Enemies of the People: The Destruction of Soviet Literary, Theater, and Film Arts in the 1930s 9780810117693

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 8
Acknowledgments......Page 10
Introduction: The Book of Odes and the Book of History......Page 12
Part I. Poetry beyond the Pale......Page 36
Katharine Hodgson. Russian Womens Poetry in the 1930s......Page 38
Diana Lewis Burgin. Sophia Parnok and Soviet-Russian Censorship, 1922-1933......Page 64
J. Alexander Ogden. Overcoming the Destruction of Peasant Russia: The Epic Impulse in Nikolai Kliuev's Late Poetry......Page 86
Victor Terras. Death of a Poet: Osip Mandelshtam......Page 108
Part II. Creators of Public Art......Page 122
Jeffrey Veidlinger. How the Weasel and the Well Became the Heavens and the Earth: Soviet Yiddish Drama in the 1930s......Page 124
Peter Kenez. Bezhin lug (Bezhin Meadow)......Page 146
Lynn Maliy. Soviet Youth Theater Grows Up: TRAM in the 1930s......Page 160
Edward Braun: Vsevolod Meyerhold: The Final Act......Page 178
Part III. The Voices of Silence......Page 196
George Luckyj. Mykola Khvylovy: A Defiant Ukrainian Communist......Page 198
Efraim Sicher. The Three Deaths of Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel’......Page 212
Alice Nakhimovsky. Death and Disillusion: Il’ia Il’f in the 1930s......Page 238
Notes on Contributors......Page 262

Citation preview

Enemies of the People

Northwestern University Press Studies in Russian Literature and Theory Founding Editor Gary Saul Morson General Editor Caryl Emerson

Consulting Editors Carol Avins Robert Belknap Robert Louis Jackson Elliott Mossman Alfred Rieber William Mills Todd III Alexander Zholkovsky

Enemies of the People THE DESTRUCTION OF SOVIET LITERARY, THEATER, AND FILM ARTS IN THE 1930S

Edited and with an introduction by Katherine Bliss Eaton

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS / EVANSTON, ILLINOIS

Northwestern University Press Evanston, Illinois 60208-4210 Copyright © 2002 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2002. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America 10

987654321

ISBN 0-8101-1769-X Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Enemies of the people : the destruction of Soviet literary, theater, and film arts in the 1930s / edited and with an introduction by Katherine Bliss Eaton. p. cm. — (Studies in Russian literature and theory) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8101-1769-X (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Russian literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Literature and state—Soviet Union. 3. Russian literature—20th century—Censorship. 4. Censorship—Soviet Union—History. 5. Theater—Soviet Union—History. 6. Motion pictures—Soviet Union—History. 7. Communism and intellectuals— Soviet Union. 8. Political persecution—Soviet Union. I. Eaton, Katherine Bliss. II. Series. PG3022 .E52 2001 700'.947'09043—dc21 2001044813

Thanks to the following for permission to reprint material in this volume: Canadian Slavonic Papers for Efraim Sicher, “The Trials of Isaac: A Brief Life,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 36, nos. 1-2 (1994): 7-42. A. Landman, translator of Osip Mandelshtam’s “Twilight of Freedom,” “The Age,” and “Leningrad.” NTQ (New Theatre Quarterly) for Edward Braun, “Meyerhold the Final Act,” NTQ 9, no. 33 (Feb. 1993): 3-15.

The paper used in this pubheation meets the minimum requirements of the Ameri­ can National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

For my mother, Ilse Bliss, and to the memory of my father, Joseph Bliss

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: The Book of Odes and the Book of History Katherine Bliss Eaton

xi

Part I—Poetry beyond the Pale Russian Women’s Poetry in the 1930s Katharine Hodgson Sophia Pamok and Soviet-Russian Censorship, 1922-1933 Diana Lewis Burgin

Overcoming the Destruction of Peasant Russia: The Epic Impulse in Nikolai Kliuev’s Late Poetry J. Alexander Ogden Death of a Poet: Osip Mandelshtam Victor Terras

5

31

53

75

Part II—Creators of Public Art

How the Weasel and the Well Became the Heavens and the Earth: Soviet Yiddish Drama in the 1930s Jeffrey Veidlinger Bezhin lug (Bezhin Meadow) Peter Kenez

91

113

Soviet Youth Theater Grows Up: TRAM in the 1930s Lynn Maliy

127

Vsevolod Meyerhold: The Final Act Edward Braun

145

Part III—The Voices of Silence Mykola Khvylovy: A Defiant Ukrainian Communist George Luckyj

165

The Three Deaths of Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel’ Efraim Sicher

179

Death and Disillusion: Il’ia Il’f in the 1930s Alice Nakhimov.sky

205

Notes on Contributors

229

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank those who helped bring this book to fruition. My husband, Henry Eaton, suggested the idea and helped see it through to pubheation. Whenever I had technical problems, the computer wizards Jonathan Eaton and Cyndi Lewis cheerfully gave instructions over the phone and even made house calls. My backup wizard, Stephen Eaton, because of geo­ graphic distance was less often importuned, but he was equally quick to help out. My friend Judy Klehr, typically, volunteered two weeks of her time to assist me. The University of Illinois Russian and East European Center’s Summer Research Lab and the Slavic Reference Service’s Julia Gauchman have been invaluable resources in this and other projects. I ap­ preciate the support of Caiyl Emerson, Series Editor. Other editors at Northwestern University Press—Susan Harris, Editor in Chief; Susan Betz, Managing Editor; Rachel Drzewicki and Theresa Biancheri, Assistant Ac­ quisitions Editors—always responded to my questions fully and promptly. The thoughtful and detailed comments offered by the outside reader helped improve the book as a whole. Finally, my thanks to those contributors who responded to my request to read a draft of the introduction and point out mistakes. Any mistakes remaining in that essay are mine alone.

ix

Katherine Bliss Eaton

Introduction: The Book of Odes and the Book of History Those who dare to talk to each other about the Book of Odes and the Book of History should be executed and their bodies exposed in the marketplace. Anyone referring to the past to criticize the present should, together with all members of his family, be put to death. . . . Those who have not burned [the books] within thirty days after the issuing of the order, are to be branded and sent to do forced labor. —Prime Minister Li Ssu to the First Exalted Emperor of the Ch’in Dynasty1

THE BOOK OF HISTORY

The Book of History, one of the Five Classics attributed to Confucius, cel­ ebrates kings whose virtue typified their whole administration. These ideal rulers, devoted to their subjects’ welfare, even selected men better than their own sons to succeed them. Such kings were as rare as they were de­ voutly wished for. Therefore, according to Li Ssu’s reasoning, those who kept alive the memory of such ideals must be destroyed. The regime of the First Emperor of the Ch’in, in its massive construction projects, police con­ trol, attempts to obliterate unwanted ideas by controlling behavior through fear, and general suffering of the population—in particular peasants— resembles nothing so much as Stalin’s Soviet Union. Although they never achieved the vast power and control of a Stalin or a First Exalted Emperor of the Ch’in, the tsars and tsarinas of Russia had moments of inventiveness. Some of their techniques and devices survived the 1917 revolutions, pro­ viding useful precedents for Soviet leaders. Stalin, who was personally acquainted with tsarist censorship and prisons, elaborated these devices of intimidation and terror and applied

Introduction

them on such a grand scale that Ivan the Terrible (reigned from 1533 to 1584) himself could hardly have imagined it. There are similarities between the regimes of these two demented tyrants. Each created a police state within a state. Ivan’s black-uniformed oprichnina and Stalin’s secret police ruled vast territories and terrorized, tortured, and murdered alleged evil­ doers and traitors. Peter the Great also created a police agency (preobrazhenskii prikaz) which, for the few years it existed, had extraordinary punitive powers. One of the early classics of Russian literature to be repressed by tsar and church was Thitie protopopa Avvakuma, im samim napisannoe (The Life of Archpriest Avvakum, Written by Himself 1669-76). Avvakum. (1620-82) was the leader of the Old Believers, a group which broke with the Russian Church in opposition to reforms introduced by Patriarch Nikon in the 1650s and upheld by Church council in 1667. The Archpriest’s Life is a direct, un­ sentimental, and harrowing account of his and his family’s sufferings and the inner and outer demons that constantly tormented him. Government and Church were determined to destroy the Old Be­ lievers. Avvakum, a prolific writer, was exiled in 1667 to Pustozersk, north of the Arctic Circle, and was confined there for the remainder of his life. In a prefiguring of samizdat, he smuggled his writings out of Pustozersk, to his family in Mezen, “who copied them and distributed them in an underground network throughout Russia.”2 On April 4, 1670, he and three companions were taken to be beheaded, but at the last moment were read a message from Tsar Alexis commuting their sentences to imprisonment. Lazar, Fedor, and Epifanii (the companions) had their tongues cut out to silence them and hands or fingers cut off to prevent them signing the cross the old way. They and Avvakum were burned at the stake in 1682. Catherine the Great (1762-96) herself presided over two cases of al­ leged sedition, which put an end to two good men and their worthy efforts and had long-lasting consequences for literature and political reform in Russia. One was the case of Alexander Radishchev, the other of Nikolai Novikov, both of whom took advantage of a new freedom to own and oper­ ate printing presses (1783). In 1790 Radishchev anonymously published his own book, Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu (Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow), an imaginary travelogue describing serfs shackled by their landlords and Rea­ son shackled by censorship. The book dealer who sold the Journey was ar­ rested and interrogated and soon enough gave up the author’s name. Radishchev himself was arrested (but not before he destroyed six hundred unsold copies of his book), tried, and sentenced to death, a sentence that Catherine commuted to ten years’ imprisonment in Siberia. Freed and par­ doned by Catherine’s successor and son Paul (1796-1801), and allowed to return to St. Petersburg in 1796, Radishchev continued to argue for free xii

Introduction

speech, emancipation, and equality before the law but, apparently fearing that he would again be exiled or imprisoned, he committed suicide in 1802. Novikov was also a writer, but more important he built the largest pub­ lishing enterprise in Russia in the 1770s and 1780s. He was an editor, es­ sayist, and journal publisher, and ran the University of Moscow press, among other enterprises. His satirical magazines Truten (The Drone, 1769-70) and Zhivopisets (The Painter, VH2r-73) mocked the venality, arrogance, and stupidity of the ruling classes.

A recently appointed voevoda [governor of a province] is leaving for his as­ signed post and, to lighten the journey, wishes to sell his conscience; those who wish to buy it may find him in this city.3 Even the royal court did not escape Novikov’s satire. In addition, he was a philanthropist who supported many charitable causes. Thus in his profes­ sional and private life he tried to promote, as did Radishchev, social justice in general and the well-being of the poor in particular. What precisely moved Catherine to destroy Novikov—his freemasonry, satirical journalism, suspected treasonable contacts with Grand Duke Paul— is not clear. Following his arrest in April 1792, Novikov’s residences were searched, materials confiscated, several bookstores shut down, and their proprietors arrested.4 During his interrogation by Secret Police Chief S. Sheshkovskii (who had also been involved with Radishchev’s case), Novikov confessed his guilt, offered his contrition, and begged Catherine’s mercy; he was secretly sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment. A few of his close colleagues were also arrested and given prison terms. Like Radishchev, Novikov was pardoned by Paul but emerged from his ordeal a much weak­ ened man. Although he had behaved decently toward Radishchev and Novikov, Paul was no friend of press freedom. He prevented foreign books from en­ tering Russia, consigned thousands of books to the flames, and in other ways made his contribution to Russia’s rich history of censorship. In 1797, he issued a command to write and print the word “resident” instead of “cit­ izen,” and “state” instead of “fatherland,” “but the word ‘republic’ was gen­ erally forbidden.”5 One of the most disturbing aspects of Imperial and Soviet censorship was the collusion between agencies of state repression and artists them­ selves, achieved in tsarist and Soviet times by hiring writers as censors, a job which some eagerly accepted, “recognizing] censorship as a necessary and even useful partner of literature and the arts.” Nicholas I’s court poet, Vasily Zhukovsky (1783-1852), a man respected by his contemporaries not only for his poetry but also for his good, generous character, remarked enig­ matically on the banning of the journal Moscow Telegraph, “I am glad that the Telegraph is banned, although I regret that they banned it.”6 This col­ xiii

Introduction

laboration between artist and state continued into the Soviet period, ac­ cording to Vladimir Solodin, the chief censor from 1971 to 1991, who claimed that the censors were themselves a diverse group of specialists from the lib­ eral arts, law, journalism, philology, theater, art, and so on.7 Important fig­ ures in the Union of Soviet Writers helped to provide, and signed, lists of writers to be arrested, an action that was very often the equivalent of a death sentence. One such executioner’s helper was the novelist Alexander Fadeev (1901-56), the general secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers (1946-53), and its president (1954), who ended his life with suicide. Even before Fadeev became General Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers, he was a powerful figure in that organization and as such signed many ar­ rest warrants against his fellow writers.8 In the aftermath of the Decembrist uprising, Nicholas I in 1826 cre­ ated the Third Section of the Imperial Chancellery, the state’s secret polit­ ical police, progenitor of generations of such institutions, and also approved a new Censorship Code whose provisions included a novel foreshadowing of Soviet conditions. Now the artist would be expected to eliminate politi­ cally undesirable writing and besides, provide the kind of “socially uplift­ ing” material satisfying to the state.9 In Imperial Russia, censorship had wide-ranging effects but did not necessarily diminish the artist’s work. While he was in exile for his subver­ sive poetry, Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) continued to write poetry and began his most famous work, the verse novel Evgenii Onegin (1823-31). When, in 1837, Mikhail Lermontov (1814^41) wrote a poem on Pushkin’s death, in which he blamed the poet’s death on court nobility, he was arrested and sentenced to a year in the Caucasus, boosting his literary rep­ utation. Ivan Turgenev’s (1818-83) arrest (1852) and subsequent forced confinement on his estate because of an allegedly subversive obituary on Gogol must have enhanced his rising popularity. That same year, Tur­ genev’s Zapiski okhotnika (Notes of a Hunter) was published and was a great success. Even Fedor Dostoevsky (1821-81), after the unspeakable trauma of a death sentence,10 four years of hard labor, and five more years of exile in Siberia, returned to write and publish his best works. These include Zapiski iz mertvogo doma (Notes from the House of the Dead, 1860), reflect­ ing on his prison experience, followed in 1864 by Zapiski iz podpol’ia (Notes from Underground), in which a hyperconscious, gnomelike character delivers a brilliant defense of human liberty, “the most advantageous advantage.” For others, however, censorship was neither fortuitous nor mild. Nikolai Chemyshevskii (1828-89) and Dmitry Pisarev (1840-68), brilliant critics and essayists, were arrested in 1862 and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul fortress. During his two years there Chemyshevskii composed Chto delat’ (What Is to Be Done?), which was published in 1863 only because tsarist censorship failed to spot its subversiveness. The book had a powerxiv

Introduction

fui revolutionary influence on reform-minded readers. In 1864 its author was stripped of his civil rights and sent to Siberia for seven years’ hard labor followed by exile. He was allowed to return to European Russia (As­ trakhan and Saratov) only in 1883. Pisarev also continued to write during his four-year imprisonment. Not long after his release (1865), however, he drowned, probably a suicide. Certain aspects of Soviet censorship have been compared to the “epoch of the 'dark seven years’ of 1848-1855” when Nicholas I, in fright­ ened response to European revolutions, created a secret, supercensorship board called the Committee of April 2, 1848 (or the Buturlin Committee, after its chairman, or simply the secret committee). It supervised censors as well as writers and made censors and authors equally responsible for any writing that might at any time be found to run counter to official view­ points. Dostoevsky, Mikhail Saltykov-Schedrin (1826-89), Vladimir Dal’ (1801-72), Turgenev (1818-83), and Alexander Ostrovskii (1823-86) are a few of the writers who were persecuted by this committee.11 In December 1848, Dal’ was called before the Interior Minister for writing a story about a thief who cleverly eludes all the lawmen searching for her. Alexander Nikitenko, an enlightened, highly educated man who was a censor for the tsar for over forty years, recorded this about the writer:

What a wonderful place Russia is! . . . We’re beating a retreat faster than we ever advanced. . . . Here’s a recent example. Dal’ was forbidden to write. What? Dal’, that intelligent, good, noble Dal’! Can he, too, have fallen among communists and socialists? . . . Perovskii [the Interior Minister] summoned Dal’ . . . and . . . made him choose: “Either write—or work; work—or write.”12

Dal’ chose not to publish, waited for Nicholas to die, and perhaps thought he had gotten off lightly. The reforms of Alexander II (1855-81), especially the judicial re­ forms of 1864, moved Russia toward a Rechtstaat,13 a state that “does not break its own laws, . . . exercises power according to laws and rules, . . . [and] does not enact laws that contradict the Constitution or moral and religious principles that are widely recognized by society.”14 However, the serious flaws in Alexander’s most profound reform, emancipation of the serfs, gave rise to the populist movement and out of it the politics of radi­ cal reform and terror. Responding to that threat, Alexander retreated from his ideal of the Rechtstaat, establishing instead a protopolice state. In the late 1870s the government resorted to great show trials and deportations to Siberia by executive order to eradicate subversives. Russia’s distance from the Rechtstaat increased after Alexander’s as­ sassination (1881). Under the provisions of a “Maintenance of Order” statute (August 14,1881), the police and courts could deal summarily with xv

Introduction

perceived threats. The statute provided for administrative exile up to five years anywhere in Russia, transfer of criminal cases to military courts, two weeks’ detention for suspects, anywhere-anytime searches, and the shutting down of journals and schools. Designated as “temporary,” these regulations lasted until 1917. Nevertheless, the period between the 1905 Revolution and 1917 pro­ vided an interlude of comparative liberalization, when artists and audiences could look forward to the construction of a more humane society in which all talented people, regardless of social or religious heritage, could freely in­ novate, compete in the marketplace of ideas, and even, as Babel’ later sug­ gested, indulge the “right to write badly.”15 At the same time, the political straightjacket for the arts was being fashioned. Lenin’s 1905 article “Partiinaia organizatsiia i partiinaia literatura” (“Party Organization and Party Literature”), which became the Bible of Soviet literature, spells out the idea that literature

cannot be at all an individual affair independent of the proletariat as a whole. Down with nonparty writers! . . . Literature must necessarily and inevitably become an inextricable part of the work of the Social-Democratic Party. Newspapers must become the organs of the various party organizations. Pub­ lishing houses and storerooms, bookshops and reading rooms, libraries and book concerns of all sorts—must all become Party enterprises subject to its control. Lenin goes on to promise that the Party will “create a free press . . . free, above all, from anarchic bourgeois individualism.”16 After the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks moved quickly to con­ trol the arts. On November 9, 1917, Lenin issued a decree giving supervi­ sion of all arts activities to the newly formed Commissariat of Education (Narkompros), headed by Anatolii Lunacharskii (1875-1933). In January 1918, perhaps the first instance of censorship in the Soviet era occurred with the shutdown of a Yiddish newspaper, Toghlal, the seizure of its equip­ ment, and the arrest of its publisher and editor.17 The NEP period of 1921 to 1928 was from its beginnings a period of fearfulness among artists and intellectuals. The poet Nikolai Gumilev (18861921) had been accused of participating in a counterrevolutionary conspir­ acy and executed as an “enemy of the people and the worker-peasant revo­ lution.”18 In the same year the symbolist Alexander Blok languished and died while Lenin and Lunacharskii “debated whether to grant the poet an exit visa” for medical treatment.19 The secret police were everywhere and everyone had good reason to be afraid.20 When the German Marxist writer Walter Benjamin visited Moscow for two months in the winter of 1926 to 1927, he noted the cool audience

xvi

Introduction

response to Meyerhold’s remarkable version of Gogol’s Revizor (The In­ spector General). The applause in the theater was restrained, and perhaps this was due to the official line more than to the audience’s actual reaction. . . . But this is no doubt linked to the general atmosphere of cautiousness here when it comes to openly revealing one’s opinions. If you ask people whom you barely know what they think of some insignificant play or film, the answer is: “the word here is this or that,” or “people have mostly been of such and such an opinion.”21 In 1923 centralized control of dramatic works, musicals, and film was handed over to the newly bom Glavrepertkom (Central Repertory Commit­ tee), which was an arm of Glavlit (Central Administration for Literature and the Press, established in June 1922 as a subdepartment of Narkompros, to “liq­ uidate literature directed against Soviet construction”). Both Glavlit and Glav­ repertkom were eyes and ears for the secret police22 and like them, reported to the ideological department of the Central Committee. Under communism, drama censorship “acquired a character heretofore unknown. ‘Performance art,’ because of its huge emotional and ideological impact on the spectator, needed a special custodian,”23 and that watchman was Glavrepertkom. In 1929, Stalin removed the relatively liberal Lunacharskii from his position in Narkompros. Lunacharskii’s successor, Andrei Bubnov (18831938), a loyal servant of the regime and sometime defender of artists he liked (for example, Meyerhold), led the campaign against formalism in the midthirties, oversaw the closing of the Second Studio of the Moscow Art Theater (1936), and increased the banning of performances. He himself was arrested in 1937 and shot the following year.24 By 1932, Mikhail Riutin, an Old Bolshevik, in a bitter polemic aimed at Stalin, declared the death of the arts in the Soviet Union. Indeed, it was in that year that the Party’s Central Committee, with Stalin’s backing, adopted two crucial resolutions. “On the Politics of the Party in the Area of Belles Lettres” for the first time minutely detailed the Committee’s posi­ tion with regard to Soviet literature. “On the Reconstruction of LiteraryArtistic Organizations,” through its mandate to unify all writers into one single organization—the Union of Soviet Writers—definitively fused the state and its writers. The establishment of similar monolithic “unions” for other artistic groups soon followed, and writers as well as all artists now had it in writing that they were expected to “stand on the platform of the Soviet government... and participate in socialist construction.” This reorganizationby-fiat of artists’ leagues closed the last door between an artist and his or her intellectual freedom. Without union membership, writers and other artists were not allowed to publish or exhibit their original work, at home or abroad. Because non-Party artists were also allowed to join, it is no wonder

xvii

Introduction

that many of them welcomed professional unions, which allowed them to make a living and enjoy the perks of membership. 25 The concept of socialist realism, first proposed by Stalin in 1932, was publicly introduced as the officially preferred and sanctioned artistic style at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in Moscow (August 17 to Septem­ ber 1,1934). The idea was broached in a speech by Stalin’s spokesman, An­ drei Zhdanov (1896-1948), and was soon used as a wide net to snare all arts, including painting, sculpture, film, theater, and music. As a means of con­ trol, socialist realism operated to a large extent through critics’ attacks on works considered “unsuitable”; indeed, such attacks often prevented publi­ cation. As interpreted by Stalin’s regime and after, socialist realism de­ manded a “realistic,” easily understood, unambiguous picture of life and human nature coupled with an unflagging optimism that Soviet humanity was headed toward a Communist dawn with fingertips of rose. In short, so­ cialist realism reflected Stalin’s taste, but it was only secondarily an artistic style; primarily it was a means of control and therefore an opposite, de­ monic pole was created for it: formalism. Originally a literary movement that began about 1914 to 1915 in Mos­ cow and St. Petersburg, formalists “saw literature, and poetry in particular, primarily as a linguistic phenomenon. ... As Roman Jakobson put it, they “looked for the literary in literature.”26 The term came to be used as an of­ ficial damnation in the early 1930s and was lavishly applied to avant-garde work in all the arts as well as in science and teaching. By the beginning of 1936, the young composer Dmitry Shostakovich (1906-75) was already a highly regarded artist whose groundbreaking opera, Ledi Makbet mtsenskogo uezda (Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk Dis­ trict, premiered 1934), was popular and critically successful, at home and abroad. But on the morning of January 28 he officially became a “formalist,” which is to say, a social and artistic pariah. The opening fusillade occurred via two Pravda articles; the first, “Muddle Instead of Music” (January 28) savaged his Lady Macbeth and accused it of “effete” formalism and “Left­ ist distortion [which] stems from the same source as the Leftist distortion in painting, poetry, teaching, and science.” Equally guilty of artistic blunders, according to the article, were all other avant-garde composers as well as music critics who praised their work. For Shostakovich’s friend and mentor, the theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874—1940),27 the article took an especially ominous turn by identifying formalism with “Meyerholdism.”28 Lady Macbeth was quickly pulled from the repertoire and did not reappear until after Stalin’s death. Shostakovich withdrew his Fourth Sym­ phony (1935-36) from a planned performance in case the authorities might object to it also, but even that precaution did not satisfy Stalin’s wrath against Shostakovich’s music (of “quacks, grunts, and growls”) and other avant-garde composers, or music critics who approved such affronts against xviii

Introduction

Soviet sensibilities. Soon there appeared yet another Pravda offensive “Baletnaia fal’sh” (“Falsehood in Ballet,” February 6), this one aimed at Shostakovich’s ballet Svetlyi ruchei (The Bright Stream, 1934), which was hastily canceled. Finally, as if to prove that formalist dissonance was every­ where, Pravda on February 20 published “Kakafoniia v arkhitekture” (“Ca­ cophony in Architecture”). The reaction of Shostakovich’s colleagues in music exemplifies one of the most harrowing differences between the Tsarist and Soviet methods of artistic repression: the panicky, often self-serving, government-orchestrated stampedes to join a denunciatory choir. Ariadna Diagileva, whose father was arrested in 1937 and killed, described what life was like when the “net of denunciation” entangled everyone; people feared their friends and ter­ ror was a steady companion.29 After the Pravda articles, there were three days of denunciations of the composer, sponsored by the Moscow Composers’ Union. The aftershocks from these Pravda attacks were varied and widely felt; expulsions from professional arts organizations, arrests, exile, prison and camp sentences, and executions. Soviet music composition and other arts were benumbed and more than ever “reticence became the norm of life.”30 Shostakovich was allowed to survive (unpredictability is also a terror device) and even (beginning in 1937) to enjoy not only official approval, but well-deserved public triumphs for some of his greatest works. Meyerhold was not so fortunate. The closing of the Meyerhold Theater in early 1938 was also preceded by a furious denunciation in Pravda, as well as by an official proclamation accusing the theater of being bourgeois, formalist, leftist, a distorter of classics, antiartistic, defamatory of Soviet reality, foreign to So­ viet art, and failing in its duty to mount a special production to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution.31 Readers will find a chill­ ing, graphic description of Meyerhold’s fate in Edward Braun’s chapter in this book, as well as a description of a similar pattern of press attacks, fol­ lowed by denunciation meetings, in Peter Kenez’s chapter on Eisenstein’s Bezhin lug (Bezhin Meadow). The journalist, essayist, and playwright Sergei Tret’iakov (1892-1937) worked with both Meyerhold and Eisenstein, having joined Meyerhold’s Theater Workshop as teacher, administrator, and playwright in 1922. The eminent German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht called Tret’iakov “my teacher,” and all eight of Tret’iakov’s extant dramas were accepted for pro­ duction by either Meyerhold or Eisenstein, “the giants of the early Soviet theater.”32 Tret’iakov’s last play, Khochy rebenka (I Want a Baby, 1926, re­ vised for the censor 1928), is the playwright’s most important, controversial, and ambiguous work and “from a purely architectonic point of view . . . rep­ resented the culmination of all Meyerhold’s experiments with . . . perfor­ mance space.”33 The production was so “visionary” that Meyerhold decided xix

Introduction

he would have to defer it until the completion of the new theater building promised him by the government. But in 1937, before the building was fin­ ished, the play was officially condemned as “a slander on the Soviet family.” Tret’iakov was taken from his Kremlin hospital bed by the NKVD, then secretly tried and found guilty of terrorism and spying for Japan (common charges) and shot.34 The attempt to stage I Want a Baby (and Erdman’s Samoubiitsa [The Suicide, 1928]) became one of the capital offenses Mey­ erhold was charged with in 1939.35 The director Igor Terentiev, who had competed with Meyerhold for permission to produce the play, was “liqui­ dated” in 1941.36 Indeed, Meyerhold’s circle of colleagues, friends, and acquaintances was poisoned by betrayals, terror, arrests, disappearances, and unnatural deaths. In 1928, when the Meyerhold Theater was in financial and artistic trouble, the great director pinned much of his hope on the rising young satirist Nikolai Erdman (1902-70). Meyerhold’s production of Erdman’s Mandat [The Warrant, 1925) was a smash hit, lavishly praised by such lu­ minaries as Maxim Gorky, the official éminence grise of Soviet letters who would himself feel the weight of Stalin’s plots and repressions, and Anatolii Lunacharskii, the respected, once influential Commissar of Enlightenment. “The Warrant marked Meyerhold’s virtual rejection of placard drama and his return to a theater of disturbing complexity.”37 Given the success and high tragicomic quality of The Warrant, it is not surprising that three theaters signed on to stage Erdman’s next satire, The Suicide. About the latter play, Nadezhda Mandelshtam wrote, “I believe that, with all its anti-intellectualism, there is an undercurrent of humanity in the play. It is really about why some of us decided to go on living even though everything was pushing us to suicide.”38 The Suicide was banned and remained so though Meyerhold and Stanislavsky struggled for years for permission to stage it; Stanislavsky even appealed directly to Stalin. In 1933, the playwright himself was arrested for writing “anti-Soviet” fables. A prison document not actually signed but with his name typed at the bottom purports to be his confession: I am the author of a series of counterrevolutionary literary productions, that is to say, “fables,” which were widely and illegally disseminated in Moscow and other cities of the Union. The responsibility for writing and illegally dis­ seminating these fables belongs to me and the coauthor Vladimir Mass. We read them not only within the circle of our close friends, but sometimes even to a circle of casual acquaintances.... Finally, I confessed and I confess, that I am also responsible for the anti-Soviet fables which I myself (or with Mass), did not write, but which imitated the genre created by me and Mass.39 Erdman was exiled to Siberia for three years, kept warm by Meyerhold’s fur coat (the director sent the playwright his own mantle), and for a time stayed xx

Introduction

employed on theater jobs Meyerhold found for him in Eniseisk and Tomsk. But permission to visit or reside in Moscow would be withheld for another sixteen years.40 After his three-year sentence was up, Erdman was allowed to live in Kalinin “in a poky little hole of a room with a bunk to sleep on and a small table.”41 Indeed, Erdman’s situation was such that his friend and fel­ low playwriting genius Mikhail Bulgakov in 1938 wrote directly to Stalin imploring him to ease “the fate of the writer N. Erdman ... I strongly urge that N. Erdman be given the possibility of returning to Moscow, of work­ ing in literature without hindrance, released from his isolation and spiritual depression.”42 In a twist of fate worthy of one of his own satires, during World War II Erdman was hired on as a “literary consultant” for the Song and Dance En­ semble of the NKVD, writing sketches intended to pump up wartime morale. And though he was later to enjoy success as a writer of screenplays and musical comedies, the year before his death he told guests that his “life as an artist ended long ago.”43 Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940), Erdman’s loyal ally, is regarded as one of Russia’s greatest writers of the twentieth century. Although Bulgakov was, amazingly, never arrested, his life was made miserable by a censorship system that often impoverished him and, after 1926, made it impossible for him to publish his work. Of Bulgakov’s nine plays, only one, the very pop­ ular Dni Turbinykh (The Days of the Turbins, premiered 1926), based on his novel The White Guard (Belaia gvardiia, 1924), after being banned from 1929 to 1932, was suddenly brought back to the stage, at Stalin’s request. The play remained in the Moscow Art Theater’s repertory, providing Bul­ gakov with “virtually his only regular income.” The permission to allow The Days of the Turbins, however, was not accompanied by any loosening of restrictions on anything else Bulgakov wrote. In 1928 he began a story that would eventually become his master­ work—the novel Master i Margarita (The Master and Margarita). Poor and often ailing, Bulgakov in 1930 wrote a long, bold letter to the Soviet gov­ ernment (in effect, to Stalin), requesting work in the theater as an alterna­ tive to “destitution, the street, and death.”44 During the night of March 10, 1940, Erdman snuck into Moscow from his place of exile in order to pay his last respects to Bulgakov. The once-so-promising young satirist and soon-to-be librettist for the NKVD sat in silence by the body for two hours, and then returned to his place of banishment. Through these and hundreds of other campaigns of terror against artists was bom the most powerful method of censorship: the fear-driven self-censorship that made artists commit their work to oblivion before it was ever submitted to a censor or audience of any sort. The pervasiveness of self-censorship and the harnessing of art to state service makes it imposxxi

Introduction

sible to know all the treasures that were sacrificed by those who could say, with Mayakovsky, “I have stepped on the throat of my own song.” ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE

What were these songs? In order to appreciate the ruthless intensity of Stalin’s terror against “people and the intellect” it is necessary to have a no­ tion of how unprecedented and widespread was the eruption of revolution­ ary experimentation in the arts in Russia shortly after the turn of the century and into the early thirties. The Russian avant-garde, from the be­ ginning of the twentieth century, had been active and pathbreaking in every artistic arena: photography, film, book design (including typography), ar­ chitecture, painting, sculpture, literature, literary criticism, music, and the­ ater. It was, moreover, a time of wonderful mingling of artistic genres. Poets no longer thought of themselves just as poets, but as poets-directorsartists-actors. One of the best examples (among many) of such a hybrid was the poet-poster artist-playwright-actor Vladimir Mayakovsky, who, hounded by vicious and unrelenting official criticism of his work and haunted by a failed love affair, committed suicide in 1930. Theater became a natural forum for such artistic mergings, where di­ rectors, poets, painters, architects, and musicians shared their talents and, in doing so, enlarged their own artistic horizons. This interaction among artists was embodied by the futurist opera Pobeda nad solntsem (Victory over the Sun, 1913), a product of the collaboration of Mikhail Matiushin (1861-1934), a painter-musician who composed the music; the futurist poet Alexei Kruchenykh (1886-1969), who wrote the libretto, and the artist Kaz­ imir Malevich (1878-1935), who designed the cubist-suprematist sets and costumes, the most sensational and fascinating part of the production. Perhaps a natural outgrowth of this freewheeling merging of arts was the idea—pushed most forcefully by Meyerhold—that audiences ought to be something more than passive, semihypnotized onlookers. In 1907 Mey­ erhold, a budding virtuoso who would one day be called the Master, used Fedor Sologub’s new play Pobeda smerti (The Triumph of Death) as a means of blurring the boundaries between stage and audience and drawing the au­ dience physically and intellectually into the world of the play. Meyerhold took the role of a poet and in the prologue commented “on contemporary symbolist theatre and on the tragedy itself.” Theatergoers were shocked when “in the middle of the Prologue, the Poet and the Lady emerged from the lobby and walked, conversing freely, through the auditorium toward the stage.” The actress who played the lady recalled that both she and Meyer­ hold were extremely nervous before entering the auditorium, since it had been “absolutely unknown for actors to step across the footlights or to speak [their lines] in the auditorium.” As if that were not unsettling enough, after xxii

Introduction

the poet and lady finally reached the stage, and conversed there for a while, they strolled back into the audience and took their seats.45 These and other devices now so commonplace in Western theater, which were intended to create an intellectual bridge between audience and stage, were pioneered by Meyerhold and other Russian theater workers from about 1905.46 Theatrical innovation was by no means limited to Moscow and St. Pe­ tersburg. Some of Meyerhold’s earliest experimental theater was carried out at the very beginning of the century in places like Vitebsk and Tiflis. Moreover, one of the Soviet Union’s best avant-garde directors was the Ukrainian Les’ Kurbas, who created the experimental Molodyi [Young] The­ ater (later the Berezil Theater) in Kyiv and Kharkiv and, like his Russian counterparts, was part of a cooperating circle of actors and artists. Although he has been called the Ukrainian Meyerhold, Kurbas was very much his own artist with his own original style. He was probably murdered, like the great director-actor Solomon Mikhoels, with whom he seems to have shared a strong artistic affinity.47 Kurbas is said to have died by a method of exe­ cution whereby bargeloads of prisoners were drowned in the Arctic seas.48 In book design, Russian artists, encouraged by an ideology that em­ phasized bringing art and literacy to the masses, were also pioneers of in­ novation and experiment. Beginning about 1910, artists redefined the traditional expectations of what a book should look like and even what sort of content was suitable for the object known as a book. The most famous masters in this art form were the painter-photographers Alexander Rod­ chenko (1891-1956) and El Lissitsky (1890-1941), whose exhibitions and book designs were popular at home and abroad. In the field of architecture, the 1922 design by the Vesnin brothers (Leonid, Viktor, and Alexander)49 in the competition for designing the Moscow Palace of Labor was so innova­ tive that it quickly became a landmark of modern architecture.50 If architecture is “frozen poetry,” Russian poetry itself was becoming ever more fluid because the avant-garde were experimenting with a revo­ lution in, and redefining of, the very forms, uses, and meanings of language. In the beginning of the artistic revolution was the Word, and the Word in­ vented by Kruchenykh was zaum—“a free language, transrational and uni­ versal.”51 Clearly, the futurists—a group as many faceted and splintered as the arts they were creating—were trying to liberate language from its cage of traditional, representational usage, to move into the realm of pure art, as many photographers, painters, and composers were doing in their media. Although the first, most brilliant generation of futurist poets was sup­ pressed, a number of younger poets, deeply influenced by the futurists, cre­ ated avant-garde poetry during the Stalin era “in secret and in silence.”52 Such, in brief, was the heritage of the Soviet artists whose lives and work under threat are studied in this volume. They stepped into the decade of the 1930s with extraordinary baggage: a recent Silver Age of explosive, xxiii

Introduction

joyful innovation shadowed by an ever-hardening official determination to stifle that joy absolutely. Stalin himself would see to that. In a letter to the Ukrainian playwright Alexander Korneichuk concerning Korneichuk’s V stepiakh Ukrainy (On the Ukrainian Steppes, 1941), the “Leader” com­ mented: “I am only afraid that it’s too jolly; there is the danger that your comedy’s happy revelry might divert the reader’s attention from its content. By the way, I added a few words on p. 68. This is for greater clarity.” The writer Alexander Afinogenov’s play Lozh’ (The Lie, 1939) was also censored and emended directly by Stalin.53 THE BOOK OF ODES

Li Ssu feared those who shared their knowledge of the Book of Odes, much of which is political. Some of its poems are straightforward praise of good rulers; others are complaints, veiled in “Aesopian”54 language, about cruel regimes that exploit a helpless populace: “Big rat, big rat, / Do not eat my millet.” Even delicate love lyrics were popularly believed to be secretly sub­ versive: “Take my hand and we will go in the same carriage” might be an appeal to run from an oppressive king.55 Consequently, Li Ssu urged his emperor to destroy those suspected of reading or talking about the Book of Odes. The focus of this book, too, is on ambiguity and destruction. The lives and works of artists were distorted or destroyed. Under the weight of this terror, the brilliant art bom in Russia at the beginning of the century col­ lapsed entirely, or was entrusted to the precarious custody of memory, or hidden for decades in every sort of cache: pots, pillowcases, walls. Indeed, Stalin attempted to expunge even the memoiy of an artist’s life and work.56 The Aesopian language that often enabled nineteenth-century Russian writers to evade censorship became, in the Soviet Union, an everyday sur­ vival strategy, a fragile bridge between an artist’s creative imperative and will to live. In this book, readers will find chapters (by Kenez and Braun, respec­ tively) on Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) and Vsevolod Meyerhold who, though eventually victimized by the regime, cooperated with it as long as they could, accepting its honors and special privileges while still preserving their singular art. The reader will also find chapters on other loyalists who never were successful in keeping both their unique voices and their jobs. Lynn Maliy shows how leaders of the Leningrad Theater of Working Youth (TRAM) quickly caved in to the official criticism of their theory and practice, scurrying to recreate themselves according to a formula that was inevitably a recipe for their own destruction. In Katharine Hodgson’s contribution on women poets, for example, we see how Vera Inber (1890-1972) strove to remake herself “as an unambiguously loyal Soviet woman poet.” Perhaps xxiv

Introduction

for that reason, when she stood up to speak at a 1936 meeting of the Pre­ sidium of the Union of Soviet Writers, she declared that as a relative of Trotsky, she was obliged to be especially strong in her demand for “shoot­ ing the counterrevolutionary assassins” who had just been tried and found guilty.57 Inber’s political sisters in poetry, among them Olga Berggol’ts (191075) and Margarita Aliger (1915-92), dedicated socialists, struggled to merge the lyrically unmergeable: love and socialist construction. At the same time, there were those like Anna Akhmatova, who at great cost never aligned themselves with the regime, and more and more as the terror progressed, went beyond self-centered lyrics to poetry that witnesses, protests, and condemns. One result of this artistic commitment was Akhmatova’s cycle Requiem, which, as Hodgson points out, “dominates our impressions of women’s poetic responses to the Terror.” Other poets, not so well known as Akhmatova, also became chroni­ clers of persecution. In his chapter, J. Alexander Ogden relates the process by which the “peasant poet” Nikolai Kliuev (1887-1937) used his last, “si­ lenced” decade to steadfastly bear poetic witness, employing both lyric and epic forms to identify his own fate with that of the besieged Russian peas­ ants and their culture. Mykola Khvylovy (1893-1933), writer, cultural visionary, dedicated Communist, and Ukrainian nationalist, was at once insider and outsider. Fi­ nally, no longer able to live with the tension between his devotion to an ideal and the increasingly brutal encroachments of Stalin’s power, he com­ mitted suicide. The actor-director Solomon Mikhoels (1890-1948) and other Yiddish Theater workers, Jeffrey Veidlinger argues, had socialist goals which “coincided with those of the state.” Yet even this seeming harmony between the state and the theater collective did not prevent the ensemble’s decisions to use politically charged codes in word, gesture, and setting. Nor could these codes prevent the murder of Mikhoels in 1948 or the execution of other Yiddish theater artists: Veniamin Zuskin, Der Nister, Itsik Fefer, Perets Markish, and David Bergel’son. Both Veidlinger and George Luckyj emphasize the phenomenon of artistic nationalism within a Soviet context. Veidlinger argues that the Mos­ cow State Yiddish Theater produced shows that promoted Jewish “national awareness.” Luckyj maintains that Soviet oppression of artists and writers was sometimes dictated by Russian imperialism: what the Soviets called bourgeois nationalism was often an attempt by non-Russians to affirm their own national and aesthetic identity. Perhaps the forced closing of Yiddish theaters in Moscow and elsewhere in the Soviet Union reflected not only official anti-Semitism but also the crackdown on national cultures that Luckyj describes. There were sympathetic fellow travelers like Il’ia Il’f (1897-1937) and his coauthor Evgenii Petrov (1903-42) who (before their journey to the XXV

Introduction

United States) “probably believed in a [just] Soviet future as an attainable goal,” but the veiy popularity and publishability of their satires depended on an ambiguity that made their work at once subversive and officially ac­ ceptable. The disillusioned Iff did not end up a suicide like Khvylovy (or Mayakovsky) or an execution victim like Meyerhold; in her study of Il’f s American journey, Alice Nakhimovsky shows how the man and his trust in the Soviet future simply faded and died quietly together. Some poets, like Anna Barkova (1901-76), wrote about the past, per­ haps consciously encrypting descriptions of their own times. For others, even coded language was too risky, or too futile, and they became silent. But silence also had two faces, both of them subversive in Stalin’s eyes. In the late twenties and thirties, readers who hearkened toward Sophia Parnok (1885-1933), Nikolai Kliuev (1884r-1937), Osip Mandelshtam (1891-1938), Natalia Krandievskaia (1888-1963), Mariia Petrovykh (1913-79), or Isaac Babel’ (1894-1940), heard little or nothing. But screened behind the mute public persona, these artists were finding their most brilliant private voices; some of their best surviving work was written for “the drawer” or for metaphorical grandchildren. Both faces of silence, the real and the pretended, were difficult and dangerous to maintain. A writer like Babel’, who seemed to have quit writ­ ing, was as much an object of suspicion as one who produced the “wrong” kind of work. Furthermore, artists crave an audience. It is well known that Mandelshtam attempted to bridge the duality of public silence and secret protest by reading his poetic satire of Stalin to a small group of friends. In effect, he condemned himself to death. Yet because a few dedicated read­ ers knew about this poem and many others, most of Mandelshtam’s best work is extant. Victor Terras’s chapter on Mandelshtam’s poetry of the thir­ ties culminates in an analysis of one of the poet’s finest lyrics, produced during his prolonged and forced publishing silence, a poem bom of a des­ perate effort to hack out an ode to Stalin. Babel’, on the other hand, en­ trusted his secret writing to no one. All that remains of his hidden work is the darkly prophetic, supremely ambiguous phrase he invented to describe it: “the genre of silence.” Efraim Sicher shows us that the silencing of Ba­ bel’ was, moreover, a complex process which began in the twenties and still continues. The censorship of the poet Sophia Parnok (1885-1933), as Diana Lewis Burgin shows, is also a work-in-progress which, like the censorship of Babel’, perseveres in Russia to this day. As with many others discussed in Hodgson’s chapter, Pamok’s is a poetry of private experience, love, and the world of the spirit. Socialist construction and an easy optimism are not fea­ tures of her poetic universe. Her lesbian sexuality is a central feature of her poetic universe, however, and this earned her a place in the galaxy of those artists whose “only confidante is silence.” xxvi

Introduction

In his chapter on Khvylovy, Luckyj asserts that Ukrainians never sin­ gle out artists or any other special group to commemorate persecution, on the grounds that the whole people suffered, not just this or that part of the community. Braun introduces his narrative of Meyerhold’s ghastly “Final Act” with a similar caveat. But a collection such as this, which studies the fates and works of artists under extreme persecution, needs no apology, not even a passing one. The degree to which a state tolerates artistic expression is a litmus test of that state’s freedom and health. This particular volume concentrates on artists of literature, theater, and film because these were the most accessible and popular arts, the genres Russians turned to as chan­ nels for dissent and bearing witness, and as mirrors for their own lives. Such a focus on artists should not persuade us to forget about the millions of oth­ ers who also suffered and died. As Nadezhda Mandelshtam (1899-1980) re­ minded us, “a poet, after all, is just a human being like any other, and he is bound to end up in the most ordinary way, in the way most typical for his age and his times, meeting the fate that lies in wait for everyone else.”58 Her husband perished in a transit camp in 1938, thereby merging his fate with the other “enemies of the people” who were arrested by the millions. Few chapters in this book, however, focus on physical violence. Stalin’s campaign against people and the intellect took many forms: physi­ cal, economic, psychological, spiritual. Like the artists studied here, the scholars who have contributed to this book are not in lockstep with each other; appropriately, they present the reader with a richly idiosyncratic va­ riety of approaches to the idea of artists as “enemies of the people.” By their very diversity, these chapters show that Soviet repression of the creative population was as complicated, unpredictable, and various as its target: artists and their work.

Notes 1. William T. de Bary, ed., Sources of Chinese Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 155; Derk Bodde, China’s First Unifier: Li Ssu (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1967), 83. 2. Pierre R. Hart, “Avvakum” in Handbook of Russian Literature, ed. Victor Terras (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press), 30. 3. George Vernadsky, ed., A Source Book for Russian History from Early Times to 1917. Vol. 2 (New Haven, Conn, and London: Yale Univer­ sity Press, 1972), 463. 4. John T. Alexander, Catherine the Great, Life and Legend (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 300-3. 5. Arlen V. Blium, Za kulisami “ministerstva pravdy”: Tainaia istoriia sovetskoi tsenzury, 1917-29 (St. Petersburg: Akademichesldi proekt, 1994), 11. xxvii

Introduction

6. Quoted in Alexander Gershkovich, “Censorship in the Theater,” in The Red Pencil: Artists, Scholars, and Censors in the USSR, ed. Marianna T. Choldin and Maurice Friedberg (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 171. 7. Steven Richmond, “‘The Eye of the State’: An Interview with So­ viet Chief Censor Vladimir Solodin,” The Russian Review 56 (1997): 582. 8. John G. Garrard and Carol Garrard, Inside the Soviet Writers Union (New York: Free Press, 1990), 53, 56-57. 9. Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974), 292. 10. Dostoevsky and other members of the socialist circle of Petrashevskii were arrested in 1849, held in the Peter and Paul Fortress for eight months, and then tried by court martial as conspirators. Dostoevsky was found guilty of “having taken part in criminal plans, of having circulated the letter of the journalist Belinskii (to Gogol) full of insolent expressions against the Orthodox Church and the Supreme Power, and of having at­ tempted, together with others, to circulate antigovernment writings with the aid of a private press.” Dostoevsky and others similarly charged were sentenced to eight years of hard labor, which was then commuted to four years, “after which he was to serve as a private soldier.” But a cruel trick was played on the “conspirators”: they were told they had been given death sen­ tences, and were only informed of their actual sentences after the first group of prisoners were tied to posts, seemingly about to be shot. D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature, ed. and abr. Francis J. Whitfield (New York: Knopf, 1966), 174. 11. Richard Peace, “The Nineteenth Century: 1840-1855,” in The Cambridge History of Russian Literature, ed. Charles A. Moser (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 193. 12. Aleksandr V. Nikitenko, Dnevnik (Leningrad: Gos. izd. khyd. lit., 1955), 1: 312-13. 13. Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, 295. 14. Gunnar Opeide, “Some Reflections on the Problem of Freedom in Russian History,” Scando-Slavica 41 (1995): 54. 15. Babel’ was responding ironically to a speech by Leonid Sobolev, as E. Sicher points out in his chapter in this book. 16. V. I. Lenin, “Party Organization and Party Literature,” Dialectics 5 (1938): 3. 17. Arlen V. Blium, Evreiskii vopros pod sovetskoi tsenzuroi: 1917-1991 (St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg Jewish University, 1996), 29. 18. Archival documents concerning the trial and sentencing of Gu­ milev are reprinted in Zakhar Dicharov, Raspiatye: Pisateli-zhertvy politicheskikh repressii (St. Petersburg: “Severo-Zapad,” 1993) 1:192-210. 19. Vitaly Shentalinsky, Arrested Voices: Resurrecting the Disap­ peared Writers of the Soviet Regime, trans. John Crowfoot; with an intro­ xxviii

Introduction

duction by Robert Conquest (New York: Martin Kessler Books, Free Press, 1996), 234-35. This is an interesting book, but Shentalinsky does not doc­ ument his sources. 20. See, for example, the Russia chapters in Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 2d ed., vol. 2 (New York: Dover, 1970), or Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary, ed. Gary Smith, trans. Richard Sieburth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 11-13. Robert Thurston in his Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia: 1934-1941 (New Haven and London: Yale Uni­ versity Press, 1996) disputes the idea that there was widespread fear among the general populace during even the worst years of the Terror: “for the vast majority of the citizenry, if it [fear] occurred at all in the late 1930s, it existed only between mid-1937 and some point in 1938,” 163; but see Robert Conquest, “Stalin: The Revised Edition,” National Review (July 15, 1996) : 45-48. 21. Benjamin, Moscow Diary, 33. 22. Gershkovich, “Censorship” 267; Herman Ermolaev, Censorship in Soviet Literature: 1917-1991 (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), 7; Blium, Za kulisami, 9, 105; Richmond, “The Eye of the State,” 582. 23. Blium, Zfl kulisami, 161. For further details about the mechanisms of Soviet censorship in the twenties, see Burgin’s chapter on Parnok in this book. 24. V. F. Koliazin, ed., “Vemite mne svobodul”: Deiateli literatury i iskusstva Rossii i Germanii—zhertvy stalinskogo terrora (Moscow: Medium, 1997) , 78. 25. Denis Babichenko, “Schast’e literatury”: Gosudarstvo i pisateli 1925-1938. Dokumenty (Moscow: Rosspen, 1997), 121; T. M. Goriaev, comp., Iskliuchit vsiakie upominaniia ... : ocherki istorii sovetskoi tsenzury (Minsk: 1995), III. 26. Terras, A History, 517. Besides Jakobson (1896-1982), other no­ table formalists included Viktor Shklovskii (1893-1984); Boris Eichenbaum (1816-1959); and Boris Tomashevskii (1890-1957). 27. For the relationship between Meyerhold and Shostakovich: see Edward Braun, Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995), 282, 285, 236; L. Mikheeva, Zhizri Dmitriia Shostakovicha (Moscow: Terra, 1997), 114-16, 192-93. 28. “Muddle instead of Music” (Sumbur vmesto muzyki) is translated in Victor I. Seroff, Dmitri Shostakovich: The Life and Background of a So­ viet Composer (New York: 1943), 204-7. 29. Dicharov, Raspiatye, 5. 30. Harlow Robinson, Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography (New York: Viking, 1987), 316. V. A. Kumanev, 30-e gody v sud’bakh otechestvennoi intelligentsii (Moscow: Nauka, 1991), 206-7. See also “Diary of Lyubov Vasilevna Shaporina” in Intimacy and Terror. Soviet Diaries of the 1930s, xxix

Introduction

ed. Véronique Garros et al., trans. Carol A. Flath (New York: New Press, 1995), 381. 31. Gershkovich, The Theater of Yuri Liubimov: Art and Politics at the Taganka Theater in Moscow (New York: Paragon House, 1989, 39-40. 32. Robert Leach, “Brecht’s Teacher,” Modem Drama 32, no. 4 (1989): 502-11. 33. Edward Braun, Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre, 2d ed., rev. and enl. (London: Methuen Drama, 1995), 242. 34. Koliazin, “Vemite mne svobodu!” 63. 35. Braun, Meyerhold, 300. 36. Tret’iakov’s wife Ol’ga (1895-1973), who in the 1920s worked for the futurist journal Novyi Lef was arrested in November 1937; kept in Moscow’s Butyrka prison, charged with being her husband’s accomplice as well as a spy for Germany through her association with left-wing German writers; sentenced (in 1939?) to five years in a forced labor camp, but wasn’t actually released until 1946; was rearrested in 1951 and exiled to northern Kazakhstan. She was freed in 1954. Koliazin, “Vemite mne svo­ bodu!” 46-68, 130-36. 37. Braun, Meyerhold, 219. 38. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope against Hope: A Memoir, trans. Max Hayward (1970; reprint, with an obituary by Joseph Brodsky, New York: Modem Library, 1999), 329. 39. Koliazin, “Vemite mne svobodu!” 18-19. 40. Ibid., 15. 41. Mandelstam, Hope against Hope, 329. 42. Koliazin, “Vemite mne svobodu!” 20. 43. Joseph E. Brandesky, Jr., Nikolai Erdman’s “The Mandate” and “The Suicide”: Critical Analyses (Ph.D. diss., University of Kansas, 1991), 53. 44. J. A. E. Curtis, Manuscripts Don’t Bum: Mikhail Bulgakov, A Life in Letters and Diaries (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1991), 117, 110. 45. Irina Miller, “Selections from the Private Correspondence be­ tween Vsevolod Meyerhold and Fyodor Sologub Concerning Two Produc­ tions oîThe Triumph of Death,” Slavic and East European Performance 18, 1 (Spring 1998): 76-77. 46. The contributions of directors such as Meyerhold, Alexander Tairov, Evgenii Vakhtangov, Nikolai Okhlopkov, Igor Terentiev, Sergei Radlov, and Les’ Kurbas and artists such as Liubov Popova, Varvara Stepa­ nova, Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, Alexandra Exter, Nikolai Sapu­ nov, and Sergei Sudeikin include doing away with the front curtain and heavy scenery; exposing the bare stage walls; constructivist, symbolist, and cubo-futurist settings; area lighting to achieve fast scene changes; the frag­

XXX

Introduction

mentation of the three- or five-act play into numerous more or less brief, independent episodes; replacement of traditional settings with color, light­ ing, and music to evoke atmosphere and mood; construction of the stage on multiple levels; deepening of the forestage; grotesque distortions of every­ day objects; and rigorous training of actors in the art of acrobatic-gymnastic movement so as to make the actor’s body a lither instrument of expression (Meyerhold’s Bio-Mechanics). 47. See Natalia Chechel, “Did Kurbas Stage King Lear in Moscow? Unraveling the Mystery of Les’ Kurbas’s Last Production,” Slavic and East European Performance 19, no. 2 (summer 1999): 69-79. 48. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 322. But according to another account, Kur­ bas was “shot at Stalin’s orders in Pervozavodsk in 1937.” Irena Makaryk, “Reconsidering a Canon: The Ukrainian Theatrical Renaissance” (review article), Slavic and East European Journal 40, 3 (1996): 547-50. 49. The life spans of the Vesnin brothers are 1880-1933, 1882-1950, and 1883-1959, respectively. 50. Gail H. Roman, “The Ins and Outs of Russian Avant-Garde Books: A History, 1910-32,” in The Avant-Garde in Russia, edited by Stephanie Barron and Maurice Tuchman (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980), 102, 106; K. Paul Zygas, “Cubo-Futurism and the Vesnins’ Palace of Labor” in The Avant-Garde in Russia, 110. 51. Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), 127. 52. Irene E. Kolchinsky, “The Last Futurists: ‘Nebyvalists’ and Their Leader Nikolai Glazkov,” Slavic and East European Journal 43 (Spring 1999): 174-95. 53. V. A. Kumanev, 30-e gody v sudbakh otechestvennoi intelligentsii (Moscow: Nauka, 1991), 211-12; Ermolaev, Censorship, 72. 54. “The name given in Russian criticism to the language of opposi­ tional political writing, disguised in literary form for the purpose of passing the censorship. Such writing makes extensive use of circumlocution and topical hints at current political happenings; it may be also cast in a gener­ alized form, such as the fable. The reader is supposed to read between the lines or give the particular application suggested by current events.” Wil­ liam E. Harkins, Dictionary of Russian Literature (New York: Philosophi­ cal Library, 1956), 2. 55. de Bary, Sources, 10, 15-16. 56. See, for example, Roger Babb, “Erasing Meyerhold,” TDR 40 (1996): 13-14; David King, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalins Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997).

xxxi

Introduction

57. Denis L. Babichenko, comp., “Literatumyi front”: Istoriia politicheskoi tsenzury 1932-46. Sbomik dokumentov (Moscow: Entsiklopediia rossiiskikh dereven’, 1994), 19. 58. Mandelstam, Hope against Hope, 10; Zakhar Dicharov, Raspiatye, 5.

xxxii

Enemies of the People

PARTI

Poetry beyond the Pale

Katharine Hodgson

Russian Womens Poetry in the 1930s

THE 1930s made martyrs out of many Russian poets, male and female. A brief list of the most well known might include Osip Mandelshtam and Nikolai Kliuev, who died as prisoners of the Gulag; Anna Akhmatova, isolated, unable to publish, and persecuted; and Boris Paster­ nak, forced to seek refuge in translations. The censorship and terror prac­ ticed in Stalin s Russia placed heavy burdens on poets of both sexes, so that it might now seem odd to single women out as a group when the machin­ ery of repression failed to do so. This chapter will, however, argue that the absence of any directly targeted and dramatic persecution did not mean that women poets were not specifically affected by their position in the Stal­ inist state. Official culture tended to marginalize women, both as authors and as subject matter. This chapter will begin by discussing the position of women writers in the Soviet Union of the 1930s and suggest why women poets in particular tended to find themselves on the margins of literary life. Next it will look at the poetry some of these women published during the 1930s in periodicals and collections of verse aimed at a broad reading public, and explore atti­ tudes toward gender conveyed in their work in relation to women’s margin­ alization in Soviet society. Finally, it will discuss some of the poetry women wrote at the time that could not be published until much later. It will sug­ gest that womens exclusion from the cultural establishment offered them an escape from the limitations that affected how women wrote within the system, as well as a position from which they could resist the dominant artis­ tic and moral values. The subject of womens poetry in Russia in the 1930s seems initially to have little to offer apart from a bleak contrast to the prolific, varied, and often highly sophisticated poetry written by women in the first quarter of the twentieth centuiy. The picture changes somewhat once poetiy that was written in the 1930s but published much later is taken into consideration, but the contrast with what had been achieved in the previous twenty years nevertheless remains.1 In the early years of the twentieth century an un­ precedented number of talented women poets appeared on the literary 5

Katharine Hodgson

scene. The two most celebrated figures among them, Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva, emerged alongside many others, including Adelaida Gertsyk, Vera Inber, Marietta Shaginian, Natal’ia Krandievskaia, Sofiia Parnok, and Elena Guro. The changes brought about by the 1917 revolutions did not halt the succession of new and striking poetic voices; the originality of both Mariia Shkapskaia and Anna Barkova was evident in their publica­ tions of the early Soviet era. Nevertheless, by the start of the 1930s many of the poets whose work had brought a new breadth of expression to the fe­ male voice had withdrawn, or were excluded from the public arena. Some, including Tsvetaeva, emigrated, while others, such as Shaginian and Shkap­ skaia, gave up poetry in favor of prose or journalism. Shkapskaia’s with­ drawal from poetry was a significant loss; no poet before her had focused so intently on motherhood, stripping it of sentimentality, or on the community of women united by shared experience in a harsh, male-dominated world in which women and children suffered from mens arbitrary cruelty. Shkap­ skaia s poetry offered a bleak view of the world that was out of tune with of­ ficial culture; her religious convictions compounded the problem and made it impossible for her to continue as a published poet. The poets who will be discussed here fall into two broad groups: those who attempted to work within the boundaries set by censorship and state control, and those who took little or no part in official literary fife. Women who pursued careers as published poets accepted the constraints this placed on them, whether through fear of what might happen if they did not, or through the hope that they were helping to support a system which was, as it claimed to be, the way to a better world. Vera Inber, bom in 1890, was one of the few poets established before 1917 who chose to give her full support to the new status quo and to recreate herself as an unambiguously loyal Soviet woman poet. There were newcomers, too. Ol’ga Berggol’ts and Mar­ garita Aliger belong to the first generation of poets educated in the Soviet period; they published their first collections of poetry in the 1930s. Berggol’ts came to occupy a distinctly ambiguous position, publishing acceptable po­ etry while writing other poems, largely in response to the Stalinist Terror, which were destined “for the desk drawer.” For many the only alternative to silence was writing poetry, which was then hidden or circulated among a small group of trusted friends. Among the outsiders were Anna Akhmatova and Sofiia Pamok (who is discussed in a separate chapter of this book), Na­ tal’ia Krandievskaia, Mariia Petrovykh and Vera Merkur’eva. Literary trans­ lations offered them a tenuous link to official cultural life and supplied a meager income. Anna Barkova was cut off from literary life altogether, as she spent the years 1934 to 1939 as a labor camp prisoner. She continued to write, though her work did not begin to appear again until the late 1980s. There is no evidence that women poets were singled out for persecu­ tion as a group. Russian women poets had no tradition of seeing themselves 6

Russian Womens Poetry in the 1930s

as a group united on the grounds of their gender; women active before the Revolution were certainly aware of each others work, but saw themselves as participants in the wider tradition of Russian poetry rather than creators of a separate feminine canon. Male critics writing before 1917 who were skeptical of the value of women’s writing did, however, tend to discuss them as a group, and this indiscriminate criticism continued in comments made after 1917 about women whose careers were established before the Revo­ lution. Despite occasional hostile criticism, women poets by and large es­ caped the fate of many of their male colleagues. This mirrored the situation across society as a whole: women were far less likely than men to attract the attentions of the secret police. Although the emancipation of women was claimed as a major achievement of the Soviet system, in reality they were assigned a secondary role in society, which made it less likely that they would be suspected of conspiring to undermine it. By the 1930s the “woman question” was considered to have been resolved, and any feminist initiatives that had survived the early years after the Revolution were suppressed.2 Of­ ficial culture was expected to demonstrate what the system had achieved for women, but once the goal of womens emancipation was crossed off the agenda, the portrayal of liberated Soviet womanhood started to emphasize traditional feminine qualities. To a certain extent, this was a welcome de­ velopment for women who, during the 1920s, had often been represented either as iron-willed revolutionaries in leather jackets or as backward crea­ tures in the thrall of superstition and religion. The female-identified do­ mestic sphere, which had been associated with unacceptable bourgeois and regressive attitudes, now began to be seen as fulfilling an important sup­ porting role in society. An increasing emphasis was placed on women’s role as mothers who would raise the next generation of Soviet citizens. While in the early 1930s the rhetoric of women’s emancipation could still be seen in propaganda posters that urged women to join the workforce and throw aside the constraints of tradition, by the end of the decade the association of women with social upheaval was replaced by an association with stability and continuity. Meanwhile, as preparations were made for war, a growing emphasis on military matters helped to consolidate the reversion to con­ ventional ideas about gender roles. The image of the thoroughly “mascu­ line” man was increasingly epitomized in the figure of the soldier, and had as his female counterpart a woman who combined gentle feminine charm with selfless dedication to both her domestic and social obligations. Within the structures that were set up to regulate official literary life women tended to play an auxiliary role. Men occupied most of the influen­ tial positions in the central organization of the Union of Soviet Writers. At the Union of Soviet Writers First Congress in 1934 the only women poets to speak were Agnia Barto, who wrote for children, and Vera Inber. Over­ all, women made up just 3.7 percent of all delegates. Women were instead 7

Katharine Hodgson

involved lower in the Union of Soviet Writers hierarchy, at the local rather than the national level. Even before the abolition of autonomous literary groups in 1932, women were much less likely than men to belong to a group, and were especially sparsely represented in groups closely associated with the Communist Party. The relative status of male and female poets is fur­ ther reflected in what can only be described as a division of labor between the sexes as far as subject matter is concerned. Male poets were more likely to write on themes of national or international significance, as did Nikolai Tikhonov in his 1936 cycle Ten druga (Shadow of a Friend) on the rise of Fascism in Europe,3 while women tended to concentrate on local or domes­ tic matters. Much of what they wrote dealt with “women’s issues”: personal relationships, family, the place of women in Soviet society. The promotion of military action as a prestigious and politically important theme foregrounded the work of male poets; war was evidently not considered a suitable topic for a womans pen.4 Women’s choice of subject matter cannot be said to be the result solely of official promptings; a preoccupation with the personal and domestic sphere is evident in women’s poetry before the Revolution. These were, however, areas held to be of secondary importance in Soviet culture, and the association between women’s writing and personal themes may well have been seen as confirmation of the marginal status of both. Prerevolutionary womens poetry established a strong link between gender and genre, as most women concentrated on writing lyric poetry. Womens continued focus on the lyric was a major factor that contributed to their low profile during the 1930s. The status of lyric poetry had been called into question in the late 1920s and remained uncertain. The privileg­ ing of the collective at the expense of the individual meant that lyric poetry came to be reinterpreted as a less individualistic genre in which the author s individuality was given new meaning through membership of the collective; the author of a 1929 book on poetry described young poets of the time as members of a choir or orchestra rather than soloists. It was, he continued, the poet’s task to “create lyric poetry which might correspond to the feel­ ings and attitudes of Soviet-minded poetry lovers.”5 Lyric poetry specifically by women had been subject to fierce criticism during the 1920s for being essentially bourgeois, individualistic, and subjective, and therefore redun­ dant in the new socialist society. Anna Akhmatova was the most prominent target. She was rebuked both for the absence of work and the collective, and for the presence of God in her poetry.6 The attacks on the woman who had become the figurehead for the pre-1917 tradition of womens poetry made it clear that the much-imitated Akhmatova was no longer a suitable model for others. This sat awkwardly with the established popularity of Akhmatovas poetry with women readers. There was indeed an audience for womens lyric poetry; some of what they were offered, by poets like Ol’ga Berggol’ts and Margarita Aliger, whose work will be discussed below, rep­ 8

Russian Women s Poetry in the 1930s

resents an attempt to reconcile the exploration of personal emotion with the communication of acceptable attitudes. Other poets made an effort to distance themselves from the kind of poetry associated with Akhmatova. Much less controversial and at the forefront of official culture was the pop­ ular, or, in Soviet terms, the “mass,” song. Such works responded to current events or formulated prescribed attitudes in accessible verse. The mass song epitomizes the poetic values of the time: simplicity of form, clarity of expression, a focus on action, heroism, unanimous collective certainty. The foremost practitioners of this genre were, without exception, male. It seems as though women in official culture were expected to speak only on behalf of other women, not as the voice of the whole society. Moving from the general to the particular, we shall now look at poetry written by women and published in the 1930s. This was a time when state control over publications of all kinds became absolute. There no longer ex­ isted any of the small publishing houses which had, under the terms of the New Economic Policy of the 1920s, enabled writers whose work was felt to be inappropriate for the mass Soviet readership to see their work in print. To all intents and purposes there was now only one audience, and censors determined what that audience should be given. Vera Inber was one of the most loyal and conventional Soviet women poets. Her choice of a conformist path may have been motivated partly by an awareness of the risks that came with being a first cousin to the princi­ pal “enemy of the people,” Trotsky. Like many of her contemporaries, In­ ber imitated Akhmatova to some extent in her early work, but as her career progressed she took pains to distance herself from the kind of women’s lyric poetry that was closely identified with her. As part of the process of rein­ venting herself as a Soviet woman poet, Inber switched her focus away from personal concerns to demonstrations of what the system had achieved for women in general. Her poetry of the 1930s combines an emphasis on greater opportunities for women with a traditional view of feminine qualities. The fact of her female identity caused Inber some difficulties in her attempt to recreate herself as a Soviet poet during the 1930s. Symptomatic of her initial uncertainty is the poem “Vpolgolosa” (“In an Undertone”), dedicated to the anniversary of the October Revolution. It was first pub­ lished in 1932 in Literatumaia gazeta (Literary Gazette). The first part of the poem is largely a consideration of the authors unsatisfactory past as a bourgeois woman poet; the second part is a generalized statement about a male poets path away from his bourgeois past toward involvement in the socialist present. The poem begins with a portrait of the poets former self in 1917, which is contrasted with the revolutionary street fighter she wishes she had been. The real self, who heard about the Revolution secondhand, is described in terms that echo prerevolutionary male critics’ disparaging at­ titudes toward women poets.7 Inber likens her past poetry to dressmaking, 9

Katharine Hodgson

suggesting an implicitly unworthy feminine obsession with textiles rather than texts:

... А я утопала в дни Октября В словесном шитье и кройке but in the days of October I was drowning in verbal sewing and cutting-out. The poets confession that she used to write with a “tender lyrical pen” is also presented as a piece of self-criticism. Having undermined her former poetic self largely on the grounds of feminine identity, which is conflated with her bourgeois lack of involvement in revolutionary struggle, her at­ tempt to assert her identity as a poet of the Soviet present is doomed to im­ personal generalizations. Appropriately, the poets attempt at characterizing her present self, which opens the second section of the poem, consists of a list of largely absent attributes: ... Пафос мне несвойственен по природе. Буря жестов. Взвихренные волосы. У меня, по-моему, выходит Лучше то, что говорю вполголоса. И сейчас средь песенного цикла, Вызванного пафосом торжеств, К сожаленью, слаб, как я привыкла, Голос мой. И не широк мой жест.

