The Naked Year (21 page)

Death! Sedition, hunger, a taper: –See in order to live. The first days of July, before the intense heat, for five days there were rains and storms, the anarchists were in the house,–and Andrei had never known such joy, joy of being alive!

For Natalya, the “repentant noblewoman,” now a Bolshevik, “freedom” means being allowed to lead the academic life of an archaeologist, supporting the Revolution but not actually taking part in it. But once again another “freedom” is introduced by Pilnyak. By combining Natasha's “fellow traveler” status with the archaeological excavations Pilnyak is able to release Russia's Eastern past from the mists of time. There is something more than just a little paradoxical about a Bolshevik being an archaeologist concerned with worlds long forgotten in an age which was meant to drag Russia out of the Middle Ages and thrust her, head first, into the twentieth century. Natalya's role is to constantly thrust at the reader recently exhumed reminders of Russia's roots, and to remind him that an Eastern civilization existed in Russia long before Marx or Lenin appeared.

On Uvek they found the remains of an ancient town, stone ruins of aqueducts lay in layers, the foundations of buildings, a sewerage system,–hidden by the loamy soil and black earth this had survived not from the Finns, nor the Scythians, nor from the Bulgars–someone unknown came here from the Asiatic steppes in order to found a city and disappear into history–forever.

The last words are significant. Evidence presented in this semi-factual manner, combined with the frequent inclusion of medieval texts in the narrative, shows that the Asiatic past may, on the one hand, have been obscured by the Revolution, but it also shows how underneath the surface the past is still very much a part of Russian culture, and that the Western superstructure will never obliterate it.

As a converted Bolshevik, Natalya, has adopted Western ideologies and influences; but underneath she is still firmly rooted in rural, peasant Russia. When she speaks, her language is rustic; and her sympathies, subconsciously, are Oriental–

…there is the genuine Russian nation, these here hollow, gray ones, eaten away by filth and sweat, with harrowing faces like huts, with hair like the thatched roofs. The old man was looking westward; the other was sitting motionless, having drawn up one leg and put his head on it. The girl was sleeping, sprawled out on the asphalt, expectorated on and bespattered with sunflower seed. They were silent. And it was pitiful and frightening to look at them–at those by whom and in whose name the Revolution is made. A people without a history–for where is the
history
of the Russian
people?

In passages such as these there is an implicit question as to the ethics of depriving such backward people of their backwardness. The peasant of pre-Revolutionary Russia was free to fish and generally indulge his rural pursuits, but the Revolution has imposed another lifestyle on these peasants and thundered freedom at them down the barrel of a gun. The “freedom” now enjoyed by these people is the freedom of “having nothing, refusing everything–being poor!”

The October Revolution may have liberated a nation from tyranny, but at what price?

“–I've been in the town. Can you imagine what's going on? In winter everyone will die of hunger and will freeze. There's no salt, without which it's impossible to smelt steel, without steel it's impossible to make saws, there's nothing to saw wood with–in winter the house will freeze–because of no salt! It's frightening! –What frightening, deaf silence. Just look–death is more natural than birth, than life. All around is death, hunger, scurvy, typhus, smallpox, cholera… The woods and ravines are swarming with bandits. You can hear it–a deadly silence! Death. In the steppes there are villages which have died out completely. Nobody buries the corpses, and in the darkness at nights dogs and deserters roam about… The Russian nation.”

Another “freedom” germane to the 1917 Revolution, according to Pilnyak, was that freedom afforded by events to the violent, instinctive drives in Man, that energy and basic life-force which had preoccupied

Pilnyak from the beginning of his writing career. For him the social and economic reasons for the cataclysm with which historians are concerned formed only part of the picture. Pilnyak saw the Revolution as being, in part at least, a vast orgasmic release; and in his story “Ivan and Maria” (1922) he actually states through Ksenya Ordinina that “The Revolution smells of sexual organs.” In
The Naked Year
the pristine violence which was partly responsible for the Revolution is embodied in characters such as the swashbuckling Irina.

Irina is the epitome of anarchistic arrogance and unfettered vector energy which sweeps aside all opposition and incorporates the Darwinian thesis that the strong survive and the weak perish. In strikingly luscious, lyrical prose she is able at once to describe the sylvan pleasures and natural charm of the Russian countryside, and then suddenly alter her theme and tone to make a bombastic plea for violent virility in Russian manhood:

“Surely men don't ask?–men take! They take freely and wilfully like bandits and anarchists! You're an anarchist, Comrade Andrei. In life there are tsars–those who have strong muscles, like stone, will-power as elastic as iron, a free mind, like the devil, and who are beautiful like Apollo or the devil. One has to be able to strangle a man and thrash a woman. Surely you don't still believe in some sort of humanism and justice?–to the devil with all that! let those die who cannot fight! Only the strong and free will remain!”

Irina is, in fact, the direct antithesis to the intellectual Natalya, admiring violence for its own sake and the willingness to live life in a manner uncomplicated by an anaemic concern for others.

In dealing with his final “freedom” Pilnyak goes beyond the confines of contemporary historic events and enters the realms of the philosophy of language.

There are several passages in this chapter (as elsewhere in the novel) which appear to defy any interpretation which does not indicate pure
linguistic experimentation. The opening paragraph to
Chapter 3
contains the lines:

“The stones of the embankment crumbled, flew together with it down into the ravine (the wind of fall whispered: gviu!…) and everything showered down like sparks of eyes from the fall–and then remained only: a red heart.”

Later in the novel words are deliberately misspelled, people talk in elliptical sentences and use esoteric images and figures of speech. Perhaps these linguistic contortions and the imagistic surrealism, included as they are for the most part in the chapter on “Freedom,” are an attempt on the author's part to push language to the limits of its usefulness. Excessive use of experimentation in language implies the destruction of communication, in which case language becomes meaningless. But where is the point beyond which linguistic conformity is minimal but communication still possible? One may ask if Pilnyak is attempting to find the ultimate freedom, namely freedom from the constraints of linguistic orthodoxy?

