ON SINCERITY IN LITERATURE

by Vladimir Pomerantsev

 

It is difficult for writers working in a later place and age, where Stalinist controls over literature have passed (or at any rate taken on subtler and weaker forms) to appreciate the conditions under which Soviet literature and writers once existed.

Writers wrote only if authorized to do so by the state. Their writing was censored by the state, and their writing was published only at the directive of the state. The content of their work was entirely dictated by the current line in political ideology. Varying from the Party position meant, at best, the silence of non-publication. At worst? Torture, imprisonment, forced labor, death.

On Sincerity In Literature appeared in the December 1953 issue of the Soviet literary journal Novy Mir. Written by Vladimir Pomerantsev, a legal investigator, in the wake of Stalin's death, the article was the first explicit and direct assault on hypocrisy, mediocrity, and untruth in socialist realism.

Earlier, the publication of comments like Pomerantsev's could have resulted in the death of the writer and those publishing, disseminating, and even reading or hiding his work. Imprisonment in the Gulag would have been the other, not necessarily less fatal, option. And it might have done so in this case.

But Pomerantzev's and Novy Mir's courage and decision to test the oppressive conditions with an essay that dealt with it head on transformed the situation for writers and writing in Russia and throughout the Soviet sphere. His essay provoked a firestorm of controversy, but also marked the beginning of what came to be know as The Thaw in Soviet literature.

In honor of Mr. Pomerantsev and in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the beginnings of the restoration of Russian literature, Unreal City would like to publish several excerpts from Pomerantsev's historic essay.

 

 

SINCERITY

The degree of sincerity -- the directness of a work -- should be the first measure of its worth. Sincerity is the essential component of that mix of gifts we call talent. Sincerity distinguishes the author of a book or play from the impostor who merely presents a book or play. To assemble a dead book, all you need is cunning and experience. To create living work you need, first and foremost, sincerity.

Sincerity is absent not only in works forced to fit a mold. A mold is not the worst form of insincerity. That kind of work strips a book of its power and leaves us bored but it does not engender direct distrust of literature itself. That arises from a different type of insincerity, a lying that tries to varnish and fake reality itself.

Obvious methods of lying are quite naked and primitive. They bring a work of literature close to the original meaning of the word "novel" -- a synonym for pure invention.

There is a second method that is subtler. It doesn't set the table with jellied pork and roast goose; it removes the black bread. At least that's how it's done in one "industrial" novella. The author says nothing about the factory hostel and cafeteria, which were foul. He doesn't hang any earrings or brooches on anyone, but anything nasty is excluded and never mentioned.

The third method is the cleverest. One presents a subject in such a way that all the problems of the theme remain out of the field of view. The distortion here is arbitrary selection. Using this method, one novella was written about a prosecutor. The hero dedicates all his efforts to the reconciliation of a tiff between a couple of lovers. He even appears noble since he's not required to get involved in such matters.

However, crime, with which he is required to fight, just does not exist in the region.

You can't find fault with the author -- he has his own particular subject.

But all the same, the reader feels the lie.

***

Writers not only can but must cast off all methods, devices, and means of avoiding contradictory and difficult questions. The duty of a writer, having received a clear program for the advancement of our nation, is to help this program precisely by dealing with the difficult questions. Our literature needs builders, and not promoters. A promoter sings the praises of joy, but a builder works to create it. A writer… must never try to stifle problems. Rather, he should search for a solution to the problems of our complicated and very interesting time. Why do we need to present unreal idealizations when we are working to bring our ideal to reality?

***

The writer, like any living person, is not immune to incorrect thoughts, to tastes and opinions born in any given moment. Genuine sincerity is not automatically objective truth. Even the most subjective measure or transient thought can be sincere. But the sincerity that can lead to the truth of life… is not only a mood. It is greater. It encompasses the mind, the conscience, attitude… It demands an intensity which is not required by insincerity. Sincerity is always complex.

***

CONVERSATION WITH A MEDIOCRITY

Writers like these have many names, but you can't tell them apart or remember them. Their names are known to their building managers and their close friends but not to readers. They're as alike as candles or door locks. Reading their books is boring and tedious, as tedious as it would be to eat the same borscht and cutlets day after day in a empty cafeteria.

