To Western observers the reaction of Soviet audiences to classical plays may seem curiously naive; when, for example, a play by Shakespeare or by Griboedov is performed, the audience is apt to react to the action on the stage as if the play was drawn from contemporary life; lines spoken by the actors meet with murmurs of approval or disapproval, and the excitement generated is wonderfully direct and spontaneous. These are perhaps not far removed from the kind of popular audiences for which Euripides and Shakespeare wrote, and the fact that soldiers at the front have so often compared their leaders with the stock heroes of patriotic Soviet novels, that fiction is to them, as often as not, part of the general pattern of daily life, seems to show that they still look on the world with the shrewd imagination and unspoilt eye of intelligent children, the ideal public of the novelist, the dramatist and the poet. This fertile soil, still so little ploughed, in which even the poorest seed seems to sprout so quickly and so generously, can scarcely fail to inspire the artist, and it is probable that it is the absence of precisely this popular response that has made the art of England and France often seem mannered, anaemic and artificial.
As things are, the contrast between the extraordinary freshness and receptivity, critical and uncritical, of the Soviet appetite, and the inferiority of the pabulum provided, is the most striking phenomenon of Soviet culture today.
Soviet writers in articles and feuilletons love to emphasise the extraordinary enthusiasm with which the public has received this or that book, this or that film or play, and, indeed, what they say is largely true; but two aspects of the case are, not unnaturally, never mentioned. The first is that, despite all official propaganda, strongly felt and perhaps almost instinctive discrimination between good and bad art - for example, between nineteenth- century classics and the very few surviving literary masters on the one hand, and routine patriotic literature on the other - has not been wholly obliterated, and standardisation of taste does not, so far at least, seem to have occurred on the scale which might have been expected, and which the best members of the Soviet intelligentsia (such as survive) still fear.
The second qualification is the continued existence, although under difficult conditions and in dwindling numbers, of a real nucleus of ageing but articulate intellectuals, deeply civilised, sensitive, fastidious and not to be deceived, who have preserved unimpaired the high critical standards, in certain respects the purest and most exacting in the world, of the pre-Revolutionary Russian intelligentsia. These people, now to be found in politically unimportant Government posts, universities, publishing houses, if not positively catered for by the State, are not vastly harried either; they tend to be gloomy or sardonic because they see few successors to themselves in the succeeding generation, and this is said to be mainly due to the fact that such young men or women as show any signs of independence and originality are ruthlessly uprooted and dispersed in the north or central Asiatic regions, as an element disturbing to society.
A good many of the young who showed signs of talent as independent artists and critics are said to have been swept away in 1937-8 ('as with a broom', as a young Russian said to me at a railway station, where he felt unobserved). Nevertheless, a few such are still to be found in universities or among translators from foreign languages or ballet librettists (for whom there is great demand), but it is difficult to estimate whether by themselves they are sufficient to carry on the vigorous intellectual life upon which, for example, Trotsky and Lunacharsky used to lay such stress, and for which their successors seem to care so little. The older intellectuals, when they speak with candour, make no bones about the atmosphere in which they live; most of them still belong to the class of what are known as 'the scared', that is, those who have not fully recovered from the nightmare of the great purges - but a few are showing signs of emerging once again into the light of day. They point out that official control, while no longer as fiercely devoted to heresy-hunts as before, is so complete in all spheres of art and life, and the caution exercised by the timid and largely ignorant bureaucrats in control of art and literature so extreme, that whatever is new and original among the ambitious young naturally tends to flow into non- artistic channels - the natural sciences or the technological disciplines - where more encouragement to progress and less fear of the unusual obtains.
As for other arts, there was never much to be said for or about Russian painting - today that which is exhibited seems to have fallen below the lowest standards of nineteenth-century Russian naturalism or impressionism, which did at least possess the merit of illustrating, with a great deal of life, social and political conflicts and the general ideals of the time. As for pre- and post-Revolutionary modernism, which continued and flowered during the early Soviet period - of that not a whisper, so far as I could tell.
The condition of music is not very different. Apart from the complicated cases of Prokofiev and Shostakovich (political pressure upon the latter seems scarcely to have improved the style of his work, although there may well be vigorous disagreement about this - and he is still young), either it is again largely a dull academic reproduction of the traditional 'Slav' or 'sweet' Tchaikovsky-Rachmaninov pattern, now worn very thin (as in the case of the endlessly fertile Myaskovsky and the academic Glier), or it has taken to lively, shallow and occasionally skilful, at times even brilliantly entertaining, exploitation of the folk song of the constituent republics of the USSR, along the simplest possible lines - perhaps, to put it at its lowest, with an ultimate view to possible performances by balalaika orchestras. Even such moderately competent composers as Shebalin and Kabalevsky have taken this line of least resistance, and have, with their imitators, become monotonous and tirelessly productive purveyors of routine music of remorseless mediocrity.
Architecture in its turn is engaged either in the admirably done restoration of old buildings and occasional supplementation of these by competently executed pastiche, or in the erection of vast, dark, bleak buildings, repulsive even by the worst Western standards. The cinema alone shows signs of genuine life, although the golden age of the Soviet film, when it was genuinely Revolutionary in inspiration and encouraged experiment, seems, with some notable exceptions (for example Eisenstein and his disciples, still active), to have yielded to something cruder and more commonplace.
In general, intellectuals still seem haunted by too many fresh memories of the period of purges succeeded by rumours of war, succeeded by war and famine and devastation; regret as they might the flatness of the scene, the prospect of a new 'revolutionary situation', however stimulating to art, could scarcely be welcome to human beings who have lived through more than even the normal Russian share of moral and physical suffering. Consequently there is a kind of placid and somewhat defeatist acceptance of the present situation among most of the intellectuals. There is little fight left even in the most rebellious and individualistic; Soviet reality is too recalcitrant, political obligation too oppressive, moral issues too uncertain, and the compensations, material and moral, for conformity too irresistible. The intellectual of recognised merit is materially secure; he or she enjoys the admiration and fidelity of a vast public; his or her status is dignified; and if the majority long, with an intensity not to be described, to visit Western countries (of whose mental and spiritual life they often entertain the most exaggerated notions), and complain that 'things are screwed up too tight in this country', some, and by no means the least distinguished, tend to say that State control has its positive aspects as well. While it hems in creative artists to an extent unparalleled even in Russian history, it does, a distinguished children's writer said to me, give the artist the feeling that the State and the community in general are, at any rate, greatly interested in his work, that the artist is regarded as an important person whose behaviour matters a very great deal, that his development on the right lines is a crucial responsibility both of himself and of his ideological directors, and that this is, despite all the terror and slavery and the humiliation, a far greater stimulus to him than the relative neglect of his brother artists in bourgeois countries.