THE WRITER AND THE CONSTRUCTION SCHEMES

 Alexei Surkov

We are proud that we are a literature from the f1eople, about the people, and for the people. The people are not an abstract conception. They can be met in their thou­sands at literary evenings. We discussed it with them over the wireless. Together with them we fought at the front; we met, and we meet them on the construction site and in the fields. They read to us. They impatiently await our books. They are concerned and worried when any one of their beloved writers is silent for any length of time. They expect much) and are as strict as a father in their criticism. But they are aboundingly generous in the expression of their love and confidence in literature and in their writers. They want to see themselves in litera­ture. They want that literature shall help them to live and build their future. Our dependence on the people is not a burden which shackles the freedom of the indit.1idual and of creativeness. It is the only way to create freely and inspiringly) to comprehend the reason for one's existence on earth. 

ALEXEI SURKO VJ October 22, 1949, at the Rudolf Steiner Hall) London; full sj1eech re­printed in ANGLO-SOVIET JOURNAL) Vol. X,No. 4. 

DISCUSSION on the part played by writers in the great construction schemes of communism should start by recalling the tasks of literature as formulated in the Communist Party's decisions on literature in connection with the jour­nals Zvezda and Leningrad. 

I think it apposite to recall those words, and those of the Communist Party's decisions on the film The Great Life. in this article. because we are still suffering from many failures and disappointing shortcomings, notwith• standing a flow of good books which are worthy of the demands made on them by our Soviet reality. 

When we stop to think about the tasks we are set, of the truly titanic and epic scale of the five great construction sites of communism, we naturally realise that such large-scale construction undertakings by the Soviet state do not mark a mere further step along our road to communism. On the contrary. We may regard our work as the expression of a qualitatively new stage in the development of Soviet society in its advance towards Communism. This is one of the great epochs in our history. Stages such as this determine for a good while to come the most important formative processes in the growth of Soviet literature. 

1f we look back on our past we can see that, by the very nature of the Soviet state and of the new nature of Soviet literature, every decisive period of our society's development has imprinted a sharp and clearly distinguishable mark on the development of literature. 

The first period in our socialist society's existence, linked with the Octo­ber 19 l 7 victory, produced in the l 920s a good deal of literature inspired primarily by the great events of the Civil War. Similarly, we can discern that a new and important stage in the history of Soviet literature began in the late 1920s and early 1930s when with the adoption of the first Five-Year Plan our society entered upon a new and decisive phase of its advance to socialism. 

When a new stage begins a good deal of the previous subject matter dis­appears, withers away or undergoes sharp changes in form. This is the fate that befell the subject of the attitude of the intellectual towards the revolution. a common theme in the 1920s. This theme may be seen in Fedin's novels Towns and Years and Brothers, in Malyshkin's Sevastopol, in Sobolev's Capital Repairs, in Olesha's Envy and List of Blessings, in the poems of llya Selvinsky, and in many other works. 

The decisive turning point as regards intellectuals was fixed by our great successes in Socialist construction during the first Five-Year Plans and by our successes in the transformation of social and productive relations in town and village. 

Not only was the attitude of the older generation of intellectuals towards Soviet society changed. The very scale of Socialist construction gave birth to a new generation of intellectuals formed by Socialism, a generation that was flesh of the flesh and bone of the bone of our young Socialist society. 

During that period a whole range of subjects, characteristic of the 1920s, disappeared from our literature. At first such books as Blast Furnace, by N. Lyashko, and F. Gladkov's Cement (which laid the way for the appearance of the industrial theme in literature) were very rare among the books devoted to the heroic deeds of the Civil War.

During the Five-Year Plans the latter gradually gave way to books whose subject-matter was the creative present of our Soviet socialist society. 

At the present time, when discussing the part to be played by writers in the great undertakings of today, we should bear in mind what happened at the end of the l 920s and the beginning of the 30s. 

The events of that time determined the further development of prose, poetry and drama; and the creative future of many writers was decisively altered as a result, a fact of which vou need no reminder. 

