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Source: Problems of Communism, May 1963.
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
This book [1], in the best tradition of modern scholarship, is a careful and dispassionate study of how American literature has been treated by Russian critics since the Bolshevik revolution. Professor Brown, who teaches Slavic languages and literature at the University of Michigan, is conservative in his approach: he sticks closely to his texts and speculates only with reluctance. His method is to provide a series of exercises in ‘content analysis’ of the major Soviet writings on American literature, in the course of which he quotes liberally, perhaps a bit too liberally, from the critics, summarising their views with an evident desire to be fair, and finally discussing the political and other grounds for the Soviet judgements.
The opening chapter on the 1920s is the skimpiest in the book, but for understandable reasons: there was a certain measure of freedom for critical opinion in the Soviet Union until about 1927 and Professor Brown’s study deals primarily with the terrorism that followed. The remaining chapters are devoted to the several periods which can be conveniently located in Soviet cultural life, with especially detailed attention to the years from World War II until 1955 (quite the worst in Soviet literary history) and to the 1951–60 period, concerning which Professor Brown’s treatment is rich but necessarily inconclusive. Rounding out the book are chapters on Dos Passos, Sinclair, London, Lewis, Dreiser, Fast and Hemingway, all of them writers frequently discussed by Soviet critics.
The result, let it be said at once, is not exactly a fascinating book. Much of the data with which Professor Brown must deal is simply tiresome; he finds himself, in the name of research, forced to copy out a large amount of repetitive nonsense and empty sloganeering. A good part of this material cannot even be regarded as the sincere opinion of ill-equipped or over-zealous critics, since it is precisely the excesses of bad but honest work that are missing from Soviet criticism. And almost all of it is drearily predictable. Any literate person must know what the author demonstrates at studious length: that in the USSR literary criticism is at the service, more often the mercy, of a dictatorial regime, reflecting not merely its formal Weltanschauung – which might not be so crippling – but also its immediate political needs and even the whims of its rulers – which certainly is crippling.
Distinguished criticism can be written from almost any world-view, or from a mere eclectic release of personal tastes. Distinguished criticism has been and will be written from a Marxist point of view. One can even imagine that distinguished, or at lease competent, criticism might be written from within the limits of the official Soviet state ideology – one can imagine it, that is, provided the critics had merely to conform to a general position and were free to express personal views concerning style, content and form. But what besets Soviet criticism is something far more oppressive than mere censorship or ideological constriction; it is an effort on the part of the state, perhaps without historical precedent, to dictate the literary nature of literature on behalf of non-literary ends.
It seems to me a serious error to suppose, as do certain scholars, that ‘socialist realism’ is an authentic critical doctrine, to be treated more or less in the way one might treat Freudian or Marxist or formalist or mythic criticism. All of these critical approaches, no matter how well or ill they are used, can be applied with seriousness, tact, disinterestedness and intellectual freedom. The nebulous and threadbare formula of ‘socialist realism’, however, has its origins so completely in the dictates of state power (as well as in the provincial conceit of party bureaucrats) that it can hardly be understood except as an elastic cover for whatever the momentary needs of the dictatorship may be. It has not undergone any internal development as a body of critical thought; its history is inseparable from the history of political turns during the Salin and post-Stalin dictatorships; and so long as it remains the official state doctrine, it insures the prevalence of non- or anti-criticism. To understand ‘socialist realism’ one has to know something about the nature of totalitarian society, but almost nothing about the methods of literary criticism. That there has nevertheless been a certain amount of genuine criticism written in Russia these past few decades does not threaten this assertion: it merely indicates that no system of thought control can be total.
Now, the consequence of all this for Professor Brown’s study is that large parts of it make pretty dull reading. The more evidence he offers, the less we need; for it becomes entirely clear that insofar as he is dealing with official dogma and sanctioned judgement there can be none of that surprise or freshness which we expect from criticism. That the Soviet critics praised the early Dos Passos and denounced the later one; that they attacked Howard Fast after a certain date with the vigour they had previously praised him; that they ignored shameful aspects of Dreiser’s career because he had announced himself a Communist – all this we have known all along. And if it be said that the virtue of positive scholarship is to demonstrate with overwhelming detail what we merely suspect we know, then it must be remarked, in turn, that Professor Brown has seized upon a subject in which the beginning of value, to say nothing of interest, consists in a willingness to speculate.
One premise for such speculation, I believe, must be that many of the Soviet critics are quite as intelligent, learned and sensitive as their Western counterparts, and given their problems of intellectual survival, probably a good deal more shrewd. Nonetheless, they are engaged in an activity that is radically different from, while yet significantly related to, what we understand by literary criticism. Professor Brown reports a fascinating discussion among Soviet critics, held in the mid-1930s about the techniques of Dos Passos’ USA. The critic Anna Yelstratova writes about Dos Passos’ Newsreel device that it is ‘the most progressive, most revolutionary link of his creative method as a whole, permitting him to approach ... a genuine example of revolutionary realism in literature’. But the critics Korneli Zelinski and P. Pavlenko declare that ‘the stenographs of newspapers and everyday life ... involuntarily recall the empirical method of Joyce, who wants to produce an inventor of the world, like a sheriff or agent of justice to the pursuit of his legal duties. This is not ours, this is the bourgeois approach to things.’