Pathos isn’t in my nature. A storm of gestures. Hair on end. Things work bet­ ter for me when I speak in an undertone. And now among this song cycle, in­ spired by the pathos of celebrations, my voice is, unfortunately as is my habit, weak. And my gestures are not broad.

Her rejection of excessive displays of emotion might be read as a rejection of an excess identified as feminine. Is her preference for speaking in a low voice to be seen, therefore, as a model for a self-effacing female voice, or even a voice that attempts to conceal its feminine identity? It is striking that the grammatical gender that predominates in this passage is masculine. Most of the key nouns—“pathos,” “voice,” “gesture”—are masculine, and their gender is accentuated by the adjectives that qualify them. Inber s fem­ inine “I” appears only once as the subject of a clause, with the past tense verb indicating the speakers gender, while all the masculine nouns cited above are grammatical subjects. After the lines just quoted, the poem veers off into a curious general­ ization. It seems as though Inber is only able to explore her own changed attitudes by attributing them to a “poet” who is clearly masculine, repeat­ edly referred to as “he.” The evolution from bourgeois male poet to Com­ munist sympathizer who has conquered his old-fashioned fear of death is presented as a perfectly straightforward one.8 The poem ends with a satis­ 10

Russian Women s Poetry in the 1930s

fying conclusion for this abstract male poet, but the female “I” who was the poem’s initial focus has vanished from sight. This movement away from re­ flections on the poet’s own experience toward generalizations which efface any signs of her individuality, including her feminine identity, is typical of Inber’s work of the early 1930s. Anxiety over the pitfalls of speaking as a woman may be behind In­ ber’s use of the masculine first-person voice in two poems of 1934. These poems, published in Inber’s Izbrannye stikhi (Selected Verse) of 1935, offer alternate views of women as politically progressive members of the work­ force or as pleasing ornaments. One, set in Samarkand, is a demonstration of the ways in which the Soviet state has freed women from traditional bur­ dens, and contrasts the young hero’s enlightened attitude toward women with his mother’s regressive Asiatic ideas. She is anxious that his intended bride, Zeinab, an emancipated factory worker, is, at eighteen, “no longer young.” The hero rejects the child-bride his mother suggests, and reasserts his decision to marry Zeinab. The other poem suggests that women’s chief purpose is to charm men. It is a curious poem that evokes the hero’s desire to love and be loved in would-be jocular terms relating to the supply of scarce goods. As the poem progresses, it emerges that the hero is either refusing to name the object of his affection, or that he has no particular woman in mind. All women, he reasons, wear colored jackets and carry lilac in spring, so he is happy for any one of them to imagine he is writing about her. At a stroke women are transformed into appealing commodities with negligible individual value.9 During the second half of the decade Inber produces generalized portrayals of exemplary Soviet women in which social involvement and ap­ pealing feminine qualities are yoked together; the reader is reassured that any contradiction between the two is only a matter of appearances. Inber speaks only rarely as “I,” preferring the more impersonal “we.” “Nasha devushka” (“Our Girl”), published in the newspaper Izvestiia in 1935, de­ scribes the type of women who fought for the Revolution and are now contributing as workers and mothers to Soviet society. It is unusual to find a mention of the women who fought in the Civil War at a time when Inber’s male contemporaries were writing numerous poems idealizing the manly comradeship of soldiers in that war, and the qualities of uncompromising toughness and self-sacrifice they acquired. Inber’s representative heroine knows how to use a rifle, but any suggestion that this knowledge might com­ promise her feminine qualities is dismissed when the reader learns that she appears “no stronger than a bird.” The heroine is now a ubiquitous pres­ ence in endeavors agricultural and industrial, and as a crowning achieve­ ment she has a daughter with identical qualities.10 In Inber’s poem “Tikhaia Natasha” (“Quiet Natasha”), which appeared in the periodical Tridsat’ dni (Thirty Days) in 1938, the achievements of the heroine are less grandiose 11

Katharine Hodgson

but do suggest to ordinary women that they too can have some influence outside the home. Natasha is a domesticated creature who has nevertheless left her husband at home to speak at a “wives’ meeting.” Her husband’s sur­ prise at hearing his “quiet” wife speaking on the radio is, Inber implies, a sign that he has underestimated her capabilities, and she subjects him to a little gentle mockeiy, making him shed a sentimental tear and symbolically reducing him to a helpless boy weeping, while Natasha, now the voice of authority, speaks from the wireless.11 Inber s poetry of the 1930s shows an increasing tension between her repeated assertions that women may now enjoy unprecedented career opportunities and the actual achievements and occupations of the women she portrays. “Zvezda nad mirom” (“Star over the World”), published in the periodical Krasnaia nov (Red Virgin Soil) in 1938, gives a panoramic view of the world living under the red stars of the Kremlin; the only woman to feature among representative Soviet figures, including a scientist and diplomat, is a woman about to feed her newborn baby.12 Vera Inber earned her credentials as a Soviet woman poet by writing predominantly about the ways in which the system had improved women’s lives, but wrote little about her own life. Whereas Inber resorts to imper­ sonal generalizations, much of what Ol’ga Berggol’ts (1910-75) and Mar­ garita Aliger (1915-92) wrote in the 1930s invites an autobiographical reading. Berggol’ts and Aliger were children at the time of the Revolution and were educated for literary careers in Soviet institutions. To judge from the work they published in the 1930s, both saw themselves as members of a generation whose efforts would help to construct a new and better soci­ ety. Unlike Inber, who evidently felt the need to set aside poetry that em­ phasized her own feminine identity because of unwelcome associations with the past, the younger women seem to have a largely unproblematic view of gender. In their debut collections, Berggol’ts’s Stikhotvoreniia (Poems) in 1934 and Aliger’s God rozhdeniia (The Year of My Birth), each offers a self­ portrait of a young woman who is thoroughly at home in the present, where she finds fulfillment in a fife combining love and work, the domestic and broader social sphere. Berggol’ts offers the formula “Republic, work and love” to characterize her own life and that of her contemporaries, while Aliger’s 1936 poem “Samoe glavnoe” (“The Most Important Thing”) sums up the main concerns of herself and her friends as follows: “Then we talked about work, about art, anxiety and love.”13 Through their poems, which assert that private fife and involvement in wider society form a seamless whole, Aliger and Berggol’ts portray women’s lives in a new fight. Women are no longer restricted to the confines of the home, but they do not need to forgo personal happiness either. What they write appears to confirm that the “woman question” had indeed, as Stalin said, been resolved. Aliger disparages as outmoded traditional female be­ 12

Russian Women s Poetry in the 1930s

havior in “Buna” (“The Storm”) of 1933, in which the heroine mocks her­ self for having fallen prey to groundless jealousy, and in “Zhena” (“The Wife”) written in 1934, which makes fun of the traditional housewife, ob­ sessed by domestic trivia and possessive of her husband. Marriage and do­ mesticity are seen instead as an integral part of wider existence. Aliger describes her own marriage as a partnership where domesticity plays a mi­ nor role, and work, friends, and idealism offer a wide sphere of activity.14 Berggol’ts has a number of poems portraying the life of a busy Komsomol family. Modest domestic details are fondly presented to the reader, in po­ ems that do not denigrate the business of day-to-day living. “Sem’ia” (“The Family”), which first appeared in the periodical Molodaia gvardiia (Young Guard) in 1933, fuses the domestic scene with travel plans: ... А вечером, как поезд, мчался чайник, на всех парах кипел среди зимы. Друг заходил, желанный и случайный, его тащили—маленькую мыть. Друг—весельчак, испытанный работник, в душе закоренелый холостяк— завидовал пеленкам и заботам и уверил, что это не пустяк. Потом маршруты вместе составляли (уже весна прорезывалась с силой), и вдруг, стремглав, окачивали дали, крик поезда сквозь город доносило .. .15

And in the evenings, like a train, the kettle rushed at full steam, boiling amidst the winter. A friend called in, a chance but welcome guest, he was dragged off to bathe the baby. This friend, a sociable chap, an experienced worker, at heart a confirmed bachelor, was envious of the nappies and cares, and assured us it wasn’t just child’s play. Then we drew up itineraries together (spring was already forcing its way through), and suddenly, in a rush, the wide open spaces swept over us, a locomotive’s cry was carried through the city . . . While Aliger and Berggol’ts are clearly engaged in presenting the lives of young Soviet women in ways that imply a contrast with the lives of women before the Revolution, their poems about love and its attendant problems suggest that some things have changed very little. Despite the occasional and not altogether successful attempt to fuse political and emotional commit­ ment, their poems about love affairs that go wrong, misunderstandings, and separation hark back to a predominant theme in prerevolutionary women’s poetry.16 Love and anxiety seem to go together in Aliger s work. The hero­ ine of Aliger’s “Pervaia poema” (“First Poem”) confronts the fact that her 13

Katharine Hodgson

lovers refusal to welcome her pregnancy, and, implicitly, compel her to have an abortion, meant that he did not love her, even though she continues to love him. Her cycle Cheloveku v puti (To a Man on the Road) is a consid­ eration of love that demands self-sacrifice, even suffering, on her part.17 Berggol’ts writes repeatedly of love and separation. Sometimes she deals Iightheartedly with the problems of a couple whose work demands that they seldom meet; a poem in her debut collection, Zhena (The Wife), presents a working wife’s regrets that she is too busy rushing off on business to sit down and eat a meal with her husband. Elsewhere love is frequently asso­ ciated with parting and loneliness.18 The works written by these two women in the early stages of their ca­ reers have a good deal in common. Both speak as enthusiastic Young Com­ munists who are dedicated to the building of socialism, are optimistic in mood, and tend toward the categorical and formulaic in expression. Aliger’s heroine, when not troubled by the vicissitudes of love, finds fulfillment in doing her duty. Her “Zheleznaia doroga” (“The Railway”), the title poem of her 1939 collection, uses the rapid and purposeful progress of the train as a metaphor for her fife: ... Есть в движенье сладость и тревога, Станция, внезапный поворот ... Жизнь моя—железная дорога, вечное стремление вперед ...

In movement there is sweetness and anxiety, a station, a sudden turn . . . My life is a railway, an eternal striving ahead. The poem enthuses over the endless possibilities such a life offers, although its close suggests that this frantic activity might be an escape from personal problems:

Чтобы я забыла боль и горесть разочарований и невзгод, чтобы мне навек осталась скорость, вечное стремление вперед .. ,19 So that I can forget the pain and sadness of disappointments and misfortune, so that for ever I shall have speed, an eternal striving ahead.

Berggol’ts s poetry of the mid-1980s onward moves away from the ex­ clamations and unambiguous declarations of previous work. While the im­ age of the railway in her poem “Sem’ia,” quoted above, is associated with the excitement of travel, in later poems the train is linked with a sense of emotional detachment. A poem of 1935, which appeared in her second col­ lection in 1936, recalls Aliger’s use of the railway as a metaphor for the speak­ er’s life, but the railway track, which initially seems to signify purposeful progress, becomes an image of emotional emptiness. Berggol’ts’s laconic 14

Russian Women s Poetry in the 1930s

style, evoking mood through a single image, owes something to Akhma­ tova’s early poetiy. It represents, however, a change from her most explic­ itly “Komsomol” poems of around 1930:20 Я люблю сигнал зеленый, знак свободного пути. Нелюбимой, невлюбленной, Хорошо одной брести.

Снег легчайший осторожно вертится у самых губ ... О, я знаю—всё возможно, всё сумею, всё смогу. Разве так уж ты устала, беспокойная душа, разве молодости мало мира, круглого как шар?

И твердят по всей природе зеленые огоньки: проходите, путь свободен от любви и от тоски .. ,21 I love the green light, sign of a clear track. Not loved, not in love, it is good to wander alone. The lightest snow carefully whirls close to my lips . . . О, I know—everything’s possible, I can manage, I can do everything. Can you re­ ally be so tired, restless soul, isn’t the world, round like a sphere, enough for youth? And throughout the whole of nature green lights proclaim: pass on, the track is free from love and longing . . .

Here, as in many poems of the later 1930s, Berggol’ts focuses on in­ dividual emotions without recourse to the wider social context. The hero­ ine of Aliger’s “Zheleznaia doroga,” by contrast, is careful to remind the reader that she is traveling with others and gains reassurance from their company. Berggol’ts defended lyric poetiy, which encompassed emotions beyond simple happiness, in a 1936 article in Literatumyi Leningrad (Lit­ erary Leningrad). She complained that contemporary lyric poetry was di­ sastrously one-sided, full of mindlessly cheerful heroes. It did not begin to cover the range of emotions people actually felt: “We love, grieve, hate, yearn, rejoice, are angry, we think about death, enjoy nature, work, we are lonely, calm or anxious, we lose loved ones, we meet new friends. All this is happening in our times and to our people. The ‘eternal’ themes have been renewed, and our recourse to them needs no kind of justification, especially not the justification stuck into a poem: ‘don’t forget I’m a Soviet person.’”22 The lyric poetry Berggol’ts wrote during the 1930s explores feelings of in­ creasing uncertainty and darkness in response to a series of disasters: both her daughters died in quick succession; she was excluded from membership 15

Katharine Hodgson

of the Party and the Union of Soviet Writers in 1937; and she was subse­ quently arrested and imprisoned. Very few of her poems of the late 1930s were actually published at the time; they will be discussed below, with other women poets’ responses to the Terror. All the works discussed so far were published under the constraints of fear and censorship that circumscribed official culture. Compromise was often necessary to get a piece past editors and censors, and even before submitting work for publication the author’s own “inner censor” would be active. Writers would be “guided” by critics, whose often vituperative re­ sponse to work already published made it clear that certain tendencies were not to be pursued. Under these circumstances, many poets made little at­ tempt to publish their work, or published only a fraction of what they wrote, knowing that the rest was unlikely to be accepted, and being unwilling to submit to the demands editors might make in order to get it past the cen­ sors. Withdrawal from attempts to publish had costs: it was inevitably ac­ companied by pressing financial problems, and left an author with a very limited audience. But there were benefits too: compromise could be avoided, and poets could write how they liked about what they liked. Accepting that their work would not reach a wide readership was not a new experience for women poets, who historically had often written for and within their im­ mediate domestic context. In the 1930s the withdrawal from the world of published writing could offer sanctuary. Two main categories of poems that could not be published in the 1930s when they were written will be dis­ cussed: apolitical lyric poetry, which made no gestures toward the kind of ideological content that was required in published work, and poetry written in response to the Stalinist Terror, which voiced feelings that could not be acknowledged openly. Lyric poetry, as has already been suggested, was a potentially contro­ versial genre in the 1930s. Much of what was published purporting to be lyric poetiy was distorted by ideological considerations and made to express simplistic and supposedly collective sentiment. As Berggol’ts suggested, the emotional range in such poetry was restricted, and empty formulae took the place of reflection.23 The values upheld in official culture privileged the col­ lective at the expense of the individual, and the public at the expense of the private. Despite repeated assurances that women had gained unprece­ dented equality and opportunity, the dominant values privileged the mas­ culine over the feminine. Given a hierarchy in which the individual, the private, and the feminine were of secondary status, and the strong associa­ tion between women poets and the lyric that was established in prerevolu­ tionary culture, it was only to be expected that the output of women who were active outside of official culture was predominantly in this genre. From their position on the margins, women writing lyric poetry could declare their independence from the system, and assert alternative values that placed the 16

Russian Womens Poetry in the 1930s

private experience of individual women at the center. This was resistance of an unspectacular kind, a phenomenon that has only come to light with the passage of time. With hindsight, the existence of this poetiy testifies to a cultural continuity that was maintained by withdrawing from the public gaze. Some of the poets who were active but unpublished were then known only for their earlier work, like Natal’ia Krandievskaia; otherwise they were known, as Mariia Petrovykh and Vera Merkur’eva were, for their verse translations rather than as poets in their own right. Natal’ia Krandievskaia (1888-1963) was one of the numerous women who began to publish their poetry before the Revolution. She spent the years 1918 to 1923 in emigration with her husband Alexei Tolstoi. Between 1922 and 1935 she wrote no poetiy, but broke her silence when her mar­ riage collapsed, although none of this work was published during her life­ time, only a volume of memoirs. In the work that follows the breakup of her marriage, painful emotions are expressed in simple, restrained language that reflects her declared determination to continue living and accept her lot. She describes her poetiy as follows:

А я опять пишу о том, О чем не говорят стихами, О самом тайном и простом, О чем, чего боимся сами. Судьба различна у стихов. Мои обнажены до дрожи. Они—как жалоба, как зов, Они—как родинка на коже .. ,24

And again I’m writing about things people don’t talk about in verse, about things which are most secret and simple, things we ourselves are afraid of. Poems have different fates. Mine are so exposed they shiver. They are like a complaint, a summons, they are like a birth mark on the skin. A constant theme in Krandievskaia’s poetry in the late 1930s is love and re­ nunciation. Her lyric heroine is portrayed at moments of painful self-sacrifice, willing herself to choose stoical acceptance rather than emotional protest, and at moments of hope and renewal, when the harmony of the natural world offers escape from fruitless self-absorption. The realization that love has restricted her existence and made her blind to the rest of the world is conveyed in tones that are subdued, yet self-possessed: Нет! Это было преступлением, Так целым миром пренебречь Для одного тебя, чтоб тенью У ног твоих покорно лечь.

Она осуждена жестоко, Уединенная любовь, 17

Katharine Hodgson

Перегоревшая до срока, Она не возродится сновь.

Глаза, распахнутые болью, Глядят на мир, как в первый раз, Дивясь простору, и раздолью, И свету, греющему нас. А мир цветет, как первозданный, В скрещенье радуги и бурь, И льет потоками на раны И свет, и воздух, и лазурь.25

No! It was a crime to disregard the whole world like that for you alone, so as to lie submissively like a shadow at your feet. Solitary love has been cruelly condemned, having burnt out before its time, it will not be reborn. My eyes, wide open in pain, look at the world as if for the first time, amazed at the space and expanses, and the light which warms us. And the world blooms as when first created, in the intersection of rainbow and storms, and it pours in torrents onto [my] wounds both light and air and azure.

The work of Vera Merkur’eva (1876-1943) has not yet been as widely published as Krandievskaia’s poetry. Some of her poems appeared in an­ thologies in 1918 and 1926, but the only book of poetry she published in her lifetime consisted of translations from Shelley. Her own poetry presents considerable difficulties to the reader through her sometimes convoluted syntax. A poem of 1934 dedicated to Akhmatova is striking in its use of dense sound patterns alongside images that evoke sound in near abstract terms: Из тусклой створки голос пел протяжный, Как говор волн в раковине влажной. И были в нем созвучия слиянны, Как над водой встающие туманы. Он тосковал разлуки ожиданьем, Он укорял несбыточным свиданьем, Он заклинал обетом непреложным, Он искушал ответом невозможным. И заклинанию—сердцебиенье. Сжимая горло, застилая зренье, Отозвалось—беззвучней, бесстелесней Неслышным отголоском, вздохом, песней— Клянясь тоской ночного расставанья Не знать забвенья на путях скитанья, Пока иного утра совершенство Не озарит бессонное блаженство.26

A long-drawn-out voice sang through dim shutters, like the speak of waves in a damp seashell. And in it were blended harmonies, like mists rising above the water. It was melancholy in the expectation of parting, it reproached with 18

Russian Womens Poetry in the 1930s

an impossible meeting, it vowed with an immutable promise, it tempted with an impossible answer. And in response to the enchantment—a heartbeat. Compressing the throat, veiling sight, it responded—more soundlessly, more disembodied in an inaudible echo, a sigh, a song,—vowing by the melancholy of parting at night not to know oblivion on the roads of wandering, until the perfection of another morning illumined sleepless bliss. The style of two poems in which the poet converses with her recently dead sister is much simpler; the succession of questions and answers sug­ gests a kinship with the language of folklore. In “Svidanie” (“The Encounter”) the poet s sister comes to fetch her, but decides regretfully that it is not yet time. The poet longs for the time when her sister will return to take her away, but in “Ona prishla” (“She Has Come”) she reminds her sister of the responsibilities that bind her. Neither the sorrow of friends nor an unfin­ ished poem are accepted as sufficient reason to stay in the world of the liv­ ing, but mention of their crippled cat persuades her sister to let her stay:

—Ты готова? А наша кошка, Искалеченный пыткой зверь? Ей без нас в подполье дорожка— На голодную смерть. Не поймет до конца безножка, Почему не отворят дверь.—

И задумалась, и сказала, легким вздохом грусть затая: —Кто забудет о твари малой, Позабуду о нем и я. Оставайся,—она сказала И ушла неслышимая.27 “Are you ready?” “But what about our cat, an animal crippled by torture? Without us her path will lead downhill to starvation and death. The poor lame creature won’t be able to understand why the door doesn’t open.” And she was thoughtful, and said, hiding her sadness with a gentle sigh: “If any­ one were to forget about a little creature, I’d forget about them. Stay behind” she said and, silent, went away. Mariia Petrovykh (1908—79) published very little of her own poetry in her lifetime. Some poems did appear in wartime periodicals, and Petrovykh did at least see one collection of her work published in 1968. Her writing is often concerned with conveying nuances of perception and states of mind. A recurring theme in the early 1930s is the writing of poetry itself. “V ugodu gordosti moei...” (“To Satisfy My Pride”) is a striking evocation of the tran­ sition from extreme emotional tension to the beginnings of poetic creativ­ ity. At first the boundaries between the poet and the exterior world are disordered, then the process of inspiration intervenes and restores the har19

Katharine Hodgson

mony between the poet’s body and mind, and between the poet and her surroundings. Petrovykh portrays poetic inspiration in strongly physical terms, showing poetry to be a life-giving force that is an inseparable part of her being. The equally physical manifestation of her distress—her heart pounding like the wheels of a train—gives way to sensations of harmony and integration: В угоду гордости моей Отвергнула друзей, Но этих—ветер, ночь, перрон— Не вымарать пером.

Они дрожат в сияньи слез, А плачут оттого, Что слышат возгласы колес Из сердца моего.

Но током грозной тишины Меня пронзает вдруг, И тело—первый звук струны, А мысль—ответный звук. Я узнаю мой давний мир— Младенчество земли, И ребра, струна диких лир, Звучанье обрели.

Певуче движется душа Сплетениями вен, И пульсы плешут не спеша Пленительный рефрен. Во тьме растет неясный гуд, Во тьме растут слова, И лгут они или не лгут, Но я опять жива.

И вновь иду с мечтою в рост, В созвучиях по грудь. Заливистая свора звезд Указывает путь.28 То satisfy my pride I rejected my friends, but these—the wind, the night, the platform—can’t be crossed out with a pen. They shiver in a glitter of tears, and they weep because they hear the exclamations of wheels coming from my heart. But I’m suddenly pierced by a shock of threatening silence, and my body is the first sound of a string, while my mind is an answering sound. I rec­ ognize my former world—the infancy of the earth, and my ribs, strings of wild lyres, have acquired sound. Melodiously my soul moves in the inter­ weaving veins, and pulses lap unhurriedly in a captivating refrain. In the darkness there grows a vague hum, in the darkness there grow words, and 20

Russian Women s Poetry in the 1930s

whether they lie or do not lie, I am once more alive. And again I walk as tall as dreams, up to my breast in harmony. The outspread pack of stars shows me the way.

Petrovykh’s husband fell victim to Stalin’s purges. Her work does not, however, abound in overt references to the Terror. It figures obliquely in “Kogda na nebo sinee” (“When Up to the Dark Blue Sky”) through the dates 1937 to 1938 at the end of the poem. The association of this poem with the worst years of repression makes its theme—a mother s pledge of devotion to her daughter—particularly poignant. This is not the often sentiment­ laden picture of motherhood that recurs in official Soviet culture, but a por­ trayal of a relationship that offers the only refuge from a hostile world.

... Клянусь—необозримое Блаженство впереди, Когда ты спишь, любимая, Прильнув к моей груди. Тебя держать, бесценная, Так сладостно рукам. Не комната—вселенная, Иду—по облакам.

И сердце непомерное Колышется во мне, И мир, со всею скверною, Остался где-то, вне .. .29

I swear—endless bliss awaits when you, beloved, sleep, clinging on my breast. Holding you, precious one, is so sweet to my hands. It’s not a room but the universe, I walk across the clouds. And my inordinate heart flutters in me, and the world, with all its vileness, is left behind somewhere outside. The poem’s conclusion suggests just how fragile the speaker senses her se­ curity might be: В тиши блаженства нашего Кляну себя: не сглазь! Мне счастье сгинуть заживо И знать, что ты сбылась.30 In the quiet of our bliss I conjure myself not to tempt fate. It would be hap­ piness for me to die a living death, knowing that you have come into being.

Only two of the poets discussed in this essay were actually arrested during the years of Stalins Terror. Anna Barkova spent years in the labor camps, while Ol’ga Berggol’ts was lucky to be released from prison after several months. More commonly, women were not themselves arrested, but their male relatives were. Anna Akhmatova’s husband and son were impris21

Katharine Hodgson

oned, as was Petrovykhs husband. After her return to the USSR in 1939 Marina Tsvetaevas husband and daughter were arrested. Women domi­ nated the long lines of relatives who waited outside prisons to hand over parcels and find out what they could about the fate of those inside. The arbitrary nature of the Terror, its scale and savagery were all taboo subjects; any attempt to create a written record of it was potentially dangerous, as it could, if discovered, be used as evidence against the author. Women used their “invisibility” and their position as onlookers to a social and moral catastrophe to write as witnesses to the Terror. Their gender played an important role in how they responded to it; traditional and reli­ gious culture endowed the self-sacrificial, suffering woman with moral au­ thority. In the nineteenth century female revolutionaries had drawn on religious tradition in order to fuse moral absolutism and femininity. Barbara Alpern Engel outlines the gender-related value systems that informed their thinking: “They viewed morality, like the capacity for feeling, for suffering, and for self-sacrifice, as essentially feminine, whereas emotional distance, hierarchy, and the arbitrary exercise of power characterized masculinity.”31 Nineteenth-century novels repeat this pattern of the virtuous woman and the erring man; even the image of Soviet woman projected in official 1930s culture implies that women possess innate and effortless virtue, but that their role is secondary and complementary to the role fulfilled by men. In women poets’ portrayals of Stalin ’s purges the world is divided along gen­ der lines which, however, depend on antagonism rather than complemen­ tarity. The Terror could easily be portrayed as an act of male violence on a powerless, feminized population. Regardless of actual gender, the passive victims of terror are cast in the female-identified roles suggested by Anna Akhmatova’s words: “the city of Leningrad dangled like a useless appendage beside its prisons.”32 Women poets were well placed to respond on behalf of a feminized nation, giving the silent victims a voice against the perpetra­ tors. Womens position on the margins allowed them to speak, while those at the center of events, captors and captives, were forced to remain silent. Akhmatovas widely known cycle Rekviem (1935-40), first published in Munich in 1963, dominates our impressions of women’s poetic responses to the Terror. The poet speaks as one of the women in the prison queue, and on their behalf. Most of the few male figures in the cycle are voiceless victims, arrested, imprisoned, symbolized in the crucified Christ. The male perpetrator makes a brief enigmatic appearance in a poem expressing the poet’s longing for death, where death is personified as a bandit or a secret policeman.33 The cycle is otherwise peopled by women who suffer and wait outside the prisons, as much prisoners as those behind the walls. In this world of female suffering the heroine asserts her moral authority and her right to speak on behalf of the entire nation. She reminds her readers of a previous episode of arbitrary male violence in Russian history: Peter the 22

Russian Women s Poetry in the 1930s

Greats brutal treatment of the strel’tsy rebels in 1697. The male victims are unseen, but their wives are heard, and the speaker announces her intention of making herself heard alongside them:

Буду я, как стрелецкие женки, Под кремлевскими башнями выть.34

Like the strel’tsy wives I shall howl beneath the Kremlin towers.

As well as historical precedent, Akhmatovas speaker draws on religious im­ agery to lend weight to her words. In “Raspiatie” (“Crucifixion”) she implies a parallel between her imprisoned son and Christ, and herself and the Vir­ gin Mary. The Mother in this crucifixion scene displays none of the for­ bearance usually associated with the figure of Mary. She is set apart from the others; while the words and reactions of the Christ figure, Mary Mag­ dalene, and the disciple are recorded, all that we are told about her is that she is silent, and that no one dared even to look at her. The mother’s silence is ominous, accusatory, suggesting an inexpressible intensity of emotion. These religious and historical references lend authority to what the speaker has to say, but although Akhmatova suggests parallels between her poetic persona and the symbolic representative of the nation, Mother Russia, ulti­ mately she avoids making an appeal to simplistic nationalism.35 Her author­ ity derives above all from her task of remembering and “weaving” together the words of her companions which she overheard in the prison lines. Ol’ga Berggol’ts found herself among the women on the other side of the prison walls. As a Party member, before her arrest she found it difficult to disbelieve the official line that those arrested as “enemies of the people” really were enemies plotting the downfall of the Soviet Union. The evi­ dence of her own experience, first during 1937 to 1938 when she was ex­ cluded from the Party, then from December 1938 to July 1939 when she was in prison, forced her to contemplate the possibility that the ideals she believed in had been betrayed. Berggol’ts wrote about her imprisonment in poems that dramatize her inner conflict through the attempt to establish a dialogue with the Motherland (Rodina). Akhmatova’s version of the Terror contrasts the role of perpetrator and victim through gender; Berggol’ts is unable to bring such simple clarity to bear on her predicament, or to reject wholeheartedly the system she had supported all her adult life. It seems sig­ nificant that she chose to address the Motherland, which has a feminine grammatical gender in Russian, and therefore personified her country as a woman. By recognizing something akin to herself in this figure, Berggol’ts is eventually able to understand and speak to her on equal terms. In a poem of 1939, which first appeared in her 1965 collection Uzel (The Knot), writ­ ten after her release from prison, she speaks to her country with new au­ thority. Pledges of loyalty that have survived the ordeal are combined with 23

Katharine Hodgson

demands not to test this loyalty further. The supplicant of earlier poems now has a peremptory, accusatory tone: Изранила и душу опалила, лишила сна, почти свела с ума ... Не отнимай хоть песенную силу, не отнимай—раскаешься сама! Не отнимай, чтоб горестный и славный твой путь воспеть. Чтоб хоть в немой строке мне говорить с тобой, как равной с равной,— на вольном и жестоком языке!36

You wounded me and seared my soul, robbed me of sleep and nearly drove me mad . . . But just don’t take away my power of song, don’t take it away— you’ll regret it yourself! Don’t take it away, so that I can sing your sorrowful and glorious path. So that if only in mute lines I can speak to you as an equal with an equal,—in a free and fierce language! Another cycle of Berggol’ts’s prison poems, Ispytanie (The Ordeal) evokes the desperate attempt to withstand interrogation, the stillbirth of a third daughter, and the spectacle of child prisoners in the exercise yard, but most often they look to the outside world and to memory to sustain her. Some of the motifs suggest folk song: the comfort in the belief that she hears her husband repeating her name, and the dream of turning her heart into a boat or airplane that will escape and leave her in prison untroubled.37 One poem, first published in 1987, turns to the myth of Orpheus and Eury­ dice to convey the poet’s desperate efforts to retain some kind of integrity:

Из края тьмы, бессмысленной и дикой, В забытое земное бытие Я душу увожу, как Эвридику, Нельзя мне оглянуться на нее. Шуршат изодранные покрывала, Скользят босые слабые ступни ... Нет,—не глядеть, не знать, какой ты стала За эти, смертью отнятые дни, Нет,—если я условие нарушу И обернусь к запретной стороне— Тогда навек я потеряю душу И даже песни не помогут мне .. .38 From the edge of darkness, meaningless and savage, into forgotten earthly existence I lead away my soul, like Eurydice, I must not look back at her. Her tattered veils rustle, her weak bare feet slip . . . No—I mustn’t look, mustn’t know what you have become over these days which were taken away by 24

Russian Women s Poetry in the 1930s

death, no—if I break the condition and turn round in the forbidden direc­ tion—then I lose my soul for ever, and even songs will not help me. . . . Anna Barkova (1901-76) spent 1934 to 1939 as a prisoner in labor camps. She published a collection of poetry, Zhenshchina (Woman), in 1922, but no more of her poems appeared in print until they surfaced in a 1988 number of Ogonek, one of the periodicals at the forefront of glasnost’. From the start of her career at the time of the Civil War Barkova consis­ tently rejected a conventional feminine voice in her writing, projecting a difficult, cruel persona whose aggression was directed as much inward as outward. Some of the poetry written before her arrest in 1934 comments sardonically on the political situation. A 1931 poem “Rifmy” (“Rhymes”) de­ plores the standardization of poetic language, the obsequious rhymes intro­ duced to rhyme with “Stalin,” the words banished by editors, the overused rhymes to “tractor.” Barkova pointedly rhymes plokho (“bad”) with epokha (“epoch”) and slezy (“tears”) with kolkhozy (“collective farms”).39 Her disil­ lusion with the system that the Revolution had created was clearly formu­ lated in other poems of 1931. In one of them she castigates the naivete of the idealists, herself included, who believed in the Revolution, and foresees a future of cynicism, amorality, and drunkenness. Barkova characterizes the “sick century” as follows:

... Он наши надежды предал, Он нашу любовь осмеял, Он нам обещал победы И деспотов новых дал.40 It betrayed our hopes, it mocked our love, it promised us victories and gave us new despots. The poems Barkova wrote as a prisoner in the 1930s have relatively little to say about the circumstances in which she was living. Often she looks to the past and imagines possible alternative selves in an attempt to escape from the oppressive present. A poem of 1938 expresses the poet’s longing to be reincarnated as a savage Mongol empress at the time of Tamberlain:

... Возвратиться монгольской царицей В глубину пролетевших веков, Привязала б к хвосту кобылицы Я любимых своих и врагов. Поразила бы местью дикарской Я тебя, завоеванный мир, Побежденным в шатре своем царском Я б устроила ваварский пир. А потом бы в одном из сражений, Из неслышанных оргийных сеч, 25

Katharine Hodgson

В неизбежный момент пораженья Я упала б на собственный меч .. .41

If I could return as a Mongol empress into the depths of the centuries which have fled, I would tie to a mare’s tail both those I loved and my enemies. I would astonish you, conquered world, with my barbaric revenge, and in my royal tent I would arrange a barbarians’ feast for the defeated. And then in one of the battles, one of the unimaginably orgiastic fights, at the inevitable moment of defeat I would fall upon my own sword. Other “historical” poems seem to offer parallels with the present day: The portrayal of Roman emperors Nero and Augustus suggests the tyranny of Stalin, while a self-portrait as a heretical nun condemned by the inquisi­ tion echoes her own fate as political prisoner.42 Although Barkova launches an uninhibited attack on the authorities, she claims no moral high ground for herself or her contemporaries, and speaks on behalf of them all. In her view, all are responsible for the excesses of those in power because of their complicity. The world cannot be divided up between victims and perpetrators: ... С покорностью рабскою дружно Мы вносим кровавый пай Затем, чтоб построить ненужный Железнобетонный рай. Живет за окованной дверью Во тьме наших странных сердец Служитель безбожных мистерий, Великий страдалец и лжец.43 With the obedience of slaves we join together to contribute our bloody share so as to build an unnecessary ferro-concrete paradise. Behind a metal-bound door in the darkness of our strange hearts lives a servant of the godless mys­ teries, a great martyr and liar.

Women’s own complicity in the terror was not something that could easily be integrated into the role of the heroically suffering victim. Petrovykh too recognizes that the whole of society must bear some responsibility for what has happened; there can be no easy retreat: Без оглядки не ступить ни шагу. Хватит ли отваги на отвагу? Диво ль, что не громки мы, не прытки, Нас кругом подстерегали пытки. Снится ворон с карканьем вороньим. Диво ль, что слова не пророним, Диво ль, что на сердце стынет наледь И ничем уж нас не печалить. А отрада лишь в небесной сини, 26

Russian Women s Poetry in the 1930s

Да зимой на ветках белый иней, Да зеленые весной листья ... Мы ль виновны в жалком бескорыстье! Мы живем не мудрствуя лукаво, И не так уж мы преступны, право ... Прокляты, не только что преступны! Велика ли честь, что неподкупны. Как бы ни страшились, ни дрожали— Веки опустили, губы сжали В грозовом молчании могильном, Вековом, беспомощном, всесильном, И ни нам, и ни от нас прощенья, Только завещанье на отмщенье.44 We don’t move one step without looking round. Do we have enough courage to be courageous? No wonder that we are not noisy or lively, when tortures lurked all about us. We dream of ravens and ravens’ croaking. No wonder we do not let slip a single word. No wonder our hearts are as cold as ice and there’s nothing left that can sadden us. There is joy only in the blue of the heavens, and in winter in the white hoar-frost on branches, and in spring in the green leaves . . . Can we be guilty of pitiful disinterestedness! We live without cunning sophistries, and really we aren’t all that wicked ... Not only wicked but accursed! Is it any great honor that we are incorruptible? How­ ever much we were afraid, or shivered, lowered our eyes, compressed our lips in the ominous silence of the grave, eternal, helpless, all-powerful, there can be no forgiveness either for us or from us, only a legacy of revenge.

Barkova and Petrovykh address their readers not with the lyrical “I,” but speak confidently as representatives of the whole society, “we.” The ac­ knowledgment that all are implicated in the catastrophe of the Terror might appear to compromise the speakers claim to moral authority, but it places her firmly among her contemporaries. Within official culture, by contrast, pronouncements on behalf of Soviet women are made by marginalized voices whose “we” seems to refer to a small group of largely fictitious crea­ tures who embody prescribed attitudes. Gender is constantly an issue in women’s poetry of this kind, where women are represented through re­ strictive stereotypes rather than as individuals. Published women’s poetry became a much more homogeneous entity in the 1930s than it had been be­ fore 1917. Outside official culture, where women poets were clearly iso­ lated from mainstream literary life, they wrote with greater individuality and with a broader thematic range. They did not need to be concerned with projecting an appropriate feminine persona; they had at their disposal the multiple possibilities offered in prerevolutionary women’s poetry, and a sense of a tradition that was not prescriptive. Writing from the margins allowed women to resist the artistic and moral values promoted in official culture. The fear of reprisals meant that this resistance was limited; its 27

Katharine Hodgson

importance should be seen in the long term as we piece together a fuller picture of Soviet culture. The work of women poets in the 1930s shows that some independent cultural values survived. This is an achievement that we cannot overlook.

Notes All translations are the authors own. 1. Carol Ueland, “Womens Poetry in the Soviet Union,” in Women Writers in Russian Literature, eds. Toby Clyman and Diana Greene (West­ port and London: Greenwood Press, 1994), 229-39, provides a useful ac­ count of Soviet women’s poetry. See also Catriona Kelly, A History of Russian Women’s Writing 1820-1992 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 227-83, for an examination of writing by both “insiders” and “outsiders” be­ tween 1917 and 1953. 2. For further reading on women in Soviet society, see Lynne Att­ wood, The New Soviet Man and Woman: Sex-Role Socialisation in the USSR (Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1990); Mary Buckley, Women and Ide­ ology in the Soviet Union, (Hemel Hempstead, England: Wheatsheaf, 1989); Gail Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development and Social Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 3. “Ten’ druga,” Stikhotvoreniia i poemy (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1981), 209-60. 4. Nevertheless, women did make a significant contribution to poetry between 1941 and 1945. See K. Hodgson, Written with the Bayonet: Soviet Russian Poetry of World War Two (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996), 207-56. 5. Ivan Rozanov, Russkie liriki: ocherki (Moscow: Kooperativnoe izdatel’stvo pisatelei, Nikitinskie subbotniki, 1929), 33, 37. 6. See, for example, V. Arvatov, “Grazhdanka Akhmatova i tovarishch Kollontai,” Molodaia gvardiia, 4-5 (1923), 147-51; P. Vinogradskaia, “Voprosy morali, pola, byta i t. Kollontai,” Krasnaia nov’, 6 (1923), 203-14; L. Trotskii, Literature and Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 30; G. Lelevich, “Anna Akhmatova,” Na postu, 2-3 (1923), 178-202. 7. Prerevolutionary critics had mocked what they saw as women poets’ obsession with details of dress; see Vladimir Khodasevich, “Sofiia Pamok, Stikhotvoreniia,” in Sobranie sochinenii, eds. John Malmstad and Robert Hughes, 2 vols. (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1990), II, 255. Trotsky’s later crit­ icisms of women poets were, by contrast, aimed at their supposed preoccu­ pation with religion; see Leon Trotskii, Literature and Revolution, 41.

28

Russian Womens Poetry in the 1930s

8. “Vpolgolosa,” Sobranie sochinenii, 4 vols. (Moscow: Khudozh. lit­ eratura, 1965-66), I, 201-3. 9. “Vesna v Samarkande,” ibid., 221-24; “Vesna u nas vo dvore,” ibid., 220-21. 10. “Nasha devushka,” ibid., 233-36. 11. “Tikhaia Natasha,” ibid., 240. 12. “Zvezda nad mirom,” ibid., 245-47. 13. See Berggol’ts, “Poruka,” in Sobranie sochinenii, 3 vols. (Lenin­ grad: Khudozh. literatura, 1988-90), 1,115; Aliger, “Samoe glavnoe,” Stikho­ tvoreniia i poemy, 2 vols. (Moscow: Khudozh. literatura, 1975), I, 36-37. 14. “Buria,” in Sobranie sochinenii, 3 vols. (Moscow: Khudozh. liter­ atura, 1984), I, 23-24; “Zhena,” ibid., 29-31. I have been unable to locate a publication date for the first poem earlier than Aliger’s 1955 collection Lirika (Lyrics'); the second one was published in 1934 in the newspaper Komsomolskaia Pravda. 15. “Sem’ia,” Sobranie sochinenii, I, 118. 16. See, for example, Berggol’ts “Brigada,” Sobranie sochinenii, I, 106; “Obeshchanie,” ibid., I, 139-40, and Aliger, “Bessmertie,” Sobranie sochinenii, I, 37-39. 17. “Pervaia poema,” Sobranie sochinenii, I, 33-36; Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, “Cheloveku v puti,” I, 56-61. 18. “Zhena,” in Stikhotvoreniia (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo pisatelei v Leningrade, 1934), 21-22. For other poems see, for example, “Puteshestvie. Putevka . . . ,” Sobranie sochinenii, I, 114-15; “Poruka,” ibid., 115; “Vechemiaia stantsiia . . . ,” ibid., 129; “Romans,” ibid., 148. 19. “Zheleznaia doroga,” Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, I, 47. 20. For examples of Berggol’ts’s “Komsomol” style, see “Iz tsikla-Na praktike,” Sobranie sochinenii, I, 107; “S zaminkoiu, s perestanovkoi . . . ,” ibid., 108-9; “Ot”ezd,” ibid., 109-10. 21. “Ia liubliu signal zelenyi. . . ,” Sobranie sochinenii, I, 131-32. For similar poems, see “Puteshestvie. Putevka,” ibid., 114-15, and ‘Vechemiaia stantsiia’, ibid., 129. 22. “Doverie к sebe,” Sobranie sochinenii, I, 577. Berggol’ts contin­ ued her polemic about the inadequacies of Soviet poetry, and in particular the low profile of lyric poetiy, in articles from 1953 to 1954. 23. See note 22 above. 24. “A ia opiat’ pishu о tom, о chem ne govoriat stikhami,” Grozovyi venok: stikhi i poema (St. Petersburg: Litsei, 1992), 71. 25. “Net! Eto bylo prestupleniem,” ibid., 76. 26. “Iz tuskloi stvorki golos pel protiazhnyi . . . ,” “Vera Merkur’eva: iz literatumogo naslediia,” Oktiabr, 5 (1989), 158. 27. “Ona prishla,” ibid., 156; “Svidanie,” ibid.

29

Katharine Hodgson

28. “V ugodu gordosti moei . . . ,” Izbrannoe (Moscow: Khudozh. literatura, 19, 1991), 227. For other poems on related themes, see “Muza,” ibid., 224, and “Neukrotimoiu trevogoi,” 236. 29. “Kogda na nebo sinee . . . ,” ibid., 14. 30. Ibid., 15. 31. Barbara Alpem Engel, Mothers and Daughters: Women of the In­ telligentsia in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 1983), 199-200. 32. “Vstuplenie” to the cycle Rekviem, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy (Moscow, 1989), 329. 33. “K smerti,” ibid., 352. 34. “Uvodili tebia na rassvete . . . ,” ibid., 329. 35. For a discussion of the relationship between Russian national symbolism and Akhmatovas self-representation in Rekviem, see Joanna Hubbs, “Variations on the Myth of Mother Russia: Akhmatovas Rekviem,” in Gender Restructuring in Russian Studies, eds. M. Liljestrom, E. Mantysaari, A. Rosenholm (Tampere, Finland: University of Tampere Press, 1993), 117-26. 36. “Izranila i dushu opalila . . . ,” Sobranie sochinenii, 172. 37. See “Dni provodila v dikom molchanii. . . ,” Sobranie sochinenii, I, 159-60; “Zhelanie,” ibid., 163-64. 38. “Iz kraia t’my, bessmyslennoi i dikoi. . . ,” Sobranie sochinenii, I, 160-61. 39. “Rifmy,” in Izbrannoe (Ivanovo, 1992), 28-29. 40. “Spokoinoi khochu ostatsia . . . ,” ibid., 30-31. 41. “V barake,” ibid., 31-32 42. See “Predsmertnye slova,” ibid., 35-36; “la kogda-to v vek Savonaroly . . . ,” ibid., 37-38. 43. “Gde vernost’ kakoi-to otchizne . . . ,” ibid., 30. 44. “Bez ogliadki ne stupit’ ni shagu . ” Izbrannoe, 16.

30

Diana Lewis Burgin

Sophia Parnok and Soviet-Russian

Censorship, 1922-1933 My only confidante is silence. My mournful voice is dear to none. —Sophia Parnok

AT THE BEGINNING of 1922, the Russian lesbian poet Sophia Parnok (1885-1933) returned to Moscow, where she had lived and worked before the 1917 Revolution, having spent four harrowing, yet creatively fertile, years in the Crimean town of Sudak. Along with her part­ ner, Liudmila Erarskaia, an actress, Parnok had left the Crimea in Decem­ ber 1921 because of the threat of famine. At the start of that year, Parnok had spent a short time in a Red prison in Sudak and had there contracted tuberculosis, which nearly killed her. Parnok began publishing her poetry in 1906. Before the Revolution, she had established herself in Russian letters as a permanent critic and re­ viewer for major journals in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and had published one book of lyrics (in 1916). She did not identify herself with any of the main prerevolutionary poetic movements, such as symbolism, acmeism, or futurism. Her poems were purely lyrical, personal (even autobiographical), and apolitical, at least in the narrow sense of the word “political”; they treated the traditional themes of Russian romantic poetry—nature, yearn­ ing, creativity, soul, and love. Untraditionally, her love lyrics were addressed almost exclusively to women, expressing the poet’s lesbian orientation with an openness rare in Russian poetry of the Silver Age (1893-1917). A Jew by birth, Parnok was totally assimilated into mainstream Rus­ sian culture and, in fact, expressed strongly patriotic, even Russophile views in her journalism. Her profound love of Russian culture, combined with a yearning to be part of that culture, obviously played a decisive role in her prerevolutionary acceptance of baptism in the Russian Orthodox faith. A new preoccupation with religious (specifically, Christian) ideas colors Par­ nok s journalistic writing, and to a lesser degree, her poetry, in the years just before the Revolution. Parnok did not accept the Bolshevik Revolution, nor did she ever consider emigrating after the Bolsheviks came to power. Iron31

Sophia Parnok, mid- to late 1920s (photo courtesy of Diana Burgin)

Sophia Parnok and Soviet-Russian Censorship, 1922-1933

ically, her love of Russia made the Red and the White causes equally un­ palatable to her. The theme of the Revolution, like contemporary events in general, is absent from Pamoks poetry. Indeed, she seemed to perceive her poems as an escape from contemporaneity into a personal world of her soul, dreams, poetry, and love. Parnok often enough described her poems as “dark” and “gloomy.” Murderous moods and despair, by her own acknowledgment, stimulated her creativity, and at the end of her life she wrote to her good friend, Eu­ genia Gertsyk, that she was “not a cheerful poet” (letter of May 4, 1929). One would never guess at Pamoks sardonic wit, fun-loving nature, and ebullient gaiety from the melancholic tenor of most of her poems, their rare ecstatic moments notwithstanding. Given her lyrical pessimism, religiosity, passive hostility to Soviet power, and her belief in the moral obligation of each person, and poets especially, to accept both the good and the evil of his or her life, it is not surprising that Parnok’s lyricism would be considered “out of tune” with the dominant major key of Stalinist communism, which, in its early years, was propagandized in the slogan, “Life has become more cheerful, comrades!” In her own eyes, Parnok was a member of a dying breed of Russian poets who had been nurtured by, and blossomed under, the “ray of Push­ kin’s sun.” She attributed her troubles with the censorship in the 1920s, as we shall see, to the fact that lyric poetry was simply unpublishable in a quintessentially antilyrical era. By 1928 Parnok ceased even trying to publish, choosing to write for her “secret drawer,” into which “flew” many of her best poems. They saw the light of day only in 1979, forty-six years after Parnok’s death, and then, only in a Western edition of her Collected Poems, published in North Amer­ ica by Ardis Publishers. Only today, as this chapter is being written, is Par­ nok finally coming into her own in the Russia she loved; a corrected edition of her Collected Poems has just been published in Russia for the first time. The question arises, though: why did Parnok have to wait so long to be rediscovered by Russian readers? Her colleagues and contemporaries, poets like Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelshtam, and Ma­ rina Tsvetaeva, all of whom wrote far more politically censorable poems than Parnok, were all “posthumously rehabilitated” in Soviet Russia before her. Their poetry had reentered the canons of Soviet dissident poetry and then, post-Soviet literature, while Parnok’s work remained stubbornly for­ gotten. It is true, as Russians will inevitably argue, that Parnok wrote less and was less naturally gifted than the above-mentioned quartet of her fa­ mous colleagues. But such arguments rationalize too easily the virtual era­ sure of Parnok from modem Russian poetry on the grounds that she was too secondary a poet, her lyricism too narrow and personal, to deserve the attention of Russian readers. One can, after all, point to numerous secondary, 33

Diana Lewis Burgin

even tertiary, previously repressed Soviet-Russian poets who have long ago been reintroduced to Russian readers and whose names are now known to poetry lovers, while Parnok’s brings a quizzical wrinkle of unfamiliarity to their brows. Why, in the early 1980s, on the threshold of glasnost’, did Russian po­ etry lovers who eagerly read all manner of dissident and forbidden poets in Western editions (especially from Ardis) not try to get their hands on the 1979 Ardis edition of Parnok’s Collected Poems? Why, after Ardis published Parnok, did it receive more than a few censorious letters from its Russian émigré readership, accusing it of publishing pornography? Perhaps Parnok herself knew better than her official censors the true, unspoken reasons for the uniquely long oblivion (unofficial censorship) that was, during her lifetime, and was to be in posterity, her “unlawful, orphaned” poems’ fate. After publication of her next-to-last book, Music, in 1926, Parnok already realized that what she described to Eugenia Gertsyk as “a voice like mine” was “officially unlawful.” Therefore, the positive response evoked by the poems in Music “among the most different sorts of people” meant a great deal to her “as a human being more than as a poet.” “I did not expect,” she continued in this letter to Gertsyk, “that a voice like mine could be heard at present. The acknowledgment of a soul’s right to exis­ tence is dearer to me than any literary recognition. I now look on poetry as a means of communicating with people. I’m happy that there is an eternal, extratemporal language that can be used in all times to make oneself clear to people and that sometimes, I find words everyone understands” (letter of June 6, 1926). This statement from the embattled poet confronting her imminent si­ lencing in Soviet poetry is especially interesting in that Parnok does not fo­ cus on whether a book like her Music could be published. Clearly, if she had thought the volume would not pass the censor, she would not have even tried to publish it. Indeed, political scrutiny of literature compelled [Soviet] writers to embark on extensive self-censorship. They would strike out or avoid committing to paper what they felt would not stand a chance against censorship, thus greatly facilitating the work of Glavlit” (Ermolaev, 1997, 10). In her letter to Gertsyk about the reception of the poems in Music by a variegated circle of readers and listeners, what concerns Parnok is not her book’s right to existence, but, more profoundly, her souls right to existence. Her feeling of still being able to communicate with others through her po­ ems amazes her. The fact that people can still hear her, still want to listen to her, to her music, to a voice like hers, elates her, mainly because she had ceased to believe that such listeners existed. Parnok’s sense of alienation from her readers and peers compels our attention if only because it distinguishes her so sharply from those of her poet-contemporaries who were also censored, even more harshly than she, 34

Sophia Pamok and Soviet-Russian Censorship, 1922-1933

in most cases. As distinct from Pamok, they rarely, if ever, felt totally alone in their plight, certainly not in 1926! One never gets the sense that the likes of Mandelshtam, Pasternak, Akhmatova, or Tsvetaeva, all of whose voices were silenced from the late twenties on, ever felt that their poems could not be heard, or that their souls’ right to existence was in question. On the contrary, Parnoks greater and more harshly repressed poet-contemporaries gained moral strength and courage from their unshakable faith that their voices could be heard by Russian readers and would be heard by posterity. Pamok’s more deeply experienced alienation from readers and poets of her own time speaks, ironically, to the existence of an unspoken, unoffi­ cial censorship of her poems and of her. This unofficial, but more general deafness to Parnoks voice, this unacknowledged but widespread inatten­ tion to Pamok’s presence in Russian poetry of her day, made her feel like an invisible woman, as she wrote in a 1927 lyric that will be discussed later in this chapter. In another poem, the 1928 “Prologue,” Parnok cries out her pain at the realization that however she might call out to others to hear her, they refuse to do so for reasons she imagines to be her critics’ accusations of her: You’re not traveling our road, You confuse us with dreams, Upset us with talk of heights, Hobble us with quietude. What we hide even from ourselves, You dare to say out loud. (215)

It is ironic that once Parnok was forced to write for her secret drawer, once she accepted the “arctic circle” of her isolation from her readers, a space in which she could keep warm only from the heat of her own ardent poems, or “useless goods,” as she called them, she began writing with an honesty and inner freedom greater than she had ever felt in her “free” poetic life. Official censorship and the deafness of her poetic culture to her voice somehow released her from an internal censor which she herself, perhaps, had not been consciously aware of earlier. Parnok, therefore, provides an interesting (and very Russian) example of the liberation to be found only in prison, of the creativity stimulated by its suppression, for the theme of many of Parnoks censored poems is the condition of being an unlawful fe­ male poet in a patriarchal totalitarian century and state. During the years “between 1917 and 1931 the huge [Soviet] censor­ ship machine was built. Since then, censorship went through a series of changes, but its principles remained essentially the same for almost six decades” (Ermolaev, 1997, 10). Parnoks multifaceted experience of Soviet censorship both raises and helps to answer several interrelated questions 35

Diana Lewis Bürgin

about censorship and artistic creativity in the Soviet Union, not only in the twenties and early thirties, but for the duration of Soviet power. These questions include: What, in practice, was censorable in the work of an apo­ litical, lyrical poet? Did the Soviet state consciously strive to eliminate namely lyrical poetiy? What role did the expectation of being censored play in poetic creation? Why would being censored stimulate a poet’s best work? In discussing and attempting to answer these questions, first the official limitations on poetic expression during the Soviet twenties in order to de­ termine what could be considered censorable in Parnok’s poems will be summarized. Then, chronologically, the difficulties Parnok experienced with censorship from 1922 to 1930 in her various professional capacities as poet, de facto head of a poets’ publishing artel, and as opera librettist will be discussed. Finally, the several lyrics in Parnok’s opus that deal with her official and unofficial status in her poetic culture as an “unlawful” poet will be discussed. LIMITATIONS ON POETIC EXPRESSION IN SOVIET RUSSIA FROM 1921 TO 1931

The Communist Party’s conscious campaign of censoring the written word began in 1921 when an issue of Literary Gazette was not published because the Party’s central committee found the paper’s contents, and members of its editorial board, to be unresponsive to the demands of the political moment. The Soviet government, seeking supervisory political control of published material, institutionalized censorship on June 6, 1922 with its es­ tablishment of GLAVLIT (Main Administration of Matters Pertaining to Literature and the Press), which was attached to the Commissariat of Education. GLAVLIT was to censor five types of printed material: (1) antiSoviet propaganda; (2) military secrets; (3) false information that stirred up public opinion; (4) anything that aroused nationalistic and religious fanati­ cism; and (5) pornography. GLAVLIT worked closely with agencies for political agitation and with the secret police. In 1923 to 1924 an Instruction was issued that man­ dated the removal of undesirable literary works from libraries with a mass readership. Undesirable books included those judged to arouse “animal and antisocial feelings” (like anger, cruelty, sexual perversion) or those contain­ ing superstition, nationalism, or militarism. This Instruction was accompa­ nied by lists of forbidden writers, two of whom are worth mentioning here, namely, Anastasia Verbitskaia and Lidia Charskaia. Verbitskaia achieved great popularity at the turn of the twentieth century for her novels that dealt with sexual love and emancipated women. As testimony to Verbitskaia’s notori­ ety in her time, the contemporary American historian Laura Englestein chose the title of a Verbitskaia novel, The Keys to Happiness, for her ground36

Sophia Parnok and Soviet-Russian Censorship, 1922-1933

breaking 1992 study on “sex and the search for modernity in fin-de-siècle Russia.” As for Charskaia, she earned an equally flamboyant reputation for authoring a series of phenomenally popular boulevard romances, some of which treated the shocking theme of female same-sex passions in private Russian girls’ schools. Charskaias novellas came to be considered danger­ ous and inappropriate reading for well-brought-up young ladies. To wit, Ariadna Efron, the daughter of Marina Tsvetaeva, remembers that even in the early twenties when she and her mother were living outside the Soviet Union in emigration, her mother forbade her to read Charskaia (Efron, 1992, 233). Despite GLAVLIT and the 1923 to 1924 Instruction, during the years of the New Economic Policy (NEP) private publishing thrived in the Soviet Union. Private publishers issued more literary works than all other pub­ lishers combined; in late 1922, they accounted for 60 percent of all literaiy publications—an impressive market share, especially in view of the fact that the censorship of privately published works was stricter than of state or Party publications, and private publishers paid authors less than state pub­ lishing organs. Given a choice of venue, writers clearly preferred publish­ ing their work with private publishers rather than with the State Publishing House (GOSIZDAT). A choice of publisher—state, private, or Party—did not last long. In 1926 the Party tightened its control over GLAVLIT and broadened its re­ sponsibilities to include preliminary and postpublication censorship of all literature published in the Soviet Union. (Previously, GLAVLIT had had no jurisdiction over GOSIZDAT and other Soviet publishers.) By the end of 1927 and the securing of Stalins dictatorship, ideological criteria for pass­ ing the censor became narrower and were enforced with increasing strin­ gency over the next four years. In 1928 the government brought all censorial agencies under a newly created umbrella agency within the Ministry of Ed­ ucation, GLAVISKUSSTVO (Main Administration of Matters Pertaining to Belles Lettres and Art). GLAVISKUSSTVO exercised general control over literature, theater, music, fine arts, cinema, the circus, and amateur per­ formances, although initially, GLAVLIT continued its censorial functions as well. By decree issued on June 6, 1931, GLAVLIT empowered the direc­ tors of pubfishing houses to control their respective publishing processes. The actual censorship work was executed by political editors who were ap­ pointed by publishing-house directors with GLAVLIT s approval. In addition, a new regulation specified that “every printed item from books to musical scores had to list in its publication information when the item was sent to the printers and when it was approved by a censor” (Ermolaev, 1997, 10). Stalins First Five-Year Plan effectively subordinated literature and the other arts to the Party’s political and economic programs. As a result, 37

Diana Lewis Burgin

Ermolaev argues, the distinction between Soviet and prerevolutionary tsar­ ist censorship widened. While tsarist censorship was purely prohibitive, “Soviet censors and editors did not restrict their job to deletion; they made insertions reflecting the politico-ideological position of the ruling Party, or asked the author to make them” (Ermolaev, 1997, 10). In an essay in a re­ cent collection of articles (in Russian), Essays on the History of Soviet Cen­ sorship, T. M. Goryaeva condemns the Soviet censorship more harshly than Ermolaev by comparison with its tsarist predecessor: “Soviet censorship differed from tsarist censorship . . . primarily in the former s lack of legality and therefore in the utter impunity, mysteriousness, and erasability of its criteria for what was permissible. This led to a situation where any work could be deemed ideologically harmful for tendentiously trumped-up rea­ sons” (Goryaeva, 1995, 19). From this review of Soviet censorship we con­ clude that Parnoks poetry could be considered censorable mainly for its religious coloration and lexicon, for its potential to spread “superstition” and mysticism, or arouse “religious fanaticism.” By the end of the twenties, her poems’ lack of ideological and political contents might also have made them unpublishable. PARNOK’S EXPERIENCE OF SOVIET CENSORSHIP

By her own account in letters to friends, Pamok’s first confrontation with Soviet censorship attended her several attempts, upon her return to Mos­ cow, to publish a cycle of poems, The Burning Bush, written by her friend and fellow writer, the well-known poet Maksimilian Voloshin, which treated the Revolution in religious terms. Voloshin had empowered Parnok to act as his literary agent in Moscow, an obligation she willingly undertook at least in part because Voloshin had facilitated her return to the capital from the war-torn and starving Crimea on a special hospital train. On March 4, 1922, barely a month after her arrival in Moscow, Par­ nok wrote Voloshin that The Burning Bush “cannot for now be published as a whole.” In her next letter about a month later she wrote Voloshin a de­ tailed account of her attempt to publish his lyrical cycle with a private pub­ lishing house, Campfires, an attempt that failed, she noted succinctly, “due to censorship considerations.” In other words, Campfires would not take The Burning Bush because the editor in chief believed the cycle as a whole would not be approved by the censor. Parnok then tried to place individual lyrics from the cycle in various almanacs. In April or May Parnok received from Voloshin via messenger the manuscript of a collection of his poems, Selva oscura (A Dark Woods), which he hoped to publish with illustrations by an artist friend, K. F. Bogayevsky. By the beginning of August, Parnok was able to write Voloshin the good news that she had succeeded in signing an agreement with GOSIZDAT to 38

Sophia Pamok and Soviet-Russian Censorship, 1922-1933

publish Selva oscura “for 25 gold kopecks a line (which equals 3000 paper rubles per line. There are 1,480 lines, so you’ll get 440 million). GOSIZDAT will own the copyright for five years. You will also receive 25 authors copies” (letter of August 3, 1922). Nine months later, however, the censor­ ship had changed sufficiently to make the publication of Selva oscura “doubtful.” At the beginning of June 1923 Parnok wrote to Voloshin: “I haven’t been sent the second proofs of Selva oscura [. . .] GOSIZDAT now demands “a Soviet orientation” and has mounted an open, savage attack against mysticism.” Despite the relative freedom of expression that allegedly prevailed during NEP, Parnok ran into difficulties almost immediately in attempting to publish her own work. Specifically, a minor, but nonetheless upsetting, problem arose with printing her critical article, “Days of the Russian Lyric.” In this piece Parnok discussed books of verse by Akhmatova, Khodasevich, Sologub, and Briusov in the broader context of her personal understanding of the relationship between God and humanity and the religious signifi­ cance of the 1917 Revolution. She argued, in brief, that the Revolution had given those who had survived it “new credit” with God and new indebted­ ness to Him. The proofs of this article came back to Pamok from the censor with the word “God” rewritten in lower case. Pamok assiduously restored each “G” to uppercase, and the article was published in 1922 in the second issue of the almanac Dogrose. The almanac itself, however, survived only its first two issues. In 1922 GOSIZDAT offered to publish a volume of Parnok’s poetry, collected under the title Centuries-Old Mead, which included several reli­ gious poems written between 1916 and 1921. Parnok was thrown into a quandary: She desperately needed the money from the sale of the book— GOSIZDAT paid significantly more than private publishers—but her expe­ rience with “Days of the Russian Lyric” had taught her that GOSIZDAT would insist on printing the word for the deity in lower case and the thought of “god” in her book instead of “God” repelled her. She did finally sign a contract for the book, and it was advertised for publication at the back of her collection, The Vine, which was published by a private press in 2000 copies in 1923. Centuries-Old Mead never appeared in print, however. As Parnok wrote to Gertsyk on January 26, 1923: “My second book of poems [Centuries-Old Mead] has frozen at GOSIZDAT—and probably won’t get out of the ice there: too much about God, and at present, the persecution of God keeps intensifying! My article about Akhmatova was disallowed by the censor, a review of Abram Efros’s Erotic Sonnets—also. I think the same fate will befall the essay on Khodasevich.” Parnok was correct on all counts. The Khodasevich piece did circulate in manuscript, however, and received attention and discussion in intellectual circles, especially in Leningrad. 39

Diana Lewis Burgin

At the beginning of 1926 Parnok began her active and enthusiastic participation in the Knot, a small Moscow poets’ cooperative, first as an organizing member and then as secretary of the artel. The Knot received permission from GLAVLIT to publish only works by members of the coop­ erative. They made one attempt to broaden their authors’ list when they asked for permission to publish a posthumous edition of poems by Velimir Khlebnikov. As Parnok wrote archly to Gertsyk on January 11, 1926, GLAVLIT denied their request “because Khlebnikov is already dead and consequently, not a member of our cooperative. As of now, the censor has given us permission to print four collections, but the fifth, sent to the cen­ sor along with the others—mine [Music]—has not come back yet. Perhaps they will forbid its publication although it is utterly blameless [nevinen] and there’s nothing offensive in it save mention in verse of the word ‘God.’ We requested permission to print only 500 copies, i.e. hardly more than ‘au­ thor’s copies only,’ and if it is still rejected, that will mean that lyric poetry has been condemned, if not to death, then, in any case, to a long sleep. Be­ sides books of verse, we hope to publish some almanacs. I’d like, if only in Adya’s obituary [Adelaida Gertsyk, Eugenia’s sister, who had died the pre­ vious June and left numerous unpublished poems], to quote some of her poems. I hope the obituary will be allowed. Please—send me . . . some of Adya’s poems, of your choice, but in choosing, keep in mind that ‘religion is opium for the people.’” This passage leaves no doubt that Parnok herself believed that what might be censorable in her collection Music, and what she knew would be unprintable in Adelaida Gertsyk’s work, was the lyrical expression of reli­ gious faith. In the end, Music did pass the censor, albeit with more trouble, and in a smaller print run than the other four volumes of poetry that the Knot submitted for approval with it. Adelaida Gertsyk’s religious poetry was unpublishable, and her more secular lyrics could only appear in print as quotations in her obituary. Parnok called the poetry in Music “blameless,” an adjective Russians use regularly to describe, among other things, “normal,” opposite-sex (as opposed to same-sex) sexual relationships and conduct. In selecting poems for Music, however, Parnok appeared not to have been guided by the greater or lesser lesbian erotic suggestiveness of individual lyrics. While she did not include several fine, fairly explicit, lesbian love poems (such as “To­ day I do not want you, Memory” [No. 104], “Shade from the windmill” [No. 114], “Every evening I pray / God, to let me dream of you” [No. 122]), Music, as published, contains a number of equally, if not more erotic les­ bian lyrics, such as “The flower droops on its slender stalk” (142), “Not pas­ sion’s bed is sacred” (145), “If you should murmur in your sleep” (146), and “How am I worthy of this, my God?” (151). Clearly, Parnok’s love lyrics in Music were not objectionable to the censorship on pornographic grounds, 40

Sophia Pamok and Soviet-Russian Censorship, 1922-1933 nor did the scattered references to “God” trouble anyone. GLAVLIT ap­ parently agreed with Parnok that Music was “blameless,” which only en­ hances the strangeness of the poet’s conviction, as expressed in her previously cited June 1926 letter to Gertsyk, that a voice like hers in Music was already “unlawful.” Parnok was the unofficial head of the Knot. Although all members of the cooperative’s governing board had equal power in voting decisions of the board, Parnok evidently was prima inter pares in determining from which poets the Knot would solicit work, and whom it would publish. Throughout its short life, the artel was plagued by the members’ petty quarrels, pas­ sions, and jealousies as much as by the censor. Still, after publishing its first series of fourteen books of verse, it earned the respect of its small circle of readers, and, to Parnoks astonishment, even turned a small profit. The Knot had no dearth of prospective submissions, in part because it offered a unique publishing opportunity for poets at a time when, as Pamok wrote to Voloshin in May 1926, “no one is publishing poets, not even very timely ones.” The censorship waxed and waned almost whimsi­ cally during the two years of the Knots existence. While in the spring and summer of 1926 Pamok actively solicited manuscripts from well-known po­ ets like Voloshin and Mikhail Kuzmin, hoping to publish them in the Knot’s fall series, when September came those hopes were much dimmer. “After a certain easing,” Pamok informed Voloshin, “the censorship is again mount­ ing a savage attack.” Just about a year later, Trotsky was purged, and the Party intensified its campaign “to proletarianize” culture. The continued existence of all semiautonomous literary organizations and publishing ventures was threat­ ened. When the central committee of the Communist Party passed its res­ olutions on culture at the end of 1927 and the beginning of 1928, Parnok and her colleagues on the governing board of the Knot realized that their cooperative would be shut down. In fact, Parnok had foreseen the end dur­ ing the previous summer. “Judging by the newspapers,” she wrote to her colleague and friend Sophia Fedorchenko, “it won’t be possible to publish poetry anymore; the days of the Knot are numbered” (letter of July 12, 1927). After the Knot’s demise, Parnok was convinced that the chances for publishing her poetry would be nil because “it wasn’t a time for poetry” (let­ ter to Fedorchenko, July 12, 1927). Pamok’s last and most energetic battle with the censorship was waged not for publication of her lyrics—she, in fact, stopped writing poetry en­ tirely from late 1929 to the fall of 1931—but in defense of her and Alexan­ der Spendiarov’s opera, Almost, the orchestration of which was completed, after Spendiarov’s death in 1928, by his (and Pamok’s) friend and colleague, Maximilian Shteinberg. For about a year, Parnok, who was already seriously ill, devoted all the energy she could muster, and all the time she could take 41

Diana Lewis Burgin

away from the team-translating jobs she took to support herself, to the bat­ tle to get Almast produced at the Bolshoi Theater. Her campaign for Almast’s right to existence began in 1929 when she spoke at the first meeting of the Bolshoi’s Artistic-Political Committee, which had only recently been established at the theater. The Bolshoi’s director at that time, Burdikov, had initiated a politi­ cally inspired program to bring the Bolshoi’s productions closer to a socalled mass audience. Such productions were supposed to actualize the “socialist construction of culture” and respond artistically to the “ideologi­ cal demands of contemporary life.” This mandate, which anticipated the forthcoming socialist realist ethic requiring that every artistic endeavor “fit the teleology of revolution and ideal communist development” (Forrester, 1996, 34), led to various experiments at the Bolshoi, such as contemporary readings of the classics, semiamateur directorial endeavors, and a concerted effort to undermine the art of classical ballet. Almast was based on an obscure event in eighteenth-century Arme­ nian history that involved the betrayal of her country and husband (Prince Tatul) to the enemy Persians by the Armenian princess Almast, who was then executed for treason. The text of the opera was obviously irrelevant to contemporary Soviet life and the proletariats revolutionary struggle. Par­ nok admitted as much in her speech to the Artistic-Political Committee, saying that despite the opera’s not responding to the “ideological demands of contemporary life,” it “still had a right to exist” because it “acquaints the broad masses with the richness of popular melodies from the Soviet East” and “represents a rare example in opera literature of unity between verbal and musical texts” (Parnok, “Introduction to Almast”). In my 1994 biography of Parnok, I have written a detailed, docu­ mented account of her torturous and bittersweet campaign to get Almast produced despite its “untimely subject.” Bitter because of the toll the effort took on Pamok mentally and physically; sweet because her gargantuan struggle was crowned with success. The premiere on June 23, 1930 had a stunning popular success and Parnok enjoyed a rare moment of public recognition when the audience insistently called for her to take a bow as the author of Almast. Here, in order to avoid repetition, I shall limit myself to a mention of those moments in Parnok’s effort on behalf of the work she fondly called her “brainchild” that especially illuminate the workings of early Stalinist censorship and Pamoks responses to (and around) it. Shortly after hearing Pamoks speech and reading the libretto of the opera, the Artistic-Political Committee commanded her to write a Communist-oriented prologue and epilogue to the opera in order to justify its non-Communist contents. Though repelled by this command, Parnok did write a prologue and epilogue, which, despite time-consuming “tinker­ ing with lines not composed of [her] own free will,” yielded a text “not at all 42

Sophia Pamok and Soviet-Russian Censorship, 1922-1933

to [her] liking.” Writing to Shteinberg, Parnok explained why she had car­ ried out the committee s directive: “On my execution of that command de­ pended the fate of the whole opera, whose untimely subject required the most vigorous defense” (letter of September 22, 1929). Without implying any criticism of Parnok in agreeing to write something “not of [her] own free will,” we still must note that her stated reason for doing so reflects es­ sentially the same “ends-justify-the-means” rationale that was used by So­ viet power to justify some of its worst abuses. As if to drive home the irony of using censorial firepower to fight the censor, four months before the scheduled premiere of Almost, a newly formed Artistic-Political Committee at the Bolshoi listened to the opera’s libretto and decided to remove Parnok’s “Communist” prologue and epi­ logue on the grounds that they represented a politically illiterate text which muddied any class message. The secretary of the committee was directed to write a new prologue and epilogue to replace Parnok’s despite the fact that he was neither a poet nor a musician. This blatant political interference in Parnok’s work upset her so much that she refused to take any part in the composition of the new prologue and epilogue. Instead, she turned to the well-known director Vsevolod Meyerhold who happened to be a member of the Artistic-Political Committee. Evidently, Meyerholds personal interces­ sion saved the opera and enabled the first performance to take place on schedule. In the end, Almost was performed without any prologue and epi­ logue, which, even more ironically, Parnok had by then decided was detri­ mental to it, not only politically, but artistically: “I still think,” she wrote to Shteinberg, “that we need a prologue and epilogue, not only as a Soviet passport, but artistically as well because I think Alexander Afanasevich [Spendiarov] originally intended to compose a prologue and epilogue in or­ der to create a framework for the opera and therefore, he did not begin it with a real beginning and did not end it with enough pizzazz, which remains an artistic flaw” (letter of June 29, 1930). After the premiere, word of the opera’s stunning success with the au­ dience spread quickly. A director from Soviet Georgia visited Parnok and told her there was a desire to mount a production of Almost in Tiflis. The Georgian producers, however, insisted that the opera be “brought up to date”: Almast, the eighteenth-centuiy Armenian princess, was to be trans­ formed into a “totally positive” proletarian woman who would betray both the “feudalistic lords” in her life, her husband, and her lover (the Persian shah), whom she detested equally. Parnok’s response to the Georgian direc­ tor shows her emphatic lack of support for such a “vile proposal,” whose means were so self-desecrating that they clearly would destroy the end they were supposed to effect: “I often have reason to regret,” Parnok wrote to Shteinberg after the Georgian director’s visit, “that we still have not com­ pletely freed ourselves from certain petty bourgeois prejudices and do not 43

Diana Lewis Burgin

consider it acceptable for women, upon hearing such a vile proposal, to send the people who make them straight to where any man would send them” (letter of June 29, 1930). The premiere of Almast took place at the very end of the Bolshoi’s 1929 to 1930 season. After the second performance, on June 26, which was attended by all the top Party officials, including, perhaps, Stalin himself, the theater closed for the summer. The first reviews of the opera were not nearly so positive as the audience’s response at the first two performances. On June 28,1930, for example, the following headline appeared in Evening Moscow: yet another tsar-loving opera (“almast” at the bolshoi). The brief re­ view denounced Almast for its “nationalism, chauvinism, and monarchism.” Neverthless, the opera was staged several times at the beginning of the 1930 to 1931 season, and ticket sales for all performances were brisk. Then, in October, the lead singer, Maria Maksakova, left the role of Almast and was replaced by a singer whose “vulgar and unbridled” interpretation, in Pamok’s opinion, ruined the whole production. For this, or some other, more political reason, Almast soon ceased to be performed at the Bolshoi and was not revived until many years after Parnoks death. In 1939, Vera Zviagintseva, a poet and actress who had been Parnoks friend and trusted confidante during the poet’s last years, republished the libretto of Almast in her own significantly changed and artistically inferior version. It was Zvia­ gintseva’s version that reentered the Bolshoi’s repertory. PARNOK’S LYRICAL RESPONSE TO THE SILENCING OF HER VOICE

The impossibility of publishing her poetry obviously had a deleterious ef­ fect on Parnoks financial situation, making it difficult for her to earn a liv­ ing, reducing her to penury, and possibly undermining further her already precarious physical and mental health, which hastened her early death. At the same time, the official censorship neither forced her to compromise her artistic integrity nor destroyed her art. On the contrary, judging by her late lyrics, both those published in her last book, Halfvoiced (1928), which was virtually censored since it was approved for printing only in 200 numbered author’s copies, and the poems she wrote from 1928 to 1933 for her secret drawer (about 100 lyrics), one can argue that Pamok actually turned the of­ ficial censoring of a voice like hers (however one interprets what she meant by that) to creative advantage. First, and perhaps most important, the cen­ soring of Parnoks lyrics and her resulting invisibility in Soviet poetry and isolation from a readership, became a major theme in the poems she wrote from 1925 till the end of her life. In other words, the censorship did not cause Pamok to expire creatively, it inspired her to continue creating, if only “halfvoicedly.” Clearly the title of her last published collection had 44

Sophia Pamok and Soviet-Russian Censorship, 1922-1933

symbolic resonance for her existential and creative status as a censored lyric poet in Soviet Russia. There is no better evidence of the central, tragic irony of the censor­ ship’s ambivalent impact on Pamoks creativity than the following poem, written on May 12, 1927, and published in Halfvoiced: I dreamt: I’m wandering in the dark, My eyes have gotten used to darkness. And then—light. A Caucasian inn. Guttural chatter. Drunken shouting.

