At the same time, despite the general critical re-evaluation, there was an effort to find in the past something beyond question — an authority, a principle, a direction on which one could rely in the struggle against Stalinism and for the renewal of spiritual life. The intelligentsia saw the exposures at the Twentieth Congress as proof that there were healthy forces in the system; that it was not in itself to be blamed; that its primordial basis was sound. The task was to get back from the Stalinist distortion of principles to the principles themselves. The decisions of the Congress constituted a return to Lenin, and a similar rebirth of principles could be observed in the sphere of art. Moreover this was conceived, by those who participated in it, as a single process. ‘Such was the time, the time of the Twentieth Congress…’ O. Yefremov, the founder of the Contemporary Theatre, recalled later. ‘It could not fail to affect art.’113 And so a discussion began in the theatrical world concerning Stanislavsky’s system, which until then had been regarded as obligatory upon everyone. Stanislavsky’s pupil M.O. Knebel' wrote in those days:
they inculcated Stanislavsky’s ideas in mechanical fashion, using his prestige to suppress dissident artists who were trying to go their own way… At that time the name of Stanislavsky served as the only password for admission to the camp of the ‘orthodox’ realists, and so everybody without exception swore by that name, including those who in their hearts had no faith in it.114
And now, after the Twentieth Congress, actors, producers and especially theoreticians saw their task as returning from the dogmatic, scholastic ‘Stanislavsky’ to the real Stanislavsky. Knebel' wrote:
The shadow of one phenomenon fell upon another, and at once amateurs were found who put the blame for everything on Stanislavsky. But, of course, the founders of the Moscow Art Theatre were in no way responsible for the fact that, in later years, dramatic art developed on worse lines than we should have wished. There were other reasons for that — they were recorded in the decisions of the Twentieth Congress, we know them, and we are fighting against everything that hinders our art from developing and growing. Can it be said that Stanislavsky was responsible for ‘conflictlessness’ in art, the prettifying of reality, the reign of half-truth? Can we blame Stanislavsky for our timidity, for the fact that, for a time, we lost the spirit of discovery and ceased to approach his system in a creative way? No, in my view neither Stanislavsky nor Nemirovich-Danchenko has anything whatsoever to do with that!115
N. Krymova, who quickly became one of the theoreticians of the new generation of the intelligentsia, called upon them, in her dissertation, not to rest content with ‘using the terms of the system and making general appeals to truth and experience’.116
An endeavour to get back to genuine realism was the basic programme of the Contemporary Theatre, and these ideas also inspired A. Efros. In its turn, V. Yu. Lyubimov’s theatre attempted to ‘throw a bridge across’ to Brecht and the dramatic ideas of the twenties, which had been hushed up in the period of Stalin’s ‘socialist realism’. But this was not just a renewal of art, it was also a political struggle, and people wrote and spoke of that fact almost openly. ‘The Contemporary Theatre’, wrote Kardin, ‘was born in the year of the Twentieth Party Congress, and, in their avoidance of the high-flown, its actors called themselves “children of ’56”.’117 The young Contemporary Theatre, and, later, Lyubimov’s theatre on the Taganka carried out a real revolution in the field of drama, and this revolution in artistic form would have been impossible if the artists of the new generation had not based themselves also on new social ideas, a new world-view. The famous Leningrad producer G. Tovstonogov, who emerged in this period, emphasized that
the ideological content of a work, its civic spirit, cannot be ‘one problem among others’ for the artist. It is the basis, the premiss — here the work of art either begins or does not begin. One can possess refined technique and even talent and yet not be an artist, for if a person is not sensitive, with the keenness of a perfect barometer, to the pulse of life, the breathing of the age, his creation will be, all in all, an intellectual trick, a game of fantasy and nothing more.118
The renewal of social ideas and the renewal of artistic forms have always been closely connected, and the ‘children of ’56’ understood that connection.
Desire to tell the truth implies hatred of those who defend lying. For people who think like this, moral and political principles are inseparable. The one implies the other — more: each is the other. There is political significance in the fight for the artist’s creative individuality, his right to speak for himself. These elementary truths were struggling to break through. When B. Runin said that ‘self-expression by the artist is the necessary precondition for any creative work’,119 the right-wingers responded by practically accusing him of an attempt to subvert the Soviet order. Since he had referred to the views of Marx and Lenin, they charged him with distorting those views. So the battle went. However, the Left conquered one position after another.
As a result, the change effected in the type of thinking on artistic questions led to political conclusions and compelled people to take up the position which later, in the seventies, came to be called ‘dissidence’. The counterposing of ‘idea’ and ‘reality’ was only the first step. It was not hard to see that the bureaucracy’s practice contradicted the theory which they claimed to be correct (whether Marx’s or Stanislavsky’s), but it still had to be understood why and how this ‘false practice’ had developed, what its sources and laws were, and what was the nature of those who carried it out. So it could be said that thinking Russia passed from an attitude of rejection, albeit by a long and difficult process, to analytical criticism.
In December 1956 K. Simonov, who took over the editorship of Novy Mir after Tvardovsky’s dismissal, published ‘Literary Notes’, in which he called for an investigation of the nature of Stalinism:
We cannot define all the influence that the cult of personality exercised upon literature by means of a formula that fits into a single phrase. We need to examine, by joint effort, just how the cult of personality affected literature and, concretely, how that effect was expressed. Unless mistakes are analysed it is hard to correct them.
It is not a matter of repentance, of purging oneself of ‘sins’, or of casting blame off one’s own back on to others. The point is that, without such analysis, all our future work will be made difficult. Without it we cannot write a truthful history of literature, nor is genuine literary criticism conceivable. Such analysis is needed by all writers. Every one of them, when working on new books and remembering the past of literature, evaluating his own former work, is undertaking analysis of this sort on his own account. But would it not be more useful to carry out this analysis, which is going on anyway, not separately but collectively?120
Analysis of literature is only part of an analysis of society.121 It is, of course, good to criticize outlived aesthetic norms: ‘But, we ask ourselves, what can be changed in reality, and not just in words, unless we have clarified the real situation in which these necessary changes have to be made?’ Finally, our analysis of society must be objective and truthful, otherwise the new art will create nothing of value: ‘when talent becomes entangled with falsehood, it is impoverished.’122 Simonov himself tried to appraise Stalinism in his work The Lessons of History and the Writer's Duty, but this was not published. Thus the need for collective endeavour was thrust upon the writers by the censorship: where one had not succeeded in ‘breaking through’, perhaps others might. To oppose the censorship apparatus a unified centre of literary endeavour was required.