The making of the state writer : social and aesthetic origins of Soviet literary culture 9780804733649, 0804733643

Citation preview

The Making of the State Writer SOCIAL OF

AN

SOVIET

DSAESTHETTIG LITERARY

EVGENY

ORIGINS CULTURE

DOBRENKO

Translated by JESSE. M.

SAVAGE

The Making of the State Writer SOCIAL OF

AND

SOVIET

AESTHETIC LITERARY

ORIGINS CULTURE

Evgeny Dobrenko Tianslated by Jesse M. Savage

“We have studied the forest of Stalinist culture, literature in particular, either by examining the ideological seeds of

Stalinism or by focusing on relatively few ostensibly exemplary trees. The

Making of the State Writer is our first picture of the forest proper, and a dense

forest it is, the debris, the underbrush,

and all. And what a different sight it presents when approached as social, institutional, and cultural history! The book is a tour de force of

scholarly writing: erudite, well researched, at once pathbreaking and definitive, and captivating as narrative history.”

Gregory Freidin, Stanford

University

This book completes the author's study of the sociology of the literary process

in Soviet Russia, begun in 7he Making ofthe State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts ofthe Reception of Soviet Literature (Stanford, 1997). The history of the literary process of the Soviet era, understood as the living process of the clash of political and ideological aspirations and the interests and psychology of cultural elites, allows one to understand the social

origins and cultural aims of Stalinist art in an entirely new way.

(continued on back flap)

14 DAY BOOK This book is due on or before the latest date stamped below

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The Making ofthe State Writer

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/makingofstatewri0000dobr

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Translated by Jesse M. Savage

STANFORD SCAN 2OOI1

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UNIVERSITY CALLE © RIN TA

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Stanford University Press Stanford, California

© 2001 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dobrenko, E. A. (Evgenii Aleksandrovich) {[Formovka sovetskogo pisatelia. English] The making of the state writer : social and aesthetic origins of Soviet literary culture / Evgeny Dobrenko ; translated by Jesse M. Savage. ens Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8047-3364-3

1. Russian literature—2oth century—History and criticism. 2. Soviet literature—History and criticism. 3. Aesthetics, Russian—2oth century. 4. Socialism and literature— Soviet Union. 1. Title. PG3021 .D6213

2001

891.709'004—de21

2001020744

Original Printing 2001 Last figure below indicates year of this printing: 10

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Typeset by James P. Brommer in 11/13.5 Garamond

—

To Galina Andreevna Belaia

Contents

From the Translator Foreword CHAPTER

I

Agitation by the Ruins: At the Sources of Ideological Graphomania

CHAPTER

2

The Army of Poets: “Proletarian Creativity” (Anamnesis)

CHAPTER 3

The Horror of Aimlessness: The “Young Guard” of the New Literature

CHAPTER 4

Between the Reader and the Writer: The “Masses’

Literary Movement” and Mass Soviet Literature CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

The Literature of Readers: The Creative Work of Shock-Workers (The “Pure Art” of Socialist Realism)

2.43

Balthasar’s Feasts: Soviet Literature as “Literary Training”

CHAPTER 7

180

“Master Craftsmen”: Socialist Realism and the “New Temper of the Writer” Notes

Bibliography Index

295

349 409 443 473

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From the Translator

Throughout this text, the translator has used a simplified spelling of the surnames, and/or omitted the first names (except in quoted matter and the Bibliography), of the following persons: Chekhov (Anton Pavlovich Chekhov); Dostoyevsky (Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevskii); Gogol (Nikolai Vasil’evich Go-

gol’); Gorky (Maksim [Aleksei Maksimovich] Gor'’kii); Mayakovsky (Vladimir Vladimirovich Maiakovskii); Pushkin (Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin); Tolstoy (Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi); and Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Trotskii). The rationale for this was twofold: first, in most cases specialists and nonspecialists alike will

be familiar with these spellings (and persons) and may not even notice the absence of first names; and second, the simplification avoids “diacritical overload”

for some of the names used frequently in the possessive form (thus “Gorky’s,” not “Gorkii’s’).

All other Russian words are fully transliterated according to the Library of Congress system but are printed without that system’s ligatures. First names or initials are used when available and appropriate for all other persons. No attempt has been made to formulate “translations” for compounded

names (e.g., “Mospoligraf,” “Skorokhod”) of corporate entities.

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Foreword

In April 1920, Aleksandr Blok noted in his diary:

I am afraid of any kind of manifestations of the “art for art’s sake” tendency, because this tendency contradicts the very essence of art and because in following it, we would ultimately lose art; after all, it is born from the eternal interaction of two kinds of music—the music of a creative personality and the music which is heard in the depths of the people’s soul, the soul of the masses. Great art is born only from the combination of these two electrical currents.'

Blok’s diary entry thus marks the beginning of a theme that one year later would reappear in his “Pushkin speech.” Blok related the birth of the future “person/artist” with the imminent synthesis of the creative personality and the “soul of the masses.” Nonetheless, the

implacable logic of revolution led to cardinal changes of both these beginnings. The imminent “person/artist” turned out to be a gross caricature of Blok’s daydream. The horrible premonition filled Blok’s cogitations with alarm until the last days of his life; the “music of revolution” deafened him more and more with its grotesque dissonances and thus imparted a true propheticism to one of the central themes of his latter work: “the poet’s calling.” In starving, half-dead Petrograd, under the circumstances of an astonishing exodus of the intelligentsia, in the heat of the civil war, and amid the fervent

zeal that had reached its limit, Blok’s speech, which he read at the Writer's House on the 84th anniversary of Pushkin’s death, resonated profoundly in the consciousness of his listeners (according to the memoirs of a contemporary,

“all of literary Petersburg was present” in the hall): “Opinions about Blok always varied, especially in the latter years, but what he said about Pushkin and

how he said it—with a kind of convincing affirmation—took hold of everyone, was reflected in the listeners with an uneasiness that was not immediately realized, evoked long applause, and awakened lengthy discussions.” xi

Xl

FOREWORD

Sensitive to the “music of revolution,” Blok unerringly defined the central theme of an era of unprecedented historical “creativity of the masses’ —the

theme offreedom ofcreation. He legitimized the long-standing conflict between “poet and mob” and rid it of romantic anguish by asserting the common people’s right to demand “utility” from the poet: “From their own point of view, the common people are correct in their demands.” But the price of this right was high: the “secret freedom” celebrated by Pushkin, Blok asserted, was “by far not only a personal freedom, but a much larger one.” The poet was given three sequential tasks to accomplish: “first, to liberate sounds from the native unprincipled anarchy in which they are found; second, to bring these sounds

into harmony and give them form; third, to bring this harmony out into the external world.” The common people hinder the “poet’s assignment,” but their possibilities

were limited, Blok was convinced, for the poet is the “son of harmony,” and his business is “completely incommensurable with the order of the external world.” Nonetheless,

the people figured out that they must single out only one organ of the state— censorship—for the preservation of order in their world, which is expressed in the forms of the state. By means of this they have placed an obstacle only in the poet’s third path: in the path of bringing harmony into the world; it would seem that they could figure out the necessity of putting obstacles also in his first and second paths; they could seek out means of muddying the very sources of harmony; what holds them back—slow-wittedness, timidity, or conscience—is unknown. Or perhaps such means are already being sought??

Blok’s question turned out to be more profound than any possible answer. It held a terrifying conjecture. This book is about “muddying the very sources of harmony’—about an unprecedented undertaking that, judging by Blok’s question, was even little imagined in the culture that was waning. Let me stipulate immediately that this last task of the poet—“bringing harmony into the world”—is of the least interest to me here (censorship had stood on the path of its execution since ancient times, and permit me to note in passing, that Blok generally regarded this with understanding: “From their own point of view, the common people are correct in their demands”). The chief thing is the change in the lifeblood of the “creative personality.” This problem, as one may imagine, takes discussion of Soviet literature out of the area of endless truisms about “freedom/nonfreedom of the Soviet writer” (this

Soviet/Sovietological rhetoric itself comprises a part of Soviet/anti-Soviet lit-

FOREWORD

Xili

erature). According to this kind of binary logic, Soviet literature simply cannot be understood.

~

,

This book was born out ofa sense ofthe constant failing, in the numerous studies of the history of Soviet literature, to capture the “atmosphere” of the revolutionary and Soviet eras, a lack of abroad cultural perspective and understanding of the historico-literary process as a living process of human activity, a meeting of various political and ideological aspirations, an encounter

of interests and psychologies, and a real struggle among people. It is fully worth recognizing an essentially surprising fact: every attempt to historicize Soviet literature has ended with a /oss of the object. An elusiveness such as this, repeated in the majority of historico-literary works devoted to So-

viet literature, suggests a certain defect in the initial conceptions of the phenomenon under study. As one may imagine, this becomes an issue when the problem of the aesthetic value of Socialist Realist production is not sufficiently clarified, and in turn, there is an imprecise understanding of the nature of the subject of the Socialist Realist product. This can apparently explain the fact that the majority of “histories of Soviet literature” written in the West (and those being written in the post-Soviet era in Russia as well) amount to desctiptions

of the history of essentially zon-Soviet literature. All the attempts to create some sort of “general” history of Soviet literature, which have been undertaken

numerous times both in the West and in the post-Stalin era USSR (in the latter case, it was a matter of “fitting in” the “returned writers” into a “history” al-

ready written), can be characterized as completely romantic undertakings. The central figures of the existing histories are the authors who, as a rule,

stood either outside or on the distant peripheries of truly Soviet—Socialist Realist—literature (Soviet criticism was correct here in its evaluations of Platonov

and Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova and Bulgakov, and Pasternak and Mandel’shtam). One can speak of these writers’ relationships to Soviet literature (about their relationships £o it, for they were not an organic part of it) only by starting out with Blok’s ideas about the obstacle in the poet’s “third path”; this is their

(these writers’) history, but not the history of Soviet literature. Standing at the center of Soviet literature, however, were completely different figures, and in discussing them one must not bypass Blok’s main conjecture—the possibility of “muddying the very sources of harmony.” The most significant Russian writers of the twentieth century have an extremely attenuated relationship to Soviet literature precisely because they not only realized the possibility of “muddying the very sources of harmony” but also understood this possibility as the greatest danger. Their destinies, their tragedy, was the usual destiny of the poet. Indeed, Blok began his speech about “the poet’s creative burden” with an affir-

XIV

FOREWORD

mation of this, declaring calmly, “The poet's role is neither easy nor joyous: it is tragic.” Soviet literature is a phenomenon of a qualitatively, and indeed quantitatively, different nature. The extreme reduction of the authorial base in Soviet literature, when the role of the real author of “artistic products” was played in fact by authority,’ does not change the obvious fact that Soviet literature was nonetheless created by specific prose writers, poets, and dramatists—the authors ofSocialist Realist texts. The volume of these texts is, without exaggeration, huge, as is the number of their creators—Soviet writers—huge. The number of members of the former Union of Soviet Writers is well known—ten thousand. This figure is not absolute—not all authors were members of this union; besides that, the figure reflects the number of writers toward the end of the half-century history of Soviet literature and thus does not reflect the quantitative characteristics of the “writers’ union” in diachrony. In addition, the total number of works of Soviet literature created by them is far from being known (only statistics on published books exist). And anyway, what does this figure mean? One can more or less definitively pin it down by using the data promulgated at the Second Congress of Soviet Writers, which convened exactly two decades after the first, in 1954: in 1934, 3,085 works of Soviet writers were issued in printings of 40,135,000 copies; in 1953, 4,285 works were published with an overall printing of 198,327,000

copies.’ Thus the average annual figures would be 3,685 works with an overall printing of 119,231,000 copies. Taking two decades into account, this is 73,700 works printed in 2,384,620,000 copies. Such was the volume of works of Soviet

literature only in the “classical Stalinist era.” One should keep in mind, however, that the history of Soviet literature spanned at minimum three more decades, and the number of producers (and consequently the “artistic products” produced by them) increased threefold during this period. Of course an objection might arise here: Is it worth talking about these “legions of Red Leo Tolstoys” at all, if the entire Socialist Realist canon can be displayed on the relatively localized bridgehead of the “Soviet classics” —if it is sufficient to operate with two dozen names, not exceeding the limits of the content of the Soviet middle-school curriculum? It is obvious, however, that the issue is not only one of establishing a specific research task that dictates a particular principle of selecting materials. Socialist Realism is not simply a canon. Immanent study of the Socialist Realist canon does not allow one to penetrate to the depths of the specifics of Socialist Realist aesthetics.° Socialist Realism is not a dozen or so texts, but indeed a boundless sea of “artistic production”— epics, novels, poems, plays, and so forth. Socialist Realism is important pre-

FOREWORD

Xv

cisely because of its extensiveness, which under the “representation of life in the forms of life itself” conceals the bottomless entropy of the “lively creation of the masses” and of Socialist Realist writing itself, which is “built like a machine for encoding the currents of the masses’ desires.”” The locking of Socialist Realism into a narrow range of chrestomathic exemplars (of texts and names) can

be recognized as the inertia ofa traditional approach to artistic creativity that does not take the specifics of the subject under study into account.® Socialist Realism, like any aesthetic system, had its own aesthetic agenda.

This agenda boiled down to the defeat of modernism. Its utopianism lay in its attempt to “jump out of history” by creating a premodernist aesthetics and to conceive a situation in which modernism seemed not to have existed (in this

sense, Socialist Realism was truly the “impossible aesthetic,” to use Régine

Robin's term). In general, Socialist Realism could be defined as postmodernism minus modernism, an aesthetic located in “minus time.” The retrogradism of Stalinist culture had deep social roots, growing out of the aspirations of an authority that had overcome the revolution to return art to the masses. For this unprecedented task, nontraditional means were required—a peculiar institution of “Soviet writers,” people whose cultural horizon would be suitable for the creation of such a literature: it was necessary not to know (or to forget)

many things, necessary to “learn” many things “from the classics” and to reconstruct one’s “artistic reflexes” (to use Aleksei Tolstoi’s term); it was ultimately

necessary to “conquer history,” since modernism specifically in its aggressive antitraditionalism was first and foremost the result of an intracultural process (the crisis of tradition), while Socialist Realism was the product of a history moving retrospectively rather than in a forward-looking manner. If the aesthetic parameters of Socialist Realism could be expressed mathematically, they would be negative quantities. This new cultural dimension—minus-style—was born of the powerful historical retreat that postrevolutionary (Stalinist) culture was. Yet another aspect is important: studies of Socialist Realism have traditionally been based on analysis of the products of this culture (the canon), but not of the process ofproduction, and therefore in practice do not explain the social sources and cultural aims of Stalinist art. However, one must understand that Socialist Realism is a peculiar kind of museum. An orientation toward the “apexes” (as in classical cultural models) is in this context frequently far from productive. Besides, the normativism of Socialist Realism is not a specific feature of “the most advanced artistic method.” On the contrary, its normativism

brings it in line with many other aesthetic systems. But the “living spirit of Socialist Realism” is not in normativism, but rather in a “creative personality” that functions in a specific way.

XVI

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In a broader sense, at issue is the understanding of literary history that Roland Barthes was already defending in the early 1960s, when he tried to find the boundary between history, literature, and the author's personality (for me the fundamental crux of the issues). In his book about Racine, Barthes spoke of

the “serious consequences” of “author-centricity” in traditional literary history: In snuggling up to the author and turning the center of observation to the literary “genius,” we squeeze out to the periphery, to a zone of some sort of distant fogs, the truly historical objects; we touch them only by accident, in passing, at best we indicated their existence, leaving to others the concern of studying them in an indistinct future; the chief thing in the history of literature becomes an escheat that the historian and critic have simultaneously rejected. One might say that the place of the person, the writer, in our history ofliterature is analogous to the place of an event in a historicizing history: possessing a primary importance in a different plane, here he obstructs the whole perspective; genuine in and of himself, he leads to the creation ofa false picture.’

With Barthes it is a matter of a radical change in optics: a history of literature is possible only at the level of literary functions (production, communication, consumption), and in no wise at the level of the individuals who manage

these functions. In other words, a history of literature is possible only as a sociological discipline which interests itself in activities and institutions, and not in individuals. . . . Writers will be regarded only as participants in institutional activity that rides above the individuality of each of them... . Sever literature from the individual! The painfulness of the operation, and even its paradoxicality, are obvious. But only at such a price can one create a history of literature; by screwing up our courage, we can more accurately see that if it is brought into the necessary institutional boundaries, the history of literature will turn out to be simply history as such.'°

Courage was truly required to make such an assertion in 1960: four decades before that, the cultural space now described by Barthes had been regarded by

Russian formalists in categories of “literary environment” [byr]. To some degree, Arkadii Belinkov was pondering this issue at the same time. One of the most perceptive researchers of the phenomenon that interests me here, he wrote (in the same words as Barthes) about the “most severe con-

sequences” of “generalization” and of the traditional interest in “canon”: ”

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Process, necessity, determination, lack of free will, and the lack of interest in the real artist all lead to the researcher tearing his hero out of concrete history, like a page from a book, and he tries to understand what the book is about from this torn-out page. Study of the real history of artistic literature has

FOREWORD

XVil

given way to detailed description of good books. The history of literature turns out to be written in dotted lines. Between the great writers chinks have formed, which are filled with such writers that are considered not only outright unsuitable to study but even to ask what they wrote. Simultaneously with the writer from the chinks, somewhere on the litérary roads the ordinary bad writer has gotten lost as well. The ordinary bad writer—the intermediate link between the great writers and the culture on which the great writer matures—has gee from literary study. The science of literature has turned into The Live[s] of Remarkable Persons |Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh liudei],

an absolutely respectable publication, but not one charged with exhaustive literary study. In reading what is published as literary study, you often experience an urgent need to dedicate your life to “Essays on the history of bad Russian literature” and to interleave the chapters of the great but too successful history with them. The value of works on the great and successful history of Russian literature is truly indisputable in that after reading them, everything suddenly becomes clear. The question mark has gone out of literary studies. Rare and timid are the question marks that break through in the unequal battle with the thick stems of exclamation marks!!!!

All of this is particularly true in regard to Socialist Realism, which poses more and more questions, the proof of which is the interest in Stalinist culture

in the post-Communist world. It would seem that this interest is already devoid of the pragmatics that were characteristic of the era of a world broken in two. It feeds also on the unsatisfactoriness of the existing set of Sovietological answers to the fundamental questions of Socialist Realist aesthetics (“political control,” “repressions,” “pressure of the regime,” and the like). Returning to

Blok’s conjecture, let us observe that censorship, for example, in which Blok saw an obstacle on the path of the artist’s bringing harmony into the world, is not just a social institution, which can serve not only as an obstacle but also as a “conveyor of harmony,” if Socialist Realism is viewed as the attempt to change life according to the laws of a “total politico-aesthetic project.”!* Censorship, precisely, is necessary for “muddying the very sources of harmony,” but no longer as a factor external to an author, rather as an internal one, as a most im-

portant component of his “creative personality.” Accordingly, one should not exaggerate the services and role of Glavlit in the history of Soviet literature, at least in the classical period of its history. Glavlit was only the mechanism for readjustment of the Socialist Realist mechanism of “reflection and remaking of life,” which showed the degree of accordance/deviation of the author’s func-

tioning with/from the functions of Soviet literature.’° Strictly speaking, Socialist Realism is not a managed art, as traditional Sovietology has maintained, but rather a self-managed one, and not a control but

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self-control: for a Soviet writer the “problem of censorship” cannot exist, for to

the degree that the act of censoring is transformed from a constituent part of the “creative act” of a Soviet writer into a problem external to him (or what is

more, into an obstacle), he accordingly ceases to be a Soviet writer in the strict sense of the term (the well-known examples of this in the history of Soviet literature are not few). Neither political control nor censorship were necessary, for

either rank-and-file Soviet writers or “classic writers of Soviet literature”: Nikolai Ostrovskii needed them just as little in the 1930s as did the four Ostrovskiis writing in the 1970s (two prose writers, a poet, and a translator—members of the USSR Union of Writers). The “Soviet classic writer” (Fadeev, for example)

was himself the censor. It was only a matter of creating such a writer. The transformation of the author into his own censor—herein is the true history of Soviet literature. The specific nature of Socialist Realism is neither in the canon nor even in its “artistic production.” The true products of Socialist Realism are people: readers and writers. Socialist Realism is not the creation of texts, but rather the creation of life. According to the classical Stalinist definition, Soviet writers are “engineers of human souls,” but they themselves are the product of social engineering (the true authors of this definition—the LEF-

ists'*—could not acknowledge the second part of it, remaining as they did in pre-Soviet, revolutionary culture). Least of all should one see a trivial “terror directed at creators”: indeed, Soviet literature flourished after the era of Sturm und Drang as a postrevolutionary culture. And the problem of censorship is the problem of divergence between the functions assigned to literature and the creative personality. But the Soviet writer never had a more severe censor than himself: a Soviet writer 7s a censor. Thus Soviet culture overcame the eternal abyss between art and life, or, in the terms of traditional culrure—from Pushkin to Blok—between “poet and mob,” between “poetry and utility” [poeziia i pol’za|. The paradoxical synthesis of the “music of the creative personality” and the “music of the soul of the masses” was effected in Socialist Realism. A powerful force of will from authority was required to bring these always tragically separated musical themes together. As a result of this truly “revolutionary creation,” the former system of relations between “the poet and the common people” was broken down; but what is more, a new creator appeared —“flesh from the flesh of the people.” The Soviet writer can be called the product of authority's creation only to the extent that this authority itself has recognized and institutionalized what Lenin called the “lively creativity of the masses” [zhivoe tvorchestvo mass]. It is not only the specific nature of Socialist Realist products that strikes anyone who steps beyond the boundary of the “stone age” of Russian literature (let us

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designate the era of the birth of Soviet literature—the 1920s—as the “bronze age” of Russian literary history), but also that of the “literary environment,” and the “creative behavior” of its participants. Where did this “army of poets”

come from? Who are these people who created the many-volume epics in multimillion printings? What were their destinies? Some of them were “ille-

gally repressed” and others became Stalin laureates, but all of them were together—and there were many other intertwinings as well. In a word, the common Soviet fate. . . . The commonality here is genetic: they all find themselves a new generation of creators of one sort or another. And although this “generation’ itself consists of a multitude of generations, each of which destroyed the preceding one with a different degree of frantic zeal “to swim farther into rev-

olution,” and although this “generation” was multifaceted (the typology of Soviet writers—from illiterate shock-workers to “reformed” emigrants, from yesterday’s rebels to loyal repentant intelligentsia, from unapologetic hacks to those who naively believed in their “calling,” from graduates of the Literary Institute to the highest literary functionaries—is truly inexhaustible), this was a common page in the history of Russian literature. The main issue here is the reassessment of traditional conceptions about the nature and essence of creation, about the “creative burden,” and about “the poet’s purpose,” which were so

powerfully expressed in Blok’s Pushkin speech and preserved outside of, or on the periphery of, Soviet literary culture. In this sense, the “Soviet classic writ-

ers” that are traditionally referred to in speaking of Socialist Realism are only exemplary Soviet writers; there is no fundamental difference between First Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers Georgii Markov (a prose writer) and, for

example, the prose writer Aleksandr Markov from Astrakhan or the poet and

prose writer Evgenii Markin from Riazam’ (the latter being the real “members” of this union). And although these latter two were located at the “outfall” of Soviet literature, there had indeed been a path to the “moral and political unity” of this literature. It is not the path of this /iterature, however, that will concern me in this book, but rather the path of the people who created it—

their common biography. This interest in “literature without literature” has also defined the logic of

my investigation. The task of examining the history of the shaping of the Soviet writer dictates a special method of choosing materials: the greatest interest is not in the “Soviet classics,” but instead in the ordinary “Soviet writers’—that same “legion” that produced Soviet literature. It was here, in this mass, that the

overwhelming majority of “Soviet litterateurs” dwelt: from the secretaries of the Writers’ Union to the “wider community of writers” and “creative youth.” Given this, one will constantly need to move along the “shoulder” ofRussian

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FOREWORD

literatures road; but it was precisely here that the “highroad” of Soviet literature passed. Some writers were born on this roadside and spent their whole “creative path of service to the Party and the people” here; others came here later and remained forever; still others who were born here left sooner or later, some only toward the end of their lives; yet others never came, or only rarely, or tried to be both here and elsewhere. . . . The swelling river of Soviet literature dictates the researcher's itinerary: from the lower reaches of nineteenth-century raznochinets and populist poetry, the current of the “self-taught” flowed into Russian literature as a barely noticeable little brook. The revolution broke down the barrier between the cultured and subcultural currents, forming a new cultural alloy and creating unprecedented utopias of creativity, giving birth to a new “creative behavior,” and reaching its peak in the struggle between literary groups and in the new theories and practices of creation. This peak occurred in the “mass literary movement’ of the 1920s and early 1930s, bringing in huge streams of people; “col-

lective creativity” rose to the surface, first among the Proletkult “studioists” and then among the workers’ and village correspondents organized by RAPP,” the “literary circleists,” and the “shock-workers in literature.” Afterward the “writers’ brigades” came. The whole edifice was completed with the theory and practice of “literary training.” The end of “collective creativity” arrived with the end of the revolutionary era and the affirmation of Stalinist culture, which was based on the ascent from “beginners” to “master-writers’; the former writers either adapted themselves within Soviet culture or left it. New generations came into literature, no longer knowing of the “gap between worldview and creative activity” (I am still talking about Soviet writers here). It goes without saying that this process was not unilinear and that it had various dimensions (ideological, institutional, aesthetic, and so forth); it had numerous deviations

as well, but it is obvious that it was definitive of Soviet literature. But the historical generative chain of Soviet literature, a sort of “periphery of the periphery” (“self-taughts,” studioists, workers’ correspondents, literary circleists, shockworkers, “beginners,” and “master-writers”), is in the center of this study and

thus dictates the logic of the investigation. Socialist Realism is a cultural revolution not only “from above” but also “from below.” The authorities that headed this revolution only took into account (and accurately “read”) the masses’ “demand”: Soviet literature became

the reader's response to this “demand.” The reader shaped the Socialist Realist aesthetic “down to” his “horizon of expectations,” but he also created it, by becoming the Soviet writer. Soviet literature is oriented toward the “masses” in extremely broad terms. This endows it with a certain centrifugality—the So-

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cialist Realist canon advances toward the periphery, its boundaries are “inflamed.” But just at the boundaries of the aesthetic system, the “fiery Empire style” of the center loses its luster,'® flowing out in a multitude of streams from the multithousand “army of Soviet writers” to the “mass reader.” Moving along the “periphery” of Socialist Realism allows one to historicize and often to correct substantially the traditional models of Soviet literature: the concept of a periphery in Socialist Realism is only apparently absolute, and who knows whether a text of Aleksandr Markov is more representative than one of Georgii Markov, or the latter’s text more representative than one of the “Soviet classics.” After all, the “effacedness” of Socialist Realist writing is relative, and in a more effaced text Socialist Realism shines much brighter than in a more “personalized” one. The genealogy of Socialist Realism at the level of authorship allows one to understand Socialist Realism not only as the endless process of producing texts and their consumers, but also as a process of radical creation, that is, the production of the producers themselves; thus it is not only a master studio for texts but also a master studio that creates—the masters. An art that creates itself . . . how is one to know whether the notorious utilitarianism of Soviet literature at its extreme is a self-denial, and Socialist Real-

ism “pure art”? Perhaps Blok, deafened by the “music of revolution,” in that same diary entry with which I began my preliminary remarks, posits an even more profound conjecture—the idea that “the ‘art for art’s sake’ tendency... contradicts the very essence of art” and that “in following [this tendency], we would ultimately lose art”? Is such a loss possible? One thing can be definitively stated: the era of Socialist Realism that separates contemporary readers from Blok has the potential to correct any traditional conceptions of art and creativity.

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CHAPTER

ONE

Agitation by the Ruins At the Sources of Ideological Graphomania Firs: Before the disaster, it was the same way: the owl hooted, and the samovar whistled all the time.

Gaev: Before what disaster? Firs: Before the liberation.

— CHEKHOV,

The Cherry Orchard

Slepushkin versus Pushkin; or, The Genealogy of Captain Lebiadkin Logicality is dear to history. Affera discussion of Socialist Realism, it is (chrono)-

logical to glance into its postmodernist Foremirror and to look at SotsArt. Not in order to “step out of history,” but rather to return to history. The term “SotsArt” was invented by the artists Vitalii Komar and Aleksandr Melamid in the early 1970s. At that time (1973) they created one of the first SotsArt texts, the illustrated short story “A. Ziablov.” The hero of this work,

constructed according to all the rules for a historical/artistic study article (including documentary proof, transcripts, examples of his paintings, and so forth) was the serf artist Apelles Ziablov, who had already created abstract painting in the seventeenth century. The “imperial academy” rejected his work, forcing him to paint antique-style casts. In desperation, the artist hanged himself. This convoluted metaphor aims to explain the relations between postmodernism and the avant-garde (although Ziablov’s abstract canvases were meant as deco-

rations for the torture chambers of his master, the European-educated landlord Struiskii). However, it is worth keeping in mind that the cultural reference in this SotsArt text is a fictitious history: not the seventeenth but the twentieth

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century, and foremost, Socialist Realism in which the revolutionary-populist mythology, which literally teems with such Ziablovs, is reshaped into a nationalist myth, paradoxically uniting in itself (figuratively speaking) the tastes of Ziablov and those of the imperial academy. It is therefore clear that in the interpretation of the SotsArt biographers of the fictitious artist, Ziablov’s art seems apt for the “time of establishment of Russian national self-consciousness, the time of wild teeming and expansiveness ofthe creative forces of the people, awakened by Peter the Great from the great sleep.” Fully in the style of Soviet art history of the 1940s—1950s model (the era of struggle for Russian priorities and against “kowtowing to the West”

and against “rootless cosmopolitanism,” when it was maintained that Russian peasant “natural talents” had eclipsed the European luminaries and that all the discoveries ascribed to foreigners had been made by these peasants), Komar

and Melamid asserted that “Ziablov’s art arose as the protest coming from the depths of the people’s soul against the sanctimonious moral values of the imitators of the ‘London engravers,” and that the “life-affirming painting of the great artist takes its sources from the native traceries of frost-covered glass,

from the ever-changing nuances of the sea and sky of the mid-Russian region and of the boisterous play of flames, and it also absorbed the rich plastic possibilities of polished sections of decorative stone, the designs upon which the Urals master-craftsmen have long been famous for,” and that “the tragic fate of the serf artist Apelles Ziablov—whose optimistic creations have finally by right taken a worthy place in the treasure house of world culture—will now shine across the expanse of the centuries as a guiding star to all the representatives of the creative intelligentsia who are seeking a typical reflection of reality in its dialectic development.”! If one removes the postmodernist “trick” from this text—that the avantgarde, antagonistic to Socialist Realism (as well as to postmodernism) turns out to be a national exemplar—one reveals pure parody. History has been transformed into a SotsArt simulacrum, a hyperreality without referent. But behind

this form of image that has lost its referent, reality existed. It is about this reality that I shall speak now. Utopias in general, and those of creation in particular, are not born in an empty place. They have their own real historical topos. It is in this cultural space that the roots of Russian mass graphomania are located. Russian history, beginning in the seventeenth century, can reveal not a few mournful stories about serf poets similar to the artist Ziabloy. At first, their “mournful fates” differed little from Ziablov's. However, that was before the imperial academy and the court took a genuine interest in the “muzhiks” and began to support

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them. This took place in the era of the birth of new Russian literature in the

early nineteenth century.

'

Take, for example, Ivan Semenovich Sibiriakov: he was a serf of a Riazan’

landlord, in whose troupe he had played since he was seventeen, and began to write poetry in his early years. In 1818, the influential Pavel Svin’in (publisher of Otechestvennye zapiski [Notes of the fatherland], member of the Russian

Academy and the Academy of Art, and author of many books on Russian history, including a biography of the self-taught Russian mechanic Ivan Kulibin) placed an article in Trudy obshchestva liubitelei russkoi slovesnosti (Transactions

of the Society of Devotees of Russian Literature) entitled “A Natural Russian Poet” (“Prirodnyi russkii stikhotvorets”) with a few of Sibiriakov’s poems. Vasilit Zhukovskii, Petr Viazemskii, and Fedor Glinka had taken part in the fate of this “natural poet” when they had purchased his freedom. When he entered the Petersburg scene, however, Sibiriakov had an unsuccessful debut and ended up being a prompter. Having assumed this role (an interesting one for a poet)

he published his poems and stories. There were not a few poets like Sibiriakov at this time.” But three of them occupied a special place in Pushkin’s time: Fedor Slepushkin, Mikhail Sukhanov,

and Egor Alipanov. Vissarion Belinskii, who reviewed their every new handiwork, wrote in an 1840 review of New Pastimes ofFedor Slepushkin (Novye dosugi Fedora Slepushkina, printed by the imperial Russian Academy) that Slepushkin is now sticking to his own sphere and describing peasants for us; but these peasants are somehow like the shepherds and shepherdesses of Messrs. Florian and Panaey, or like those peasant men and women who dance about in the

divertissements on the theatrical stage. Mr. Slepushkin appeared at the time when an ability to compose rhymes was considered talent, and garnered fame even among educated people: thus this self-taught peasant aroused greater interest. . . In Mr. Slepushkin’s poetry we can see a clever fellow who is noble of thought and not educated in a peasant fashion, whom we cannot but respect—but not a poet. There is nothing even resembling poetry in his verses, not one poetic image. . . . Obviously, his poetry is not a gift of nature but the fruit of an education beyond his estate. If membership in the gentry does not give one the right to talent, then neither does membership in the peasantry... . What dull, cold, and insipid description! Is this not rather bad prose with almost-decent rhymes?

He concluded, “In Mr. Slepushkin’s poetry there is truly nothing the best or the worst, but everything is equal: grammatical meaning is maintained throughout, and the rhyme, although not pleasing, is always there: but there is no poetry anywhere. 3,

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A year later, Belinskii turned to Alipanoy’s series of “little books”: “The little muzhik Alipanov has decisively joined the ranks of the writers! In order to pursue this jolly profession more conveniently, he started a printing house, and as its owner, who is his own boss, he boldly places ‘second edition’ on his worth-

less little books, though issuing them only for the first time.”* I will quote the review written by the “furious Vissarion” of Alipanov’s “Tale of the Magical Miller, Two Little Jews, and Two Farmhands” (“Skazka o mel’nike-koldune, o dvukh zhidkakh i o dvukh batrakakh”) in its entirety: Mr. Alipanov’s name always brings to mind the other no less glorified name of B. M. Fedorov, to whom the author of “The magical miller” is indebted for the discovery and development ofhis own poetic genius. This was long ago, in the times when Damskii zhurnal [Ladies journal] printed sentimental dedications “to her,” “to the rose,” “to lemons, oranges, and melons,” and charades and logogriphs were found in Blagonamerennyi |The loyalist]. In

those good old days, a passion for everywhere discovering and tenderly caring for homegrown Russian talents reigned: self-taught Russian astronomers and mechanics, Russian musicians, and most of all poets. “Look, look,” they would shout, “here is a ten-year-old boy, a sexton’s son, who is illiterate, but by selfstudy makes watches, and in mechanics could run circles around any German professor. Here are verses created by a peasant plowman, a future Lomonosov or Burns.” And everyone rejoiced and was moved by this; we were moved as well, when we were still young unreasoning children. But B. M. Fedorov, who loved to unite the glory of Horace with that of Maecenatus, was especially moved by this delightful phenomenon. At that time he had not yet sunk to writing children’s tales, which afterward he published by the dozens and hundreds; at that time he was simultaneously crowned with picturesque glory for Turmoil at the Fancy-Dress Ball (Sumatokha v maskarade] and other

comedies, and had published sentimental little verses in Damskii zhurnal and in Blagonamerennyi that mostly sang the praises of flowers: roses, jasmine, narcissus, and even mignonette; he was pondering over his Julius Caesar (Lulii Tsesar’], a high tragedy, and meanwhile concealed an idea of genius in his

heart—to create a Russian historical novel, that is, Kurbskii. At that time Slepushkin, Sukhanov, and Alipanov arose in the distant Russian backwoods: three distinctive poetic talents, like flowers, uniformly pleasant-scented. Fedorov sought them all out and charitably supported them, in zeal for the poetic glory of Russia. } But where are those talents today, and where is their glory? We do not know whether Messrs. Sukhanov and Slepushkin are well now, or whether with good sense they have forgotten the precepts of their mentor and ceased writing and resumed anew their honest and useful occupations. Only in the heart of Mr. Alipanoy did B. M. Fedorov’s exhortations imprint themselves deeply, and he, carried away by the example and poetic spark of his teacher,

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until this day strings rhymes together. Behold the fruits of useful precepts! Mr. Alipanov’s creations were indicated for the shrine of immortality, but instead of this they have ended up in the sacks of secondhand booksellers bound for the Makar’ev bazaar, and in the hands of village lackeys and the like. Razmakhnul batrak rukami, V stol udaril kulakami, Kriknul: “Ia zh vam dokazhu,

Chto ot mertvykh ne drozhu, Is kol’'tsom iavlius’ pred vami:

Pust’ otvetiat sapogami, Kto ostanetsia neprav. U tebia takov li nrav2” (?!) Spor soglas’em povershili: (?) Delo sladili, skrutili,

V polu khlopnuli poloi; (?) Kak gora s ikh plech doloi. [The farmhand waved his arms, Beat his fists on the table,

Shouted, “T’ll show you, I do not tremble at corpses,

And with a ring I'll appear before you: Let them answer with boots,

Who will remain wrong.

Do you have such a disposition?” (?!) They ended the quarrel with agreement: (?)

They settled the deal, bound it, Their flaps flapped together; (?) Like a weight off their shoulders. ]

This is the kind of verses our homegrown Burns writes. These verses, the wrapping paper [on which it is printed— Trans.], and the dirty product and printing of Sychoy, prove that the “Tale of the magical miller” is winning fame among the aforesaid audience. . .. What more do you want?

Here Belinskii recalls the cusp of the 1820s—1830s, when the influential figures Pavel Svin’in, Boris Fedorov (former president of the Petersburg Academy), the legendary Faddei Bulgarin, Aleksandr Shishkov (the Tsar's secretary of state, an admiral, member of the State Council, minister of education, and president of the Russian Academy)—in a word, the full pride of Russian literature, con-

stant figures in contemporaries’ epigrams and parodies—began to promote “poets from the people.” Under the sponsorship of just these figures, the peasant Sukhanov, who had taught himself to read, moved to Petersburg and took

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up writing, and received the silver medal of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1828 for his first collection, Fables, Songs, and Various Poems (Basni, pesni, 1

raznye stikhotvoreniia). But Slepushkin, in whom Shishkov saw “the Russian Theocritus,” had received the gold medal of the Russian Academy two years before Sukhanov. On this occasion, Pushkin remarked ironically in a letter to Petr Pletnev, “SlePushkin is given a caftan, a watch, and a half-medal, but the real Pushkin gets the fig.” Nevertheless, the “little muzhik” Slepushkin was equally successful

in both the poetic and commercial fields. Born to a serf family, he set out for Petersburg in 1803 for work and took up trading, but when he published his first poetry in 1820, he was noticed by Svin’in and soon thereafter bought out of serfdom with Svir’in’s assistance. It was Svin’in who published Slepushkin’s verses in Otechestvennye zapiski, and the latter’s Pastimes of a Country-Dweller (Dosugi sel’skogo zhitelia) was published in 1826 (and was awarded no less

than the gold medal of the Russian Academy). A short time later the poet became a merchant, but did not curtail his poetic activities: he continued to

write his bucolic verses and published several more “little poetic books.” The third character in this gripping history was Egor Alipanov, quite the

tragic figure. One knows about him most of all thanks to the efforts of Semen A. Vengerov, who discovered Alipanov’s verses at the end of the nineteenth century and wrote, “In leafing through Alipanov’s poems, one is struck not so much by the author’s lack of a poetic gift as by the extreme pretentiousness of his subjects and by the lack of that which gave him the right to the title of ‘the people’s poet.””” Alipanov did in fact write about Russian warriors, about the Amur River, about Russian poets, about the nightingale, and about the peace with Turkey. But about the phenomena that “directly related to the milieu which matured him,” he wrote, for example, as in his “Shepherd’s song”: Pastushka molodaia Pod kustikom sidit V venok tsvety spletaia, Vse v storony gliadit. Ne gonit li otkuda Iagniatok na luzhok Krasivyi, belokuryi, Liubeznyi pastushok. [The young shepherdess Sits under the little bush Weaving a wreath of flowers

Looking all around.

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Maybe the dear shepherd, Handsome, fair-haired, Is driving his lambs Out from somewhere?]

Following the lead of Belinskii and of Anton Del’vig, Vengerov suggested

that Alipanov’s poems come across as “completely impossible literary trash.”® But that is not what interests me here. Perhaps more interesting is the fate of these “natural Russian poets.” In the foreword to the first collection of Alipanov’s poems, “B. E.” (Boris Fedorov) wrote:

Alipanovy received no education, but is obliged for everything to nature and to a love of reading. His passion for poetry was awakened by Slepushkin’s poems. And his first composition was a dedication to Slepushkin, whom he did not know personally, but to whom he sent the poems via mail. Shortly afterward, Alipanoy’s gratitude suggested to him the poems in honor of his beneficent landlord, and the sufferings of his countrymen awakened an enthusiasm in him and the courage to celebrate the feats of Russian leaders and warriors. ... The son of a workman in Ivan Akimovich Mal'tsev’s Liudinov Metalworks, Egor Ipat’ev Alipanov is now twenty-eight. He is a native of the Kaluga Province, from the Zhizdrin District. Reading religious books, he from his youth grew to love the secluded life and wished to enter a

monastery, but his master laid out all the difficulties of his chosen calling to him and advised him to put this off and look around a bit. Alipanov, guided by good sense, humbly accepted this advice, and convinced that one can with diligence and good morals be useful to oneself and others in any calling,

began to tirelessly work at his duties. ... Exemplary humility, moderation of desires, sobriety of life, and simplicity of his heart even with his mind and gifts, set Alipanov apart. His deeds bear witness to the goodness of his soul,

and in his conversation his discretion and prudence are evident. He is completely satisfied with his status, rejoices in his lot, wishes for nothing better, and the whole purpose of his labors is diligence to the benefit of his master and caring for his mother, sister, and his brother's family. Alipanov travels to Petersburg every year by barge and goes to the sale of factoryproduced cast iron. He spends the summer in Petersburg, but the winter in Zubov, working as a goods inspector.’

From Ivan Rozanov’s Literary Reputations (Literaturnye reputatsii) one learns about Alipanov’s subsequent fate. When his fables were approved by the Russian Academy, the academy financed their publication, and six hundred copies went to the fabulist for his own use. After the academy awarded him the silver medal, Alipanov was granted freedom by Mal’tsev and became a steward for

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Count Mordvinov. It was precisely at this time that he wrote the “Tale of the Magical Miller” that amused Belinskii so much, and the Russian Academy again published six hundred copies of “the aforesaid tale” for his benefit. His sponsors wrangled the Tsar's award as well: a gift of two gold watches. Rozanov relates all of this, taking as his source Vengerov’s famous dictionary, in which Vengerov cited an article about Alipanoy from the 1856 issue of Novgorodskie gubernskie vedomosti (Novgorod Province gazette). From this source it was known that in 1837 Alipanov married the poet Slepushkin’s daughter and had owned a printing house from 1838 to 1842 (which one already knows from Belinskii), but

shortly afterward the printing house went bankrupt, and along with it, our poet —he turned out to be a less successful entrepreneur than his father-in-law. AF ter 1843, Alipanov was no longer published. He worked on a railway and then

as a midlevel manager in a glass factory in Novgorod Province, at his former landlord Mal’tsev’s. There is no further information about him after 1856. The

author of the original Novgorodskie gubernskie vedomosti article concludes his sketch thus: “The instability of life's happiness changed his character, and in his face one notes a deep pensiveness, and in his conversation a lack of hope for happiness.”!° Such a change. . . . One could take all these stories as fabricated anecdotes by Komar and Melamid if the books of Slepushkin, Alipanov, and Sukhanov had in fact perished in “the sacks of secondhand booksellers bound for the Makar’ev bazaar” and “in the hands of village lackeys,” as Belinskii prophesied. But the “father of Russian criticism” was mistaken on this occasion: these books were appar-

ently not all bought out, even at the Makar’ev bazaar, and so their originals migrated from the booksellers’ sacks to Russian libraries. Not only there, but even across the ocean—in the library holdings of Harvard and Berkeley. One might repeat after Belinskii once again: “Behold the fruits of useful precepts!” After one hundred years, who needed all this “literary trash,” and for what purpose? After the revolution, these “poets from the people” unexpectedly attracted the attention of the “literary community”: liberal criticism (from Vasilii Lvov-Rogachevskii, Leonid Grossman, Ivan Rozanoy, and Vasilii Sipovskii), which could readjust itself “on the fly,” hastened to create a genealogy

for the gathering forces of “proletarian literature.”!' Now it was no longer proper to start the history with Nechaev and Shkuley, but from much farther back—from all these Kudriavtsevs, Belkins, Borisovs, Beliaevs, Kruglikovs,

Riabinins, Slepushkins, Alipanovs, and so on. It might seem that Aleksei Kol’tsov and Ivan Nikitin already existed in the populist intelligentsia’s mythology for this purpose, but they were both petty bourgeois, and they both had some education (although neither graduated, Kol’tsov studied in the parish

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school, Nikitin ina seminary), so that it would have been difficult to call

them “self-taught.” Besides, it is not so much a matter of “survey data,” nor of social origin or class principle, as it is of the literary culture that was engendered by the groups in question. After all, it is apparent that what the academic Fedorov produced was the same kind of “literary trash” that the serf Alipanov produced. Therefore, both these figures, despite their obvious class differences, belong to a sin-

gle cultural arena. For this reason they easily recognize themselves in each other: if “natural talents” like Alipanov produced books for “village lackeys,” as Belinskii asserted, they differed from their academic sponsors (of Fedorov’s ilk) only in the fact that the latter produced a product for the masters of these

lackeys. Thus it is a matter of a (only at this time) hypothetical combination (figuratively speaking) of Alipanov and Shishkov in a single person. In the early nineteenth century, such a cultural experiment seemed impossible. A century had to pass before this cultural combination could become reality. ~ Here is a biography: he was born in 1899 in a village of the Central Rybinsk Region of the Iaroslavl’ Province, received no education, and from the age of

twelve was an errand-boy in Petersburg. After the revolution, he went to the front and participated in the civil war and returned to his village after demobilization. “He worked in the volost’s executive committee, was a village li-

brarian, an organizer for political education in the volost, and did a bit of correspondence work for the village in the district newspaper . . . and, obliged by the hopeless chronic lack of repertoire, even wrote little plays for the drama circle.”!? Afterward he went to do Komsomol work in Rybinsk and then Party work in Iaroslavl’, editing the Komsomol newspaper. He moved to Moscow in 1926, and in 1928 he worked in the secretariat of RAPP. He enrolled in the

Institute of the Red Professorate and, upon graduation, worked at Literaturnaia ucheba (Literary training) from 1934 to 1939. His work began to appear in print in 1918, in the Petrograd Krasnaia gazeta (Red newspaper), after which he published about thirty collections of verse. He was a candidate for membership in the Central Committee of the Party, a member of the Central In-

spection Committee of the Party, a deputy at the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (five sessions) and of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR (three sessions), a

member of the World Peace Council and of the Soviet Committee for the Defense of Peace, secretary of the Board of Directors of the Union of Soviet

Writers, and from 1953 to 1959 occupied the union's post of First Secretary; at

various times he acted as chief editor of Literaturnaia gazeta (Literary newspaper) and Ogonek (Zest). He was named a Hero of Socialist Labor and won two Stalin Prizes.

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The subject of this biography—Aleksei Surkov, one of the classic figures of Socialist Realism—began as a “proletarian poet” and undoubtedly belonged to the category of nomenklatura-type “autodidacts.” This was the “glorious path of many” into Soviet literature (a path followed, for example, by the originators of Komsomol poetry Aleksandr Zharov and Aleksandr Bezymenskii). The

discovery of apath from Alipanovs to Shishkovs not only dramatically shortened the cultural distances but also polarized Soviet cultural space. The disproportion between the poles intensified, and the niche (figuratively speaking) even for Del’vig disappeared (not to mention the niche for Pushkin or Belinskii). Thus arose—in the already-Soviet era—a self-sufficient cultural model

in which the Fedorovs and Shishkovs are reflected in the Alipanovs and Slepushkins, and vice versa. And only vice versa, since a third character in this cultural space is not assumed. The third is superfluous: he is either removed from the game, or else leaves it himself. Before the Literary Institute and the Institute of the Red Professorate, the poets of the new generation (like Surkov or Zharov), people without a biography, needed a genealogy. In the mid-1930s, just as soon as the mechanism for repro-

ducing the new “creative intelligentsia” began to develop its first “product,” references to the “self-taught” ceased, and the “classics” were again settled onto the “ship of contemporaneity,” which does not mean that Pushkin nonetheless conquered Slepushkin in this historical debate. It means that the intelligentsiapopulist illusions had already become alien to the new generation. There remained a tested model according to which such “literary reputations” were built. To do this in the 1920s, it was enough to downplay the “peasant” accent in the creations of the self-taught poets and to proclaim them to be the forerunners of a truly “proletarian poetry.” Thus, for example, Rozanov called his

first study of Alipanov The Literary Fate of the First Worker-Poet (Literaturnaia sud’ba pervogo poeta iz rabochikh), and Grossman went as far as asserting

roundly that the unfortunate Alipanov was “the undoubted forerunner of subsequent worker-peasant lyric poetry” and that he “opened the first page of proletarian creative work in our lyric poetry.” Rozanov, however, corrected Grossman in this matter: “Evidently Grossman has remained unaware of the existence in the 18th century of the poet Ivan Rudakov, a printing-house worker, else he could not so unequivocally consider Alipanov the first worker-poet.”" So the debate went. One perhaps could boast of something even earlier than Rudakov in the eighteenth century, since one knows of the artist Apelles Ziablov from the seventeenth: he created the avant-garde—but this was in postmodernist fantasies. And the historical Slepushkins and Alipanovs, as befitted the “natural poets,” created a literature that was, as Belinskii so precisely

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divined it, for village lackeys. This literature at the Makar’ev bazaar (and later, in the Apraksin market in Petersburg and the,Nikol’skii market in Moscow), as Jeffrey Brooks showed,'? was never in short supply. Let us note, incidentally, that while “Russia learned to read,” even before the beginning of the twentieth century, Alipanov’s tale of the magical miller was issued (in fifty years) in more than twenty(!) /ubok editions. Such are the “fruits of useful precepts.”

“The Intellectual Proletariat”: Revolutionary Raznochintsy, and Litterateurs, to Boot Alipanov’s printing house, the bankrupting of which apparently finished off this gifted poet once and for all, seems a place that was culturally significant to the greatest extent. One might suggest that it went bankrupt because it only published the books of its owner. But this is untrue: in 1840 the first book of the nineteen-year-old Nikolai Nekrasov, Dreams and Sounds (Mechty i zvuki) was published here (the author later repudiated the book). What fate brought

these two undoubtedly symbolic figures in Russian culture together on the literary path—the chief “natural talent” of the Pushkin era and the “father of revolutionary raznochinets poetry? It was as if two eras came face to face here —but did they recognize themselves in each other? In the 1860s a new model of the function of Russian literature began to take shape. As the era of reform was beginning, the production of “mass literature” finally caught up with that of “high literature.” Both these literatures began to function autonomously, but constantly came together at those same Apraksin and Nikol’skii markets, which were visited by professional litterateurs in search of the books they needed. But between mass (/ubok) literature and “high literature” there was a huge cultural field that began to be intensively cultivated precisely in the 1860s. This field was filled both from the ranks of raznochintsy and those of the cultural elites. These were gradually converging parallel paths. But the cultural product thus created fell out of general consumption in a strange way: it did not reach the mass market, nor did it belong to the sphere of “high literature.” One can suppose that it fed exclusively on itself, which was particularly true of populist poetry. This isolation was a reflection of the intelligentsia segregation of the producers of this poetry. This literature had one recipient—the secret police. The censors’ prohibitions, however, inflamed only the “authors’ activist group” that espoused liberal publications, which more often were published in London, Geneva, or Paris than in Petersburg or in Moscow, and were called

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“free-press” publications.'° This dissident literature was patently different from the pastorales of Slepushkin’s times. The obvious difference was thematic. This

poetry's sources of style were the same. Imitation always accompanies nascent literary movements. Social marginality and the character of ideological discourse determine the choice of models. For raznochinets literature, reliance on both “high-literature” models and “mass-literature” models was natural. Satire and the “ode” were taken from “high” literature, and the folk song and raeshnik from the “low.” This wild symbiosis became the nutrient medium for the new literary generation.

For our short historical excursus, perspective is of primary importance: it was precisely this literature that became the real domain of ideological graphomania, which later spilled over into “proletarian literature” and then into Soviet literature; it was in this literature precisely that the institutional framework and Party-caste rules for “literary struggle” first began to take shape; these were appropriated by the heirs to this literature and were carried over into the Soviet revolutionary era, the 1920s; it was precisely in this literature that the stylistic types for the future growth of the “mass literary movement” at the cusp of the 1930s developed; and

it was precisely this literature that created the preconditions for transforming the marginal cultural strata of the suburbs into the “army of poets” that inundated the cultural arena of the twentieth century with its “iron flood.”

There are certain cultural arenas that cannot be filled with anything but a certain type of “human material.” Describing the milieu of the 1860s “intellectual proletarians,” which was completely eclipsed by the flowering of the Russian novel and therefore attracted little attention from literary historians, the prerevolutionary historian of the raznochinets movement Ch. Vetrinskii (Vasilii Cheshikhin) wrote that in the 1860s, “an entire, rather colorful literary bohemia was formed in Petersburg, a group of persons who partially achieved significant and deserved fame, but who for the most part only held out laterunjustified hopes.”!” The lyricists of this lower-class literary “brotherhood” were basically raznochinets poets of the ilk of Gavriil Zhulev, Leonid Trefolev,

Vasilii Kurochkin, Mikhail Mikhailov, Dmitrii Minaev, Petr lakubovich, and many, many others. These people of almost identical social origins (children of liberated serfs, ruined gentry, small-time merchants, bureaucrats, clergy, and petit bourgeois) eagerly joined in the cultural life; several of them became publishers of innumerable magazines and newspapers, through whose kaleidoscope it is difficult to follow in the 1960s era of “raising up the revolutionary move-

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ment.” Parodying the opponents of raznochiners “nature” in his ballad “The Literary Old Believers” (“Literaturnye starovery”), Gavriil Zhulev portrayed the “gang” and “crowd” of the noble aesthetes thus, who complained: Bozhe moi! teper’ vo vsem Golaia natura,

Akh! propakhla muzhikom

:

Vsia literatura! . . .

I zhurnaly izdaiut Vse molokososy, I prevazhno zadaiut

Novye voprosy ...

[My God! now everything has pure nature, Ach! all literature now smells of the muzhik! . . . And journals are published

by greenhorns all, And with a too-important air they ask new questions... ]

It is curious that from the viewpoint of the new bohemians, the “gang” and “crowd” are not the raznochintsy themselves (terms allotted to them in the traditional literary milieu), but on the contrary, this milieu itself. The new “liter-

ary youth” that literally flooded Russian journalism in the 1860s would become the nutrient medium for reproducing the new intelligentsia elites. It is notable that this milieu, which was wholly occupied with self-reproduction, endless “ideological debates,” and political demarcations, and was directly tied to “antigovernment activities,” turned out to be artistically barren. Its apices were the “naturalistic essays” of the hard-drinking raznochinets writers Nikolai Uspenskii, Fedor Reshetnikov, and Nikolai Pomialovskii, the criticism of Dmitrii Pisarev and Nikolai Dobroliuboy, and the prose of Nikolai Chernyshevskii—

this is what was preserved as second-rung Russian literature; only Nekrasov’s poetry ended up at the margins of the first rung. Something similar can be observed later with “proletarian literature.” The raznochinets inundation, like any phenomenon of this kind, took shape around a “leader” who represented it in “great” literature. Similarly to the way in which Gorky would represent and then uplift postrevolutionary Russian (Soviet) literature by his own authority, Nekrasov would become not only a beacon and an object of imitation in the half-poetry, half-journalism raznochinets milieu, but also he would absorb the cultural energy of this milieu. For

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this reason, he would become such a significant figure in criticism and the “literary battles” of the 1920s that in just the raznochinets culture that he represented would be seen a historical matrix for new culture. The debate about Nekrasov in the 1920s revolved around two aspects—milieu and style—that were primary in this respect. Since these aspects are important in further reflections,

I will pause briefly to look at them. The debate involved the basic movements in revolutionary-era literature, from formalists and RAPPists to Kornei Chukovskii. The latter in particular maintained that “in artificially tearing Nekrasov away from the mass literature of those times, we only distort and confuse the truth.”'* Here Chukovskii had in mind the “literary swarm,” the philistine and semi/ubok poetry of the period on the eve of reform. The RAPPists, on the contrary, held dear a different image of the “poet-citizen.” When Grigorii Lelevich wrote that Nekrasov must not be analyzed “outside the connection with the literary wave whose crest he was,”!? he had precisely the “revolutionary raznochinets poetry of the 60s and 7os’ in mind. What Lelevich called the “social base of Nekrasov’s style” explains much in the fate of this style in Russian literature itself.

Raznochinets poetry, from the venerable “thick journals” to the satirical /skra (Spark), is characterized by a hybrid, incomparable to anything else, of newspaper satire style and hysterical pathetic style, pamphleteer’s sarcasms and the pathos of “tragic fate.” The style of the pamphlet, satire, epigram, parody, and pseudo raeshnik that was cultivated by Svistok (Whistle), Iskra, Russkoe slovo (Russian word), and that was undoubtedly discovered by raznochinets youth, was preserved forever in Russian “free poetry”: all political “writers,” starting with the “proletarian poets” of Zvezda (Star) and Pravda (Truth) and ending

with Lenin, wrote in this style. The truly grotesque forms that it took with, for example, Dem’ian Bednyi, were only an expression of the “genre memory” of the ideological graphomania of the 1860s era. Lelevich turned out to be right about one thing: This style was not created by Nekrasov alone, but by a whole flank of poets. These poets, often very talented and original, expressed in their work varying aspects of the social psycho-ideology of the raznochintsy. But Nekrasov, as an artist of genius, expressed all the most important aspects of this psychology. He synthesized all the basic achievements and innovations of raznochinets poetry— ideological, thematic, and formal. He merged into a single torrent all the streams of poetic creativity of the raznochintsy.?°

Indeed, it was the search for stylistic novelty that made the figure of Nekrasov attractive in the 1920s and put him at the crossroads of the new culture.

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More than anything else, this style was developed by repulsion from the preceding literary tradition and gave currency to Nekrasov and the “flank” that he headed in the era of Russian literature’s acute identity crisis after the revolu-

tion. As I have pointed out, the issue of the relationship to tradition (for other reasons than in the 1860s) became extremely important in the 1920s. The formalists lurii Tynianov”! and Boris Eikhenbaum” spoke of the enormous role played by parody in the shaping of Nekrasov’s style, when working on the problem within the boundaries of the “literary series,” which explained,

for example, the linguistic shakeup of Futurism. Raznochinets periodicals were truly colored by the parodies of Pushkin and Lermontoy, to say nothing of the contemporary “nobleman poets” Afanasii Fet, Apollon Maikov, Iakov Polonskii, Nikolai Shcherbina, and Vsevolod Krestovskii, but behind the aesthetic polemic with “pure art,” the social nature of the debate could be seen. Theoreticians of “proletarian literature” understand this debate literally: “The raznochinets poets have subjected the nobleman’s poetics to a crushing defeat. ..~ The raznochinets poets have pulled away, of course, not only from the ideological content of the gentry’s poetry, but also from its formal peculiarities; they have defeated the gentry style in its entirety, and have overthrown the entire aesthetic system of the gentry.”” In this there was an obvious “adjustment” of history driven by the needs of current literary politics: after the breakdown of Na postu (On guard)” and his expulsion from the RAPP Secretariat, Lele-

vich, one of the founders of RAPP who always stood opposed to the Onlitguardist directors, held up Nekrasov as a counterfigure to the RAPPist calls to “study the classics.” But neither Lelevich nor his RAPPist opponents could understand the fundamental difference in the “style situation” of the 1860s from that of the 1920s: for the raznochintsy (and, of course, for Nekrasov) Pushkin

was a living cultural phenomenon, a part of their own cultural biography (for this reason Pisarev pushed him off the “ship” of that time’s “contemporaneity” with such vehemence). It was a different thing for the “mass-writer” of the 1920s, for whom Pushkin and all “high” culture were somehow unattainable

and (partly because of this) alien. Chukovskii was right: If in the areas of vocabulary and subject-matter Nekrasov at times also revolted against Pushkin, then it was almost always unconsciously. This was to the highest degree a respectful uprising, that of a loyal subject, in the course of which even the protester did not know what he was protesting. . . . There is not a single line of overt challenge to Pushkin in his work at all,

nowhere is there to be found that noisy, jolly, youthful “down with . . . !” that every new school carries within itself when it overthrows another school

in a polemic.”

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It is even less likely that one would hear that “noisy, jolly, youthful” word about the raznochintsy themselves is the 1920s. This generation itself recog-

nized the tragedy of its own situation (one of the sources of the stylistic hysteria of raznochinets poetry)—and it was indeed one of the most tragic genera-

tions in Russian literature, almost the first to experience for itself the law of any revolutionary activity, a law summed up so precisely by Stalin in 1917: “Revolution does not know how to pity nor how to bury its corpses.””°

And indeed there is reason to speak of “corpses,” of aburned-out generation, the average age of whose members was 40, whose most frequent cause

of death was either consumption or alcoholism. To understand the fate of this generation, it is important to consider as well the closed nature of raznochinets poetry, its circlelike character, as well as the pitiful fate of “raznochinets youth” itself, the flowering of whose energies was spent on only a short period of reform in Russian history. When the funeral for forty-four-year-old Vasilii Kurochkin was held in 1875, for the man who was the editor and soul of one of the most “militant” satirical publications of the 1860s, Jskra, “about thirty or forty writers gathered for the funeral, but no one else was there.” Thus Mikhail Lemke wrote pitifully in 1904, in his Essays on the History of Russian Censorship and Journalism ofthe 19th Century (Ocherki po istorii russkoi tsen-

zury i zhurnalistiki XIX stoletiia). “They had forgotten Kurochkin; they don't remember him now either, but they should.”*”’ Nikolai Mikhailovskii also spoke of this occasion: “It was amazing. Thirty to forty people followed the coffin of the man who fifteen years before had been one of the most popular people in Russia.”** This popularity was relative. In the raznochinets milieu, the authority of Nekrasov, Chernyshevskii, Dobroliubov, or Kurochkin was in fact enormous, but beyond the borders of the intelligentsia caste it was, as

it turned out, empty. When the strong but brief wave of revolutionary euphoria had subsided, it turned out that there was no one to follow, not even Scotter. ees Nonetheless, this was a cultural wave of extreme importance, which brought entire new social strata onto the cultural stage, and the first powerful “explosion” of a subculture, which changed the structure of the institution of literature in Russia. This “inundation” of the 1860s would be repeated in Russian literature after six decades had passed. The second time, according to the law of history, it would be as the farce of the “masses’ literary movement.” When one compares these two undoubtedly similar cultural situations, one clearly sees that which made akin and set apart not only these eras but also the cultural complex that gave them expression. Undoubtedly, both held a number of things in common: a severe ideologicalization of creativity; the social milieu

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(the marginality of the social position of the “actors”); the widespread lack of demand for their products and the segregation, inward-lookingness, and isolation tied in with this, which doomed the participants to a “literary battle” according to a closed cycle; and the lack of aesthetic independence, which doomed the products of these literatures to foreordained marginality. What was new in the 1920s was the political situation that did not allow this subculture to independently disappear (“disperse”) into the general stream of

culture: it turned out that from the cultural domain that was raznochinets literature, only the most radical forms survived (as a result of historical “natural selection”)—the ideological, social, institutional, and aesthetic forms:

if the ideological base of the nineteenth-century Sixtyists was formed of flexible and quickly transformable “ideals of revolutionary raznochinstvo” (in a broad range, from liberalism to nihilism and the political extremism of “revolutionary populism”), then in the 1920s the ideological base was not only prepared but also stable, fortified by state institutions; the 1860s bohemian milieu was mainly fed from the educated strata of the population (students, dropout seminarians, and so on), but the new “proletarian” writers’ milieu was mostly replete with the strata of yesterday’s peasants who had not fully mastered the culture of books nor even elementary literacy;

the literary products of the raznochintsy were the expression of free ideological choice, but in the 1920s they were the result of the activity of various manipulatory mechanisms used by the authorities for purposefully creating an appropriate “literary environment” and for squeezing the “ideologically alien” high culture out of the cultural arena;

the relations between “high” and “low” culture in the 1860s had the character of polemical repulsion but—not infrequently—of collaboration as well; but in the revolutionary era they cannot be described in any other terms than “alienation,” open battle, and mutual negation; the self-segregation of the Sixtyists was first of all determined by ideological dissension, and the corporate interests of groups were not a definitive factor (although they played a certain role as well); but the situation of the 1920s and early 1930s was mainly characterized by the dominance of the interests of “circles,” with open expression of aspirations to “seize” literature or hold “hegemony” over it, which was the result of revolutionary cultural figures being drawn directly into the sphere of the authorities, and which often transformed the “literary struggle” into an unprincipled simulation;

the lack of demand for the literary products of the raznochintsy was determined by market mechanisms (these products were alien to both the “mass

consumer” for whom the special /vbof literature existed, and to the cultural

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elites who preferred “high literature”), and they basically had value only in the raznochinets intelligentsia milieu itself; but “mass-produced” proletarian literature (and later Socialist Realist literature) was “promoted” by means ofa

whole series of actions on the part of the power structures, which exerted a direct influence on the process of literary production (and reproduction) in the Soviet era;

the idea of the “social-teaching” functions of literature was only being developed by the Sixtyists, and although it was brought forth in the most radicalized form (the debate over “beauty versus utility”), it was still insufficiently methodologized and was not “logically tied to the liberation movement’; but in the Soviet era this idea acquired not only the severe theoretical and institutional forms of “Party-mindedness ofliterature” but also the character ofa truly paranoid “battle against formalism and aestheticism”; the most radical ideas of the Sixtyist movement (such as Pisarev’s “destruction of aesthetics” and its utilitarianism) still lay at the periphery in their own time, but similar ideas in the 1920s were already at the center of the polemic, incarnated in utilitarian art; and the lack of aesthetic independence in raznochinets literature was tied to a “duality” of its audience (since models were taken from both the “high”

and “low” cultures); but the dependency of the new cultural strata in the revolutionary era was artificially oriented toward the “high” (“classical”)

models, which doomed the products of the “Red Tolstoys” to a foreordained decline.

These similarities and differences bespeak only the obvious mutual connections between the two cultural eras (it is not chance that the problems of

raznochinets literature began to occupy a place that was definitively “distinguished” in Soviet historico-literary science, nor that this literature itself played an extraordinary role in the Soviet recension of Russian nineteenth-century literary history: in essence, this history was rewritten according to the Sixtyist canon). For my subsequent examination, however, it is important that the “in-

jection” of raznochinets elements became one of the most significant factors influencing the mechanism of literary reproduction. But the cultural arena that was shaped in the 1860s cannot be understood outside the context of the inner evolution of its principals nor outside that of the dynamics of the social strata that comprised it. The interstitial intelligentsia arena (which spanned between the “high” and “low” cultures) drew in not only the “lowly ones” (raznochintsy)

but also the “superiors,” who likewise found their own cultural niche in this

peripheral (but utterly important in the perspective of the closely following history) expanse. This niche was in “revolutionary populism,” the second powerful current of the subculture.

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“We Call This Groan a Song...°: The Flowers of Populist Poetry The flowering and waning ofliterary movements is tied to both the fates of

their adepts and the exhaustion of the artistic forms developed within the framework of the movements. It is unnecessary to say that there is a mutual connection between these two processes. This connection was manifest already in the aesthetic polemics of the 1920s. Nekrasov undoubtedly remained

a key figure in relation to which the “magnetic field” of the “new wave” of Russian literature in the latter half of the nineteenth century here examined was transformed. The “Nekrasov problem,” which I touched upon earlier, not only helped to determine one or another of the currents of Soviet aesthetic thinking in the 1920s, but also allowed several issues that were fundamentally important to the revolutionary era itself to be formulated, issues that went far beyond the confines of the historico-literary debate proper. This is seen primarily in the position of Tynianov and Eikhenbaum in this debate, a position that was as usual both latent and urgent. In defining their position thus, I have in mind the fact that the problematics concealed in the formalists’ works went beyond the bounds of the “methodology of scholarship” that they foregrounded, but the ideas they expressed were no less relevant to the current cultural situation than the work of Nekrasov himself. First I will mention the notion (expressed by Tynianov) of a mechanism of “prosaicization of poetry” that Nekrasov used. Tynianov observed that poetry differs from prose “in no way by an immanent sound, nor by rhythm as a given, nor by music that is constantly realized,” but rather by the fact that “all the elements of verse are not given, but assigned: rhythm is assigned as a rhythmic energy which strives to be revealed, and melodic and instrumental articu-

lations and connections are assigned”; in other words, “the assigned key is important’: “Verse differs from prose not so much by immanent characteristics or a given as it does by the assigned series or key.” And this, according to Tynianov, is what creates the “profound differences between the two types.”” The problem of “a given” and “an assigned” has moreover a broader context. It projects directly onto the problem of “decanonization of forms,” more broadly onto the problem of tradition, and even more broadly onto the situation of revolutionary culture as a whole. Tynianov’s article was written in 1921. It is difficult to say whether Eikhenbaum, when literally the following year he addressed the “Nekrasov problem” as well, was compelled only by problems in the “methodology of scholarship.” Eikhenbaum developed the same ideas that Tynianov had only made reference

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up to a to, historical/transformative ideas, which brought the “problem” itself completely different level. Eikhenbaum was content to accept the peculiarities of Nekrasov’s Muse: “He had his own kind of Muse . . . not like her classical sisters, but taken from the street, although she was coquettish up to the point

of theatricality. He had peculiar tastes —maybe somewhat perverted ones. It is the same with other gastronomes.”*” (The subject to which the present book is dedicated suggests a certain “perversion of gastronomic tastes” as well, but this does not obviate the necessity of seeking out the ingredients and recipes.)

Furthermore, Eikhenbaum was not at all inclined to democratize Nekrasov: in arriving at his system of devices, “Nekrasov did not come from the street, not as a natural talent, but rather straight from literature.”*' This difference oflocation (a Muse “from the street” and an author “from literature”) perhaps con-

stitutes the essence of the event of Nekrasov’s existence in Russian literature.

“Biography lovers are puzzled by the ‘contradictions’ between Nekrasov's life and his verse. These contradictions cannot be glossed over, but they are not only legitimate but also totally necessary, for the very reason that the ‘soul’ or ‘temperament is one thing, but creative work is something completely different,” asserted Eikhenbaum. “The role chosen by Nekrasov was suggested to him by history and was undertaken as a historical act. He played his role in the play that history had written just as ‘sincerely’ (and in the same sense of ‘sincerity’) as one may speak of an actor’s ‘sincerity.’ He had to choose a lyric posture faithfully, to create a new theatrical emotion and entertain ‘the mob that doesn’t heed the prophecies’ with it. Nekrasov succeeded in doing this.” Eikhenbaum went on to cite Andreevskii’s 1899 article (“one of the cleverest in the literature about Nekrasov”):

Over the course of many years this romance of Nekrasov and the people unfolded before the eyes of all Russia. Poetry was no longer only what he wrote, but in his role itself, in this story of Nekrasov’s undivided, passionate love for the people. Thus, when he died, having long since been spoiled by wealth, an innumerable throng buried him with tears, like a sufferer for the common people and the downtrodden.”

The picture presented here needed some explanation. Eikhenbaum based his blasphemous (from the viewpoint of moralizing criticism) interpretation of the “poet of grief and sorrow” as an actor (if not cynic) and aesthete on a traditional understanding of freedom: Nekrasov was a historically inevitable and necessary phenomenon. The significance of his individuality is by no means diminished by this. The freedom of individuality is not manifested in immunity to historical laws,

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but in an ability to realize them—in the ability to be contemporary [while] hearing the voice of history. Individuality and historical law are not opposite concepts, nor do they exclude each other. Creative activity (and individuality is a concept of the creative personality) is in general the act of recognizing oneself in the flow of history: it is responsible.*?

The formalists could hardly be accused oftnot knowing how to “be contemporary.” This is why Eikhenbaum’s last observation is so substantial: Art lives by interweaving and opposing its traditions, developing and modifying them by the principles of contrast, parody, and displacement. It has no causal relationship with “life,” nor with “temperament” or “psychology.” One may study the history of literature, but not the history of “temperaments” or of “natures.” But art is a continuous process, and therefore to study it not as a historical phenomenon that has its own laws of development but rather as a projection of individual “temperament” is to study the problem of time according to a clock’s face.*#

But when one goes beyond the boundaries of the “literary series” and the OPOlaZ didactic writing samples, one is left with the “given” and the “assigned”; the irrelevance of judgment of taste; the poet as an actor in the theater of history, his or her “sincerity” always tempered by the role; freedom is the consciousness of choosing the role, but “individuality” (“temperament,” in Ei-

khenbaum’s terminology) itself remains outside the boundaries of the scenic space that literature is. Let us now step back from the obvious: here one can see a practically complete “theory of the social mandate” (the 1921-1922 model). Much more important are productive conclusions drawn from the statements of Tynianov and Eikhenbaum. The view of the figure of Nekrasov that they expounded literally provokes a mental experiment: What happens if the poet turns out to be a bad actor? For example, if he did not possess the skill of Nekrasov-as-publisher, nor Nekrasov’s material advantage, but on the contrary was burnt out with alcoholism or tuberculosis, or in prison, and played “for real’—that is, did not “play”? In this there is not even a grain of “invention”: practically the entire “Nekrasov school” (from the 1860s raznochintsy to the later populists of the 1890s) consisted of very bad actors. In this context, the “Nekrasov problem” acquires

a completely distinct meaning: Nekrasoy, as I shall elaborate, turns out to be a point of orientation (whether conscious or unconscious) for the poetic move-

ment that defined itself in relation to him (from raznochintsy and populists to the Surikovians)—he had no heir among those who deified him (the populists) nor among those who rejected him (Surikov). They all took the poetic

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metaphor of Nekrasov (“poet” or “citizen”) seriously: the populists supposed

that they carried on Nekrasov’s line (choosing the “citizen” role), and Surikov on the contrary rejected the metaphor (by becoming a “poet”). This is one of

numerous examples of being blinded by a poetic ideal, induced by the absence of aesthetic vision (or by a defect in this vision). In fact, the entire poetic movement revolving around Nekrasov was part ofthat “innumerable throng” that buried him “with tears, like a sufferer for the common people and the downtrodden.” Thus Nekrasov can be regarded as the boundary (yet another unexpected function of his in the history of nineteenth-century Russian literature) along which the lines of “poets” and “citizens” divide. The latter are the subject of this inquiry. It is patently obvious that in this case the role of that which Eikhenbaum called “temperament” (and “nature,” “psychology”) grew manifold. After all, Nekrasov did not simply “play a role’—he wrote that role for him-

self. But what is to be done with the actors that do not know the role, not to mention those who do not even suspect that they are on the stage? It may be categorically stated that they are true hostages of “historical law.” The great actor Gorky got into literature according to this law, and the countless poets and writers surrounding him played the roles of extras, which is undoubtedly better than the role that fell to the aforementioned peasant Sibiriakov, when he served as a prompter on the Petersburg stage. Furthermore, it is just this corps of “extras” that creates the “actor.” Not so that these “courtiers” could make a “king,” but that without it, a good actor (in the sense that Eikhenbaum bestowed on this word) is doomed to the role of genius in art. Thus the limit of the cultural arena examined here becomes apparent. Limits are of course conditional. And when history does not meddle in geography too much, they are drawn according to “natural” boundaries: according to riverbanks or meridians, for example. Thus it happened in the case I am examining: the boundary between the raznochintsy of the 1860s and

the populists of the 1870s—1890s lay beyond the “meridian” noted by Eikhenbaum: the former realized themselves in literature and journalism; the latter, in pure politics. As it turned out, the ardent revolutionaries of the People’s Will [Narodnaia volia] era were destined to complete the literary cycle. Or, more precisely, one spiral of a cyclical process: from the “hymn of joy” of the raznochintsy and the vigorous force of their pamphlets, to the pessimism and breakdown of the 1880s and 1890s. This cycle would be repeated: from the early proletarian poetry of the 1890s and early 1900s (the age of Zvezda and Pravda) to the funeral knell of Kuznitsa (Smithy*) in the early 1920s; and later (at an accelerated tempo) from the joyous flight of Komsomol poetry (the time of Alek-

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sandr Zharov and Aleksandr Bezymenskii) in the early 1920s to the “poetic decadence” of the mid-20s (the time of Mikhail Golodnyi and Iosif Utkin).

The only thing that could stop this meaningless endless cycle was “state appropriation of literature” and an imprisonment of historical time in (to use

Eikhenbaum’s image) the edges of the clock face. But for the time being, this generation——the “revolutionary populists’— were a sort of accident in literature. The designation “revolutionary” was not simply a sign of distinction (“for one’s services”) for the “progressive forces,” as

they have usually been designated in Soviet history; it was also a completely accurate characterization of the circle of people involved. These people were in fact an “accident” in literature, which makes all the representatives of the cultural space I am investigating akin. After all, the “little natural-talent muzhiks”

(“muzhichki-samorodki”) of Pushkin’s time were not occupied with poetry proper, but rather with presenting “the people”; the raznochintsy were engaged in writing—in breaks from political debates; the proletarian poets preferred making revolution to making literature; the RAPPists were not inclined to write, being above all preoccupied with “taking control” of literature; and Soviet writers “participated in Socialist construction” “in the struggle for peace,” and being writers in the strict sense only came after this participation. Torn between the professions of “poet” and “citizen,” these people created a huge literary output and carried an entire culture with them, which applies to the “revolutionary populists” as well—a phenomenon that is undoubtedly peripheral, from the viewpoint of “good gastronomic tastes,” but that was extremely important in the history of literature. It is also true that literature was by far not the main concern of their lives. Their biographies consist of three actions: throwing bombs, sitting in prison, and . . . writing poetry. This is really all. In Lenin’s words (and he used Kautskii’s expression), the 1870s were an era in which “every socialist was a poet, and every poet a socialist.”°° Thus “a few words about the authors” would state that they were all professional revolutionaries, drawn not by chance into antigovernment organizations, but consciously, logically, and unwaveringly continuing underground political activities. Freedom of choice is manifest in these biographies in a clinically pure form. Petr Lavrov, who came from a rich noble family, was a professor in the Artillery Academy in Petersburg. For releasing his own poems in Hertzen’s publications, he was dismissed from his position (the rank of colonel) in 1866, arrested, and sent to the Vologda Province under police surveillance, but even

there he continued his association with Otechestvennye zapiski. After an escape organized by German Lopatin, he turned up abroad, where he witnessed the

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Paris Commune and was close to many of the communards, met Marx and Engels, became a member of the First Internationale and editor of the populist journal Vpered (Forward), and later, having joined the People’s Willists, became one of the editors of Vestnik “Narodnoi voli” (People’s will herald).

Feliks Volkhovskoi, from a noble Poltava family, enrolled in Moscow University and immediately became involved in “antigovernment activity.” He was first attracted by the Karakozov affair, then participated in the student movement, and was finally arrested and spent two years in Petropavlovsk Prison. He was tried for the Nechaev affair and after the trial organized a propaganda group among workers. A few years later, he was again tried for the “affair of the 193” and sentenced to exile in Tobol’sk Province; from there he was transferred to Tomsk, and in 1889 he fled abroad. Settling in London, he participated in

the activities of the Society of the Friends of Russian Freedom, and afterward joined the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. Sergei Sinegub came from a small-gentry family and studied in the Petersburg Technological Institute. In the 1870s he participated in a group of Chaikovists and did propaganda work among weavers. Becoming a teacher in Tver’ Province, he continued propagandizing among the peasants. He was arrested

in 1873 and spent four years in Petropavlovsk Prison. He was later tried for the “affair of the 193” and sentenced to nine years of hard labor; after serving his

sentence, he remained on a settlement in Chita (for twenty years altogether) and all this time continued to write for the “free Russian press” collections. Petr Iakubovich was from a noble family of modest means. He studied in the department of history and philology of Petersburg University and at that time began to work on literary journals. Having gotten involved with populists, he dedicated himself exclusively to revolutionary activities, became a member of People’s Will, and actively participated in the planning of terrorist acts. He was arrested in 1884 and three years later was sentenced to death for the “affair of the 21”; the sentence was commuted to eighteen years of hard labor. He spent eight years in the mines, then remained on a settlement in Tobol’sk Province. He was published all the while in populist publications and

upon returning to Petersburg in 1904 became a member of the editorial board of the journal Russkoe bogatstvo (Russian riches), wherein he continued his lit-

erary activities as a poet, critic, and translator.

German Lopatin was one of the most courageous revolutionary activists, although at first he worked alone; but it was he who organized Lavrov’s escape from prison, organized an attempt (unsuccessful) to free Chernyshevskii from hard labor, and reconstructed the devastated central organization of People’s Will. He was arrested numerous times but managed daring escapes. Abroad,

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he grew close to Marx, was a member of the General Council of the First Internationale, and translated Das Kapital into Russian. After his arrest in 1887,

he was sentenced to death, which was commuted to indefinite penal servitude, and he spent eighteen years in solitary confinement in ShlisseP burg Prison. Vera Figner, from a venerable noble family, was educated at home and then studied in the women’s Rodionov Institute in:Kazan’. In 1872 she went to Switzerland, where she studied in the medical faculties of Zurich and Bern Universities. She began to participate in populist groups at this time. Returning to Russia, she became a revolutionary exclusively, joined the Land and Freedom [Zemlia i volia] organization, and after it split, became a member of the exec-

utive committee of People’s Will. From 1879 to 1881 she participated directly in the planning and execution of this organization's terrorist acts and was one of the organizers of Aleksandr II’s assassination. After March 1, 1881, and up to the time of her arrest in 1883, she remained the sole member of the People’s Will

executive Committee, continuing to reconstruct this illegal organization. After her arrest, she spent one and one-half years in Petropavlovsk Prison, then was

sentenced to death, which was commuted to lifetime hard labor. She spent twenty years (1884-1904) in solitary confinement in Shlissel’burg. Nikolai Morozov, who like Vera Figner became a legend for many generations of revolutionaries, was the illegitimate son of a rich landlord and a serf

peasant woman. He studied at the Moscow Gimnaziia, from whence he was expelled for revolutionary propaganda. A continual participant in populist organizations, he went abroad in 1874, where he collaborated on emigrant publications. Upon his return to Russia he was arrested and spent three years in prison, having been involved in the “affair of the 193.” After his release from

prison in 1878 he joined Land and Freedom, becoming one of the editors of their journal, and after this organization split, he became a member of the executive committee of People’s Will and the editor of its journal. In 1880 he emigrated, met Marx, and a year later, when trying to cross the Russian border,

was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment in the “trial of the 20.” He spent the first part of his sentence in the Alekseev ravelin of Petropavlovsk Fortress, the latter part in Shlissel’burg. He spent twenty-five years in solitary confinement, but was granted amnesty in 1905. Five years later, however, he was again tried for the publication of his collection of poems Songs of the Stars (Zvezdnye pesni) and was sentenced to a year in Dvinsk Fortress Prison. After the October Revolution, he was head of the Lesgaft Institute of Natural Sci-

ences for many years.*” These are only seven biographies, out of many hundreds. As one can see,

the “poets of revolutionary populism” were as a class extremely different from

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those of the raznochinets milieu, although they were closely connected “ideologically” with them. But the destinies of the two generations were quite different: the latter literally burned out in their youth, but the former, in spite of what they experienced, almost all died at quite advanced ages and acquired while still alive the titles of “grandmothers” and “grandfathers” of Russian revolution: Petr Lavrov died at seventy-seven, German Lopatin at seventy-three, Feliks Volkhovskoi at sixty-eight; Vera Figner lived to be ninety years old, and Nikolai Morozov, ninety-two. Only Petr lakubovich and Sergei Sinegub died young, at fifty-two and fifty-six, respectively. The average lifetime of the raznochintsy was forty years, but that of the populists, seventy. This difference of thirty years was spent, as I have pointed out, in prison. These were the last participants in Russian revolutions to have long lives: the average life span of several succeeding generations was determined by the year 1937.

The works of the populists were published almost completely by the underground, while their predecessors and contemporary raznochintsy were mostly legally published. But, as Soviet literary historian A. M. Bikhter notes: Only to the most “loyal” of readers and lovers of literature could it seem that the literary-social struggle in Russia was limited to the pages of “thick” journals and books. Such “respectable” readers did not even suspect that beyond the confines of their legal worldview a whole world opened up, a diversified and varied world full of heroic images and sentiments, a world of names they had never heard of, of poems they had never read. Indeed, with only a first superficial view of the literary life of this era it was difficult to discern the movement of the stratum of poetry that was developing illegally and covertly, and which was the artistic and poetic reflection of the heroic struggle of a handful of Russian revolutionaries against police tyranny and the whole machinery of tsarist autocracy in general.**

I will interrupt Bikhter to return to the problem of the “given” and the “assigned.” The Nekrasov cult was also characteristic of this latter generation of poets, as were the ties to folk lyricism and folklore, and the orientation toward bookish literary sources (apart from Nekrasov’s, which was common to all).

But in distinction from Nekrasov, they did not come “from literature”: they solved “problems of form . . . on the basis of notions formed in the school and gimnaziia about classical Russian versification, about rhythm, and even about the vocabulary of Russian poetry,” as Bikhter states.*? One should note that this aesthetic conservatism was not a distinguishing feature of only the People’s Will poets: raznochinets literature was tied to the living process of “decanonization,” but the populists were pure “archaists” in

Tynianov’s model. The only real issue is that the “given” for each successive

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generation changed: the ties to literature grew ever weaker, and the orientation to the “street” grew ever stronger (which is attested to by the experience of “proletarian literature”), until in time these ties were definitively broken in the

illiterate scribblings of shock-worker writers at the cusp of the 1920s—1930s. Only afterward was there a return to “tradition”: Socialist Realism patched the “spine of two centuries” (as Mandel’shtam said), and as a result, the aforementioned Surkovy, surpassing all his real predecessors, became the direct heir to “great Russian literature.” Thus the “given” was transformed into the “as-

signed,” and the conflict was resolved: it became possible to study time by the clock face.

But while the cycle was becoming complete, a new cultural phenomenon was being created. The unity of biographies defined a unity of motifs as well,

which allows one to regard this poetry as a unified whole. These motifs differed chiefly from those of raznochinets poetry in theme. Central here were the new hero, struggle, hatred of “stifling autocratic oppression,” bitter prison experiences, the torturous expectation of death and punishment, and thoughts

of one’s strength fruitlessly waning. This oratorical poetry was different from raznochinets poetry in that the latter rarely contained direct appeals to the reader, and if it did, it was almost never in the form of direct political proclamations such as: Prosnis’, prosnis! Vosstan’, neschastnaia Rossiia

Tvoi bog zovet tebia.. . Okovy razviazhi! Vosstan’, svobodnaia, pred siloi bezzakonnoi, Pred khaosom vlastei!*®

[Awake, Awake! Revolt, unhappy Russia Your god calls you...

Unbind your fetters! Revolt, free, against the lawless force, Against the chaos of authorities! ] (Lavrov, “To the Russian People”

[“Russkomu narodu’})

Ne dovol’no li vechnogo goria? Vstanem brat’ia, povsiudu zaraz!

Ot Dnepra i do Belogo moria, I Povolzh’e, i dal’nii Kavkaz! Na vorov, na sobak—na bogatykh!

Da na zlogo vampira tsaria! Bei, gubi ikh, zlodeev prokliatykh! Zasvetis,, luchshei zhizni zaria!

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[Is there not enough of eternal grief? Let us arise, brothers, everywhere at once! From the Dniepr and to the White Sea, And along the Volga and the distant Caucasus! Get the thieves, the dogs—the rich! And get the evil vampire of the tsar! Beat them, kill them, the damned villains! Shine forth, dawn of new life!] (Lavrov, “New Song” § [“Novaia pesnia”})

Skoro ystanet rabochii narod. Drognut vragi ego, strakhom ob’ iatye; Rukhnut pred nim eti zdar’ia prokliatye: Tiurmy, kazarmy, sudy i dvortsy.. . S gordykh tsarei on sorvet ikh ventsy . . . Bol’no uzh mnogo narodu stradan‘ia! Vse ne prikhodit nash chas vozdaian ia! Pust’ on udarit: my vmeste poidem Pravdu sviatuiu dobyt’ toporom! [Soon the working people will arise. Their enemies will shudder, seized by fear; These accursed buildings will fall down before them; Prisons, barracks, courts and palaces . . . They will tear the crowns from the proud tsars . . . The great suffering of the people already pains! Our hour of revenge still doesn’t come! Let him strike: together we will go And get holy truth by the axe!] (Lavroy, “New Prison”

(“Novaia tiur’ma”]})

This zeal for destruction—“a call for the axe,” in the People’s Willists’ own language, or “agitation by the ruins,” as Dostoyevsky called it—was indeed introduced into literature by the populists. Akin to this was the motif of despondency, born of the realization of the uselessness of struggle and of one’s own doom: Pogibnem vse my nezametno, Kak pogibaet muravei, Nogoi dosuzheiu bessledno Razdavlennyi sredi polei . . . Uvy, nam chuzhdo uteshen’e,

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Chto v budushchie vremena Proiznesutsia s uvazhen’em, S liuboviu nashi imena

[ We will all die unnoticed, Like an ant dies,

Crushed by an indifferent foot Leaving no trace in the fields . . . Alas, alien to us is the consolation That in future times Our names will be pronounced

With respect, with love] (Volkhovskoi, “To Our Oppressors” [“Nashim ugnetateliam’])

Bessil’nym svidetelem zdes’ ia stoiu, Svidetelem kazni uzhasnoi: Bessledno khoroniat zdes’ iunost’ moiu, Izmuchivshi mukoi naprasnoi! . . . [I stand here a powerless witness, Witness to a horrible execution:

Without trace, they bury my youth here, That was tortured to death in vain! ...

]

(Sinegub, “The Years Pass . . . Vault of My Darkness . . .”

[“Prokhodiat goda . . . Svod temnitsy moei . . .”])

Sginuli sily ... Tusklo siianie dnia.. .

Kholod mogily Obnial, kak savan, menia... [My strength has vanished . . .

The light of day is dim... The cold of the grave Like a shroud, has enveloped me...

]

(Morozov)

Nothing brings relief, not even nature—the mental journey through onceloved fields alongside a brook ends thus: No i ruchei, kogda-to milyi, Segodnia chuzhd dushe moei. Mne veet kholodom mogily

I ot lesov i ot polei... Zdes vse krugom polno otravoi

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{But the brook, too, once dear, Today is alien to my soul. I feel the cold of the grave blowing Both from forests and from fields. . . Here all around is full of poison] (Morozov, “From Old Recollections”

(“Iz starykh vospominanii”])

Repeated in poem after poem, these motifs create a sensation of time hav-

ing stopped. It is difficult to imagine that this poetry was created—in the same monotonous way—during a period of almost three decades. The decades of isolation as it were stopped these poets’ lives; one could have asked them: “What millennium is it, dear ones, outside?” One would await an answer in

vain. The perception of time is permeated with the same hysterical extremes that transfix all this poetry: Kak mnogo let uzh pozadi, Kak malo ikh uzh vperedi.. . Za godom novyi god vlachitsia, Kak krov’, chto medlennoi struei

Ves’ den’ iz rany rokovoi Skvoz’ bint bez uderzhu sochitsia [So many years now far behind, So few of them in front of me...

The new year drags in behind the old, Like blood, in a slow stream

All day from a fatal wound Seeps uncontrollably through the bandage]

writes Lopatin in the poem “For January 13th of Any Year (“Na 13 ianvaria vsiakogo goda”)—January 13 was his birthday—and likewise the pathetic greeting of the new year: »

Vstretim my veselo, vstretim my smelo Novyi rodivshiisia god! Budem my bit’sia za bratskoe delo, Bit’sia za bednyi narod!

[We greet it gaily, greet it boldly The newborn year! We will fight for our brothers’ cause,

Fight for the poor people!] (Lavrov, “Song of Youth” [“Pesnia iunosti”])

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The perception of time is without perspective—it flows “according to the clock face,” as if imprisoned in the space inside a camera:

Golye steny, tiuremnye dumy, Kak vy unyly, temny i ugriumy! . . . Skverno v nevole bez dela lezhat’, Tselye gody 0 vole mechtat’. . . Vse zdes’ tak tikho, bezzhiznenno, bledno .. . Gody prokhodiat besplodno, bessledno, Tianutsia dolgo nedeli i dni,— Skuku tupuiu navodiat oni... [Naked walls, prison thoughts,

How dismal, dark, and gloomy you are! .. . It is bad to lie in prison with nothing to do, To dream whole years of freedom . . . Here everything is so quiet, lifeless, pale... Years pass fruitlessly, without trace, The weeks and days stretch long, They cover you with dull boredom... | (Morozov, “In Confinement” [“V zakliuchenii”])

Kashel’ dushit, grud’ bolit, Serdtse b’etsia nesterpimo,

I vertitsia vse vokrug Po chasam neuderzhimo... Skol’ko zh let eshche tak zhit’? Pravo, sil uzh netu bole... Khot’ ssylali uzh skorei Ili veshali uzh, chto li!

[The cough chokes you, the chest hurts, The heart pounds unbearably, And around you everything spins For hours on end... How many more years must I live like this? Truth said, I have no strength left. . . I'd rather they exiled me Or just went ahead and hanged me!] (Volkhovskoi)

This is undoubtedly ecstatic poetry. If the young Shklovskii, when he like Eikhenbaum still believed that art “has no causal relationship with ‘life,’ nor

with ‘temperament or ‘psychology,”” had written about this poetry, he would

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probably have titled his article “Hysteria as a Device.” But at issue is the fact that there is no “displacement” here: everything is “serious.” Heroism, sacrifice, and along with it the pathos of doom:

Rasseian mrak, zavesa podniata! I v pervyi raz ia soznaiu bez strakha, Chto umerla o schastit mechta

I ne podniat’sia ei iz prakha [Darkness is dispersed, the veil is lifted! And for the first time I realize without fear, That the dream of happiness has died And that it cannot arise from the ashes] (Iakubovich)

Pali vse luchshie . . . V zemliu zarytye V meste pustynnom bezvestno legli! Kosti, nich’eiu slezoi ne omytye, Ruki chuzhie v mogilu snesli. . . [All the best have fallen . . . Buried in the earth

They have lain down in a desert place unknown! Their bones, not washed by anyone's tears, Were carried to the grave by strangers’ hands. . . } (Figner)

Raynina mertvaia pod snezhnoi pelenoi.. Krugom toska, zloveshchaia toska

.

[A dead plain under a snowy mantle. . . All around is melancholy, ominous melancholy] (lakubovich)

Zdes’, za tiuremnoiu stenoi, Mogu teper’ ia oglianut’sia— Nad razorennoiu dushoi, V toske, gluboko sodrognut'sia . . . [Here, below the prison wall, I can now look round—

Upon my ravaged soul, And in melancholy, shudder deeply . . . ] (Figner, “Twelve Months in Prison Already . . .” [“Uzh dvadtsat’ mesiatsev v tiur’me . . .”})

Odoleli dumy mrachnye: Gibnut—strashno, zhit—strashnei!

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[Dismal thoughts have overcome me: To die is horrible, to live more horrible!] (lakubovich)

Grob, grob! grob! . . .

V kazhdom zhivaia dusha iznyvaet! Grob, grob! grob! . . . Medlenno, tikho v nikh zhizn’ ugasaet! [Grave, grave! grave! ...

In everyone the living soul languishes! Grave, grave! grave! ... Slowly, quietly, the life in them dies away!] (Sinegub)

Zaterty slavnye stezi, Potushen fakel ideala, I znamia svetloe v griazi [The glorious paths are wiped away, The torch of the ideal is smothered,

And the bright banner lies in filth] (Iakubovich)

It would seem that a storm would finally break out. But no, an explosion follows: Vse naskuchilo, vse nadoelo! Glaz nedobroiu iskroi gorit, Ni na chto by krugom ne gliadela. I khotelos’ by vse raznesti, Vse ustavy slomat’, vse pregrady I v bezumnom poryve naiti Khot minutochku zhguchei otrady! [Everything has bored me, wearied me! The eye burns with an unkind spark, Would rather not look round at anything.

And I'd like to smash everything, Break down all regulations, all obstacles And find in a mindless burst Maybe just a minute of burning delight!] (Figner, “Day After Day You Sit at Work . . .” [“Den’-den’skoi za rabotoi sidish’ . . .”])

This deep depression is replaced by the unexpected:

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la ves —ogon’ i mech, Ia ves —poryv otmshchen ia, I gneva ia pevets do grobovoi doski

[I am all fire and sword, I am all the bursting of vengeance,

And am the singer of wrath till my dying day] (lakubovich)

Thus the underground-romantic consciousness is born, which describes itself in the canons of early-nineteenth-century romantic poetry: V eti dni bol’nogo ozloblen’ia, V eti dni unyniia i toski Gde naiti ulybku odobren’ia I podderzhku druzheskoi ruki? Chto tolpa! Ona, zavidey rany, V glubine serdechnoi u tebia, Predpochtet krasivye obmany, Ubezhit, spokoistvie liubia. Luchshii drug poniknet golovoiu, I v molchan’e grustnom ty prochtesh’: “Gordym bud’! Molchi s tvoei toskoiu, Mirno spiashchikh stonom ne trevozh’!”

[In these days of painful bitterness, In these days of dejection and melancholy Where can you find an approving smile And the support of a friendly arm?

From the mob?! Catching sight of the wounds That are in the depths of your heart, They will prefer pretty deceptions, Will flee, loving tranquility.

A best friend will hang his head, And in his sad silence you will read: “Be proud! Be silent with your melancholy, Dont disturb the peacefully sleeping with your groaning!”] (lakubovich, “Decision” [(“Reshenie”])

But how is this romanticism born a century late? Its foundations are of course bookish, since books remained the only source of real-life impressions: Poroi v tosklivuiu nevoliu

Zhivaia kniga popadet

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I vdrug pomanit za soboiu I v zhizm liudskuiu uvlechet. Bor’ba i trud, k dobru stremlen’e, Liubov i radosti liudei, I ikh stradam ia, ikh muchen’ia, I gorech’ edkaia strastei— Vse voskresaet pred glazami

V kartinakh, v obrazakh zhivykh, Risuias’ iarkimi chertami V odnoobraz’e dnei glukhikh . . .

Sklonias’ nad knigoi, zabyvaesh’ Svoi tesnyi mir, tiur’mu, sebia.. . S chuzhoi dushoi svoiu slivaesh’, S nei nenavidia, s nei liubia! . . .

I toiu vlast’iu sily divnoi, Chto my sochuystviem zovem, V minuty te khotia fiktivnoi, No vse zhe zhizn’iu my zhivem. [Oft into melancholy captivity A living book will fall And suddenly it will beckon to follow And will bring you into human life. Struggle and labor, striving for good, Love and the joys of people, And their sufferings, their tortures,

And the caustic bitterness of passions— All revive before your eyes In pictures, in living images, Drawn in bright outlines In the monotony of dead days... Bent over a book, you forget Your cramped world, prison, yourself. . . You merge your soul with another's, Hating with it, loving with it!... And by the power of the wondrous force That we call sympathy, For those minutes we live a life That though imagined, is still a life.] (Figner)

This poem reflects the inner world of the “prison poets” in the fullest possible

manner. Sinegub described the “process of creation’ —his “literary existence”— as follows:

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Aside from the half-hour walk (as yet, there were few of us in the prison)— the walks that were always in one and the same little courtyard, under the supervision of three people—a noncommissioned officer, a garrison soldier standing at the gates, and a soldier from the guards—there was no influx of real-life impressions. And for almost a year and a half, I did nothing but lie down and read until evening, and in the evening until the wee hours I walked from corner to corner, daydreamed, thought, and composed poems to myself. . . |could not write: we were not allowed to have paper, ink, nor pencils, according to the prison’s instructions. One had to keep the poems in one’s head, so as not to forget them.*! And what persisted of these memories?

Kak strastnyi, goriachechnyi bred, Kak lepet rebiacheskii, snova Dni gordykh poryvoy, velikikh nadezhd Vykhodiat iz mraka bylogo . . . Shumna i vol’na, kak vesennii potok, Beseda rosla i kipela; U kazhdogo krov’ klokotala v grudi, Litso vdokhnovenno gorelo. Ugrozy i kliki nosilis’ krugom V potokakh tabachnogo chada, I sami, sluchalos’, ne videli my V rechakh nashikh smysla i slada. Iz lishnego slova rozhdalas’ gora, Vragi mezh druzei nakhodilis’ I's penoi u rta—ne na zhizn’, a na smert ,—

Slovami, kak shpagami bilis’! Obidnye klichki brosalis’ v litso S kakim-to zloradnym staran’em . . . I chasto konchalsia bezumnyi razdor Vnezapnym i strashnym rydan’em! To plakalo chuvstvo liubvi molodoi, Porugannoi chistoi pechali; Zavetnye, luchshie struny dushi, Zadetye, gnevno rydali.. . [Like passionate heated delirium,

Like a child’s babbling, again The days of proud outbursts, great hopes Come out of the darkness of the past. . . Noisy and free, like a springtime stream, The conversation grew and seethed; Each felt the blood bubbling in his chest,

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a7

The face shone with inspiration. Threats and calls were carried about In the streams of tobacco fumes,

And we, as it happened, did not see The sense and order in our talk. From a stray word a mountain was born, Enemies among friends were discovered And mouths foaming—not to life, but to death— We fought with words, like rapiers! Insulting names were thrown in the face With a kind of malicious intent. . . And often the senseless discord ended In sudden and horrible sobbing!

Thus wept the feeling of young love, Profaned with pure sorrow; The sacred, best strings of the soul,

Stricken, sobbed angrily . . . ] (Iakubovich, “Debate”

[“Spor”])

Here one sees not only a picture of the everyday life of People’s Willists but also an accurate description of the hysterical condition that these people lived in even before going to prison. Since proletarian poetry was the direct heir of the People’s Will poetry, attempts were constantly made in Soviet criticism to describe the latter in categories of “realism.” And in fact one finds quite a few texts that are no longer distinguishable from the “poems about professions,” with endless moaning and complaints about back-breaking toil and inhumane living conditions, which

the proletarian poets applied in abundance. Such is Sinegub’s “Thoughts of a Weaver” (“Duma tkacha”): Muchit, terzaet golovushku bednuiu Grokhot mashinnykh koles;

Svet zastilaetsia v ochen’kakh krupnymi Kapliami pota i slez...

Kashel’ prokliatyi izmaial vsiu grud’ moiu, Tozhe boliat i boka, Spinushka, nozhen’ki noiut, serdechnye,

Stoi tselyi den’ u stanka!. . . Grokhot mashin, dukhota nesterpimaia, V vozdukhe kloch’ia khlopka,

Maslom progorklym voniaet udushlivo: Da, zhizn’ tkacha nelegka! . . .

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Kak-to zhena nynche s domom spravliaetsia, Chto nam zemlitsa-to dast? Malo zemlitsy; plokha ona, matushka, Sushchaia, pravo, napast’! Kak sberegu, zarabotavshi, denezhki, Stanu domoi posylat’. . .

Skol’ko za mesiats-to nynche pridetsia mne Deneg shtrafnykh otdavat’? Ekh, kaby men’she . . . O gospodi, gospodi!

Nash ty vsevyshnii tvorets! Dolgo li budet zhit’e goremychnoe, Skoro

muchen’iu konets?

[My poor little head is tortured, tormented By the rumbling of wheels of machines; In my little eyes it grows dim With big drops of sweat and tears. . . The damned cough has tortured my whole chest, My sides, too, are hurting,

My little back and feet ache, poor things, Stand all day at the station! .. . The din of machines, unbearable stuffiness, Scraps of cotton in the air, The stifling stink of rancid oil: Yes, a weaver’s life is hard! . . . But how is my wife coping with the house, What will the earth give us? Too little land; it’s bad, my God! Truth to tell, a real disaster! As soon as I save a bit of money I've earned,

I'll go and send it home... But how many months will I have to Give up my money in fines? Oh, let them be few . . . O God, God! Our all-powerful creator! Will this poor devil’s existence be long, Is the end of the torture nearby?]

Here one sees an obvious transposition of Nekrasov (preserving not only his poetic meter and rhythm but also his style and turns of phrase). As is well known, Nekrasov was described as a “realist” in Soviet tradition. However, what is undoubtedly going on here is a “reversed” syndrome, when, “bypassing” Nekrasoy,

romanticism arrives in the ragged dress of Nekrasov’s “hacked-up” Muse. The romanticism of the People’s Will poets was the reflected light of populist ideol-

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ogy itself, from which the very idea of the revolutionary hero, as well as the idea of terror, further grew. Romanticism is constantly in the shadow of revolutionary poetry (in this sense the Smithy poetry of the 1920s is no less romantic than that of the 1870s populists—a half-century made no difference). Populist romanticism was also grounded in the crisis of populist ideology (and in the same

way the romanticism of Smithy grew out of the crisis of political poetry in the postrevolutionary era). Not provided with a serious reserve of content, unfortified by depth of its issues, and based on mood alone, this poetry became the pure modeling of reality according to the ready molds of hagiographic literature. Witness Sinegub’s “Populist” (“Narodnitsa’): Ee vsegda v dni detstva okruzhala

Tolpa prostykh trudiashchikhsia raboy, I v ikh srede ona vsegda vstrechala K sebe vniman’e, lasku i liubov’.

[In days of childhood she was surrounded By a throng of simple toiling slaves,

And in their midst she always found Attention, affection, and love for herself.] This “throng of simple toiling slaves” was something from pre-Derzhavin

times. It is as if there was yet another return to Slepushkin. The populist heroine, of course,

Vzrosla. I vot iz tikhoi detskoi kel’i Ee sveli v obshirnyi, pyshnyi zal, Gde utopal v izyskannom vesel’e Gostei blestiashchikh prazdnyi personal . . .

[grew up. And from the quiet childhood cell They took her to a spacious, splendid hall, Where the bored personnel of glittering guests Wallowed in refined amusement . . ]

Clearly, however, this romantic creature (who afterward becomes a bomb-

throwing terrorist), is “alien” to all these “personnel”: No shla ona pechal’no, odinoko Sredi likuiushchei razriazhennoi tolpy. Da, serdtse chutkoe soznalo, chto vokrug,

Gde vse pokryto iarkoi pozolotoi, Vsia eta roskosh’, vse—sozdan’e grubykh ruk

Synov nuzhdy, zadavlennykh rabotoi . . . I, vyrvavshis’ iz zolotoi nevoli,

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S liuboviu k liudiam v serdtse molodom, Ona poshla iskat’ schastlivoi doli V mir, perepolnennyi zabotoi i trudom.

[But sadly she walked, and solitary Among the rejoicing overdressed throng. Yes, her sensitive heart knew, that here, Where all was covered in bright gold-leaf,

All this luxury, was all the creation of coarse hands Of sons of need, oppressed by work. . . And tearing out of the golden prison,

With love for the people in her young heart, She left to seek a happier lot In a world overfull of cares and labor.]

It goes without saying that “the proud heart was not confused by battle”: I vot ona v inuiu zhizn’ vstupila.. . Ei ne strashny rabota i nuzhda, Is ugnetennymi geroiami truda Ona soiuz naveki zakliuchila!

[And so she undertook a different life . . .

She is not frightened by work and need, And with the oppressed heroes of labor She made an alliance for evermore.]

The phrase “heroes of labor” calls attention to itself as the most visible example of the outgrowth of populist rhetoric in the Soviet era. But, on the whole, the orientation toward the high salon style distinguishes the poetry of the populists from that of their raznochintsy predecessors. The process of canonization was irreversible; it quickly overcame the Nekrasov obstacle and proceeded directly to the “nobleman’s poetry” so odious to the raznochintsy. Suffice it to quote Volkhovskoi’s “M. A.”: Kogda ia vnov’ tebia uvizhu, Moi beskonechno milyi drug, Kogda do serdtsa vnov’ proniknet Znakomoi rechi milyi zvuk, Kogda vnov’ ruku doroguiu Pochuvstvuiu v ruke svoei I vnov’ na mne ty ostanovish’ Spokoinyi vzgliad tvoikh ochei,— Skazhi, zhelannaia, skazhi mne,

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Chtob poniala ty serdtsem chutkim Vse, chto pochuvstvuiu ia sam? Chto ia mogu? Naliubovavshis’, Tebia v svoikh ob” iat’iakh szhat’ I strastno, trepetno i nezhno Vse tselovat’ i tselovat’?

Il’, milye obniav koleni, Skazat’ na tysiachu ladoy, Chto ia liubliu tebia bezmerno

I za tebia na smert’ gotov? [When I again will see you, My eternally dear friend, When in my heart again will touch The beloved sound of familiar speech, When again in my own hand I will feel your dear hand And again upon me you will rest The tranquil gaze of your eyes— Tell me, beloved, tell me, How I can convey the passion, So you with tender heart could know All that I myself will be feeling? What can I do? Over-full of love,

Seize you in my own embraces

And passionately, trembling, tenderly Kiss you over and over again? Or, resting my arms on your beloved knees, Say in a thousand ways, That I love you immeasurably And for you I am ready to die?]

Lelevich noted a flaw in the poetry of his teachers: No matter how devoted to populist interests the People’s Will poets might have been, the direct connection with the masses of the people that was distinctly felt in Nekrasov’s work vanished in their poetry . . . here we will not find peasant lyrics nor peasant epic literature. The emotional motifs of these poets are closed in a tight circle of the experiences of the revolutionary avantgarde itself of the raznochinets intelligentsia.

It is not surprising that “the idea of a debt to the people gave way to the idea of a debt to one’s lost friends, a debt to one’s comrades-in-arms. . . . The cult

of the revolutionary milieu is characteristic of all People’s Will poetry.” Lelevich provided an accurate characterization of Party poetry proper, which is not

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surprising: he himself was one of its leading theorists. For him, the populists lacked what Nekrasov had: the artistry and charm of his “romance with the people,” noted by Eikhenbaum. Observing that the populists had inherited the tradition of oratorical style, the “revolutionary-pathetic ode,” and so forth, Lelevich concluded: “As regards form, the People’s Will poets perfected the already established Nekrasov style, just as People’s Will was the apex of revolutionary populism.”** Nonetheless, the populists were not so much “perfecters” of Nekrasov’s style as they were “srave robbers” of it (as Marxist jargon would have it). Although Nekrasov’s

poetry did have, as they said in the 1860s, a “direction,” it was not party oriented. But Iakubovich’s poetry, as Lelevich observed, was “Party-minded”: “It reflects not the heroic era but rather the decline of the People’s Willists; it is the poetic groan of an organization that was falling apart.”** “We call this groan a song”: in political poetry, from which Party poetry is born, only ideology and mood show through a reading —if they are subtracted, nothing remains. This “self-expression” is in fact the distinguishing feature of political (and to even a greater degree, of Party-minded) literature: when ideology and passion are “removed,” only Slepushkin and Shishkov remain—the two poles of the salon. This semantic transparency and the emptiness born of rhetoric are due to the fact that this poetry has no subject. Its subject is ideology and its wellspring is graphomania, so it is not important whether its author is Sinegub or Morozov (in populist poetry), Shkulev or Nechaev (in the proletarian variety), Zharov or Bezymenskii (the Komsomol type), or Sofronov or Gribachey (Socialist Realist poetry).

What distinguishes the political literary discourse from the Party-minded one is the attitude toward the old problem of freedom. The choice made by the populists, as political poets, was free. But by their creative output they demonstrate the dead-ended nature of this choice, which raises doubts about the necessity of freedom itself. This freedom in political poetry falls apart at the extremes. Both the extremes of freedom (against everything) and of necessity (as

the result of this free choice of a social role) come together in the poetry of the populists. A conflict, the irreconcilability of the polar extremes, engenders despair that reflects an identity crisis (thus the unintelligibility of aesthetic orientations, from Nekrasov to Maikov, and from Kurochkin to Shcherbina). As a

higher manifestation (for its time) of political poetry, populist poetry revealed the crisis of free creative activity. From there it was only a step to “Partymindedness of literature” and the birth of a new Party-minded “organicity” of creative activity. The main thing that sets all this poetry apart is its amazing optionality, some

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sort of organic lack of necessity of everything spoken of in it. Political poetry is the poetry of the will for power. Party-minded literature is a higher expression of this will, which subordinates any kind of poetry to itself. But the basis of populist poetry is lack of will (perhaps all energy has been spent on the struggle with the government?). This is truly “pure art,” thus its ties to Decadent poetry. It was itself a real poetry of decadence, which distinguished it from raznochinets

poetry of the first half of the 1860s. Suffice it to examine the titles of some of Takubovich’s poems: “Anxiety” (“Trevoga”), “The Forgotten Corpse” (“Zabytyi mertvets’), “A Prisoner’s Dreams” (“Sny uznika”), “On a Black Day” (“V chernyi den’), “At a Friend’s Grave” (“Nad mogiloi druga”), “I Keep Seeing a Lifeless Corpse” (“Vse vizhu trup bezzhiznennyi”), “Overcome By Gloomy Thoughts” (“Odoleli dumy mrachnye”), “Death of the Eagle” (“Smert’ orla”), and so on. It is noteworthy that Iakubovich, whom the populist poets consid-

ered “the most profound lyricist,” “would not part with Baudelaire’s book” (as his contemporaries recalled), often declaimed Baudelaire’s poems at parties,

loved him very much, and translated Les fleurs du mal into Russian. There is a profound meaning in the fact that while the chief figure of the 1860s raznochinets poets was Béranger (Kurochkin made his debut in literature as a transla-

tor of Béranger, and the poets of his circle were called “the Russian Bérangerians”), the People’s Willists at the cusp of the 1880s would have none other than Baudelaire as theirs: he attracted them with his motifs of disappointment, skepticism, and pessimism.

Thus ended the cycle that was begun on the cusp of the 1860s by the raznochintsy. There were many roads from this point: the most natural path turned out to be the one from the “poetry of the people's grief” to “high decadence.” Witness Nikolai Minskii, addressing his formerly like-minded friends:

Podvig vash, druz’ia, bessledno propadet! Svoei karaiushchei sud’boi vy byli sami. [Your deed, my friends, will disappear without trace! You were your own chastising fate.]

Minskii started out publishing in raznochinets publications and was the author of the first “decadent” manifesto to appear in Russia (his article, “The Ancient

Debate” [“Starinnyi spor”]). Pessimism and a sense of tragic inevitability also pervaded the poetry of Semen Nadson, who became one of the forerunners of Russian symbolism, and Dmitrii Merezhovskii’s first collection of poems was

created in the spirit of Nadson. Also from this milieu was Konstantin Bal’mont, who was expelled in his youth from the law faculty of Petersburg University for his participation in the student movement. Bal’mont's first collec-

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tions of poetry also contained motifs of “civic-minded grief” and self-sacrifice

suggested by the poetry of late populists, which did not hinder him from appearing in the cradle of Russian symbolism. Minskii, Bal’mont, and Merezhovskii died in Paris, however; other heirs remained in Russia.

In fact, not only a foundation for the birth of Party-minded poetry, but even a set of symbols for this poetry, was created in populist poetry. This is

clear if one recalls Iakubovich’s “The Smiths” (“Kuznetsy’): ... vy, druz’ia svobody, Kuznetsy zemli rodnoi, Stoite bodro v dni nevzgody U gorna bor’by sviatoi! Pust’ grokhochet nepogoda: Molot vashikh myshts i dum Schast’e vykuet naroda, Voliu-doliu . . Dzin’-dzin’! bum!

[... you, friends of freedom, Smiths of the native land, Stand hale in days of trouble By the forge of holy battle! Let foul weather thunder: The hammer of your muscles and thought Will forge the happiness of the people, Their freedom-fate . . . Zing, zing! Boom!]

The 1920s Smiths did not need to add anything to this: “proletarian poetry” was the direct heir to populist poetry. From this milieu emerged Nechaev, Shkulev, Gmyrey, and Demian Bednyi, who had been Iakubovich’s students. Nonetheless, Merezhovskii and Shkulev grew up on different cultural foundations, as did Bal’mont and Bednyi. Nekrasov and the genius-poet Alipanoy, who had met in the latter's printing house, were separated for many years— but not forever. Their reunion, which would last for a long time, would take place in proletarian literature. But meanwhile the “Alipanovian” fruits were borne in their own season.

Between the Rye-Field and the Nikol’skii Market: Surikovians, and Geniuses, to Boot

In the kind of peasant country that Russia was at the turn of the century, a proletarian culture could only arise at the intermingling of two cultural currents: the lower-class element within “high culture” and the same element within

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peasant culture. To pass over into a new (“proletarian”) state, the new cultural phenomenon had to possess at least two characteristics: it had to be sufficiently marginal; and it had to express the critical condition of the cultural currents that it represented. From these currents, indeed, the necessary “cadres” could be recruited from suburban culture. There is no doubt that the lower-class current within “high culture” did in fact enter a phase of marginalization and breakdown (the proof of which is the “poetry of the revolutionary populists”). The encounter of this current with the “self-taughts from the people” was what created the cultural niche in which proletarian culture developed. In the same year (1841) that Belinskii published his review of Slepushkin’s

“Pastimes,” in the same Iaroslavl’ Province that the poet Slepushkin himself was from, Ivan Zakharovich Surikov was born. Surikov was destined to begin a new stage of “autodidacticism” in Russian literature and to serve as the representative (with his name) of the entire flood of “natural talents” that poured into the book market from the 1870s to the 1900s. These “Surikov poets” (or “natural-talent poets,” “autodidact poets”) were not a part of “high” literature.

One might even say that they were not a part of literature at all, if the significance of their activities was limited to the boundaries of their ambitions to, as Nikolai Mikhailovskii said, “make an appearance in literature.” But it was from the milieu of these unsuccessful graphomaniacs (I use this designation in this

case without the usual negative connotation), precisely, that the “literary cadres” came, those who were enriched with knowledge of “class truths” and perme-

ated with the passion and stylistics of the populist poets, and who subsequently created “proletarian literature.” Usually the printed products of these “autodidacts” were traditionally classified as a type of /ubok literature (this is how V. Lvov-Rogachevskii, for example, regarded them). But A. Efremin, who devoted much study in the 1920s to the work of these “poets from the people,” suggested on the contrary that lumping the /ubok writers with the Surikovians is not only a mistake, but an outright slander of the latter. The Surikovian writers were by their social class poor. Their origin for the most part is from the peasants who left the countryside and subsisted on seasonal work, or who joined the ranks of the minor artisans, lower-class domestics, or small-time tradesmen. Their education was limited to the settlement school. In the cities, they were bakers, order-clerks,

cap-makers, joiners, peddlers, and the like. If they returned to the countryside, they farmed on cheap plots of land. Material need and a wandering existence accompanied them all their lives. Occasionally a provincial merchant’s son, or a little kulak, or a microscopic bureaucrat would end up in their group. However, these constituted an exception. The main nucleus was composed of provincial petit bourgeois, seasonal-work peasants, the urban

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poor, and the like. Despite the extremely varied composition of this group, their milieu had many common features. Their literary tastes were rather identical, and their ideological perspectives as well. Most of their literary production consisted of songs. They created a great number of songs. In addition, there were minor lyrics, ballads, meditations, poems, byliny, and the like. All of these have an air of backwardness and provincialism—above all, provincialism. Even in the cases where the Surikovians had press organs in Moscow (Petersburg had hardly heard of them), they were provincial in content and readership. The Surikovian press mostly huddled in remote provincial cities, where their quiet little newspapers, leaflets, little journals,

almanacs, and little collections with unpretentious titles (My Village Community [Rodnoi mir], On the Path to Light {Na puti k svetu], Life and Songs |Zhizn i pesni], and the like) came out.* Efremin also notes:

This group of autodidact and natural-talent Surikov-poets was composed of tailors, porters, hapless artisans, and other such poor devils. . . . Oppressed, hopelessly down on its luck, without clearly thought-out goals and plans, resigned and dependent, it had very ill-defined hopes. . . . The writings of the autodidact poets, their ideals, the whole complex of their attitudes and output—all of this had the obvious marks of homegrown amateurish work and improvisation. The vague, ill-defined protest against the powerful and rich, against a bureaucratic church and exploitation, sounds at times rather lachrymose and in any case devoid of any power at all.*°

Clearly, in Efremin’s opinion, the existence of Surikovians after the revolution was a “logical absurdity”: The further the process of class differentiation and class self-awareness of the proletariat and the poorest peasantry went, the more superfluous the writings of the Surikovians became, the more harmful their hackneyed motifs that called for compassion and humanity sounded. Against the backdrop of the well-defined Bolshevik party of revolutionary social-democracy, which was well-tempered for class struggles, the Surikovians’ ideology took on an ever more clearly defined character of backwardness and reaction. With the victory of the proletariat, with the establishment of its dictatorship in 1917, any attempt to continue Surikovian activity . . . must be construed as outright

reaction, as an onslaught of counterrevolutionary agents of the petty bourgeois.*”

I will not yet deal with the fate of “Surikovian activity” in the revolutionary era. Let me, instead, turn to the real issue: the “autodidacts” did not in fact

create consciously /wbok-type literature (not because they were different in any

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way from /ubok authors, publishers, or booksellers in a “class” sense, as Efremin explained it*®they were all from the same social milieu), nor did they

create “high literature.” This distance from the two natural paths obliges one to suppose that their activities followed some kind of “third path.” What could such a path mean? When the first collection of the Surikovians, Dawn (Rassvet), was published, Nikolai Mikhailovskii responded to it with a review (in Otechestvennye zapiski) in which he literally repeated what Del’vig had written about Alipanov three decades before him”:

One of two things: either they could undertake the tasks of a literature for the people, since they know the peasants’ daily life and know how to talk to them; or they could provide the educated classes with pictures from the life of the people, convey the feelings and attitudes of the people. Unfortunately, the collaborators on Dawn did not choose either one, but simply wished to make an appearance in literature.” The assignment, so it seems, was clear: create either /ubok or literature. But

what did the Surikovians create? To answer this question, one must get an idea of what the “autodidact movement” really was. At the movement's center stood Ivan Zakharovich Surikov, the owner of a vegetable stand in Moscow, who from childhood conceived a liking for versification instead of commercial zeal (he did not attend any school, and his neighbors acquainted him with reading). When he was

barely forty, he died of consumption and a “nervous breakdown,” but the wide circle of “autodidact poets” just like him that formed around him in the 1870s continued to live his life. This group included Aleksandr Bakulin, I. A. Belousoy, Savva Derunov, Spiridon Drozhzhin, Stepan Grigor’ev, Matvei Kozyrev, Maksim Leonoy, Egor Nazarov, Aleksei Razorenov, Ivan Rodionoy, Ivan Tarusin, Dmitrii Zharoy, Anikanov, Gan’shin, Gavrilov, Glaznev, Gorokhov,

Vlasov-Okskii, and many others. Political activity of any kind was alien to these people, and they were exclusively engaged in poetic self-afhrmation (in addition to their fundamental occupations, of course). Among them, they developed their own poetry, prose, and journalism, and engaged in active publishing (the Surikovians themselves undertook publication

of their own works; Belousov, Leonoy, S. V. Liutov, and particularly P. A. Travin (“Ded-Travoed”), became professional publishers). Travin, for example, was

well known as the author of poems, novels, and newspaper satires that “made him famous in his own milieu.” Together with the future “fathers” of proletar-

ian poetry Nechaev and Shkuley, he published countless newspapers and jour-

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nals. The newspapers he published, Prostaia zhizn’ (Simple life), Muzhitskaia pravda (The muzhik’s truth), Novaia pashnia (New fields), Kopeika-charodeika (Kopeck-Enchantress), Kopeika-zlodeika (Kopeck-Villainess), and many others,

were a sort of parody of Sytin’s newspaper Kopeika (Kopeck). In their own way, they were poor reflections of “big” journalism. A sort of idea of the “literary environment” of this milieu is given in Travin’s unpublished memoirs, where he writes, for instance, that his editors (poets and self-taught writers) were accommodated “in basements and in attics.” For example, the editorial offices of the journal Ostriak (Wit) (which in 1909 had a printing as large as 20,000 copies)

“were accommodated in a little stall alongside a public toilet, and sometimes visitors would, in the darkness which prevailed there, end up in the latrine instead of the editorial office, and . . . ‘take offense.”””’ Another self-taught poet, the tailor Belousov, received a large inheritance, and, subsidizing various publishing enterprises, even became a member of “lit-

erary circles.” Bakulin (who was, incidentally, Valerii Briusov’s grandfather) created an enormous number of fables. These were written in “eighteenthcentury” style, and were colored with maxims such as: “The glory, might, and greatness of the throne is united with the happiness of the people.” The former order-clerk, lackey, peddler, cook, and finally owner of a produce stand in Moscow, Razorenoy, left a not inconsiderable “literary heritage” as well. This “poet-shopkeeper” (as a sympathetic sketch about him in the newspaper Narodnyi golos [People’s voice] was titled) wrote and published privately toward

the end of his life a continuation of Evgenii Onegin. He wrote twenty more chapters for Pushkin, in which one learns that Onegin “quickly sank into the cauldron of rakish life,” was ardently in love with Tariana, and, finding no reciprocation, attempted to lose himself in bouts of drinking, wandering, and country life. In the finale he becomes consumptive and dies of unrequited love, and the grieving Tatiana says farewell at his grave. Nazarov, yet another Surikovian, after writing his “peasant lyrics” switched to patriotic poems, such as: “Nipochem likhoe gore—/S nim srodnilsia nash narod, / Na plechakh sneset on gory, /Vbrod puchinu pereidet!” (“We think nothing of evil grief— / Our

people have become its kin, / On their backs they'll carry mountains, / Will ford across the depths!”).” “Tt goes without saying,” Efremin wrote, “that the Surikovians were not much in the way of talent. The technique of their verse was primitive. Their petty-bourgeois depressed Philistine existence left them at the crossroads and eliminated their possibilities of having a place in life and in literature.”® It is of course not at all a matter of “technique of their verse”: what kind of “place in life” did they nor have, and what kind could these poets have? Efremin sug-

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gested that there was a use for them: “Order-clerks, small-time artisans, microscopic shopkeepers, seasonal workers, and rural, barely literate people— this is the contingent of readers of these self-taught poets. . . . This mass reader started out with Frantsyl’ Venetsian, and the move to the Surikovians was for

him a step forward, a sort of ascent which often served as a bridge to Pushkin, Nekrasov, Ostrovskii, and Tolstoy.” He further notes, especially importantly: The self-taught reader began to do a little writing, and assumed the position of a self-taught writer. After all, in those times there were not yet any wallnewspapers, wherein beginners nowadays realize their literary experiments. In those times a self-taught person was left to his own devices, and had to have a forceful example which he would trust. . . . Many of the self-taught began with outright imitation of the Surikovians: this “popular” current in poetry had an indubitable and significant weight. Many of those who were wistful and gifted in the countryside were drawn to it, in the milieu of city artisans, peddlers, and the like. There was some kind of something which gave life to the Surikovian groups, which drew them away from the most primitive /wbok. A mass reader existed, providing a base for publishing and republishing the Surikovians’ collections of verses, and these collections had a rather successful circulation . . . , coming out in considerable print-runs and quickly being bought up.™ But what were these books about? “Poverty, orphaning, the deaths and funerals of intimates, the despotism of parents, forced marriages, drunkenness,

prison, unrequited love, women’s perfidy.””’ =

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In a word, the complete set of |

f «

“ur-

ban romance” themes. And what was the reaction outside the milieu of order-

clerks and the barely literate people in the villages? Faithful to the revolutionaryraznochinets tradition of the 1860s, the journal Delo responded thus to Surikov’s collected poems: Just in looking at their works [those of the poets of the people—E.D.], one

is fully convinced of the fatal and sad stagnation of the everyday life of our people, and of the narrowness of their interests, worldview, and goals. At the end of the 20s, Kol’tsov wrote the same thing that Nikitin did in the late sos,

and that Mr. Surikov wrote at the beginning of the 70s, and we of course are not about to blame these poets for the monotony of their motifs, or for not forcing the people in their poems to suffer from civic-minded grief instead of

regretting a little cow that has perished. A lie, no matter what kind of reasons evoked it, will always remain a lie.*®

One might assume that this kind of consistent refusal on the part of the intelligentsia elites to recognize the autodidacts’ right to the title of poet was the expression of some kind of snobbery. This is not so: Dedo, for example, was fa-

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vorably disposed to Surikov and eagerly printed his poems. The attitude of the autodidacts themselves toward the elites was also complicated: to be printed meant to be recognized, but there was outright antagonism here as well. These autodidact poets “learned from the classics,” but this “learning” was (fully in

keeping with later RAPPist spirit) naive and mindless copying, which turned their output into an unconscious parody (as was the case with Bakulin’s fables or Razorenov’s sequel to Evgenii Onegin). Not only the Surikovians but Surikov himself, who was doubtless the most gifted of all of them, were unable to develop a more sophisticated relationship to the classics, because they did not know them, “I also decided to sell the books that cost money—what good are they to me? My health doesn’t allow me to spend time with them, and I’ve hardly ever read them—lI bought them and put them on a shelf,” Surikov wrote in a letter to Ivan Rodionov.” This is a telling admission. Incidentally, one statement made by Surikov about contemporary literature is famous—it refers to Nekrasov: “In his (Nekrasov’s) muse there is nothing poetic. This is

dry prose, and monotonous and ordinary to boot.” Of this, a researcher of Surikovian poetry comments, “Even if these words had never been spoken, the very soul and essence of Surikov’s work would have definitely announced that Nekrasov’s inventions remained for the most part alien to him.”* Without a doubt, the “inventions” of Slepushkin were more dear to Surikov. These were an idyll: Zanialas zaria na nebe,

V pole iasno i teplo; Zvonko lastochki shchebechut;

Prosypaetsia selo .. . Iz vorot pastukh vykhodit, Pomolivshis’ na vostok, On rozhok beret—i zvonko Zalilsia ego rozhok [Dawn has risen in the sky,

Clear and warm are the fields; Swallows twitter noisily; The village awakens . . . Out the gates the shepherd comes, Saying a prayer to the east,

He brings a horn—loudly His horn sang out] (“Morning in the Village” [“Utro v derevne”])

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The difference between the two muses was only one of tonality. For Slepushkin, all this abundance is a part of the general Nirvana in which the world

is immersed; but for Surikoy, it is only a part of village life, beyond the boundaries of which is the hell of the city. Thus was invented the tradition of contrasting the village to the city, which later became fundamental in the work of

the “new peasant poets”: Nakonets-to ia na vole! ...

