Russian Literature (15 page)

Katerina Clark’s pioneering study of Socialist Realism,
The Soviet Novel:
History as Ritual
, first published in 1981, showed that the homiletic and formulaic novels produced by Socialist Realism were in fact the expressions of powerful myths of self-transformation and loyalty which helped to hold the edgy and unstable new nation of the Soviet Union together. These novels’ sketchy characterization and scant consideration for psychological plausibility, and their emphasis on progress via the overcoming of external obstacles, allied them with
90

the devices of traditional Russian folklore on the one hand and classical epic on the other. More recently, other critics, such as David Shepherd, Thomas Lahusen, and Jochen Hellbeck, have analysed the active process of self-shaping undergone by Socialist Realist writers themselves, as they struggled, in private diaries as well as public statements, to mould themselves in the manner required by Party dictates, repeatedly rewriting early versions of their works in order to make them conform with changes in policy. Processes of this kind may not suit Western ideals of artistic and ethical independence, but they were in no sense unambiguous and easy to interpret: one central tragedy of the Stalinist era, indeed, was the amount of complex thought and agonized intelligence that went into producing the simple-minded propaganda novels and poems required by Party policy.

‘A

wak

Whichever way, the view of the writer as ‘master of minds’ was a
enin

constant of Russian literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

g nobl

Even so studiedly ironic a Modernist as Vladimir Nabokov was happy
e feelin

to assert that he was no ‘frivolous firebird’, but ‘a moralist kicking sin,
g

scoffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel – and assigning
s with

sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride’. Dissent crystallized
m

round the manner in which ethical or aesthetic edification was to be
y lyre’

imparted, and the material that it should impart, rather than the question of whether such edification might be tolerated in the first place. The author’s right and duty to give such edification was a central plank of Soviet literary culture, in which officially approved authors not only enjoyed material privileges, but were also treated as experts on topical issues of the day. (A typically grotesque example of this was the participation of the prominent Soviet poet Pavel Antokolsky, then in his sixties, in a debate about ‘the youth of today’ that ran in the Young Communist League newspaper
Komsomol’skaya pravda
during late 1963

and early 1964.) The official view of writers as ‘tutors to the masses’ did not mean that this role was eschewed by those opposed to the regime.

As memoirs and letters make clear, marginal or persecuted writers such as Anna Akhmatova and Joseph Brodsky were credited with peculiar
91

insight into psychological, moral, and aesthetic problems. They were appealed to by intelligent fellow citizens not only as patrons and authoritative readers of literary texts, but as experts on everything from painting, music, architecture, right down to manners, dress, and household decoration.

The fact that regard for writers was so high was one reason why, during the Soviet period, large numbers of Russians became sufferers from ‘graphomania’, the compulsive desire to spew out writing, and if possible get this into print, irrespective of its merits. Stirred up by 1920s propaganda, which exhorted the Soviet masses to express themselves (‘anyone can write!’), graphomania was ubiquitous until the end of Soviet power. It encompassed lyric poems and fiction as well as letters to the press, and avant-garde work as well as official literature. As the émigré writer Svetlana Boym has pointed out, graphomania was ‘an embarrassment to literary institutions’ of all kinds, unofficial as well as
ture
official, since it raised uncomfortable questions about the grounds upon
rae

Lit

which it was possible to discriminate between the talented and the talentless. Some of the most inventive and interesting novels and
ssian

Ru

stories created under Soviet power were tragi-comic examinations of the fatal affinities between good and bad art. If the genius of Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach in ‘Death in Venice’ has to be taken as a given, and the sensibility of Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert at least mimics that of the true artist (though he makes the fatal mistake of confusing fantasy and life), the talents of many Soviet writer-heroes were of a more questionable kind. For example, in Yury Olesha’s
Envy
(1927), two different but equally ambiguous writer figures combine genius in perception and invention with social parasitism and paralysis of the will.

The pathological fantasist, self-styled inventor, and scribbler of verses-to-order, Ivan Babichev, stands alongside Nikolay Kavalerov, capable of wonderful artistic insights (he sees a bird as a hair-clipper, a scar as a cicatrice from a missing tree-branch) but reduced at the end of the novel to drunken inanition upon the vast, bug-infested, curlicued bedstead of widow Anechka Prokopovich.

