The Novel of a Novel: Abridged Diary Entries from Moscow, 1935–1937 1498546366, 9781498546362

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The Novel of a Novel

The Novel of a Novel Abridged Diary Entries from Moscow, 1935–1937 Ervin Sinkó Edited and translated by George Deák

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB English translation, translator’s introduction, and editor’s endnotes copyright © 2018 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. Translated from the Hungarian language edition of The Novel of a Novel, by Ervin Sinkó. Translated into and published in the English language by arrangement with the Croatian Authors’ Agency (HAA) as the representative of the copyright owner Croatian Academy of Science and Art. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including phodocopying, reprinting, or on any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Croatian Authors’ Agency (HAA). All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-4985-4636-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4985-4637-9 (electronic) TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

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Translator’s Introduction: Ervin Sinkó and the Dilemmas of an Optimist

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Note on Conventions

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I: Part I 1 By Way of Introduction 2 As If by Miracle 3 Károlyi Goes into Action, and Two Letters from Switzerland in Quick Succession 4 Comrade Arosev and the Strange Parisian Career of Optimists 5 The Journal Europe and Further Friendly Letters from Villeneuve 6 The Dream Come True: On the Way to Moscow 7 Idyllic Intermezzo: From Rouen to Leningrad 8 On the Way to Moscow, the Same Night on the Train II: Part II 9 Preliminary Explanation 10 Growing Amazements, Growing Concerns 11 Béla Kun 12 The Adventures of Optimists and its Author are Just Beginning 13 The Happy Life and Gratitude 14 Gorky, Rolland, and a Word about Barbusse

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1 3 11 17 25 33 37 41 55 57 59 65 81 101 121 133

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III: Part III 15 Nighttime Thoughts, or Letter to My Yet Unborn Friend 16 While the Censors Write 17 My Incurable Individualism and an Unforgettable Lesson 18 In Black and White 19 “One Must Get Used to Life” 20 In a Foreign Land . . .

139 141 153 161 169 177 185

IV: Part IV 21 Commentary on Three Months, which are Only Summarized by the Journal 22 “Degenerate Art” 23 Comrade Bukharin Must Correct His Views 24 Andor Gábor, the New Censor of Optimists 25 André Malraux and the Marxist Encyclopedia 26 I Am Beginning to “Understand” Babel 27 The Optimists Makes Propaganda for Zinoviev 28 The Screenplay for Mosfilm 29 A Human Trait Has Been Lost

201 203 211 221 227 229 241 245 249 255

V: Part V 30 The Last But Most Eventful Part, Ending in Paris 31 Brief, Happy Excitement but “The Times Are Unfavorable” 32 The Soviet Union, Seen from the Perspective of Madame Lupescu’s Kingdom 33 “These Mad Dogs Must Be Shot” 34 Proof of the Author’s Blindness 35 Funeral 36 The Friendly Visits of Comrade Lopuhina 37 My Witness, I. E. Babel 38 “Now Nothing Can Be Known For Sure” 39 Two Years Later 40 On the Meeting of Romain Rolland with Stalin

259 261 263 267 271 277 281 285 287 297 299 305

Epilogue

311

Postscript

327

Table of Contents

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Another Postscript

329

Index

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About the Editor and Translator

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Acknowledgments

My interest in Ervin Sinkó was awakened in graduate school while studying Hungarian history under the mentorship of István Deák at Columbia University in the 1970s. Having been a part of an optimistic generation myself in the 1960s I wanted to learn more about those optimists who first brought communism to Hungary, to understand why their project failed, and how they related to and participated in its failure. But it was only after a number of other projects, both in and out of academia, that I was able to return to reading Sinkó and further considering these questions, now in the context of the general failure of communism. I would not have been able to accomplish either this translation or the study that went into writing its infrastructure without the help of my family and friends. I wish, first of all, to thank my wife, Vera Lampert Deák, who took time out from her own work on Bartók scholarship, to elucidate shades of meaning in the original text, to provide advice on interpretations, both linguistic and conceptual, and to proofread the entire text, some parts more than once. My historian colleagues, especially Peter Pastor, who has done much to reintegrate me back into academia, István Deák, whom I am happy to be still able to call upon for critical reading, advice, and friendship, and György Péteri of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The Hungarian scholars Zsuzsanna Agóra, Árpád Hornyák, Jolán Mann, Pál Pritz, Virág Rab, and György Tverdota have also helped by providing various perspectives and friendship. Stewart Alter, who welcomed me to this country in the 1950s, helped me not only with his encouragement on this project but in editing some parts, and most of all, in making my translation of the poem Epilogue which appears in the chapter entitled “Entartete Kunst” more poetic. I am also grateful to my other friends Peter Gács, David Rome,

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Alan Rosenthal, Judit Schulmann, Anna Szalai, and Fruzsina Veress for their reading of parts of this work and their advice. My work has also benefitted from the advice of Professor Erzsébet Csányi, Chair of the Department of Hungarian Language and Literature at the University of Novi Sad, Serbia, and Zeljko Trbusic, Archivist at the Croatian National Academy of Science and Art. I wish also to thank the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University for taking me on as an Associate and providing me with access to Harvard’s library, as well as for the many stimulating seminars and gatherings that I have been able to attend at the Center. Joshua Rubenstein, also an Associate of the Davis Center, has been especially helpful. Finally, I would like to thank my editors at Lexington Books, Brian Hill, Eric Kuntzman, and Paula Williamson, for seeing value in this work and for their help at many stages of its production. Whatever flaws remain in this work of translation and commentary are my own.

Translator’s Introduction Ervin Sinkó and the Dilemmas of an Optimist

The Novel of a Novel, which, as we shall explain, is not a novel but a sourcebased memoir, tells the story of the Hungarian-born writer Ervin Sinkó’s attempt to publish, in the mid-1930s and in the Soviet Union, his magnum opus about the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, Optimists. 1 The Novel of a Novel is a rarity in several ways. It is a work of reportage on conditions in the Soviet Union by a non-Soviet writer, based on the journal of his two-year residence in the country from May 1935 to April 1937. 2 These two years were a period of transition from the Popular Front era in Soviet policies to the era of the Great Terror. Not many foreigners’ memoirs have been published about this period that cover so long a stay, recount as many substantial encounters with well-known natives, visitors, as well as ordinary (but representative) citizens, and probe with such self-lacerating discomfort into the meaning of events. Sinkó went to the Soviet Union with great hopes both for himself and for the Soviet experiment. Yet, he ended up recording his growing disillusionments. The Novel of a Novel depicts the inner conflicts of a humanist socialist trying to retain his positive view of the Soviet Union even as he becomes increasingly aware of the grossly inhumane and dehumanizing policies that characterized Stalinism. The work is important as one of the earliest publications of communist discouragement—though it is not one of total rejection. It is certainly one of the first such works to be published in a socialist country, Yugoslavia. The Novel of a Novel is also worthy of our attention as a dramatic story of a writer’s struggle to publish his work and escape poverty without sacrificing his artistic and ethical principles. Such stubbornness was dangerous in the xi

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1930s and not the norm. It was only shown by a few exceptional writers like Mikhail Bulgakov, the author of Master and Margarita (written in the 1930s but published, in expurgated form, only in 1966–1967), or the poet Osip Mandelstam, who paid for it with his life. Many writers, both Soviet and foreign, conformed to the demands of the required styles and messages in order to appear in print in the Soviet Union. Although Sinkó was willing to bend a little, his concessions were never enough to meet the demands of his potential Soviet publishers. Coupled with the frustrations of his efforts to be published on his own terms, Sinkó’s observations of Stalin’s betrayal of the socialist dream led him to an often debilitating depression that he recorded with almost clinical precision. Readers have vividly remembered some of the episodes in this book nearly fifty years after having read them. For example, the persistent Sinkó refused to accept the claim of a receptionist that her boss, an editor too frightened to make a decision one way or another about publishing Sinkó’s novel, was not in his office. The tall Sinkó barged through the open door of the inner office and found the sheepish editor hiding under his desk. Nor can one forget the misunderstanding in the author’s friendship with the writer Isaac Babel, with whom Sinkó and his wife shared an apartment in the final year of their stay. Babel, the well-connected Russian author of Red Cavalry, did much to help the impecunious Sinkó’s efforts to publish and to earn a living as a scriptwriter. But when Sinkó initiated a suit against the film company Mosfilm over payments owed to him, his chief witness, Babel, took the stand and, much to Sinkó’s surprise and consternation, denied ever having seen the manuscript that he, in fact, had recommended to Mosfilm. The reason was probably that Babel had received a last-minute tip about the grave danger of testifying from his intimate friend, the wife of political-police chief Nikolai Yezhov. We who know the tragic ending of Babel’s life (he was arrested in 1939 and shot in January 1940) can better appreciate his caution than Sinkó did at the time. Sinkó was a dedicated diarist since his teenage years, and he did not shy away from keeping a diary even when he was warned by a Hungarian comrade in Moscow that it was lunacy to do so. (The comrade insisted that his name should never be mentioned in the diary, “in my lifetime or thereafter.”) The fact that the diary survived is also quite remarkable and attests to the holes in the totalitarian system. But it is important to keep in mind that The Novel of a Novel is an artistic retelling of the story recorded in the diary and in the related documents—letters, manuscripts, newspaper clippings—that Sinkó preserved through his many perilous, voluntary, and involuntary peregrinations between 1937 and 1953, the year when he composed the present work in Tito’s Yugoslavia. We should thus think of The Novel of a Novel as a memoir, though one that is more reliable than most and remarkably true to its written sources. Although the title could be rendered as The Story of a Novel,

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I have kept the repetition of words in the original Hungarian Egy regény regénye as well as in the Croatian and German translations (Roman jednog romana and Roman eines Romans) published with Sinkó’s cooperation, because Sinkó obviously enjoyed its recursive humor. Sinkó separates his narrative into two interlaced forms, at times intermixed within the same chapter but clearly set off typographically from each other. (See “Note on Conventions” below.) The italicized sections are explanations written, as Sinkó makes clear, from the perspective of 1953–1955. However, the question arises, how faithful are the diary sections to the actual diary? A comparison (though admittedly, not a line-by-line comparison) of these sections with the published diaries shows that this layer of the work faithfully preserves the moods, enthusiasms, doubts, and depressions of the original. I have noted some exceptions, none of which is very significant, in footnotes in the chapters that follow. Thus without the usual post-facto explanations one finds in many memoirs, one can see how Sinkó vacillated in the 1930s between his naïve hopes in the Soviet Union and his bitter critiques of it. This unvarnished veracity is a singular distinction of the work, giving valuable insight into the mentality of a foreign observer who was in this respect not alone among the visiting intellectuals of his time. Only in the italicized reflections do we find his later self-critical or exculpatory explanations for his inability to comprehend the true nature of what was happening around him at the time. The modern reader may wonder why it was so hard for Sinkó to reject Stalin’s Soviet Union during his visit even when he deplored much of what he observed and experienced in it. To understand this, it is necessary to consider aspects of his biography and of how he, as many in his generation, saw the choices that his times presented to him. BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND Ervin Sinkó was born Ferenc Spitzer in 1898 to an assimilated Jewish family of moderately well-off merchants in Opatin, then a small town in southern Hungary, near the larger city of Szabadka, today’s Subotica in the Vojvodina region of Serbia. The whole region, as Hungary in general, had prospered at the end of the nineteenth century. After the Compromise of 1867 brought about the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary, the land, waterways, and transportation systems of Hungary had been improved through a combination of private enterprise and government support. Although most of the land was owned by the historical Hungarian nobility, Jews played a major role in the development of the area as merchants and professionals. They also assimilated to the dominant Hungarian culture of this ethnically mixed territory containing sizable Serbian, Croatian, and German populations, to name only the

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most important groups. Yet, Jewish social integration was incomplete. The very success that Jews had achieved in commerce, industry, finance, and in the free professions was a goad to the anti-Semitism of their less successful neighbors. Already in 1882, the Tiszaeszlár Case of 1882 brought the ancient blood libel myth to the fore again. The disappearance of a Christian servantgirl in a village on the Tisza River was attributed to ritual murder. Although Károly Eötvös, a member of one of Hungary’s most prestigious noble families, was able to successfully defend the accused men in this trial, antiSemitism was fanned and exploited by the press and some smaller Parliamentary opposition groups. One of four children, Sinkó rebelled against the rigid formality and social isolation typical of the life-style of the partially assimilated Jewish-Hungarian middle classes of the provinces. The Spitzers’ lives remained formal and isolated even after the family had moved from the village of Opatin to the city of Szabadka in time for Ferenc to start his high school (gimnázium) education. This insularity is echoed in some of Sinkó’s later works: for example, in the elegant but tightly shuttered house of Dr. Seiden in the author’s main novel, Optimists; and in the description of the mistrustful relationship between Ferenc’s mother and their Christian maid in Sinkó’s 1934 autobiographical essay, Facing the Judge (French: En face du juge; Hungarian: Szemben a bíróval). 3 Ferenc’s rebellion against middle-class formalities was accompanied by experiences with anti-Semitism and his discomfort with his Jewishness. In Facing the Judge, Sinkó describes the childhood trauma of bullying (including being undressed to have his circumcision exposed) by the Swabian (ethnic German) boys of Opatin. It is to this experience that he attributes the awakening of his sensitivity to injustice. The main character’s, Báti’s, uncomprehending, painful reactions to anti-Semitic taunts forms one of the most interesting, albeit understated themes of Optimists. Sinkó, like Báti, no doubt experienced continuing anti-Semitic insults as he sought entry into the local intellectual and artistic community of Szabadka during World War I. One of the most troubling allegations against the Jews in the novel was that of war-profiteering, exemplified by Báti’s uncle, Westermayer, and by the father of Báti’s love, Erzsi, who is modeled in the novel on Sinkó’s future wife, Irma Rothbart. In defending himself against an attack on his wealthy and conservative relative, Báti asks, “What have I to do with my uncle?” 4 Sinkó had already found his way to socialism before the war as a young teenager by becoming active in Szabadka’s “workers’ home,” an institution that was used by the local Social Democratic Party to organize the largely illiterate labor force working in agriculture and construction. Socialism provided a new sense of identity in which ethnic origin did not matter and salved any sense of guilt arising from his family’s privileged status and isolation from their non-Jewish neighbors. Sinkó, a young middle-class high-school

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student, tutored the uneducated workers in basic literacy skills. He was also put in charge of setting up a library for the servant girls. He himself devoured the socialist literature that he purchased for the library. When World War I broke out at the end of July 1914, Sinkó was disappointed by the pro-war position taken by the Social Democratic Party. For a time, he lost interest in socialism and developed a life-long admiration for the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, which he interpreted as a call to individual liberation and self-expression. By the evidence of his diaries, the teenage Sinkó spent the first years of the war (in addition to pursuing women whose menfolk were away in the army) reading widely in European literature, skipping classes, and honing his writing skills. He wrote articles in the county paper and was determined to become a poet and a philosopher. He was also drawn to the Budapest avantgarde. In 1916, under his non-Jewish sounding nom de plume of Ervin Sinkó, he published his first book of poems, Nights and Dawns (Éjszakák és hajnalok) inspired more by Nietzsche and the modernist Hungarian poet Endre Ady than by socialism. In that same year, when he turned eighteen, he was drafted into the army. In 1917, he was sent to the Russian front where by that time the fighting was largely over and there were occasions to fraternize with the enemy, who were spreading the gospel of World Revolution and Leninism. Between this time and the outbreak of revolution in Hungary, he too became a Leninist. In October 1918, the Dual Monarchy was exhausted by war and suffered its final defeat on the Italian front. Austria separated from Hungary, and the minority areas declared their independence. Thus, the area around Szabadka, the Vojvodina, became part of the newly declared Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, known as Yugoslavia. Soldiers began to stream back into Hungary at the end of October, and a relatively bloodless revolution broke out in which one of Hungary’s leading magnates, Count Michael Károlyi (to be encountered in The Novel of a Novel), became the country’s leader. Károlyi was unusual within the Hungarian political establishment for having established contacts with the Western powers of the Entente during the war, taking a leadership role in the international peace movement, and eventually allying himself politically at home with the unenfranchised Social Democrats and other democratic forces. The Aster Revolution—named after the flower that blooms in early fall—brought to power a coalition of Social Democrats and Bourgeois Radicals. Its goal was to transform Hungary into a parliamentary democracy on the French or British model and to extend the suffrage from its narrow base in which the historical nobility and the various Christian establishments, especially the Catholic, held predominant sway. Back from the war, Sinkó joined in Budapest a dozen or so young, mostly Jewish intellectuals and revolutionaries who (turning their backs on their Jewish origins) advocated a Marxist revolution inspired by what little they

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could learn about events in Russia. They were certain that the revolution led by Lenin would soon spread to the rest of the former belligerents and sweep away the bourgeois world that they held responsible for the unprecedented slaughter of the preceding four years. They expected the quick transformation of mankind once it had been awakened from its false consciousness, a mixture of nationalism, deference to the old ruling classes, and anti-Semitism. In late March 1919, Sinkó and some of his friends found themselves in power without the benefit of a revolution from below. The Károlyi regime had been forced into an untenable situation both internationally and domestically. Romania and Czechoslovakia were threatening the territory that remained to Hungary after the armistice. Although Károlyi had embraced the Wilsonian principles of national self-determination and democracy, Britain and the United States were at best indifferent to Hungary’s fate, while France, the strongest victorious power in the region, was decidedly hostile. France was eager to support the Czechs and the Romanians, whom they counted on for military support of the interventions against Bolshevik Russia and whom they wished to consolidate, along with Yugoslavia, into a French alliance system against the possibility of a future German resurgence. The Allies pressured Hungary to withdraw its troops deep into the Hungarian heartland as the Romanians advanced. These demands were delivered in the form of an ultimatum by the French lieutenant-colonel Fernand Vix, the head of the armistice commission, on March 20, 1919. Károlyi refused these terms and turned to the Social Democrats to form a new government. They, however, saw no choice but to hitch their wagon to the revolutionary wave that they thought was about to sweep through Europe and decided to form a fused party with the recently formed Communists of Béla Kun. We shall also encounter Béla Kun often in The Novel of a Novel. He had been a Social Democratic functionary before the war, became a reserve officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army, and was captured in Russia in 1916. Even before the Bolsheviks coup in Russia in November 1917, Kun became a supporter of Lenin and afterward played a major role in organizing AustroHungarian POWs in support of the Red Army. In November 1918, Lenin sent Kun and a number of his followers back to Hungary with funds and instructions to establish the Party of Communists in Hungary (KMP) and to spread the World Revolution. 5 Sinkó and his friends joined the KMP in February, 1919. For the twenty-year-old Sinkó, these exciting months were not only about politics. They were also about love, camaraderie, and ethical development. Sinkó’s future wife and life-long emotional and financial supporter, Irma Rothbart (in the diaries and in The Novel of a Novel referred to as M, for the diminutive of Irmuci or Muci), was an active member of the circle of revolutionaries befriended by Sinkó. She was the daughter of a wealthy Jewish

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“war profiteer” (as described in Optimists). Against her father’s will, though with his financial support, she had become a medical student. She was a member of a remarkable generation of Hungarian women, often of Jewish background, who had begun to enter the universities after the beginning of the century. When Sinkó met her, she was the mistress of one of the other members of the circle: Aladár Komját, a factory clerk, a poet, a married man, but an apparently irresistible womanizer. The essence of this multi-sided romance is told in the Optimists in fictionalized form and cannot detain us here (although regrettably for interested English-speaking readers, Optimists is not yet available in English). Toward the end of 1918 Sinkó also met the young philosopher György Lukács, who had returned during the war from his studies with Max Weber and Georg Simmel in Heidelberg. Born in 1885, Lukács was the son of a wealthy Jewish Hungarian banker. The young Lukács became the central figure of a group of Budapest intellectuals, artists, and writers called the Sunday Circle, many of whom later went on to earn fame in the West as well; these included the sociologist Karl Mannheim, the polymath Michael Polányi, the writer and film director Béla Balázs, the art historians Charles Tolnay and Arnold Hauser, and peripherally, the composers Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály. Unlike the aforementioned intellectuals, none of whom became long-term converts to Leninism, Lukács became an adherent at the end of 1918 and remained a steadfast communist to his death in 1971. 6 Around the time Sinkó met him, Lukács sought to synthesize Leninism with the Kantian tradition of non-consequentialist ethics, though, of course, he could not succeed in this endeavor. Leninism, like all practical political philosophies, is primarily utilitarian and based on the very non-Kantian consequentialist notion of the ends justifying the means. But the question that Lukács raised made a great impression on Sinkó, who considered himself the philosopher’s disciple in the first few months of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. The ethical question of the importance of consequences in deciding upon the right action would play an important role in Sinkó’s career, though one that he did not answer in the same way in 1919 as he did in 1937. In 1919, as we shall see, by the end of the revolution, he came down on the side of Kant’s non-consequentialism, holding that it was wrong to kill under any circumstances. In the late 1930s, he was willing to remain silent when he thought that publicizing the truth about Stalinism would hurt the cause of defeating fascism. The new regime came to power under the leadership of Béla Kun on March 21, 1919, and lasted until August 1, 1919. Describing itself as a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” the new regime saw itself as a link in the chain of revolutions that it optimistically expected to sweep through at least Central Europe, if not the world. Its social and economic policies were decidedly revolutionary. It nationalized large industry. In the countryside, it at-

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tempted the unpopular collectivization of agriculture, a process that the Russians only forced on the peasantry under Stalin after 1928. Lukács became commissar of education in the new government. Sinkó was brought in as well. Although Sinkó thought that he would work in the area of cultural policy and, with Lukács, create a program of civic education in revolutionary ethics, such theoretical and educational efforts had to be deferred while the country was under military siege by its neighbors. The Kun regime, like its predecessor, had decided not to yield to the demands of the Vix démarche. It created a Red Army with the help of members of the old officer corps and planned to link up with the Russian Red Army making its way through Ukraine. Like Russia, Soviet Hungary had to worry about intervention from abroad—in Hungary’s case, especially France, Romania, and Czechoslovakia—and from counter-revolutionaries at home. Sinkó was sent to the provinces to recruit soldiers for the effort of resisting Romanian agression, the most immediate threat. He found the peasantry to be largely unresponsive to his speeches projecting a communist utopia. Witnessing the violence and duplicity that accompanied revolution on all sides, Sinkó began to vacillate privately between communism and a self-defined form of Christianity based on the Mosaic Commandment of Thou Shalt Not Kill, on the teachings of the older Leo Tolstoy, and of Hungarian Christian sects and individuals whom he encountered during the revolutions. As he was passing through the major agricultural town of Kecskemét at the edge of the Great Hungarian Plain, a local rebellion had forced the new government’s representatives and administrators to flee. Sinkó was named city commissar and charged by Budapest with restoring order. This was the first major test of Sinkó’s emerging non-violent approach to dealing with opponents of the revolution. Some of the leaders of the rebellion had been captured before his arrival, and Sinkó succeeded in obtaining forces from the Ministry of the Interior, the self-styled “Terrorists” or “Lenin Boys,” thus regaining the town for the Reds through the threat but not the use of force (with the exception of a single casualty, which only strengthened Sinkó’s aversion to violence). When a large trial took place against the rebellious peasants and their gentry instigators, Sinkó convinced the judges that most of the defendants should be pardoned and that no one should be executed. Sinkó was recalled from his post for his leniency, but he was not disciplined or dismissed from the party. Indeed, he was allowed to practice his policy of winning converts through non-violence a second time when a counter-revolutionary rebellion broke out in the capital in June. Among the rebels who besieged the government were some two hundred and fifty cadets of the Ludovika Military Academy. After the Lenin Boys had put down the rebellion at some cost in lives on both sides, Sinkó convinced both Lukács and Ottó Korvin, in charge of political security in the Commisariat of Internal Affairs, that the students, all of whom were between the

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ages of sixteen and twenty-two, should be treated with leniency. He also obtained permission to re-educate them. Believing in the power of literature and the Marxist classics, Sinkó organized a course for the students. Its goal was not to turn them into communists but “independently thinking, internally free people . . . who will not be counter-revolutionaries.” 7 The course included excerpts from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Illych, along with the Communist Manifesto and the writings of a the Hungarian Marxist, Ervin Szabó, who had died in 1918 and had pointed out the necessity of raising the cultural level of the proletariat as a precondition to its fulfilling its historical role. He also read to the students from the poems of Endre Ady and even from Paul’s Second Epistle to the Corinthians (which speaks about caring for the poor and defends the nature of Paul’s apostleship). The cadets later returned the favor that Sinkó had done them when the Soviet Republic fell and Sinkó was forced into hiding in Budapest. One day, moving from one hiding place to another, he recognized some of the cadets on the street in uniform. They also recognized him but walked past discreetly. On the other hand, a relative of one of the people whom Sinkó had saved from hanging in Kecskemét led a major terror action in the city after it fell to the Whites, torturing and murdering hundreds of supporters and presumed supporters of the fallen Soviet Republic, a fact that Sinkó also noted. 8 After several months of hiding, Sinkó managed to escape to Vienna. Irma, who had been imprisoned by the new counter-revolutionary regime, also found her way there. They married in 1920. 9 They lived for several years in barracks in the Grinzing section of Vienna, which had been converted for the refugees of Central Europe’s revolutions, a milieu often referred to in The Novel of a Novel. Sinkó would never return to Hungary except for a short visit in the 1960s. In the interwar years, a counter-revolutionary and antiSemitic regime led by Miklós Horthy took over the country. Not only did that regime unleash a reign of terror that dwarfed what the Reds had produced, it also conflated Communism with Judaism and brought about the first antiSemitic legislation in post-War Europe by setting quotas on the number of Jews who could be admitted to higher education (while it cooperated with the Jewish high bourgeoisie in reviving Hungary’s economy). Even during the more moderate period of consolidation between 1921 and 1932 associated with the prime ministry of István Bethlen, the Sinkós would have been personae non gratae. The situation became much worse again as Hungary followed in Hitler’s footsteps in the 1930s and during World War II. After that war, as we shall see, Sinkó, though he wrote primarily in Hungarian, felt more at home politically in the Yugoslavia of Marshal Tito. The marriage to Irma was a blessing for Sinkó. Not only was she a likeminded intellectual but she believed as much in his literary talent as he did, despite his inability to earn a living from it. She also shared his sense of privileged guilt and moral obligation. Moreover, she was willing to take on

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the role of the family’s breadwinner. The couple did not have any children, and one is tempted to think that this was by choice, given their circumstances. They scraped by for many decades mostly on the financial support of their parents, on Sinkó’s meager earnings from his writings and short-lived efforts to find alternative employment—for instance, as a cabinetmaker— and later on Irma’s inheritance, but mostly on Irma’s work as a doctor. Irma resumed her studies of medicine in Vienna, did her internship in Sarajevo, and returned to Austria in 1926 for a specialization in radiology. Sinkó had managed to obtain a Yugoslav passport under his original name of Spitzer, thus avoiding arrest and extradition to Hungary for his past activities in the Hungarian Soviet Republic. In fact, in the early 1920s Sinkó was not a communist either in terms of party membership or ideology. He had not renewed his membership when the Hungarian party reconstituted itself in exile. His self-styled Christianity had become more intense and he dedicated himself to it spiritually until about 1927. This is reflected in his letters, his poetry and writing, and especially, in his 1920 reminiscences about his role in and spiritual awakening during the Hungarian Soviet Republic, The Way (Az út). The essence of his Christianity was that people had to purge themselves of aggression and vengefulness through prayer and devotion to following the ethical example of Jesus Christ before a peaceful and just society could be built. Failing to convert his friends, he hoped that he could at least purge himself of evil. But with the increasing strength of an extreme Right in much of Europe, such a personal withdrawal from politics seemed selfish and dangerous. While in Austria for Irma’s studies, the Sinkós witnessed a violent confrontation between workers and the Austrian police. The workers were protesting the acquittal of a group of paramilitary rightists who had earlier been accused of murder. The police responded with deadly fire against the workers. Sinkó saw in the government’s actions—we now know, correctly—a foreshadowing of the extreme Right’s coming to power in Austria and beyond. 10 Returning to Yugoslavia late in 1927, Irma set up a general medical practice in a small village, Prigrevica-Sveti Ivan (Bácsszentiván) in the Vojvodina, close to where Sinkó had been born. It was here, in 1931, that Sinkó began to write Optimists, which he completed in Paris in 1934. 11 Optimists tells the story of 1918–1919 through the prism of Sinkó’s own biography: recounting how he became a communist, fell in love, devoted himself to serve the Kun regime, and struggled with the incompatibility between his emerging non-violent convictions and his equally fervent wish to transform Hungary, indeed the world, into a communist society. The work is a roman à clef. Many of the individuals who made up Sinkó’s circle have been clearly identified in the novel by readers familiar with the period. Behind the major characters, we find the communist writer Aladár Komját, the philosopher György Lukács, and the later cultural tsar of 1950s Hungary, József Révai,

