Pathway to Japanese Literature

I

In the Soviet Union, which had crushed fascism in Western Europe at the cost of immense sacrifices, vigorous reconstruction across both material and spiritual fronts appeared to have commenced immediately after peace was restored.
For instance, the great Dnieper Power Plant—a true symbol of affection and pride for all Soviet people during the era of the First Five-Year Plan—had been destroyed by the very workers who built it when the Nazi army’s invasion of the Dnieper region became imminent.
When I read that article in the newspaper, I thought those who were profoundly moved by these brave people’s actions could not have numbered merely one or two.
How fervently must they have vowed to rebuild this with their own hands even as they destroyed it?
Starting from the reconstruction of that Dnieper Power Plant, the honorable revival of Stalingrad and production recovery efforts spanning the entire Ukraine region and Don basin—as we understood through shortwave news reports—were progressing with an efficiency that astonished the world.

In the cultural sphere as well, post-war re-examination and research aimed at development to higher stages were being vigorously undertaken.
In the November issue of *Yūkei Tsūshin* and other magazines, extremely fragmentary reports were published.
Through Mr. Yoshitarō Jomura’s translation, we had the opportunity to read Zhdanov’s report focusing on the two Leningrad magazines, *Zvezda* and *Leningrad*.
At the same time, the New Japan Literary Society also published a record of the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art conducted by Mao Zedong in May 1942, titled *The Direction of Chinese Literature at the Present Stage*.
We Japanese writers unexpectedly gained the opportunity to read these two profoundly interesting records.
And what we deeply felt was this: in countries sincerely striving to become truly democratic in the modern age, how seriously they evaluated and studied literature and other arts as matters vital to their people.
France and post-war young Germany, liberated from the Nazis, were likewise earnestly addressing issues of literature and art as national tasks.
Those circumstances, though fragmentary, began reaching us Japanese.
In Japan, as the people—who had only just begun to escape semi-feudal pressures—strove through complex efforts to realize a democratic society, what kind of literature and art were they attempting to claim as their own?
What kind of contributions were writers making to that end?
Zhdanov’s report and Mao Zedong’s records stimulate our reflection and spirit of inquiry.

The first half of Zhdanov’s report was primarily devoted to critiques of Zoshchenko’s work *The Adventures of a Monkey* and Anna Akhmatova’s poetry.
However, for Japanese readers at the time, Zoshchenko remained almost entirely unfamiliar.
It was likely none of his works had been translated either.
I found this a rather intriguing phenomenon when considered against Japanese publishers’ longstanding practice of zealously promoting exaggerated translations for any work that gained even a modicum of reputation.
In other words, Zoshchenko was too insignificant a literary figure to be promoted abroad as a representative Soviet writer.
This becomes clear when we recall how we Japanese writers felt whenever foreigners asked us whom to recommend.

Though they could not be called true literary works, there indeed existed writers and works that persisted domestically due to various circumstances.
The trends of decadence and eroticism now flooding Japanese journalistic literature—along with their authors—held not an ounce of literary value worthy of representing modern Japanese literature.
No Japanese person would wish to see *The Reclining Young Lady* translated into foreign tongues.
Yet within domestic journalism, such works and writers undeniably existed.
The crux of literature's problem lay in why these works emerged and persisted within contemporary Japanese society and journalism.
Pursuing this literary quandary in Japan yielded an unexpectedly grave answer.
It was fundamentally a matter of paper.
Profit-driven publishing sought maximum profit from each ream of paper while demanding guaranteed sales.
This inevitably led them to embrace eroticism as the basest form of sales security.
Such was the diagnosis by publishing specialists.

*Zvezda* and *Leningrad* are not profit-driven magazines.
As the writer Simonov, who had recently visited Japan, had sincerely hoped might occur in Japan's publishing world too, the Soviet Union's publishing industry is planned and operated directly as part of the people's cultural undertaking.
Why did magazines like *Zvezda* and *Leningrad*—operating under such favorable conditions—kowtow to a worthless writer like Zoshchenko and mistakenly regard Akhmatova as appealing?
In Zhdanov's report, the editors of those magazines are described as having confused public and private matters on grounds of "friendship."
One cannot help but think Zhdanov was merely going through the motions of taking seriously the desperate excuses made by the editors of the two magazines.
After all, even editors in a nascent democratic society like Japan have stopped blindly publishing manuscripts recommended through "friendship-based" connections with company presidents or editors-in-chief these days.
"Was there no editorial board at *Zvezda*?"
"Was *Leningrad*'s editorial office composed of just a single person?"

I think both *Zvezda* and *Leningrad* succumbed to the greatest temptation for editors and publishers—that of appealing to readers.
Writers too were susceptible to this temptation, and Japan had no shortage of examples where unexpected authors demonstrated unforeseen downfalls.
Even if they did not experience dramatic downfalls, as warned in *The Direction of Chinese Literature*, writers were easily poisoned by arrogance through this.
They tended to become literary bosses.

