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 high-
est 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, "recog-
nizes 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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