The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

poverty, broke up into continually smaller particles, and could not weary itself out.”

The kulaks aredispatchedona raft downthe river,afterwhichthe peasants on thekolkhoz[collective farm] celebrate the successful expropriation with a party. Singing weakly and stomping heavily, the peasants start up a strange dance. To get them to stop, to rest, they must be tackled by the local cripple and tumbled to the ground. Immediately they fall silent like mummies. The entire sequence echoes one of the most famous grotesque “dance scenes” in Russian literature, Gogol’s wedding party at the end of his 1831 Ukrainian tale “Sorochinsky Fair.” “People whose sullen faces seem incapable of smiling stamped their feet and shook their shoulders in time to the music,” Gogol writes of their drunken swaying. A group of old women is singled out: “Blind to all around them and quite incapable of sensing either compassion or innocent delight, these old hags were propelled by the sheer power of drink into a movement that was faintly human, like lifeless machines set in motion by a mechanic . . .”21 Such a Gogolian dynamic, poised between animate and inanimate bodies and moving indifferently between them, appears to govern “blind matter” in a triumphantly socialist village as well. The cumulative effect of these entropic scenes in Platonov is mesmerizing and suggests that his materialism was of an entirely original, non-dialectical sort. Such a message was not welcome during the Stalinist era of heroic achievements. Matter, Platonov suggests, is not so easy to mobilize or to control, nor can mere words energize it. Energy flows slower through it than we suppose and cannot be stored reliably in it. The focus of this truth is the death of the orphaned girl Nastya.

Recall how Nyurka had clung to her mother and begged for love and for grapes, speaking like an ordinary little girl, without ideology. Nastya, living in a novel written five years later, is anothersort of being,sunk immeasurablydeeper into the Stalinist period of re-education and transformation. Her mother dies early in the book, after which Nastya announces to her adoptive collective that at first she “didn’t want to get born,” she was afraid her mother would be a bourgeois, but “as soon as Lenin came, I came too” (p. 62). She goes to school and learns to chant and to compose letters, one of which she sends to her protector: “Liquidate the kulak as a class,” she writes. “Regards to the poor kolkhoz, but not to the kulaks” (p. 84). Instead of signing her name on a document, she signs a hammer and sickle (p. 119). All these childish gestures are somehow both comic and awful. When Nastya dies one night of a chill, the minuscule remaining energy of the pit-diggers dissipates. For she was the forward-looking emancipated one, already living in the future; the adults were the emotional relics, held back by matter and weariness, hoping to learn from

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her example. If Nyurka’s death in Cement is the price exacted for her parents’ collective idealism, then Nastya’s death in The Foundation Pit is no longer a meaningful communal sacrifice, only a private elegy.

The “right to the lyric” in an Age of Iron

If judged by Gorky’s 1934 speech, socialist realism in literature would appear to be a doctrine designed for the longer forms of prose. Lyric poetry, with its personal addressee, contemplative texture, attention to subtle shifts of emotional state, and intense respect for privacy, could hardly recommend itself in this era of large, heroic narrative forms. But in fact, the smaller poetic forms flourished, although the official function they filled was not that of the Golden or “Silver” Age. The lyric was respected as efficient, earnest, truthful, euphonic speech. When overtly non-political, it was free to be sentimental. A vigorous campaign for the “right to the lyric” was mounted in the mid- to late 1930s, which peaked around three jubilee celebrations: the 100th anniversary of Pushkin’s death in 1937, the 150th of Byron’s birth in 1938, and the 125th of Lermontov’s birth in 1939.22 A socialist realist climate took naturally to hyperbole and heroic extremes. The huge event of World War II, its “aboveground” moral simplicity, to a certain extent clarified and unified public poetry. The most exquisite lyric cycle of the Stalin years, however, could not be made public: the “Requiem” of Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966), inspired by her son’s arrest, written in 1935– 43 but not published in its entirety in Russia until 1987. This sequence of ten short, compact, painfully concrete poems, framed (or insulated) by a preface, dedication, prologue, and epilogue, begins with the poet waiting in a prison queue, promising to give voice to the Terror, and ends with that same woman cast in bronze by the banks of the Neva. The cycle passes through every lyric register, from denial through lament, protest, folk ditty, chant, and elegy. In the penultimate poem, “Crucifixion,” we see Mary silent near the Cross that bears her dead Son, with Magdalene sobbing and the Disciple turned to stone – but the Mother stands apart, “no one dared look at her.” At the deepest reaches of dissidence and grief, one is beyond being watched or seen. We recall in Blok’s Tw e l v e the image of Jesus Christ, garlanded by white roses but invisible in the storm, leading the Red Guards to some unknown (yet possibly blessed) destination. The end point of this twentieth- century Russian journey can be sensed in Akhmatova’s Golgotha tableau.