Allow me to recall Virgin Sc;il Upturned, by M. Sholokhov; the second and third parts of F. Panferov's Brnsski; Hatred, by l. Shukhov; 1. Ehren­burg's The Second Day and Without Drawing Breath; Skutarevsky, Sot, and The Road to the Ocean, by L. Leonov; V. Katayev's Forward, oh Time! Night of Tragedy, by A. Bezimensky : Song of the Hatchet, My Friend and other plays by N. Pogodin; the outstanding poem Mother, by N. Dementyev. who was virtually dragged out of an aesthete's stuffy and timorous little world by  the life at the Bobrikovsky combine during the first Five-Year Plan. 

ln that period also was published F. Gladkov's Energy. M. Shaginyan's Hydrocentral, A. Tvardovsky's Land of the Ants and a huge number of novels, poems, short stories, plays and verses which showed not only a change in subject matter, not only use by the writer of fresh material, but also a new a pp roach to this material. 

There can be no doubt what very fruitful results to their theoretical analyses and conclusions would accrue to our literary theoreticians if they would only, at long last, turn to solving the complex problems of the forma­tion of socialist-realist methods and to settling the question of how writers of different calibre and quality achieved a mastery of the socialist-realist method during the first Five-Year Plan. 

The new subject-matter resulted in the development of a new quality in the books of those years, and the work of many writers stood infinitely higher in ideological content and artistic skill than had their work in the 1920s, in­cluding the titles I have listed and many others, notwithstanding individual shortcomings, sometimes very great. 

People's vision and view of the world altered. What happened to llya Ehrenburg is very characteristic in this respect. After holding for a long while what I regard as a rather dubious position, and observing the happenings of the 1920s in our country from the side-lines. as it were. Ehrenburg came into contact with everyday reality during the first Five-Year Plan and then not only wrote books differing sharply from everything characteristic of his previous stage of creative work, but may be said to have been re-born. And I would say that it was this re-birth that to a large extent determined the new alignment for his creative future, a new alignment that was to show itself so powerfully 􀀖particularly during the Great Patriotic War and in the post-war years. 

V. Katayev's work at Magnitostroi for Forward, oh Time .1 was a very fundamental period for his creative development. The writing of Virgin Soil Upturned was for Sholokhov not only a change-over to new material and new subject-matter; this work made him leave the theme of Quiet Flows the Don. which he wrote at the same time as Virgin Soil Upturned, and helped him to enter into a world of new social relations, which􀂶possibly from their very novelty􀂹-were not sufficiently clear to Sholokhov in the material on the Civil War and the pre-Revolutionary life of the Don Cossacks. The same may be said of many books of that period and of the profound reorientation that writers underwent at that time. 

This was a very positive stage in the development of Soviet literature, one which determined its further development. Nor is it an accident that this stage coincided with the dissolution of R.A.P.P. The rea􀃡on for the writers' inward reorientation, which was to be seen in their work during these years, naturally led also to the necessity of breaking with out-of-date and narrow organisational forms in literature. Everything which was harmful. unnecessary or hampering in its path of development had to be done away with. 

It was the lively participation of our writers and intellectuals in helping to carry out the very new and long-term plans for socialist construction that determined the Union of Soviet Writers' programme of work, and made it pos­sible for us in 1934 to formulate, with Party assistance, the basic principles of the socialist-realist method, principles which arose from our day-to-day crea­tive experience of those years.

The writers' direct participation in the people's creative life helped to prepare us for the fine work done by Soviet literature during the Great Pat­riotic War. 

If our literature had not had a deep understanding of the very nature of our new reality, an understanding reflected in the books written in the decade before the war, if understanding had not extended to a profound daily know­ledge of Soviet man's new traits of character and behaviour (this knowledge the writer could only acquire from his living experience of exchanging ideas with the actual builders of socialism) : then our literature might have shown itself incapable of the unified. purposeful and patriotic drive which it displayed from the very first days of the war. It might not have understood its tasks so clearly and profoundly, it might not have shown itself so entirely and staunchly convinced of the invincibility of our social order. 

