cut his hair ‘like Mendel’, then combed it ‘like Lysenko’, and now he would very much like to have a hairdo ‘like Mal'tsev’, but… he was already balding, with only a few strands of hair left. Still, that wasn’t important. What mattered was inner conviction.128
The result is incompetence and putting the interests of one’s career or of ‘one’s own’ clique before the interests of the task in hand. A character in Dudintsev’s novel formulates, before Parkinson, the principle of incompetence, and adheres to it in his life:
A man’s job should always be a little beyond his powers… And as soon as one began to be equal to the job, as soon as one had been praised once or twice — the thing to do was to move up into a region of fresh difficulties….129
Bureaucratic man’s lack of principle does not mean in the least that he is tolerant of other people’s ideas — quite the reverse. People with staunch principles scandalously obstruct the working of the bureaucratic machine; they hinder its ‘mobility’. Hence the bureaucrats’ hatred for all dissidents, a hatred which is essentially antisocial and antipopular. ‘It is impossible’, wrote Dudintsev, ‘to destroy those who think differently — they are needed, just as a conscience is needed.’130 The bureaucracy is hostile to all thought, to every idea, to any conscience:
Their aim is to stay put in their easy chairs, and to go on getting richer. But a discoverer of new things is serving the people. A discoverer always thinks differently, in any sphere of knowledge. Because he has found a new and shorter way, he rejects the old habitual one.131
Dudintsev’s book aroused interest out of all proportion to its artistic merits. 'Not By Bread Alone', writes the American scholar Joshua Rubenstein, ‘is not an elegantly written novel. The characterizations are crude, and the story takes predictable and not wholly convincing turns.’132 As regards the alleged ‘unconvincingness’ of the story one may disagree: the misadventures of the inventor who tries to overcome the bureaucratic barrier are described in a lifelike way. For the rest, however, Rubenstein is right: the book is far from perfect. From the artistic standpoint, the novel was, as Shatz puts it, ‘a peculiar mixture of conventional socialist realism and relatively penetrating criticism’.133 Dudintsev’s success was a succès de scandale, a political success. The right-wingers cried panic, which only increased the interest taken by the youth and the intelligentsia in this novel.
In December 1958 Literaturnaya Gazeta quoted with approval some dramatic utterances by various neo-Stalinists, such as: ‘The danger of revisionism… has touched literature with its dark wing’, or ‘the nihilistic wind from the West has also enlivened our own nihilists… They are slandering our Soviet way of life, sometimes with subtlety and sometimes crudely.’134 The ‘revisionists’ included Dudintsev, A. Yashin and others. The journal Teatr was also attacked. In that same year Pasternak published (abroad) his novel Doctor Zhivago. This was the first case of its kind for many years. There was reason to sound the alarm. Khrushchev himself showed irritation (as he often did) and spoke out against Dudintsev. ‘His book Not By Bread Alone,’ he said, ‘which reactionary forces abroad are now trying to use against us, contains tendentiously selected negative facts interpreted with an approach that is biased and unfriendly.’ That almost amounted to subverting the system. ‘This approach to the presentation of reality in works of literature and art is nothing short of a craving to misrepresent reality, as it were through a distorting mirror.’135
