Language and Metaphors of the Russian Revolution: Sow the Wind, Reap the Storm 149859798X, 9781498597982

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Note on Translation, Transliteration, and Dates
Introduction
Part I. Sow the Wind
1 Origin Stories of the Russian Revolution
2 Roots of the Russian Intelligentsia
3 The Intelligentsia and the People
4 An Incomparable Age
Part II. Reap the Storm
5 Bolshevik Weaponization of Language and Culture
6 The Lives of “Former People”: White Guard
7 Fruits of Revolution: Three Soviet Novels
8 A Defense of the Personal: Doctor Zhivago
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

Language and Metaphors of the Russian Revolution

Crosscurrents: Russia’s Literature in Context Series Editor: Marcia Morris, Georgetown University Embodying what is specific to a single culture as well as what is common to all humankind, literature has always been a privileged mode of discourse in Russia. Crosscurrents takes cognizance of Russian literature’s simultaneous particularity and universality by exploring the aesthetic, cultural, political, temporal, and geographical contexts in which it has been written. Monographs and edited collections in the series focus on literature written across cultural periods, geographical divides, and intellectual disciplines. We welcome proposals and manuscripts focused on the intersections between literature and law, religion, philosophy, science, film, the arts, and other disciplines as well as on Russian émigré literature, literature written in Russian by non-Russians, and comparisons of different cultural periods.

Advisory Board Eliot Borenstein, New York University Lioudmila Fedorova, Georgetown University Deborah A. Martinsen, Columbia University Amy D. Ronner, St. Thomas University Ilya Vinitsky, Princeton University Peter Rollberg, George Washington University

Titles in the Series Language and Metaphors of the Russian Revolution: Sow the Wind, Reap the Storm, by Lonny Harrison Dostoevsky as Suicidologist: Self-Destruction and the Creative Process, by Amy D. Ronner Wingless Desire in Modernist Russia: Envy and Authorship in the 1920s, by Yelena Zotova Babel in Russian and Other Literatures and Topographies: The Tower, the State, and the Chaos of Language, by Martin Meisel Russian Symbolism in Search of Transcendental Liquescence: Iconizing Emotion by Blending Time, Media, and the Senses, by Anastasia Kostetskaya Chekhov’s Letters: Biography, Context, Poetics, edited by Carol Apollonio and Radislav Lapushin Physical Pain and Justice: Greek Tragedy and the Russian Novel, by Gary Rosenshield

Language and Metaphors of the Russian Revolution Sow the Wind, Reap the Storm

Lonny Harrison

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2021 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Harrison, Lonny, 1974– author. Title: Language and metaphors of the Russian revolution : sow the wind, reap the storm / Lonny Harrison. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2020] | Series: Crosscurrents: Russia’s literature in context | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This panoramic history of the Russian intelligentsia provides a uniquely cross-disciplinary look at the language of the Russian Revolution from its origins through fruition in early Soviet society. Harrison examines storms, floods, and harvest metaphors in selected works of fiction and analyzes the use of language as a weapon of class war”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020040849 (print) | LCCN 2020040850 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498597982 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781498597999 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Russian literature—20th century—History and criticism. | Metaphor in literature. | Symbolism in literature. | Soviet Union—History—Revolution, 1917–1921—Literature and the revolution. | Intellectuals—Sovet Union. Classification: LCC PG3026.M48 H37 2020 (print) | LCC PG3026.M48 (ebook) | DDC 891.7003/09—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040849 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040850 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Prefacevii Acknowledgmentsix Note on Translation, Transliteration, and Dates

xi

Introduction1 PART I: SOW THE WIND

17

1 Origin Stories of the Russian Revolution

19

2 Roots of the Russian Intelligentsia

43

3 The Intelligentsia and the People

67

4 An Incomparable Age

105

PART II: REAP THE STORM

123

5 Bolshevik Weaponization of Language and Culture

125

6 The Lives of “Former People”: White Guard 147 7 Fruits of Revolution: Three Soviet Novels

173

8 A Defense of the Personal: Doctor Zhivago 193 Conclusion229 Bibliography235 Index243 257

About the Author v

Preface

Storms are ubiquitous in Russian literature. Sometimes a storm is just a storm, but more often than not, it is an ambient metaphor accentuating personal turns of fortune, unrestrained political forces, seismic ruptures, or the inexorable tide of change. Likewise references to the succession of seasons and the agricultural cycle are frequently met in Russian novels and poems alongside meditations on the meaning of personal experiences, or the movements of history on a grand scale. In both cases, severe weather and agrarian imagery take on their most iconic meaning as emblems of the Russian Revolution. To trace every instance of storm and harvest metaphors occurring in Russian literature would constitute an encyclopedic undertaking, which the present work has no pretensions to. Nor is it an attempt to account for and catalog all the metaphors and symbols of the Russian Revolution. Inspiration for the present volume came from a curiosity about the beauty and intensity of storm imagery in two works in particular: White Guard, by Mikhail Bulgakov, and Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. It evolved into a survey of the preponderance of storms in the Russian classics generally and grew to encompass the tropes of sowing and reaping, and similar literary representations of the revolutionary movement in Russia. In order to contextualize the narrative points of view of both of the novels named above, moreover, it was necessary to define the Russian intelligentsia and trace its trajectory along the arc of history that brought the Russian Revolution, wherein the intelligentsia occupied a unique position as both instigator and victim. My finding was that the metaphors I set out to examine paralleled the experience of the intelligentsia, both in their culmination in the language of Soviet authoritarianism and responses to the same in works of literature under the Bolshevik regime. The following is an interpretive history of the Russian Revolution and the literary tradition that dreamed, anticipated, provoked, and induced it, as vii

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well as selected works that reacted to and resisted it. Favoring an interdisciplinary approach, I draw liberally on historical analysis and biographies of prominent writers whose lives and work underscore the complexities of the themes under examination and powerfully capture the tensions of the age. If any selections appear idiosyncratic, my choices were shaped by the wealth of material at my disposal and the need to customize an approach to a topic that afforded myriad possibilities. This book is intended for readers who have an interest in the Russian Revolution and want to know more about how it unfolded. It is especially suitable for students of Russian literature and history who want to explore the complexity of forces that went into the buildup to the Revolution, and responses to it by writers and thinkers who found themselves on the margins of Soviet society. Although primarily aimed at a general readership, it is sure to engage and provoke professional researchers too. General readers and specialists alike will find a cogent analysis of the language and rhetoric of revolution, particularly pertaining to the metaphors, symbols, stories, and motifs that encoded its meanings in the Russian context. Despite the number of outstanding histories of the Russian Revolution and exceptional studies of the authors and works I feature—many of which are sources I am greatly indebted to—the following pages constitute a new framework for examining the past as well as confronting the challenges of today. As authoritarianism sees a resurgence in twenty-first-century culture wars and politics around the globe, we are in a unique position to witness the uses of authoritarian language to shape public discourse in ways that are corrosive to the maintenance of democratic institutions and defense of human rights. The conditions, events, and people that shaped the Russian Revolution were specific to Russia’s own national setting and unique confluence of historical factors—a point I emphasize throughout the book. Yet my hope is that the findings herein will translate into a wider account of the human experience. Hinging on the cultural clashes inherent to modernization, at the intersection of ideas that get to the very core of the fight for modernity, the ultimate aim of this study is to guide a critical reading of authoritarian discourse and investigate rare examples of counternarratives that thrived in spite of their suppression.

Acknowledgments

The preparation of this book was greatly facilitated by a Faculty Development Leave granted by the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Arlington in the spring of 2019, which awarded me an abundance of the precious resource of time, for which I remain forever grateful. I also want to thank each one of my incomparable colleagues at the University of Texas at Arlington, who are too numerous to name. I will single out my two consecutive chairs in the Department of Modern Languages, Christopher Conway and Sonia Kania, whose warm collegiality and generous championing of my work over the years has made all the difference. Special thanks to Dr. Conway, a dedicated friend whose willingness to read early drafts of the manuscript and many conversations since then have been essential to my progress. Thanks also to my sagacious friend James Alexander, whose encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible led to a vital modification of my discussion of the title proverb. However, should inaccuracies be found in this regard or any other aspect of the book, the fault is entirely my own. My thanks as well to the UTA Central Library, especially the librarians at Interlibrary Loan, whose phenomenal service and unequaled efficiency have been indispensable to this research. I would be remiss not to acknowledge my students at the University of Texas at Arlington, who, over many years of fruitful classroom discussion, have helped me think through the ideas and arguments presented in this book. Thank you all for your infectious energy and enthusiasm. As a student myself, I was privileged to take a graduate seminar many years ago at the University of Toronto with Dr. Christopher J. Barnes, this continent’s foremost expert on Boris Pasternak. I recall fondly the tremendous erudition, wit, and magnetism with which Dr. Barnes introduced the world of Pasternak to a handful of graduate students huddled among the ix

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Acknowledgments

unruly stacks of books and papers in his office across from the famed Robarts Library. It would be my first exposure to the poet and first time reading Doctor Zhivago. Dr. Barnes’s course made a strong impression, especially with regard to the dynamic role of storm imagery in Pasternak’s extraordinary novel. Unbeknownst to me at the time, it would plant a seed in my brain for the topic which would later grow into this book. My thanks are owed to the editors and staff at Lexington Books, especially Eric Kuntzman, Kasey Beduhn, Alexandra Rallo, and Marcia Morris, for helping me bring the idea to life. I am grateful to you for believing in this project and the part each of you played in shepherding it through to completion. Sincere thanks as well to my peer reviewers for their close reading of the manuscript and candid advice that persuaded me to revise key aspects, which unquestionably made a great improvement. Finally, I am profoundly indebted to many friends and family for their love and support on a daily basis, which make anything seem possible. My deepest love and appreciation are reserved for the one whom I owe more than words can say, my wife Maggie, who not only is patient enough to read endless drafts of my work but also holds the key to my heart, and handles it with care.

Note on Translation, Transliteration, and Dates

TRANSLATION I cite frequently from translations of classic works of Russian literature throughout this volume. Where excellent and well-regarded translations already exist, I cite from those texts. Where translations from Russian were not freely available, or instances where I wished to emphasize a word, phrase, or other nuance from the original, I produced translations myself. In each latter case, I cite the original source in the notes and indicate that the translation is my own. Quotations from Mikhail Bulgakov, White Guard, trans. Marian Schwartz (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008) are reprinted with permission from Yale University Press, all rights reserved. TRANSLITERATION With the exception of well-known anglicized forms of Russian names, I use the Library of Congress system of transliteration. Thus, Maxim Gorky instead of Maksim Gor’kii; however, I preserve the Russian spelling Aleksandr instead of Alexander. Russian sources in the notes and bibliography use Library of Congress transliteration.

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Note on Translation, Transliteration, and Dates

DATES Dates referring to events in Russia that took place before February 1918 are given in Old Style (O. S.) according to the Julian calendar, which remained in use until the Soviet Government switched to the Gregorian calendar. The day following January 31, 1918, became February 14. Events in Russia after that date are given in New Style (N. S.). Dates which refer to international events are given in New Style throughout the book.

Introduction

In the 1967 film Commissar by director Aleksandr Askol’dov, a montage depicts Red Army soldiers brandishing scythes in the desert, as if they are reaping the desert sands. It is a powerfully charged image, a visual metaphor of sorts, but one whose meaning may not be immediately clear to all viewers. When I’ve shown the film to students, the question often arises: “Are they some kind of Grim Reaper?” Apart from a forbidding premonition of death, however, the Grim Reaper, a personification known to the West more than Russia, is not the dominant motif here.1 In the same montage, the soldiers are pushing heavy guns and mortars through the desert. The machinery sinks in the sand, pulled by horses who are spent and emaciated, while the soldiers are desperate, sun-blind, and bandaged. One of them wanders frantically, shouting, “Pomogite!” (Help!). The scene is juxtaposed with images of the heroine of the film, Comrade Vavilova, as it gradually becomes apparent that the soldiers scything in the desert are her nightmarish hallucination while she struggles in the throes of labor. She imagines herself there—or possibly recalls the memory of leading soldiers through a parched desert like this one. In the same montage, Vavilova engages in amorous embraces with a male commissar, suggesting that he is likely the father of the child now being born. But the soldiers’ efforts to push the guns and mortars seem fruitless, and the agonizing pain of childbirth draws on. The wind whips up a whirlwind as the soldiers go on reaping the empty, unfertile sands. The terms of the metaphor emerge more clearly: reaping the desert sands, a barren whirlwind is their only harvest. An implicit comparison means the dramatic tension turns on the uncertainty—will mother and baby survive? Comrade Vavilova is a Soviet commissar, an officer responsible for the political education of Red Army soldiers during the Russian Civil War. She had been pregnant through the beginning of the film but seemed oddly 1

2

Introduction

reticent and unwilling to accept the fact that she would need to cease her role in the war in order to prepare for giving birth. Her personal conflict becomes the focus when Comrade Vavilova is billeted with a Jewish family who cares for her and delivers the baby. After several moving scenes of the formerly stern, gruff commissar nursing her baby and bonding with it, effectively softening and humanizing her as a mother, she makes the anguished decision to leave the infant behind with the family that sheltered her. She abandons her child to return to the war. By that decision, what fate has she sown—for the child’s life, and for her own? What destiny will they reap? In the story by Vasily Grossman on which the film is based, “In the Town of Berdichev,” the baby is compared to a single harvest grain, vulnerable and helpless: “He was as puny as an oat stalk that had grown in a cellar.” Yet the mother’s joy and her baby’s future are marred by his posthumous birth: “And this little one, this helpless one, had been born without a father.”2 In all, the orphaned child seems to emblematize Russia’s situation after the Revolution and Civil War render an irreparable break from the past. The fatherless, motherless child will be forced to make its own way in an alien world and uncertain future. To continue the sowing-reaping analogy, one could ask, what sort of seeds did revolution sow for Russia’s future, and what sort of harvest would it gather? Examining the social, political, and economic factors that come into play to culminate in the Great October Socialist Revolution, we are accustomed to asking what conditions sowed the seeds of revolution. Grossman’s story and the film Commissar invite us to ask what seeds were sown by the Revolution itself, and what sort of future the Bolsheviks reap for Soviet society as a result. The images in the film suggest that the Revolution has sown conflict and discord. Like the sun-blind soldier shouting “Pomogite!” blind devotion to the war and the revolutionary cause are justified by the political ideology which it is Commissar Vavilova’s responsibility to enforce. Like soldiers pushing guns and mortars in the desert, however, the fruits of the labor of revolution are grim. They reap a whirlwind in the barren desert, driven by the storm of war and chaos. The proverb comes to mind: Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind. The axiom of the present book’s subtitle is a rendering of the biblical portent from Hosea 8:7, “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” In Russian: “Так как они сеяли ветер, то и пожнут бурю.” (The colloquial phrase, “You reap what you sow,” comes from Galatians 6:7 stating, “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” In Russian, the saying is “Посеешь ветер—пожнёшь бурю,” or “Что посеешь, то и пожнёшь.”) In its original context, the verse in Hosea is a reprimand from

Introduction

3

God (Yahweh) spoken to the Israelites to condemn their practice of idolatry and the worship of polytheistic gods. The Book of Hosea delivers a stern warning, calling for the Israelites’ repentance, but it also expresses the hope that they will abandon their transgressions and be reconciled with God. The imagery reappears in Revelation 14:15 when the time for reconciliation has expired: “And another angel came out of the temple, crying with a loud voice to him that sat on the cloud, Thrust in thy sickle, and reap: for the time is come for thee to reap; for the harvest of the earth is ripe.”3 Metaphors of sowing and reaping and related tropes thread their way through the literature of modern Russia in its pre- and post-revolutionary years. While the biblical allusions are not directly related to the project of Soviet Communism, the proverb itself is fitting in ways, and it provides a convenient lens for examining the policies, practices, and cultural transformations that Russia underwent both before and after the Revolution. For an agrarian economy is at the center of the Russian story. Sowing the right crops at the right time is vital to the survival of the Russian people quite literally as much as it is critical, in the figurative sense, to the success and survival of the new regime. The problem of grain supply was one of the biggest challenges the Bolsheviks faced, one that required them to fashion new manipulative strategies to fuel the progress of industrialization and drove them, at the same time, to extremes of brutality to accelerate class war. Grain requisitions in 1918–1921 were carried out by acute means of force. Shooting, whipping, and torture of peasants who resisted were not uncommon. In many instances whole villages were destroyed and their inhabitants executed. But peasants frequently fought back. Besides hiding grain or turning it into alcohol to avoid handing it over to authorities, villagers in some cases killed the members of the requisitioning brigades. Localized revolts soon turned to full-scale rebellion across the countryside. Sometimes armed with no more than pitchforks, axes, or other farming implements, but also sustained by soldiers returning to their farms after the Civil War, peasants resisted the Bolshevik brigades and recovered their grain and confiscated livestock. They also exacted brutal revenge and perpetrated heinous tortures themselves. The regime was forced to surrender the countryside for some months before winning it back, thanks to starvation and exhaustion of the rebel peasants. As a result of the requisitions in 1921–1922, there was virtually no grain left to take, and in the sowing season, no seed to sow. Adding to the crisis were drought and frosts leaving famine conditions so dire that many people resorted to cannibalism.4 Recovery from the famine happened thanks in part to donations of seed and other resources from Herbert Hoover in response to Maxim Gorky’s appeal for Western aid. The harvests of 1922 and 1923 were bumper crops

4

Introduction

that turned the famine crisis around—with little help from Soviet authorities, who frequently harassed aid workers, interrupted transports, and seized supplies. While much of the population was still underfed, they exported grain to raise capital for purchase of industrial and agricultural equipment from abroad, causing the Americans to cease their relief funding in the summer of 1923.5 Later in the decade, the industrialization drive of the First Five-Year Plan required a reliable grain supply to the cities to feed worker populations and continue to finance international trade. Yet a grain procurement crisis in 1927–1928 indicated to the regime that peasant farmers could “hold the state to ransom.” Successful farmers dubbed kulaks (“fists”) were blamed for hoarding grain and branded as class enemies. The collectivization drive called for the liquidation of kulaks, as Communist collectivizers went from village to village to stimulate class antagonisms and intimidate and terrorize peasant families into joining collective farms (kolkhozy).6 Collectivization of peasant agriculture in the Soviet Union was a destructive and disastrous policy. Not only were peasants reluctant to join kolkhozy, they often hid grain and slaughtered animals in order to resist handing them over to the state. An attempt was made to curb the excesses of violence and mitigate resistance when in March 1930 Stalin published an article titled “Dizzy with Success” in the state propaganda organ Pravda. With it he extolled collectivization’s triumph. Declaring that a radical turn toward socialism had already been achieved in the countryside, he announces that the Five-Year Plan had been overfulfilled by 100 percent. Insisting that successes of the collective-farm policy were due to the voluntary character of the movement, resting on the active support of the peasantry, Stalin cautions that kolkhozy should not be established by force. He accuses “overzealous socialisers” and local Party leaders of exceeding instructions with regard to collectivization and grain procurements. He orders local authorities to ease off the pressure, so peasants would have incentive to sow their spring crops.7 In spite of Stalin’s injunction, collectivization proceeded apace. The halt was only temporary, as thousands of urban workers were mobilized to work in the countryside as kolkhoz organizers and managers, and peasants were again coerced into joining the collectives. The attitudes and practices that took place are summed up by orders carried out by coordinator of the collectivization drive in the Lower Volga region and Ukraine, Pavel Postyshev. Upon his arrival in the Lower Volga, Stalin and Molotov ordered Postyshev to spare no mercy for local officials accused of stalling grain procurements: “We propose, first, that all such criminals from all the districts be arrested, and, second, that they be put on trial immediately and given five or, better, ten years in prison. Sentences and the reasons for them should be published in the press. Send report upon fulfillment.” Postyshev’s instructions were “to

Introduction

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fulfill the grain-procurement plan by any means possible,” which he did with savage efficiency. When one of the district Party secretaries pleaded that it would not be possible to fulfill the plan because the villagers had “nothing left to winnow or thresh,” Postyshev reputedly asked the district assembly, “Is this really a district Party secretary? . . . I propose relieving him of his post.” Which they promptly did.8 The above is one example of the irrational expectations of Party policy on grain procurement and the callous cruelty with which it was carried out. The direct results of collectivization were mass arrests and deportation and resettlement of “kulaks” in labor camps. The direct consequence was starvation in the countryside, including the man-made famine in the Ukraine known as Holodomor, which translates as “to kill by means of starvation.” The winter of 1932–1933 saw catastrophic famine-genocide resulting from the deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainian farmers under the collectivization policy.9 The priority to raise revenue selling excess grain to fund industrialization left the countryside without enough food, while rural populations were prevented from leaving their villages to seek refuge and rations in the cities by a system of internal passports introduced in December 1932.10 The tragic episode of Soviet collectivization is indicative of the kind of political performance culture and ritualistic practices that, by the late 1920s and advent of the First Five-Year Plan, had come to define the function of official party language and the role of the press in Soviet society. The First Five-Year Plan and collectivization were represented in the press as the necessary and rational means toward achieving the promised land of Soviet Communism. As its leadership is lauded and accomplishments celebrated as fabulous successes despite glaring evidence to the contrary, the rule of imagination overtakes reason—the original, Enlightenment-era inspiration of the European Socialist tradition, which included the Russian revolutionary movement.11 To the point, metaphors, symbols, and stories, in fact, lie at the heart of the revolutionary transformation of Russia. One can view early Soviet Russia from 1917 to roughly 1960 through the lens of several ruling metaphors that capture and articulate the age, which might be called origin stories. In the language of Party communications, mass culture, and popular fiction, origin stories tell us how the origins of Soviet society are understood and how the meanings of the Revolution are disseminated—like seeds of a new consciousness. Like any powerful image or narrative, metaphors, stories, and symbols take on associations which increase their weight and impact with every repetition. As they grow in meaning and importance, the accumulation of meaning produces outcomes which amount to a reaping of the harvest—fruits of the values and definitions attributed to the Revolution.

6

Introduction

SHAPING THE STORY: METAPHORS OF SOVIET LIFE In the language and narratives of revolution, whether by Party communications, in the works of writers and artists, or recurrent in the colloquial language of workers, soldiers, and peasants, certain images and metaphors become absorbed into the culture. Time and again, they are repeated and internalized by ordinary individuals and inform the consciousness of daily life. In her introduction to Everyday Stalinism, historian Sheila Fitzpatrick describes the metaphors that shape the “story” of Soviet society. She posits that people understand their lives in terms of narratives, which, in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the regime had a vested interest in shaping. This was the function of agitation and propaganda. Fitzpatrick is interested not so much in the source of the stories, but what they said at the time about the past, present, and future, and the connections between them. One such story is “The Radiant Future” (“Svetloe budushchee”), after Aleksandr Zinoviev’s book of that name (not to be confused with Bolshevik revolutionary and Politburo member Grigory Zinoviev). The story goes approximately like this: The present is the time when the future, socialism, is being built. It follows that for the time being, there must be sacrifice and hardship. The rewards will come later. This is a natural, inevitable process based in “science,” that is, Marxist economics. According to the Radiant Future story, Soviet people could be confident that there would be rewards because of their knowledge of historical laws, derived from Marx. In the October Revolution of 1917, the proletariat, headed by the Bolsheviks, had overthrown the exploiting capitalists, whose concentration of wealth in a few hands had left the majority to suffer in poverty and deprivation. Socialism was the predetermined outcome of proletarian revolution. This prediction was visibly being fulfilled in the 1930s as the industrialization drive and the elimination of small capitalist enterprise laid the economic foundations of socialism. By abolishing exploitation and privilege and increasing production and productivity, socialism would necessarily bring abundance and raise the living standards of all. Hence, a radiant future was assured. A person who did not know the story might see hardship and misery in their present life. Artists were urged to depict life in its “historically concrete, revolutionary development”—to see life as it was becoming, rather than how in actuality it was—and ordinary citizens were expected to perceive things this way too. “An empty ditch was a canal in the making; a vacant lot where old houses or a church had been torn down, littered with rubbish and weeds, was a future park.”12 Another story was “Out of Backwardness.” The Soviet Union was overcoming the legacy of backwardness, otherwise known as “a deficiency of development,” that it had inherited from Tsarist Russia. The “liquidation of

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7

backwardness” was an ongoing project in the 1930s. Why was Russia “backward”? It was a late industrializer, reliant upon primitive peasant agriculture. Literacy and education were low. It had suffered humiliating defeats in the Crimean War in the 1850s and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905; and the First World War impeded further development. The Soviet Union, then, was striving to overcome backwardness through rapid industrialization, militarization, and modernization of agriculture. A Soviet dictionary of 1938 explained, “The Great October Socialist Revolution liquidated the age-old backwardness of our country.” The story had implications that workers’ and peasants’ children had been exploited by gentry landlords and abused by their masters, but now, they themselves were the masters. “Then the people had been deceived by priests and lulled by the opiate of religion; now their eyes had been opened to science and enlightenment.”13 The final story Fitzpatrick introduces is “If Tomorrow Brings War,” the title of a popular song of the interwar era. The First World War had ended abruptly for Russia, with no closure and great losses after Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, ceding large tracts of land to Germany. When the Civil War followed the Bolshevik seizure of power, a number of foreign powers intervened to support the counterrevolutionary cause. Thereafter it was expected that the capitalist nations would never accept Communist rule in Russia and would try to overthrow it whenever a good opportunity presented itself. Whether the Soviet Union (formed in 1922 after the end of the Civil War) would survive “the last, decisive battle”—a motif of this story from the popular revolutionary hymn “The Internationale”—depended on how much socialism had been built, counted in tractors, tanks, manufacturing yields, and kilometers of railroad track.14 Katerina Clark introduces a further set of metaphors and symbols of Russian Communism. In early Soviet society, she argues, the focus was on machines and advances in technology, but a shift occurs in the early 1930s to images of nature and struggle. In 1920 Lenin famously devised the slogan, Communism equals Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country. In Lenin’s vision, electric power would drive advances in all sectors of the economy from heavy industry to transport, agriculture, and production of consumer goods. But electrification also implied a set of values: “enlightenment” (the Russian prosveschchenie has the root svet, meaning “light”) brings the potential to spread light not only in the physical but in the figurative sense, implying universal education and an end to illiteracy. For Lenin, as much as Marx, electricity is a symbol of technological progress, of knowledge, and the society organized on a rational, scientific basis.15 When in his Five-Year Plan address of 1928, Stalin calls for large-scale industrialization and collectivization of agriculture, he announces a vision of

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Introduction

industrial utopia where everything is scientifically planned and mechanized on a grand scale. Goals of the First Five-Year Plan are to modernize and industrialize Russia, to bring “light”—electricity, technology, education, and planning. Just as Peter the Great had modernized Russia in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Soviet Russia would forge a new age, leading the world to the radiant future. The machine becomes the dominant cultural symbol for Soviet society. A train, a tractor, a crane, a “planned city” are each an emblem of its distinction. Man is a part, a bolt, a “cog” in the machine (without the negative connotations we now attribute to the phrase), while Party bodies were “levers,” and the Party itself a “driving axle” or “great conveyor belt.” Clark writes that industrialization becomes a ritualized myth. Even social ills could be redressed by immersion in the urban environment, as people allegedly benefit from working alongside the regular rhythms of machines. Controlled, rational rhythms cure the “primitive,” “anarchic” tendencies of the human psyche. The machine stands for harmony, progress, and control, as opposed to chaos or hard labor, lacking rhythm or purpose. The revolutionary values of enthusiasm and sacrifice could never achieve very much without planned, controlled use of the latest technology.16 The machine represents utopian enthusiasm, not a mechanized nightmare; however, the latter view would also arise. Zamiatin’s We (My, 1924), for instance, postulates a hyper-mechanized, dystopian society, while modern noble savages live in the wild, uncivilized jungle beyond its walls. Stalin’s aims included a plan to eliminate the conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat—a leveling of society, where the privileged would dissolve in the masses, and all layers of society would be harnessed to the immediate tasks of the industrial effort. However, whereas the original intelligentsia would approve the aim of educating the masses, the mechanized utopia was harder for the old intelligentsia to praise with sincerity.17 These class groupings, along with the makeup and evolution of the intelligentsia, are topics addressed throughout the present volume. The First Five-Year Plan makes a retreat in 1931 as production targets looked impossible to meet. According to Clark, “Authoritative voices began to lament the fact that the age’s obsession with technology, statistics and immediate practical needs had crowded out that higher and more enduring value, ideology.” The machine as a root metaphor for society is replaced. A machine is too impersonal to embody a society’s entire identity. Above all, it carried no guiding role for the Party and its leaders. It could not encompass change and historical development, nor establish legitimacy or venerate heroes. Moreover, it did not express the key notion of Stalinist vocabulary—struggle.18 The latter would be central to the new metaphorical apparatus, which is the Garden or the natural world in a wider sense. The guidelines of Socialist

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9

Realism were thought out at this time, when there was a wave of reaction against machine-age values. Heroes are now adventurers, engaged in epic struggle with brute, elemental forces. Machines even take on natural and sometimes anarchic rhythms. Natural disasters are spotlighted as a setting where struggle unfolds, with machines merely as backdrop. Instead of “the machine in the garden,” per Leo Marx’s 1964 study of technology and the pastoral ideal in America, Soviet writers put “the garden in the machine.” The impetus, Clark points out, was far more than an attempt to mediate the transition from rural to urban life for workers of peasant origin who found themselves suddenly propelled into the industrial age. Writers were no longer asked to illustrate the practical tasks of the economy but urged instead to concentrate on something closer to ideological parables with their metaphorical source in nature.19 Many of the construction projects of the First Five-Year Plan were launched under this Stalinist rubric of “struggle with nature.” Hydroelectric stations, collectivized agriculture, and so on, aim to tame the wild, destructive power of nature. In fiction the imagery becomes associated with the struggle of man against the elements. However, as the 1930s progress, the struggle is tied less to construction and more often to the powers of the new man and his heroic attainments: “Soviet man proved himself superior to all men who had existed before by combating the natural phenomena of greatest symbolic resonance in traditional Russian oral and written literature: water and ice (floods, disasters as the ice breaks up, snowstorms, etc.).” The everyday Soviet hero was cast as the most resistant to ice and cold, to which he was more immune than any other people—especially Americans.20 Thus, Soviet man was superior to his Western counterparts, and even to his native Russian forbears because of his strength, endurance, and perseverance in the face of the destructive powers of nature. This was especially true of Bolshevik heroes of the Revolution. Biographies of Soviet leaders in the mid-1930s followed a typical hagiographic structure in which the future revolutionary hero endured exile or harsh conditions in frigid Siberian prisons before finally escaping. Stalin’s numerous escapes from Siberia were mythologized in this manner; likewise, his exile above the Arctic Circle was no match for the Soviet man of steel.21 The message of these tales of struggle and triumph over nature was plain: anything can be accomplished if one is truly committed to victory. Even the laws of science are only “blinkers” which prevent (Soviet) man from reaching his highest potential. However, struggle in the Soviet lexicology also becomes something more: it is to be waged not only against nature but more importantly in an ideological sense, against enemies, both internal and external. The core dynamic of struggle as an ideological conceit is elemental spontaneity (stikhinost’) pitted against conscious, political understanding (soznatel’nost’). The

10

Introduction

storm (or threat of the enemy) is elemental and spontaneous, like the people (narod); but the Party has a mission to bring class consciousness to the people, to focus their unfettered energy and guide them in the eradication of class enemies and confrontation of other enemies of progress like ignorance, greed, and superstition. I discuss examples of this principle in Socialist Realist prototypes and classics of Soviet-era literature at several points throughout this work.22 Thus, nature is struggle, but in the Stalinist novel, nature also refers to harmony. A way out of the harsh present is by looking to the future rather than some idealized past. Man had become alienated from labor—this, after all, is the chief tenet of Marxism. The aim was to restore the wholeness, the harmony between the individual and the collective good. A pattern, Clark explains, emerges in the Soviet novel: “The novel begins in harmony and plenitude, proceeds through the autumn of increasing doubt and conflict, through the ice of winter and/or the devastating floods and storms of early spring, to come out at last, at the novel’s end, into the sun of a higher order.” Restitution is found in each successive generation of the cycle: “In the second, brighter summer is a world of wholeness, faith, and harmony wherein new life is born to the community as a harbinger of those better summers that will come with future revolutions of the gyre.”23 Clark presents this model as a master plot or formula to which most canonical Socialist Realist novels conform. Girded by such a generic formula, the peculiarity of a Soviet novel, then, is its lack of complexity and nuance as an art form. It wants for those elements which usually help good literature explore the tension between the objective and the subjective, including parody, irony, and complexity of point of view. While a Socialist Realist novel may feature a questing hero, the novel itself lacks a certain structural sophistication, or what might be called a questing form.24 The questing form of the modern novel is the fertile soil missing from Soviet culture. It is a critical omission, since so many of the debates that took place over the meaning of the Revolution and the direction of Soviet society centered on the question of cultural transformation. In the present book I offer several examples of the modern novel that thrived on the margins of Soviet literature, making robust use of the metaphors and symbols of the Soviet narrative but subverting them in productive ways, enhancing them with unwelcome complexity. The urge to interrogate and problematize official narratives would earn their authors censure in the Soviet press, yet their stories, in questing form, would take root and survive for posterity to produce an abundance of insight into the lives of individuals living under the restrictive pressures of Soviet Communism. James Billington, author of the classic interpretive history of Russian culture The Icon and the Axe, offers another take on the cluster of metaphors

Introduction

11

that were pivotal in the understanding of the Revolution from the point of view of some Russian émigrés: storm and flood.25 What he calls the “accidental-pathetic view” was held by those who saw no deep meaning in the Revolution, but bewailed its catastrophic outcome in the lives it overturned. Metaphors like flood and storm circumscribed a senseless natural calamity that could have been avoided, and those who subscribed to this view tended to focus on random detail. Billington finds that historian Sergei Mel’gunov, for example, uses a flood metaphor while trying “not to explain but to concretize” events in How the Bolsheviks Seized Power (Kak Bolsheviki zakhvatili vlast’, 1937). Kadet Party founder Pavel Miliukov, on the other hand, refers to an impersonal natural catastrophe and its tragic grandeur. It is not so much a senseless flood as a powerful geological upheaval that buried European culture under the lava of the anarchic, long-simmering peasant rage that erupted upon instigation. Socialist Revolutionary Party founder Viktor Chernov, finally, speaks of the cataclysm as if the elements themselves are responsible: “Across the plains, blizzards and storms are free to move and rage. The storm of revolution revealed the genuine ‘color and aroma’ of the people’s soil . . . with all the best features of the national character and all the savage passions and vices implanted by its history.”26 Chernov’s view is fairly typical of storm metaphors that characterize the Revolution as an unstoppable force of nature somehow related to the fierce, retributive impulses of the Russian narod. Beyond Billington’s revealing examples, I will argue for a broader interpretation of the storms, natural disasters, and weather tropes frequently applied to the Russian Revolution, which are laden with meaning and significance by the authors who use them. For storm and flood motifs were a mainstay of Russian literature for a century or more before 1917, in works which perceive the gale winds of change on the future’s horizon, as well as those written in their wake. Of the latter, whether describing revolutionary times from the eye of the proverbial storm, or deciphering the Revolution’s causes and effects, storms and floods become part of a discourse used in a variety of ways, alternately to encode or deconstruct Soviet ideology. PLAN OF THE BOOK This book is divided into two sections which roughly partition the discussion into the lengthy run-up to the Russian Revolution and consideration of its outcomes. Part I provides a brief history of revolutionary ideas, language, and symbolism in Russia, foregrounding pivotal works of literature and selected intellectual currents. In chapter 1, I introduce the language and ideas of writers in the long and tempestuous nineteenth century, an era of extraordinary change when the arts and literature provided a forum for the quest for Russian

12

Introduction

national identity and solutions to many of its social and political dilemmas. Chapter 2 takes a deep dive into the formation and development of the Russian intelligentsia throughout the nineteenth century—for the fractures among the loose categories of individuals classed under this label are vital to understanding the revolutionary movement and therefore form a critical part of my analysis overall. Chapter 3 continues to examine the intelligentsia from the point of view of its relationship to the Russian people, including warnings from segments of the intelligentsia who cautioned against rousing the latent anarchic instincts of the narod. Storm metaphors are featured in works by Aleksandr Blok and Alexei Remizov, as well as Maxim Gorky, who was uniquely situated to provide a bridge between the people, the intelligentsia, and the Bolshevik regime. Chapter 4 explores the concept of modernity as a type of myth in itself, one that poses beliefs about contemporary life in modern industrial societies. The clash of visions between the so-called bourgeois view of modernity and the artistic view combined with Russia’s unique geopolitical situation visà-vis Europecreated conditions which were ripe for revolutionary change. Bolsheviks made use of language and literature to incite cultural revolution and class war, particularly targeting “bourgeois” elements—a label that cast a wide net across the social spectrum. At the same time, the language of workers, soldiers, and peasants in 1905, 1917, and beyond shows a high degree of spontaneous action against perceived class enemies that resists a top-down interpretation. Part II begins with an analysis, in chapter 5, of the weaponization of language and culture in post-revolutionary Russia. Bolsheviks viewed it as imperative to implant a new vision of society through cultural channels in order to achieve success for the revolutionary order. This chapter includes a discussion of the social dynamics of repression and social purging, as well as the variety of reactions to class war by writers, intellectuals, and average citizens. Responses to the challenges of daily life are explored in works of literature that broach the topic of survival through the chaos of revolution and class war persecutions. I turn then to the principal novels reserved for examination in the context of the featured ruling metaphors and their meanings in a wider cultural discourse. In chapter 6, White Guard (1925) is the first of several novels I spotlight in which weather metaphors are especially potent, while another overriding theme in this particular case is hearth and home. Juxtaposing the brutal realities of civil war with the comforts of family, home, and tradition, White Guard presents the deep experiences of individual protagonists whose values belong to the endangered intelligentsia. The traditions of this world will be lost in the ensuing years, while its people would become the new exiles. Critics called the novel a nostalgic panegyric to the White movement and a lament for the liquidated class. It was banned after

Introduction

13

two out of three serial installments, and the journal that had published it was shut down. Ironically, the stage adaptation Days of the Turbins, after an initial ban, would go on to become one of the most successful plays of the Moscow Art Theatre through the 1930s and 1940s. It was a favorite of Stalin’s, who is reported to have attended the production dozens of times. Chapter 7 looks at three examples from Soviet literature which contrast greatly with White Guard in their treatment of the Civil War narrative, while all make creative use of the primary metaphor clusters, sometimes to the extreme. First, The Iron Flood (1924) by Aleksandr Serafimovich, as its name implies, raises the stakes on the flood myth to a new degree of hyperbole. The novel’s lack of concern with individuals and its focus instead on the masses as collective hero are some of what made it an ideological prototype of Socialist Realism. What sets it apart is its unflinching treatment of the stark circumstances of the Civil War, which are overcome by the fortitude of the masses and the firmness of Bolshevik resolve. The second of the triad is Leonid Leonov’s The Thief (1927), a complex novel which describes the moral ambivalence of a Civil War hero who slides into the criminal underworld, thus problematizing his ability to extol the achievements of the Party. The third is a Socialist Realist classic that stands in a category of its own. An epic narrative that tests the limits of Socialist Realism, Mikhail Sholokhov’s Quiet Don (1928–1940) is uniquely known for both its highly individualized heroes and the rich tapestry of agricultural imagery which provides a backdrop to the saga of war and revolution on an enormous scale. Chapter 8, finally, looks at Doctor Zhivago (1957) as a modern Russian epic that reclaims the narrative of the Revolution and Civil War. Amid the chaos of revolutionary change, as a study in the perseverance of character at a time of upheaval, there is perhaps no better. The hero is a doctor and poet who bears enthusiasm for the Revolution but grows weary of its brutality and rhetorical bombast. The novel’s ruling metaphors of storm and flood represent the intractable, ever-changing tides of life and destiny. Zhivago is awed and inspired by their power, but he must struggle against them to survive. The flood is the beautiful, perennial life force associated with the heroine Lara Antipova. But the storm of revolution is relentless, destructive, and inhumanly cruel; it transforms people into pitiless ideologues, like Lara’s husband, the Red commander Strelnikov. The novel itself would become a touchstone of the cultural dialogue like no other. Rejected by censors, Pasternak smuggled his manuscript out of the Soviet Union to publish it in Italy in 1957, after which it was translated into many languages and became an international sensation. A firestorm of criticism from Soviet authorities would hound the author until his death in 1960. The book even became a Cold War weapon when the CIA smuggled a Russian edition of Doctor Zhivago back into the Soviet Union.

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Introduction

There is much overlap to be found in the lives and works of the authors featured throughout this volume, especially given that some of them wrote semi-autobiographically. Their biographies therefore become important aspects of this study. Specifically, Bulgakov and Pasternak interpret events in personal, unorthodox ways, risking retaliation from Party leadership, the state-controlled media, and authorities who perpetrated state-sponsored terror. Each of them suffered retribution from these quarters. However, their stories speak to the recovery of language and meaning from Party control and the ideology-driven doctrines of Bolshevism, Marxism-Leninism, and Stalinism. Establishing the context for reading novels such as these, our aim should be to understand the epoch, to empathize with its people and learn their motivations and responses to the times in which they lived. Above all, this is the story of modernity in Russia and the contradictions at its core. It is about the development of the Russian intelligentsia in the nineteenth century and its instigation of the revolutionary movement; the clash between the bourgeois vision of modernity and the creative intelligentsia or avant-garde; the emergence of the working class as a political force; and finally, the words and actions of the radical left intelligentsia, who drive a wedge between the classes and inflame the culture war. Ultimately, post-revolutionary Russia is viewed through the lens of the lives and works of Russian writers who powerfully capture the tensions of the age as both observers and participants. Irrespective of the dangers, in the great tradition of Russian literature, its most tenacious chroniclers breathe life into their inimitable heroes, who bear witness to the tide of social and political change with courage and humility. NOTES 1. The Grim Reaper image popular in the West differs from the personified image of death in Russian culture, where it is more frequently associated with folkloric characters such as Baba Yaga or Koshchei Bessmertnyi. 2. “In the Town of Berdichev” in Vasily Grossman, The Road: Short Fiction and Essays by the author of Life and Fate, trans. Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, and Olga Mukovnikova (Quercus and London: Maclehose Press, 2010), 25–26. 3. English translations from the Bible are cited from the King James Version, and Russian from the Russian Synodal Bible. 4. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution (New York, NY: Viking Penguin, 1996), 752–58, 775–79. 5. Ibid., 778–79. 6. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 4th Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 137–42.

Introduction

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7. J. V. Stalin, Works, Vol. 12 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), 197–205. Italics in the original. 8. Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017), 427. 9. Estimates of the death toll of the Holodomor vary widely, from 2 to 6 million. See the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, hosted by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta: http:​/​/www​​.ency​​clope​​diaof​​ukrai​​ne​.co​​ m​/dis​​play.​​asp​?l​​inkpa​​th​=pa​​ges​%5​​CF​%5C​​A​%5CF​​amine​​6Ge​no​​cideo​​f1932​​hD73.​​htm (accessed July 31, 2020). 10. Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 140–41. 11. On political “performance culture” and “ritualistic practices,” see Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 54–82. 12. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 8–9. 13. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 9–10. Italics in the original. 14. Ibid., 10–11. 15. Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, 3rd Edition (Bloomington, IN and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000), 93. 16. Ibid., 93–95. 17. Ibid., 95–97. 18. Ibid., 98. 19. Ibid., 98–100. 20. Ibid., 101. 21. Ibid. The novels and stories of Jack London were much loved by Soviet people and their leadership, since London’s work centers on man’s survival under conditions of extreme cold and dangerous animals. 22. On the stikhinost’ and soznatel’nost’ dichotomy, see Clark, The Soviet Novel, 106–13. 23. Ibid., 113. 24. Ibid., 39. On Socialist Realism as an art form, see also Régine Robin, Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1992). 25. James H. Billington, “Six Views of the Russian Revolution,” World Politics 18, no. 3 (April 1966): 452–473. 26. Chernov 444; cited in Billington, “Six Views.”

Part I

SOW THE WIND

Chapter 1

Origin Stories of the Russian Revolution

Like other modern nations, Russia formed the basis of its national identity from a cluster of myths which function as origin stories. The principal Russian version after its conversion to Christianity is a sacral myth wherein the tsar-autocrat is viceroy of Christ on the earth, guardian of the Russian zemlia—its ancestral land, and narod—its people. To the people, the tsar was tsar-batushka, “little father,” making the nation a patriarchal community with the sacred quality of a holy monastery, which remained an ideal in the national consciousness long after modernizing forces had begun to transform Europe.1 The special, idealized relationship between the peasants and tsar would be an important factor in the age of revolutions when the tsar could look to the peasantry as a conservative bedrock of support for autocracy. Up until at least 1905, peasant revolts were directed more at landowners and gentry officials than the tsar. The latter was looked upon as the one who could solve the land and bread problem, and his overthrow was not on the mind of an average rural serf.2 Russian identity was further shaped by clashes with the Other: centuries of struggle with nomads of the steppe, Aleksandr Nevsky’s defeat of the Teutonic Knights, two and a half centuries of subjugation under the Tatar– Mongol Yoke, the victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Borodino, and the Red Army’s heroic stand at Stalingrad, to name a few. In the words of ethnic historian Anthony D. Smith, together these “mythmaking encounters” constitute “stages of ethnic crystallization [that] help to bind together a Russian community of fate.”3 Besides the energizing effect of mass-mobilization and its potential to bolster the community mythos (often to compensate for the horrors of war), the Russian landscape itself is a unifying element of national identity and one of its chief mythmaking principles. The living geography with its great rivers, 19

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beguiling forests, and endless steppe is a ubiquitous presence in Russia’s national imagery. Whether in folkloric motifs, in the landscape art of Ivan Shishkin or Isaac Levitan, or the music of composers Aleksandr Borodin (In the Steppes of Central Asia) or Igor Stravinsky (The Rite of Spring), each of these mythologems has left their mark on the Russian outlook and its cultural products.4 If these are the macro layers of national myth, on another level, metaphors and metaphorical compounds embody further nuances of the national psyche. In Russian literature, through the long nineteenth and early twentieth century, clusters of common metaphors recur with such frequency that they allow us to track the path of cultural change through the peaks and valleys of Russia’s tumultuous modern history. Certain metaphors encapsulate the rapid changes taking place in the Russian empire and the political upheavals that finally erupted in revolution in 1917. Historian Sheila Fitzpatrick reminds us, for example, that metaphors of displacement, alienation, and lack of control over one’s destiny are prominent in pre-revolutionary Russian literature. The famous image by Nikolai Gogol in his 1842 novel Dead Souls (Mertvye dushi, which he called an epic poem) compares Russia to a troika careering at breakneck pace into the dark unknown. Similarly, for Duma politician Aleksandr Guchkov, criticizing Tsar Nicholas II and his ministers in 1916, Russia was “a car steered along the edge of a precipice by a mad driver, whose terrified passengers were debating the risk of seizing the wheel.” Driving metaphors such as these are impactful because of their kinetic vigor. Charged with frenetic energy, a reckless spinning out of control verging on madness, they pair well with our understanding of the dynamic clash of cultural forces that attended Russian development through the stormy nineteenth century. When “In 1917 the risk was taken,” as Fitzpatrick puts it, “and Russia’s headlong movement forward became a plunge into revolution,” those spinning wheels had gained a powerful momentum, and events took an irrevocable turn into chaos.5 Another way of regarding the Revolution, for many who experienced its unfolding in real time, was to see it as a spring awakening. During the spring of 1917, an editorial in a Moscow daily called it “The Springtime of Russia” (Vesna Rossii), referring to “the springtime of resurrection and renewal,” and “the springtime of freedom.” Connotations of the sacred accompany this seasonal metaphor with its associations with warmth, light, regeneration, and rebirth, naturally placing spring in the same symbolic field as freedom. To capture the sudden spontaneity of the moment, the editorial writer compares the Revolution to a liberating storm as well: “All revolutions come unexpectedly. This the real grandeur of their arrival. . . . They are born spontaneously (stikhiino [literally, like the elements]). They fly in, like a hurricane, and tear out freedom for the exhausted people.” With these and other instances of “lived experience” in the early days of the Revolution, cultural historian

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Mark Steinberg captures how, like a spring thaw, the flow of events produced a torrent of words in 1917 that filled every conceivable space in the streets, squares, barracks, taverns, train stations, and political meetings. They produced a flood of new meanings so stirring that Russia was, for a time, a “republic of words.”6 The latter points to a whole spectrum of dynamic metaphors in the field of extreme weather events. All manners of storms, floods, arks, and associated images can be found throughout the preceding century and in the decades leading up to 1917 to portend a coming cataclysm. Floods are the outcome of rain, snow, blizzards, hurricanes, whirlwinds, and cyclones that generate them, plus the tidal change, and the rivers, seas, and oceans they cause to overflow. A constellation of related organic metaphors, furthermore, occurs with a regular frequency that should draw our attention. Namely, the semantic field of sowing and reaping generates foundational myths for both pre- and post-revolutionary Russia. While storm, flood, and related meteorological conditions herald the coming revolution, organic metaphors of flourishing and abundance signify its fruition. Moreover, figurative language of sowing and its complement in the harvest gets at the dual inheritance of modernity: crisis, catastrophe, apocalypse, or death of the old world clear the soil for the seeds of change; the latter then engender rebirth and regeneration, producing a new, Edenic, earthly paradise. Metaphor clusters like these provide the basis for narratives that Russian writers and thinkers capitalized upon, from Romantics and realists to conservatives and radicals, ideologues and propagandists to dissident intellectuals. From these various points of view, the tropes named above might be called origin stories or creation myths: they form and disseminate meanings for disputed Russian identities, give purpose to national problems and challenges, and finally spur the anticipated revolutionary change and its fallout. Attention to the way writers used figurative language not only informs us about the events of an era but can also uncover outlooks and attitudes—how people conceived of what transpired, and how they responded to circumstances according to both deeply seated ideals and newly forming aspirations. As the story unfolds, organic metaphors give all kinds of nuanced information about attitudes and motivations which help to explain how contemporaries viewed their situation. To begin, when it comes to revolution, the roots run deep in the Russian soil. SEEDS OF ENLIGHTENMENT The notion of spreading knowledge is itself a metaphor that stems from the idea of sowing Enlightenment values. A painting by Vassily Khudoyarov

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which depicts Tsar Peter I (the Great) supervising the planting of a tree during the construction of St. Petersburg at the turn of the eighteenth century uses just such a metaphor. Peter was a builder and reformer. He created the first Russian navy, built the city of St. Petersburg as a “window to Europe,” and he literally planted trees and gardens in the city like Khudoyarov’s painting shows. But the symbolism of the image is even more suggestive, alluding to the fact that Peter planted ideas in the Russian soil and disseminated Enlightenment values. Tsar Peter’s westernization reforms would have an immeasurable influence on the development of Russia and bear fruits that changed the course of its history. In the century after Peter, the French Enlightenment produced values that had a tremendous impact on Russia, as progressive thinkers looked to France for models of liberty, equality, and fraternity. After victorious campaigns in Western Europe following the defeat of Napoleon, many Russian officers came home, as one historian puts it, with “boxes crammed with books and heads full of ideas for improving their country.” The ideas were Enlightenment ideals which promoted education, free, uncensored dissemination of knowledge, and guarantees of liberty, justice, and natural law. Some of the returning officers formed secret organizations whose conspiratorial plans would culminate in the so-called Decembrist revolt in December 1825—often considered to be the first Russian revolution.7 The reign of Nicholas I was reactionary from the start after his inauguration was marred by the rebellion, which he thwarted and mercilessly crushed. The poet Aleksandr Pushkin rebuked the tsar in an unpublished, anonymous poem attributed to him, called “To the Emperor Nicholas I,” in which he jests, darkly, that immediately following ascension to the throne, Nicholas Displayed his flair and drive: Sent to Siberia a hundred-twenty men And strung up five.8

In the published work “Stanzas,” however, Pushkin paid tribute to the tsar, painting him as a wise and judicious leader in the hopes of encouraging him to aspire to that noble image. He compares Nicholas to his eminent ancestor Peter the Great, urging him to take up the mantle as cultivator of Enlightenment principles: With autocratic hand He boldly planted seeds of enlightenment; He did not spurn his native land, Knowing well its destiny.9

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Pushkin goes on to develop a picture of Peter as a distinguished figure who, after initially punishing rebellion in his own time, later curbed his autocratic tendencies and learned to “use the truth to conquer hearts.” Pushkin urges Nicholas to emulate Peter, a ruler of “all-embracing soul,” a wise and humble builder who nurtured the budding sciences and arts, allowing knowledge to sprout from modern-day education to transform the barbaric customs of his land. In all, “Stanzas” is an appeal to the tsar to work steadily and firmly while keeping mercy and forgiveness uppermost in mind.10 Pushkin also wrote his poem “To Siberia” (known by its first line, “In the depths of Siberian mines”) to express sympathy for and solidarity with the Decembrist exiles. Pushkin had handed the poem to Princess Volkonsky, the wife of one of the Decembrists, shortly before her departure for Siberia. However, it was discovered and promptly reported to the Third Section (the tsar’s secret police), who, after the exile of the Decembrists, had continued to pursue individuals who disseminated antigovernment material. Having only recently cleared his own name after repeated chastisements and exile, Pushkin fell under suspicion yet again. In another secret poem Pushkin conveys his recalcitrant attitude toward Nicholas’s reactionary regime, asking what had become of liberty and natural law in a land governed “by an executioner’s ax alone,” at the mercy of “a murderer and his henchmen for a Tsar.”11 The Decembrist revolt took place in what was then Peter’s Square (later Decembrists’ Square and now Senate Square) against a backdrop of one of the most important and potent symbols of Russian absolutism—the famous equestrian statue of Peter known as the Bronze Horseman. Commissioned by “Enlightened despot” Catherine the Great, who dedicated it to her illustrious predecessor in 1782, the Bronze Horsemen is an enduring symbol of the might of Russian autocracy. The statue features the formidable tsar glaring down with imperious gaze, his hand outstretched toward the Neva river, whence he had launched his flotillas against Charles XII of Sweden. Peter’s revolution from above included his building of the fortress city St. Petersburg (founded 1703) during the Great Northern War (1700–1721) against Sweden, from which Russia would emerge victorious, for the first time establishing itself as one of the most powerful empires of Europe. Built on a marshy plain, however, crisscrossed with canals, the city on the banks of the Neva was prone to inundation, often catastrophic flooding, which claimed scores of lives of its inhabitants. The floods of St. Petersburg provide the basis for a string of narratives that flow out of the city to form a pattern of legends that came to be known as “the Petersburg myth.” Flood in itself takes on an even greater allegorical significance when, after the Decembrists, the revolutionary movement is driven deeper underground, where storm waters gather in the collective dream of progressive thinkers who saw gale winds on the horizon.

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MYTHS OF FLOOD AND ARK Flood imagery is common to mythical narratives around the world but known to Christian nations mainly through the Book of Genesis, when an angry OldTestament God washes the earth free of sin and instructs Noah to build an Ark to save the animals two by two. In Russia, the flood image is ubiquitous in pre- and post-revolutionary fiction, where it often extends beyond water to images like oceans of blood, or seas of people, and represents retribution for the wrongs suffered by the Russian people, later in socialist lore cast as the exploited working class. The best-known flood in Russian poetry is found in The Bronze Horseman: A Petersburg Tale (1833), a modern epic by Russia’s most loved poet, the same who had written the disparaging lines to Nicholas. Pushkin’s creation myth bridging Peter I with Russia in the nineteenth century, The Bronze Horseman is an ambivalent tribute to the tyrant who forced westernization on Russia, for better or worse. When a flood of 1824 destroys much of the city and claims the life of his betrothed, the hero Evgeny defiantly shakes his fist at the autocrat on his pedestal in Peter’s Square. Glaring menacingly at poor Evgeny, the statue comes to life, crashes down to chase the hapless hero, and pursues him to his death. Lynn Ellen Patyk sums up the dual meaning of the flood in Pushkin’s poem: “The unappeasable wrath of the bronze colossus overwhelms the futile outrage of a tattered vagabond, just as the Neva’s floodwaters had overwhelmed Peter’s city.” However, before his demise, the hero’s outburst of “Just you wait!” carries a prophetic ring, one that empowers the otherwise defenseless subjects of the tsar: “Evgenii’s outburst telegraphs a narrative of blame and retribution. The autocrat is the creative destroyer and the architect of unnatural disaster—the founder of a city that is a deathtrap for his subjects—but it is only a matter of time until the roles are reversed.” Indeed, although The Bronze Horseman was censored personally by Tsar Nicholas I, in a twist of fate, the entire, uncut poem would be published in 1880 when the People’s Will were preparing to carry out the promise of Pushkin’s little hero to exact revenge on the autocrat—and did so when they assassinated the tsar on March 1, 1881.12 The flood in The Bronze Horseman is a complex symbol. On a basic level, the flooding river is an elemental force that threatens the city and its inhabitants. Pitiless, implacable nature is a force to reckon with throughout the difficult trials of Russia’s modernization. The building of the city itself is all the more impressive, a result of the imperial command of Peter’s unassailable autocratic power. On the other hand, the seat of imperial power was built on the bones of workers who died in thousands forced to work in the inhospitable conditions and swampy terrain of the northern Russian wilderness. As an origin story, it marks the beginning of an era of reform and westernization

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which would divide the Russian nobility and service class from the common people, owing in part to Peter’s establishment of a meritocratic bureaucracy based on the so-called Table of Ranks and Privileges. Pushkin takes up these ambiguities in his poem without diminishing their complexity. Like he did in “Stanzas,” the poet pays tribute to the founder of modern Russia, indefatigable builder and reformer, spreader of progressive enlightenment; but he also laments the poor and subjugated ordinary folk, the Russian people who suffered repression under the yoke of tyranny, denied the freedoms promised by Enlightenment ideals. Pushkin’s poem encapsulates the contrast between the great deeds of the autocrat and the longsuffering of the “little man”—tragic hero of Gogol and Dostoevsky who persists at the dark center of the Petersburg myth through the nineteenth century and beyond. The view of St. Petersburg as an “un-Russian” chimera—and the negative view of Peter himself—would persist in the early twentieth century in Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (Peterburg, 1916), Aleksandr Blok’s poem “Retribution” (“Vozmezdie,” 1910–1921), and in several works by Alexei Remizov including Whirlwind Russia (Vzvikhrennaia Rus’, 1927), discussed in chapter 3. Associated with Apocalypse, the Bronze Horseman itself is an enduring, ambiguous symbol of the nation’s fate.13 For the two centuries following the founding of St. Petersburg, especially once the spark ignited by the Decembrists took flame, the Western-oriented intelligentsia would advocate for greater reforms and emancipation of the Russian people, or narod. To call Pushkin a revolutionary, though, as Lenin did, would be an oversimplification. Pushkin’s defense of liberty did not mean he advocated social revolution. In fact he warned against the danger of unruly popular rebellion of the sort led by Emelyan Pugachev during the reign of Catherine II in his short novel The Captain’s Daughter (Kapitanskaia dochka, 1836), from which the epigraph to White Guard is taken (see chapter 6). Meanwhile the image of revolution as an inevitable flood gains currency from conservative perspectives too. For the poet Feodor Tyutchev, the tide of revolutionary ferment in Europe is met with resistance from the Russian empire, which, using another metaphor in the flood series, is an ark of salvation. His stature in the Russian estimation second perhaps only to Pushkin, Tyutchev was a poet and thinker of a more traditional ilk. While sprung from the same generation, Tyutchev lived much longer than Pushkin, and when he saw the revolutionary year of 1848 and its aftermath, he viewed Russia as a monolithic entity that would stand unshaken by the destructive events of the West. Also a diplomat, Tyutchev wrote to Tsar Nicholas that “only two opposing forces remained in Europe: Russia and Revolution, the Christian and the anti-Christian principle.” In Tyutchev’s version of the myth, the sacred Ark of Empire would ride the revolutionary flood which was soon to

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overwhelm the West.14 He welcomed the explosive events of 1848 in Europe, believing that the struggle between Orthodox Russia and the godless West would culminate in Russia assuming her true place in the world: God has written it in letters of fire on this sky all darkened by storms. The West is disappearing, everything is toppling down, everything is being destroyed in a general conflagration. . . . . And when we see emerging from this immense deluge this [Russian] empire, as if it were the Holy Ark, still more immense, who can then doubt its mission, and should it be for us, its children, to display skepticism and cowardice?15

For Tyutchev, the Holy Russian Empire is the ark that will survive the flood of revolution to build a new society on the ruins of the old world. That notion stems from a tradition seeing Russia as having a sacred destiny, unique from the West, an ideation which is part of a larger concept of Russian exceptionalism known as the “Russian Idea.” Though he is a monarchist, Tyutchev’s image fits a pattern that will become part and parcel of the narratives of revolutionary thought over the next century. A thinker of decidedly more liberal stripes galvanized by the revolutionary unrest that swept across Europe was Aleksandr Herzen. After receiving a sizable inheritance, Herzen had managed to escape from the repressive regime of Nicholas I in 1847 by emigrating first to Italy, then Paris, where he witnessed the cycle of revolution and the years of reaction that followed. Nicholas’s response to the uprisings across Europe was a policy of police terror, arrest of political dissidents, and Siberian exile.16 Herzen narrowly avoided such a fate. Instead he is known for his commentaries on Russia written and published while he lived in exile in Paris and London. Most of his writings were smuggled into Russia and were hotly debated by factions of the intelligentsia. By the mid-1850s, Herzen was read by a broad liberal audience in Russia and reactionary opponents as well—not to mention police from the Third Section, who had him under surveillance—and certainly by the tsar himself. In a letter from Paris to his friends in Moscow, on March 1, 1849, Herzen contrasted the relative freedom of individual expression in Europe with the stifling environment in Russia, where a borrowed system of government from the West had not successfully taken root: The revolution effected by Peter I replaced the antiquated landlord rule of Russia by the European bureaucratic system. Everything that could be transferred from the Swedish and German codes was; everything that could be transplanted from Holland, a land of free municipalities, to an autocratic government of rural communes was borrowed. But the unwritten, moral restraints on the government, the

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instinctive recognition of the rights of individuals, the right of thought, of truth, could not be transplanted and were not.

The dire result in Russia, according to Herzen, was that virtual slavery increased even as education expanded and the state developed. The stronger the state grew, the weaker the rights of individuals became. Recognition of rights, he further explained, was one of the great humanistic principles of life in Europe. But the same spirit had never emancipated Russia, where individuals were oppressed and neglected, because “free expression of opinion at home was always regarded as an insolence, independence as sedition.” Moreover, in Russia, the European forms of administration supporting the judiciary, military, and civil organization had developed into “a monstrous, hopeless despotism.”17 Herzen expands upon the flood analogy in From the Other Shore (S togo berega, 1850), a collection of letters in which he reflects upon the years 1848–1849. Originally circulated among his friends in Russian capitals, they were later published in Europe—a German edition in 1850, and a Russian imprint which appeared in 1855 in London. Francis B. Randall describes the double system of imagery in From the Other Shore as “the sea, its shores, a ship, and a storm,” on the one hand, and “the destruction of the ancient world and the rise of Christianity,” on the other. The two systems are combined in the imagery of Noah’s Ark and the Flood. Unique to Herzen’s iteration, the shore is an important element of his metaphor cluster, which helps us establish his point of view both physically and intellectually. When Herzen speaks of “the other shore,” he is an exile writing from Europe rocked by revolution and reaction, calling out to readers at home who live under absolutist authoritarian rule in Russia. His readers, Russian liberals and radicals who risked their own arrest for reading his outlawed works, know and understand that Herzen is representing the conventional opposition between Russia and West-Central Europe. But in the book’s opening letter, addressed to his son, he is clearly referring to something more: “Modern man . . . merely builds the bridge. The unknown man of the future will cross it. . . . Do not stay on the old shore.” Here and in other places, Herzen’s shore is a literary trope used to contrast the present with an unknown future. In this, Herzen acknowledges his inspiration in historian Nikolai Karamzin, a founding father of Russian conservativism from the generation before Pushkin and Tyutchev, but a writer whose prose was an inspiration for both of them and for generations after. In Karamzin, progress is compared to a ship sailing through dark waters and perilous weather. Karamzin had seen the Enlightenment and the French Revolution as periods of the darkness clearing away, while the sun shone through, and humanitarians approached the goal of perfection, rejoicing in view of the shore. But the sky then darkened over, and the fate of humanity

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was obscured by storm clouds as the ship was tossed upon uncertain seas once more.18 Succeeding Karamzin, Herzen takes the whole metaphorical conceit further: the reader is on the old shore, the dark and bloody ground of his native land; he is looking out to sea—“that strange, unstable, unpredictable element,” as Randall puts it, “which Russians above all other peoples were used to regarding as distant and alien.” The writer is aboard a ship, a modern, nineteenth-century steamer, heading for a storm, which it moves through in the course of Herzen’s book. The other shore in this analogy is the future; however, while the author confirms that “the curious fate of Russians is to see farther than their neighbors,” the future beyond the storm cannot be seen from Russia. Meanwhile, it is exhilarating for the interlocuters to watch and discuss its properties. The first essay in Herzen’s book is called “Before the Storm: A Conversation on Deck.” The conversation is about social and cultural questions such as whether America were “the other shore” (it wasn’t; it was not the new world but an iteration of the old), and comparing the present age to the long and difficult decline of Rome. A storm ends the conversation as thunder and lightning chases everyone to their cabins while the ship lists and pitches. In the next letter, called “After the Storm,” written in Paris in the summer of 1848, the storm imagery represents the events of that year in Paris. Uncertainty in the new freedoms was unsettling and stark, yet the travelers were obliged to overcome their fears and press on, like an intrepid Christopher Columbus: “It was madness to set out on the ocean, not knowing the course, the ocean which no one had traveled before, to sail for a country whose existence was a question. By this madness he discovered a new world.” Herzen then makes the analogy plain, speaking not of continents but the horizon of time: “The future is worse than the ocean—nothing is there, it will be what circumstances and people make of it.”19 All in all, Herzen’s flood poetically combines an expression of the dream of liberal thought and an impassioned plea for humanity to strive for a future of justice and liberty. However, while he was a defender of human dignity and personal freedoms, Herzen did not believe that the rise of the middle class in the West was the answer. To him the habits of the bourgeois middle class represented the epitome of vulgar, materialistic concerns, and a debasement of the high spiritual destiny of mankind that he envisioned. This view had resonance among fellow critics of the West such as Dostoevsky, who took a similar stance in “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions” (“Zimnie zametki o letnikh vpechatleniiakh,” 1863) and Notes from Underground (Zapiski iz podpol’ia, 1864), among other works. But Herzen also rejected the view that history was on a predestined course toward some future utopia. Defining progress as a vast, stormy sea upon which a small craft (humanity) was mercilessly tossed, it was madness to believe that one had any control over the seething elements, while the shore could never be seen. Man’s

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saving grace was his own personal affairs, ennobled by the dignity of human freedom to respond to the immediate realities of life.20 Storm metaphors continued to provide a dynamic figurative language to Russia’s burgeoning revolutionary movement into the twentieth century. A noteworthy example is Maxim Gorky’s poem, “The Song of the Stormy Petrel” (“Pesnia o burevestnike”), first published in 1901. The stormy petrel (or storm petrel) is a seabird whose name carries the connotation of harbinger of trouble. In Gorky’s poem, a number of bird species engage in dialogue, but all are loath to recognize the tempest gathering on the horizon. It is only the stormy petrel who has the courage to herald the coming storm. The image thus becomes a symbol of the pre-October revolutionary struggle and a rally cry of the revolutionary underground. Stormy Petrel became a nom de guerre of sorts for Gorky himself. His printed works and later references to the writer were sometimes accompanied by an emblem of the bird.21 Lenin deeply admired Gorky’s work and shared his antipathy toward the petty bourgeoisie (meshchanstvo). He references Gorky’s poem in his 1906 article, “Before the Storm” (“Pered burei”), referring to signs of “the eve of a great struggle.” The proletariat were “preparing for the struggle,” united and “boldly marching to meet the storm, eager to plunge into the thick of the fight.” The cowardly liberals, on the other hand, quoting from Gorky, were “stupid penguins” who “timidly hide their fat bodies behind the rocks.” Lenin then concludes his article by citing the final lines of the poem: “Let the storm rage louder!”22 Gorky is an ambiguous figure in the story of Russian Bolshevism. An avowed revolutionist, he nevertheless remained a committed humanist who deplored the Bolshevik vulgarization of culture. A staunch defender of individuality, Gorky was an opponent of Party control of literature, who saw the liberty to think and speak freely as a sacred right, and the preparedness to die in the struggle for it, a virtue. He could not accept Lenin’s simplistic division of men into classes, nor his willingness to condemn dissenters to death. Gorky remained stubbornly nonparty, resisting Lenin’s efforts to make him embrace partiinost’ (party-mindedness) and write exclusively for the Bolsheviks.23 Both figures and the drama of their complex relationship feature throughout my discussion in this volume. Presently, I turn our attention to the moments when the long-awaited storm came bearing down, and the flood gates of revolution were thrown open wide. THE ENCHANTED FLOOD The flood myth would form the basis of a secular, post-Christian apocalypticism in early Soviet society. Flood imagery in this context continues to represent destruction of the old world but transitions further along utopian lines

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to reference the building of a new one with new people, a new Adam and Eve, or the so-called New Soviet Man. These myths share a common reference to prelapsarian “cosmic unity” of the Golden Age—from cataclysm and destruction of the flood and/or expulsion from the garden, to future peace and harmony of the coming utopian age. Washed in the people’s blood, it will be free of both the “sins” and the sufferings of generations’ past. For example, in Gorky’s Mother (Mat’, 1906), a novel regarded by the Soviet establishment in the 1930s as a forerunner of Socialist Realism, Pelageya Nilovna, mother of the revolutionary hero Pavel Vlasov, cries out as she is led away by tsarist gendarmes, beaten and bloody, “Not even an ocean of blood can drown the truth!” Another character, recounting the story of a factory owner who gave a golden wash basin and chamber pot to an actress, declares that the factory owner ought to be brought before the people and chopped to bits and his rotten flesh thrown to the dogs. “Oh, it’s a great punishment the people will mete out once they rise up! They’ll shed a lot of blood to wash away the wrongs they’ve suffered! And it will be their own blood, drained out of their own veins, so they’ll have a right to do whatever they want with it!”24 Notwithstanding the violence implied in Gorky’s narrative—and the very real violence that accompanied the events of February 1917—the retributive character of flood is given a temporary reprise in the memoirs of Mikhail Kol’tsov (pen name of Mikhail Fridliand). Kol’tsov captures the air of excitement and euphoria in his description of the Duma (legislative assembly) headquarters in the old Tauride Palace, a Catherine-era royal sanctuary surrounded by its own parks and lakes. A magical current bears everyone aloft in the limitless space of the palace: “The entire courtyard around it was filled with motorcycles, carts, sacks, and people—a whole sea of people and movement breaking against the entrance in waves.” Kol’tsov likens the historic importance of the moment to a new act of creation: The sudden chaos of new creation had lifted up the ancient house, widened it, enlarged it, and made it enormous, capable of encompassing the revolution and all of Russia. . . . Flooding in, all around me, were countless streams of soldiers, officers, students, schoolgirls, and janitors, but the hall never seemed to grow too full; it was enchanted; it could accommodate all the people who kept coming and coming. Chunks of alabaster from the walls crunched underfoot, amidst machinegun belts, scraps of paper, and soiled rags. Thousands of feet trampled over this trash as they moved about in a state of confused, joyous, incomprehensible bustle.25

For Kol’tsov, the image of an enchanted flood captures February’s ecstatic spirit of liberation. It connects the chaos of tidal change and at the same time

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embodies a creative force, bringing together a torrent of people inspired by the democratic levelling. Mixing his metaphors, Kol’tsov also depicts a volcanic eruption amid the deluge: In this elemental, volcanic explosion, there were no leaders. They bobbed along, like wooden chips, in the flooding stream, trying to rule, to direct, or at least to understand and participate. The waterfall flowed on dragging them with it, twirling them around, lifting them up, and then casting them down again, into the void.

