The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

204 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

him 5,000 workmen, all the material he wants, his word of honor to shoot any saboteurs on the spot, if only he will complete a task that should take a month within four days (p. 116). Kleist is skeptical at first, but then won over. “Heroism means doing the impossible,” Gleb remarks to his female comrade Polya (p. 55), who tosses her curly head in agreement – in this novel, men and women flirt via such phrases. Gladkov taps into Nature’s wanton energy as well, with nourishing and intoxicating metaphors that we can almost taste, as in the opening lines of the novel: “Behind the roofs and angles of the factory the sea foamed like boiling milk in the flashing sunlight. And the air, between the mountains and the sea, was fiery and lustrous as wine” (p. 1).

The ruined factory is always at the center of our vision. Inside this structure, however, the production of cement is intermittent at best. Production starts up halfway through the novel but is immediately interrupted by armed attacks from anti-Bolshevik forces in the surrounding mountains (tsarist Whites, anarchist-peasant Greens, hostile Cossacks). Mostly the factory is the site of party meetings. Unlike the “boiling milk of the sea” and the lustrous wine-like open air, indoors everything is tobacco smoke, screaming, tramping, rush, filth. Notwithstanding this local ecology, however, Gladkov’s novel introduces a new chord in the Russian literary canon: the positive presentation of bureaucratic work. To be sure, bureaucrats can always ossify into self-serving scoundrels, and Gleb is forever threatening to line them up and shoot them. The image of the bullying (and lecherous) Party boss was censored variously in different editions of the novel. But overall, Gladkov presents the stern, leather-jacketed, bronze-faced committee chairmen and security police, who answer to “higher organs” and authorize inhumanly cruel measures, as necessary, positive repositories of consciousness.

Thus the novel Cement modifies a longstanding Russian literary tradition that presents bureaucratic activity as pathetic, corrupt, mad, or worthless: the pen-pushing clerks or venal officials in Gogol (Akaky Akakievich, the major who tries to bribe Khlestakov), the schizophrenic functionaries in Dostoevsky (Golyadkin), the irrelevant or ineffectual state ministers in Tolstoy (Aleksei Karenin), the doddering reactionary senator in Bely (Apollon Apollonovich). In Gladkov and socialist realism generally, a man – or woman – can answer to a committee or take part in a task force and not be ridiculed for it. In fact, this is the proper route. Look first to institutions and only later to the specific needs of individuals. Genuine agency resides in Party and collective doctrine, not in the personal story.

This new positive role for committee work went hand in hand with an enhanced role for the secular book. In a novel otherwise obsessively taken up with deeds and deadlines (“do it on time or be shot”), the seemingly passive

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act of reading is an important marker of virtue for Dasha, the novel’s most positive heroine. Amid disintegrating households, ailing children, and ripening treason, she spends hours at her undusted desk, struggling to grasp the truths contained in a Marxist-Leninist textbook. The lessons are learned. Early in the novel, soon after Gleb’s return, the couple visits their daughter Nyurka in the children’s home. When the matron – whom Dasha suspects of stealing from the children – remarks that “Your Nyurochka is such a lovely little girl,” Dasha tenses up: Stop that, she says, “they’re all equal here, and they all ought to be lovely” (p. 39). While Gleb is away at party headquarters and Dasha is otherwise occupied, Nyurka dies from malnourishment; she “flickers out” in the children’s home. Her mother, we are told, is in anguish but steels herself to conceal it from others. Never do we see that she regrets her decision to abandon her present child for the sake of the equitable flourishing of future life.

