The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1927-06-06
New Literature in the Soviet Union

uOWH from MOSCOW, among winch is
the other brother, Pavel. Yet it is not
so much the armed forces Of the town
which break up the band and over
come the peasantry; it is the very
logic of events, the iron necessity of
history working itself out, as Pavel
tells Simeon in a strange lonely meet
ing in the forest. "YouIl come over
to us all the same, and not merely be-
cause we're defending your land. No,
without us there's no road the village
can take, you'll see." And Simeon is
constrained to admit that it is so, and
goes out alone to submit to the new
and the inevitable. In some respects,
and especially judged from the purely
literary point of view, Leonov's
Badgers is the greatest work Of art
yet produced by Soviet novelist
Fyedor Gladkov's Cement, published
in 1926, is also novel of conflict, the
third great struggle that the workers
of Soviet Russia are waging. While
the earlier part of the story deals
with the civil war and the struggle to
maintain the conquests Of the revolu-
ton, it is chiefly concerned with the
reconstruction period, and portrays
the return to life and activity Of a lit
tie town and its cement works. Chief
parts in the work of reconstruction,
as in the task of repulsing the white
forces, are played by young worker
soldier, Gleb Chumalov, and his wife
Dasha, and through these two and
other characters Gladkov reveals the
revolutionary fervor and determina-
ton which overthrow the old order
and kept it at bay, being flung whole
heartedly into the restoration of eco
nomic life. He reveals, what neither
Fyedin nor Leonov reveal, the ability
of the workers not only to pull down
and destroy, but to build up and Gre
ate; he reveals the last great conflict
that faces the workers, the conflict
with nature and life itself, the final
struggle with the slavery of economic
conditions, and their gradual subiuga-
ton to the corporate will of man. And
because this is so, because Gladkov
enters profoundly and sympathetically
into the creative spirit Of the work
ers, because he discerns a synthetic
process at work in the revolution, and
has the eye to see not only the over
throw of the old order but the birth
of the new, Cement is a great achieve
ment, greater than either Towns and
Years or The Badgers, even though
from the formal literary aspect it
ranks not so high. Gladkov, who
works at the office of the Soviet
Trade Union General Council in Mos
COW, has written the finest inte~pre-
tation of Soviet Russia's creative eff
forts yet given to the world.
One need hardly say that Soviet
fiction is still in stage of formation
and development. The past years
have been years of experimentation,
with new forms and with new content,
and this has left its impress of chaos
and great disunity on the literature,
its one common characteristic being
realism. Yet even in its realism there
has been development, and whereas
the realism of the early days was
severely uncompromising and analyt-
zeal, leaving nothing whatever to the
imagination, already this has largely
yielded to more imaginative treat
ment, which, itself more synthetic,
calls the readers own imaginative
faculties into requisition, and gains
its effect by suggestion as well as by
plain, downright matter-of-factness.
The writers are clearly no longer
merely setting up their memories in
type, but are becoming more creative.
Modern Soviet fiction has complete
ly broken with the past, and its real
ism is only reflection of the writer's
(and workerso attitude to life. They
are intensely concerned with events,
and comparatively little with sub
jective mental reactions to them. For
them man is master of the event, and
not event the master of man, as it
was in the old writer's. The ominous.
brooding fatalism of Chekhov and
Dostoyevski is dethroned; the en-
shaved wills have been unshackled;
the characters are not continually
talking about going to Moscow to-
morrow or next month; they pack up
their things and set out without more
ado. Conflict-man's conflict with
man, with nature, with life itself-is
the dominant note not only of the
three typical novels above mentioned.
but in every serious story of any i'm
portance during the last ten YEAR,.
not excluding even those of Ehrtsn.
burg!
Conflict, and mans dynamic will
set free by the revolutiop and erap-
ping with the fatalism and inertia
inherent in the old order, in things. in
the mechanics of life itself, the ir
tense self-confidence and the creati
ability of the worker once he