He carries the metaphor further as heroes and leaders emerge at the crest of what has now become a sentient sea of people. The waves throw speakers up as the listing sea now listens and seems to calm. Their words drop like pebbles stirring ripples and receding into the turbulent water. Duma deputy Aleksandr Kerensky, hero of February, is cheered by the elements, who shower him with a waterfall of applause before erupting into “The Marseillaise.” Amid the din, even politics were submerged and hushed by the extraordinary scale of events. The Soviet of Workers’ Deputies is swept into the hall by the flood waters coming from the factories and army barracks; but in their meeting, the Mensheviks, SRs, and populists don’t know what to say, “because no one knew what was needed in this hour of deluge and fire.” As if to contradict the sanguine nature of the flood as Kol’tsov remembered it, Sergei Rachmaninoff happened to be in town, performing his ÉtudesTableaux, op. 39. Historian Yuri Slezkine circles back to Pushkin: Immersed in the Dies irae theme, it opens with an image of a deluge drowning out all calls of distress, continues with a mournful scene of doomed expectation (“seagulls and the sea”), and culminates in a blood-curdling Last Judgment (no. 6). This was the flood from Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman—as seen by its victim, “poor Evgeny.”26

Another ambiguous symbol of the storm and enchanted flood comes in a poem by Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941) who recounts the last days of October as she witnessed them in the Crimean seaport of Feodosia: Night.—Northeaster.—Roar of soldiers.—Roar of waves. Wine cellars raided.—Down every street, every gutter—a flood, a precious flood . . .27

In it dances a reflection of the blood-red moon. This flood of alcohol that Tsvetaeva alludes to has a concrete, historical basis. While the incident she relates took place in Feodosia, during the uprisings of 1917 in St. Petersburg and Moscow workers and soldiers frequently raided the cellars

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of mansions and hotels of their overclass enemies, sending the rebellion into a drunken free-for-all. “Depictions of the ‘wine riots’ run like a red stream through the work of monarchist and liberal diarists, memoirists and authors recoiling from the chaos of 1917,” notes translator Boris Dralyuk. The riots were an indication for some, such as Gorky, that the Russian people were comporting themselves not as freedom fighters but lawless rebel slaves. In a December number of his daily newspaper Novaia zhizn’ (New Life) Gorky writes: Every night for almost two weeks crowds of people have been robbing wine cellars, getting drunk, banging each other over the head with bottles, cutting their hands with fragments of glass, and wallowing like pigs in filth and blood. Over this period, wine worth several tens of millions of rubles has been destroyed, and, of course, hundreds of millions of rubles’ worth will continue to be destroyed.28

Beyond this sort of irresponsible gaiety, Gorky was appalled at the mob trials he witnessed in the streets of Petrograd, which in some cases were exceedingly gruesome. For him they negated the ideals of justice for which the revolution had ostensibly been fought. In his speech to commemorate the first anniversary of February, he stated that a revolution that is simply a release of the instincts of people oppressed by slavery is not a revolution at all but a riot of malice and hatred. The latter sort of rebellion was incapable of changing lives, but only bred bitterness and evil. His position, on the other hand, was not shared by everyone on the Left. Many of those believed that violence was justified by the wider goals of the Revolution and should be permitted to take its natural course.29 BOURGEOISIE OVERBOARD: MYSTERY-BOUFFE In time, the dizzying success of February would be surpassed by October and the more prodigious and shattering trials of the Civil War. In later chapters I discuss the motives of the Bolshevik regime and their seizure of power, when a greater certainty of political aims would prevail. Presently, to illustrate the ideological paradigm on which it was based, I turn to a work which puts the flood motif at the center of a mythical parody by Vladimir Mayakovsky. Storm and flood motifs fit almost too perfectly into Mayakovsky’s biography. An avant-garde poet, he was a titan who made an equal match for the winds of revolution. Robert Payne writes eloquently that “He was at home in the tempests and the snowstorms, and he was never comfortable unless the lightning was playing about him.” Further,

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the whirlwind of Mayakovsky met the whirlwind of the Revolution head on, and if they sometimes seemed to be the same whirlwind, if they often appeared to be moving in the same direction, they were nevertheless separate and distinct. Sometimes he drew the Revolution around him like a cloak, but he could just as well walk without it . . . he poured out poetry in a torrential and undeviating flow, and it is possible that he never knew whether he was writing at the top of his genius or at the lowest pitch of his talent. That he was born and died seemed the least important thing about him; it is not the birth or the death of a cyclone that one remembers. One remembers the destructive path and the raging of the heavens.30

Some of Mayakovsky’s major work is about the storms of revolution; on the other hand, there is an element of saving grace to his eschatological forecasts. Coincidentally, an abbreviated form of his name—Mayak, meaning “lighthouse”—was sometimes used as a nickname for Mayakovsky, a sort of revolutionary moniker that suits the great confidence he had in his work, and the beacon others saw in him during uncertain times. According to Payne, Mayakovsky embraced the October Revolution ecstatically but remained an “intellectual anarchist” who never became a member of the Party even while serving as an advocate and propagandist. “What he admired above all was the ruthless energy of the Bolsheviks, their promise to build a state in which the mighty were humbled and the poor were glorified.”31 Mayakovsky was a cofounder of a group of avant-garde Russian artists and writers who called themselves Futurists. They published a manifesto of Russian Futurism in 1912 called “Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (“Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu”), in which they pronounce themselves alone the “face of our Time.” Devastatingly iconoclastic, they declare that “The Academy and Pushkin are less intelligible than hieroglyphics,” and, employing the ark metaphor, demand that we “Throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc. overboard from the Ship of Modernity.” They pledge to enlarge the scope of the language of poetry “with arbitrary and derivative words,” and finally, “To stand on the rock of the word ‘we’ amidst the sea of boos and outrage.”32 The Futurists unambiguously stake their claim in a future where the old world is not only rejected but also abolished and annihilated. This same script is reiterated in the play Mystery-Bouffe (Misteriia-Buff), written and originally published by Mayakovsky in 1918 and revised in 1921. Mystery-Bouffe is a codex supreme of flood metaphors representing a pseudoapocalypse that brings about the world-transforming socialist Revolution. Mayakovsky reinterprets the biblical flood, likening the new Soviet state to Noah’s Ark. In this witty satire of the international bourgeoisie, the flood occasions their demise, while it opens the sluice to rush the proletariat to a utopian destiny which is theirs alone. A boisterous, slapstick satire in the

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style of a comic (bouffe) mystery (medieval morality) play, Mystery-Bouffe lampoons capitalists, international politicians, and the bourgeoisie—the “Clean”—who go to their doom after a mock-biblical flood destroys the world, and valorizes the proletariat—the “Unclean”—a soldier, a blacksmith, a carpenter, a baker, a farmhand, a seamstress, a laundress, and others— who throw the Clean overboard from their ark, then proceed with sailing to humanity’s bright future. In mercilessly satirical verse, the poet drowns the people of the old world among whose ranks are a Russian merchant, an Orthodox priest, an Australian, a German, an American, international dignitaries from England, France, and Ethiopia, and other supposed representatives of world capitalism and the bourgeoisie. The Unclean, on the other hand, have no national origin. “We have no nationality: labor is our native land” they declare. The Clean are frightened of them—with good reason, for, with a cry of “Break your rusty chains!” they proclaim, “What this country needs / Is a good class struggle. We’ll show you one!” and they promptly cast the Clean overboard. Meanwhile an Intelligent (intellectual) and a bourgeois lady hide, emerging later to announce that they want to work for the Soviet Government: “We’re on your team / We’re not Party members; / we’re from the corner chest. / But we’re for the regime / of the Soviets.”33 Saints, devils, and Jehovah play their parts when the Unclean protagonists journey first through hell and then heaven, mocking and deriding the inhabitants of each, and then move on to meet the “Actors of the Promised Land”— everyday objects associated with proletarian life: machines, trains, a needle and fabrics, a boot, a hammer and sickle, and bread—who pledge themselves to the service of the proletarian heroes and their future workers’ paradise. The Intelligent and a “Compromiser,” meanwhile, play humorous, antagonistic roles. The action is summarized in a Prologue spoken by one of the Unclean, who enumerates the cast of characters fleeing the world-inundation, who begin building “not just an Ark, but a great big super-duper one.”34 As a “waterless flood” swallows everything like a mysterious, retributive plague in Act I, one of the Clean, a German, describes the event. The tonguein-cheek account has him enjoying himself at a restaurant on a day so serene, it was “like a bourgeois before the Revolution.” There was a sudden roar as Berlin was engulfed by “an angry sea, raving / in bass notes of invisible waves.”35 Curiously, the event had occurred without rain. Here the allegorical thread begins: the Intelligent explains that it was more of a metaphysical event, as “The whole earth, / smelted in the open hearth of revolution, / poured down like one big waterfall.” The satire takes off as several characters are introduced who represent allegorical types, or caricatures of people from their respective classes, who give their typical reactions. The Compromiser,

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in hysterics, cries, “I thought the flood would be a nice moderate one . . . / with the wolves well-fed / and the lambs untouched. / But now / people are killing each other dead! / Dear Whites! / Dear Reds! / Listen to me! This is just too much!” For his cowardice, the Compromiser becomes an object of scorn and is beaten with blows from both the Clean and Unclean.36 The social roles of the respective classes come further into definition after the priest refers to Noah’s flood, and the merchant suggests they all build an Ark. The Unclean set to work; even the Compromiser shouts, “Let’s all work for the cause!” But the Intelligent is reluctant: “Work? / I wouldn’t dream of it! / I’ll just sit right here / and sabotage a bit / (He shouts to the men at work.) / Faster, men! / Let’s make every stroke tell!” When the Carpenter asks him, “Why do you do no work at all?” the Intelligent replies, “I’m a specialist— I’m indispensable.” Thus ends Act I, ringing with a sarcastic rebuke of the intelligentsia, surely calculated to add enthusiasm to the audience response after curtain.37 Borne on the flood, the workers eventually realize that they have nowhere to plant their grain, “With no furrowed fields—only troughs in the waves.” Before they reach land, however, another encounter provides more forage for the play’s iconoclastic thrust. Sailing toward what they think is Ararat, they spy a man walking on the water toward them. It is not Jesus, whom they reject, fearing He has come to lay a trap: “God has oranges, / cherries, / and apples; / He can make spring leaf out seven times in one day. / But from us He has always turned away. / And now He’s sent Christ here to snare us.” It turns out to be an ordinary man, “the man of the future” (a role played by Mayakovsky himself in performances of the play), declaring that he is of no class nor clan, came simply to “fan the flames in the forges of souls.” But not as a Christian will he deliver his good news: the heaven he has come to preach about is “a genuine, earthly one,” where the comforts are made possible by electrical fixtures, and the work is miraculously gratifying: There, labor is sweet, and won’t callus your hands; work will bloom in your palms like a rose. There, the sun will perform such miracles that at every step you will sink down in flower beds big as the sea. Here, one must toil endlessly, using all of the gardener’s skill (the glass frame, the manure mixed with soil). There, pineapples will grow six times a year from the root of the common dill.38

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This projection of an agrarian utopia is typical of revolutionary texts at least since Vera Pavlovna’s dream of the workers’ paradise in Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done? (see chapter 2). Mimicking biblical language, Mayakovsky reverses the Christian story in this myth of heaven-on-earth, a proletarian paradise of extravagant abundance. In this iteration, the Christian heaven is “famine-struck,” since, up until now, God’s abundance (oranges, cherries, and apples) had not been shared with the proletariat (“from us He has always turned away”). But in the new, earthly paradise, the pineapples grow six times a year without toil, and the labor is sweet and won’t callous your hands. The man of the future continues his iconoclastic, terrestrial sermon, inverting the biblical tropes: his paradise is for everyone except the poor in spirit, “who are swollen up as big as the moon from fasting in Lent.” On the contrary, he calls to the vengeful and remorseless: Come unto me all you who have calmly stabbed the enemy, and then walked away from his corpse with a song on your lips! Come, unforgiving one! You have first right of entry into my kingdom— which is earthly, not heavenly!39

Most poignant here is the call for cheerful, retributive violence—from the mouth of a heroic anti-Jesus—who rewards lack of remorse for the victims of violence, since it is owed to the perpetrators of the workers’ oppression. He calls for the anarchic flood to rage upon the earth, claiming the apocalypse is necessary to usher in the new world. By the end of the play, that new world is achieved. In Act V, the Unclean liberate a locomotive and steamship buried in the earth and revive them with coal and oil. They slay Queen Chaos (“I blow away factories like down . . . and the country dies of cold and hunger”), who had reared up to quash their cheerful labor. On the steamship and locomotive, they rush into the future, singing, “Forward, breathing life / into all machines!” to the curtain on Act V. Act VI brings their arrival, finally, in the Promised Land—Moscow. There they find electrification, factories, apartment buildings, trains, streetcars, and automobiles wrapped in rainbows. The “Things” greet them in welcome, led by the Hammer and Sickle, saying, “We don’t have any masters. / We belong to no one.” The Machines come forth, apologizing to the workmen for all the times they had injured them. They had been enslaved by “the fat ones,” but

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now that the fat ones are beaten, they are free. All the other Things surrender to them as well, as do the Edibles. They had caused workers suffering with their inaccessibility, but from now on the bread and other victuals are freed of their bonds.40 After the flood of Revolution finally subsides, the workers claim their rightful mastery over the Machines, the Things, and the Edibles. They all sing together, “Take what is yours. / Take it! / Come and get / Whatever you need to work with, / whatever you eat! / Come, take it! / Conqueror, come!” The Farmhand bends to touch the earth: “It’s dear mother earth! / Our own native soil!” He strikes a bargain with Comrade Things—the people will manufacture them, and they will feed the people. If the boss interferes, “we won’t let him get away alive.” Thus the workers enjoy their harvest, the fruits of the earth—and vow to annihilate any representatives of the old world. The play ends with the Unclean singing an adaptation of the revolutionary anthem “The Internationale” in chorus, where the chains are broken, “whirled off like dust clouds in a gale,” and the whole universe bursting into song heralds a new spring for mankind.41 Many of the metaphors in my focus are contained within Mystery-Bouffe and summarized in this song at the end of the play: whirlwind, storm, retributive flood, a new spring (seeds of a new world), and new people. In all, the underlying theme is defeat of the enemy bourgeois oppressors. I return to this topic recurrently in later chapters, when I discuss the Bolshevik language of class war that targeted the bourgeoisie. Mayakovsky and his Futurist brethren showed their disdain for anything that smacked of “bourgeois” culture and the whole edifice of language and literature of the past. The art of the past was of no use in the factories and on the streets. The Futurists welcomed the Revolution and, after October, served the revolutionary government for a clean sweep of the old order that they advocated was in line with official policy at that time. The social program of Marxism threatened the rigidities of Russian life, so it was the perfect means of self-expression of the avant-garde artist whose chief concern was smashing convention. But it was an uneasy and short-lived alliance, as Futurists, like many Russian modernists, believed in the independence of art. They claimed to have proletarian interests in mind and spoke of a “proletarian dictatorship” in the arts, but Mayakovsky was interested in serving, more than any political doctrine, himself and his own creative instinct. One need only recall that his first large-scale work in 1913 was something he called Vladimir Mayakovsky, A Tragedy. Mayakovsky was the writer, actor, director and producer. But it earned him only a scandal. He was mocked and derided by the audience and in the press. Nevertheless, Mayakovsky believed in himself because, as Edward Brown puts it, the Futurist is the “irreverent innovator” who “offered

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himself as a willing victim to the established literary priesthood.” As the story played out, predictably, “they crucified him.”42 Well after the Revolution had swept away the old order, Mayakovsky’s conflict with the establishment followed him for more than a decade of Bolshevik power. Caught in the web of conventions and routine, he was employed by the state to make propaganda posters, agitational verse, even advertisements for Soviet retail goods. By the time he was admitted to RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers)—he had held out for a long time but was eventually forced to join—he was received coldly because he had often spoken out against them. Mayakovsky was accused of being an “egotist,” a “bohemian,” and a “petit bourgeois individualist.” Demurred by his own belief that he had compromised his art and capitulated to the establishment, and owing further to complications in his personal life, Mayakovsky took his own life in 1930. His suicide note, famous for the line “love boat smashed against convention,” is a searing indictment of the compromise, at the hands of the revolutionary regime, of what Mayakovsky saw as the true revolution—constant, daily, tireless, personal reinvention of life through poetry and art. Now, the poet whose method was to shout his message “At the Top of My Voice” resigns himself to fate in silence: “there’s no need to wake you or disturb you with telegrams or thunder.” He is moving on to greater things: “In hours like these you get up and you speak / To the ages, to history, and to the universe.”43 The storm and flood narratives presented in this chapter accomplish diverse aims. Pushkin’s inundation is connected to the founding of St. Petersburg and contributes to the building of the Petersburg myth, foregrounding ambivalence in the people’s relationship to the tsar. Tyutchev’s revolutionary flood conveys the conservative values of the Russian Empire but portends disaster in the West. Herzen’s stormy sea expresses the dream of liberal progressive thought, decrying the bourgeois culture of the West, while implying that individuals alone may stem the tide. Mayakovsky’s deluge puts the ideological calculus of class struggle into a satirical framework and confirms the utopian dream of a workers’ paradise. Kol’tsov’s enchanted flood conveys the jubilation felt at the realization of the century-long dream when the first blossoms of the fruits of revolution appear. Gorky is the storm messenger who ushers in the Revolution and then is forced to deal with its complex cultural and political fallout. In each of these instances, whether a movement of people, an empire in change, the agency of fate, or a Marxist dialectic, the storm and flood are always an elemental power or a force for reckoning that irrevocably shapes the nation’s course and its national identity. These are just a few of the instances to be found throughout Russian literature where storm and flood metaphors are applied as harbingers of the coming

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upheaval or heralds of the workers’ utopia. More follow in the chapters to come, when I will be interested in their co-option and adaptation as responses to Soviet power. Snow, storms, and whirlwinds are dominant tropes in works by the poet Aleksandr Blok and his contemporary Alexei Remizov. Storm imagery punctuates Mikhail Bulgakov’s banned first novel White Guard as well as his semi-autobiographical Theatrical Novel. A preponderance of storm, blizzard, and flood imagery permeates Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, the controversial Nobel-Prize-winning novel I dwell upon at greatest length in the final chapter of this study. The foregoing account of origin myths in Russian literature sets the stage for a deeper analysis of the language and images that encapsulate the transformative events of Russia in its revolutionary age. The next chapter examines what the age meant to some of those who were destined to face the gathering storm and how they responded to it.

NOTES 1. Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 67. 2. Zhand Shakibi, Revolutions and the Collapse of Monarchy: Human Agency and the Making of Revolution in France, Russia, and Iran (London and New York, NY: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 28. 3. Smith, The Ethnic Origins, 76. 4. Ibid., 76, 185. 5. Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 17. 6. Mark D. Steinberg, The Russian Revolution, 1905–1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 23, 3–5, 14–17. 7. Basil Dmytryshyn, ed., Imperial Russia: A Source Book, 1700–1917, 3rd Edition (Fort Worth, TX: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1990), 207. 8. Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, Pushkin Threefold: Narrative, Lyric, Polemic, and Ribald Verse, the Originals with Linear and Metric Translations, trans. Walter Arndt (New York, NY: E. P. Dutton, 1972), 27. 9. Aleksandr Pushkin, “Stansy,” Moskovskii vestnik 7, no. 1 (1828): 3–4. My translation. 10. Yuri Druzhnikov, Prisoner of Russia: Alexander Pushkin and the Political Uses of Nationalism, trans. Thomas Moore and Ilya Druzhnikov (New Brunswick, NJ and London, UK: Transaction Publishers, 1999), 335. 11. Ibid., 336–37. 12. Lynn Ellen Patyk, Written in Blood: Revolutionary Terrorism and Russian Literary Culture, 1861–1881 (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2017), 31–33. 13. Greta N. Slobin, Remizov’s Fictions, 1900–1921 (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1991), 141.

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14. Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), Chapter 4, “The Coasts of Utopia.” 15. From the final paragraphs of Tyutchev’s article, “Russia and Revolution” (“Rossiia i revoliutsiia,” 1848), quoted in Nicholas Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825–1855 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 156. 16. On tsarist era political police and the Siberian carceral regime, see Jonathan W. Daly, The Watchful State: Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1906–1917 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004); and Daniel Beer, The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile under the Tsars (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017). 17. Dmytryshyn, Imperial Russia, 274. 18. Aleksandr Herzen, S togo berega, in A. I. Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, Vol. 6 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1955), 5–142; cited in Francis B. Randall, “Herzen’s From the Other Shore,” Slavic Review 27, no. 1 (1968): 92–93. 19. Ibid., 93–95. 20. Victor Terras, ed., Handbook of Russian Literature (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1985), 192. 21. Gorky’s “Pesnia o burevestnike” (“The Song of the Stormy Petrel”) was first published in the journal Zhizn’ (Life) No. 4, in April 1901. 22. V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 11, translated from the Russian, ed. Clemens Dutt (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962), 139–40. “Before the Storm” was first published in the newspaper Proletarii (Proletariat) No. 1, August 21, 1906. On Lenin’s attitude toward revolution, see also Robert Service, “Storms before the Storm: 1912–1914,” in Robert Service, Lenin: A Political Life, Vol. 2: Worlds in Collision, 2nd Edition (New York, NY: MacMillan Press, 1995), 34–66. 23. Bertram D. Wolfe, The Bridge and the Abyss: The Troubled Friendship of Maxim Gorky and V. I. Lenin (New York, NY: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), 23, 26, 32. 24. Maxim Gorky, Mother, trans. Margaret Wettlin (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1954), 449, 260. 25. Mikhail Kol’tsov, Fel’etony i ocherki (Moscow: Pravda, 1956), 17–20; here and below, Kol’tsov is quoted in Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017), 124–25. My italics. 26. Slezkine, The House of Government, 126. 27. Marina Tsvetaeva, “Night.—Northeaster . . . ,” trans. and ed. Boris Dralyuk in 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (London: Pushkin Press, 2016), 20. 28. Dralyuk, 1917: Stories and Poems, 15–18. On the looting of wine cellars and liquor stores, see also Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution (New York, NY: Viking Penguin, 1996), 494–95. 29. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 400–402.

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30. Robert Payne, “Vladimir Mayakovsky,” in Vladimir Mayakovsky, Mayakovsky: Plays, trans. Guy Daniels (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995), 2. 31. Ibid., 6. 32. D. Burliuk et al., “Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” in Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928, ed. Anna Lawton, trans. Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), 51–52. Besides Mayakovsky, the other authors of the manifesto are David Burliuk, Aleksandr Kruchenykh, and Victor Khlebnikov. 33. Mystery-Bouffe: A Heroic, Epic, and Satiric Representation of Our Era (Second Version 1921) in Vladimir Mayakovsky, Mayakovsky: Plays, trans. Guy Daniels (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995), 57, 75, 80–83. 34. Ibid., 45–47. 35. Ibid., 49–50. 36. Ibid., 59, 56. 37. Ibid., 63. 38. Ibid., 82, 87–88. 39. Ibid., 88–89. My italics. 40. Ibid., 120, 124, 130–34. 41. Ibid., 134–35, 138–39. My italics. 42. Edward J. Brown, Russian Literature Since the Revolution, Revised and Enlarged Edition (Cambridge, MA and London, UK: Harvard University Press, 1982), 23–24. 43. Ibid., 43–44. These lines are excerpted from posthumous notes that Mayakovsky had intended for an extension of his poem, “At the Top of My Voice” (“Vo ves’ golos”), several lines of which appeared in his suicide note. The final lines (“In hours like these”) are Brown’s translation, and the penultimate (“There’s no need”) are my own.

Chapter 2

Roots of the Russian Intelligentsia

The turn of the twentieth century was a time of great change and uncertainty in Russia. At the bicentenary of the founding of St. Petersburg, the Russian experience had produced a crucible of competing ideologies stoked by clashing forces of progress and reaction. The Decembrist uprising of 1825 and revolutionary unrest in Europe had fueled the reactionary tenor of the regime of Nicholas I (1825–1855). His successor Aleksandr II initiated an era of Great Reforms, which delivered the Emancipation Manifesto abolishing serfdom in 1861, but critics found the measures too little and too late. Aleksandr the Liberator, as he came to be known, was assassinated in 1881 by Populist conspirators from the revolutionary organization the People’s Will (Narodnaia volia). It was the final assault of a series of attacks beginning in 1866 that can be considered the first acts of political terrorism in the modern age.1 Questions about the path Russia should take, or was destined to take, had traveled a long road before the assassins threw their bombs at Aleksandr’s carriage. Throughout the century, like many nations in the age of nationalism, Russia faced an identity crisis that shook it to the core. The number of outspoken individuals and the diversity of their perspectives grew more numerous and their voices more desperate and impatient as the century wore on. Finally, in the embers of 1905 and 1917, a revolutionary regime was forged, which altered the country in fundamental, but in a sense, predictable ways. Over the next two chapters I discuss the root causes that transformed Russia from an inflexible monarchy into an authoritarian leftwing dictatorship, which grew from conflicts spanning the long nineteenth and early twentieth century. Insofar as the birth of Soviet Communism in Russia is a complex progression, the history of the revolutionary movement is in large part the story of the evolution of the Russian intelligentsia. 43

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To understand Russian Communism, then, we need to examine the seeds that were planted in Russia’s native soil in the late eighteenth century; to see how they germinate through the storms and floods of the later imperial period; and find, finally, how the early twentieth century brought the fruits of revolution to Russia. It is helpful to get a grasp on who or what are intended by the Russian word intelligentsia. Referring, in the main, to a Westernized educated elite who exercised a capacity for critical thought and held a semi-oppositional stance toward Russia’s autocratic regime, the term came into common use in the middle of the nineteenth century. But its genesis can be located in the latter part of the eighteenth century when nobles were released from mandatory service to the state. Some members of the gentry prompted by their modern, humanist education were compelled to apply their talents and energy toward the betterment of conditions for the Russian people, who lived under an antiquated manorial system and suffered grievous social injustices. After initial attempts to advocate reform were met by reactionary reprisals from the autocratic rulers, however, the intelligentsia coalesced around their opposition to tsarist tyranny. The revolutionary movement gains momentum in the second half of the nineteenth century, when small-scale conspiratorial groups, working mainly through secret, underground cells, become increasingly radicalized.2 More a shared outlook and set of values than a class, the intelligentsia held a unique position in Russia, which sometimes set them apart and put them at odds with the rest of society. Rejecting the existing order and nurturing a self-image as righteous champions of the people’s cause, members of the intelligentsia formed a subculture with its own honor code and set of ethics. They played host to social circles, clubs, and clandestine organizations, and published (to the extent permitted by censors) their own partisan newspapers and journals.3 As many of the literati of the century belonged to this loose association of intellectuals, the main currents in Russian critical thought have made literature and society virtually inseparable in Russia. In modern Russia, the intellectual elite has traditionally performed the combined task of literary critic and social philosopher. This feature of Russian intellectual life crystallized with the emergence of a publicly active intelligentsia in the first half of the nineteenth century. Adding to that, the faculty of dignity or personality counted a great deal toward the identity of an intelligent. Some, who did not enjoy the privileged background conferred by noble status, depended on their intellectual work for a livelihood, which permitted them a degree of independence from the state. In the 1840s, men of the gentry dominated the intelligentsia, while in the 1860s a looser assortment known as raznochintsy—men of various ranks— brought the group into full awareness of its separate identity.4

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The latter represented a far more radical wing of the intelligentsia, who rejected any compromise with the regime. Believing only in violent struggle, they despised liberalism and civil law as so many tools of state oppression. In their view, the law was morally inferior to the peasants’ ancient customs and the interests of social justice. Later subsets of intelligentsia resorted to political extremism after failures of the Populist movement drove them to more radical measures following the 1870s. Vera Figner, for instance, speaks frankly in Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Zapechatlennyi trud, 1921–1922) of a “cult of the bomb and gun” in which “murder and the scaffold took on a magnetic charm.” Some radical intelligentsia deemed it a matter of good taste to sympathize with terrorists who assassinated high-profile government officials, and wealthy citizens were even known to patronize their cause with large donations of money.5 The doctrinaire character of the radical intelligentsia shouldn’t be underestimated. From the start, theirs was a youthful rebellion against the artistic dabbling of their fathers’ generation, the so-called “men of the 40s.” Questioning all authority, moral and religious, its members shared a militant utilitarianism, materialism, and rejection of tradition. More than idealism, their uncompromising moral stand was intolerant and absolutist to the point of dogmatism. Turgenev drew a caricature of the radical “nihilists” in the protagonist of his novel Fathers and Sons (Ottsy i deti, 1862), but the real-life radicals took it to be an honest portrait of themselves and adopted the hero Bazarov as one of their patron saints.6 Progressive ideas—which in Europe’s climate of pluralism and healthy skepticism had been forced to compete with other doctrines and attitudes—in Russia, where the censor forbade political expression, became frozen in abstract dogmas. Prone to an egocentric, heroic fanaticism, the radical intelligentsia believed the fate of humanity rested on the outcome of their doctrinal struggles. They viewed the movement of history as the forces of progress vs. reaction, which admitted no gray area. Historian Orlando Figes argues that herein lies the source of Soviet authoritarianism, and thus the origins of totalitarianism.7 Turning now to the roots and development of the Russian intelligentsia, this chapter begins with an overview of its history, from inception to later bifurcation along ideological lines, and concludes with an analysis of the complex position occupied by the intelligentsia in the Soviet state after 1917. The tragedy of the Russian intelligentsia is that the cultural branch becomes a “surrogate bourgeoisie” (Christopher Read’s term) who end up as scapegoats, victimized by the radical, revolutionary faction. The radical intelligentsia renounced the bourgeoisie along with what they considered the bourgeois intelligentsia, and called for their suppression as a class. Thus, many thinkers and writers who could be considered intelligentsia in the original sense of the word were later lumped in with the bourgeoisie and persecuted as class

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enemies. Yet few organizers of the revolutionary underground belonged to the working class themselves. Looking at the derivation of the Russian intelligentsia and tracing its development through the nineteenth century, we can form a picture of how and why the Revolution, tragically, saw the intelligentsia turn on itself and victimize the class of thinkers who had originally hatched the dream of the Russian people’s liberation. RADISHCHEV’S MONSTERS In 1767 Empress Catherine II (the Great) convened a Legislative Commission to replace the outdated Muscovite Code of Laws. The Commission recommended a new, progressive code permeated with ideas based in the French Enlightenment, which were drafted in a document called the Nakaz (“Instruction”). Catherine’s historic program of reform was a model of the so-called enlightened absolutism. But while the Nakaz reads well in theory, it was never put into practice as a bona fide civil code, and its democratic ideals were destined to remain locked in a hypothetical realm where they couldn’t impinge upon the monarch’s unassailable, absolute authority. Meanwhile the rise of satirical journals in the mid-eighteenth century had an enormous impact on the development of Russian literature and came to exercise a powerful political influence against the autocratic state. Writer and editor Nikolai Novikov (1744–1818) held so much sway that Catherine created her own journal to comment on his articles. She knew there were problems in her empire and that sooner or later criticisms would be published, so she created a new kind of satire to soften the impact: she required that all journals use only “smiling satire” (ulibatel’naia satira)—innocuous caricature directed at bad habits, personal foibles, and social types, without naming names. Criticism of the empress and her regime was strictly forbidden. To enforce the proscriptions, Catherine read and scrutinized everything that was written, and all literary activity was subject to Her Majesty’s control. In effect, the self-styled “enlightened despot” was at once supreme ruler of the state and its chief ideologue and censor. But if Catherine thought she could keep the bourgeoning journalism within the range of smiling satire, she was mistaken. Any progressive thinker wants to upset the status quo, especially when motivated by a humanitarian mission. Yet those who believed they could defy and taunt the all-powerful tsarina were also sorely misguided. After the French Revolution in 1789 toppled the monarchy in France, Catherine no longer found it prudent to allow the likes of Novikov to undermine her rule. First his printing press was confiscated, and then he was locked in the Schlüsselburg Fortress for fifteen years. Catherine’s son Emperor Paul later set Novikov free, but the former nemesis to the most powerful woman in Europe never returned to writing.

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The life of Aleksandr Radishchev (1749–1802) follows a similar trajectory. Radishchev began his literary career in the late eighteenth century translating works from French on democratic republicanism, proclaiming that monarchy was the worst and cruelest form of government. This was the start of a precipitous slope. In his seminal work Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu, 1790) Radishchev condemns the Russian institution of serfdom as inhumane and denounces the aristocratic landowners who felt entitled to beat, rape, and kill their peasants. The book provoked the ire of Empress Catherine, who, despite her pretensions to enlightenment, sentenced Radishchev to ten years of Siberian exile for his brazenness. The author served his stretch, but by the time he regained his freedom was a broken man, and he took his own life shortly thereafter. In Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow Radishchev uses organic metaphors paired with terrifying images of monsters, phantoms, and avenging hordes. Quoting from his own poem “An Ode to Liberty,” he cries, “Behold a horrible monster, hydra-like, with a hundred heads! It looks mild and its eyes are ever full of tears, but its jaws are full of venom. It tramples upon the earthly powers, and stretches its head up toward Heaven, which it claims as its native home. It sows false phantoms and darkness everywhere, and commands all to believe blindly.” This “religious superstition,” the traveling poet tells us, together with “political superstition” is inimical to freedom: “In the shadow of slavish peace no golden fruit can grow; where everything hinders the spirit’s striving, nothing great can thrive.”8 These sowing and reaping tropes are models of the same we’ll find in use throughout the following century and the revolutionary era. As are the images of retributive violence. Radishchev foretells an imminent reckoning, with reference to an avenger coming to proclaim liberty. Here the language takes an apocalyptic mood that sets the tone for later revolutionary prophecy: “Everywhere martial hosts will arise, hope will arm all; everyone hastens to wash off his shame in the blood of the crowned tormentor. Everywhere I see the flash of the sharp sword; death, flying about in various forms, hovers over the proud head. Rejoice, fettered people! The avenging law of nature has brought the king to block.” The retaliating hordes are the people, those who tilled the soil but were forced to relinquish the fruits of their labors to the benefit of the landowning class. Further in Radishchev’s divination, the people now sit on the throne and castigate the vanquished king: “Garnering with bloody sweat the fruit I planted for sustenance, dividing my crumbs with you, I did not spare my strength. But to you all treasures are insufficient!” What follows is “an account of the kingdom of Liberty” whose achievements include security, peace, and well-being. Radishchev shows, however, that he is not a naïve idealist, continuing, “But the passions that goad men to madness . . . turn the civil peace into disaster.” Then, in a

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Dostoevskian turn avant la lettre: “This is the law of nature: from tyranny, freedom is born; from freedom, slavery.” Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow foregrounds the Enlightenment notion that natural law (zakon prirody) inheres in human society as a birthright. Patyk argues that Radishchev draws the reader into the immediacy of experience through first-person narration in order to awaken our sensitivity to the injustices that violate that code. His means of instructing the universal truth to his readers is the crux of the text. Building to an emotional outburst, he prophesies the retribution of the population. Thus modulating the emotional response to end in violence, he condones the right of citizens to exact revenge on an abuser of their natural rights in order to defend themselves from tyranny and oppression. “Radishchev lays the groundwork,” Patyk concludes, “for the moral, emotional, and legal sanction of political murder.” While violence is rejected in the end, it is because of its futility rather than immorality. “In the meantime, Radishchev has done all he could to make such acts legible, moral, and exemplary.”9 Radishchev is thought of by later generations as a forerunner of the intelligentsia and an inspiration to their revolutionary struggle. The language of retributive social justice in the form of rebellion and cataclysm would become the vernacular of the revolutionary movement through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. It is worth noting in this context, however, that many adherents of the secular crusade were staunch utilitarians and atheists, while Radishchev criticized arguments for materialism. He expounded that a belief in immortality is necessary for the maintenance of absolute moral standards; therefore, the existence of the soul must be postulated if the unity of consciousness is to be accounted for. Novikov, similarly, emphasized the need for moral idealism to counteract the destructive spirit of an exclusively rationalist Enlightenment.10 The difference in outlook between moral idealists and rational materialists is the dichotomy that drives a wedge from the midnineteenth century onward between divergent factions of the intelligentsia, which I alluded to at the beginning of this chapter and discuss further below. Indeed, the heritage of the Enlightenment gets funneled through a variety of philosophical systems and other influences. In the first quarter of the century, for the time being, insurgency takes the form of constitutional republicanism inspired by the French Revolution. THE DECEMBRIST MYTH After December 1825, the individuals who came to be the new heralds of Enlightenment ideals, as well as martyrs for the cause, would be known as Decembrists. Seeds of their rebellion grew from a clandestine organization

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called the Union of Welfare (originally the Union of Salvation), which advocated for social, economic, and political reform. Many members of the Union had been Russian officers in the campaign against Napoleon. After his unsuccessful invasion of Russia, their pursuit of the Grande Armée back to France delivered an opportunity to absorb Western ideas of liberalism and republicanism, which they brought home with them to Russia for discussion in gatherings of literary and historical societies and clandestine intellectual circles. Later their ideas as well as martyrdom at the hands of the reactionary tsarist regime would inspire a myth-like primogeniture. The Union of Welfare spelled out their aims in a confidential document called the Statute of the Union of Welfare. Members of the Union committed themselves to active service in hospitals, orphanages, dungeons, and prisons to carry out their aims. “The Union is fully convinced that the government is generally sympathetic with all of this,” reads a portion of the document. But the circumstances leave no question that this was merely wishful thinking. (Who had put the people in dungeons and prisons, after all?) In order to avoid the “censure of malice and jealousy,” the authors reason further, the Union’s activity must be conducted in secrecy. In truth, the Union’s aspirations were kept confidential and its activities conducted in secret because they represented ideals of the Western Enlightenment which were considered threatening, as they were in Catherine’s time, to the sovereignty of the Russian autocracy.11 Yet they seem innocuous at first blush. Per the Statute, the aims of the Union are grounded, above all, in good morals. All that follows will stem from one objective—to disseminate “the true rules of morality and enlightenment among fellow citizens.” These rules are predestined by the Creator, and upheld by reason, manners, honor and nobility, through which justice must prevail. Members are obliged to be guided not by lust for glory, but by a desire for the common welfare. This accords with the next aims, which are philanthropy, education, justice, and national economy. Notably, justice and economy are served by the development of minds and manners—which might seem well and good, barring one glaring sin by omission: is justice not served by the tsar? In a bid for support of the government, however, Catherine’s Nakaz is cited, per the empress’s instruction: “If their minds are inadequately prepared for [the laws], then assume the responsibility of preparing them and you will accomplish thereby a great deal.” The chief idea is to prepare the minds of the citizenry before imposing new laws; thus, again, reason and good manners as well as justice and the tenets of natural law are keys. The Union pledges to disseminate genuine principles of virtue “among all estates”—including, by implication, the peasantry. The objective is to educate the masses, whose welfare depends on rectitude and moral integrity. Vices will

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be eradicated: baseness, vile passions, hypocrisy, extortion, cruelty toward subordinates, or any preference for personal rather than public gains. The aim, counting all classes and ranks, is the common good, so that public opinion will serve as a moral tribunal and good habits prevail in the welfare of the Russian people. Virtue is the pillar upon which every other aim is based. In the dissemination of knowledge, however, satire is indicated as a tool for working toward diverting people away from books that are contrary to the aims of the Union. Tellingly, “Only the truly elegant will be allowed in literature and everything that is either bad or mediocre will be eliminated.” This point reminds us that the society is composed of elites from the nobility—the protointelligentsia which hadn’t yet opened its ranks to the low ranking and mixedclass intellectuals of the raznochintsy (more below). It is also interesting that foreign education is discouraged. In spite of the liberal Western ideals that inspired the document, an emphasis is placed on the importance of Russian nationality. Parents are discouraged from educating their children in foreign countries, and the Union promises to scrutinize foreigners, “who, in addition to sowing dissension and corruption in households, instill in children contempt for [everything that is] native and an attachment to [things that are] foreign.” Next to good morals, justice is held up as a primary goal of the program. To eradicate lust for power and disregard for human rights, the Union will supervise government business and support honest officials, promote deserving individuals, and attempt to redirect the dishonest and depraved—but, failing that, deprive them of the opportunity to do further harm. The aims of the Union of Welfare conclude with very practical concerns on national economy, trade, and agriculture, where economy is recognized as the foundation of national wealth and grounds for uniting all the social estates: “The Union will pay particular attention to agriculture and to all forms of cultivation of the soil in order to develop useful produce; it will support every useful industry in the state.” It pledges as well to back merchants and industrialists, and foreign trade. Clearly, transformation of the agrarian economy is a major priority in order to foster equality of opportunity and enjoy prosperity through industriousness. This implies without direct statement that social and economic restructuring included reform of the institution of serfdom. Here more than anywhere else, one senses just how politically charged the document is and why the members were sworn to secrecy. The overarching aim of the call to justice is to educate all Russians in the truth that “the general prosperity of the people is infallibly based on private [prosperity] and that every individual, regardless of his estate, has the right to use it.” This statement is emphasized in the original, indicating, as does the tenor of the whole document, that the institution of serfdom is one of the main sources of injustice and hardship in the empire, which the Union aims in the long run to call the government to account for.

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In all, the Statute is more than a petition for improvement of minds and morals. Proposing to supervise and intervene in government function, the members of the Union have drafted a plan for total social, economic, and political restructuring, a nineteenth-century perestroika of sorts. Starting with reform of habits and manners, it aspires toward elimination of inequality and injustice, for reason and natural law dictate that these are essential ingredients for harmony in a modern, prosperous society. More, it verges on utopianism. This is several years before French Utopian Socialism took root in Russia, but its impetus can be felt. Utopian Socialism was a doctrine which had its origins in social thinkers who inspired the French Revolution, and its wake continued to influence socialist movements across Europe, reaching Russia in the 1830s–1840s, where it burgeoned into homegrown Russian revolutionism. After members of the Union staged their ill-fated revolt against Nicholas I, the Decembrists’ legacy would grow to be a font of inspiration and ideological blueprint of sorts for future insurgent groups—each building their own iteration of the myth. For example, Lenin, in his article “In Memory of Herzen” (1912), summarizes the contributions of those whom he saw as architects of the revolutionary tradition—only five years before he would lead his own party’s seizure of power in October 1917. Written in honor of Herzen’s centennial, it extols the Decembrists’ historical role as revolutionary forerunners. Although they belonged to the nobility and were too distant from the people, Lenin says, the Decembrists stirred Herzen, Chernyshevsky, and others who made the revolutionary movement more democratic: The Decembrists roused Herzen. Herzen deployed revolutionary agitation. The revolutionary raznochintsy took over, broadened, strengthened and tempered it, beginning with Chernyshevsky and ending with the heroes of the People’s Will. The circle of fighters became wider, their tie to the people closer. “Young navigators of the future storm,” Herzen called them. But this was not the real storm.12

Lenin’s premonition of the greater, “real” storm to come is ominous. It fits with a trope propagated by revolutionary thinkers who saw all the failed and fledgling efforts toward reform as so many preambles to a Real Day coming soon, when true, retributive justice of Radishchev’s prophesy would dawn. In The Decembrist Myth in Russian Culture, Ludmilla Trigos puts the question of why Lenin would choose the Decembrists as his progenitors instead of Radishchev or peasant revolt leaders like Emelyan Pugachev or Stenka Razin. The answer has to do with class and cultural policy that Lenin was interested in devising, which would become an important basis for promoting the legitimacy of Bolshevik authority after the Revolution. For when Lenin wrote the article, he had been grappling with the question of the

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educated elite’s role as a vanguard to lead the masses. The Decembrists were an important link to justify the social distance between them: He points to the Decembrists, the era’s most progressive thinkers, as important models for the group that later became the Bolsheviks, most of whom had origins in the intelligentsia rather than the working class. Only after the Bolshevik revolution in October 1917, led by a revolutionary vanguard purportedly for the workers and peasants’ benefit, did Lenin and others begin to think about the relationship of the Bolsheviks and their predecessors to the common people.13

The fact that the Bolsheviks derived from the intelligentsia rather than the people was an important sticking point that Lenin’s party would have to work to overcome. As the intelligentsia split into factions, Bolshevik self-stylization as a revolutionary vanguard gave them occasion to weaponize language while they worked to ensconce Soviet Power through force of propaganda and cultural policy. As we shall see, the Bolshevik ideology, while ostensibly based on social justice, was far removed from the Decembrists’ emphasis on virtue and Enlightenment ideals. QUEST FOR A NATIONAL IDENTITY After Nicholas I suppressed the Decembrist revolt, the revolutionary movement was forced deeper underground. There, in spite of persistent reactionary measures of the Nicholas government, including a branch called the Third Department, designed specially to weed out sedition, the nuclei of Decembrist aims would germinate throughout the century and flourish eventually in ways that probably would have surprised or even disconcerted the Decembrist rebels themselves. The individuals and groups who initiated the movements that would lead toward revolutionary change in Russia were characterized by a fusion of culture and politics. The rise of literary journalism in the 1820s and 1830s occurred in tandem with the rise of prose, and both stimulated each other to create a literary culture which acted as a leading force of national life. One reason literary polemics were such a valuable forum for political expression was the degree of official censorship and suppression of liberal thought by the monarchy after 1825 and the severity of Nicholas’s crackdown. Also important was the paramount influence of Western literary culture, philosophy, and social theory. Russian literati had already evinced a strong tendency to take their cues from Western Europe since the advent of eighteenth-century Russian Classicism. Now, during the first half of the nineteenth century, intellectual currents such as German Romantic Idealism

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and French Socialist Utopianism paired literature and social reform with particular cogency, leading to the flowering of the Russian intelligentsia from the 1820s through the 1840s and the advent of a new national consciousness. From this point forward, writers and thinkers viewed national identity as a chief concern and pursued it as an urgent quest. In the ensuing decades, the influence of the West divided the Russian intelligentsia into a complex and sustained debate of opposing factions referred to generally as Westernizers and Slavophiles (zapadniki and slavianofily). Slavophiles saw in pre-Petrine Russia the true way of life of their people and passionately advocated a return to native principles and expurgation of the “Western disease” (as they saw it) of individualism. Their opponents, a more diverse group known as Westernizers, ranged from moderates, who argued that the Western historical path was the model that Russia needed to follow, to radicals, who challenged religion, society, and the entire Russian and European system. The debate between Slavophiles and Westernizers demonstrated that Russia’s internal contradictions stemmed from issues of political and cultural identity that were hotly debated in contemporary philosophy. Slavophiles and Westernizers, generally speaking, both saw in the collectivist spirit of the peasant commune a bulwark against Western industrialization, capitalism, and the middle class. Read notes, “They found common ground in abominating bourgeois values, especially vulgar materialism, preoccupation with money making and the hypocrisy of liberalism.” As the intelligentsia matured, so too did attitudes toward modernization evolve; yet debates still raged between proponents of Western liberalism vs. native conservatism, individualism vs. collectivism, and positivism vs. idealism. Struggles between the creative (cultural or artistic) intelligentsia, and the political (revolutionary) intelligentsia persisted, a dichotomy discussed in greater detail in chapter 4.14 Literary and social critic Vissarion Belinsky (1811–1848) pinpointed these differences in his call for a Russian literature with a unifying national character, which he called narodnost’ from the root narod meaning “folk” or the Russian people. Belinsky’s vision for a national Russian culture derived from the folk is not so much given with a patriotic thrust, as with the purpose of establishing a philosophy of Russian life to give it shape and direction. After Belinsky, national character became a hub around which many intellectual debates evolved. Yet it was necessary to form some kind of systematic conception of the Russian reality before its true national character could be defined. For this purpose the leading thinkers turned (perhaps ironically, if Russian nationality was the question) to contemporary German philosophy. Here, they found an intellectual orientation based in metaphysics. Ideas of German metaphysicists like Hegel, Schelling, and Fichte almost permeated the air in Russia in these decades (1830s–1840s). Belinsky adapted his

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own ideas not to any rigid dogma, but to the purpose of creating a national literature—a literature that could be the free consciousness of Russian society. Belinsky’s importance lies most in the fact that he provided an emerging critical tradition with a passionate and resounding statement of principle.15 Another consequential thinker whose views on Russian history and culture made a significant impact on the early intelligentsia was Petr Chaadaev (1794–1856). Through much of the era, Russia was plagued by the sense of an absence in the country of an independent cultural life. This became the stimulus for some of its most incisive critical thought, such as a letter by Chaadaev in which he mounted a scathing criticism of his nation’s historical development. Chaadaev’s Philosophical Letters, written in French, had circulated in manuscript starting in 1829 and were finally published in the Moscow journal Teleskop (Telescope) in 1836. The journal, for which Belinsky had written since 1833, was suppressed for publishing Chaadaev’s Letters, while Chaadaev himself was declared insane and placed under police supervision. What was so threatening about Chaadaev’s views? It was the first of these letters that provoked such a controversy. In it, he takes a broad historical perspective, defining Russia in terms of the movement and development of peoples and nations. Russia was neither East nor West, and it possessed none of the traditions of either, nor had it achieved their progress. Divorced from time, it lay untouched by the education of mankind. Russia had developed no proper habits, rules, nor anything to awaken sympathy or compassion. Russian culture left nothing durable or lasting; its people were merely casting about: “In our own houses we seem to be camping, in our families we look like strangers, in our cities we look like nomads, even more than the nomads who tend their herds on our steppes, for they are more attached to their wastelands than we to our cities.”16 Chaadaev briefly picks up the storm metaphor, but with a twist—Russia had missed its growth spurt of Sturm und Drang: Every nation has its period of stormy agitation, of passionate unease, of hasty activities. . . . This is a time of great passions, strong emotions, great national undertakings. At such times nations toss about violently, without any apparent object, but not without benefit for future generations. All societies have gone through such phases. Such periods provide them with their most vivid memories, their legends, their poetry, their greatest and most productive ideas; such periods represent the necessary basis of every society. Otherwise societies would have nothing valuable or cherished in their memory; they would value only the dust of the earth they inhabit.

This phase of development, which Chaadaev called a nation’s adolescence, failed to occur in Russia, he says, because it had gone from barbarism and

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superstition to cruel and humiliating foreign domination (by the Mongols)— “the spirit of which was later inherited by our national rulers.” It had experienced no period of exuberant activity, nor any powerful teachings. Instead, contact with other nations had resulted in borrowed, ready-made ideas which did not foster natural development. Russia was like a nation of children who had never been made to think for themselves. Russians did not invent anything, he maintained, “while from the inventions of others we borrowed only the deceptive appearances and the useless luxuries.” Russia had none of the virtues of a mature, highly cultured people. Peter the Great had tried to teach his Russian subjects education and enlightenment, but they hadn’t rubbed off. “What renders us so indifferent to the hazards of life renders us indifferent also to all good, all evil, all truth, all deceit, and . . . it is precisely this which deprives us of all those powerful motives which lead men to perfect themselves.” Furthermore, coming back from the glorious triumph of defeating Napoleon, Russian officers brought only evil ideas and baneful errors, which “resulted in an immense calamity that set us back half a century.” Russia was absorbed, moreover, in religious separatism (per the Orthodox Church, which developed from the Eastern, Byzantine branch of Christianity), while the Christian world traveled on its proper road marked out by the Creator. In sum, Chaadaev maintains that while mankind marches toward its destiny, Russia lags behind in darkness and obscurity. He concludes that Russia lived in the narrowest of presents, without a discernible past or future, without original thinkers nor traditions of its own, and had offered nothing of substance to the future of the world. Chaadaev’s commentaries indicate enormous, perhaps insurmountable, liabilities and internal contradictions. The controversy he stirred, however, was hardly a novel concept, but a poignant expression of a common feeling among his contemporaries in the early decades of the nineteenth century. His views would spur debates for the remainder of the century as Russia stood at the crossroads of the age of revolutions. Russia existed to teach the world a great lesson, he maintained, but what was it? Radical thinkers of the next generation acted with greater certainty that they knew. In particular, they subscribed to a millenarian belief that a day was coming when Russia would break free from her chains of blind ignorance and tyranny. Meanwhile they read signposts in works by Gogol, Ostrovsky, Turgenev, and others, that come down to us today as classics of world literature. Wary of censorship and the threat of exile, all sides in the unofficial debate about Russia’s future expressed their ideas in works of fiction, literary criticism, and philosophical and religious tracts, rather than direct political language. The 1850s and 1860s were pivotal decades in Russia that gave impetus to the further development of revolutionary ideas, which would culminate over the next half century.

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Isaiah Berlin’s classic essay “The Birth of the Russian Intelligentsia” surveys the era when a Romantic idea takes hold of the early intelligentsia—the notion that individuals, groups, and institutions all share in the fundamental quality that each has its own unique, organic purpose. Coordinating naturally in a single, universal purpose or “spirit,” each may not be aware that they have it, but coming to awareness of that spirit is the very process of enlightenment. Russians borrowed and adapted this brand of social philosophy from Europe, especially German Romantic Idealism, which Berlin likens to an underground stream: The task of the philosopher was to discern the march of history, or of what was, somewhat mysteriously, called “the Idea,” and discover whither it was carrying mankind. History was an enormous river, the direction of which could, however, only be observed by people with a capacity for a special kind of deep, inner contemplation. No amount of observation of the outer world would ever teach you where this inward Drang, this subterranean current, led. To uncover it was to be at one with it; the development both of your individual self as a rational being, and of society, depended upon a correct assessment of the spiritual direction of the larger “organism” to which you belonged.17

The Russians may have been “liberated” by the great German metaphysical writers. Through these decades, however, the question lingered ever pervasively: Who were the Russian heroes, and when would they make their appearance on history’s stage? “WHEN WILL THE REAL DAY COME?” Herzen’s influence in the realm of ideas was great, but he was too individualistic and too uniquely devoted to the idea of personality to figure greatly as a leader among successive generations. After the untimely death of Belinsky at the age of only forty-seven in June 1848, the leadership among the progressive intelligentsia passed to a handful of thinkers known as Civic Critics, owing to their radical social agenda. Their cultural and class alignments are significant, since, deriving from the so-called raznochintsy of mixed-class origin, they differ greatly from the Decembrists, who descended from the nobility. Without a social identity of their own to cleave to, the cause of social justice and the burgeoning revolutionary movement becomes their social identity and indeed their existential purpose.18 This is also the period when serious divides between the revolutionary intelligentsia and the creative intelligentsia are beginning to form. Their relationship is characterized initially by aesthetic and ideological differences,

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waged chiefly through literary polemics, followed by some degree of compromise and collaboration; by the end of the century, however, it was all-out class war. The importance of the nineteenth-century novel at this point in time is hard to overstate. Russian prose, following the lead of early publicists Novikov and Radishchev, had already become a powerful mechanism of public debate. Now it became a vehicle for authors and critics to project images of revolutionary change.19 Among others, including nihilist Dmitri Pisarev and Populist theoreticians Petr Lavrov and Nikolai Mikhailovskii, two critics named Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828–1889) and Nikolai Dobroliubov (1836–1861) came to fuel the engines of revolutionary thought. Chernyshevsky famously wrote in his doctoral thesis The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality (Esteticheskie otnosheniia iskusstva k deistvitel’nosti, 1855) that art is merely a pale imitation of reality and therefore always inferior to the reality it represents. He was an avid reader of Belinsky, whose work had been suppressed in the reactionary years since his death, and, like Dobroliubov, thought of himself as Belinsky’s successor. However, the Civic Critics absolutely lacked the refinement of Belinsky’s appreciation of aesthetic values in literature. For Chernyshevsky, and likewise Dobroliubov, Gogol’s value was purely as a social satirist. With Studies of the Age of Gogol (Ocherki gogolevskogo perioda russkoi literatury, 1855–1856) and other works on economic and social questions, Chernyshevsky laid the foundation of utilitarian, civic criticism, and became the recognized leader of a generation of like-minded young radicals. Believing only in Western science and the principle of progress, they regarded literary texts merely as source documents for drawing utilitarian lessons. They rejected anything that smacked of Romanticism and viewed the Russian peasant as a reservoir of proto-socialist ideals. They were strongly influenced in this respect by the Left Hegelian, German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, and by French Utopian Socialists such as Saint-Simon, Louis Blanc, and Charles Fourier. As literary historian D. S. Mirsky describes them, Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov formed the nucleus of a new kind of plebeian intelligentsia dedicated to promoting revolutionary socialism: Both were the sons of comparatively prosperous and highly venerated priests. While rejecting all the traditional ideas of their homes, they retained much of the moral atmosphere they had been brought up in: they were puritans—almost ascetics—and fanatics. Herzen called them the “bilious set,” and Turgenev said to Chernyshevsky on one occasion, “You are a snake, but Dobroliubov is a rattlesnake.” They were plebeians, uncontaminated by the artistic and aesthetic culture of the educated gentry, and they simply had no use for any non-utilitarian cultural values. . . . A new plebeian intelligentsia, risen from the people and

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imbued with scientific rationalism, was to build a new Russia in place of the corrupt land of serfdom.20

This plebeian intelligentsia, as Mirsky defines it, would grow to become a significant force in the doctrinaire socialist groups that fomented revolution in later decades leading up to 1917. In a fate that echoed that of Radishchev and Novikov, Chernyshevsky was arrested in 1862 for disseminating revolutionary proclamations, and he served time in St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress before being sent to Siberian exile. The same fortress had housed Dostoevsky before his own exile and would intern a who’s who of revolutionary radicals from the later generation, including Bakunin, Nechaev, Gorky, and Trotsky. Unique in Chernyshevsky’s case was the fact that he managed to write and smuggle out of the prison a novel which, against all odds, evaded censors to be published. It would go on to become one of the greatest inspirations for radicals, who saw What Is To Be Done? (Chto delat’? 1863) as a revolutionary handbook of sorts. Vladimir Lenin even borrowed its title for his own political pamphlet of the same name, published in 1902, in which Lenin spells out his highly contentious thesis that workers will never become class conscious on their own but depend on the Party to be a political vanguard to lead them.21 Chernyshevsky’s work is remembered most for its hero Rakhmetov, an ascetic nihilist who, despite coming across as somewhat wooden and unrealistic, represents the ideal revolutionary hero at a time when models for positive heroes were few.22 Rakhmetov possessed superhuman will, an unyielding capacity for self-denial, and single-minded dedication to the cause. He was an inspiration to nihilists of the 1860s, and later Lenin, who claimed that Chernyshevsky’s book changed and reshaped him, and converted him to the revolutionary movement.23 A significant and often quoted excerpt from What Is To Be Done? is the fourth of a series of dreams by the novel’s heroine Vera Pavlovna. In an apotheosis of utopian pastoral imagery, Vera sees meadows decked with flowers, as nature rejoices in a flourishing Eden-like paradise. An enormous edifice—a palace unlike any seen in the largest capitals, built of cast iron and glass—stands amid impossibly abundant fields of grain (“Who ever saw such grain?”), plus gardens and orchards, whose richness is exaggerated to excess with the ring of a Homeric epic. The inhabitants are busy with harvest time, working quickly and singing. Vera marvels at the otherworldly beauty but senses its natural unaffectedness: “But how can it help going on and how can they help singing?” Most of the work is done by machines while the men look on and supervise. The utopian passage seems otherworldly to the dreamer, but the heroine prophecies its manifestation in her native land: “Are these really our people? Is this really our country? I heard their song; they speak

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Russian.”24 Indeed, Chernyshevsky’s book, especially the utopian dream of Vera Pavlovna at its heart, would achieve a lasting impact and motivate generations of utopian dreamers in the Russian revolutionary movement to bring the Russian Eden to life. Dobroliubov, like Chernyshevsky, was destined to be canonized a saint of the radical intelligentsia, which his early death at age twenty-five in the very year of the Emancipation made all the more certain. He was read assiduously by all the radical intelligentsia from 1860 on. However, while his commentary centered on works of fiction, his writing doesn’t easily qualify as literary criticism, since his sole concern was their potential for political grist, which he pursued with single-minded tenacity. He wanted to inspire a democratic intelligentsia, whose faith in progress and desire to serve the people would replace the lazy, morally defunct gentry, and consign everything related to the traditions of Old Russia to the dust bin of history.25 Dobroliubov published an article on the plays of Aleksandr Ostrovsky called “The Kingdom of Darkness” (“Temnoe tsarstvo,” 1859) and another on Ostrovsky’s play The Storm (Groza, 1859) entitled “A Ray of Light in the Kingdom of Darkness” (“Luch sveta v temnom tsarstve,” 1860). The Storm is a work of social criticism that captured the tensions of the late 1850s and shaped the outlook of the men of the 60s, whose radicalism would inspire a new era of revolutionary fervor. Dobroliubov considered the play a harbinger of the changes occurring in Russian society—Tsar Aleksandr II had yet to carry out his program of liberal reforms including emancipation of the serfs— and called the play’s heroine “a ray of light in a kingdom of darkness.” The storm of the play’s title is anticipated by all, but it never comes to pass in the course of the drama. Yet Dobroliubov saw the play as something of a revolutionary prophecy. As Terras puts it, “Ostrovsky’s plays are hardly treated as dramatic literature but rather as documents detailing the cruelty of the oppressors and the resignation of their victims.” In his broadly interpretative reading of The Storm, Dobroliubov “departs even further from the text of the play (as most would read it), seeing in the pitiful figure of the ignorant and superstitious Katerina, the suicide, something like a symbol of revolution.” Later the same year, Dobroliubov penned his most overtly mutinous work, an article on Turgenev’s novel On the Eve (Nakanune, 1860), called “When Will the Real Day Come?” (“Kogda zhe pridet nastoiashchii den’?”). Once again the critic values Turgenev’s highly lyrical prose only insofar as it provides him material for sociopolitical analysis.26 Turgenev’s hero Insarov is a Bulgarian revolutionary, and Dobroliubov asks why he was not Russian—the answer to which, glossed over by Dobroliubov, is quite simply that Turgenev would not have been able to pass a literary portrait of a Russian revolutionary past the censor. Like Rakhmetov and Turgenev’s nihilist caricature Bazarov of Fathers and Sons, Insarov is a single-minded zealot of the revolutionary

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struggle, so much so that he lacks the human qualities that would make him a genuine hero. For Dobroliubov, though, and for the next generation of dedicated radicals, each of these were taken as serious role models, enough for them to wonder when the “Real Day” would see these New Men come to life in a new Russia. The radicals would call themselves “thinking realists,” but they accepted the label “nihilists” that their opponents had stuck them with. Two such radicals, Dmitrii Pisarev and Mikhail Bakunin, preached a gospel of destruction, believing conditions had to deteriorate first in order to get better. Anything that collapsed as a result of their exertions, they believed, was not worth saving. Bakunin is famous for advancing the position that since Russia was rotten to the core, to destroy it was a positive, creative act. He also used the proverbial storm imagery to augur the inevitability of change. As far back as 1842 Bakunin had written under an alias in an article about reaction in Germany that “even in Russia, the boundless snow-covered kingdom so little known, and which perhaps also has a great future in store, even in Russia dark clouds are gathering, heralding storm. Oh, the air is sultry and pregnant with lightning.” The conclusion that “The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!” would become a byword for both anarchism and the avant-garde in the fin-de-siècle age when destruction would be held as a common denominator for art and revolution.27 Even Chernyshevsky had proclaimed, “The worse the better,” and advocated emancipation of the serfs without land, so that peasant farmers, in their desperate situation, would rise up against the local landowners. Lenin later adopted the same outlook, opposing humanitarian relief after the famine of 1891. He believed that the people could not bring about their own salvation and had to be forced to be free. In the end, the legacy of the generation of Civic Critics was a radicalized intelligentsia who approached revolutionary action with the dedication of uncompromising zealotry. This is the brand of intelligentsia radicalism that the humanist-oriented cultural intelligentsia would oppose with mounting alarm.28 POPULISM TO DICTATORSHIP The question remains: what drove the intelligentsia from their position of humanitarian idealism toward alienation, rebellion, conspiratorial activity, and revolutionary terror? Some of the catalyst may be found in the fact that the raznochintsy were not a privileged group and were denied admittance to the educated, cultured elite by the gentry establishment. They therefore had no concrete basis for subscribing to a philosophy of humanism. On a personal level, their development of personality was hampered by poor material

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conditions and a perception of inferiority. As Martin Malia puts it, “Indeed, the alienation of the intelligentsia arose much less from their sense of difference from the masses than from their hostility to the majority of the gentry, whom they considered to be poorly educated in their military schools, uninterested in ideas as such, brutal, boorish, and overbearing.” For this underprivileged class of intelligenty, then, a resentment toward their social betters who rejected them meant utilitarian ideology became their primary tool for confronting a hostile world, alien to their experience and outlook.29 On the other hand, many of the Populists were children of wealthy noblemen, conscious of their privileged status and because of it, ridden with guilt and shame. The path to radical extremism by many Populists may stem from their own cultural isolation in this respect. The roots of Populism are in Herzen, and after him, the intelligentsia’s idealization of the peasantry. Herzen also called the movement “Young Russia,” by which he meant peasant Russia, believing the peasant commune was a repository of ancient tradition, an organic symbol of Russia’s authentic condition. The source of freedom, harking back to the roots of intelligentsia thought, was in the people, and the source of oppression in the tsarist autocracy. In deference to the tradition inaugurated by Radishchev, in a preface to the 1858 edition of Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, Herzen wrote, “How can this martyr be anything but dear to our hearts?” As the century wore on, conscience-stricken nobles sought to repay their debt to the people. If they could bring about the people’s liberation, their original sin would be redeemed, their debt of being born into privilege repaid. Dedication to the cause meant a search for meaning in their own lives. The character Konstantin Levin in Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina (1877) is an illustration of such an individual. He works alongside the peasants on his estate (as Tolstoy himself was known to do), concerns himself with writing a treatise on agricultural reform, and dreams of sharing the profits with his serfs to bring about a “bloodless revolution.”30 Pioneer of Russian Populism Pyotr Lavrov’s Historical Letters (Istoricheskie pis’ma, 1868–1869), which appeared at a time when mass arrests had followed an uptick in revolutionary activity, were the first to present a theory of the origins and role of the intelligentsia and helped focus it in a united front with the masses. They also urged the importance of ending its self-containment, which would endanger progress, and reminded the privileged elites that they owed a debt to the masses for their comfort and leisure to pursue higher intellectual and moral development. The Letters become a gospel of the revolutionary movement, and Lavrov a leader that the younger generation looked to.31 Striving for liberty and democracy, Populists idealized the peasantry and believed that Russia’s path to socialism was separate from the West. Theirs

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was a Romantic vision of the Rousseauian “noble savage” unspoiled by modern civilization. The failure of Populism is when it takes a turn from propaganda and conspiracy to terrorism. The group Land and Liberty (Zemlia i volia), formed in 1876, became a Jacobin organization of terror for terror’s sake. Petr Tkachev’s writings united the traditions of Populism with nihilism and saw the time as ripe for seizure of power by a revolutionary vanguard. One branch of Land and Liberty broke off to form the People’s Will, the group who assassinated the tsar in 1881, as noted above. The assassination, however, did not bring about political concessions from the tsarist government. The other branch of Land and Liberty rejected terrorism and turned instead to Marxism. Theorists such as Georgii Plekhanov, Pavel Axelrod, and Vera Zasulich placed their hopes in the growth of the urban working class and advocated social revolution coming from the people themselves. Marxism was seen as a path of reason lighting up the way to modernity, enlightenment, and civilization. Marxists and Populists eventually worked together in Russia, but Marxism transferred the focus from peasants to workers. Yet Lenin’s doctrine of action stemmed from the Russian tradition in Chernyshevsky, Sergei Nechaev, Tkachev, and the People’s Will, rather than Marx. It can be said that Lenin made Marxism revolutionary, rather than vice versa.32 It comes as a surprise to some students of history that Lenin’s own heritage stemmed from noble roots. He apparently was fond of spending time at the gentry estate of his maternal grandfather. It has even been posited that his indifference to the suffering of peasants (as post-October policy bears out) may be due to his noble lineage and its accompanying sense of entitlement. Lenin’s strident prose in What Is To Be Done? made his homage to Chernyshevsky a revolutionary catechism in its own right. It echoed the uncompromising sort of revolutionary rhetoric of a hero like Rakhmetov, stressing tight, intransigent discipline, and a centralized party structure. He rejected outright any proposals for democratic reform. For Lenin, adding any bourgeois elements to socialism was akin to venturing into the marsh of political regression.33 Charismatic in an unprincipled, demagogic way, Lenin’s personality was a key factor of his success in 1917. While impactful, his oratory, on the other hand, lacked eloquence and color. It did not have the pathos, humor, vivid metaphors, or drama that speeches by Lev Trotsky or Grigory Zinoviev had. Instead, his skill lay in his iron logic and knack for finding easy slogans, which he repeated endlessly, mesmerizing crowds with indomitable energy and will. This hypnotic power instilled fanatical faith in the cause. He seemed to be a “chosen leader.” Yet the Bolshevik Party prior to October was not a monolithic organization. In 1917 it was controlled by Lenin, but had many factions. Those he would work, however, to bring to heel under his own domineering command.34

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At the same time as Lenin’s virtual dictatorship was taking root, Lenin took pains to uproot the new democracy, barely a sapling at this time. Bolsheviks consolidated their power at the state level by centralizing power in the hands of the Party, using terror against opponents, and at the local level, by decentralizing authority, through class rule by local Soviets, factory organizations, and soldiers’ committees. Breakaway ethnic borderlands were encouraged, further disrupting former feudal relations. These efforts had the effect of dismantling infrastructure and its civil service while creating a perception that there was no need for a Constituent Assembly of elected officials—the truly democratic body, representing all people and classes, that had been the promise of the Revolution since its inception. Elections to the Constituent Assembly had been the anticipated goal of the Provisional Government since it convened in February; meanwhile their delay was used as a pretext for the Bolshevik seizure of power. When the elections finally took place in November, despite using intimidation to influence the outcome, Bolsheviks did not win a majority. Unwilling to accept defeat, they declared the vote unfair, arrested three of its electoral commissioners, and after a wave of protest against Bolshevik strong-arm tactics, arrested scores of delegates and other leaders from opposition parties. Following more clashes and bloodshed, when Bolshevik troops used machine guns to fire on crowds of demonstrators from rooftops, Lenin and the Bolsheviks shut down the Constituent Assembly altogether.35 Pained by the irony that the events of January 1917 nearly replicated the massacre of 1905, Gorky lamented, “For almost a hundred years the finest Russians have lived by the idea of a Constituent Assembly. . . . Rivers of blood have been spilled on the sacrificial altar of this idea, and now the ‘People’s Commissars’ have given the order to shoot the democracy which demonstrated in honour of this idea.”36 The Red Terror and the tactics the Bolsheviks used to consolidate power are the topic of analysis in chapter 5. But for the tenacity of Gorky, many people who survived the Terror may not have escaped prison or the executioner’s block—although in the 1930s, his collaboration with the Stalinist regime may have abetted the persecution of many more. Gorky is an ambivalent player in the years leading up to and following the Revolution, owing to differences he held vis-à-vis the Party, while maintaining a complex affiliation with Lenin and later Stalin. His biography is an important barometer for the intelligentsia’s journey; I therefore reference his story throughout the next several chapters. As for Lenin, his own intransigence was the Revolution’s undoing—if considered from the point of view of those who expected it to blossom into a true government of the people sustained by democratic institutions. I take up this topic further below after stepping back in chapter 3 for

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a closer look at the intervening years between 1905 and 1917 to examine the fractious debates that took place between the two divergent branches of intelligentsia, especially with regard to their outlook on the Russian people. NOTES 1. See Claudia Verhoeven, The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity and the Birth of Terrorism (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2009). 2. Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 23; Christopher Read, Culture and Power in Revolutionary Russia: The Intelligentsia and the Transition from Tsarism to Communism (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 15. 3. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 124–25. 4. Martin Malia, “What Is the Intelligentsia?” in The Russian Intelligentsia, ed. Richard Pipes (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1961), 1–18. 5. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 126. 6. Ibid., 131. For a later literary portrait of the nihilist generation, see also Sofya Kovalevskaya, Nihilist Girl, trans. Natasha Kolchevska with Mary Zirin (New York, NY: The Modern Language Association of America, 2001). 7. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 126–29. 8. Aleksandr Radishchev, Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, trans. Leo Wiener, ed. Roderick Page Thaler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 194–212. Excerpts from Journey here and below are cited from this edition. My italics. 9. Patyk, Written in Blood, 22–28. 10. Frederick C. Copleston, Philosophy in Russia from Herzen to Lenin and Berdyaev (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 20–22. See also Avrahm Yarmolinksy, Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), Ch. 1, “The Ancestor: Radishchev,” 1–14; and Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism, trans. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1979), Ch. 2, “The Culmination of The Enlightenment in Russia: Aleksandr Radishchev,” 35–52. 11. Here and below, the “Statute of the Union of Welfare” is cited from Dmytryshyn, Imperial Russia, 207–10. 12. Ludmilla A. Trigos, The Decembrist Myth in Russian Culture (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 56. My italics. 13. Ibid., 57. 14. Read, Culture and Power, 19–20, 33. 15. See Herbert E. Bowman, Vissarion Belinski (1811–1848): A Study in the Origins of Social Criticism in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954). 16. See the excerpt from Chaadaev’s “First Philosophical Letter” in Dmytryshyn, Imperial Russia, 245–52. For discussion, see Walicki, A History of Russian Thought, Ch. 5; and Copleston, Philosophy of Russia, Ch. 2.