Dushnyi gorod daleko; Mne otradno v chistom pole, Dyshit grud’ moia legko

[At last, then, I am free! . . .

The sweltering city is distant; The pure field comforts me, My chest breathes freely] (“Beyond the City” [“Za gorodom”])

Gorod shumnyi, gorod py! ’nyi, Gorod, polnyi nishchety, Tochno sklep syroi, mogil’nyi, Bodrykh dukhom davish’ ty! Rad, chto ia tebia pokinul,

Dushnyi gorod, gde ia ros, Gde edva-edva ne sginul V bezdne goria, v more slez

[Noisy city, dusty city, City full of destitution,

Like a damp funereal crypt, You crush those of good cheer!

I am glad I deserted you, Stuffy city, where I grew up, Where I all but vanished In a chasm of grief, a sea of tears] (“Now the Steppe, With Its Charms . . ee

[“Vot i step’ svoei krasoiu . . .”])

One finds this also in Surikov’s followers: Prikhodite ko mne, bedniaki, Iz storonki chuzhoi i dalekoi V derevushku u slavnoi reki. . .

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Bros'te pyl’nye vy goroda, S ikh razvratom i roskosh’iu mody, S ikh besplodnym izbytkom truda, Bros'te pyl’nye vy goroda, Mrachnykh fabrik nesvobodnye svody, Poliubite razdol’e prirody [Come to me, 0 poor, From foreign parts and distant

To the hamlet by the glorious river . . . Abandon the dusty cities, With their depravity and luxury of fashion, With their fruitless surplus oflabor, Abandon the dusty cities, The unfree walls of gloomy factories, Come and love the freedom of nature} (Drozhzhin, “Come To Me, O Naked Poor. . .” (“Prikhodi ko mne, gol’-nishcheta . . .”})

Mne protiven dushnyi gorod, Ia stremlius’ tuda dushoi, Gde v teni derev zelenykh Milyi serdtsu dom rodnoi

[The stuffy city is hateful to me, With my soul I hurry on, To where in verdant shade of trees My natal home is, dear to my heart] (Leonov)

Ia s derevnei rodnoi Krepko druzhbu vedu, V gorod dushnyi ia zhit’ Nikogda ne poidu [With my native village

I keep a friendship strong, To live in the stuffy city Will I never go] (Leonoy, “In the Village” [“V derevne”])

Nonetheless, the “autodidacts” lived in these very same odious cities, here

they ruined themselves, became drunkards, and died of consumption and “nervous breakdowns.” Hence the gloom, hopelessness, depression, and unwavering pessimism:

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Cherstveet serdtse, merknet um...

Grud’ nadryvaetsia ot boli. . . Pod gnetom gorkikh chuvstv i dum Poetsia grustno ponevole

°

[My heart grows dry, my mind grows dim... My chest is rent with pain. Oppressed with bitter alas and shale It sadly sings involuntarily] (Surikov)

Idu ia, ob”iatyi toskoi bezotradnoi; Ni zvuka, ni sveta. . . vezde tishina. Grust serdtse soset i iazvit besposhchadno, I grud’ moia noet, somneniia polna

[I go along, seized by dismal melancholy; No sound, no light . . . silence everywhere. Sadness gnaws my heart and stings it mercilessly, And my chest aches, full of doubt] (Surikov, “Solitude” [“Odinochestvo”])

Ja v tesnoi mogile lezhu odinoko,

Ob’ iatyi muchitel’no-tiagostnym snom, Zasypan zemleiu, bez slov i dvizher‘ia, Bessil’nye ruki slozhivshi krestom .. . Ne klich’, ne zovi ty menia iz mogily, Ne trat’ ponaprasnu slez gor’ kikh svoikh: Ne veriu ia v schast’e, rastratil ia sily—I mne ne voskresnut’

dlia pesen bylykh [I lie solitary in the oppressive grave, In the grasp of torturously painful sleep, Covered with earth, without words or movement, My powerless arms folded in a cross . . Do not hail me, call me from the grave,

Do not waste your bitter tears in vain: I don’t believe in happiness, I wasted my strength—And I cannot arise for my former songs] (Surikov, “In the Grave” [“V mogile”])

Mnogo speli gor’ kikh pesen V etoi zhizni my tiazheloi; Legkii smekh nam neizvesten, Pesni net u nas veseloi

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[We have sung many bitter songs In this painful life; Easy laughter is unknown to us,

We have no jolly song] (Surikoy)

Okhvachen ia zhiteiskoi t'moi,

I net puti iz (my... Takaia zhizn’, o Bozhe moi!

Uzhasnee tiur'my

[I am seized by the darkness of existence, And there is no way out of the darkness. . . Such a life, my God! Is more horrible than prison] (Surikov, “In Darkness” [“Vo t'me”])

Gde vy, pesni svetloi doli, Zharkikh iunosheskikh let? Pesni schast ia, pesni voli, Vy ischezli, vas uzh net!

[Where are you, songs of a bright fate, Of hot youthful summers? Songs of happiness, songs of freedom, You've disappeared, you are no longer!] (Surikov)

It is always the same—from poem to poem, from one poet to another: Nasha zhizn’—vseskorbiashchaia byl’, Vdal’ promchitsia zvezdoiu paduchei, Vmig zasokhnet, kak travka kovyl’, Zalitaia slezoiu goriuchei [Our life is an ever-grieving story, It flies far away like a falling star, In an instant it withers, like bitter grass, Watered with scalding tears] (Derunoy, “Ballad” 3 Duma”])

Zhizn’-—chasha, polnaia stradanii, Gde prochnykh radostei nam net,— Khaos nesbytochnykh zhelanii, Zhizn’ placha, gorestei i bed!

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[Life is a cup full of sufferings, Where we have no lasting joys— The chaos of unrealizable desires, A life of weeping, sorrows, and troubles!] (Razorenovy, “Lost in the Darkness of Doubt” [“Bluzhdaiushchii vo t'me somnen’ia”])

Nevertheless, sometimes a kind of plaintive “protest” breaks out of all these

moanings: O Bozhe! Da gde zhe zakony tvoi, Kogda zhe pridut dlia nas svetlye dni? Im tol’ko obroki davai-podavai, A sam ty s senveiu lozhis’ umirai [O God! Where are your laws, then,

When will the bright days come for us? It’s all give them quitrent, again and again,

But you and your family just lie down and die] (Leonoy, “Peasant Song” [“Pesnia krest ianskaia’])

Or, as in Drozhzhin’s “Song of the Workers” (“Pesnia rabochikh”), familiar de-

scriptions of the difficulties of life: Trud da gore, kapli pota Popolam s slezoi, I tiazhelaia zabota S vechnoiu nuzhdoi. Lomota v kostiakh, mozoli S griaziu na rukakh, Zhizn bez schast’ia i bez voli V chetyrekh stenakh.

Kholod, golod i stradan’e Tela i dushi, I za vse, kak podaian’e,

Mednye groshi [Labor and grief, drops of sweat Mixed with tears, And oppressive worry With eternal need. Aching in the bones, corns

With filth on my hands,

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Life without happiness and without freedom Within four walls. Cold, hunger and suffering Of body and soul, And for all this, like a handout, Copper coins]

From the time that the first collection ofthe self-taught writers’ work, Dawn (1872), whose initiator and soul was Surikov, came out in Moscow, the literary

groups of the “autodidacts” existed for several decades. At the end of the 1880s

they began to style themselves “Surikovians,” and regarded the memory of their teacher as saintly. In these years a great number ofliterary circles, publishing enterprises, “people's editions,” collective compendia (Sounds ofHome [Rodnye zvuki], Our Hut [Nasha khata], Stars [Zvezdy], Ballads [Dumy], Daydreams [Grezy], Flashes [Blestki], and others), newspapers, and journals appeared; even official unions arose, with their own staffs and administrative organs (the Moscow Comrades’ Circle of People’s Writers [Moskovskii tovarishcheskii kruzhok

pisatelei iz naroda], Surikov Literary-Musical Circle [Surikovskii literaturnomuzykal’nyi kruzhok], and others), and a central newspaper, Dolia bednoty

(Lot of the poor), was published. But just at the time that the creative work of the “autodidacts” had reached its decline (toward the end of the 1880s), their activism grew: The “Surikovians” . . . are not growing weaker, but on the contrary

stronger, and are consolidating and expanding all kinds of activities. Various branches, lines, and movements are arising, and they sometimes find themselves in vehement battle among themselves. The “Surikovians”

are engrossed in various kinds of self-affirmation. They have one festival or honorary celebration after another. The poetry, prose, and declarations of the “Surikovians” are acquiring a tinge of some sort of great social

significance. The term “natural talent” is coming into use, not infrequently sounding—among a number of other acts and words—like an apologia for amateurish work and dilettantism in art. One can also observe a

preoccupation with tactical maneuvers, and with splintering and struggle among the groups.”

Here one sees a typical picture of internecine struggle that would be repeated in the 1920s—the expression of crisis in a literary movement. One could conclude, together with the contemporaries of the “autodidacts,” that among all these “diamonds in the rough” there were in fact no real gemstones, and that those who considered themselves to be gemstones were mere glass imitations. One could talk about their lack of talent, remembering

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the observation of Chekhov's not unfamous physician Dmitri Ionych Startsev: “It is not the person who does not know how to write stories who is untalented, but rather the one who writes them and does not know how to conceal

this.” But all of this has been said. What I have not examined are the paths leading out of this torrent of “autodidact” literature. There were four of them,

and they were all dead ends.

;

The first was the path upward into a peasant culture of its own: this was the

path followed by the “new wave of peasant poets” [novokrest‘ianskie poety|— Sergei Esenin, Nikolai Kliuev, Sergei Klychkov, Petr Oreshin, and Aleksandr Shiriaevets, among others—who were considered “Surikovians” at first. There is no need to discuss them: the fate of these poets is well-known. The second path also led into a peasant culture of its own, but downward: VSKP (Vserossiiskii soiuz krest’ianskikh pisatelei), the All-Russian Union of Peasant Writers, grew directly out of the Surikovian milieu, and smoothly tran-

sitioned into ROPKP (Rossiiskaia organizatsiia proletarsko-kolkhoznykh pisatelei), the Russian Organization of Proletarian-Kolkhoz Writers, with Grigorii Deev-Khomiakovskii as its leader. Thus it became a sort of “kolkhoz branch” of RAPP. The postrevolutionary fortunes of Spiridon Drozhzhin are character-

istic of this path: the Academy of Sciences recognized his poetry twice with medals of honor® (although the medals were never gold, as in the time of Sle-

pushkin). Drozhzhin, incidentally, was highly esteemed by the poet “K. R.,” Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, who remarked on the “courage” and

“joyous mood” of his poetry and noted that Drozhzhin was not “infected by fashionable trends.” Evgenii Kalmanovskii notes:

In Drozhzhin, especially as the years pass, there arises a combination of the quality of simple folk with aestheticism, a peculiar “autostylizing”; at times it can hinder one from separating the natural from the artificial, and transports the perhaps naive and clumsy but sincere poetry of this “autodidact” into a different category, as if transforming it into a poetic trade, a type of peasant cottage industry.°"

It is easy to see this identity crisis of Drozhzhin’s if one compares various of his poems devoted to the theme of poetry. In his “To the Poet” (“Poetu”) one sees Drozhzhin-as-Pushkin: Poet, s dushoiu chistoi,

S umom pytlivym i zhivym, Idi dorogoiu ternistoi K narodu s slovom ognevym;

Boris’ s nepravdoi i porokom Vo slavu rodiny svoei,

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V griadushchem bud’ ee prorokom I probuzhdai k dobru liudei

[Poet, with a pure soul,

With a keen lively mind, Go by the thorny way With the fiery word to the people;

Fight untruth and vice For the glory of your fatherland, Be its prophet in the future And awaken people to goodness] In another poem, Drozhzhin-as-Nekrasov:

Chestnym poryvam dai voliu svobodnuiu, Nachatyi trud dovershai I za schastlivuiu doliu narodnuiu Zhizr vsiu do kapli otdai!

Teploi liubvyi—vekovogo prizvaniia— V serdtse svoem ne gasi, Chudnoiu silotu—svetochem znaniia Bud’ na Rusi!

[Give free reign to honest impulses, Complete the work that is begun And for the happy fate of the people Give your life, to the very last drop! Warm love—the eternal mission— Do not stifle it in your heart, A wondrous force—the luminary of knowledge Be this for Rus’!]

Finally, in his “Poet and Reader” (“Poet i chitatel”) one has the opportunity to see Drozhzhin himself: “Pevets idet, i na puti /Ne znaet, gde ostanovitsia, /Kakuiu pesniu zavesti” (“The singer goes on, and on the way /Does not know where to rest, /What song to start singing”). The “late” Drozhzhin is however a completely pitiful spectacle: Proshli veka nevoli zloi

Velikogo naroda, I dolgozhdannaia svoboda Iz mraka iasnoiu zarei Vzoshla nad Russkoiu zemlei.

Teper’ nash pakhar’ terpelivyi, Kak prezhde, s bednoiu sem’ei

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Ne budet plakat’sia nad nivoi,— Vsegda dovol’fyi i schastlivyi, Drugie pesni zapoet I k svetu dvinetsia narod

[The great people’s centuries Of evil bondage have passed, And the long-awaited freedom From the gloom, like bright dawn Has risen over the Russian land.

Now our patient plowman, Will not, as before, with poor family Weep over the field,— Always content and happy, He will sing other songs And the people will move to the light]

Thus he responded to the revolution. Finally, in the year (1929) preceding his death, the old man, aged eighty-two, encountered collectivization: Kogda-to ia v nevole zloi Na storone moei rodnoi

Sred’ bednykh khizhin i palat Pel pesni, polnye pechali. No eti pesni otzvuchali,

Ta ikh poiu na novyi lad, I pesnia goria ne nuzhna Tebe, rodnaia storona

[Once held in evil bondage

In my own native strand "Tween poor cabins and palaces I sang songs full of sorrow. But these songs have faded, I sing them with a new tune,

And you, my native strand Don’t need a song of grief]

The third path is the one leading nowhere: the most “persistent Surikovians,” such as S. Koshkarev, Leonov, I. Morozov, I. Nazarov, and M. Savin, remained on this path. In this regard, the fate of Leonov, one of the most active Surikovians and the organizer of a host of different publications, is char-

acteristic: he concluded his “creative biography” in the 1920s as a salesman in the children’s toys department of an Arkhangel’sk store.

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Finally, the fourth path meant leaving one’s own culture for the proletarian culture: this was the path taken by the proletarian poets Shkulev and Nechaey, for example. I shall have more to say about this path, along the route of which the masses’ writership developed. So, what kind of poetry have we seen? Not /ubok, but not “high literature” either. But simultaneously, both /ubok and an orientation toward the salon style. Comparison leaves much to be desired. This truth is as old as attempts to define via comparison are themselves. However, before Soviet literature arose, there was simply nothing with which to compare all of this. And indeed, it was in Soviet literature that all the currents I have briefly examined here met; in it they dissolved themselves, at the same time preserving their own natures. Soviet literature is “high culture” for the “lower classes,” transforming “high literature” into /ubok, and lubok into “high culture”—and it is the answer to the question of the nature of the phenomena discussed above. But of course processes similar to those that occurred covertly in the Russian literature of the “Golden Age,” and which were the subject of my attention in this chapter, most often become the property of the history of “social movements” or of historico-literary regional studies. It would be thus in this case as well, had the subcultural current not coincided with the crisis that Rus-

sian literature itself entered at the turn of the century. The “Silver Age” was precisely the era of such crisis. Here, as Tynianov observed, “‘creative freedom’ became an optimistic slogan, but it did not correspond to reality, and gave way to ‘creative necessity.’ The literary function and correlation of the work to literary series put an end to the matter.”® This was said of Pushkin—but it was written in 1927. And it can be applied to things other than just the battle within the “literary series.” The correlation of “literary series” to social “series” puts an end to the matter as well, which Tynianov undoubtedly understood when he wrote the article “On Literary Evolution” (“O literaturnoi evoliutsii”) in the year of the tenth anniversary of the socialist revolution. Yet another observation by Tynianoy, in his essay “The Literary Present-Day” (“Literaturnoe segodnia”), is important here since it directly relates to Tynianov’s own times: “Every genre is important when it makes itself felt.” What I have discussed here “made itself felt” in the Soviet “literary presentday” of the 1920s quite distinctly. This is why the idea expounded by Tynianov in the article “Literary Fact” (“Literaturnyi fakt”) is so material: “Strictly speaking, every deformity, every ‘mistake,’ every ‘incorrectness’ of normative poetics

is—potentially—a new constructive principle.” The fact is, however, that the new “constructive principle” and new culture consolidated by the subcultural tradition examined here had already become “literary fact” by the 1920s, which obliges one to think in terms of kinetics rather than of potentials.

CHAPTER

TWO

The Army of Poets “Proletarian Creativity” (Anamnesis) I want to tell about them . . . without mockery, like about the sick. —OSIP

MANDEL

SHTAM,

“The Army of Poets” (‘Armiia poetov”), 1923

Smerdiakovs Revolt: Mikhail Sivachev as a Mirror

of the Russian Revolution The formation and development of subcultural fields, which have a powerful influence on processes in “high” culture, is one of a number of the most ob-

scure spheres of historico-cultural studies. This is only partially explainable by the absence of sufficient documentary records. In the preface to the memoirs of Nikolai Sveshnikov, Recollections ofa Hopeless Person (Vospominaniia propashchego cheloveka), one of the rarest records of this type, Abram Reitblat justifiably observes: The culture of the urban lower classes (philistines, minor functionaries, craftsmen, servants, and so forth) was either unnoticed or held in extremely

low regard—as vulgar, defective, dirty. For this reason, very few ethnographical descriptions and memoir-type records remain. The memoirs about the life and milieu of the urban lower classes can be counted on one’s fingers.!

But as one may imagine, there is more involved than the traditionally high status of the noble, intelligentsia, and peasant cultures in Russia: subcultural fields form in any of these cultures. Much more relevant is the underestima6I

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tion of the processes that take place in them. In the Russian historico-cultural situation, this attitude toward “lowbrow” culture often prevents understanding of the sources and nature of extremely important cultural phenomena. It is evident that historical events like the Russian Revolution, which radically influence the cultural hierarchy itself, also give rise to cultural manifestations in the light of whose analysis the subculture acquires not simply an important function but also an explanatory one. A subculture, as I have discussed, develops according to its own agenda. One can only understand its immanent logic if one takes into account the nature of the bond between the “top” and the “bottom” in culture. Throughout the nineteenth century this subculture broke through to the cultural surface until, as a result of revolution, it flooded this surface almost completely. These eruptions of subcultural magma were at first perceived as a wonder (in the era of the Slepushkins), then as an ordinary occurrence (in the era of the raznochinets flood of magma), then as something secretive (in the era of the late

populists), and finally as atavism (in the era of the Surikovians). And each time, they were not “taken into account” as a universal law of the functioning of culture. Culture lives on a volcano of subculture, in constant expectation of its own “last day.” This day arrived in Russia, by the admission of the adepts of “high culture” themselves, in 1917.

Nonetheless, the magma that destroys everything in its path cools and hardens. In filling the emptied houses, it acquires their form and gives them a new “content.” A subculture does not seek out new forms. Culture leaves for it the already prepared forms. But as in all revolutionary eras, “the tempos determine everything”: magma is inert; culture, on the contrary, is mobile. When, for example, “high” culture is approaching modernism, the subculture is only growing into the realist style and requires a “Red Leo Tolstoy.” The subculture’s rejection of modernism is a tribute to the “wholesome taste of the masses,” who are not ready to accept “a muddle instead of music” (in this sense, postmodernism is culture’s attempt to guarantee safety on top of the volcano). Subculture is underground culture. It would be surprising if it were not in the genuine sense a culture of the underground. Any explosion is the result of a lengthy accumulative process. By looking at the cultural ruins produced by it, one understands that the Russian Revolution—this enormous historical ex-

plosion—brought many layers of underground consciousness to the surface. The subculture, as personified by the Surikovians, for example, was not isolated within the framework of peasant literary circles—a certain part of the subcultural bohemia was simply institutionally crystallized in them. And there can be no doubt that one is dealing with an extremely bohemian milieu.

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From about 1900 to 1920 there was a little-noticed character named Lev

Kleinbort at work. Before the revolution, he-was an active employee of the legal Marxist and Menshevist presses, worked for the journals Obrazovanie (Education), Mir bozhii (God’s world), and Sovremennyi mir (Contemporary world),

and took part in revolutionary activities. A typical Menshevik, he retained the “birthmarks of populism,” of which he was unfailingly reminded in the 1930s (he nevertheless died of natural causes in 1950 in Leningrad, at an advanced age). After the revolution, he directed the literary studies of the People’s Com-

missariat of Education and of the Petrograd Proletkult organization, and did a great deal of writing. In 1924 and 1925, three long books of his, which he had written well before the revolution, came out suddenly: Essays on Workers’ Journalism (Ocherki rabochei zhurnalistiki), Essays on Popular Literature (Ocherki

narodnoi literatury), and The Russian Working-Class Reader (Russkii chitatel’rabochii). Kleinbort’s name has been lost in the history of Soviet criticism. Reviewers wrote of his books: “The author evidently did not aspire to critical depth of thought, and did not manifest such,” and his books were judged to be “lightly literaricized raw material of a biographical-chrestomathic nature.” Nonetheless, the reviewer (of Essays on Popular Literature) expressed his confi-

dence that “Kleinbort’s unpretentious industriousness is . . . fully justified. The material collected in them [the essays—E.D.] speaks for itself, and without the guidance of the author awakens the thinking of the reader to generalizations and conclusions.”* The author himself, however, did not awaken anyone’s thinking, and no “generalizations and conclusions” about his work resulted. But if manuscripts do not catch fire readily, then books even more so do not burn up. The unassuming laborer Kleinbort, who was really a good-for-nothing critic, had a single passion: collecting. He gathered autobiographies: over the course of a quarter-century he was occupied with what I am here calling the subculture. He worked with a rare intensity, corresponding with hundreds of “popular writers.” Some of them became alcoholics, some went into literature, and some even became classic Soviet writers. Only a part of his archive made it to the pages of his Essays on Popular Literature, but this was a priceless archive. He helped “popular writers” get started, sent surveys to his correspondents, and collected, collected, and collected all of this. The responses were not standard-

ized: not intended for publication, they were deeply personal, and revealed the full horror of underground creativity. With the conscientiousness of a collector, Kleinbort reproduced these heartrending letters in his book. One sinks into his book as if into the Dead Sea: the concentration of “underground” is such that it literally pushes one out of “literature.” The reader begins to un-

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derstand why Kleinbort never made it as a critic—his “collections” are impossible to read. He was a historian, sociologist, and anthropologist . . . all in proportion to his modest talents, of course. One also begins to understand why the phenomena examined here, alas, did not become a subject of historico-literary interest. This is literature of a special kind—preliterature, that which Mandel’shtam was later to call a “cry,” like that of an infant. This material is priceless in another, profoundly sociocultural sense. Any cultural explosion is the result of an imbalance in the social structure. Turbulence and identity crises, when they reach critical mass, are the preconditions for social upheavals. Like the little cloud in The Captains Daughter, behind which it was difficult to discern the approaching storm, these “crisis phenomena” quietly appear, “swim up” to the surface of culture, and at first are perceived as something insignificant. Only in time does it become apparent that the social base for the explosion had been waiting and ready. Decades had to pass before a serious interest developed in what exactly the “revolutionary class” in Russia was, and in how a nonexistent “proletariat” in an absolutely peasant country became not only a fermentative substance but the actual social base for a revolution. Clearly, this is a matter of some kind of construct, but it is equally clear that behind this political construction activity a real social force stood—not peasants, not urbanites, but the same culture of déclassé suburbia that in recent decades has become a subject of enormous interest primarily to Western historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and economists,

precipitating an explosion of historico-cultural studies.° Nonetheless, “proletarian culture” even now is not recognized as the basic source of the Soviet culture that differs remarkably from it but that was supplied with its basic “human material” from it. This is why that milieu itself is so important, the process of accumulation of the properties in it that were necessary for the coming explosion; it is more important than events and texts. This seething marginalized milieu was the magma that rose up in the crater of culture, and its shouting was its voice; only the blind did not glance into this abyss, only the deaf did not give an ear to this involuntary, inarticulate, pained cry. Everyone stood at the edge of this crater—Bolsheviks and Vekhists, Mensheviks and populists, Gorky and Blok, Gippius and Merezhovskii. . . . Some were horrified, others were in denial, still others welcomed the storm... . Somewhere in the back rows of this dense cultural circle, Kleinbort was standing as well. He was busy collecting. His Essays on Popular Culture (Ocherki narodnoi kul’tury) has a subtitle that translates as “Facts, observations, characteristics.” Most importantly, facts. The truth is that Kleinbort was so distracted

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by them that he made no distinction at all between the natures of the various social strata. For him, everything was “popular culture,” beginning in the 1880s and ending in 1923. This kind of investigative nearsightedness had an enor-

mous advantage ofits own: Kleinbort did not typologize. Por him, everyone had the same face, the same biography. Sergei Semenoy: born in the village of Andreevsk in the Moscow Province, a backwater—about 17 miles from the district center, almost 40 from the rail-

road. Hardly anyone in the village earned a subsistence. For this reason, all the more able-bodied villagers fled to Moscow—some to factories, others to domestic service, others became carriers or street hawkers. Sergei also was waiting to grow up, to escape the hungry village for Moscow. At age eleven, having taught himself to read, he moved to Moscow, where he worked as a seasonal

worker: in the winter he worked at a rubber-band factory, then as a lithograph inspector, then in a water-pipe workshop, in a mineral-water booth, then for

an amateur artist. All of this was between haymaking season: in the summer, he worked in the countryside. At age eighteen, he met a book peddler, and

conceived a definitive passion for books—he read Tolstoy’s religious books for the people, which forced him to “ponder the most fundamental questions.” Se-

menov immediately got the “writer's itch” and eventually managed to meet Tolstoy. [he acquaintance went on for a long time, and Tolstoy helped Semenov get his short stories published. Moving out to the countryside, Semenov in be-

tween haymakings “totally gave himself over to literary work”; he even spent some time abroad, at the invitation of Chertkov. It is clear that, having re-

turned to his native village in 1905 and encountered the “power of darkness,” he began to propagandize the peasants. A conflict ended with flight to Moscow and arrest. Again, abroad: Switzerland, Italy, France, and England. He returned to the village a vehement opponent of the commune and an advocate of farmstead agriculture. And here is the dénouement: “In 1923, Semenov was barbar-

ically murdered by the peasants of his own village” (7-12).4 This is the typical life story of a “pioneer,” similar to those of V. Savikhin and N. Temnyi—the same villages, the same beatings, the same drunkenness,

the same workers’ barracks in the city, the same environment of Gorkyan flophouses. Not only Gorky’s famous play, but his autobiographical trilogy as well, speaks on behalf of this whole generation. “What is this half-peasant, half-

proletarian?” Kleinbort asks himself. With one foot in the village, in handicraft-work, and the other in the city, in

the factory... . With the completion of the work in the fields, the poor, who

cannot subsist on the land, leave their long-occupied places and flood the city.

Hungry and trembling, they are ravenous for work, any kind of work at all.

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They were met by contractors, tavern-keepers, transport-driver brokers, who would hire them for next to nothing, and enslave them for “food and

lodging.” Some, with the onset of spring and jobs in the fields, go back; servitude detains others for years, and the only bond with the village is their

family. (29) Hence, according to Kleinbort, the next wave—the “timid poor’—Travin, M. Tikhoplesets (Loginov), Shkulev, G. Zavrazhnyi, and Vasilii Karpov, who

populated the milieu that I introduced above, the “Surikovians.” Travin: When he was thirteen, his father put him to work in a factory. He

did not want to work, but necessity was overwhelming. . . . They lived in a stuffy damp basement. . . . It was hard to get books, but the passion for reading turned into a sickness. Travin hid himself in the shed and cried—he wept

bitterly in an unabated yearning for books. At this time, too, he first began to write. ... His biography is already familiar. He became the organizer of a number of publications for hapless peasant poets such as himself. The publi-

cations constantly went bankrupt, and complete pennilessness set in again. He wrote to Kleinbort: “I have to write novels and short stories for the Nikol’skii market at 3 rubles 50 kopeks per quire.” Another letter on the eve of 1917:

I find myself in a most desperate material situation. I have turned to several people with requests for some kind of work, but have gotten no answers. To complete all my misfortunes, I am tied by the lack of documents. Back in early 1914 I was tried according to Article 129. So as not to leave my family at the mercy of fate, I had to obtain forged documents. All these troubles have created a situation for me about which I can say: there is nowhere to turn. Kleinbort concludes, “Travin has fallen both literarily and morally” (30-33).

Loginov (Tikhoplesets): The family was half-starved, huddled somewhere in a basement... . In his youth, when fate drove him out of the village, he lived as a tramp, washed dishes in a tavern, worked at a pharmacist’s, and so forth. He published several little books of verses. He wrote to a friend, “What can I do? Where can I go? What is there to eat? These are the questions. Look, you and... know I am a drunkard, but I never sold my feelings. . . . Kolya, dear, I am writing in a tavern and am drunk. How I want to unburden my soul and take your advice! But how and when? . . .” Kleinbort reports his predictable end: “He died in a hospital, drinking himself to death before he was

forty” (33-37). Popov (Zavrazhnyi): When the boy was growing up, his family split up, having fallen upon hard times. From the age of nine he, like all the children in his family, was already helping his father with work at home, and at twelve he

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went to work for a rich muzhik, enduring all the strain of farmwork and humiliations from ‘his masters. He went to school for only two winters. . . . After

he left school, Zavrazhnyi forgot how to read—there were no books, nor any time to read—and by the time he was about seventeen, he could just barely make out something printed (37-39). Karpov (Miasnikov): He was a student,two winters in the settlement school and was obliged to cut his schooling short, since he had neither shoes nor warm clothing. At fifteen he was taken to Moscow and set to work at a printing house (40).

Shkulev (the future patriarch of proletarian literature): very little schooling: a place opened up for him in the factory. The factory was hell for him, from the start. He would get home from work at nine or ten in the evening and would get up to go back at three in the morning (40—41). These are the biographies of the “popular writers” in the capitals. Needless

to say, in the “heart of Russia,” the biographies of such self-taught writers as N. Stepnoi, Grigorii Chudov, G. Ustinov, P. Dorokhoy, FE. IP'in-Morozov, and

many others, unfolded even more tragically in the “nooks of provincial writing”’— Orenburg, Saratov, Nizhnii Novgorod, Tver’. Kleinbort enumerates the titles of the almanacs: Sudokhodets (Navigator), Volzhskie utesy (Volga cliffs), and

Nizhegorodskii almanakh (Nizhnii Novgorod almanac) in Nizhnii Novgorod, Altaiskii almanakh (Altai almanac), Step’ (The steppe), and Seryi trud (Dull labor) in the Urals, Pod nebom Turkestana (Under Turkestan skies), and so forth. Hence the dozens of self-taught writers, half-peasant, half-worker: Ivan Kasatkin, Pavel Porshakov, Shiriaevets, N. Rogozhin, E. Sharov, S. Safonov, E. Tret’iakov, A. Pavlov, A. Ershov, M. Odinokii, D. Pogorelov, “Mytar’.” What kind of literature was this? Here is how a certain unnamed self-taught poet, once associated with these circles but later having left them, answered this question in a letter to Kleinbort:

There is no artistic value in this literature. In the course of fifteen years, not a single thing better than mediocre has come out of the ranks of the people's writers grouped around Travin, for example Shkulev, Tikhoplesets, Travin

himself. This is all vulgar. Nothing but celebration of poverty and degradation. As if everything else . . . did not exist. This is why their anthologies and newspapers have not taken root in life. They quickly died out and turned into scrap paper. The authors who found refuge in these publications became “hacks” and “pulp writers.” . .. There is nothing to learn here. One only had to write about the lot of the poor peasant. And Travin himself got stuck, like in a swamp, in these “Lives of the poor peasants” that fed him. He did not

become an ideological worker, nor a writer of the people. This is why I now

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value so highly the merciless exactitude of Maksim Gorky, who once wrote

Travin a sharper letter than he did me. (43)

As I have said, Kleinbort saw no difference between the “popular writers.” His chain of the self-taught was continued by “bellelettrists of the workers

press”—samovar-makers, metalworkers, clerks, the unemployed—hundreds of names. Here is one of the typical stories, that of the salesman Grigorov (from the age of nine, he worked in a shoe store, a sewing-machine store, then in a

brick factory and afterward a lumber factory, then again in stores: a stationery/ photographer's store, an optician’s, a store for church and officers’ things):

Once—I was eighteen then, and had leaned on the counter—I opened a notebook and started writing my first short story. This happened totally unexpectedly; this was the first time I had wanted to do any writing. I was amazingly illiterate, but somehow I connected one word to another, one phrase to another. I got something. But what an effort this first work was! Customers would interrupt my writing every minute. . . . After the first short story, I was drawn to a second. Distracted, | didn’t hear the cash-register bell... . Once, .. . Iwas caught red-handed. A scandal ensued—I almost flew out of the store. .. .

Kleinbort comments, “These are the emotions of labor, unemployment, many

centuries of humiliation. Subjectively, we see a drama. . . . The more difficult the circumstances—real-life and intellectual—the more suffering there is. How many embryos die away, wither, unable to realize their potential!” (111-12). Kleinbort quotes hundreds of such letters from “working-class bellelettrists.” Names, biographies, and scenes flash by, and they are all similar: drunkardfathers, prostitute-mothers, families riven apart, abuses, basements, degradation; carters, order-clerks, tavern-keepers, contractors. . .. And suddenly you

stumble upon the names that ended up in Soviet literature: more and more often, familiar names and characters from the literary life of the 1920s appear— Aleksei Chapygin, Ivan Kasatkin, Ivan Vol’noy, Semen Pod” iachey, Aleksei Novikov-Priboi, Aleksandr Neverov, Fedor Gladkov, Pavel Nizovoi, Vsevolod Ivanov, Aleksei Bibik, Nikolai Liashko, Pavel Bessal’ko. . .. So in fact, as the previously cited Novyi mir reviewer wrote, Kleinbort’s interest in the phenomenon of “popular literature” [sarodnaia literatura], more intuitive than deliberate, “speaks for itself, and without the guidance of the author awakens the thinking of the reader to generalizations and conclusions.” Kleinbort’s own “conclusions” are on the whole uninteresting, but one of

them deserves attention. In discussing the works of the “working-class bellelettrists,” he observes:

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Has it been long since the question was asked in our literature: “Is there room for everyday life?” Has realism not died out? “Everyday life is dead,” the Symbolists exulted, these poets of the created legend. . . Can one think about the people artistically and at the same time digress from the canvas of everyday life in which they live, from the diversity of-real-life units of which they are composed?

All of this brings our critic to think about the fatal inevitability of “naturalism,” “Pomialovskyism,” and “prosaic descriptiveness” in this kind of creative work (182—83).° This poetry consisting of moans and complaints about “the lot of the poor,”

the poetry of the underground, was the niche where the new storm was born, the storm that the people of this turn of mind were ardently calling for. Who were they? “Skitalets” (S. G. Petrov), from a peasant family, a friend of Gorky’s who did not complete seminary, and was arrested; Evgenii Tarasov, a participant of the 1905 Revolution, who was arrested; “G. Galina” (G. A. Einerling),

exiled from Petersburg during the student uprisings of 1901; and “Tan” (V. G. Bogoraz), from a teacher’s family, who was arrested. This is still not proletarian poetry, nor is it peasant poetry. This is the poetry of a disbanded marginal social stratum. It is full of nonacceptance of reality, protest, and hatred for “the rich ones,” “the masters of life”:

I go into the rich man’s palace and I want to sing him a song. I will sing to him, laughing aloud, “There is soot and filth on your soul; I will not sing the

kind of song that would cleanse you: let the shadow lie on your soul.” . . . See, I crawl to you like a snake and bite you with a song. I will give you only poison and wounds, but God will give you tortures. I have appeared to you to announce: life awaits your punishment! Life wants to avenge itself on you mercilessly: it follows behind me! (Skitalets)

And with his eye on the choristers burying “the one who loved gold,” the poet exclaims: “It disgusts me to go with your hired retinue and give my voice not to the people, not to struggle, not to songs of joy and battle—but to you, you sack stuffed with coins!” Not yet burdened with the knowledge of “class truths,”° this poetry appeals to the simple antithesis of poor versus rich. Hence the vagueness of the threats: “Enemies of the people, liars, jackals. Our wrath is an avalanche, and it is growing. You are on a volcano. Inside it is boiling and bubbling. The crust will rupture, and will swallow you up. You, jackals, will be swallowed up, you, lackeys of tsarism who pinned on bows, but with a lackey’s soul” (V. Sorokin); or, “We arrive at dawn to snowy white palaces, we arrive at dawn for retribu-

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tion. O strong of the world, o princes and gods, do you see the reflections of distant fires? The day of wrath and suffering is already on the threshold, the pole-axe of retribution has struck at the roots” (Tarasov). Hence the ambigu-

ity even of who “we” were: “We are not poets, we are forerunners of those who don’t yet exist.” However, the poet of the future is already discerned on the horizon: “He has not arrived, but he is among us. He gets coal in the mines, he forges with a heavy hammer, he breathes flame into the forge. . . .” These prophecies are uttered—by the well-known tradition—invariably in darkness, in captivity: “But in the windows the grates flash cruelly, but people with arms watch alertly”; “I am a prisoner, I am also in prison”; “My soul in prison! ... Where, oh where can I escape? Emptiness wherever you look . . .”; “The heavy door thundered shut—and again I am alone in the hateful walls, like a beast caught in a net!”; “In a silent abyss you are separated forever from the world of the living, you are a corpse.” Thus arises the phenomenon of a single consciousness: “I am alone in the hands of the enemies”; “In the gloom I sing nervously, solitarily”; “Both in the crowd and alone, I am always solitary: IT am like the flower torn from its root” (Petr lakubovich). But “thoughts, like

stars, flash proudly” and “it sleeps like a tired beast, this damned world, always hostile to me. . . . Iam alien to it. In a squalid room, gripped by silence, I and my thoughts—nothing more” (Skitalets). At the same time, this is the poetry of anguish and hysteria, when the cry to “weep, bitterly weep” is suddenly replaced by a frenzy: “I want gaiety, joyful singing, uproarious revelry, laughter and witticisms. . . . | want to fight with cold steel, avenge myself with reckless passion. . And I want love, and I want happiness . . .” (Skitalets). This combination of love and hate had taken

on a distinct turn toward hate among the forerunners of revolutionary poetry, in a poeticization of conflagrations and destruction: “We carefully store up a new hatred, we bide our time, we will inundate the city.” Tarasov’s “Little Tale” (“Skazochka”) tells just such a story about how “once upon a time there was a sort of mansion, and lord-princes lived in the mansion,” but then the muzhiks

decided to “burn the sad thoughts away, to light a drunken, jolly flame.” And they did just that: “feasting and revelry, beams fell to the ground, the honoree was an arsonist. Black jackdaws ran hither-thither shrieking, old women’s faces burned madly.” Under the chrestomathic texts of Gorky stood an enormous subcultural layer, when one finds even his Mother in verse: “In the shades of the factories,

amidst the sound of gears. . . day after day we burn and know that every morning, the insistently calling whistle will rudely awaken us, and our hunger bunches us up into sullen crowds, and on the sleepy street, with the rustling of

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a thousand legs, toward a bottomless trap.” A frightening world of adestroyed idyll, the breakdown of an integral sense of the world, and of perturbed consciousness, breaks out in the poetry of the forerunners: “O outcast of unloved nature, region of exile! No bright blue lakes, nor shady groves: a desert, unpeopled horizon, squeezed into mountain ridges. ... But yet with a daring dream. . . .” But—“Halt, dreamer! Your dungeon is strong—there is no way home from here!” But what kind of home was this? “Since dawn you covered us with the shade of a sinister cloud, you drank our blood drop by drop too soon! You've destroyed us like an enemy, like a fierce tyrant! Buried us alive in

darkness without dawn. .. . You made our souls drunk with spite, like poison. ... What kind of mother have you been? Why should we love you? . . .” The curses ring out in addressing not only the homeland but also time: “Damnation is your lot, O mad ages. . . .” An apocalyptic picture arises when the fight (in the famous revolutionary formula “the movement is everyone”) becomes permanent: “When the peoples rebuild the obsolete world, not-all evil will disappear, grief will not be silenced, and the sores of new wounds will

ache. .. . And again we will beat our timid wings against the sweltering arch of prison!” Of course all of this poetic production is secondary in its literariness (love “like a vision of Eden, beautiful!”), monumentality, and pomposity. The pic-

tures that arise in it are full of theatrical gesturing and have a sculptured quality: “I raised my stretched-out hands so high. ... Who sees my countenance? Respond, this very minute! Who sees in darkness my blind tortures. ...I stand in gloom, ‘midst unwakeable night. . . .” Much would pass directly from this into proletarian poetry, and via the latter, into Socialist Realism, with its orientation toward the “high style” of the salon. This kind of “literariness” is tied to the corresponding level of culture, but in contrast, an orientation toward the Nekrasov tradition in poetry is quite apparent. The appeal to Nekrasov has a truly radical character in this context: “Bitter misfortune has no path to sunny freedom . . .”; “Ruddy evening has grown quiet, burning out, not a leaf will whisper in the forest depths; a golden

bank of fleecy clouds sleeps in the unattainable height. A star glimmered quietly, then another. . . . Night is donning its kingly crown.—Torture, great human torture! Have you grown quiet, at last?” All this sickly stripped-bare consciousness is striking in its transitions from delirium to clarity. In it one hears religious motifs (they are easy to find in Gorky’s Mother and in others of his works suffused with the aesthetic of the “forerunners”), and still evident is, if not a reliance on them, then at least the

use of the corresponding imagery (which in proletarian poetry proper is rare):

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first the “guardian angel,” then the “miracle-working hope,” and then suddenly the poet talks about himself: “My voice echoes with prayerful praise,” “I breathe a prayer through the gloom of black darkness.” Also here are theomachist motifs: “In the primeval chariot, life rushes on in a garland of roses. . . The fiery spokes of the bloodied wheels glitter. . . . Sobbing drowns out laughter, the mortal cry merges with the song. . . . And over it all, in radiance, an indifferent, eternal face reigns. . . .” Be that as it may, one is present at the tragedy of broken bonds and destroyed integrity. The framework of the “new culture” is already evident—the absence of a consciousness of sin and of the inevitability of atonement, rejection of the ideas of reconciliation and ofjustification ofsuffering, an artificial sublimation of hatred and a sort of childish immoralism.’ Nowhere was the revolutionary spirit evinced in such purity of “slavish” (Berdiaev’s famous characterization) consciousness as in the poetry of the fore-

runners. When I say “slavish consciousness,” I do not mean the moral sense of this concept that Berdiaev operated with, but rather the literal sense: “But we will sing with others’ words our own aching grief, the heavy sorrow of living people deprived of sun, the sorrow of slaves’”—as “all twenty-six sing” in Gorky’s story “Twenty-Six Men and One Woman” (“Dvadtsat’ shest’ i odna”).* Here this consciousness is still infantile and naive, still painful and vulnerable. Decline, a break with traditional values, a destroyed past, a hateful present, an in-

distinctly bloody future, and a complete immersion into an abyss of slavish hatred of oneself and of the world—this is what can most easily be read in the poetry of the forerunners. It is an explosive literature. But at the center of the explosion is not the articulated hatred of “the masters of life,” but the quiet everyday hatred of the “underground man,” real “Dostoyevskyism,” or, as the outraged intelligentsia of the beginning of the century said, “rebellious Smerdiakovism’—a totally Russian phenomenon. Before all of this spilled over into the arena of social history, a rebellion occurred in literature. This seismic shock of considerable force went almost unrecorded in the annals of the Russian “Silver Age,” which obliges one to turn to the history of the phenomenon that at that time—1911~-1913—received the name “Sivachevism.”

During the course of two years the books of three authors were published: Annas Notes (Zapiski Anny), by Nadezhda Sanzhar’ (1910), Procrustes’ Bed (Prokrustovo lozhe), by Mikhail Sivachev (1911), and Flame (Plamen), by Pimen

Karpov (1911). All three were autobiographical works, and each came from a representative of a different stratum of the population—the unemployed proletariat (Sivachev), the “peasant/grain-grower” (Karpov), and the “daughters of

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the people” (Sanzhar’)—who aspired to the ranks of the intelligentsia. In them

a “hunger for a spiritual life” awoke, they wanted “to create, to think.” “Well, is someone responsible for the very character of culture? . . . And look at their

hatred. They fiercely and inexorably hate those who take on this responsibility for culture . . . the ‘intelligentsia’ is responsible. That is, they embittered the Sivachevs, have discarded them to die on the roadway.”? It is worth remembering that these books appeared at the same time that Landmarks (Vekhi) was

published. The fact that these two cultures did not come into contact is amazing: just when the lower classes that the intelligentsia had for decades called “to

freedom, to the light” finally began to drag themselves toward culture, the spiritual leaders, the keepers of the mystery and faith, departed for the catacombs,

hermitages, and caves.

These books offended everyone—Tolstoy and Gorky, Blok and IvanovRazumnik, Gippius and Filosofov, Ozhigov and Krainii, Izmailov and Chukov-

skii, Belorussov and Demian Bednyi, Friche and Sinegub. “How culture was reflected in the soul of the half-crushed autodidact” was not the only problem, although all three authors were in fact lumpens, cast into the city by necessity

and floating in and out of Surikovian circles. The larger issue was the possibility of a bond between the masses and culture: after 1905, wrote Kleinbort, workers and peasants wanted not only political, but also psychological equality, without understanding that the intelligentsia could not be different from what they [already] were. And intelligentsia-baiting grew. “You put on such airs when you come to see us,” the rednecks said now, and along with them the three books aimed against the intelligentsia, aggrievedly, without regard for any proprieties” [echoed their sentiments]. (59)

Except for his book and letters to Kleinbort, almost nothing has remained of Sivachev. In the letters, he writes that he feels broken, that earlier he had

had the strength to starve for the sake of writing, but that that was gone as well: “It seems I have already embarked on that time when a man feels that it is the beginning of his end.” Sivachev’s biography is the usual one: at nine, he lost his father, and at eleven, his mother; he was left in extreme poverty with infant sisters. He worked in abattoirs, where the butchers gave him meat, then he worked building bridges for 20 kopeks a day, then as a boiler-maker, then in a metal factory, where he earned up to 50 rubles a month. He became a “conscientious worker,” got acquainted with Marxism, and lost his job. Thereafter, he began wandering about the country, had brushes with the police, and so forth. But as Sivachev recalled, he was never hungry while he was working. At twenty-four, he began to suffer from severe rheumatism. Physical labor was

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no longer possible. Worse, his wife and child died. It was in this broken state that Sivachev began to write and “go to see the literary people”—but editors

brushed him off, he was deceived (by Gorky), and not taken seriously. All of these degradations of the “little man,” the beginning self-taught writer, pour out in an unprecedented concentration of anger onto the pages of Procrustes’ Bed. \n a letter to Kleinbort, he wrote about his hatred of the culture that had deceived him:

I have been taught a cruel lesson, that people without means should not have high aspirations, for high aspirations are valued in words. And when I think about the literary path, this path seems a hundred times worse to me than penal servitude. There they give a man bread, even one who has committed a crime, feed him, but here in literature, they don’t give shelter or bread to a man whose only fault is that he aspired to a more spiritual life than the life of the masses. This is one of the cruel faces of hypocritical culture, and that of art is even worse. The writers are to blame for this. It is they who crush everything bright in us. . . . I starved on the path ofliterature for ten whole years, I was persecuted, had no shelter, I slept under the open sky. For all of this the litterateurs have given me the agony I now exist in. Indeed, agony. ... The whole moral aspect of my situation lies on the conscience of our culture. (61-64)

Pimen Karpov’s case was more typical—he knew many peasant songs: “And I go to the editors—I don’t know how to read, I don’t know how to write down my songs; just two years ago, I saw a primer that some kid had in the steppes for the first time, and learned the ropes a bit for myself, but just barely” (65). But when he got to Petersburg, as our hero remembers, “All day long I go walking around, craning my neck, and I learn to read from signs.” And again, the same story: trips to the editors’, where without even talking to him, they kick him out; and to writers, who “smile spitefully” (Merezhovskii). Nadezhda Sanzhar’ had the best luck—this “girl with the thoughts of Nietzsche” even managed to see Tolstoy. But before that, her mother was a prostitute who drank herself to death, her father was in penal servitude “for bad

dealings”; from the age of thirteen, the usual wanderings—she was a maid, worked in a bakery, then as a milliner; she turned up penniless in Petersburg, when her only option was prostitution. But then, impressed by something she had read, she wrote a short story and sent it to a publisher. They accepted it. Then they accepted another. Sanzhar’ could not trust herself: “Since they have recognized literary talent in me, I have to go to Iasnaia Poliana.” The conversation with Tolstoy did not go as planned: he advised her against writing, since “two thirds of what is written is lies,” and advised reading Ertel’. Sanzhar’ told

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him that she was “also Ertel’, in my own way.” Tolstoy “reddened and became indignant,” refused to read her “little notebpok.” All of this seemed “silly and hypocritical” to her, and she fled from him: now she knew his “real essence,” which she had not observed in his books.!° The blind hatred of the intelligentsia litterateurs, who “settled in warm little places, eat high on the hog, live on easy street, and play their little card games,”'' spilled over in the books of Karpov, Sanzhar’, and Sivachev, and spread into all of “cultured society’—the “refined mob.” The heroine in one of Sivachev’s short stories says: “God lives in simple people’s hearts. Until now I didn’t know to what extent intelligentsia people can be beasts! . . . I wanted to slap two rascals, but couldn’. Just the sound of ‘cultured people’ brings to

my mind a creature with whose filth nothing can be compared” (74). “On behalf of all the peasantry” Karpov talks about intelligentsia “spiders”:

You will gain little if you block the peasants’ access to a higher life. The time will come when they will break your obstinacy, and you will lie like stones under their feet. . . . The backwater of popular forces is still calm, and the old dam of the intelligentsia still holds, but the fresh streams of the BogatyrCurrent are already trickling through it. They will tear down the barricades, and the great force of the current will inundate everything and everybody. (79)

In her Anna’ Notes, Sanzhar’ describes how in the society of cultured people Anna cannot help her “outbursts,” cannot but do something that shocks and insults these people. “What got hold of me?” says Anna, who has become a governess in an intelligentsia family. “Looking at their sleek bodies in English suits, pretentious hairdos and expensive lacy clothes, I suddenly wanted to force my way into this elegant, carefree, very frivolous little group of people with my ugly, harsh, terrible childhood.” She told them about how the soldiers came to her prostitute mother, and how she shouted at them: “Let her go, son

of a bitch, let Mama go! Let her go, I said, you scoundrel!” (80). She tired of “shouting into her pillow.” This is usually how her work ended in the various houses. This scene—quite Dostoyevskyan—ends with furious tirades: “You were real people to me, living in your clean houses, wearing clean clothes, and speaking in such a beautiful noble language. I was drawn to you. You have punished me cruelly for these impulses, for my faith in the intelligentsia, and I will never forgive you for the horrible disappointment in you as

people” (81-82). Each of them religiously believed in his or her own calling, his or her own

talent. So it was all the more bitter to see oneself rejected in the environment to which one was drawn. Sivachev writes: “I will croak on the streets, but even

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when I croak there, I will be convinced that Russian literature is so rich . . . in diamonds . . . that it did not find it necessary to elevate such gold in quartz as I am” (70). Sanzhar’ (after her stories were accepted in a journal) “entreats

heaven that she not become dizzy with success”: “Help me, O heaven, despite talent, glory, and money, to be a person to the end of my days” (71). Izmailov wrote that Sivachev was a “truly unhappy person,” but he called his book “a book of vicious dark ingratitude. . . . Disgusting vicious words exploded in him, addressed to those who were imprudent enough to treat him the most kindly” (59-60); “In all fairness, such a book can only rouse indig-

nation,” Gippius concluded. About Sanzhar’, Gippius wrote that the book was “Sivachevism, not even individual, but typical. Ultimately, it is not only the intelligentsia that she damns. Is this not a sign of outrageousness, of an abnormal condition? . . . Is this not a symptom ofsome kind ofradical cultural perversion, not [only] of the intelligentsia, by far, but of all Russia?” (60). The

same applied to Karpov’s book. Ozhigov wanted to “throw this blasphemous book somewhere further away,” and Filosofov wrote about wishing to “toss it into a corner.” Even Demian Bedyni responded to “The Murmur Of Sun-

rises” (“Govor zor”) with a review for Russkoe bogatstvo, wherein he accused Karpov of “feeble-mindedness” and “moral slovenliness,” calling the book “confused and outrageous.”'* “It shows,” reviewer Ivanoy-Razumnik concluded, “what kind of gibberish an upstart from the common folk [vykhodets iz na-

roda|'* is capable of arriving at when he engrafts the urban venom of the semiliterary culture of modernism onto his original pious hatred. . . . Talents from among the people have beaten themselves a path into literature, but these semigifted, semitalentless toilers suffer downfall after downfall and become im-

measurably embittered at everything and everybody.”'* At issue was not only the attitude of the “autodidacts” toward the intelligentsia, but their writings themselves. Critics were unanimous in their opinion that the misfortune of these people was their obvious lack of talent: “Sivachev possesses neither a literary gift nor simply literary aptitudes,” Anton Krainii wrote. As opposed to Lomonosov, Krainii concluded, Sivachev was seized with a thirst

for teaching, not learning; “These are parvenus [vykhodtsy] from the lower strata of the people,” Ivanov-Razumnik echoed in his article devoted to these writers, “endowed with a thirst for literary work, but deprived of talent” (70). Chukovskii was amazed that these “Messrs. Sivachev have still not even once killed anyone “because of baseness.’ They hate us with a passion.” Observing that in fact there was much baseness, egoism, and cynicism in the intelligentsia milieu, Chukovskii wrote that “Sivachev is in and of himself a nasty and vicious creature.” But Chukovskii arrived at a curious conclusion:

TEES

AU RIM Yo 7OiRy

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Wye

Everything that set apart the former Russian intelligentsia—all that heroic ardor, that ideological boiling [sic], that love of the ‘people, that thirst for

sacrifice and exploits—has fled from us, has gone away and become their property, of “half-beggars, half-ignoramuses,” of Kobelevs and Malafeevs that appeared only today on the social scene, but who have already completely

taken oven the legacy of our fathers that was promised to us and that we repudiated. So, already now the real intelligentsia is them, only them alone! The basic, fundamental characteristics of the former Russian intelligentsia are in them, precisely, the Malafeevs! (72) But Blok was the only one who dared to glance into this abyss:

Nothing has been preserved of them as books, the only thing preserved is something that is impossible to express and formulate, like the memory of physical pain. We will have to, like it or not, remember something about Russia. Let it be added to the “knowledge of Russia,” and we will flinch again, remembering that our rebellion can be again, like it was, “senseless and merciless”; that not everything can be divined and foreseen; that blood and fire can come and begin to speak when no one expects them; that it is Russia that, having broken away from one revolution, is already greedily looking into the eyes of another, perhaps a more terrible one. (72)

The Bolshevist Pravda in those years never tired of reiterating the “mass exodus of the intelligentsia” away from the masses, and that “the intelligentsia almost to a man is turning traitors and renegades,” and at the same time the

intracultural underground that was dressed up in yellow blouses did not tire of “cocking a snook at philistines” and of giving out “slaps in the face to society’s taste” left and right. . .. But the meeting of the reflective intelligentsia who stood on the historical crossroads with the “rebelling Smerdiakovs” and “Kobelevs and Malafeevs” of Russian literature did not take place. The subculture was still deideologized. It remained for the “ideological worker” to be hatched from the “writer of the people.” The meeting of the masses’ graphomania with the leftist-radical intelligentsia elites had yet to take place. The cultural niche for “proletarian literature” was ready.

The End of “The People’s Literature”: Gorky and Others Engels has the credit for an observation whose meaning remains, as one may imagine, obscure even now. This idea is a sort of slip of the tongue (which

makes it attractive): “Generally speaking, the poetry of past revolutions, with the exception of the ‘Marseillaise,’ rarely makes a revolutionary impression on later times, since in order to influence the masses, it must also reflect the prej-

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udices of the masses of the time.”!® If one factors out the common denominators of this equation, one is left with something that is, from the Marxist point of view, absurd: the poetry of past revolutions makes no impression on suc-

ceeding generations since it does not reflect the prejudices of the masses of these generations. The “revolutionary impression,” it turns out, consists of

“the masses’ prejudices” alone. At least, Engels indicates no other reasons for such quick loss of “influence.” One is left to think that even from the view-

point of one of the founders of Marxism, one has correctly chosen the cultural field for examination of the sources of Soviet literary culture: the masses’ prejudices are a phenomenon (even in the context of Engel’s statement) sufficient

for a discussion of revolutionary literature. The phenomenon of proletarian literature is primarily interesting because of its transitional nature. This literature can be called both “the people's” and

“the Party’s.” Nonetheless, by definition neither of these designations is sufhcient: it is no longer “the people's” literature, nor is it “the Party's.” Petr Kogan observed that the fundamental importance of this literature is

that it was precisely within it that the transformation of the object of creation

into a subject took place. Proletarian literature, he wrote in 1926, remains the most peculiar literary phenomenon of our Revolution. Cast it out of this era, imagine for a moment that it did not exist, and you will see

that perhaps the most significant thing has dropped out. Over the course of this period we have had a number of great literary accomplishments, among which some were a revolution of sorts, but a literary revolution, nonetheless, a revolution within selected boundaries. But we know of only one phenomenon that served as a powerful stimulus for acquainting huge masses with literature in the capacity not of object, but of subject, of literature. And this phenomenon is proletarian poetry.'”

In fact, “the mass-oriented [massovaia] proletarian artistic literature of the teens was created mainly by poet-correspondents.”'® In the [18]90s and the early [1]900s, the fundamental authors of revolutionary songs and verses came to be the professional revolutionaries, the members of the social-democratic organization. In the Revolution years [1905-1907—

E.D.], proletarian poetry began to develop as mass literature, and its base broadened remarkably: the self-taught writers’ movement expands, [as does] the spontaneous, quickly growing workers’ creative work, coming “from below,” from the factories and plants.!” «

“Mass literature,” as I have noted, developed along several lines. Relevant to proletarian” literature, however, is only the part of it that was characterized by M4

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leftist-radical tendentiousness and accordingly was inevitably tied to political struggle. During the course of this struggle, the encounter of Party ideologues with “writers of the people” took place. This encounter was not simple: it was

accompanied by an intense “ideological struggle” among the Party elites. During the period of the greatest flowering of “proletarian literature,” this struggle reached its greatest intensity. The “discussion about proletarian artistic creative work” that was heating up in social-democratic circles had deep roots—not only historical, but also political (transcendence of populism). What is impor-

tant to us is the fact that “in the discussion of the ‘teens, it was precisely the problem of the masses’ creative work that became the main juncture, the starting-point in working out the remaining issues of the new artistic culture.””!

As is well known, one of Lenin’s “genial conclusions” that lay at the heart of Bolshevist doctrine was the one regarding “introduction of socialist consciousness ‘from without.” In the Short Course On the History ofthe VKP(b) (Kratkii kurs istorii VKP[b]), this Leninist ideal becomes the starting point, and the

“conception of a new type of Party” itself is described here as a sort of “fertilization’: the Party was born, this work proclaimed, “on the basis of the work-

ers movement in prerevolutionary Russia from Marxist circles and groups that allied themselves to the workers’ movement and introduced a socialist con-

sciousness into it.”** Lenin, as an opponent of “massism” and “arbitrariness”— categories that would later become part of Socialist Realist demonology—remained faithful to these views until the end. Nevertheless, in reality everything

unfolded in a more complicated manner: it turned out that there was no one to introduce “socialist consciousness ‘from without’”—given the flight of the intelligentsia, the “source” remained “from within,” which became the reason for the “workerization” of the Party. The fifth conference of the RSDRP (1908)

observed that the victory of the counterrevolution “rids the Party ranks of all wavering intelligentsia and bourgeois elements that had allied themselves with the workers’ movement, mainly in the hope of the approaching triumph of the revolution,” and accordingly oriented Party organs toward “making practical and ideological leaders of the s[ocial].-d[emocratic]. movement from among

the workers themselves.”” Against this background, Lenin’s position regarding “proletarian culture” is understandable. The “Forwardists” [Vperedovtsy] or so-called Capri School of

1908-1909 (Bogdanoy, Lunacharskii, Gorky, Fedor Kalinin, and others—ideo-

logues of the Proletkultism yet to come) tried to prove that only the workers “themselves” could create the new culture. It goes without saying that this was diametrically opposed to Lenin’s idea of “fertilizing” the masses with socialist ideology “from without.” Here, in fact, the fate of the future Proletkult was pre-

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determined: in Bogdanov’s class purism no role was allotted to a “socialist state”

or a political party, the importance of both of which Lenin had tirelessly emphasized. However, the “Forwardists” were not monolithic—especially on issues of aesthetics. Gorky and Lunacharskii had “special opinions” of their own. Lunacharskii, for example, asserted in 1907 that “around Gorky are intelligentsia artists, the intelligentsia constantly produces new talents, and the closeness of part of the intelligentsia to the proletariat will have to, perhaps soon, give rise to a social-democratic fiction, and afterward painting and sculpture.”*4 Proletarian artists, he suggested, would come out of the intelligentsia:

“Whoever can surrender his whole head to work in the new field has already surrendered his /eart to it. »25

A specifically intelligentsia proselyte (but a real one, having completely accepted the new faith) is capable of expressing the most important and valuable thing in the proletarian attitude more clearly than the proletarian himself, even if the latter is just as talented. . . . After all, it is well-known

that landscape painting was created by urbanites who grew up among walls. The proletarian breathes his attitude naturally, it has also grown for him, like the tranquil river, green willow, and gently sloping banks covered in flowers have blurred in the peasant’s vision. One must open soul of the proletarian with cleansed vision, open it like precious gold, order to joyously forge wondrous masterpieces from it.

Therefore ier for the its milieu, of the new

stone blurry the in

Lunacharskii confidently states, “I maintain that in general it is easintelligentsia, much easier, to produce a socialist artist from among than for the proletariat, and in general it is natural that the beauty harmony of the soul, and through it the beauty of the new world as

well, would first be seen by the Marxes of fiction, the Engelses of the brush, and the Lassalles of the chisel.”*® This “optics” (ideologues/masses) undoubt-

edly impressed Lenin (he later wrote Gorky that Lunacharskii was easy to “separate” from Bogdanov “in aesthetic matters”’’). The aestheticization of the masses was recognized as an urgent task, but there was still no answer to the urgent question of how to relate to the creative work of the masses. The Mensheviks provided the answer. One of their leaders, Aleksandr Potresov, dedicated a series of articles entitled On Literature Without Life and Life Without Literature: The Tragedy of Proletarian Culture (O literature bez zhizni i zhizni bez literatury: Tragediia proletarskoi kul’tury), published in the Menshevik journal Nasha zaria (Our dawn), to the problems of proletarian culture. He stated: “The proletarian culture of art... is something that by its essence is capable only of being extremely homegrown, homemadeproletarian”*’ (a point on which the “right” [Menshevik] and “left” [Forwardist]

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wings of Russian Social Democracy came together). On the issues of art, Potresov asserted, “The experience of the intelligentsia with the proletariat . . .

is lamentable,”” of which I have already been convinced. He concluded, “A

whole sea of literature still does not guarantee us even a drop of artistry.”2° Ten years later, Trotsky would repeat all of this after Potresoy, having already had the opportunity to be convinced of the results of “introduction of socialist consciousness” into the workers movement of the masses “from without.” The Mensheviks did not limit themselves to statements but also provided explanations for the situation. Potresov asserted:

Under pressure of the relentless laws of struggle in a capitalist society, a tendency toward unconscious economy of forces is developing among the proletariat, a tendency toward involuntary limitation of culture by the practical needs of the basic process of the proletarian movement, and the

whole culture is acquiring a character of a certain utilitarianism. The psyche . . . of a proletarian Sparta is being created, and Athens cannot be created.*!

Hence the “practical rigidness . . . with its nonapplied aspect of ideology moved to the back, with its incomplete art.”°* Developing this idea in an article published in the Menshevik Novyi zhurnal dlia vsekh (New journal for everyone),

P. Iushkevich observed: “A conscious worker always slightly smells of the Party program, like an intelligentsia person does of books and bookish quotes.”*° This latter observation characterizes the results of the famous “introduction” of “consciousness from without”: given the absence of culture, the pure ideol-

ogy “introduced” into workers’ heads was transformed into their only passion and became almost the fundamental “sensation of life” that they were obliged

to rhyme. As a result, the “Party program” was literally transformed into an “aesthetic fetish.” A single example of this will suffice—the “Song of the Proletarians” (“Pesr’ proletariev”) of Arkadii Kots, in fact a rhymed retelling of the

Communist Manifesto: Silen nash vrag—burzhuaziia!

No vsled za nei na strashnyi sud, Kak neizbezhnaia stikhiia, Ee mogil’shchiki idut.

Ne ustrashit nas boi surovyi.. Narushiv vash krovavyi pur, My poteriaem lish’ okovy, No zavoiuem tselyi mir! Drozhite zh, zhalkie tirany!

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Uzhe podkhvachen etot zov! Pod krasnym znamenem bortsov Uzh podymaiutsia vse strany...

[Our enemy is strong—the bourgeoisie!

But right behind them, to a horrible judgment, Like an inevitable fate, Their grave-diggers follow.

We do not fear the cruel battle . . . By breaking up your bloody feast, We only lose our fetters, But we will win the world entire! Tremble, then, miserable tyrants! The call to this has been accepted! Under the red banner of champions All countries already arise. . . ]

In this political-ideological hodgepodge the sense of the “source” often was lost. In Kots’s work, for example, the proletariat ended up going “to a horrible judgment” right along with the bourgeoisie. Nonetheless, Kots, an Odessan underground writer and translator of the “Internationale” into Russian, was one of the educated representatives of the political poetry of the beginning of the century—a rare quality. On the whole, however, “proletarian poetry” was completely oriented toward tradition. The aforementioned ties to “revolutionary raznochinets poetry,” and above all to Nekrasov’s poetry, now acquired the character of outright dependence. The watchword of “learning from the classics” had not yet been spoken, but its precept was already in full swing (with the same success it enjoyed with the “shock-workers” impressed into literature twenty years later, of which I will have occasion to speak). Witness “Storm of the People” (“Buria

narodnaia’) by I. Voinov: Buria narodnaia, Buria velikaia,

Skoro I’ priidet tvoi chered? Polnoch’ bezvol’naia,

Nenavist’ dikaia, Zloba zhestokaia dushu gnetet. Vstan’ ty, zagadochnyi, Vechno bezradostnyi, Vstan’, raspriamis’, russkoi byli geroi. Rabstvo unyloe,

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Bremia postyloe Smelo striakhni i po-novomu spoi! [Storm of the people,

Great is the storm, Your turn, will’t come soon? Apathetic midnight, Wilding hatred, Fearsome anger oppresses the soul. Arise, thou mysterious, Always joyless, Arise, upright, O Russian epic hero. Slavery is doleful, The burden nauseating Boldly brush’t off, and sing anew!] And here is “Spring is Coming” (“Vesna idet”) by IPia Sadof’ ev: Idet vesna moguchaia, Veselaia, kipuchaia,

Prozrachnaia, poiushchaia, P’ianiashchaia, nesushchaia— Vostorgi, zhizn’ i svet.

[It is now mighty spring, Jolly, teeming, ‘Transparent, singing, Intoxicating, bringing— Raptures, life and light.]

Frequently, a long-ago classic author (Lermontov, for example) was chosen as a model. In Iakov Berdnikov’s “Foundry-Worker” (“Liteishchik”), one can observe the repetition of not only the rhythmical intonation of Lermontov’s “Mtsyri’, but its vocabulary as well: Uidia ot zhizni trudovoi, S nadezhdoi .. . s bodroiu mechtoi, Vdali, gde shumnoi zhizni net, Ia zhil v izgnan’e mnogo let, To v krai glukhoi, gde dremlet liud,

Ia vyslan byl za vol’nyi trud . . . I tam ia zhil i toskoval,

No kak pomoch’ sebe ne znal . . . I vspomnil ia pro zhizn’ svoiu, Proshedshuiu v rodnom kraiu . . . [etc.]

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[Leaving the life of toiling, With hope... and cheerful dreams, Far off, where noisy life is not, I lived in exile many years,

To a region far, where people slumber,

Exiled I was, for my free labor. . . . And there I lived and yearned, But knew not how to help myself. . . And I recalled the life I spent,

While still in my own region... |

The main crutch remained, of course, the genres of “civic-minded poetry” from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, since at the cusp of the twentieth century “the only living stylistic tradition of civic-minded poetry was precisely the tradition of declarative-generalized language that the populist poets took with them. It has been appropriated by the young revolutionaryproletarian art of the 90s as well.”*? Hence the reliance on the ode, journalistic invective, and lyrical-philosophical meditation filled with a generalized ceremonial/triumphant lexicon. The issue is not that of genres, however. Political poetry is not stylistics, not

genre, nor even content. Its specifics can only be understood by comparison to the Party-minded poetry it engendered (as has been said already, the proletarian poetry of the Zvezda and Pravda eras is already at this frontier): the main difference is the status of the word and of the author in each. This is why the “cadres” of “proletarian literature,” who comprised the nucleus of revolutionary culture, as a political literature were doomed in the era of “Party-minded literature.” They in fact were beaten out in the 1930s, since new “cadres” were

required at this time, but now invariably nonpolitically thinking people (the necessity of producing a “new writer” in the 1920s and 1930s was latent in political [pre-Party] culture). But the process that was taking place on the eve of

the revolution in “proletarian literature” was externally similar to what happened at the end of the 1920s. Above all one should consider carefully the character of the relations between “workers’ folklore”*® and proletarian poetry. “Beginning with the era of the 1905 Revolution,” V. A. Keldysh observes, “representatives of the factory and plant masses make a widespread entrance into proletarian literature— self-taught authors to whom, naturally, the stylistics of oral workers’ poetry is most familiar. But characteristically, those who did not limit themselves to a few more or less occasionally written pieces, who wanted to get started on the path of poetic creativity connected with the printed word, gradually rejected

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the ‘documentary’ tradition of descriptiveness and strove to assimilate the ‘general language’ of proletarian poetry.””” But what is this “documentary .. fi ipraenee: and this “general language °? The former is an embarrassed euphemism to designate the usual “‘poetic masturbation” (Gorky) from which the‘‘workers’ chastushki” that were

later given a channel in the wall-newspaper grew. An excerpt from rhymed “correspondence” from the “Neva Threadworks No. 2 (3 Lifland Street)” in the January 3, 1914, issue of Proletarskaia pravda (Proletarian truth), signed

“Podruga” (“Friend”), can serve as a exemplar of this type of “descriptiveness”: Nu i fabrika u nas, Provalis’ ona khot' s glaz. Ia ne budu igrat’ v priadki, Rasskazhu pro vse poriadki. Nu khov “uzkuiu” vozmu

I pro vse zdes’ rasskazhu. “Upakovki” otdelen’e— Ekh, tovarishchi, terpen’e!

Zdes’ vot nitki raz propali, No vorishku ne syskali. Nashi knizhki otobrali

I raschet vsem zapisali. A kogda v sarai poshli,

Nicki tsel’nymi nashli. V tot sarai my ne khodili, Nas naprasno obvinili. Nam raschet ne vsem prostili,

Sluchai mimo propustili. Odnogo lish’ rasschitali,

A za chto? My vse ne znali. “Samokhody” otdelen’e Ne rabota, a muchen’e. Zdes’ rastsenok-to plokhoi, Nu a brak vsegda bol’shoi. Zdes Vasil’ev vse brakuet, Nas vezde vsegda on suet. Nas shtrafuet besposhchadno, Tochno zver’, gliadit on zhadno. No Vasil’ev vse zh ne tot, Kak podmaster’e nash Fedot. Nastoiashchii pustobai— Tselyi den’ my slyshim lai... [etc.]?*

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[Well, the factory that is ours, Let it disappear from sight. I won't go skipping, hopping, I'll tell in order everything. Well, maybe a “narrow,” then,

And here I'll tell you all about it. The “packing” division— Comrades, oh be patient! Here, you see, some thread got lost, The little thief, though, got away. They took our record-books away And “laid it down’ to all of us. And when they went into the shed, They found the thread all there. We'd never been into that shed, They'd blamed us for no reason. They let it go, but not for all, They let it go, this time. Only one was singled out, And why? Nobody knew. The “self-propelleds” department Is not work, but torture. Here the raises are always low, And lots of money’s lost on discards. Here Vasil’ev discards it all,

Always shoving us around. He shows no mercy, fining us, Looking greedy, like a beast. But Vasil’ev isn’t half as bad As Fedot, our apprentice. He really cusses all the time— All day long we hear him bark. . . ]

The “general language” was that of half-baked ideological clichés and Party slang, which political poetry attempted to master. The result was verses like “The Woman Worker” (“Rabotnitsa”), published in Pravda: “Kapital, kak pautinu, fabriki postavil. / Obratil nas vsekh v skotinu, muchit’sia zastavil” (“Capital, like spider’s webs, put the factories up. / It made us all a herd of cattle,

made us suffer”). The worker responds to this enemy thus: “Dovol’no rabskoi zhizni. /Proch’ s dorogi, beregis'!/Zhal ty silu s nas privol’no, /No teper’ ty pokoris!” (“Enough of this, the slavish life. /Get off the road, watch out! / You squeezed our strength out as you liked, / But now you will submit!”).

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Again one finds oneselfin the famous space of “bashful form” that critics such as Kogan were already trying to understand as early as the 1920s:

To say about Kirillov or Gerasimov that they did not invent new literary forms, that Gerasimov’s “Mona Lisa” [“Monna Liza”].reminds one of Blok’s “The Stranger” [“Neznakomka”] and Kirillov’s poetic summonses of

Bal’mont’s musicality, is to approach them from a side that is totally uninteresting. Comparing Demian Bednyi with Akhmatova is equivalent to a comparison of rifles and lace.

The situation is quite reminiscent of the Soviet situation, wherein the “form” of Socialist Realism turned out to be something mystical and embarrassingly vague. Kogan’s conclusion was of a methodological nature: “A significant part of the misunderstandings and arguments related to the question of proletarian literature could not take place if the completely hopeless attempts to approach it from the viewpoint of traditional historico-literary methods, and to define its accomplishments in the area of form, did not exist.”* In fact, this is the same

conclusion that researchers of Socialist Realism arrived at many decades later: “Aesthetics here is not the aesthetics of ‘works’ in the European sense of the word (paintings, books . . . ), but the aesthetics of the configuration of power.”“° In this case it is not yet power but the “will for power” (an important corrective for the definition of political literature); the strategy of choosing exemplars, however, is already definitely similar. This means the aesthetic omnivo-

rousness of proletarian literature and the stylistic eclecticism noted by Kogan (which make proletarian literature similar to Socialist Realism):

Proletarian poetry, since it wanted to remain proletarian, did not posit formal goals for itself—or if it did, then it did so very unsuccessfully. It almost indiscriminately used all the forms that reached it as a legacy from earlier eras, beginning with the most immediate predecessors like Blok and Bal’mont, even

contemporaries like Mayakovsky, and ending with classic realist writers.*!

These ties to “the future” are just as obvious as the break with predecessors: in its motifs, proletarian poetry differed markedly from the popular “poetry of grief and sorrow” that preceded it. Among the differences, Keldysh enumerated the following: In proletarian poetry, the image of the singer-“mourner” cultivated by the Surikovians disappears, together with the psychology of self-sacrifice itself. Replacing this is “the expression of wild, exultant joy, a complete happiness not darkened by reflection nor a consciousness of doom”: “Vsia priroda molodeet, / Vse tsvetet, vse zeleneet, / Zdravstvui, mai, iunyi mai! /Pust zhe staryi

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mir tomitsia, /A my budem veselitsia” (“All of nature grows younger, / Everything blooms and grows green, / Greetings, May, youthful May! / So let the old world languish, / But we'll be bright and gay!”); or: “Bratia-

tovarishchi! Prazdnik vesny, /Svetlyi nash prazdnik svobody, / Prazdnuem zdes, i vesel'ia polny/ Eti tiuremnye svody!” (“Comrade-brothers! The holiday of spring, / Our bright day of freedom, / We now celebrate, and full of joy/

Are prison arches these!”); a renewal of “prison poetry” itself takes isa The real “weightiness of existence” (the “reign of tyranny and despotism,” the “power of tyrants,” and so forth) that exists in the present, appears in

proletarian poetry as something finished and past; the classic example: “The black days have passed . . .”;

“Everywhere you look, features of the future pass into the present,” and the image of “slowly passing” time is replaced by that of “Heeting time,” which was the basis of “revolutionary romanticism”; examples such as: “All Countries Are Caught up in Fire of Revolt” (“Pozharom vosstan’ia ob” iaty vse strany’), “Razve ne slyshite pesen pobednykh?/ Razve ne vidite solntsa voskhod?/ Razve ne taet tma sumerek blednykh? / Razve ognem ne ob"iat nebosvod?” (“Can

you not hear the conquerors’ song? / Not really see the sunrise? / Does not pale twilight’s dark melt ’way? / The vault of heav’n not seized by fire?”— Dodaev); “Vot i predvestnitsa utra / Krasnaia zorka vzoshla... / Nebo iasnei

perlamutra... / Noch’ umerla, umerla!” (“See, the morning's herald /Red dawn has risen up .. . / Sky brighter than mother-of-pearl . . . /The night has died, has died!” —Siverkov);

One of the driving motifs of late populist poetry definitively disappears—the motif of sacrificing one generation for the sake of another's flowering;

The infusion of horrors and martyrdom, and the constant motif of the executioner tormenting his victim, characteristics of revolutionary populist lyrics, gradually disappear; on the contrary, the prison chambers no longer hear groans but a real “hymn of joy”: “/ pust’ nas po tiurmam sazhaiut, / Lomaiut, kalechat i gnut, /Moshch' nasha rastet, vyrastaet, /Okrepnet i skoro

slomaet /Okovy nepravednykh put!” (“And let them throw us in the jails, / They break, and maim, and bend us, / But our might is growing, growing, / It gathers strength and soon will break / The fetters of the unjust chains!”).

In the most acute form, this is manifested in Gorky: optimism as a norm of

behavior, suffering makes a person decline, the cult of social activism, and so on.” It is worth observing, however, that behind this change of motifs was a

change of the authors who were writing political poetry, a change of the poetic voice: the elements of Party-mindedness, mutual support, and Party unity intensify, elements that served as the basis of “wild optimism”; and this optimism, which in this poetry already carried an obvious nuance of a sort of religious drama or invocation, would later spill over into the “hymnology” of

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Proletkult and the Smithy, and “revolutionary romanticism” and the new “chronotope” that accompanied it (reshaping of the past, treatment of the future as the present, a flowering of historical fantasizing, and so on) would spill

over into Socialist Realist aesthetics. “Eruptions” of this poetic production to the surface of literary life took place in the era of the first Russian Revolution, when the censorial limitations had eased a bit, and in the “era of new revolutionary ascent,” 1912-1914. In

these years, Bolshevist publications or those influenced by Social-Democrats became the real smithy in which the new “literary cadres” were forged. Such were the numerous labor-union journals (Tkach [The weaver], Bulochnik [The baker], Merallist [The metalworker], and many others) and the illegal Bolshe-

vik military press (on the basis of which the so-called soldier poetry* arose), but mainly Zvezda and later Pravda. The era of Zvezda and Pravda can by rights be considered the golden age of proletarian poetry. Pravda printed almost exclusively nonprofessional poets “from the factory,” and what is more, in huge quantities: during a period of slightly more than two years (1912-1914), about three hundred working-class writers appeared in its pages, and about eight hundred poems, poetic satires, and fables were printed.** The orientation toward the “man-of-the-masses poet” was obligatory: this type of poetry was produced only by this group of “poets,” and the poetry was necessary for propaganda purposes. Nikolai Baturin, one of the former staff of Zvezda (which Pravda succeeded), recalled: “One should ob-

serve that the propagandistic significance of the poems was enormous, especially for the broad masses of the people. The working man of the masses could not make sense of Zvezda’s political articles without difficulty, but the

poems were not only easy to grasp, they also awakened the consciousness of even the most backward.” Therefore, Baturin concluded, “Someone visiting the taverns of the suburbs and observing the readers of Zvezda there could notice that they almost always began reading it with the poems.”* The poems were almost always “about professions” (headings for the majority of the poems in Pravda were of the ilk of “The Worker,” “The Miner,” “The Smith,” “The Factory,” “In the Factory,” “Song of the Smith,” “Slaves of Labor,” “Thoughts of a Woman Worker,” “Song of a Factory Worker,” and the

like). Their authors were not only individual workers but also groups of authors (often the poems would be signed “Group of workers of the copper workshop,” “Collective of the copper workshop of the Krug Factory,” “Group of workers of the Iuzovka Settlement,” and the like). This “collective creative work” was nonetheless fully organized, as Pravda

poet M. Artamonov indicated. He described the “process of creation” thus:

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The whole week, the fourth page of the newspaper would be allotted to some special issue: for example, Tuesday—female workers; Wednesday—woodworkers and metalworkers; Thursday—miners; and so on. They would write about their environment, working conditions, and correspondence and poems from local areas would appear. . . . Often K. Eremeev [one of the editors of Pravda—E.D.] would say to us, “Write down in your notebook

what day which department goes on, otherwise you might forget. . . . You must go to the factory, see how they work, and then describe the work in verses... .” And often, all five-six of the worker-poets who constantly visited Pravda would write about the very same subject.*” This detail of the “literary environment” explains the main Bolshevist newspaper's position on the issue of “self-taught” poets. Pravda’s position was so logical that some of the statements on this subject in its pages are hard to distinguish from those of the “Forwardists”:

All kinds of workers and peasants are taking up the pen, and one may assuredly say that they will bring out artistic talents from their milieu that will do what contemporary literature is powerless to do. Worker and peasant democracy is historically predestined to renew Russia and dispel the stagnant atmosphere that we now live in. And from its milieu will come the writers that will lead our literature out of the helpless situation it is now in. And only they will succeed in writing a bright and beautiful page into the history of Russian literature after those pale and indistinct ones that were written into it in recent years by an intelligentsia grown soft.**

This was the prediction of one “V. Vol-kii,” written on Pravda’s pages in 1913. A year later, Pravda would publish an editorial containing a challenge: “Comrade workers, begin developing editors and working-class journalists, and

working-class artists in literature, from among yourselves. You must concern yourself with this constantly, you must devote efforts and time to this. Let the road for the worker be wider! Long live the working-class writer!”* Reliance on the reader and writer from the “taverns of the suburbs” also dictated the corresponding attitude toward “high” culture. Thisisnot the place to detail the battle waged by “Marxist criticism” against so-called literary disintegration [/iteraturnyi raspad |. This “glorious page” of its history reflected not only the attitude toward “the culture of the upper ten thousand suffering from obesity” (Lenin), but also toward “high” culture as a whole. “Literary disintegration” (as the “Silver Age” was so elegantly named in the slang of Marxist criticism) was associated above all with a rejection of realism, while readers and authors were pushing for a “defense of realism.” The aesthetic tastes of the ideologues themselves, of course, were not at all at issue, but rather the demands

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of the audience with whose tastes any political force was obliged to reckon. And Pravda tirelessly repeated: “Messieurs the decadents are fighting a reviving realism precisely because they feel the reflection of the force of the workers movement in it. They feel that their vulgar ‘creatable legend’ is fading and disappearing in view of the life being created by the proletariat.” Meanwhile, life was being “created by the proletariat” primarily on paper. An exemplar of such a “creatable legend” was provided for the mass reader/ writer at that very time: publication of Gorky’s autobiography began in the newspaper Russkee slovo. In the journal Voprosy strakhovaniia (Insurance issues),

managed by Bolsheviks, the article “A Bitter Childhood” (“Gor’koe detstvo”) appeared, in response to Gorky’s Childhood (Detstvo): A great writer-artist has grown out of the little Alesha Peshkov, as new proletarian writers and poets grow out of the dark workers’ milieu. How many of them have grown out of this milieu has been clearly shown by the workers’ newspapers, which over the two years of their existence have brought out not a few natural talents from the workers’ milieu.”!

The then-current Gorky legend differed from the one “created” by the Symbolists in its direct appeal to life: just before he began working on his autobiography, Gorky wrote the article “About Self-Taught Writers” (“O pisateliakhsamouchkakh”)—a sort of prologue to Childhood. Gorky’s article, which was published in 1914 as a separate book (three years after its first publication) and which evoked enthusiastic reviews from “Marxist criticism,”*” contained an analysis of more than four hundred manuscripts from “writers of the people” that Gorky had received and read from 1906 to 1910. This “direct voice of the

masses” gave Gorky the opportunity to “find out what the agitated Russian man is thinking about in the long nights of the six-months’ winter.””? The majority of the authors were residents of railway stations, factory settlements, and villages; few were peasants—there were twice as many workers. They were shoemakers, dvorniks, cabmen, soldiers, tailors, clerks, convicts, seamstresses, maids, prostitutes, cooks, market sellers, laundresses, nurses, cemetery watchmen, chimney sweeps, porters, and even a policeman (Gorky conscientiously gave numbers for each).

The content of the manuscripts was typical of “autodidacts.” Here is one example, from the many dozens that Gorky included: “Diary of a Prostitute” (“Dnevnik prostitutki”), written by a basket maker: Ona ne vinovata

Byla obol’shchena i nevinnost’ u nee otniata . . . Po vsemu svetu prostitutka sushchestvuet

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I vsiakaia natsiia o nei toskuet

A nikto na nikh vnimaniia ne obrashchaet I v tseliakh dobrykh ne pomogaet . . . [etc.]”*

[She is not to blame She was seduced, her innocence taken away .. . The prostitute exists throughout the world And every nation needs it But no one pays them any mind Nor helps with good intentions . . . ]

Analyzing in detail the corpus of authors, the motifs, themes, and content of their writings, and their attitude toward literature, Gorky concluded that “respect for the people, attention to their probings and to the working of their awakened thought” were necessary. A few years later, in the foreword to the self-taught poet Ivan Morozov’s Razryv-trava, Gorky retold the typical biography of the “natural-talent” poet (of which one can meet hundreds in Kleinbort’s Essays on Popular Literature) and theatrically confessed: Every time the post brings a gray notebook made of “penny” paper covered with handwriting unaccustomed to a pen, and a letter in which an unknown and familiar, unseen and close-by person asks me to “have a look” at his efforts and say “Whether I have talent, do I have the right to people’s attention,” my heart is wrung with both joy and grief, simultaneously a great hope flares up in it and it is even more fiercely pained by fear for the motherland that is suffering such difficult days at present. .. . Joy—because they are sending more and more awkward verses and clumsy prose, and the voices of the writers are resounding more loudly and cheerfully; you feel how in the lower strata of life a man’s consciousness of his ties to the world is flaring up, how in a small man the aspiration toward a great wide life and the thirst for freedom are growing, and how passionately he wants to tell his youthful thoughts. . . . *°

Let us note the words “youthful thoughts”: the image of the “youthful nation” would become pivotal in Gorky’s foreword to the first “anthology of proletarian writers,” and Soviet criticism would acknowledge this foreword as the “programmatic document of proletarian literature.”*” The history of this anthology is in many respects remarkable. In fact, it was the first manifest of proletarian literature, the first conscious political-aesthetic action that hailed the birth of the half-political, half-Party-minded literature. Where was the basket maker to go with his “Diary of a Prostitute”? To Gorky’s herbarium or to the Sivachevs? In both cases the result would be lamentable. It would be another matter to versify the very same “harsh life” in the

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newspaper, where the “self-taught “class growth.” Thus in May 1913 ized by Pravda. There were about bytnik” [Aleksei Mashirov], lakov

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poet” would feel his requisiteness and his the first workers’ literary circle was organthirty people in it (among them “SamoBerdnikov, Vladimir Kirillov, and IVia Sa-

dof’ ev—later the eminent “prolet-writers”). They met in the Panin House of the People, in the wings of the Gaideburov Theater, where Samobytnik had

taken a job as a stagehand, and in a tavern in Ligovka; they were published in Pravda and Prosveshchenie (Enlightenment). Here also the idea of an almanac arose. To begin with, they published a literary anthology, The Answering Echo (Ekho otvetnoe, St. Petersburg, 1913), in honor of the tenth anniversary of Ligovka House of the People, and in Moscow, “the first anthology of workingclass poets” entitled Our Songs (Nashi pesni, 1913). At the same time, two al-

manacs of “people’s writers” had been published in the provinces by I. Nazarovs firm “Probuzhdenie” (“Awakening”) (the first in Suzdal’, 1912, and the

second in Voronezh, 1913). But all of these publications were still not, strictly speaking, “proletarian” (especially Nazarov’s), and contained both “proletar-

ian’ and “people's” writers. But the idea of a “real” proletarian publication was in the air.

In 1914, the first Anthology of Proletarian Writers (Sbornik proletarskikh pisatelei) was finally published by the Party publishing house, “Priboi” (Surf); Gorky was the editor of this anthology.”® In the foreword he wrote, “Not one

country of Europe produces such a quantity of self-taught writers as does Russia, and after 1906 the mass of writers grew immeasurably.””? Gorky saw the “historical and political youthfulness of the Russian people, of the Russian proletariat” as the reason for this. From this youthfulness came “social idealism” and the “courage of the proletariat’s strength”; hence the idea of literary training, of a “periodical publication for self-taught writers that will set itself the goal of teaching literary technique.”°! When Gorky expounded these ideas, which were realized in the 1920s and 1930s, he was already firmly connected with the social-democratic elites.

It is worth observing that for more than ten years Gorky was the virtual manager, editor, and principal author of the “Knowledge” (Znanie) group, to which the “democratic writers” (Leonid Andreev, Ivan Bunin, Sergei Elpat’evskii, Nikolai Garin-Mikhailovskii, S$. Gusev-Orenburgskii, Semen Iushkevich, Aleksandr Kuprin, Mikhail Prishvin, Aleksandr Serafimovich, Ivan Shmeley,

and Vikentii Veresaev) contributed; among its poets were familiar personalities in revolutionary poetry: Skitalets, Evgenii Tarasov, I. Voronov, A. Cheremnov, and others.©? The enterprise was profitable: in the massive “Cheap Li-

brary” (“Deshevaia biblioteka”) series alone, up to 65,000 copies of 150 titles

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were printed. Publication was tied in with Party circles (beginning in October 1905, a series of Marxist brochures was published, by agreement with the Cen-

tral Committee). Gorky attracted “people’s writers” here as well—Ivan Kasatkin, S. Kondurushkin, and others. In this period the romanticist Gorky fought actively for “realism” (“Knowledge” literature was of an emphatically realistic tenor with an obvious touch of “Pomialovskyism”); but the most important thing, of course, was the author-

ial corpus. Briusov had every right to rebuke Gorky in 1906 for encouraging the “Kuprins, Serafimoviches, Iushkeviches, Gusev-Orenburgskiis, and other talentless people,”® but Gorky was a gambler in literature and, as if in response to the “aesthetes,” began to be moved by his stoker-poets and to go into raptures over the proletarian writers. This was a consciously chosen role

that transformed him into an independent player in literature at the beginning of the century, raised him above parties, and created the reputation of an independently thinking litterateur of radical views. In 1926, Kogan wrote thus about Symbolist literature: “The grave-digger of this mystical poetry was not censorship but the new consciousness that arose in the fight for communist forms of life. Soon the last voices of this poetry will grow silent, and an army of proletarian poets will appear on the cleansed battlefield of literature, heralds of the new life and of new aspirations.”** One had to possess a considerable historical intuition to foresee this situation more than two decades before its appearance and to “make” one’s life the same way Gorky “made” his. “Knowledge” was an important business for him.® It was no less important for the Bolsheviks, who urgently needed sympathetic support from writers, and for this reason, as one Soviet critic pointed out, “the creative work of ‘Knowledge’ writers was already in the sphere of the Party’s literary policy at the time of the first Russian Revolution” (Bolsheviks urged these writers to

contribute to Novaia zhizn’ |New life], Vestnik zhizni {Herald of life], and

other Party publications).°° When Gorky left “Knowledge” in 1912, he was persistently urged to participate in the Bolshevik press. G. Petrovskii recalled how Lenin sent him in the autumn of 1913 from Poronino to “go and see Gorky” in Capri “and ask him to

stick closer to Pravda, to organize proletarian writers around it.”®” At this time precisely, the familiar image of Gorky as “organizer of the new literary forces” was shaped: he headed the literary department of the Bolshevist Prosveshchenie and worked for Zvezda and Pravda, assisting in the “education of working-

class litterateurs.” This was how the 1914 Anthology of Proletarian Writers was born, of which almost half the publication's participants, fifteen writers, were in prison and exile when the collection came to light.

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The main thing was the enterprise's success: Gorky's authority grew unusu-

ally, and the attitude of the “proletarian poets” themselves toward their own work began to change. Characteristic in this respect was the fate of one of Samobytnik’s poems: Gorky opened the above-mentioned Anthology with this poem: Ne govori v zhivom priznan’e Mne slova gordogo ‘poet,’

My pervoi radosti dykhar’e, My pervoi zeleni rastsvet. Razrushiv chernye okontsa,

My zhazhdem mirom opianet’, Eshche ne nam, ne znavshim solntsa, Vershinoi gordoiu shumet [Dont say in live recognition [sic]

The proud word ‘poet’ to me, We are the breath of first joy, We are the flourishing of the first greenery. Destroying the little black windows, We thirst to get drunk with the world, It is not yet our time, who have not known the sun,

To rustle like the tree’s proud canopy.]

The original version of this poem, however, had opened the earlier anthology Nashi pesni: “No ia schastliv: vysokoi tseliu /My vse posluzhim v smene let,— /My budem pervoi kolybeliu, / V kotoroi iavitsia poet” (“But I am happy: the high goal / We will all serve as the years pass, / We will be the first cradle, / In which the poet appears”), and a bit further, “Ja ne odin, nas v mire mnogo / Pevtsou, poiushchtkh kak-nibud’, / Svoei poeziei ubogoi / My lish drugim gotovim put’/Iv pesniakh nam gorditsia nechem” (“I am not alone, there are many of us in the world / Singers, singing somehow /Our wretched poetry / We only prepare the path for others /And have nothing to be proud of in our songs”). Keldysh notes that in the later-published version of this poem, all the nuances of the underestimation of proletarian poetry (“somehow,” “wretched,” “nothing to be proud of”) have been removed.

Finally, workers’ literary circles began to spring up one after another—in the Ligovka evening classes, in the bakers’ union, in the Krasnopol’sk paper factory, in Otto Kirkhner’s factory, and in many other places. But the main fountainhead of proletarian literature remained, of course, Pravda. If those three hundred poets that were published in it had never “surfaced” later in the culture, there would probably be no justification to recall the newspaper's work

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in “educating the new cadres of proletarian literature.” But first, they were a sort of acme around which the even more obscure poets grouped themselves.” And second, it was here that the whole generation of writers and poets arose without whom it is not only impossible to imagine 1920s Soviet literature, but

also who to a great extent later initiated the processes that produced new writers through the literary institutions that arose after the revolution—Proletkult, the Smithy, “Workers’ Spring,” the Young Guard, “October,” RAPP, Pereval, and others. Here are only a few of those poets: Vasilii Aleksandrovskii was born to a peasant family, served as an office errand-boy, and worked in a leather-dressing workshop. He was a Party member from the age of seventeen, was in Proletkult 1918-1919, and afterward in the Smithy.

Pavel Arskii (Afanas’ev) was born to a working-class family. He worked as a stoker, sailor, and miner. He participated in the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917. He later participated in Proletkult and the Smithy. Iakov Berdnikov was a worker in the Putilov Factory, and an active participant in the 1905 Revolution. In 1908, he was exiled to his native Tambov Proyince under police surveillance, for disseminating RSDRP proclamations. After the revolution he published several books and participated in Proletkult and the Smithy. Aleksandr Bogdanov-Volzhskii, one of the pioneers of proletarian poetry,

was born in a lawyer’s family. He was a Party member from the age of twentyfive. He lived with forged documents for more than ten years and was arrested and imprisoned numerous times. After the revolution he published several dozen books of poetry and prose. Mariia Boretskaia was an active revolutionary and was arrested. She authored novels, the last two of which, The Peoples Wrath (Gnev narodnyi) and The People’ Feast (Pir narodnyi), were published after the revolution with fore-

words by Nadezhda Krupskaia. Aleksei Dorogoichenko was the son of a Mordvinian peasant. After the revolution, he participated in the civil war. He was the author of many poetic collections and novels, and a member of Proletkult and the Smithy. Ivan Filipchenko was from a peasant family. After finishing the village school, he worked at a number of professions—he was a farmhand, shepherd, and factory worker. He studied at Shaniavskii University. He actively participated in the revolutionary movement and was arrested several times. After the revolution he worked on the editorial board of Pravda, was one of the organizers of Pro-

letkult, the Smithy, and “Cosmist” (“Kosmist”), and actively participated in the “Workers’ Spring” literary group.

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Aleksei Gastev, one of the leading proletarian poets, was born to a teacher’s family. He began to participate in revolutionary work while still a youth and was arrested many times, exiled, and emigrated to France. After the revolution, he was Proletkult’s most original poet. Mikhail Gerasimov, another leading proletarian poet, was born in the family of a railway worker. He was a Party member at sixteen and an active participant of the revolutionary movement. Arrested many times, he fled abroad and lived in France, Belgium, and Italy, where he worked in factories, mines, and as a ship’s stoker. During the First World War, he volunteered for the French Army, but was exiled to Russia for antiwar propaganda. He participated in the October Revolution. He was chairman of the Samara Soviet of Deputies and a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. Aleksei Gmyrev was the son of a railway conductor. From the age of thirteen, he worked in a shipbuilding factory. Arrested four times from 1902 through 1906, he was sentenced to seven years of hard labor in 1908. He died

in 1911 in Kherson Prison Hospital at the age of twenty-four. Vasilii Kazin was from a working-class family. He was in Proletkult 1918— 1920 and was one of the organizers and leaders of the Smithy. He was later one of the leading Soviet poets. Vladimir Kirillov was born to a peasant family. At ten, he was a shoemaker and later a sailor, and from the age of fifteen an active participant of the revolutionary movement on the Black Sea Fleet. He was arrested, court-martialed, and only escaped the death penalty because of his youth. He spent three years in exile at Ust’-Sysol’sk and fled to America in 1911. He participated in the October Revolution. He was an active figure in Proletkult and afterward in the Smithy. He authored many books of poetry. Sergei Koshkarev came from a long line of barge haulers. He was an active member and later chairman of the Surikov Society, and the author of more than thirty collections of poems. Ivan Kozlov (pseudonym Batrak), was from a peasant family. From the age of twenty, he was a worker and participant in the revolutionary movement, and

a Party member. Arrested numerous times, he was sentenced to eight years of penal servitude and held in Shlissel’burg Fortress until March 1917. He was one of the leaders of VOKP (Vserossiiskoe obshchestvo krest ianskikh pisatelei), the

All-Russian Society of Peasant Writers, and later of ROPKP. Aleksei Kraiskii was born into the family of a retired soldier. He worked as a clerk. After the revolution, he was an active figure in Proletkult and the author of self-teaching manuals for beginning writers. Aleksandr Malyshkin was born to a peasant family. He graduated from

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Penza Gymnasium School and Petersburg University. He was an active participant of the revolution and civil war. His first poem was printed in Pravda in 1912, and in the 20s he worked at Novyi mir. He was the author of the famous novels The Fall of Dair (Padenie Daira), Sevastopol, and People from the “Sticks” (Liudi iz zakholust’ia), which became part of the “gold reserve of So-

viet literature.” Aleksei Mashirov (“Samobytnik”) was one of the most senior proletarian

poets. From age twelve, he worked as a factory metalworker. From age nineteen, he was a Party member. He became involved in underground activity and in 1916 was arrested and exiled to Eastern Siberia. He was one of the or-

ganizers of young proletarian writers before the revolution, and afterward of Proletkult. In Soviet times he was director of the Leningrad Conservatory and afterward of the Research Institute of Theater and Music. Sergei Obradovich was from a working-class family. He finished third grade in the city elementary school and worked at a printing house. During the First World War, he was tried for dissemination of antiwar literature on the front. After the revolution, he was a Proletkult member and one of the organizers of the Smithy, and for a time headed the literary department of Pravda. Aleksandr Pomorskii was a veteran of proletarian poetry. A Party member from age seventeen and a professional revolutionary, he was arrested more than once, imprisoned, and spent time in exile. He participated in the revolution and the civil war. He was secretary of the Moscow-Narvsk Party Regional Committee, held “a managerial position” in many newspapers and in the printing divisions of the Moscow Party Committee and the Bolshevik Central Committee, and in the 20s and 30s headed Pravda’s literary division. He was an organ-

izer of the first workers’ literary circle and of the Our Songs anthology. After the revolution, he was a Proletkult member and the author of more than twenty

collections of poems. IPia Sadof’ev, a peasant’s son, went to Petersburg at age thirteen, where he worked in Semiannikov’s factory, and later in a tinware factory. He was arrested and exiled more than once (the last time, to six years in Iakutiia). In 1921, he helped organize the “Cosmist” group and was later its chairman. Grigorii Sannikov worked in a zemstvo, and at seventeen went to Moscow. He joined the Bolshevik Party, did underground Party work in the factories and plants of the Zamoskvorech’e District, and was one of the organizers and leaders of the student battalion of the Red Guard. In 1918 he volunteered for

service in the Red Army. He participated in Proletkult and was one of the organizers and leaders of the Smithy. He assisted in editing Oktiabr’, Krasnaia nov, and Novyi mir, and authored fifteen collections of poems.

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Ivan Shuvalov was born to a peasant family and began working in Petersburg factories while still a child. Beginningin 1905 (at the age of thirteen), he participated in the revolutionary movément and was a Party member at age seventeen. For Bolshevist propagandizing in the army, he was sentenced to hard labor. He participated in the revolution, the civil war, and the Second World War. He authored many poetic and dramatic works.

Aleksei Solovevwas born in a factory worker's family. He taught himself to read and write. At age twelve he worked in Petersburg as a painter and later wandered about Russia as an unskilled laborer and farmhand. For his participation in the revolution, he was arrested and put in Moscow's “Kresty” Prison.

He was published in Pravda and a member of the “Pravda poets” circle. He participated in the First World War and carried on Bolshevik propaganda among the soldiers. After the revolution he worked on various journals. Sergei Stepanov was from a working-class environment. From age ten he

was an errand-boy, then worked at a factory, and later as a laboratory assistant at Moscow University. In late 1890 he gravitated toward Maksim Leonov’s “Circle of People’s Writers.” He published much before the revolution and was a member of Surikov’s circle, and after the revolution actively participated in the work of the “Smychka” (“Union”) group of “worker-peasant writers.” I have selected only two dozen biographies—out of three hundred.”” The proletarian poets who grouped themselves around Pravda, almost all from the lower social strata with only elementary education, were professional revolutionaries and Party workers; after the revolution, many were active as participants in “cultural construction” and as members of the Party-state apparatus. For part of them—the most famous: Filipchenko, Gastev, Gerasimov, and Ki-

rillov—life ended in 1937; for others, it continued in Soviet literature; and for

still others, it stretched on tragically in non-Soviet literature. Let us look at two poems from 1914. The first is “Life of a Baker” (“Zhizn’ bulochnika’): Dushno, dushno v pekarne,

Smradu i dymu polno. Griazno, kak budto na psarne, Svet ne prokhodit v okno . . Skol’ko chasov za rabotoi

Bulochnik bednyi stoit, Griaznyi, bol’noi i razbityi, Tri chasa v sutki on spit... Bulochnik! Drug i tovarishch!

Vstan’, osmotris’, chto zh ty spish’, Soiuz “Muchnogo izdel’ia” otkrylsia— Tovarishch, chto zhe v nego ne speshish’?

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[It is stuffy, stuffy in the bakery, Full of stench and smoke. Just as dirty as a kennel, No light comes through the window . . . How many hours at his work The poor baker stands,

Dirty, sick, and broken, He sleeps three hours a day... Baker! Friend and comrade!

Arise, look round, how can you sleep? The “Flour Products” Union is open— Comrade, why don't you hurry to it?] The second is “To My Favorite Newspaper” (“Liubimoi gazete”):

Ia iznyval ot toski i nevzgody, Ia iznyval i ot goria, nuzhdy, Ia iznyval ot bedy, ot zaboty, Ia iznyval ot zhestokoi sud’by. No rodilas’ ty, rodnaia gazeta, Ty ukazala mne pravil’nyi put’, Ty prolila v moiu dushu luch sveta, Ty ozhivila zachakhshuiu grud’. . . Zoy tvoi otkryl nam oslepshie ochi, On nam nash pravil’nyi put’ ukazal!

S fabrik, zavodoy, iz dal’nikh kvartaloyv I iz podzemnykh glubin rudnika, I iz lesov, is polei, iz podvalov Rvetsia k gazete rabochikh ruka.”! [I ached from anguish and adversity, I ached from grief, too, and need, I ached from misfortune, from anxiety, I ached from cruel fate. But you were born, my native paper, You showed me the correct path, You poured a ray oflight into my soul, You revived my wilted chest. . . Your call opened our blinded eyes, It showed us our correct path! From factories, plants, from distant blocks And from the mine’s underground depths, And from forests, and fields, and basements The workers’ hand stretches out to the paper.]

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The fifteen-year-old boy who wrote these model “proletarian verses” later became famous under the pseudonym “Andrei Platonoy.”

And another boy who did not then break through to his “favorite newspaper” later recalled how in his youth, still working as an errand-boy, he would

buy Pravda for adults and read it on the sly:

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I would buy . . . Pravda and the Menshevik Luch [Ray] from the newspaperman who stood on Nevskii Avenue by the Public Library. With the danger of getting a whipping for being late, I would read (in the square near Mikhailovsk Manége) everything in these newspapers that was accessible to my understanding. In Pravda, I read for the first time the scathing, vicious satirical poems and fables of Demian Bednyi that were understandable to my deeply humiliated and abused heart. And in Pravda read the first verses about working-class life. Under its influence, I myself wrote some poems that imitated the proletarian poets’ verses, and sent them to Pravda... . ” This boy was the future classic Socialist Realist writer, Aleksei Surkov, who has

already passed through the pages of this book. But the fate of “proletarian poetry” itself unfolded in Soviet culture according to an already developed “mausoleum principle”: it was fastidiously prepared and transformed into a museum exhibit. It was canonized in the mid-1930s mainly by the efforts of Aleksandr Dymshits, who prepared the three-volume Proletarian Poetry (Proletarskaia poeziia) in the “Major Series” (“Bol’shaia seriia”’) of “Library of the Poet” (“Biblioteka poeta”), where the carefully chosen corpus

of texts was broken into sections and subsections (“Poetry of the Party underground,” “Proletarian poetry from the labor-union press,” and so on). In his ex-

tensive preface, which for many years served as the only canonical interpretation of proletarian poetry, Dymshits transformed “political” poetry into “Party” poetry by giving it the following definition: The only poetry that can be called proletarian poetry is that which, while reflecting in artistic images the fundamental moving contradictions of reality and serving the aims of socialist revolution and the attainment of the final goal of its class—the building of socialism—and at the same time noted for its militant proletarian Party-mindedness, is a part of the revolutionary action of the working class and of its Party.”

This undoubtedly had its own logic: Party-minded literature acquired a heroic pedigree, and the issue of the destiny of political poetry removed itself. However, another question arose: if poetry simply serves “the building of socialism” but “at the same time” is nor “noted” for its Party-mindedness—can it no longer be called “proletarian”? Answering this question meant separating

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political literature, which preserved an independent status for the author (at least in the choice of his political position), from Party-minded literature,

which deprived him of this status. The concealment of this difference comprised the basic content of the Soviet interpretation of the “heroic pedigree” of Soviet culture.

These two types of literature are organically different, but genetically related: Party-minded literature is in fact a radical offshoot of political literature: the absolute freedom of revolutionary culture (down to the lifelong penal servitude of People’s Willists—the result of their choice) and the absolute nonfreedom (“necessity”) of Soviet culture (down to its dictating themes for nov-

els and poems) had to converge by turning necessity into freedom. This new characteristic was organically alien to the generation of “proletarian poets” who had passed through independent political and creative maturity, through years of imprisonment, exile, and penal servitude, and who were doomed in Soviet

culture. But at the same time, it was precisely this milieu that inevitably gave birth to the “Party-minded artist.”

The Iron Flood: The Proletkult Studio as the “Smithy”

of “Red” Writing This history contains many biographies. But there is nothing one can do— history is composed of biographies. Life is fuel for biography. And the reforging of life into biography makes up the very essence of the historical process. In an era of a “flood of history,” the creative activity of people who have “fallen out of their biographies like balls out of billiard pockets” (Mandel’shtam’s image) sharply increases, in the creation of a new biography. Mandel’shtam proclaimed, “The October Revolution . . . took my ‘biography’ away from me, my sense of personal worth.””* This identity crisis was not only a sign of the times but also a temptation of the era: the majority of people justly supposed that the age had given unlimited opportunities for the creation of biography, in other words, for “life-creation.” Life, however, assumes its rights here. In 1929, Anatolii Lunacharskii, just

then removed from his post as People’s Commissar of Enlightenment, made a speech in the Communist Academy on a somewhat unexpected theme of “sociological and pathological factors in the history of art,” in which he stated that “in periods of crises, hunger, revolution, wars, and so on, the number of people who turn out to be abnormal increases; the normal approach psychopathy, and the seminormal become abnormal. This fringe of abnormal people grows larger as a consequence of purely social reasons.” Nonetheless,

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the organic, so-called healthy eras, eras of stable style and a stable way oflife, do not need psychopathic exponents. If someone psychologically ill begins to speak at such a time—to write novels or paint pictures—then this will seem to be eccentricity; in certain particularly acute cases he will even be sent to a clinic. In eras unbalanced with respect to culture and daily life, in eras of decadence, when any normal person suffers from contradictions and seeks heralds who feel these contradictions especially keenly and who know how to express negative experiences especially expansively and inflammatorily— in these eras, history strikes with its virtuoso’s hand on . . . pathological keyboards.”

These revelations should not seem strange coming from the lips of Lunacharskii, who, as is well known, even to the end could not avoid the temptation of “life-building” ideas. Life building, strictly speaking, is a process of creating biography from life. This process undoubtedly had an enormous influence on literary (and more broadly, on cultural) development. This “rustle

of time” could not but be heard by such a sensitive artist as Mandel’shtam, who—as opposed to the Marxist Lunacharskii—discerned the actual social sources of the mass pathology. In the autumn of 1923, Mandel’shtam published the essay “The Army of Poets” in Ogonek, in which he stated: “In Russia, youth’s writing of poetry is so widespread that one ought to speak of it as an enormous social phenomenon and to study it like any large-scale industry that although useless, has profound cultural and physical causes.”’° Driven by the desire to do as much as he could for the study of this “industry,” Mandel’shtam characterized the average versomaniac as follows: Acquaintance, one into a sick inflamed main in the struggle

no matter how superficial, with a circle of verse-writers, brings pathological world, a world of eccentrics, people with an nerve of their will and brain, obvious failures unable to adapt for existence, who most often suffer from not only intellectual,

but also physical cachexia. (208—9)

Thus was the portrait of his contemporaries. Mandel’shtam, however, notes that this character is new and radically different from similar personalities of decades past, when verse writing came out of idleness and prosperity, and lazy bureaucrats and mama’s boys “indulged themselves” in it by “dressing up as poets.” In the seventh year of revolution, this generation “grew up”: “Among the masses of those writing verse, one rarely finds spoiled and well-off poet-snobs.” Mandel’shtam suggested that “hundreds of thousands of people” were afflicted with this “childhood illness.” Reflecting on the nature of this illness, he wrote:

“The basic characteristic of these people who are useless and persistent in their

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deed is aversion to any profession, almost always the lack of serious professional education, the lack of a taste for any particular trade. As if poetry begins where any other trade ends, which is of course untrue” (209-10). But “after the difficult transitional years, the number ofthose writing verses increased dramatically. Based on widespread malnutrition, the number of people whose intellectual awakening has a diseased character, and finds no outlet in any kind of healthy activity, has increased. The coincidence of an era of hunger, rationing, and physical deprivations with a higher intensity of widespread verse-writing,” Mandel’shtam suggested, “is not a chance phenomenon” (210). Having given his lively portraits of the versomaniacs, Mandel’shtam observed that “those writing verse are for the most part very bad, unobservant readers of verse . . . ; extremely inconsistent in their tastes, lacking education, born nonreaders—they invariably are insulted by the advice to read before beginning to write” (211). He called their poetry “atavistic, continuing the cry of the infant”: “A child cries because be breathes and lives, and then the cry breaks off—babbling begins, but the inner cry is not silenced, and a grown person cries with a mute cry, the same ancient cry of the newborn” (214). De-

scribing one such worker-versifier from Irkutsk, Mandel’shtam conveyed the following impression of his verses: The ancient roar is heard in them: I live, I want, I hurt, and maybe one more cry from a grown, conscious person—help! There are tens of thousands such as these. They—the main thing—they should be helped to stop shouting, and when they are finished with the verses—this atavistic roar—the babbling will begin, speech will begin, life will begin. (215)

Recognizing the indisputable authority of Mandel’shtam on the issues of poetry, let us listen to the observations of an authority just as indisputable on the issues of child psychology, Kornei Chukovskii, who asserted: Children’s verse-making is a sign of the excess of playful forces. It is a phenomenon of the same order as somersaulting or arm-waving. A sad, sickly, or sleepy child will not create a single line of verse. In order to become a poet, an infant must experience what is called “foolish enthusiasm.” On the green grass of early spring, when children go a bit crazy from the wind and sun, you can hear them pour out their exultation in verses for hours at a time.””

The difference between these characterizations calls attention to itself: for Mandel’shtam, “poetry” of this type is the product of “obligatory anemia”; for Chukovskii, on the contrary, it is the product of “craziness.” But on the main issue they are agreed: poetry properly speaking begins after childhood and is the product of mature socialization.

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Accordingly, Mandel’shtam’s observations in 1923 that “the wave of versewriting illness inevitably must subside with. the general improvement in the country’s health” and that the then-contemporary youth were producing “fewer poets and more readers and healthy people”’® were, of course, too optimistic. Reality, alas, gave no reason for such conclusions: after all, even Mandel’shtam himself stated that the massive graphomania had reached an apogee in “an era of hunger, rationing, and physical deprivations,” that is, just before and during the time that “The Army of Poets” was written. And although Mandel’shtam’s social diagnosis was undebatably accurate and made just in time, the patient did not acknowledge himself to be sick and so refused treatment. Besides, the era gave birth to not a few doctors who had their own views about the “patients.” Vladislav Khodasevich, who had spent some time earning his living by teaching in the Proletkult studios, recalled the atmosphere that prevailed in them: I saw how in just a few months youth that were in essence very good were spoiled, disfigured, and corrupted by flattery and the pernicious theory of “proletarian art.” .. . Not only did nothing come of proletarian literature, but people who undoubtedly deserved a better fate were ruined as well. Unscrupulously and unduly flattered but not armed with any knowledge of the business, they could not stand up to the competition of the fellow-travelers.” What could the content of the intelligentsia’s educational activities have been?

Khodasevich recalled that from the viewpoint of the Proletkult ideologues, my students, who were supposed to be made into the cadres of proletarian literature, were supposed to adopt “expertise” and literary “technique” from Pushkin but not to be charmed by his work and his personality under any circumstances. Consequently, my readings were presented to them as a masked counterrevolution, while in actuality the Proletkult Council itself was occupied with making fools of the working-class audience, that is, with the real counterrevolution. . . . Sensing that the studio students were becoming more and more subject to the influence of the “specialists,” Proletkult’s ringleaders decided to fight against this. To drive us out altogether would have meant acknowledging their own powerlessness, showing all the cards, and making the students rebel against the Proletkult Council. Therefore they began simply to interfere with us.*°

The vocabulary is striking: “making fools of,” “ringleaders,” “showing all the cards.” As if they were talking about cardsharps at best, or at worst, a gang. Seven decades later, in 1988, the publisher “Moskovskii rabochit” (Moscow worker) issued an anthology entitled Jn the Polytechnical “Soiree of New Poetry”: The Poetry ofthe Participants in the Poetic Soirees in the Polytechnical Mu-

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seum 1917-1923 (V Politekhnicheskom “Vecher novoi poezii”: Stikhi uchast-

nikov poeticheskikh vecherov v Politekhnicheskom muzee 1917-1923). lurii

Kublanovskii wrote a review of this anthology. In analyzing “ideological graphomania” and “revolutionary kitsch,” this author talks about the “ominous spirit of rage” that came from them, says that “half-mad verbiage mingled with a thirst for blood and hysterical exultation” and a psychology of “real hatred of mankind” can be seen in these poems, and that “the pseudo-passion ofideological windbaggery and aggressiveness was substituted for the spiritual impulse implicit in the words.” In a word, Kublanovskii concludes, this was “simply a clinical case.” But there is a curious example ofintertextuality: “One feels

sorry for those fanatic plague-infected youth” is almost a word-for-word repetition of Khodasevich. But here is another testimony, that of the eminent Proletkult poet Mikhail Volkov. As quoted in Kleinbort, this figure recalled: In August 1918 an announcement about the first literary studio that Proletkult was opening appeared in the newspaper. I enrolled in it to study literature. | had no intentions of becoming a writer. And in fact, the first studio did not have an “authorial” character like the later ones did. Obradovich, Sannikoy, Kazin, Aleksandrovskii, Poletaev, and others graduated from this studio. The studio was run by Andrei Belyi, Viacheslav Ivanov, N. Shvarts, M. Stoliarov, and Prof. Sakulin. Belyi had a strong influence on the students, particularly the poets. He “infected” everyone with creative energy outright, so that every student involuntarily worked in one area of literature or another. He uncovered the subconscious depths of poetic creativity. One could listen to his lectures for two hours without a break, and not get fatigued. In the seminars for the study of form, Stoliarov gave the prose group a lot by way of analyzing examples. Prof. Sakulin and Ivanoy also gave a lot; Shvarts was remarkable as the initiator of the studio.*'

In this testimony, as in Khodasevich’s memoirs, one can read a sort of horror of the superfluousness of the representatives of the former culture in the new culture, and the same old sense of nonconvergence: Ivanov, for example, was attracted by the idea of a “people’s theater,” but Belyi was uninterested in this “theory of ecumenicity”: what did “the father of Russian Symbolism” have in common with Volkov? The injection of “high” culture into “proletarian creativity’ could not change the latter’s nature; it only emphasized the unorganicness of intelligentsia aestheticism in relation to political culture. However, this short-lived bond brought only disappointments to “high” culture itself as well (to judge by Khodasevich’s statements), mixed with a certain surprise: Belyi later wrote that the Proletkult studio students, as it turned out, were not

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“tendentious rednecks with square chins whose only mission is to break up busts of Pushkin with hammers.”’? The usual failure of the two cultures to converge obliges one to return again to the Proletkult studio.

The world of these studios has been obscure to this day. Only rarely have scattered testimonies turned up in the pages of memoirs. The explanation for

this is simple: after 1920 (and definitely in.the 1930s), only abuse of Proletkult could be heard in the Soviet press. For a person on the outside, the situation prevailing here must have seemed rather strange. The famous theater figure

Aleksandr Mgebrov, who was close to the Petrograd Proletkult in those years, recalled the atmosphere of Proletkult studios, sections, and workers’ clubs thus:

Who didnt come to our gatherings at that time: children, young girls, youths from the barricades, graybeards in homespun coats and bast-shoes from the villages, totally unknown poets who had until then written verses in chickenscratch in dug-outs or under the roofs of stone houses, or simply at the factories or while plowing. Before then, I had never seen such faces and garb as appeared within Proletkult’s walls. . . . Emaciated, almost crippled people, totally exhausted, with eyes straining passionately and stubbornly somewhere into the distance, all mingled with the noisy, bright, healthy worker and peasant youth who sang in the proletarian manner. There were those who had come straight with their possession-sacks, as if they were from the roads and byways between the innumerable cities and villages of our immense land.*°

_

The Proletkult ideologues were not a gang. They were ordinary politicians expressing the interests of the “plague-infected youth.” The pitiful fate of Proletkult was the fate of political culture in the postrevolutionary era. Political culture came up against authority for the first time, an authority that did not reject (as before) its passion or content (on the contrary, it supported them), but

rejected it as such. This was the clash of two organically different types of cultures. On the same level—an organic level—the “classical heritage” as well was alien to Proletkult: when Proletkultists qualified the creations of the past as “for the most part philistine and provocational in content, and criminal in origin,”®*

it was not an opposition of “proletarian versus bourgeois-nobleman culture” but rather “subculture versus culture’-— there was an outright “Sivachevism” in Kirillov’s famous rallying cry, “In the name of our Tomorrow, we will burn Raphael, tear down the museums, and trample on the flowers of art.”*° Proletkult’s efforts to defend political culture (that is, culture independent of the state) were both then and later characterized as “the anarchistic pettybourgeois aspiration to separate themselves from the Soviet apparatus, to avoid any kind of state control whatsoever.”** The battle to subordinate Proletkult to the state began to grow proportionally to the growth of the Party-state bureau-

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cracy. One such skirmish occurred in spring of 1919, when the Department of School-Supplementing Activities of the People’s Commissariat of Enlighten-

ment led by Lunacharskii, supported by the Moscow City Soviet, demanded that Proletkult be subordinated to it. In this struggle between Proletkult and the Party-state apparatus, Lunacharskii was not a “third party”: he only strove to reach a compromise. Before 1920, he had achieved it. At that time, Lunacharskii tried to calm not only the zealous “stateists” [gosudarstvenniki |who maintained that Proletkult was trying to “replace and edge out the work of the Soviet organs,”*” but also the extremist leaders of Proletkult: Lunacharskii stressed that

Proletkult should concentrate all its attention on studio work, on recognizing and supporting original talents among proletarians, on the creation of circles for writers, artists, and young scholars of all kinds from the working class, on the creation of the most diverse studios and living organizations in all areas of physical and spiritual culture, with the unalterable goal of developing in them the free . . . seeds [semena] without the coaxing and fabrication that are found

in the proletarian soul.*®

But given the conditions of a state that aspired to swallow up any enclaves of autonomy, any claim to political activity was naturally regarded as encroachment on the state monopoly. In this sense, Proletkult leaders really were “meddling” in “the affairs of the state.” This was expressed in Proletkult’s effort to defend its own autonomy. Its autonomy was in name only, on the level of a declaration, but after all, politics begins with declarations.

Let us recall the definition of “proletarian” poetry given by Dymshits: it is above all “Party-minded.” And let us compare this with the proclamations of the All-Russian Union of Working-class Writers, writers who saw the goal of the union as: “(1) uniting of all the writers coming out of the workers’ milieu and holding to its class-oriented viewpoint, and (2) creation of a proletarian socialist

literature, artistic and scientific, corresponding to the ideals of the revolutionarycommunist proletariat”*”—not a word about the Party. Let us now turn to the Smithy’s manifest—the same kind of proclamation of political culture: “Proletarian art is an art that fits a three-dimensional area of creative material into a clear, precise synthetic form appropriate to the class, and carries the line of the proletariat’s aspirations toward ultimate goals through it.”°? “Proletariat” and “class” are everywhere—but not a word about Party-mindedness. Of course many accusations made against Proletkult can easily be rejected. For example, accusing them of fighting the intelligentsia: Lynn Mally, in her history of the Proletkult movement, cites cases where in a number of large

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cities literary studios could not be opened because of the lack ofintelligentsia “specialists” —“good instructors.”?! One should not confuse the real workings of the Proletkult groups with the precepts of their ideologues: much that was truly creative (especially in the areas of painting, theater, and film) came out of Proletkult, a creative atmosphere that was truly free reigned in many of its studios and circles, and many studios in reality “were run collectively by the students, who set the curriculum and determined their creative direction.” The same applies to the accusations of the “laboratory nature” of the Proletkult organizations, which are more relevant to theory than to practice: “Proletkult studios were never really laboratories in any meaningful sense of the word. To begin with, artistic collectives were not stable enough to form a cohesive creative environment. ... The word ‘laboratory’ implies that studio work was carefully monitored and perfected before it was brought to light, but this was not the case.” On the other hand, Proletkult published 34 journals (164 issues) in Petrograd, Moscow, and the provinces during the period 1918-1922; from 1917 to

1920 it published ten million copies of literary works that “belonged exclusively to the pen of proletarian writers””*; its organizations included 400,000 members, of whom 80,000 actually participated in the workings of the studios and circles. But the issue is not that of concrete “accusations” nor of concrete “credit”:

the days of political culture were numbered. Its tragedy was that the sentence was pronounced on it just at the time that it finally took shape, was flowing with its juices, was straining for power, and had taken flight (a decade later, in 1932, all of this would be repeated with RAPP). I say “flight” here without

judgment, keeping in mind the fact noted by Men’shutin and Siniavskii in their book about the poetry of the early years of the revolution: Literature is being renewed not only in its content but in its class and social composition. Unprecedented relocation, promotion, and swelling of its cadres are occurring. These new creative forces that earlier were almost unknown,

frequently existing somewhere “on the periphery” or totally beyond the bounds of art, are now defining the artistic life of Russia and the development of its

basic literary currents, poetic schools and organizations.”

It is also worth remembering that as a “cadre,” the cohort of Proletkult writers came from Pravda: “Petrogradskaia Pravda is proud of the fact that on the pages of its predecessor, the names of proletarian poets, prose writers, and journalists shone for the first time. At that time it was only individuals, but now we see a whole Pleiade,” said one of the delegates to a conference of pro-

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letarian writers.”° The “organizational” (Army) habit inculcated here was not

only preserved but also led to the development of real organizational paranoia. On this subject, Kogan wrote:

Work on a well-organized fixed plan, the striving to be transformed into an organization, to assume a defined place in the system of forces that were struggling for consolidation of the communist order . . . organizational work, collecting all the literary proletarian forces under one banner, development ofasystem for managing and governing this literary army, is becoming the subject of the tireless attention of the leadership of proletarian poetry.”

Hence the abundance of manifests and the endless “construction ofthe organs of proletarian literature.” However, the accusation that leaders “devote less attention to literature than to the governing of literature” was leveled by Kogan on the basis of the fact that “proletarian literature would not be itself if the natural tendency to pull enormous masses into the business of writing and to bind them to a well-organized planning organization were cut off.””* This was precisely the environment that imposed a group framework on the literary life of the 1920s: this literature could never have been developed by individuals, and its strength was always in the group, the mass, the organization. Strictly speaking, all of the 1920s can be understood to be the organizational and ideological agony of proletarian—political—literature. In this context, one can also understand the endless “rifts” within this cul-

ture. I interrupted Volkov’s memoirs about the life of the Proletkult studio above at the most interesting place: Conversations in the literary studio taught me a lot about the works of not only young proletarian writers, but also of those who had appeared in print before that. In the studio, I for the first time became personally acquainted with working-class and peasant writers: N. Liashko, M. Proskurin, Nizoy, Novikov-Priboi, and others. The youth among the studio students at that time grouped around the journal Gudki |Whistles]. Even its editorial board consisted of studio students. Gerasimov, Kazin, Aleksandrovskii, Volkov,

Obradovich, Kiselev, Degtiarev, and Poletaev were part of it. In 1920, some of the “young ones” broke with Proletkult. Futurism had begun to permeate it, taking hold of the studios, both the theater and plastic arts studios. The literary studio did not want to serve as material for futuristic experiments, therefore it was regarded with suspicion. All of Proletkult’s means were used for theatrical and musical work. The “futurist specialists” ruined both the theater and plastic arts studios. In 1922, the students of the plastic arts studio themselves refused to work with the futurist directors. But the theater studio, to this day [1923—E.D.] is under their influence. Among the writers that left

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Proletkult were Gerasimov, Kazin, Sannikov, Obradovich, Degtiarev, and Poletaev. Volkov and Kirillov stayed. Those who left formed the Smithy group of proletarian writers. Kirillov and I, who had stayed in Proletkult, also joined the Smithy. In 1920, I set about organizing a new literary studio (the fourth one), out of which the “Create!” [“Tvori!”] group was later formed. I

participated actively in “Create!” I led the literary division of Proletkult as well, from 1920 up to 1922—up to the NEP time, when Proletkult went commercial, and I left it with the whole “Create!” group. At a congress of proletarian writers, I was elected a member of the association’s management; I serve in the presidium of the Smithy group and of the “Create!” group.”

