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Written: 1996.
First Published: May 1996.
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This little known article by the famous Belgian-Russian revolutionary, Victor Serge (1890-1947), has only been published twice before in English, and is omitted from a number of Serge bibliographies. Judging by internal evidence, it was probably written in late 1946 or early 1947. It was first published in French by Les Egaux in 1947. It appeared in the journal Now, no.7 in the same year under the title The Writer’s Conscience and was reprinted in Marxists on Literature edited by David Craig (Penguin, 1975). This newly translated version restores a paragraph missing from previous editions, as well as correcting a large number of errors. Special thanks go to Julie Saunders for the translation.
In his passionate denunciation of the crimes of Stalinism and his vigorous defence of artistic freedom, Serge echoed many of the themes developed by Trotsky in such works as the manifesto, Towards a Free Revolutionary Art, and this stand was given added weight by the fact that Serge knew personally many of the writers murdered by Stalin.
The Writer’s ConscienceHere I want to look at this problem only under the most formidable aspects of immediate reality. These notes are from a writer who knew what it was like to have been caught in the middle of increasingly stifling events for over twenty years, where he continually saw men (and their works) whose main aim was to express conscience, perish in one way or another.
I recently received from afar, by circuitous routes, two simultaneous messages, which complement each other in their tragic significance. The literature of our times of cessation of war without peace, that is to say without reconciliation for the victims, with no desire to rebuild the world, without renewing our confidence in humanity, reflects, above all, anguish. It shows what a narrow margin of creative freedom reality leaves the intellectual even when, in order to give himself an enlivened illusion and no doubt to rise up to the level of a nightmare, he is happy to affirm, as do certain French authors, a ‘vertiginous freedom’. If today, however, there were still semi-sincere exchanges, if we weren’t isolated by a huge network of prisons, one would notice the singular appearance of a benevolent clarity in Soviet Russian literature.
Amongst the pile of works from the war, sometimes written with an undeniable talent but in which all the general themes, furnished by the omnipotent Bureaux, are known in advance, several poems have emerged which bear the official stamp only as the soldier does his uniform. All of a sudden one sees the man under the uniform and this man has a face full of intensity, a personal silhouette. The Regime of Controlled Thought has reasonably taken into account that in times of darkest suffering it is necessary to afford some relief to the human soul and it authorised on the one hand a properly managed religious renaissance, on the other a lyrical poetry strictly limited to the great theme of love. Love is certainly more dangerous to tyranny than one would think at first sight. They know it. A man and woman should not find escape engrossed In the joy of being a couple likely to lessen their desire to work their obedience to the State’s commands, their devotion to the Leader . . . I remember a young worker ‘fed up with ideology’ who wrote to the old Maxim Gorky:
I wish that, instead of embracing his tractor, the countryman would embrace the countrywoman, I wish for fields where grass, not nails, would grow. I want to “have fun”.’ And the great writer, becoming all official, replied in an indignant tone: ‘Have fun, but that is the oldest slogan of the parasites. Let others work: let’s have fun!’ (Pravda, December 20, 1931). The most noteworthy Russian lyrical poet, Sergei Esenin, lived precisely for this reason under a harassing disapproval which finally drove him to suicide in 1925. Some years later, the same internal conflict led the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who had hope In the dictatorship, to commit suicide . . . But in times of war, dangers less psychological than lyricism threaten the absolute state. Because all youth are deprived of the right to life, it becomes prudent to allow them the song of love which if it helps one to live can also help one to fight and die. The fact is that, alongside patriotic prose weighed down with monotony, Soviet Russian literature has recently produced some love poems of a noble vigour and with enough freshness of feeling and thought to show that the Russian continues to live deeply, even under the heaviest of constraints.
I have in front of me the ninth edition of the review Znamia (The Standard) for 1945 which contains Margarita Aliguer’s poem Your Victory, 6,700 lines long. Only yesterday the author was a young unknown. The work is simple, written in the classical language of nineteenth century Russian poets and at certain moments reaches heights of lyricism full of experience, lucid passion, affecting intelligence, right across the vast emotional range:
Let he who falls on the reddened dust,
His helmet pierced by a splinter,
Let he who falls forgive the two who live
Their holy right to earthly caresses!
As a whole, despite the inevitable and probably sincere concessions to the ideological phraseology of the time, to me this work is first class, and I have seen nothing to compare with it in the four European languages whose literary production I endeavour to follow.