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17. Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers, eds. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1978), 121. 18. D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature from Its Beginnings to 1990, ed. Francis J. Whitfield (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1958), 224–28. One bears in mind that the intelligentsia of this time made up a small elite reaching, by the end of the century, only roughly 50,000 people. See Christopher Read, Religion, Revolution, and the Russian Intelligentsia, 1900–1912: The Vekhi Debate and its Intellectual Background (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1979), 6–7. 19. Richard Freeborn, The Russian Revolutionary Novel: Turgenev to Pasternak (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 11. 20. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature, 224–25. On Chernyshevsky and the generation of 1860s radicals, see also Walicki, A History of Russian Thought, Ch. 11. 21. Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917– 1991 (New York, NY: The Free Press), 1994. 22. See Rufus W. Mathewson, Jr., The Positive Hero in Russian Literature, 2nd Edition (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975). 23. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 130–31. 24. Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is To Be Done?, trans. Michael B. Katz (New York, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014). The passage here is from an excerpt of Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream cited in Fedor Dostoevskii, A Dostoevskii Companion: Texts and Contexts, eds. Katherine Bowers, Connor Doak, and Kate Holland (Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2018), 342–43. 25. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature, 226. 26. Terras, Handbook of Russian Literature, 101. 27. Patyk, Written in Blood, 36. 28. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 129–31. 29. Malia, “What Is the Intelligentsia?” 15. 30. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 126–28, 134–35. See also Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960). 31. Philip Pomper, Petr Lavrov and the Russian Revolutionary Movement (Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1972), 101–2. 32. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 136–48. 33. Ibid., 143–44, 150–51. 34. Ibid., 390–93. 35. Ibid., 502–17. 36. M. Gor’kii, Novaia Zhizn’, 9 and January 11, 1918; quoted in Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 515.

Chapter 3

The Intelligentsia and the People

On the evening of October 15, 1905, Tsar Nicholas II reluctantly signed a decree promising a constitution, voting rights, an elected parliament, and broad civil liberties for the first time in Russia’s long, troubled history. The October Manifesto was met with jubilation in the streets. The general strike was called off. Angry demonstrations were replaced by people gathering to celebrate. Even officers and society ladies joined the crowds of workers to sing “The Marseillaise.” With the halting of censorship, newspapers flourished in the general mood of reprieve, publishing daring editorials and political caricatures. Socialist leaders returned from exile, and political meetings were held in public squares and parks. Parties freely distributed their propaganda leaflets. There was a euphoric sense that a new Russia was being born, a new era of Western-style constitutionalism was dawning. The liberal journalist and cofounder of the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party, Ivan Petrunkevich, recalled in his memoirs, “The whole country buzzed like a huge garden full of bees on a hot summer’s day.”1 But not everything was well in the garden. Outbreaks of hooliganism put a damper on the euphoria. Mob violence, drunkenness, rioting, looting, and vandalism were frequently mixed in with the celebrations. Bolsheviks, who at this point, were already planning an insurrection, tried to use the violence of the crowd toward their own ends.2 More street fighting and aggression were prompted from their rivals on the right. A faction called the Union of the Russian People formed as a movement to mobilize the masses against the forces of the Left, who dubbed them the Black Hundreds. These rightwing patriots, hailing from the lumpenproletariat—casual laborers, small shopkeepers, artisans and low-ranking officials and police—were afraid of losing their petty status as a result of modernization and reform. Standing for God and tsar, they confronted the 67

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left revolutionaries in violent clashes on the streets and were often joined by gangs of common criminals and opportunists.3 Almost a year since the outbreak of disorders following Bloody Sunday, tsarist forces resolved to put an end to the civil unrest. Leaders of the Petrograd Soviet were arrested. Authorities suppressed strikes and insurgencies through mass arrests and summary executions. Thousands of socialists were exiled, imprisoned, or shot. In outlying regions, punitive army units scoured villages and purged them of rebel elements. Where peasants were found in revolt, their whole villages were razed. In short, the regime reneged on its October promises; in place of democratic reforms, it instituted a reign of terror.4 In the end result, the October Manifesto and its fallout caused irreparable damage to the relationship between liberals and socialists. An unbridgeable gulf after the failure of these fledgling efforts at Western-style democracy occasioned the final estrangement of socialist revolutionaries from advocates of liberal reform. Nor could the latter hope to win over the people. Never again would the masses support a constitutional democracy as they had in 1905—much less follow the political lead of liberals.5 The mood and relations between peasants and gentry changed after 1905 too. There was less deference and humility on the part of commoners, and more brazenness and insubordination. Country gentlefolk came to fear their peasants. There was a general understanding that the next revolution would not be a bloodless celebration of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, but “a terrible storm, a violent explosion of suppressed anger and hatred from the dispossessed, which would sweep away the old civilization.”6 The bourgeoisie now saw 1905 as an epidemic of madness that stirred up the instincts of the mob. Fear and panic is palpable in the darkening language of the bourgeois press. Fearing violence and the breakdown of the social order, a distinction was no longer made between criminal hooliganism and violent but justifiable protest. The hostilities occasioned the intelligentsia’s turning away from the people when they realized they would be targeted by anarchic violence stemming from the envy, hatred, and greed of the embittered masses. Even Maxim Gorky wrote to a friend in July 1905, “[The revolution] is giving birth to real barbarians, just like those that ravaged Rome.” From this point forward the writer would carry with him a dark premonition that the “people’s revolution” could very well destroy Russian civilization.7 THE LANDMARKS DEBATE The intelligentsia’s advocacy for the common people is fraught with difficulty, ending in the estrangement of the intelligentsia from the people. The

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complexity of the intelligentsia’s makeup might explain this failing. By the time of the upheavals of 1917, the separation of the intelligentsia into the radical or revolutionary branch, on the one hand, and the creative, cultural (artistic) and professional branch, on the other, had matured. As noted in the previous chapter, this bifurcation goes on to play a significant role in the transformations of the revolutionary movement and early Soviet society. To get a grasp on these categories, it is helpful to look at the models offered by historians. Christopher Read identifies three main groups of the splintered intelligentsia before 1917: Russian nationalists and defenders of the church, who are anti-Western and anti-modern, including some Slavophiles, who considered themselves separate from the intelligentsia; the Landmarks group (of which, more below); and the creative intelligentsia, including Symbolists and Decadents.8 Jane Burbank presents four groupings after 1917: active opponents of Bolshevism; neither supporters nor opponents, who tried to shore up institutions and protect traditional intellectual life and values; sympathizers or collaborators with the new government; and the Bolsheviks themselves.9 Ultimately the tragedy of the Russian intelligentsia is that the cultural or creative intelligentsia become scapegoats of the radical/revolutionary intelligentsia, who victimize the former as a means of forwarding the class war agenda. A case study of this critical cultural divide can be found in what is known as the Landmarks (Vekhi) debate. Landmarks was a symposium of philosophical idealists and religious thinkers who published a volume of articles in Moscow in March 1909 in which its authors resist the politicization of culture and ideas. The seven authors Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov (novelist Mikhail Bulgakov’s first cousin once removed), Mikhail Gershenzon, A. S. Izgoev, Bogdan Kistyakovsky, Semyon Frank, and Petr Struve uphold the connection between culture and the development of moral and spiritual values. The vekhovtsy, as the authors were collectively known, drew a distinction between two types of intelligentsia: the intelligent as a negative, narrow, puritanical fanatic, vis-à-vis the positive, humanist, personalist, Christian variety. The humanists looked back to Radishchev and Chaadaev, and the narrow puritans to Belinsky, Bakunin, Chernyshevsky, and others. The latter, who had become known as the “left intelligentsia,” were now recognized as the typical variety of intelligentsia, if not its only casting. Indeed, the division into materialists and idealists had taken the place of the traditional distinction between Westerners and Slavophiles, and the materialists on the Left were the dominant group. They constituted the main subject of the Landmarks debate.10 Struve argued that a split between the left materialists and the people had arisen from the “immanent atheism of the former and the transcendental religion of the latter.” Intensifying clashes between the intelligentsia and the

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state had furthered the divide. The basic difference between the humanist vekhovtsy and their revolutionary counterparts, on the other hand, was their personalist viewpoint, stressing the absolute value of the individual. Nothing, from the Landmarks perspective, justified violence against individuals for political gain. For both Frank and Struve, the individual bestrides the ideal and the real world, so each and every human being must be free to live life in his or her own way. They believed that the revolution could not succeed unless the individual was respected and given a proper place instead of treated as so much raw material to mold, or a machine that could be altered and improved upon by anyone who understood how it was engineered.11 Gershenzhon wrote in his preface to Landmarks, “The inner life of the personality is the sole creative force of human existence, and . . . this inner life, not the self-sufficient principles of the political sphere, is the only solid basis on which a society can be built.” Berdiaev, similarly, urged, “We will free ourselves from external oppression only when we free ourselves from internal bondage, that is, when we accept responsibility and cease to blame everything on external forces.” As an alternative to political dogmas, Landmarks emphasized “new and individual ways of meeting personal and political situations in preference to accepting complete ready-made ideologies.”12 Sergei Bulgakov points out that the radical intelligentsia pursued a contradictory mission in the fact that it deified the self yet persecuted the individual personality: The concepts of personal morality, personal self-improvement (samousovershenstvovanie) are extremely unpopular with the intelligentsia, (while the word social, in contrast, has a special sacramental quality). Although the intelligentsia’s outlook constitutes an extreme self-deification, in its theories the intelligentsia relentlessly persecutes the personality, sometimes reducing it without trace to the influence of the environment and the spontaneous forces of history (in accordance with the general doctrine of Enlightenment). The intelligentsia will not grant that the personality holds living, creative energy and it is deaf to everything that approaches the question.13

The argument here is that reliance on utilitarianism in place of respect for the personality is the intelligentsia’s chief weakness. The implications, further noted, are far-reaching and potentially calamitous: “Ready to sacrifice himself for his ideas, he does not hesitate to sacrifice others.” The vekhovtsy impugn the left intelligentsia’s reckless tendency, moreover, to be heedless of truth: “The intelligentsia’s basic moral premise is summed up in the formula: let truth perish, if, by its death, the people will live better and men will be happier—down with the truth if it stands in the way of the sacred cry ‘down with autocracy.’”14 One detects an ominous similarity here to the temptation proffered by Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov (Brat’ia Karamazovy, 1880).

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The Landmarks’ authors exempted the Russian literary classics from the intelligentsia outlook described above. Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and other greats, they said, enshrined truths of a religious inference; their works were considered sacred and inviolable in their own right. They held that the radical intelligentsia, on the other hand, was an irreligious splinter group, who had always evinced moral nihilism and tended to be anti-cultural. There is irony in the fact that the radical intelligentsia renounced religion but fostered a pseudo-religion or revolutionism of their own. For the classic intelligent was in Frank’s estimation, “a militant monk professing the nihilistic religion of earthly well-being.” The devotee’s principal article of faith was hatred of wealth, while his mission was to “expropriate the expropriators.” In all, the doctrinal foundation of the nihilist religion was the belief that destruction of old social forms through rebellion and terror would ensure the realization of the social ideal.15 Frank’s prophetic words, nearly a decade before the Red Terror, were supported by the fact that the narrative of revolution always bore a patina of nihilism. For it is impossible to separate revolutionary idealism from its language of expression, and an implicit nihilism had been inherited along with the revolutionary ideal since the 1860s. The revolutionary novel, that is, played a significant part in the propagation of fanaticism long before 1917. Lenin and countless others found their inspiration, for example, in Chernyshevsky’s Rakhmetov and Turgenev’s Bazarov. Extremism in the 1860s flourished in a spirit of resentment and violence. In their revolutionary manifestos, Petr Zaichnevsky and Sergei Nechaev (the latter born a serf), in Young Russia (1862) and Catechism of a Revolutionary (1869), respectively, urged ruthless discipline and dedication, and they called for the overthrow of the autocracy using Jacobin methods of organization and coldblooded violence.16 For Bulgakov and Berdiaev, self-control, philosophical truth, and a moral outlook were lacking in the movement. Since the 1860s, the radical intelligentsia had been picking and choosing philosophy that suited their revolutionary vision and justified its aims, while hatred and destruction were natural outcomes of the disdainful nihilism and disorderliness of their thinking. A temperament of desperate opposition made the left intelligentsia impervious to ethical reasoning. Instead of acting from love, as Radishchev and other pioneers of the revolutionary ethos had, the pressure of autocratic opposition had stifled their better instincts and turned a positive into negative, love into animosity: “In their life hatred takes the place of a deep and passionate ethical impulse,” wrote Frank.17 To be sure, the Landmarks’ authors did not oppose revolution as they understood it themselves, meaning the subjective revolution of personal, moral conversion. They wanted to discourage the tendency to enter blindly into social revolution and encourage potential insurgents to look inward first

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and understand the revolutionary potential of personal transformation.18 In its “all or nothing” maximalism, they argued, the left intelligentsia had passed up the chance to use opportunities for progress after the October Manifesto guaranteed them many freedoms. Instead, the radicals had supported riots and the Moscow uprising in 1905, and boycotted elections to the Duma. The left-wing mentality maintained a heroic image of itself embodied in literary heroes. As a result, the all-consuming preoccupation with social questions eclipsed personal and individual concerns. Izgoev remarked upon the radicals’ admirable desire to help their fellows and yet the lack of spiritual and physical wherewithal to do so. In a crisis, he maintained, extreme elements have a tendency to come to the fore. There was a danger of the most immature, unscrupulous, and incompetent elements gaining the upper hand.19 All told, in spite of the noble principles behind them, the concerns voiced in Landmarks did not evoke sympathy with the revolutionary intelligentsia, because a principled stand of this nature precluded immediate and consequential action against the tsarist government. Instead of stemming the tide of hostility, the Landmarks perspective only provoked a storm of criticism from intelligentsia across the spectrum.20 In the final analysis, the ideal of personal self-improvement as the true basis of revolution is a fairly weighty, mature outlook, one that perhaps not everyone was up to or willing to concede. It is a difficult thing to challenge oneself to take full responsibility for one’s own self-awareness and agency for change. It is far easier and more reassuring to rally around a cause bolstered by easily understood political principles. For these same reasons, perhaps, the spotlight shone by Landmarks on intelligentsia factionalism was ignored. After the Bolshevik victory, revolutionary nihilism then sets the tone for Soviet mass culture, which carries an overlay of crude fanaticism in the form of class hatred. The mood therefore fosters cruel suppression of so-called class enemies. A collection called From the Depths (Iz glubiny) written in 1918 by the same authors along with several others showed how many of the vekhovtsy prophecies had come true in the light of 1917 as their warnings had gone unheeded.21 In the years preceding the Revolution another small grouping of intelligentsia expressed their opposition to Bolshevism in the journal Biulleteni literatury i zhizni (Reports from Literature and Life). Reminiscent of earlier Landmarks concerns, critics warned that the radicals were destroying everything for which the progressive (educated, Westernized, liberal) intelligentsia had stood. These opponents of the revolutionary intelligentsia reproached them for exploiting popular disturbances and harnessing the energy of the masses toward their own political ends. Bolsheviks in particular, they said, were out of touch and fantasy-breeding. The latter stopped at nothing to whip up “blind partisanship” and “deaf absoluteness” in the lower classes, who were “plunged in darkness [temnota].” The Bolsheviks had exploited the

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popular movement to carry out their own hidden agenda. With its choice to incite the lower classes instead of tapping the creative vision of the cultural intelligentsia, they had “sown the wind and reaped the storm.”22 “A MIRACLE BEFORE THE TIME WAS RIGHT” Some leading poets of the cultural intelligentsia held an ambivalent attitude toward the Revolution, falling somewhere between the two poles described above. Andrei Bely’s novel Petersburg (Peterburg, 1916) elicits a sense of the doom of Russian civilization, carried as well by other Symbolist writers. Bely referred to a “many-thousand swarm” plodding toward the factories as “dust whirled through the city in dun brown vortexes.”23 The gathering storm is a persistent motif, as here, the workers are a whirlwind descending from the outskirts to threaten the echelons of power at the center. The novel blends lyricism and satire to present a complex view of revolutionary terrorism, concentrated in the protagonist’s involvement in a plot to assassinate his father, who is a high tsarist official. Replete with allusions to The Bronze Horseman and other literary classics, Petersburg is both a tribute to the creative intelligentsia and an indictment of its radical wing. The centrality of the city itself along with the book’s mystical overtones give the novel a prominent place within the Petersburg myth, adding weight to the portentous themes of political violence and catastrophism. Bely’s short poem “Russia” (“Rossiia”), written in August 1917, however, is a trenchant expression of the transformational power of revolution. Russia is at once an elemental force and messiah heralding the new day. The poet’s apostrophic cry bids Russia rage in “pillars of thundering fire,” and through the seas of tears, seethe, fiery ball of the earth, with luminous stormy rays.24

Earlier that summer, among his essays in Revolution and Culture (Revoliutsiia i kul’tura), Bely had spoken of the Revolution in a series of similes equating it to primordial cataclysm, “like a quake deep in the earth,” emphasizing its power to change, “like a hurricane, sweeping aside forms,” or its overflowing reach: “The revolution recalls nature: storms, floods, waterfalls. Everything in it breaks ‘across boundaries’; everything in it is excessive.” In the same piece comes the typical pairing with agronomy, as Bely compares the Revolution to a new shoot, life emerging from chaos, “the tearing of the shoot through the seed’s membrane, the germination of the maternal organism in the mysterious act of birth.”25

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Bely’s close friend Aleksandr Blok (1880–1921), too, wrote emphatically about the epoch in prose and verse. Like Bely’s, his poems are full of mysticism and a sense of impending catastrophe. A leading poet of the Silver Age, Blok likens the moral passion and spiritual energy sweeping Russia and the world in his lifetime to a vibrant spectrum of storm imagery and other elemental metaphors. Although Blok’s best work deals in very personal themes, it frequently resonated with Russia and her people. Boris Pasternak, a decade younger, considered Blok a guide through the years of his youth, and a poet who deftly captured the zeitgeist: “Hide-and-seek, breathless agitation, nimbly darting little figures, abruptness—how that style seemed to agree with the spirit of the age, hiding, secretive, underground, barely emerged from the cellars, talking in the language of conspirators, of which the chief character was the city and the chief event the street.”26 Blok’s ambivalent attitude toward the Bolshevik regime only underscores his status as one of the creative intelligentsia’s foremost representatives. Having augured the cataclysms of revolution for many years in advance of its fulfillment, when the day finally came in 1917, he sided with the Bolsheviks in an initial burst of enthusiasm but rejected their methods soon afterward. Blok’s attitude toward revolution was one of consistent awareness of responsibility to the Russian people. He saw it as his duty to mend the rift between the intelligentsia and the narod. After the failed reforms of 1905, he warned of the coming calamity of a greater, further reaching, social revolution. His play The Song of Fate (Pesnia sud’by, 1908) takes Russia as a theme, in a message of warning about the growing rupture between the people and the educated classes, which he believed it was his destiny to heal. In the words of biographer Avril Pyman, “To prepare to meet this calamity, to welcome it in the name of youth and renewal and to rise above all personal sense of loss, was the duty of the individual to society; to give warning of its approach was the task Blok tried to take upon himself.”27 Two essays written a decade apart, one before and one soon after the Revolution, are particularly germane. Blok’s earlier essay, “The People and the Intelligentsia” (“Narod i intelligentsiia”), was first delivered as a lecture before two literary societies in November 1908 (a few months before Landmarks) and published early the following year in the Symbolist art-literary journal Zolotoe runo (The Golden Fleece). In it, Blok ponders whether the gulf separating the intelligentsia from the people were so vast as to be impassable. In spite of the intelligentsia’s valiant efforts, the people, some hundred and fifty million of them, and the intelligentsia, a mere few hundred thousand, were unable to understand each other even in the most fundamental of things. Like Herzen and Tolstoy, Blok believed that radical advocates of Western ideas were inimical to Russian tradition and had created a deep-seated and long-standing antagonism between the intelligentsia and the people. He

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reproaches Belinsky, “the father of the Russian intelligentsia,” for heaping abuse on Gogol in the famous letter he wrote in response to Gogol’s Selected Passages from a Correspondence with Friends (Vybrannye mesta iz perepiski s druz’iami, 1847). Referring to the intelligentsia’s attempts to rouse the people to rebellion, Blok recalls the racing troika image, with its magic ringing bell, from Gogol’s Dead Souls. Gogol and other Russian writers had likened Russia to a sleeping giant, but the spell had come to an end, and a far-off rumbling was gathering beyond the din of the cities: The rumble, growing so fast that with every passing year we can hear it more distinctly, is nothing else than the “magic ringing” of the troika’s bell. What if the troika, around which “the rent air thunders and becomes wind,” is racing straight at us? When we rush to the people, we are rushing to certain death under the mad troika’s hoofs.28

Blok’s sense of guilt before the people prompted him to forgive and even justify the people’s hostility toward the cultural values of the intelligentsia. He makes it clear that danger is imminent if the intelligentsia insisted upon rousing the people’s latent destructive instincts. For redemption to be possible, Blok’s solution is that a Russian must “love Russia” in the same way that Gogol had implored in A Correspondence with Friends—through compassion, self-abnegation, and renunciation of what is dearest and most personal. Sadly, an intelligent like himself, Blok admits, finds it nearly impossible to do so because of his love of estheticism, individualism, and despair. On the latter point, he explains that intelligentsia were given to debauchery and imbued with a “will to die,” while the people possessed a more sanguine nature, an abiding faith, and a healthy “will to live.” A poem he wrote on June 3, 1907, from the collection Iambs (Iamby) makes it clear that Blok takes the side of the people: Hey, get up, ignite, and burn! Hey, raise your trusty hammer! So the darkness, pitch black Is cleft asunder by living lightning! You burrow, subterranean mole! I hear a strained, hoarse voice . . . Don’t delay. Remember: should a frail ear of wheat Under their hatchet fall . . . Like seeds, burrow into the wicked earth And come out into the light. And know: On the heels of their precarious victory Burrows the graveyard twilight.

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Foster, water, nurture the new earth, And spring will dawn over that soil. Nursed on your blood, A new love will blossom.29

The people, like the scion growing underground in stealth, will ripen in that soil and emerge in a victorious dawn. One is reminded of the parable from John 12:24 (KJV), which Dostoevsky used as the epigraph to The Brothers Karamazov: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” Yet the agrarian metaphor of seeding in Blok’s poem is a rally cry with a darker undertone. A kernel is accidentally sown when an ear of wheat is hewn by the executioner’s hatchet (sekira, an archaic word for axe, but the instrument itself is a medieval weapon similar to a poleaxe). An ominous forecast of retribution is intoned when that kernel is nursed on the people’s blood while maturing under the “graveyard twilight.” The blossoming spring, by implication, will be a time of reckoning. Lest we underestimate the seriousness of the clarion call in Blok’s poem, on the day of its composition (June 3, 1907), he also wrote in his notebook that after the enemy is skewered on pitchforks, We’ll swing their bodies in nooses, Till the veins pop out of their necks, So their cursed blood will flow.30

This unpublished verse is a crude, unvarnished cry for retributive violence— albeit ventriloquized—that is, speaking in the voice of the narod. To interpret his words bluntly, the poet says let the confounded bourgeoisie get what they deserve. As noted above, and further evidence bears out, he is disgusted with the intelligentsia too. A decade later, in “The Intelligentsia and the Revolution” (“Intelligentsiia i revoliutsiia”), published in Znamia truda (Labor’s Banner), January 1918, Blok takes the intelligentsia’s alienation from the people as his foremost concern once again. At this point in time, soon after Red October, he reports hearing from every quarter that Russia is through, that she is finished and dead. But “Russia is a storm,” he emphatically states. It is a cleansing storm, meaning that after suffering “torments, abasement, divisions,” Russia would come out again renewed. His own “torrent” of emotion over the last ten years consisted of “anguish, terror, guilt, and hope.” The years of reaction after 1905 had stifled the revolution and passed “like a long, sleepless, ghostfilled night.” The carnage of the World War proved that Europe had gone insane. The wasted years modern man spent at war were akin to the flower of

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civilization lying dormant in a bog. The tedium, idleness, and triviality were as nauseating as the bloodshed. “This,” he mourns, “was when humanity really turned brutish, and the Russo-patriots in particular.”31 The surge of premonitions he and others felt after 1905 had been forced underground, Blok goes on to say, but now, after the “bloodless idyll” of February had shaken Europe, the upwelling emerged from the dark to sound again, with “new music in its noise.” Blok makes much of the music analogy, hearing the spirit of revolution as a rushing torrent in this instance and other places. He insists that one must listen to it and love it, understanding its theme, and knowing that it was no plaything. In its dissonance is a power and beauty, which is the revolution’s soul. An artist’s job was not to worry what aims were accomplished, but to see and listen: “‘Peace and the brotherhood of nations’ is the sign under which the Russian Revolution runs its course. This is what its torrent roars. This is the music that all who have ears must hear.”32 Blok respects the Revolution’s single-minded, uncompromising certainty. A consummate poet, he illustrates it in some of the most saturated storm imagery encountered yet: [Revolution] is akin to Nature. Woe to those who expect a revolution to fulfill merely their own dreams, however high-minded and noble. A revolution, like a hurricane, like a blizzard, always brings something new and unexpected. It cruelly deceives many, it easily maims the deserving in its vortex, it often carries the undeserving unharmed to dry land; but these are details, they change neither the main direction of the torrent nor its awesome, deafening roar. The roar is still about something grand—always.33

Furthermore, the reach of the Revolution promises a kind of transformation that he illustrates with an inventive metaphor of cross-fertilization of weather patterns: “The sweep of the Russian Revolution . . . is such that it hopes to raise a world-wide cyclone, which will carry warm winds and the sweet scent of orange groves to snow-covered lands, moisten the sun-scorched steppes of the South with cool northern rain.”34 Russia’s greatest writers, he continues, naming Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, had all gone into the darkness, gnashing their teeth in despair; but they had also had the strength to lie low and dwell in the darkness, because—in Blok’s attribution—they knew the light, and knew it would return, since, in essence, life is good. Those who survived, those not “crushed by the onslaught of the noisy whirlwind,” Blok declares, citing Tyutchev, shall become masters over countless spiritual treasures. Only a new genius like the poet from Pushkin’s poem “Arion” would be able to realize them fully: “Tossed ashore by a wave,” he will sing “the old songs” and dry “his wet garment in the sun, at the foot of a cliff.” Blok reiterates that the artist’s job, his obligation, is “to see what is

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intended, to listen to the music thundering in the ‘wind-torn air.’” He would find that its intent is to remake everything anew, to change the “false, filthy, boring, hideous life” into “a just, clean, gay, and beautiful life.” When such an intent, concealed since the dawn of time in the heart of man, the heart of the people, breaks its confining bonds and rushes forth in a stormy torrent, tearing down the last dams, carrying off chunks of riverbank, this is called revolution. Lesser, tamer, lowlier things are called insurrection, riot, coup d’état. But this is called revolution.35

Why defile the gentry’s beloved estates, or fell centuries-old parks, he asks? Because of the egregious abuses of power that the people had suffered at the hands of the landowning class. However, Blok reassures, not a grain of anything truly valuable could be lost. A palace that is destroyed is no palace; a tsar toppled from his throne is no tsar; for the real palace and the real tsar are in our hearts and minds. Citing John again, he intones, “Perfect love casteth out fear.” Blok’s own ancestral home at Shakhmatovo was sacked by local peasants in the summer of 1902, when he was twenty-one. Blok wrote of this incident several times over the years in his private recollections. The date of the following fragment, March 19, 1921, signifies that it was among the last things he wrote. He speaks of drinking tea with his family under the lime trees at sunset at his maternal grandfather’s Shakhmatovo estate in the Moscow region. He hears the sound of scythes being sharpened, and then the scythes swinging through the grass in the neighbor’s meadow. Instead of shouting and swearing as they usually did, the peasants began singing. One of the peasants from the factory surprises Blok with his powerful voice. The gentry family feels awkward as the song swells and swells. Blok confesses to having a tickle in his throat; wanting to cry, he runs off to a far corner of the garden. But this moving moment, worth citing in full, marks an ominous portent, a turning point, inviting the storm: It was after that that everything began to go to pieces. The men who had been singing brought in syphilis from Moscow and spread it all through the neighbouring villages. The merchant whose meadow was being mown took to the bottle and once, when drunk, set fire to his own hay lofts. The deacon began getting illegitimate children. The ceiling in Fyedot’s izba fell in completely and Fyedot did nothing about it. In our family the old people began to die and the young people to grow old. My grandfather began to say the most stupid things, quite unlike his old self. As for me, the next morning I went and cut down the ancient lilac.

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That lilac was centenarian, aristocratic, the flowers were pale bluish and sparse, and the trunk so gnarled it almost defied the axe. I chopped it all down and beyond it rose a grove of birches. I cut down the birches too, and beyond them was the gully. From the bottom of the gully I could now see nothing but my own house rising above my head. It stood open to every wind and storm. If I were to dig underneath it, it would collapse and bury me.36

The passage is full of symbolism. Blok’s chopping down the “aristocratic,” ancient lilac symbolizes a separation with (or renunciation of) tradition, or the old order. Cutting down the birches, a common symbol of Russia, is likewise a parting of ways with the past. The singing of the peasants while they scythe is their revolutionary enthusiasm, led by one of the men home from the factories, where agitational activity flourished. The song they sang may have been “The Internationale,” “The Warszawianka,” or another revolutionary song. They are inspired, and there is beauty to their somber enthusiasm, but the fruits of their labor bring wrack and ruin to the village, along with disease, drunkenness, and madness. Presently, Blok can see only the house, a vestige of the past now vulnerable to “every wind and storm,” and verging on collapse. Blok’s poetry, too, is full of archetypal symbolism. In 1900, at twenty years old, the poet experienced a personal revelation of a principle he would call the “Eternal Feminine,” the idea of the world soul maturing, or as Pyman put it, “growing gently and inevitably, as the corn in the ear, the child in the womb, towards a new life.” This feminine principal he understood as a link between humanity and the divine and would become a major font of inspiration for his poetry. Another inspiration at the other end of the spectrum is the “Eternal Masculine,” or what Blok also called “demonism.” It is the impatient demand for “a miracle before the time was ripe.” The balance of the two poles can be considered the mystical source of inspiration of Symbolist poetry, a form of mythmaking that Blok saw as tangible “flowers of the earth” whose scent could be perceived in art that bordered on religion, yet whose final incarnation, just beyond our grasp, could not be forced in poetry.37 This outlook was inseparable from the way he viewed the political upheavals, which had begun to tip the balance toward the masculine principle, or demonism: incitement of the people to rise up was a miscalculation, like pursuing a miracle before the time was right—certain to breed dire consequences. By 1909 Blok had already become disillusioned. Upon departure for Italy early that year, he wrote to his mother that Russia had become a land of spitefulness and dissention. It was impossible to remain human, he said, and avoid being turned into a machine for the preparation of spite and hatred.38 In summer 1917, his attitude still ambivalent, he believed the intelligentsia deserved what it had coming:

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I should not be in the least surprised if (even if not very soon) the people, clever, calm, and with an understanding of things the intelligentsia is incapable of understanding (that is, with a socialist psychology which is something completely, diametrically opposite), begin with equal calm and majesty to hang and rob the intelligentsia (to re-establish order, to clean the rubbish from the mind of the country).39

In “The Intelligentsia and the Revolution,” cited above, he upbraids the intelligentsia for its superciliousness while Russia is swept up in the revolutionary squall—such as only using the word comrade ironically, or scoffing at the language and leadership style of the “unenlightened” and “benighted” revolutionary radicals. It was not from the proud intelligentsia that the people’s enlightenment would come, he informs. The more condescending and sarcastic the intelligentsia remained, the more terror and bloodshed there would likely be: We should be ashamed to be haughty, to scoff, weep, wring our hands, moan over Russia now, when she is swept by the revolutionary cyclone. So we had been hacking away at the branch we were sitting on? A lamentable situation. With voluptuous malice we stuck firewood, shavings, dry logs into a heap of timber damp from the snows and the rains; but when the sudden flame flares up to the sky (like a banner), we run around, crying: “Oh, ah, we’re on fire!”

Here, to send the message home, Blok pronounces the proverb, “We reap what we sow.” Yet, again, he believes that an uncompromising love for Russia meant hearkening to the Revolution’s music: “With your whole body, your whole heart, your whole consciousness, listen to the Revolution.”40 APOSTLES OF THE PEOPLE: “THE TWELVE” Blok’s attitude toward the Revolution would progress in 1917–1921 through cycles of enthusiasm and despair echoing the ambivalent views he had expressed in the texts cited above. He continued to write about the Revolution as a cleansing storm in images with quasi-mystical overtones. His final published works “The Twelve” (“Dvenadtsat’”) and “Scythians” (“Skify”) appeared in early 1918, each depicting fierce revolutionary forces facing apocalypse. The former, especially, stirred controversy from all sides, as Read attests: Émigrés and Western scholars try to show that [Blok] was not really a revolutionary, while Soviet critics try to show that he was practically a Bolshevik. The

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debate around him is particularly acute because his poem “The Twelve” is the greatest work of art of the revolutionary period. In reality, the poem, and Blok’s enthusiasm for revolution that goes back to 1905, are not an endorsement of Bolshevism in all its aspects, but rather a symbol of hope that, in the end, the ordinary narod will triumph and benefit from the revolution.41

That Blok endorsed the Russian folk rather than the Bolsheviks is telling insight and helps to explain some of the ambiguity in his work of this period. “The Twelve” is shot through with some of the most evocative and iconic snow imagery in Russian literature. The poem opens with a brisk invocation to the winds and snow, mars-like gods of revolutionary fury. Then it comes alive with dynamic movement as people slip and fall on the icy streets. A large banner calls for the transfer of power to the Constituent Assembly— bastion of liberal hopes, but confusion for the babushka who ponders: Who needs such a big piece of cloth when our boys don’t have proper footwraps? She clambers up a snowy hill to call to the Holy Mother in heaven and cry that the Bolsheviks were coming to put everyone in their graves. Other characters appear as the hammering wind and dogged frost meanwhile lash at a bourgeois standing at the crossroads—where the symbolism is plain—with nose buried in his turned-up collar. The usual enemies are wheeled out and set up for rebuke: a low voice declares that Russia is “finished,” parroting the watchword from Blok’s article “The Intelligentsia and the Revolution.” The defeatist is betrayed by his long hair—it is a liberal intelligent. Further on, a priest, too, is sneered at, creeping behind the snowdrifts, the glint of a cross on his protruding belly, caricaturing those of his vocation. The wind itself is happy, mad, strutting, and gleefully toying with the people—until the heroes of the poem emerge in the black night: twelve men, a detachment of Bolshevik urban guerrillas. Among them is the impetuous Petya, who cares only for his freedom and his girl Katya, as the troop takes pot shots at Holy Russia, labeled with several unflattering epithets. Quoting fragmentary speech, the poet ventriloquizes popular sentiments, ringing like a refrain: We’ll give grief to all bourgeois, set the world on fire— fire, soaked in blood—42

Thus the stage is set for the poem’s central drama. For Petya’s beloved Katya is galivanting with Vanya, a bourgeois deserter, whirling through the snowy streets on a coachman’s sled. Object of Petya’s affection, she is also, by indication of details slipped into the narrative—a knife scar on her neck, a cut beneath her breast—a victim of manipulation and violence. It is uncertain

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whose, although Petya’s vindictive reprisals are the ones in the spotlight here. He calls her ugly names and shames her for trysts with officers and indulgence in bourgeois luxuries—stockings, lacy underwear, French chocolates, Kerensky roubles, and other petty sins. A skirmish takes place on the street when the sled carrying Katya with Vanya races toward the twelve soldiers. Bullets fly. In the confusion and snowy dust, Katya is shot in the head. It’s unclear at first who fired the bullet, but Petya is soon identified as the murderer, and he later confesses to it. Aiming at his rival, he had accidentally killed his lover—or did he shoot her on purpose out of vengeful ire? Marching onward with his comrades, Petya is overcome with grief and regret, remembering her sweet embraces and the brazen fire in her eyes. This story of passion, lust, revelry, and revenge resonates with the elemental spirit of the people caught up in the revolutionary euphoria. A parable of the people’s anger toward the bourgeoisie, the darker side is the turn to egotism, spite, and greed. Katya’s trysts with officers and other bourgeois cadets stir Petya’s blind fury, resentment, and jealousy; he lashes out and eventually murders her under cover of a street battle. He’ll then take out his grief and rage against the unsuspecting enemy: he’ll drink the blood of the bourgeoisie in retribution for the loss of her ravishing beauty. Mixing his bloodthirsty vengeance with prayers, the unhappy Petya tries to assuage his guilt, beseeching God to rest her soul. However, as he calls to the Lord for help from the snowstorm and his guilty anguish, one of Petya’s comrades-in-arms tells him to forget about Katya and the Lord, and The Twelve march ahead on their profane quest to snuff out the indefatigable enemy who lurks around every corner. The caricatured bourgeois citizen still stands at the crossroads, nose-incollar, this time with a mangy, mongrel dog—identified as the old world, crouching behind him, tail between its legs. The bourgeois himself is now labeled “a hungry cur,” his whole, insecure existence a question mark hanging precipitously in the wind. The mangy dog turns into a mongrel wolf, bearing its fangs—the old world giving its last, dying howl. But up ahead, bearing the red, blood-stained banner before the marching vigilantes is a mysterious figure. They take shots at it, answered by the laughing whirlwind dancing across the snow. The unlikely sentry is Jesus Christ, wearing threads of pearls and a crown of roses made of snow. Underscoring the improbability of His deus-ex-machina appearance, the English translators add a question mark to the final line of the poem naming the Savior, which doesn’t appear in the original.43 Blok, however, expressed his own surprise that it occurred to him to place Jesus at the head of the column.44 His sudden appearance gives a quasi-religious undertone to the Bolshevik advance, mixing the secular revolutionary movement with a murky religiosity which is normally the preserve of the monarchist state.

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Petya’s abuse and eventual murder of Katya are ambiguous as well. Both she and Vanya are, in an allegorical sense, Russia. Not Holy Russia, but profane Russia. Its elemental passions are wild and free as the wind and snow, but also pitiless and destructive, like the blizzard. Merrily playing about in the shape of a threatening twister, the snow circling in a funnel and rising in a column is a prominent motif in the poem. Echoing the sentiment of Blok’s earlier articles, Russia is a storm, and the Revolution borne of it must be embraced with unstinting love for the nation and its renewal. After a tentative endorsement of Bolshevism, which some considered “The Twelve” to be, Blok quickly rejected the Party, writing in a diary entry of June 1919, “What you can’t deny the Bolsheviks is their unique ability to corrode life (byt) and destroy individuals.”45 The poet who had welcomed the Revolution as a cleansing storm had become thoroughly disillusioned. Before long, he would cease to hear the “music” of revolution he had written eloquently of in “The Intelligentsia and the Revolution.” In May 1921 he told his friend Kornei Chukovsky, “All sounds have stopped. Can’t you hear that there are no longer any sounds?” Disenchanted and despairing, he told Gorky he had lost his faith in the wisdom of humanity. With Blok’s health in serious decline, Gorky pleaded with the Party to allow Russia’s finest poet to go abroad for treatment. Eventually an exit visa was granted on August 10, but it came too late. Blok had died the night before. By some measures, his death in August 1921 can be considered the end of the intelligentsia as a cultural force.46 REVOLUTION OR A CUP OF TEA? WHIRLWIND RUSSIA If Blok represents the creative intelligentsia who perished in the early days of the Revolution, Alexei Remizov’s Whirlwind Russia (Vzvikhrennaia Rus’, 1927) encapsulates the dilemma of the cultured elite who survived the Revolution’s gale yet remained suspended in its animations. Remizov (1877–1957) said of it, I didn’t always understand what was being spoken inside me, and often there were no words, but some kind of spiraling here and there. . . . The whirlwind had taken hold of my soul. . . . I give voice to all my thoughts: I’m afraid I’ll be split asunder. I speak and speak and speak and I don’t know what I’m saying, I speak my thoughts: they’re like a whirlwind.47

Remizov’s allusion to an inchoate, rushing sound in connection to the Revolution invites comparison to the rushing noise and music Blok reported to hear, which had led him onto the streets of Petrograd in 1905 and 1917,

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and stirred his muse in writing “The Twelve.” Remizov saw a connection between his work and Blok’s, whose “music” was an inspiration for Whirlwind Russia, even if Remizov would not go so far as to say, with Blok, that “the music of the intelligentsia is the same as the music of the Bolsheviks.” Like his predecessor, Remizov’s work is a coming to terms with the Revolution, but on a larger, epic scale. Intoning Blok, Remizov uses the street as his setting, with the cadence of street slang, fragmented voices, and an open-ended structure featuring cinematic, montage-style action.48 Remizov chronicles the day-to-day experiences of an individual striving amid an increasingly difficult daily routine. Filled with revolutionary slogans, snippets of dreams, philosophical aphorisms, and rhetorical addresses to the Russian people, Whirlwind Russia is a revolutionary diary of an artist experiencing the whirling change as the extraordinary becomes ordinary, and the “everyday” is swept up and transformed in the vortex. Yet he strives for cultural continuity, recalling and reexamining the Russian classics. The book brims with homages to Dostoevsky and Blok, and parodies of others. Beyond that, Remizov contemplates and perpetuates the Petersburg myth, replete with its contradictory folk and literary antecedents. The apocalyptic flood of Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman is conjured, confirming the ambiguity of Peter the Great’s legacy. Remizov’s poem “Lament for the Destruction of the Russian Land” invokes the “mad horseman” (bezumnyi ezdok) who seems about to “leap over the sea from the yellow mists of the beloved, granite city, invincible and strong as Peter’s stone.” The poet sees “in dreams and in reality” the horseman standing “over the Neva, like a whirlwind”; however, calling out directly to Tsar Peter, he is compelled to inform him, “My mad brother—an unfortunate hour!—your Russia is dead.”49 Remizov laments the death of Russia but calls to the Russian people to take heart that a new Rus’, a new Radiant Day, will come (echoing the Radiant Future myth along with Turgenev’s On the Eve and Dobroliubov’s “When Will the Real Day Come?”). The narrator is a chronicler who, instead of commenting on the flow of political events in the context of history, reports with cinematic precision on the existential minutiae of life for people caught in the storm and forced to survive in the cold, hungry city.50 The personal struggles and daily vicissitudes of life are captured in surrealist simulations. For example, in “Moscow,” freezing and tormented by thirst, the narrator makes tea and gulps it down in “flaming mouthfulls.” He tries to obtain more water from the tap to slake his thirst, but the water bursts into flames in his hands. He washes himself in the flames. Then when his lamp catches fire, he puts out the flames with his hands and burns them. He yells, aphoristically, “Don’t pick burning things up with your hands, they’re hot, you’ll get burnt!” But nobody hears him.51

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The former is a warning presaging dire presentiments, as when a neighbor reports that in Moscow, thieves had stolen the tsar-kolokol—the Tsar Bell— citing the legend that when the tsar-kolokol rings, the living and the dead will rise (making a pun on “the dead will arise” and “rise” as in revolt or rebellion). Then, mimicking Bolshevik language: “And the yard keeper will take up his broom and sweep out all the thieves from the Russian land, like dead leaves, sweep them on the scrap heap.” The narrator ratchets up the analogy, making the whirlwind a sower of seeds: It’s a whirlwind! A fiery whirlwind turns in Rus’. In the whirlwind is litter, in the whirlwind dust, in the whirlwind is a stench. The whirlwind carries seeds of spring. The whirlwind is flying to the West. The old West will twist and curl our Scythian whirlwind. It will turn the whole world upside down.52

Here and elsewhere in the chronicle, Remizov’s fiery whirlwind carries a constellation of meanings; more than the fire of destruction, it is Christ-like suffering (“a fiery crown burns my brain”), and it spurs language and creativity (“set fire to the earth with the word”). The seeds of spring, moreover, suggest rebirth and renewal.53 In the latter sense, the poet makes another allusion to Blok, in whose poem “Scythians” the whirlwind is depicted as a cleansing storm from the East. Referring to Russia’s dual East-West heritage, the storm would uproot European civilization based in rationalism, to make way for Russia’s mystical rebirth in its Eastern aspect. For Remizov, the promise of resurrection is not Christian in essence but based rather on the myth of Petersburg and a cyclical view of history more typical of the ancients. His attitude toward the Revolution is skeptical, even while he accepts its inevitability: “And the most dizzying dreams—the earth is about to turn into heaven and a holiday will come to our street, too—and then the most unexpected grey reality.” Yet he will use the opportunity to embrace his liberation: “I, myself, want to be like the whirl . . . I am free—free from my first memory, and light as a bird in flight.”54 Liberation from the everyday comes down to a principle, that which was celebrated by the avant-garde (see chapter 4)—the revolt against routine, autonomic living, which was the hallmark of bourgeois existence, against the encrusted habits of daily life encapsulated by the Russian word byt: I cannot live for long in the country. That life of sequence: eating, growing, marrying—green, mud, quiet . . . No I can’t live according to “natural laws.” . . . It’s time to go home to fireplaces and hunger.

Juxtaposing the new urban reality with bucolic life in the country, Remizov finds a new way to live at the eye of the storm:

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I know that the most ominous of all storms—revolution—will change nothing, but I also know that we are lost without that storm . . . I want it to hit hard, so that for at least once we are made to . . . clutch at our heads, otherwise our petty dog’s existence [zhit’e] will poison any real life [zhizn’].55

Embracing the destruction of the everyday means making art of life and life of art. Stephen Hutchings, who calls Remizov’s book the summit of Russian modernism, argues that “in Whirlwind Russia, art is reconceived as the creation of life (zhizn’) out of the everyday—life as participation and unceasing transformation”; moreover, that “the havoc wreaked by the revolution conferred on every detail of life a sense of drama that in one stroke evacuated the word ‘everyday’ [byt] of its meaning.” In other words, life is uprooted and transformed in such a way that what had previously been considered normal, habitual, or routine now takes life to the extremes and carries the significance of momentous feats. Each day is made anew, in response to crisis, dire need, trauma, or amazement. The real revolution is not what can be read in the newspaper headlines, but in the kaleidoscopic turmoil he calls a whirlwind of “little sticks” (palochki): “All these twisted little sticks, the dance of the battles . . . the dance of the r e v o l u t i o n.”56 To drive the point home, at intervals throughout his work Remizov makes use of a rhetorical refrain: “Revolution or a cup of tea?” (Revoliutsiia, ili chai pit’?). It is a reference to Dostoevsky’s polemical novel Notes from Underground (Zapiski iz podpol’ia), which, in 1864, critiqued and parodied the radical left faction of the intelligentsia. At one point in the tale, the cantankerous title character declares that the whole world can go to pot, so long as he gets his tea. At another he moans, “I might foam at the mouth, but bring me a doll to play with, give me a cup of tea with sugar in it, and maybe I should be appeased. I might even be genuinely touched, though probably I should grind my teeth at myself afterwards and lie awake at night with shame for months after. That was my way.” The tea takes on a heightened significance in Dostoevsky’s novel during the Underground Man’s tense and tortured conversation with the prostitute Liza, whom he cruelly subjects to ridicule, first building up and then crushing her dreams. The crisis is prefigured as he orders his servant to fetch more tea even though Liza had declined his offer to drink some. The tea becomes an emblem of the emotional tug-ofwar as he manipulates the girl but torments himself with his own rage. Later at the climax, Liza “crumbles his [defenses] by offering him the metaphorical cup of tea that he writes about in his second paragraph.”57 What does the cup of tea mean to Remizov? First he poses it as a simple juxtaposition: “In other words, the Elemental Flying Sticks or stubborn refusal.” The cup of tea symbolizes the historical rift between the complacent gentry intelligentsia, and the elemental narod. The intelligent’s words

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are just words; he would rather enjoy his cup of tea and let the world go to pot than dirty his hands with the difficult work of revolution. Or one could say more particularly that the cup of tea represents the dichotomy between the detached, alienated self over against the herd instinct of the spontaneous folk. Earlier in his chronicle the narrator had been a detached observer of the storm, permitted to intellectualize its contours. It is impossible to maintain an aloof distance, however, from the eye of the storm, “For Russia’s whirlwind years not only sweep away the ground on which the tea-sipping intellectual stood (‘in order to make a cup of tea you’ve first got to have tea’), they hurl him to the center of the maelstrom.”58 Here the cup of tea takes on monumental importance: the difficulty of obtaining and making tea is emblematic of the revolution in daily life, where nothing, not even the simple act of making tea, can be taken for granted. The spontaneous, elemental flow of events guarantees that the choice of a passive, contemplative life is not an option. Indeed, even the proverbial cup of tea can be the stage of heroic action, or as Hutchings puts it, “the vortex of the whirlwind is located in the midst of the traumas involved in obtaining tea.”59 On the other hand, Remizov subscribes to the avant-garde credo that “one is lost without a storm.” He accepts the Revolution and its suffering because “it must be so.” The only way to counter man’s historically passive inclinations, he avows, is to see that he is “shaken from the roots to the tops” in order to give him the impetus to start a new life. The humanist in Remizov forces him to qualify these statements, however, with the caveat, “I don’t know whether it is good or bad, but I know that it’s necessary and extremely difficult for the living man.”60 CONSCIENCE OF THE STORM MESSENGER This chapter on the intelligentsia and the people closes with a spotlight on a figure mentioned several times already, whose complex and ambiguous story illumines all of the groupings discussed thus far: the narod, the intelligentsia, the bourgeoisie, and the Bolsheviks. For Maxim Gorky associated with each of them but properly belonged to none. His legacy is equally perplexing. Gorky’s name was used in the Soviet Union to cover up monstrous crimes and justify the basest human cruelty. He has been seen as an apologist for the Bolshevik regime, and an accomplice, later in the 1930s, of Stalinist repression. Yet Gorky was critical of Bolshevism, publishing, through 1917 and 1918, unvarnished criticism of Lenin and the Party until his daily paper Novaia zhizn’ (New Life) was finally shut down. Even after his capitulation to Soviet power, Gorky maintained a firm conviction that the revolution could only be sustained with the help of the humanist values of the creative

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intelligentsia (those of the Landmarks camp), and he persisted in his efforts to oppose the excesses of Bolshevism. An individual at heart, Gorky advocated early on for individual freedoms and dignity. He disagreed with Soviet attitudes toward the intelligentsia, believing that the government needed to nurture people of talent, not attack them. He (unsuccessfully) attempted to set up publishing free of government and Party control, at one point threatening to give up his Soviet citizenship when the regime created an index of forbidden books. A perennial defender of humanist principles, Gorky worked to defend and support intellectuals and their values, often intervening with personal assistance when individuals faced privations, harassment, and dangers of persecution.61 On the other hand, evidence of an ambiguous relationship to truth is troubling. In several works, his advocacy of the “salutary lie” places Gorky in a hazy category of what might be called soft collaboration. The relationship between reality and illusion is a theme he returns to often throughout his oeuvre. His heroes are romantic figures, larger than life, and some of his works bear a utopian stamp. In response to conditions of abject misery that he personally witnessed and later mastered as his aesthetic terrain, Gorky was not averse to cultivating the usefulness of the “comforting lie.” The varnished truth he saw as a form of courage, hope, and faith, rather than deception. In works like The Lower Depths (Na dne, 1902), his concern is not so much the harsh reality of what life is, but the comforting dream, a consoling fiction for what life could be. Living for something better to come was perhaps the only way out of the otherwise demoralizing depths. On the other hand, Gorky may have compromised his own humanitarian ideals by trusting too much in the salutary lie when he returned to Stalin’s Russia, after many years of selfimposed exile, to do the Party’s bidding.62 The incongruities in Gorky’s actions disappointed many. For one, he wrote a letter of condolences upon the death, in 1926, of Felix Dzerzhinskii, founder of the Cheka and OGPU, and the Revolution’s chief executioner. Gorky’s return to the Soviet Union in the late 1920s was controversial. The poet Khodasevich, his longtime associate, wrote after Gorky’s death, “He finally sold out—not for money, but to preserve the powerful illusion of his life, both for his own sake and for the sake of others.” The price, in Khodasevich’s view, was that Gorky became a slave and a sycophant. At any event, the trajectory of Gorky’s life and work must be seen in terms of a shift that involved first his clarion call to revolution and later, a repudiation of the past, tempered with compromise. He wanted a humanistic revolution and clung to this ideal to the tragic end, however distorted it may have grown.63 Once the proud, heroic, resolute voice of the people, Gorky sung ecstatically of the coming gale of revolution in “The Song of the Stormy Petrel,” discussed in chapter 1. Virtually every one of the revolutionary generation

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knew the poem by heart. Its author had gained worldwide fame and adulation as the proletarian poet—the Stormy Petrel himself—who announced the imminent international workers’ rising. But by the time the revolution came, the author’s views had matured. Gorky was later sick of his poem’s turgid rhetoric and called it “a mere fanciful invention” in a 1928 interview titled, “How I Learned to Write.” Common sense and moderation had taught him the prudence to recognize how destructive a tempest the people’s rebellion could be. The storm came, indeed as he predicted, and with it, as one biographer put it, came “the wild vengeful emotions he had once helped to unleash.”64 Gorky was born into the lower middle class (meshchane), the class of small traders and artisans also known as petty bourgeoisie. Orphaned at a young age and abused by an overbearing grandfather, he struck out on his own, wandering the country, living hand-to-mouth and taking whatever odd jobs he could muster. The heroes of his early stories are the down-and-out, ragtag masses known in Marxist terms as the lumpenproletariat—the underclass of vagrants, criminals, prostitutes, homeless, and unemployed who lack class consciousness enough to know that they are oppressed, nor to unite their collective interest to seek social justice. Like their author, who cut a jaunty figure in his distinctive walrus mustache, Gorky’s heroes were classless outsiders, cast-outs who enjoyed their lawless, boundless freedoms. Free from social and personal responsibility, impulsive, strong but undisciplined, they resisted the “philistine and slavish” conventions of polite society.65 Wounded early in life by the trials of grinding poverty and abuse, Gorky turned his anger to moral idealism and developed an unimpeachable empathy for Russia’s insulted and humiliated. A lifelong search for men of wisdom, morality, and strength to emulate as role models brought him into close contact with Anton Chekhov, Lev Tolstoy, Vladimir Lenin, and, ultimately, Joseph Stalin. As one of Lenin’s closest associates, he helped to shape the revolutionary thinking that brought the Bolsheviks to power, especially the view that for the revolution to be successful, people needed to be remolded from scratch. But Gorky’s relationship with the charismatic leader was troubled. He couldn’t accept the iron discipline and narrow dogmatism of the Bolsheviks. The motley characters in his early works like The Lower Depths were not mere representatives of an underclass, but individuals struggling for their own freedom. In Gorky’s view, it was not classes that struggled; people struggled.66 Gorky played a major role in the 1905 demonstrations. On the morning of January 22, before the infamous Bloody Sunday massacre began, Gorky led a delegation of intellectuals to see the minister of interior Svyatopolk-Mirsky to ask him to prevent an armed clash, but was unable to gain his audience. When the workers, women, and children, led by Gorky’s friend, Father Gapon, were

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fired on by palace guards and mounted Cossacks, Gorky’s apartment became a regrouping point, where he helped to disguise Father Gapon for his escape.67 Some of the literary intelligentsia of the day—intellectuals like Gorky— saw it as their moral obligation to use politics and journalism for the good. “The blood of the people is being spilt,” he wrote to one writer, “everywhere the regime is cynically killing the best people—the young Rus’—and you write only about yourself.” Gorky even upbraided Tolstoy at this time for adhering to a policy of moral perfection of individuals (as the vekhovtsy later would). Was it possible to strive for moral perfection of character, he asked, when people were being shot down in the streets?68 Arrested two days after Bloody Sunday, Gorky was interned in the PeterPaul Fortress, where, like Chernyshevsky, he was able to sublimate his energy into revolutionary writing. Within a month he had finished his play Children of the Sun (Deti solntsa, 1905) after obtaining permission from the prison authorities to write “a comedy.” A drama about the intelligentsia, it is full of pathos extolling the triumph of love over death, yet paints the cultured class as blissfully unaware of the tragic lives of the denizens of the lower depths around them, even ignorant of the impending catastrophe as a cholera epidemic unleashes a scourge of mob violence. The protagonist Pavel Protasov waxes, “Fear of death, that’s what hinders people from being bold, beautiful, free people. . . . It frightens their reason. . . . But we, children of the sun, of the bright source of life, . . . we will conquer the dark fear of death. . . . It burns in our blood, it is what gives birth to proud, flaming thoughts. . . . It is the ocean of energy, loveliness and joy . . . !” Contemporaries saw the work as Gorky’s repudiation of the intelligentsia, but the writer himself saw it as an appeal to artists and intellectuals to ally themselves with the working class. Gorky did not spring from the intelligentsia, and he remained cautiously aloof from bourgeois intelligentsia society; nevertheless, he knew that the success of the revolution depended on the culture-bearing class, and he became its chief defender.69 After the Bolshevik coup, Gorky found himself in the position of something of a go-between, often intervening to save writers from persecution or financial hardships. Gorky believed in Russia and her people’s rebirth, but he also intuited that it needed the careful, conscious guidance of genuine socialist culture in order to bring the renascence about. This depended on the intelligentsia, and he worked at defending and supporting intellectuals who had fallen afoul of Bolshevik police agents of the Cheka. By pressuring authorities for concessions, or other times through direct intervention via Lenin, Gorky helped individuals and organized group patronage to provide means of subsistence for writers who found themselves in desperate straits. He also failed at times to provide the much needed assistance in time to stave off catastrophe.70

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Gorky’s bond with Lenin was complex. At the Fifth Congress of the Social Democrats in London in 1907, Gorky was surprised at first to find something lacking in Vladimir Ilyich; he did not seem to him like a leader.71 Even while admiring his acumen, Gorky would describe Lenin as a deceitful political fighter who would “veer, prevaricate, intrigue and sow confusion, seeking support from the devil himself if it were offered.” By these same tactics, however, Lenin outwitted and outmatched his more scrupulous opponents. Father of Russian Marxism Georgii Plekhanov was too much a gentleman, lacking Lenin’s magnetism. Viktor Chernov, founder of the SR’s, was a brilliant intellectual but lacked the resolve of a professional revolutionary leader. The Menshevik leader Yulii Martov was “a prisoner of standards of behavior and of principles which he never thought of compromising.” Over these men and others like them, Gorky saw that it was Lenin’s sheer tenacity and Machiavellian savvy that prevailed.72 But Gorky kept away from Lenin during the years 1913–1918, proving that he did not want to see the man in power. By this time Gorky had moved toward moderation, with no need to romanticize revolution. He loved the people but regretted their crudeness, their desire to hurt and spoil. When the February Revolution came, he wanted a new Russian man to emerge with reason, knowledge, and culture, but feared that Russia was too exhausted physically and spiritually at that point to realize the humanist dream. He organized associations for the spread of science and culture. He campaigned to guard the palaces and monuments of the old order, pleading with those who would destroy them that they were the nation’s heritage, “the soil from which your new national art would grow.” His appeal was printed and circulated by the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies.73 Witnessing the cruelty and violence that transpired through the various waves of revolt in 1917, Gorky was afraid that Russian culture and the intelligentsia might fall victim to barbarism from below, the “lower depths” of his coinage in the 1902 play. Gorky was appalled by mob violence and the views of those, such as Trotsky, who believed that bloodshed was a natural course for the revolution to take. For Gorky, “the slow flame of culture” was needed to cleanse Russia of “its inbred slavery.” In Children of the Sun, the people, the Russian narod who surround the sun children, are depicted as primitive, savage, ready and able to destroy the intelligentsia. Like Blok, on the other hand, Gorky also blamed the intelligentsia in part for abandoning its duty to the people and being responsible for its own potential demise.74 Trotsky saw the vandalism and violence as the “awakening of the personality.” Blok saw the destruction of the old world as an inevitable step in the emergence of a new, more fraternal, even Christian world (hence the figure of Jesus Christ marching at the head of the Red Guards in “The Twelve”). Others, like Gorky, were appalled by the savagery. Even while recognizing

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the people’s anarchy as a just, elemental force, Gorky had seen the socialist revolution as a cultural transformation with the distinct purpose of building a humanist civilization based on ideals of democracy and the development of people’s moral, spiritual, and intellectual faculties.75 Gorky maintained that people had been treated inhumanely by the tsarist regime—conditions which could not have fostered in them respect for the individual, nor awareness of civil rights or justice. They then grew accustomed to violence because of the war. After February, the thin veneer of civilization had been stripped away, the unwritten laws of civilized behavior forgotten. He also believed the national character to be exceptionally cruel to begin with. He did not sustain the romantic view that many others upheld, which idolized the peasantry as a repository of goodness, simplicity and wisdom. In the common people, he saw common ignorance and evil. He recognized the spontaneously anarchic nature (stikhinost’) of the Russian peasants and believed they possessed an innate brutality. He believed their feral instincts to be an “Asiatic” legacy, while civilization was a Western heritage, delivered by the intelligentsia. Like Blok and others, Gorky foresaw that Lenin’s rousing of the narod using demagogic calls for terror would unleash the people’s predilection for violence. He believed the role of the intelligentsia was to defend the moral and cultural values of the Enlightenment against the destructive passions of the crowd and feared most of all that they would destroy the goals of culture and humanism that he upheld. The intelligentsia had a duty, in this regard, to safeguard the revolution as a constructive and creative process of national civilization. Gorky saw that the Bolsheviks, on the other hand, had been exploiting the cultural ideals of the socialist intelligentsia in the interests of furthering their own political ends. He accused the Bolsheviks of stirring up class hatred among the “nihilistic masses” and harnessing their destructive energy in order to direct it against the old order. In New Life, Gorky warned that overthrowing the autocracy might not bring the spiritual healing Russia needed. It might even exacerbate the ills at the core of the “organism” if the restructuring of political life were not accompanied by restructuring on a soul level. Using the common weather metaphor, albeit with surprisingly sagacious intuition about the collective psychology of the people, he warned of a “distortion of the psyche” owing to the fact that “we live in a storm of political emotions, in the chaos of a struggle for power, a struggle that arouses dark instincts along with good feelings.”76 After violent clashes on Nevsky Prospekt on April 20–21, repelled by the acts of street violence, Gorky wrote, “The most dreadful enemy of freedom and rights is within us: our stupidity, our cruelty, and all that chaos of dark, anarchistic feelings, which have been cultivated in our souls by the monarchy’s shameless oppression.”77 Furthermore, in the language of cultivation,

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he draws out a more pointed critique of political infighting among factions of the new revolutionary government: “Politics is the soil in which the nettle of poisonous enmity, evil suspicions, shameless lies, slander, and lack of respect for the person (lichnost’) grows rapidly and abundantly.”78 Gorky’s message is a custom version of the reap what you sow adage. Remarkable is his refusal to see the fault as one-sided: just as the monarchy cultivated conditions that had led to its downfall by unleashing the dark impulses of the masses, he does not see any profit in perpetuating the disastrous downfall of the Russian nation if those same unchecked impulses lead a further descent into violence and chaos. In October, Gorky campaigned against the Bolsheviks coming to power. He sensed that a Bolshevik takeover was assured to spur a redux of the boorish folly and “bloody, senseless slaughter” perpetrated by unruly crowds during the Bolshevik-instigated unrest in July. On October 18, a week before the Bolshevik insurrection, Gorky predicted: All the dark instincts of the crowd irritated by the disintegration of life and by the lies and filth of politics will flare up and fume, poisoning us with anger, hate and revenge; people will kill one another, unable to suppress their own animal stupidity. An unorganized crowd, hardly understanding what it wants, will crawl out into the street, and, using this crowd as a cover, adventurers, thieves, and professional murderers will begin to “create the history of the Russian Revolution.”79

Gorky continued to publish his opposition paper New Life after October and was lucky it wasn’t shut down (which surprised even him), as most other nonparty publications were. Its survival owed to his revolutionary past and his popularity with the masses—but even more to Lenin’s fondness for Gorky. Otherwise, there is no way he could have written, on November 7, that “Lenin and Trotsky do not have the slightest idea of the meaning of freedom or the Rights of Man,” much less “They have already become poisoned with the filthy venom of power, and this is shown by their shameful attitude toward freedom of speech, the individual, and all those other civil liberties for which the democracy struggled.”80 Gorky’s paper called the Bolshevik insurrection “Madness” and “The Breath of Death”—a pair of titles from his editorials of this time. He was outraged by the fact that they used the same repressive measures against their opponents as the ones they themselves had recently suffered under. He condemned the Bolsheviks’ disgraceful disregard for freedom of speech and the democratic rights for which the country had struggled for so long. He described Lenin as a reckless aristocrat (Lenin indeed, as noted earlier, hailed from the upper class) and a mad chemist who was toying with the masses in

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a cruel experiment doomed to failure. In another metaphor, he was a metallurgist working with ore: “Is it possible, under the existing conditions, to cast a socialistic state out of this one?” It was not, but Lenin was worse than the chemist in his laboratory employing dead matter to produce results valuable to life, “whereas Lenin works on living material and leads the revolution to perdition.”81 On the other hand, because Gorky retained his influence with Lenin and the Party, intelligentsia factions on the political Right despised him as a Bolshevik collaborator; then for the same reason they flocked to him for help because he had the pull to intercede with the regime. In such an emotionally fraught time, Gorky of course wanted to intercede on behalf of those who were the bearers of Russia’s culture and humanism. He ignored the insults and helped whomever he could.82 Meanwhile he continued to criticize the general environment of lawlessness and bedlam. On January 11, 1918, when vandalism, crime, and drunken looting were rife on the streets of the capital, he wrote that what was going on was not a process of social revolution, but a “pogrom of greed, hatred and vengeance.” Participants in the mayhem were not the organized working class of the socialist idyll but victims of the breakdown of that class, unemployed holdovers from the destruction and ruin of the war years, as well as unskilled laborers from the countryside, mixed in with bandits and common criminals.83 Gorky perceived the revolutionary horizon with uncommon clarity. It was Bolshevik policy and Lenin’s philosophy itself that frustrated him. But for Lenin’s sheer and perverse incompliance, the Bolsheviks may have joined a coalition government that participated in the democratically elected Constituent Assembly. Instead, the first democratically elected national legislative body in Russia’s history was dissolved after one session. Gorky’s own aspirational vision, like that of the Landmarks authors, relied upon a moral authority. But it ran up against the nihilistic tradition, which translated, in the case of the post-October Bolsheviks, into Lenin’s recalcitrant, Machiavellian politics. Yet in late 1918, Gorky gave in and joined the Bolsheviks. Explaining in his essay upon the death of Lenin in 1924 that his role was to form a union of the workers and the intelligentsia, he wanted to reconcile people of culture to the Bolshevik Revolution. He clung steadfast to a faith in the people’s thirst for knowledge and culture but struggled with the agonizing suspicion that his efforts to educate and foster culture would be marred by the “dark, vindictive yearning of people to break, mutilate, mock and vilify the beautiful,” which he had observed during the two revolutions and the war.84 Gorky’s reconciliation with the Party came at the same time as the launch of the Red Terror. Numerous counterrevolutionary White Army campaigns and Allied interventions had ratcheted up the stakes in the Civil War.

