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the cruel, indulgent ramblings of an Underground Man? Or worse? To be sure, dialectical materialism and “reality in its revolutionary development” were dry slogans when hacks and toadies applied them to art, but they were more than political opportunism. They implied that human beings could improve themselves by taking the high road. No one at the Writers’ Congress doubted the enormous benefits of the Thaw for “freedom from”: from arbitrary violence against writers, from a corrupt bureaucracy, from a moronic social command. But about “freedom to,” there was no consensus. From inside the profession, these troubled debates concerned not only “Stalinism versus freedom” (that simplistic and persistent binary) but also “Marxist-Leninist humanism” versus triviality, self-indulgence, and despair.
The virulent campaign directed against Boris Pasternak over the Nobel Prize in Literatureis oneindex ofthe tension and confusion.When Pasternakreceived the prize in 1958 for his novel Doctor Zhivago (an Italian edition had appeared the previous year, followed soon by the English), he was vilified in the press and at official meetings nationwide as a traitor, philistine, and “decadent formalist” – even though very few Soviets had read the novel, which was still unpublished in Russian. The Bolshevik Revolution is portrayed in that novel for what it was, a political coup rather than a mass uprising, and Strelnikov (the husband of Zhivago’s beloved, Lara) destroys peasant villages out of mili-tarynecessity.But arguably more serious than these political indiscretionsis the novel’s literary texture, its unapologetic alliance of poetry, medical healing, and erotic love. Russia’s suffering becomes background to a personal love story – actually, several love stories – whose resolution always seemed more pressing than any social or moral task. The ease with which this complex philosophical novel was reduced to a sultry, silly, but tuneful and picturesque Hollywood box-office hit (David Lean’s 1965 Doctor Zhivago, starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie) is confirmation of its “Western”- friendly plot, if judged by the perspective of party-minded Russian literature at mid-century. Even today, Russians despise the American film as unworthy of their great novelist-poet. In 2006, a Russian television serial based on the novel was produced that polemically targeted that Hollywood bowdlerization.
Pasternak was compelled to renounce the Nobel Prize. If he had left the country to receive it, he would not have been allowed back in. Other international prizes (Venice Film Festival, Cannes) were tolerated, but Soviet authorities bristled about Stockholm. The uneasy relationship between Russian writers and that coveted prize has helped shape the foreign footprint of the Russian canon. Since the founding of the Nobel prizes in 1901, five Russians have won the award for Literature, three of them while on Russian soil. (That Leo Tolstoy, the world’s most famous writer, was still alive during the first nine years of the
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award and not selected for it was a scandal – although the bard of Yasnaya Polyana would surely not have accepted: he craved repression, not one more award, and the idea of literary honor linked to, and financed by, the discoverer of dynamite could only have struck the pacifist Tolstoy as obscene.) The three “Soviet-based” laureates are Boris Pasternak (1958), Mikhail Sholokhov (1965, for his war epic The Quiet Don written a quarter-century earlier, 1928–40), and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1970). All awards were political. Even Sholokhov, who had served the Stalinist literary establishment impeccably, was known for his intercessions on behalf of writers. In a spectacular speech at the 1956 Twentieth PartyCongress,SholokhovshamedtheUnionthathadnourishedhim,remark-ing on the “huge piles of gray trash” that buried the handful of intelligent books produced over the past several decades – and noting that the Union contained almost four thousand members but this size was deceptive, because among them were so many “dead souls.”
Of Russian Nobel laureates, the most heroic in productivity, longevity, and resistance has been Solzhenitsyn. He will be this chapter’s first, “Tolstoyan” anchor for its survey of the post-Stalinist literary field. Our second and contrasting anchor will be the most “Dostoevskian” of the women prose writers of the next generation, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya (b. 1938). The third section of this chapter, devoted to three younger prose writers of the post- communist period already well established in English translation, makes no attempt at anchoring or synthesis – only at sampling the rich variety out of which a twenty-first-century literary canon will emerge.
The intelligentsia and the camps (Solzhenitsyn)
Solzhenitsyn is a master of several prison-camp genres, each informed by his privileged position as an intellectual reduced to the ranks of the unfree. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, published in 1962 and a milepost for the new Thaw, was one type of testimony: modest, private, Chekhovian, a single bricklayer’s survival from dawn to dusk. Prisoner Shukhov’s one day is drawn from Solzhenitsyn’s own experience in 1951 in the northern camp of Ekibastuz, a vast complex established exclusively for “politicals.” But the events of the day are filtered through a far simpler mind. Self-pity and bitterness in this pungent oral diary are minimal. Although the canonical prototypeof Siberian hardlabor is Dostoevsky’s life and prison memoirs, a deeper subtext for Ivan Denisovich’s relatively successful day might be Platon Karatayev, prisoner of war, Tolstoy’s ideal of a reconciliation with one’s fate through resourcefulness and simple manual labor.
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Stalinist practice had grotesquely distorted this Tolstoyan motif, with the willing (or recruited) support of the literary establishment. In 1934, Gorky and thirty-five other prominent writers published a festive volume celebrating the completion of the 140-mile Belomor [White Sea] Canal in the far north. The Belomor project had been directed by engineers arrested for this purpose and built by slave labor, as a model for “re-forging” the social renegade into the New Soviet Citizen through corrective physical labor. Its brutal construction plan, which assigned prison crews the task of chipping with primitive tools through solid granite, cost 100,000 lives and resulted in a waterway too shallow to be of commercial value. Ivan Denisovich was not being “reforged.” Nor does his author focus on the perverse details of that far less harrowing one day. Solzhen-itsyn later remarked that his intent was not to document his own despair, which was very real, but “something more frightening – the gray routine year after year when you forget that the only life you have on earth is destroyed.”2 The “gray routine” of this day nevertheless knew its share of modest success and triumph. That restrained tone surely contributed to the story’s publishability in 1962. Solzhenitsyn’s older friend and fellow witness Varlam Shalamov (1907– 82) saw the Gulag inferno in less quotidian fashion. His collection of Kolyma Tales, smuggled out to the West in the early 1970s and drawing on seventeen years in various labor camps between 1929 and 1954, is a sardonic, horrific corrective to Solzhenitsyn’s more heroic-ascetic focus on individual moral growth. Shalamov’s camps contain lepers who pass unnoticed as maimed war invalids and prisoners whose “workday” includes logging a mountainside that, eroded by the wind, suddenly reveals a “mass prisoners’ grave, a stone pit stuffed full of undecayed corpses from 1938” – for in far-north frozen Kolyma, “bodies are not given over to earth, but to stone.”3
Solzhenitsyn’s two quasi-autobiographical novels, The First Circle (1964) and The Cancer Ward (1968), explore other sides of the Tolstoyan legacy: the morality of science collaborating with evil; and the imperative to die well, with circumscribed desires. These great novels in the style of conventional nineteenth-century psychological realism stand apart from Solzhenitsyn’s most ambitious genre hybrid, the massive Gulag Archipelago (1973–75), subtitled “an experiment in literary investigation.” That subtitle deserves attention. Its “investigatory” dimension was meant to expose Gorky’s “disgraceful book on the White Sea Canal, which was the first in Russian literature to glorify slave labor.”4 The “literary” aspect refers, first of all, to the mass of personal narratives woven into the three volumes – but also, one suspects, to the status of Solzhenitsyn’s sources. For the safety of their tellers, these orally transmitted horror stories hadto remain anonymous.Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn challenges us to consider all this unverifiable testimony as non-fiction.
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The cumulative effect of this strategy is a nightmarish myth spread out along the archipelago of camps –
