The writing and the blood on the wall: a survey of Soviet censorship
The Bangkok Post 1987
Earlier this year saw the first appearance in the Soviet Union of Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, originally published in the West in 1957, and for which the author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958.
The novel chronicles life in Russia during the turbulent first three decades of this century. Its belated publication is a sign of the new openness, glasnost, much vaunted by both East and West during the past year.
Boris Pasternak, already a respected poet, was expelled from the Union of Writers for daring to write, let alone publish, a novel which went against accepted history and the received ideas of his time. For ‘accepted history’ and ‘received ideas’ one must look to the Soviet ideology. Mr Surkov, editor and secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers, along with Krushchev, was responsible for the novel’s suppression.
‘The Zhivago Affair’ makes interesting literary history and is crucial to our understanding of how governments in totalitarian societies interfere with free thought and information. If glasnost is today’s headline, then lies, perniciousness, bureaucratic bumbling and repression were yesterday’s – except nobody in the Soviet Union was free to say so then. That they might be free to say so now is still in question.
Dr. Zhivago was originally announced for publication in the Soviet Union in the monthly literary journal Znamia in April 1954. However, Pasternak didn’t finish work on his long, detailed book until the end of 1955 when he submitted it to several Moscow publishing houses which promptly rejected it. At the same time he gave his manuscript to an Italian Communist publisher, Feltrinelli, and in 1956 the prospect of this potentially dangerous novel appearing in Italian alarmed the Soviet authorities. They asked Pasternak to demand the return of the manuscript. They pressured Feltrinelli through the medium of the Party and Surkov, the dedicated bureaucrat, flew to Milan to ask for its safe return. Pasternak had secretly sent a second copy, however, and the novel appeared to immense popular and critical acclaim. But only in the West.
When the Nobel announcement was made, Pasternak, under severe political pressure and scurrilous attacks from the Soviet authorities, was forced to decline the prize.
At one time, in 1960, Dr Zhivago was No. 2 on the US bestseller lists. That other controversial novel, Lolita, by the émigré Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov was riding high and pretty at No. 1. Now recognised as the greatest Russian writer of the twentieth century, Nabokov described his chart rival as ‘a third-rate sentimental novel inexplicably written by a rather good poet’. He also called social realism, all the Soviet authorities allowed at the time, ‘philistine boredom’.
Nabokov, too, has undergone a reassessment in the Soviet Union. Apart from a few early poems, nothing whatsoever of his had been published there. It is difficult to see how this master of language and criticism, this dandy and lepidopterist, fluent in three languages and writing books in two, could be published in his entirety since he was a lifelong foe of ‘the most philistine organisation on earth’, the Soviet government. But novels have begun to appear and his name is spoken. It is doubtful if the following, part of an essay entitled 'Russian Writers, Censors and Readers', will get an airing, even in the warm glow of glasnost:
‘... from the very start the Soviet government was laying the grounds for a primitive, regional, political, police-controlled, utterly conservative and conventional literature. The Soviet government, with admirable frankness ...proclaimed that literature was a tool of the state; and for the last forty years this happy agreement between the post and the policeman has been carried on most intelligently. Its result is the so-called Soviet literature, a literature conventionally bourgeois in its style and hopelessly monotonous in its meek interpretation of this or that government idea.’
Nabokov had no illusions about the role of the State in the writer’s study; it should be kept out and the door firmly locked against unwelcome intrusion. Likewise, he saw how public relations could be used by the Soviet Union to manipulate the climate of opinion in the West:
‘In the course of forty years of absolute domination (writing in 1958) the Soviet government has never once lost control of the arts. Every now and then the screw is eased for a moment, to see what will happen, and some mild concession to individual self-expression is accorded; and foreign optimists acclaim the new book as a political protest ... even so, the Soviet government cannot permit the individual quest, the creative courage, the new, the original, the difficult, the strange, to exist.’
Literary repression is not only a feature of Russia since the Bolshevik Revolution. It has been very much in evidence since the founding of the Russian nation. Tsar after Tsar sent his bully boys into the writer’s study so that there are ample grounds for believing that intolerant and autocratic government went hand and fist with one of the greatest and most intellectually vibrant cultures in the world. At the time of Empress Catherine II (1729-1796), the government acknowledged the importance of literature in helping to educate the country and in spreading ideas and attitudes among the nobility. However, a split developed between rulers and educated society, due to the infiltration of ‘pernicious ideas of the West’ arising from the French Revolution. The familiar pattern of closing presses, exiling writers and the imprisonment of ‘liberal educators’ was set in motion and, by and large, has not changed much since.