If that was the case, then why were Zoshchenko and Akhmatova favored by a segment of Soviet citizens?
Around the time when the First Five-Year Plan was beginning—in the latter half of the 1920s when I was in Moscow—Esenin’s poetry had been favored by some.
Esenin was undoubtedly a poet who created verse, though not without his complexities.
His poems—steeped in melancholy, devoid of life’s purpose, and subverting the melodies of old Russia’s soul—were celebrated by certain circles.
Some foreigners even protested against the notion that Soviet literature was represented by Fadeev and Sholokhov, insisting, “No—Esenin’s popularity remains formidable even now!”
With subtle psychological motivations, they persistently invoked Esenin’s name through nuanced emphasis.
Such individuals—unwittingly exposing their own culture’s fragmented and skeptical emotional core—took keen interest in probing the idea that beneath Soviet social psychology there always flowed an undercurrent diverging from what *Pravda* affirmed.

In the wider world, there may well be people who view the examples of Zoshchenko and Akhmatova cited in Zhdanov’s report with the same emotions that were directed toward Esenin over twenty years ago.
Yet for literary scholars who earnestly seek to understand human development through the march of history, it is impossible to hold identical impressions of similar literary phenomena when comparing the pre-Second World War past to the postwar present of today.

It is said that Americans know better than the Japanese how to laugh genuinely.
Despite various social contradictions, a people who possess a tradition as a democratic society, stand on their tangible experience of citizens’ rights, and have the confidence to critically examine both their society’s failures and successes prefer innocent laughter.
The development of American comics, a taste for absurd pastimes, light music, and Saroyan’s lighthearted literature.
All of these are reflections of cultural demands arising as counterparts to America's vigorous productive power, intense free competition, and demanding work hours marked by tense productivity.

In various sectors of world production, the Soviet Union was catching up to America, and in some areas was already surpassing it.
In terms of the stability of working people’s living conditions, the Soviet Union likely excelled the most.
Because socialist democracy was advancing the form of social production from demands for profit to enjoyment by direct producers.
Following the desire for laughter that arose from such social life, the Soviet Union’s five-year struggle against the Nazis—which it had endured—was a brutal one that claimed seven million lives.
This bloody struggle requiring long endurance ended in victory.
How Soviet citizens must have desired a refreshing change of mood at that juncture.
Give us joyful music!
Give us entertaining spectacles!
And give us reading material!
Along with delicious borscht and clean sheets after so long, they desired those things.
Are we to say that Soviet citizens who had even eaten furniture glue had no right to desire those things?

All active writers had gone to the frontlines and home front near the battle zones, sending their literary records and dispatches.
Even Vera Inber—who over a decade ago had said things like “I grew so bored in that narrow Moscow study with that woman from Japan sitting before me; I’d grown tired of even acrobatic performances…”—flew off to besieged Leningrad and wrote a diary-style record of the city’s defensive life.
As the lyrics of *Frontline Correspondent* go, nearly all energetic Soviet writers had scattered “to the east and west, south and north,”
cooperating for their homeland’s defense.
When the war ended, it could be imagined that these writers—while recuperating from exhaustion—were occupied with organizing and publishing their wartime literary output.
For this reason, it could also be imagined that they lacked the leisure to respond to Soviet citizens’ demands for relaxation and laughter.

It can be considered that Zoshchenko emerged in this gap.
Zoshchenko had evacuated to somewhere in Central Asia, eating roast mutton; with a body that had not grown thin and a brain saturated with fat—haggard yet full of vigor—he returned to a Leningrad seeking laughter.
And he began to set up his own shop.

What Soviet citizens had desired was hearty, boisterous laughter—the kind of open and honest mirth where one pokes a comrade in the side while breaking into a satisfied grin.
If there were no such humor in the emotional fabric of Soviet citizens’ lives, satirists like Ilf and Petrov—scathing yet humane, and imbued with the sensibility of the new society—would never have emerged.
Nor would there have emerged singers of satirical pop songs (*chastushkas*) pioneering new Soviet light music, or performers who played leading roles in works like *The Merry Fellows*.
I don’t know if the satirical magazine *Krokodil* is still being published today, but this too was a bitingly sharp satirical publication.
Satire as self-criticism has found a natural and healthy place within the Soviet emotional fabric that clearly grasps self-criticism as a driving force of development.

Zoshchenko had always been a writer who filled his works with dubious, sordid, voyeuristic exposés.
The scandals Zoshchenko subjected the monkey to in *The Monkey’s Adventure* are generally imaginable.
The Soviet citizens of Leningrad—who had initially sought hearty, boisterous laughter—were likely lured, before they knew it, into Zoshchenko’s preferred brand of raucous guffaws and snickering mirth.

