Engineers of the Soul

From Moscow, TIME Correspondent John Hersey cabled this account of Soviet writing and publishing in 1944:

The Russian alphabet is still away at war. Even on the eve of victory not a word is written in this country which is not a weapon. Every sentence written in Russia must help beat Hitler or help build a Communist Russia that will make another such war impossible.

Maxim Gorki had a singing phrase to describe the function of the writer--"the engineer of the human soul." During the Russian war this has certainly been true. Never before have Russian writers had such an audience. Never before have they had such immediate influence and such great responsibility. Perhaps J. B. Priestley exaggerated when he said that recent Russian writings had been "the conscience of the world," but they have unquestionably been the conscience of Russia.

To assess the worth of these works in American terms it is not enough to apply ordinary standards of literary criticism. The war is the thing, and as one writer says: "It is better to be without literary criticism than without victory." The only fair test is to see whether writers have fulfilled their aims. According to the chairman of the Writers' Union, their aims are, first, "to tell the truth about the war," and second, "to feel the heart and soul of the Soviet man."

State Publishing. The number of state publishing houses in the Soviet Union runs into the hundreds. The most important group of them is known as OGIZ-- --initials for Obiedineniye Gosudarstvennikh Izdatelstv, meaning Amalgamated State Publishing Houses. It has seven member houses in Moscow and Leningrad and one in each of the 16 Soviet Republics.

OGIZ is a tremendous, self-contained industry. It publishes fiction, poetry, translations, pamphlets, broadsides and books on politics, music, art, science and agriculture. It controls the production of prints and colors. It runs 14 print shops like "The Model Printery" in Moscow, which hires 2.000 workers, and "The Printing House" in Leningrad, which printed the equivalent of 24 billion pages a year before the war. It has more than 3.000 book shops, stands and rare-book stores throughout Russia. It is an influence over writers, since no book may be published without the signature of the editor of a state house.

The Readers. There is a truly extraordinary demand for reading matter here which the state publishing houses cannot possibly satisfy for years to come. The Government has maintained a consistent and highly successful campaign to "liquidate illiteracy." The appetite here for literature is hard to imagine in America.

Books are extremely hard to buy on the open market. About three-quarters of all editions are sent directly to libraries, which are open to the public. A large list of military and political leaders, writers, doctors, scientists and engineers get monthly bulletins on forthcoming books and they have the privilege of checking off what they want and can buy up to one thousand rubles' worth each month. Most of what is left goes on the open market and is bought up in a matter of hours. The average price for a novel on the open market is ten rubles, or about $2 at the official rate of exchange.

With such a great demand, nearly every book that is published could become a runaway best seller. Therefore the size of each edition is decided beforehand by the state publishing houses, more or less arbitrarily. The basis for decision is not how many books will sell, but how important and useful they are.

Stalin in the Small Hours. The process of self-criticism and external criticism through which a writer has to go before publication is a good test of his genius. First he discusses his work with an editor of a state publishing house, who may or may not approve. Next he is apt to read the work or parts of it to friends, who are often unsparing in their criticism. It is a frequent practice to publish chapters in magazines, and these are also open to criticism. He may also stand on his feet before a meeting of the Writers' Union and read passages from his work and then hear them discussed.

The book goes next to "Glavlit"--the Central Administration on Literary and Publishing Matters of the Central Committee of the Party. This, in effect, has in its hands the guidance of all cultural and ideological writings. Stalin has said: "The printed word is the sharpest and most powerful weapon of the Communist Party." After censorship the book goes back to the publishing house and is published, when the editor is ready to sign it.

Sometimes there is one other step in the process. Joseph Stalin takes an intense interest in literature. Sometimes in the small hours of the night a writer may get a telephone call. It is Stalin. He congratulates the writer on the book and sometimes gives keen and thoughtful advice. One book, The Great Mouravi, a novel about Stalin's birthplace, Georgia, by a woman writer, Anna Antonovskaya, had been sidetracked by the publishers until Stalin called her up and told her it was brilliant and gave her some additional information on Georgia.

Truth in Wartime. Do Russian writers tell the truth? The other night I heard the extremely popular, 29-year-old poet, novelist, playwright, scenarist, journalist and pamphleteer, Konstantin Simonov, publicly express the Soviet writers' attitude on truth:

"It is a prevalent opinion that a person who writes a novel or a book about a war during that war cannot be sufficiently objective. There is truth and error in such an opinion.

"Beyond a doubt, in wartime the writer will portray the Germans primarily as enemies who kill, burn and destroy our homes and our families. In some large, more permanent sense this may be sometimes unobjective. But this unobjectivity is far from clashing with the truth. Didn't the Germans burn our towns? Didn't they kill women and children? Didn't they hang and didn't they shoot? And is not the writer right who in wartime wants to write, and will write, primarily about this and only about this?

