The Magical Chorus

degree of intellectual freedom. The answer, which the poet paid with his life to get, was “No.”

Entering NEP, the Bolsheviks in effect told the intelligentsia: as long as we were unable to feed you, you had the right to a small bit of independence; now take your hunk of bread and salami and serve the new regime without murmur. This period saw a lessening role for Lunacharsky, arguably the most educated and tolerant of Soviet leaders, whom Lenin, the wily political tactician, made mediator between the authorities and the intellectuals whenever the situation was critical for the Bolsheviks.

Lenin once admitted to the German Communist Klara Zetkin: “I am incapable of considering the works of Expressionism, Futurism, Cubism and other ‘isms’ the highest manifestation of artistic genius. I do not understand them.”⁴ When Lenin (whom Gorky later described as a “bald, solid, sturdy man who could not pronounce the letter R” with “amazingly lively eyes”) was asked to express his opinion about a work of art, he usually replied, “I don’t understand anything here, ask Lunacharsky.”⁵

Still, Lenin was obviously annoyed by Lunacharsky’s fondness for high culture, especially the theater (Lunacharsky wrote plays, too), over the elementary education of the masses. Lenin rebuked Lunacharsky on August 26, 1921, the day after Gumilev was shot, with a harsh remark: “I suggest piling all theaters into the grave. The People’s Commissar of Education should be teaching grammar, not dealing with the theater.”⁶ According to Lunacharsky’s memoirs, Lenin tried to shut down the Bolshoi and the Maryinsky theaters several times, reasoning that the opera and ballet “were a piece of purely bourgeois culture, and no one can argue with that!”⁷ Fortunately, Lunacharsky, with figures in hand, could show that shutting down these great cultural palaces would bring tiny economic profit and enormous propaganda loss, thereby fighting off Lenin’s attacks (with the quiet support of Stalin, a fan of opera and ballet).

In the second half of 1921, Lenin became seriously ill, and in May 1922, a stroke paralyzed his right side. In the gap before the next stroke, in December, Lenin initiated the expulsion abroad of 160 “of the most active bourgeois ideologues,” including the creme de la creme of Russian philosophy—Lev Karsavin (at the time, the elected rector of Petrograd University), Sergei Bulgakov, Berdyaev, Frank, Ivan Ilyin, and Stepun.

The final list of banished philosophers was sanctioned personally by Lenin. It was his last anti-intellectual shot before his third stroke, which in March 1923 ended his involvement in state affairs.

Lenin died January 21, 1924, but the Party’s cultural policy had been supervised for some time by Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik military leader, and Nikolai Bukharin, the prominent ideologue. Both were much more authoritative figures than Lunacharsky, but they dealt with culture more as a hobby, even while writing about it frequently enough.

Their later struggle against Stalin and their deaths at his hand has created a myth of their cultural tolerance. But both Trotsky and Bukharin, while comparatively educated men who spoke several languages, remained Marxist doctrinaires all their lives and ruthlessly criticized philosophers, writers, and poets for any sort of ideological deviation.

For example, in a Pravda article published in September 1922, Trotsky belittled the expelled leaders of the Russian religious renaissance—Berdyaev, Karsavin, Frank, and others: “There aren’t many takers to shake up the neoreligious liquid distilled before the war in the little apothecaries of Berdyaev and others.”⁸

In Trotsky’s opinion, the influence of the “new religious consciousness” on Russian literature had “dwindled to nothing.” Contradicting himself, Trotsky petulantly scoffed at the religious motifs in the poetry of Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva, especially mocking their constant appeals to God: “Now there’s truly a place where you can’t get to the door without God…. It is a very convenient and portable third person, completely house trained, a friend of the family, who sometimes performs the duties of doctor for female dysfunctions. How this elderly personage, burdened by the personal and often very labor-intensive errands of Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, and others, manages in his spare time to handle the fate of the universe is incomprehensible.”⁹

Bukharin, who held more moderate positions politically than the extreme left Trotsky, could be just as unbridled in his attacks on cultural figures who displeased him: he called Berdyaev’s work “nonsense”¹⁰ in 1924 and in 1925 a “brain eclipse.”¹¹ But Bukharin and Trotsky united to push through the Politburo a famously benign resolution “On the Party’s policy in the sphere of literature” of June 18, 1925 (the draft had been prepared by Bukharin). This resolution not only defended mainstream authors who were attacked brutally by the Communist dogmatists in the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), but also proclaimed that the Party “cannot insist on a preference for any particular literary form” and even called for free competition among various cultural groups and tendencies.

Naturally, even in 1925 the Communists were not as liberal in deed as they were in word. NEP, which started in 1921, forced them to loosen the ideological reins a little (in Moscow alone in 1922 there were 220 small private publishing houses), but by 1922 the authorities restored tight control over printed product by establishing a special censor’s office—The Main Directorate on Literary Affairs and Publishing (Glavlit).

The ruling party supported “proletarian” writers, of whom, according to RAPP data, there were several thousand in 1925. They were given priority financing, organizational help, and access to state publishing houses. Peasant writers were treated much more suspiciously, even though officially the Soviet state was one of united workers and peasants.

In a letter to Bukharin dated July 13, 1925, Maxim Gorky endorsed the wariness of the Bolsheviks toward the peasantry. “The Central Committee resolution’ On the Party’s policy in the sphere of literature’ is a marvelous and wise thing, dear Nikolai Ivanovich! There is no doubt that this smart smack on the head will push our belles-lettres forward.” And after that dubious compliment, Gorky moved on to his point: “Dear comrade, either you or Trotsky should point out to worker writers that the work of peasant writers is appearing next to their oeuvre and there is the possibility, I would say, inevitability, of conflict between these two ‘directions.’ Any censorship here would only be a hindrance and would exacerbate the ideology of muzhik-worshipers and village- lovers, but criticism—ruthless criticism—of that ideology must be aired right now.”¹²

Gorky—unlike Leo Tolstoy, who idealized the Russian muzhik—always considered the peasantry a dark, uncontrollable force, simultaneously lazy and cruel and permanently anti-intellectual. He felt that Count Tolstoy did not know the real countryside, while he, Gorky, who had come out of the people and had walked all over Russia, understood it completely. Like the leading Bolsheviks, Gorky disliked and feared the peasants, pointing out: “I have always been distressed by the fact that in Russia the illiterate village dominates the city and also by the zoological individualism of the peasantry and the almost total absence of social emotions in it. The dictatorship of politically literate workers, in close alliance with the scientific and technical intelligentsia, was, in my opinion, the only possible way out of this impossible situation.”¹³

In a country where at the start of the revolution, the mostly illiterate peasants constituted 82 percent of the population, the Bolsheviks, who considered themselves the avant-garde “proletarian” squad, shuddered when assessing the economic and cultural threat coming from the gloomy and distant peasant ocean. Many urban intellectuals felt the same way; Gorky was no exception here.

In this unsettled context, the suicide of Sergei Esenin was no less symbolic than the death of Blok and execution of Gumilev in 1921. Esenin, thirty, was the leader of the so-called New Peasant poets. On the night of December 27, 1925, Esenin hanged himself in a room at the Hotel Angleterre in Leningrad. That morning, he had attempted to write down a farewell poem, but there was no ink in the room; he cut a vein in his left wrist and wrote in