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Democratic freedoms were further curtailed as the Bolshevik dictatorship clamped down on independent organizations, finally catching New Life in its net. A further catalyst in an already volatile situation came via an assassination attempt on Lenin on August 30, 1918, by a member of the Left Socialist Revolutionary party, the Bolsheviks’ archrivals on the left. “The intelligentsia got [me] with its bullet,” Lenin reportedly said to Gorky. Later investigations suggest that the incident was a Chekist provocation to instigate the terror, eliminate enemies, and clamp down on resistance.85 For those who survived, conditions were dire. Winter set in with no food, nor fuel for heating or light, let alone paper for the work of writers and publishers. Between 1918 and 1921 Gorky did everything he could not only to save culture but to save writers and intellectuals from starvation and persecution. He intervened even for those who had previously baited him in the press. Gorky struggled to protect scientists, writers, artists, and professionals of many stripes from merciless discrimination and harassment, pleading, “The basic wealth of a country consists of the amount of brains, the number of intellectual forces nurtured and accumulated by the nation,” and attached a list of scholars who had perished in the recent months. He helped provide jobs and rations through the Commission for the Protection of Monuments and Antiquity; he created jobs for actors, directors, and playwrights by forming a Petrograd Theatre of Tragedy; the previously established Committee for Freedom and Culture provided room and board in exchange for lectures to workers; the Free Association for the Development and Spread of the Positive Sciences helped shield “workers in the arts” from the terror. He organized shelters for scientists, writers, and artists, regardless of class origin or affiliation, including a Home of Scholars, Home of Writers, and Home of Artists. Criteria were flexible enough to accommodate a wide spectrum of applicants for lodging and meals. He set up an Institute of World Literature for the translation of classics, which employed, among others, Aleksandr Blok and Boris Pasternak. Accounts by contemporaries refer to countless letters Gorky wrote for protection from arrest, and procurements of food, medicines, clothes, paper and ink, or milk for newborn babies. He cast off praise, regretting, “It’s nothing. For every one or two I get off, they manage to kill two or three hundred.” Meanwhile Lenin once chided him over the frequency of his requests on behalf of people, to the effect that he was busying himself with nonsense. On one such occasion, when Gorky tried to help a mother gain a stay of execution for her son, Lenin allegedly replied to him, “For God’s sake—don’t come to me with all these trifles. Don’t you understand—this is one boy. There’s a revolution going on. Please try to understand.”86 Other people and institutions in the early 1920s aimed to defend the livelihoods and interests of the intelligentsia, but they were suppressed in the latter part of the decade and through the 1930s and 1940s. Independent publishing

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was nearly impossible; however, groups were established for the defense of writers’ interests. In 1918–1922 the Moscow intellectual Pavel Muratov set up the Writers’ Bookshop (Knizhnaia lava pisatelei) as a cultural center and anchor for personal safety—a refuge for writers, artists, professors, and intellectuals. A similar function was carried out by the Petropolis cooperative in Petrograd, which published Anna Akhmatova’s poems.87 Similarly, the Union of Belleslettristes (Soiuz deiateli khodozhestvennoi literatury), organized by Fedor Sologub in March 1918, including members Gorky, Blok, Aleksandr Kuprin, and Nikolai Gumilev, helped provide material assistance for writers: food, heating, and the opportunity to write. An AllRussian Writers’ Trade Union (Vserossiiskii professional’nyi soiuz pisatelei) called for “defence of the professional and spiritual interests of writers.” The groups maintained an uneasy alliance with the state. Relations with authorities were delicate, and ultimately efforts such as these were short-lived.88 In spite of Lenin’s indulgence, Gorky’s clout weakened, and he made the decision, with Lenin’s urging, to leave the Soviet Union, using poor health as an excuse (his ailing tubercular lung would benefit from the change of climate). A month before his departure, in July 1921, he made an appeal to the United States for help for the sick and starving people of Russia. The American Congress and American families responded with aid that probably saved thousands of lives, despite Soviet officials calling the intervention a “weapon.” In Gorky’s first play written in exile, about the seventeenth-century peasant rebel Stenka Razin, the outlaw Razin can be read as a portrait of both Lenin and the elemental, merciless, irrational spirit of the people, propelled by resentment, hate, and vengeance. In both, the rebel hero is an embodiment of the force of irrationality that canceled out compassion and self-restraint. Gorky later worked on The Life of Klim Samgin (Zhizn’ Klima Samgina) for a decade, from 1927 until his death in 1937, and published four volumes of this epic tale of the intelligentsia world from the 1880s through 1917. A repudiation of the past, it may have been Gorky’s method of clearing the deck for the future.89 Gorky’s response to Lenin’s death, which happened while Gorky was living in exile in Europe, was predictably severe. “I loved him with wrath,” he wrote to his friend, the French writer Romain Rolland. Another friend recalled how Lenin’s death had left Gorky feeling that he and the whole of Russia had been orphaned. Bereft of a father figure and his native country, Gorky faced a deeper personal crisis than any he had previously known. But in truth Gorky’s friendship with Lenin had been a love-hate relationship. His memories of Lenin in V. I. Lenin (1924) expressed a tone of reconciliation. It marked a reassessment of his whole attitude toward the Revolution and may have helped his decision to return to the Soviet Union

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(although that was still a few years away). Another deciding factor was his status within the Russian émigré community. Fellow exiles and émigrés saw Gorky as ethically culpable for their country’s tragic demise. One wrote, for example, “To us Russians, Gorky is one of those who are morally and politically responsible for the great calamities that the Bolshevik regime has brought to our country. Years will pass, but he will never be forgotten.” Some of his friends among the same émigrés who had rejected Bolshevism now saw his return, which occurred in stages between 1928 and 1932, as a betrayal.90 Gorky had rejected, most of all, the regime’s hostile policy toward the arts and culture. Its heavy-handed treatment of the peasantry, on the other hand, was something Gorky could justify, given the elemental nature (stikhinost’) of the narod, which he believed would require force to properly quell. He purportedly didn’t like Stalin as a human being but supported some of his policies, such as collectivization, with hopes that it would bring peasant Russia out of its backwardness. There is reason to believe Gorky thought he could rein in some of Stalin’s excesses, as he had done with Lenin. There is evidence he continued to intercede for people sentenced to labor camps whenever he could. It must have been an emotional struggle with his conscience that forced Gorky’s return to the Soviet Union under Stalin’s dictatorship, first for much fêted visits in the summers of 1927 and 1928 (he made five summer trips in all before resettling), and then permanently in 1931. For many, especially of the émigré community of the time, his defense of Stalinist policies—particularly the forced labor practices of collectivization—was an unforgivable compromise of the humanist principles he purported to uphold. For Gorky, it was an attempt to accept the reality and push through it. After all, could the great proletarian writer of the Revolution, the Stormy Petrel himself, live out his life in exile, watching his country’s troubled history unfold from the cafés of Europe? Corresponding with Stalin before his return, Gorky was undoubtedly mistaken about the character and intentions of Lenin’s successor. He may have believed in the potential of Stalin, a practical man not of the intelligentsia, and a national minority (Georgian), to steer the Party and the legacy of the Revolution toward a greater humanism. Gorky may have persuaded himself that he could influence and educate the new cadre of Communist leaders. He believed he could influence Stalin’s policies and resuscitate his—Gorky’s— original mission to salvage Russian culture and ensure that the Revolution would at last secure its foundation on culture and humanism.91 His preliminary returns in the two consecutive summers of 1928 and 1929 were met with great fanfare, while the true reality of conditions in some locations, such as collective farms and the labor colony at Solovki, were hidden from him. Potemkin farms notwithstanding, he may have willingly turned a

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blind eye; but he soon got the full picture, which, it turns out, was impossible to ignore. Hundreds of letters came from people asking him to intervene in the cases of arrested loved ones. He commented on the suffering he saw all around and opined that collectivization should be undertaken on a voluntary basis, without violence or coercion. Incidentally, Gorky told the Bolshevik commissar who accompanied his tour and later wrote his memoirs from exile in Paris, that Stalin’s “Dizzy with Success” dictum was the result of his prompting. However, the propaganda machine proceeded apace, and when an article lauding the collective farm was published bearing Gorky’s signature, Gorky later confided to the same commissar that everything in it was the opposite of what he had written.92 Upon his permanent return in 1931, aiming still to promote a program of culture and humanism, Gorky started several more journals toward that end. Like The Day of the World (see chapter 4), they would inevitably become propaganda organs of the regime. His friend the writer Viktor Serge, an outspoken critic of Stalin, said he thought Gorky was aging fast and seemed crushed by hopelessness. He ceased speaking out about the disappearances of people and the decline of culture. Increasingly opposed to Stalinism, Gorky found himself a prisoner of the regime—Stalin refused to let him go abroad again—but remained a thorn in its side. His last writing reveals the contempt he held for the totalitarian system of the Soviet government, and personal contempt for Stalin. As noted earlier, Gorky remained a believer in the salutary lie—the dream that the myth of today might be the reality of tomorrow. This was probably a point of contact with Stalin. Rehabilitation and the rebuilding of personality and character through “ennobling work” was a cherished ideal of Communism and the ostensible goal of forced labor projects such as the White Sea Canal, and the Gorky Colony for orphans and juvenile delinquents initiated in the writer’s name by the progressive educator Anton Makarenko.93 However, further efforts toward the good had little effect. The “Trial of the Mensheviks” took place in the year of his return, when some of Gorky’s friends, including his former editor Nikolai Sukhanov, were subjected to show trials and liquidated. If Gorky thought he could influence the outcome, he was mistaken. Instead, Party purges intensified. He did continue to intervene for fellow writers, helping Evgeny Zamiatin, for example, obtain permission to emigrate. Others, though he attempted, he was unable to save. In one of his final literary efforts, in 1935 Gorky rewrote a 1918 play called The Zikovs (Zikovy) which, for reasons that will be obvious, was never staged. One of the characters rues, “To accomplish anything, for Russia, I cannot keep too pure a conscience. I cannot refuse to lend my name to lies, and even evil. If I spoke out, I could no longer do what little good I now can. I must only work on, in the sense of holy respect for Russia and her latent

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possibilities.” More speeches in the play are clearly indictments of Stalin via the antagonist Muratov. Sofia (“wisdom”) defies him, calling out his people for killing and torturing dozens, throwing many more in prisons, and shattering countless lives. There are, somewhere, people who feel life as I do. . . . In my soul there is light—that means, light also exists outside my soul; in my soul is faith in the possibility of a different life—that means, it exists in people, this blessed faith. Much I do not understand, I am poorly educated, but I feel life is a blessing, and people—good. . . . And you always lie about people . . . and even—against yourself.

To Muratov’s counter that he always speaks the truth, she adds, “No— another truth lives and grows. . . . There is another Rus, not the one in whose name you speak! We—are strangers . . . I am not a fellow-traveler of yours, and—we have finished, I trust?” To which Muratov retorts menacingly, “I’m confident that on the path to that other truth of yours you will break your neck.”94 In spite of this dire threat, spoken by the villain who is an indubitable analogue to Stalin, the play has a life-affirming ending: if one struggles for values, even if the consequence is death, one has done one’s duty, and a return to the good will eventually be accomplished. Gorky may have finally repudiated the salutary lie once and for all. But it may have cost him his life. After the 1934 assassination of Kirov instigated the wholesale liquidation of scores of original revolutionary idealists who remained in the Party— believers in liberty, opposed to the modern totalitarian state—some contend that first his son and then Gorky himself were among the victims. Although the evidence is inconclusive, it has been posited that the purges that began in late 1936 and continued through 1939 started only after Stalin had removed the “conscience” of the Revolution, Maxim Gorky.95 Gorky died on June 18, 1936, at sixty-nine years of age in the same residence where Lenin had passed away twelve years earlier. Contemporaries recorded in their diaries and memoirs that peals of thunder rang over Moscow that day, with flashes of lightning, followed by a violent downpour. Fitting that a eulogy of thunder should accompany the death of the Stormy Petrel.96 The following chapter looks back at more of the contributing factors that brought the Russian intelligentsia and the people into contact, and reasons for the unbridgeable gulf between them. The revolutionary age itself is the focus, particularly with regard to the self-conscious pursuit of modernization as a millenarian principle. In Russia, the language and outlooks of modernity that brought class antagonisms to the surface are critical elements in the strategy

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of the Revolution’s victors, who exploited these cultural differences toward achieving political ends.

NOTES 1. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 192. 2. See Claudia Verhoeven, “‘Une Révolution Vraiment Scientifique’: Russian Terrorism, the Escape from the European Orbit, and the Invention of a New Revolutionary Paradigm,” in Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions, eds. Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 204–6; Ian D. Thatcher, “Scripting the Russian Revolution,” in Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions, eds. Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 213–30; and Joan Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900–1914 (Berkeley, CA and Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1993). 3. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 196–97. 4. Ibid., 200–202. 5. Ibid., 203–5. 6. Ibid., 207. 7. Ibid., 208–9. 8. Read, Religion, Revolution, 175. 9. Jane Burbank, Intelligentsia and Revolution: Russian Views of Bolshevism, 1917–1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 5–11. 10. Read, Religion, Revolution, 117; Copleston, Philosophy in Russia, 204–5. On the Vekhi debate, see also Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 209. 11. Read, Religion, Revolution, 132, 108, 23. 12. Ibid., 107; M. O. Gershenzon, ed., Vekhi, sbornik statei o russkoi intelligentsii, 2nd Edition (Moscow: Taylor & Francis, Ltd., 1909), 38. See also Landmarks: A Collection of Essays on the Russian Intelligentsia, eds. Boris Shragin and Albert Todd, trans. Marian Schwartz (New York, NY: Karz Howard, 1977). 13. Read, Religion, Revolution, 118; Gershenzon, Vekhi, 47. Italics in the original. 14. Read, Religion, Revolution, 108, 111; Gershenzon, Vekhi, 8, 193. See also Leonard Schapiro, “The ‘Vekhi’ Group and the Mystique of Revolution,” The Slavonic and East European Review 34, no. 82 (December 1955): 56–76. 15. Freeborn, The Russian Revolutionary Novel, 54. 16. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 132–34. Nechaev’s Catechism of a Revolutionary was likely written with the collaboration of Mikhail Bakunin. On Young Russia, see Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution, Ch. 6: “‘Get Your Axes!’” and Abbot Gleason, Young Russia: The Genesis of Russian Radicalism in the 1860s (New York, NY: The Viking Press, 1980), 170–79. 17. Read, Religion, Revolution, 110–11; Frank in Gershenzon, Vekhi, 196. 18. Read, Religion, Revolution, 106. 19. Ibid., 116–17, 109.

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20. Ibid., 177–78. 21. Ibid., 119–20. 22. S. Kondrushin, “K kharakteristike russkoi revoliutsionnoi intelligentsii,” Biulleteni Literaturyi i zhizni, November 1917, books 9–10, 44. Originally printed in Rech’, No. 236. Quoted in Read, Culture and Power, 47–48. 23. Andrei Bely, Petersburg, trans. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1978), 51–52. 24. Andrey Bely, “Russia,” trans. Gerard Shelley, in 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution, ed. Boris Dralyuk (London: Pushkin Press, 2016), 49. 25. Andrei Belyi, Revoliutsiia i kul’tura (Moscow, 1917), 3, 12–13; quoted in Steinberg, The Russian Revolution, 39. 26. Boris Pasternak, I Remember: Sketch for an Autobiography, trans. David Magarshack (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1959), 50. The Silver Age is a pinnacle of Russian poetry, the flowering of Russian modernism spanning the last decade of the nineteenth and the first two decades of the twentieth century. It is surpassed only by the Golden Age of Russian Poetry, aka the Age of Pushkin. 27. Avril Pyman, The Life of Aleksandr Blok, Vol. 2: The Release of Harmony, 1908–1921 (Oxford, London, and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1980), 5. 28. Aleksandr Blok, “The People and the Intelligentsia,” in Russian Intellectual History: An Anthology, ed. Marc Raeff (Princeton, NJ and Sussex: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), 363. Blok’s italics. Find the original “Narod i intelligentsia” in Aleksandr Blok, Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh, 8 Vols., 1960–63, Vol. 5 (Moscow and Leningrad: Gos. izd. khud. lit., 1962), 318–28. 29. Excerpt from Aleksandr Blok, “Ia ukho prilozhil k zemle,” in Iamby, Sovremennye stikhi, 1907–1914 (Petersburg: Alkonost, 1919), 12–13. My translation. 30. Aleksandr Blok, Zapisnye knizhki Al. Bloka, ed. P. N. Medvedev (Leningrad: Priboi, 1930), 70. My translation. 31. Aleksandr Blok, “The Intelligentsia and the Revolution,” in Russian Intellectual History: An Anthology, ed. Marc Raeff (Princeton, NJ and Sussex: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), 366. Find the original “Intelligentsiia i revoliutsiia” in Sobranie sochinenii 6 (1962): 9–20. Italics in the original. 32. Ibid., 366–67. 33. Ibid., 366. Italics in the original. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. Italics in the original. 36. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, Vol. 6, 169–70. Quoted in Avril Pyman, The Life of Aleksandr Blok, Vol. 1: The Distant Thunder, 1880–1908 (Oxford, London, and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1979), 1–2. 37. Ibid., Vol. 5, 435. Quoted in Pyman, The Distant Thunder, 67–68. Blok learned the idea of the Eternal Feminine from Russian philosopher and Blok family friend Vladimir Solov’iev (1853–1900), who wrote extensively about it in the form of the personification of wisdom called Divine Sophia. 38. Read, Religion, Revolution, 136. 39. Blok, letter of June 19, 2017, to his mother, in Sobranie sochinenii, Vol. 8, 503; quoted in Pyman, The Life of Aleksandr Blok, Vol. 2, 256. Italics in the original.

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Blok notes that he is writing from the Winter Palace, “where . . . I hate to go. It is a realm of disorder, rumours, intrigues, and inefficiency.” That summer the Constituent Assembly had commissioned him to write a summary of events leading up to the tsar’s abdication, which he would title, The Last Days of the Imperial Regime. See Pyman, The Life of Aleksandr Blok, Vol. 2, 252–54. 40. Blok, “The Intelligentsia and the Revolution,” 370–71. 41. Read, Culture and Power, 92; see also Read, Religion, Revolution, 134–35. 42. Aleksandr Blok, “The Twelve,” trans. Boris Dralyuk and Robert Chandler, in Stories and Poems, 50–63. Original text in Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, Vol. 3 (1960), 347–59. 43. Dralyuk and Chandler, Stories and Poems, 63. 44. Pyman, The Life of Aleksandr Blok, Vol. 2, 320–22. 45. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, Vol. 7 (1963), 365. My translation. 46. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 784–85. This marker often includes Silver Age poet Nikolai Gumilev, Anna Akhmatova’s first husband, who in August 1921, the same month Blok died, was executed for allegedly taking part in an anti-Bolshevik conspiracy. 47. Stephen C. Hutchings, Russian Modernism: The Transfiguration of the Everyday (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 211; Alexei Remizov, Vzvikhrennaia Rus’ (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1991), 250, 339. 48. Slobin, Remizov’s Fictions, 132, 138. 49. Hutchings, Russian Modernism, 194–95; Slobin, Remizov’s Fictions, 140–43. 50. Slobin, Remizov’s Fictions, 132. 51. Remizov, Vzvikhrennaia Rus’, 337. Here and below, translations from Vzvikhrennaia Rus’ are my own unless otherwise indicated. 52. Ibid. 53. Hutchings, Russian Modernism, 214. 54. Slobin, Remizov’s Fictions, 141–42, 146. 55. Remizov, Vzvikhrennaia Rus’, 395, 306; cited in Hutchings, Russian Modernism, 201–2. 56. Hutchings, Russian Modernism, 214, 196–98. Spacing of the letters in the final word is in the original. See also Fredric Levinson, “Vzvikhrennaia Rus’: Remizov’s Chronicle of Revolution,” Russian Literary Triquarterly 19 (1986): 211–27. 57. Deborah A. Martinsen, “Of Shame and Human Bondage: Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground,” in Dostoevsky on the Threshold of Other Worlds: Essays in Honour of Malcolm V. Jones, eds. Sarah J. Young and Lesley Milne (Ilkeston, UK: Bramcote Press, 2006), 165. 58. Hutchings, Russian Modernism, 204–5; italics in the original. 59. Remizov, Vzvikhrennaia Rus’, 251–52; Hutchings, Russian Modernism, 203; italics in the original. 60. Slobin, Remizov’s Fictions, 146; italics in the original. 61. Read, Culture and Power, 85. 62. Wolfe, The Bridge and the Abyss, 54–60. 63. Dan Levin, Stormy Petrel: The Life and Work of Maxim Gorky (New York, NY: Appleton-Century, 1965), 263, 272.

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64. Wolfe, The Bridge and the Abyss, 18, note 2; Levin, Stormy Petrel, 194. 65. Wolfe, The Bridge and the Abyss, 21. 66. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 175–79. 67. Levin, Stormy Petrel, 114–16. 68. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 180–82. 69. Levin, Stormy Petrel, 117–18; Jacob Adler, A Life on the Stage: A Memoir, trans. Lulla Rosenfeld (New York, NY: Applause Theatre Books, 2001), 335. 70. Read, Culture and Power, 82–86. 71. Wolfe, The Bridge and the Abyss, 28. 72. Levin, Stormy Petrel, 142. 73. Ibid., 182–84, 188–90. 74. Read, Culture and Power, 83; Levin, Stormy Petrel, 118–19. 75. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 398–99. 76. M. Gor’kii, “Nesvoevremennye mysli,” Novaia zhizn’, April 20 (May 3), 1917, 5; quoted in Steinberg, Russian Revolution, 37. 77. M. Gor’kii, “Ob ubiistve,” Novaia zhizn’, April 23 (May 6), 1917, 1; quoted in Steinberg, Russian Revolution, 37. 78. Gor’kii, Novaia zhizn’, April 20 (May 3), 1917, 5; quoted in Steinberg, Russian Revolution, 37. 79. Gor’kii, Novaia Zhizn’, October 18, 1917; quoted in Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 495–96; see also Levin, Stormy Petrel, 191–93. 80. Gor’kii, Novaia Zhizn’, November 7, 1917; quoted in Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 502. 81. Levin, Stormy Petrel, 196. 82. Ibid., 194–95. 83. Gor’kii, Novaia Zhizn’, January 11, 1917; quoted in Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 495. 84. Levin, Stormy Petrel, 199–201. 85. Ibid., 199–200; Arkady Vaksberg, The Murder of Maxim Gorky: A Secret Execution, trans. Todd Bludeau (New York, NY: Enigma Books, 2007), 21–23. 86. Levin, Stormy Petrel, 203–8; Christopher Barnes, Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography, Vol. 1: 1890–1928 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 273. Italics in the original. 87. Read, Culture and Power, 62–63. 88. Ibid., 62–65. 89. Levin, Stormy Petrel, 218–19, 264–65. 90. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 819–20. See also Henri Troyat, Gorky: A Biography, trans. Lowell Bair (New York, NY: Crown Publishers, 1989), 151–65. 91. Levin, Stormy Petrel, 267–69. 92. Ibid., 270–71, 311; Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 821. 93. Levin, Stormy Petrel, 287–90. 94. Ibid., 305–7. 95. Ibid., 301–2. See also Vaksberg, The Murder of Maxim Gorky. 96. Ibid., 313; Vaksberg, The Murder of Maxim Gorky, 4.

Chapter 4

An Incomparable Age

In 1937 Soviet publishers issued a book the likes of which the world had never seen. It was the inspiration of Maxim Gorky, now chairman of the Union of Soviet Writers, to create a book that would chronicle a single day in the life of the entire world through newspaper clippings, letters, articles, photographs, drawings, and caricatures on everything from politics and industry to fashion, entertainment, and the day-to-day life of ordinary citizens around the globe. The book, called The Day of the World (Den’ mira), zeroed in on September 27, 1935, intending to present a snapshot of everything that was happening in countries around the world on a single day simultaneously. The result was an encyclopedic propaganda tome which detailed the decaying capitalist world while valorizing Soviet society and its accomplishments. Gorky, in a letter to coeditor Mikhail Kol’tsov, described it as such: The Day of the World endeavors to show our reader what a bourgeois day is filled with and to contrast this picture with the contents of our Soviet day. Why do we need this? We have been writing that the bourgeoisie is decaying, rotting, etc., which sounds unsubstantiated, since it is not confirmed by facts. Our newspapers simply do not contain material on everyday life sufficient enough to provide an obvious, clear picture of exactly how the senile, obsolete bourgeois world is decaying.1

Gorky’s mission is to give the “proof”—to provide the facts to make an obvious, clear, and complete statement of the superiority of the daily life of people in the Soviet Union over the West. In the second decade after the Great October Socialist Revolution, life had been completely reshaped and reconstructed. The book is a triumphant display of the result of this total social and economic transformation. 105

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In the Introduction I alluded to the “Radiant Future” myth that made up a significant part of the story-building tendency of Soviet ideology. To reprise the story, the present is the time when the socialist future is being built. For the time being, sacrifice and hardship are justified by the rewards that will come later. This is a natural, inevitable process based in “science,” that is, Marxist economics and dialectical materialism. The path toward the Communist state was visible and clear, and needed only time to unfurl into the inevitable workers’ utopia at the end of history. The Day of the World ostensibly showed that the rewards of the Radiant Future had already come. On September 27, 1935, they are plain to see all around. The whole project embodies the exuberant spirit of the victory of socialism, when in every moment of their happier, more technologically advanced, ideologically correct, and virtuous lives, the Soviet citizens proclaimed total victory over the crumbling, decaying West in everything they did. Soviet workers, planners, and builders were busy living and creating the Radiant Future right now, in fact were part of its continuous and inevitable unfolding toward ever greater and greater progress. How had the shining path been built? Bourgeois capitalism had been eradicated, the enemies of progress defeated, and exploitation of workers was a thing of the past. In short, the Real Day had finally come. The Day of the World illustrates more than just a claim of superiority of the Soviet accomplishments it touted. It exemplifies the ways in which the early twentieth century was an age of new intensity and purpose, a modern age of great planners and builders, of “new people” with a new form of self-consciousness and power, which the Soviet working class was meant to epitomize above and beyond everyone else. The critical point in this narrative is modernity’s obsession with what is unparalleled in human history: the idea of living in an age of human progress, a time best characterized by its underlying belief that the outcome of human progress rests within—and solely within—the powers of humanity. Art Berman’s definition in Preface to Modernism is useful in this regard: Modernity is founded on the assertion that the present inaugurates an unprecedented era: not simply a continuation or modification of the past, but an incomparable age. A new form of human self-consciousness is to intervene in history, not only as a mode of awareness, but as a mode of power. Human rationality will predominate, subordinating irrationality, custom, and superstition, with the efficacy to plan for and attain progressive improvement in all social institutions through the free exercise of will. Humans have the ability to understand nature as it is—real, solid, and lawfully dependable—which diminishes dependence on theological or transcendental concepts.2

While applicable to the Western world generally speaking, this definition is pertinent for understanding the social and political dynamics of revolutionary

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Russia and early Soviet society. For Russia embodies the struggle for modernity particularly strongly in the project of Soviet Communism. In the modern era, Berman argues, God is replaced by progress. Secular society is founded on science, technology, and industry. The Renaissance dictum that “man is the measure” takes on a greater resonance, for man(kind) is not only the measure but the creator and arbiter of society’s structures and institutions, even of the immutable laws they are founded upon. Although Russia didn’t experience the European Renaissance (more below), the notion that progress could achieve the perfection of civilization by application of human knowledge and ingenuity reached Russia during the Age of Enlightenment. It came with a strong conviction that human destiny rests in human hands. In thinking typical of the modern era, humans rather than God or a divine force beyond our ken control the conditions of our own existence and future life. Advancements of science, technology, and the arts would bring an end to history, in the sense of reaching its summit, a perfected civilization that would continue to prosper in perpetuity. Our focus as a species is on achievement unimpeded by the superstitions and ignorance of the past—or by the “evildoers” who propagated and exploited them. This goes to the larger view of the investigation here and allows me to continue to pursue signposts of the zeitgeist and vernacular of revolutionary Russia. Toward that end, the task demands further parsing of the concept of modernity as a governing narrative that fueled the class conflicts inherent to the ideology of socialist revolution. THE FIGHT FOR MODERNITY Modernity in Russia takes a course of its own, in some ways running parallel to Europe, but in others moving in its own direction. Occupying a middle space between Europe and Asia, Russia’s early history has been compared to a two-headed Janus looking simultaneously east and west.3 The period of Mongol invasion and rule (1237–1480) ensured that Russia did not experience the cultural Renaissance that most of Western and Central Europe had. It was the Western reforms of Peter I and his father Alexei Romanov, together with the French Enlightenment, and finally the Age of Revolution through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that carried the most profound impact in Russia. They brought with them modernity’s spectrum of ideals, along with the full weight of their contradictions and liabilities. In Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, the struggle for modernity finally came to a head. In some ways Soviet attitudes toward progress epitomize the modern era. For the idea of modernity presupposes that modern industrial societies are formed by centuries of advancement toward an ideal understood as a new

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form of human self-consciousness. A new mode of power, as prefaced above, supplants any previous dependence on theological or transcendent concepts. Beliefs about modern progress are often motivated by a teleological mission—an end point of ultimate achievement toward which modern humans strive. The cornerstone of this myth is its intensity of development, and commitment to increasing that intensity in our present lives toward the goal of achieving a perfected human society in the future. The myth of modernity, as it might be called, unfolded in Russia and the Soviet Union along a nonlinear path which pitched various strains of the values, beliefs, and ideals of modernity against one another in a drawn-out struggle to own the future. In a word, Soviet Communism exemplifies the triumph of modernity that came as the result of a tripartite clash of visions between the so-called bourgeois view of modernity, the artistic or cultural view, and the political or revolutionary view. Modern class war is rooted in the idea of modernity itself, in the very notion that there is a modern age when humanity is waking up from slumber in a long, benighted past. The future is happening now, in the present moment, on a trajectory of infinite progress. Soviets saw themselves as pioneers of the new age, and took it as a given that enemies of progress needed to be liquidated. Using language and policy designed to incite cultural revolution and class war, ideologues particularly targeted “bourgeois” elements—a label that cast a wide net for scapegoats across the social spectrum. Often workers, soldiers, and peasants were willing participants, taking the initiative to persecute perceived class enemies on their own. To come to grips with the myth of modernity, then, one needs to examine closely the makeup of modern class distinctions—particularly the bourgeoisie, its place in the ideological calculus of revolutionary change in Russia, and finally, its fate once the decades-long struggle had finally come to fruition. In the socialist iteration of the myth, what kinds of progress are we speaking of; who are the bourgeoisie, and why are they the enemies of progress? First, the history of the word modernity harks back to seventeenth-century France, and in time it comes to mean two things: both modernity as a stage of history of Western civilization—the battle between the Ancients and the Moderns—and modernity as an aesthetic. Somewhere in the middle of the nineteenth century, the two come into conflict. That is, “bourgeois modernity,” on the sociopolitical, technological side, clashes with “cultural modernity,” the artistic, aesthetic or avant-garde variety. The crux of the conflict turns on the fact that cultural modernity implies, very fundamentally, hostility to the past. It has a radical anti-bourgeois quality. A revolt of the present against the past, it embodies permanent crisis, a dialectic which is the driving force that shapes the modern world.4 Around the time of the European Renaissance, the idea of the Ancients was that of a privileged and exemplary past which could be emulated and

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venerated. In succeeding centuries, however, some Moderns saw fit to proclaim themselves superior to the Ancients. All that could be considered modern came to challenge tradition and authority—not only in secular government but also unorthodox interpretations of Christian myths. To be modern was to be a “free thinker.” Though modernity is associated with the secular world, its formative outlook relies on a juxtaposition vis-à-vis Christianity. For modernity represents a rupture, or discontinuity between cultural cycles. For the Ancients, the gods were manifestations of cyclical time. They would come to life and die again. Romantics interrupt the cycle, harboring a new consciousness of living toward the end of the Christian cycle. At the same time, the romantic period—the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century—sees a religious revival in literature. Romanticism is a reaction against neoclassicism, reason, and the Enlightenment. It brings a new emphasis on sentiment and intuition, the cult of originality and the imagination, exaltation of the individual, and a fascination with gothic art and the civilization of the Middle Ages. Romantics were the first to conceive the idea of the death of God, long before Friedrich Nietzsche did. They presaged a sense of doom, a tragic Twilight of the Idols, but also the eve of rebirth, renewal, and regeneration—ideals of transcendence and hopes for a radiant future. The quest becomes an end in itself, one holding close communion with a new obsession in the idea of revolution. By the 1830s and 1840s, in Germany, the Romantic reaction to the past has been worked out into two types: the revolutionary and the philistine. This opposition is a form of aesthetic protest against bourgeois mentality, which became in Germany an instrument of ideological and political criticism. The same division is recapitulated by the fin de siècle generation in the concept l’art pour l’art in France, or iskusstvo dlia iskusstva in Russia. Art for Art’s sake is an embodiment of the rebellion of aesthetic (cultural) modernity against bourgeois modernity. It is a concept of beauty related to an aggressive assertion of art’s total gratuitousness. Such an attitude is embraced by modern artists at the close of the century who were labeled decadents. Already by the mid-nineteenth century, then, we can speak of sets of beliefs that define the era in terms of particular groups and their modes of thought—specifically, the contrast between bourgeois and cultural/aesthetic modernity. The bourgeois idea of modernity centers on progress, confidence in the beneficial possibilities of science and technology, concern with measurable time (commodified time that can be bought and sold), the cult of reason, the ideal of freedom defined within the framework of an abstract humanism, pragmatism, and veneration of action and success. These are key beliefs and values of the middle-class, who view them as the pillars of their triumphant civilization. Secondly, cultural or aesthetic modernity is a Romantic turn which inspired forms of modernism such as decadence and avant-garde. It

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sustains radical anti-bourgeois attitudes. Disgusted with middle-class values, cultural modernity is given to rebellion, anarchy, apocalypticism, and selfexile. It stands for the rejection of bourgeois modernity with a vehement, negative passion.5 The clash of visions that define modernity is best illustrated in the art world. Before political factions came to exploit these tensions, the artistic project of modernity had two principal objectives: to reject bourgeois modernity and project a future of perpetual revolution. Its result is an ideological war of the forces of modernity fighting against themselves. Put another way, the frontline of the culture/class war is the struggle between bourgeois modernity, manifested in middle-class, mercantile values, and aesthetic modernity, represented by the cultural avant-garde. Effectively, the quarrel comes down to an issue of subjective, individual creativity versus creativity bound up in social processes.6 Culture is a system of myths with its own unique origin stories. Modernism, the domain of cultural modernity, as a self-contained culture, developed its own mythology.7 One of its aspects is obsession with time— both the search for beginnings (e.g., spiritual, aesthetic, psychological, and national) and stock in the future. Another is the myth of “the bourgeois” itself. In Russia, the bourgeoisie per se hardly existed until the twentieth century. The meshchanstvo, its closest equivalent there, had neutral connotations—except to the intelligentsia, who carried the Populist mindset, which idealized the peasant and opposed corruption of both the tsarist and Western capitalist systems. As Populism gave way to Marxism and idealization of the proletariat, “the bourgeois” (burzhuaziia) gained further negative connotations. As modernists did in the West, Russian modernists used the term as a negative moniker for passing aesthetic and philosophical judgment, in other words, parroting the Romantics who had used “the bourgeois” to imply cultural philistinism. Boris Pasternak wrote, “Romanticism needed philistinism [filisterstvo], for without the bourgeois [meshchanstvo] it lost half of its meaning.” Likewise, Russian modernism needed “the bourgeois” to label artistic or intellectual practices they disdained, whether in Russia or the West. These were mostly in connection with bourgeois sensibilities such as domesticity, stability, and the daily habitual routine (in Russian, byt), which were inimical to the modernist sensibility. Modernists valued, in their place, the sacred and heroic. Thus, modernist anti-traditionalism and anti-materialism are the main functions of the disparaging bourgeois mythologeme in its discourse.8 In Russia, the narratives of modernity are problematized when the radical intelligentsia co-opts the anti-bourgeois rhetoric of the cultural avantgarde. As the revolutionary movement develops through the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the role of political parties increases, enabling the

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Bolsheviks, finally, to institutionalize revolutionary power. Lenin and his Party encode the visions of the radical/revolutionary intelligentsia, declaring themselves a political avant-garde. In so doing, the radical intelligentsia effectively highjacks the anti-bourgeois version of modernity from the artists of the cultural avant-garde. Thus, anti-bourgeois attitudes and an ideal of permanent revolution become touchstones of the ideology perpetuated by the Communist regime, and the impetus behind the Revolution is a program of class war that plays out primarily in the field of culture. To reiterate, the political project of modernity has pursued two principal objectives. The first is to advance the myth of modernity, which implies progress in science, technology, and the arts, and perfection of civilization by application of human knowledge and ingenuity. The second is to lead the masses in pursuit of that myth. Toward the end of the nineteenth century these aims coalesced around rejection of the bourgeoisie as a class, which nurtured a sense of empowerment, giving working-class generations a new sort of rebellious attitude and identity. Part of that identity is persecution of scapegoats who are perceived to be nefarious enemies intent upon sabotaging progress. In such a view, persecution of the bourgeoisie is a necessary ingredient to the advancement of progress in the name of continuous revolution. Advancing the myth of modernity became the political project of the revolutionary intelligentsia. After Red October, Soviet ideologues claimed that Soviet culture, the first of its kind in the world, could describe the whole of reality. Fragmented realities did not suffice—as opposed to modern Western society, which, by contrast, valued pluralism. But it was Marxism that contributed the element of polarization and total victory. For Marxism is a form of political millenarism based not only on Enlightenment humanism but also on Romantic expressivism, which lends it a kind of cultural absolutism: The millenarist scenario describes a moment of crisis, one in which acute conflict is about to break out, one in which the world is polarized as never before between good and evil. It is a moment in which the suffering and tribulation of the good dramatically increases. But at the same time, it promises an unprecedented victory over evil, and hence a new age of sanctity and happiness unparalleled in history.9

This “irrefutable” logic of Marxism, especially in its adapted MarxistLeninist form, provided incentive for a new phase of the class war. Before, during, and after the revolutionary year of 1917, the Bolshevik Party incited class war by adapting the cultural avant-garde’s anti-bourgeois attitude and exploiting it for maximum political advantage. Owing to its centrality in the revolutionary story, this topic returns below and again in

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the following chapters. First, a closer look at the concept of avant-garde will bear out the fact that the Party was able to optimize its political advantage by casting itself as a political avant-garde to lead the charge in the battle for modernity. THE CULTURAL AND POLITICAL AVANT-GARDE The Romantic notion of avant-garde is a military metaphor, especially denoting the modern kind of revolutionary civil war. It acquired its political overtones after the French Revolution, when it included the myth of the poet as prophet. Artists in this narrative play a special role in seeing and shaping the future (viz. Saint Simon). They occupy the frontlines of culture, a vanguard with an integral mission to take the Golden Age of the past and offer it to the future. The avant-garde is conscious of being in advance of its time—an elite committed to a totally anti-elitist program whose final aim is the equal benefit of all. It holds a didactic-utilitarian conception, which assigns to the artist an avant-garde role only to make him a disciplined soldier or militant. Similarly, Marxist-Leninist theory sees the Party as the revolutionary avant-garde of the proletariat. Following Lenin’s definition of the political avant-garde (avangard) in What Is To Be Done? (1902), the Communist Party would later monopolize the term in Soviet Russia. The politicized variety, however, met resistance from the original cultural/ aesthetic avant-garde. The artists of the cultural avant-garde were trying to revolutionize art and life by overthrowing tradition and enjoying radical freedom. Their work went against the stylistic expectations of the general public, which the political avant-garde, on its own, was trying to win over. Lenin makes art a cog in the system of Social Democracy in his 1905 article “Party Organization and Party Literature” (“Partiinaia organizatsiia i partiinaia literatura”). The cultural avant-garde insists, however, on the independently revolutionary potential of art. Poetry in this view, for instance, has a moral effect and plays a social role simply by stimulating the imagination.10 The cultural and political avant-garde enjoyed an uneasy alliance for a time. Art in early Soviet society had a social agenda of revolutionary iconoclasm which suited them both. Futurist poets, for example, welcomed the Revolution and the advent of a communal way of life in which the artist would be an integrated member of society. In general cultural pioneers took advantage of Bolshevik patronage of the avant-garde, including rations and work materials.11 The Revolution gave a reality to their activity and direction for their energies, since their art itself, they believed, had anticipated the Revolution. For the painter Kazimir Malevich, Cubism and Futurism were

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the revolutionary forms in art which foreshadowed the political and economic revolutions of 1917. Avant-garde artists in Russia were now anxious to speed the reorganization of artistic life in their country. The cultural avant-garde recognized the need for artists to be active builders. Malevich said, “Let us seize [the world] from the hands of nature and build a new world belonging to [man] himself.” The “culture of materials” had already been established by Vladimir Tatlin, who introduced “real” materials into his art: tin, wood, iron, glass, plaster. Artists did away with frames, for a frame isolates a piece of art, lifting it to a plane of the “eternal.” It is this separation of art from reality that the avant-garde combated against. Mayakovsky declared, “We do not need a dead mausoleum of art where dead works are worshipped, but a living factory of the human spirit—in the streets, in the tramways, in the factories, workshops and workers’ homes.” This was not the time for painting canvases in a museum, like the bourgeoisie did, for art needed to live in the streets, squares and villages, and proclaim that the future is now. This was a new era for an artist. The artist must cease to be the “victim” and his art an object of worship.12 A small group of artists transformed art into mass culture for the new Soviet state. All over the country, they decorated the streets for International Workers’ Day celebrations and the anniversary of the October Revolution. In Petersburg, they decorated Palace Square with giant Futurist abstract sculptures. They organized street pageants with thousands of people to reenact the revolutionary takeover, enlisting real battalions of soldiers as the actors. They formed mock tribunals to instill the spirit of Soviet justice and chastise “enemies of the people.” Artists, actors, writers, and composers organized “heroic-revolutionary” impromptu plays all over the country. Street performances also provided a chance to give rudimentary education on everything from hygiene and proper breathing technique to rearing chickens, or planting corn. Film was a major new medium for entertainment and propaganda purposes. Agit-trains, boats, and other mobile venues were sent all over the country to provide a platform for showing these and other agitational efforts.13 Amid the chaos and bitter struggle for survival, avant-garde artists were elated, riding on a surge of enthusiasm for the future and a new-born purpose to their existence. They took it into their own hands to actively reorganize the artistic life of the country as well as the art of day-to-day living. Much of the avant-garde program, however, was too radical even for the Bolsheviks. In their total rejection of bourgeois art, avant-garde enthusiasms verged on cultural nihilism. Take, for example, Mayakovsky’s December 1918 poem “It’s Too Early to Rejoice” (“Radovat’sia rano”), in which he matter-of-factly declares, “It’s time for bullets to pepper museums.” The agenda of the proletarian cultural organization Proletkul’t was equally bent on destruction of all preexisting culture tainted with a bourgeois origin.

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Revealing the extent of cultural divides on the Left, Proletkul’t and Futurism themselves were mutual antagonists, as the former saw Futurists as denizens of ego-centered elitism, who poisoned the class purity of proletarian culture.14 The goal of art under Russian Communism was to train human minds to be collective in spirit and practice. Avant-garde art forms were harnessed for this project, but were rarely successful in achieving its aims. Experimental cinema by filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and Aleksandr Dovzhenko, pioneers of Soviet montage, were meant to bring a psychic revolution. Their avant-garde techniques, however, were too sophisticated for contemporary audiences to appreciate. Avant-garde music and theatre, similarly, were meant to break down the barriers between performers and audiences. Presenting caricatures of class enemies and working-class heroes, they sometimes provoked visceral responses, but not necessarily the ideological transformations that were meant to happen. In visual arts, unlifelike modernist images alienated peasants, who were used to icon painting; thus, Soviet agitational art that employed icon-like imagery was more successful. Popular tastes of urban workers, who preferred detective stories and romances, ironically, mimicked the bourgeoisie.15 Avant-garde artists, in the end, succeeded in creating a modernist aesthetic for themselves, but not in transforming people into Soviet men and women. The latter task was accomplished through a combination of Party cultural policy and autonomous self-identification with the Revolution. FORGING THE REVOLUTIONARY SELF Russian society at the end of the nineteenth century was peopled by a cultural system which incorporated local cultures of the village, the city, and the university. The religious peasant community, irreligious urban workers, and political, radicalized students, all contained their own respective values, and each category expressed its values in a unique set of symbolic actions and imagery.16 Each segment of the contemporary culture had roots in history and tradition. Values and the cultural identity that went with them, however, were malleable. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, social mobility, both geographically and socially, were compounded by changes to the political situation and the ever-present instability of the human factor. Industrialization and rapid urbanization saw people adapting to new roles and taking on new identities or self-image. A major example is urban workers moving from the village to cities where they joined or were exposed to the urban culture of factories, unions, political organizations, and workers’ collectives. Acquisition of new skills, especially literacy, meant a new outlook

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and new values—which were familiar to contemporaries via the term worker “consciousness” (soznanie). An overview of the economic situation of the peasantry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century reveals a dismal picture. By the end of Imperial Russia there was still only limited development of capitalism. Yields were half those in Europe due to primitive agricultural methods and small plots of land. By village tradition, paternal heads of the household divided their property among their married sons, meaning property was rarely held for more than a generation. Wooden plows and small hand sickles were still used, while in Europe these had been replaced by the heavy iron plow, the scythe, and the heavy reaping hook. Crop rotation was virtually unknown. Sowing, threshing, and winnowing were still mostly done by hand, when elsewhere machines were already used. One in three peasant families at the turn of the century did not have a horse and dragged their own plow by hand.17 When world agricultural prices hit a depression in 1878–1896, many landowners turned their estates into commercial farms. Thus, peasants were caught between a pre-capitalist system of agriculture and the emergent system of mechanized commercial farming. This meant a diminished need for farm labor coupled with high rents and low wages. A growing class of impoverished peasants was driven off the land, resulting in a migrant workforce of hired peasant labor of some nine million workers by the end of the century. Numbers of these were hired for plowing and harvesting on commercial estates. Often rural folk, alternatively, headed for the cities to join the new urban population of the proletariat. As Russia’s industrial revolution gained enormous speed, many were eager to leave village life behind, drawn by the allure of modern, cultured life in the capitals. A major consequence, politically speaking, was that city life had the transformative effect of secular, rational, humanistic thinking and outlook. Frequently this brought new urban migrants closer to the socialist intelligentsia and prompted them to despise and reject village life.18 A large number of rank-and-file Bolsheviks were recruited from this new urban proletariat descended from the rural peasantry. These recruits generally held a deep-seated mistrust and contempt for the peasantry. For them, the bleakness of peasant life was emblematic of their own dreary past, which impelled them to embrace their new urban identity all the more. It was a personal mission as well as a class obligation to obliterate the peasant world once and for all.19 A crisis point came in 1891 when early frosts, severe winds, and months without rain caused catastrophic crop failures. Poor harvests and mismanagement of the crisis by the government bureaucracy led to famine conditions across the countryside in seventeen provinces. Russian society was activated

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and politicized—and radicalized—by the famine. It proved the culpability and incompetence of the old regime. Many converted to Marxism at this time, including Vladimir Lenin. Institutions became independent and better organized, due to the political awakening of civic society, even as the autocracy weakened.20 Herein lie the roots of labor unrest and labor militancy. There were spontaneous forms of rebellion (buntarstvo) among recent immigrants to the urban working class, who were volatile and belligerent. But the rise of labor militancy can be attributed even more to the skilled and literate urban workers, who organized the strikes in the 1890s. They had no ties with the village, whereas migrant workers had a piece of land to return to and therefore more to lose. Skilled workers might under different conditions have integrated into a democratic reform movement, but there were no labor movements or legal trade unions for modern reform in Russia as there were in Europe. Thus, the political situation pushed the urban working class toward extremism. That is, workers followed the radical intelligentsia of the revolutionary underground, and the party organization became the worker’s family home and hearth.21 In his illuminating study of Soviet diarists—not only writers but engineers and scientists, teachers, workers, peasants, soldiers, schoolchildren, housewives, and others—Jochen Hellbeck finds that, far from a personal space for private thoughts, or a motive to secretly oppose state propaganda or resist oppression the way we think someone like Orwell’s Nineteen EightyFour hero Winston Smith might, many Soviet diaries were not inspired by an individualistic agenda. Instead, writes Hellbeck, “They sought to realize themselves as historical subjects defined by their active adherence to a revolutionary common cause.” Individuals who were committed to the Revolution saw their goal as the total remaking of life—not only of society but first and foremost of themselves as individuals. Budding from the revolutionary ideals discussed above, “The concern with self-transformation, shared by the Communist regime and these Soviet diarists . . . promoted a new thinking about the self as a political project.”22 Part and parcel of an enlightened political order grounded in the rational “laws of history,” in modern science, and purity of moral purpose, citizens believed in the liberation of Russia not only from the tsarist system, but from its backward centuries of darkness and obscurity. The “new men and women” these diarists strove to emulate were more than merely exemplary workers and citizens, for the aim of each was an integrated personality. In some ways recalling the Landmarks principles discussed in chapter 3, perfection of the self came to be the goal of the Revolution, achievable only through struggle, but nevertheless part of the inevitable march of history toward an apex where fully realized human beings lived in a perfected modern society.23

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Bolsheviks capitalized on the popular enthusiasm for personal transformation and the readiness to internalize the historical task of building socialism. Through political education, the Party endeavored to guide citizens to identify with the Revolution out of personal conviction. Seeing themselves “as active participants in the drama of history,” writes Hellbeck, “They were summoned to internalize the revolution and grant it an interpretation defined not only by the objective course of history but also by the spiritual unfolding of their subjective selves.”24 For many “conscious” workers, the Party was a new family, which helped them construct a new cultural identity.25 A significant part of that identity was invested with a stake in the class war that pitted the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. “THE LESS BOURGEOISIE, THE MORE DEMOCRACY” In Gorky’s Mother (Mat’, 1906), the title character is educated by a band of revolutionary conspirators whom she harbors after her son is arrested for distributing agitprop against the tsarist regime. She is inspired by an agitator named Yegor Ivanovich: “The mother loved to listen to his speeches, and they left her with a strange impression: it seemed that the most vicious enemies of the people, those who most often deceived them and were most cruel to them, were fat, redfaced little men, mean, greedy, sly and cruel.” When she asks him if her impressions are correct, Yegor Ivanovich laughs and rolls his eyes, then answers in the affirmative and explains, “It’s just these fat little men who are the biggest sinners and the most poisonous parasites feeding on the people. The French were right in calling them ‘bourgeois’—remember that, mother,—boor-geois for it’s boors they are, smashing their fists into all those whose ignorance they can take advantage of, and sucking their blood.”26 This is a typical picture of the enemy bourgeoisie as it was depicted in left-wing literature of the period. Written after the defeat of the revolutionary insurgency in 1905, Gorky’s novel is meant to inspire the movement after brutal reprisals followed in the wake of the Moscow uprising, when the regime executed estimates of 15,000 people, shot or wounded 20,000 and exiled some 45,000. Civil rights protected by a democratically elected parliament, which were promised in the October Manifesto, turned out to be a sham when the tsar divested the first Duma of any real government authority. This drove a fatal wedge between liberals and socialists. As noted in the previous chapter, the failures of 1905 were blamed on liberal advocates for reform, meaning the Russian masses would never again support a constitutional democratic movement. Liberal politics were henceforth associated with bourgeois compromise and worse, complicity with tsarist repression.27

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The term “bourgeois” (burzhooi) was used in the revolutionary struggle in broad ways, always with a pejorative meaning. It is anti-Western, antiurban, and anti-intelligentsia. The word was often contrasted with “democracy” (demokratiia). The latter had started as a universal political concept, but came to be class exclusive, omitting the bourgeoisie. In common usage, demokratiia was often used interchangeably with the words narod (“the people”) and trudiashchikhsia (“the toilers”). By way of illustration, part of the grassroots effort in 1917 to establish a free press for working-class, socialist newspapers was the workers’ demand for the closure of “all the counter-revolutionary newspapers of the hateful and the dirty bourgeoisie.” In other words, repression of bourgeois citizens was not considered to be contradictory to the notion of democracy, which was defined as the interests of the common people, exclusive of class competitors. Repressive measures against the bourgeoisie (or the variety of people labeled as such) were justified, even necessary, in the name of the Revolution. Further, the Revolution would never triumph until the bourgeoisie had been completely eradicated. The dichotomy established in revolutionary Russia pitting democracy against the bourgeoisie meant that there was no cultural or social foundation for genuine democracy in its liberal conception. Workers did not think of democratic power in the language of constitutions, parliaments, citizenship, or rule of law, but rather in simple and direct terms of us vs. them. Workers’ and soldiers’ resolutions in the autumn of 1917 called for the establishment of a “dictatorship of the democracy” with an implicit understanding of “the less bourgeoisie, the more democracy.”28 Even in 1905, hostility toward the bourgeoisie, broadly speaking, had been a significant part of the general revolutionary fervor. But the antagonism was unfocused and directed at a range of potential class enemies: employers, officers, landowners, merchants, Jews, students, professionals, or anyone well dressed, foreign looking, or apparently well-to-do. As Joan Neuberger argues in her study of hooliganism in St. Petersburg between 1900 and 1914, this sort of social violence along class divides owed much to a deep-seated cultural prejudice between the “uncultured” poor against the “cultured” rich.29 The passion to purge class enemies was recognized as part of the revolutionary program as early as 1909 in Landmarks, discussed in the previous chapter, particularly in Semyon Frank’s “The Ethic of Nihilism: A Characterization of the Russian Intelligentsia’s Moral Outlook.” Frank refers to the revolutionary intelligentsia’s inclination to “expropriate the expropriators,” and promote “a metaphysical absolutisation of the elemental importance of destruction.” Furthermore, All the political and social radicalism of the Russian intelligentsia, its proneness to see in political struggle and in its most extreme aspects—conspiracy,

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rebellion, terror and so on—the most direct and important way to achieve the people’s welfare, derives exclusively from the belief that struggle, the annihilation of the enemy, the forcible and mechanized destruction of the old social forms can of themselves ensure the realization of the intelligentsia’s social ideal.30

Shoring up and further emboldening these earlier forms of political narrative, socialist language of class conflict dominates the Russian revolutionary discourse through 1917, even among moderate socialist parties. The revolutionary tradition had depicted the struggle for the people’s cause as a Manichaean struggle between good and evil, replete with its own pantheon of heroes and villains. The words of the popular revolutionary song “The Internationale” called for truth, justice, and freedom to take the place of oppression, while the “final and decisive battle” must be fought to unite the people and defeat the “dark forces” of the enemy. The “Workers’ Marseillaise,” adapted from the French revolutionary anthem by Russian Populist Pyotr Lavrov in 1875, used even more violent imagery, with calls to extinguish the rich and evil, and the “vampire-tsar.” With the help of this sort of divisive language of tradition, the revolutionary underground fostered an entire repertoire of caricatures, verses, and songs, the basis for a new mass culture in which the enemy was portrayed as morally depraved, aesthetically vile, and hygienically disgusting. Demonic and zoological imagery was used to portray him as dangerous and subhuman. Words such as “predator,” “vermin,” or “parasite” also ensured that the use of violence and terror against the enemy was not only justified but a necessary recourse. A social purge was needed to rid the world of the monstrous predators.31 As ideals failed to materialize after the tsar was toppled in February 1917, however, revolutionary euphoria gave way to disappointment. People looked to the texts and learned that the enemy still needed to be annihilated. There was a tendency to look for new, hidden enemies and counterrevolutionary conspiracies, while the burzhooi continued to be the perfect scapegoat.32 A final example will serve to encapsulate the class conflict described above in the words of one witness. In a letter of March 1917 a young officer wrote to his father about feeling that he remained a barin (nobleman) in the peasant soldiers’ eyes, and therefore a loser of the social revolution: Between us and the soldiers there is an abyss that one cannot cross. Whatever they might think of us as individuals, we in their eyes remain no more than barins. When we talk of “the people” [narod] we have in mind the nation as a whole, but they mean only the common people [demokraticheskie nizy]. In their view what has taken place is not a political but a social revolution, of which we

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are the losers and they are the winners. They think that things should get better for them and that they should get worse for us. They do not believe us when we talk of our devotion to the soldiers. They say that we were the barins in the past, and that now it is their turn to be the barins over us. It is their revenge for the long centuries of servitude.33

As the officer puts it, the Revolution was a zero-sum social reversal more than simply a change of the political regime. Spontaneous action brought centuries-long festering resentments to the surface, now empowered by the dismantling of hierarchies and demise of figureheads and symbols of authority. An incomparable age had begun, but the new social order that would ultimately replace the ancien regime was far from spontaneous. It was shaped by an ideology which exploited existing tensions through language that cajoled class divisions, incited hatred, and instigated violence. The Bolshevik weaponization of language toward this end and the use of state-sponsored terror as a political strategy are topics of the next chapter, which inaugurates Part Two of this book. The chapters in the second half take account of numerous outcomes of the Revolution, especially with regard to the cultural front. They feature close readings of several works that each confront the language and realities of the epoch in imaginative, often controversial ways, by challenging the class war story and other canonical narratives of the Revolution. NOTES 1. Slezkine, The House of Government, 593–94; M. Gor’kii and M. Kol’tsov, eds., Den’ mira (Moscow: Zhurgaz, 1937), introductory material (no pagination). My translation. Gorky died in June of 1936, a year before the book appeared in print. 2. Art Berman, Preface to Modernism (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 3; my italics. 3. David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 91. 4. Here and below, I draw from interpretations of modernity in Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987). 5. Ibid., 41–46. 6. Read, Culture and Power, 32–33. 7. The cultural movement known as modernism is an outcropping of cultural modernity. More readily understood as a “modernist sensibility,” it is a culture unto itself with a “nonintellectual, intuitive” system of meaning rather than a worldview or mentality. Leonid Livak argues that modernism is a “way of relating to the world,” or a “form of experience” instead of a fixed set of ideas. It bound together a number

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of competing worldviews, “a patchwork of literary trends” whose congruity was “the consciousness of living in extraordinary times.” Purveyors of the “new art” in Russia responded to the crisis of modernity (sovremennost’), for which they cited a range of causes: political and economic development, capitalism and liberal democracy and its consumerist mass culture, wars and revolutions, decline of religious belief, and erosion of other traditional cultural ties. Each of these brought into question the parameters of individual identity, allowing modernists to create a space for new meaning in artistic, social, and private life. See Leonid Livak, In Search of Russian Modernism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 7–9. 8. Ibid., 11–12. 9. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 386–88. See also Slezkine, The House of Government, passim. Slezkine convincingly compares Soviet Communism to a millenarist cult. 10. Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 114–15. 11. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 736–37. 12. Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art 1863–1922, Revised and Enlarged Edition by Marian Burleigh-Motley (New York, NY and London: Thames & Hudson, 1986), 219. 13. Ibid., 222–25. 14. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 736–37; Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York, NY and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 70–71. 15. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 737–40. 16. Reginald E. Zelnik, “Introduction,” in Semën Kanatchikov, A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Semën Ivanovich Kanatchikov, ed. and trans. Reginald E. Zelnik (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), xxii. 17. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 104–6. 18. Ibid., 106–10. 19. Ibid., 110. 20. Ibid., 157–62. 21. Ibid., 114–15, 120–21. See also Reginald E. Zelnik, “Russian Bebels,” in Kanatchikov, Radical Worker, 443. 22. Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 4–5. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 6. 25. See Zelnik, “Introduction,” in Radical Worker, xxvi–xxx. 26. Maxim Gorky, Mother, trans. Margaret Wettlin (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1954), 155. 27. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 202–3. 28. Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 122–25, 180–82. 29. Ibid., 168. See also Neuberger, Hooliganism.

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30. Gershenzon, Vekhi, 20. Quoted in Freeborn, The Russian Revolutionary Novel, 54. 31. Figes and Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution, 153–54. 32. See Figes and Kolonitskii, Ch. 6, “Images of the Enemy,” in Interpreting the Russian Revolution, 153–86. 33. Figes and Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution, 142.

Part II

REAP THE STORM

Chapter 5

Bolshevik Weaponization of Language and Culture

If ever there were a time when so much depended on the weather, it was February 23–March 3, 1917. For it was inclement weather that turned an already critical bread shortage in Russia’s northern capital into a dire situation. Then it was fair weather which brought people out into the streets to say they’d had enough of the tsarist government they held responsible for the crisis. The priority given to army transports for the extremely unpopular war in Europe had impeded bread deliveries to the weary citizens of Petrograd. Blizzards and arctic conditions in February finally brought the railway systems to a halt. Meanwhile, factories were closed, leaving thousands of workers hungry and desperate. Women queued all night for bread only to be told in the morning there would be no delivery. This would be the last straw, as bread riots turned into the catalyst for a revolution many years in the making which had finally reached a breaking point.1 On February 23, International Women’s Day, the weather warmed to a mere −5°C, and people came out of hibernation to forage for food and enjoy a brief respite from the dark, northern winter. Women marching for equal rights also protested the bread shortages and were joined by workers from the factories. Before long, a 100,000 strong strike had gathered. Despite clashes with police, the strikes continued the following day. Under the bright morning sun, armed agitators looted and vandalized well-stocked food shops in the affluent downtown districts. The strikers were joined by shopkeepers, students, clerks, cabbies, children, and even well-dressed urbanites. Witnesses later described a circus-like or festive mood to the disorders. One correspondent reported the feeling of “rather precarious excitement like a Bank Holiday with thunder in the air.”2 An even larger strike took place on February 25, with red flags, banners, and calls for the overthrow of the tsar. Acts of civil disobedience turned more 125

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violent. Police defended the city, but soldiers and Cossacks sympathized with the crowd. In one incident, rioters dragged the chief of police from his horse, beat him, and shot him with his own revolver. In another, the people squared off with a squadron of Cossacks near Kazan Cathedral. A young girl approached the soldiers as the crowd looked on with bated breath. She held out a bouquet of roses and offered them to a Cossack officer. After several tense moments, he leaned down from his horse and accepted them as the crowd cheered and celebrated. A candid gesture of peace from both sides, the bouquet symbolized something long anticipated, a centuries-long dream now materializing before their very eyes. Everyone knew the revolution was finally happening. But it wouldn’t come without further sacrifices. The tsar directed police to put down the disorders using military force, which the next day they did. On February 26, a second Bloody Sunday turned the snow red; but this time the crowd was emboldened by the bloodshed.3 Further anarchy in the capital made the situation untenable for an already severely weakened and compromised autocracy. Isolated at military headquarters, the tsar had only inconsistent and conflicting news of the disorders in the capital—and seemed reluctant to know more. By the end of the month, the newly formed Provisional Government, along with the army high command, were both demanding his abdication. Late in the evening of March 2, he reluctantly complied. The abdication of Tsar Nicholas II was met the next day by jubilation in the streets. A daily newspaper reported, The dazzling sun appeared. Foul mists were dispersed. Great Russia stirred! The long-suffering people arose. The nightmare yoke fell. Freedom and happiness—forward. “Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!” With thunderous roar, the thousand-voiced cry of the elated people cheer the student-orator. From end to end are carried excited voices.4

The general euphoria was commensurate with an outcome unimagined by even the most ardent revolutionary dreamers. But the revolution per se had only just begun. Political intrigue and scandal doomed the Provisional Government from the start, as strikes and demonstrations continued. So too mass desertions from the army, as the war in Europe dragged on, stretching resources and wasting lives. People took to the streets in unprecedented numbers throughout the spring and summer, singing revolutionary anthems, fighting, looting, and now facing reprisals from the revolutionary government itself. Bolsheviks incited the people and rallied crowds under red banners calling for “All Power to the Soviets.”