The Poet’s ResistanceAt the same time that I received the official literary review containing this poem, I learnt, after a delay of several years because the general rule is one of secrecy, of the death (or, one should say, murder) of one of the most important Russian poets of the last thirty years: Osip Emilevitch Mandelstam. He would be just over 50 if he were still alive. Around 1913 he, along with Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev, founded the Acmeist School which had a strong creative influence. Acmeism had as its objective the expression of ‘immediate truth’ in perfectly appropriate forms. (N S Gumilev, one of the four or five greatest Russian poets at the start of the revolution, openly professed counter-revolutionary opinions and was shot in 1921). I remember one evening in 1932 in Leningrad at the Mandelstams. The poet got together several writer friends to read to us a piece of prose which he had brought back from a trip to Armenia. I won’t name here any of the people who attended, my comrades and friends, so as not to compromise those who survive. Jewish, quite small with a face full of sadness, and with worried, meditative brown eyes, Mandelstam, greatly valued by literary people, lived poorly and with difficulty. He was hardly published, produced little, not daring to combat the censor’s reprimands and the diatribes of the orators of the Association of Proletarian Writers. The chiselled text which he read to us made me think of Giraudoux at his best, but here there was no question of the dream of Suzanne before the Pacific; secretly it was about the poet’s resistance to the strangler’s noose. The visions of Lake Erivan and the snows of Ararat raised, in the murmur of the breeze, a demand for freedom, a subversive praise of the imagination, an affirmation of ungovernable thought . . . Mandelstam, his reading finished, asked us: ‘Do you think it could be published?’ It wasn’t forbidden to admire landscapes. But would the censors penetrate the protesting language of these landscapes? I don’t know if these pages ever saw the light as a short time later I was imprisoned in the Internal and secret Moscow Prison (for thought crimes). I learnt that Mandelstam later tried to commit suicide; that during the ordeal he wrote an epigrammatic quatrain in which one could see an allusion to the Leader and was imprudent enough to let several people know this; that he was arrested; that from 1942 on, his few friends believed him dead in captivity in unknown circumstances. It is permitted to publish a great love poem. It is forbidden upon pain of death to ask the State what happened to the poets and authors who disappeared. Even love must remain quiet at the cell door.
Under the Threat of DeathThe story of the massacre of Soviet writers from 1936-39 has not been written. No account has been published. Which publisher, which review, would have accepted that account? As everything happened in secret, it could only be fragmentary. But, published or not, this drama constitutes one of the fundamental facts of present-day culture. A friend, who was one of the most remarkable writers of the revolutionary generation, said to me in Moscow: ‘The conscience of we Soviet writers is very different from that of western men of letters. Not one of us can escape the fear of possible execution. There’s not one of us who doesn’t cry out bitterly in his loneliness, “Oh, if only I could create freely!”.’
The anguish of this extraordinary creator has been fully justified; nobody knows what happened to him. His fifteen extremely valuable novels have been withdrawn from libraries. His colleagues no longer dare to speak his name. Such has been the lot of several first class master writers who must be recognised as the founders of Soviet literature. Boris Pilniak, author of Ivan-da Maria, of The Naked Year, of Wood of the Isles and of The Volga Flows to the Caspian Sea. Babel, author of Red Cavalry and Odessa Tales. Voronski, former revolutionary prisoner, who was the driving force of Soviet literature from 1918 onwards (Art and Life, Beyond the Dead and Living Waters, Eye of the Hurricane) who was certainly shot because he was of the Left Opposition. The old Ivanov-Razumnik, philosopher and historian, one of the intellectual leaders of the 1917 generation (Ivanov-Razumnik had just published a biography of Shchedrin when he disappeared. I got this news while in prison from a young poet, my cell companion for one night, who didn’t know why he had been imprisoned; I thought I could discern that the master and his pupils were reproached for maintaining a hidden attachment to the idealistic philosophy of Mikhailovsky and Peter Lavrov). The producer Meyerhold whose boldness renewed Russian theatre in the years from 1902 to 1936. The historian of Marxism, Riazanov, who died in exile at the beginning of the war. Naturally I cannot list less well-known writers, the young, the writers of memoirs of the revolution who disappeared by the hundred. Nobody knows the list, except perhaps the heads of the secret police. And the ‘perhaps’ that I put in here is vague, because the police chiefs who carried out these purges have themselves disappeared. The rule is that once the man is suppressed, his works are eliminated, his name is no longer spoken, he is erased from the past and even from history.