I enter. Sit. And no one at The neighboring tables turned to notice. An old Lezghin is pouring wine Lethargically from a wineskin. Now he directs his gaze at me. (His pupil, like a cats, is narrowed.) I say to him emphatically: “Innkeeper! What’ve you got for supper?”

My voice gets louder till I shout, But clearly, no one there can hear it: The old man does not raise a brow,— He yawns, and goes out to the kitchen. I’m scared. And I can’t comprehend: These people here, with me, around me, These people—all the young ones—why, Why can’t they hear my urgent outcry?

And why is no one looking at The bench and table where I’m sitting As if they’re empty? ... I get up, I wave my arms, begin protesting— And right away I think: “Well then? So I’m invisible, is that it? As such a woman, where’ll I go?” And weary, I approach the window . . . Before the break of day there’s such Exalted silence in the mountains! And a drunk looks through me, out The window—and he says: “It’s morning . . .” (189) In this poem Parnok confronts the two realities of her creative life as a lyric poet (and, possibly, as a lesbian-outsider poet) in Soviet Russia: in­ audibility and invisibility. Outwardly, the poem narrates the poet-dreamer’s 45

Diana Lewis Burgin

nightmare of discovering her own invisibility, a discovery that frightens and confounds her because her invisibility separates her from everyone else in the dream space or interior, a Caucasian mountain inn (dukhan) and pub­ lic place. One can read the specifically Caucasian references and lexicon in the poem—the mountain inn and the Lezghin innkeeper who pours wine from a Caucasian wineskin—as allegorical allusions to the Georgian “moun­ taineer” (as Mandelshtam would later name him), that is, the Caucasian, non-Russian Stalin and the “inn of Soviet poetry” he keeps. The fact that the mountain inn in Parnok’s poem is populated with drunks and melan­ cholics only supports our allegorical interpretation. After the tragic suicide of the so-called peasant poet Sergei Esenin in December 1925, which hit Parnok and other writers very hard, Parnok noted in a letter to Gertsyk that many people had taken to the bottle in or­ der to drink themselves into oblivion. The poet-dreamer’s sudden perception of herself in No. 189 as an in­ visible woman (nevidimka) in the public house suggests the magical trans­ formation worked in Russian fairy tales by the hero’s donning the so-called invisibility cap (shapka nevidimka). In fairy tales, however, the invisibility cap always proves useful to the wearer, whereas in Parnok’s too-real lyrical nightmare, the poet perceives her invisibility and inaudibility ambivalently. As far as the innkeeper and other customers in the dream inn are concerned, the poet-dreamer is a nonpresence, an unheard voice, who has been cen­ sored out of their visual and auditory reality. Initially, her invisibility seems wholly disadvantageous to the poet: she is frightened and wonders where she can, or will, go “as such a woman”? She makes a first weary move to­ ward the window, a symbolic gesture that expresses her desire to escape from the confining, noisy inside space where she feels like an utter outsider. The potential for spiritual, if not actual, escape is realized by the poet in the final stanza, which implies that the only destination for “such a woman” poet as she, is far outside the inn (of Soviet poetry) in the isolated, un­ bounded natural space of exalted, rather than stigmatizing, silence, “the ex­ alted silence in the mountains.” Scores of lyrics in Parnok’s opus were inspired, like No. 189, by the of­ ficial Soviet inattention to and eventual “outlawing” of her (the poet’s) voice. In these poems we read Parnok’s hurt, outraged, yet resigned and ul­ timately creative response to censorship:

Silence is my only confidante. My mournful voice is dear to none. (159, October 3, 1925)

I’ve come out on stage inopportunely And feel the way my weary lips

46

Sophia Pamok and Soviet-Russian Censorship, 1922-1933 Are formulating an untimely Luxuriantly mournful line. (166, March 1, 1926)

The quiet word works magic, Convoking secret dreams. (202, March 17, 1926) From an ultimate loneliness With a farewell plea,—not a prophecy I call to you, young friends: (192, February 8, 1927)

We sank in a chair at twilight— Anguish and I, alone. (186, April 25, 1927) Every pine tree—can rustle to its grove, Well, and whom am I—to give my news? (219, April 11, 1929) I do not intend to leave my Useless goods [poems] to anyone. So I’m polishing the crystal And the silver just for one.

And my icon lamp is burning, Getting rosy from inside . . . Well, and all of you who spurn it, From my feast just hide your eyes. (224, October 12-23, 1931) Well, then, my life—creating verse, Whom I breathe, in whom I live, Fly into the darkness, into the void, Or simply, into the secret drawer! (225, October 26, 1931) For them, for those great grandsons— For those whom I shall never meet, Here is this, my own unlawful, My orphaned and unsheltered song. (229, November 19, 1931)

The lines and stanzas quoted above demonstrate that Parnok survived the censorship s attempt to silence a voice like hers by continuing to write and taking the long view on her momentary inaudibility to Russian poetry

47

Diana Lewis Burgin

lovers. She put faith in the longness of art compared to the brevity of her own life. Her faith enabled her to understand the relative brevity of the So­ viet era in the enduring life of Russian poetry. In addition to becoming an inspirational theme in her poems, writing for the secret drawer appears to have liberated Parnok entirely from the self-censorship she had imposed during her whole creative life, both before and after the 1917 Revolution, on her specifically lesbian creativity, that is, her love lyrics (which constitute about one third of her known poetic “pro­ duce”). This emancipation of her lyrical libido, so to speak, resulted in the writing of her greatest and most straightforwardly erotic love poetry, the 1932 to 1933 cycles Ursa Major and Useless Goods. The fact that Pamok named the latter cycle, a veritable lyrical diary of her last passionate love af­ fair with the Moscow physicist, Nina Vedeneyeva, with the metaphoric phrase “useless goods” (nenuzhnoe dobro}, which she had created in an ear­ lier poem (224) to define the status and oxymoronic value of her poems in the Soviet antipoetic economy, shows how closely her “secret-drawer” lyri­ cism was wedded to her lesbian sexuality. In the end, both Parnoks poems and the love (for Vedeneyeva) that inspired them, were “useless goods” in a society where lyric poetry and fe­ male same-sex love were unspeakable, and the latter “perversion,” at least officially, unimaginable. By the thirties, Soviet power had decreed the elim­ ination and consequent nonexistence among the “new Soviet people” of such decadent bourgeois social problems as women’s inequality, and of such women as prostitutes and perverts (lesbians). Although neither lyricism nor lesbianism were illegal by the letter of Soviet law, both were unlawful by its spirit. In the first poem of the cycle Useless Goods Parnok writes to her lover, Vedeneyeva, of her doubly—lyrically and amorously—useless goods:

Yes, you’re greedy, deaf-mute woman, You’re greedy, Adam s rib! Why pick up, without accepting, These goods you do not need? What use to you is all this produce— This thundering play of elements, The rapid heartbeat of a poet, Her verse in all its shagginess? (239)

Parnoks poems to Vedeneyeva represent a creative and political (in a broader sense than the Russians typically give the word) act that lends new meaning to the lyricism of double entendre, the art of which became Parnoks most inspired response to the official and unofficial censorship of her poetiy, especially her lesbian poetry. A more politically pointed use of double entendre occurs in one of the poems in the first cycle to Ve48

Sophia Pamok and Soviet-Russian Censorship, 1922-1933 deneyeva, Ursa Major. Using the occasion of her and Vedeneyevas first kiss, Parnok plays on the incongruousness of her most desired, privately planned economy of “forbidden” love at last coming to fruition deep inside the hated, centrally planned economy of Stalin s First Five-Year Plan:

Your eyes are wide open, your mouth clamped shut. And I feel like shouting at you rudely: “You senseless woman you! The other way about Shut, shut your eyes, open your lips to me!”

Yes, that’s the way, tormentress ... At long last! . . . Let us not make haste in vain. Leave rushing to the callow youth, In a kiss, I like the Five-Year Plan! (234) The implicit comparison in the last two lines of this poem of Stalin’s FiveYear Plan to a callow youth’s premature ejaculation represents a particularly delightful bit of condescension to the censoring authority on the part of the censored lesbian poet. Their double entendres notwithstanding, Pamoks poems to Vede­ neyeva constitute the most honest, unadorned lyrical expressions of one womans desire and love for another that can be found in the Russian lan­ guage and in Russian poetry up to and including our present post-Soviet times. In this sense, a voice like Pamoks has been, and is, unique in Rus­ sian literature. But the question remains: Was her lesbian voice “unlawful,” and in what sense? The role of Parnok’s lesbianism in determining her fate as a poet un­ der Soviet censorship is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to assess accu­ rately. Was the official ban on her poetry simply an example of the Soviet era’s (and Communist leaderships) hostility to lyric poetry, as Parnok her­ self seemed to have believed? If she had tried to publish lesbian love lyrics like the Vedeneyeva poems in a volume like Music, would it have passed the censor? To what degree, if at all, did Pamok censor her specifically lesbian creativity in the years when she still had some hope of publishing her work? Finally, what role, if any, did Parnok’s open lesbian way of life play in the of­ ficial censorship of her poems and in her contemporaries’ deafness to her voice? There are no ready or documentable answers to any of these ques­ tions, all of which most likely confounded Parnok herself, if she even raised them to herself. As I have argued in much of my work on Pamok, I believe, albeit without material evidence beyond Parnok’s lyrics, that she suffered a par­ ticularly intense isolation in her poetic culture because she was a lesbian poet, or maybe, because she was an “untimely” lyric poet who was also, obviously, a lesbian. As she herself puts it in “Prologue,” passersby closed 49

Diana Lewis Burgin

their ears to her voice in part because she “dared to say out loud” what people “hide, even from themselves.” Parnok’s isolation from her poet­ contemporaries and readers of her own time came about not wholly as a consequence of the official censoring organs, but also as the result of Soviet citizens’ unacknowledged desire not to hear her. There can be no doubt that Parnok suffered more from this unofficial denial of the existence of a woman like her and a voice like hers than from any official denial of her right to creative existence. It is difficult to prove the prohibition of what is deemed by the pro­ hibitionists not to exist, to document the silencing of words the silencers dare not name. Yet, as the history of lesbian writing in other cultures amply demonstrates, just because lesbian writers cannot be proved to have been censored for their lesbianism does not mean that they were not effectively shunned and silenced by their censorious societies. The most eloquent testimony to the unofficial censorship of, or simple refusal to hear, Parnok’s voice in her own lifetime comes from responses to her and her openly lesbian poems in Russia today. Stalinist and post-Stalinist, Soviet censorship are gone, but the tacit censorship of Parnok continues in force, as can be seen in the fact that veiy few Russians have read her, or even know who she is. The publication of Parnok’s Collected Poems in Rus­ sia will, one hopes, make her and her poetry better known. Yet, in this au­ thor’s experience, Russian readers who do know Parnok and even like her poems, generally want to avoid discussion of her sexuality while simultane­ ously registering visible consternation at it. I have often wondered if such readers do not wish, at least subconsciously, that the Soviet censorship had been more effective in destroying Parnok’s more overtly “blameworthy” lyrical legacy so that the “blameless” portion could endure more blamelessly. At the same time, the response to Parnok by today’s homophobic Russian readers illustrates, in one more way, the failure of Stalinist censors to silence even the most individualistic and nonconformist of Russian lyric voices. The Soviet censors were bureaucrats, but they were also, in a more basic sense, readers, albeit prejudiced, soulless, and narrowly politicized ones. As readers, they approved or disapproved poems for publication ac­ cording to increasingly inflexible “laws” that specified what was publishable. Like the majority of Soviet Russian readers, both good and bad, fair and un­ fair, pro-Soviet and anti-Soviet, the censors probably held to the traditional Russian cultural conviction that a poet’s private life and personal tastes, ten­ dencies, and predilections (of which sexual orientation was [and is] clearly one) were simply not relevant to her poetry. Therefore, a poet’s private life was also irrelevant to the Soviet artist’s main task, as mandated by the Party, to respond to the ideological demands of socialist cultural construction in the contemporary moment.

50

Sophia Pamok and Soviet-Russian Censorship, 1922-1933

By comparison with Parnoks extremely personal, even idiosyncratic, treatment of love in her poems (as her censors read them), her expression of religious faith in an officially atheist state, and her lugubrious tone of voice in an officially “more cheerful” era, must have had a recognizable po­ litical dimension, lacking in her love lyrics, that was clearly apparent to cen­ sors trained to read for it and disallow it in printed form. Therefore, Parnok was censored officially for her religiosity and pessimism. Her lyrical ex­ pressions of female same-sex desire and love passed the censorship most probably because they were construed by the censors as part of Parnoks general preoccupation with personal themes, which, initially, were consid­ ered too unimportant to be censored. (The same devaluation of any politi­ cal aspect to the personal informs post-Soviet attitudes to American-style identity politics and explains why such politics have not taken hold in to­ day’s Russia). By 1927 to 1928, when poets were no longer to be permitted the luxury of writing purely personal lyrics for publication, Parnok, like most lyric poets, was forced to write for her secret drawer. Writing for the secret drawer, however, was a highly respected voca­ tion under Soviet power, far more respected, by the intelligentsia, at least, than writing for GOSIZDAT. Most silenced poets, we repeat, had no dearth of “secret” readers. Yet Parnok, as we have seen, felt that no one around her could hear her, that her voice was dear to none, that her song was not merely unlawful but orphaned and outcast, that her only confidante was si­ lence. In this author’s opinion, the reason Parnok felt so alone as a poet was that her secret drawer was in a lesbian desk. On a recent trip to St. Petersburg (in January 1998), an older RussianJewish friend of mine, a former lawyer who survived Soviet power and greeted its demise and the end of censorship with enthusiasm, happened to read one of Parnoks more blatantly erotic lesbian love poems in the context of my distinctly “blameworthy” interpretation of it. After criticizing me for making too much of Pamok’s lesbianism, she added, with almost involun­ tary astonishment at the love lyric in question, “And how could a poem like that have been published?!” evidently blamelessly unconscious of the pal­ pable irony in her potentially censorious exclamatory judgment. Here is how I would reply to my Russian friend’s astonished query. A poem “like that” could be published for the same reason, I imagine, that Pamok realized a voice “like hers” was not only officially, but existentially, unlawful, not only because such a voice was outside the whole Soviet so­ cialist legality but also because it was outside the whole Soviet and Russian cultural tradition of poetic legitimacy. As an acquaintance, an émigré and new American, remarked in Russian and sotto voce after reading (eagerly) part of my biography of Parnok in the Russian edition: “Yes, she’s interest­ ing. I respect her. But the farther away she stays from me, the better.”

51

Diana Lewis Burgin

Note Poems by Sophia Pamok quoted in this essay are cited from the Russian texts in S. Poliakovas edition of Parnok’s Collected Poems and are refer­ enced by the number they are given in that edition. All English translations of Russian poetry and prose that are used in this essay are the authors.

Bibliography Burgin, Diana Lewis. Sophia Parnok. The Life and Work of Russia’s Sap­ pho. New York: New York University Press, 1994. Efron, Ariadna. “Stranitsy vospominanii” (“Pages from Memoirs”), Vospominaniia о Marine Tsvetaevoi, Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1992,143-250. Ermolaev, Herman. Censorship in Soviet Literature 1917-1991. New York and London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997. Forrester, Sibelan, “Reading for a Self: Self-Definition and Female Ances­ try in Three Russian Poems,” The Russian Review 55 (January 1996). Goriaeva, T. M. “Sovetskaia politicheskaia tsenzura” (“Soviet Political Cen­ sorship”), Iskliuchit’ vsiakie upominaniia . . . Ocherki istorii sovetskoi tsenzury. Moscow: Vremia i mesto, 1995. Parnok, Sofiia. “Pis’ma E. K. Gertsyk” (“Letters to E. K. Gertsyk”). DeVisu, no. 5/6 (14) (1994). Edited and annotated by T. N. Zhukovskaia and E. B. Korkina, 11-47. --------- . Sobranie stikhotvorenii (Collected Poems). Introduced, edited, and annotated by S. Poliakova. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1979. UNPUBLISHED ARCHIVAL SOURCES CITED

Fedorchenko, S. Z. archive of S. Z. Fedorchenko. Russian State Archives of Literature and Art (RGALI), Moscow, fond 1611, op. 1, ed. khr. 95. Pamok, Sofiia. “Pis’ma к S. Fedorchenko” (“Letters to S. Fedorchenko”). Archive of S. Z. Fedorchenko, Russian State Archives of Literature and Art (RGALI), Moscow, fond 1611, op. 1, ed. khr. 95. --------- . “Pis’ma к Shteinbergu” (“Letters to M. O. Shteinberg”). Shteinburg archive, St. Petersburg Institute of Theater, Music and Cinematog­ raphy, fond 28, G. 617. --------- . “Pis’ma к Voloshinu” (“Letters to M. A. Voloshin”). Archive of M. A. Voloshin, Institute of Russian Literature and Art (IRLI), St. Pe­ tersburg, fond 562, op. 3, ed. khr. 931. --------- . “Vstupitel’noe slovo к opere Spendiarova, Almast” (“Introduction to Spendiarov’s opera, Almast”). Archive of S. Y. Parnok, RGALI, fond 1276, op. 1, ed. khr. 7. 52

J. Alexander Ogden

Overcoming the Destruction of Peasant Russia:

The Epic Impulse in Nikolai Kliuevs Late Poetry

BETWEEN THE LAST substantive appearance of his new work in print (1927) and his execution by the NKVD in October 1937, the “peasant poet” Nikolai Kliuev lived in poverty and isolation, moving from St. Petersburg to Moscow and then, after his arrest in 1934, living in Siberian exile in the Narym village of Kolpashevo and in Tomsk.1 This decade was a stark contrast to the period 1907 to 1917, when Kliuev had been hailed by Blok as “Christ among us,” Briusov had written the intro­ duction for his first collection, and Kliuev had attained fame on tours across the Russian Empire. Even the ten years following the Bolshevik Revolution had significant successes for Kliuev, as he created his own unorthodox po­ etic synthesis of Bolshevik rule, Old Belief, Karelian legend, and sexual ec­ stasy in his collections Lenin and L’vinyi khleb (Lions Bread, 1922).2 But Kliuev continued to write. And this chameleon poet, whose earlier poetry had moved from confessions to stylized folk songs and who throughout his life showed a fascination with masks, remained constant to one role—that of self-appointed mediator between age-old peasant Russia and modem so­ ciety, whether symbolist or Soviet. Confronting collectivization, the de­ struction of religious art, and the eradication of peasant traditions and ways of life along with the eradication of many peasants themselves, Kliuev adopted the role of witness, from a peasant point of view, to the destruction around him. He stood firm in the face of Bolshevik critics who had their own ideas about peasant literature and about whether a specifically peasant approach to art should exist at all.3 In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Kliuev wrote several narrative poems about Russia and its fate, culminating in his mammoth oeuvre “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi” (“Song of the Great Mother,” finished 1931). Taken as a series, these poems can be seen as a conscious attempt to address the cata­ strophic changes taking place in Russia, to document chaos in the country­ side, and to provide a written monument that would preserve a record of vanishing peasant ways. They exhibit an ever-increasing desire to capture 53

J. Alexander Ogden

Nikolai Kliuev in 1931 (photo courtesy of Konstantin Azadovskii)

every aspect of a vanishing rural Russia, and they grow in size to the fourthousand-line “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi.” In this temptation to include every­ thing in order to document, bear witness, and construct a written memorial, Kliuev shows something of the same impulse as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who begins the first tome of his massive Gulag Archipelago by calling it a “monument” and ends the last by saying that, were it not for the laws of 54

Overcoming the Destruction of Peasant Russia

size, his work could have continued to grow forever; there is always more that could be added.4 Other than in size, the “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi” is not one of Kliuevs greatest achievements. It is too long, too rambling, and its images and extended realized conceits often seem contrived or forced com­ pared to their inspired counterparts in some of Kliuevs earlier poemy. But it provides the most developed example of Kliuev’s response in the 1930s to the destruction of a peasant world he had spent his life glorifying, and it demonstrates the role Kliuev assigned to art and the artist when confronted with that destruction. The “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi” and the poems leading up to it demon­ strate Kliuevs pretensions toward the epic. In the urge to create a national epopee of his people, Kliuev was able to draw on influences ranging from the Finnish Kalevala to Longfellows The Song of Hiawatha. At the same time, while reaching out to embrace all of Russia, Kliuev turned increas­ ingly inward, bringing his own life and personality more and more into the poem and enmeshing his own fate with that of his idealized Russia. There is thus a curious tension between the epic impulse and an ever more intru­ sive lyric “I”; correspondingly, Kliuevs method raises a number of questions about the works genre, the role of its creator, and its implied or intended audience. The complex of personal and national issues that Kliuev poured into his “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi” remained central for the poet in his years of exile, influencing his interactions with others and his correspondence from exile with Moscow and Petersburg friends. Kliuevs simple assertion of a peasant identity was more than enough to at­ tract censure from the mid-1920s on, as the hostile attitude of Soviet liter­ ature to the country’s “peasant poets” became increasingly relentless. Many critics felt that there was no place at all in literature for a self-consciously peasant voice. Kliuev compounded his affront by thematizing in his work precisely what Bolshevik critics most frequently denigrated in the writings of prerevolutionary peasant poets: an emphasis on religious belief, an in­ sufficiently masculine stance, and a nostalgia for the old Russia. Boris Arvatov expressed a prevalent opinion when he wrote in 1925 that “the culture of the peasantry can serve only as material for the creative work of other classes, and that in nature there are no uniquely peasant stim­ uli for cultural or, consequently, literary development, since the remains of the past alone cannot become ferment for the future.” Arvatov was not en­ tirely inaccurate in his characterization of Kliuev, Oreshin, and Klychkov as members of the “bourgeois literary profession” who simply brought with them elements of the past from peasant backgrounds. But in his opinion, rather than searching for a peasant literature, “on the contrary it is neces­ sary to use every means to de-peasantize writers from the countryside, cre­ ating in place of peasant literature a proletarian literature for peasants.”5 55

J. Alexander Ogden

Others felt that there was perhaps a place for a specifically peasant voice, but only if it showed stronger allegiance to Soviet rule than to the Russian peasantry. A group formed for such writers, calling itself the AllRussian Union of Peasant Writers (VOKP). One of the primary ways that these writers defined themselves was in contrast to earlier writers from the peasantry, often in explicit contrast to Kliuev or Esenin by name. In the words of one observer, “Young cadres of new, truly peasant poets come to replace the old false peasant poetry.” The new generation advocated “a syn­ thesis of greenery and steel,” and it was seen as Communist and forward­ looking: “These poets accept the new without strain or cracking. They are sons of the revolution. The Civil War tempered them and educated them in a spirit of irreconcilable enmity toward old forms of cultural life. They fill forest and valley with their songs, they smash gods and godlets, calling for decisive changes.”6 The pose taken here is a warlike, forceful, and pointedly confrontational one, in keeping with the persona of the new Soviet man. This exaggeratedly masculine stance contrasts directly with the terms used to describe the “old” peasant poets, who were often seen as weak or feminine. Writing in Pravda thirteen months after Esenins suicide, Nikolai Bukharin saw Esenin as an embodiment of the worst aspects of the Russian village. Bukharin characterized Esenins stance as a flirtatious one and found it especially out of place in the new Soviet era:

If even in earlier times such flirtation was disgusting in its intelligentsia slob­ bering, weakness, lack of will, and pathetic flaccidity, then it becomes simply unbearable in our time, when we need completely different characters—en­ ergetic and strong-willed—rather than trash that should have been dumped in the garbage long ago.7 For Bukharin, Esenin is clearly not “masculine” enough; this half-dandified Russian peasant and the weak, passive, and sickly trend {eseninshchina) that he represents are contrasted with virile, optimistic communism. Bukharin s argument is reminiscent of some of the passages in Vasily Kniazevs booklet Rzhanye apostoly: Kliuev i kliuevshchina {Rye Apostles: Kliuev and Kliuevism, published 1924 but written earlier). Kniazev, too, had expanded from the specific to the general in assigning a name to the phenomenon of “Kliuevism.” And like Bukharin, Kniazev linked the poet under examination with a passive and ineffectual peasantry. He felt that Russia’s peasant farm­ ers needed to escape from the “childhood illnesses” of “outright infant helplessness in the field” and belief in God; Kliuev would never help such farmers accomplish this, so his work must be dismissed.8 In Soviet literature of the period there was thus clearly little place for a peasant voice, which was repeatedly portrayed as weak, childlike, or fem­ inine. Traditional Russian reverence for a sacred maternal force had been almost effaced, as Joanna Hubbs has noted: 56

Overcoming the Destruction of Peasant Russia

The new Soviet woman is created in man s image to meet masculine needs for control over nature. Freed from the authority of husband and father, rep­ resented as comrade to her male partner, she is defined as a worker for the state and is subordinated to the authority of masculine rule. Her fecundity, the ancient source of her power, is harnessed to serve that state and sub­ jected to its regulation.9

For Kliuev, the Bolshevik attitude was an attack on his recurring themes of the maternal and of a sacred, separate, “feminine” world—the peasant “womens kingdom” (Jbab’ia derzhava) of his narrative poem “Mat’-Subbota” (“Mother-Sabbath,” 1922) and, in particular, the world presented in his “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi.” In this largest of his poetic undertakings, Kliuev painted a sad picture of what was becoming of that world: Им [ласточкам] лишь оплакивать дано Резное русское окно И колоколен светлый сон, Где не живет вечерний звон. Окно же с девичьей иголкой Заполыхало комсомолкой, Кумачным смехом и махрой Над гробом матери родной!10 The larks can only mourn the Russian fretwork window and the bright slum­ ber of bell towers where no evening chime is living. The window with its maids sewing blazed up like a Komsomol woman, with calico laughter and cheap tobacco, over her dear mothers coffin.

Along with his larks, Kliuev mourns the passing of old Russia and the cheap­ ening of the Russian feminine beauty he idealizes. His poem strives to re­ cover and redeem both these things, united in the “Great Mother” of the poem’s title who is simultaneously the poet’s own mother and Russia itself. Kliuev built up to the “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi” with a series of narra­ tive poems about the landscape of northern Russia and its peasant inhabi­ tants: “Derevnia” (“The Village,” 1926), “Solovki” (about the Solovetskii island monastery, written between 1926 and 1928), “Zaozer’e” (“Land be­ yond the Lakes,” 1927), and “Pogorel’shchina” (“The Burned Ruins,” 1928). Kliuev came from the Russian North and constantly returned to it both in his verse and, until the late 1920s, in person. As Soviet rule began to destroy the things that Kliuev most valued, however, he became increasingly im­ passioned in the defense of his northern homeland. These earlier poems emphasize the beauty of their northern setting and the native peasants’ connection to nature. In “Solovki,” Kliuev marvels at the “most beautiful Solovetskii island,”11 and he begins “Pogorel’shchina” by depicting the setting for his imaginary village of Sigovyi Lob (also called Sigovets and Velikii Sig) in the midst of a northern wilderness whose forests 57

J. Alexander Ogden

and lakes are populated by reindeer, lynx, and a vast variety of birds and fish.12 The idealized peasant life in “Zaozer’e,” untouched by the modern world, is filled with the Christian festival days marking the Russian peasant year. Father Aleksei presides, an earthy and whimsical man described as a “bright birchbark priest, his beard the yellow tint of grouse, and his hair a sheaf of grain” (2, 311). Kliuev embeds Father Aleksei into a peasant cos­ mos in which festivals gain their significance at least as much from their as­ sociations with crops, livestock, and the natural world as from the particular saints’ days that they mark. Similarly, the inhabitants of Sigovyi Lob are truly at one with nature: Pavel the icon-painter, for example, has “ошупь и глаз нерпячий” (“а ringed seal’s sense of feel and sight” [2, 330]). Everything about Pavel’s icons comes directly out of nature, still alive. Wood, taken from the heart of a pine tree, “is, for an icon-painter, like a honeycomb”; the spirit of the for­ est hums beelike in the piney sinews of the wood. Every painted feature is linked by Kliuev to its inspiration (or actual pigment or brush source):

«Виденье Лица» богомазы берут То с хвойных потемок, где теплится трут, То с глуби озер, где ткачиха-луна За кросном янтарным грустит у окна. Егорию с селезня пишется конь, Миколе—с крещатого клена фелонь, Успение—с перышек горлиц в дупле, Когда молотьба и покой на селе. Распятие—с редьки: как гвозди креста, Так редечный сок опаляет уста. (2, 330) Icon-painters take the “Vision of the Face” sometimes from piney shadows where tinder flickers, sometimes from lake-depths, where weaver-moon mourns by the window behind a loom of amber. A horse for Egorii is painted from a drake, Mikola’s robe from a christened maple, the Dormition from the featherlets of a turtle-dove in a tree’s hollow, at a time of threshing and peace in the village. The crucifixion comes from a radish: radish juice singes the lips like the nails of the cross. In “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi” Kliuev goes even further with the glorifi­ cation of the northern landscape and the linking of people to nature. The world is shown teeming with birds, animals, and heroic Russian peasants, and it is governed by the ancient cycles of the agricultural calendar. Kliuev’s opening sets the scene:

Эти гусли—глубь Онега, Плеск волны палеостровской, В час, как лунная телега С грузом жемчуга и воска 58

Overcoming the Destruction of Peasant Russia Проезжает зыбью доской, И томит лесная нега Ель с карельскою березкой.

(4)

This folk harp is the Onega deep, the splash of Paleostrov waves at the hour when the lunar cart, with its load of pearl and wax, passes by like a lustrous ripple, and the forests languor wearies fir tree and Karelian birch. The nighttime landscape here is the magical one of a fairy tale. The locale is the Onega region, Kliuevs own homeland. Kliuevs characterization of the moon as a cart shows the persistent peasantization of the universe that is typical of his poetry. The inhabitants of this fairy-tale world are suitably larger than life: it is a land of heroes, where the poet s father is described as a bogatyr’, and mythical creatures such as a Sirin hide behind the stove. Kliuev brings in the legendary and historical heroes and martyrs of the Old Believers as well as the legends and traditions of the Lapps and other non­ Russian peoples of the north.13 Kliuev is particularly persistent in weaving peasant life into the nat­ ural world. As in the earlier poems, Kliuev introduces a cast of characters from village life, whose expertise, power, and charm come directly from na­ ture: Akim Ziabletsov and his fellow master woodworkers “learned the or­ der of house-beams from the cedars, tree-felling from the waterdrop that hollows out stone, porch decoration from white willows” (7). Given this closeness to nature, it is not surprising that such people are often charac­ terized with natural imagery: a hefty peasant lad dances “first like a polar fox in snows, then like a stately elk in mosses” (14). Just as people take on the features of the natural world, nature and the entire peasant world literally come to life, as animals and details of the peasant household become animated. Long stretches of the poem are made up of dialogue between objects: a homespun coat carries on a whispered gossip session with a pair of boots (8), and some sbiten (honey mead) tries to get a meat pie to hurry up (13). In his attempt to capture Russian peasant life as a whole, Kliuev ex­ hibits conscious pretensions toward the epic. Kliuev once described himself as “a Longfellow from Olonets,” and he shares Longfellows impulse seen in The Song of Hiawatha to create a work that would encapsulate a vanishing tradition. As Longfellow described his plan in a diary entry, “I have at length hit upon a plan for a poem on the American Indians, which seems to me the right one and the only. It is to weave together their beautiful tradi­ tions into a whole. I have hit upon a measure, too, which I think the right and only one for such a theme.”14 Kliuev similarly reveals a desire to cap­ ture as much as possible of the peasant life of the Russian North and to weave these traditions into a whole, and the structure that he uses to do so 59

J. Alexander Ogden

in “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi” is also similar. Both works are packed with an abundance of both natural and ethnographic details, and both trace the growth from childhood to adulthood of a hero who is immersed in his nat­ ural setting. The opening lines of Kliuev’s work quoted above are reminis­ cent of Longfellow not only in their trochaic tetrameter but also in their awareness of the sweep of the natural setting. While Kliuev knew of Longfellow’s work, the two also shared a com­ mon literary inspiration: the Finnish national epic Kalevala, compiled from various parts of the oral tradition by the philologist Elias Lonnrott in the 1830s and 1840s. Longfellow had been reading the Kalevala a few days be­ fore he wrote the diary entry above, and in fact he had to defend himself from critics who felt that he had used the Kalevala not just as the inspira­ tion for Hiawatha but as the source of many of its incidents as well.15 Kli­ uev was well versed in the Kalevala and referred to it frequently in his verse of the Soviet period. Many of his later works show a particular fascination with the Finnic peoples of the Russian north, as already noted in the case of “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi.” What all three of these works share, in addition to stylistic features and the fact that they all relate the coming-of-age stories of their heroes, is an urgent awareness of the need to preserve a tradition in the face of im­ minent destruction. The Kalevala, while based on ancient oral sources, was only compiled as a coherent work in the nineteenth century, when the oral tradition was being threatened and at the same time a growing sense of na­ tional uniqueness and identity made it attractive to capture these traits in a national epic. Longfellow drew on the work of American ethnographers who were documenting a native tradition before it vanished. Kliuev’s “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi” stems from the same motivation, but in his work the forces of destruction become a part of his narrative and are given a vivid de­ piction within the poem. In “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi” as well as the narrative poems that pre­ ceded it, Kliuev’s ideal Russia is under attack, threatened not only by mod­ em life in general, but specifically by the horrors of revolution, civil war, and Soviet policies in the countryside. Sometimes Kliuev only implies the danger. In “Solovki,” for example, he does not explicitly deal with the noto­ rious island prison camp set up there by the Bolsheviks, but simply laments the loss of the monastery, symbolized by the disappearance of Christ and the Mother-of-God from the frozen lakes and fields. In “Zaozer’e,” nothing encroaches on the idyllic peasant life portrayed, and it is only when the reader juxtaposes this life to the actual state of the countryside when the poem was written that its particular poignancy and fragility become clear. In “Derevnia,” “Pogorel’shchina,” and the “Pesn’,” however, Kliuev directly confronts the challenge of Bolshevik steel and the other forces wreaking de­ struction; the continued existence of village life is at stake. In “Derevnia,” 60

Overcoming the Destruction of Peasant Russia

after all the horrors of war and starvation (“we were steeped in blood to the belly” [2, 326]), now the tractor has come to town, with dire results. In one of several impassioned apostrophes to Russia, Kliuev declaims in despair: Ты Рассея, Рассея теща, Насолила ты лихо во щи, Намаслила кровушкой кашу— Насытишь утробу нашу! Мы сыты, мать, до печенок (2, 328) You, Mother-in-Law-Russia, salted our soup with evil and buttered our kasha with blood; you will fill up our belly! We’re full, mother, to the fiver! In “Pogorel’shchina,” Sigovii Lob’s happy fairy tale is suddenly tormented by outside forces. Its inhabitants try to understand what has happened, but they are completely baffled. The poem shares their bafflement in convoluted im­ ages that show only confusion and do little to describe the evil invader; only later is it seen as a dragon, and this description is further defined only toward the poem’s conclusion: Gorynych the serpent “crawls from the west along planks of iron waters” (2, 344). Thus the modern world has encroached in the form of a railroad, representative of all of Soviet Russia’s incursions on village life, and the dire effects of this invasion are felt immediately. The forces of destruction and evil attack precisely those things which Kliuev has shown to be most crucial to a world in balance and at peace: an alive and beautiful natural setting and people’s direct links to that setting in ways both physical and spiritual. In “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi,” the disruption of the natural order is shown to be both local and Russia-wide. In her dy­ ing moments, the poet’s mother is shown evoking the northern landscape and its peasant life; she says she is dying from sorrow and from a black, icy hand, which fumbles its way through all the precious parts of the natural, private, family world:

По перелесицам, озерам, По лазам, пастбищам лосиным, Девичьим прялицам, холстинам, В печи по колобу ржаному, По непоказному, родному, Слезе, молитве, поцелую. (34) Through coppices and lakes, through holes, elk pastures, maids’ spinning, pieces of linen, across the round rye loaf in the stove, through everything pri­ vate and dear—a tear, a prayer, a kiss. Here, then, the threat to the natural surroundings is internalized, and Kli­ uevs idealized mother Parasha cannot bear the blow. 61

J. Alexander Ogden

The extent of nature’s disruption is emphasized in a passage where Kliuev shows that all of Russia is affected; he begins this lament thus:

К нам вести горькие пришли, Что зыбь Арала в мертвой тине, Что редки аисты на Украине, Моздокские не звонки ковыли, И в светлой Саровской пустыне Скрипят подземные рули! (26)

Bitter news came to us, that the Aral’s surge is a dead mire, that storks are rare in Ukraine, that Mozdok feather-grass no longer rings out like a bell, and that underground rudders are creaking in the luminous Sarov wilderness.

The thirty-seven-line passage from “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi” of which these lines are the beginning was also excerpted by Kliuev as a separate poem titled “Song of the Gamaiun,” the first in his cycle Razrukha (Devastation). In that form it was preserved as an appendix to the record of the poet’s inter­ rogation by the NKVD in February 1934, where it served to demonstrate Kliuev’s anti-Soviet attitudes.16 As seen above, Kliuev sees people’s direct connection to the natural world as urgently necessary; in the new Soviet era, that connection is being forcibly severed. In Kliuev’s introductory section to “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi,” nature’s imprint on the Russian peasant (typically portrayed by Kliuev in a literal manner) has disappeared. “There is no wiser narod [“folk,” “people”],” Kliuev says, “than the one whose brow is the wintering-place of bluish elk”; now, however, Все пророчества сбылися, И у русского народа Меж бровей не прыщут рыси! Ах, обожжен лик иконный Гарью адских перепутий, И славянских глаз затоны Лось волшебный не замутит! (5)

All prophecies have come to be, and lynx no longer spring between the brows of the Russian narod! O, the icon’s visage is scorched with the smoky haze of hellish cross-roads, and an enchanted elk no longer troubles the backwaters of Slavic eyes! The details of peasant life that are animated and apotheosized by Kliuev desperately need saving, and he hopes that a hero of old, in a helmet of cast gold, will come galloping out of the fog to incinerate the invading Leviathan with the burning, two-fingered cross of the Old Believers (12). Such a fig­ ure would be necessary to rescue the “beamights” and “elk-days”: 62

Overcoming the Destruction of Peasant Russia

И что любимо искони От звезд до крашеной солонки Не обернулось в гать и пни! (12) And so that everything beloved from time immemorial, from the stars to the painted salt-cellar, would not turn into a log-path and stumps. It is, however, too late for such a hero to bring salvation. The transforma­ tion has already taken place, consuming both nature and the peasant way of life: “amidst the eyeless darkness of the swamps there is neither izba (peas­ ant log house) nor dear brothers, only burned stumps and paths made of logs” (12). By the time Kliuev nears the end of the poem, twelve years of Soviet rule have wrought havoc with everything:

Двенадцать лет, как пропасть, гулко страшных, Двенадцать гор, рассеченных на башни, Где колчедан, плитняк да аспид твердый, И тигров ненасытных морды! Они роднятся день от дня И пожирают то коня, То девушку, то храм старинный Иль сад с аллеей лунно-длинной. (41) Twelve years, like an abyss, hollowly horrible, twelve mountains cloven into towers, where there are pyrites, flagstone, and hard slate, and the insatiable maws of tigers! More are bom every day, and they devour now a steed, now a maiden, now an ancient temple or a garden with a long moonlit alley. Throughout his late narrative poems, one of Kliuevs most common means of conveying the effects of the Soviet era on the countryside is through the use of images of absence. As seen above, the Russian narod has lost much of its greatness when its brow is no longer furrowed by lynx or elk; what once was there is now gone. One by one, the beloved figures of Kliuev s peasant universe disappear. While Soviet policies are at fault for in­ troducing new values and scorning old ones, Kliuev also blames the narod itself for so quickly switching allegiance. Life has been turned upside down, and all its joys are now considered wrong:

Индустриальные пороки— Молитва, милостыня, ласка, В повойнике парчевом сказка И песня про снежки пушисты, Что ненавидят коммунисты! (“Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi,” 41)

Industrial vices: prayer, alms, tenderness, a fairy tale in a brocade head dress, and a song about fluffy snowflakes, something Communists hate! 63

J. Alexander Ogden

If, as here, faith and fantasy are no longer valued and are cast aside, then they will be lost forever. Kliuev shows in “Derevnia” how a personified “fairy tale,” like a novice with a kerchief on her brow, silently disappears into the forest gloom, while the house and forest spirits are now just garbage (2, 327). This loss is particularly apparent in the religious sphere: Russia has abandoned its saints, so the saints in turn have departed, leaving the Rus­ sian people without religious protection: “Уж отлетели херувимы / От нив и человечьих гнезд” (“the cherubim have already flown away from grain­ fields and human nesting-places” [“Pesn’,” 30]). Even Egorii (St. George) and Mikola (or Nikola, St. Nicholas), the age-old patrons of the Russian narod, have been spumed:

Безбожие свиной хребет О звезды утренние чешет, И в зыбуны косматый леший Народ развенчанный ведет, Никола наг, Егорий пеший Стоят у китежских ворот! (“Pesn,” 31) Godlessness rubs its porcine spine against the morning stars, and the de­ throned narod leads a shaggy wood-spirit into quagmire; Nikola is naked, Egorii unhorsed, and they stand at the gates of Kitezh!

Just as fairy tale and wood spirits are cast aside when the tractor comes (in “Derevnia”), or the Virgin takes her child and leaves the fields empty (in “Solovki”), at the coming of the railroad Sigovets loses the saints on whom it depends: И с иконы ускакал Егорий,— На божнице змий да сине море!..

Гляньте, детушки, за стол— Он стоит чумаз и гол; Нету Богородицы У пустой застолицы! ("Pogorel’shchina,” 2, 334) And Egorii galloped away from the icon—on the icon-shelf were nothing but a serpent and the blue sea! . . . Look, children, beyond the table: it stands, dirty and naked; there is no Mother-of-God at the empty table! The residents of Sigovets appeal to Mikola to return Egorii to his icon, since he is the defender of their izba paradise. But, in the godless environment of Soviet Russia, Mikola does not come, and Egorii does not return. These images of Egorii from “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi” and “Pogorel’shchina” are in

64

Overcoming the Destruction of Peasant Russia

stark contrast to the one in “Zaozer’e,” where the peasant world is as yet un­ touched by outside interference: А Егорий поморских писем Мчится в киноварь, в звон и жуть, Чтобы к стаду волкам и рысям Замзла метелица путь, Чтоб у баб рожались ребята Пузатей и крепче реп, И на грудах ржаного злата Трепака отплясывал цеп. (2, 312) And a St. Egorii in the Pomorian icon style gallops in cinnabar, ringing and awe, so that the snowstorm will sweep a path to their packs for wolves and lynx, so that peasant women will give birth to children plumper and stronger than turnips, and the flail will dance out a trepak on the piles of rye gold. The prelapsarian world seen in “Zaozer’e” is only a memory in the later po­ ems, where the disappearance of Egorii from his icon leaves behind an aching emptiness, an absence emphasized by the blank spot that remains. These are only a few of the numerous examples of Kliuevs contrasts be­ tween the rich, teeming life of an unspoiled, idyllic folk world and the gray, empty, and dying version of that world once it has been corrupted and de­ stroyed. Again and again Kliuev conveys the miraculous variety and beauty of the surrounding world and shows what happens when outsiders ignore or attack them. It is important to note that, for Kliuev, the roots of the destruction of traditional ways of life go much deeper than the period of Soviet rule. Kli­ uev traces it back at least as far as the medieval Tatar yoke and the in­ ternecine strife in seventeenth-century Russia that led to the Old Believer schism; more than anyone, though, he blames Peter the Great: “К дувану адскому, не к славе, / Ведут Петровские пути! ..” (“Petrine ways lead not to glory but to a hellish, windswept height,” “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi,” 24). The most compelling destructive force in “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi” is not part of the new Bolshevik Russia but rather comes, like Kliuev, from a peasant background. This character is Rasputin. Kliuev’s verse starting in 1916 shows a fascination with Rasputin; it was in that year that Kliuev supposedly read his verse before the Empress and met with Rasputin. No independent confirmation of these meetings exists, and Kliuev was an in­ veterate mythmaker, freely fashioning his autobiography to fit his artistic needs. But whatever the reality, in the image he created of himself and the narrative he forged of his life, these meetings became central for Kliuev, and he played on them again and again throughout the rest of his life.17 In a story recorded by his companion Nikolai Arkhipov and entitled “Gagar’ia 65

J. Alexander Ogden

sud’bina” (“A Loons Fate”), Kliuev recounted these meetings, and further­ more implied that he had known Rasputin since childhood. The encounter did not go well, however, since according to Kliuev Rasputin no longer un­ derstood that “secret folk language about the soul, Christs birth in man, and the Evangelic lily” and finally admitted that he had become a strict Or­ thodox and was no longer a sectarian. “Upon parting,” Kliuev related, “I no longer kissed Rasputin, but bowed to him in the monastery fashion.”18 Rasputin, and especially his dancing and his eroticism, appear fre­ quently in Kliuevs poetry of the years of war and revolution. Later, in his poem “Chetvertyi Rim” (“The Fourth Rome,” 1922), Kliuev takes on the role of Rasputin himself:

Это я плясал перед царским троном В крылатой поддевке и злых сапогах. Это я зловещей совою Влетел в Романовский дом, Чтоб связать возмездье с судьбою Неразрывным красным узлом, Чтоб метлою пурги сибирской Замести истории след ... (2, 302)

It was I who danced before the Tsars throne in a winged peasant cloak and evil boots. It was I who flew into the Romanov house like an ill-boding owl, to tie together revenge and fate with an unbreakable red knot, to sweep up the track of history with the broom of a Siberian snowstorm. In this passage, the storm and the owl, as well as Kliuevs dancing, boots, and fateful role, are all traits which elsewhere the poet used as recurring motifs associated with Rasputin.19 In works from the early years of Soviet rule, when trying to establish his credentials as a friend of the Revolution, Kliuev portrayed himself as part of a force that had consciously worked for the downfall of the old order. In this way he cast himself as an unlikely ally of Rasputin, since for Kliuev Rasputin was a constant symbol of the de­ structive forces that brought down tsarism. A decade later, however, Kliuev firmly aligned himself with Old Russia against Soviet rule, and thus became a mortal foe of Rasputin. In “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi” a major portion of part three (or the “Third Nest,” as Kliuev calls it, borrowing a term from the oral folk poetiy of the Russian North) contains a detailed, mythical elaboration of his per­ formance for the imperial family. The account begins with a trip into the capital by train—already a bad omen, as Kliuevs repeated negative por­ trayals of the railroad make clear. Kliuev is traveling to the capital with other peasants who have been called up for the war, a staunch cast of fish­ ermen, smiths, and others. But a high-ranking officer and his retinue find 66

Overcoming the Destruction of Peasant Russia

Kliuev and one of his fellows extremely amusing, as archetypical peasant types, and decide to assign them to Tsarskoe Selo, because the tsar would find such characters pleasing. The scene Kliuev shows of Tsarskoe Selo is idyllic, and he portrays the tsar as well meaning. But his visit is dominated not by the tsar, but by Ras­ putin. Rasputins power has taken over, and is causing the disintegration which eventually will allow the “red-toothed centaur” of the Revolution to gallop out, since the burden left to the tsarevich is too great to bear: Слишком тяжкая выпала ноша За нечистым брести через гать, Чтобы смог лебеденок Алеша Бородатую адскую лошадь Полудетской рукой обуздать! (38) It came as too heavy a burden to follow behind the evil one through the log­ road, in order for the signet Alesha to be able to keep the bearded hellish horse in check. The poem records a long conversation between Kliuev and Rasputin; the latter patronizes Kliuev as a fellow villager and in his stories makes fun of the tsar and his family. He shows a fascination with drugs and potions, and he makes Kliuev a “brotherly” offer to share an “Asiatic root” with him, which will let him “fly into a group of people like into a beehive, and sting souls with simplicity more sweetly scented than forest bird-cheriy” (39). Kliuev declines, but Rasputin pushes a silver cross containing some of the root into Kliuevs hand, and it has an immediate hallucinogenic effect. A long section following describes the horrible mockery made of the natural order that Kliuev observes while drugged. Rasputin begins to dance with a goat, the garden fills with hordes of bats, horns, wings, and tails. For Kliuev, Rasputins evil influence is comparable to Russia’s op­ pression by the Mongol Hordes. He repeats the image of the “Asiatic root,” this time as a reference to the Tatar yoke: As he fights off the effects of his drugging by Rasputin, Kliuev fights Khan Mamai within his head, just as Grand Prince Dmitry had done on the Kulikovo field. In “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi,” Rasputin thus becomes the embodiment of an age-old force op­ pressing and opposing the free development and flowering of the Russian narod, a force that encompasses both Mongols and Soviets. The space given in “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi” to Kliuev’s interaction with Rasputin, as well as more generally the central roles given to the poet and his mother, raises the issue of the peculiarly individual and personal nature of Kliuev’s epic. While he follows accepted models in portraying the lives of his heroes, he breaks with those models in making himself one of the he­ roes. The tension between Kliuev’s epic pretensions and the encroachment 67

J. Alexander Ogden

of his personality and fictionalized autobiography provides Kliuev with a unique opportunity to enmesh his fate with that of Russia and to create an exalted role for himself as artist, preserver, and prophet. In appearing so prominently within his epic, Kliuev both recasts Rus­ sia’s devastation on a personal scale and inflates his own life to a stature where it can be played out on a mythic and epic plane. National tragedy is directly translated into individual disorientation, since all the elements of the old world necessary for orienting and defining the self are gone: Что сталося co мной и где я? В аду или в когтях у змея, С рожком заливчатым в кости? Как пращуры, я сын двоперстья, Христа баюкаю в ночи, Но на остуженой печи Ни бубенца, ни многоверстья. (12)

What has happened to me, where am I? In hell or in the clutches of a dragon, with its horn in my bone? Like my ancestors, I am a son of the two-fingered Old Believer cross. I sing Christ a lullaby in the night, but on the cooled stove there is no sleigh-bell and no sweeping expanse. Conversely, Kliuev transforms himself into an epic hero, complete with a legendary origin for his name (34) and a role directly entwined with the fate of his country; thus the importance for Kliuev of the Rasputin section, which includes Kliuev’s telling comment that “I met with Russia’s fate face to face” (39). Kliuev’s late narrative poems show contradictory progressions leading up to “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi.” Even as they expand in a desire to encom­ pass more and more of Russia in their epic grasp, they at the same time be­ come increasingly personal, and Kliuev’s role as a character within them becomes more pronounced. In the earlier three, Kliuev appears incidentally if at all. He presents the fife of “Zaozer’e” from an omniscient perspective, and in “Solovki” he writes himself into the poem, but simply as a visitor learning from and honoring his setting. In “Derevnia,” he speaks with the first person plural of the narod, but does not distinguish his own voice from the general one. In “Pogorel’shchina” and “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi,” however, Kliuev creates a distinctive role for himself within the poem. In the former he is artist and witness: “Нерукотворную Россию / Я—песнописец Николай, / Свидетельствую, братья, вам” (“I, the song-writer Nikolai, bear witness to you, my brothers, of a Russia not made by human hands” [2, 341]). By implication, the text of “Pogorel’shchina” is the record of Kliuev’s role as chronicler within the poem. Kliuevs role is to pour all his knowledge of a 68

Overcoming the Destruction of Peasant Russia

vanished Russia into his verse, just as the population of Sigovyi Lob, all skilled artisans, pour their entire essence into art before dying: Pavel the icon-painter, for example, “smelted his heart into paints and painted an icon for us” (2, 336). The carver Olekha disappears, summoned by the saints Zosim and Sawatii (founders of the Solovetskii monastery),20 but he first creates with his carving skill the mythical Alkonost who laments the fate of Sigovets. In both “Pogorel shchina” and “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi,” Kliuev several times uses the image of a treasure chest. At times it holds the as-yet-unused resources from which his poetry stems; elsewhere it is his gift to posterity, holding eveiything that he has preserved in his art. One such passage from “Pogorel shchina” captures the conflation of Mother Russia and Kliuevs own mother that was later to form the central conceit of “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi”; Kliuev has concealed his treasure, but a purring cat knows his secret: “Он знает, что в тяжелой скрыне, / Сладимым родником в пустыне, / Бьют матери тепло и ласки ..(“Не knows that in a heavy chest, like a sweet desert spring, beats the warmth and caresses of a mother” [2, 345]). In “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi,” Kliuev exclaims:

Родной поэзии атласы He износил Руси дудец,— Взгляните, полон коробец, Вот объярь, штоф, и канифасы! (22) The piper has not exhausted the satins of his native poetry—Look: the box is full, here’s silks, damask, and linens!

Kliuev includes such a treasure box in his picture of how he will preserve the old, vanished Russia for generations to come:

Я затворюсь в глухой пещере, Отрбщу бороду до рук,— Узнает изумленный внук, Что дед недаром клад копил, И короб песенный зарыл, Когда дуванили дуван!.. Но прошлое, как синь туман: Не мыслит вешний жаваронок Как мертвен снег и ветер звонок. (“Pogorel’shchina,” 2, 343) I will withdraw to a distant cave and grow a beard down to my hands; my as­ tounded grandson will find out that it was for a reason that his grandfather amassed this treasure and buried a box of songs when the loot was divvied up! But the past is like blue fog: the spring lark does not think about how dead the snow is, how resounding the wind. 69

J. Alexander Ogden

Similarly, in “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi” a treasure made up of the precious stones that Kliuev has strung together in his verse will also remain behind for a grandson:

И может быть, далекий внук Уловит в пряже дятла стук, В кострике точек и тире Гусиный гомон на заре. (18)

And perhaps a distant grandson will catch a woodpeckers tap in the thread, [or] a goosey hubbub at dawn in the flaxen fluff of periods and dashes. But as both these quotations indicate, there is some uncertainty as to whether following generations will want to remember and will fully appre­ ciate the gift that Kliuev offers. This uncertainty over the issue of whether the implied audience for the “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi” will in fact materialize is the reason for a sec­ ond complication with the work’s status as a traditional epic. A national epic needs an appreciative national audience; otherwise it is not a national epic. But Kliuev has repeatedly emphasized that most Russians have turned their backs on the very traditions he is trying to preserve; if he must bury his trea­ sures in a box, then at the very least the audience for them is both in doubt and deferred. Only for the initiated, pure, and enlightened few, Kliuev feels, will his work make any sense:

Кто пречист и слухом золот, Злым безверьем не расколот, Как береза острым клином, И кто жребием единым Связан с родиной-вдовицей, Тот слезами на странице Выжжет крест неопалимый И, таинственно водимый По тропинкам междустрочий, Красоте заглянет в очи— Светлой девушке с поморья. (5)

Не who is most pure and whose hearing is golden, who is not troubled by evil unbelief as a birch is by a sharp wedge, and who has cast his one lot with his widowed motherland, will, with tears on the page, scorch the cross that burns unconsumed and, led in secret along the paths between lines of verse, will look beauty in the eyes—a fair maid from Pomor’e. Until such a reader is found, Kliuev is in the peculiar position of a writer of epics without an audience, or with only the most limited of audiences. 70

Overcoming the Destruction of Peasant Russia

The actual audience for the work was limited by the fact that in the 1930s Kliuev could not publish, and he spread his poetry mainly through his own readings. Kliuev was closely connected to the artistic community— most of his friends in Moscow and later, all his correspondents in the years of exile, were fellow artists of one kind or another. Among those to whom Kliuev grew particularly close in his Moscow years were the writer Sergei Klychkov and his wife Varvara Gorbacheva, and Nadezhda KhristoforovaSadomova, a singer, voice teacher, and wife of a soloist in the Bolshoi The­ ater. Gorbacheva and Khristoforova-Sadomova became the most frequent addressees of Kliuevs letters from Siberia.21 The image of Russia and the destruction being wreaked upon it that Kliuev evoked in “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi” was to remain unchanged for the poet for the rest of his life, as can be seen in this correspondence. In Kli­ uevs first letter to Nadezhda Khristoforova-Sadomova, exile has shipwrecked the poet, shattering the ship of his life with its “cargo of precious stones— my songs, love, devotion, and tenderness”; the miserable life that Kliuev sees around him in Kolpashevo is marked by the features of the hell that has overcome his idealized Rus’: the village “became a well-gnawed bone long ago,” the native peoples believe that “the swamp devil gave birth to Narym through a hernia,” and the newer population of exiles is a group of “half-dogs.”22 In a later letter to her he places himself consciously in the epic tradition, quoting his “ancient brother Homer.” Writing to Sergei Klych­ kov, he takes on the role of martyr for his true, religious Russia, speaking with the authority of Avvakum and the pre-Petrine world: “My blood whether willfully or not links two epochs: the epoch of Tsar Feodor Alek­ seevich, illumined by tarry bonfires and the sparks of self-immolations, and ours, so young and therefore not knowing much.”23 Even in the desolate Siberian wildness Kliuev finds the natural beauty so dear to him; he glories in each unexpected flower he comes across and, in a letter from the spring of the year he was killed, writes: “I congratulate you on the [occasion of] the spring sun! On the Resurrection of Mother-Damp-Earth!”24 In the end, Kliuev did find precisely that deferred audience posited in his narrative poems. Most Russians today first encountered Kliuev and his poetry in the pages of major magazines and newspapers of the pere­ stroika period and the first few years after the breakup of the Soviet Union. As increased openness brought access to restricted archives, the journals Ogonek, Literatumaia gazeta, Novyi mir, and Nash Sovremennik (among others) all carried long articles based on newly discovered documents re­ lating to Kliuev and his verse. The secret police (OGPU and NKVD) files on Kliuev’s arrest, interrogation, and execution came to light.25 Almost all of this material dealt with Kliuev’s last years of exile and prison. Before the late 1980s, only part of Kliuev’s poetry from the 1930s had been known, and none of the details of his later life had ever been 71

J. Alexander Ogden

addressed in print in the Soviet Union. The 1977 Poets Library collection of Kliuevs poetry, for example, included ten poems from the 1930s, but Vasily Bazanovs introduction gave no indication of Kliuevs fate. Thus a major part of Kliuevs life and a significant amount of poetry have been uncovered in articles in Soviet and Russian periodicals, many of them intended for a wide audience and not exclusively focused on litera­ ture. The nature of these publications has encouraged an approach toward Kliuev that is not so different from that of the poet’s contemporaries of the prerevolutionary period: Kliuev has often been portrayed unproblematically in the terms that he himself encouraged, as a messenger of a vanished Russia. His “treasure chest” of verse survived more intact that any had re­ alized, and in this sense his predictions came true and he succeeded in con­ cealing his precious legacy and in passing it on to future generations. The temptation to turn him into a true prophet, however, removes him from the realm of literature and makes it impossible to study the way in which he self-consciously constructs the role of prophet and of preserver of his coun­ try’s heritage in the face of destruction.