On the face of it, this dispute is close to absurdity, for as Professor Brown remarks, literary techniques cannot in themselves be considered progressive or reactionary. But I am persuaded, though I cannot prove it, that in its original context this discussion was probably not absurd and that it referred to problems decidedly important for Russian writers and readers. Some unspoken difference was ‘really’ at stake in this discussion, probably going beyond the immediate matter of Dos Passos’ technique. Perhaps it is unfair to ask Professor Brown to tell us what that difference was; perhaps no one as yet can tell us; but one wishes, at least, that he were less ready to copy out such extracts as if they made sense in their own right and were more prepared to suggest that they must be dissolved in a solution of analysis. What is needed here is an expert and controlled speculation, something that scholars of Soviet cultural life cannot afford to reject even as they recognise all the risks it involves.
We need such speculation because literary criticism in the Soviet Union constitutes a kind of double language – except, of course, when written by the sheerest dolts or hacks, and Professor Brown’s citations make it clear that at least a reasonable minority of the critics are more than that. Let us assume a Soviet critic has to review a novel by an American writer of vaguely ‘progressive’ tendencies, or at least a writer not regarded as an open enemy: he searches for aspects of the writer’s political ‘tendency’ that can be praised, he notes the way in which the writer falls short of ideological correctness. So far, standard practice: it could be done by a machine. But whether consciously or not, the critic then finds himself wanting to suggest a little bit more; he wants to touch upon something that cannot be communicated through official phrases; he wants, that is, to weave a few strands of critical perception, in mild colours, through his essay or review. He communicates through bits and pieces of understatement, and the experienced Soviet reader probably learns to look for these phrases in between the official passages.
If my sense of what happens in a totalitarian country like the Soviet Union is correct, and recent testimony indicates that it may be, then it forces upon a scholar writing a book such as Professor Brown’s the dangerous necessity of confronting certain questions. What does this Soviet critic ‘really’ think? – by which one means not that his private feelings are in full conflict with his public role or that he is a principled opponent of Communism, but that he writes from a state of tension. Are there underground strains of sensibility beneath the crusts of his official rhetoric? Is he trying to offer an occasional signal of personal valuation, visible perhaps only to an audience trained to receive them in a world of unfreedom? Only by assuming that such questions are meaningful can we take seriously the writings of the Soviet critics.
This problem of interpretation is far more difficult in regard to literary criticism than with political texts. In the political writings produced for the Soviet regime there is by now a standard set of references and euphemisms: for example, everyone knows that when Pravda says ‘Albania’ it means ‘China’. The conventions of obfuscation have been so well established that they serve, paradoxically, to help make clear what the Soviet political journalists are saying. But when a literary critic speaks of, say, ‘reality’ or ‘truth’, one cannot be nearly so certain of his meaning: it can range from the slogans of the moment to his personal sense of human existence. Because the conventions of obfuscation are not so well established, the result is greater obscurity and uncertainty. That is why literary criticism in the USSR is so ticklish an activity: the very fact that some slight margin of personal taste or freedom is allowed magnifies the dangers of the critic. One wishes, therefore, that the author, instead of quoting so many occasional passages, had reproduced a few reviews in full, so that it would be possible to study them with an eye towards detecting the relationships between statement and signal.
There are moments when Professor Brown does permit himself a certain latitude of speculation, and then his book becomes decidedly interesting. Why is Jack London so popular among Soviet readers?
They deeply respect the elemental vigour of his writing, his hearty temperament, and his love of violence and brute force. In fact, the Russian taste for stories of hardy adventure in remote and uncivilised territories was cultivated largely through his works. In the 1920s critics even complained that his books had produced in the Russian mind a distorted image of America – a land of mysterious adventure instead of a country of industrialisation and highly developed capitalist contradictions.
And what in Hemingway has so absorbed Soviet readers?
... his vigorous love of nature, sports, combat and adventure must appeal to the Russians. This clean, rugged outlook on life (despite its elements of bravado, of which the critics took due note) strikes the same chord in the Russian heart as do the stories of London. In the Russians there is a strong love of the primitive, and a comparable distaste for the sophisticated, which amounts at times to a puritanical attitude towards the ‘decadent’ trappings of civilisation. The unmistakable longing for a simpler, purer and more elemental life which rings in Hemingway’s stories must find response in this part of the Soviet reader’s nature.
The point is well-taken, despite Professor Brown’s tendency to construct an ideal Soviet reader who has never been exposed to Russian symbolist or decadent poetry. One might add that the strong distaste for official lying in the Western world, which runs through Hemingway’s earlier work, must strike chords of response among Soviet readers who do not find it very difficult to make their own applications. In any case, it is passages such as these which provide moments of light in Professor Brown’s study, and one finds oneself, perhaps ungratefully, wishing for more of them.
1. Deming Brown, Soviet Attitudes Toward American Writing, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1962.
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