The Magical Chorus

Solzhenitsyn was sour about the Nobel Prize going to The Quiet Don (ironically, a work that was much closer to him stylistically): “It was a very dreary and hurt feeling in our community when we saw that Sholokhov won the prize for that very book”²⁸—yet another example of how aesthetic judgment is subjugated to politics.

Even classic modernism, a milestone of which was Bely’s Petersburg (1914), a phantasmagoric novel much admired by Nabokov, is still not considered mainstream literature in Russia. That may be one of the reasons that Nabokov’s surrealistic novels (eight in Russian, including the tour de force The Gift and Invitation to a Beheading, and eight in English) have not entered the popular canon, even after they were finally published in Russia. (The first step came in 1987, when an excerpt from the “chess” novel Luzhin’s Defense appeared in the weekly Chess in the USSR.)

The Nabokovian tradition is still little absorbed in Russia. Exceptions are Andrei Bitov’s novel Pushkin House (even though the author always insisted that he wrote this book before reading Nabokov) and the works of Sasha Sokolov, whose A School for Fools was hailed by Nabokov as “an enchanting, tragic, and touching book.”²⁹

Khrushchev, who was one of Stalin’s henchmen in repression, no longer desired to—or perhaps no longer could—act as his ruthless boss once did. Hence his anti-Stalinist speech and attempts at a Thaw. But he still wanted to maintain strict discipline. Any whiff of liberalism made Khrushchev nervous. He feared it would weaken the country in its struggle with the West, and suspected that the main sources of dangerous liberal ideas were the writers, poets, composers, and artists.

Unlike Stalin, Khrushchev was no fan of high culture, and his relationship with these people was colored by the inferiority complex of a poorly educated man. These prejudices, multiplied by Khrushchev’s growing high- handedness, as he gradually freed himself of Stalin’s humiliating superiority and became more comfortable as leader of the Communist world, were an emotional powder keg, ready to explode at any moment. All it needed was a match.

Many historians continue to assert that the match was always lit by others, that every time Khrushchev exploded (and there were many), it was the result of the sinister intrigues of his advisors, conservative writers and artists. Khrushchev, like all leaders of the Soviet state, including Stalin before him and Brezhnev after, was first of all a professional politician who did not trust anyone fully besides himself and who made all final decisions personally. It is doubtful that anyone could manipulate Khrushchev. But he skillfully simulated spontaneity and impulsiveness in his skirmishes with the intelligentsia.

The first time Khrushchev “lost it” publicly was during a meeting with writers at the Central Committee on May 13, 1957, when after a two-hour rambling speech he shouted at an elderly literary grande dame, Marietta Shaginyan, whose dogged questions about why meat was not available in the stores set him off (he was planning to announce in ten days’ time his intention to surpass America in the production of meat, butter, and milk). At the second meeting with the cultural elite, on May 19, 1957, at a state dacha near Moscow, Khrushchev picked another woman as his main target, the poet Margarita Aliger.

Eyewitnesses describe him attacking the tiny, frail Aliger “with all the fire of an enraged drunk muzhik,” yelling that she was a traitor. “When Aliger meekly disagreed, Khrushchev howled that she couldn’t be an enemy, she was just a little bump in the road that he spat on, stomped on, and it was gone. Aliger burst into tears.”³⁰

Those present at this humiliating scene were terrified and sure that Aliger and the other writers Khrushchev had attacked that day would be arrested the very next morning. Even though arrests did not follow, we can assume that fear was exactly the effect the wily leader had wanted.

Khrushchev consciously built his political and cultural strategy in imitation of Stalin as a series of unpredictable zigzags: that was his brand tactics. He kept announcing that he was a Stalinist in cultural policy, then he would complain about the Stalinists who could not tolerate his struggle against Stalin’s cult of personality, and then he would attack anti-Stalinist literature. The intelligentsia had to keep guessing what his intentions were. From time to time, he would produce some disorienting surprises.

One such mind-boggling bombshell was the highly publicized publication in November 1962 in Novy Mir (editor-in-chief, Alexander Tvardovsky) of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the stunning novella about the Stalin concentration camps by a forty-four-year-old math schoolteacher from provincial Ryazan and a former prisoner, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It was the first work on this banned topic printed in a Soviet magazine, and it would not have appeared without Khrushchev’s personal approval. At the urging of Tvardovsky, whom he respected, Khrushchev decided to allow this novella to be published as the final chord of his anti-Stalin campaign, which had climaxed on October 31, 1961, with the removal of Stalin’s embalmed body from the mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow, where it had been placed with Lenin’s mummy in 1953.

Solzhenitsyn’s story had been read aloud to Khrushchev by his aide in September 1962 while he was on vacation, and he liked it very much—it suited his current political plans. Khrushchev’s unexpected verdict was: “This is a life-affirming work. I’ll say even more—it’s a Party work.” And he added significantly that at the moment Solzhenitsyn’s novella could be “useful.”³¹

A few days after the magazine came out, there was a scheduled plenary session of the Central Committee, which brought the Party elite from all over the country. The Kremlin requested over two thousand copies of the magazine with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich for the delegates. Tvardovsky, who participated in the plenum’s work, recalled that when he saw the light blue cover of the magazine all over the auditorium of the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, his heart beat wildly.³²

For Tvardovsky this was the high point of his sixteen-year tenure as head of Novy Mir, which in the Khrushchev era had become the center of the liberal forces in Russian literature. Three-time winner of the Stalin Prize (and under Khrushchev, the Lenin Prize), Tvardovsky underwent a remarkable evolution from loyal believer to protector of oppositionist voices, like Vladimir Voinovich and Georgy Vladimov. Tvardovsky was most proud of his discovery of Solzhenitsyn, especially dear to him because of his strong Russian roots, keen understanding of peasant psychology, traditional writing style, and stern character.

I was eighteen then, and I remember the general shock caused by One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, both because it had been published at all and for its enormous artistic power. Its first readers encountered narrative mastery, amazing in a literary debut: without melodrama or stress, with deliberate restraint it told the story of just “one day,” and far from the worst, in the life of one of the millions of Soviet prisoners, the peasant Ivan Shukhov, depicted through his peasant perceptions, his colorful but natural language, which elicited associations with Tolstoy’s prose. This publication created in the intelligentsia a sense of unprecedented euphoria, which lasted, alas, just over a week.

On December 1, 1962, Khrushchev with his retinue of associates and sycophants made an unexpected visit to an exhibition at the Manege near Red Square that was dedicated to the thirtieth anniversary of the Moscow Artists’ Union. Khrushchev was expected at the moment to support liberal trends in art, but instead he attacked the paintings he saw there by the patriarchs of Russian modernism, like Pavel Kuznetsov and Robert Falk, calling them “dog shit.” He was particularly infuriated by the works of young Moscow avant-garde painters, mostly pupils of Eli Belyutin, which had been hastily delivered to the Manege the night before his visit, which later gave rise to