illness, so that the cure may have some sense and direction.

Much of the essay which follows will be occupied with an investigation of the nature of reality in terms of its literary reflection, as well as the use of the realistic method in the attempt to portray life truthfully. However, when I speak of reality, it should be noted here that I do not refer to any absolute, but to the historically relative understanding of the truth at the moment when the particular literary product comes into being. Truthful writing--which I use as the highest criterion--is always dependent upon the relationship of the writer to reality, but the truth itself must be seen in the dialectical sense, which, to quote M. Rosenthal and P. Yudin, the Soviet philosophers, in Handbook of Philosophy, "recognizes the relativity of our knowledge, not in the sense of a denial of objective truth, but in the sense of the historical limitations of the approximation of our knowledge to this truth." ¹

I do not propose the essay which follows as anything more than a beginning of this examination; yet a beginning must be made somewhere. We must take a full grip on this matter of reality and literature; we are at a time when all of mankind is being projected into a face-to-face relationship with reality, and writers must march at the front, not at the rear. Theirs is the task of communicating the nature of reality to masses of people, and therein is their art and their glory; for the very nature of their work makes it possible for them to extract the essence of human hope and fear and suffering and triumph. But to do this, they must see the world and not a shadow of it.

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