Brezhnev, however, is still faced with the same dilemma Khrushchev had-how to adapt the party to its leadership role and keep its ideology relevant to Soviet society and the Communist movement. For a short period in 1965, when the leaders were most unsure of their directions, they seemed cautiously to seek the assistance of the intellectuals in taking some moderate steps toward adapting the Soviet establishment to modern needs. However "scientific" their orientation has been since that time, the leaders have demonstrated that the party's

bias remains anti-intellectual, resistant to change, and distrustful of the artist. One Soviet intellectual who lived through both the 1953-54 and 1964-65 "thaws," and who understood clearly this persistent inflexibility of the party leadership, has suggested that what the Soviet Union obviously needs is frequent leadership changes, so that during the confusing interregna, the management of the country can be left to those who know what must be done and the intellectuals can benefit from the relative freedom that flows from disorientation at the top.

"Slavophilism" takes many forms in intellectual Russia. One extreme form is represented by the Smogisti, who have stated in their manifesto: "Contemporary art is in a cul-de-sac and cannot turn back. It is steeped in the fumes of foreign literature and art and has become epigonic. National art is dead, we should and must resurrect it." This quotation was published in the context of an attack on the Smogisti in Komsomolskaia pravda (June 20, 1965); it is rare, however, for such strongly nationalistic cultural views to get into print. Thus the publication of the journals of the young painter Ilia Glazunov in the Komsomol journal, Molodaia gvardiia, was greeted with some amazement. Glazunov, by no means a follower of the Smogisti, is, nonetheless, deeply nationalistic about Russian art. In the past he found much in common with the "modern liberals," but more recently he has become the favorite "Slavophile" of certain elements in the Komsomol and government. Although he is anathema to the "dogmatists" who control the Academy of Fine Arts and the Union of Artists, his journals have been used by the Komsomol to build up the circulation of Molodaia gvardiia. Herewith some of his views:

As is known, Peter opened just a window, not a door, on the West so that Russians could look at life in Europe and study it, and from students become teachers. But unfortunately, by throwing off their national tunics, many Russians broke connections with their homeland. Cutting off their beards, they lost instead their Russian individuality.

-Molodaia gvardiia, No. 10, 1965, p. 121.

The history of Russian culture recalls moments of the highest ascent of national self-consciousness, and each time-whether during the heroic and difficult period of breaking loose from the Mongol yoke, or during the glorious period of "Moscow-the Third Rome," or at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Century, in the years of tension and the great flowering of national creative thought-each time Russia reinterpreted anew her great significance in world culture . . . as the successor of the great cultural heritage of Byzantium, the guardian of the achievements of the ancient world.

Stalin's heirs, however, instead of "surrounding his death with miracles" and having him rise to watch over Russia from a Celestial Kremlin, as

Tertz suggested they should have done, complained

rather of a "more than natural stench," like that surrounding Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov. The result was that the Socialist Realist "engineers of human souls" felt shaken to the foundations of their science and began to look timidly and apprehensively at these foundations, not so much with a view to questioning the principles of

1 New York, Pantheon Books, 1960, p. 93.

Mr. Monas, Professor of History at the University of Rochester (New York), is currently a Fulbright Visiting Professor at the Hebrew University, Jeru salem, Israel. He is the author of Third Section: Police and Society in Russia under Nicholas I (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1961).

their construction as with a kind of frightened and ever-widening question mark as to whether they might still be made to hold. To a rather extraordinary degree, these foundations have nevertheless held, if not "firm" at least more or less in place, though everything that rests on them has shiftedand, I would be tempted to say, has shifted radically.

The Human Unconscious and

Party Consciousness

As long as Socialist Realism retained the force and authenticity of its religious purpose, Tertz argued, the fact that its basic characteristics combined to form a "loathsome literary salad," an eclectic mish-mash of contradictions, might be swallowed even with a certain relish. The positive hero who "logically tends toward the pattern, the allegory" might be presented in the context of psychological analysis of character; elevated style, declamation, grandly rhetorical speeches mixed with prosaic descriptions of everyday life, idealization mixed with photographic realism. But only the strength of a naive faith could serve as the universal solvent, as it did in the Christian Middle Ages, and help the salad slide down--if not smoothly, at least down.

Once, however, the order of the overall system had been violated-as it was with the exposures

that followed upon Stalin's death-the eclecticism characteristic of Socialist Realism became too apparent; the center could not hold, and things fell apart. Tertz suggested as best under the circumstances not a return to the hyperbolism, the Socialist Surrealism, of Maiakovski, but rather what he called a "phantasmagoric art, with hypotheses instead of a purpose"-an art characterized by irony, ambiguity, and a seeking after meaning. The assumption that “meaning" and "purpose" are given and fixed must be honestly discarded as compromised. Instead, they must be sought where meanings ever lurk, in the depths of the unconscious; they must be wooed with conventions and hunted with snares so fashioned as to give words and images to meanings that rise from the unconscious.