Their muddy books are depressingly monotonous! Stereotyped heroes, themes, beginnings, and endings. They're not books, but twins. Read two or three of them and you already know the next one. They are full of clichés. You'd think they were produced not by a man, but by an assembly line. The first leaves you bored, but by the third, you feel insulted. A man says of this book, "It's mine, I wrote it." But I say, "Yours? Just what in it is yours?"

We talk:

HE (insulted): How am I worse than the others, and the others better than me? Everything in my book is politically correct.

ME: So correct it's nothing but clichés! And clichés are always correct.

HE: You call my politically correct formulas platitudes?

ME: Your formulas? They're are yours at all. You copied them down, you didn't live them. You stole them, you didn't mastered them. Otherwise these formulas would have feeling. And feeling would have given you the means to artistically realize anything. But what's the point of talking to you about a plan, when all you have is a cheat?

HE: …And what was I supposed to come up with? I wasn't summing up an epoch, wandering through the centuries. I wasn't talking about peoples, revolutions, or wars. I was just describing one little village. Come on, what do you want?

ME: What right did you have to write about a village if it wasn't, for you, the center of the universe, didn't consume your every thought?

HE: Oh, this is too much! My book may not be so good, but your tone is ten times worse. And what absurd demands! I didn't intend to use my book to slip in among the ranks of geniuses. I set myself a modest, small task.

ME: But even in a modest task you don't automatically set out to avoid the honest and the difficult. You must seek it out for yourself, not run from it. You know how to write a book about the people in one little village? Write it so that the whole world would read it.

Yes, yes, don't raise your eyebrows in surprise. There are many books about peasants. If you're going to write another one about them, you have to do it in such a way that the new book is a new illumination of life, opens a new account. In other words, don't write a book unless you feel it is particularly needed, if you don't feel necessary, even inevitable in literature.

HE: So in your opinion, literature should consist only of geniuses?

ME: No. But your purpose should be great, your work should be broad, your treatment exhaustive, and your goals high. Otherwise, your book will come out not just ordinary, but hackneyed and gray. And dull books are harmful for our nation. I was in an agricultural region where in the last year seven people stopped using the library. When the librarian met a young fellow on the street and asked him why he stopped coming for books, he answered, "I already read three novels, and they're all the same thing." During the year, the library acquired 45 new users, which covered the loss. But the loss can never be removed from the writer's account.

Writers have to recognize that drab, similar books discredit literature.

Therefore, writers need a slogan: A bad book is worse than no book at all.

HE: It's all very easy to say. You yourself should try to write....

ME: We do try, if we are strongly drawn to it and care about it. We don't write without caring or feeling. Why is your work bereft of dramatic effect? Because you yourself didn't experience it. And why should you? The village didn't inspire you. The desire to fabricate a book led you to use it. When village life attracts writers to itself, when the problems of the village move them, then their books will attract and move readers.

A novel should illuminate life. But what you do is ride around choosing episodes, complications, phrases. Therefore, your subjects are not really subjects but pretexts, and the conflicts you've searched out are not conflicts at all. These are not conflicts, but only pre-arranged set-ups…

I always understand the purpose of this bit of dialogue, of that piece of scenery. All of your moves are clearly visible. And you set up everything at the beginning to make sure that there can be only one outcome. You smooth over every problem, even though you know that, in fact, they're not eliminated at all and remain alive and aching. That's what really irritates us readers.

The poverty of your composition, the standard nature of the plot, the premeditation of the scheme, the drabness, the muddiness -- all this leaves us indifferent. The all-purpose nature of your solution to every situation, achieved through deceitful rhetoric, irritates us. We're insulted by this deceitful method, reducing all ideas, problems, and situations to nothing. In every situation when boredom or bitterness arises in us, when our fates change and challenge us, what you give us? Empty, dry sentences. This is the cruelty of talentless people.

HE: Enough! Now it's your turn to listen to me. All right, let's say my works are dull. There's not a single new word in anything you've just said, either. Maybe I am a producer of standard material, but there are no fresh thoughts in your attacks either. Talk about dullness and over-simplification has become just as stereotyped and common as the dull books themselves. The critics have mastered cursing the production of standard after standard and lecture me. But they tell me to get out of the circle into which they themselves have pushed me!