One final image might be added to this poetic sequence on sacrifice and appropriate vision, from “Hamlet,” the first of the “Poems of Yury Zhivago”

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appended to Pasternak’s great novel of the Revolution, Doctor Zhivago (1957). The applause is over; Hamlet is about to walk out on stage. He knows his lines and his fate. Both the “murkiness of night” and “thousands of binoculars” are focused on him. He is “willing to play this role” – he is an actor, he has no choice – but “another drama is now taking place. / For now, release me.” And so Hamlet’s plea: “If you can, Abba, Father, let this cup pass me by.” Shakespeare’s tragic hero as Christ figure in this poem has its own huge subtext in Pasternak’s life. It peaks during the Terror, the very years that Akhmatova was composing her “Requiem,” and is linked with the poet’s reverence for Meyerhold, and especially for that great director’s conviction that every canonical literary work should be adapted freely to the stage in the spirit of its present-day contemporary audience. Early in 1939 Meyerhold, already shamed in the press and deprived of his theatre but still at liberty, commissioned Pasternak to prepare a new translation of Shakespeare’s tragedy for staging at the Pushkin Theatre in Leningrad.23 Pasternak produced the translation but Meyerhold never read it: in June of that year the director was arrested, and several months later, executed. Pasternak expected his own arrest. It never came. Throughout this period he sustained himself by Hamlet; twelve versions of his translation remain. Indeed, “another drama was going on.”

In the early, ambitious Bolshevik years there were spirited debates over “crises” in all inherited literary genres. In 1922 Osip Mandelstam, one of the century’s very great lyric poets, predicted the end of the novel. The European novel, he wrote, had been perfected over an immensely long period of time as “the art form designed to interest the reader in the fate of the individual.” Its two identifying features, “biography transformed into a plot” and “psychological motivation,” require a “special sense of time,” developmental and continuous. That sense, Mandelstam insisted, has been lost. Personal psychological motifs are now impotent; individual action has become abrupt, disconnected, and cruel. “The future development of the novel will be no less than the history of the atomization of biography as a form of personal existence,” he predicted. “We shall witness the catastrophic collapse of biography.”24

To be sure, Mandelstam was wrong about the novel. But Mandelstam’s musings in the 1920s are instructive in light of our three exemplary Stalin-era writers. Their fictional worlds are very much a product of the ideology of their time – which, among other savageries, did indeed further the “atomization of [individual] biography” in a ghastly literary sense. Gladkov, Shvarts, and Platonov represent very different ways of accommodating the Stalinist experiment as Maksim Gorky laid it out in 1934 at the First Writers’ Congress. All were to some extent “believers.” Gladkov created a master socialist realist

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narrative to celebrate the experiment, in earnest and single-voiced fashion. Shvarts produced ironic, double- voiced but also strangely inspirational fairy tales that required a miracle to bring off their happy ending. Platonov suspended the experiment, ran it in slow motion almost below the voice barrier, and was barely heard in his own