All these qualities, which made of our literature in the war years, in Mayakovsky's words both bomb and banner, would never have shown up so clearly without the rich accumulated experience of the previous years. 

The first post-war years witnessed a stagnation, a marking-time, when we discovered a certain falling off in the unified and resilient nature which Soviet literature had had both in the war years and in pre-war years. And it was this situation which produced in 1946 the now historic Resolution of the Central Committee on ideological questions, and the resolution on Zvezda and Leningrad. 

The five years which today separate us from these historic decisions have shown that our literature-by virtue of its own nature and of the experience of previous years-is capable of raising its creative level. 

The post-war years have been marked by widespread innovation in our literature. It has turned its attention to the most stirring contemporary sub­jects. The task of restoring everything destroyed by the war, and the creative tasks carried out by the whole nation in the first post-war Five-Year Plan, had become the central theme of Soviet post-war literature as early as 1946. This theme ran parallel to the urgent and equally vital task of struggling for peace and exposing the warmongers. 

When, therefore, we raise the question of what creative resources we have in our literature at the present stage in the nation's life, we can quite correctly reply : on the threshold of this great new epoch, literature has emerged suf­ficiently well equipped by past experiences and by new experiences in the use of the principal trends of the present day. 

Were an analysis to be made, however, of books written in the post-war period, there would become very apparent a certain disproportion, if 1 may use the word, in the attention our Soviet writers pay to varying aspects of Soviet reality. 

The collective farm has been a particularly "happy" subject since the war. This subject, and the living material in the collective farm village, have formed the basis of a number of outstanding and memorable Soviet novels, well received by a wide public. This cannot be said of other material, of prob­lems connected with the life of our Socialist cities and with that of our work­ing class. The working class has not, on the whole, fared very well in our literature over the past thirty-three years. This must be frankly and honestly admitted. Works on the leading class of our society, the class that is the strength of our reality, can be counted in tens, and none too high at that. This was substantially so before the war and there has unfortunately been no real change since the war. We have not yet mastered this vital theme with as much intensity as the Soviet reader is entitled to expect of us. This question emerges with particular clarity when we speak of the tasks facing us as regards the great construction sites of communism. 

What new principles are being introduced into our lives by the great canal and irrigation schemes, the hydro-electric schemes on the Amu-Darya, on the Volga at Stalingrad and Kuibyshev, on the Dnieper at Kakhovka and on the Don at Tsimlyanskaya ? 

(Surkov then goes on to quote the plan figures for increasing the irrigated areas, the use of electric power and so on, comparing today's plans with 1913 in Tsarist Russia and with the first three Five-Year Plans, showing the great scope and scale of the new works.) 

But Soviet people are not content with this. There are enthusiasts among us who are already thinking out schemes which are so vast as to make even the current plans appear modest ! 

We have scientists who are already working on the problem of damming the Ob and the Yenisei so that these great rivers cease to pour their tre­mendous water resources into the Arctic. These people are planning how to turn the Ob and Yenisei southwards and use their waters for the vast areas of Central Asia burnt black by the sun, and choked with sand. And these people have tentatively calculated that were such a plan to be carried through, it would be possible to feed and clothe 400 million people from the lands wrested from the desert. 

There is one particular feature of these new construction sites that I would like to dwell on. All the gigantic things we have already built, we built by the efforts of the entire people, a unified co-ordination of our national economy, based on Socialist planning. The five great new construction sites of communism, however, extend over a front broader than anything we have ever known. The forward line runs through Stalingrad, Kuibyshev, Kakhovka and Takhia-Tash, but in depth the front extends into the remotest parts of our land. There is not a single factory that has not been linked in one way or another with these sites. The gigantic scales of these undertakings and the unparalleled extent of mechanisation are determined by the great develop­ment of industry and its high technical level, its enormously increased ability to put the boldest of technical ideas into practice. 