Notes 1. For a bibliography of contemporary publication of Kliuevs work, see Russkie sovetskie pisateli: poety, vol. 11 (Moscow: Knizhnaia palata, 1988), 32-109. Izba i pole, the last collection of Kliuevs work during his lifetime, appeared in 1928 but contained only verse that had appeared pre­ viously. Kliuev’s one new work to appear in the 1930s was a cycle of four po­ ems called Stikhi о kolkhoze (1932); as Konstantin Azadovskii has noted, “the appearance of verses under such a title, and furthermore in a journal that had specifically fought to dissociate ‘peasant literature’ from Kliuev and those like him, could mean only one thing: a striking, expressive example of ‘reforging’ was necessary. . .” K. Azadovskii, Nikolai Kliuev: Put’ poeta (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990), 304. Kliuev’s unpublished work from the period as well as his correspondence show that he was in fact by no means “reforged” in spirit, although he was desperate to appear in print. 2. The Lenin collection went through three editions in 1923 to 1924, right before and right after Lenin’s death. The third edition had a print run of 25,000 copies, compared to a usual for most of Kliuev’s other collections of 2,000 to 5,000. 3. On the last period of Kliuev’s life, see Azadovskii, Nikolai Kliuev: Put’ poeta, 292-320; Lev Pichurin, Poslednie dni Nikolaia Kliueva (Tomsk: Vodolei, 1995); Vitaly Shentalinsky, Arrested Voices: Resurrecting the Dis­ appeared Writers of the Soviet Regime, trans. John Crowfoot; with an intro72

Overcoming the Destruction of Peasant Russia

duction by Robert Conquest (New York: Martin Kessler Books, Free Press, 1996), 197-209. 4. In his acknowledgments, Solzhenitsyn describes the book as “our common, concerted monument to all who were tormented and killed”; he refers to the reassurance in the fact that “everything will be told” (Alexan­ der Solzhenitsyn, Sobranie sochinenii [Vermont and Paris: YMCA Press, 1980], 5: 11). In his second afterword he writes that “anyone even slightly connected to this subject or who has thought about it will always add more—even a true pearl” (Ibid., 7: 550). 5. Boris Arvatov, “Krest’ianskie pisateli,” Zhizn iskusstva 49 (1925), 2. 6. M. Bekker, “O krest’ianskoi poezii,” Puti krest’ianskoi literatury: Sbomik, ed. P. Zamoiskii et al. (Moscow: Moskovskii Rabochii, 1929), 130. It should be noted that these writers’ attempts to create a Soviet voice dis­ tinct from that of the proletariat was later abandoned; at the beginning of 1931 VOKP changed its name to VOPKP, “All-Union Organization of Proletarian-Kolkhoz Writers.” See Azadovskii, Nikolai Kliuev: Put’poeta, 295. 7. N. Bukharin, “Zlye zametld,” Pravda, January 12, 1927; reprinted in N. Bukharin, Etiudy (1932; Moscow: Kniga, 1988), 204. 8. Vasilii Kniazev, Rzhanye apostoly. Kliuev i kliuevshchina (Petro­ grad: Priboi, 1924), 9. 9. Joanna Hubbs, “The Worship of Mother Earth in Russian Culture,” in Mother Worship: Themes and Variations, ed. James J. Preston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 134. 10. Nikolai Kliuev, “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi,” Znamia 11 (1991), 41. Further citations will be noted parenthetically. All translations are the au­ thor’s own. 11. Nikolai Kliuev, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, ed. K. Azadovskii (Mos­ cow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1991), 310. Parenthetical references to “Solovki” in the text will refer to this edition. 12. Nikolai Kliuev, Sochineniia, ed. Gleb Struve and Boris Filippov (Munich: A. Neimanis, 1969) 2: 328-29. References to this poem and all others included in the Struve and Filippov edition will be noted parenthet­ ically in the text by volume and page number. 13. For a discussion of the non-Russian aspects of “Pesn’ о Velikoi Materi,” see E. I. Markova, “Karel’skii kniaz’: (Finno-ugorskie korni russkogo poeta Nikolaia Kliueva),” Nikolai Kliuev: Issledovaniia i materialy (Moscow: Nasledie, 1997), 137-49. 14. Diary entry for June 22, 1854; quoted in “The Song of Hiawatha: Introductory Note,” in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Song of Hi­ awatha (New York: Bounty, 1968), iii-iv. 15. “The Song of Hiawatha: Introductory Note,” iv and vii. 16. For the text of the Razrukha cycle, see Vitalii Shentalinskii, “Gamaiun-ptitsa veshchaia,” Ogonek 43 (1989), 9-12. For a discussion of 73

J. Alexander Ogden

the secret police file on Kliuev see Vitaly Shentalinsky, Arrested Voices: Res­ urrecting the Disappeared Writers of the Soviet Regime, trans. John Crow­ foot; with an introduction Robert Conquest (New York: Martin Kessler Books, Free Press, 1996), 197-209. 17. For discussions of Kliuevs fascination with Rasputin, see Aza­ dovskii, Nikolai Kliuev: Put’ poeta, 181-84; and Aleksandr Etkind, Sodom i Psikheia: Ocherki intellektual’noi istorii Serebrianogo veka (Moscow: ITsGarant, 1996), 113-15. 18. Azadovskii, Nikolai Kliuev: Put’ poeta, 182-83. 19. See, for example, “Gospodi, opiat’ zvoniat. . . ” (1916), “Bagrianogo L’va predtechi. ” (1918), and “Zhil’tsy grobov, prosnites’! . . .” (1918). 20. Nikolai Kliuev, “Pogorel’shchina,” Novyi mir 7 (1987), 98n. 21. For texts of Kliuevs letters sent from Siberian exile, see G. S. Klychkov and S. I. Subbotin, “Nikolai Kliuev v poslednie gody zhizni: pis’ma i dokumenty,” Novyi mir 8 (1988), 165-201; A. I. Mikhailov, “Prostite, ne zabyvaite . . . , Sever 9 (1994), 117-39. 22. Sever 9 (1994), 121. 23. Sever 9 (1994), 133; Novyi mir 8 (1988), 168. 24. Sever 9 (1994), 137. 25. See Pichurin’s book for documents and the following publications by Vitalii Shentalinskii with both documents and poetry: “Gamaiun—ptitsa veshchaia,” Ogonek 43 (1989), 9-12; “Vestnik Kitezh-grada” and “Pesn’ о Velikoi materi,” Ogonek 35 (1991); “Pesn’ о Velikoi materi” (conclusion), Ogonek 37 (1991), 10-11; Arrested Voices, 197-209. Shentalinskii worked to create (and then was chosen to preside over) the All-Union Commission on the Heritage of Repressed Writers, formed within the Union of Soviet Writers during perestroika. Despite the value of Shentalinskii’s work in making available much new material, his commentary is often questionable as scholarship since he accepts without question the self-image that Kliuev himself presented. He sees Kliuev first and foremost as a prophet who di­ rectly tapped the cultural wellsprings of Old Russia: “Kliuevs word is prophetic, it preserves the living roots of Old Russian mysticism and secret knowledge. This is not an imitation in folk style [stilizatsiia pod narod] (we’ve heard too much of that!), but an authentic epic, and Kliuev, perhaps, is the last Russian myth-creator” (Shentalinskii, “Gamaiun—ptitsa veshchaia,” 10).

74

Victor Terras

Death of a Poet: Osip Mandelshtam

“DEATH OF A POET” (1837) is a poem by Mikhail Lermontov occasioned by the death of Alexander Pushkin in a senseless duel, blamed on court intrigue and malicious gossip. Only four years later Lermontov was himself killed in an even more senseless duel. Russian po­ ets died senselessly and prematurely even in the twentieth century. A par­ tial catalog is found in Roman Jakobsons article “On a Generation that Squandered Its Poets” (1930), a reaction to the suicide of Vladimir Maya­ kovsky (1893-1930). An appalling number of Russia’s poets of the Silver Age met an early death or were otherwise silenced at the height of their creative powers. Among them, Osip Mandelshtam (1891-1938) presents a special case in that his futile struggle for survival found a reflection in his poetry. His is also the crassest of all cases of squandered poetic genius, for Mandelshtam, a nonperson in the Soviet Union for many years, is today considered by many to have been the greatest Russian poet of this century. Mandelshtam s chances to flourish, or even to survive, as a poet under the Soviet regime were slim to begin with. He belonged to the acmeist school of poets whose leader, Nikolai Gumilev, was shot as a counterrevo ­ lutionary in 1921. Anna Akhmatova, Gumilevs divorced wife and a lifelong friend of Mandelshtam, was blacklisted by the Soviet literary establishment and could not publish her poetry for twenty years.1 The son of a business­ man, Mandelshtam was decidedly a bourgeois. He had traveled and stud­ ied abroad. He had belonged to the Petersburg bohème of poets and artists. Apolitical at heart, Mandelshtam was a free spirit unable to bend his talent to authority or expedience. His philosophy was idealist and he did not believe in progress, least of all in the arts and letters. Without forsaking his Jewish heritage, though he had converted to Lutheranism in 1911, in order to gain admission to St. Petersburg University, he frankly and consistently identified with the Christian culture of the West.2 His prerevolutionary poetry had been Parnassian (detractors would call him a salon poet), alien to topical social issues, concerned with absolute human values. Like other intellectuals of a moderately liberal persuasion, Mandelshtam welcomed the February Revolution, but was stopped in his tracks by the 75

Victor Terras

Bolshevik coup of October 1917. He immediately recognized the Bolsheviks for what they were and boldly challenged them while this was still possible: When red Octobers opportunist readied His yoke of violence and hate, The capital bristling with killer armor And beetlebrowed machinegun crews,

The soldiery then clamored that Kerensky Be crucified, a vicious mob applauding: Pilate would have us hoist our heart on bayonets So that our heart would cease to beat! And at the horseshoe of red buildings, Reproachfully, a shadow flits about: It is as if I heard that bleak day in October: “Let’s tie him up, that whelp of Peters kin!”

Mid civic tempests and ferocious masks, Enflamed but by the subtlest anger, You, a free citizen, strode fearlessly In the direction Psyche led you. If an enraptured people will to others Some day wind golden garlands, Russia, With light step, will descend to deepest hell To offer you her benediction.3

This poem appeared as early as November 15, 1917, in the newspaper Volia naroda, organ of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, soon to be suspended by the Soviet government. “Lets tie him up . . .” is an echo of a line in Pushkins drama Boris Godunov, where the whelp is Godunovs son. Here, Kerensky is cast in the role of defender of the Petrine, Westernizing trend in Russian culture. Like his contemporaries, the futurists and poets of Proletarian Cul­ ture (Proletkul’t), Mandelshtam perceived the Revolution as an event of cosmic proportions. Unlike them, he saw it as a catastrophe: Twilight of Freedom Brothers, let us proclaim the freedom s twilight, The great year of the darkening blight. A weighty thicket of nets is lowered into the seething waters of the night. Oh, you are rising during voiceless years, You sun, and people, and the judgment.

Let us proclaim the fateful burden Our people s leader shoulders tearfully, Let us proclaim the twilight burden,

76

Death of a Poet

Its yoke, weighing upon us unendurably. Whoever has a heart, must hear, oh Time, How your own sinking ship is foundering. We’ve harnessed swallows into battle legions— And now the sun herself is lost from sight The sky is all a-twitter, all alive and moving The sun is out of sight—through the dense twilight— Through nets—and the whole earth is now afloat.

Well, let us try then: and the rudder Goes through an awkward, huge and creaking turn. The earth is now afloat. You men, take courage. And cleaving, as if with a plough, the ocean, We will remember even in Lethe’s icy cold, We gave ten heavens in exchange for our earth. (translated by A. Landman) This poem appeared in Znamia truda, organ of the trade unions, on May 24, 1918, under the title “A Hymn.” The fact that it was allowed to appear is in part explained by the circumstance that Russian sumerki stands for the twilight of dawn as well as of sunset. Nevertheless, it requires a fair amount of illiteracy to see a Communist message in this poem, granted even that “freedom” is a bourgeois prejudice. The first death introduced in Mandelshtam’s poetry is that of his be­ loved St. Petersburg, which was quickly becoming a cultural necropolis as it was engulfed by “Soviet night”:4

Up in those fearful heights a light, a wandering fire . . . Is it a star we see there, staring, spying? О far, translucent light, о flickering, wandering fire, Your brother, your Petropolis is dying. In those dread heights to which Earth’s burning visions fly, Green-gleaming star, is what your light says, lying? Oh, if you are a star, brother of sea and sky, Your brother, your Petropolis is dying.

Up in dread heights a ship spreads wide its wings, immense And ghostlike, monstrous wings, we see it flying. О green, о soaring star—lovely in indigence, Your brother, your Petropolis is dying. Over the darkened stream transparent Spring breaks down, Wax melts on wings whose splendor seemed undying. Oh, if you are a star—Petropolis, your town, Your brother, your Petropolis is dying. (1918, translated by A. Oras)

77

Victor Terras

The death of St. Petersburg, Russia’s window to Europe, was the death of the Petrine period of a Westernized Russia, the death of an age and a cul­ ture to which Mandelshtam belonged with heart and soul. The dying of an epoch is realized in personified metaphoric images:

The Age Age of mine, beast of mine, who can look into your eyes And cement the vertebrae Of two centuries with his blood? Blood-the-builder gushes out From the throat of our worlds ways, Only parasites are trembling On the threshold of new days.

Any creature, while it lasts, Bears its backbone to the end And a wave is playing softly On a spine that can’t be seen. Once again the crown of life, like a lamb is sacrificed, A child’s tender cartilage Our earth’s infant century. To tear life from its prison, To begin the world anew, Of the knotty days the nodes Must be joined as in a flute. It’s our age which rocks the wave With the yearnings of mankind, In the grass the viper breathes, Golden measure of our time.

Yet the green shoots will be sprouting, And the buds will swell again, But your spine is smashed forever, Oh, my beautiful, pitiful age. And, with a senseless smile, You look back, weak and raw, Like a beast that was once supple At the tracks of your own paws. (1923, translated by A. Landman)

Here the image of the backbone as a metaphor of life’s ability, or lack of it, to resist strain and suffering, may well have been borrowed from Vladi­ mir Mayakovsky’s poem “The Backbone Flute” (1915). Mandelshtam ex­ tends the metaphor, letting vertebrae stand for years, so that the backbone flute becomes the instrument of the music of an age. Mandelshtam’s poem

78

Death of a Poet

may also be a response to a poem by the Proletarian poet N. I. Kolokolov, who likened the old regime to a vicious beast whose death evoked no compassion. In several poems of this period, Mandelshtam perceives himself as the doomed son of a dying age. Here, the first three stanzas of “January 1, 1924” (1924): He who kissed Time on a tormented brow, With a sons tenderness, will later Remember how Time went to sleep In a wheaten snowdrift by the window. He who has lifted his inflamed eyes to his Age— Two large and drowsy apples— He will forever hear the sound of roaring rivers Of Times deceitful, deaf and hollow.

Two drowsy apples has Age-the-Sovereign And a beautiful mouth of clay, But he will fall reaching out, dying, For his aging sons hand, itself grown numb. I know, each day Life’s breath is getting weaker, A little while, and they’ll snip off My simple little song of hurts of clay, And seal my lips with tin. О Life of clay! О dying of an Age! I fear that he alone can understand you Who wears the helpless smile of someone Who’s lost himself. What pain to search for a lost word, To lift one’s inflamed eyes And, with lime in one’s veins, gather Nocturnal herbs for an alien tribe. The years of the New Economic Policy (NEP) were hard enough, but still tolerable intellectually. Mandelshtam and his wife Nadezhda Yakov­ levna, née Khazin, married in 1922 and had no permanent home. He was barely eking out a living, doing translations and an occasional review. But he had found a patron of sorts in N. I. Bukharin, editor of Izvestiia, official organ of the Soviet government, and could, in 1928, publish a last book of verse, as part of a three-volume edition of his collected works. But the year 1928 was also the beginning of an endless string of misfortunes, humilia­ tions, and outright persecution. There were hostile reviews in the press by Communist activists, who denounced Mandelshtam as a deleterious ana­ chronism. There was a nasty incident in which Mandelshtam was charged with plagiarism when a translation of Charles de Coster’s novel La Légende

79

Victor Terras

de Thyl Ulenspegel et de Lamme Goedzak, which he had revised, appeared without credits to the initial translators. From here on, Mandelshtam could only publish an occasional poem, the last of these in 1932, and a travelogue of a journey to Armenia (1933), undertaken in 1930, which appeared in the journal Zvezda, whose editor was fired for having accepted Mandelshtam’s contribution. After their return from Armenia, the Mandelshtams had no home of their own and lived with different relatives. They had no steady income and had to depend, all too often, on the help given them by friends and family. Several poems of the early 1930s describe the poet’s plight. One of them, apparently due to an editorial oversight, was published in The Literary Gazette on November 23, 1932:

Leningrad I’ve returned to my city I know like my hand, By my veins, by my tears, by a child’s swollen glands.

You’ve returned to your city, so swallow again The fish oil of Leningrad’s lanterns in rain. So recall then December’s so-called day hours, Where some yolk is admixed to a sinister tar. Petersburg! I don’t want yet to die, I still have your telephone numbers to try. Petersburg! I still have some names in my head, To find the voices of friends who are dead. On the backstairs I live, and my temple is gashed By each ring of the doorbell tom out with its flesh. Through the whole of the night my dear guests I await, With the door chains rattling like fetters of fate. (December 1930, translated by A. Landman)

The publication of this poem called forth a howl of protest by Party hacks. Some other poems, bom of the same situation, have survived, for example: The two of us will sit in the kitchen awhile. This white kerosene smells sweet.

A sharp knife and a loaf of bread . . . Want to pump up the kerosene stove? Or else, let’s get ourselves some strings, so we can tie up our wicker basket before dawn, So we can be off to the railway station, Where no one can find us. (January 1931) 80

Death of a Poet

Or this:

Lord, help us live through this night: I’m afraid for my life—for Thy servant— To live in Petersburg is like sleeping in a coffin. (January 1931)

It becomes clear, from these and some other poems,5 that Mandel­ shtam, through all those years, expected to be arrested—until it actually happened on May 13, 1934, not in Leningrad, but in Moscow, where the Mandelshtams had finally succeeded in getting an apartment of their own. A poem devoted to this apartment sounds ominous: The flat is silent, like a sheet of paper— It’s empty, no fancy gadgets— And one can hear the moisture gurgling In the radiator pipes.

The property is in perfect order, The telephone sits, frozen like a frog, our well-worn belongings Ask to be taken out into the street.

Yet these damned walls are thin, And there’s no place left to run away to And I, like a fool, I’m obligated to play On a comb to somebody’s pleasure . . . More brazen than a Komsomol cell, Or Communist student song, Is the job of teaching hangmen Chirping their lines correctly.

I read books written for hire, I listen to speeches spun of hemp, And sing a menacing lullaby To the kulak way of life. Who’s handy at such depictions, A carder of kolkhoz flax, Who’s mixing ink with blood, Is worthy of such a goad. An honest-to-God informer, Cooked soft in the purges, like salt, Provider for wife and children, May well knock off such a moth . . .

There is so much painful meanness Concealed in each and every hint, As if Nekrasov’s own hammer Were driving the nails home. 81

Victor Terras

So let’s you and I, like on a scaffold, Make a start, seventy years later— You, old man and sloven, It’s time for you to get moving. And instead of the spring of Hippocrene, A stream of homegrown fear Will break through these makeshift walls Of this wretched Moscow domicile. (November 1933) Nikolai Nekrasov (1821-78) was a poet known for his scathing attacks on the injustice and cruelty of Russian society under the tsars. Soviet poets were encouraged to emulate him in their struggle with the vestiges of the old order. Mandelshtam voices not only his indignation at the venality of his many confreres who were busily applauding the “liquidation of kulaks as a class,” but also mocks the futility of his own efforts to come to terms with the Soviet regime.6 This poem alone would have been sufficient to brand Mandelshtam an enemy of the people, but there were some more of this kind discovered at the search of his apartment, including this epigram di­ rected at Stalin himself:

We live, hardly sensing our country below us, Our talk can’t be heard ten steps away, And where there’s enough left for half-a-conversation, It will be about that Kremlin mountaineer. His thick fingers are greasy like worms And his words hit home like twenty-pound weights. His cockroach moustaches laugh And bright shine his jackboots.

Around him a gang of thin-necked chieftains, He toys with the services of these semi-humans. Some whistle, some mew, some snivel, He alone shoves and prods them. Like horseshoes, he forges ukaze after ukaze— Hitting some in the temple, the brow, the groin, or the eye. Every execution is for him a piece of cake, And an Ossetian’s broad chest.7 (November 1933)

We know, now that the archives of the NKVD are open to us, that Mandelshtam was made to name the persons who were present when he re­ cited this poem. It must be assumed that Stalin never saw the poem in which he was personally attacked, for who would have dared to show it to him? And so Mandelshtam’s arrest led to mere exile to Cherdyn, a small 82

Death of a Poet

town in the Urals. In Cherdyn, Mandelshtam tried to kill himself by jump­ ing from a window at the local hospital but only broke an arm. Nadezhda Yakovlevna, who accompanied her husband, succeeded in contacting Bukharin, then still a member of the politburo (he was purged in 1938), who put in a word for the poet with Stalin, and Mandelshtam was allowed to choose his own place of exile. Mandelshtam chose Voronezh, a provincial capital southwest of Moscow, for the site of his exile, which was fixed at three years. These years were terrible, as the Mandelshtams now depended entirely on what help they could get from friends. Their contacts with the literary world ceased almost entirely. Yet the poems of Mandelshtam’s Voronezh Notebooks, pre­ served by Nadezhda Yakovlevna, are in many ways—philosophically, in the range of their pathos, emotional depth—a culmination of the poets oeuvre. The following poem is an expression of utter desolation and abandonment:

Where shall I go this month of January? The open city is absurdly sticky . . . Perhaps I’m drunk from too many closed doors?— And feel like bellowing from all these locks and bolts. The culs-de-sac of all these barking alleys And larders of criss-crossing streets, Big comers come running at me from comers To hurriedly in little comers hide.

I slide to an icecoated water pump, Into a ditch, into a warty darkness, Gasping for air, I eat dead air, As flocks of blackbirds fly up in a raging fever.

And I after them, groaning, knocking At some kind of a frozen wooden box: A reader! A counselor! A doctor! And on these prickly stairs—a conversation, maybe! (1937)

The poets despair is made palpable by a series of puns: chulki, “culs-desac” (literally, “stockings”); puns with chulany, “larders”; big, little, and just plain comers are ugly, ugolki (the same word with a diminutive suffix), and uglany (with an augmentative suffix); grachi, “blackbirds”; puns with goriachka, “raging fever.” In other poems, Mandelshtam’s despair is expressed in simple images and with quiet dignity: You are not dead, nor are you all alone, So long as with your spouse, a beggar, You can enjoy the grandeur of the plains, And gloom, and hunger, and a blizzard. 83

Victor Terras

In ornate poverty, in potent beggardom, Live calmly and consoled— Your days and nights are blessed And your mellifluous labors sinless. Unhappy he who’s frightened by his own Shadow, a barking dog, bowled over By the wind. Poor he who, half alive Himself, must beg alms from a shadow. (1937) There are moments where the poet transcends the miseries of earthly exis­ tence and anticipates his apotheosis:

Do not compare: you can’t compare the living. And fondly startled, in a certain way, I would agree that plains are even, And that the sky’s orb was an ailment to me.

And I addressed the air, my servant, Expecting service from it, or a message, Got ready for the road and did sail off Along an arc of never started journeys. I’m set to roam where there’s more sky for me, A lucid yearning keeps its hold on me From these still youthful hillocks of Voronezh To those all-human hills shining in Tuscany. (January 1937)

Some untranslatable details: in the original, “compare,” “plains,” and “even” are all formed from the same root, rav(e)n; toska, “yearning,” puns with Toskana, “Tuscany”; “ailment” (nedug) forms an inner rhyme with “orb” (krug) and puns with “arc” (duga)—all of this aimed at expressing the mad­ dening monotony of the plains of southern Russia. Released from his Voronezh exile in May 1937, Mandelshtam still did not have permission to live in Moscow or Leningrad. The Mandelshtams spent the following year without a permanent residence in various towns not too far from Moscow, where Nadezhda Yakovlevna had to go often to get help from friends. Mandelshtam was rearrested on May 16, 1938, and sentenced to five years in the camps for “counterrevolutionary activities.” He was put on a transport to the Far East and died, according to official records, in a Magadan transit camp on December 28, 1938. A letter that he wrote to his brother Alexander in October suggests that Mandelshtam died of exhaustion and malnutrition: “My health is very poor. I am extremely ex­ hausted, emaciated, almost beyond recognition. I don’t know if there is any sense in sending me things, foodstuffs and money. But try anyway. I am very cold without clothing.” 84

Death of a Poet

Osip Mandelshtam, labor camp file, 1938 (photo courtesy of Peter Maggs, The Mandelstam and “Der Nister” Files [Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1996])

Mandelshtam s physical death was followed by his death as a poet—a process that had begun even earlier. His name disappeared from literary encyclopedias and handbooks. Not a single poem of his appeared in the So­ viet Union until 1962. In 1957 the Union of Soviet Writers appointed a commission to survey the poets posthumous papers and to consider an edi­ tion of his works. Only in 1973 did a representative collection of his poetry finally appear. A collection of his prose followed in 1987. When a collection of Mandelshtam s verse was published in New York in 1955, the editors did not even know when and where the poet had died and were unaware of the existence of his widow, but the world owes the sur­ vival of Mandelshtam s late poetry to Nadezhda Yakovlevna. Her memoirs, classics in their own right, Hope against Hope (Vospominaniia, 1970) and Hope Abandoned (Vtoraia kniga, 1972) appeared in the West. She died in 1980. A painful postscript must be added to this martyrology of a great poet. We know now that the Soviet regime ultimately succeeded in breaking Mandelshtam s spirit to the extent that in 1937 he actually tried to save his life by composing a long and turgid ode to Stalin. The first stanza (of seven) will suffice:8 85

Victor Terras

If I would take a charcoal pencil for the highest praise— For the unceasing joy of drawing— I would dissect the air by artful angles With cautiously excited care, So that the lines drawn will reflect the real. In art that borders on audacity, I’d tell about the man who moved the worlds axis, Yet honoring the customs of a hundred forty nations. I’d raise the angle of my brow a little, Raise it once more, then decide otherwise: Must be, it was Prometheus blowing on his charcoal— Look, Aeschylus, I weep as I am drawing.

Various explanations for this abject surrender have been proposed. The poet’s widow remembers that, for a period of time in 1937 to 1938, Man­ delshtam actually developed a mood that corresponds to the metaphysical hero worship of the ode.9 Poetic justice has it that out of the complex of the Stalin myth there grew one of Mandelshtam s most fascinating poems: Armed with the vision of those slender wasps Who suck the axis of the Earth, Earth’s axis, I sense all I was destined to encounter, Remember it profanely and by heart.

I do not draw, nor do I sing, Nor do I stroke a dark-voiced bow: I only suck in life and love To envy powerful and cunning wasps. Oh, if some day the goad of air And warmth of summer could enable me, Defeating sleep and death alike, To hear the axis of the Earth, Earth’s axis. (1937)

This poem is at first sight an exercise in sound effects and punning: Russian osa, “wasp.” Genitive plural: os—os’, “axis,” but also the poet’s name Osip, and Iosif Stalin! But a look at the “Ode to Stalin” (“the man who moved the world’s axis”) explains its message: The high and the mighty of this world are like wasps, murderous and cunning.10

Notes 1. Mandelshtam predicted her fate in a poem, “To Cassandra,” which appeared in the journal Volia naroda on December 31, 1917:

86

Death of a Poet

Some day, in this crazed capital city, At a Scythian feast on the banks of the Neva, To the sounds of some disgusting dance tune They’ll rip the headband from your lovely head . . .

2. “Today apples, bread, and potatoes satisfy not only our physical, but even our spiritual hunger. A Christian, and today every cultured person is a Christian, knows not only physical hunger, or only spiritual nourishment. For him, the word is flesh and simple bread—a joy and a sacrament.” (“The Word and Culture,” Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 2 [1921], 223). All quotations and references are from Osip Mandelstam, Sobranie sochinenii, ed. Gleb Struve and Boris Filippov, 4 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Inter-Language Lit­ erary Associates, vol. 4 [Paris: YMCA Press], 1964-81). All translations are the authors, unless otherwise indicated. 3. Such enthusiasm must be explained by the poet’s lyric fervor of the moment. Mandelshtams depiction of the brief tenure of Kerensky’s “lemonade government” in his novella “The Egyptian Stamp” is not at all flattering. 4. “Soviet night” is a recurrent motif in a poem dated November 25, 1920 (Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1, 85). 5. In one of them, “For the Resounding Glory of Future Ages” (So­ branie sochinenii, vol. 1 [March 17-28, 1931], 162) the poet actually imag­ ines himself in Siberia. 6. Such is “Midnight in Moscow” (Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1 [1931], 182). 7. An Ossetian is a member of a Caucasian tribe (Stalin was actually Georgian). 8. For a detailed discussion of Mandelshtams Ode to Stalin and its context, see Gregory Freidin, A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and his Mythologies of Self-Preservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 150-271. 9. For variants of the late poems and their relation to details of the poet’s life and readings, see Jennifer Raines, Mandelstam: The Later Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). For background informa­ tion on Mandelshtams arrest and interrogation, see Peter B. Maggs, The Mandelstam and “Der Nister" Files: An Introduction to Stalin-Era Prison and Labor Camp Records (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), and Vitaly Shentalinsky, Arrested Voices: Resurrecting the Disappeared Writers of the Soviet Regime, trans. John Crowfoot; with an introduction by Robert Con­ quest (New York: Martin Kessler Books, Free Press, 1996). 10. For a detailed analysis, see Kiril Taranovsky, Essays on Mandel­ stam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 113-14.

87

PART II

Creators of Public Art

Jeffrey Veidlinger

How the Weasel and the Well Became the Heavens and the Earth:

Soviet Yiddish Drama in the 1930s

THE ARTISTIC COMMUNITY of the Soviet Union found itself largely under attack throughout the 1930s.1 Some of the coun­ try’s most revered contributors to world culture, including the film director Sergei Eisenstein, the composer Dmitry Shostakovich, the theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold, and countless others were subjected to defamatory campaigns in the official Soviet press. Many of these luminaries were sub­ sequently imprisoned, exiled to Siberia, or simply executed in the Great Terror of the late 1930s. Many Cold War historians, pointing to Stalins early attacks on the most prominent Jewish members of the Party—Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev—have argued that the purges were at least partially motivated by a veiled anti-Semitism, which had long been lurking beneath the surface of Soviet officialdom, or at least in Stalin s personal psychologi­ cal profile. This argument was given further credence by the dispropor­ tionate number of intellectuals of Jewish heritage who fell into Stalins whirlwind. As one observer wrote: “At first, by dark hints and allusions, Stalins agents stirred up anti-Semitic prejudice and brought it nearer the surface until it reached its climax during the period of the great purges in 1937-1939.”2 Yet, throughout the purges of the 1930s, Yiddish secular cul­ ture flourished in the Soviet Union. Jewish ethnomusicologists collected and published anthologies of Yiddish folk songs; Yiddish and klezmer (East­ ern European Jewish music) performing troupes filled concert halls in Kiev, Moscow, and Baku; Yiddish writers published both novels and nonfiction works with several Yiddish publishing presses; and eight Soviet State Yid­ dish Theaters, of which the most prominent was Solomon Mikhoels s Mos­ cow State Yiddish Theater, entertained audiences throughout the country. Thus when the full severity of the Great Terror, and particularly its effect on Soviet Russian cultural life, is taken into consideration, the ultimate liq­ uidation of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater in 1949 and the subsequent 91

Jeffrey Veidlinger

attacks on all aspects of Jewish culture, about which several recent studies have been conducted,3 seem less remarkable than their survival up to that point. How can the survival and promotion of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater throughout the 1930s be reconciled with what one historian has re­ cently called a “policy of state anti-Semitism pursued over the years by Stalins totalitarian regime”?4 Historians and contemporary observers have been pondering this question for half a century. Some Cold War-era writers, like the leftist lit­ erary critic Nakhman Mayzel, have denied that the paradox even exists by diminishing the anti-Semitism of the Soviet regime. He alleged that the works of Soviet Yiddish writers such as Peretz Marldsh, Der Nister, and David Bergelson display strong nationalist motifs and evoke nationalist sen­ timents.5 Others, like the American Yiddishist Shmuel Niger, maintained that the Soviet state forced Jewish writers to deny their national culture and assimilate.6 Since the 1970s the view that the Soviet state “denationalized” Yiddish culture has become paramount.7 We are told that Jewish writers, artists, performers, and musicians were confronted with “the choice be­ tween rejecting the Jewish idiom or sinking into oblivion.”8 It has been sim­ ilarly contended that Soviet Yiddish culture was Jewish only in its language: it produced typical Soviet material devoid of national content. The director of the Moscow Yiddish Theater, Solomon Mikhoels, we read was “a man who had never taken part in Jewish civic affairs.”9 Thus, the solution to the quandary was found by denying that the surviving Jewish artists expressed themselves as Jews. As a result, it has been contended that Jewish culture was gradually curtailed until “toward the end of the 30s nothing was left of it,”10 allowing Stalin to revel in the “total suppression of Jewish cultural life.”11 Only recently have some, such as Igor Krupnik, come to realize that “Jewish policy was a fairly integrated component of Soviet nationalities pol­ icy. Several other peoples were purged and promoted in roughly the same way, while a few had a far more tragic record of persecution by the com­ munist state.”12 This chapter argues that the Moscow State Yiddish Theater was able to accommodate Jewish motifs to socialist realism through a variety of tech­ niques, including the use of Aesopian language—a poetic label first applied in the 1860s that refers to the authors use of rhetorical devices to shift the meaning of the text in an effort to get past the censor—and by appealing to national myths.13 Using the example of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater, it can be demonstrated how Jewish writers and artists were able to promote their own national culture within the confines of Soviet nationality policies before World War II. This author argues that, while sharing many aspects of the state s educational ideals and class-based worldview, the Yiddish the­ ater successfully resisted all attempts to turn its stage into just another plat­ form of Soviet propaganda. The Yiddish stage retained a distinctly Jewish 92

How the Weasel and the Well Became the Heavens and the Earth orientation not merely by dint of being performed in a Jewish language, but more important by virtue of overt and covert cultural contexts and signifiers. The theaters productions were Jewish not only in form, but also in content. The Soviet Yiddish Theater emerged in 1919 out of the Jewish The­ atrical Society of St. Petersburg, which was formed by a group of liberal Jewish activists in 1917 with the goal of promoting the development of Yid­ dish theater. Following the Bolshevik consolidation of power, the Yiddish Theater was nationalized and added to the prestigious list of State Theaters, garnering it significant state subsidies and promotion. In 1920, the theater moved to Moscow and soon after obtained a five-hundred-seat auditorium on Malaia Bronnaia, in the heart of the Moscow theater district. Through­ out its first decade, the theater, under the leadership of Alexander Granov­ sky, presented prerevolutionary Yiddish plays in the modernist framework that was one of the dominant trends in Moscow theater. While it achieved immense popular success both within Moscow and during its annual provin­ cial tours, the theater was criticized by some Party activists for its adherence to prerevolutionary plays. Several attempts to incorporate contemporary Soviet plays into its repertoire during the latter half of the decade led to a decline in the theaters popularity, forcing a return to prerevolutionary Yid­ dish classics for which many Party zealots never forgave Granovsky. During its first and only European tour, in 1928, Granovsky, facing constant ha­ rassment and criticism, defected to Germany. Upon the theaters return, Solomon Mikhoels, the troupes most talented actor, was appointed direc­ tor of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater. Mikhoels s appointment coincided with Stalin s “Cultural Revolution,” in which the autonomy enjoyed by numerous cultural organizations during the New Economic Policy era was curtailed.14 In April 1928 the Council of Peoples Commissars (Sovnarkom) founded the Central Arts Administra­ tion (Glaviskusstvo) as a supervisory organ over all artistic institutions in the country. Several months later, the Management of State Academic The­ aters, under whose auspices the Soviet State Yiddish Theater had func­ tioned, was abolished and replaced with a department of literature, art, and theater. The change was immediately felt among even the most established state theaters. During the spring of 1928 the paper Komsolskaia pravda be­ gan a campaign against the Bolshoi Theater, accusing the venerable institu­ tion of bourgeois and conservative tendencies. Similarly, the Central Arts Administration refused to allow a Paris season for Meyerholds theater, which was rapidly losing its audience due to repertory difficulties. These af­ fairs, compounded by the defections of Granovsky and Mikhail Chekhov, director of the Second Moscow Art Theater, culminated in the November 1928 resolution of the Central Arts Administration condemning all “rightist deviations.” A year later, Anatolii Lunacharskii, the relatively liberal Com93

Jeffrey Veidlinger

missar of Enlightenment, resigned, citing the organization’s intolerable dis­ crimination against respected artists.15 This was the environment in which Mikhoels found himself in 1928. However, it soon became apparent that Mikhoels s own goals coin­ cided with those of the state. Both sought to reorient the theater toward a contemporary repertoire of Soviet writers. Mikhoels hoped to use the stage to promote the work of his colleagues, enhance the prestige of the cultural community to which he proudly belonged, and nurture the development of Soviet Jewish culture. The Soviet authorities, for their part, demanded reper­ toires from contemporary Soviet playwrights to reflect the “great achieve­ ments” of the Bolshevik Revolution and socialist construction. Further, both sides warmly embraced the slogan of “socialist in content, national in form.” Thus, one of Mikhoels s first productions was his 1930 adaptation of The Deaf by the Soviet playwright David Bergelson. The Deaf was one of many Soviet plays which ostensibly sought, in the words of Konstantin Rudnitsky, “to show ordinary, average people who were not heroes, who did not speak or behave heroically, but who were nevertheless capable of rising to the heights of heroic action.”16 David Bergelson (1884-1952) was born in Uman, Ukraine in 1884. Although he began writing in Hebrew and Rus­ sian, he achieved great popularity with his first Yiddish novel, At the Depot (1908). After embracing socialist ideals, Bergelson, in his When All Is Said and Done (1913) and Departing (1920), turned toward works sensitively portraying the poverty and hopelessness of the old Jewish life and the bank­ ruptcy of the old aristocracy. In the late 1920s, while living temporarily in Berlin, Bergelson became one of the first Yiddish writers to focus on the new Soviet man with his novel A Measure of Strictness (1928). The Deaf his first major dramatic work, was based on a short story he had written in 1907. It was first performed in Gomel in 1929, and later, in 1930 in Vilna under the title The Flour Mill. However, it was the production of the play at the Moscow State Yiddish Theater that would be most remembered. The deaf protagonist of Bergelson s play, who is never given a formal name, is a simple inarticulate mill worker who lost his hearing in an acci­ dent at the mill caused by the negligence of the mill owner, Shimon Bika. He lives alone in a silent world; his only concern, the welfare of his daugh­ ter, Esther, whose mother was worked to death at the mill. Plagued by emo­ tional and physical pain, the Deaf silently accepts his lot. The play begins as the Deaf discovers that Esther, who is employed as a servant in Bika’s house, is pregnant from Bika’s son, Mendel. Grieving, the Deaf remains silent until he hears of a plan of Bika’s to bring in new machinery and lay off half the workers. No longer able to control himself, the Deaf reaches his limit. “Bika is my enemy,” he stutters in a rambling soliloquy which serves as his meek epiphany, “I am perpetually envious of him. He is my enemy. Come here, come here. If Bika is killed, I will be happy. Yes, yes, I will be happy. 94

How the Weasel and the Well Became the Heavens and the Earth

Nu, and when I . . . when I alone ...” He stops midsentence before con­ tinuing, “The blood goes to my head. I do not sleep at night, I do not sleep.”17 In the next scene, he is thrust into the forefront of a futile rebellion in which he radicalizes the working masses and calls for a violent attack on Bika. However, when the Deaf breaks into the mill owners home with an axe, he is easily apprehended and arrested, leaving the workers to continue their futile strike. Seemingly fated to linger in obscurity as just one of the injured working masses, the Deaf’s pent-up anger, frustration, and desper­ ation suddenly explode, thrusting him into the forefront of a revolution and turning him into a working-class hero.18 The much-suffering Deaf is a tragic figure whose life has been devas­ tated by the evil forces of capitalism as represented by the ruthless, yet re­ ligiously pious, mill owner. His only joy in life is his daughter, Esther, by whom he measures any semblance of hope he encounters in his pitiful life. “Nu, already twenty-three years I have worked for him,” he ponders in a re­ flective moment, “I became deaf by him. I hear nothing. But sometimes when she, Esther, speaks to me I hear. She Esther. Esther.”19 In the words of one theater critic: “He perceives in a vague manner, but he does not un­ derstand. It is the tragedy of a single individual.”20 The play was praised by countless Soviet critics for its revolutionary significance. One wrote that the play “decisively exposes the Jewish bour­ geois nationalists, who contend that amidst the united Jewry there were never class antagonisms.”21 On the surface, the narrative was representative of classic socialist realism: a naive worker hero is martyred for the revolu­ tionary cause, but fails in his endeavors due to lack of “consciousness.”22 Aside from its overt revolutionary significance, however, the action of the play paralleled in many ways the biblical Book of Esther. Like the bib­ lical Esther, Bergelson s Esther is a poor young woman whose only source of love is her male guardian. As a result of her extraordinary beauty her fortune changes when she is brought into the camp of the overlord—the Persian king in the Bible, the mill owner in the play. In both versions, her guardian is left on the other side of the real or metaphorical palace wall where he discovers a plot emanating from within the palace to destroy his people either through death (Bible), or the loss of livelihood (play). To­ gether the two attempt to foil the plan. Both stories also focus on a banquet: the entry scene for the biblical Esther; the place where the Deaf prepares to attack the mill owner. However, at this point the two stories differ. While the Book of Esther is one of the most optimistic books of the Bible as the evil plan is foiled and its culprit is hanged, Bergelson s play ends in tragedy. The biblical villain initiates his genocidal plan after Esthers uncle stub­ bornly refuses to bow down to the minister, reserving this respect for God alone, while Esthers continued identification with the Jewish people prompts her to halt the genocide. The Deaf, in contrast, has adopted a subservient 95

Jeffrey Veidlinger

and fatalistic attitude toward his oppressor, making his final vanquishment an inevitable product of his lifelong capitulation. By neglecting both God and his people, the Deaf preordains his own failure. Bergelson s lyrical play, by paralleling the Book of Esther, nevertheless reminded its audience of the optimistic history of the Jewish people and their ability to survive. In addition to the metaphorical association of the narrative, the Mos­ cow State Yiddish Theater added a new symbolic reference to nationalist themes. Solomon Mikhoels, as the Deaf, developed what he called a “ges­ ture leit motif” in which he begins to raise his hands to the stars, but on the way his right hand gets distracted and wipes the sweat off his brow. After a moment, he becomes lost in thought as his right hand lingers in a clenched fist resting limply over his head, where it remains for extended periods of time. Mikhoels argued that this gesture symbolized his characters high as­ pirations that are unable to reach fruition because of his preoccupation with his labor, leaving him perpetually frustrated, seemingly fated to a life of in­ action. However, this gesture, combined with the stuttering voice Mikhoels used to speak the meager thirty words his character utters during the course of the play, can be seen as an allusion to the oath of the biblical Psalm 137, one of the most stirring Zionist oaths, which had recently been adopted by countless Zionist organizations of the era: “If I forget thee, О Jerusalem, let my right hand lose its cunning, If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.” While the image of the tongue-tied Deaf with his right arm resting limply above his head was a mundane pose to the vast majority of the secular and non-Jewish audiences who saw it merely as indicative of a “tortured soul,” it can be seen as a value-laden symbol for those, like Mikhoels and Bergelson, who were entrenched within a Jewish milieu. Could Mikhoels, with this gesture, have been subversively declaring his allegiance to the Zionist cause? The answer, although by no means cer­ tain, becomes clearer when the play is viewed in conjunction with Mikhoels s other productions. After The Deaf, Soviet Yiddish dramatists were ordered to portray not just any revolution, but specifics from the Bolshevik Revolution and the ensuing Civil War. Rather than the blind slashing out of frustrated working masses, dramatists and writers were told to look toward conscious workers for inspiration. The first Yiddish play in this direction was the 1931 pro­ duction of Daniel Meyerovich’s (known as M. Daniel, 1900-41) Four Days. The narrative takes place in Vilna during the German occupation of 1919. The play was written in honor of Iulis Shimeliovich (1890-1919), a former Bundist who had become an active member of the Jewish Commissariat for Nationality Affairs and editor of the journal Kommunist following the Revo­ lution. In 1919 Shimeliovich and eight other Bolshevik activists committed suicide in Vilna.23 The play draws its name from the four days during which Bolshevik partisans within the city are forced to wait for reinforcements 96

How the Weasel and the Well Became the Heavens and the Earth

Solomon Mikhoels as the Deaf, 1930 (photo courtesy of Jeffrey Veidlinger)

from the Red Army. The Bolsheviks, however, are betrayed by the other so­ cialist parties, the Bund and the Polish Socialist Party, who go over to the side of the Whites and help stave off the Red Army. As a result the Whites are able to take control of Vilna. During the final exciting battle scene, the 97

Jeffrey Veidlinger

Bolshevik partisans, beginning their rebellion from within the city, wait in vain for the Red Army to back them up. Realizing they have been betrayed by the national Communist parties, the Bolsheviks commit suicide before the counterrevolutionary forces are able to capture them.24 Outwardly the play sought to exalt the Bolsheviks’ role in defending the Revolution against the perceived treachery of the national Communist parties. Meyerovich’s play was praised by critics as the archetype of Yiddish revolutionary plays. Yet critics were unhappy with the final suicide scene, noting that it was an ideological error, “lulis is a proletariat revolutionary who is capable of the greatest sacrifice,” wrote one critic, “but who does not completely possess the necessary Bolshevik duty to fight.”25 Surely the author knew that mass suicide under siege was hardly the type of heroism required of committed Bolsheviks. One must ask, then, why this tragic ending was included. The answer may lie within a symbolic interpretation of the text. A play about a group of ideologues who wait un­ der siege for the enemy to approach, deciding at the last minute to take their own lives rather than be captured, evokes the stoiy of Masada—the most famous mass suicide in Jewish history. The fortress of Masada was the last holdout during the first Jewish rebellion in a.d. 70 against Roman rule in Palestine. When the Romans laid siege to the mountain of Masada, the rebel Zealots decided to take their own lives rather than become slaves of the Romans. Seen within this light, the narrative takes on a nationalist significance linking the Bolshevik protagonists who outwardly reject the nationalism of the Bundists and Polish Socialists to the greatest Jewish nationalists—the rebel Zealots. Once again, it evokes one of the proudest moments in Jewish national history. The reference to Masada was particularly timely as the story had only recently begun to reemerge in the Jewish collective memory after centuries of neglect. In 1922 Josephus’s War of the Jews, the only historical narrative of the Masada story, was translated for the first time into Yiddish, and the following year a new popular Hebrew translation was released. Masada became an integral Zionist symbol with the 1927 publication of Yitzhak Lamdan’s epic poem, Masada. The poem, which uses the mountain as a metaphor for Zion, tells of a Jew who flees oppression in Russia to rebuild the Land of Israel. Its popularity rapidly spread throughout Europe. By the late 1920s a Zionist journal entitled Masada had emerged in Europe and the mountain itself became a popular pilgrimage site for Zionist youth. Given the contemporaneous popularity of Masada as a nationalist symbol, the Yiddish theater’s cryptic reference could hardly have been missed by any audience literate in Jewish mythology.26 In both The Deaf and Four Days, the Soviet State Yiddish Theater’s “Jewishness” was forced beneath the surface. The plays’ depiction of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat and their vanguard against the evil 98

How the Weasel and the Well Became the Heavens and the Earth

forces of capitalism, was balanced with Jewish archetypes and structures underlying the manifest text. To the casual observer, these plays displayed no elements of Jewish form other than language; it mattered little whether or not Iulis and the Deaf were even Jewish. They fit the model plot of con­ temporary socialist realism and contained no observable taboos. Therefore, they were acceptable productions. By the mid-1980s, the Yiddish theater was able to insert more overt references to Jewish national existence. The Soviet Writers’ Conference of 1934, at which the doctrine of socialist realism was formulated, warned eth­ nic writers against producing mere facsimiles of Russian culture. Artists and writers were urged to draw from the cultural traditions with which their people identified. They were told to appeal to the narod, the common folk. Yet despite its celebration of cultural diversity and exoticism, the regime sought to divorce cultural production from the ideology behind it; culture was permitted to be national, but not nationalist. In other words, Soviet folklorist culture was expected to present “kitsch nationalism,” a superficial recognition of a nations cultural idiosyncrasies, devoid of political or reli­ gious implications.27 Official recognition of a nations unique cultural tradi­ tions was not expected to validate that nations claim to distinctness, and certainly not to sovereignty. National motifs were to be used solely as a medium through which socialist themes could be communicated. Thus, of­ ficial Soviet nationalities policy continued to deny the existence of a Jewish nation, while simultaneously promoting a diluted Jewish national culture. However, the Yiddish theater used this new leniency to further promote Jewish national awareness. The demand to resurrect historic heroes came directly to the Moscow State Yiddish Theater in a rather curious manner. One night, in 1937, Lazar Kaganovich, Stalin s right-hand man, attended a performance of the Yiddish Theater. It was not Kaganovich’s sheer power, however, that most disturbed the Yiddish Theater troupe. Unlike most official Party representatives who occasionally observed the theater, Kaganovich was Jewish and fluent in Yid­ dish. He had received a typical Jewish religious education and his grand­ father had been a cantor. Thus he was able to understand and appreciate every linguistic and cultural nuance. Further, despite his background, Kaga­ novich was not known to be a friend of the Jews.28 One negative word from this illustrious guest, and the entire theater could be closed down and its participants arrested. When Kaganovich appeared backstage after the performance and ad­ dressed the trembling artists, his comments were most unexpected:

It is a shame to me, a shame . . . look at me, at what I am ... I am a Jew, my father was also one: exalted, bright, healthy. Why do you drag down such Jews on your stage? Deformed, lame, crippled?! . . . such Jews summon sen­ sations among the audience. I want you to summon sensations of pride in 99

Jeffrey Veidlinger

today and yesterday with your plays. Where are the Maccabees? Where is Bar Kokhba? . Where are the Birobidzhan Jews who are building themselves a new life?29

Rather than chastise the theater for too much national content, Kaganovich was asking for more. Kaganovich, indubitably acting with Stalin s support, had strong rea­ sons for encouraging heroism. As fascism began to rise in Germany, Stalin began to prepare his people psychologically for the possibility of war. In an effort to rouse the peoples patriotism, the Soviet state soaked its propa­ ganda in the historical heroism of the nations defenders. Films such as Eisensteins Aleksander Nevsky drew from the distant past to resuscitate historical figures as models of patriotism. Personal valor and military might were the character traits most valued for the coming confrontation, and it was the goal of Russian and Yiddish culture to provide heroic examples of this type. Thus over the next two years, the troupe would present two plays situated in the halcyon days of preexilic Judaea, in which the national con­ tent was foregrounded in both the text and the performance. The produc­ tions, Shulamis and Bar Kokhba, were both written by Shmuel Halkin (1897-1960) based on plays by the so-called grandfather of Yiddish theater, Abraham Goldfadn. No Yiddish author was better suited for the task of re­ viving Jewish national history than Halkin. Halkin has long been recognized as one of the most nationalist Soviet Yiddish writers: “Among the Soviet Yiddish writers,” wrote the American Yiddish literary critic Nakhman Mayzel in 1958, “Shmuel Halkin has remained the most complex and sophisti­ cated, the most profound and the most Jewish.”30 Aron Gurshteyn, a noted Soviet Yiddish literary critic, agreed, noting that Halkin’s poems “strongly strived toward the threads of old Jewish culture, toward the metaphorical imagery of ancient Jewish literature, among which the Bible is given the first place.”31 Halkin was bom in the Belorussian town of Rogachev in 1897. His father, a lumber inspector, taught him a love of nature and philosophical ap­ preciation for physical labor that would permeate much of his early writing. As a youth, Halkin began writing Hebrew poetry on the theme of nature. Fleeing the wartime devastation of Rogachev, Halkin moved to Kiev where he met the Yiddish writers David Hofshteyn and Peretz Marldsh. It was there that he began to write in Yiddish, publishing his first poems in the Minsk literary journal Shtem (Star) in 1921. He moved to Moscow the fol­ lowing year. Between 1924 and 1935, Halkin published five original poetry collections. In contrast to the majority of Soviet Yiddish writers, Halkin re­ jected shtetl life as his primary subject matter, preferring instead biblical and historical themes. For this reason, he was criticized in 1929 by a group of proletarian literary critics.32 The author, however, found that his creative impulse was integrally linked to a national stimulus. Deprived of Hebraic 100

How the Weasel and the Well Became the Heavens and the Earth

motifs, Halkin found he had difficulty composing. Although he continued sporadically to publish poetry in various anthologies and journals after 1935, he began in the mid-1980s to turn his attention to translations of Eu­ ropean classics, most notably his translation of King Lear for the Moscow State Yiddish Theater, and to adaptations of canonical works, such as Gold­ fadn’s plays. Shulamis, perhaps Goldfadn’s most famous play, was based on the leg­ end “The Weasel and the Well.” The legend, often cited as “one of the most popular and important stories in Jewish culture,”33 traces its origins to Tal­ mudic times.34 The fable tells of a young woman who, while wandering in the desert, falls into a well. Her screams are heard by a young warrior who rescues her, falls in love, and vows to marry her after completing his cam­ paign. In need of the two witnesses required by Jewish law to confirm an oath, the lovers decide to use the well and a nearby weasel. The warrior then breaks his vow and marries another woman who bears him two chil­ dren—the first of whom is killed by a weasel and the second of whom dies after falling down a well. Realizing that he is cursed, the warrior returns to and marries his betrothed who has remained faithful, discouraging suitors by feigning insanity. The fable was eternalized by a Talmudic reference in which Rabbi Hanina uses it as an example to illustrate the importance of abiding by God’s covenant. If a vow to a weasel and a well must be taken so seriously, he writes, imagine how earnestly one must adhere to a vow be­ fore God.35 The fable was first adapted into a play, The Lovers of Zion, in the early 1880s by Joseph Lateiner, a rival of Goldfadn’s. Not to be outdone, Gold­ fadn quickly responded by writing his own play, under the title Shulamis— a reference to the heroine of the biblical Song of Songs, usually interpreted by rabbinical commentators as a symbol for Zion or the Jewish people. First performed in the southern Ukrainian town of Nikolaev, Goldfadn’s play was so popular it has since been performed in Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian, Pol­ ish, Hungarian, and German. “Raisins and Almonds,” a lullaby from the play, has become one of the most beloved of Yiddish songs. The original text was written during Goldfadn’s so-called nationalist period, the point at which the playwright rejected Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) in favor of a more romantic nationalism. By setting the story in biblical Judaea, Gold­ fadn was making a political statement in favor of the nationalist Zionist camp. Furthermore, the play is set against the backdrop of a war of national liberation as the Hebrews defend the Land of Israel from foreign invaders. While the Moscow State Yiddish Theater had previously performed plays by Goldfadn, it had never before attempted one from his latter nationalist years. Like Goldfadn’s play, Halkin’s is set in biblical Judaea as the shep­ herdess, Shulamis, follows her father on his way to war against a powerful invader. Shulamis thereby became the first play performed on the Yiddish 101

Jeffrey Veidlinger

stage, and the first major work by a Soviet writer, to be set in biblical Ju­ daea. Not only did Halldn revive the Jewish homeland for Soviet audiences, but he also reinvented the Jewish people. The Jewish people in Halkin’s play are armed shepherds with the will and the strength to defend their land from powerful invaders. Indeed, the play opens as a group of shep­ herds take up arms to defend Judaea against a fearsome invading enemy.36 Like Goldfadns text, Halkin introduces the shepherdess Shulamis who follows her father, Monoyekh, on his way to war. Upon reaching the desert, Monoyekh instructs his daughter to return home. But first, he and a folksinger warn her to beware of the “well of the beloved two”—an inno­ vation of Halkin’s. According to the folksinger, a childless Canaanite man rich in sheep and cattle had come across a well in the desert while travel­ ing with his veiled wife. When the two approached the well, his wife re­ moved her veil to take a drink. As she was drinking, the shepherd caught a glimpse of his wife’s unveiled face in the water’s reflection, and was so over­ come by her beauty that he fell into the well.37 This folktale, which does not significantly contribute to the plot of the play, was probably inserted as an allusion to the patriarch Abraham. Not only is Abraham recognizable as the childless shepherd from ancient Canaan, but the tale itself is borrowed from a popular fable that tells of Abraham’s journey from Canaan to Egypt. According to the fable, Abraham was so pious that he never looked at his wife’s face, until one day he caught a glimpse of her face reflected in a stream and was overcome by her beauty.38 Halkin thereby surreptitiously brings Abraham into his play to prepare us for his next major innovation. Predictably, after departing from her father, Shulamis, dizzy with thirst, falls into a well. She is saved by the great hero himself, Avessalom, who is on his way to Jerusalem to fight the enemy. Upon gazing at Shulamis’s face, the warrior immediately falls in love, and pledges to return to marry her after his campaign. At this point, Halkin makes a drastic depar­ ture from both the Talmudic parable and Goldfadns play. Rather than make their oath before the weasel and the well, in Halkin’s version the two swear before the “heavens and the earth.”39 Thus, the entire ironic structure of the narrative is removed. In Halkin’s play Avessalom will not have two chil­ dren who are killed by a weasel and a well—it would be meaningless. This conspicuous alteration can be seen as an ellipsis, a marker indicating to those who are familiar with the parable that something is awry. Instead of the ex­ pected oath, the audience is confronted with a far more serious oath; in fact it is the very oath about which Rabbi Hanina warned in his commentary on the parable—a vow before God. The oath before the heavens made in the Canaanite desert also al­ ludes to the biblical covenant between God and Abraham—the defining moment in Jewish history in which God is said to have granted the Jewish people the Land of Israel in return for their eternal allegiance. Indeed, the 102

How the Weasel and the Well Became the Heavens and the Earth

Covenant has often been compared to a betrothal between Israel and God. In this case, God is represented by the heavenly witness to the oath, whereas Shulamis, like her biblical namesake, is a symbol for the people of Israel. The reference is strengthened by the folksingers earlier allusion to Abra­ ham. The oath to the heavens and earth is also reminiscent of Moses’ song, “Ha’azinu,” which begins the penultimate weekly portion of the Torah with the phrase, “Give ear, О heavens, let me speak; Let the earth hear the words I utter.” The song, allegedly composed by Moses at the border of the Prom­ ised Land, celebrates the return of the Jewish people to Zion and the fulfill­ ment of Gods promise to Abraham. By simultaneously alluding to both God’s initial covenant with Abraham and His ultimate fulfillment of that covenant many generations later, Halkin establishes a nationalist and religious sub­ text within his work. Seen within this light, Halkin’s play is transformed into a warning to those who believe that the covenant in the Canaanite desert can be broken without consequence. Further, in Halkin’s version Avessalom does not intentionally betray Shulamis by marrying another, but is forced into an arranged marriage against his will. While this addition can be seen as an added attack on the strictures of religious tradition, it can also be seen as a symbol for the Jew­ ish condition. Shulamis, as the betrothed, becomes a symbol for Zion—of­ ten portrayed as a bride—while Avigail represents any substitute for the Promised Land. Like Avessalom, the interpretation continues, the Jewish people were forcefully taken away from their beloved Zion and made to pledge allegiance to another. Just as Avessalom can never be content with his new bride, so the Jewish people can never be content with the Diaspora or with a substitute for Zion—a possible reference to the Jewish Au­ tonomous Region in Birobidzhan. To underline this interpretation further, two characters were added to the text for its onstage performance—a talking dog and a talking cat—both of whom served as a chorus, accentuating the action taking place on the stage. Neither character is represented in Halkin’s published text; both ap­ pear only in an unpublished addendum to the script.40 The two were largely extraneous, adding little to the plot development. Thus, their addition was severely criticized by countless critics. Their presence in a production which was touted as a “historical” play—an already absurd classification given that the play does not represent a genuine historical episode and does not even take place in any clearly defined historical era—seemed to be nothing other than a repudiation of the genre classification, and an insinu­ ation that the play had allegorical connotations. The only major functional significance the two animals added to the plot development was to remind Avessalom of his oath and help convince him to return to Shulamis. When the two animals hear of his marriage to Avigail in Jerusalem, the dog urges “we must remind Avessalom of the promise he gave to Shulamis. I am head103

Jeffrey Veidlinger

ing to Jerusalem ... I don’t believe, I don’t believe that in his heart, the warrior can live as a traitor. I am going to Jerusalem to Avessalom. I suggest you follow me.” The dog then proceeds to bark the musical “oath theme,” linking Jerusalem (Zion) to the oath. This scene, which ends the second act, facilitates the reunion of the two lovers that forms the basis of the third and final act. Thus, the just conclusion of the story is made functionally contin­ gent on the journey to Jerusalem. Further, the simple utterance of the phrase “I am going to Jerusalem. I suggest you follow me,” can be seen as a subtle hint, directed not only toward the dogs feline companion but also toward the entire audience. Indeed, it was common practice in Soviet Ae­ sopian writing to express taboos by attributing them to another through quotation. In this case, the phrase is further distanced from the author by being attributed to a dog. Shulamis exalted the freedom, romance, and heroism of preexilic Ju­ daic life. Yet the majority of critics, failing to recognize the play’s signifi­ cance, praised the theater for abandoning the national limitations of the productions that had filled the stage during Granovsky’s tenure. One critic wrote that “the new production of Goset, Shulamis, has a profound signifi­ cance for the theater’s creative history. Shulamis signifies a novel improve­ ment in Goset s ideological and artistic growth. It is a new step on the path of reconsidering and surmounting its conception, which it inherited from the former director of Goset, Granovsky.”41 Izvestiia echoed this sentiment: “This performance will no doubt take its place in the history of Jewish the­ ater as a step on the path of overcoming the traditions of national limita­ tions, characterized by the list of its old plays.”42 This dichotomy can be attributed to the theaters own publicists, who chose to deny the nationalist aspects of the play, and touted it instead as a historical representation of the class struggle. Given that the vast majority of theater critics and censors lacked the linguistic and cultural tools required to understand the complete text, they were forced to rely upon the synopses provided by the theater, Mikhoels’s public statements, and the Russian translations of each play that the theater submitted to its censors. In 1938, during the heart of Stalin’s Great Terror, the theater once again turned to Halkin, presenting his adaptation of Goldfadn’s Bar Kokhba. The play told the story of the Judaean revolt against Roman rule in A.D. 132. This time the nationalist message was even more explicit. Although for cen­ turies the rabbinic tradition had marginalized Bar Kokhba, in the late nine­ teenth century the Zionist movement promoted the revival of a Bar Kokhba hagiography. Bar Kokhba became a popular name for Zionist youth groups, and Betar, the location of his last stand, was adopted as the name of the Re­ visionist Zionist youth group. It is ironic that after Goldfadens original play was performed in Russia in 1883, the Tsar banned all Yiddish theater, al­ legedly fearing that the glorification of a Jewish rebellion against foreign 104

How the Weasel and the Well Became the Heavens and the Earth

rule would be interpreted as a modern call for revolt. Yet, in the Soviet Union of 1938, the play was once again permitted. In his writings on the play, Halkin claimed to debunk the “myth” that the revolt was a national movement, arguing instead that it was a class re­ bellion. Rather than a Jewish uprising against the destroyers of the Temple, Halkin claimed that the uprising was fought on behalf of all the downtrod­ den who were enslaved by the imperialist Romans.43 Halkin also claimed to emphasize the internal conflicts within the Jewish community, particularly the struggle of the young fighters against the elders who oppose the upris­ ing for fear of surrendering their wealth and religious traditions.44 “Bar Kokhba,” wrote M. Shekhter, who played the role, “is the spirit of the peo­ ple, reflecting their hopes and struggles for freedom. He is close to the peo­ ple, always with the people . his personal life, the personal happiness of Bar Kokhba is dependent on the fate of the people and subordinated to the happiness of the people.”45 These themes were reiterated by many critics who wrote about the production in Soviet papers. “The heroic poem of S. Halkin is one of the best dramatic works of Soviet Jewish literature and the high quality of it in the first place guarantees a successful production,” wrote one.46 Commen­ tators believed that the play was particularly successful in its reinterpre­ tation of the Bar Kokhba myth. “He [Halkin] strove not only to write a colorful episode of remote history,” wrote another critic, “but also to pre­ sent it to Soviet viewers through the prism of a Marxist historical under­ standing ... to free Bar Kokhba from the captivity of lies put out by clerics and assimilationists.”47 Similarly, another warned that “the Zionists want to appropriate the gloiy of Bar Kokhba for themselves,” but thanks to Halkin the hero has been reinstated to his proper place in the Marxist canon.48 Pravda saw the play as an affirmation that “the theme of the battle for free­ dom and independence is international.”49 The first scene sets the tone for the rest of the play: Bar Kokhba is portrayed from the start as a clever, well-educated warrior—self-assured and confident, yet still intent on training himself and others through vigor­ ous physical exercise. Contrarily, Eliezer, an elderly rabbinical scholar, in­ dicates from his first words that he opposes the rebellion. However, the people side with Bar Kokhba. As one enthusiast explains to Eliezer: “Be­ tween you, Rabbi, and the people a wall has arisen.”50 Repeated references to both Eliezer’s age and Bar Kokhbas youth firmly place a generational conflict within the plot. Antireligious themes also permeate the play. Eliezer is portrayed as a religiously pious but traitorous villain who prefers to retain his position under Roman sovereignty rather than risk his liveli­ hood for his people s freedom, while Bar Kokhba gives no thought to either himself or God. When the rabbi blesses his troops, Bar Kokhba snaps: “God! Only do not help our enemies. For us, we can do without your help.”51 105

Jeffrey Veidlinger

Set for Bar Kokhba, 1938 (photo courtesy of Jeffrey Veidlinger)

With the next scene, set in a blacksmith shop, Halkin establishes the working-class origins of the rebellion. The audience is also introduced to a token non-Jew who supports the rebellion. The theme of international­ ism, however, is never fully developed, despite the theater’s claim to be radically reinterpreting the story as an ecumenical rebellion. Non-Jews play no significant role in the revolt. This does not stop Bar Kokhba from defending the rights of the non-Jews within his kingdom, but they become beneficiaries of the rebellion only through Bar Kokhba’s justice and im­ partiality. The victorious Jewish leader grants equality to his non-Jewish subjects as a privilege; they do not earn it as a right. This becomes evident after Bar Kokhba’s initial victory, when one of his assistants issues a decree ordering the expulsion of the Syrians from the land. Bar Kokhba chastises him with the words: “Where do you get the right to give this order? . . . Not only Jews are fighting with us, but also Greeks, Syrians, all those who are not content with Rome fight together with us. . . . The Syrians, and the Parthians and the Greeks, they want to be free from Rome just like we do.”52 Although Halkin makes it clear that non-Jews will benefit from the rebellion, the crucial decision to take up arms is made solely by Jews for the benefit of Jews. Eliezer’s assessment of the situation is based on his im­ pressions of Jewish suffering rather than class oppression. As he states in the second act, during which the decision to go to war is made: 106

How the Weasel and the Well Became the Heavens and the Earth

I have been around the entire land F rom border to border. I have also been in foreign lands where Jews live— There all is over: Many who never even dreamt of war, Are now ready for battle.53

Bar Kokhba replies with the language of war: The time has come. Enough talk! Because if not today, Who knows if tomorrow will already be too late The cry: the time has already come To free ourselves from the Roman yoke.54

This call to arms is soon followed by a stage direction indicating the exclu­ sive participation of Jews: “A struggle. Bar Kokhba arrives armed and throws himself directly into the melee . . . from all sides armed Jews enter.” Bar Kokhba then addresses the assembled Jews with the words:

My brothers! I look at you Perhaps in numbers we are few Less men than the enemy, fewer arms we bear, Only with my head and right hand I swear And let us all in a single voice vow: With our arms, we will defeat him now.53

The musical score, choreography, and art of this scene accented the exclusive role of Jews in undertaking the rebellion. The backdrop, for in­ stance, was a simple set of palm trees and ancient ruins, alluding to the de­ struction of the Jewish Temple—the stimulus to the Jewish revolts that the theater was claiming to reject.56 All the musical themes were drawn from East European Jewish folk music. One critic complained that the music “was, as always, melodious, but the composer did not find his niche in this performance. It is difficult to blame him for relying on folklore, for hardly any musical documentation is preserved from the period, but the music should be closer to the theme of the production.”57 Others suggested that the play would have been more successful without music and dance alto­ gether.58 Aron Gurshteyn wrote that despite the success of Halkin’s text, the aesthetic presentation of the play was somewhat “distasteful.” “Why do Jews suddenly break into a dance when they are called upon to revolt?” he asked. “The people call to rebellion, they prepare themselves for a battle, and suddenly a dance—this suggests that these are a strange people.”59 This comment seems somewhat inappropriate for a musical based on song and dance. Perhaps Gurshteyn, a specialist on Goldfadn who indubitably would have noticed the inconsistencies in Halkin’s “reinterpretation” of the play, 107

Jeffrey Veidlinger

was using this general critique of the musical genre to hint at a more sub­ stantial criticism of the production. Other diatribes against the anachronism of using folk material in a historical production support the hypothesis that the song and dance were intentional non sequiturs with allegorical implica­ tions. The anachronistic song and dance could have served as a marker for the audience, indicating an ulterior message. While Bar Kokhba calls upon all oppressed peoples to join in his rebellion, the distinctly East European Jewish dance that signifies inclusion in the group essentially excludes the participation of non-Jews, thereby marginalizing their role in the rebellion. The idea of ancient Parthians joining in on the Hasidic-style dance would have appeared absurd to any audience. Through this technique, the theater may have sought to emphasize the Jewishness of the uprising in its perfor­ mance, while maintaining publicly that the uprising was ecumenical. The final scene, depicting the melee between the rebels and the Ro­ mans, also emphasizes the national element of the uprising. The battle is fought between the Jews and the Romans—there are no non-Jewish rebels present, while rich and poor Jews alike die for the cause. Bar Kokhbas last words, also the final words of the play, pay tribute to his people, his folk: “He who dies for freedom for his people is destined to remain alive forever. In battle, in battle! The battle is not yet over.” As the curtains close, a fel­ low rebel kisses the hero, alluding to the biblical parable that recounts how God recalled Moses to heaven with a kiss.60 Halkin had incidentally used this same midrash before to express his ambivalence toward his Soviet homeland. The pledge of allegiance in his 1923 poem “Russia” is tempered by the final line, which declares: “But now we have fallen in step with you I Though of your kisses we die.”61 Bar Kokhba thereby is equated with Moses, the most important Jewish prophet, who led his people from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Land of Israel. Once again, Mikhoels succeeded in using “national form” to promote nationalist content. With the advent of socialist realism and the slogan “national in form; socialist in content,” the Yiddish theater was encouraged to introduce its au­ dience to national heroes who could serve as historical models to be emu­ lated and admired, provided that their struggle was expanded to include all oppressed people. At first, in the early thirties, the theater achieved this goal through the use of symbolic language. It took advantage of the fact that few of its censors spoke Yiddish, and few were familiar with Judaic lore and He­ braic symbols. Plays ostensibly dealing with typical socialist realist plots were manipulated on stage to give them ulterior meanings incomprehensi ­ ble to the censors but recognizable to the theaters Yiddish speaking audi­ ence. As the call for national heroes became more distinct throughout the decade, the theater became more daring in its subject matter. Beginning in 1937, it presented plays harking back to the halcyon days of Jewish state­ hood in Palestine. The Judaean desert, however, could not appear on stage 108

How the Weasel and the Well Became the Heavens and the Earth without evoking the most profound national sentiments of the Jewish peo­ ple. The two thousand-year-old Judaean state had too many national asso­ ciations to become merely another arena for the class struggle. Although structurally the plays can certainly be linked to the narratology of socialist realism, their meaning also lies elsewhere. Audiences entrenched in Judaic lore could easily look past the theater s platitudes extolling the ecumenicism of ancient rebellions, and see instead the greatest moments in the Jewish struggle for a national home unfold on the stage.

