William K. Malcolm, in what is perhaps the best critical presentation of Ewan to date,9 draws attention to his literary precursors in the Soviet Pantheon, and links him to the Russian and international debate over the nature of the Communist Hero and how to present him. He sees Gorki’s Mother (1906) and Gladkov’s Cement (1925) as the most important analogues, and Ewan’s brusque rejection of Ellen as being in their tradition, where ‘the protagonist demonstrates his heroic fortitude … by resisting the threat made to his greater political destiny by romantic involvement’ (p.161). But it is not strictly correct to speak of a ‘socialist realist’ influence here: the dogma was not theoretically formulated until 1934, and therefore could have had no influence on either Mother or Cement. Orthodox communists have always criticized Gibbon’s presentation of Ewan. They have felt that the ideal communist leader should be warm, sympathetic, many-sided, and richly human—all the things that socialist realism said he should be, and which Ewan is not. His coldly analytic mind drives him to extreme and ‘super-revolutionary’ conclusions, to ‘an intellectualized and at times inhuman conception of the workers’ struggle for Socialism’, and his remarks on tactics do not in the least resemble the real communist tactics of the time; they are pure fantasy on Gibbon’s part.10 But the whole course of history since 1934 seems to show that they were not fantasy. The book is dedicated to Hugh MacDiarmid, and as early as 1926, in the First Hymn to Lenin, MacDiarmid had proclaimed that the horrors of the Cheka were not merely necessary but even insignificant when compared with the role of Death in the whole Cosmos, and had asked

what maitters’t wha we kill

To lessen the foulest murder that deprives

Maist men o’ real lives?

Solzhenitsyn has shown how the Leninist Cheka was a precursor of the Yezhov terror, and it is only a step from MacDiarmid’s lines to ‘What maitters’t what lies we tell, or how we deceive the poor lumpen proles?’, since we, whatever our actual social origins, are the working class, and our will is the ‘real will’ of the proletariat, whether they know it or not. Jim Trease makes the point, at first grimly joking:

For it’s me and you are the working-class, not the poor Bulgars gone back to Gowans. And suddenly was serious an untwinkling minute: A hell of a thing to be history, Ewan … A hell of a thing to be History!—not a student, a historian, a tinkling reformer, but LIVING HISTORY ONESELF, being it, making it, eyes for the eyeless, hands for the maimed!—

Or again, when Ewan is with Trease and his wife:

[He] liked them well enough, knowing that if it suited the Party purpose Trease would betray him to the police tomorrow, use anything and everything that might happen to him as propaganda and publicity, without caring a fig for liking or aught else. So he’d deal with Mrs Trease, if it came to that…. And Ewan nodded to that, to Trease, to himself, commonsense, no other way to hack out the road ahead. Neither friends nor scruples nor honour nor hope for the folk who took the workers’ road …