The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

cultural diversity (within, of course, a framework of ideological uniformity). In practice this meant that folk songs, legends, colorful costumes and superstitions, local peasant and tribal rituals were allowed their own expression, even their own national language, and could coexist alongside the more “consciously” proletarian plots of hydroelectric dams, cement factories, and metros.But likehistorical factsinsideapatriotichistoryplayduring theRoman-tic era, “authenticity” here was ornamental, sentimental, pre-packaged, and essentially powerless.

The third principle in this quartet, class-mindedness, became less important after 1936, when the new Soviet Constitution declared that the USSR had become a classless society and thus all class antagonism was officially ended. Such conflictlessness made it difficult for fiction writers to find, from within the domestic population, villains, rogues, or any negative principles out of which to construct plots. A new genre appeared: the “optimistic tragedy.” This manic optimism affected writers personally as well as creatively. Mikhail Zoshchenko (1895–1958), perhaps the greatest prose satirist of the 1920s and like so many comics and clowns a clinical depressive, wondered why, if reality could be manipulated and human bodies and natures reforged through attitude alone, he was such a failure at it. In the 1930s, Zoshchenko began writing deeply auto-therapeutic texts, such as Youth Restored (1933), in which he attempted to “engineer” his own physical and psychic health.9 In 1943, in a strange work of “literary research” titled Before Sunrise, this troubled writer attempted to reason himself out of his phobias using a combination of Pavlovian reflexology and Sigmund Freud. Although the choice of Zoshchenko as one scapegoat for the post-war crackdown on writers in 1946 certainly exemplified proizvol, the punishment was probably not without justification in Zoshchenko’s own guilt-ridden mind.

Socialist realism, like every other party line in Stalinist Russia, was never a fixed formula, and certainly not in the 1930s. En route to cleansing Russia of her superfluous heroes and depraved plots, quite a bit of humor and self-criticism remained. Language satire was one vital site for it. Much as eighteenth-century playwrights, including the Empress Catherine II herself, had satirized awkward and ill-learned Frenchifying among the upwardly mobile rural gentry, so the garbled Soviet-speak of the new, barely literate peasants-turned-officials, full of acronyms and poorly digested Bolshevik slogans, was ridiculed by masters of oral narrative or skaz (Mikhail Zoshchenko was one such master; Isaak Babel another). Several years before his suicide in 1930, the poet-playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky had parodied this jargon through the brilliant jingles and slick commercial street talk that formed the aural backdrop to his futuristic farce, The Bedbug. Dysfunctional or substandard speech – a product of the imperfect,

202 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

and thus potentially sympathetic human face – is naturally individualizing. The right to integrate such disoriented language into art was an indispensable safety valve in a society that otherwise demanded ever more conformity and obedience.

Satire and criticism were tolerated, even welcomed, if the target of the satire was a corrupt official or a “NEPman,” one of the small entrepreneurs who flourished between 1921 and 1927. (Bulgakov’s “Adventures of Chichikov” from the mid-1920s follows this approved formula.) The vast expansion of government bureaucracy had provided many berths for swindlers; both state and reader benefited by having this fact made public. The most beloved hero in this vein, however, was thoroughly unruly and seemingly of no benefit to anyone but himself. This was the con man and imposter Ostap Bender, heir to Gogol’s Khlestakov, created by a pair of comic journalist- novelists known by their pen names Ilf and Petrov (Ilya Fainzelberg, 1897–1937 / Evgeny Kataev, 1903–42). They published two famous novels about this trickster, The Twelve Chairs (1928) and The Golden Calf (1931), at the start of the Stalinist cultural takeover – and each became an immediate bestseller.10 Throughout the darkest years, Soviet readers continued to respond to these novels rapturously, with a mix of indignation, envy, and unfeigned admiration. Ostap Bender became the shadow comic double to those more single-minded heroes who frantically, devotedly built socialism in the serious novels of the time.

Outright mockery of the heroic task of socialist construction was not permissible. If authors desired to provide an alternative or ambivalent perspective on the state-building or state-defending events of the 1930s and 1940s, the literary means had to be indirect. The three exemplary prose works for this chapter, two novels and one play, were selected with this problem in mind. The basic plotline of each (parodied to various degrees) reflects the simplified types and roles canonical for the era. A positive, politically conscious hero who furthers the Purpose is confronted by an “enemy” – which can be either a person or a concept, usually faceless, always heartless. A third indispensable actor is the “masses”: hungry, responsive, confused, in need of leadership and an “idea.” This cast of characters invariably seems flattened and two-dimensional when compared with the peaks of nineteenth-century psychological prose. Its “simplified” quality can inspire us, irritate us, amuse us or depress us, depending on the genre in which the characters are embedded and the attitude we bring to the Purpose being pursued.

Only one of our three exemplars is canonically socialist realist. The other two hover around the periphery of that doctrine, build off its needs, mouth its words, envy or parody its self-confidence, and expose its impossible pretensions. Fyodor Gladkov’s Cement (1925) was one of several party-minded novels

The Stalin years 203

(Gorky’s 1906 Mother was another) to be declared a prototypical socialist realist work retroactively, that is, after the doctrine became official policy in 1934. In return for this honor, Gladkov was obliged to rewrite his novel several times in accordance with changing party-mindedness. The plot of Cement is original to the Soviet experiment and constructed in defiance of the Western novelistic canon; its driving force is not money, fame, self-expression, erotic or family love, but economic production. Our second exemplar, Evgeny Shvarts’s dramatized “fairy tales for adults” and especially his Dragon (1943), rely on familiarity and old-fashionedness, not originality and industrialization. Shvarts created a distinctively self-conscious, quasi-ironic tone for the stage that did, after a fashion, follow Gorky’s 1934 behest to writers to exploit the “profound, striking, artistically perfect types of hero created by folklore.” Andrei Platonov, our final exemplar, is the greatest writer of the three. He would have liked to be a “fellow-traveler.” But that category of writer had disappeared by 1931 – when Stalin himself purportedly read Platonov’s short story “For Future Use” “Vprok” and wrote in the margins: “Talented, but a son-of-a-bitch” [talantlivo, no svoloch]. Platonov was classified a “kulak writer” and relegated to the opposition.

Cement and construction (Fyodor Gladkov)

Fyodor Gladkov (1883–1958), a self-made writer from a family of poor Old Believerpeasants,became aMarxistearlyin life andwashelpedbyGorky toward aliterary career. “Lermontov, Dostoevsky and Tolstoyintoxicatedme,” Gladkov wrote in an autobiographical note. “Pushkin and Gogol left me cold.”11 Cement tells the story of the reconstruction of a ruined factory under the leadership of one of its workers, Gleb Chumalov. Returning from the fronts of the Civil War (1918–21), Gleb finds the cement factory in ruins and its workers pilfering, squabbling, and demoralized. His wife Dasha, now liberated from hearth and marriage, heads the Women’s Section of the Party. Their hut is neglected, their daughter Nyurka now lives in a children’s home. Everything around him is estranged and paralyzed. But Gleb is a bogatyr, an epic hero.12 Once recovered from his initial shock, he radiates energy and restlessness.

Gladkov’s fondness for Dostoevsky (and his indifference to Pushkin) leaves its trace in the extraordinarily lush hyperbole of his prose and its heightened emotional aura. His world is one of uninterrupted crisis time and precarious threshold space. Characters are constantly grinding their teeth, clenching their fists, gasping, frothing, flailing their arms. Maximalism is the norm. When Gleb recruits the old-regime engineer Kleist to the factory’s cause, he promises