Tvardovsky was later to suffer a good deal for that article and was even temporarily removed from the editorship of the journal. The article had been published by I. Sats in the absence of the editor-in-chief, and it was approved by Tvardovsky only post facto. Like many others he was not yet anti-Stalinist; his position was undefined. New ideas made their way into literature by degrees, casually or accidentally, so to speak. But a logical historical tendency was cutting a road for itself by way of these ‘chance cases’.
In the first place, Pomerantsev directed attention to the almost complete absence of truth and sincerity in the literature of the Stalin period. ‘Insincerity does not necessarily mean lying’,37 he wrote. It meant everything artificial, contrived, made up and not born in the creative process, not achieved through suffering. Writers had not been speaking their own thoughts — they had been, as it were, making statements ‘in the name and under the instructions of’. Genuine art is not only preaching, it is confession.
The simple idea that a writer has the right to speak in his own name and set forth his own thoughts became the subject of a most impassioned discussion during the period of liberalization, immediately after Pomerantsev’s article appeared. Such a principle, it became clear, subverted the very foundations of the system of ‘socialist realism’, but precisely this fact that ‘socialist realism’ had proved inimical to the elementary laws of art said a great deal. When, later, the Stalinists reacted against Pomerantsev and his followers, they revealed once more their hostility to culture in general — to any culture at all.
Pomerantsev called for an end to the prettifying of reality:
Life is embellished in a dozen different ways, and not always deliberately. These ways are so firmly established that some people employ them almost unconsciously: they have become, so to speak, a style of writing.38
These ways amounted, briefly, to the pretence, in the first place, of allround well-being. In a period when the whole country was going hungry, films were made such as Kuban Cossacks, Tales of the Siberian Land, and so on, ‘in which people were seen banqueting on plentiful and tasty food, whole collective farms of them.’39 Another device that was used was elimination. ‘Nothing’ was added to life, but instead all unpleasantness was removed. A third way was the selecting of ‘safe’, serene subjects. The heroes of the socialist-realist novel were typical one-dimensional people such as the bureaucrats wanted everyone to resemble: ‘Their very dreams were always consistent. Ordinary chaotic dreams were out of the question for them.’40
It is interesting that Pomerantsev, whom we must assume to have been perfectly sincere, spoke out at the same time for ‘Party truth’, against ‘subjectivism’, and saw his article as merely giving support from below to the official self-criticism which some groups in the leadership needed to initiate in the course of their struggle for power. The subsequent charges against Pomerantsev, accusing him of being almost an enemy of the Party and the regime, were absolutely false. In fact, Pomerantsev and the other liberal intellectuals of the Khrushchev period regarded themselves as supporters of the system, and hoped merely to promote its evolution towards greater democracy. The fact that Stalinism was being criticized from above filled them with many hopes and illusions.
At the same time, Pomerantsev attacked quite sharply the bureaucrats’ policy in the sphere of literature and the established institutions in that sphere. He criticized the editorial and publishing apparatus of the Writers’ Union, but showed that responsibility for the crisis in art lay chiefly with the workers in that field themselves, who submitted to this apparatus:
As for the apparatus of the Writers’ Union, the ‘creative sections’ and the rest, what has all that got to do with me, as a reader? Things arc in a bad way in the Union? Well, change them. I’m only afraid that, in your Union, though everybody thinks the present system is bad, nobody knows what improvement should be made. And I don’t understand why this prevents you from writing interesting books. I’ve heard that Shakespeare did not belong to any union, yet he wrote pretty well.41
Some changes, said Pomerantsev, could already be observed, but these were by no means always for the better. Interest in the individual, which was being proclaimed officially with increasing frequency, sometimes implied a new form of ‘absence of conflict’: ‘Will not the importunate whispers of lovers prove irritating to me, even as hitherto I have been deafened by the sound of tractors?’42
The critics, too, received Pomerantsev’s attention. Their articles ought to have constituted a programme, but instead they provided only a list of facts — and that was true only of the best of them. There was also another breed of critic: ‘These are professional unmaskers, nit-pickers, exposers.’43 In any case, criticism was not fulfilling the most important task:
What is wanted is not the creation of literary Highnesses, not selecting for immortality, nor the passing of sentences without right of appeal, but study of the characteristic features of our writers’ creativity, their role in the progress of literature — and telling the truth about all this.44
In place of standardized and empty literature there should come a new sort — truthful, individual, variegated: ‘The writer will clarify life for us, and change it.’45 What was needed was to tell the truth, only the truth, nothing but the truth. Under conditions of liberalization the officials sometimes allow art to show the dark sides of life, but call for ‘a sense of proportion’. On that point Pomerantsev observes:
People who introduce ‘an element of the negative’ into their books do not deserve respect. One can, of course, find the equilibrium between ‘prettifying reality’ and ‘a gloomy picture’, but the very quest for that, the mere calculation, condemns a work to lack of artistic merit. That way of looking at things can produce compilations, but not writings, because it is not the viewpoint of art. When a writer takes to calculating what is in his novel — a third of this, a half of that, a quarter of the other — he is not giving his artistic heart to the work.46
In Pomerantsev’s view the literature of the Stalin era was bad primarily because the spirit of the age is not discernible in it. On that he was, of course, not altogether correct. It is precisely in the soulless socialist-realist novels and plays, in their lack of artistry and their monotony, that the ‘spirit’ of the Stalin era is best discernible. On the whole, though, Pomerantsev’s idea was quite correct. Literature can reflect the spirit of a new age, can feel the breath of the wind of freedom. The age of Stalin had passed away, and with that age its art. After 1953 one needed to write differently. ‘Only what is actual is lasting,’ said Pomerantsev, ‘but what is actual is not what is fleeting. True actuality does not fade with the passing of time.’47
I have dealt with Pomerantsev’s article in so much detail because it was undoubtedly the first manifesto of the post-Stalin liberal intelligentsia, and was seen as that by friends and foes alike. Mark Perakh wrote that Pomerantsev’s work also influenced the young people who, at the end of the 1950s, formed the first underground socialist groups.48