Iskusstvo i socializm. Anketa "Literaturnoj gazety" [04-01-1932] - [D103]

Concise description of the directive:

Literary survey on the theme “Literature and Socialism”. Several Soviet writers are asked to comment on the issue and to evaluate some much-criticised works by their own colleagues. These are the questions: – Some writers claim that art is incompatible with socialism: are they right? – What changes do you think socialism is bringing to the very type of ‘spiritual work’ in the field of art? – What opportunities or difficulties do you encounter in your art today? – How do you rate the books of O. Forsh (Sumasshedshiy korabl), V. Kaverin (Khudozhnik neizvesten), B. Pasternak (Okhrannaya gramota) in the light of these questions? – How do you assess the state and prospects of contemporary foreign bourgeois art?
The answers are reported. N. Tikhonov: In terms of this restructuring, we are discussing the works of O. Forsh, V. Kaverin, B. Pasternak and others. To put it bluntly: in times to come, the works of many writers will not be admissible within the new socialist art.
As for the state of the art in the West, I frankly do not know what is being done in Western literature. Reviews of Western books are random and rare, but what is known (I choose: Remarque, Maurois, Zweig, Paul Morand, Durtain), while talented in form, are saturated with extraordinary pessimism or full of unconcealed hostility.
Zenkevich says that socialist art is now a fact, it has existed for many years, while the problem of the spiritual element now arises, and that is why the Soviet writer must change a great deal internally and find new spiritual forces in socialism, which is changing man’s very being from the roots up (in fact it goes without saying that the new generations of writers will not experience this dilemma). Of the aforementioned books, Zenkevich has only read Pasternak’s, which he finds very sincere, and which reveals the philosophical roots behind his own work, in particular the German idealism of the Marburg School; this is a disease, and it is right that Soviet critics have diagnosed it. He hopes that Pasternak will be able to recover in his later productions. Of bourgeois art: it is now in decay and in crisis, it is finished and cannot create anything new or meaningful; only Joyce’s Ulysses deserves to be saved.