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. We have been told to repletion about the writer’s ‘responsibility’. 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. Literature is not a means which the writer puts at the service of some cause. The writer can no more know what function he serves than any other artist. We are asked: ‘why do you write? What purpose do you serve? What is your function in society?’ Our art is judged to be ‘decadent’ and ‘inhuman’. Here, as in the West, we are blamed for our ‘gratuitousness’, our ‘formalism’. 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. T here have been a number of very interesting speeches here.
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