Alberto Sholokhov

The modern world is full of things which, contrary to what we tend to think, have never been seen before today. It does not seem, for example, that the ancient world knew the disconcerting and, in some ways, terrifying phenomenon of non-art. Art in the ancient world seems always to have been, if not actually art, at least artisanship; no matter how crude, vulgar, almost formless, it was nevertheless, in the broad sense, an esthetic product. Non-art—the kitsch of the West and the State Art or Socialist Realism of the Communist countries—is a new phenomenon divorced from art, and must be judged from a new standpoint.

The atmosphere in which the non-art of the Eastern countries was born is reflected in Mikhail Sholokhov’s speech against his colleagues Andrei Sinyaysky and Yuli Daniel at the recent Russian Communist Party Congress at Moscow. Among other things, Sholokhov said: “There are scribblers who publish one sort of writing at home and another, completely di...