So the split occurred because of the “futurist specialists”: the Smithy consisted of the most radical zealots of the purity of proletarian literature. Gladkov, Kazin, Aleksandrovskii, Obradovich, and Bakhmet’ev, who left the Mos-

cow Proletkult organization in 1920, formed a section of the Literary Division of the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment. This was in fact the beginning of the Smithy. To judge by their proclamation in Pravda (February 5, 1920), the

reason for leaving was “the working conditions in Proletkult, which for a whole variety of reasons hinder the discovery of proletarian writers’ creative possibilities.” Soviet criticism, which insisted in every way that the Smithy’s “mistakes” (Cosmism and the like) were of a deeply literary nature, but which tried not to notice the general crisis of proletarian culture occurring as a result of the disintegration of Proletkult initiated by Lenin, was ready to accuse the already defeated Proletkult of everything, and therefore it eagerly took on faith the proclamations of the “Smiths,” maintaining that the latter “have made an attempt to transcend the narrowness and dogmatism of the outlook of Proletkult’s leaders.”°° It is clear, nonetheless, that first, the truly independent artists in fact came from Proletkult nuclei (the most “infected by futurist specialists’—in the plastic arts and theater), while almost nothing came of the Smithy (cf. the issue of

“hindrance”); second, the futurists were not the problem, since many proletarian poets at precisely this time gravitated to them for “expertise”; and third,

dogmatism and narrowness (what is more, precisely of the Proletkult model) were preserved among the Smiths themselves, a fact that as early as the mid-20s made them an anachronism. Later, Viacheslav Polonskii accurately depicted these most restrained individuals: “The Smiths reflected the enchantments and disenchantments of a certain part of the working class that was the most extremist, the least restrained, more easily than others giving in to despondency at the first failures, more exultant than others with the first successes.”'°! As early as 1919, Vladimir Friche recognized the signs of the crisis of prole-

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tarian literature. “At the present time, proletarian poetry ts undoubtedly at a crossroads,”

»

he wrote.

We are seeing how the greatest of the worker-poets are imperceptibly falling under the influence of bourgeois-intelligentsia poetry. Some, like Gerasimoy, are schooling themselves with the modernists, and others, like Gastev, are

going to study with futurists. ... This imprisonment of proletarian poets in intelligentsia poetry is highly pernicious for them. Poetic expertise and the pursuit of bizarrerie are beginning to suppress even in the best of them the healthy germ of a proletarian frame of mind. . . . The separation of workerpoets from the masses, from industry, from the factory and plant, their transition into the ranks of the intelligentsia, albeit of proletarian origin, and their transformation into professional poets with rising demands as regards technique and as regards expertise—all of this was supposed to facilitate the very process of their imprisonment by poets of the bourgeois intelligentsia.” Friche suggested the following prescription for rescue:

If the poets coming out of the working-class milieu want to create poetry that is truly proletarian both in spirit and in form, they should go not to the intelligentsia, not to professional poets of the bourgeois past, but back to... . their own milieu, back to the masses, to the proletariat, to the factories and plants. They should cease being only poets—let them again be above all workers and proletarians, and only during leisure time creator-artists of the word as well. . . . Proletarian poetry was born in the factory and plant—and there, in the factory and plant, the true proletarian poetry of the near future should also be born.!

Nonetheless, this advice was too utopian for anyone to obey. A political culture does not know retrograde motion. It went faithfully and unbendingly forward—to its own end.

The Smithy, “Workers’ Spring,” and “Create!” were the fevered attempts of political culture to preserve itself under the “new historical conditions.” This culture had a troubled genetics of hysteria: crises were in its blood. Nowhere was this inevitability so obvious as in the manifests, which were like the exercising of ideological muscles, like self-exorcism. Here is a text: “Create!” This is our challenge. One must have a right to such a challenge. One must create oneself. And begin with this, no matter how imperfect one’s young sprouts are. This is why our first [sic: pervoe] belongs to “The Creatable.” It is already laying down a road for itself. “Does it exist?” some ask with doubt. It does!—no matter what the opponents of proletarian culture might

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say. It has its own path, even if it is because it is already on the move. Do we know it? We will know it by-and-by. “The Creatable” puts out landmarks. . . . But not everything “creatable” can be shown in “Create!” Moreover: one asks, how is all of this being created? . . . “For us,” the “creatable” will only join “our path” and not become “alien,” when “ventilation” blows over it as a healthy and invigorating stream.'™

Madness underlies the grammatical-stylistic peculiarities of this text, which is the manifest of “Create!” Who could its author be? One finds the answer in another manifest, that of the “group of proletarian writers ‘Workers’ Spring,” in which one of the members of the group is presented thus: “A barely literate

worker in an auto-repair factory. Understanding the clumsy lines of his verses, scratched out with difficulty, is almost inconceivable.”!° These are the authors and heroes of the manifests. What do they manifest? Absolutely nothing. This,

to recall Mandel’shtam, is a collective cry. And borderline insanity like this is always present in 1920s proletarian literature, in its waning stage. In this regard

the “cosmic production” of the Smithy differs little from the writings of the “barely literate worker in an auto-repair factory.” At least, several of Filipchenko’s or Gastev’s works perceived as “innovative” differ little from the manifests of “Create!” Hysteria, however, is not the issue. This is simply the genetics of the “grand-

fathers and grandmothers of the Russian revolution’—the populists. The issue is the qualitative change in the social environment and in the function of lit-

erature. As Vissarion Saianov observed, “The Smithy is not a literary organization of the masses. It is rather a comradely circle, a community of writers. . . . Only RAPP is organizing contemporary proletarian literature as a literarysocial movement of the masses.”!°° Who needed the “comradely circle”? The “Surikovian” era was long past. They were only needed by themselves, and

could not count on support. Deprived of its social functions, political culture was dying before one’s very eyes. As Kogan put it so precisely, “The Smithy is not a chronological date, not a school, not a trend. It isa... socioliterary frame of mind, it is a zone of social creation, reflected in literature.” And thus

the “beautiful honey-sweet month of the revolution” ended, and “the frame of mind that found a finished expression in the Smithy’s poetry died out. The romance of revolution and its passion acquired a different direction.”'"” The romance of revolution concluded along with the end of civil war and the beginning of NEP1° In 1922, the era of the Young Guard and “October” arrived,

the era of RAPP and of the transformation of political culture into Partyminded culture. A debate about proletarian artistic culture went on for several decades in the

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social-democratic milieu. The founders of Marxism, who did not leave any articulate ideas on this issue, left this question, as if deliberately, to their successors. And among the European social-democratic circles, this theme was constantly debated by Karl Kautsky and Emile Vandervelde, Franz Mering and Paul Lafargue, Klara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg, Georgii Plekhanov and Lenin, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, Lunacharskii, Bogdanov, Gorky, and others. There seemed no end to the mutual accusations, the insults and political demarches that accompanied the “ideological debates” in this milieu. The debate was about whether “proletarian culture” was at all possible in an era of “political domination of the bourgeoisie.” History solved this problem, but as it turned out—as if history had had its joke—the debate had been about the wrong thing: “proletarian culture” not “possibly,” but rather inevitably, accompanies as a subcultural substrate the

process of social ferment. What comes into question is its existence after the “victory of socialist revolution,” not before it. Essentially, the entire history of “proletarian literature” in the 1920s is the

history of the struggle of political literature with the Party-minded literature that was growing out of it. The victory of the latter in this was also inevitable, since in a (“successful”!) revolution, power passes from the politicized masses to party elites. The alienation from real politics and ideological creativity that takes place has a painful character—above all for the adepts of political and revolutionary culture, who in these conditions are doomed. In exactly the same way, the birth of a new type of writer is snevitable. Thus the theoretical

debate was resolved: there is often more meaning in the incorrectly posited questions than in the correctly given answers. The problem of “proletarian culture” became a problem when the masses’ channels for direct political creativity were exhausted. The voice of the masses can then be reproduced only via authority's coding of it. The political poet is, from the constructive aspect, not only superfluous in this mechanism but also harmful. The process of pushing him out, which took two decades (the 1920s and 1930s), was in fact

the process of replacing one (political) mechanism with another (Party) mechanism: the revolutionary political-aesthetic project was replaced with the Socialist Realist one. And in such matters, as is well known, “the cadres determine everything.” The proletarian poets of the beginning of the century perceived themselves as replacements coming to take over for the “revolutionary populists,” the champions brought down by the regime. This self-perception was manifested most clearly in Samobytnik’s poem “Rowers” (“Grebtsy”):

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My grebtsov ustalykh smenim I besstrashno, v svoi chered,

Rokovye volny vspenim, Smelo dvinemsia vpered!!

[ We will replace the tired rowers And fearlessly, in our turn, Will raise the fatal waves, Boldly will move forward!]

.

This was not the first time the “rowers” had been replaced. Indeed, it was not the last: in revolutionary times, the weather is distinguished by a particular in-

constancy—the RAPPists then ascended “to the literary guard,” and the LEFists stood in expectation of “the great commander of the guard.” The process of replacing various elites with others, that continued throughout the 1920s at

a constant speed, spilled over into the constant “creative crises” that appeared on the surface of literary life in the form of endless “creative debates” and budding off of literary groups. The crisis of the early 1920s was the current crisis in this series, but—on the threshold of a new sociocultural situation—an ex-

tremely important one: the old “army of poets” faced breakdown because the conditions of revolution had changed—the end of political literature had arrived, and Party-minded literature stood at the door. This meant that a new

“young guard” was needed.

CHAPTER

THREE

The Horror of Aimlessness The “Young Guard” of the New Literature Do you know the story of the barren fig tree? It was a male specimen. They demanded fruit from it, and so it inseminated [the others]. —VIKTOR

SHKLOVSKII

I. ANDRONNIKOV,

TO

1940

After “Proletarian Creations”

The most amazing thing in revolutionary culture is its merciless dynamism. This new quality of a rushing time, rather than of a passing time, was felt in revolutionary culture in its own way. Even a person with such an unreliable historical memory as Anatolii Lunacharskii could observe: The old people used to live at such a slow pace that they could fall asleep. In earlier times one could doze off, sleep two years, and having awakened, continue living as if nothing had happened. Life moved on like a brokendown cart, but now it rushes about madly. Event after event, crisis after crisis—and our emotional life, inarguably, is more ebullient, brighter, and

more varied than that of the old artists.'

In order to be infected with the passion of this “mad chase,” it was necessary not to know how the former “broken-down cart” had “moved on.” It was necessary not to know how to turn around. This transubstantiated syndrome of Lot's wife saved one from tragic searching for oneself and one’s place in the new era, but it did not save one from the “flame of revolution” (one could only be spared the latter by memory and the realization of oneself within History), for even a 116

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congenital absence of memory cannot be regarded as a means of salvation. In this can be observed one of the tragic paradoxes of revolutionary culture: one who does not know how to turn around remains behind. The flames of the burning cities force the refugees forward, not even allowing them to be transformed into pillars of salt. Only afterward, after many decades had passed, when one steps on this “stony grass, into this “scrap-heap of history,” one sees

among these ruins the traces of a formerly stormy life, one notes in the poses that were frozen forever the leap into which the “flame of revolution” had fused them. The ardent revolutionaries burned from within. The sentence of time— “uselessness” in the future—was in their dear-bought goal (fatally unattainable):

every time, the future turned out to be the odious present, but . . . others were on the way to be consumed in the flames of the present as well. And so it was, until Socialist Realism, which was the calm harbor of revolutionary culture. The journey was proclaimed to be finished, and the “reconstruction period” arrived. It became clear that it was impossible to live in the burned-out ruins. Restoration was, as they would have said in that era, a “directive of time.” Of course it was still a long time before the “gardens of Socialist Realism.” But hardly anyone understood where the “locomotive of history” was rushing to, and even fewer wanted these “gardens.” It is paradoxical, but the most ardent utopians with their future-optics turned out to be the blindest about the future: just at the moment that the revolutionaries were singing about the “mad rush” to the future, history (often with their help) had already put on the brakes. It was not for these ardent revolutionaries, who were throwing their energy into the furnace of revolution, to know at what moment the energy they exuded was already being diffused by history as the energy required for a complete stop. Revolution moves in spurts until the “commander of the guard” foretold by Tret iakov arrives and says “Halt!” The fundamental distinction between the revolutionary cultural paradigm and the restorationist one, as well as between the revolutionary politicalaesthetic vision and the restorationist one, is the independence or nonindependence of personality in defining the “ideal of revolution.” Until such time that the revolutionary artist is free in his self-determination toward the march of the historical process (of course, such freedom is always constrained by the framework of this process), culture will advance in the revolutionary paradigm. “Literary groupings” in this sense are only the expression of one or another set of “revolutionary ideals,” “variants of the path,” or “models of revolutionary development,” and simultaneously are a means of organizing the advocates of these ideals in their struggle for power, for revolution is nothing

more than the most radical form of such a struggle.

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A restorationist culture arises from the recognition by artists and ideologues of their own nonindependence, which brings with it submission to the suprapersonal social machinery of authority. This historical process coincides with the stabilization of anew authority and the understanding that it has become established, as Lenin said, “in earnest and for a long time to come.” Since conflict with such an authority bodes no good, a mechanism of conformity begins to operate and the upper hand is taken by a generation unwilling to take upon itself the burden of independence, having realized the obvious advantages of “restraint.” At first this is nothing more than a sect among the ardent revolutionaries, a sect that does not yet fully realize its historical mission and only with time understands that the future is on its side. In this sense, the birth of the Soviet writer took place exactly five years after the revolution—in October 1922, when the Central Committee of the Russian Komsomol made a special decision to organize a “union of Komsomol writers.” This literary group received the name “Young Guard” [Molodaia gvar-

diia]. Its nucleus was made up of young Party functionaries (who were also critics, poets, and writers) who did some Komsomol work and grouped them-

selves around the journal /unyi kommunist (Young communist): Leopold Averbakh (nineteen, Party member since 1920), Aleksandr Bezymenskii (twentyfour, member since 1916), Grigorii Lelevich (twenty-one, member since 1917),

Jurii Libedinskii (twenty-four, member since 1920), Semen Rodov (twentynine, member since 1918), Aleksandr Zharov (eighteen, member since 1920),

and Aleksandr Zonin (twenty-one, member since 1918). These in turn gath-

ered provincial young people around themselves. However, the organizers of the Young Guard did not intend to work with “beginning Komsomol poets”: the Komsomol framework seemed close-knit, gravitating toward “great literary matters.” So on December 7 of the same year, just two months after intro-

ducing the Young Guard, they organized the literary group “October,” which claimed its right to the legacy of “proletarian literature.” Four months after that, in March 1923, these same personages organized MAPP (Moscow Association of Proletarian Writers [Moskovskaia assotsiatsiia proletarskikh pisatelei]),

which subsumed the Young Guard, “October,” and “Workers’ Spring”; and in less than a year, MAPP became a part of VAPP (All-Union Association of Proletarian Writers [Vsesoiuznaia assotsiatsiia proletarskikh pisatelei])—and moreover, in such a way that it made the latter subordinate to itself. The whole process took only a year and a half: thus began the history of the powerful RAPP. As Lunacharskii said, life then was “rushing about madly.” Nonetheless, the birth of the Soviet writer itself is of undoubted interest—

an interest even more justified by the fact that in the enormous literature about

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the 1920s, the Young Guard is practically unmentioned, or perhaps mentioned

only as a short prelude to RAPP and Pereval.? The fact alone that such powerful literary groups of the 1920s as RAPP and Pereval arose from precisely this organization makes it interesting. Researchers’ lack of attention to the Young Guard is however fully explainable: as opposed to LEE, Proletkult, the “Smithy,” and later RAPP and Pereval, the Young Guard appears to be a nonindependent, weak literary organization. It quickly disintegrated and was assimilated into RAPP when it lost its brightest authors (Eduard Bagritskii, Mikhail Go-

lodnyi, Mikhail Svetlov, and Artem Veselyi left to join Pereval, which was in fact founded by them). And even for the founders themselves, the Young Guard

turned out to be a starting point for going on to the political struggle for literary hegemony. Since the subject of this literary investigation is not the literary struggle of the revolutionary era as such, and much less the literature of the 1920s, but rather the birth process of the new writer that took place then, one cannot bypass the Young Guard. As Aleksandr Voronskii noted, the new writer “barges . . . out of some godforsaken places, out of the provinces”’; thus my interest in such a “peripheral” phenomenon in the literary process of the 1920s as the Young Guard is more than justified. In the literary crossroads of 1922, the Young Guard could not but appear: “proletarian literature” (under the “proletarian dictatorship,” no less!) was not

only institutionally destroyed but also completely demoralized. The powerful subcultural torrent that poured out into Proletkult after the revolution encountered complete resistance from “its own” authorities; the channel began

to dry up, and the “lively creation of the masses” began to dissipate. The conflict of the authorities with Proletkult was completely natural: when authority is established, it never recognizes the claims of those who helped build it. Moreover, revolutions such as the one that occurred in Russia in 1917 are set

apart precisely by the swpraparty nature of the historical creativity of the masses. While intraparty struggle ends with “The Great Terror” or the “night of long knives,” the conflict between authority and the masses always ends with the defeat ofauthority, since the stability of authority arises only out of a union with the masses. And while NEP was in fact such a step toward economic reconciliation between authority and the masses, in ideology, on the con-

trary, authority insisted on its own way.‘ The subordination of Proletkult was only an episode in this process. But the force of action is equal to the force of reaction: the unreconciled (“organizationally” and “ideologically”) Smiths by their opposition literally “put on the agenda,” as it was then said, the creation of their own literature by the authorities. The fact that this literature of theirs

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was called “proletarian” or “Komsomolian” or “the literature of the revolutionarily inclined young man” should not be troubling. It was above all Party-run literature, that is, literature deprived of its independence and therefore ready to follow the “revolutionary ideal” that was presented in the form of “external ideology.” It was born in the Young Guard, whose name itself bears colorful witness to this fact: not simply “fighters” (“soldiers of revolution”) but a guard; and not an earlier guard forged of revolution and therefore infected with “independence,” but a new one that was young. The Young Guard was a unique organization: for the first time a literary

grouping was not born “by itself”; it did not simply adapt to accommodate authority (like the “leftist artists” after the revolution, for example), nor did it set itself up in opposition to it (like the Proletkultists or Smiths), but was cre-

ated by authority itse/f- This truly revolutionary step was proof of the new authorities’ readiness to participate in political-aesthetic activity and bespoke the great opportunities for them in this sphere. The authorities were obliged to

assure that the new writers “barging” out of the “godforsaken places” (predominantly youths, of course) had the opportunity to join not Proletkult and Smithy, which were opposed to the new Party line, but rather the loyal “liter-

ary organization for youth” that they controlled. Let us observe here that the ineffectiveness of the authorities’ control over the spheres of theater, music, and cinema, where Proletkult and the “leftists” had practically complete control of the situation, led to such artists as Dmitrii

Shostakovich and Sergei Eizenshtein coming out of the 1920s “cauldron of revolutionary art,” while the “cauldron” of Soviet literature produced the likes of Aleksandr Fadeev and Fedor Panferov. After all, even during the flowering of Socialist Realism, Soviet cinema, music, and theater were on the same level as the leading worldwide schools, and in many genres and trends reached (in the Stalin era, no less!) their highest ascent (this is Soviet art, remember), while So-

viet literature was almost completely bogged down in Socialist Realism (again, this is Soviet literature | am talking about). During the Second World War,

Shostakovich created his Seventh Symphony, Eizenshtein produced Ivan the Terrible [Ivan Groznyi]}, but in Soviet literature (by an irony of history) Fadeev’s novel Young Guard |Molodaia gvardiia] was born. This “literary organization for youth” was grouped around the journal of the same name, Molodaia guardiia, which was from the outset conceptualized as a wide-ranging enterprise with no less scope than that of Aleksandr Voronskii’s Krasnaia nov’as far as its plurality was concerned. The editorial committee headed by Averbakh announced as early as 1923 that a multitude of

individuals were being enlisted to work with the journal: not only zealous

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Komsomol writers and poets (Bezymenskii, Aleksei Dorogoichenko, Ivan Doronin, Mark Kolosov, Mikhail Svetlov, and Zharov), but also Smiths (Vasilii Aleksandrovskii, Aleksei Gastev, Vasilii Kazin, Vladimir Kirillov, Pavel Ni-

zovol, Sergei Obradovich, and Samobytnik); Perevalists (in the near future: Mikhail Golodnyi, Valerian Pravdukhin, and Voronskii); LEFists (Boris Arvatov, Nikolai Aseey, Osip Brik, Mayakovsky, and Sergei Tret’iakov); Proletkultists (from Platon Kerzhentsev to Valerian Pletnev); and the “red professorate” (from A. Deborin to Vladimir Friche), not to mention the Party elites, practi-

cally all of whom, as it was announced, “are participating in the journal” (Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, Nikolai Bukharin, Georgii Chicherin, Avel Enukidze, Emelian Iaroslavskii, Mikhail Kalinin, Lev Kamenev, Nadezhda Krupskaia, G. Krzhizhanovskii, Anatolii Lunacharskii, Mikhail Ol’minskii, G. Piatakov, Karel Radek, Stalin, Iurii Steklov, Trotsky, Klara Zetkin, and Grigorii Zi-

nov ev).” In a word, this encompassed the whole Party-literature beau monde of the “young Soviet Republic.” This was not just an advertisement to attract subscribers. In the first few

years, Molodaia gvardiia printed the poetry of Mayakovsky and Mikhail Golodnyi, Nikolai Assev and Iosif Utkin, Sergei Obradovich and Eduard Bagritskii, Demian Bednyi and Petr Oreshin, Vladimir Kirillov and Mikhail Svetlov, Aleksandr Bezymenskii and Nikolai Tikhonov, Aleksandr Zharov and Ilia Sel’'vinskii, Ivan Doronin and Sergei Klychkov, Mariia Gerasimova and Boris

Pasternak. The range of poets represented was “bright and broad.” In the prose division one finds the names of Pavel Nizovoi and Lidiia Seifullina, Ivan Vol’nov and Vsevolod Ivanov, Veniamin Kaverin and Aleksandr Tarasov-Rodionov, Aleksandr Fadeev and Sergei Tretiakoy, Gorky and Panteleimon Romanov, Alek-

sandra Kollontai and Iurii Libedinskii, Dmitrii Furmanov and Aleksei Gumilevskii, and so on. Molodaia gvardiia soon became a small satellite of Krasnaia Nov’;

with regard to the makeup of authors and the quality of the contributions, Averbakh’s journal often did not fail to match Voronskii’s. Averbakh wrote about the platform of Molodaia gvardiia, which he edited

at the time, that the journal was designed to “shape the scholarly and independent work of proletarian youth; give them subject-matter and methodically guide them, on the one hand, and to become a compass for youth in the new environment, on the other”; and further, that “the journal has the task of uniting and advancing the new generation of young writers. The creation of a group of Komsomol poets and writers (which has taken the name of the journal for itself) is only the first indicator of the work that has been done and is being done in this respect.”° The platform of the journal was nonetheless broader. In a feature article written for the occasion of the journal’s first an-

T22,

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niversary, this “contained pluralism” was proclaimed quite clearly: “We consider Russian Komsomol the artistic-thematic platform whereon there will be a place for the heroic-adventure novel writer, and the writer on everyday things, and the psychologist-writer, and poets of all more or less leftist communist leanings.”” This is understandable, for the audience of readers was, as the Young

Guardists saw it at this time, quite diverse: “Party school students, the workers’ faculty students, Komsomol members studying systematically in the propaganda collective and Marxist circle, . . . young Party members, and the ma-

jority of schoolteachers.”® The first anniversary of Molodaia gvardiia spilled over as well into a curious

“victors’ congress.” The Young Guardists were welcomed by Trotsky and Chicherin, the All-Russian Conference of Russian Komsomol (which even brought out a special resolution “On the Young Guard” [“O Molodoi gvardii”] wherein was affirmed the “extreme significance of the work that has been done” and a challenge to the Young Guard to “draw Komsomol into literature” was advanced’), and Bednyi; by Mayakovsky, Aseev, and Tret’iakov, from LEF; by

Kirillov, Gerasimov, and Aleksandrovskii, from the Smithy; by Isbakh and Doronin from “Workers’ Spring”'®; and others. Bednyi devoted the poem “The Exact, Simple Truth” (“Tochnaia, prostaia istina’) to the Young Guardists, prefacing it with the epigraph from Trotsky’s epistle “To the Young Guardists” (“Mologvardeitsam”). In his usual style (a

blend of chastushki and Derzhavin) of the new Salon, Bednyi calls Trotsky the “teacher of proletarian change in literature”: Segodnia prazdnik moi. S segodniashnego dnia Ia volei vnov’ okrep i dukhom ozhivilsia, Mne nynche chort ne brat. Nezhdanno u menia Stal’noi soiuznik poiavilsia. Iz krepkikh slov ego ia vyzhal krepkii sok I usladil sebia tselitel’nym napitkom. Nam Trotskim veksel’ dan, v griadushchee brosok, Kotoryi my uchtem s neslykhannym pribytkom. Da! Nasha rech’ krasna zdorovoi krasotoi. V zdorovom iazyke zdorovyi est’ ustoi. Granitnaia skala shlifuetsia vekami, Uchitel’ mudryi, rech’ vedia s uchenikami,

Ikh uchit istine i tochnoi, i prostoi. Bez tochnoi prostoty net Istiny Velikoi. Bogini radostnoi, pobednoi, svetlolikoi!"! [Today is my holiday. Starting today, My will is newly strong and my soul alive,

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Now nothing scares me. To my surprise

The steel unionist has appeared. From his strong words I squeezed out a strong juice And delighted myself with the healing drink. Trotsky gave us a promissory, a leap into the future, “ Which we will use for unheard-of profit. Yes! Our speech is red with a healthy beauty. In healthy language there is common sense. The granite cliff is polished by the ages, A wise teacher, having a talk with his students, Teaches them truth both precise and simple. Without precise simplicity there is no Great Truth. No goddess joyful, victorious, and fair of face!]

(Let us note, as an aside, that Trotsky’s “promissory” note is not a metaphor here. The Young Guard appeared on the crest of Trotsky’s appeal to youths and students in his fight against bureaucratization of the Party, and Trotsky’s popularity in this milieu was at this time enormous.

Furthermore, the Young

Guard was supposed to be an antithesis of the “proletarian literature” that Trotsky rejected.) Mayakovsky challenged Young Guardists to “fly further to the left”; Tret’iakov, addressing the “Soviet eaglets,” wrote an urgent “order for the army of the arts’; and the thirty-three-year-old Kirillov, assuming the pose of an old man, addressed the group in the name of “tired Smiths”: Buriami smiatyi, izmolotyi Molotom tiazhkikh let, Tebia oklikaiu, molodost’, Tebe, molodesh’, privet.’ [Trampled by storms, hammered

By the hammer of hard years, I call out to you, young ones, I welcome you, youth.]

Zharov—on behalf of the “sons’—replied: No ia—s toboi: Ia snova—na iacheike, V krugu druzei... Vot slushaiu doklad: —“Vselennaia’ . . ==sIstmat: Yee

—“Problemy pola’...

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Kipuchie voprosy ostrykh dum. A po utru zdorovym i veselym Po ulitsam i ploshchadiam bredu . . . Idu. V ushakh: Lozovskii, Radek, Vardin, Kon, “Anatol” Vasil’ich”, Kollontai.. . V tebe, “Molodaia gvardiia,” Zavodskaia krov’ razlita. V tebia stanok nezrimo zaverstan I razgovarivaet v strokakh. Liubliu tvoe spokoinoe uporstvo I komsomol’skii razmakh! S iacheiki, s rabfaka, s zavoda—

Vernus li pod vecher domoi,— Nechaianno-dolgii otdykh Liubliu korotat’ s toboi!!’

[But I am with you: [I'm again at the meeting, In a circle of friends. . . Here I listen to a speech: “Universal” . . . “Historical materialism” . . . “Gender problems” . . Teeming questions of sharp minds. But in the mornings, healthy and jolly I wander along the streets and squares . . . I walk. In my ears: Lozovskii, Radek, Vardin, Kon, “Anatol’ Vasil’ich”, Kollontai . . . In you, Young Guard, The factories’ blood is merged. In you the lathe is invisibly incorporated And speaks in lines of verse. I love your calm persistence And your Komsomol breadth! Be it from meeting, work-school, factory That I return home towards evening, The unexpectedly long break I love to while away with you!]

This “parade of attractions” would be repeated two years later, when the Young Guard would again be congratulated by the entire “literary front”—from Averbakh to Polonskii and Voronskii—on the occasion of the group’s third an-

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niversary. But the “specter of battle” already lay over this spectacle: its heralds were present as early as 1923. At that time, the Onguardists, welcoming their “replacement” (which was born, nonetheless, earlier than the “fathers”) wrote of

the “disorder which led to the surrender of literary positions to our class enemies” and about how “some of our editors” were helping “petty-bourgeois ideologues to get their paws on the commanding heights of literature.”“The era of “peaceful coexistence” was over. It is, of course, clear why this was so. This was the “golden age” of Molodaia gvardiia as a journal, but the Young Guard as a literary group was becoming more and more marginalized in this constellation of names and themes. The polarization reached its limit in the mid-20s owing to the attack of the Onguardists (that is, of the actual founders of the Guard) on Voronskii. In response, Pereval was formed, among whose

founders were Mikhail Golodnyi, Mikhail Svetlov, and Artem Veselyi—all Young Guardists. The Young Guard entered an era of decline: its directorate “went off to the front” of “grownup literature” to fight for “hegemony,” and its leading authors, to Pereval. The organizers retained the right to inherit “their own” or-

ganization—the Young Guard became part of RAPP, and its directorate went to people unknown by everyone except the editors of young people’s journals. The appearance of these “unknowns” is an important symbol in the history of Soviet literature, which in the main was indeed comprised of such “unknown” rank-and-file Soviets that were half-writer, half-bureaucrat. When in 1925 the remaining Young Guardists established their journal, Kom-

somoliia, headed by Zharov and Bezymenskii (materializing the connection between the “big Association’ —RAPP—and its “children’—although it would have been more accurate to say that the Young Guard was the “parent”), it turned out that there was no one to participate in it other than the “proletarian poets of the new call” that were unknown then and remained unknown.” And although Zharov proudly wrote that the new journal was 80 percent full of “new names completely unknown to the young reading public” (among others, Mikhail Sholokhov’s name was here), seeing in the growth of the “Komsomol-

writer flank” a guarantee of the flowering of “Komsomol literature,”!® what actually began to issue from the Young Guard was that “nameless literature” that would afterward become known as Soviet—“roo percent restrained,” aimed at

a “consciousness of contemporaneity” and devoid of any individuality. The isolation and decline of the Young Guard were obvious, as it could not satisfy the poets themselves nor (even more importantly) their ideologists, since the latter constantly risked becoming generals without an army in their relentless battle for hegemony.

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The Young Guard became the first school of “organizing literature” for the nineteen-year-old Averbakh, the pupil of Voronskii(!), and taught him that

simply “rallying good writers” around the journal brought neither political dividends nor power. The place of chief organizer was held by Voronskii, and Molodaia gvardiia remained in the shadows of Krasnaia nov’. Against the back-

drop of the best writers attracted to contribute to the journal, Averbakh’s role was unremarkable—he lacked the authority among writers and influence in Party spheres that Voronskii enjoyed. Besides, the writers grouped around Molodaia gvardiia were entirely “outsiders,” and the journal’s “own” writers (as compared to the “outsiders”) often seemed like outright students. Herein the

usual encounter of the interests of personality with the “social mandate” of the era took place: Averbakh left to join RAPP, and after the fall of the Onguardists (the Rodov-Lelevich group), he turned up at the top of the “proletarian literary

movement.” The journal was handed over to a new editor (for whom Molodaia gvardiia also became only a stepping-stone toward RAPP), Vladimir Ermilov, who saw the thick journal as a “helper and accomplice of the newspapers.” The literary history of the Young Guard ends here, and the history of purely political struggle begins. Toward the end of the 1920s, the Young Guard had already become a sort of myth of the “glorious Komsomol past.” At this time RAPP had undertaken mass production of “writers from among youth,” and the former Young Guardists eagerly shared their reminiscences: “We had a group of Komsomol writers called Young Guard. What became of it?” asked Mark Kolosoy at a conference of Komsomol delegates to the second plenary session of VOAPP in June 1931. “We RAPPists expended the greatest efforts in it, struggling against the elements of youthful syndicalism, against attempts to oppose ourselves to the organization of proletarian writers and its leadership. ... We had to overcome the inclinations to tear ourselves away from Komsomol work, attempts to be-

come academic, and a reluctance to carry out large-scale work with beginning writers.”!® The “call of shock-workers into literature” was at its height. At about this time, few remembered the “buried theories of youthful syndicalism and

avant-gardism.”!” “Youthful syndicalism” was replaced by an Onguardist one. The change was so striking that even many former Young Guardists did not always understand its nature. “Was it not Komsomol that educated the majority of our writers? Was it not the first political school for many proletarian writers, teaching them to struggle in a Bolshevist way?” Evgeniia Koval’chik”® asked rhetorically at the very height of the conflict between RAPP and the Komsomol Central Committee.*! Aspiring to be an independent “Party line,” RAPP was being trans-

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formed into a powerful independent party in literature before one’s very eyes. By an irony of history, the last conflict turned out to be that of the RAPPists against Komsomol, from whose “broad sleeve” the future RAPPists had come for the ten years preceding. Separating from the nucleus of the Komsomol Central Committee, the former organizers and leaders of the Young Guard and now of all “proletarian literature” joined the skirmish against Komso-

molskaia pravda (Komsomol truth). Even the shouts from the highest Party courts and the admonitions of Pravda could not make the now-grown “Soviet eaglet” see reason. But even when the Onguardists “reconciled” with Komso-

mol, they continued to remonstrate: “On the substance of all its . . . creative principles, RAPP rightly debated with Litfrontists and with the enemies of proletarian culture who had chosen the Komsomol press for propaganda of their own anti-Marxist views.”** This was at the Fifth Extraordinary Plenum of RAPP’s secretariat, which took place in November 1931. Little did they know that the “restructuring of literary-artistic organizations” was only five

months away. Meanwhile, things were faring badly for Komsomol literature, which had

already been buried in RAPP. Bezymenskii, who had become one of the leaders of Litfront, found himself in conflict with the Onguardist leadership.

Zharov, whose poetry even to RAPPists now seemed parted from “Komsomol poetry” and “got nowhere” bine “the young Komsomol generation” with “popular ing to advance were the Komsomol prose writers (even

completely archaic, dein his attempt to comlyricism.” Likewise failKolosoy, to say nothing

of second-rate “Komsomol authors” such as Ivan Rakhillo, Viktor Svetozarov, and Valeriia Gerasimova, or much less the “Komsomol writer flanks” following behind them). Therefore it is clear that when in October 1931 (as if for a

“demonstration of power” to the Komsomol Central Committee) the RAPPists decided to “renovate” the Young Guard (but now in the form of a “creative

union of the Komsomol authors of MAPP”), there was practically no one they could rely on. The RAPPist leadership warned that it would “slap the wrists of anyone who attempts to compromise or discredit this undertaking, or who would as before continue to generalize [“make generals of ”?—E. D.] individ-

ual representatives of poetry who are far from perfect, like the main Komsomol poets.”?? This was meant not so much for Kirill Molchanoy, who was called

upon to “sing of nice things,” as it was for Bezymenskii and Zharov. But the RAPPists needed “Komsomol literature”: the “shock-worker writ-

ers” poured into RAPP, which swelled before one’s eyes, and 80 percent of this “proletarian replacement in literature” were Komsomol members; the latter did not intend to (nor did they know how to) create a “living man,” but hav-

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ing seen models among the Komsomol writers of the “first call,” could write “poetry and prose” about themselves and their industrial experiences. Since “Komsomol literature” no longer existed then, as it was then being asserted that “the Komsomol author is above all a RAPPist author who discerns and

promotes the Party line in literary issues,” the path that dissolved “Komsomol literature” into “proletarian literature” turned out to be completely normal. As a matter of fact,

not a few “Komsomol” poets, prose writers, and critics from the ranks of the “replacement” have become part of the basic cadres of proletarian literature. Suffice it to mention Bezymenskii, Zharov, Doronin, Svetloy, Altauzen, and Saianov, among the poets; Artem Veselyi, Kolosov, Isbakh, and Galin, among the prose writers; Averbakh, Ermilov, and many other critics, leaders, and creators of the mass proletarian literary movement. That is, Komsomol literature is a part of proletarian literature, which deals with the issues of Komsomol themes.” The “self-liquidation” of “Komsomol literature” was obvious, but the RAPPists were nonetheless worried, as is evident in the triumphant tone of their

communiqués:

The turbulent waters of the Komsomol flood make one happy, like spring does. ... As a whole our youth is fresh and cheerful, and is bursting forth into a new life of labor. There is no cause to become uneasy. We will work, work, work! Never before have youth, their broadest masses, had such gratifying [szc!—E.D.] opportunities. These opportunities must be made use of, and the cheerful young growth will do this.

RAPPist critics’ articles written in a “major key” always reflected a new “breach on the literary front.” In this case their worry was understandable: the “bridgehead of Komsomol themes” they had left behind was now being intensively colonized by “others,” indeed “aliens*—former Komsomol authors. But when the RAPPists cast a glance (a dying glance, as it immediately became clear) over this “neglected sector,” they beheld a “horrifying picture.” The works of the former Young Guardists (Viktor Kin, Mark Kolosov, Valeriia Gerasimova, and others) were now characterized as follows: “justification

of rash heroism . . . typification of particular cases; preoccupation with psychologizing that is alienated from class struggle, and with sickly-sweet romanticism; incorrect interpretation of the issues surrounding Komsomol’s participation in the Civil War”; “entirely undistinguished as to literary merits, a work written in a mediocre and dull way . . . excessive preoccupation with sexual problems.” The heroes of these works were often “isolated from society, out of touch with

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Komsomol and the working masses; they lead a poor, solitary, embittered existence’; still other works were judged to be “titerarily immature pieces, characterized by oversimplification in the portraiture of Komsomol types, and by the pretentiousness, sketchiness, and vulgarization of characters.”

But when the works “on the subject-matter of youth” written by nonYoung-Guardist authors were under discussion, the choice of words was even more inappropriate: In portraying the Party-member student, wreaking havoc with an adventuristic, scandalous plot, and describing the egotistical philosophy and criminal activities of students, their “ecstasy with life” in all kinds of hideouts, the author does not contrast all of this with even a minimum of the positive phenomena which are abundant in the student milieu, totally failing to mention them. Not showing in the slightest how our higher institutions of learning really live, Lidin shamelessly singled out young criminals and made them out to be typical characters.

Another author “portrayed a student as a real self-interested scoundrel, and represented Party people suffering from bureaucratic narrow-mindedness, and propagandized untrue relations between personality and the collective.” A third author “represents the history of youth in a perverted, absurd, and vulgar way.” A fourth lets himself make “reactionary-decadent attacks against Soviet reality.” In a fifth’s writing, “biology holds dominion over all social and class facts, and is the ‘guiding’ basic principle of life.” A sixth “pessimistically and decadently portrays youth in the higher institutions of learning, and slanderously paints younger students.” A seventh “naturalistically and with relish exposes the behavior of ‘the contemporary Sanin,” in effect reducing everything to a “vulgar exposé of the Komsomol cell, as if it consisted of prostitutes and kept men.” An eighth “in an illiterate and vulgarly absurd way paints the rural Komsomol, which is always occupied with wild psychopathic and pathological outpourings and experiences. . . The countryside is shown as a beastlike faceless mass, where there is neither Soviet authority, nor a Party, nor a real Komsomol.” But

to stop “counting,” the following are simply excerpts from a review of twentyeight(!) works “on Komsomol subjects” from the latter 1920s: “They call you away from construction and struggle to ‘intimate’ life”; “They preach social equality, and political equality of workers and of all kinds of former gentry and factory owners”; “They are agitating for the replacement of the class-conscious method of admissions into our institutions of learning”; “They portray the first Sverdlovians as deformed”; “Trotskyist slander of the Party cadres ...a rehashing of Trotskyist slanderous statements about the degeneration of the

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cadres, about ‘facelessness’ and the ‘herd of voters —that is what this book represents”; “a work imitative of gentry literature”; “Students are depicted as a mob of social and psychological freaks, as half-crazy bohemian cranks”; “The Party-Komsomol students are exclusively represented as degenerates, racked by torture and realizing that they cannot master scholarship since they come from the workers’ milieu”; “The struggle against sabotage is reduced to love-andcriminal (!?) intrigues”; “disgraceful hack-work, vulgar Philistinism, vulgar

slander”; “a literary muddle, a crazy jotting-down of ‘thoughts’; “He describes the [Young] Pioneers, slurring over the qualitative difference between a Pioneer

and a Boy Scout, between the old and contemporary schools, and he thinks it is boring and miserable to live as an adult in our country”; “It attempts to ennoble the little sons of kulaks”; “Brazhnin equates Soviet physical education

with bourgeois sports... . There is no representation of the class character of our physical education(!?), its international character and its ties to industry.

Brazhnin makes it completely apolitical”; “the worst slander against Komsomol”; “a little counterrevolutionary bohemian group.” The author fit all these epithets cited into just six(!) pages of the review.”” Toward the early 1930s it turned out that there was no “Komsomol literature” (this is what came of the rejection of “leadership”); instead there was a “literature about youth” that was “completely unsuitable for the mass reader” and “unrestrained” (as one can see, all the accusations boiled down to the “po-

litical failures of the authors”). The question of the status of “Komsomol literature” was not new: the debate about what exactly it was began among the Young Guardists from the first days of its existence. The question of who the “Komsomol writer” was had also been discussed. One could explain the attempts of the organizers of “Komsomol literature” to affirm its “place in literature” as a “stabilization of status” that would allow them not only to monopolize “youth-oriented subject-matter” but also (and no less importantly) to attract “writing youth” and to create a “new type of Komsomol writer.” Everyone participated in the debates about what “Komsomol literature” was and who the “Komsomol writer” was—from “Komsomol critics” to “Komsomol poets,” from Perevalists to the Komsomol Central Committee. The diversity of opinions was impressive:

“Komsomol literature exists and will exist as long as Komsomol and the youth correspondents [iunkory] exist, among which the young proletarian artist will mainly experience growth,”’* the chief Komsomol critic Mikhail Bekker affirmed, regarding this as his own private domain. “The term ‘Komsomol literature’ can only be used conditionally—in the sense of a Komsomol branch of proletarian literature as a whole; and besides,

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the boundary between this branch and the rest of the working class’s literature

is extremely indistinct and unstable,””? insisted Lelevich, who saw in “Komsomol literature” a battleground for the struggle within “bigger proletarian literature.” “Komsomol literature is a separate column of the greater army of proletarian literature, whose [the column’s— Traus.] chief weapon is youth. Komsomol literature as a whole is not distinct from proletarian literature, but the de-

scription ‘Komsomol’ is used in the same way as [for] a separate Red Army unit, which although not distinct overall from the greater Red Army, nonetheless has its own designation, let’s say the 42nd Brigade, or the like,”?° Mikhail

Svetlov suggested. In mid-1926, when Pereval was quickly gaining ground because of the broadness of its position, Svetlov viewed the “Komsomol” and “proletarian” literatures as parts of a greater Soviet literature.

“Let them call it that! If readers’ opinions in society will call it ‘Komsomol,’ it is not worth objecting to this, and there is no need to argue about it.-Let

them call it that!”*’ the chief “Komsomol poet” Zharov benevolently granted the polemicists. Given the fact that the Party-Komsomol bureaucracy had created its own literature and wished to solidify its “hegemony,” the question of

what literature is arose. “There is not, nor can there be, a specifically ‘Komsomol’ belles lettres. One

cannot divide literature by age or sexual characteristics, although the latter does leave its own stamp on literature,”** reasonable critics asserted, seeing a serious

danger in “Komsomol fantasies”:

If we grant legitimacy to Komsomol literature, we would end up with a logical necessity for Komsomol painting, Komsomol sculpture, Komsomol architecture, that is, we would end up with outright nonsense. If we allowed a different characteristic—a division by age—we would end up with recognition of Pioneer literature, of Octobrists’ literature, and that of hundred-year-old men. We said “would end up with,” but that is a mistake; we should say that

we “have ended up with.” In the central organ of our union, just following the discussions, an article appeared, a serious one, about the literature of the younger generations, particularly about the so-called “Pioneer literature.” 33 Period. There is no further to go. “Pioneer lyrics,” “Pioneer poetry,” “Pioneer literature” —all this dangerous literary trash, soiling the minds of ten- to twelve-year-old children, and directly evoked by this same “Komsomol literature,” “Komsomol poetry” and lyrics, and who knows what else.*4

The “Komsomol writer,” “Komsomol reader,” and “Komsomol critic” were proclaimed to be the fruits of pure fantasy, but “Komsomol literature” to be the result of the activities of critics pursuing the “youth theme”:

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And so it was. A man came, and triumphantly looking around the crowd of young men and girls with their Komsomol badges on their leather jackets, observed with a wise air: “Everyone has literature. The self-satisfied lazy Greeks had it, the spoiled Romans, the cruel hardened knights of the Middle Ages, even the bourgeoisie, and the latter, tearing themselves away for a minute between the foxtrot and the varieté, were so wise as to create their own literature. But you who chip away at the granite of science, you builders of the future . . ..—here his voice broke—“you still don’t have your own literature. For shame!” he shouted ominously, and catching his breath, added, “ll help you create it.” And he was as good as his word. He worked diligently for a long time: he wrote long serious articles about books that were already printed, about books not yet printed, even about books which were not yet written. He approved, insisted, showed displeasure, praised, distinguished, and in general did everything that depended on him. After all, he was a stubborn, hard-working fellow. And behold, when the long list of names and titles marked the path he had traversed, he, self-satisfiedly wiping his hands, betook himself to compiling a “family tree” of Komsomol literature. In it he found wise fathers and very wise grandfathers, and, patting them on the head, pointed them out to the upcoming generation. He himself remained in the shadows and modestly called himself a“Komsomol critic.” He was very modest.**

Everything in this amusing little picture is true—this is indeed how affairs were arranged. With the exception that the “fellow” who created “Komsomol literature” was not a “Komsomol critic.” He was even more modest than Georgii Munblit suggested. He was a member of the Komsomol editorship and its Central Committee, but he well understood how far the ambitions of the

young poets could go. These ambitions were, in fact, boundless. As early as 1925, a group of VAPPist Komsomol members (that is, the most “restrained” of

the Young Guardists) suggested giving Komsomol a monopoly to all “youth literature” via monopolization (which is particularly important in the light of the

issues discussed here) of “Komsomol writers’ cadres”: “The Komsomol groups of the Association of Proletarian Writers,” these VAPPists wrote, “should be grouped around youth newspapers and magazines. We think the union should put them in charge ofestablishing literary departments in youth publications.” The Komsomol Union's regional committees themselves were even forbidden to send a Komsomol member off to study, if it was a question of a literary-artistic higher institution: “Komsomol committees should come to an agreement on the candidacy of those to be sent from the Komsomol groups of the Association of Proletarian Writers.” On this issue, they also demanded that Komsomol subordinate “its own” literature to them (in exactly the same way that the Onguardists did; I again note the same people: among the “signatories” were Lele-

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vich, Bezymenskii, and Zharov, who sought the Party’s affirmation of their “general line” and wanted “Communist organjzation’” in literature), basing this demand on the fact that “until now the Komsomol branch of proletarian literature, whose strongest representatives constitute the nucleus of proletarian literary organizations [which was true—E£.D.], developed without the constant

attention of the union, and often outside it,” hence the “rift between the creative work of anumber of young writers and proletarian ideology.” This meant that “every Komsomol writer is also a worker for proletarian literature, is a prole-

tarian writer, just as every Komsomol worker is a worker for all of society . . . the Komsomol proletarian writer must strive to satisfy certain needs of the Komsomol masses with his work, to shed light on and formulate the urgent question of his union’s work—in a word, to tie in his work with the tasks and work of the Leninist Komsomol.” \n order to strengthen this tie, it was required that “the Komsomol circles of the Association of Proletarian Writers and the Komsomol proletarian writers regularly give an account of their work to the appropriate organizations and [Party and Komsomol] cells.” The ideal seemed in

sight: “When we attain this, the Komsomol proletarian writer will grow up directly into a Bolshevik proletarian writer, and a departure from the proletarian literature and community to the side of primitive circleism, to the side of Pereval, will be impossible.”*° Komsomol did not wish to see itself obliged, and so, following the Party,

exactly a year after the Party’s Central Committee resolution “On the Policy of the Party in the Area of Artistic Literature,” the Central Committee Bureau of

Komsomol adopted the resolution “On Writers From Among Youth” (“O pisateliakh iz molodezhi”) on June 2, 1926—just as evasive a resolution, but containing an unambiguous “directive”: “There is no specifically Komsomol literature, nor can there be. The literature created by Komsomol writers and by

young working-class and peasant authors in general is a part of the general proletarian class-oriented literature. . . Komsomol has no ‘line’ of its own dis-

tinct from the Party’s on the issues of literature.”*” Elaborating on these propositions of the resolution, Komsomol Central Committee’s chief of the Press Department A. Gorlov said:

Komsomol literature is a part of overall proletarian literature. We might just for the sake of example make the following comparison: between these two types the relationship is approximately the same as that between the proletarian and youth movements. They are both united by their ultimate goals, but are different as to the forms and content of their work and struggle. In other words, there is no peculiarly Komsomol literature which is in principle different or separated from overall proletarian literature, nor should there be.

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There is an overall proletarian literature, an organic constituent part of which is “Komsomol literature.”**

The Komsomol leadership understood just as well as the Party’s that one ought to speak of the “Party-mindedness ofliterature” rather than of “the Partys literature.” The Young Guardists and Onguardists had given the Party this concept. Nonetheless, it is clear that “Komsomol literature” was being given over to the “management” of the Party and RAPP. Furthermore, the Komsomol Central Committee’s resolution contained a serious criticism ofthis literature, pointing out its sketchiness, the “lifelessness of its heroes, drawn more likely from a poster than from reality, and the poverty of its language,” and demanding education and “work on literary proficiency” [/iteraturnaia gramotnost’ |and the like. Impressive in this resolution is a new, not yet customary, proprietary tone in ref-

erence to ones own literature, a literature that the Komsomol Central Committee was nonetheless not prepared to “grant amnesty,” emphasizing in every possible way its distance from its “offspring”; the conflict that flared up between RAPP and the Committee in 1931 had already ripened at this earlier time. The Onguardists (like the Young Guardists) had no desire to come to terms

with the situation in which they found themselves in the mid-20s, when their own literature was not in any way “protected” from competition, they were not given any power, and their only distinction from the “unrestrained” was that there was a greater “demand” for their own products, which as is well known, were never very distinguished. The authorities did not yet completely understand the advantage of such helpers, who so persistently knocked on their doors, but rather still believed (in Voronskii’s times) that only “good lit-

erature” was worth paying for. Only later was it realized that when “the cadres determine everything,” the real question was not about literature at all. The 1925 struggle for a “general” Party (Komsomol) “line” in literature was in this

sense the usual bartering: the Onguardists demanded power that they received only in the latter half of the 20s; the Young Guardists as well wanted the same thing from Komsomol. And when they only received a “rejection” (the Party wanted a monopoly over a//literature, not just over proletarian literature, and Komsomol likewise did not wish to limit itself to any particular “literature”) and failed to obtain a “mandate” from the Komsomol Central Committee for a monopoly over “Komsomol literature,” the Young Guardists were forced to “lean on” RAPP, which was gathering strength, and which proclaimed in its 1928 manifesto that the “Young Guard is completely inseparable from the proletarian literary movement. The Young Guard never existed as something isolated from this movement, ‘limited to youth,’ nor can it exist as such.”2? Let us note at this juncture that literature was less an ideological problem for

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Komsomol than it was for the Party. The problems ofsocial education came to the fore here. Komsomol, of course, promoted its “social demand” made of literature: “A precise formulation of the problems of everyday life and work is needed, especially along the lines of attention to details, heroism of ‘the little things’ in construction is needed, and a representation of living, rank-and-file working people is needed—relating these things more simply and clearly, without vulgar coarseness nor superfluous aestheticism.”“° But the real issue involved the urgent problems in “drawing youth into art”: “The time is ripe to advance a more active motto—that all youth are in any case Komsomol members and must become not only consumers of art but organizers of this art as well. Every Komsomol member should become an organizer of the environment and life of the youth surrounding him, and must become an entertainer who makes the everyday life of neighboring youths brighter.”*! “Brighter” is here not only an ideological-aesthetic problem but also an “economic-political” one. At the First All-Union Meeting on Artistic Work Among Youth, a striking

statistic about the use of vodka among working-class youth was presented: in units of millions of vedra [units equaling 21 pints— Trans.], this was 0.8 in 1923-1924; 4.1 in 1924-1925; 20.5 in 1925-1926; and 31.5 in 1926-1927. Kom-

somol intended to address this with a “restructuring of the system of relaxation and entertainment of working-class youth” and coined the motto “Instead of a bottle of beer or wine, a ticket to the theater or movie.” In the logic of Komsomol leaders, all the organization’s “cultural-educational work” was supposed to be subordinated to this “motto for everyday life,” including (in the elegant expression of the Komsomol Central Committee’s chief of the Press Department) the “literary type of work.” Accordingly, they demanded that youth be drawn into “creation of art”: “By no means limiting its [youth’s— Trans. ]

role to only that of a passive consumer of works of art, Komsomol must with all persistence facilitate the discovery and development of youth’s aspirations toward active creative participation in the construction of new art, must pre-

pare new effective artistic cadres from it,” and must embark on a “decisive course of both bold advancement of up-and-coming artistic young people and training of art activists from the milieu of working-class youth.”* In this there was no “Proletkult massism” but, on the contrary, pure “culture-mongering,”

which among other things explains the coolness with which Komsomol regarded the political-aesthetic ambitions of Young Guardist ideologues who had found sympathy in the Party establishment. I have already elaborated the subsequent fate of the Young Guard, however. I am dwelling on the activities of this “literary organization” not only because it has received practically no scrutiny in scholarly literature, but also because it

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became the “cradle” of the Soviet writer properly speaking—a sort of foreimage of the future RAPPist “fountainhead,” the precondition and herald of the

future mass production of the “literary replacement.”

Russian Ritual Poetry of the “Era ofSocialist Construction”

Despite its apparent transience, “Komsomol poetry” was a phenomenon ofextreme complexity. This complexity was inherent in the genetics of the “generation of poets of the second call,” as Lunacharskii called it, and it led to an astoundingly rapid breakdown of the Young Guard. This was primarily a generation that arose to replace the earlier proletarian poets. The “first-call”

generation soon tired of the “onward march of history.” In describing this “poetic situation” Lunacharskii wrote: They [the proletarian poets of the first call—E. D.], like us, are revolutionaries

of the first quarter of the century and children of the past, saturated with animosity towards this past, fighters in the preparation of the revolution, and fortunates who at least lived up to the beginning of the realization of their hallowed goals. The services rendered by this generation are of course great, but nonetheless, the cast of their ideas and sentiments are perhaps not completely suited to the world that arose from the nucleus of the revolution they prepared. I at least always heard in the songs of the proletarian poets of the first call a note that was somehow unsatisfying to me, and even some as it were overplayed notes, or dissonant overtones. Some of them tried by lung pressure to as if over-shout the thunder of revolution, and thereby fell into a sort of overblown pathos; others tried instead to contrast the purely proletarian content to the old[,] and ultimately distilled their motifs into a

too-poor repetition of the inventory of factory-and-shop images, and images akin to them; among yet others, disenchantment and a certain aspiration to reach out to symbolist or classical poetry showed through, which was sternly judged by others of their comrades to be a petty-bourgeois tendency; finally, still others too easily fell under the influence of the bourgeoisie’s last-born

children, its enfants terribles.“

The poets of the “new wave” attracted Lunacharskii because they were “children of the revolution”: They fled, as they say, even before they were wearing pants; when it was over, they became men, and often even became only youths, after only seven revolutionary years had noisily passed over their heads; they are saturated in its juices through-and-through. . . These young singers of the Revolution have no anguish at all. They are more convicted than their older brothers,

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and are simultaneously both more tranquil and more energetic. I would put it this way: more bubbly, they have more fizz. They rejoice in life, they love the sun with unusual directness. Look how often it makes its appearance in Alfeksandr] Zharov.

They are jolly Komsomol members, companionable’people. Young, rich in strength and joy, they know perfectly the bitterness of life as well, but do not fear it in the least. They recognize themselves not only as conquerors, but as builders of the new land as well. For this reason they have such a cheerful and happy music.*

Among the “Komsomol poets” Lunacharskii saw only the “jolly Komsomol members” Zharov and Bezymenskii. However, the “anguish” that Lunacharskii obviously did not completely understand, his own creative development having

stopped somewhere “between” Leonid Andreev and Aleksandr Bogdanov, was a sign not of generations but of an era. Herein is the key to the profound difference between the precepts of the organizers and ideologues of “literary youth” and the “literary environment” of the early 1920s. The Young Guard was envisaged and created as a “literary organization” capable of drawing literaryminded youth who were ready to cooperate with authority into a space of ideological control; it was to be an alternative to the ideologically “independent” Proletkultists and “Smiths.” One reads in the editorial of the first issue of Molodaia guardiia: We are young workers for an old but not aging cause. We are the recruits of communism. Under the leadership of “cadre” soldiers of the revolution|[,]

we in the historical “today” continue a great cause begun in the historical “yesterday.” We call the young revolutionary communist guard to us, to our ranks. Members of the party of the “last call,” young “Komsomolians.” . . . We want to become an organ of revolutionary education, of ideologicalpolitical armament for the young detachments of the working class . . . to give a Marxist temper [zakalka, like metal— Trans. to those young workers

who are not tempered like our older comrades. . . .

This combination of the stylization of Smithy manifestos with the “rejection of the old world” (the “new world” is transformed into an “old” one before one’s

eyes) is curious. Of course not quite everything was spelled out here: the essential thing was the new “temper,” since the “older comrades” were indeed not sufficiently “tempered,” or more precisely, were “tempered” in the old manner: their hardness was not combined with the necessary flexibility. In other words, their creative work was proletarian-romantic—class oriented, but not Party oriented. Hence the unpreparedness of the older comrades to “dive deeper into revolution.”

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To get an idea of how utopian the first projects of the Young Guard organizers were, one need only look at the precepts of Iurii Libedinskii, who suggested that future Komsomol literature be “shaped” according to the following selection of themes (let us note, by the way, that just a bit later, in the era of

RAPP Libedinskii would suggest such a thematization for a// literature): 1. Paths to RKSM

[Russian Komsomol] membership:

a. the path of peasant youth into RKSM (individually or collectively); b. the path of working-class youth into RKSM (individually or collectively); c. the path ofindividuals from the bourgeois and kulak environments and from intermediary groups into RKSM; 2. RKSM’s work in making contact with youth: a. RKSM in industry (in establishments in the cities or in factories far removed from them);

b. RKSM in the countryside; c. RKSM in the navy and army during the Civil War; d. Committees and other upper-level RKSM organizations, and their work; 3. RKSM’s environment and types: a. RKSM in the family; b. RKSM in the school; c. RKSM types (lower-class workers, activist workers, demagogues and squabblers . . . ); 4. Types of youth not in contact with RKSM, in their own environment and in conflict with revolution (“little tramps” and the children of kulaks and NEP-men).*”

Need I say that all of this did not go according to these prescriptions cloned from the series of “urgent” resolutions of the Komsomol Central Committee? The organizers of the Young Guard still believed that via such regimentation they could not only gather but also “mobilize” writers and poets. The breakdown of this group became a testament to the impossibility of working with the “untempered” creative personality, which turned out to be “human mate-

rial” that was unsuitable for these goals. RAPP arose out of the realization of this impossibility. As I will discuss subsequently, the organizers of the Young Guard very much wanted to see in the new literary group an opposite to the earlier “proletarian poetry,” not by any means because the “Cosmism” of the Smiths seemed to them an obsolete style (which one may read in any work about the 1920s), but because the Smithy was in practice ungovernable. The Onguardists would say this outright in their address to the Young Guard on the latter’s third anniversary:

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You consolidated your ranks at the moment of the most difficult crisis being undergone by proletarian literature because-of the transition from the Civil War to NEP. The poets whose names have seemingly become symbols of proletarian literature had lowered their ensigns and surrendered to despair. The organization ofproletarian writers (and we know that without organization no workers’ undertaking is stable) fell apart like an uncemented

unstable building. Only the new wave of the mass proletarian literary movement ended the crisis, discarded the broken-spirited, and gave new birth to the literature of the working class. One of the first [in fact the first—E. D.] distinctive signs of this new rescuing wave was the creation in the autumn of 1922 of the Young Guard

group. Communist youth, who so often had found themselves in the most dangerous places, then turned up on guard duty. The very formation of Young Guard signified the beginning of a rebirth of proletarian literature.**

The old “broken-spirited” ones were in fact “discarded.” The only persons who do not crumble are those who are sufficiently flexible: to keep new “broken-spirited” people from developing, it was necessary to suggest a “new world-

view —more flexible and not dogmatic—in short, a Party-minded worldview. Thus from the real-life practice of the revolutionary era the principle of Partymindedness inevitably arose.

The polemic against the Smithy in Molodaia gvardiia acquired an “aesthetic” coloring because its true political-ideological subtext could not be articulated—an appropriate argumentation for the struggle against “hardline Marxists” had not yet been worked out. But if one rereads the Young Guard’s “poetic forays” against the Smiths, it is easy to see that the argument here was not with the latter’s “Cosmic style,” and the “social-historical significance” of the Young Guard was far from being “in the struggle against the Smiths, who were hardened in their Cosmic traditions . . . the struggle for ‘concretization’ of feelings, for portrayal of a living person, for sunny cheerfulness, and for artistic realism.”* Political arguments in the Young Guard era still “swam about” in the saturated solution of “civic-minded lyricism” and did not yet disintegrate into the atoms of RAPP’s political slogans and those of Party directives. Meanwhile, the days of the “poetic manifesto” genre were numbered. Take, for example, Bezymenskii’s famous challenge to the Smithy: “Dovol‘no neba i mudrosti veshchei! /Davaite bolshe zhivykh gvozdei. / Otkin'te nebo! Otbroste veshchi!/Davaite nebo i zhivykh liudei” (“Enough of heaven and pro-

phetic wisdom! / Give us more living nails. /Away with heaven! Throw away these things! / Give us the sky and living people”). One should sce in this challenge more of “life in its revolutionary development” than “living people,” and

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“heaven and the wisdom of things” as an outright euphemism for the Smiths’ “Marxist orthodoxy.” Bezymenskii would later express this idea even more clearly: “Tol’ko tot nashikh dnei ne melche./ Tol’ko tot na nashem puti, / Kto umeet za kazhdoi melochiu/ Revoliutsiiu mirovuiu naiti” (“Only he is not smaller than our times. / Only he is on our path, /Only he who knows how, beyond every detail / To find worldwide revolution”). Ultimately, Bezymenskii would proclaim his program “at the top of his voice” in his poem “Guta” (“Vor

etu zhizn’ khvatai glazami, / Kotoruiu my stroim sami” “Here, seize this life with

your eyes, / The life that we ourselves build”}), but in his view, this “constructive life” was valuable in and ofitselfand not subject to scrutiny by ideas: “Onz zastaviat shevelitsia / Zhivye, podlinnye litsa/ Zhivykh, dopodlinnykh liudei,/ A ne vertliavenkikh idei” (“They [young poets—E.D.] cause to stir / The living, genuine faces / Ofliving, very real people, / Not those of wobbly ideas”). “Wobbly ideas”—this was the apex of the Party-mindedness principle as the mind mastered it: “wobbliness” was finally ascribed to ideas, while “life” was proclaimed to be “genuine” and “very real.” One can recognize in the radical nature of this turnaround (for example, when Mayakovsky is contrasted to futurism) the inimitable Soviet style, with its exquisite shamelessness in the

renaming of things. This was a real “creation of words,” the Soviet “transrational language” wherein words not only lose their meanings but change them to opposite meanings. At the same time, this was a totally RAPPist political-aesthetic program. While it was Bezymenskii who articulated this program by the logic of “not A, therefore B, therefore C,” it was Zharov who became, so to speak, the de-

finitive “legislator” of Party fashion. Zharov’s “path to literature” was rather typical. He later recounted: The first stage of my Komsomol work, its “organizational” period, ended in 1921. Beginning in 1921, | as a member of the Moscow Committee of Komsomol’s office worked as the Moscow Committee's chief of the press

department, as editor of /unosheskaia pravda |Youth’s truth], and later as secretary of the Komsomol Central Committee's press department and as a

member of the editorial board of Junyi kommunist. Alongside this I at the end of 1921 enrolled in the literature and language department of Moscow University No. 1.°°

Zharov was in Valerii Briusov’s (!) poetry seminar, although he had already begun writing poetry in 1919 during his work in the Mozhaisk District Komsomol Committee. Averbakh was at that time editor of Junosheskaia pravda. But it was just at that time that the “first fall” occurred. Zharov recounts his first conversation with Averbakh on this subject:

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“I'm publishinga militant issue of Junosheskaia pravda. Everything’s ready. Only there aren't any poems. It would be nice to have a sort of challenging resonant poem. “It would be nice,” I answered. “But we don’t have anyone who writes poetry. Such a pity.” “A great pity,” I agreed. “Well?” “What do you mean, “Well?” “Well, will you write a poem?” “And why should I do it?” “Well Pve heard you've written a few... » “Everyone's written a few. . . . Probably you have, too . . .” “Well, what do you say?” “To what?” “Will you write it?” “If Ihave to, I will.” I sweated a bit, then I wrote it. To tell the truth, it was very derivative, with a lot of Dem’ian Bednyi in it, but in general it was suitable. . . . They published it.

Zharov began to write more and more “suitable” poems, “sweating” less and less. Writing “on demand” became for him not simply a habit but a sort of “program of creation” (his longtime friendship with Demian Bednyi was not coincidental). He describes the philosophy of this “program” thus: I always considered it my duty to propagandize any [sic!|—E.D.] of the Party’s measures, to participate in all of the most important campaigns of the Party and Komsomol, be it the struggle for . . . fuel or bread, for consolidating the country’s defenses, for the workers’ faculties, . . . for mobilizing Komsomol for the armed forces, for competition, for shock work, for an industrial-

financial plan. One might ask if this is not a departure from “service” to art— does this service to not only general ideas, but also to the Party’s concrete interests, not lead to degradation of art? The need for an answer to this question disappears if one considers that 1) there is no art that does not

serve the interest of a particular class, and any service to art is service to a class and a party, which [a party— Trans.] is the headquarters, brain, and heart of the class; and 2) the concrete interests of a party and a class are the

expression and embodiment of the common ideas of the party and the class. There are no abstract ideas. Only nonsense can be abstract. . . . ”!

When Bednyi said the same things, he was expressing a position and polemic that originated earlier, in the time of the “social-democratic battles”

against “literary breakdown,” and there was much slyness in his words. But Zharov’s conscience was blissfully pure. With complete sincerity he believed

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that his was a “creative position” and knew no other. Any other truly seemed “nonsense” to him. Fully in Nekrasov fashion and in accordance with the aesthetics of the “forerunners,” he believed in the “priority of civic-mindedness [grazhdanstvennost’|,” which he wrote about in his 1925 poem “Our Songs” (“Nashi pesni”): Da, chasto nashi pesni plokhi, V nikh tol’ko radosti vino. . . I, mozhet, pesniami epokhi Ne im ostat’sia suzhdeno.

No budem pet’, ne nyt’, ne okhat’,— Pust’ letsia radosti vino. Ne tol’ko pesni,—i epokhu Samim nam stroit’ suzhdeno!”

[Yes, our songs are often bad,

In them is only the wine ofjoy. . . And maybe it’s not their fate To be the songs of the era. But we will sing, not whine, not sigh—

Let the wine of joy be poured. Not only songs—an era, too, It is our fate to build!]

Even so, these “bad songs” of Zharov’s were the “songs of the era.” Their chief interest here is as a part of the biography of the “builders of the era” and as the material expression of a new “psychology of creation.” When one is immersed in this world, it is sometimes difficult to believe that at the same time, in the same literature, the likes of Pasternak, Mandel’shtam, and Akhmatova also existed. Mayakovsky’s article “How to Make Verses” (“Kak delat’ stikhi”), in which he analyzes his work on the poem he wrote on the occasion of Sergei Esenin’s death, is exceedingly well known. Nevertheless, as one may imagine, Zharov’s sketch of his work on his “Song About Metal” (“Pesnia o metalle”) is no less

valuable. Perhaps this is so just because it is one hundredfold more typical of the era and its poets than the article of Mayakovsky, who had issued the “social mandate” to himself. Zharov’s poem is completely obscure (perhaps in direct proportion to the fame of Mayakovsky’s “anti-Esenin poems”); it is a typical “poem of the day” for the usual anniversary celebration (“Balok dlia novykh postroek!/Rel’sy dlia novykh putei!/ Zhadnost’ k metallu vskipaet /V nashikh pro-

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stornykh poliakh: /- Malo! Plugov ne khvataet!” (“Some beams for new buildings! / Rails for new paths! / Greed for metal flares up / In our spacious fields: / “Too little! Not enough plows!’”]). But here is Zharov’s “work process”:

In February 1926 they called me from Pravda and said, “The Red Army anniversary is in two days, you simply must write something.” “Allright. PIl try.” And I began to try... You will ask if such an order is not an imposition on the creative will. Perhaps I would like to be writing about snowdrops, but I have to write about

the Red Army? Maybe I would like to be writing about snowdrops. And there is nothing wrong with this. I adore snowdrops. . . . But after all, I can write about them another time, not when I have to write about the

Red Army. But this “must”—how can creative freedom be reconciled with this “must”? Very simply: because this “must” completely fits within the boundaries of my creative freedom. If I had to write about something that Ido not know and feel, then one could speak of imposition on the creative will. But the Red Army after all is a subject that arouses enthusiasm in every citizen (in the best sense) of the Soviet Union. How could this subject not arouse excitement, enthusiasm, and a creative response from a poet who is “obliged

to be a citizen”? This sounds terrible only to those who have come into literature from class-alien groups and for whom writing about the Red Army or an industrial-financial plan is a “dry,” somehow bureaucratic order, because they do not really feel the Red Army, because they only understand an industrial-financial plan as a sort of statistical report, not seeing living people, living passions, behind the figures. For us there was never such a problem. This is a problem of the narrowminded: “Can one or can he not write per an order?” If you know the subject you are writing about, if you feel it, if you have a defined relationship to this subject, then whether you write about it per an order or not is all the same. In this case, an order is nothing more than a formal suggestion. The inconvenience of the order that I was talking about lay only in the too-short period to carry it out. Two days. But determined literary habit can to a great degree overcome this inconvenience.”

The main theme of Zharov’s reflections was that of “the writer's sincerity.” Zharov himself was utterly sincere. Note that the “order” given by Pravda in 1926 was exactly the same as that given a few years before by Averbakh. One can write later “about snowdrops”: the creative process is understood here discretely: one can write about what one “wants to write” in time that is free from

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“orders,” on “off-duty” time. And “inspiration” is not required for this: neither for the “order,” nor for the snowdrops the poet “adores”; “inspiration” visits the author at any time (he wants to write “now,” but he has to write about some-

thing else, because he can “write about them another time, not when [he has] to write about the Red Army”). Furthermore, it turns out that writing about the Red Army is not a “must,” but is natural, like writing about snowdrops.

One might even suppose that there is no difference at all between the snowdrops and the Red Army: both “completely fit within the boundaries” of the poet's “creative freedom.” The poet is not being cunning about this, for after all he is a “citizen (in the best sense)”: the army arouses no less “excitement” than snowdrops. He infuses the same “creative explosion” into his “Song About Metal” that he would into any “Song About Snowdrops”: there is no difference, nor can there be, between these two “songs.” Of course one could wish for a deadline of more than two days. . . . Let us note in passing that the “narrow-minded” poet mentioned by Zharov is absent as a problem in his con-

sciousness. This poet is simply a sort of negative figure whose subsequent fate is obscure. The main thing that distinguishes him from the Soviet poet is his lack of an organic nature, his separation from “life.” That is why he understands an order externally, or as Zharov says, “bureaucratically.” His misfortune, however, is that he looks at an order from the outside, or in other words,

he does not become the kind of bureaucrat-poet that “serves” as Zharov does. Or rather, he does “serve,” but without faith, without pleasure, without “excitement” and “enthusiasm.” Our loquacious poet does not stop here, however, but rather leads us into his “creative laboratory.” Let us follow him, for after all, the overwhelming majority of Soviet writers on whose behalf Zharoy speaks were also in this “laboratory.” He was the first one to speak: for the early 30s it is difficult to find a more elaborate description of the creative process of the new Soviet writer. The description was written in the early 30s, but the “process” itself belongs to the mid-20s.

There is no agenda at all: as Zharov says, the subject is organic to him. The creative process begins with “the definition in the consciousness of an aspect of a subject so that as a result of poetically developing it the requisite literary ‘focus’ is obtained.” After all, “writing about the Red Army is very easy and simple. Being a more or less skillful maker of rhyme, it is easy to take a piece of paper and write ‘Red Army, you are a hero,’ [Krdsnaia drmiia, ty geroinia)™4 and so forth. One can write rhymed lines completely accurately, without mistakes, but this will be gibberish if the secret of influencing the readers is not in them, because only a work that is artistic will influence them.”

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This amusing thought leads the poet to the necessity of “creativity.” His “creative search” goes in the following direction: The Red Army is the defense of the Union’s borders. It is the child of October. It is the defender of its [October's] conquests... . The Red Army is not a luxury, but a necessity. . . . Without it Lenin’s precepts cannot be brought to life, the country cannot be rebuilt peacefully. . . Rebuilding the country! That is where the hook should be. The central supporting image of the poem should be constructed on it. ... Rebuilding the country. . . . In other words, the Red Army is the army for the reshaping of the workers’ country. Its peculiarity lies in this. And where is the peculiarity of reshaping? The peculiarity of reshaping lies in the fact that the Soviet Union must be made out of an agrarian, backward country into an industrial, independent country. It must be made a metallic country. . . . Electricity, metal... . The fight for metal. Metal for its construction, metal for its defense. Period. Stop! Metal! Here is the “focus.” And Zharov’s “polishing” proceeds—“correction and emphasis.”» “Poetic consciousness’ is situated in a sort of “red-hot metal” (to use Zharov’s metallurgical metaphors), which cools in the molds before one’s very eyes. The

crystallization in these molds in the “poetic consciousness” of the author is conceived of by him as a “creative search.” The real issue is, as one can see, not in

the order that has been given—Zharov is correct about this. The issue is the nature of the “process of creation,” or the “relationship to the subject”—“whether

you write about it per an order or not is all the same. In this case, an order is nothing more than a formal suggestion.”

It is worth turning our attention to the endlessness and irreversibility of this kind of creation. The subjects on which one “wants to write” become ever fewer. The “necessary” subjects become the “desired” ones: after all, Zharov

did not have the time to write about snowdrops. At issue here is the concept of “creation” itself. The Central Committees of the Party and of the Council of People’s Commissars adopted resolutions on April 8 and May 22, 1933, about

the workings of the Donbass coal industry. Zharov visited a mine after these resolutions and related how he saw that “the mine’s administration, the Party leaders, and the professional organizations” did almost nothing to carry out

these resolutions. The poet made a speech to an audience of thousands of miners, trying to “bring home to them” the meaning of the resolutions and to “mobilize” them. It was clear (even to Zharov) that “the greater part of those present” did not have “even an approximate idea about poems,” so the poet resorted to “use of such literary forms and poetic genres” that were “the most accessible to the underdeveloped mass of mine workers”—folk verses [chastushki] and satirical sketches. Zharov asserts, right behind Bednyi, that “there

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are no ‘high’ and ‘low’ genres. All genres that perform the necessary social function are good.” Be that as it may, Zharov’s folk verses explaining the resolutions (against “drifters,” “truants,” and “idlers”) “were spread throughout

the workers’ barracks” and fulfilled their “necessary social function.” After all, poetry is in Zharov’s words the “poetic armament of a class,””’ and for the writer to master this armament, he must “create for himself {szc!—E.D.] a rev-

olutionary self-discipline of personality, which is the responsible creative part of the great socialist collective.”** Indeed it is a question of se/f-discipline, that is, of the “organic nature” that is the distinguishing mark ofthe truly Soviet writer, as was the poet Zharov. The poet “wants” what is “necessary’—this is the

“formula of creation” out of which Party-minded poetry grew. Accordingly, it is no coincidence that the image of the “Komsomol poet” and “jolly Komsomol member” remained forever linked directly to Zharov. The singers of the new Party-minded aesthetics found in his poems the “joy of the victorious proletariat, the joy of a young conqueror-class, a builder-class going upwards with gigantic steps, the class to which the future belongs,””” and the “tempestuous joy of youth, youthful fervor” that “overflow from every page of Zharov's books.”® Zharov, Lunacharskii asserted, was a “real young agitator who poetically felt and clearly expressed his feelings. The fact that he has a huge reserve of the joy of existence, a certain bravado, high spirits, is wonderful, and this gives him a curious and to the highest degree sympathetic literary-social physiognomy.”°! From this Lunacharskii went on to a broader generalization: Zharoyv is cheerful and jolly. No matter what, he wants to be cheerful and jolly. He is utterly unafraid of all sorts of evils, he does not shrink from their path but wishes to conquer them, and believes in the possibility of conquering them. Jolly agitation is one of the best kinds of agitation. This is exactly why Komsomol wants to organize its jolly host of harmonica players and turn them into Soviet jongleurs [a suprisingly accurate description—E. D.} who with music and dancing would lift the spirits of those around them and would thereby sow the vigorous seeds of our class wisdom.”

These dreams of the People’s Commissar contained an entire aesthetic program. In the context of Mayakovsky’s and Zharov’s works, Lunacharskii asked

if “our art of the transitional period, which is forward-looking and overcomes huge obstacles” should be “optimistic art.” His answer was affirmative: “It should be optimistic. But there are two kinds of optimism: the optimism before trials, sufferings, and critical problems, [which is] to some degree a foolish optimism; and the optimism of a person who has won by suffering his right to say, ‘Despite all the adversities, we are living well.’’® Only an optimistic zeal,

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according to Lunacharskii, can oppose the bourgeois “dissatisfaction with life.” In full accordance with his earlier “life-building” convictions and his subsequent Socialist Realist ones, Lunacharskii contrasted these moods with a

“strong lively and artistic line, the mission of which is to paint a picture of construction itself and ofall its materials, to awaken an enormous love for this construction. . . . Our art must forge patience and cold enthusiasm that will last a long time.”

“Cold enthusiam” was supposed to overcome not only “decadent moods” but also “sober people” infected with bourgeois pragmatism. The requirement

for optimism acquired the completely finished features of a recognizable aesthetic program. Lunacharskii would present his arguments for this program in his speech at the First All-Union Meeting on Artistic Work Among Youth.

People must be shown the beautiful since, according to Tolstoy's theory of “infection” that Lunacharskii was basing himself on, a demonstration of the ugly (or even of the deformed) produces an undesirable effect on the reader (or spectator): “Imagine,” said Lunacharskii, that we are shown a nag whose legs are broken (a nag that is lice-ridden,

dispirited, and with all sorts of ailments); you in sympathy feel these sufferings and in essence, yield to sickness and feel this sickliness in yourselves. This is a minus for your life’s feelings, and therefore is felt with disgust. This example is probably sufficient to show that beauty is always constructed from a combination of positive elements, in a certain order, which gives you more easily than in ordinary life not only the elements of lines, tones, and so on,

but also various sensations of life. Therefore, one ought to be shown “a magnificent steed, his swift gait, the grace of his motion—the key to which grace is that everything is purposeful, and when we see the power and joy of life that such a beautiful horse experiences,

we ourselves are infected with this and receive a huge quantity of life impressions, without expending much energy.”” Lunacharskii assumed that, in fact, the essence of art is a concentration of life impressions, in order to

inculcate them in you with unusual force, whereby these impressions, and the force with which the impressions are conveyed to us, astound our feelings, and in this way changes our volitional aspirations, our reactions, and thereby nurtures the person. . . The content of art depends on which class gives art its directive. We of course base the directive on art that serves, on nurturing art.

The fully Socialist Realist “mature” characteristics of art itself were based on this; but the familiar utopias of creation were based on it as well: “Should

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every one of us aspire to be an artist?” Lunacharskii asked. If itwas a question of “amateur performances,” his answer was yes, but in answering the question, “Should everyone try to become an artistic specialist?” Lunacharskii said unambiguously, “Of course not. On the contrary.”® This “on the contrary” can only be understood if one considers that what one sees here are specifically Proletkult life-building fantasies—by far not RAPPist ones. Meanwhile, the “artists” propagated with incredible rapidity, and if it were not for the broad context of this generative phenomenon, perhaps it would not be worth mentioning at all here the actually small group of Young Guard poets who rallied around the Komsomol Central Committee (literally, as in Zharov’s famous poem “The Ice-Breaker” (Ledokhod ): “Ia—delegat nebesnoi rati/I ot nebesnogo Tieka!/Ia, solntse—nynche predsedatel’/I na zemle i v oblakakh!” \"I

am a delegate of the heavenly host / And from the heavenly Central Committee / I, the sun, am now chairman / Both on earth and in the heavens!”}°’). But

Komsomol “literary groups” were actively created not only in Moscow but also in the provinces (most notably in Kursk, Nizhnyi Novgorod, Baku, Vladimir, Ekaterinoslav, and Irkutsk), and of course in Petrograd.

Much is known about the Petrograd literary milieu of the early 20s, but the “House of the Arts,” the “Serapion Brothers,” and OPOIaZ constituted only one side of the cultural life of the revolutionary era. The other has been preserved in the pages of the Petrograd Literaturnyi ezhenedel nik (Literary weekly), which fit quite a collection of the “creations of literary youth” in its pages, and in local periodicals—not only in the early 1920s journals /umyi Proletarii (Young proletarian), Krasnyi student (Red student), Zinovevets, Tolmachevets, and Vul-

kan (Volcano), but also in handmade magazines and the wall-newspapers of workers’ faculties, higher institutes, factory-and-plant schools [fabzavuchi], and Komsomol clubs.** So who were these “lights in NEP’s rotten swamp,” as one columnist at Literaturnyi ezhenedel'nik called the young poets? Let me introduce them. Nikolai Braun, the future “famous Soviet poet” and author of numerous poetry collections (A Sally into the Future |Vylazka v budushchee], Loyalty [Vernost’], The Seas Glory |Morskaia slava], Vales of My Fatherland [Doliny Rodiny moei], The Land in Bloom |Zemlia v tsvetu])—but at that time a

twenty-year-old lad from the Parakhino village in the Tula Province who had come to Leningrad: Nyne bogom ty ne budesh’, slovo, I kosnoiazychnye raby Uzh metall vykovyvaiut novyi Dlia zolotozvonchatoi truby.

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[Now, word, you'll not be a god, And inarticulate slaves Are already forging a new metal For the gold-belled pipe.] (published in Krasnyi student)

Fedor Levin, in the future one of the constant contributors to Literaturnyi kritik, author of articles about Fedor Gladkov and Anton Makarenko, and of a number of forewords to both classics and contemporary works; accused in 1949 of cosmopolitanism; in addition, a poet, author of the collection of poems In the Storm of Days (V bure dnei); a children’s writer as well, author of

the tale “Fed’ka.” But in the 1920s a young Party man, still unaware that in ten years he would be a graduate of the Institute of the Red Professorate: Mysli bystry, kak pticl’i stai, Lovliu i schitaiu kazhdyi mig, Zhadnyi, golodnyi, gryzu i glotaiu Stranitsy vlekushchikh knig.

[Rapid thoughts, like flocks of birds, I catch and count at every second, Thirsty, hungry, I gnaw and swallow The pages of attractive books.] (published in Zinovevets)

Nikolai Fomin, in the future not unknown by anyone, a rank-and-file “member of the USSR Union of Writers”; author of two collections of poetry and of a book of children’s stories—but at that time a Red Army soldier returned from the front and working in a port city: Na beregu brosaet teni

Kriukami vyplastannyi gruz... ... Zhivei, matrosskie rubakhi! Puskai pod pliasku iakorei

Letiat pevuchie, kak ptakhi, Navstrechu solntsu stai dnei.

[The cargo, taken out with hooks, Throws shadows on the bank...

... Look lively, sailor chaps! Under the splash of anchors,

Let the flock of days fly singing Like birds, to meet the sun.]

(published in Junyi Proletarii)

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The workers’ faculties celebrated by Zharov were the real cradle of Soviet poetry. One could endlessly continue “tracking” the biographies of the future Soviet poets who in the 1920s were absolute unknowns, “beginners” who got their start with the wall-newspapers. The “renascent proletarian literature”

pinned its hopes on them; they had, after all, as the columnist said, a “healthy sense of the world, a joyous understanding of life, a celebration of life.” He noted that “all of this is from revolution, the reflection of struggle and construction, the reflection of the experiences of the conqueror-class that firmly stood its ground over five years of incessant skirmishes. These literary youths advance under the banner of proletarian literature.” Furthermore, “the issue of these youths is the issue of development, of the prospects of Soviet proletarian literature.” The columnist looks forward to a new “industrial poetry . . . permeated with machines resounding ofiron, where in industrial rhythms and in industrial images the worker’s sense of the world is organized.” Is this not, however, the same thing the Smithy was engaged in? No, the columnist is convinced, proving with the factory newspapers in his hands that “the proletariat in the very near future will bring forth new creative forces to replace the old pleiad of proletarian writers.” Petrograd’s Literaturnyi ezhenedel’nik did not wish to “lag behind” in the process, so it initiated a special section called “The Workers’ Studio” and

printed the “beginner” poetry and prose that was full of “a healthy sense of the world” in issue after issue. One learns that this “studio” was a “reserve of contemporary proletarian writers”; what is more, it was designed to “nurture and forge new writers, drawing its forces from the throngs of workers.” Let us examine for the last time a review of the creations of this new poetic “pleiad” that was born from the “throngs.” Reviewer M. Dmitrievskii writes: The whirlwind of revolution tore them away from industry while they were still teenagers; it threw them to the fronts; it ensconced them in social organizations; it threw them like a ball from one end of the country to the other; it

infused them with the worthiness of struggle and the joy of victory. . . . The result? A type of youth developed that had spent two-three years in industry and was torn away from the industrial base for five—six years, but in return it underwent the tempering of revolutionary struggle. On the other hand, the wave of revolution took hold of youth from the petty-bourgeois and philistine environments and gave them, too, a good record of civil war. That which we may call “Soviet youth” was developed. Now these youth are studying (yet again torn away from industry), “gnawing off and swallowing the pages of attractive books,” and are suppliers of literary material. . . Can these youth develop and extend the industrial principle in poetry?

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By all evidences, no. But we have seen what they write about, We said that this young literary generation is advancing under the banner of proletarian literature. . . . This demonstrates what a broad reach proletarian literature acquired during the

years of revolution. Soviet youth” is organizing its creative forces, is approaching art like students and successors to the proletarian poets and writers.

In this “social analysis” one reads first of all a sentence pronounced on earlier proletarian literature, the end of the era of the Smithy, which did not and could

not have heirs among the people “torn away from industry.” But, in contrast, there is the “tempering” of revolution and political struggle, and the rhetoric of this struggle, which is based on current political slogans; also the “healthy sense

of the world” and “joyous understanding of life” of this “conqueror-class.” Such is the portrait of this stratum of “promising youth.” But it is still not quite clear what exactly their promise is—neither to themselves, to the colum-

nist, nor to anyone. There is already a “Soviet youth’; the time of “Soviet literature” will soon arrive as well. Meanwhile, the Young Guard will be responsible for rallying this “young generation of writers” for proletarian literature and for uniting these “throngs” of working-class poets and writers. This wave from the bottom was a most powerful boost for new literature. Indeed, the shaping of the core group of Soviet writers would take place among these “throngs.”

The mechanism of negative selection would be born out of the Young Guard and “October” groups and would be developed in RAPP. In the meantime, the Young Guard was seen only against the backdrop of the past. Petr Kogan, one of the first historians of proletarian literature, gives his perspective of the Young Guard in proletarian poetry: When you go from the poetry of the manifests of the older generation of proletarian poets and from the epics and tragedies of the Civil War to Young

Guard, it seems as if you are rising via a purifier from Dante's hell to the bright spheres leading to the Empyrean. And we understand the name “Young Guard,” as with all the preceding names, not in an age-related or

chronological sense. Organizationally, the writers united under this banner are part of the Moscow Association of Proletarian Writers, as well as of the

“October” and “Workers’ Spring” groups, and other such groups. They are ideologically close to “October” as well, and fight alongside them for a common cause. They are personally interwoven as well. Sometimes you cannot tell where the Young Guardist ends and the “Octobrist” begins. But we have something else in mind. [Namely,] the new stage of social and

literary development that was marked by the entrance of youth and of the old people refreshed by the din of their jollity, and the new sense of the world

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that it brought into the treasure-house of proletarian poetry. They have come here not only without the old intelligentsia introspection and without anguish, but also without the sense of tragedy, without the fatigue, and without

the morose reminiscences that at times erupt into the work of the most hardened fighters.”

This picture is emotional and quite accessible—but inaccurate.

There was “discord” in Komsomol poetry, and if Kogan failed to notice it, it is only because after the Smithy, this discord seemed somehow insubstantial to him. Furthermore, the “discord” in the Young Guard was deeper, as one may imagine, for this was not the traditional romantic “discord between poet and reality” (as in the Smithy), but a discord within the creative personality. The signs of trouble were noticed by the “Komsomol critics” themselves: “We have two completely distinct, different, and even opposing tendencies in the

development of the generation of proletarian literary youth. One of them... is the tendency toward joy and high spirits... . The other direction .. . is a mood of sadness, weariness, melancholy, and dissatisfaction with the present day and the surrounding reality.””° Others perceived this as a difference of style:

In this energetic ferment of ideas, forms, and organizational shifts that particularly sets apart the Young Guard group and the young proletarian writership in general, it is easy to observe two distinct tendencies that struggle between themselves. They both involve literary form, at least judging by an outward impression. One derives from the precepts of futurism (Mayakovsky and Co.); the other, under the conditions of proletarian revolution, resurrects

the old classic realism of Pushkin and Tolstoy,

critic A. Divil’kovskii wrote in Pechat’i Revoliutsiia, designating the poetic style of Zharov and Bezymenskii as “semifuturistic.” When Divil’kovskii suggested that classes that are just beginning to enter into their cultural ascent usually at first

produce poets in literature as the voices of class idealism, romanticism, and the “flight” into a bright future; a greater cultural maturity, and even more so the attainment of power with the ensuing construction of one’s own new unprecedented form of all of life, naturally calls for immersion into the detail of this “prose of life,” and gives rise to an abundance of prose writers,”!

he had in mind the transition from the Smithy to the Young Guard, and afterward to the RAPPist “younger generation.” Nonetheless, Kogan was apparently closer to the truth when he observed, “The boundary separating Young Guard's prose from its poetry is at times scarcely perceptible. The artistic prose

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of youth is permeated with the same high spirits that its poetry is. There are

just as many autobiographies in it, the same attention to everyday things, and the same capacity for feeling the poetry of our times.”” The issue was not high spirits, from which by far not all the Komsomol poets suffered, but that the prose of the Young Guard just failed to come together. It was too “autobiographical.” And no matter how much the Young Guardists’ critics called upon them to “create a full-scale proletarian epic with a plot,””? to “break out into the monumental genres, into epic canvases, into a full-scale plot,””* and no matter how the critics tried to “look after” an “inclination toward monumental epic genres, and a propensity for picturesqueness and psychologism” in “Komsomol prose,”” they were nonetheless themselves forced to admit, “Artistically finished types are created by a writer at the time of his spiritual and creative maturity. The Komsomol writer is undergoing only the preparatory class of his development. He has not yet stood on his own feet. He is still rather young, and his work is not noted for, cannot be noted for, breadth of synthetic scope.””° The Young Guard had provided no prose, only some poets. No. 10 Vozdvizhenka Street: Komsomol Bohemia In a 1928 letter to Eikhenbaum, Shklovskii wittily observed: “The literary environment must be regarded as one of the types of the resistance of materials [soprotivlenie materialov].”’’ The 1920s literary environment is nonetheless

one-sidedly famous: its “bigger picture” was revealed detail-by-detail—around the most notable and interesting creative personalities and groups. While Shklovskii’s formula is universal, the “resistance of materials” is equally universal in an era of revolution. Such “resistance” alone is creatively productive. This is just as accurate as the widespread characterization of the artistic life of the postrevolutionary (already Soviet) period as “fragmented” [bezbytnaia].

One has yet to witness the literary environment, or rather the “resistance of materials,” in the Young-Guardist milieu. There are very few witnesses: this

milieu was unattractive to its clever and otherwise intellectually curious contemporaries. But there was an environment. Or rather, there was a struggle between “materials” and the overhanging fragmentation. At the height of the “literary battles” in 1924, there were heated discussions about the new intelligentsia. In one of the debates, M. A. Reisner, a senior jurist and specialist in the area of social psychology (and also Party member since 1905, one of the developers of the first Soviet Constitution, and one of the founders of the Communist Academy), spoke of “the presence of alarming

characteristics” in the milieu of proletarian and workers’-faculty students:

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In some circles of this intelligentsia, aspirations of profiting by one’s proletarian origin and diploma are appearing, as well as a craving for privileges

and projects for a new system of titles. . . . If we add to this the desperate economic situation of our higher institutions and their pupils, then we will be faced with a full-blown danger of turning our new intelligentsia into

impoverished bohemians separated from their own milieu.”

This bohemian milieu engendered its own literature, which subsequently began to be called “Komsomol literature,” and the milieu itself was shaped into the Young Guard. It is important to recognize this source of Party-minded creative literature and to note that one is dealing here with a paradox: the Party's bohemians aspired to become a salon—to turn into their opposite. Traditionally, “free artists” migrate to a bohemian atmosphere, but here one ob-

serves the reverse—Party-minded artists coming owt of this milieu. It goes without saying that the bohemian milieu is not a “class”; it is rather a caste. In fact, the so-called literary groupings of the 1920s were only different bohemian groups professing one or another set of “aesthetic principles” that provided them a market. But, for example, the bohemian milieus of LEFists and “new peasant poets” were more similar to each other than, say, to the bohemian milieu of the “Komsomol poets,” in spite of the fact that “ideologically” (or “in principle”) Bezymenskii was closer to Mayakovsky than to Kliuev. Nonetheless, both Mayakovksy and Kliuev were organically incapable of becoming Party functionaries, while Bezymenskii, on the contrary, did become one. The Young Guard became an attempt to socialize young people and, as was completely natural in the revolutionary era, an attempt to advance them into a new, more “socially valuable” group. And so resulted the Komsomol bohemia. In order to understand its atmosphere, let us turn to the reminiscences of the Young Guardists themselves,

those present at the group’s inception. The Young Guard occupied a few rooms in a big dormitory at No. 10 Vozdvizhenka Street. The meetings took place in a small room—“A huge window, a bed, and bare walls with severe wallpaper,

some trunks and boxes.” Attending these meetings were Artem Veselyi, Mikhail Svetlov, Serafim Ogurtsov, Boris Ringov, Mark Kolosov, Sergei Malakhov, Mikhail Golodnyi, Nikolai Kuznetsov, Ivan Rakhillo, and the “leaders’— Bezymenskii, who “emitted indistinct noises,” and Zharov, “overwhelmed by his own greatness.””? Not far away, huddled into two rooms in the “Press House,” was the editorial board of Molodaia gvardiia—Iurii Libedinskii, Leo-

pol'd Averbakh, and Aleksandr Zonin—who were still involved with the Young Guard but were already organizing RAPP. Also nearby—on Pokrovka Street— were the evening classes for the group studying “literary mastery,” taught by

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none other than Osip Brik: “Plot... Method of writing... Keeping the reader in check . . . The renowned Brik! We drank in palpable, weighty knowl-

edge through Brik’s prism.”*° Everyone was working on some youth newspaper or another, warmly recalling how they had stolen apples from the vendors on Tverskoi Boulevard, since they had no money. All of them were delightfully uneducated. Ivan Rakhillo recalls how he’ became a member of the Young Guard: a stranger in the market (who turned out to be the poet Ogurtsoy)

asked him, “You write poems?” In his amazement, Rakhillo lied that he had recently started to write some and read him a poem that he pretended was his own ...a Lermontov poem. “It’s so-so,” said Ogurtsoy, “but you can tell it’s poetry. You, fellow, write three poems tonight and bring them to our group:

we'll put you with the poets.” Rakhillo did write something and brought it. They didn’t like it, but they accepted him into the group anyway and “from that time onwards, I started to write short stories.”*! Here are Zharov’s reminiscences of that time: “What was the Young Guard group in 1922? It was apartment No. 7 in No. 10 Vozdvizhenka. What was this like? At first it was Bezymenskii, who was working in the [Party] Central Committee, and later—also through Komsomol connections—they took me out of

the Moscow Committee to work in the Central Committee.” Unknown “guys” began to drag themselves “up the endless staircase” to the fifth floor with poems and short stories to visit these neighbors (Zharov and Bezymenskii lived next door to each other). A regular “group” and an “activist group” were formed: “Look, guys, this is Komsomol li-te-ra-ture!”*”

Another “leader’>—Bezymenskii—left a poem instead of memoirs: Volnoiu komsomol’skikh pesen Nesli my korabli vesny. My vse bor’boiu rozhdeny, A splocheny Vozdvizhenkoiu, desiat’. Plecho k plechu, perepletias’ rukami, Poidet vpered Mladogvardeiskaia gur’ba. Gliadiat na zemliu nashimi glazami Vesna i pesni, Druzhba i bor’ba.*?

[On a wave of Komsomol songs We carried the ships of spring.

We were all born through struggle, And united through Vozdvizhenka, Ten.

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Shoulder to shoulder, arm in arm, Forward will go The Young Guard throng. Spring and songs, Friendship and struggle

Look at the earth through our eyes.} “Spring and songs”. .. . The Young Guard’s anniversary collection, with sto-

ries about the three-year journey of the “happy Komsomol members,” ended with—three obituaries: three members of the group committed suicide. Nikolai Kuznetsov hanged himself in that same dormitory at No. 10 Vozdvi-

zhenka. “The failures of his literary forays,” recalled his Young Guard colleague Viktor Svetozarov, “had a strong effect on his nerves”; after reading some criticism, “he stopped talking to us, tore up books and magazines and threw them

on the table. And at night he would yell that somebody was suffocating him, and he had signed his portrait in advance as follows: “The poet Nikolai Kuznetsov shot himself on December 24, 1924.’ We didn’t believe him... .” He

hanged himself on September 14th, in the room adjoining the one where his colleagues were discussing publication of a joint collection of poems to be titled The Roll-Call (Pereklichka). The first one to find out what had happened was

the poet Mikhail Svetlov. They buried him two days afterward, on September 17th. The coffin lay in room number 3. We comrades would alternate every now and then on the honor guard, and all of literary Moscow came to see the coffin. It was slushy outside. The funeral was in the evening. The orchestra bellowed out the funeral march terribly loud, making the crowd of those accompanying him larger. A lot of people spoke at the grave. Many of us could not hold back our tears when we lowered forever the body of this amazing person and most talented poet, Nikolai Kuznetsov.**

Vladimir Pestriak, who had edited Junosheskaia pravda, went to Tiflis . . . and “Komsomol literature, poor in satire, was suddenly orphaned . . . there remained only . . . a book of jolly short stories and a black grave on a steep cliff, where the Kura River sounds below.”*° Egor Khvastunoy, a contributing author to Novyi mir, Krasnaia Niva (Red

field), Komsomol’skaia pravda, and Krestianskii zhurnal molodezhi (Youth's peasant journal), “ended his life on January 26th. Dear Egor left us for good in the flower of his age and talent,”*° leaving his last poem: Zhil ia, zhil, kak vosh’ v solome.

A teper’—tsvety.

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Prikhodi—v mogil’nom dome

Otdokhnesh i ty... Ia ushel v inye shiri, Tam— inaia ler’. Slishkom slezno v etom mire, Chtob 0 nem zhalet’ . . . °”

[I lived, lived like a louse in straw. But now—flowers. Come—in the funereal home You, too, will rest... I have left for other expanses, There—a different time-scale is.

There are too many tears in this world, To be sorry about it... ]

This is a by no means complete list of the dead: it includes only the Young Guard members. But a letter sent from “the provinces” to Oktiabr’ and published in Komsomoliia gives an idea of how many morally “brain-damaged” young people there actually were around. The text of the letter is replete with marks of omission—the traces of the editorial pencil are distinctly visible throughout—but still I will cite this document at least in the form it appeared in the journal: Dear comrades! I am a beginning writer. I have been in Komsomol for a long time. I have worked at the district, regional, and provincial levels, in a number of managerial positions. Recently an issue that will not let me have a minute's peace has cropped up, the issue of the interrelationship between the artist and the Party man. The artist and the Party man within me are impossible to manage. The Party demands unconditional fulfillment of a number of tasks, writing theses and making up diagrams, reading books about cooperation. . . . Literature demands spending whole nights over a white piece of paper, and anxious observation of the tender shoot of every line. .. A day, as you know, has twenty-four hours, and I, a youth, cannot fit in all the requirements that are made of me. ... Short stories and theses, Tolstoy and political education—how far apart these are. Nekrasov said, “The fighting hindered me from becoming a poet.” Nekrasov is right. But Bezymenskii is not right, he is insincere, when he says, “We are first of all Party men, and poets afterward.” I at least can

affirm that it is not so. Either a fighter or a poet. . . . But who said that a poet is not a fighter?

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Can it really be better to write bad theses instead of good poems? But they demand bad theses from us. I am a victim of this lack of understanding. They think verses are fun for us.

. If you cut one hand off, it is painful. If you cut the other one off, it is also painful, but I think both hands will be whole if Ileave the communist organization and preserve my individuality.

Since I am completely on the side of the revolution (by my convictions, social origin, and so on), I will remain a fighter at the same time (who said that a poet is not a fighter?).

So there, dear comrades, allow me my doubts and shorten the period of my expectations. With the comradely regards of a writer, Ivan Musienko.**

There was widespead dissuasion from “early professionalization” of the young poets, beginning with Komsomol critics®” and ending with the Komso-

mol Central Committee.” Nonetheless, youths were pouring into Moscow, swelling the ranks of the “poor bohemians,” sinking into disenchantment and poverty, and reaching the point of suicide. Of them, Mikhail Bekker wrote: Poets continue to make the pilgrimage to Moscow, tearing themselves away from the life-giving social base, and leaving their warm, accustomed places. In Moscow, hunger, cold, and disenchantment await them. I know many young writers who have chosen the visitation of editors’ offices and the corridors adjoining them as a constant occupation. There they declaim poetry, carry on endless conversations about touchy literary subjects, and calculate honoraria—their own and others’. They flee from a wide-open life into the narrow dark corridors of literary establishments. It is not surprising that their work has so little light and warmth, that early on they begin to get depressed and start whining.”!

However, the “bright side” was immediately apparent—Komsomol critics needed this environment, because it was there that their cherished “Komsomol literature” lay: “Is the poet hungry?” Bekker inquired. “Well, let’s feed him, slake his hunger, wash his wounds, show him much kindness.”°? The Komsomol leadership was so “kind” to these young people that concern arose even in the Young Guard milieu itself: There is no appropriate setup for serious creative work; time is spent on

endless plenums, conferences, and “organization of proletarian literature.” They bring some young poet from the provinces, elect him to a responsible organizational post, make him a member of the editorial staff of a metropolitan journal. The fellow himself must study persistently for a long time to come, yet he gets the opportunity to pass judgment on the pieces of his more

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mature and creatively older comrades. Here is the roaring success of the presentations given in the clubs and literary organizations: a not wholly healthy literary situation, work overload, no further growth. . . . Unfortunately, these are not idle speculations but the hard facts that we ought to ponder over.”

This atmosphere was perceived even more keenly by outsiders. Telling in this regard are the observations about the Komsomol “literary environment” published in Pereval’s third collection:

The material position of our writer . . . alas. . . . Sometimes he has nothing to eat: it is so bad that the writer will hang around the editorial office all day in hopes of a ruble, and in the evening he searches for an apartment. . . . The business of lodging goes badly. Recently a certain Komsomol poet reminisced with a slight grin about his lodgings in a morgue. . . . Hunger relentlessly makes itself known. As a result of these two factors—a hungry existence and freezing cold outside—a process of suicide of the creative energy occurs in the writer. . . . Themes, ideas, feelings—all these elements that constitute poetic content—assume the form of infinite grief and melancholy. .. . Already the Komsomol poet writes verses with a down-and-out motif, with a glorification of his own needs and the darkened street, its dregs and filth... . Our community, our Komsomol organizations, our communist literary criticism is unfortunately a dark alley. We do not hear the person’s wailing,

wailing because he is hungry. .. . The material environment and the material base contribute to the growth of bohemian, down-and-out moods. . . . Material adversities lead to the loss of poetic perception, and frequently,

instead of communist art we see the frenzy and convulsions of the poet who is clinging only to his pain and resentment.”

Therefore one need not be surprised by the appearance of lines such as, for example, Boris Kovynevss: V strane berez i stroinykh topolei Ia byl rozhden ot ploti chelovech’ei, No volchii voi mne vse-taki milei Moei rodnoi chlenorazdel’noi rechi.”

[In a country of birches and slender poplars I was born from human flesh,

But the howling of wolves is still dearer To me than my native articulate speech.

Discussion of the horrible situation of “creative youth” rarely spilled over into the press (making such evidence all the more valuable). Criticism began to

acknowledge—timidly, at first—the distinct connection between the “literary

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environment” and the widespread “psychology of the ‘underground,’ of avague consciousness that awakens only for sarcasm and is open to only a feeling ofbitterness and emptiness, or even at times to neurasthenic animosity.””° Ilia Rubanovskii told of the “person in the tarpaulin raincoat” (the “hospital gown of the new era”) in the almanac Molodost’ (Youth). This “young writer from the provinces” came to the publisher's dressed in this raincoat and summer canvas

shoes in extremely frosty weather. This is his tale of his Moscow adventures: In March I made a contract with the Proletarii publisher for publication of a story as a separate book. . . . I submitted the manuscript, signed the contract, and asked for my money. Tomorrow. And so “tomorrow” stretched out for three months. ... Hungry and embittered, you go to the publisher's like a beggar to the boulevard, for a handout: “At least give me something to eat on.” “No, and it won't be tomorrow either.” Is this a good thing? This was for three months of work! For go sleepless nights. . . . Four of us huddled together in an area a little over 3 meters. Two of them lived on one stipend, but I was with my brother, on a year’s leave from the Vkhutemas workers’ faculty, and I didn’t get a government stipend, but lived on one poem a month, since they stopped handing out the stipend the day I went on leave.”

These words are a justification: the unfortunate “in the tarpaulin raincoat” was obliged to rehabilitate himself from accusations of belonging to the group that was rumored to be a “league of suicidals.”

The person in the “hospital gown of the new era” goes on the offensive, however: It must be said about VAPP, that they are the league of suicidals, they are the group of today’s corpses. This is where the infection of the young proletariat is. Who else but VAPP shouts, “Comrades, beginning writers, workers’ correspondents, village correspondents, join our ranks, organize circles, recruit members, sing about factories, communism, revolution, and such. Hold the pen tighter in your calloused hand”? As if it were a matter of saving the revolution. And thousands of people join their ranks, organize circles, squeeze a pen in their fists, and sing: Zare vpered, navstrechu,

Zavod, shumi, gremi, Shtykami i kartechiu Za kommunizm goriat ogni!!! [Forward, march! to meet the dawn,

Factory, be noisy, roar With bayonets and buckshot The flames rise for communism!!!]

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These are their songs, this is their creative work. These are the ones, the corpses and suicidals, the thousands of illiterates infected with a poetry bug, counting on glory and on a big honorarium. These are the ones standing in line at the lit journals’ postal boxes and [by] the editors’ baskets. These are the ones that desert their class and yearn for “Moscow the indecent.”

How did criticism explain this affectation? Apparently, this writer was “on the sidelines. He is forgotten in the ferocious quarrel of literary theoreticians.”” The ferocious quarrel was of course not between “literary theoreticians,” but rather literary politicians, ideologists of the groups in whose larger game the “young poet” was only a trump. And neither the ridicule of these “thousands of illiterates infected with a poetry bug” nor the vicious invectives against the “literary cardsharps” who were deceiving the “small fry” allows one to understand the situation. And the real issue is not the young people themselves who were “cast out of their biographies”: social forces awakened by revolution, that few could resist, carried them to the cities. What one witnesses is the next step in the process of social marginalization already mentioned, when socialization

occurred through “loss” of one’s biography, traditions, and social groups and connections.

As a result, “proletarian poetry of the second call” took a most curious turn, in fact returning to the aesthetics of the “forerunners.” To be convinced of this one need only turn to the poetry of Mikhail Golodnyi. The contrast between his sad, gloomy poems about the low ceilings of working-class quarters, the

dreary walls covered with mold, and the oppressive labor of miners, and the poems of Zharov, who has “warmth from the sun, and warmth from the heart,” is

astonishing. Golodnyi: Stelet serdtse vorokh dum. Ugol’ khmur, a ia ugrium. Mozhet, eto ot uglia Ili ot tebia, zemlia.

Skrezheshchi zubami, rudokop, Sam sebe pri zhizni roesh’ grob.'°°

[The heart spreads out a pile of thoughts. Coal is gloomy, but I am morose.

Maybe this is from the coal Or from you, earth. While gritting your teeth, miner,

You're digging your grave while yet alive.]

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The fact that such motifs permeated the poetry of the Smiths (in particular, that of Nikolai Poletaev) or peasant poetry can be explained, on the one hand, by the “decline” of the NEP era and, on the other, by the traditional rejection of the “octopus city.” Obviously, similar motifs in the creations of Komsomol poets (Golodnyi, Mikhail Svetlov, A. Iasnyi, and many others) in no way exceeded the limits ofthe “poetic consciousness” of this time. But in neither case was “warmth from the sun, and warmth from the heart” required. Not only was such “warmth” expected from proletarian poetry—the poetry itself was associated with it. Critics continued to assert that the “young sprouts of poetry growth” had simply been overwatered with the “Esenin poison,” even at the time that “Eseninist sentiments” had become practically the dominant ones in the Young Guard. The critics were obliged to admit, although only with reservations, that “there is an organic, internal fracturedness [nadlomlennost’} in this art.”'°' Ni-

kolai Kuznetsov’s suicide was the real detonator of the “suicidal poems” that quite accurately reflected the world of the young poets. Those who had yes-

terday still glorified “bright Komsomol,” who had affirmed their break with the past, and had stated along with Svetlov, “I feel my road is true / Under the waving of the raised ensigns,” after just a few years responded thus to Kuznetsov’s death: Skoro lezhat’, sineia, Mozhet, iz nas liubomu.. . Eto moia sheia Diko zovet na pomoshch’. Eto moi kosti Zhazhda zhizni skovala. Mozhet k tebe v gosti Skoro i ia pozhaluiu. Vstrechu tebia tem li,

Chtoby vetrom gonimym Uvidet’ nashu zemliu

I vmeste proiti mimo!!”

[Soon to lie growing cold, Perhaps is any one of us... This is my neck Wildly calling out for help. These are my bones That thirst for life has chained. Perhaps as your guest, too,

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I will soon come see you. Will I come to see you, That, driven by wind, We'll see the land And pass together along it?!] (Svetloy)

Ne po plecham nam dali klad’,

Ne po glazam dano nam vider’, I rano veleno vnimat’ Chuzhim i ne chuzhim obidam. Vse rezhe tot ogon’ v glazakh, Chto zheg vesnu i plavil leto; V strane Sovetov v kabakakh

Zhivut rabochie poety .. . 1% {Not our shoulders were given the load,

Not our eyes were granted to see,

And early were we made to hark To strangers’ and nonstrangers’ wrongs. Sharper still that fire in the eyes, That burned up spring and melted summer; In taverns in the Soviets’ country The worker-poets live... ]

(Golodnyi)

Kol’ khochet byt’ samim soboiu Rabochii—priznannyi poet, On vse zhe gorechi ne skroet, Kogda v dushe vostorga net. Kol’ net sredi svoikh otveta, Mogiloi mozhet stat’ proval.'

[Though the worker wants to be

A famous poet on his own, Yet he does not hide his grief, When in his soul there is no joy. Though his own can give no answer, His downfall can become the grave.] (Aleksei Dorogoichenko)

losif Utkin’s poem on the death of Sergei Esenin became a kind of coda in this symphony of grief:

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Est’ uzhas bezdorozh ‘ia, I v nem—konets koniu. I ia tebia, Serezha, Ni kapli ne viniu.

Kipit, tsvetet otchizna, No ty ne mozhesh’ pet’. A krome prava zhizni, Est’ pravo umeret’.'”°

[There is the horror of aimlessness, And in it is the horse’s end.

And you, Serezha, I cannot blame at all. The fatherland teems and flowers, But you cannot sing. And instead of the right to life, There is the right to die.]

No matter how much was written in response to this—that suicide is “weakness” and that “to live life is significantly more difficult”—by Poletaev the Smith, Mayakovsky the LEFist, Bezymenskii the Young Guardist, and by others, the “formula” of the era had been already found: the “horror of aimlessness” came to be the “third path” to which Shklovskii (the only alternative to Bezymenskii

and Zharov) beckoned. This “formula” was engendered by the radically impersonal “Party-minded position” of the leading lights of “Komsomol poetry.” Still,

the immune system of the creative personality had not yet broken down, and its resistance was manifested in its attempt at self-determination, in its acknowledgment of “aimlessness.” Ultimately, this meant that the breakup of the Young Guard was predetermined.

“Restraint” versus “Decadence”; or, The Triumph ofLife One can adduce a number of examples wherein the history of ideas is presented to the contemporary reader in, so to speak, a reversed perspective. This is particularly applicable to revolutionary eras, which always abound with new ideas. Transcending the situation in research (both in Soviet and Western scholarly literature) wherein the “ideological creativity” of a revolutionary era is regarded as an immanent process of “spontaneous generation of ideas” is apparently one of a number of vital problems. The overarching subject of the present book— the prerequisites for and consequences of the “ideological creativity” connected

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in revolutionary and postrevolutionary cultures with the attempt to create a “new type of creative personality”—is a subject of “real reality” (to use a Socialist Realist phrase) rather than a closed space of “wobbly ideas.”

Party-minded and Party-run literature made itself felt for the first time, al-

though inarticulately, precisely in the Young Guard; it was here that it first tried, timidly and clumsily, to institutionalize itself; and within precisely this institutional framework the arguments of both advocates and opponents of

such literature were forged. This was particularly manifest at the “polar extremes” of Komsomol literature (which provisionally one may call “decadence” and “restraint’).

“Restraint” possesses a distinct tendency toward “congealing,” since the

repertoire of authority always gravitates toward a certain set of ideological molds and light filters that in the 1920s language of criticism were called “stamps” (shtampy). The notion of a “stamp,” which became a permanent part of the “arsenal” of Soviet criticism, is worthy of attention at least on the “methodological level.” One can easily see the “critical instrumentation” in complaints about “hackneyed devices,” “sketchiness of plot,” “clichés,” and the like; also apparent are the indurate aesthetic-ideological norms themselves, understood by their

contemporaries as subject to be overcome. It is especially material that the “beginning writers’ followed the same path as “beginning readers”—they studied with samples of writing, started out with a “model.” In order to advance beyond this “model,” creative will was necessary, the will that Party-minded literature is

aimed at suppressing (and not nurturing). There was much talk of the “triteness” and “banality” of Komsomol literature in the 1920s. Authors spoke of “production of mannequins,” “stereotyping in young authors, not only in their representations of people, but also in

the glorification of factories and machines,” and of “poetic formulas worn down like copper 5-kopeck coins.” The result was that a cliché has been created among us, which some do not wish to overcome, and

indeed not everyone can overcome it. Predominant in literary images are hopelessly boring stereotypes, all the people (or rather the outlines of people) are touchingly similar to each other, and everywhere the not-unknown leather jacket, the red scarf, the heart shining with the Komsomol pin, and the like,

make their appearance. There is no profound creative penetration at all. Everywhere our Komsomol girls carry suspect traces of a caramel origin and seem to be taken from the poster of some film or another. A hard-to-get-rid-of cliché for the representation of every phenomenon has been created among us.

This “weak will” was recognized by criticism as a dangerous symptom of creative infantilism, since “to be a jolly eighteen-year-old Komsomolets all one's

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life with impunity for one’s poetic voice is impossible. 106 Ultimately, massoriented “Komsomol literature” was the literature of young beginner writers,

by definition unprepared for independent creative work. The problem lay in how to get beyond this state. Nonetheless, even the most perspicacious critics concluded that “Komsomol

literature” was organically incapable of “interpreting contemporary life,” the reason being that same old “horrible triteness ofthe literary devices with which dozens ofwriters represent analogous or closely related facts oflife.”'”” A closed circle was forming. Critics understood that “such literature—the literature of marionettes—is not needed by Komsomol nor by working-class youth.”'”* The Komsomol leadership also understood this: in its Central Committee Bureau's resolution “On Writers from Among Youth,” it spoke in the same vein about “sketchiness and lifelessness of heroes that are copied from a poster, rather than

from reality.”!° In passing, let us note that the question of whether perhaps a hero should not be “copied . . . from reality” at all did not even arise (for I have yet to address the issue of total realism). Besides the issues of youth and inexperience, however, there were also those of the means of organizing this literature and of the natural adaptability of the

“beginning writer” to it. Analyzing the minor genres of “youth prose” in the publications of the Young Guard, Pereval, and “Create!” from 1922 to 1925, a reviewer in Pechati revolutsiia writes:

Youth is not to blame for this contrivance: at work here is simply the law of majority influence, the traditional life of literature in the circles (and

now in groups). With their platforms and principles the groups pull the prose writer to a certain range of subjects, plots, and devices, exterminating everything that seems superfluous or alien to them. That they are far from joking about this is shown by the regulations of the Ekaterinoslav Young Smithy, wherein in point number 13 “members are forbidden to print their pieces in other publications without the permission of the chairman.”!'® Of course,

only the most gifted individuals are capable of not submitting to the opinion of the gross majority and going along their own actual way. But nonetheless this adjustment of a work to a preordained platform and formula has already bestowed a doubtful benefit upon youth prose. Mainly, it has sucked the living person—the author—out of it; instead of a writer who has lived the life of his heroes and is interesting for his personal feeling of life, a writer is developing who [only] describes, and what is even worse, a writer who discusses (more accurately, who retells newspaper editorials).'!!

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The organizers of “Komsomol literature,” however, pertise” in this situation. In the mid-20s, the RAPPist ary training” developed precisely in this milieu. For were more a center of “life building” than places for

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saw only a “lack of exinterpretation of “literProletkult, the studios the “creation of a new

writer (artist); but the RAPPists, already in their “Komsomol” stage, saw their

mission as precisely the creation of a new type of professional, beginning literally with the youth correspondent, upon whom Komsomol critics advised “focusing our central attention.” They saw the “growth of the Komsomol writer” as follows: “from the sketch to a more voluminous correspondence, and from correspondence to a small essay about a subject from daily life, all the while perfecting one’s style and reading the classics of literature,” and the like.!!

Komsomol poets themselves issued the call to “study” in verse: “Serdtse moe— zavod, / Mozg moi—rabfak, ucheba” (“My heart is a factory / My brain is the workers’ faculty, training”), “Uchis, uchis, ves razum svoi, / Vsiu moshch na mir

razbryzni. | I budesh’tymasterovoi / Razvertyvaiushcheisia zhizni” (“Study, study, splash all your mind / And all your might onto the world. / And you will be a workshop / Of developing life”). These were the invitations of Zharov, who

not being a professional critic, understood the aims of such “study” in a completely caricatured way, and thus advised the poet, waxing elegant, to “avoid holes in your work.”!'? “Yes,” the chief Komsomol poet lamented, “there are many such things that we have not yet mastered from Pushkin.”!"4 And in 1923 Trotsky was still calling for “mastery” when he addressed the Young Guardists on the occasion of their first anniversary: “The younger generation of writers is called upon . . . to study, develop, and elevate the expertise of writing. The young should write better than old men do. To study and learn this . . . is the aim of Young Guard.”!!? Lunacharskii, and even the Komsomol Central Committee, spoke of the same thing, demanding that Komsomol workers “organize literary training and assist in the improvement of the general and especially literary competency of the writing stratum of working-class and peasant youth—

youth correspondents.”17° “Study,” however, was reduced by the Komsomol critics to “mutual influ-

ence” within Young Guard itself. It was recommended that the young poets learn “richness of plot from Bezymenskii, the emotional tension of verse from Zharoy, economy of artistic means and maximum expressiveness from Utkin, and artistic simplicity and musicality from Doronin.”'”” This kind of “valuable advice,” which suggested that the appropriate clothing be taken from the “poetic wardrobe” of one or another poet, was not invented by Komsomol critics themselves—after all, the “masters of Komsomol poetry” themselves came out of others’ “overcoats”—Mayakovsky, Esenin, Kazin, Tikhonov, to say nothing

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of the “influence of the classics on Komsomol poetry,” which was expressed in, for example, Mikhail Iurin’s address to Pushkin: Kogda Oktiabr’ s Avrory bukhal, Zheg goroda, zhivykh liubia (?), V etu poru kraem ukha

Ne prikasalsia do tebia. [When October thundered from Aurora,

It burned up cities, loving the living, At this time it didn’t even Brush the edges of your ear.] But the civil war ended, and Iurin began to “lend an ear” to Pushkin. He called upon his colleagues to do likewise: Brosai aleiushchie dali I bol’she Pushkina chitai.'!®

[Throw off the crimson reaches And read more Pushkin. ] This was, however, the apex of mass “Komsomol literature,” since its over-

all level was (as one can conclude at least by the lines here cited) depressing.

Even Komsomol critics like Mikhail Bekker were forced to admit that “the Komsomol writer came into literature as a ‘dull, unremarkable teenager.’ His literary development was too meager. The range of his reading interests is extremely limited, wherein the first and fitting place [sic!—E.D.] was occupied by the rudiments of political literacy. . . . Artistic literature in his consciousness occupied the absolute last place.”''? Nonetheless, Bekker maintained, “It is not book(s] that make a person a professional—this is a secondary, even a tertiary|?!] thing. In the main, the professional writer should use his time for ac-

quainting himself with the material that is transformed into artistic images, that is, with life.”!7° Here the “problem of a worldview” arose. This was already the RAPPists’ area. Iurii Libedinskii taught the Komsomol poets that first and foremost “the artist should be a good Marxist. . . . It is necessary-that Marxism saturate the artist's entire inner essence, all his creative reflexes.”!?! This challenge was addressed to “literary youth,” but the “decadent” among the poets of the Young Guard were organically incapable of understanding it—the nurture of “creative reflexes” failed to work with them. Therefore, RAPPist doctrine was addressed to them in another of its aspects; not by chance did the debate about “restraint”

begin in the Young-Guardist press. When S. Berkovich wrote that Grigorii Lele-

;

ie /, A

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vich, when he called upon young writers to “at times sacrifice the sincerity of their poems” (this was a better way of saying “corrupt oneself and one’s readers’), was in fact pushing “the young generation of writers” into insincerity, into coercion of themselves and their writing,'” this was only the beginning of

many years of “skirmishes.” Lelevich continued to insist that works be “not only sincere, but also appropriate to the needs and interests of the class,” and that the “proletarian artist . . . is an artistic ideologist, an educator and inspira-

tion to his own class.” He viewed the situation thus: “Because of the failure of the romantically rebellious revolutionary spirit [the words were finally found— E.D.], one can observe—it still persists, to this day—a dangerous crisis in part of the younger proletarian literary generation.” Seeing a split between “thought” (which was “already saturated with the class features of the proletariat”) and the “subconscious” or “feeling” (“which still preserves the stamp of some other class or stratum [of the petty bourgeois, the lumpen proletariat, and so on]”), Lele-

vich maintained that by “feeling [or “knowing”?—£.D.] one’s duty to one’s class,” the young writer “will strive to make his attitudes and feelings, his work, agree with his convictions. He will work on himself, persistently reeducating himself, restructuring his psyche, stifling nonproletarian or antiproletarian in-

stincts and aspirations within himself.”!”? In this “Mozartian” (a curious parody of Pereval theory) act of creation, according to Lelevich, the “transcendence of

decadence” will occur. “Whoever cooks up bad little propaganda poems carelessly is committing a crime, Lelevich wrote. “But the crime is not that the poet undertook propaganda, but that he undertook it unconscientiously.”4 The “conscientious” au-

thor of “bad little propaganda poems” in Young-Guardist poetry was, as is well known, Zharov. But even his proponents were “put on their guard” by the presence in his poetry of a great quantity of “‘stormy flashes of lightning,’ ‘outbursts of worldwide fires,” by his “‘fiery daring’ . . . ‘rearing on his hind legs,’ and the like,” and admitted that “this produces an impression of artificial pathos, and leaves one cold.”'”’ Dissatisfaction spilled over into the Leningrad press (Smena [Successors] and Leningradskaia pravda [Leningrad truth]) in a

series of satirical articles by Tur, Olender, Gorelov, and Bleigardt, and the phenomenon acquired its corresponding denomination, “Zharovism” [zharovshchina]. The starting point was Bezymenskii’s good-natured characterization: “And Sasha Zharov dances the trepak in his lines.” In turn, Tur wrote: And really, Zharov does not stop dancing the srepak in all his poetic work: he breaks up a monotonously jolly and buoyant beat into lines up to the point of unconsciousness, nausea, and stupefaction. . . . If the zrepak is danced methodically and regularly day in and day out, on all the red-letter days, it

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is sometimes full of the insincere high spirits and cheerfulness of the

professional. Zharov dances solely and exclusively. He ceaselessly comes up with happy-go-lucky propaganda slogan tricks, and it is not surprising

that in his poems a natural dose of civic-minded optimism is accompanied by an enormous false expenditure of unconvincing drum-beating high spirits.

Bleigardt responded with a poetic parody: Akh, komsomol'tsy! Akh, rabfaki! Akh, Oktiabriu! Akh, Oktiabria! Ia vosklitsatel’nye znaki Za! kazhdym! slovom! stavliu! zria! [Oh, Komsomolians! Oh, workers’ schools!

October, ooh! October, ah! An exclamation mark I'll put "Twixt! every! word! just! ‘cause! | wanna!]

Of course the real issue had nothing to do with “sincerity.” Olender wrote, in direct reference to Zharov’s “Song of Metal” that I examined earlier, “All of these poems of Zharoy’s are sincere in their own way. I state this from an internal conviction.” The problem, it appeared, was in the “objective content of Zharov’s poetry.” And when Zharov’s defenders asserted that the poet must not be blamed for being “constantly jolly” or for the fact that “he looks at life cheerfully, happily, with joy, and the painful phenomena of reality surrounding him do not cloud his dreams or cause him to lose sleep,” and that such a person should be “envied,” the opponents of “Zharovism” insisted on readers’ and their own right to “lose sleep” and clearly did not envy Zharov’s “sound sleep” at all: “Just look at any of our newspapers,” wrote Tur, on the day of any anniversary, any event, any campaign, or any revolutionary holiday. Invariably you will find the little gray boxes with lines signed with the familiar surname typeset in the corner of a page. With the methodical utilitarian exactitude of a calendar that marks every event with a date in red, Zharov unfailingly accompanies every celebration with the standard magniloquence of a poem. Zharov in principle writes according to the calendar.

He is the calendar’s poet and knight. Without a moment’ thought, one could print Zharov’s poems on the back of the calendar’s pages alongside the menu [the diet recommended for the liturgical season— Trans.], like Sytin’s famous bits of calendar wisdom for each day.'°

The “calendar poetry” (or “poetic clichés,” to use Soviet criticism’s term) of the new age was nonetheless a serious aesthetic phenomenon: Zharov “fulfilled

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his duty to the class” in a (frequently) “professional” way, and (almost always) “sincerely”—in other words, in full accordance with the prescriptions of Lelevich and the later summons of Pereval. There was no “vise of preconceived form”'” in this, since the form itself was not a “vise”: Zharov’s “cteative act” was the act of blending “preconceived form” and “external ideology.” This type of unity delighted People’s Commissar of Enlightenment Lunacharskii, for example, in the works of Mark Kolosov: he called Kolosov “the most Komsomolian of all writers,” primarily because in his works one could see “the combination of an unconditional restraint—I would say programmatic restraint—and the most complete orthodoxy on the one hand with an indubitable liveliness and artistry on the other.”'** Here was something to be learned. But if one looks at Komsomol poetry from the Perevalist shore of literature, then a completely different landscape opens up: there is not even a trace of “unclouded joy’—everything is covered by “storm clouds” of problems. The warnings intended for “the tender young ones” could be heard even before the Young Guard was organized: a reviewer in the Petrograd journal Zhizn’ iskusstva watily observed, “We must remember one thing: conveying little bits of everyday life and of superficially assimilated prevailing ideologies is not the only way of reproducing contemporary life, and this should [be remembered] not only by us [but] also by those who will come after us.”!”” The drama of the situation,

however, lay in the fact that it was precisely among “the young” that a type of author was being shaped for whom conveying these “little bits” and “superficially assimilated” ideologies became the organic basis for creative work. “Pressure from without” only legitimized this kind of creation. Thus the matter stood with those who had “come after us.” These “arrivals” were by now tenuously connected with those who had lived through the era of the “break,” which had been most acutely evident in the “creative biography” of the Young Guard “decadents” who had not been able to “fulfill the demands of Komsomol criticism.” These demands could be reduced to approximately the following: “only a member of a Komsomol organization who can supplement the defects of his creative work with the appropriate credentials can be called a Komsomol writer”; “too-percent ideological restraint, which must be expressed in inexhaustible enthusiasm and the capability to celebrate any event mentioned in the newspapers in flowery [sic!] expressions”; and the writer must “take themes from Komsomol life, and their treatment therein must be exe-

cuted in the spirit of the appropriate directives.”!”° This picture is exaggerated. But the viewer on “the other shore” (of the same river of literature) was able to discern the profound internal collisions suffered by both “restrained” and “unrestrained” Young Guardists:

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They believed in the infallible rightness of the theoreticians and tried to take

in the latter's commands organically. The result was internal discord and stacks of emotionally colorless but nonetheless “orthodox” poems and stories. The result was writing “for the press” and “not for the press,” never mind that an author frequently becomes his real self precisely in his latest pieces. . . . Thus with the first attempt to squeeze living creative individuality into the

framework of the definition concocted by our critics, utterly lamentable results are obtained. In the first case the painstakingly created framework breaks down, and the hatching fledgling sets out swimming, despite the squawking of the frightened brood-hen critic. In the second, the ill-starred critic’s “creation of form” is crowned with the mutilated figure of the

unsuspecting writer; and finally, in the third, the small fry of the young generation of writers slithers out of the nets of that same critic who has this time been incarnated like before as an ill-starred fisherman. Under such

conditions, can one think about the necessity of defining Komsomol literature? What is more, can one think of the possibility of its existence?