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just to name a few. One of the novel’s most memorable and sympathetic characters, whose model is unknown and probably not a single individual, is the ethnic German waiter, Eisinger, a representative of the uneducated but gentle souls whose class consciousness is non-existent but whose common sense is often greater than that of the intellectuals. His greatest ambition was to work in America where he could earn enough money to return to Hungary to marry. Sinkó shows how the actual uneducated classes, including most factory workers as well as the peasants, were quite deaf to the messianic message of the communists, a situation that his alter ego, Báti, initially blamed on the gradualist Social Democrats. As the revolutionary regime began to falter, these elements (though not Eisinger) were susceptible to the anti-Semitic slogans of the emerging counter-revolution which identified the Reds with the Jews. As he was finishing Optimists, Sinkó and his wife relocated to Paris so that they could find a publisher for the novel. There was no hope of doing this in Horthy’s Hungary or in Yugoslavia. But after many rejections in Paris, Sinkó took a chance on telephoning the well-connected Hungarian émigré Count Michael Károlyi. The two men had never met before, and there was reason for Sinkó to fear that Károlyi and Kun, whom Sinkó had served, were not on the best of terms. 12 To his surprise, Károlyi received Sinkó gracefully in his Parisian apartment and, moved by the sincerity and verisimilitude of the manuscript that Sinkó had left him, was eager to help. Károlyi contacted the Nobel Prize–winning novelist Romain Rolland on Sinkó’s behalf. Rolland was the most important public figure supporting friendship and cooperation with the Soviet Union in France. Rolland was not able to find a publisher for Sinkó’s oversized tome in the French publishing industry, which itself was under great financial stress at the time, but he and his wife, Mariya Pavlovna Kudasheva, a Soviet citizen, arranged for Sinkó to be invited to Moscow by VOKS (the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad) so that he could find a publisher for Optimists there. SOVIET CULTURAL POLICIES AT THE TIME OF SINKÓ’S VISIT: BETWEEN TWO PERIODS To appreciate the present work, it is helpful to place Sinkó’s sojourn in the Soviet Union within the changing context of cultural outreach and political tourism that prevailed to the center of world communism in 1935 and the subsequent period of xenophobia that accompanied the Great Terror starting in the summer of 1936. Soviet cultural policy in 1934 and 1935 welcomed people like Sinkó as visitors to the country. Domestic developments in the Soviet Union as well as foreign policy considerations led to a period of cultural outreach. By 1933, the First Five Year Plan had ended; industrial

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capacity had grown significantly, though this had been achieved through incredibly strenuous (and often forced) labor with the brutal sacrifice of millions of mostly peasant lives. Indeed, the Soviet leadership wished to tout its successes to a European and American intellectual audience made receptive by the trauma of the World Depression. The Great Famine (Holodomor) that attended the forced collectivization of agriculture between 1929 and 1933, and which may have been allowed to happen for ethnic and political, not just economic reasons, had abated. Its toll of death and suffering were, for the most part, successfully hidden from Western eyes which were often willing to look the other way. The country was still far behind the West in living standards, but its real achievements and its highly controlled propaganda convinced many at home and abroad that the Soviets were on their way to building a new society which would surpass the West, not only economically but as a civilization, and in such progressive areas as the humane treatment of prisoners and wayward children (the problem of marauding orphans was hard to hide), birth control, women’s rights, healthcare, education, and the arts. A whole series of model institutions—factories, prisons, orphanages, abortion clinics, museums, and “parks of culture”—had been created to indicate to the local population and to foreigners the intended direction of communist development. In art and literature, Socialist Realism was promoted under the guidance of Maxim Gorky and others to illustrate not so much the present reality of the Soviet Union but that condition to which it aspired through work inspired by the common good. What was really happening behind the facade was hidden from view. For example, in the area of “criminal justice,” the development of the Gulag system of forced labor to which, “unreformable criminals,” political prisoners, peasants labeled as kulaks, entire classes and nationalities (like the Volga Germans whom Sinkó mentions in his entry for September 2, 1935) considered undesirable by the regime had been and continued to be consigned. The threat posed by Nazi Germany initially reinforced the Soviet cultural outreach to the West. Having failed to stop Hitler through a policy of hostile competition with the German Social Democrats and with other non-communist left-wing parties in Europe, the Soviets changed direction, adopting a policy called the Popular Front. The Seventh Congress of the Comintern (Communist International) in the summer of 1935, which Sinkó witnessed and described, directed the communist parties belonging to the Comintern to make alliances with social democratic and other “progressive” forces (which in their vocabulary did not include the Trotskyists) in a common struggle against fascism. This began in France already in 1934 with an alliance between the Socialist and Communist parties, a rare case of foreign communist parties (here, of France and Italy) initiating a change in direction of the Comintern. The alliance of the French Socialists and Communists, joined by the Radicals, led in 1936 to the Popular Front government of Léon Blum.

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France and the Soviet Union even concluded a Pact of Mutual Assistance in May, 1935, though the anti-Soviet Pierre Laval, having taken over the post of Minister of Foreign Affairs after the assassination of Louis Barthou, diluted that pact’s military value. Nor would the French Popular Front be able to live up to its promise of reviving the economy and resisting Germany’s increasingly aggressive moves. 13 Several agencies of the intertwined Soviet party-state were active in promoting a positive image of the Soviet Union abroad by means of inviting foreigners to visit the country. 14 These agencies included Intourist which arranged travel and monitoring for tourists; the Comintern, which provided services to members of the world’s communist parties; the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), and the Foreign Commission of the Board of the Soviet Writer’s Union. Perhaps the most important such agency in the mid-1930s was VOKS, then under the leadership of Aleksandr Iakovlevich Arosev whom we also encounter in The Novel of a Novel. The VOKS had been founded in 1925 through the initiative of the Western-educated Olga Kameneva, the sister of Leon Trotsky and one-time wife of the Bolshevik leader Lev Kamenev. It lived on even after Kameneva’s star had fallen, along with those of her relations. The VOKS flourished again in 1934 as a precursor to the Popular Front under the Stalin-loyalist Arosev. The organization carved out a niche for itself in creating relations between Western intellectuals who were sympathetic to the Soviet experiment but not necessarily party members. It provided information to friendly journalists. It also sponsored the visits of many intellectuals to the Soviet Union where they could witness the work of “socialist construction,” though under highly controlled circumstances. The visitors were expected to spread their favorable views when they returned home. The historian Ludmila Stern calculates that as many as two hundred intellectuals visited the Soviet Union in 1935 from France alone, and there were also many from other European countries, Great Britain and other areas of British settlement, and the United States. Another important group were German exiles living elsewhere in Europe. 15 Among the visitors of 1935 we find the British Fabian socialists George Bernard Shaw, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, the French writers André Malraux, JeanRichard Bloch, Henri Barbusse, Paul Nizan, André Gide, and the American Louis Fisher. Most visitors returned from the Soviet Union after a stay of a month or two in a luxury hotel (the Lux, or the Metropol in Moscow) to write and lecture positively about their experiences. Even if they had their doubts, these were often suppressed at the request of their Soviet hosts and the leftwing publishing establishment back home. There were some notable exceptions. Sinkó mentions the Romanian Communist, Panait Istrati, who travelled there also under Rolland’s sponsorship in 1929, and André Gide, whose honest criticism, published after his trip in 1936 as Retour de l’URSS, caused

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a sensation and great consternation among the Left. As we shall see, Sinkó decided not to follow Gide’s example in the 1930s, although in private he agreed with many of his views. Sinkó justified his silence precisely on the basis of its probable consequences, a moral logic that Sinkó had rejected in 1919 but had come to accept during his Soviet stay. With the benefit of hindsight and perhaps somewhat ahistorically, we can say that had he followed Gide’s example, he might have been more at peace with himself. But this would be to underestimate the dilemma that many anti-fascist intellectuals faced. It may seem surprising that Sinkó was invited to the Soviet Union to publish the Optimists given its unvarnished portrayal of conditions in Hungary during the Revolution and of the development of the main character’s ethical objections to revolutionary violence. True, it was not generally expected of VOKS invitees that their works should adhere to a strict party line. But it was expected that they should be open to being influenced so that they could return to the West to praise the Soviet Union and to advocate for proSoviet policies through the press and public lectures. In January 1935, Arosev met with Sinkó and promised, purely on the recommendation of the Rollands, to have VOKS sponsor the visit of the Sinkós to the Soviet Union for the purpose of finding a publisher there. To avoid any misunderstandings with the Rollands about where he stood in his relationship to communism, Sinkó explained his evolution in a confessional letter to them. Soon, Jean Guèhenno, Rolland’s friend and editor of the leftist but non-party literary journal Europe, invited Sinkó to write an autobiographical essay for the journal. This essay, Facing the Judge, explained Sinkó’s path to his youthful socialism, Nietzscheism, communism, then his conversion to Tolstoyan-Christian pacifism in the 1920s, and finally, to a realization that, under the circumstances of racist fascism and the deadly effects of the World Depression, the use of revolutionary violence was, after all, justified to achieve the humanist goals of the proletarian revolution. To be a revolutionary writer, there is no need to pretend that the revolution is something beautiful. It is the goals of the revolution that are beautiful, and today’s society is more murderous than any revolution. We want the goals of the revolution to be realized and that is why we are in favor, the sooner the better, of revolutionary violence. 16

We should not project into these words our knowledge of the Stalinist purges that were to follow the publication of this statement. Like most people on the left, Sinkó did not credit the reports he heard of the crimes that had been committed in the name of socialism by Stalin up to that point. In early 1935, he was completely taken in by the rosy picture of the Soviet Union promulgated by the French Left under the influence of agencies like VOKS.

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No doubt, he was also swayed by the hopes of being able to publish his novel. The violence that he condoned was the violence of external war with Nazi Germany and the internal violence needed for the Soviet government to defend itself. He could not have imagined the level of the irrational violence that had been imposed on the Soviet people or was yet to be imposed in the defense of Stalinism against former revolutionaries. By 1935 Sinkó again considered himself a revolutionary writer and would refer to members of the Communist Party as comrades, but he did not rejoin the party, either in France (which in any case preferred working-class members) or later in Russia. He was not looking for party assignments or to be a professional revolutionary who would have to give up his independence of thought. He never abandoned his fundamentally humanist values, derived from his reading of the Western European literary tradition, values which he best exhibited in his lenient treatment of the students of the Ludovika Academy. These values meant that everyone deserved to be treated with compassion and was capable of it themselves if they were not misguided through social conditioning and false information. The words “humane” and “human” (in the sense of human sympathy) occur with great frequency in The Novel of a Novel when criticizing Soviet policy or alluding to what its goals should be. Sinkó’s concerns about the spread of fascism, especially after Hitler’s accession to power are understandable. After all, whatever his inclinations toward Christianity, in the eyes of the Nazis he and his wife were Jews, as were their families, to whom they remained strongly attached emotionally. But Sinkó’s rejection of fascism went deeper than personal fear. Fascism, with its chauvinistic, racist nationalism, glorification of violence, and book burning, represented everything that was contrary to his values. From today’s vantage point it is less readily understandable why Sinkó, having lost his faith in communism in 1919, looked again to the Soviet Union in 1935 rather than to the West to defend the interests of humanity and humanism. We need to remember though that Sinkó had come to distrust parliamentary democracy during World War I. In his eyes, France and Great Britain shared the blame for the slaughter of the war and, along with the United States, for allowing the emergence of conservative regimes throughout Europe thereafter. Especially painfully for Sinkó was the support given by the West to the anti-Semitic, right-wing, semi-feudal, authoritarian regime of Horthy in Hungary. Even after Hitler’s rise to power, France and England showed little resolve to act as bulwarks against fascism. Parliamentary democracy was on the defensive and under attack internally not only from the Left, but also from the Right. Meanwhile, the United States had been pursuing a policy of isolationism. Sinkó probably knew little about the program of the New Deal. What he did know about the United States was the suffering of

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the unemployed during the Depression and the sad history of race relations which was publicized in the leftist press. The paucity of attractive alternatives to the problems posed by fascism and the Great Depression in the mid-1930s led Sinkó, like many well-meaning intellectuals, into becoming “fellow-travellers” of the Soviet Union. Yet Sinkó, had he been included in the book, would have held a unique place in that panoply of figures, from H. G. Wells to Arthur Koestler and Lion Feuchtwanger, described by the novelist and historian David Caute in his work on the subject. 17 Sinkó was surely the most tormented, Hamlet-like fellow traveler to have left a record. The period of relative relaxation that prevailed when Sinkó arrived in May 1935 gave way gradually but noticeably by mid-1936 to what historians have termed the Great Purge or the Great Terror, a phenomenon of paranoia, xenophobia, and repression whose nature, causes, and extent were not well understood at the time and still pose many mysteries today. 18 Purges of party members had been instituted already by Lenin and had become a recurring feature of Stalinism in the 1930s. In December 1934, the assassination of Leningrad party chief Sergey Kirov had led to massive purges of the party as well as to the arrest of ordinary citizens and hundreds of executions. Show trials, which characterized the Great Terror, were also part of the method of Stalinist rule already by 1930, when about one hundred engineers, economists, and other experts were accused of plotting a coup in conjunction with other countries. “Class enemies,” such as members of the former aristocracy, middle class or, in even larger numbers, “kulaks” (better-off peasants or those whom their neighbors labeled as such) could easily find themselves under suspicion and disappear to the growing archipelago of prison camps. Convictions brought during the purges were based on political suspicions, vendettas, and the need to meet quotas of victims rather than on due process. Fear and suspicion had become a part of the Soviet mentality among officials and bureaucrats as well as ordinary citizens. Sinkó reports the effects of fear on people’s behavior, though he underestimated its implications for his closest friendships or for his chances of being allowed to publish his work. Only in the years after leaving the Soviet Union did he begin to grasp how under the impact of the widening terror, fear had taken hold of so many people. Reverses in foreign policy likely contributed to a renewal of fear on the part of the regime itself. Japan had begun its takeover of Manchuria on the Soviet border in 1931 and tensions increased in the years that followed. In March 1936, Germany embarked on its remilitarization of the Rhineland which made its verbal threats against the Soviet Union more credible. The foreign policy based on Popular Fronts and collective security seemed to be failing in light of French and British appeasement of the fascist powers. In 1936, the West remained passive in the face of Italian aggression in Abyssinia and of German armed support of Franco in the Spanish Civil War.

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The foreign threat was matched by reports of enemies within: wreckers and foreign agents. A campaign against internal enemies was begun in mid1936. In September 1936, Stalin put Nikolai Yezhov in charge of the NKVD. The Great Terror, also named by Russians as the Yezhovschina, had begun. By January 1937, there were nearly a million prisoners in the camps of the Gulag. By 1940, about 35 percent of the prisoners were held on charges of “counter-revolutionary offenses.” According to official figures, 1,118 political executions took place in 1936. In the following year, when Sinkó was expelled from Russia, the number of recorded political executions rose to 353,074. In 1938, as Sinkó was still trying to make sense of his experience in the Soviet Union, the number was 328,618. Of course, he had no idea of the magnitude of these numbers. 19 But Sinkó was able to observe the beginning of the show trials that marked the Great Purge. Much of the leadership of the Bolshevik Revolution, including Nikolai Bukharin, Karl Radek, Alexei Rykov, Grigory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev, was killed as a result of these much publicized trials where the only types of evidence produced against the victims were accusations by their co-defendants or other prisoners and their own forced confessions. SINKÓ’S AGONIES During his two-year stay in the Soviet Union between May 1935 and April 1937, Sinkó was a keen observer of Soviet society and the changes in it that were visible to him through his endless calvary with publishers, his daily experiences of trying to seek food and shelter, his many conversations with friends and acquainances, as well as his incessant, in-depth reading of Russia’s main newspapers. The illusions about the New Soviet Man were initially strengthened during his sea voyage and reinforced during his free stay in a luxury hotel. At the end of the first month, the couple were unceremoniously forced to leave the hotel and live at their own expense among ordinary Soviet citizens in a lice-infested communal apartment. The real reason for this fall from grace, as he recognized, was that his book had been judged counterrevolutionary by a publisher’s reader. It seems unusual that the Sinkós were able to stay in the Soviet Union as long as they did after such a judgment about the book. Until research is done in the Russian archives, we cannot know for sure under what jurisdiction they came after they were dropped by VOKS. (Such research could also tell us how Sinkó was perceived by the authorities and what their expectations were of him.) From the many times that publishers turned to Béla Kun, the head of the Agitprop section of the Comintern, it is likely that it was Kun and the Hungarian Communist Party that took responsibility for Sinkó, even though he was not a member. Perhaps Irma’s employment in several Soviet

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institutions as a radiologist allowed the couple to be categorized as foreign experts. In any case, they were allowed to stay for another twenty months, to live among Soviet citizens, and to see life from a perspective denied to most guests of VOKS. After a few months in their uncomfortable communal apartment, they found better lodging through an Austrian friend, Bruno Steiner, in a comfortable apartment whose other residents were Isaac Babel and his common-law wife, Antonina Nikolaevna Pirozhkova. Through Babel, Sinkó met the actor and artistic director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater, Solomon Mikhoels, and the film director Sergey Eisenstein: the latter in one of his most desperate moments when his film Bezhin Meadow, on Soviet collectivization, was banned and its copies were ordered to be destroyed. Like his earlier autobiographical works (which, in addition to the present one, are also his best works), The Novel of a Novel is yet another confession on the part of Sinkó: in this instance, of his inability to let go of his renewed faith in Soviet communism despite his growing distress over what he witnessed. His persistent attempts to publish Optimists, notwithstanding the support from Béla Kun, were frustrated at every step. His illusions about the humanism of Soviet laws and institutions were challenged day by day as he read Pravda and Izvestia and was dumbfounded by the self-contradictory twists and turns in social and cultural policy. New hopes for a chance to publish and for Soviet policies consistent with socialist values would be dashed by new, depressing disappointments, which in turn would be replaced by hopes in an almost never-ending oscillation. We shall not list these cycles here lest we spoil the tension with which Sinkó relates his own contradictory experiences and internal struggles. By the beginning of 1937, as the xenophobia of the regime grew more intense and as Kun’s own position and health progressively deteriorated, the Sinkós had to choose between permanent citizenship or expulsion. Realizing that they might be trapped in the Soviet Union forever, they decided not to apply for citizenship. They were forced to leave the country in April 1937. Sinkó’s feelings toward the Soviet Union continued to vacillate even after the couple had been ejected from the Soviet Union. Back in Paris, in a lecture to the “Friends of the USSR,” he initially defended the early purges of top leaders, arguing that the defendants had probably challenged Stalin’s main policies and thus fallen against their wills on the wrong side of history. But his condemnation of the victims, whom he saw as dedicated communists, lacked sufficient vigor to satisfy the French Communist Party or the unannounced Soviet agent monitoring his activities. As a result, he was prevented from publishing in any of the papers with which he had established connections after his return. As the purges continued, Sinkó would no longer make excuses for them. He even declined to submit for publication the lecture he had given to the Friends of the USSR. In the polarized situation of the time, Sinkó again fell into a no-man’s-land. He was unable to publish or earn a

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living. When the Soviets, through their emissary, the Russian-born elderly widow of Henri Barbusse, made clear to him what he was expected to write to escape his “quarantine,” he flatly refused. Only after the war did Sinkó learn that many of his interlocutors at the various publishing houses and movie studios, his Hungarian “comrades,” and his housemate, Isaac Babel, had become victims of the Terror. His confessional memoir is an implicit apology to them, which Sinkó makes explicit in the afterword to the second edition. SURVIVING THE HOLOCAUST When, at the end of August, 1939, Sinkó read the news that Stalin had made a pact with Hitler, he wrote: Despite everything, during the last twenty years of my life, I considered Bolshevism to represent the highest worldly moral category. But now it is over, over for good. I am poorer than I ever was—but at the same time, freer. It is as if I were reborn into the world. What will I find? What will I bring to it? . . . And the question that is most important: are we witnessing the bankruptcy of a policy, or is it the bankruptcy of Marxism itself? 20

It is interesting that he did not repeat this sentiment in The Novel of a Novel. Perhaps, at the time that his work was published in Tito’s Yugoslavia, he did not want to show his former doubts about the entire Marxist idea. This is one of the few places where The Novel of a Novel omits an important sentiment recorded in the diaries. As we know from his war diaries, this skeptical sentiment lasted throughout much of World War II. 21 With the outbreak of war between France and Germany in September 1939, life had become impossible for the Sinkós in France. Sinkó considered joining the Foreign Legion but was unable to do so. The couple returned to Yugoslavia. Irma soon found a position as a doctor in a hospital in Drvar, Bosnia. Yugoslavia disintegrated under Italian and German pressure in the spring of 1941 and the Sinkós found themselves within the borders of the Axis-allied, highly anti-Semitic Croatian state, though within a territory that was under Italian, not Croatian control. The couple’s Jewish background had again become a deadly liability, even more so than their former communist sympathies, which they could conceal from their small-town, ethnically focused neighbors. Irma was safe for a while because of her work in the hospital, but Sinkó had to go into hiding when the Germans and the Ustasha, the Croatian fascists, stormed the town in pursuit of Tito’s Partisan Army, which had taken over Drvar for some months. In 1942 the Sinkós were interned, as Jews, in the Italian-run concentration camp on the island of Brač, and then on Rab. Fortunately these internment camps, run by the Italians,

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were considerably less lethal than those run by the Croatian regime. Earlier in the war, the Sinkós had tried to avoid political entanglements. Irma had helped save some wounded Partisans in the woods around Drvar but she declined to join the Partisans on a permanent basis. On Rab, perhaps fearing that the concentration camp might be taken over by the Germans or the Croatians, Sinkó found that he could no longer remain passive. As president of the camp’s People’s Liberation Committee, he coordinated the liberation of the camp with the Partisans after the Italian surrender in September 1943. 22 Thereafter, until the end of the war, Irma directed a number of field hospitals for Tito’s forces. Sinkó helped in the hospitals, providing unskilled labor, entertaining the wounded fighters with short stories and skits, and writing propaganda. However, as the Sinkó scholar István Bosnyák observed on the basis of Sinkó’s unpublished poems from this time, he was no longer the enthusiastic optimist of his youth. He did not harbor utopian illusions with regard to Tito’s revolution. He was a practical humanist who tried to make himself helpful to others within the framework that presented itself. 23 The victory of Tito’s revolution finally brought the Sinkós some welldeserved security and stability. Irma took on important positions in reorganizing the administration of public health in the new Yugoslavia. Sinkó was finally able to publish. He had befriended the Croatian author Miroslav Krleža at the beginning of the war. Krleža had been a Trotskyist when the war broke out but became a supporter of Tito during the Partisan struggle and had gained great influence in the organizing of Yugoslav literary life by 1950. In 1950 or 1951, with Krleža’s support, Sinkó became a correspondent member of the Yugoslav Academy of Arts and Sciences in Zagreb and in 1960, he became a full member of that body. It was again with Krleža’s support that Sinkó was able to publish Optimists, eighteen years and many adventures after he had completed it. The first volume appeared in 1952 in Hungarian in Novi Sad, the capital of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina (within Serbia, Yugoslavia). The second volume appeared only in 1955, after a Croatian translation of the full novel was published in 1954. WRITING THE NOVEL OF A NOVEL Sinkó began to work on The Novel of a Novel in 1953. The first excerpts appeared that year in Croatian in the journal Republika in Zagreb, and in Hungarian in the 1953/1954 number of Híd (The Bridge) in Novi Sad. Although composed in Hungarian, the first complete edition appeared in Croatian, in 1955 in Zagreb, probably so that it would have a larger readership. The first complete Hungarian edition appeared only in 1961 in Novi Sad. 24 It

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was only in 1988, the penultimate year of Hungary’s communist rule, that the novel first appeared under the imprint of a publisher based in that country. What prompted Sinkó to write The Novel of a Novel in 1953? Of course Stalin’s death in March marked the end of an era. In the work itself, Sinkó tells us that he considered the work an important historical document, which it certainly is. But we can speculate that the book was also intended to contribute to the debate, occurring at that time, on the path that Yugoslavia should pursue toward communism. Although the Soviet Union and Great Britain as well as the United States had helped to liberate Yugoslavia from the Germans and Italians, the Yugoslavs, under the leadership of Tito, had had a much greater part in liberating themselves than had any of the other East European states. Tito and some of his entourage, most famously, Milovan Djilas, refused to allow Stalin to dictate to Yugoslavia. Initially, the Soviet-Yugoslav dispute was primarily in the area of foreign policy, where the Yugoslavs took a more aggressive stance on some issues (for example, the Greek Civil War and border disputes with Italy) than Stalin thought politic at the time. In 1948, the conflict had become so intense that the Soviets had Yugoslavia expelled from the cominform, a recently formed coordinating body of the Eastern European, Italian, and French communist parties. The rupture of relations allowed an opening within Yugoslavia for a debate on domestic policies, which until then had been modeled in many respects on the Soviet Union: a state and a society dominated by a single party, a pervasive secret police, a planned economy with a nationalized industry geared toward churning out war materiel, and suppression of political and intellectual dissent. 25 The Tito-Stalin dispute brought Sinkó’s own criticisms of Stalinism within the bounds of acceptable discourse. But The Novel of a Novel also took a position against the cult of personality, the over-centralization of cultural life, and advocated for permitting open discussion of social problems in the press and the arts in general. Some of these criticisms might have been taken amiss in a country where Tito was also the focus of a personality cult. But this did not happen. Unlike Milovan Djilas, Vice President of Yugoslavia in 1953, Sinkó did not convert his critiques of Stalinism into explicit demands. Djilas was one of the chief movers liberalizing the regime and decentralizing the economy with such innovations as workers-councils running factories. By the time The Novel of a Novel was published, Djilas was calling for multiple socialist parties to contest in free elections. In January 1954, Djilas was stripped of all of his official positions. In 1957, after the publication of The New Class, he was jailed. But criticisms of Stalinism were allowed and Titoism, in fact, was on a path to liberalization. Sinkó’s position was consistent with that of his politically influential close friend, Miroslav Krleža, who, in an important 1952 speech before the Congress of Yugoslav Writers had