Notes 1. This article is largely based on chapters 4 and 5 of my dissertation, “Soviet Politics on the Yiddish Stage: The Moscow State Yiddish Theater, 1919-1949” (Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University, 1998), published by Indi­ ana University Press as The Moscow State Yiddish Theater. 2. Lester Samuel Eckman, Soviet Policy towards Jews and Israel (New York: Shengold Publishers, 1974), 38-39. 3. For recent works dealing with the execution of Mikhoels and the post-World War II liquidation of Jewish cultural and social institutions, see Arkady Vaksberg, Stalin against the Jews (New York: Knopf, 1994); G. Kostyrchenko, V plenu и krasnogo faraona (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1994); Shimon Redlich, War, Holocaust and Stalinism: A Documented Study of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR (Luxembourg: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995); Mordekhai Altshuler, “The Agony and Liquidation of the Jewish State Theater of Belorussia (1948-9),” Jews in Eastern Europe 3, no. 25 (Winter 1994), 64-72; V. P. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud: Poslednii stalinskii rasstrel (Moscow: Nauk, 1994); Aleksandr Borshchagovskii, Obviniaetsia krov’ (Moscow: Kultura, 1994). 4. Iakov Etinger, “The Doctors’ Plot: Stalins Solution to the Jewish Question,” in Yaacov Ro’i, ed.,Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the So­ viet Union. The Cumming Center Series (Essex: Frank Cass, 1995), 103. 5. Nakhman Mayzel, Dos yiddishe shajw un der yidisher shrayber in sovetnfarband (New York: Yidisher Kultur Farband, 1959). 6. S. Niger, Yidishe shrayber in sovet-rusland (New York: S. Niger Book Committee, 1958). 7. Benjamin Pinkus, The Jews in the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 106. For similar predominantly Cold War-era interpretations, see Lionel Kochan, ed., The Jews in Soviet Russia since 1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Salo Wittmayer Baron, The Russian Jew under Tsars and Soviets (New York: Macmillan, 1964); Solomon Schwartz, The Jews in the Soviet Union (Syracuse, N.Y.: 1951); Nora Levin, The Jews in the Soviet 109

Jeffrey Veidlinger

Union since 1917: Paradox of Survival, 2 vols. (New York: New York Uni­ versity Press, 1990); Ro’i, Jews and Jewish Life. 8. Jack Miller, ed., Jews in Soviet Culture (New Brunswick: Transac­ tion Books, 1984), 73. 9. Jacob Frumkin, Gregor Aronson, Alexis Goldenweiser, and Joseph Lewitan, Russian Jewry: 1860—1917 (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1966), 193. 10. Ch. Smeruk “Jewish Culture in the Soviet Union in Historical Per­ spective,” in Jewish Culture in the Soviet Union: Proceedings of the Sym­ posium Held by the Cultural Department of the World Jewish Congress (Jerusalem: World Jewish Congress, 1973), 20. 11. Eckman, Soviet Policy towards Jews and Israel, 44. 12. Igor Krupnik, “Soviet Cultural and Ethnic Policies Toward Jews: A Legacy Reassessed,” in Ro’i, Jews and Jewish Life, 67-86:68-69. 13. For Aesopian language see Lev Loseff, On the Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modem Russian Literature (Munich: Verlag Otto Sagner, 1984), 1-23. 14. For the origins of the concept of “Cultural Revolution” see Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Rus­ sia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). 15. In 1930 the Central Arts Administration was turned into a soviet, and it closed in 1933. In 1932 a political-cultural committee, composed pre­ dominantly of Party members, was given supervisory power over the Soviet State Yiddish Theater. 16. Konstantin Rudnitsky, Russian and Soviet Theater 1905-1932 (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 185. 17. Deklamater fun der sovetisher yidisher literatur (Moscow: Der Ernes, 1934), 378. 18. RGALI, f. 2307, op. 2, d. 453. 19. Deklamater fun der sovetisher yidisher literatur, 377. 20. Osip Liubomirskii, Mikhoels (Moscow: Izdat. Iskusstvo, 1936), 66. 21. I. Krugi, “Novye postanovki glukhoi,” Rabochii i iskusstvo, Sep­ tember 5, 1930. 22. For an examination of socialist realism before 1932 see Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 48-52. 23. I am grateful to Joshua Rubenstein for directing me to this information. 24. M. Daniel, 4 Teg (Minsk: Melukhe farlag fun veisrusland, 1932). 25. Der Ernes, November 5, 1931. 26. Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 60-64.

110

How the Weasel and the Well Became the Heavens and the Earth

27. For an analysis of kitsch in the Soviet context, see Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 15-19. 28. For Kaganovich’s biography see Stuart Kahan, The Wolf of the Kremlin (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1987). 29. Yosef Sheyn, Arum moskver yidishn teater (Paris: Commission du plan d’action culturelle, 1964), 148. 30. Nakhman Mayzel, Dos Yiddishe shafn un der yidisher shrayber in Sovetnfarband (New York: Yidisher Kultur Farband, 1959), 253. 31. A. Gurshtein, Izbrannye stat’i (Moscow: 1959), 181. 32. Ch. Shmeruk, “Yiddish Literature in the U.S.S.R.,” in Lionel Kochan, ed., The Jews in Soviet Russia since 1917 (London: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 1970), 250-51. 33. Tamar Alexander, ‘“The Weasel and the Well’: Intertextual Rela­ tionships between Hebrew Sources and Judeo-Spanish Stories,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 5, no. 3 (1998), 254-76:257. See also Zipora Kagan, Meagadah le-siporet modemit bi-yetsirat Berdits’evski (Kibbutz Hameuchad: Kibbutz Hameuchad Publishing, 1983), 95-114. 34. While the legend itself never appears in the Talmud, a reference is made to it in Ta’anit 8a of the Babylonian Talmud. The Hebrew version of the legend tells of a rat and a well. However, in English it has convention­ ally been changed to a wildcat or weasel. The earliest written version of the fable was composed by Nathan ben Jehiel of Rome in the eleventh century. A new version was later written by Goldfadn’s grandfather, Eli Mordecai Werbel, in 1852. 35. Taanit 8a. 36. Shmuel Halkin, Shulamis (Moscow: Der Ernes, 1940). 37. Ibid., 9-10. 38. See the commentaiy on Lekh Lekha in Midrash Tanhuma and Sefer ha-yashar. Also Louis Ginzburg, Legends of the Jews, Book 1, 221-22. 39. Ibid., 18. 40. This addendum can be found in the uncataloged Goset collection at the Israel Goor Theater Archive and Museum at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 41. la. Eidelman, “Sulamif v gosudarstvennom evreiskom teatre,” Li­ teratumaia gazeta, May 10, 1937. 42. M. Zh[ivov], “Sulamif,” Izvestiia, April 16,1937. See also I. Bachelis, “Sulamif,” unidentified press clipping from IGTAM, 27; and A. Anastasev et al., eds., Istoriia sovetskogo dramaticheskogo teatra, 6 vols. (Moscow: Institut istoriia iskusstv, 1966), vol. 4, 636. 43. RGALI, f. 2307, op. 2, d. 462. 44. Ibid.

Ill

Jeffrey Veidlinger

45. M. Shekhter, “Obraz Bar-Kokhby,” Dekada Mosk. zrelishch (1938), no. 19. 46. M. Zhivov, “Pesa о Bar Kokhbe,” Sovetskoe iskusstvo, March 24, 1938. See also B. Borisov, “Bar-Kokhba,” Voroshilovgradskaia pravda, Au­ gust 3,1939; Gr. Slutskii, “Bar Kokhba,” Krasnoe znamia (Kharkov), July 16, 1939; A. Gurstein, “Bar Kokhba,” Der Ernes, March 24, 1938, March 27, 1938. 47. Iakov Grinvald, “Bar Kokhba,” Vecherniaia Moskva, n.d. 1938. 48. V. Potapov, “Bar Kokhba,” Izvestiia, May 28, 1938. 49. G. Ryklin, “Bar-Kokhba,” Pravda, March 26, 1938. 50. Shmuel Halkin, Bar-Kokhba (Moscow: Der Ernes, 1939), 49. 51. Ibid., 54. 52. Ibid., 107. 53. Ibid., 50. 54. Ibid., 52. 55. Ibid., 58. 56. Zhivov, “Pesa”; Potapov, “Bar-Kokhba.” 57. Potapov, “Bar Kokhba.” 58. Zhivov, “Pesa.” 59. Gurstein, “Bar Kokhba.” 60. Halkin, Bar-Kokhba, 127. 61. Irving Howe, Ruth R. Wisse, The Penguin Book of Modem Yid­ dish Verse (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), 512-14.

112

Peter Kenez

Bezhin lug (Bezhin Meadow)

THE ENORMOUS propaganda apparatus was an indis­ pensable part of the Stalinist state. The propagandists created a fictitious universe of rich, happy, and class-conscious workers and peasants, con­ stantly and courageously fighting dastardly enemies, and there was no one who could demolish this picture. The state controlled information by sup­ pressing hostile voices, and the authorities were extraordinarily careful about what could reach the citizens. Under the circumstances it is not surprising that during the 1930s it became increasingly difficult to make a film. First of all, the proposed script had to pass through a number of institutions, and each of them had veto rights. Since bureaucrats were afraid of appearing too liberal, they were likely to err on the side of caution. Even though the script writers knew full well what was expected of them, most of the proj­ ects were turned down for one reason or another. For example, in 1933 the largest Soviet film studio, Soiuzfil’m, paid advances for 129 scripts, but ul­ timately only 13 were accepted for production.1 Even under these circum­ stances many of the completed films were never publicly exhibited. In 1935 and 1936 alone, 37 films were declared to be unacceptable, about one third of the total film production of Soviet studios for those two years.2 Sergei Eisensteins film Bezhin lug (Bezhin Meadow) belongs to the category of films that were made but ultimately found to be unacceptable for Soviet audiences. In this sense there was nothing unusual in Eisenstein s fiasco. However, Eisenstein was not just an ordinary Soviet film director; as the creator of the greatest Soviet revolutionary spectacle, Bronenosets Potemkin (Battleship Potemkin, 1925), he was internationally the most ad­ mired Soviet director. When Bezhin Meadow was shelved in 1937, it became a subject of widespread discussion within and even beyond the industry. The unfinished film was destroyed during a bombing raid in the fall of 1941. In 1964 to 1965 the film director Sergei Iutkevich and Eisenstein scholar Naum Kleiman, re-created a fifteen-minute-long film, made up en­ tirely of still photos drawn from picture material in Eisensteins archives. They added a soundtrack from the music of Sergei Prokofiev and created a remarkably interesting document. Although this film shows Eisenstein s 113

Peter Kenez

pictorial talent, it is impossible on the basis of it to form an opinion of the director’s artistic achievement. On the other hand, two scenarios and nu­ merous descriptions by those who worked with Eisenstein are available, and these enable us to form a judgment of the political content of the film, if not of its artistic worth.3 The events surrounding the making of Bezhin Meadow and its subse­ quent suppression are particularly interesting, for they are revealing of the intellectual and political world of Stalinism in the 1930s. The evolution of the story from the actual event that took place in a remote village in Gerasimovka in the Ural mountains in 1932 to the almost finished film in 1937 is an instructive example in mythmaking. Eisensteins work on this film and then his behavior at the time, which must have been a personal crisis for him, also tells us much about the directors politics and degree of collabo­ ration with the regime. When we think of censorship, we tend to think of a courageous artist battling a repressive state. In fact, as this incident shows, the picture is nei­ ther as pretty nor as clear-cut as it seems. Eisenstein was both a collabora­ tor with and a victim of the regime that he chose to serve; at times he accepted the fundamental principles of the system, but on other occasions, one assumes, admittedly without hard evidence, he must have hated Sta­ linism. He was an extraordinarily talented Soviet artist. His talent was always evident; he always succeeded in putting his individual stamp on whatever he attempted, and in this respect he was superior to any Soviet film direc­ tor who worked in the age of Stalin. At the same time he was a Soviet artist, which meant that he never attempted to go against what he believed the regime demanded of him. Without a second thought he removed Trotsky from his almost-finished October (1928) when Trotsky lost the battle for leadership to Stalin. After all, October was never meant to be history: it was created to support a myth. Now the myth slightly changed—and that was all.4 In the 1920s, when the regime desired “revolutionary spectacles,” he made Battleship Potemkin and October. Vsevolod Pudovkin and Alexander Dovzhenko and many others made similar films at this time. Before and during World War II the leadership demanded biographical films of Rus­ sian heroes in order to encourage “Soviet patriotism.” Directors responded by making films about such historical personages as Peter the Great, Kutu­ zov, Suvorov, Pugachev, and so on. Eisenstein s contribution was Aleksandr Nevsky (1938) and Ivan Groznyi (Ivan the Terrible, 1945).5 Bezhin Meadow was also part of a group of films serving an identifiable political purpose: these are films which implicitly justify terror. The Soviet citizen was to un­ derstand that no one was to be trusted, for the enemy could be your best friend (as in Alexander Dovzhenko s Aerograd) or your husband (as in Ivan Pyr’ev’s Partiinyi bilet [Party Card]). In these and in numerous other films, the hero was the denouncer, one who put the state s interest over any other 114

Bezhin lug (Bezhin Meadow)

human tie. Indeed, in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, as in most totalitarian societies, denunciations became a widespread disease, poisoning human re­ lations. The great irony of the Bezhin Meadow fiasco is that the only film of Eisenstein s that the Soviet regime never allowed to be distributed was the one which, from an ethical point of view, was the most reprehensible. Ar­ guably, the Soviet regime performed an unintended service to the belea­ guered director. Eisenstein had last completed a film, Staroe i novoe (The Old and the New), in 1929, after which he was allowed to travel abroad, to spend some time in Western Europe, then travel to the United States and Mexico to work. Unfortunately, none of his artistic plans worked out and he returned to the Soviet Union in 1932, where he soon realized that the political life of his country had profoundly changed. In the following three years he at­ tempted three different projects but was not allowed to work on any of them. He must have been anxious to return to directing, and it was under these circumstances that in early 1935 Alexander Rzheshevskii approached him with a scenario that was to be the film Bezhin Meadow. Rzheshevskii had been an actor in the 1920s and had become an experienced script writer, providing material for the famous directors V. Pudovkin and Nikolai Shengelaia.6 One suspects that one appeal of the scenario was that Eisenstein as­ sumed that this time there would be no difficulty in getting permission to make the film. Rzheshevskii, after all, had written the scenario at the request of the Central Committee of the Komsomol (Communist Youth League). Unlike other films made during these dark times on the theme of unmask­ ing hidden enemies, this scenario was based on a real event. This “event” was well known to every politically conscious Soviet citizen. According to the story, in 1932, in the Ural village of Gerasimovka, a fourteen-year-old Pioneer, Pavlik Morozov, denounced his father, the head of the village council, for providing false documents to kulaks (prosperous peasants) who had been deported to this region. The father was arrested and sentenced to ten years. For his denunciation Pavlik was killed by his relatives.7 The Soviet authorities, who carried out collectivization with the great­ est brutality, benefited from pretending that it was not they but the enemies of collectivization who used violence against the innocent. From their point of view it was especially poignant that the victim was a young boy. The mur­ der of an innocent child, of course, is horrifying in any culture, but in Rus­ sian tradition it had a special, almost religious meaning. The murder victim in Soviet mythology was always portrayed as younger than fourteen, which the real Pavlik was, in order to increase the impression. Eisenstein, for ex­ ample, chose an eleven-year-old to play the role. Pavlik became a martyr and was celebrated in operas and songs, and innumerable paintings and statues came to depict the young hero. He retained his martyr status until the era of Gorbachev. 115

Peter Kenez

As a result of the work of the dissident Russian scholar Iurii Druzhnikov, who traveled to Gerasimovka in the 1980s and interviewed survivors, we know now that the story of Morozov was almost wholly made up to serve political purposes and celebrate informers.8 To the extent it is possible to establish the facts of the confusing story after the passage of five decades, it appears that Pavlik had never been a Pioneer (a Communist childrens club member), but a rather disturbed young boy, unaware of the conse­ quences of his acts. He turned against his father not for political motives but because the father had abandoned his wife for another, younger woman. Pavlik and his brother in fact were murdered, but the circumstances of the murder remain murky, and it is not clear that the. family had anything to do with this atrocity. The fact that members of the family confessed and sev­ eral of them were executed is by no means a proof of their guilt. Of course Eisenstein had no way of knowing the real story that had taken place in a remote Ural village three years earlier. But we can take it for granted that it would not have mattered. The director was not averse to myth creation and, like the Soviet authorities, he was willing to use the story for the expression of his own ideas, which overlapped with those of the au­ thorities, even if they were not exactly the same. He regarded Rzheshevskiis scenario, which he liked very much, as only a starting point. According to the current dogma of the ignorant polit­ ical masters of the film industry, the film belonged primarily to the script writer, whose instructions the director was compelled to follow blindly. The all-important ideological message was to be in the script. Furthermore, if the director could make any changes he wanted in the process of making his film, then there was not much point in the careful examination of the script by the authorities. Despite all the denunciation of the “emotional sce­ nario” (that is, the director using the scenario as merely a source of inspi­ ration, a starting point), Eisenstein handled Rzheshevskii s work precisely in that spirit. He liked the scenario because it was simple and therefore he could expand and rework it.9 As was Eisensteins custom, he refashioned the scenario to suit his own artistic, ideological, and even psychological purposes. The director had little interest in the niceties of Marxism and most likely disapproved of many aspects of Soviet reality that surrounded him. On the other hand, al­ though he had no firsthand knowledge of the life of the peasants, it is clear that he shared the Bolsheviks’ distaste for the traditional Russian village and wholeheartedly supported its destruction. At least to that extent this was to be an honest film. His film was not so much to celebrate the informer (unlike, for example, Pyr’ev’s Party Card), but to contrast the old and the new. In every way Eisenstein sharpened this contrast. He depicted the new village in glorious bright colors, showing gleaming tractors and clean, at­ tractive peasant faces, as opposed to those who represented the old, those 116

Bezhin lug (Bezhin Meadow)

who were always dark, threatening, ugly, and sinister. The parallel between this film and his earlier one, The Old and the New, is clear. But consciously or unconsciously, he also used the film to deal with his own individual preoccupations, such as the father-son conflict. Yon Barna analyzed Eisenstein s relationship with his father in discussing Ivan Groznyï and made the point that this topic preoccupied the artist. In Bezhin Meadow this is obviously a central issue.10 Rzheshevskii prepared himself for the work not by going to Gerasimovka, a remote, extremely poor and backward place, but to Bezhin Meadow, in the region of Orel, a place that not only had once belonged to the great Russian writer Ivan Turgenev but also came to be associated with one of his stories in Zapiski okhotnika (A Hunter’s Notebook). Turgenevs tale of peas­ ant boys in the 1850s and of a death foretold had very little to do with the scenario. Quite unnecessarily and inappropriately, the original scenario be­ gan with quotations from Belinskii, Herzen, and Saltykov-Shchedrin con­ cerning Turgenev. Eisenstein cut all references to Turgenev except one; nevertheless, oddly, he retained the title. As always, Eisenstein went to extraordinary lengths to prepare for the shooting. He made elaborate drawings for the envisaged scenes. He con­ ducted a remarkably wide search for the ideal boy to play the central role. Out of two thousand children, at first six hundred and later two hundred were selected to be interviewed by Eisenstein before the right boy was chosen.11 Unlike his previous works, in which he did not work with actors but rather chose people who represented types, now, in the age of socialist realism, he gave in and was willing to use at least some professionals. Eisen­ stein, Pudovkin, and G. Aleksandrov in 1928 published a brief but important statement about the use of sound. They advocated a nonrealistic, contra­ puntal use of sound in which there would be, at least at times, a clash between the moving image and the soundtrack. Now, for the first time, Eisenstein was ready to try out his theory. He also made extraordinary efforts to find the right location for filming. The real Bezhin Meadow would not do, and the idea of going to Gerasimovka did not even emerge. Besides the studios in Moscow, the shooting took place in widely different parts of the country, the Ukraine and the Caucasus. The film, as everyone connected with it repeatedly emphasized, was inspired by Pavlik Morozovs martyrdom. Indeed, the scenario begins: “Dedi­ cated to the bright memory of Pavlik Morozov, a small hero of our time.”12 However, Rzheshevskii chose to tell a story rather different from Pavliks. The film, after Eisenstein cut the irrelevant references to Turgenev, started with pictures of flowering orchards and blue sky and among the branches, an obelisk bearing the name Turgenev. The idyllic pictures are followed by a sad procession of Stepok, as Pavlik is called in the film, and an older peas­ ant accompanying the dead body of Stepok’s mother, who had been beaten 117

Peter Kenez

to death by her husband. (Ironically, in the real, ill-fated Morozov family no one survived but the mother, who lived to a ripe old age). Thereby the father-son conflict is established at the outset. The son’s future motivation in betraying his father is justified: he had, after all, murdered Stepok’s mother. The next scene takes place in the dark interior of the peasant hut. The father complains about his sons allegiance to the Soviet power. Stepok enters, with books under his arm and with him the light of a bright day. The father utters portentous words, quoting from the Bible: “If the son betrays his father, kill him like a dog!” Only from this reference can the viewer deduce what happened. Eisenstein delicately chose not to present the ac­ tual betrayal of the father by the son. The father is arrested for arson, and Stepok leaves his father’s hut with the kolkhoz chairwoman. The other kulak arsonists, surrounded, take refuge in the church and open fire. The church is besieged and the arsonists arrested. Next we see the contrast between the bright, clean-cut, strong, and happy peasants with their extraordinarily long column of tractors on the one hand, and the four dark, ugly arrested arson­ ists accompanied by two guards on the other. The peasants’ hatred for their enemies is so great they want to lynch them, but the arrested men are saved by Stepok, who tells a joke. Eisenstein does not share this joke with the au­ dience; we only hear the laughter of the strong and victorious, who have contempt for their miserable enemies. The peasants decide to turn the church into a clubhouse. They dis­ mantle the church and the scenes give an occasion to Eisenstein to ridicule priests. From the surviving stills it appears that this was the most interesting and powerful segment of the film. To be sure, the scenes are aimed against the Orthodox Church, but they also betray a certain, perhaps unconscious, ambivalence on Eisenstein’s part toward religion. There are biblical refer­ ences to Samson, and as the peasants play with the icons, they portray them­ selves as saints. Several times in the film there appears to be a strange halo around the head of little Stepok: the collective farm peasants are the Sam­ sons and saints of the modem world, Eisenstein seems to be saying. These scenes came to be the most discussed and heavily criticized ones in the film. The critics who later argued that these scenes were unnecessary and that they did not advance the action were correct, but most likely what dis­ turbed them was the mixed ideological message and the sheer exuberance of these pictures. The arsonists, meanwhile, manage to overpower and kill their guards. One of them even has time and energy to rape a woman. At night the father finds his son among those who guard the harvest and shoots him. The criminals are arrested once again and Stepok dies in the arms of the leader of the political department of the collective farm. According to Jay Leyda, the film was 60 percent finished when Eisen­ stein contracted smallpox in the fall of 1935.13 After spending weeks in a hospital in isolation and then in a sanatorium in the Northern Caucasus, the 118

Bezhin lug (Bezhin Meadow)

director was ready to return to work but could not. What happened was not at all unusual in the atmosphere of the 1930s. Boris Shumiatskii, the chief of Central Administration of Cinematography (GUK), without the permis­ sion, or even the knowledge, of the director, showed an unfinished version of the film to leaders of the film industry and later to members of the politburo.14 These people viewed the unfinished work and subjected it to heavy criticisms. It was a sad Soviet irony: the director was attacked for not making a picture about a real Soviet village but instead engaging in mythmaking, raising the level of conflict between father and son to biblical proportions, a fight between good and evil, light and darkness. As if the Soviet authori­ ties wanted a depiction of reality!15 Eisenstein was compelled for all practical purposes to start the work anew. It was to be a different film, with different actors, in which only the basic outline of the story and isolated scenes sur­ vived from the original. The roles of the father and of the head of the po­ litical department were assigned to different artists. The resolution included yet another irony: the rewriting of the script—in order to make it more politically correct—was entrusted to Isaac Babel’, whose last work it was before his destruction as an enemy of the people. The shooting of the new version began only in August 1936. It is interesting to compare the two versions because by doing so we can see how Eisenstein hoped to satisfy his critics and make a genuine So­ viet film, suitable for the 1930s. Undoubtedly this was to be a much cruder, one might say much less Eisensteinian, film. The most criticized segment of the film was the destruction of the church, and that had to be cut. It was substituted by scenes in which members of the collective farm fight a fire started by the arsonists. At the same time it must be admitted that from the point of view of storytelling, the fire scenes are much more relevant than the transformation of the church into a clubhouse. Some of the nonpolitical elements were removed: There is no mention of the death of Stepok’s mother, and consequently Stepok’s motivation is exclusively political. Eisenstein was criticized for using myths and biblical references rather than showing concrete events. In the new version little was left to the imagination. Now the father has a name, Samokhin. In the previous version his participation in the crime, whatever it was, took place before the first scenes of the film. In Babel’s version the boy wakes up and overhears the father and his comrades expressing their loathing for Soviet power and planning to destroy the harvest: Matches will be placed in smol­ dering sunflowers and thrown into the room where the fuel for the tractors is kept. The awakened boy sneaks out of his father’s hut and we see him in­ forming the head of the political department of the planned arson. The head of the political department has a much greater role. Because he is supposed to be in a proper socialist realist film, he is a class-conscious positive hero who knows what to do, who is decisive and tender at the same 119

Peter Kenez

time. He and the chairwoman of the kolkhoz, who at one point breast-feeds Stepok’s little sister, are the real parents of the young hero. The leadership of the Party is emphasized. At the end of the film the father shoots his son and tells him: “They took you from me, but I did not give you to them. I did not give my own flesh and blood.” It is the political officer who carries the young hero in his arms while more and more Pioneers join as the funeral procession becomes a victory march. The verbiage is also more didactic. Nothing remains here of the sly sophistication of Babel’s great works. Before he is killed, little Stepok goes out to join those who watch the harvest at night in order to protect it from the enemies. This scene is a reference to the Turgenev story where young boys discuss abstract matters at a campfire. Stepok is surrounded by younger children and he tells them a story about a revolutionary hero who resists the tsarist police and emerges victorious. “And they lead him through a line of soldiers. They beat him with rods. He walks but does not bend. Blood is flowing on his back. Flows like rain. And he walks and keeps silent. And the drum beat rolls.” The children are enthralled. Stepok continues: “He walks and keeps silent. And the Tsar asks: ‘Why is this revolutionary silent and does not moan?’ The general answers the Tsar: ‘Your excellency, revolution­ aries do not moan when they are in pain.’”16 We are to understand that Stepok is a hero, made of the same material.17 On March 17, 1937, Shumiatskii halted production of the film. Two days later he published an article in Pravda bitterly criticizing the director.18 He described the film as a slander against the Soviet countryside and wrote: “As before the film’s conception is based not on the phenomena of class struggle but on the struggle between the elemental forces of nature, be­ tween ‘Good and Evil.’” He also wrote: “Now that these deep-rooted errors have been repeated by the director, there can be no doubt that S. Eisen­ stein was interested in producing Bezhin Meadow solely as a pretext for harmful Formalist exercises.” Unfairly, but characteristically, he blamed Eisenstein for the scenes depicting the destruction of the church, even though those scenes had been removed. Shumiatskii’s article was followed by a predictable deluge of denunci­ ations of Eisenstein for being “abstract,” for being a formalist, for cutting himself off from the people. He was criticized for not showing the leading role of the Party and for depicting collectivization as an elemental process. In a particularly distasteful article I. Veisfel’d maintained that Eisenstein’s theory of filmmaking was profoundly hostile to socialism. The director was cut off from reality, and deluded by his own mistaken theory concerning “intellectual cinema.” He wrote that “in the film there is no passionate ha­ tred for the class enemy and there is no genuine love for those who build kolkhozes.” It seemed to Veisfel’d that Eisenstein had depicted the enemies in a positive light, as people who were noble carriers of an incorrect but 120

Bezhin lug (Bezhin Meadow)

nonetheless consistent theory in the name of which they were willing to ac­ cept sacrifice.19 N. Otten attacked Eisensteins approach to the scenario, attributing the failure of Bezhin Meadow to the so-called emotional scenario, which al­ lowed the director to regard the scenario merely as a starting point. In his view montage implied “formalism,” the supremacy of the director in the creative work as against the work of the scenarist and actor. The director la­ bored under the illusion that working with “emotional scenario” freed him from the control of the leadership of the studio. Otten drew the lesson that in the future only fully developed scenarios should be allowed to be staged.20 Never publicly shown and seen only by a handful of people, Bezhin Meadow became one of the most discussed films of the decade. In the age of show trials, film organizations and studios in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev each held meetings for the purpose of discussing the “lessons” of the film. In Moscow the meeting lasted three days, March 19-21, 1937.21 Shumiatskii himself opened the attack by blaming the director, the film studio in which it was made, and GUK itself. While the director was responsible for the political errors, the studio and the higher bodies were guilty of “rot­ ten liberalism,” allowing Eisenstein to proceed without knowing exactly what he was up to. GUK had asked for a copy of the completed portions of the film but had not insisted when they were not forthcoming. The head of Mosfil’m, V. Ia. Babitskii, accepted responsibility and blamed himself for not exercising daily control and therefore not stopping the project earlier. Within a short time Babitskii was arrested.22 Zel’dovich of GUK expressed concern that a man of Eisensteins political unreliability was allowed to work with students at the Film Institute. Perhaps more interesting than the predictable statements of officials were the opinions expressed by Eisensteins peers. In their speeches we find a wide spectrum, from courage and decency to swinishness. An ex-student of Eisenstein, Pavlenko, whose name deserves to be remembered for his courage, defended his master at a meeting in the Kiev studio.23 Eisenstein s former colleague, Aleksandrov, stayed away, earning himself a denunciation in Kino for “raising himself above the community.” Others managed to speak in such a way as to avoid attacking the man whom they respected. Boris Barnet spoke without saying anything. Grigorii Roshal stressed that whatever the circumstances, artists had to trust the leaders. Esfir Shub spoke ambiguously, suggesting that Eisenstein s absence from the country during the period of the First Five-Year Plan rendered him unable to draw the correct political lessons. Dovzhenko, the arch-formalist reformed, saw the source of formalism in Eisenstein s lack of knowledge of the country­ side. Eisenstein was an urbanist, he said. Probably “urbanist” was an allu­ sion to Jewishness. Ivan Pyr’ev was as harsh as one would expect from the director of the loathsome Party Card. He blamed Eisenstein for not want121

Peter Kenez

ing to be a “Soviet person,” but wishing to be somewhere else. In his eval­ uation the formalist Eisenstein had steadily declined after making Battle­ ship Potemkin.24 The most bitter attack came from a third-rate director, Iu. Mar’ian. To appreciate the flavor and absurdity of Stalinist discourse it is best to quote verbatim. First he blamed the director for looking down on others, for tak­ ing no pleasure in the achievements of others, and for being a loner. Then he went on: Formalism, formalism and once again formalism. This is a terrible disease with you. Formalism condemns you to loneliness; it is a world view of pes­ simists, who are in conflict with our era. I should say that I hate formalism with all my being, hate its elements in works of art, even when they are done by such masters as you. I became your opponent when I saw October. I saw the Revolution through your eyes. I did not see Bezhin Meadow, only ex­ cerpts concerning the fire, but that was enough. How could you make a fire the central episode in kolkhoz building? I do not understand what the artist wanted to say by that. We feel that we cannot express in our films even a part of the great thoughts which we want to express. How do you dare to give a part of your film to show a fire? This is the best testimony of your poverty. You said that the fire represented the struggle of the kolkhoz peasants against anarchy. But don’t fascists and capitalists also fight fires? There was no so­ cialist element in it.

Eisenstein’s response was extraordinary. One can sense bitterness in between the lines. He had confided in Rzheshevskii that he would admit everything of which he was guilty as well as that of which he was not.25 He must have had loathing and hatred for the Stalinist system. First he ex­ pressed the inevitable contrition, and asked his comrades’ help in overcom­ ing his errors. He asked permission to work in the theater, where mistakes could be more easily corrected. Then he went on to make an ambiguous self-criticism, which can also be read as a frontal attack on Stalinist art. He accused himself of believing “that talent and glory gave me the right to have an original vision of the October Revolution. In the Old and the New I once again attempted to give my own special, as it were independent views of the world, instead of carefully studying the statements of the Party and ex­ pressing them. I thought I had the right, but it turned out I did not.” Selfcriticism at a small scale gathering was not enough; the director had to make a public statement which appeared in Sovetskoe iskusstvo April 17, 1937.26 After repeating the criticisms made by Shumiatskii, he denounced himself for having been self-absorbed and for not having studied reality. Discussions continued for months. VGIK (All-Union State Institute of Cinematography) had special meetings scheduled on April 25 and on May 13. The same themes were repeated again and again and some of the same people gave their denunciations several times. Mar’ian, for example, 122

Bezhin lug (Bezhin Meadow)

spoke again on April 25. During the May meeting Kuleshov also could not avoid making a speech; however, in every criticism he made of his col­ league, he included himself. He began: Comrades, I must speak of the errors of Sergei Mikhailovich in a special way because my own artistic work went on the same incorrect path as the work of Sergei Mikhailovich. I have made special errors, but my artistic work is so full of errors that I cannot speak of the errors of others without remembering my own.

He continued by saying that the source of their (Kuleshov’s and Eisenstein s) errors was that they had been too preoccupied with the artis­ tic aspects of filmmaking and of not knowing Soviet reality. By saying that Eisenstein did not know Soviet reality, Kuleshov must have meant that his fellow director believed that he could still make a work of art with his own, individual stamp on it.27 In conclusion we may speculate what the real reasons were for the Bezhin Meadow fiasco. We should remember that the Stalinist system, as are all totalitarian regimes, was highly arbitrary. We may surmise that those films that were not allowed to be shown in the 1930s were not very differ­ ent from those that actually appeared in the cinemas. Nonetheless, after the state had spent two million rubles on this film, why did it have to become the only film of Eisenstein s that could never appear in the theaters? Most of the criticisms cannot be taken seriously. It is absurd to suggest that the “enemy”—arsonists, rapists, murderers—were depicted with sympathy. It is enough to look at the stills of their faces to understand that these people are monsters. Nor is it a convincing argument that the director depicted collectivization as a destructive process. There were plenty of other films made in this period that showed the dreadful consequences of the work of “wreckers.” It is true that Eisenstein operated in the realm of myth, but surely mythmaking was at the heart of socialist realism. Only one of the charges was genuine: Eisenstein was a “formalist,” according to the 1930s Soviet understanding of this concept. Shumiatskiis great and openly expressed dislike of everything that Eisenstein stood for was the decisive reason for stopping production. The boss of the Soviet film industry was a man of primitive tastes, who had nei­ ther a background nor a particular interest in cinema before his appoint­ ment. As long as he headed the industry, Eisenstein was never able to complete a project. In Shumiatskiis view, as he expressed it in his book Kinematografiia millionov (Cinematography for the Millions), great artists, Kuleshov, Vertov, and especially Eisenstein rebelled against bourgeois culture, but in fact they themselves were representatives of that culture. Had these “formalist artists” lived in Italy, they would have become fascists. By describing them as “formalists” Shumiatskii meant nothing more than 123

Peter Kenez

that they had individual styles, and to that extent never accepted socialist realism.28 Eisenstein would have liked to make a genuine socialist realist film, but he was incapable of it; he could not make films that were not in his own, inimitable style. Other great directors, Pudovkin and Dovzhenko, made films at this time that were indistinguishable from those made by less tal­ ented people. Eisenstein weathered this storm and soon—but only after Shumiatskii s arrest—started to work on his next project, Alexander Nevskii. Eisenstein the artist still survived. In this respect he was different from other Soviet filmmakers.

Notes 1. “Partiia proveriaet svoi riady” Sovetskoe kino 10, no. 3 (1933). 2. Pravda, January 9, 1938. 3. R. Iurenev, Sergei Eisenstein: Zamysly. Fil’my. Metod. (Moscow: Isskustvo, 1988), 2:100. 4. Grigorii Aleksandrov writes in his memoirs Epokha i kino (Moscow: 1976), 104-5, that Stalin walked into the cutting room of Goskino and announced that “a movie about Trotskii cannot be shown.” Without a second thought Eisenstein cut out the relevant scenes and reshot those that were necessary. 5. See this authors Cinema and Soviet Society (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1992). 6. Aleksandr G. Rzheshevskii, “O sebe” in A. G. Rzheshevskii: Zhizn, Kino (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1982), 33-96. 7. It is remarkable that both Jay Leyda in Kino: A History of Russian and Soviet Film, 329, and Marie Seton in Sergei M. Eisenstein, 353, make the story even “better” than the Soviet myth. In their version the father was a kulak and the boy was killed because little Pavlik organized the boys to defend the harvest against sabotage. How Leyda, who, after all, lived in the Soviet Union at the time, came to confuse the official Pavlik Morozov version with Eisensteins film is an interesting example of the power of mythmaking. 8. Iurii Druzhnikov, Voznesenie Pavlika Morozova (London: Overseas Publications Interchange, 1988), and a somewhat different English version, Informer 001 (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1997). 9. He was not alone in his admiration for the scenario. In “K prob­ lème siuzheta, Iskusstvo kino, no. 3 (1936): 15, E. Zil’ber, one of the ma­ jor critics of the day, also praised Rzheshevskiis work. Zil’ber particularly

124

Bezhin lug (Bezhin Meadow)

liked the fact that the major confrontation occurred not between father and son, but between the representatives of two worlds. That is, Rzheshevskii depicted types rather than individuals. Ironically, Eisenstein was attacked in the following year for precisely this characteristic of the film. 10. Yon Barna, Eisenstein (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1973), 241. 11. On making the film see Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of Russian and Soviet Film (New York: Collier Books, 1960), 327-34. Leyda acted as one of the directors assistants. 12. A. G. Rzheshevskii: Zhizn, Kino. The entire scenario is reprinted in this collection, 215-98. The scenario was first published by Kinofotoizdat in Moscow in 1936. 13. Leyda, Kino, 334. 14. E. Levin, .. na sud obshchestvennosti...” in Isskustvo kino, no. 8 (1988), 76-77. 15. Iurenev, Sergei Eisenstein, 2: 107. 16. Sergei M. Eisenstein, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow: 1964), 6: 147. 17. The text of Babel’s script is to be found in Eisensteins collected works, 6:131-52. 18. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds., Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896-1939 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 378-81. 19.1. Veisfel’d, “Teoriia i praktika S. M. Eizenshteina,” Iskusstvo kino, no. 5 (1937): 25-28. 20. N. Otten, “Snova ob ‘emotsional’nom stsenarii’,” Iskusstvo kino, no. 5 (1937): 30-35. 21. Kino published two major articles summarizing some of the speeches and gave others verbatim (March 24, 1937), 1-2; (April 11, 1937), 1. Interestingly, Rzheshevskii was not only not invited, but was not allowed to enter the hall. A. G. Rzheshevskii: Zhizn, Kino, 87. 22. A. Latyshev, “Khotelos’ by vsekh poimenno nazvat’” Sovetskii ekran, no. 1 (1989): 23. 23. Kino (April 11, 1937): 1. 24. N. M. Lary, Dostoevsky and Soviet Film: Visions of Demonic Realism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). Laiy in his chapter on Pyr’ev (111-29) gives a psychological interpretation of Pyr’ev’s hatred of Eisenstein. 25. A. G. Rzheshevskii: Zhizn, Kino, 87. 26. S. M. Eisenstein, Selected Works 3:100-5. This article together with other criticisms of the film appeared in a separate pamphlet in 1937. 27. Iskusstvo kino, no. 8 (1988): 86-88. Kuleshov and Eisenstein had made an agreement with each other that when one of them was attacked

125

Peter Kenez

the other would participate in it. After this meeting Kuleshov brought a box of chocolate to Eisenstein, who loved sweets. This story was told to this au­ thor by Viacheslav Ivanov, who had heard it from Kuleshovs wife, Khokh­ lova. Interview with Ivanov on May 14, 1990. 28. Boris Shumiatskii, Kinematografiia millionov: opyt analiza (Mos­ cow: Kinofotoizdat, 1935), 48-60.

126

Lynn Maliy

Soviet Youth Theater Grows Up: TRAM in the 1930s

IN A BOLD contribution to the long-standing debate about the relationship between the early Soviet era and Stalinism, the art his­ torian Vladimir Papemyi has argued that these two periods embody two dis­ tinct cultural systems. Soviet culture of the 1920s (which he calls “Culture One”) was based in the periphery; Soviet culture of the 1930s (“Culture Two”) was highly centralized. Culture One glorified equality and the col­ lective; Culture Two developed elaborate hierarchies based on skill and profession. Culture One rejected the cultural heritage; Culture Two was fascinated with historical origins. Among the many characteristics that dis­ tinguished the two cultures were fundamental differences about age. The culture of the 1920s, Papemyi argues, made a cult of the new and the young. In the 1930s, the grown-up individual was more important, with a renewed emphasis on fecundity and family.1 This chapter tests Papemyi s hypothesis by examining an institution that was in many ways exemplary of Culture One, Teatr rabochei molodezhi (Theater of Working-Class Youth), known by its acronym TRAM. Founded in the mid-1920s, this theater emphasized the young and the new, disdain­ ing theatrical traditions of the past. The original TRAM members were teenagers when they joined. Organized as a tight collective, the group wrote plays together and even lived together in communal housing. Rising to na­ tional prominence during the First Five-Year Plan, TRAM had to undergo massive reorganizations in order to survive into the 1930s. In essence, So­ viet authorities demanded that it “grow up.” It needed to abandon its anti­ authoritarian attitudes and unconventional acting methods, apprenticing itself to established professional stages. Although the major TRAM theaters in Moscow and Leningrad made significant changes, they could not entirely shed their youthful roots in Culture One. As a result, it will be argued, TRAM theaters were disbanded by the end of the 1930s.

127

Lynn Maliy

FROM CLUB THEATER TO NATIONAL INSTITUTION

The first TRAM began as an amateur club theater based at the Gleron House, a Leningrad club for members of the Komsomol (the youth organi­ zation of the Communist Party). It was just one of many thousands of ama­ teur theaters that sprang up to entertain urban populations in the 1920s.2 Sponsored by local factories, trade unions, neighborhood centers, and po­ litical organizations like the Komsomol, these theaters presented an eclec­ tic mix of plays, ranging from prerevolutionary melodramatic potboilers to the Russian and foreign classics to improvised sketches praising the revolu­ tionary struggles of the new nation. In the mid-1920s, when TRAM was bom, a good number of these im­ promptu stages were affiliated in spirit and sometimes in staffing with the theatrical “left”—actors and directors who believed that theater had to be radically changed in order to reflect the spirit of the Revolution. Abandon­ ing conventional repertoires, they attempted to find new material, staging methods, and performance techniques. These concerns united both profes­ sional and amateur theaters on the left; but club stages faced special circum­ stances that made improvisation as much a necessity as a virtue. Usually housed in shabby, poorly equipped places, they could not mount elaborate productions. They were critical of conventional plays that had no direct bearing on the social and political upheavals of the new nation. Often play­ ing to young local audiences, they felt pressure to perform works that di­ rectly spoke to viewers. As a result, many amateur theater collectives began to create their own works aimed at their unique audiences. The club theater circle that eventually became the Leningrad TRAM was perhaps the archetype of the many neighborhood-based, politicized amateur theaters of the 1920s.3 It was led by a charismatic cultural worker named Mikhail Sokolovskii, who got his start in agitational theater during the Civil War. Hostile to conventional kinds of theatrical training, Soko­ lovskii urged the participants in his club to do everything themselves. In the early 1920s, the club members embraced agitational tasks. Their goal, in Sokolovskiis words, was to “create festivals, evenings focusing on everyday life, and to use these evenings to pose burning questions tied to social and political life.”4 They celebrated the dates of the Red Calendar, the elaborate list of new festivals designed to popularize the Soviet regime. They also formed a “living newspaper” to investigate the life of the neighborhood and the club. In 1925 the Gleron club theater was renamed and reorganized as the Theater of Working-Class Youth. With support from the Komsomol and the city’s political education division, it broadened its base of participants and received some important professional aid. Advisors joined the group, in­

128

Soviet Youth Theater Grows Up

eluding a trained set designer, a musician, and a writer to help with scripts. It also gained the assistance of a powerful patron in Leningrad cultural cir­ cles, Adrian Piotrovskii. Employed at the Institute of the History of Art and the local political education division, Piotrovskii helped to advertise and so­ licit aid for the local group. As drama critic and playwright, he also helped to shape TRAM s original repertoire.5 TRAM quickly established a local and then a national reputation as an innovative theater focusing on the problems of Soviet youth. Participants wrote their own plays on contemporary themes—the origins of the Komso­ mol, the struggle against hooliganism, the disappointments of NEP, and the difficulty of trying to balance private life with the demands of the collective. Some topics were plucked directly from the pages of the press. When a dis­ cussion emerged in Leningrad over the problem of young women leaving the Komsomol as soon as they got married, one TRAM participant, the young worker Pavel Marinchik, was inspired to write the play Meshchanka (The Petty-Bourgeois Woman), examining precisely this theme.6 As TRAM members shaped new plays, they also began to formulate aesthetic principles which, in their view, set them apart from the dominant professional theaters. TRAM performers were not “actors” in any conven­ tional sense of the word. Rather they were activists who drew their subject matter from factories and dormitories and aimed to influence the behavior of viewers. They most often played characters very much like themselves; their goal was to recreate the language and movements of present-day youth, not to emulate people whose life experiences were different from their own. Although this required rigorous training, it was different from methods taught in conventional theaters, and especially from the methods of Konstantin Stanislavsky, who required his actors to enter into the emo­ tional world of the characters they played. In an intentional contrast with Stanislavsky, Sokolovskii maintained that the parts TRAM actors played were social masks, beneath which the faces of worker youth were clearly visible.7 The success of the Leningrad TRAM inspired emulation, first within neighborhoods of the city and then in major industrial centers throughout the country. Moscow opened its first TRAM circle in 1927. By 1928, the Leningrad theater had enough financial support to pay the young actors to quit their dayjobs. This allowed it to organize long road trips, which further increased its following. On a trip to Moscow in 1928, so many people showed up to see the theater that many new performances had to be added, reported the national Komsomol newspaper, KomsomoTskaia pravda.8 The advent of the First Five-Year Plan in 1928 only added to TRAMs popularity. That the First Five-Year Plan was to some degree a youth re­ bellion has long been recognized in scholarly literature. Young workers

129

Lynn Maliy

used shock-work campaigns to push aside the dominance of older skilled colleagues; youthful cultural activists challenged authority relationships in schools and even circumvented established institutions to launch their own literacy campaigns. Given the general ascendancy of youth, it should come as no surprise that TRAM—a theater by and for young people—came to have great visibility. Cardinal principles of TRAM aesthetics—like the re­ jection of professional models and the insistence on the political role of culture—became mainstream values during this period of cultural radical­ ization. By the end of 1928, there were seventy TRAM organizations through the Soviet Union; by 1932 there were over three hundred. New groups tak­ ing shape in other cities depended heavily on the repertoire of the Len­ ingrad organization, which began to be published in large editions. During the First Five-Year Plan, TRAM also established a national organizing cen­ ter, called the TRAM Soviet, which operated under the leadership of the Komsomol. It called several nationwide meetings where the organizational principles and aesthetics of the organization were clarified. Most important for the future history of TRAM was the 1929 congress, dominated by So­ kolovskii, where he laid out his vision of the organization, a vision that had changed little since the group’s inception. TRAM was not a theater in any conventional sense, opined Sokolovskii. Rather, it was the agitprop organ for the Komsomol. TRAM members’ task was to play themselves, the young men and women of the Komsomol.9 The Leningrad TRAM’s repertoire became even more topical during the plan, addressing the changes in labor organization and daily life de­ manded by the industrialization process. In perhaps its best-known work, Klesh zadumchwyi (The Pensive Dandy), which premiered in early 1929, the theatrical collective examined the many opportunities and distractions for young people as the country underwent a rapid social and economic transformation. At the center of the work is a seemingly model young cou­ ple that is almost torn apart by temptations that lead them away from the collective. Although it ends with a socialist-style happy ending, the work ex­ amined some of the personal costs of the rapid reorganization of daily life represented by the plan.10 At the peak of the First Five-Year Plan, TRAM’s expansion seemed to face no barriers. It formed divisions in music (MUZORAM), in art (IZORAM), and in film (KINORAM). In Leningrad, the theater group joined forces with other theaters on the left to challenge the secure position and funding sources of the city’s more conservative academic stages.11 The TRAM organization even attempted to assume a leadership role for all am­ ateur theaters, especially mobile propaganda troupes called agitprop brigades that had spread rapidly during the First Five-Year Plan. At a 1930 national conference, delegates passed a resolution seizing the position as the leading group of all amateur artistic organizations. Or to use the militant language 130

Soviet Youth Theater Grows Up

of the time, TRAM proclaimed itself “the leading brigadier in the restruc­ turing of all armies of amateur artistic forms.”12 THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

In one of the quick status reversals so common in Soviet history, the Len­ ingrad TRAM’s hegemonic position was shattered even before the First Five-Year Plan ended. In early 1931, the powerful Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, known by its acronym RAPP, began an assault on the organization. RAPP leaders were angered by the organizations grandiose claims. It also enumerated a number of aesthetic errors, especially TRAM’s hostile attitude toward professional theaters. This vituperative attack was focused primarily on the founding Leningrad organization. In the process, it gave the fledgling Moscow TRAM, to this point very much in Leningrad’s shadow, a chance to assert itself. In a series of national meetings held in 1931, leaders linked to the Moscow TRAM denounced Sokolovskii as over­ bearing and arrogant, trying to dominate all aspects of the national movement. Piotrovskii, the Leningrad TRAM’s most articulate theorist, was subject to a blistering assault for his notion that amateur theater was separate from and at certain points in history more influential than the professional stage. In addition, the Leningrad TRAM’s repertoire, especially the play The Pen­ sive Dandy, was denounced as schematic, mechanical, and unconvincing.13 The founders of the Leningrad TRAM quickly capitulated to this crit­ icism. In very short order, Sokolovskii wrote a new play that attempted to address TRAM’s alleged aesthetic errors. The production Sploshnoi potok (Unbroken Stream) was stripped of any of the elements that had distin­ guished TRAM work in the past. It paid hardly any attention to the specific problems of working-class youth.14 Instead of showing that the industrial plan could potentially cause problems for young people, this work presented entirely positive Komsomol heroes at war with a variety of class enemies. At the same time, Piotrovskii issued statements expressing regret for his aes­ thetic errors.15 TRAM’s efforts at reorganization did not abate when the Communist Party intervened to restructure literary and artistic organizations in April 1932. The famous Party pronouncement summarily dissolved self-proclaimed proletarian cultural groups, including RAPP. The decree also marked a ma­ jor shift toward a cultural policy that was extremely hostile to the original ideas of the Leningrad TRAM. All amateur theater groups were urged to overcome their opposition to the use of professional directors and profes­ sionally written plays, to institute training programs that integrated theatri­ cal history, and to provide a better education for actors. It is not surprising that Papemyi sees the 1932 Party decree as the founding document of Cul­ ture Two.16 131

Lynn Maliy

In this new cultural milieu, the national TRAM network underwent a major restructuring. The central organization was drastically cut back, and many amateur TRAM theaters were handed over to the trade union cul­ tural apparatus. Professional TRAM groups were placed under Narkom­ pros control.17 In essence, this meant that many local organizations ceased to function because their sponsoring institutions did not have the funds or interest to continue support. Those groups that remained were cut off from other TRAM organizations. This was even the case for local TRAM groups in Moscow and Leningrad. Pavel Marinchik, one of the founding members of TRAM, was the head of a local circle in Leningrad in the early 1930s. He complained, “Many TRAM organizations are ‘without rudder and without sail’; they are having extreme difficulty finding their perspective and are los­ ing their creative direction.”18 With the aesthetic shifts of the 1930s emphasizing training and a more conventional repertoire, both of the major TRAM theaters in Moscow and Leningrad underwent considerable changes. In the process, their sta­ tus positions were reversed—the Leningrad TRAM struggled from style to style and leader to leader, never hitting upon a formula that made it very popular with viewers or critics. The Moscow Central TRAM, on the other hand, quickly established finks with the Moscow Art Theater and rapidly earned at least temporary respect for its enthusiastic embrace of realism. The Leningrad TRAM’s fall from grace was rocky. Sokolovskii issued many apologies and explanations. In one especially lengthy mea culpa he admit­ ted that the Communist Party’s 1932 decree was partially directed at TRAM.19 But no matter how contrite he was, he did not seem to grasp what was required in the new cultural environment. One vivid example was the Leningrad TRAM’s staging of the eighteenth-century play by the Russian author Denis Fonvizin, Nedorosl’ (The Infant). The theater had only rarely performed works by authors outside of its own ranks; never before had it attempted a prerevolutionary work. With this choice, Sokolovskii and the TRAM collective were attempting to adjust to the renewed emphasis on the classics, a hallmark of Culture Two. However, the work was staged in an ir­ reverent manner, earning the theater more blame than praise. The original text of The Infant examined the fate of an orphaned young noblewoman. Distant, boorish provincial relatives had taken over her care, but they treated her cruelly. However, once they discovered that the heroine’s beloved uncle had struck it rich in Siberia and made her his heir, the rela­ tives immediately tried to marry the young woman off to their stupid young son (the “infant” of the title). At the last minute, the uncle arrived to save her, seeing her betrothed to a worthy young officer instead. By the time the Leningrad TRAM was finished with the play, this basic outline was barely recognizable. Sokolovskii staged large portions of the play in pantomime. Minor characters were elevated to major roles, most 132

Soviet Youth Theater Grows Up

notably the very small part of a serf tailor, who was turned into the leader of a peasant rebellion (complete with aria!). The upright uncle in the text was changed into a Siberian robber, the chaste niece into a flirt, and the worthy officer into a rapist.20 Public response to the performance was by and large negative. One critic, the theater historian Alexei Gvozdev, praised TRAM’s basic interpretation of the play, which he believed remained true to the work. However, Gvozdev criticized the theaters effort to introduce elements of satire and the grotesque into the work. Rather than playing their roles, TRAM actors embodied the characters’ political positions. In the process, concluded Gvozdev, the text of the play did not reach the viewer, getting lost in the noise and commotion of the production. The overall effect of the performance evoked “futuristic” attempts to update and satirize the classics that found a certain vogue on Soviet stages in the 1920s.21 In other words, this classic work had been staged with the methods and sensibilities of Culture One. In addition to its search for a new aesthetic direction, the Leningrad TRAM was also having trouble finding a permanent home. It was ousted from its old spot because it did not have the funds for necessary renovation. Promised another building by the city government, TRAM took to the road in the middle of 1933 in the hopes that expensive renovations would be com­ pleted on its return.22 The group headed first to Moscow, a journey which must have been a bittersweet experience for longtime TRAM participants. Two earlier visits in 1928 and 1929 were popular events, with audiences lin­ ing up in the streets to see performances. Perhaps trying to recreate that sense of excitement, the theater performed old hits, including Plaviatsia dni (The Days Are Melting) by Nikolai Lvov, as well as a play by Adrian Piotrovskii. This is further evidence that the theater had not grasped the seis­ mic shifts in Soviet culture. The Days Are Melting had already been subject to a passionate critical debate during the First Five-Year Plan, while Piotrovskii had been subject to a full-scale assault. The one new work the the­ ater developed while in Moscow, Alexei Tolstoi’s Pravo na zhizri (Right to Life) did little to reestablish its reputation. One Moscow reviewer called the production embarrassing, on the level of an average amateur theater.23 Af­ ter this disappointing showing in the capital, the Leningrad TRAM headed off for Central Asia and dropped out of sight for a year. While the Leningrad theater stumbled, the Moscow TRAM quickly reorganized and set off on a new aesthetic path. This was made easier be­ cause the Moscow TRAM experienced a fundamental shake-up in its lead­ ership and membership in 1932. In what amounted to a cultural purge, those who supported TRAM’s old methods were ousted from the theater. The Moscow Komsomol spearheaded the reorganization. It called a general meeting just after the Communist Party’s pronouncement on the arts and advised that the Moscow TRAM become a serious professional theater, 133

Lynn Maliy

recruiting staff from long-established theaters and soliciting works by pro­ fessional playwrights.24 This intervention split the Moscow TRAM into two hostile camps. The majority wanted to strengthen and redefine old TRAM methods—roughly following the path of the Leningrad organization. A smaller group wanted to change the way work was conducted fundamentally, beginning with invitations to professional artists to lead creative work.25 After a protracted struggle that lasted several months, those in favor of change won. At the beginning of 1933, there was a sizeable exodus from the Moscow TRAM. Those who left included the future film director Igor Savchenko, who abandoned TRAM on his own accord “because of creative disagreements.” Nikolai Kriuchkov (later to become a Peoples Artist) was dismissed for “hooligan behavior” after he had allegedly insulted one of the new leaders of the theater.26 In June I. Beletskii became the chief adminis­ trator and Il’ia Sudakov, from the Moscow Art Theater, became the artistic director. This path was chosen, opined Beletskii, because the system of Stanislavsky, “despite its many shortcomings,” was most likely to result in a socialist realist theater.27 The first work staged by the reconstituted Moscow Central TRAM was the contemporary play Devushki nashei strany (Girls of Our Country), by the Ukrainian playwright Ivan Mikitenko. Addressing the transformation of gender roles and romantic relationships during the First Five-Year Plan, this work bears some resemblance to early works written by TRAM authors. It is different, however, in that female laborers are at the center of the story. We can also see evidence of the transformation of social­ ist culture toward more traditional models. Komsomol members in this play read the nineteenth-century author Lermontov and play the cello; they are, in Mikitenko s words, already a working-class intelligentsia.28 The story ends with girls in white dresses waltzing with young partners in suits and ties. The basic plot centers around the formation of a female shock-work brigade to lay concrete for the construction of an electrical power plant. The female brigade is opposed by many, including an American advisor, older Soviet workers, and even a few male Komsomol members who do not think this is appropriate womens work. Subplots circle around problems of romance in this new social environment. The main female worker, Maria, appears to shun the attentions of an upstanding Komsomol member in fa­ vor of a more problematic young man who has let his success in construc­ tion go to his head. In the meantime, this young man has formed an illicit alliance with the wife of the main engineer, who is interested in the young worker only to see how much disruption she can cause on the construction site. The two plot lines intertwine in a dramatic crisis. The electrical station is threatened by a huge storm. All the Komsomol members and even the less politicized workers volunteer to work around the clock to save the proj­ ect. The betrayed engineer, who abandoned his unfaithful wife as an enemy of the people, joins in the defense of the dam. In the final scene, a dance at 134

Soviet Youth Theater Grows Up

the local Palace of Culture, the wayward young worker is forced to admit his errors and enter back into the fold, while the exemplary Maria confesses her love for her upright suitor. Girls of Our Country was a popular play in 1933, staged by the Leningrad Drama Theater as well as a number of am­ ateur theater groups. Several critics objected to the portrayals of the young women in the play, who, according to one, “acted like private school girls (institutki) from Charskaia [the popular prerevolutionary writer of literature addressed to girls].”29 For participants in the Moscow TRAM, it marked a transformation from eclectic acting styles to a more systematic approach. According to Vladimir Solov’ev, who had taken part in the Moscow TRAM from its inception and went on to a stellar career, Sudakov brought a com­ pletely new approach to acting. Rehearsals first began around a table. Each actor had to create a biography of the character he played and learn to “live the part.”30 Although the play itself did not receive very enthusiastic re­ views, both viewers and critics determined that it marked a new approach to acting and performance diametrically opposed to past styles. Not only was the Moscow TRAM gaining a reputation as a serious theater, it also received an impressive new home. During 1932 and early 1933, it had to share a stage with a neighbor club that was reluctant to give it sufficient rehearsal time. Supporters of TRAM believed that it had earned the right to a stage of its own. In the fall of 1933, the city government be­ queathed it the former movie theater Rot Front, located near Pushkin Square in the center of Moscow. In addition to its large seating space and impressive foyer, this building also held historic significance for the Kom­ somol. It was here that Lenin issued a historic speech to Komsomol mem­ bers in 1920, urging them to “study, study, study.”31 The Moscow TRAM’s next work examined the rise of fascism in Ger­ many and was an unambiguous success, earning the theater over-the-top praise in the national and local press. Commissioned from Alexandra Brushtein, who up until this point had written plays primarily for children’s theater, Prodolzhenie sleduet (To Be Continued) investigated German young peoples’ struggle against dictatorship. In the process of writing the play, Brushtein worked with TRAM members and also representatives from the international Komsomol movement. Response to this performance far surpassed reviews of Girls of Our Country. Komsomol leader Dmitry Luk’ianov claimed that TRAM was the first theater to give serious attention to the victory of Hitler in Germany. “This moves [the Moscow TRAM] to a lead­ ing position on the theatrical front.”32 The Moscow theater followed this with yet another success, Chudesnyi splav (The Miraculous Alloy) by Vladimir Kirshon. This play was a winner in a national competition for the best new work in 1934. Like Girls of Our Country, it proved popular in both professional and amateur the­ aters. During the 1934 to 1935 season, it played concurrently at Moscow 135

Lynn Maliy

Art Theater, the Theater of Satire, the Moscow TRAM, and several smaller professional theaters in the city. In addition, it was widely distributed to am­ ateur theaters. The journal Kolkhoz Theater sent out copies to all of its sub­ scribers in early 1935.33 This play offered a humorous look at scientific work among Komsomol students who were searching for a new alloy for airplane construction. Like many TRAM works in the past, it contrasted the desires of the individual as set against the goals of the collective. One critic, writ­ ing in the national newspaper of record, Pravda, asserted that the Moscow TRAM had recreated the magic of the Moscow Art Theater under social­ ism. TRAM actors had discovered their own miraculous alloy—the flower­ ing of the individual within a talented collective. “Isn’t a new cherry orchard being planted with their laughter and jokes?” he asked.34 During the period from 1932 to 1934, which Papernyi calls the cru­ cial transition period between Culture One and Culture Two, the Lenin­ grad and Moscow TRAM organizations pursued fundamentally different strategies. The Leningrad theater retained its original leadership and staff. While Sokolovskii issued many statements about the need for change, he did not fundamentally alter the theaters presentational style. By contrast, the Moscow TRAM completely overturned its ranks and called in reinforce­ ments from the Moscow Art Theater. The results of these two strategies were striking. While the Leningrad TRAM remained a homeless wanderer, the Moscow TRAM won an impressive new home and acclaim from the So­ viet press. It also gained control over what was left of the national TRAM organization. GROWING PAINS

The many successes of the Moscow TRAM came with a price. After the premier of The Miraculous Alloy in 1934, the leader of the national Komso­ mol organization, Alexander Kosarev, held a special meeting with the direc­ tor and top staff members. He issued a new challenge to the organization. It had shown its ability to address the theme of Soviet youth, but now it should expand its repertoire. Why should TRAM only stick to youthful themes, he queried? Why not play the classics, including Ostrovskii and Saltykov-Shchedrin? It would be harmful for the theater to rest on its laurels, Kosarev warned; TRAM must also learn to serve adults in order to expand the theaters audience.35 In essence, Kosarev was bidding the theater to com­ plete the maturation process begun when it adopted the Stanislavsky system in 1932. The theater had brought new skills to the presentation of Soviet youth—now participants had to show that they could do more than this. The leadership of the Moscow TRAM accepted the challenge. At a national TRAM meeting sponsored by trade unions in December 1934, Beletskii vowed to diversify the repertoire. The theater needed to expand 136

Soviet Youth Theater Grows Up

its horizons, he stated. Furthermore, its members, who tended to stay in the organization a long time, were no longer so young.36 This late 1934 meeting also served to solidify the status reversals between the Moscow and Leningrad TRAM organizations. Representatives from TRAM groups from Iaroslavl’ to the Donbass were in attendance, but there were no members from the original TRAM group. Leningrad received attention only as a bad example. It was the Moscow theater that had shown the correct way to re­ build youth theater, claimed provincial representatives. As the Moscow Central TRAM was being anointed as national leader, the Leningrad organization remained homeless. The theater spent the win­ ter of 1933 to 1934 in Tashkent and arranged road trips to far-off places like Ashkabad, only returning to its home city in the fall of 1934. The promised big, new renovated theater still had not materialized. Instead, TRAM moved into a smaller space that was not completely ready for performances. Shrug­ ging off this disappointment, Sokolovskii promised that he had finally learned his lesson. “We are now in the position to meet the demands of the mature cultural level of laborers with the method of socialist realism,” he proclaimed. To meet these new challenges, Sokolovskii announced plans to invite help from the Moscow Art Theater, once deemed TRAM’s greatest enemy. An invitation was sent out to the renowned drama teacher Alexan­ der Adashev, who apparently never answered the call.37 The Leningrad TRAM’s first work in these new surroundings was the play Ispytannie (The Ordeal), which examined the life of water transport workers and the inclusion of women workers in their ranks. Although some responses to the work were positive, praising the ability of individual actors, in general critics did not believe this work marked a major step forward. “Significant organizational questions await the Leningrad Theater of Work­ ing Class Youth,” wrote one author. “It is obvious that the answers have not yet been found.”38 In the wake of this disappointment, the Leningrad TRAM finally un­ derwent the dramatic upheavals that had reshaped its Moscow counterpart almost three years before. As in Moscow, the local Komsomol committee took charge of an aesthetic purge. The memoirist of the Leningrad TRAM, Pavel Marinchik, recounted an emotional scene in which old-time TRAM actors confronted Sokolovskii with their complaints—they knew no estab­ lished system of acting, and they were tired of the constant attempts at rein­ vention and reappraisal. They begged him to ask a professional actor to join him at the head of the theater. But after the bitter recriminations resulting from this discussion, Sokolovskii chose to leave the theater he had founded.39 An entirely new leadership took control of the Leningrad theater in the middle of 1935, headed by V. P. Kozhich from the Academic Drama Theater. Some old-time TRAM members felt alienated by these rapid shifts. Alexander Vinogradov and Alexander Grigorev, who had taken part 137

Lynn Maliy

in TRAM from the beginning, complained publicly in the Komsomol news­ paper Smena that they had no sense of the theater s new aesthetic direction because no one had discussed it with them. “The theater is no longer a col­ lective,” they charged.40 Finally, in mid-1935, the Leningrad TRAM began to fit the 1930s ideal of a professional theater. It gained a permanent home and a profes­ sional directing staff. It filled out budgets and submitted plans to the city’s arts administration. The new leadership also promised to diversify its the­ atrical offerings and their audience. “The program that Kosarev outlined for the Moscow TRAM applies equally to the Leningrad theater,” wrote the Leningrad critic Mikhail Iankovskii. “They must find broader limits to their repertoire, including not only contemporary but also classical plays; and they must attract not only young but also adult viewers.”41 Certainly the two main TRAM organizations attempted to follow the creative charge given to them by the Komsomol. During 1935, both tried their hands at the classics with works that were popular on other profes­ sional stages. The Moscow theater chose the nineteenth-century playwright Alexander Ostrovskii s Bednost’ ne potok (Poverty Is Not a Crime), which in general received good reviews.42 The restructured Leningrad group turned to Molière’s Prodelki Skapena (Scapin the Scamp), the first production un­ der new professional management. Reviews for this performance were mixed. The group did not yet have enough experience in ensemble acting, wrote one observer, and still bore traces of the slurred, contemporaiy pro­ nunciation that had flawed TRAM acting in the past.43 Both TRAMs continued to offer new works as well. Their situations were now reversed compared to the 1920s—it was the Moscow organiza­ tion that could solicit original works from sympathetic writers. In June 1935 it staged Afrodita by the Komsomol writer Nikolai Bogdanov, a work specif­ ically written for the Moscow TRAM.44 In September of that year, the Len­ ingrad theater performed the same play. Neither received very positive response to this vaudeville-inspired farce set on an animal husbandry kol­ khoz (collective farm), which involved stock-in-trade elements of mistaken identity and star-crossed romance.45 Although the Leningrad TRAM tried hard to make up for lost time, it remained very much in the shadow of its Moscow counterpart. This was vividly revealed in the two anniversaries the theaters celebrated in 1935. The Leningrad organization had existed already for a decade; the Moscow TRAM marked a five-year anniversary.46 In Moscow, the event was festive. Ceremonies opened with greetings from the local Komsomol leader, Luk’ianov, and comments about the theater s creative path from the direc­ tor Sudakov. An article in the national Komsomol newspaper noted cele­ bratory telegrams from national leaders, including Stalin himself.47 The Leningrad event was a more modest affair, and celebratory articles began 138

Soviet Youth Theater Grows Up

with long denunciations of the theaters past errors.48 The Leningrad TRAM’s performance to mark the occasion was Nachalo zhizni (Life Begins), a play about the Komsomol during the Civil War. It won a warm review from none other than Adrian Piotrovskii, who compared it to a popular TRAM work from the 1920s.49 While the Moscow theater won praise for its potential to shape a new future, the Leningrad TRAM was still constricted by its past. ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT

The celebratory festivals of 1935 marked the high point of TRAM’s at­ tempts at restructuring. This was particularly true for the Leningrad the­ ater. None of its subsequent productions won it any positive attention. Perhaps most controversial was the summer 1936 play, Asya, originally writ­ ten by Alexandra Brushtein for the Moscow TRAM. This play examined the topical—and touchy—issue of abortion, coming up with a politically correct solution on the eve of the 1936 family law that banned the procedure. The main character, an engineering student named Asya, refuses to have an abor­ tion to please her ambitious boyfriend. Instead she decides to keep the child, much to the joy of another admirer who vows to serve as a model father.50 It was not the optimistic ending that bothered critics, but rather the prob­ lem of character development. Using phrases so often associated with TRAM productions in the 1920s, writers complained that none of the characters were persuasive and none of the complicated character lines, which included workplace tensions and strains between children and parents, were suffi­ ciently developed. Indeed, one observer found explicit parallels to the play The Days Are Melting, something that could not be viewed as a compliment given the sordid reputation of that work.51 Asya was the last production of the Leningrad TRAM. In September of 1936, the theater was merged with the Krasnyi Theater to form the Theater of the Leningrad Komsomol. There were signs of trouble for the Moscow TRAM as well. At a dis­ cussion sponsored by the Moscow city theater division in early 1936, par­ ticipants complained that the director Sudakov was not devoting enough time to TRAM; they needed a full-time leader devoted only to TRAM work. External critics claimed that TRAM was not reaching out to local amateur theaters and not organizing its internal affairs very well. In the words of one observer, the management of the theater was “production chaos.”52 The city’s Komsomol organization also joined in the complaints, charging that TRAM was not living up to its educational tasks. The head of the Moscow Komsomol, Luk’ianov, demanded more works like To Be Continued, which had instructed viewers on the dangers of fascism.53 On the heels of these public meetings, a comprehensive review in the theater journal of the Union of Soviet Writers, Teatr i dramaturgiia, out­ lined a full-scale assault on the Moscow TRAM’s accomplishments. Critic 139

Lynn Maliy

I. Belikov announced that the theater had reached its creative peak with The Miraculous Alloy. But it had not been able to meet the challenge that Kosarev had issued—to move beyond youthful themes and youthful audi­ ences. In fact, it had been devoting itself primarily to lighthearted works without serious content. While TRAM skills had been improving, its artis­ tic output had not. Why no plays by Maxim Gorky, no classics, no serious Soviet works? He believed that only TRAM’s upcoming plans to perform a stage version of the Soviet best seller Как zakalialas’ staT (How Steel Was Tempered) could redeem the theaters reputation.54 But the play on which Belikov had placed so much hope was not well received. How Steel Was Tempered premiered in May 1937. Critics were disappointed in the stage adaptation of Nikolai Ostrovskii’s novel, which did not offer the richness and complexity of speech in the book. They also charged that the TRAM’s lead­ ing actor was not up to the title role.55 As the purges made their way into the dramatic community in 1937, the Moscow TRAM experienced new difficulties. Although none of its lead­ ers or former sponsors were arrested, several of the playwrights closely con­ nected to the theater were. Most devastating was the arrest of Vladimir Kirshon, whose The Miraculous Alloy had recently been hailed as TRAM’s greatest artistic achievement. Ivan Mikitenko, who had written works ex­ pressly for the theater, was also arrested.56 In late 1937, as part of a pattern of theatrical mergers in Moscow, TRAM was united with the Simonov Theater Studio.57 This new amalgam continued performing under TRAM’s name. Participants evidently thought this arrangement would continue for some time—a late 1937 newspaper ar­ ticle confidently announced TRAM’s planned program for the coming cal­ endar year.58 However, in early 1938 all links to the past were severed when TRAM disappeared from Moscow as it had in Leningrad. A new theater, with an entirely new leadership, took shape on TRAM’s former stage, the Moskovskii Teatr im. Leninskogo Komsomola (Moscow Komsomol Theater).