Everything has to be calculated : the changes in climate, the direction of future forest belts, the danger of possible salt-accumulation in the soil ; all other dangers have to be estimated to bring natural processes into the correct course : all this results in such a gigantic complex of effort as, in canying out the great tasks of the earlier stages of our history of construction, we have never known before. 

If all these facts are really understood as constituting aspects of a truly new stage on our path of advance to Communism, then study of these five great construction schemes will be regarded as it should be. This does not mean five or six literary missions [komandirovki] each lasting one or two months. It is a much more profound and fundamental matter in each indi­vidual writer's work and also one on which the future of our literature for the coming years will depend. 

Are we, or are we not, going to understand the new happenings as re­flected in these five construction sites of communism and the problems arising from them ? That is the point. 

If we fail to understand them then we shall do petty work and the reader will pass us by. In order to understand and feel all this, it does not amount to much for an artist to know it intellectually, to tabulate figures ; the artist needs to observe and feel it all, and to observe it whole, and deeply, and he must understand all this through people, I repeat, through people! Reports on how much soil a walking excavator clears in a shift, or how much soil is shifted by the suction-dredger, can be written merely by reading up newspaper or magazine items. But all these walking excavators, all these suction-dredgers, are to a writer simply a mirror in which a man with a new nature is already to be seen. 

The scale and scope of these construction sites, the speed of work, the tasks set our present levels of mechanization - all these factors will, in turn, exert a formative influence on the development of the character of the people who are working on these sites; they will widen their mental horizons and develop the emotional side of each man's personality. And man in his turn will set the imprint of his personality on the entire character of this construc­tion work. 

The problem of the writer's participation in the great construction sites of communism must not be discussed as a mere transient campaign. The matter does not consist merely in the compilation by editorial boards of a long list of people to be sent to the construction sites. People may go and spend a certain amount of time on the construction sites and come back with some unripe fruits, and then we shall see some statistics, to wit, " 872 works on the great construction sites have appeared in the journals ! ", and we shall consider our task fulfilled. Certainly, l am simplifying the matter somewhat, but there may arise a real danger of writers making unnecessary journeys. 

Writers, on arriving at a factory or a construction site, say "Let me have heroes ! " When a newspaper man says this, having come for three days, he is right in his own way. He has got to get down an outline urgently and give information. But this is no way for a writer to work. A writer must himself draw the attention of the director or the construction foreman to the people on the job that he finds outstanding. 

Jn 1939-40 l worked for four months with a group of Moscow writers on a small army newspaper on the Finnish front. All the outstanding per­sonalities of our front who later became medallists and Heroes of the Soviet Union had, in the first instance. appeared in our columns. We " sought them out " in the companies and battalions and attracted the entire army's attention to them. 

This is a matter of principle and is, l think, more or less fundamental. When leaving for the Volga or the Dnieper the writer must decide for himself what he is to do there. If l went to a construction site, l would go to the management and say, "Give me a job as a propagandist ". As such l should be able to go from team to team on the construction sites, talk to people, ex­plain what is not clear to them, get them to speak frankly as man to man, and try to make myself one of them. I should thus win the moral right to write at first hand, and not from the sidelines. about people on the construction job. 

We need to reflect carefully on this important question : In what capacity do we arrive on these sites ? Are we to be emissaries and permanent or tem­porary jurymen, or are we to take direct part in the work in hand ? 

In my opinion our primary task today is to see that people display an understanding of the whole significance to Soviet literature of the great con­struction sites of Communism. We can take very direct part in this great task as an ideological detachment of the builders of Communism. 

And so for those whose consciousness in this matter is already mature. who understand that it is impossible to live in literature without lively partici­pation in any great task, for such people it is our duty to create the best possible conditions to enter into the life of the great construction sites and of the human collective on these sites. 

Translated and slightly abridged from ZNAMYA, 1951 /6, b_1 Eleanor Fox.