Word: sovietizing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...writer is above all an artist who is trying to penetrate into the unknown. He must be honest and objective, and be able to do his creative work in freedom. These are all obvious truths. These are the very things that writers are forbidden in the Soviet Union...
Artistic freedom in the Soviet Union has been reduced to the "freedom" to praise the Soviet system and the Communist Party and to urge people to fight for Communism. The theoretical basis for this is an article that Lenin wrote 60 years ago on "The Party Organization and Party Literature," which laid it down that every writer is a propagandist for the party. His job is to receive slogans and orders from the party and make propaganda out of them...
...effect on their actions. If Stalin is on top, then praise Stalin. If they order people to plant maize, then write about maize. If they decide to expose Stalin's crimes, then expose Stalin. And when they stop criticizing him, you stop too. There are so very many Soviet "writers" who are just like that...
However much I protested or tried to prove some point, it was like beating my head against a wall. Literature in the Soviet Union is controlled by people who are ignorant, cynical, and themselves very remote from literature. But they are people with excellent knowledge of the latest instructions from the men at the top of the prevailing Party dogmas. I could not force my way through their ranks. [Evgeny] Evtushenko managed to achieve a little in this way. [Al-exanderl Solzhenitsyn managed a little more, but even that is all over now. The cracks were noticed and cemented...
...mama: So for a quarter of a century I went on dreaming about a happy state of affairs, which is unthinkable for a Soviet writer-to be able to write and publish his writings without restriction and without fear. Not to choke off his own song. To have no thought for party instructions, government-appointed editors and political censors. Not to start trembling at every knock on the door. Not to be hiding his manuscripts away in a hole in the ground almost before the ink on them...