Lidiya K. Chukovskaya sent her letter to a number of literary organizations and publications and the editors of Izvestia and Pravda. All of them ignored it.
[Because of the mood revealed by the letter, which is addressed to Mikhail Sholokov, author of And Quiet Flows the Don, and which undoubtedly reflects the feelings and views of broad circles of intellectuals in the Soviet Union, we are reprinting the full text below. ; :
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When you spoke at the 23d party congress, Mikhail Alexandrovich, you went to the rostrum not as a private person but as "a spokesman for Soviet literature."
You thereby made it legitimate for every writer, including me, ‘to pass judgment about the things you said supposedly in the name of all of us. Your speech at the congress really can be called "historical." In the whole history of Russian culture I know of no other case. of a writer publicly expressing regret, as you have done, not at the harshness of a sentence but at its leniency.
Furthermore, you were upset not only by the sentence -- you also did not like the actual court proceedings in the case of the writers Daniel and Sinyavsky. You found them too pedantic, too legalistic. You would have liked it better if the court. had tried these two Soviet citizens unhampered by the legal code, if it had been guided-not by the law but by its "sense of rough justice." I was staggered by this suggestion, and I have good reason to believe that I was not alone in this. Stalin's contempt for the law cost our people millions of innocent victims. Persistent attempts to return to the rule of law, to strict observance of the spirit and letter. of Soviet law and the progress made in this, constitute the most precious achievement of our country during the last ten years. But this is the very achievement of which you wish to rob the people!
True, in your speech at the Congress you held up as a model to the court not the comparatively recent period in which Soviet laws were infringed wholesale, but a more distant time when law and the legal code had not yet come into existence: "the memorable twenties." The first Soviet legal code was introduced in 1922. The years 1917-1922 are memorable for their heroism and grandeur, but they were not distinguished by their respect for the rule of law, as could scarcely be expected, since the old order had been destroyed while the new one was still in its infancy.
The habit of trying people on the basis of "rough justice" was fitting and natural during the Civil War, in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, but there is absolutely no justification for it on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet regime. Who benefits from and what is the point of a return to "rough justice" -- that is, in effect, to the rule of instinct -- when laws have been established? And who exactly do you dream of having tried by this particularly severe procedure, which operates outside the framework of the legal code, and was applied in the "memorable twenties"? Primarily the writers...For a long time now, Mikhail Alexandrovich, you have been in the habit in your articles and public speeches of talking about writers with scorn and crude mockery. This time you have surpassed yourself. These sentences of five and seven years' penal servitude on two intellectuals, two writers, neither of whom enjoys good health -- that is, sentences, in effect, to illness and perhaps death --
seem to you to be too light. You seem to think that a court which would have tried them not in accordance with the criminal code, but in a quicker and more straight-forward manner, would have devised a sterner punishment, and you would have welcomed this.
Here are your actual words:
"If these fellows with their black consciences had been caught in the memorable twenties, when people were tried not on the basis of closely defined articles of the criminal code, but ‘in accordance with the revolutionary sense of justice,' then, my goodness, they would have got something quite different, these turncoats! And then, if you please, people talk about the sentences being too harsh."
Yes, Mikhail Alexandrovich, together with many Communists of Italy, France, England, Norway, Sweden, Denmark (whom in your speech you call for some reason "bourgeois defenders" of the condemned men), together with left-wing organizations in the West, I, a Soviet writer, take it on myself to talk about the uncalled for, completely unjustified harshness of the sentence. You said in your speech that you were ashamed for those who tried to get a pardon for them by offering to vouch for their good conduct. But, quite frankly, I am ashamed not for them and for myself, but for you. By this plea they were following the fine tradition of Soviet and pre-Soviet Russian literature, whereas you, by your speech, have cut yourself off from this tradition. It was in the "memorable twenties," that is, from 1917 to 1922, at the height of the Civil War, when people were judged in accordance with a "sense of justice," that Maxim Gorky brought all the weight of his authority to bear not only to save writers from cold and hunger, but also to save them from prison and deportation. He wrote dozens of letters of intercession and, thanks to him, many writers returned to their writing desks. This tradition -- the tradition of interceding for people -- is nothing new in Russia, and our intelligentsia is rightly proud of it. The greatest of our poets, Alexander Pushkin, prided himself that "for mercy on the fallen I have called!" In a letter to Suvorin, who in his paper had dared to blacken Zola, the defender of Dreyfus, Chekhov said: "Even supposing Dreyfus were guilty, Zola would still be right, because it is the business of writers not to accuse or prosecute, but to intercede even for the guilty, once they have been condemned and are undergoing punishment...There are enough accusers and prosecutors as it is."