The phenomenon of a gap arising between general readers’ demands and journalistic editing also occurred in Japan from late 1945 to around mid-1946.
During the war, the majority of Japanese writers had been collaborators in the war of aggression, while democratic writers had only just emerged from lives of oppression; it was difficult to find literary works written with so-called “clean hands” that were suitable for the unfolding of new history.
Thus, the works of Nagai Kafu and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō—whose hands were indeed unstained by blood—flooded the profit-driven magazines of the time and, in a sense, laid the groundwork for today’s decadent trends.
And the general readers, who had been deprived during the long years of war of a way of life based on human-like independent judgment and the independence of taste, read and accepted these works without discernment, through an almost feudalistic habit of bowing to “reputation.”
This was clearly something that delayed the democratization of our own destiny—

Soviet citizens diligently worked to eliminate illiteracy since 1917, enlightening the Russian people who had once been on par with India and China in illiteracy rates.
The book-reading population constituted a vast portion of the entire populace.
This could also be inferred from literary works like those by Simonov having print runs numbering in the millions.
These new reader classes were no longer confined to the educated class who had already been accustomed to reading.
They were read equally widely by men and women across various professions: farmers; soldiers; factory workers; students; teachers; political activists; artists.
Therefore, it seemed the stages of their understanding were also complex.

Within the popular spirit there always existed a sharp spirit of satire.
In late Tokugawa Japan, the merchant class expressed this through senryū, anonymous satirical verses, and other forms of wordplay.
They thereby gave form to pent-up frustrations born from lacking circumstances where political satire could be materialized.
In eighteenth-century England, Swift’s *Gulliver’s Travels* had been written as a mockery of the pretentious airs among upper and middle-class society, challenging old authorities and their hypocrisy.
How satirical literature developed in that country—both in form and content—revealed a profoundly insightful critical perspective.
Where lay the significance of Gogol’s *The Government Inspector* and *Dead Souls*, among others?
What had the symbolism in Garshin’s *The Red Flower* conveyed to strike Western readers’ hearts?

In an era and society where satirical literature could exist openly and logically—infused with human wit and insight, humorous yet unapologetically sane—it was hard to believe that raucous guffaws akin to peeking up skirts from below would brighten the hearts of those laughing. In the desperate collective action of defending their socialist society, one could scarcely expect every Soviet citizen who had naturally become heroic during those trials to later develop a deeper awareness of their actions’ world-historical value once the hardships ended. For many, this experience likely remained merely sensory—something they had poured all their strength into overcoming as an unavoidable necessity—rather than consciously understood. Sensory experiences are washed away by time. This was precisely why even quiet, ordinary people not born as heroes could become heroic when survival demanded it, just as all women can endure childbirth’s agony. Yet in each conscious individual’s life, experience must accumulate; critique and development must continue until cultivated perspective emerges—a necessity equally true for societal history itself. Those who lived solely through their senses might survive, but neither livelihood nor true life could emerge from such existence. Even among Soviet citizens consciously building history’s most advanced democratic society across a fifth of Earth’s surface—planning meticulously with concrete methods—if they failed to viscerally grasp how their labor and victories shaped global peace, this would prove their consciousness lagged tragically behind the society they themselves enriched daily. For socialist democracy represents humanity’s most awakened social form this century. To imagine them being led about by Zoshchenko’s monkey—a creature unworthy of Swift’s noble Houyhnhnms—spattering raucous laughter over their own devoted efforts? An intolerable spectacle! Just as galling were Japan’s own people and writers who—crushed under imperialist atrocities and domestic oppression—still refused liberation’s struggle through sheer ignorance and servility. Could thoughtful readers stay silent when Zoshchenko—a supposed “engineer of souls”—steered Soviet innocence toward malicious mockery? Unthinkable! Just as Japan’s mindful citizens must protest rulers peddling “absolute nothingness” philosophy to intellectuals while flooding workers with vulgar trash like *The Red and Black*, reducing newspapers to half-sheets through paper hoarding—all while democratic progress forms our lifeblood’s very core.

