In our literature,’ a leftist author writes, ‘oppositions which mutually enriched each other in earlier, happier times,
have become insoluble antinomies. Thus science and belles lettres, criticism and production, culture and politics have
fallen away from each other, without maintaining any relationship or order. The showplace of this literary confusion
is the newspaper. Its content is “material” which refuses any form of organization other than that imposed by the
reader’s impatience. This impatience is not only that of the politician who expects a piece of news, or of a speculator
who awaits a tip: behind them hovers the impatience of whoever feels himself excluded, whoever thinks he has a
right to express his own interests himself. For a long time, the fact that nothing binds the reader to his paper as much
as this avid impatience for fresh nourishment every day, has been used by editors, who are always starting new
columns open to his questions, opinions, protestations. So the indiscriminate assimilation of facts goes hand in hand
with the similar indiscriminate assimilation of readers, who see themselves instantly raised to the level of co-workers.
But this phenomenon hides a dialectical moment: the fall of literature in the bourgeois press reveals the formula for
its resuscitation in the Soviet Russian press, because the realm of literature gains in width what it loses in depth. In
the Soviet press, the difference between author and public, maintained artificially by the bourgeois press, is
beginning to disappear. The reader is indeed always ready to become a writer, that is to say, someone who describes
or even who prescribes. As an expert—even if not a professional, but only a job-occupant—he gains entrance to
authorship. Labour itself speaks out for writing it out in words constitutes part of the knowledge necessary to
becoming an author. Literary competence is no longer based on specialized training in academic schools, but on
technical and commercial training in trade schools and thus becomes common property. In a word, it is the
literarization of the relationships of life which overcomes otherwise insoluble antinomies and it is the showplace of
the unrestrained degradation of the word—that is, the newspaper—which prepares its salvation.’ [4]