Georgii Munblit, who posed these questions, admitted that “an affirmative reply .. . is impossible.” His conclusion: Komsomol literature does not exist at all, and there was “simply a young literature . . . and the best wish regarding it would be the wish to surpass the level of ‘Komsomol images and comparisons.””’*’ These critics whose “mothers sang Pereval songs” to them (as Bekker said) concluded that the call of the orthodox for “restraint” forced “the writer's perspective to be narrowed to the mediocre level of the reader” and impelled them to “advance the slogan of topical interest.”'** Nonetheless, the issue was different aesthetic agendas, since from the viewpoint of these “orthodox” critics, the “Pereval-speak” critics were approaching Komsomol poetry with traditional aes-

thetic standards, while their own challenge ran thus: One must understand the social-educational role of Komsomol literature, one must see something greater in it than a preparatory class for moving into the ranks of genuine artists of the word. The young literature that is called Komsomol literature is least of all a school for writers and most of all a form of the cultural growth of our youth. . . . The young author is essentially a potential cultured reader. This is his cultural ascent looking out from the scribblings of his naive works. This whole army that soils paper and expects an answer from the capital, this young army reaching out for culture, naturally sticks to the Komsomol press. For it, Komsomol literature is a way out and a hope. Komsomol literature thereby fulfills its nurturing organizational function.'*

This was the Proletkult agenda (as one can see, still alive in the mid-20s even within the RAPPist citadel of the Young Guard), but from precisely this

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agenda RAPPist aesthetics proper took its sources. For the optics to change completely, it was enough to see a “potential? writer instead of reader in the “scribblings.” This optics required an appropriate “creative behavior” that could come into literature only with the new “human material”; and RAPP undertook the preparation of this “material.” These had to be people who were not simply reconciled to the notion that “it’s better without legs” (as Shklovskii

said), but indeed people who no longer knew what it was like to have legs. The “path into literature” for such people showed forth “brightly, roughly, and visibly” in the pages of Komsomol criticism: The question arises for many Komsomol writers, “And what if my proletarian attitudes look insincere in my poetry?” Is it not better to write sincere works, although they may be decadent? It goes without saying that no one would oblige them by force to write in a proletarian way. But after all, the Komsomol writer has no right to forget the main thing: the influence of his work on the reader. Decadent poetry, despite all its sincerity, weakens the will of the reader, corrupts the reader, that is, it in fact does an antirevolutionary thing. Could a conscientious Komsomolian really reconcile himself to this? If a poet can write only decadent poetry sincerely, this means that too many old feelings are concealed in his bosom, it means that he is obliged to reforge his sentiments to the proletarian manner. If he is a conscientious Komsomolian,

of course, and not a master of déclassé literary things.'*

This “program of creation” is so “simple” that it makes one doubt its seriousness. But only at first glance can it appear to be without an intended recipient: it did have one, and that recipient was the same author of the “scribblings” who was being insistently “called to literature.” It was not terribly difficult for him (through the process of “lit training,” of course) to “reforge

his sentiments.” For this he only needed to be situated in a zone where he could be watched and controlled. Those who had never been in such a place had difficulty; but this was the natural milieu of the “novice.” This milieu needed only to be preserved: “Staving off decadent deviations in the Komsomolians’ work does not mean obliging them by force to write with restraint,

but rather staving off their break from the class. The Komsomol writer can leave his job only after he has grown in strength and stood firmly on his feet, both as a revolutionary and as an artist.” But even then, he “must not cut himself off within the narrow confines of literary doings [/iteraturshchina],” but must “grow . . . only by participating in the friendly collective work of the joint organizations of proletarian writers.”'” If he did not, the thing Bekker warned against could happen: “It could happen that our big-thinking poetprofessional would shout in Pushkin fashion “Get lost! What business do you

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have with a peaceful poet?’ when ‘the Central Committee demands a holy sacrifice! . , .”1%°

Evidently, the notion of “taming” the “big-thinking poet-professional” was supposed to be rejected outright. Thus the “antiprofessionalism” that lay at the heart of the RAPPist theory of creation and of the RAPPists’ “call of shockworkers into literature” was not a simple “transfer of Proletkult ideas into RAPP” (although assertion of this has become literally a “commonplace” in both

Western and Soviet literature about the 1920s); it was fed from completely different springs. For Proletkult, writers’ “professionalism” was a synonym for class

alienation or for breaking with the class; for RAPP, it was a synonym for ideological and technical independence (and in their paranoid “Party-mindedness,” also for political independence). The indicator of such independence was, to be sure, “decadence.” The Komsomol (RAPPist) critics chalked up this decadence

to “the influence of the fellow-travelers from the intelligentsia and pettybourgeois camps,” while not excluding the possibility that “such attitudes are capable of taking hold of part of the proletariat as well”: Such decadent attitudes (and they can be covered by various masks, from eroticism to “God-seeking” and “God-construction,” but nonetheless their social purport—the representation of the onslaught of capitalist principles,

capitulation to these principles, the effort to distract the proletariat from its class journey and to induce enfeebling attitudes within the proletarian ranks that undermine their will and energy—remains the same) are infiltrating artistic literature as well.'*”

They saw the “decadent poets” as just so many “vagrants” who “leave the broad road of revolution for some sort of settlement, and shut themselves up within the shell of personal experiences” and as “recluses . . . whose literary activities began during NEP. They were not in the factories, they have not smelled gunpowder. They have no cohesiveness with the proletarian community.”!** “Cohesiveness with the proletarian community” was also demanded by the Komsomol leadership, which saw “the fundamental task of Komsomol in the area of artistic literature” as “putting right the connection and greater participation in the work of organizing proletarian writers with beginning writers,

[and as] the struggle against their sectarian isolation and early break with industry”;'”” furthermore, “taking care not to overburden the writer,” it should

“expand his sociopolitical training and creative accountability... to the masses of readers.”!*° Finally, observing that some young writers were “losing their connection to the masses, being reborn and transformed into typical representatives of literary bohemia,” Komsomol’s Central Committee insisted that only “a constant tie to societal work and to the masses is the indispensa-

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ble prerequisite for productive creative work and the preservation of its classoriented aspect. »141 The “measures” the Committee suggested for the fight against “bohemianism” were, as can be seen, extremely organizational in nature: it suggested that the writers participate as actively as possible in “union work,” and that they defer “professionalization” as late as possible. It is obvious, however, that these “measures” were deliberately insufficient. But the internal fight against “decadence” was also unsuccessful. The attempt to “turn youth away” from Esenin was not a rousing success, even though it was led by “restrained Young Guardists” in an extremely active fashion.!” Bezymenskii, for example, stated that the “frightening number of suicides” could be explained by the fact that “against the backdrop of temporary economic difficulties, the attitudes of a part of the younger generation, and a certain confusion among youth not hardened in battle, Esenin—despite all his undoubted significance—is poison.” In his fight against “Eseninism” [esenin-

shchina], Bezymenskii called the critic who had “created a panegyric to Esénin’ (Fedor Zhits) a “condensed type of saboteur.”!* (Although Zhits was sin-

gled out here, a great number of such books, brochures, and articles were published after Esenin’s suicide.) As a sort of prophylaxis, Lunacharskii recommended “firstly . . . developing cultural-educational work,” “secondly .

raising the general cultural level of our masses” (evidently based on the lack of culture and consciousness of those shooting and hanging themselves), and .

“making wide use of physical education.”! In all of this there was no lack of understanding of the situation, but rather the impossibility of fighting it and the unwillingness to see its roots (particularly in the “creative milieu”). “Decadence” did not arise because of “temporary

economic difficulties.” It was simply that the creative personality was not prepared to work under the suggested regime. The “straitjacket” of RAPPist aesthetics could “raise up” the “decadent,” but it could not return his poetic voice

to him. RAPP’s choice was made. The Young Guard showed that relying on “available creative youth” was a mistake. But in politics as in science, a negative

result is no less important than a success. More than that, it is the “guarantee

of success.” When all the young writers that were to any degree creatively productive renounced the “restrained” Young Guardists and Onguardists, the litterateur-functionaries had only “the masses” left to appeal to. They had to start literally at zero to gather their “army of poets.” Their “theoretical basis” for this was that, as everyone knew after all, “literature was never created by the mania of individual geniuses”: “Behind the splendid chariot that carried the chosen artists followed whole columns of second-rate and third-rate writers... . The literature of our times has more than ever before a mass-oriented

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character.”'4° The Onguardists understood this “state of affairs” perfectly: being the leaders of these “columns of second-rate and third-rate writers,” they were able to decide for themselves whom the “splendid chariot” would carry. They needed only create their own “mass literary organization.” And they certainly did not lack organizational experience. As I have pointed out, the revolutionary theories of creation were never simply aesthetic programs: they were born out ofliterary practice itself. One can definitely assert that the RAPPist “aesthetics of restraint” were born out of the necessity of holding the creative personality within the confines of an “external ideology” interpreted not as a personal understanding of the world, but indeed as a “worldview” provided from without and changing according to an impersonal agenda. In revolutionary culture, this collision first arose in connection with the coup of the Smithy. The Young Guard was created specifically as a counterbalance within “proletarian literature,” and within it the “aesthetics of restraint” were molded into a “theory of creation” proper. In fact, RAPP-

ist doctrine became an answer to the coup that had occurred (but now within the Young Guard).

If the RAPPists contrasted their aesthetics to those of the fellow-travelers, it was not at all intended to influence the latter (RAPP more often spread its in-

fluence, as is well known, “along organizational lines”). On the contrary, when they promoted the slogan “Ally or Enemy”'*° on the eve of their breakup, they demonstrated their devotion to confrontation. In general they understood “influence” to be subordination and therefore almost always resorted to “means of

persuasion” for their most serious tactical aims. The RAPPists rejected the established term “fellow-traveler” because the categories of “Ally” and “Enemy” were more appropriate to their strategy of expansion. Therefore it is necessary

to approach RAPPist “aesthetics” with prophylactic caution. It is not even proper to speak of doctrine in this regard, but rather of political slogans

changed by the Onguardists and Onlitguardists with incredible alacrity and a complete lack of principles. Any lack of principles is a sign of politics. Politics excludes any principles that contradict the principles of sovereignty. Thus the reason for the Onguardists’ fight against Voronskii was to be found only in their aspiration toward power in literature. Absolutely no outside principles should be taken into account here: they were nothing more than “slogans of the day,” for RAPP was a political party in literature, not a “literary group.” “Aesthetics” for the RAPPists, who always remained Party functionaries, were (to paraphrase Lenin’s famous definition) the “concentrated expression of politics.” In their fight with Voronskii, the Onguardists would now hasten to unite with LEF (even up to the extent that Osip Brik led seminars for beginning

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writers in the Young Guard), now go and make peace with the Smithy. Voron-

skii was their only real opponent, not at all because of his aesthetic views (the RAPPists appropriated much from Pereval’s aesthetic agenda), but because he

held power. The fall of Voronskii in 1927 meant the almost automatic “hegemony” of RAPP. So the logic of change in RAPPist “principles” was always subordinated to the strategy ofseizing, maintaining, and expanding power.

Indeed, the birth of the real Party-minded writer/functionary took place within RAPP, and this is not to be considered a “proletarian episode in Russian literature,” nor a private “variation on the path,” but rather a genuine “conformity to natural historical laws” of the function of art under the revolution-

ary conditions of the age. One need only “look around” to be convinced of this. At the end of 1926 (with a ready model to follow) the literary organization Molodniak (Youth) was formed in Ukraine by “Komsomol writers”; it united

provincial youth in the capital. The twenty-four-year-old “Komsomol poet” Pavlo Usenko (a Party member since 1925) would become its head (he was also editor of the journal called Molodniak). In a few months VUSPP (The AllUkrainian Union of Proletarian Writers) was organized: it was the “Ukrainian

RAPP,” one of whose leaders was Usenko himself, and Molodniak was trans-

formed into the “youth branch” of VUSPP. The process of internal breakdown of the “proletarian” and “Komsomol” literatures in Ukraine was completely the same as in Russia, and the struggle between VUSPP and Vaplite in fact repeated the RAPP/Pereval collision. In 1923 the Central Committee of Belorussian Komsomol formed the Maladniak (Youth) literary union, to which it turned over its own journal under the

same name. Then the process of internal breakdown familiar from Russian literature began: the Uzvyshsha group (a sort of Belorussian Pereval) was formed in 1926; Polymia in 1927; and based on Maladniak (rather, on what remained of it), in 1928 the Belorussian Association of Proletarian Writers (BelAPP) was cre-

ated, swallowing up “Komsomol literature” and breaking up its version of Krasnaia Nov-—the journal Uzvyshsha. The “arrangement of creative and political forces” was the same—the only difference was that in the Ukrainian and Belorussian literatures, both “restraint” and the “organic quality” rested on the issue of national identity.'”” Let us return, however, to the RAPPist aesthetics born in the “October” and

Young Guard groups. These aesthetics always had two sides: an outer “polemical” side (aimed against political adversaries), and an inner, “constructive” side. The latter was not usually taken into account, since it was not literary polemic that was built according to it, but rather RAPP’s practice in the shaping of the new writer. This “constructive” side did not exert a perceptible influence on

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the literature of the revolutionary era itself, and therefore it was not taken to be an important step toward Soviet—postrevolutionary—literature in the strict-

est sense. In this respect, the Young Guard is a key to understanding both RAPPism and Perevalism: in it, the breakdown of the projected creative organics took place. The Smiths’ “organic creativity” came into conflict with the “demands of life” (that is, of power). The reason was the absence of a “time mechanism,”

their concentration on “ideals,” which did not allow them to keep pace with “the quickly fleeting day.” Authority was faced with the necessity ofcreating a Party-minded “literary organization.” But the Young Guard broke down (following the earlier scheme, but within a new institutional framework) into two opposing poles—the “time mechanism” (Party-mindedness) remained within RAPP, and “organic creation” within Pereval. Subsequently the struggle be-

tween what was in fact the two halves of one and the same doctrine unfolded. It goes without saying that in such a disassociated state, the creative process was impossible. It was in just this situation that the RAPPists realized that the “aesthetics of servility” they had proposed could become a working instrument only for a literature and a “type of litterateur” that were fundamentally new. They ran into serious obstacles in the fellow-traveler milieu—and not a little time and effort was required to have the fellow-travelers arrive at the “restraint” that was demanded (and this was with difficulty, each fellow-traveler coming to this in his own way, through a profound internal evolution and crises—and this was not the full “restraint” needed, nor did all the fellow-travelers make this journey). As revolutionaries, the RAPPists did not know how to wait, nor could they. Meanwhile, this “fellow-travelers’ milieu” continuously evolved within “proletarian literature” itself. Perhaps more fully than anything else, the Young Guard demonstrated the “horror of aimlessness” of revolutionary culture. But the paths leading out of the “crisis of the creative personality” are no less clearly visible. The Young Guard proved (as an institution organized by authority) that the “creative personality” is not suitable for Party-minded literature without serious “reworking” (and often this reworking was of no avail): to paraphrase Dmitrii Gorbov, one may say that the “time mechanism” is removed from the author only in conjunction with the capability to create literature. The remak-

ing of this “mechanism” was undertaken by Pereval (succeeding very little in this, by the way, since “more decisive measures” were required). RAPP chose a different strategy—reliance on the “writer from the masses.” Here, of course, was the direct connection with Proletkult plans, but with

RAPP’s vested interests, the idea of the “writer from the masses” acquired a

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completely new meaning. There were many talented young people in Proletkult who, in spite of the mass-minded fantasies of Proletkult ideologists, were independent and therefore creatively productive. And out of Proletkult came the Smithy—an entire group of independently thinking poets (they must be credited with this, no matter what one thinks of their creative work) who were

able to assert even their own poetic style in a short time. The role of Proletkult in the history of Soviet theater and film in general can hardly be overestimated. Creative work that was primarily revolutionary and political, but not

Party-minded, developed in Proletkult. RAPP (and the closely akin Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia and Russian Association of Proletarian Music) was an entirely different matter: it in fact let loose a mechanism of negative selection in aspiring to create “a new type of creative personality” (as op-

posed to Proletkult, which as yet did not know “the schizophrenia of creation and conscience”). The only product of RAPP was the throngs of “shockworkers called into literature’—and for a half-century they remained in it as Socialist Realist “engineers of human souls” and “masters of Soviet literature.” The traces of this marginality and vacillation—between reader and writer— remained so in Soviet literature, preserving the everlasting charm of its populist character forever.

CHAPTER

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Between the Reader and the Writer The “Masses Literary Movement” and Mass Soviet Literature The lively creativity of the masses—this is the basic factor of

the new community. =—=LEN

IN

Just let there be people— Art will follow... — MAYAKOVSKY, “To That Side” (“Toi storone”), 1918

In the Absence ofa Rider

There is a story about how at a public appearance in the early 1920s, Viktor Shklovskii represented contemporary Russian literature in a parable: I went to a carrier's yesterday, and his old nag could hardly drag itself. “But what kind of—?!” I said. “What do you mean? At home I've got a nag, and what a nag it is! Dappled. A beauty!” “So why don’t you harness it?” “Well, I don't have a decent rider for it.”!

Need I say that the literary struggle of the 1920s was a struggle for the right to be called the rider? Like all transitional eras, the revolutionary era was one of new definitions and large-scale renamings. Prominent among its most important sociopsy-

chological types was undoubtedly the impostor, whose posturing in the process of establishing Soviet culture can hardly be overestimated. “The era is not judged by its colossi. ... The era is judged according to the ensuing era,” it has been said about the literature of the 1920s.* The era that followed, the 180

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truly Soviet era, brought a new type of writer. The drama of the situation in the first half of the 1930s, the time of “restructuring of literary-artistic organizations,” can be defined as the painful process of /egitimization of the writer

and of the new type ofliterature. The disbanding of the literary groups and the creation ofa unified state-run Union ofSoviet Writers pursued only this goal. Remember, however, that the famous “disbanding” in 1932 meant almost exclusively the disbanding of RAPP: beginning with the second half of the 1920s

(particularly 1928 onward), the breakdown process of the literary infrastructure was marked by the polarization “RAPP versus fellow-travelers.” The literary struggle of the 1920s was a struggle for the right to be called writers, a right that was particularly esteemed and sought-after in literature-centric Russian, and later Soviet, culture.

Clearly, this struggle was initiated primarily by the “proletarian writers” themselves. Being in no condition to compete with the fellow-travelers on the

literary market, they in their struggle for a place in literature could rely only on an organization. The search for organizational structures ended in the mid-20s with the creation of RAPP. It would be false, however, to regard this “association” as simply one of the 1920s “literary groups.” In discussions about RAPP, most often attention is devoted to its platforms, “creative slogans,” intolerance,

and the like. But RAPP was primarily a network of literary circles at the periphery, organizationally united according to Party principles—with its bureaucracy, “secretariat,” leaders, leadership conferences, obligatory resolutions on “creative and organizational issues,” and so forth (indeed, the organizational

structure of the future Union of Soviet Writers developed here). In fact, RAPP picked up the ownerless “circles” that were left after the fall of Proletkult.

When the organizational meeting of the Federation of Unions of Soviet Writers (FOSP) was held on January 5, 1927, in Hertzen’s House, the AllRussian Writers’ Union brought 360 members, the All-Russian Union of Peasant Writers (VSKP) brought 750, and RAPP brought . . . 4,000 members! Shortly afterward, the members of the Smithy and LEE which were not numerous, also joined FOSP. All of RAPP’s activities within FOSP were aimed at

seizing and subordinating the printing and publishing “workerizing” the other members of FOSP (the first to RAPP were the peasant writers). Without going into the ganizational “measures” taken by this proletarian writers’

establishments and be subordinated to “nuances” of the orassociation, we will

however ask ourselves: just who were these 4,000 writers? Where did this over-

whelming number come from? The Young Guard already had a network of literary “daughter” groups locally. The same can be said of “Workers’ Spring,” which was organized by the

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editors of the Rabochaia Moskva (Working-class Moscow) newspaper.’ The same type of literary circle was organized as “Vagranka” (“Cupola”) as an affiliate of the Rogozhsk-Simonov District Committee, in Serpukhoy it was “Rabochee tvorchestvo” (“Workers’ creativity”), “Rabochaia vataga” (“Workers’ band”) in Tula, and the same occurred in Minsk, Poltava, and in many of the

country’s other cities. The union of the dispersed and therefore weak forces into an association would not have given the desired result, however, if the

Onguardists had not obtained Party support. The fight for the “Party line in literature” that accompanied the process of organizational consolidation of

RAPP cannot be understood outside the context of the patently corporative interests (and often purely economic ones as well) of the new social elites that participated in this fight. Iakov Shafir’s article “The Problem of the Author” (“Avtorskaia problema’)

was published by the library journal Knigonosha (Book-bearer) in 1926. The viewpoint of this famous expert on readers is particularly interesting because it is a view “from the sidelines.” The article began with the statement, “Authors

as people who occupy themselves in writing as a specialty have disappeared from among us,” since in the existing situation “no one would take up writing

books as a specialty... . Writing is not profitable. It gives no opportunity to survive.” The reasons, the author insisted, were purely economic: At the present time, an author, if he is a family man, must on the average do no less than 3 quires a month (just think—write 3 quires a month!) in order

to have the possibility of just barely surviving. Such an author cannot even think about taking a breather. He cannot stop for even a minute, for such a break threatens him with hunger. Authorship has ceased to be reliable. Since on the other hand it is still connected to a series of “duties” [that is, taxes— E.D,] as regards the People’s Commissariat of Finances, it is quite under-

standable that an overwhelming number of specialists have rejected this thankless occupation. Thus writing has become a kind of seasonal work that they are occupied with in the odd moment, when there is nothing to do. This disappearance of specialist-writers and the appearance of numerous amateur writers and dilettantes bodes much ill for us.*

When he touched on books to suit the “masses’ demands,” and accordingly about the “masses’ writer,” the author suggested changing the honorarium policy. This kind of economic detail of the “literary environment” rarely surfaces. Meanwhile, the problem of the “masses’ writer” remained one of the most urgent. There is nothing surprising in the fact that it was a reader expert in particular who began to “sound the alarm”: against the backdrop of library shelves emptied as the result of epidemic library “cleansings,” the problem of filling

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the lacunae of the “masses’ demands” for the “masses’ books” was truly alarming to not only the library community but to the “reader community” as well. The consumer's viewpoint, however, suffers from a certain limitation: the reader has nothing to do with how the honorarium policy should be changed;

he is not permitted to determine precisely which writer groups have the right to count on state support, which promises them a high social status. Since

these problems least of all concerned the relatively small number of hugely successful fellow-travelers, and most of all the mass of unreadable “proletarian

writers,” it is clear that RAPP’s “literary struggle” for ideals was only an ideological veil that concealed—and sometimes did not even attempt to conceal— the socioeconomic in¢erests of the “proletarian writers” caste. This struggle had no other hidden agenda. Suffice it to recall that the leaders of the opposition group Smithy had from the beginning insisted that “the first condition for the successful development of proletarian literature is the organization of proletarian writers, their cohesion,” and that “the second condition for the successful development of proletarian literature is the necessity of our comrades’ having free time, relaxation,

for literary work.” Stated even more clearly, “We must finally definitively pose and resolve the question of recalling all the literary forces of the proletariat from all areas of work except literature.”’ The issues, as one can see, are totally “organizational,” or more precisely, economic (who would finance this “recalling”?). The Smiths were in no condition to resolve them, however, being op-

posed to Party policy and therefore unable to rely on state support. RAPP took this task upon itself.

RAPP took up the struggle for recognition and “hegemony,” not in literature, but rather in the political arena. The attacks on the fellow-travelers made

by the journal Na postu beginning in 1923 had a single goal: discreditation of any “extra-Party literature” in the eyes of the Party leadership (at this time, the Onguardists dragged Lenin’s article “Party Organization and Party-minded Literature” out of its twenty-year oblivion). But since the Central Committee's position on literature was not unanimous, the leaders of RAPP, since they were

Party functionaries, found themselves dragged into the intra-Party struggle. Already at that time, the beginning of the 1920s, the first target turned out to be the still all-powerful Trotsky. The complaints of proletarian literature’s leaders against the ardent champion of the “worldwide Commune” boiled down to the same basic accusations later leveled against Trotsky on the part of Stalin: just as Trotsky did not believe in “socialism in one country,” he did not believe in “proletarian literature.” Citing V. Popov-Dubovskoi, Trotsky stated that “proletarian poetry is not in the Smithy but in the factories’ wall-newspapers

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with their nameless authors.” “But still,” he continued, “this is not proletarian literature, but only the written expression of the molecular process of the proletariat’s cultural ascent. . . Workers’ correspondents, local poets, and exposé writers are carrying out a great cultural work in tilling the soil and preparing it for the future crop. But the authentic cultural and artistic harvest will be by then—fortunately!—socialist, and not ‘proletarian.’”” Trotsky based himselfon the evident (although unacceptable to his opponents) position that “inferior

verses, and the more so illiterate verses, do not create proletarian poetry, for they do not create poetry at all... . They say ‘Give us something of our own, native, even if it is clumsy.’ This is false and misleading. Clumsy art is not art, and consequently, workers do not need it.” Trotsky blamed the Proletkultists because “they fictitiously pull the cultural future into the narrow framework of the present day, they falsify perspectives, destroy proportions . . . and cultivate a most dangerous circle-oriented arrogance.” In the “abrupt ‘class’ gesticulation” of the Smithy he also observed “attitudes of the closed intelligentsia little world, circle, and little school.”° During the course of the conference organized by the Press Department of the Central Committee in May 1924, in which all the belligerents clashed, Trot-

sky amplified his criticism of proletarian literature. Returning to the “history of the Bolshevik press,” he declared that the “helpless” prerevolutionary proletarian poems were only “very important and meaningful cultural-historical documents”: The workers’ poems in Zvezda and Pravda still by far do not signify the rise of a new, proletarian literature. The unartistic doggerel of the Derzhavin and pre-

Derzhavin styles cannot in any way be considered new literature. . . . These revolutionary poems were a political fact, not a literary one. They did not promote the growth of literature, but rather the growth of the Revolution.”

Characteristically, the participants in the discussion, refraining from appraisals, laid emphasis on something else: “Our new writer is coming from the worker-peasant lower strata, from workers, from various other organizations, from the universities, and from the Red Army,” proclaimed Aleksandr Voronskii, who was a patron of the fellow-travelers. “The writer is coming from some

kind of godforsaken places, from the provinces—this writer is connected to the worker and the peasant by his blood and his way of life. . . . That this writer will undoubtedly occupy the main place, that we must orient ourselves to him and help him, about this we have no disagreements with the proletarian writers.”* But the Onguardists spoke up for these “godforsaken places”: it would only be possible to “use the fellow-travelers . . . if the Party will rely on its own Party

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group in literature. We need a communist cell. We need a Bolshevik faction in

literature. The group of proletarian writers is-just such a cell, just such a communist faction,” Ilarion Vardin argued.” He was seconded by then-editor of Na postu Grigorii Lelevich:

Proletarian literature is not a little heap nor a little group, it is a broad moveof the lower strata—of workers’ ment of the masses. The proletarian hives faculties, factories and plants, the Red Army, and regional and other literary circles—this is an enormous source of creative forces. If we only had them, only these masses’ embryos, we would still be strong. But besides them, we have a rank of proletarian master-writers that have come forth, and the Party undoubtedly has someone to orient itself to.!° “We have from among mol masses,” being tied to

organized, we stand at the head of a great movement growing the lower strata, we are tied to the working masses, the KomsoAleksandr Bezymenskii, head of the Young Guard, asserted. “And these masses, we can serve as a driving belt [privodnyi remen’] for

the Party, who [we— Zrans.] will acquire for the Party fresh literary forces that look at the world with the eyes of the proletarian avant-garde.”'!

A complete agenda was unfolded before the participants of this Central Committee conference by future RAPP leader Leopold Averbakh: The birth process of the proletarian writer is qualitatively different from the forms in which artists earlier appeared. He does not simply appear individually from somewhere, but can and does grow from the widespread proletarian literary movement, for we consider writers’ organizations to be the link of the chain that the workers’ correspondents have begun. Based on Lenin’s position on the era of cultural revolution, I assure you that the circle of beginning working-class writers is much more important than talented writers . . who have appeared individually.

The rejection of the old liberal-populist tradition of bringing out “natural talents” can be explained as the requirement to reserve the role of nurturer for oneself:

We do not regard the process of writers’ appearing as something that takes place unexpectedly and without our participation. No, this is not simply a haphazard process. .. . We can and must contribute, create the circumstances, surround working-class writers with the necessary atmosphere,

influence them, and to a certain extent—we have the publishers, press,

and so on—define the discovery of new writing.

Averbakh remarked on the strategy of the future RAPP: “We can corrupt it [the circle of bourgeois writers—E£.D.], on the condition that we create our

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own writers, rely on our own writers’ organizations.” And further: “Extreme significance lies in . . . organization of writers, for only through organization, and not by individual influence, can we carry on communist work.”!?

The “organization of writers” that the Onguardists suggested to the Party was supposed to unite all writers and all writers’ groups into VAPP, having assumed control of them. And although this did not transpire in the mid-20s, as is well known, Vardin insisted: “Our watchword is not dictatorship of VAPP, but dictatorship of the Party in the area of literature. And it is VAPP that can

become the instrument of this dictatorship.” And in order to make it clear just how this “dictatorship” was to be realized, Vardin declared: “To the extent that here, in this area, we are waging a war, a literary Cheka is essential for us. Comrades, this must be understood.” RAPP’s position was indeed “understood”: although the RAPPists were

suggesting to the Party an organization for the “seizure” of literature (4,000 people from all the “godforsaken places”), the goal was not to suppress the fellow-travelers, but “to attract them to our side.” For this reason, the Central

Committee’s 1925 resolution “On the Policy of the Party in the Area of Artistic Literature,” which recognized “proletarian literature” as the most desired literature, reserved freedom of choice for the Party in the “literary struggle” (a

side effect of this resolution was the crisis within RAPP itself, which ended

with a change of its leadership). Remember, however, that the concept of “literary struggle” conceals the fundamental meaning ofwhat was happening: the

issue was political struggle in literature, a struggle for power. The advantage in this struggle, without a doubt, ended up with RAPP, whose historical role as the fundamental bridge that led from revolutionary culture to Soviet culture has nonetheless gone unrecognized to this day. Entranced by the richness and colorfulness of the revolutionary-era aesthetic programs, and with the novelty of the literature engendered by this era, contemporary researchers have unfortunately rarely felt what Veniamin Kaverin wrote about quite accurately as early as the 1960s: I leafed through the three-year set of the journal Na literaturnom postu (1928-1930). In our time this is reading that is rare in piquancy and striking.

A threat is constantly felt. Literature is dissected as if along an arc inside which some kind of other, imaginary, RAPPist literature is asserted and exalted. Some people are occupied with molding of enemies, others with caressing of friends. But yesterday's friend is instantly transformed into a mortal enemy, if he steps across the magic arc whose borders are occasionally erased and again incised with new proofs of their immutability. The journal is riddled with hatred. Another force that is imperceptibly

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chained on is envy, utterly horrible because they do not acknowledge it, but on the contrary hotly denounce it. A great number of names that flashed by barely remembered, that now are forgotten forever, were fit for a model ofliterature. Others are sentenced, and the sentences carried out. Blok is condemned for “the lack of a conscious bond with the collective” (I. Grossman-Roshchin).

Among the suspect who disappointed hopes and are undeserving of trust is Mayakovsky. . . While reading Na literaturnom postu, | asked myself where this suspicion and zeal came from. What inspired this dangerous game with the literature that had novelty in its blood, that was psychologically connected with the Revolution and developed correctly and quickly? The possibility of seizing power, the dizzying temptation, which is, incidentally, spoken of in the

journal's pages with a businesslike logic, which now seems a bit laughable."

One must keep in mind, however, that the “dizzying temptation,” which soon turned into the “dizziness of success,” was handed down to RAPP from those same offices of the Central Committee’s Press Department where the idea of FOSP was born, an idea that created the conditions necessary for control over the progress of the “literary struggle.” Logically, step by step, RAPP corrupted FOSP, subordinating practically all the literary groups and publications to itself. RAPP could not, however, have realized its role in the “seizure”

of literature right on through the 1932 “restructuring” if it simply had been a “literary group.” RAPP was more than anything else a “mass literary movement’ that took on the functions of defending, propagandizing, and reproduc-

ing Party-minded literature, functions that neither Proletkult nor the Smithy had been able to carry out before the RAPPists. Professional writers soon felt,

as Marietta Shaginian said, “the pressure of the personal weight of qualitatively new masses of people on the total weight of every thing they created.” Shaginian stated that in this process, the meaning of the most widespread word of those times, “assimilation” [osvoenie], became clear to her for the first time.’

Literature was “assimilated” by the RAPPist “four thousand.” Indeed, it became clear that the Smithy was simply an “association of proletarian writers,” while RAPP was the real “smithy” in which Party-minded literature was forged. Already, one could read in a resolution of the First All-Union Congress of Proletarian Writers: VOAPP in its ranks unites proletarian writers with different qualifications from

the viewpoint of literary expertise [masterstvo], believing that the existence of a united proletarian literary movement has an extremely great significance for the

development of the international literature of the working class. The organic

bond between professional and beginning proletarian writers is essential to

both. .. . The growth of proletarian writers must take place in forms qualitatively different from that of the former individualistic competition.'°

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Such democratism in a 4,000-member writers’ organization assured “professional proletarian writers” a leading place in literature and “beginners” their chance at existence in it. This mutually beneficial union was fully appreciated by

authority. This union was subjected to rather cynical analysis in a special article in the Central Committee’s theoretical journal Bolshevik by the same PopoyDubovskoi to whose earlier article in Pravda (on February 10, 1923) Trotsky had referred in his Literature and Revolution. This latter article, “Artistic Literature and the Working-Class Writer” (“Khudozhestvennaia literatura i rabochii pisatel”), was published a year after the Central Committee’s 1925 resolution. Popov-Dubovskoi recognized that basing literary policy only on “cadre writers” meant “losing the revolutionary perspective,” and that “the most important factor is the reserves for the growth of literary cadres’"—primarily proletarian and peasant writers. But he observed that when we speak of working-class writers, then we primarily mean the manythousand mass that is still in the process of advancing out of the mass of workers correspondents. . . . This half-workers’-correspondent “lower strata” mass is the reserve and nutrient medium for the next working-class writers’ detachment that is constantly being filled from the “lower strata.”

This was where both the “masses’ working-class writers” and the “cadres of our journalistic and book literatures having the rights of real writers” (that is, the “proletarian writers” in the proper sense) were coming from. Having analyzed this social stratum, Popov-Dubovskoi concluded: “When the Onguardists strove to ‘seize power,’ first and foremost to seize the journals and technical apparatus of literature, they strove to gain support from this second, massive segment of working-class writers.” But why did these 4,000 writers support the Onguardists? “Because the working-class writers of this category face the urgent question,” answered Popov-Dubovyskoi, “of where to get printed. The Onguardists told them that as soon as they had taken the journals into their own hands. . . they would allow working-class writers in them. How could they not support them? After all, no one else was promising anything, and there was really nowhere else to get into print. They were not allowed in the general journals, and they had none of their own.” Thus the “hidden agenda” of the aesthetic struggles is revealed. Popov-Dubovskoi maintained that the issue to be raised was “not that of working-class writers’ taking over the existing journals, but of organizing [new] working-class journals for the masses.” Formulating the goal of “winning away the mass of working-class writers” from the Onguardists, Popov-Dubovskoi asserted that the latter were “fundamentally distorting the issue of the working-class writer” by starting out from

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their own “group interest’—the transformation of this writer into a professional one: “the wholesale ‘promotion’ of working-class writers, that is, the policy of making specialist writers out of working-class writers by mechanical means,” or “the Onguardist philanthropists’ activity in drawing the poor working-class writers from ‘the lower strata’ to ‘the top,’ into a writers’ heaven” was condemned as

one of the worst kinds of Onguardist demagoguery, a particularly harmful business that introduces unhealthy aspirations and corruption into workingclass writer circles. We have seen rather few natural talents, and separating the young working-class writers from their own milieu often transforms them into helpless writers who feed not on the living juices of the old culture, but on its scraps, and have nothing of their own. The author closed with a challenge: “It is time to bring our working-class writer into the general system of our literature.”!” This challenge, however, remained unanswered. No one but RAPP wanted to concern themselves with

the “army of poets”: only the Onguardists’ interests coincided with those of “the masses’ working-class writer,” and, therefore, they brought this writer into

the “system of our literature” as they understood it. In the consciousness of RAPP’s leaders, Party functionaries, the “system of

literature” was parallel to that of Party organization. Indeed, they thought in the categories of Party-cadre nomenclature, as proclaimed in RAPPist resolutions: The general rise of the movement, new tasks, the call to shock-workers—

all this imposes an enormous demand on the cadres of leaders on the most varied scale, from the lower-level circle-leader to the secretary of the association (i.e., RAPP). Nonetheless, at present RAPPist organization is

clearly experiencing the condition of a painful gap between the growing demands of the movement on the one hand, and the availability of cadres on the other. Such a situation is explained firstly by the lack of a united general plan, meticulously developed and systematically brought to life, for preparing cadres, and secondly, by an insufficiently bold and systematic promotion of the lower-strata RAPPist, and of shock-workers called into literature, into leadership work."* Averbakh, disturbed by “the segment of writers who cannot conceive of the

tasks of socialist construction, and who flee from literature into ordinary cul-

ture-mongering in factories,” suggested that “some of the writers should be allotted [sic] for work in libraries, and we should have done with dealing with them as writers [?!].”!°

In order to be managed this way (“allotted” like furniture), the “literary cadres” had to be of an appropriate type. The fellow-travelers in the 1920s, for

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example, would not submit to this type of management. This is why Aleksandr Fadeev would insistently state at RAPP’s second plenary session in 1929: “No serious Bolshevik can come to the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers and say that the ideological hegemony of proletarian literature can be achieved without including the basic cadres of the industrial proletariat in the cadres of proletarian literature.””° A year later, at a LAPP conference, he would repeat: “It is harmful to think that the intelligentsia will create the literature of the working class. . . . The hegemony of proletarian literature can be achieved,

and it can be won over, only when the considerable cadres of the industrial proletariat merge into proletarian literature.”*! The “class purism” of the Onguardists is not, of course, the issue here. Reliance on the illiterate workers’ correspondents and litcircleists “from the factories” provided the “Onguardist leadership” with that governable mass whose interests the RAPPists expressed, in whose name they acted in gaining (quite successfully, by the way) “hegemony in literature.” The explosive hybrid of “class ambition” and “unsatisfied authorial ambition” in the authors of the “doggerel of Derzhavin and preDerzhavin style” was the “fountainhead” from which the literature of rankand-file “Soviet writers” poured out. The Onguardists understood well that, in the words of Aleksei Surkov, “only from human material possessing these qualities can the cadres of writers who will pull proletarian literature up to the level of the tasks of the reconstructive period grow.”** The new type of writer was born here, and therefore the RAPPist critic was finally correct: “The new writers, not infrequently taking to the pen for the first time, have accomplished in literature a shift of historic significance.”** Besides “new cadres,” “organization” was also needed: the “loner fellowtraveler” was hardly subject to being managed. Therefore the RAPPists continued to insist that “the solitary writer, creating ‘by inspiration from above,’ tearing himself away from the life of his class, and inventing his works ‘in the

quietness of the study,’ is not the one we need... . Our association should cleanse itself of such people, and it must grow and strengthen with genuine proletarian writers.”** The new wave of the “powerful surf”? not only swept up RAPP but also, inevitably, turned it into a sort of “ministry of literature.” During the usual “restructuring,” RAPP secretary Ivan Makar’ev in a fit of “self-criticism” characterized the association’s work thus: In recent times we have begun to turn into a sort of Glaviskusstvo.”° Take, for example, the meeting of the RAPP secretariat. This is not a meeting of the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment’s board, nor anything like it. . . . There are a great number of issues we could simply not discuss, because the

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appropriate Soviet organizations should deal with these issues... . We are asked for instructions and circulars. . . . Just what kind ofinstructions and circulars is not clear... . RAPP is turning into a sort of department for art

affairs, . . . we have gradually begun to turn into a sort of people’s commissariat. ... We must remember well that RAPP is not‘ah organization with all sorts of divisions, subdivisions, bureaucratic offices, and so on, RAPP is a social organization.”’

This speech was heard at one of RAPP’s last plenary sessions, more than half a year before the “restructuring of literary-artistic organizations” that resulted in the creation of the Union of Soviet Writers. Everything that Makar’ev said about RAPP would be repeated almost verbatim in reference to the Union of Soviet Writers in the course of its entire half-century history, and especially in the era of perestroika. This “intertextuality” was engendered by the profound similarities of structures and of the “human material” from which these structures were created. The cultural and historical goal of RAPP in shaping this new “human material” reflected the overall goals of cultural revolution: “The watchword of cultural revolution,” wrote Averbakh, “reflects the peculiarities of the form in which the proletariat assumes the ownership of culture as a class unable to culturally ‘mature’ in the conditions of bourgeois society.””* This meant especially that not only would a “reeducation of the masses in the spirit of the proletariat” take place, but also that “the masses of the proletarians themselves must also be reeducated.”” This is why the RAPPists so stubbornly opposed the “attempt” to approach the masses’ literary movement “with intelligentsia-tailist playing to the gallery.”*° This assured their right to a “leading and directing role” with respect to the “masses of the proletarians themselves.” This kind of leadership, however, was impossible without replacing the obsolete, solitary “hack-writer” (pisatel’-kustar’) with the “new type” of writer. The widespread “promotionism’” of the First Five-year Plan era had the goal not only of replacing the former social elites but also of producing new ones “on an expanded basis.” This is why Averbakh, in particular, spoke out against “bankrupt ‘restorationist’ theory,” maintaining that “the overall goals of cultural revolution” were not reducible to a simple “reproduction of qualified cadres.”3! Indeed, a quantitative expansion of the social base of “cultural revolution” was needed.** The problem of the “nature of the qualifications of the new cadres” that arose thereby was simply not taken into account: “Citing the defects of quality in order to fight against quantity,” Averbakh concluded, “is a policy of focusing on the weak points in cultural construction, it means—in full accordance with the debates about overall policy—giving in to difficulties,

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not being able to outline a program to overcome them.”” To paraphrase Stalin’s famous slogan “The cadres determine everything,” one could say that it was not the cadres themselves, but rather their number. RAPP’s strength was truly not in quality (which the RAPPists understood), but in quantity, which

in 1932 reached r0,000 “working-class writers” as a result of the “call of shockworkers into literature.” Ironically, the flood subsided at this flood mark twice in Soviet history: toward the time of its breakup in the late 1980s, the Union of Writers of the USSR stood at that same figure, 10,000. The undoubted growth in the “quality of the new cadres’ qualifications” during the past half-

century was not, of course, easily achieved. In order to evaluate the path that was followed and to understand the birth process of the Soviet writer, one

must return to the sources of that “completely inexhaustible reservoir of opportunities for supplying the writers’ cadres,”** which was only possible in the country of “the lively creativity of the masses.” The New Great Initiative: From Workers’ Correspondent to Writer That same Central Committee conference in May 1924, wherein the Onguardists in accusing their “soft-liner” opponents of counterrevolutionary “protection

of the fellow-travelers” demanded “hegemony in literature” for themselves,

ended in scandal. Dem‘ian Bednyi advanced to the podium. The transcript has preserved the atmosphere in that hall. The speech of “Red Demian,” which consisted of invective and threats, was constantly interrupted by outcries here and there, then murmurs of disapprobration, then general laughter. When Bednyi concluded, it was already a shout: I have listened to so many orators here, I have listened to my fill of highminded words, but has even one word been said here about the main thing— workers and peasants? Which literature are you talking about? (Heckling. Noise.) With your tastes, you have about five years left—no, maybe three, if that—to play around at literature. New writers will come, real writers with their eyes open, from among the workers’ and village correspondents.*°

The view of the “masses of workers’ correspondents” as a reserve for supplying the “cadres of the new culture” united the activists of all generations of this culture—from Proletkultists to RAPPists, from Smiths to Gorky and LEFists. These correspondents attracted them by just those same qualities that Grigorii Zinov ev observed in his 1925 work The New Great Initiative (Novyi velikii

pochin) dedicated to this movement. At that time an all-powerful member of the Politburo, and in fact the chief figure of the triumvirate then ruling, Zi-

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nov ev wrote that although this movement “grew up from the depths of the working masses,’ ” although iit was a deep-rooted, and from rich soil, emanating from the nuclei of the masses,”*° it only lacked that which distinguished the Red Guards from the “regular, massive, disciplined, politically conscious, and battle-ready worker-and-peasant Red Army.”*” The “army-type” optics, the magic of large numbers that was so dear to the adepts of the new culture, also characterized Zinov evs appraisals, when he pointed out that a main task of the movement was “concern for a large quantitative scope”: “It is not so important now just how the correspondence is written . . . as it is important how much of this correspondence there will be. . . . The quantitative issue, the quantitative criterium is the most important.”** In fact, the number of these correspondents grouped around the central and local presses grew sharply in the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s, reaching an astronomical figure— three million. The greatest jump occurred from 1928 to 1930: from a halfmillion to two million.“ The social origins of the correspondents were on the average rather consistent: about 30 percent were blue-collar workers; about 50 percent, peasants; and about 20 percent, white-collar workers; approximately a

third of the “workers’-correspondent army” were Komsomol and Party members; up to 95 percent were under forty years of age."! This “mass” of correspondents was constantly under the same direct control of the state reserved for the press as a whole. The activities of the correspondents’ network was completely controlled by the press departments in the Party committees (special organs within the Party apparatus began to be created in ac-

cordance with a Central Committee decision already approved in 1922 by the Eleventh Party Congress). The Twelfth and Thirteenth Congresses perfected

this system even more, creating a bureaucracy within the Army’s Political Directorate to direct the work of military correspondents.” At first a commission on the village and military correspondents’ movements was created in the Press Department of the Party Central Committee, then in 1927, a commission on

the workers’-correspondent movement. A whole series of Central Committee resolutions (“On the Workers’-and-Village-Correspondent Movement” [“O rabsel’korovskom dvizhenii,” 1925], “Urgent Tasks of the Party in the Area of the

Workers’-and-Village-Correspondent Movement” [“Ocherednye zadachi partii v oblasti rabsel’korovskogo dvizheniia,” 1926], and so on) culminated in the 1931

adoption of the wide-ranging resolution “On Restructuring the Workers'-andVillage-Correspondent Movement” (“O perestroike rabsel’korovskogo dvizheniia”), after which workers’-correspondence commissions were created in the press subdivisions of regional-level Party committees. Special “corrals” for these correspondents were created, and “workers’ letters” divisions were established in

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newspaper editorial boards. The process of institutionalizing the “movement” spanned approximately a decade.*’ After the appropriate institutions were created, the “free organization for public initiative” itself (Stalin's term)” fell into decay: in 1934, the loose institution of “the people's inspectors” was replaced by a paid state “apparatus of inspectors,” and in 1936, the network of factoryand-plant newspapers was sharply reduced. The press began to assert that the workers’-correspondent movement had outlived its usefulness, since “all the

people now write in the newspapers.”” In the mid-1920s, however, the workers’ correspondents became an important factor of /iterary struggle. “We have entered a zone of cultural revolution,” a 1925 Central Committee resolution proclaimed, “Part of this massive cultural

growth is the growth of new literature, primarily proletarian and peasant literature, beginning with its forms that are embryonic but at the same time unprecedentedly broad in their scope (workers’ correspondents, village correspon-

dents, wall-newspapers, and the like), and ending with ideologically conceived literary-artistic products.”*° A resolution on the press at the Thirteenth Party Congress was even clearer on the point: The Party’s literary work in the area of artistic literature should focus on the creative work of workers and peasants who are becoming working-class and peasant writers in the process of the cultural ascent of the masses of the Soviet Union's people. . . Workers’ correspondents and village correspondents should be regarded as the reserves from which new working-class and peasant writers will advance.*”

This is just how the activists of proletarian culture regarded them: Proletarian literature is the mass workers’ movement. There is no doubt that the majority of proletarian writers in the city will come from among workers’ correspondents, and the majority of proletarian writers in the countryside, from the ranks of village correspondents. And it is no less clear that the chief cadre of Red Army poets will come from the ranks of military correspondents, from the ranks of the Red Army men themselves.** The workers’ correspondents are the inexhaustible reserve of innumerable creative forces that is called upon to play the main role in the creation of proletarian culture. . . . To call to life and to creative work those earthy

resources that like gold-bearing ore are hidden in the depths of the labor strata of our republic. Only these forces, awakened to life, can create proletarian art, which is the object of our artistic aspirations.”

This is how Gorky regarded them as well, when he suggested that “the army of workers’ and village correspondents are a most significant future force of our country—candidates to be intelligentsia.”*° As he maintained a vast corre-

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spondence with these correspondents and met with them, Gorky also regarded this “army” as a “reservoir of new literature.” Furthermore, “workers and mili-

tary correspondents are the young soldiers of the army of champions, in a word,

they should promote people from among themselves to command posts of editors, artists, writers, satirists, and sensible correspondents who reflect reality.” This is how they regarded themselves: ““The first sketch,” wrote workers’ correspondent and later journalist and writer Petr Onipko, “at once awakened in me a great interest in writing. A new era in writing opened up for me.” “In the course of the circle’s work, workers’ correspondents with literary abilities began to stand out,” wrote a correspondent for Proletarskaia pravda (Proletarian truth) from Kiev. “The newspaper editors began issuing a literary leaflet to help us. The workers’-correspondent writers, however, grew [in number],

and the literary leaflet could no longer accommodate all of them. And now we have a biweekly journal, Fkel [Torch].” Anatolii Zorskii, from the village of Maliushino, in the Kalinin District in Belorussia (a village located about go miles from a city and about 26 miles from the railroad), wrote:

We have no lack of village correspondents. In autumn of last year we decided to go from writing sketches, little by little, to writing short stories as well,

and some to write light verses. . . . Our first literary attempts were put in the wall-newspaper. It was a huge success among the readers. The girls have starting singing our chastushki, Our little verses about the sorceresses upset them [the sorceresses— 7rans.], we have about 25 sorceresses. It’s taken off!

At first there were three “writers,” and now the literary circle already has six people. We sent our first attempts to one of the peasant publications. They took almost all the material. The circle has gotten down to business even more cooperatively.”

In the journal Raboche-krestianskii korrespondent (The worker and peasant correspondent) alone, there are thousands of such letters. When Krestianskaia

gazeta (Peasant newspaper) announced that it was holding a contest, the editors received 4,000 manuscripts, and Georgii Shengeli’s brochure meant for workers’ correspondents, “How to Write Articles, Poems, and Short Stories”

(“Kak pisat’ stat’i, stikhi, i rasskazy”), went through three (!) printings in the course of a single (!) month. The extent of the literary epidemic in the workers'-

correspondent army is also difficult to imagine: “The literary brook that always had flowed along with the workers’-correspondent movement, is now, with the growth of this movement, and with the cultural growth of the workers, turn-

ing into a wide river.”™ The RAPPists’ chief aspiration was to become head of the “literary movement among the workers’ correspondents.” In this, they did not differ from

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the Smiths. Ivan Zhiga, who had himself followed the path from being a Cheka official in 1918-1922 to becoming (via Briusov’s courses) one ofthe lead-

ers of Smithy, insisted that it was above all necessary to “envelop this whole young wide-ranging literary movement organizationally, so that it develops properly”; second, it was necessary to “saturate Soviet and chiefly Party public opinion with the awareness of how one should regard this movement in general and beginning worker-peasant writers in particular”; and third, the Party should “establish a single policy . . . from the top down to the bottom, and not on paper, but in practical everyday life.””’ This familiar logic—organize in order to take control—was only proposed by the Smiths. “Bringing it to life” became the mission of RAPP. The recruiting of “low-level circleists” from “the workers’-and-village correspondents literary milieu” began from the first days of VAPP’s existence. The Onguardists persuade: in literary journals and newspapers from the mid-1920s one frequently encounters a curious advertisement aimed either at workers’ correspondents, or at village correspondents, or at military correspondents, who had “made appearances on the front of literature”: “The Red Army literary-artistic circles should merge into the general ranks of the All-Union Association of Proletarian Writers [VAPP]. Comrade Red Army men, to the literary front! Comrade Red Army men, to the general ranks of the proletarian literary army!””°

They sympathize: “After all, Pushkin’s colleagues in work were not obliged to exhaust themselves in heavy field labor from dawn to dusk. But this is the lot of those who send their manuscripts to Krest'ianskaia gazeta, they are obliged to do this in considerable abundance [sic!], and they do not even think of complaining.””” They flatter: “As soon as a village correspondent has mastered the knowledge and has learned the more refined management of his literary material (and the matter is gradually moving toward this), we are enriched by new powerful literary wellsprings.”* And it worked. The circleists found in RAPPists the only force capable of supporting them. The support turned out to be mutually useful. At the very height of the Onguardists’ struggle against the fellow-travelers “for hegemony” and for “a Party line in literature,” one finds in Na postu, for example, a resolution of the workers’ correspondents of the Krasnaia Presnia District in Moscow: “All those present . . . hotly protest against the line taken by those Party and Soviet journals and publishers who accommodate or publish the works of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois writers”; they demand “firm and systematic

Party leadership in questions of artistic literature,” “straightening of the lines

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taken by the above-said journals and publishers,” “intensification of the Party’s attention to proletarian literature, and all possible encouragement ofit,” and so on; and they consider it necessary to “establish a most intimate connection

of workers’ correspondents with proletarian literature,” “use the journal Na postu, and other organs as well, to accommodate reviews by the workers themselves from the factories and plants about all the artistic literature that comes

to light,” “intensify the recruitment of writers on the job into MAPP” “intensify the leadership of proletarian literature by workers’ literary circles locally,” and the like.” This resolution, one of a multitude of the correspondents’ actions in support of the RAPPists, as one may imagine, gives an impression of the intertwinement of the interests of these correspondents/litcircleists and of Onguardists. Already in the next issue of this journal, Fedor Raskol’nikov’s article “Workers’ Correspondents and Proletarian Literature” (“Rabkory i proletarskaia literatura’) appeared. The author portrayed the growth process of these correspon= dents from their first sketch to a real literary work and demanded that RAPP “immerse itself” in the masses of these correspondents, for “there is no doubt that it is from them that the new Demian Bednyis and new Serafimoviches, who are only now beginning to mature and develop, will come.”® Raskol ni-

kov’s article, which contained a complete agenda for the growth of proletarian literature out of the milieu of the workers’ correspondents, turned out to be a curious torch passed from Onguardists to Onlitguardists: published in the last issue of Na postu, it “provided a program” for new RAPP leadership—tor those who came to replace Lelevich and Rodov, Averbakh and Libedinskii, whose ac-

tivities led to unprecedented growth of RAPP, primarily on account of the shock-workers recruited into literature. Promoting the slogan “From sketch to novel” in 1929 (on the eve of the “call”), the RAPPists considerably shortened

the workers’ correspondents’ path into literature. In analyzing the “path of working-class writing from the workers’ correspondents’ sketch to the writing of a book, to the generalization in the latter of class industrial experience,” On-

guardist critics insisted that workers’ correspondents created real literature, and underpinned this assertion with a curious “theoretical base”:

The tasks of transmitting experience and of exchanging experience, which stand before the shock-worker authors, do not contradict to any degree the tasks of artistic description and generalization. And outside the expression of the political, industrial, and social experience of the working class, there cannot be proletarian artistic literature. Any counterposing of the tasks of artistic description and of transmission of experience is mistaken and harmful.

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Practice corresponded to theory. I cite an example review—one of thousands

that appeared in RAPPist journals at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s:

Among the recent works of young proletarian writers, D. Lavrukhin’s /n the Footsteps ofaHero [Po sledam geroia] arouses great interest. This is a strictly

literary book; it does not pose nor answer any great questions, and is chiefly interesting as material about the work of beginning writers. Lavrukhin’s innovation (and the innovation in it is indubitable) is very individual: he does

not open any new paths, even for his own further creative work. This is just exactly a “preliminary” book, a threshold to a novel, but not a novel. Lavrukhin’s Notebooks [Zapisnye knizhki] are not, of course, the notebooks of a

workers’ correspondent. They are the acute, clever, and refined notes ofa literary man, a mature writer, who already knows the riches and subtleties of language very well, who knows how to choose material, and who knows how to observe his surroundings. Lavrukhin’s hero does not yet exist; but such heroes should exist; workers’-correspondent writers who work on language in-depth and observe life clearly—as shrewdly and clearly as Lavrukhin does this—should grow up (and are growing up).

Who is the author, and who is the hero, of this remarkable book? Why is it

“strictly literary”? If it “does not open any new paths,” then what is the “innovation” coming from “a mature writer” that is “indubitable”? There is no end of questions here. One will find the answers to them not in RAPP, however, but... from LEFists. The LEFists’ attitude toward RAPP’s recruitment of workers’ correspondents, as is clear from the concept of “the literature of fact,” was markedly negative: “Down with separating the writer from industry, down with the seduction of good workers’ correspondents into producing literary trash! Literature is only a particular part of life-construction,” Nikolai Chuzhak proclaimed.® Calling on these correspondents to continue writing industrial essays, and calling Gorky “the most talented among the workers’ correspondents” (“this is the highest compliment we know,” Chuzhak added”), LEFists insisted that “the method of the workers’ correspondent is diametrically opposed to the method of the fiction writer.” Hence the perspective opposed to that of the RAPPists: “The only

correct path for workers’ correspondents is the expansion of the form of the workers’-correspondent sketch to the dimensions of the industrial essay.” Therefore, instead of “study of the classics” and reading fiction, the LEFists recom-

mended that these correspondents read special scientific-technical literature: “Only by such a path will the essayists needed by the Soviet press grow out of the workers’-correspondent ranks, and not fiction-writers, who find no place for

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themselves neither in artistic literature nor in the newspaper.”® (The LEFists

were mistaken about this: in the Northern Caucausus alone, such figures as Nobel laureate Mikhail Sholokhov and multiple Stalin Prize laureates Semen Babaevskii and Anatolii Sofronov entered Soviet literature in the 1920s and 1930s via the path “from sketch to novel,” not to mention the thousands of “rank-and-file members of the Union of Writers.”)

Sergei Tret takov called upon workers’ correspondents to “open their eyes” and “come to their senses”: “Where are they taking you? They are sticking you

in those sewers of newspapers that are called ‘literary leaflets.”’°* He “exalted the workers’-correspondent soul”: The workers’ correspondent dreams of the title “writer.” The newspaperman kisses the fiction-writer on the shoulder. He hates the everydayness, anonymity, and obligation to assignments, the cruel restrictiveness of the newspaper article and satirical sketch. Newspapermen! Raise your heads higher! You should not hold on to being fiction-writers’ last-born children!® Shklovskii urged these correspondents “not to separate themselves from

industry”: The VAPP organization has three thousand writers; this is a great number. . . .

The contemporary writer aspires to become a professional at the age of eighteen, he aspires to have no other profession besides literature. This is very uncomfortable, because in doing this he has no way of living; in Moscow, he lives with acquaintances, or in Hertzen’s House on the staircase; and some

live in the bathroom, six people together; but even the bathroom cannot fit all of the aspirants, because, as we said, there are three thousand of them. This is rather a pity, because special barracks could be built for writers—after all,

we find somewhere to fit in military recruits—but the fact is that the writers in these barracks would not have anything to write about. In order to write, one must have another profession besides literature, because a professional— a person having a profession—describes things the way they relate to him. In Gogol, Vakula the smith regards Ekaterina’s palace from the viewpoint of a smith and a painter, and perhaps he can describe Ekaterina’s palace. Bunin, in

describing the Roman Forum, describes it from the viewpoint of a Russian from the countryside.

The problem was that the workers’ correspondent had no desire to be either “Vakula the smith” or “a Russian from the countryside.” Instead, they aspired

to the likes of Gogol or Bunin. Without realizing this, and having apparently already exhausted all arguments, the LEFists were amazed: Would it really be

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“useful for the aims of the cultural revolution” if aworkers’ correspondent were to “exchange the modest title of workers’ correspondent for the imposing title of writer and receive a membership ticket in Hertzen’s House?”® Let us consider another question: Could the arguments of LEFists result in action under the conditions of “literary struggle”? LEF’s position was too “ide-

alistic,” while RAPP’s policy, on the contrary, was extremely pragmatic. Following LEFist recipes suited neither the interests of the workers’ correspondents breaking into literature, nor those of RAPPists striving to “workerize”

themselves and create a manageable “army of proletarian writers” for themselves. The aesthetic debates again ended up being subject to the laws of political struggle in literature, central among which were the laws of advantage and interest. Whoever took these into account would win. The person who in political struggle truly realized the actual “aims of the cultural revolution” was

immediately ready to “dive deeper into revolution.” Literary Circles: The Proletarian Salon The almanac Severnoe utro (Northern morning) came out in 1922 Petersburg (as then Petrograd was called on the cover). This publication, in the terminol-

ogy of those times, was completely fellow-traveler oriented: the iron clanging of Smithy, the cold gusts of “Workers’ Spring,” the stern footfalls of the Young Guard, and the hurricane winds of “October”—in a word, the “rustle of time” on this quiet “Northern morning”—was somewhere outside. Among the authors were Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pil’niak, Viacheslay Shishkov, and Petr Guber. Among the items published were a translation of Oskar Spengler and portraits of Chagall and Barlach. The almanac concluded with V. Iretskii’s article “The Young Generation” (“Molodoe plemia”). The article was aimed

against emigré criticism, which argued that “the once proudly fluttering banner of Russian art” had been taken up by emigré “poetic youth.” Naming the prose writers Vsevolod Ivanov, Boris Pil’niak, and Nikolai Nikitin, and poets Anna Radlova, Vsevolod Rozhdestvenskii, and Nikolai Tikhonov, Iretskii con-

cluded: “It is quite obvious that on these shores, and not those, the cadres of future Russian literature are being created, and here will be found the arms that will carry ‘the once proudly fluttering banner of Russian art.’”””° “Cadres” is perhaps the only word that recalled the “rustle of time.” Their destinies unfolded in different ways: some left literature for decades (Nikitin, Radlova) or left life forever (Pil’niak), others at the cost of a torturous break-

away and, in the words of Arkadii Belinkoy, “yielding themselves prisoner,” finally made themselves part of the Soviet literary establishment, becoming

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“classic Soviet writers” (Ivanov, Tikhonov). Without a doubt, all of them, who were then “promising beginners,” as writers remained forever within the 1920s.

They were not destined to become “cadres.” It is also indisputable that the “cadres of future Russian literature” were not, in fact, “created” in emigration.”! The process of regenerating the “cadres” took place outside the windows of the famed “House of Arts,” astern this “mad ship,” in other “salons’—the “literary circles.”

The reader of the Soviet literary encyclopedia will not find any article about “salons” in its sixth volume. Instead, there is a cross-reference: “Literary salons—see Literary circles.””* The substitution is significant. Let us look at this entry:

At the same time the revolutionary movement was growing, long before the October Revolution, circles of writers and poets from among workers and peasants began to be created. . . . After the 1905 Revolution, these L[iterary]. C[ircles]. were often tied to Bolshevik underground groups. After the

October Revolution they became widespread. Numerous L. C.’s arose within Proletkult organizations, in factories and plants, in journals and newspapers, actively enabling the establishment of Soviet literature. L. C.’s remain a widespread form of the mass literary movement. They exist in many large enterprises in the country, in factories, in kolkhozes, in institutions of learning, in military units, and attached to editorial boards of journals,

factory newspapers, and so on. In the L. C.’s, literary-aesthetic views are shaped, peculiarities of the literary process are studied, and the works of the circleists are discussed. Some L. C.’s have existed for several decades... . Not a few professional writers have come out of them.”

These just words are completely out of proportion to the meager bibliography about the circles completed in the nineteenth century. In the obscure world of the literary circles at the cusp of the 1920s and 1930s, the “new type of writer” was concocted. Soviet literature in the form of one large “L. C.” began precisely here. Protected by powerful RAPP, the literary circles were an expansive network of “creative unions of beginning writers and workers’ and village correspondents” that spanned the whole country. There were many provincial journals (Pervye shagi [First steps, in Armavir], Vataga [Throng] and Molot [Hammer, both in Tula], Lava and Na pod’eme [On the ascent, both in Rostov], Volzhskaia nov’ {Volga virgin soil, in Kuibyshev], Nastuplenie [The offensive, in Smolensk], Pod”em [Ascent, in Voronezh], Shturm [Assault, in Samara], Zvezda Severa [Northern star, in Arkhangel’sk], Udarnik slova [Shock-worker of the word, in Karel’sk], Shturm [in Sverdlovsk], Natisk (Onslaught, in Nizhnii Novgorod],

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and Rezets [The chisel, in Leningrad]), not to mention Moscow’s Rost (Growth),

Literaturnaia ucheba, and Na literaturnom postu, which specialized in coverage of “the mass literary movement.” They all contained rubrics such as “Around the literary circles,” “Creative review of the literary circles,” “Chronicle of the

circle’s life,” “Literary circles of the region,” and so forth. The regional literary journals of those times, filled with “chronicles,” reviews, and overviews, as well as the archives of RAPP’s central and local divisions, which contain the tran-

scripts of meetings, heated pronouncements, and nocturnal literary discussions, have preserved the living breath of the stormy life of the circles. The “golden age” ofthe circles coincided with the 1928-1931 era of cultural revolution—the era of the “call of shock-workers into literature” and the fashion for “creative

initiative of the lower strata.” The circles turned up everywhere, as one learns from “local correspondents’:

The Sormovo literary circle of the M. Gorky “Metalworker” Club has been in existence 6 months altogether, and consists of young workers. Over a short period of time, its work has developed rather quickly. During the first meetings, an active group of about 5—6 people wandered

about from one corner of the club to another, without a fixed place (without a room), and read and criticized the members’ works, literally while walking around. Over the past four months the circle has grown significantly larger and stronger. Serious literary training has begun, under the leadership of the young poet Fedor Zhizhenkov (NAPP). The group has grown to 25 people. Over 6 months we have had several meetings for factory workers: a Demian Bednyi meeting, a show trial of Chumandrin’s story “Rabelais’s Factory” [“Fabrika Rable”], and a joint meeting with the literary group from the Nizhnyi Novgorod Pedagogical Faculty. We read and discussed presentations about the works of Demian Bednyi, Gorky, Blok, and Griboedov. The circle meets twice a week, and in the coming months will publish its own journal.”*

“Its own journal”! The sketch was called “First Steps.” Another circle (forty people) at the Moscow factory “Dinamo” notes proudly: “Thanks to direct training with our own works alone {?!], we have been able

to shape the poet Sidorov and Karasev (a prose writer). We will grow others as well.””° “Poet Sidoroy.” “Karasev (a prose writer).” And of course they did “grow” others. Criticism reassured anyone who thought this was too many: “The literary circle is not an incubator that hatches writers. . . . It is very well if a writer

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comes out of a circle (and they are coming out!), but one must not think that the circle ‘hatched’ him, and what is more, one must not think that the circles should rain buckets of writers.””°

A good thing it was that they were not to “rain buckets.” Incidentally, there are two entries for poets named Sidorov in the 1970 edition of Handbook ofthe Union of Writers of the USSR (Spravochnik Soiuza pisatelei SSSR), and two prose writers named Karasev as well. Perhaps these are from among the “Di-

namo’ litcircleists? It does not matter nowadays: “In the L. C.’s, literaryaesthetic views are shaped” in the future writers.

This shaping occurs basically by the efforts of the circle members themselves, among whom not only poets and prose writers but also critics arose. In the “Val’tsovka” literary circle of the Moscow factory “Serp i molot” (“Hammer and sickle”), as one of the correspondents notes, many circle members are

engaged not only in criticism of their colleagues’ works but also are themselves writing —books: “Tiul’pakovy is writing a book called What One Should Learn From Demian Bednyi |Chemu nado uchit’sia u D. Bednogo], Ianshin is

writing a book about Maxim Gorky, Shipilin, What the Worker Should Know About the Cinema [Chto nado znat’ rabochemu o kino], and Krutianskii, The Tool of Proletarian Literature to Assist the Industrial-Financial Plan {Oruzhie proletarskoi literatury na pomoshch’ promfinplanu].””’ The Onguardists were

already setting the goal of “educating Marxistically forged critics, reviewers, and consultants from among the MOPR circle members and the ‘beginner’ cadres.”’® This goal had a practical significance as well: the Perevalists who

were engaged in “looking for Galatea” would not write about the circle members, and besides,

the time has come to wage a decisive battle to squeeze out of literature the reviewers forces that are low-quality as regards ideology and form. The creation of proletarian critical cadres prepared by way of the working-class literary circles, and their advancement to their [the reviewers’'— Trans.]

place—this is the first step of a process that is quite contemporary and from a social point of view, urgently necessary.”

The “workers’ criticism circles” remained, however, “ownerless”: “Alongside poets and prose writers, the working class and the kolkhoz peasantry are producing new forces in criticism from among themselves as well. And it worked out rather strangely that these new forces had to grow completely independently, without any help, without any critical supervision.”*° One learns what this could lead to from V. Krasil’nikov’s article “The Unsupervised Part of the Literary Business” (“Besprizornyi uchastok literaturnogo dela”), which noted cases in which “the class enemy tries to assume the guise of a critic.”*' Conse-

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quently, it was necessary to “organize” the “masses' critics” and to “guide” them: “The ranks of working-class critics must be correctly organized. They should not be left to the mercy of fate, and they should avoid disjointed activities. Under the Party's general leadership, they should shape well-organized collectives that possess all the knowledge necessary for the fight with the highly qualified enemy.”*” The enemy was not simply “in literature,” one should remember, but rather was close at hand—in the literary circle itself. The circle of the Moscow “Liuvers” factory, for example, was led, as it was explained, by the “open counterrevolutionary Suravegin, who has managed to ‘charm’ the whole circle”; in the “Motor” circle in Podol’sk, “a former White Guard officer just hung around, preaching art beyond politics”; and the circle of the “Sharikopodshipnik” factory was headed by “one of the former leaders of the reactionary ‘Poets’ Union,’ Nikolai Khorikov.” Not surprisingly, these circles turned into “real ‘proletarian literature salons.’ In circles like this, swept up in literaturism, a gentry or corps of generals developed, from among a few outstanding ‘recognized poets’ who deliberately did not make room for the working-class fellows. In circles like this, isolation gave rise to bohemianism and outright ‘academicism,’ and at-

tracted types that were socially suspect”®’; “they take the literary circle as a means of legalizing their own views.”** To be found everywhere was “leadership hiding its antisoviet face behind abstract poems, at first glance revolutionary, about factories and kolkhozes, but in fact disorienting working-class writing youth.”*? “Class struggle,” as is well known, “intensified” in the 1930s. Incidents of

“sabotage” were observed at that time in literary circles in Rostov, Sverdlovsk, Leningrad, and other places. Gorky published his “Literary Amusements” (“Literaturnye zabavy”) about the mores of “unbridled literary youth,” and Literaturnaia ucheba, of which he was editor, included an ominous article about “the pollution of the beginners’ milieu by upstarts [vykhodtsy] from a class-hostile milieu.” The article mentioned that these upstarts, . . . while carefully concealing their origin and making themselves up as workers, and having made the factory and the new construction a trampoline from which to leap into literature . . . then infiltrate local literary organizations . . . having mastered the devices of social concealment, aglitter with the tinsel of superficial “culturedness,” under the noses of some politically nearsighted leaders, quickly insinuate themselves into the “nucleus,” into the “leading group.” . . . Individualists “by blood,” they fill the atmosphere of the literary organization with the putrid miasma of self-promotion and of literary competition.*°

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But since “the literary circles are as it were the first link of the conveyor along which the tributary of new writer reserves move into literature,”®” they clearly had to be protected up front by means of “intensification of class vigilance and of careful inspection of the people joining literary circles and the creative activists’ unions”®’; “nationalists ... , counterrevolutionaries, and Trotskyites use the literary circles to prepare their own: cadres against Soviet authority. Hence it follows that we must very carefully examine the creative work of

young writers. . . .”°° The literary circles are more and more reminiscent of asubmarine on autopilot: their own “class struggle,” their own poets, their own writers, and their own critics. It only remained to make their own readers. Then it is possible to create its own literature—factory literature—as well. What exactly is “literature in one factory”? I will examine a single example—the literary circle of the Leningrad “Krasnyi treugol’nik” (“Red triangle”) factory, one of the oldest in the city. The cir= cle was founded in 1929. By 1934—during the course of six years of activi-

ties—it had produced “true shock-workers of the literary business.” Among them were the worker V. Poshekhonov, author of the novel Kochubei (“dozens

of articles in the journals and newspapers are devoted to discussion of this book,””! it seems), who published his new novel Contemporaries (Sverstniki) in 1934; the worker N. Skovorodnikov, whose novel Hate (Nenavist’) was pub-

lished in the same year by the Izdatel’stvo pisatelei (Writers’ Press); and the young circleist Ar’ev, whose plays were a feature of the clubs’ stages. The factory radios frequently broadcast short stories and essays written by circleists, and the circle even wrote songs that were “lustily sung” by factory workers. The circle produced two issues of a large literary almanac entitled Krasno-

treugol nikovtsy, as well as a Krasnyi treugol’nik journal. One also discovers that “comrades proven by literary work in the circle are often promoted to leadership work in the factory and outside its walls. . . Many comrades who appeared in the circle were recruited for the newspapers and promoted to laborunion and Party work.” As it turns out, as early as 1928, “among a number of galosh, tire, and other

workshops” there was also a “literary workshop,” founded by local workers’ correspondents: “In a small room, shock-worker galosh-makers, a rationalizer from the metal-rolling shop, and shock-workers from the tire shop, and, the

like, did their work.”®? Of course, “the path from the workers’-correspondent sketch to the artistic essay or short story was for many terribly difficult,” but “individual help” and “general classes” assured the success of the undertaking—“the essay and satirical sketch were followed by a modest short story; a

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few expanded their essays into small novellas.””* This is how Skovorodnikov “grew into a writer,” beginning with sketches and then writing the “large novel” Hate: “The author collected material and made notes for three years, and tested himself on small short stories, and only then took up work on a book.” The same journey was made by Poshekhonoy. More writers came to light as well—Bazarov, Sedova, Savicheva, Kuromiakin, and others. In 1933,

five books by the “Krasnyi treugol’nik” circleists were published (by such prestigious publishers as GIKhL and “Priboi,” among others). These books tell the

story of “the reconstruction ofthe factory and the growth of the giant”; of “the works and days of contemporary youth”; of how “early agreement on a Stateloan bond was made possible by the will of millions”; of “the difficulties associated with learning new industry technology”; of “the reeducation of youth recently arrived at the factory”; of the “best shock-workers”; and so on.” This factory's circle was endlessly organizing something “within the walls of our native factory” and was truly transformed into one of its workshops. It could not thereby separate itself “from the everyday life of the factory” nor transform itself into an “amateurs’ circle for belles lettres.” What one observes is a sort of short-circuit of “literary production.” The circle became such an in-

tegral part of the “native factory” and worked so intensively “within it walls” that it sometimes seems that “Krasnyi treugol’nik,” this “giant of light industry,” was producing books alongside the galoshes and tires, and that only by mistake did these “products” not become part of the “industrial-financial plan.” The guarantee of the circle’s success was the close tie to the “economic-political goals of the enterprise.” The circleists were called upon to orient themselves to these goals by the Onguardists, who demanded that the circles be transformed into “the light cavalry of art””® and organized “special-purpose industrial literary brigades,” “thematic links,” “tow-trucks for wide-circulation newspapers [that is, to “tow them along”— Trans.],””” “expeditionary newspaper combines,”** “workshop cannonades,” and “brigade uprisings.””” The resolution of the February plenum (1931) of the RAPP board of directors required “direct participation of

writers in the struggle to fulfill the economic plan of the decisive year of the five-year plan,” participation “in the current and upcoming economic-political campaigns, so that any of the writers participating in the campaign would be strictly answerable to the organization, both as regards his own political line

and as regards the artistic quality of his work in the brigade, in the kolkhoz, and so on.”!°° Local organizations (in Arkhangel’sk, for example) were likewise adamant: “They must consider the basic themes of the literary circles’ creative work to be description of the region’s shock-workers, and of socialist triumphs

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in wood exports, wood products and wood-rafting, railway transport, and animal husbandry . . . and popularization by the artistic word of the decisions of the 17th Party Congress.”'®' In other words, “the literary brigade must transition from the . . . isolation of each literary group to the large-scale formulation of the issues ofits own [?!] work in view of the Party and proletarian commu-

nity of the enterprise.”'®* The ties to the “community” sometimes acquired a dramatic character: at the conference of the Ivanovo division of RAPP, the circleist Gorbunov from Kal’chugin Factory related how the club director locked the circle into the club for the night and announced that he would let them out only when they had written a stage dramatization for him. When the circleists refused, the director announced that this was a rightist deviation—distrust of one’s own powers.!™ Protecting the circleists and indulging their ambitions, the RAPPists continued to orient them toward “professional writing.” With this goal in mind,

they proposed “forming detachments of our best writers so that they can work on the stories [of the other circleists—E. D.] like they do on their own.”!% Such

a method of writing for the circles allowed the RAPPist critics to assert that the circleists were “no longer pupils, but apprentices,” although “one would probably have to wait more than a year for master-writers” to mature.'”” Nonetheless, the master-writers made their appearance in Soviet, rather than RAPPist, literature. The effects of the RAPPist circles’ “injection,” however, were trans-

mitted in the genes of the “engineers of human souls.” At that time, however, on the cusp of the 1930s, it was impossible to satisfy

the needs of the “many-thousand army of circleists” who aspired to see their own works in print. For this reason, the fundamental emphasis was laid on

those same “sewers of newspapers” that Tret iakov had written about—the “literary leaflets”: “In the conditions of the reconstruction period, at the moment when shock-workers are being called into literature, the literary leaflet should be the tribune of shock-workers, and their organizer.”!°° The critic did not forget,

however, that “the literary leaflets must express the militant RAPPist line.”!”” “Selflessly” immersing themselves in the “lower-strata fabric of the literary community,”!°8 the RAPPists transformed “circle work” into their main business, determining primarily political goals as the “fundamental military detachment of the Party on the literary front.” Most important was the growth of RAPP and its strengthening organizationally. Clearly, it was easiest to lead groups that were already organized. It was impossible to work with people who had, as Libedinskii expressed so elegantly, “already crippled themselves by haphazard growth.”'” This was why the RAPPists not only refused to involve themselves with individual “natural talents” but also asserted: “The beginning

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Soviet writer should learn well from the very beginning that the theory of ‘natural talents’ is a harmful, bourgeois theory.”''° Here one sees the beginning of a new phase of “conscientious creativity”: “haphazardness and partisanism in creative work” are being replaced. Above all, the circles meant control, and

therefore “all RAPP members must join one circle or another.”""' The creation itselfof the RAPPist circles was a simple matter: “Setting up the circles,” one reads in one RAPPist instruction, “is not complicated. One must send the information about the membership, the minutes, and so on, to the board ofdirectors of the regional association, and if the membership of the circle gives no cause for concern, the circle will be incorporated into RAPP’s

network”! (and the circleists, accordingly, will turn into writers). The same free principle was preserved in VOKP, the All-Union Society of Peasant Writers

(Vsesoiuznoe obshchestvo krest’ianskikh pisatelei), whose organization was

similar to RAPP’s. The VOKP Central Soviet was advised thus about the or-

ganization of kolkhoz and sovkhoz literary circles: “Workers’-correspondent circles, workers’ committees of the machine-and-tractor stations and sovkhozes,

the cultural-life commissions of the kolkhozes, schools, clubs, reading-rooms, and Red Corners—these are the bases in which the sovkhoz, regional, and wall-

newspapers should be the center of unity and literary education of sovkhoz and kolkhoz young people who are writing.”'' The network of circles thus organized became hard to manage. Therefore,

fantasy had already drawn the Onguardist bureaucrats bright pictures of “centralization and enlargement’:

The system of original circles in the large enterprises . . . should be supplemented by the organization of creative circles on a regional scale, and it should be completed by the organization of a single citywide creative and training center for the activists that concentrates all the experience and all the accomplishments of the industrial and regional unions. The numerous scattered groups with varied social backgrounds, with various loud-sounding names that emphasize their lack of community, their narrowness and isolation, should be assimilated into these industrial circles, which, since only they have an industrial base beneath them, can and should exist.!"

By contrast, the interest of the circleists themselves in RAPP was also completely pragmatic: they had no interest in the internal struggle within it. Such passivity on the part of “rank-and-file RAPPists” obliged the Onguardist leadership to continually take pains to involve the “lower-strata circles” in their own struggle: “Finding an author is nothing; he must besides be organized, put into such an environment, the circle, where he will grow and develop; indeed, so that in this creative collective they [sic] do not study literature ‘in gen-

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eral,’ but rather that they work according to the RAPPist agenda, under the militant watchwords of RAPP”!

,

The “RAPPist programs” were primarily aimed at drawing the circleists into the incessant Onguardist quarrels. “Creative” issues, it goes without saying, were by far not of chief importance in these agendas, but rather “issues of RAPP’s struggle for the hegemony of proletarian literature” with all sorts of deviations in “cultural construction” and the like.'!® According to Onguardist logic, assimilation of “creative watchwords” was supposed to go “in reverse”: by studying “perversions,” the circleists were supposed to develop an “antidote” to “class-hostile influences.” This was just the upper layer of the “goals,” however. The circles were actively drawn into the struggle on the RAPPist Olympus (suffice it to recall that it was precisely in the local divisions of the association that Onguardists found support in the struggle against the “leftist opposition” —Litfront—within RAPP, and that it was precisely the active “organizational work in the lower-strata circles” that assured the Onguardist leadership a majority in the voting bodies not only of RAPP but also of FOSP).

Therefore, Onguardist critics asserted: One must not take the position that the circle is far away from the general movement, or is incidental in our RAPPist system. The circle as a whole, and every circleist individually, must know and understand the essence of our method and the significance of all the literary-political and creative discussions taking place among us, so that our watchwords are the watchwords

of each circleist. . . . Every circleist must feel himself a part of the overall RAPPist movement.''” It was explained at this juncture, nonetheless, that

the circleists cannot yet read all the articles in Na literaturnom postu, this is still too difficult for them, but particular issues—for example, regarding

the Smithy, Pereval, the attitude toward the creative method of LEF, or the attitude toward the unprincipled Bespalov-Bezymenskii blok—are being worked through by the circleists. For example, they worked through Sutyrin’s article about the Pereverzev school and analyzed Pereverzevist mistakes.''®

So, the circleists “analyze Pereverzevist mistakes.” . . . There were, however, few such conscientious circleists. Organizational strengthening of the association and “creation of a proletarian literary milieu”!!9 were impossible without regular “cleansings.” A resolution of the 1928 All-Union Congress of Proletarian Writers, regarding the VAPP board of directors, contained a special point:

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As one of the measures for uncovering all the defects and ills of VOAPP, and

also with the aim of cleansing the organization of ideologically alien elements and ballast, the congress resolves to undertake a review of the entire member-

ship of the association beginning this autumn, so that this review be complete toward spring of 1929. This self-cleansing should be accompanied by the involvement of new beginners’ creative forces, predominantly of factory workers. Therefore, the congress considers the watchword “VOAPP—in the

largest enterprises” to be timely, as this implies the creation of literary circles in the [Soviet] Union’s largest enterprises.'”°

It is difficult to determine what was meant by the word “ballast” here, but the road toward “the call of shock-workers” was open. The watchword of creating a “Magnitostroi'”' ofliterature,” propagated by the “Stalinist People’s Commissar” Lazar’ Kaganovich, was turned into “the call of shock-workers into literature.” It was not only the Dneproges hydroelectric plant and White Sea—Baltic Canal projects that were born in “the workdays of great constructions.” One more “great Stalinist construction” surprised the

world—Soviet literature, the unprecedented fruit of the masses’ graphomania. The Call ofShock-Workers into Literature; or, “Dizziness ofSuccess,” Part Two

Margarita Aliger, recalling in the early 1980s her studies in the Literary Institute, which she finished in 1937 as one of its first graduates, gave a list of her

classmates: “Zhenia Abrosimoy. Sasha Zhislin. Volodia Zamiatin. Dima Kalinovskii. Levarsa Kvitsiniia. Alesha Nedogonov. Volodia Rezchikoy. Natasha Peringo. Vasia Sidorov. Katia Sheveleva. Sasha Shevtsoy. Ermak Tsygal’nitskii. Lev Shapiro. Tonia Maliutina. . . . If you count Dolmatovskii and myself as well, you get sixteen people.”'”* There are four famous names: Nedogonoy, Sheveleva, Dolmatovskii and Aliger herself. Who were the remaining twelve? Aliger’s portraits spare no one: Sasha Zhislin, an athletically built handsome man, wrote something that despite our very best relationship I cannot remember. . . . Volodia Zamiatin was curly-haired, fearless, nice, and very ignorant. He returned from the war,

thank God, and began to publish, was even recognized, he received the Stalin Prize for a poem entitled “The Green Covering Force” [“Zelenyi zaslon”], and it was about the siege of the woodland zones. He died from cancer in the fifties. . . Dima Kalinovskii was a handsome sprightly fellow, but I don’t remember his poems at all. Obviously, they weren't interesting. . . . Lev Shapiro was the oldest among us. He was in the army, and worked as an assistant to one of the Ordzhonikidze deputies. He was definitely not much

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of a poet, he didn’t write much, and even what he wrote could hardly be considered poetry. ... '* .

Let us now step aside from the evaluations of the poets who “made it”—all four Stalin laureates turned out a bit more successful than “Volodia” Zamiatin with his “The Green Covering Force” poem.'*4 Aliger’s reminiscences were introduced here because in speaking of one of her classmates—poet Vasilii Sidorov, a tragic figure—she recalled that he was “called into literature as a shock-

worker” (who knows, maybe he was “the poet Sidorov” who was “grown” in the “Dinamo” factory’s literary circle?). He was, Aliger writes, a “real . . . shockworker,” and just like Iaroslav Smeliakov, “this qualification got him in.” But

was he alone in this? The world of Soviet literature is strikingly small. One can find a poet in it who lived a half-century ago, was never published anywhere, and was completely unknown. Aliger knew nothing about what happened to “Volodia” Rezchikov, a “quiet, modest, retiring man.” But, as it turns out, that same

“qualification”—instead of his poems—has provided contemporary readers with his name. If one looks at the staff listings of the secretariat and board of directors of RAPP, of the editorial boards of Oktiabr’ and Na literaturnom postu for 1931 (this being the height of the “call,” when the RAPPists required that shock-workers be taken on the staff of publishers’ and editorial boards), at

the end of the list of famous writers’ and critics’ names stands a category for the nameless: “industry shock-worker.” It was only later that in the RAPP secretariat’s list, the surname of comrade Fridman appeared, and in the staff of the Oktiabr’ editorial board—comrade Rezchikoy.!”? “Volodia” Rezchikov did not “make it” as a writer. It was the fate of the generation: “He probably went off to the war... . Did he return?”!”° But then others “made it.” In the early 1980s, it had to be explained to the reader that “in our state's heroic striving to create its own new Soviet literature, there was also a little

page or half-page: ‘the call of the shock-workers into literature.””'”” In fact, there has been a “little page” written: one in Edward Brown's book about RAPP!8 and another—also in a book about RAPP—by Stepan Sheshukov.”

Aliger suggested that there was “no need to waste time and effort today in proving the falseness of the idea that underpinned this ‘call,’ as it has already been solidly proven by life itself.”'*° Since RAPP was a unique phenomenon (one could write about the “falseness of the idea” and practice of this literary organization from either a Soviet viewpoint—after the Central Committee's 1932 resolution—or an anti-Soviet viewpoint, which cannot be said of LEF,

Pereval, the Serapion Brothers, nor any other group), it is not at all surprising that both American and Soviet researchers not only scarcely departed from

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Aliger’s appraisals but also arrived at similar conclusions: both have suggested that RAPP inserted itself into the campaign initiated by the All-Union Central Trade-Union Council, using it to its own advantage; both have examined the

“call” almost exclusively within the narrow framework of RAPPist struggle; both have seen it as a culmination of Onguardist claims to hegemony in literature. What is worrisome here is only the scope and the context in which concrete historico-literary fact is examined: Tolstoy wrote primers for children as well, but his significance in literature, as is well known, is not limited to this. The “call of shock-workers into literature” is not a “half-page” in RAPP’s history, but rather one of the most important pages in the history ofestablishing Soviet culture: indeed, the greater part of Soviet writers came from this “call,” if by this one means not only the campaign itself in the early 1930s but also the discovery, during its course, of a real system of reproduction and “srowth of ideologically and creatively high-quality human material in literature.”'>! But even in the context of RAPPist history proper, the “call” has a quite special place: RAPP, after all, did not produce any literature at all—it oc-

cupied itself with the production of writers. This is how the RAPPists themselves understood the “call”: “Educating cadres of proletarian writers from the masses’ members of the association (and consequently, from the shock-workers called into literature, above all) in max-

imally short periods. . . . This is the general, defining content of the circles’ practice, and the goal of all their work”; based on this, “the call of shockworkers into literature by the All-Union Central Trade-Union Council and RAPP is not an episodic campaign from such-and-such date to another, but an elegant system of all the further work of the masses’ literary movement as it is restructured.”'*? And although the RAPPists during only a single year “called into literature” about 10,000 people (about 2,000 in Moscow, more than 500 in Leningrad, more than 400 in the Urals, 245 in Ivanovo, 155 in the Central

Black-Earth Region, and so forth'**), an “elegant system” did not result. Because of the perennial RAPPist pursuit of numbers, reports, and percentages (the Party school), the “call” went down into the history of Soviet literature as one of its most laughable pages. “The call of shock-workers around Leningrad, which in the earliest days gave significant results, has begun to slow down’—thus the LAPP newspaper Za kadry (For the cadres) “raised the alarm” in the December 1930 article “We Will Compensate for What We Missed” (“Naverstaem upushchennoe”): “Recent weeks have brought in almost nothing new.”!*4 It had been all of seven weeks since the “call” was first announced!!*5 The slogan “RAPP’s workerization” had a whole series of constantly chang-

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ing slogans that accompanied it: “RAPP—into the factories”; “For the great art of Bolshevism”; “For the Magnitostroi of literature”; “For the portrayal of the heroes of Bolshevist tempos’; and the like. These last two slogans, in par-

ticular, signified that RAPP was “calling” not only authors, but the heroes of the future books themselves, since the “call of shock-workers” is the creation of a “Magnitostroi of literature”: “Portraying magnitostrois in literature means creating a ‘magnitostroi of literature.’”!°° In a speech at the September 1931 ple-

num of RAPP entitled “On the Portrayal of Heroes and the Call of ShockWorkers” (“O pokaze geroev i prizyve udarnikov”), Libedinskii explained this

aesthetic puzzle as follows:

So that the heroes may begin to speak with their own voice, we must speak with the voice of the shock-worker. Our portrayal of heroes and the call of shock-workers is at the same time both the call of heroes and the portrayal of shock-workers. This is a single phenomenon, advancing under the same banner, which could never arise in any literature but proletarian literature.!*”

I will not bog this discussion down now in the problem of “the author and the hero in aesthetic activities” as presented by Bakhtin (but let us note in passing that Bakhtin was working on this at approximately this same time). Instead, I

again turn attention to the tempo being imposed. The slogan had been propagated. In a very short time in Na literaturnom postu, typographically emphasized, it was announced that “We Are Sounding the Alarm” (“B”em trevogu’”). It seemed that

... IN many associations

NOTHING HAS BEEN DONE to get underway with the realization of the RAPP Secretariat’s appeal in a Bolshevist way, this in spite of the fact that since the time of the appeal MORE THAN A MONTH HAS GONE BY.!*

This is literally how the Onguardists solved the problem of “tempos” (“the cadres, who are cast into the literary sector by the working class, are obliged to align their own front, obliged to carry out their own industrial-financial plan at Bolshevist tempos”'*’). Immediately following was the appeal of the Secretariat of the Ural Association of Proletarian Writers “to all writers of the Soviet Union, to the publishers and editors of literary-artistic journals”: It is necessary, right now, to move the best writing resources to the Urals and Siberia [which, as is well known, took place just five years later—E.D.] with

the aim that in just a few months we can have qualified books [my emphasis— E.D,] about the construction of Urals-Kuzbass giants, about Urals-Siberian

kolkhozes and sovkhozes. . . . Playwrights must provide profound, qualified

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plays in the very near future |my emphasis—E.D.]. ... We must organize a dispatch of playwrights to the Urals and Siberia to study the material in situ,”

Thus the “forging of cadres” determined also the forms of the “call.” Among these forms was the just-mentioned “dispatch” ofshock-workers to “hotspots.” In one of the July 1931 issues of Na literaturnom postu (literally two weeks after the “alarm”!) were endless lists of shock-worker writers being sent

“to work on the artistic portrayal of heroes” to the Ivanovo, Central BlackEarth, and Western Provinces, in the Western Siberian Territory. Among the assigned workplaces: peat-works, an excavator factory, a glassworks, flax-combine

manufacturing, spinning plants, kolkhozes, machine-and-tractor stations, and so on. Hundreds of unknown names and places. “The mobilized will stay for one month.” The local proletarian writers’ associations complained that “the creative activists group is inadequate.” Having been incorporated into “RAPP’s creative campaign with the slogan “The country must know its own heroes,” the Western Association of Proletarian Writers resolved to “In cooperation with

the regional labor council, draw up a list of Red Banner enterprises and of individual shock-workers, and team the whole creative activists group of ZOAPP with them in the period of one year, providing in the course of the coming months for these comrades to go out to the localities, and to check their work monthly.”!4! The RAPPists’ reports grew more and more similar to reports from battlefields. The second form of the call was socialist competition, interpreted literally by the Onguardists in full accord with the forms of this competition in industry: “What is socialist competition in proletarian literature?” Ivan Makar’ev, one of

RAPP’s secretaries, asked the participants of RAPP’s fifth plenum. His answer: “This is socialist competition transferred to the arena of art... . Just as the shock-worker brigades cannot create the giant of socialist industry that is Magnitostroi without socialist competition, likewise the ‘Magnitostroi of literature’ cannot be created without socialist competition in art.”!*? Comrades from Smolensk made this concrete: “In creative competition . . . each individual comrade is a freely competing creative unit, . . . and he is indeed freely competing, because all his creative work is determined by the goals of the Party [?!].” But since “the call of shock-workers into literature is the basis of

creative competition, and creative competition is the weapon for propelling the call,” it was necessary to “give a firm slap to the wrist” of those who “drag up the freedom of literary-political factionism under the flag of freedom of creative diversity.”!” Since the Onguardists regarded the call as an expansion of their “base” in

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literature, with even greater persistence they continued to drag the “cadres of shock-workers” into the squabbles occurring within literature. “You must get

involved in the creative struggle today,”-Averbakh insisted to the “called,” during the opening of a seminar at GIKhL’s Office of the Literary Shock-Worker. You cannot be a bystander to it, you represent the organized cell of our literary movement, and you must accept-organized participation in our

creative discussion. . . . Our Party created RAPP. RAPP was built under the direction of the Party, but RAPP has an enormous number of enemies. Everyone who has attended the seminar must perceive himself as an active champion of the proletarian literary movement, must feel responsibility for this undertaking, knowing that in the arena of proletarian literature, a struggle for the general line of the Party is going on, and knowing that this is the same kind of struggle that is in other sectors of socialist construction.!“4 In a word, “creative competition .. . is the weapon of the proletariat’s class struggle.”!*°

The “basis of the call” was primarily the /iterary circles. This is what the call looked like “in one factory”: At first there were two people. There were conversations about recruitment, about how we would write, what we would write about, and how to get

involved in the life of the factory. Then two more came. .. . Then yet another came. We had a meeting. Everyone told his own story. We set to work. We read our poems and short stories, at first timidly, then more boldly. We starting working in harmony, started to help each other. . .. We rounded up six people. We wrote a poem castigating a truant. ... We made presentations twice during lunch break in the workshop. But still no new ones came. Then it was decided to wage a massive campaign and switch over to the form of a literary workshop. We held meetings in the factory shops, published a journal, Literaturnyi tsekh [Literary workshop], and scheduled an opening date. Four hundred people came to the opening. Right then and there, they joined the workshop. But little was written. Twenty people came to the first class. We had grown by 2!/2 times. But now the workshop has taken the Lepse factory's circle in tow. We appointed a brigade to carry on the call. . . . Now the basic goal is to get involved in newspapers. But the workshop’s work, as opposed to the circle, is much more complicated. The responsibility is greater... . This is no longer a circle attached to the factory, but a part of the factory. . . Any day now there will be 80 people in the workshop. . . . There is a lot of work. The work is not easy. But the call of shock-workers will

provide cadres of proletarian writers and poets—this is inevitable.'*°

This picture is typical. One need only add that to a certain degree it reflected the situation of literature as a whole, since in connection with the call,

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RAPP itself also had to “restructure”: “Yesterday we were still a circle, one of the circles in the proletarian literary movement,” said Makar’ev. “Today we are a massive movement that has grown particularly in connection with the call of the shock-workers, but the habits of the circle period have remained until this very day.”'”’ In other words, RAPP had to organize literature according to the example of the “literary workshop.” The task of “bringing the literary cadres to light” seemed rather simple in this context: if, for example, the “situation with the literary circle” in Leningrad’s Proletarian Factory was “unfavorable,” then the circle’s work had to be “amplified,” and then the “writers” would “bring themselves to light,” since after all “a factory with some three thousand workers can and should provide new literary cadres—one need only spread the work in the workshops, show the face of the literary circle.”'** With this goal in mind, on the eve of the “call,” RAPP and the Komsomol Central Committee organized an “Exhibition of the literary circles.” The Komsomol journal Smena became the center of this exhibition, whose goal was the

activization of the circles’ work, “expansion of the network of literary circles” (the call would not be issued for another year, but the goal of the exhibition was announced to be “attracting the masses to participate in the creation of working-class writer cadres”), and of course, the exhibition was supposed to become yet another pressure factor on publishers and the press, with an eye toward expanding the “printing arena” for “beginner working-class writers.” A special point in the plan for carrying out the exhibition proclaimed: “In order to clarify the situation of advancing beginner writers into print and setting up consultational work, in the course of the inspection the combined forces of circleists, Komsomol cells, and ‘light cavalry’ groups will organize a series of raids [séc!] on journal and magazine editorial boards, and also on publishers that

publish artistic literature.”'*? The paternalistic model of organizing literature was worked out in this period, the 1920s and early 1930s: one may accuse RAPP of anything one likes, but it unswervingly fulfilled its role of guardian of the “rank-and-file writing masses” that supported it. Later on, the state’s Union of Writers that served as guardian to the “writing masses” no longer had to organize “raids”: the newspapers, journals, and publishers were already in its hands. The “masses of beginning working-class authors” delegated the function of “leading the movement” to the Onguardists, in response to the latter’s “concern” for them, Within the broad democracy of the “masses’ literary movement,” this function was not only ot abolished but indeed was intensified

(just as “in the course of communist construction” the state grew ever stronger, while in theory it was supposed to “die out”). The Onguardists were vigilant

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that the slogan “RAPP—face-to-face with the working-class shock-worker” should not “smell of ‘liquidationism.”” This “liquidationism” was contained in the question “Why is special organization of the proletarian literary movement necessary, when it is the masses’ movement of shock-workers into literature?” Calling such questions “outright opportunistic nonsense,” the Onguardists argued that they could only be asked by a “vulgar liquidator and capitulator who replaces the goal of highly ideological leadership of the proletarian literary movement with the ‘goal’ of intelligentsia ‘curtseying’ to it in the spirit of the typically opportunistic ‘rabocheliubets.”'*° No, “what we need is a special organization developed in the battles for proletarian culture and literature, that fundamentally defends the Bolshevist line in these issues against the revisionism and opportunism of all calibers and sects. RAPP and only RAPP. is that kind of organization.”'*' Characteristically, in this kind of self-promotion the RAPPists described their own organization in literally the same words that the role of the “Bolshevist Party” itself was described. As has been said already, RAPP was not simply a literary group, but rather a full-fledged party in literature, with its own nomenklatura and social base. Since RAPP continued the struggle for “control” of the organs of the press throughout its whole history,'°* newspapers and journals were destined to play a special role during the course of the call. Publishers were required not only for advancing the struggle in literature, but also for providing “living space” for the “army of litcircleists” (simply put, for the expansion of their publishing arena). An enormous jump in the expansion of the “lower-strata press” oc-

curred just on the eve of and during the call: in the mid-1920s the factory newspapers [mmnogotirazhki| could be counted in the single digits, but toward late 1928 there were already more than 200 of them, in early 1929, 400, and in 1931, more than 2,000.'** However, since the litcircleists grew “not by days, but by hours,” the newspapers’ literary pages grew too limited for them. Accordingly, RAPP began a restructuring of its own publications: Okziabr’ was supposed to draw in the writers from among the shock-workers who had “already brought themselves to light”; Literaturnaia ucheba and Rost were transformed into centers of guidance, teaching, and consultation for the shock-workers; Na

literaturnom postu was supposed to lead critics and “the workers’ critical journals”; RAPP’s main theoretical journal, Proletarskaia literatura (Proletarian literature), was supposed to provide a “scientific-methodological” basis for the development of the “call”; Literaturnaia gazeta was supposed to do reviews of the literary pages and supply “operational management” of the call; Molodaia gvardiia, Smena, and the literary page of Komsomol ’skaia pravda “should be the fundamental centers of our joint practical work with Komsomol”;'™ the jour-

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nals Rezets and Stroika (Construction), and newspapers including Udarnik literatury (Shock-worker of literature), Vecherniaia Moskva (Moscow in the evening), and the Leningrad Za kadry were included in the system of “safeguard-

ing the call”; regional journals also “above all must become ideological-creative centers for the literary circles united by the territory and province, must de-

velop teaching-creative work with beginning writers”;'” the journal of GIKhL, Khudozhestvennaia literatura (Artistic literature), was specially created as a

journal for shock-workers (among its goals were consultation work, analysis of the creative work of the circles and regional proletarian writers’ associations, and annotation and review of books by and for shock-workers'”®) . A special

fourth expanded plenum of RAPP was devoted to these issues, and created the appropriate infrastructure “for the call.”!”” At the center of this infrastructure stood the restructured publishing system. It is worth remembering that the “call” itself was initiated by the VIsSPS publishing house. On August 19, 1931, a year after the “call” had begun, the Party’s Central Committee issued a special resolution entitled “On the Work of Publishers” (“Ob izdatel’skoi rabote”), designed to support “local initiatives.” This

resolution spoke of the fact that “the gigantic growth of the country, accompanied by the quick political growth of the working class, advances new hundreds and thousands of talented writing forces,” and that accordingly, publishers were faced with the tasks of “collecting and organizing around themselves all the new growing forces, and helping them rise to a higher degree of culture, knowledge, and specialization” and “paying special attention to the promotion of new authors from among outstanding workers and kolkhoz members.” GIKhL, the country’s largest publishing house, was drawn into the “restructuring” more actively than any other publisher. Within it was created the institution of “workers’ (‘socialist’) deputies” in the form of a “workers’ editorial

council” —a sort of “mediator between GIKhL and the factory.” This council was called upon to “extend its influence to the whole of publishing” (according to the directive, “in each editorial board and in the industrial division, one or two members of the editorial council will work regularly, fitting this in with their basic work in industry”), and in the long run this council was supposed to become a “smithy of new publishing cadres.” This was in the interest of “preparing an editorial and publishing apparatus from among the members of the workers’ editorial council.”'** The council attached to GIKhL consisted of seventy “working-class readers” and was overseen by the director of Gosizdat (State Publishing House) and OGIZ (Association of State Publishing Houses)

of the RSFSR, Khalatov, who was influential in higher Party circles. Thanks to the activities of this council in particular, numerous shock-workers’ books were

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published in mass printings (100,000 copies each), and the Workers’ Call (Ra-

bochii prizyv) anthologies; it was this council that rejected “ideologically harmful works” (it was at its recommendation that GIKhL rejected “Andrei Platonovss kulak tale A Bedniak Chronicle [Bedniatskaia khronika}”!). “Mass departments” (sassovye otdely, specializing in large print-runs) and “workers’ editorial councils” began to be created in other publishing houses as

well. Their assignment was to publish the same kind of books and anthologies

of the “shock-worker writers.” The quantity that they published is truly impressive. According to the bibliography compiled by S. Breitburg,'® 249 works of the shock-workers were published during a single year (from September 1930 through July 1931), and by 1934 this figure had increased by at least three times. Among the authors: the Komsomol brigade of the operations-planning section

of the “Krasnyi putilovets” (“Red pathfinder”) factory; a worker from “Elektrozavod”; a worker from the Petrovsk Factory in Dnepropetrovsk; a worker

from printing-house number 14 of “Mospoligraf”; a worker from the “Serp i molot” factory; a typesetter in printing-house number 5 of “Transpechat’”; workers from the “Samotochka” factory; a worker from the Khar’kov electromechanical factory; a drill operator from the Lepse Factory; a shock-worker of

the Perm’ boat-repair workshop; shock-workers of the heavy-freight wagons shop of the “Krasnyi Profintern” factory; a metalworker of the “Krasnaia Presnia’ machine-building factory; a worker from the steelworks shop of the Lenin Factory; a molder in the “Skorokhod” plant; and a “called shock-worker” of the literary circle in the “Kauchuk” factory—that same Vladimir Rezchikov who would become a member of the editorial board of Oktiabr’and the classmate of Margarita Aliger at the Literary Institute. What could criticism (even well-wishing criticism) say about the works of the shock-workers? For an example, I will cite the review of the “literary-artistic anthology of working-class writers” entitled Light and Shades of the Workers Daily Life (Svet i teni rabochego byta). The reviewer esteems this book as an indicator of the great cultural growth of the working class. The worker, while

standing at his station, writes a short-story, novella, or essay. This can only be in the Soviet Union! The stance of Gosizdat on drawing in the working-class author to work on a book for the masses is completely justified. This anthology is an exemplar of how we must draw in and teach the worker in such a complex business as artistic literature, creating a literature for the worker using the workers themselves!?°"

The anthology, a “great accomplishment on the workers’ mass culture front,” was written (and this was the important thing) “from a pure heart, with great sincerity and winning simplicity.” The appraisal of the book is extremely posi-

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tive: the author of the review was himself aworkers’ correspondent. But even he cannot but point out “a few faults”: “The material is by far incomplete. . . . This anthology can only be called experimental. It abounds in many faults from a literary point of view, on every page one feels the authors’ inability to master the material. And in some places an elementary lack of literacy shows through.”!°° One of the fundamental “bases of the call” was Komsomol. As a result of the

“workerization” of RAPP, the constituency of workers in the association reached 80 percent. The percentage of “recruited Komsomol writers” also came to this.

Komsomol’s participation in the call included not only “development of massoriented explanatory work among working-class and kolkhoz youth about the meaning of the proletarian literary movement,” but also forms of direct control over the Komsomol shock-workers that were called. For example, the October 2, 1931, resolution of the Komsomol office of the Central Black-Earth Region

required that the work of “both Komsomol-member and non-Party beginning writers” be “subordinated to the control of the larger Komsomol organization.”'© On the other hand, “the VOAPP and RAPP organizations to a signif-

icant extent were transformed into organizations that educated the thousands of Komsomol writers.”!™ Finally, RAPP’s satellites in literature itself became active participants in the

call: ROPKP, the aforementioned Russian Organization of Proletarian-Kolkhoz Writers, and LOKAF (Literaturnoe ob’edinenie Krasnoi Armii i Flota), the Lit-

erary Union of the Red Army and Fleet. ROPKP was the second largest literary organization, in terms of membership, to RAPP. Under the complete control of Onguardists, ROPKP activists joined in the execution of the call with unprecedented zeal. Just a year after the “announcement of the call” these “proletarian-kolkhoz writers” could give the following account of their accomplishments: ... organized 252 literary circles, encompassing 3,000 people. In the Leningrad Province, 32 circles were organized, with 400 people; in the Moscow Province, 31 circles with 600 people; in the Northern Caucasus Territory, 41 circles with 600 people; in the Tatar Republic, 16 circles with 224 people, and so on... . The literary circle of the sovkhoz, kolkhoz, and machine-andtractor stations have by now become the center of mass-organizing work,

and VOPKP [Vsesoiuznaia organizatsiia proletarsko-kolkhoznykh pisatelei (AllUnion Organization of Proletarian-Kolkhoz Writers)] in its work relies on the

Party-Komsomol organizations, and the kolkhoz unions and labor unions of

agricultural workers.'®

What this “reliance” meant can be understood by the situation that unfolded in the Western Province, wherein the leaders of the local branch of VOPKP

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demanded: “The regional kolkhoz union and the regional division of the union of agricultural and forestry workers must begin participation immediately in the development of work . . . by sending literary brigades to the kolkhozes and sovkhozes and providing local directives for the creation of a setup for the work of the literary circles.”!© ; The activists of LOKAF to an even greater extent depended on state organs in the organization of the call: “The direct leadership of the Political Directorate of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army in the literary-artistic education of Red Army men has assured the efficient operation of the literary circles and unions in Red Army units,” reported Literaturnaia ucheba. The article was about the directive issued by Ian Gamarnik, head of the directorate, which es-

tablished the “literary minimum” for Red Army men and junior officers (the directive’s lists included works from Griboedov to DenYian Bednyi). It turned out that the library subscriptions of the army literary circles were “littered with all kinds of trash,” and furthermore, “beginner poets read poetry exclusively, and prose writers’ works of prose”; therefore, the “literary minimum” would force them to read “according to a plan” (according to Gamarnik’s directive, for some reason “all Red Army men must read” Boris Godunov and Tale of the Priest and His Servant Balda |Skazka 0 pope i rabotnike ego Balde]). The jour-

nal expressed its certainty that with such “efficient organization of work,” “we will succeed in forcing . . . the growing Red Army writers” to read what was necessary: “Under the conditions of the Red Army at present, it is not at all difficult to carry out this measure in an organized way.”'°’ Therefore, although LOKAF announced the call half a year later than RAPP, the ranks of “defense writers” grew threefold in only six months’ time: the Moscow and LeningradBaltic LOKAF organizations each “mobilized” about 300 Red Army soldiers and commanders, and political workers; Ukrainian LOKAF swelled to 350

members, and the Volga-Region organization, to 150 (a total of more than 1,500 military men were “called”).'° Three powerful currents of shock-workers—workers’ correspondents via RAPP, village correspondents via ROPKP, and military correspondents via

LOKAF—flowed together into literature. All of this occurred against the background of the “call ofshock-workers to the press” announced by Pravda. The slogans of this call: “The shock-worker worker’s correspondent, the organizer of

shock-work, is becoming a central figure of the workers’-correspondent movement. The village-correspondent kolkhoznik, the organizer of kolkhoz construction, is becoming a central figure of the village-correspondent movement.”!© These slogans were echoed literally by the RAPPist slogan, “The shock-worker is the central figure of proletarian literature,” which was imme-

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diately replaced by a slogan of the “struggle for the quality of the call.” The change in slogan was the Onguardists’ forced concession to Pravda, which spoke out against “overpraising” the shock-workers. Averbakh immediately provided a “theoretical basis for the change of course”:

In conditions wherein a /eap is made in the promotion of new working-class cadres, the spread oftailist attitudes, of sickly-sweet and false “rabocheliubie,” and ofintelligentsia-populist lisping, becomes a real danger. Against such attitudes—and they do exist—we must strike with all our might. Lack of sufficient direction in this regard can lead only to overpraise and glossing over the enormous difficulties facing every beginning writer . . . , that is, to that which can infect the new working-class cadres with a serious illness.'”°

Nonetheless, the Onguardists demanded recognition of the status of writers for the “new working-class cadres,” proclaiming that “the division of the called shock-workers and professional writers into two hostile camps is a politically incorrect and most harmful thing, and anyone who tries to do this should be given a most decisive slap on the wrist.”'”' Taking this even further, they attempted to prove the undoubted superiority of the former group to the latter, since “the writer falls behind the tempos of today and experiences a bygone day. But life does not wait. And here, just as in other areas of labor, the shock-worker has come to his aid”; he “has come to do creative work on one of the backward parts of socialist construction—artistic literature.”'” A campaign was even launched in pedagogical publications to introduce the

works of shock-workers (often instead of books by professional writers) into the school curriculum (the usual review of literature programs was occurring at this time), which would not only raise their “authorial” status but also would bring them closer to the official literary anthology: “In school teaching of literature, the works of shock-workers must be allotted a significant place,” demanded the journal Literatura i iazyk v politekhnicheskoi shkole (Literature and language in the polytechnical school).'”* This was seconded by another journal, Narodnyi uchitel’(The people’s teacher), which recommended including shock-workers’ works in school readers, since “the school, which is attaching itself to industry, cannot and should not ignore the description of industry by workers themselves.”'”* It is not difficult to imagine the kind of reaction that such a policy was bound to produce among professional writers, and above all among the fellow-travelers, among whom the “call of shock-workers [wdarniki} into literature” received the name “the call of the ungifted [bezdarniki| into literature.”!”°

Be that as it may, the “call” was not in any way, as both Soviet and Western historians of literature have suggested, an attempt of “Onguardist leadership”

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to bring RAPP out of any “profound crisis.” In 1930 and 1931, there was no crisis in RAPP. On‘the contrary, a “crisis” could be observed in the ranks of the fellow-travelers.'”° Indeed, on the eve ‘of and during the “call,” RAPP suc-

ceeded in removing practically a// the literary groups from the struggle: under pressure of RAPP in 1929, LEF “abolished itself,” and in the same year, as a result of the campaign against Evgenti Zamjatin and Mikhail Bulgakov headed

by RAPPists, RAPP succeeded in definitively subordinating FOSP to itself and in fortifying itself in the All-Russian Writers’ Union; in the following year, the Onguardists completed the rout of Pereval, subordinated the Smithy to its own influence, centralized the tiny literary groups of VAPP (“Smena,” “Vagranka,” “Zakal” [“Temper”], and others), and broke up the Constructivists’ group, all of whose members eventually joined RAPP; Mayakovsky too became a mem-

ber; in 1931, there was an internal “revolution” in the “peasant” VOKP, which became the “proletarian-kolkhoz” ROPKP—a curious “kolkhoz branch” of RAPP. About this time, practically a// the literary publications fell into RAPP’s hands—from the thick journals and Moscow’s Literaturnaia gazeta to the provincial journals. These are only the fundamental events in RAPP’s struggle for the “Bolshevization of literature.”'”” Beyond this, the Onguardists routed the “leftist opposition” (Litfront) within RAPP and acquired the public support of the Central Committee (suffice it to point out the two 1931 editorials in Pravda, the April 18th “For Proletarian Literature” [“Za proletarskuiu literaturu’] and the August 31st “For the Hegemony of Proletarian Literature” [“Za

gegemoniiu proletarskoi literatury”], in the former of which it was asserted that “the fundamental leading union in proletarian literature that promotes the Party's line in questions of artistic literature is RAPP”!”®). The era of the “call” was RAPP’s brightest hour. The “call,” or to use Averbakh’s term, the “recruitment of shock-workers into literature,” was truly the realization of the RAPPist dream (“For the first time... what we had talked about is realized in fact”!”?)—to transform liter-

ature into a completely controllable organization, consisting of half-literate “shock-workers” who would finally replace the writers that were hardly submissive. And this is precisely how the RAPPists understood the “call,” as the practical creation ofa new type of writer: from the address of Averbakh, Antselovich, and Khalatov on the occasion of the

first anniversary of the “call”: “The future of proletarian literature, and its

tomorrow . . is in its worker nucleus, in the cadres of shock-workers. .. . The new type of writer finds its distinct expression in the call”;1®°

from Averbakh’s speech at the plenum of the Board of Directors of RAPP: “The essence of the matter is that based precisely on the portrayal of shock-work

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and socialist competition, a whole new generation of proletarian writers can and | || SNOULC grow

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from Sergei Varshavskii’s speech at the same plenum: “Only along the paths of drawing workers and kolkhozniks into literature, shock-workers and front-

rank workers, can its lag from the tempos of socialist offensive be overcome and gotten rid of, and only in the process of the call can a new type of writer be developed”;!*

from Mark Serebrianskii’s presentation at the expanded plenum of MAPP: “The call of shock-workers into literature is the path . . . of shaping and forging a new type of Bolshevik writer” and only this “new type of Bolshevik writer” would create the conditions for “proletarian literature’s winning of hegemony in the shortest historical time periods.”!*’

This was indeed RAPP’s principle goal, and it permitted Averbakh to speak with such certainty about the fact that “the call of shock-workers into RAPP is the turning point from which the real history of RAPP begins, and all its foregoing stages are its prehistory.”'** This is why another RAPP leader, Libedinskii, was so confident: “The time is coming when worker-writers will make proletarian literature. . . . The call of shock-workers into RAPP should lead to there not being any non-shock-worker writers in RAPP.”'® This is why (and not from thoughtlessness, as Sheshukov asserted, nor from a “zeal” to report back to the Party on its own successes, as Brown asserted) the RAPPists im-

mediately advanced the slogan “The shock-worker is the central figure of proletarian literature.” The slogan was replaced a few months after the criticism from Pravda. By that time, when the RAPPist initiative was in full flight, the “reverse mechanism” developed on its eve began to operate. One might call the scenario “Dizziness of Success, Part Two.” Needless to say, the “cultural revolution” and RAPP’s activities on the “literary front” in 1928-1932 were a reflection of the “great break” that occurred at

the same time at the top of the Party pyramid. The “call of shock-workers into literature” by it methods, tempos, and character was a curious reflection of the “complete collectivization of the countryside.” Stalin’s famous article “Dizziness of Success” (“Golovokruzhenie ot uspekhov”), which introduced a certain

“weakening” into the process of “complete collectivization,” can be regarded as a universal political mechanism by whose action many of the “obscure places” in Soviet history are explained. It remains a mystery to this day, for example, why the aforementioned 1925 Central Committee resolution, “On the Policy of the Party in the Area of Artistic Literature,” was not reexamined in 1929. Everything was ready for this to happen: discussion about reexamining the resolution was occurring openly, not only in literary publications but also in the Vecher-

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niaia Moskva newspaper; Onguardists again exerted pressure, demanding that “all literary matters” be transferred directly to their control by directive; and “liberals,” personified by Gorky, Lunacharskii, and the fellow-travelers, discussed possible concessions in the press. It was clear to everyone in 1929 that the

era of authority's tolerant attitude toward the various literary groups had passed. But still, no new resolution followed. ,“Now it is understandable why in November 1929 a general reexamination of the June resolution of 1925 was

proposed,” writes Karl Aimermakher, one of the most profound researchers of 1920s Soviet literary politics. “Why this reexamination nonetheless was not realized is even today unclear.”'*° There is no sense in seeking an answer in the archives: unwritten political laws are what operated here. The logic of “dizziness of success” explains the reason: the situation had to be “whirled around” to its limit (to the point of “dizziness”); meanwhile, the higher Party leader-

ship remained as if “above the skirmish.” Later, at the height of “success,” like thunder in a clear blue sky, the higher Party leadership’s directive regarding “local extremes” came crashing down (in the form of an article by Stalin or a

Central Committee resolution—possible variants). The “local” initiative was paralyzed, authority took the “matter” into its own hands and established order. One might adduce a number of examples in Soviet history that confirm the operation of this mechanism. The events of 1929-1932 in literature developed according to just this sce-

nario: in comparison with the “call of the shock-workers,” the Union of Writers really seemed to the majority of writers a long-awaited liberation—the taste for literary groups had been removed, apparently forever. The “call,” externally unconnected with the fellow-travelers, was a shocking demonstration of a possible model of the functioning of literature: it rallied the fellow-travelers “on the platform of Soviet authority” many times faster and more enduringly than all the special actions taken to “draw them into socialist construction” taken together. This was the calculated effect. By rejecting an official reexamination in 1929 of the 1925 Central Committee resolution, Stalin provoked the necessary “dizziness.” But the RAPPists, in-

toxicated by the upper-Party encouragement of all their new initiatives aimed at the “Bolshevization of literature,” could hardly have guessed their subsequent fate. They were used by authority as an artificial “counterweight”: the more-than-cruel course to the “Bolshevization of literature” that they imposed forced writers to pin their hopes of “moderation” on a higher Party authority. When the boiling point was reached (and this was what the “call” was), the

“reexamination of the resolution” finally took place: writers were freed from RAPP by joining the Union of Writers that was being created, but now under

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conditions imposed by authority. Stalin did not, of course, lay his stakes on “shock-workers”: for him, Gorky’s name alone was far more important than the voices of the whole “many-thousand army of shock-worker writers” fos-

tered by the RAPPists. If experienced politicians, Party bureaucrats themselves—the RAPPists— did not understand this, then what could be expected of people far from the political struggle? Welcoming the “industrial-financial counterplan of proletarian literature,” the future academic who would educate more than one generation of Soviet writers in the Literary Institute, Leonid Timofeev, wrote at the height of the “call” that in its course, the dreams ofa new type of culture were becoming reality: firstly, the “direct inclusion ofliterature in socialist construction,” secondly, the “new type of writer-producer,” and thirdly, “collective creativity.” Here one sees an entire assemblage of the already-familiar “utopias of creativity.” Revolutionary culture, however, was drawing to a close. At the threshold of Soviet culture, Timofeev foresaw the appearance of “new forms of creativity”: The leading tendencies that are now already observable in the creative work of these writers that are still in the very rudimentary stage of development oblige us to fear not so much their overestimation as their underestimation. We are now faced with such possibilities of the growth of proletarian literature of the reconstructive period and with its forms that are so unexpected, that the consequences are still simply hard to foresee.'*”

The consequences did not make him wait long: only a year remained until the “unforeseen” Central Committee’s resolution “On the Restructuring of Literary-Artistic Organizations’ (“O perestroike literaturno-khudozhestvennykh organizatsii”).

The “Lower-Strata Writer”: Who Is He?

Moving along the “shady side” of the street has certain advantages: the backyard can tell a great deal more about reality than the main entrance and signs on the facade. Immersion into the world of “lower-strata Soviet literature” creates a perspective that differs markedly from the widely known one that is described in textbooks and “histories.” This is a sort of “other literature”’—without the usual names, without the famous works. In part it is also an “other history.” In an article that was destined to open up a whole new area in literary scholarship, “Literature and the Literary Environment” (“Literatura i literaturnyi byt”), Boris Eikhenbaum wrote about certain “paradoxes of historical systems”:

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“The shifting of issues and signs of meaning leads to a regrouping oftraditional

material and to the introduction of new facts that were overlooked by the former system because of its natural limitations.”!*® Enough has been said about

the “limitations” of the former system: it is impossible to explain the phenomenon ofSoviet literature without departing into the sphere of subculture—nei-

ther purely political explanations, nor inquiries in the purely aesthetic sphere, allow one to understand the nature of the Soviet cultural phenomenon. Eikhenbaum also speaks of this in his article: “Literature, like any other specific series of phenomena, is not born from the facts of other series, and is therefore

not reducible to them. The relations between the facts of a literary series and the facts lying outside of it cannot be simply causal, but can only be relations of correspondence, mutual influence, dependency, or conditionality.”'*°

These relations precisely are the object of examination in the present work. “Existence outside a system (‘coincidence’), from a scientific viewpoint, is

equivalent to null,” Eikhenbaum observes.'”° In the former “historical systems” of Soviet literature, “Soviet literature” ztse/f'seemed to be an example of such a

“coincidence,” if one regards it not only as a corpus of “Soviet classics’ —dozens of chrestomathic texts and the dozens of “masters of the word” that created them (and this is just how the history of Soviet literature looked both in Soviet “histories” and in many Western studies)—but also as a unique, highly organized political-cultural institution that produced a huge corpus of texts with its own aesthetic and a system for regenerating the “cadres” to produce them. In essence, this was the impulse that produced Eikhenbaum’s article, when he observed in 1927 that “in crisis now is not literature by itself, but also its social existence”!?! (it might be suggested that precisely this crisis caused the “literary environment’ to surface as a problem in the latter half of the 1920s). The place where the article was published was also appropriate—JNa literaturnom postu. In this leading RAPPist journal, one of the fathers of Russian formalism wrote that

“questions of technology have openly yielded their place to others, central among which is the problem of the literary profession itself, the very ‘business of literature.’ The question of ‘how to write’ has been replaced or at least complicated by another question, “how to be a writer. In other words, the problem of literature as such has been overshadowed by the problem of the writer.”"”* The pressure of the acknowledged “social mandate” complicated the situation even more, since “a particular type of writer has appeared—a professional-acting dilettante who does not ponder the essence of the question and his own fate as a writer.” !”

Eikhenbaum thus noted the appearance of a new character on the literary stage. He also made a number of important observations on the plot of the play

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being acted out on this stage under the title “Literary Struggle”: “The attitude toward the issue of literary professionalism acquires a fundamental significance and demarcates some writers’ groups from others.”!”* The law of opposition is however absolute—the “scissors” are determined by the sociohistorical situation itself:

The forms and possibilities of literary labor as a profession change in relation to the social conditions of the era. Writing, when it becomes a profession, removes the writer from his class, but conversely makes him dependent on the consumer, on the “client” [zakazchik]. .. . The writer now feels around

for his professional opportunities. They are undefined because the functions of literature themselves are tied up into the complicated knot.'”

The functions ofliterature were “tied up” because the “mode of existence” of literature itself had fundamentally changed: both new consumers (the masses) and new “clients” (the authorities) had appeared. The onus was on the new

producers. The “masses’ writer,” the one who as Voronskii said, came from “some kind of godforsaken places,” was already waiting on the threshold. Perhaps the most indicative thing could be considered the makeup of the correspondents of RAPP’s and GIKhL’s literary consultancies, through which up to half a thousand quires of the products of “writers of the masses” passed per month. These were people aged seventeen to twenty-five. By social origin, they were primarily peasant youth, then students (mostly higher-education students from among workers and peasants), then blue-collar workers, and finally, whitecollar workers (mainly lower-level ones). The percentage of unemployed people who saw the writing profession as a sort of way out of “everyday troubles” was extremely high. Almost all the authors were from distant, scattered smaller cities,

towns, settlements, and stations; practically none were from larger cities.!°° Letters are the only thing that has preserved this nameless mass for us. “Tam the son of a very poor, old, peasant widow” from such-and-such a settlement, such-and-such a rural district, and so forth. The author relates how,

still a child, he loved composing chastushki and songs, and how his ability for composition helped him at this time: “I eked out a bit with my chastushki and songs’; “rich people’s sons took me along with them,” although they hated his “rags.” “Now I am seventeen, but have still not lost my passion for versewriting and my love of poetry, but they rather have grown because of an elementary acquaintance with the life surrounding me. Now I have learned that verses are printed to make a sketch of life, and leave the best description for the future.” Therefore the author asks the consultancy to answer him as soon as possible after “making sense of” his poems “fittingly.” He concludes his let-

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ter by saying: “Please, I have torn myself away from work, I’ve scraped together, because of my poverty, a few measly kopecks for paper and the like, and have sent it. . . to you.”!” Tam one of the writers who are despised everywhere. The life I wanted has passed me by, and now, having been orphaned, I am perishing in poverty. In age I am all of nineteen. A peasant, non-Party, a poor peasant. On my plot I have only a hut, a rooster, and a cat. Up until now, not one of my stories has been printed, this is why they despise me. I sit on the stove with small children, I cry because of the grief that has surrounded me. I breathe stinky air, turn somersaults with naked children. . .. Do I, a natural talent, really have to be in such circumstances forever?!”*

“Greetings, Moscow . . . beautiful capital,” one worker from Taganrog begins his letter. “You are probably cold? Everyone is wearing overcoats, but we have a papery veil [of snow— Trans.] on the streets, and among other things,

the soviet elections are going on now.” About himself, the author says: “I some-

times come out and make a report for the living newspaper at the builders’ club.” On “my life nowadays”: “I am one of three who live in a small hallway, two comrades and I. By profession I am a painter/builder and a self-taught artist, but for the meantime unemployed; I am twenty-five years of age, plus I

have a family of eight living in the city of Eisk.” The letter ends with a promise: “By the end of ’29, or no later than the beginning of 30, with your solid

support I promise to write the first volume of my works: a mix of poems, verses, prose, short stories, and so on.”!”” I have decided that there is an opportunity to write short stories, and to a certain extent verses, so I have decided to use them [ssc] for real, and for this they will give me something, even miserable pay, but something. In conclu-

sion I establish that my life is one of the very worst. Of course, it is hard to describe my bitter fate here, my bitter life, my nightmarish life. And all this life has slid in and out because of learning, because on my own I left to study in the Young Communists School, but my father dislikes this very much.

To the letter was appended a story, “In the Countryside” (“V derevne”), about which its author wrote: “It is very badly written, ungrammatically. I wrote it exactly without observing any grammatical rules, but of course if I got a little bit more into writing, then undoubtedly I could write [it] alright.” Since the writer had written to the “Novaia Moskva” publishing house (from whence the letter was forwarded to RAPP’s “litconsultancy”), the letter ends with an official declaration: “Please sign me up as a regular special writer, and I give my faithful word that no matter what stories I might have, I swear to send them

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only to ‘Novaia Moskva’ publishing house, to the address Moscow, Kuznetskii Bridge, Bldg. 7.”*°°

“If 1don’t come to Moscow now, then nothing will be left except to finish the flour-milling tech school. This would be two years. My abilities will disappear, my aspirations will die. I will end up a specialist in the milling business, not a writer”?! “I am now working as an afforestation inspector. My comrades are very boring and rather stupid. If you printed my piece, then I would come to Moscow and would give myself over completely to literary labor. I want to dive into the waves of the capital’s life.””°* “I am not working anywhere, since the jobs around me are unsatisfactory. I sent a story, but they still haven't printed it. I have weakened physically. I am concerned for my life. I live in the forgotten farmstead of Smolichevo, in a little hut with one window, with good people.”*”’ “Anyway, I'll come to you personally in August, I cannot afford to put it off any longer: I'll soon be twenty-five, when an artist and worker of science is in full flower. I’m not afraid of a bohemian life. Can you really refuse? And I will go away without anything, like a silly youth who came for glory and money. This would be an insensitive, formal approach.”**

“If you want to save me from suicide, then send me about 200 rubles,” one of the hundreds of “suicidal” letters concludes.*” “Tf the story is not worth printing, then I am not worth living. Then let the boiling blood take the hot lead [of a bullet— Trans.],” one such letter begins.?°° Give me advice as to how to teach myself to write well-made verses and stories. I am the son of a poor muzhik, without any profession, with 1/2 desiatinas of land, a cow and a pair of sheep, a bad hut and a shed. My mother is illiterate, | myself finished the three-year course at the village school and received a certificate. From my early childhood I have worked as an adult, including the whole time I was finishing school. I spent all my free time writing and reading. My life forces me to write despite grief and hunger; I am barefoot, have no clothes, and started to write in the evenings; I

described my whole unhappy life as a child. Malicious fate itself has laughed at me and made me so poor, and did not give me a good childhood. I could enroll in a second-level school, but I have no money; so you see I have to

remain a poor man all my life, in filth and barefoot. . . . Ibegan to write twenty-three years ago, that is, at the age of thirteen. But the hard situation of a poor man has not let me wave a pen around.””