In the Soviet Union, self-criticism was instigated across all fields of literature, theater, music, and film through examples such as Zoshchenko and Akhmatova.
Regarding literary matters—which should fall under the Soviet Writers’ Union’s purview—one might argue there was no need to await Zhdanov’s report.
However, had either the Leningrad Writers’ Union or Moscow headquarters possessed sufficient capability to properly address these concrete phenomena and emerging problematic tendencies within literature, incidents like *Zvezda* might never have occurred.
That criticism originated from Party cultural policy might lead some foreign intellectuals—following their thirty-year-old pattern—to anticipate backlash against artistic freedom in the Soviet Union.
Yet when Mao Zedong speaks with such earnestness about literary tasks for establishing humane Chinese lives—starting from fundamental issues—who could resent this?
It proves particularly intriguing that certain Japanese readers express sympathy toward China’s communists.
In the Soviet Union, where the Party bears responsibility for guiding all societal life, these organized members themselves constitute part of literature’s readership.
First and foremost as readers, they hold critical rights.
This vital dynamic advances beyond both current Japanese social sentiments and existing intellectual relations between vanguard parties and external groups.
Though Japan’s party has existed legally for barely a year—still lacking cultural richness while its members remain too busy for serious literary engagement—how could prioritizing concern for democratic revolution and literary development be deemed erroneous?

Recently, sixteen provisions concerning Japan’s labor movement were announced by the Far Eastern Commission.
Among these were codified core provisions for Japan’s democratization—such as clauses guaranteeing labor unions’ freedom of political activity, freedom to support political parties, and protections against unfair treatment or arrest solely due to union membership.
What sort of Japanese bureaucrats was it that drew the Far Eastern Commission’s attention to the actual conditions of Japan’s labor movement and pushed the boundaries of Japanese limitations to realize fundamental human rights?
This was precisely what the working masses’ capabilities, the unions’ dedication, and their vanguard—the Party—achieved through their own sacrifices.
It was only natural that the Party, which strove so earnestly for the systematic improvement of working people’s livelihoods, published an outline of cultural policies unmatched by any other existing political party in Japan.
And I believe that when each democratic nation of the world, according to its historical stage of democratic advancement, studies and learns from one another’s experiences and achievements, this constitutes the most genuine form of camaraderie.
It is only natural that there are common research topics running through the world’s democratic literary movement.
It cannot be that Rotary Clubs organized by capitalists and entrepreneurs alone should constitute the sole ring connecting world culture.

II

During the Second World War, the citizens of the Soviet Union demonstrated to the world the full extent of their abilities that had been developed over the past dozen years.
The bloodletting schemes planned against the Soviet Union ultimately failed to bleed its social life dry.
This fact held world-historical significance and became cause for jubilation.

In the Soviet Union, collective farms and state farms existed where mechanized agriculture was carried out.
This single fact did not merely turn Russian muzhiks into agricultural workers of socialist production.
The young people who mastered tractors did not need to struggle with tanks.
Rural inhabitants who possessed the ability and habit to organize their work in the Soviet style demonstrated that capability even when they went to villages in East Germany.
The existence of technical schools for workers did not merely send their daughters happily to coeducational classrooms.
They brought forth lovely and proud women radio operators as depicted in the novel Spring.
And the extensive development of worker and peasant correspondents centered around various magazines and newspapers gave rise to numerous frontline reporters during and after the war.
The careers of Simonov and Gorbatov, well-known in Japan, proved typical of new society writers—their literary talents blossomed from in-house literary circles before becoming connected to their local writers' unions.
In this way, it was the Nazis who willfully ignored, scorned, and slandered the fact that in Soviet socialist society, each citizen—man and woman alike—was endowed with unique breadth and quality of abilities, talents, and life experiences, thereby creating the seeds of their own destruction.

It was impossible to imagine that all frontline and reportage literary works written in the Soviet Union during this great war had been of excellent literary quality.
There must have been formulaic patterns, stereotypical emotional depictions, and instances where enemies were treated like labeled solid objects.
However, one undeniable reality persisted.
This was the inevitable qualitative leap observable between Soviet writers of quantity and caliber from 1917 through the civil war period and those who achieved global prominence during this Second World War in the 1940s.
Should this not be earnestly examined and digested as a phenomenon within world literary history?

In capitalist society, the fact that artistic talent has suitable conditions for its development and flourishing means that the greater part of this possibility is constantly entrusted to the vagaries of circumstance.
That is precisely why such trivial facts as Miss Stuart—who, aspiring to become a film actress, left her hometown of Oklahoma not for Hollywood but for New York and was recognized by Metro Film Company to sign a contract—are reported to Japanese readers with photographs as one such stroke of luck.
Not only are opportunities for talent to "emerge into society" entrusted to chance, but the very possibility of talent existing as a latent ability among the people is entirely left to spontaneous generation.
In the world of the past, culture was deemed something that could only blossom within the upper class.