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called for an engaged literature, but one that was freed of the strictures of socialist realism. 26 The Novel of a Novel helped establish Sinkó’s reputation as a writer within Yugoslavia. In 1959, he was appointed to establish the Department of Hungarian Language and Literature in Novi Sad. There he taught literature to an emerging group of Yugoslav Hungarian writers and teachers until his death from illness in 1967. Some of the writers who grew up under his tutelage would come to revere him for his humanist conception of socialism, and others, inspired by a new wave of student rebelliousness in the late 1960s, criticized him for his subservience to the Tito regime. 27 Despite his success in Yugoslavia, the authorities in Hungary did not welcome the publication of The Novel of a Novel. Prior to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Sinkó was seen as an enemy of the state for his criticisms of the show trials that took place in Hungary in 1949. The Novel of a Novel was deemed too radical a critique of socialism even during the more relaxed years of the Kádár regime, almost to its very end. But the book had made its way across the border much earlier than 1988 and was read in Hungary with great interest in the 1960s and 1970s by those who sought alternatives within Marxism to the “ossified, leftist, intellectual atmosphere” that was imposed on the country. 28 With the collapse of communism, the work is interesting to us primarily from a historical and literary point of view. It conveys in a most convincing manner the inner struggles of a communist trying to deal with the dissonance of his beliefs and the evidence of his senses. It demonstrates how narrow the range of choices available to people of good will was in the years preceding World War II. But if we were to look for a lesson in Sinkó’s work, we could start with one of the most emblematic episodes in The Novel of a Novel. Sinkó describes a meeting of émigré German writers in Moscow in 1935 in which, following the latest party line, they condemned Nietzsche as a protofascist. At a later gathering of some of the same writers in one of the apartments of the Hotel Lux, Sinkó, surprised by the simplistic interpretation of his fellow writers of a philosopher whom they had all admired in their youth, read a passage to the other guests from Nietzsche about self-inflicted blindness. It was met with an awkward silence, not the least because everyone other than Sinkó feared that the room was bugged. The theme of blindness, self-inflicted and otherwise, recurs in the work. We can reject the lesson that Sinkó drew in the 1950s from this episode at the end of the first chapter in part II, when he said that there are situations in which the revolutionary “has no choice—not only psychologically but also morally—than to suppress day after day his moral rebellion, his judgment and clear thinking.” Or, we may interpret this to be a warning about becoming a revolutionary. While the dream of communism has largely passed for now, ideological thinking and partisanship, whether on the left, the right, secular, or religious,

Translator’s Introduction

xxxiii

still inspires many people today. Sinkó’s confessions about his naivety should be seen as a warning. We must believe the evidence of our senses, exercise our critical thinking and our ethical humane instincts. As Sinkó himself writes in his 1965 postscript, “We have learnt our lesson: There is no ideology and no social system that automatically liberates man. Every revolutionary concept, at every stage of its history, must be modified on the basis of a tireless gathering of new information and criticism.” Sinkó did not have the courage to exercise such criticism in the 1930s in public. Whatever consequences there would have been for him, it is doubtful that such criticism would have led to the victory of fascism, as he seems to have feared. But we should not judge Sinkó too harshly. Even Arthur Koestler, the author of Darkness at Noon, the book that made Koestler a poster-child of the Cold War, only left the German Communist Party in 1939, and only after a neardeath experience in a Francoist jail. In any case, we can be grateful to Sinkó for honestly bearing witness to a time when such moral choices were extremely difficult to make, and rarely made. NOTES 1. Sinkó Ervin, Optimisták: Történelmi regény 1918–1919-ből [Optimists, historical novel from 1918–1919] (Budapest: Noran Libro, 2010). 2. The actual Moscow and Paris diaries on which The Novel of a Novel is based were published as “Moszkvai napló, 1935–1936,” [Moscow diaries, 1935–1936] in: Sinkó, Ervin, eds. József, Farkas, and László Illés, Az út. Naplók 1916–1939 [The Road. Diaries 1916–1939] (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1990). This book also contains, among other Sinkó diaries, the essay, Az út. It also has a rich set of notes by the pre-eminent Sinkó scholar, István Bosnyák, who unfortunately passed away without having written a biography for which he had done so much spadework. 3. Ervin Sinkó, ed. Mihály Sükösd, Szemben a bíróval, Válogatott tanulmányok [Facing the Judge, Selected essays] (Budapest: Gondolat, 1977), 50. 4. Sinkó, Szemben a bíróval, 47; In his Szabadka diaries, Sinkó mentions a character, in an early work written during World War I, whom he modeled on his uncle, a great “striver” (using the Hungarian-Yiddish word “stréber”). The character reappears in Optimists as the war-profiteering Westermayer, who sides with the right-wing defenders of property during the revolution that followed World War I. See Szabadkai napló, in Sinkó, Az út. Naplók., 27; compare to Sinkó, Optimisták, p. 33. 5. Borsányi György, trans. Mario Fenyő, The life of a communist revolutionary, Béla Kun (Boulder, Colo: Social Science Monographs, 1993), 73. 6. Mary Gluck, George Lukács and his Generation, 1900–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 196. See also Lee Congdon, The Young Lukács (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). 7. Sinkó, Az út. Naplók. 144. See also fn. 140 on p. 447, which validates through independent documents the basic facts of this story, though it mentions that in addition to Sinkó, the main mover in the lenient handling of the students was Aurél Stromfeld, their teacher under the old regime and the head of the Red Army under Kun. 8. Sinkó, Az út. Naplók. 144, 145. 9. József Kovács, Sinkó Ervin levelezése (The letters of Sinkó Ervin) 2 vols. (Budapest: Argumentum, 2001). See letters from 1920 in vol. 1. 10. Sinkó, Az út. Naplók. 201–202. 11. Sinkó, Az út. Naplók. 487, fn. 62.

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Translator’s Introduction

12. When Kun read Optimists in Moscow, Sinkó was afraid to mention to him that he had met with Károlyi in Paris. See chapter “Béla Kun,” entry for June 3, 1935. 13. H. Stuart Hughes, Contemporary Europe: A History (London: Prentice Hall, 1966), 252; see also Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (New York: Oxford Univ., 2012), 288. The transition from Popular Front to Great Terror in Soviet cultural policy during Sinkó’s stay is also covered in Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2011), especially chapters 5 and 6. 14. See extensive discussions by David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment and Ludmila Stern, Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union, 1920–1940 (London: Routledge, 2007). 15. Stern, Western Intellectuals, 17. 16. Sinkó, Szemben a bíróval, 90. 17. David Caute, The Fellow-Travellers, Intellectual Friends of Communism, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University, 1988) 18. On the period of relaxation, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism (New York: Oxford, 1999), 90. 19. Lewis Siegelbaum, “Building Stalinism, 1929–1941,” in Gregory L. Freeze, ed., Russia, A History, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 2009), 368. 20. Sinkó, Az út. Naplók. 384. 21. The war diaries have been published in the following two books: Ervin Sinkó, ed. István Bosnyák, Honfoglalás előtt: Naplófeljegyzések 1939-től 1942-ig [Before settling down, Diaries from 1939 to 1942], (Novi Sad: Forum, 1976); Ervin Sinkó, ed. István Bosnyák, Háborús bezúzott napló [Pulped war diary] (Novi Sad: Hungarian Cultural Society of Yugoslavia, 2000) 22. Sinkó, Háborús Bezúzott Napló, 463. 23. Sinkó, Háborús Bezúzott Napló, 461–463. 24. Ervin Sinkó, A regény regénye [The Novel of a Novel] (Budapest: Noran Libro, 2011), 577. 25. József Juhász: “A titói Jugoszlávia első évtizede,” [The first ten years of Tito’s Yugoslavia] in: Enikő A. Sajti, József Juhász, Tibor Molnár: A titói rendszer megszilárdulása a Tisza mentén (1945–1955) [The consolidation of the Tito regime along the Tisza, 1945–1955] (Szeged: Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Csongrád megyei Levéltára, 2013), 7. 26. Miller, Nick. The Nonconformists: Culture, Politics, and Nationalism in a Serbian Intellectual Circle, 1944–1991. (Budapest: Central European University, 2007), 47. 27. One student was the above-mentioned István Bosnyák, Sinkó’s proto-biographer, who interpreted Sinkó in a positive light. Another, more critical student who nevertheless respected his dedication to his students, is László Végel. See his novel Egy makró emlékiratai [The memoirs of a pimp] (Budapest: Noran Libro, 2017), about the 1960s student movement in Novi Sad, in which a minor character, a professor, is modeled on Sinkó. (The memoir in the title of this work has nothing to do with The Novel of a Novel.) 28. Tverdota György, personal communication with author, Budapest, Hungary, July 2017.

Note on Conventions

The reader will notice that some parts of this work are in italics and other in normal font. The sections that are in italics provide a framework from the perspective of 1953–1955, when The Novel of a Novel was composed in Zagreb, Yugoslavia. The normal font sections are a rewritten form of the actual diary entries that Sinkó made during his visit to the Soviet Union and after his return to Paris between May 1935 and September 1939. That actual diary of 368 pages, deposited in the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb, is in parts terse, or even intentionally vague, which is why Sinkó claims that he rewrote it in a more clearly understandable language but maintaining the perspective of the original. Of course how well he maintained that perspective can be debated and I touch on that in the translator’s introduction. This edition of The Novel of a Novel (the first one in English) is an abridgement. The original runs to 553 pages in its most recent edition published in Hungary, the edition that I used as the basis for this translation. 1 I have translated about two-thirds of the book but no chapters have been left out, nor, in my opinion, any important episodes. I have tried instead to omit only those passages that repeat points that Sinkó had previously articulated in the work. The excised portions are everywhere indicated with ellipses enclosed in square brackets thus: [. . .]. Where Sinkó himself used ellipses, those appear without square brackets. I have also summarized some sections of Sinkó’s work. These also appear within square brackets and are italicized or not, to match the section from which they are taken. NOTE 1. Ervin Sinkó, A regény regénye [The Novel of a Novel] (Budapest: Noran Libro, 2011).

xxxv

I

Part I

Chapter One

By Way of Introduction

To decide that you will recreate through art the most intense, formative, eventful and defining period of your life means, even among the most favorable conditions, that you are setting out on an adventure. And it is inherent in the concept of an adventure that the outcome is uncertain. This is precisely what makes artistic creation so intensely attractive: it would not be worth the effort of forming the work if that activity led to nothing surprising for the artist. The more lifelike the figures and the more concretely the recalled time and place come alive, the less room there is for the writer to think up fates and events. Artistic hallucination differs from the superficial games of imagination in that it excludes all possibilities of arbitrariness. Necessity and laws dominate; they guide and form the course of events just as inexorably as in nature. Hence, the writer is always faced with unexpected and unfamiliar assignments and surprising lessons. He begins an adventure, and lives through an adventure. There is yet another factor that makes the undertaking of a writer adventurous. While working to convey a complex of experiences with the toolkit of art, the writer lives not only in that time and place which he is portraying in his work: the writer does not only remember, he is in motion himself in an eventful time. Constantly exposed to new impressions, information, and experiences, the writer’s relationship to his own memories is subject to change. The way in which he interprets and evaluates what he remembers can change substantially in the time that it takes to write it down, especially if the work that he began lightheartedly takes not weeks or months but years to complete. And this is all the more so if the years are not simply years but ones packed to an unusually density with shocking events. If in those years, instead of being allowed to concentrate his attention on this complex of experiences, he is frequently forced to change the town, the city, the country where 3

4

Chapter 1

he does his work—that is, if he is constantly forced to view his model from different perspective—it is evident that the writer’s own irrational need and will to artistically record the receding past is in danger of being overwhelmed by the forces of time and place, of external and internal circumstances, in other words, by the irresistible laws of motion. The historical novel entitled Optimists is an attempt to convey the outlines of the Hungarian revolution of 1918–1919 and of the inner, crisis-filled lives of its revolutionary generation. Its author started writing his novel in total isolation in a Swabian-inhabited town of Yugoslavia, Prigrevica Sveti Ivan, and wrote the final sentence in undiminished isolation but in greater financial uncertainty in 1934, at the dawn of a winter day in Paris. [. . .] The current work was written not to excuse, defend, or praise a novel that was completed over two decades ago or because the author overestimates the importance of his own story. If in what follows there is much said about both Optimists and its author, it is because it cannot be helped. In other words, it would only be possible if I were to decline the opportunity, presented by the publication of Optimists, to publish the novel of that novel as well. I have no right to do this. My Moscow journal, letters, and the other documents that I have managed to save to this day have by now become important historical sources, and it is on the bases of these that I wish to tell the story of the novel. When in 1934, at the dawn of that winter day, I put the final period at the end of the last sentence of Optimists, I was, quite naturally, happy and, less naturally but quite as justifiably, perplexed at the same time. Suddenly and with the merciless objectivity of things, the large pile of written sheets of paper lying before me demanded: And what now? The question was no doubt a logical one: What good is a letter, even if written with your own heart’s blood, if it cannot reach its addressee? What good is a manuscript beautifully typed by the author’s wife (poor thing) onto good white paper—paper whose acquisition more than once required hard sacrifices? What good is the manuscript of a 1,200-page novel if it ends up on the top of the armoire or under the bed in the mass grave called a “vulcanized” suitcase, roughed up by its burden in the course of its many travels? The question, which struck me in this happy moment and made me unhappy was already put succinctly by Endre Ady: What good is a man, if he is Hungarian? 1

I could no longer ignore this question. I had silenced and beat it back in selfdefense throughout our wanderings until now so that I would have the strength to continue working. Like the spirit in a bottle from The Arabian Nights, when there was no longer anything to stop it, the question grew,

By Way of Introduction

5

casting an oppressive shadow as big, as gigantic as Paris itself, as the entire foreign world! A manuscript for a novel is only potentially a novel’s manuscript. It becomes real as a novel (and I know very well all that can be said about art for art’s sake!) only when through it and within it the writer can form his own visions and convictions into an experience that he also conveys to others. As I reached the end of three-and-a-half years of labor, I could no longer hide from the question: What can one do in the middle of foreign Paris with such a huge, frighteningly huge Hungarian manuscript in 1934, of all times, when Hitler was already Germany’s official and revered leader, but also the not-so-secret hope at that time of Europe’s great powers! What can one do with such a manuscript in an age when Hitler became the idol of middleclass (and not just middle-class) youth, in the same way that Napoleon had captured the imagination of the French at the beginning of the last century? What seemed timely and compelling in Europe in 1934, what attracted the public’s attention, was the unmistakably upward arc of German fascism and of fascism in general. Articles, studies, reports, and books appeared by the dozens, even by the hundreds, that discussed and analyzed the thinking, ideology, successes and perspectives of German National Socialism. Day by day an increasing number of European liberal celebrities, while distancing themselves from the ideology of fascism and from its euphemistically called “excesses,” nevertheless paid their respects, in the name of even-handedness, to the “positive and constructive accomplishments” of the “new-style revolutions” of the twentieth century, “to the creative force that has been animating the inherent energy of nations to a previously unimagined extent.” Europe’s most powerful and largest workers’ parties and organizations, those in Germany, vanished in silence from one day to the next, as if into a trap door on the stage of history. Publish the Optimists then, in such times?! What kind of reception could have been expected in 1934 for an episode that took place in Hungary in the months following World War I, at the highpoint of a revolutionary tide that was over, apparently forever? What about Hungary? Ever since I had escaped from there to Austria in 1919 after the failure of the revolution, there was not a day when I did not think of it as the burying ground of smashed hopes, loud with the voices of carousing gentlemen; a burying ground which from time to time, as once again, becomes the place of executions. In the 1920s, at the time of the socalled consolidated counter-revolution, Ernő Osvát and Zsigmond Móricz were courageous enough to find a place relatively frequently in the Nyugat for my novels, short stories, and articles. 2 But since then, under the influence of the events in Germany, the “consolidated” counter-revolution has become the “dynamic” counter-revolution and has moved in the direction of a fascist dictatorship. But even if this hadn’t been so, even if Osvát had not committed suicide in 1929, even if Nyugat had continued to be willing (as it had long

6

Chapter 1

ceased to be) to publish my work, there was no chance that a novel about the Hungarian revolution like Optimists could have seen the light of day in Horthy’s Hungary. Yes, but there was a Hungarian emigrant community as well. There was also a Hungarian Communist Party in Moscow, and there, the Publishing Company of Foreign Workers of the USSR had a Hungarian language division as well. Yet, what was being published by the Hungarian Communist Party clearly illustrates the situation of the author of Optimists at that time: namely, that the novel about the Hungarian revolution could by no means count on the party’s publishing house. This was simply so because what appeared under the heading of Hungarian literature in Moscow had much more to do with an ever-changing political doctrine than with literature. This is illustrated by the fact that when the leadership of the party returned from Moscow to Hungary at the end of the war, after a quarter century of exile, there was hardly a work, whether novel, play, short story, or poetry, that the party itself felt worthy of republication in Budapest among its otherwise quite weighty baggage of material written and published in Soviet Russia. [. . .] There were talented, indeed, extraordinarily talented writers of prose and poetry among the Hungarian émigrés in Moscow. And yet, there is not a single work of Hungarian literature that had been produced during the entire quarter century of the Moscow exile that can measure up to the works of Zsigmond Móricz or Atilla József. 3 A Hungarian writer living in Zurich, Vienna, or Paris and closely following the published works of party writers and poets in Moscow could, in the best of cases, convince himself that such literature was useful or necessary from a political point of view, but even if he did convince himself, it was in spite of this literature that he was able to maintain a faith that the party could live up to its calling: the creation of a new man by giving wing to the human spirit and by liberating man’s intellect. When all was said and done, I had to come to the conclusion: it was not my book that the party wanted. Those to whom I felt the closest once again as I watched the forward march of fascism, would have desired this book the least, precisely because I had written it about them and, above all, for them. The primary reason that they would not and could not have wanted it published was that in it I had endeavored to provide an unhesitatingly full exposition—without regard to anyone’s reputation—of the experience of the revolution with all its contradictions. They would not want it precisely because I had recorded what I feared no one else would or could record. I have completed it. It exists. But now that it exists—thought I on that very first dawn—it is as if it did not exist; that is, there was no way for the pile of scribble-filled sheets to leave the mass grave of my valise and to go beyond my four walls into the real world of living people and to become a real, living book capable of producing an effect. But if this is so, then the question

By Way of Introduction

7

arises: Is there any valid reason, any ethical justification, for my whole monomaniacal, graphomaniacal existence? There is no feeling more chokingly oppressive than the suspicion that perhaps, after all, your whole way of life, its content, the very essence of your life is built on a false premise. There are words which, once they come before our eyes, can never be erased from memory. They may be obscured by various events, only to break forth at certain turns in our life journey with ever greater, tragic emphasis. It was back in the days of the Grinzing barracks, at the beginning of our emigration that I was struck by two sentences in Hebbel’s diary. One was about the silkworm which will always spin silk, even if there is no one who would want to wear garments of silk. I was in my early twenties at the time and was naturally attracted by the stubborn pathos of the statement. At that age, one can enjoy playing that role. The aesthetic pathos of the pose provides a sense of compensation in a world that crushes everything beautiful and good. But with time the silkworm realized that it is not living on its own resources and that life, this life—if one is allowed to continue in this manner—becomes an ethical problem; especially if there is someone next to you who has to share the extraordinarily heavy consequences of your life. And on the dawn of this Parisian day, seeing the completed manuscript of Optimists, the other sentence from Hebbel’s diary came back to me: My identity comes from my poetry. If it is a mistake, then so am I. 4

[. . .] It is not the recognition itself that is the most important here, but the intention and decision that is expressed in this recognition: the poet’s intention to subordinate his life, despite everything and everyone, to his task, which he holds to be his personal obligation, an obligation that defines him. [. . .] Such a decision also contains a submission, not a servile bow but a selfconfident bow before a fate that I choose for myself with the understanding that I recognize it as, and will it to be, my fate. Yes, but when you are past all youthful posing before the mirror and all feelings of self-righteousness then you might awake to the possibility that what you have considered your personal calling, the thing to which you have dedicated your life, is not a calling at all but an obsession; it is the way not of the consistent warrior but of the stubborn fool, and hence your whole life has been a mistake. Isolation and the absence of feedback can reach a point where you have to struggle day by day, indeed hour by hour, to preserve the belief that you have the right to your calling, the belief in your right to expend your best energies into writing what appear to be unwanted poems, novels, and dramas in a world where people—those people closest to you—bleed real blood from real wounds in the struggle for human justice and the enhancement of life.

8

Chapter 1

I did not become a writer to deny my solidarity with this struggle; on the contrary, it was the aching need and the will for solidarity that made me a writer, and also the belief that by writing I am taking part in this struggle, indeed more effectively than by doing anything else. [. . .] Although I never possessed that intoxicated, perhaps necessary fanaticism (most frequently found among young artists) through which one overestimates the worth of one’s creations, I was convinced that, compared to all my other abilities, there was nothing I could do better and nothing was better suited to what was possible and necessary for me than the effort—indeed, the compulsion—to put into words, to register in words, and to convey to others in words all that is alive in me. In this way, to be a writer was for me, from the beginning and increasingly so as the years passed by, equivalent to a certain obligatory ethical stance with respect to the outside world and toward myself. Consequently, I could be an unskilled laborer in a bed-spring factory, I could be an apprentice carpenter, or a fee-collector traversing the city of Vienna from one end to the other for the daily Der Tag—in its Bosel days—or I could be, as I often was, without any income, like so many others in the émigré barracks of Vienna’s Grinzing district, but under no circumstances would I have allowed my writing to be guided by any considerations other than the laws of my inner truths. In this matter, any compromise or concession whether to the “right” or to the “left” would have been a betrayal of the right to pursue writing as a life’s calling. Thus, even if the author of Optimists did nothing to insure that an article suitable to the tastes of the “market” leaves his hand (in fact, he did all that was in his power to write his novel as if a “market for books”—a name that quite accurately expresses what it is—did not even exist) he nevertheless felt, after three and a half years of labor, that it was just as much his duty to transform the manuscript into a book that becomes a living thing, a book that gets into the hands of the reader, as he had felt initially that at all costs he must write this manuscript. There is not much to be said about most manuscripts: they either find a publisher or they do not. But this was not so with the novel entitled Optimists: this manuscript at a particular moment began to live an actual life of its own. It experienced adventures and trials just like a flesh-and-blood living person. And I, its author, suddenly realized that I hardly had a choice in the matter, that the manuscript of Optimists was not only guiding my path, but was also getting me into situations and forcing me into such unexpected experiences and realizations that would decisively affect, indeed, shape the rest of my life. Stranger still: the adventures and experiences—some quite painful, others comic—engendered by the tortuous career of the manuscript worked to illuminate, directly or indirectly, the same problems on the level of

By Way of Introduction

9

external reality with which the most important characters of the novel struggled. The history of the manuscript is, in a certain sense, a continuation of the novel on the unfriendly level of empirical reality. Now that, after twenty years of waiting and after such adventures, the novel Optimists has arisen from its tearful manuscript grave, it is apt that I tell its own story. My venture is considerably facilitated by the fact that I do not need to rely on my memory to reconstruct the novel of the novel. On my desk sit the documents from which I shall quote. And, most important of all . . . During the two years that I spent in Moscow between 1935 and 1937, I kept a journal. “My good God! Among the two hundred million people of the Soviet Union, there is no one else so idiotic as to keep a journal!” said a Hungarian comrade then living in Moscow, after he heard about this journal. And he added: “My only request is that neither while I am alive nor when I am dead should you ever connect my name in any way to your stay in Moscow.” This comrade, as I recently learned, has already perished, yet I will keep my promise out of consideration for those close to him. But the journal that I kept in Moscow has survived; it is here before me and belongs to the fantastic but true adventures of the manuscript of Optimists. NOTES 1. Endre Ady (1877–1919) was a symbolist poet deservedly idolized by Sinkó’s left-wing generation. This well-known rhetorical question is from Az ős Kaján (Old Kayan). The question quoted could be understood to mean “What is a man worth, if he writes in Hungarian?” It indicates the dilemma of the Hungarian poet on the world stage. For a translation of the entire poem by Watson Kirkonnel, see “The Quest of the Miracle Stag: The Poetry of Hungary,” Adam Makkai (ed), Corvina, Budapest, 1996. 405–7. 2. The Nyugat (West), was the preeminent literary journal of Hungarian “bourgeois radical” reformers. It was founded in 1908 but still published during the conservative Horthy era, when its editors were the essayist Ernő Osvát (1877–1929), followed by Zsigmond Móricz (1879–1942), one of the most important Hungarian novelists of the twentieth century. 3. Atilla József (1905–1937) was a member of the illegal Communist Party in Hungary and one of Hungary’s most important poets, irrespective of political affiliation. 4. “Von meiner Poesie hängt mein Ich ab; ist jene ein Irrtum, so bin ich selbst einer.” The quote is from the Tagebücher (Diaries), October 3, 1839 entry, of the German poet Christian Friedrich Hebbel (1813–1863), a favorite of both György Lukács and of Lukács’s one-time protegé and friend, Sinkó. See chapter 11, note 7.