“Dear comrades who will make sense of my poems, I beg you not to be offended by my bad writing, because although I am literate, I still don’t know

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grammar very well, since I didn’t finish my studies in view of my poverty.” Enclosed with the letter was a packet of verses with the title: “First book of my verses of my beginner’s poetry.” The verses were furnished with an afterword

that could easily have been written by the hero of an Andrei Platonov work: The key to my poems is that they manifest the inspiration I have from the poor devil’s proletarian life that I am now given over to with my whole soul and the whole organ oflife [organ zhizni]. | am ready to describe all the grief and all the truth in the whole world. Long live the first stage of my accomplishment, and for this I send you my ardent greeting, dear comrade poets and writers, for I also want to be your brother.?°°

A female correspondent is clearly in despair: As of now I have not received any answer to my letter. . . . If nothing else can come of me, then you could at least write to tell me that. Why do you stay silent? After all, I have put my soul, my whole burdened soul, into these pieces of paper, and gave them a somewhat artistic form. . . . Icannot change the tone of this letter. Life has already turned out this way. Around me is filth and mud, there is no sympathy anywhere, nor encouragement, and hard material conditions lead to madness. The most nightmarish thoughts come into my head... . 1am a peasant girl. I have read a lot, studied a little (seven years), have left my own peasant class [but] have not attached myself to any other, and absolute disorder is in my soul. Write, I beg you. I even wanted to come myself, sell my clothes and books to come. . . . Death, or if 1 don’t have

the strength of will, or prostitution. I have no other way out. I have my mother and three younger ones in the station. They have to be raised, but I myself am on the verge of craziness. I am nothing, a drop, but am still a

person, and in the name of solidarity, you must help me, save me.””

Not only such “people from the wrong side of the tracks,” but people quite well-off from the standpoint of “social origin,” appeared among those “disappointed by life.” Here a certain Bychenkov, a worker with many years of industrial experience, writes in a letter included with his poems that “life has

tied me up into a knot,” that “the ideal of life is buried under the wreckage of suffering,” and he complains that there is no justice around him since he had always “with a broken spirit . . . worked like an ox”; no one understands or listens to him, they only mock him. And here a certain worker Nikitina writes that “the clanging and knocking of the machinery wheels tortures and torments my hurting little head,” that “the clanging of the wheels, like a cloud of

dust, completely covers my bright eyes,” and that “in this crazy groaning of machines, my restless little head has no other place to go.”*!° RAPP sent such “little heads” (and such letters were almost one-third of the overall torrent of

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letters) to literary circles or to the litconsultancy. In this widespread type of letter-confessional, the desire to have literature as a job (to “wave a pen around”) seems more an attempt to escape from “life’s dead end,” than an expression of any kind of serious aspiration to “become a writer.” The typical author ofthese letters was a lumpen, a marginal figure (“[I] have left my own peasant class [but] have not attached myself to any other, and absolute disorder is in my

soul”), unemployed, on the verge of madness or suicide, yesterday's peasant going deaf from the noise of factory machines. A different, more specific type of author of these letters and works sent to

the litconsultancy was the conscious graphomaniac. This type also had its opposing poles: from those who only saw literature as their “calling” to those who were a sort of “literary terrorist.” I will demonstrate both these types with examples from the editors’ mail. The first case: I am eighteen. I feel a strong attraction in myself to literature. . . . I read during every minute that is free from work. I have read an enormous number of books, both scholarly and from the belles-lettres series. .. . By penetrating and understanding the works I have read, I too have created in myself something like an independent literary skill, or rather, I have felt the forces of independent creativity in myself.*!!

Comrade Pisarev writes from Syzran, ending his short letter with a startling exclamation: I am the son of a worker. A student. I am eighteen. Even as a child, I was attracted to literature, and up until now I have “swum about the sea” without a compass, not finding the shores for a long time. Now I have seen something on the horizon. My heart started pounding. “Finally. . . . Finally |am dropping anchor in the long awaited port of literature.” Why did I start writing verse? Because the Volga nurtured me, because I grew up in the family of a working-man, I have seen labor and labored myself, |know the poetry of labor, and finally, could I really not be a poet, when I see and feel the reality surrounding me?!?!*

“Should I not go and travel about Russia?” asks comrade Popov from Vetluga. “Why does Maksim Gorky write well? Because he has traveled about Russia, has seen different people and their various professions. He did not invent them himself, but saw all of it with his own eyes. .. . I am a student now in a forestry tech school, but am not learning anything. I await your advice. What do you think, should I go or not?”?! In addition to the tale “Jew” [“Zhid”], I am sending my revolutionary poems. Please publish them in three parts, each of course in a simple dark-brown

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binding. The price that the mass reader could afford is about 40 kopecks each. It is desirable, and even necessary, to provide suitable drawings for part of the poems. I allot the profit from these aid my later works thus: 1/2 to MOPR, */4 [sic] for the use of workers’ inventing, 1/4 [sic] to the Literary Fund, and 1/4 [sic] to the State Bank in a credit account at my disposal. This

will give me the possibility of satisfying my son’s and my own moral and physical needs. Without any excesses, of course. With literary greetings, A. Ogon’ ["Fire,” pseudonymous surname— Tians.], poet.?'4 You inform me that I should send you my named works. I sent the tale “Trip to Sakhalin” [“Puteshestvie na Sakhalin”] to Moscow back in Novem-

ber, but they sent it back to me, because it was badly written. Therefore I have begun rewriting this tale. The novel A Quiet Life [Tikhaia zhizn’] I also sent (the first volume) to Moscow, and am waiting for an answer. I cannot

send this: Don Don

such a big novel to Khabarovsk only because the Quiet Life novel is like similar to and a bit more interesting than Sholokhov’s novel The Quiet

[Tikhii Don]. But the novel The Quiet Don portrays the life of the Cossacks, while the novel A Quiet Life portrays Siberia, beginning from

1877 through 1917, and from 1917 to 1931. Such a life is portrayed in the novel

A Quiet Life that IPin Petrovan’s brothers have dreamed about a march on Moscow. You probably don’t believe that I’in Iashka dreamed of a march on Moscow in 1918-1919 and in 1920. No. This was true. This was in 1918,

when Iakov Petrovanych dreamed a dream that he'arrived in Moscow to the sounds of a wind orchestra. This you will find out when the sixth volume is ready. Now I am writing the second volume. I am finishing up writing the last chapter.*”?

“Write me to say just what style of poems and songs of my pen I should send you. Who I should dedicate them to, and how, since my love for making verses gleams with young flowering life,” the “beginner poet” S. K. writes to a Khabarovsk editor. “I do not understand poetry any better than Evgenii Onegin, when he could not tell an ‘iamb’ from a ‘trochee.’ I devote the hours of

leisure to my favorite occupation. I ask you to help me, dear comrades, I ask only even a little of your spark to set fire to my creative flame.””!° One also encounters such self-attestations as: Da, ia poet! No net mne zvan‘ia,

Ia zarodilsia, ne kak oni! S liubov’ iu strastnoiu stradania Ia provozhu s tetrad’iu dni!?!” [Yes, I’m a poet! But there’s no title for me, I was conceived, but not like them!

With passionate love of suffering I spend days with the notebook!]

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or (from a certain Ermonskii, a shock-worker poet from the Moscow Province): Ne povinuius’ ia dekretam,

Chto vypuskaiut kazhdyi den’, Net, ia rozhden tol’ko poetom I nenavizhu drebeden’.*'®

[I don’t submit to the decrees

That they issue every day, No, I was born only to be a poet And I hate rubbish. ]

Another poet writes to the litconsultancy in a versified letter:

Ia zhdu ot vas zaimnoi perepiski Khochu imet’ ia s vami razgovor Khochu ia znat’ svoiu rabotu Khochu ia mnogo vam pisat’

V svoem pis’me khochu skazat’ vam novyi adres Kuda pisat’ dolzhny vy dlia menia [I’m waiting for your answer back I want to have a talk with you I want to know my own work I want to write you a lot I want to tell you my new address in my letter Where you should write to me]

Sharing his “creative plans,” the poet informs the editors: Budu pisat’ ia Muzy chudny Liroi stanet mne dusha Lesam, lugam, stepiam, prostoram Neminovat’ movo pera.”!” [I will write wondrous Muses

My soul will become my lyre Forests, meadows, steppes, expanses Cannot avoid my pen.]

It is hardly necessary to say that every one of these letters was only an enclosure in an enormous parcel of either poems (“a heap of rhymed nonsense”*”°) or short stories. Among the correspondents were amateur graphomaniacs who were only apparently harmless. (An example of this type: a certain “beginner” from the Azov—Black Sea Territory spent two weeks versifying the entire speech of People’s Commissar of Agriculture Iakovlev about the regula-

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tions of the agricultural artel; in the letter accompanying this “epic poem” he

wrote: “I am sending you a little verse of my own composition. If it is suitable, print it, but if not, throw it away. It doesn’t cost me any trouble to write something.””?') Tuliia Shestakova, who worked in the mid-1930s as an editor of the Khabarovsk journal Na rubezhe (On the border), related an anecdotal case: a

person who announced that he was blind (this was after Nikolai Ostrovskii’s How the Steel Was Forged [Kak zakalialas’ stal’] had been published) appeared at

the editorial office, bringing with him the manuscript of a short story written “in a single sitting.” When this story (entitled “How the Pilot Saved the Tsar’s Daughter” [“Kak letchik spas doch’ tsaria”]) was “culled” by the editor, and it was explained to the author why it could not be printed, he “then and there tore up the manuscript and said, “Give me some paper, and I’ll write another one right now. I’m dying for money.””?”? Nonetheless, “beginners” like this were still a rather simple case. Litconsultancies and editors’ offices had to work with a more active audience as well (in-

cidents of beatings of overly demanding litconsultants by “beginners” were even known). There was no end to the troubles from correspondents who had

not yet discussed the questions of “What is to be done?” or “How do I become a writer?” but who were fully convinced of their authorial calling. One of these—a certain comrade Bel’tenev—turned into a nightmare for the editors

of Leningrad’s Rezets. Such cases were extremely common. What this case encompassed was clear from Bel’tenev’s letters, those of one who had managed to

write forty-eight poems, nine short stories, one play, one article, and one review, during the course of two years (1931-1932):

“If you cannot make a writer out of me over the course of a year,” he wrote to the consultant, “then it is more your fault than mine. [Rather] than send-

ing the story [back to me] ten times to re-do it, you should yourself correct it and show me by example how it should be written. Why don’t you rework my story ‘Count Off in Fives’ [‘Po piat’—rasschitaisia’] yourself? I am waiting for your answer about my stories ‘Periphery’ [‘Periferiia’], ‘Oddballs’ [‘Supchiki’], and ‘Tail in Front’ [‘Perednii khvost’].” Then, after a short while: “I am send-

ing you my comedic play The Strike [Zabastovka] and my reworked poem, “To the Hero of Socialism’ [‘Prorabu sotsializma’]. Why have you completely ‘dried up’ with your reviews? You still haven't answered about three of my works.” The poor consultants did not have time to react to the constant torrent of

products from the “shock-worker of the literary workshop.” Besides, as one may be sure, the author had little need of their advice, occupied that he was

with “placing” his works for the press: “You also criticized ‘Votives’ [‘Lampadki’] too much. . . . The hell with it! Maybe I should just send them to an-

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other journal?” Comrade Bel’tenev turned to more venerable consultants as well. In one of his letters he writes, “Incidentally, I’m thinking of sending one of my stories to Maksim Gorky. I wonder how he'll answer? At one time I corresponded with Demian Bednyi, but then I quit.” Our shock-worker was not

afraid of jumping into new forms of literary work as well: “Since you yourself write a bit of verse and prose,” he wrote to his consultant, “I challenge you to a socialist competition—to publish over the course of 1932, in various journals and newspapers, five short stories and five poems. I hope you will accept my challenge.” Writing turned into a sport:

As to the long length of our correspondence, I am thinking of writing you for about another year, and if nothing comes of this, then I'll quit prose, too; that’s right, without any special regrets, like poetry. Not everyone can be a writer?! I’m already twenty-four. It’s no bowl of cherries to spend your time with such “trifles” as writing poetry. I should repeat Fonvizin’s Mitrofanushka’s words: “I don’t want to learn, I want to get married!” By the way, you needn't get insulted that I’m “spitting” on your advice and not reading anything. Recently I have been intensely busy reading. Besides that, I have run away from the Cherepovets timber farm and am now working in the Vakhnov Young Communists School as a physics teacher, so as to have free time for reading, that is, it is your fault that I did a runner.

And finally, from Bel’tenev’s last letter: “You are horrified that I write so

much. . . . Rest assured that I will now write two times as much more, since I have gotten more time with the transfer to school, and . . . don’t worry, I’ll send it to you. So you'll have to fuss over me only one more year, ’til New Year's (1933), or maybe two years, if you like fussing over grown ‘children.’ And apparently you do!””*’ The evolution of our “beginner” is interesting: his consciousness of his own “rights” grows in him from one letter to the next one. The characters portrayed in these letters were to be found everywhere in the milieu of “writing young people.” But this was, so to speak, the “wild beginner,” and he was therefore practically unmanageable. This is why the RAPPists

placed their bets on the “organized” shock-worker, the circleist who had accepted the “call”: Having read the call-leaflet of RAPP, I, a shock-worker correspondent of the Lenin Factory, am joining this call and proclaiming myself to be a shockworker of proletarian literature. When I joined on at the Lenin Factory, the old industrial workers started telling me their reminiscences about the past heroic struggle with prerevolutionary Russia, and about the fact that the Lenin Factory, formerly the Semiannikoy Factory, was in the vanguard of forward-looking factories in its heroic struggle.

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Thus in addition to my basic work as a workers’ correspondent, I began writing down these reminiscences and began studying the history of the Bolshevik Party, as a result of which at present my work has appeared in print in the journal of the Party’s regional committee, Krasnaia letopis’ [Red chronicle], under the title “The Semiannikoy Factory.”

I think that not only the workers’ correspondent, but every worker, be he Party or non-Party, every Komsomolian; should know the past history of his factory. And a writer should portray in an artistic formulation the whole struggle of the titan-workers who fought for the workers’ general cause, as for example comrade Fadeev did in his novel The Rout [Razgrom]....

Tam a Party member; I was born in 1883 in the proletarian family of a foundry worker. At present I work as a weigher in the Neva Lenin Factory. I come to the Association of Proletarian Writers to learn and to work to portray in an artistic formulation how we are fighting for socialist construction for the final victory of the working class.’~4 There are thousands of such declarations. RAPPist publications of the late 1920s and early 1930s are literally inundated with shock-workers’ accounts of

how they “came into literature,” how they began writing, how they “found the correct path,” and so forth. In 1933, the Profizdat publishing house, to initiate

the “call of shock-workers into literature” published a collection of articles by “shock-worker writers” entitled How We Started Writing: Working-Class Authors on Their First Steps in Literature (Kak my nachinali pisat’: Rabochie avtory o

svoikh pervykh shagakh vy literature). Among the authors: One Al. Shein, a worker from Avtogennyi Factory No. 1, author of the books In the Name of the Workers’ Community (Imenem rabochei obshchestvennosti,

1931) and The Avant-Garde (Avangard, 1933). He writes in the article, “It is a

joke to say, “Write a book!” (“Shutka skazat—napisat’ knigu!”): I was almost completely self-taught. . . . Iwas sure that only people with a great education, possessing a special natural talent, could write, but not by

far rank-and-file poorly educated workers. . . . At that time I was still growing up and being shaped willy-nilly. But then October broke out. At eighteen or nineteen I volunteered for the Red Guard. . . . At nineteen I had already

become an active military correspondent. . . . The call of shock-workers into literature provided a powerful stimulus for writing. . . . It occurred to me: “I write sketches, articles, and satires; could I not also be able to write a little

book? I should try. Maybe it won't turn out so bad.” I couldn’t sleep all night. . . . I decided to go to Profizdat and get some advice about what to write, and how to do it. They received me warmly in the publishing house,

like a comrade, and chatted. I left the publishers’ with the firm intention of

finally undertaking the task. . . .

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Afterward, of course, came the “torments of creative work,” the making of a “list of heroes” and an outline. “I ‘stuck together’ the literary material out of raw human material, trying to delineate the most characteristic and to combine similar types of several living people into a single generalized image, a ‘type.’ .. . I firmly decided not to be frightened by difficulties. I was cheered by the consciousness that . . . our brother—the worker—cannot write his first book roo percent well and artistically.” The “little book” was nonetheless written and published, and “the workers of our plant regarded it with great attention and interest... . The little book was of use to industry. ... And this means that I am growing. . . Among our fellows are already the kind that will undoubtedly become part of great literature, will become decent proletarian writers.”?”> At the time, comrade Shein was working on The Avant-Garde (“A

big problem, a broad canvas”), which was about the 1931 sowing campaign he

participated in with three thousand workers sent by the Party to do battle against kulaks. N. Mikhailov, a worker in the “Serp i molot” factory, author of Jn the Battles for Metal (V boiakh za metall, 1930), The Seventh Battery (Sed’maia batareia, 1932), and The “M” Brand (Marka “M,” 1933). His article is called “The Collec-

tive Helps” (“Kollektiv pomogaet”): his first book was written, “as they say, in a single sitting. . . . The issue was very dear to me, I not only invented, but experienced and felt what happened in the workshop. . . . Before I left for the army I set myself a goal—providing a book about the Red Army upon my return.””° Thus his second book appeared. Then, after a year, the third—and so on. S. Tarasevich, a drill operator in the Stalin Factory, author of the “little book” We Will Catch Up (Dogonim, 1930). His article is entitled “Literary Labor Is Not Easy Labor” (“Literaturnyi trud—nelegkii trud”): Writing a little book is not a bowl of cherries. . . . I decided that it was necessary to establish a firmer foundation. I thought, let me study some of the old writers, I'll borrow from their experience . . . after all, a book should be written artistically, it should be infectious. . . With literary work I sit alone in my room, there are no bells or anything else that forces me to work. There are no comrades with me, I am a solitary craftsman. . . . Sometimes

I can tear away two-three hours for writing, but half the time is wasted getting ready to work. You sit and comb your hair. Not that you're waiting for “inspiration,” but you feel your solitude. ... There is no artel, no collective.”””

First of all, comrade Tarasevich was not keen on “studying some of the old writers” and “borrowing from their experience.” So at one of the meetings of the shock-worker writers at GIKhL, he announced: “I’m writing a play about 4

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Baku (I’ve never written plays before) and during the course of working on it,

I thought maybe I should have a look at how Gogol writes plays; I had a look at The Inspector-General [Revizor] and found an awful lot of bald spots in it, that is, weak spots calculated for an effect, not organically tied to the idea of

the work, to the overall development of the play.””’’ So““studying from Gogol” was no good. Secondly, by far not all the circle-writers (even the “published” ones) had

the working conditions that Tarasevich speaks of (“I sit alone in my room’; “You sit and comb your hair”; “You feel your solitude”). Here is a more typical situation: I don't have a room, I live in the corner of a passageway that doesn’t even have a window. Several working-class men from various factories live with me. Therefore I can't write at home. I write where I can, mainly in libraries.

I haven't written a single thing at home. I only feel good outside Moscow. I cant read at home either, I read in libraries, on trams, and places like

that. .. . | work as a solitary craftsman, without outside help. Not one critic has got interested in what I've had printed. I also don’t have any connections with the older, qualified poets.’”

The literary circle provided the feeling of being “needed,” and created the “artel” that shock-worker Tarasevich had so pined for while combing his hair. The circle turned the “factory poet” into a “real” poet. An example of such a circle was one of the oldest in Moscow, the “Val’tsovka” circle of the “Serp i molot” factory. Things reached the point where the “factory poets” began to publish articles in the factory newspaper on such topics as “How I work on a poem” and “How I work on myself,” copying the talks of the “masters of the word” for beginner writers. But what “separated” the factory poets from the beginners, and what kind of “creative experience” did they convey? Here a circleist (one “comrade Tikhonov’) shares the “secrets of the craft”: “I cannot

work if there is a cigarette butt in the ashtray, if there is rubbish on the floor, or books are scattered on the desk.” He complains that his children do not appreciate their father’s labor, leading to family scenes such as follows: “Roza, sweetie, don’t bother me, I’m working” “Mama, look, papa is lying on the bed and saying ‘I’m working.’ But youre not working, you just don’t want to play with me.”

The Literaturnaia ucheba author who related this tale concurs with the opinion of the daughter of “comrade Tikhonov.” But what is interesting is not just the very existence of such articles, but rather the atmosphere in which these articles were written and printed in the factory newspapers. What was

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the “inner feeling of self” of the factory poets who had already “found themselves in literature” in this way? What gave them confidence in their “work”? Was this simply the “attraction of literature”? The fifth anniversary of “Val’tsovka” was celebrated in 1934, just after the

First Congress of Writers. The circle received many congratulations (including that of the secretariat of the Union of Writers’ board of directors). Literatur-

naia gazeta even printed an anniversary article timed to this date, in which it called upon circleists to “struggle for great mastery,” while in fact they had yet to learn elementary literacy. The unrelenting Literaturnaia ucheba, criticizing “the managerial comrades” for such “rabocheliubstvo,” saw this as an “exaggeration of the merits of the anniversary honorees.”*’' But, as one may imagine, there was a more important connection here: the circle, as a “smithy of new writing cadres,” not only socialized the “lower-strata writer” but also engen-

dered a “superiority complex” in him and simultaneously created a micromodel of the “writers’ organization” with its total transparency: it was better by far to let the “poet Tikhonoy” tell about “his little daughter Roza” and to be happy with the “laurels” of the poet made wise from experience, than for him to complain that “life has tied me up into a knot,” that “the ideal of life is buried under the wreckage of suffering,” that there is no justice around him, and that he had always “with a broken spirit . . . worked like an ox” (one may not, however, doubt the latter).

“Conscientious,” “organized” shock-worker litcircleists were by definition preferred over the “unorganized mass of beginning lower-strata writers” from which they were recruited. Their “path” was always exhibited as an example. From this precisely emanated the “rabocheliubstvo” and tender emotion with which the “the managerial comrades” from the Union of Soviet Writers regarded the “creativity” of the circleists. For example, there were quite a few women among the circleists. One learns, however, exclusively about those who “came to literary creative work” by difficult but “correct” paths. For example, about a certain Kseniia Bykova, whose childhood was spent in a village of the Kaliazin District of the Tver’ Province. At the age of twelve she was taken to the city “to make her own way,” where she was hired as a nanny, and after many years of drifting from one “house job” to another, the teenage girl conceived a passion for books. She began writing at age thirteen. After the revolution, she ended up in the Caucasus (“in Menshevist Georgia”) with the family for which she was working. But “a healthy class interior helped the girl to understand her circumstances, and Kseniia managed to break away from her masters and from the Menshevist nest, to make her way into Soviet Russia.” In 1920, she was in Moscow. Here she soon joined the Party and began to work

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in the Working Women’s Division of the Party's Moscow Committee. From 1921 on, her poems began to appear in Kommunistka (The communist woman),

Rabotnitsa (The working woman), and Rabochaia Moskva. In 1922 she joined “Workers’ Spring,” soon finished the workers’ faculty, and focused all her attention on “putting a solid scholarly foundation undérheath the structure of her creative work.” From her poems one learns:

Ia zdes’, ia v pole rodilasia, No zhizr’iu s gorodom slilasia: Ia proletarka vsei dushoi.?”

[I was born here, in the field,

But I have merged my life with the city: I am a proletarian with all my heart.]

Of course such a Kseniia Bykova (an already-complete Socialist Realist character) differed advantageously from the correspondent of GIKhL’ litconsultancy, who was “on the verge of craziness” and who, as she put it, “have left

my own peasant class [but] have not attached myself to any other.” The literary circles, the “call of shock-workers into literature,” the litconsultancies, and the “work with creative youth”—these were all attempts to return biographies to the people that had fallen out of them, as Mandel’shtam said, “like balls

from the billiard pockets.” V. A. Shentsoy, who had worked professionally with the “lower-strata writers” for many years, in 1928 published Notes ofa Literary Secretary (Zapiski literaturnogo sekretaria) (so modestly was his job of “unsolicited contributions

editor” titled). Many of the “army of poets” had passed through his hands, and Shentsov describes many meetings wherein he patiently explained to the reader that “the lower-strata poets and writers are not poets and not writers in the full sense of the word, they are thinking contemporaries. . . . Every one of them, perhaps, is a good carpenter or accountant, but besides that, he is a... social

unit.” Shentsov compared the need to write with the need to make a speech at a meeting. He saw the manuscripts of these writers as “documents of the era,

poetic memoirs, so to speak.”?’? Shentsov maintained that “the more badly educated a person is, the more yearning and love he has for a word placed on paper, the more lavish he is in his thoughts and statements.”*** Was not this widespread “poor education” the social medium that nourished the masses’ graphomania and the “flood of lower-strata literary creativity”? Did it not shape the peculiar literary milieu from which many future “Soviet classic writers” came into literature? One of them, Lev Oshanin, later recalled:

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As a slip of a boy I wrote a poem about school and brought it to Jack Althausen at Komsomolskaia pravda. He did not read the poem, but gave me a note saying they should send me to the literary circle. At that time, many districts of Moscow had workers’ literary circles. So I ended up in the “Zakal” literary circle of the Sokol’niki District. And from this circle, at age sixteen, still not having printed a single poem, I was accepted as a member of the Moscow Association of Proletarian Writers (MAPP). I remember, for

example, how at one of the meetings in 1931 we all, including us little boys,

accepted Eduard Bagritskii and Vladimir Lugovskoi as members of MAPP?”

Indeed, the sixteen-year-old Lev Oshanin “accepted” Eduard Bagritskii as a poet! By an irony offate, Oshanin in 1936, by now a student at the Literary Institute, took a seminar—Lugovskoi’s. The shock-workers that were splashed out onto the surface of literary life and who were in a limbo somewhere between reader and writer, for the most part departed from literature (as the “forerunners of revolutionary poetry” of the Zvezda and Pravda era had departed from it before them), but the type of “lower-strata” (“mass”) writer that they had introduced into Soviet culture was

preserved forever in this culture. This half-writer/half-reader was engendered by the revolutionary era itself—the era of “lively creativity of the masses.” Truth be told, the rank-and-file Soviet writer is a reader who happens to write books; a reader who creates literature not only by his “requirements” but who also physically manufactures an “artistic product”—Soviet literature—the Literature of readers.

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The Literature of Readers The Creative Work of Shock-Workers (The “Pure Art” of Socialist Realism) Just maybe,

five? unheard-of rhythms have survived only in Venezuela. . . ——— MACY AUK OVS. KY:

“Thousands of Tons of Literary Ore’: or,

“The Bitter Cup of Versification” Texts produced by dilettantes undoubtedly are part of so-called mass literature. According to the definition of Iurii Lotman, this type of literature possesses two mutually contradictory characteristics. On the one hand, “it should represent the part of literature that is more widespread in a quantitative sense,” and in a particular collective it will be perceived as “culturally valid.” On the other hand, “norms and ideas from the viewpoint of which this literature would not only be held in excessively low regard but did not exist at all, must

operate and be active in this very same society. It will be regarded as ‘bad,’ ‘vulgar, ‘obsolete,’ or by some other characteristic will be excluded, rejected, and

apocryphal.”! According to this characterization, a// that Socialist Realism produced, which is traditionally evaluated literally in the terms suggested by Lotman, can assuredly be ascribed to the category of “mass literature.” Nonetheless, “mass literature” should in some way be related to “official literature.” In the context of Lotman’s cultural model, the term “official” (just like the term “valuable” among “literary gourmands”) can only be countenanced in

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the perspective of opposition. Here one approaches one of the most characteristic features of Socialist Realism: the opposition “mass literature/official literature” turns out to be just as relative in Stalinist culture as it appears obvious in the traditional model. Socialist Realism is as much an “official literature” as it is a “mass literature.” Lotman relegated to the latter category the “works ofselftaught writers, dilettantes who frequently belonged to the lower social strata.” “A great error on the part of the 1920s literary-scholar/sociologists,” he wrote, “was to suppose that the creative work of these writers can be regarded as the original expression of popular culture. More often than not, it is precisely they who create the most exact, frequently slavish copies of this or that norm or requirement, of the texts of the prevailing literature. Deviations from the norms among them arise only from lack of skill.”? Thus, “skill” in fact transformed the “self-taught dilettante” into a “real” writer—that is, in the perspective of Lotman’s historical “focus,” the 1920s, into a “Soviet writer.” What is the historical-

cultural interest of such literature? “It is precisely in it,” Lotman observed, “that we get the simplified picture, reduced to average norms, of the literature of the era, based on which it is easiest to construct average investigative models of taste, reader ideas, and literary norms. And since a knowledge of these ideas

and norms is vitally necessary for understanding the ‘high’ attainments of art, acquainting oneself with the school exercises of beginner poets or the doggerel of dilettantes who with difficulty overcame the resistance of literary technique, is an activity that is not at all so fruitless.”* The case here is perhaps special— not because the “shock-workers” were ultimately unable to “overcome the resistance of literary technique” (this is a quantitative issue), but because the /eve/ of dilettantism is of a completely different order. In fact, even “Socialist Realism classics” (more precisely, those which were later proclaimed to be) were at first perceived to be depressing “handicrafts” (suffice it to recall the professionals’—not readers’!—reactions to Aleksandr Fadeev’s The Rout |[Razgrom] or Fedor Gladkov’s Cement [Tsement]). However, analysis of the shock-workers’ cre-

ative work allows one to understand from truly close range the kind of “trash” from which Soviet literature arose, the kinds of sources that fed Socialist Realism’s Grand Style. In this context, how should one understand Lotman’s ideas that “the world of texts that lie outside the prevailing literary norms is not chaotic, and its organization is in a definite fashion correlated to the overall structure of the culture of the era” and that “although ‘high’ literature does not acknowledge mass literature, the two of them comprise a united whole in a particular way”*? If by “high” literature one means literature lying outside Socialist Realistic literature, then one must acknowledge that it was practically wholly excluded from “cul-

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tural circulation” and that functionally it did not “exist” at all in Stalinist culture. Therefore the question remains: What precisely is the “particular way” in which Osip Mandel’shtam forms a “united whole” with Anatolii Sofronov? The idea that mass literature (as distinct from folklore) “arises in a society that

already has a tradition of complex ‘high’ culture of recent times, and on the basis of this tradition”® remains perhaps indisputable. In this sense “mass literature” is a sort of bridge between the traditional and new literary cultures—that is, between Tolstoy and Semen Babaevskii. The cultural abyss remains unfilled. And still one has to understand precisely how “the dual nature of mass literature’s ‘primitiveness’ . . . defines the contradictory nature of its function in the overall system of culture. In a particular way acting as a means of destroying culture, it simultaneously can be drawn into the system of culture, participating in the construction of new structural forms.”” Apparently, the degree of its participation can serve as a curious indicator of the depth of “cultivation” in culture. Although the subcultural creative work of the Soviet era has not until now attracted researchers’ interest, it is hardly possible to overestimate the role of “mass literature” in the business of “construction of new structural forms” of Soviet culture. The “mass literature” of autodidacts and dilettantes exists in any culture. But never—until Socialist Realism—had a culture been created

from their “products,” from this kind of “human material.” Language is the bridge that joins the shores lying so far apart from each other. Nonetheless, the connection is deceptive. Revolution burns bridges. Language is transformed into a space of disunity, not unity. Literature (particularly poetry)—like no other sphere of spiritual culture—makes this process obvious. I have yet to talk about the “poetic creativity of shock-workers.” I begin, then, with verse because it occupies the most significant place in the bulk of the “artistic products” of interest here: the very fact of poetry's domination over prose in revolutionary culture, obviously, is not explained so much by the condition of a “world turned upside-down” when the time for its molding into themes has not yet come, but—yet again—functionally. Sharing his experience of working with beginner circleists, Mikhail Chumandrin noted that the cir-

cleists almost always started out with verses: I explain this by the fact that verses are the first step of any literary creativity. You have probably chanced to read letters of badly educated people, haven't you? Usually such a letter is something like a raeshnik, only with a business

theme, and at the end the letter often ends with two or four little lines of verse. I think the explanation for this is rather simple: after all, songs existed before the rise of writing, the gravitation toward rhythm has lived in man since time immemorial, it is the first step of literary creativity. As a rule,

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anybody begins with verses. And only as he grows, does a person establish himself either in prose or in drama.” Least of all could anyone suspect one of the chief RAPPist writers of an attempt to somehow “belittle” the significance of the shock-workers’ creative work. On the contrary, the explanation seems well considered. One surprises the “new writer” at the stage of learning writing, and although he is, as Lot-

man stated, only a “copyist,” one must remember that he is obliged to copy, given the situation of unprecedented turbulence wherein the cultural, linguistic, and genre forms are in motion and growing. This situation can be defined as the aphasia of writing. The breakdown of communication, along with the destruction of practi-

cally all its genre institutions, is a phenomenon in general characteristic of revolutionary culture. In the sphere of poetic creativity one encounters its complex forms (was not the interest in the problems of poetic speech in the 1920s a spontaneous reaction to this?). Much later, Lidiia Ginzburg reflected on this: Poems exist that are not below a certain level, but [that] are not really poems

at all. And in a country of limitless book-buying, many copies from the huge printings of these poems lie unbought on the shop-counters. The words in them—both the everyday and the bookish—are in no wise transformed. Simply vocabulary words with which absolutely nothing has happened, because they (according to Tynianov) fell into a single, close rank. No, nonetheless something happened—mechanical rhyming does not allow them to fulfill their normal communicative purpose with dignity.”

These “in no wise transformed” words are meaningless, intransitive, nonfunctional: at the extreme, they are empty and thus ideally suited to the creation of “pure art.” When I talk about this kind of art, I of course have in mind not the upper (pragmatic) stratum of expression (nor even less the sphere of aesthetic manifestation), but rather its “internal form.” The lexical inflation of the “un-

transformed” words plays no role in this: semantic impenetrability blocks any functionality (therefore the poetry of “factories and turbines” can come closer to being “pure art” than “landscape lyrics” do). The strategists of the “army of poets” supposed, however, that the difference between “professional” and “amateur” poetry was only in “quality”: If you take the abyss of the lack of poetic taste with which even our thick journals are often inundated, and compare it with the verses of some of the poets of Workers’ Call, then you will have to admit that, as regards artistry, the professional poets are really not so different from worker poets. And if you take into account that all the works of the latter are illumined by the red

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light of October, then you will have to say that their social-propaganda role is immeasurably higher than the artistic capers of the troubadours of ; aestheticism."° Of course, 1920s “professional poetry” is a many-sided phenomenon. Bezymenskii or Zharov, for example, were (within their cultural frame) fully “professional” poets. Just whom the authors of the foreword to Workers’ Call were

calling “troubadours of aestheticism’” is also difficult to say. But one is nonetheless obliged to agree with the assertion that “Shock-workers already have a special ‘style’ of their social self-assertion that is completely distinct from others.”!! I will designate this “special ‘style’ of .. . social self-assertion” as unconsciously parodic: the shock-workers’ texts can actually be regarded as unconscious parodies of the “high” literature that was being created in their “here and now.” But herein lies a fundamental peculiarity of the beginners’ “poetic reflection”: two conditions of parody are lacking. Firstly, parody cannot be un-

conscious, since it assumes an ironic stance with respect to the parodied text;

and irony, in turn, presupposes a conscious attitude toward the-object of irony. Secondly, parody, which constitutes a critical metadiscourse on the theme of the basic work, is always secondary and cannot exist before the parodied text does. But “mass literature” is created not only in parallel with “high literature” but sometimes somewhat earlier, clearing as it were the genre “site” for the latter, removing thematic clichés and the like. For this reason, dilettantes do not always only create, as Lotman stated, “the most exact, often slavish copies of

this or that norm or requirement of the texts of prevailing literature,” but often are “groundbreakers.” Both roles (in the intensive process of revolutionaryera creation of new literary forms, stages cannot always be precisely determined) engender an effect of cultural “recurrence,” wherein “mass” literature creates certain forms “as a reserve” and others as a “redundant” (unconsciously parodic) shade of the already-finished forms of “high” literature. The genre of “philosophical poem,” for example, is a rather late product of Soviet poetry. But consider the poem “Formula of Life” (“Formula zhizni”) by a certain “E. Z.” from Siberia: Zhizn —chto eto takoe? Zhivu i vse tak dumaiu ia A chto zhe sud’ba, chto zhe zanemoga? Vse neponiatno dlia menia. Zachem knigi ia chitaiu

Zachem nauku ia gryzu Kirkoi ugol’ kovyriaiu Zachem poniat’ ia ne mogu

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Mchius’ na poezde vdal’ Lechu na vozdukh wverkh Plyvu po I'dam ia v okian Puskaius’ zachastuiu v beg Shpaly tolstye kladu

Rel’sy stal’nye nastilaiu Kladu zavod, rabotaiu v nem Zachem. Zachem. Ia vse mechtaiu . . . [etc.]'? [Life—what is it?

I live and I keep thinking But what is fate, too, and why do I feel so sick? Everything confuses me. Why I read books Why I gnaw science Why I peck at coal with a pick I can't understand I rush along farther on the train I fly up into the air I swim through the ice into the ocean I oftentimes dash off running I lay the thick ties I lay the steel rails I put the factory down, I work in it Why. Why. I keep dreaming... ]

If this text had been written a half-century later, classifying it as “SotsArt” would not raise any doubts. However, not only is there no intention of parody in it, but also it has no internal appeal to the nascent “philosophical poem” tradition. Behind the awkward constructions is the familiar Soviet “poetic language,” and every verb has its corresponding “correct attribute” (gnaw science, rush along farther, lay ties, lay rails, and so on), but the “genre grid” does not yet exist—our “natural talent” poet moves blindly, creating a sort of “preparody” of the just-nascent genre. Another variant of the “creative work of beginners” is the construction of a new genre path from preexisting constructs. Take, for example, the poem “Construction” (“Stroika”), by seventeen-year-old Aleksandr -Lapshei, from the Brakhloe settlement in the Klimovsk District, Smolensk Province. It can be under-

stood as an attempt to create a sort of “novel in verse” from fragments of an already existing “epic poem” (Bezymenskii’s poem “Socialism” [“Sotsializm”] served as the model). As is well known, the ardent propagandist of the Soviet “poetic epos” in the 1920s was Ilia Sel’vinskii (suffice it to recall his “poetic

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epics” “Ulialaevshchina” and “Pushtorg”), but the tradition of the “novel in verse” forever associated with Evgenii Onegin had already been fleshed out in the nineteenth century by Iakov Polonskii’s A Fresh Legend (Svezhee predanie),

N. Panov's Vladimir Volgin, and L. Munshtein’s The Onegin of Our Times (Onegin nashikh dnei). But between the handwork of the preceding century and the flowering of the Soviet “novel in verse” in the 1950s (I. Avramenko’s Home on the Moika |Dom na Moike], E. Dolmatovskii’s Volunteers [Dobrovol’tsy], V. Saianovs The Kolobovus [Kolobovy], Sel’vinskii’s The Arctic [Arktika], and so on) appears the attempt to “cross” the “novel/chronicle” with the “epic poem.” The

attempt was, of course, still completely schoolboyish, but no less culturally significant. Following is how Lapshei provides a comparison of two five-year plans: 1929: Bol’shoi teatr zalit ves svetom,

Znamena alye goriat, V nem razmestilsia s’ezd Sovetov,

Ego privetstvuet otriad Krasnogalstuchnykh rebiat. Pod burnyi grom rukopleskanii Plan piatiletki utverzhden, Namechen riad postroiki zdanii, Chtob byl fundament zalozhen. [The Bolshoi Theater is all flooded with light, The banners crimson burn, In it the congress of Soviets was quartered,

Welcomed by a detachment Of red-neckerchief children.

Over the stormy wild applause The five-year plan is confirmed, A series of building-buildings is planned, So that the foundation be laid.] 1933:

Proshlo ne piat’, a lish’ chetyre,

Za eti burnye goda V strane vozdvigli, skol’ko v mire Nel’zia vozdvignut’ nikogda. [Not five have passed, but only four

Over these stormy years The country has built, so many Could never be built in the world.]

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Dolmatovskii or Avramenko differed from poor Lapshei only in that they had completed the Literary Institute and had not written “A series of buildingbuildings is planned, / So that the foundation be laid.” Besides, “lyrical digressions” came more easily to them. Lapshei literally suffered over his paper: Iz-pod pera vyletaiut v mgnoven’e Bukvy, slova, a potom Snova ia dumaiu, snova zabven’e,

Mysl’ napriagaiu na tom: Pravil’no I’ eto?’

[Out from the pen fly in an instant Letters, words, and then Again I think, again unconsciousness,

I strain my thoughts on this: Is this right?]

In vain did the young poet “strain” his “thoughts” as to whether everything was “right”—many lacunae in the history of the genre transformations of Soviet literature should be sought not in “high” literature but precisely in “mass” literature (the flexibility of the boundaries between them in Socialist Realism makes

the tasks of genre archaeology easier). A curious cross-flow of the most widespread themes and devices from “high” poetry to “mass” poetry—and viceversa—became a common occurrence. Thus the poetry of the “forerunners” gravitated toward strict thematicization (poems about the professions) and to-

ward description of the relations with “instruments of production.” In the 19308, this whole poetic “layer” was to move into the sphere of “verses for children,” but in the interim (the 1920s), this subject-matter was “in limbo” in the

poetry of shock-workers, while “forerunner” poetry simultaneously attained the status of “high literature.” The theme did not simply “abide” temporarily outside “official” culture: in shock-worker poetry, precisely, it was transposed and moved away from being the “poetics of suffering” (say, from Samobytnik) to being a “poetics of joy” (say, to Mikhalkov). The obvious transitional nature of such products determined the character of “poetic meditations.” An anthology entitled Poetry of the Working-Class Professions (Poeziia rabochikh professii), edited by Boris Volin, was published in Moscow in 1924. For the “forerunners,” labor was, as I have discussed, only a “difficult necessity”; but in this anthology one observes workers who are in love with their work to the point of self-denial. For example, a lathe-operator’s attitude toward his lathe is expressed as follows (“Just Before Vacation” [“Pered otpuskom”], by a certain Ignatov from the Egor’ev textile factory):

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Liubliu stanok, dnem, bessonnymi nochami Stradaiu za nego muchitel’noi toskoi, Liubliu kapel’nitsa zvenit slezami S rastvorom my!’noiu vodoi. ... Davno v grudi moei zaryta Liubov’ vysokaia k nemu. ... V pechal’nyi chas razluki i proshchan’ia, V poslednii raz pod beg remnei mne pel, I v pesne toi tsvetnye dali, I nad vodoiu les smotrel. ... Okonchil den’, otdalsia ia trevoge. V dushe razluka, nadlomlennyi pokoi. ... V pechal’nyi chas razluki i proshchan‘ia, I tol’ko ty odin v toske moei nemoi Poniat’ ty mog moi poslednie lobzan’ia Tebia sukhoi i chernoiu rukoi."4 [I love my station, daytime, sleepless nights I suffer tortures of longing for it, I love the dropper ringing with tears With the solution of soapy water. ... Long since buried in my breast Is a great love for it. ... At the mournful time of parting and goodbye, For the last time it sang to me over the running of the belts, And in that song, the colorful expanses, And the forest, looked over the water. . . Day has ended, I gave in to anxiety. In my soul are parting, broken peace. ... At the mournful time of parting and goodbye, And only you in my mute longing Could understand my final embraces I gave you with dry and black arms.] Another operator exclaims: “Wu, kak mne ne liubit’, /ne nezhit’ gaiku?” [“Well, how can I not love, / not coddle the screw-nut?”].!° A third (worker Kukanov):

“Ta s utra ego snachala ves proveriu, smazhu. / Tsentora, karetki, supor i patron nalazhu. /Zatochu rezets, kak nado, privernu pokrepche, / Sam poiu, ne unyvaiu, chtob zhilosia legche” |“First thing in morning I check it through, I oil it. /The centering, frames, carriage, and chuck, I place in order. / I sharpen the threader, just right, I screw it tighter, /I sing, ’'m not depressed, to make life easier”).

Operator Tumanoyv is happy: “Ja tochu i sverliu, narezaiu rezbu—Neposlushnyi, uprugii metall./I gorzhus, chto svoiu nerazryuno sudbu/ Ia s gigantom zavodom

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sviazal” [“I sharpen and drill, I drill the threads—Disobedient, elastic metal. /

And I am proud that my fate inseparably /I have linked with the giant, the factory”].'° Here is foundry-worker Andreev: “S chugunom i my pylaem, / Rady my trudu. / My v mashiny prevrashchaem / Mertvuiu rudu” (“With cast iron we are

/ The lifeless ablaze, / We are happy in labor. / Into machines we transform ore”].'” He is seconded by crane-operator lakov Shvedov, who subsequently became a famous Soviet poet:

[a—prostoi kranovshchik pri razlivke ‘Tselyi den’ na kranu raz’ ezzhaiu I ushastye chushki tiazhelye Posle plavok k vagranke taskaiu. Kogda konchat svistet’ forsunki I goriachaia plavka gotova, Ia kovsh podtsepliu ogromnyi, K gorlu pechi pod” edu provorno. [etc.]'® [I, a simple crane-operator in casting

All day ride about on the crane And drag the handled heavy ingots To the cupola after casting. When the sprayers cease their whistling And the heated cast is ready, I hoist the huge bucket, I nimbly drive up to the furnace throat.]

Here is weaver Kuz’michev: “Khorosho kachat’ botanom, / Na podnozhkakh tantsevat. / Ne daet chelnok za stanom / Ni minuty zadremat’. / Shelkom steletsia osnova, / Nitki prochny, kak struna” {“How nice to rock the loom, / To dance

atop the running-boards. / The shuttle behind the loom / Leaves not a minute to drowse. / The fabric spreads out like silk, / Lasting threads, like string”]"’; typesetter Svetaev: “Mne stoiat’ u kass ne skuchno, / Ia s verstatkoi—nerazluchen. / Bukvy strochat stuk, stuk, stuk, /Mne vestatka—luchshii drug” {“1 don't get bored at the type-case, / I’m inseparable from the composing-stick. / The letters bang out click, click, click, /The composing-stick is my best friend”]”°; and tram-driver Kuznetsov: “Ja—prostoi vagonovazhatyi, / Vozhu tramvai, / Po nitiam rels/I na ulitsakh, / Zdaniami szhatykh, / Nogoiu rassypaiu trel’” (“Pm a simple wagon-driver, / I drive the tram / On threads of rails /And on the streets, /Squeezed down by buildings, /My hand drops out a trill”].2! Almost all professions are represented—a female tram conductor and a joiner, a stoker and a mechanic, a smith and a hairdresser (“Zamutilsia belym oblakom / Fartuk v dymnykh zerkalakh. / Otletaet volos provolkoi, / Narastaia na usakh./.. .

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Rodila menia na fabrike /Mat’ khudozhnikom golov” (“Like a white cloud my apron / Grew dim in smoky mirrors. / A hair strays out wire-like, / Growing

/Birthed forth the artist of atop the ears./... My mother in the factory heads”]**), and so on. In the 1920s and early 1930s, entire books by beginner professionals were published. For example, the publishing arm of the paper-

makers union published the anthology Samocherpka: Creative Work ofPapermakers (Samocherpka: Tvorchestvo bumazhnikov), with a foreword by Serafi-

movich, and the central committee of the miners’ labor union published an

anthology entitled Poetry of the Miners’ Blow: First Book of Verses By Miners, Workers-Correspondent Poets (Poeziia gorniatskogo udara: Pervaia kniga stikhov

gorniakov poetov-rabkorov), edited by Bezymenskii. In the Foreword, Bezymenskii informs readers that “oil workers and peat-cutters are less fortunate than miners as regards literary representation.”*? Oil workers, it is true, published their anthology later, and the peat-cutters never did get around to it.

Characteristic is the same goal, to write about one’s profession (the lessons in “realism” and “study from life” had not been taken in vain). Thus “60 percent, if not more, of the poems of beginner proletarian/kolkhoz poets are dedicated

to the praises of the tractor and of tractor-drivers male and female.” Be that as it may, one of the most important genres of Soviet children’s “poetry of the

workers’ professions” was developed precisely in the shock-workers’ poetry— the “ABC genre.” This source was not coincidental: the alphabet-primer was for the majority of the beginners the first school of “literary study,” since the average level of

their literacy was appalling.”” The primer, however, was a real trauma for beginners. In the “poetic syntax” itself, classroom dictation can often be heard, as in, for example, the poem of a Kuban’ sovkhoz worker: Stroitsia, dvizhetsia vse v prirode Novaia zhizn’ i novaia tekhnika.

S kazhdym dnem, s kazhdym godom Krepnet sovetskaia strana. Strana sovetskaia velika.

Krepka budet navsegda. Krugom Sovetskogo Soiuza

Dvizhen’e dvizhetsia vpered.** [In nature always moving, building Is new life, new techniques.

Each passing day, each passing year The Soviet country strengthens.

The Soviet country is great.

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It will be strong forever. All round the Soviet Union Motion is moving forward.]

The simplex constructs (such as “The Soviet country strengthens. The Soviet country is great, It will be strong forever,” and the like) simply echo “Mama

washed the window-sash.” But the primer was not only syntax: it also meant mastery of anew lexicon, as in the poem “We Are Growing” (“My rastem’”) by

A. Kozyrev, a worker in the “Paris Commune” factory: Pozval nas Stalin,

V riady my vstali Vse kak odin Smelo i gordo,

Otvet nash tverdyi: “Esti: dadim, Ot masterskoi S rabotoi ruchnoi K stankam pereshli Bol’sheviki. V tekhnike novoi Osvoili vse. Lenta. . . Dispetcher. Klei, guttapercha. Konveier idet.*”

[Stalin called us We stood in ranks All as one Bold and proud, Our answer firm: “Yessir! ... Will do!” From the cobblers’ Handmade work We went to fac'tries Bolsheviks.

In new techniques We know it all.

Cable . . . Dispatcher Glue, Gutta-percha. The conveyor moves.]

The ABC primer was, finally, complete lexical matrices from which a “poetic text” was constructed, as in worker A. Kononenko’s poem “The Soviet Country” (“Sovetskaia strana”): »

*

»

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Gde slyshitsia radost’, gde druzhba krepka, Gde rasa i natsfia ravna, Gde liudiam ko schast’iu doroga blizka I zhenshchiny zhizn’ ravnopravna, Gde zhizn’ molodaia, i otdykh, i trud, V edinoe tseloe slilis’. Gde gneta ne znaiut, gde v bratstve zhivut, Gde polnoi svobody dobilis’. Nigde krome nashei strany molodoi. Ona lish’ leleet v ob” iat iakh, Dni druzhby velikoi, liubvi dorogoi, Ne znaia mechty o prokliat’iakh.”® [Where joy is heard, where friendship’s firm, Where race and nation equals,

Where people’s road to happiness is near Where women’s life is equal-right,

Where life is young, and rest and work Into a single whole have merged.

Where whip’s unknown, they live like brothers, Where fullest freedom they have got. Nowhere but our youthful country. It only fosters in embraces, Days great in friends, and in love dear, Unknown the dreams of curses.]

This text has not a single word, a single phrase, that would convey “authorial individuality,” and abrupt defects like “dreams of curses” not only set off the overall effacedness of the linguistic constructions but also bring something human into the “poem.” This “human” element, the thing that broke through the smooth surface of the beginners’ texts, always elicits a smile: it is here, precisely, that a disjunc-

tion occurs—the “untransformed word” is “made strange” in a paradoxical way and acquires a defective functionality. Witness shock-worker Elena Korzakova, from the footware shop in the “Krasnyi treugol’nik” factory: Ja dni piatiletki schitaiu Ne dniami, a sotniami novykh kalosh. I v kazhdoi kolodke, uplyvshei po lente, Ia vizhu boitsa na frontakh piatiletki.

I mysli, kak ptitsy, letiat verenitset, S guden’em motora slivaias’ v odno.”

[I count the days of five-year plans Not in days but hundreds of new galoshes.

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And in every mold that swims past on the conveyor, I see a champion on the five-year’s fronts. And thoughts, like birds, fly all in line, Merging as one with the roar of the motor] Or the poem “Happy Song” (“Veselaia pesnia’) by shock-worker V. Proshkin,

awarded a prize in the “Paris Commune” factory’s factorywide competition: Kak v skhvatke tsekhov govorkovykh, Nakhmuriv pytlivye lby, Uchilis’ my delat’ botinok S ognem bol’shevistskoi bor’ by. 30

[As in the rush of noisy shops, Knitting our curious brows, We learned to make our boots

With battle-fire as Bolsheviks. ] Pavel Dunaev,

a miner in the “October”

Mines,

in his poem

“Meeting”

(“Vstrecha’):

Svintsovo khmuritsia shakhter: —U nas proryv,—ne skazhesh’ prosto . . . On ystal nad nim, kak prigovor,

Oshelomliaia groznym rostom . . . Grokhochut piatiletki dni, Begut upriamo drug za drugom . . . Shakhter nevol’no uronil Vysokii temp bor’by za ugol’.*! [Like lead the miner furrows brows: “We've had a lapse,” to put it plain. . . It stood as sentence over them, Stunning in its awful growth . . . The five-year’s days go thund’ring by, They run one aft’r another . . . The miner accidently dropp’d Fast tempo in the fight for coal.]

One should regard these captivating “poetic lapses” (“I count the days of fiveyear plans ...in... hundreds of new galoshes”; “We learned to make our boots / With battle-fire as Bolsheviks”; “The miner accidently dropp’d / Fast tempo in the fight for coal”) primarily as drama of language. “Don’t shoot me, I'm only the piano player.” Sometimes this “playing” reaches a high degree of “estrangement.” If the ballad “Kuz'ma,” for example, were written not by tex-

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tile factory worker Of ga Kanunova but by Daniil Kharms, one would today speak ofits absurdism and of the special poetic vision of the author: Vozle malen’kogo doma Sidit zhenshchina odna. Skloniv golovu, gotova Usnut ot znoia ona... Vdol’ po ulitse idet Zhenshchina s rebenkom,

On otkryl shiroko rot I rydaet gromko.* [Beside the little house A woman sits alone.

Swaying her head, as sultry heat Wants her to doze off there Along the street there go A woman with a child, He opens his mouth so wide And sobs so loudly.]

The professionalism of Soviet poetry was in the particular “mastery of the word” whereby the collision of the personal and the social roles (if such a col-

lision occurred) practically could not be discerned (in this regard, the more obscure a text is, the more “professional” it is). A stylistic “smoothness,” a sort of “sterility” in Soviet writing, separated the author from the text, making the text opaque. The basic “poetic task” was thus reduced to alienation of the word from its bearer, and of the bearer from the recipient. Beginners still lacked this

skill. In poems “about love” it is especially obvious how a naive literary sense broke through the wall of “restraint” every time. The uncalculated comic effect was born at this junction, as in the poem “She” (“Ona”), by S. Pozdnyshev, a student in the Leningrad Machine-Building Institute: Noch’ kachnulas’ ot okna Legkim priznakom dvizhen’ia, Ia dopivaiu uzhe do dna Gor’kuiu chashu stikhoslozhen’ia

Togda-to kak raz i vzygralo v krovi Vysokoe kachestvo zdorovoi liubvi.*” [Night recoiled from the window

With the lightest sign of movement,

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And I’m drinking down to the bottom The bitter cup of versification

Just then and there my blood was stirred High-quality healthy love was heard. ]

or in “May ist” (“1 Maia”), by typesetter V. Sul’kovskii: Girliandy dnei splelis’ v venki godov Nashu ramu zhizni okaimliaiut Ia raduius’ vesne: s vesnoi pridet liubov’, No o liubyi potom, a vot o Pervom mae.™

[Garlands of days wove into wreaths ofyears Our frame of life they border all around I’m happy with spring: with spring comes love; But later with love, and on with the First of May.] Sometimes, “smooth writing” took the upper hand, but since beginners could not wield it deftly, the result was unexpected (from Ivan Pishchurin’s poem “The Train Rushes On” [“Mchitsia poezd”}):

—Za Otchiznu borolsia ty smelo,— Skazhet Raia i nezhno vzdokhnet. —wNas za eto velikoe delo Nagrazhdaet sovetskii narod.*

(“For Fatherland you fought bravely,” Says Raia, sighing gently. “For this great undertaking The Soviet people reward us.”]

When on the contrary an author wished to express himself in an existing “poetic image” (for example, a “macho poet” attacking “philistine love,” like a certain teacher “S-ov” from Smolensk Province) and to transcend the “mold,” it

turned out that the existing stylistics possessed such a “restiveness” that the inexperienced rider literally “flew out of the saddle”: Igrat’ v liubov’, kak v podkidnogo, Valiat’ ot skuki duraka, Sygral chasok, a dva uzh mnogo, I do svidaniia poka. Ved’ eto zh smekh! Ved’ eto zh lozh’! Liubov’ nastoika tol’ko s pertsem, Chtob dukh ot riumki zakhvatilo I dushu plamenem prizhglo.

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... Liubliu dushoi, liubliu i telom

(Boius’ ne vyshel by uprek), Liubliu i v chastnosti i v tselom,

I vdol’ i vkos’ i poperek. Liubit’ slegka, liubit’ nemnozhko, Liubit’ po Tsel’siiu na piat— Meshchanskii rai, meshchanskii shtil’.

Ego, kak starye kaloshi, Pridetsia prosto sdat’ v util’?°

[To play at love, like blackjack, For boredom’s sake, to play the fool, I played an hour, two is too much, So it’s goodbye for now. Oh what a laugh! And what a lie! Love is nothing but pepper vodka, That it can take your breath away And set your soul aflame. . . Llove with body and with soul (Or have I said too much?!),

I love not only part but whole And far and wide to clutch. To love so light, and love a little,

To love at Celsius five degrees— Philistine heaven, Philistine calm. This, like old galoshes ravaged, Should simply be put out for salvage!]

In general, the search for a “face” took away almost all the “creative energy” of beginners. Not that this “face” was at all necessary to the shock-worker poets. It was acquired “accidentally,” “for technical reasons”: existing templates were required (“learning from the classics”). From Pushkin, for example. Let us

take the long poem “In the Fatherland Again” (“Opiat’ na rodine”), by beginner Epishin, from the Bukharin District of Smolensk Province, as an exemplar: Prishedshi s fabriki, Vnoy ia posetil Tot ugolok zemli, Gde ia otshel’nikom provel Vsiu iunost’ nezametno Uzh desiat’ let proshlo s tekh por I mnogo peremenilos’ v zhizni dlia menia.. [Back home from the factory, Once more I visited

.

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That little piece of land, Where I lived a hermit’s life All my youth, unnoticed Ten years have passed since those days And much has changed in my life. . . | Here the poet sees the lake where no longer

Kak prezhde v odinochku Ne plyvet rybak, tashcha ubogii nevod, Teper ikh mnogo na motornykh lodkakh . . . [Not like before, in solitude

The fisherman sails, dragging a clumsy net, Now there are many on motored boats . . . ] Further on, there is a picture like this:

... Vdali

Stoit odin ugriumyi Sosen tekh tovarishch Iu ego kornei

Poprezhnemu vse odeto, golo. Tak lishenets smotrit khmuro Na nashu zhizn’, na nashi dostizhernia I v slezlivoi zlobe

Kusaet guby i skripit zubami. Puskai lishenets zlitsia. [... Over there

All lonesome and morose The comrades’ pine stands And at its roots As before, all covered, bare. Like this the pariah looks louring Upon our life and our achievements And in tearful spite

Bites his lips and grinds his teeth. Let the pariah be angry.]

Although he welcomes the “generation young, unknown,” the author nonetheless is not thinking about death. On the contrary, his life is not boring: Peremenilsia ia.

Uzhe poprezhnemu naivno, glupo Ia ne mechtaiu, no

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Uchus’, rabotaiu i dobivaius’ Real’nogo, fakticheskogo schasv’ia. I schast’e obshchee sotsializma Uporno pomagaiu stroit

I zhizn’iu moeiu ia dovolen, V serdtse u menia Net mesta gor’kim i tosklivym chuvstvam.¥ [I have changed. Not like before, naively, stupidly Do I dream, but

I study, work and achieve Real, actual happiness. And the overall happiness of socialism

I persistently help to build And I am pleased with my life, The heart that is in me Has no place for bitter, regretful feelings.] The same can be said about the nameless shock-worker who wrote a poem en-

titled “The Workday” (“Rabochii den”): Vsiu noch’ Tatiana ne spala:

Ot pyli grud’ ee bolela, No lish’ sirena progudela I skrylas utrenniaia mgla, Ona, kak plennitsa, no smelo K stanku na fabriku prishla. V okoshko master iz kontorki,

Krutia usy, smotrel: on zorko Sledil za khodom vsekh rabot, Rabotnits oziraia glazom. No vot vzdokhnuy, k stanku s nakazom On mal’chika za Tanei shlet.

Kak vse prekrasno bylo v nei! Ona—vostorg i vdokhnoven’e: Cherty litsa, i vzor ochei,

I dugi chernye brovei, V pokhodke stroinoe dvizher’e. Voshla .. . i zvuk ee rechei Poplyl, slivaias’ s gulom stali.

—Stepan Petrovich! Vy pozvali Menia v kontoru? Master: Ia Tatiana: Zachem?*®

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[All night Tatiana didn’t sleep: From dust her chest was hurting,

But once the siren starting blurting,

And morning sun through mist did peep, She like a prisoner, but bravely asserting, Arrived to the plant her station to keep. From observation window looked the foreman

‘Twisting mustache, looking: keenly Followed progress of all jobs, Eyeing the women, peering there. But sighing now, to her station sends

A little boy for fetching Tanya. How beautiful she was, all told!

She was ecstasy, inspiration: Her face’s features, bright her eyes, And the arches of her darkling brows, Her walk was grace in motion. She came. . . and the sound of her words Swam off, blending with roar of steel.

“Stepan Petrovich! You summoned Me to meet you here?” Foreman: Yes.

Tatiana: Why?]

And here a beginner (a border guard from Belorussia) describes “the business of preserving the sacred borders of the Republic”: Na granitse dub zelenyi, Zolotaia tsep’ na nem, Dnem i noch’iu krasnoarmeets

Khodit po tsepi krugom.* [A green oak at the border, On it a golden chain,

Day and night a Red Army man Walks around the chain.]

Among beginners, the available “teachers” were limited to the schools’ selection of authors for the official anthology. Alongside Pushkin, whose irrefutable authority assured him unquestioned leadership, Lermontov also held a solid place: Nemnogo let proshlo s tekh por, Kak v FZU prishel Egor Primerno, goda poltora,

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Kogda metalasia Sura. Pora vesenniaia byla.*° [Not long ago at all it was, When Egor came to learn a trade

Perhaps in all, just eighteen months, When the Sura began to thaw It was the springtime then,] or:

Spi, moi Lenin, spi prekrasnyi, Baiushki-baiu. Tikho svetit mesiats iasnyi

V mavzolei tvoiu.*! [Sleep, my Lenin, sleep, wonderful one Hushaby my baby. The bright moon is quietly shining Into your little mausoleum.]

And here is another excerpt (from the poem “Snov’”) from Aleksandr Lapshei, whom I have already introduced: Na rodine moei

Skvoz’ grokhot, liazg polei Reka burlivaia techet

I vody shumnye neset. Nazad tomu piat let Reka ne znala—net! Pro etot grokhot na poliakh,

Pro etu raznitsu v godakh. Ona stremitel’no tekla

I vody v Dnepr ona nesla. Seichas zastavil ee vid Svoe techen’e izmenit Ona shumit, burlit volnami, O chem-to sporia s traktorami,

I vody polnye vse vnov’ Neset reka s nazvan’em Snov.*

[In my own birthplace Through thunder, clang of fields A boisterous river flows

And carries noisy waters. It was just five years ago

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The river didn’t know—no!

About this thundering in the fields, About this difference in the years. She hurried along her waters Taking them to the Dnepr. Her aspect now perforce has changed, Her flow is engineered, arranged She makes her noise, her waves loud actors

When she debates a point with tractors Again her waters full and tough, The river that is called the Snov’.]

The authority of Nekrasovy, traditionally highly regarded as far back as the “forerunners,” remained: Slyshish’, v sele nad goroi nedaleko Zychno raznositsia “Zhertvoiu pali,” Aleiut znamena, narodu-to skol’ko .. . Dvizhutsia, dvizhutsia, vot oni stali. Blednye litsa, glaza pogorelye Reiut v osennem siianii dnia, A po zaboram plakaty-to belye: Nynche vstrechaem my den’ Oktiabria.**

[You hear in the village just over the hill The strains of “They Fell Victim” loudly, The banners crimson, so many the people .. . They move and move, but now they've stopped. Faces pale and eyes grown dim Hover in the autumnal day-shine, And behind the fences white cloths: Now we greet October Day.]

Note that, regardless of their models, the beginners’ versification every time preserved the same linguistic “awkwardness,” as a result of which the poems acquired a completely unexpected meaning. If, for example, the beginner wished to write about a celebration of the anniversary of the revolution, then he or she by no means intended to commit an “antisocial act” (rebukes of this nature color the press of those years): the poet simply did not know what he or she was rhyming; as a result, “faces pale” and “eyes grown dim” were attributed to celebrators of the October Revolution. This effect can be equated to the efforts of a foreigner who tries to speak a language that he or she knows passively, but

which in active use is almost worthless for expression of his or her thoughts. Among the contemporary poets whom the beginners aspired to imitate,

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Mayakovsky, whose clearly expressed recognizability and unusual style attracted them, held first place. Sometimes, “learning from Mayakovsky” bore the character of direct imitation:

Aleksandr Ivanych, vashu ruku, Vot moia. Khot’ s drian’iu ot truby. S toboiu govoriu kak s drugom, ‘Ty menia, nadeius’, ne zabyl . . . [etc.]*

[Aleksandr Ivanych, your hand, Here’s mine. Tho’ dirtied from the pipe. I talk with you as with a friend, You haven't forgotten me, I hope...

. ]

More often, beginners were attracted by the “satirical style” codified by Mayakovsky (as, for example, the worker Kiselev: “O esli byl by ia poetom /Ia b vsem prichastnikam k rastrate/V glaza metaforoi pleval/I dal trudiashchimsia signal / V pogoniu protiv biurokratov” [“O if I were a poet / To all taking part in embezzling / T'd spit my metaphors in their eyes / And give a signal to the workers / To flush out all the bureaucrats”}*’) and the “epic forms” of poetry. A swelling flood of “epic poems” followed, for example, after Mayakovsky’s Vladimir lich Lenin was published, a poem in which the history of the Party was versified. The “antiopportunist poem” of worker Andrei Bezuglov “Enough” (“Dovol’no”) can serve as an example of this type: “Soldaty begut po domam, A vy—vosstavat . Luchshe nos ne sovat’. . .” Idia u eseroy na povodu,

Eshche v 17-m godu Govorili gore-kommunisty, Tepereshnie likhie opportunisty, V sily Klassa ne veria (“Soldiers are running to their homes,

And you say, Revolt. Best you kept your nose out of it. . .” Following the esers on a leash

Way back in nineteen-seventeen The excuses-for-communists said,

Who now are opportunist-devils Not trusting in the force of class].

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Of course: “We won,” and then Mchit istoriia k pobedam— God za godom. Ei, derzhis’!

I klikusham etim pravym Ob’ iavila voinu zhizn’. [History rushes to victories

Year after year. Hey, hold on tight! And war has been declared

On these rightist madmen by life.]

The hysterical “madmen” do not, of course, give up—they “focus on the weak points.” In their opportunism, the “excuses-for-communists” go as far as sabotage. Their evolution is depicted thus in the poem:

Krikuny obobshchili napevy I “sprava’ i “sleva”. V odinochku ne oplevat’ TsK— Partiia bol’no krepka. Dvorniazhki zlee psoy, Doshli do “vysokikh golosoy”. Podlichali, dvurushnichali, Spletnichali, naushnichali,

Tiavkali, grebli nogami, zlilis— I dokatilis’ “politiki kutsye” Do... kontrrevoliutsii [Bawlers generalized the tunes

Both “left” and “right.” Alone, they can’t dismiss the Central Committee— The Party is frightfully strong. Mongrels meaner than curs, They “broke” their voices shouting. Scoundrels, double-dealers, Scandal-whisperers, They yapped, dug with their paws, were mad— And rushed on, the “dock-tail politicians” To... counterrevolution]

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The poem ends with a threat:

Raz tempy u nas neimovernye,

My boremsia za pervenstvo zavoda, To nakanune tret’ego goda Vsei etoi gnili,

Chto dolg svoi i sovest’ zabyli, Vsem i vsiakim opportunistam,

Lzheudarnikam i lzhekommunistam I Izherabochim, do rublia okhochim, zarvavshimsia bol’no,— Skazhem Prosto I strogo:

Dovol’no!** [Since our tempos are incredible,

We fight for first place of the factory, Since on the eve of the third year Of all this rottenness, They forgot their duty and conscience, To all false shock-workers and false communists And false workers, greedy for a ruble, Terribly high-handed— We'll say Simply And sternly: Enough!] Sometimes the “lessons” led to a “hybrid character’—the result of simultaneous “lessons” from two poets, as in the poem “The X—Mechanics Factory” (“Mekhzavodu imeni . . .”) by worker A. Kuz’min, from the Orekhovo-Zuevsk

literary circle called “Osnova” (“Foundation”)—a sort of cross between Mayakovsky’s verses of the “call” with Blok’s Factory (Fabrika): Tovarishchi, v velikom plane eshche nevidannykh mirom rabot rabochei voli

tvoriashchee plamia szhigaet v pepel privychka rabov. Ae DELVE vtulok sotniu (detal’ 242)

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prislali vy nam— khot’ shvyriai v podvorotniu! 70 shtuk ne vkhodiat na val bee

xacoianit

ZU dozhdalosia ot nas kronshteina §7. No koromysla ne vkhodiat na osi—

Kronshteiny ne sdelany vse. yei/ tret:

ne otdelany dyry v chugunnykh gnezdakh dlia uzkikh stankoyv (N detali—g4).

Vot vam produkt kakov! Vot ona gnusnaia

rabia rabota! Druz ia, do kakikh eto por?—

Temnyi kto-to, vrazhii kto-to nad nashei stroikoi derzhit dozor.

Byt’ mozhet, on smeetsia ekhidno: “Avos’, edak progoriat skorei.” Metallisty,

verim, vam bol’no i stydno! Primite privet ot imeni tekstilei.*” [Comrades,

in the great plan of works the world has not yet seen the creative flame of the workers’ will the habit of slaves will burn to ashes. ... First: the one hundred bushings (Part # 242) you sent us—

throw them in the garbage, if you like! 70 pieces won't fit in the shaft ... Second:

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The bosses finally got 57 brackets from-us. But the rocker-arms wont fit on the axles— The brackets are not all made. fan Uhird: The holes are not finished

in the cast-iron jacks for the narrow lathes (Part # 94).

Look what you call a product! It is

vile

slavish work! Friends, how long will this go on? Someone benighted, Someone against us over our work

is keeping watch. Maybe he is laughing wickedly: “Maybe like this you'll soon be ruined.” Metalworkers,

we're sure youre hurt and ashamed! Accept the greetings of those in textiles.]

But most often the beginners’ poems were limited to the “pre-DerzhavinSumarokov style” of which Trotsky spoke. This was the style that Dem’ian Bednyi used in writing his “doggerel” addressed during the civil war years to his illiterate audience, from among whose numbers shock-workers “went as a herd” into literature ten years later. An exemplar of this type is an endless poem about Lenin, “The Fate and Path of the Creator” (“Sud’ba i put’ tvortsa”), by one

“N. K.” V. A. Shentsov quotes this “oration of the ‘Soviet Derzhavin” in his already-cited Notes of a Literary Secretary, which contains hundreds of such examples:

Pylaiushchei dushoi rozhdennyi, Maliutka—budushchii tvorets,

Talantom s detstva odarennyi Iskal svoi tvorcheskii venets.

Lish’ vosem’ let spokoinykh Provel on v detstve, vse rezvias’,

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No i tut zatei besplodnykh Ne vidno bylo otrodias’. No vremia shlo, i, gody za godami, Proshla mladenchestva pora, I, nagrazhden prirodnymi darami,

Umom on stal ostree topora. Prichudnym mog on pokazat'sia V seme pechali i nevzgod, Kogda instinkt stal vyiavliat’sia V nem iarkosvetlostnykh zabot. Nemalo trudnostei zybuchikh Naperekor emu sud’boi Pregradoi stali put’ kipuchii V tsvetushchei zhizni molodoi. No iunyi um ego prekrasen, Vpered on vzor vperil, Khot’ put’ ego ternist, no krasen, I eto smal’stva on tverdil. Roditeli ego v to vremia,

Kak iunets kryl’ia raspuskal, Vpadali v starcheskoe bremia.

V mechtakh uslyshat’, chto syn iskal, Vzdykhaet mat’ ot sostradar‘ia, Chto zamechatel’neishii syn V bol’shikh trudakh i istiazan’iakh

Svoi ishchet luchezarnyi tyn. Sud’boi na put’ sei obrechennyi, Khotel rabochii on pokoi Voznagradit Sozdan’em sobstvennoi rukoi. [etc.}**

[Born with soul all passion-filled,

O little one, creator in the future, Gifted with talent from childhood He sought his own creative crown.

Scarcely eight then-tranquil years He passed in childhood, playing, But no empty games were here From the time that he was born. But time did pass, year after year, Infancy’s years were gone, Endowed he was with gifts of nature,

And sharper than the axe his mind. Perhaps he seemed somewhat a crank,

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In a family with hard sorrows beset, When his instinct first was clear For cares of bright and radiant kind. A host of difficulties shifting Counter to his fate, a stumbling-block Became to his ebullient path, into

A life that flourished all with youth. But beautiful as youthful was his mind, His gaze he fixed into the future,

Tho’ thorny was his path, yet radiant, And this from infancy confirmed. His parents at the very time

The youth spread forth his wings, Their senile burden did assume. Dreaming of her son’s pursuits,

The mother sighs, anticipating That most remarkable, her son Will seek in labors great and tortures His radiant paling for to find.

By fate appointed to this path, The worker he aspired to give

Rewards by his own hands’ creation .. . ] In the same style (but now in the post-Derzhavin model), beginners wrote

about the “workdays of construction” (for example, worker Ignatov from the Egor’evo Textile Factory, in the poem “At Dawn” [“Na zare”]):

Shumnyi den’ ukrylsia. Zvezdnoe mertsar’e, I v vechernei nege stroika mirno spit .. .

Zarevom zakata dal’ nebes ob” iata, Pestraia postroika bleshchet, kak v ogne, Stroinymi lesami korpusa ob” iaty

Na podmostkakh bochki v iasnoi vyshine.*[Hidden now is noisy day. To stars a-twinkle, The work-site sleeps in bliss of evening, peaceful . . . In sunset’s glow are distant heav’ns embraced, The parti-colored building gleams as if ablaze,

Scaffolding elegant embraces buildings Barrels rest on its transparent summit. ]

“Learning from the classics,” which is justifiably recognized as parody, was not realized as such among beginners. Its programmatic character was provided by RAPP. The high status of the classics that beginners strove to imitate

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was calculated by the authorities then, in the 1930s, when owing to deliberate actions the classics acquired a cultural significance beyond estimation. The year 1937, for example, marked by pompous celebration of the rooth anniversary of Pushkin’s death, brought a new wave not only of poetic “handicrafts” about Pushkin, but indeed “after Pushkin”:

Ty mog predugadat’, Obvev svoim spokoinym vzgliadom Rabov beschislennuiu rat’, Tomiashchuiusia pred pregradoi, Chto gnev, kotorogo v kol'’tse Sud’boi schastlivoi naslazhdennyi I v lestnoi poze (iskazhennoi) Sidel “orel” v dvoinom litse. [etc.]*°

[You could divine,

Surveying with your glance all tranquil The endless host of slaves, Beset with obstacles, and pining, That wrath, whose in the circle [sic]

Delighted in his happy fate And in a flatt’ring pose (distorted) The “eagle” with two faces sat... ] or:

I mnogotysiachnaia tolpa lubilei s liubov’iu provedet, Trudy velikogo poeta otsenit, Tvorchestvo ego prochtet.”! (The many-thousand crowd also With love the jubilee will mark, Esteem the labors of the great poet, Will read his every work.]

The “masses’ poetic production” can also be regarded, however, outside the context of “high literature,” as an independent historical document. The preceding chapter mentioned the “sense of self” of the “lower-strata poet.” But this was expressed in the beginners’ verse even to a greater extent than in their letters. “Poetic self-expression” was not free from the linguistic environment,

which combined along with the “shout of desperation” and the “howl of loneliness” the speech patterns of the time, as in, for example, the work of a Komsomol girl Zhurenkova from the city of Dimitrov, in the Moscow Province:

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Zhizn’ polna dum pechal’nykh, Gor’kikh slez i terzanii dushi.. . Zhizn nesnosnaia. . . Udovletvorenia v zhizni ne naidu ia... Mne net bol’she vozvrata: Ia iskalechena dushoi . . . Kaleka ia i vnutrennii urod.>”

'

[Life is full of grieving thoughts, Of bitter tears and torments of the soul . . . Life is unbearable . . . I can find no pleasure in life. . . There is no return for me:

Crippled

Iam in my soul...

I am a cripple and an inner freak.]

Here one sees the whole “linguistic arsenal” of the beginner, from the “salon lexicon” of the “forerunners” (grieving thoughts, torments of the soul, bitter tears, and so forth) to Komsomol jargon (inner [=moral] freak). The broader

the shock-worker’s “literary selection” was, the greater drama this linguistic collision reached. Beginner G. Kulikov writes: Klass moi, klass! Ia otdam tebe dushu,

Esli etogo trebuesh’ ty. Ne mogu tol’ko miloi ne slushat’,

Ne liubit’ ni ee, ni tsvety. ... 1 velikaia stroika volnuet, I divliusia ia tvorchestvu mass. A ona ko mne [net i tseluet, Ee kozha nezhna, kak atlas. ... Oi, kak mnogo zavodoy i domen V zhizr gliadit iz-za granok gazet. Au miloi maliusen’kii domik, Ves’ v zhasmin i siren’ razodet.”? [O class, my class! To you I'll give my soul,

If only you require it. My darling only I cannot ignore, Not love her, nor the flowers. ... And the great construction rumbles, I marvel at creations of the masses. But she to me holds tight, gives kisses, Her skin as soft as satin. ... Alas, so many factories and furnaces

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Peer into life from galley-proofs of papers. But tiny is my darling’s little house,

All dressed in jasmine and in lilacs.|

As one can see, the “intertextual” range expands—now it contains the “Smithyist” passion for direct address of the “class,” “psychologism” on the level of the RAPPist “living person” (collision between the “creativity of the masses” and the “tiny . . . little house”), and the familiar literariness (skin soft as satin), and

so on. But in the “factories and furnaces,” the poet got lost, and the “class meaning” of the collision was “blurred”—language again threw its unskilled rider—Komsomol-member Kulikov hardly intended to somehow “diminish” the significance of the “factories and furnaces” by stating that they “peer. . . from galley-proofs of papers.” He simply was trying to express some sort of collision in a dialect that was unfamiliar to him. When the pull toward “poetic self-expression” is not clouded, “mass poetry” can yield “documents of the era” with an amazing purity, as in the case of the unfortunate “poet” Aleksei Migaev, whose poems Libedinskii quoted in his speech at the October 1930 plenum of RAPP. The first one was entitled “My Dreams and Life” (“Mech'ty [séc] i zhizn’ moia” [the author's orthography is reproduced]): Ia sizhu pod oknom, V obshchezhit’i odnom Daleko ot rodnogo seleria. I khochetsia mne uekhat’ skorei

Tuda, gde znakomy mne vse derev ia. I dolgo ia dumal, s soboi rassuzhdal: Kuda zh teper’ mne devat’sia?

No potom poreshil pozabyt’ obo vsem, Tut do oseni zhit’ ostavat’sia. No bestsel’naia zhizn’ i rabota moia

Nu, kaneshna, vam stalo poniatno, Chto razdevshi sovsem i razuvshi pri tom,

Bylo b ekhat’ domoi nepriiatno.

Ne ot zhizni khoroshei ia priekhal siuda. I sestra tozh v Moskve prozhivait’.

Ot sud’by li zavisit i!’ ot zhizni takoi Peremena bol’shaia byvait’? Mne b khotelos’ odno: byl by dom nash rodnoi Ne v bol’shom, no khot’ v srednem dostatke,

Sestry, brat’ia moi zhili b vmeste vsegda. I khoziaistvo chtob bylo v poriadke. Dlia chego ia zhivu na chuzhoi storone,

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I sily svoi ubivaiu? Dlia sebia ia nazhit’ nichego ne smogu I kvalifikatsii nikakoi ia ne znaiu. Solntse saditsia za tuchi, A ia pod oknom vse sizhu.

Kto ne poimet, chto napisano— Prikhodite ko mne, ia vam vse rasskazhu.

[I sit by the window Alone in my dorm Far from my native village. And I want to go away right now

To where the trees are all familiar. And long I thought, discussed with myself: But where can I go now? But then I decided to forget it all,

And stay here living until fall. But my aimless life and my work Well, of course, you know already, That since I’ve no clothes nor shoes besides, Going home would not be pleasant. The life I left there wasn’t so good. My sister stays in Moscow, too. Does fate decide, or a life like this That the change is always so big? I'd like just one thing: my family to have its own house Not really prosperous, but at least average, My sisters and brothers would always live together. And for the money to be alright. Why do I live in a strange land,

And use up all my strength? I can't earn a thing for myself And I’m not qualified at all. The sun sets behind the clouds, But I still sit by the window. Anyone who doesn’t understand what I wrote, Come see me, I'll tell you all about it.] Migaev was not about to wait and thus told “all about it” in the poem that

followed, “My Life in the Dormitory” (“Zhizn’ moia v obshchezhitii”): Vecher uzhe nastupaet, Stanovitsia vse kholodnei, Iz obshchezhit’ia khotel by ia skryt’sia

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Podal’she v les ot liudei. Nadoelo mne obshchezhit’e: Den’ i noch’ vse shumit zdes’ rabochii narod. Vstaiut odni utrom rano

I gudiat, kak chugunno-liteinyi zavod. No vremia pridet i svobodno vzdokhnu ia, Rasproshchaius’ s obshchezhit’em togda,

Naguliaiusia skol’ko ugodno. Ne teriat’ chtob svoi molodye goda. Akh, zachem ia popal na chuzhbinu,

A zatem, chtoby deneg nazhit’, Nariadit’sia kak mozhno poluchshe, Patinki s kostiumom kupit’. No i esli kupit’ ne pridetsia, Vse zh ia skoro uedu domoi, Otdokhnu ia v derevne spokoino Zimoi na pechke rodnoi!”™*

[Evening’s already coming, It's getting colder and colder, I'd like to hide away in the woods Far away from the people in the dorm. I’m really tired of the dorm: Day and night the working people make noise here. Some get up early in the morning And hoot like a cast-iron foundry. But time will come, and I’ll breathe free, I'll say goodbye to all the dorm then, Pll walk around as much as | want. So's not to waste my young years. Oh, why did I end up in a strange land, And then, to earn some money, To dress up better, if I could, To buy some boots and a suit. But if I don’t get the chance to buy them, I'll still go home soon, I'll breathe easy in the village In winter on the family stove!]

One sees the extreme: there is no longer material for a history of literature here, but it is priceless material for a sociologist (and perhaps for a clinician?). Here is “Song” (“Pesnia”), by Baku worker Ivan Iurchenko:

Shirokii i smuglyi, ‘Ty radost’iu dyshish’.

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K mashine-podruge Ty snova idesh’: Ty mnogo rabotal I mnogoe dal S upriamoi okhotoi Zheleznym godam. Mashinoiu, gariu Naskvoz’ ty propakh, Ty luchshii udarnik, Tovarishch Panakh. Ty s partiei druzhen I druzhboi proshit, No partii nuzhen Pisatel’ mashin. I partiia khochet Poetoy strany,

Poetov rabochikh, Rabochim srodni. Idi zhe, tovarishch,

K poetam v riady, Chtob plamen’ udara Na stroike ne ostyl.” [Broad and swarthy,

You breathe with joy. To your machine-friend You go again. You've worked a lot And gave a lot With stubborn will

To the years of iron. Of the machine, cinders, You've taken the smell, The best shock-worker

is you, comrade Panakh. You're the Party’s friend Covered with friendship, But the Party needs Writers of machines.

And the Party wants The country’s poets, The workers’ poets, Akin to workers. Go on, comrade,

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To the poets’ ranks, So the ardor of shock-work Doesn't cool at the worksite. }

This appeared in the pages of Workers’ Call, but as I pointed out above, there was no particular need to “call” again. Two decades later, in 1952, the publisher of the Kaluga newspaper Znamia (Banner) published an anthology ofthe work of participants in the Kaluga Regional Literary Union, Poetry About Peace (Stikhi o mire). The theme of “fight-

ing for peace” was at this time the main theme of “high” Soviet poetry, from Konstantin Simonov to Aleksei Surkov, and therefore it is no surprise that the

nonprofessional poets undertook writing verse “on the assigned theme.” The authors in brief: Vasilii Zelenchikov, teacher; Liudmila Nikulicheva and Oleg Iva-

khnenko, students; Konstantin Afanas’ev, tractor driver; Iurii Gladkikh, factory superintendent; Nikolai Bukin, kolkhoz member; Aleksei Dubroy, electrical re-

pairman; Mikhail Prosvirnovy, railroad employee; Pavel Shpilev, hydroelectric plant worker; and Konstantin Tiuliapin, journalist. All were “people in peaceful professions.” There is no need to quote the poems. Among their subjects: Red Square, from which “comrade Stalin with a map in his hand” sees everything—from Oka to Stalingrad, and the poem's speakers were “proud and glad, that we live with him in such a beautiful age,” because “Stalin and peace” were indivisible in all languages;

a memorial in Berlin’s Treptov Park, where a “simple Russian champion/soldier, as before, at his post. . . grasps the just sword,” which the diplomats who “again prophesy war” should remember; “my native plowed fields,” from whence the tractor driver “brings peace to all the planet”; a steel founder, who said: “Let there be no return to war! We will wall up

peaceful labor with steel!”; French transport workers who refused to transport cannonballs;

a milkmaid from the “Journey Forward” kolkhoz, Alena Troshina, who speaks out at a meeting “as a mother,” demanding “an answer from the devils across the ocean who threaten us with the bomb’;

the firstborn son, who lies in the cradle and for whom “peace is tomorrow’; Frenchwoman Eugénie Cotton, winner of the Stalin Peace Prize; American pilot John Sidney, who yesterday had battled fascism, and who then

was dropping bombs on the peaceful inhabitants of Indochina; the people of Korea struggling against American aggressors, who, “when the time comes, will also be cast into the sea.”

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Here one observes the entire “fundamental lexicon” of high Socialist Realism. Mastery of writing is almost irreproachable. All themes and tropes are already tried and tested numerous times in “official literature.” But, in fact, there is no boundary separating Konstantin Simonov from the Kaluga tractor driver. The process of making nonprofessional poets more like “real poets” occurs not only by virtue of “training” but also by virtue of assimilation to an established literary canon (in the 1920s, as I discussed previously, there was no existing

canon, much less a united one), that one only need “duplicate.” The only difference between the tractor driver and Simonov was that the latter had to, largely independently, transcribe in verses the prepared ideological blocks of feature articles, but the tractor driver received them in an already-prepared (developed) form from the poet. Thus he did not have to deal with untested material, and just as easily as earlier he had written about his tractors, now he

could “respond” to any “life-shaking themes of the present time.” The machine of Socialist Realistic writing had begun to operate practically on autopilot. To understand the mechanism of this machine’s operation, one must cease to submit to the mimetic magic of Soviet writing. This writing is opaque, it is

(despite its obvious unprofessionalism) excessively literary, and therefore anyone who wants to read a Socialist Realist text is obliged to not only read the text but also to consider the laws of “the untransformed word.” The history of the desperate battle to “enliven” this “word” is indeed the captivating history of Socialist Realist writing. If one does not realize this, then one risks a return to the old mimetic debates about the truth/untruth of what is portrayed and the freedom/unfreedom of the author—in other words, a return to the understanding of the history of literature that was characteristic of traditional Sovietology—and therefore risks becoming like the shock-worker poet from Astrakhan who supposed that Kogda-to v starinu pisateli pisali

Pro nezhnykh angelov, pro ved’m, pro koldunoy, Pro boga, pro tsaria i pro liubov’, Potomu chto ikh tsenzura zastavliala,

I Groznyi im katorgoi grozil

I chasto vysylal v Sibir’.°° [Writers in ancient times used to write About soft angels, witches, sorcerers, About God, the tsar, and love, Because the censors forced them to,

And [Ivan] The Terrible threatened hard labor And often exiled them to Siberia.]

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“Minus-Style”: From Workers -C vorrespondent Sketch to Novel

In an article entitled “Writers and Those Who Write,” Roland Barthes came to a paradoxical conclusion: “The institution of literature (and particularly its fundamental material—the word) . . . is much more important than its functions.”””

According to this notion, “the writer fulfills a function, and someone who writes is engaged in an activity.”** And since the institution is “more important,” the “inherent value of the writer” is under constant threat. In contrast, “those who write,” as Barthes explains, are people “of a transitive type,” for whom the goal of the activity lies outside words; they use language in its “natural role of acommunicative tool.” They “do not carry out any substantially important technical action on words,” using “the general writing of all those who write—a sort of koine wherein dialects, of course, are distinguished . . . but individual styles, extremely rarely.”® But since society aspires to “bring itself into power, to tame and institutionalize the unpredictability of thought,” it—with the help of language—transforms the writer into someone who writes. And according to Barthes, as soon as “the entire essence of language is in paradox—in the institutionalization of subjectivity,” there is nowhere to escape from this circle. The model that Barthes proposed to describe the French cultural situation is universal. It simply has its specifics for social models of the so-called totalitarian type. Here the role of “society” is assumed by authority, but the system of relations does not become more rigid (as is usually supposed) because of this—on the contrary, the writer who is “fulfilling a function” is pushed out to the periphery and thus totally “falls out of literature,” as it were—he does not exist within it. In this respect, neither Pushkin nor Gogol existed in Soviet culture. Or more precisely, they were reduced to “those who write.” Thus their lives as writers were “canned,” and culture had no business with these lives, just as it

had no business with Andrei Platonoy, who had swept the courtyard of the Literary Institute behind the windows of which “those who write” studied, those “craftsmen of Soviet literature.” The writer paid for this freedom with his nonexistence. The “untransformed word” is a fragment of language, which, according to another of Barthes’s paradoxes, is “neither reactionary nor progressive; it is an ordinary fascist, for the essence of fascism is not in forbidding someone to say something, but in forcing him to say it.”*' Once it becomes permanent, terror ceases to be effective. Soviet literature is that which comes on the heels of “forcing”; it is no longer a demand to “speak up,” but an “organic” impossibility of remaining silent—the Soviet writer does not have to be “forced.” Soviet literature operates with the alienated word. The beginners’ situation

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is extreme: they do not wield “style” (a category in general irrelevant to Socialist Realism), and they are not fluent in the “koine.” Their language is like clay, whose composition is shaped beyond the “authorial” will. The “craftsman of Soviet literature,” in the process of his or her “institutional activity” can at least sculpt the assigned shape out of this material (can create an “artistic product”);

but the unskilled beginner “works on the word” so long and so clumsily that he or she is dealing with material that has already hardened too much to be malleable. “The language of the workers’ correspondent,” one reads in S§. Meromskii’s article about workers’-correspondent speech, “is threatened with partial bureaucratic ossification. Individual parts of living, full-blooded country speech are subjected to the corrosive effect of bureaucratese.”©? Whose fault was this? “Our newspapers, whose language to a significant extent has become automatized and full of many clichés, have worked particularly hard at this.”°? Workers’ correspondents (and consequently, the “proletarian-kolkhoz writers” who “sprang” from their milieu) were not to blame, for “the worker’s correspondent, after all, is a progressive Soviet peasant/activist [krestianin-obshchestvennik| who

hybridizes the language of books, newspapers, the city, factory, and proletarian revolution with an opposing wave of linguistic possibilities by far not yet exhausted, possibilities that the living language of the countryside that is being renewed conceals within itself.”°* One could suppose that these correspondents in fact fell victim to the “ossifying” language of newspapers. But then there is the anthology of works by authors from “Workers’ Spring,” about which a reviewer writes: “The language of these works does not have its own stylistic texture, but is rather parole [govorenie], that is, a precise conveyance of widespread, everyday speech. .. . And it is good that they [the authors—E.D.] are not affected and that they write without any pretensions to any ‘new style.””® One should remember, however, that “parole” lacking “its own stylistic texture” is still not “without style.” The “new style” did not announce itself in manifests, since it was not the fruit of rational “creation of form.” This style was born spontaneously, “organically”: the literature flooded by amateur writers was flooded with “parole” naturally and irreversibly. The process of giving birth to a “new style” can be compared with the process of metal-founding (this metallurgic metaphor is dictated by Soviet literature itself): the hot mass is poured into prepared molds designed according to the templates developed in the culture. But the quality of the “product” nonetheless depends on the composition of the metal. Disturbance of the “technological process” is only one of the reasons for the short lifespan of the constructs of Soviet texts. They fall apart because of the nature of the ore, from the

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incorrectly calculated composition of the mass. As far as the templates themselves are concerned, they exist in a prepared form for beginner authors: “For the young generation in Soviet literature, as well as for the latter’s basic cadres, the issues of subject-matter are to a significant extent resolved issues.”°°

One can easily calculate the range of templates in the works of shockworkers. It is limited to plots about bridging production gaps, about the struggle with truants, and about how the backward became the progressive. The workers’-correspondent writers’ choice of plots can also be reduced to three constructs, namely:

the workers’-correspondent plot: the decommissioned Red Army man returns to his native village. Here he is struck by darkness, ignorance, the peasants’ passivity, the abuses of the village soviet, and the dark activities of kulaks. He cannot stand idly by, and becomes a workers’ correspondent (he writes about the soviet’s abuses, organizes the poor, causes the kulaks, who hate him, to rise up against him, and in the end they kill him);

the commune plot: an artel or commune is organized. The peasants are reluctant to go to it. Gradually, the commune gets on its feet. A tractor and machines are acquired, electrification appears. The peasants become convinced of the advantages of the commune and begin to join it; the progressive woman plot: once upon a time, there was a benighted wench. All her life she cooked, did washing, looked after her husband, earned herself a bit of bread. The husband drank and pushed her around. An aspiration for a better life lived within her. A female organizer of a woman's department

arrives in the village and summons the peasant women to a meeting. The heroine passionately tells about the needs of the peasant women. The woman's department representative gets her involved in public work, and yesterday's benighted wench becomes a social activist.

Beginners do not know how to write descriptions—the art of “realistic, psychologically true description of life” is yet to be “learned from the classics.” Meanwhile, it comes out something like this: “In the broad expanses of the kolkhoz fields the new man arose. And his title is kolkhoznik, tireless champion against the accursed class enemy—kulakism. There are a lot of these, new people, in the ‘Flame’ kolkhoz: Smirnov, Fedorov, Kozlov. . . . But is it worth counting them all? There is neither enough time, nor printing paper.”*” One can definitely state that Smirnov, Fedorov, and Kozloy were real people. In A. Tverdov’s short story “Borisov’s Brigade” (“Brigada Borisova”): “Der, Poliakov, and Abakumov were here” (12); “Der, Poliakov, and Abakumov watched

silently as Chukhanov, Glukhov, and Kleshchey left” (12); “But were there many workers? You could count them on your fingers—Deer, Poliakov, Abaku-

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mov, Borisov, and Baenko” (13); “Der, Svirinov, and Poliakov work on a steamer” (18).°* Who were these people, Der, Poliakov, and Abakumov? They are inde-

scribable: “Who participates actively in the production meetings and in the rationalization of production? Vasilii Ivanovich. Who signed up first, and more

than anyone else, for the loan? Vasilii Ivanovich. Whosé productivity is higher and waste less? Vasilii Ivanovich’s. Who is the first pioneer of socialist competition in the factory? Vasilii Ivanovich”; but “Ask any worker in the metalworks

who our most habitual truant is. Without even thinking, they'll all say Pankratov. Who is the first idler? Pankratov. Who is a self-seeker? Pankratov” (from A. Tsypkin’s tale Badulin the Idler [Lodyr’ Badulin])®; “White-haired, with a curly snow-white beard, Semechkin. A public worker, a shock-worker, he acts

as orator at meetings. He has a good attitude toward production, not like the slipshod Bogatyrev. It was Bogatyrev’s fault the oven fell off its wheels. He made the holdup worse””®; “Ivan Petrovich Kulakov is a kulak, and Grigorii Sa-

fonych is also a kulak. Both kulaks actively defended the chairman and his benighted little capers regarding the citizens of the settlement. . . .” Kulakov the

kulak—what came next would not be hard to guess: “Then the poor people announced, “We don't want to live like before, organize a kolkhoz.’ The commissioner flew around the volost. The work went quickly. The seredniak got behind the poor people. And so they organized a kolkhoz.” The “industrial” plot obligatorily contained the collision of “holdup—crisis—victory : Can we put up with this any longer? Will we allow such a »

ae

shameful thing?’ the Party, Komsomol, and labor-union organizations asked. And they, raising their hammers, seizing the handles of the transmission con-

ductors, powering on the lathes, the workers answered, “We must not put up with it any longer!’””! The course of events, incidentally, can also be more extensive. Sometimes a very short story contains within itself the complete summary of an industrial novel. For example, Andrei Baskakov's “To the Assault” (“Na shturm”), which begins thus: “Again! . .. A holdup again! . . . For shame, a holdup! . . . For the third month in a row, the “Torch of October’ Factory has not met its goal” (42). The following page is an argument about who the guilty party ts: “Who's to blame, then?” “Who!? You yourselves didn’t meet the goal!” “Blame who you like, but mostly yourself!” “Everybody's to blame. . . . Everybody needs a good hide-tanning! “Listen to you, Vit! You're like an old activist correspondent. . . .” “I was, but got away from it. They don’t listen to the advice, they don't print the sketches. . . .” (43) »

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The next two pages describe the organization of ameeting, thus: The chairman of the trade-union committee opened the meeting. The first

one to get the floor was a gloomy fellow from the Party Central Committee. He went up to the bar and slowly looked around at those who had gathered. Everyone quieted down because of his sullen, prickly look. “Comrades!”, the Central Committee member began, in a bass. “I must

report to you the reasons for your holdup. . . .

”

The speaker told about poor labor discipline, truants, slipshod workers, and

people who ran away. The reaction of the hall is easily imaginable: The words bit acidly into the increasing silence. . . . All those assembled listened intently, some of their mouths even fell open. From time to time, others would shake their heads, bit their lips. . . Vit’ka heard a whisper behind him: “Devils! Real saboteurs!” But the Central Committee member spoke louder and louder. . . . (46-47) The next seven pages transcribe remarks at the meeting:

“Comrades, the comrade here blamed the Party committee, which means, as a result, me. But I can definitely say, that. . . .” “Comrades! Our pride is the factory! Comrades, the honor of the factory is our honor. Let’s not let it be dirtied! Not one deserter from the labor front! Let me be the first to swear, to the end of the five-year plan. . . .” “Comrades! We've shamed ourselves. . . . But why? Is it our own fault? We've become idlers. But we are the forces, we can do anything, don’t you see? So lets: .. 5” “Comrades! I think the question is clear to everybody: we must catch up with the industrial-financial plan, and exceed it, and therefore it’s a short conversation. Since we must, then let’s do it. We'll carry it out, that’s it. . . .” “Comrades! That carrying out the industrial-financial plan is our first necessary goal, there’s no need to say. The work must be accurate and cleat air The Komsomol girl Lida reads a resolution: “With the aims of liquidating

the gap and carrying out the industrial-financial plan, the general meeting of the factory welcomes . . . , [and] notes the necessity of developing shockwork, socialist competition, intensification of the workload. . . .” There was a storm of sudden applause. It seemed that the walls and the work-areas all swore to join the socialist struggle. (54)

The following pages relate how “with each day and with each hour, the tempo of work grew and grew. The initiative of the workers grew ever stronger

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(61). Accordingly, the plans are doubled and, as a result, are overfulfilled at 300 percent. At the end of the month,

. . . the evening was tinted bright purple. It was quiet. Near the entrance, there was an impromptu meeting. Potokov was on

the scaffolding: “Comrades! I must give you the good news: thanks to your efforts, the industrial-financial plan is one hundred thirty percent fulfilled. . . .” At once, there was a burst of applause. Joyous shouts broke out. “Our success is the result of uplifting the factory’s workers. I recommend sending a resolution/report to the Party Central Committee. . . .” (65)”?

This scheme can become complicated by the heroes’ sufferings. As, for example, in Dmitrii Sangarskii’s short story “Alarm” (“Trevoga”), wherein the hero suffers during a meeting: his beloved made a speech suggesting the organization of “shock-worker brigades from among the workers’ correspon-

dents,” but he does not want her proposal to pass: Mukhartsev understood the practicality of Odintsova’s proposals, but Katia’s

coldness to him and her loving conversation with Demin spited him. He regretted that he had not made the proposal himself. Nor could he reconcile himself to the fact that here some slip of a girl who had worked a year, if that, in the factory, wanted to lead the old workers’ correspondents, among whom were Mukhartsev. Just then an alarm rose in his heart regarding his

future relations with Katia. No, today he would not allow his authority as a senior workers’ correspondent and shock-worker to be diminished. So when the editor asked whether anyone didn’t have any suggestions, he began tospeala. ©

Need it be said that the “conflict” was easily resolved after all of ten minutes?: He stopped alongside the entrance of the wicket, glanced into the editors’ building and recalled a comrade’s story about hypnotic suggestion at a distance. He stood there for ten minutes and internally demanded that Odintsova leave the meeting. Then the editorial office door opened, and a woman's figure appeared on the threshold. Mukhartsev sighed with satisfaction. . . . His heart began to beat faster. Katia’s insult was forgotten. By now he was already thinking about how and where he could best spend the evening with her.”

A possible and more complex case is the conflict that is as if transcribed from Konstantin Trenev’s Livbov’ larovaia. During the conflict, the heroes express themselves as follows (in Sangarskii’s story “Her Path” [“Ee put’”]):

“Vasia! What are you looking for?” asked Nastia, suddenly on her guard.

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“I had a package with tin in it with me. An acquaintance had asked me to buy it.” “Well, where could you have bought it, when you brought it from the

factory? Vasilii, I've long been wanting to ask you: what kind of acquaintances are these, who are wanting copper, or bronze, or tin?”

“What's it to you?” “T want to know, Vasilii, ’m your wife. You're a Party member, so am I.

I think I have the right to ask you about this.” “Too late. You should have asked yourself, when you pushed your husband into stealing runners for a sledge.” “So that’s the kind of communist you are! Don’t you remember that your wife back then was benighted, a rank-and-file worker, not knowing and not understanding all the questions the Party raised? So where were you, Party member since eighteen? Why didn’t you try to reeducate me? Or was it better for your wife to remain benighted?” “Nastia, I don’t understand you, what do you want from me?” “You don’t understand? I want to know where you get these materials from and who you're taking them to. Watch out if you pilfer and sell—irll go badly. . . . las a Party member will be forced to tell the Party committee about this. Then you'll have yourself to blame! . . . Watch out, Vasia, so you don’t end up in Butyrki with your acquaintances!”

So Nastia discovered that her Vasia was stealing and went to the Party committee. The committee secretary told her, as she was leaving: “Thank you, comrade Balueva! Every Party member and every worker should act like this!”

The story ends thus: “Leaving the committee office, Nastia understood that she had fulfilled the duty of a communist Party member. Her earlier pity for Vasilii was gone.””° Such “sparse psychological development of theme” originated from an ignorance that could not replace even the aspiration to write “juicy prose” such as: “The flickering lamplight thoughtfully flooded the sphere of the room. With his mighty arm, Ostoukhin entwined the widow's body [vdovia natura). Bychikha blew her nose into an elegant handkerchief”; or, “On the snowwhite bed, with domes, lay the woman with jet-black hair. He looked at her with devouring eyes. A flood of stormy passion welled up in him. The atmosphere of their relations thickened””; or, “October pinched Verunia’s heart, like a young curly-haired boy [pinching] her nipple.” All these “widows’ bodies,” “young curly-haired boys,” and “devouring eyes,” this whole “macho style” remained just this way, forever, in the Soviet novel. The same can be said about the “depth of psychologism,” which did not always lie on the level of the dialog between Nastia and Vasia. Sometimes the collision spread, as in P. Vorob’ev’s short story “Anguish” (“Toska”), which re-

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lates the tragedy of an old “craftsman.” The fact was that Petr Agapych had become accustomed to working for a master. When shock-work was beginning

at the factory, he felt out of his element. And then in his declining years, he began to feel that he had torn-himself away from his own class, had become cut-off. ... Anguish weighed on him and oppressed him. He was bored, it was difficult. . . . Mechanically digging around in the desk drawer, Petr Agapych pulled out a small light revolver. . . . Suddenly Petr Agapych’s eyes flashed, his face contorted. The coarse, knotted fingers, dropping the Browning, threw themselves around his gray head. He shook all over, mutely sobbing. . . . Perhaps he should go to the factory and tell them, “Dear comrades, look at my hands, they are clean and white. But the callous is still there. This is the stamp of the class. I want to work... . I sincerely want to work.” Would they really not understand? . . . Is there really no return for me to my class? But Petr Agapych’s heart was anguished and despondent. Breathing with difficulty, he fell on the sofa cushion. And again he began to shake in sobbing. . . .

Then the hero set off by night to the factory entrance and began to try to force the locked gates: “Open up!’ he hoarsely shouted. ‘Open up! ... I’m bored... . I'm alone... alone.” But no one opened the gates. And then: “The night is still... . The factory building is still. Everything is sleeping . . . everything has been forgotten. . . . Only Petr Agapych cannot sleep—he is looking for the forgotten path to his own native class.”” In a work of this type, there must be, invariably, lyrical-public-minded di-

eressions (be they of the hero or of the author), as in S. Tarasevich’s aforementioned story “We Will Catch Up”: How good to feel oneself a spoke in one’s native wheel! It is good to be the master of a country, of one’s own factory, one’s own work station! Just get the

notion, and you can make a precisely measured part from a huge amorphous mass. Just get the notion, and you can fulfill any industrial-financial plan at all. Just get the notion, and you will catch up with any America, and surpass it!*°

The invariable attribute is the “poetry in prose” about the work station (again, Tarasevich): The radial drilling machine, silvery in the places where it has slipped and blue on its outer casing, glittered with specks of light from the hinged windows of the ceiling. Its whole obedient frame shuddered from the internal violence of its gears. On the table beside it was a tool. The drills are delicate, like shoots of a steely plant, or coarse, like pieces of a shaft. The blades of all of them are

sharpened—you could shave with them! . . . In the morning he put on the

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glossy specialists’ uniform . . . got to work on the machine. He cleaned

everything. He gave the parched jaws a drink of oil. It seemed to almost bathe in the gold-tinted oil. He adjusted the instrument. The machine began to gleam again, as iflit by candles or reflected sunbeams. Bluish, a ton by weight, the support easily slid along the oiled racks. The whole frame, similar to an outstretched bird, swam along over the block. Cast-

iron, tightly enveloped below by the embrace of the jig, it awaited the completion ofits birth.®!

Pathos sometimes, however, breaks the fabric of the “blank verse.” Then scenes such as the following appear: in I. Kibal’chich’s novel Verdure (Porosl’), the dying hero addresses the reader with such a touching “behest”: “Keep up with the development of animal husbandry! Develop arable land! Sow purebred cultures! . . .”*? All of this, of course, is not simply the fruit of “ineptitude.” What one observes is a sort of half-finished product, construction elements. Anyone who is familiar with more of the Soviet industrial novel than just Gladkov’s Cement clearly knows: one need only collect these “slivers” under one cover in order to obtain a text which could bear the signature of any “craftsman of Soviet literature.” Were these shock-workers’ “handicrafts” only products of inept copying of existing texts? In “high” (“official”) literature, the flowering of the industrial novel occurs precisely in the first half of the 1930s. The texts I

have cited are from 1930 and 1931. Between the first industrial novels of the mid-1920s (Gladkov’s Cement, Liashko’s The Blast-Furnace |Domennaia pech’}, and Karavaevas Timber-Mill |Lesozavod]) and the “classical industrial novel”

lie the products of the shock-workers. It is impossible to understand the evident process of “ossification” of the word in the Soviet classic (from the first

edition of Cement to its last, and from the latter to Kochetov’s The Zhurbins [Zhurbiny]) if one bypasses the paraliterary experiments of those “called” by the RAPPists. They were a sort of laboratory in which the hybrid of the literary koine and the language of production-meeting minutes was produced, with the subsequent transformation of this word into a fact of literature. The stylistic array of beginners is easily followed along the frequently encountered landscapes. It can be chosen from either: the already-familiar dictation, consisting of simple sentences (“Yesterday there was a thunderstorm with copious rain. The land must soon grow stronger. The fireflies bespeak the coming seedtime. The red combs of the chickens bespeak the coming seedtime. The birds are chirping about the coming seedtime. Such rays of sunlight every morning joyfully knock on the window about the coming seedtime. The Bolshevist seedtime is growing and strengthening!”); the attempt to write a coordinate sentence out of complex syntactic constructions, whereby the text

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falls apart (“In conjunction with this gloomy thick nature it was so evident that one could easily imagine that in the hours of the dull evening, when the fog spreads from the not-yet frozen lake, ‘penetrating through the branches of the fir forest and lies on the grass that has grown still”); the language of “bu-

reaucratic ossification” (“This period of time clearly delineated the transition from the damp autumn to the severe winter, which was accompanied by the

fall of wet snow on the land and by the appearance of light frosts in the air”); or “poetic speech” (“With the collar unbuttoned on its cream-colored shirt,

with a cleanly washed rosy face, in a hat made out of curly wind, and in big sunny shoes, the morning was going by. As if it had been washed up in a bath, its clean and ruddy, sunny face, sticking to the hem of the sky, made everyone who tried to glance at it squint”®’). Behind all this lies an oppressive muteness.

The problem was not that beginners “had not mastered” something in their attempts to express themselves in the “artistic word”; rather, it lay in the nonfunctionality of the very act of utterance. One might encounter dialog like this: “Alex?” “Wi

ate”

“Where's my ax?” “T don't know where you've put it!” “Tt was with yours!” “There it is, take it!”*4

It does not follow to assume that the author simply “has not mastered dialog.” The “untransformed word” has its own laws and is, in its own way, organic. When it occurs in the context of “as it were, literary utterance,” it manifests its

chief distinction from an artistic utterance—an improbable redundancy. Redundancy in everything —even in redundancy itself (as one reviewer said, “The monotony of beginners’ products is very diverse”®’). In connection with this, Viktor Pertsov asked, What good is it publishing many books that talk about one and the same thing? Maybe it would be correct to publish only a small series of little books and cease further work, so as not to repeat ourselves? Such a viewpoint is a harmful mistake. It is the fruit of a bystander’s superficial attitude toward all the diversity in which the life of socialist production is unprecedentedly rich. Suffice it to recall that the former nobleman’s and bourgeois literature sang over and over the themes of love, marriage, jealousy, and the like, to a

thousand different tunes.*°

Pertsov was, without a doubt, correct: singing “to a thousand different tunes” the themes of “socialist production” in a paradoxical way meant embodying this

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er

production that was halfway the fruit of

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hi

“creative imagination.” In this rewere the difficulties of “sowriters shock-worker the of spect, the difficulties cialist construction’ itself.

The Adventures ofMelpomene on the Workers-Correspondent Parnassus

Ascent in “craftsmanship,” as I have illustrated, always began with verses for self-taught writers. Taking up playwriting signified a definitely new level of “literary competency”: a play requires a high degree ofdistancing of the author from its hero. The fact that the play became one of the most attractive and popular forms ofliterary creation among beginners is not fully explained simply by the clublike nature of this creative work (in the Proletkult era, theater

was in general the most widely cultivated form of art, since it was ideally suited to Proletkult’s theory of “mass art”). In this regard, the beginners’ “drama-

turgy” has a special value. Foremost, let us note that plays were still perceived with great difficulty by beginner authors as something different from prose. Indicative of this are the stage directions found in their “dramatic” texts: “Goes offstage and drives away

to Kiev”; “Goes offstage and shoots himself”; “Goes offstage and faints”; “Lying on the stage are corpses that are not yet cold”; “They answer with lips grown white as a corpse’s’; “The words can be changed”; “The audience claps and cries “Bravo!’—again”; “The audience runs like rain to the exit”; “Her cheeks blazed with the purple flame of the setting sun”; “Her eyes fly to all directions, like this”; or “Chestnut hair spills over in a broad wave on her strong

young shoulders.”*” And here are stage directions from a single play: “The artist seats them or puts them into poses. I beg the scenic artist to choose an inoffensive pose, or as best he can”; “Involuntarily, she says ‘Him’ and runs backward somewhat mechanically. Kassil’ also runs onstage quickly and produces embraces [sic], with kisses at first”; “The tsar’s reception hall. The tsar, dressed de-

cently, of course sits on the throne”; “The tsar on the throne. The same decorations. Vul’mina does not make an entrance”; “A picture can be hung. For example, Ivan the Terrible killing Repin’s son”; “Iaon, having changed into a woman's maternity costume, enters with a midwife that he bribed with gold to get in.”** No matter how much the handbooks for beginners explained that stage directions must describe only what is taking place onstage, beginners continued to see the world not “scenically,” but rather in a linear fashion. The already-familiar language of “workers’-correspondent prose” is spoken not only by authors but also by their heroes. Perhaps the only difference is that

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the heroes speak more emotionally. This hybrid of the pathetic element and newspaper slang is applied in plays to truly fantastic plots. Beginner playwrights (as opposed to beginner prose writers) rarely wrote plays about their

own industries or about the familiar everyday life of peasants. On the contrary, their plays were chiefly narrations about foreign life+-with kings, counts, barons, with Alberts and Emmas (wherein, the king expressed himself as fol-

lows: “Well, why aren’t you stocking up, dear guests, have a bite! . . . Hey, courtiers! Let them refuel a little from the road, OK!”®’ and a certain Emma, who “listening to how the church bells were tolling,” turns to her Albert with

the words, “Listen, Albert! Shrovetide is over, Lent has started, and youre still hanging around on vacation”); or about the old peasant way of life and the daily life of landlords (neither of which, of course, the author knew about). For

example, in one play the peasants pay quitrent to the landlord, and the landlord birches the peasants in the stable: although this play of Vasilii Mitrofanchenko is set in the era of serfdom, the hero suggests to one of the peasants that he read Lenin’s works, and he avers that he has seen the landlord’s son Nikolai with a Party membership card.”! Telling in this respect, too, is a case

wherein one of the authors wrote a stage dramatization after Tolstoy’s “Father Sergius” (“Otets Sergii”). In this dramatization, Prince Kasatskii (officer of the guard) goes to some kind of “office” and rides about Petersburg in the driver’s

seat of a carriage. At the Korotkovs’ grand-monde ball, the following exchange takes place between Mary and one of the guests: Mary: Why are you rushing off? Dancer: Well, there’s nothing else to do. They've drunk all the vodka, the musicians are drunk and not playing. Mary: Good gracious, what a mess!

At the banquet, a groom inexplicably doubles as a lackey, and a “grand dame” who has arrived as a guest asks none other than the governess to “look after the horses.” The furnishings of the Kasatskiis is described thus: “There is a round table in the middle of the hut.” Princess Kasatskaia addresses her son: “Sonny,

all our hopes were on you. When a son gets hitched, he’s a breadwinner, but what’s happened? How on earth will we live without a man in the house?” This unfortunate princess, after “toting in the samovar”(!), says to her daughter, “Varia, get the dishes. Put sugar and tea on the table” and then beckons her

guest, “Stepa, sit, have a little tea.” This interest in “high society” life was a reflection of the same trauma written about by shock-worker poet Ermonskii: Chtob uravniat’ vo vsekh manerakh, Zhilos’ chtob kazhdomu teplo,

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Rodit’sia nado v vysshikh sferakh Da chtoby s nosu ne teklo.”’

(‘To be equal For everyone You must be So that your

in all manners, to live in warmth, born in higher spheres nose don’t run.]

Alongside such elevated themes, among other favorites of peasant authors were “historical” themes, primarily “Bloody Sunday.” In this context, a worker might appear on the stage with a bandage across his face and with two red marks in the place of eyes, and exclaim: “Where are my eyes?! Where are my blue eyes, the color of the sky?! They were shot out by the executioner’s bullet [both eyes shot out with a single bullet!—£.D.]} and rolled under the feet of

the bloody Nikolai.” In another play, written in verse, the heroine declaims the following monologue: Akh, chainik, chainik moi,

Ty prevratilsia v oskolki ot ruk Predstavitelia palachei. Chto budet s nim? Chto zhdet Valeriia moego?

[Oh, teapot, teapot mine, You've turned to fragments from the hands Of the executioners’ representative. What will become of him? What awaits my Valerii?] and a bit further on: I nuzhno chto imet’ v grudi,

Chtob vybrosit’ na ulitsu bol’nogo? Ne nuzhen bol’she, ukhodi, Idi, ishchi diadiu rodnogo.”°

[And what must they have in their breast To throw a sick man on the street? Don't need you anymore, go away, Go and look for your own uncle.}

This was the reflection of the “historical interests” of the beginner peasant playwrights. Plays about the present were similarly constructed out of the plot clichés familiar in prose. In one play, it is related how the kolkhoz chairman rejects Zoia, the daughter of a kulak, since this love hinders his work and discredits his “social ego” (Loginova's play, Crisis [Perelom]); in another Loginova play, Regeneration (Pererozhdenie), a kolkhoznik who is a drunkard and idler,

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influenced by his Young Pioneer son Vasia, realizes that he is not “living right” and decides to live otherwise, giving up vodka. But no matter what theme the beginner playwrights chose, they had nothing to write about. Their texts (except for obvious amusing incidents) con-

tained empty logomachies or pointless quotidian dialogs such as: Father: Have you spent all the money? Mother: No. Father: Is there much left?

Mother: A fiver, maybe. Father: What did you spend all the other five on? Mother: Almost nothing. To make borshch, I picked out some onions, potatoes, beets, cabbage, meat... . ”°

It is incomprehensible why the heroes of this literature, brought into the world and out onto the stage, are striking not because of excess verbosity, but

because of a certain gravitation toward rhetoric. In one play (this time an antireligious one), which consisted only of conversations and propagandistic “argumentative” speeches, the beginner author, not knowing how to flesh it out with stage business, inserted food and tea-drinking in all five scenes. Thus the entire first act is constructed on the fact that the worker Mar’ia is treating worker Ivan to white salmon, about which they carry on endless conversations. In the second act, the priest’s wife gives Mar’ia a lecture about this same salmon. The author is relentless, however, and in the third act makes Maria

retell to Ivan the content of the conversation with the priest’s wife that the audience has already heard, that is, the salmon again.”’ Interspersed with the salmon is a debate about religion. The propensity for tea drinking is explainable not only by the thirst that seized the heroes as a result of their passion for salty fish: Andrei Siniavskii noted the same passion for tea drinking in the heroes of the chief Socialist Realist text—Gorky’s Mother: One wonders why, in a novel about social-democrats and the imminent revolution, Gorky broke all records for tea drinking. I think this is not simply the material aspect of Russian daily life of the time, that appeared in Gorky’s novel under the influence, perhaps, of the celebrated productions of the Artistic Theater with a Chekhovian subtext and a realistic decor. But in this case it is the reverse side of Gorky’s revolutionary rhetoric. It is, so to speak, its foundation and accompaniment. After all, one need not force the heroes to orate constantly. All the same they much too zealously go for these occasions, besides being in their own circle, face to face, persuading one another and one explaining the rightness of the ideas of revolution to the other. It is not necessary for revolutionaries to repeat truisms to each other. But the author

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needs them as a means of political enlightenment and education of readers.

And so that the loud slogans do not simply hang in midair, the samovar was needed as an everyday link behind which the heroes could assemble and talk to their heart’s content. The samovar is a realistic decoration for a rhetorical performance, which against this backdrop should seem more convincing.”®

The creative work of shock-workers is remarkable for the fact that in principle it is not intended for a reader or spectator—the majority of the poems, short stories, and plays that I have discussed here were never published or performed. But even if this “pure art” had become part of “high” Soviet culture, and had not remained forever in the archives of editors and literary consultants, the fact would not change: the “decoration for a rhetorical performance” would not have suited the consumer, not because it was insufficiently “realistic,” but because on the contrary it was too lifelike—it was not literary enough. But Soviet literature was, in fact, a “realistic decoration for a rhetorical performance.” This “theater” was populated with fully alive people, who had learned (true,

throughout many decades) to accept “realism” as reality.

CHAPTER

S'1X

Balthasar’s Feasts Soviet Literature as “Literary Training”

*

The Soviet republic must have a boiled lobster, a red animal, as its symbol.

But he can no longer rush anywhere, even backward. —=VIKTOR-SHELOVSEII

HOW

G ORK

Veo 2,

The Theory of Training; or, How to Be a Writer To a significant extent, the history of Soviet literature in the strictest sense is a

history of graphomania. Socialist Realism is a system that legitimized this “organic creation,” as it were, making it a part of an overall politico-aesthetic project. For this reason, the “most progressive artistic method” can be understood

as a curious justification of the shock-writers’ “pure art”: by making this “creative activity” necessary and “marketable” (if one may speak of a market in terms of the “economy of socialism”), it created both a consumer and a producer for these “goods,” respecting the “encounter” of their “interests” (the “mass reader” received the “goods” with the appropriate characteristics from the hands of none other than yesterday's “mass reader”).' But the writer needed to be molded, just as the reader had to be: the historical mission of Stalinist culture was not the creation of new “masses” (these revolutionary fantasies—the Proletkult Aomunculi—were discarded toward the end of the 1920s), but in-

deed the “reforging” of the “human material” that was already available. Of course Soviet literature, which created both “rank-and-file Soviet writers” and Stalin Prize winners among its members, was much more professional than the

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experiments of the literary circles. RAPP had established a goal that was in principle correct: the creation of the “professional shock-worker writer.” The shock-worker writers were good in every way—manageable, subject to suggestion, ambitious, energetic, not too introspective—except one: they did

not know how to write. RAPP, too, was good in every way—efficient, bright, capable of grasping the Party “line” ata moment’s notice, re-forming while on the march—except one: the “army ofpoets” they headed included no “masters of the word.” But masters were required, since literature was required, not only as the most powerful weapon in the “ideological arsenal” (such a weapon would have to be forged for yet a very long time), but also as a most important institution in the politico-aesthetic project that was being realized. It was supposed that “masters” could be created. The issue of creating these masters was in all respects a postrevolutionary issue. One would not err if one called it, following Chuzhak and Arvatoy, a “restorationist” problem. In Soviet

language, this was a problem of the “reconstructionist period.” The idea of “training” was unacceptable to both Proletkult and LEF. Proletkult ideologues occupied with the creation of a new culture, who regarded the “legacy of the classics” with great suspicion, saw “training” as a narrow practical issue that was to be resolved one way or another in the studios. The negativistic “attacks” of the “proletarian poets” against the “heritage” (such as Kirillov’s famous call to “burn Raphael, tear down the museums, and trample on the flowers of art”) were ranked alongside Mayakovsky’s futuristic challenges to “attack the generals of the classics” and to “shoot at museum walls” (an inscription that Mayakovsky penned in one of his books given to Kirillov became a curious symbol of this unity: “To a fellow-soldier in the battles with Raphaels”). Trotsky took the opposite view: “The reader created the writer, and the writer the reader. To an immeasurably great degree this should be applied to the proletariat, since its economics, politics, and culture can only be constructed upon the creative activity of the masses themselves.”* Hence the assignment of the intelligentsia is “the most concrete type of culture-mongering” rather than “abstraction of a new culture.” The idea of permanent training followed from this. In a paradoxical way, Trotsky, the ideologue of permanent revolution, arrived at this idea in his own reflections as well: since the new culture, according to him, was new specifically because of its classlessness, the proletariat were “doomed” (in the language of those times) to apprenticeship “as a class” in the business of creating new culture. Trotsky carried this logic to the brilliance of a syllogism: “The proletariat will sooner cease to be the proletariat, than to leave the stage of cultural apprenticeship.”

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The idea of “training” had a justification outside of “class logic” as well, when intelligentsia’ “habits of consciousness” (or more simply, common sense)

were at work. Anatolii Lunacharskii, for example, who had earlier been closely associated with Proletkult, asserted determinedly as early as 1924 that the “construction of new culture” was impossible without “expetiénce,” since “material culture is an enormous accumulation of curious instruments and finished

products that become garbage when the knowledge for using them is lacking: they are valuable only when a person with a definitely enriched brain is assumed.”* His calls for an “enriched brain,” however, met with Opposition not

only among the “new creators” but also from within the “new culture” itself, chiefly among the leftist ideologues. The LEFists were disinclined to trust Trotsky’s class-oriented sophisms, and Lunacharskii’s “intelligentsia arguments” were even less convincing. Not only in the first couple of years after the revolution but indeed throughout the 1920s, they methodically struggled against the “restorationist” idea of training. The LEFists’ attitude toward “training” in this matter remained complex. Rejecting “apprenticeship” to “the classics,” they strove to “methodologize” training itself, reducing the process to a set of some sort of literary “skills and habits.” In Mayakovsky’s famous work, Jn the Poetry Workshop (V masterskoi stikha), a similar view of “training” was developed, seemingly in the most logical way. Stating that poetry was “production” (“The most difficult and complicated production, but production nonetheless”), Mayakovsky insisted that “study of a work of poetry is not study of a particular limited type of poetic things, but rather study of the methods of any poetic work, of the productive habits that help to create new poetic works.” Lumping together “various types of literary labors, including poetry and the worker-correspondent’s sketch,” Mayakovsky suggested that the difference between a workers’ correspondent and a professional poet is “only the means of development” of the material: “Only learning, constant improvement, accumulation and diversification of literary devices makes a person a professional writer.” Given this approach, the “secrets of poetic production” turned out to be fully masterable. But Mayakovsky said that he and his friends in LEF were the “only ones who want to reveal these secrets, the only ones who don’t want to speculatively surround creative work with artistic-religious worship.” Viktor Shklovskii spoke of this matter similarly, suggesting that proletarian literature could not be created by “naked talent, nor by imitation as dangerous

as measles, but by skill.” For example, it was necessary to “know literary theory,” but only so as to “be able to pick apart a classical work, to separate the method in it from the intent.” Shklovskii saw an image of the writer as a sort

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of machine: he must not “explode once, like a bomb, but rather work like an internal-combustion engine”; he “must know how to take hold oflife, in order to write about it. Life can only be taken hold of by skill”; he “must understand literary mastery” and then the “similarity between the creator's room and the workroom of the assembly shop” will become clear to him.° Waving aside “the classics” and insisting on pure technique, the LEFists demonstrated an amazing illogicality, since “literary training” itself did not in any way fit into the LEFist “sample-text” teaching. Why, for example, should one “study literary mastery,” if artistic literature was generally “dying out” and being replaced by the worker-correspondents’ “literature of fact”? The contradiction is easily removed when one moves from the sphere of “ideas” to the sphere of “interests.” Least of all did the LEFists suffer from “pure love of art,” as is well known; their emphasis on “mastery” assured for them the hugely prestigious status of “specialists” [spetsy] in the 1920s. Thus in their pronounce-

ments could fantasies of “the literature of fact” so organically combine with ac-

tivist work in “teaching the young writer cadres.” The LEFists rejected study of the “old masters” and demanded “mastery” of a writer; but in the proletarian poets’ milieu, “training” in even its most fun-

damentally applied sense was called into question. This kind of attitude toward “training” was amplified with the formation of the Smithy. The Smiths believed that the process of “mastering mastery” was progressing in their milieu at unprecedented tempos and was even (already by 1920!) practically complete. Vasilii Aleksandrovskii, one of the leading Smithy poets, painted this breathtaking picture of this “growth”: the enemy was “bourgeois literature” and its superiority over us is in technique and means. We must surpass it in both of these... . We all began with the “ABCs,” as was necessary. With great difficulty, and not always successfully, we progressed through metric form. Was this necessary? Undoubtedly, it was. After that caesuras, mixed meter, alliteration, free verse, until we sunk to [?!] form and rhythm. These were all

stages, nothing more. . .. We can see that even at these stages we are beginning to take the upper hand from bourgeois literature. And in many ways we have surpassed them. At present, the Moscow group of proletarian writers is working on image and rhythm. The future will show whether it soon passes through this stage and goes further. More than anything else this depends on our conscientiousness, persistence, and favorable conditions for work.”

“Persistent” work, as one can see, included “conscientiousness” and “favorable conditions.” There was no talk of “training” at all. In fact, as soon as the worker-writers “set out on the path of artistic representational creation,” the poet-“smith” was seconded by the “smith” prose writer,

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the guardianship of those who sincerely believed that they were called not only to teach the worker-writer how to write correctly, but also how to choose themes, how to see, and how to feel, was losing its hold over the workerwriters. A worker-writer who perhaps does not even suspect the forces that are latent in him is transformed before our eyes from a student into an artist.

