The recent news from the March of Glasnost is the formation of a Soviet chapter of pen, the international writers’ organization. Will its composition differ from that of the Soviet Writers’ Union, the obedient executor of the Party’s stick-and-carrot policy? Already many writers, both here and abroad, have protested the offering of pen memberships to such warhorses of Socialist Realism as Yuri Bondarev and Stepan Zalygin, who not so long ago made fervent appeals for the expulsion of Solzhenitsyn and other Enemies of the State. I wonder: if Maxim Gorky, the founder of the Writers’ Union, were alive today—would he pass muster?
The question might be regarded as merely idle, except that Gorky enjoys an enduring celebrity status in Soviet—and, to some degree, international—letters. Next to Lenin (at the time of the writing of this article), he remains a sacred cow in the Soviet Union. Just as attacking Lenin would force a complete—rather than partial—revaluation of the basis of the Soviet State, attacking Gorky would cast aspersions on the entire body of Soviet letters.
The comparison is apt and yet isn’t. Twenty years ago, when I went to school in Russia, the slightest criticism of Lenin sent shivers down one’s spine; but no one took Gorky’s work seriously. His name adorns one of Russia’s largest cities, Moscow’s major street, a car plant, a film studio: not a weapon in the Party’s propaganda arsenal has been spared to etch his name in the collective memory. Yet in