Chapter Two

As If by Miracle

[. . .] I do not exaggerate at all when I characterize the situation of the Optimists in the early months of 1934 as utterly hopeless. For the foreigner, Paris can truly be a city of miracles. You don’t even need to have lots of money; you can be living under pinched circumstances at the level of the respectable poor. But the situation of the respectable poor is like that of the aristocracy-of-wealth when viewed from the situation of a destitute foreigner who is not even allowed to aspire to that level, because if the police discover that you have tried to earn a living by any means, be it of the lowest-paid occasional job, you can be put in jail and deported. This is not even the worst of it. The thing that pursues the foreigner who has no acquaintances in Paris—what makes him sick and tortures him even more than the fear of falling into that forbidden zone of poverty—is a short question pronounced with the most natural tone, with unbelievable spontaneity and ease by secretaries, office clerks, maids, or their bosses, on the phone or face to face. The question that everyone, regardless of class, seems to have learned while still in the crib as a weapon against the métèque (foreigner, pejoratively), consists of the few seemingly innocent and harmless words that appear to express mere curiosity: “At whose recommendation?” (De la part de qui) or sometimes even more simply, abbreviated, and in this form the three dots act as if in anticipation but at the same time, with rifle by the feet, “De la part . . . ?” The foreigner without acquaintances in Paris can count himself happy until he realizes what lurks behind those five almost ingratiatingly melodious monosyllabic little words. But he will soon learn their meaning. So much so, that he will fear them as soon as he lifts the telephone receiver in the booth of the corner bistro or as he ascends the stairs that lead to a publisher’s or 11

12

Chapter 2

editorial staff’s office. And he has reason to fear them, because to whomever he turns, as soon as he explains his wish to see this or that person, they will not ask, “in connection with what?,” but always anew and always with the prescribed politeness and friendliness, with an amiability that reminds you of your barbaric nature: “De la part de qui?” [When it turns out that you have no answer to this question, you are very politely turned away with some excuse.] [But] one autumn afternoon, after I deposited the tokens into the telephone at the Café Dupont, dialed, gave my name along with my meek request for an appointment, suddenly, for once, it was not the persecuting “De la part de qui?” that I heard, but rather, without any further ado: “Certainly, please come to my apartment tomorrow morning at Avenue de Lowendal.” This alone was a happy novelty after the long, fruitless series of failures. Next morning, in the company of the Hungarian manuscript of Optimists squeezed into two big blue folders tucked under my arms, I set off to visit Michael Károlyi. 1 I was excited and felt an awe unbefitting someone closer to forty than to thirty. In this case, the excitement was not due to the question of whether I would succeed at taking a step toward the publication of Optimists; by then I had long begun to carry out the experiments to this end mostly out of a sense of duty, prepared for resignation and not in the expectation of some surprising positive turn. I imagined that I would tell this man, if I ever did get to see him, what his unique career path meant in moral and human terms to the generation who witnessed it: from one of Hungary’s highest magnates to the hero of the duels—“with heavy cavalry sword and without bandages”—against Count István Tisza 2; to the telegraph sent by the mutinous sailors of Kotor greeting him as their friend; to his role as the “red baron,” President of the Hungarian Republic, against whom the Horthy regime created a law and whom it designated as the greatest traitor ever in Hungary’s thousand-year history, from whom they took all property, and whom they forced into becoming the fugitive Comrade Károlyi. I arrived exactly at the appointed hour. Actually, I was there early and walked around the house until it was time. I walked up the stairs, rang the doorbell and waited. Silence. Maybe I rang too timidly. I rang again. I leaned more heavily on the electric bell’s pushbutton. In vain! My good mood vanished instantaneously. Under normal circumstances, one assumes that there was some misunderstanding. I, on the other hand, stood before the tall, locked door with that big package of manuscripts that had brought me pain in a whole series of similar situations. People who have not had such experiences may not realize that an unfriendly touch does not just stand for itself but reverberates and recalls all those slights that have piled up in heaps independently of it; like a single off-handed remark that stirs up and revives every disagreeable memory. [He rang one more time. . . .] And then I walked

As If by Miracle

13

down the wide staircase that suddenly seemed frighteningly distinguished, toward the gate. I hurried out to be on the street again. But once out on the street, I stopped to take one more look around and recognized Károlyi’s unmistakably tall, gaunt figure appearing on the corner. I remembered him from photographs—on horseback, on aristocratic hunts, speaking before Parliament, or dressed in formal Hungarian pomp—I had seen in my childhood in the The World Magazine of Tolna (Tolnai Világlap) and in Interesting News (Érdekes Újság). Now, with a woven, straw carrying-bag in his hand, he was hurrying, as much as his left leg, which he was dragging behind himself with noticeable effort, would allow. He waved the bag, from which peered forth the freshly bought vegetables and lettuce, as a gesture of excuse, as soon as he caught sight of me. Ever since his bicycle accident, he explains, his left leg has been giving him trouble; he is forever underestimating the distance; he was sure he could get back in time, and, “well, you see . . .” He acted as if he had just escaped a threatening doom by still finding me here. Joyful at my presence and still reproachful toward himself, he led me back up to his apartment. [. . .] From the first moment he made me feel that it was I who was about to do him a favor and that he already felt indebted to me. He behaved with such suggestive directness that I actually forgot that I was the one who was always bothering people, was burdensome and in need of help. How he achieved this I still cannot tell. It was not some outward show but something, if I may so express myself, emanating from his inner being that affected me so. As he sat opposite me with stiff torso, his long, ringed fingers on the table, and his old, bald head inclined toward me, he made all my problems so naturally his own that I had the feeling that in the final analysis, we were discussing our shared problems. In Vienna, Zurich, and especially Paris, I had already had my share of experiencing the terrible emptiness behind the conversations of the impressively well-heeled. Not that what such people say lacks intelligence. Indeed, sometimes it is even interesting. And the problems about which they inquire can be, indeed, often are quite serious ones. But when at the end of the meeting you are out on the street alone, you suddenly have a bitter taste in your mouth, bitter and acerbic: the exchange was simply “conversation” and the many words served not to bring two people closer together but on the contrary: the gentleman in question was trying to classify you before placing you in his collection of exotic species, or he was simply making “conversation” about great but general issues of an intellectual or political-ideological nature because this is the most sophisticated way to avoid establishing a personal relationship with you, which in the present situation, could lead only to unpleasant entanglements. Károlyi, on the other hand, inquired immediately about how I was making a living, and when I told him that this is a mystery even to me, he didn’t insist

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that I keep telling him more but as an incentive, started telling me a few things about himself. He pretended that he was just “making conversation,” as if he simply wanted to entertain me. He spoke about Hungary, saying that it was perhaps the only European country in which the caste system was so strong that not only was the aristocracy totally isolated from the people but also from the middle classes. He spoke of the journalists from Budapest who came to interview him before the War in one of his castles, and tried to pay off his bodyguard hussar to divulge the location of my harem, nor would they believe the hussar when he denied the existence of one. And he told me about his wife, the daughter of Count Andrássy, who, at the age of sixteen, wanted to travel from Buda across the river to Pest to buy something, at which point her English governess sent a telegram to Paris asking permission from her parents for Countess Katinka to go across to the plebeian Pest in the company of her governess. He used this occasion, as if incidentally, to ask about my wife and to beg that the next time I come, I should make him happy by bringing her as well. From the often grotesque occasional work performed by my wife, for whom it was forbidden to work in her profession as a physician, the discussion turned to Paris. “Still,” said I, “despite it all, we felt relieved when we arrived from Vienna to Paris, where one sees more kissing couples on the streets than political symbols,” and I told him that in Vienna, which we had left after the burning of the Reichstag in Berlin, we were eyewitnesses, literally eyewitnesses, to the forward march of fascism. My wife and I did not look at people’s faces on the streets but only on what kind of pins they had stuck in their lapels. And not just I or my wife, but we noticed that everyone was looking only at the lapels of those coming toward them. This created a kind of eerie, inhuman atmosphere. Even when you were alone in your room, the pins would dance before your eyes. You had the feeling of total helplessness, that in this country there was no way out, that unstoppable fate was day by day becoming a reality. Wherever you went in the city you could not help but notice from one day to the next the increasingly frequent appearance of swastika pins on the chests of young men and girls, on the middle-aged and the old, and on people of all orders and ranks. Just like at the beginning of our stay in Vienna as émigrés, at the time of the great inflation, when hour by hour the numbers signifying prices sprang upward and upward in the shop windows next to the items on display, so grew the numbers of those who put swastikas on their chests. It was not easy to work on the chapters of Optimists there, on a novel of the Hungarian revolution. In this connection we started to talk about Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss, whom the Austrian Social Democrats had underestimated at the start of his career in the same way that German Communists had underestimated the threat of Hitler. Otto Bauer had condescendingly mocked him as “Hitler in a

As If by Miracle

15

vest pocket.” But Dollfuss, putting down the uprising of the Viennese workers, demonstrated that they had underestimated his qualities as an executioner, until he himself—and at the time of my meeting with Károlyi, it had hardly been a month previous—was assassinated by the Austrian followers of Hitler. Károlyi said: “It is as if we have ceased to be an active factor. About us, they just have to decide amongst themselves, who will be our executioner, the Heimwehr or the Swastika, Starhemberg or Hitler . . .” When he started to talk, his face became flushed from emotion for a moment, and as he fell silent, the brief wave of his hand and the line that appeared around his lips expressed fatigue and almost hatred. What surprised me were the expressions “we” and “us,” the way that he totally identified himself with the communists. I even asked him: “I know that you participate in every anti-fascist activity, but I thought that this was from human sympathy and not because you are a communist . . .” “No, even today I am not a Marxist,” confessed Károlyi, “but the Soviet Union is the only place where the battle for humanism is being waged. You will see, in the end not only the English but also Mussolini will make an attempt to come to an agreement with Hitler, but the only power that could never even consider such a pact is the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union,” and Károlyi, who could express himself better in French than in Hungarian, was searching for the right word, and finally expressed his idea with the use of a French word, “The Soviet Union is in my mind, at the present time the only ‘noyeau’ (kernel) in which still lives the possibility of a humane future..” Károlyi did not forget this conversation of ours, either. When we met again in Paris in 1937 after my return from Moscow, just after the first Moscow trials, he greeted me with: “I don’t believe a word that the communist papers write about the trials. This is a funeral, believe me, our own funeral, at which we assist with our silence. Can you call it a life when one has lost all hope? The noyeau, what has become of the noyeau . . .” I left the manuscript of Optimists with Károlyi so that he could perhaps find the time to read it. If I expressed myself thus, it was not just out of humility or politeness. The morning that I had spent with him meant a lot to me; this was the first time since the completion of the manuscript that it had brought me joy. After all, Károlyi is not a professional intellectual. I could not expect more than that he would let me know his impressions about a manuscript dealing with a period which had such a decisive significance in his life and political career. Three days later, I received a letter from him, via pneumatic tube, and it only contained a few lines in his characteristically large script. It told me to

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look him up and to bring with me the German translation of Optimists and also what exists of it in French. It is only upon seeing a happy miracle that people can sit in wonder as two people sat that day in a room at the Hôtel des Étrangers. It’s true that one of the two only said: “It is fortunate that I didn’t let myself be dissuaded from making that German translation,” and she pretended for pedagogical reasons that she wasn’t even surprised, as if she hadn’t just been overcome by fantastic hopes. I, on the other hand, was open about my conviction that we stood before a change in the fate of Optimists and in our own fate. But what in fact followed was a much larger change, much more far reaching and fateful than I had imagined. The incalculable paradox that ultimately transpired can be summarized in the sentence: You think you are about to walk from the Rue Racine to the Avenue de Lowendal but you later realize that it was not to there but to Moscow that you had set out. NOTES 1. Count Michael Károlyi (1875–1955)—on Károlyi’s role in the post-War revolutions in Hungary, see the foreword. Károlyi went into exile after the overthrow of the Kun regime in July 1919. In 1924, he moved to Paris, but he travelled extensively, including to the United States and to the Soviet Union. Also around 1924, after becoming convinced that the liberal democratic program no longer had a chance in Horthy’s Hungary and recognizing the trend toward fascism that was sweeping through Europe (which he experienced first-hand in Italy, where he lived for a short time), he decided to cooperate with the newly re-established Hungarian Communist Party, and through them, with the Soviet Union. He did not join any communist party. After 1929, he was a key member of the International Anti-Fascist Committee and other international organizations in which the Comintern was also involved. In the late 1920s Károlyi funded the publication in French, through the Monde (not to be confused with Le Monde) press of a number of books in Hungarian, which were smuggled into Hungary with the help of the Communists. Sinkó does not mention this and one wonders if he was aware of it. In any case, Károlyi was no longer publishing such books when Sinkó looked him up. We should also note that Károlyi and Kun always had a tense relationship. Kun had refused to allow Károlyi to stay on as president of Hungary when the Kun regime came to power. Károlyi’s biographer attributes the discord, beyond ideological and policy differences, to personal chemistry. See Tibor Hajdu, Ki volt Károlyi Mihály (Who was Michael Károlyi) (Budapest: Napvilág, 2012), 123. 2. István Tisza (1861–1918) was Prime Minister of Hungary prior to the War and during most of it. He exemplified the old order of Dualism in Austria-Hungary. His sword duel with Károlyi occurred in 1913 over Tisza’s forceful and unconstitutional measures to limit the powers of the opposition parties in Parliament.

Chapter Three

Károlyi Goes into Action, and Two Letters from Switzerland in Quick Succession

His first words were exclamations of complaint, which in their bitterness might have passed for reproach as well. “This is terrible, if I may say so, terrible. Such a pile of loose manuscript pages! If only you had bound them together somehow!” What happened was that he had been reading the manuscript by an open window and while he was out of the room momentarily, a wind rose up so that by the time he innocently re-entered the room to continue his reading, he was confronted with a horrible sight; the only thing that remained on the desk was the cover of the manuscript whereas the entire floor was strewn with the pages of Optimists. “Exactly like a ballroom at midnight after a confetti battle,” he said. He had to gather up the pages on hands and knees and then struggle to put them into order by page number. “That was no trivial task, and then the uncomfortable worry until I ascertained that no page had been lost!” The typist, translator, and, up to that time, for the most part, the only reader of Optimists, who this time, in compliance with the invitation, was with me, interpreted the events as accusations against herself in such an evident way that Károlyi, who just a moment ago had been bitterly giving vent to the panic that he had experienced, quickly changed gears and made believe that his complaints and reproaches had not been meant seriously. Chuckling, he quickly switched to what, as he said, was of the utmost importance. He asked me to tell him what I had tried to do up to that point in the interests of publishing Optimists, and said it was good that the three of us were together now so that we could jointly work out a plan of attack. 17

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I launched into a listing of my experiments, or rather, failures so far, and, as the most typical, I started describing my recent brief visit to Editions Albin Michel. “Brief” refers not to the amount of time I spent in the waiting room but only to the amount of time I spent in the editor’s office itself. The editor was a short, morose elderly gentleman—perhaps he was having a bad day independent of my visit. In any case, he forgot to offer me a seat. Nor did he let me explain what I wanted. He reached right after the manuscript and, weighing it in his hand, started shaking his head side to side, exclaiming, “Oh! là! là!” and then with an expression such as one makes when about to taste some food toward which he has a phobia, he opened up the manuscript at a random place, then, without even looking into it, closed it and handed it back to me. “Not interested! I see Rosa Luxembourg, Liebknecht, so it’s a sort of political novel.” And with that, he rose to show that the audience was over. The whole thing took less time than it does to count to sixty, though I can’t even begin to tote up how many places I had to visit before getting a letter of recommendation to the famous publisher. Károlyi’s look became so serious that I didn’t want to continue the recitation of my adventures, and I asked him instead to tell me what he thought of Optimists. He seemed surprised at my request. “I totally forgot,” he said, and if I had not seen his face, this answer would have seemed incredible. But it was clear that he had completely forgotten about his own person and about how important it might be for me to hear his opinion. He saw his role as one of finding a publisher for Optimists. “I have said it all, when I tell you both that we must find a publisher; whatever it takes, we must find one.” He fell silent, leaned forward slightly, and from behind his glasses, his dark eyes came to rest with intense attention upon us as we sat across from him. He stood up with sudden determination, and as far as his left leg permitted, hurried to the telephone on his small desk. He removed a thick phone book from a drawer, and after a fairly long search for a number, sat down, dialed, and stood up, pressing the receiver to his ear. I heard him ask for Gallimard to come to the phone. “De la part du comte Michel Károlyi,” 1 he answered to the usual question, and pushing the receiver away from his ear with a mocking face, he whispered to us: “In such cases, you will see, it is better to be a count.” And after arranging with Gallimard, who had come to the phone right away, to receive him the next evening—“il s’agit d’une affaire urgente et très importante,” 2—he again sat down across from us. “I’ll put this tiny parcel under my arms and limp over to him with it,” he said, picking up the German copy of Optimists and the few hundred typed pages that existed of it in French, and immediately added, “One must attack from several angles at the same time. Whom do you know among the French

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writers? No one? Then you must meet André Malraux 3 right away. He is an extraordinarily likeable, warm, and active young man; I will invite him. I need to speak to him anyway about the latest arrest of Communists in Budapest and about the Rákosi 4 case that is in the offing. He will be able to help a lot. He continued coming up with many such plans and after a while I tried to steer the conversation back to the Optimists, or rather to the question of what effect it had on him. The book had been an experience for him. He had relived that atmosphere—this is how he expressed himself—in which he had lived at that time but it was only now that he realized consciously that it had been a chiliastic atmosphere. He spoke of some of the characters in the novel whom he recognized despite their novelistic aliases. He knew Ágota Koltai, or rather that aristocratic girl who bore that name in the novel, just from those times when she had been infatuated with the communists. She was not inspired by Marx but rather by Tolstoy and Meister Eckhart. Since then, Ágota Koltai has found her way back to the aristocracy and was recently in Paris as the victor in an aristocratic “horserace” for a husband. But it was not just such personal reminiscences that the novel brought up. He warned me that my novel portrayed his political role falsely at one point. He himself was the most surprised when on the morning of March 22, 1919, a printed flyer appeared on the streets with a proclamation supposedly by him and addressed to the people of Hungary. He had not written this proclamation and had never seen it before. It had come to him as an unpleasant surprise. The Communist Party had need of his popularity and without asking him, they forged not only the story of his resignation but also his calling upon the Hungarian people to support the government of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The most interesting thing in all this was that although it was within his power to expose the truth, he could not bring himself to do so, simply because, despite everything, the cause of the Communists was also his cause, not so much in its political particulars but morally, taken as a whole. He disagreed with them completely on the detailed questions of politics, but to attack them would have meant lending his political prestige to the service of the Whites, the enemies of the Communists. This is why it happened that right at the beginning of the dictatorship, he clashed sharply with Dr. Jenő Hamburger, the commissar of agrarian policy, since Károlyi’s policy was that there should be a distribution of land [to the peasants]. It is now evident, and can be seen from the novel as well, that the alternative policy of “socializing” 5 the landholdings led to a fatal catastrophe. But this was the remarkable thing: with respect to the Communists, he felt that he had no right to openly emphasize his own views. To go against them, to take a stand against them, would have meant that one was standing, whether willingly or not, with the counterrevolution.

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Another, otherwise not very significant part of the novel also surprised Károlyi for personal reasons. Namely, that minor episode in which the character named Dani, the commander of the Lenin Boys, 6 describes how he clicked his heels when Count Esterházy, who had been under arrest in Dani’s power, extended his hands when Dani freed him. In the novel this is told from the point of view of the commander of the Lenin Boys. But Károlyi already knew this story, not from the novel, but from Count Esterházy’s personal recounting of it. Esterházy had looked up Károlyi on the day that he had been set free and with the experience fresh in his mind, he described his adventures with József Cserny, the real person on whom Dani was modeled. Esterházy was amazed and amused by the fact that he, who stood defenseless shaking before the towering, armed man, suddenly found himself to have the upper hand with him. Károlyi thought the greatest virtue of Optimists to be that, as in this little episode, one senses the depiction to be authentic throughout, both historically and psychologically. Ceterum censeo: we must do everything to find a publisher for it. From this point on, Károlyi was tireless in pursuing all kinds of unconventional, sometimes quite bizarre experiments. On one such occasion, I received an invitation from a Marquis de Brion, who was totally unknown to me but who was giving a reception in his Parisian mansion in honor of German émigré writers. Naturally, the white-gloved footmen who bowed respectfully as they served the much more shabbily dressed writers made quite an impression, but Heinrich Mann, to whom Károlyi introduced me, could only say that he, too, would like to know whether anything will come of that publishing company that German émigrés were planning to set up in Sweden. And so, by the time that Gallimard’s answer arrived in a letter—in which he indicated that he thought extremely highly of Optimists and wished he could publish it, but to his greatest regret the unusual length of the work provided an insurmountable obstacle in today’s unfavorable market for books—I had a considerable collection of such letters, complete with the seals and signatures not only of French publishers and literary agencies but also those of London. Károlyi forewarned me of every experiment he was about to make except for the one that was to have a decisive significance from the point of view of the author of the Optimists. One day Károlyi victoriously waved a French letter, containing a particular flag-like script, in front of me. I reproduce a translation of it here in its entirety: Villeneuve (Vaud, Switzerland), Villa Olga, Jan. 1, 1935 My Dear Sir, every week I receive two manuscripts in all languages with a request that I read them and naturally that I write a foreword with which to

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recommend them to a publisher. Despite my sincere wish to comply with these requests, a person at my age (69), ill, and full of assignments, cannot be expected to fulfill this role of reader for publishing firms. I had to decide that I would not write forewords or introductions to manuscripts that I am unfortunately unable to read. And I regret that I cannot make an exception in the case of Mr. Erwin Simko (sic) either; because if I make an exception in his case, I would anger all those in whose case I did not make an exception. Please be so kind as to forgive me. Nevertheless, I skimmed Erwin Simko’s novel’s first two chapters in French (it is difficult for me to read German), and without personally sympathizing with the people and psychological situations that he describes, I immediately recognized the merits of the writer. His value is unquestionable and he would deserve to be recognized by a European elite. I am quite comfortable in recommending him to the publishing firm of Rieder (the only French publisher who listens to what I say) but I am quite sure that in this year of serious crisis for the French publishing industry, one can hardly hope that they will accept a foreign book of such length. My wife, who was even more affected by the first two French chapters that we received than I was, is wondering why the author does not offer it to the publishers in the Soviet Union: to the Union of Revolutionary Writers or to the State Publishers. You are aware how liberal they are there about publishing new, valuable works, especially if the work is bound to such real social interests as is this book. We are convinced that Erwin Simko has very good prospects of being accepted and recognized there. We remember you amicably and I remain your sincere devotee, Romain Rolland 7

Károlyi took these lines to be the sure signs of victory and tried to weave plans with me for making use of this letter in the interests of Optimists. Contrary to Rolland, he did not think that sending the book to Moscow would lead to the desired result. So far, only one novel had been published there on the Hungarian Soviet Republic, namely, Ég a Tisza (The Tisza is Burning), 8 in 1929. This book aimed not so much at a realistic depiction of events and people but rather at a romantic glorification of the Revolution. “It is just the opposite of your book. In your book the historically accurate story dominates. They would twist your neck until it broke; if no one else, then Béla Kun would,” opined Károlyi. [A week later, a second letter arrived from Rolland, this time directly to Sinkó, and although the spelling of his name was correct this time, he almost could not retrieve the letter at the post office because his identity papers bore another name—most likely Franjo Spitzer, his birthname, under which he had his Yugoslav passport issued to protect himself from extradition proceedings started by the Horthy regime.] Villeneuve (Vaud), January 7, 1935

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Dear M. Ervin Sinkó, A few days ago, after leafing through your manuscript, I wrote to Count Károlyi. Now I have read these chapters more thoroughly in French, especially Chapter XI, which has left a deep impression on me. I and my wife (who was struck by your work from the very first line) are astounded by the wealth of psychological detail, that free and broad intelligence, which raises the most important moral questions facing modern man in a revolutionary situation and discusses them in a gripping mode that is never abstract. I am too loaded down with tasks and too ill to be able to spend the time to read the rest of the work in German (while I can read German well, it always tires me out). But if the rest of the work lives up to the standards of these three chapters (which I have every reason to believe is the case), then there is no doubt: your work is important and occupies a place among the best of our age. Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely that a novel of such length can appear in French translation at this time with a major French publisher. At this moment, all of these firms are seriously struggling in the crisis of the book market; some of the best-known ones are facing bankruptcy, and understandably, they are more careful and hesitant than usual. In any case, I will recommend you to the company of Rieder, with whom I have a personal connection and which is in the midst of publishing a series of foreign novels. I do not dare to hope for much from this intervention. I will also mention you to the editors of the journal Europe, which is published by the same company and which, in my opinion, should publish at least some chapters from your work. But I place my greatest hopes in the USSR. It is a stroke of luck that we were visited recently by comrade Alexandr Arosev, the director of the VOKS, 9 who himself is a talented novelist. I gave him your manuscript for his perusal, after we recommended it highly. He promised that as soon as he gets back to Paris tomorrow, that is, on Tuesday, he will get in touch with you so that you can meet. I think the most effective way for you to move forward would be to have Arosev recommend your novel to the USSR’s State Publishing Company and to the journal of the Revolutionary Writers. So I hope that tomorrow or the day after you will receive an invitation from Comrade Arosev. They will probably invite you to the Soviet Embassy at Rue de Grenelle 79. Please be so kind as to inform me of how the meeting goes and of its results. (Arosev is only staying in Paris for two or three days. He has to return to Moscow.) Please accept my expressions of true friendship and sympathy. Your willing devotee, Romain Rolland

[. . .] NOTES 1. On the part of Count Michael Károlyi. 2. It’s an urgent matter and of great importance.

Károlyi Goes into Action, and Two Letters from Switzerland in Quick Succession

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3. André Malraux (1901–1976) was at this time a novelist and political activist, a towering figure of French and European intellectual life. The image that emerges of him from Sinkó’s book is consistent with the way he is seen by David Caute, in his classic, The Fellow Travellers. Malraux was too independent to be a member of the Communist Party, and was even too independent to be a reliable fellow traveler, but his prestige was useful to the Soviets in the period covered by The Novel of a Novel. 4. Mátyás Rákosi (1892–1971) is best known as the Stalinist dictator of Hungary (1948–56). He was a leader of the underground Hungarian Communist Party in interwar Hungary, arrested in 1925, imprisoned for eight years, and, as his sentence was about to expire, tried again for his actions in the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic. An agreement between the Horthy regime and the Soviet Union in 1940 exchanged Rákosi for the Hungarian flags that had been captured from the Hungarian army in 1849 by tsarist Russia at the end of the nationalist revolt against the Habsburgs. 5. Clearly, Károlyi is referring to the mistaken policy of the collectivization of agriculture insituted by the Kun regime. 6. See the translator’s introduction. 7. Romain Rolland (1866–1944), writer, dramatist, musicologist, biographer, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1915. He was a leader of the peace movement from the beginning of World War I. In the 1920s, he was an adherent of the non-violent political philosophy of Gandhi. Although initially cool to Lenin’s revolution, considering Lenin another Bonaparte, in the early 1930s, Rolland became the key conduit through whom the Soviets exercised their cultural policy in France. (See the translator’s introduction). Roland was motivated to support the Soviet Union by the rise of fascism and the onset of the Great Depression. His views of the Soviet Union were also influenced by his marriage to a Russian citizen, Mariya Kudasheva, who had once worked for the VOKS (see below). She, in turn, would be later influenced by the Soviets, since her grown son was still living there. According to the historian Michael DavidFox, Rolland was always in search of a hero. After Beethoven and Gandhi, he turned to Stalin. He had reservations which, as we shall see, he mostly kept to himself. He did, however, use his influence with Stalin, as described accurately in The Novel of a Novel. See Michael David-Fox, Showcasing, 238. 8. By Béla Illés (1895–1974), author and long-term member of the Hungarian Communist Party. 9. VOKS, Vsesoiuznoe Obshchestvo Kul’turnoi Sviazi s zagranitsei (All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries) was the Soviet agency charged with keeping links with Western culture. On the role of this organization in bringing Western intellectuals to the Soviet Union for short stays, see the translator’s introduction.