Stylistically, there is much in
The Naked Year
which is reminiscent of the Symbolists. Andrei Bely, in particular, is constantly recalled in the staccato sentences, strained imagery and arbitrary movement within the time-space continuum. Sentences in Pilnyak's works are often cut short; linguistic lubricants such as conjunctions, commonplace expressions and images are often conspicuous by their absence, and the reader is presented with a prose style which appears jerky, unfinished and, at times, chaotic. Of course, this is perfectly suited to the desired aim of reflecting a turbulent period in Russia's history when a sense of order or definite direction was difficult to find. But more than this, Pilnyak's choosing not to be restricted by linear time allows him to present events not in the order in which they occur, but in a sequence which best suits his purpose. The opening passage (particularly the opening lines) of the novel immediately transpose the reader back into the eighteenth century, where the apparent stability of capitalist Moscow is shown to be undermined, even then, by Russia's resurgent Oriental past. The constant symbolic references to China-Town, which peeps around the corners at night (when the bowler hat has been put away till the next day) like soldiers' buttons, anticipate the return to a consciousness of Oriental antiquity, jolted by the Revolution. Even in the eighteenth century the Orient was on the move, and a hundred years later the same force erupts as potent as ever, just as if, in this respect time has stood still.

Later in the text the confusion of contemporary events is viewed against a backcloth of time, which is seen as a figment of man's imagination; when passages resembling nedieval Russian documents follow descriptions of the creation of the new Soviet state, the impression is that nothing has changed. History, eternally moving forward, is at the same time eternally static.

Perhaps one of the most striking features of Pilnyak's style, next to his manipulations of time, is his manipulation of nature. Nature is not merely a backdrop to the action or narrative, but an omniscient, active force. At times it serves to move the narrative forward; at others it revitalizes otherwise limpid, repetitive descriptions of events; and at others its function resembles that of a Greek chorus, in that it comments on humanity and places human weaknesses and foibles within the context of eternity. In the conversation between Comrade Yuzik and Andrei, the former gazes up at the stars, and the sheer vastness of space and awesome eternity make him realize that all human endeavor, including the Bolshevik Revolution, is paltry:

“When you think about the stars, you begin to feel that we are totally insignificant. The earth–is a worldly prison; what are we, humans? What do our revolution and injustice mean?”

Particularly noticeable in Pilnyak's style is the frequency with which he suspends the narrative at a critical or climactic point to insert a description of natural phenomena. The impression thus given is that Pilnyak is using nature to frame human actions–further evidence that man cannot be treated as a separate entity in the context of existence, and that man is merely another phenomenon of nature, a part of the whole which comprises man, animals and even inanimate bodies such as the stars, oceans and mountains. In the train speeding across the Russian steppe-lands a soldier is suddenly overpowered by his sexual instincts and:

…his thoughts throng like mottled peasant women at the fair–thoughts are flying to the devil!–a wild animal! instinct!–and the man kisses, kisses, kisses the naked female belly passionately, painfully–who is she? where's she from?–The peasant woman slowly wakes up, scratches herself, says sleepily:

–“Finish, loudmouth… Oh, you smarty!… “–and she begins to breathe unevenly.

Steppe. Emptiness. Boundlessness. Darkness. Cold.

For this man the gratification of his sexual impulses is of supreme importance; he is totally oblivious of everyone and everything else in the universe, but the contextual interruption of the author's stark description of impartial nature renders the whole episode banal and unimportant.

In describing the Revolution itself Pilnyak frequently draws on nature for his images and similes. The unleashed violence of the Revolution is described at times as a snowstorm (possibly a symbol taken directly from Alexander Blok), and at times it is compared to the irresistible power of a Russian river in full flood:

“…but in the first spring of the Revolution when the rivers had overflowed with their voluminous spring torrents–his life changed sharply” and later, “The Revolution came like white blizzards and May storms.” And later still, he fuses the two images: “was our Revolution not a May storm?–and weren't they March flood waters which washed away a two-hundred year scab?”

The narrative of
The Naked Year
, with all its chaotic appearance is held together by descriptions of nature as the one permanence in the universe, which contrasts with man's pathetic stumblings through his transitory existence. When Pilnyak punctuates the novel with references to the cathedral bells ringing our every five minutes–“Dong, dong, dong” (in Russian “Don, don, don”)–the symbolism is both subtle and double-edged. There is the obvious symbolism of the survival of religion in Russia and the inextricable place it occupies in the mind of the people. But there is also the onomatopoeic reference to the mighty river Don and as such yet another reminder that Russians (and, indeed, all humanity) are controlled by rather than control the latent natural resources of energy which exist in the universe. Such imagery serves to remind us of our violent origins and that we, as products of such violence, are still unconsciously governed by it.

A feature of the novel which must be particularly repugnant to the Party hierarchy (especially since the adoption of Socialist Realism) is Pilnyak's portrayal of the Bolsheviks. His treatment of them ranges from portraying them as mindless dinosaurs who are capable of gargantuan feats of strength, to describing them as beings totally impervious to sentiment and blindly insensitive to the sufferings of others. When we are told in
Chapter One
that Jan Laitis is preoccupied with courting Olga Kuntz and learning to play the clarinet while droves of poor people are searching the steppe lands for food, the only inference possible is that the Revolution has not matched up to its promises. References to the Bolsheviks as “Leather people in leather jackets,” and lines such as, “You won't wet them with the lemonade of psychology,” leave little room to doubt the proposition that Pilnyak was not particularly enamoured of the new rulers of Russia.