Sovetskaja literatura na Zapade (di I. Ėrenburg) [1934] - [D145]

Concise description of the directive:

Ilya Erenburg – writer, journalist, translator, and a prominent figure in Soviet cultural life – reflects on the reception of Soviet literature in Western countries, highlighting the distance, not only geographical but above all historical, cultural and psychological, between the socialist and capitalist worlds. According to the author, the USSR represents not merely another country, but another time, another era. This difference in mentality and values makes mutual recognition between the two worlds difficult, even when they share certain cultural trends (such as cinema, jazz, literary modernism or constructivist architecture).
Erenburg acknowledges that, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, Soviet literature began to circulate in the West, but often more as a documentary source on the new socialist society than as an artistic phenomenon in its own right. Foreign readers looked to Soviet novels for answers to their curiosity about Soviet life – from collectivisation to the kolkhoz system – rather than for aesthetic experiences. However, some authors such as Babel, Pasternak, Zoshchenko, Olesha or Fadeyev also gained literary recognition.
A central point of the essay concerns the tension between content and form: for Soviet writers, revolutionary content often ‘crushes’ attention to form, or induces them to recycle outdated models. The Western reader, sensitive to artistic quality and still immersed in the cult of the great writers of the 19th century (from Tolstoy to Flaubert), negatively perceives the use of outdated or “mannered” narrative patterns.
The writer also criticises those attempts by some Soviet authors to ‘recreate’ a Soviet War and Peace, as if it were enough to replace aristocratic characters with collective farm workers to achieve a great modern novel. In his opinion, art cannot be born from pre-existing patterns, but must find a new form suited to the new content: just as Tolstoy did not imitate the Iliad, the Soviet writer must also free himself from the “old wineskins” (p. 159).
The greatest challenge, according to Erenburg, is to move from a literature that informs (about the construction of socialism) to one that truly represents the new man: not just prototypes, but living, complex characters, individual and universal at the same time. Only then can Soviet literature be appreciated not for its ideological value, but for its artistic strength.

Ilaria Aletto