Chapter Four

Comrade Arosev and the Strange Parisian Career of Optimists

The great old man of Villeneuve reached into my life with some sort of friendly magical power, above all, with the direct and personal support that he gave me at the point of my greatest depression. (At that time, I believed it to be my greatest depression.) But beyond this, he liberated me from the desperate and increasingly difficult-to-suppress suspicion that the thing upon which I had bet my life and what I do day after day is worth no more than if I were suffering from chronic-compulsive graphomania. He freed me from this suspicion by providing, or so it seemed, prospects for my novel, and through my novel, for me as well. And what kind of prospects! Before me, there opened the prospect of the seemingly endless country of revolution and socialism! I was heartened by the fact that Comrade Arosev, even though Rolland had suspected that he might not live up to his promise of contacting me right away [. . .], did in fact contact me on January 8th at the Hôtel des Étrangers, asking me to come to see him right away at the Soviet Embassy. There, I was immediately led into the salon, where a lively, dark-eyed, short, slightly chubby man awaited me. He flashed his white teeth gaily from below his black, English mustache as he squeezed my proffered right hand with both of his. Yes, he is Alexandr Arosev, the president of the Soviet organization created for the care of cultural contacts with foreign countries, to whom Romain Rolland and his wife, Mariya Pavlovna—this is when I learned that Rolland’s wife was Russian—spoke with praise about Optimists. Rolland even gave him the manuscript for his perusal, and I cannot imagine how sorry, terribly sorry, he is not to have had the time even to look into it, but he gave it back to Rolland exactly as he had received it. At this point, in order to cheer him up, I reached into my attaché case and pulled out a Germanlanguage typescript of Optimists that I always carried with me just in case, 25

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and said, “The trip from Paris to Moscow is quite long, you will have time to familiarize yourself with the manuscript.” Comrade Arosev, while adjusting with one hand the handkerchief in the front pocket of his jacket, that incidentally matched his necktie in color, hastily put up his other palm, thanking me for my kind offer but announcing that in his free time he himself was a sort of writer, but for him, it is quite sufficient that Romain Rolland spoke of the book as one of contemporary European literature’s works of lasting value. This “but” left a lasting impression on me, all the more so because after this first meeting with Comrade Arosev, I have often encountered this reaction, even today, from individuals who are much more accomplished intellectuals than he was. One would think that those who in some form or another have writing as their occupation would be more eager to read the works of others. [. . .] [Sinkó felt an urge to express his gratitude to Romain Rolland as well as to “pour out his heart to him and to explain his life to that point.” In a long letter, he also described his meeting with Arosev. The latter had invited Sinkó and his wife to the Soviet Union with all expenses paid by the VOKS and promised that Optimists would be published in Russian by the State Publishing Company and in several European languages by the Publishing Company of the Revolutionary Writers of Foreign Languages.] We will be guests of the VOKS and the Soviet Union, my wife and I! In connection with this, I had to also explain in my letter to Romain Rolland, the doubts which plagued me while I was an active participant in the Hungarian revolution, how these ethical qualms overwhelmed me under the Hungarian dictatorship of the proletariat 1 and even more so after the collapse of the dictatorship, 2 and how it was the massive progress made by fascism that convinced me that it was not only a political but an ethical imperative to subordinate everything without reservation to the interests of the Soviet Union. After having mailed this letter, there was only one thing that I was waiting for: the invitation that Comrade Arosev had promised to send to me via the Soviet Embassy. I was certain that I would receive it soon, because when Comrade Arosev offered his unexpected invitation, I mentioned to him that besides everything else, this will free me from an otherwise quite hopeless financial situation. I did not go into details, for that would have amounted to begging, but I told him that we didn’t have anything to live on in Paris. Comrade Arosev nodded his head tactfully and with understanding as he saw us to the door, squeezed my right hand again with both of his, and asked me to write to Romain Rolland that, as a result of our conversation, I am planning to travel to the Soviet Union along with Optimists. I now considered my stay in Paris to be temporary, and with the first money that my wife earned through some occasional work, we bought a

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Russian grammar book and a Russian-French dictionary at Gilbert’s, the used book store across from our hotel. In the meantime, however, before hearing from Comrade Arosev, much to my surprise, I received another letter from Romain Rolland [. . .]. It made a peculiar impression on me that he didn’t mention Arosev at all. Indeed, like someone who assumes that the trip to Moscow will not materialize very quickly, [. . .] he was still trying to find sources of income for me in Paris. This made me wonder, but I did not despair, since I learned from this letter that Rolland had made a third foray into my book [despite his difficulties with German.] And finally, there was the invitation at the end of the letter—this was not the voice of an illustrious patron but that of a man who considers another man worthy of his friendship. The letter was dated Villeneuve, January 18, 1935, and the incident that he erroneously thought was left out of the novel is described there in the chapter on comrade Blaha and the peasants of Szentkirály. Here is the letter: Dear Ervin Sinkó, I was touched reading your last letter. You confided such memories of your life to me that I shall never forget. Amidst your many trials, you have had the rare fortune of having beside you the love of a brave and faithful partner in life. Allow me to ask you to convey to her my expression of friendship and respect. I am returning the manuscript via registered mail. I wrote about it warmly to Jean Guéhenno, the director of Europe 3; I gave him your address and urged him to publish at least some chapters from your novel in his journal, if possible. [. . .] If he doesn’t write to you soon, please feel free to write to him, referencing me (de ma part) at this address [. . .] I looked at the last chapters of your novel in the German translation. My impression is that in no other European revolution was the intellectual element so heavily over-represented. It was not proportional to the proletariat or the conscious popular element: this imbalance was bound to bring about the revolution’s destruction. I don’t think that even in the West, where there are plenty of intellectuals, intellectual debates dominated to such an extent in situations where action is what is required—(though the conversations of your youthful Hungarians reminded me of Saint Just and Barrère, who, lying on their mattresses in the rooms of the Comité du Salut Publique after a grueling day’s work, would discuss questions of art, reciting the works of Racine and Voltaire: but their consciences were never bothered by what had to be done . . . The only one indeed who did feel this uncertainty was the one who remained alone to hold discussions with himself: Robespierre.) Let me confess also that however alive are the struggles of those thoughts that you portray on the final pages, I was even more moved by the few lines of your letter in which you recall the memory of those sixty peasants whom you were supposed to condemn but could not, because you saw their eyes. I am sorry that you did not want to bring back to life this meeting of the eyes, this touching of souls through the eyes.

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Chapter 4 Allow me to warmly squeeze your hand. And be so kind as to regularly keep me abreast of everything that happens with you. Your ready servant, Romain Rolland

We should not forget: in the Paris of early 1935, German fascism and especially the Reichstag fire, the Dimitrov case and, no less so, the eruption of Italian fascism into Ethiopia had turned the French intelligentsia, even that part which until then in the name of the dignity of the spirit had looked down its nose at anything that faintly reminded it of politics, into enthusiastic friends of the interests and goals of the Soviet Union and of the French Communist Party. [. . .] This is the time when André Gide appeared at a meeting with such people as François Mauriac, Gabriel Marcel, Jacques Maritain, Daniel Halévy, none of whom had earlier sympathized with any sort of revolutionary ideas, to declare before an interested audience in the context of a debate his support for a communist position and the ethical and intellectual validity and necessity for doing so. Daniel Halévy yelled out in consternation to the new Marxist, “I don’t understand, Monsieur Gide; previously you spoke to us of Montaigne and Goethe, calling them your masters. Now we hear you talking about Lenin. I don’t understand! I just don’t understand!” This was the time in France when Jean Guéhenno, the editor of Europe, interpreted Daniel Halévy’s indignant outcry as the unintentional recognition of the fact that there is indeed a straight line leading from Montaigne and Goethe to Lenin, to the politics of the French Communist Party and the Soviet Union because at that time still, even Guéhenno viewed the Soviet Union with enthusiasm and as the most advanced, practical embodiment of humanistic thought without precedent. [Sinkó quotes André Malraux as an example of one of the many intellectuals who in 1934 supported the Communist Party:] I believe that a fundamental consequence of Soviet society is the possibility of the revival of humanism: in Soviet society, humanism can become the basic attitude of mankind towards a civilization that it favors, just as individualism is the fundamental attitude in a civilization that mankind will reject; what will be of decisive importance in Soviet society will not be the uniqueness that lives in each individual, and individuals will not protect that which separates them from others but rather that which makes it possible for them to join with others in a community.

At this time, even Céline, when his book Voyage au bout de la nuit 4 appeared, was considered a communist writer and was celebrated by Aragon.

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This is the time when Romain Rolland’s reminiscences, entitled Quinze ans de combat (Fifteen years of combat), shows with long quotes from his earlier works that his intellectual journey can be seen as an ascent along one logically consistent and imperative staircase of development: from his humanistic pacifism during World War I; to his Clarté movement, which called for intellectuals to be above party politics; and from there to his militant support of the Soviet Union. Under these circumstances, Optimists ceased to act as an endless source of painful and humiliating experiences in its author’s life. To the haunting question of “de la part de qui,” I answered with the title of the manuscript and in a miraculous way this became increasingly acceptable, indeed, a door-opening answer. After a while I no longer needed to knock on doors myself. That is, Rolland did even more than he had promised. Within his own circle, he organized a sort of general mobilization in the interests of Optimists. I only realized this when I received a letter from somewhere, and while the letter did not mention Rolland, I knew from whence the wind was blowing. From being someone ignored even by the dogs, I became somewhat fashionable. I remember that it seemed quite comical to me when, contrary to Rolland, who never had a secretary, I received a letter from the secretary of Henri Barbusse, asking if I would be so good as to bring the first two chapters of Optimists tomorrow [. . .] because Barbusse would like to discuss what sections to publish in Monde with me and that he looked forward to the experience of meeting me! 5 So is this the ending of The Novel of a Novel then, and a happy ending at that, as is proper for a well-heeled, edifying novel? The author of Optimists was at times inclined to see things this way, except that there was one recurring circumstance that got him thinking, indeed, always worried him. I am talking about the experience I had had during my meeting with Comrade Arosev, who, while very enthusiastic about the Optimists, would not even leaf through the manuscript. To get out of an uncomfortable social situation, someone invents a person, even gives him a name and a profession, say that of gardener, and uses this non-existent person as an excuse for not being able to do this or that. But the name comes to life. People ask about the gardener and one must reply to the question with a newer lie. It becomes customary even to use this person in various situations as either an excuse or a threat. This non-existent somebody, since he is mentioned so much, eventually acquires many characteristics, becomes an individual and without anyone noticing it, becomes a factor in the life of the circle where, for a momentary convenience, he was invented. And in the end the simple name, which in the course of time has developed a whole biography, gives birth to its real bearer; the supposition becomes a fact, the phantom comes to life, a fitting man appears to suit the name.

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I often thought of this striking and suggestive short story of Anatole France during those weeks and months that I spent in Paris in the aura of Romain Rolland’s friendship. In my case, the gardener actually existed from the start in the form of the novel Optimists and its various, full or partial translation. But this does not alter the basic situation—it could just as well have been a non-existent invention like the hero of France’s short story. After all, it lived a similarly phantom-like existence: people discussed it, asked about it, debated its future, indeed, pronounced its name with a tone of respect and pointed to its author as the person who wrote Optimists, and as such, even invited him to lunch [. . .]. The author received letters of recommendation, such as the one from Luc Durtain, who wrote “the great Hungarian writer, the author of the great novel Les optimists,” and all this without any of these people having ever taken the manuscript into their hands. The English journal New Writing which published my short story “Szerelem” (Love), did not neglect to mention that it was written by the author of Optimists. We can say without exaggeration that this novel became famous, so much so that one could ask, as André Malraux joked on one occasion, “Actually, is it even necessary for this manuscript to exist?” It was too often that I later had to think in bitterness on this playful remark during the Moscow adventures of Optimists. But for the time being, Optimists, even if only in the form of a phantom, opened a path for its author, thanks to the prestige and active help of Romain Rolland, into the journal Europe and to Barbusse’s Monde. When on that certain day I was “so good as to” bring the first two chapters of Optimists to Monde, the secretary of the editorial board, Gautier, said exactly what Comrade Arosev had said: it is unnecessary for him to read even the two chapters after Romain Rolland’s long letter to Barbusse on the subject. It would be best if I myself selected some passages, and Monde will publish them, perhaps along with an appropriate quote from Rolland [. . .] Finally, after considerable delay, on April 12, 1935, some short sections of Optimists appeared, along with the comments of Romain Rolland and illustrations of my French translator, Lancelot Ney, in Monde under (in big letters) Pages d’un roman inédit sur la révolution hongroise, 6 and then (in even bigger letters) Les Optimists par Ervin Sinkó. NOTES 1. Revolutionaries often referred to the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 in this way. 2. Sinkó is here referring to his Christian phase. See the translator’s introduction. 3. A journal founded by Rolland and others in 1923 that published many well-known writers. It was closely allied with the foreign policy of the French Communist Party. It was suspended after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939.

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4. Voyage to the end of the night. Céline (Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches, 1894–1961) became a rabidly anti-Semitic writer a few years later. He collaborated with the Nazis when they occupied France. 5. Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) was a French writer who became a pacifist during the First World War. He went to Russia in 1918 and joined the Bolshevik Party. In 1923, after returning to France, he joined the French Communist Party but remained a frequent visitor to the Soviet Union. Along with Romain Rolland, he was the Soviet Union’s most prominent contact through the VOKS with French intellectuals. He died in the Soviet Union during a visit, in August 1935. His Russian-born widow will play an important part in Sinkó’s story in the last section of this work. He and his widow will play important parts in this story. 6. Pages from an unpublished novel about the Hungarian revolution.

Chapter Five

The Journal Europe and Further Friendly Letters from Villeneuve

[Sinkó found that publishing in Monde, which was subsidized and tightly controlled by the French Communist Party, did not enhance the reputation of Optimists because most of the works published there were so propagandistic and of such low quality that even writers who otherwise considered themselves communists would not publish in the journal. Sinkó mentions Aragon’s poem Hourra l’Oural! (Hurray, Ural!) as one example of such works that won only scorn from most serious writers. In fact, Sinkó points out, the esthetic policy of the Soviet Union turned many French intellectuals away from communism even before the political behavior of the Soviets in Spain did so.] The situation was quite different with the journal Europe. Most of its contributors belonged to those French writers, critics, and publicists who would not accept that to be a communist meant that you had to bow down before Moscow’s pronouncements on esthetic—or any other—subjects. They would not voluntarily submit to shackles from Moscow. At that time in Paris it was possible for a journal to publish not only excerpts from Gorky’s Klim Samgin but also from the memoirs of Trotsky; not only from the works of the then representative French Communist Paul Nizan but also from the exiled Russian writer Zamyatin, 1 to provide a venue not only for Romain Rolland but also for Victor Serge, who was sitting in a prison in Moscow. Yet, at the time of Guéhenno’s editorship, Europe was considered even by the official Communist organ L’Humanité, by Monde, and by Aragon’s Commune, as a journal that stood close to the Communist Party. It was among those few foreign journals that I was able to find in Soviet libraries in 1935, though not later. 33

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(Jean Guéhenno, 2 the editor-in-chief of Europe, always reminded me in physical appearance of Mihály Babits. 3 [. . .]) My subsequent acquaintance, I could say friendship, with Guéhenno made the similarity to Babits’ political stance all the more evident to me. The journal Europe reflected the profile of its editor, who could never completely shake off his doubts, who was internally incapable of practical political decisions, who was filled with melancholic contradictions, and whose entire spiritual makeup predestined him to contemplation but who lived in an age that forced everyone, including him, to choose an active role in the practical political struggles of the day. He was always in his element when it was necessary to accuse, attack, and identify the inhumane, the evil, and the ugly, but he was hesitant, as if forced against his will, and never without reservations, never happily enthusiastic when it was a matter of expressing faithful solidarity with something out of political necessity. This was simply so because politics, as long as it exists and as long as it must exist, is the only path and weapon toward the realization of a humane society; yet as a momentary reality, it is always by necessity in contradiction with its own immanent vision, with the very thing that it is trying to realize. Such people react to the grim laws of history, while those are manifested before their eyes in practice, as mean personal insults directed against them, and their eternally nostalgic ambition—eternal because it must always remain only an ambition—is to try to find a position from which they can actively participate in the battles of those forces which they consider, at the moment and relative to others, to be the most progressive forces of history, though with whose methods, for visceral reasons, they cannot but stand in opposition. Given what I have just said, it is probably not surprising that Guéhenno would have found Optimists of unusual interest, having been apprised of its theme by Rolland. After all, the novel describes within the context of a particular historical moment, problems quite like his, through the political role of a historical generation surprised by a revolutionary situation, a situation for which and for the demands of which it was unprepared. 4 In addition, more than a year before he and I had met, he came into possession of a truly chilling document through a circuitous route from Budapest: namely, the farewell message of Ottó Korvin, the political police chief of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, who appears in the Optimists under the name of Comrade Kovács. This document was written in 1919 in the shadow of the gallows and was smuggled out from prison. Guéhenno published this as the first story in his journal (Europe, 1933, November 15) as Journal de prison. As a motto to this historical document, he quoted from the dialogue between the death court’s presiding judge and Ottó Korvin: President: Will you perhaps claim that it was the love of mankind that motivated you?

The Journal Europe and Further Friendly Letters from Villeneuve

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Ottó Korvin: This will seem curious to you. Yes.

When we first met, Guéhenno right away started talking about this document, with which I was not familiar then, but which not only matched the picture that I had painted of Ottó Korvin and his comrades-in-arms, but which, as a historical document, now retrospectively supported and validated the historical accuracy of my novel. [. . .] Guéhenno, having learned from Romain Rolland that I had incorporated many autobiographical elements into Optimists, asked me during our first conversation whether, instead of publishing excerpts from my novel, it would not be better if I wrote an autobiography for Europe, and through that, told the story of the 1918 Károlyi Revolution and of the Hungarian dictatorship of the proletariat in a condensed but well-rounded form, the way I had experienced them. Guéhenno said that he knew a whole slew of people who, like himself, gained their first reliable information about the spirit of the leaders of the Hungarian revolution from Ottó Korvin’s prison diary. To that date, the only other so-called “source material” that had appeared in French about the Hungarian dictatorship of the proletariat was the White Guardist and anti-Semitic pamphlet by the Tharaud brothers. And in addition to providing an eyewitness account from a political and personal point of view, my autobiography would raise the interest of publishers toward the Optimists. As for the length, Europe stands at my disposal without limit. I got down to work right away without shilly-shallying, with enthusiasm, in fact, I could say joyfully. It was the first time that as a writer I had been given an assignment. It was the first request I received to write something that only I could write and it was the first time that I heard that this might be of interest not just for me but for others as well. When I read today what I wrote in forty typed pages at a speed unusual for me—the title of this autobiography is Facing the Judge (En face du juge), which in fact is nothing but a set of confessions about a whole life, from childhood to the day of writing— I find its most characteristic feature to be an eager, zealous desire to tell others, within the given limits, everything about myself and about everyone and everything that I encountered. The person who wrote this work was starved. He had been starving for a long time, and now that finally the opportunity had been granted him to get close to a reader, he sought to fulfill that privilege with the understanding of the lofty obligation and the wonder of the exceptional moment. [. . .]. [Even before publishing his autobiography, Sinkó had an opportunity to publish an article in Europe on the Rákosi trial taking place in early 1935. This was an indication that his fate had taken a turn for the better, since he was able to participate as a writer in the struggle in which he believed. But he was disconcerted that there was no news from Arosev. The Rollands kept his hopes up by recommending his novel to a German-Jewish publisher who

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had just moved his operation to Switzerland, lending Sinkó money, arranging for an advance from Europe, and by writing to the Soviet Embassy to hurry the invitation along. Sinkó sent the Rollands his autobiography before it was published in Europe, and Rolland made some stylistic changes to the French translation, as well as suggesting some further explanation of how “fascism and the White Terror” (in Rolland’s words) moved Sinkó from the Christian and Tolstoyan views that he held after the revolution to his re-embrace of communism. The Rollands also offered to send this autobiography to Maxim Gorky in the Soviet Union. Finally, the Rollands suggested that Sinkó change the title of his novel, arguing that “Optimists” was too “ideological.” Sinkó, however, wrote back saying that he would not change the title because it was central to his conception of what the novel was about and that there was no other word that would express “the tragedy, the wonder, and the uniqueness of the time as manifested in both the faults and virtues of the novel’s characters.”] NOTES 1. Author of the dystopian 1921 novel We, Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin (1884–1937), whose works were banned in the Soviet Union, was allowed to go into voluntary exile by Stalin in 1931 with the intercession of Maxim Gorky. 2. Jean Guéhenno (1890–1978) was a French author, educator, and editor-in-chief of Europe. He, like many intellectuals in France, had come to support the Soviet Union only in the 1930s under the impact of fascism and the Great Depression. He was not afraid to take independent positions from other “fellow travelers.” For example, in 1937, he asked publicly in connection with the show trials, what “intolerable constraint” could have turned old Bolsheviks into traitors, a position for which he was greatly castigated by his circle of writers. See David Caute, The Fellow Travelers, 126. 3. Mihály Babits (1883–1941), one of interwar Hungary’s greatest poets and writers whose political neutrality did not make it necessary for him to emigrate after the defeat of the 1919 revolution. 4. While one can read many things into this general description of Optimists, perhaps what Sinkó has in mind is that his generation of revolutionaries should not have made the mistakes it did make, such as turning the peasantry against itself by nationalizing all large landholdings, or failing to mobilize the country to defend its borders when the Entente powers demanded that it withdraw from the territory it had already won back from Romania and Czechoslovakia.

Chapter Six

The Dream Come True On the Way to Moscow

[On April 30, 1935, Sinkó finally heard from the Soviet embassy, got his passport stamped with the hammer-and-sickle visa, and was given a letter instructing the captain of a coal ship to transport Sinkó and his wife free of charge from Rouen to Leningrad. He received a final letter from Rolland an hour before boarding a train in Paris bound for Rouen. Rolland warned him: “You are headed for the land of great construction. Take your place among the builders. Consistently shun those who argue. Avoid associating with political factions or getting involved in sterile disputes. At this moment, all this is useless and dangerous. What matters is the positive, the work of building.” Sinkó writes that he was so grateful to Rolland, that until 1948 he felt it would be a breach of faith with the great man to publish anything critical of the Soviet Union. Rolland recommended that Sinkó look up M. Marshak (Ilya Jakovlevich Ilin), whose book, Men and Mountains, was being translated just then by Marie Rolland. Rolland also gave him Alfred Kurella’s address, which was, in fact, was that of the hotel where the Sinkós were to stay as guests of the VOKS. Rolland’s wife also wrote that she had not yet translated Sinkó’s biography and recommended that he give it to a Boris Alexandr Grivtsov in Moscow to translate and that he ask Grivtsov to hand it to Gorky as soon as it is done. Rolland had already written Gorky about it. She further warned him: “No doubt you will, of course, encounter difficulties and abuses of the system. Do not allow the bad that you will see to sway your opinion.” Sinkó interpreted this warning to be a reference to the case of Panait Istrati, a Romanian writer who, like Sinkó, was helped by Rolland to publish in Eu37

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rope and then to travel to the Soviet Union, from whence he returned and published an embittered and angry book about his experiences there.] But I was not going to the Soviet Union with the same mindset as Panait Istrati 1 or later, as André Gide 2; I had been schooled in politics, I had political experience; I knew that a revolutionary transformation, thus far the greatest in world history, which, moreover broke out and is still in process in Europe’s most backward empire as regards its level of civilization, cannot unfold in the atmosphere of the gospels or under idyllic circumstances. [. . .] As I wrote in Facing the Judge: [. . .] “The revolution of the proletariat received as its inheritance people who were raised in the foul air of a dying capitalism. We have no reason to lie and to make believe that we find revolution to be a beautiful sight. It is the aims of the revolution that are beautiful and today’s society is more murderous than any revolution. We want the goals of the revolution and this is why we want, as soon as possible and with all its consequences, revolutionary violence. . . . The dissolution of capitalism makes life less bearable every day. Dying capitalism necessarily tries to save itself through fascism and by bringing about a new world war. If the revolution could come before war breaks out, it could destroy capitalism; but let us not kid ourselves, there is every reason to fear that the proletariat will not be able to prevent war. This makes it all the more necessary and desirable that in contrast to the various nationalisms that are in conflict with each other, we forcefully and clearly expose not only the economic goals of the proletarian revolution, but also its humanitarian and ethical ideals. Today, the international proletariat is not only the appointed heir of all humanistic values but also its sole protector and last stronghold.” This is how I saw things, and that is why I thought the concerns and warnings from Villeneuve to be unfounded and unnecessary. But there was another reason. For so long had I lived in objective isolation, for so long had the paper on which letters appeared from the tip of my pen been the only medium between me and the world—between me and that world in whose struggles I had taken part with all my heart from as far back as I could think for myself—the monologue as a lifestyle had become so unbearable to me, that it was not only from the point of view of publishing Optimists that I felt it to be my life’s great, decisive fortune to be allowed to go out to the Soviet Union, but equally because I expected to live there as an active member of a gigantic community, just as Romain Rolland had written, building along with the builders, inspiring along with the inspired. [. . .] This is how I departed for the Soviet Union. NOTES 1. Panait Istrati (1884–1935) was a Romanian leftist writer living in Paris in the 1920s. He became a protégé of Rolland and visited the Soviet Union twice. During his second visit, in

The Dream Come True

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1928–1929, he became disillusioned and published his very negative impressions in Confessions of a Loser. He later became an adherent of a splinter group of the fascistic Iron Guard in Romania. The publication of his negative views caused great disappointments for Rolland and for Istrati’s Soviet handlers. 2. André Gide (1869–1951) was and remains one of France’s most respected writers of the early twentieth century. One of his early successes was The Immoralist (1902), a journey of self-discovery. A friend of Oscar Wilde, he was one of the first writers who spoke openly of his homosexuality, indeed, in his own words, of his pederasty, that is, of his love of teenage boys (Corydon, 1924). In 1926–1927, he travelled in French Equatorial Africa, the Congo, and other colonies in the region. The near-slavery conditions imposed upon African workers by Frenchand Belgian-owned rubber companies turned him into a fighter not only for personal freedom but also an opponent of colonialism and capitalism. In 1936, he visited the Soviet Union among much fanfare. He watched the funeral procession of Maxim Gorky from the Kremlin’s reviewing stand near Stalin in the summer of 1936. His hosts hoped that he would return to the West and write a book praising the Soviet achievement, as his comments in Russia seemed to indicate he would. Instead, he published in November 1936 his Retour de l’URSS, in which, while recognizing the promise held by the Soviet Union, he was very critical of its lack of personal freedom and its use of propaganda, even questioning the truthfulness of its economic boasting. His criticism caused grave problems for those in the Soviet Union who had handled his trip. Along with the news of the show trials, it led many French left-wing intellectuals to turn away from or to question their support of the Soviet Union. Yet, his commitment to the truth, unconcerned with consequences, has earned him lasting respect. Nor can his stance be considered to have strengthened fascism in a significant way, as Sinkó feared such a stance would.

Chapter Seven

Idyllic Intermezzo From Rouen to Leningrad

Aboard the freighter Vitebsk, May 5, 1935 Yesterday morning we reported to the Soviet ship’s captain in Rouen with the letter from the Parisian Soviet consul. It was with considerable trouble that we clambered on board the ship and it was with equal difficulty that we climbed the steep and narrow ladders until we reached the captain. Our shoes and clothes, and of course our hands, too, were soon full of dirt. The ship, as we later learned, carried anthracite coal from the Donets region, from Mariupol to Rouen. We had seen the coal piled as high as a mountain and it reminded me of the earth of [my native] Bácska with its blackness and oily sheen. Head to toe, people on board were like chimney sweeps. The inhospitable captain examined and reread the official letter over and over again and, pointing to the ship and its people, indicated that his steamer was not at all suitable for transporting passengers. I panicked. Here is the obstacle, which at the last moment foils everything! We hurried to explain that we expected nothing from him besides letting us on board. He replied that in that case we could bring our luggage on board. We had seven heavy suitcases mostly full of manuscripts and books. Naturally we had no money for a porter. How to carry these up those narrow, steep steps that we had found so hard to negotiate without any bags? I looked around in despair. M (my wife) set off right away, and grabbed the lighter bags. I followed suit, hoping that even if they ignored me, some of the robust sailors, who were standing on the deck talking, would rush to help her. That did not happen. We went up and down, up and down again until every piece was on 41

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deck and then from the deck we carried them into the main cabin. No one lifted a finger. The captain, too, kept his hands in his pockets as he explained to us where to place the bags in the main cabin: the “salon.” And after all this was done, he explained to us that he had no cabin to give us. We would have to sleep on the narrow couch of the salon. He also told us that the trip to Leningrad would take eight days. We can lie down in the salon after ten but since the salon also served as the dining room, we would have to be up by seven so that it could be readied for breakfast. We left the inhospitable and inauspicious captain and his ship so that until two o’clock in the afternoon we could have something to eat. With some anxiety, which we naturally kept secret from one another, we said merely that we will see what happens. And, in accordance with what almost seems to be a law of nature at such times, it was raining. An unusually cold wind was blowing for May. Our limbs were tired from the bustle and tensions of our last days in Paris. We could hardly be described as cheery. But the manuscript of Optimists was on board a Soviet ship, that is, in a word, on Soviet territory. That’s what was important. Yes, but the thought that for eight days there would not even be a hole into which we could retreat during the day . . . the entire prologue was so dreary and we were so agitated, that we passed by Rouen Cathedral without so much as stepping in. We got back to the ship exactly at two in the afternoon. We took our places politely next to one another on the salon’s plush-covered couch. Politely, and dead tired! Immediately, a light blond young man joined us. He, too, is going to Leningrad. He remembers seeing us in the waiting room of the Embassy. He is a technician, twenty-six years old, was in Paris for a year, having been sent there by the Soviet state to study. And he immediately began to explain to us the excellent qualities of the anthracite coal from Donets as compared to every other type of coal in the world. He talks a lot. Always explaining. And his self-respect is expressed equally by the handkerchief placed in his jacket’s front pocket and by the movement with which he takes a velvet-covered cigarette case out of his pocket, and from the cigarette case, a cigarette holder [. . .] It is as if he were trying to emphasize that everything is in order with him. He is very well mannered, which in this case is less commendatory with the adjective “very” than without it. He helps to interpret for us. The second person we met was the ship’s waitress. She is a pretty, young, married woman who started a conversation with us soon after we had settled down on the couch and before the ship embarked. She immediately offered to share her cabin with M, and in contrast to our initial inhospitable reception, she made arrangements to have our large suitcases, filled with books and manuscripts, taken to another location and the lighter ones into her cabin. There, M laid down to rest right away on an improvised couch. When I looked in upon her an hour after the ship’s departure, her hostess, who was

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sitting on the bed, raised her finger to her lips to indicate that I should be quiet: her guest was sleeping. Besides the straw-blond young man and us, the ship has another, or rather three, passengers: a run-down homely red-headed woman with two young children. She had lived abroad for eight years but is going home to Leningrad because she has become unemployed and has nothing to live on. When the ship left, her father, an old man, was tearfully waving from the shore to her and the two blond children. The large ship took a long time to turn around in the Seine, so the farewell dragged on. Several crew members of the Vitebsk stood around the woman and watched the tragically lonely old man tirelessly waving his bandana. Suddenly, I noticed that one after the other, the sailors picked up the children and lifted them high so that the old man could catch a final glimpse of them. Then the sailors took out their own handkerchiefs and gaily waved them at the solitary old man, as if he, too, were an old acquaintance, until the shore disappeared from view. Knowing everything that I have learned from the moment that I boarded the ship until today, I naturally see in my entries made on board the Vitebsk how much I did not see and did not even suspect, how much I did not want to even think through. But this does not change the fact that everything I experienced as good and lovely on board the Soviet ship during those eight days, I could have experienced nowhere else and that for the most part these things really were lovely. We should not forget even today: Lenin’s October liberated such forces in the Soviet Union and caused such fundamental changes that even the apocalyptic state machinery of the Stalinist tyranny, a power that ground down everything that smacked of human freedom, could not destroy or lastingly cripple and deform everything that the Leninist October brought about. At least, not yet in 1935, when this journal was started! But at the same time, even the notes made on board this Soviet ship record some things that—to today’s reader—speak unmistakably of a withering and deforming process. I continue with the journal. M had stories to relate when she came down from her cabin. Her host, the waitress, told her that she is married to a student in Leningrad and that they have a child. People in France are kind, too, particularly the common people are truly kind. When we were struggling with our bags as we were boarding the ship [. . .] a dockworker approached me. He was kind—but he expected a tip. It was impossible for him not to expect a tip. The direct human contact is obscured by the fact that I am a passenger and he is a dockworker. On this ship, it is otherwise. This woman is kind in a different way. She is kind because, as she said, she found M likable from the very first moment.