92

The more reflective writers of the 1930s and 1940s, then, were concerned that under a regime which accorded at best a secondary weight to aesthetic criteria in setting down guidelines for publication, all literary production might turn into graphomania. (That such worries were not necessarily chimerical was illustrated by the case of Olesha himself, who sank into alcohol-fuelled despair and the composition of fissiparous fragments during the mid-1930s.) After Stalin’s death, though, the term ‘graphomania’ acquired a different force, as the prize-winning novels of the Stalin era were examined and found wanting, and Socialist Realism itself came under scrutiny. Though the doctrine officially remained in force until 1991, it was irrelevant to a fair amount of the literature published after 1956, even during the relatively repressive ‘period of stagnation’ (1964–87) which succeeded
‘A
the ‘Khrushchev thaw’ of 1954–64. The future of Soviet literature was
wak

the subject of heated debates, which occasionally reached journals and
enin

public meetings, but were more often carried on over kitchen tables.

g nobl

Those who proclaimed the virtues of artistic autonomy, ‘art for art’s
e feelin

sake’, could point to the many solemn, huge, and forgotten novels that
g

littered the artistic landscape like beached whales. The fact that
s with

Solzhenitsyn’s novels and stories of the 1950s and early 1960s were
m

preceded by the publication of fulminating articles about parish-pump
y lyre’

problems in provincial newspapers, and followed by the composition of yet more polemic, lent fuel to accusations that Solzhenitsyn was a kind of latterday Pyotr Boborykin or Aleksandr Amfiteatrov (two prolific and long-forgotten late nineteenth-century authors of topical fiction). But it was equally possible for advocates of writing’s moral purpose to refer to the cases of the early twentieth-century avant-garde writers Aleksey Kruchonykh and David Burlyuk, whose repetitive output mechanically reproduced futurist devices long after the creative power of these had become exhausted. In Andrey Sinyavsky’s 1960 story ‘Graphomaniacs’, some of the characters were passionately committed to writing in alternative genres – extremely badly; but the story’s narrator, Galkin, a ‘graphomaniac’ of the officially approved kind, and operating a sort of Socialist Realist ‘writing by numbers’, seemed at least equally ludicrious.

93

The pessimism expressed in ‘Graphomaniacs’ was to become a standard theme in post-Thaw discussions of ‘the state of Russian literature’. In his ‘Catastrophes in the Air’, for example, Joseph Brodsky argued that ‘politics fills the vacuum left in people’s minds and hearts precisely by art’, but was just as scathing about avant-garde writing (which, in his view, led to isolation over the vodka bottle) as he was about political commitment. And in ‘Soviet Literature: In Memoriam’

(1990), Viktor Erofeev took up the theme again, dismissing both dissident and official Soviet writing as of merely local and topical interest.

Fortunately, post-Stalinist literature was considerably more varied and vigorous than such jeremiads proclaimed. To be sure, there were some writers – for example, the novelist and short-story writer Yury Trifonov – in whom the search for a ‘middle way’ provoked a reversion to a Chekhovian realism of authorial self-effacement plus relentless
ture
stress on cultural and moral decline. But a ‘prosaics of invisibility’ was
rae

Lit

not the only or even the most favoured interpretation of ‘the middle way’ among post-Stalinist Russian writers. On the contrary: scepticism
ssian

Ru

about the standing of the writer was (as in the 1920s) matched by an emphasis upon the construction of the art work as a conscious act. This is evident, for example, in Joseph Brodsky’s poem elegy ‘The Year 1972’, which disposed of the figure of ‘the poet’ in favour of that of ‘the wordsmith’, working not ‘with the aim/of winning fame’, but ‘for the sake of my native tongue and of writing’. But it was equally clear in the work of writers as committed to the true depiction of real events as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov. Though these two writers held very different views about the experience of incarceration in the prison camps (for Solzhenitsyn, the camps opened up vistas of inner freedom and moral renewal; for Shalamov, they were claustrophic ‘pits’ of moral degradation), they were strikingly similar in terms of the prominence that they gave to the act of writing. The figure of ‘walking on fresh snow’ at the beginning of Shalamov’s huge story cycle
Kolyma
Tales
(1978) turned out to be not simply an introduction to camp life,
94

the reader following the prisoners on their journey through the wastes of the far North. It was also a metaphor for the act of writing about untouched material, about retrieving narrative from silence: How do you stamp out a path on fresh snow?