"It is the business of writers not to prosecute but to intercede...
This is what we are taught by Russian literature in the person of its best representatives. This is the tradition you have breached by loudly regretting that the sentence was not harsh enough.
Just consider for a moment the meaning of Russian literature.
The books of the great Russian writers have always taught and still teach us to look not in an oversimplified way, but deeply and subtly, armed with social and psychological insight, at the complex causes of human error, misconduct, crime and delinquency. The humanizing message of Russian literature is indeed to be found mainly in this quality of understanding. Think of Dostoyevsky's book about penal servitude, "Notes From the House of the Dead," and Tolstoy's novel about prison, "Resurrection." Both writers were passionately concerned to plumb the depths of man's soul, human destiny and social conditions. It was not in order to pronounce a further condemnation on men already condemned that Chekhov made his heroic journey to the island of Sakhalin, and the book he wrote about it had great depth. Last but not least, think of "And Quiet Flows the Don": with what concern the author treats the mistakes, misdeeds and even counterrevolutionary crimes committed by his heroes, with what depth of understanding for the enormous social changes taking place in the country and for the slightest impulses of the bewildered human soul. It was startling to hear the author of "And Quite Flows the Don" reduce a complicated human situation to the simplest and most elementary terms by asking the crude question which you addressed to the delegates of the Soviet Army: "What would you have done if traitors had been found in one of your detachments?" This is nothing less than a call for drumhead justice in peacetime! Why bother, after all, to wonder which article of the criminal code Sinyavsky and Daniel had infringed, why try to figure out which sides of our recent history had been satirized in their books, what events had led them to take up the pen and what factors in our life had made it impossible for them to publish in their own country? Who cares about psychological and social analysis? Put them up against the wall! Shoot them within 24 hours!
To listen to you, one might think that the condemned men had been distributing anti-Soviet leaflets or proclamations, or that they had sent abroad not works of fiction but the blueprints for a fortress or a factory at the very least...By reducing complex propositions to simple ones, by bandying around the word "treason" in such an unworthy manner you have once again, Mikhail Alexandrovich, been false to the writer's duty of constantly explaining and bringing home to everybody the complexity and contradictory
nature of the literary and historical process, instead of playing with words, thus deliberately and maliciously oversimplifying the case.
On the surface, the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel was held with due regard to the legal formalities. For you this is a fault, and for me it is a good feature. Yet, even so, I protest against the sentence pronounced by the court.
Why?
Because Sinyavsky's and Daniel's committal to trial was in itself illegal.
Because a book, a piece of fiction, a story, a novel in brief, a work of literature -- whether good or bad, talented or untalented, truthful or untruthful -- cannot be tried in any court, criminal, military or civil, except the court of literature. A writer, like any other Soviet citizen, can and should be tried by a criminal court for any misdemeanor he may have committed, but not for his books. Literature does not -come under the jurisdiction of the criminal court. Ideas should be fought with ideas, not with camps and prisons. ;
This is what you should have said to your listeners if you had really gone to the rostrum as a spokesman of Soviet literature.
But you spoke as a renegade from it. Your shameful speech will not be forgotten by history.
And literature will take its own vengeance, as it always takes vengeance on those ‘who. betray the duty imposed by it. It has condemned you to the worst sentence to which an artist can be condemned -- to creative sterility. And neither honors nor money nor prizes, given at home or abroad, can turn this judgment from your head.
Lidiya Chukovskaya
A NEW