You don't know the real cause of dullness in books. There is a lot you aren't aware of. When I exclaimed, "You should try to write yourself," I wasn't talking about the difficulties of creation, but about the conditions of being a writer. I have to write in conformity with the critics.

In their opinion, I'm always feeble-minded, I blunder in every attempt to take an independent step, I'm eternally in need of corrections and straightening-out. Well, they straightened me out so much that you are sickened by the result… There was nothing left for me to do but hide from these people behind a combine, a blast furnace, or a tractor.

…How could I not fear them? Reviews expressing opinions which would lead to living discussions were never written about me. On me, they only passed sentence. They either pat me on the head or slap me on the neck.

Publishers? They took their cues from the critics. They always reacted cautiously to me and my manuscripts. They were only interested in whether it would receive a pat or a slap. To combat their nervousness, I had to bring them a plain and featureless manuscript, so that there would be no wrinkles, stitches, patches, or flounces...so that it would be easier to iron....

I had only one publisher, "Soviet Writer"… So I had to make myself bland enough that "Soviet Writer" could find no "but" against me. It's not easy to squeeze yourself into the publisher's plans. There's not much room. In the official literary-artistic journals (there are a total of three in Moscow) their slots are already packed full, like a long-distance train. Chances of being published are small. You can't go from editor to editor. The only thing you can do is drive into the journal offices on a tractor. A tractor is powerful, growling, thundering, perhaps deafening.

You ask why didn't I appeal to the Union of Soviet Writers? I did appeal, but it got me nothing…

Do you really think that I willingly write this way our of my own preference? This rhetoric isn't me -- it's my opportunism, my lack of will, my weakness. I let those who advocated playing it safe do with me as they willed.

But calm down. The atmosphere in the editorial offices has begun to clear up… I'm thinking about real works. Wait a year or two and you'll see them.

ME: I'd like to believe it. But I don't.

I supposed that whereas the essence of an actor's art lies in concealing his own true personality, the essence of a writer's art lies in the opposite direction. I don't forgive your weakness. And I don't believe that only weakness and outside obstacles are to blame.

Why do you pour your bitterness onto others and not onto yourself? After all, you who wrote the books, not them! Perhaps the indignation you turn on other people is a safety valve with lets you avoid facing your internal dissatisfaction with yourself.

What would you do if there were no critics? Who would you blame for your bland and gutless works? Can't you admit that, in the final accounting, creativity is not determined by reviews or the Writers Union? It's determined by you.

Only a bad writer constantly accommodates himself to others. And though there are many sins on the souls of our critics, I don't believe that they gave you the direct order: "Write badly, write uninterestingly!"

Has an improper situation arisen in the Union? Well, change it. I only fear that everyone there thinks that the present order of things is bad, but nobody knows how to make it better. But I still don't understand why that would prevent you from writing interestingly. Shakespeare didn't belong to any union, and he didn't write badly.

And who's going to believe your contention that a good, interesting book wouldn't somehow find its way into print? This can be asserted only by someone who feels aggrieved, whose manuscript did not find approval outside of the circle of his own family and friends. I reject your slander on editors and publishers. They are not a special layer of society set in opposition to the writer's world; they are your brother-writers… Why would they place choose only dull books for publication?

And what if you did find a worthless editor? Is he really the only judge? Certainly it isn't so. Among writers there are people who are not gladdened by another's success, fearing that they will be overshadowed, squeezed out. But an author can certainly seek to have a rejected work considered for different journals, by different editors, at different levels of the Union of Writers.

I find everything you've said in your self-justification unconvincing. Obstacles would not prevent the appearance of genuine works of art. Rather, you have not written such works…

Did you know what exact values you wanted to defend in your latest novel? Did you read your manuscript to dozens of people, carefully watching their faces to see if they felt the book, if you carried them over into your own world? Did you ask your listeners what they hated and what they loved and what they wanted to do after their return home from your book? Did you have the feeling that your novel was just as necessary to man as food and clothing? Did you consider your novel to be a new window through which things can be seen more clearly? No, probably you didn't do, consider, or think any of this. Otherwise you would not have turned the conversation to editors and the Union, you would not have belittled a great and important theme.

