Defend human value

Author: Ilya Ehrenburg
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1998-03-01
Features: We declared the lice that spread typhus as enemies of the revolution, just as we now declare cats and peacocks as enemies of the revolution. We must fight against crude painters and café poets, like weeding out weeds. When building cities, don’t forget that we are not only building for ourselves but also for our future generations. We must leave them a beautiful chronicle, telling them how people transformed a wild and impoverished nation into a brand-new, unprecedented society. Don’t let that beautiful chronicle be accompanied by dull illustrations of marble, granite, or concrete. Don’t let future generations ask: How could the people of Magnitogorsk in those days or the explorers of the Chelyuskin expedition have appreciated the fading extravagance of money, vulgarity, and arrogance? The imagination of an artist can alter the proportions of phenomena, emotions, and behaviors, but every novel, even a fantasy or utopian story, must be grounded in reality. Wells’ Martians or ?apek’s amphibians1—are all satires on human society. To create a tragic knight of fantasy, Cervantes had to thoroughly understand his contemporaries. Art outside reality does not exist and cannot exist. Social environment determines a writer’s thoughts, feelings, life, and work; detached from the environment and society, his creation will wither and die. Russian literature may be more evident than Western literature, as it has always been connected to the people. Only a few examples have escaped into a social vacuum—followers of Pushkin after his time—some indecisive poets and novelists, and nearly all the Symbolists who later strove to find a connection with real life (this is particularly evident in the work of Alexander Blok, who moved from The Poems of a Beauty through Retribution and poems about Russia to The Twelve.) Dear guests, you should understand that we live in a century of socialist society, and our enemies are countless. I am not saying that there are no enemies in this hall—here there are none. We are on the right path, we have made mistakes, but as we move forward, we will probably make more mistakes, but we won’t lose hope and will continue to move forward. Sometimes our writers produce bad novels not because they are bound by socialist thought, but because God has not given them talent. We have never said that in socialism, there will be no talentless people. We said that here, there will be no exploiters. Exploiters no longer exist, but there are plenty of talentless authors. Like all writers, Chekhov expresses his own thoughts through the mouths of his protagonists. He, too, dislikes attributing the thoughts of his protagonists to himself. He was particularly generous to the protagonist, Professor Nikolai Stepanovich, in A Boring Story, giving him his own ideas. When someone took Nikolai Stepanovich’s words as Anton Pavlovich’s, he grew very angry. He said, “If I offer you the professor’s thoughts, then please