarian in the most precise sense of the word. Not only content and ideas but also style, form and artistic images were subjected to control. If an artist was allowed aesthetic independence, then he might later demand political independence as well. There could therefore be no concessions to creative individuality, or it would escape from control. As subsequent experience has shown, this attitude was, in its way (from the standpoint of the bureaucracy’s interests), the only correct one. ‘If we start from such premises,’ a Canadian scholar has rightly observed, ‘any policy which claims that a little artistic nonconformity does no harm to anybody appears foolish and suspicious.’115 The Stalinist bureaucracy’s endeavour to reduce art to politics, ignoring the specific character of artistic creativity, was capable of engendering only unartistic works. Theodor Adorno wrote, in his time, that essentially it was as unthinkable — or, rather, fruitless — for art to be devoted exclusively to problems of social and political struggle as for art to try to ignore that struggle. Artistic creativity can develop only ‘between the two poles of involvement and non-participation, inclining now to one pole, now to the other, but never coinciding with either’.116 The failure of the bureaucrats’ attempts to make the question of form a political question — and thereby to create a state literature which should be reliable in all respects and yet which should really be literature — proves the correctness of this idea a negativo. The statocracy was compelled increasingly to lift its control, allowing greater freedom for intellectual activity and retreating from Stalin’s totalitarian principles. But this process was slow and painful.
A peculiarity of totalitarian society is the existence of official ideals and norms applicable to every sphere of life. These ideals and norms are proclaimed by the ruling statocracy and guarded by the state, and deviation from them incurs sanctions. As Soviet society has evolved from the totalitarian to the authoritarian phase, ‘free zones’ have appeared where such norms and principles are absent. In these zones an opposition is formed. Most of these ‘free zones’ appeared after Stalin’s death, in everyday life and in art, because it was hardest to pursue a unified policy in these spheres. Stalin, incidentally, understood this; that was why he tried to submit these hard-to-control spheres as much as possible to the state. ‘The great leader’ was quite right, from his point of view, to distrust the intelligentsia. However, in the policy of the statocracy towards the intelligentsia there were always two closely interconnected aspects. On the one hand the intellectuals had to be made to serve the regime; on the other, their independence had to be undermined by all possible means.