Tertz's sometimes impressive, sometimes clumsy experimentalism is just such a wooing of the inchoate possibility of meaning that dwells in the human unconscious. All his themes have to do with "possession" or "revelation"-either the seizure of a human being by a powerful but unexpected psychic force, or the tearing away of a veil from the surface of things, an access of symbolic understanding, a "revelation." The body of his work gropes for a meaning not yet discovered but strongly hungered after.

What went on trial with Tertz and Arzhak a year ago, though it was never openly and explicitly arraigned, was the unconscious. The trial, beneath its preordained and apparently inflexible surface, did not proceed with the air of certainty and inexorability that it required. It seemed to breed contradictions: a supposedly open trial held in closed quarters, presided over by a judge (Smirnov) who had written widely on the importance of "socialist legality," yet who resolutely rejected the discussion of literary criteria in what seemed manifestly to be (if that is not a contradiction in terms!) a literary trial; the lack of direct news, where only a short time before Valeri Tarsis had been giving interviews to foreign correspondents in his apartment. All this and much else created a weird impression, as of some sleepwalker's ritual. The charge (under Article 70 of the Criminal Code) of carrying on anti-Soviet propaganda was manifestly absurd; yet the real charge of violating party controls, of failing even to consult (before publication abroad) with an official and "responsible" representative of the party, whether the editor or some other was suppressed, though it was constantly hinted at obliquely throughout the trial. Tertz did not even try, the prosecutor complained, to have his dangerous works printed in the USSR;

he wrote one way as Siniavski, and another way as Tertz."

In fact, the trial was an analogue of the old revolutionary argument between "spontaneity" and "consciousness," as immortalized in Lenin's What is to be Done?-that is, as between Lenin and Martov. Under what are, of course, completely different conditions, the argument goes on in all walks of life throughout the Communist camp, but most poignantly and dramatically, most sharply focused and most easily understood with regard to literature. The cause of Socialist Realism is the cause of party consciousness.

During the trial itself, it was Tertz and Arzhak who kept constantly trying to introduce literary discussions and explanations, and the presiding judge who kept insisting that they were irrelevant. This left the prosecution and the witnesses for the prosecution free to refer to conventional artistic representations-the speech of a character in a short story, for example as literally the opinion of the author. Elsewhere, Socialist Realism has been defended in a more appropriate manner and more ably, and it is with these defenses, which are more interesting and more revealing than is generally acknowledged in the West, that I wish primarily

to deal.

The Foundations of a Dogma

First, however, it should be said that these defenses go back to the positions taken at the First Congress of the Writers' Union of the USSR in 1934, and it might therefore be appropriate briefly to review these. There were four major addresses at the Congress, delivered by Zhdanov, Gorky, Radek and Bukharin.3 In the light of what has happened since then, each has a peculiar interest.

Zhdanov's speech, if one bears in mind his later style, was singularly free of invective. Nevertheless, it contained in embryo the later position of "Zhdanovism," eloquently summed up in one sentence of the speech: "The key to the success of

2 See Max Hayward, "The Trial of Siniavski and Daniel," The New York Times Magazine, April 17, 1966; and A. Brumberg, "Traitors in the Dock," Problems of Communism, MarchApril 1966. A full transcript of the proceedings can be found in On Trial-The Soviet State versus "Abram Tertz" and "Nikolai Arzhak," translated, edited, and with an introduction by Max Hayward, New York, Harper and Row, 1966.

3 For the proceedings of the Congress, see Problems of Soviet Literature: Reports and Speeches at the First Soviet Writers' Congress, New York, 1934 (hereafter cited as Problems of Soviet Literature).

Soviet literature is to be sought for in the success of socialist construction." From here on, other "keys" become at best secondary. Even the phrase "socialist construction" needs to be interpreted in Bolshevik terms. Partisanship, partiinost, is the test of style, and not the other way around.

About the "technical” (i.e., secondary) achievements of Soviet literature, Zhdanov was quite modest. "The weaknesses of our literature," he explains, "are a reflection of the fact that consciousness lags behind economic life." Here, he feels, Soviet writers have much to learn from the West and from their own Russian past: "The bourgeoisie has squandered its literary heritage; it is our duty to gather it up carefully, to study it and, having critically assimilated it, to advance further." Throughout the Congress, this notion of technical imperfection and learning from the past and from the West is repeated respectfully over and over again.