The talents of new Soviet writers emerging from 1917 through the Civil War era remained products of contingency and spontaneous generation inherited from their former society.
October removed Tsarist oppression.
The civil war instigated by Denikin, Kolchak and Wrangel—alongside famine and mass migration—combined with Bolshevik resistance brought inexhaustible experiences and narratives to all Russians.
The entire populace now possessed “something worth telling”.
They had truly lived.
Writers akin to us like Furmanov consciously crafted works such as his *Red Guard* and *Mutiny* with political-literary awareness—Fadeyev’s *Destruction* being no accident.
This was no mere guerrilla youth’s memoir.
Yet contemporaries like Pilnyak likely stumbled into literary expression accidentally—carrying potato sacks along rail lines until impressions demanded written form.
I believe even Ivanov’s *Armored Train* contained fortuitous environmental elements.
Though October expanded social possibilities for people’s culture with broadened foundations，literary talent then still relied heavily on “heaven-sent” endowments.

Avdeenko, author of *I Love*, was one of the "children without guardians" during the revolution.
The fact that he was one of the besprizorny (homeless children) carries profound significance.
The fact that Soviet society constructed “children’s homes” for the besprizorny (homeless children) and defended the dignity of their humanity and their capabilities from corruption also served as the impetus for creating the moving cinematic work *Life Guidance* in the realm of film art.
It emerged as the outstanding literary work titled *Educational Epic*, which is about to be translated into Japanese.
And as tens of thousands of living Avdeenkos working across all fields of Soviet society’s construction.

As a result of the battles during the Civil War era, the young Ostrovsky—blinded and rendered completely paralyzed—left behind the full-length novel *How the Steel Was Tempered* at the end of his life, supported by his comrades and family.
This fact is not merely that he was a successful amateur writer and a brilliant namesake of the nineteenth-century Russian realist playwright Ostrovsky.
As recorded in Jobamura Yoshitaro’s introduction, the literary period following the Soviet Union’s achievement of its First Five-Year Plan had, as its great positive aspect, clearly sent forth writers in the form of amateur writers—new citizens created, nurtured, and humanized by the particularities of Soviet society.
The fact that Soviet literature’s negative aspects during this period lapsed into facile trivialism can rather be seen as established writers from the old society—who had emerged in the preceding era through obsolete contingencies or had displayed vigorous fervor under the phenomenal influences accompanying the transition to a new society—returning to their own habitual ways.
If this were a makeshift blade, one might say it had reached the point of peeling away.

After undergoing these transitions crucial to the history of democratic literature, the present arrived as the third stage.
Japanese writers who for years could not even get their hands on a single copy of *Literary Newspaper*, along with ardent supporters of Soviet literature, witnessed the emergence of a Soviet literary landscape filled with an astonishing number of new names.
Almost all of these writers—both men and women—were infants in October.
They were innocent, blue-eyed Oktyabryata (October’s children).
They were people who grew up within Soviet social life as Pioneers and Komsomol members, began writing through Rabselkor (worker-peasant correspondent) activities, gradually came to compose stories, and ultimately became professional literary activists.
They manifested as the very social achievements of the Soviet Union, and the history of this new society over the past thirty years coursed through their very flesh and blood.
The courageous lives of each individual who went forth from villages, factories, schools, and enterprises to defend democracy on the frontlines bore no resemblance whatsoever to the fates endured over thirty years by such figures as a fanatical Otto from the Nazi army or a pitifully coerced Karl.
The roots of Soviet literature from today into tomorrow lay precisely there.
Could it be accepted that literary figures who grew as products of a society most conscious of humane living in modern history—artists and "engineers of the soul" who ought to be most attuned to life’s varied experiences—possessed only an ambiguous evaluation of the value of the people’s life to which they themselves belonged and from which they emerged?

In modern Russia, there existed literary figures like Belinsky, Nekrasov, and Dobrolyubov who formed the bedrock of human spiritual history. There was a writer who embodied the very history of the people's revolution since the 1900s—Gorky. It was only natural that Zhdanov emphatically stressed in his report how modern Soviet writers must vigorously develop these achievements of democratic literature. Soviet society had passed through the eras of Lenin and Stalin via its manifold realities. Stalin’s writing style—with its clarity, conciseness, and beauty of vibrant vitality—inaugurated a new era in linguistic artistry. During the Second World War’s October Revolution anniversaries and May Days: Could those warmly human messages Stalin sent, with their vigorous rhythm that pierced hearts and awakened people to the value and joy of being Soviet citizens, truly be poems unworthy of their pride? Alongside seven million lives that fell bravely defending that line—could such expressions be ones they would feel ashamed to possess? How could anyone believe that literature so vigorous it approached gracefulness, suffused with tenderness attainable only through endurance, as realistic as their science and as earnest about unifying theme and style as their production plans—how could such literature fail to emerge after their great victory?

For Japanese writers, this page could not have been written without tears welling in their eyes.
Where in Japan’s modern literature could one find a single tradition of Belinsky or Nekrasov?
We stood in unparalleled barrenness.
Yet we could not help recalling one solemn song by Schumann.
The song sang:
“I do not grieve.”
If there were no figures ahead to lead the way, we first had to recognize that tradition had been begun by those who walked that path.
This was precisely why the history of the proletarian literary movement—which had blazed as a signal fire for literature serving Japan’s people—and its fundamental understanding of literature, however crude and wounded by misfortune they might be, possessed absolute existential value.