I have just read Konstantin Fedin’s three beautiful recollections of Maxim Gorky. They go back to a time when I knew Maxim Gorky quite well. He maintained a courageous moral independence, did not hesitate to criticise the revolutionary power and ended up receiving an amicable invitation from Lenin to go into exile abroad. I can vouch for the astonishing accuracy of Fedin’s notes, the meticulousness with which he relates Gorky’s customary remarks, in which I can see his gestures and hear his voice. However, on each page I notice that his frequently expressed ideas, historical facts and names have been omitted. It is with a feeling of unease that I admire the skill, the tenacity and the paralysed honesty of the author who managed to sketch a truthful and powerfully living portrait while still conforming totally (but not, I imagine, without distress) to the rule of obedience.
Not one of the disappeared writers that I have just named, except for Riazanov, has been openly accused. (And Riazanov was accused in the press of having conspired with the Socialist International in preparing for war against the USSR, which was the height of delirium; he was condemned in secret, by an administrative measure. In reality, he had made several indignant outbursts and generous gestures towards persecuted Marxists). Not one has been the subject of a public condemnation. Several, such as Pilniak, Babel, Meyerhold and Riazanov were personally known in both hemispheres. Their works were translated into English, French, German, Spanish, Catalan, Czech, Yiddish, Chinese . . . No PEN club, even those which had offered them banquets, has asked any questions about them. No literary review, as far as I know, has commented on their mysterious end. Books on Soviet literature have been published abroad which make no mention of them or only mention them in passing and evasively. A universal complicity surrounds their anguish.
Universal CowardiceOn the attitude of the reviews, that is to say the intellectuals who make the reviews, towards these mysteries and crimes, I will allow myself to cite a case drawn largely from my own personal experience. When the old German Marxist Otto Ruhle, Karl Marx’s biographer, the author of many acknowledged important works, a militant in the 1918 revolution, died in Mexico in 1943, I offered to write an essay about him for an important review journal in South America, where he had several friends. At first my proposal was received with interest although my reputation as a heretic gave rise to some unease. As soon as I expressed the intention to mention, among the battles supported by Otto Ruhle, his participation in the Dewey Commission which proclaimed Trotsky’s innocence after the Moscow Trials, I was categorically told that this was impossible.
From a rational point of view, I have never fully understood why it was impossible unless it was because an irrational fear distorted the consciences of the review’s editors. The same malaise has today spread to the far comers of the world. A new Parisian review, popular and sympathetic, called Maintenant, published in last January a study of the poet Marcel Martinet, who died under the occupation (Les Temps Maudits, 1918, La Nuit, 1920, Une Feuille de Hêtre, 1935). The author of these warm-hearted pages passes entirely in silence the struggles which the poet upheld for twenty years for the integrity of revolutionary thought. An omission verging on impiety: Marcel Martinet, whose moral courage never flinched, would have repulsed it like a treason. I understand, however, that it is practically impossible to publish today in Paris a hundred clear lines on the problem which I deal with here. And I understand that the friends of the poet, having to choose between total silence on his death and his work and this mutilated in memoriam, have preferred to erect a provisional monument which will lack his true greatness.
