The Magical Chorus

Klyuev was a maddeningly complicated figure, at once a firm traditionalist and a bold innovator. Like Esenin, even before the revolution he began to mourn the wasting away of the traditional peasant way of life in Russia, doing so in complex verse weighted down by clusters of modernist metaphors. Like Esenin, Klyuev dressed as a stylized paysan—in a side-buttoned collarless shirt and a woolen jacket known as armyak, low boots, a large pectoral cross, and brilliantined hair—and did not hide his homosexuality, which was rather unusual in Russian literary life then. (Another exception to this rule was his contemporary, the prominent modernist poet Mikhail Kuzmin.)

In 1918, Klyuev joined the Bolshevik Party, only to be expelled two years later because “his religious convictions are in complete contradiction to the party’s materialistic ideology.”²⁴ Klyuev left behind a powerful cycle of poems in honor of Lenin (1919) and Pogorelshchina [Burned Out], in Brodsky’s opinion the most brutal poetic expose of the Soviet antipeasant policy.

Sadly, there were not many works written about those horrible years, despite the fact that Russia was predominantly a peasant country with a powerful tradition of idolizing the peasantry in literature, culminating in the works of Leo Tolstoy. It is telling that for Chekhov peasant life was no longer a central theme and that Gorky treated peasants with undisguised contempt. This reflected the growing cultural gap between the peasantry and the intelligentsia.

The liberal author and critic Kornei Chukovsky ventured in his diary on June 1, 1930, at the height of the destruction of the Russian peasantry, that “the kolkhoz is the only salvation for Russia, the only solution to the peasant question in the country!”²⁵

The diaries also record a presumably unfeigned appreciation of Stalin as destroyer of the kulaks, expressed in a private conversation with Chukovsky by the literary theoretician Yuri Tynyanov: “As author of the kolkhoz, Stalin is the greatest genius restructuring the world.”²⁶

Isaak Babel, the master of the Soviet short story, attempted to write about collectivization. In 1931 he published a fragment of a planned novel in the journal Novy Mir, but it was not very successful and he dropped the project, because, as Babel admitted, “that grandiose process was torn into disjointed shreds in my consciousness.”²⁷

Stocky, bespectacled, and ironic, Babel did not condemn collectivization publicly, but he did not become its singer, either, even though the nationalist critic Vadim Kozhinov and his colleagues in the postperestroika period accused the late writer of participating in the forced collectivization of farms in the Caucasus and Ukraine. In his youth, Babel, a man with an extremely checkered past, had—by his own admission—worked for the Cheka, and later considered as close friends some of the highest-ranking officials of the Soviet secret police (this fact was noted with disapproval by Solzhenitsyn in 2002), but that still did not make Babel an apologist for the security apparatus.

As early as 1925 the emigre D. S. Mirsky noted that the magic of Babel was “to sharpen” a tragic anecdote artfully as in Pushkin’s novellas and maintained that even in his most “realistic” works, like the short-story cycle Red Army about the Civil War, the writer remained politically unengaged: “Ideology for him is just a helpful device.”²⁸

In fact, Babel cannot be called the bard of the criminal world, either, but his colorful stories about Odessa’s exotic bandits and muggers belong to the highest achievements of Russian prose. His ability to preserve a distance between author and character is comparable to Chekhov’s.

Next to Babel, Osip Mandelstam, a famously difficult poet, seems, strangely enough, much more politicized. Born just three and a half years before Babel, in 1891, Mandelstam had won a serious literary reputation even before the revolution, unlike Babel. Mandelstam, with Gumilev and Akhmatova, belonged to the Acmeists, the St. Petersburg group of poets opposed to Symbolism. Scrawny but scrappy, Mandelstam saw a “longing for world culture” in Acmeism, and even in his early poems, collected in 1913 in The Stone, he created an original style— hieratic, solemn, filling intentional ellipses in meaning with numerous historical, literary, and political allusions. Mandelstam declaimed his poetry to everyone he met, wailing and lisping, according to a contemporary, “insinuating and at the same time arrogant, even satanically arrogant.”²⁹

Even sympathetic contemporaries mistakenly took him for a self-centered eccentric remote from real life. The social theme was a natural component in Mandelstam’s work from his youth. His artistic response to every political situation was always sincere, significant, and original—for instance, his 1918 poem “Twilight of Freedom,” a substantial ode to Lenin, whom the poet, according to Mirsky, “praised for something that I think no one else ever did: for the courage of responsibility…. Here we are very far from the Scythians and Mayakovsky. The Bolshevism in Mandelstam is combined with courageous and positive Christianity.”³⁰

It was Mandelstam, with his reputation as sophisticated master and bookish aesthete and seemingly infinitely far from the New Peasant poets (even though he rated Klyuev’s work very highly and liked some lines in Esenin), who was one of the few to respond to the famine that befell the peasant regions of the Soviet Union as a result of Stalin’s collectivization in the early 1930s.

Mandelstam’s “Fourth Prose,” a stunning example of the Russian confessional genre (comparable to Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground), describing the animal fear engulfing Soviet society, the fear that “writes denunciations, beats people when they are down, and demands execution for the prisoner,” reveals the author’s revulsion for such antipeasant slogans of the Stalin regime as “The muzhik has hidden rye in his storeroom—kill him!”

This growing horror and anger (“The authorities are as revolting as a barber’s hands”) burst out in May 1933, when Mandelstam poured out several political poems, the most biting of which was the openly anti-Stalin satire “We live, not feeling the country beneath us.” It has become perhaps his most famous poem.

The irony is that this work, which lacks complex associative images, is not at all typical of Mandelstam’s work: Akhmatova observed that Stalin’s portrait in it resembles the primitive folk style known as lubok:

His fat fingers are as flabby as worms,

His words are as accurate as pound weights,

His cockroach eyes mock

And his boots are shiny.

Boris Pasternak refused to recognize these lampoon lines as poetry when Mandelstam rushed to declaim them to him: Pasternak was horrified not only by the poem’s unheard-of political daring but its provocatively direct, almost caricature-like style: “This is not a literary fact but an act of suicide, of which I do not approve and in which I do not want to take part.”³¹

Mandelstam saw his anti-Stalin lampoon in a different light, according to his friend Emma Gershtein: “The Young Communists will sing it in the streets! At the Bolshoi Theater…at congresses…from every row.” He knew what he was risking: “If they find out, I could be…EXECUTED!”³²

Even though Mandelstam was not executed for this work, he had been essentially right: the poem started a