Three

Among Soviet writers, there was a man called Ilya Ehrenburg.
Ehrenburg was the author of *Trust D.E.*, which Meyerhold had staged in an Expressionist style around 1927–28, but I think his activities as a writer may have constituted a unique exception within Soviet culture up to 1940.
Ehrenburg lived frequently in France and other foreign countries, and at the time when France took the lead in initiating the People’s Front movement during the anti-fascist struggle, he published dynamic reportage.
He had served as a cultural conduit between the democratic and progressive groups in European capitalist countries and the Soviet Union’s achievements.
To us foreign writers, Ilya Ehrenburg appeared as one of the most cosmopolitan figures among Soviet authors.

With the recent world war as a turning point, the borders encompassing all Soviet citizens were expanded.
As evidenced by Simonov’s short story collection *Yugoslav Notebooks*, the sphere of Soviet citizens’ lived experiences and emotional horizons broadened—those who had never crossed the Don River did not merely set foot upon its banks.
Through stories they had heard, they observed the peoples of other nations and their social lives.
Neither having gone to adopt local customs through “When in Rome” pragmatism nor approaching with invaders’ violence, these millions of Soviet citizens found themselves compelled—with clear eyes and hearts—to contrast the living dimensions of their emerging socialist society with Central European nations still shrouded in medieval feudal mists from the old world.
This development was understood to hold profound implications for Soviet society’s future cultural evolution and establishment of its unique character.
Around 1930, Soviet citizens had to summon mechanics from Germany to study precision machinery production.
Shipbuilding techniques had been acquired by Peter I from Dutch experts.

In the sincere feelings of Soviet citizens there was no ethnic prejudice; as a civilized advanced nation they harbored both curiosity toward capitalist countries’ cultures and a reluctance to pass judgment—as seen in the most straightforward example of women’s fondness for French face powder and stockings. This awareness of being latecomers in production technology enabled Soviet citizens to achieve their twenty-five years of “Catch up and overtake!” At the same time, in the realm of culture they were accompanied by a mood of being slightly captivated by Anna Akhmatova’s poems—imbued with the lingering scent of French perfume—in their aged hues of pink and purple. The influence of French art and music on Soviet art and music was pronounced, and even a modern talent like Shostakovich had initially followed the confused trends of French modern music. When Simonov came to Japan he was asked at a literary roundtable discussion: “What foreign writers were being read in the Soviet Union?” At that time he listed American writers such as Steinbeck; placing Balzac first among French classics followed by Flaubert Maupassant Stendhal Mérimée Marcel Proust and others. While it was understandable that Balzac studies were being conducted by Soviet scholar Dr. Griftsov I found it strange that after works like *Boule de Suif* and *A Woman’s Life* several insignificant Maupassant pieces were being published while Romain Rolland and Martin du Gard remained unread. While it was understood that Mérimée’s appeal—along with his techniques—offered something valuable to Soviet writers could Marcel Proust have been read merely as exoticism? The lives and deaths of Proust and his British successor Virginia Woolf—who sought to establish literature in the realm of the subconscious—made it difficult for us to comprehend how modern Soviet literature’s path could connect with Proust’s approach in any way. Even if one sensed this affinity with foreign literature in the psychological tendencies of *Professor Skutarevsky*’s author since Soviet society did not entrust its structural foundations to Freudian “unconscious” determinism the work ultimately fractured and failed in its realism. The reason Libedinsky’s work *Hero* received unrelenting criticism from the Soviet public around 1930 lay in his interest in psychological analysis—treated as a new plaything—and its resulting failure.

Simonov was considered a writer who possessed a young and robust physique and spirit, with both a great capacity to enjoy life and an aptitude for learning.
He came to Japan, returned to Moscow, and immediately departed for America.
For a writer like Simonov to experience American social life was deemed extremely beneficial.
For his own sake, and for that of Soviet society and its literature.
Because even when visiting Japan or Yugoslavia, there had been nothing that could engross him enough to make him drop his notebook.
His composure and objectivity had never been tested.
The social life in those countries was not sufficiently rich to confound his innate judgment.
In America, Simonov—as a Soviet citizen and socialist writer—was bound to encounter several experiences he had never before encountered in any context.
The writers of Simonov’s generation had acquired confidence in enduring hardships, privation, and danger.
The nature of capitalist society was also thought to be understood.
Yet the realities of day and night in New York were in no way equivalent to his translated work *Day and Night*.
Foolish things, grotesque and vile things—yet simultaneously wise, pure, grand, and overflowing—all these phenomena bloomed in full upon American society, which now held over half the world’s total possessions.
Along with its unemployment, strikes, and housing shortages.
Soviet writer Simonov, having entered this giant organism of America, could not avoid confronting—through all the exhilaration of his human internality and socialist consciousness—the naturally arising temptations and allurements.
He received stimulation sufficient to exert his own reason to the fullest extent.

