The Whisperers

reconstruction of bad people into good, of common criminals into builders of the Five Year Plan.’89

For Simonov – a nobleman involved in the reconstruction of his own identity as a ‘proletarian writer’ – the idea of perekovka had a special resonance. In his memoirs Simonov recounts how he perceived the reforging of the ‘kulaks’ and ‘bourgeois saboteurs’ as ‘highly promising for society’, and as an inspiration for himself, because it showed ‘the possibility of burying the past and moving on to a new path’. The reforging of the former oppositionists at the Seventeenth Party Congress (the ‘congress of victors’) in 1934 was another inspiration to the young writer, as he strove to make a career for himself in an artistic sphere that was so tightly supervised by the Party. At that congress several Party leaders who had been opposed to Stalin’s extreme policies (Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Rykov, Tomsky, Piatakov and others) were allowed to speak. They recanted their old positions and heaped praise on Stalin in the name of Party unity, and they were received in a manner that suggested that the Party leadership had rehabilitated them. Simonov took comfort from their example. As he saw it, the reception of the repentant oppositionists proved that the Party was a place where people like himself might receive forgiveness for their past. Simonov understood that his own reforging would depend on the reconstruction of his political personality. Like the former oppositionists, he had to show that he was a worthy Communist by renouncing his own past. His writings on the White Sea Canal were the means to that end. After he returned from the canal Simonov applied for a second time to join the Komsomol. On the previous occasion, following the arrest of his stepfather in 1931, he had been advised to withdraw his application. But this time he was invited to join. This acceptance was a ‘huge relief’ for Simonov. In his memoirs he remembers 1934 as the high-point of his hopes in the future:

I cannot speak for other people of my age, but for me 1934 was the year of brightest hope in all my youth. There was a sense that the country had come through a difficult period and that, although problems still remained, life was becoming easier, in both spiritual and material terms. I was happy to be taking part in the building of this new life… The correctness of Stalin, who was leading the industrialization of the country and achieving great success, seemed indisputable to me. As I saw it, he was right to argue with his opponents and to show that they were wrong.90

In the summer of 1934, shortly after his return, Simonov wrote a poem, ‘Horizon’, about the reforging of a criminal in the labour camps. The poem was heavily edited – and in places censored – by the Cultural-Educational Department of OGPU, which concluded that the poem was very badly written (‘pretentious’, ‘clumsy’, ‘cacophonous’, ‘mechanical’ and ‘sentimentalized’) but worthy of publication for its propaganda value nonetheless.91 ‘Horizon’ was reworked by Simonov and eventually published as ‘Pavel Chyorny’ in 1938. In later years Simonov would look back at this poem ‘with feelings of horror’. He insisted on excluding it from all collections of his published works.92 But the poem was the making of Simonov’s career. It demonstrated his ability to turn out poetry that could be used by the Stalinist regime. Simonov was encouraged to apply to the Gorky Literary Institute. He was even given a recommendation by his political patrons in Goslitizdat and the Cultural-Educational Department of OGPU.93

Located in the former Herzen palace on the Tver Boulevard, the Literary Institute was opened in 1933 to encourage writers from the working class (until 1936 it was called the Workers’ Evening Literary University). Classes took place in the evening, which allowed Simonov to continue with his job at Mezhrabpomfilm and supplement his 200 rouble grant. Most of the students at the Literary Institute were not from the working class at all. They had been born to noble or bourgeois families and, like Simonov, had qualified for entry to the institute by going through a factory school or by working in a factory. Half the students were members of the Komsomol or the Party. The institute was a cosmopolitan place, with writers from twenty-seven different nationalities.94 Among the many Jewish students were two young women who would become Simonov’s first wives: Natalia Tipot, the daughter of a well-known variety theatre-man, who married Simonov in 1935; and Zhenia Laskina, the youngest daughter of the ruined NEPman Samuil Laskin, who joined the institute in 1936 and married Simonov in 1939.

By his own admission Simonov had no special affinity for literature. It was a career he pursued because of his spoilt biography. ‘If it were not for my noble origins,’ he had told Natalia, ‘I would not have been interested in literature at all, only in politics and history.’95 Nor was Simonov considered to be among the most talented students at the Literary Institute (in 1936 he was ranked seventh in a list of excellence headed by the poet Margarita Aliger). But he was known as a conscientious student who was well organized (he carefully planned out the time he spent on working, reading, even socializing) and always punctual in completing his tasks. His fellow students nicknamed Simonov the ‘iron bottom’ because he worked so hard. ‘He just sat down and wrote and wrote,’ recalls the poet Yevgeny Dolmatovsky (who came in second on the list of excellence). Aliger remembers Simonov as someone who stood out as a leader from the start. Usually dressed in a leather jacket, like the Bolsheviks in the Civil War, or in a jacket, shirt and tie, Simonov distanced himself from the bohemian culture of the other students at the institute, spending his spare time in Komsomol activities or writing book reviews rather than in playing billiards. Not surprisingly, he was held in

Simonov in 1936

high regard by the administration of the institute, which saw him as a Party loyalist and entrusted him with many tasks (in 1937 he would play a leading role in the denunciation of ‘anti-Soviet elements’ within the institute). Simonov was serious and censorious, more like a literary bureaucrat than a young poet. ‘Not having written my own book,’ he recalled in 1945,

I wrote many critical reviews of books written by others. I was very strict and impatient, which just goes to show that the most crudely negative reviews of a book are always written by reviewers who have not succeeded or could not succeed in writing such a book themselves.96

As a poet at the institute, Simonov was learning how to write for his political superiors. The theme of perekovka, which became a commonplace of the Socialist Realist tradition in the 1930s, reappeared in several of his early poems, which returned to the subject of the White Sea Canal. But increasingly his poetry was shaped by the hopes of the Five Year Plans and by the heroic theme of struggle epitomized by the Spanish Civil War. Here Simonov was deeply influenced by his poetry teacher, Vladimir Lugovskoi (1901–57), a charismatic figure to the young poets at the institute, whose room was filled with swords and guns, memorabilia from his fighting days in the Russian Civil War and the last campaign against the Basmachi Muslim rebels in Central Asia in 1931. Simonov explored the theme of masculinity and heroic courage in poems like ‘The General’, which was inspired by the death of the Hungarian Communist Mate Zalka (also known as General Lukach) in the Spanish Civil War. For Simonov, who took his basic values from the military ethos of his stepfather, the bravery and self-sacrifice of fighters such as Zalka were not just ‘wonderful human qualities’ but ‘virtues of the first necessity’ in a world engulfed by the struggle between socialism and Fascism. As Simonov explained to a foreign journalist in 1960, ‘we young Communists of the 1930s hated with a passion anyone who showed signs of complacency by imagining that our future victory would be easy and bloodless’. This was a generation immersed in the notion of struggle – a generation that lived in readiness for war. Recalling his student years, Simonov was speaking for a whole epoch when he wrote in 1973:

The Literary Institute opened the same year the Nazis came to power. All our years of study were overshadowed by the sense of an impending war with Fascism. These were years when it was impossible to think of literature and one’s path in it without thinking how, sooner or later, we too would be forced to play a part – whether with a pen or a rifle in our hands was not yet clear – in this looming struggle with Fascism.

On 1 January 1936, Simonov had his first poem published in Izvestiia, ‘New Year’s Toast’. It was an early sign of the favour with which the young poet – then just twenty years of age – would come to be regarded by the Party leadership. In the poem, Simonov conjured up the idea of a final struggle between light and dark:

Friends, today we stand on high alert!

Wolves encircle our Republic!