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To be a waitress under capitalism is a profession bordering more or less on prostitution. But this woman on the ship is a comrade and she moves about in the salon with a certain dignity. She brings the food and puts it on the table as a welcoming housewife would in our culture. She feels herself to be free and the equal of all those whom she serves. In the salon—amidst plenty of food, served four times a day [. . .]—we made the acquaintance of several people. The most interesting for me was Vyacheslav Fyodorovich, the ship’s mechanic. Vyacheslav Fyodorovich is a twenty-four-year-old giant of a lad with brown eyes, protruding cheekbones, broad shoulders, and unbelievably large hands [. . .] who occasionally would flash a childishly mild, kind smile. He asked about the situation of the French and Hungarian workers and to my explanations he responded with a sort of guttural “hmm.” I have never before heard so many shadings of this “hmm” as I did in the last twenty-four hours of our acquaintance: it expressed encouragement, disapproval, satisfaction, indignation, surprise, and heaven knows what else. Already at our first meal together I came to realize that the cult of polite formalities, carried out with the seriousness of ceremony, was not only a personal trait of the straw-blond young man: at the table, every tenth word consisted of the repetition of the formulas “thank you” and “you’re welcome,” and if someone decides to light up, he first asks those sitting next to him if the smoke would bother them, if he may have their permission, and since the others naturally just as politely give their permission, the one asking thanks them with equal seriousness. The salon where we eat is that of the officers, but I found the same almost boastfully courteous modes of interaction when I visited the other dining room, that of the crew. The only difference was that in our dining room everyone came to table clean and well ironed, while there the diners gathered round the table straight away, sooty and dirty, as they had left their work. And in their cabin there is a wall newspaper as well as a picture of Lenin and one of Stalin, and between the two, a picture of the entire Central Committee of the Party. On one of the tables, I found a Russian copy of Engels’s Ludwig Feuerbach in horrible condition full of greasy fingerprints. The crew amused themselves by testing me: they asked me to read from the book. They encouraged me, saying it would be easy, and they invited me to visit them again. After leaving the crew’s dining room, Vyacheslav Fyodorovich asked me if I would not rather sleep in his cabin. He is on duty in the afternoon from four to eight and again in the morning from four to eight, and he assured me that my presence would not bother him in the least. And so it came about that I am writing these notes already in his room. We spoke till midnight, which necessitated that I look up many words in the dictionary. I asked him if he had noticed that in Rouen, as our ship was leaving, a French fisherman in a rowboat stood at attention for a long time

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saluting us with the clenched fist of the Red Front. 1 He had not seen it, but he was not surprised by my report. He thought it was natural that it should be so. He told me that when the Vitebsk anchored in Italy, a group of soldiers who had been mobilized against Abyssinia, stole on board and asked if they could hide there. “And what happened to the soldiers?” It was my impression that he only pretended not to understand me. He answered with a “hmm” and changed the subject. To understand him and to ask him questions, I had to spend minutes looking up words in the dictionary. But he vehemently objected when I suggested that we stop our conversation since he had to be in the machine room already at four in the morning. Vitebsk, May 6 A heaping plate in front of me and I don’t know what to choose. We have been aboard for two days and each hour is full of news, discoveries, events! What to choose? This time I will restrict myself to a few words about the straw-blond fellow and my host, Vyacheslav Fyodorovich. As to the strawblond fellow, perhaps I would not notice him or be so interested in him if it weren’t for being on this ship where it is as if we were in an apartment, or even in a single room, day after day before each other’s eyes. I am afraid that my first impression of him was unjust, but I still don’t know what to make of him. Perhaps the problem is that I am trying to judge Soviet people with the experiences that I have brought with me from capitalist society. Certainly, this youth would represent the most unpleasant type of climber there; the kind who always wants to get the best grades, and who is proud of being so diligent, meticulous, and exceptionally proper. But maybe in the Soviet world, this same type means something else. He was sent out by the Soviet Union to study in Europe. [. . .] Of all the things that he talked about, the only one that interested me was what I learned from him about Makhno, the former Ukrainian anarchist and the leader of a guerilla army infamous for its bloody anti-Semitic pogroms. I was under the impression that Makhno had been living in America since the 1920s and now I hear that he is living in Paris as a construction worker and— something I don’t understand at all—that this young man who was sent to France on a stipend from the Soviet Union was the roommate in Paris of Makhno, the erstwhile leader of the White Ukrainian peasant rebellion. [. . .] The most interesting thing was how Makhno described his fate to the straw-blond young man: everything turned out quite differently from how he had imagined it and he was the most surprised when it turned out that he had become the leader of a counter-revolutionary band. There may be many varied reasons why someone turned against Lenin or the party—not everyone was as lucky as Gorky 2 —and despite the various circumstances, each one

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ended up playing the same objective role: they ended up in the camp of the enemies of the Revolution helping the Whites. I was interrupted in writing my journal by Vyacheslav Fyodorovich, who just returned from his shift. [. . .] I am always happy to see him. I have learned that he is a party member. [. . .] His patience is inexhaustible. We resumed our slow discussions of the world’s most varied problems [. . .]. We spoke of the prospects for war. “Peace will last at most one or two more years,” says he. Of Litvinov’s policy aimed at a Russo-French alliance, he approves with a slightly sly, “Hmm, in the face of German fascism, it is an excellent policy and an excellent tactical move.” [. . .] “What do you think? If there is a war, will the socialist Soviet Union and the Red Army help the bourgeois French Republic, which oppresses its own proletariat and the peoples of the colonies?” I ask, and relate to him that the French Communists discuss this question a lot these days. Vyacheslav Fyodorovich flicks his hand with a superior calmness: “Everything will be fine. One thing is certain. I will not fight for the French bourgeoisie. And neither will any soldiers of the Red Army.” “Strange situations might arise,” said I in reply. Vyacheslav Fyodorovich looks at me as if I were a child, with such confidence and with such superiority as if he were in possession of secrets that I could not even imagine and on the basis of these he indicates my error with a happy hissing sound and waving of his raised index finger: “No, no, everything is fine and everything will be fine, very fine (ochen harasho).” Judging by the example of Vyacheslav Fyodorovich, it seems that one of the characteristics of Soviet Man is that he sees no disquieting problems; in fact, it is as if he sees no problems whatsoever. Will I ever be able to learn from him how to live without problems, without torturing problems? On the wall of my cabin, across from me, above Vyacheslav Fyodorovich’s bed, there is a picture of a woman pinned up with a thumbtack. His wife. Vyacheslav Fyodorovich somehow takes pride in everything. He is proud of having a wife so soon. The photo was made according to provincial tastes. It is a sort of “artistic image.” The little woman strikes a film-star pose. They were married two months ago; the little lady who looks provincial is actually from Leningrad. There were two letters awaiting Vyacheslav Fyodorovich in Rouen. Last night, while already in bed, he reread them, and again this morning. When I asked him how they managed financially, he answered that his salary is 180 rubles. “Is that enough to live on?” The answer is a happy, good-natured laugh, followed by an explanation. “I have a room in a new house in Leningrad. Every year: health resort, vacation resort, theater,” and here, after a slight pause, another word, which

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is the most characteristic: “Everything! Absolutely everything that one needs. I live like a civilized person.” It seems that for him there are no problems, not only in the spiritual but also in the material realm. It is as if for him all problems have been solved forever and solved optimally. What is going on here? Is it that he has not yet developed certain wants or does he possess an inner harmony which is unattainable for me? Whatever the truth, the whole thing seems as improbable to me after Paris and Vienna as if it were a vision. On the boat everyone eats as much as they wish. The cook, who had participated in the Chelyuskin expedition to the North Pole, feeds the leftovers to the pigs only in the morning, because, as he says, someone might get hungry at night. 3 Indeed, I saw people coming through the kitchen at night to snack on the “leftovers.” It is laid out in a designated place. When I think of the undernourished, unemployed Viennese (and I saw plenty of these in Paris as well), I ask myself, if only for a minute, am I dreaming? And yet, if only for a moment, I became uncomfortable and confused, even depressed by an image that was in itself quite insignificant: interesting, if at all, from an aesthetic point of view. Perhaps my reaction is totally flawed. Among Vyacheslav Fyodorovich’s books, I found the newest copy of the journal Sputnik Agitatora. On its cover, with the Lenin Mausoleum in the background, there is a photograph of white-shirted female workers on parade in Red Square. They are marching joyfully and endlessly, sixteen to a row. Each white shirt is filled with ample breasts and these are decorated with an even larger picture of Stalin. The shirts were manufactured with Stalin’s picture printed on them. Who ordered this, I ask myself. Is it possible that this pleased the Communists—no doubt better communists than I am—who organized this parade on Red Square (and in front of Lenin’s Mausoleum, of all places!)? Is the fact that this displeases me, much more so than the photograph made of Vyacheslav Fyodorovich’s wife, just an intellectual’s aesthetic oversensitivity, is it just something vestigial? And then the question occurs to me: can I truly wish, truly want to be freed of this oversensitivity, this vestige? Would its disappearance be liberation? Can I sincerely wish not to be repulsed by a picture of someone’s face, whoever that may be, affixed over thousands of female nipples? Of course one should not even waste words on such lapses of taste; it is merely intellectual pettiness, nitpicking. But without doubt a certain primitivism plays a role in these aesthetic lapses, the same primitivism which impels Vyacheslav Fyodorovich to be proud of everything to the point of showing off. I lie in my bed and watch as he strips completely after returning from work and washes himself. There is a small mirror above the basin and he notices that I am watching him. He washes his handsome, youthful, muscular body from head to foot. After washing, he splashes cologne on himself. He

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remarks in passing that it, too, is made in the Soviet Union. Do I want a sniff? Then he watches me out of the corner of his eye while he squeezes toothpaste onto his toothbrush. He brushes his white, healthy-looking teeth for a long, long time. He completes the activity with self-satisfaction, enjoying in secret the effect it has upon me, as if it were a uniquely Soviet achievement that a stoker would have toothpaste and a toothbrush. Finishing his oral hygiene, he dips his toothbrush and rinses it in the same water in which he just washed the oil and coal grime off his body, and then carefully wipes the brush dry. It is evident that we are observing a civilization which is new and still mostly superficial. It derives not from an inner drive but rather from imitation. It is a social show rather than a culture. It is worthy of note not for its badly learned hygiene but for its still unfelt aesthetic demands and necessities. I am not at all surprised that I can hardly remember the last time I saw M in such high spirits, so happy to be alive, as here on the ship. This joie de vivre is present in everyone here on board: in the many young sailors and in the sixty-seven-year-old helmsman who plays with the two children of the homely woman and stuffs them with candy. This relaxed attitude toward life is something that I have never in my life experienced anywhere else and it is an even greater joy than the sea, the sky, or the lost post-pigeons that seek refuge on the ship and are fed with bread by everyone. [. . .] Vitebsk, May 10 [. . .] Last night, I had an unforgettable hour. This hour was yet another reminder that I must be more careful about jumping to conclusions from first impressions, as I am prone to do. It pertained to the straw-blond young man. It is not that in his case my first impressions were totally without foundation. But my impressions misled me. My mistake was to judge the whole person from a few correctly noted characteristics. This pars pro toto error, repeated time after time, is common in superficial people and with superficial acquaintances. This and one other thing: you cannot conclude anything about the inner character of a person from external observations until you know in what kind of situation that person happens to be at the time. There was a good reason why this person drew my attention almost from the very first moment, and the more I know of him, the more disquieted I become. Now I know his name as well. He is called Lukin. By now I know that his euphoric readiness to help, his indefatigable running from one person to another, as if to offer his services, is not because he is some sort of new type of man, an intellectual who is constantly coming to the aid of others; rather its origins

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are to be found in his growing anxiety as we approach Leningrad. He is so nervous that it is unbearable and he takes refuge in conversation, and perhaps also . . . perhaps from yet another motive: he wants to find sympathizers, people who will put in a good word for him. One thing is for sure: he is sick with fear, and I, fool that I am, only realized this when he himself told me and confided in me. Late last night, M and I were alone with him in the salon when suddenly the generally colorless face of the blond man became even more pale and he said to us that everything he had told us about himself so far had been a lie. It is not true that the Russian state had sent him for a one-year study-tour to France. He fills his glass with water and lifts it to his mouth but then, without drinking from it, places it back on the tray [. . .]. He smiles. I recognize that vibrating, timid, ready to serve smile with which he played the role of an encyclopedia. So, he continues: he was not sent abroad at government expense. He escaped from the Soviet Union without a passport and it was not last year but three years ago. He escaped because he was about to be arrested at the time that the party’s Right Opposition, to which he belonged, was put into an impossible situation. He lifts his glass to his lips again and again but does not drink. He tried his hand as a journalist abroad and lived well from that. He even has a “bride”—that’s the word he uses—and he takes a picture out of a brand-new-looking, blue wallet. The “bride” is a French girl, whose parents would have assured him a good life if he had stayed in Paris. He didn’t stay in Paris. After three years, he is returning to the Soviet Union. “I have to go back,” as he puts it. Had I pressed him, or simply asked him why he had to go back, or what impelled him, or how they were able to force him into this decision, I think he would have told us. The fact that he has made this confession to us can only be explained by his nervousness, over which he has no control. Any further questions on our part would amount to taking advantage of his current state. M later told me that she had felt the same way; that it would have been abusive, since he might have told us things that otherwise, when in control of himself, he would not reveal to anyone. The fact that today, all day, he has avoided us as much as possible only serves to validate this view. [. . .] The ship’s cook is Jewish. There are Armenians, Russians, Ukrainians, and Caucasians here. The cook, having fled from pogroms during the Civil War, was brought up in a children’s shelter. He took part in two Arctic expeditions. Anti-Semitism? He had heard about something like it existing in the past. If he understands correctly, the word means making a distinction between Jews and other people. Such things only happened under the tsars and, of course, now in Germany. There is no one more popular on board than he but probably his skill in cooking has something to do with that. He is very strong, squat, and always smiling. He is not yet thirty years old. His pocket

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has a veritable collection of photographs. There are many, very many photos of women. “Acquaintances,” he says, giving me a wink, while looking at me with satisfaction as he notes my amazement at their endless multitude. Incidentally, these pictures of women also bear the marks of that same provincial taste, that same shy and awkward imitation of fashionable celebrities—in the way that the bodies are posed, in their dress, and in their hair-styles—that I noticed before in the young wife of Vyacheslav Fyodorovich. Isn’t it odd that the victors inherit, though only in tatters, the demeanor and style of the defeated class? [. . .] Tomorrow we shall arrive in Leningrad and I am filled with both joy and anxiety. Big discussion with M about my anxieties in this regard. I cannot imagine how I am going to continue my writing about topics that I have explored until now when already in the last seven days of our journey these problems have [. . .] become outdated: this goes for my questions, my doubts, my wounds, everything that I am, and that which I have written. But can one learn not to feel pain where it hurts and not to see questions, or at least not to see questions where others see situations that have already been settled and solved once and for all? I tell M that Vyacheslav Fyodorovich is definitely a representative of that new proletariat that has grown up in the Soviet Union. His entire intellectual and emotional makeup is a product of today’s Soviet society, or, one could say, of the victorious October. I have not a single poem, short story, study, or novel which would be of the least interest to Vyacheslav Fyodorovich, though it is evident that it is he, not I, who is, if not the representative, then at least the bearer and creator of that world for which we wish and in which we believe. M objected fervently to my whole argument: everything that I said was false from its premises to its conclusions. She senses a danger for me from my own—as she puts it—impressionable nature. Perhaps—and she stressed the perhaps—we do have something to learn from Vyacheslav Fyodorovich. But from that, it does not follow in any way that he has no problems, or that he is already beyond problems because he is healthier. M is skeptical about the use of the term “health” when applied to mentalities. It is much more likely that rather than being beyond problems, Vyacheslav Fyodorovich has not yet even discovered them. “Besides,” she argues—and it is odd that she has to make this point against me—“I am not willing to consider listening to the recordings of Abraham and Benatzky’s music as achievements for any kind of revolution; perhaps it is a necessary evil, yes, it is certainly an evil that must be tolerated, but then it is not necessary that a person who can think should stop using their innate mental capacities. And the same is true for taste.” 4

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The discussion depressed me and reminded me of some lines in Romain Rolland’s farewell letter: instead of barren criticism—dismissing all barren problems—build with the builders. Together, together! May 11 [The Vitebsk was renamed the Chapaev after a hero of the Civil War who died in 1919 and whose story was popularized by a Soviet film of 1934. Vyacheslav Fyodorovich again displayed his enthusiasm for the Soviet regime by pulling out a map from his drawer showing the areas of China under communist control. When Sinkó expressed his regret that these areas are so far from the Soviet Union, he replied that it is not a problem: there are Soviet instructors there.] Leningrad, May 14, 1935 It has been three days since we have left the Chapaev; ten days since we have last stood on the ground of capitalist Europe—only ten days, but from here it seems to me as distant as, say, the society of Louis XIV’s Versailles. [. . .] [As we approached the end of our sea voyage] on a cold and windy late afternoon, M and I watched for the moment when the city would appear before us, the city that we knew from Dostoyevsky’s novels and from a list of sources stretching from John Reed’s book, to newer ones, and to the latest books and pamphlets, polemical writings, articles, and reports. Suddenly, the ship’s scullion, with whom we had occasionally exchanged smiles, steps up to us and asks if we have money for the trolley from the harbor to the city. [Sinkó had already received some change from Vyacheslav Fyodorovich, since change was all that the crew were allowed to take abroad.] The scullion said, “You are, after all, foreigners.” You should have some “reserves,” and he gave us his 15 kopeks. As the sun went down it was as if the distant gigantic harbor had turned on its lights. Leningrad appeared, but our ship stopped on the open sea and waited until a motorboat came out of nowhere and headed straight for us. There were about ten people sitting in it and they came aboard. “It’s the GPU. They are coming to check out the ship before we dock,” explained the scullion, not without a trace of nervousness in his voice. Upon boarding, the GPU people disappeared with the old helmsman and everyone waited in silence until they reappeared. Then they asked for us and told us that a car was already waiting for us in the harbor with the representative of the VOKS. Their commanding officer kindly asked about our luggage. He didn’t let me lift any of the suitcases but picked them up himself, without asking us to open them. I told him they are heavy because of the books and manuscripts and he nodded with a smile and said that he knew. He

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fastened a lead seal to each, handed me a quickly-filled-out form and, after further handshakes, he continued on his way at the head of his group. That is, not with his entire group, because, as I had already noticed, some members of his group had stayed behind with the straw-blond young man, Lukin. The whole procedure didn’t last more than half an hour; afterwards, the people of the GPU—saying good-bye to M and me once more—let themselves down one by one on the ladder to the waiting motor launches. My eyes fell on Lukin for an instant. In the cold evening wind he was wiping the sweat off his brow with the handkerchief he had pulled out of his jacket’s front pocket. Before the last two men of the GPU descended, they waved Lukin ahead. They took him with them in the launch. Everyone was standing on the deck but no one said a word about this, as if no one had wanted to acknowledge what had transpired before their eyes. M told me later that just before Lukin disappeared, he turned to her and said that he was leaving with the GPU because they were going to find a room for him. The Vitebsk-Chapaev stopped ten kilometers out to sea. This was, they explained to us, because it was a freighter. We waited for the motor launches. [. . .] It was after midnight when I, and then M, finally descended on the rope-ladder into the boat. [. . .] A tall woman who had come for us with a car from the VOKS was waiting on the shore. She introduced herself as the director of the Leningrad office of the VOKS. We only took our handbags with us. Before we were able to leave the port, a man in a uniform stopped our car. He asked for the “permission papers” (bumashka). I took out the form that I had received from the GPU on the ship, and despite this, he said we had to get out so that they could examine our luggage. The representative from the VOKS showed him her own “bumashka” and pointed to the lead seals from the authorities on our luggage. The soldier listened patiently and attentively. He listened patiently to our increasingly exasperated guide’s arguments and waited until she finished all she had to say. I interpreted his silence as an indication that our guide’s arguments were beginning to convince him. But when she finished, he repeated again, slowly and in a monotone, that we should leave our car along with our luggage because it had to be examined. It was after 2 A.M. and our guide was so angry she began to shout. [Eventually, the guide went to get a higher-ranking officer, who let the luggage through.] [The Sinkós were greeted at the Hotel Europe in Leningrad by a liveried doorman whose feudal, servile manners Sinkó found amusingly out of place.] Our guide, though visibly tired, very kindly accompanied us to our room to assure herself that everything was in order and she asked us when we would like to have a car pick us up for sightseeing in the morning. She informed us that we could eat and drink as much as we wished in the hotel’s restaurant at any time we wished and she urged us to create a list of things we would like

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to see in the city. Museums, theaters, everything would be on the VOKS, we should just ask for what we wanted. And with this, she left us. As we were finally alone in our room, in this large space decorated in the extravagant tastes of the last century, we looked at each other and both of us felt the same thing: appreciation and surprise that this was really happening, that we were here and that there is a country in the world where we are greeted in such a manner. Our first night on Soviet soil, in the city of Lenin! In the alcove, a fourposter bed with heavy yellow silk hangings which we did not, however, close. We convinced ourselves that the white nights of St. Petersburg were not just the title of a novel. After the wooden cot of the freighter, the soft, springy, delicious bed! We were tired, yet, as we confessed to each other in the morning, neither one of us could fall asleep. My mind was racing with the replays of what I had seen aboard the Vitebsk-Chapaev, but I also felt anxious, tortured by the fact that we were treated with such royal pomp, that they greeted us as they did and placed us in such a hotel. It did not surprise me when the captain greeted us with a wry face in Rouen. I was used to it. And it somehow seemed normal that I didn’t have money for a porter and that we had to struggle with carrying our own bags aboard. The entire course of my life so far had accustomed me to being treated as a burden: in the best case, as a tolerated foreigner. But everything that happened later, on the ship itself and then after, with the captain of the GPU not allowing me to lift my bags, the kindness with which everyone waved goodbye to us when we left the ship; the woman who waited for us until two o’clock in the morning and brought us to this hotel in a car that was dispatched for us; all this makes me happy, indeed it makes me worried, because I have to ask myself if I can ever repay this treatment. And just having raised this question makes me appear to myself like some sort of con-man who is the beneficiary of some misunderstanding. Then, with my mind buzzing and my nerves overwrought, as I gradually open my eyes to look into the dawning white night and hear the noises of the awakening city, I am suddenly reminded of Lukin, the strawblond young man. And I remember that I acted just like the others, like everyone on board; I didn’t even say goodbye to him. [. . .] NOTES 1. The League of Red Front Fighters was a paramilitary organization associated with the Communist Party in Weimar Germany. 2. Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) was a close associate of Lenin already before the Revolution but was shocked by its violence, which he publicly criticized. Lenin, however, forgave him for his hesitation. Gorky had an ornamental role in the regime, and thanks to his international reputation, under Stalin as well. Until shortly before his death in 1936, he was able to perform

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an intermediating role between Soviet writers who came under criticism. Sinkó hoped to gain his support for the publication of Optimists. 3. The Chelyuskin was a steamship that sought to navigate across the polar ice cap from Murmansk to Vladivostok in 1933–34. It was caught in the ice and sank. After spending several months on the ice, its crew was rescued by air under harrowing conditions. Both the mission and the rescue were presented by the regime as symbolic of Soviet bravery and capability. 4. Paul Abraham (1892–1960) and Ralph Benatzky (1884–1957) were composers of popular operettas in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Abraham was a Hungarian Jew (born in the same town as Sinkó) and Benatzky was Austrian, born in Bohemia. In an earlier passage (omitted from this edition), we learn that Vyacheslav Fyodorovich liked the music of Abraham and Benatzky.

Chapter Eight

On the Way to Moscow, the Same Night on the Train

In Leningrad, we became acquainted with a woman, or rather—and this is what we found uncomfortable—a woman insinuated herself upon us. She was dressed conspicuously better than the local average and immediately honored us—too much so—with her confidence. She confessed that she had no sympathy for the Bolsheviks. “You cannot imagine,” said she, “what it was like here in Leningrad after the murder of the Leningrad party secretary, Kirov.” I told her that I could, because the French press printed the official Soviet communiqué, which reported that after the assassination, one hundred and twenty White Guards were executed in retaliation—which was all the more surprising since the communiqué gave no indication of how in 1934 the Soviet authorities suddenly found so many “White Guards.” The woman shrugged and started to tell us that on the day of the murder, the GPU closed down whole streets and, with trucks that were already in place, removed the inhabitants, because the policy is: It is better that hundreds of innocents suffer than that one who could be harmful remain free. It seemed odd that it was our official escort who, in the carpeted foyer of the Hotel Europe, introduced us to this woman and that as soon as our escort left us, this woman, speaking excellent French, would launch into describing her feelings of antipathy to the regime even though M remained silent and impassive to the point of rudeness. The woman told us that she herself had been arrested in the Crimea by the GPU in 1927 and was in confinement for three weeks, and that her fiancé, a former Russian prince, had been arrested two years ago and taken to Siberia as a socially dangerous element. The woman, who is incidentally good-looking, must be around thirty. After Lukin, our acquaintance from the ship, this is the second person who 55

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has insisted on confiding private matters with us, though we are total strangers. There was yet another reason why I felt uncomfortable with this woman: perhaps she is nearsighted or just has a bad habit, but, contrary to her otherwise impeccable manners, while talking she leaned quite close to me, indeed leaned on me and when I instinctively drew back, if only because her perfume was too much for me, she would put her hand on my arm—as if to hold me back. Despite this, when I learned that she had personal experience with the GPU, I could not help but ask how the GPU treats its prisoners. She answered that however much she dislikes the GPU, she can affirm, based on her own experiences and that of her friends, that the GPU never harms those whom it arrests or holds under suspicion. [. . .] What should I believe from what this woman has told me? What does she want? And after this experience, what should I think about Lukin? [. . .]

