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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 14, No. 11. September 6, 1951

Bolshevik Boots

Bolshevik Boots

One of the most infamous Soviet institutions is known to be the political censorship of literature, music, and art. Professor Rhodes' remarks on this matter were very valuable, for it was specifically to study the relations between writer and reader that he paid his brief visit to the Soviet Union last year. Speaking at the Wellington Training College in February, he said this so-called political censorship was precisely the effective control of the reader over the writer, the audience over the artist. The ordinary citizen reads (voraciously) every notable Soviet book that appears. They talk about it, write to their papers about it, and finally invite the writer to come down to their collective to discuss it with them.

"Imagine T. E. Eliot going and reading his poems to the London dockers," remarked the Professor without malice.

When the Soviet people don't like a novel or a poem or a ballet or a symphony, they say so, and they know enough to be able to criticise intelligently. They believe in social realism, condemn formalism, timelessness, decadence. When the controversy is at its height, it is the habit of responsible Russian political organs, following a lead from cultural organisations, to sum up the discussion and give a judgment.

The Soviet Communist Party's censure of Prokoviev and Shostakovich in 1947 was heralded by Just such a popular controversy. At the time of the dust-up that followed in the western Press, the British composer Christian Darnton wrote this in "Challenge":

"Music is produced and consumed. Has the customer no say in the kind of product put before him?

"I would not for a moment suggest that every Soviet citizen should aspire to make profound technical or Marxist criticisms of music. But I am convinced that every Soviet citizen has the Right to express an opinion on music. It would be a healthy thing for British music if our people lost their timidity and insisted on exercising their own rights in the matter."

At the same time the Scots authoress Naomi Mitchison wrote her remarks in "Glasgow Forward":

"Sometimes I am told by good liberals . . . that it is shocking and terrible that Russian artists of the caliber of Shostakovich should publicly state, at the behest of a committee, that they repent because their art is become out of touch with the people, and should then resolve to do better. But is it necessarily such a revolting spectacle of Communist terrorism and insincerity, or fear, as they make out? I wonder . . ."

She went on to state that the only standards by which a writer in the western world could judge his own work were his own standards or else that of economic return. "I do not say that the economic standard is bad in itself," she said. "It means that the writer writes (or the painter paints) work that can be understood by others. He has crossed the narrow threshold of individualism into the great shared world of man's experience."

That, of course, is precisely what Eliot and many of his "modern" cobbers have failed to do. The people cannot stomach their esoteric gibberings.