Pushkin, the greatest of the Russian writers, was exiled to south of Russia. Lermontov was several times exiled (though, on one occasion, because of romantic entanglements with women). Under Tsar Nicholas 1 (1825-55), spies and police became commonplace, there were restrictions on travelling abroad, and books were sifted for ‘impiety and rebellion’. In one case a cookery book was censored because it contained the sentence ‘free air is necessary for the dough’. Another censor banned a book about administrative practices by saying ‘the very danger of the work lies in its truthfulness.’ Then as now, only those in government circles were thought to have a monopoly on truth.
Soviet policy in the 20th century as regards literature and freedom of expression is little different from that of previous regimes. The nadir of repression was from 1946 to the death of Stalin in 1953 when, according to Andrei Zhdanov, the literature policy-maker of the time, ‘Soviet literature neither has not can have any other interests except those of the people and of the State. Its aim is to educate the youth according to Communist principles. Literature must become party literature, and one of its tasks is to portray the Soviet Man in full force.’
This policy produced ‘Olga and Boris Tractor Literature’, dull books written according to formulae extolling the virtues of hard work, production and obedience. The barbaric practices of sending writers to camps, of forbidding them to publish, of keeping them under house arrest and, in many cases, of brutalisation and murder, were the consequences for those who did not toe the Party line. Osip Mandelstam, one of the century’s great poets, was arrested in May 1938 and never seen again. He died in a ‘transit camp’ near Vladivostok.
After the death of Stalin, a ‘thaw’ set in and the powers that be decided that the ‘varnishing of reality’ should end. However, during that thaw Pasternak’s novel stretched the new liberalism of the regime to its limit.
In this century Russian writers have won five Nobel Prizes for Literature and, though the Nobel Prize can often be of more political than literary significance, five laureates is still a stunning achievement. They are: Ivan Bunin (1933); Pasternak (1958); Mikhail Sholokhov (1964); Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1970) and Joseph Brodsky (1987).
Three of them were expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers, without whose support it is difficult to get anywhere in Soviet literary circles. Solzhenitsyn, arrested on false charges, was sent to a forced-labour camp from 1945 to 1953 but was eventually rehabilitated with no case against him being found. He was obliged to publish largely in the West, where he now lives. Bunin left Russia in 1920 and, though the Soviets attempted to lure him back, he stayed abroad to become the leading light of the émigré writers.
Sholokhov, author of Quiet Flows the Don, one of the masterpieces of ‘Soviet Realism’, appears to have got on fine with the regime. The date of his reception of the Nobel Prize is significant, however, in that it heralds the warming of relations between East and West after the Cold War. Joseph Brodsky, early on recognised as one of the finest poets of his generation, was branded as a ‘social parasite’ and exiled for a year in 1964. Most of his work, until recently, has appeared only in the West. In 1972 he was expelled from the Soviet Union.
This brief survey of the extent of the damage done to life and literature illustrates the consequences wrought by meddling and arrogant systems, be they in the East or in the West. In the words of Joseph Brodsky’s acceptance speech in Oslo: ‘as long as the state permits itself to interfere with the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere with the affairs of state.’
Persons in the political arena, on the whole, are not known for their literary gifts or for even a modicum of subtlety in their expression (Julius Caesar being an admirable exception). Politics, by its nature, addresses the lowest common denominator, and for that you need a good microphone, plenty of throat tablets and simple language. Leaders and politicians are often cultural cretins. Ronald Reagan, to judge by his reading habits and language use, has the bare minimum of word power for a man of his stature. Writing is a sacred art, above the market-place of party and ideology and, especially in places where these change overnight, it is better off out of it. In the words of Vladimir Nabokov: ‘writing and reading books is synonymous with having and voicing individual opinions’: politics is the arena of the crowd.
There is a sense in which glasnost is only the Soviet Union cleaning up its own intellectual mess. It should not be made so easy for successive regimes to play political musical chairs with established writers’ reputations, in some cases with those writers’ lives. Before wiping the blackboard clean the bullyboys should take a good hard look at the writing and the bloodstains on the wall.