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“THE FREEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD” The anti-tsarist movement devoted to the liberation of the Russian people had originated long before. In previous chapters I established that the story of revolutionary thinking reaches deep into the shaping of modern Russian identity and veers sharply toward extremism in the last decades of the empire. Much of the final push for revolution was owing to the fact that the hard-won freedoms of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, from the Great Reforms to the October Manifesto, had proven illusory. While tsarist hegemony had eroded, the regime proved unwilling to compromise its authority and cede any real institutional change reflecting democratic reforms. The previous chapter included discussion of the view that many artists and thinkers saw the Revolution as a chance to usher in a new mode of consciousness, a transformation not only of material conditions but the heart and soul of new Russian people. The situation on the ground was more fluid and nuanced. When it came to the utopian socialist paradigms of the nineteenth century, the ideal and the reality were far apart. Despite its valiant efforts, the intelligentsia had made little progress since Nicholas I exiled the Decembrists nearly a century before. For the years leading up to the Revolution had brought about radical changes across the entire spectrum of Russian society, including dynamic alterations to the social fabric and economic circumstances which had brought the intelligentsia into existence. Intense pressures created fractures in the intelligentsia and led to permanent divides. Some factions of the revolutionary movement had devolved into patent terrorism. The cultural intelligentsia and the radical left were now distinctly different political animals. Origins of the revolutionary movement in Russia and divisions among the intelligentsia have been discussed in detail in the earlier chapters. Presently, our focus turns to the methods and means of the radical wing to dominate the revolutionary narrative, exploiting its language and symbols to exacerbate tensions and provoke class war. While the language of revolution had nearly always foregrounded class divisions, the shift from its democratic function to narrower hegemonic purposes is especially marked in the months leading up to and following Red October. Starting from February 1917, the Provisional Government had made a host of political reforms along the lines of Western constitutional democracy. For the first time, Russians were granted freedoms of press, speech, and assembly. The justice system was overhauled and police suborned to local government. Legal restrictions of class, race, and religion were lifted. Capital punishment was abolished. Adult universal suffrage was introduced. For a short time, Russia had indeed suddenly become, per Vladimir Lenin’s words, “the freest country in the world.”5

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Leaders in the Provisional Government used the language of liberal democracy, much of it borrowed from revolutionary France, and based their reforms on its principles. But in the minds of the common people and political camps on the left, democracy (demokratiia), as noted, was a social rather than political term. It referred to the lower classes themselves, whose opponent was not tyranny, but the bourgeoisie (burzhooi). The “democracy” wanted their autonomy through social revolution rather than political reforms; for the masses that meant, in the words of historian Orlando Figes, their priority was “retribution, not a constitution.” Parallel to the democratic revolution was a grassroots, anarchical rejection not only of the tsarist regime, but authority figures at all levels including judges, priests, civil servants, professors, teachers, police, employers, military officers, landowners, village elders, and, in some families, even fathers and husbands. The decentralization of power permitted local communities to declare their independence and establish self-rule through ad hoc committees, through which workers and villagers defended their interests. Through the summer and fall of 1917 the inauguration of village Soviets with their own volunteer militias or Red Guards—peopled by younger peasants straight out of the army—often coincided with the sacking and plundering of gentry estates, and murder of the landowning squires.6 The multiple loci of power was one reason for the ineffectiveness of the Provisional Government, which in the long run—compounding its inability to understand the Revolution in social rather than political terms—would lead to its downfall. Its failure culminated in an inordinate delay in holding elections to the long anticipated Constituent Assembly while lawmakers attempted to perfect electoral laws. The Bolsheviks took advantage of the delay to sow doubt in people’s minds about the legitimacy of the Provisional Government. They justified their own seizure of power by claiming it was run by counterrevolutionary, bourgeois traitors.7 As argued in the previous chapter, the Revolution took language to the very frontlines of the fight for the future. For Russia’s unique journey of revolutionary modernity is the story of Bolshevik weaponization of language. To be sure, before the Revolution as well, socialist language of class conflict dominates the cultural and political discourse, even among moderate socialist parties. Violence was a mass phenomenon; Party language and policy merely took advantage of existing resentments to stoke long-simmering hate. But the language and symbolism of class war lie at the heart of the Red Terror and vindictive social policies of Soviet Power to an unparalleled degree. Ultimately Bolsheviks were the creators, curators, and enforcers of a new Soviet identity which was founded, in the main, on class struggle and persecution of class enemies. Party leaders attempted to effect cultural transformation in post-revolutionary society by manipulating popular prejudices

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and divisions. Weaponization of language and culture was a key tactic in this struggle. BOLSHEVIK SEIZURE OF POWER AND MEANING There were vast fluctuations in Soviet cultural and political life through the years of Soviet rule, starting from the earliest days of its inception. Even before the Great War in 1914, socialist parties had exploited a rich tradition of mixing political discourse with popular entertainment. Early twentiethcentury mass media included newspapers, chap books, poetic couplets, guitar songs, street posters, and short movies. All of these were easily mobilized formats accessible to the masses. There was an upsurge of political activity and self-organization in the wake of February 1917 as workers’ educational and cultural groups began to form. Trade unions, factory committees, and district Soviets also became local hubs of revolutionary organization.8 In such an environment, the Bolsheviks gained power not by physical force alone, nor by seizing the means of production according to the Marxist playbook. More importantly, they were expert propagandists who poured enormous amounts of resources into dominating and controlling the narratives of public discourse. Bolsheviks not only wrote theoretical works explaining historical processes in terms of class struggle—per MarxismLeninism, stressing the Party’s role as vanguard of the proletariat—but, in a more immediate sense, they seized the names, labels, and concepts of daily life and interactions. By changing the names of things and the dialogue of everyday life, the Party established a master narrative of the Revolution and gained control over its meaning. In that story the working class is valorized as history’s victors, new men and women who, in pursuing modern progress, fulfill nature’s highest purpose, and, in condemning the bourgeoisie, defeat its lowest adversary. The language and symbols of daily life had to embody and enforce this meaning, which to a large extent was a binary code that either extolled the proletariat and the revolutionary regime or condemned its perceived opponents. Adaptation of the language and symbols of cultural tradition to the modern, revolutionary social mind in the long run gave definition to the moral and spiritual yearnings of a people. At the same time as cementing the legitimacy of the regime it secured the loyalty of the working class, in whose name the Revolution was carried out. Even so, the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 made the propaganda game more complex. In the months following the insurrection, Lenin’s Party found themselves faced with the challenge of gaining popular support. After October, there was no consensus, even among their backers, about fundamental issues of interpretation of the Revolution. Questions needed to

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be resolved about the role of the people, the function of the state, the power structure, and policy on every issue from agricultural reform to distribution of food and other material goods—not to mention on what basis, historically or even philosophically, to approach them. In the days before the Revolution, the main enemies had been easily identified as landowners, bureaucrats, or bourgeois capitalists. Bolshevik agitators’ greatest challenge was to avoid the tsarist police. Now, as rulers of the state, Party officials needed to win over its politically and socially diverse citizenry. In the words of cultural historian James von Geldern, “The culture gap could not be forced like a river crossing during war.” While the economy could be socialized and industrial outputs upped, in effect, by decree, forcing citizens to say and do as they should was a more subtle art. It required people not just to give lip service to the regime, but embrace it in their private lives and conversations as well.9 The Revolution had created a void which required a new way of defining the past, present, and future. To establish their legitimacy, Bolsheviks needed to transform popular attitudes and beliefs. Working at every level of communication available, they introduced new symbols, rituals, stories, and images geared at solving the conundrum of how to internalize socialism. In short, by seizing control over public discourse and appropriating its imagery, Soviet ideologues seized meaning.10 Below are some examples of how this was accomplished. The population adapted to the new revolutionary symbolism in stages. After February, insignias, flags, and symbols of rank and title were already modified. Many different groups rallied under the Red Flag, marched to “The Marseillaise” and “The Internationale,” and used the growing array of language and symbols of the Revolution before they were co-opted by the Bolshevik regime. Emblems of autocracy were removed, and often desecrated in the process, including portraits of the tsar, the double-headed eagle, and officers’ epaulets. Tsarist prisons were emptied, set on fire, and destroyed. Changes of nomenclature—street names, squares, parks—were adopted soon after February, and more followed in October. Thus numerous public squares were renamed “Freedom Square,” Palace Bridge was called “Freedom Bridge,” and Nicholas Street became “27 February Street.” Even surnames with tsarist connotations (e.g., Tsarev, Romanov, Zhandarmov) were changed to revolution-friendly variants like “Republican,” “Citizen,” “Democrat,” or “Renewal.”11 It was only later that Bolsheviks successfully claimed each of these emblems of the Revolution as their own and became adept at using them as weapons. The process didn’t happen overnight. However, by means of a steady, sustained effort, while adapting to the flux and flow of circumstances, Bolsheviks were eventually successful at levying language in the fight for their own party’s political and cultural hegemony.

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Already within a year, Bolsheviks had created a compelling set of symbols, which now are perennial emblems of Communism: the hammer and sickle, the red star, the image of the heroic worker. They devised new and reorganized former state rituals, such as November 7 (October 25 Old Style) and May Day celebrations. They invented new means of propagating their messages—agit-trains and ships, village reading rooms, political posters, monumental sculpture, books, newspapers, journals, and film—to bring their ideas to a broad audience. The overriding aim was a total cultural and psychological reformation of human beings through political re-education.12 Party propagandists were helped in this respect by an existing cultural predisposition in Russia which imbued words and images with sacred power. Visual imagery and rituals were central to Russian tradition in the practices of the Russian Orthodox Church, where iconography occupies a special place in religious practice. In the traditional understanding of Russian Orthodox icons, the image was not a work of art but a vessel holding sacred powers. The holy image transmits not human ideas and conceptions of truth, but Truth itself—the Divine Revelation. The power of saints was thought to be concentrated in their icons. In the words of icon painter and art historian Leonid Ouspensky, “It can be said that if Byzantium was preeminent in giving the world theology expressed in words, theology expressed in the image was given preeminently by Russia.” The presence of iconography in Russian life was ubiquitous—icons hung in virtually every peasant hut and many urban dwellings, giving Russians familiarity with a certain type of imagery and an assumption of its sacredness. Analogously, in the new Soviet society, words and images took on more than expressive power; they had the power to create, change, and alter reality. Since a majority of the population was illiterate (about 83 percent rural and 55 percent of the urban population), one of the most effective means of agitation or political education was through visual imagery. Bolsheviks appreciated the effectiveness of imagery for reaching people with their message and took advantage of it with a rich Soviet visual culture using political posters, caricatures, chapbooks, and other forms of artistic propaganda.13 Bonnell finds that the key to Bolshevik success was to ensure that its “invented traditions” were consistent, repetitive, and comprehensive, and that they reached their intended audience.14 Toward this end, almost from the moment they seized control, the Bolsheviks nationalized the publishing industry and tightly restricted the press. Printing presses, newspapers, theaters, and movie houses were confiscated and placed under state control. The Decree on the Press in late October 1917 closed liberal and socialist newspapers that were likely to “sow sedition by a clearly slanderous perversion of the facts,” or “poison the minds and sow confusion in the minds of the masses.”15

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Soviet authorities were never ashamed of their monopoly on media and culture, but considered their policies progressive, viewing culture as an indispensable weapon of class struggle. After all, culture, they believed, was inherently partisan, and media had long been used by the bourgeoisie for their own exploitative purposes. Trotsky upholds the typical Soviet view of propaganda in Literature and Revolution (Literatura i revoliutsiia, 1924) when he defines it as a form of education to bring political consciousness to the workers. Censorship, then, was a natural practice and indispensable tool for achieving political and cultural objectives. There was no point debating the ethics. From day one of the Bolshevik assumption of power, Lenin considered the free press an existential threat. Von Geldern writes poignantly, “Allowing the enemy access to mass media would have seemed criminally stupid, and neglecting propaganda a disservice to the people.” Bolsheviks were intent upon molding popular values and needed to reach the masses directly, to reflect the requirements of the state without interference from alien ideals.16 When it came to the language arts, free expression was never a Communist principle. After a brief period of leniency toward Fellow Travelers and experimentation in the arts, the Party strictly enforced a literary orthodoxy and endeavored to breed politically conformist writers. We bear in mind that the cultural revolution in Soviet letters that culminated in Socialist Realism happened not only from above, but also from below. Stalin famously called writers in the Soviet Union “engineers of human souls,” but as Evgeny Dobrenko argues, Soviet writers and readers themselves were products of social engineering: “The transformation of the author into his own censor—herein is the true history of Soviet literature. . . . The true products of Socialist Realism are people: readers and writers.”17 Moreover, as discussed in chapter 4, the diaries of average Soviet citizens show that many saw it as their own personal mission to become exemplary workers who embodied the revolutionary transformation of society. However, the intransigent political philosophy of Lenin and the Bolshevik Party meant that the Enlightenment ideals that inspired and drove the revolutionary movement for over a century were significantly compromised. In order to cement his authority over the Party, Lenin crushed all sources of intellectual diversity within it. Read asserts, “Lenin rejected the fundamental premise of philosophy—the search for truth. For him this was a chimera used by the bourgeoisie to divert thinkers from the revolutionary path.”18 If the first proverbial casualty was truth, the succeeding fallout was an immeasurable decline of humanist culture. Many poets and artists who had celebrated the coming Revolution now found themselves on the wrong side of the barricades. One of the chief mechanisms of cultural domination in this regard was organized social purging.

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SOCIAL PURGING AND STATE TERROR In large part the amplification of bourgeois persecution after October is a result of the radical orientation of Lenin and the Bolshevik Party. Straining above the diverse pool of voices in 1917, after return from exile, Lenin galvanized the energy of marginalized groups, especially workers and soldiers, and inflated their grievances with propaganda and scapegoating. He artfully prodded, provoked, and magnified the wrongs they had suffered for generations at the hands of the tsarist regime and the landowning nobility, or more recently by industrialists and factory owners and managers—and turned them into violent extremism. The Red Terror capitalized on the plebeian desire for revenge and took active persecution to a new level. Leninists were utterly contemptuous of what they called “bourgeois democracy,” and with it, individualism and intellectual freedom. The rights of individuals were unimportant and completely expendable if they did not align with class interests of the proletariat. In his December 1917 pamphlet, “How to Organize Competition” (“Kak organizovat’ sorevnovanie”), Lenin asked each village and town to devise its own means of cleansing the Russian land of all vermin, of scoundrel fleas, the bedbug rich and so on. In one place they will put into prison a dozen rich men, a dozen scoundrels, half a dozen workers who shirk on the job. . . . In another place they will be put to cleaning latrines. In a third they will be given yellow tickets [such as prostitutes were given] after a term in prison, so that everyone knows they are harmful and can keep an eye on them. In a fourth one out of every ten idlers will be shot. The more variety the better . . . for only practice can devise the best methods of struggle.19

With this and other Party communications, Lenin’s Bolsheviks unleashed mass terror by controlling symbolic representations of “the enemy.” The campaign was all the more chaotic because people interpreted the symbols and identified the enemy in diverse ways. They could finger-point at scapegoats by using any of the proffered labels and purge so-called class enemies and counterrevolutionaries at will. Strictly speaking, social purging was not by any means an exclusively “top-down” process. The narrative of class war is a malleable script, and the roles are fluid. As the Bolsheviks incited class war against the bourgeoisie and other perceived class enemies, people responded with vigor. Incidents of intimidation and violence increased dramatically. Many workers and soldiers were enthusiastic supporters of the Red Terror, and grassroots movements amped up the intensity of persecutions. People began to speak the language

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of class war in their daily lives and actively participate in denunciations and vigilante justice. As Wendy Goldman argues, “The terror was not simply a targeted surgical strike ‘from above’ aimed at the excision of oppositionists and perceived enemies, but a mass, political panic that profoundly reshaped relationships in every institution and workplace.”20 A mass phenomenon, it was institutionally disseminated. The social dynamics of repression reveal that it spread downward through the hierarchical layers of workers’ unions, factory and shop committees, and other organizations. People naturally bound up in their human relationships were inextricably involved in whatever issues and rivalries were germane to their professional and social environments, while those who perpetrated the purges sometimes became victims of the same process they had initiated. The effect on work culture in general was one of confusion, panic, and mass paranoia: It transformed every workplace and institution with its ritualized “unmasking” of trusted workmates, internal reviews, accusations, and denunciations. A worker, party member, engineer, or official could as easily become a victim as a perpetrator. No one fully understood why certain victims were selected. Party members struggled in shocked incomprehension to explain the arrest of relatives and spouses at party meetings. Unlike the German genocidal war against the Jews, the line between victims and perpetrators in the Soviet case was blurred. Yesterday’s denouncer often became tomorrow’s victim.21

A good deal of the terror was driven by private vendettas and denunciations. The war on privilege played on popular resentments, as Bolsheviks drew on the revolutionary zeal of the poor and dispossessed who derived a certain pleasure from seeing or taking part in the destruction of the rich and highly placed—regardless of whether it meant improvement in any significant fashion to their own lot. Driven by Bolshevik incentive, the working-class revolt became a bona fide social holocaust. In the countryside as well, looting, vandalism, and confiscation of gentry and church lands were common practices. Former serfs sometimes tortured their erstwhile owners and committed other unspeakable acts of violence, though some squires, in a spirit of egalitarianism, were given a plot of land on their former estate, roughly equal to a peasant family holding, to start their own farm. Reprisals were frequently carried out, moreover, against army officers, cadets, and bourgeois civilians, against whom the Red Guards, in Figes’s words, “reaped a savage revenge.” Turning the tables of the social revolution also meant putting the leisure classes to work. Bourgeois citizens were given demeaning jobs to perform, such as clearing snow or rubbish from the streets, or cleaning latrines. There were few opportunities for the newly dispossessed to earn a living. Instead, they were

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forced to scrounge for food and fuel and queue for bread with the rest of the urban poor.22 In the years following the Revolution and Civil War, the Party continued to ruthlessly suppress populations it labeled as class enemies. There is a chilling severity in Lenin’s call for persecution and murder of clergymen and bourgeois townsfolk, as demonstrated in a secret letter to the Politburo of March 19, 1922: “It is precisely now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy.” In the town of Shuya, where seizure of church property had been met with resistance, Lenin demanded the arrest and trial of local clergymen and bourgeois laity. The trial, he instructed, must end in no other way than execution by firing squad of a very large number of the most influential and dangerous Black Hundreds in Shuya, and to the extent possible, not only in that city but also in Moscow and several other clerical centers. . . . the greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing for this reason, the better. We must teach these people a lesson right now, so that they will not dare even to think of any resistance for several decades.23

Revolutionary justice of this nature was the order of the day. One Chekist boss ordered his subordinates not to look for evidence as proof of a crime, but rather to query the class, education, and profession of the accused, and that information alone would determine the outcome of the trial.24 With these and other measures like them, the class struggle intensifies against writers and artists identified as intelligentsia. Factions of the cultural intelligentsia are labeled as bourgeoisie and suffer greater harassment and repression. Soviet policies impacted intellectuals indirectly as the closing of newspapers and journals deprived them of both a space for self-expression, and sources of income. More directly, with the advent of “anti-parasite” laws and compulsory labor, some artists and intellectuals are branded center- or left-wing affiliates and arrested for alleged political crimes. One of the reasons the cultural intelligentsia is expressly targeted is that the bourgeoisie had been so vehemently attacked and hunted that after a time, it ceased to exist as a class. Read argues that fanning the flames with the ideology of class struggle went on far past the point of any real threat of a powerful, exploitative bourgeoisie. Within a short period of time, the intelligentsia would become a “surrogate bourgeoisie” after that class had been nearly entirely liquidated. Soon the intelligentsia as a whole—in its cultural, professional, and technical branches—are targeted as class enemies themselves.25

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There is evidence, however, that Lenin regretted certain of these outcomes. Among his final notes is a letter known as “Lenin’s Testament” (“Zaveshchanie Lenina”) written during his declining months in failing health. Addressed to a future Communist Party Congress, it contains words to the effect that he saw the Revolution as having turned out a mistake. Lacking the cultural wherewithal, the backward peasantry had not been ready to replace the bourgeoisie without a process of heavy-handed state control. The tyranny that Lenin himself perpetrated is ample evidence of this failure; he feared the situation would worsen under Stalin, as history shows in fact it did.26 Lenin had appointed Stalin General Secretary in April 1922, and only weeks later suffered a stroke. Chairmanship of the Secretariat gave Stalin the power to appoint provincial Party officials and promote thousands who remained loyal to him, and dismiss those who were not. Many of them uneducated proletarians, Stalin’s appointees were generally suspicious of intellectuals in the Party leadership like Trotsky and Bukharin, who were consequently labeled notorious class enemies and eventually purged. Stalin used a cult of personality for strategic gains in the power struggle that ensued after Lenin’s death. Myth and legend were created around the Father of the Revolution in 1923–1924. In order to popularize the regime, its founder was memorialized—indeed immortalized—in huge public portraits and statues, and his embalmed corpse was placed on display in August 1924 in the Mausoleum on Red Square where it has remained well into the twentyfirst century. Narratives such as Mayakovsky’s “Lenin” and many other poetic tributes regaled the leader. The iconography of Russian Communism permanently canonized its founder father while deflecting attention from the dictator who replaced him. This is not to say that dictatorship was the only or even the principal reason that a reign of terror engulfed the country through these years. As argued above, the regime did not create the conditions for terror, but it certainly encouraged and perpetuated them. Figes stresses that the Russian people “were not the victims of the revolution but protagonists in its tragedy,” and maintains that “however much the people were oppressed by it, the Soviet system grew up in Russian soil.” Broadly speaking, the weakness of Russia’s democratic culture allowed Bolshevism to take root. More than specific individuals who seized power, Russians were “trapped by the tyranny of their own history.” When it came to revolution, the people could destroy the old system, but did not have the tools to build new institutions along democratic lines. No democratic institutions founded after February 1917 survived beyond 1921, by which time the authoritarian government of the Bolsheviks had become more ensconced in the culture, resembling the former autocracy.27 In fact the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, after the Soviet Union’s founding in

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December 1922, would be more despotic, inflexible, and controlling than the tsarist autocracy had ever been. Social purging continued apace, in further organized and institutionalized forms, as the impetus from above and below was shaped by the Party press. The origins of Stalinist mass culture can be found in the language of newspaper journalism in the late 1920s. Through the years of the New Economic Policy and the First Five-Year Plan in particular, the task of molding a master narrative for Soviet history and creating a Bolshevik identity fell to the journalists, who were pressured by the Party leadership to mobilize society for the monumental task of industrialization and the culture to support it. The press not so much documented as fomented political intrigue and social upheaval, as daily life—especially on the labor front—became an epic battle for modernization. The enemy imperialists and bourgeoisie were sometimes outdone by the horde of internal enemies, such as saboteurs (“wreckers”), shirkers, and spies. The press provided workers and Party activists with an identity as warrior heroes battling for socialism.28 Party control of language intensified in 1933 after enforcement of a new uniformity imposed by Stalin. Afraid to express oppositional views in public, people sometimes lived a double life, speaking one discourse in the official, Soviet world, and another at home in private. Ultimately, this would prove disastrous for the regime and society as a whole, as education and science suffered from the consequences of double-speak. Bound by dogma and forbidden from taking the most honest, objective approach available to science, experts were powerless to adequately assess cause and effect relationships. Sociologists and social historians, unable to work outside the frame of Marxism-Leninism, were especially hampered in their analysis. On an individual level, hindered by the authoritarian system, people lost their motivation for taking responsibility in either the personal or civic sphere.29 The latter was a direct outcome of the effects of mass terror. Nadezhda Mandelshtam captures the essence of daily life under its tyranny in this harrowing account from her memoir: The principles and aims of mass terror have nothing in common with ordinary police work or with security. The only purpose of terror is intimidation. To plunge the whole country into a state of chronic fear, the number of victims must be raised to astronomical levels, and on every floor of every building there must always be several apartments from which the tenants have suddenly been taken away. The remaining inhabitants will be model citizens for the rest of their lives—this will be true for every street and every city through which the broom has swept.

Mandelshtam explains that the systematic fashion of the terror worked so effectively because the process was repeated and passed on to the next

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generation, who grew up learning to live in fear and not to trust their elders. Maintaining his power over a long period of time, Stalin saw to it that each successive wave of terror outdid the last, ensuring that every public persona was a mask combining feigned loyalty, detachment, and contentedness: It was essential to smile—if you didn’t, it meant you were afraid or discontented. This nobody could afford to admit—if you were afraid, then you must have a bad conscience. Everybody who worked for the State—and in this country even the humblest stall-keeper is a bureaucrat—had to strut around wearing a cheerful expression, as though to say: “What’s going on is no concern of mine, I have very important work to do, and I’m terribly busy. I am trying to do my best for the State, so do not get in my way. My conscience is clear—if what’shis-name has been arrested, there must be a good reason.”

People were at a luxury to remove the mask only at home, though even that could be a risk. “Even from your children you had to control how horrorstruck you were; otherwise, God save you, they might let something slip in school.” Others profited from the culture of betrayal. If one’s conscience allowed one to denounce a neighbor in order to get their job or apartment, it was perfectly within the natural order of the times to do so.30 To a certain degree, social purging was the result of local authorities taking instruction from the center. In the production-obsessed spirit of the times, even uncovering “wreckers and saboteurs” had quotas, which local authorities were expected to meet. If officials didn’t turn up enough class enemies to denounce, they could be turned in as enemies themselves. But purges also happened spontaneously among the ranks of ordinary people, unspurred by higher authorities. Party committees purged their local institutions and universities of the sons and daughters of Kulaks, priests, merchants, tsarist officers, and intellectuals. Over-zealous purges sometimes went too far even for the Party, such as those that happened in secondary schools, which the Soviet government notably tried to discourage.31 Probably the best example of social purging among the rank and file is the Komsomol (Young Communists League) raids on government bureaucracy in 1927. The Komsomols, with their propaganda organ Komsomol’skaia pravda, were great enthusiasts of Cultural Revolution, of overturning “reactionary” and “bureaucratic” authority. Their powerful immunity as a force is witnessed by the fact that they were known to criticize even Stalin and his inner circle. The Komsomols made Cultural Revolution a new kind of Civil War—for this generation of youth had been too young to participate in the original. Enthusiasts of culture war, they spoke in the language of a “cultural army,” storming the bastions of former bourgeois hegemony, like the Bolshoi

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Theatre and the Academy of Sciences. All in all, spontaneous social purging was allowed to go on for some time, and a formal purge of the government administration took place on a large scale in 1929–1930, which in essence, amounted to a bureaucratic purge of the bureaucracy.32 CULTURE WAR AS CLASS WAR In 1927 “Cultural Revolution” meant the non-militant development of mass education that a rapid, large-scale industrialization of the country required. After this point an intensification of the class-war concept of revolution came at the Fifteenth Party Congress in 1928, when forced collectivization was initiated along with the focused persecution of prosperous peasants (kulaks). Moreover, in the trial of the Shakhty in May–June 1928, mining engineers and technicians were charged with conspiracy and sabotage, and from 1928 on, mass arrests of engineers followed in the thousands. Additionally, 1929– 1930 saw the arrest of a hundred or more academicians and historians from the Academy of Sciences. Much of this purging was done by local initiative. People were fired from their jobs and expelled from their unions for being “social aliens,” “class aliens,” or “bureaucrats.” From this time on, not only the cultural intelligentsia but skilled professionals known as the technical intelligentsia were no longer considered allies, as they had largely been seen until this point. Now they were potential traitors whose alliances were to the capitalists and their foreign supporters. A new, intensified rhetoric of class war lasts for several years in the form of a Stalinist Cultural Revolution. Led by a reinvigorated proletarian movement of RAPP (The Russian Association of Proletarian Writers), “proletarian” writers and artists (often with no working-class origins of their own) aimed to root out class-alien culture and create new art forms in its place. Yet, as von Geldern puts it, the so-called proletarians “proved more adept at condemning culture than producing it.” As a result, cultural initiatives of this period were some of the most consequential of all the iconoclastic thrusts to date: “The Cultural Revolution, not the Revolution of 1917, altered the face of mass culture once and for all. Industrialization and collectivization almost destroyed folk and popular culture. The intelligentsia surrendered its independence; the peasantry and its culture almost ceased to exist; the urban audience was transformed.”33 Intolerance and repression were the call signs of the movement. Prerevolutionary culture was dismantled and swept away, as class enemies, from former aristocrats to intellectuals and nonconformist artists, were denied access to publishing houses, theaters, or other cultural institutions. Folk culture and Western genres such as detective stories and science-fiction novels

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were banned and replaced by documentarian-style reporting from factories and collective farms. However, the writing, predictably, tended to be substandard and held little appeal for average readers. A more popular genre came in the form of Civil War narratives, which evinced a new glamorization of conflict and brought a spirit of militancy to mass culture. These cultural paradigms ramped up the intensity of the class war, which reaches an even higher pitch of hysteria by the end of the first decade of the Revolution. Anyone seen as ambivalent toward the new society was targeted as an enemy of the state. Compliance wasn’t enough; Soviet citizens were expected to display enthusiasm in public and private or be branded as outcasts.34 Fitzpatrick argues that class war is a mobilization strategy. On the road to consolidating his power, Stalin took advantage of the widespread spirit of class war not only to discredit his opponents in the Politburo but also to build a loyal following of cadres. The Cultural Revolution promoted the mobility of working-class Party members into higher educational, administrative, and managerial jobs. It was a vehicle for training the future Communist elite and creating the new Soviet intelligentsia (of which, more in the following paragraphs).35 Increasingly, Party membership was the doorway to advancement, especially among the low educated. During and after the twenties, many workers joined the Party, whose membership went from 23,600 in 1917 to three quarters of a million in 1921, and up to a million by 1925, despite losing some 250,000 to purges. Opportunities for social mobility meant that active, public participation in the denunciation of enemies would reach ever greater extremes. Since individual aspirations were stigmatized, upwardly mobile officials saw participation in public purges as one of the few avenues available to their ambitions for career building.36 Even the Great Purges (1936–1938) had beneficiaries. The vydvizhentsy (“movers-up”) were proletarians who were promoted in the professional and Party ranks to jobs as technicians, administrators, and posts in management and higher education. The vydvizhentsy, who gained more than anyone else from the Cultural Revolution, would form the Party leadership of the 1930s and 1940s, and would look on the militancy of the Cultural Revolution and the fury it unleashed as something to strive to avoid in the future. With their upward mobility, they were much more motivated and practical-minded than the militants of the Cultural Revolution—their erstwhile mentors whose dissembling and social experimentation, while dismantling institutions and creating a state of permanent crisis, had made their studies very difficult.37 What of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”? Stalin seemed to be trying to give it substance by promoting the rank and file to important positions in industry and government. In 1936–1939, he revised the formal status of the intelligentsia, prohibiting its persecution, to allow for new respect of the “Soviet intelligentsia,” who would be called the “best people.” However, a

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surprising phenomenon seen in the 1930s was an emergent respect for the Soviet upper crust. Privileges and high standards of living for elites—meaning Communist officials and some industry professionals—became the new norm. This was in stark contrast to the 1920s when salaries for politicals had been subject to a Party maximum and privilege had been interpreted as a sign of the hated bourgeoisie. Now Party cadres enjoyed material benefits unavailable to the general population including specialty goods, exclusive apartments and dachas, seaside holidays, and chauffeur-driven cars. Underscoring their hypocrisy, these privileges, however, were usually hidden, and conspicuous consumption was reprimanded. Some Old Bolsheviks still favored the ascetic life and scorned their colleagues’ luxuries. While Marxism made no provisions for a privileged bureaucratic class, Stalin avoided the cognitive dissonance by calling the new privileged elites an “intelligentsia,” effectively changing the focus from a socioeconomic to a cultural orientation. The Soviet intelligentsia was both a service class and a cultural vanguard that paralleled the role of the Communist Party in politics. Access to consumer wares could be seen as part of their obligation to drive cultural innovation, which therefore justified their access to goods unavailable to the general population.38 At once highly ironic and disquieting, the intelligentsia, one could say, had come full circle. Motherhood, along with the virtues of family life earlier regarded with scorn, also made a comeback in the 1930s and was heralded with a new sanctity. Free marriage, a vestige of the emancipated spirit of the Revolution, lost its legal status. Abortion was outlawed, divorce made more difficult, and homosexuality criminalized. To some original Communists these developments represented a regression to philistine, bourgeois values.39 But family had become an important institution with new, symbolic connotations beyond its physical structure. By the 1930s, society had made such progress that the nuclear family could naturally be seen as the helpmate of the state. Family was compatible with the machine metaphor, because all the parts needed to work together harmoniously, as brothers and sisters who cooperate and work together. All parts were equally important, like the wheels, furnace, and gears on a train, as is every bolt and rivet. But it was essential to always understand the parts in relation to the whole. The Party was the guiding force, or the driving axle. The family had an obligation to produce good citizens but remained a microcosmic auxiliary of the state. The “familial warmth” of the Party had taken precedence over family for those who would reject corrupt blood relatives in favor of serving the political community, a trend established long before the Stalinist era.40 Nevertheless, the return of bourgeois luxuries and centrality of family in the mid-century Soviet experiment are ironic in light of the fact that

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persecution of the bourgeoisie had contributed so much of the grist for the establishment of Bolshevik hegemony and the language it employed. In sum, when the language of class war ballooned after Red October, Soviet agitprop aimed to fully transform mass culture. Mostly crude, it became more sophisticated with time, but never reached a level that could bring forth the ideals of utopian life aspired to by generations of revolutionary dreamers. Whether by chance or by force, it was the Party’s mandate, as leaders saw it, to guide the people to conscious understanding of the historic processes taking place and the hero’s role of the working class. Its shortcoming was that, in spite of the wide variety of media at its disposal, Soviet propaganda exploited the binary, Manichean thinking of the revolutionary ethos. Depicting a world of stark contrasts, Soviet propaganda art, as von Geldern puts it, was “unencumbered by complexity.” Self-conscious irony was never a part of its discursive field. In the Soviet mythology, Reds are valorous, selfsacrificing heroes, and Whites are cruel and debauched villains. The enemy is clearly labeled, even if those labels are haphazardly applied and “class enemies”—capitalists, clergy, intelligentsia, and, chiefly, the bourgeoisie— are painted in broad strokes and viciously condemned.41 All in all, life in revolutionary Russia was dynamic and spontaneous. There were incredible psychological pressures on people. It is difficult to estimate the scale and impact of violence that people witnessed—and willingly engaged in. It is challenging to account for all the human factors, to weigh them and place blame or calculate agency, or above all to measure the toll it took on individual lives. A rise in productivity finally came in the late 1920s. Modernized farming had been slowly introduced, like crop-rotations, advanced tools, chemical fertilizers, and graded seed. Culture was brought to the countryside in the form of theaters, cinemas, and libraries, as well as social improvements such as hospitals.42 Yet with time, the Bolsheviks would crush the fledgling institutions of civil society based on legal and democratic principles. At the core of their weaponized narrative was persecution of groups and individuals according to the fabricated notion that a “bourgeois conspiracy” was working insidiously to disrupt the Revolution. When it came to their suppression, Soviet authorities sowed chaos instead of harmony. The workers’ paradise promised by Communist ideologues was compromised by state security methods used to carry out persecution, arrests, exile, and terrorization of both urban and rural populations. These repressions meant there was little left to harvest, whether in the material or cultural realm, for the common weal. In the final analysis, Bolshevik revolutionaries were a warrior class. They were destroyers, not builders. In its initial phases, Lenin viewed technological progress as vital to the success of the Revolution. He defined this aim succinctly with his pronouncement, “Communism equals Soviet power plus

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electrification of the entire country.” Electric light was a symbol of enlightenment and a metaphor for everything good. At least in outward appearances, the Enlightenment had finally reached fruition in Russia, and the fight for modernity had been won by workers. Yet peasant Russia was still backward, undeveloped, and superstitious, and technology was a long way from transforming the country’s deep-rooted social problems. In rural areas, where material development and political culture were both slow to advance, the thin veneer of civilization had been swept away by the flood of revolution. When Gorky said, “The immense peasant tide will end by engulfing everything,” he knew that it could happen by the sheer force of numbers. Echoing Blok and others of the prerevolutionary intelligentsia, he foresaw the coming calamity of peasant rebellion and the Party’s response, resorting to tyranny. What neither of them could have predicted was the extent to which an organized campaign of persecution would empower deeply ingrained resentments and drive the class divisions to ever greater extremes of cultural warfare. The next chapter examines a novel which illustrates some of the class issues and other cultural conflicts investigated in the present study so far. Namely, Mikhail Bulgakov’s White Guard, set in Kiev during the Russian Civil War, uses a backdrop of storms threatening on many sides—from anarchic peasant revolt, to nationalist armies, and the advance of Bolshevik forces—to frame the story of a family of monarchists who cling to their old-world values while aware that their lives and traditions are receding into history. While it presents a coming secular apocalypse that augurs ill for the future, White Guard counters the narrative that the “bourgeois intelligentsia” represented petty, materialistic concerns which debased human destiny. Instead, its protagonists represent the kind of ennobling vision of honor, moral integrity, heroic self-sacrifice, and resolute individualism that original revolutionaries like the Decembrists might have envisioned, had their own ideals been permitted to flourish. NOTES 1. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 300, 307. 2. Ibid., 307–9. See also Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, The February Revolution: Petrograd, 1917 (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1981), 199–200, 21–24, 232–38, 247–55. 3. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 310–13. 4. “Soldaty idut …,” Ezhednevnaia gazeta-kopeika, March 6, 1917, 3; quoted in Steinberg, The Russian Revolution, 19. 5. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 358–59. 6. Figes and Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution, 122–25, 180–82; Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 358–59, 462–63. The practice of looting gentry estates

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was part of a longer wave of peasant violence that predated the Revolution, per the sacking of Blok’s ancestral estate at Shakhmatovo in 1902. See chapter 3. 7. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 360–61. 8. James von Geldern and Richard Stites, eds., Mass Culture in Soviet Russia: Tales, Poems, Songs, Movies, Plays, and Folklore, 1917–1953 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), xiii–xiv. 9. Ibid., xi–xii; my italics. 10. Victoria E. Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 1. 11. Figes and Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution, 1–3, 57–60. On nomenclature and onomastic revolutions in general, see Figes and Kolonitskii, Ch. 2, “The Symbolic Revolution.” 12. Bonnell, Iconography of Power, 3. 13. Leonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, trans. G. E. H. Palmer and E. Kadloubovsky (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994), 45; Bonnell, Iconography of Power, 4. 14. Bonnell, Iconography of Power, 1–3. 15. Decree on the Press, Izvestiia, 209 (October 28, 1917), 2; quoted in Steinberg, The Russian Revolution, 96. 16. Bonnell, Iconography of Power, 2–3; Von Geldern and Stites, Mass Culture, xi. 17. Herman Ermolaev, Censorship in Soviet Literature, 1917–1991 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 10; Evgeny Dobrenko, The Making of the State Writer: Social and Aesthetic Origins of Soviet Literary Culture, trans. Jesse M. Savage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), xviii–xx. Italics in the original. 18. Read, Religion, Revolution, 55. 19. V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th Edition, Vol. 35 (Moscow: Nabu Press, 1958–65), 204. Quoted in Figes and Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution, 185. 20. Wendy Z. Goldman, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin: The Social Dynamics of Repression (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 7–9. 21. Ibid. 22. Figes and Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution, 185–86; Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 400–401, 526–36. 23. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 4th Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 98–99. Fitzpatrick cites Richard Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin, trans. Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 152–54. 24. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 534–35. 25. Read, Culture and Power, 53–54. 26. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 797–801. 27. Ibid., 808. 28. Matthew E. Lenoe, Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet Newspapers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

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29. Martin McCauley, Stalin and Stalinism, 2nd Edition (London and New York, NY: Longman, 1995), 81–82. 30. Nadezhda Mandelshtam, Hope Abandoned, trans. Max Hayward (London: Collins & Harvill, 1971), 304–5. 31. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), 129–32. 32. Ibid., 132–36. 33. Von Geldern and Stites, Mass Culture, xvi–xvii. 34. Ibid. 35. Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front, 118. 36. Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 44. 37. Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front, Ch. 7, “Stalin and the Making of a New Elite.” 38. Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 162–63. 39. Ibid., 160–61. 40. Clark, The Soviet Novel, 114–20. 41. Von Geldern and Stites, Mass Culture, xiv–xv. 42. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 789–93.

Chapter 6

The Lives of “Former People” White Guard

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940) graduated from the Medical Faculty of Kiev University with distinction in 1916. It was a time when the ancestral home of East Slavic civilization had become a center of intellectual life as never before in the modern era. In Kiev, where the upper strata consisted of officers and clergy, Bulgakov came from a clergy background. His father was a conservative clergy-intellectual—a professor of divinity at the Kiev Theological Academy. His mother was a well-educated woman who placed a high value on family life. Both parents instilled in him the virtues of discipline and order, courteousness, and respect for others. After graduation, Bulgakov spent the spring and summer of 1916 serving in frontline military hospitals until he was transferred to a remote village in Smolensk province. Through the fateful year of 1917, as cascading historic events shook the capitals, Bulgakov was bored and longing for life in the city. From far away in a backwater village was where he learnt that the tsar had been deposed. After transfer to the larger town of Vyazma in the fall, he was head of the infectious diseases and venereological department there when the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government in October. Yet his prolonged stay in the country was not without gain, at least for the budding writer’s creative imagination. He later wrote several stories based on his experiences as a provincial doctor, most of which were published between 1925 and 1927 in the journal Meditsinskii rabotnik (Medical Worker) and issued in a posthumous collection entitled Notes of a Young Doctor (Zapiski iunogo vracha, 1963).1 The first time Bulgakov uses storm imagery is in his story “The Snowstorm” (“V’iuga”). The young doctor, who is supposed to be enjoying a day off and a hot bath, is continuously interrupted and finally called out to see a sick girl who dies before he can tend to her. Caught in a snowstorm on the way home, 147

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he pledges never to venture out again in such conditions; but out of his strong sense of duty, he knows he will. Interpreters of the story have seen the storm as a symbol for the Revolution, while a hospital lamp, symbolizing light and science, shows the way through it. Yet others have countered that such an allegorical reading is unnecessary. The theme of man alone in a hostile world is sufficient to suggest that the doctor finds light and civilization on his own terms, in a world he is otherwise powerless to change.2 I concur with the latter inasmuch as the blizzard in “The Snowstorm” does not have to be read as a concrete analogy for revolution. However, it does prefigure the broader storm imagery in Bulgakov’s first novel White Guard, in which the trope is used in more sophisticated and ambiguous ways including metaphorical representations of civil war. Bulgakov was discharged from army service in early 1918 and returned to Kiev at the beginning of March. It was a time of incredible political instability and continuous violence in the city. The Red Army had occupied Kiev in February but was forced out by the Germans, who installed a Ukrainian Hetman, reviving the sixteenth- to eighteenth-century title for military commander. When the Germans withdrew after the armistice with Allied Forces in November, the Hetman fled, and an ultranationalist army under Semyon Petlyura took the city. Over the next two years, the city changed hands more than a dozen times, a succession of occupations alternating between Bolsheviks, White forces, and Petlyura and his allies. Bulgakov wrote, “By the reckoning of the Kievans, they had 18 violent changes of government. Some of the hot-house writers of memoirs have counted 12; I can state accurately that there were 14, and moreover I personally experienced 10 of them.”3 The experience of his beloved city torn by civil war would provide the setting for the novel he began to compose several years later. Upon his return to Kiev, Bulgakov opened a private practice as a venereologist and dermatologist. At this most chaotic of times, he became unavoidably entangled in the circumstances, much like his protagonist Alexei Turbin of White Guard. He probably served for short periods as a medic in the armies of the Hetman and even Petlyura. This detail is suggested by “The Extraordinary Adventures of a Doctor” (“Neobyknovennye prikliucheniia doktora”) and other stories based on this period of his life, when the doctor– protagonist is mobilized by respective occupying forces.4 In late 1919 Bulgakov left Kiev with White Army forces before the city was captured again by the Bolsheviks. He ended up in the city of Vladikavkaz in the Caucasus mountains. There he came down with typhus, which prevented him from fleeing the country to settle in Paris and live a peaceful writer’s existence, which he longed to do, per indications in his autobiographical work Notes on the Cuffs (Zapiski na manzhetakh, 1922–1923). Delirious with typhus for a month, by the time he recovered it was too late to emigrate

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because the city had been occupied by the Red Army, who forbade him to leave. Bulgakov found a way to put his talents and energy to good use when he and colleague Yury Slyozkin started a Vladikavkaz sub-department of the arts. It was a time when reorganization of the arts was a priority under the first director of the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros) Anatoly Lunacharsky, whose agency had the mandate to provide a cultural education for the masses. Although material resources were limited, Bulgakov and Slyozkin gave local writers, actors, and musicians work by organizing literary readings, lectures, concerts, and theatrical productions. The political climate, however, remained fractious. Bulgakov’s defense of Pushkin at one literary evening earned him censure in the local press, when Communists who rejected cultural traditions of the past accused Bulgakov of using language as a weapon for the bourgeois cause. Considering the weaponization of language instigated by the Bolsheviks (per chapter 5), these charges appear heavily ironic. Nonetheless, a pervasive ideology that called for struggle against the bourgeoisie was a reality Bulgakov and other intellectuals had to face. Later criticisms he sustained against his profession as a writer and his personal safety would turn out to be far more aggressive.5 Bulgakov arrived in Moscow in September 1921, at the beginning of the NEP period. Notes on the Cuffs is a revealing source for this period as well. The aspiring writer had difficulty finding work and accommodation. Hungry and sometimes ill, in personal correspondence he wrote of a “mad struggle to exist and adapt to new conditions of life.” He came near to starvation, recounted in his semi-autobiographical story, “Forty Times Forty” (“Sorok sorokov”). A further setback was the death of his mother from typhus—an autobiographical detail which would figure in the premise of White Guard.6 Bulgakov’s tribulations in Moscow were temporarily offset by work he began for several newspapers. Among them, he wrote for Gudok (The Whistle), a Railway Workers’ Union periodical, and the Berlin émigré newspaper Nakanune (On the Eve). But he found the work of writing and editing there dull and the environment at the editorial offices frustrating and stifling to his latent creative energies. Yuri Olesha, author of the 1927 novel Envy (Zavist’), wrote for The Whistle too, where he published satirical poetry under the pseudonym “Zubilo” (the Chisel), as did the satirical duo Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, who caricatured the offices of Gudok in their famous satirical novel The Twelve Chairs (Dvenadtsat’ stul’ev, 1928). All of them satirized the language and metaphors of “building socialism”—an easy target, mocking terms like “the path” (put’), “the task” (zadacha), and “Soviet power” (Sovetskaia vlast’), which were frequently used in worker and peasant newspapers like Working Moscow, The Poor, The Peasant Newspaper, and the main Bolshevik Party organ, Pravda.7

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In Moscow Bulgakov hid his class origins by ceasing to practice medicine. A decision later echoed by Yuri Zhivago in Pasternak’s novel, it was safer to conceal his past identity as a doctor—a sure sign of belonging to a society and education now outlawed. In Bulgakov’s case, his ambitions were more of the literary sort anyway, and he had already written several plays while in Vladikavkaz. Among these was The Brothers Turbin, about a family from the petite bourgeoisie and scenes from the uprisings of 1905. The outline for a novel also dates from this period, which, like the play, seems to be the genesis of White Guard. “FORMER PEOPLE” White Guard (Belaia gvardiia) is a semi-autobiographical novel written in 1923–1924, which began serialization in the Soviet journal Rossiia (Russia) in 1925 and was adapted for the stage production Days of the Turbins (Dni Turbinykh) the following year. Bulgakov focuses his tale on the struggle for survival during revolutionary upheaval, a major theme throughout his oeuvre. The same is reiterated in the form of a writer struggling for independence and survival in his posthumously published works A Theatrical Novel (Teatral’nyi roman, 1965) and The Master and Margarita (Master i Margarita, 1967). Other major themes of White Guard are home and hearth, escape, honor, and apocalypse (of which, more below). Politically speaking, White Guard and Days of the Turbins memorialize a category of people who are rejected in the post-revolutionary world. Specifically, the Turbin family and their friends are former people (byvshie liudi)—a label used in the Soviet press that lumped in a spectrum of “class enemies” including nobles, bourgeoisie, and intelligentsia. Juxtaposing the brutal realities of civil war with the comforts of family, home, and tradition, White Guard presents the deep experiences of individual protagonists whose values belonged to the cultural intelligentsia. The traditions of this world would be lost in the ensuing years, while its people would become the new exiles along with the condemned bourgeoisie. For family life and the comforts of home, as I discuss in previous chapters, were deemed bourgeois philistinism by Bolsheviks in the 1920s and considered anathema to the new social order under Communism. Critics called the novel a nostalgic panegyric to the White movement and a lament for the liquidated class. It was banned after two out of three serial installments, and Rossiia was shut down. White Guard would not be reprinted in Russia until long after its author’s death. Ironically, however, the stage adaptation Days of the Turbins, after an initial ban, would go on to become one of the most successful plays in the Moscow Art Theatre’s repertoire throughout the 1930s and 1940s.

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Set in Kiev at the end of 1918 and beginning of 1919, White Guard spotlights a family of monarchist officers and cadets for whom family is the vital social organism. The Turbins are gentry intelligentsia. They are fighting for the loyalist White Army to save the city from the series of occupying forces noted above. The novel is rich in imagery of traditional family life as it was known to the Turbins before the Revolution and the demise of the time-honored values they subscribed to. The Russian intelligentsia as a class officially no longer existed. As discussed in the previous chapter, their merit was not valued by the Soviet state, who grouped them with the despised bourgeoisie. Moreover, their old-world values posed a threat to a state that prided itself on its proletarian base and pledged to “loot the looters.” In all, White Guard is a novel that emblematizes the social and political outlook of the Russian cultural elite, situated in the Ukrainian capital, whose survival is threatened by the coming of Bolshevism.8 The Bolsheviks do not appear until the end of the novel, when they are ambiguously portrayed as a liberating force. At the particular point in time when the novel takes place, the Germans retreat—and with them departs Elena Turbin’s husband, an outsider of Baltic descent, as well as the Ukrainian Hetman. Both reveal their cowardice and opportunism by leaving the city vulnerable to the ultranationalist Petlyura, who captures it on December 14, 1918. The Hetman’s election had taken place in a circus, prompting the narrator to remark snidely that he knows historians will have a field day with that detail. Indeed, the city under Hetman Skoropadsky is circus-like, decadent, vaudevillesque, something like a New Year’s Eve bash at the end of time. He and his supporters live extravagantly. The Hetman does bring a degree of stability to the city—at least until he flees with the Germans, leaving it to the advancing army of Petlyura.9 Amid the mayhem and atrocities, the Turbins feel only contempt for Petlyura and his “demonic clowns” but have little choice but to wait for their overthrow by the Bolsheviks. Disbanded upon Hetman Skoropadsky’s departure, the officers and cadets of the tiny mortar battalion they belong to are left to fend for themselves. The loyalist White Guard regiment was mustered at the Aleksandr I High School, where a painting of Tsar Aleksandr I at Borodino, the tsar revered for defeating Napoleon, is unveiled to boost the troops’ morale. “Don’t you see Emperor Aleksandr the Blessed? Straighten up!” their commander hollers.10 The protagonist Alexei Turbin, an army doctor, is sentimental, walking through the school. What did they have to defend? Could Aleksandr even save this doomed building? He thinks nostalgically of the eight years he had spent at the school. Wistfully recalling the snow that had lain on the school grounds in winter, it represents for him tradition, comfort, and security, and a time when he had dreamt of the university, of “sunsets on the Dnieper,

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freedom, money, power, fame.” Afterward he had gone off to medical school, then, in an abrupt turn that descended like a storm, to the war: “Suddenly a black cloud seemed to have blocked out the sky and a whirlwind to have swooped down and wiped out his whole life, the way a terrible wave wipes out a jetty.” Now he is back on the same schoolgrounds, which nobody seemed to care about. It had been turned into an armory. Its vacant windows evoked a black and gloomy calm, causing Turbin to reflect, “Odd that in the center of the city, in the midst of collapse, turmoil, and commotion, there was a lifeless, four-decker ship that had once carried tens of thousands of lives out to open sea.”11 The school is an ark. Like Tyutchev’s ark of the Russian Empire (see chapter 1), this was a monarchist ship. But this ark is all but lost. Once proudly carrying its favorite sons into the broad world, now, “lifeless,” it barely stays afloat above the flood of revolution. But its sanctity is preserved, symbolically, by a crowning layer of virgin snow. Following his story “The Snowstorm,” Bulgakov frequently used snow as a symbol, as its omnipresence in Russian fiction could have predicted. However, in Bulgakov’s case, the symbolism and imagery of snow acquire new associations and contours, and even a surprising new color—black. BLACK SNOW Like rain and floods, snow, snowstorms, and blizzards are persistent motifs of Russian fiction. As the weather presents an unremitting force in nineteenthcentury novels, poems, and plays, the same is true of Soviet literature and its Fellow Travelers. Snow in particular has a malleable quality that lends itself to an endless variety of poetic situations across the aesthetic and ideological spectrum. Snowstorms dot the canvases of Soviet-era fiction in works of canonical and noncanonical writers alike. The falling snow adds an atmospheric tonality to many a classic novel, and no wonder, for it is an ever-present feature of Russia’s winter landscape. The condition of the snow—light, heavy, fluffy, icy, ashy, slushy, even black—can hold a nearly unlimited number of connotations. More than descriptive, snow is often a harbinger, a signal of some impending action, a hidden (shrouded) secret, hint of some treachery, mutiny, or rebellion. The latter, for instance, is a theme in Dostoevsky. The title of Part Two of Dostoevsky’s 1864 novella Notes from Underground, “Apropos of the Wet Snow” (“Po povodu mokrogo snega”), turns on the idea that so much depends on the weather. The foul weather, says the Underground Man, is the cause of his bilious outlook. He associates his selfish crimes with their inspiration in the gloomy St. Petersburg climate. The relentless

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wet snow of the imperial capital has something to do with his cantankerous mood, hidden away in his gloomy subterranean hovel, and indeed it colors his moral sense and pessimistic, one could even say sadistic, outlook. The snow that depresses him is yellow, ugly, disconnected from nature. It is neither the fluffy, powdery snow of fairy tales, nor the luxurious, sparkling white snow of scenes in Kiev as Bulgakov portrays it, like a mythical city, in White Guard. Nor has it anything in common with the profound, destinyladen snows of Blok’s St. Petersburg or the epic Siberian snows that Yuri Andreevich struggles through in Doctor Zhivago. The Underground Man’s “wet snow” is distorted nature in a disaffected city out of touch with organic reality (Dostoevsky called St. Petersburg, pejoratively, “the most abstract and intentional city in the world”). Symbolically it points to the alienation of the intelligentsia, cut off from nature, orphaned from Russia and her people. In the Underground Man’s mind, his own inflexible will is more powerful than nature itself. Yet his fatal flaw is a need for human contact and a desire to be happy. Breaking his isolation is the only way to achieve freedom. If the Underground Man can be compared to some of Dostoevsky’s contemporaries, like the radical critics he meant to pillory, the left intelligentsia, by analogy, is out of touch, separated from their organic selves. They are distorted by the principle of rational egoism popularized in the 1850s and 1860s by Chernyshevsky, Dobroliubov, Pisarev, and others, who formed the nucleus of inspiration for later revolutionary groups and individuals (discussed in chapter 2). The weather encapsulates these dichotomies by setting the mood and creating a causal link, “apropos of the wet snow.” By way of contrast, and before returning to Bulgakov, one of the most beautiful and bracing anthropomorphic descriptions of snow in all of Russian literature comes in Pasternak’s 1929 story “Zhenia’s Childhood” (“Detstvo Luvers”), an early prototype for some of the themes in Doctor Zhivago: Oh, but it was coming down properly now, and no mistaking it. The skies shuddered and from them out came foundering whole white empires and continents without end. And they were both mysterious and frightful. It was clear that those falling worlds (who knew whence) had never heard either of life or of this world, or the earth, and being midnight things and blind they smothered it, because they neither saw it nor knew anything about it.

The passage features language denoting conquest and dominion, the “falling worlds” of “empires,” bringing muteness to the muffled lands caught under their collapse. “Mysterious and frightful,” they were “midnight things,” which knew naught of life but, in their blindness, smothered it. The young Zhenia’s imaginative impressions continue:

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They were ravishingly frightful, those empires; absolutely satanically rapturous. Zhenia caught her breath as she gazed on them. And the air staggered to and fro, grasping at that falling universe, and far, far away, in pain, oh, in what pain, the countryside howled as if seared by whips.12

The countryside “howled in pain,” “seared by whips,” a scene that is “ravishingly frightful” to the precocious heroine, even “satanically rapturous.” The imagery is rich and saturated with elusive, suggestive qualities; however, there is no additional contextual information to shore it up. The metaphors must handle all implications on their own. A coming-of-age story of budding self-awareness, of adolescence and the private revelations of puberty, Zhenia’s innocence is shielded by the story’s interior third-person perspective from knowledge of wider social-political events, except in the smallest clues. Seeing a condemned man led off in a wagon bed and asking why, she is told that it was “because he was a criminal.” When Zhenia persists, her mother clarifies that he was being taken to Perm, a government center where there was a prison department, because Ekaterinburg was only a small, provincial town. The conversation never turns to any reason why the man might have been condemned or what his punishment could be. The latter sort of intangibles are often transferred in the novella to the weather, as later when the blizzard finally ceases, the world outside is “deathly silent.” Yet from Zhenia’s perspective, accentuating her innocence, it is also “bright and sweet like candied cakes in fairy stories.”13 The same story contains the aphoristic “Life endows very few with an awareness of what it does to them.”14 In this sense, the snowstorm in Pasternak is an image of impermanence, or indeterminability—the unknowability of reality. In another instance, in his autobiographical tale Safe Conduct (Okhrannaia gramota, 1931), the author approaches the art of reminiscence through an analogy of the mind reaching back to a point where a snowstorm spontaneously arises: “This is all so far away that if imagination reaches back so far, at the point where it meets this scene a snowstorm rises of its own accord. It breaks out from extreme cold in obedience to the rule of the conquered unattainable.” The storm represents an arbitrary point where the rational mind composes the myriad points of reference which exist in a dynamic state of flux. As John Pilling observes, Pasternak is renowned for his blizzards and rainstorms, “not because they are the standard coefficients for poetic melancholy, but because these are the moments when life is at its most fluid and mobile.” Pasternak’s poetry and prose both are saturated with weather imagery, but it figures not in the way the pathetic fallacy is typically used; rather, Pasternak expounds the idea that humankind and nature interpenetrate. The “rule of the conquered unattainable” allows the poet to present an image of something real, but it prevents him from appropriating the real

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in actuality. Art is not mimetic but metonymic—the artist names things by their qualities.15 Angela Livingstone comments, similarly, that contrary to pathetic fallacy, where the idea points inward (“the raging storm speaks of the rage in my heart”), or when we read into someone’s personality from hints about it given by signs in the surroundings, in Pasternak’s usage, the image points outward. “The flowing water of thaw and waterfall does not reflect the flight of the conscripts from the train, on the contrary, their escape copies it: ‘They ran as the water runs.’ Lying in autumn leaves in the forest, Yurii disappears into them—copies them.”16 Already in his early poetry, Pasternak had used weather imagery in a way that turned even storms into a personal, intimate image. According to his own philosophy of the poetic image, the qualities of things transfer ownership, one to another. Stikhinost’ (elemental force) in Pasternak’s poetry, on the other hand, is a personal, interior quality. The elemental unconscious merges the subjective “I” with the world. For instance, in the poem “Marburg,” the poet refers to “the blizzard of lace” blowing cold “in your white matinée.”17 Or in the 1912 poem “February…” (“Fevral’…”; in translation sometimes called “Black Spring”), Pasternak’s snow is epitomized particularly well. Its first stanza suggests we take up pen and ink and, Write about February into sobs, While the rumbling, thundering slush Burns with the black of spring.18

The image of black slush drives the poem sonically and thematically. It is the fountain ink of the poet, and it’s the noisy, slushy mess under the carriage wheels and galoshes of people on the street. Snow, then, is a powerful metaphorical conceit which can enhance the lyricism of a deeply personal response to the outer world. Like Pasternak, as well as Aleksandr Blok, whose snow imagery is discussed in chapter 3, Bulgakov gives primacy of importance to the weather. They each employ storms and blizzards like a lexicon in its own right, whose nuanced properties carry meaning beyond the immediate context. In Bulgakov’s work, slushy, wet snow is often a hindrance to progress, personal or public. Or the sudden appearance of snowflakes can signal a change. A raging blizzard is commonly associated with the unruly, devastating power of revolution and chaos. Blood spattered on snow accentuates the horrific images of civil war. An image of particular rhetorical force in Bulgakov is black snow. Snow has the air of a magical substance in Bulgakov’s account of how he came to imagine the characters of White Guard. A Theatrical Novel,

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also known as A Dead Man’s Memoir (Zapiski pokoinika), is a semi-autobiographical novel about his writing and trials and tribulations of publishing White Guard as well as his writing and staging of Days of the Turbins, its adaptation for theater. Both are renamed Black Snow in the account given in A Theatrical Novel.19 The use of Black Snow as an alternative title for White Guard tells us something about its provenance. The circumstances Bulgakov describes of writing and attempting to publish the novel are extremely challenging. The reversal in the title from white to black signifies despair—not only for the dying world depicted in White Guard, but the author’s despair at being prevented from giving sustaining life to his heroes and heroines in art. First, a heavy rain lends an atmospheric presence to A Theatrical Novel while heralding a life-changing force, a cleansing ablution or baptism: “A thunderstorm washed Moscow clean on April 29 and the air became sweet and my heart was somehow softened, and I felt I wanted to live.” This cathartic rinse initiates Maksudov’s (Bulgakov’s first-person persona in A Theatrical Novel) conception of the novel: “It was conceived one night when I woke after a sad dream. I had been dreaming of my native city, snow, winter, the civil war . . . . In the dream a silent blizzard passed before me, and then an old grand piano appeared, with people standing around it who are no longer in this world.” Later, he conceives the play under analogous circumstances: “A blizzard woke me up one day. March was still full of blizzards and wild winds, even though it was already approaching its end. . . . And again the same people, and again the distant city and the side of the grand piano, and the shots and somebody sprawled out on the snow.”20 The latter image reiterates a graphic scene from the novel, when “In the lines a cadet fell face down in the snow and dyed it [red] with his blood.”21 This is one illustration of how the author uses snow to augment the lyrical quality and emotional impact, applying color for additional intensity. In A Theatrical Novel the writer-narrator’s own material conditions are degraded: “Just imagine it, Ilchin walks in and sees the divan, and its upholstery is ripped open and there is a spring sticking out, the shade on the light bulb above the table is made of newspaper, and the cat is wandering around, and there is the sound of Annushka swearing in the kitchen.” The uniformity of living arrangements among residents of Soviet Moscow is hinted at when he visits the same theater director who had tried to solicit the stage adaptation of his novel and finds that the divan in the director’s apartment was exactly the same as the one in his room, with a spring sticking out from precisely the same spot. These conditions contrast sharply with the ambient, well-furnished home of the protagonists in his novel and play. The weather is a persistent motif mirroring the drama of events: “And to the rumbling of the thunder, Xavier Borisovich said ominously: ‘I have read your novel.’” Likewise, the blizzards ease when circumstances improve:

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“The force of the storm abated and the day began to return. . . . My chest was heaving, I was drunk on the afternoon storm and vague premonitions.” Maksudov finishes the novel at the end of storm season, exulted but finding himself worse for the wear: “‘My God! It’s April!’ I exclaimed and, for some reason startled at this thought, I wrote in large letters: ‘The End.’ . . . The end of winter, the end of blizzards, the end of the cold. Over the winter I had gradually lost my few acquaintances, become very shabby and threadbare, fallen ill with rheumatism and become rather unsociable. But I had shaved every day.”22 The thunderstorm that washes Moscow clean had represented a turn of fortune for the author. His manuscript is going to be published. But it turns out to be unprintable. His hopes are dashed when he reads it to friends who tell him there is no way it can be published; or if it is, it will surely get him arrested. His guests all declare unanimously that it is because of “the content.” One of them hints, “Do you know what’s required? You don’t? Aha! Well now, there you are!” Without describing any of the said content, the argument proceeds, as the author models the old-world decorum of his characters, while his interlocuters exemplify the brash tone and unpolished manners of the new urban society. He suffers torment from their familiarity as they imply that he is not one of them. One visitor insinuates his culpability: “It’s obvious straightaway what kind of comrade you are! No, brother, you’re not a straightforward kind of person!” Another puts a finer point on it: “There’s a touch of the Dostoevsky about you!”23 His companions’ prediction bears out when the publisher pulls out of the deal. Discouraged but undeterred, Maksudov begins to see his characters in miniature before his eyes and is inspired to write the Turbins’ story in a play. He imagines seeing a three-dimensional picture, a little box, in which his characters are moving and coming alive. He hears sounds and music as the story unfolds, and thus his play is composed. Aware that his hallucination might be considered an alarming symptom of madness, he nevertheless sees the piano his protagonists are gathered around, and he also hears an accordion, “forcing its way through the blizzard in miserable fury,” joined by voices that are angry and sad. He clearly sees the winter night on the Dnepr River, and sees the faces of horses and men in tall astrakhan hats astride them, hears the whistling of their sabers. He reimagines pivotal scenes from the novel and knows he must record them in some fashion so they will never go away.24 Maksudov’s misfortunes pile on when he takes the play to Ivan Vasilievich, a caricature of pioneering theater director Konstantin Stanislavsky, who would eventually produce Days of the Turbins in 1926. After the dismal first reading with Ivan Vasilievich, the rain augments the writer’s misery: “The wind tore the hat from my head as I came out into the yard and I caught it

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in a puddle. There was not a trace left of the Indian summer. The rain was slanting down, my steps made a squelching sound, the wet leaves were falling from the trees in the garden. Water trickled down behind my collar.” Ivan Vasilievich and other principals of the theater company tell Maksudov that his play is unstageable. But they never refer to the real reasons why. They beat around the bush about how it doesn’t have a “scent of acacias” or the “rushing Dnepr” like his novel does (which it doesn’t). It is evident that they haven’t read the novel. Ivan Vasilievich finally says, “we are saying in a friendly way that to perform your play would mean causing you terrible harm! Quite horrific harm. . . . You will find life unbearable and you will curse us.” In a rage that his play won’t be produced, Maksudov declares that he is destined for the theater, that he had understood its intricacies from the moment he stepped foot inside of one. He cries out, in a parody of Soviet speech, “I’m the new man! I’m inevitable, I’ve arrived!”25 He was not the new man, and neither were his heroes. That was the problem with White Guard from the beginning, and therefore with its analogues Days of the Turbins and the fictional novel and play Black Snow. They are unmistakable laments for a vanishing class of people, as the author is too well aware. Black snow is a metaphor for his anguish, a blackening of his world and the world he eulogizes in his work. As well it is an expression of the exasperating ups and downs he is forced to endure while trying to publish the manuscript and, barring that, to stage the play. The darkening of hopes in its wake, however, makes the bright and cozy environment of the novel all the more tactile and poignant in retrospect. In an evocative scene from White Guard, the youngest protagonist, Nikolka, is having a macabre nightmare after losing his commander in a street battle. He dreams he is entangled in a spider’s web that is spreading and climbing up toward his face and threatening to suffocate him. His salvation is the dazzling snow beyond the spider web if he could only reach it: “On the other side of the spider web the purest snow, as much as you wanted, entire ravines full. That was what he had to get to, that snow, and quickly.”26 The black snow of Maksudov’s nightmare scenarios is the photo negative of the white snow in Nikolka’s dream. Caught in the web of civil war and reaching for the safety and quiet serenity of home, the young soldier’s dream is a microcosm that encapsulates the traumatic struggle of his family and the lost generation of people like them. BEHIND CREAM-COLORED CURTAINS In White Guard, snow is a complex and multifaceted symbol. It is an emblem of fairytale beauty, of peace and comfort among family and friends. It is a

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blanket of mystery that bespeaks ineffability and the awe of being in the world, protected by a loving God. Yet it is also a harbinger of the threatening reality of war, of pain, loss, vulnerability, and uncertainty in the future. Bulgakov’s novel begins with the death of the protagonists’ mother during the Civil War, whose epic quality is heightened by the interminable snowfall. Likewise, Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago begins with a snowstorm on the night after the funeral of Yuri Zhivago’s mother. Death of the mother in both cases—and, likewise, an absent or deceased father—is a motif symbolizing the demise of the parent culture along with its cultural traditions and historical memory. The opening sequence of White Guard is filled with imagery that signifies the comforts of home and hearth in a fabled winter. In the midst of timeless elegance and grace, the tangible ambience of the Turbin family home takes center stage in the novel. It provides a comforting, warm shroud of security that insulates the protagonists from the dangers of the world outside—the freezing blizzard, the violence of war, and an uncertain future. A tiled Dutch stove burns in the dining room, with the story of Peter the Great in Holland portrayed on its tiles. A bronze clock plays a gavotte, while another clock, which their late father had bought long ago “in a day when women still wore silly leg-o’-mutton sleeves,” plays steeple chimes. Despite the passage of time, the clocks were “quite immortal” and the tiled stove a “wise crag” which “radiated life and heat in the darkest of hours.” Further, there are beds with shiny brass knobs, Turkish carpets, a tapestry with a picture of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich (father of Peter I) holding a falcon on his arm, and another showing Louis XIV “lolling in a garden paradise on the banks of a silky lake.” Their mother had also left them “the world’s best shelves of books, which smelt like mysterious old chocolate, with Natasha Rostova and the Captain’s Daughter,” plus gilded cups, silver, portraits, and creamcolored hanging drapes.27 The stove, the clock, the portrait of an antiquated tsar, the chocolate-tinted books and cream-colored curtains, all are objects that contain the memory of the Turbin children’s deceased father and mother, and the dying mother culture of the Russia they have known. These objects speak of warmth, security, family comforts, and traditions of an aristocratic caste—while reference to Natasha Rostova and the Captain’s Daughter, heroines of novels by Tolstoy and Pushkin, respectively, signals the family’s cultural intelligentsia standing. Their simple, humanist values are reinforced by the dying words of the young Turbins’ mother: “Live . . . in friendship.”28 The importance of family and the comforts of hearth and home are themes that persist throughout the novel. Later, when Alexei Turbin suffers in a feverish delirium from a battle wound, he imagines mortars moving in and out of the apartment, and the tolling clocks remind him, “man had erected his

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towers, his alarms and weaponry, for but one purpose—to safeguard man’s tranquillity and hearth. That was why he fought, and to be honest, there never was any other reason to fight.”29 Yet when he is wounded in a street skirmish and saved by a woman who leads him to her home, Alexei recognizes that the world he loved would be lost. His memories are triggered by “virgin, untouched lilac, under the snow,” and several tokens of the old world, such as a piano, a framed portrait of someone in golden epaulets, and a Japanese robe that “gave off the sweet scent of days gone by.” He thinks, “There had been a world, and now that world had been killed off.”30 A large part of the danger to the Turbins is their class alignment. As described in detail in chapters 4 and 5, Bolshevik language stigmatized the cultured elite with the label “bourgeois.” But Bulgakov in this novel makes a distinction, exploiting the bourgeois sobriquet for the Turbins’ less sympathetic neighbors. The house is a two-story structure, where the Turbins have their apartment on the top floor, and the bottom is occupied by an older couple, bourgeois caricatures Vasily Ivanovich Lisovich (whom they feminize with the nickname Vasilisa) and his wife Vanda. Unlike the protagonists and their friends, who are compelled by traditions of order, decency, and honor, the avaricious Vasilisa and his wife are motivated by self-interest and cowardice. A distinction is drawn between the genteel, intelligentsia Turbin family and their petty bourgeois neighbors through light, color, imagery, and pejorative labels. For instance, the snow cap on the house looked like a White general’s hat, and the lights upstairs were bright and cheerful, while the lower portion of the house inhabited by their disagreeable neighbor Vasily Ivanovich Lisovich—“engineer, coward, and bourgeois”—appeared a dim yellow. Demonstrating cowardice supposedly befitting his class, Vasilisa constantly frets and complains about the patriotic music he hears emanating from the Turbin apartment as they sing “God Save the Tsar.”31 More bourgeois elements color the novel’s background setting and provide contrast to the family of protagonists. A surge of refugees into Kiev are identified as decadent bourgeois debauchees: actors, aristocrats, prostitutes, gamblers, bankers, industrialists, engineers, attorneys, writers; these and other cosmopolitan riff-raff descend upon the city from all corners, fleeing the Russians and taking refuge under the liberal regime of the Ukrainian Hetman. They sleep on sofas and chairs and dine in luxurious apartments; they frequent cafés and nightclubs where the denizens are decked in diamonds and Siberian furs, and the air smells of “scorched coffee, sweat, liquor, and French perfume.” People apply for visas to Germany or Poland and dream of emigrating to Paris or London. The city is a kind of way station, a Soviet-era Casablanca with an ambience of fin-de-siècle, bourgeois extravagance—a last hurrah while the Four Horsemen knock at the gates. Political views of this motley cast are aired in satirical newspaper articles which revile the Bolsheviks. They

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hate the Bolsheviks with a cowardly hatred, says the narrator, not the face-toface kind that wants to stand and fight, but the kind that cowers in the dark and disturbs the sleep. Whenever thundering cannons are heard outside the city, the thought crosses their minds, “And what if? . . . what if? . . . what if that iron cordon should break? And the gray masses should rush in. Oh, the horror.”32 Those who would stand and fight were the likes of Alexei Turbin, who had returned home to Kiev from distant frontlines to rest and begin a normal, nonmilitary life, but would not be afforded that luxury. There were students who had enlisted from university but couldn’t return to their studies, now with unhealed wounds and greatcoats with the epaulets torn off. The latter slept on chairs using their coats as blankets, drank their fill of vodka, and burned with enough malice for Bolsheviks to impel them to fight another war. Finally, there were the newly graduated gymnasium students, like Alexei Turbin’s seventeen-year-old brother Nikolka, who, between childhood and adulthood, were neither soldiers nor civilians, but soon would find themselves in the thick of battle to defend their families and homes, and their honor.33 ESCAPE WITH HONOR As noted, flight, escape, and survival are constant themes in Bulgakov’s works. They follow personal experience, such as the time the writer was forced to flee to the Caucasus and would have emigrated if he hadn’t fallen ill before the Bolsheviks took Vladikavkaz. White Guard is structured around a series of escapes—of those who flee in fear, and those who, overcoming fear, escape with honor. For it is not only escape, but how one escapes that matters. Some characters act cowardly in the face of danger, while others act honorably and heroically. Comparing the scenes of narrow escape among several of the characters, a view emerges of each individual’s identity as a composite of their conduct and comportment. For instance, Elena’s husband Talberg flees the town with the Hetman and retreating Germans under cover of the night. She watches stoically while he packs his things, telling her he could not simply take her with him to wander into the unknown. When she asks him whether they should warn her brothers that the Germans are about to betray the city, Talberg blushes and answers: of course, she can tell them herself. His cowardly behavior is all too plain. While Elena is too proud to upbraid him, a tone of reproach is taken by the narrator, who evokes both the aesthetic power of home effects and the elemental storm to underscore the value of honor and courage: Afterward the room was hateful, like any room that has known the chaos of packing, and even worse, where the shade has been removed from the lamp.

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Never. Never remove a shade from a lamp! Shades are sacred. Never run from danger and into the unknown like a fleeing rat. Doze by the lampshade and read. Let the storm rage. Wait for them to come to you. Talberg was running away.34

Elena feels emptiness after Talberg is gone. She misses him, but realizes she hardly knew him (they had been married eighteen months) and cannot respect him now, knowing that he would leave her and her family in the lurch at such a perilous time. She tries to justify his decision to herself but wonders, “What kind of a man is your husband?” Her brother Alexei divines what she is thinking and answers to himself, out of Elena’s earshot, “He’s a scoundrel.” Then he puts his finger on it: “Oh, he’s a wretch without the slightest concept of honor! . . . And this is an officer of the Russian military academy! This should be the best Russia has to offer.” Honor continues to occupy Alexei’s thoughts. That night when he can’t sleep and is trying to read, he keeps stumbling on the same line: “to a Russian, honor is nothing but a superfluous burden.” Finally falling asleep at dawn, he dreams of a nasty little man in “garishly checked trousers” who repeats the same phrase to him sardonically.35 The checkered pants are symbolic of the devil, like the one who taunts Ivan in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. His cynical statement is an indication that it is a temptation from the devil to think of honor in such terms. The phrase itself comes from Dostoevsky’s Demons (Besy, 1871–1872), of which, more below. While honor is difficult to uphold—a burden perhaps—in the Russian heroes of White Guard it nevertheless comprises the core of their character. As other characters make their own escapes, the reader is left to decide how each of them confronts their respective circumstances: With honor or cowardice? Acting out of fear or bravery? Do they prove their true mettle or show their true colors? Colonel Shchetkin, commander of the first Infantry Detachment, which the Turbin brothers belong to, was partial to his brandy and the comforts of his train car before going missing on the morning of Petlyura’s advance. Disguised in a “shaggy civilian coat and a porkpie hat,” he meets a buxom blonde at her well-furnished apartment, tells her it’s all over, then drinks a strong cup of coffee, and falls asleep.36 He has abandoned his troops without so much as issuing a warning and leaves many men in peril. Another commander who flees with the Hetman is Mikhail Semyonovich Shpolyansky. Shpolyansky lived lavishly, kept mistresses, dined in the best restaurants, dressed like Pushkin’s antihero the dandy Eugene Onegin, and was adored for his good looks and eloquence. He also had pretentions to erudition, was writing a scholarly work on Gogol with a pompous title, and associated with a syphilitic poet named Rusakov, with whom he had contributed

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to a book of Futurist verse. Smeared in engine grease and soot upon his escape, he had been in charge of readying four armored cars for battle but sabotaged them by putting dirt in the carburetors instead.37 An extravagant aristocrat and intellectual, he is the typical sort of enemy saboteur whom the Bolsheviks believed were behind all the counterrevolutionary forces. As the characters above make their ignoble escapes, those who stand and fight show their fortitude and unimpeachable honor. Colonel Nai-Turs is one. Exemplifying leadership and dedication to his men, he refused to order them to fight without proper winter coats and boots. He brings his cadets before the general, who had delayed the requisition of the needed combat attire, to stand in a threatening pose until the order is issued. The colonel’s fate is tied to Nikolka, who, although only a seventeen-year-old corporal, is senior rank in a company of twenty-eight men after their commander goes missing, and Nikolka is ordered to lead them into the battle. Reaching their post, they find all the cadets fleeing from Petlyura’s advance. Nai-Turs, running with them, rips off Nikolka’s epaulets and tells him to flee with the others to safety. Seeing the colonel stay behind to hunker down with a machine-gun and fire at the advancing cavalry, however, Nikolka does not want to leave, and stays with him to feed the belt into the gun. When the colonel is shot, his last words to Nikolka are “Quit playing the hero, damn it,” and he orders him again to retreat. Nikolka, terrified and alone, finally makes his escape, but having made his heroic stand, his flight contrasts sharply with the picture of frenzied, cowardly absconders around him, such as a bourgeois who “slid by like the wind, crossed himself in every direction and shouted, ‘Jesus Christ’! Volodka! Volodka! Petlyura’s coming!’” Nikolka masters his own fear, feels a rush of fury and surprising confidence in a face-to-face encounter with one of his pursuers, and finally makes it to the comfort and security of the creamcolored curtains of the Turbin home.38 The virtue of honor is emphasized when Nikolka wants to go back outside to listen where the booms of canons are coming from, but his sister implores him to go no further than the yard. The phrase “word of honor” (chestnoe slovo) is repeated four times in their back-and-forth. When he is outside and tempted to leave the yard to climb a snowy hill where he would be able to see the whole upper city, he resists, thinking, “But no one should break his word of honor because then you can’t live with yourself.” The contrast is underscored again the next day once it is clear that Petlyura had taken the city virtually unopposed because the bulk of the White Army leadership had fled without warning their men. Nikolka reflects on how his side had been taken unawares and slaughtered, and “the criminal generals and headquarters scoundrels deserved death.”39 As a further point of honor, Nikolka makes a special expedition to find Colonel Nai-Turs’s family. His resolve is challenged “as events rained

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down on the family like stones,” and hunting through the city, he “fought the stormy waves of people.” Through perseverance he finds the family and, weeping as he relates his story, tells them how the colonel had died a hero while trying to save his men. Afterward Nikolka sets out to find the colonel’s body at a makeshift morgue, where the gruesome sight of stacks of corpses and the hellish stench are a trial that conjure an element of myth, as Nikolka’s mission is analogous to the hero’s descent to the underworld in a conventional hero’s journey narrative. He successfully rescues the colonel from that oblivion and helps the family arrange a proper funeral in a small chapel. The service lets Nikolka assuage his conscience, while, with a slightly macabre Bulgakovian twist, “Nai himself was much happier and had cheered up in his coffin.” The sense that things had been set aright by Nikolka’s honorable deed is compounded, as he leaves the chapel, by the clear, frosty night, “with snow, stars like crosses, and the white Milky Way.”40 While chaos reigned outside, the only refuge of order and stability was the family hearth, and comportment befitting men and women of honor. The healing power of the Turbin ethos is attested to by Alexei Turbin’s miraculous recovery. The family dines together joyously with friends, and they sing around the piano as they had before the fighting began, although signs of their monarchist past had been obliterated by the storm of war: “[Not] a single man sitting at the table [was] wearing epaulets, which had slipped away somewhere and dissolved in the snowstorm outside.” Even the comical bourgeois neighbors Vasilisa and Vanda are redeemed by the Turbin family’s kindness. After their apartment is searched by common thieves who pose as soldiers and abuse them with language like “pig” and “bloodsucker” and steal their money, clothes, boots, galoshes, and even a clock—then ask for a receipt stating that they had given the items willingly—the Turbins commiserate with them, prompting Nikolka to think, “Damn, Vasilisa’s been so likeable since he had his money stolen. Maybe money keeps you from being pleasant. Here, for instance, no one has any money, and everyone’s pleasant.”41 SNOWY APOCALYPSE Unlike the cowardly bourgeoisie, the monarchist, intelligentsia Turbin family is cultured but not decadent, and vulnerable but courageous. The contrast between the rich imagery of domestic comforts and the sorrow and suffering that besets the family of protagonists is driven home using palpable imagery. The very same sets the stage for a drama where all that is precious will be lost. The time was coming when “walls would tumble, the frightened falcon would fly from the white sleeve, the light would go out in the bronze lamp, and the Captain’s Daughter would be burned in the stove.” Although their

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mother on her deathbed had told her children, “Live . . . in friendship,” the family members cannot escape the perils from outside: “In store for them was suffering and death” is the narrator’s ominous prediction.42 Throughout the novel, the comforts of home are contrasted with imagery of storms representing danger and great trials. White Guard’s first epigraph from Pushkin’s novella The Captain’s Daughter prefigures this contrast: A fine snow at first, suddenly it came in flakes. The wind howled. It was a snowstorm now. An instant later the dark sky had blended with the snowy sea. Everything disappeared. “Well, sir,” shouted the coachman, “looks bad. A blizzard!”

The blizzard Pushkin depicted was the eighteenth-century peasant revolt of Emelyan Pugachev and the senseless violence and mayhem perpetrated by his followers. Some representatives of the literary intelligentsia such as the Symbolist poets Andrei Bely and Aleksandr Blok, discussed above, had welcomed the people’s revolts of 1905 and 1917 as the liberation of Russia but later saw the movement descend into pandemonium. Now Bulgakov’s generation of intelligentsia sees that the poor peasants have turned out to be murderous monsters. In his novel, the kind of rebellion warned of by Radishchev long ago, and later by Blok and Gorky, had finally come to fruition. Filled with antipathy toward the Hetman just as much as they despised their former landowners were “four times forty times four hundred thousand peasants with scythes who were burning with unslaked malice.” Tens of thousands had come back from the war, where they learned to shoot from the Russian officers they loathed. Now they wanted to be free of the Russian landlords and had buried weapons and munitions in preparation to reap their revenge for “the requisitioned horses, the confiscated grain, [and] the fat-faced landowners who returned to their estates under the Hetman.” Waves of peasant fury, arsons, and pogroms accompany the elemental peasant wrath. Each side must hope to win their loyalty, for victory depended on it and failure would surely spell disaster: “This peasant rage had to be lured down a road, for the wide world was so magically arranged that no matter how far that rage ran, fate would bring it to the same crossroads.”43 The spontaneous tide of peasant folk in White Guard has symbolism that relates directly to the works of Dostoevsky. When the Turbins’ closest friend, the burly Lieutenant Myshlaevsky, returns from the front, he says they were out there fighting “Dostoevsky’s holy masses”—meaning the narod, whom Dostoevsky called the “God-bearing people” (narod-bogonosets in Dostoevsky’s neologism). But now the people, these sons of the soil, are turning against those philosophers (the intelligentsia) who had called for their liberation (as Blok and Gorky had warned they might). Compounding the

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allusion, Dostoevsky’s anti-revolutionary novel Demons (aka The Possessed) is lying open on the floor while Alexei Turbin has an apocalyptic dream in which “the Demons were jeering, speaking desperate words.” The tie-in with Petlyura is that the Ukrainian nationalist had been Prisoner 666. An order from the Hetman’s government had released him; however, little more was known about him beyond conjecture. He had an obscure background, connected to Romantic myths and rumors associated with native Ukraine. A fitting demon demagogue from a Dostoevskian nightmare, he was “secretive and faceless,” and nobody knew what he was capable of or what he might do.44 The doomsday scenarios are tempered, however, by contrasts in the novel’s imagery and narrative structure. “This is a dark, dark hour, that is true,” says Father Alexander, whom Alexei Turbin had visited soon after his mother’s death. The priest urges Alexei not to lose heart, though, for despair is a great sin. Yet there were great trials to come, he concedes. Holding his Bible so that the day’s dying light from the window fell upon the page, he reads, “And the third angel poured out his vial upon the rivers and fountains of waters; and they became blood.” By way of contrast, the next chapter begins with a reminder of the enchanted beauty of “a white and shaggy December,” when “Christmas could already be felt reflected on the snowy streets.” In juxtaposition to the rivers of blood, snow brings reassurance in the form of quiet comfort. The Turbins’ home is enveloped in the wonderous, wintry snowscape: “Snow lay in drifts on the hill and sprinkled the garden shed—an outsized sugar loaf.” On the other hand, the snowstorm is a persistent indicator of the existential danger which seemingly endless hostilities brought to the Turbins’ civilized world: One assumed it would end any day and the life written about in the chocolate books resume, but not only was it not resuming, all around them everything was becoming more and more frightening. In the north the blizzard kept howling, and here, under their feet, the earth’s belly, alarmed, rumbled forlornly and growled. The year 1918 was rushing to a close, and each day it was even more terrible and bristly.45

Above all, the strong and cheerful Turbin home is marred by the injustice of the death of the family matriarch: “Oh, Father Frost, sparkling with snow and happiness! Mama, radiant queen! Where are you now?”46 The youngest sibling bewails his family’s fate during their mother’s memorial service, looking up at the altar and iconostasis, “where God, that sad, enigmatic old man, loomed and winked.” Nikolka thinks, “Why this wrong? This injustice? What was the point of taking his mother away just when they had finally been reunited and known relief?” In all, Nikolka’s questions imply a broader,

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figurative question for Russia’s motherless children: how could one have faith in the future of the nation? As Freeborn puts it, “Kiev as the mother of Russian cities is left paradoxically in the hands of its motherless sons to defend it from an encroaching revolutionary barbarism.”47 These premonitions are further symbolized in the conflict between Mars and Venus—augured in the opening paragraph of the novel and reprised in the final chapter—and by apocalyptic visions from Revelation, presaged in the novel’s second epigraph: “And the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.”48 Apocalypse is the novel’s predominant motif representing antagonistic forces. Several people quote from the Revelation of St. John. Tying the Revolution and its stormy sea metaphor to this version of apocalypse, the syphilitic poet Rusakov reads, “And the sea gave up the dead which were in it.” The same Rusakov, seeing Dr. Turbin for treatment, names Shpolyansky “the anti-Christ’s precursor” and speaks of Trotsky “the destroyer” leading the hosts of Satan.49 More apocalyptic imagery in a lengthy, kaleidoscopic montage narrates the departure of Petlyura and makes way for the coming of the Bolsheviks. St. Sophia’s Cathedral, unparalleled monument of ancient Kievan Rus’ and burial place of some of its founders, is now the site of a procession that resembles a black mass or inverted Last Judgment, the cathedral bells raising a horrible din, “as if Satan had climbed the bell tower . . . himself.” To the accompaniment of a song of Judgment Day, the snow seems to have turned into coals that incinerate people’s souls and reduce them to soot and ash: “The frost crunched and smoked. The soul melted and was released to repent, and the people spilled out across the cathedral square, black as black can be.” A confused cacophony of voices reveals that these are supporters of Petlyura, who is leading the procession to Moscow. The motley crowd “spilled through the cathedral square like a black sea,” as “the church doors kept shedding new waves.” Several pages of florid description follow, describing the regiments of Petlyura’s army, like a caricature of biblical hosts, with analogues to “either a gray cloud with the belly of a snake . . . or else raging, muddy rivers . . . flowing through the old streets.” A blood-red sun appears above the murky gloom and paints the main dome of St. Sophia in blood as a speaker climbs atop the fountain calling for the people to rally under the red banner and proletarians of all countries to unite. He is identified as a Bolshevik provocateur by the crowd of people who swarm in a “maelstrom” to eject him from the fountain.50 The Bolshevik capture of the city does not take place within the parameters of the novel, but it ends with presentiments of the Bolsheviks’ imminent arrival. Symbols like a red banner and starred hats are alluded to, as people speak in nervous snippets of dialogue about the inevitable Bolshevik advance. The

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Bolshevik red star is also affiliated with apocalypse, as Mars suddenly explodes “in the frozen heights above the outskirts of the City” at the very moment a Jew is murdered. In the wake of the star, “the black expanse on the far side of the Dnieper, the expanse that led to Moscow, struck with thunder, long and hard.”51 The five-pointed Mars is also shining above an armored train that waits on the track, black and ominous, seemingly breathing fire. The station is “frozen in horror.” A soldier, “savagely, inhumanly cold,” stands guarding the train, his eyes “blue, suffering, sleepy, exhausted,” peering under “a snowy fall of lashes.” Covered in the white snow, identified only by his “snowy lashes,” this is the Bolshevik guard, an ironic inversion of the “White Guard” epithet. The image recalls the “white-robed angels” whom John sees in Revelation standing at the throne of God, who turn into the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. By this analogy, the Bolsheviks are both liberators and harbingers of doom. The “White Guard” in this sense could refer to snow-shrouded forces advancing on the city to liberate it from Petlyura, only to bring greater calamity.52 In the final accounting, the novel both exploits and subverts the apocalyptic epos, making it part and parcel of a renewal myth. The bad guys (Talberg, the Hetman, Petlyura, and the cowardly general staff) are not punished—they all get away. In other words, there is no retribution for wrongs committed. Blood soaks the ground, but there is new life. However, is there any great, liberating change? The novel closes on a tone of remorse and resignation. One can only hide in one’s private existence, guard one’s honor, and wait for the end to come: What had it all been for? No one could say. And would anyone pay for the blood? No. No one would. The snow would melt, the green Ukrainian grass would come up and plait the earth, lush sprouts would emerge, the heat would shimmer above the fields, and no trace would remain of the blood. Blood is cheap in these dark red fields, and no one would ever redeem it. No one.

In spite of the religious symbolism and the narrative parallels to Revelation, in this iteration, there is no Redeemer. In His place is nature’s fertile renewal. There is transcendence of a wholly different order, in cyclical time, whose passage is emblemized in the stars: “But this isn’t frightening. All this will pass. The sufferings, agonies, blood, hunger, and wholesale death. The sword will go away, but these stars will remain when even the shadows of our bodies and our affairs are long gone from this earth. There is not a man who does not know this. So why are we reluctant to turn our gaze to them? Why?”53

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The ultimate appeal to humankind to turn to a higher order neutralizes the gloomy false apocalypse. In some of the final pages of the novel, Alexei Turbin, while treating Rusakov, tells the suffering poet to stop reading Revelation, that it was turning into an idée fixe and would land him in a psych ward. Yet there was reason to trust in the Resurrection after all. When Alexei had been wounded and lying on his deathbed, Elena had prayed to the Virgin for intercession and experienced a vision of the Resurrected Christ. Her prayers are rewarded by “the resurrected Turbin himself.” He had lain ill during Petlyura’s forty-seven-day reign in the city, “shackled in ice and dusted by snow,” and recovered as February “flew in and twisted into a snowstorm.”54 The novel’s themes coalesce around these images: the rivers and fountains may turn to blood, but life’s remarkable power of renewal is as persistent and tenacious as the ubiquitous storm. As noted, White Guard was turned into a play, The Days of the Turbins, one of the most often performed and well-loved for over a decade in the Moscow Art Theatre repertoire, second only to Chekhov’s The Seagull (Chaika, written 1895, premiered 1896). The Days of the Turbins was known to be Stalin’s favorite play—he attended it at least twenty times. This is rather surprising, given its “former people” characters, its nostalgic tone, and bourgeois coloration. From 1926 through 1941 it was performed 987 times, despite the fact that White Guard remained unprintable until the late 1960s.55 Moreover, press reaction to Bulgakov’s work was generally hostile, and all of his plays were banned in 1929. Desperate, he turned to Gorky for intercession, and then made an impassioned plea in a letter to Stalin asking for permission for his wife and himself to leave the country, while defending his honest portrayal of the intelligentsia in White Guard and other works. For his brazenness, he received a phone call from Stalin in April 1930, four days after Mayakovsky’s suicide, to ask him why he wanted to leave. Bulgakov admitted to the general secretary that he would rather stay in the country if he were allowed to thrive as a writer—which amounted to turning down his only opportunity to leave, which he had wanted to do since fleeing to the Caucasus in 1919. But his reply may also have earned him the dictator’s favor and saving grace, as Stalin straightaway arranged a job for him at the Moscow Arts Theatre adapting Gogol’s Dead Souls, which opened in November 1932.56 However, Bulgakov’s life continued to be troubled through the 1930s, as his plays were derided by party-line critics, whom he parodies in his last great work, The Master and Margarita. Continual delays in the staging of his plays and interference of censors contributed to the nervous disorder and depression from which Bulgakov suffered in his final years. He would still be working at the theater when he completed The Master and Margarita, before he died in 1940 at age 48. His widow managed to have White Guard partially

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published in the literary journal Moskva (Moscow) in 1966, and the novel was finally published in its entirety in 1973. Bulgakov did not live to see the momentous 1940s and 1950s, years which included the Great Patriotic War and the death of Stalin in 1953, but his contemporary Boris Pasternak survived him through those decades and produced a novel in which the title character Yuri Zhivago bears some resemblance to Bulgakov’s hero Alexei Turbin. Both authors bring an idealist vision to their novels, partly religious, but principally humanist and personalist in ultimate meaning. Seeking an ideal vision in the midst of their war-torn motherland, their works are about individuals and interpersonal human relationships which thrive not because of the Revolution but in spite of it. Countering the official narrative line of political education of the spontaneous masses, their works are more concerned with the spontaneity of life in its ever changing and churning guises, like the inscrutable weather: mystical, ravishingly beautiful—as Zhenia Luvers saw the falling snow in Pasternak’s story—or capricious and menacing as “black snow”—but always awe-invoking. As wartime doctors, Alexei Turbin and Yuri Zhivago are healers in both the corporeal and the spiritual sense. They mirror the age through the filter of their lives and character. Yet on a purely mundane level, like their respective authors, both protagonists bear witness to the storm of historical events while merely trying to survive. These themes are taken up again in the final chapter of this study, which examines the life and work of Pasternak and his monumental novel. Before turning to Doctor Zhivago, however, the next chapter examines three Soviet novels which are more typical of the Civil War narrative, even as each exploits weather and harvest motifs in original and unexpected ways.

NOTES 1. A. Colin Wright, Mikhail Bulgakov: Life and Interpretations (Toronto, Buffalo, NY and London: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 9–14. 2. Ibid., 12; A. M. Al’tshuler, “Bulgakov–prozaik,” Literaturnaia gazeta, February 7, 1968, 5–6. 3. Wright, Mikhail Bulgakov, 15. The quote is from Bulgakov’s feuilleton “Kievgorod” (Kiev—a Town), July 6, 1923, 2–4. 4. Wright, Mikhail Bulgakov, 16–17. 5. Ibid., 19–20; the rebuke of Bulgakov appeared in the local paper Kommunist of July 10, 1920, signed M. Skromny (likely a pseudonym, meaning “modest”). 6. Wright, Mikhail Bulgakov, 24–27. 7. Ibid., 24–32; Brooks, Thank You, 44–53. See also Maria Kisel, “Literacy and Literary Mastery in Early Soviet Russia: The Case of Yuri Olesha’s ‘Envy,’” Ulbandus Review 11, High/Low (2008): 23–45. 8. Freeborn, The Russian Revolutionary Novel, 144–45.

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9. Mikhail Bulgakov, White Guard, trans. Marian Schwartz (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 58. 10. Ibid., 98–99. 11. Ibid., 107, 93–94. 12. Boris Pasternak, Zhenia’s Childhood and Other Stories, trans. Alec Brown (London and New York, NY: Allison & Busby, 1982), 46–47. 13. Ibid., 36, 49. 14. Ibid., 4. 15. John Pilling, Autobiography and Imagination: Studies in Self-Scrutiny (London, UK and Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 54–55. On the pathetic fallacy, Pilling cites Isaiah Berlin, “A View of Russian Literature, review of The Epic of Russian Literature, by Marc Slonim,” Partisan Review 17, no. 6 (July–August 1950): 748–51; and Marina Tsvetaeva’s essay “A Downpour of Light,” in Pasternak: Modern Judgements, eds. Donald Davie and Angela Livingstone (London: Macmillan, 1969), 58. 16. Angela Livingstone, Boris Pasternak: Doctor Zhivago, Landmarks of World Literature Series (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 94. 17. Barnes, Boris Pasternak, Vol. 1, 117–19. 18. Boris Pasternak, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, Vol. 1 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1989–92), 47. My translation. 19. A Theatrical Novel was first published in Russia in 1965, in Vol. 8 of Novy mir. I cite from Mikhail Bulgakov, A Dead Man’s Memoir (A Theatrical Novel), trans. and ed. Andrew Bromfield (New York, NY and London: Penguin Classics), 2007. 20. Ibid., 3, 6, 40. 21. Bulgakov, White Guard, 153. 22. Bulgakov, A Dead Man’s Memoir, 4–6, 43, 8. 23. Ibid., 9–11. 24. Ibid., 41. 25. Ibid., 107, 120–21, 137. 26. Bulgakov, White Guard, 181–82. 27. Ibid., 4–5. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 203. 30. Ibid., 214–18. 31. Ibid., 6–8, 45–46. 32. Ibid., 54–57. Italics in the original. 33. Ibid., 57–58. 34. Ibid., 24. 35. Ibid., 51. 36. Ibid., 129–30. 37. Ibid., 138–46. 38. Ibid., 147–50, 151–54, 164–75. 39. Ibid., 178, 195. 40. Ibid., 273, 281–84. 41. Ibid., 298, 236–42. Italics in the original.

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42. Ibid., 6. 43. Ibid., 66–68, 76. 44. Ibid., 64–66, 76–78. 45. Ibid., 6. 46. Ibid., 3. 47. Ibid., 4; Freeborn, Revolutionary Novel, 144–46. 48. Bulgakov, White Guard, vi. 49. Ibid., 307–8, 294–95. 50. Ibid., 256–70. 51. Ibid., 267, 298, 302. 52. Ibid., 305. 53. Ibid., 302–3, 309–10. 54. Ibid., 289–91. 55. Evgeny Dobrenko, “Writing Judgment Day,” trans. Jesse M. Savage, in Mikhail Bulgakov, White Guard, trans. Marian Schwartz (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), xix. 56. Wright, Mikhail Bulgakov, 144–47.

Chapter 7

Fruits of Revolution Three Soviet Novels

Following the Civil War and a brief period of relative liberalization of economic and cultural policy during the NEP (New Economic Policy, 1921– 1928), literature in Soviet Russia was increasingly curtailed and harnessed for ideological purposes. Resulting from the combination of Party policy, social pressures, and self-censorship described in earlier parts of this volume, the wide-ranging diversity and experimentation in literature in the first several years after the Revolution were blinkered and corralled within a short span of time into a tightly regulated state system. With few exceptions, novels about the Civil War followed a formulaic pattern. In essence the Civil War narrative became a critical instrument for legitimizing the Bolshevik regime and a template for the trajectory of popular Soviet fiction. A multifront, complex affair, the Russian Civil War was more than a feud between Reds and Whites; the armed struggle included a number of other warring factions such as Socialist Revolutionaries and other nationalist groups, anarchists, peasant armies known as “Greens,” interventions from Britain, France, the United States, and other Allied powers, and an offshoot in the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–1920. The previous chapter describes how White Guard depicts a small segment of this larger picture, demonstrating the chaotic change of fortunes as numerous factions battled for Kiev. On the ideological front, to a large extent the Civil War was a struggle to own the narrative of Russia’s future. In its aftermath, armed with class war as a defining motive, the Bolsheviks sought first and foremost to control what was feared as counterrevolutionary—pluralism, heterodoxy, tolerance, and individualism. As Bulgakov’s difficulty with publishing White Guard can attest, variations on the ideological meaning of the Civil War which veered from the Party perspective were destined for suppression. Civil War lore that grew with the tradition of Soviet literature in the 1920s yoked the 173

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narrative to Bolshevik myth, which was canonized eventually under Socialist Realism in the mid-1930s. Slezkine compares the main task of Bolsheviks to gospel-writers mythologizing the Civil War by drawing contrasts between “Babylon” (i.e., bourgeois culture) and “the raging elements—winds, storms, blizzards, and inchoate human masses.”1 This is because its chief tropes, which carried over from pre-revolutionary imagery, were the elemental forces of nature. Literature of the Soviet era is filled with nature tropes, including the flood and harvest metaphors I enumerate throughout this book, which occupy the center of narratives both prior to and succeeding the Revolution. The present chapter examines a selection of texts which deal with aspects of the Civil War, each of which capitalizes upon either flood or harvest metaphors, or a combination of the two. Some canonical and others only marginally so, each captures major elements of the spirit of the mid- to late 1920s and early 1930s, paving the way for the advent of Socialist Realism. Namely, The Iron Flood uses flood extensively as a metaphorical conceit to represent the scores of soldiers and civilians waylaid in a Civil War rout. The Thief is a reckoning with the Civil War and NEP periods in a psychological novel whose characters struggle with moral questions which problematize the notion of the New Soviet Man. Quiet Don is a work of epic proportions universally regarded as a pinnacle of Soviet literature, while arguably employing harvest metaphors more expertly than any other Russian novel. THE DIN OF MULTITUDES: THE IRON FLOOD As briefly explained in the Introduction, Soviet Socialist Realism pivots on the simple principle that the people have spontaneous, elemental energy that needs to be made conscious and harnessed by enlightened representatives of the Party. Enlightenment in this case means political (class) consciousness. The Soviet novel epitomizes the dichotomy of elemental spontaneity (stikhinost’) vis-à-vis consciousness (soznatel’nost’). Its mission is to bring class consciousness to the elemental, spontaneous people in order to conscript them for the struggle of the masses against their oppressors. At the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in August 1934 when the forms and purposes of Soviet art were debated, and Socialist Realism was designated as its official method, certain texts were held up as prototypes. Among them were Gorky’s Mother, alluded to in chapter 4, Chapaev (1923) by Dmitri Furmanov, and The Iron Flood (Zheleznyi potok, 1924) by Aleksandr Serafimovich. The Iron Flood befits the present analysis for obvious reasons—with its focal image, Serafimovich’s novel takes the flood narrative into ideological terrain in a major way as a metaphor for the spontaneity and tenacity of the people.

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Serafimovich’s flood chronicles the grit and gore of the Civil War, where Bolshevik forces emerge as victors of the class war and bring the people to conscious understanding of the class struggle. On top of abundant storms and floods that assail them throughout the novel, the main flood alluded to in the novel’s title is the endless streaming, suffering human sea of armies and their supply trains. Repeated reference is made to the clamor, din, chatter, creaking carts, horses, old people, children, campfires, rattling pails, crying infants, “ponderous” artillery guns, and the shuddering ground beneath them. The “undisciplined, roaring torrent” is made up of demobilized men recruited into the Red Army after returning from the European front—they are carpenters, cobblers, tinkers, coopers, fishermen, and tradespeople of every stripe along with their families. The majority are peasants whom the coming of Soviet power had given an opportunity to rise in defence of their homes. Pursued by a detachment of Cossacks fighting on behalf of the Whites, in a series of forced marches, the desperate battalion moves in an endless flowing human stream: noisy, confused, swaying and turning, the stream is a “dusty grey serpent” which glides along amid “continuous din” and “blinding white dust.”2 The elemental flood of people is dogged by raging storms, which spur them on. In a sudden deluge during the crossing of a mountain pass, for example, a roaring flood sweeps the people off their feet as a menacing black sky portends the likelihood that the end of the world is nigh. In a book filled to the brim with exaggerated imagery of mayhem and death, this is surely the mother of all storms. Nevertheless, their commander, a man with an “iron jaw” named Kozhukh, orders the forced march to continue, despite the exhausted condition of the starving people and their spent, emaciated horses.3 Kozhukh had been elected commander by soldiers who reasoned, “Whoever we elect must have the power of life and death over us. There must be iron discipline.” In some ways Kozhukh is a conventional Socialist Realist hero whose natural talents and energy blossom when he learns class consciousness. He had been a poor peasant recruit in the tsarist army during the First World War whose bravery and discipline led to his promotion to officer; but he came to resent how his position set him apart from the people, while none of his fellow officers would accept him as an equal either. When the Revolution came, he ripped off his epaulets and returned to his village to fight in the service of the masses. The Iron Flood is typical of the canonical Civil War narrative because, instead of standing out as the hero of the novel, Kozhukh’s role is to bring discipline and enlightenment (class consciousness) to the true hero of the story: the ragged, disorderly, river of people in his charge. In the absence of clear individual heroes—Kozhukh emerges more clearly as one in the 1967 film by Vladimir Ivashov—do these masses, a collective embodiment of elemental spontaneity, ever come to politically conscious order? They do, thanks

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in large part to successful manipulation of the flood motif. One of the reasons The Iron Flood is regarded as a prototype of Socialist Realism is that among early Soviet novels, it presents the starkest contrast between the elemental and the conscious, and therefore provides the clearest illustration of Socialist Realism’s chief ideological principle.4 Slezkine argues that it renders Soviet history as a millenarian myth: “The Iron Flood became the canonical Book of the Civil War because it was the most complete realization of the flood metaphor, the most elaborate Soviet version of Exodus, and the most successful solution of the Moses puzzle,” meaning, “the ‘life-giving dialectic’ between the transcendental and the local, the conscious and the spontaneous, predestination and free will.” The tempering is achieved through a transmutation of Kozhukh’s bold leadership and the unassailable fortitude of the people. “As the human mass turns into an iron flood, the Commander acquires a measure of humanity. By the time they arrive in the promised land, they come together for good.”5 To the unaccustomed reader, the novel’s starkness and brutality, with its casual treatment of violence, can come across as cruel and coarse. The tension is balanced by extreme contrasts built into the narrative. For one, the silent backdrop of the sea resolves the dialectic as the powerful certainty and calm indifference of nature contrasts with the senseless brutality of the human conflict. For instance, as one laughing youth recounts the vicious murder of a priest (i.e., a class enemy), his story is punctuated by a falling star and the calm majesty of the sea. His laughter is cut short as everyone falls into reverent silence: “Suddenly all strained their ears: from yonder, where there was no human being or thing, but only night and immeasurable emptiness, came a sound, the voice of the invisible sea.”6 Vis-à-vis the vast, cold indifference of nature, the novel posits salvation in Soviet power. As one soldier explains, “Workers came to our places, they proclaimed liberty, put soviets in the villages, said that the land would be taken. . . . They brought class consciousness and the bourgeoisie fled.”7 The elemental force represented by the “iron flood” is tamed when its trials are resolved definitively in the final chapter like a dissonant chord finding the tonic: And in the steppe beyond the orchard was a human sea, like that at the opening of the campaign. But there was something new over it. The innumerable carts of the refugees were the same, but why was the light of inextinguishable assurance shining as a reflection in all their faces? . . . Here was the same horde of bedraggled, ragged, naked, barefoot soldiers—but why had they silently arrayed themselves in endless files as straight as a taut thread, why did their emaciated faces look as if they had been forged from black iron, and why did the dark bayonets sway as to the rhythm of music?

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Kozhukh provides the answer to these and further questions—how many people lay dead, how many children were lost, “For whose sake did thousands, tens of thousands of our people suffer torture? For whose sake? . . . For one thing—for the sake of the Soviet power, because it is the power of the peasants and workers. They have nothing besides that.” By way of confirmation, the people speak of the sacrifices they’ve made. One babushka elbows her way to the front of the crowd and tells her story: Listen, good people, listen! We abandoned our samovar in our house. When the time came for me to get married, my mother gave it to me as my dowry. She said: “Mind it, as the apple of your eye.” But we lost it . . . well, let it be lost! Long live our power and our country! All our lives we bent our backs and knew no joy. And my sons, my sons.

In response, the “human sea” gives a “deep-drawn and joyous sigh.” Babushka’s husband speaks of how they had lost their horse and all their possessions but, proclaiming it was worth it, he shouts, “Long live Soviet power.” Others rush to pledge fealty to Kozhukh, thanking him for the iron discipline he enforced so they could master the elements: “Our father . . . lead us where you will! We will give our lives.” Kozhukh replies, “I have neither father, mother, wife. . . . I have only these whom I have led from death. . . . These are my father, my house, my mother, my wife, my children.”8 The sentiments expressed at the close of the novel foster a spirit of gratitude and obedience, even blind submission, to the Bolsheviks. Because Bolsheviks are tried and trusted revolutionaries who have dedicated every ounce of their own strength, with an iron will, to saving their loyal followers, the hardships, hunger, violence, and bloodshed that the people now endure are justified and redeemed. Rewards for the people’s loyalty and submission are all the greater, the more they relinquish their own family ties and adopt the Bolshevik commanders as surrogate fathers—also a typical Soviet trope.9 In their dark ignorance, the people don’t have words for what is happening, but they understand it intuitively. In the closing scene of The Iron Flood, they were creating “it” here too—the same thing that was happening in Russia and on a world scale: They bandied words, catching fragments from the orators, not knowing how to express themselves but feeling that, cut off though they were by immeasurable steppes, impassable mountains, age-old forests, they too, were creating upon a smaller scale the same thing that was being created there, in Russia, on a world scale, that starved, naked and barefoot, without political guidance, without material means or any assistance whatsoever, they were creating it here, alone. They did not understand it, they did not know how to express it, but they felt it.

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Underscoring their taming, at the close of the novel, the great sea of people finally falls gently asleep, beneath the stars, smiling.10 A class war temperament underpins the general impetus of Russian Civil War narratives like The Iron Flood, where the conflict ends in reinforcement of the Bolshevik regime and consolidation of Soviet power. Much of the mythology of Soviet heroes and the justification of Soviet power stem from narratives such as these, setting the stage for Socialist Realism, which dominated Soviet art from the mid-1930s on. THE SEED SOWN BY THE MAN IN THE BLACK HAT: THE THIEF More complex and therefore less canonical applications of the flood myth and the father motif are met in the early work of Leonid Leonov. Leonov’s flood offers further possibilities for bending the sacred Christian story within a secular narrative arc. In “Ham’s Departure” (“Ukhod Khama,” 1922), the author reinterprets the biblical story, making the peace-loving Ham a witness to his father’s sleeping with his (Ham’s) wife, while Ham’s brothers cover their faces and refuse to see. Ham is cursed by his father and driven out, but his story survives. Biographer Boris Thomson finds a parallel to a writer’s situation under Soviet conditions, when the archetypal artist was forced to harbor guilty secrets of both a private and a public nature, since the truth he had witnessed was unacceptable even as it exposed him to harm.11 Moreover, Leonov’s heretical take on the Creation legend introduces the concept of the Father’s shadow. This duality is introduced after the earth and sun have been created out of the void, when suddenly a usurper appears: The sun lay in the right hand of the Father, and in the left the earth. . . . The voids and the depths were filled with the waters of darkness, and the Father was reflected in them. Then the reflection that was in the water came silently. When he was close he seized the earth out of the hand of the Father and leapt into the depths and the voids. There he became the second Father of the earth.

Thomson reads this as a Manichean account of the Creation, which presents a theme that will reverberate throughout Leonov’s body of work: “The forces of creation produce their own shadow or reflection, secondary in order but indistinguishable from it. In this story the identities of the Father and his Shadow may seem clear enough, but in the conditions of everyday life, not least in Soviet Russia, it proved not so easy to distinguish one from the other.”12 The point, which lingers in Leonov’s mature works, is that reality as

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it is known by its public face contains a nefarious and sinister reverse side, which threatens to undermine and expose the former. Other early works by Leonov depict a lost Eden, the loss of innocence, and the disintegration of “cosmic unity” after 1917. Trying to work in concert with nature, but frequently at odds with it, man’s attempts to introduce his own values rarely succeed. Nature is amoral and anarchic, but vitally alive, functioning according to its own laws. In keeping with such a worldview, Leonov rejects Marxism with its insistence on human will as an accelerator, viewing human attempts to regulate and synthesize nature’s laws as sheer hubris and naiveté. The trauma of revolutionary change is treated instead as a philosophical and moral/emotional problem, represented for example in “The End of a Petty Man” (“Konets melkago cheloveka,” 1924), a story about the interruption of life and irregular torments inflicted upon a representative of the old-world intelligentsia by the Revolution. The intelligent, viewed sympathetically, is “irreplaceably torn between two incompatible sets of values, justifiably distrustful of the old intelligentsia, while remaining skeptical as to the cultural pretensions of the new rulers and the masses they exalt.” Further works flirt with the idea of rebellion against the Revolution and the Soviet system, such as Leonov’s first novel The Badgers (Barsuki, 1924), concerning a peasant revolt against Red Army grain requisitions.13 Leonov’s second major work The Thief (Vor, 1927), a psychological novel set in Moscow of the 1920s, retains the darker tones and complexities that occasion frequent comparisons of Leonov’s work to Dostoevsky. Although its protagonist is a Civil War hero, Mitka Vekshin complicates the canonical story. His longing for moral certainty engages him in a shadow pursuit as he descends into depravity, becoming a leader of thieves to oppose the NEP, which, based on private property and a market economy, he believes is a compromise of Bolshevik principles. Leonov continues to use storm and agricultural conceits in this novel in interesting and original ways. For one, Mitka is in love with Maria Fyodorovna Dolomanova, otherwise known as Manka the Snowstorm (Man’ka V’iuga). A femme fatale with a fierce and impassioned personality, Manka the Snowstorm is an elemental character who is a foil to Mitka’s failed intellectualizing efforts. Furthermore, in an unusual vegetal metaphor, an antagonist named Nikolka, a Nepman, is “a little grain” that “swelled, struck its roots into a chink in the asphalt, grew strong, and strained upward.” Nikolka’s budding success in the market economy is described in terms of flourishing and rising above his humble origins, as “suddenly the germinating grain burst its husk, and he bought a smart leather jacket and a striped cap.” The narrator adds that there were many such chinks in the asphalt, “which had been well cracked in the storms of the preceding years.” The characterization of Nikolka as a shameful opportunist emerges from his own braggadocios

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pronouncements, such as “Nowadays there are two sorts of men—those that get eaten up, and those that do the eating.” He laughs at his own quip, “for it pleased him to be able to class himself in the second category.” He also gloats to a crowd of drinking companions whom he was treating to celebrate his business: “Now we’ve the power, we can do anything. I’ve nothing now, but I’m going to take everything I want, and no one will break me, I can tell you.” However, in spite of Nikolka’s success, his social position is a precarious one. Here the grain motif is grafted onto an extended metaphor keyed to persecution of class enemies: in the eyes of Mitka, whose sister is in love with Nikolka, “All the grain has been threshed from the sheaves, and they should be thrown into the fire, sister . . . we must wait for the new ones to come.” His sister Tanya replies, “Nikolka is the new one,” but Mitka objects: “Nikolka is the blight. . . . The little black fungus on the ears of corn—it must be stamped out. I’ve got a plan already.”14 Mitka had grown up hating the bourgeoisie and bourgeois decadence; therefore, he loathes the marketeering Nepmen like Nikolka. In his back story, we learn that as a boy a mysterious visitor who had spent the night in his family’s hay loft had made a deep-rooted impression on Mitka’s young mind, speaking until midnight of an Evil that stalked the world, while the soul of Man was crushed by Authority (capitalization in the original). Mitka did not understand him and started to cry, but from that day forward was under a “spell,” as “the fanatical, inexorable eyes of the man in the black hat had stamped themselves indelibly on his brain.” Later, on a train journey, a passenger in gold-rimmed glasses had flung the boy a three-kopek piece, which he used to buy chocolate. After greedily eating it up in secret, he felt terrible about the act and came to despise the gentleman who had so demeaned him with his charity. The narrator interprets for us: “The seed the man with the black hat had sown grew up.”15 Who is the man in the black hat? We have only the sparing detail cited above to go on, but he is without a doubt a pre-revolutionary socialist, who spoke to Mitka of tsarist oppression and the coming workers’ revolution. The seed that he planted in little Mitka’s brain is scorn for the bourgeoisie and other class enemies, and an embryonic passion for retributive justice. Mitka develops a dim view of humanity and an authoritarian disposition, displayed in the following conversation, which echoes sentiments described in The Iron Flood above, but in decidedly more jarring tones: “Sister! Mankind can’t do without a shepherd. . . . You won’t lead men to the light unless you harness them with an iron yoke. I’ve been living with the mouzhiks [peasants] this summer, and, take my word for it, they need a kind father, but a father with a rod. They will remain as they are for another five hundred years, like an undiscovered vein of ore.”

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“And then it’ll be discovered and made into pocket knives,” said Tanya acidly. “Without Shepherds men will cut each other’s throats, they’ll become like beasts, they’ll raise their snouts to the sky and howl to God, and the darkness will resume its power. The human race is in its dotage.”16

Citing the father motif, Mitka believes people need to be kept in line by a strong paternal authority. But we recall that the father in Leonov’s cosmology has a shadow. The authoritarian line in its shadow aspect is carried in this novel by another character, chairman of the lodgers’ committee Chikelyov— more a caricature than the protagonist Mitka, whose maturation into a Bolshevik and renunciation of thieving make him a successful Communist hero. Chikelyov, on the other hand, trivializes the brutality of the Red Terror, pontificating that everyone will one day be inspected with a magnifying glass, for if not held under strict scrutiny, anyone left to their own devices will be capable, thanks to the advances of science, of blowing up the world. “If I was the president,” he says, “I would put a machine on everyone’s head like a telegraph.” Everyone will be forced to be honest, there will be no secrets, and no one will be allowed to run around without control. Thought, he concludes—in a cheap parody of Dostoevsky—is the sole cause of suffering, and anyone who can eradicate it will earn the eternal gratitude of all mankind. Chikelyov uses this argument to justify his own petty tyranny over the inhabitants of the building. At one climax of the narrative, he scandalizes the neighbors by reading the diary of Maniukhin, a drunken and sentimental former landowner and monarchist—who is reduced to beggary, storytelling, and debased parlor tricks to earn a living—and implies that Mitka is Maniukhin’s bastard son.17 The Thief is too saturated with tragic complexity of this sort to be considered a precursor of Socialist Realism, although its author’s subsequent works were recognized contenders in this regard. Leonov occupies a space on the margins of Soviet letters among the so-called Fellow Travelers until the 1930s when he achieves success with Soviet River (Sot’, 1930) and Road to the Ocean (Doroga na okean, 1935), which earned him a place in the canon of Socialist Realism and a role in the leadership of the Soviet Writers’ Union. His new novels were prototypes of the construction novel, which overtook Civil War narratives as the preferred subgenre of Socialist Realist fiction. Leonov was particularly good at depicting a vision of the coming utopian city, even if showing its fruition was “as difficult as tracing the shadow of a thunder cloud on a huge meadow.”18 For present purposes, however, war narratives are more revealing of the ideological uses of the metaphors in question. We turn now to one of the crowning achievements of the first decades of Soviet literature, considered to be a work of proletarian literature, though unlike any other. A war epic which

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tests the limits of the Socialist Realist master plot, it was surprisingly successful for a work atypical of the mode—not least of all, I’ll argue, because its broad and inventive uses of weather and farming motifs are some of the most sophisticated yet seen. LEGENDS OF THE HARVEST: QUIET DON For many loyalists, the forces regrouping on the Don were the last hope for saving Russian civilization, as General Denikin led a Volunteer Army of White Army officers in the Don River valley in southeastern Ukraine. The Donbass region was the ancestral home of the Cossacks, a legendary warrior clan, who had often been called upon by the tsarist government to put down uprisings, which they did with ferocious efficiency. Their support for the White Army cause, however, was never consistent, as the Cossacks themselves were divided along regional and generational lines. For many, the Civil War was a Russian affair, which they wished to stay out of. This was especially true of the younger generation returning from the frontlines of the World War, weary and wishing to settle peacefully on their village farms.19 However, when the Bolsheviks initiated a concerted effort of “decossackization,” which amounted to attempted genocide against the Cossacks and transfer of their lands to Russian peasants, thousands of Cossacks joined General Denikin’s forces as he led a counteroffensive against the Reds in the spring of 1919.20 A fourteen-year-old Mikhail Sholokhov witnessed the bloody anti-Bolshevik Cossack uprising that allowed Denikin’s forces to break through. Although not of Cossack descent, Sholokhov was raised on the Don, where his father, a Russian, sowed crops in the fertile river valley. Neither of the intelligentsia nor the urban proletariat, as a writer Sholokhov is in a category all his own, and his work—at least his major novel—is regarded as some of the best of the cultural products to emerge from the relatively barren field of Soviet fiction. In particular, he would come to be known as the greatest novelist to immortalize the struggle of the Don Cossacks. In the early 1920s Sholokhov worked for the Soviet regime as a teacher, a tax inspector, and served in a special food-requisitioning detachment, confiscating the harvests from alleged grain-hoarding kulaks. By the middle of the decade he had published dozens of short stories and the first installments of his singular epic about the Cossacks’ role in the Revolution, Quiet Don (Tikhi Don, 1928–1940; in some translations And Quiet Flows the Don or similar). Sholokhov won the Nobel Prize for literature for his novel in 1965. A sweeping tale in four parts—Peace, War, Revolution, Civil War—some have called it the War and Peace of Socialist Realism.21

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A story of brutal passions, jealousy, and rivalry, the novel is saturated with storm and harvest metaphors, including some of the most bracing ever seen in Russian fiction. Mowing, threshing, and winnowing are the backdrop to young love, lust, marriage, and betrayals. Early in the novel, the metaphors mix to augur the gathering storm: “A grey pillar of dust whirled over the square, and the heat-burdened earth was already beginning to be sown with the first grains of rain.” A mixed grain metaphor is further pursued as the hero Gregor Melekhov’s passion for his married neighbor Aksinia Astakhova is compared to a heavenly harvest of stars: “The red-tailed dawn was pecking up the starry grain from the dove-coloured floor of heaven.”22 Melekhov fights in the First World War and is decorated as a hero. Wounded in battle and recovering, he encounters a Ukrainian who tells him about the class struggle; that while he is fighting for the tsar, workers are being exploited, used as cannon fodder, and going hungry. However, in the Civil War, Melekhov doesn’t side with the Red Army. He eventually fights with the Cossacks against the Reds but finds little humanity on either side. The novel is unusual in the Soviet milieu for this same reason: in a society which required ideological conformity, especially in the literary arts, the hero of Quiet Don is politically uncommitted, and historical events are treated in the novel with an uncommon degree of impartiality. No Bolshevik commissar appears to educate the workers or peasants and guide their elemental spontaneity, as would happen in typical Soviet fare. No digressions on dialectical materialism or superiority of the proletariat take place. There are only sparing exceptions to the dearth of politics, as when a propagandist for the RSDLP (precursor of the Bolshevik and Menshevik parties) named Stockman brings agitational literature to share with local laborers. Stockman reminds a group of Cossacks that they are descended from Russian serfs who had escaped from landowners’ estates and settled along the Don. But his role in the novel is curtailed when he is arrested by tsarist police.23 Instead, the characters’ private lives and tragic love dominate the tale, and characters are portrayed as individuals rather than social types. The protagonist Gregor Melekhov is an especially complex individual. He rejects his family and village for the sake of his infatuation with Aksinia, the wife of another Cossack from his village. The agricultural cycle is a backdrop to Aksinia and Gregor’s affair. The whole village turns out for the mowing, merrily adorned, as if for an annual holiday: “From early morning the meadow blossomed with women’s holiday skirts, the bright embroidery of aprons, and coloured kerchiefs.”24 The festive and fertile environment stirs the young lovers’ passion, and they consummate their lust in a secret rendezvous at midnight. It must be noted that some of the language and situations in this scene and throughout the book are problematically misogynistic and need to be treated sensitively. In an ambiguous scene that blurs the lines between seduction and rape, the similes are built around

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the regional flora and conclude with a crude reference to cattle breeding: “After the mowing Aksinia was a changed woman, as though someone had set a mark, burnt a brand on her face.”25 As the symbolism suggests, Aksinia is stigmatized by the affair, and she is beaten savagely by her husband in reprisal. For his part, Gregor is forced to comply with his father’s injunction to marry another woman and reluctantly submits to an arranged marriage to the daughter of a wealthy Cossack in the village. When he marries Natalia, bride and groom are both received by the groom’s family beneath a shower of hops and wheat grain. A handful of grain is poured down the bridegroom’s boot to protect him from the “evil eye.” The blessing is a symbol of abundance and is supposed to augur the prosperity of the marriage. However, Gregor is secretly irritated when the grain in his boot hurts his foot; it’s a bad omen for the marriage, which fails and ends in tragedy.26 After his marriage to Natalia, Gregor still pines for Aksinia, whose husband Stepan Astakhov meanwhile has forgiven her transgressions. The happy couple celebrates joyously while threshing together, singing at full voice, as Gregor listens jealously from the adjoining threshing floor. The entire village is enjoying a bumper crop and “waxed fat on the harvest,” but such are the vicissitudes of joy and abundance that “in every farmyard, under the roof of every hut, each was living a full-blooded, bitter-sweet life, separate and apart from the rest.”27 Gregor and Aksinia are still in love, and the adulterous couple run off together to find employment with an old, widowed general, leaving bitterness behind them. In her despair, Gregor’s wife Natalia turns to suicide. Her gruesome attempt by throwing herself on a scythe blade invokes an implied contrast with the joyous mowing and threshing scenes described above: “She crawled on her knees to the earthen wall, thrust the blunt end of the scythe blade into it, and throwing her arms above her head, pressed her chest firmly forward, forward. . . . She clearly heard and felt the resisting, cabbage-like scrunch of the rending flesh.”28 Natalia survives, but her face and neck are permanently disfigured—although, people marvel, she retains her natural beauty. Juxtaposed with Natalia’s suicide attempt is an image of the river Don’s noisy, crunching, spring thaw, a “joyous, full-flowing, liberated river” shedding its “icy fetters.” The association implies that Natalia too is liberated, free now of her shame and anguish. In addition, the imagery suggests that the joyous flow of life (the river), like the impartial sea in The Iron Flood, is indifferent to the private sorrows and pain of individuals. When Gregor’s brother Piotra tries to tell him of the “misfortune,” his voice is drowned out by the wind, and Gregor doesn’t learn about it until much later. Before that, Aksinia gives birth to hers and Gregor’s child, which happens, predictably, during the harvest. Reinforcing the imagery of childbirth, the laborers with their reaping machine drive in a circle around the

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mother in the throes of labor, and she sticks her head in a pile of the harvested barley to gnaw away her pain.29 The planting season and harvest merge with the progression of historical events. When mobilized by order of the Ataman (regional commander), the Cossacks complain that they hadn’t gotten their corn in yet, and who would reap the barley? Other references are made to the ungathered grain until finally, the same sensory-laden language confirms that the time is ripe for battle, as the announcement of Germany’s declaration of war is compared to puffs of wind across heavy ears of oats ready for harvest.30 Again, the hero’s inner struggle finds an echo in the environment. While on campaign, Gregor Melekhov has difficulty with his conscience. He loses weight and sleep, and can’t stop seeing the form of an Austrian he had killed, reliving the battle again and again in his mind. The earth and crops, similarly, suffer trauma in the war: The gloomy face of the earth was pock-mocked with shells; fragments of iron and steel tore into it, yearning for human blood. At night ruddy flickerings lit up the horizon: trees, villages, towns were flaming like summer lightning. In August—when fruits ripen and corn is ready for harvest—the wind-swept sky was unsmilingly grey, the rare fine days were oppressive and sultrily steaming.

The soldiers are severely traumatized. Gregor studies the changes in their physiognomies, noting, “each was inwardly nursing and rearing the iron seeds implanted by the war, and the young cossacks were wilting and drooping like the stalks of mown grass.” Completing the picture, the conventional colors of early fall mirror the carnage of war, making the trees appear as though they are rent with wounds and drenched in blood.31 The metaphorical array is finally consolidated in an exchange between the bourgeois heir Listnitsky and the Bolshevik agitator Bunchuk, which introduces another iteration of the present volume’s title aphorism: “What do you propose to do after the war?” Listnitsky asks Bunchuk. “Some will reap what is sown . . . but I shall see,” Bunchuk replied. “How am I to interpret that remark?” “You know the proverb, ‘Those who sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind’? Well, that’s how.” As Bunchuk walks off, Listnitsky wonders if he were trying to be clever, and ultimately writes him off as someone with an axe to grind.32 However, the next chapter begins with evidence of Bunchuk’s perspicacity: the second and third lines of reserves are called up together, such that the villages are depopulated, “as though everybody had gone out to mow or reap the harvest.”

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The metaphor is consummated thus: “But a bitter harvest was reaped along the frontiers that year; death caught away the labourers . . . the ruddy cossack blood was poured out, and glassy-eyed, unawakable they rotted beneath the artillery dirge in Austria, in Poland, in Prussia.”33 Himself wounded and convalescing, Melekhov meets an injured Ukrainian machine-gunner named Garanzha, who “educates” Gregor on the real causes of the war—the bourgeoisie and the tsar. His mind “awoke” as he literally lies unsleeping one night and wakens Garanzha to ask him further questions. This is the closest the book will come to the formulaic episode of a Party intercessor appearing to harness the spontaneous hero’s undisciplined mind with ideologically correct thinking. Evoking the storm and spontaneous tidal wave metaphors, Garanzha tells Gregor to turn his rifle on those who had sent him to war: “After the storm will come the fire. . . . You must shoot those who sent the people into hell. You know who! . . . A great wave will rise and sweep them all away.” When every government is a workers’ government, Garanzha says, there will be nothing else to fight for. There will be “One beautiful life all over the world.” “Grishka,” he concludes the sermon, “I’d pour out my blood drop by drop to live to see that day.”34 The third year of the war left devastation at home in Gregor’s village. Nature’s animations leave hints that its inhabitants will “reap the whirlwind,” as the wind tousles wheat and hay ricks, scattering them about the yards, over the road, and atop the roofs of some of the Cossack huts.35 This passage is a preface to the information that the village, deprived of all the male hands away at war, lay in ruin and decay. On the surface, the Melekhovs enjoy a fruitful year. Natalia has twins, and so do the sheep, cows, and goats. However, “During these years life declined to its ebb, like flood waters in the Don.” Life is dreary and exhausting, passed in the continual activity of work and providing for basic needs, as the war drags on. Finally the front breaks up and soldiers desert en masse, shooting their officers in the process, pillaging regimental property, “and pouring in an unbridled, stormy flood-tide back to their homes.”36 The final part of the novel provides an account of the Red Army victory over the Whites, and the author provides the requisite Marxist explanation of the laws of history that make it inevitable. Even so, Gregor Melekhov remains a questing hero, for whom Communism provides none of the answers he is looking for.37 The chapters in Part 4 are filled with more reprisals and violence, predicated by a powerful suggestion by the weather, once again, that all will not be well, as “the strong wind blowing from the Ukraine raided the town again and again”—imagery which is possibly an oblique reference to the Holodomor.38 All told, while the novel would secure Sholokhov a place

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among the top ranks of Soviet writers, its bleak outcome and noncommittal ideological perspective would earn him his share of criticism, even as his more politically oriented works failed to achieve the same kind of success. Sholokhov interrupted his writing of Quiet Don in 1930 in order to compose, at the Party’s behest, a new novel about collectivization, the agricultural arm of the First Five-Year Plan. The first part, Virgin Soil Upturned (Podniataia tselina, 1931, named Seeds of Tomorrow in an American edition), describes the collectivization of agriculture in a Don Cossack village, where the Cossacks are hostile to collective farming and must be brought to heel by dedicated Communists who are the novel’s heroes. The same must also defeat the resistance of former White Army officers. The second part of Virgin Soil Upturned took much longer to complete, appearing in 1960 and translated as Harvest on the Don (1961). These novels did not have the impact of Quiet Don, lacking its depth of characterization and the epic sweep of the former novel’s tale. They are widely considered to be propaganda pieces. Collectivization is viewed from the official Party point of view, but there is no discussion of its demerits, and opponents of the regime are typically painted black. Only volume one contains some of the drama of Sholokhov’s earlier work, narrating an eyewitness chronicle of the events and phases of collectivization. Sholokhov’s theme of the unity of man and nature persists, but the landscapes and nature metaphors are applied primarily to the task of celebrating the triumph of collectivized agriculture. Volume two covers two summer months in 1930, recounting anecdotal situations and comic relief. Neither volume contains a character as independent and individualized as Gregor Melekhov, nor the complexity of Quiet Don’s point of view overall. The author does not broach the tragic outcomes of collectivization; indeed, the repression and famine of 1932–1933 are never mentioned.39 However, Sholokhov’s correspondence with Stalin reveals that the writer was not afraid to speak candidly on abuses of power. Sholokhov’s fame as the author of Quiet Don seemed to protect him from the Great Purges as they raged throughout the country while collectivization ravaged the countryside. His prestige even allowed him the privilege to protest directly to Stalin against local miscarriages of justice. Recognizing the far-reaching impact of great literature, Stalin likely pardoned the transgression because he expected a novel from Sholokhov extolling his regime and its policy of collectivization, and, after the Second World War, a contemporaneous War and Peace to immortalize his legacy.40 A report from Vladimir Stavsky, who became head of the Union of Writers after Gorky’s death, is instructive. Stavsky sanctioned the prosecution, exile, and liquidation of many literary figures for alleged criminal conspiracies

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and targeted others, like Boris Pasternak, who were fortunate to survive persecution waged on similar accounts. In 1937 Stavsky visited Sholokhov in his native village of Veshensk and subsequently wrote to Stalin of the writer’s “alarming conduct,” informing him that Sholokhov was “politically misguided.” Sholokhov apparently claimed that conditions had prevented him from writing the highly anticipated final installment of his grand novel. Reading the typed manuscript, moreover, Stavsky found the fourth part of Quiet Don depressing, gloomy, hopeless, and lacking sufficient patriotism. Sholokhov had purportedly justified his independently minded hero Gregor Melekhov by saying, “I just can’t make him be a Bolshevik.”41 Sholokhov also defended a group of workers and the Party secretary of the Veshensk district, his close personal friend, who had been arrested for allegedly belonging to a counterrevolutionary organization. If the secretary were guilty, he said, he was guilty too, for they had worked together on everything concerning the district. “Look what’s going on!” an exasperated Sholokhov complained to Stavsky. “They put pressure on us about the sowing and harvest, but they’re letting the grain rot in [the village of] Bazki. Tens of thousands of poods are rotting in the open air!”42 Stavsky concluded in his report that Sholokhov, as a member of the district Party committee, had neglected his duties to the collective farm and moreover that he was shielding enemies in the district who were hiding behind his name and reputation. Following Stavsky’s report, Stalin invited Sholokhov to meet with him on several occasions at the Kremlin or at Stalin’s dacha, giving him the opportunity to voice his grievances directly to the leader. After one such meeting, in a letter of February 16, 1938, Sholokhov wrote frankly of the torture and interrogation of local officials by NKVD agents to elicit false testimonials and confessions. He refers to hundreds of honest and loyal Communists languishing in prisons in connection to the Veshensk district secretary’s case, while the secretary himself had been released after Stalin’s intervention. Moreover, Sholokhov defends the collective farmers, tractor drivers, cattle breeders, and others who had fallen victim to local purges, and decries the fact that the population was terrorized into readiness for their own arrest at any given moment. To the material consequences of such an atmosphere, he speaks plainly: “What earthly good could this do, Com[rade] Stalin? Hasn’t this circumstance contributed to the fact that last year’s magnificent crop was scarcely harvested, a huge quantity of grain rotted in the field, the seed wasn’t preserved, and the plowing wasn’t finished for the spring sowing?” He asks Stalin to personally make a full investigation of the local situation. Sholokhov’s remonstrations fell on deaf ears. Soviet myths of abundance meant that the answer to grain supply shortages was always to strengthen worker discipline and persecute alleged wreckers and saboteurs. The stark reality of food shortages was countered in state propaganda using variations

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on the folk legend of the “Magic Tablecloth” (skatert’–samobranka), which, when laid out, produces a fabulous spread of food and drink. Images of storybook abundance, the reaping of wonderous harvests, and great feasts in every village are commonplace motifs of art and literature in the 1930s, even as collectivization produced widespread hunger.43 While a revered author like Sholokhov might have felt empowered to speak his mind, agency for average citizens continued through the 1930s to be compromised to a large degree. Jeffrey Brooks describes how “Soviet Power” (sovetskaia vlast’), the Party, and the Revolution itself were the primary actors in society. Within the new worldview devised by Bolshevik weaponization of language, theft of agency from citizens is embodied in variations of the 1930s slogan, “Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for a Happy Life!” On the eve of the Great Terror another of Stalin’s pronouncements becomes an ironic catchphrase of the times: “Life has gotten better, comrades, life has become happier” (“Zhit’ stalo luchshe, tovarishchi. Zhit’ stalo veselee”).44 These phrases are an indication that social conditions of the time are a kind of fiction, one in which identity is manufactured, a product of deception and repression. Brooks calls it “the rhetoric of the gift, according to which all good things were bestowed by the Party and Stalin, rather than earned by those who enjoyed them.”45 In 1936 the words “Life has gotten better” were composed into the chorus of a song with lyrics by Vasily Lebedev-Kumach and music by Aleksandr Aleksandrov. Also typical of the spirit of exaggerated pride and falsification is “Song of the Motherland” (“Shiroka strana moia rodnaia”), a propaganda song of the same year by Lebedev-Kumach in which the poet celebrates his native land, singing, “In it are many forests, fields, and rivers!/I know of no other such country,/Where people breathe so freely.” The final novel of this study takes the Civil War narrative as a starting point for another epic tale with the scope and depth of Quiet Don, while arguably outmatching the latter in artistry. Doctor Zhivago, already referenced several times, is a culmination of the many themes discussed so far in this volume, while it finds even greater dramatic tensions in the cognitive dissonance implied by the disconnect between Soviet rhetoric and material realities. The flood in Doctor Zhivago is again the human sea of revolution, spontaneous, dark, and unconscious; but it is also associated with the heroine Lara, who gives it a greater significance as a prevailing force of life, at once elemental and conscious. Spontaneity in nature and people is the life and consciousness that Yuri loves and, as a poet, perceives deeply. Embodying the fully realized questing form, the novel features a hero who longs to breathe freely among the forests, fields, and rivers of his native country, yet finds that the only way to do so is on his own personal terms.

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NOTES 1. Slezkine, The House of Government, 195. 2. Aleksandr Serafimovich, The Iron Flood, translated from the Russian (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1935), 57, 207. 3. Ibid., 166–68. 4. Katerina Clark analyzes the master plot of several types of Socialist Realist novels and identifies The Iron Flood as a prototype. See The Soviet Novel, 4, 27, 44–45, 83–84. 5. Slezkine, The House of Government, 208. 6. Serafimovich, The Iron Flood, 91. 7. Ibid., 86. 8. Ibid., 236–43. 9. See Clark, “The Stalinist Myth of the ‘Great Family,’” in Soviet Novel, 114–35. 10. Ibid., 245–46. 11. Boris Thomson, The Art of Compromise: The Life and Work of Leonid Leonov (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 2001), 29. 12. Ibid., 29–30. 13. Ibid., 17–28. 14. Leonid Leonov, The Thief, trans. Hubert Butler (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1960), 193, 394–95. 15. Ibid., 62. 16. Ibid., 394. 17. Ibid., 237–41. 18. See Slezkine, The House of Government, 474. 19. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 558–62. 20. Ibid., 660–61. 21. Terras, Handbook of Russian Literature, 408–10. 22. Mikhail Sholokhov, And Quiet Flows the Don, trans. Stephen Garry (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1967), 33, 28. 23. Ibid., 204–9. 24. Ibid., 49. 25. Ibid., 52. 26. Ibid., 94. 27. Ibid., 117. 28. Ibid., 180. 29. Ibid., 184. 30. Ibid., 220, 238. 31. Ibid., 248–49. 32. Ibid., 271–72. 33. Ibid., 273. 34. Ibid., 304–5. 35. Ibid., 354. 36. Ibid., 356–57, 447.

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37. Ibid., 458–60; Brown, Russian Literature, 147. 38. Sholokhov, And Quiet Flows the Don, 461. 39. Brown, Russian Literature, 148; Terras, Handbook of Russian Literature, 410. 40. See “The Stalin-Sholokhov Exchange,” in Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917–1953, trans. Marian Schwartz, eds. Katerina Clark et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 336–44. 41. Ibid., 337. 42. Ibid. 43. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 89. 44. Speech at the First All-Union Conference of Stakhanovites, November 17, 1935. 45. Brooks, Thank You, 27.

Chapter 8

A Defense of the Personal Doctor Zhivago

“In those awful, bloody years, anyone could have been arrested. We were shuffled like a pack of cards.”1 This is how, at the end of the 1930s, Boris Pasternak (1890–1960) recalled a decade in which the government of the USSR arrested, exiled, and executed unprecedented numbers of Soviet citizens. After a dozen years of repression which had accompanied the breakneck drive toward industrialization and forced collectivization, resulting in a famine that claimed millions more lives, the end of the 1930s was particularly fierce. In those awful years, Pasternak retreated into self-imposed professional exile, sheltering in the relative safety of translation work. Shakespeare, Goethe, a series of Georgian poets, and other translation projects gave him a meager income and at least a modicum of creative outlet. Still, he was besieged by deprecating attacks from the custodians of Soviet culture for his lack of commitment to its increasingly shrill demands. He survived the purges of 1937–1939 and persecutions in the 1940s under the retrograde cultural policy of the Zhdanov Doctrine (zhdanovshchina) that leveled many of his friends and contemporaries. Yet Pasternak was mournfully aware of the precarious situation he and others were in: “I don’t want to indulge in vulgar rejoicing that I survived while others failed to. It is necessary for someone to proudly lament, wear mourning, and experience life tragically. Here tragic attitudes are prohibited however, it is regarded like pessimism and moaning. How wrong it is! . . . A living person is still needed as a bearer of this tragedy!”2 As a bearer of the tragedy, Pasternak was known to help ostracized friends and fellow poets. In 1946 at the height of zhdanovshchina, he refused to denounce Mikhail Zoshchenko and Anna Akhmatova when called upon to do so. Quite the reverse, he gave Akhmatova material assistance when she 193

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was forbidden to publish and therefore deprived of income. He was known to assist other victims’ families financially, despite his own straitened circumstances.3 He openly associated with widows, brothers, children, and other family members of the accused and condemned at a time when doing so could have earned him his own sentence to the GULAG. Nadezhda Mandelshtam records that Boris was the only person to visit her upon word of her husband the poet Osip Mandelshtam’s passing in a labor camp in the far east of Siberia in December 1938.4 Although he had long withdrawn from the limelight, according to his friend, Oxford scholar Isaiah Berlin, Pasternak felt in these years that he had “something to say to the rulers of Russia, something of immense importance.”5 Early on Pasternak had striven to accept the Revolution and endeavored to lend his poetic skill to the refashioning of civilization. Berlin said Pasternak had had “a passionate, almost obsessive desire to be thought a Russian writer with roots deep in Russian soil.”6 But he could never accept the doctrinal spirit and strident propaganda of the regime and found himself more and more isolated as the years wore on. By the mid-1940s, planning his novel, Pasternak wrote to another friend, “I need to do something dear to me and my very own, riskier than usual, I need to break through to the public.” He labored over his masterwork for more than a decade, feeling, “Until it is finished, I am a fanatically, manically unfree man.”7 To his cousin Olga Freidenberg, Boris wrote, “I could not go on living another year unless this novel, my alter ego, in which with almost physical concreteness certain of my spiritual qualities and part of my nervous structure have been implanted, went on living and growing, too.”8 While not overtly political, the novel he eventually produced was perceived as a rebuke of the narrow ideology of the Soviet state. Adding insult to injury from the authorities’ point of view, after Soviet censors refused to approve it, Pasternak published his manuscript abroad in the West. Such a brazen act of defiance could have spelt a death sentence for the author, who nevertheless survived, possibly shielded by Stalin, who seemed oddly entranced by the celebrated poet. The fascination for a time was mutual—at least insofar, as one memoirist put it, as Pasternak was “morbidly curious about the recluse in the Kremlin.”9 If nothing else, Pasternak’s relationship with Soviet power over the years was complex and fraught with mystery. By the time he published his opus, it’s fair to say Pasternak had been engaged in a very personal negotiation with Soviet authority, including its highest leadership, for decades. DIALOGUE WITH SOVIET POWER Pasternak’s first book of poems Twin in the Stormclouds (Bliznets v tuchakh, 1914) received little attention, and he later dismissed the poems as juvenilia.

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Similarly, Vladimir Mayakovsky’s early poem “A Cloud in Pants” (“Oblako v shtanakh,” 1915) drew more criticism than acclaim. But time would tell these were not merely indulgent rhymesters lost in the clouds. Both poets had tuned their lyres in the bohemian dens of Moscow among the avantgarde movements alternately known as Decadence and Symbolism. Along with other fringe groups such as Mayakovsky’s company of iconoclasts, the Russian Futurists, they would soon be known as two of the most important artists of the age, although very different from each other in temperament and outlook. Pasternak held an ambivalent regard for Mayakovsky. His own early associations with Futurism were built on a fascination with Mayakovsky’s charismatic personality. However, preserving a strong sense of the continuity of world culture, Pasternak never did embrace the destructive bent of modernism or the iconoclasm of its extremist wing in the avant-garde. Though not a political group per se, the Futurists were anti-bourgeois, anti-establishment, and prior to the revolution were frequently caught by run-ins with tsarist police for indecency, blasphemy, or allegations of treason.10 Pasternak’s admiration for Mayakovsky cooled after the latter applied his work to service for the Bolshevik regime. The gulf between them widened, but the two maintained a friendship. Nevertheless, Pasternak’s assessment of Mystery-Bouffe was not kind. He found “no appeal in these clumsily rhymed maxims, elaborate vacuity, commonplaces and hackneyed truisms, expounded so artificially, confusedly and unwittily.”11 Several years after Mayakovsky’s suicide in 1930, Stalin established an official cult of reverence for him by decree, making indifference to his memory and works a crime. Pasternak responded unfavorably to this sort of obligatory hero worship: “[Mayakovsky] began to be introduced forcibly, like potatoes under Catherine the Great. This was his second death. He had no hand in it.”12 The episode is a harbinger for the cultural landscape Pasternak would enter upon with his own mature works and the clashes with cultural authorities he would face. It was Pasternak’s third collection My Sister Life (Sestra moia—zhizn’), written in the summer of 1917, that caused a sensation and catapulted him to literary fame. Due to the shortage of paper, it circulated in manuscript copies until it was finally published in 1922. Poet and friend Marina Tsvetaeva gushed, “I was caught in it as in a downpour . . . . A downpour of light.”13 As much as they resonated with the times, however, the poems in My Sister Life carried little connection to political events. For certain, Pasternak had celebrated the abdication of the tsar after February. “Just imagine when an ocean of blood and filth begins to give out light,” he said. His sister described him as “intoxicated” by the charismatic Kerensky when he saw him speak to a crowd outside the Bolshoi.14 But judging from his poetry, the

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twenty-seven-year-old might just as well have been a caller from the Age of Pushkin: The window-halves I’ll throw apart, In muffler from the cold to hide, And call to children in the yard, “What century is it outside?”15

Because he was both inquisitive and highly invested in the age, yet curiously detached from its political realities, is perhaps the reason that, like Gorky and Blok, Pasternak’s relationship with the authorities was ambivalent and highly charged. As biographers Peter Finn and Petra Couvée put it, “There was a beguiling obliviousness to Pasternak’s encounters with the powerful.” He seemed unwilling or unable to self-censor at a time when people guarded their views and minced words carefully in order to avoid inadvertently committing a punishable offence.16 When Trotsky summoned Boris Leonidovich for a meeting, he confessed to the poet that he had been “struggling through the dense shrubbery of your book.” As Trotsky wondered why he ignored social themes, Pasternak allegedly told the Commissar that his “answers and explanations amounted to a defense of true individualism, as a new social cell in a new social organism.” Reporting later that he found himself “enraptured and captivated” by Trotsky, Pasternak nonetheless rebuffed his further questions and managed to escape future critical censure from Trotsky’s corner.17 However, to be sure, there would be no shortage of criticisms to come for Pasternak in later years from other official quarters. Throughout the 1920s, Pasternak gained a reputation as one of the most talented poets of the era. His lyricism and stubborn tendency to avoid political themes, however, continued to irritate authorities. Feeling increasingly at odds with the times, by the end of the decade, Pasternak resisted the subordination of the arts to Party directive and opposed other cultural paradigms of the state. Moreover, his stature and world renown became a hindrance to the author himself under an authoritarian apparatus which operated on the expectation that it could use the voices of prominent individuals to enforce and justify terror. Because the consolidation of Soviet power required absolute domination over language and meaning, cultural purges gained a particular currency and focus (see chapter 5). The accused included scores of prominent writers and cultural figures. Pasternak witnessed the arrest and disappearance of numerous friends, supporters, and fellow writers. He was well aware of his own difficult position, a lyrical poet with an unapologetic mission to confront history on his own terms. Nothing drove the point home more than the evening

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in October 1937 when Pasternak and his wife Zinaida were visiting writer Boris Pilnyak and his wife in their Peredelkino writers’ colony home, where the Pasternaks lived next door. A car of KGB men suddenly arrived to whisk Pilnyak away, never to be seen or heard from again. He was accused of fabricated crimes including involvement with “anti-Soviet, Trotskyist, subversive and terrorist organizations,” and an alleged plot to assassinate Stalin. Coerced into signing a false confession, Pilnyak was executed the day after a trial that lasted all of fifteen minutes.18 More victims at the height of the Stalinist purges were poets whose work Pasternak had translated from the Georgian, Paolo Yashvili and Titsian Tabidze. Both had become close friends during Pasternak’s several trips to Georgia. After Tabidze disappeared without a trace, Pasternak publicly supported his widow Nina Tabidze, who had otherwise been an isolated pariah since her husband’s arrest. Yashvili, rather than submit to arrest in July 1937 after suffering from pressure to denounce friends and associates, fatally shot himself in front of his colleagues at a meeting of the Georgian Writers’ Union.19 Forced denunciations and public confessions were methods frequently used by the Party to control and terrorize the population. When prominent citizens were arrested, this type of repression often took the form of an obligatory denunciation letter in a Party newspaper, such as one that appeared in Pravda on August 21, 1936, under the headline, “Wipe Them from the Face of the Earth.” Pasternak’s name was added without his knowledge and he was pressured into letting it stand—to do otherwise would have amounted to virtual suicide. At another point an official arrived at Pasternak’s dacha in June 1937 with a letter for him to sign which called for the execution of a group of alleged military conspirators. Pasternak was furious, and this time, unequivocally defiant: “To sign this, one would have to know these people and know what they have done,” he told the official. “I know nothing about them, I didn’t give them life and I have no right to take it away. The state, not private citizens, should deal with people’s lives. This is not like signing complimentary theatre tickets, and I refuse to put my name to this!” His wife Zinaida, who was pregnant at the time, pleaded with him to sign, if only for the sake of their unborn child. He still refused. But the condemnation of the accused was printed in Literaturnaia gazeta (Literary Gazette) anyway on June 15, 1937, with Pasternak’s name among the signatories. Pasternak was livid and tried to have it corrected, but to no avail. The appearance of his name, on the other hand, may have saved Pasternak’s life, while his protest against it allowed him to live with conscience intact. Although Zinaida had been incensed by her husband’s willingness to place their family in immediate danger, she too later came to appreciate his moral stand.20

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Shortly after the incident, Pasternak allegedly wrote a letter to Stalin in which he stated that he had grown up in a family that held strong Tolstoyan convictions, which he had imbibed with his mother’s milk. Stalin could dispose of his life, but he (Pasternak) did not consider himself entitled to sit in judgment over the life and death of others. Although no evidence of the letter exists, Pasternak’s claim to have communicated directly with the dictator is consistent with a handful of separate occasions when he did.21 Pasternak’s relationship with Stalin is mysterious in several ways. His own views would evolve over the years, but he maintained a dialogue with Stalin that baffled many observers and drew criticism from others. In the end it may have been his commiserating stance vis-à-vis the inscrutable leader that was responsible for the bewildering fact that Pasternak survived the years of repression after repeated acts of defiance and outspoken criticism of the regime. A few years earlier, when a public letter of sympathy signed by prominent writers was published upon the death of Stalin’s wife (by suicide, a fact concealed in the press), Pasternak appended a separate note of condolences in which he claimed that the morning before he read the news, he “had for the first time thought about Stalin deeply and intensively as an artist,” and felt that he was present with Stalin to witness his grief and console him. It has been suggested that from this moment the dictator may have seen the poet as a yurodivy, the archetypal Russian “holy fool,” somewhere between a saint and a jester, invested with the power of clairvoyance and prophecy—and uniquely entitled to speak truth to power.22 In another incident that bears no documentary evidence but survived by oral account, Stalin telephoned Pasternak in 1934 to ask his opinion of a fellow poet. Their conversation has become something of a legend, which, despite some variance among a number of retellings, is almost certain to have occurred in fact. The poet Osip Mandelshtam had refused to feign loyalty to the Party and fallen afoul of the authorities by reciting a satirical poem in which he named Stalin, among other things, a killer in a cockroach moustache. After Mandelshtam’s arrest, Pasternak sent a note via Nikolai Bukharin asking for clemency on behalf of his friend—possibly prompting Stalin’s phone call. The conversation, where Stalin seemed to be fishing for an admission from Pasternak that he had heard the offending poem (he had, but didn’t say so), ended when Pasternak averted further questions by asking, “Why do you keep on about Mandelshtam? I have long wanted to meet you for a serious discussion.” When asked “What about?” and Pasternak replied, “About life and death,” Stalin purportedly hung up.23 From the time of the denunciation letters cited above, Pasternak no longer felt he could be at one with the age, instead becoming its open opponent and ceasing his creative activities except for translation.24 Risking his own life, he

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spoke out for others who were condemned. He wrote a note to Bukharin, who in early 1937 was now under house arrest himself and soon to be executed, saying, “No forces will convince me of your treachery.” Pasternak’s incautious disregard for his own safety at such a perilous time could be considered the height of recklessness. Indeed there is evidence that he too had been placed on a list of writers slated for execution.25 On the other hand, there is reason to suspect that Pasternak retained an odd sort of respect for and trust in Stalin for an additional period of time. Through the purge years 1938–1939 an epidemic of denunciations, arrests, executions, and internment in forced labor colonies saw the untold suffering of millions of Soviet families. Yet Pasternak, not unlike many other patriotic citizens, labored under the illusion that the perpetrators belonged to a secret element within the Party that the great leader knew nothing about. “If only someone would tell Stalin about this!” he reportedly exclaimed one snowy night to fellow writer Ilya Ehrenburg.26 Surprising as it may seem, the kind of dual thinking that allowed Pasternak to feel dismay at the architects of terror, yet believe that Stalin somehow didn’t sanction it, represents a common feeling among average citizens and Party personnel alike during this era. One simply cannot overestimate the sway of belief in the “cause” of the Revolution: social justice after centuries of abuse at the hands of the tsarist oppressors; the “radiant path” promised for the future; a Communist Golden Age that justified the trials and tribulations of the present. Those who had witnessed the euphoric early years of the Revolution especially cherished the dream of its fulfillment, and disillusionment came only slowly, in stages.27 The years he spent working on his magnum opus would focus Pasternak’s perspective in a way that helped him come to terms with his nation’s history while at the same time reclaiming the narrative of the Revolution for himself and his readers. “A COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY NOVEL” After laboring over his manuscript for more than a decade, Pasternak completed Doctor Zhivago in December 1955. Exhilarated by his triumph, he wrote to Nina Tabidze, You cannot imagine what an achievement this is! Names have been found and given to the whole of that sorcery which tormented, evoked debates and disbelief, and which astounded and created so many decades of misery. . . . Once again, freshly and in a new manner, definitions have been given to the dearest and most important things, earth and heaven, great and ardent feeling, the spirit of creativity, life and death.28

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His joy was dampened by the knowledge that his book was most likely unprintable in the Soviet Union. Pasternak’s introspective take on the events of the Revolution was out of line with the Soviet cultural policy of his day, of which he was only too keenly aware. It was a time, as Gorky put it at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, when books were “the most important and most powerful weapons in socialist culture.”29 Before his death, even Mayakovsky had joined the chorus of condemnation—in proverbial storm imagery—against Boris Pilnyak, charged in 1929 with publishing his novel Mahogany (Krasnoe derevo) in the West: “To me a finished literary work is like a weapon. . . . Handing it over to the White press strengthens the arsenals of our enemies. At the present time of darkening storm clouds this is the same as treachery at the front.”30 In practice, the weaponization of literature meant that after 1934 all literary production was strictly scrutinized and required to conform to the strictures of Socialist Realism. Pasternak’s place within the schema was a disputed topic. In the course of a three-hour lecture at the Writers’ Congress, Bukharin referred to Pasternak as a poet of great talent, who, although he stood remote from current affairs, had “also given us a number of profoundly sincere revolutionary pieces.” Later Writers’ Union head Alexei Surkov did not agree: “The immense talent of B. L. Pasternak will never fully reveal itself until he has attached himself fully to the gigantic, rich, and radiant subject matter [offered by] the Revolution; and he will become a great poet only when he has organically absorbed the Revolution into himself.”31 While Bukharin and Gorky consistently upheld the importance of artistic freedom, it was the likes of Surkov who voiced the Party line in matters of cultural policy. In 1947, an article signed by Surkov in Kul’tura i zhizn’ (Culture and Life)—a journal which contained so many denunciations of intelligentsia in the Zhdanov era that some writers wryly dubbed it the “Mass Grave”—reported on Pasternak’s “reactionary backward-looking ideology.” The author supposedly spoke with “obvious hostility and even hatred about the Soviet Revolution,” and his poetry was a “direct slander” of Soviet society.32 Cooler heads recognized that Surkov’s vitriolic tirade was an indicator of the real danger to writers and their craft. Nadezhda Mandelshtam said of Surkov, who worked as an informant for the KGB, “Like all his kind he stultifies language, stifles thought and life. In so doing, he also destroys himself.”33 It came as no surprise, then, that Pasternak’s retelling of the Revolution through the eyes of an apolitical poet should arouse suspicion. Pasternak’s readings of his early drafts of Doctor Zhivago to friends were surveilled by police, who saw them as “underground readings of a counterrevolutionary novel.” This sort of reaction was typical of the political climate. As critic Victor Erlich put it,

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When culture is treated as a weapon and literature as a source of moral edification, poetic detachment smacks of sabotage. When politics is viewed as the highest form of human activity, esthetic contemplation seems an act of political defiance. When dry-as-dust abstractions of an official ideology are increasingly used to displace reality and explain it away, even such politically innocuous qualities as delight in the sensory texture of things are likely to appear as escapism.34

Pasternak’s work was a threat precisely because of his hero’s preference for poetry over politics. When he submitted it to Novy mir (New World), the editorial board, following consultation with cultural authorities including Surkov and others, composed a lengthy analysis of the text which ended with a rejection on the grounds that the tenor of the novel spurned the Great October Socialist Revolution. Moreover, its heroes were intelligentsia whose egocentric philosophy, more Tolstoyan and Christian than socialist, was never corrected, per Socialist Realist cant, by a character who represented an ideologically correct Party spokesperson.35 Seeing no way around the refusal, especially given that the Novy mir letter stated explicitly that the novel could not be repaired by any amount of editing, Pasternak was driven to desperate lengths. If he wanted it ever to see the light of day, he would have to smuggle his manuscript out of the Soviet Union and publish it abroad—a transgression which would put him as well as his family and friends in considerable danger. But by the summer of 1956, he is reported to have said he was prepared to face “any kind of trouble” in order to get it out. He had come to see it as his mission to publish the book at whatever peril it brought to himself or his family—some of whom were not on board with his decision. Nevertheless, after a sequence of clandestine negotiations with an agent in Milan, an Italian translation of Doctor Zhivago was issued there in 1957 and soon appeared in multiple languages around the world.36 The predictable fallout for Pasternak was a firestorm of criticism that would hound him for the remainder of his days. Labeled a “bourgeois individualist,” he was harassed by Soviet authorities until his death in 1960. Pasternak’s lover, the poet and translator Olga Ivinskaya (said to be the inspiration for the novel’s heroine Lara Antipova), was twice arrested on account of her relationship with Pasternak and spent several years in Soviet prisons. Ivinskaya’s daughter Irina Emelianova, similarly, was accused of dealing with a foreign publisher on Pasternak’s behalf and spent a year in jail herself. The book then became a Cold War weapon when the CIA smuggled a Russian edition of Doctor Zhivago back into the Soviet Union in hopes that Soviet citizens would read it and turn against their oppressive system of government. All told, the novel is hardly a political work, although it unquestionably contains a political statement if only by virtue of a hero who renounces

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political dogma when real Soviet citizens were not given the choice to do so. More than anything Doctor Zhivago vindicates the rights of an individual to choose his own worldview and nurture it freely, outside of ideological conformity. Perhaps nothing demonstrates this tension more than the fact that when Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, he was forced to decline it, since the award was seen by Soviet authorities as a provocation from the bourgeois, capitalist West. Pasternak himself refused to see the work as anti-Soviet. He was distressed by the reduction of his novel to something akin to a political pamphlet indicting his home country. “I deplore the fuss now being made about my book,” he said in late 1957. “Everybody’s writing about it but who in fact has read it? What do they quote from it? Always the same passages—three pages, perhaps, out of a book of 700 pages.” In 1958 he told the sculptor Zoya Maslenikova that his novel could be seen as “anti-Soviet” only if “by Soviet one is to understand the desire not to see life as it is.”37 Soon after the English translation appeared, Marc Slonim wrote in his New York Times review, “The book, despite all its topical hints and political statements [is] a basically anti-political work, in so far as it treats politics as fleeting, unimportant, and extols the unchangeable fundamentals of human mind, emotion and creativity.”38 Following Pasternak’s death, years later in retirement when Nikita Khrushchev finally read the novel, the former Communist Party General Secretary wondered what the commotion had been all about. He told his son he saw nothing anti-Soviet in Pasternak’s book and wished they had simply published it in the Soviet Union in the first place.39 STORM AND FLOOD IMAGERY IN DOCTOR ZHIVAGO Doctor Zhivago is a modern Russian epic that reclaims the narrative of the Revolution and Civil War from the monolith of Soviet culture. Calcified in the Party mold for nearly four decades, the story of the Revolution is recrafted by Pasternak into a personalized account of lived experience in an era of calamitous change. The hero is a doctor and poet who initially bears great enthusiasm for the miraculous spontaneity of events, but he quickly wearies of the mayhem and brutality of the war and the rhetorical bombast of Bolshevik ideology. His views and life choices respond to the tidal events he witnesses through the novel’s ruling metaphors of storm and flood. They represent the Revolution in all its mutinous glory and stark brutality. Its very spontaneity and splendor, at the same time, is the wellhead of the intractable, ever-changing tides of life and destiny, which for Yuri Zhivago is a manifestation of the living God.

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The name Zhivago came to Pasternak through an Orthodox prayer. He recalled reciting, as a child, the prayer “Ty est’ voistinu Khristos, Syn Boga zhivago” (“You truly are the Christ, the living God”). Pasternak once told the writer Varlam Shalamov that in his childhood prayer he would pause before the final word. “I did not think of the living God, but of a new one, who was only accessible to me through the name Zhivago. It took me a whole life to make this childish sensation real by granting the hero of my novel this name.”40 Throughout this volume I have discussed flood and storm motifs in Russian classics by Pushkin, Tyutchev, and Herzen, among others, and new iterations in Soviet-era works by Blok, Mayakovsky, Remizov, Serafimovich, Leonov, and Bulgakov. These works can all be informally credited as sources of the flood and storm imagery in Doctor Zhivago insofar as the trope had entered the lexicon of Russian literature that Pasternak inherits and adapts to his own work. The sea and “sea change,” in particular, are an extended metaphor which might be considered the novel’s principal conceit. Storms and the weather generally speaking are major aspects of the novel’s system of meaning and overall narrative structure. Pasternak’s novel, like his poetry, centers on the ecstatic beauty and creative power of life. Emotional states are mirrored in the weather and environment, or vice versa. The Revolution is welcomed by Yuri Zhivago, who views it with awe, like the spontaneity of weather—an unleashing of elemental force (stikhinost’), for better or worse, creative or destructive, but always profound in its impact. Unlike the trope as it appears in canonical Soviet literature, where elemental force or spontaneity are tempered by class consciousness, the most essential part of life for Zhivago is the living, breathing consciousness that springs from inner vitality—the life of the mind and its interconnectedness with phenomena of the physical world antecedent to ideological systems. He values above all the personal connectedness of people, rather than the impersonal, abstract philosophies and political rhetoric of the new order developing around them in Soviet society. Zhivago’s calling as a poet compels him to seek to live by the natural rhythms of life. The preponderance of weather imagery in Doctor Zhivago is more than a reflection of the protagonists’ inner emotional life. Zhivago is awed and inspired by its power, but he must struggle against it to survive. The flood is the beautiful, perennial force of life associated with the heroine Lara Antipova. But the storm of revolution is relentless, destructive, and inhumanly cruel; it transforms people into pitiless ideologues, like Lara’s husband, whose journey changes him from the sweet, studious, lovelorn Pasha Antipov to the merciless Red commander Strelnikov. Even Zhivago’s childhood friends Misha Gordon and Innokenty Dudorov, men of intellectual capacity and moral fiber, by the late 1920s, become conformist Party backers,

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politically “re-educated” and unable to think for themselves. An exasperated Yuri Andreevich concludes that men who are not free are prone to idealizing their bondage—but he keeps it to himself in order not to hurt his friends’ feelings.41 Decades earlier, Pasternak had poetically illustrated how Lenin gave agency to the storm. Impressed with his striking charisma and oratorical skill, Pasternak wrote a poem depicting his memory of the Bolshevik leader at the Ninth Party Congress in July 1921. Lenin enters “Like the compressed sphere of a storm/Flying smokeless into the room.” His speech pierced the poet’s neck with sparks “Like the rush of globe lightning”; his words were “of engine oil”; and Lenin himself is likened to a “rapier thrust.” Later in a draft excerpt from the 1950s, Pasternak would call him the “voice of the great Russian storm,” who “allowed the ocean to rage,” while “the hurricane passed over with his blessing.” Similarly, in Doctor Zhivago, Yuri places the likes of Lenin in a special category, observing that wars and revolutions are like history’s yeast, produced by fanatical men of genius. But it wasn’t the military genius alone who transformed the world. Referencing War and Peace, he doesn’t think Tolstoy spelled out the limitations of the great man theory of history quite enough. Revolutions might be made by fanatical men of action, but the spirit that inspired them is worshipped long after. Zhivago longed nostalgically for earlier days, when the revolution had seemed like a god unto itself, a particular sort of madness for that point in time only, but not a confirmation of any political theory or party.42 Such were the events of 1905 and the first weeks after February 1917, depicted in the novel as part and parcel of the organic whole encompassing the weather and environment, flowing social movement, and the private lives of individuals. In the previous chapter, I refer to the death of the protagonists’ mother in White Guard as a symbol of the death of the mother culture and noted that the same analogy figures in Doctor Zhivago. In Pasternak’s novel, the tenyear-old Yurochka stands atop his mother’s burial mound during her funeral, and his distorted face appears like a wolf cub about to release a howl. He bursts into sobs instead, just as a cloudburst lashes his hands and face as if to intensify his grief. In the night, the motherless boy is beckoned by a tapping at the window and a blizzard raging with supernatural force. The storm is personified again, seemingly aware and reveling in the terrifying effect it has on the boy. Yura wants to run outside and do something, frightened that his mother is sinking deeper and further away from him into the ground, like the frozen heads of cabbage in the monastery kitchen garden. His feeling of utter isolation and bereavement is embodied in the storm, as “The blizzard was alone in the world; nothing rivaled it.”43 The revolution’s inexorable advance is prefigured; yet the analogy itself is irreducible—it remains at once a timeless force of nature and the private experience of the boy.

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In young adulthood, the grave illness of his future mother-in-law is an occasion for Yuri’s affirmation of faith and the awakening of his best, heroic qualities. When she asks him, a young medical student, not for a diagnosis but a deeper kind of reassurance, he delivers an impromptu sermon about consciousness and faith in resurrection so insightful and moving that he surprises even himself. The gist of it is that consciousness is poison when directed inward at oneself, but directed outward, toward others, it lights the way. As to what will become of one’s individual consciousness after death, it hinges on the fact that true existence is not in one’s material constitution, but in its active manifestation through one’s work and service to others. Life in others is the essence of a person whether before or after death. Finally, he imparts the teaching of St. John, paraphrasing verses from Revelation promising that there shall be no more death, because former things had passed away. Yuri explains that it means, essentially, that we have been given eternal life.44 Contrary to the materialists, whose positivist jargon had provided the vernacular of revolutionary thought for generations, Zhivago’s is a mystical yet practical, life-affirming philosophy. It evinces qualities of character he will strive to embody in his life and experiences throughout the novel, even in the face of counter winds, and arguably against great failure in the end. Like the Turbin matriarch’s instruction to her family to live and abide in love, Anna Ivanovna bids, similarly, that Yuri and Tonia love one another, essentially arranging their betrothal before it had occurred to either of them that they were in love. The matrilineal bequest in these novels is strong, but more conspicuous still is the demise of the fathers’ authority. Absent altogether in White Guard, the fathers in Doctor Zhivago are weak figures; worse, they are replaced by an arch villain whose name is derived from the Russian word for mosquito—Komarovsky. Komarovsky had seduced Lara’s mother, abused Lara, scandalized their family, and stolen Lara’s youth. He had driven Yuri’s father to suicide. As Lara later notes when they compare stories, he was the evil genius in both of their lives. All in all, Zhivago’s life philosophy centers on those forces in society that nurture attachment, connection, self-sacrifice, and solidarity, and resist those which seek to exploit, enslave, and sow division, discord, antagonism, and isolation. The idea of the Stalinist Great Family placed the Soviet leadership at the top of a patriarchal order where the vozhd’ (great leader) is a mythical, godlike figure, and kinship became the dominant symbol for social allegiance.45 Placing the abusive and odious Komarovsky in a position of dominance over the young orphaned protagonists’ lives, in the absence of the genuine care of loving parents, Pasternak inverts a major social trope of Stalinist Russia. Yuri’s life philosophy is tested when he meets his lover-to-be and the heroine of the novel, Lara Antipova, while both are serving in a field hospital at

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the southwestern front. Wounded by shrapnel, Yuri is recovering in a small town called Meliuzeevo, where Lara is a nurse. It was an area endlessly traversed by armies and wagon trains heading in both directions to and from the war, which gave rise to portentous, black clouds of dust which are compared to a swarm of locusts. It was part of the black earth region or chernozem, also known as the “breadbasket,” a swath of fertile soil stretching from northeastern Ukraine all the way across southern Russia. Supposed to be a land of rich, nourishing crops and abundant harvest, it is covered instead by this figurative swarm, which conjures a sense of barrenness and desertification, since the plague of locusts eat all the vegetation in sight, like they do in Exodus. The black-dust locusts in Meliuzeevo seem closer, though, to the locusts in Revelation 9:3–10 who emerge out of the smoke from the bottomless pit opened by the fifth angel. These locusts are commanded not to eat the grass or trees but only torment those men who do not bear the seal of God. The shapes of the locusts are like horses prepared for battle, and the sound of their wings is the sound of many horses running to battle.46 Both meanings of the locust symbol are conjured here by Pasternak. It is in the town of Meliuzeevo, moreover, that Yuri and Lara are employed by the new revolutionary government. The narrator comments that bureaucratic jobs were springing up every day like mushrooms. Thus, instead of the fertile crops that should grow in the chernozem come mushrooms, which typically grow in places of rot and decay. The new bureaucratic jobs seem haphazard, like an amusing children’s game of tag. Thus they are trivialized, as if not a serious business. This is the life that sprung up and flourished in abundance instead of the rich, nourishing lives the protagonists had been used to among worldly, educated city dwellers. Fulfilling their posts out of duty, they longed to return home to the more purposeful, rewarding lives of their chosen occupations.47 The new principles of life, nevertheless, hold a mysterious beauty, as people and nature fuse in an insoluble bond. In a mixed metaphor, the yeast of life is an agent of transformation which moves in a tidal wind/wave that nearly overwhelms Yuri. Politically, the old world is giving way to the wind of change pushing indiscriminately through every barrier to make this process occur. Yuri is stunned by the beauty of the people congregating in the town square, the magnificence of their voices and the general hubbub mingled with the voice of Russia herself. Later he tells Lara what an astounding spectacle the meetings he watched had been. It seemed to him that Mother Russia herself were walking and talking and couldn’t be silenced. He sees a parallel to sacred times, finding a spirit akin to the gospel, when Paul bade the Corinthians to speak in tongues and prophesy, and to pray for the gift of interpretation. Lara concurs that she has observed similar inspired scenes. In the same oration, Yuri holds forth while she irons, exclaiming how miraculous is

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the change going on around them, a metamorphosis that happens but once in all eternity. Such a liberation had occurred as if Russia had had its roof torn off, leaving real freedom, liberty beyond words and expectations, so surprising an act of happenstance, it might as well have fallen from the sky.48 The sea metaphor is re-introduced as Yuri traces the cause and effect of all this tidal change. An unnatural interruption, the war had initiated the transformation, and the Revolution did the rest, breaking out “involuntarily, like breath held for too long.” People had each gone through their own process of rebirth, such that it seemed like there were two revolutions: the public one and the private one, flowing into one another. All the separate, personal revolutions were streams that flowed into the sea of socialism, a great sea of life that people had decided to jump into rather than debate in abstract theories or principles.49 This passage is key in that it outlines Yuri Zhivago’s personal philosophy and lays bare the underlying theme of the novel. Once again recalling vekhovtsy ideas of personal revolution discussed in chapter 3, it indicates the contrast between conscious living and personal creativity vis-àvis the cold, stultified language and deadening philosophy of the revolutionary regime that will come to be. The latter will revert to abstractions, words, and demands, whose inconceivable extinction Yuri had just been revering. The sea conceit and the limitless freedom it connoted were bound not to flourish in the Revolution, which devolves into Civil War and the empty abstractions alluded to; they develop, rather, in connection to Lara’s genuine life-sustaining energy and spirit. In Meliuzeevo, chance brings the two protagonists together, in a former gentry mansion now serving as a field hospital, where Yuri first convalesced and then stayed to work, and where Lara was also staying. The night before Yuri’s departure for Moscow is disrupted by a terrible storm with gale-force winds, a noisy downpour, and peals of rolling thunder. From this point on the storm is connected in concrete imagery to Lara. Yuri and the caretaker Mademoiselle Fleury (former governess of the countess’s daughters) had heard a knocking at the door and thought it was Lara returning, but it turned out to be a branch that had broken through a window, allowing the rain to flood in. In what used to be Lara’s room, a deluge had filled the void, leaving huge puddles behind, which resembled “a veritable sea, a whole ocean.” Moreover, a linden tree appears at this significant moment in the narrative, a sacred symbol of love and friendship, which releases a baptismal flood of emotion when Yuri begins to realize the true nature of his feelings for Lara. He and Madame Fleury had been so sure that it was Antipova knocking at the door that they imagined her coming in, soaked and chilled to the bone, ready to help her dry her things by the stove and listen to her tell the story of her recent misadventure that had left her stranded in the downpour. Afterward the image of Lara as a watery wraith out in the storm continues to haunt Yuri.50

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On a symbolic level, the sea and water imagery that Lara conjures is an emotional torrent that overwhelms Yuri and occasions his personal transformation—something of the kind that began to overcome the masses of people depicted in the novel as well. In Zhivago, whose name recalls the child Boris Pasternak’s prayer to the Living God, the political merges with the personal in an epic struggle to find meaning in the clash of old and new. They flow together in an elemental cycle like so much unpredictable weather. Leaving the front and travelling home to Moscow, Yuri observes that the cacophony of voices issuing from the crowds of people on the railway station platforms is like a storm at sea “besieging” the train with its deafening roar.51 On the train, returning to Moscow, Yuri ponders two kinds of newness he perceived in the recent revolutionary upheavals. He recalls the prewar enthusiasm for revolution in the sense that it was supported by the middle classes, and the protests of 1905, led by young students who idolized Aleksandr Blok. He also recalls the years immediately before the war during which Russian thought and art had thrived, when the promise of a bright, vigorous future was Russia’s tangible new destiny. This was the Revolution as seen and driven by the cultural intelligentsia. Returning home from the front, Yuri longs to return to those days. This group of thoughts also swarms around his wife Tonia, and the warmth and affection in their home, a settled life where everything is certain and has an aura of poetry about it. He knows, however, that another kind of new has taken hold: the horrors of war with its chaos and savagery. This was not a revolution like that of 1905, idealized by intellectuals; it was a reckless, bloody revolution led by specialists in that domain, the Bolsheviks. This is one of the few passages in the book, in fact, where the Bolsheviks are called by name. Curiously, Pasternak groups his hero’s budding romance and his struggle with thoughts of infidelity in the same cluster of emotions as these triggered by the Party’s cause. For the trials of life caused by the Revolution also brought new experiences, and the homelessness and wandering brought new places and people. Yuri knows little about Lara Antipova but finds himself drawn to her quiet strength and tries consciously not to fall in love. The same category of newness cited above is the very one that encompassed Yuri’s love for Lara, which he tried with all his might to resist—with the same intensity of purpose with which he had tried all his life to love family and friends.52 The elemental change, destructive and creative, drags every kind of experience in its wake, like the tail of a comet. Lara in this sense is the catalyst for Yuri’s personal revolution. A deepening of the social-political sort of elemental change is augured by a mysterious character Yuri meets on the train. The deaf-mute Pogorevshikh, who had learned the art of speech with astonishing precision and now uses his powers garrulously, plies Yuri with prophecies of ruination while seeming to relish the fact of its coming. The extremity of his views reminds Yuri

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of the nihilists of the previous century, or some of Dostoevsky’s later heroes, and more recently those in the provinces where radicalism thrived. Arguing for the restoration of calm and order, Yuri is annoyed with Pogorevshikh’s calm detachment as the latter keeps contradicting him, calling destruction and social breakdown a necessary step toward construction on a larger scale. Only when society had broken down completely would the revolutionary power reorganize the pieces into a new whole, according to a new set of principles. The radical views of Pogorevshikh represent those of the Bolsheviks named in the preceeding section, discussed in the paragraph above. Zhivago is extremely agitated by Pogorevshikh, but confirms for himself the falsity of his interlocuter’s anarchistic outlook, now feeling all at once, after three years of witnessing war, death, changes, and uncertainty, that the true essence of existence was this return to the family hearth. Artists and adventurers alike were after the same thing, he feels, which was this act of coming home, which marked a renewal of oneself and one’s existence. A burst of rain welcomes his return as the cathedral of Christ the Savior appears from beyond a hill, and now the cupolas, roofs, and chimneys of Moscow.53 LIVING SPACE One of the most consequential norms to undergo transformation in post-revolutionary Russia was the definition of family and the circumstances regarding family life. As described in chapter 6, the ambience of the Turbin home with its bourgeois comforts and a nod to monarchist tradition is the thematic heart of White Guard. Bulgakov revisits the problem of residential accommodation amid the flux and flow of societal norms in The Heart of a Dog (Sobach’e serdtse, 1925), this time in a satirical manner. The Communist practice of dividing the spacious living quarters of bourgeois professionals into communal apartments is treated as a farce and a travesty. When the House Committee (domkom), led by the proletarian caricature Shvonder, rings at Professor Preobrazhinsky’s apartment demanding that he surrender his rooms, the urbane professor flatly refuses and delivers the comically inept domkom a thorough tongue lashing instead. In real practice, such confiscations and takeovers were often instigated by house porters and domestic servants motivated by revenge—a carnivalesque reversal wherein masters and servants traded places.54 In contrast, the Zhivago family makes willing concessions to the socialist regime. His wife Tonia’s family, the Gromekos, is a well-do-to intelligentsia family whom the orphaned Yuri had grown up with. In their youth the twostory house had been tastefully furnished in a way that recalls the Turbins’ comfortable home in White Guard, except instead of cream-colored, the

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curtains are pistachio, and the furniture olive-green, which, along with an aquarium and seaweed-like plants, “made the impression of a green, drowsily undulating sea bottom.”55 The sea motif, here dormant, later awakens in the spontaneous tide described above. Things have changed when Yuri returns to Moscow from the front. His wife Tonia concedes that rich people used to live too comfortably and informs him that she had given up most of the Gromeko family home and moved their things to the upper floor. She also apprises him of a nomenclatural change, specifically that they didn’t say “rooms” anymore, as all quarters were now called “living space.” Yuri responds that he is glad the rooms had been given up, agreeing with the sentiment that affluent people had lived an unhealthy life of superfluous luxury before the Revolution, and that wasted space and the surfeit of worldly goods had given rise to a superfluity of thought and feeling. He suggests they do even more to scale back further. This is the Zhivago family embracing the Revolution—filtered through Yuri’s personal philosophy of self-sacrifice for the benefit of others. As the conversation continues, Tonia tells him that cold, privations, and hunger are predicted for the winter. Yuri acknowledges the news, stating calmly once more that honest work and devotion to family were all that were within their power. Aware that some people were planning to escape to the south or emigrate abroad, he confesses it is not something he would choose, since he felt that a true man must share his nation’s fate. His family, on the other hand, he would send to safety in Finland or somewhere else if he could.56 These moments are premonitions of later twists in the novel’s plot, when Yuri’s family does emigrate abroad, and he is faced with the difficult decision whether to escape to the Russian Far East with the villain Komarovsky, or entrust Lara and her daughter, who by that point have become Yuri’s surrogate family, to Komarovsky’s care while he stays behind. Yuri will retain his family-centered philosophy, and it will be put to the test. He’ll find that the joys of ardent work for oneself and one’s family are fleeting and perishable. He may well trust in the hand of fate, but remains vulnerable to its vicissitudes, and indeed they will ultimately overwhelm and defeat him. He already begins to see the signs of decay when he finds that his friends have become joyless and morose, worse for the fact that they had also failed to hold on to their own personal values and opinions. At a gathering of friends and family, Yuri, intoxicated on diluted black-market vodka acquired for the occasion, makes a spontaneous, oracular speech to the guests, conjuring grotesque sea imagery in a gloomy fable of doom and destruction. After three years of war, the people had seen the boundary between the front and the rear disappear, knowing that sooner or later, “the sea of blood will come to everyone and flood those who sat it out and entrenched themselves. That

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flood is the revolution.” Now, Yuri opines, it seems that everything personal has been overcome by killing and dying. The end is nowhere in sight, and he cannot say whether the people will rise of themselves, or whether the revolution will be accomplished in their name. On the other hand, it was pointless, he concedes, to try to find the ends and beginnings of tidal changes of this magnitude: events of such enormity needed no explanations; they were a cause unto themselves. Unlike domestic disturbances, which begin and end in trifling matters, a truly great event, Yuri says, like the universe itself, has no end or beginning. It has always existed but comes to be part of our reality all of a sudden like an opening in the sky. In this way, he believes that Russia is destined to become the first socialist country, as if it were meant to be. Once it has, the new order will overtake and obliterate all memory of the past, encompassing everything like a forest or the vaulting heavens, with nothing else beyond them.57 At the end of his speech, a window is thrown open, and the dinner guests realize there had been a thunderstorm while Yuri was holding forth. The storm punctuates his prophecy, drawing together the primary storm and planting metaphors: “There was a roll of thunder, like a plow drawing a furrow across the whole of the sky, and everything grew still. But then four resounding, belated booms rang out, like big potatoes dumped from a shovelful of loose soil in autumn.” These tropes are compounded with the core themes of spontaneity (stikhinost’) and connectedness in Zhivago’s life philosophy: “The thunder cleared the space inside the dusty, smoke-filled room. Suddenly, like electrical elements, the component parts of existence became tangible—water and air, the desire for joy, earth, and sky.”58 Later, the announcement of Soviet power is similarly heralded by portents and elemental signals. The whole, dark day, rimmed with snowy clouds, the stove had emitted horrible black smoke, summoning a cloud of soot to the room, like a mythical beast from the forest. When Yuri is finally able to stoke the fire, he is aided by a fresh burst of air that rushes in, scatters the papers, slams a far-off door, and whirls in all the corners, chasing the smoke away like a game of cat and mouse. The wood catches fire, blazes, and crackles, and the room brightens, just at the moment when Yuri’s father-in-law bursts in like another gust of wind to announce the news of fighting in the streets that presaged the Bolshevik insurrection.59 Historic events continue to be matched by auguries in the weather. The military action which drew on for days had left the streets deserted, when Yuri finds himself walking in a fierce, howling blizzard. Its significance, however, goes deeper than brute force, as Yuri senses that a phenomenon similar to that powerful blizzard was taking place in the physical and moral world simultaneously. Buying a news bulletin from a paperboy on the street, he is bowled over, the weight of the news mimicked by the storm: “The

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blizzard lashed at the doctor’s eyes and covered the printed lines of the newspaper with gray and rustling granular snow. But that did not hinder his reading. The grandeur and eternity of the moment astounded him and would not let him come to his senses.” The bulletin was an official communiqué from the Soviet of People’s Commissars announcing the transfer of power to the soviets and establishment of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” along with the new government’s first set of decrees.60 Yuri is awe-struck by the suddenness of the change, likening it to a masterfully performed surgery to remove old sores, or a triumph of justice, resolving ancient wrongs in one fell swoop. He sees the maneuver as a stroke of genius, since anyone preparing to build a new world would normally clear a space and wait for the old world to come to an end, such as Pogorevshikh had insinuated. Zhivago, a poet, is impressed that the Bolsheviks started an unprecedented thing without even waiting for a blank page, or a new paragraph. They started not from the beginning, but from the middle, on the first weekday to come along, in the middle of rush-hour traffic. Just as he had earlier opined that great events had no beginning or end, now he admires how greatness can suddenly appear in so incongruous and indecorous a fashion.61 However, after these and other early enthusiasms, Yuri comes to reject the Bolshevik takeover in phases, over time growing further wearied and disillusioned with the regime’s banal phrases, shrill demands, and empty prophecies. A long segment of the novel initiates this transition in the form of a journey which delivers the Zhivagos to both a new location and new stages of understanding the seismic events which have begun to alter their lives irrevocably. As White Guard makes escape a core theme and structural principle, the same is a persistent motif in Doctor Zhivago. In fact, escape was a common resort for people confronted by the trials of survival during the Civil War in general. Intelligentsia families were among those who fled the cities in hopes of finding safety and better access to provisions in the countryside. In Read’s words, “Pasternak’s fictionalized description of such a journey by an idealized conception of an intellectual in this period, Doctor Zhivago, could be multiplied innumerable times in reality. As with Zhivago, the end results were not always more welcome than the conditions bringing about the flight.”62 The Zhivago family decides to make their escape by train from Moscow to the town of Yuriatin in the Ural Mountains, geographical border of Europe and Asia. Their destination is the estate of Tonia’s grandfather, who had been an industrialist in the region. While much of the novel has an urgency to it, here the pace changes, in a lengthy transitional segment, as the protagonists breathe a respite from the privations and dangers of the city, churned up by the war. Moving further away, they find the natural rhythms of life, by contrast, are still intact. One example, during a three-day pause in the journey to clear the tracks of snow, is the setting sun, which appears to set in the same

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place behind an old birch tree every day in order to demonstrate its fidelity to the past. Even clearing the tracks is joyous work in which all the passengers participate, and are rewarded with hot, freshly baked bread that came no one knew from where. Yuri is enraptured by the blinding brilliance of the sun sparkling on the snow, reminding him of the far-off days of childhood, when everything was delightful.63 At a further station on the journey, Yuri listens to a waterfall in his sleep. It drowns out the sound of voices on the platform. He doesn’t hear a conversation in a freight car below about “pacifying” villages who had resisted the grain requisition. The speakers had collected forty thousand bushels of milled grain after terrorizing the local population into obedient silence. This is an example of the social-economic and political reality happening around him, while Yuri is blissfully unaware. Instead, he is lulled by nature. He listens to another waterfall—or likely the same one; Yuri isn’t sure, drifting in and out of sleep, brimming with a sense of liberation and harmony. In the miraculous connectedness of things, the waterfall for him is consciousness incarnate, while it merges at the same time with the spirit of the requisitioners, turning into “a fairy-tale dragon or giant serpent of those parts, who exacted tribute from the people and devasted the countryside.”64 Upon arrival at their destination, the family’s class origins are a liability. Tonia’s ancestral estate, where they had come to weather the civil unrest sweeping the country, is not as safe a locale as they had hoped it might be. For Tonia’s grandfather, an industrialist named Krüger, was well known in the region. His name not only had a German ring to it, but as he was a successful industry magnate, it was also virtually synonymous with capitalism and the exploitative bourgeoisie. What is more, Tonia bears genetic features that the locals can recognize. The caretakers of the estate, the Mikulitsyns, greet Tonia and her family with reproaches verging on hostility. The narrator adds that the agitation is so acute that it is felt by the mare who pulled their cart, by her colt, by the very rays of the sun, and the ubiquitous mosquitoes alike. Worried and confused, Mikulitsyn asks why on earth they had come to hand them such a burden as this. The Zhivagos plead that all they desire is a corner of some dilapidated building, a small plot to grow vegetables, and a load of firewood from time to time. But they have missed the point, and when they mention their familial ties to the estate, their host is baffled by their naiveté, exasperated by their lack of understanding of the current times; his wife translates this into elemental terms, comparing their precarious circumstances to a volcano ready to blow. Adding to the complications, Mikulitsyn’s son is a Bolshevik, while Mikulitsyn himself was an elected representative to the Constituent Assembly—now seen as a doomed bourgeois institution. Having barely survived the awkwardness of their own situation, they are completely nonplussed by the arrival of Krüger’s relatives to claim his estate

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and draw unwanted attention. In the end, however, out of decency Mikulitsyn capitulates; but not without citing an ominous portent from Psalm 18:11 tying to the novel’s dominant storm motif: “These be the dark waters in the clouds, the shadow-scripted murk of secrecy.”65 THE EMBODIMENT OF A PRINCIPLE Yuri had first met Strelnikov on the train journey to the Urals. Just before his encounter with Lara’s estranged husband formerly known as Pasha Antipov, Yuri sees something symbolic in a wounded schoolboy being led away by Red Army soldiers. Wearing a cap over the bandage on his head, the student keeps pulling it down and disrupting the bandage instead of just carrying the cap. The soldiers help him do it. Zhivago wants to cry out: “Salvation lay not in faithfulness to forms, but in liberation from them.” The next moment, Strelnikov appears before him. Is the juxtaposition a suggestion that Strelnikov and those like him were slaves to form? His perfect proportion, his exemplary bearing and flawless military attire are all very impressive; yet, Yuri discovers, this man’s gift was merely the gift of imitation. For everyone imitated someone, he muses, whether the glorious heroes of history, soldiers at the front, or the most revered authorities.66 Strelnikov seems to Zhivago to be “the consummate manifestation of will.” The first we hear of him in the novel are rumors of his merciless cruelty: he had shelled a village from his armored train for the inhabitants’ refusal to comply with a decree to supply horses to the Red Army—and burned down the neighboring village for good measure. Later we learn that he does the same to Yuriatin, out of duty, knowing his wife (Lara Antipova) and daughter were there, but never checking whether they’d survived, in order to maintain the secrecy of his assumed identity.67 A biography of Strelnikov follows, and while readers begin to realize he is Lara’s husband Pasha, we also learn how and why he became a Civil War commander estranged from his family. A precocious youth from a poor family who studied more diligently than the children of well-to-do families, he became a man of rare moral purity with a strong sense of justice, clarity of thought, and warm and noble feelings. Striving for the highest good, in his strict, principled nature, he believed the world to be a place where people honorably observed the rules to compete in the attainment of perfection. Finding it was not so, his disillusionment turns into cold dogmatism. As his internal conflicts are driven deeper inside, he grows convinced of his obligation to become an avenger who would arbitrate between life and the dark forces working against it. The stark Civil War mindset enabled his transformation: “Disappointment embittered him. The revolution armed him.”68

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Although not a Bolshevik but an independent partisan commander, Strelnikov represents an outlook that Bolshevism promotes: a black-andwhite world where resentment and vengeance are empowered and turned with ferocious intensity against ideological rivals and other scapegoats. Most revolutionary fighters were susceptible to the self-righteous illusion attributed to Strelnikov, to whom, we’re told, it had never occurred that he might be doing harm by over-simplifying the world order. He stands for truth and justice, yet his is an overgeneralized, idealized view of the world. Although a man of principle, he understands the general rather than particular causes. The same worldview motivates the sentries who had apprehended Yuri and brought him to their chief. They could just as easily have finished him off, a fisherman lying nearby him tells; but he shouldn’t blame them—they were just doing their duty as class-conscious soldiers. If they thought they had found an enemy of the people and turned him in, they were only defending the workers’ cause, which was destined to triumph in the end.69 It is no coincidence that Strelnikov’s original surname Antipov begins with “anti-.” He is a character foil to Zhivago, whose name, again, stems from “zhiv-,” a root meaning “life.” In a sense, he is the anti-Zhivago. Strelnikov is as much an individual as Yuri, but one whose dedication to a principle has handicapped his innately resolute moral sense. Later when Yuri shares with Lara that he had met Strelnikov—before he knows that the latter was her husband—Yuri tells her that he saw how individuality was the commander’s essence. He had expected to meet a “brutal soldier” or “murderous revolutionary maniac,” but he was neither. This proved to Yuri that Strelnikov, to his credit, was an individual who didn’t belong to a type, but he was a man “free of himself” who had achieved thereby “a grain of immortality.” On the other hand, to the Party he was expendable, and the Reds would have no use for him soon. He would end badly and pay for the evil he had wrought. His danger was compounded by the fact that the revolutionaries were volatile and arbitrary, their cause “a machine that’s gone off the rails,” such that military geniuses like Strelnikov were disposable heroes. The Bolsheviks would use him as long as they needed him and afterward wouldn’t hesitate to cast him aside. However, unlike the Bolsheviks, whose source of madness is their intransigent ideology, Strelnikov is mad for his own, personal reasons. Yuri is convinced there must be a secret behind Strelnikov’s enigmatic persona, but he doesn’t know yet what it is.70 When she later reveals to Yuri that Strelnikov is her estranged husband, Lara infers that his secret has something to do with his taking the Revolution somehow too personally, and she recognizes that it would be the cause of his ruin. She had spotted him once from a distance and noticed that although his handsome, honest, and resolute face had gone virtually unchanged, one detail alarmed her. She felt that it was somehow tainted by abstraction, such

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that “A living human face had turned into the embodiment, the principle, the portrayal of an idea.” She is distressed to discover it, realizing that it was the consequence of the deadening powers he had given himself over to, an intractable force which had marked him for doom.71 In some of the novel’s most poignant pages—undoubtedly those several out of seven hundred that Pasternak complained were the only ones people referred to when they indicted his novel for counterrevolutionary motives— Lara continues to tell the story of the breakup of her marriage with Pasha. After two years, they had just set up their home when the war broke out. Nineteenth-century reason and conscience suddenly were no more, and mass insanity had taken their place. It used to be taken for granted that people would trust the voice of reason, that it was natural to follow one’s conscience. Murder and mayhem were things that happened only in newspapers, novels, or plays, but never in ordinary life. Suddenly the measured serenity of their lives had been broken up by “the savagery of daily and hourly, lawful and extolled murder.”72 Lara articulates what they both are feeling when she posits that the greatest calamity arrived when “untruth came to the Russian land.” She and Yuri recall how things had broken down. First transport systems and food supplies, then the foundations of family and moral standards. Finally, the root of all the evil to come was the loss of ability to trust in the value of one’s own opinions, and people’s moral compass had been replaced by an external standard imposed upon everyone. It was the power of high-flown principles and grandiloquent phrases, moreover, that held everyone in thrall, as conversations were taken over by a declamatory tone, replete with the requisite philosophizing about the world. This proved to be Pasha Antipov’s Achilles’ heel. His fatal error, in Lara’s view, was attributing the unnatural stiffness in their conversations to his own mediocrity. Without any prompting but his own sense of inadequacy, he went to war to free his family of his unworthiness. Out of vanity, he took world events personally and picked a quarrel with history. Lara believed that the extravagance of his ambition, demonstrated in this way, would lead to his demise.73 Lara laments that what had destroyed her marriage with Antipov wasn’t a matter of differences in temperament or lack of love. It was the crumbling into dust of everything in their lives owing to the general upheaval and the systematic dismantling of society. She and Yuri, on the other hand, were like the first and last people of the earth, an Adam and Eve who were the vestiges of what the world had achieved from its naissance, but naked and homeless now as when the world began. Their purpose had been to live and bear witness: in their love for one another, they honored the many vanishing wonders of thousands of years of civilization.74 Life is cyclical and, she implies,

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always reducible to its origin. This runs counter to the teleological philosophy of the Communists, the Radiant Future myth referenced throughout this book, in which progress delivers humankind from darkness, superstition, and exploitation toward enlightenment at the end of history—a future utopia which justifies the hardships of today, as well as validates the moral transgressions that may be necessary to root out the enemies of progress. If we stretch the myth further, Adam and Eve’s expulsion is punishment for the sin of creating their own origin myth, one that resists the orthodox narrative of Bolshevism. Pasternak’s Adam and Eve are not prelapsarian. They have eaten of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; they know the difference between good and evil because they have seen it around them. They are the first of a new race of human beings, whose lives are not tainted by fear of reprisal for the sin of knowledge. The difference between them and the primordial Adam and Eve is that they have a choice, a moral choice. It is the same for the Turbins, whose story is also about making moral choices. Zhivago avows that he is not trying to build a system. His and Lara’s values are personal, private, and reclusive. For Zhivago, his escape is also an aesthetic affirmation. To live in wonderment and gratitude for life itself is Zhivago’s own revolution. Now and when he and Lara return to Varykino in Chapter Fourteen of the novel, he must admit that life as they are living it is unsustainable. It is not a life philosophy or political program but a stolen moment. Nevertheless, drawing sustenance from aesthetic celebration of life’s mysteries, he finds justification in the experience itself. It is the very ephemeral nature of circumstances that gives them their value and meaning. Ironically, their time spent in hiding rings similar to accounts by original Bolsheviks like Yakov Sverdlov, Aleksandr Voronsky, and Pavel Postyshev, whose letters and memoirs recount the time they spent in remote locations under exile by the tsarist government. These accounts are filled with both suffering and redeeming faith in the promise of liberation, which they believe their revolutionary activities will one day deliver.75 The critical difference is that Yuri and Lara are not plotting anything. The pre-revolution Bolshevik exiles had been trying to create a system, a workers’ and peasants’ paradise. A proverbial “return to the garden,” however, is not a choice for Yuri and Lara; therefore, it is not a romanticized ideal for them. They are not supposed to become like God. After eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they are banished from eating from the tree of life in the new society forming around them. Yuri and Lara live in a paradise of their own making, in the transcendent love between them and the liberty to form a personal worldview from their own minds and perceptions. Yuri channels his into writing and poetry.