Gleb has an equally tensed moment, but for him it is formative. He has been home only a few days and is campaigning to be elected head of the Factory Committee. His most persuasive qualifications are his Civil War stigmata. He has looked death in the face and – he tells the meeting – “I’m as tough as Koshchey the Deathless” (p. 67). Do you need proof? He tears off his tunic and shirt. By the light of the oil-lamp (recalling the vessels placed before holy icons) the assembled voters see: wherever he touches his chest, side, and neck, “purple, pallid scars” show forth. “ ‘Shall I take down my trousers?’ ” he then shouts. “ ‘I’m wearing the same sort of decorations lower down . . . Choose me for this job!’ ” None of the workers dares to approach Gleb. “They looked at his naked body, all knotted and scarred. Dismayed and shocked by his words, they steamed with sweat and were silent, glued to their seats” (p. 68).

Significantly, Gleb’s war wounds are all on the surface. He seems to have suffered no lasting internal damage, and this anatomical diagnosis has some metaphorical weight. Being wounded did not cause Gleb to doubt, but only hardened his resolve. The crisis time, threshold tension, and theatrical bodily display in this novel recall a scene out of Dostoevsky – minus, of course, the genius, richness of ideas, and unreliable or ironic narrator – but in the Dostoevskian novel, crucifixion and resurrection imagery must always serve the inside of the person, not the surface. The depthlessness in socialist realist characters cannot ultimately be explained by the techniques of the psychological novel. They require a different framework, perhaps one more akin to the simpler forms of epic.

Boris Gasparov has put forth the following hypothesis to explain the socialist realist innovation in character construction.13 The classic psychological novel is built on continuity. Events in it are internalized, remembered, brooded over, recovered in a crooked way, partially confronted or evaded. The illusion of

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depth in each character derives from this sense of uninterrupted development combined with inner incompleteness – for at any given moment, the hero is multidirectional. Doubts coexist with convictions. The Modernist novel, in contrast, overtly experiments with non-continuity: abrupt breaks, hallucinations, glimpses, slices. Juxtaposition and contrast matter more to it than the development of character. Since socialist realism emerged as a deliberate, even militant alternative to Modernism, it is not surprising that psychology returns. As we saw in Cement, the spectrum of emotions is broad and the vigor of their expression almost embarrassing. What strikes one as depthless and thin, however, is the unnatural linearity, segmentation, and “one-wayness” of the emotions expressed. There are powerful displays of hatred, jealousy, love, grief – but only in a row, one at a time. Dasha grieves intensely over the death of her daughter, but her grief passes and does not impede her future Party work. Badin, the leather-jacketed chairman, enters Polya’s room and rapes her; she is upset about it for one night, his womanizing makes everyone uncomfortable, but it too passes without any lasting consequence, neither straining him nor traumatizing his targets. (It bothered theStalinistcensor, however, when official policy shifted toward conventional “family values” in the mid-1930s; Gladkov was required to tone down Badin’s libido.) Gleb is devastated by the loss of his wife and home – but a few lines later he is joking with a neighbor woman and then is delirious with joy at the opening of the factory. Transitions are never a problem, Gasparov points out, and each character, at any given time, is whole. The inner struggle of a personality to answer for a contradictory, side-by-side layering and backsliding of deeds, emotions, responses, is not part of the hero’s task.

There is also a Tolstoyan moment in the closing scene of the final chapter, titled “A Thrust into the Future” – Tolstoyan not in style, but in idea. The factory is again working. The dedication ceremony is under way, brass bands playing, the speaker’s platform vibrating, Gleb is “pale and glazed,” his face convulsed. Gleb does manage to utter some slogans, but the novel ends entirely focused on the mute mass deed. As deeds go, a cement factory would hardly have interested the sage of Yasnaya Polyana – although he would have approved the transcendence of sexual love and the escape from the trap of the biological family. But the reopening of the factory is not in fact the deed being celebrated. The primary product is not material, but psychological and sentimental. Just as in Tolstoy’s theory of art, what is being celebrated is not the artifact – a novel, a symphony, a cement factory – but the change of spirit in the producer and the receiver of the artifact. This change in attitude is made possible through “revolutionary romanticism”: the insistence on seeing and acting on a singular, united sense of the good.14 Cement is a byproduct. Tolstoy would agree