They spoke of the difficulties of educating their children according to the 'European' standards which they had known before the war, and said that in Leningrad it was in spite of all difficulties easier than in Moscow, because the number of well- educated persons outside the State schools continued to be greater than elsewhere, and that children therefore came under civilised influence, which prevented them from becoming the standardised technical experts - even in literature - which they were otherwise in danger of turning into. There was much talk about the 'values of humanism' and general culture as opposed to 'Americanism' and 'barbarism', which are thought to be the main perils at present. Indeed, I can say from my personal meetings with one young member of the Red Army, lately back from Berlin and son of a person liquidated many years ago, that he was at least as civilised, well-read, independent and indeed fastidious, to the point almost of intellectual eccentricity, as the most admired undergraduate intellectuals in Oxford or Cambridge. But I gathered this case was a very exceptional one, although perhaps less so in Leningrad than anywhere else in the Soviet Union. As the young man in question gave evidence of having read both Proust and Joyce in the original (although he had never left the confines of the Soviet Union), I can well believe that this is so, and that no generalisation can possibly be drawn from one astonishing example.
I cautiously touched with my newly made acquaintances among the writers on the degree of political conformity which they had to observe in order not to get into trouble. They said that the difference between Communists and non-Communists was still pretty well marked. The main advantage of belonging to the Party was the better material conditions, due to the high proportion of orders placed with reliable Party men by the State publishing firms and literary journals, but the main disadvantage consisted in the duty of grinding out a great deal of lifeless government propaganda at frequent intervals and of appalling length (this was said in a mild, evasive fashion, but the sense was quite unmistakable). When I asked what view was taken, for example, of so faithful a Party member as the poet Tikhonov, the President of the Writers' Union, the answer was that he was 'the boss' (nachalstvo) and consequently undiscussable. I obtained the general impression that there are few real illusions about the actual quality of the work of Soviet writers, and that pretty frank discussions of this went on, but were scarcely ever published in so
the soviet mind many words. Thus everyone seemed to take it for granted, for example, that Boris Pasternak was a poet of genius and that Simonov was a glib journalist and little more.
Possibilities of travel were, I learnt, somewhat confined, as no writer could travel, for example, to Moscow of his own free will without a formal invitation from either the President of the Writers' Union or its Communist Party secretary, and although this could of course occasionally be wangled by indirect means, it was humiliating as well as difficult to do so at all frequently. The writers enquired with the greatest eagerness about writers abroad, particularly Richard Aldington and John Dos Passos. Hemingway was the most widely read of the serious novelists in English, and, of the English authors, Dr Cronin, although the highbrows did think him a somewhat commercial author, though superior to some. Knowledge of English literature obviously depends on what is accepted for translation and, to a smaller degree, on what VOKS permits to be supplied to individual readers of foreign languages. The results are occasionally eccentric: thus in Leningrad, for example, the names of Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster (mentioned in Priestley's article) were not known, but everyone had heard of Mason, Greenwood and Aldridge. The source of foreign books was in Moscow, but they were very difficult to obtain even there, and if some method of supplying them with the imaginative literature of the Anglo-Saxon countries could be devised they would be most grateful. Anna Akhmatova was particularly pleased by an article which had appeared in the Dublin Review on her verse and by the fact that a doctoral thesis on her work had been accepted by the University of Bologna. In both cases the authors had corresponded with her.
The more eminent Leningrad writers are magnificently housed in the old Fountain Palace ('Fontanny Dom') of the Sheremetevs,[27] a kind of Holland House on the Fontanka, often visited by Pushkin - indeed the most famous of all the portraits of him had been painted in its morning room - a building of the late eighteenth century fronted by an exquisite ironwork grille and gates constructed round a wide quadrangle filled with trees from which thin, narrow staircases go up towards a series of high, well-constructed, well-lighted rooms. The problem of food and fuel is still fairly acute, and the writers I saw there could not be said to be living with any degree of real comfort - indeed their lives were still semi-obsessed by household needs. They hoped, I thought rather pathetically, that, as Leningrad developed into a port communicating with the outside world, more information and perhaps more foreigners would begin to visit their city and so bring them in touch with the world, isolation from which they appear to feel very deeply. My own visits, though arranged quite openly through one of my bookshop acquaintances, had been the first, literally the first, I was told, made by any foreigner since 1917, and I got the impression that it would be as well if I did not mention the fact at all widely. The writers in question said that they read Britansky soyuznik with great avidity, and any references to Russian literary achievement in it, for example reviews of books and the like, were most warmly appreciated.
I found no trace of that xenophobia in Leningrad signs of which are discernible in the minds of some of even the most enlightened intellectuals in Moscow, not to speak of Government officials and the like. Leningrad looks upon itself as, and indeed still is to some degree, the home of Westward-looking intellectual and artistic life. The writers in the literary newspapers, the actors in the theatres and the assistants in the half-dozen or so bookshops at which I bought books, as well as passengers in trams and buses, seem slightly better bred and educated than their cosier but more primitive equivalents in Moscow. Any seeds that we could plant in this ground would sprout more gratefully, if my impression is correct, than in any other part of the Soviet Union. Whether this is practical - whether for example, if a British Consulate were established in Leningrad, contact would still be relatively as easy and almost informal as it seems at present, is, of course, another and very real question. Present freedom of circulation may well be due to the absence of resident representatives of foreign institutions and countries, which makes the task of surveillance of those who pass through the inescapable (and surprisingly comfortable) turnstile of the Astoria Hotel relatively easier, and less worrying to the authorities.
A GREAT RUSSIAN WRITER
1965
Osip Emilievich Mandel'shtam was born in St Petersburg in 1891 and died in a Soviet prison camp. He belonged to a generation of Russian writers who revolted against the unbridled mysticism, the self-dramatising metaphysical dreams, and the conscious 'decadence' of the Russian Symbolist writers. Their master was the remarkable and still under-valued poet Innokenty Annensky, the withdrawn fastidious classical schoolmaster who taught Greek in the famous Lycee in Tsarskoe Selo. An absorbed and patient craftsman, remote from the political passions of his day, austere, aesthetic, and contemplative, Annensky was a preserver and re-creator of what, for want of a better term, may be described as the classical tradition in Russian verse, which descends in a direct line from the godlike figure to whom all Russian writers pray, from which they all stem, and against whose authority no rebellion ever succeeded - Pushkin himself. In the years before the First World War these poets called themselves Acmeists and sometimes Adamists. They were a Petersburg sect, nor is it extravagant to suppose that the formal lines of that solidly beautiful city were not without influence upon their writing. Annensky's most gifted followers, Nikolay Gumilev, Anna Akhmatova and Mandel'shtam, founded the Guild of Poets, the very title of which conveys their conception of poetry not as a way of life and a source of revelation but as a craft, the art of placing words in lines, the creation of public objects independent of the private lives of their creators. Their verse with its exact images and firm, rigorously executed structure was equally remote from the civic poetry of the left-wing poets of the nineteenth century, the visionary, insistently personal, at times violently egotistic art of the Symbolists, the lyrical self-intoxicated verse of the peasant-poets, and the frantic gestures of the Ego- Futurists, the Cubo-Futurists and other self-conscious revolutionaries. Among them Mandel'shtam was early acknowledged as a leader and a model. His poetry, although its scope was deliberately confined, possessed a purity and perfection of form never again attained in Russia.