Al. Mitrofanov only said that young but qualified writers had virtually dropped out of the Organizing Committee's field of vision from the very beginning.

Once again there's going to be diarchy in the Union, because Gorky wants a monopoly, but the Party won't give him a monopoly, and once again there are going to be two trends, which, of course, will reflect above all on us, i.e., we writers are going to keep suffering.

Many people are offended. A few days ago there was a drinking Party at Lev Gumilevsky's. Pilnyak brought me. I thought they were just going to chatter, but it turns out a faction of the offended had gathered and arranged a drinking party. There are all kinds of ways of correcting one's affairs, but I find this way repugnant. How dare they think I would ever stand up for “Dog's Lane” [“Sobachii pereulok”]?

Lev Gumilevsky's “Dog's Lane” (1927), a novella about sexual mores, occasioned a press campaign at the time against sexual license in the young.

I gave Pilnyak a good dressing down, too. Why does he have to poke his nose into those affairs? What does he have to be offended about? He got moral satisfaction. I didn't like his new story

[Document footnote:] She's referring to Pilnyak's new story, in which he depicts a congress of agronomists in Cen[tral] Asia. The congress is limp, uninteresting, but as soon as one of the delegates makes a statement rejecting the aim of the main speaker, the congress comes to life. Seifullina {…} feels this is an analogy to Bukharin's report.

—there's something like a parody of the writers' congress in it, although Pilnyak denies that. And the story has already been accepted at Novy mir, and naturally it will go through, while good authors like Pravdukhin are kept down.

P. Sletov: I've never been one of the optimists, but right now, since the congress, I have to say that it looks like our brother is going to breathe a little easier. True, 90 percent of what was said at the congress is the usual bureaucratic drivel: the half-empty hall speaks very well to that. All this is redeemed, though, by the truly historic significance of Bukharin's stunning report. No one can diminish the significance of this report: neither his “apology,” nor its partial disavowal on the part of Stetsky. This is a matter of tremendous principle: the question has been posed point-blank about the two forces fighting it out in literature—the official “lack of talent raised on the shield” (the Bezymenskys, Zharovs, and, the logical continuation, the Stavsky-Panfyorovs), and the free and independent masters (Pasternak, Vasiliev, Olesha, et al.). Nothing you do could burn the descriptions given for Bezymensky and Demian [Bedny] from the consciousness of millions of readers, just as nothing you do could drown out the ovations addressed to the same Pasternak and Olesha.

Boris Lapin : It's going to be harder now for Gorky to be the boss in literature, especially if Shcherbakov remains working at the TsK. Yudin could be at someone's beck and call and evoke Gorky's displeasure, but Shcherbakov's hardly going to be his little boy.

L. Kassil : The constant “office switching” at the Orgkom has yielded no creative results of any kind. Now a more or less “firm” authority has been organized. What will come of it, we shall see, not laboring under any especial delusions, of course. It's hard in general to labor under any delusions with Gorky presiding. If he does have his own policy, then it is determined by personal considerations exclusively. What a petty and vindictive old man he is after all. He will never forgive the deceased V. V. Mayakovsky, for example, for his poems about him. We heard how he attempted to “lower” him in his closing word: “the influential and original poet.” He never forgives anyone anything as a general rule. All Prokofiev had to do was come out one time with a critical review of him, and, if you please, in that same closing word he stupidly, without any pretext, came crashing down on Prokofiev.

Yury Nikulin : “I look on things like this, that we should be competing not with corpses like Fadeev, Stavsky, and others, but with living people, with Pushkin and Tolstoy, so what does the congress mean to me? It was a congress of people already brushed by decay. Are we really supposed to expect any good to come of it? Talk with the whole mass of writers. Did even one of them really expect anything to come of the congress, and did anyone really get anything out of it? All it did was tickle the vanity of the people sitting on the presidium.”

Let us cite a report < … > that indicates the manifestation of hostile, great power—chauvinistic moods among the group of poet-translators from the national languages. “The attention paid by the congress to the national literatures evoked unique, chauvinistically colored moods among translators. The general tone was this: nat[ional] writers are bad. It's we who actually make them into writers, sacrificing our own creativity. For this, not only do we not see any gratitude, but we encounter perpetual dissatisfaction, behind-the-scenes accusations, and so on. These writers are widely published here and surrounded with esteem, chosen for central organs of the union and so forth, whereas we always take a back seat.”

Gusev said also that having worked with Uzbeks he was convinced of their work's profound lack of talent, the insincerity of their attitudes, and the rottenness of their literary milieu, where everyone hates everyone and informs on everyone, and that he is not going to engage in translation anymore.

All these individuals, as well as Zenkevich and Narbut, were saying that the congress yielded nothing, that they had no occasion for “genuine” discussion about genuine tasks, that “there” (at the TsK—Zenkevich) they couldn't possibly understand that you can't command literary work, that you can't create anything to order, and that you have to give up on the union and work “for the drawer.”