In front walks a man, sweating and swearing, hardly able to move his legs, sinking every minute into the brittle deep snow. [ . . . ]

Five or six men follow after, along the narrow and treacherous trail. They walk alongside the track not in it. [ . . . ]

Every one of them, no matter how small and weak he is, must stand on a piece of fresh snow, not in someone else’s tracks. It’s only readers, not writers, who ride on tractors and horses.

‘A

If Shalamov drew his readers’ attention to the problems of narrative
wak

right at the outset of his text, Solzhenitsyn’s novels
The First Circle
(1978)
enin

and
Cancer Ward
, began, quite traditionally, ‘in the middle of things’

g nobl

without preamble. But they too were in literary terms heterogeneous.

e feelin

The citation in
Cancer Ward
of Tolstoy’s late story ‘What People Live
g

By’ (1881), a tale in which an angel comes to live with a poor cobbler
s with

and his wife, emphasized that the novel was not merely a representation
m

of a hospital as metaphor for Soviet society, but also a text preoccupied
y lyre’

with the miraculous in the mundane (an insight fundamental to understanding the novel’s extraordinary last chapter). One of the inset narratives in
The First Circle
, ‘Prince Igor’, was an illustration of creativity in extremity, a tale told for the joy of the telling, precisely because it did not bear direct or oblique relation to ‘real life’. And
One Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovich
(1962), with its refrain, ‘How can a well-fed man understand the hungry?’ drew attention, like Shalamov’s preface to
Kolyma Tales
, to the fact that representing horror was impossible. The more ‘true’ a narrative, the
less
likely it was to communicate with its anticipated audience. Such utterances were more than merely a rhetorical strategy aimed at shaming the ‘well-fed’ into attentive silence. They also questioned the function of literature at a time when any utterance might leave only ‘the stamp of “good-night” on lips/that
95

could say it to no-one’, in the words of a poem from Joseph Brodsky’s cycle ‘A Part of Speech’.

In the post-Stalin era, then, the concept of writers as ‘masters of minds’, compromised by Socialist Realism, was the source of serious doubt among many intelligent commentators on, and practitioners of, literature. These included not only Shalamov, recognized by Viktor Erofeev as a ‘literary’ writer, but also the supposedly ‘teleological’

Solzhenitsyn. With emerging doubts that the writer’s function was or should be purely didactic went a decline in the standing of the novel, the genre most privileged under high Stalinism precisely because of its supposed capacity for weighty moral commentary. (A cartoon published in the humorous magazine
Krokodil
in 1952 showed two writers talking. Writer A to Writer B: ‘I’ve just thought of a great subject for a little short story!’. Writer B: ‘Well, get down and write it, then!’.

Writer A: ‘No, you see the problem is I can’t think of how to turn it into
ture

a big novel!’.) (Ill. 14.)

rae

Lit

However, the compromised standing of moral disquisitions on the one
ssian

Ru

hand, and the novel on the other, was not well understood in the West during the post-Stalin years. Here, many readers looked to Russian writers for the direct and unironic discussion of ethical matters that had become unfashionable in the West after the Second World War. To many commentators in the late 1950s, Boris Pasternak’s
Doctor Zhivago
(1957) seemed a much weightier novel than any recent publication in the English language, while Solzhenitsyn’s
One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich
spoke with an authority recalling Dostoevsky’s memoir of prison-camp life
House of the Dead
(1861–2). If Nabokov wished that Tolstoy had exercised his concentration entirely on the free-floating curl hanging down at the back of Anna Karenina’s head, many readers, since
Anna Karenina
was published, have been more absorbed by the novel’s governing moral themes: whether personal happiness is legitimate at the cost of imposing suffering on others, or whether there may be such a thing as inescapable or deserved suffering. And they have expected
96