Jackals with Fountain Pens

Tough writers are seldom tough guys, but Alexander Fadeyev was an exception. His early novels are Russian-style westerns, full of galloping hooves and gun battles against terrible odds, simple taciturn heroes who figure that the only way to give an order is to snap yes or no. Fadeyev himself lived this kind of life as a Soviet guerrilla during the civil war, and he believed that if it was not yes it must be no. Later, when it became his job to ride herd on Soviet literature for Dictator Stalin, tough Fadeyev made many an author bite the Siberian mud.

Russian literature, a powerful weapon in the Russian people's struggle for liberation from the Czars, was plunged into confusion after the establishment of the Soviet state. Many famous authors (Kuprin, Bunin) went into exile voluntarily; disillusionment led others (Yesenin, Mayakovsky) to suicide. To give literature drive and direction, and broaden its appeal, the party formed the Union of Soviet Writers, headed by famed Maxim Gorky. But Gorky's optimistic ideas about "socialist realism" did not suit Stalin. The dictator found his man in Fadeyev, the steely-eyed yes man.

Rising Man. In 1936, two years after Fadeyev joined the presidium of the Union of Soviet Writers, Gorky died suddenly. Then people began asking questions. Where is Isaac (Red Cavalry) Babel? What has happened to Novelist Boris (Mother Earth) Pilniak? Why is the work of Poet Boris (Above the Barriers) Pasternak no longer published? About lesser writers there was no mystery: they had been arrested as "enemies of the people." While they disappeared, Fadeyev became No. 1 man in the Soviet Writers' Union. Disdaining elegant clothes, he habitually wore the party uniform, but he had his own chauffeur-driven car and a luxurious apartment. There was always a bottle of vodka within his easy reach.

By 1939 the Union of Soviet Writers was a well-drilled literary claque which dutifully applauded Stalin's deal with Hitler and praised his "military genius" when the Germans drove to the outskirts of Moscow. The union helped whip up enthusiasm for the "patriotic war," and Fadeyev himself produced a long, turgid novel called Young Guard about underground operations in the Ukraine. The Kremlin's kept writers grew fat on the war (Young Guard sold 3,000,000 copies), but when it was all over, Stalin cut them down to size in a new purge. Described as "filthy" and "obscene" in journals controlled by Author Fadeyev's union were two survivors of the revolutionary epoch: Satirist Mikhail (The Adventures of an Ape) Zoshchenko and Poetess Anna (The White Flock) Akhmatova. Even Fadeyev, criticized in Pravda, had to eat a little crow. Told to rewrite Young Guard, he said: "I quite agree."

Typing Hyenas. Fadeyev was ordered aboard the great Communist peace bandwagon and sent off to Wroclaw to deliver a vodka-primed attack on the U.S. There he talked of the "disgusting filth" emanating from American culture and spoke of "trite films . . . reactionary waste paper such as TIME" and American swing, a "contemporary version of St. Vitus' dance ..." Said he, speaking of the work of Writers John Dos Passos, T. S. Eliot, Eugene O'Neill, Andre Malraux, Jean Paul Sartre: "If hyenas could type and jackals could use fountain pens, they would produce such works." Next year, attending a Communist-front cultural conference in Manhattan, he was startled to find himself questioned about Soviet writers. Said he: "They all exist; they are in this world. Pasternak is my neighbor . . . I don't know about Babel, and about Kirshon I won't say."

After the slobbering eulogies around Stalin's bier, there was a great silence in the Union of Soviet Writers. Then, almost two years later, under the weight of Ilya Ehrenburg's The Thaw, the ice broke. But no Writers' Union congress could revive the dead, nor could so many veteran sycophants make sense of their new function. Sensing change, Fadeyev handed down a new line, appealed for less "socialist realism." At the sensational 20th Party Congress last February, Novelist Mikhail Sholokhov (whose way of protesting the Stalinist regime had been to produce almost no creative work since he wrote The Quiet Don two decades ago) made an outright attack on Fadeyev, calling him a power-loving bureaucrat who practices the cult of personality. By praising Gorky in the highest terms, Sholokhov revived the old mystery of his death and Fadeyev's succession.

In the literary controversy that has raged in Moscow since Sholokhov's attack, the magazine New World, an organ of the Writers' Union, this month began publishing Bruno Yasienki's long-suppressed novel, The Plot of the Indifferent, with a preface by his widow referring to his "arrest based on the slander of provocateurs." In the strange dialectic of Communist Russia, yes was rapidly becoming no. An old Stalin-line man could no longer remain indifferent. Last week Tass News Agency reported the end. In his luxurious apartment, Alexander Fadeyev shot himself. The cause, said Tass, was chronic alcoholism and "grave mental depression."

The new Soviet leadership is capable of delicate literary irony. The entire Presidium filed past Fadeyev's coffin.

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