II

Part II

Chapter Nine

Preliminary Explanation

[. . .] The manuscript of the Optimists took on the role of a sort of spirit medium; its career in Moscow unveiled before the author a social condition, an entire mechanism that otherwise—and this was part of the system, too— was guarded from view with great fear and jealousy at the time. But for a long time through this unveiling, the author of the Optimists—as evident from his journal—did not see, did not dare to see and wanted not to see what his experiences revealed, what they confessed and signified, though these far outstripped in importance the interesting story and significance of his manuscript’s vagaries. [. . .] This tale is not simply about one man’s isolated “case” but about a private case through which a common situation, a general principle, is unusually vividly revealed. [. . .] And this is why it is worthwhile and interesting to consider the story of the novel in Moscow. I emphasize, its story in Moscow. The manuscript of the Optimists, along with its author, arrived in Moscow at a moment in history when the most fundamental transformations were starting to take place within the life of the Soviet Union. At the time the writer did not and could not have known this. But, since he kept a journal, often without knowing what he was registering, he, in his own way, was recording all this, day by day. From 1935 through 1937 one surprise followed another in the Soviet Union. Anyone who spent these years in Moscow had to see, was able to follow with his own eyes, the disappearance of what had been presented to him upon his arrival—in 1935—as essential parts of the Soviet way of life and how it was being transformed into something totally different from that which only yesterday had been touted as something ideal. From today’s perspective it is obvious that what was taking place precisely in these years—1935, 1936, and 1937— was the liquidation of the spirit of Lenin’s October Revolution—and of its 59

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living representatives. Lenin’s Revolution was being completely disfigured and falsified, a process which reached its fitting peak in the Moscow trials and in that apotheosis of shameless Stalinist lies, The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), which saw the light of day immediately after the trials. [. . .] Perplexity and the struggle to find some sort of positive explanation for even the most negative developments, the alternation of enthusiasm with the darkest despair were experiences that characterized not just the journal’s author but those hundreds of thousands of believers and disbelievers-struggling-tobelieve who lived there. At the time that this journal was written, its author was oblivious to the fact that he was not an isolated individual, subject to these inner fluctuations, but one among the innumerably many who went through the same process, crisis after crisis. He didn’t realize that others were having the same experience, only they were more assiduous in hiding their feelings from themselves and even more so from others, and thus, it appeared for a long time that it was a matter of isolated doubts and sorrows whose sources were flaws peculiar to the author. More than once the veil would lift, but at such times, instead of looking directly at what had been made visible, he wove an even denser veil of explanations between himself and reality. Dispensing for a moment with the strict chronological order, I will quote from two entries in the journal to illustrate the above point. The first quote is from March 21, 1936. The second one is from April 21st of the same year. I received an invitation to attend last night’s meeting of the Arbeitsgemeinshaft deutscher Schriftsteller (German Writers’ Collaborative). Familiar faces: the little Hugo Huppert; the fat Party poet, Weinert; one of the censors of the Optimists, Hans Günther; and naturally, the tall Johannes R. Becher; plus another twenty or so people. Kurella gave a lecture on Nietzsche and the French Revolution. There was not much that I didn’t know, but it was a very well-documented presentation, providing many facts and quotes to argue that Nietzsche’s past and present effect on the French literature of our time, and that literature’s interpretation of Nietzsche is the exact opposite of how Nietzsche is seen in Hitler’s Germany today. Kurella refrained from taking a position on which interpretation was correct but he pointed implicitly to the problem. His presentation was followed by a debate. I was shocked that the German Communist writers spoke about Nietzsche in the same way as Rosenberg did, and that they agreed with the fascist ideologue in seeing Nietzsche as a precursor of German National Socialism. I could not help but respond to this. I didn’t say anything extraordinary; indeed only such things as in my opinion would be self-evident, obvious truths anywhere else. I said that if the fascists in Germany now wish to make Nietzsche their own, we

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should not help them by dressing one of the nineteenth century’s greatest thinkers in a brown shirt. I said that those present here are mostly from the same generation as I and should know from their own experience and memory that it was not Nietzsche’s philosophical conclusions but his intensity, his passion for thought, his intellectual courage that played such a positive educational role in turning us into revolutionaries. Here, they fear for the revolutionary spirit of the French worker because Gide and Malraux, along with all other French left-wing intellectuals, still refer to Nietzsche as a great European thinker, but they do not see that it is the French communist intellectuals who are right in not acceding to the fascists’ attempt to bring Nietzsche down to their own level. We must not relinquish to fascism—that negation of intellect and humanity—anything that has undeniable intellectual and human value. I was shocked by the consternation and silence that my platitudes elicited. Johannes R. Becher—noticing that the debate, quite lively until my intervention, had suddenly faltered—dispelled the unease with the suggestion that rather than ending the discussion of the topic at this point, we devote next month’s entire meeting, that is, the evening of April 20th, to it, “so that the comrades can be thoroughly prepared.” *** Tonight: continuation of the Nietzsche debate at Arbeitsgemeinschaft deutscher Schriftsteller. [. . .] They asked me to outline my views, if possible, in the form of a set of theses. As soon as I opened my mouth, the reaction was one of great indignation. I simply don’t understand. I only said, once more, that we must not allow Nietzsche, root and branch, to be expropriated by the fascists, and that the left-wing French intellectuals whom we want to teach about Marxism could teach us a thing or two. I referred to Lenin’s gesture in regard to Tolstoy. There is no doubt that the reactionaries of the time did everything in their power to extract dividends from the fame of the dead Tolstoy for the reaction; they wished to make him their own, and they forged weapons against all thoughts of revolution from his teachings. Undoubtedly there were numerous writings of his that made this possible. Despite this, or perhaps precisely because of this, Lenin refused to give Tolstoy over to the reactionary camp of Russia’s intelligentsia. And shouldn’t we do the same with Nietzsche, not just in defense of Nietzsche, which is important from a cultural point of view, but also, simply as a matter of political expediency? The debate proceeded in a depressing way. Just as I had based my argument on an article by Lenin about Tolstoy, so, they too, rested theirs on a different article of Lenin’s, one entitled “The Heritage We Renounce.” 1 Of course in this article there is no mention of Nietzsche. But that’s beside the point. The point is that I had the feeling that people here, in this debate, were not speaking openly. And later, this was confirmed to me. After we left the meeting, one of the Germans informed me that some Party coryphaeus—I

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think it was Radek—wrote an article over two months ago about Nietzsche with a thesis that put my assessment totally at odds with the official party line. In the margins of this journal entry, I find the three words: “Morgenröte, page 285”* in parentheses. To this day, I remember well the meaning of this note. A few days after the debate, I was sitting in the room of a German comrade in the Hotel Lux and among his books I noticed the sixteen-volume complete edition of Nietzsche’s works. Sitting in the room with us were several of the people who a few days before were willing to consign Nietzsche to the trash heap of fascism. My books had mostly remained back in Prigevica-Sveti Ivan, including my copy of the same green-cloth-bound Nietzsche edition that I now saw on the bookshelf of this room in the Lux. I can’t quite explain how, but while they were talking around me, I lifted Nietzsche’s Morgenröte off the shelf and started to leaf through it aimlessly. All of a sudden, as if by miracle, my eyes came to rest (on page 285) on a typically Nietzschean aphorism, called: Die Freiwillig Blinden (The voluntarily blind). I first read it to myself, and then breaking into the conversations of the others, loudly: There is a kind of excessive devotion to a person or a party which betrays that we secretly feel superior to them and are angry with ourselves about this. We, as it were, voluntarily blind ourselves in punishment for what our eyes have seen.**

I read these lines without any hesitation or hidden agenda, as when someone shouts out in surprise. But as I was reading it out loud, in a raised voice, to comrades, here in a room of the hotel reserved for the functionaries of the Comintern, in the Lux, it seemed even to me as if something had been said that should not have been said, especially not here. It dawned on me that I had callously broken an unspoken convention that everyone was obliged to recognize, a convention needed for life, to make life bearable. Never before had I realized so strongly that a voiced thought could deliver such a blow to naked nerves. Not just on others, but on myself as well. The awkard silence, however short, was an awkward silence shared by all. We hurried to put an end to it, just like one would close a window unexpectedly blown open by an icy wind howling outside that had suddenly broken into a protected room. Everyone tried to quickly change the subject and to talk loudly about something else with the evident intention of helping each other deny what had just happened, or act as if nothing had happened. We were in the second half of 1936 and by then everyone had a reason to fear their own thoughts and, in addition, to fear those you considered your friends, to fear everyone.

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I don’t know who is still alive from those who were then together, and who was destroyed morally and physically in the hellfire of the “purges.” But I know for certain that at this time this room, with its friendly evening company, was just one among the hundreds of thousand of rooms with a similar atmosphere. Tragically, legion is the number of those best of people who, out of loyalty to the revolution, to mankind, and to the hopes they had attached to man, found no other solution—at that time, there was no other solution—than at the cost of voluntary blindness to declare everything that was happening in the Soviet Union, exactly because it was happening in the Soviet Union, as necessary, revolutionary, and good. This instance of voluntary blindness was accompanied by such intellectual self-mutilation and turned into such an orgy of maiming of intellectual, indeed, of human life as Nietzsche could not have imagined. He only saw the subjective, psychological causes of voluntary blindness. He knew nothing about the possibility that a political constellation could develop in which the adherent of revolution, precisely because he is not allowed to lose hope, precisely because he wants to remain a revolutionary and a complete man, has no choice—not only psychologically but also morally—than to suppress day after day his moral rebellion, his judgment and clear thinking. He suppresses them unflaggingly until either he himself is sent to his death, or—perhaps this is the greater tragedy—since he has methodically and successfully killed in himself, over the course of years, every independent, spontaneous, individual enthusiasm and thought, he now does this without effort or pain. Indeed, he lauds as a revolutionary the man who is not a man but a deformed, ascetically submissive party official who agrees to everything and is ready to do anything. I did not understand then that this was the process that I was witnessing, that I had fallen into the maelstrom of such a process, that I was trampling in its swamps and struggling against its whirlpools with a copy of the Optimists in my hand. I could not name that which I saw and in which I lived, but I faithfully recorded for myself and faithfully, if naively, sought—as did many hundreds of thousands, many millions of other people—to find a name for what was happening in front of me, with me, and inside me day after day. And this journal of mine is historical evidence that there are objective and subjective situations in which we find it impossible to believe our own eyes and to admit to ourselves that we are seeing what we wish we were not seeing, and yet which we cannot but see. NOTES *Nietzsche: Morgenröte (Dawn). [Author’s footnote] ** Es gibt eine Art schwärmerischer, bis zum Äussersten gehender Hingebung an eine Person oder Partei, die verräth, dass wir im Geheimen uns ihr überlegen fühlen und darüber mit uns grollen. Wir blenden uns gleichsam freiwillig zur Strafe dafür, dass unser Auge zu viel gesehen hat. [Author’s footnote]

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1. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, The Heritage We Renounce, accessed October 9, 2017, https:// www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1897/dec/31c.htm.

Chapter Ten

Growing Amazements, Growing Concerns

Moscow, May 19, 1935 [. . .] On the one hand, “life” here seemed to us in our first days to proceed at the speed of an express train, but we also noted in our first days, and this impression became stronger each day and each hour, that people here live life at a slower pace than one could possibly have imagined. [. . .] There is no adequate simile with which to indicate how long it takes to accomplish the simplest tasks here. I want to enter a book publisher’s office or that of the VOKS. At the gate, I am stopped. Without a “bumashka,” I cannot get one step closer to the goal. You can only get a “bumashka” (that is, written permission) to go up the stairs if you first present another “bumashka” (a passport or personal identification booklet). But this is just the beginning. I take out my passport and hand it over in the hope that I can now go on my way. Not so fast. There is now another procedure to go through. They examine the passport thoroughly and without hurry, and then with it, the porter retreats to his booth. I can see through the window that he sits down by his phone and tries to reach the appropriate person with whom I would like to meet. The called person generally does not pick up right away, because he is either on another line, or has just left his room, or is in his room but in an important discussion. In the best scenario, the person on the other end picks up the phone and directs the porter to send me up. Now the porter hangs up the phone and with amazing tranquility sits down to a table, removes from its drawer a palm-sized piece of paper, puts it before himself, and, with the solemn movements of someone not used to writing, fills in the various fields 65

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of the form: the date, the name of the visitor, the name of the visited, and then asks: what is the reason for the visit, and after recording all this, he lifts his head to see what time it is, writes that down . . . More waiting, even if I had an appointment for this time. I have to wait because the person I am trying to visit is a tremendously busy person who is on an endless, very important call, or is at a meeting that is lasting longer than was planned, or— and this is the worst but most frequent case—he left the room for a minute, having left a message that he would be right back (sichas), but in the best case, this right away means at the minimum, half an hour. In Moscow, the three most elegant hotels are: Hotel Metropol, the Savoy, and the hotel on the bank of the Moscow River where the VOKS has put us. Again, a liveried patriarch, reminiscent of the castellan in a romantic play, stands at the door. We have a magnificent room with a private bath and a telephone and we can choose from a collection of the finest foods in the restaurant at the expense of the VOKS. But . . . but the service is so slow that between the first course and the last we, who read very slowly in Russian, can finish reading Pravda from the first letter to the last and sometimes even Izvestia. [Sinkó was puzzled and frustrated by the fact that the VOKS, which was extremely solicitous in showing the Sinkós around Moscow, could not arrange a meeting between Sinkó and Arosev, the president of the VOKS, whom Sinkó had met in Paris and who had arranged their visit. Sinkó would like to work on the task of getting the Optimists published and expects Arosev’s help with that. His wife also hoped to find employment in her field, radiology. The female guides who greeted the Sinkós each morning urged him to be patient and promised that before the end of the month in which the Sinkós were the guests of the VOKS, the meeting with Arosev would happen and his wife would find a job.] And so it was. Our expectant longing for the moment of the meeting with Arosev to arrive turned out to be unwarranted. The moment arrived but . . . It is not that Comrade Arosev was unfriendly. Indeed, he was friendly, very friendly, only—in contrast with our first meeting, when in a small conference room at the Soviet Embassy in Paris he sat on the edge of a small table talking to me—he now greeted me in his somewhat overly and ostentatiously elegant “presidential” room from behind a no less imposing “presidential” desk, from which he rose and extended—not two, as before—but one hand in greeting. Comrade Arosev was evidently one of those people—it seemed to me—who behave differently when surrounded by the external attributes of their social position. [. . .] Actually, for a long time—that is, a relatively long time, since I only held up Comrade Arosev with my affairs for fifteen minutes—I could not get a word in edgewise. Comrade Arosev spoke. He asked questions which he answered himself. He asked about our trip but

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then added that the long boat trip must have been tiring. He enquired about what we had seen in Leningrad and in Moscow so far. He was upset that we had not yet been taken to see the new opera of Shostakovich, Katerina Ismailova, based on a novella by Leskov, and shaking his head, he immediately rang a bell on his desk—there were three such bells in addition to the telephone on his desk—and he told the secretary who appeared at his summons, in no uncertain terms, that she must obtain tickets for Katerina Ismailova. 1 [. . .] Arosev asked my wife if she has been shown the abortion clinic, because as a doctor she would surely find it very interesting; the VOKS shows this institution to every foreign doctor because this, too, belongs to those types of institutions that one does not find anywhere else in the world and this institution is proof that the Soviet Union lives up in practice to the principle that women are not slaves, that women have control over their own bodies—and who knows how long this would have gone on, or rather, I know: it would have gone on until the last minute of the quarter hour allotted to me, had I not suddenly become aware of this danger and had I not, almost rudely, grabbed the reins and with a yank stopped Comrade Arosev from rambling every which way, having forgotten why in fact I was there. Then, at once, Comrade Arosev’s heretofore gaily sparkling white teeth disappeared behind his compressed lips, his thick, black, English mustache suddenly seemed to turn sober on his round face, and his features expressed a sincere surprise, as if I had indeed reminded him unexpectedly, even with brutal absence of tact, about something that he had forgotten. “I’ve been on pins and needles for days regarding the publication of Optimists. I could hardly wait to see you again,” I repeated, surprised that it was necessary to explain this to him. Then, having lost some confidence in my momentum but with all the more determination, I continued, “You will be so kind as to take up the matter now, will you not, and inform the State Publishing Company and the Publishing Company of the Revolutionary Writers of Foreign Languages about my manuscript and, as we had discussed in Paris, as the president of the VOKS, you will ease the way for me as a foreign writer to get in touch with Soviet publishers . . .” Despite my determination I could not continue. While I was talking, not only did Comrade Arosev remain unpleasantly serious but he made a face as if someone had put some food on his plate to which he had a definite aversion and that he was doing his best to conceal out of good manners. [. . .] “I would be very, very sorry if you were to misunderstand me,” he said, while offering me Russian cigarettes—and for a second he compared the long Russian cigarettes with the shorter European ones—“I would be extremely sorry if you were to misunderstood me, but I have to admit, that my impression is . . .” Comrade Arosev was no longer speaking fluently. Instead of ending some of his sentences with a predicate, he would make a gesture. He spoke of

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Romain Rolland, who, as he said, was “the greatest” among the many foreign friends of the Soviet Union and whose words bear great weight in the Soviet Union. There is absolutely no reason to doubt, none whatsoever, that a manuscript about which Romain Rolland has spoken highly will find a publisher here, and I should be sure to show Romain Rolland’s letter to publishers when the occasion comes. He is telling me this as a friend. At the same time, he asks in all friendship that I should not misunderstand him, or rather that I try to understand that he, as president of the VOKS, has done all that he can do for me by inviting me and being my host in the Soviet Union and thus making it possible for me to take the necessary steps in the matter of my manuscript. I must be able to appreciate that he, as president of the VOKS, cannot personally engage himself, even indirectly, as my liaison in the matter of a manuscript about whose merits he has no doubt, but precisely because he is the president of the VOKS, thus in an exposed political and social position, he cannot take responsibility for this manuscript. “Such things,” and here he used the same expression as our guide had used in Leningrad with the port guard who insisted that we get out of our car, “after all we are cultured people, and you as a considerate man of culture will understand that such things are delicate matters.” The gist of this flood of words was that Comrade Arosev denied that there was anything he could do for me in the matter of the Optimists. The only thing he could do was to have his secretary call the manager of the GIHL (the State Publisher of Literature), Comrade Yonov, and ask him when he would be able to meet with me. Then he forcefully pressed one of the buzzers on his desk and instructed his secretary to do as he had described, and, asking once more that I should not misunderstand him, or rather, that I should understand him, he wished me a continued pleasant stay and in a friendly manner sent me on my way. As chance would have it, after days of persistent telephone calls at all hours of the morning and evening and with an insistence in my voice that, despite my will, conveyed my agitation, I succeeded in having a meeting on that same day with that Professor Grivtsov to whom Rolland’s wife had sent my manuscript of Facing the Judge and that I had written for Europe. Grivtsov had agreed back then to translate that autobiography into Russian and to convey it to Gorky, whom Rolland had already alerted about the manuscript and about my arrival. I asked him straight out what progress he had made in the translation and when he expected to be able to complete it so that he could send it to Gorky. This conversation took place in the hallway of a state-run institution. Grivtsov, who was a very well-educated person, stressed in answering my question that he was first of all a “specialist,” that is, apolitical. Then he added that exactly for this reason . . . And he finished his sentence with a hand motion, the same one that Comrade Arosev had used. He continued:

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Mariya Pavlovna—Roland’s wife—has been living abroad for so long that she is not aware of the specific conditions in the Soviet Union and she thinks of things as being simpler than they really are here, where . . . And again it is that same uncertain wobbling gesture that finishes the sentence. Professor Grivtsov says that he has read Facing the Judge and by the way, he finds it to be an autobiography of the sort that brings to life a whole generation’s state of mind, and for his part, he agrees completely with Mariya Pavlovna; he finds it a fascinating, indeed, passionately gripping human document—but he said this with so little passion and with such a sour face that if we had not been speaking French, I would have thought that I had misunderstood him—, but . . .—he continued—the question is not whether it appeals to him personally or not, but rather—and unfortunately there is no question about this—or at least he fears that here in the Soviet Union this valuable manuscript would be found to be too daring, too outspoken, in a certain sense, impermissible, and naturally in such a case, he, as the translator—and Professor Grivtsov used the same expressions as Arosev had—could end up in a precarious position. He doesn’t yet know if he can take on the responsibility, because such things, I should understand him, are risky. If I write to Maria Pavlovna, I should tell her that he will try to find some solution, but for the time being, any hurry could turn out to be foolhardiness, and he is a man who likes to think things through. [Reflecting at the time on these two events, Sinkó remembers being struck by the fact that not only an “apolitical specialist” like Grivtsov but also a Communist Party member like Arosev, who as a teenager took part in the Civil War and was a revolutionary, should be so full of fear. “Is it possible that in a country where the revolution has won, where the forces of the revolution are already in full control, the revolutionaries themselves must change?”] This is what I had to ask myself because it quickly turned out that Arosev’s behavior was not atypical [. . .] indeed, it was especially typical for Soviet Communists. For example, here is the director of the State Publisher of Literature, Yonov. The facade of the building in which he presides advertises with imposing graphs visible from the street the millions and millions of books that they have published and year-to-year growth (by the millions) of their publications. The numbers make you veritably dizzy—and if you happen to be a writer, as I am, then it is hard not to be jealous of your Soviet-Russian colleagues, for whom it is not an exceptional event if some of their books are published with a printing of one hundred thousand copies. But the jealousy with which you think about the gigantic territory on which Soviet writers operate dissipates as soon as you talk for three minutes about a manuscript offered for publication with the director of the State

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Publisher of Literature, or, as they call it here—where acronyms are so popular—GIHL. This Yonov is a tall person, not thin and not fat, not friendly and not unfriendly. There is no reason to think that he is malicious but it is also clear that he is not very capable of compassion. In every way, he is quite colorless, except for his slightly puffy face, which is distinctly yellow. He is about my age, perhaps a few years older, but the impression given by this director of the Soviet Union’s largest publisher, thus, of one of the Soviet Union’s largest cultural institutions, is as impersonal as a yellowed administrative sheet whose rubrics were filled in with proper penmanship by a poorly paid scribe turned gray with honesty and boredom, and long turned to dust. Could it be just my personal bad luck that here, in the state of the victorious proletariat, in the short time that I have been here, I have only run into functionaries of state institutions whose personality brings to mind not a revolutionary, or a passionate and brave fighter for the realization of an idea that embraces all of mankind, but rather—oh, much rather—of the immortal Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, eternally playing their roles transparently badly and walking on egg-shells. It is as if some superior power were always present, floating frighteningly above and around them, some power that is so unpredictable and so frightening that they would rather not initiate anything, because if regrettably even doing nothing is an action (in a negative sense,) still, it is less risky than doing something and assuming responsibility for an action based on their own independent decision. [. . .] When I stepped into Yonov’s office, I took out the manuscript and placed it on his desk. Then, as Arosev had advised me, I took out Rolland’s letters. I also took out the letter André Malraux had given me just before I left Paris with the comment that I might be able to make some use of it in the Soviet Union. The director of the GIHL pushed the manuscript away from himself with an automatic motion, away to the very edge of the desk, and started to read the letters with what seemed to be the greatest concentration. He read them, one after the other. And when he finished, he put them on top of each other like a man who is used to order and handed them back to me. He did all this so unhurriedly that we seemed to be no longer sitting at the very center of the capital of the socialist Soviet Union during its Five Year Plan but on the shores of eternity, where, as is well known, Time, as a Kantian category, no longer exists. That this slow pace was just a facade, a gray cover for the thoughts and concerns that chased each other around in his head, that the slow pace was necessary only so that the director of the GIHL could find the formula that would absolve him—whose job, in the final analysis, was to say yes or no— from the responsibility implied in both a yes and a no; I realized all this when finally Yonov glanced at the swollen manuscript on the edge of his desk and—sighed. [. . .] I almost felt guilty about putting the director of the GIHL

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before the dilemma of either accepting or rejecting a manuscript in such a way that he had to take a position concerning me—which in itself would not have been hard—but also concerning the opinion of Romain Rolland about whom Pravda had written in the last few days that “he is a shining example of the best intellectuals in the world.” Yonov’s sigh ended, and I plaintively broke the silence. “This is an urgent issue for me,” I said. “I have to find a publisher while I am still a guest of the VOKS. My goal and wish to remain in the Soviet Union can only be realized if I find a publisher. It is urgent because I would like to find, or rather, to rent a room now, but for this I need money. I have not a single ruble in my pocket (literally, not figuratively); the VOKS treats me very generously for the moment but this only means, as far as my financial security is concerned, that I have but a short time in which to find the means under favorable condition—granted, under very favorable conditions—to normalize my situation in the Soviet Union by arranging for the publication of the Optimists. It was with these stipulations that Comrade Arosev invited me to Moscow. I must repeat, therefore, that it is of utmost urgency for me to make arrangements for my manuscript. Yonov, still occupied in his thoughts, allowed me to expound at length why it was important for me to get the publication of the Optimists under way. I did so and then remained silent. He needed a few more moments before he could respond. Then, with a trace of rebuke, he asked me, to my surprise: “Why did you not publish your book in France?” In his letter, Malraux had explained that Gallimard was willing to publish the book with the stipulation that I shorten it, but that I could not bring myself to do so. I reminded Comrade Yonov that he had just read this letter and that in France today, the Hungarian Soviet Republic, which is the theme of the manuscript, and the whole spirit of the manuscript . . . Suddenly, the lines from the brow of the director of the GIHL disappeared. He became so agitated that he interrupted my explanation with a question which this time had a merry sound to it: “So your book’s theme is explicitly political, explicitly about the Hungarian Soviet Republic? But then the matter is quite simple. I will give it to a reader and as soon as we get his written opinion, you can get the contract and, along with the contract, the prescribed advance, and everything will be in order.” I was dumbfounded. Why did it take him so long to come up with this obviously simple and standard solution, and why did he rejoice at finding it, as if it had been a sudden saving inspiration? “But since the theme of the manuscript deals with the Hungarian dictatorship of the proletariat, we will need, besides the reader of the GIHL, the opinion of the Comintern, that is, of Béla Kun himself. Without this, I cannot accept the responsibility, no, I cannot accept the responsibility for a novel

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which deals with the Hungarian dictatorship of the proletariat. Béla Kun, yes, let him decide. Only he can decide.” [. . .] Moscow, May 28, 1935 [“The thin Silvio” was an acquaintance of the Sinkós from Paris who had arrived in the Soviet Union as an engineering specialist a few months before the Sinkós. He appears at several points in The Novel of a Novel. When they met in Moscow, Silvio, already more familiar with the way things worked there, tried to disabuse Sinkó of his “childish illusions,” namely that he would find a publisher for the novel in short order. He urged Sinkó to try to publish excerpts from the novel and to publish shorter pieces from his other writings as well, as a way to earn income.] Whether he is right or wrong, I am moved by Silvio’s friendly overprotectiveness. He tries to help us in every way. It was as a result of one of his “actions” that we were invited to the apartment of Deutsch, the editor of the weekly magazine Za Rubezhom (At the frontier). 2 I will write more about this, but it is not Deutsch, our new acquaintance, that has made me stay up at this late hour and to take pen in hand. Before we set out for the apartment of this editor, I looked through my suitcases to find those short stories that might be appropriate for publication in a weekly magazine. Following Silvio’s advice, I wanted to bring them with me. I had an unforgettable surprise. Here are my short stories that had appeared in the Viennese Der Tag, the German Arbeiter-Zeitung, or in the Zurich Volksrecht. I used to like these pieces, that is, I liked them until this evening. But as I took them in my hand this evening, I immediately pushed them away. Without exception, they all dealt with the unemployed, the homeless, with haggard women, physical and mental misery, hopelessness, insoluble conflicts, and destruction. They all express that impenetrable darkness that has filled the depths and heights of society and which in the last decade has swallowed up and is swallowing up that confidence in a future of justice and in the victory of humanity that had once been alive in Europe. [. . .] Here at the very center of Moscow where my eyes are filled with workers’ clubs, windows lit late into the night, crowds flooding into the street at all hours, children in playgrounds—seeing another lifestyle—my novels find no echo even in me. Here the acoustics for such stories are missing. They have no resonance. I wasn’t interested in them because here my imagination, too, is exercised by completely different problems. While I was rummaging through my short stories, M sat down next to me to help and without my saying one word about my surprising discovery, at this time she came to the same conclusion and was equally surprised by it. A whole set of ancient, traditional problems no longer seemed relevant. Here is

