Russian Literature (14 page)

For writers, as opposed to commentators, there was always a tension between ideological and imaginative aims. The frequent practice among writers of composing prefaces, afterwords, and commentaries
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upon their own literary texts was a manifestation of the ‘intergeneric’

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character of Russian literature, its desire to bridge the gap between fiction and non-fiction (note the pasting of real documents into
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Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
). But it also pointed to an awareness that literary convention interfered with the straightforward communication of messages.

A striking instance of the clash between fiction and ideology was Tolstoy’s late story
The Kreutzer Sonata
(1889). An ‘Afterword’ written by Tolstoy after the book was published endorsed the outrageous case made by the central character, Pozdnyshev: it insisted that absolute celibacy was the only morally acceptable form of human existence.

Tolstoy also expressed consternation that readers should have found it so hard to grasp the point of his story. But Pozdnyshev, who was shown in the opening sections of the story itself swarming with nervous tics and feeding his caffeine addiction with glass after glass of the strongest tea, was hardly the best advocate of views that his creator (then energetically recommending abstention from intoxicating substances)
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apparently wished to be taken seriously. The character did not even have the grace to repent his misdeeds or sympathize with his victim.

It was and is difficult to see the story as a fable; it is much easier to appreciate it as a grim and convincing sketch of the mentality of a murderer, prowling in his stocking feet through his own house to surprise his victim, and detachedly remembering the feeling of his knife cutting through first whalebone, then flesh. A similar communicative uncertainty was evident in
Anna Karenina
, which was at once a moral tale about appropriate married life and a delineation of the horrors of that life. Exploiting marriage as a convenient starting point for an encyclopaedic exploration of Russian society in which
everything
has meaning, it was at the same time obsessed with quotidian detail whose beauty lay in the fact that it had
no
meaning.

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But what Mikhail Bakhtin was to term, in a famous study of
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Dostoevsky, the ‘polyphony’ of novelistic discourse, the absence in it
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of a unified, reliable, omniscient point of view, did not necessarily
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equate with an absence of moral or philosophical certainty. The
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exuberant linguistic vitality of Gogol’s play
The Government Inspector
,
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which shows the full bawdy energy of colloquial Russian constantly
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bubbling up through the characters’ pathetic attempts to ‘speak
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proper’, was intimately related to Gogol’s concept of the play as a spiritual morality drama, an illustration of the vices that he believed polluted the human soul and would come to light at the Day of Judgement. For Gogol, linguistic propriety and impropriety were different aspects of the same human error: the assumption that it was possible to conceal frailty and weakness from the all-seeing eye of the deity.

This inextricable blending of ‘medium’ and ‘message’, of didactic purpose and expressive range, continued to be found in some Soviet writing, despite an upsurge of state interference on the one hand and intellectual conformity on the other. A case in point was the poetry of Mayakovsky. Mayakovsky’s post-1917 writings are often considered to
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represent a sad falling-off from his early achievements: the writer stands accused of ‘stepping on the throat of his own song’ (a phrase that he himself uses in his great unfinished testament, ‘At the Top of My Voice’).

But rather than a historical aberration, a by-way of literary history, the later Mayakovsky was a typical case of a Russian writer in whose work didacticism and art were inseparable. His gripping poem ‘Two Not Wholly Usual Occurrences’ (1922), for example, juxtaposes scenes of starvation in a Moscow street to a vignette of a ‘feast in time of plague’

going on at a restaurant, where writers and other intellectuals indulge themselves on the nearest things to delicacies that the crisis-ridden city can provide. Summed up in these bald terms, the piece sounds as crude and obvious as a ‘before and after’ poster for shampoo, or as an item of anti-capitalist agitprop (the scrawny waif, the bulbous banker) from a 1920s demonstration. But the summary elides the eerie intensity of Mayakovsky’s description of the silent Moscow streets, and the shock effect of his opening image, a miscegenated monster, a man-horse:
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Suddenly

I see

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between me and the window

a stick-man move.

Staggering and sliding.

The stick-man has a horse’s head.

Onward he – it, slides.

Into its own nostrils it has stuck

its own fingers:

three fingers, maybe two.

Flies squat round the open eyes.

From the side of its neck

hangs a vein,

scattering drops on the streets

that freeze blackly where they ooze.

I look and look at the crawling shade:

shuddering from an unbearable certainty:

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this half-man, half-beast

must be a figment of my mind.

Safe rationality is soon re-established, and the ‘half-man, half-horse’

stripped of its mythological significance to be revealed as the head of a starved nag sawn off its scraggy neck by the pen-knife of a desperate Muscovite. Yet the vision, like the nightmare that it resembles, cannot be reduced to an emanation of the everyday: it is not even simply an intimation of death. It remains irreducible, a manifestation of fears normally banished from the modern city, but rising up unsuppressibly at times of extremity.

‘Two Not Wholly Usual Occurrences’, then, is not an example of
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imaginative power sacrificed to didactic aims, but of the former and the
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latter inextricably entwined with each other. It appeals to a sensibility
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nurtured on psychoanalytical interpretations of myths as archetypes of
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human experience as much as it no doubt did to a Bolshevik believer
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convinced that the suffering of the revolutionary years could only be
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averted through Communism. The gruesome centaur of the Moscow
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streets, intended as an exemplum to support Mayakovsky’s political
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sermon, is a creature with its own artistic life, perhaps even a metaphor
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for Modernist poetry as grotesque and unnatural hybrid.