A real writer, it seems to me, will always find an appropriate task; but no organization of the Union of Writers will be of help to a false writer…

I want my longing, my thirst, for great true writing to rouse you up… Definitely change, review, improve your relationship to me as a human being. Don't disavow anything in me, don't foist anything upon me. Find a new synthesis, the center of which will be me, my work, my thoughts, and everything in my life, feelings that even I myself don't know and which will help you discover these new heights. And most of all raise me up to these heights with yourself, so that I may see the world better.

Then you will no longer be drab, but many-colored, and your creative harvest will be great. People will hang on your every word, and, who knows, they might even take you along with them as they proceed to Communism.

 

CREATION VERSUS THE CRITICS

It's bad when what comes from a critic are not sounds, but echoes. It's bad when he doesn't suggest anything, but waits for suggestion. It's bad when he doesn't make discoveries, but only restates things.

The very development of criticism has proceeded in an odd manner. It has been working out its positions not as a result of constant, thoughtful observation and synthesis but only when certain writers have fallen into error and the Party press subjected them to criticism.

Some critics fashioned a niche for themselves out of this search for errors among writers and their brother-critics. These expose professionally, they are dissectors. They don't know how to write, but they always know when something is wrong…

The task of a critic is not just to uncover the patriotism of a writer or whether the theme he has chosen to illuminate is topical. The critic should evaluate the role of the book in literature and point out what it has to offer that is new in comparison with previous works. We want to learn from the critic what has come with this book and what comes from it. We're interested in knowing what kind of furrow it has cut, where it has left its mark, on what it has put its seal. The critic doesn't answer these basic questions, leaving us in complete darkness. We know the names of many authors, we know their books, but we have no idea at all how literature is indebted to them, about what they have contributed to it. Ignored as well is an essential element of genuine criticism -- a comparison of creative works. This causes us to lose our bearings.

***

I have just read “Rayon Days” by Valentin Ovechkin. Even approaching it from a purely utilitarian point of view, it is obvious that it contains a host of important discoveries. Ovechkin speaks of things that previously were not described. Before him, these topics were avoided, treated with silence. Some writers didn't see them at all; others considered these things to be under the jurisdiction of higher authorities and would not undertake to discuss them without their approval. But this writer took the topics and spoke about them so as to aid the higher authorities!

And then I understood that before Ovechkin, in many books on the theme of the kolkhoz, everything was wiped clean, all the sharp edges had been cut off, the corners broken off. I understood that Tutarinov (Babaevsky's hero) overcame simple obstacles; he did not deal with or even see the genuinely complicated problems of village life. Today he looks not so much like a hero as a little angel on an Easter cake. He is sprinkled with praise, like colored poppy seeds; but lick him, and he melts. On the other hand, the heroes of Ovechkin are seekers. They keep their eyes open. They do politics. It's not just that their own thought is not constrained; but they also awaken ours. The writer clarifies life for us, and changes it.

***

Criticism does not study the characteristics of the creative work of our writers. Why? Maybe because they're still not dead? But many authors are written into the history of literature while still alive. Such a history takes shape in every country along with the strengthening of criticism. Many old writers would have unjustly been forgotten if criticism had not protected them.

One must give one's manuscript to people who are bad off, people cannot easily be made happy. If the book does not raise their spirits one iota, does not add to their strength for life, does not improve their work for a better future, then the book has an organic flaw and must be rewritten.

When the book passes this test, it must be given to the self-satisfied. If it turns out to contain nothing to rouse them from their happy self-assurance, from the feeling that everything everywhere is good, then the book is still not finished.

And if it survives this second test, it must still be subjected to a third. Walk with it past houses with memorial plaques, where people without whom literature would be poorer lived, created, and thought. If this doesn't make the writer think, if he doesn't feel bitterness over something undone, then he isn't a writer at all and he should find himself a different profession.

If, however, having measured his manuscript by this high mark, the writer doesn't totally loathe his work, this means that the work will be needed by people and can be taken to the publisher.

***

OBJECTS AND PEOPLE

Isn't it time, comrades, to move on to new problems? For almost a quarter century the critics have been bringing us back to the same circle of questions, not realizing that many of their arguments have become scholastic, that we have grown sick and tired of them. Literature needs a push onto new paths, for we have entered a new period of life.

As I see it, the first task of critical thought today is to lead writers to a widening of themes, to a change of the interpretation of problems. This is the main thing, for the reader has to draw something new from literature…

The critic should occupy himself with the problem of bringing everyday life to light in literature. This is not a simple task.