In a retrospective article on the long prehistory of the Leningrad Komso­ mol Theater published in 1938, the author concluded that the struggle for professionalism was never quite won within TRAM. Thus it was a sign of hope and a fresh start when a new entity took shape that bore a different name. “The Leninist Komsomol will nurture and cherish its theater; its leadership will ensure that the theater bearing its name will grow and grow as a theater of truth, big ideas, and stirring images.”59 This evaluation indi­ cates the main problem of TRAM stages—they were unable to “mature” enough by Stalinist standards to be taken seriously as professional theaters. The Leningrad TRAM did not even master the basic rules of Stalinist cul­ ture, which required theaters adopt a generally recognized training system. Moscow TRAM’s difficulties began later, when the Komsomol leadership 140

Soviet Youth Theater Grows Up

determined that it expand its repertoire beyond youthful themes. This amounted to an additional test of professional status that it failed to pass. As Culture Two solidified during the 1930s, writes Papernyi, its rep­ resentatives began to see Culture One increasingly as its “antiworld”—a repository of evil influences that had to be eradicated.60 I believe this in­ sight can help to explain the demise of TRAM theaters in the late 1930s. By the standards of the times, TRAM’s elimination was a comparatively pain­ less process. Sokolovskii, the “bad boy” of the TRAM movement, was not arrested; his end came during the Second World War. Sudakov, the director of the Moscow TRAM, assumed more prestigious and lucrative positions. Several former TRAM actors went on to stellar careers.61 Nonetheless, the new Komsomol theaters that took shape made great efforts to sever their ties to their questionable past. By the end of the 1930s very few reminders of their beginnings remained—not the actors, the leaders, the original reper­ toire, and most certainly not the name.

Notes 1. Vladimir Papemyi, KuTtura “Dva” (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1985), passim, esp. 75, 119-27. 2. On club theaters in general, see Gabriele Gorzka, Arbeiterkulturin der Sowjetunion: Industriearbeiter-Klubs, 1917-1929 (Berlin, 1990), 340-59, 401-3. 3. On TRAM, see N. Rabiniants, Teatr iunosti (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1959), 7-31; Valentina M. Mironova, TRAM: Agitatsionnyi molodezhnyi teatr 1920-1930kh godov (Leningrad, 1977); Lynn Maliy, “The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Youth Theater TRAM,” Slavic Review 51 (Fall 1992), 411-30; Katerina Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cam­ bridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 266-78. 4. M. Sokolovskii, “Puti razvitiia Leningradskogo TRAMa,” RGALI, f. 941 (Teatr Leninskogo Komsomola), op. 4, d. 66,1. 1. 5. See Clark, Petersburg for an investigation of Piotrovskii as a major figure in the city’s cultural life. 6. For the origins of this play, see Pavel Marinchik, Rozhdenie Komsomol’skogo teatra (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1963), 114-21. For a more de­ tailed analysis of TRAM plays of the 1920s, see Lynn Maliy, “Performing the New Woman: The Komsomolka as Actress and Image in Soviet Youth Theater,” Journal of Social History 30 (Fall 1996), 79-95. 7. A. Piotrovskii and M. Sokolovskii, “O teatre molodezhi,” in Teatr rabochei molodezhi. Sbomik p’es dlia Komsomol’skogo teatra (Moscow, 1928), 4-5. 141

Lynn Maliy

8. “Golos rabochei molodezhi,” Komsomol skaia pravda (henceforth cited as KP) July 6, 1928. 9. B., “Printsipy i metody TRAM’a,” Vechemiaia Moskva, July 3, 1929. 10. N. Lvov, Klesh zadumchivyi (Leningrad, 1929). 11. “Revoliutsionnyi dogovor,” Zhizn’ iskusstva 44 (1929), 7. 12. “Novyi tramovskii god,” Sbomik materialov к tret’emu plenomu (Moscow, 1930), 6. 13. I. Chicherov, “Oshibki i nedostatki tramovskogo dvizheniia,” June 23,1931, RGALI, f. 2947 (Moskovskii teatr imeni Leninskogo Komsomola), op. 1, d. 32,11. 3-6. 14. [Mikhail Sokolovskii], “Sploshnoi potok,” RGALI, f. 2723 (N. G. Zograf), op. 1, d. 531,11. 110-61. 15. A. Piotrovskii, “O sobstvennykh formalistskikh oshibkakh,” Rabochii i teatr (henceforth cited as RiT), 3 (1932), 10. 16. Papemyi, 18. 17. “Postanovlenie sekretariata VTsSPS,” April 1933, GARF f. 5451 (Vsesoiuznyi Tsentral’nyi Sovet Profsoiuzov), op. 17, d. 492, 1. 4. 18. P. Marinchik, “TRAM politotdela i gorprofsozha Murmanskoi zh. d.,” Klub 14 (1934), 36. 19. M. Sokolovskii, “Рога perestroiki,” Teatr i dramaturgiia (hence­ forth cited as TiD) 5 (1933): 29. 20. Mironova, 95-96; Rabiniants, 29-30. 21. A. Gvozdev, “Klassiki na sovetskoi stsene,” Literatumyi sovremennik 6 (1933), 129-33. 22. “Lentramu—novoe pomeshchenie,” RiT 25 (1933), 15; Mikh. Dolgopolov, “Bez pomeshcheniia,” KP, July 11, 1934. 23. Mironova, 97. 24. “Otkrylsia plenum TsS TRAM,” Sovetskoe iskusstvo, June 3, 1932; “Resheniia sekretariata MGK VLKSM po dokladu tov. Beletskogo,” RGALI, f. 2947, op. 1, d. 36, 1. 1. Later references to this meeting would state that the Komsomol ordered the Moscow TRAM to turn to the Moscow Art The­ ater. See, for example, “Piaf let komsomolskogo teatra,” Pravda, February 10, 1935. However, the 1932 documents contain no mention of a specific professional stage. 25. I. Beletskii quoted in “Soveshchanie—seminar rukovoditelei TRAMov,” GARF, f. 5451, op. 18, d. 508,1. 57 ob. 26. “Rasporiazheniia,” January 31 and February 6-11, 1933, TsMAM f. 2007 (Upravlenie moskovskimi zrelishchnymi predpravleniiami), op. 3, d. 187, 11. 6-10; Igof Savchenko in Как ia stal rezhisserom (Moscow: Goskinopechaf, 1946), 256. 27. “Stenogramma seminara soveshchaniia rukovoditelei teatrov rabochei molodezhi (TRAM) pri klubnoi inspektii VTsSPS,” December 1934, GARF, f. 5451, op. 18, d. 510,1. 54. 142

Soviet Youth Theater Grows Up

28. I. Mikitenko, “Plachu dolg,” Devushki nashei strany (Leningrad: Gos. izd. khud. lit., 1933), 10. 29. M. Berliant, “Teatral’naia samodeiatel’nosf Leningrada,” Klub 19 (1933), 54. 30. V. Solov’ev, “Akter—vyrazitel’ idei p’esy,” TiD 5 (1933): 30-32. On his future career, see Teatral’naia entsiklopediia, vol. 4, 1034-35. 31. Eidinov, “Gde igrat’ TRAMy?” KP, August 15, 1933; “Moskovskii TRAM poluchil pomeshcheniia Kinoteatra Rot Front,” KP, Nov. 20, 1933; I. F. Beletskii, “Osushchestvlenie davnishnei mechty,” KP, Nov. 20, 1933. 32. Dm. Luk’ianov, “Vydaiushchiisia spektakl’,” KP, Feb. 15, 1934. 33. L. Tamashin, Vladimir Kirshon: Ocherk tvorchestva (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1965), 183; N. Gorchakov, “Chudesnyi splav v moskovskikh teatrakh,” Kolkhoznyi teatr 2 (1935), 15. 34. D. Zaslavskii, “Chudesnyi splav,” Pravda, June 15, 1934. 35. “Bol’she rabotat’ nad stsenicheskoi kul’turoi,” KP, June 23, 1934. 36. “Soveshchanie—seminar rukovoditelei TRAMov,” GARF f. 5451, op. 18, d. 510,1. 59 ob. 37. “TRAM snova v Leningrade,” RiT 26 (1934), 15. 38. M. Iankovskii, “Lentram i ego zavtra,” RiT 6 (1935), 19. 39. Marinchik, Rozhdenie, 241-43. 40. “My ne znaem puti teatra,” Smena, September 24, 1935, cited in N. Rabiniats, “Teatry, rozhdennye revoliutsiei,” in Teatr i zhizn: Sbomik ed. D. I. Zolotnitskii and M. O. Iankovskii (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1957), 323. 41. M. Iankovskii, “Prodelki skapena,” RiT 20 (1935), 16. 42. Indeed, one Moscow critic opined that it was one of the finest pro­ ductions of this work he had ever seen. A. Vysotskii, “Bednosf ne potok,” KP, 16 April 1935. 43. Iankovskii, “Prodelki skapena,” RiT 20 (1935), 16. 44. See I. Belikov, “Teatr, otstavshii ot svoego zritelia,” TiD 11 (1936), 672. 45. N. Bogdanov, Afrodita (Moscow, 1935). For reviews of the Len­ ingrad performance, see M. Osipov, “Afrodita v Lentrame,” RiT 19 (1935), 14-15. 46. This date for the Moscow celebration is puzzling, since the first TRAM organization opened there in 1927 and the Moscow central TRAM began work in 1929. 47. “Piaf let tsentral’nogo Trama,” KP, May 23, 1935. 48. “Leningradskomu TRAMu desiaf let,” RiT 24 (1935), 4-5. 49. A. Piotrovskii, “Pesn’ komsomol’skogo muzhestva,” Krasnaia gazeta, 20 December 1935. Cited in Mironova, 99. 50. Aleksandra Brushtein, “Kak rozhdaetsia p’esa,” KP, September 8, 1935; idem., “Asya: Liricheskaia komedia,” RGALI, f. 2546, op. 1, d. 8, 11. 77-153. 143

Lynn Maliy

51. M. Iankovskii, “Asya. Spektakl’ Leningradskogo TRAMa,” in RGALI, f. 2546, op. 1, d. 734,1. 50. 52. Stenogramma soveshchaniia u tov. Belikovskogo ot 26 fevralia 1936 g. TsMAM f. 2007, op. 1, d. 59,1. 18-19 ob. 53. “Soveshchanie о TRAMe,” TiD 5 (1936), 311. 54. I. Belikov, “Teatr, otstavshii ot svoego zritelia,” TiD 11 (1936), 672-74. 55. N. Dmitriev, “Как zakalialas’ stal’ v Moskovskom TRAMe,” Lite­ ratumaia gazeta, 10 May 1937. 56. On Kirshon, see Literatumaia gazeta, April 26, 1937. On Mikitenko, see Nikolai A. Gorchakov, The Theater in Soviet Russia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), 364. 57. “Ukrupnenie moskovskikh teatrov,” Pravda, September 4, 1937. Jury Jelagin asserted that these mergers were part of an effort to punish theaters that did not follow Party directives closely enough. See his Taming of the Arts, trans. Nicholas Wreden (New York: Dutton, 1951), 153. 58. “Teatral’nyi dnevnik,” Literatumaia gazeta, December 5, 1937. 59. S. Tsimbal, “Imeni Leninskogo Komsomola,” Iskusstvo i zhizri 10 (1938), 13. 60. Papemyi, 148-49. 61. On the fate of former TRAM members, see Marinchik, Rozhdenie, 244-47; A. D. Kakhnovich, “Rol’ khudozhestvennoi samodeiatel’nosti rabochikh v podgotovke kadrov professional’nogo iskusstva (1933-1937gg.),” in Iz istorii sovetskoi kuTtury (Moscow: Mysl’, 1972), 74-77. Adrian Pio­ trovskii was arrested in 1937, but he had long since ended his ties to TRAM.

144

Edward Braun

Vsevolod Meyerhold: The Final Act

UNTIL RECENTLY the circumstances of the arrest, interrogation, trial, and execution of Vsevolod Meyerhold were known only by rumor or hearsay. At least three versions of his last public speech were in circulation, and even his closest family survivors were denied knowledge of his burial place. Since 1989, however, the process of glasnost has led to the release of KGB files on “Case No. 537”: official transcripts have been published, and further personal recollections have followed. Apart from the names of the actual executioners of Meyerhold and his wife, Zinaida Raikh, we now know as much as we are ever likely to know about this infamous episode. It is perhaps invidious to single out any individual from the millions who perished in the Stalin Terror, yet it is certain that none represented a greater loss to Soviet culture than Meyerhold. When on February 2, 1990, the fiftieth anniversary of his death was commemorated at the Yermolova Theater in Moscow, a packed audience heard a succession of prominent actors, directors, theater scholars, musicians, and academicians mourn the loss of this greatest of stage directors. The collective emotion was one of shame and outrage at the wanton and bestial destruction of a unique cre­ ative genius. There is no adequate atonement for that crime, but the least that can be done is to publish the known facts in their entirety. The purpose of this chapter is to make more widely available the information that has already appeared in Russia, and for the account that follows this author is indebted to the following principal sources, all published in Moscow: Teatral’naia zhizn, no. 5,1989, and no. 2,1990; Ogonek, no. 15,1989; Teatr, no. 1,1990; Vechemiaia Moskva, June 14, 1991; and Mir iskusstv: almanakh, 1991. HOPES FOR REHABILITATION

Following the liquidation of his theater in January 1938, Meyerhold was thrown an unexpected lifeline by his former mentor but apparent theatrical antipode, Stanislavsky. Seeing a closer affinity between their work than 145

Vsevolod Meyerhold and his wife, Zinaida Raikh, 1923 (photo courtesy of E. Braun Collection, University of Bristol Theatre Collection)

Vsevolod Meyerhold

most of his contemporaries could discern, Stanislavsky invited Meyerhold to become artistic director of his Opera Theater; and, shortly before his death on August 7, 1938, he entrusted the rehearsals of his last production, Rigoletto, to Meyerhold. The premiere took place on March 10, 1939, by which time Meyer­ hold was also planning to stage Don Giovanni and a new opera by Prokofiev, Semyon Kotko. Three months earlier, at the Pushkin (formerly Alexandrinsky) Theater in Leningrad, he had presented a highly praised revision of his 1917 masterpiece, Lermontovs Masquerade, with the sixty-six-year-old Yuriev in his original role of Arbenin. Soon there was confident talk of Mey­ erhold rejoining the company on a permanent basis, and productions under consideration included Hamlet, Pushkins Boris Godunov, Ostrovsky’s The Storm, and several new works by Soviet writers. His proposed move to Leningrad had the enthusiastic support of Leonid Vivien, artistic director of the Pushkin Theater, and was endorsed by the theaters artistic council. It also seemed likely that the All-Union Committee for Artistic Affairs, which had closed Meyerhold’s theater in 1938 (but was now under new chairmanship), was favorably disposed to­ ward his gradual rehabilitation and would uphold his appointment.1 Such hopes were encouraged by what appeared at the time to be a major shift in Party policy. In December 1938 Yezhov had been replaced as People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs by Beria (and was to perish proba­ bly in January 1940 in the same way as his countless victims before him). At the Eighteenth Party Congress in March 1939, Stalin and others de­ nounced the errors and excesses perpetrated by the NKVD during the pe­ riod known as the “Yezhovshchina.” Seemingly, the Great Purge was at an end, although we now know that the execution of Party members continued well after the conclusion of the Congress.2 Concurrently, a new attitude seemed to have been adopted toward the arts and the intelligentsia, and during the Congress Stalin had said: “As regards the old prerevolutionary intelligentsia who had served the capitalist and landowning classes, the old theory of mistrust and hostility was entirely appropriate. . . . For the new intelligentsia we need a new theory, emphasizing the need for a friendly attitude toward them, concern for them, respect for them and co-operation with them.”3 The following month, the implications of this new line were devel­ oped in a series of public pronouncements by Alexander Fadeev, Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers and a reliable voice of Stalinist opinion. In an article in Pravda on April 16, 1939, Fadeev called for greater trust to be placed in the arts; what is more, he sharply criticized the Committee for Artistic Affairs for seeking to remodel all theater companies in the image of the Moscow Art Theater, and advocated the renewed proliferation of the­ atrical forms. To many at the time this sounded like the official abandon147

Edward Braun

ment of the campaign against formalism, which had culminated in the clo­ sure of Meyerhold ’s theater. AT THE ALL-UNION CONFERENCE

At the end of April, during a week-long meeting of the Presidium of the Union of Soviet Writers chaired by Fadeev, Meyerholds position was dis­ cussed at length and a more balanced view of his work was demanded. In his concluding speech, Fadeev said, “Meyerhold is an outstanding artist who continues to work in the Soviet theater. His work must not be covered up. We need to have a clear attitude toward what he is doing and what he has done in the past, openly criticizing what is incorrect and false but ac­ knowledging what is forward-looking and capable of enriching the Soviet theater.”4 Around the same time Meyerhold himself was once again promi­ nent in public debates. When he addressed the Union of Soviet Writers on May 19, 1939, he had regained sufficient confidence to criticize sharply the stifling effect of the State Repertoire Committee on new writing. Citing the inspiring example of Dovzhenko s new film Shchors, he called for a new popular heroic theater that would burst the bounds of the “box-stage” and free actors from the drudgery of “rummaging around in narrow, everyday subject-matter.”5 These were hardly the words of a supplicant for reem­ ployment, so clearly Meyerhold had high hopes that he would soon be at work again in Leningrad. But as we shall see, Fadeev, who had convened the discussion on May 19, may already have known otherwise. Despite the baleful presence of Andrei Vyshinsky, Prosecutor Gen­ eral and Vice-Chairman of the Council of People s Commissars, the first All-Union Conference of Theater Directors opened in Moscow on June 13, 1939, in a mood of optimism. Doubtless encouraged by the Party’s appar­ ent change of attitude toward the arts, a number of directors were surpris­ ingly outspoken in their criticism of recent clumsy bureaucratic attempts to impose a crude version of Stanislavskian psychological realism as the norm for theater production. Others were equally frank in condemning the effects of the campaign against so-called formalism, launched in 1936, which had stifled true theatricality and experimentation, producing a style that, in the words of Pavel Novitsky, could best be described as “panicstricken realism.”6 In this atmosphere, Meyerhold was inevitably the focus of eager at­ tention and high expectations. At the opening of the conference he was elected to the platform by acclamation from the floor, and on taking his place immediately after Vyshinsky he was greeted with an ovation that the inexperienced chairman, Khrapchenko, was powerless to quell. Meyerhold himself tried in vain to direct it toward Vyshinsky, but the assembly would not be denied. 148

Vsevolod Meyerhold

During subsequent speeches on the opening day, the mention of his name in speeches from Solomon Mikhoels and Alexei Popov was enough to prompt further vociferous demonstrations of support. By the third day of the conference Khrapchenko was so alarmed by this turn of events that he attempted to prohibit “all applause, laughter, and comments during speeches.” This ludicrous proposal was greeted with derision and the pro­ ceedings continued as before. Originally, Meyerhold himself was not listed amongst the main speak­ ers and when, at the start of the conference, it was proposed from the floor that he contribute on the theme of “performance style,” he responded with uncharacteristic diffidence and surprise. However, he did undertake to par­ ticipate in the debate after the main speeches. He spoke on June 15 for close to forty-five minutes. Until recently the contents of this speech have remained in dispute, and it was not until 1991 that the verbatim text was published, together with Meyerhold’s own notes and extracts from the contributions of other speak­ ers.7 This full version corresponds to the extracts that had appeared in Teatr in 1974, and, interestingly, confirms the substance of the brief summary in­ cluded by Alexander Kaun four years after the event in his Soviet Poets and Poetry.8 Once and for all, it exposes as a complete fabrication the frequently cited version that Yury Yelagin claimed to have reconstructed from notes that he took at the conference and that he included in his generally un­ sound biography of Meyerhold.9 THE SPEECH AT THE ACTOR’S HOUSE

Sadly, the speech that Meyerhold actually delivered to his expectant audi­ ence at the Actors House bears no resemblance to the defiant words that Yelagin sought to inscribe in legend. Over the years Meyerhold had proved himself as a formidable orator—erudite, acerbic, and recklessly combative. But on this occasion all those qualities were missing, and his speech was sadly deferential, rambling, and inconclusive. On such a clearly momentous occasion, and under the unsettling pa­ tronage of Vyshinsky, it is understandable that Meyerhold should have be­ gun with the familiar sycophantic platitudes in praise of Stalin, “our leader, our teacher, the friend of toilers throughout the world,” and then proceeded to express his gratitude for the freedom (enjoyed in common with Shosta­ kovich and Eisenstein) to work and correct past errors. Tactically, at least, it made sense for him to apologize for exposing “laboratory experiments” like Les (The Forest) and Revizor (The Government Inspector) to a wide audience. Such comments could well have served as the effective preamble to a bold exposition of what Meyerhold now envisaged as the program for himself and his fellow directors in a new, more tolerant climate of opinion. 149

Edward Braun

Undoubtedly, many regarded any creative freedom granted to Mey­ erhold as a clear indication of what they themselves might hazard.10 But those in the audience who had hoped for such a lead were gravely disap­ pointed. Time and again, he approached such burning issues as the rein­ terpretation of the classics, the commanding role of the artistic director, the need to resist hack work, and the demand for a new heroic drama—only to lose himself in insignificant detail and inconclusive argument. His soriy per­ formance ended lamely with a repeated citation of Dovzhenkos film Shchors as a model for the new heroic drama and a patriotic inspiration for all true citizens of “the great Country of the Soviets.”11 The speech was greeted with warm applause, but Meyerhold knew only too well that it had been a fiasco, and there was no disguising the dis­ may that many of his audience felt. The following day, in the course of a brave intervention from the floor, Isaac Kroll, a director at the Moscow Jew­ ish theater, said:

It was the speech of a great man. Yet it seems to me that much of what we should have heard was not referred to by Vsevolod Emilievich. He made no mention of it. Like a mortally wounded lion, Vsevolod Emilievich was forced to hide in the long grass. But if he has recovered and come out of the long grass, it should be not as a bedraggled cat, but as a mighty lion. Because it is as a lion that he is vital to Soviet art.12 The critic Moissei Yankovsky voiced similar sentiments:

Yesterday from this platform Meyerhold, with the stroke of a pen, destroyed everything that he has stood for throughout his fife. Comrades, can we hon­ estly agree that on the strength of what Meyerhold the man said yesterday, Meyerhold the artist never existed? For that is what officially he announced to us. It would be wrong for us simply to try and ignore the vast riches that Meyerhold has bestowed on the history of our theater. On the contrary, we must help Meyerhold now to understand what was and still is true in his work, and what can be discarded as dross. If Meyerhold—who to me seems to be in a state of confusion—cannot understand what has happened to him, then it is our task as critics and theater specialists to help him. I call on you all to remember everything that he has given us and to help him find those positive things that should be preserved.13 In the following days of the conference not every speaker was as sup­ portive of Meyerhold, and when Khrapchenko came to sum up the debate on the role of the director in Soviet theater, his comments were blunt, sanc­ timonious, and sickeningly familiar in tone:

Comrade Meyerhold . . . referred to his mistakes, but his admission of them was to an extent formal. The Party teaches us that it is not enough merely to admit our mistakes; we need to demonstrate their nature and their essence so that others may learn from them, above all our young people. We need to 150

Vsevolod Meyerhold

show them what such mistakes lead to, how they arise, and where their true nature lies, why such mistakes are harmful and how they can be overcome. He said nothing about the nature of his mistakes, whereas he should have re­ vealed those mistakes that led to his theater becoming a theater that was hos­ tile towards the Soviet people, a theater that was closed on the command of the Party.14 By this time Meyerhold was back in Leningrad, where he was directing a display of physical culture by students of the Lesgaft Institute. Khrapchenko’s condemnation would have come as no surprise to him, and in any case, how significant was it? How much did Meyerhold’s fate depend on his making a satisfactory “confession”? Angered as Vyshinsky was by the vociferous dem­ onstrations of support for Meyerhold, were they in any way decisive? Re­ cent evidence suggests that while the events at the conference may have hastened his actual arrest, in fact the die was already cast—by Stalin himself. BEFORE THE ARREST

Following his speech at the Union of Soviet Writers in April, Alexander Fadeev had again advocated support for Meyerhold during a debate in Kiev. On returning to Moscow mid-May, Fadeev was summoned by Stalin and shown confessions recently extracted by the NKVD from the leading Soviet foreign correspondent, Mikhail Koltsov, and Belov, former Commander of the Moscow Military District, both of whom had denounced Meyerhold as a foreign agent and as a member of their own subversive organization. “Now I hope you can see who you were supporting in your speech,” said Stalin. “So, with your permission, we intend to arrest Meyerhold.”15 It was more than Fadeevs own life was worth to warn Meyerhold, and there is no evidence to suggest that he himself had discovered what lay in wait for him. But how else does one explain his demoralized performance at the Directors’ Conference, which was quite at odds with the renewed confidence of his recent public utterances? Possibly he sensed that, regardless of the apparent easing of artistic policy, Stalin would never tolerate the return of such an undisputed leader as himself to the theatrical sphere. Certainly, this would make sense of the apprehension with which he begged the assembly to redirect its ovations toward “our government, our Party, and towards him who inspires us artists to achieve great deeds in building a new Communist society; towards him who created the constitution that in turn creates the conditions for we who have erred to correct our mistakes through our labor.”16 Meyerhold spent the night of June 19, 1939 in the Leningrad flat of Erast Garin (the Khlestakov in Meyerholds Government Inspector) and his wife, the film director Khesya Lokshina. Also present were Meyerholds for­ mer students and actors, Yelena Tyapkina and Zosima Zlobin, together with the Director of the Lesgaft Institute. The evening started late and was con151

Edward Braun

vivial, with Meyerhold in good spirits despite reflecting ruefully on the Mos­ cow conference. It was seven in the morning before he left to return to his flat on the Kharpovka Embankment, to change before going on to rehearsal.17 At nine o’clock that morning Meyerhold was at home with his wife’s sister and her husband when two NKVD officers arrived with a warrant for his arrest. The original order had been signed the previous day in Moscow by Beria. The signature was in blue pencil, indicating that the suspect was destined for execution. After a two-hour search of the flat, Meyerhold was conveyed to the Leningrad NKVD headquarters. Meanwhile, in the face of violent resistance from Meyerhold’s wife, Zinaida Raikh, four officers carried out a search of their Moscow flat at 12 Bryusov Pereulok (now Nezhdanova Street). Among the papers removed was the eleven-page draft of a letter of complaint from Raikh addressed to Stalin about Meyerhold’s treatment. Much as she reproached herself for this afterward, its discovery by the NKVD obviously came too late to influ­ ence the decision to arrest Meyerhold, and no reference is made to it in the record of his case. Whether it influenced the treatment of Raikh is another matter. In the course of further searches of their family dacha and of Meyerholds office at the Stanislavsky Opera Theater, further letters to Stalin, Yezhov, and Vyshinsky were discovered, but none was cited subsequently and their contents remain unknown.18 PREPARING THE PROSECUTION CASE

At two o’clock in the morning on June 22, Meyerhold left Leningrad under escort by train for Moscow. Upon arrival he was placed in solitary confine­ ment in the “inner prison” of the Lubyanka. The preliminary case against Meyerhold, compiled by NKVD Captain Golovanov and endorsed by Beria, was based on evidence extracted from a number of other prisoners,19 among them the journalist Koltsov and a young Japanese Communist Party member, Yoshimasu Yoshido. Yoshido, who had served two terms of imprisonment in Japan for his political activities, was arrested with an actress, Okada Yosiko, in January 1938 while attempting to cross the Soviet border on Sakhalin Island. Under interrogation in Moscow, he was forced to incriminate Meyerhold as an agent of Japanese intelli­ gence who, among other terrorist activities, had been involved in plotting an assassination attempt against Stalin during a visit to his theater. At his subsequent trial Yoshido retracted his confession, but was shot on Septem­ ber 27, 1939. Koltsov’s confession cited Meyerhold’s links with French intelligence through the writer (and later Minister of Culture) André Malraux and a journalist, “Vaugel.” Koltsov also confirmed that Meyerhold had helped an English journalist, Fred Gray of the Daily Mail, to make contact with 152

Vsevolod Meyerhold

Rykov, the ex-Soviet Premier who with Bukharin and others had been exe­ cuted for treason following the final mass “show trial” in March 1938. Gray himself, whom Meyerhold and Zinaida Raikh had known as a friend since 1913, was expelled from the Soviet Union for alleged espionage in 1935. In addition to Meyerhold’s supposed links with foreign intelligence, the NKVD had forced others to testify to his involvement with the so-called Trotskyist right-wing counterrevolutionary organization headed by Bukharin and Rykov. Specifically, it was stated that, together with Trotsky, Meyerhold had defended the poet Yesenin; that he had attempted to stage Tretyakov s “harmful” play Khochu rebenka (I Want a Baby), and also Erdmans satiri­ cal comedy Samoubiitsa (The Suicide)—“which constitutes a counterrevo­ lutionary slander against the Soviet power.”20 INTERROGATION AND “CONFESSION”

On June 23 Meyerhold was confronted by his first interrogator, the head of the NKVD Special Investigative Section, B. Z. Kobulov. The greater part of the dossier on “Case No. 537” consists of a factual record of dates, individ­ uals, questions, answers, and written statements. Normally, one would be left to infer the actual form of the interrogation to which the victim was sub­ jected. In Meyerhold’s case, however, we have the explicit account given by him in a two-part letter of appeal that he wrote to Molotov as Soviet Pre­ mier on January 2 and 13, 1940.21 First, Meyerhold describes the effects of the “psychological attack” that he underwent in the initial stage of his in­ terrogation by Kobulov:

Immediately after my arrest... I was plunged into the deepest depression, obsessed by the thought “It serves me right.” I began to convince myself that the government felt that the sins I had committed had received insufficient punishment (the closure of my theater, the dissolution of my company, the sequestration of the new theater planned by me and under construction on Mayakovsky Square), and that I should undergo further punishment, which was now being administered through the agency of the NKVD. “It serves me right,” I convinced myself, and that “I” split into two. The one began to search for the “crimes” of the other, and when it failed to find them it began to make them up. In this process my interrogator proved to be a well-experienced as­ sistant, so we set about inventing things together in close collaboration.

Meyerhold’s first interrogation by Kobulov yielded a statement in which he confessed to being recruited for “anti-Soviet” work in 1922 to 1923 by Mikhail Rafail, a Party worker who had met him through his involvement with the Theater of the Revolution and later the Meyerhold Theater.22 As a direct consequence, all the leading Trotskyists had frequented his produc­ tions, and in 1923 Trotsky himself had facilitated the supply of military equipment for Tretyakovs epic drama, Zemlia dybom (Earth Rampant). 153

Edward Braun

“In this way,” Meyerhold confessed, “I found myself in the criminal orbit of these embittered and villainous enemies of the people.” Referring to further social contacts with other prominent political opponents of Stalin, together with Koltsov and the poet Demyan Bedny, Meyerhold stated that “these gatherings over dinner had the undoubted aim of bringing to­ gether people of anti-Soviet inclination for the purpose of undermining the Soviet system.” Under further interrogation on June 27, Meyerhold elaborated on his earlier confession, naming further Trotskyist contacts within the period 1923 to 1925 that led to his pursuing “subversive work” in the theater—one ex­ ample being Earth Rampant, dedicated to “Trotsky, first soldier of the Red Army.” He was, he said, encouraged to continue work of this kind in the years 1932 to 1935 by his further involvement with the “right-wing Trots­ kyist organization” that included Bukharin, Rykov, Radek, Milyutin, and others. In regard to his acquaintance with Fred Gray, Meyerhold admitted to reestablishing a “criminal link” with him in 1928, though this amounted to no more than introductions to Soviet ministers (including Rykov and his wife) and a letter of reference supporting the extension of Grays visa. Following the second interrogation, Meyerhold was returned to his cell and given a week in which to write out a full confession, naming as his confederates, known Trotskyists, and other anti-Soviet individuals. In this statement Meyerhold included the prominent Party figures who had visited his theater, among them such incriminating names as Trotsky, Bukharin, Kamenev, Smilga, Radek, Bubnov, and Gamamik—all opponents of Stalin. Perhaps ill-advisedly, he chose to include in this company the names of Molotov and Stalin himself. Clearly this latest confession fell far short of Kobulov’s requirements, so Meyerhold’s interrogation was handed over to his subordinate, Voronin. Working with one of two assistants (Rodos and Shvartsman) Voronin aug­ mented the tactics of “psychological attack” with “physical methods” until a deposition was secured that met NKVD requirements. The first of the in­ terrogations took place on July 8 and continued for eighteen hours, using a combination of the nonstop “conveyor” method and actual physical torture. Meyerhold wrote to Molotov:

They beat me, a sick sixty-six-year-old man. They laid me face-down on the floor and beat the soles of my feet and my back with a rubber truncheon. When I was seated on a chair they used the same truncheon to beat my legs from above with great force, from my knees to the upper parts of my legs. And in the days that followed, when my legs were bleeding from internal he­ morrhaging, they used the rubber truncheon to beat me on the red, blue, and yellow bruises. The pain was so great that it was like boiling water being poured on the tenderest parts of my legs (I screamed and wept with the pain). They beat me on the back with the truncheon; they beat me about the 154

Vsevolod Meyerhold

face with blows from above—[they beat from me] all the strength of the last years of my life. . . . Lying face-down on the floor, I discovered the capacity to cringe, writhe, and howl like a dog being whipped by its master. Meyerhold was summoned again by his torturers on July 14, this time for a session that lasted fourteen hours. Gradually, the whole improbable fabric of his confession and denunciation was put together:

Whenever my imagination became exhausted my interrogators would work in pairs (Voronin and Rodos, Voronin and Shvartsman)23 and draft the state­ ments, sometimes rewriting them three or four times.

At some point in August Meyerhold’s physical state necessitated urgent treatment in the Lubyanka prison hospital. In the letter to Molotov, he wrote:

When through lack of food (I was incapable of eating), lack of sleep (for the three months),24 from heart attacks at night and bouts of hysteria (floods of tears, trembling as though from fever) I became bowed and sunken, and my face was lined and aged by ten years, my interrogators became apprehensive. I was given intensive medical treatment (I was in the “inner prison” which has good medical facilities) and put on a special diet. But that only helped to restore my appearance, my physical state; my nerves remained the same, my consciousness was still dull and confused—because the sword of Damocles was hanging over me; my interrogator threatened me constantly: “If you refuse to write (meaning ‘compose’?!), we shall beat you again, leaving your head and right hand untouched but turning the rest of you into a shapeless, bloody mass of mangled flesh.” ZINAIDA’S DEATH—AND AFTER

By August 20 the inquisitors had completed their work and the task of pre­ paring the indictment was given to a new investigator, Shibkov. This process occupied the period from September 22 to November 4, and at some point Meyerhold was moved from the Lubyanka to the nearby Butyrka Prison.25 Following Meyerhold’s arrest his family were denied any form of communication with him, and were not even certain where he was impris­ oned. On delivering winter clothes for him to the Butyrka in November, they were told that he had been transferred to the Lefortovo. There they were informed verbally that he had already been sentenced to “ten years without the right of correspondence”—which, as in the case of Koltsov, com­ monly meant execution. Meyerhold himself probably heard nothing from his family, and was never told of Zinaida Raikh’s fate. On the night of July 14, 1939 she was at home in their first floor flat in Bryusov Pereulok. At about one o’clock in the morning, two men entered by climbing up to the rear balcony and in a vio­ 155

Edward Braun

lent struggle stabbed Zinaida repeatedly with a knife. The Meyerholds’ el­ derly housemaid was awakened by her screams, but was beaten uncon­ scious without catching sight of the intruders, one of whom escaped via the balcony while the other ran down the stairs, leaving traces of Zinaidas blood on the wall. The caretaker emerged just in time to catch sight of the two figures jumping into a large black car waiting at the corner on Gorky Street. On dis­ covering Zinaida, he called an ambulance, but she died before reaching the hospital. Celebrated as she was, there was no announcement in the press and her burial on July 18 at the Vagankovo Cemetery was attended by only a scattering of mourners beyond her family. The word had come down “from above” to stay clear, and the actor Moskvin, a Deputy of the Supreme Soviet, told Zinaidas father: “The public refuses to bury your daughter.”26 She went to her grave in the black velvet gown of Camille, which she had worn in the last performance at the Meyerhold Theater before its closure on January 7, 1938. Immediately following the funeral, Zinaidas son and daughter, aged twenty-one and nineteen, were given forty-eight hours to vacate the flat, despite the fact that legally it remained in Meyerhold’s ownership. “Your eviction is quite proper” was Moskvin’s comment. But before they could re­ move furniture, books, and Meyerhold’s extensive archives, they were being harried by a young woman, recently appointed to Bena’s staff, who had been allocated half the accommodation, the remainder going to his chauffeur. Before Zinaida’s housemaid had fully recovered from the shock of the attack, she was arrested by the NKVD and questioned. She could remem­ ber nothing, but even so found herself charged with some fictitious crime and sent off to a prison camp. Rumors circulated that the culprits were “for­ eign agents,” but eventually in the 1940s it was rumored that a singer from the Bolshoi Opera and his son had been arrested and charged with the crime. Recently, it has been revealed that they were in fact imprisoned in 1943, but for “anti-Soviet propaganda and hostile activities against the So­ viet state.”27 To this day, no archive has revealed the identity of Zinaida Raikh’s assailants, or for that matter the precise motive for her murder. THE FINAL INDICTMENT

In drawing up the indictment against Meyerhold, Shibkov did not resort to the methods of his fellow investigators, though the threat of renewed tor­ ture remained. At this stage Meyerhold attempted to modify some of his earlier incriminating statements and complained about lack of time to read through the draft in its entirety. The principal points of his confession remained unaltered, but with one important addition. The final indictment dated October 27 stated that 156

Vsevolod Meyerhold

“in 1930 Meyerhold was the head of the anti-Soviet Trotskyist group Left Front, which coordinated all anti-Soviet elements in the field of the arts.” In July Meyerhold had denounced, among others, Ilya Ehrenburg, Boris Pasternak, and Yury Olesha, and said that he had instructed Pasternak to re­ cruit more writers with anti-Soviet views. A few days earlier, Isaac Babel’ (who was shot on January 27, 1940)28 had confessed under torture that he was the leader of the writers’ section of this alleged anti-Soviet organization within the arts, with Eisenstein responsible for the cinema and Mikhoels for the theater “supported by Meyerhold.”29 But clearly it suited the NKVD to identify Meyerhold as the principal figure in this “Left Front” conspiracy. Possibly the original intention had been to mount a further show trial, this time of artists, which would remove the entire Soviet avant-garde at a single stroke. This seems unlikely, however, for as Robert Conquest points out in The Great Terror, Stalin probably abandoned plans for further pub­ lic trials soon after Beria replaced Yezhov as the head of the NKVD in De­ cember 1938, and decided that the time had come to curb the monstrous scale of the Great Purge.30 Whatever the true explanation, none of the lead­ ing figures named by Meyerhold and Babel’ were ever arrested, though many other writers and artists were still to die or serve long years in the prison camps.31 Solomon Mikhoels, artistic director of the State Jewish Theater, was murdered in a faked road accident in January 1948. While the show trials may have served Stalin’s political purpose, they more than once caused considerable public embarrassment, notably in March 1938 when Bukharin completely outfaced the State Prosecutor, Vyshinsky. Given the same opportunity, Meyerhold might well have equaled his performance, even though the final outcome would have been similarly unaffected. THE CASE COMPLETED

On November 9 Meyerhold was brought before Military Procurator Belkin, Deputy Commander of the Investigative Section Pinzura, and Investigator Shibkov for the purpose of confirming or denying what was contained in his earlier depositions. At the conclusion of a “harsh interrogation” (apparently without any further physical torture) he confirmed the essential facts ad­ mitted during the period from June 27 through August 20, but asked per­ mission to reread his statement in order to make certain additions and corrections. In a letter of appeal to the State Procurator dated January 20, 1940, he stated: At the interrogation on November 9, 1939 I again lost control of myself, my consciousness became blurred, I began to tremble hysterically and I was in floods of tears.... In this state I should not have been asked to sign the state­ ment drawn up on November 9. 157

Edward Braun

The Military Procurator allowed Meyerhold’s request, and a week later he was summoned by Shibkov to reread the statement. However, he was given no time to make any alterations, and was deemed to have signed without reservation. As far as the NKVD was concerned the case was complete, but on the same day Meyerhold was allowed to make a further statement. Written in his own hand, it is preserved in his dossier, countersigned by Junior Lieu­ tenant Shibkov, and dated November 16—17, 1939. In this courageous doc­ ument Meyerhold makes no attempt to retract the confession of his own links with foreign intelligence and Trotskyist political circles. However, he repudiates entirely all statements that might have endangered the lives of others (Malraux, Ehrenburg, Pasternak, Eisenstein, Shostakovich, Olesha, Fedin, Vsevolod Ivanov, and others), and rejects the idea of an anti-Soviet organization within the arts. Twice more Meyerhold wrote letters of appeal, first to the Military Procurator and then to the State Procurator, seeking to retract in toto all the confessions that he had made under torture, including those relating to his alleged links with Trotskyist elements and foreign intelligence. Then, on January 2 and 13, he wrote the two-part letter to Molotov quoted above, de­ scribing the methods of his torturers and concluding: I repudiate the confessions that were beaten out of me in this way, and I beg you as Head of Government to save me and return me my freedom. I love my motherland and I will serve it with all my strength in the remaining years of my life. There followed one further appeal to the State Procurator on January 24, but on the same day the indictment drawn up on October 27 was given fi­ nal approval by the Military Procuracy and the date for Meyerhold’s trial was set. At its preliminary meeting on January 31 the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR was presided over by the notorious judge Ulrikh, who had sent tens of thousands of innocent people to their death throughout the 1930s. The court resolved to hear Meyerhold’s case in cam­ era, with no counsel for the prosecution or defense, and no witnesses. On the same day Meyerhold was formally served with the indictment and brought from the Butyrka to the cellars of the Military Collegium close to Red Square. TRIAL, EXECUTION—AND AFTERMATH

The trial took place the following day before Ulrikh, two military jurists, and a recording secretary. The typed summary covers five A4 pages, and the details suggest that the proceedings may have lasted rather longer than the customary ten to fifteen minutes. Meyerhold pleaded not guilty, and repeated 158

Vsevolod Meyerhold

his total denial of his earlier testimony, ascribing it to the methods used by his interrogators. His final address to the court was recorded verbatim:

It is strange that a man of sixty-six should testify not to the truth but to what the investigation required. He lied about himself just because he was beaten with a rubber truncheon. It was then that he decided to lie and go to the stake. He is guilty of nothing, he was never a traitor to his country. He has a daughter who is a Communist, whom he has brought up himself. He believes that the court will understand him and decide that he is not guilty. He has made mistakes in the field of art, and for that he was deprived of his collec­ tive. He asks the court to consider that although he is sixty-six, he still has suf­ ficient energy and is capable of eradicating the faults that he has admitted. Recently, he has written letters to Lavrentii Pavlovich [Beria], Vyacheslav Mikhailovich [Molotov], and the State Procurator. He believes in the truth and not in God, because he believes that the truth will prevail.32 The court is not likely to have deliberated long over its verdict, which is recorded in hasty and crudely formed handwriting. It concludes with the sentence:

Meyerhold-Raikh, Vsevolod Emilievich, is to suffer the extreme form of criminal punishment by shooting, with confiscation of property. The sentence is final and not subject to appeal.33 Meyerhold was shot the following day, February 2, 1940, in the cellars of the Military Collegium. For the next fifteen years all mention of Meyerholds name was sup­ pressed in the Soviet Union, and it was two years after Stalins death in 1953, when Khrushchev became First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, before the first steps were taken to secure his rehabilitation. Even then, that process needed the courage of many people, principal among them Maria Valentei, Meyerhold’s granddaughter. Thanks to her and others, the sentence pronounced by Ulrikh was fi­ nally quashed on November 26, 1955, and the lengthy and hazardous process of artistic rehabilitation could begin. Only now is that process near­ ing its completion with the full documentation of Meyerhold’s work in the hands of Russian scholars, the founding of the Meyerhold Arts Center in Moscow, and the recent retrieval of Meyerhold and Raikh’s flat from the person who had occupied it continuously since its allocation to her by Beria in 1939. Various versions of the circumstances of Meyerhold’s death were given out, supported by falsified copies of his death certificate even after his legal rehabilitation. It was summer 1955 before the true date was named by a member of the Military Procuracy. In November 1987 Maria Valentei was finally given a certificate bearing the true date of death. But after “cause of death” there was only a dash.34 159

Edward Braun

Meyerholds burial place with inscription COMMON crave

no.

1,

BURIAL SITE OF UNCLAIMED REMAINS FROM 1930-1942 INCLUSIVE

(photo courtesy of E. Braun Collection, University of Bristol Theatre Collection)

The discovery of Meyerholds grave was even more recent. On June 14, 1991, the paper Vechemiaia Moskva announced that a search of KGB archives by the journalist A. Milchakov had revealed that following his exe­ cution, Meyerholds body had been cremated.35 The ashes were deposited in “Common Grave No. 1” in the cemetery of the Don Monastery, together with those of countless other victims from the period 1930 to 1942, of 160

Vsevolod Meyerhold

whom 493 have so far been identified. On a recently erected monument the inscription reads: Here lie the remains of innocent victims of political repression who were tor­ tured and shot in the years 1930-1942. To their eternal memory.

Notes This chapter was originally published in NTQ (Neto Theatre Quarterly), vol. 10, no. 33. 1. See D. I. Zolotnitskii, “V. E. Meierkhol’d: poslednii srok,” in D. I. Zolotnitskii and V. M. Mironova, eds., Iz opyta nisskoi sovetskoi rezhissury 1930-kh godov (Leningrad: Leningradskii gos. int-t. teatra, muzyki, i kinomatografii im. N. K. Cherkasova, 1989), 45-47. 2. See Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (London: Hutchinson, 1990), 438-41. 3. Quoted in M. P. Kotovskaia and S. A. Isaev, eds., Mir iskusstv: al­ manakh (Moscow: Gitis, 1991), 414. 4. Ibid., 421. 5. Ibid., 421, 435; Teatr, Moscow, no. 2, 1974, 36-39. 6. Kotovskaia and Isaev, eds., Mir iskusstv: almanakh, 416. 7. Ibid., 437-75. 8. Teatr, Moscow, no. 2, 1974, 39-44; Alexander Kaun, Soviet Poets and Poetry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1943), 96-97. 9. Iurii Elagin, Temnyi genii (New York: Izd-vo im Chekhova, 1955), 406-10. 10. See Vadim Shcherbakovs discussion of the conference in Meierkhoïdovskii sbomik, A. A. Sherel’, M. A. Valentei, et al., eds. (Moscow: Tvorcheskii tsentr im Vs. Meierkhol’da, 1992), 2:216-24. 11. Kotovskaia and Isaev, eds., Mir iskusstv: almanakh, 453. 12. Ibid., 455. 13. Ibid., 459. 14. Ibid., 461. 15. “Iz vospominanii K. L. Zelinskogo ob A. A. Fadeeve, ’ Teatr, no. 1, 1990, 144. 16. Kotovskaia and Isaev, eds., Mir iskusstv: almanakh, 442. 17. See E. Tiapkina, “Posledniaia vstrecha,” TeatraVnaia zhizn, no. 5, 1989, 7-8. 18. A different view of the effect of Raikh s letter is taken by the Mil­ itary Procurator who reviewed the case for rehabilitation in 1955. Accord­ ing to him, it was the “direct cause” of his arrest, but in that case it must 161

Edward Braun

have been an earlier letter. None of these letters has ever been discovered, see Tiapkina, “Posledniaia vstrecha,” 9. 19. Unless stated otherwise, all details referred to below of Meyer­ holds case are taken from the account in Teatral’naia zhizn, no. 2, 1990, 1-13, 33-34. 20. Meyerhold abandoned plans to stage Khochu rebenka in 1930. Work on Samoubiitsa was halted following a run-through in the presence of Kaganovich and other Party functionaries in October 1932. 21. First published in Sovetskaia kul’tura, February 16, 1989, 5, and again in Teatral’naia zhizn, no. 5, 1989, 2-3. 22. Alexander Matskin, an authority on the period, describes Rafail as “a long-forgotten rank-and-file Trotskyist.” See “Vremia ukhoda” in Teatr, no. 1, 1990, 43. 23. Elsewhere, Meyerhold refers to a fourth interrogator, Serikov. 24. “Three months” in the text. In fact, Meyerhold had been in prison for two months by this time. 25. It is not clear whether he remained in solitary confinement. 26. Valentin Ryabov, “Case No. 537” in Ogonek, no. 15, 1989, 12. 27. Also referred to in Teatral’naia zhizn, no. 2, 1990. 28. Ibid., 11. 29. For an account of Babel’s interrogation see Ogonek, no. 39, 1989. 30. See Conquest, The Great Terror 422-23. 31. The most recent assessment by the Union of Soviet Writers is that some 2,000 literary figures alone were repressed, of whom about 1500 met their deaths in prison or camp. See Conquest, The Great Terror, 297, quoted from Literatumaia gazeta, December 28, 1988. 32. Teatral’naia zhizn, no. 5, 1989, 1. 33. The record of the court proceedings is published in facsimile in Teatral’naia zhizn, no. 2, 1990. 34. For a detailed account of Meyerhold’s rehabilitation, see A. A. Sherel’, vol. 1, 23-157. 35. Vecherniaia Moskva, June 14, 1991, 6.

162

PART III

The Voices of Silence

George Luckyj

Mykola Khvylovy: A Defiant Ukrainian Communist

DEVELOPMENTS IN Soviet Ukrainian literature may be understood only when seen against the background of history. Only now, after the collapse of the USSR, have Western scholars realized the histori­ cal importance of the various nationalities of the former Soviet state. They even admit that the “tensions” and “conflicts” among the non-Russian na­ tionalities contributed to the collapse (they were playing down these ten­ sions ten or twenty years ago). Ukrainians, as the largest non-Russian entity in the former empire, were viewed (in conformity with the official Russian view of history) either as “younger brothers” or “junior partners” of Russia. To a large extent, such a view was not inaccurate. In the three-hundredyear-old relationship of Ukraine with Russia, the “elder brother” indeed came to be the dominant force in the political, social, and cultural life of Ukraine. Ukrainian resistance, at times quite strong, was also accompanied by Ukrainian collaboration. There were, in the course of this turbulent his­ tory, many more Ukrainian accomplices than autonomists. Because of the draconian measures the Russian government took in the nineteenth century against Ukrainian language and literature (culmi­ nating in the so-called Ems ukaz of 1876 banning nearly all publications in the Ukrainian language, a ban which lasted until 1905), Ukrainian culture within the Russian Empire developed slowly, suffered great losses (which included the writers Kapnist, Gogol, and Korolenko, Ukrainians who, for various reasons, chose to write in Russian) and yet was not assimilated to the Russian model and did not become merely a regional phenomenon. There were not only those who, like Ivan Kotliarevsky, created at the very end of the eighteenth-century masterpieces in the baroque tradition of Ukraine, but also Ukrainian romantic rebels (Taras Shevchenko, Mykola Kostomarov, Panteleimon Kulish) who laid a firm foundation in the first half of the nineteenth century for a new literature in Ukrainian (a language spo­ ken mostly by the peasants). Such rebels could pay a heavy price for their achievements (Shevchenko served a ten-year sentence of internal exile in 165

George Luckyj

Siberia) and yet they left a legacy not only of nationalist protest against op­ pression but of a genuine universalist concern about spiritual and cultural freedom. The vision of these writers was rooted in Ukrainian history and memory and differed from the preoccupations of Russian writers (no won­ der that Shevchenko and Kulish were attacked by Belinsky, the first articulate spokesman for Russian cultural imperialism).1 It is only now, in the post­ colonial era, that a new look at the nature and history of modern Ukrainian literature is being offered gradually in Ukraine and elsewhere. The Revolution of 1917 was very different in Ukraine and in Russia. In Ukraine the Revolution was fought as a war of liberation. A documentary study of it by an American scholar, John Reshetar, was published in 1952.2 There were four main contenders: Ukrainian nationalists, White Russian forces, the Communists, and the anarchists. Soon after the February Revo­ lution in Russia, Ukrainians formed a quasi-govemment in Kyiv, the Cen­ tral Rada, which at first demanded full autonomy for Ukraine, but then, on January 22, 1918, proclaimed its independence. It is interesting that the leaders of the Central Rada included the historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the writer Volodymyr Vynnychenko. Obviously, real, experienced politi­ cians were in short supply. The declaration of independence turned out to be more symbolic than real. A few weeks after its proclamation, Bolshevik forces (led by a former tsarist chief of gendarmes then a commander of the Russian Red Army, Muravev) occupied Kyiv, and eventually the govern­ ment of the Ukrainian People s Republic was forced to retreat to the west (though its presence in Ukraine was evident as late as 1920). The White forces, under General Denikin, and the anarchists, under the peasant leader Nestor Makhno, were dispersed and a Soviet Ukrainian government, first formed in Kharkiv in 1918, took control of the country. That government included several Ukrainian Communists, who were soon joined by native socialists—the so-called Borotbists, a group that included some writers. The capital of Ukraine was transferred from Kyiv, the seat of Ukrainian in­ tellectual life, to Kharkiv—the Russified center of the proletariat. During 1919 to 1921, not only was Soviet policy in Ukraine being spelled out, but the formation of the Soviet Union was being mapped out in Moscow. Lenin, who conceived of a “union of nationalities” run by local Moscow-guided Communists, promised and implemented policies that en­ sured linguistic and cultural autonomy in the various soviet republics, but gave the real power to the centrally controlled Communist Party. Some scholars regard this, with some justification, as a temporary compromise be­ tween Russian communism and Ukrainian nationalism.3 It certainly would not have come about without the previous struggle for independence, and many Ukrainians regarded the new Soviet rule as an acknowledgment of their past efforts toward independence. The intellectual atmosphere in Ukraine in those early postrevolutionaiy days was on the whole pluralist, 166

Mykola Khvylovy

although some writers preferred to emigrate and some went into so-called internal exile in Ukraine trying to do their work without paying much at­ tention to the Communist Party, which used persuasion but little force in trying to direct cultural policy.4 On the eve of the events of 1917 the old populist school of literature was thriving, and many of its writers felt it their duty to serve the people. They wrote in the realistic tradition and shunned innovation. At the same time, Ukrainian writers were increasingly interested in symbolism and modernism, which came to Ukraine partly through Russia and partly through Galicia (western Ukraine, until 1917 under the relatively liberal rule of Austro-Hungary and not too far from Vienna). Among the modernists were the poets Lesia Ukrainka and Oleksander Oles, and the novelist and short story writers Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky and Vasyl Stefanyk. Literary criticism was still dominated by traditionalists (Serhiy Yefremov).5 The Revolution intensified the search for new forms and ideas and even propelled writers toward Marxism and radicalism. This was also hap­ pening in Russia, where apart from the symbolists and acmeists, futurists and some “proletarian” groups came to the fore. The intellectual and artis­ tic turmoil was at first little influenced by Party policies, which indeed re­ mained unclear until the resolution on literature, issued in Moscow in 1925. It legitimized the existence of “fellow travelers” (a misnomer invented by Trotsky), that is, writers who did not intend to listen to Party advice. A sim­ ilar resolution was published in Ukraine. By 1925 the old literary groupings, centered formerly around the magazine Ukrainska khata (Ukrainian Home) and some symbolist circles, had disintegrated and new “literary organiza­ tions,” some calling themselves “proletarian,” came into existence. It was obvious to everyone that from then on a struggle for new directions in lit­ erature would be fought in and through these organizations. In Ukraine the literary climate was influenced by another political decision—the “Ukrainization” (ukrainizatsiia), which promoted the use of Ukrainian language in education and government. Although Lenin was now dead, it seemed to some Ukrainian Communist leaders (Oleksander Shum­ sky, Mykola Skrypnyk) that Soviet culture would be “multicultural” (al­ though that word was never used, “multinational” was preferred; still later, in the 1930s, the slogan was “socialist in content and national in form”). There were open debates about “two cultures” in Ukraine (for example, be­ tween Lebed and Shumsky), but, for the time being, the line followed by Skrypnyk who, in 1927 became the commissar for education, was the offi­ cial policy. This kind of “affirmative action” was a great help to Ukrainian writers as well. Were some of them later to be blamed, when Party policy suddenly changed (at Moscow’s behest) and those Communists in Ukraine who were “true Leninists” were swept into oblivion? True, their belief that they had some power proved to be an illusion. All real power in the USSR 167

George Lucktjj

was in Moscow, as it had been before the Revolution. Yet their illusion was perhaps part of the Utopian atmosphere that communism spread around to all true believers. In one “proletarian literary organization,” Mykola Khvylovy, a devoted Communist but also a strong nationalist, came to dominate literary politics in Ukraine between 1925 and 1933 when, hounded and disenchanted, he put a bullet through his head. He was born Mykola Hryhorovych Fitilov in 1893 in the village of Trostianets in the Kharkiv region. His father was for a time a teacher but was more interested in hunting than in providing for his wife and children. Mykolas mother, Yelysaveta Tarasenko, also a teacher, finally left her husband, taking her children with her. Mykola attended five grades of the local gymnasia and later worked for a time as a locksmith. He also read a great deal of Ukrainian and foreign literature. Conscripted into the army in 1916, he left it two years later with decidedly leftist sympathies. For a time he was a member of a “soldiers’ council,” then worked for the local Ukrainian “Prosvita” (a cultural institution) until 1918 to 1919, when, disenchanted with the nationalist government of Ukraine, he became a ded­ icated Bolshevik (perhaps taking part in actual fighting) and, in 1919, joined the Communist Party of Ukraine. In the same year he married Kateryna Hashchenko, but a year later they separated (after their daughter Iraida was born) and he married Yulia Umantseva. In 1921 Mykola and his wife settled in Kharkiv, where his literary career developed rapidly. His first collection of poetry was published there in 1921, under the pen name “Khvylovy” (in Ukrainian, “excited,” “agitated”). It was not as a poet, but as a short story writer that Khvylovy first gained recognition, when his collection of stories Snyi etiudi (Blue Etudes) was published in 1923. It was greeted warmly by both populist (Yefremov) and new critics (Biletsky) as a most innovative work in Ukrainian prose. Ba­ sically, the “etudes” were impressionist, romantic tales of the Revolution, but they also contained some satirical and decadent elements. A complete edition of Khvylovy s short stories came out in 1927.6 The style of his stories (reminiscent of Boris Pil’niak) was also marked by the charismatic and im­ petuous personality of the author. The iconoclastic bent in his prose may best be seen in the first part of the novel Valdshnepy (The Woodcocks, 1927; the second part was destroyed either by the censors or by the author).7 In the novel, the hero, whose name is Karamazov, attacks Ukraine’s will-less intellectuals, and the national poet, Taras Shevchenko, accusing him of “having castrated the Ukrainian intelli­ gentsia.” In another piece, Khvylovy extolled Shevchenko’s conservative contemporary, Panteleimon Kulish, unpopular in Soviet times, as “a true European intellectual.” These deep insights into Ukraine’s past, gained from a truly dissident perspective, were described by Khvylovy’s critics as “un­ patriotic.” Given to sweeping romantic images and slogans (“An Asiatic 168

Mykola Khvylovy

Mykola Khvylovy, 1932 (photo courtesy of George Luckyj)

Renaissance Is Coming!”), often using Russian and French words, Khvylovy not only revitalized Ukrainian prose but also wrote a series of pamphlets that were to make him famous in the modern intellectual history of Ukraine. A perceptive analysis of these essays has been offered in Ukrainian by George Shevelov,8 and in English by Myroslav Shkandrij.9 Their effect also had profound ideological and political consequences. That they were pub­ 169

George Luckyj

lished and discussed in 1925 to 1928 proves that dissident opinions could be and were popular with Ukrainian intellectuals. These ideas became part of the “Literary Discussion”10—the last free debate on Ukrainian literature in the Soviet era—when almost a thousand articles were published and open debates on literature were held. Khvylovy’s pamphlets, entitled “Whither Are You Going?” “Thoughts against the Current,” and “The Apologists for Scribbling” were published in 1925 to 1926 and stirred great controversy. In them he attacked Ukrainian graphomaniacs, the so-called Red Prosvita (Soviet-oriented mass culture), and, above all, the dependence of Ukrainian literature on Russian models. The finest literary training, he claimed, could be gained by tutelage from the best writers of western Europe. He called for an orientation toward Eu­ rope, which to him was “past or present, bourgeois or proletarian, the ever­ changing one.” The ideal man, for him, was “the European intellectual, in the highest sense of this word. He is, if you like, the wizard from Witten­ berg, who revealed to us a magnificent civilization and opened boundless perspectives.” Khvylovy was equally adamant about Russia—“Since our lit­ erature can at last follow its own path of development we must not, on any account, follow the Russian. This is unconditional. . . Russian literature has been burdening us for ages ... it has trained us to imitate it slavishly.”11 His long article “Ukraine or Little Russia” was banned in 1926, and only one excerpt, quoted by a hostile critic, was known: “To attempt to rub out our independence by empty pseudo-Marxism means a failure to under­ stand that Ukraine will continue to be an armory of counterrevolution as long as it does not pass through that essential stage that western Europe un­ derwent at the time of the formation of national states.”12 Not until 1990 was the full text of the article published. It is one of Khvylovy’s best—a forceful indictment of “Great Russian chauvinism. Not only these anti­ Russian sentiments but above all Khvylovys exuberant and combustible prose were new, almost unprecedented fare for a Ukrainian reader. In the same pages Khvylovy did not hesitate to show his open admiration for some Ukrainian fellow-traveler writers (in the official view, the enemies of prole­ tarian literature) like the neoclassicist Mykola Zerov, who also called for a return “to the sources” (meaning Western literature).13 Philosophically, Khvylovy was influenced by such different thinkers as Henri Bergson, Oswald Spengler, and Rudolf Steiner. According to a critic, the ideas of Steiners anthroposophy can be clearly traced in several of Khvylovy’s short stories. Ukrainian socialist thinkers such as Mykhailo Drahomanov, Ivan Franko, and Volodymyr Yurynets were also well known to Khvylovy.14 Yet, as Shevelov has demonstrated, while the most frequent ref­ erences in the pamphlets are to Ukrainians (229), the Russians come a close second (221).15 Khvylovy’s own literary theory of “vitaism” was not clearly defined, but was perhaps posed as the answer to what he regarded as Rus170

Mykola Khvylovy

sian somnolence. His real contribution to Ukrainian thought was his polem­ ical talent, playful style, and daring, questioning spirit. Khvylovy s visionary philosophy is of special interest today. Influenced by Spengler s prophecy of the decline of the West, Khvylovy sensed what an American critic described recently as Spenglers concepts of “organic his­ tory” and the surpassing of the declining West by “dynamic non-European civilizations.”16 Khvylovy s prediction of the hriade Aziiatsky renesans (“com­ ing Asiatic Renaissance”) also looked for a future place for Ukraine in a new cultural constellation (“There cometh a mighty Asiatic renaissance in art and we are its precursors”). This was, surely, a deliberate departure from the European tradition of Ukrainian literature, even from a writer Khvylovy admired, Panteleimon Kulish, who in 1882 condemned Ukrainians as “mis­ erable Asiatics.” At the same time, Khvylovy could also be quite pragmatic about the immediate development of Ukrainian culture. He stressed the need to “conquer” cities in Ukraine (which were still mostly Russian) in order to elevate Ukrainian literature to a level of European modernity. As could be expected, Khvylovy’s stance drew sharp rebukes not only from local Communist bosses but from Stalin himself. In a long letter to Kaganovich (who was then a member of the Ukrainian politburo), written in 1926 but made public only in 1950, Stalin chided Khvylovy, as “this Ukrainian communist . . . who has attempted to divorce culture from poli­ tics . . . and who had nothing to say in favor of Moscow except to call on Ukrainian writers to run away from Moscow as fast as possible.” Stalin ended the paragraph: “And this is called internationalism.”17 The fact that there were no immediate repercussions from this veiy uneven battle between a defiant Ukrainian Communist and a man in the Kremlin who was even then getting ready to move into a leading position in the Party may be ex­ plained partly by the support which Khvylovy enjoyed among Ukrainian writers and even politicians. In 1925, soon after the death of Vasyl Elian Blakytny, his close friend and an editor of the daily Visti, Khvylovy formed a literary organization (out of the remnants of Blakytny s Hart) which he called grandiloquently the Free Academy of Proletarian Literature (VAPLITE—Vilna Akademiia Proletarskoi Literatury). Strong political support came from the so-called Borotbists (Blakytny, Shumsky, Hrynko, P. Liubchenko; in 1920 hundreds of them were admitted to the Communist Party of Ukraine).18 Among VAPLITE’s members were such leading writers of the day as Pavlo Tychyna, Volodymyr Sosiura, Mykola Bazhan, Mykola Kulish, and others. Khvylovy was their unquestioned leader and mentor. He also had very close ties to the Kharkiv theater Berezil, directed by the talented Les Kurbas.19 The soon­ to-be-famous filmmaker, Oleksander Dovzhenko, was also a founding mem­ ber of VAPLITE. Indeed, the intellectual and artistic elite of Ukraine were associated with Khvylovy and openly admired him. The Ukrainian Com171