Need we say that the worker-writer, who has grown up on labor, struggle, and civic grief, even without this guardianship would not sell his own birthright? Perhaps he will stray, but without coaching he will overcome his errors.°

Thus the Smiths found themselves cast out to the wayside of literature by the Party men of the Young Guard and “October,” because they were too independent, too boastful of their own “primogeniture,” not understanding that the era of the independent movement of proletarian culture was coming to a close toward 1920, that the age of “coaching” and “teaching” had arrived, and

that the mission was simply focused on “teaching the worker-writer not only how to write correctly, but also how to choose themes, how to see, and how to

feel.” In a word (or three words, essentially), to “study, study, and study,” according to Lenin’s famous aphorism. The role of teacher was assumed by RAPP, which had keenly discerned the “social mandate” for student-writers (the “untaught” being unmanageable, and the “finished” student even more so). “Teaching” was written on RAPP’s ban-

ner from literally the first days of its inception. Called into the role of teachers and leaders of the “army of poets,” the RAPPists clearly understood that, as Averbakh astutely observed, “the struggle for hegemony is first and foremost the fight to educate [writers].”” Teaching became a curious incantation for the RAPPists.

Indeed, it was through teaching that these worker-writers were

promised their sacred “place in literature,” as the RAPPists set it forth: “We must nurture in every chap that is beginning to write the realization that up to 90 percent of his work has shortcomings, which by means of lengthy and substantial refinement, by means of work on his products and on himself, should

be smoothed out.”'® It was explained to these “chaps” bursting into literature, who boasted of

their working-class origin and “innovations,” that “innovation and ignorance are incompatible” and that “a writer must be cultured”"’; that “by study” a writer “receives the set of tools for the realization of his natural capabilities” and that “systematic profound study polishes talent and provides the necessary direction for its development””; and that “every profession requires training and . . . everyone who wishes to become a writer must first of all be a diligent reader.”'? As can easily be assumed, all these strictures failed to produce the de-

sired effect: promises deferred into an indefinite future could not satisfy the

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“growing needs of the beginners” who demanded that they be taught to be writers in some kind of “simple way.” In the 1920s, when publishers were still relatively sensitively reacting to “the masses’ demands,” the market was literally flooded with books about “how to become a writer.” Dozens of “textbooks,” “reference books,” “self-study guides,” “recommendations,” and “hand-

books” were called upon to satisfy the masses’ hunger for a “cheap book for learning the means of literary-artistic creation.”'* They were issued in huge printings (sometimes up to fifteen or twenty thousand copies), in as many as five editions, with the most diverse institutions named on the title-pages: Glaviskusstvo'’s Division for Mass Work; the Literary Bureau of VOKP; the Cultural Department of the Moscow City Council of Labor Unions; and the Commissariat of Transportation, to name a few. These were titles such as Viktor Pertsov's How and About What a Worker-Writer Should Write; Georgii Shengeli’s How to Write Articles, Poems, and Short Stories and The Writers School: Foundations ofLiterary Technique; A. Kraiskii's What the Beginning Writer Needs to Know; Mikhail Bekker’s The Writer at Work; V. Tverskoi’s How a Writer Should Work; Leonid Timofeev’s Poetry and Prose: Literary Theory for the Beginning Writer; Fedor Nefedov’s Primer on Poetic Composition; \zotov'’s Foundations of Literary Competency; Viktor Shklovskii’s Techniques of the Writer’ Craft and his How to Write Screenplays: A Handbook for Beginning Screenplay Writers with Examples of Various Types ofScreenplays; A. Borodin’s How to Write a Play: A Popular Guidebook for Beginning Dramatists and his Help for the Beginning Dramatist: AGuidebook; and F. Ilinskii’s Construction ofa Play;'° these are only a few of the most popular titles. Under the conditions of the stillexisting market, wherein there was no demand for the critics’ output, the publication of “reference works” and “guidebooks,” for which there was an enormous demand, became for many a sort of “seasonal work.” But this latter literature also holds a certain interest in cultural terms.

What draws the attention most in this literature is the authors’ modeling of their reader (writer). How, for example, could Shklovskii have understood the

reader of his reference for beginning screenplay writers, when he explained to them that “cinematography works by showing a representation in motion. This representation is achieved by means of recording a series of photographs with moving objects onto a narrow celluloid film’? Or that “objective lens is the name of a special kind of convex mirror that breaks up a ray of light so that the representation of an object appears in a diminished form on film”?'® How could Shklovskii have understood the reader of his Techniques of the Writer's Crafi, in which he mentioned a “landscape (that is, a picture of nature)” or explained that “In literature, every era (that is, a slice of time) has its own laws”?!” But for the

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reader who did not know what cinema, objective lenses, and landscapes were, and who did not know what “era” meant, other “allusions” were accessible. For example, Il'inskii in his Construction ofa Play for beginners explained thus: A shoemaker must know the names of his tools . . . must understand such

terms as “sew the welts in,” “cord the soles,” and “sizing for wear.” In exactly the same fashion, the beginning dramatist naust master so-called theory, that is, the lessons of the dramatist’s business. Every art, not to mention music [?!—E. D.], wherein everything everywhere is specialized and conventional, has its own theory, its own lessons. The expert must master these lessons, learn the so-called theory, else he will be blind in his business: he will start to construct a play and heap up things such that he will only ruin the material, and the whole construct will fall to pieces from a puff of criticism like a house

of cards.'8 Considering the shoemaker analogies to be insufficiently accessible, the author resorts to a builder’s analogy: “The theme of a play is the layout of a house (the bathroom, a granary, barn, and hut); the plot, the framework of a house. . . ; and the story line, a house in cross-section, or its inner structure.”!” Theme, for example, is explained thus: “If we take a play (Hamlet) in which it will be shown how one person avenged another, then it is clear that the main essence

of the play’s action is vengeance. This main essence, the main thought of the play, is conventionally called the theme of the work.”” (The choice here, re-

member, is rather limited: the “interpretation” of Hamlet is completely delineated by the given “builders’ parameters,” be they bathrooms, granaries, barns, or huts.) Bekker compared a writer with a tailor and advised the beginner to “have a notebook, a compass [?!—£.D.], and a pencil. These are his instru-

ments of production. He must accumulate raw materials, and make various kinds of half-finished garments, fittings, and cut-outs. . . . Inspiration helps those who help themselves.”*! Taking up this initiative, Kraiskii, in his “cheap book for study of examples of literary-artistic creation,” also stated that “socalled ‘inspiration’ . . . is developed into a prosaic /abit in the professional.”” The authors were obliged to set out the basic notions of literary creation from “sround zero,” revealing the corresponding idea of “the nature of creative work” and the already-familiar logic of the notion of art as a whole in only the most accessible form. One may not doubt that such “lessons in literature” were not issued to these beginners in vain. The “young writers” hungrily consumed the “information” from the “handbooks.” Shengeli explained various things: “A person who is continually occupied with the writing of literary works is called a litterateur, a writer’”’; “In written

dialog you cannot express anything with your voice, and in order for the idea to

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be completely clear, you must know how to arrange the words’; “Words consist of syllables; in every word there is one voiced sound. ... All the other

sounds are consonants”; “Large articles are called just that, articles, but short ones have the name sketches or notes”’’; “A journalist who provides this sort of material is called a reporter, and one who provides a chronicle, a chronicler.”* Tverskoi taught beginners that “even a person writing for the first time, not

even learned or educated, can write a good artistic story. To do this, he must possess only the skill of observing life surrounding him.” Incidentally, it was also stated here that similarly to the way in which “a tailor sews a garment from fab-

ric and thread, or a joiner makes furniture from wood and glue,” a writer should possess the “means of working with words,” should “have a reserve of varied

knowledge,” should “study his native language constantly,” and so forth. Tverskoi explained that “transcribed human speech, a collection of ideas, have [sic] one meaning or another, and are [sic] therefore a literary work, but all tran-

scribed human speech that is socially meaningful is literature.”*” Along the way, Tverskoi divided the “types of literary work” into the two following groups:

To the first group belong works that completely objectively describe or explain one or another phenomenon of nature and social life in the present and past. These works have the goal of actually reproducing that which has occurred or is occurring without any embellishments and inventions, and for

the most part serve to assist the daily work of mankind. This group of works we call prose. . . . The other sort of literary work, which is also related to real life, although conditionally, that is, representing not that which took place in real life, but rather what could have, and which seems completely truthful and likely, is called . . . poetry.*°

The clarity of such definitions suggests to the reader a character who is even further advanced in philology than Moliére’s Jourdain. Nonetheless, even this level of explanations seemed beyond the reach of many beginners. In August 1931, GIKhLs Literary Criticism Department submitted a publication plan for popular handbooks to help shock-worker writer literary-circleists for discussion by the literary circle at the “Paris Commune” factory. The transcript of this session has been preserved:

Kogan: “Those of us starting to write are writing lyric poetry, but since we're separating ourselves from reality, then we don’t know what to write. I have Tomashevskii, and Izotoy, but I didn’t understand anything from them. Last year in Komsomolskaia pravda they told me to get these books, Kraiskii and so forth, but it turns out they write about iambs and trochees, and I don’t know

what I’m supposed to mix with these things. . . .”

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Vaineman: “We guys just starting out don’t have any technical help. . . . I’m interested in éssays and satire. .. . The old instructions, for example Shengeli, don’t give any information about how to do satire and essays nowadays. And how to reveal the character of the shock-worker, there’s nothing about that. . . . We're lost as far as the classics goe They ought to give us some directions on how to learn from the classics.” Kozyrev: “Where can you learn style? I tried to learn from Shklovskii, Tomashevskii, and Kraiskii, but I didn’t learn anything from them. . . .” Kogan: “Yomashevskii ruined me.” Kozyrev: “Me too. I was writing blank verse, but then I gave up writing altogether. . . How do you construct contemporary verse? How do you learn to write like Mayakovsky wrote? I want to achieve that style. . . . And I’d like to get a textbook that would make me able to write in such a militant style. I'd like to ask GIKhL to publish a textbook where you could learn how Mayakovsky, Bednyi, and several others wrote.” Mikhailov: “Ym thinking of taking up criticism. I read a book about how youre supposed to do criticism, but I didn’t understand anything. There are such weird words that get you confused right away. Comrades, I think

GIKhL ought to put out some really small books about how to start criticizing [kak nachat kritikovat’].”*'

The meeting ended with the presentation of the addresses of the “Paris Commune’ literary-circleists to RAPP and Gorky. In the last one, it was said, “We have a great many articles about the creative method, but they very often do not reach out to literary-circleists. They cannot satisfy the growing needs of shock-workers who are going into literature.”*” The growing (!) needs of shock-workers going into literature. . . . It was not only beginners, however, who criticized the handbooks: critics, too, unani-

mously took them to task. In these feeble books, which congested the book market in the latter 1920s and early 1930s, official criticism found even “seri-

ous methodological perversions.” In Kraiskii’s book, for example, “vulgarization of Marxism” was discovered; Tomashevskii’s book, as it turned out, demonstrated “methodological fallaciousness, the danger of formalism”; Bekker had “bourgeois statements” in his book; and “Tverskoi’s book must be removed from libraries, and not a single tutorial should recommend it to the beginning writer, under any circumstances.”*? One critic went so far as to say that “the majority of textbooks and guidebooks on literary theory cannot be recommended to the beginning writer.”*4 And Shengeli’s book, which had by 1926 already come out in three editions, was criticized not only by professional critics but also by poets themselves. In a specially organized debate about this book in a Pravda worker-correspondents’ club, Mayakovsky called it “unac-

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ceptable nonsense” and “a charlatan’s enterprise”; Aseev stated that it could “breed only untalented re-writers”; and Brik asserted that throughout the Soviet Union there were 14,000 poets registered who were also buying up books similar to Shengeli’s.*° The general verdict was as follows: “The ‘gifts for young literary cooks’ which recount ‘how to most sparingly and cheaply prepare a thousand tasty and cheap literary dishes —from chastushki to novels . . . and which do not impart elements of positive learning to the young writer, teach only superficiality and circus riding.”** Was this verdict disseminated throughout the entire institution of “literary training”? Of course not. The era of the Writers’ Union in this area began with the cessation of publishing “handbooks” and their removal, and with the publication of the universal “Letter to the Beginning Writer,” in which it was stated, for example, that “poetry differs from scientific articles, newspaper features, official reports, and so on, in rhythm, rhyme, and figurativeness.”*” To provide a way out of the depressing situation with the “literary training”

of the masses, Gorky saw the necessity of developing a “general plan of classes for beginning writers, a plan that would exclude subjectivism, extremely harm-

ful to the young, from this work.”** However, the level of the “self-study books” for beginning writers obliges one to ponder a more general problem: the issue was not at all “subjectivism” (after all, among the authors of the handbooks were not only a Kraiskii or a Tverskoi but also Shklovskii, Tomashevskii, and Shengeli). Nor are the methods of “training” important, since the enterprise was doomed to fail: a worker-correspondent who is a graphomaniac cannot be taught to “become a writer.” It is quite another matter to teach him how to create “valuable artistic products” (Soviet literature).

In 1945, Boris Eikhenbaum published his article “Let's Talk About Our

Craft” (“Pogovorim 0 nashem remesle”) in the Leningrad journal Zvezda. The article began with a paradox: “The craft of the writer is difficult—the more so because it really isn’t even a craft.” A whole era (in actuality, lasting about fifteen years) had had to pass for one of the founders of Russian formalism to arrive at such a conclusion. Eikhenbaum reflected on the fact that Tolstoy had

named the “scaffolding” [podmostki] of the writer’s work, without which the act of writing loses its spiritual meaning and content: The business of a writer and of literature is absolutely not in simple “reflection” of that which is already apparent to anyone, absolutely not in supplementary illustration of phenomena that have already been noticed, pointed out, and established. For this, no special “scaffolding” is required. . . . We must be concerned about “scaffolding,” about the inner stimuli of the writer’s work, because this work is not a craft, nor is it a profession, completely. Feel-

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ing, thinking, and talking—is this really a “profession”? Do the words “I want to live in order to think and suffer” really mean the same as “I want to be an engineer”? Not completely.°” Eikhenbaum was “on the edge” here: as is well known, the comparison of the

writer to the engineer belonged to Stalin. In just a year, when this same Leningrad Zvezda would figure in the “historical resolution of the Central Committee,” such reflections would become impossible. “Scaffolding” cannot be “learned.” Meanwhile, “literary training” had turned out to be the most lively of all the utopias of creation. The Writers’ Union of the USSR disappeared. The USSR itself disappeared. But the Gorky Literary Institute, from which almost all the “masters of Soviet literature” came, exists to this day. And it is still located in “Herzen’s House,” at 25 Tverskoi Boulevard.

Let us remember this address.

“The Inertia ofForward Motion”: Learning from the Classics Lidiia Ginzburg, while earning a living teaching in a workers’ faculty in the late 1920s and early 1930s, reflected thus on the processes of different cultural strata of society's understanding of the classics: A classic book exuded the current symbols of emotional and social ideas. In the consciousness of the intelligentsia, it lived by the solidity of general cultural associations. What is “Eugene Onegin,” really? And what does it consist of? Belinskii’s articles? Pushkin’s death in a duel? An opera wherein Lenskii sings parodic verses with feeling just before he dies? Pushkin’s verse? Lermontov’s verse? Vospetyi im s takoiu chudnoi siloi Srazhennyi, kak i on, bezzhalostnoi rukoi . . .

[Sung by him with such amazing power Defeated, like him, too, by a pitiless arm... ]

Take your choice. Go read “Onegin” just as it is. In the intelligentsia milieu, perhaps only children reading books that they were still too young to read could have done this. The person acquiring culture is another matter. At first I was horrified in

the workers’ faculty, when at times I would receive the most inappropriate answers to questions about the basic characteristics of Manilov or Pliushkin. Later, I became accustomed to this, and I understood that in the absence of a cultural-historical apperception, the fleeting connection between ideas is

not necessary. As it turns out, an intelligent person of our times can read

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The Inspector-General and not notice that Khlestakov is lying. He still needs to create an apperception. This is the business of the teacher. 40

Does the writer belong in the category of “intelligent persons” of his own time? Is productive “writer's work” possible outside “cultural apperception”? These questions today seem devoid of meaning. Nevertheless, when Ginzburg was working at the workers’ faculty, just such questions ignited the most heated debates, regardless of whether the LEFists were calling for “learning the techniques of the writer’s craft” and rejecting the “cult of the forebears,” or the RAPPists insisting, to the contrary, on “studying the classics.” The main thing is the motives of the opposing sides. Why did the LEFists find this insidious “cult” so hateful? Undoubtedly, it was principally because “the classics” were real contenders for their envisioned role as “specialists.” Why were the RAPPists such ardent supporters of “studying the classics”? Not only because they, as Edward Brown stated, wrote “in the manner of Tolstoy” and knew no other “school,”*! nor only because “the clas-

sics” ideally suited the masses’ threshold of perception as well as their ideal of literature, but also because it is easier to deal with dead “specialists.” They do not lay claim to power. This extremely political undercurrent of the debates was deeply hidden behind wordy pronouncements about “the literature of fact” that was allegedly arriving to replace “tradition,” about the “dialecticalmaterialistic artistic method,” and the like—fantasies that are bewitching even today for their “novelty.” In the era of futuristic Sturm und Drang, Boris Arvatov’s fantasies of the “literature of the future” had a particularly intense class tinge, when he wrote in his article “Marx on Artistic Restoration” (“Marks 0 khudozhestvennoi restavratsil’),

The art of the revolutionary proletariat must live by the future; moreover, only by the future. Let everyone remember, let him remember well, he who with every step imposes the past on the proletariat, who in the name of Marx legitimizes and glorifies the spontaneous pilgrimage of struggling proletarian

artists to the graveyard of all times and peoples, calling these funeral processions quests. . . . It is not restorationists of antiquity or of the Renaissance, not priests of “Egyptian pots with meat” who should occupy the place of honor as predecessors of the working class; this place belongs only to those who with inexorable, stern, genuinely revolutionary courage are prepared to exterminate “all the superstitions of the past.”*?

It is hardly necessary to say that “the place of honor as predecessors of the working class” was indeed occupied by “priests of ‘Egyptian pots with meat,” the

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authors of “Derzhavin and pre-Derzhavin doggerel,” as Trotsky put it. And no matter how much Arvatov might blame the “Cclassicists” for “interfering with and hindering the cause of proletarian art, which means also the cause of cultural revolution”; no matter how often he might repeat that “the shadows of Ancient Rome’ and all sorts of other shadows” were only needed by the bourgeoisie; nor how much he prophesied that the working class “will free itself from all the hobbles that bind it in one way or another, and especially from the hobbles that drag it toward the past, that is, from the hobbles of tradition,” it was clear that the “pilgrimage of struggling proletarian artists to the graveyard of all times and peoples” was not spontaneous. Rather it was the only possible pilgrimage, precisely because the proletariat was still faced with the task, to use Arvatov's words, of “victoriously concluding its revolution, the revolution of the great leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.” This “victorious conclusion” was indeed a “leap”—into the “graveyard.” Struggling against “Red restorationism” and the “counterrevolution of form,” and mocking the “romances of today’s ‘little students of the classics,’ who are depicting the ‘sufferings of proletarian Werters during their time off,” the LEFists greatly diminished their class rhetoric toward the latter 1920s. Their ambitions to leadership in literature at this point did not extend beyond “aesthetic issues,” about which they felt their undoubted superiority over RAPP precisely because they were “specialists.” Their catchwords changed accordingly: “training” was now acknowledged, and the “blows” aimed at tradition became more

precise. Characteristic of this was Viktor Pertsov’s article “The Cult of the Forebears and the Literary Present” (“Kult predkov i literaturnaia sovremennost’””), which evoked an enormous response toward the latter 1920s, just on the eve of

this “reformed” critic’s joining RAPP. Pertsov stated: In all these discussions about “training” and “realism,” a sheerly formal approach to literature prevails. A literary work is conceived of as a pure form that can be transferred to any social milieu. Whatever these people who do not realize the social function of a literary work taken as a whole call themselves—VAPPists, Onlitguardists, Perevalists, or the like—they are all dangerous, superficial formalists. We should declare a mortal combat with them.”

One may say as much as one likes that LEFist aesthetics itself was tied to formalism, but Pertsov accurately pointed out the implied level of the RAPPists’ aesthetic program, which bound these extreme “utilitarians” with the aesthetics of “pure art.” The next blow was aimed at the traditionalist “fellow-travelers,” who, as it

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was said, only due to a lack of understanding “are understood by some of us to be some kind of literary specialists.” Here an old but ferocious weapon for discrediting one’s competitors comes into play: the “class origin,” which turns even the best of this group’s intentions into something evil.*° But no matter

how much Pertsov might mock the “grave-robbers” of RAPP, who had already reached the point of studying Zhukovskii, his sarcasms were only a precise statement of what was happening: “Vasilii Andreevich Zhukovskii is advanc-

ing upon the Soviet present . . . like something deeply natural—I might even The future in this debate was precisely say something inevitable and fatal. 47

on the side of the RAPPists, who, if not realizing it outright, at least caught a whiff of the “wind of revolution” changing to the “wind of restoration.” The seeds of LEFist doubts about the suitability of the classics as “models” fell, however, on fertile ground: the Litcircleists spoke out against “studying the

classics.” Symptomatic in this respect was the polemic that played out in the Rabochii chitatel’ (Working reader) magazine in 1925, occasioned by the article

by one “Perekati-pole,” called “On Work in the Literary Circle” (“O rabote v literaturnom kruzhke”). The author argued that “there can be no discussion” of

any systematic study of the classics in the circles; rather, all their efforts should be focused on mutual discussion of the works of the circleists themselves.**

Evgeniia Didrikil’, on the contrary, insisted that a “systematic study of the history of literature” should be done in the circle, and that there should be a program that would also foster an acquaintance with literary theory.*” Genrikh Lenobl’ refuted her with this observation:

The bourgeois and nobleman writers may have usually gotten a good education, and had much time to study and work on their writings and such, but our comrades do not have any of this. Their education, with rare exceptions, is negligible, and many of them have only recently liquidated their illiteracy; they are little acquainted with literature, and have read little; they have almost no free time, since in addition to industrial work, they are also occupied with social work. . . . Didrikil’ wants to turn the literary circle into a literary

college, or at least into a workers’ faculty.

And although Lenobl’ conceded that “worker-writers need learning,” nonetheless “the literary circle should prepare writers, and not literary historians”; thus there was no reason to “impose” classical subtlety on the worker-writers, since it would not interest them, and consequently this knowledge would “go to waste and not be used for the writer's work.”* RAPP secretary Aleksandr Zonin summed up the discussions thus: “The fundamental task in the circle is correct class criticism, and the leader should amplify the knowledge of the circleists in

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the areas of theory, understanding of composition, style, and the like, along the way.” As far as this study‘‘along the way” was concerned, this meant an orientation toward the “great masters of the classics,” Pushkin for example, who “despite his nobleman’s ideological outlook, gives an example of the healthy realistic use of words, which in this respect is close to the proletariat.” But if the circleist does not like to “study,” then therissue is not the studying itself, but rather the directives of the circle’s leader—“false and academically dry.”>! Four years later, dissatisfaction with RAPP’s watchword—“learn from the classics’—poured out into a torrent of reader (writer?) responses to Aleksandr Skambrychii’s essay printed in the Leningrad journal Rezezs, “On the Danger of Reading” (“O vrede chteniia’).” The editors of Rezets printed several of these, under the rubric “What to learn from the classics, and how to study

them”: From I. Kozyrev (Saratoy): “It is about time someone raised the issue of the

danger of reading. Getting carried away with the classics can imperceptibly lead the beginning writer into an ideological imprisonment by the classics.” From V. Tunisimov (Ivanovo-Vosnesensk): “This slogan ‘learn from the

classics’ can have an extremely unhealthy effect on the beginning writer, since in giving himself over to tutoring by the classics and getting carried away for example by Tolstoy, the beginning writer will blindly imitate him without realizing it, which of course will lead to the loss of independence and originality in the beginner.””? The editors were obliged to explain that “study of the classics is ultimately necessary for us, but not so that a second Pushkin or a second Tolstoy can appear. . . We must know the classics so as not to unconsciously repeat their devices, and in repeating them, not to realize that you are discovering ‘America.

Our goal is not to imitate the classics, but to transcend them.”™ There are three noteworthy elements in this typical RAPPist “elucidation”: first, “unconscious repetition”; second, “transcending” the classics; and third, the impossibility of going beyond the framework of “the classics” (one can repeat the classics either consciously or unconsciously, but no other relationship to them is envisaged). “Unconscious repetition of devices” was understood literally by the RAPPists: a writer must know the classics so as not to “unconsciously” borrow from them (“conscious” borrowing, such as in Fadeev or Libedinskii, for example,

was encouraged to a greater degree): An old truth proclaims that “ignorance of the law is no excuse”: since the law is generally binding, everyone should know it and everyone should be

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accountable to it. The same applies to the literary heritage. It is hard to

determine precisely whether a comrade has read one particular author or another. But this is also unimportant. It is of no concern to editors, to say nothing of readers, why another's intonations or another's devices can be heard in the work of ayoung poet.”

One must read the “classics,” if for no other reason than to be able to “tran-

scend” them. “Transcending the classics” was the curious euphemism used by the RAPPists to designate their own “method” ofwriting “after the style of Tolstoy.” “How does one learn from Tolstoy?” asked Valerii Druzin, and he answered:

One can only learn from Tolstoy by turning all his devices around. For example, instead of a fixed, stagnant way oflife, one may take the passion oflabor, or of struggle: people come and go, but the passion remains. And this passion is confirmed by the triumph of conscious, rationalized judgment over blind, subconscious feelings. The method of decisive transformation

[of devices] should also be applied in study of the technical heritage in poetry.”°

Another critic suggested (speaking now of poetry) “transcending Byron, using the devices of his Childe Harold for the propaganda of love of life.”*” It was implied that with the help of these completely anecdotal bits of advice (“method of device transformation,” “people come and go, but the passion remains”) the “inertia of forward motion [sc!] will arise and develop in and of itself”** for

beginning proletarian writers, and that they would begin to “develop things that transcend the technique of the things of other writers, in great quantity,” and that “by relying on the heights of the old literature, proletarian literature will develop to the point that it will surpass all other ranks of literature.” To this end, it was suggested that the popular assertion that “Marxists have no reason to study form” be rejected, since this was “aestheticism” that implied that “the duty of a Marxist is to lay bare the ideology of the work in question.” This viewpoint was now called “capitulatory and liquidationist, since it is com-

pletely obvious that the study of form is thereby surrendered to the lifelong use of formalists and other idealistic amateurs engaged in it.”°' However, the “study of form” created an endless torrent of articles and books about how the classics “worked.” The means of “study” are made clear by the titles themselves: “How Pushkin Worked”; “Pushkin’s Work on His Verses”; “Pushkin’s Work on Artistic Prose”; “Griboedov, Master Writer”; “How Gogol Worked”; “Ostrovskii’s

Methods of Creative Work”; “Ostrovskii’s Techniques”; “How Dostoyevsky Worked on His Novels”; “How Nekrasov Worked”; “How Goncharov Worked”;

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“Tolstoy's Work on His Creations”; “Tolstoy the Artist”; “How Tolstoy Wrote Novels”; “Gleb Uspenskii: In the Studio of an Artist of the Word”; “Chekhov's Techniques of Literary Work”; “Gorky as Editor of His Early Works”; “Gustave Flaubert’s Techniques of Literary Work”; “How Prosper Merimée Worked”; “Stendhal’s Creative Techniques”; “How Balzac Worked”; and the like. These are only a few of the titles of books and articles published in the years 1930-1932. The tone for the publication of such studies, wherein the “preparations” of the “masters” were described (their carrying of notebooks, repeated corrections of

their own texts, rewrites of rough drafts, and so forth), was set by the journal Literaturnaia ucheba, which aimed thus to fight “the superficial recipes of lit-

erary handbook specialists and the semiliterate babblings of certain literary circle directors.”®* But the LEFists were not allowed to publish in Literaturnaia

ucheba, and the battle against the “specialist” competitors on this front was incessant, right up until the “restructuring of literary-artistic organizations,” when

the entire “literary business” came under the control of the state-run Union of Writers of the USSR. Only then was the debate about “learning from the classics’ brought to a close. Soviet culture was entering the era of “solidification” (to use Vladimir Papernyi’s term®’), and the status of the classics was recognized to be indisputable, both for “apprentices” (“The literary circle, no matter what stage of development it is in, must study the classical legacy. This is an axiomatic truth which no one would dispute”™) and for “master craftsmen” (“The writer’s prime source is the classics, which are living exemplars”). In the 1920s, however, the term “classics” was only a euphemism, for LEF-

ists and RAPPists alike. Both understood that, as Onguardist critic A. Mikhailov put it, a classic is not in and of itself valuable, but only as a pinnacle of a particular style. The issue of the literary legacy and its study is the issue of critical assimilation of particular styles, and the classics are only taken as the most brilliant representatives [of these styles]... . The issue is not Tolstoy or Pushkin but the style they expressed, and the style should not be overshadowed by them.°°

Perhaps on this issue one cannot fail to agree with the RAPPists. The Discreet Charm of Total Realism; or, WhatIsHecuba to Us? Shklovskii challenged both “students” and “teachers” to “discover new forms” when he wrote,

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Our contemporaries need not study anyone, because they have ended up in the factory with its tools thrown about, and do not know which machine is for planing and which is for drilling; for this reason, they do not study often,

but rather imitate, and want to write the same kind of piece that has been written before, only they want to write it about their own things.

He advised both, “You must learn to work toward the future, on the form that you yourself should create. For teaching people only literary forms, that is, the ability to solve problems but not [learn] mathematics [as a whole], means rob-

bing the future and creating vulgar creatures.”°” “Vulgarity,” however, was being created because “training” and “invention of new forms” were incompatible. The reliance upon tradition and “teachers,” natural in “students,” was breeding the “realistic forms” and “regrettable imitationism” so hated by the LEFists, and against which they had fought since the era of Sturm und Drang. In the context of “training,” even the question of departure from tradition was useless. The LEFists insistently summoned the students to class, at the same time making the teachers stand outside in the hall. Given the situation of “training,” the beginner was doomed to be an imitator in every way: he copied the teacher, and the teacher himself was an imitator (read “realist”) as well; neither the student nor the teacher had been

given any tradition other than the realist tradition. Nor did the LEFists choose between “apprenticeship” and “invention of new forms.” They did not choose because they wanted to reconcile the irreconcilable: to be both “inventors” and “teachers.” The RAPPists, on the contrary, being the most diligent “students of the classics,” made the choice in favor of “teacherhood,” since they had well learned the lesson that “inventors” find no support among the masses of readers (also brought up on tradition) nor from authority, which tends not to break with the masses. This mutual dependency was most clearly verbalized by former Perevalist Petr Sletov: “Only the writer who takes the aesthetic compre-

hension of the reader into account can become the ‘sovereign of thought.’ But this comprehension looks for concrete images that are constructed with the same gradualness, that have the same connections and interrelationships they might have in real life.” Aspiring to the role of “sovereign of thought” (via the writer) were the authorities, and the threshold of the masses’ comprehension was decisive in this regard. The “naive realism” of readers (as Grigorii Gukovskii puts it) ideally suited both the “naive realism” of writers (and really of those same readers who had only begun to write) and the aspirations of the authorities, who were ready to accept any style that was adequate for the masses’ needs and hence effective for their own aims. The RAPPists acknowledged the “inevitability of realism” as

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well and thus created their own theory-watchwords upon it (“Down with Schiller!,” “tearing the covers away from realjty,” “the living man,” ““Denvian-

ization’ of poetry,” “portraying heroes,” and so forth). It only remained for “naive realism” to harden into the measured formulas of the “Leninist theory of reflection”® when it received a “philosophical basis” from this theory. One need not seek this theory in Lenin’s “Philosophical Notebooks,” but rather in his contemporaries’ reminiscences. Lunacharskii, for example, tells how Lenin rejoiced in “lifelike monuments” and how he praised the People’s Commissar of Enlightenment for honoring his request to avoid putting up “some kind of futurist scarecrow’ as a memorial to Marx: “Anatolii Vasil’evich, tell the artist in particular that the head should come out such that it gives the kind of impression of Karl Marx that comes from his good portraits, otherwise there is little re-

semblance.” The notes of Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, the business manager of the Council of People’s Commissars, abound with similar reminiscences when

he relates how “Vladimir Ilich was attracted by the joy of life,” how Lenin “could not tolerate the least deviation from naturalness into any kind of disfigurement,” and how displeased he was when a certain futurist group painted the trees in Aleksandrovskii Park on the eve of the First of May festivities: “Who permitted this? Who allowed this mockery of the trees in the Aleksandroyskii Park to be made? They are painted purple, red, and maroon.” Furious, Lenin demanded that Bonch-Bruevich “take special measures to wash

this mangy paint off these charming trees.” In fact, washing the paint off was unsuccessful, in spite of Bonch-Bruevich’s having assigned the Kremlin Military Unit to the task, and the trees remained multicolored for several years. But Lenin’s attitude toward artists who lapsed into “disfigurements” of various kinds was militant. (Bonch-Bruevich recalled how Lenin had reacted to the

avant-garde project of restoring the Sheremet’ev Hospital: “You needn't even talk to them. Don’t get us involved with them. It’s alright to put them in charge of building farmyards in the sovkhozes, but under no circumstances should they be allowed to repair historic buildings like these.”’') Healthy Leninist taste (the “charming trees” of Aleksandrovskii Park!) was only “philosophically grounded” in the “Leninist theory of reflection.” Behind this theory stood an enormous tradition connected with the names of prominent Marxists in France (Paul Lafargue), Germany (Karl Liebknecht, Klara Zetkin, and Rosa Luxemburg), and Russia (Georgii Plekhanov, Vatslav Vorovskii, and Mikhail Ol’minskii).”* ,The theory was based on the notion that, to quote Plekhanov,

“poetic works, and artistic works in general, always tell some kind ofstory.””* So

the litcircleists were taught to “tell a story” and to “reflect” (or “portray”) things. The first question was what to “tell a story” about, so theme became a defin-

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ing category in “training”: “We may speak of it [that is, theme— 7rans.] as was once spoken of the third estate, ‘It was nothing and must become everything.’ And really, there is nothing else in a work except the theme. . . . Theme is a

‘general’ characterization of what is contained in a work.””* This fetishization of the “thematic assignment” was inculcated in criticism by the RAPPists,

chiefly by their leading theoretician, Libedinskii. He asserted that it was precisely in the theme that

for the first time the relationship ofthe artist to reality merges with objective reality, and therefore, for the artist, theme conditions the further process of creation of a work ofart, that is, the development of a unity between subject and object as a dialectical contradiction. . . . Defining the theme ofawork of art means defining the class mission of the artist and the degree to which he approaches an objective reflection of the world, [and it means] finding the key to the living system upon which the work is constructed.”

Consequently, the “mechanism of literary creation” was described as the sum of two processes, “observation” and “thematization”: “In the process of his life’s work, based on his own life experience, the writer accumulates observations, impressions, and thoughts. Based on his level of ideas and culture, the writer selects the most significant and interesting things, and generalizes, remarks on the phenomena of life about which he wishes to tell the reader . . . [and] de-

termines the theme of his work.””® However, in order to know what to write about, the writer first of all had to have “knowledge of life”: If one is sitting in Riazan’, one should not write about Sakhalin, which the beginning prose writer is not familiar with, nor should the Sakhalin essayist describe the life of Chilean rebels, which is unknown to him. A worker in a power plant will hardly succeed with a novel based on the life of the courtiers of the French king Ludovic XV, nor likewise should a Balaklava fisherman portray the everyday life of Panyshin shepherds. It is of course conceivable

that our comrade from Balaklava might write a good story based on the life of Panyshin shepherds, but he must study their life in detail in order to do this.””

So, since the captivating “life of Panyshin shepherds” is indescribable without “study ... in detail,” the beginner should not tempt fate, but rather write about what he knows well. Thus: The example of Gorky, who traveled all over Russia and through his own experience became acquainted with dozens of different professions, studied the life of the most diverse strata of society, constantly participated in the

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revolutionary movement, became well versed in the most diverse areas of human knowledge, and who knew how to express all of this in clear artistic

images, is an example for the beginning Soviet writer that is extraordinary for its conviction.”8

But how must one “describe” this life that has been studied “in detail”? First of all, the worker-writer was counseled to “cultivate in himself a tenacious capacity for observation, in order to be able to distinguish the particular from the general. Only then . . . when thanks to a host of details one is able to present graphically the class meaning of events in an artistic representation, is it worth setting out to do a description, and the description will never be hackneyed.”” These “descriptions,” however, always turned out to be insufficient, and the critics never tired of repeating complaints about this: “The sketch says nothing about the methods by which Savichev machines 250 springs instead of 200, and the forms of the new attitude toward labor are not portrayed at all”; “But how

Parusova achieves her success, how the growth of Parusova’s industrial and social activity takes place, how she leads the working masses by virtue of her own example, what her connections with other Parusovas like her are, how Parusova

opposes and fights against the enemy and his agent in industry (the drifter, the self-seeker, and so on), How the Party directs the work of such Parusovas—all of these most significant details are either left out completely, or they are reduced to a little report of information”; “Bulachev does not portray Kuzin, he just talks about him. ... But /ow he achieved the decisive breakthrough, or

how he put the work in order, or how he effected a turnaround—there is not a word about this. . . The author does not give concrete form to this heroism’;*° “_.. it is very important for us to know, and very interesting, /ow the people conducted themselves in solving this problem, /ow relations within the shop and brigade developed. . . . It is not disclosed how these qualities that constitute a characterization of a genuine builder of socialism under the conditions of escalated class struggle [“Bolshevist solidity and Leninist implacability’— E.D.], how these qualities surfaced concretely in each of the characters in particular, and what form they assumed in running through the whole diversity of social and personal psychology in a given person.”*! Even the slogan “The country should know its own heroes,” by which the “industrial sketch” and “industrial novel” of the early 1930s were born, signified first and foremost a “portrayal of five-year-plan heroes as the basic general theme of all Soviet literature”: “Literature should show how these people in a socialist enterprise are remade and reeducated, ow they overcome their individualistic petty-bourgeois personal views and habits.”**

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Everything that fell outside the sphere of “description” had to be either coordinated with it or denounced. An “invention,” without which one cannot conceive of a “work of art,” was “necessary,” but “this invention should not be absurd or unreal. An artistic invention should be grounded in real-life situations, in real-life facts, based on living people,”®’ but a “symbol” would not do,

for as Marietta Shaginian stated, “without doubt, the predominant use of a symbol almost always arises from an artist's dualistic relationship to the world, while a direct image and love for the image [?!] are usually connected to a

monistic understanding of the world.”* And anything to do with “allegory” was absolutely bad: “Who needs an allegory, and what kind of art could operate by allegory? Clearly, allegory is a means of masking needed when the artist's political consciousness is in disharmony with the existing political system.”” What Shaginian could state “clearly” was apparent to every Soviet school-age child, to say nothing of the beginning writer: “Artistic literature has first and

foremost a cognitive significance. The writer should reflect life in his creative work, and at the same time help the reader to understand it and deal with it,”*° and should represent life “in the forms of life itself.” Thus, for example, people in a novel should be “like living people”: “A writer should look at his characters and at the situation in which they find themselves, imagine them to be like living people; then it will be clear to him what he should emphasize, underline,

and remark in them, so that the reader can also see them.”*” Socialist Realism required a special arrangement of the eye: the writer was obliged to “see” so much (while at the same time to “not see” many things),

and he always had to “portray” so much (so as “not to portray” others). The process of creation was reminiscent of photosynthesis: absorbing the “carbon dioxide” of reality and emitting the “oxygen” of “artistic products,” the writer got bogged down in “description.” This condemnation to permanent “description” constitutes perhaps the most striking collision of Socialist Realist writing. Beginners were taught what to write about, how to describe, from

where to “dig up material,” and which “artistic methods and means” were necessary for success. Over the whole array of answers, however, hung a mute question: “Why?” The attempt to get at this question repeatedly led back to the preceding “how”: Of course one may write about anything one likes—about all the phenomena of society, nature, and man—and may seek out as many forms of expression as one likes, but nonetheless, in the end, history, relentless history, will demand of us, of Soviet literature, of all Soviet workers in art: How did you reflect socialism? History will test us for how we in our works and creations portrayed the best and most advanced thing of our times—socialism. And

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who but us should be asked to portray in art what socialism is, how it was created, and how it was fought for!’*

Since the question “why?” is implied in Soviet culture in a strange fashion, one must search for an answer in the nature of Socialist Realism as the discourse of power. The particular nature of totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, it seems, is not in the simple presence of traditional attributes of power (the repressive apparatus—punitive organs, secret police, and the like), since any repressive regime has such attributes at its disposal (“nonrepressive” regimes do as

well, since only the mechanisms and the degree of repression are significant in this). The peculiarity of aregime after the Soviet model is in the aspiration toward seizure of both the masses’ consciousness and their unconscious. Without taking these into account (for the subsequent “reforging”), power turned into

pure repression when it should have become “organic.” In just this “organicity” was its guarantee of permanency (applied to artistic creation, as one can see, this

was the key problem: not to “contrive” for power, but to assume the “truth of power’ for itself—this is the fundamental collision in the fight for the new writer). Art was destined to be the tuning-fork according to which the “tuning”

of the impersonal machinery of power was set. After all, besides the weapons of outright repression, authority had nothing else except an imaginary world in which people nonetheless lived. This world (“scientific communism”) was a product of fantasy. It was art that created this fantasy, portraying it just like reality (to quote Fadeev, “How have you reflected socialism?”). This is one of the

most significant sources of the total realism of the “Grand Style” of Soviet culture. Boris Groys called Soviet architecture an “embodied ideology.”® But literature was exactly the same kind of ideology, only “written out in words.” It is worth pondering the depth of the change in the nature of creative work: one is faced with a qualitatively new type of social activity, a qualitatively new type of discourse, and a qualitatively new set of social functions in art, which are in principle irreducible to simple schemes of “political control” or “Party pressure on art.” Quite another matter was how often the available “human material” turned out to be unmanageable, or how irreducible the “creative individuality of the writer” was to the specified activity, or how insistently the unprogrammable reality of “writers’ destinies” (or of the reality being “described”) protruded into the “artistic product” of Socialist Realism. Nonetheless, the extraordinary nature of the measures taken by the new authorities to develop a writer who was prepared to carry out the kind of assignments I have mentioned here reveals how important the creation of this new figure was, and to what extent the new type of writer was born out of the “working-days of great construction projects.”

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Advice from a Stranger: “My Creative Experience—

for the Working-Class Author” Every literary era is filled with its own colors, but without exaggerating one could say that the 1920s were the most sanguineous era in the history of twentieth-century Russian literature. This era is of great interest for its color, variety, depth, novelty, and impact. Revolutionary culture would flower brightly, but live only briefly. If this book leads the reader through its “backyards,” it is only because it was here that the new cultural mass was maturing, the mass that was destined to burst forth as Socialist Realism. It was from just these “out-of-the-way corners” that the new generation came into literature. Culture is an integral organism: there is no abyss between the beginners and the “recognized artists of the word”; they are located within a single cultural

space. Besides, a certain spontaneity is characteristic of revolutionary culture: the “master craftsmen” expressed their views on art and creativity openly. These views were most often situated “above” the literary battles, into which these individuals were almost never drawn, or with which they were only superficially involved. This distance is explained by the fact that they, being “materially and creatively quite independent,” needed no defenders of their interests in literature as did, for example, beginning writers. The voices of the beginners and of group ideologues were heard alongside those of the “master craftsmen.” But the “master craftsmen” said absolutely the opposite things about their creative activity from what the ideologues wanted for their own protégés:

Aleksei Tolstoi: “The process of artistic creation occurs not by logical thinking, but in a burst of ecstasy. . . . Art, or a work of art, arises like a dream—in an instant.””° Andrei Belyi: “I achieve a synthesis of material not through reflection, but through the sound of a musical theme whose program, that is, plot, I must discover... . The intonation and sound of this theme, which is born out of the tendencies of the collected material and which gives rise to the first image, to the seed of its inner plot, is for me the moment that form begins in the strictest sense; and this sound precedes, sometimes long precedes, my own work at the writing table.”?! Evgenii Zamiatin: “I dream on paper. . . . I have learned to forget what I know while I am working, as I am writing. . . One has to dream one’s way into a story, a novella or play. ... The hardest thing is to begin, to cast off from the banks of reality into dreams... . Then, page after page, the dream becomes stronger and stronger.”

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Mikhail Zoshchenko: “The entire creative process comes together extraordinarily quickly and almost always subconsciously.””? Nikolai Nikitin: “My first short story came to me in a dream.”™ Boris Pil’niak: “All beginnings arise from the unconscious. .. . In the morning, when sleep struggles against wakefulness, when [only] part of the sensa-

tions have arisen from sleep, but thoughts have begun to move about one’s brain, one, another, a third—in these minutes I bring into order what I will write on paper that day, at the juncture of the cerebral cortex and subcortical unconsciousness. It would not be right to say ‘I think it over.’ From the scrapheap of everything that has accumulated in the garrets of memory and ruminations over the story that I am writing at the time, what is needed for the day comes together in these minutes of the morning; I see and hear what will be written that day—I see it in sleep, I hear it with my consciousness.” Viacheslav Shishkov: “In the process of creation, any significant thought or idea that has floated into the unconscious can completely swallow up the idea or thought that has been calmly invented or even advanced by the calculating mind within the framework of the writing plan.””° These are only a few of the professional writers’ statements about the “creative process.” It is no surprise that, as Pertsov wrote, “Many workers and workers’ correspondents exaggerate the difficulties of the literary business. A well-known role in the creation of such attitudes is played by the statements of certain professional writers who ‘mutter’ about their work like sorcerers or priests.” Hence arose the task of “taking the cover of secrecy off literary work.””” But when the “cover” was taken off and the professionals started to discourse on issues of “the place of art in society,” “the artist’s role,” or of the destinies of literature and revolution, it turned out that their pronouncements in these areas were even less acceptable from the standpoint of the goals of literary education: Andrei Sobol’: “If we writers are in fact only subordinate fingers on some sort of iron hand, then we in any case may not wish to curl and extend only

one index finger on command. . . . An artist can pay heed to revolution, and does pay heed to it, only voluntarily. In the same way, his response to it does not arise on command.””® Pil niak: “The communists want to create their own communist literature,

this genuine luxury of life and its monuments—and they will not create it. . . since there is no communism in the life of Russia—there is no communist literature, nor can there be any, it will remain in the backyards of the ‘agitators’;

but a description of the life of today’s members of the Russian Communist Party . . . is not of course communist literature. The fact that nowadays those

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working in the area of description of the life of these Party members wield the writer's craft badly (and this is of course by accident, for talented descriptionists might turn up), and understand art as it was understood in the sixties—

and they are being moved on the literary shelf toward the sixties; that is, literature as art does not need them, and they do not exist in it... . This is not literature, but rather a Proletkult incubator where even with a magnifying glass you cannot find any distinction between one ‘individual’ and another. . . . We should have more of Shchedrin published than of Dem’ian Bednyi.”””

Konstantin Fedin: “The concept of an ‘era’ has obviously become very limited among us. .. . Time is necessary for material to come together, to become useful for my work. Writers’ trips to sovkhozes can be of some benefit to the sovkhozes, but of none to literature. . . . It is laughable to think that immediately upon a writer’s return from a sovkhoz, the art of literature will be enriched by books that express the significance of the sovkhozes in contemporary

life. Enriching the literature about the sovkhozes is an extraordinarily urgent and great matter. But only LEF could think that this is the art of literature.”’° Zamiatin: “It is just when incendiaries and heretics are exterminated by fire, the axe, and the word. In every today, in every evolution, in difficult, slow, useful, extremely useful, constructive, painstaking work, heretics are harmful. . . . But harmful literature is more useful than useful literature: because it is antientropic, it is a means for battling calcification, sclerosis, crust, moss, and death. It is... right [even] after 150 years. . . . To deal with already-answered questions is the privilege of minds that are organized according to the principle of cow's innards, which as is well known, are adapted to digesting the cud.”'®! Tolstoi’s statement about art “like a dream,” the “one index finger” of Sobol’ that has the right to refuse to curl, Pil’niak’s observations on communist literature and the “Proletkult incubator,” and Zamiatin’s opinions about heretics and entropy, all resonated from the pages of the 1924 collection called Writers on Art and on Themselves (Pisateli ob iskusstve i o sebe), published when the

era of the “fellow-traveler” was in full bloom. The rest of the statements are cited from the collection How We Write (Kak my pishem), which was designed, as the Preface said, “to help young writers get started in literature,” and

was published in Leningrad in 1930. Although the authors of this latter anthology were still exclusively “fellow-travelers” (and their sympathizers), the statements contained in it were now obviously restrained: the “RAPP era” stood at the threshold. The editors of Na literaturnom postu responded to the latter book’s publication with a huge article and even formulated a special question about writers’ attitudes toward the collection in a survey they did at this time. The writers’ responses are noteworthy:

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Mikhail Chumandrin: “How We Write is full of nonsense, and a harmful book. Although a few of our comrades have honestly described how they work in this book, several [others] have disseminated most dangerous opinions,

whose place at best is in the pages of the bourgeois press, and in the reactionary period at that (Belyi, Pil’niak, and the like).”!” Leonid Leonov: “Just in time, I refused ‘to participate in it.”!™ Georgii Nikiforov: “The book . . . was published for nothing. Never would

a person tell the real truth about himself, even if he sincerely wanted to, because this is a thing that can't be overcome. . . . You would undoubtedly lie, and, what is more amazing, you would lie sincerely. The book How We Write could be more accurately called Sincere Lying.”'4 Anna Karavaeva: “The book is harmful in general, and irresponsible. It makes you want to bring a shovel for this ‘priestly’ rubbish.”!° Aleksandr Tarasov-Rodionoy: “Here many authors, in trying to mask themselves so cleverly, have in fact laid themselves bare and stand like little naked

people without shirts. . . Many of these articles would invoke nothing but

disgusted ridicule in the sincerely Soviet writer.”!°° Viktor Pertsov: “I consider the collection . . . useless, like a collection of au-

tographs. . . . Its modicum of success is an indicator of the unhealthy interest of the metaliterary milieu [that is, “fans’— Trans.] in the handwriting of the

‘real writer, in other words, in the hidden aspect of his work. ... One ought

to treat the majority of the materials brought together in the collection . . . as the clearest documents of the bourgeois creative process.”!°” P. Orovetskii (a shock-worker writer): “We won't have books like How We

Write back home.”'® Thus toward the early 1930s, just before the shock-worker writers’ inunda-

tion of literature, and when “literary training” was being “made the order of the day” by both RAPP and Gorky, it turned out that there was no one to teach the “working-class authors”: one could not count on the professional writers (yesterday's fellow-travelers). Against the backdrop of the continued massive flooding of the market with all manner of “handbooks,” Profizdat—

this “smithy” of shock-worker writers’ books—began to publish the brochure series My Creative Experience—For the Working-Class Author (Moi tvorcheskii opyt—rabochemu avtoru), and in the formative period of the Writers’ Union,

a complete change of the whole corpus of materials for “literary training” took place. In 1934, just after the Writers’ Congress, the main beginners’ journal, Rost, published a feature article entitled “Lit. Training Has Begun” (“Litucheba

nachalas’”). This article proclaimed that “books that have appeared up until the present as handbooks . . . do not measure up to criticism,” and that they

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should be replaced by Gorky’s, Mayakovsky’s, and Furmanov’s brochures, by Profizdat’s My Creative Experience series, and by material from the journals Literaturnaia ucheba, Rost, and Rezets.'”” In the years 1933-1935, Profizdat published items by Bednyi, Shaginian, Chu-

mandrin, Zharov, Fadeev, Tikhonoy, Seifullina, Gladkov, Paustovskii, Serafimovich, Slonimskii, Pavlenko, and others in its series. These booklets, which were 60-120 pages, cost 15—40 kopecks, and were published in printings of up

to 20,000, quickly replaced the numerous “handbooks” and “wisdom of the master craftsmen” titles. The majority of these little books were reworked transcripts of presentations made by professional writers in Profizdat’s WorkingClass Writers’ Club. Critics unceasingly admired the initiative of the laborunion press, asserting that the brochures had an “extraordinary significance in the business of transmitting the ‘secret’ of literary expertise to the working-class author,”!!° and that “writers that share their experience with their younger comrades are helping them to get on-track immediately, so that they may then quickly move forward.”''! It was suggested that “we should develop the discus-

sions appearing in the series for young writers.”!'” But what “secrets” did the “master craftsmen of Soviet literature” impart to working-class authors? Bednyi spoke of the significance of “classical creative devices”: if, for example, Homer described shields in the Iliad with refined knowledge of them, then “do we really not have the right to, in a similar—and even better—way embellish the Soviet tractor, portraying the kolkhoz fields and the sovkhoz fallow-lands plowed up with the tractor?”!'’ Zharov tried to convince beginners that “every literate person should know how to write verses, af essay, OF a short Story. N14 Shaginian told of how she read textbooks on geodesy and geology when she was working on Hydrocentral (Gidrotsentral’), and how “it seems there was not a single book published in those years about concrete that I wouldn't have bought, read, and written a synopsis of.”!! Gladkoy assured the working-class authors that it was easier for prerevolutionary authors to write than us, [since] the productive forces were primitive. The country was agrarian: taxed allotments, weedy boundary-paths, wooden plows, sickles, bast shoes, the sky, brooks, and coppices. Without moving from the spot, a writer observed a peaceful monotonous life. . . . Tolstoy could sit at home in Iasnaia Poliana all his life and write novels: both people and nature grew into him with one and the same

look from the cradle to the grave.'!°

Especially gladdening was the new solution to the problem of “the role of the unconscious in the creative process”: a contributor wrote in Literaturnaia ucheba, “It is extremely gratifying that Soviet writers, in testifying [sic!] about

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their work, stress the unbreakable bond between feeling and thought.”"!” Least of all am I interested, however, in the “quality” of the training given here (it

goes without saying that “training” with Zamiatin was more fruitful than with Chumandrin or Zharov).

To understand the “unbreakable bond” between the revolutionary and Socialist Realist cultures, one must recognize the character of the changes that took place in the “creative laboratory of the Soviet writer.” Profizdat’s series and numerous other publications of the late 1920s and the first half of the 1930s

on the theme “How I work” only partially open the door to this “laboratory.” There are also the various archives that grew over the years, such as those of the FOSP-associated Moscow Shock-Workers’ Club, Profizdat’s Working-Class Writers’ Club, the Leningrad House Press’s Beginning Writers’ Club, not to mention Soviet writers’ personal archives and those of literary journals, newspapers, and publishers, as well as those of all sorts of “creative unions” located in both the capitals and republican/provincial cities. This whole lost Atlantis of Soviet literary culture has remained until now not only unknown but often unacknowledged as a culturally significant phenomenon.'!® Nonetheless, precisely at the moment of this break—in the early 1930s, when the new generation of Soviet writers was being intensively molded and “lit. training” was being pushed to the forefront—one is able to peek into the “laboratory.” At this time it has been cleaned up, and everything that was not meant for bystanders’ eyes has been put away: the Soviet writer does not “share secrets,” and what he does have to share is not secrets, but some sort of image

of “creative secrets.” This image was programmed by the tasks of “lit. training.” In this one can again recognize the synthetic nature of Socialist Realism, in which a synthesis of various approaches to “lit. training” developed in the 1920s occurred. “Study of the artist’s craft,” “study of the classics,” and “study of the masters” were all combined (if one combines these three “studies,” one gets ex-

actly the threefold “Leninist behest,” “Study, study, and study”). Traces of this “trinity” were inscribed forever into the genetic code of Socialist Realism. The primitive preoccupation with technique that was introduced by the LEFist “specialists” hardened into the fundamental Socialist Realist categories of “artistic craftsmanship” and “artistic devices,” and into the interest in the “creative laboratory of the writer” and in “mastery of the classics” (the favorite themes of the literary studies of the 1930s up through the 1950s). With the focus on total

realism and the requirement to “represent life in the forms of life itself,” “study of the classics” spilled over into Socialist Realism. The master writers—living “Classic writers of Soviet literature’—continued to teach all these things in the Literary Institute. It is worth remembering that “literary training” is, after all,

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not only “studying” but also a significant institution of Socialist Realism. I have yet to examine this “training” in its institutional dimensions.

“Literary Training”; or, Bitter Gorky The “thick journal” remained a basic literary institution whose status was never disturbed in Russia, even by the revolution. The process of founding new journals in the early postrevolutionary years was closely connected to the

routine work of “attracting authors,” but it was also inseparable from the work of creating the “new author.” This type of “work with the writer” was a qualitatively new function of the Soviet literary journal. As early as 1926, it had become clear that “the editorship should assume the role of a ‘literary consultancy’ for an author, where the beginning writer can go not only to try his luck

(perhaps they will print his work), but also to obtain clarification and useful advice as to how he should work in future.”''? The term “literary consultancy,” which subsequently came into general use (reduced to a compound, “litconsultancy”), still had the stamp of novelty in the mid-20s: it was printed with

extra spacing'”? and in quotation marks. For RAPP, which demanded “deep-down growth” from an author, this model of the journal (journal-consultancy) remained fundamental because of RAPP’s reliance on the “provincial author,” who was supposed to regard the

journal not so much as a forum for publication as a place for “training.” Being a “masses’ literary movement,” RAPP most of all strove to assemble the “new writer cadres” around such journals. The Moscow center of this type was Rost,

and the Leningrad one, Rezets; both journals grew from litcircle publications to the status of all-union publications. The history of Rezets is typical in this regard. Rezets appeared in 1924 as a small worker-correspondents’ page in the Leningrad Krasnaia gazeta. During 1925-1926, the page was reorganized into a separate journal whose goal was “recruiting reader/writers.” In 1927, Rezets developed a section called “The Lit-

erary Studio” under Kraiskii’s editorship, and in 1928, notices about sending beginning authors’ letters with critiques of their works’ deficiencies began to appear. In February 1929, the journal added a litconsultancy whose authors served practically all the other publications of the Krasnaia gazeta Publishing House (Krasnaia panorama [Red panorama], Vokrug sveta [Around the world],

Krasnaia gazeta itself, and others). In 1930 and 1931, a journal not including be-

ginners’ work was rare, and several issues after 1931 were dedicated completely to it. Toward 1932, Rezets was corresponding with 3,000(!) beginning writers, and the litconsultancy saw its goals as “raising the level of worldviews and cul-

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ture, introducing elements of writers’ expertise to the masses, and forging new writers out of our own class (workers, kolkhoz workers, and farmhands), writ-

ers from the victorious proletariat.”'! Rezets was transformed into a consultancy journal only over time, but Rost was conceived of as a beginners’ journal from the start; and beginning in 1931,

the latter became a center for “recruiting shock-workers for literature.” Rost lasted five years, from 1929 to 1934. Within its permanent features (“A Page on Literary Pages,” “A Parade of Literary Circles,” “Writers on Their Own Experience, “Letters from the Litconsultancy,” and “Advice to Beginners”) are

priceless materials from the subcultural life in which revolutionary culture was distilled into Soviet culture. It is curious that over the first half year of Rost’s existence, there is not a single work from a beginner, but beginning in 1932,

the literary section of the journal was almost completely filled with their work. Many future Soviet writers got their start in Rost, including the future first students of the Literary Institute (Evgenii Dolmatovskii, Iakov Khelemskii,1.

Dremoy, S. Margolis, Ekaterina Sheveleva, and many others); and many literary circles had ties to this journal. But toward the mid-3os, the era of amateur literary activity came to a close. In the era of experts, “growing” meant “studying,” taking lessons from the experts. The principal expert and teacher, as is well known, was Gorky. Rost, like Rezets earlier, and other special beginners’

journals, came to an end. The business of “literary training” was completely handed over to Gorky’s favorite offspring—the straightforwardly titled Literaturnaia ucheba. Gorky suggested that “beginners” did not need to be published; rather, they needed to study. His journal was accordingly conceived of as a “methodologicaltextbook journal,”!?? but no literary section was proposed for this journal: all paths to publication were closed to beginners. The organizers, however, explained this situation differently: journals such as Rost “were the connecting link between the creative work of the litcircleists and the creative work of outstanding writers. These journals played the role of a curious literary worker's faculty. . .. The new journal [Literaturnaia ucheba—E.D.| should be not only a correspondence school for literature, but also a creative laboratory, a creative

tribune for beginning writers.”!”* The journal, however, provided no laboratory, much less a tribune. Gorky’s attitude toward beginners was always ambivalent: he supported their striving to make it “in the world,” regarding this as his duty and remembering his own path; but at the same time, he responded to the “morals” and

“level of expertise” of beginners with outright hostility. He was a strict teacher who always wanted to teach, prizing his role as a teacher and therefore slight-

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ing his pupils and always giving them “unsatisfactory” marks. Beginners were of interest to him only as beginners, but never as maturing pupils; in “Gorky’s school,” one never advanced to “the next grade.” With great enthusiasm, he prepared, promoted, and published the works ofhis perpetual grade-repeaters. But just let one of them act like a “writer” or make known his ambition to the

title of “real writer,” and Gorky would react cruelly and violently. Gorky’s most merciless attacks ofthis kind took place in 1934, the eve of the First Congress

of Writers: at the very moment that the title of “writer” suddenly became unsteady (the former system had fallen apart and the new one had just been created), Gorky published his “Literary Amusements,” “Letter to Pavel Vasil’ev” (“Pismo Pavlu Vasil’evu”), and other articles, as if to remind all that for him,

as head of the new Writers’ Union, the “hurdle” remained as before: the “apprentice” is not allowed to do as the “master” does.

It is supposed that the expert will teach. Gorky had long been trying on the role of teacher. As far back as 1914, he had in the foreword to the first Anthology of Proletarian Writers expounded his idea about organizing a periodical to help youth master “literary technique.” In 1927, he wrote in a letter to O. Anzimirova:

The question you asked me about guiding the first steps of beginning writers has long made itself felt to me as a real necessity. Fifteen years ago, I even suggested publishing a “journal for self-taught writers.” It seems to me that now is exactly the right time for such a publication. Its essence is in short as follows: village and workers’ correspondents, and “beginners” in general, need a knowledge of literary competency [/iteraturnaia gramota], of literary “technique”—and this must be given to them.'** And in 1929, when LAPP’s leaders (Libedinskii, Saianov, Chumandrin, and

Kamegulov) suggested that Gorky publish such a journal, and made known their desires to work on it, Gorky ardently supported the idea of creating this “home university” in his /zvestiia article “The Working Class Must Educate its Own Craftsmen of Culture” (“Rabochii klass dolzhen vospitat’ svoikh masterov kul’tury”). Valentina Maksimova, author of a special study of the history of Literaturnaia ucheba, states that the journal “was the first experiment in collective largescale ideological and aesthetic education of young writers.”'?° The question of the sources of this experiment, however, remains unanswered. As is well known, experiments in the revolutionary and Soviet cultures were not uncommon, but

why was this particular experiment initiated and developed by Gorky? One should note that the creation of the Writers’ Union was no less unique an experiment, but the idea for it came from Stalin, and Gorky only played (al-

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though enthusiastically) the role assigned to him. But Literaturnaia ucheba was

another matter altogether: a favorite idea, nourished for many years, brought to fruition by much suffering (Gorky was obliged to exert great efforts to keep the journal “out of the battle-zone,” and he until the end of his life dedicated much time to it,’’° although the journal—unlike his post as head of the Writers’ Union—yielded him no visible dividends or power).

Everyone who comes into contact with revolutionary culture for the first time, still unburdened by “habits of consciousness,” finds him- or herself in a peculiar vacuum of aesthetic opinions: “norms” are created “on the fly” in an era of struggle for power, under pressure of the current political situation, and are wholly dependent on the “political formation” on the field of “literary battle”; they reveal themselves in the form of hastily pieced-together aesthetic projects and manifests. The revolution tore down the previous scale of values, and the ideologues who were recruited for its “battles on the literary front”— this “army of poets’—rushed into the abyss thus formed. The model of “literary values” was cobbled on a ready last, so that beginning poets of one’s own group were quickly elevated to the rank of classic poets: Ivan Doronin was proclaimed the “Soviet Kol’tsov,” Aleksandr Bezymenskii the “proletarian Venevitinov,” Iosif Utkin the “Red Byron,” and Mikhail Svetlov, the “Red Heine.”

Aleksandr Zharov was compared to Paul Verlaine and Théophile Gauthier. This practice was ridiculed (by Mayakovsky in his poem “To the Proletarian Poets” [“Proletarskim poetam”] or Pertsov in his pamphlet against “literary grave-robbing”), and even those “aggrandized” by this practice protested against it.'’7 Finally, after ten years passed, the former studioists themselves understood what Khodasevich had already understood in the Proletkult studios— the beginning half-correspondent/half-poet began to realize the “damage” done by “lying praises.” In the September 1929 issue of Oktiabr’, Mikhail Iurin’s “Notes of One

Who Gave Hope” (“Zapiski podavavshego nadezhdy”) was published. Turin told of how after his “first little book of verses” was published, when he as yet,

he says, “did not have a feeling for words, did not know how to work with them,” the critics announced that his craftsmanship “is second to none of the best exemplars of so-called pure poetry,” and after the publication of his second collection, they compared poor Turin with Mayakovsky and Esenin (not to the advantage of the latter, of course: “Iurin is so much more profound, historically more literate [sic!], and more ethical than they”). “At first, especially

in the first two or three years of my literary career, I was simply ashamed to read such things, such brave assertions of this or that reviewer,” Iurin recalled,

“but afterward, I gradually became accustomed to all these assertions and be-

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gan to accept them as fitting. Thus it was that my careless attitude toward the printed word began, a casual attitude toward words, and an uncritical attitude toward everything that came from my pen.”!”° Why did the critics praise the poet Iurin? Not only because they needed a futurist Mayakovsky or a “bohemian” Esenin, but also because it was not nice to cut down a former workers’ correspondent: only the “highbrow” LEFists or “aestheticizing” Perevalists could fail to understand these rules of political etiquette, for which reason they were proclaimed to be “class-hostile.” So the critics maintained a revolutionary politesse; the ideologues stood behind “their own people”; and the fellow-travelers laughed up their sleeves: no one had the right to criticize the “beginners from the masses.” No one except Gorky. The “chief workers’ correspondent of the Soviet land,” as the LEFists styled him, gave himself the great title of “beginner” and thus had the moral right to criticize: being the chief “craftsman,” he made the history of his own studenthood a fact of literature and of literary politics. One could not take offense at Gorky: he spoke not in the name of any group, but as if in the name of Literature itself. Thus from no other does one find as much sarcasm in reference to

the “downtrodden Spaniards” (as Gorky called beginners), nor as many heated invectives against the singers of praise: “Today's youth are greedy, even sickeningly greedy, for praise, and if you don’t tell a young author that he is almost Gogol, or lacks little of being Chekhov, then he is offended”’”’; or his mention of people “with an immeasurably high opinion of themselves and the unhealthily heightened sensitivity of cachectic young ladies”'**; the picture of the “author inspired by praise,” who “turns up his tail behind him, wanders the earth like a lion, and thinking that ‘everything he could do, he has already finished,’ studies nothing, and hungers for further intoxications of praises”'*'; one must not indulge “ambitious young people. . . . Their ambition will swell up even more dangerously if we dare to compare a person who has written a mediocre little tale with Romain Rolland. . . . The danger here is that the youth will go out to Senate Square and shout at the Bronze Horseman, “Begone! I am already Romain Rolland!”!” No one else was allowed to talk about beginners this way. But for the very reason that Gorky knew their value and saw his mission as “teaching” them to write, he suggested (and reasserted this in a programmatic article, “The Goals of Our Journal” [“Tseli nashego zhurnala”], with which the first issue of Litera-

turnaia ucheba opened) that those young writers who “having had a skinny little collection of verses or short stories printed, stop studying,” who “think that a writer's work is simple and easy, and more than any other kind of work can

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bring a good salary, make them noticed in a crowd of people, and bestow attention and glory... are not needed by literature,” and therefore the mission

of the journal was to “teach beginning writers literary competency, the writer's craft, the techniques of the business, and work with and on words.”!33

Did Gorky really believe in the “fruits of education”? I will address this question later. But for now I will just mention that he did not allow anyone (except himself, of course) to “attack” beginners. Preserved in the immense Gorky archive is a manuscript sent to Literaturnaia ucheba in 1933 (but not published) of a review of beginners’ books. It was titled “Against Alien Influences in Literature About Komsomol” (“Protiv chuzhdykh vliianii v literature

o komsomole”). The text, with Gorky’s notes throughout, was rejected. Gorky did not like its tone, since its author had flung “unsubstantiated accusations” and had passed judgment on the books “off-handedly”: Gorky concluded that “Reviews with such a tone are unacceptable in general, and particularly in Lit eraturnaia ucheba. Teaching means explaining, telling a story.”!“ “Explaining, telling a story.” . . . It would be difficult to find a more accurate characterization to define the work of the journal directed by Gorky. What did the journal ot “explain,” what did it vot tell a story about? It broke all records for the publication of articles about “mastery of the classics”: there was no issue that might not “tell a story” about Pushkin, Stendhal, or Goncharov,

“how they worked”; in which a “generally educational” article with a “story” about the “life and work” of Gogol, Zola, or Hugo might be absent; in which there might not be an article about language similar to a section from a schoolchild’s grammar textbook; in which the “recognized writers” (Gladkov, Ti-

khonovy, Libedinskii, Vishnevskii, Lavrenev, or Fedin) might not “tell a story” about how they worked on their own creations, rewriting them many times and “polishing their craftsmanship.” But at the center of the journal that Gorky founded upon the principles of “literary and technical pedagogy” was the practice of “litconsultancy” proper. Toward the mid-1930s, there were in Moscow alone more than ten regularly staffed “litconsultancies” (at the journals Krasnaia nov, Smena, Oktiabr’, Rost,

Novyi mir, Znamia, Ogonek, Krestianskaia gazeta, in the “Sovetskaia literatura,” Profizdat, and GIKhL publishing houses), but the center remained, with-

out a doubt, in Literaturnaia ucheba, the “Letters from the Editors” section (the “litconsultancy” proper) headed by Gorky himself, who was at that time proclaimed to be the “litconsultant of all Rus” as well. Gorky’s efforts to turn this journal into a litconsultancy-journal were reflected in the nature of the endless “reconstructions” of the journal’s workings that he made: every one of them led to expansion of the “practical examples” sections. The “Literary Work

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in the Newspaper” section was one of these: herein were printed articles about the “lit. pages” of provincial factory newspapers, about poetry in these newspapers, about regional newspapers’ experience working with the “literary activists groups,” about the language of wall-newspapers, and the like. Beginning in 1931, the journal regularly printed material about “shock-workers in literature,” surveys of collections, and reviews of shock-worker writers’ books. Being a passionate advocate of the idea of “recruiting,” Gorky did much to propagandize this in Literaturnaia ucheba as well as in other arenas. At a meeting with shock-workers on June 12, 1931, Profizdat representative Pavlov said that his press “has been printing the books of working-class authors for two years. For a long time, our press and critics had nothing to say about working-class authors’ books; only after Aleksei Maksimovich, who lives thousands of versts away from us, wrote a review of [some of these] books, did people everywhere begin to talk about this.”'*’ The “talk about this” began not only because Gorky wrote the review in question, but also because RAPP needed a campaign, and the interests of real authority stood behind RAPP. But the fact that these interests had again come to coincide with Gorky’s passions only facilitated the “success” of the undertaking. However, when after the 1932 resolution the “cadres of shock-writers’>—

RAPP’s “gold reserves’—dwindled, Literaturnaia ucheba added the sections “Young Cadres of Soviet Literature” and “Letters from the Provinces,” wherein

the fundamental emphasis was on working with “beginners in peripheral areas and with the literary youth in the provinces and national republics.” After the merger with Rost, it was proposed to make the journal a “unique encyclopedia of literary craftsmanship.”'*° Indeed, it was in Literaturnaia ucheba in the 1930s that the works of the “beginners” who were to become the future “craftsmen of Soviet literature” received their first favorable reviews; among these were Margarita Aliger, Aleksandr Avdeenko, Evgenii Dolmatovskii, Aleksandr Iashin, Vera Ketlinskaia, Vadim Kozhevnikov, Iurii Krymov, Sergei Mikhalkov, Lev Oshanin, Sergei Ostrovoi, Arkadii Perventsev, Boris Polevoi, Nikolai Rylenkoy,

Konstantin Simonoy, Sergei Smirnoy, Leonid Solov’ev, Aleksandr Tvardovskii, and Sergei Vasil’ev. Several of these names even received their first mention in the journal. During the next “restructuring” of the journal on the eve of the First Congress of Soviet Writers, Mariia Rybnikova, the future academic and creator of the “method for teaching the Russian language,” published her article “Literaturnaia ucheba and Its Readers” (“Zhurnal ‘Literaturnaia ucheba’ i ego chitateli”). Having done an analysis of the enormous volume of mail to the editors, Rybnikova reached the following conclusion about the fruitfulness of

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“training”: “The journal should return to doing what it started out with in 1930, when it announced a subscription for a “complete course of literary

training” in twenty volumes. She opined that the journal “should develop a planned cyclical issue of general-education, literary-study, and technical matetials for the beginning author,” which meant that “Literaturnaia ucheba should become an upper-level correspondence school for literature.”!3” The truth of the matter was that the editors, immersed in literature, forgot that beginners

had not mastered rudimentary literacy, and the loftily named “upper-level correspondence school for literature” was in fact only a euphemism for a “liquidation of illiteracy” objective: Rybnikova proposed that the journal include “curricula of general-education courses,” that it print articles on orthography and syntax, an “exercise book on stylistics,” a “dictionary of difficult words,” a “dictionary of synonyms,” and so forth. The shock-writer had yet to experience “deep-down growth,” as Averbakh had expressed it. “Deep-Down Growth”: From Litconsultancy to Litinstitute

The transformation of publishers into enterprises for “working with authors” began immediately after the August 19, 1931, resolution of the Party’s Central Committee, “On the Work of Publishers.” The institution of litconsultancies was officially created according to this resolution. The resolution, which up-

held the RAPPist “call of shock-workers into literature” and Profizdat’s initiatives, and which created a foundation for these in publishing, observed that

“the gigantic growth of the country, accompanied by the rapid political growth of the working class, brings forth new hundreds and thousands of talented

forces in writing,” and therefore publishers were faced with the tasks not only of “gathering and organizing around themselves all these new and growing

forces, and helping them to rise to a higher level of culture, knowledge, and specialization,” but also of creating the appropriate “conditions” (institutional forms) for them. Thus the resolution required that “for working with the new cadres of authors, special consultancies or offices should be organized in all

publishing houses within a month's time, in which responses and advice to the authors of all submitted manuscripts should be given, regardless of whether they are accepted for publication.” At the time the resolution was published, perhaps only RAPP’s “litconsultancy” had been in regular operation: as early as 1929 (that is, before the “call of shock-workers”), it had seen as many as 200 printers’ quires of beginners’

manuscripts.'3 This volume grew manifold with the increased number of “litconsultancies” and with the beginning of the “call.” (It is worth noting that the

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RAPPists came up with the slogan “struggle for mastery” (“bor’ba za masterstvo”] in connection with Stalin’s “Technology resolves everything,” and the

RAPPist slogan “Face-to-face with technology!” could be deciphered thus: “Artistic literature’s immediate struggle for technique is the struggle for artistic quality.”'”? In connection with the recruitment of shock-workers into literature, this meant a large-scale expansion of the network of “litconsultancies” in

which the “recruits” could “polish their expertise.”) From 1931 to 1935, 60,000 (!) manuscripts with a total volume of up to 120,000 (!) authors’ pages passed through the hands of the “litconsultancies” (in Moscow alone!).'*° To get a bet-

ter idea of these proportions, let us turn to the statistics on GIKhLs “litconsultancy,” which saw 800-1,000 manuscripts per month.'*! Characteristically, 90 percent of the manuscripts came “from unorganized workers and kolkhozniks not included in the [lit]circles.”!*? In its first year alone (December 1930 to De-

cember 1931), GIKhL gave its consulting service to 1,500 people and sent 4,100 letters with reviews of beginners’ manuscripts. The growth in volume is attested to by the following data: twenty answers were sent in December 1930, but toward the end of 1931, their number rose to 1,000 per month;'* and in 1932, the “litconsultancy” issued 9,000 written review/consults and 2,400 oral

ones, processing 20,000 pages of the authors’ work. All of this volume of work was done by twenty-three consultants, of whom only three were full-time staff.'44 Who worked in this literary “factory”? Who were the shock-workers of this “literary shop”? As it happened, they were these same writers. Beginning prose writer Mileshkin complained that the consultants “advise me to read Tomashevskii’s Theory ofLiterature [Teoriia literatury], which even a literate person finds hard to understand, much less a person who has not mastered grammar.” He suggested that instead of such advice, “the consultancy should long ago have started to work with beginning authors on mastery of rudimentary literacy.” Additionally, this writer “who has not mastered grammar” was upset that “the consultancy assigns the beginner’s manuscript to a circleist who is even less literate than the person who sent the manuscript.”

In passing, let us note that shock-worker writer Mileshkin, who had had one short story published in Bezbozhnik (Atheist), and who by his own admission had never heard the words “object” and “subject,” was promoted by the Lepse Factory—to work in the “litconsultancy” of the Moskovskii rabochii publishing

house.'*? Was this an extreme example? The level of the exchanges between consultants and beginners does not permit one to answer this question in the affirmative. The “litconsultant” answer to the usual illiterate poetry would be: “You

have many grammatical mistakes as well, particularly syntactic ones, that is,

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incorrect sentence constructions.” The shock-worker writer, who had never heard such words, was further advised: “Besides a number of syntactic and semantic errors, the poem is spoiled by the lack of picturesqueness [szc!].” Or, “The Old Raven’ is an unnatural [?!] work, since it contains nothing but malice toward Poincaré [?!].”!“° And from a review of a short story:

Although negative phenomena (in reference to portraying everyday defects) among certain backward workers are possible, this is not the case among shock-workers, particularly not the best ones; our best shock-workers are promoted to managerial work and managerial positions, and it must be known that they fight to raise the productivity of labor through the liquidation of undefined responsibility in everyday family life [?!].'47 It is perhaps worthwhile to cite one review (addressed to “E S. Zaitsev, Bolva

Station, Western Railroad, Briansk District, village of Dubrovka’) in its entirety: Comrade Zaitsev: The material in your poem “The Pig” is appropriate to an article or prose writing. The fact that pigs in the sovkhoz breed more and are fatter, and that

caring for animals in the sovkhoz is based on a knowledge of zoology, would be better conveyed in an article or sketch. If you nonetheless decided to write a poem about this, then you ought to take a specific sovkhoz, a specific pig that perhaps has one ear markedly lower than the other, and a noncollective

peasant whose pig grows very poorly and hardly breeds at all. You have produced a rhymed sketch, but nothing more. You narrate, but you do not portray anything. “In noncollective agriculture the pig doesn’t receive the proper ration—skinny.” As you can see, the strophe “stretches” into a most ordinary line of prose. What is characteristic of a work of art in general? Picturesqueness, comparisons, epithet, metaphor, apt characterization. You

do not have this. Granted, in one place you say the pig was “proud,” but this is hardly apt. One can say that a person is proud, but one must not say this about a pig at all. [signed] N. Nikitin'*®

Poor beginner-poet Zaitsev, poor consultant Nikitin, the poor pig who “doesn't receive the proper ration” —here one sees obvious stumbling-blocks to “deepdown growth.” That the level of the consultants themselves barely surpassed that of their advisees can be demonstrated by a selection of the examples that the latter were recommended to imitate. This was “training” nourished by whatever “food” they could find: Your Jn Flames is not a play. It is not fit to print. There are no unfolding events, there is no intrigue, no denouement; that is, there is none of all the

things that are necessary in every work, including a play. This is all due to

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your inexperience and, one has to think, your unfamiliarity with literature. We recommend that you carefully read at least two plays, Bezymenskii’s The Shot |Vystrel] and Karavaeva’s Farmyard |Dvor], and then you will understand

how to construct a play.'*” Recall that one beginner had stated that Gogol’s The /nspector-General was an

unsuccessful play: who knows whether it is he who is now suggesting that one can “understand how to construct a play” from Bezymenskii’s and Karavaeva's plays? What the beginners lacked in the consultants’ responses was “concreteness.” Concrete recommendations took, for example, the following form:

Study persistently and thoughtfully every day. Work through these books: (1) Stalin’s Questions ofLeninism |Voprosy leninizma]. (2) D. Bednyi’s On the Work of the Writer (O pisatel’skom trude]. Read the journals Kombain [The Combine], Zemlia sovetskaia |The Soviet land], and Literaturnaia ucheba.

You have some errors and incorrect usages of words. . . . Buy Ustinov’s Techniques ofSpoken and Written Speech [Tekhnika ustnoi i pismennoi rechi] (for 2 rubles). Maintain correspondence with the wall-newspaper [editors]

and the litconsultancy of GIKhL. [signed] Litconsultant Liubimov.'”°

The shock-writers responded to such advice with irritated letters, the most witty of them with ponderous humor: Original’nye slova, Original’nye idei! Tut strochka kazhdaia nova, Ot kazhdoi bukvy znan’em veet.

No bol’she pol’zy by prines Otvet, osoznannyi vooch'iu, O tom, chto kon’ zhuet oves, A mesiats svetit tol’ko noch’iu.'*!

[Original words, Original ideas! Here every line is new,

Every letter reeks of knowledge. But of more use would be An answer easily recognizable, About how a horse chews oats,

But the moon shines only at night.]

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Besides the natural dissatisfaction with criticism, the theme of “quality of answers” is heard constantly in the beginners’ letters: “They write that the verses are not picturesque enough, are ordinary, too dry and stretched-out, but there is not a word about what to do to make them picturesque and not dry or stretched-out.”!°? And what was to be done so that the verses would be “picturesque? Let us disregard the confidentiality of correspondence once more. A certain Savel’ev, a worker in the Moscow Krasno-Presensk Tramway Depot, wrote the poem “Song of the Radio” (“Pesn’ 0 radio”): Vsem, vsem zvuchit ona, Nauki tochnoi dostizhenii I ob’ ediniaet vsekh—to radiovolna Dnei nashikh gordost’, naslazhden’e.

Volna granits ne znaet tverdykh, Radio vsem vezde . . . vezde,

Radio-svet, razumnyi otdykh Na fabrike, v kazarme, v izbe...

And so on, ending: Zhgi, zhgi serdtse povsiudu, Nesi vsem znaniia, volna,

Sluzhi polnei trudiashchemusia liudu, Zovi na podvig, efirnaia volna.’”

[It plays for all, everyone, The attainment of exact science And unites everyone—the radio-wave Is the pride of our days, their delight. The wave knows no firm boundaries, Radio is for everyone everywhere . . . everywhere, Radio-light, wise relaxation In the factory, in the barracks, in the hut. .. Burn, burn hearts everywhere, Take knowledge to all, o wave, Serve working people more fully, Summon to action, ethereal wave.]

The consultant agreed, of course, that “comrade Savel’ev has not fixed a big

problem.” Why? “He was too lazy to think it through properly, and did not attempt to make it real.” But if he had “properly” thought it through, he could have made the issue “real,” since after all it was a matter of observing only a few things: “He should have drawn a few pictures of the political and cultural

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educational influence of the radio in the village, the plant, and the barracks, and of how the cities, kolkhozes, and shock-worker enterprises have something in common because of radio. He could have selected the First of May

holiday, for example . . .”'* 154 (and the consultant goes on, carried away in fantasies). Or, for example, he could portray how “the tired worker, putting on

headphones, senses a calming of his nerves under the influence of music or an interesting lecture, and how his irritation and fatigue melt away, and how Red Army folk experience the same in their barracks, and the kolkhoznik in the kolkhoz”; then the idea that “radio is a healthy respite” would be “convincingly expressed.” Yet again, if this poet “drew a series of pictures of how workers abroad ‘tune in to Moscow’ and listen to broadcasts of Soviet radio stations and how this animates them for the final and decisive battle against capital,” then the idea that “radio does not know the boundaries that capitalist states in their predatory interests have heaped up” would likewise be “convincingly expressed.”!°> What the consultant “prescribed” as exemplary for poetry by “comrade Savel’ev” is in fact the “Soviet writer’s expertise”: if the beginner’s text were only more professionally versified and one could find a reflection of the pictures suggested by the consultant in it, then it could perfectly well be published in, say, a central newspaper, for Radio Day, with Aleksandr Zharov’s or Sergei Ostrovoi's signature. Except for the single concept that “a litconsultant’s mission is to explain to an author what is required for artistic writing, and how he is to learn and acquire experience based on his knowledge and habits, and how he is supposed to master artistic devices,”'*° there was no unity of views on the training process among the consultants themselves. Some of them maintained that “publishing shock-workers’ books reduces to nothing all opinions about the necessity of an author's lengthy studies. Possession of political and industrial literacy already allows the shock-worker to creatively portray the work of his own shop,

brigade, or factory.”'*’ Others, on the contrary, suggested that “in the majority of cases these are people for whom ‘writership’ is a form of cultural growth, and very often of simply cultural awakening. . .. One should approach this material as being one of the phenomena that accompany the process of cultural revolution.” Hence the task of taking action so that “a lying graphomaniac like this would lose the necessity of writing for himself, and he could be transformed into a conscientious and thoughtful reader. In the majority of cases this is exactly what should be done: carefully deflect him from independent creativity to the creativity of a reader, toward reading and self-education.”!** The most radical stand among the consultants could be reduced to the observation that often it was necessary “to resort to amputation. For some beginners, it is

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necessary to curtail the ‘writers’ itch’ at once. . . . It is necessary to immediately kill, in the embryonic stage, the very idea of becoming a professional writer.”!”

Such were the “methodological concerns” of the “litconsultants.” Literary politics took a completely different view of the consultancies. Aleksei Surkoy wrote in 1932 that they should be converted from “pass-throughs”

into “the driving-belt leading between beginning youth and literary organizations,” and into “a serious center for ideological-creative education by correspondence for individuals.”!°° “Literary organizations” existed (if nominally)

at the time. Four years later, the factual head of the Writers’ Union, Vladimir Stavskii, proclaimed, “We must completely exclude the possibility of literary training outside the general system for the beginning author.”!*! No longer could one just “get into” literature “by chance,” but only via “lit. training,” which was no longer the RAPPist watchword, but rather the watchword of the state-run Writers’ Union of the USSR, affirmed in the speech of Kuz'ma Gorbunoy at the First Congress of Soviet Writers: “If you want to be a writer, you must get a higher education.”'® In Gorky’s(!) Almanakh, Gorbunov wrote,

“There are still young authors who cherish the hope that they can get into literature in a haphazard way, avoiding the difficulties of training and relying on natural talent. We must forget the shameful word ‘self-taught,’ and what is more, stop intoning it with a nuance of arrogance.”'® This was not simply a call to “study culture in the university under the guidance of experienced specialists.”'°* Behind this “sentence” pronounced on the “self-taught” stood a change of the entire cultural paradigm: in fact, only in the mid-1930s did the era of the “revolutionary-democratic illusions” that had nourished Russian social consciousness for almost a century draw to its close. In the era of modernization, “engineers” were required, as was the university. Training is a gradual process, impossible outside institutions; this was even more the case for

literary training in the literature-centric Soviet culture. Neither the “litcircle” nor the “litconsultancy” could completely carry out the training functions, primarily because they did not have “qualified literarypedagogical cadres” at their disposal. Accordingly, the first regular “literary courses” were organized for training the “litconsultants” and circle leaders themselves. These were correspondence courses that began in 1931, not in Moscow

but in Smolensk, in the Western Shock-Workers’ Literary Club. Two hundred ninety people were accepted for the courses, members of the literary circles of both the Western Province and other provinces (the Central Black-Earth Province, Middle Volga, and Eastern Siberia).!® There were eleven courses in the

curriculum: literary policy of the Party, the literary circle’s work with the masses, history of the proletarian literary movement, contemporary organization of lit-

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erature, the creative method of proletarian literature, current politics, foundations of dialectical materialism, methodology of literary studies, issues in the technology of creative work, literature and technology, and demonstrative consulting.' The curriculum, as one can see, differed little from the RAPPist program for literary circles. The Smolensk courses were still on a correspondence basis. But on February 1, 1932, GIKhL’s Shock-Workers’ Literary Club was opened in Moscow, and it gave an in-house “seminar for the literary shockworker,” which included sixty-two students chosen by MAPP (thirty-nine were shock-workers “called” into literature, and the rest were either members of GIKhL’s Workers’ Editorial Council or nonstaff “litconsultants.” The seminar’s classes were held once a week).'°’ The seminar was based on GIKhL’s correspondence courses for beginning writers that it had started already in 1931'°°—

a sort of prototype of the Literary Institute. RAPP’s own system, however, based on a strict centralization, was at the same time centrifugal: the circles were not connected with each other, but only with “the center.”

When RAPP was disbanded, the Organizational Committee for a Soviet Writers Union took steps to “organize literary youth.” The first of these was the organization of the Young Writers’ Club, attached to the Central Writers’ House, which was also created at this time. Club director Grigorii Brovman aspired to turn the club into a sort of center for organizing “large-scale literarycreative measures’ (sessions on young poets’ writing, transmission of experience, publishers’ presentations, and so on, including sessions for factories’ lit-

erary circles).'® These were all held in the evenings. But the beginning writers’ days remained as joyless as before, in the search for work and lodgings. The insistent calls to organize “a real literary university” were also an expression of the hopes for the possibility of having permanent living space (a dormitory) and a means for existence (a stipend). The criticism of the club amounted to precisely these issues: “We need a more permanent type of training, which would also include philosophical and theoretical courses. At present, not even the external conditions for such training exist: there is no reading-room or library, and the club lacks its own special location”!”°; “under the present work setup, the club is designed for litcircleists. It offers nothing for the young writer who has already gotten into literature. Besides the club, a higher type of

seminar should be organized. . . . The club has nothing”!”'; “at present, this is not a club, but rather a smoke-filled office for organizing various soirees, talks, and presentations: there is no reading-room, no room to relax in, no place for beginners to sit down and work a bit.”!”* In 1935, Literaturnaia gazeta published E. Troshchenko’s article, “On Young Poets” (“O molodykh poetakh”), which served as a stimulus for the beginning

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of the discussion about the “social behavior of young poets and the avenues for their obtaining literary qualification.”'”3 The first part of the problem (“social

behavior”) was raised by Gorky’s “Literary Amusements,” published on the eve of the Writers’ Congress; the second (“obtaining literary qualification”) pro-

voked a polemic between Literaturnaia gazeta and Gorky’s Literaturnaia ucheba. The position of Literaturnaia gazeta was that special upper-level literary institute was an unheard-of fantasy, and that beginners should acquire their education within the general system of upper-level institutes. Literaturnaia ucheba dedicated a special feature article entitled “On the Literary Education of Beginners” (“O literaturnom obrazovanii nachinaiushchikh”) to the polemic, in

which it continued to insist upon Gorky’s old idea of a literary institute, which Lenin (as Gorky himself recalled) had long ago considered “dazzling,” but hardly realizable.'”4 The latter journal also countered the misgivings that creating an upper-level literary institute was a senseless experiment from which nothing could be gained: “The ‘masses’ literary movement has existed for too long in petrified immobile forms”'”; and to the suggestion to focus on the literary circle, their

reply was, A [literary] circle, even reformed, even greatly bettering the content and forms of educational work, cannot be a universal unit for educating the writer. It will nonetheless remain only the first step in the literary preparation of youth. This obliges us to raise for discussion, without a moment's delay,

the issues of the further steps ofyouth’ literary education, as well as further ways ofguiding their creative activity.'”° (Indeed, the organizers of the Literary Institute understood it to be the most

important way of “guiding . . . creative activity.”) The journal maintained that consultancy work did not justify itself, most of all because there were no qualified consultants (experienced writers did not accept the job, nor did young writers who had other incomes; this left only the “unsuccessful, for whom consulting work remained the only source of income within literature. The consultancies’ low wages oblige them, despite the fact that they are ill-adapted to this delicate work . . . to ‘accept in quantity’ and to drive up such standards [of quantity] by which it is impossible to speak of satisfactory reviews.”'”” The journal opined that correspondence education, which was already provided under the auspices of the “workers’ evening literary universities” in Moscow and Leningrad, “cannot exist without a center for ‘direct’ education. In other

words, in concluding a discussion about a system of literary education, we cannot avoid its apex—a literary institute.”'”* Gorky’s journal also expressed the

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opinion that opponents of the idea of such an institute were only defending “the existing haphazardness and amateurism in educational work with the new writers’ cadres”: “The fight for systematic literary education of beginners from the ground up should be, alongside reform of the literary circles system, the fundamental content ofthe organizations that are responsible to the country for its literary reserves.”'7? “Reform of the literary circles” after the fall of RAPP meant their dissolution. There remained only the Literary Institute, which would funnel the new cadres of writers through itself. This belated debate could not continue: the “Resolution of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR on the Establishment in Moscow of the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute,” which marked “the occasion of forty years of Gorky’s literary activity and his service in the area of educating new writers’ cadres from among workers and peasants,” had already been signed by Mikhail Kalinin on September 17, 1932.'*°

25 Tverskoi Boulevard: The School of the “Masters” The venerable cream-colored two-story the middle of a sickly garden separated iron fretwork grating. The small square and in winter a snowdrift with a shovel

house sat on the boulevard circle in from the circle’s sidewalk by a castin front of the house was asphalted, in it would pile up, but in summer it was transformed into a most magnificent extension of the summertime restaurant, under a canvas tent... .

Thus the fifth chapter of The Master and Margarita begins. Bulgakov’s “Griboedov House,” where the famous MASSOLIT headed by Berlioz was located, where the majority of the committees met and extremely

long queues stretched out to the doors with notices such as “One-Day Creative Excursions,” “Waiting List for Paper... ,” “Cashier,” “Personal Accounts— Sketch-writers,” “Housing Issues,” “All-Inclusive Creative Holidays . . . ,” the house that seethed with life and wherein the fortunate holders of the “brown MASSOLIT membership cards known to all Moscow, which smelled of expensive leather and had a broad gold border” scurried about, was an artistic snapshot of a real mansion on Tverskoi Boulevard known in Moscow as Hertzen’s House. The just-mentioned 1932 resolution signed by Kalinin said nothing about this house. But there had been another decree—the Council of Peoples’ Commissars 1920 decision according to which the residence on Tverskoi Boulevard was given to the writers’ organizations: “After the October Revolution,” recalled Vladimir Lidin, who had joined his life with that of the Literary Insti-

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tute, “the house Hertzen was born in was nationalized and handed over to writ-

ers’ organizations. This house became a strange nest of extremely dissimilar birds, acquired the name “Hertzen’s House,’ and included the All-Russian Writ-

ers’ Union, the All-Russian Poets’ Union, the Smithy and the ‘Federation,’ and even the ‘Nothingists’!’ and the imagists sat on the windowsills and emotively read their verses.”'*’ Today it is difficult to imagine that practically all the literary groups at war with each other, from Smiths to Nothingists, coexisted un-

der one roof. The whole “literary front”—from one flank to the other—could go from one end to the other via the corridor. Fedor Kamanin recalled becoming a member of the Smithy:

It was housed, as were almost all the literary organizations of the time, in Hertzen’s House on Tverskoi Boulevard. It occupied a single, average-sized room on the third floor; the board of directors was there, and discussions were

held there. Next door, the peasant writers met in two rooms, and further down were the quarters occupied by RAPP and the editors of the journals Literaturnyi kritik and Na literaturnom postu. But the All-Russian Writers’ Union (the fellow-travelers) and the Poets’ Union got the second floor, where the rooms were roomier and brighter.' Mayakovsky, Esenin, Serafimovich, and Zamiatin gave readings in the house, as well as Blok (whose last public appearance was here) and many others. The wing of Hertzen’s House was living quarters and was managed (as was the

whole house) by the writer Aleksei Svirskii, whose official title was “member of the board of directors of the All-Russian Writers’ Union and Manager of Hertzen’s Houses [sic].” He enjoyed lodgings in this first writers’ house, which came into being ten years before the house in Lavrushinskii Lane and the Peredelkino Writers’ Dacha Village. In the 1920s, Sergei Sergeev-Tsenskii, Vsevolod

Ivanoy, Andrei Platonov, Osip Mandel’shtam, Leonid Sobolev, and many others lived here. Three decades later, in 1953, the Upper-Level Literary Courses that many Soviet writers attended were held here. Here also was housed (at first temporarily) the Literary Institute. The first point in the 1932 resolution settled the argument between Leningrad and Mos-

cow, to Moscow’s advantage: “to establish the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow.” (The fact is that the first literary university was opened in Leningrad: in 1934 the Leningrad Workers’ Evening Literary University graduated its

first class, composed of twenty-six students.) The resolution spoke of laying the cornerstone of a new building; however, the Literary Institute is to this day housed in Hertzen’s House, occupying it almost completely. It became the peculiar heir to the mansion on Tverskoi Boulevard wherein the “literary battle” raged. In the same rooms where manifestos that impressed the world with

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their radicalism had been devised in a tobacco-smoke haze by night, the students who were destined to become the authors of The Cavalier of the Golden Star (Kavaler Zolotoi zvezdy), The White Birch (Belaia bereza), Uncle Stepa (Diadia Stepa), and The Blockade (Blokada) studied, and the authors of those

same manifestos became their teachers. The Literary Institute (officially named the All-Union Workers’ Literary University—Vsesoiuznyi rabochii literaturnyi universite-—“VRLU”) opened on December 3, 1933,'*° with 130 correspondence students. At first the curriculum

was designed for two years, but in 1936 there were already two divisions in the institute—in-house and correspondence. In time, the institute acquired all the

features of a higher-level institution: a five-year curriculum (six years for the correspondence program), a graduate course, and the Upper-Level Literary Courses (a two-year program of study). The institute’s contribution to Soviet literature can hardly be overestimated: during half a century (1933-1982), 2,921 people graduated from the institute, half of whom (1,349 people) became members of

the Writers: Union. Among its graduates (including those who took the upper-

level courses) were practically all of those comprising the corpus of “masters of Soviet literature”: Raisa Akhmatova, Mikhail Alekseev, Fazu Alieva, Margarita

Aliger, Eduard Asadov, Vasilii Azhaev, Semen Babaevskii, Grigorii Baklanov, Sergei Baruzdin, Boris Bednyi, Vasilii Belov, Iurii Bondarevy, Mikhail Bubennoy,

Aleksandr Chakovskii, Evgenii Dolmatovskii, Iuliita Drunina, Gevorg Emin, Evgenii Evtushenko, Vasilii Fedorov, Vasilii Firsov, Rasul Gamzatov, Aleksandr

Iashin, Egor Isaev, Sil’va Kaputikian, Iurii Kazakoy, Antonina Koptiaeva, David Kugul’tinov, Kaisyn Kuliev, Georgii Lomidze, Mikhail Lukonin, Andrei Lupan, Elizar Mal’tsev, Mikhail Matusovskii, Sergei Mikhalkov, Sergei Narovchatov,

Aleksei Nedogonov, Vladimir Ognev, Sergei Orloy, Ley Oshanin, Aleksandr Rekemchuk, Robert Rozhdestvenskii, Viktor Rozov, Nikolai Rubtsov, Boris Ruch’ey, Afanasii Salynskii, Vladimir Sangi, Sergei Sartakoy, Paruir Sevak, Iuvan Shestalov, Nikolai Shundik, Konstantin Simonoy, Sergei Smirnov, Vladimir Sokolov, Vladimir Soloukhin, Nikolai Starshinoy, Vladimir Tendriakovy, Iurii Trifonoy, Konstantin Vanshenkin, Sergei Vasil’ev, Sergei Vikulov, Evgenii Vinokuroy, Platon Voron’ko, and others. These are only the Moscow laureates or “masters”—this does not cover the authors from other cities or those from the republics. “In order to count the graduates of the Gorky Institute,” wrote one of its first alumni (and later its professor), Evgenii Dolmatovskii, “it is best to walk

along library shelves. One could be convinced that better than half of today’s ‘active’ poets and prose writers went through the institute.”!*° That half of the graduates who did not become members of the Writers’ Union, however, were not lost for the cause of Soviet literature: “The great ma-

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jority of them,” wrote Vladimir Pimenoy, for many years director of the Literary Institute, .

are actively and usefully working in literature. They are editors in publishing houses, for journals, newspapers, radio, and television, and Writers’ Union

consultants, and managers ofliterary divisions of the theaters, and film studio associates . . . and even literature teachers-in the higher institutions of both Union and autonomous republics. To a not insignificant degree, the staff of the central publishing houses, the secretaryships of both the USSR and RSFSR Writers’ Unions, the Committee on Publishers, the Printing Industry and the Book Trade of both the USSR and the RSFSR, are all comprised of graduates of the Literary Institute.'*” Pimenov wrote elsewhere,

It is often said that Soviet literature is like a collective Gorky. Perhaps nowhere else is this formulation so organically applicable as when applied specifically to the Literary Institute. . .. The school named for Gorky is a ~ springboard for the young literary generation. Young writers go out to meet life, and here new resonant voices are heard, here youth never lapses into silence, and in this is the guarantee of social health, of the eternally youthful Socialist literature.'**

The Literary Institute was the only educational enterprise in the world at that time where professional poets and writers were molded.'*? The “Academy of Poetry” of which the young Chizhevskii had dreamed in 1918 became a reality. But it was hardly poetry alone—whole literatures were engendered in the institute: “I was the first student from Buriatiia in the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow,” Tsyden-Zhap Zhambiev recalled.

For me, the Literary Institute became the dearest, most beloved and holiest place on earth. It was here that I wrote my first book, became a member of the USSR Writers’ Union, and was accepted into the ranks of the Communist Party. In my third year I was joined by a graduate of the Buriatiia Pedagogical Institute, my countryman Tsyren-Bazar Badmaey. Young writers followed soon after in our tracks: Solbon Angabaev, Nikolai Damdinov, Gunga Chimi-

tov, Tseren Galanov, Dondok Ulzytuey, and many other of our writers. . . . Altogether, about forty-five of my countrymen can now be called “litinstitutists.” And now in the republic’s writers’ organization there are already fifty members of the USSR Writers’ Union. In a word, it would be hard to overestimate the Literary Institute’s help in preparing writers’ cadres for the most remote autonomous republic of our country—Buriatiia.’”° Indeed, out of fifty members of the Buriatiia Division of the Writers’ Union, forty-five came from the institute—nine out of ten. Within the institute, a real

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production line for Soviet writers was at work. Besides Soviet literature, there was no other literature in which practically all the active writers were tied to-

gether by a single alma mater, by the same teachers, and by the same courses. For the fiftieth anniversary of the institute, the Writers’ Union published a voluminous tome in 1982 entitled Recollections ofthe Literary Institute (Vosponot a few deminaniia o Litinstitute). There is much amusing material here scriptions of surprising encounters, memorable friendships, rare features of the

Soviet era. This book is a wonderful textbook of Soviet literature’s everyday ex-

istence. A peculiarity ofliterary life in the “era of stagnation” is the peaceful coexistence within one binding of Evgenii Evtushenko and Semen Babaevskii, Iurii Trifonov and Mikhail Godenko, Inna Goff and Semen Shurtakov, and

Natal’ia IP'ina and Iurii Bondarev—Soviet writers of different mind-sets. They all dedicate a few pages of reminiscences to their native Literary Institute, some in prose, others in poetry: Osobniak na Tverskom bul’vare,

Iunyi Gor’kovskii institut. Dver’ otkryta. Smelei, tovarishch! Nas nauki i knigi zhdut. Korotka u menia anketa, Biografiia korotka. Metrostroevtsa, ne poeta Prinimaiut siuda poka . . .

Kogda, provalivshis’ na tretem predmete, Ia vyshel na ulitsu, gordyi i khmuryi, Za mnoiu poshli (ia ne srazu zametil)

Kakie-to dve neponiatnykh figury. Ia nachal shagi pribavliat’ vorovato, Potom oglianulsia: pridetsia li drat’sia? Da eto zh iz nashei brigady rebiata— Kaitanov s Ufimtsevym! “Zdravstvuite, brattsy!” “Zdorovo!” otvetil neveselo Slavka (Kaitanov molchit, tol’ko tucha vo vzore).

“Pechal’naia nami poluchena spravka, Kak ty v institute brigadu pozorish’.”"! [Mansion on Tverskoi Boulevard,

Gorky’s young Institute. The door is open. Come on in, comrade!

Learning and books await us. My application is short,

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My biography is short. They take me for the meantime As a metro-builder, not a poet . . . When I failed the third subject, I went outside, proud and sullen, Behind me followed (I didn’t see right away) Two shadowy figures of some kind. I began to hasten my steps, like a thief, Then I glanced round: will I have to fight? But these were guys from our brigade— Kaitanov and Ufimtsev! “Greetings, brothers!” “Well done!”, Slavka answered, not smiling (Kaitanoy was silent, only a black cloud in his look).— “We've received the sad report, How you disgrace the brigade in the institute.”]

This is still the shock-worker writer's style—that of a “metro-builder, not a poet.” “Guys,” “brothers,” “the sad report,” “you disgrace the brigade,” “failed the third subject.” . . . Why did the hero of the “novel in verse” (“Volunteers”) not fail an exam, but rather “the subject” [“na... predmete”]? Because in

alternate-line rhyme he had “zametil.” Why does he leave, after the failure, “proud and sullen” [“gordyi i khmuryi” |? Because a rhyme was needed with the later figury. The picturesque poetry of Evgenii Dolmatovskii. Whether or not I have free time, whether a biting little autumnal drizzle is falling or it is snowing, every time I happen to be walking along Tverskoi Boulevard, without fail I will stop at a particular, apparently unremarkable,

iron fence. Mentally, I kneel down, deeply, I bow my bald head like a son, feeling some sort of strange coldness in my breast. Wherever you look here,

everything is your own, native and dear to you. The same gates flung open wide, the same courtyard, the same trees. In the heart of the courtyard is the same Hertzen’s House, the same doors I once entered so often. The same windows gaze at me—whether with joy or with grief, it is impossible to discern. It seems to be with joy. The same flowerbeds, the same walkways. . . . Without taking notice of me, tousle-headed fellows go into and out of the gates just there, with their energetic steps, and talk about some urgent matter of their own—apparently, the same kind of dreamers and the same kind of daredevils that my coevals and I once were.'”” Of course, the rain is not just “rain,” but a “little. . . drizzle,” and it is ob-

ligatorily “biting.” The “fellows” are “tousle-headed,” and it goes without saying that their steps are “energetic.” Clearly, they are “dreamers” and “daredev-

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ils.” The surfeit of feeling is expressed in the mental “kneeling.” The pose must be monumental, therefore it is necessary to bow (and inevitably, “like a son’!).

As ifincidentally, an unnecessary shade of something mystical and mysterious appears—the “strange coldness in my breast’—and having noted these “nuances,” the author does not refine them further. Then, there must without fail be some nuance of coarse self-irony—the head is bald. An essential attribute is “gentle humor”: the windows’ “gaze” is inscrutable. Let us imagine the au-

thor making the effort to “discern” whether it is “with joy or with grief.” He cannot stop with that, and adds “It seems to be with joy,” as well. It goes without saying that it will be “joy.” And finally, unrepeatably, like an autograph of his style and times, “Wherever you look here, everything is your own... .” Whose? Semen Babaevskii’s, of course. Ia b khotela otmotat’ nazad Lentu zhizni i vernut’sia snova

V milyi nash litinstitutskii sad, Gde brodila devochkoi surovoi.

To byla otlichnaia pora— Vzlety, neozhidannye starty. Letchiki, tankisty, snaipera Za studencheskie seli party. Veterany v dvadtsat’ s lishnim let Nachinali zhizn’ svoiu snachala I schitali zvanie “poet” Mnogo vyshe zvan’ia generala.

Na zare poslevoennykh dnei My, soldaty, ponimali chetko: Na Parnas probit’sia potrudnei, Chem na bezymiannuiu vysotku.

Zvezdnyi chas, nepovtorimyi chas— Kak liubilos’, verilos’, mechtalos’! Mnogo li teper’ ostalos’ nas— V zhizni i v Poezii ostalos’?! [I'd like to rewind, backward,

The tape of life, and return afresh To our dear Litinstitute garden, Where I wandered, a severe girl. That was an excellent time—

Raptures, unexpected flights. Pilots, tankmen, and snipers Sat behind the students’ benches.

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Veterans at just over twenty Began their life all over And esteemed the title of “poet” Much higher than the title “general.”

At the dawn of postwar days We soldiers understood perfectly: More difficult it is to break through to Parnassus Than to a nameless vantage-point.

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A starry time, an unrepeatable time— How one loved, believed, dreamed! Have many of us remained now— Remained in life and in Poetry?]

Anyone who remembers this unforgettable image of the “severe girl” saying “we soldiers,” this nostalgia for the “warring brotherhood” and these “veterans

at just over twenty” who after the war “sat behind the students’ benches,” this romanticization of the past (“How one loved, believed, dreamed!”), this naughty girlish gaze at the “pilots, tankmen, and snipers,” will easily recognize Iuliia Drunina.

With these exemplars of “individual styles,” one can study the history of Socialist Realist writing. Dolmatovskii, who belonged to the first generation of Literary Institute students, was already popular before the war; this is the poets’

generation: Margarita Aliger, Mikhail Matusovskii, and Konstantin Simonov. Babaevskii’s ascent occurred in the postwar years, and his is the prose writers’ generation: Mikhail Alekseev, Vasilii Azhaev, Mikhail Bubennov, Aleksandr Chakovskii, and Elizar Mal’tsev. Drunina’s “starry time, an unrepeatable time”

coincided with the era of the “thaw”: this is the “poets of the front” generation: Sergei Narovchatoy, Mikhail Lukonin, and others. Different generations of So-

viet writers: they all (the ones quoted and those only mentioned) are amazingly similar to each other. For a half-century, the ineradicable Soviet style seeped into the walls of Hertzen’s House, perhaps more permanently than even the 1920s tobacco smoke. . . .

Meanwhile . . . near midnight, the restaurant in Griboedov House, considered the best in Moscow, was filled with singing and dancing:

And suddenly from a nearby table, the word “Berlioz!!” flew out. The jazz suddenly fell apart and died down, as if someone had punched it with a fist. “What, what, what—what?!!”

“Berlioz!!!” Everybody started to jump up and rush about. Yes, a wave of grief shot up at the strange news about Mikhail

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Aleksandrovich. Someone bustled about, shouted that it was essential right now, then and there without leaving the place, to compose some sort of collective telegram and send it right away. But what kind of telegram, we ask, and where to send it? And why send it? Really, where? And why is any kind of telegram at all necessary for the man whose flattened temple is now squeezed in the dissector’s rubber-covered hands, whose neck the professor is now piercing with his curved needles? He is dead, and he doesn’t need any kind of telegram at all. It’s all over, we won't burden the telegraphs any more. Yes, he died, he’s dead. . . But we are still alive!!”*

In fact, with Berlioz’s death in the Patriarch’s Ponds, the strange events in Moscow (Griboedoy House was only one of many places) only began to unfold. They took their normal course, as if oiled by the oil that Annushka poured out.

CHAPTER

SEVEN

“Master Craftsmen” Socialist Realism and the “New Temper ofthe Writer” The work that provides bigger creations requires unsqueamish hands. . . —ANDRET

PLAT'IONOY,

“The Literature Factory,” 1926

I have no other writers for you. ——jOSEPH

STALIN

Gorky Among Us In an August 3, 1945, memorandum addressed to Central Committee Secre-

tary Georgii Malenkov, deputy chief of the committee’s Agitation and Propaganda Department Aleksandr Egolin (who was both an academic and a literary specialist) expressed the following assessments of the activities of Soviet

writers during the war:

Some, frightened by the difficulties, put down their pens in 1941-1942 and did not write anything. For example, K. Fedin, Vs. Ivanov, did not publish a single work of art in these years, “sitting created the kinds of works that aggravated the experiences people that were difficult enough without them; N. Aseev,

and V. Lugovskoi them out.” Others of the Soviet M. Zoshchenko,

I. Sel’vinskii, and K. Chukovskii created harmful works devoid of principles

or ideals.'

The first author in the list, Konstantin Fedin, might well be put in both “categories of writers.” He in fact did not write any works of art, and what he did write—the book Gorky Among Us (Gor’kii sredi nas)—was judged by Pravda a “harmful work.” Fedin’s “image of Gorky,” it seems, was “distorted.” From both 349

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Fedin’s correspondence with Gorky (and a third of the book was letters) and his

own reminiscences, it was revealed that the “founder of Socialist Realism,” who after a “series of vacillations” arrived at a “complete union with his own people, the Party, and the Soviet state,” was in the 1920s not only close to the “aesthetes” group called the “Serapion Brothers” but also nearly their teacher. Nonetheless, Gorky could have equally successfully been called “teacher” by former RAPPists and Perevalists, Smiths and futurists, fellow-travelers and proletarian writers, litcircleists and imagists, peasant poets and “proletariankolkhoz writers,” and others. Others who could boast of correspondence (perhaps a bit less than Fedin’s) were Fedor Gladkov and Leonid Leonov, Viache-

slav Shishkov and Aleksei Chapygin, Aleksei Tolstoi and Konstantin Treney, Semen Pod” iachev and Ol’ga Forsh, Mikhail Prishvin and Sergei SergeevTsenskii, and still others. Sometimes on the same day Gorky would answer letters to Perevalists (Prishvin and Ivan Kasatkin), peasant writers (Pod”iachev and Ivan Vol’nov), Smiths (Gladkov, Pavel Nizovoi, and Sergei Obradovich),

“proletarian poets” (Mikhail Gerasimov and Vladimir Kirillov), and others. Gorky was both with everyone and with nobody. Regarding the “literary struggle,” he ironically observed, “If A belongs to group B, then all the other letters of the alphabet are either hostile to him, or else they don’t exist.”* Gorky acknowledged the whole alphabet. According to Leonid Leonoy’s apt observation, “All of Soviet literature issued from Gorky’s broad sleeve,” similarly to the way in which Russian Realism had once “issued from Gogol’s ‘Overcoat.” Thus Gorky could easily be “pulled in” as teacher of the various currents in Soviet literature: as opposed to the second “founder’—Mayakovsky—he did not have to be “cleansed” of a “futurist past,” and his “certain vacillations” (“god-building” [“bogostroitel’stvo”| and Untimely Thoughts [Nesvoevremennye

mysli]) had always been in the realm of politics. “Aesthetically,” Gorky was pure and clean with respect to the Socialist Realism he “founded” (even the “godbuilding passions” that showed through in certain of his early artistic works was skillfully neutralized by Soviet criticism).

“Gorky among us”: this formula offended the sensitive ear of the Central Committee, because Fedin situated Gorky in the context of the wrong “us”; thus Gorky’s perpetual “aesthetic rightness” turned out to be doubtful. “Among us” could only refer to all Soviet writers, more precisely even, to the whole Union of Writers, whose own leaders affectionately called it the “collective Gorky.” Much has been said in the present work about RAPP, which became the real smithy in which Soviet writers on the cusp of the 1930s were forged. However, as Marietta Chudakova wrote, “The word ‘RAPPist’ long ago acquired

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the function of a universal skeleton key for the problems of the era. But this function is gone—today this word . . . incarnates the depth of amany-layered phenomenon. Not uncommonly, the rebukes addressed to RAPPists could with just as much foundation be readdressed to Gorky. He was undoubtedly ruled by the profound conviction that writing is only a higher degree of overall literacy, and that liquidation of literacy-was the first step, but a direct one, toward making this profession accessible to the broadest range of people.” Thanks to Boris Groys, the designation “LEFist” became another “universal skeleton key for the problems of the era.” But the “many-layered phenomenon’ noted by Chudakova does not recognize any “universal skeleton keys.” So it appears that one should not speak of “readdressed” rebukes (to “rebuke” his-

tory is in general meaningless), but rather about the various historical phases of the establishment of Soviet culture. It is hardly necessary to say that 1932 was a turning point in this history. It is

true that Gorky’s “influence on social consciousness and the literary process was more prolonged and therefore stronger than strictly RAPPist” influence.*? RAPP was dissolved in 1932, and beginning in 1933, Gorky was forbidden to leave the

country, taking up the relay baton, as it were, from RAPP, in his own “teacherhood” (without, of course, the RAPPist “administrative enthusiasm’). The word

“RAPPist” (like “LEFist” as well, by the way) thus does not “separate the researcher from the subject,” or “place the limit on historical-sociological thinking just where it should begin,” but rather has only a defined historical boundary. This boundary is Maksim Gorky. Gorky became a curious “bridge” to the Union of Writers and to Socialist Realist aesthetics. He was a bridge out of history (in fact the last living classic writer); a bridge between the most varied revolutionary utopias of creativity; and a bridge between literature and authority (a role that Gorky assumed from the first days of the revolution and that he continued to play until the last days of his life, although as the patriarch of Soviet literature, Gorky was not only a buffer but also the “transmitter of the mounting pressure of the political pressmachine”). Gorky is, in all respects, a key figure for understanding the growth process of Soviet literature in both the aesthetic and institutional dimensions. Of all things in the world, Gorky needs most of all the organs and devices that would cover the orifice of the ears like an eye is closed.

Gorky is burdened by quantity just as old Russia was burdened by an army of twenty million during the war. His passion for preserving culture—all of it—is more developed than

anything else. His motto is “Don’t walk on the grass”.

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He is a writer to the end. Even more than by the idea that water consists of oxygen and hydrogen, he is struck by the business of writing. From under his tasks as a teacher and through his lyricism, he gravitates toward the only necessary thing—toward craftsmanship and vividness . . .

Cut down, cut short by failures, unable to finish his pieces, carrying on himself the dactyloscopic traces of his teachers’ fingers, sick with all the ailments of Russian literature—lack of plot and attentiveness, teachiness—

Gorky blooms like a showy shrub. I love Gorky tenderly and truly. For his admiration of craftsmanship, for how he acted toward us young writers... . °

Thus Viktor Shklovskii began his Successes and Failures of Maksim Gorky (Udachi i porazheniia Maksima Gor’kogo). This was one of the books for

which Shklovskii was never forgiven. Unforgiven in the era when Gorky no longer had “successes” or “failures,” only triumphs (or sometimes, “mistakes owing to vacillations”), transformed during his lifetime into the “chief writer of

the Soviet land,” the “gatherer of literary forces,” “founder,” “forefather,” “patriarch,” “inspirer,” “storm petrel,” and “standard-bearer.” Every one of Shkloyskii’s attributes of Gorky—despite all their surprising contradictions—is true.

The phenomenon of Gorky is the combination of the uncombinable, the natural synthesizing of his aesthetics, which, as Lenin could have said, consisted of “screaming contradictions.” One of these contradictions is Gorky’s understanding of the nature of creativity, which, although lying on the surface, has not to this day been understood in the sea of literature about Gorky. Shkloyskii found cause to “love Gorky tenderly and truly” for the latter's “admiration of craftsmanship.” In speaking earlier of “craftsmanship,” however, I have pointed out the difference between the LEFist and RAPPist concepts of the goals of “training”: Shklovskii called for “learning the technique of the writer's craft,” while the RAPPists advocated “learning from the classics.” Gorky was able to easily reconcile these two approaches: “The question of one’s relationship to classic literature amounts to a question of craftsmanship. Any kind of work requires a craftsman,”° he wrote in his aforementioned 1929 article “The

Working Class Must Educate Its Own Craftsmen of Culture.” This formula cannot be said to be either definitively LEFist or RAPPist: the last sentence sounds completely LEFist, but the whole passion of the article is aimed against the pronouncements of the “anticlassicists,” in defense of the classics. And it was like this every time: Gorky uses the same words that the fundamental debating parties do, but in his words there is a completely different, synthesizing meaning.

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Look at how Gorky spoke to the workers’, village, and military correspondents in Tbilisi in 1928:

The majority of you suffer from a deficiency ofliterary technique, or to put it simply, from the lack of knowledge of how to write. . ... I think from time to time we ought to set up courses for workers’ and village correspondents, in which literary technique would be taught; so that you could learn how to write. And again:

There must be study, some kind of courses must be set up, wherein this knowledge of writing would be taught. .. . Take me, for example: I did not

study anywhere, but I am a writer and I know how to write—I learned how. Why could others not learn?’ Noted further in this transcript:

Question: They say the amateur circles have outlived their time, and that it is time to choose a different form. Is this true? Gorky: But what form? A school? No, I think the amateur circles have not outlived their time, we need them, and they should be in the villages and factories.

Comrades, I must close now, because I have to go to another place and speak there.® In “another place,” with different correspondents, beginners, litcircleists

(there were hundreds of such speeches and meetings in Gorky’s life), he would repeat the same thing: “Some will no doubt desire to write novels about ten quires long. It is better to wait for this, since one can ruin very good material. One must first learn a bit, and then he can make a very good cupboard, a good mounting, and so on, in a word, a good thing. But if he does not learn, then

there will be no cupboard, nor chair, nor axe.”? This is how Gorky responded to the question of “socialist competition in literature” as propagandized by RAPPists. The “technicalism” of RAPPists fed on a different source from that of LEFists: for the former, this was an unattainable dream, embodied in “the classics”;

the latter regarded “technique” as property that they were prepared to hand over to beginners in exchange for certain concessions. But Gorky’s technicalism, without rising above RAPPist and LEFist narrow-mindedness at all, as

one can see, combined both sources within itself: this was the technicalism of the “chief workers’ correspondent of the Russian land” (as the LEFists called him) who had left the lower strata via his famous “universities,” via complex

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relations of attraction to and repulsion from classic writers, but simultaneously, the technicalism of precisely the “craftsman” who confidently wielded the “technique of the literary craft” (“I am not one of those people,” Gorky would say about himself, “who, not knowing how to swim, try to teach others the art of swimming”'®),

Primitiveness of logic is only the external manifestation of the reductionism that set apart the revolutionary-era mentality. Everything needed to be explained not only in light of the new “scientific worldview” but also in the interests of accessibility to the “broad masses oflaborers” who turned up center stage in the historical creation. Gorky was not pleased with Dmitrii Gorbov (with respect to the latter’s 1929 Searching for Galatea {Poiski Galatei]): one of the beginners, Gorky notes, “howls bitterly”: “‘I read five books—here he named five

authors, ‘but I can’t understand who is right. And who is this Galatea?” Gorky drives the point home: Take, for example, Galatea—what good is she? What can this nymph tell a person who lives on the banks of the Kotorosl’, in which there are remarkably large perch, but where no nymphs swim? It goes without saying that it is highly commendable for a critic to be literate, but is it necessary to confuse a young person with one’s knowledge of ancient myths, when this person wants to learn how to write about the comedies and dramas of current reality in a politically literate and vivid way?"!

These “comedies and dramas” of the man who wants to write “in a politically literate and vivid way” are close to Gorky, reminding him as it were of his own “universities.” “Training” acquires a completely transparent meaning: one must not “confuse a young person with one’s knowledge of ancient myths,” but rather must teach him “technique.” This also determined Gorky’s concept of “learning from the classics”: “Above all one must use the technique of the classics. What will you get from Dostoyevsky, besides technique?”!? In an article about literary technique, Gorky explains what he has in mind: “Thinking and cognition are nothing but technique.” Even more concretely, “The thinking of a writer in images is nothing but a technique of organizing working experience in forms of words and images.” However, “technique—the

process of working—must not be confused with the concept of form, as some of our critics do.” Gorky was polemicizing against not only the LEFists but also against the RAPPist concept of talent (“So fly away then, the sooner the better!”); however, Gorky situated “observation,” “comparison,” “selection,”

and “imagination” (from his viewpoint, the most important operations in creative work) “inside” technique.'’ “Talent” consists only of the ability to master such “technique.”

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Gorky expanded on this idea in his speech at a celebratory meeting of the plenum of the Tbilisi Soviet: It is altogether unimportant that Aleksei Peshkov as the result of certain particular reasons became Maksim Gorky. This is nog important. Only the will of aperson, comrades, directed toward a goal, is important. Important is the desire to be what a person wants to become, to freely do what he wants to do. These are precisely the conditions that are given to us. I repeat again, insistently, that I was not born with any special germs of talent. I say this sincerely. . . Among you are not a few people with a much more difficult past than mine. . . . These people are not worse than I, they were not born, in my opinion, with any special abilities given them by nature, they acquired them in working. Comrades, it is very important to understand this idea. A person can do everything he wants to do for himself, if he really only wants to do it, if his whole will is directed toward this goal. Then he will be able, he will do it, he will triumph."

Gorky’s “revolutionary romanticism,” as one can see, went far beyond the confines of his strictly artistic works. What Soviet criticism has called “Gorky’s faith in man and labor” became a programmatic aesthetic factor, and a curi-

ous aesthetic voluntarism defined Gorky’s attitude toward the workers’ and village correspondents’ creative work, as well as toward the “masses’ literary movement” headed by RAPP and toward the “call of shock-workers into literature,” which he accepted “like all reasonable Soviet people,” in the opinion of this criticism, “with delight.”'* He even suggested that it would not hurt “young writers, especially those who have more or less decently written two or three short stories, who put on airs, already considering themselves to be experts in literary matters, and completely stop learning” to learn a bit from shock-workers, from whose works “one can extract something valu-

able and profoundly instructive.”'® The other side of this “romanticism” was Gorky’s “rationalism,” his profound belief that a rationally conceived “technique” is acquired in the process of “conscientious study.” At the heart of this belief lay a view of creativity as a primarily “conscientious” process. In a March 1935 speech at the Second Plenum of the Board of Directors of the

Union of Soviet Writers, Gorky called attention to the words of one of the presenters, who had said that “the most active participation in the creation of

an image is that of unconscious creative work.” “This is not true, comrades!”, Gorky exclaimed. “One must not speak of unconscious work at all, in my opinion.”'” “Never before in Russia,” Gorky wrote movingly from the safe distance of Capri,

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has there been such a large number of youths writing verses and prose; the

passion for literature, one might say, has taken on the nature ofan epidemic. Knowing the kind of horrible conditions young writers are working in, I of course do not let myself think that literature attracts them only as “easy

work.” In the first place, this work is far from easy, and in the second, you can see and feel quite clearly that youth are being obliged to write by their saturation with “the impressions of daily life.”'®

Inspired by an “incarnation of adream,” Gorky created amazing images: “The Union of Soviets is an enormous body composed of one and one-half million units who, working unceasingly, discovering and binding into life the mighty revolutionary energy of their will and reason, are creating new forms of the state, a new culture.”'? The image of the “enormous body” of the Soviet state developing a new culture later acquired a sort of “structuredness”: “Never before has the writer been so interesting, so close to the mass of readers, as he is in our times, among us, in the Union of Soviets, never has he been esteemed so highly by the literate masses, and this esteem is natural, because the masses see how they themselves are creating writers and how they are reflected in their books.””° It would be difficult to describe the phenomenon of Soviet culture more precisely. In his famous article “On the Use of Literacy” (“O pol’ze gramotnosti”), Gorky returned to a favorite subject: “Among us a process that has never existed at any time or in any place is developing—people from the plow and the lathe are going into literature by the hundreds, but this is not at all many for a country with a population of one hundred fifty million.” Of course, Gorky conceded, they were still “technically helpless,” but they had “indubitable talents,” and “almost all have enormous life experience, such as the writers of my generation did not have,” since the latter came into literature “via the gimnaziia and university, from a good book.” Although these “old men” had “technical training,” they often had no talent whatsoever and only thanks to an excellent knowledge of the language did they “make an honorable name for themselves” in literature. Therefore Gorky animatedly demanded “more attention to young writers, more concern for them!”?! The motif “this is not at all many” would become pervasive in Gorky’s ap-

praisals of the “massiveness of the literary movement.” He began the article “On Beginning Writers” (“O nachinaiushchikh pisateliakh”) with the statement that “by the most conservative accounts, there are fifty thousand people who call themselves writers” (this was three years before the “call of shockworkers into literature”!), but immediately added: “Of course, this is not very many for a country with a population of one hundred fifty million.” This

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arithmetic, which in a strange way always replaced algebra in the aesthetics of

the writer whose voice was so keenly obeyed by Russian literature in the 1920s and 1930s, reached its apogee in Gorky’s speech at the opening of the First Congress of Soviet Writers: The Union of Soviet Writers brings together 1,500 writers, which if counted

against the masses gives us one writer for each 100,000 readers. This is not that many, for the inhabitants of the Scandinavian Peninsula at the beginning of this century had one writer for each 230 readers. The population of the Union of Socialist Republics constantly, almost daily, demonstrates its talent, however we must not think that we will soon have 1,500 writers of genius. We will be dreaming to say 50. And not to fool ourselves, we would say 5 genial ones and 45 very talented ones. I think that even this number will be enough

to start with. The remainder will be people who do not yet relate to reality attentively enough, who organize their material badly and develop it carelessly. To this remainder we must add the many hundreds of candidates for the [Writers] Union and then the hundreds of “beginner” writers in all the~

republics and provinces. Hundreds of them are writing, and dozens are already being printed.’

