There have been a number of very interesting speeches here. But I must express my astonishment at hearing the majority of Soviet writers expressing the same sharp criticism of modern literary pursuits as are made in Western bourgeois society. Here, as in the West, we are blamed for our ‘gratuitousness’, our ‘formalism’. Our art is judged to be ‘decadent’ and ‘inhuman’. We are asked: ‘why do you write? What purpose do you serve? What is your function in society?’
Naturally, these questions are absurd. The writer can no more know what function he serves than any other artist. Literature is not a means which the writer puts at the service of some cause. We hear praises sung to the 19th-century novel as a ‘good tool’—the tool which the nouveau roman is accused of rejecting when, with a few small improvements, of course, it could still be used to show people the evils of present-day life and the fashionable solutions, as though this were a matter of perfecting a hammer or a sickle. We have been told to repletion about the writer’s ‘responsibility’. In answer, we are truly forced to point out that the novel is not a tool and that, from society’s point of view, it indeed probably serves very little purpose at all.
The novelist is certainly engaged—he is bound to be, anyway, but no more or less than anyone else—in the sense that he is a citizen of a certain country, a time, an economic system, and lives within certain social customs and rules, among them religious and sexual prescriptions. He is engaged to the exact extent that he is unfree. And one of the particular, and very virulent, forms that this restriction of freedom takes at the moment is precisely the pressure brought to bear by society when it tries to make the writer believe that he is writing for it —or against it, which comes to the same thing. You have there a very interesting case of what today everyone agrees to call alienation.