George Luckyj

munist Party reprimanded him (and he openly recanted), but that did not stop him from traveling abroad (in 1926 he visited Vienna and Paris). Like its predecessor Hart, VAPLITE had plans to involve in its oppo­ sition to Party controls other national groups of writers in Ukraine (a group of Russian writers in Odessa asked to be admitted) as well as in the USSR (the Belorussian group Polymia), and even literary proletarian organiza­ tions abroad (Clarté in France). This smacked of what the Russians pri­ vately called khakhlatskaia derzost (khokhol [a pejorative for “Ukrainian”] impudence). VAPLITE s letterheads were in Ukrainian and French, not in Russian. Altogether this was a defiant, upstart group that would not play along with Russian sponsored groups (Proletkult, VUSSP). Therefore both sides, Ukrainian and Russian, were digging into their positions and the fierce battle that followed represents some of the most fascinating pages of recent Ukrainian history. Today it can be recreated in some detail. We have rare documentary evidence of the trip Khvylovy and other Ukrainian writers made to Moscow in 1929 and a rather inadequate but authentic transcript of how on that occasion they listened to Joseph Stalin lecturing them on Ukrainian literature. There is real drama in this confrontation, which Khvy­ lovy no doubt enjoyed while he was able. There are two accounts of Stalin s meeting with the Ukrainians writers: one, private and smuggled out in 1984 to the West by a writer who was there, Borys Antonenko-Davydovych;20 and an official one, published in Harvard Ukrainian Studies in 1992.21 Antonenko-Davydovych reports individual speakers (the official report gives only a few), and describes, rather vividly, Stalin’s argument that “Ukrainians were not a nation, but a nationality.” At the end of the meeting, Lazar Kaganovich, a close associate of Stalins, asked an inane, rhetorical question: “Do Ukrainian girls still sing?”—perhaps most revealing of the traditional Russian view of Ukrainians as good singers and dumpling eaters. The official version was printed in Russian and Eng­ lish in the United States in 1992. The editor, Leonid Maximenkov, set the document against the wider framework of the struggle against Ukrainian nationalism (which at that time was often identified with “Khvylovyzm”), Stalins own political fight against his opponents in the politburo, and the “ideological rationale for the Great Purge, coined one year before the be­ ginning of the genocide known as collectivization . . . Stalin revealed his cyphered plans for Ukraine to the Ukrainian writers.” The document, es­ pecially Stalins defense of Bulgakovs anti-Ukrainian play Dni Turbinykh (The Days of the Turbins, premiered 1926)—in 1930 Mykola Kulish’s Patetichna sonata (Sonata Pathétique) was viewed in Ukraine as an answer to Bulgakov—and his concern about Galician Ukrainians is revealing not only of Stalins true feelings about Ukraine but also of his Russian chauvinism. VAPLITE, under pressure from the Party, dissolved itself in 1928, but Khvylovy formed a new group around the magazine A Literary Fair, per­ 172

Mykola Khvylovy

haps the best platform of the modern Ukrainian avant-garde. He continued to fight the controls (although sometimes forced to compromise his col­ leagues and behave in a rather repugnant way) until 1933. We have an ac­ count by his friend Arkady Liubchenko (a secretary of VAPLITE, who brought the organization’s archives to the West in 1945) about a trip Khvylovy took in 1932 to the Ukrainian countryside, where the man-made famine among peasants opposed to collectivization was then raging. He realized that his dreams of a free Communist Ukraine had been laid to rest. Already in 1930 many members of the Academy of Sciences were sentenced to banishment for alleged participation in the “Union for the Liberation of Ukraine”—a fabrication of the NKVD. And soon after 1933 the entire Ukrainian government and politburo were either arrested or replaced by Russians.22 There remained one way out—a conspicuous and dramatic ges­ ture of protest. On May 13, 1933, after calling his friends to a party in his Kharkiv apartment, Khvylovy went to an adjoining room and shot himself. His funeral almost became a public demonstration (though the eulogies were muted), but soon enough his name and works were anathematized and for­ gotten in Ukraine for the next fifty years. In 1934, the Union of Soviet Writ­ ers, on whose organizing committee (Orgkomitet) Khvylovy had served, was finally formed, and Khvylovy was promptly, and posthumously, expelled. A few weeks after his death, another prominent Ukrainian Communist, Mykola Skrypnyk (often referred to as “Lenin’s friend and comrade”), also commit­ ted suicide. Was he following Khvylovy’s example? The brief account of his opposition to Party controls and to Russian imperialism offered here may not adequately explain why Khvylovy and his ideas were banned or why the terror in Ukraine in 1933 to 1938 swept away more than three hundred Ukrainian writers, who either perished in the Gu­ lag or were shot.23 The wholesale extermination of Ukrainian writers and artists must be seen in the wider framework of Soviet genocidal policies in Ukraine. In his “secret speech” to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, Khrushchev hinted that Stalin would have liked to deport all Ukrainians to Siberia, but “there were too many of them.”24 The man-made famine of 1932 to 1933, used as a weapon against the peasants who opposed the col­ lectivization, has been well documented in Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow (1986). Unfortunately Conquest pays little attention to writers (Khvy­ lovy is mentioned only twice). It is significant that the Soviet onslaught on Ukraine was total; it was not only against the intelligentsia or the political elite but also against the peasants. Strangely enough, this has led to a new sense of national solidarity among the Ukrainians, who today feel that many of them, of all classes and convictions, were martyrs for a just cause. A new sense of purpose has emerged out of common suffering. The restoration of Ukrainian writers to their place in history and the republication of their works, which started in 1989, continues. Memorials, 173

George Luckyj

monuments, and many biographies keep appearing. Commemoration of this cultural genocide has remained a priority on the literary and even on the political agenda in Ukraine. There are, perhaps, only half a dozen names that might merit international recognition (this singling out of prominent men and women, victims of the regime, is never practiced today because of a sense of common humanity). Apart from Khvylovy, there is his close friend, the playwright Mykola Kulish, whose Sonata Pathétique (1930) was success­ fully staged by Tairovs Kamemy theater in Moscow (but not in Ukraine). English and German translations of the play are available. Kulish also wrote two other plays in the expressionist tradition—Narodnyi Malakhiy (The Peoples Malakhiy, 1928) and Maklena Grasa (1933)—as well as a satire Myna Mazailo (1929), unquestionably the best Ukrainian comedy of the twentieth century. Kulish’s plays were written for and performed by the Berezil theater, directed by Les Kurbas (1887-1937), a very talented and original disciple of expressionism and constructivism and an adapter, in these genres, of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Upton Sinclairs Jimmie Higgins, and Georg Buechners Woyzeck. While he was exiled to the Solovky Islands Kurbas staged Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple (1936) with a cast of prisoners. Valerian Pidmohylny, a very talented novelist, was a member of the fellow-traveler group Lanka (the Link). Before his arrest in 1934, he pub­ lished two very fine novels—Misto (The City, 1928) and Nevelychka drama (A Little Touch of Drama, 1930). The latter has been translated into Eng­ lish. Accused of belonging to a terrorist organization, Pidmohylny was shot on November 3, 1937. His last letters to his wife cringed with admiration for Russia and Leninism. A doctoral dissertation on Pidmohylny and Mau­ passant was defended at Harvard (1986) and a monograph on his works ap­ peared in 1994.25 Special mention should be made of the “group of neoclassicists” led by Mykola Zerov, with whom Khvylovy had cordial relations (in letters writ­ ten from Kharkiv to Kyiv) and ideological affinities. Zerov, who was also a professor of literature, wrote a series of Essays to the Sources (1926) in which he, like Khvylovy, advocated pro-Western ideas. The neoclassicists (Zerov, M. Rylsky, P. Fylypovych, M. Dray-Khmara) tried to emulate in their poetry the French Parnassiens. Zerov and Rylsky were also distin­ guished translators; the latter was the only one to survive the purges. Zerov was shot on the same date as Pidmohylny. A minor poet, Mykhailo DrayKhmara shared their fate. His poem “The Swans,” inspired by Mallarmé, caused a great storm among politically minded critics. Dray-Khmara’s let­ ters were published by his daughter.26 Two great artists who had close links to VAPLITE and to Khvylovy were the filmmaker Oleksander Dovzhenko (1894-1956) and the painter Mykhailo Boychuk (1882-1938). Boychuk, bom in western Ukraine and

174

Mykola Khvylovy

educated in Cracow and Paris, created, in the 1920s, a school of paint­ ing which combined the Byzantine tradition of Ukrainian art with a new “monumentalism.” The entire group of Boychukists (who were members of ARMU—Association of Revolutionary Art of Ukraine, a close ally of VAPLITE) as well as their leader and his wife did not survive the purges. Most of their works were destroyed.27 Oleksander Dovzhenko avoided arrest (as did some other prominent writers such as Pavlo Tychyna, Maksym Rylsky, Mykola Bazhan, and Yury Yanovsky, who accepted Party controls and became panegyrists of Stalin) but was forced to live in Moscow and make films “to order.” In 1943, his film Ukraina v ohni (Ukraine in Flames)—like his earlier Zemlia (The Earth, 1930)—extolled the spirit of the Ukrainian people. Ukraine in Flames was banned on Stalin’s express orders. Dovzhenkos literary masterpiece, the novel Zacharovana Desna (The Enchanted Desna, 1957), was published posthumously. His is the only Ukrainian name in Twentieth Century Cul­ ture: A Biographical Companion (New York, 1983). The standard explanation for the purging of these writers, offered by Soviet and sometimes by Ukrainian émigré sources, was that these writers were “bourgeois nationalists,” or simply “nationalists.” Some of them, like Khvylovy, could be classed as “national-Communists” in their ideology. But their opposition to Party controls also came from a different and much deeper source. The “Vaplitians” were trying to show new directions to Ukrainian culture—away from Moscow, toward Western Europe. More­ over, they had demonstrated in their works (not only in poetry and prose, but also in drama and cinema) that they were capable of creating new and different works of art that did not conform to the old populist or new, nar­ rowly “proletarian” models. Soviet cultural policy aimed at limiting the non­ Russian nationalities to ethnic and local objectives in art and literature (a little later, that relationship was often referred to in the Soviet press as that of “elder and younger brothers”). The most talented of the non-Russian writers were allowed to imitate Russian models (in the hope of a common Russian culture, of which many prerevolutionary Russian theorists also dreamt) and so enrich the mighty Russian culture. That culture was planned as an imperial entity (which, to a large extent, it had been before the Rev­ olution), though the word “imperial” was never used. Any Ukrainian writer or artist who, like Mykola Kulish, Les Kurbas, Oleksander Dovzhenko, or even Mykola Khvylovy, broke the narrow ethnic mold, ignored Russian examples and aspired to world standards, was declared to be an enemy of socialism and was eventually destroyed. Ukrainian Communist writers, as well as fellow travelers, fell victim to the Stalinist purges and all memory of these writers was erased for some five decades. When perestroika began in 1989 and Gorbachev declared that

175

George Luckyj

all the “blank spaces” in literature would have to be filled in,28 Ukrainians began a long and complicated process of rehabilitating their writers (some had been partially restored in publications after 1956). Khylovy’s rehabilita­ tion offers an interesting example of the gradual restoration of suppressed historical memory that is still incomplete in Ukraine today. So much had been hidden and distorted in the past that the task of full rehabilitation was difficult. First to be published (in 1989) was the note Khvylovy wrote be­ fore his suicide. In it he professed himself to be a “Communist.” He wrote: “Long live communism, long live socialist construction, long live the Com­ munist Party!”29 Obviously, he could not part with his Utopia and in death, as well as in life, he left a powerful message to his fellow writers. Great lit­ erature, it said, must be fed by great vision, which for him was rooted in so­ cialist as well as nationalist ideology. All Khvylovy’s works have now been republished in Ukraine, but the fullest edition remains the five-volume one, published in Baltimore in 1978 to 1986, edited and amply annotated by Hryhoriy Kostiuk, who has also left reminiscences of the author. The present author published in Canada in 1977 Vaplitiansky zbimyk, a collection of documents from the VAPLITE archive, unfortunately still not fully explored. How relevant is this in Ukraine today, when, finally free from ideo­ logical strictures, writers are turning to entirely new ideas? Ideology, even if it is a postmodernist one, has not disappeared. But there is an awareness that, as a recent critic put it, “the poetic consciousness is [still] firmly de­ termined by the parameters of contemporary social consciousness and that this dependence sprang from the superiority of the social over the individ­ ual.”30 Yet most recently, in the words of the same critic, “the spiritual world of the poet has gained a higher level of freedom and become independent of social goals.”31 The latest events in literary fife show a clear struggle be­ tween the remnants of the ideological literature (represented by the dying Union of Soviet Writers) and new organizations (the Association of Ukrain­ ian Writers created in 1997), which look beyond ideology. Yet, writers still feel the need to organize. Khvylovy’s testament that innovation must be fought for in both public and professional forums will, probably, appeal to most writers, even the most “individualist.” His anti-Russianism is still a valid weapon today in Ukraine, where the Russian minority of twelve mil­ lion holds much power and influence. Khvylovy’s “deviationism” may be passé, but the iconoclastic bent is still admired, and a certain charismatic quality, always appealing to the Slavs, has survived. Also, since there is now a virtual cult of Khvylovy, he has joined other great literary figures who were always and still are regarded as more than mere writers. Shevchenko’s and Khvylovy’s lives, dramatic as they were, are unparalleled stories of mar­ tyrs who have helped to shape the national psyche and they are still being used as a defense against all enemies. 176

Mykola Khvylovy

Notes 1. V. Swoboda, “Shevchenko and Belinsky,” in Shevchenko and the Critics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980); also see B. Rubchak, “Introduction,” ibid.; A. Rutherford, “Vissarion Belinskii and the Ukrainian National Question,” Russian Review, October 1995. Khvylovy quoted, in an article written in 1926 but not published until 1990, Belinsky’s dictum that “Russians are the inheritors of the entire world, not only of Europe,” as ev­ idence of the latter’s chauvinism, adding that “the Great Russian intellec­ tual today also thinks so.” (Mykola Khvylovy, Kyiv, 1995), 738. 2. J. S. Reshetar, The Ukrainian Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952). 3. J. E. Mace, Communism and the Dilemma of National Liberation: National Communism in Soviet Ukraine, 1918-33 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). 4. G. Luckyj, Literary Politics in the Soviet Ukraine: 1917-34, 3d ed., updated (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990). Henceforth referred to as Literary Politics. 5. G. Luckyj, “An Overview of the Twentieth Century,” in D. Cyzevs’kyj, A History of Ukrainian Literature, 2d ed. (New York and Englewood: Ukrainian Academic Press, 1997). 6. Some of the stories appeared in an English translation in M. Khvy­ lovy, Stories from the Ukraine (New York: Philosophical Library, 1960). 7. For translation of the first part of The Woodcocks see Before the Storm: Soviet Ukrainian Fiction of the 1920s (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1986). 8. Yu. Shevelov, “Pro pamflety Mykoly Khvylovoho,” M. Khvylovy, Tvory v piatiokh tomakh (Baltimore: Smoloskyp, 1983), 4. 9. Mykola Khvylovy, The Cultural Renaissance in Ukraine: Polemical Pamphlets; 1925-26 (Edmonton: Canadian Institue of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1986). 10. M. Shkandrij, Modernists, Marxists and the Nation: The Ukrain­ ian Literary Discussion of the 1920s (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1992). 11. For the full text see M. Khvylovy, The Cultural Renaissance in Ukraine, 39-160. 12. Ibid., 227. 13. Literary Politics, 101-2. 14. See R. Lindheim and G. Luckyj, eds., Towards an Intellectual History of Ukraine: An Anthology of Ukrainian Thought from 1720 to 1995 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). 15. Shevelov, “Pro pamflety,” 57. 16. A. Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History (New York: Free Press, 1997), 236-37. 177

George Luckyj

17. Literary Politics, 68. 18. I. Majstrenko, Borotbism: A Chapter in the History of Ukrainian Communism (New York: Research Program on the USSR, 1954). 19. N. Kuziakina et al., eds. Les’ Kurbas': stat’i i vospominiia о L. Kurbase: Literatumoe nasledie (Moscow: Isskustvo, 1987). 20. Quoted in Literary Politics, 252-53. 21. L. Maximenkov, “Stalins Meeting with a Delegation of Ukrainian Writers on February 12, 1929,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies, December 1992. 22. Hryhorii Kostiuk, Stalinist Rule in the Ukraine: A Study of the Decade of Mass Terror (1929-39) (London: Atlantic Books, 1960). 23. G. Luckyj, “An Overview,” 771. 24. N. Khrushchev, The Crimes of the Stalin Era (New York: New Leader, 1962), 45. 25. M. Tarnawsky, Between Reason and Irrationality: The Prose ofValerijan Pidmohylnyj (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). 26. О. Asher, Letters from the Gulag: The Life, Letters, and Poetry of Michael Draikhmara (New York: R. Speller, 1983). 27. M. Shkandrij, ed., Mykailo Boychuk and His School of Monu­ mental Art (Edmonton: forthcoming). 28. Literary Politics, 251. 29. Literatuma Ukraina, August 17, 1989, 6. 30. V. Morenets, “Proshchannia z ideolohichnoiu vichnistiu,” Berezil, 1-2, 1997, 166. 31. Ibid., 169.

178

Efraim Sicher

The Three Deaths of Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel’

THE END FROM THE BEGINNING

Manuscripts do not burn we are told in Mikhail Bulgakovs The Master and Margarita. This hope should ideally sustain our faith that literature can sur­ vive totalitarian regimes even if writers cannot, despite Jean-Paul Sartre’s warning that societies that destroyed people had even less room for books. However, the ashes of Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel’ in the mass grave of Stalins victims in a Moscow monastery give no answer to this question. When arrested on May 15, 1939, Babel’s manuscripts, notebooks, and per­ sonal papers were confiscated and have not been seen since. A new collec­ tion of his work, Novye rasskazy (New Stories), was in preparation and was to include stories about “heroes of our times.”1 But, as Babel’ was heard to say as he was being led away, “They didn’t let me finish” (“Ne dali mne zakonchit’”).2 What was the “master of silence” working on when he was arrested? What priceless masterpieces have been lost to us? This chapter will try to gauge that loss, but first the reasons why Babel’ was already in some senses a dead writer by the end of the twenties will be described, before describing the destruction of his literary career and the circumstances lead­ ing to his physical death. The discussion will conclude with an account of Babel’s posthumous rehabilitation during the Thaw, a resurrection followed by his third death under Brezhnev. There has been since Babel’s name reappeared in print after the XX Party Congress a resistance to his restitu­ tion in the annals of Russian literature, not least among nationalist and antiSemitic circles, notwithstanding glasnost’ and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the final tragedy of Babel’ is perhaps that in both Russia and the West it has been difficult to resurrect the unexpurgated corpus of his work. In the West, Babel’s disappearance was noted a few times after the war,3 and was countered by Soviet misinformation. However, no scandal was raised as in the Pasternak affair. In print Babel’ had a checkered exis­ tence,4 often based on expurgated Stalinist versions,5 and his stories were 179

Efraim Sicher

further censored by prurient editors or distorted by misinterpretation dur­ ing the Cold War of Babel’ as a convinced Communist.6 Only in the mid­ nineties did Western publishers overcome commercial hesitation and bring out almost all the surviving remnant of his work. In both Russia and the West, Babel’s biography and the corpus of his work have been distorted accord­ ing to prevailing political conditions. If Babel’s supporters had previously tried to persuade the Soviet authorities of his support of the Revolution, in the new Russia he is accused of complicity in that Revolution, which is seen as so disastrous for Russia’s national heritage. Babel’ has even been dubbed the “Marquis de Sade” of the October Revolution because of the seeming jouissance of blood and violence in his stories,7 while in the West these mo­ tifs have led to his identification with a Nietzschean vision.8 Freedom of speech and Russia’s search for collective memory, as well as the working through of a traumatic past, have not made possible a balanced reassess­ ment of Babel’s place in Russian literature. Unfortunately, the destruction of Babel’ did not stop with the end of Babel’ himself, and the damage done cannot be easily remedied. The resurrection of Babel’ is confounded also by Babel’s own mysti­ fication during his lifetime, a mixture of playing cat-and-mouse with the authorities and a love of playing pranks. Neither Babel’s “Avtobiografiia” (“Autobiography”), written in 1924 to gain ideological credentials as a “So­ viet” writer, nor the so-called autobiographical stories, which Babel’ intended to collect under the title Istoriia moei golubiatni (Story of My Dovecote), strictly relate to the facts, but they are illuminating for the construction of the writer’s identity as someone who had to break with his Jewish past and who identified Russian culture and Russia with the destiny of a writer. Despite the necessary postrevolutionary revision of biography, carried out by many writers, nothing could be more natural than Hebrew, the Bible and Talmud being taught at home by a melamed, or part-time tutor. Babel’, however, writes in his “Autobiography” as if this was purely at his father’s insistence (“po nastoianiiu ottsa”), as part of the family’s pressure on the boy to learn a multitude of subjects from morning to night.9 The “Autobiogra­ phy” conveniently glossed over Babel’s descriptions of the horrors of revo­ lutionary Petrograd in Gorky’s Menshevik newspaper Novaia zhizn, which Lenin closed down in July of 1918 for its scathing attacks on his regime.10 Moreover, any attention to Babel’s absence from the events of the October Revolution is diverted by references to service on the Rumanian front, then in the Narkompros and Cheka, where, like so many intellectuals, he may have worked for a short time as a translator in return for the rations necessary for survival in the hungry years of war communism.11 The evasions and deceits of his postrevolutionary “Autobiography” attempted to cover the long peri­ ods of “silence” that Babel’ needed to gestate his short stories, too thin in length and risqué in content to satisfy the critics on the watch for deviance 180

The Three Deaths of Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel’

from Soviet norms. This was a strategy Babel’ repeated with decreasing suc­ cess from the midtwenties, when the survival of independent fellow travel­ ers was threatened by militant Marxists and the dominant Proletkul’t, and in the thirties, when total state control made it gradually impossible to pub­ lish even the little that Babel’ had so painstakingly produced.12 THE PRICE OF SILENCE

The attempts to incriminate Babel’ began long before the Purges with the public quarrel between Marshal Budenny (Civil War hero and Bolshevik calvary commander) and the prestigious writer Maxim Gorky. The attack by the legendary commander on the first Konarmiia (Red Cavalry) stories to appear in Moscow journals in 1924 had not been forgotten, and Gorky felt compelled to come once more to Babel’s defense in 1928 during the esca­ lating battle between ideology and art.13 Budenny again repeated his attack on what he alleged to be a pornographic calumny, charging that all Babel’ had ever seen was a remote backwater in the rear of the First Horse Army.14 Gorky responded with a tribute to Babel’s ability to make heroes of the Cossacks in Red Cavalry by embellishing them from within in a finer way than Gogol had done in Taras Bul’ba. The attack on Babel’, wrote Gorky, who had not yet resettled in Russia, was unjustified and his indisputable artistic talent was useful to the Marxist cause.15 The debate is said to have been stopped by none other than Stalin himself, but the issue was resusci­ tated whenever Babel’s name resurfaced in the Soviet press. The hardliners accused Babel’ of failing to understand the revolutionary struggle and of ex­ pressing his hostility to it through the figure of Liutov. If Budenny’s initial attack had amused Babel’ and boosted sales of Red Cavalry, now the ques­ tion of Babel’s loyalty seemed to be answered by his failure to produce ideologically suitable material. The danger in which Babel’ stood was ap­ preciated by Gorky, who came to the defense of “lynched” writers and Jew­ ish authors in 1928 to 1929. Gorky tried to deflect some of the damaging ideological implications of Babel’s writing, arguing that ideological consid­ erations could not deny artistic value.16 In 1929 the Zamiatin and Pil’niak affairs highlighted the lack of artis­ tic freedom in Soviet Russia. Evgenii Zamiatin, author of the dystopian novel My (We), appealed to Stalin and got permission to go abroad, while Boris Pil’niak, who had published his novel Krasnoe derevo (Mahogany) in Berlin in 1929, agreed to conform. (Pil’niak was not to be forgiven for the publi­ cation of his story of political murder, “Povest’ nepogashenoi luny” [“Tale of the Unextinguished Moon,” 1926]). Now one risked one’s reputation by re­ siding or publishing abroad. Babel’ had both of these on his record, and he faced the even more serious charge of having made anti-Soviet statements to the Polish press when, in 1930, Warsaw’s Wiadomosci literackie carried 181

Efraim Sicher

an interview Babel’ was supposed to have given, in which he was made to sound sick of the Bolshevik regime and resigned to emigration on the sunny Riviera. The Revolution, he was “quoted” as saying, had bred only death and disease, and the sun had last shone brightly in 1914. Since then the sky had turned red with the flag of the Revolution and with human blood. Now Ba­ bel’ had to recuperate in the south of France, but what he most needed from the doctors were injections of faith. “Have you heard of Gedali? He is superior to Lenin! Lenin formed an International of exploited people, but Gedali brought together good people. What a brilliant crazy idea—'Good people of the world—unite!”’17 Significantly, the reported conversation with Babel’ on the Côte d’Azur was not dated, which would give the impression that Babel’ was still abroad. In fact, Babel’ had returned from France in fall 1928, and the arti­ cle was a crude reworking of Babel’s Red Cavalry story “Gedali,” though it was sufficiently convincing for some, despite the parodic and hysterical style uncharacteristic of the real Babel’.18 The émigré Polish Communist Bruno Jasienski seized upon the “interview” as evidence of Babel’s ques­ tionable loyalty as a Soviet writer.19 Babel’ quickly sent off a letter to the editors of Literatumaia gazeta pointing out that he had, of course, never given the interview,20 but since Jasienski had raised the question of Babel’s right to call himself a Soviet writer, Babel’ was nevertheless called upon to make an immediate public statement. At the hearing before the secretariat of the writers’ organization FOSP on July 13, 1930, Babel’ defended him­ self by declaring his unquestionable allegiance. In line with his tactical mys­ tification, he repeated the story in “Autobiography” of his apprenticeship with Gorky and explained his silence by ascribing it to characteristically long drawn out creative work on a new book. He went on to state that he had indeed disappeared from literature since the publication of the Red Cavalry and Odessa stories in 1924, but this was because he could no longer write in his former manner, and because he had repudiated the style of Red Cavalry: “It is a pity that Budenny did not ask me for some assistance in his attack on Red Cavalry because I do not like Red Cavalry.” The present “si­ lence” was in fact the greatest service he could offer to Soviet literature, since he had given up the comforts of life made possible by fame and gone into the country, into the collective farms, to get to know Soviet life from inside. This was something the ideological demagogues were demanding at the time, though not quite in the way Babel’ had in mind! Sensing the need to disassociate himself from the fellow travelers and aware that his evasive habits were incriminating in the new political climate, Babel’ painted him­ self as someone who had been much maligned and feigned astonishment that he needed to state his innocence. He undertook to sue the Polish news­ paper and was exonerated.21 Babel’ reported to his family abroad that he was bearing up well to what he called a “nasty business.”22 182

The Three Deaths of Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel’

In its front-page headline on September 3, 1930, Wiadomosci literackie splashed across the entire page the news of the sensational Warsaw court case Babel’ had brought against it. The paper summarized Jasienski’s article in Literatumaia gazeta and printed a reply by Aleksander Dan to Babel’s letter in Literatumaia gazeta, in which he had protested that he had not been on the Riviera and had never heard of Dan. Dan explained that he had met the Russian who introduced himself as Babel’ in fall 1926 (when Babel’ was not in France) and later “reconstructed” the conversation after reading the German translation of Red Cavalry. The Polish newspa­ per claimed that it had fallen victim to a ruse, but also maintained that the “interview” reflected the spirit of what Babel’ had actually written in Red Cavalry. Moreover, it noted the repressive atmosphere in Soviet literature, of which Mayakovsky’s suicide and Jasienski’s attack on Babel’ were indica­ tive. Such remarks could be construed as constituting a “foreign anti-Soviet campaign” from which Babel’ had to disassociate himself.23 Babel’ pleaded that his silence was a fruitful one, but the book that he promised never materialized. If his solitary existence on a country farm in Molodenovo was a form of self-sacrifice to bring nearer the day when he would see his family again, it was to prove a sacrifice in vain. He wrote his family abroad:

My whole way of life—hard-working, solitaiy, single-minded—is subordi­ nated to that end, and if you don’t count my professional thoughts, then my thoughts of you engulf me entirely. Mon amie, if one is going to acquire rel­ atives, then one should pick them from among peasants; if one is going to pick a trade—make it that of a carpenter and house painter; if one is going to marry, it should be to a pock-marked cook. But as you and I have fulfilled none of these recipes for happiness, then we must, first, develop bonne mine and second, struggle, break our way out, surmount our troubles, quand même et malgré tout. I dare to give you advice from my sublime distance because every hour, every moment, I share your misfortunes. I share them in spirit and wish for nothing so much as to share them physically. You see now what a classically Jewish “family man” I’ve turned into.24 Babel’ implored his mother and sister not to “jog” his hand as he wrote his way to their reunion. Still, for all his encouragement to them to follow his example and look on the brighter side of life, to decorate their houses “with gaiety and not with tsores,”25 he was no less of a nagging worrier than they. Babel’ characterized himself as an “animal with a long period of gestation,”26 and he realized that the intensive work on new stories had yielded reams of notes and drafts, but little that was actually publishable. What Babel’ did manage to publish by the end of 1931 were merely the promising beginnings of the book Story of My Dovecote, about an Odessa childhood, and one chapter of the collectivization book, Velikaia Krinitsa. The publication of another Odessa story, “Karl-Yankel,” proved 183

Efraim Sicher

embarrassing, since the attention of the foreign press was drawn to its ac­ count of a mother on trial for having had her baby circumcised and named Yankel, after the Jewish patriarch Jacob instead of Karl, after the Marxist patriarch. Babel’ tried to play down the importance of the story and claimed it had been printed in a distorted and uncorrected form: In general, what’s being published is a quite insignificant part of my work— I am writing the bulk of it only now. It is too early to shower me with praise— we’ll see what there is to come. The only thing I know I have gained is the feeling of having become a professional writer and a will and eagerness for work such as I have never experienced before.27

This was a time when Babel’ was awaiting a decision on permission to go abroad and the granting of foreign currency, so he could not afford any fur­ ther uproar like the Warsaw provocation. Yet he could be eminently im­ practical in his devotion to his art. Only ten days later he wrote his mother:

Yesterday and today I worked a lot and have drafted a story that strikes me as poetic and simple, and is on a quite unexpected topic. I haven’t yet given a thought to practical considerations concerning it. I know I ought to have done so. But still, I’ve derived moral satisfaction from it.28 By 1932 Babel’ was marking a further seven-year “silence”—one that matched the first period of “going into the people” in his “Autobiography.” In a revised ending of his “Autobiography,” which he prepared that year, he wrote that he was wandering about the country and getting up strength for his new work.29 Yet once more Babel’ was out of tune with the orthodoxy of his times. The Party was taking control of literature just as it had taken con­ trol of every other field. Writers were now to be required to conform to the dictates of socialist realism, which required unswerving allegiance to Party control (partiinost’), demonstrative recognition of the class conflict as reg­ ulating human affairs (klassovost’), and identification with the people (narodnost’). The formation of the Union of Soviet Writers set up a powerful body that could both discipline wayward members and distribute “privi­ leges” to those in favor or to the well connected. The First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 was to be a historic parting with any remaining plu­ ralism in art. Lionel Trilling has called Babel’s speech at the 1934 First Soviet Writers’ Congress a “strange performance”: Beneath the orthodoxy of this speech there lies some hidden intention. One feels this in the sad vestiges of the humanistic mode that wryly manifest themselves. It is as if the humor, which is often of a whimsical kind, as if the irony and the studied self-depreciation [sic/], were forlorn affirmations of freedom and selfhood; it is as if Babel’ were addressing his fellow-writers in a dead language.30 184

The Three Deaths of Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel’

Babel’ went through the motions of praising Stalin. However, he then de­ clared himself a “master of silence.”31 The established convention was to laud Stalin as the leader of a nation united in the struggle for communism, and Babel’ did note the unified struggle of the people, but said it was a struggle against trite vulgarity (poshlosf), which he termed “counterrevolu­ tionary.” Stalin had called writers “engineers of the human soul,” but Babel’ gently reminded his listeners that their profession necessitated “a difference in their feelings, tastes, and methods of work.” Yes, it was an exciting time— the first scaffolding was coming down from the building of socialism—but writers would be failing in their task if they went around shouting their hap­ piness through loudspeakers, which was the usual manner of writers in the service of Stalinist propaganda. If things went on like this, he joked, decla­ rations of love would be made over loudspeakers like announcements at sports stadiums. Babel’ won applause and laughter in his lighthearted protest against the personality cult. Perhaps he could get away with saying this and could be ambiguous without risking insincerity because he held the writers them­ selves responsible for describing adequately the historic transformation of the Soviet Union. Above all, they were responsible first of all to the reader (and by inference not to the Party). Soviet readers demanded literature, and one could not put a stone in their outstretched hands, only the “bread of art.” But mass production literature would not do, it had to be quality lit­ erature, a literature of ideas. The writer had to bowl the reader over with the unexpectedness of art. And speaking of respect for the reader, Babel’ declared, arousing the audience’s laughter: “I suffer from a hypertrophy of that feeling. I have such unlimited respect for the reader that I am struck dumb and I fall silent.”32 To say that the writer had to know collective farms and factories in­ side out and at close hand was a way for Babel’ to justify his silence as be­ ing essential, since all this required much time and thought. Perhaps he was being unduly optimistic or ironic in assuming that in the Soviet Union dif­ ferences among writers, in other words nonconformism, could be main­ tained. In this connection Gorky had endorsed the purpose of the Union of Soviet Writers to organize writers for collective work in the new socialist culture, though without writers ordering each other about.33 However, it was precisely collective work to which Il’ia Ehrenburg was opposed, and, in his speech, Yurii Olesha insisted on being himself, pleading to be allowed the freedom to devote himself to the dreams of the new Soviet youth, since he could not describe factories.34 Babel’ was probably correct in claiming that in the West no capitalist publisher would have cared whether he had something different or important to say, or “whether,’ as Ehrenburg put it, T was a rabbit or a she-elephant.’”35 However, by following Gorky in referring to the slogan coined by a previous 185

Efraim Sicher

speaker, Leonid Sobolev, “The Party and the government have given the writer everything and have taken from him only one thing—the right to write badly,” Babel’ concluded amid laughter, with significant double mean­ ing: “Comrades, let us not hide the fact. This was a very important right and it is no little thing being taken away from us. This was a privilege of which we made much use.”36 The right to write badly was a privilege that writers had abused and in giving it up they would have to be responsible for their art and freedom.37 The importance for the Party of the First Congress of Soviet Writers may be measured by the embarrassed fury of the Soviet literary establish­ ment at Max Eastmans book that had appeared a few months before, Artists in Uniform: A Study of Literature and Bureaucratism. It presented a very different picture than the one that the Party wished to give. Describ­ ing in full the Zamiatin and Pil’niak affairs, Eastman exposed systematic re­ pression of artistic freedom. The chapter entitled “The Silence of Isaac Babyel” lauds Babel’ for not prostituting his pen to the apparatchiki and ad­ mires his silence, a treasonable act for which he risked severe punishment. Eastman guessed that Babel’ survived not because of his evasiveness but because of powerful connections and a peculiar privilege Stalin had accorded Gorky, Babel’s chief protector. The audience who laughed at Babel’s ref­ erence to his silence would have undoubtedly heard of Eastman’s contro­ versial book. In vain Ehrenburg defended the right of Babel’, Olesha, and Pasternak to be different. For Babel’, as for Mikhail Bulgakov and Nikolai Erdman, the only option was silence. THE REST IS SILENCE

At the first Congress of Soviet Writers, Babel’ had declared himself a mas­ ter of the genre of silence. Two years later, in 1936, the critic Isai Lezhnev marked the tenth anniversary of Babel’s “silence.”38 It was made clear that silence could itself be regarded as treasonable, and writers were called upon to demonstrate their loyalty to Stalin.39 Yet Babel’, like other “writers of si­ lence,” had not laid down his pen. Babel’s silence was in fact a productive one, but tragically whenever he seemed near to perfecting his work, the in­ creasingly repressive times made publication impossible. In 1937 Babel’ started making “a neat copy of my many years of meditation—as usual, I find that instead of weighty volumes, I have less than a sparrow’s beak to show and that’s sure to cause a great outcry.”40 The truth of the matter is that his book on collectivization, or Kolia Topuz, his lost novella about a reformed Odessa gangster in Donbass mines and factories, was even less acceptable in the thirties than were the frank descriptions of violence and cruelty in Red Cavalry, which were still draw­ ing fire from Marxist critics. What interested him was the extreme, the 186

The Three Deaths of Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel’

grotesque, the abnormal, and what was required was conformism and mediocrity. A lost story recalled by Semyon Hecht which Babel’ read to Ehren­ burg in 1938, “U troitsy” (“By the Church of the Holy Trinity”) tells of the loss of many illusions, “a wise and bitter story.”41 Nor were his tales of Kabardino-Balkariia, based on his experiences in Nal’chik as a guest of Betal Kalmykov, publishable. Betal Kalmykov, the legendary leader of the Kabardino-Balkariia region fell into disgrace, possibly because Stalin could not abide any rival cult figures, least of all one who so successfully modern­ ized his region and transformed it into what Babel’ termed a gem of the So­ viet Union, a paradise, by Soviet standards, of rich harvests and abundance.42 Another writing assignment took Babel’ to the Don valley, a mining and industrial region at the heart of the Stakhanov movement. There he be­ friended a local Communist called Furer, a young protégé of Lazar Kaga­ novich. Furer later committed suicide without waiting for his arrest. Babel’s powerful friends from Civil War days, Yakir and Tukhachevskii, also fell, and their trials considerably upset Babel’. A deeper and more personal blow was the loss in 1936 of Gorky, his chief protector and mentor. “That man was my conscience and my judge,” wrote Babel’ after Gorky’s death, “an example to me. I was linked to him by twenty years of unspoiled friendship and affection. The way for me to live up to his memory now is to live and work, and to do both those things well.”43 The deaths of his fellow Odessites, the poet Eduard Bagritskii in 1934 and the humorist Il’ia Il’f in 1937, left Babel’ lonely and surrounded by “mechanical loudspeakers” blaring out praise for the Leader.44 Several writers who chose not to blare out praise were arrested—among them Osip Mandelshtam, who was banished to Voronezh, and the playwright Nikolai Erdman, whose second arrest Babel’ came close to witnessing when he was on vacation in the Caucasus. Viktor Shklovskii, associated with the condemned formalists in liter­ ary criticism and with the heresy of a “Southwestern” or Odessa school of Russian literature (which included Babel’, Bagritskii, Olesha, Il’f, and Pet­ rov), recanted. The internationally renowned film director Sergei Eisen­ stein was also in hot water and was forced to confess his “ideological errors” in a self-critical speech on April 25, 1937. Eisenstein had worked with Ba­ bel’ on a revised version of Bezhin lug (Bezhin Meadow) in 1936, an adap­ tation of a Turgenev story to the legend of the Soviet Komsomol member Pavel Morozov; the film was banned and responsibility fell not just on Eisensteins head but also on his collaborators.45 The assassination of Kirov in 1934 had given Stalin an excuse for step­ ping up the persecution and the show trials of political enemies. The de­ nunciations and terror intensified, climaxing in 1937. The public campaign from 1936 against “Trotskyism” and “formalism” in art, fanned by Radeks attack on Joyce and modernism and by the campaign against Shostakovich, 187

Efraim Sicher

provided another opportunity for settling old scores and for demanding declarations of total obedience. Babel’ was not prepared to betray his re­ maining friends or his soul, and he behaved with maximal reticence when required to address public meetings to denounce “Trotskyists” and “for­ malists.”46 He would speak about maintaining cultural values and human decency, knowing these were being destroyed, and he would further ex­ plain away his silence by attributing it to dissatisfaction with himself. His fastidiousness was, he said, a feature of his “difficult character” that distin­ guished him by implication from others who rushed out verbose novels of unoriginal and turgid prose about life in a factory.47 Rarely is Babel’s signature found on the collective letters denouncing some “enemy of the people” that writers were pressured into signing for publication in the offi­ cial newspapers.48 It was becoming increasingly difficult to “buy time” from editors, and Babel’ was threatened by bailiffs because of his accumulated debts.49 Babel’s letters from Paris and Sorrento in 1933 to 1934 show his apprehen­ sions that the censor might not pass his new work. Of the stories he sent back with Gorky hoping they would restore him to favor in Russia, “Froim Grach,” a valedictory Odessa story about the Cheka’s execution of an Odessa gangster leader, and “Moi pervyi gonorar” (“My First Honorarium”), about a Tbilisi prostitute who becomes the narrator’s first “reader,” were not pub­ lished in Babel’s lifetime.50 In 1935 his play Mariia was repressed while in rehearsal at the Vakhtangov and Jewish theaters in Moscow, although it did appear in print. This was doubly unfortunate because Babel’ had discov­ ered a flair for writing plays. Besides a Gogolian comedy about a town that had gone mad and a play about Kotovskii, whom he knew, Babel’ started on the sequel to Mariia, Chekisty (The Chekists), which would have undoubt­ edly been equally controversial.51 The 1935 Paris congress of international writers protesting German fascism proved to be a last brief occasion for Babel’ to visit his family. Ba­ bel’ and Pasternak were sent only after the French left complained about their absence from the Soviet delegation. The congress was an opportunity for Soviet propaganda, but it was discredited by the infringement of per­ sonal and creative liberty in the USSR, as well as arguments within the So­ viet delegation and the factionalism of the French left. The impromptu addresses of Pasternak and Babel’ were met with wild applause.52 Back home, the pressure to conform intensified: “I’ve been told that I’ll be able to see my family any time I have some ‘output’ to show.”53 And so it continued—Babel’ took advances from editors to buy time to work on his stories, but found it impossible to do so because of having to complete hack work, while pressured constantly to produce “suitable” material. In his eulogy for Eduard Bagritskii in 1935, Babel’ regretted the poet could not

188

The Three Deaths of Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel’

realize their shared dream of retiring to sunny Odessa;54 did he suspect how small was his chance of living out his old age in a seaside villa? THE END AND AFTER

To what extent did the Stalinist Terror shake Babel’s natural optimism and idealistic faith in a better future? How did he rate his chances of survival and how much was he risking in maintaining his “silence”? What finally brought Babel’ down? How much did Babel’ manage to write that has been lost to us? First, we must bear in mind the complete divorce made by Babel’ be­ tween his writing and his private life. Few indeed were privileged to see what lay at that moment under his pen or in the infamous chest of manu­ scripts that he guarded like Pushkin’s “Miserly Knight” (in which guise he had been caricatured in a cartoon accompanying the 1932 pubheation of “Guy de Maupassant”).55 Antonina Pirozhkova, the subway engineer with whom Babel’ lived in the thirties, was strictly forbidden to look at the man­ uscripts on which Babel’ was working and her lack of a literary background was an advantage for Babel’s secretive habits, in contrast to the openness he had displayed in his correspondence with his former mistress, the actress Tamara Kashima. Second, Babel’ was far from being a political creature. He was not a member of the Party. When living a hermit’s existence at Molodenovo he doggedly resisted attempts at conscripting him for “consultation sessions” with shock workers. Later, when offered a writer’s dacha in Peredelkino, Babel’ was mainly concerned that the houses be sufficiently distant from one another to assure him privacy so he could get on with his writing.56 These were times, Babel’ told Ilia Ehrenburg, when a man could only talk with his wife in bed, and then only under a blanket.57 With horror he talked of the incarceration of children of living parents in orphanages or the recycling in a paper factory of books by banned authors.58 Babel”s conver­ sations in Moscow with the Hungarian Communist Ervin Sinko and in Paris with Boris Suvarin, who was writing a biography of Stalin, show how up-todate he was on daily arrests and that he was aware of what was going on in­ side the Party.59 Nadezhda Mandelshtam has testified that Babel’s Moscow apartment remained one of the last refuges to which the families of those who disappeared could turn for support and counsel. Babel’ would go off somewhere, relates Antonina Pirozhkova, and he would return dejected, but would attempt to reassure the victim’s relatives.60 In 1937 Babel’ wrote to the Union of Soviet Writers complaining that his books were no longer available at bookstores or libraries; the last edi­ tion of his collected stories appeared in a heavily censored volume in 1936.

189

Efraim Sicher

Babel’ held a number of editorial posts, but the ring was tightening. We now know that Babel’ was under surveillance from 1934. About a year be­ fore Babel’s arrest, the NKVD placed a plant in the Babel’ household, in the person of Yakov Efimovich Elsberg, who worked for the Academia pub­ lishing house. Antonina Pirozhkova was used to finding all kinds of guests visiting or staying, so she was not suspicious of Elsberg’s obsequiousness in arranging for repairmen or decorators who appeared with lightning speed. Babel’ seems to have been simply amused when Elsberg accompanied An­ tonina Pirozhkova to the opera one night and brought her home in a smart black car.61 Ezhov, NKVD chief from 1936, suspected Babel’ of having an affair with his wife, Evgeniia Solomonovna (née Khaiutina), who was an old friend of Babel’ from Odessa and worked with him on USSR in Construc­ tion (she apparently committed suicide in winter 1938 after the arrest of a close friend). Babel’ was known to frequent Ezhov’s home and Osip Man­ delshtam was moved to ask him for his motives. Did he actually want to touch death? “No,” Babel’ replied, “I just like to have a sniff to see what it smells like.”62 Babel’ wanted to understand how Yagoda and Ezhov could instigate such inhuman terror, but to satisfy his writer’s curiosity he had to get dangerously close.63 In early 1939 Babel’ decided to live on his own at Peredelkino in or­ der to work on his new book. Upon its successful completion, he intended to have Antonina Pirozhkova and their daughter Lida join him from Mos­ cow. There remained a couple of filmscripts to finish—the completion of Gorky’s Trilogy, which Babel’ had promised Gorky’s widow to undertake in order to ensure that the filmmakers did not take liberties with the original,64 and the script of a children’s film Staraia ploshchad’, 4 (No. 4, Old Square) about an airship, USSR 1, that Babel’ wrote within the space of only twenty days.65 His last letter on May 10, 1939, announced he was now installed in his Peredelkino home and would soon “devote himself to the final polish­ ing” of his “true work,” which he intended to hand in by the fall.66 At five in the morning of May 15, 1939, Antonina Pirozhkova was woken up by four NKVD officers asking for Babel’. Two of them accompa­ nied her to Peredelkino where they forced her to knock on Babel’s door and then, once they had searched him for weapons like some dangerous criminal, they arrested him.67 It is estimated that of the six hundred delegates to the First Congress of Soviet Writers, at least half failed to survive the Stalin years. Some were arrested, some died prematurely or committed suicide, some simply disap­ peared. Stalin’s megalomania tolerated no rivals and he was suspicious of potential subversion everywhere. The most talented writers and artists per­ ished or were silenced, with a few exceptions for reasons we may never fully understand. It would be only a matter of time before the discovery of a 190

The Three Deaths of Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel’

“conspiracy” of writers working to undermine Communist rule and to carry out counterrevolutionary acts of terrorism. Babel’s arrest on May 15, 1939 was apparently carried out “preemptively,” that is to say the NKVD had no firm “evidence” of the conspiracy, but it was hoped that Babel’ could quickly be broken and made to incriminate other members of the literary fraternity. The warrant for Babel’s arrest was in fact signed by Beria thirty-five days after he was picked up. Also arrested were the journalist Mikhail Kol’tsov, a loyal supporter of Stalin and a Spanish Civil War veteran, and the theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold. Other potential candidates for inclusion in the “conspiracy” were Yurii Olesha, another writer of silence, and Boris Paster­ nak, the leading Russian poet, neither of whom were arrested. In order to fabricate a strong case against the “conspirators” the in­ vestigators drew evidence from any contact with foreigners or persons abroad to prove espionage for a foreign power. In addition, involvement during the twenties with literary journals such as Alexander Voronskii’s Krasnaia nov’ or its successor Pereval and the associated Krug publishing house prompted accusations of ideological subversion. Moreover, contact with anyone later disgraced testified to active membership in a “Trotskyist” terror organiza­ tion. Extracts were read to the accused from the confessions of other prison­ ers indicting them in anti-Soviet activity, although, unknown to the accused, they may already have been executed (as was Pil’niak in Babel’s case). Apart from the pressure of being forced to stand for days and nights, the signed “confessions” were often extracted from prisoners with the persua­ sive help of beatings that were repeated on the most painful areas of inter­ nal bleeding.68 From the papers in the NKVD files it seems that the initial grounds for suspicion offered to substantiate Babel’s “crime” were association with arrested “Trotskyites” based on their testimony (or testimony that was put into their mouths). S. B. Uritskii, former editor of Krest’ianskaia gazeta, testified to meeting Babel’ at Ezhov’s home and hearing him express anxi­ ety about his silence being considered an anti-Soviet act, as well as about the arrest of close friends. “A writer,” Babel’ was reported to have said, “must write with sincerity, but what he writes with sincerity is not publish­ able because it does not fit the Party line.” This allegedly demonstrated Babel”s sense of his own guilt, his Trotskyite views, and his links with Ezhov, who had been arrested as an enemy of the people. Furthermore, the “in­ telligence source” (protectively unnamed in the dossier) reported remarks made by Babel’ in 1934 about the Great Trials. Babel’ had lamented the de­ struction of the best talents and the lack of any real leadership, insinuating that innocent people were being arrested (obviously a Trotskyite plot to in­ cite anti-Soviet feeling). By 1939 Babel’ was reportedly expecting his own arrest. None of this constituted evidence that would stand up in any kind of court, so from May 29 Babel’ was subjected to three days of ruthless inter­ 191

Efraim Sicher

rogation. At first, Babel’ did not buckle under, but in the end a confession was extracted from him that incriminated him in a Trotskyite terror organi­ zation. Babel’ admitted that in 1924 he had been invited by Voronskii, then editor of Krasnaia nov’, to Eduard Bagritskiis reading of his new poem The Ballad of Opanas, in the presence of Trotsky and Radek. Babel’ denied he ever saw Trotsky again, but in the perverted logic of the interrogators the link was established both with Trotsky and an “anti-Soviet” writers’ group around the disgraced Voronskii, which was at the end of the twenties a last stronghold of independent writers and fellow travelers who withstood the wholesale destruction of literary values and were now incriminated for this. The figure of Trotsky could be shown to explain the “anti-Soviet” views ex­ pressed in Red Cavalry, where Babel’ had, in the words of the dossier, deliberately ignored the role of the Party in the war and slandered one of the units of the Red Army. Subsequently, during de-Stalinization, it turned out that two of Babel’’s interrogators, Shvartsman and Rodos, were half­ educated and could not see—even when on trial themselves—why they should have actually read Red Cavalry. Another count in the charges against Babel’ under section 58 of the criminal code of the RSFSR was that of spying for a foreign power. Babel’ was made to confess that his contact was the French writer André Malraux, to whom he had been introduced during his stay in Paris in 1933. Babel’ had also met with Malraux in Russia when Malraux had visited Gorky in 1934 and again in 1936 (accompanied by Mikhail Kol’tsov, one of the ar­ rested writers),69 as well as during the 1935 Anti-Fascist Congress in Paris. Malraux rated Babel’ highly, and Babel’ regarded him as a useful protector; in fact, he hoped that word of his arrest would get to Malraux. The infor­ mation Babel’ had passed on to Malraux concerned, by his own admission, a critical account of the true mood of Soviet society during the show trials, the state of literature, collectivization, and items from the Soviet press on Soviet aviation. So Babel’ “confessed” to being a French and Austrian spy— his former Moscow flat-mate, the Austrian engineer Bruno Steiner, a rep­ resentative of an Austrian company until he left Russia in 1936, came in handy here—as did his contacts with Trotskyites and other Russians living in Paris, among them Il’ia Ehrenburg, with whom Babel’ discussed the mass arrests on Ehrenburg’s return to Moscow from Spain.70 As if these accusations were not sufficiently absurd, the interrogators persuaded Babel’ to confess that he had been involved with Ezhov’s wife in a terrorist plot against Stalin and Stalin’s close associate Kliment Voroshilov (a common charge against victims of the purges). Babef’s role was suppos­ edly to undermine morale and influence public opinion, which was an admis­ sion of sorts of the danger Stalin, like the Tsars, sensed in writers (attempting to overthrow the existing system was also one of the charges Babel’ claimed in his memoir of Gorky that he had faced under the ancien regime!).71 In 192

The Three Deaths of Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel’

his interrogation on May 11, 1939, Ezhov, who was sentenced to be shot, said he had thought Babel’ might be working together with his wife for British intelligence. Questioned in July 1937, N. N. Zarudin, likewise sen­ tenced to be shot, had named Babel’ along with Kataev, Pil’niak, and Vasily Grossman, as members of Voronskii’s “terrorist conspiracy” against Ezhov. However, Voronskii, arrested in winter 1937 and later executed, did not mention Babel’ at all. It could be that Ezhov was behind the idea of fram­ ing the writers and, after he fell, gatherings of writers at his apartment could be used to implicate Ezhov himself in an anti-Soviet conspiracy. Babel’ could not have hoped that the absurd pack of lies and insinua­ tions would fail to withstand honest judgment and must have realized that his fate was sealed. In a letter to Beria dated September 11, 1939, Babel’, full of the required contrition at his “criminal” past, asked for the confis­ cated manuscripts, the fruits of the past eight years’ work, so that he could put them in order—these included the drafts of the collectivization book, a number of other stories, a scenario, and an incomplete play, as well as ma­ terial for a book on Gorky. He presumably wished to leave his new book, so long awaited, to posterity. This was denied him. It was established routine that, since a crime was assumed, the accused was expected to name his accomplices. In Robert Conquests estimation, the arrest of such “accomplices” and of many who had merely come into con­ tact with the accused widened the scope of the mass arrests to as much as 5 percent of the total population.72 The interrogators were therefore eager to see what names Babel’ would let drop as people with whom he had held “anti-Soviet” conversations: they noted down Yurii Olesha and Valentin Kataev, both of them fellow Odessites; the Yiddish actor and director of the Moscow Jewish Theater, Solomon Mikhoels, murdered in 1948; the film di­ rectors Aleksandrov and Eisenstein; and other lesser-known personalities. The recording of these names could later be used in evidence against them, and Babel’ must have realized this when on October 19, 1939 he re­ tracted his confession: “I beg the investigation to note that in giving evi­ dence I committed a crime, even while in prison: I slandered a number of persons.” This was typical of Babel’s self-effacement up to the very end and consonant with his intellectual honesty and integrity. At the very least he did not want his friends to be harmed through their association with him; Ehrenburg was particularly implicated in the “French connection.” On a scrap of paper dated November 5, 1939, he scribbled an appeal to the State Prosecutor’s office to be allowed a hearing before his case went to trial. Having received no reply, he wrote again on November 21, once more as­ serting that he had in his confessions made false statements that implicated persons who were innocent of any crime and only worked for the good of the Soviet Union. “The thought that my words not only do not help the in­ vestigation but could do direct harm to my country gives me no rest.”73 A 193

Efraim Sicher

third letter on January 2, 1940, likewise went unanswered, as did an appeal to the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court sent January 25, 1940, naively asking to see his case and call witnesses.74 At his trial, held the next day on January 26, 1940, Babel’ protested that he was innocent of any act against the Soviet Union and retracted the confessions that had been forced out of him. He was given a last word, in which he requested to be allowed to finish his last work, a draft version of which he had completed by the end of 1938.75 The military collegium sitting in judgment read out the death sentence. Execution was promptly carried out on January 27, 1940. Meyer­ hold and Kol’tsov were executed shortly afterward, on February 2. The military tribunals would try cases and pronounce sentences on a “conveyor-belt” system: twenty minutes per victim. The trials were held secretly, behind closed doors, and no witnesses could be brought by the prisoner, who was not allowed a defense attorney. The transcripts of the interrogation and trial of the three arrested writers—Babel’, Meyerhold, and Kol’tsov—suggest clearly why a show trial was never staged. None of them, even after being broken, offered the kind of material required for a public show trial, nor when faced with the prospect of death did they seem willing to turn state witness against other writers. Moreover, the great anti-Trotskyite show trials were over, and Ezhov himself had fallen. Now the removal of “enemies of the people”—that is to say, the intellectual and military elite, as well as remnants of the former opposition and old guard— was proceeding quietly and efficiently. The relatives of those executed were told that their loved ones had been sentenced to ten years without right of correspondence. 76 For a while, until Babel’ was transferred to the Butyrskii prison for trial and execution, Antonina Pirozhkova’s parcels were accepted at the Lubianka. One day she was visited by NKVD officers who asked her to give them clothes for Babel’, which she mistakenly thought a good sign. For some years afterward former inmates or their relatives fed Antonina Pirozhkova with rumors that Babel’ was still alive in some distant labor camp. In 1952, in a letter home, one prisoner sent word that Babel’ had died of a stroke af­ ter being kept under incredibly ideal conditions—in a hut on his own with plenty of writing paper. The authorities clearly did not wish to risk the slightest hindrance to the smooth working of the Terror, least of all any pub­ lic opposition. Even after Babel’s rehabilitation following the review of his case in 1954 by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court, the world was lied to and told he had died (in unspecified circumstances) on March 17, 1941. This might have been in line with the general policy to postdate deaths to make them seem war casualties or to imply death from natural causes during confinement. The full truth was something that was not char­ acteristic of the Soviet regime and might provoke unrest, especially since the concentration camp system was still maintained and even repopulated. 194

The Three Deaths of Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel’

De-Stalinization had to be limited to excesses and abuses in the Commu­ nist system, and could not be allowed to lead to its delegitimization. Strangest of all, an arrested man’s innocence did not suffice to clear his name. Although the investigating judicial commission could find no ba­ sis for legal action against Babel’, Antonina Pirozhkova had to procure three character witnesses for the rehabilitation process. She chose Gorky’s widow Ekaterina Peshkova, Il’ia Ehrenburg, and Valentin Kataev to testify to Babel’s loyalty to the Soviet Union. Peshkova confirmed Gorky’s evaluation of Babel”s talent and reliability as a Soviet citizen, while Ehrenburg asserted that Babel’ was a confirmed Communist and anti-Trotskyist, though he had to explain away the appearance of Malraux in the indictment, since Malraux was now considered a Gaullist. Kataev, curiously, felt the need to voice reservations about Babel’s work, particularly Red Cavalry. Perhaps Ehren­ burg and Kataev still felt jittery prior to the XX Party Congress, and may have realized their own names appeared in the NKVD files. The times were evidently not ripe for writers to be judged by more enlightened standards, as the Siniavskii and Daniel trial and the expulsion of Solzhenitsyn from the Union of Soviet Writers were to show. Ehrenburg managed to secure the republication of Babel’s Izbrannoe (Selected Works), in 1957. Two somewhat enlarged editions followed in 1966, and some new material did appear in distant Central Asian journals through the seventies. However, following the publication of Babel’s Selected Works in 1957, a number of critics in fact denied Babel’ had a place in the newly revised his­ tory of Soviet literature, since he was identified with the vacillating Liutov, who was hostile to the Revolution when compared with other fictional Civil War heroes. If Babel’ had been accorded a “second life” under Khrushchev, he reverted to a twilight zone during the “stagnation” under Brezhnev and the crackdown on Jewish activism. Khrushchev had turned against avantgarde art and shown there was a limit to the freedom and liberalization her­ alded by the Thaw: spring had not yet come. Andrei Siniavskii’s arrest meant that his name did not appear in publication of expurgated archival material in 1965; L. Poliak, assigned the task of replacing Ehrenburg’s preface to Babel’s Selected Works in 1966, commented with hidden irony how difficult it was to write about Babel’.77 Gorbachev’s perestroika gave Babel’ what Galina Belaia calls his “third life,”78 but even under glasnost’ there were some who felt Babel’ did not fit within the Russian national tradition or that premature publication of the full texts might do more harm than good.79 Babel’s full rehabilitation lagged behind that of Pasternak, Mandelshtam, Bulgakov, Zamiatin, Tsve­ taeva, and other writers less favorable to the Soviet regime. At the end of the Soviet period a two-volume edition was published of Babel”s stories, plays, film scenarios, memoirs, speeches, and correspondence, as well as the full text of his 1920 Diary. What it did not include were a few minor pieces, but 195

Efraim Sicher

also fragments or incomplete works, such as the novella Evreika (The Jew­ ess'), which had appeared abroad; nor did the notes indicate where the text remained censored. The difficulties facing the editors are understandable, considering the fact that it is nearly impossible to distinguish between the very many stylistic changes that Babel’ made in successive editions and the deletions made by editors. The choice of the 1936 edition as the last life­ time version prolongs the censorship;80 worse, it perpetuates the distortion of the corpus of Babel’s work by publishing the stories, apart from RedCavalry, in order of publication, which, due to the political circumstances and Babel’s long “gestation,” bears little relation to order of composition or their thematic and chronological sequence and ignores Babel’s plans, whether thwarted or abandoned, to publish his work in separate books or cycles of linked narratives. In effect, most of the recent Russian editions have failed to fully restore what had been destroyed by the Soviet system, though at least they have made available in Russia much that had been un­ publishable until the end of the Soviet period, when at last it was possible to print material that was critical of the Revolution, such as Babel’s articles for Novaia zhizn or his 1920 Diary. After the breakup of the USSR, a fur­ ther two-volume edition81 again selected the 1936 Stalinist text, though also inconsistently used the texts of first publication of several stories, some of which first saw light much earlier than was previously thought, thus alter­ ing the history of Babel’s literaiy career. Alongside the official transcripts of Babel’s interrogation there exists his own personal disposition, a handwritten self-criticism. Putting the two together we get a picture, albeit falsified by lies and half-truths, of a man who saw all around him the systematic destruction of culture, but who blamed himself for his failure to complete his life’s work. He knew he had been arrested because of his “silence” and his foreign contacts; looking back, his attempts to describe truthfully collectivization or a typical Soviet family, the Korobkins, among other projects already mentioned, were doomed to failure because he touched on the human side and could not bring himself to turn his writing into a political statement. Only too late did he realize that his fictional autobiography, Story of My Dovecote, had be­ come his own indictment because it was the story of a man who had grown up before the Revolution in Jewish Odessa and who had tried in vain to rec­ oncile his humanitarian beliefs with the cruelty of the Revolution. He real­ ized how out of place the Liutov type was in the new society where there could be no doubts or individualism. Stalin could barely tolerate the living legends and enfants terribles of the Revolution, several of whom (Schmidt, Okhotnikov, Primakov, and others) Babel’ knew personally and named in his interrogation; they had been Babel’s “heroes of our times” and their elimination was to considerably weaken Soviet military readiness when Hit­ ler invaded Russia. 196

The Three Deaths of Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel’

In 1964 Antonina Pirozhkova appealed for the return of Babel’s con­ fiscated manuscripts. She was officially informed that the manuscripts were not preserved. This accords all too well with Solzhenitsyn’s calling the air­ space above the Lubianka chimney stack the most wretched on earth, as it received the smoke of so many burning manuscripts. However, no official order for burning Babel’s papers has been located, so, as Babel’ himself al­ ways did, we too must, against all the odds, live in hope, despite our knowl­ edge that manuscripts were arrested and, like their authors, do burn.