Ten years earlier, the party line had at least held open the possibility of a classless art, an art that would contribute not to the formation of an organizing ideology (the "false consciousness" of Marx) but which might, ultimately at least, transcend ideology, as the purpose of the proletarian revolution was not to make out of the proletariat a new ruling class, but to transcend class society and to create for the first time a complete humanity. In any case, the most important thing about Zhdanov's speech was the fact that he, in his role as Party Supervisor, was the one who made it, signifying that the party had decided to organize the writers, to take control, to "collectivize" them. The "engineers of human souls" were themselves to be engineered, and their science was provided in a handy manual which underwent rapid changes of edition. Their job was to adapt and to apply. Genres, styles, form were (as Zhdanov put it) their "weapons," their tools, their instruments."

wise, this European literature was merely an affair of "introspection and arbitrary thought," restricted, solitary, "detached from life"-obsessed with the notion of personality, with individualism. Gorky spoke of the need to study folk literature as a contrast to the above, to study its inherent power to organize labor and the power of words to give personality to a group." "Myth is beneficial,” he said, invoking a strangely flat conception of myth, “in that [by projecting an image of the desired, the possible] it tends to provoke a revolutionary attitude to reality, an attitude that changes the world in a practical way." "

7

Later, in response to the indignation of the German writer Wieland Herzfelde, Radek disclaimed any objection to artists' familiarizing themselves with Joyce's work. He did not even deny that Joyce was a great writer, but he did not think that the revolutionary artist should be directed "inwardly" at that time. "If it is a question of being able to present the typical in the individual," he added, "we do not need Joyce for that. As teachers, Balzac and Tolstoy are enough for us." It turns out that Radek's real objection to Joyce was not that he concerned himself with "the dung heap" of every

6 In Gorky's novel, Mother, the progress of the hero, Pavel Vlasov, from "spontaneous" revolt to "conscious" revolution is measured by the contrast between his first reacting to a threatened beating from his father by picking up a hammer and his first "speech" delivered to his mother. What he acquires in between is rhetoric, exhortatory language. Gorky wrote this novel in 1907 at Lenin's suggestion. Though by no means his best work, it is one of the perenially cited models of what a Socialist Realist novel should be.

7 Problems of Soviet Literature, p. 44.

8 Ibid., p. 158.

day life, as he had stated in his speech, but that Joyce tended to create a kind of “Chinese alphabet without commas so that it cannot reach the masses of the people."

T

he most interesting of the speeches, from our present point of view, was that of Bukharin, for he tried to present Socialist Realism in such a way as not to exclude modernism-i.e., the search for new channels to the unconscious. He spoke of realism as a realism of effect, which might invoke the boldest metaphorical devices, the irrational, disjunction, cacophony as well as harmony. He did not specify "effect on whom," but it seems clear that he did not have "the masses" exclusively in mind, for he found high words of praise for Boris Pasternak as the most original of contemporary Russian poets. He spoke of unity as a unity of aim, not of means; and, almost as though he were already apprehensive, he pointed to the absurdity of ordering literature according to plan and the futility of prohibitive measures. He saw Socialist Realism as a point of view rather than a style, and as such he extolled it. It is striking, however, that even Bukharin, who would seem all along (through the rather heavy pedantry of his own style) to have been warning against the future and calling out from under his breath that there were lurking dangers, saw "point of view" in literature as, fundamentally, the translation of a philosophic system into literary terms, so that Zola equals Comtean positivism, symbolism equals V. Soloviev plus Kant, and Socialist Realism equals dialectical materialism. On the other hand, Bukharin insisted very strongly that no area of experience should be excluded: "The new man that is being born and the whole world of his emotions, including even 'new erotics,' if one may so express it, are therefore the province of socialist art." Bukharin's attitude toward the unconscious was that it changes with consciousness; it is not there merely to be repressed, but must be studied and wooed in its shifting aspects.

The First Writers' Congress of 1934 may thus be seen, from the point of view of literary history, as an extremely momentous event. The principles of Socialist Realism received their first public and official expression there, and all subsequent controversies refer back to it, either explicitly or implicitly.

Zhdanov, Gorky and Radek-though with far greater diffidence toward literary values than was customary later, it is true-outlined the essentials of the Stalinist position in literature, including its essential confusion.10 Bukharin expressed a position closer to the present-day "pro-modernists," but in a heavy and pedantic manner that obscured the differences between him and his colleagues. He spoke as a representative of the party and could hardly have called its authority in literary matters into question. Moreover, since he seemed to take it for granted that style and ideology were intimately related, and since a Bolshevik could hardly be expected to advocate the primacy of style over ideology, there were distinct limits even to Bukharin's latitudinarianism. Nevertheless, he was clearly pleading for greater tolerance toward stylistic experimentation and the depiction of new modes

* Ibid., p. 255. (For a recent interpretation of the "new man," see V. Yermilov (ed.), Literatura i novyi chelovek, Moscow, 1963.)

10 The best account of this "Mongol yoke," its tensions and controversies, and the beginnings of its demise, is to be found in Harold Swayze, Political Control of Literature in the USSR, 1946-1959, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1962.