This

hierarchical

logic, however,

was

the later product of Gorky-as-

patriarch. But six years before this Congress, he wrote in the article “On the Exalted and the “Beginners” (“O vozvelichennykh i ‘nachinaiushchikh”) that

he was by no means “great” but simply “just like any of the beginner writers in our times should be.” Such self-denigration, of course, in fact only raised Gorky above the battle raging around him: to RAPPist and LEFist ambitions he contrasted the modest delight of the “worker-peasant masses” that “as one would expect, are producing from among themselves an intellectual force that after ten years will be bound to take the press and literature of the Union of Soviets into its own hands.”” Gorky’s aesthetics turned out to be amazingly in tune with the times. Yes, Gorky was convinced that “it would be more useful for young men to refuse to call themselves ‘creators’ in a country where millions of modest workers are required””®; yes, he advised beginner poets and prose writers to “cast the aristocratic ecclesiastical little word ‘creativity’ out of their lexicon and replace it with a simpler and more precise one: work””’; but in the context of Gorky’s logic, this “work” was devoid of the industrial nuances of Proletkult slogans, LEFist specialization, and RAPPist amateur work. It was a term corroborated

by the “gold reserve of craftsmanship.” In an era where “technique decided everything,” the demand for “craftsmen” became unusually high. As early as 1929, Gorky formulated a new slogan: “The working class must educate its

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own craftsmen of culture.”2* Not its own writers, but its own craftsmen. This was an important corrective. This slogan would be stamped on the sacred tablets of Soviet culture, in Gorky’s speech at the First Congress of Soviet Writers: “The proletarians’ state must educate thousands of outstanding ‘craftsmen of culture,’ ‘engineers of souls.”””” Gorky participated in this work directly and in a most active way. He was in constant correspondence with young writers,” as well as with litcircleists and the circles themselves, which had elected him their honorary chairman and named themselves after him (Gorky’s voluminous correspondence with factory literary circles from Ivanovo, Tver’, and Stalingrad has been preserved).*! “Fostering the younger generation” became Gorky’s favorite theme

in his role as chairman of the Union of Soviet Writers: “Sharing our experience with the youth that are now being created [sic] in the factories, at least in

working on factory histories and in the lit. circles, is extremely important, profoundly important.”* As I have pointed out, he played a key role in the organization of the Literary Institute and of the journal Literaturnaia ucheba, convinced as he was that “in our country it is unacceptable that the growth of literature should develop haphazardly; we are duty-bound to prepare a replacement for ourselves, to expand the number of workers of the word ourselves.”*? This was from Gorky’s closing speech at the First Congress of Soviet Writers, and the very next day, at the First Plenum of the Board of Directors of the Union of Soviet Writers, he began his speech with the same theme: “Work with youth . . . is extremely necessary work in our conditions. We must develop a whole army of outstanding writers—we must! . . We must develop an agenda, an editorial commission to create this agenda is necessary, and then we must create an editorial board for Literaturnaia ucheba that will undertake this matter seriously.” All of this gave Gorky the right to assume the role of “teacher of creative youth,” as well as that of “class leader.” He was concerned not only with the level of “craftsmanship” but also with “morals.” In the article “Literary Amuse-

ments,” troubled by the ambitions of “youth,” with even a hint of melancholy Gorky recalled the RAPPists, “under whom . . . the morals of literary youth . . . were not so shaky.” Gorky’s influence on the formation of Soviet eee culture did not end here. Gorky’s aesthetic itself possessed an enormous inner integrity, since it was the fruit of his own biography. It was not an acquired aesthetic, not developed by someone else, not a received aesthetic, but rather one attained to by Gorky during the course of his entire life, the events of which would have been enough for ten people. It was for this reason that with such passion Gorky

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stamped his own aesthetic code onto the new Socialist Realist aesthetics that he created. Convinced of the immutable significance of the “knowledge of life,” the “exactness of portrayal,” and the “truth of what is being described,” Gorky persistently taught “realism” to beginning writers. The réquirement for “verisimilitude” pervades his entire aesthetic. Soviet criticism was right when it derived its formulas directly from Gorky’s logic (“The typical in literature must *

be an artistic reflection of the typical that exists in reality”>®), or when it sim-

ply “lifted” ideas from him. (“Ifa writer lacks a sufficiently large reserve of observations, and has a low level of professional training, it is impossible for him to show the phenomena of reality in a way convincing to the reader, and consequently, to attain to a genuine artistic verisimilitude in his work. Gorky tirelessly reminded us about this, pointing out to beginner writers the only true approach to the literary business.”?”) When he initiated Literaturnaia ucheba, Gorky stated: Genuine literary art is always very simple, picturesque, and almost physically palpable. One must write so that the reader can see what is represented by the words as perceptible to the touch. Such craftsmanship is possible only when the writer himself knows perfectly well what he is portraying. If he does not write simply or clearly enough, it means that he himself sees poorly what he is writing.**® Developing this theme in Letters to Beginner Writers (Pis'ma nachinaiushchim

literatoram), Gorky related the “realism” of the writer to that of the reader: What does the work of a writer amount to? He portrays—arranges, encloses in images, pictures, and characters—his own observations, impressions, thoughts, and his real-life experience. The work of an author has a more or

less strong effect on a reader only when the reader sees everything the writer is showing him, when the writer gives him the opportunity to also “portray’ —to flesh out and add to—the pictures, images, figures, and characters provided by the writer, from his own personal, reader’s experience, from his

own reserve of impressions and knowledge. It is from the merger and coincidence of the writer’s experience with the reader's experience that artistic truth is obtained—the special convincingness of the literary art that also explains the force of literature’s influence on people.”

The almost complete coincidence of the processes of creation and reception calls one’s attention. And given such a similarity of processes, if the transformation of the reader into a writer does not occur, then one may suppose that it is only because of the former's lack of “craftsmanship.” In 1932, RAPP secretary Ivan Makar’ev published Gorkys Notes on Begin-

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ning Writers’ Books (Pometki Gor’kogo na knizhkakh nachinaiushchikh pisatelei) to mark Gorky’s forty years of literary activity. The book comprises Gorky’s corrected versions of manuscripts by beginner Red Army authors subsequently published by the “Voennyi vestnik” (“Military herald”) publisher in

the series “Library of Stories About the Civil War” (“Biblioteka rasskazov o grazhdanskoi voine”). It contains endless corrections by Gorky of language and of “errors against truth.” Gorky corrected thousands of such texts, some

of which remained only in manuscript form. He was a great editor. But his corrections always had one and the same goal: language and “realism”—the things he had himself struggled to perfect. The demand for “realism” sometimes takes on outright paranoid forms for Gorky. He is displeased, for example, that the action in Aleksandr Molchanov’s Peasant (Krest’ianin) takes place

in an unnamed village, which makes it impossible to judge the lifelikeness of

the peasants’ speech and the accuracy of the description of daily life. Gorky remarked, “We know the map of our huge country very badly; we would know it much better if publishers would print on the blank page before a book's title a map of the locale wherein the people portrayed in the book live and act.”*° Gorky also applied this idea to “gentry” literature, which he called “regional” since “it drew its material mainly from the central zone of Russia, and its basic character is a muzhik primarily from the Tula or Orel Province; but after all, there is the muzhik of Novgorod, or those from the Volga, Siberia, the Urals, Ukraine, and so forth. Bunin’s or Turgenev’s muzhiks, for example, are totally unlike those from Viatka or Iaroslavl.”*! “Alike,” “unlike,” “portray,” “describe,” “reflect”—these are Gorky’s favorite words. Here is his advice to a litcircleist: Never begin your stories with a “dialogue” or conversation—this is an oldfashioned, unsuccessful device [many works with this “unsuccessful device” spring to mind—from

War and Peace to Chekhov's short stories —E.D.]. The

reader must first see who is talking, and where, that is, a talk or voices must be preceded by a small description of the setting, and one must also provide sketches of the people, the appearance of the people having the talk. A stout, ruddy, barefoot man is talking with a small fidgety hook-nosed man, and so on. The setting—a hut, something characteristic in it must be shown, so that

it immediately sticks in the reader’s memory.’

The following letter to a litcircleist begins with apparently the opposite advice, but about the same thing: “The stories you have written are not bad; their failing is that you simply talk too much about them, but you show—portray— your characters and their surrounding life poorly.” Gorky talks about the same thing to both the litcircleist and the famous

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writer—the “lifelikeness,” “verisimilitude,” and “exactness” of the “portrayal,” “representation,” “description,” “reflection,” and so on. He writes to Zoshchenko, “It seems to me that you sometimes do not choose your material quite correctly, that is, you operate with facts that are not typical enough.” Such claims are particularly numerous in letters to the Serapion Brothers. Gorky taught the skill of “operating” with “facts” especially passionately. In this one approaches the issue that has preoccupied both Sovietological and Soviet criticism more than any other. The former criticism could not understand how Gorky, who had all his life felt all kinds of oppression and had struggled against it, who “knew life” so well, could go into raptures over prison labor and the penal “communes,” turning a quite blind eye; the latter criticism, on the contrary, credited him for this “blind eye,” seeing in it the apex of Gorky’s

“knowledge of life” and the “triumph of realism.” Gorky and truth—this is truly an enormous subject, but one that is of great interest here from the aspect of aesthetic agendas (in the perspective of the So-

cialist Realist theory and practice of creative work). Gorky’s speeches and correspondence with workers’ correspondents, litcircleists, and beginner writers shed the fullest light on this subject. Gorky’s “realism” was of a special type: as he vigilantly watched for inexactitudes in language and quotidian details, he

was no advocate of “pretty lies”; but the trauma of the October Revolution was a defining factor in his biography. In 1917 and 1918, the era of Untimely

Thoughts, Gorky for the first time not only lost the mass reader but also was rejected by him. At that time he realized that he had ended up on the side of the losers. Gorky did not know how to lose. From that time on, “realism” remained for him a “method of describing” prerevolutionary reality (and since he knew no other “method,” he in fact did not write in Soviet times—for two decades—a single artistic work about “Soviet reality”). On the other hand, it

was precisely during this time that he developed a new attitude toward “truth” that he propagandized intensively. 1927: “But what should workers’ correspondents write more about—good or bad? I am for their writing more about good. Why? Why, because the bad has not become worse than it always was, but the good we have is better than

it was at any time and in any place.” 1928: “Of course self-criticism is necessary, but not to the point of hysteria... . Often ‘self-criticism’ in its tone completely blends with the criticism of our most spiteful enemies”“®; “Perhaps, comrades, you should not always ‘air

your dirty laundry’ on a street that is hostile to you?”*” 1929: “All sorts of ‘negative phenomena exist, they even predominate over phenomena of an opposite nature. . . . This is of course true, and pointing out

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the existence of all sorts of abominations is considered serving the truth. That is the way it really was in the time when a writer, seeing the deformity of reality quite well, could not escape anywhere from its vicious circle, and it still is that way in those countries wherein this vicious circle has not been broken. . . . The working class says, literature must be one of the instruments of culture in my hands, it must serve my cause. . . . This voice is the voice of anew history. Does young literature hear it well? I would say that it hears it badly. Badly, because in passively submitting itself to the old tradition of adenunciatory and negative attitude toward reality, it does not reflect the second reality clearly enough, and in portraying the old truth, it does not notice the new one... . Literature does not have enough of the spirit of courage, the spirit of heroism, while reality is already heroic.”** 1931: “You maintain that I do not see the truth? I see two of them. One of

them is yours, the old decrepit one that has a withered left eye—toothless, and feeding on the filth that it created itself. The other one is young, animated, inexhaustibly energetic, rushing forward to its own high goal without looking around, and at times it falls into the pits dug inimically and vengefully on its difficult path by the slaves of the old truth”*’; “Not everyone by far knows how to see reality such as it is, many are still looking at the present from the past, from the distance, from one side. . . . Our tutor is our reality. Enemies exaggerate the strength of its negative phenomena and belittle the importance of

positive achievements””’; “A special kind of ‘truth’ exists, that serves as spiritual food only for misanthropes, for the skeptics whose skepticism is based on ignorance. .. . This is an old, rotten, dying truth, it is slops for pigs. . . . I see and know very well how it hinders the work of honest people. But I am against using it to feed and comfort the people who have been justly humiliated by history”®'; “One must ask oneself the question, first, what is truth? And second, why do we need truth, and what kind? What kind of truth is more important? The truth that is dying out or the one we are building? Can we not bring some part of that old truth as a sacrifice to our truth? In my opinion, we can””*; “In literature—and in yours particularly, in your class literature during this era—what is important? Not the dark aspects of life that are being abandoned, and rather quickly abandoned. ... What kind of truth do we need? The truth that stands before us as a goal and which we place in front of all the laboring world.”” One can observe how from year to year Gorky’s new “stereoscopic” vision strengthened, which began to annoy even Stalin, who considered it necessary to separate himself publicly from Gorky’s “struggle for truth” at the apex of the campaign for self-criticism. But Gorky’s position was not even influenced by

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Stalin’s famous letter in which the leader explained to the embittered advocate of “realism” that “we cannot do without self-criticism, we cannot at all, Aleksei Maksimovich.”™ Stalin’s position should be understood, however, not from this

letter, but from his concrete “organizational” support of Gorky’s thetoric. The Central Committee consistently supported Gorky’s plans, wherein two of his “truths” materialized, by publishing, on the.one hand, the journals Nashi dostizhentia (Our accomplishments), SSSR na stroike (The USSR in construction), Istoriia fabrik i zavodov (The history of the factories and plants), and Lindi pervoi 1 vtorot piatilerki (People of the first and second Five-year plans), and on the

other, the journal Za rubezhom (Abroad), which portrayed the “old truth.” The “debate about truth” that Gorky had initiated earlier, via his character Luka in the play The Lower Depths (Na dne), now entered its final stages. The

Socialist Realist vision had been developed practically by Gorky in the course of the “literary training” of workers’ correspondents and beginners. Everything that he had repeated in letters to workers’ correspondents and shock-workers

now went into his “foundation-laying” works about Socialist Realism: So that the poisonous unbearable nastiness of the past can be brought to light and understood well, we must develop in ourselves the ability to look at it from the height of the accomplishments of the present, from the height of the great goals of the future. This elevated point of view should and will awaken the proud, joyous passion that will endow our literature with a new tone, will help it create new forms, will create the new direction that we need—socialist realism, which—it goes without saying—can be created on [the basis of ] the

facts of socialist experience.”

It was precisely in Gorky’s aesthetics that the separation of realism into “form and content” occurred: the “portrayal of life in the forms of life itself” became easy to combine with Gorky’s “truths” that had split in two. Moreover, Gorky proved not only the organicity of such duality but also its creative productivity. He accomplished what the RAPPists had not succeeded in attaining with their “unorganic” restraint imposed on the artist, and their “direct impressions.” He transformed “realism” into a style. This stylization ofrealism is his enormous contribution to Soviet aesthetics. Gorky’s aesthetics in an ideal way turned out to “fit” the new politicalaesthetic project that Stalin named “Socialist Realism.” Gorky’s “new truth” became a part of it in the form of “revolutionary romanticism.” In 1934, Gorky still did not even discern completely where his “Revolutionary Romanticism” ended and the “Socialist Realism” introduced by Stalin began. That year he wrote, “Revolutionary Romanticism is in essence the pseudonym of Socialist Realism, the purpose of which is not only to critically portray the past in the

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present, but mainly to facilitate the consolidation of what is revolutionarily attained in the present, and the elucidation of the high goals of the socialist future.” As early as 1931, in discussing the “two truths,” Gorky had stated: “Reality is monumental, it has long since been worthy of broad canvases, broad generalizations in images. Should we not look for the possibility of combining realism and romanticism into something else capable of portraying the heroic present times in brighter colors and talking about it in a higher tone, more worthy of it?”” Accordingly, he challenged “young shock-workers who have come into literature” to “learn to provide syntheses, not fragments and pieces. Broad generalizations, and big pictures, are needed. Hence serious study is inevitable and necessary.”** And the shock-workers diligently “studied” Gorky’s ability to “see.” No, it was not Zhdanov who invented the Socialist Realist formula that he used in his speech at the First Congress of Soviet Writers, “truthful depiction of life in its revolutionary development,” when he called upon writers to “look into tomorrow.” This formula belonged to Gorky, who had already written in 1930: “I personally think ‘realism’ could cope with its difficult task if it, in ex-

amining personality in the process of ‘formation’ by the path from ancient philistine and animal individualism to socialism, would portray a person not only as he is today, but as he should be—and will be—tomorrow.”*? What

Gorky had just yesterday “personally” thought, had in four years hardened into the chiseled formulas of the Regulations of the Union of Soviet Writers. If one recalls Chudakova’s remark, Gorky’s influence on the literary process was not only “more lasting” than the RAPPists’, but indeed more profound, since it was multiplied by his enormous authority and personal experience, both always more meaningful than any institution. One may seek the “roots of Socialist Realism” in the 1920s theories and manifestos, or in the inventions

of authority, as much as one likes. But there is the logic of the culturalhistorical process and what was in those days called the “social mandate.” As Shklovskii explained this in 1919, “The matter proceeds thus: Having exhausted the old forms, ‘high’ art ends up in an impasse. The tension of the artistic atmosphere weakens—and then the infiltration of elements of noncanonized art into it begins, art that usually by this time has managed to develop new artistic devices.” The process examined in this book affirms Shklovskii’s truth: “In the history of art there is one very important feature: the inheritance of seniority passes not from father to eldest son, but from uncle to nephew.”*! Soviet literature was no exception. Among the other family secrets, perhaps the darkest link is in its genealogy: to use Shklovskii’s metaphor, the bond be-

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tween the “nephew” and the “eldest son”—in the terminology of those days, the “creative union.” ‘

“Brigade Creativity”; or, An Ordinary Story Five hundred eighteen and 1,040. In the early 1930s these numbers were as

hard to forget as one’s own home telephone number. There were repeated everywhere, countless times. They were even used for the names of “industrial collectives” (for example, the “518 and 1,040 Shock Brigade”). They were the watchwords of the “third, decisive year” of the first five-year plan, according to

which 518 factories and 1,040 machine-and-tractor stations were to be built in 1931. As the country was restructured, so was Soviet literature, along with it.

Thus the “restructuring of literary-artistic organizations” found writers on the move—they spent 1931-1933 on the road. It seems that in Moscow only the leaders of RAPP remained, issuing directives and promoting new slogans (even at that, they did it as if passing the time before being driven out),-while “shockworkers poured into literature” from all directions and writers headed for the “five-year-plan construction projects,” as if freeing up their Moscow places for the newly arrived “young people.” Before the Soviet writer (after the actual closing of the borders in 1929-1930), the limitless space of the Soviet country

that was being restructured opened up. While on the way, writers had time to answer the journalists’ questions about “creative plans.” There were no plans—there were endless trips. On the road—in between trips to Magnitogorsk—Valentin Kataev took time to say: “Construction is taken not only aesthetically but practically, and this is the most reliable method of assimilating the new thematic strata. . . . Writers should travel as much as possible.” Several other writers caught their breath to oblige the journalists: Hurriedly—in between trips to the construction site of the Kramatorsk machine-building factory, to Zlatoust, and the Urals—Vsevolod

Ivanov: “Involving writers in the creation of a history of factories and plants is one of the best methods of including artists in contemporary events.”® Recently returned from Baku to Moscow, Lev Slavin: “I’ve been going to Baku for several years in a row. I’m studying the oil problem comprehensively and, so it seems, not without some success. Oil is an extraordinarily profitable ma-

terial for a writer.” Just back in Moscow from the Urals machine-and-tractor

factory, Aleksei Surkov: “One ought to work in a factory chosen as an object of study for at least four to six months. . . . There is no purpose in traveling to places only as a ‘writer,’ with the special goal of only ‘collecting material’ like bees collecting honey. One must be able to become a participant in the

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construction site, one of the people it needs.”® Arriving from Turksib, Amir Sargidzhan: | worked as a navvy in Turksib, so as to get more squarely into the very thick of the work, so the “distance” that often hinders a journalist from getting closer to the workers would disappear. . . . Trips are absolutely necessary for a writer. The country is alive at its outlying districts, construction is felt the most prominently there. The writer who spends too much time sitting in his own study dooms himself to beastly old age.

laroslav Smeliakov: “At the end of1932 and in early 1933, I was in the Urals— in Magnitogorsk, Cheliabinsk, and Sverdlovsk. This trip provided me with an extraordinary amount [of material]. And now I am writing a great epic poem

about the Urals, about the new construction project.”°’ Mikhail Karpov: “I have just returned from the sowing campaign in the Moscow Region. Before

that, I had traveled about the sovkhozes of Bashkiriia for a whole year, because I am writing about sovkhozes. . . . It is impossible to write about our times without traveling.”® Boris Galin, who had managed to spend many months during 1931 and 1932 in the Stalingrad and Cheliabinsk tractor factories and

the Khar’kov machine-building factory: “Not haphazard, but ary trips provide an awful lot. You could even say they shape These trips in fact “provided an awful lot’—from them the essay (Galin, B. Agapov, N. Atarov, V. Fink, I. Zhiga, M.

planned, ‘itinera writer.”® Soviet industrial Ilin, I. Kataev,

V. Kantorovich, I. Sokolov-Mikitov, and K. Paustovskii) and novel (Ilia Eren-

burg’s The Second Day {Dew vtoroi], lakov I'in’s The Big Assembly-Line [Bol’shoi konveier], Fedor Gladkov’s Energy [Energiia], Mikhail Kozakov’s

Time Plus

Time [Vremia plius vremia], Aleksandr Malyshkin’s People from the “Sticks,” Leonid Leonov’s Soviet River [Sov], Marietta Shaginian’s Hydrocentral, Valentin Kataev’s Time, Forward! [Vremia, vpered], Vasilii I’enkov’s The Driving Axle [Vedushchaia os’], and Iurii Krymov’s The Tanker “Derbent” [Tanker Derbent])

were born in the early 1930s. These journeys were not “haphazard,” but rather, as Galin said, “itinerary” trips. One need not doubt that they “shaped a writer.”

Yet again, Gorky took the role of author of the ideological “itinerary.” On the cusp of the 1930s, the chief Soviet writer was seized by a real “mania for history.” One after another, grandiose projects arose—“history of factories and plants,” “history of the civil war,” “history of cities and villages,” “history of the young person,” “history of the town,” “history of urban culture,” “history of the two five-year plans,” and many other “histories.” In his “historical” projects, Gorky succeeded in endowing his aesthetic agenda with a pragmatic dimension. At the start, his agenda lacked, first, a “union” with writers and, sec-

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ond, a “social mandate.” Both were acquired in the course of these broadly developing works. Gorky energetically advertised his projects widely in the central Soviet and Party press. His suggestions found support at the level of the highest Party leadership: the Central Committee adopted special resolutions on the preparation of the “histories” of the factories and of the civil war. Against the backdrop of approval of Gorky’s other publication projects, these documents became yet another demonstration of Gorky’s distinction as the “leader of Soviet literature.” One should keep in mind that these “histories” were not simple publications (like Gorky’s journals, for instance): they were real enterprises, institutions in Gorky’s hands. Their main editorial offices, with state-employed staff, had their own “branches” in the republics and in factories. Discovering Stalin to be a “friend/leader,” Gorky again was transformed (as

he was under Lenin after the revolution) into not only the main intercessor in writers’ affairs but also into a real contractor for writers. Finding “work” in writing the “histories” were Aleksei Tolstoi and Leonid Leonov, Konstantin Fedin and Konstantin Paustovskii, Lidiia Seifullina and Vsevolod Ivanov, Petr Pavlenko and Aleksandr Serafimovich, Vera Inber and Anna Karavaeva, Fedor

Gladkovy and Bruno Jasenskii, Boris Galin and Aleksandr Bek, Iurii Libedinskii and Mariia Shkapskaia, Boris Agapov and Marietta Shaginian, Valentin Kataev

and Viktor Pertsov, Kuzma Gorbunov and Ol’ga Berggol’ts, Solomon Marvich, and many others. The correspondence shows how grateful the writers were to Gorky.”° All of this undoubtedly increased his status. It is easy to suppose that in understanding this, Stalin supported almost all of Gorky’s initiatives and played the role of “friend/leader” for him. Their interest was mutual: after the “great break” of 1929 and the removal of almost all the “rightful heirs of Lenin”

from Party leadership, Stalin did not want to appear a “usurper,” and so had to uphold the myth of succession; having a vested interest in supporting Gorky, he went out of his way to accommodate him, thus acquiring the authority of Gorky and of the “master craftsmen” writers simultaneously. It goes without saying that such a powerful and pivotal influence on writers immediately became an excuse for envy and fighting on the part of RAPP. Na literaturnom postu eagerly made its pages available to N. Shushkanoy, the managing secretary of “Glavnaia redaktsiia Jstorit fabrik i zavodov” (“Main editorial office for history of the factories and plants”’'), and he used these pages to call for “allotting writers and writers’ brigades for all of the largest factories whose histories are planned to come out first... . The writer will be restructured [budet perestraivatsia] in doing this. In the process of working on ‘History of the Factories,’ the process of creating a new proletarian literary milieu and the development of a new type of proletarian writer is hastened to an

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enormous degree.””? The RAPPists in turn then asserted that the ideas behind the “History of the Factories and Plants” series not only corresponded to their basic “creative watchwords” (“depiction of the shock-worker,” “call of shockworkers,” “creation of Magnitostrois of literature,” and so on), but that “in an organizational perspective,” RAPP was faced with the tasks of turning its local divisions into

organizational centers for working on the history ofthe factories, organizing supporting groups and cooperative committees in all the plants, factories, kolkhozes, schools, and so forth, and without fail getting the shock-workers called into literature involved in this work. The plants’ and factories’ literary circles must get involved in the work by writing articles, essays, biographies, autobiographies, monographs, and transcripts of the stories ofliving witnesses and old workers of the plants and factories, giving them an appropriate literary treatment.”

Meanwhile, Gorky in a letter to Shushkanov categorically refused to recognize a leading role for RAPP in the work on the histories and advised Shushkanov to adopt a very watchful attitude toward the RAPPists’ interference in his “enterprise.””* The letter was written a month before RAPP was dissolved, after which latter event Gorky gathered into his own enterprises the RAPPists, who were now despised by all and driven from everywhere, and gave them jobs. Symbolically, Averbakh, who had just recently from the heights of his post accused Gorky of not being a completely proletarian writer, after 1932 became Gorky’s assistant for the “History of the Factories and Plants” series (in fact, he organized the creation of the book about the White Sea—Baltic Canal).

In a very short time, all of Soviet literature became the large “enterprise of Gorky.” So what are these “histories” of Gorky’s? Gorky had long ago conceived the idea of the workers in the factory writing its history themselves, an idea that arose out of his aesthetic ideas discussed earlier. In 1931, he wrote a foreword to

The Heroic Donbass (Donbass geroicheskii), by workers’ correspondent GudokEremeey, in which he emphasized that the book was “not literature but something greater—more important, more active. . . . It is the raw material from which in time beautiful dramas and novels will be developed, it is an authentic document of the history that the masses themselves are creating . . . the man of the masses.””” There is no need to point out how closely Gorky stood next to

the RAPPist smithy of “working-class authors’ cadres.” But in distinction from the RAPPists, Gorky created a project that would not only suit the general ideological turnaround toward “history” (and he had keenly sensed such a turnaround in the early 1930s), but one that would also interest both “working-class

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writers” (who, as I have discussed, did not wish to describe anything but their own factories) and professional writers (who could only take this “mass literary movement’ seriously if it were endowed with an appropriate social status). The work on the “histories” was spread among historians (creating as the first stage

a history/chronicle of the factory), circleists (collecting materials, reminiscences, and so on, in the second stage), and writers (who reworked the collected material in the third stage).

The product of this work was supposed to be a “scientific-artistic book.” This

notion perhaps requires a bit of decoding. The special April 10, 1932, elucidation provided by “Glavnaia redaktsiia Istorii fabrik i zavodov” advanced a de-

mand for “artistically developed, picturesque, clear, and understandable text.””° Since such an explanation convinced very few, Averbakh gave a speech entitled

“Can a History of the Factories be Both Scientific and Artistic?” (“Mozhet li byt’ istoriia zavodov nauchnoi i khudozhestvennoi?”) at the January 1933 meeting on the history of the factories (the meeting was organized by the Party’s Leningrad Province Committee). “We now live in an era of breakdown of the old aesthetic criteria and of the development of new ones,” said Averbakh.

The material of the new reality always seems inartistic to people brought up on the old aesthetic. The history of the factories and plants, specifically, introduces the kind of new material that by its own logic demands other means of artistic formulation and composition. . . . We need the kind of books about the history of the factories and plants that would be a document of the literary revolution, elevated works of socialist artistic literature. Such a history cannot be fitted into the framework of the traditional family or adventure novel. . . . To the extent that we are not talking about a simple literaricization [belletrizatsiia] of the material, but rather about its true artistic

development, we accordingly are giving ourselves the gigantic task of creating a new heroic epic, and accordingly our work on the history of the factories and plants cannot but be one of the most important events of the further restructuring of Soviet literature . . . , and of the development from it of its own special literary style, different from the former schools and trends. Furthermore, to the extent that the work on the history of the factories and plants inevitably is becoming one of the pivotal points of the fight against our writers getting behind in the practice of socialist construction and [against]

the well-known separation of some of them from the political tasks of our times, the breakdown of the old type of writer and the shaping of the new one is being accelerated and intensified accordingly.”

As is apparent, many problems were solved simultaneously. The idea of a half-“literaricized” history, which had not a few advocates among the writers,”* provoked protests on the part of historians. Gorky was

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obliged to explain: “On the question of the writer's role: this role boils down to the literary-artistic polishing of the material, just as it was in [the] “History of the Civil War’ [series (/storiia grazhdanskoi voiny)}.”” Quite a few writers

participated in this other project of Gorky’s as well. For example, Konstantin Fedin edited the anthology October in Leningrad (Oktiabr’ v Leningrade),

Vsevolod Ivanov edited the War in the Sands (Voina v peskakh) anthology about events in Central Asia, and Aleksandr Fadeev edited the anthology about the war against the Japanese in the Far East entitled Jaga Campaigns (Taezhnye pokhody). But the writers’ participation was not simply passive (editorial): Petr Pavlenko, A. Shtorm, Vsevolod Ivanov, Aleksei Tolstoi, and many

others greedily “picked over” the themes—Bliuker and the uprising in Dagestan, the taking of Perekop and the fall of the Bukhara emir, and so on. Ivanov “kindly agreed to write” about Parkhomenko, and Tolstoi on the theme “de-

fense of Tsaritsyn.”8° Thus a few years later their novels appeared, Ivanov's Parkhomenko and Tolstoi’s Bread (Khleb). Indeed, this series established a

“base” for the “historical-revolutionary novel”—one of the metagenres of Soviet literature.*!

But Gorky’s favorite child was “History of the Factories and Plants,” which he regarded as a real school for beginner writers. In his article “Let Us Write

the History of the Struggle of the Working Class” (“Napishem istoriiu bor’by rabochego klassa”), published in the September 7, 1931, issue of Pravda, Gorky stated:

In the process of working on “History of the Factories,” young writers get the opportunity to attain the high literary-technical qualifications that are requisite for them and necessary to the country. Along with this, the members of the factories’ and plants’ literary circles, in becoming familiar with the past of their grandfathers and fathers, will certainly strengthen their own consciousness of themselves as a class. Shock-worker writers will find at their disposal varied material for their literary work, based on which [material] it will be

easier and more convenient to do literary training with beginner writers.*

Participation in the work on the “histories” in fact did provide much for beginner writers,’ by creating a certain stimulus to the work of the literary circles in the factories“ and to activism at the “periphery.”*> However, the chief desired effect—widespread inclusion of professional writers (“master craftsmen” )—was not attained.

The following complaints in a June 9, 1932, letter to Gorky, from the edi-

torial office for the history of the “Vladimir Il'ich” factory, are typical: the workers who wanted to write the factory's history were “encountering obstacles,” and

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they are leaving the writers’ circles, which having gotten brigades at their disposal and having taken on a certain part of the factory’s history, sit in their

offices or go out on field trips, but have forgotten the factory history and the brigades of the IPich old-timers. . . They do not even show up at the factory. Owing to this kind of callous attitude of our comrades, the business of writing the factory's history is moving very slowly; materials are being collected and written down from the old men’s stories, but no one is coming forward to work them up. . . . And ifachange on the part of the brigade-writers involved does not come very soon, then the work on writing the history of our factory might be disrupted, the same way it has been before, on more than one occasion.*°

Although Gorky continued to maintain that “we can create .. . a proletarian

artistic literature only if we rely on the living, constantly growing experience of the masses’ creative work,”*” he understood that without the participation of professional writers, no literature at all could be “created.” But it was litcircleists, and not professional writers, that were rushing into doing this. When

the critical mass of “working-class authors” began to threaten the whole struc-

ture, Gorky began to “put on the brakes.” In a discussion with the authors of True Tales ofMount Vysokaia (Byli gory Vysokoi), he cautioned against “excessive enthusiasm for the massiveness of the literary movement in this matter,

and gigantomania, when they want to attract millions into literature” (at that time, 1934, they were not needed—the era of the RAPPist “call” had ended). “Look, for example, in today’s Pravda it says that in the Gus’ -Khrustal’nyi [fac-

tory] 3 million drinking glasses are defective. This is quite a few. We must be careful that we don’t get to the point that we're all writing books but there’s nothing to drink tea out of.”**

The writers’ passivity irritated Gorky more and more. In his “Literary Amusements,” which was published as a pamphlet on the eve of the First Con-

gress of Soviet Writers, Gorky allotted a great deal of space to “collective creative work.” But irritation constantly breaks through his exhortations: The fact that writers are more and more eagerly undertaking in large groups the collective work on the material signifies, in my view, a very serious turnaround of our comrade writers toward a living and extremely useful enterprise. What can such work provide for each unit of the collective? Everything that this unit would want and succeed in taking. Firstly, it will provide an acquaintance with the broadest and most diverse quantity of facts [sic]—a quantity that an individual could assimilate only with years of accumulation. Secondly, it can limit the outgrowth of musty emotional philistine individualism, and foster the qualities necessary for the new individualism created by reality. Individualism is necessary only in order to

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portray life in one’s own words, and not written from others’ books, but by far not in order to portray one’s own person in all the greatness ofits stu-

pidity. .. . Thirdly, by deepening writers’ acquaintance with each other in a living enterprise, collective work should foster mutual respect among writers

for each other, as nothing [else] can more naturally in a country where the true criterion of social value of the unit is recognized to be its capability for

labor, its creative energy, and its understanding of the historical meaning of its labor.*? In the same

spirit, his remarks

addressed

to shock-workers

were

also

restrained:

I am quite sure that our working masses, our new, free workers in the land, will quickly start working in all areas of art, and that we are on the eve of creating some new form of collective creative work in art. We must welcome this phenomenon. Our literature and criticism are faced with a variety of most important, most complex tasks, and one of them is not to set out on that road that the army of intelligentsia individualists walked on. . . . Writers and critics must seek and develop paths for congenial mutual work in the interests of the laboring masses.”°

The idea of the collective “histories,” as one can see, was connected in Gorky’s consciousness with one of the most persistent utopias of revolutionary culture, the utopia of collective creative work. And Gorky saw the creation of the Union of Soviet Writers as a realization of this dream. In a speech at the First Congress of Soviet Writers he said: “The Union of Writers is not being created to simply join the artists of the word physically, but so that professional unity would allow them to understand their collective strength, to define the diversity of the directions of their creative work, its aims, and to harmoniously combine all goals into the unity that drives all the labor-creating energy of the country.”! The books in the “History of the Factories and Plants” series that appeared from 1934 to 1936 were remarkably varied. They manifested the whole gamut

of collective projects: brigades of professional writers, beginners’ brigades, litcircleists, and hybrids of all of them. Among the most famous was the first book of the series, People of the Stalingrad Tractor Factory (Liudi Stalingradskogo traktornogo), which Gorky called “one of the most interesting and original books that has appeared in our literature in fifteen years.”°? The book was a collection of autobiographies of workers, engineers, foreign specialists, the factory's director, the Party committee secretary, and others, “artistically polished” by a group of writers headed by Iakov I’in (“the editor/author artistically worked up the storyteller’s material” with the aim of “providing genuinely

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artistic portraits of the builders of socialism”). True Tales ofMount Vysokaia

was written by workers themselves—a hundred workers -correspondent miners who called themselves the “first litetary kolkhoz of the USSR.”™ V. Ko-

valevskii, by working up the materials on the history of the Trekhgornaia spinning factory along with litcircleists, wrote the novel/chronicle By the Three Mountains (U trekh gor). In a similar fashion, A. Iakovlev wrote Red Sormovo (Krasnoe Sormovo). (These books were often given as examples of the fruitfulness of professional writers’ participation in collective projects.) Bolshevites

(Bolshevtsy), about the NKVD’s commune in Bolshevo, was written exclusively by beginner writers. On Gorky’s advice, the “brigade” of young prose writers, gathered by the “Sovetskii pisatel’” [Soviet writer] publishing house under the direction of Kuzma Gorbunov and Mikhail Luzgin, lived several months in Bolshevo and as a result wrote this book about “reforging” [perekovka| after the example of “senior comrades” (let us note in passing that the

poets attached to this same publisher were united under the direction of IPia Sel’vinskii and wrote the collective poem “House” [“Dom”]). Almost every

book of the “histories” had its own history and was the result of “collective efforts.” This applies to History of the Moscow Subway (Istoriia Moskovskogo metro), The Putilov Worker in Three Revolutions (Putilovets v trekh revoliu-

tsiiakh), and many others. But a book about the construction of the White Sea—Baltic Canal justly became the most famous. In the summer of 1933, “Glavnaia redaktsiia Istorii fabrik i zavodov” organized a trip to the White Sea—Baltic Canal site for 120 writers. The result of the

trip was a book (“a gift to the Seventeenth Party Congress”) in which thirtyfive writers participated (including B. Agapov, S. Alymov, L. Averbakh, A. Berzin’,, S. Budantsev, S. Bulatov, $. Dikovskii, N. Dmitriev, A. Erlikh, K. Finn,

E. V. B. V.

Gabrilovich, N. Garnich, G. Gauzner, S. Gekht, K. Gorbunoy, B. Iasenskii, Inber, N. Iurgin, V. Ivanoy, V. Kataev, Z. Khatsrevin, G. Korabel nikov, Lapin, A. Lebedenko, D. Mirskii, L. Nikulin, V. Pertsoy, I. Rykachev, Shklovskii, L. Slavin, A. Tikhonov, A. Tolstoi, K. Zelinskii, and M. Zo-

shchenko). Gorky personally directed the writers’ brigade, corrected manuscripts and proofs, and wrote the introductory and concluding chapters. This book, which became a textbook example of how Russian literature had become degraded—from the traditional humanism to an apologia for forced la-

bor and mass terror—is at the same time an example of the high degree of aestheticization of reality that was reached by Soviet literature at the moment Socialist Realism was proclaimed. It is hardly necessary to say how much this book suited Gorky’s new “optics,” his understanding of the “truth of life.” In a speech at the Second Plenum of the Board of Directors of the Union of So-

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viet Writers on the issue of writers’ participation in the “histories,” Gorky said that a writer “should be an Aeolian harp that reproduces every movement in pleasant sounds.””” Without commenting on whether these “sounds” were

“pleasant,” I will note the correctness of one of the reviewers of History of the Construction of the White Sea—Baltic Canal (Istoriia stroitel’stva BelomorskoBaltiiskogo kanala): “A book about the restructuring of human material be-

comes the instrument ofrestructuring the writer's way of life, the writer's psyche, and the writer's culture of labor.””°

Not only indicative is the fact that the writers participated in this project, but also telling are their widely known enthusiastic responses to it. The titles of

the articles alone tell the story: Evgenii Gabrilovich, “The Book Has Introduced Images of People Unknown to Our Writers into Literature” (“Kniga wvela v literaturu obrazy liudei, nevedomykh nashim pisateliam”); G. Gauzner,

“My Experience Has Been Enriched” (“Moi opyt obogatilsia”); G. Gekht, “I Learned to Get Acquainted With My Own Heroes” (“Ia nauchilsia znakomit’sia so svoimi geroiami”); N. Dmitriev, “The Third Higher-Education In-

stitution” (“Tretii vuz”); Lev Nikulin, “Efficiency Test” (“Ekzamen na operativnost’””)”’; Vera Inber, “A New Type of Writer is Growing” (“Rastet novyi tip

pisatelia”). Inber wrote in part: Always and for all times the writer had been a solitary workman. .. . But the experience of writers’ collective work on the book about the White Sea[-Baltic] Canal... , the very fact that a writer—this isolated, individualistic, un-self-critical being such as he was before the revolution and such as he

still is in the West—went to work in a collective, experiencing joy and satisfaction from this—all this bespeaks . . . a change in the type of writers. . . . The new improved and renewed type of writer will provide, must provide, the quality of product, the new themes, the distinctive indicators, in a word, the valid and great writer’s workday that will be worthy of our remarkable country and of its future classless society.”

Vsevolod Ivanov spoke in the same vein in his speech at the aforementioned Second Plenum of the Union's Board of Directors: Collective work is valuable in that a new creative milieu is engendered in its process, and the elements of the former competitiveness and the struggle of petty ambitions disappear, the secretiveness of craftsmen disappears, and a genuinely socialist interest in the overall creative result arises... . Work in the collective is becoming the instrument of the restructuring of the writer's psyche, of the old writers’ culture of labor.®”

The issue was so life-shaking that a debate arose over it even at the First Congress. The impetus was the speech of Il’ia Erenburg, in which he stated:

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It is possible to collectively make an anthology of enormous documentary importance. . .. But one could hardly make a lyrical poem or novel collectively. I hear conversations such as: the writer was an isolated craftsman, he must be replaced by a collective. I simply don’t understand this. A living writer in our country is inevitably and unchangingly,tied to the collective by thousands of threads. He does not think of himself nor ofhis heroes outside the collective. He depicts the world and people, however, through his own individual experience. The richer and better his individuality is, the livelier his heroes are and the more monumental is the collective that he depicts. The creation of works of art is an individual matter, or more precisely, an intimate one. I am convinced that the literary brigades will figure in the history of our literature as a picturesque but short-lived detail of its younger years.! Vsevolod Ivanov disagreed with Erenburg, calling his own work in the literary

brigade on the White Sea—Baltic Canal book “one of the best days of my creative life,”'®' as did Lidiia Seifullina. Finally, Gorky returned to this theme

twice, in his speech and in the closing words of the Congress, defending-his idea and proposing the creation of a collective book, Deeds and People of Two Five-Year Plans (Dela i liudi dvukh piatiletok), by a brigade consisting of seventy writers.

At the same plenum wherein Gorky demanded that authors be transformed into “Aeolian harps,” Jurii Libedinskii also gave a speech. To illustrate the growth of writers thanks to their “participation in socialist construction,” he

told about the experiences of Leningrad writers in collective work, in particular about how the writers’ brigade consisting of Nikolai Chukovskii and three

other writers, led by the Party’s Narva Regional Committee, wrote a collective book about the Narva Gates, Four Generations (Chetyre pokoleniia).'* But this remarkable trail was not the only one that this writers’ brigade left behind in Soviet literature; it also left a little page in Lidiia Ginzburg’s reminiscences. While sitting at the first meeting of the Children’s Section of the Union of So-

viet Writers, she wondered why “the presidium relentlessly scrutinized whether it should register some kind of writers’ circles, and whether someone shouldn't write something together with somebody else... . At the same meeting, Kolia

Chukovskii told about the activities of the “Northern Brigade’ of the Union of Writers... . They went to Kareliia and jointly wrote a book. . . . But why is it good if four writers write a book jointly?” Ginzburg guessed why, of course: Literature ended up at the tail end of the whole movement. People who are not fit for real places are playing at being craftsmen of literature. Such literature cannot create its own everyday and industrial forms out of itself. This is why our official literary practice is all pieced-together from forms and categories dragged up from other areas. The literary and practical misuse of

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the ideas of control of the masses, shock-work, socialist competition, and of technologicalization, is sometimes the result of widespread literary hypnosis and of the short-term but incredibly strong universality and pervasiveness that the sloganish words thrown to the linguistic surface acquire among us;

in other instances, it is the result of the quite cynical calculations of literary speculators. More often than not, it is that mix of thoughtlessness, cunning, and imagination that causes a child to put a matchbox on two spools turned on their sides and state that it is a steamship. . . . Future historians of litera-

ture will have to learn to recognize these literary aberrations, these transplanted slogans, and child’s-toy ideas.'”

Without debating the inarguability of my own interpretation of these “child’s-toy ideas,” I will note that again I am talking about truly peripheral phenomena that are always called “episodes” or “pages” in history. It is from these “episodes” and “pages” that the present book was put together. In the history of literature there are quite a few hidden plots that preserve in themselves a much more profound drama than the stories of traditional “histories of literature” familiar to all. There is also a multitude of plot twists misunderstood by their contemporaries. Why did writers still not join the brigades? Neither the “literary aberrations” nor the “transplanted slogans” could fool anyone. The revolutionary era finally receded into the past, and with it, the utopia of “collective creative work” that had no personal accountability also died. The End of “Undefined Creative Responsibility’: Art as Accountability

“Writers generally happen,” Shklovskii explained, “as a landscape happens: a river flows, a tree stands, then another tree—as a result, a landscape has happened—and good! Thus writers happen. Lev Tolstoy, that is, War and Peace,

happened. . . .”'4 Shklovskii is easy to interrupt. He interrupts himself. Tolstoy. War and Peace... . 1 am interested in an extreme example: What did this “landscape after the battle” upon which Semen Babaevskii, Anatolii Sofronov, or Arkadii Perventsev “happened” (“and good!”) look like? How did the Soviet writer in general “happen”? Recalling the “law of inheritance in art” formulated by Shklovskii—not the “father” nor the “elder son,” nor even the “uncle’—how did the “nephew” to whom “the inheritance of seniority passed” “happen”? The attempt to hybridize writers and workers in Gorky’s “historical” projects, as I have elaborated, was unsuccessful. The idea of “brigade creativity,”

this last atavism of the revolutionary utopias of collective, impersonal creative

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work, was buried as being “of no use.” It was not needed because the “lively creativity of the masses” entered a new stage of relations with authority, which took upon itself the concern of shaping the “social mandate”: the new era required not amateur shock-worker litcircleists, but professional “engineers of human souls” capable of providing a “worthy artistic product” for the mass reader. The year 1932 was the end not only of RAPP (and together with it, of

all the literary groups that at least nominally existed), but also of the whole former cultural infrastructure. A decade and a half had to pass after the revolution for the “professional literary cadres” to mature into Party-mindedness. The raging of RAPP was only needed, as I have discussed, to hasten this “mat-

uration” process, so that writers, predominantly fellow-traveler “experts,” would literally endure, would accept like a hard-won gift or “liberation,” both the Union of Soviet Writers and Socialist Realism, in order to prepare (as Gregory Freidin wittily expressed it) “the metamorphosis of the ‘poet and citizen,’ when

he was transformed from the marginal figure of the NEP era into the exem-

plary hero of the drama of building socialism in one country.”!° Bearing witness to the “readiness” for “restructuring” were not only the

countless letters to the Central Committee and to Stalin personally from RAPPists opposed to the Onguardist leadership (“opposition groups” arose inside RAPP in the early 1930s, one after another), but also the condition of the “fellow-traveler camp” that was undergoing an acute crisis.'°° The word “crisis” be-

came a keyword in evaluations of the condition of literature in the early 1930s. At the very height of the “call of shock-workers into literature,” in September 1931, when the tone of RAPPist victory communiqués was particularly buoyant, a discussion about the fate of the fellow-travelers arose in the Union of Soviet Writers. Taking part in it were Leonid Leonov, Viacheslav Polonskii, Petr Sletov,

Petr Pavlenko, Lidiia Seifullina, and others. The writers talked about “the end of fellow-travelerism” and about “restructuring.” The tone of the discussion was

most gloomy: Leonov: “The writer is interested in restructuring primarily for himself, for he has to live and work; the union of fellow-travelers should think on this a

lot: Has it not perhaps reached its station already? For in future the train will pick up speed, the distances between stations will become ever farther, and

those jumping off the socialist express in motion will be ever more threatened by the danger of falling underneath its wheels.”!” Polonskii: “The real question is the fate of fellow-travelerism itself. A large

circle of writers, brilliant writers that any country could be proud of, writers who created many brilliant and in their time revolutionary works that will remain in history of literature, this circle of writers obviously does not under-

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stand the artistic tasks that our country expects it to fulfill. . . . Fellowtravelerism has lost the leading role in our Soviet artistic literature. . . . Any literary struggle is a political struggle . . . , but the times require an organic acclimation to the era. . . . Fellow-travelerism is threatened by a new great misfortune: it is losing its former reader. But the new ‘restructured’ man will not accept the fellow-traveler. ... The task of inner restructuring is at hand... , the crisis of fellow-travelerism is a crisis of decline; the fellow-travelers as a

group ofwriters formed at the beginning ofthe revolution is undoubtedly undergoing a breakdown.”'”* Sletov: “Fellow-travelerism is a completely marginal phenomenon. . . . The old baggage constantly served the fellow-traveler in place of his inadequate worldview, which he could not fail to feel when he set forth on the path of cooperation with the revolution. . . . The fellow-traveler, who [only] partially understood the phenomena of the revolution, was obliged to supplement this inadequacy, this defectiveness of his views, with his own old notions. . . . The crisis of our literature lies in the eclecticism of fellow-traveler literature.”!”’ Pavlenko: “The creative routine of the artist is undergoing an abrupt

change. .. . The restructuring of the writer is not simply recognition of RAPP. It is the profound philosophical reexamination of one’s own poetic house-

keeping in the light of the new tasks arising before the art of our era... . Ifa writer who today is still not proletarian does not have this categorical demand of himself to grow into a proletarian artist, then he has no future whatsoever,

there is no sense in his writing, his creativity has nowhere to go.”!!° The range of opinions was broad—from calls for restructuring (Leonoy) to declarations of readiness to all but die at the “barricades of fellow-travelerism” (Seifullina and Zamoshkin), from assertions of the impasse that fellowtravelerism had reached (Polonskii and Sletov) to Pavlenko’s “categorical im-

perative” to “grow into a proletarian artist.” The “experts,” however, were not to grow into “proletarian artists’—they were replaced by the “Soviet writer.” The basic parameters of this new type of writer began to be examined in that same year—1931—in none other than the chief Onguardist journal. Na Jiteraturnom postu conducted a survey entitled “What Kind of Writer Do We

Need?” (“Kakoi nam nuzhen pisatel’?”). Lively responses came from writers of the most diverse groups and generations: the former LEFist Viktor Pertsov; the “Serapion” Veniamin Kaverin; the Perevalist Mikhail Golodnyi; the LOKAF

member Mate Zalka; fellow-travelers Ivan Evdokimov, Vera Inber, Leonid Leonov, Vladimir Lidin, Panteleimon Romanov, and Efim Zozulia; constructivists IPia Sel’vinskii and Kornelii Zelinskii; RAPPists Mikhail Chumandrin, Anna

Karavaeva, and Aleksandr Tarasov-Rodionoy; Smithy writers Vladimir Bakh-

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met ev, Fedor Gladkov, and Georgii Nikiforov; peasant poets Sergei Klychkov and Petr Oreshin; “beginner prose writer” A. Mitrofanov; and workers’ corre-

spondents and shock-workers “called into literature” A. Kudreiko, P. Orovetskii, A. Salov, F. Sviatenko, and F. Vagramoy. The editors printed the responses throughout 1931 in order of receipt and without editorial corrections,

intending to “provide an assessment in a concluding article.” The “assessment,” however, was provided by the Central Committee's April 1932 resolution. This survey is of interest primarily because it provides a picture of attitudes in the literary milieu across a full spectrum—from constructivists to litcircleists— and over the broadest range of topics. How was the new type of writer distinct from the previous types?: “The proletarian craftsman . . . is just as much an anticlassical writer as he is a classical one. Equally alien and close to him are the Budetlianins, who are breaking away from commonplace vocabulary thanks to neologisms and trans-

rational poetry, as are the epigones of the Saint Petersburg literary language and of Acmeist culture” (Selvinskii)!"!; “The writer is the same kind of rank-

and-file worker and builder that the shock-worker proletarian who competes in his brigade for raising tempos is” (Gladkov)'!*; “Being unfamiliar with the former type of writer, I cannot answer this question” (Kaverin)''?; “Writers of

the new type do not just write ‘in general,’ but rather base their work on the historical development of class and economic forces in the country of the proletariat. But I understand this question too poorly to answer more concretely” (Orovetskii)''*; “For the contemporary writer, the most fundamental and fateful difference from the former writer is, in my opinion, that our writers have

lost the internal . . . necessity of disagreeing (not of expressing discontent!— this is a completely different matter!), of leaving for themselves and for their creative work . . . some sort of restricted area for ideas, feelings, and thoughts

that have at present acquired all the general laws of citizenship and have become a strong and inviolable part of the code we call contemporaneity. Our writers do not have such a resistance to contemporaneity, or else it barely remains in them. From my point of view, this impoverishes the writer. Although materially, of course, it makes him richer, this is not the issue, and happiness

is not to be found in that!” (Klychkov).'” Attitudes toward trips to factories and kolkhozes, and toward writers’ participation in “the practical work of socialist construction”: “Short trips to factories and kolkhozes are worthwhile if the interests of the factory or kolkhoz require them” (Mitrofanov)""°; “I even advocate a writer's living in a factory for no less than half a year” (Gladkov)'"”; “I am against sending writers’ brigades

to factories with a special assignment; a writer should be used (like any ma-

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chine, I suppose) in his specific area” (Leonov)''®; “A writer should be in a fac-

tory, in a job. He must create physically before he undertakes a portrayal oflabor” (Orovetskii)!!’; “Gorky sits at his desk in Sorrento, but his participation

in socialist construction is immeasurably greater than dozens of others on the beaten tracks of all Sovturist’s tours of the factories and plants” (Zelinskii)'”°; “To my great regret, I have not worked in any part of socialist construction, if one does not count my work done at my desk. I know that this is not much for Soviet society. But I repeat that I was seriously ill for two years (duodenal ulcer and middle-ear infections in the right and left ears) so that I was defi-

nitely in no condition to travel around kolkhozes, sovkhozes, factories, plants, and the like” (Oreshin).!”!

Attitudes toward the idea of a “second profession” for a writer: “The writer does not need a second independent profession but rather several secondary ones” (Inber)!”?; “We should stand up for writing as a profession” (Golodnyi)'??; “A writer should have one profession—that of a writer” (Lidin)'*;

“The Soviet writer does not need a ‘second’ profession, but active participation in socialist construction needs to be his first profession” (Zozulia).'*°

Behind the motliness of the picture is an amazing uniformity. Perhaps only Klychkov was out of harmony with the amiable choir (which was noted by the editors of Na literaturnom postu, who in a special remark proclaimed that he had used the survey for “defense of his own kulak creative work”!”°)—this, by the way, was the real-life relationship between those who had “broken away

from socialist construction” and its “participants.” Hesitations at the limits of the norm, evident in the writers’ responses to the survey, bespeak the fact that the “norm” itself, which had not yet acquired any fixed institutional forms, had already entered the consciousness of professional writers rather lastingly, in being transformed from an “external ideology” into an “internal” creative agenda. Such was the result of revolutionary culture. It remained to provide an institutional shape for this agenda. The Union of Soviet Writers, created during the years 1932-1934, was con-

ceived as an elite institution oriented primarily toward professional “masterwriters.” “Amateur activity” (the “mass literary movement,” litcircles, the “call

of shock-workers into literature,” and other such forms), which had fulfilled

its function of pressuring the “master-writers,” was no longer needed. More than anything else, this meant the decisive eradication of the elements of the revolutionary utopias of impersonal creative work. The era of “undefined creative responsibility” drew to a close. The process of institutionalization began, during the course of which everything that went beyond the framework of the structures being created was subject to either assimilation or destruction. This

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primarily applied to the litcircles, which now became a burden and were regarded as yet another “unfortunate RAPPist legacy.” It came to light that many of the circles that RAPP “transferred” to the union’s organizational committee had been functioning only “on paper.” For

example, as a result of acheck in Leningrad, it turned out that of fourteen circles in the Vasileostrovsk District, eight were completely nonfunctional; in the Petrograd District, only three of the eleven circles checked were functional,

and only one in the Narvsk District; two of the six circles in the Vyborgsk District were functional.!?” The committee above all strove to remove the circles from the union’s “balance-sheet” by giving control of them to the labor unions. The resolution of the Presidium of the All-Union Organizational Committee entitled “On Working with the Beginner Author” (“O rabote s nachinaiushchim avtorom’) had the following demands:

1. achieve leadership of the literary circles by the local factory labor committees in the factories; 2. combine all the work of the literary circles with the work of factory newspapers and libraries; and 3. include the literary circle in the cultural budget of the factories. !**

Lamenting that “the mass literary movement is not everywhere a part of the mass-culture work of the labor unions,” the leaders of local writers’ cells organized movements both “from below” (publishing the letters of the litcircleists demanding that “literary circles in the factories be under the control of labor unions, and the resources for their work be calculated from the resources of the local factory/plant committee”’”? and “from above” (for example, deciding in favor of the labor unions’ “creative (!) leadership of the literary circles,” the Northern Organizational Committee for the Union of Soviet Writ-

ers adopted a special resolution recommending “a reporting relationship of the lit. circles to labor-union organizations (boards of directors of clubs, the local

factory/plant committee, the unions’ cultural committees, and so on).”!°° The haggling with the labor unions lasted several years (leading to curious incidents: for example, the city labor-union council of Kerch’ replied to a demand

of the local division of the Organizational Committee that “the council is not a social security department for paying for literary circles”’*'), and as a result the circles, which had besides lost their RAPPist support, began to close “on a massive scale” (owing to the lack of resources to pay the “instructors” and the rent for their accommodations). The journal Rost, which had specialized in working with the litcircles, described the situation unfolding thus: “The instructors have left, the leaders have run in every direction, and the litcircles are

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again stranded. . . . Dozens of literary circles that had united the best creative forces of Soviet young people are now (like how many times before?) in the position of orphans and are threatened with breakdown.”!*”

Only in 1934 did the Organizational Committee finally succeed in reaching agreement with the labor unions, which resulted in the joint resolution of the All-Union Central Trade-Union Council, the Organizational Committee itself, and the Central Writers’ Bureau, entitled “On Joint Work in the Leadership of Literary Circles” (“O sovmestnoi rabote po rukovodstvu litkruzhkami”). Ac-

cording to the resolution, “labor-union organizations at all levels . . . have been

charged with full responsibility for establishing mass literary work among male and female workers organized into labor unions in the city and countryside’; the labor unions were charged with the

full maintenance of the training/creative work of the litcircles organizationally/ materially (quarters, inclusion in cultural budgets, appropriation of special funds for prizes, provision of programming and methodological materials, payment of instructors, organization of lit. conferences and rallies, everyday material assistance, creative leave for the most talented authors, publication of the special literary leaflets of the factory-and-plant, sovzhoz, and machineand-tractor-station presses, and of the central union press . . . , and so on).

The unions were further charged with “the literary and mass work of clubs and libraries (literature/readers’ circles, readers conferences, soirees of workers’ criticism and meetings with authors, exhibits and readings, and so on).” Writ-

ers’ organizations now only bore the responsibility of “working with beginner

writers” and “creative leadership of the litcircles.”'* Five years later, the Union of Soviet Writers would find support in the Komsomol Central Committee. The joint resolution of the Committee and the Union’s Presidium entitled “On Working with Young Writers” (“O rabote s molodymi pisateliami”), adopted in September 1939, ratified the complete victory of the professional union over the “mass literary movement’: the status of the circles was decisively defined (“The literary circles in factories, kolkhozes, and businesses must be one of the types of the masses’ amateur activities within the system of labor unions and in kolkhozes”) and “work with beginners’ was definitively institutionalized (“The existence of literary unions of young and beginner writers can only be considered advisable as part of the editorial boards of literary-artistic journals and newspapers. . . . Responsibility for the work of the unions must rest on the editors and editorial boards of the newspapers and journals”).'*4 Be that as it may, the litcircles were no longer regarded as a “smithy of writers.” On the contrary, it was now asserted that the RAPPist slogan “From the

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sketch to the novel” and the aspiration toward “‘mass production’ of writers” had

been, and still were, “a most harmful vulgarization, a perversion of the very meaning of the mass literary movement.”'*> The task of the circles was now seen to be the “aesthetic education of working-class youth interested in literature,”!%°

and the “mass literary movement” itself was understood by Managing Secretary of the Organizational Committee of the Union of Soviet Writers Vladimir Stavskii as a “movement for the propaganda of artistic literature among the

'*’No longer was it appropriate to “endow” a circle with a “specifically masses.” artistic bias”: “Why endow the circles with a special significance as compared to other amateur cultural-educational unions in the clubs?” Kuzma Gorbunov asked in one of Gorky’s almanacs. “After all, it would occur to no one to suggest that the participants in a string-players’, wind-players’, choral, chess/checkers, or

theatrical circle would necessarily become professionals in these areas.” Everything was falling into place: “Good readers are educated in the circle,” nothing

more, and therefore “there is no need to create cadres of special instructors,-as

school teachers of literature are fully capable of doing this work,” and so forth.'** The products of the litcircleists were also routed now into a new channel. The output of anthologies and almanacs of “young working-class authors” was sharply reduced, these publications now being seen as “schemes remote from

the interests of literature”: “The fatal passion for discovering new authors and even whole new collectives apparently originates from purely bureaucratic considerations.”'*? Instead of books and special issues of journals, circleists were now offered wall-newspapers and pages in the factory newspapers (not even in local newspapers!): The chief concern for the mass literary movement is not incumbent on republican and regional presses. The basic center[s] of the mass literary movement are factory and political-department newspapers, and the wallnewspapers of workshops, kolkhozes, and brigades. . .. We must make sure that the litcircles have learned this well: the basic outlet for the litcircle’s products is the wall-newspaper and the factory newspaper; the basic subjectmatter for the work of the circle’s members is the life of their factory and kolkhoz; the literary circle is the active assistant of the wall-and-factory

newspaper in all the latter’s work.'*°

And so there would be no temptations in the future, nor doubts about the seriousness of the “new course,” a series of “crushing” articles and reviews of various central and provincial anthologies and almanacs for “beginners” made its way through all the journals in the latter half of the 1930s. The article enti-

tled “Young Poets and Their Liberal Editors” (“Molodye poety i ikh liberal’nye redaktory”), about the Young Moscow (Molodaia Moskva) anthology (in which

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future Stalin Prize laureates and “Soviet classic writers” Margarita Aliger, Evgenii Dolmatovskii, Mikhail Matusovskii, Sergei Mikhalkov, Pimen Panchenko, Konstantin Simonov, Sergei Vasil’ev and others appeared with their first poetic experiments), spoke of “the general colorlessness of the poems,

their lack of personality, their absence of thought, passion, and [any] expres-

sion of unrepeatable poetic individuality” and “lack of content, and poetic helplessness, poetic featurelessness.” The reviewer wrote, “Depressing bare descriptiveness, pettiness of thought, and the absence of genuine emotions for some ofthe writers . . . is naively exposed, and for others . . . covered over with

the false importance of mannered metaphors, coquettish silences, and a dense verbal fog.”'*! Sergei Shvetsov wrote an epigram on this book:

V siuzhetakh zametna snorovka, V emotsiiakh net besporiadka, I rifmy podognany lovko, I mysli prichesany gladko .. . No vse zhe, tovarishchi, vse zhe Smotret’ nevozmozhno bez drozhi, Kak vse eti diadi i teti V zelenom pariat pereplete I, golovu k nebu zakinuy, Zhuiut moloduiu miakinu! Tianet lyko da mochalo Kollektiv muzhchin i zhenshchin . . . Molodykh tut ochen’ malo, A poetov eshche men’she.

[In plots a knack is evident, The emotions are all in order,

And rhymes adjusted deftly,

And ideas are smoothly coiffed . . . But still, comrades, still You can’t without shivering see How all these uncles and aunts Soar in the green binding And, tossing back their heads,

Masticate the young chafft How the collective, men and women, Chew the fat and cud... Here there are very few young ones,

And even fewer poets.]

Valerii Druzin wrote a review of the Young Leningrad (Molodoi Leningrad) anthology in Leningrad’s Rezets, using lines from this epigram (“And rhymes ad-

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justed deftly, And ideas are smoothly coiffed ...”) as his title. The review ended with a pronounced sentence: “If this collection is to be considered the debut of the young authors, then involuntarily one has to say they should not go into literature. Real poets have never begun their creative journey in this

way ..., their work did not have the stamp of indifference and of childish playing with rhymes.”!

;

These examples were only from the capitals. Criticism of “literary dilettantism” inundated the press. All the irritation directed at the hackwork of the circles’ “skilled craftsmen” that had accumulated throughout the years of RAPPist leadership now seemed to find an outlet in the fight against all kinds of “dilettantism.” This was the triumph of the “master craftsmen.” “Among Soviet writers there is no place for an amateurish attitude toward the higher intellectual activity of mankind—artistic creativity”'; “The urgency of the works of the circleists who are most often writing about their own factory and its affairs, in view of their inadequate political and artistic culture, in fact often comes out as sham. As to their content and form, the works of the circleists stand out by their monotony rather than by their diversity” !“4—it would be difficult even to imagine such statements made in print just two years before the Congress of Soviet Writers. The tone was set by the factual leader of the union, Vladimir Stavskii. Indeed, it was he who made the speech “On the Literary Youth of Our Country” (“O literaturnoi molodezhi nashei strany”) at the First Congress of Soviet Writ-

ers. Beginning by saying that “youth go into literature impetuously, swiftly, like mountain brooks... youth rush in,”’* and quoting from letters sent to the Congress from literary circles (several hundred such letters had come in), Stavskii adduced a number of instances wherein writers had matured from workingclass litcircleists. But the fundamental thrust of his speech (“the basic thing we recommend and support”) was that a litcircle in a factory should write the history of its own factory, joining in the work on “History of the Factories and Plants”; that it should become part of “the overall system of cultural-political work in the factory”; that the factory's newspaper should become its “industrialliterary base”; and that it should be taken care of by Party, Komsomol, and labor-union committees.!“° In other words, the literary circle was removed from the sphere of activity of the writers’ organization and transformed into an amateur enterprise whose boundary was the entrance of the factory or plant. Stavskii explained such coolness to the “lively creativity of the masses” by the presence of “quite prominent defects”'“” (a characterization that was amazingly strongly worded in the context of the triumphant speeches at the Congress) in the works of the circleists.

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’

If in Stavskii’s speech the “strategic line” of the new union regarding the “mass literary movement” was expressed, then in the next speech, delivered by Kuz'ma Gorbunoy, this “line” was “organizationally corroborated.” Gorbunov's speech was titled “On the Work of Publishers with Beginner Writers” (“O rabote izdatel’stv s nachinaiushchimi pisateliami”), and had been read and ap-

proved in advance by Gorky. Gorbunoy did not “read aloud” letters or analyze works by yesterday's “birthday boys,” the literary circleists. He cited figures, beginning his account with August 1931, when the Central Committee's resolu-

tion “On the Work of Publishers” was printed, according to which resolution the publishing base for the “call of shock-workers into literature,” the litconsultancies, and the offices for beginners in all publishing houses were created. During three years the consultancies of only the basic Moscow publishers and journals had advised about fifty thousand(!) authors who had sent material amounting to as much as eighty thousand(!) quires (35 percent of the works

were prose, and 65 percent were poems; a partial breakdown of the subject-

matter given revealed that 43 percent were about workers in industry, 18 percent about kolkhozes and the countryside in general, and 9 percent about the civil war and the Red Army). Among the authors, 47 percent were blue-collar workers; 18 percent, kolkhoz residents; and 35 percent, white-collar workers,

students, and Red Army men. During this same period, the Moscow journals alone had printed the works of 800 young authors, and publishers had issued 92 single titles by beginners and 18 anthologies in which 192 beginner authors had participated.'** These impressive figures were followed, however, by “practical suggestions” aimed at the effective curtailment of the “mass literary movement” that were accepted with applause by the participants of the Congress. For example, Gorbunov suggested that since “the creative unions of young writers” attached to publishers and editorial boards had proven themselves, they must be supported—but “they should be given concrete creative assignments along the lines of the history of the factories and plants”; “the work of publishers with

beginners” should be “individualized,” which meant, for example, that Profizdat (the main “base” of the shock-workers) “should educate working-class authors who would be able to write . . . a good technical book”; “based on the demands, establish the principle for youth that ‘If you want to be a writer, you must get higher education.’ We must stop boasting with the words ‘self-taught’ and ‘natural talent’”; “make the study of basic Russian and foreign writers obligatory for beginners. Without assimilation of the classical heritage [osvoenie klassicheskogo nasledstva], one cannot provide a worthy piece that will live for decades”; consultancies must be freed from the obligation of answering

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those who send them “illiterate verses”; “regular observation of the provincial journals is necessary” (journals that, as was well known, most often published the local “skilled craftsmen” of literature); and ifthese journals do not “present firm demands for artistic quality,” “the question of closing them must be posed.”!*? The reexamination of the attitudes toward the “writers from the masses,” approved by the first Congress, became the basis for shaping a sort of “craftsmen’s institute,” a mechanism for producing Soviet writers. It is perhaps worth recalling the “vital statistics” of the audience that accepted this turnaround: the average age of the writers attending the Congress was 35.9 years old, and their average years of involvement with literature numbered 13.2 years.'"° So they were born at the beginning of the century, and the year of their “entrance into literature” was 1921. On behalf of beginner writers, the

Congress welcomed the then workers’ correspondent from the Rostov Agri-

cultural Machinery Factory, Anatolii Sofronov. This event had many more consequences for the fortunes of Soviet poetry than the famous debate about whether it should follow the path of Mayakovsky or of Pasternak, a debate stirred by Nikolai Bukharin’s speech at the Congress—Soviet poetry was destined to follow Sofronov’s path. Let us return, however, to Stavskii. Two years after the first Congress, by now

general secretary of the Union of Writers of the USSR, he published an unprecedented criticism of “litcircle amateur activities” in Literaturnaia ucheba:

We must liquidate the literary creative circles. Their participants, arriving as readers for a more in-depth study of artistic literature, leave to join readers’ circles. Another group of participants—workers’ correspondents who are

active staff of factory newspapers, when they are freed of the mistaken idea about their own work, will continue useful activities in the newspapers, increasing their political and cultural levels in the overall system of work with workers’ correspondents.

All “work with young people,” in Stavskii’s opinion, should be concentrated in the “authors’ collectives for writing the history of the factories and plants,”

which were “one of the organizational forms of the culture of the workers’ and kolkhoz residents’ amateur activities.”!°! An abrupt narrowing of the channels for advancement in literature was occurring. Out of all the “preparatory institutions,” there in fact remained only the Literary Institute. After Gorky’s death, the fate of Literaturnaia ucheba was also sealed. As has been said already, Gorky in his numerous enterprises “sheltered” many former RAPP leaders. The year 1937 was a fateful one for them. One can judge the scale of the rout by the feature article “Finish Off the Trotskyist Filth!” (“Dobit’ trotskiskuiu gadinu!”) published in the May 1937 issue of Lit-

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eraturnaia ucheba. Afcer the 1932 resolution, it seemed, “Averbakh, Kirshon,

Afinogenoy, Iasenskii, and their assistants Korabel’nikoy, Kiriakov, Shushkanov, Buachidze ..., the enemies of the people Makar’ev, Maznin, Kovalenko ... and others, relying on the help and support of the traitor Iagoda, going underground, began demolition work with an entire system of machinations.” The “literary demolition center” was organized by Averbakh during the creation of the book about the White Sea—Baltic Canal and the one about the Bolshevo Commune, “where Gorbunoy and Luzgin ran the show.” The editorial office for “History of the Factories and Plants” was turned into a “springboard for counterrevolutionary Trotskyist activity.” The journal Jeatr i dramaturgiia (Theater and dramaturgy), which was directed by Kirshon (who

had also headed RAPP’s “call of shock-workers into literature” in the past), was used to “unite all sorts of inimical filth,” and it was “swarming with all stripes of spies and provocateurs.” But Kirshon, Efim Dobin, and Gorbunov were also members of the editorial board of Literaturnaia ucheba. Then it came to light that they “had been forming an undoubted nucleus of Trotskyist Averbakhism and had tried to exert a corruptive influence on the work of the journal. With Kirshon’s help, almost all the former staff of Rost—this printed stronghold of diversions in literature—had been taken on in the journal's personnel.”!? Clearly, after such a “rout of the cadres,” the journal could only be saved by a powerful “social mandate” (which now would be shaped by the authorities). But there was no such mandate.

The journal continued to be issued, as if by inertia. Several issues from the late 1930s consist entirely of three articles. All the articles were about Russian

and foreign classics (like “Language and style in Dead Souls”); contemporary literature was completely absent; the sections about young writers and litcircles disappeared as well; and the litconsultancy and editorial board staffs were constantly changed. The journal, like Literaturnyi kritik, was not closed by the 1940 resolution of the Central Committee, but in the articles expounding on this resolution one could read the following about Literaturnaia ucheba: “monstrous absurdity . .. , harmful rubbish has been proffered as ‘learning’ to young writers from the pages of a Soviet journal” and this “bears witness to the level of Literaturnaia ucheba, a journal that long ago broke away from Soviet literature and its young audience of writers.”'*’ The journal was allowed to die a natural death: it was already wartime (1941) when its last issue, the dual-numbered

7/8, was signed off to the press, which allowed the statement alleging that “cessation of the publication of Literaturnaia ucheba was caused by the war.”!4 In reality, however, the journal had already seemed an anachronism as early as the latter half of the 1930s, when the process of “producing writers” (like

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other “industrial processes” as well) became more and more secretive, and

“technology” was being replaced by “magic”: “High quality is absolutely obligatory for an ‘engineer of human souls.’ Our engineering has its own industrial laws, and it is just as necessary for a writer to know them as it is for a shipbuilder/engineer to know the laws of hydraulics.” But one cannot learn “laws of hydraulics” from journals. These laws (by-virtue of their “strategic properties”) are not for an “open press.” The same applies to the laws of “writers’ en-

gineering” as well, the ideological import of which becomes enormous. Since the era of “laying bare the device” was passing on, “technologism” was again

replaced by fickle “talent.” And Literaturnaia ucheba was already obliged to justify itself in a feature article: “We must not honor the memory of Gorky by suggesting that he thought to replace talent with training and to ‘make writ-

ers’ on the order of assembly-line production.”!*° Thus the era of “dilettantism” ended. But the torrent of “new writers’ cadres” did not dry up; on the contrary, it swelled. The authorities’ actions in 1932-1934 for the creation of the “Soviet writer” (Stalin’s meetings with writers, demonstration of the personal friendship of Stalin and Gorky, and the organization of a writers’ congress like an enormous “show”) shaped the un-

precedentedly high status of the “Soviet litterateur.” The calling of a writer was now assured by the “public concern” of the leader himself, and involvement in

literature became a mark of special distinction, of an elite quality. With the formation of the Union of Soviet Writers, the concept of “writer” lost its former amorphousness: a “writer” could now be called simply a person with the union’s membership card; the rest were either “beginners” or “spongers” who arbitrarily assumed this lofty title (like losif Brodskii). A mechanism of selection began to operate immediately after the breakup of RAPP, when the question arose of who would join the new state-sponsored union. Stalin had calculated the attractiveness of the new organization in advance (a characteristic statement of his during one of the meetings with writers in 1933: “Our writers will soon school like minnows”!’’). But suddenly both the

10,000 shock-workers that had just yesterday been “called” and the majority of those who back in the mid-1920s had joined FOSP (recall that RAPP alone had brought 4,000 members to FOSP at the time) all found themselves “overboard” the union’s “ship.” As 1934 approached, the union had 2,200 writers.!°* The

“class makeup” of the union no longer matched the goal of the “call for workers”: although RAPPists had, just after the 1932 resolution when trying to “save

face,” convinced the “writers’ community” that “proletarian writers have grown so strong that their ideological-creative influence can and should be realized in a united union of Soviet writers,”!*’ it was now clear that those “grown so

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strong” made up an insignificant part of the new union. As it turned out, many writers (both “proletarian” and fellow-travelers) had come into literature from

anywhere but the “lathe”; they came instead, for example, from the teaching profession: Fedor Gladkov had been a teacher for fifteen years; Aleksandr Neverov had taught in a village school for eleven years; first in the city schools, then for many years in villages, Lidiia Seifullina worked as a teacher; also leaving teaching for literature were Valeriia Gerasimova and Anna Karavaeva, Aleksandr Afinogenov, Ivan Evdokimov, Nikolai Ognev, Nikolai Pogodin, Mikhail Prishvin, and Konstantin Trenev; Sergei Auslender, Aleksei Gastev, and Ivan ike any elite organization, the Vol’ nov had started out in teachers’ institutes. ' | union strove toward self-isolation. Differentiating between litcircleists and “beginner writers” (“so as not to turn all litcircleists into beginning writers and beginning writers into litcircleists ”161) and freeing themselves of the former, the

union’s leaders did everything possible to keep the latter away from “early professionalization.” The beginning of the new era of struggle against this “sickness” was set in 1934 by Gorky’s “Literary Amusements.” The “literary community” again began talking about how “under the glass dome of the literary way of life... unhealthy, diseased tendencies arise and bohemianism is born,” and how the writer’s place was in “contact with the people making history in the factories and plants, in the kolkhoz fields.”'* Stalin’s decisions in the arena of culture demonstrate his impressive ability to find and “maintain” a middle ground. The strategy of averaging was the universal strategy of Stalinist culture. Not the egalitarianism characteristic of revolutionary culture, but elitism with the support of a mass-averaged level of perception—the curious combination (as in Socialist Realism) of “dream and

reality” that Stalin keenly understood became the true matrix for the cultural modeling of the Soviet era. The Stalinist conception of “expertise” must also be regarded in this context. An elitist “expertise” could not count on support in the culture: it had to be either ideologically converted and simplified in order to end up at least on the periphery of this culture (for example, the genial level of simplicity in Pasternak’s translations of the Georgian classics, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Petéf,, all expropriated by Stalinist culture), or else be totally silent (for example in Akhmatova or Bulgakov): “Isolate but preserve,” according to Stalin’s famous resolution. What was done “without expertise” was also subjected to criticism, but this was a sort of marginal case (like the “shock-workers’ creative work”).

These extremes were practically excluded. A sort of balance arose (upon which the construction of Soviet literature was also maintained), as a result of which such “average” characters as Aleksandr Fadeev, Fedor Panferov, Petr Pavlenko,

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Aleksei Surkov, or Vsevolod Vishnevskii (in the “best of times”) inevitably were pushed out to the “top” (not to mention rhe “thick”), and similarly, the likes of Semen Babaevskii, Mikhail Bubennov, Nikolai Gribachev, Vsevolod Kochetoy, or Anatolii Sofronov (in the “worst of times”). The balancing of these scales was managed by the authorities, sometimes raising one pan when

they required “ideology in literature,” then the other, when they were turning the “fight for artistic expertise” around.!°

The end of “undefined creative responsibility” [tvorcheskaia obezlichka| meant (also in the language of the times) a struggle against “egalitarianism [wravnilovka) in literature.” “Some writers think,” Fadeev wrote in 1937, that “in summing up” it is better not to distinguish the best works but to

count them along with others that are often poorer in quality: they think that this might be a means of fighting against individualism and conceit, that it

will emphasize the “equality” of writers. Such a viewpoint is profoundly mistaken, because in all areas of life we are now liquidating egalitarianism, as it is a nonsocialist principle. It is time for us in literature as well to liquidate

egalitarianism. . . . With egalitarianism, aesthetic tastes can be cultivated only arbitrarily, by chance, and as a rule in false directions.'

Fadeev demanded that the “element of aesthetic appraisal” be recognized as the basis of judgments about literature. The writer bears the responsibility for the “craftsmanship of the artistic product.” If the work is “unfinished,” then the author should be required to finish it. Fadeev saw this as one of the primary tasks of the Union of Soviet Writers: “This will create, first, a respect for real work and, second, respect for the people who do this real work. This will raise our young writers demands made of themselves . . . , and will provide a strong stimulus for competition . . . , the same kind of stimulus to competition that there is among the best steelworkers of the south, the Urals, and Siberia”; this would promote “further general growth of the productivity of labor, and of its quality.”'® Be that as it may, “craftsmanship” was unthinkable without “responsibility.” Yes, the Socialist Realist aesthetic, although undoubtedly profoundly “idealistic,” nonetheless never succeeded in overcoming “formalism”—it was indebted for too much in its development to “material aesthetics,” the genetic

code of which was constantly replicated via “literary training.” The obstacle that was placed in the way of universal “all-leveling formal expertise” was the personal “responsibility of the writer” (Fadeev's article, by the way, was entitled “On Exactingness in Craftsmanship”

[“O trebovatel’nosti v masterstve”]),

which had a specific meaning in Stalinist culture. The fact alone that the question of “responsibility” was raised bespoke the

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fact that the genuinely Soviet writer had come to exist: responsibility is only possible (let us recall the Perevalist prescriptions) in “organic creative activ-

ity’—there is no responsibility until there is “organicity.” Here “organicity” is a euphemism for “freedom.” I again return to the problem that Soviet criticism was killing itself over in the 1920s: How can freedom, without which creativ-

ity is impossible, be reconciled with an “external ideology”? Of course, only by means of recognizing what is “assigned” as a “personal obligation,” by turning the “unorganic” into the “organic” (by Sholokhov’s famous formula, “We write at the behest of our heart, but our hearts belong to the Party”'®°).

Twenty years before Fadeev, Mikhail Bakhtin had in the article “Art and Responsibility” (“Iskusstvo i otvetstvennost’”) pondered over this same collision,

also talking about responsibility, but calling the “unorganic” the “mechanical.” He had asserted that in art the unity of the whole is provided by the unity of the personality, and the unity of the personality, by responsibility,'®’ thus suggesting a sort of formula of the creative act: art is freedom; freedom is personality; personality is responsibility. Socialist Realism turned necessity into freedom. Responsibility acquired an alienated—‘legal,” almost criminal—meaning. In Bakhtin’s formula, the common denominator—personality—was canceled. This important aspect of “totalitarian aesthetics” was aptly formulated by Maia Turovskaia: “The era in general preferred the idea of high performance art over the image of the artist/demiurge.”'®* Therefore one will not err if one defines Socialist Realism as a truly integral political-aesthetic project: in its framework, the theory of impersonal creativity, which the most radical Proletkult and LEF theoreticians had developed in the first postrevolutionary years, could finally become reality. Furthermore, it created an effective working mechanism for reproducing this kind of creative activity. The Literature Factory

The school, since it is an institution of socialization, not only tries to solve the problem of the shaping and reproduction of “social instincts,” but also in its practical work often methodologizes (and as it were parodies) the mechanisms of the operation of institutions that, it would seem, are far removed from the school. Furthermore, the object and subject of this social parodying are not always distinguishable. Thus the idea of collective creative work was engendered, as is well known, in the minds of Proletkult aestheticians. Nor was it alien to Andrei Platonoy. His “The Literature Factory” (“Fabrika literatury”)

was a wild invention about which it is impossible to definitively say, as always with Platonoy, that it was a utopia or an antiutopia. This document had a sub-

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title: “On a Radical Improvement of the Means of Literary Creation” (“O korennom uluchshenii sposoboy literaturnogo ,tvorchestva’). The question of collective creative work found here a paradoxical and, as is often the case with Platonov, most radical answer.

In that same year, 1926, when Platonov was working on this project (it was published in article form sixty-five years later), Rodnoi iazyk v shkole (The native language in the school), the journal of the People’s Commissariat of En-

lightenment, hosted a discussion of the problems of “collective teaching,” a method that was inordinately popular in the Soviet school during the first decade surrounding the revolution (the “brigade” form of teaching survived, as is well known, until the late 1920s). The most widespread form of collective

teaching of literature was the so-called collective composition, which was supposed to be both the “collective work” and the “collective responsibility” of the students. It seemed that in the mid-1920s (as the country’s main journal of literary methodology wrote) collective compositions had achieved an unbelievably wide dispersal: “In the first-level schools, collective compositions definitely predominate over individual ones, in the higher schools (including the institutions of higher learning) collective compositions have also won for themselves—in one form or another—a solid place, and in the beginners’ schools for adults... , sometimes almost all the writing can be considered collective.”!”

But what was such collective work like?

Titles (a theme) are suggested. The best one is chosen by general vocal assent (more rarely, by voting), is written on the blackboard and transcribed by the students in their notebooks. . . . The students think of and call out a few sentences. The best one is chosen and written down. . . . The work itself goes along the lines of collective invention, choice, and writing down of sen-

tences. : . . By getting answer after answer, that is, sentence after sentence, the class in sum will have a collective story. . . . The authors provide their own formulations (sentences, topics); the collective is responsible for the final approval and editing.'”°

A different method of writing was also possible: each student receives a “subtopic,” then “writes his own part on a quarter of the sheet, asking his teacher or comrades for corrections as needed. The sheets turned in need only be sewn together, and the composition 1s ready. After the teacher corrects it, it is read and

discussed.”!7! Need it be said that “the growth of collective compositions in the school points to a phenomenon of not only special (literary) significance but also of an immeasurably larger general significance: to the habit of working together, which has taken root in the school, and to the acquisition of general

habits of collectivism”; that the listeners “are transformed into a real laboratory

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of the word”; and that “collective work within the framework of the broad collective (the classroom) is always done with the teacher, which assures it of complete guidance and assistance, and also . . . with such a setup there will be the least possible irresponsible and uncontrolled [sic!] writing.”'”* This method-

ological article gives examples of such “collective stories”: “In the Weaving Factory,” “The Lumber Factory,” and so on. “Collective creative work” in the classroom had finally achieved the methodological goals that had been defined. Regardless of one’s opinion of these goals, the methods for achieving them were effective.

Platonov's “The Literature Factory” is not a parody of this method of creative work. As a radical thinker tortured by “the spiteful dogs of our powerlessness before the History that envelops us,”'”* Platonov simply had gotten accustomed to excessively “thinking something out to its end.” In particular, he suggested: “It is necessary that the methods of literary creation progress with the tempo of the revolution, if people cannot grow at such a speed.”!”* He also suggested that “literature is a social thing, it naturally must be built by a social collective, only under the leadership of, or with the ‘assembly’ directed by, one person—a master craftsman, a writer.”'”’ On such serpentine roads, as one already knows, thinkers most often ended up in the “ditch” of utopian project making. It is difficult to say exactly where Platonov “miscalculated the curve.” Be that as it may, he was expecting the “accident.” He only talked about his “modest experience” in working on the short story “Antiseksus”: he had assembled prepared “pieces of life.” But this “was still cottage-industry literature.” Here is the real plan for the “literary enterprise”: At the center of the enterprise is an editorial board (of, say, a monthly)—a collective of literary fitters... . Iwould do it like this in the USSR. We have an all-Union or all-Russian literary journal. In each national republic or province... there is a network of lit. correspondents, in which each correspondent, according to his own internal inclination, specializes in a certain subject alone (“labor” or “personalities and character,” or something else), but not denying himself the work of assembling live material and of other plots, if he wishes to... . It could also happen that the plot is broken down into a few subplots, and each subplot has the services of a particular correspondent. For example, the plot of “labor” is easily disassembled into dozens of subplots: platinum,

mining, lumberwork, and so on—in a single narrow-radius region. Lit. correspondents are the raw-material workshops, where the semifinished products of a social nature end up, and where they are selected, sorted, and somehow put together. Then the material goes from the lit. correspondents to the national (or regional) lit. correspondent, the most experienced lit. correspondent who is already a fitter of literature, if lit. correspondents are only qual-

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ified “workmen.” .. . The natl. (or regnl.) lit. correspondent isa... qualitycontrol laboratory. The lit. correspondents should not introduce anything of their own into what is extracted from lifé. . . . The natl. (regnl.) lit. corres-

pondent periodically sends the material brought together into a single notebook to the editors (“assbly. dept.”) “for assembly’—to have works created. The enterprise looks like this: workmen “at the bench’ (lit. correspondents)

shop foremen (natl./regnl. lit. correspondents) fitters (writers, collectors of works) director/engineers (critics) . . .

The honorarium is divided approximately like this: 50% for the writer [that is, the] “fitter,” 5% for the critic [that is, the] “bureau of repres[entationa]| liter[ary] methods,”

5% for the natl./regnl. lit. correspondent, 40% for lit. correspondents,

for every work published by the given literary enterprise. The work is published with the name of the “fitter” and with the trademark of the literary

enterprise. ... Perhaps then we will get closer to radical reform of literature (of its content, style, and quality) and we will solve the problem of collectivizing this “mysterious” and delicate area simply, we will liquidate the archaism of the devices and customs of literary labor, will attain to the level of a production organization's reasonableness, although with a bad factory to make agric[ultura]| machinery and tools.'”°

Platonov’s project, with an examination of which I close this book, was a sort of response to Aleksandr Chizhevskii’s project for creating a unified staterun “Academy of Poetry.”!”” But, in a paradoxical way, the captivating picture drawn by Platonoy does not bring one closer to the “Academy of Poetry,” nor even to the “factory to make agricultural machinery and tools,” but to the school classroom. This is not even a hypothesis: Soviet literature for the most part is one huge school composition written by students in a “primary school for adults.” The adults learned how to write, joined together in the “enterprise,” and there was almost no “irresponsible and uncontrolled writing.” But this was later, and besides, they were “adults.” But young people, as Stalin had predicted, were “schooling like minnows.” In a Rost article pub-

lished just before the First Congress of Soviet Writers, Ivan Zhiga wrote: The growth of the mass literary movement provided the qualitative and quantitative growth of beginner writers. . . . Assuredly, in many cities,

districts, provinces, and republics, up to 90 percent of the writers’ organizations

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are precisely beginner writers appearing in print for the first time in local

newspapers and journals, publishing their first books—making their way up to the central thick journals.'”*

This was the social base of Soviet literature, not the few dozen large-city authors who acted as representatives at the Congress of the multithousand “army of poets.” These masses were not uniform. Mikhail Jurin, in a speech about “working with beginners” that he gave at the third plenum of the Organizational Committee, distinguished four groups in the “young creative generation.”

First group: “Leaders of the literary circles. Creatively, the strongest comrades in the litcircles. They are already recognized writers in their own factory newspapers and no one questions their being printed, but they have not taken a single step beyond the factory newspaper.” Second group: “The most difficult and the most sensitive. Here belong the young writers who have outgrown the litcircle, more often than not loners . . . , no longer satisfied with the factory newspaper. They gravitate toward the writers’ milieu . . . , although it is hard for them to meet the big writers. . . The person breaks away from industry but does not grow up as a writer.” Third group: “No one doubts the talent of these comrades . . . , people begin to mention them in literary speeches. They have yet to publish a single book, but their work appears often in newspapers and journals. . . . They are on the fast track to literature.” Fourth group: “Every one of these comrades has already published one or two books. . . . They have already become part of literature. . . . They demand exclusive attention for themselves.”'”

The article, by the way, was entitled “Masters and Apprentices” (“Mastera i podmaster ia”) and concluded with a challenge: “Not a single master of the artistic word should be in the All-Union Congress without an apprentice.” lurin gave names in the article for people who belonged to each group. A simple search for these names in the Handbook ofthe Union of Writers ofthe USSR (Spravochnik Soiuza pisatelei SSSR) for 1970 showed the following: of the four names in the first group, only one turned up later in the union; of the four in the second group, two; of the five in the third group, three; and all four of the fourth group were in the 1970 handbook (including the future Stalin Prize laureates: the Russian poet Evgenii Dolmatovskii and the Belarusian poet Arkadii Kuleshov). The evident “gradation” in the progression from group to group suggests a sort of pyramidal construction. The sifting out of the “chaff” during this progression was assured by constant institutional control at all stages: lit-

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circles, litconsultancies, genre sections of the local divisions of the union, literary associations, and the Conferences of Youth Writers, the participants of which were chosen through the union and the Komsomol Central Committee. These mechanisms of selection and control not only assured the uninterruptibility of the process ofproducing Soviet writers but also proved amenable to regulation. Thus, in connection with the reduction of the number of books published in the early 1950s overall, publication of books by “young authors” decreased significantly, the demands made of these authors became stricter, and the publishers’ responsibilities greater (the young authors’ books now had to be published not only with reviews but also with special recommendations from the local divisions of the union). This requirement was stated thus:

It is necessary to regulate the business of publishing artistic literature in a radical way, especially the publishing of the first books of young writers, keeping in mind that both the Union of Soviet Writers and the publishers of artistic literature should manifest an everyday paternal concern for and attention to the upbringing and education of young Soviet writers. .. . We must increase the demands made on the reviewers and editors who provide appraisals and determine the fate of each new work.'*°

The “everyday paternal concern for and attention to” beginners were completely justified and based on common sense: “When you are standing beside the sources of creative work, it is easier to predict and direct its development.”'*!

Nikolai Ognev, who spent a particularly large amount of time with beginners, quoted in 1936 the maxim “Genuine talent will make its own road” and immediately warned, “We must decisively sweep away this harmful, blatantly bourgeois point of view. Zalent must be nurtured.” In conclusion, he said, “The liter-

ary cadres are maturing. And ‘the cadres determine everything.””'** Why were these cadres “maturing”? Because the time of the old cadres was passing. The process of replacing the corpus of writers was happening not so much in Moscow as on the “periphery’—in the provinces and republics. The “widespread repressions” that touched the “local writers’ cadres” were felt particularly keenly in the republics, where writers had been drafted directly into “nationalcultural construction,” which almost inevitably turned them into “nationalists.” This problem, although quite interesting in and of itself, has only one aspect of relevance here: “advancement of the new literary generation.” What were the conditions in which it was “advanced”? A single piece of evidence provided by I. Vilenski, although indirectly, betrays quite a few things, as one may imagine. Vilenskii began his overview of the work of young Uzbek writers in the following manner:

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.

The bourgeois nationalists and Trotskyite-Bukharinist spies and provocateurs who were unmasked and expulsed from the Uzbek Union ofSoviet Writers in 1937 had made obstruction of the growth and advancement of young writers their immediate goal. They carried out sabotage to this aim. The enemies of the people closed off the young writers of Soviet Uzbekistan’s access to literature... . A pile [kuchka] of talentless writers tried to monopolistically

represent the literature of Soviet Uzbekistan, squeezing out the youth. When the enemies of the people were unmasked and driven out of the Union of Soviet Writers of Uzbekistan, when the refreshing wind of Bolshevik selfcriticism blew through the union—the dams that had constrained the growth

ofliterary youth also fell apart.'*?

The situation in other republics and provinces were described in literally these same words at the end of the 1930s. During the five-year period that passed af-

ter the First Congress of Soviet Writers, several divisions of the Union of Soviet Writers underwent a complete “renewal” of members. The “dams... fell apart” and yesterday's beginners were transformed into “full-blooded” Soviet writers; as Party-bureaucrat language would say, a complete “rotation of cadres” occurred. This, more than anything else, explains the new quality of the Soviet literary product in the postwar years. In order to understand how the generation that literally followed the 1920s writers could sink to the level of Cavalier ofthe Golden Star, how after the war Azhaev, Babaevskii, Bubennoy, or Perventsev could advance to the first ranks of Soviet prose writers (or Gribachev and Sofronov to those of poets, and Surov, of playwrights), one must imagine both the conditions in which this new writers’ generation came into literature and the average professional level of this “young mass of writers.” Here is their generalized portrait as unveiled to their enthusiastic con-

temporaries at the All-Union Conference of Young Poets in 1938: They have gathered together from different ends of our immense mighty Fatherland. Pilots, tank-drivers, divers, scholars, stokers and combine operators, Stakhanovites of the fields and factories. Like a closed iron structure, knowing for whom they live and work, the heroes of young Soviet poetry advance, only yesterday having won the right to their creative work. We have

become accustomed to calling the representatives of this young poetry the “third generation.” It grew up and creatively matured in the era of spread-out socialist construction and of the fight against international fascism. This generation witnessed the trial of the scoundrel gang of Trotskyite-Bukharinist bandits and the victorious thunder of our cannons at Lake Khasan. . . . This generation is the witness to the triumph of the policy of our party and government, the triumph of Stalin’s Constitution. Countless facts [sic] at every step daily fostered an ardent patriotism in this generation; creative prospects have

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opened up in front of them; youth have been stirred by the daily heroism of our life. Along with this, the requirements of the reading masses have grown; the cultural growth of the country has put rather complex and responsible demands before this generation. They not only had to live and be stirred by the feelings and thoughts of hundreds of millions of people who were building in capitalist surroundings the first socialist state in the world[:] they [also] had

to incarnate the people’s thoughts and feelings in full-blooded artistic images. They had to raise their poetic craftsmanship to the level where any allowances for youth and inexperience are becoming inappropriate'*4 .

In fact, when these remarkable “youths” began to turn into Stalin Prize laureates immediately after the war, “allowances for youth and inexperience” became not “inappropriate” but outright impossible. In Lidiia Ginzburg’s last book of memoirs, the posthumously published Transubstantiation ofExperience (Pretvorenie opyta), there is an essay entitled “The Meeting” (“Sobranie”), in which Ginzburg analyzes the makeup and behavior of the participants of a certain meeting in the Union of Soviet Writers. There is an entire gallery of social types, and an analysis of the group consciousness and social behavior of the participants. Ginzburg reflects on what the “driving mechanisms” are that work out the negative social energy, and who the “Soviet writer” is in his real social function. She calls this caste “intelligentsia without the intelligentsia principle of behavior.”'® Every time, her attendance at a writers’ meeting would result in an entry in her diary and an analysis of the social types that accompanied her observations. Here she describes a meeting of the union’s poetry section for discussion of the poems of the two then-young poets Aleksandr Kushner and Viktor Sosnora, which spilled over into the routine Soviet “ritual of condemnation [prorabotka].” This

meeting was held in 1962. “Several people from some literary association or another,” Ginzburg recalls, “came to the discussion with particular intentions. They were young, but horrible. They are made of the same stuff, as it happens, that the 1949 thugs were made of.”!*° Again, the description concludes with an

analysis of the “mechanisms of social behavior”: Where do they get these overzealous critics? Just exactly what kind of human material is used for this business? Of course, among them were sadists, misanthropes, cold and hot murderers by nature. This is to some extent or another a pathology, and it is not typical. We do not believe in born villains. We believe in mechanisms. In the twentieth century the science of behavior loved operating with mechanisms. . . . In this case a simple social mechanism operates, although it sometimes has rather complex psychological consequences as well. It was not their essence, by far, that they wanted from

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humanitarian activities, but something completely different. Accordingly, they [the activities— Zians.] were handed over to people adapted for something else and completely incapable of, and therefore completely indifferent to, what they were doing. This is an immutable law, for capable people invariably would have taken an undesirable interest in the matter, by their very nature. Talent is selflessness and stubbornness. So talentlessness became a thing of enormous fundamental social significance. But then began the drama of these people, and of course, of those who happened to come into contact with them. Self-satisfaction is more often than not only a veneer. The attempts to hold their ground (to keep the capable ones from by chance replacing them)—it is unabated evil and deceit,

from big crimes to small lapses of conscience. But the mechanism of using the unsuitable takes hold of everyone—ordinary people, good people capable of doing something or another. More than anything else, it kills their will for productive labor, and accordingly, their conscience. Who knows, perhaps talentless young poets could become real workers, engineers, pilots, or sailors. The complex of those who sit in a place that is not their own, and the similar complex of those left without a place, are similar in their makeup: inferiority, nagging self-love, envy. They envy each other, two typical contemporaries— who have not made use of their capabilities and are incapable of doing what they are trying to do.'*”

This kind of sociopsychological sketch explains much more in Soviet culture than the voluminous works that tell stories of repressions, censorship, and “political control.” The “young, but horrible” people did not need “political control.” They themselves were control. Kushner, who is not a character in this book, is another matter. In this book dedicated to the history of the shaping of Soviet writers, | agreed not to talk about writers. But just as the shock-workers did not exist in a vacuum of “great literature,” this literature itself also did not exist in the vacuum of Soviet history—and not only in the sense that, for example, Mandel’shtam made his living in the late 1920s by working in the litconsultancy of Moskovskii komsomolets (Moscow Komsomolian). The motives

of historical behavior were different for Mandel’shtam than they were for his Komsomol correspondents. But between these opposite poles lay a multitude of sociopsychological types—‘“the great mishmash of the instinct of selfpreservation and of the intelligentsia habits of scientific-historical thinking and fear . . . destructive activism . . . the desire to live and work.”'** Neither the mechanisms of the intelligentsia’s social behavior nor the paradoxes of this behavior in the 1930s are the subject of this study. Quite a few studies have been devoted to analyzing them. What interests me, rather, is simply the import of the mutual influences of the two elites—the old and the new. One has no reason to trust such contemporaries of and participants in that

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era as, for example, Mikhail Slonimskii; but given his role as a transitional fig-

ure, he was in his own way right when he stated, in 1933: The division of our literature . . . into young and old is absolutely false and artificial. Young literature has its own history. In 1921 and 1922, when the majority of today’s old men had just gone into literature, such a division into young and old men was very profound. Then, old men were real old men in every respect. They were the people of a different era. Among us there was a fundamental and profound difference, there was a very harsh, exacerbated struggle between the two generations of our writers. But can we say that there is such a difference now? Of course there is not. We have a single Soviet literature. And under no circumstances should we emphasize any kind of division by age. The more so if we turn our attention away from the age characteristic of one or another writer, then in reading the books that come out now, it is hard to distinguish, by the creativity or the works, whether it is an old man writing, or a young one.'®

It was, of course, still possible to “distinguish.” Here Slonimskii was being overdiligent out of the desire to be “together with everyone and at one with the established order.” Writers such as Slonimskii, figures in the transition from the 1920s to the

1930s—former fellow-travelers, “experts” who had occupied the “key positions” in Soviet literature (Aseev, Fedin, Leonov, Pavlenko, Selvinskii, Shagin-

ian, A. Tolstoi, and others)—in fact got (to varying degrees, of course) more trouble from the authorities than anyone else. Indeed, it was upon these writers (perhaps as many as one hundred) that the apparatus of censure operated. One need only consult the archives that became accessible after perestroika to become convinced of this.!°° The same names that were at the center in the 1920s appeared in them, while quite other characters figured in public documents—Stalin’s laureates. Both these groups created Soviet culture. But understanding the relationship between them is not easy. Helpful here is the principle of “sincerity,” so dear to the Perevalists, which died in 1930 along with Pereval, and was first revived in Vladimir Pomerantsev’s famous article

that appeared with the first breezes of the Khrushchev “thaw.” The problems that constantly arose with the “experts” were not caused by their desire to rebel, but rather by the “inorganicness” of their behavior and creative work, by the duality of their social and artistic experience. Nikolai Ostrovskii (not Vsevolod Kochetov!), for example, once counseled beginner writers thus:

You should know, my young comrades, that anyone can become a writer. But to do this, one needs a stubborn will, enormous training, endless enrichment

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by knowledge, and endless aspiration toward a higher level of culture. . . . Fifteen or sixteen years ago, I was a witness to and participant in a huge struggle and great events, and I observed heroic champions. But could I then, an almost illiterate boy, have written what I have now written, after persistent study, now when I have armed myself with a knowledge of the theory of revolutionary struggle and have been able to generalize my experience in artistic images? No, I could not have. . . . You must, you must know the best works of world culture, in order to broaden your perspective. .. . Only then can you boldly take up the pen and, having generalized your observations, provide a valuable work.'”'

But what had Ostrovskii himself read, what did he “study”? He continues, “Just before beginning to write a new novel—eight months were dedicated to study. Over the course of these eight months I read the fundamental works of world artistic literature, such books as War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and | read a whole series of other world-famous works many times. 192 For this reason, of course, books were rewritten for him and a whole brigade of editors

followed in his steps. “Craftsmanship” was lacking. But there was “organicity” and “sincerity’—just those things that the greatest “master-writers of Soviet literature” did not have, from Aseev to Zoshchenko: they were not “boys.” For

this reason, Fedin remained entirely in the 1920s, although he also held leading posts in the Union of Soviet Writers and wrote an endless Socialist Realist epic; but Ostrovskii remained forever in properly Soviet culture thanks to a single book. He was part shock-worker, part writer: he read Anna Karenina and “a whole series of other world-famous works” like a school assignment. He was a good pupil who passionately wanted to be a writer. But the main thing was that nothing in his moral and cultural perspective went beyond the framework of Soviet experience. The fellow-traveler from just yesterday was another matter. Nikolai Piksanov, who had analyzed one hundred autobiographies of Soviet writers,'”> despite the amazing diversity of origins of the “master-writers” that he had seen, concluded in 1930: “Soviet literature is only at the beginning of

its journey. . . . The social change is not complete. It is continuing before our very eyes, and its results in literature will echo much later.”!*4 In an era of (as Mandel’shtam said) “the flood of history,” the value of biography is not very great: the “role of personality in history,” at least in the history of Soviet literature, was understood according to “the laws of revolutionary times”: nothing could shake the greatness of the structure, not even the most severe losses. When Aleksandr Fadeev died, Konstantin Simonov began his eulogy thus: “With the death of Aleksandr Fadeev, our literature has suffered one of its

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severest losses for all the years it has existed,” but “Soviet literature is a collective business, its tasks cannot be diminished by losses, even the hardest ones, and since it is necessary to the people, then what is left undone by one person must be completed jointly by others.”!°> What was there to be “completed”? Finishing writing his novel Ferrous Metallurgy (Chernaia metallurgiia). And

truly, the idea of the Union of Soviet Writers was a realization of the utopia of “collective creative activity,” in which one only could create “jointly.”!” When the writers that condemned the bureaucracy prevailing in their “creative union” asserted that bureaucracy leads to the destruction of literature, they hardly understood the degree of tenacity that the institution created by Stalin possessed: throughout the half-century of the existence of the Union of Soviet Writers, not one independent artistic trend took shape in Soviet literature. Indeed, it attained the degree of uniformity that Slonimskii had written about at the beginning of the 1930s: “We do not have two literatures, one ‘large’ (professional) and the other ‘small’ (amateur).”!"” Decades had to pass

before this statement was not only perceived as an axiom but in general corresponded to reality: shock-worker Georgii Markov rose to the level of first secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers, and the union’s chairman, Konstantin Fedin, toward the end of his life himself became a writer, like Markov. They

met in the neutral space of Soviet writing: Markov’s postwar novel was awarded the Stalin Prize, and his epic novels were no different from those of Fedin’s latter period of work. And it was to this same “averaged” level that “creative youth” were oriented. Lidiia Ginzburg numbered the subject of “education of the new literary generation” among the “substitute subjects”: “When there is a new generation, it comes itself, and sometimes it is even uneducated. The new generation comes whether or not it is wanted. More often than not it is not wanted, because people naturally do not like to give up their places. The less possible a generation is, the more eagerly it is called for.”!”* This last observation perhaps explains the reason for the perpetual “discussions about youth.” And the trivialization of the subjects raised in these discussions was the result of their being “substitutes.” When on the eve of the Third Congress of Soviet Writers in 1958-1959 the rou-

tine “discussion” was undertaken, the following such “urgent questions” were discussed: whether to establish an age requirement (twenty-five to twenty-eight years old) for applicants to the Literary Institute; whether to reopen the journal Literaturnaia ucheba; whether to insert a special item in the union's regulations

requiring every writer to work with young authors; should the acceptance of young people into the union be made quicker, in order to “rejuvenate” ite The selection of topics, as one can see, is traditional. Traditional too was the “re-

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sult of the fruitful discussions’—eight years later, Sholokhov raised “tricky questions” for the delegates of the Fourth Congress of Soviet Writers:

I want to introduce a few figures that make one reconsider and think things over. At the first Congress, 71 percent of the writer delegates were under forty, at the second one, only 26 percent, and at the third, 13.9 percent. We are

getting old, my fellow writers! .. . The average age of the delegates of the present Congress looks a bit sad, nearly sixty. But after all, this is the present day ofliterature, and a good master [/oziain] does not live only by the present day.*”°

One cannot deny Sholokhov’s “breadth of vision”: when criticizing, he always knew that the Soviet authorities were “good masters.” In the historical literature, a statement of Erenburg’s (in the fourth volume of his memoirs) is often adduced as indirect proof of the extent of repressions

among authors: he said that out of the seven hundred writers that participated in the first Congress in 1934, “maybe fifty” survived until the second Congress in 1954.70! “Even if we make allowances for natural death (although according to the minutes of the first Congress, the average age of the delegates was 38.9

years, and 71 percent were still not 40), this figure is striking,” Robert Conquest observes.*°* Here something is overlooked: during this period the Union of Soviet Writers overall had grown significantly in the quantitative sense (and,

it goes without saying, had changed significantly in a qualitative sense). The replacement of Babel with Babaevskii is, of course, such an unequal trade that the “successors” are simply not taken into account. Nonetheless, it should be emphasized that in the context of the history of Soviet literature proper, the real question is not “where did the authors go?” after 1934, but where did they come from? Soviet literature cannot be understood outside the context of the change in the corpus of writers that occurred on the cusp of the 1930s, just as one cannot understand the history of the Bolshevik Party without taking into account the complete change of its membership that took place starting with “Lenin's call.” The “purges” and repressions both in the Party and in literature must be examined against the backdrop of the constant “reproduction of cadres.” Therefore it can be said that in Soviet culture a mechanism for reproducing the new type of creators, a real “literature factory,” was created. Taking the workings of

this mechanism into account is fundamentally important to understanding Soviet culture as a system that was effective throughout seven decades. Indeed,

in the mid-1930s the social system “changes course—from the ‘heroism of revolutionary hysteria’ to the routine reproduction of its status quo.”2" As a result

‘

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5)

405

of the mechanisms of ideological transmission, in the following generation, fifteen to twenty years later, as sociologists Lev Gudkov and Boris Dubin demonstrate in their studies,”* Soviet mythology “ceases to be apprehended as something ideological, constructed, ‘cultural.’ By then it is ‘reality itself.”2 The transmitter of this genetic program, the carrier of the “stable value systems, the matrices of the Soviet person's identity,””°° was the “Soviet intelligentsia’ that was built “from ground zero” by the authorities via a “replacement of the educated stratum from below with a literally complete cleansing [chistka] at the top.”””” Defining the intelligentsia as a “massive bureaucracy of

reproductive systems,” as an “attribute of a totalitarian society . . . characterized by a curious ‘defect’ of its reproductive systems,” researchers point out that under Soviet conditions, the intelligentsia as a bureaucracy reproductive in its functions and its understanding of itself, could not talk about itself any other way than in a form of conversation about the entire social whole. The language of social description and criticism (the people, society, common interests) was its only available form to universalize its own definitions, knowledge, and symbols. Therefore art, primarily

literature, acted as its screen, form, and channel of self-presentation.””

Thus, between the Soviet writer (to the degree, of course, that he remained Soviet) and authority, no “gap” existed: Soviet literature was the natural form of “bureaucratic writing” and needed no repressions against bureaucrats (Soviet writers). But the history of repressions that for eight decades was passed off as the history of Soviet literature, was a history of erasing the real Soviet literature: the real picture of Soviet literature—its mechanisms, its social nature and functions, and even its history—was thickly painted over with the pathetic picture of the Artist’s struggle against the Soviet Leviathan, which imbued the history of Soviet literature with a sort of heroic tinge. Yes, the changing of the

functions of literature in the system of Soviet culture was accompanied by, as I have elaborated, a constant changing of projects and project-makers that proceeded with unprecedented acceleration. But let us refrain from appraisals and try to understand the character of the cultural model: as a result of these permanent changes (or “cleansings,” in Soviet language), a construct was shaped that preserved both programs—“destruction” and “creation’—in its genetic code. Neither of these programs can be definitely attributed to it. “T do not hate the Winter Palace and museums any less than you do,” Blok wrote in an unfinished letter to Mayakovsky, in response to the latter’s 1918 call to fire on the museums. “But destruction is just as old as construction, and just as traditional as it is... . In destroying, we are those same old slaves of the old

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world; the destruction of traditions is the same tradition. A great curse lies over us... . Some will build, others destroy... , but all will be slaves, until a third something appears that is equally unlike construction and destruction.”*"° Perhaps we are dealing with that “third something”? After all, a museum— that “height of creation,” the constant target of “revolutionary destruction”— is not simply a “repository.” What it most often harbors is “revolutionary destruction” itself, accepted by successive generations to be completely respectable “tradition.” Besides, Soviet culture similarly did not simply “preserve” the programs of “destruction” and “construction.” After all, the whole of Socialist Realism was aimed at neutralization of both these codes, which made the process “routine,” predictable, and controllable. In Socialist Realism, books, pictures, and buildings were created “for eternity,” were transformed into “classics” even before the ink or paint had dried. Only now, when this ink or paint has not only dried, but—through the toll of history—has also faded or chipped quite a bit, can one begin to understand that Stalinist culture is the real museum of revolution.

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Notes

FOREWORD

A. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii v 8 tomakh, vol. 7, p. 364.

- Quoted in A. Blok, Sochineniia v 2 tomakh, vol. 2, p. 762. . Ibid., pp. 347-54.

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4. See Nadtochii, “Druk, tovarishch i Bart”; and Dobrenko, Metafora vlasti. 5. Vtoror Vsesoiuznyi s”ezd sovetskikh pisatelei, p. 11. | have summarized data pre-

sented in a speech by Aleksei Surkov on “Russian Soviet of writers of the other brother peoples of the USSR.” 6. It is not coincidental that the most fruitful studies are based on analysis of the intersections of the different ism: conceptual-theoretical and historical (Giinther, Die

artistic literature” and “works of the Socialist Realist canon dimensions of Socialist RealVerstaatlichung der Literatur);

and cultural-anthropological and structural-aesthetic (Clark, The Soviet Novel). Con-

versely, even the most successful attempts at immanent study of this canon (as a rule, in the theoretical dimension only) inevitably draw a sort of unilinear picture of either “formulation of dogma’ (in the Sovietological variant, see Ermolaev, Soviet Literary Theories) or of “the path to the flowering of the most advanced artistic method” (in the Soviet variant, see Akimov, V sporakh 0 khudozhestvennom metode), not to mention

the countless Western “counterpropaganda’ descriptions of Socialist Realism and the equally numerous Soviet “historical-theoretical” descriptions (for example, Mark Slonim in the West, or Aleksei Metchenko in the USSR), both of which overstep the boundaries of scholarship. 7. Nadtochii, “Druk, tovarishch i Bart,” p. 115. 8. Pointing out that Socialist Realism “must not be judged from the standpoints of Western discourse,” Nadtochii observes, “Aesthetics here is not the aesthetics of ‘works’ in the European sense of the word (pictures, books, and so forth), but rather the aesthetics of the configuration of power” (“Druk, tovarishch i Bart,” p. 120). 9. Barthes, lzbrannye raboty, p. 216. to. Ibid., pp. 219-20. u. Belinkov, Sdacha i gibel’ sovetskogo intelligenta, pp. 605-6. 12. See Groys, The Total Art ofStalinism. 13. It is not coincidental that the “golden age” of Glavlit occurred in the 1920s, when there were still very few “Soviet writers” and a great number of “creative per-

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sonalities” (see Blium, Za kulisami “Ministerstva pravdy”), but in the mature Stalinist

era, the forms of censorship changed (see Literaturnyi front; and Babichenko, Pisateli i tsenzory). Numerous documents in the Party archives opened in the post-Soviet era

reveal the mechanism by which censorial decisions were made: the political mechanism ofcensorship is more and more aestheticized, merging with the fundamental aesthetic category ofSocialist Realism and Socialist Realist creativity—the principal of Party-mindedness. This transition of politics to aesthetics and to a “creative act” is given an interesting treatment, based on materials regarding the history of 1930s Soviet cinema, in Iampol’skii, “Censorship as the Triumph of Life.”

14. LEFist: Member of LEE, the “Left Front of Arts” (“Levyi front iskusstv”). 15. RAPP: Rossiiskaia assotsiatsiia proletarskikh pisatelei (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers). 16. See Dobrenko, “The Petrified Utopia.”

CHAPTER

ONE

1. Komar and Melamid, “A. Ziablov,” pp. 404, 407.

2. See Poety 3. Belinskii, 4. Belinskii, sugi dlia detei,” 5. Belinskii,

1790-1810-kh godov. [Review of:] “Novye dosugi Fedora Slepushkina,” pp. 159-61. [Review of:] “Feofil, dukhovnaia povest’ . . . Voennye pesni . . . Dop. 172. [Review of:] “Skazka o mel’nike-koldune, 0 dvukh zhidkakh i o

dvukh batrakakh,” pp. 617-18. 6. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, t. 13, p. 265. 7. Quoted in Rozanoy, Literaturnye reputatsii, p. 70.

8. Ibid., p. 68.

9. Stikhotvorentia krest'ianina Alipanova, p. 3. 10. Rozanov, Literaturnye reputatsit, pp. 74-75.

11. See Grossman, Poety krepostnoi pory; Sipovskii, Poeziia naroda; and so on. 12. Surkov, “Tak my rosli,” p. 13. 13. Grossman, Poety krepostnoi pory, p. 14.

14. Rozanov, Literaturnye reputatsii, p. 78. The first edition of this work was published by the Nikitinskie Subbotniki publishing house in 1928; references here are to the 1990 edition. 15. See Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read.

16. See Vol’‘naia russkaia poeztia XVIII-XIX vekov v 2-kh tomakh. 17. Istoriia russkoi literatury XIX veka, t. 3, p. 125.

18. Chukovskii, Nekrasov, p. 272. 19. Lelevich, “Poeziia N. A. Nekrasova kak sinteticheskoe vyrazhenie revoliutsionnoraznochinskogo stilia,” p. 14. 20. Ibid., p. 34. 21. Tynianoy, “Stikhovye formy Nekrasova” (1929), pp. 399-411. 22. Eikhenbaum, “Nekrasov” (1986), pp. 77-115.

NIOMERES

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‘zakon antiteza,’”

24. Members of the group gathered around this journal called themselves “Onguardists” (napostovtsy). Similarly, “Onlitguardists” (nalitpostovtsy) refers to those grouped

around Na literaturnom postu (“On literary guard”). 25. Chukovskii, Nekrasov, pp. 258-61.

26. Quoted in Vainberg, “Gor’kii, znakomyi ? neznakomyi,” p. 41. 27. Lemke, Ocherki po istorii russkoi tsenzury 1 zhurnalistiki XIX stoletiia, p. 36.

28. 29. 30. 31. 33. 35.

Quoted in Efremin, Poet imassy, pp. 4-5. ‘Tynianov, “Stikhovye formy Nekrasova” (1977), p. 25. Eikhenbaum, “Nekrasov,” p. 342. Ibid., p. 350. 32. Ibid., p. 360. Ibid., p. 342. Sane bids. pu357. Kuznitsa is also the Russian name of the literary group (the Smithy) whose

journal this was, its members kuznetsy (“[black]smiths”); because “Smith” is, of course, not a Russian surname, the word “Smiths” will be used (with initial capital and with-

out quotation marks) in this text to denote members of this group.— Trans. 36. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, t. 1, pp. 271, 272. 37. See A. M. Bikhter’s commentary at the end of Poety revoliutsionnogo narodnichestva, pp. 247-59, for notes on other authors.

38. Bikhter, “Poety revoliutsionnogo narodnichestva,” p. 10. 39. Ibid., p. 16. 40. Poem texts of Petr Lavrov, Feliks Volkhovskoi, Sergei Sinegub, Nikolai Moro-

zov, Petr Iakubovich, German Lopatin, and Vera Figner are quoted from Poety revoliutsionnogo narodnichestva. Many of these poems are untitled and listed in the index under the opening words of the first line. I have included the authors’ own titles where applicable, but have not used first-line titles unless the quoted text does not begin with

the first line. I have included the authors’ names as an attribution when it is unclear from the surrounding text. 41. Sinegub, “Vospominaniia,” p. 123. 42. Lelevich, “Poeziia narodovol'tsev,” pp. 120-21, 125. 43. Ibid., p. 131. 44. Efremin, “Poet narodovol’cheskogo zakata,” p. 85.

45. Efremin, “Poety-surikovtsy,” pp. 96-97.

46. Ibid., pp. 112-13. 47. Ibid., p. 116. 48. See Sveshnikov, Vospominaniia propashchego cheloveka. 49. “Who should the peasant poet primarily influence?” Del’vig asked in Literaturnaia gazeta. “The people who share his occupation, of course. But if he starts to speak in a language that is not native to him, if he begins to portray objects he knows nothing at all about and to use names that are strange and unfamiliar to his ear, then

the peasants will simply not understand him, and people of higher occupations will find only incompleteness and a vain effort to attain the unattainable in his works” (quoted in Rozanovy, Literaturnye reputatsii, pp. 71-72).

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50. Otechestvennye zapiski, no. 1 (1873): otd. 2, 143744. 51. Efremin in his book describes the content of Travin’s manuscript, for which no

publisher was found in the 1930s. 52. Poem texts of Ivan Surikov and of the “Surikov poets” are quoted from J. Z. Surikov i poety-surikovtsy. As with the poem texts quoted earlier in this chapter, I have supplied titles and/or authors’ names where applicable. 53. Efremin, “Poety-surikovtsy,” p. 99.

54. Ibid., pp. 100-101. 55. Kalmanovskii, “Surikov i poety-surikovtsy,” p. 11. 56. Delo, no. 8 (1875): 300. 57. Quoted in Kalmanovskii, “Surikov i poety-surikovtsy,” p. 8.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

Kalmanovskii, “Surikov i poety-surikovtsy,” p. 23. Ibid., p. 53. Ibid., p. 47. Ibid., p. 51. Tynianoy, “O literaturnoi evoliutsii,” p. 278. Tynianov, “Literaturnoe segodnia,” pp. 150-51. Tynianoy, “Literaturnyi fakt,” p. 263.

CHAPTER

TWO

1. Reitblat, A. I., “N. I. Sveshnikovy,” p. 5.

2. Zhits, [Review of:] “L. M. Kleinbort. Ocherki narodnoi literatury,” pp. 158, 160. 3. See Bonnell, The Russian Worker; Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite; Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read; Brower, The Russian City Between Tradition and Modernity,

1850-1900; Clowes, Kassow, and West, Between Tsar and People; Engel, Between the

Fields and the City; Engel, The Woman’ Side; Engel, “Russian Peasant Views of City Life”; Frank, “Simple Folk, Savage Customs’?”; Frank and Steinberg, Cultures in Flux; Von Geldern, “Life In-Between”; Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian; Neuberger, Hooli-

ganism; Steinberg, Moral Communities; Steinberg, “Workers on the Cross”; and Zelnik, A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia. 4. The biographies of the “people's writers” are taken from Kleinbort, Ocherki narodnoi literatury (with page references indicated in the text).

5- On “reflection of the life of the proletariat” in this literature, see Kubikov, Rabochii klass v russkoi literature, pp. 215-71. 6. P. Kogan wrote, “The absence of a clear-cut worldview, artistic poverty, the close ties to the village, and traces of intelligentsia reflection, are the distinctive features of all poets of the pre-October period” (Proletarskaia literatura, p. 11). Lebedev-Polianskii seconded Kogan: “In the earliest times of the movement, when the cadres of the future class [sic] were still only being assembled, and the minds of the broadest masses

of the class were enveloped by the still-unclear idea of struggle, agitated by the obscure contours of an ideal, ideology was inevitably imbued with similarly amorphous, and sometimes even contradictory, tendencies” (“Predislovie,” p. 3).

NOTES

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7- Mark Steinberg demonstrated in his work how religious motifs were transformed in proletarian literature via motifs of suffering and salvation; see his “Workers on the Cross.” 8. Gorky, Sobranie sochinenii v 30 tomakh, t. 4, p. 281. It is worth noting that the self-styled appellation of “slaves” was widespread in proletariah poetry. 9. Kleinbort, Ocherki narodnoi literatury, p. 57. 10. ‘Tolstoy took quite an interest in “writers from the people.” On his attitude toward them, see Bekker, “Tolstoi i nachinaiushchie pisateli iz naroda.” 11. Kleinbort, Ocherki narodnoi literatury, p. 73. 12. Bednyi, Sobranie sochinenii v 8-mi tt., t. 8, p. 263.

133. Vykhodtsy (sing. vykhodets), from the verb vykhodit’ “to come out [of],” has no

exact translation as an independent word in English and is almost always used in the formulation “vykhodets iz X,” “X by birth/origin,” where X is a nationality or social class. But in the contexts quoted in this book, there is a nuance of deprecation (how-

ever slight) that imbues the word with an independent sense of “newcomer,” “parvenu,” or “upstart,” and the word is therefore translated as such (with the Russian word supplied at each instance).— Trans.

14. 15. 16. 17.

Kleinbort, Ocherki narodnoi literatury, p. 60. Dooktiabrskaia “Pravda” ob iskusstve i literature, pp. 27, 63. Marx and Engels, K. Marks i FEEngel’ ob iskusstve, t. 1, p. 556. P. Kogan, Proletarskaia literatura, p. 6.

18. Keldysh, Problemy dooktiabrskoi proletarskoi literatury, p. 29.

19. Ibid., p. 116. 20. The first chapter of Keldysh’s Problemy dooktiabr'skoi proletarskoi literatury is devoted to analysis of this discussion. 21. Keldysh, Problemy dooktiabrskoi proletarskoi literatury, p. 32. 22. Istoriia VKP(b): Kratkii kurs, p. 3. 23. KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh i resheniiakh s”ezdov, konferentsii i plenumov TsK, Ch. 1,

p- 202. 24. Lunacharskii, “Zadachi sotsial-demokraticheskogo khudozhestvennogo tvorchestva,” p. 164. 25. Ibid.

26. Ibid., pp. 165-66. 27. VI. Lenini A. M. Gor kii, p. 110. 28. tarskoi 29. 31.

Nasha zaria, no. 3 (1914): 89, quoted in Keldysh, Problemy dooktiabr skoiproleliteratury, pp. 47, 57> 70: 30. Nasha zaria, nos. 10-11 (1913): 44. Nasha zaria, no. 2 (1914): 97. Nasha zaria, no. 6 (1913): 70. 32. Nasha zaria, no. 3 (1914): 95.

33. 34. 35. 36.

Novyi zhurnal dlia vsekh, no. 12 (1912): 93. On his biography and creative work, see Lelevich, “Odin iz zachinatelei.” skoi proletarskoi literatury, p. 173. Keldysh, Problemy dooktiabr Working-class folklore actively made its way into the press in the years just be-

fore the revolution, but it also had enjoyed a profound tradition in Russia. See Pesni russkikh rabochikh; Lozanova, “Fabrichno-zavodskie pesni krepostnoi Rossii”; and

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Chicherovy, “Pesni i stikhi proletariata v period massovogo rabochego revoliutsionnogo

dvizheniia (1890-1907 gg.).” 37. Keldysh, Problemy dooktiabrskoi proletarskoi literatury, p. 209. skoi proletarskoi literatury, pp. 206-7. 38. Quoted in Keldysh, Problemy dooktiabr

39. P. Kogan, Proletarskaia literatura, p. 5. 40. Nadtochii, “Druk, tovarishch i Bart,” p. 120.

41. P. Kogan, Proletarskaia literatura, p. 5. 42. Keldysh, Problemy dooktiabr skoi proletarskoi literatury, pp. 84-86. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

See Eventov, “Podpol’naia soldatskaia poeziia 1905-1907 gg.” Alferov, Vozniknovenie i razvitie rabsel'korovskogo dvizhentia v SSSR, p. 57. Baturin, Sochineniia, p. 466. Baturin, “Ot Zvezdy k Pravde,” p. 14. Quoted in Priamkov, Dooktiabr’skaia “Pravda”o literature, p. 183.

48. Dooktiabrskaia “Pravda”ob iskusstve i literature, pp. 21-22. 49. Ibid., p. 28. 50. Ibid., p. 17. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

Voprosy strakhovantiia, no. 8 (1915): 9. See Shaumian, Literaturno-kriticheskie stat’, p. 40. Gorky, “O pisateliakh-samouchkakh,” p. 99. Ibid., p. 100. Ibid., p. 137.

56. Gorky, “Predislovie” [Foreword to Ivan Morozov's Razryv-trava}, p. 165. 57- Miasnikov, M. Gor’kii, p. 348.

58. On the history of the creation of the first anthology, see Breitburg, “Maksim Gor’ kii”; and Balabanovich, “Gor’kii i pervyi ‘Sbornik proletarskikh pisatelei.” 59. Gorky, “Predislovie” [Foreword to Sbornik proletarskikh pisatelet|, p. 169. 60. Ibid., p. 170. 61. Ibid., p. 172. 62. See M. Gor'kii ipoety “Znaniia.” 63. Quoted in Semenovskii, V bor be za realizm, p. 103. 64. P. Kogan, Proletarskaia literatura, p. 17. 65. On Gorky’s participation in the “Milieu” (Sreda) and “Knowledge” literary unions, see Golubev, “M. Gor’kii i Znanie”; Oleinikov, M. Gor’kii i “Znanie”; Ga-

malii, Redaktorskaia detatel’nost’A.M. Gor kogo v izdatel’stve “Znanie”; and Kastorskii, “Realisticheskaia proza.” 66. Semenovskii, V bor'be za realizm, p. 103.

67. Quoted in Breitburg, “Maksim Gor'’kii,” p. 62. 68. Keldysh, Problemy dooktiabr koi proletarskoi literatury, p. 72. 69. See the anthology U istokov russkoi proletarskoi poezii, which was issued in the

series Biblioteka poeta: Bol’shaia seriia in 1965. To get an idea of the extent of this phe-

nomenon, one need only refer to the anthology Dm. Semenovskii ipoety ego kruga, issued in this same series in 1989 and compiled from local (Ivanovo-Voznesensk) mate-

rial: even the poet Semenoyskii had a “circle” that revolved around him. 70. See Priamkov, Dooktiabr’skaia “Pravda”o literature, pp. 185-95; Sovremennye

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raboche-krestianskie poety v obraztsakh i avtobiografiiakh s portretami; and N. V. Os'makov's commentary in Poety “Pravdy”, pp. 311-33.

71. Poety “Pravdy,” pp. 223-26. 72. Surkov, Sochineniia v 2-kh tomakh, t.1, p. 10. 73. Dymshits, “Iz istorii proletarskoi 74. Mandel’shtam, “Poet o sebe,” p. 75. Lunacharskii, “Sotsiologicheskie pp. 78-80. 76. Mandel’shtam, “Armiia poetoy,”

poezii 90-kh i nachala‘900-kh godoy,” p. xxx. 217. i patologicheskie faktory v istorii iskusstva,” p. 208. Further citations of this work are in-

dicated by page references in the text. 77. Chukovskii, Ot dvukh do piati, p. 224. 78. Mandel’shtam, “Armiia poetoy,” p. 211.

79. Khodasevich, “Belyi koridor,” pp. 62-64.

80. Ibid., pp. 60-61. 81. Kleinbort, Ocherki narodnoi literatury, p. 200. 82. Quoted in Akimov, V sporakh 0 khudozhestvennom metode, p. 122.

83. Mgebrov, Zhizn’ v teatre, t. 2, pp. 314-15, quoted in Men’shutin and Siniavskii, Poeztia pervykh let revoliutsti, p. 43. 84. “Resolution of the meeting of representatives of proletarian organizations in Petrograd, December 4, 1917” (Rezoliutsiia zasedaniia predstavitelei proletarskikh organizatsii v Petrograde ot 4 dekabria 1917 g.), quoted in Papernyi, “Proletarskaia poeziia

pervykh let sovetskoi epokhi,” p. 25. 85. Kirillov, “My,” p. 222. 86. Papernyi, “Proletarskaia poeziia pervykh let sovetskoi epokhi,” p. 24.

