The Thinking Reed полностью

On the other hand, in the beginning, the inner logic of the development of dissent itself dictated this approach. The whole history of social thought confirms that people moralize before they start analysing. It is said that Khrushchev was inconsistent. That is undoubtedly true; but it would be wrong to see his waverings as mere concessions to external pressure from right-wing dogmatists. His policy fully corresponded to his own notion of what de-Stalinization ought to mean. From the outset he understood very well that its scope must be limited, and he defined the limits clearly enough. He drew near to those limits or else withdrew from them, depending on circumstances, but he could not and did not want to step over them. It was impossible to cast doubt on the basic institutions and principles of the state which had been inherited from Stalin — all that ensured the dominant position of the statocracy in society. Even after the Twentieth Congress he spoke out against ‘a sweeping denial of Stalin’s positive role’,100 and even after the Twenty-Second Congress he continued to say that ‘the Party pays credit to Stalin’s services’101 while periodically he reminded people that Stalin ‘did much that was beneficial for our country.’102 Although condemning the terrorist methods of the ‘leader and teacher’, he did not choose to condemn his actual policy.

The longer the period of reform went on, the clearer it became that what was being undertaken was no radical transformation but a ‘controlled modernization, reflected also in ideology’.103 At the beginning, however, the limits to liberalization were not yet obvious to the Lefts, if only because their attention was centred not so much on political as on artistic questions. It was necessary to ‘clear up the mess in our own home’, getting rid of the Stalinist stereotypes of pseudo-artistic thinking. Until he had shaken them off a writer would be simply unable to tell the truth, even if he wanted to. As Solzhenitsyn said, the socialist-realist dogma bound writers like a collective ‘solemn pledge to abstain from truth’.104 Consequently, a struggle was waged in the sphere of art for a new form, for a break in practice with the dogmas of ‘socialist realism’. But a new form implied also a new world-view. The place of dogmatic pseudo-realism had to be taken by truly realistic art. The principles of the new artistic creativity must be sincerity, actuality, return to the sources. The first two principles had already surfaced in Pomerantsev’s article, while the third began to play a special role after the Twentieth Congress.

The rehabilitation campaign that then began forced people to look at the past in a new light — to rethink it. It was in this period that the foundations of present-day Soviet literary criticism were laid. One of the first literary critics to proclaim the new principles guiding attitudes to art and reality, as early as the fifties, was Mark Shcheglov. Although he died young, he succeeded in seriously influencing many of his own generation (for example V. Lakshin, who later did much to ensure that Shcheglov was not unjustly forgotten). Shcheglov cast doubt upon authorities and principles which had until then been unshakeable. He subjected to critical examination the novel The Russian Forest, a ‘classic’ of ‘socialist realism’, by L. Leonov and revealed the mass of defects, the artificiality, the striving for effect and the lack of warmth in this work. Shcheglov wrote also about the ‘conflictlessness’ of the literary sketch in the Stalin period: