The scene: an American college classroom, half a generation ago. The guest speaker: a highly placed literary bureaucrat from Moscow. The brash student`s questions concerned a recently exiled celebrity: ”Your lecture was supposed to cover all the great achievements of Soviet literature, but why haven`t you mentioned (Alexander) Solzhenitsyn? And why isn`t he published in your country?” Unperturbed, the wily old ideologue explained with an indulgent smile: ”Solzhenitsyn, my dear young man, is not a Soviet writer.” Today Solzhenitsyn is published in huge editions by private publishing houses and sold in streetcorner kiosks, and ”Soviet literature” has been relegated to the storeroom of historical terms. What did the term mean, anyway? As used by that visiting apparatchik it meant ”pro-Soviet
literature,” writing that embodied-or at least did not question-the values and policies promoted by the state. The traitor Solzhenitsyn had by virtue of his dissident writing defined himself not only out of the literary canon but also out of citizenship.
Though censorship-waxing and waning in periods of frost and thaw-tried to keep from readers anything that censors deemed subversive, Soviet literature as officially defined was hardly a homogeneous entity. It denoted not simply the continuation of the pre-revolutionary Russian literary tradition, but rather a multi-national compendium of all the literature written in any of the scores of languages of the Soviet Union. The establishment sought to make this body of writing seem the harmonious expression of a single people-for example, through the promotion of particular genres and themes (paeans to Stalin in a hundred languages, novels about heroic feats of record-breaking workers who behaved essentially the same way whether in the deserts of Central Asia or on the snowbound Siberian steppe).
Russian literature dominated, of course, as did everything else Russian in the Soviet empire, and when we take stock now of the writing produced between 1917 and 1991, it is Russian literature that claims our attention. But what Russian literature? When the chaff of written-to-order conformist fiction is cleared away, what remains of value?
Starting in the early Gorbachev years, Russian writers and literary critics began publicly discussing precisely this question. The object of debate was changing as they spoke: during the late `80s, as taboos were lifted and censorship disappeared, works long kept from the reading public, like Boris Pasternak`s ”Doctor Zhivago,” were at last published at home. This body of what came to be called ”delayed literature,” nearly all of it published previously in the West, could finally be acknowledged as an integral part of the literary heritage of the Soviet period.
That period began with a decade that produced more works of lasting value than any other decade since. The Bolshevik Revolution marked a sharp break with the past, but as far as literature was concerned, the `20s in many ways saw a continuation of the avant-garde flowering of the pre-war years. This is not to say that the best writers ignored politics-virtually no writers did, and poets were no exception. Since poetry loses so much in translation what follows largely ignores it-unforgivably, really, since poetry in Russia is accorded such great importance and so widely read. The first important literay work following the Revolution, was the great Symbolist poet Alexander Blok`s narrative poem ”The Twelve,” claimed by pro-Bolsheviks as a voice for their side but actually a vision of revolution more dark than radiant. And no account can omit the major poets who made their reputations in the `10s and
`20s: Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelshtam-and the controversial poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky, who powerfully expressed the artist`s conflicting attractions to art and individualism, on the one hand, and the common cause, on the other.
This sort of ambivalence colors much of the writing of the `20s. The experiences of the Civil War period (1918-1921) were most brilliantly captured in Isaac Babel`s ”Red Cavalry” stories, based on the author`s experiences as a military journalist. (A diary kept by Babel at this time, to be published in English next year, reveals even more poignantly the young writer`s struggle to reconcile his conscience to the violent realities of ends and means.) The White Guard-the main antagonist of the Reds, and the title of a beautiful novel by Mikhail Bulgakov-portrays how upheaval shook a naive and loving family wanting only to go on living as before. But probably the most important novel of those early years is Evgeny Zamyatin`s ”We”-an anti-utopia set thousands of years in the future and aimed not at the Russian scene in particular but more generally at the kinds of tyranny made possible by human frailty and technological progress. Orwell cited it as an important influence on 1984, and it still makes compelling reading.
Zamyatin was a master of satire as well, a genre that always proliferates in rapidly changing times and that therefore flourished in the `20s. Its most celebrated practitioner was Mikhail Zoshchenko, whose vignettes of the predicaments and frustrations of the post-revolutionary person on the street were read by millions and are still pretty funny. The idea of molding a ”new Soviet person” equal to the tasks of the new order was skillfully lampooned in Bulgakov`s novella ”Heart of a Dog,” but not all writers were such cynics. Published in the same year-1925-was one novel you may not want to run out and get: Fyodor Gladkov`s ”Cement,” a precursor of the ”production novels” of the `30s which really is about a cement factory and which takes very seriously the building of Soviet industry and of a new Soviet man and woman.
The ”tasks of socialist construction,” to use the Soviet jargon of the time, received more engaging treatment in a few books that are still worth reading: Yuri Olesha`s wickedly funny novel ”Envy,” and the difficult, haunting novels of Andrei Platonov. ”Chevengur” is about a naive and ultimately vain and violent quest to create a collectivization and the quiet desperation of workers bereft of purpose and spiritual comfort. Neither could be published in Russia until the advent of glasnost.
The `30s saw the toughening of censorship and the establishment of the Union of Soviet Writers, which at its first Congress in 1934 greeted delegates with signs that said ”Welcome, Engineers of Human Souls.” The reigning literary doctrine henceforth was to be Socialist Realism, defined in the Union`s statutes as ”The truthful, historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development.” Despite these constraints, a few decent works actually got into print during the `30s-Safe Conduct, for one, a meditation on his own creative path and (obliquely) on his times. The best novel of the decade-and the greatest novel of the Soviet period, period-was Bulgakov`s ”The Master and Margarita” (written, as the Russians say, ”for the desk drawer” and published only in the late `60s). It parodies some of the conventions of socialist realist production novels and is, on one of its many levels, about a writer who cannot get published. Bulgakov intertwines Jesus and Satan, Pontius Pilate and a huge black cat to dramatize the many forms of spiritual corruption under Stalinism. The devaluing of the individual and the uncertainty of existence in a time of mass arrests are concerns also of the little-known writer Daniil Kharms, who wrote striking and unsettling miniature stories that have kinship with Kafka and Beckett.
Not much will survive of the literature of the `40s and `50s, though the post-Stalinist thaw was marked by historically notable works like Vladimir Dudintsev`s ”Not By Bread Alone” and Ehrenburg`s ”The Thaw.” Pasternak`s
”Doctor Zhivago” is the most important novel of the period, and its publication history illustrates the literary politics of the time: it was submitted for publication to a Soviet journal in 1956, rejected, and then published abroad (whence many copies made their way back across the border). Alexander Solzhenitsyn fared better with ”A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” published in 1962 after Krushchev`s personal intervention. That is the best of his works, but though critics dispute the literary quality of
”The Cancer Ward” and ”The First Circle,” these novels are also likely to pass the longevity test.
Except for ”Ivan Denisovich” and a few stories, Solzhenitsyn circulated in the pre-Gorbachev years either in smuggling foreign editions (what the Russians call tamizdat for ”foreign-published”) or in typewritten copies
(samizdat, for ”self-published”). Also read in those two forms were the stories and essays of the still-prolific Andrei Sinyavsky, one of the most important literary figures of the `60s and beyond. The 1966 trial of Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel showed the world that the stupidity and severity of the Soviet literary police were undiminished when service called. But many talented writers were published in the `60s, representatives of the movement called
”Young Prose”-writers like Vasily Aksyonov, Andrei Bitov, and Vladimir Vionovich, all of whom are still writing and remain worth reading. Another wonderful writer of the `60s and `70s is Yuri Trifonov, whose ”The House on the Embankment” (1976) is already a classic.
Trifonov`s stories provide a good feel for middle-class Moscow in the Brezhnev years. He is interested also in the long-term consequences of Stalinism on the mentalities of its survivors. That subject is probed masterfully in Georgi Vladimov`s ”Faithful Ruslan” (1974), told from the point of view of a labor camp guard dog who cannot recalibrate his concepts of good and evil once his camp is disbanded and the inmates released. The stresses and transformations of Stalinism are also powerfully dealt with by many memoirists. The memoir is a particularly important genre for Soviet literature, and though it is a whole subject in itself one must mention at least two: Eugenia Ginzburg`s ”Into the Whirlwind” and Nadezdha Mandelstam`s ”Hope Against Hope” and its sequel, ”Hope Abandoned.”
At a conference last year at the Moscow Institute of World Literature, a spirited disagreement broke out over whether a collaborative history of 20th Century Russian literature should include anything after the 1960`s. The young scholars who argued that it was not too early to assess those years won out, but it is hard to identify future classics at short range. The present literary scene is very lively, with scores of new journals and publishing houses vying for the reader`s attention. But intellectuals are worried that the commercialization of publishing will severely hurt good literature, making it hard for serious but non-mass-audience writers to get into print. To which their Western friends answer: welcome to the market economy.
There is also some concern that, now that literature has been decriminalized, it will lose its claim on the public`s attention and loyalty. Numerous essays on the writer`s need for a censor with whom to do battle appeared during the Gorbachev years. But literature has occupied such a central place in Russian society for the past 200 years that there is no real danger of its diminishing in quality or importance. It may be that sex manuals, astrology charts and get-rich schemes are now selling more briskly on Moscow streets than the latest good novel, but that is an understandable function of lifted taboos and hard times.
Writing in Literature and Revolution nearly 70 years ago, Leon Trotsky spun utopian visions of a distant communist world in which masterpieces would be produced by every individual at every turn. ”The average human type,” he wrote, ”will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.” Trotsky was wrong about a lot of things, and this was one of them. But if world literary history must continue to get made by no more than the usual number of geniuses, then Russia will certainly continue to have its share of them-and, if the past two centuries are any indication, perhaps even more.
Where to look
All the fiction mentioned in this article is available in English. For those wishing to learn more about Russian literature in the Soviet period, the following books are worth perusing:
”The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader,” Clarence Brown, ed.
(Penguin, $9.95). An anthology of short works, including the novella
”Envy,” from late Leo Tolstoy to the late 1970s.
”Russian Literature Since the Revolution,” Edward J. Brown (Harvard University Press, $35). Major writers, movements and developments in literary politics from 1917 to the 1970s.
”The Soviet Novel,” Katerina Clark (University of Chicago Press, $11.95). A study of socialist realism and its relation to Soviet culture.
”Glasnost: An Anthology of Russian Literature Under Gorbachev,” Helena Goscilo and Byron Lindsey, eds. (Ardis, $39.95). Ten of the best stories published in the late `80s.