Discussions of Soviet literature’s didacticism as aberrant, then, are based on a misapprehension. The ultimate starting point of this is an understandable squeamishness over the nature of the aims that Soviet literature’s didactic means had in view. Is it possible to detach artistic value from moral integrity? Can an ode to the Soviet secret police, or to a dictator as vicious as Stalin, ultimately responsible for the death of millions, have any aesthetic value whatever, even when produced by a writer of indisputable artistic talent? These are not merely hypothetical questions. The ‘soldiers of Dzerzhinsky’ were in fact the subject of a eulogistic poem written by Mayakovsky in 1926. And the mid-1930s, when Socialist Realism was established, also saw the full-scale
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blossoming of the official cult of Stalin. Writers who wanted to be published needed to manifest
partiinost’
, or fidelity to party values, including (from the late 1930s) the adulation of the leader. In countless poems, stories, and novels, he appeared as the all-seeing friend of every good Soviet citizen: Late at night, when every sound falls silent, Behind the Kremlin’s grey and ancient towers, The people of all nations’ secret wishes

Are entrusted to dear Stalin by the world.

This poem by Aleksandr Surkov is terrible by any standards; but writers of real talent also responded to the Stalin cult. An ‘Ode to Stalin’ by Mandelstam, for instance, is distinguished by its nobility of phrasing and apparent sincerity of feeling.

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For many critics belonging to the so-called ‘first wave’ of the
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emigration (those who left Russia during or soon after the Revolution), the case against Soviet art was settled in advance. According to
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Vladislav Khodasevich, a formidable literary critic as well as an outstanding poet: ‘Mayakovsky has never been the poet of the revolution, any more than he has ever been a revolutionary poet. His rhetoric is, in fact, the rhetoric of the pogrom, directing violence and invective against anything weak and defenceless, whether that be a German sausage-shop in Moscow or a bourgeois gripped tightly round the throat.’ On its own terms, Khodasevich’s assessment is hard to assail, but the trouble is that few texts produced in post-1917 Russia would satisfy the criterion of unqualified support for those who suffered under Soviet power. Anna Akhmatova’s
Requiem
, a lament for the victims of the Great Purges (the butchery of millions of supposed ‘enemies of the people’ in 1937–8), and implacably hostile to their torturers, was a work of artistic skill dedicated to a morally impeccable purpose. But this was exceptional. Mostly, the talented writers caught in the different waves of repression dealt in various forms of moral
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compromise. Bulgakov’s novel
The Master and Margarita
(1928–40), for example, juxtaposed to the vision of a corrupt 1920s Moscow, disrupted by Satan, a ‘humanized’ version of Jesus Christ as socially impotent ‘holy fool’, moving through a Jerusalem that has uncanny resemblances to the Moscow of the late 1930s. And the novel’s epilogue allowed the final word to Woland, Bulgakov’s version of Mephisto, who voiced a code of moral relativism in which ‘good’ and ‘evil’ were associated with ‘light’

and ‘dark’ in the physical world, both being seen as necessary in a life without sensual monotony. For their part, the short stories of Daniil Kharms, such as
Incidents
(1934–6), were brilliant exposures of the dehumanization of life in the 1930s and also texts in which meaningless cruelty itself became a central artistic device, and indeed the object of collusive pleasure for narrator and reader.

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In the case of Soviet art, then, it is simply not possible to draw an easy
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connection between talent and moral steadfastness: many of the most
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gifted writers had attitudes to tyranny that were equivocal or even
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admiring. One logical response would be to see nearly everything,
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including much work produced ‘for the desk drawer’ (neither Bulgakov
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nor Kharms had any illusions about being able to publish their later
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writings), as damnable on the grounds of its ethical dubiety, while
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consigning
Master and Margarita
to a different circle of hell from, say, Anna Karavaeva’s trilogy
The Motherland
(1951), which celebrates the joys of life under the wise governance of the all-seeing Stalin. But this would be to imitate in reverse the narrow-minded cultural politics of the Soviet era, according to which only works imbued with ‘Communist morality’ and ‘progressiveness’ deserved to survive (see Chapter 2). It would also conceal the extent to which the moral dilemmas of Soviet artists resembled those of artists at other times and in other socities; as the Russian historian Boris Groys has pointed out, ‘historically, art that is universally regarded as good has frequently served to embellish and glorify power’. If one takes a longer or broader view of the tradition of ‘embellishing and glorifying power’, it is instructive to read Mandelstam’s ‘Ode to Stalin’ in the context of Lomonosov’s tributes
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to Peter I (hardly the most merciful of rulers). It is equally illuminating to compare the Socialist Realist novel with Third Reich fiction, with the Catholic novel of mid-twentieth-century France, Italy, and Ireland, or indeed with formulaic genres such as the ‘Harlequin romance’ and the detective novel in Britain and America.

A second position is to ignore Soviet art’s relationship with political power. If Dostoevsky may be stripped of the Pan-Slavic messianism and anti-Semitism that are painfully obvious in
Diary of a Writer
(1876–81) (and incidentally evident in the novels) and understood as a prophet of universal human freedom, it might be equally legitimate to see the 1920s Mayakovsky as a prophet of liberty in spite of himself. During the final scene in
The Bed-Bug
(1928), the worker Prisypkin, who throughout the play has been relentlessly guyed as a manifestation of the worst kind of petit-bourgeois materialism, suddenly becomes a tragic figure, writhing in a cage to expostulate against the sterile smugness of the
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Utopian future, and by extension, the stupidity of any community that
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believes that bringing the future into existence would represent progress.

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Alternatively, ethical judgement may be suspended altogether: Soviet literature may be studied in and for itself, and discussed from an ‘anthropological’ perspective. This means replacing the question of whether the composition of five-year plan novels or odes to Stalin was morally and aesthetically justifiable by the question of what it meant to write them and how they were understood by contemporary readers.