Ars Gratia Partis

"Generally speaking," said recently purged Soviet writer Mikhail Zoshchenko (TIME, Sept. 2), "it is rather difficult to be an author." In the U.S.S.R. last week it was proving harder than ever.

U.S. writers like Eugene O'Neill, John Steinbeck, J. P. Marquand and John Hersey could afford--as the Moscow Radio charged last week--to "stay out of touch with the life of their people and the problems which moved all freedom-loving humanity," but Soviet writers, warned a Pravda editorial, must dispense with the "nonsensical theory of a postwar breathing space and the right of literature to relax from ideology."

"Our literature," proclaimed Andrei Zhdanov, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and spearhead of a four-month-long campaign to clean up Russia's intellectual front, "is not a private enterprise. . . . We demand that our comrades, as leaders of literature and as authors, should be guided by that without which the Soviet system cannot live--politics!"

Already Zhdanov's committee has singled out for reprimand a host of writers, editors, film directors and play producers who have veered away from the party line onto primrose paths "where interests of the party were made victims of personal interests and general self-praise." The magazine Leningrad has been suspended, the Writers' Union given a thorough shakeup. A million-ruble movie, The Monogrammed Diary, was spirited away without a trace, after one viewing by the Cinema Ministry. Even the prestigious, semi-official Izvestia was scolded for printing the news straight, leaving the reader "to grope his way through international problems without guidance."

And what holds for writers is just as true for musicians. The latest Soviet artist to feel the sting of Zhdanov's whip was once-favored Composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Loudly hailed as "a triumph of our great victory" at its premiere, Shostakovich's Ninth Symphony was described last week by the Central Committee's Culture and Life as a "playful and fanciful trifle . . . sharp and screaming" and hopelessly lacking in "warm, ideological conviction." It was probably, conceded the young composer's critic charitably, the fault of undue influence by expatriate Russian Composer Stravinsky, "an artist without a fatherland or deep ethical principles." But jilted Genius Shostakovich, hard at work on an opera crammed with ideology, declined an offer to conduct in Boston.

Meanwhile, in the Russian zone of Austria, Chief Editor Ferdinand Rieffler, of the People's Press, was convicted not for anything he had written but for something he had merely heard. At a public meeting a speaker cast a slur upon the Soviet Army. Rieffler failed to rise and voice an objection to the slur. His silence was held a crime to be expiated by four to ten years in Siberia.

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