The Connoisseur Speaks

"What sort of smear is this?" gasped Nikita Khrushchev as he strolled past rows of abstract paintings in a Moscow art gallery last week. "You cannot figure out whether they were painted by human hands or daubed by a donkey's tail!" With these words, the Kremlin's ruler doused hopes of Soviet painters that a new liberal era of artistic freedom was under way in Russia.

Approaching the painter of an avantgarde canvas titled Self-Portrait, Khrushchev asked, "Have you a mother?" "She's dead," stammered the artist. Replied Nikita: "She would die a second time if she saw your self-portrait." He spotted another objectionable work. "How much was paid for it?" inquired the Premier. Told the price was 3,000 rubles, he cried: "Deduct it from the salaries of those who approved the purchase!"

The Kremlin last week was also rapping the knuckles of Soviet writers. Pravda, in a front-page editorial complained that too many Russian authors had "betrayed" the cause of socialist realism in favor of "all-forgiving liberalism or rotten, sentimental complacency." These "pseudo innovators," argued the editorial, "idly pursue Western fashions, which are profoundly alien to our world outlook, to our esthetic sense, and to our concept of what is wonderful and beautiful."

One group of writers was exempted from Pravda's tirade. They were the authors who served Khrushchev's destalinization campaign. All the rage in Moscow last week was an autobiographical short novel by a previously unknown writer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsin, 44, a provincial teacher who spent eight years in an Arctic slave labor camp after the war.

His book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, tells the story of how one falsely accused convict and his fellow prisoners survived--or perished. A typical day: chased from bed at 5 a.m. for a bowl of soupy gruel, herded to work on a construction project guarded by sadistic overseers, fall back to bed at 10 p.m.

Solzhenitsin's stark account, the first detailed description of Stalin's prison camps ever published in Russia, sold 40,000 copies on newsstands and a second printing of 100,000 was ordered. Glowing reviews, which compared the author to Tolstoy, appeared simultaneously in several newspapers, and it was reported that Khrushchev himself had read the story before publication and cleared it.

But even the Stalin kickers might not have their freedom indefinitely. As a Soviet author told a recent Western visitor to Moscow: "Today, yes. But what about yesterday and tomorrow?"

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