In reply to Nazism, a group of French intellectuals who had attended the Soviet writers’ congress—André Malraux, André Gide, Louis Aragon—decided to mount an International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, which was scheduled to open at the 3,000-seat Maison de Mutualité, in the Latin Quarter, on June 21, 1935, and run for five days. Around 250 invitations went out to writers in thirty-eight countries, including many political émigrés.97 Koltsov arrived early to assist in the organizing and deliver the secret financing (20,000 gold rubles). Thanks to Ehrenburg, Gide, and Malraux, Isaac Babel (who had once lived in Paris) and Boris Pasternak (whose poems were untranslated, but whose name was well known) got added as late as June 19. (They arrived late, in new suits specially sewn for them.) Gorky declined Stalin’s urgings to attend, citing poor health.98 About a week before the opening, outside a Paris café, André Breton encountered Ehrenburg—who was infamous for having denounced surrealism as “onanism, pederasty, exhibitionism, and even bestiality”—and smashed him in the face. Ehrenburg cut Breton from the speaker list.99
From the podium, Malraux declared that “the humanism we want to create . . . finds its expression in the line of thought running from Voltaire to Marx,” while Gide averred that “one can be profoundly internationalist while remaining profoundly French.” Aldous Huxley deplored the “endless Communist demagogy,” while E. M. Forster would write that he’d had “to hear the name of Karl Marx detonate again and again like a well-placed charge, and draw after it the falling masonry of applause.”100
During the congress, the leftist French writer, dramatist, and musicologist Romain Rolland traveled the other way—to the USSR, at Gorky’s invitation. After rounds of theater, cinema, and banquets, on June 28, he enjoyed a long audience in the Little Corner.101 Wispy, compulsive, puritanical, Rolland (b. 1866) had won the Nobel Prize in Literature “as a tribute to the lofty idealism of his literary production and to the sympathy and love of truth with which he has described different types of human beings.” His masterwork, a ten-volume novel cycle,
Rolland told Stalin that he saw him as the embodiment of the “new humanism.”103 He observed that Westerners shared the idealism inside the USSR but had trouble comprehending, for example, the news in the Soviet press that, as of April 7, 1935, criminal law was being applied to children twelve and up, and that minors could be executed. After letting Rolland speak for twenty minutes, Stalin requested permission to respond. “We had to pass this repressive law threatening the death penalty for child criminals, especially their instigators,” he answered. “In fact, we will not enforce this law. I hope that it will not be enforced. Naturally, publicly, we cannot admit this; the desired effect would be lost, the effect of intimidation.”104 The dictator deployed his customary flattery (“I am happy to chat with the greatest writer in the world”), but came across as genuinely enamored of the
On June 30, Rolland, a guest on the Mausoleum at a physical culture parade involving 127,000 participants, was taken aback by the idolatry of the “emperor”—including the airplanes writing Stalin’s name in the sky—but also by the dynamism of the young people of the revolutionary epoch. His surprise reflected reading about Soviet failures before his arrival. “The economic situation, it seems, is good,” he wrote in a letter from Moscow to a literary critic friend in France. “During the last year, the conditions of life have improved significantly. This gargantuan city, which now numbers four million inhabitants, is a waterfall of life, healthy, warm, well-ordered. Among this crowd of strong, mobile, well-nourished people, you and I would look like strangers from a famine land.”107