The civilised person who sees a crime being committed in broad daylight outside his window without either him or anyone else intervening or even shouting out, can he then hold himself in high esteem, still have clear judgement, a critical spirit, or the ability to create if he is an artist? The writer informed about what is happening in the world – and I maintain that it is the writer’s duty to be informed – is often in the uncomfortable position of this civilised person. Wounded conscience only escapes from the oppressing contamination of controlled thought, controlled moreover by terror and psychological perversion, if it confronts the whole inhumanity of the problem with resolute disapproval. Here, it is true, complex questions of belief are posed, inseparable from the social environment and self-interest. Again, should we demand of religious or political belief that it does not obliterate conscience? Modern man’s faith should be compatible with clear knowledge, loyalty, simple mental well-being and a sense of the dignity of himself and others or it becomes a regression to the outlook which precedes that of our culture, the latter of which is considered to be a superior form. All too often, right under our noses, the writer (more generally, the intellectual) exhibits a blindness which is as much imbecility as deceit. We are thus seeing the disintegration of universal values caused by the forced insincerity of double standards towards oneself and others. That this insincerity could be driven into the subconscious and that the writer could believe himself, in giving in to it, to be perfectly sincere or devoted to a supreme reason of State is all the more worrying. I would not wish to underestimate the importance of the literary work of the French Resistance for which so many of my comrades have suffered and died. This work obviously shows a precious vitality. And this is why I experience a feeling of suffocation on reading its texts. That poetry rises to lash the tormenters, to exalt the memory of the tortured, to keep the proud memory of those shot, is without doubt one of its most humane missions in present times. But that this poetry is often written by poets who, elsewhere, praise the executioner, praise the torturer, insult those who have been shot, tell lies of another ‘silenced’ resistance for the same motives – namely man’s defence against tyranny – this by a frightening twist causes us to deny all professed values. Pure gold is no more than modified mud. The writer’s conscience reveals itself to be full of dark corridors. The impassioned voice of song is nothing more than that of a false witness. The poetic quality of Aragon’s work has sometimes seemed to me moving, even excellent; but how many men in the USSR and the Third International to whom he looked for guidance, that he loved or pretended to love, have been tortured and shot without his being moved? Without his asking the elementary question of innocence or guilt in relation to their cases? Without asking himself about the sinister gravity of the repression paradoxically justified by ‘revolutionary humanism’? Aragon wrote formerly, I think in Commune in 1937, unbelievable pages about the accused in the Moscow Trials. Whether they conspired or not, these old socialists at least deserved the human respect that the victors accorded the Nazi chiefs in the Nuremberg Trials. (That respect for the truth might have saved these men is difficult to doubt now that the Nazi archives are in the hands of the Allies. Checking certain crazy accusations has become easy. I dare say that it has been done).
The Poet of the Communist Resistance was, among others, the friend of Bruno Jaszinski, whose novels L’Humanité published (Je Brule Paris, a successful title), whom I knew in Moscow, who was timidly faithful to ‘the general party line’ and who would die in a concentration camp in the Far East. Aragon was the friend of the General Secretary of the Association of Proletarian Writers, the most senior of the leaders of Soviet literature, Léopold Averbach, shot where, when, how? Shot certainly, since he was the nephew of the People’s Commissar for the Interior and head of the political police, Yagoda, who was himself shot.
The writer’s allegiance to a very powerful party, accustomed to shooting many people, is in this particular case a sufficient explanation. But beyond this, how to understand these verses about traitors written by another poet from the same party (Paul Eluard):
lls nous ont vanté nos bourreaux
lls nous ont détaillé Ie mal
lls n’ont rien dit innocemment
(They have vaunted our tormentors
They have detailed the bad
They have said nothing innocently)
Yes, how can they be understood? Let us grant the psychological disintegration. Let us allow that the poem, as perfect as it can be in its flow, has a false ring about it. The reader believes he is hearing the voice of a defender of freedom, of an enemy of the killers of innocents, and the reader is mistaken. And one asks uneasily: what is happening in the soul of these poets? The poet is suddenly stripped of his inspiration. ‘What is truth?’ Pontius Pilate asked of the condemned. Thousands of men trained in the intellectual discipline of scientific thought – apparently – in fact reply: ‘It is what the Leader of my party commands’. The death of intelligence. The death of ethics.
Committed Thought or Directed Thought?To a lesser degree, a number of other Resistance writers, less clearly classified, poisoned by their environment, incur the same criticism. They seem to have discovered the annihilation of people at the hands of a totalitarian apparatus only by suffering it themselves for several years. Don’t they know that this drama is not just national, that Europe, our whole civilisation, are affected. It is obviously a question, in the hands of good writers, of ‘committed thought’, of ‘participation in action’, of ‘making up one’s mind’, of ‘responsible literature’ and even of being prepared to die for the just causes of our times . . . But what exactly do these formulae mean? Does one want to apply them only to the narrow confines of a patriotic movement which is already out of date? Does one hear an esoteric meaning conferred on these words to the detriment of their universal meaning? ‘Committed thought’: is it to be permitted here, only to be humbly put aside in the face of directed thought? Is ‘participation in action’ legitimate against one oppression and deserving of condemnation against another? That would only be a return to the tribal mentality of thousands of years ago. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ a member of your own tribe, but it is laudable to kill a member of a neighbouring tribe. The ‘responsible literature’ correctly advocated by J-P. Sartre: does it limit its responsibility to certain historic cases only to renounce it in others? It would be right to say that the writer’s conscience can only betray itself by avoiding these questions. And these questions today interest the conscience of only those people for whom the old magic of words and living works created with words remains a means of enlightening and ennobling us.
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