This experience of Simonov would exert a stronger direct influence on Soviet literature than Ehrenburg’s experiences in America.
Ehrenburg, by virtue of his disposition, age, and long experience living abroad, possessed the skill to establish a fixed standard for his relationship with American social life.
Konstantin Simonov—his age in the prime of thirty, his sensitive disposition, his pursuit of experiences, his writerly way of life rooted in the pursuit of observation—even during the period he stood upon the shallow and meager flow of Japan’s social life, were perceived by us.
His exuberance would confront and mingle with America’s own exuberance—with what astonishment would he reconfirm his identity as a citizen of a democratic nation that had reached the socialist stage, and as a writer of its people?
Herein lay a great spectacle.
The weakness of Soviet writers’ emulation of foreign literature—as cautioned in Zhdanov’s report and evident even in Simonov’s case—was precisely being transcended through the reality that young, capable writers, technicians, and citizens, now growing internationalized due to the magnitude of contributions Soviet society continued making to human history, were themselves becoming internationalized in their lived experiences.

The internationality of Soviet culture and literature—borne from the people’s state’s assuredly growing international significance even amid all prejudices—had made an essential leap compared to the era when Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev were renowned both then and now; when Gorky’s works were performed in Paris; and when Chekhov had his own translator in England, Mrs. Garnett.
The great writers of previous eras struck Western and American intellectuals through the social contradictions—those agonies that Western Europe’s so-called “civilization” had lost the habit of earnestly addressing—the lamentations of ignorance, and the noble anguish of the disenfranchised.
They rendered them solemn yet receptive while imparting the joy of human self-awareness.
Since the midst of this great war, the relationship Soviet literature began establishing with readers worldwide had surpassed this stage of the previous era.
It began moving.
By enduring its own hemorrhage to defend its socialist homeland for humanity’s justice and liberation—while simultaneously acting as executor defending both the people’s freedoms in France and Germany and the progressive conscience of America and Britain—Soviet literature emerged before global attention as both an authentic chronicler and indomitable combatant for peace.
At the twentieth century’s dawn, Pyotr Kropotkin delivered his renowned lecture titled “The Ideals and Reality of Russian Literature” at Boston University.
Achievements scarcely conceivable from that lecture’s content were becoming Soviet literature’s defining essence.

Zhdanov’s dignified, precise, and emotionally resonant advice to Soviet writers struck us Japanese writers as still only modestly drawing attention to the joy and self-awareness of Soviet writers’ uniqueness.
Where could the source of their creative passion lie if Soviet writers did not learn from, depict, and narrate the various experiences, achievements, and painful failures of the Soviet people’s state?
Soviet writers could be nothing other than members of the Soviet people’s state.
Within this reality lay both limitless future achievements and today’s incompleteness—herein resided the pure motive of literature.
When the society in which writers lived was no imitation of any past society, why must they imitate what was old, outdated, and part of a culture with atrophied legs?
When that very society worked to develop a three-dimensional humanity befitting human beings, why should writers need to bind themselves to the deformed “house” that Chen Yun satirized?
We Japanese democratic writers acknowledged how meagerly the semi-feudal social life of Japan’s past had contributed to humanity’s happiness, both in the Orient and the West.
Precisely for that reason, Japanese literature—both its classics and modern works—did not widely exist in the world.
It was by no means the case that only the uniqueness of language and customs—as some conservative and self-righteous individuals claimed—was the decisive factor.
Those inconveniences would inevitably be overcome through the discovery of some method once more pressing needs arose and demands emerged.
Look at the proceedings of the Tokyo Trials.