A German once told me: "Your literature is very rich in content, very significant, but there's no coziness in it." In fact, the settled style of life, domesticity, has indeed gone out of our literature. But, really, what place could they have in stories of industrial construction sites and war? During those times, we weren't sitting at the tea table or settling ourselves into soft armchairs. Literature was severe, like life, and we required nothing else.

How many days we spent on missions away from home! How many times we left our home! How many years we waged war! This life was our daily life. We would have suffocated reading ‘cozy' literature; we would not have been able to stand ourselves.

Now we have built many homes with bathrooms and refrigerators; we have declared war on the housing shortage and all sorts of shortages; we will be one hundred times more concerned about the human person. Houses by a factory should be built at the same time as the factory; in any town you should be able to buy everything. Yes, this is necessary. Yes, we shall live well. And all the same... all the same, while struggling for a comfortable everyday life, we must remain above everyday life.

To date, our novels have talked little about what has occupied people in their personal lives. But this does not mean that henceforth we must give detailed descriptions of what people eat. Our hero never gets lost in everyday life, never gets swallowed up by it. An important job of the critic is to teach us to fight for a well-balanced everyday life, so that we might lift the reader even higher above everyday life.

***

A novel is not required to describe the technique of war, or of a factory, or of an event as such. A novel should not be a substitute for historical, military, technical, or other data. A work of art, as is well known, should reflect the experience, doings, and feelings of people. Events, scenery, and facts must be subservient to this, must be introduced only in service of this. A "document of the epoch" should not document it. We want to find not documents in it, but the soul of the epoch.

The Patriotic War and the construction of factories should not be excluded from our literature. But they will stir us only if they cease being a theme in and of themselves and become a setting for the life and action of man.

No matter how great the temptation to linger on a particular event, if it does little to illuminate the role of the hero, it must be mercilessly cast aside. Some books are burdened, weighed down with material about objects. Education is brought about by thoughts and ideas, not by things and information.

***

The predominance of events over man in a book, the fact that they overwhelm and crowd man out, is one of the reasons such a book might have a short life. Events are superceded by new ones, and books and plays concerned with describing these events get old.

We say, "I wrote an industrial novel", "I published a novel about trade", "I did a play about America". In other words, we are writing about events, not people. People serve only as a contrived embodiment of a preplanned program to portray events. It's clear that such works cannot give any intimate feeling of life, that any change in the given country or given economic sphere will toss such novels overboard, even if the inertia of criticism and the author's own efforts continue to keep it afloat.

One can and must produce novels that are both topical and ageless, that is to say, eternally topical. Incessant lofty talk about the fact that our life is too fast-paced, that it is hard to keep up with it, and that works get old in the process of writing--all this is evidence of the artistic impotence of authors, who are repeating unpersuasive and tiresome arguments.

Yes, life is fast-paced. But it is we who are guilty before life, not life before us. For we are trying to catch up with time, instead of trying to outpace it. We get swallowed up by today and we don't think about tomorrow. Events overwhelm us, and we don't see the chain of events. In this situation, it is entirely natural that the morning will change everything that was written the night before, and we will never finish our novel…

Of course, for great literature you need, first and foremost, great writers. But you don't have to be a genius to avoid being eternally helpless. For this, an author needs only the most elementary self-determination. He simply should not place himself in a situation where every fresh radio report raises the alarm of what he should do now. If, in this situation, the novel "falls apart" or "flies away", then it wasn't a novel. When a writer has firm ideological moorings, then his novel is insured against time. But a book tied too firmly to petty events of the day is doomed not to outlive the day....

We are not historians, and we have no reason to wait until today slips into the past and becomes fixed in time. But we must write about the role of man in the great developing events of our time with an unflinching look at the events themselves and at the events in the personal lives of people. We should not worry ourselves about the circumstances of the day. Then not only will we avoid trailing behind events, but we will be able to guess at the following events, suggest fresh thoughts, blaze a trail to new judgments and create books that will genuinely live.

 

The Full Text of Vladimir Pomerantsev's On Sincerity in Literature is available online in the original Russian at: http://vivovoco.nns.ru/VV/PAPERS/LITRA/MEMO/POMER.HTM