Notes An earlier version of part of this chapter originally appeared in Canadian Slavonic Papers (Revue canadienne des slavistes) 36, 1-2 (1994): 7-22. The permission of the editors to use this material is gratefully acknowledged. 1. The plan for this publication by the publishing house Sovetskii pisatel’ speaks of a small print run (20,000) and an original publication date set for November 1938, which could have been delayed as much by Babel’s characteristic prevarications as by political difficulties (archives of the Union of Soviet Writers, RGALI f. 631, op. 15, no. 315). 2. Antonina Pirozhkova, “Gody, proshedshie riadom (1932-1939),” in Vospominaniia о Babele, ed. A. Pirozhkova and N. Yurgeneva (Moscow: Knizhnaia palata, 1989), 294. A further uncensored and enlarged version of these memoirs appeared in three consecutive issues of Literatumoe obozrenie, nos. 1-3, in 1995; translated into English by Anne Frydman and Robert L. Busch, At His Side: The Last Years of Isaac Babel (South Royal­ ton, Vt.: Steerforth Press, 1996). 3. R. Rosenthal, “The Fate of Isaac Babel’: A Child of the Russian Emancipation,” Commentary 3 (1947): 126-31. 4. Babel’s stories were rarely included in wartime anthologies, de­ spite popular and official support for the Russian war effort. 5. The first postwar volume of selected stories was Benya Krik, the Gangster: and Other Stories, ed. A. Yarmolinsky (New York: Schocken, 1948). The first major collection of Babel’s stories in English was Collected Sto­ ries, revised by Walter Morison with an introduction by Lionel Trilling (New York: Criterion, 1955). The first full editions of the stories in Russian were collected in two volumes, Detstvo i drugie rasskazy, ed. Efraim Sicher (Jerusalem: Biblioteka Aliia, 1979), translated into English by David Mc­ Duff in Isaac Babel’, Collected Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, ; 1994) and Peterburg 1918, ed. Efraim Sicher (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1989). English translations of correspondence and selected stories trans­ lated by Max Hayward and Andrew MacAndrew appeared as The Lonely 197

Efraim Sicher

Years: 1925-1939: Unpublished Stories and Private Correspondence, edited and with an introduction by Nathalie Babel’ (New York: Farrar and Straus, 1964; republished with a revised introduction, Boston: David R. Godine, ; 1995) You Must Know Everything: Stories 1915-1937, edited with notes by Nathalie Babel’ (New York: Farrar and Straus, 1968). 6. On distortion of Babel’s work in the West, see Charles Timmer, “Translation and Censorship,” in Miscellanea Slavica: To Honour the Mem­ ory of Jan M. Meijer, ed. B. Amsenga et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1983), 443-68. 7. I. Yarkevich, “Babel’ как Markiz de Sad russkoi revoliutsii,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, March 16, 1994. 8. For example, Robert Mann, The Dionysian Art of Isaac Babel (Oakland, Calif.: Barbary Coast Books, 1994); Gregory Freidin, “Revolution as an Aesthetic: Nietzschean Motifs in the Reception of Isaac Babel’ (19281932),” in Nietzsche and Soviet Culture: Ally and Adversary, ed. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 149-73. 9. Detstvo, 7. 10. Gorky used the paper to voice his belief in the power of the intel­ ligentsia to revive moral values and to plead for a cessation of violence in politics and, after October, for the restoration of individual freedom. See Maxim Gorky, Untimely Thoughts: Essays on Revolution, Culture and the Bolsheviks, 1917-1918, translated by H. Ermolaev (New York: Paul S. Erik­ son, 1968). 11. Whether Babel’ had actually served in the Cheka and in what ca­ pacity is ultimately a matter of speculation fuelled by Babel’s detailed de­ scriptions of Chekists in a 1917 sketch, “Evening,” his stories “The Journey” and “Froim Grach,” and his own boast that he had worked for the Cheka, which may have been meant to enhance his acceptance to the authorities in Moscow and his mythical notoriety, especially when it was expedient to dis­ tance himself from the Russian émigrés in Paris. 12. For an account of this period see my “The Trials of Isaac: A Brief Life,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 36, 1-2 (1994): 7-22. 13. “Rabsel’koram i voenkoram о tom, как ia uchilsia pisat’,” Pravda, September 30, 1928, 3. 14. “Otkrytoe pis’mo M. Gor’komu,” Pravda, October 26,1928,4. This letter was actually written by S. Orlovskii, former secretary of the RevolutionaryMilitary Council of the First Horse Army. It is quite possible that Budennyi’s original attack on Babel’ had also been penned by a Party hack. 15. “Otvet S. Budennomu,” Pravda, November 27, 1928, 5. The ms. of this letter in Gorky’s archive uses much sharper language, but the editors of Pravda persuaded Gorky to tone it down. Babel’ thought Gorky had been too soft in his reply (letter of November 29, 1928 to Anna Slonim, Sochineniia [Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literature, 1990], vol. 1, 291). 198

The Three Deaths of Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel’

16. M. Gor’kii, “Mekhanicheskim grazhdanam’ SSSR (Otvet korrespondentam),” Pravda, October 7, 1928, 3-4; “O träte ènergii,” Izvestiia, September 15, 1929, 2. 17. Aleksander Dan, “Izaak Babel’,” Wiadomosci literackie 21 (1930), 2. 18. The interview was featured in the Parisian Dernières nouvelles, June 13, 1930. The Israeli poet Avraham Shlonsky took it seriously enough to publish it without commentary in his translations of Babel’s stories, Yitskhak Babel’, Sipurim (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat hapo’alim, 1963), 342-43. 19. “Nashi na Riwere,” Literatumaia gazeta, July 10, 1930, 2. Jasien­ ski was later arrested in Stalin’s purge of the Polish Communist Party on July 31, 1938. He was sentenced to fifteen years and died of typhus in the Vladivostok transit camp (Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalins Purge of the Thirties, revised edition [Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971], 585). 20. Literatumaia gazeta, July 15, 1930, 1. 21. Transcript of the meeting, IMLI, f. 86 op. 1, no. 5, 1-3, Sochineniia, vol. 2, 372-74. 22. Letter of July 22, 1930, Lonely Years, 144. 23. At least Babel’ could still set the record straight and have his ver­ sion published, as it was in “Literaturnoe zhul’nichestvo: somnitel’naia nevinovnost’ pol’skogo ezhenedel’nika,” Literatumaia gazeta, August 10, 1931, 1. See his letter to the editor of July 17, 1930, Sochineniia, vol. 1, 309. 24. Letter from Molodenovo, February 8, 1931, Lonely Years, 160. 25. Letter from Kiev, December 15, 1928, Lonely Years, 112. 26. Letter from Molodenovo, December 16, 1931, Lonely Years, 200 27. Letter from Moscow, January 2, 1932, Lonely Years, 202. 28. Letter to his mother from Molodenovo, January 12, 1932, Lonely Years, 205. 29. Ms. in RGALI f. 1559, op. 1, ed. khr. 3, published in Detstvo, 7-8. 30. “Introduction” to Walter Morison’s 1955 edition of Babel’s Col­ lected Stories, republished as an Appendix in Isaac Babel’, Collected Stories, ed. Efraim Sicher and trans. David McDuff, revised edition (Harmonds­ worth: Penguin Books, 1998), 343. 31. Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s”ezd sovetskikh pisatelei: stenograficheskii otchet, ed. I. Luppol et al. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1934), 279. 32. Sochineniia, vol. 2, 381. 33. Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s”ezd, 225-26. 34. Ibid., 234-36. 35. Sochineniia, vol. 2, 381. 36. Ibid., 382. 37. Lionel Trilling seems to have understood this expression differ­ ently—that the right to write badly was itself a right not to be given up eas­ ily (Collected Stories, ed. Efraim Sicher and trans. David McDuff, 343). 199

Efraim Sicher

38. “Vakkhanaliia pereizdanii,” Pravda, December 15, 1936, 3. 39. V. Pertsov, “Novaia distsiplina,” Znamia 12 (1936): 238-41. 40. Letter of March 11, 1937, Lonely Years, 335. 41. Erenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990), vol. 2, 486. 42. See letter from Nal’chik, the provincial capital, of November 8, 1933, Lonely Years, 242. 43. Letter of June 19,1936, Lonely Years, 309. This is the uncensored (corrected) edition. 44. On Il’f see the chapter by Alice Nakhimovsky in the present book. 45. See letter of October 25, 1936, Lonely Years, 322-24. On Eisen­ stein and the film Bezhin lug see the chapter by Peter Kenez in the present book. 46. Transcript of speech of March 26,1936, IMLI f. 41, op. 1, no. 228, 87-93. The newspaper version reprinted in Sochineniia is expurgated. 47. Sochineniia, vol. 2, 398. This is an edited transcript of Babel’s remarks made at an evening arranged by the young writers’ journal Literatumaia ucheba at the Union of Soviet Writers, September 28, 1937; it appeared in Nash sovremennik 4 (1964): 96-100. 48. A rare example is “Lozh’, predatel’stvo, smerdiakovshchina,” Literatumaia gazeta, January 26, 1937, 4 (special issue dedicated to the show trials and including articles signed by many Soviet writers). James Falen (Isaac Babel: Russian Master of the Short Story [Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974], 252) ascribes to Babel’ a piece entitled “V liuboi moment my gotovy smenit’ pero na vintovku,” in an anthology published af­ ter Kirov’s assassination in 1934, Pisateli—Kirovu, but I have not been able to find evidence of Babel’s authorship. 49. Letter to Efim Zozulia of October 14, 1938, from Peredelkino, Vospominaniia, 318-19. Fortunately for Babel’ the bailiffs were instructed to leave essential furniture like a writing table; one of the assessors hap­ pened on one occasion to be the poet Boris Slutskii, then a budding law stu­ dent, who has left a memoir (first published in Voprosy Literatury in 1989) of the incident in which he recalls that Babel’ had not left any other assess­ able furniture in his apartment and the bailiffs were disappointed. I am grateful to Professor G. S. Smith for pointing out this reference. 50. A variant of “My First Honorarium,” called “A Reply to an In­ quiry” “Spravka,” did however appear in English translation in a Soviet pub­ lication, International Literature 9 (1937), 86-88. 51. Sergei Povartsov writes on the basis of Dmitiy Furmanov’s diary records of meetings with Babel’ in 1925 to 1926 and interviews with Babel’s contemporaries that this was a novel, from which Babel’ read excerpts at a private gathering in 1937; as Povartsov notes, the Cheka had been a pro­ hibited literary theme since 1930, but this apparently did not deter Babel’ 200

The Three Deaths of Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel’

even at the height of the Purges (Priehin a smerti—Rastrel [Moscow: Terra, , 1996] 2-22). 52. Erenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn, vol. 1, 254, 430. On his return to Moscow, Babel’ attended a public debriefing on the congress, reported by Del’man, “Shirokim frontom protiv fashizma: I. Babel’, V. Kirshon i K. Luppol о Kongresse zashchity kul’tury,” Literatumaia gazeta, August 15, 1935. Babel’ noted the care and attention Soviet writers visiting abroad received from the Motherland, doubtlessly a hint that his movements and behavior were restricted. 53. Letter of November 13, 1935, Lonely Years, 294. 54. “Bagritskii” in Eduard Bagritskii: Al’manakh, ed. V. Narbut (Mos­ cow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1936): 160-61. A slightly different version may be found in Eduard Bagritskii: Vospominaniia sovremennikov, ed. L. G. Bag­ ritskaia (Moscow, 1973), 400-1. 55. “Skupoi literaturnyi rytsar’,” 30 dnei, 6 (1932), 35. 56. Letter to family of April 16, 1938, Lonely Years, 359. 57. Erenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn, vol. 2, 158. 58. Ibid., vol. 1, 471. 59. Ervin Sinko, Roman eines Romans: Moskauer Tagebuch (Köln: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1969); Boris Suvarin, “Poslednie razgovory s Babel’em,” Kontinent 23 (1980), 343-78; a French version is to be found in Boris Souvarine, Souvenirs sur Isaac Babel, Panaït Istrati, Pierre Pascal (Paris: Gérard Lebovici, 1985). 60. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vospominaniia (New York: Chekhov Press, 1970), 341; Pirozhkova, Vospominaniia, 388. 61. Pirozhkova, 307-8. After the Thaw, Elsberg’s role in the arrest of writers was investigated and he was thrown out of the Union of Soviet Writ­ ers in 1962, though apparently later reinstated. Elsberg even wrote an appreciation of Babel’s “underrated” talent (“Ob issledovanii formoobrazuiushchikhikh faktorov i ikh sootnoshenii,” in Problemy khudozhestvennoi formy sotsialisticheskogo realizma, vol. 1 [Moscow, 1971], 162-65). 62. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vospominaniia (New York: Chekhov Press, 1970), 341; translated by Max Hayward, Hope against Hope (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975), 385. 63. Pirozhkova remembers Babel’ relating a conversation with Yagoda, a frequent visitor at Gorky’s house, in which he asked what to do if he fell into his hands. Babel’ thought Yagoda’s secret police humane by compari­ son with those of Ezhov, who succeeded him (Vospominaniia, 271). 64. See Pirozhkova in Vospominaniia, 293. Moi universitety was re­ leased in 1940, but Babel’s name was dropped from the credits as he was by then an “unperson.” 65. Letter to family from Leningrad, April 20,1939, Lonely Years, 377. Babel’ had gone to Leningrad to tie up some loose ends in his film work, 201

Efraim Sicher

but characteristically found time for visiting friends and sightseeing, sum­ moning Antonina Pirozhkova to join him on the pretext of a sudden attack of asthma. James Falen interprets the film as containing anti-Stalinist notes (“A Note on the Fate of Isaac Babel’,” Slavic and East European Journal 11 [1967]: 398-404), but the film seems to be yet another routine assignment which Babel’ wished to get over as quickly as possible. 66. Lonely Years, 379. 67. Pirozhkova, Vospominaniia, 293-95. The story of Babel’s fate at the hands of Beria’s henchmen, suppressed at the time of his rehabilitation during the Thaw, was first told in the Soviet Union in 1988 thanks to Gor­ bachev’s policy of “openness.” Excerpts from the dossier of NKVD Case No. 419 against Babel’, I. E., opened May 16, 1939, were published by Vi­ talii Shentalinskii, “Khranit’ vechno: Poslednie dni Babel’ia,” Ogonek 39 (September 1989): 6-7, 22-23; republished as a chapter in his Raby svobody: V literatumykh arkhivakh KGB (Moskva: Parus, 1995), 26-81. An­ other account of Babel’s secret police dossier is to be found in Sergei Povartsov, Prichina smerti—rasstrel (Moscow: Terra, 1996). The following account is based on these sources and on Arkadii Vaksberg’s report on the “writers’ conspiracy,” “Protsessy,” Literatumaiia gazeta, May 4,1988, 12, as well as Pirozhkova’s memoirs in Vospominaniia, 288-314, and her conver­ sations with the present author in 1977. It should be pointed out that while Shentalinskii and Povartsov gained access to the original dossier, they do not always cite sources. Povartsov also improvises some imaginary recon­ structions of “what it must have been like” without substantial documenta­ tion. Moreover, Shentalinskii was only too aware from his experiences trying to open up arrested writers’ archives back in 1988 during glasnost’ that the KGB had probably taken prophylactic measures to clean up some of the documents, that they were not going to readily reveal the identity of informers, and that cooperation depended on orders from above (Shenta­ linskii, 23-25). Povartsov, who was told that prison and other records had not been preserved, believes that totalitarian habits die hard (see Povartsov, 47 n. 2). We shall never know how complete this account is; for example, both Shentalinskii and Povartsov vouch for the incredible order in which the pseudojudicial process was documented, even in trivial details, but no credible explanation is given for missing material such as confiscated man­ uscripts, notebooks, and private correspondence (though a postcard from Babel’s family abroad was featured in a small exhibition of the dossier at the Institute of World Literature, Moscow, summer 1994). To this must be added the atmosphere in which Shentalinskii and Povarstov were writing, between the collapse of the Communist system and the chaotic restructur­ ing of Russian society, as well as against the background of revision of the Russian heritage and open anti-Semitism.

202

The Three Deaths of Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel’

68. Povartsov states there is no firm evidence that Babel’ was sub­ jected to torture as Meyerhold was (Povarstov, 48, and see Braun’s essay in this book), but it would be difficult to imagine Babel’ assenting to the fab­ rication of nightmarish accusations against him without physical and psy­ chological pressure. 69. From the photograph of one of these meetings in 1936 showing Malraux talking to Babel’, Kol’tsov, and Gorky, one can clearly see Gorky’s dejected look (reproduced in Shentalinskii, facing p. 144). Gorky was being increasingly isolated and he was irritated by the uncouth behavior of Stalin and his associates, as confirmed in Pirozhkovas memoirs and Babel’s own remarks when under interrogation after his arrest (Shentalinskii, 364-65). His son Maxim had died suddenly in mysterious circumstances, possibly poisoned by the secret police, and Stalin may have wanted the old man out of the way. 70. Why Ehrenburg was not arrested may have to do with services the French police suspected he was performing for Moscow, and his usefulness as a Soviet propaganda tool to deny repression of other writers, especially during the anti-Cosmopolitan campaign after the war. This could supply part of the answer; ultimately it is a matter of speculation, though a ques­ tion that preoccupies Ehrenburg himself in his memoirs. See Joshua Ruben­ stein, Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (New York: Basic Books, 1996). 71. “Nachalo,” God XXI (1938): 79-81. 72. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalins Purge of the Thirties (London: Macmillan, 1968); revised edition, The Great Terror: A Reassess­ ment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); the chapter entitled “On the Cultural Front” shows the extensiveness of the repression of Soviet writ­ ers from the twenties on in the context of secret police practice. See also Conquest’s Inside Stalins Secret Police: NKVD Politics, 1936-1939 (Lon­ don: Macmillan, 1985). 73. Archive of the State Military Prosecutor’s Office 39041-39, quoted Povartsov, 170. 74. Ibid., 172. 75. Protocol of the session of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, January 26, 1940, ibid., 175-76. 76. Povartsov dismisses the hypothesis that the reason Stalin shelved plans for a writers’ trial was the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, signed in August 1939, which brought the Soviet Union into a nonaggression pact with the fascist regime whose book burning and destruction of its intellectuals had been so often attacked in the Soviet press and might invite unwelcome par­ allels (Povartsov, 76); however, it should be remembered that with the ex­ pansion of Soviet rule in 1940 the secret police were required to remove

203

Efraim Sicher

intellectuals and political leaders in the newly annexed territories quietly and discreetly, which would hardly be possible if all eyes were turned on pub­ lic trials of leading Soviet writers. Nor would it seem to make much sense for Babel’ to play the role of an Austrian as well as French spy once the Reich was no longer an enemy of the USSR. We can only guess why in August 1939 there was a changeover in Babel’s investigating team and an unex­ pected official request to extend the proceedings in order to procure more evidence, or why, after the interrogations were ended, the detention period was extended, in anticipation of further orders from above. 77. I. Babel’, Izbrannoe (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1966), 3. 78. “Tret’ia zhizn’ Isaaka Babel’ia,” Oktiabr 10 (1989), 185—97. For a post-Soviet perspective see her “Na novyi uroven’ issledovaniia,” Voprosy literatury 1 (1995): 96-97. 79. Galina Belaia presumably has circles close to Pamiat’ in mind when she describes the refusal by Moscow journals to publish Babel’s 1920 Diary in summer 1987. It was eventually published after expurgation of ex­ pressions that might be considered derogatory of the Russian national char­ acter . . Nenavizhu voinu . . .’: Iz dnevnika 1920 goda Isaaka Babel’ia,” Druzhba narodov 4 [1989]: 238-52; 5 [1989]: 247-60). Babel’ was casti­ gated along with other Jewish writers in Igor’ Shafarevich’s pamphlet Russofobia (1989), which reverted to the old charges that they were an alien presence corrupting the pure Russian spirit and language. Shentalinskii re­ ports typical responses to his publication of Babel’s NKVD dossier that identified Babel’ as a Russophobe because he had been suspiciously close to Ezhov and had always been a Jewish intellectual, or that accused Shen­ talinskii of fanning anti-Semitism because Babel’ had “betrayed” friends and colleagues under interrogation (Shentalinskii, 300). 80. Rasskazy (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1936). This volume, however, did not suffer the wholesale cuts in the Red Cavalry cycle recommended for the 1935 edition (see directions for expurgations, dated April 1935, in TsGALI f. 613, op. 1, ed. khr. 5446). 81. Isaak Babel’, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Terra, 1996).

204

Alice Nakhimovsky

Death and Disillusion: Il’ia Il’f in the 1930s Жить на такой планете—только терять время

Living on a planet like this is nothing but a waste of time

—Il’ia Il’f, 1937 notebook

THE PRESSURES of the Stalinist thirties bore down on different writers in different ways. For Il’ia Il’f, the decade opened in a kind of guarded hopefulness, and ended in isolation and lost illusions. Strictly speaking, the decade came to an end without him: he died in April 1937 of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-nine. Il’f’s natural reticence, com­ bined with the need to hint and conceal, meant that little of what he knew would be stated outright. But his “final notebook”—a combination of writer’s sketchbook and personal diary that has yet to be published in full— leaves no doubt about his mood and the direction of his thought. IL’F IN THE EARLY THIRTIES: LUCK AND AMBIGUITY

Il’f began the thirties as half of a young and very famous pair. His partner­ ship with Evgenii Petrov (1903-41) had begun serendipitously in 1927 when the two Odessans were working at one of Moscow’s numerous comic papers. Their very first collaboration was Dvenadtsat’ stul’ev (The Twelve Chairs), a biting satire that would retain its relevance over the entire course of Soviet history. That this satire and its sequel, Zolotoi telenok (The Little Golden Calf), reached their readers during the authors’ lifetimes consti­ tutes a minor miracle of Soviet literature. Or perhaps not: for as the publi­ cation history shows, the wall of censorship was not yet impenetrable. But if The Twelve Chairs skirted by the censors, it was troublesome enough to be ignored by critics. The book found an audience on its own, enchanting a wide range of readers including Mandelshtam1 and the hyper­ critical Nabokov, who happened on it in emigration and declared himself enchanted.2 Obviously enough, neither the politically dubious Mandel­ shtam nor the political émigré Nabokov could have made the novel into a 205

Alice Nakhimovsky

Il’ia Il’f (photo courtesy of Aleksandra Il’f)

Soviet classic. The reader who counted was Bukharin, in 1928 still a member of the politburo. In a speech he gave that December, reprinted in Pravda the following day, Bukharin mentioned that he had read the book. He de­ clared that it raised the right kind of questions, and even quoted from it? This speech may well have provided the necessary imprimatur? The spring of 1929 saw a series of reviews in major journals, and within two years—by which time the novel’s champion had been ousted from the politburo—The Twelve Chairs was in its fifth edition. The Twelve Chairs was followed by a large number of comic stories, including a novella and two cycles of short satires. The longer the work, the 206

Death and Disillusion

more problematic: after their fleeting appearances in magazines, the novella would be withheld from the public until 1961; the satiric cycles until 1961 and 1989, respectively. Given this background, it is not surprising to find trou­ ble with the publication of The Little Golden Calf. From January to July of 1931, installments of The Little Golden Calf came out in the journal Thirty Days. The publication owed a great deal to the daring of the journals editor, a man who, according to the novelist and memoirist Konstantin Paustovskii, once entered a lions cage as a circus stunt.5 Still, nearly two years passed before the actual book appeared, to be­ come a “mindboggling”6 popular success. Exactly why the ban was lifted is hard to explain. A window of oppor­ tunity opened in April 1932, through a decree abolishing literary groups. The decree, liberal in its intent, disarmed the most militant enemies of cre­ ative freedom who had been operating through a powerful literary group called RAPP. Il’f and Petrov benefited immediately, becoming essayists first for Literatumaia gazeta and then for Pravda. But their novel contin­ ued to languish. A look at the date of one surviving rejection letter shows that in No­ vember 1932, publication of The Little Golden Calf seemed as remote as ever. The Russian scholar Iakov Lur’e, whose important monograph on Il’f and Petrov came out in France, pseudonymously, in 1983, uncovered an in­ ternational dimension to the book’s appearance.7 Seizing on the Soviet de­ lay, Il’f’s and Petrov’s American publishers had been advertising the book as unprintable in its home country. Il’f and Petrov appeared in print with a short note declaring themselves outraged (September 1932) and six months later, a Soviet edition proved their point. In late 1935, at a time when a renewal of literary control had alto­ gether stifled their satiric voice, opportunity came once again from the United States. Il’f and Petrov journeyed to New York, beginning a two-month trip that would take them cross country and back in their own American car. The experience resulted in their final major collaboration, the travelogue Single-Story America. As with the novels, the book’s combination of ortho­ doxy and daring turned it into an accessible but—if read in the right way— ultimately subversive “cult classic.”8 All three books were read for decades. The possibility of a pro-Soviet interpretation permitted reprinting, as it had permitted the initial publica­ tions. The fact that the authors died before they fell afoul of the authorities (a rumored possibility, particularly in the case of Il’f) made editors’ tasks that much easier. At the other end of the political spectrum, the widely available and well-known books became a source of satiric one-liners, used by the generation of the sixties as “Aesopic” commentaries on contemporary life.9 Since ambiguity played such a central role in the history of the Il’fPetrov novels, and since, for the purposes of this chapter, the possibility of

Alice Nakhimovsky

Il’f (left) with American guides, 1935 (photo courtesy of Aleksandra Il’f)

a pro-Soviet reading constitutes a baseline from which Il’f would eventually depart, it is worth recalling just how the books are ambiguous. Both novels use the device of a rogue hero, Ostap Bender, who cuts a swath through a variety of Soviet institutions in their formative years (late NEP to early First Five-Year Plan). He himself is the ultimate anti-Soviet, a dreamer of West­ ern dreams (“what I want ... is a well-ordered country with long-standing capitalist traditions”)10 whose opposition to progressive humanity is cheer­ fully principled (“they want to build socialism and I don’t”).11 The problem, as the early critics all realized, is that Ostap is far from a negative figure. He is gifted, insightful, and possessed of a devastating humor; contrary to every­ one around him he is aware of the cultural past and speaks with the authors’ complex voice. In The Little Golden Calf he is, in addition, touched by compassion and sadness. No wonder that his defeat at the end of that novel struck a certain kind of reader as tragic. For ironically minded readers, the portraits of Soviet bureaucrats constituted another swipe at the system. The stalwarts of the Soviet state are, for the most part, complete idiots whose acquisitive inclinations match Ostap’s own. As Lur’e noted, a Soviet Union run by characters like these is rotten at the core.12 But the cynicism that runs through the book is not unanswered. Il’f and Petrov also strain to make the opposite point: that the problems in constructing a socialist society are traceable to its materialist, grasping citizenry. It follows that if socialism can transform human nature, the promised Soviet future will be realized. 208

Death and Disillusion While readers could brush off this kind of interpretation as so much necessary smokescreen, both novels present what can be read as an asser­ tion that people with true socialist values will triumph.13 In The Twelve Chairs, the paragon of socialist virtue is an old worker who appears at the very end of the book. The chance discoverer of the very diamonds Ostap had sought for himself, the old man has passed them directly to his work­ ers’ club. The situation in The Little Golden Calf is more complex. In this later novel, the bearers of socialist values come, pointedly, from the rising generation: they are a group of idealistic students who individually and col­ lectively humiliate Ostap. These students are free of the vices that plague the transitional generation; the world they are creating will be pure, just (and boring) in their image. It is possible, of course, to disregard the brief appearance of the old worker and dismiss the equally episodic students; in the case of the latter, the text allows the reader to despise them. But whether convincing or not, whether a result of expediency or belief, both books as­ sume the speedy arrival of a new social order. IL’F IN THE EARLY THIRTIES: A STRATEGY FOR COPING

The Little Golden Calf appeared during years that were difficult for satire of any variety. By the end of 1929, the Soviet Union had launched its “great breakthrough.” Newspaper headlines deified Stalin and demonized politi­ cal rivals. Industrialization and collectivization promised total transforma­ tion in record time. Enemies were uncovered in economic life (“wreckers”), in the countryside (kulaks), and, hitting closer to home, in literature. Of the writers close to Il’f and Petrov, some, like Bulgakov, were on the receiving end of the poison, while others (Bagritskii, Kol’tsov, Petrovs brother Kataev) signed accusatory proclamations. Literature itself was being pushed in directions inimicable to satire. As Il’f and Petrov worked on the second novel, they undoubtedly read in Literatumaia gazeta that writers must set as their goal “the decisive strug­ gle against bourgeois literature and its Soviet infiltrates.”14 Some issues later, literature itself had been declared irrelevant:

The writer is leaving his study for the plant, the factory, the collective farm. The writer ceases to be a chronicler of events, an observer, a commentator— he turns into an active participant in socialist construction. . . . The essence of this new stage of literary movement is that it has become a MASS move­ ment, that literature has ceased to be the province of individual writers, pro­ fessional writers.15

Under the circumstances, The Little Golden Calf was a gamble. The fol­ lowing rejection letter conveying the decision of GLAVLIT (the censorship office) could hardly have come as a surprise: 209

Alice Nakhimovsky

Dear Comrades Il’f and Petrov, Excuse me for taking such a godawful long time with your manuscript. But the last few months, the absence of Auerbakh and Kirshon have left me extraordinarily busy. That your novel is witty and talented you know yourselves. But your satire is nonetheless superficial. And the things you are poking fun at are charac­ teristic for the most part of our formative period. The adventures of Ostap in the form and content you give them are hardly imaginable now. And the petty bourgeoisie is more threatening than may seem at first glance. From this point of view your novel is passé. Another drawback is that the most at­ tractive person in the novel is Ostap Bender. And he’s a son of a bitch. Nat­ urally, for all these reasons GLAVLIT will not agree to pubheation of the book. Fadeev 19/11-3216 Il’f’s response to this letter has not been preserved. Nor has his re­ sponse to political matters outside of the literary world: we can only specu­ late that some were passed over through trust and a kind of complacent ignorance,17 while others, more ripe for Il’f’s brand of nasty satire, invoked a protective silence. We can be on much firmer ground in reconstructing the authors’ code of conduct in the early thirties. The Il’f and Petrov strat­ egy seems to have had three parts: Do not sign denunciations; write fluff as long as it does not exceed certain limits; write reformist-minded satire whenever possible. All three principles require some comment. The history of Il’f’s (and as long as Il’f was alive, also Petrov’s) non­ participation in compromised activities has been detailed by Lur’e.18 A par­ ticularly striking case, because we can trace in it the beginnings of compromise followed by withdrawal, is their relation to the Belomor Canal trip and the book that resulted from it. The Belomor (Baltic-White Sea) Canal was the first massive construction project undertaken in the GULAG. In 1933, Maxim Gorky organized an excursion there, similar—except in its GULAG connections—to numerous trips intended to bring literature to industrial sites. One hundred and twenty writers went along, among them Il’f and Petrov. In December of that year, a smaller group (“the first literary kolkhoz of the USSR”)19 produced one of the century’s most notorious propaganda pieces, a book extolling the virtues of forced labor. While they were on the trip, Il’f and Petrov signed a congratulatory telegram which they of course did not compose, but whose content still makes unpleasant reading:

The ship “Anokhin,” carrying over 100 Soviet writers and leaders of the con­ struction along the Belomor-Baltic waterway has reached the White Sea. A great path has been traveled, created from the idea of our leader Com­ rade Stalin through the omniponent energy, will, and enthusiasm of the Party which is transforming nature and people, erecting gigantic projects, making 210

Death and Disillusion rivers flow in new courses, making dams to hold back the rush of water, dig­ ging canals through granite. We have seen people, reeducated by Bolshevik-Chekists for a working life. All this inspires and enhances our creative energy. Books must appear, wor­ thy of such a project.20 Apparently it was possible, no one knows how, for writers who were on the trip to withdraw from the final project. Along with fourteen other writers, whose names appear on the telegram but not in the book, Il’f and Petrov demurred. Their only other public pronouncement came in another group display of authorial enthusiasm in the newspaper Komsomolskaia pravda. We can assume that this declaration was also produced under duress, but it bears the hallmarks of Il’f and Petrovian style and is, under the circumstances, a model of restraint and hidden irony. The writers begin their statement by linking their Belomor trip to the problem of what to do with Ostap Bender: should he remain a “half-bandit” or undergo reform, and if he were to turn into a useful citizen, would anyone believe it? They continue:

And while we were discussing this question, it seemed that our novel had al­ ready been written, polished, and published. This happened at the Belomor Canal. We saw our hero and many other people, far more dangerous in the past than he had been. And after only a year and a half constructing the great canal, they had com­ pleted a journey of the sort an author would never risk as the beginning of a story, without a preparatory explanation: “Twenty years had passed. The school of hard knocks had tempered Ivan Petrovich” and so on and so forth. The talented and brave authors of the canal are breaking the traditional slave-like reproduction of life, they are recreating life anew.21 That Ostap would have ended his career in the Gulag is entirely believable, and this suggestion does indeed obviate the need for a third novel. But Il’f and Petrov are suggesting something more—if the “authors” of the canal are the new writers, then they themselves, creators of literature that mir­ rors life, are just as outmoded as Ostap. Indeed, the pair produced no new novel, though they did continue to write. Their “fluff”—minor pieces produced from the beginning of their partnership until the America trip—comprises a mixture of satire with So­ viet platitudes. The “reformist-minded” satire appears in waves, most no­ tably in 1928 to 1929 and in the few years following the decree of April 1932 that abolished literaiy groups. Il’f and Petrov also produced a fair number of journalistic pieces and screenplays showing Soviet ideals mani­ fested in everyday life. These pieces appear throughout the thirties, peak­ ing in the period just before the America trip, at a time when their satiric voice diminishes altogether. 211

Alice Nakhimovsky

The satirical stories of 1928 to 1929 have two broad targets: holdovers of bourgeois thinking on the one hand, and on the other, excesses of Soviet ideological zeal. Both sides appear in the premise of 1001 Days, or the New Scheherezade (1928).22 The heroine of this series, a Soviet Scheherezade, is faced with a purge at work. A clever storyteller, she avoids being fired by distracting her purge committee with captivating tales about corruption on the job. Like the Scheherezade stories, a number of the eleven “Extraordi­ nary Stories from the Life of the Town of Kolokolamsk”23 show the Soviet imagination intent on moneymaking. But ideology is also targeted: the cycle includes a reworked version of the biblical story of Esau, in which the coveted birthright designates a “pure-blooded proletarian.” A similar antiideological theme pervades a short piece that Il’f wrote on his own, and published— unbelievably—in 1930. Called “The Return of the Prodigal Son,”24 it casts itself as autobiography (and in some psychological sense, probably was). The narrator of the story gets fired from his job because he is a rabbi’s son. As the story progresses, the rabbi’s Soviet son discovers that despite all the slo­ gans that he hears around him, the truth is that he loves his father. This is a dilemma with immense implications. In the story, Il’f takes an easy way out— his narrator discovers that it has all been a bad dream. Perhaps Il’f hoped that political realities would reverse course just as easily. Or perhaps not, for the dream in the story is said to be “recurring.” Following the liberalizing directive of April 1932, the pair were taken on as essayists first for Literatumaia gazeta and then for Pravda. For a short time, they satirized excesses of cultural control:

бойтесь, дети, гуманизма бойтесь, ячества, друзья формализма, схематизма опасайтесь как огня^°

fear the dreaded humanism egotism too formalism, schematism keep them far from you In some of these essays, the consequences of ideological interference are related in surprisingly nasty detail. Thus, in “An Ideological Fine,”26 Il’f and Petrov propose a solution to the problem of having to renounce one’s own work: they write out a formula for publisher and author making it easy for both parties to confess their mistakes and renounce their publications in advance. In “How Robinson Was Made,”27 an attempt at writing a Soviet Robinson Crusoe is so overburdened by political corrections that poor Rob­ inson swims to his island in the company of uncountable administrators and a safe for Party cards.

212

Death and Disillusion

In addition to criticisms of the literary world, Il’f and Petrov used their short-lived freedom to turn out satires of social and economic (though never political) relations. Their descriptions of life on the streets occasion­ ally touched nerves, depending on whether the behavior being satirized was understood as—to use the terminology of the day—a “typical exception,” and hence innocuous, or as a “typical example” that implicated the entire system. Without touching the question of authorial intent, we can say that the satires were powerful because their subjects were so recognizable. The story “Kloop,”28 whose publication in Pravda apparently angered Stalin,29 is a case in point. While nobody who works for the mysteriously named “Kloop” can say just what the enterprise produces, the staff members know exactly what they are doing there. In a picture of the socialist workplace that would be recognizable a half-century later, Il’f and Petrov show the Kloop staff rac­ ing up and down staircases, lining up now for cheese and now for sweaters. There is no need to assume that at the time these stories were writ­ ten Il’f and Petrov saw problems of motivation or Party control as endemic to socialism. From the perspective of these stories, the failings of socialism, particularly in economic life, are the moral failings of individual citizens. We are back to the old Russian vice of philistinism, that excessive concern with material life disdained by the prerevolutionary intelligentsia. In the nineteenth century, philistines spoil life for themselves; here they impede the construction of a just world. The obverse of stories like “Kloop” and “Robinson” are fictions in which philistine holdouts are replaced by positive socialist heroes. Positive heroes have, as we saw earlier, a passing role in the Ostap novels. They are given much more weight in journalism and in film scenarios that Il’f and Petrov wrote both before and after 1932. The film “The Barracks”30 (sce­ nario written in 1931, produced 1933) takes up the transformation of the human soul through socialist labor. In the course of the film, a brigade of slackers is taught to work by a shock worker-hero who courageously pene­ trates into their midst. “The Rich Bride,”31 written in 1935 but not approved for production, is another satire of materialist impulses. Here, however, the moral villains are spoilers in a world—the world of the collective farm— that is in other respects close to utopian. What were the complex satirists of the Ostap novels doing writing comedies like these? Certainly expediency was a part of it: they wanted and needed to publish. But given their principled stand in more important mat­ ters, we must also assume a certain comfort level with the ideas expressed. Both Petrov, and at this point, Il’f, probably believed in a Soviet fu­ ture as an attainable goal. The writers could have pointed to positive signs as well as threatening ones. Both novels had, despite difficulties, been pub­ lished. They themselves had appeared as satirists and might well do so

213

Alice Nakhimovsky

again. No serious repercussions had resulted from the publication of “Kloop,” or from their withdrawal from the Belomor project, or from their failure to sign collective denunciations. On the contrary, in the years from 1933 to 1935, one of their collections (How Robinson Was Made)32 went through three separate editions, and there were six additional collections of essays and stories. And they had the privilege of travel: a trip to Europe and Greece in 1933 to 1934 and then, in 1935, to the United States. But if a decision to “wait it out” was in fact taken, the waiting must have proved hard. By 1934, Il’f and Petrov were finding it difficult to pub­ lish even the most affirmative of comedies. The scenario for “The Rich Bride” was not approved by censors. The screenplay for another film, Cir­ cus,33 would achieve genuine, iconographie success—but it was so changed in production that Il’f, Petrov, and coauthor Valentin Kataev had their names removed from the credits. Circus would prove their last really inventive piece—in the end, they simply stopped writing antic fiction. Il’f and Petrov continued to appear in Pravda, but in an unusual way. No longer satirists, but still moralists, they uncovered minor examples of injustice and recorded the ways in which these cases were happily resolved. The replacement of satire by affirmation was not, however, complete. One escape from the situation was the trip to America. In America, the scale of the permissible was reversed: While praising what they saw was problematic, the Soviet travelers had the freedom to criticize whatever they wished. Another escape from public affirmation, this time Il’f’s alone, was his final notebook. IL’F IN 1935: THE AMERICA TRIP AS WATERSHED

Crossing the Atlantic to the heart of the capitalist West would prove a watershed for both writers, but particularly for Il’f. Observing America, he con­ tinued to formulate a Soviet future; returning—to judge from his notebooks— his cynicism was total. He arrived in America a man of thirty-eight, with plans for the future; he returned to face his inevitable death from tuberculosis. Of all the American impressions that Il’f and Petrov brought to their readers, the one that is hardest to avoid is the sense of widely accessible ma­ terial wealth, despite the Depression. In Il’f’s and Petrov’s America, two Pravda correspondents, operating on what they often remind us is a limited budget, travel long distances, stay in hotels, eat steak, and drink exotic juices. Their account of buying a car takes up five ecstatic pages, full of de­ tail that is far more admiring than ironic. Similar in tone, and in its negative effect on contemporary critics, is their account of American “service” (they use the English word), as in this brief excerpt from their description of a stop at a gas station: 214

Death and Disillusion

So, everything is under control and it would seem that there is nothing left to do. But now the service-coddled traveler gets the idea that perhaps the right front door isn’t closing firmly. With a well-meaning smile, the gentle­ man in the striped uniform extracts some tools from his back pocket—and two minutes later the door is working. In addition to all this, the traveler receives a first-rate map of the state, published by one of the companies that sell gas on the road. These maps are all superbly printed on excellent paper, are very easy to read and give ab­ solutely precise and up-to-date information. It is inconceivable that you could be given a map showing the roads as they were last year.34 The account of the gas station concludes with a paragraph making it clear that the services described are not the privilege of any kind of elite. In America, everyone is on the road, the sheer number of travelers giving new meaning to the catch phrase from The Little Golden Calf, “the automobile is not a luxury but a means of transportation.”35 In the novel, Ostap, pre­ tending to be a Soviet official, coins the famous phrase as the harbinger of a Communist future. Il’f and Petrov lived to see the phrase embodied in real life—but in the wrong country. Faced with this “golden” America, and finding it more populist than they had imagined, how did the authors reconcile their discovery with the sensibilities of Pravda correspondents? The most simplistic solution is what might be termed the “inserted admonition.” Readers are warned to restrain their admiration—the houses and vacuum cleaners that Americans think they own have been bought on credit: “Oh, what a dreadful life millions of Americans lead as they struggle for their crumb of electrical happiness.”36 More in harmony with the text is the conviction that American capi­ talism, with its material achievements and its appearance of rapid move­ ment (“All America is racing somewhere, and it seems that there will be no end to it”)37 is nonetheless in a historical dead end. Russian émigrés whom the authors find adrift in America—a Jew from Bendery, presently of Cleve­ land, a Russian ferry boat captain in San Francisco, late of Vladivostok—are shown to have made the wrong historical choices.38 The reasoning is char­ acteristically theoretical: Capitalism is judged by its present and socialism by its future. The authors quote with approval a comment of the journalist Walter Duranty: “In your country everything has been clarified. But in our country things have become uncertain. And nobody knows yet what will happen.”39 In a similar vein, they contrast a criticism of the tastelessness of American food with “Mikoian’s speech about how food in a socialist coun­ try should be delicious and bring people happiness.”40 That this line of thinking is not an artificial insert is bolstered by a comment in the diary Il’f kept during the journey. Reporting enthusiasti­ cally on the modernity of a town in the middle of the desert, he reminds himself of the stupidity of the American way of life. The Soviet future 215

Alice Nakhimovsky

can embrace the former while bypassing the latter: “But we can avoid all of that.”41 In the meantime, there is no lack of material for satire. Among the most glaring offenses on the American scene is the preeminence of adver­ tisements, whose repetitive mindlessness served, they surmise, as an effec­ tive substitute for independent thinking. Il’f especially appears to have been fascinated with advertisements. An amateur photographer, he re­ turned home with a series of billboard images: close-ups of ads for Wrigley’s Spearmint gum (“Flavor lasts!”), Camels (“Healthy nerves!”) and Shell Lu­ brication (“Gets out the squeaks!”).42 The American tolerance for adver­ tisement confirms the writers’ perception of Americans as passive (unlike Soviet citizens, they do not complain)43 and, more generally, as childish. It is childishness that Il’f and Petrov see as the core of the American character—related, perhaps, to such attractive national features as kindness and generosity but responsible for a lot of bad judgment. Childishness explains the American failure to see through the illusory nature of reli­ gion and democracy. It explains the American cult of cheerfulness in social discourse: [grinning]. How’s business? second American [laughs], Very bad. Very bad [in English], How about you? FIRST [chortles], Dreadful! I just got fired. second [doubled over with laughter]. Hows your wife? FIRST. She came down with a rather serious illness. [Tries to make a serious face, but his good-humored, life-affirming laughter wins out. ] Yesterday . . . hahaha. . . . Yesterday. . . . No, I can’t. . . . Yesterday, the doctor came.44 first American

Finally, it explains the American misdirection of technology. Fresh from the construction frenzy of the First Five-Year Plan, the travelers visit the Gen­ eral Electric plant in Schenectady. There they see a model all-electric house, but don’t approve. While the inventiveness behind it is marvelous, the house lacks social value: electricity trivialized in the service of domestic life. Even when engineers (or artists) are working for the people, American so­ ciety fails to honor them. The glory that should be theirs (and in the Soviet Union, would be) accrues to the company for which they work. Of all the problems that Il’f and Petrov perceive in American life, the most trenchant is the poverty of American culture. Taking for granted the connection between high culture and a nation’s spiritual fife, they look at America and find emptiness. At concerts, the bourgeoisie sleeps or shows off; great artists either pander to this public or are ignored by it. American culture is the culture of Hollywood, with its banal, demeaning, and “idiotic” movies. Il’f and Petrov do not fault the writers and directors they meet, whose political and social views were not far from their own. In the view of 216

Death and Disillusion

these men, and of Il’f and Petrov, the cause is the studio owners, capitalists with enormous power and no cultural standards. If the Hollywood film represents the low point of American life,45 it is offset by one intangible but redeeming feature. This is Americas compara­ tive lack of bureaucracy, what authors call its “democratism.” To Il’f and Petrov, who had criticized when they could the opposite phenomenon in the Soviet Union, the discovery was notable. While the paragraphs devoted to this “democratic” theme include the expected qualifications and protes­ tations of Soviet loyalty, the message is serious. Soviets should acquire not only American industrial technology but also this particular democratic quality of social behavior, which “enhances human dignity.”46 The compar­ ative sting of a passage like the following would have been clear to everyone:

The American businessman has time for a business discussion. The American sits in his office in his shirtsleeves and works. He works quietly and modestly, without fuss. He is never late and isn’t racing off anywhere. He has only one telephone. Nobody cools his heels in his waiting room, because the appoint­ ment begins precisely on time and not a minute is wasted on conversation.47 The paragraphs about “democratism” constitute Il’f’s and Petrov’s fi­ nal serious comment on American life. The observations are set in the book’s penultimate chapter, followed only by the lighthearted story of their departure. For Il’f in particular the issue was important; we shall see it—in the company of numerous other details of the America trip—recur in his fi­ nal notebook. LOST ILLUSIONS: IL’F’S NOTEBOOKS OF 1936 TO 1937

Somewhere in the American southwest, Il’ia Il’f understood that he was dying. The realization is recorded in a single sentence in his American diary— “Sunset, sunset. The cactuses are standing, but life, it seems, is over”48— followed without pause by a return to Il’f the observer: “remember to de­ scribe a grocery store.”49 The only other reference to his health on the America trip comes in an entry from New Year’s, 1936, when he remembers his family and wishes himself courage. The final notebook includes a few sparse and poignant notations about his approaching end, along with some introspective comments about his loneliness and his ethical place in the world. To what extent Il’f’s awareness of his coming death influenced his per­ ception of the Soviet future we can never know. Certainly he was far from resembling the dying Lincoln Steffens, who appears on the pages of Single­ Story America, “dreaming about the future and making plans.”50 With one possible exception—a sketch for a future novel that develops over several 217

Alice Nakhimovsky

paragraphs—Il’f made no plans. He simply observed, without illusions (“an­ other lost illusion,” begins one entiy)51 and without hope. Moving from the novels and Single-Story America to the late note­ book, the most striking change is Il’f’s abandonment of any pretense of belief in social progress. As we have seen earlier, all of the Il’f-Petrov satires are predicated on the notion—explicit or implied—of the transformation of humankind under socialism. Readers of The Little Golden Calf will re­ member the novel’s final section, set in 1930, when history marches forward and the retrograde Ostap is left behind. But when Il’f thinks about Ostap in his final notebook, his point is precisely the opposite. Seven years later, Ostap has not been vanquished in the least: “Even now Ostap could travel across the whole country, giving gramophone concerts. And he would live well, he’d have a wife and a mistress.”52 The rest of the entiy reads like an idea for a third novel, except that the force that will defeat Ostap on this oc­ casion is no longer socialism in action, but simply (or maybe metaphorically) a fire. It is not Ostap who has been cast aside, but the socialist timetable. Il’f’s somewhat cryptic judgment on that matter—“It would be interesting to see if the garden lasted and while we’re at it, if the city itself is still stand­ ing”53—is decipherable as a sardonic reference to a Mayakovsky verse cele­ brating the First Five-Year Plan: через четыре года здесь

будет город-сад54

In four years here will be a garden-city

The Mayakovsky verse celebrates construction that is lightening-swift, uto­ pian, and permanent. Il’f’s response assumes a transformation in reverse: not a lack of forward movement but quite simply disintegration. In a dif­ ferent entry, he acknowledges historical progress, but questions the pace: “The only thing that comforted him was the thought that forty million years ago everybody was like this.”55 The historical record shows little improve­ ment in human behavior and that over an astronomically long time. For someone who expected a new way of life to materialize in a few years, this is small comfort. Instead of progress, what Il’f sees as he looks around is dirt, disorder, and rudeness. The contrast is not only with what socialist Russia should by now have become, but also with his memories of America. In entries like the following, one of two discourses on the state of Russian roads, the American contrast is unmistakable: 218

Death and Disillusion

Late in the evening I’m driving to Kraskovo. There’s not a single sign on the road indicating where it’s leading. Cars are riding without brake lights. Some of them have their headlights dimmed. A truck is stuck in the middle of the road with no flares to mark it. Bicyclists as a rule ride without lights. Pedes­ trians stroll nonchalantly in the road. A harmonica is playing. In general, as the French say, you’re riding right into an open grave.56

In place of “service,” another American theme, Il’f records rudeness: “In a first-class café, the waiter responds to a request for mineral water: ‘You’ll wait.’”57 When people are polite, there’s nothing for sale,58 a situation he records in different manifestations over and over: “Despair, despair for­ ever!”59 Or else there is food for sale, but it is repulsive: In one entry, a piece of salted shark meat that no one will touch, in another, some meat so cov­ ered with flies that it seems as though the flies are for sale and not the meat.60 Given the context, it is instructive that among the handful of refer­ ences to America in the notebook is the following: For many miles beyond New York you won’t see a single udder. But all night long, silver cylinders of milk fly towards the city. On their nautical sides are green and red lights. They speed ahead at fifty miles an hour. They are car­ rying the best milk in the world to seven million people.61 If American orderliness remains bright in Il’f’s memory, what about American bourgeois emptiness? Il’f’s disdain for American popular culture remains in force: It is in the notebook, indeed, that he recalls “American movies as a splendid school of prostitution.”62 Missing from the notebook, however, is the expected contrast with Soviet culture. Soviet movies in the notebook are described in the same terms as American ones—as banal trash. More pointed yet is an extended sequence, apparently a sketch for a story or novel, in which Il’f goes so far as to transport a group of Soviets to Hollywood. Taking part in the filming of Mutiny on the Bounty, a movie Il’f particularly disliked, one of their number has the misfortune to drown. The remainder drink themselves insensate on the insurance proceeds, winding up knee-deep in the Pacific. About to go under (“the magnificent sunset lit up their radiantly drunken mugs”)63 they are saved by the Molokans, a colony of émigré sectarians last seen in Single-Story America. Il’f’s heroes then resume their travels, keeping the ashes of their drowned comrade al­ ways with them “in a small plastic urn.”64 The fictional participants in the Hollywood expedition differ only in degree from their real counterparts, whom Il’f observes at a variety of writ­ ers’ retreats. He records these architects of Soviet culture immersed in the life of the body. Entirely without self-consciousness, they accord their phys­ ical satisfactions the kind of respect one might expect a group of Russian in­ tellectuals to direct elsewhere: 219

Alice Nakhimovsky

Ostaf’evo. Finally it came to pass. She appeared at dinner even plainer and more pitiful than usual, but devilishly happy. He, on the contrary, took his seat with the look of a man who has done his duty. Everybody knew this, and a respectful hubbub filled the light space of the dining hall. At the height of the meal, when everyone was eating fried duck, Shkapki appeared. His bar­ tender’s mug was gleaming. Apparently he had just downed an entire de­ canter. A rest-home idyll.65 Matching the writers’ physical appetites is their careerism, recounted in a series of anecdotes in which the major players are Soviet writers, or in one case, Soviet artists. But to a reader of the notebook, their scheming makes perfect sense. Il’f has described a world that is dominated by rank. In the entry below—one of many in which hierarchy is a motif—Grisha is Grigorii Aleksandrov, the film director with whom Il’f clashed in the mak­ ing of Circus:

In the valley of Baidarskie Gates. How the town was built. Drinking water was hauled in on airplanes and doled out to the movie directors at the rate of a cup a day. But in Grishka’s tent stood a whole barrel of it. This so disturbed the directors, they were so envious, that they were unable to work any more and died in droves from thirst and sunstroke. The valley of talent was stuffed with corpses.66

The bitterness here and elsewhere is probably rooted in the disparity be­ tween Soviet reality and the Soviet ideal. But it also has an American echo: Though the link here is not explicit, the contrast between the Soviet insis­ tence on hierarchy and the “democratism” section that concludes Single­ Story America is unavoidable. Along with a preoccupation with physical pleasures and status comes out the writers’ undisguised material consumerism. Il’f’s generation of suc­ cessful writers is overwhelmed by things: “A gramophone and twenty-five records. To own an orange ski suit and plastic teacups, what more could you want? A gramophone and twenty-five records.”67 The repetition of the “gramophone” sentence (cut by the editor of the 1967 edition) suggests that the point is circularity: A ball in the age of prosperity. Everybody has money, everybody has apart­ ments, everybody has wives. Everybody gets together and has fun. Gin is not drunk. Either the rectangular bottle is unsettling, or novelties in general are not appreciated. At one o’clock people sit down to eat. Towards morning they leave. An overloaded coat rack comes off the wall, along with a nail. The next time everything happens the exact same way. Gin (not drunk), coat rack (comes off the wall); towards morning everybody leaves.68 Bourgeois entitlement, a Western vice, has infected the Soviet elite and obviated the Soviet ideal. Where there is circularity there can be no

220

Death and Disillusion

forward movement; where the body is paramount there can be no selfless dedication to work. Under such circumstances, literature is not possible— Exhausted from their irregular sexual relations and their abortions, will they be able to write anything?69

—and neither, judging from this comment about a renovation of Pravda’s offices, is journalism:

The building is full of bathtubs and toilets. But I’m not going there to bathe or urinate. I’m going to work. Work, on the other hand, is already an impos­ sibility there.70 Given the Il’f-Petrov understanding of high culture as the indicator of a nation’s spiritual health, for Il’f to write an entry like “Unpleasant, but true. The great country does not have a great literature”71 marks a major loss of belief. A final blow to literature and life is the ominous political situation of 1936 to 1937. References are often indirect but suggestive: “The guard at the morgue used to say: Don’t fear the dead. They won’t do anything to you. Fear the living.”72 In the same way, presuming a political context renders understandable a pair of otherwise irrelevant entries about prerevolution­ ary trials. The first refers to an acquittal. So uncharacteristically flat that it reads like something copied from an old newspaper, its only possible point is the contrast between then and now: “The gentlemen of the jury declared the accused innocent. After the innocence of the accused was declared, he was immediately released from custody. The gentlemen of the jury declared both of the accused innocent.”73 The other comment is just a fragment of a sentence: “The trials of the defenders of Port Arthur.”74 Why would Il’f have included this reference in his final notebook? It is worth recalling that the Russian generals who lost Port Arthur were not put on trial: a pointed con­ trast with the state of affairs in 1937.75 Observing the intrusion of politics into culture, Il’f was considerably less elliptic. Pointed comments about capitulation, about the arbitrariness of attacks and the stultification of language appear at intervals throughout the notebook. Since Lur’e has discussed these comments extensively, there is no need to do more than reiterate a few examples here. Thus, Il’f’s final word on the subordination of literature to industrial life:

It was in that happy time, when the poet Sel’vinskii, seeking the closest pos­ sible integration with the industrial proletariat, had taken up autogenous welding. Aduev also went to weld something. Nothing proved weldable. Good night, as Alexander Blok used to say, meaning that the conversation was over.76

221

Alice Nakhimovsky

On pressure, he wrote: “We will consider your creative method in the people’s court,” said Fartuchnyi.77 On the herd mentality of the creative intelligentsia: Composers had long since stopped working; they were busy composing de­ nunciations of one another on music paper.78

And the frightening meaninglessness of the whole cycle:

Every journal is condemning Zharov. The first ten years they sang his praises, now for the next ten years he’ll get condemned. How dreary and depressing to live among unmuzzled idiots.79 Il’f in 1937 was a lonely man. Loneliness had troubled him in Amer­ ica: “In the valley of the Colorado River. In the distant, strange and terrify­ ing valley of the Colorado River. Whatever made me end up here?”80 And it remained a factor even when he had returned to the bosom of his family. In part, this was the isolation of a dying man: “No letters come for me, no telegrams come for me, no visitors come by to see me. The last human be­ ing on earth.”81 But it was also an isolation of behavior and style. After the funeral of the poet (and fellow Odessan) Eduard Bagritskii, Il’f records his inability to attain the expected state of public exaltation: an absence, pre­ sumably, of Russian soul. His Jewishness distanced him as well. Two entries on the subject emphasize the separateness of Jews from the Russian cultural center, while a third—oddly, for a Soviet atheist—uses a rabbi as a spokes­ man for Il’f’s ideas about moral probity: “You have to deny yourself. . . you can’t live that well, said the old rebbe.”82 The last thing that Il’f and Petrov collaborated on was a stoiy called “Tonia.” Long hailed by Soviet critics as a promising new direction for the writers, the story, which shows no irony and only a little humor, unfolds along accepted ideological contours. It constitutes a kind of rewrite of SingleStory America, in which the traveler, a Soviet factory girl who follows her diplomat husband to Washington, finds herself in an inhospitable world. The character Tonia makes one appearance in Il’f’s notebook, where she is lonely because she is not going dancing and not bothering to study English. In the story, by contrast, her sufferings are attributed to the exploitative and static (compare: “All America is rushing somewhere”) nature of American society. Given this kind of America, Tonia’s longing for the Soviet way of life makes complete sense. Between “Tonia” and Il’f’s final notebook, two works written at the same time, lies a familiar gap between a Soviet writer’s public voice and his private one. In this way, Il’f shared the ethos of his time—which is perhaps what he meant when he wrote in two different places in his notebook: “I am no better than others, and no worse.”83 Il’f judged himself perhaps too 222

Death and Disillusion

harshly, but with the same penetrating eye that he trained on his surround­ ings. As the thirties, and his life, drew to a close, something within him had snapped. He had entered the decade as a writer whose sardonic bent was tempered by a belief in a Soviet future. As his final notebooks show, he ended up without belief and alone.

Notes 1. O. Mandelstam, “Veer gertsogini,” in Sobranie Sochinenii v trekh tomakh, ed. G. P. Struve and V. A. Filipoff (New York: Inter-Language Lit­ erary Associates, 1969), 52-56. 2. Nabokovs comments about Il’f and Petrov are, considering his attitudes toward Soviet literature in general, respectful and even tender. In a letter to Edmund Wilson, he excludes only Pasternak, Olesha, and “IlfPetrov” from the “trash published in Russia during the last 27 years.” (Simon Karlinsky, ed., The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971, New York: Har­ court Brace Jovanovich, 1989). Five years later, he uses the “twelve chairs” metaphor to characterize philistine resentments among a certain class of Russian émigrés. (В. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Tears, Prince­ ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), 85. 3. Pravda, December 2, 1928, 2. 4. The link between the Bukharin speech and the flood of criticism in 1929 was suggested by A. A. Kurdiumov (pseudonym of Iakov Solomon­ ovich Lur’e) in V kraiu nepuganykh idiotov (Paris: La Presse Libre, 1983), 63-64. 5. The editor was Vasily Aleksandrovich Reginin; the stunt took place at the Ciniselli circus in prerevolutionary Petersburg. See Konstantin Paustovskii, Povesf о zhizni v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1966), vol. 2, 114-15. 6. The phrase “golovokruzhaiushchii uspekh” is Paustovskii’s, 532. Further testimony to the book’s success appears in an early review by Kornelii Zelinskii, “Fioletovyi smekh,” Literatumaia gazeta, April 23, 1933, 3. Writing just after the event, Zelinskii describes a scene of frenzy: When the novel appeared in the writers’ bookstores on Tverskaia, the line at the counter was so immediate and so enormous that the cashier barely man­ aged to collect the money. In the space of a few hours, he continues, all eight hundred copies were gone. 7. Kurdiumov, 87. 8. Vail’ and Genis use the term “cult book” to describe Single-Story America at the time of its initial publication (1936) and again in the 1960s. The term applies equally well to the Ostap novels, which as Vail’ and Genis 223

Alice Nakhimovsky

among others have noted, were a “bottomless” source of citations for the ironically minded reader. See P. Vail’ and A. Genis, 60-e: mir sovetskogo cheloveka (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1958), 53. 9. M. Kaganskaia, “Nasledniki Tolstoevskogo ili shestidesiatie gody, “ Vremia i my, vol. 6, 1077, 127-42; it is also taken up in Vail’ and Genis, 131-32. Very recently, the poet Lev Rubinshtein called attention to the same thing: “Among the youth of my generation not to know Il’f and Petrov by heart was a sign of hopeless backwardness. We communicated exclusively through citations” (Rubinshtein, “Dvenadtsaf s pliusom,” Itogi, January 20, 1998, 76). 10. Il’ia Il’f and Evgenii Petrov, Sobranie sochinenii v 5-i tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1961), vol. 2, 31. All translations are mine. 11. Ibid, 30. 12. Kurdiumov, 144-45. 13. Iurii Shcheglov argues that the socialist ideal forms a structurally crucial element in both novels. As an “epic” ideal (never observed from too close) it contrasts to the “everyday prose” of Soviet reality. See Shcheglov, Iu.K., Romany I. Il’fa i E. Petrova: Sputnik chitatelia (Vienna: Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, 1990), vol. 1, 8-9. 14. Literatumaia gazeta, September 23, 1929, 1. 15. Ibid., November 15, 1930, 1. 16. Photocopy in my possession. 17. This point, specifically with regard to collectivization, is made by Mikhail Dolinskii, editor of Il’ia Il’f and E. Petrov, Neobyknovennye istorii iz zhizni goroda Kolokolamska, ed. M. Dolinskii, Moscow: Knizhniaia palata, 1989, 13. 18. Kurdiumov, see especially 199-207 about the years 1936-37. 19. “Kniga о Belomorstroe,” Literatumaia gazeta, December 23, 1933, 4. 20. Ibid. 21. Komsomolskaia pravda, April 24, 1933, quoted in Il’ia Il’f and E. Petrov, Sobranie sochinenii v 5-i tomakh, vol. 5, 544. 22. 1001 den, ili novaia shakherezada, in Il’ia Il’f and E. Petrov, So­ branie sochinenii v. 5-i tomakh, vol. 88, 483-530. 23. “Neobyknovennye istorii iz zhizni goroda Kolokolamska,” in Il’ia Il’f and E. Petrov, Neobyknovennye istorii iz zhizni goroda Kolokolamska, 41-76. 24. “Bludnyi syn vozvrashchaetsia domoi” in Il’ia Il’f and E. Petrov, Neobyknovennye istorii iz zhizni goroda Kolokolamska, 209-11. Readers of The Little Golden Calf will recall a chapter with the same title. In the novel, the Gospel citation is directly reversed: The prodigal son, Adam Kozlevich,

224

Death and Disillusion

returns to the cheerful atheism of Ostap and his crew, who in this one regard represent historical progress. In Il’f’s story, the use of the citation is more radical precisely because the meaning is not reversed: the wandering son returns to his father. Whether Il’f saw any irony in using a Gospel cita­ tion to describe the dilemma of a rabbi’s son is not known, but it is likely that for him the big divide was not between Christian and Jew but between believer and Bolshevik. For further discussion of this story, see my essay “How the Soviets Solved the Jewish Question: The Il’f-Petrov Novels and Il’f’s Jewish Stories” in Symposium (Summer 1999). 25. From “Otdaite emu kursiv,” in Il’ia Il’f and E. Petrov, Sobranie sochinenii v 5-i tomakh, vol. 3, 160. 26. “Ideologicheskaia penia,” ibid., 144-48. 27. “Как sozdavalsia Robinzon,” ibid., 193-97. 28. “Kloop,” ibid., 18-25. 29. This story is told by Lur’e, apparently on a personal communica­ tion from Erlikh, who had brought Il’f and Petrov into Pravda. According to Erlikh, Stalin told Mekhlis, Pravda’s editor, to find out if Il’f and Petrov could be trusted; Erlikh vouched for them in private, but distanced himself from “Kloop” as quickly as he could in print (“Razgrom ravnodushnikh,” Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1933, no. 5, 16). See Kurdiumov, 168. Stalin’s anger could not have been long-lived: The story was reprinted in Как soz­ davalsia Robinzon (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1935). 30. “Barak,” in Il’ia Il’f and E. Petrov, Neobyknovennye istorii iz zhizni goroda Kolokolamska, 316-41. 31. “Bogataia nevesta,” in Il’ia Il’f and E. Petrov, Neobyknovennye istorii iz zhizni goroda Kolokolamska, 283-314. 32. “Как sozdavalsia Robinzon” came out in 1933 in two different edi­ tions (Moldavia gravid and Sovetskaia literatura); in 1935 the publisher was Sovetskii pisatel’. Biblioteka “Ogonek” published the collections Ravnodushie (1933), Sil’noe chuvstvo (1933), Direktivnyi bantik (1934), Bezmiatezhniaia tumba (1935) and Chuvstvo mery (1935). The final collection for those years was Chudesnye gosti’ (Moscow, Biblioteka “Krokodila,” 1935). 33. The title of the original screenplay is “Pod kupolom tsirka,” in Il’ia Il’f and E. Petrov, Sobranie sochinenii v 5-i tomakh, vol. 3, 476-514. 34. Ibid., vol. 4, 93. 35. Il’ia Il’f and E. Petrov, Sobranie sochinenii v 5-i tomakh, vol. 2, 78. 36. Ibid., vol. 4, 95. 37. Ibid., 91. 38. A third émigré who makes a wrong historical choice is a popcorn seller in Schenectady (ibid., 111-13). When pressed to admit his mistake, the man claims that his relatives in Volhynia are worse off than he is. Il’f and

225

Alice Nakhimovsky

Petrov forestall the obvious conclusion that this man’s family has been through collectivization by maintaining that the village is now part of Poland. Was this a veiled criticism of collectivization, or did the authors perhaps relocate the village without thinking that the result would look odd? Nothing else that they wrote indicated any criticism of collectiviza­ tion. It comes up in positive terms in the screenplay “Bogataia nevesta.” A different set of émigrés in Single-Story America, Molokans now settled in San Francisco, note pointedly that letters from relatives on collective farms show them to be very happy. 39. Ibid., 51. 40. Ibid., 39. 41. Il’ia Il’f, “Amerikanskie dnevniki,” in Literatumoe nasledstvo, vol. 78 (Moscow, 1965): 566. 42. Il’f’s American photographs can be seen now on the yellowing pages of Ogonek for 1936, nos. 11-17 and 19-23. The “advertisement” se­ ries is in no. 20, 13-17. 43. For an example of the Soviet determination to complain when things are not right, Il’f and Petrov cite themselves: “We wanted to write to the Soviet desk, and to the Party desk, and to the Central Committee, and to Pravda. But there was no one to complain to. And Americans don’t keep a suggestion book.” (Il’ia Il’f and E. Petrov, Sobranie sochinenii v 5-i tomakh, vol. 4, 40. In repeating this platitude, Il’f and Petrov have conve­ niently forgotten how in The Little Golden Calf Ostap saves the pickpocket Balaganov from an angry crowd by offering to write down witnesses’ names. The crowd disperses immediately. 44. Ibid., 287-88. “Life-affirming laughter” is a Soviet virtue; the American context permits a different interpretation. 45. In a forthcoming essay, “An Obsession with America: On the Il’fPetrov America Trip and Its Strange Aftermath,” I take up the issue of Il’f’s and Petrov s complex relations with Hollywood, including a letter they wrote to Stalin to forestall the construction of a “Soviet Hollywood.” 46. Ibid., 441. 47. Ibid., 440-41. 48. Il’ia Il’f, “Amerikanskie dnevniki,” 566. Outside confirmation of his poor health at the start of the trip comes from the New Yorker reporter who referred to him as “gaunt” (“Soviet Funny Men,” The New Yorker [No­ vember 9, 1935]: 13). 49. “Amerikanskie dnevniki,” 566. 50. Il’ia Il’f and E. Petrov, Sobranie sochinenii v 5-i tomakh, vol. 4, 330. 51. Ibid., vol. 5, 238. When possible, notebook citations will be from the Collected Works. Emendations and additions are from a complete type­ script in my possession. 226

Death and Disillusion

52. Ibid., 217. 53. Typescript in my possession. 54. V. Maiakovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 10 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1958), 131. 55. Il’ia Il’f and E. Petrov, Sobranie sochinenii v 5-i tomakh, vol. 5, 219. 56. Ibid., 231. Given the reference to Kraskovo, where Il’f was rent­ ing a dacha, we can date this entry to the time when Il’f and Petrov were writing Single-Story America. 57. Ibid., 220. 58. “Prokazchiki vezhlivy, tovarov net,” ibid., 239. 59. Ibid., 248. 60. The entry about the shark meat: ibid., 239-40. About flies: “Flies are still being sold at the store. On a small black slab of meat are a thousand flies. The price for a kilo of flies is 5 rubles. Not expensive, but you have to catch them yourself.” Ibid., 241. An interesting word in this entry is “still,” the first word of the Russian text. Is Il’f implying that meat is no longer be­ ing sold, but flies are? 61. Typescript in my possession. 62. Il’ia Il’f and E. Petrov, Sobranie sochinenii v 5-i tomakh, vol. 5, 247. 63. Ibid., 221. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., 219, except for the name. 66. Ibid., 216, except for the reference to “Grishka” [Aleksandrov], 67. Typescript in my possession. 68. Il’ia Il’f and E. Petrov, Sobranie sochinenii v 5-i tomakh, vol. 5, 237. 69. Ibid., 233. 70. Ibid., 232, except for the word “urinate.” 71. Typescript in my possession. 72. Il’ia Il’f and E. Petrov, Sobranie sochinenii v 5-i tomakh, vol. 5, 236. 73. Typescript in my possession. 74. Il’ia Il’f and E. Petrov, Sobranie sochinenii v 5-i tomakh, vol. 5, 218. 75. The respect for old regime justice embedded in this comment is more striking considering that as a Jew, Il’f had no reason to look back on it with fondness. In another entry in the final notebook he writes, “He looked at him the way a tsar would look at a Jew. Can you imagine how a Russian tsar could look at a Jew?” Ibid., 247. 76. Ibid., 223. 77. Ibid., 224; the last two words are missing. 227

Alice Nakhimovsky

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

Il’f and Petrov, Sobranie sochinenii v 5-i tomakh, vol. 5, 233. Typescript in my possession. Il’f and Petrov, Sobranie sochinenii v 5-i tomakh, vol. 5, 242. Ibid., 236. Typescript in my possession. Il’f and Petrov, Sobranie sochinenii v 5-i tomakh, vol. 5, 250.

228

Notes on Contributors

Edward Braun recently retired as a professor in the Department of Drama at the University of Bristol, England. He has published books on avantgarde theater and on Vsevolod Meyerhold, including Meyerhold: A Revolu­ tion in Theatre and Meyerhold on Theatre. Diana Lewis Burgin is a professor of Russian at the University of Massa­ chusetts, Boston. She is the author of a biography in verse, Richard Burgin: A Life in Verse; Sophia Pamok: The Life and Work of Russia’s Sappho; and the forthcoming Marina Tsvetaeva and Transgressive Eros and the cotrans­ lator of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. She is working on a social history of lesbian women in Russian culture. Katherine Bliss Eaton is an independent scholar and a retired English pro­ fessor and was twice a Fulbright professor in Romania. She has published The Theater of Meyerhold and Brecht and is writing a book about daily life in the Soviet Union. Katharine Hodgson, a lecturer in Russian at the University of Exeter, held a postdoctoral research fellowship at St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge. She is the author of a study of Russian poetry of World War II and has pub­ lished articles on twentieth-century poetry and women’s writing.

Peter Kenez holds the Neufeld-Levin Chair in History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he has taught since 1966. He has published several books on Russian history and culture and is planning a book on cul­ ture under repression. He is currently a visiting professor at the Central European University in Budapest.

George Luckyj, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, was born in western Ukraine and educated in Germany, England, and the United States. His doctoral dissertation, Literary Politics in the Soviet Ukraine, has been reprinted three times. His monographs on Gogol and Shevchenko are 229

Notes on Contributors

now appearing in translation in Ukraine. He received the Antonovych Prize in 1998 for his life’s work.

Lynn Maliy is on the faculty of the history department at the University of California, Irvine, and has published books and articles on Russian cultural history after the Revolution. Alice Nakhimovsky is a professor of Russian and the chair of the Depart­ ment of Russian at Colgate University, where she also teaches Jewish stud­ ies. She has written on twentieth-century Russian culture, including books on Russian literature of the absurd, Russian-Jewish literature, and, most re­ cently, the photographer Yevgeny Khaldei.

J. Alexander Ogden is an assistant professor of Russian and comparative lit­ erature at the University of South Carolina. He has coedited two volumes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography series and is currently at work on a book entitled The Peasant Poet and the Russian Soul: The Authority of the Folk Voice in Russian Cultural Discourse, a study that investigates the phe­ nomenon of peasant poets and their reception in Russia from the 1830s to the 1930s. Efraim Sicher teaches at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva and was a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. Sicher has edited two volumes of the prose of Isaac Babel’. His numerous books and articles include a study of Babel’s short stories and a controversial discus­ sion of Jewish writers and artists in Russia after the October Revolution.

Victor Terras is a professor emeritus from Brown University. His many pub­ lications in the field of Russian literature include A History of Russian Literature. Jeffrey Veidlinger is an assistant professor of Jewish studies and history at Indiana University, Bloomington. His first book, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (Indiana University Press, 2000), won a National Jewish Book Award.

230