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YURI’S DIARY Yuri’s notebook (which in the novel fills roughly half of Chapter Nine) is a text-within-a-text, a mise en abyme wherein the hero unfolds his private philosophy. A sort of Zhivagoan manifesto, it sums up what we already know of Yuri’s personalist values within a context of their direct application. Now that circumstances force him to weigh, evaluate, and put them to the test, he can say for certain that happiness is working for oneself and one’s family; joy is in authentic, subsistence living; satisfaction comes from hard work, resourcefulness, and using up all of one’s focused energy and talent, like Robinson Crusoe, creating a world of one’s own, as God created the universe.76 This would seem like a Tolstoyan ideal, and it invites comparison with Tolstoy’s semi-autobiographical hero Levin in Anna Karenina. In a seminal passage of that novel, when the progressive landowner takes up his scythe to work alongside his peasants, the prolonged manual labor involved in mowing reaps its own reward—a blissful sense of ego loss: “The longer Levin mowed, the more often he felt those moments of oblivion during which it was no longer his arms that swung the scythe, but the scythe itself that lent motion to his whole body, full of life and conscious itself, and, as if by magic, without a thought of it, the work got rightly and neatly done on its own.”77 But if we are inclined to see in Yuri a representative of Tolstoy’s principles, he preempts such a reading, stating explicitly that he is not preaching Tolstoyan austerity. How, then, is what they were doing so different? He and Lara, he insists, were not building a philosophy on the basis of their own accidental system. They do not propose any amendments to socialism on agrarian questions. Their own example, he admits, was problematic, and not intended as a model for anyone else. Many of their resources were obtained by the generosity of others, not the work of their own hands. Their use of the land was illegal. Their cutting of wood for fuel was theft. The extent of their planning was storing up enough food and supplies to last the winter, a lot of it due to luck. For Yuri, a poet, the real meaning of life comes down to the earthy aesthetics of living moment-to-moment. His diary is filled with tactile imagery of his immediate surroundings: the earthy smell of the woodshed and vegetable cellar, the snow, the dim light before dawn. He doesn’t mind the hard work and sacrifices, and believes his existence is more authentic and fulfilling for its challenges. Any denizen of city life relying on the artificial stimulus of strong coffee and tobacco was missing out on the more authentic joys of honest industriousness, and sound health.78 As early as his time of service at the front, Yuri had been annoyed by all the posturing and false speechifying, when he had been struck by the embarrassing naiveté of the commanding officers, whose torrent of words were the epitome of all that was banal, superfluous, devoid of meaning, and

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inimical to life. He had longed to escape to what he considered real life, to replace human grandiloquence with the serenity of nature, and become absorbed in the fullness of meaning to be found in a life of quiet contemplation.79 Now at Varykino, finally having the time to reflect, he recognizes again what had been preventing him from working at his true calling: it was the grandiose orations extoling the “the dawn of the future,” “the building of the new world,” and other bywords of the new order, which he finds to be nothing but pompous slogans. By contrast, he thinks Pushkin demonstrates the principle best of all, that “Only the ordinary is fantastic, once the hand of genius touches it.” Pushkin and Chekhov were concerned with their private, individual lives and work, he believes, unconcerned with the ultimate goals of mankind. Zhivago values them now greater than Gogol, Tolstoy, or Dostoevsky, who anxiously sought their meanings in the bigger picture. Pushkin and Chekhov, on the other hand, had lived their lives unassumingly, for themselves, letting their work mature over time, so that now, “like still unripe apples picked from the tree, [it] is ripening in posterity, filling more and more with sweetness and meaning.”80 Cultivation of a meaningful personal life and reflecting it in art—goes the implication of this harvest metaphor—yields the more steady and richly satisfying crop in the long run. Furthermore, in the worst ideological transgression he could make at this historical juncture, Yuri commits to his diary an unabashed appraisal of Pushkin’s paean to bourgeois life in his poem “My Genealogy,” as well as this confession in “Onegin’s Journey”: My ideal now is a housewife, My desire is for peace, A pot of soup, and my fine self.81

Although he recognizes the precariousness of their situation, for the time being Yuri and his surrogate family were free to live a pseudo-bourgeois existence, protected by their remote location, and by the resourcefulness of their mysterious benefactor Samdevyatov—a sincere revolutionary who was capable of removing the Varykino forest just as easily and adroitly as he was of making a profit and getting away with it clean.82 All they desired was a quiet place to themselves and a good, home-cooked meal, however miraculously obtained. Yuri’s half-brother Evgraf, whom Yuri calls “my good genius and rescuer,” also seems to have mysterious power and influence as a benefactor. Evgraf’s uncanny ability to pull strings and improve conditions for the Zhivagos leads Yuri to conclude that every life story, along with the standard cast of characters, involves another, secret, unknown force, a type of symbolic deus-ex-machina who comes to the rescue. The notebooks of Yuri

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Zhivago end with this final observation.83 Fortuitous correspondence of this sort is another aspect of his philosophy that bears further examination below. “THE RIVER FLOWED. THE ROAD WENT THE OPPOSITE WAY.” One of Pasternak’s aesthetic principles in narrative writing is his reliance on the miraculous coincidences that seem to propel life from one moment to the next. He wrote explicit commentaries on the elusive “reality of life” he depicted in Doctor Zhivago, which was quite an intentional device. At some point in the writing, he had been reading reference materials on history and folklore and wrote in a letter that he saw his work as action set “on the border with fairy tale.” He believed that some of it evolved in the form of a “philosophy frequently hidden even from the author: . . . the narrower, mysterious and little-known reality of life amid the broader, everyday, social, accepted and usual reality.”84 In another letter he described the way he understood and interacted with the unknown forces of his narrative method: I would pretend (metaphorically) to have seen nature and the universe themselves not as a picture made or fastened on an immovable wall, but as a sort of painted canvas roof or curtain in the air, incessantly pulled and blown and flapped by something of an immaterial, unknown aand [sic] unknowable wind. . . . There is an effort in the novel to represent the whole sequence of facts and beings and happenings like some moving entireness, like a developing, passing by, rolling and rushing inspiration, as if reality itself had freedom and choice and was composing itself out of numberless variants and versions.85

The extraordinary connectivity of people that Pasternak’s methodology allows is manifested in the numerous instances of serendipity that motivate the plot. During a visit to town, Yuri chances to find Lara in the library; he hadn’t seen her since Meliuzeevo the night her room flooded and he imagined her as a watery wraith out in the storm. Watching from a distance, he notices now how she seems to have a calming and healing effect on people, and that anything she did, no matter how complex, appeared as simple and uncomplicated as the manual work he had been writing about in his diary. Her goodness was reflected in the humblest of tasks: “She reads as if it were not man’s highest activity, but the simplest of things, accessible to animals. As if she were carrying water or peeling potatoes.”86 When he goes to see her, the elements begin to augur fate once again. While on his way, the wind holds him up, stirring clouds of dust that block his path, but he perseveres. When he finds her, she is connected to the storm

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and water imagery once again: a whirlwind catches her by surprise as she is standing by a well with water drawn in buckets hanging by a yoke over her shoulder. When the wind blows her kerchief away, Yuri fetches it, and they return to her place to talk. Yuri sees gracefulness in everything she does. In the reading room he had thought she read with the ardor of doing physical work, while here now, he finds her carrying water “lightly, effortlessly, as if she were reading.”87 Lara is repeatedly connected in the ways described above to the vitality and essence of life through associations with the flow of water and swirling wind. This type of elementality (stikhinost’) is a recurring motif in Doctor Zhivago which counters the official Soviet narrative of the elemental force of the narod which needed to be harnessed by class consciousness and directed by Marxist-Leninist principles—the high-flown rhetoric that had mesmerized Strelnikov and other revolutionaries, which Yuri so despises. In Lara, the elements represented in the wind and water, on the contrary, elude the stilted phrasing of revolutionism and carry a connotation instead of flowing life, connectivity between people and nature, and the elemental love that binds them. An allusion to the harvest theme, moreover, foreshadows both characters’ tragic fate. At the end of Chapter Nine, Yuri is captured by partisans, a guerilla army of mostly peasant conscripts fighting for the Reds, known as the Forest Brotherhood. At the very moment he is captured, he is looking at a billboard, which he had noticed twice before: once from the train, and once through the window in Lara’s house in Yuriatin onto the vacant lots by the river. Like a premonition, the billboard reads, “Moreau and Vetchinkin. Seeders. Threshers.” At the point of capture, Yuriatin had been on the verge of breaking off his affair with Lara and was returning to his wife Tonia, when he is seized by an urge to go back and say one more proper goodbye to Lara. He looked forward to receiving her loveliness as if from the Creator’s hands, and imagines how her intimacy will come rolling to him like the waves of the sea. The sea imagery once again identifies Lara as a representative of the elemental source of life that inspires Zhivago. These noble sentiments aside, tying in the sowing/reaping theme, one suspects Yuri is now getting his comeuppance for infidelity. Upon arrival in Yuriatin, incidentally, he had been informed that it was time for sowing the spring crops such as oats, wheat, or millet, but it was too early for buckwheat, which was sown on St. Akulina’s day. The latter carries possible symbolism in the fact that St. Akulina (also Aquilina) was arrested and executed at only twelve years old during the Roman emperor Diocletian’s persecution of Christians for preaching conversion of pagans to Christ. The allusion may be seen as a premonition of Lara’s fate, who, we learn in the novel’s epilogue, was taken away to perish in the GULAG.88

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Yuri’s lot is to be kidnapped and forced to serve as a medic in the partisan army, where he is confronted once again by the cold, dead, rhetoric of his captors. He tells the loquacious, cocaine-addled Liberius, whose hours-long, hyperbolic orations through the night are wearing Zhivago down, that the language and ideas of socialist building only lead him to despair. He is sickened by the fact that mere talk about it had already cost seas of blood. The principle dichotomy Yuri reacts to is life lived versus life simplified and reduced to the terms of rational understanding. Life made ready for reshaping is abhorrent to him, for, according to Yuri’s outlook, life reshaped is life violated. He won’t accept the rhetorical cant about remaking life uttered by those who don’t understand its spirit but see life as merely a lump of clay to be molded.89 A legacy of nineteenth-century materialists, the revolutionary struggle had been perceived as a business of reducing life to its most basic components, which then could be formed and shaped at will by partisans armed with the right theoretical tools. To Yuri’s mind, life is not and never has been a material substance. It is, on the contrary, a principle of self-renewal, continually and eternally creating and re-creating itself. As such, he tells Liberius, “it is far above your and my dim-witted theories.”90 Life, for Yuri Zhivago, is a living, flowing, current, one that runs the opposite way of man’s attempts to rationalize life and diminish its essence. After tribulations of forced service to the partisans, Yuri escapes and returns to Yuriatin, emaciated by his six-week journey on foot through snowy conditions and devastation around the country. The scenes he had witnessed in that sojourn alone paint a grim picture of end times that mirrored an earlier, primitive state, where every man was an enemy to another, where the laws of civilization no longer stand and humans have regressed to a caveman existence. Arriving in Yuriatin, he finds government proclamations stating that the town had ample food supplies, but they had allegedly been stolen by the bourgeoisie in order to sow chaos. Another announcement read, “Those caught hoarding and concealing food supplies will be shot on the spot.” Others refer to requisitioning, assessment, and taxation of members of the propertied classes, and surrender of arms. One states explicitly that the only way out of famine was for the government to conduct property searches and use any means of terror necessary. Yuri is furious at the hypocrisy and blindness the proclamations implied. There simply were no stores of food hoarded by bourgeois elements, nor were there any propertied classes, speculators, or exploiters, since they had all been abolished by earlier decrees and eradicated. He cannot believe that these kinds of lies and ravings could still be perpetuated year after year, with no regard for the desolation they had caused. In a paroxysm of indignation adding to the hunger and exhaustion from his long journey, Yuri faints on the spot.91 By the end of the novel, when he returns to Moscow, gaunt, disheveled, and spent, the organic metaphors often invoked throughout the novel turn

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barren as Yuri bears witness to the devastation around him, consequences of the Civil War in the form of deserted villages, abandoned fields, and unharvested crops. One descriptive passage is particularly evocative: the overripe ears of rye spill their grain all over the ground, which Yuri tries to consume in raw handfuls when he has no opportunity to boil it into kasha. Difficult to chew and digest, it nevertheless sustains him, although he notes how the dull gold color of the unharvested grain is an unsettling sign of neglect, since it is usually a lighter color when reaped at the proper time. The forgotten fields themselves are grotesquely transformed. Abandoned and decayed, they are overrun by an infestation of mice, moving in a disgusting swarm under his feet and scurrying over him as he tries to sleep. Mongrel dogs also follow threateningly and seem to conspire with one another over when to attack and use him for their dinner.92 But the one thriving element is the woods, compared in similes with overt reference to the political environment vis-à-vis the sacred world. The forests and fields are described as opposites, the latter “orphaned without man, as if they had fallen under a curse in his absence.” The forests, on the other hand, liberated from human interference, “stood beautiful in their freedom, like released prisoners.” The fields appeared to be gravely ill, suffering under the devil’s scourge, but the forest, on the mend and thriving, was the dwelling place of God.93 Tellingly, on this journey to Moscow, it is noted that the river flowed one way, while the road went in the opposite direction. Yuri travels along this road; thus, he is moving quite literally against the current. The storm clouds are following him in that direction. Once he reaches Moscow, the seat of power and administrative center of the Soviet Union, his life enters a period of stasis, where there is no longer flow nor growth. This return to Moscow is vastly different from the earlier one, when, voyaging home from the front, perturbed by his encounter with Pogorevshikh, he had been relieved to leave him behind, feeling that coming home to family and familiar places had to be what life was really all about. Since then, the Pogorevshikhs of the world, who wanted to raze the old civilization to the ground, had prevailed. This time, learning that his family had emigrated, Yuri grows estranged from his friends and lives a paltry, selfish existence. He seems to have forgotten his life philosophy of outward dedication, self-sacrifice, and family. After a semi-successful publishing enterprise, he settles down in a loveless marriage—without formally ending his first to Tonia, who had emigrated abroad—and compounding his betrayal of Lara, whom he had tricked into believing he would follow close behind when she left with Komarovsky to shelter in the Far East. His new wife Marina forgives his strange quirks, seeing him as a man who had gone to seed but was aware of his decline. She puts up with his grumbling and irritability and the dirt and disorder he spreads

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around him, but eventually is disconsolate when he leaves to go into hiding, explaining cryptically that he needed space to concentrate. His latest and final escape amounts to shutting himself in to write his reflections, memories, and poems that swarm chaotically and resist cohesion. Their primary focus is the city he once loved, now altered beyond recognition, which he nonetheless calls home once again. It has a “false artlessness” and “unnatural mannerism.” The noisy street outside is like the opening overture before the curtain, mysteriously suggestive in the suspenseful glow of the footlights. However, like the boy who had stood at the window looking out at his mother’s grave, Yuri gives the sense that he is not a participant in the life outside his window, but only an observer. He writes that the city’s restless stirring outside the window is like an expansive introduction to every person’s life. The city, it turns out, is not to be his own life’s introduction but its epilogue. On the way to a hospital for his first official employment since he’d reached the capital, as lightning flashed and thunder rolled on a stifling day at the end of August 1929, Yuri suffers a heart attack on the tram and dies on the sidewalk. He is not yet forty years of age.94 Life goes on for his friends, and history marches forward in the epilogue of the novel, which begins in the summer of 1943, in the midst of the Great Patriotic War. Yuri’s view of the Revolution remains pessimistic to the end, yet his life-affirming personal philosophy holds true. He had shared with Lara at Varykino that he felt there had been ample time since the Revolution to achieve something. For the purveyors of revolution, the turmoil of change seemed to be enough. The obsession with arranging the future had ensured that building transitional worlds had become an end in itself. In Yuri’s view, however, “Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.” Like nothing else, this pithy but cogent statement sums up the Zhivago life philosophy. All of life may be a stage, but it is no dress rehearsal. Or, as he puts it in “Hamlet,” from the collection of Yuri Zhivago’s poems in the final section of the novel, “Life is no stroll through a field.”95

NOTES 1. Christopher Barnes, Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography, Vol. 2: 1928– 1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 143–44. Italics added. 2. A. K. Tarasenkov, “Pasternak. Chernovye zapisi. 1930–1939,” in Vospominaniia o Borise Pasternake, eds. E. V. Pasternak and M. I. Feinberg (Moscow: Slovo, 1993), 150–74; quoted in Barnes, Boris Pasternak, Vol. 2, 143–44. 3. Peter Finn and Petra Couvée, The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the Cia, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book (London: Harvill Secker, 2014), 54–55.

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4. Ibid., 46; Nadezhda Mandelshtam, Hope Against Hope: A Memoir, trans. Max Hayward (New York, NY: Modern Library, 1999), 132. 5. Finn and Couvée, The Zhivago Affair, 41; Mandelshtam, Hope Against Hope, 148; Isaiah Berlin, Personal Impressions (London: Pimlico, 1998), 223. 6. Finn and Couvée, The Zhivago Affair, 32. 7. Ibid., 75. 8. Ibid., 54. Letter to Olga Freidenberg, October 5, 1946, in Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg, The Correspondence of Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg, 1910–1954, ed. Elliott Mossman, trans. Elliot Mossman and Margaret Wettlin (New York, NY and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 253. 9. Mandelshtam, Hope Against Hope, 148. 10. On Pasternak’s attitude toward Cubo-Futurism, see Barnes, Boris Pasternak, Vol. 1, 163–65. For Pasternak’s impressions of Mayakovsky at their first personal meetings in autumn 1913, see Ibid., 170–73. 11. Barnes, Boris Pasternak, Vol. 1, 289; Boris Pasternak, Sochineniia, Vol. 2 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1958–61), 43. See my discussion of Mystery-Bouffe in chapter 1. 12. Payne, “Vladimir Mayakovsky,” 17. 13. Marina Tsvetaeva, Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry, trans. Angela Livingstone (Northumberland, UK: Bloodaxe Books, 2010), 22. 14. Finn and Couvée, The Zhivago Affair, 20–21. 15. Ibid., 33. 16. Ibid., 15–16, 35. 17. Ibid., 34–35. 18. Ibid., 9. 19. See Barnes, Boris Pasternak, Vol. 2, 146. 20. Finn and Couvée, The Zhivago Affair, 43–46; Barnes, Boris Pasternak, Vol. 2, 148. 21. Barnes, Boris Pasternak, Vol. 2, 148–49. 22. Finn and Couvée, The Zhivago Affair, 37–38. 23. The conversation was subsequently recorded in writing by as many as eleven different people. See Finn and Couvée, The Zhivago Affair, 280, note to p. 40. The account given is the one according to Mandelshtam, Hope Against Hope, 146–48. Exiled and spending four years of isolation and obscurity away from the capitals, Osip Mandelshtam was arrested again in 1938 after the loss of his protector in Bukharin, himself a victim of the purges by this time, and later perished in prison. 24. Finn and Couvée, The Zhivago Affair, 44; Olga Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time: My Years with Pasternak, trans. Max Hayward (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1978), 81. 25. Finn and Couvée, The Zhivago Affair, 45; Eduard Shneiderman, “Benedikt Livshits: Arest, sledstvie, rasstrel,” Zvezda 1 (1996): 115. 26. Barnes, Boris Pasternak, Vol. 2, 157. 27. The essays in The God That Failed remain some of the best documented accounts of the difficulty many former Communists had in renouncing the Party and

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their faith in the Revolution. See Richard Crossman, ed., The God that Failed (New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1949), with essays by Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, André Gide, Louis Fischer, and Stephen Spender. 28. Letter of December 10, 1955, to N. A. Tabidze, cited in Barnes, Boris Pasternak, Vol. 2, 299. Original text in Pasternak, Sobranie sochinenii, Vol. 5, 541. 29. Finn and Couvée, The Zhivago Affair, 127; John Garrand and Carol Garrand, Inside the Soviet Writers’ Union (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1990), 42. 30. Finn and Couvée, The Zhivago Affair, 8–9; Vitaly Shentalinsky, The KGB’s Literary Archive, trans. John Crowfoot (London: The Harvill Press, 1995), 141. 31. Finn and Couvée, The Zhivago Affair, 42; Surkov cited in Guy De Mallac, Boris Pasternak: His Life and Art (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981), 145. 32. Finn and Couvée, The Zhivago Affair, 59. 33. Ibid., 53; Nadezhda Mandelshtam, Hope Abandoned, trans. Max Hayward (New York, NY: Atheneum, 1974), 594–95. 34. Finn and Couvée, The Zhivago Affair, 58; Victor Erlich, “Introduction: Categories of Passion,” in Pasternak: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Victor Erlich (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978), 5. 35. Barnes, Boris Pasternak, Vol. 2, 315. 36. Letter to S. N. Durylin, June 1945; see Pasternak’s comments to his Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli and agents in Finn and Couvée, The Zhivago Affair, 91. 37. Finn and Couvée, The Zhivago Affair, 152; Edith W. Clowes, ed., Doctor Zhivago: A Critical Companion (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995), 6. 38. Marc Slonim, “But Man’s Free Spirit Still Abides, review of Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak,” New York Times, September 7, 1958. 39. Finn and Couvée, The Zhivago Affair, 256. 40. Ibid., 57; Varlam Shalamov, “Pasternak,” in Boris Pasternak, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 11 Vols., eds. Yevgeni Pasternak and Yelena Pasternak (Moscow: Slovo, 2003–2005), Vol. 11, 645–46. 41. Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York, NY: Vintage Classics, 2011), 570–71. 42. Barnes, Boris Pasternak, Vol. 1, 325–26; Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, 538–39. 43. Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, 3–5. 44. Ibid., 78–80. 45. See Clark, The Soviet Novel, 114–35. 46. Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, 152. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 164–70. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 175. 51. Ibid., 183. 52. Ibid., 187–88. 53. Ibid., 189–93.

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54. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 528–29. 55. Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, 62. 56. Ibid., 199. 57. Ibid., 212–13. 58. Ibid., 214. 59. Ibid., 221–22. 60. Ibid., 225–26. 61. Ibid., 228–29. 62. Read, Culture and Power, 58. 63. Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, 272–73. 64. Ibid., 278, 282. 65. Ibid., 322–24; Psalm 18:11 reads, “He made darkness his covering around him, his canopy thick clouds dark with water” (KJV). 66. Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, 294–95. 67. Ibid., 269, 294, 356. 68. Ibid., 297–98. 69. Ibid., 298, 290. 70. Ibid., 352–53. 71. Ibid., 476. 72. Ibid., 478–79. 73. Ibid., 479–80. 74. Ibid., 477. 75. See Slezkine, The House of Government, 46–55. 76. Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, 329. 77. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York, NY: Penguin Classics, 2004), 253. 78. Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, 329–32. 79. Ibid., 162. 80. Ibid., 338–39. 81. Ibid., 338. The references are to Pushkin’s poem “My Genealogy” (Moia rodoslovnaia, 1830), in which the words “I am a bourgeois” are repeated as a refrain. “Onegin’s Journey” is an excised segment from Pushkin’s novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin (Evgenii Onegin, 1823–30). See note 6, p. 667 in Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago. 82. Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, 329–30. 83. Ibid., 341–42. 84. Letter of November 9, 1954 to T. M. Nekrasova, quoted in Barnes, Boris Pasternak, Vol. 2, 292. Italics in the original. 85. Barnes, Boris Pasternak, Vol. 2, 292–94. 86. Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, 346–47. 87. Ibid., 348–51. 88. Ibid., 363, 352, 362, 304. 89. Mathewson, The Positive Hero, 273. 90. Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, 401. 91. Ibid., 446–47, 452–53. 92. Ibid., 554–55.

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93. Ibid., 555. 94. Ibid., 554–83. 95. Ibid., 353, 614.

Chapter 8

Conclusion

In The Captive Mind (1953), Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz describes the dilemmas of living in the people’s democracies (socialist states) of Europe under the Soviet sphere of influence after the Second World War. He calls Communism the “New Faith.” Another way of describing revolutionism, he says, is the pitting of a New Faith, or New Word, against the forces of modernity. Its principal tenet is that history develops according to immutable laws, one of which is the class struggle. Those who see it otherwise view reality falsely and can only be driven by the criminal motives of a defunct class of former people. Anyone forcibly suppressed because of their false view of reality therefore deserves no sympathy from someone who understands history correctly.1 In such a society it is dangerous to hold dissenting opinions, although many people do, by learning to mask their true beliefs behind a veneer of social conformity. Masking oneself requires cultivation of a very special kind of reticence. Milosz borrows a term from Islamic civilization to give a name to this brand of social role-playing: Ketman. It refers to the practice of keeping silent about one’s true convictions. Every word has to be weighed and evaluated for potential consequences. There comes a time, however, when silence is not enough. Then one must not only deny one’s true opinion but use deceit to convince one’s adversary, through unimpeachable professions of faith, that it is the opposite of what it truly is. The trouble is, conscious acting develops traits which become reality. With time one can no long differentiate one’s true self from the simulated self. Even intimate couples speak to each other using Party slogans.2 One recalls how in Doctor Zhivago, Lara described the tone of falsehood which had crept into her marriage with Pasha Antipov after the Revolution and eroded it from within. It ultimately changed Pasha into the hard-hearted Commander Strelnikov. 229

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Milosz’s thesis is another way of putting Yuri Zhivago’s theory, which he tells Gordon and Dudorov near the end of Pasternak’s novel, that a disturbance in the moral order is the cause of a recent increase in heart disease. People, he believes, are paying the price of living a double life in the form of microscopic cardiac hemorrhages, which are a disease particular to their time. Yuri believes that the constant requirement to disguise oneself and one’s true motivations—even to the point of having to rejoice over that which brings misfortune—was having a devasting impact on their health and longevity. To connect the physical manifestations of heart disease to a moral disorder is one of the profound observations of the book. It is a most perceptive diagnosis by a doctor who reasons with his heart. The constant duplicity that forces one to live disingenuously and extol falsehood creates a potentially fatal psychic imbalance. The soul is a physical manifestation, Yuri goes on to suggest. The nervous system is not a fictional entity but a physical body made of tissue and fiber. Likewise, “our soul takes up room in space and sits inside us like the teeth in our mouth. It cannot be endlessly violated with impunity.” Driving the point home, he tells Dudorov it was painful for him to hear how his friend believed his understanding had grown during exile, and that he greatly valued his political re-education. “It’s as if a horse were to tell how it broke itself in riding school.”3 Since at least the mid-nineteenth century, when the Civic Critics cast the revolutionary struggle as a radical reshaping of human society, the problem had been viewed as a utilitarian puzzle, as if there were only so many natural laws to discover, based upon which a perfect, mechanized, ideological system could be built. To reiterate one of the fundamental divides between factions of the intelligentsia, the basic difference between the humanist vekhovtsy (Landmarks’ authors) and their revolutionary counterparts on the far Left was their personalist viewpoint, stressing the absolute value of the individual. The Landmarks point of view, and that which was promulgated later by Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Bulgakov, among others, was that nothing justified violence against individuals for political gain. The revolution could not succeed unless the individual was respected and given a proper cultural space in which to develop instead of treated as so much disposable raw material. Moreover, individuals needed to look within before casting blame outside, at others. As a result of its utilitarian philosophy, the radical intelligentsia deified the idea of new men and women who created a revolutionary self, yet persecuted real, living, individuals in the name of their idea. “Ready to sacrifice himself for his ideas, he does not hesitate to sacrifice others” was the charge laid at their door. If truth got in the way of the struggle against autocracy, truth was cast overboard along with the enemies of the people. In hindsight it is hard not to see these few Landmarks principles as prophetic.

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The story unfolded in the pages above is one that gets to the heart of the class war, which has to be seen as the focal point of the Russian Revolution. I have underscored the critical role of language and literature as weapons in the cultural trenches of revolutionary warfare. By the same token, responses to authoritarian control in Soviet society were many and varied. They are difficult to gauge, however, because terror often achieved its desired effect. Most authentic responses were expressed in private. Some, however, made their way into art. The Party commandeered media, art, literature, and the language of daily life by force, using labeling, scapegoating, persecution, and state-sponsored violence as its principal mechanisms. However, some of the novels and other literary works examined here provided counterweights to revolutionism by reorienting the narrative toward humanistic values that had provided the original impetus for the revolutionary movement in the first place. Resistance to Soviet authoritarianism also came in many forms, all of them dangerous. Non-participation or internal exile was the chosen tack for some. In other cases, self-preservation meant walking a fine line between conformity and personal integrity. The mask of Ketman provided a mode of survival for many artists and civilians alike. A more overt, if probably foolish, form of resistance to a regime which had created an environment of fear and distrust that permeated society was to risk one’s personal freedom in order to reclaim the language and meaning needed to assert its value. If revolutionary lore depicted elemental forces as an adversary to overcome, or an undisciplined mind to shape and harness, authors like Bulgakov and Pasternak understood that human hearts and minds are more like the weather: unpredictable, perennially creative and destructive, impossible to pin down or capture. Each author’s voice of dissent was nuanced with complexity. There is a self-deprecating humility to their works—a humanist sensitivity that the Bolsheviks called reactionary, counterrevolutionary, and bourgeois. The heroes of their stories did not pretend to have the iron certainty in the trajectory of history that Marxism-Leninism presupposed. On the contrary, they exploited that uncertainty, which is the major strength of their art, the backbone of the questing form which canonical Soviet literature lacked. In this book I have examined a cluster of metaphors which gave rhetorical thrust to the revolutionary movement in Russia and represented its outcomes. Storms, floods, arks, or planting and harvest metaphors are ubiquitous tropes found in the literature and mass culture of both pre- and post-revolutionary Russia. They are used in many diverse ways, sharing a contextual field, sometimes with merging interpretations and other times striving toward divergent ends. What do they tell us? In brief, here are some of the purposes I have found the metaphor series put to: calling attention to injustice; condemning

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tyranny; prophecy of a coming cataclysm; representations of disorder, chaos, and violence; galvanizing the forces of revolution; building a society based in cultural myths; furthering an ideology of class war; justification of war and revolution; describing the challenges of everyday life; acceptance of the inevitable; counternarratives to state ideology; the passing of the old world; aesthetic appreciation; respect for the wild freedom and power of nature; awe before the living God; passion, love, and the depths of the human heart. Weather and the rotation of the agrarian cycle made for powerful images and rhetorical tools that allowed the metaphors to be employed in the service of authoritarian control. On the other, the weather and the fertile earth are above our plebeian concerns. The anonymous aphorism “All of us could take a lesson from the weather, for it pays no attention to criticism” rings true. Similarly, the circular nature of sowing and reaping contradicts and negates the teleological myth of modernity. As cycles of nature recur, they are fulfilled in their very manifestation. There is no end goal toward which they are striving. By contrast, human ideological systems are based in a dissatisfaction with the present, or lack of fulfillment. Fulfillment is projected in a dream of fruition far in the future. The myth of progress presupposes an end state, such as the workers’ paradise in Vera Pavlovna’s dream. However, the weather and agricultural rhythms suggest that when history ceases, the cycles of nature will inevitably recur day after day and year after year, vital to all forms of life, but always unstable, unpredictable, astonishing in their variety and power, terrifying, beautiful, and full of mystery. Milosz writes in 1981 that The Captive Mind, which was published the year of Stalin’s death, takes as its subject “the vulnerability of the twentiethcentury mind to seduction by sociopolitical totalitarian terror for the sake of a hypothetical future. As such, the book transcends the limitations of place and moment as it explores the deeper causes of today’s longing for any, even the most illusory, certainty.”4 One could say the twenty-first-century mind is equally vulnerable. If twentieth-century authoritarianism taught us anything, it is that demagogues who endeavor to dismantle democratic institutions and replace them with repressive state systems betray the achievements of Enlightenment humanism. The latter reminds us that the retrograde forces of authoritarian control always pose a clear and present danger to the survival of Western democracy. The urgency to understand these dynamics couldn’t be greater. As authoritarianism sees a global resurgence in politics today, it behooves us to understand how its purveyors shape public perceptions and cultural values. Authoritarianism always relies upon the silencing of heterogeneous voices and other pluralistic tendencies, which is accomplished in large part through language. The slippery slope into tyranny relies on the relentless insistence on a monochromatic discourse used to reduce complex issues to over-simplified

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binary choices, thereby to sow discord, antagonize rivals, and persecute resistance. Just as storms come and go, however, the language of oppressive political structures can always be weathered with patience and self-reflection. When the breath of the storm is appreciated in the fullness of its power and beauty, humanity is there to be found at its heart. NOTES 1. Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1981), 209. 2. Ibid., 54–60. 3. Ibid., 572. 4. Ibid., v.

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Index

Academy of Sciences, 139 The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality (Esteticheskie otnosheniia iskusstva k deistvitel’nosti) (Chernyshevsky), 57 “After the Storm” (Herzen), 28 Age of Pushkin. See Golden Age of Russian Poetry agriculture: and crop failures, 115–16; primitive methods of, 115 Akhmatova, Anna, 96, 102n46, 193–94 alcohol, 3, 31–32 Aleksandr I, 151 Aleksandr II (the Liberator), 43, 59 Aleksandrov, Aleksandr, 189 All-Russian Writers’ Trade Union (Vserossiiskii professional’nyi soiuz pisatelei), 96 America: CIA and, 13, 201; Hoover and, 3 Ancients, Moderns and, 108–9 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 61, 218 “anti-parasite” laws, 135 anti-tsarist movement, 127, 128, 147, 195 apocalypse, 25, 167, 168 ark: myths of flood and, 24–29; Russia as, 26 art, 57; avant-garde, 112–14; as cultural education, 149; with modernity and

consciousness, 120n7; Moscow Art Theatre, 13, 150, 169; peasants and, 114; role of, 112, 114 Art for Art’s sake, 109 artistic freedom, 200 Askol’dov, Aleksandr, 1 assembly, freedom of, 127 “At the Top of My Voice” (“Vo ves’ golos”) (Mayakovsky), 38, 41n43 authoritarianism, 45, 232 avant-garde, 109, 112–14 Axelrod, Pavel, 62 Baba Yaga (folkloric character), 14n1 backwardness, 6–7, 97 The Badgers (Barsuki) (Leonov), 179 Bakunin, Mikhail, 58, 60, 69 “Before the Storm” (Herzen), 28 “Before the Storm” (“Pered burei”) (Lenin), 29 Belaia gvardiia. See White Guard Belinsky, Vissarion, 53–54, 57, 69, 75 Bely, Andrei, 25, 73, 165 Berdiaev, Nikolai, 69, 70 Berlin, Isaiah, 56, 194 Berman, Art, 106–7 Besy. See Demons Bible: Apocalypse, 25; Exodus, 176, 206; flood and ark, 24–29; Galatians

243

244

Index

6:7, 2; Genesis, 24; Hosea, 2–3; John 12:24, 76; Psalm 18:11, 214, 227n65; Revelation, 3, 131, 167, 168, 169, 205, 206 Billington, James, 10–11 “The Birth of the Russian Intelligentsia” (Berlin), 56 Biulleteni literatury i zhizni. See Reports from Literature and Life Black Hundreds (Union of the Russian People), 67–68, 135 black snow, 152–58 Black Snow. See White Guard Blanc, Louis, 57 Bliznets v tuchakh. See Twin in the Stormclouds Blok, Aleksandr, 25, 39, 74–80, 165; Gorky and, 83; influence of, 208; Remizov and, 83–84; “The Twelve” and, 80–83 Bloody Sunday, 68, 89–90, 126 Bolsheviks, 62–63, 133, 136; avantgarde art and, 113; criticism of, 89, 92; Decembrists and, 52; in Doctor Zhivago, 208–9; Populism and, 72– 73; seizure of power and meaning of, 63, 129–32; using violence, 67. See also language, weaponized Bolshoi Theatre, 138–39, 195 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 19, 22, 49, 55, 151 Bonnell, Victoria E., 131 Borodin, Aleksandr, 20 bourgeois: intelligentsia, 45–46, 90, 143; modernity, 109; with negative connotations, 110, 117–20; persecution, 133–35; rejection of, 111; repression of, 118 Brat’ia Karamazovy. See The Brothers Karamazov bread riots, 125 Bronze Horseman, 23, 25 The Bronze Horseman (Pushkin), 24– 25, 31, 84 Brooks, Jeffrey, 189

The Brothers Karamazov (Brat’ia Karamazovy) (Dostoevsky), 70, 76, 162 The Brothers Turbin (Bulgakov), 150 Brown, Edward, 37–38, 41n43 Bukharin, Nikolai, 136, 198, 199, 200, 225n23 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 25, 39, 70, 173, 203, 209, 231; early life of, 147, 148–50; Landmarks group and, 230; Stalin and, 169; weaponized language and, 149. See also Days of the Turbins; A Theatrical Novel; White Guard Bulgakov, Sergei, 69, 70, 71 Burbank, Jane, 69 The Captain’s Daughter (Pushkin), 25 The Captive Mind (Milosz), 229, 232 Catechism of a Revolutionary (Nechaev), 71 Catherine II (the Great), 23, 46, 47, 49, 195 censorship, 13, 52, 55, 67, 132, 173, 194 Chaadaev, Petr, 54–55 Chaika. See The Seagull Chapaev (Furmanov), 174 Charles XII of Sweden, 23 Chekhov, Anton, 71, 89, 169, 219 Chernov, Viktor, 11, 91 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 36, 51, 57, 58–59, 62, 112; rational egoism and, 153; in Siberia, 58 Children of the Sun (Deti solntsa) (Gorky), 90, 91 Christianity, 19, 25, 27, 55, 109, 221 Chto delat’? See What Is To Be Done? Chukovsky, Kornei, 83 CIA, 13, 201 Civic Critics, 56, 57, 60, 230 Civil War narratives, 140, 173–78 Clark, Katerina, 7, 8, 9 class consciousness, 10, 89, 174, 175– 76, 203, 221

Index

class war: as culture war, 139–43; as mobilization strategy, 140 “A Cloud in Pants” (“Oblako v shtanakh”) (Mayakovsky), 195 Cold War, 13, 201 collective farms (kolkhozy), 4, 97, 140 collectivization: famine and, 5; forced, 139; Gorky and, 97–98; industrialization and, 139, 193; Sholokhov and, 187, 189; Stalin and, 4, 7–8, 97. See also grain commercial farms, 115 Commissar (film), 1–2 Commission for the Protection of Monuments and Antiquity, 95 Committee for Freedom and Culture, 95 Communism, 229; and art, role of, 114; roots of, 44 Communist Party: on living space, 209; membership, 140 confessions, false, 188, 197 conscience, Gorky as, 87–99 consciousness: art and, 120n7; class, 10, 89, 174, 175–76, 203, 221; self-, 106, 108; spontaneity and, 174; worker, 115 Constituent Assembly, 63, 81, 94, 101n39, 128, 213 Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party, 67 A Correspondence with Friends (Gogol), 75 Couvée, Petra, 196 creation myths, 178; of flood and ark, 24–29; origin stories and, 21, 217 creative intelligentsia, 14, 56–57, 69, 73, 74, 83 Crimean War, 7 crop failures, 115–16 Cubism, 112–13 cult of personality, Stalin and, 136 cultural absolutism, Marxism and, 111 cultural army, language of, 138–39 Cultural Revolution, 138–43

245

culture, 51; arts education and, 149; avant-garde, 112–14; Committee for Freedom and Culture, 95; gap, 130; literary, 52; militancy and mass, 140; modernity and, 109; myths and, 110; origin stories and, 110; spiritual values and, 69; spread of, 142; war as class war, 139–43. See also language, weaponized Culture and Life (Kul’tura i zhizn’) (journal), 200 cyclical time, 109, 168, 216–17 The Day of the World (Den’ mira) (Gorky), 98, 105, 106 Days of the Turbins (Dni Turbinykh) (Bulgakov), 13, 150, 156, 157, 158, 169 A Dead Man’s Memoir. See A Theatrical Novel Dead Souls (Gogol), 20, 75, 169 death, of mother, 159, 204 Decadents, 69, 109 The Decembrist Myth in Russian Culture (Trigos), 51 Decembrists, 22, 48–52 Decree on the Press (1917), 131 democracy (demokratiia): connotations, 128; liberal, 121, 128 Demons (Besy) (Dostoevsky), 162, 166 Den’ mira. See The Day of the World destruction, gospel of, 60 Deti solntsa. See Children of the Sun “Detstvo Luvers.” See “Zhenia’s Childhood” dictatorship, Populism to, 60–64 Diocletian (Roman emperor), 221 Divine Sophia, 101n37 “Dizzy with Success” (Stalin), 4, 98 Dni Turbinykh. See Days of the Turbins Dobrenko, Evgeny, 132 Dobroliubov, Nikolai, 57, 59–60, 153 Doctor Zhivago (Pasternak, B.), 39, 189, 199–204, 229–30; Bolsheviks in, 208–9; censorship of, 13, 194;

246

Index

as Cold War weapon, 13, 201; as counterrevolutionary novel, 199–202; death of mother in, 204; elementality in, 221; and embodiment of principle, 214–17; fathers in, 205; flood imagery in, 13, 202–9; Khrushchev on, 202; living space and, 209–14; New York Times review of, 202; reality of life and, 220–24; sea metaphor in, 203, 207–8, 221; snow in, 159; storm imagery in, 13, 202–9, 211–12, 220–21; Yuri’s diary in, 218–20; Zhivago name in, 203 Doroga na okean. See Road to the Ocean Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 25, 28, 58, 76, 219; influence of, 70, 71, 86, 162, 165–66; Leonov and, 179; snow and, 152–53 Dovzhenko, Aleksandr, 114 Dralyuk, Boris, 32 Duma, 20, 30, 31, 72, 117 “Dvenadtsat’.” See “The Twelve” Dvenadtsat’ stul’ev. See The Twelve Chairs Dzerzhinskii, Felix, 88 economy: NEP, 137, 149, 173, 179; peasants and, 115 education: art as cultural, 149; literacy and, 7; mass, 139; propaganda as, 132 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 199 Eisenstein, Sergei, 114 elections, 63, 151 electrification, 7, 142–43 elemental force (stikhinost’), 9, 92, 97, 155, 174, 203, 211, 221 Elrich, Victor, 200–201 Emancipation Manifesto, 43 Emelianova, Irina, 201 Enlightenment, origin stories and, 21–23 Envy (Zavist’) (Olesha), 149 equal rights, for women, 125 escape with honor, 161–64

Esteticheskie otnosheniia iskusstva k deistvitel’nosti. See The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality “The Ethic of Nihilism” (Frank), 118–19 Eugene Onegin (Pushkin), 227n81 Everyday Stalinism (Fitzpatrick), 6–7 Exodus, 176, 206 “The Extraordinary Adventures of a Doctor” (“Neobyknovennye prikliucheniia doktora”) (Bulgakov), 148 family: importance of, 159; intelligentsia, 212; living space and, 209–10, 212–14; mother, death of, 159, 204; motherhood and, 141; Stalinist Great Family, 205. See also White Guard famine, 3–4, 5, 15n9, 36, 60, 115–16, 186, 193 Fathers and Sons (Turgenev), 45, 59 “February…” (“Feyral’…”) (Pasternak, B.), 155 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 57 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 53 Figes, Orlando, 45, 128, 134, 136 Figner, Vera, 45 filmmakers, 114 Finn, Peter, 196 First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, 174, 200 First Five-Year Plan, 4–5, 7–9, 137, 187 Fitzpatrick, Sheila, 6–7, 20, 140 floods, 21; in Bronze Horseman, 24–25; in Doctor Zhivago, 13, 202–9; enchanted, 29–32; Mystery-Bouffe and, 33, 34–35; myths of ark and, 24–29; in St. Petersburg, 23, 24. See also The Iron Flood “former people,” 147–70 “Forty Times Forty” (“Sorok sorokov”) (Bulgakov), 149 Fourier, Charles, 57 France, 22, 51, 53

Index

Frank, Semyon, 69, 70, 71, 118–19 freedoms: artistic, 200; of assembly, 127; Herzen on, 26–27, 29; for peasants, 60; of press, 127; of speech, 93, 127, 132 “the freest country in the world,” Russia as, 127–29 Freidenberg, Olga, 194 French Enlightenment, 46 French Revolution, 27, 46, 51 Fridliand, Mikhail. See Kol’tsov, Mikhail From the Depths (Iz glubiny), 72 From the Other Shore (Herzen), 27, 28 Furmanov, Dmitri, 174 Futurists, 33, 37–38, 112–13, 114, 163, 195 Gapon (Father), 89–90 Genesis, Book of, 24 Germany, 148, 160 Gershenzon, Mikhail, 69, 70 Gogol, Nikolai, 20, 25, 55, 57, 71, 75, 169, 219 Golden Age of Russian Poetry (Age of Pushkin), 31, 101n26 The Golden Fleece (Zolotoe runo) (journal), 74 Goldman, Wendy, 134 Gorky, Maxim, 3, 38, 58, 68, 200; Blok and, 83; Bloody Sunday and, 89–90; and Bolsheviks, criticism of, 92; collectivization and, 97–98; as conscience of Revolution, 87–99; early years, 89; on elections, 63; influence of, 174; influences on, 105; Landmarks group and, 87–88, 94, 230; legacy of, 30, 87–88, 95; Lenin and, 29, 91, 93, 96–97; on politics, 93; salutary lie and, 88, 98, 99; on violence, 92 grain: bumper crops, 3–4; metaphor, 179, 180, 183, 184; procurement, 4–5; requisitions, 3, 179,

247

213; shortages, 188. See also collectivization Great Northern War, 23 Great October Socialist Revolution, 2, 7, 105, 201 Great Purges, 140, 187 Great Reforms, 43, 127 Grim Reaper, 1, 14n1 Grossman, Vasily, 2 Groza. See The Storm Guchkov, Aleksandr, 20 Gudok. See The Whistle GULAG, 194, 221 Gumilev, Nikolai, 96, 102n46 “Ham’s Departure” (“Ukhod Khama”) (Leonov), 178 The Heart of a Dog (Sobach’e serdtse) (Bulgakov), 209 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 53, 57 Hellbeck, Jochen, 116 Herzen, Aleksandr, 38, 51; on Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov, 57; on freedom, 26–27, 29; influence of, 56; Populism and, 61; shore and, 27–28 Historical Letters (Istoricheskie pis’ma) (Lavrov), 61 Holodomor, 5, 15n9, 186 holy fool (yurodivy), 198 honor, escape with, 161–64 Hoover, Herbert, 3 Hope Against Hope (Mandelshtam, N.), 225n23 Hosea, Book of, 2–3 “How I Learned to Write” (interview), 89 How the Bolsheviks Seized Power (Mel’gunov), 11 “How to Organize Competition” (“Kak organizovat’ sorevnovanie”) (Lenin), 133 Hutchings, Stephen, 86 Iambs (Iamby) (Blok), 75–76

248

Index

The Icon and the Axe (Billington), 10 “If Tomorrow Brings War,” 7 Ilf, Ilya, 149 immortality, 48, 215 individuals, rights of, 133, 202 industrialization: collectivization and, 139, 193; First Five-Year Plan and, 4, 5, 7–9, 137, 187; as ritualized myth, 8; self and, 114, 115 “In Memory of Herzen” (Lenin), 51–52 “Instruction” (Nakaz) (Catherine II), 46, 49 intelligentsia, 43, 67, 151; bourgeois, 45–46, 90, 143; creative, 14, 56–57, 69, 73, 74, 83; Decembrist myth and, 48–52; defined, 44; duty of, 92; families, 212; feelings toward Revolution, 73–80; and Gorky as conscience, 87–99; Landmarks debate, 68–73; leaders of, 56–60; national identity and, 52–56; plebeian, 57–58; politics and, 44–45; from Populism to dictatorship, 60– 64; radical, 45, 59, 70, 71, 110–11, 116, 230; Radishchev and, 47–48; raznochintsy and, 44–45, 50, 51, 56, 60–61; revolutionary, 53, 56–57, 69, 72, 111, 118, 143; as “surrogate bourgeoisie,” 45, 135; “The Twelve,” 80–83; types, 69; “When Will the Real Day Come?” and, 59–60; Whirlwind Russia and, 83–87 “The Intelligentsia and the Revolution” (“Intelligentsiia i revoliutsiia”) (Blok), 76–77, 80, 81, 83 “The Internationale,” 7, 37, 119, 130 International Workers’ Day, 113 “In the Town of Berdichev” (Grossman), 2 The Iron Flood (Zheleznyi potok) (Serafimovich), 13, 174–78, 180, 184 Istoricheskie pis’ma. See Historical Letters “It’s Too Early to Rejoice” (“Radovat’sia rano”) (Mayakovsky), 113

Ivashov, Vladimir, 175 Ivinskaya, Olga, 201 Iz glubiny. See From the Depths Izgoev, A. S., 69, 72 John 12:24, 76 Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu) (Radishchev), 47–48, 61 justice system, 127 Kadet Party. See Constitutional Democratic Party “Kak organizovat’ sorevnovanie.” See “How to Organize Competition” Karamzin, Nikolai, 27–28 Kerensky, Aleksandr, 31, 82, 195 Ketman, 229, 231 KGB, 197, 200 Khodasevich, Vladislav, 88 Khrushchev, Nikita, 202 Khudoyarov, Vassily, 21–22 “The Kingdom of Darkness” (“Temnoe tsarstvo”) (Dobroliubov), 59 Kistyakovsky, Bogdan, 69 Knizhnaia lava pisatelei. See Writers’ Bookshop “Kogda zhe pridet nastoiashchii den’?” See “When Will the Real Day Come?” kolkhozy. See collective farms Kol’tsov, Mikhail (Mikhail Fridliand), 30–31, 38, 105 Komsomol. See Young Communists League Koshchei Bessmertniy (folkloric character), 14n1 Krasnoe derevo. See Mahogany kulaks, 4, 5, 138, 183 Kul’tura i zhizn’. See Culture and Life Kuprin, Aleksandr, 96 labor: man alienated from, 10; strikes, 125–26; unrest and militancy, 116 Labor’s Banner (Znamia truda), 76

Index

“Lament for the Destruction of the Russian Land” (Remizov), 84 Land and Liberty (Zemlia i volia), 62 Landmarks (Vekhi) debate, 68–73 Landmarks group (vekhovtsy), 69; authors, 71, 94, 230; and class enemies, purging of, 118–19; Gorky and, 87–88, 94, 230; influence of, 116; personalist viewpoint of, 230 language: of cultural army, 138–39; cultural revolution incited by, 108; divisive, 119, 120. See also metaphors language, weaponized: Bolshevik seizure of power and meaning, 129–32; Bulgakov and, 149; control of, 12, 196; and culture war as class war, 139–43; and “the freest country in the world,” 127–29; in historical context, 125–26; social purging, state terror and, 133–39; symbols and, 130–31 Lavrov, Petr, 57, 61, 119 Lebedev-Kumach, Vasily, 189 Left Socialist Revolutionary party, 95 Lenin, Vladimir, 58, 71, 89, 111, 127; death of, 136; on Decembrists, 51–52; electrification and, 7, 142–43; Gorky and, 29, 91, 93, 96–97; Marxism and, 116; Pasternak and, 204; persecutions and, 135; regrets of, 136; as storm, 204; taking control, 62–63, 129–30, 133; on technology, 142–43 “Lenin’s Testament” (“Zaveshchanie Lenina”) (Lenin), 136 Leonov, Leonid, 13, 178–82, 203 Levitan, Isaac, 20 liberal democracy, 121, 128 liberals, socialists and, 68 literacy, 7, 114–15 literary culture, 52 Literary Gazette (Literaturnaia gazeta), 197 literature, weaponization of, 200–201

249

Literature and Revolution (Literatura i revoliutsiia) (Trotsky), 132 Livak, Leonid, 120n7 living space, 209–14 Livingstone, Angela, 155 Louis XIV, 159 The Lower Depths (Na dne) (Gorky), 88, 89 “Luch sveta v temnom tsarstve.” See “A Ray of Light in the Kingdom of Darkness” Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 149 machine. See technology “Magic Tablecloth,” 189 Mahogany (Krasnoe derevo) (Pilnyak), 200 Malevich, Kazimir, 112–13 Malia, Martin, 61 Mandelshtam, Nadezhda, 137–38, 194, 200, 225n23 Mandelshtam, Osip, 194, 198, 225n23 “Marburg” (Pasternak, B.), 155 “The Marseillaise,” 31, 67, 119, 130 Martov, Yulii, 91 Marx, Karl, 6, 7 Marx, Leo, 9 Marxism, 36, 62; cultural absolutism and, 111; famine and, 116; on man alienated from labor, 10; Populism and, 110; rejection of, 179 mass culture, militancy and, 140 mass education, 139 mass terror, 133, 134, 137–38 The Master and Margarita (Master i Margarita) (Bulgakov), 150, 169 Mat’. See Mother Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 195; on avant-garde art, 113; MysteryBouffe and, 32–38; October Revolution and, 33; RAPP and, 38; Stalin and, 195; suicide and, 38, 41n43, 169, 195 meaning, Bolshevik seizure of power and, 129–32

250

Index

media: censorship, 67; freedom of press and, 127; free press for working class, 118; on Nicholas II, abdication of, 126; peasants and, 149; restrictions on, 131–32 Medical Worker (Meditsinskii rabotnik) (journal), 147 Mel’gunov, Sergei, 11 Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Figner), 45 metaphors: flood, 11, 21, 29–39, 174– 78, 202–9; grain, 179, 180, 183, 184; harvest, 174, 183–86, 219, 221, 231– 32; mother, death of, 159, 204; sea, 167, 176–77, 203, 207, 208; shore, 27–28; of Soviet life, 6–11; sowing and reaping, 2–3, 21, 93; storm, vii, 11–12, 20–21, 27–28, 29, 38–39, 51, 54, 73–86, 147–48, 152–57, 179, 183, 202–9, 211–12, 220–21, 231–32 Mikhailovskii, Nikolai, 57 militancy, mass culture and, 140 Miliukov, Pavel, 11 Milosz, Czeslaw, 229, 230, 232 Mirsky, D. S., 57–58 mobilization strategy, class war as, 140 mob violence, 67, 90, 91 modernism, defined, 120n7 modernity: art and, 120n7; bourgeois, 109; cultural/aesthetic, 109; defined, 108; fight for, 107–12; and incomparable age, 106; myth of, 12, 108, 110, 111 Moderns, Ancients and, 108–9 Molotov, Vyacheslav, 4 Mongol invasion, 107 Moscow (Moskva) (journal), 170 Moscow Art Theatre, 13, 150, 169 mother, metaphor of death of, 159, 204 Mother (Mat’) (Gorky), 30, 117, 174 motherhood, 141 “movers-up” (vydvizhentsy), 140 Muratov, Pavel, 96 Muscovite Code of Laws, 46 “My Genealogy” (Pushkin), 219, 227n81

My Sister Life (Sestra moia—zhizn’) (Pasternak, B.), 195 Mystery-Bouffe (Mayakovsky): criticism of, 195; flood and, 33, 34–35; origin stories and, 32–38 myths: Christianity and, 19, 109; creation, 21, 178, 217; culture and, 110; Decembrist, 48–52; of flood, 29–32; of flood and ark, 24–29; industrialization as ritualized, 8; of modernity, 12, 108, 110, 111; national, 19–20; “Radiant Future,” 84, 106, 199, 217. See also origin stories Na dne. See The Lower Depths Nakanune. See On the Eve Nakaz. See “Instruction” “Narod i intelligentsiia.” See “The People and the Intelligentsia” Narodnaia volia. See People’s Will national identity, 38; origin stories and, 19; quest for, 11–12, 52–56 natural law, 22, 23, 48, 49, 51, 85, 230 Nechaev, Sergei, 58, 62, 71 “Neobyknovennye prikliucheniia doktora.” See “The Extraordinary Adventures of a Doctor” Neuberger, Joan, 118 Nevsky, Aleksandr, 19 New Economic Policy (NEP), 137, 149, 173, 179 New Life (Novaia zhizn’) (newspaper), 32, 87, 93 New Soviet Man, 30, 174 New World (Novy mir), 201 Nicholas I, 22–23, 24, 26, 43; Decembrists and, 52; October Manifesto and, 67, 68, 72, 117, 127; Third Department and, 52 Nicholas II, 20, 126 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 109 nihilism, 45, 58, 60, 62, 71, 72, 92, 94, 113, 118, 209 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell), 116

Index

Nobel Prize for Literature, 39, 182, 202, 229 nomenclature, changes of, 130 Notes from Underground (Zapiski iz podpol’ia) (Dostoevsky), 28, 152–53 Notes of a Young Doctor (Zapiski iunogo vracha) (Bulgakov), 147 Notes on the Cuffs (Zapiski na manzhetakh) (Bulgakov), 148, 149 Novaia zhizn’. See New Life Novikov, Nikolai, 46, 48, 57, 58 Novy mir. See New World “Oblako v shtanakh.” See “A Cloud in Pants” Ocherki gogolevskogo perioda russkoi literatury. See Studies of the Age of Gogol October Manifesto, 67, 68, 72, 117, 127 October Revolution (1917), 6, 29, 33, 37, 113 “An Ode to Liberty” (Radishchev), 47 Olesha, Yuri, 149 “Onegin’s Journey” (Pushkin), 219, 227n81 On the Eve (Nakanune) (Turgenev), 59, 84, 149 origin stories: creation myth and, 21, 217; culture and, 110; Enlightenment and, 21–23; flood, enchanted, 29–32; flood and ark, myths of, 24–29; Mystery-Bouffe and, 32–38; national identity and, 19; role of, 5 Orwell, George, 116 Ostrovsky, Alexander, 55, 59 Ouspensky, Leonid, 131 “Out of Backwardness,” 6–7 “Party Organization and Party Literature” (“Partiinaia organizatsiia i partiinaia literatura”) (Lenin), 112 Pasternak, Boris, 39, 74, 110, 201; legacy of, 196, 200; Lenin and, 204; Nobel Prize for Literature for, 202; and persecution, resistance against,

251

193–94, 197; on “reality of life,” 220; Soviet power, dialogue with, 194–99; Stalin and, 194, 195, 197, 198, 199; Trotsky and, 196; and weather imagery, 153–55. See also Doctor Zhivago Pasternak, Zinaida, 197 Patyk, Lynn Ellen, 24, 48 Paul (Emperor), 46 Payne, Robert, 32–33 The Peasant Newspaper, 149 peasants, 78; art and, 114; collectivization and, 4; economy and, 115; freedom for, 60; grain requisitions and, 3, 179, 213; kulaks, 4, 5, 138, 183; media and, 149; Populism and, 61–62; revolts, 3, 19, 68, 165; serfdom and, 43, 47, 50, 134; urban proletariat from, 115–16; violence of, 144n6, 165 “The People and the Intelligentsia” (“Narod i intelligentsiia”) (Blok), 74–75 People’s Will (Narodnaia volia), 24, 43, 51, 62 “Pered burei.” See “Before the Storm” persecution: of bourgeoisie, 133–35; of Christians, 221; religious, 135; resistance against, 193–94, 197; Zhdanov Doctrine and, 193 personal transformation, 72, 117, 208 Pesnia sud’by. See The Song of Fate Petersburg (Peterburg) (Bely), 25, 73 Peter the Great, 8, 22–23, 24–25, 55, 84, 159 Petlyura, Semyon, 148, 151 Petrograd Theatre of Tragedy, 95 Petrov, Yevgeny, 149 Petrunkevich, Ivan, 67 philistine, the revolutionary and, 109 Philosophical Letters (Chaadaev), 54 Pilling, John, 154 Pilnyak, Boris, 197, 200 Pisarev, Dmitri, 57, 60, 153 plebeian intelligentsia, 57–58

252

Index

Plekhanov, Georgii, 62, 91 Podniataia tselina. See Virgin Soil Upturned policy, cultural revolution incited by, 108 Polish-Soviet War, 173 politics: avant-garde, 112–14; Constituent Assembly, 63, 81, 94, 101n39, 128, 213; Gorky on, 93; intelligentsia and, 44–45; and power, decentralization of, 128; Provisional Government, 63, 126, 127–28, 147; violence and, 148 The Poor (newspaper), 149 Populism: Bolsheviks and, 72–73; to dictatorship, 60–64; Herzen and, 61; Marxism and, 110; peasants and, 61–62 Postyshev, Pavel, 4–5, 217 power: Bolshevik seizure of meaning and, 129–32; decentralization of, 128; mass terror and, 133, 134, 137– 38; Pasternak, B., and dialogue with Soviet, 194–99; of saints, 131 Pravda (newspaper), 4, 149, 197 Preface to Modernism (Berman), 106 Proletkul’t, 113–14 propaganda, as education, 132 Provisional Government, 63, 126, 127–28, 147 Psalm 18:11, 214, 227n65 psychological pressures, 142 Pugachev, Emelyan, 25, 51, 165 purges: of class enemies, 118–19; Great Purges, 140, 187; KGB and, 197, 200; state terror and social, 133–39 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 38, 71, 84, 165, 219, 227n81; on Peter the Great, 22–23, 24–25; snow symbolism and, 165. See also Golden Age of Russian Poetry Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu. See Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow Pyman, Avril, 74

Quiet Don (Tikhi Don) (Sholokhov), 13, 174, 182–89 Rachmaninoff, Sergei, 31 “The Radiant Future” (“Svetloe budushchee”) (Zinoviev, A.), 6 “Radiant Future” myth, 84, 106, 199, 217 radical intelligentsia, 45, 59, 70, 71, 110–11, 116, 230 Radishchev, Aleksandr, 47–48, 57, 58, 61 “Radovat’sia rano.” See “It’s Too Early to Rejoice” Randall, Francis B., 27, 28 RAPP. See Russian Association of Proletarian Writers “A Ray of Light in the Kingdom of Darkness” (“Luch sveta v temnom tsarstve”) (Dobroliubov), 59 Razin, Stenka, 51 raznochintsy, 44–45, 50, 51, 56, 60–61 Read, Christopher, 69, 212 reaping, sowing and, 2–3, 21, 93 Red Terror, 14, 63, 71, 94, 120, 128, 133, 181 religious persecution, 135 religious separatism, 55 religious symbols, 131 Remizov, Alexei, 25, 39, 83–87 Renaissance, 107, 108–9 Reports from Literature and Life (Biulleteni literatury i zhizni) (journal), 72 “Retribution” (Blok), 25 Revelation, 3, 131, 167, 168, 169, 205, 206 Revolution and Culture (Revoliutsiia i kul’tura) (Bely), 73 the revolutionary, philistine and, 109 revolutionary intelligentsia, 53, 56–57, 69, 72, 111, 118, 143 revolutionary movement, 44, 114–17. See also intelligentsia revolutionary self, 114–17, 230

Index

rights: of individuals, 133, 202; women and equal, 125 Road to the Ocean (Doroga na okean) (Leonov), 181 Romanov, Alexei, 107, 159 Russia: as ark, 26; as “the freest country in the world,” 127–29 “Russia” (“Rossiia”) (Bely), 73 Russia (Rossiia) (journal), 150 Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), 38, 139 Russian Orthodox Church, 131 Russo-Japanese War, 7 saints, power of, 131 Saint-Simon, Henri de, 57 salutary lie, 88, 98, 99 scapegoats, 45, 69, 108, 111, 119, 133, 215, 231 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 53 “Scythians” (“Skify”) (Blok), 80 The Seagull (Chaika) (Chekhov), 169 sea metaphor, 167, 176–77, 203, 207, 208, 221 Selected Passages from a Correspondence with Friends (Vybrannye mesta iz perepiski s druz’iami) (Gogol), 75 self-consciousness, 106, 108 self-transformation, 72, 117, 208 Serafimovich, Aleksandr, 13, 174–78, 180, 184, 203 serfdom, 43, 47, 50, 134 Serge, Viktor, 98 Sestra moia—zhizn’. See My Sister Life Shakhty, trial of, 139 Shalamov, Varlam, 203 “Shiroka strana moia rodnaia.” See “Song of the Motherland” Shishkin, Ivan, 20 Sholokhov, Mikhail, 13, 174, 182–89 shore metaphor, 27–28 Siberia, 9, 23, 47, 58, 194, 221 Silver Age, 74, 101n26, 102n46

253

“Skify.” See “Scythians” “Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (Futurists), 195 slavery, 27, 32, 48, 91 Slavophiles, Westernizers and, 53, 69 Slezkine, Yuri, 31 slogans, 7, 62, 84, 142–43, 189, 219, 229 Slonim, Mark, 202 Slyozkin, Yury, 149 “smiling satire” (ulibatel’naia satira), 46 Smith, Anthony D., 19 snow: apocalypse, 164–69; black, 152–58; in Doctor Zhivago, 159; symbols, 158–59, 165; wet, 152–53; in “Zhenia’s Childhood,” 153–54 “The Snowstorm” (Bulgakov), 147–48, 152 Sobach’e serdtse. See The Heart of a Dog Socialist Realism, 8–9, 13, 30, 132, 174, 176, 178, 181–82, 200 socialist revolution, 2, 7, 33, 92, 105, 107, 201 socialists, liberals and, 68 social philosophy, 56 social purging, state terror and, 133–39 Soiuz deiateli khodozhestvennoi literatury. See Union of Belleslettristes Sologub, Fedor, 96 Solov’iev, Vladimir, 101n37 The Song of Fate (Pesnia sud’by) (Blok), 74 “Song of the Motherland” (“Shiroka strana moia rodnaia”), 189 “The Song of the Stormy Petrel” (Gorky), 29, 88 “Sorok sorokov.” See “Forty Times Forty” Soviet life: machine and, 8; metaphors of, 6–11 Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, 31, 91 Soviet River (Sot’) (Leonov), 181

254

Index

sowing and reaping metaphor, 2–3, 21, 93 speech, freedom of, 93, 127, 132 spiritual values, culture and, 69 spontaneity, consciousness and, 174 Stalin, Joseph, 63, 89, 140, 232; Bulgakov and, 169; collectivization and, 4, 7–8, 97; criticism of, 198; and cult of personality, 136; Days of the Turbins and, 13; mass terror and, 138; Mayakovsky and, 195; Pasternak, B., and, 194, 195, 197, 198, 199; Sholokhov and, 187, 188; in Siberia, 9 Stalinist Great Family, 205 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 157 “Stanzas” (Pushkin), 22–23, 25 starvation, 3, 5, 95, 149 state terror, social purging and, 133–39 Stavsky, Vladimir, 187–88 Steinberg, Mark, 21 stikhinost’. See elemental force The Storm (Groza) (Ostrovsky), 59 storms: black snow, 152–58; Doctor Zhivago and imagery of, 13, 202–9, 211–12, 220–21; invitation for, 78; Lenin as, 204; Quiet Don and imagery of, 183, 186; “The Snowstorm” and imagery of, 147–48, 152; White Guard and imagery of, 148 Stravinsky, Igor, 20 strikes, labor, 125–26 Struve, Petr, 69, 70 Studies of the Age of Gogol (Ocherki gogolevskogo perioda russkoi literatury) (Chernyshevsky), 57 suicide, 38, 41n43, 169, 184, 195, 198 Sukhanov, Nikolai, 98 Surkov, Alexei, 200 “surrogate bourgeoisie,” intelligentsia as, 45, 135 Sverdlov, Yakov, 217 “Svetloe budushchee.” See “The Radiant Future”

Symbolists, 69, 73, 74, 79, 165 symbols: mass terror and, 133; religious, 131; snow, 158–59, 165; in weaponized language, 130–31 Tabidze, Nina, 197, 199 Tabidze, Titsian, 197 Tatlin, Vladimir, 113 Teatral’nyi roman. See A Theatrical Novel technology: Lenin on, 142–43; machine and, 8, 9 Telescope (Teleskop) (journal), 54 “Temnoe tsarstvo.” See “The Kingdom of Darkness” Terras, Victor, 59 terror: KGB and, 197, 200; mass, 133, 134, 137–38; Red Terror, 14, 63, 71, 94, 120, 128, 133, 181; social purging and state, 133–39 terrorism, 43, 62, 63, 73, 127 Teutonic Knights, 19 A Theatrical Novel (Teatral’nyi roman; A Dead Man’s Memoir) (Bulgakov), 39, 150, 155–58 The Thief (Leonov), 13, 178–82 Third Department, 52 Thomson, Boris, 178 Tikhi Don. See Quiet Don Tkachev, Petr, 62 Tolstoy, Leo, 61, 74, 89, 90, 159, 182, 187, 204 torture, 3, 134, 177, 188 “To Siberia” (Pushkin), 23 totalitarianism, 45, 98, 99, 232 “To the Emperor Nicholas I” (Pushkin), 22 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, 7 Trigos, Ludmilla, 51 Trotsky, Lev (Leon), 58, 62, 91, 93, 136, 167, 197; Pasternak, B., and, 196; on propaganda as education, 132 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 31, 195 Turgenev, Ivan, 45, 55, 57, 59, 71, 84

Index

“The Twelve” (“Dvenadtsat’”) (Blok), 80–83 The Twelve Chairs (Dvenadtsat’ stul’ev) (Ilf and Petrov), 149 Twin in the Stormclouds (Bliznets v tuchakh) (Pasternak, B.), 194 tyranny, 25, 44, 48, 136–37, 143, 181, 232–33 Tyutchev, Feodor, 25–26, 38 “Ukhod Khama.” See “Ham’s Departure” ulibatel’naia satira. See “smiling satire” uncertainty, 1, 28, 43, 159, 209, 231 Union of Belleslettristes (Soiuz deiateli khodozhestvennoi literatury), 96 Union of Soviet Writers, 105 Union of the Russian People. See Black Hundreds Union of Welfare, 50–51 United States. See America urban proletariat, from peasants, 115–16 utopian dreams, 38, 58–59 Utopian Socialism, in France, 51, 53 Vekhi debate. See Landmarks debate vekhovtsy. See Landmarks group Vertov, Dziga, 114 violence, 71; Bloody Sunday and, 68, 89–90, 126; Bolsheviks and, 67; Gorky on, 92; at labor strikes, 126; mob, 67, 90, 91; peasants and, 144n6, 165; politics and, 148; rejection of, 48 Virgin Soil Upturned (Podniataia tselina) (Sholokhov), 187 Vladimir Mayakovsky, A Tragedy (Mayakovsky), 37 von Geldern, James, 130, 132, 139, 142 Voronsky, Aleksandr, 217 “Vo ves’ golos.” See “At the Top of My Voice” Vserossiiskii professional’nyi soiuz pisatelei. See All-Russian Writers’ Trade Union

255

Vybrannye mesta iz perepiski s druz’iami. See Selected Passages from a Correspondence with Friends vydvizhentsy. See “movers-up” Vzvikhrennaia Rus’. See Whirlwind Russia War and Peace (Tolstoy), 182, 187, 204 We (Zamiatin), 8 weaponization, of literature, 200–201. See also language, weaponized weather: labor strikes and, 125; Pasternak, B., and, 153–55. See also floods; snow; storms Western ideals, 49, 50, 74, 139 Westernizers, Slavophiles and, 53 What Is To Be Done? (Chto delat’?) (Chernyshevsky), 36, 58–59, 62, 112 “When Will the Real Day Come?” (“Kogda zhe pridet nastoiashchii den’?”) (Dobroliubov), 59–60 Whirlwind Russia (Vzvikhrennaia Rus’) (Remizov), 25, 83–87 The Whistle (Gudok) (newspaper), 149 White Guard (Belaia gvardiia; Black Snow) (Bulgakov), 39, 150–70; banning of, 150; black snow and, 152–58; epigraph to, 25; escape with honor and, 161–64; fathers absent in, 205; “former people” and, 150–52; home imagery in, 159–60, 209; publication of, 169–70; snow apocalypse and, 164–69; snow symbolism in, 158–59; storm imagery in, 148; themes, 150 “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions” (Dostoevsky), 28 women: and death of mother, 159, 204; equal rights for, 125; motherhood and, 141 worker “consciousness,” 115 “Workers’ Marseillaise,” 119 Working Moscow (newspaper), 149 World War I, 7, 76, 182

256

Writers’ Bookshop (Knizhnaia lava pisatelei), 96 Yashvili, Paolo, 197 Young Communists League (Komsomol), 138–39 Young Russia (Zaichnevsky), 71 yurodivy. See holy fool Zaichnevsky, Petr, 71 Zamiatin, Evgeny, 8, 98 Zapiski iunogo vracha. See Notes of a Young Doctor Zapiski iz podpol’ia. See Notes from Underground Zapiski na manzhetakh. See Notes on the Cuffs

Index

Zasulich, Vera, 62 “Zaveshchanie Lenina.” See “Lenin’s Testament” Zavist’. See Envy Zemlia i volia. See Land and Liberty Zhdanov Doctrine (zhdanovshchina), 193 Zheleznyi potok. See The Iron Flood “Zhenia’s Childhood” (“Detstvo Luvers”) (Pasternak, B.), 153–54 The Zikovs (Zikovy) (Gorky), 98–99 Zinoviev, Aleksandr, 6 Zinoviev, Grigory, 6, 62 Znamia truda. See Labor’s Banner Zolotoe runo. See The Golden Fleece Zoshchenko, Mikhail, 193

About the Author

Lonny Harrison holds a PhD from the University of Toronto and is an associate professor of Russian at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he is also director of the Charles T. McDowell Center for Global Studies. Dr. Harrison specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature and has wider teaching and research interests in Russian film and media, propaganda, revolution, and cross-disciplinary approaches to intellectual and cultural history. His book Archetypes from Underground: Notes on the Dostoevskian Self was published in 2016. His research also appears in journals such as Slavic and East European Journal and Canadian Slavonic Papers. Work in progress includes a monograph on personas of the revolutionary terrorist in Russian fiction and memoirs, forthcoming in 2022.

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