The people and their writers who aspired for Japan’s democratization and strove toward it were now seeking to transform Japan—a nation that had until then only made its presence known to the world through moments of aggression—into something entirely different.
They were striving to become promoters of democratization in the Orient, participants in it, and one of the forces ensuring peace.
This was the progressive direction of Japanese society, and this was the path leading to the realization of each individual, each talent, and each happiness.
Even when we spoke of the advancement of democratic literature in Japan, this was impossible unless democratization progressed in all aspects of Japanese social life.
For that reason, all democratic cultural figures, artists, and technicians had to work with all their energy.
The more thoroughly Soviet society embodied socialism, the greater the international significance of Soviet literature and its writers became—and precisely for that reason, all artists had cooperated through their art with the Five-Year Plan when necessary and risked their lives on the front lines in times of crisis.
We had to frankly acknowledge that unless we first created the society that should exist for our own existence, there could be no way for us to exist.
Lately in Japan, in a twisted manner characteristic of its long-oppressed intelligentsia, the issues of politics and art had begun to be discussed.
The broadest organic connection between politics and literature had, I believed, been implied and articulated within the examination of society and literature’s relationship that we had touched upon here while studying Zhdanov’s report.
Because they had been made victims of the excessively oppressive governance and policies of a minority, they had developed a habit of timidity.
When they heard the word “politics,” they immediately thought of orders, control, and restraint; their limbs stiffened, their breath caught, and like slaves who had seen a whip, they lost all comprehension and sank into stupidity.
It was strange that these very people did not question themselves about dutifully paying a metropolitan tax thirty-five times higher, paying an income tax that effectively reduced their earnings to one-third, submitting to paper shortages tantamount to press suppression, and engaging in social life through various votes.
They offered no resistance to the minority politics they were in fact submitting to, yet why should politics aiming to liberate them from this—if one recognized oneself as a member of the populace—be considered unnatural when it signified a class-based progressive struggle for the improvement of people’s lives and the establishment of culture?
The tormented, pathological thinking capacity of today’s Japanese intelligentsia could not even comprehend the very notion of political primacy over culture and literature except in terms of its bureaucratic essence.
They could not naturally perceive literature as a social phenomenon of humanity—one encompassed within the direction and methods of the historical achievements of their own people’s class.
This was nothing other than a confession that the Japanese people—even their intellectuals—had had no experience in advancing, destroying, and rebuilding their own society, and thus knew nothing of socially autonomous methods.
In today’s Japan, the issue of politics and literature—and the primacy of politics—held profound significance.
On this issue hinged the people’s tangible sensibility toward Japan’s democratization.

Both Zhdanov’s report and the "Direction of Chinese Literature" seek to foster a legitimate and natural understanding of the relationship between politics and literature, grounded in the actual conditions of their respective social realities.
It seems that in any country, the primacy of politics risks inviting misunderstandings and prejudices; Chen Yun expressed this with a distinctly Eastern sagacity as follows.
“Our discipline merely restrains non-proletarian elements obstructing revolution—exactly as swimming techniques only restrain a swimmer to prevent them from drowning,” he stated.

Finally, there remained the question of how the political nature, class nature, and ideological nature—warned against and emphasized in Zhdanov’s report—should be manifested and heightened within the concrete process of literary creation.
To take an example easily understandable to us: for this purpose, the Soviet Writers’ Union gave Gorbatov time to revise *The Unyielding People* once more—allowing him to enrich crucial historical details necessary for it to endure as a true modern classic while providing the opportunity to further establish principal characters as archetypes—a method that proved effective.
The overall structure needed more thorough study: some parts required significant shortening; others demanded relocating descriptive passages as necessary; certain sections called for more realistic and unsparing depictions.
Such painstaking refinement grounded in those works demanded from writers a serious pursuit of reality regarding the unity of motive, theme, and technique when creating as class-conscious individuals.
And through this process, it fostered a writer’s growth.

When Tolstoy was writing *Anna Karenina*, he came to the scene where Anna, who had run away from home, stealthily visited her husband’s house on the morning of her beloved son Seryozha’s birthday to see him.
It is said that at this time, Tolstoy—the author—agonized for days over whether the unfortunate Anna, amidst her urgent feelings of love, humiliation, and the turmoil of hatred and sorrow, would remove her veil or not when entering Karenin’s entrance, and what she would do with her coat.
Within the limitations of his art yet remaining faithful to reality, Tolstoy sought to explore the specific actions necessitated by particular emotions.
Modern democratic or socialist literature expanded its grasp of reality beyond understanding individual connections between phenomena.
It expanded to encompass within their tangible grasp the social and class-based historical necessity that lay beneath the individual necessity of phenomena.
The social life emotions of individual writers were deepened, expanded, and rendered more organic, reaching the point where they could understand and perceive the universality of phenomena as they individually manifested, grasping them as living archetypes.
This aspect represented a particularly notable trend in the post-Second World War intellectual climate.
In human culture, the diminishing role of individualism after the Second World War did not mean that individuals or individuality had vanished; rather, it signified that we had learned how critical it was for the society in which those individuals lived to possess actual democratic conditions to truly secure the development of individuality, value, and freedom.
Individual lives were being inexorably expanded, and within the framework of petit-bourgeois conservative individualism, coherence could no longer be maintained.
Connected to the fact that the yen in personal wallets had come to hold one-hundredth of its value, no matter how complex and subtly individual Mr.A and Mrs.B’s personal experiences might be, within the scope of asserting individual experience no measures could be devised to normalize such abnormal changes in monetary value.
This was what it meant—that the same would apply to various social and cultural phenomena as well.

[March 1947]