result (at best) is indifference, a quick default to irony, loss of creative initiative, and at worst, paralyzing fear.
Faced with this reality, some writers (and the editors and publishers who vetted their work) began to practice “the genre of silence” – a phrase coined by Isaak Babel in self-defense at the 1934 Writers’ Congress. During the most dangerous periods, the entire culture-producing apparatus could grind to a halt. In more flexible years, Babel and other great artists (among them Mikhail Bulgakov and Boris Pasternak) worked in literary fields less ideologically regimented than creative writing: translation, adaptations for stage, screenplays, literary scholarship or textology, literature for children. In a bureaucracy this vast, it was easy not to know precisely how one fit in to the “system,” or why one was cast out. Why was Pasternak not arrested in 1938–40? (a miracle). Was some lower-level rival, not the Party or party line, responsible for denouncing Shostakovich’s work in 1936? (he thought so). Some creative artists, of course, were unwaveringly proud to be part of the social command. But artists of the highest talent could not be put repeatedly in a position where they trusted neither the inner rules that governed their own creative imagination, nor the outer rules that governed the society of which they were a part.
Massive literacy campaigns, begun in the early 1920s, created millions of new readers, both among the rural population of European Russia and (in newly devised alphabets) among those peoples or tribes in Siberia that previously had no written language. Approved authors and books had unimaginably large print runs. Newly re- canonized and cleansed, classic Russian writers flooded the country in millions of copies, especially during their centennials (Tolstoy in 1928, Pushkin in 1937). Thus cultural expansion and cultural contraction occurred together. Alongside the gradual curtailment of foreign travel for ordinary citizens came the disappearance of foreign (European) language instruction in the schools. Only specialists received this training; the ordinary Russian reader encountered the outside world through carefully controlled translations. Russian high culture – which for two hundred years, through all degrees and severities of censorship, had been among the most polyglot in Europe – became officially monolingual. This narrowing, in conjunction with the closing down of churches and religious education, resulted in the new Soviet reader’s unprecedented reliance on the state and Party for intellectual and spiritual guidance.
Throughout the 1920s, a profusion of literary groups competed for readers. For most of them, the devastated economy and paper shortage ruled out anything like the “thick journal” of nineteenth-century fame, but relations between these groups were nevertheless articulate, shrill, and saturated with ideology. Proletkult (“Proletarian Culture”) was founded during the Civil War, on the
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slogans of class struggle. In 1923 the Futurist-inspired LEF (“Left Front of Literature”) was attacked by the more militant “On Guard” and “October” groups, which had no patience with formally innovative poetry even when it supported the Bolshevik cause. Peasant writers and proletarian writers each had their own national organizations. Some insisted on the author’s right to be political in an individually chosen way (excluding, of course, the option of opposition to Bolshevik rule); Trotsky labeled these non-aligned but non-hostile writers
By the mid-1920s, a certain “normalization” had set in. One index of stability was Maksim Gorky’s decision in 1927 to return to Russia from Sorrento, Italy, after seven years of self-imposed exile. Such returns into the lap of Stalinism would be repeated by other great Russian creative artists, including the composer Sergei Prokofiev in 1936 and the poet Marina Tsvetaeva in 1939. A world-famous and well-traveled writer before the Revolution, Gorky had exiled himself once before, 1906–13, to the Italian island of Capri. There he befriended Lenin and other visionary revolutionaries. But his relations with Lenin became tense, and at times bitter, during the Revolution, especially over repressions of the cultural elite. By temperament Gorky was more a revolutionary humanist than a Bolshevik (he was not a Party member). His humanitarian activity on behalf of threatened writers embarrassed the more iron-fisted of the Bolsheviks. But Gorky, an autodidact from a working-class family with no formal schooling after the age of eleven (and with no “suspicious” foreign languages at all despite his several sojourns abroad), had achieved the Soviet-era equivalent of the status that Count Leo Tolstoy enjoyed under the Old Regime. Ties with Lenin, together with his fame and reputation for moral goodness, made him a difficult man to silence. Lenin himself pressed a second voluntary exile on Gorky in 1921, “for reasons of his health.”
The regime trumpeted Gorky’s return as a political and cultural triumph, rewarding him with fabulous gifts. He received a former millionaire’s mansion as his Moscow residence, an estate in the Crimea, an unlimited bank account (although Gorky cared little about money), and the honor of having towns, streets, schools and factories namedafterhim while he wasstillalive. Atthe same time, police surveillance over Gorky (sustained at modest levels during the exile years through members of his own household) significantly increased. Surely Gorky’s monolinguality heightened his willingness to return; unlike the quatra-lingual Prokofiev or Tsvetaeva, Gorky carried Russia within him wherever he was and could make for himself no other verbal home. It seems that he accepted
the chairmanship of the Writers’ Union in 1932 with the intent of saving lives, as he had done in 1919–21. But deeper affinities to emerging Stalinist norms must have played a role as well: his unquenchable idealism, his intolerance for truths that depress and deplete, and his preference for hope (which Gorky saw as a form of creativity) over the harmful facts of the present.
The stabilization of literary politics in the mid-1920s turned out to be more apparentthan real: the spectrumwas shifting. One early harbinger of thechange had been the so-called “philosophers’ steamship” in 1922, the deportation to Western Europe of Russia’s prominent idealist philosophers and religious thinkers (with no right of return). This gifted group lent prestige and visibility to the Russian emigration until the end of World War II. Philosophy permitted to remain active on Soviet soil increasingly came to share the tenets of dialectical materialism – or, as it was popularly known, “diamat.” This world-view became part of the (willing or unwilling) mental equipment of all Soviet citizens, who were required to take academic courses in the discipline at all levels of their education. Dialectical materialism could be resisted, amended, and parodied (as Bulgakov does brilliantly on several levels in his novel
Dialectical materialism might be laid out simply as follows. All reality, in its essence, is material. Matter is objective and primary. But matter is not
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Dialectical materialism has other aspects less compatible with a religious worldview, however. Although all