87. See the comments from the editors of /zvestiia VIsIK on Lunacharskii’s article “Once More on Proletkult and Soviet Cultural Work” (Eshche o Proletkul’te i sovetskoi kul'turnoi rabote), published in /gvestiia, Apr. 13, 1919.

88. Lunacharskii, “Eshche o Proletkul’te i sovetskoi kul’turnoi rabote,” p. 164. 89. Quoted in Polonskii, “Ocherki literaturnogo dvizheniia revoliutsionnoi epokhi (1917-1927), p. 412.

go. “Deklaratsiia proletarskikh pisatelei “Kuznitsa,”” p. 165. gt. See Mally, Culture ofthe Future, p. 126. 92. Ibid., p. 127. For more on the studios, see particularly the section “In the Stu-

dio and at the Front: The Locus of Proletkult Creation,” pp. 124-30. 93. 94. gs. 96. 97.

Ibid., p. 128. Proletarskaia kultura, nos. 17-19 (1920): 2, 5. Men’shutin and Siniavskii, Poeziia pervykh let revoliutsti, p. 38. Griadushchee, nos. 1-2 (1920): 30. P. Kogan, Proletarskaia literatura, p. 19.

98. Ibid., p. 20. 99. Kleinbort, Ocherki narodnoi literatury, pp. 201-2.

100. Osmakov, Russkaia proletarskaia poeziia, p. 28. ror. Polonskii, “Ocherki literaturnogo dvizheniia revoliutsionnoi epokhi,” p. 407.

102. Friche, Proletarskaia poeztia, p. 110.

416

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II27-25

103. Ibid., pp. m1-12. 104. “Tvori!” pp. 1747-75. 105. “Rabochaia vesna,” pp. 1747-75.

106. Saianov, Sovremennye literaturnye gruppirovki, p. 121. 107. P. Kogan, Proletarskaia literatura, pp. 41, 43. 108. Analysis of the poetry of the civil war and militant communism eras can be

found in K. V. Driagin, Pateticheskaia lirika proletarskikh poetov epokhi voennogo kommunizma; and Men’shutin and Siniavskii, Poeziia pervykh let revoliutsit. Two works devoted to examination of the mass poetry of this era are Abramkin, “Frontovaia krasnoarmeiskaia poeziia 1918-21 gg.”; and Saianskii, “Partizanskie poety Minusinskogo fronta.” 109. Quoted in Olenev, “Samobytnik,” p. 13.

GHAP

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THREE

1. Lunacharskii, /skusstvo, molodezh’ i zadachi khudozhestvennoi raboty sredi molodezhi, p. 29. 2. Even in the most authoritative works about RAPP (Brown, The Proletarian Episode; Sheshukov, Neistovye revniteli) and Pereval (Maguire, Red Virgin Soil; Belaia,

Don-Kikhoty 20-kh godov) the Young Guard is often not even mentioned. 3. Voronskii, “Doklad na soveshchanii 0 politike partii,” p. 59. 4. As Arlen Blium demonstrates convincingly in his Za kulisami “Ministerstva pravdy,” adducing a voluminous corpus of archival materials not previously available about the authorities’ activities in “controlling the word,” one must “substantially correct the viewpoint of NEP traditionally developed and still obtaining among certain circles of historians as an era of relatively liberal attitudes among the authorities towards manifestations of intellectual and spiritual life, foremost in the printed word” (p. 304). Similar conclusions have been made by many Western historians as well (Fitz-

patrick, Rabinowitch, and Stites, Russia in the Era of NEP; and Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front), not to mention evaluations of later eras

(Kemp-Welch, Stalin and the Lit-

erary Intelligentsia, 1928-39). 5. Molodaia gvardtia, nos. 9-10 (1923): 329-30.

6. Averbakh, “‘Molodaia gvardiia’ za god,” pp. 14, 16. 7. Molodaia gvardiia, nos. 4-5 (1923): 2. 8. Averbakh, “‘Molodaia gvardiia’ za god,” p. 14. 9. “O ‘Molodoi gvardii,” p. 7.

10. For an account of the first-anniversary celebration for Molodaia gvardiia, see Napostu, no. 1 (1923): 167.

u. Bednyi, “Tochnaia, prostaia istina,” p. 8. 12. Kirillov, “Molodoi gvardii,” p. 1. 133. Zharov, “Molodoi gvardii,” p. 12. 14. “Godovshchina ‘Molodoi gvardii,” p. 168. 15. Komsomoliia, no. 9 (1925): 81.

NOME Se Or

AiG BS

192/540

417

16. Zharov, “Odin god ‘Komsomolii,”” pp. 3, 4. 17. Ermilov, “Put ‘Molodoi gvardii,” p. 191. 18. Kolosov, “O komsomol’skoi literature,” p. 124. 19. Vanslov, “Voprosy komsomol’skoi literatury,” p. 79. 20. Koval’chik, “Za vysokokhudozhestvennuiu literaturt 6 komsomole,” p. 126. 21. For more detail on the conflict between RAPP and the Komsomol Central Committee, see Brown, The Proletarian Episode in Russian Literature, 1928-1932, pp. 184-88; and Sheshukovy, Neistovye revniteli, pp. 301-4. 22. See the report on the Fifth Extraordinary Plenum of the RAPP Board of Directors and on the resulting resolution “For Proletarian Youth Literature” (“Za proletarskuiu molodezhnuiu literaturu’), in Rezets (Leningrad), no. 1 (1932): 10-11. 23. “Napostovskie zametki,” p. 15. 24. Kats, “Literatura i komsomol,” p. 118.

25. Ibid., p. 119. 26. Efremin, “Molodezh’ y literature i zhizni,” p. 61.

27. Kats, “Literatura i komsomol,” pp. 131-36. See also Brykin’s sharply critical overview of Komsomol literature in his vividly titled “Komsomol in the Crooked Mirror: Class-alien Literature” (“Komsomol v krivom zerkale: Klassovo-vrazhdebnaia literatura’). Smena, in which this article was published, was Komsomol’s own central

journal. 28. Bekker, “Zametki na poliakh,” p. 62. 29. Lelevich, O proletarskom literaturnom molodniake, p. 6. 30. Komsomolskaia pravda, no. 123 (1926): 32. 31. Ibid. 32. Ippolit, “Komsomol i ego pisateli” (1926), p. 16.

33. The reference is to the article “To the Attention of the Pioneer Writer” (“Vni-

manie pionerskomu pisateliu”). 34. Ippolit, “Komsomol i ego pisateli” (1928), pp. 8-9. 35. Munblit, “O ‘komsomol’skom pisatele’ . . . ,” p. 183.

36. “Otkrytoe pismo komsomol'’tsam,” pp. 15~17. 37. “O pisateliakh iz molodezhi,” pp. 122, 126. 38. Gorlov, “K voprosu o komsomol’skoi khudozhestvennoi literature,” p. 27.

39. “Gruppa pisatelei “Molodaia gvardiia,” p. 2. 40. “O khudozhestvennoi rabote v derevne,” p. 141. 41. Komsomol, na front iskusstval, p. 99.

42. Ibid., p. 64. 43. “Rezoliutsiia o khudozhestvennoi rabote komsomol’skikh organizatsii,” pp. 11-12.

44. Lunacharskii, “Predislovie k knige A. Zharova Ledokhod,” pp. 270-71. 45. Ibid., p. 271.

46. “Molodoi rabochei gvardii,” p. 3. 47. Molodaia gvardiia, nos. 4—5 (1923): 399.

48. “K trekhletitu gruppy ‘Molodaia Gvardiia,” p. 62. 49. Bekker, “O poetakh i pisateliakh gruppy ‘Molodaia Gvardiia,” p. 200. 50. Zharov, Besedy, provedennye poetom v Kabinete rabochego avtora, pp. 4-5.

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PAGES:

141-59

5I. Ibid., pp. 12-13. Sie Ibid., pp. 13-14. 53. Ibid., pp. 15-16.

Geroinia is “heroine,” not “hero,” but the grammatically and lexically feminine word is used in Russian for its rhyme, as well as to “agree” with armiia, also grammat54.

ically feminine. —— Trans. 55. Zharov, Besedy, provedennye poetom v Kabinete rabochego avtora, pp. 17-20. 56. Ibid., pp. 25-29.

57+ Ibid., p. 58. 58. Ibid., p. 73. 59. Khanin, “Dva puti literaturnogo molodniaka,” p. 25.

Lelevich, O proletarskom literaturnom molodniake, p. 10. Lunacharskii, “Nashi poety,” p. 341. 62. Ibid., p. 340.

6o.

61.

63. Lunacharskii, “Molodaia rabochaia literatura,” p. 398. 64. Ibid., p. 397. 65. Lunacharskii, “Iskusstvo, molodezh’ i zadachi khudozhestvennoi raboty sredi

molodezhi,” p. 17. 66. Ibid., pp. 18-19. 67. Zharoy, “Ledokhod,” p. 23. 68. Dmitrevskii, “Literaturnyi molodniak,” pp. 12-13. 69. P. Kogan, Proletarskaia literatura, p. 69.

70. “et . . .

Khanin, “Dva puti literaturnogo molodniaka,” p. 48. Divil’ kovskii, “Iunsektor literatury,” pp. 37, 39, 43-

P. Kogan, “‘Molodaia Gvardiia,” p. 22. Lelevich, O proletarskom literaturnom molodniake, p. 25. “Ktrekhletiiu gruppy ‘Molodaia Gvardiia,”” p. 62. . Bekker, “Formal’nye vliianiia v komsomol’skoi poezii,” p. 53. . Bekker, “Problema tipa v komsomol’skoi literature,” p. 45. . Voprosy literatury, no. 1 (1993): 324.

. “Budushchee intelligentsii,” p. 16. . Kolosov, “Iubileinye shtrikhi,” p. 48. . Ringov, “Neokonchennye vospominaniia,” p. 53. . Rakhillo, “O literaturnom golose, zharenoi kolbase . . . ,” p. 56. . Zharov, “Oskolki vospominanii,” pp. 57-58.

. . . . .

Ibid., p. 61. Svetozarov, “Obshchezhiteiskoe,” pp. 60-61. I. R., “Volodia Pestriak,” p. 68. Dolin, “Egor Khvastunoy,” p. 68. Quoted in Rubanovskii, “O porokhe i entuziazme,” p. 276.

. Komsomoliia, nos. 6-7 (1926): 67. 89. “Our young writers should not hastily leave the factories and leave the country

for the city; they need to stew in the juice [varitsia v soku] of the worker-peasant masses, get to know life as it is, work and study—even if it has to be after a hard eight-

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419

hour workday, after all kinds of committees and meetings, after working in the field in the country [—they need to] sweat over their workat night, snatching a few minutes” (Iartsev, “Nuzhen ser’eznyi sdvig,” p. 45). 90. “The Komsomol Central Committee considers it necessary to exercise great

caution in matters of promoting certain gifted comrades to professional writers. Occupation with literary labor should not prematurely become the basis or specialty of the Komsomol writer. He should make a more or léss long journey of creative development, not losing his ties to factory work and to the masses of working-class youth. The practice of literature should be regarded mainly as training, not as a means of making a living. A literary specialist, who has made literary labor the basic profession that provides his living, should only be found as an exception among Komsomolians who have just stepped onto the road of literature” (“O pisateliakh iz molodezhi,” p. 123). 91. Bekker, Proletarskii literaturnyi molodniak, p. 55. 92. Bekker, “O poetakh i pisateliakh gruppy ‘Molodaia Gvardiia,” p. 211. 93. Berkovich, “O t. n. komsomol’skoi khudozhestvennoi literature,” pp. 53-54. 94. Baril’, Zametki 0 komsomol skoi literature, pp. 270-73. osniibids poa7k 96. Rubanovskii, “O porokhe i entuziazme,” p. 274.

97. Ibid., p. 277.

98. Ibid., p. 282. 99. Ibid., p. 293. 100.

Quoted in Baril’, “O grusti, upadochnichestve i iskrennosti,” pp. 40-41.

tor. 102. 103. 104.

Divil’kovskii, “Iunsektor literatury,” p. 45. Quoted in Lelevich, O proletarskom literaturnom molodniake, p. 47. Lelevich, O proletarskom literaturnom molodniake, p. 45. Ibid., p. 46.

105. Quoted in Khanin, “Zametki 0 tvorchestve Utkina,” p. 106.

106. Berkovich, “O t. n. komsomol’skoi khudozhestvennoi literature,” pp. 52-53.

107. Munblit, “O ‘komsomol’skom pisatele’ . . . ,” p. 186. 108. Ippolit and Kin, “Geroi plakata,” p. 66. 109. “O pisateliakh iz molodezhi,” p. 123. 110. The Young Smithy [Molodaia Kuznitsa] was an organization similar to Young Guard. For more details, see E. Lavrov, “Gruppa komsomol’skikh poetov i pisatelei ‘Molodaia kuznitsa’”; or Sofronov, “Molodaia kuznitsa.” ut. Krasil’nikov, “O molodoi proze,” p. 108. 112. Iartsev, “Nuzhen ser’eznyi sdvig,” p. 46. 113. Zharov, Besedy, provedennye poetom v Kabinete rabochego avtora, p. 77. 114. Ibid., p. 79.

us. 16. 117. 118.

Trotsky, “Sotrudnikam i chitateliam “Molodoi Gvardii,” p. 4. “O pisateliakh iz molodezhi,” p. 123. Bekker, “Formal’nye vliianiia v komsomol’skoi poezii,” p. 49. Quoted in Bekker, “Formal’nye vliianiia v komsomol’skoi poezii,” p. 51.

119. Bekker, “Formal’nye vliianiia v komsomol’skoi poezii,” p. 43. 120. Bekker, “Zametki na poliakh,” p. 62.

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. Molodaia gvardiia, nos. 4~5 (1923): 400. 122. Berkovich, “O t. n. komsomol’skoi khudozhestvennoi literature,” pp. 47-48. 123. Lelevich, “O proletarskom literaturnom molodniake i tov. Berkoviche,” pp. I2I

e

.

.

s

»

55758.

124. Ibid., p. 60. 125. Kasimenko, “Zagadochnyi pustotsvet,” p. 211.

126. Khanin, “Dva puti literaturnogo molodniaka,” pp. 32-36. 127. Divil’kovskii, “Iunsektor literatury,” p. 22. 128. Lunacharskii, “Mark Kolosoy,” p. 354. 129. Rashkovskaia, “Poeziia ‘Molodykh,”” p. 16. 130. Munblit, “O ‘komsomol’skom pisatele’ . . . ,” p. 184. 131. Ibid., pp. 185-86. 132. Ibid., p. 188. 133. Troshchenko, “O komsomol’skom pisatele, komsomol’skom chitatele i skvernom kritike,” pp. 190-91. 134 . “Put proletarskogo pisatelia-komsomol'tsa,” pp. 67-68. 135. Ibid., p. 68. 136. Bekker, “Zametki na poliakh,” p. 63. ee Kasimenko, “Zagadochnyi pustotsvet,”

138. 139. 140. 141.

p. 215. Bekker, “Po povodu odnogo stikhotvoreniia,” p. 66. “Rezoliutsiia o khudozhestvennoi rabote komsomol’skikh organizatsii,” p. 122. “O khudozhestvennoi rabote v derevne,” p. 139. “O pisateliakh iz molodezhi,” pp. 125-26.

142. See O pisatelskoi etike, literaturnom khuliganstve i bogeme. 143. Bezymenskii, “Protiv ‘eseninshchiny,”” p. 71. 144. Lunacharskii, “Upadochnoe nastroenie sredi molodezhi (Eseninshchina),” P- 347145. Bekker, Proletarskti literaturnyi molodniak, p. 45. 146. Sheshukoy calls this slogan “absurd” (Neistovye revniteli, p. 29). Nonetheless,

it reflected quite logically the RAPPist battle strategy for power in literature. 147. For more detail on the literary situation in Ukraine and Belorussia, see Luckyj, Literary Politics in the Soviet Ukraine, 1917-1934; Shkandrij, Modernists, Marxists and the Nation; and Adamovich, Opposition to Sovietization in Belorussian Literature, 1917-1957.

CHAPTER

FOUR

1. See Ginzburg, Literatura v poiskakh real'nosti, p. 149. 2. Chudakova, “Bez gneva i pristrastiia,” p. 260. 3. For a more detailed history of Workers’ Spring, see Fabrichnyi, “Rabochaia vesna,” pp. 86-87. 4. Shafir, “Avtorskaia problema,” pp. 4-5. 5- Olenev, “Slovo i delo,” p. 37.

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421

6. Trotsky, Literatura i revoliutstia, pp. 158-64.

7- Quoted in Sud by russkoi intelligentsii, pp. 89-90. 8. Ibid., p. 59. It is worth noting Voronskii’s curious blending of the concepts of

“demos” and “okhlos,” which he used as synonyms, with a positive interpretation. For example, in a polemic against emigrant critics, he spoke ironically of the “shouts about the boor” and “hysteria about the o&h/os”: “But nonetheless this ‘okh/os,’ this ‘boor,’ will run the state and will create the writer” (Voronskii, Na styke, p. 235). But in an article about Vsevolod Ivanov he wrote at the same time, the quotation marks are re-

moved and the critic speaks of the “real-life strength of the okhlos” and two lines further down of the “ideology of the post-October demos,” and gives Ivanov credit for being “tied by blood to the okhlos that filled the workers’ faculties, studios, academies, universities, and so on” (Voronskii, /skusstvo videt’ mir, pp. 200-201). 9. Sudby russkoi intelligentsii, p.69.

10. Ibid., p. 77.

uw. Ibid., p. 112.

12. Ibid., pp. 81-82.

13. Ibid., pp. 121, 124. 14. Kaverin, “Neskol’ko let,” pp. 141-42. 15. Shaginian, Literatura iplan, p. 64.

16. “Kul’turnaia revoliutsiia i sovremennaia literatura,” p. 170. 17. Popov-Dubovskoi, “Khudozhestvennaia literatura i rabochii pisatel’,” pp. 5965, 69. 18. “Rezoliutsiia plenuma rasshirennogo sekretariata VOAPP ...,” p. 34. 19. Averbakh, “Za khudozhestvennoe kachestvo,” p. 8.

20. Quoted in Sheshukov, Neistovye revniteli, p. 215. 21. Na literaturnom postu, no. 12 (1930): 9. 22. Surkov, “Prizyv udarnikoy,” p. 38. 23. Arkhangel’skii, “Za marksistsko-leninskoe mirovozzrenie proletarskogo pisa-

telia, p.75-

24. Slepnev, “Vnimanie rabochemu pisateliu!” p. 1. 25. Krasil’nikov, “Poeticheskii molodniak,” p. 63. 26. Glaviskusstvo: Main Administration on Art Affairs [Glavnoe upravlenie po delam iskusstv]. 27. Makar’ev, “Puti perestroiki,” p. 14.

28. Averbakh, Spornye voprosy kul turnoi revoliutsit, p. 39. 29. Ibid., p. 55. 30. “Za bol’shevistskoe nastuplenie na fronte proletarskoi literatury: pes. 31. Averbakh, Spornye voprosy kul’turnoi revoliutsit, p. 128. 32. On “promotionism” in the cultural-revolution era, see Fitzpatrick, “Cultural Revolution as Class War’; Joravsky, “The Construction of the Stalinist Psyche”; and Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System, pp. 234-36. {22

33. Fitzpatrick, “Cultural Revolution as Class War,” p. 130.

34. “Vospityvat’ pisatelei-bol’shevikov,” p. 3. 35. Sudby russkoi intelligentsti, p. 119.

36. Zinov ev, Novy: velikii pochin, pp. 4, 3437. Ibid., p. 9. 38. Ibid., p. 10.

422

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39. See Kozhevnikov, Partiia—organizator rabsel’korouskogo dvizhentia, pp. 575 113. See also Periodicheskaia pechat’ SSSR i rabsel'korovskoe dvizhenie mezhdu XV i XVI s’ezdami VKP(b). Thousands of books, pamphlets, and articles about the workers’ and village correspondents’ movement were published in the 1920s and 1930s. Many of their

authors were themselves participants in the movement. The titles themselves often reflected the “sweep” of the movement, for example “Raid of the hundred thousand” (“Reid sta tysiach,” by A. S. Magid, 1932), the anthology “There are thousands of them: 1924-1934” (“Ikh tysiachi. 1924-1934 gg.,” 1934), and many others. 40. This growth coincided with the “campaign for self-criticism” that unfolded in 1928 (See Freidin, “Vopros vozvrashcheniia 1,” pp. 179, 185). 41. See Kozhevnikov, Partiia—organizator rabsel korouskogo dvizheniia, p. 59.

42. See KPSS v rezoliutstiakh i reshentiakh, Chap. 1, pp. 644, 870. 43. See Kozhevnikov, Partiia—organizator rabsel'korovskogo dvizheniia; Karavashkova, Rabsel’korovskoe dvizhenie v strane v pervye gody sovetskoi viasti; and Alferovy,

Vozniknovenie i razvitie rabsel’korovskogo dvizhentia v SSSR.

44. The workers’-correspondent movement had no leadership organs and called neither congresses nor conferences, but only meetings, at which neither boards of directors nor central committees were elected; the decisions of these meetings were not

of a binding nature. See Pervoe Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie rabochikh korrespondentov; Itogi iperspektivy rabsel’korovskogo dvizheniia; Ill Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie rabsel'korov; IV Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie rabsel'korov; and Rezoliutsii Vsesoiuznogo soveshchaniia pri

“Pravde” po voprosam rabsel korovskogo dvizheniia. 45. See Bol’shevistskaia pechat’, no. 1 (1936): 7.

46. “O politike partii v oblasti khudozhestvennoi literatury,” p. 215. 47. KPSS v rezoliutstiakh i reshentiakh, chap. 1, p. 877. 48. “Krasnoarmeitsy, na literaturnyi front!” p. 2. 49. “Rabochaia kritika i proletarskoe iskusstvo,” p. 1.

50. Gorky, O pechati, p. 199. st. Ibid., p. 243.

52. Onipko, Zapiski starogo rabkora, p. 16. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

Raboche-krestianskii korrespondent, no. 5 (1926): 38. See Zhiga, “Rezervy proletarskoi literatury,” p. 57. Ibid., p. 59. “Krasnoarmeitsy, na literaturnyi front!” p. 3. A. Meromskii, “Literaturnyi rost sel’kora,” p. 51.

58. Ibid., p. 52. 59. Na postu, no. 5 (1924): 287-90.

60. 61. 62. 63.

Raskol’nikoy, “Rabkoryi proletarskaia literatura,”p. 108. Simkhovich, “Ideino-khudozhestvennyi rost,” pp. 15, 22. Trifonova, “Molodaia proletarskaia proza,” p. 16. Chuzhak, “Pisatel’skaia pamiatka,” p. 20.

64. Chuzhak, “Literatura zhiznestroeniia,” p. 42. 65. Trenin, “Rabkor ibelletrist,”pp. 207, 209.

66. Tret’iakov, “Nuzhno predosterech’,” p. 210.

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423

67 . Tret’iakov, “Blizhe k gazete,” p. 212. 68 . Shklovskii, “O pisatele i proizvodstve,” p. 189,

69 . Ttenin, “Rabkor i belletrist,” p. 207. 70 . Iretskii, “Molodoe plemia,” p. 126. oie The crisis of Russian emigrant literature caused by the lack of any new writers growl ng out of the emigrant milieu received the attention of emigrant researchers themselves (Gleb Struve, Mark Slonim, and others). mye Kratkaia literaturnaia entsiklopediia, vol. 6, col. 617. 73: Brudnyi, “Literaturnye kruzhki.”

74.

Grigor’ev, “Pervye shagi,” p. 28. 7): Ch., G. “Litkruzhok z-da “Dinamo,” p. 20. 76. Kraiskii, “Massovoe literaturnoe dvizhenie vy gorode Lenina,” p20: 77- Medakin and Slavin, “Na zavode ‘Serp i molot,”” p- 63. 78. “Za bol’shevizatsiiu proletarskoi literatury!” p. 30. 79- Maizel’, “O rabochikh kriticheskikh kruzhkakh,” p. 101. 80. Stepanov, “Rabota zhurnalov s molodymi pisateliami,” p. 53. 81. Krasil’nikov, “Besprizornyi uchastok literaturnogo dela.” See also Maznin, “O massoO voi rabochei kritike.” 82. “Rabochaia kritika i proletarskoe iskusstvo,” p. 2. 83. Borovoi, “Mobilizatsiia stikha,” p. 22. 84. K. Mikhailov, “Klassovaia bor’ba v nizovom kruzhke,” p. 17. 85. Simkhovich, “Literaturnyi krematorii,” p. 22. 86. “Vospityvat’ pisatelei-bol’shevikov,” pp. 4-5. 87. Ibid., p. 7 88. Ibid., p. 6.

. Vioroi plenum Pravleniia SSP SSSR, p. 295

. Korotkov, “Krasnotreugol’nikovtsy v literature,” p. 21. e Ibid Sipxey. 92. Ibid., pp. 21-22. . Ibid., p. 21. 94. Ibid. . Ibid.,-p. 22. . See Ritman, “Organizuem legkuiu kavaleriiu iskusstva,” pp. 78-84. . See “Rabotu litkruzhkov—na vysshuiu stupen’,” p. 3. . Ganichey, “Litkruzhki kraia,” p. 76. . Gorelik, “Na vysshuiu stupen’,” p. 5. too. “Rezoliutsiia Plenuma pravleniia RAPP po dokladu t. L. Averbakha,” p. 2. . “O massovom literaturnom dvizhenii v krae,” p. 78. . Kharitonov, “Opravdat’ zvanie udarnikoy Magnitostroia literatury,” p. 10. . Na literaturnom postu, nos. 15-16 (1930): 105. 104. Isbakh, “O rabote v nizovykh kruzhkakh,” p. 103.

105. E. Troshchenko, “Na pod”eme,” p. 107. 106 . Makedonoy, “Stat’ tribunoi udarnikov,” p. 74.

107. Ibid., p. 76. 108. Libedinskii, “O prizyve udarnikov v RAPP 1 men’shevistskom uklone Bek-

Toom,” p. 67.

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109. Ibid.

110. V. Liubimoy, “Pis’ma nachinaiushchikh,” p. 10. 1.

“Kak organizovat litkruzhok,” p. 129.

112. Ibid. 113. Ibid.

114. Slepnev, “Vnimanie rabochemu pisateliu,” p. 1. 115. Gorbunoy, “Nasha konsul’tatsiia dolzhna rabotat’ po-novomu,” p. 5. 116. See “Programma pervichnogo literaturnogo kruzhka na predpriiatii,” pp. 13-153 and “Novaia programma dlia litkruzhkov RAPP,” p. 1. 117. Isbakh, “O rabote v nizovykh kruzhkakh,” p. 104. 18. Ibid. 19. Kats, “Litsom k udarniku,” p. 73.

120. Quoted in Literaturnye manifesty, pp. 223-24. 121. Magnitostroi: an industrial project in the Ural Mountains.— Trans. 122. Aliger, “Chernyi khleb s gorchitsei,” pp. 41-42. 123. Ibid., pp. 42-43. 124. Evgenii Dolmatovskii received the Stalin Prize in 1950, having already become one of the most famous poets of the Stalin era; Margarita Aliger was made famous by the poem “Zoia,” awarded the prize in 1942; the star of Aleksei Nedogonov was at its very zenith in 1947 (his poem “Flag over the Village Soviet” [“Flag nad sel’sovetom’], even included in school textboooks, was awarded the prize) when he died in an automobile accident; the creative path of Ekaterina Sheveleva was less brilliant, but critics did notice her, writing that “formulation of urgent political and social problems, and sincerity of tone” were characteristic of her poetry. 125. See Sheshukov, Neistovye revniteli, p. 294. 126. Aliger, “Chernyi khleb s gorchitsei,” p. 42. 127. Ibid.

128. 129. 1330. 131.

Brown, The Proletarian Episode in Russian Literature, pp. 162-67. Sheshukovy, Neistovye revniteli, pp. 293-96. Aliger, “Chernyi khleb s gorchitsei,” p. 42. Surkov, “Daesh’ rabochie literaturnye kadry!” p. 11.

1332. Surkov, “Prizyv udarnikov,” pp. 37, 38. 133. Volkov, A. M. Gor'kit i literaturnoe dvizhenie sovetskoi epokhi, p. 349. Compare

the data on the 1931 “call” in Fridman, “Za perestroiku raboty,” p. 22. Numbers appeared in Na literaturnom postu, by the way, that exceeded by many orders of magnitude the ones here cited. For example, in no. 12 (1931): 45, readers are informed that

during the “call” in Ukraine, the number of “shock-workers called into literature” exceeded 120,000, 1434. Zlatopol’skii, “Naverstaem upushchennoe.” 1435. The RAPPists regulated the percentage of workers in the association before the “call” as well, setting quotas of workers in each regional branch. Indicative in this regard is the special resolution of the RAPP Secretariat regarding the Middle Volga group: “The Secretariat of RAPP observes the complete unsatisfactoriness of carrying out the watchword of workerization in the Middle Volga Association of Proletarian

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425

Writers” and “presents the Middle Volga Association of Proletarian Writers the task of bringing the worker component of the association up to 70 percent in the shortest time possible” (“Za perestroiku!,” p. 37). 136. “Ne zabyvat’ 0 pokaze geroev,” p. 4.

137. Libedinskii, “O pokaze geroev i prizyve udarnikov,” pt 4. 1338. “B’em trevogu,” p. 13. 1339. Kiriakov, “Za perestroiku,” pp. 12-13. 140. “Vnimanie Uralo-Kuzbassu,” p. 16.

141. “Ispravliaem oshibki,” pp. 2-4. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149.

Makar’ev, “Puti perestroiki,” p. 16. ~O tvorcheskom sorevnovanii v ZOAPP,” p. 4. Averbakh, “Uchebu—yv tsentr vnimaniia,” p. 3. ~O twvorcheskom sorevnovanii v ZOAPP,” p. 4. M. Kogan, “Literaturnyi tsekh TsAGI,” p. 48. Makar’ev, “Puti perestroiki,” pp. 122-23. R., “Usiliv rabotu v tsekhakh, vyiavim literaturnye kadry,” p. 31. “Plan provedeniia smotra litkruzhkov,” p. 11. 150. Rabocheliubets, meaning, roughly, “worker-lover” (and the related words rabo-

cheliubielrabocheliubstvo, approximately “worker-loverism”), was a disparaging term for someone who was overzealous in looking to the workers’ “needs.”— Trans. 151. Gel’fand, “Dvizhenie udarnikov v literaturu,” p. 14. 152. Beginning with their first manifestos in 1923, the Onguardists asserted, “The boards of directors of the associations ascertain the organs ofthe press, journals and publishers that must be won over, or which measures must be taken to assure a correct line”

(Rodov, V literaturnykh boiakh, p. 308). 153. See Pertsov, O chem i kak pisat’ rabochemu pisateliu, p. 9.

154. Makar’ev, “Puti perestroiki,” p. 126. 155. “Massovoe literaturnoe dvizhenie na smotru,” p. 2.

156. Criticism was tasked with elucidation and leadership of the call: “Not a single issue of a RAPPist journal without an article about the shock-workers’ creative work! Nota single RAPPist critic who does not engage himself in the creative work of shockworkers!—such must be our demands made of critics” (Makar’ev, “Prizyv rabochikh udarnikovy,” p. 6); see also Glagolev, “Tvorchestvo udarnikov i zadachi kommunis-

ticheskoi kritiki.” 157. Kiriakov, “Na novom etape,” pp. 2-3. 158. Ostrogorskii, “Sotsialisticheskie zamestiteli,” p. 3. 159. Pavlov, Dmitrii, “Bol’she vnimaniia, bol’she sviazi s rabochim redsovetom,” ppii-3.

160. See Breitburg, “Tvorchestvo udarnikov (Bibliografiia),” pp. 158-74. 161. Ezhokin, “Vazhnyi pochin,” p. 109. 162. Ibid., p. 106. 163. “Postanovlenie Biuro obkoma VLKSM ot 2 oktiabria 1931 g.,” p. 5. 164. Averbakh, Antselovich, and Khalatov, “Udarnik stal tsentral’noi figuroi prole-

tarskogo literaturnogo dvizheniia.”

426

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165. “VOPKP perestraivaetsia (Khronika),” p. 46. 166. Rylenkov, “Razvertyvat’ udarnye iacheiki proletarsko-kolkhoznoi literatury,” p. 62.

167. “Kak rabotaiut i uchatsia nachinaiushchie krasnoarmeiskie pisateli,” pp. 127-30. On LOKAR, see Dobrenko, Metafora vlasti, pp. 138-50.

168. See Liberman, “Prizyv udarnikov vyLOKAK,” p. 1; Zubkovskii, “MOSLOKAF vospityvaet tvorcheskii molodniak,” pp. 22-23.

169. See Gorelik, “Na vysshuiu stupen’,” p. 3. 170. Quoted in Timofeev, “Vstrechnyi promfinplan proletarskoi literatury,” p. 41. 171. “Za bol’shevistskoe nastuplenie na fronte proletarskoi literatury,” p. 7. 172. 173. 174. 175.

L-v, “Udarniki v literature,” pp. 114, 117. Rumiantsey, “Strana dolzhna znat’ svoikh geroev,” p. 105. L-v, “Udarniki v literature,” p. 117. Makar’ev wrote about this issue, particularly, in connection with the anniversary of the “call” (Makar’ev, “Prizyv rabochikh udarnikoy,” p. 5). On the complaints of fellow-travelers about the “call” that appeared in Party publications, see Brown, The Proletarian Episode in Russian Literature, pp. 166-67. 176. See the materials from the September 1931 discussions in the Union of Soviet Writers in Novyi mir, no. 10 (1931).

177. See Aimermakher, “Sovetskaia literaturnaia politika mezhdu 1917-m i 1932-m,” pp. 50-61.

178. “Za proletarskuiu literaturu,” p. 32. 179. Quoted in Sheshukov, Neistovye revniteli, p. 293. 180. Averbakh, Antselovich, and Khalatov, “Udarnik stal tsentral’noi figuroi proletarskogo literaturnogo dvizheniia,” p. 2. 181. Quoted in Kirianoy, “Udarnik y literature,” p. 37. 182. Varshavskii, “Literaturnyi tsekh,” p. 6. 183. Serebrianskii, “T'vorchestvo kruzhkovtsev-udarnikoy,” p. 5.

184. Quoted in Libedinskii, “O prizyve udarnikov vy RAPP i men’shevistskom uklone Bek-Toom,” p. 63. 185. Ibid., pp. 63-64. 186. Aimermakher, “Sovetskaia literaturnaia politika mezhdu 1917-m i 1932-m,”

Pp. 44. 187. Timofeev, “Vstrechnyi promfinplan proletarskoi literatury,” pp. 43, 44. 188. Eikhenbaum, “Literatura i literaturnyi byt,” p. 47. 189. Ibid., p. so. 190. Ibid., p. 47. 191. 193. 195. 196.

Ibid., p. 48. 192. Ibid. Ibid. 194. Ibid., p. 51. Ibid., p. 52. E. Troshchenko, “Literaturnaia konsul'tatsiia RAPPa i ee korrespondenty,” p. 33.

197. Ibid., pp. 33-34. 198. V. Liubimoy, “Pis'ma nachinaiushchikh,” pp. 9-10. 199. E. Troshchenko, “Literaturnaia konsul'tatsiia RAPPa i ee korrespondenty,” p. 34. 200. Ibid., p. 35.

NOW ES) TOP 201. 202. 204. 206. 207. 208. 209. 210. OL. Mee 213. 214. 215. 216. Dias 218. 219. 220. ont, 222. 223% 224. 225. 226. 2275 228. 229. 230. 23%, 232. 233. 234. 225:

PAG Hon 23/0417

V. Liubimoy, “Pis'ma nachinaiushchikh,” p. Il.

Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., pp. 10-11. Ibid.

203. Ibid., p. 1. 205. Ibid., p. 1.

E. Troshchenko, “Literaturnaia konsul'tatsiia RAPPa i ée korrespondenty,” p. 35. Ibid., p. 36.

Ibid., p. 37. K. Mikhailov, “Klassovaia bor’ba v litkruzhke,” p. 16. “Tribuna nachinaiushchego pisatelia,” p. 29.

Ibid. Ibid. Shvetsoy and Altaiskii, “Za gor’kovskii stil’ raboty,” p. 176. Shestakova, “Rabotat’, uchit’sia!” p. 79. Ibid., p. 77.

Gibet, “Pervye shagi,” p. 9. V. Liubimov, “Kulatskaia poeziia,” p. 6.

Shestakova, “Rabotat’, uchit’sia!” pp. 78-79. Shvetsov and Altaiskii, “Za gor’kovskii stil’ raboty,” p. 176.

Ibid. Shestakova, “Rabotat’, uchit’sia!” p. 81. “Tribuna nachinaiushchego pisatelia,” p. 30. Paialin, “Rasskazyvaiu geroicheskuiu istoriiu zavoda,” p. 17.

Kak my nachinali pisat, pp. 7-15. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., pp. 22-25. Quoted in “Sozdadim uchebnuiu literaturu dlia udarnikov!,” p. 15. Kanatoy, “Rabotaiu—kak kustar’-odinochka,” p. 7.

“Kruzhok “Val’tsovka,”” p. 150. Ibid., p. 151. Didrikil’, “Pervye lastochki,” pp. 6-7.

Shentsov, Zapiski literaturnogo sekretarid, p. 11. Ibids p=i2.

Oshanin, “Nemnogo 0 sebe,” pp. 8-9.

GHEGAS PTE

Re Fo VE

I . Lotman, “Massovaia literatura kak istoriko-kul’turnaia problema,” p. 382. 2. 4. 6. 8. 9. 10.

427

Ibid. 3. Ibid., p. 383. Ibid., p. 383. 5. Ibid., p. 386. 7. Ibid., p. 388. Ibid., p. 387. Chumandrin, Kriticheskaia otsenka moei praktiki, pp. 52-53. Ginzburg, Literatura v poiskakh real nosti, p. 329.

Nizovtsev, “Neskol’ko predvaritel’nykh zamechanii,” p. 8.

NOTES

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i. 12. 13. 14.

TO

PAGES

247-77

Eremin, “Tvorchestvo rabochikh-udarnikovy,” p. 96. Gorbunov, Put’ kmasterstuu, p. 406. Evstaf’eva, “Uglublenno rabotat’ nad soboi,” p. 78. Zelenskii, “‘Detskie bolezni’ literaturnogo tvorchestva,” p. II.

15. Gibet, “Rabota s rukopisiu,” p. 11. 16. Volin, “Poeziia rabochikh professii,” p. 129. 17. Ibid. 18. Sokolov, “Fabrichno-zavodskie pisateli,” p. 11.

19. 20. 22. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

Volin, “Poeziia rabochikh professii,” p. 130. Ibid. 21. Ibid. Ibid., p. 132. 23. Bezymenskii, Foreword, p. 8. Kotomka, “Traktor v tvorchestve nachinaiushchikh poetovy,” p. 4. Gibet, “Rabota s rukopis’iu,” p. 12. Gorbunoy, “Kak dolzhny rabotat’ konsul'tatsii,” p. 9. Stavskii, “O literaturnykh kruzhkakh,” p. 120. Mukhareva, “O stikhakh molodykh avtoroy,” p. 94. “Udarniki, prizvannye v literaturu,” p. 4.

30. Stavskii, “O literaturnykh kruzhkakh,” p. 120. 31. 32. 33. 34.

Dunaev, “Vstrecha,” p. 34. Mukhareva, “O stikhakh molodykh avtoroy,” p. 91. Pozdnyshev, “Ona,” p. 22. Serebrianskii, “Tvorchestvo kruzhkovtsev-udarnikoy,” p. 1.

35. 36. 37. 38.

E. Driagin, “Stikhi molodykh poetov na stranitsakh “Leninskoi smeny,”” p. 71. A. B., “Protiv burzhuaznykh vliianii,” pp. 72-73. Evstaf’eva, “Pismo iz litkonsul'tatsii,” pp. 69-70. Bekker, Pisatel’ za rabotoi, p. 60.

39. “11,000 otvetov,” p. 16.

40. Malinkin, “Ucheba molodykh pisatelei,” p. 62. 41. Bekker, Pisatel’ za rabotoi, p. 61. 42. Evstaf’eva, “Pismo iz litkonsul’tatsii,” p. 70. 43. A. B., “Protiv burzhuaznykh vliianii,” p. 74.

44. Malinkin, “Ucheba molodykh pisatelei,” p. 62. 45. E. Liubimov, “Nasha konsul'tatsiia,” p. 9.

46. Bezuglov, “Dovol’no,” pp. 67-75. 47. Kuz'min, “Mekhzavodu imeni ... ,” p. 22.

48. 49. so. 51. 52.

Shentsov, Zapiski literaturnogo sekretaria, pp. 41-42. Zelenskii, ““Detskie bolezni’ literaturnogo tvorchestva,” p. 12. Zdanevich, “Rabota s molodymi pisateliami,” pp. 315-16. Ibid., p. 321. Kotov, “Za novye formy raboty s nachinaiushchim avtorom,” p. 9.

53. Altaiskii, “Ia. Kulikovu,” p. 3.

54. Libedinskii, “O prizyve udarnikov v RAPP i men’shevistskom uklone Bek-

Toom,” pp. 66-67. 55. lurchenko, “Pesnia,” p. 144.

NORTE Ss WO

PAGE Se 279i9) 5

429

56. Malinkin, “Ucheba molodykh pisatelei,” p. 61. 57. Barthes, zbrannye raboty, p. 133. 58. Ibid.,p. 134. 59. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. vesna’, 66. 67.

Ibid., p. 138. 60. Ibid., pp. 140-41. Ibid., p. 549. S. Meromskii, “Zametki 0 sel’koroyskoi rechi,” p. 48.’ Ibid., p. 49. Ibid., p. 52. Zamoshkin, [Review of:] Literaturno-khudozhestvennyi almanakh “Rabochaia pp. 203, 204. Brovman, “Tvorcheskie puti molodoi literatury,” p. 45. Bekker, “Tvorcheskii start,” p. 13.

68. Tverdov, Brigada Borisova, pp. 12, 13, 18.

69. Tsypkin, Lodyr’ Badulin, pp. 17, 21. 70. “O torcheskom kosnoiazychii i zaikanii,” p. 12.

71. Tverdov, Brigada Borisova, pp. 3-4. 72. Baskakov, “Proryv,” pp. 42-65. 73. Sangarskii, “Trevoga,” pp. 22-23. 75. Ibid., p. 30.

74. Ibid., p. 24. 76. Ibid., p. 33.

77. V. Liubimoy, “O poshlosti, shablonakh i shtampe,” p. 18.

78. Gorky, Sobranie sochinenii v 30 tomakh, t. 25, p. 131. 79. P. Vorob’ev, “Toska,” pp. 94-97.

80. Tarasevich, Dogonim, p. 12.

81. Ibid., p. 18.

82. Kibal’chich, Porosl; p. 162.

83. Gibet, “Rabota s rukopis’iu,” p. 12.

84. Gibet, “Pervye shagi,” pp. 7-8. 85. Kotomka, “Nedostatki nachinaiushchikh litkonsul’tantov,” p. 7.

86. Pertsov, O chem i kak pisat’ rabochemu pisateliu, p. 63. 87. IWinskii, Postrotka pesy, p. 41. 88. Borodin, O pesakh nachinaiushchikh dramaturgov, pp. 41-42. 89. IPinskii, Postroika pesy, p. 10.

90. Ibid.

91. 92. 93. 94.

Borodin, O pesakh nachinaiushchikh dramaturgov, pp. 11-12. Ibid., pp. 12-13. V. Liubimoy, “Kulatskaia poeziia,” p. 6. IPinskii, Postroika pesy, p. 1.

95. 96. 97. 98.

Borodin, O pesakh nachinaiushchikh dramaturgov, p. 50. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., pp. 17-18. Siniavskii, “Roman M. Gor’kogo Mat 5 pp. 86-87.

CHAPTER

SIX

1. Let us note in passing that “organicity of creation” is apparently one of the features that distinguishes Socialist Realist “artistic production” from “mass culture,”

430

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sinces the latter develops “without a deity and without inspiration”

in a purely

“market-driven” environment. as Trotsky, Literatura 1 revoliutsiia, p. 152.

3. Ibid., p. 153.

4. Lunacharskii, “Doklad Lunacharskogo na dispute ‘Sud’by sovremennoi intelligentsii,”” p. 24. 5. Mayakovsky, “V masterskoi stikha,” pp. 135—37. 6.

Shklovskii, “Literaturnaia ucheba,” pp. 42-43. 7. Aleksandrovskii, “O putiakh proletarskogo tvorchestva,” pp. 33-348 . Liashko, “O zadachakh pisatelia-rabochego,” p. 27. 2 . Averbakh, Za proletarskuiu literaturu, p. 63. 10. Lavrov, “Zametki chitatelia,” pp. 46-47.

. “O podrazhanii i novatorstve,” p. 122. oe “Vospityvat’ pisatelei-bol’shevikoy,” p. 10. . Perekati-pole, “O rabote v rabochem literaturnom kruzhke,” p. 20. 14. Kraiskii, Chto nado znat’ nachinaiushchemu pisateliu, p. 3. . Special note from translator: To avoid overburdening the main text at this juncture with Russian titles for these mostly ephemeral works, I have omitted them there. For the Russian-speaking reader, here are the titles: Pertsov, O chem i kak pisat’ rabochemu pisateliu; Shengeli, Kak pisat’ stati, stikhi i rasskazy and Shkola pisatelia: Osnovy literaturnot tekhniki; Kraiskii, Chto nado znat’ nachinaiushchemu pisateliu; Bekker, Pisatel’ za rabotoi; Tverskoi, Kak rabotat’ pisateliu; Timofeev, Stikh i proza: Teoriia literatury dlia nachinaiushchego pisatelia; Nefedov, Azbuka stikhoslozheniia; \zotov, Osnovy liter-

aturnot gramoty; Shklovskii, Tekhnika pisatel skogo remesla and Kak pisat’ stsenarii: Posobie dlia nachinaiushchikh stsenaristov s obraztsami stsenariev raznogo tipa; Borodin, Kak pisat’ pesu: Populiarnoe rukovodstvo dlia nachinaiushchikh dramaturgov and V pomoshch’ nachinaiushchemu dramaturgu: Rukovodstvo”; and Ilinskii, Postroika pesy. 16. Shklovskii, Kak pisat’ stsenarii, p. 7. i Shklovskii, 7ekhnika pisatel skogo remesla, pp. 57, 60. 18. IPinskii, Postroika pesy, p. 3. 19. Ibid., p. 8. 20. Ibid. 21. Bekker, Pisatel’ za rabotoi, pp. 6-7. 79% Kraiskii, Chto nado znat’ nachinaiushchemu pisateliu, pp. 3, 21. 233 Shengeli, Kak pisat’ stat, stikhi i rasskazy, p. 4. 24. 26. 28. 29. 30.

Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., p. 73.

25. Ibid., p. 14. 27. Ibid., p. 74.

Tverskoi, Kak rabotat’ pisateliu, pp. 5-6. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., pp. 8-9. 31. ““Khoroshee delo zadumal GIKhL,” pp. 18-19. 32. “Obrashchenie litkruzhkovtsev f-ki ‘Parizhskaia kommuna’ k M. Gor'komu,” prac. 33. Zhuchkov, “O knigakh dlia nachinaiushchikh pisatelei,” pp. 8-11.

N OMMPEISy

LOMP

AIG ES) 3.01304

431

34.

Vitin, “O samouchiteliakh po tekhnike pisatel’skogo remesla,” p. 122. N-skii, “‘Kontsert’ v klube rabkorov ‘Pravdy,”” pp. 53-54; N-skii, “Neudachnyi 35. samouchitel’,” p. 9. 36. “Ot izdatel’stva,” p. vi. 37- Pismo nachinaiushchemu pisateliu, p. 35. 38. See Rost, no. 17 (1934): 36. 39. Eikhenbaum, “Pogovorim o nashem remesle,” pp. 107-8. . Ginzburg, “Iz starykh zapisei,” p. 230.

. See Brown, The Proletarian Episode in Russian Literature, pp. 66-69. . Arvatov, “Marks o khudozhestvennoi restavratsii,” pp. 92-93. . Ibid., pp. 93-95. . Tretiakov, “Biografiia veshchei,” p. 67.

. Pertsov, “Kul’t predkov i literaturnaia sovremennost’,” pp. 154-55. . Ibid., pp. 155-56. . Ibid., p. 157. . Perekati-pole, “O rabote v rabochem literaturnom kruzhke,” p. 20.

. Didrikil’, “Nuzhna li sistema i programma?” p. 22. . Lenobl’, “Chem dolzhen zanimat’sia literaturnyi kruzhok,” pp. 20-21.

. Zonin, “K diskussii,” pp. 25-26.

52. See Rezets, no. 16 (1929).

. Rezets, no. 20 (1929): I.

54. Ibid.

. Trifonova, “Nado uchit’sia chitat’,” p. 15. . Druzin, “Zadachi proletarskogo poeticheskogo molodniaka,” p. 43.

. Krasil’nikov, “Poeticheskii molodniak,” p. 69. . Nikolich, “Na shkol’noi skam’e,” p. 205.

. Druzin, “Zadachi proletarskogo poeticheskogo molodniaka,” p. 42. . Druzin, “Ne podrazhanie, a kriticheskaia pererabotka,” p. 14. . Druzin, “Ob izuchenii formy,” p. 1.

. “Vospityvat’ pisatelei-bol’shevikov,” p. 9. . See Papernyi, Kultura Dva. . Bekker, “Literaturnaia ucheba v kruzhke “TsAGI,”” p. 148. 65. Savich, “Ob izuchenii opyta klassikov,” p. 61. 66. A. Mikhailov, “O literaturnom nasledii i uchebe u ‘klassikov,” p. 19. 67. Shklovskii, “O pisatele i proizvodstve,” pp. 193-94. 68. Sletov, Besedy s nachinaiushchim pisatelem, p. 62. 69. See T. Pavlov, Teoriia otrazheniia; and Nedoshivin, “Iskusstvo kak forma otra-

zheniia deistvitel’nosti.” For a critical analysis of the Marxist conception of realism, see Bisztray, Marxist Models ofLiterary Realism. 70. Lunacharskii, “Lenin i iskusstvo,” p. 402. a, Bonch-Bruevich, Vospominaniia o V. I.Lenine, pp. 404-5, 410. coe See V zashchitu iskusstva.

73: Plekhanov, Put’ burzhuaznoi kul’tury ot demokratii k reaktsii, p. 120. 74. Vinogradoy, “Ideinost’ i tema,” p. 87.

21. 75: Libedinskii, “Voprosy tematiki v proletarskoi literature,” p. i Stikh proza, 10. Timofeev, p. 76:

432

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77. Pismo nachinaiushchemu pisateliu, pp. 15-16. 78. Timofeev, Stikh i proza, p. 7.

79. Pertsov,

O chem i kak pisat’ rabochemu

pisateliu, p. 64. In the periodicals of these

years, one can often find examples of “lessons in realism.” For example, it was suggested that the beginner make a sketch of teenaged cigarette vendors they met on the street; or, “In the evenings, citizens getting off work go for a stroll in the park. Sit on a

bench in the park and make a number ofsketches of those going for a stroll, and in doing so, try to determine the essence of each one, to guess approximately what kind of work he does”; and the like. Such lessons, it was maintained, were a proven method of developing the power of observation—this is how Flaubert had taught Maupassant to write (see Olenin, “Portretnost’ v khudozhestvennoi literature,” pp. 33-35).

80. Kats and Makedonovy, “Geroi bol’shevistskikh tempoy v literature,” p. 58-62. 81. Pertsov, O chem i kak pisat’ rabochemu pisateliu, p. 41. 82. Rumiantsey, “Strana dolzhna znat’ svoikh geroev,” p. 98. I should also point

out the nature of the demands made of the “realism of language”: “The sooner working-class conversational speech places its stamp on the language of proletarian literature, the better. It is the stamp of the political power of the working class” (Pertsov, O chem i kak pisat’ rabochemu pisateliu, p. 81). But this kind of “worship of popular speech,” which stretched back at least as far as Tolstoy's 1862 article “Who Should Teach Whom to Write—We the Peasant Fellows, or the Peasant Fellows Us?” (“Komu

u kogo uchit’sia pisat’: krest'ianskim rebiatam u nas ili nam u krest’ianskikh rebiat?”), was in criticism combined with the requirement to “rework real language”: “Literary treatment of the masses’ language should raise it up to the level of the proletariat’s scientific worldview. It should enrich and improve this language of practice from the standpoint of revolutionary theory and accumulated literary experience” (Pertsov, O chem i kak pisat’ rabochemu pisateliu, p. 82). Characteristically, this duality of recipes for beginners was peculiar to “literary training” at the height of the discussion about language initiated by Gorky (see Giinther, Die Verstaatlichung der Literatur, pp. 55-68). 83. Goldberg, “Rabota nad prozoi,” p. 101. 84. Shaginian, Literatura i plan, p. 136. 85. Ibid., p. 137. 86. Ibid., p. 9. Be; Ibid p. 20 88. Fadeev, “Pisatel’ i sovremennost’,” p. 3. 89. See Groys, “Die gebaute Ideologie.” 90. Tolstoi, “Literaturnye zametki,” pp. 9-10.

g1. Kak my pishem, pp. 13, 16. 92. Ibid., pp. 29-30.

93. Ibid., p. 48.

94. Ibid., p. 107. 95. Ibid., pp. 125-27. 96. Ibid., p. 193. 97. Pertsov, O chem i kak pisat’ rabochemu pisateliu, p. 5.

98. Sobol’, “Kosnoiazychnoe,” pp. 108-9. 99. Pil'niak, “Otryvki iz dnevnika,” pp. 84-85, 86, 89. 100. Kak my pishem, p. 181.

NiO

IOl.

TOs 103. 104. IOS. 106. 108. 110. Ill. II2. 113. 114. IIS. 116. 117. 118.

ES

LO

PANG BIS) 312,01

312,

433

Zamiatin, “O literature, revoliutsii, entropii i o prochem,” pp. 69, 71.

“Kakoi nam nuzhen pisatel’,” no. 10, p. 28. ,

Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 32. “Kakoi nam nuzhen pisatel’,” no. 15, p. 37. Ibid., p. 39. 107. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., p. 35. 109. “Litucheba nachalas’,” pate

Bas, “Opyt pisatelia—rabochemu avtoru,” p. 46. N. Liubimoy, “Tvorcheskii opyt masteroy,” p. 74. Zlobin, “Tvorcheskii opyt sovetskikh pisatelei,” p. 29.

Bednyi, Vpered i vyshe, p. 31. Zharov, Besedy, provedennye poetom v Kabinete rabochego avtora, p. 71.

Shaginian, Kak ia rabotala nad “Gidrotsentraliu,” p. 18. Gladkov, Moia rabota nad “Energiei,” p. 28. Bugrov, “V laboratorii sovetskogo pisatelia,” p. 136.

As early as 1933, Nikolai Piksanov had challenged critics to study these mate-

rials so as to “get to know the Soviet writer—a new writer, such as the old bourgeois world had never seen” (Piksanov, “Kak rabotaiut sovetskie pisateli,” p. 29).

119. Lavrov, “Zametki chitatelia,” p. 47. 120. This is a Russian typographical convention to denote a definition.— Trans. PAE “Nachinaiushchemu pisateliu—postoiannuiu pomoshch’,” p. 45. 122. Serebrianskii, “Osnovnye zadachi,” p. to. 123. 124. 125. 126.

Shvetsov, “Ne zabyvat’ o nasushchnykh interesakh,” p. 11. See Zhernov, nos. 4-5 (1927): 18. Maksimova, Gor kii-redaktor, p. 204.

Ibid., pp. 196-270 (the chapter “‘Literaturnaia ucheba’ i voprosy ideino-

khudozhestvennogo vospitaniia literaturnykh kadrov’). 17. See Svetlov, “Literaturnyi zud,” p. 220.

Iurin, “Zapiski podavavshego nadezhdy,” p. 97. 129. Gorky, Pisma k rabkoram i pisateliam, p. 31. 128.

130. Gorky, Sobranie sochinenii v 30 tomakh, t. 24, p. 416. 131. Ibid., t. 26, p. 295.

132. 133. 134. £5. 136. Rvs

Quoted in Maksimova, Gor kii-redaktor, p. 224. Gorky, Sobranie sochinenti v 30 tomakh, t. 25, pp. 101-2. Quoted in Maksimova, Gor kii-redaktor, p. 271.

139. 140. 141. 142. 143.

Vinnitskii, “Litsom k tekhnike,” p. 31.

Gorky, Sobranie sochinenti v 30 tomakh, t. 26, p. 94. See Literaturnaia gazeta, Oct. 10, 1934.

Rybnikova, “Zhurnal Literaturnaia ucheba iego chitateli,” p. 129. 138. E. Troshchenko, “Literaturnaia konsul’tatsiia RAPPa i ee korrespondenty,” p. 33. Gorbunovy, Put’k masterstvu, p. 393.

“Bol’she vnimaniia nachinaiushchemu pisateliu,” p. 2. “Za bol’shevistskoe nastuplenie na fronte proletarskoi literatury!” p. 7. “V tsentral’noi litkonsul’tatsii GIKhLa,” p. 10.

434

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“Smotr literaturnykh konsul'tatsii,” p. 15. Here also one may find information about literary consultancies in Profizdat’s Working-Class Writers’ Club, at the journal Smena, in the Sovetskaia literatura publishing house, and in the Literary Club of the Organizational Committee of the Union of Soviet Writers. 144.

145. Mileshkin, “Moi schet konsul’tatsii,” pp. 4~5. 146. Quoted from Surkoy, “Litkonsul'tatsiia,” p. 19.

Ibid., pp. 19-20. Ibid., p. 20. 149. Quoted from Kotomka, “Nedostatki nachinaiushchikh litkonsul’tantovy,” p. 9. 147.

148.

150. V. Liubimov, “Pis’mo tov. Kiselevu,” p. 9. Isl. Ibid., p. 8.

. Morozov, “Govorit nachinaiushchii,” p. 8. . Zelenskii, “‘Detskie bolezni’ literaturnogo tvorchestva,” p. 10.

. Ibid. Ibid., p. 1. . Zelenskii, “Tribuna konsul’tanta,” p. 10. . L-v, “Udarniki v literature,” p. 115. . E. Troshchenko, “Literaturnaia konsul'tatsiia RAPPa i ee korrespondenty,” p. 33. . Zdanevich, “Rabota s molodymi pisateliami,” pp. 315, 317. . Surkov, “Litkonsul'’tatsiia,” pp. 21-22.

. Stavskii, “O literaturnykh kruzhkakh,” p. 127. . Gorbunov, “O rabote s nachinaiushchimi pisateliami,” p. 48. . Gorbunoy, Pur’k masterstvu, p. 400.

. Ibid., p. 401. . Kats, “Avtoru-udarniku—konkretnuiu pomoshch’,” p. 80. . Kats, “Litsom k udarniku,” pp. 74-75.

. . . .

Dudun, “Dadim novye kadry,” p. 30. See Biriukov, “O zaochnykh kursakh dlia nachinaiushchikh pisatelei.” Brovman, “Nachalo raboty,” p. 6. Gorbunov, “Ukrepit’ rabotu kluba,” p. 8. . Kanatov, “Zakrepit’ molodezh’,” p. 9. . Aframeev, “Krepche sviaz’ s zhurnalami,” p. 9. . “O literaturnom obrazovanii nachinaiushchikh,” p. 3. . Gorky, “V. I. Lenin,” p. 4s.

. “O literaturnom obrazovanii nachinaiushchikh,” p. 4. . Ibid. 177. Ibid., pp. 6-7. . Ibid., p. 9. 179. Ibid., p. 12. . Vospominaniia o Litinstitute, p. 19.

. Bulgakov, Belaia guardiia. Teatral’nyi roman. Master i Margarita, pp. 470, 472. . “Nothingists”: The “nichevoki”, a radical avant-garde group. . Quoted in Kraevskii, Tverskoi bul’var, 25, p. 41. 184. Ibid., p. 41. 185. See Nikolich, “Na shkol’noi skam’e”; Nikolich, “Vechernii rabochii universitet”: >

Dobranoy, “O tvorchestve studentoy VRLU”; and Krasnochub, “Edinstvennyi v mire.”

NOTES

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342-55

435

186. Quoted in Kraevskii, Tverskoi bul var, 25, p. 9.

187. Pimenovy, Svideteli zhivye, pp. 216-17. 188. Pimenoy, “Shkola Gorkogo,” pp. 11-13. 189. The Johannes Becher Literary Institute in Leipzig was later founded on the model of the Moscow Institute. 190. Zhambievy, “V pervyi god,” p. 239. 191. Dolmatovskii, “Osobniak na tverskom bul'vare,” ppa26-27, 192. Babaevskii, “Prokhozhu po Tverskomu . . . ,” p. 57. 193. Drunina, “Ia b khotela otmotat’ nazad . . . ,” p. 177.

194. Bulgakov, Belaia guardiia. Teatral’nyi roman. Master i Margarita, pp. 470,

477-78.

GHAPTER

SEVEN

1. Literaturnyi front, p. 162. 2. “Molodomu chitateliu,” p. 338. 3. Chudakova, “Bez gneva i pristrastiia,” pp. 254-55. 4. Ibid., p. 255.

5 Shklovskii, Udachi iporazheniia Maksima Gor 'kogo, pp. 7-8. 6. Gorky, Sobranie sochinenii v 30 tomakh, t. 25, p. 44.

7. Gorky, “O pechati,” p. 225. 8. Ibid. 9. Gorky, “Beseda s pisateliami-udarnikami,” p. 81.

10. u. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Gorky, Sobranie sochinenii v 30 tomakh, t. 24, p. 277. Gorky, “O literature,” p. 260. Gorky, “Beseda s molodymi udarnikami,” p. 67. Gorky, Sobranie sochinenii v 30 tomakh, t. 26, pp. 333, 336. Gorky, Sobranie sochinenii v 30 tomakh, t. 24, p. 397. Sheshukoy, Neistovye revniteli, p. 293. Note that Gorky’s tolerant attitude toward the various literary groups, which assured him the role of arbiter in the literary debates, was a deliberately developed principle that extended even to people who had personally “insulted” him, which included, as is well known, the RAPPists, who had reckoned him among the fellow-travelers, and above all Averbakh, who had written an article against Gorky on the eve of his return to the USSR. Indeed, Gorky “sheltered” former RAPPists (Averbakh, Kirshon, Libedinskii, and many others—practically the entire RAPPist secretaryship) after the dissolution of RAPP in 1932 in his numerous literary

enterprises (the editorial offices of the journals he published, the editorial office of “The History of Factories and Plants”) in exactly the same way that he “sheltered” the hungry intelligentsia after the revolution in the publications of which he was proprietor. But Gorky’s relationship to RAPP was never as dismal as Soviet criticism painted it, asserting that there was never a mutual understanding between him and the RAPPists (see Volkov, A. M. Gor’kii i literaturnoe dvizhenie sovetskoi epokhi, pp. 345-78; and Naumoy,

M. Gor'kii v bor’be za ideinostimasterstvo sovetskikh pisatelei, pp. 190-218). Indeed, on

436

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355-62

the issue of “writers from the masses,” the RAPPists found an ardent supporter in Gorky. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Gorky, Gorky, Gorky, Gorky,

“Udarniki v literature,” p. 18. Sobranie sochinenii v 30 tomakh, t. 27, p. 414Sobranie sochinenii v 30 tomakh, t. 24, pp. 276-77. “Shkole vzroslykh v Smolenske,” p. 385.

20. Gorky, “O literature i prochem,” p. 49. 21. Gorky, Sobranie sochinenii v 30 tomakh, t. 24, p. 326. 22. Ibid., p. 412. 23. 24. 25. 26.

Gorky, Sobranie sochinenii v 30 tomakh, t. 27, pp- 331-32. Gorky, Sobranie sochinenii v 30 tomakh, t. 24, p. 359Ibid., p. 36r. Gorky, “Besedy o remesle,” p. 309.

27. Ibid., p. 310. 28. Gorky, “Rabochii klass dolzhen vospitat’ svoikh masterov kul’tury,” p. 39.

29. Gorky, Sobranie sochinenii v 30 tomakh, t. 27, p. 331.

30. There is a voluminous literature on Gorky’s relationship with young writers. See Muratova, M. Gor’kii v bor’be za razvitie sovetskoi literatury, pp. 135-79; Volkov, A. M. Gor'kii i literaturnoe dvizhenie sovetskoi epokhi; and Naumov, M. Gor kii v bor be

2a ideinost’ imasterstvo sovetskikh pisatelei. See also the bibliography of works treating the relationships of individual writers with Gorky in the cited work of Muratova. 31. See Volkov, A. M. Gor'kii i literaturnoe dvizhenie sovetskoi epokhi, pp. 189-90,

345-78. 32. Gorky, “Pered nami razvertyvaetsia ogromneishaia i prekrasnaia rabota,” p. 82. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

Gorky, Sobranie sochinenii v 30 tomakh, t. 27, p. 353Ibid., p. 357. Ibid., p. 249. V. Vorob’ev, A. M. Gor'kii o spetsifike literatury, p. 239. Ibid., p. 126.

38. Gorky, “Tseli nashego zhurnala,” p. 102. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

Gorky, Sobranie sochinenti v 30 tomakh, t. 25, p. 16. Gorky, “Literaturnye zabavy,” p. 245. Gorky, “Besedy o remesle,” p. 311. Literaturnaia ucheba, no. 2 (1930): 24. Ibid., p. 25.

44. Gorky, Pisma k rabkoram i pisateliam, p. 28. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. so.

Gorky, Gorky, Gorky, Gorky, Gorky, Gorky,

“Pis’mo rabkoru Sapelovu,” p. 299. “O nashikh dostizheniiakh,” pp. 384-85. “Rabkoram depo imeni Il’icha,” p. 429. “Molodaia literatura i ee zadachi,” pp. 96-97. “O tsinizme,” p. 383. “O deistvitel’nosti,” pp. 454-55.

st. Gorky, “Otvet intelligentu,” p. 33. 52. Gorky, “Beseda s molodymi udarnikami,” p. 63.

NO

WES

l/OP

PAGES =3 62> 70

437

53. Gorky,‘‘Besedas pisateliami-udarnikami,” pp. 82-84. 54. Stalin, “Pismo Gor’komu ot 17 ianvaria 1939 goda,” pp. 173-74. 55- Gorky, “O sotsialisticheskom realizme,” pp. 12-13.

56. Gorky, “O boikosti,” p. 159. 57- Gorky, “O literature i prochem,” pp. 52-53.

58. Gorky, “Beseda s molodymi udarnikami,” P- 97: 59. Gorky, “Besedy 0 remesle,” p. 324. 60. Shklovskii, “O kinematografe,” p. 14. 61. Ibid. 62. “Pisateli i sotsialisticheskoe stroitel’stvo,” p. 10.

63. 65. 67. 69.

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

p. 8. p. 11. p. 13. p. ro.

64. Ibid., p. 12. 66. Ibid. 68. Ibid., pp. 13-14.

70. See A. M. Gor'kii i sozdanie “Tstorii fabrik i zavodov.” 71. Although the full title of the series was “Istoriia fabrik i zavodov,” references to the series often shortened the title to “Istoriia zavodov’”; the shortened form, in quota-

tions, is translated here as “History of the Factories.”— Trans. 72. Shushkanoy, “‘Istoriiu zavodov’ na novuiu stupen’,” p. 15. 73. Rogov, “Sozdadim bol’shevistskuiu istoriiu,” p. 85. 74. Gorky, “Pismo N. G. Shushkanovu,” p. 48. 75. Gorky, “Kniga rabkora Gudka-Eremeeva,” pp. 400-401.

76. Rabochie pishut istoriiu zavodoy, p. 17. 77. Averbakh, “Mozhet li byt’ istoriia zavodov nauchnoi i khudozhestvennoi?”

Pp. 44745. 78. See Malakhoy, “Khudozhestvennaia istoriia fabrik i zavodov’; and Simkhovich,

“Khudozhestvennye problemy istorii zavodov.” 79. Gorky, “Pismo N. G. Shushkanovu,” p. 50.

80. See the report on the work of the “History of the Civil War” series publishers, presented at the Second Plenum of the Board of Directors of the Union in 1935, in

Vioroi plenum Pravleniia SSP SSSR, p. 396. 81. Vsevolod Ivanov spoke of this connection in his speech about the “History of the Factories and Plants” series at the Second Plenum of the Board of Directors of the Union in 1935 (see Vtoroi plenum Pravleniia SSP SSSR, pp. 409-15).

82. Gorky, “Napishem istoriiu bor’by rabochego klassa,” p. 24. 83. See Gruzinskii, “Shkola literaturnykh kadrov.” 84. See Gruzinskii, “Litkruzhkovtsy avtory ‘Istorii zavodov.”” 85. On the “local” conditions of the work on the “histories,” see L-in, “Kak ne

nado pisat’ istoriiu zavoda”; Sergeich, “Sozdadim ‘Istoriiu zavodov’ TsChO”; Makedonov, “Pokazhem istoriiu rabochego klassa”; Sibirskii, “Budet pisat'sia istoriia stroiki Burremzavoda’; Vostryshey, “Geroev-udarnikoy—na khudozhestvennye polotna’; “Sozdadim bol’shevistskuiu istoriiu zavodov”; Rogov, “Sozdadim bol’shevistskuiu istoriiu’”; Oralov, “Za rabotu!”; Pan’kovskii, “Sozdadim istoriiu Sel’masha’; Toom, “Napishem istoritu Kuznetskogo zavoda’; Tetereviatnikova, “Zadachi ‘Istorii fabrik i zavodov’”;

438

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37£E=-86

Komarov, “O nekotorykh itogakh raboty po sozdaniiu istorii fabrik i zavodov TsChO i nashikh zadachakh”; Novlianskii, “Zolotye priiski pisatelia’; and Potapchik, “Rabochii klass sozdaet svoiu istoriiu.” 86. “Pismo

redaktsii istorii zavoda imeni Vladimira Il’ icha A. M. Gor’komu,”

p. 90. 87. Gorky, “Kakaia kniga nam nuzhna,” p. 36. 88. Quoted from an article in the newspaper Stalingradskit proletarii (The Stalingrad proletarian) in A. M. Gor'kii i sozdanie “Istorit fabrik i zavodov,” p. 121. 89. Gorky, “Literaturnye zabavy,” p. 272.

go. Gorky, “O literature i prochem,” p. 54.

gi. Pervyi Vsesoiuznyi s’ezd sovetskikh pisatelet, p. 17. 92. Gorky, “Liudi Stalingradskogo traktornogo,” p. 54. 93. Averbakh, “Literaturnye zametki (“Liudi STZ’),” pp. 140, 141.

94. See Zlygostev’s “Kak pisalis’ “Byli gory Vysokoi’” and his “O “Byliakh gory Vysokoi.” 95. Vtoroi plenum Pravleniia SSP SSSR, p. 500. 96. Oruzheinikov, “Raport pisatelei,” p. 14. 97. See “Kak pisateli rabotali nad knigoi o Belomorstroe.” 98. Inber, “Rastet novyi tip pisatelia,” p. 8.

99. Ivanoy, Vsevolod, “Doklad na Vtorom plenume Pravleniia SSP,” pp. 404-5. 100. Pervyi Vsesoiuznyi s"ezd sovetskikh pisatelei, p. 184.

ror. Ibid., p. 232. 102. See Vioroi plenum Pravleniia SSP SSSR, p. 470. 103. Ginzburg, Chelovek za pis mennym stolom, pp. 108-9. 104. Ibid., p. 56.

105. Freidin, “Vopros vozvrashcheniia 1,” p. 178. 106. On moods in the “creative milieu” on the eve of and after the adoption of the Party Central Committee’s resolution “On the Restructuring of Literary-Artistic Organizations,” see Kemp-Welch, Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, pp. 68-142. 107. “Diskussiia v VSSP,” p. 125. 109. Ibid., pp. 142-43.

108. Ibid., pp. 128, 129, 135, 136, 138. 110. Ibid., pp. 145, 147.

uu. “Kakoi nam nuzhen pisatel’,” no. 6, p. 43. 112. “Kakoi nam nuzhen pisatel’,” no. 10, p. 29. 113. Ibid., p. 32. 114. “Kakoi nam nuzhen pisatel’,” no. 15, p. 35. 115. “Kakoi nam nuzhen pisatel’,” nos. 20-21, p. 59.

116. “Kakoi nam nuzhen pisatel’,” no. 6, p. 42. 117. “Kakoi nam nuzhen pisatel’,” no. 10, p. 29.

18. 119. 120. 121. 122.

Ibid., p. 31 “Kakoi nam nuzhen pisatel’,” no. r5, p. 35. “Kakoi nam nuzhen pisatel’,” nos. 20-21, p. 52. Ibid., p. 58. “Kakoi nam nuzhen pisatel’,” no. 6, p. 45.

123. Ibid., p. 48.

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439

124. “Kakoi nam nuzhen pisatel’,” no. 15, p. 41. 125. “Kakoi nam nuzhen pisatel’,” nos. 20-21, Pp. 55.

“

126.

Ibid., p. 59.

27 128. 129. 130. 13 Ie

Kraiskii, “V shtabe po rukovodstvu litkruzhkami Leningrada,” p. 31. “O rabote s nachinaiushchim aytorom,” p. r. Romanenko, “Profsoiuzy i massovoe literaturnoe dvizhenie,” pe i7: “O massovom literaturnom dvizhenii v krae,” pp. 78-79. Romanenko,

“Profsoiuzy i massovoe literaturnoe dvizhenie,” p- 17. See also

Delo vospitaniia pisatel’skikh kadrov trebuet aktivnogo uchastiia profsoiuzoy,” p. 30. ge Afanas’eva, “Ukrepit’ rukovodstvo litkruzhkami,” pp. 43, 44. 133. “O sovmestnoi rabote po rukovodstvu litkruzhkami,” p. 79. 134. “O rabote s molodymi pisateliami,” p. 4. 135. Vasil’ev, “Na pod”eme,” p. 36. e

ee

.

>

.

.

on

.

136. “Literaturnyi kruzhok “TsAGI,”” p. 146. i Wg Stavskii, “O literaturnykh kruzhkakh,” p. 130. 138. Gorbunov, Put’k masterstvu, p. 404.

139. 140. I4I. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. Age 148. 149. 150. IsI. iiG2, 153. 154.

Shvetsov and Altaiskii, “Za gor’ kovskii stil’ raboty,” p. 179. Subotskii, “Massovoe literaturnoe dvizhenie i pechat’,” p. 4.

Dobranoy, “Molodye poety i ikh liberal’nye redaktory,” p. 128. Druzin, “I rifmy podognany lovko, I mysli prichesany gladko...,” p. 24. Malinkin, “Literaturnaia ucheba nachinaiushchikh pisatelei,” p. 45.

Borisoy, Stavskii, Ibid., p. Ibid., p.

“O programmakh dlia literaturnykh kruzhkov,” p. 34. “O literaturnoi molodezhi nashei strany,” pp. 578-79. 587. 595.

Gorbunoy, “O rabote izdatel’stv s nachinaiushchimi pisateliami,” p. 599. Ibid., p. 604. Pervyi Vsesoiuznyt s”ezd sovetskikh pisatelet, p. 697. Stavskii, “O literaturnykh kruzhkakh,” p. 125.

“Dobit trotskistskuiu gadinu!” pp. 6-8. Mirskii, “O literaturnoi kritike i bibliografii,” p. 183. Maksimova, Gor’kii-redaktor, p. 257. Literaturnaia ucheba would be resurrected

three decades later by the Party Central Committee’s resolution “On Working with Creative Youth” (“O rabote s tvorcheskoi molodezh iu’). 155. Brazhnin, “Iskusstvo videt’,” p. 105. 156. “Ob uchebe molodykh avtoroy,” p. 4. TS Je Panferov, “Vystuplenie na Vsesoiuznom slete litkruzhkov i rabochikh avto-

Tov,” p. 3158. See Garrard and Garrard, Inside the Soviet Writers Union, p. 32; although at the

First Congress, Gorky had cited the number of writers at 1,500. 159. “Tvorcheskie zadachi udarnikov na novom etape,” p. 2. 160. See Nikolaev, “Umestnye dialogi.” 161. Zhiga, “O rabote s nachinaiushchim pisatelem,” p. 1. 162. “Vospityvat’ pisatelei-bol’shevikov,” p. 13.

440

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391-403

163. On the use of this mechanism in 1946 through 1953 in the political campaign system of the “Zhdanov era,” see Dobrenko, “Pravda zhizni kak formula real’ nosti.” 164. Fadeev, “O trebovatel’nosti v masterstve,” p. 151.

165. Ibid., p. 154. 166. Vtoroi Vsesoiuznyi s"ezd sovetskikh pisatelei, p. 378. 167. Bakhtin, “Iskusstvo i otvetstvennost’,” pp. 5-6. 168. Turovskaia, “Fil’my ‘kholodnoi voiny,”” p. 100.

169. Chistiakov, “O kollektivnykh sochineniiakh v shkole,” p. 186. 170. Ibid., pp. 187, 188, 189, 194. 171. Ibid., p. 197.

172. Ibid., p. 200. 173. Platonoy, “Fabrika literatury,” p. 196. 174. Ibid. 175. Ibid., p. 197. 176. Ibid., pp. 199-200. 177. See Chizhevskii, Akademiia Poezii.

178. Zhiga, “O rabote s nachinaiushchim pisatelem,” p. 1. See also Eikhe, “Zapadnaia Sibir’ zhdet pisatelei,” p. 196. 179. Iurin, “Mastera i podmaster’ia,” pp. 46-47. 180. Makeev, “O pervoi knige i redaktore,” p. 129. 181. Adel’geim, “O samykh molodykh,” p. 172.

182. Ognev, “Moia rabota s molodymi avtorami,” pp. 154, 156. 183. Vilenskii, “Molodye pisateli Uzbekistana,” p. 129. 184. Dukor, “Zdravstvui, zhizn’,” p. 211. 185. Ginzburg, Pretvorenie opyta, p. 179.

186. 187. 188. 189.

Ibid., p. 138. Ibid., pp. 144-45.

Ginzburg, Chelovek za pis mennym stolom, pp. 301, 303. Remarks made by Slonimskii in a discussion of youth prose, quoted in Rezets

(Leningrad), nos. 11-12 (1933): 41.

190. See Literaturnyi front; and Babichenko, Pisateli i tsenzory. See also KempWelch, Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, pp. 205-68. 191. Ostrovskii, “Za literaturu sotsialisticheskoi pravdy,” p. 243. 192. Ostrovskii, “Moi tvorcheskii otchet,” p. 233.

193. Piksanov based his analysis primarily on material from the anthology Writers: Autobiographies of Contemporaries (Pisateli: Avtobiograhi sovremennikov; Moscow,

1928), compiled by V. Lidin. 194. Piksanov, “Sovetskii pisatel’,” p. 186. 195. Simonoy, “Pamiati A. A. Fadeeva,” p. 3. 196. In Inside the Soviet Writers’ Union, Garrard and Garrard examine the birth of

the union in the context of the “organizational utopia” that dates back to Chernyshevskii (pp. 15-44). Nevertheless, the “organizational utopia” itself was, as one may imagine, only the form given to the broader idea of collective creativity. 197. Gol'dshtein, Pisateli 0 svoem trude, p. 4. 198. Ginzburg, Pretvorenie opyta, p. 181.

NOTES

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403-6

441

199. See Kerbabaey, “Talant, serdtse, umen’e, trud”; Diagilev, “Davaite razberemsia’; Gulia, “Verno, nado razobrat’sia!”; and Bialik, “Eshche o molodykh.”

200. May 31, 201. 202. 203. 204.

Sholokhov’s speech at the Congress’is reproduced in Literaturnaia gazeta, 1967. Erenburg, Sobranie sochinenii v 9 tt, t. 9, p. 36. Conquest, Bolshoi Terror, p. 593. Gudkov and Dubin, “Ideologiia besstrukturnosti,” p. 168. See Gudkov and Dubin, Jntelligentsiia; and Gudkov and Dubin, Literatura

kak sotsial nyi institut. 205. Gudkov and Dubin, “Ideologiia besstrukturnosti,” p. 168. 206. Ibid., p. 179. 207. Ibid., p. 168. See Lashin, Kulturno-vospitatel’naia deiatel’nost sovetskogo gosu-

darstva; Karpov, O sovetskoi kul’ture i kul’turnoi revoliutsii v SSSR; Sovetskaia intelligentsiia: Istoriia formirovantia i rosta; Narodnye massy i stroitel’stvo sovetskoi kul tury; Kul turno-prosvetitel naia rabota; Pulatov, Kommunizm. Gosudarstvo. Kultura. Lichnost’;

and Iz istorii sovetskoi kul tury. 208. Gudkov and Dubin, “Ideologiia besstrukturnosti,” pp. 170, 176. 209. Ibid., p. 171. 210. A. Blok, Sochineniia v 2 tomakh, t. 2, p. 731.

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Index

In this index an “f” after a number indicates a separate reference on the next page, and an “ff” indicates separate references on the next two pages. A continuous discussion over two or more pages is indicated by a span of page numbers, e.g., “57-59.” Passim is used for a cluster of references in close but not consecutive

sequence.

“A. Ziablov” (Komar, Melamid), 1f, ro

Afinogenov, Aleksandr, 388-90 passim Agapoy, Boris, 366f, 373 Aimermakher, Karl, 225 Akhmatova, Anna, xiii, 87, 142, 200, 390 Akhmatova, Raisa, 342 Akimoy, Vladimir, 409n6 Aleksandroyskii, Vasilii, 96, 106, tof, 121f, 298

Alekseev, Mikhail, 342, 347 Alieva, Fazu, 342 Aliger, Margarita, 210ff, 219, 330, 342, 347,

384, 424n124 Alipanoy, Egor, 3-11, 44 Altauzen, Jack, 128, 242 Alymoy, S., 373 Andreev, Leonid, 93, 137 Angabaey, Solbon, 343 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 402

Annas Notes (Sanzhar’), 72, 75 Anzimirova, O., 326 Arctic, The (Sel’vinskii), 249 Arskii, Pavel (Afanas’ev), 96 Art for art’s sake, xi, xix, I5, 18, 43 Arvatov, Boris, 121, 306f

Asadoy, Eduard, 342 Aseey, Nikolai, 121f, 349, 401f Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia,

179 Ataroy, Nikolai, 366 Auslender, Sergei, 390 Avant-Garde, The (Shein), 237£ Avdeenko, Aleksandr, 330

Averbakh, Leopold: arrest of, 388; call of shockworkers into literature and, 215, 222ff; History ofFactories and Plants and, 368f, 373; Komsomol literature and, 118-21 passim, 124-28 passim, 140, 154; literary training and, 299, 331; mass literary movement and, 185, 189, I9I, 197

Avramenko, Ilia, 249f Azhaey, Vasilii, 347, 398

Babaevskii, Semen, 199, 245, 342-47 passim,

376, 391, 398, 404 Babel, Isaac, 404 Badmaey, Tsyren-Bazar, 343

Badulin the Idler (Tsypkin), 283 Bagritskii, Eduard, 119, 121, 242 Bakhmet ey, Vladimir, 111, 379 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 392 Baklanov, Grigorii, 342

Bakulin, Aleksandr, 47-50 passim

Bal’mont, Konstantin, 43f, 87 Balzac, Honoré de, 311 Barthes, Roland, xvi, 280 Baruzdin, Sergei, 342

Baskakoy, Andrei, 283 Batrak (Kozloy, Ivan), 97 Bedniak Chronicle (Platonov), 219 Bednyi, Boris, 342

Bednyi, Demian: and call of shock-workers into literature, 221, 236, 269; Demianization

of poetry, 313; and Karpov, 73, 76; and literary training, 303, 320, 322, 334; and populist

poetry, 14, 44; and proletarian poetry, 87,

473

474

INDEX

101; and workers’ correspondents, 192, 197,

202f; and Young Guard, 121f, 140 Bek, Aleksandr, 367 Bekker, Mikhail, 129, 158, 168, 172f, 300f BelAPP (Belorussian Association of Proletarian Writers), 177 Belinkov, Arkadii, xvi, 200 Belinskii, Vissarion, 3-10 passim, 45, 305 Belorussoy, 73

Belousoy, I. A., 47f Belov, Vasilii, 342

Bubennov, Mikhail, 342, 347, 391, 398 Bukharin, Nikolai, 121, 387 Bulatoy, S., 373 Bulgakov, Mikhail, xiii, 223, 340, 347f, 390 Bulgarin, Faddei, 5 Bunin, Ivan, 93, 199 Byron, George Gordon, 310, 327

By the Three Mountains (Kovalevskii), 373

Call of shock-workers into literature, 189, 192,

Belyi, Andrei, 106, 318, 321

210-26, 236-42, 355, 424f Captains Daughter, The (Pushkin), 64

Berdnikovy, Iakov, 83, 93, 96

Cavalier of the Golden Star, The (Babaevskii),

Berggol’ts, Ol’ ga, 367 Berkovich, S., 168 Berzin’, A., 373 Bespalovy, Ivan, 209 Bessal’ko, Pavel, 68

Bezbozhnik (journal), 332 Bezymenskii, Aleksandr: and Komsomol poetry, 10, 23, 42; and literary training, 327, 334; and mass literary movement, 209, 247f, 253; and Young Guard, 18-28 passim, 133-40 passim, 152-57 passim, 164-69 passim, 175, 185

Bibik, Aleksei, 68 Big Assembly-Line, The (IV in), 366 Bikhter, A. M., 26 Blagonamerennyi (journal), 4 Blast-Furnance, The (Liashko), 288

Bleigart, 169 Blockade, The (Chakovskii), 342 Blok, Aleksandr, xi-xix passim, 64, 73, 77, 87, 187, 267, 341, 405

Bogdanoy, Aleksandr, 79f, 114, 137 Bol’shevik (journal), 188 Bolshevites, 373, 388 Bonch-Bruevich, Vladimir, 121, 313 Bondarey, lurii, 342, 344 Boretskaia, Mariia, 96 Boris Godunov (Pushkin), 221 Borodin, A., 300 Braun, Nikolai, 148 Bread (Tolstoi), 370

Breitburg, S., 219 Brik, Osip, 121, 155, 176, 304 Briusoy, Valerii, 48, 94, 140, 196 Brodskii, losif, 389 Brooks, Jeffrey, 1

342, 398 Cement (Gladkov), 244, 288 Censorship, xii, xvii, xviii, 11, 279, 400f, 409n13 Chakovskii, Aleksandr, 342, 347

Chapygin, Aleksei, 68, 350 Chastushki, 85, 122, 145, 195, 228, 304 Chekhov, Anton, 1, 57, 311, 328, 360 Cheremnoy, A., 93

Chernyshevskii, Nikolai, 13, 16, 24 Cherry Orchard, The (Chekhov), 1 Chicherin, Georgii, 121f Childe Harold (Byron), 310 Childhood (Gorky), 91 Chimitov, Gunga, 343 Chizhevskii, Aleksandr, 343, 395

Chudakova, Marietta, 350f, 364 Chudoy, Grigorii, 67

Chukovskii, Kornei, 14f, 73-77 passim, 104, 349 Chukovskii, Nikolai, 375 Chumandrin, Mikhail, 202, 245, 321-26 passim, 378 Chuzhak, Nikolai, 198 Circles, literary: after 1932 Resolution, 361, 381, 385; and call of shock-workers into literature, 215f, 232, 236-42; and literary training, 296, 302f, 308f, 325, 337-40; and mass literary movement, 182, 185, 195f, 200-210; in pre-Revolutionary Russia, 93, 95

Clark, Katerina, 409n6 Collective creativity, theory of, xx, 226, 365-76, 392-95, 403, 440196

Congresses of Soviet Writers: First, 240, 321,

330, 337, 3576, 364, 371-75 passim, 385ff, 395-98 passim; Fourth, 404; Second, xiv, 404; Third, 403

Conquest, Robert, 404

Brovman, Grigorii, 338

Contemporaries (Poshekhonov), 205

Brown, Edward, 211, 224, 306 Buachidze, 388

Correspondents (workers’, village, military), 188, 192-200, 221, 281f, 304, 353, 361, 400

INDEX Cosmism, 138f

Evdokimoy, Ivan, 378, 390

Cosmist (literary group), 96, 98

Evgenti Onegin (Pushkin), 48, 50, 249, 305 Evtushenko, Evgenii, 342, 344

Create! (literary group), m1ff, 166 Damdinoy, Nikolai, 343 Damskit zhurnal (journal), 4 Dead Souls (Gogol), 388

Factory (Blok), 267 Fadeev, Aleksandr, xviii, 120f, 190, 244, 309, 317,

370, 390ff, 402

Deborin, Abram, 121

Fake] (journal), 195

Deev-Khomiakovskii, Grigorii, 57 Delo (journal), 49

Farmyard (Karavaeva), 334

Del’vig, Anton, 7, 411n49 Derunoy, Savva, 47, 54 Derzhavin, Gavrila, 184, 190, 269, 307 Didrikil’, Evgeniia, 308 Dikoyskii, S., 373 Divil kovskii, A., 152

Dmitriev, N., Dmitrievskii, Dobin, Efim, Dobroliuboy, Dolmatovyskii,

373f M., 1so 388 Nikolai, 13, 16 Evgenii, 210, 249f, 325, 330,

342-47 passim, 384, 396, 424n124 Dorogoichenko, Aleksei, 96, 121, 163 Dorokhoy, P., 67

Fedin, Konstantin, 320, 329, 349f, 367, 370,

401-3 Fedoroy, Boris, 4-9 passim Fedoroy, Vasilii, 342 Fellow-travelers (poputchiki): after 1932 Resolu-

tion, 350, 4orf; and call of shock-workers into literature, 189, 192, 196, 200, 223, 225; literary politics and, 178-83 passim, 377f; literary training and, 307, 318ff Ferrous Metallurgy (Fadeev), 403 Fet, Afanasii, 15 Figner, Vera, 25f, 32-35 Filipchenko, Ivan, 96, 99, 113 Filosofoy, Dmitrii, 73, 76 Fink, Viktor, 366

Doronin, Ivan, 121f, 128, 167, 327

Finn, K., 373

Dostoevsky, Fedor, 28, 310, 354 Dreams and Sounds (Nekrasov), 11

Firsoy, Vasilii, 342

Dremoy, I., 325

Flaubert, Gustave, 311 Fomin, Nikolai, 149 Formalism, xvi, 18, 227, 304, 307

Driving Axle, The (IVenkov), 366

Drozhzhin, Spiridon, 47, 51-59 passim Drunina, luliia, 342, 346f Druzin, Valerii, 310, 384 Dubin, Boris, 405

Dymshits, Aleksandr, ror, 108 Efremin, A.,. 45-49 Egolin, Aleksandr, 349 Eikhenbaum, Boris, 15, 19-23, 31, 42, 153, 226f,

304f Eisenshtein, Sergei, 120

Elpat’evskii, Sergei, 93 Emin, Gevorg, 342 Energy (Gladkov), 366

Engels, Fredrik, 24, 77f Enukidze, Avel, 121 Eremeey, K., 90 Erenburg, Ilia, 366, 374f, 404 Erlikh, A., 373 Ermiloy, Vladimir, 126, 128

Ermolaev, Hermanm 409n6 Ershov, A., 67 Esenin, Sergei, 57, 142, 162f, 167, 175, 3276, 341

475

Flame (Karpov), 72

Forsh, Ol ga, 350 FOSP (Federation of Unions of Soviet Writers), 181, 187, 209, 223, 323, 389

Freidin, Gregory, 377 Fresh Legend (Polonskii), 249 Friche, Vladimir, 73, 111, 121 Furmanoy, Dmitrii, 121, 322 Futurism, 15, 110, 140, 313, 350

Gabrilovich, Evgenii, 373f Galanov, Tseren, 343 Galin, Boris, 128, 366f Galina, G. (Einerling, G. A.), 69

Gamarnik, Ian, 221 Gamzatoy, Rasul, 342 Garin-Mikhailovskii, Nikolai, 93 Garnich, N., 373 Gastev, Aleksei, 97, 99, 112f, 121, 390 Gauthier, Théophile, 327 Gauzner, N., 373 Gekht, S., 373f Gerasimov, Mikhail, 87, 97, 99, off, 122, 350

476

INDEX

Gerasimova, Mariia, 121 Gerasimova, Valeriia, 127f, 390 GIKhL (publishing house), 206, 215-19

passim, 228, 238, 241, 302f, 329-34 passim,

338 Ginzburg, Lidiia, 246, 305f, 375, 399, 403

Gippius, Zinaida, 64, 73, 76 Gladkov, Fedor, 68, 111, 244, 322, 329, 350, 366f, 379» 390

Glavlit. See Censorship Glinka, Fedor, 3 Gmyrey, Aleksei, 44, 97

Heine, Heinrich, 327

Heroic Donbass, The (Gudok-Eremeey), 368 Hertzen, Aleksandr, 23, 341 History ofFactories and Plants (series), 363-75 passim, 385-88 passim History ofthe Construction ofthe White Sea—Baltic Canal, 373ff, 388 History of the Moscow Subway, 373 Home on the Moika (Avramenko), 249

How the Steel Was Forged (Ostrovskii), 235 Hugo, Victor, 329

Hydrocentral (Shaginian), 322, 366

Godenko, Mikhail, 344 Goethe, Johann, 390 Goff, Inna, 344

lagoda, G., 388

Gogol, Nikolai, 199, 239, 280, 305f, 310, 328f,

lakubovich, Petr, 12, 24, 26, 32-37 passim, 42ff, 70 Iaroslavskii, Emelian, 121

334 Golodnyi, Mikhail, 23, 119-25 passim, 154, 161-63, 378, 380

Goncharoy, Ivan, 310, 329 Gorbov, Dmitrii, 178, 354 Gorbunov, Kuz'ma, 337, 367, 373, 383-88 passim

Gorky, A. M., 13, 22; and beginning writers, 350-60; and “brigade creativity”, 364-76; and fellow-travelers, 225; Lenin and, 79f; and literary training, 295, 303f, 311, 314, 321-30 passim, 337, 339, 389; and mass literary movement, 192-98 passim, 202-4, 236,

380; and proletarian literature, 65-70 passim, 77, 85-95 passim, 114; and RAPP, 387, 435n15; and Sivachev, 64, 73f; and So-

cialist Realism 293f, 361-64; Stalin and 226; and Union of Soviet Writers, 386, 390; and Young Guard, 121 Gorky Among Us (Fedin), 349, 350 Gorloy, A., 133

Jakovlev, A., 373

Iasenskii, Bruno, 367, 373, 388

Iashin, Aleksandr, 330, 342 Iasnyi, A., 162 IP'enkoy, Vasilii, 366 Il'in, Iakov, 366 Ilina, Natal’ia, 344 Il'in-Morozoy, FE. 67

IPinskii, FE, 300f

Inber, Vara, 367, 3736, 378, 380 Inspector General, The (Gogol), 239, 306, 334 In the Battles for Metal (Mikhailov), 238 In the Name of the Workers’ Community (Shein), 237

Iretskii, V., 200 Isaev, Egor, 342 Isbakh, Aleksandr, 122, 128 Iskra (journal), 14, 16 lunyi kommunist (journal), 18, 140

Gosizdat (State Publishing House), 218f

lunysheskaia pravda (newspaper), 140f, 156

Gribachey, Nikolai, 42, 391, 398 Griboedov, Aleksandr, 202, 221, 310 Grigor ev, Stepan, 47 Grossman, Leonid, 8, 10

lurgin, N., 373

Grossman-Roshchin, I., 187

Groys, Boris, 317, 351 Guber, Petr, 200 Gudkoy, Lev, 405

Gukovskii, Grigori, 312 Gumilevskii, Aleksei, 121 Giinther, Hans, 4o9n6

lurin, Mikhail, 168, 327f, 396 lushkevich, P., 81

lushkevich, Semen, 93f Ivanov, Viacheslav, 106 Ivanov, Vsevolod, 68, 121, 200f, 349, 365-75 passim Ivanov-Razumnik; 73, 76 Ivan the Terrible (Eisenshtein), 120 Izmailov, A., 73, 76 Lzvestiia (newspaper), 326

Gusev-Orenburgskii, S., 93f Hamlet (Shakespeare), 301 Hate (Skovorodnikoy), 205f

Kaganovich, Lazar’, 210 Kalinin, Fedor, 79 Kalinin, Mikhail, 121, 340

;

INDEX

Kalmanovyskii, Evgenii, 57 Kamanin, Fedor, 341 Kameguloy, Anatolii, 326 Kameney, Ley, 121 Kantorovich, V., 366

Kaputikian, Sil’va, 342 Karavaeva, Anna, 288, 321, 334, 367, 378, 390 Karpoy, Mikhail, 366 Karpov, Pimen, 72-76 passim Karpoy, Vasilii (Miasnikov), 66f

Kasatkin, Ivan, 67f, 94, 350 Kataey, Ivan, 366

Kataev, Valentin, 36s5ff, 373 Kautsky, Karl, 14 Kaverin, Veniamin, 121, 186, 378f Kazakoy, Iurii, 342 Kazin, Vasilii, 97, 106, tof, 121, 167 Keldysh, V. A., 84, 87, 95 Kerzhentsev, Platon, 121 Ketlinskaia, Vera, 330 Kharms, Daniil, 257

Khatsrevin, Z., 373 Khelemskii, Iakov, 325 Khodasevich, Vladislav, 1osf, 327 Khorikov, Nikolai, 204 Khudozhestvennaia literatura (journal), 218 Khvastunoy, Egor, 156

Kin, Viktor, 128 Kir iakov, 388 Kirillov, Vladimir, 87, 93-99 passim, 107, 111, 121ff, 296, 350 Kirshon, Vladimir, 388 Kleinbort, Lev, 63-68, 73f, 92, 106 Kliuev, Nikolai, 57, 154

Klychkovy, Sergei, 57, 121, 379f Knigonosha (journal), 182 Kochetoy, Vsevolod, 288, 391, 401 Kochubei (Poshekhonov), 205 Kogan, Petr, 78, 87, 94, 10, 113, Istf

Kollontai, Aleksandra, 121 Kolobovs (Saianoy), 249

477

Koptiaeva, Antonina, 342

Korabel’nikov, G., 373, 388 Koshkarev, Sergei, 59, 97 Kots, Arkadii, 81f Koval’chik, Evgeniia, 126 Kovalenko, A., 388

Kovalevskii, V., 373 Kovyney, Boris, 159 Kozakoy, Mikhail, 366

Kozheynikoy, Vadim, 330 Kozyrev, Matvei, 47 Krainii, Anton, 73, 76 Kraiskii, Aleksei, 97, 300-304, 324 Krasil’nikoy, V., 203 Krasnaia gazeta (newspaper), 9, 324. Krasnaia nov (journal), 98, 120f, 126, 177, 329 Krasnotreugol/nikovtsy (almanac), 205

Krasnyi treugol nik (journal), 205 Krestianskaia gazeta (newspaper), 195f, 329 Krestovskii, Vsevolod, 15 Krupskaia, Nadezhda, 121 Krymoy, lurii, 330, 366

Krzhizhanovskii, G., 121 Kublanoyskii, Iurii, 106

Kudreiko, A., 379 Kugul'tinov, David, 342 Kuleshov, Arkadii, 396 Kulibin, Ivan, 3

Kuliev, Kaisyn, 342 Kuprin, Aleksandr, 93f

Kurochkin, Vasilii, 12, 16, 42, 43 Kushner, Aleksandr, 399, 400

Kuznetsov, Nikolai, 154, 156, 162 Lafargue, Paul, 114, 313 Lapin, Boris, 373 LAPP (Leningrad Association of Proletarian Writers), 190, 212, 326 Lava (journal), 201 Lavrenev, Boris, 329 Lavrov, Petr, 23-30 passim

Kol’tsov, Aleksei, 8, 49, 327

Lavrukhin, D., 198 Learning from the Classics, 259-72, 282, 296,

Komar, Vitalii, rf, 8 Kombain (journal), 334 Kommunistka (journal), 241

Lebedenko, A., 373 LEF (The Left Front of Arts): and learning

Kolosovy, Mark, 121, 126ff, 154, 171

305-12, 329, 352, 354

Komsomol literature, 10, 22, 118-79 passim,

from classics, 306-12 passim; literary train-

220, 329. See also Young Guard Komsomoltia (journal), 125, 157 Komsomol skaia pravda (newspaper), 127, 217, 242, 302 Kondurushkin, S., 94

ing and, 296ff, 320, 352ff; and mass literary movement, 192, 198-200 passim, 209, 211, 328, 357; and RAPP, 176, 181, 223; and Socialist Realism, xviii, 115, 323, 351, 3923 Young Guard and, 119-22 passim, 154

478

INDEX

Lelevich, Grigorii, 14f, 41f, 18, 126, 131f, 169, 171, 185, 197

Lemke, Mikhail, 16 Lenin, V. I., xvili, 14, 23, 118, 176, 183, 299; and fucurism, 313; and Gorky, 80, 94, 339, 352, 367; in poetry, 269, 291, on proletarian

culture, 79f, 90, 111, 114, 180

Leningradskaia pravda (newspaper), 169 Lenobl’ Genrikh, 308 Leonov, Leonid, 321, 350, 366f, 377-80 passim,

401 Leonov, Maksim, 47, 52, 55, 59, 99

Lubok, 1-17 passim, 45-49 passim, 60 Lugovskoi, Vladimir, 242, 349 Lukonin, Mikhail, 342, 347 Lunacharskii, Anatolii: on creative process,

102f; and Lenin, 313; and literary politics, 225, and Proletkult, 79f, 108, 114, 297; and Young Guard, 116-21 passim, 136f, 146ff, 167, I7I, 175

Lupan, Andrei, 342 Luxemburg, Rosa, 114, 313 Luzgin, Mikhail, 373, 388 Lvov-Rogachevskii, Vasilii, 8, 45

Lermontov, Mikhail, 15, 83, 155, 262f, 305 Les fleurs du mal(Baudelaire), 43

Levin, Fedor, 149 Liashko, Nikolai, 68, 110 Libedinskii, Iurii: after 1932 Resolution, 367, 375; and literary training, 309, 314, 326, 329; and RAPP, 197, 207, 213, 274; and Young

Guard, 18, 121, 138, 154, 168 Lidin, Vladimir, 129, 340, 378, 380 Liebknecht, Karl, 313 Literary brigades, 365-76 Literary consultancies, 218f, 228-41, 324f, 331-40, 386, 400

Literary environment, xvi, xix, 17, 153, 159f, 182 Literary Institute, 10, 210, 242, 250, 305, 325,

338-48, 358, 403

Maikov, Appolon, 15, 42 Makarenko, Anton, 149 Makar ev, Ivan, 190f, 214, 216, 359, 388

Maksimova, Valentina, 326 Maladniak (Belorussian literary group), 177 Malakhoy, Sergei, 154 Malenkov, Georgii, 349

Mally, Lynn, 1o8f Mal'tsev, Elizar, 342, 347

Malyshkin, Aleksandr, 97f, 366 Mandel'shtam, Osip, xiii, 27, 102-5, 113, 142,

241, 245, 400, 402 MAPP (Moscow Association of Proletarian Writers), 118, 127, 151, 197, 224, 242, 338

Margolis, S., 325

Literary Training, 82, 93, 239, 279, 295-348 Literatura i iazyk v politekhnicheskoi shkole (journal), 222

Markin, Evgenii, xix

Literature and Revolution (Trotsky), 188 Literature of fact, 198

Marvich, Solomon, 367 Marx, Karl, 24f, 306, 313

Literaturnaia gazeta (newspaper), 9, 217, 223,

Marxism, 73, 78, 90, 114, 168, 310, 313

240, 338f Literaturnaia ucheba (journal): after 1932 Resolution, 339, 358f, 387-89, 403; and call of shock-workers into literature, 9, 202, 204,

Mass Literary Movement, xx, 16, 180-242, 339,

217, 221, 311, as literary consultancy: 239f, 322-34 passim

Literaturnyi ezhenedel nik (journal), 148, 150 Literaturnyi kritik (journal), 149, 341, 388 Literaturnyi tsekh (journal), 215

Litfront (literary group), 127, 209, 223 Liubov’ Iarovaia (Trenev), 285 Liutov, A. V., 47

LOKAF (Literary Union of the Red Army and Fleet), 220f Lomidze, Georgii, 342 Lopatin, German, 23-30 passim Lotman, lurii, 243-47 passim

Lower Depths, The (Gorky), 363

Markov, Aleksander, xix, xxi

Markov, Georgii, xix, xxi, 403

356, 357, 381-83, 386 Master and Margarita (Bulgakov), 340, 347f Matusovskii, Mikhail, 342, 347, 384

Maykovsky, Vladimir: and literary training, 243, 265, 267, 296, 303, 322, 327f, 341; proletarian poetry and, 87, 180; and RAPP, 187, 223; and Socialist Realism, 350, 387, 405; and Young Guard, rarff, 140, 142, 146, 152, 154, 164, 167

/

Maznin, Dmitrii, 388

Melamid, Aleksandr, rf, 8 Men'shutin, A., 109 Merezhkovskii, Dmitrii, 43f, 64, 74 Merimée, Prosper, 311 Mering, Franz, 114

Meromskii, S., 281 Metchenko, Aleksei, 409n6

INDEX

Mgberov, Aleksandr, 107 Mikhailoy, A., 311 Mikhailov, Mikhail, 12 Mikhailov, N., 238 Mikhailovskii, Nikolai, 16, 45f Mikhalkovy, Sergei, 250, 330, 342, 384 Minaev, Dmitrii, 12

Minskii, Nikolai, 43f Mirskii, D., 373 Mitrofanoy, A., 379 Molchanoy, Aleksandr, 360 Molchanoy, Kirill, 127 Molodaia gvardiia (journal), 120-26, 137, 154,

Nizovoi, Pavel, 68, 121, 350 Notes ofaLiterary Secretary (Shentsov), 241, 269

Novaia Moskva (publishing house), 229

Novikoy-Priboi, Aleksei, 68, 110 Novyi mir (journal), 67, 98, 156, 329

Obradovich, Sergei, 98, 106, 110f, 121, 350 October (literary group), 96, 113, 118, 15, 177,

200, 299 Odinokii, M., 67 OGIZ (Association of State Publishing Houses), 218

217 Molodniak (Ukrainian literary group), 177

Ognev, Nikolai, 390, 397

Molodost (almanac), 160 Molot (journal), 201 Morozoy, I., 59

Ogonek (magazine), 9, 103, 329 Ogurtsov, Serafim, 154f Oktiabr’ (journal), 98, 157, 211, 217, 219, 327,

Morozoy, Nikolai, 25-30 passim, 42 Moskovskii komsomolets (newspaper), 400

Moskovyskii rabochii (publishing house), 332

Mother (Gorky), 7o0f, 293f Munblit, Georgii, 132, 172

Munshtein, L., 249 Musienko, Ivan, 157f

Nadson, Semen, 43 Nadtochii, Eduard, 409n8 Na literaturnom postu (journal), 186f, 202, 209-14 passim, 227, 320, 341, 367; 378, 380 Na pod”eme (journal), 201

479

Ognev, Vladimir, 342

329 Olender, 169 Ol'minskii, Mikhail, 121, 313 Onegin of Our Times (Munshtein), 249 Onguardists. See MAPP; Na postu; RAPP; VAPP

Onipko, Petr, 195

OPOlaZ (Society for the Study of Poetic Language), 21, 148 Oreshin, Petr, 57, 121, 379f Orlov, Sergei, 342 Orovetskii, P.,, 321, 379f Oshanin, Ley, 241f, 330, 342

Napostu (journal), 15, 183, 185, 196f Narodnyi uchitel’ (journal), 222 Naroychatoy, Sergei, 342, 347 Na rubezhe (journal), 235

Ostrovoi, Sergei, 330, 336

Nasha zaria (journal), 80

Orzhigoy, 73, 76

Ostrovskii, Aleksandr, 49, 310 Ostrovskii, Nikolai, xviii, 235, 401f Otechestvennye zapiski (journal), 3, 6, 23, 47

Nashi dostizheniia (journal), 363 Nastuplenie (journal), 201 Natisk (journal), 201 Nazarov, Egor, 476 59 Nechaey, Egor, 42-47 passim, 60

Nedogonoy, Aleksei, 210, 342, 424n124 Nefedov, Fedor, 300

Nekrasov, Nikolai, 1-26 passim, 38-44 passim,

Panchenko, Pimen, 384 Panteroy, Fedor, 120, 390 Panoy, N., 249

Papernyi, Vladimir, 311 Parkhomenko (\vanov), 370 Party-mindedness (partiinost’): Komsomol

poetry and, 134-46 passim, 154, 164f, 177ff RAPP and, 179, 187, 377; raznochinets

49f, 58, 71, 82, 142, 157, 264 Neverov, Aleksandr, 68, 390

poetry and, 18; populist poetry and, 42ff;

New Great Initiative, The (Zinov ev), 192 New Pastimes ofFedor Slepushkin (Slepushkin), 3

proletarian poetry and, 84, 88, 92, rorf, 108, 114f

Nikiforov, Georgii, 321, 379 Nikitin, Ivan, 8, 49 Nikitin, Nikolai, 200, 319 Nikulin, Lev, 373f

Pasternak, Boris, xiii, 121, 142, 387, 390

Pastimes ofa Country-Dweller (Slepushkin), 6 Paustovskii, Konstantin, 322, 366f Pavlenko, Petr, 322, 367, 370, 3776, 390, 401

480

INDEX

Pavlov, A., 67 Peasant (Molchanov), 360

Peasant culture, 51f, §7, 62 Pechat’ iRevoliutsiia (journal), 152, 166

People from the “Sticks” (Malyshkin), 366 People ofthe Stalingrad Tractor Factory, 372

184, 188; and RAPP, 127, 143, 222ff and Soviet literature, 349, 370 Pravdukhin, Valerian, 121 Priboi (publishing house), 206 Prishvin, Mikhail, 93, 350, 390 Procrustes’ Bed (Sivachev), 72, 74

People’s Will, 22-28. passim, 37f, 41f Pereval (literary group): and Gorky, 350; and

Profizdat (publishing house), 237, 321ff, 329ff,

LEE, 307, 328; and literary politics, 96, 131; and RAPP, 119, 169, 171, 177f, 203, 209, 211, 223; and Socialist Realism, 392, 401; and Young Guard, 121, 125, 159, 166, 172 Pereverzev, Valerian, 209

Proletarian literature: emergence of, 10, and proletarian literary movement, 61-115

Pertsov, Viktor, 289, 300, 307f, 319, 321, 327,

367, 373, 378 Perventsev, Arkadii, 330, 376, 398 Pervye shagi (journal), 201

Pestriak, Vladimir, 156 Petéfi, Sandor, 390 Petroyskii, Grigorii, 94

Piatakov, Georgii, 121 Piksanoy, Nikolai, 402 Pilniak, Boris, 200, 319ff Pimenoy, Vladimir, 343 Pisarey, Dmitrii, 13, 18

Platonov, Andrei, xili, 99ff, 219, 231, 280, 349,

392-95 Plekhanov, Georgii, 114, 313 Pletnev, Petr, 6 Pletney, Valerian, 121 Pod’em (journal), 201 Pod iachev, Semen, 68, 350

Pogodin, Nikolai, 390 Pogorelov, D., 67 Poletaev, Nikolai, 162, 164 Polevoi, Boris, 330 Polonskii, Iakov, 15, 249 Polonskii, Viacheslay, 111, 124, 377 Pomerantsev, Vladimir, 401 Pomialoyskii, Nikolai, 13 Pomialouskyism, 69, 94 Pomorskii, Aleksandr, 98

Popoy-Dubovskoi, V., 183, 188 Popular Spirit (narodnost’), 179 Populist poetry, 1, 19-44, 88

386

passim, 181-200 passim, 224ff, raznochinets

literature and, 12-18 passim, 23, 27, and Surikovians, 45, Young Guard and, 119, 123, 126f, 133, 139, 150f, 161, 173. See also Proletkult; RAPP Proletarskaia literatura (journal), 217 Proletarskaia pravda (newspaper), 195 Proletkult, 63, 295, 320, 392; Lenin and, 79f;

and literary training, 296f, 327, 357; and mass literary movement, 192, 290; and proletarian poetry, 89, 96ff and RAPP, 148,

178-87 passim; studios of, xx, 102-11 passim; and Young Guard, 119-21, 137, 172, 174 Pushkin, Aleksandr, xi, xviii, 6, 60, 173, 280;

learning from the classics and, 152, 167f, 259-62, 272, 305, 309f, 329; Nekrasov and, 15; peasant writers and, 48f, 57; proletarian writers and, 107, 196 Putilov Worker in Three Revolutions, 373

Rabochaia Moskva (newspaper), 182, 241 Raboche-krest'ianskii korrespondent (journal), 195 Rabochii chitatel’ (magazine), 308 Rabotnitsa (journal), 241

Radek, K., 121 Radlova, Anna, 200 Rakhillo, Ivan, 127, 154f RAPM (Russian Association of Proletarian Music), 179 RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian

Writers): after 1932 Resolution, 367f, 381-89

passim; and call of shock-workers into literature, 178-231 passim, 236f, 288; Gorky and, 350-58 passim, 364; and learning from the classics, 50, 271; and literary politics, 23,

Populists, xx, 17-23 passim, 39, 62, 113

57> 96, 109, 365, 377; and literary training,

Porshakoy, Pavel, 67 Poshekhonoy, V., 205f Potresov, Aleksandr, 80f Pravda (newspaper), and mass literary movement, 221, 242, 303, 371; and proletarian

296-314 passim, 320-24 passim, 330ff, 337-41 passim; and mass literary movement, 113,

poetry, 14, 22, 77, 86-101 passim, 109, U1,

115, 246, 274; on Nekrasoy, 14f; and Young Guard, 118f, 125-28, 132-40 passim, 148-54 passim, 167f, 172-78 Raskolnikov, Fedor, 197

INDEX

Raznochinets, xx, 1-27 passim, 40-43 passim, 49, 62, 82

;

481

Sartakov, Sergei, 342

Razorenoy, Aleksei, 47-50 passim, s4f

Savikhin, V., 65 Savin,M., 59

Razryv-trava (Morozov), 92

Searching for Galatea (Gorbov), 354

Red Sormovo (Iakovlev), 373

Second Day, The (Erenburg), 366 Seifullina, Lidiia, 121, 322, 367, 375-78 passim,

Reisner, M. A., 153 Rekemchuk, Aleksandr, 342 Reshetnikoy, Fedor, 13 Rezchikoy, Vladimir, 210f, 219 Rezets (journal), 202, 218, 235, 309, 322-25 passim, 384

Ringoy, Boris, 154 Robin, Régine, xv Rodionoy, Ivan, 47, 50 Rodnoi tazyk v shkole (journal), 393 Rodoy, Semen, 118, 126, 197 Rogozhin, N., 67 Rolland, Romain, 328 Romanoy, Panteleimon, 121, 378

390

Sel’vinskii, IPia, r21, 248f, 349, 373, 378f, 401 Semenoy, Sergei, 65

Serafimovich, Aleksandr, 93f, 197, 322, 341, 367 Serapion Brothers (literary group), 148, 211, 350, 361

Serebrianskii, Mark, 224 Sergeev-Tsenskii, Sergei, 350

Sevak, Paruir, 342 Seventh Battery, The (Mikhailov), 238 Severnoe utro (almanac), 200

Shafir, Iakov, 182 Shaginian, Marietta, 187, 316, 322, 366f, 401

ROPKP (Russian Organization of Proletarian-

Shakespeare, William, 390

Kolkhoz Writers), 57, 97, 220-23 passim Rost (journal), 202, 321-25 passim, 329f, 381,

Sharov, E., 67 Shcherbina, Nikolai, 15, 42 Shein, A., 237 Shengeli, Georgii, 195, 300-304 passim Shentsov, V. A., 241, 269

388, 395 Rout, The (Fadeev), 237, 244

Rozanoy, Ivan, 7-10 passim Rozhdestvenskii, Robert, 342 Rozhdestvenskii, Vsevolod, 200 Rozov, Viktor, 342 Rubanovskii, IPia, 160

Rubtsov, Nikolai, 342 Ruchrey, Boris, 342 Rudakoy, Ivan, 10 Russkoe bogatstvo (journal), 24, 76

Russkoe slovo (journal), 14 Rybnikova, Mariia, 330f Rykachey, I:, 373 Rylenkovy, Nikolai, 330

Sheshukoy, Stepan, 211, 224 Shestakova, Iuliia, 235 Shestaloy, Iuvan, 342 Sheveleva, Ekaterina, 210, 325, 424n124 Shiriaevets, Aleksandr, 57, 67 Shishkoy, Aleksandr, 5-9 passim, 42 Shishkovy, Viacheslav, 200, 319, 350 Shkapskaia, Mariia, 367 Shklovskii, Viktor: 31, 116, 164, 173, 180, 364, 373, 376; on Gorky, 351f; on literary environment, 153; and literary training, 295-304

passim, 311f; on mass literary movement, 199

Shkulev, E, 42-47 passim, 60, 66f Sadof’ey, Ilia, 83, 93, 98 Safonov, S., 67 Saianov, Vissarion, 113, 128, 249, 326

Sakulin, Pavel, 106 Saloy, A., 379 Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail, 320 Salynskii, Afanasii, 342 Samobytnik (Mashirov, Aleksei), 93-98 passim, 114f, 121, 250

Sangarskii, Dmitrii, 285 Sangi, Vladimir, 342 Sannikoy, Grigorii, 98, 106, 11 Sanzhar’, Nadezhda, 72-76 Sargidzhan, Amir, 366

Shmeley, Ivan, 93 Sholokhoy, Mikhail, 125, 199, 233, 392, 404

Shostakovich, Dmitrii, 120 Shot, The (Bezymenskii), 334 Shtorm, A., 370 ~ Shturm (journal), 201 Shundik, Nikolai, 342

Shurtakoy, Semen, 344 Shushkanoy, N., 367, 388 Shuvaloy, Ivan, 99 Shvarts, N., 106 Shvedoy, Iakov, 252 Shvetsoy, Sergei, 384 Sibiriakov, Ivan, 3, 22

482

INDEX

Sidorov, Vasilii, 210f Simonoy, Konstantin, 278f, 330, 342, 347, 384,

402 Sinegub, 73 Sinegub, Sergei, 24-29 passim, 33-42 passim Siniavskii, Andrei, 109, 293 Sipovskii, Vasilii, 8

Sivachey, Mikhail, 61, 72-76 passim Sivachevism, 72, 107 Skambrychii, Aleksandr, 309 Skitalets (Petrov, S. G.), 69f, 93 Skovorodnikoy, N., 205f Slavin, Lev, 365, 373 Slepushkin, Fedor, 3-10 passim, 39-45 passim,

sof, 57, 62 Sletov, Petr, 312, 377£ Slonim, Mark, 409n6 Slonimskii, Mikhail, 322, 401, 403 Smeliakov, Iaroslay, 211, 366 Smena (journal), 216f, 329 Smena (literary group), 223

Smena (newspaper), 169 Smirnov, Sergei, 330, 342

Smithy (literary group): mass literary movement and, 192, 196, 341; proletarian literature and, 22, 39, 44, 89, 96ff, mmf, 183f, 350; Proletkult and, 102, 108; and RAPP, 176-81 passim, 187, 209, 298f; and Young Guard, 119-23, 137ff, 152, 162 Sobol’, Andrei, 319 Socialist Realism: canon of, xiii-xvii passim, 79, 120, 147, 316f, 373, 377; Gorky and, 293f, 350f, 359, 363f; mass culture and, xxf, 60, 179, 241-45 passim, 250, 279, 281, 295, 318,

Sovietology, xvil, 361, 279, 409n6 Spengler, Oskar, 200 SSSR na stroike (journal), 363 Stalin, Joseph, 16, 121, 183, 192, 332, 349; and Gorky, 363, 367, 389; and literary politics,

224ff, 377, 390, 395; and workers’ correspondents, 194 Starshinov, Nikolai, 342 Stavskii, Vladimir, 337, 383-87 passim Steklov, Iurii, 121 Stendhal, 311, 329 Stepnoi, N., 67 Stoliarov, M., 106

Strotka (journal), 218 Successes and Failures ofMaxim Gorky (Shklovskii), 352 Sukhanov, Mikhail, 3f, 8 Surikov, Ivan, 21f, 45-56 passim Surikovians, 21, 44-62, 66, 87, 97, 99, 113 Surkov, Aleksei, 9f, 27, 101, 190, 278, 337, 365, 391

Sutyrin, V., 209 Sveshnikov, Nikolai, 61 Svetlov, Mikhail, 119, 121, 125-31 passim, 154, 156, 162, 327 Svetozarov, Viktor, 127, 156 Sviatenko, F., 379

Svin’in, Pavel, 3-6 passim Svirskii, Aleksei, 341 Svistok (journal), 14

Symbolism, 43f, 69, 90f, 94, 106

Tale ofthe Priest and His Servant Balda (Pushkin), 221

429n1; and modernism, xv, 390ff, 406; pro-

Tan (Bogoraz, V. G.), 69

letarian poetry and, 87, 89, 114; raznochinets poetry and, 18; and “return to tradition’, 27,

Tarasevich, S., 238f, 287

117, 323; and SotsArt, 2

Social Mandate, Theory of, 21, 227 Sofronoy, Anatolii, 42, 199, 245, 376, 387, 391, 398 Sokolov, Vladimir, 342 Sokolov-Mikitoy, I., 366 Soloukhin, Vladimir, 342 Soloy ev, Aleksei, 99 Solov’ev, Leonid, 330 Sorokin, V., 69 Sosnora, Viktor, 399 Sot’ (Leonoy), 366 SotsArt, 1f, 248

Sovetskaia literatura (publishing house), 329 Sovetskii pisatel’ (publishing house), 373

Tanker “Derbent,” The (Krymov), 366

Tarasov, Evgenii, 69f, 93 Tarasov-Rodionovy, Aleksandr, 121, 321, 378 Tarusin, Ivan, 47 Teatr i dramaturgiia (journal), 388

Temnyi, N., 65 Tendriakov, Vladimir, 342 Tikhonov, Nikolai, 121, 167, 200f, 322, 329 Tikhoplesets, M. (Loginov), 66f Timber-Mill (Karavaeva), 288 Time, Forward! (Kataev), 366 Time Plus Time (Kozakov), 366

Timofeey, Leonid, 226, 300 Tolstoi, Aleksei, xv, 318, 350, 367-73 passim, 401 Tolstoy, Leo, 49, 157, 212, 245, 304, 376; learn-

ing from the classics and, 152, 306-11 passim,

INDEX

322; peasant writers and, 65, 291; Sanzhar and, 73ff; theory of “infection” and, 147

Tomashevskii, Boris, 302ff, 332 Toshchenko, E., 338 Transubstantiation ofExperience (Ginzburg), 399

Travin, P. A., 47f, 66f Trefoley, Leonid, 12 Trenev, Konstantin, 285, 350, 390 Trev iakov, E., 67 ‘Tretiakovy, Sergei, 117, 121ff, 199 Trifonoy, Iurii, 342, 344 Trotsky, Ley, 81, 121ff, 129, 183f, 188, 269, 296f,

307 Trudy obshchestva liubitelei russkoi slovesnosti (journal), 3 True Tales ofMount Vysokaia, 371, 373 Tsvetaeva, Marina, xiii Tur, 169, 170 Turovskaia, Maia, 392

483

Writers), 118, 126, 132, 160, 186, 187, 196,

199, 209, 210, 220, 307 Vardin, Ilarion, 185f Varshavskii, Sergei, 224 Vasil’ev, Pavel, 326 Vasil’ev, Sergei, 330,-342, 384 Vataga (journal), 201 Vecherniaia Moskva (newspaper), 218, 224f Venevitinoy, Dmitrii, 327

Vengerov, Semen, 6ff Verdure (Kibal’chich), 288

Veresaey, Vikentii, 93 Verlaine, Paul, 327 Veselyi, Artem, 119, 125, 128, 154

Vestnik “Narodnoi voli”

(journal), 24

Viazemskii, Petr, 3

Vikuloy, Sergei, 342 Vilenskii, I., 397 Vinokurovy, Evgenii, 342 Vishnevskii, Vsevolod, 329, 391

Vladimir lich Lenin (Mayakovsky), 265

Tvardovskii, Aleksandr, 330 Tverdoy, A., 282 Tverskoi, V., 300-304 passim

VOAPP. See VAPP

Tynianoy, Iurii, 15, 19, 60, 246

Voinoy, I., 82, 83

Vladimir Volgin (Panov), 249

VOKP (All-Union Society of Peasant Writers),

Udarnik literatury (newspaper), 218

208, 223

Udarnik slova (journal), 201

Volin, Boris, 250

Ulzutuev, Dondok, 343 Uncle Stepa (Mikhalkov), 342 Union ofSoviet Writers, xiv, 9, 181, 380, 389, 391, 402, 404; and beginning writers, 338, 342fF, 381ff, 397ff Gorky and, 326f, 350f, 355-58 passim, 364, 372-75 passim; and literary training, 304f, 311, 321, 337; and mass literary movement, 240; and “organizational utopia’, 403, 440n196; RAPP and, r91f, 216,

Volkhovskoi, Feliks, 24-31 passim, 40 Volkov, Mikhail, 106, 110f Vol’noy, Ivan, 68, 121, 350, 390

225, 377 Untimely Thoughts (Gorky), 350, 361

Volunteers (Dolmatovskii), 249 Volzhskaia nov (journal), 201

VOPKP. See ROPKP Vorob’ey, P., 286 Voron’ ko, Platon, 342 Voronoy, I., 93

Voronskii, Aleksandr, 119-26 passim, 134, 176, 184, 228, 421n8

Usenko, Pavlo, 177

Vorovskii, Vatslav, 313

Uspenskii, Gleb, 311 Uspenskii, Nikolai, 13 Ustinov, G., 67

Vpered (journal), 24 VSKP (All-Russian Union of Peasant Writers),

Utkin, Iosif, 23, 121, 163-67 passim, 327

VTSsSPS (All-Union Central Trade-Union Council), 212, 218 VUSPP (The All-Ukrainian Union of Proletarian Writers), 177

Uzvyshsha (Belorussian literary group), 177 Uzvyshsha (journal), 177

57> 97> 181

Vagramoy, F., 379 Vagranka (literary group), 223

Vandervelde, Emile, 114 Vanshenskin, Konstantin, 342

Vaplite (Ukrainian literary group), 177 VAPP (All-Union Association of Proletarian

War and Peace (Tolstoy), 360, 376, 402 We Will Catch Up (Tarasevich), 238, 287 White Birch (Bubennovy), 342 Workers’ Spring (literary group), 96, r12f, 118, 122, ISI, 181, 200, 241

484

INDEX

Young Guard (Fadeev), 120

Young Guard (literary group), 96, 113-79 passim, 185, 200, 299. See also Komsomol literature Za kadry (newspaper), 212, 218 Zakal (literary group), 223

Zalka, Mate, 378 Zamiatin, Evgenii, 223, 318-23 passim, 341 Zamiatin, Vladimir, 210f Zamoshkin, N., 378 Za rubezhom (journal), 363 Zavrazhnyi, G. (Popoy), 66f Zelenyi zaslon (Zamiatin), 210f

Zelinskii, Kornelii, 373, 378, 380 Zemlia sovetskaia (journal), 334 Zetkin, Klara, 114, 121, 313 Zhambievy, Tsyden-Zhap, 343 Zharov, Aleksandr: on creative process, 140~45; and Komsomol poetry, 10, 23, 42, 146-55 passim, 247; and literary training, 322-27 passim, 336; and Young Guard, 118-33 passim, 137, 161-67 passim; and zharovism, 169fF

Zharoy, Dmitrii, 47 Zhdanov, Andrei, 364 Zhiga, Ivan, 196, 366, 395 Zhits, Fedor, 175

Zhizn’ iskusstva (journal), 171 Zhukovskii, Vasilii, 3, 308 Zhuley, Gavriil, 12f Zhurbins (Kochetov), 288

Ziablov, Apelles. See “A. Ziablov” Zinov ev, Grigorii, 121, 192f Znamia (journal), 329 Znanie, 93£ ZOAPP (Association of Proletarian Writers of Western Provinces), 214

Zola, Emile, 329 Zonin, Aleksandr, 118, 154, 308 Zorskii, Anatolii, 195 Zoshchenko, Mikhail, 319, 349, 361, 373 Zozulia, Efim, 378, 380

Zvezda (journal), 304f Zvezda (newspaper), 14, 22, 84, 89, 94, 184, 242 Zvezda Severa (journal), 201

“

(continued from front flap)

Previous scholarship has concentrated largely on Sovietological answers to such basic problems of Stalinist aesthetics as “political control,” “repressions,” and “pressure from the regime.” However, the author demonstrates that Socialist Realism is not so much directed as it is self-directed; it is not a matter of control but of selfcontrol. The transformation of the author into his own censor is the true history of Soviet literature. Socialist Realism is cultural revolution

not only from above but from below as well. The state simply took into account,

and accurately discerned, the demands of the masses, and Soviet literature became the reader’s answer to these demands. The reader not only shaped Socialist Realist aesthetics down to his own expectations, but in fact created it. The Soviet writer was yesterday's Soviet reader who had learned how to write books. The Soviet writer can be called the

product of authority to the extent that this authority recognized and institutionalized what Lenin called the “lively creativity of the masses.” The author also shows that the Soviet writer is the radical realization and embodiment of the nineteenth-century Russian populist utopia of enlightenment of the people.

Evgeny Dobrenko is Reader in Slavonic Studies at the University ofNottingham.

Jacket illustration: V. Konashevich,

The Tenth

Anniversary of the October Revolution, 1927.

Jacket design: James P. Brommer

The Making of the State Reader SOCIAL

AND

RECEPTION

AESTHETIC OF

SOVIET

CONTEXTS

OF

THE

LITERATURE

1997

“Dobrenko’s account provides fascinating reading. . . . He does not insist that his analysis provides the sole legitimate approach to the stickler of socialist realism, only that it is an essential and hitherto

neglected ingredient in any overall investigation. In the ongoing reappraisal of twentieth-century

Russian literature, such detailed presentations of previously understudied data from Soviet

cultural life will prove invaluable.” — Slavic Review

ISBN 0-8047-3364-3

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