"The same applies to portraying the Soviet Army and the Russian people. It is quite natural that in wartime a patriotic writer is moved mainly by the people's courage, their heroism and their scorn of death. He is far less prone to dwell on other emotions which unquestionably do exist in people's hearts -- on such feelings as a longing for home, on man's natural fear in the face of peril, on bodily fatigue and depressing thoughts.

"The heroism of our people, their self-sacrifice, their contempt for death -- this is the main theme. This is truth."

The Days of Hate. Another important thing to remember in assessing current Russian literature is that every Russian writer has taken part in the war in a very real sense. Much more than our polemicists on the Writers' War Board, much more than our warriors of the Office of War Information, more even than most of our war correspondents (certainly than those in Moscow), the Russian writer has been in & out of the war. And this is not just correspondents: it is poets, writers of the most tender lyrics, historians -- all of them.

One cannot exaggerate the mark left on Soviet writing by the terrible months of reverses in 1941, right up until the battle for Moscow was won. In those months the writers became so closely identified with the very courage and determination which has finally beaten Hitler back that they all developed muscular, bitter, mystical, adjectival writing styles, which they still employ in the sweeter days of triumph. Those were the days when Simonove wrote Wait For Me -- the words of a soldier to his wife: Wait for me, wait very hard --Never give up hope, even if they all say I am dead; Do not believe it, but wait for me.

Above all, those were the days when hate was born. As Nicolai Tikhanov of the Writers' Union says: "In the course of cruel battle grew a hatred of the Germans -- a heavy hatred, an indistinguishable hatred, a personal hatred, a hatred which still moves the Red Army and the Soviet people forward." On June 23, 1942, Mikhail Sholokhov wrote a terrific news paper story called The School of Hate, setting the pitch for the hate propaganda, of which Ilya Ehrenburg became the strident genius. The Russian people still feel that hatred and are very much afraid that the British and the Americans may be "sentimental" toward the Germans. The writers still feel and express the hatred.

These things have been responsible for a literary style for which there is a Russian word: Agitka, something to agitate the people and make them act.

The Writers. In my opinion, one man stands above and apart from all these things. He is Mikhail Sholokhov, the nearest approach to a man of genius in Russia's great tradition. The author of And Quiet Flows the Don and The Soil Upturned stays in his native village of Veshenskaya and writes. He does not come to Moscow to spend the writers' tremendous royalties and reap his great honors. He refuses to become the president of the Writers' Un ion, because he is too busy -- writing. He writes for no censorship except truth as he sees it. He is just now putting the finishing touches to his new novel, They Fought for Their Country. Sholokhov gets his heroic effect by indirection. He does not find it necessary to rant or repeat cliches of patriotism. He writes what seems to me to be the truth about soldiers. He says: "How much does a man need in time of war? To get a little farther away from death than usual, to rest, to have a good sleep and eat his fill, to get a letter from home, and to have a leisurely smoke with his friends; there you have all that goes to make up the quickly maturing happiness of a soldier."

Another prose writer whose position is strong is Alexei Tolstoi. He is undoubtedly a distinguished writer and a fine stylist, but he writes mostly about a fairly remote past and has not identified himself with the war. He is now somewhat disliked by a few younger writers for his pomposity and his airs; he is something of an eccentric -- writes standing up, for instance, with his manuscript on an inclined chest-high table, like a speaker's rostrum.

The finest poet seems to be Pavel An-takolski. He recently finished a poem called Son. It is in the ancient style of a scald -- as if written by a poet who has marched with troops for the purpose of intoning laments over the dead on the field of battle and calling for revenge. Son is written for Antakolski's own son-warrior, who died for his country.

Below these three the writers look pretty much alike. They are the writers of Agitka -- the journalist-artists. One of the best of them, probably the most typical, is Konstantin Simonov. The most promising seems to be Boris Garbatov, author of the record-breaking bestseller, The Unvanquished. He has apparently been much influenced by translations of Hemingway and by Gogol.

The Future. As to the future of Russian literature, I heard the other night a most revealing program set forth by Vsevolod Vishnevsky, a distinguished playwright who is a naval officer and has written mostly about the Baltic Sea and the defense of Leningrad. Speaking specifically for the magazine Snamya, of which he is an editor, but inferentially for all Russian writers, he said that Russia's postwar writing will: 1) gather from partisans, soldiers, sailors, officers and workers the whole truth about this war; 2) glorify Russia's heroic traditions; 3) promote "Slavism" and see to it that the German enemy, which has twice hurt Russia, will never divide the Slavic peoples again; 4) memorialize German bestiality as it was revealed at Lidice and Maidenek; 5) occupy itself with human honor, conscience and soul; 6) call on Russians for a new effort of creativeness and rouse them to transfer the heroism they have shown in war to achievements in peace ; 7 ) explore England and America, whose aid in the war will not be forgotten.

"We shall talk," he said, "plainly, clearly and with polemical incisiveness and we shall expect our British and American colleagues to speak to us in the same language and in the same spirit."

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