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just one, but very important, example: something about which over the centuries and even today innumerable dramas and novels have been written, a humiliating, often deadly problem in European civilization that has plagued one-half of the population, women, day after day, has ceased to be a problem here. They put a white coat on me, too, so that I could accompany M as the enthusiastic and pleasant Russian professor showed us around the sparkling clean hospital called an abortarium. According to the professor, the technique has been perfected to such a degree here that patients, of whom many are treated each day, are sufficiently recovered after half an hour to chat with each other, feeling refreshed and healthy. The professor laughed nonchalantly while assuring M that the opinions of the European medical schools are completely wrong about the procedure; when done properly, it has no lasting ill effects. He proudly showed us statistics about the activities of his institution. What made perhaps the greatest impression on me was that no unwanted questions are asked of the patient. They don’t even need to give their name if they don’t want to. This is probably the only institution in the Soviet Union where a bumashka is not needed. Reality has surpassed literature and outgrown it. A traditional theme of literature which was carried from Ariadne on Naxos through various incarnations to Gretchen’s tragedy, or even to Romain Rolland’s heroine in L’Âme enchantée, has been reduced by the new society to a technical problem and solved as such. [. . .] But one question remains. [. . .] The problems posed by my short stories are of no interest here even to me. That’s fine, since they were not produced here. But why is it that the artistic productions we have seen here so far, those produced here—with the exception of an opera by Shostakovich—are extremely weak: weak emotionally and intellectually, barren, bloodless like ghosts, hollow sounding. How can I understand, how can I explain to myself that just as I failed to find any trace of the revolutionary in Comrade Arosev or in Director Yonov, I find not even the hint of anything that might be called revolutionary, new, or socialist in the artistic products of the Soviet Union. I am incapable, at least at this point, of understanding the principles and considerations by which cultural life is guided here. At this point I cannot understand why it is that what is pursued here as art lacks all originality, grandness, or courage, why it is so evidently second-tier while the society that produces it, its foundation, Soviet reality, is one that has torn down the social structures and norms of the past and which is pregnant with so much that is new and with so many previously unsuspected problems and tasks. What is behind this problem? What explains it? Is this necessary or a flaw? But whence the flaw? If only I could believe that the flaw is in me, that it is I who am wrong in judging these works, that it is I who cannot see their greatness and value! But for there to be even a remote probability of this, it would be necessary to be

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looking at something new, unusual, perhaps shocking. [. . .] But what is most surprising in this art is precisely the very absence of anything surprising. [. . .] Already in Leningrad where we saw a guest performance by the Vakhtangov Theater of a Russian play entitled “Aristocrats,” we felt sorry for the wonderful actors who are wasting their considerable talents on such lifeless figures. In the Hudozhestvenii Teatr (Moscow art theater)—again, fantastic actors—they were performing a play by Knut Hamsun. If I found my short stories uninteresting here, I must say about Hamsun’s drama that I would have found that boring by now even in Vienna or Paris. The piece is about a young artist who is unwilling to compromise; he sticks to his ideal of beauty. His wife cheats on him for a while and eventually leaves him for an emptyheaded journalist. To top off his love troubles, the young artist who was betrayed by his wife, falls prey to financial problems. The drama ends with the appearance of the repossession agent. M laughed: “Someone to whom it is worth sending a repossession man. Is that misery?” We wondered together: when would we see a Soviet drama, a real one, about today, really about today? Seeing Schiller’s Intrigue and Love with the Vakhtangov only made this question more acute: where is the Soviet drama that is as revolutionary and as artistic as was the young revolutionary’s Intrigue and Love? The VOKS took us to the Tairov Theater, too. There they were performing one of Lecocq’s weaker operettas, Sun and Moon. 3 The VOKS thought that in the Moscow of 1935, we should see this French operetta from the last century. The acrobatics of the actors were not sufficiently entertaining to keep us in the theater past the first act. At the Malii Theater we saw the masterpiece called Sound of the Flute (Solo na fleytye). Any Catholic young-men’s clubs from the Bácska 4 could put this play on their program because its “message” is that virtue will be victorious and sin will get its punishment; and furthermore, the play is atrocious. What about films? Whatever happened to the staggeringly great revolutionary Russian films, which at one time forced even the enemy to praise them for their suggestive artistic force? What Soviet films have we seen since we have been here? As art, the only film worth mentioning is the one about Chapaev. It has some scenes that are unforgettable. (For example, where the White officers march in parade formation, in fact not as much into battle as to their deaths.) But a question arises here, too. Is this film the apotheosis of heroism in war, warrior virtues, or the spirit of revolution? The border between these two is rather thin in this film. This is all the more puzzling since Furmanov’s novel, written by the young writer in the first year of the revolution and on which the film is based, is, quite to the contrary, filled with the Great October’s

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youthfully joyous, fantastically naive, and chiliastic, revolutionary spirit. And the other films? One of them is called Harmonica. The only encouraging aspect to it, as with the entire “art” world in general, is the audience. The audience, which, for example, followed the excellent performances of Shostakovich’s opera or even of Intrigue and Love with intense attention and grasped every word— one could feel this—was fidgeting uneasily in its seats; three young workers who sat behind me even provided cynical commentaries to some overly idyllic, idiotically “cute” scenes and left the movie house in the middle of the showing. It seems that this film, Harmonica, is trying to follow in the footsteps of the Veselye rebiata (Happy guys) series: it was made in order to propagate that “joie de vivre” which bores me to death, though, admittedly, the Veselye rebiata is very popular here. These films are surrounded by a proletarianized version of a rococo falseness, a tasteless and dumb operetta atmosphere. Every theater and movie house in Moscow is filled to capacity, but those producing the works, rather than trying to rise at least to the level of the public, do their best to suppress its taste. Why is this degradation of art allowed here? Why do they permit that the audience be cheated in this way, that this audience, hungry for truth and beauty, be served with some phony surrogate of the truth, with poor, tasteless operettas? I remember a patient that I saw a few days ago in the Central X-Ray Institute. The Institute itself, where the chief doctor, Dr. H, showed us around, and in general, everything here is more interesting than the literary and cultural life. The Institute is filled with small laboratories squeezed one against the other. There is not enough space. Dr. H says, “We have to be clever like Robinson Crusoe; we make our own Roentgen tubes, dosimeters, and the walls that protect the doctors and nurses from the harmful rays are made with barite, lead being needed for other purposes.” He doesn’t speak of the difficulties in a complaining tone but almost as if to brag, enthusiastically, because they give evidence of the energy with which they master them. “We would need about another one hundred thousand doctors,” says Dr. H. In one of the wards, I notice a man sitting at the edge of his bed and he can hardly breathe. Dr. H explains: “He can’t lie down anymore. He is a miner from the Urals. Cancer; his whole body is full of tumors. It took him four days and four nights to get here from the Urals. We told him: go back, we’ll give you medication, go back. He wouldn’t believe us. ‘You can’t help? You here in the capital, in Moscow, can do everything.’ We couldn’t argue with this faith,” says Dr. H. They allowed him to stay, though his case was hopeless. It seems to me that this faith creates an obligation. It should obligate everyone to give their best, their truest, their most beautiful. This is the faith of the revolution; it was created by the revolution and is the strength of the

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revolution. What a challenge, what a privilege, and what a responsibility it is to speak to people whose faith can move mountains! But could it be that little men like Arosev and Yonov are the authentic representatives of these people? What has this Ural miner, this faith, to do with what is on offer here as Soviet culture, as food for the spirit? Nothing. Even my short stories that were produced in a darkened Europe, in desperation, even those have more truth than the problem-free joyful life propagated by Harmonica, Sound of the Flute, and their whole company. I am not forgetting that in the context of all other questions, the quality of theater and film is of tertiary rank. The art of the French Revolution also did not measure up to the historical importance of the revolution itself. [. . .] But in the Soviet Union, it wasn’t always so. In the first years of the Soviet Union, throughout the NEP period, there was a literature that was excitingly fresh, alive, bold, and true. It was in fact the literature of the revolution. It was the artistic expression of the problems of the revolution, of the people who lived through the revolution. There was Eisenstein. There was Pudovkin. Why did all these disappear and to where, so that their place could be taken, in one form or another but in the final analysis, by the style of an operetta like Pastukh Kostya (Kostya the Shepherd) with its overture as the dominant motif of every Soviet cultural product? This week’s copies of Pravda lie stacked up here on my desk. Just as I try to understand everything that I see on the street and everywhere that I turn, I pick up the papers over and over again so that, as soon as possible, I can get a stable, clear picture of the new reality here, which one can hardly call easy to understand. At times, you think that you understand something well and in the next hour you realize that you have to revise your conclusions once again. Even now, as I was about to stop writing this journal and finally go to bed, while leafing through this week’s editions of Pravda, it is as if someone had hit me on the head. It has not been a half an hour that I wrote in this journal about the abortion clinic, about how clean it was and about how humanely and rationally it solves a problem that is so horribly problematic everywhere else. But now, still sitting at the same desk, I see the following article in small print in the May 22, 1935, edition of Pravda. Secret Abortion Clinic and its Owner [The article describes the arrest of an older doctor who was performing abortions in his apartment. The apartment was equipped with two operating tables and the instruments and medications needed for the procedure. When the police entered, two women who had just been operated on were lying on the tables. Both were taken to the hospital. The doctor, who worked at a legal abortion clinic had turned the women away because they were past the legal term or were considered unfit, but the doctor gave them his address and

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offered his private services. Money and jewelry were found at the apartment. An attending nurse was also arrested.] What’s going on here? A doctor who has amassed 65,800 rubles at his apartment performing illegal abortions in a city where the average monthly earnings are about 150 to 200 rubles? True, this Dr. Mironov is a single case but this case indicates . . . What does it indicate? Does it show only that on the walls of the new house the mold of many centuries, which has seeped into the soil, breaks through over and over again? But even then I don’t understand. Why do women here need to resort to such services if the abortion clinic, as the professor said, is available to all? Or are these model institutions only models, that is, for show? I started these notes after midnight with the news that Deutsch, the editor of Za Rubezhom, had invited us to his apartment. [. . .] I naturally want to grasp every opportunity to learn more about how things work here. I would have liked to have gained an understanding from the dinner company about things that puzzle me, so I took a small article that I found in the May 15th edition of Pravda which I am now pasting back here: Hooligans Attack a Group of Pioneers The Pioneers of the Kuzminogotsk school near Tambov visited the factory called The Red Soldier, after which they marched home to the sound of drums. Along the way, they met a group of hooligans who showered the children with stones and beat them with sticks. They took the red kerchiefs of the Pioneers, pierced their drum, and punctured the hands of the drummer [. . . The hooligans were arrested and all six were taken to court.] This news would not have been surprising had it appeared in the newspaper ten or fifteen years ago. But is the Civil War still being fought here? I asked our new friends what kinds of hooligans might be involved in this, what might the background of this incident be? I had many questions, or would have had, but I held back because I saw that either my questions did not interest them or . . . In any case, they started to talk about something else. [. . .] I’ve never seen a place where people talk so little about politics. Something positive: Editor Deutsch agreed to publish an excerpt from the Optimists in the next edition of his journal, Za Rubezhom. Moscow, June 1, Midnight We wanted to make the best use of our time before M starts her new job at the Central Cancer Research Institute. And the best use of our time means walking on the streets as much as possible. If you allow yourself to be driven around in a car of the VOKS from one place to the next, you zip by a part of

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reality with eyes closed. You can see very nice institutions, but—and I finally realized this—you cannot get a true picture of how people live and what they are like merely by getting to know a society’s largest institutions. By now I have learned that each such institution expresses merely an ideal model, an intention, a governmental goal, and no more. The perfection of the institution does not mean that outside its walls everything is already working in the institution’s spirit. Quite to the contrary: [Sinkó gives as an example the opulence of the new Moscow metro. He compares this “model institution” to the actual houses being built. In a letter to the editor an inhabitant of one of these houses complains that his apartment has neither a toilet nor a kitchen, and no running water. They must go to the neighbors for these necessities.] I write all this in connection with the children’s museum [and library] that we visited today. [. . .] We had a three-hour conversation with the director, a very pleasant young woman who showed us every aspect of the museum. [. . .] It is encouraging to see someone so enthusiastic about their work, and—with the exception of journalists, writers, and the women whom the VOKS employs as tour guides, who are always secretly tired and bored but put on a professionally happy smile—here in Moscow, just like on the ship, it is remarkable how many people light up when they talk about their work. The woman from the museum was not only kind but also very intelligent. She talked about the importance of children’s literature and how it was lacking. I took a risk and added, “To me it seems it is not only children’s literature that is lacking. The programs in the theaters . . .” The woman smiles meaningfully. “I don’t agree with you. We adults have plenty to read: Pushkin, Tolstoy, not to mention Balzac . . . Today Balzac is right beside Pushkin and Tolstoy. They are the Soviet Union’s most popular writers.” The most interesting thing that I saw and heard about in the children’s museum was the wall of the great hall where colorful pictures presented the major cities of the world. One of these shows the plaza before Tokyo’s main railway station from where electric trams, cars, buses, and trolleys take the passengers into the city. In the maelstrom of these various means of transportation, some rickshaws are prominently visible here and there; some are rushing with passengers sitting in them, while others are waiting for passengers with a barefoot and ragged coolie between the two poles. [. . .] A guide with a group standing before this picture asks the children which means of transport they would like to take to get to the city. The children have learnt that in China and Japan, human power is cheaper than that of horses and that this is why the rickshaw has remained in use as a means of transportation. But not one of the children ever chooses the rickshaw. When the guide asks them if there isn’t anyone who would want to

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take a rickshaw into town, they answer, with horror and indignation, “Aren’t you ashamed to ask us such things?” I asked the woman, “But don’t you think that some children would at least be curious and would be interested to see what it is like to have a person rather than a horse running before the wagon?” The woman didn’t hesitate to agree with me but then immediately added, “Exactly so. And that is precisely why the question provokes them to such intense revulsion and indignation. The spontaneous childish curiosity is immediately countered by what our social education has formed practically into an instinct, the social instinct. In our country we have developed—she hesitated for a moment and corrected herself—there is developing a new, a distinctly social conscience. It is a habitual, spontaneous, actually physiological hatred for anything that injures human dignity.” Yes, this would be the ultimate goal: to develop an aversion, that is, an ethically filled aesthetic sensitivity in man. Just as the many millennia of civilization have developed a disgust in man against even the thought of cannibalism, so in a new society, it should be possible to develop not only a philosophical or moral—that would be too little—but a physiological aversion to any action that injures the feeling of human social solidarity. This is similar, if I remember correctly, to how Hegel once defined the torment of shame, as a spontaneous anger against something that is forbidden to humans. What must be achieved is not the constraint of man from above but the creation of a man whose own imagination—for this is the essence of humane sensibility—makes it impossible for him to enjoy anything gained through the humiliation or exploitation of his fellow man. The Moscow Children’s Museum functions in this spirit and we would have been happier after seeing it, had we not known that this museum only expresses an intention and not actual reality. Ah, Reality! In fact, as soon as you step out of the Museum, you run into children at every step who are perhaps lying when they say that they are hungry, but in any case, they are here prowling about in the street and survive on begging, extending their incredibly dirty hands before you. One would think that these are the last isolated remnants of the millions of children who had become homeless during the Civil War. That is what I thought in Leningrad. But oddly enough, just after leaving the Children’s Museum and sitting in a cafe reading a copy of Pravda that I found there—for it is not easy to get a hold of Pravda because the number of copies printed is small and only certain categories of people are allowed to subscribe—so, having left the museum and sitting in the green easy chair of a cafe, it was Pravda that alerted me to the fact that it was not as I had thought in Leningrad. Today’s edition of Pravda contains a whole series of new government regulations and measures concerning homeless children; measures intended to serve the “energetic struggle” against juvenile crime. Among these measures concerning children and

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juveniles and among the regulations dealing with their punishment—here, in the same country and city with that beautiful children’s museum—I read, among other things, about the extension of capital punishment to juveniles. Moscow, June, 1935 (sic) Now I am totally confused. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw a huge article in Pravda. It was about the necessity of abolishing the rights of Soviet women to medical intervention for the termination of unwanted pregnancies. In Austria, it was the clerical, Christian Socialist government that, against the opposition not only of the Communist but also the Social Democratic and even the Liberal bourgeois parties and presses, insisted on the infamous “Paragraph 145” according to which women were to be punished with up to five years of imprisonment for aborting a pregnancy and up to one year for just trying to do so, even if the attempt was not successful. The French [Communist] Party constantly pointed to the fact that in the Soviet Union, women are in control of their own bodies. And here in Moscow I met Friedrich Wolff, the German writer, who referenced his communist convictions as his reason for openly going against the laws of the German Reich and announced that as a doctor he would, despite the law, help women who turned to him. And now here is this article in Pravda, which claims that even when performed with the greatest care and best medical practices, such operations have unforeseeably harmful effects on women and, in order to protect women—so says the article—it demands a stringent law banning abortion. This in itself is more than surprising. But what I could not believe, or rather, what I did not want to believe my eyes were seeing: the large article was written by none other than that professor, or more precisely, the article was signed by the professor, who only a few days ago showed us the abortion clinic with such pride and who told us just the opposite of what is now printed just above his name. Try to figure that one out! NOTES 1. The opera is also known as Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District. See further part V, chapters 22, 23, 25. 2. A magazine that published writings from abroad, headed by Mikhail Koltsov, who was also an editor of Pravda and a mandarin of Soviet culture under Stalin. 3. Charles Lecocq, 1832–1918, French composer of popular operas and operettas. The piece referenced is probably Le jour et la nuit. 4. The Bácska was the region of pre-1919 Hungary where Sinkó grew up.

Chapter Eleven

Béla Kun

Again I need to interrupt my journal entries: without any commentary, the reader would not understand [. . .] the source of the emotions, indeed, awe, enthusiasm, and infatuation with which these journal entries speak of every meeting between their author and Béla Kun. [. . .] One of the words that have become innocent victims of ignominious men and times is the word “leader.” But for us in 1919 Béla Kun was a leader in the then still pure sense of that term: for me at that time there was no one whose word would have had greater weight in commanding than his. Being a “leader,” as he was, did not only imply authority to which one submits. He made the daily lives of a whole generation of Hungarian revolutionaries more fulfilling; the young generation of revolutionaries learned from him and found through him what it had until then only sought—feeling its way through the dark—mostly in vain and more or less in the wrong direction. He brought to us an assignment; exactly that great assignment for which we were all waiting. In a word: in the lives of a whole generation of youth who rebelled blindly against the First World War and experienced that war in desperation, Béla Kun was the first authentic messenger of the ideas of Lenin’s October—the first Bolshevik whom we saw with our own eyes. He was someone who knew from the experience of battle all that all of us could only guess at from the infrequently arriving and deliberately distorted news, and from the confusing maze of publicity. He was the first Bolshevik whom we saw and who brought with him to us from distant Russia that joyous and determined faith with which the Russian proletarian revolution summoned us to the final and world-redeeming battle. With the message that “’Tis the last conflict” of the Internationale, we believed literally, just as the Russians did, that a single great offensive, sweeping all before it, was all that was needed 81

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to cleanse the world, along with the corpses of the twenty million war dead and of the corpse of a mortally wounded world-capitalism. Kun had been sent with the mission of organizing this offensive on Hungarian territory. He accomplished it with dramatic speed and drove it to victory. As is well known, the victory was short-lived. The rule of the Hungarian Soviet Republic lasted about as long as had the struggle to bring it about. But our topic here is not the historical significance of these four months. It is the person of Béla Kun, who, with all his mistakes and faults, and with all his carefree faith, remained the living symbol of an entire era of the European workers’ movement—and of the faith of a generation of young, so very young revolutionaries: of their hopes, their fatal mistakes, and tragedies. When I arrived in Moscow, more than fifteen years had elapsed since those four short months that were rightly referred to by everyone as the time of Béla Kun, and those fifteen years were for me merely the continuation, processing, clarification, and consequence of those four months, uniquely rich in a life-time’s worth of joys, sorrows, and problems, the content of which had been determined by the leadership of Béla Kun. 1 The mere fact that it was in the building of the Comintern in which we were being cleared on the ground floor filled me with a momentary pathos; I felt its significance to my personal history. This moment actually took about half an hour because telephone calls had to be made, our personal identifications had to be recorded, and then we had to be given papers with which we could be led through the labyrinths of the building to see Béla Kun. For this once, even the half-hour did not seem to last long. While we waited downstairs with the manuscript of the Optimists under my arm, several of the characters of that book, or rather, the models of several of those characters recognized me. For a second it was as if each in turn froze from the surprise and then after we mutually convinced ourselves that we weren’t seeing visions but had popped up before each other in our ordinary physical realities from the improbably distant shadow of the past, we continued our relationships, indeed, one could say our conversations, where we had left off fifteen years ago, that is, where they ended in the manuscript of the Optimists. [. . .] Moscow, June 3, 1935 It is high time that I write about my first meeting with Béla Kun, now that we have met three or four times already. The first impression of our first meeting: he has visibly aged, seems ill, but nevertheless, for me he has somehow not changed. I remembered him as somewhat shorter, probably because back then he was not so thin. Otherwise, I felt that he was just like he was back then, or rather, I felt that I was just like I had been with him back then; I

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would not have been surprised if Comrade Kun, as I stepped into his office, would have bawled me out in his old clipped voice for all that I had done wrong, and then, just like in days bygone, when I had grown whiskers to look older than my improper twenty years, he would slap me on the back in consolation and grab me by the beard. Here in his room at the Comintern his desk is cluttered with stacks of papers, newspapers, and books, as it was once in Budapest in his room at the Hotel Hungaria where he had received me in the morning while the barber was lathering his face. But after all, fifteen years have elapsed since the Hungaria. In those fifteen years those of us who were youngsters have, it seems, grown up. I realized this when I heard Révai, 2 whom we met just as he was about to leave Kun’s office, calling Kun by his first name, Béla, and he used the familiar “thou” with him, even though “back then” he was twenty, as was I, and just like me, he also stood with a certain self-conscious anxiety before Kun, about whom we only spoke, even amongst ourselves, as “Comrade Kun.” And the “last time” we saw Kun it was not customary even among young comrades in the Hungarian Party to use the familiar form of address. When M and I were left alone with Kun, he sat us down before his desk, and he took his seat behind it. He asked us to tell him all the places we had been, how we had lived, what we had done since we had seen each other. He let me talk while, with his fountain pen and seemingly with his full concentration, he traced the clouds that were on the box of “Borci” cigarettes in front of him, and then, with slightly tilted head, he proceeded to fill in each cloud with blue ink. While I talked, the pen scratched the paper. I realized this when he would ask a question and the pen would stop moving. During this whole meeting, I was conscious of the fact that this was the only time when I could, indeed, should tell him everything. To tell him that, as surprised as I was by the resignation of the Revolutionary Governing Council without a fight, I was even more surprised by the way that the leaders of the Council—with none other than him showing the way, with Béla Kun out ahead—left their closest comrades, those most “compromised” in the lurch, while the leaders, having ensured the right of asylum from Austria for themselves, departed on a private train to Vienna. He would occasionally interrupt his doodling on the “Borci” cigarette box to quietly ask a question, and each time he did so, I felt that this would have been the chance to tell him about what for me had remained the most disquieting experience. Maybe even more so than Kun’s flight, I had found that it almost took more strength than I could muster to obey the Party’s orders at the time of the White Terror, when I was in hiding in Pest, not to provide the means (with the dollars that had been carefully packed up and entrusted to me and to Révai) for the escape of those comrades who had gone into hiding in Budapest and who were being pursued by the new authorities. (Horthy’s police

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found the brown box, full of dollars, untouched at the home of poor Mrs. Lederer, Révai’s mother, who spent several years for this in the prison at Márianosztra.) It was this inhumanity of the Party toward its own members along with the factional struggles, devolving into mutual recriminations and reproaches, that broke out immediately after the start of the emigration that finally alienated me from the Party. I didn’t mention any of this. Kun gave not the slightest indication that he expected a walk to Canossa from us, and in that case, how could I be the one who, even in the form of a confession, would in the final analysis, accuse him and ask him for an explanation. I did tell him that right at the beginning of our life in emigration I wrote about my experiences and even though the art historian Frigyes Antal translated this work to German and even found a publisher for it, I decided at the last minute to desist from publication, lest that manuscript and the data that it conveyed be used against the Party. While listening to my account of the past fifteen years, he made a few brief comments from which it was evident that I wasn’t telling him anything new and that he was just letting me talk so that he could validate the accuracy of his information. He asked me, for example, with whom I had met in Paris, and when I hesitated about mentioning Károlyi, he was the one who first used Károlyi’s name and also that of László Ney. His memory astounded me: he remembered what I wrote and where I wrote it, even of such a minor satire as my article entitled Monsieur Godefroy that I published in L’Humanité on the occasion of the Parisian Congress of the Second International. 3 He was very serious throughout and asked me if I remember when we had last seen each other. “I described it in my novel. In Cegléd, when the front fell,” I said, and I added that there was one aspect that I had not mentioned in the book. I wrote that throughout the entire time that Kun spoke, there was a soldier in the first row, who was watching the fleecy clouds drift by, and I saw, I experienced, what it is like when a voice cries out in the wilderness. Kun spoke, trying to convince the well-equipped team to go into battle. He spoke with tremendous force but it was received with tremendous indifference and silence. Never before had I seen a man so alone as Béla Kun at that moment. I did write this, but I did not write that he often had to interrupt his speech, because practically after every third sentence, he had to turn aside, lifting his hand to his mouth. He was gagging, vomiting . . . While I was speaking, his head leaned closer and closer to the “Borci” cigarette box without stopping his doodling, and I could see that he was crying. “Well, I will read your novel. Call me in three days.” He stood up and said in parting “Strange are the paths of life, aren’t they?”

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We were touring the Central Radiological Institute three days later, and that is from where I called Kun. “I wished you and your Optimists to the darkest pit of Hell at least ten times a day,” snapped Kun’s familiar voice good-naturedly in the telephone. “I have so much to do but I cannot put the manuscript down. I will try to stop reading it but I fear that I may not be able to do so. It interests me too much. Call me again so we can set up a meeting.” This newer meeting, so far the last, took place in the afternoon the day before yesterday, once again in the building of the Comintern. This time he received M and me in a more than friendly way. He looked at us with a warm smile and at the same time with a penetrating look as if since our last meeting—that is, after having started to read the manuscript—he had discovered surprising, personal things about us. It was as if he were seeing us for the first time in this new light, and he received us with friendship and an open curiosity. Again, we found Józsi (Joey) Révai with him. It was now clear that it had not been an accident that we had found him there in our earlier meeting as well. But now he remained there as a quiet observer throughout our visit. Józsi! The memory of our close friendship which had filled the years of our youth and which formed such an integral part of it will never fade. No one else has filled the place of that friendship. What remains is an irreplaceable loss. It only proves the cruel stupidity of life or the stupid cruelty of life that, during the whole hour that we spent sitting together in that room, the few words that we exchanged were in an off-handedly ironic tone and with a coldness like the glistening of the spectacles on Józsi’s blue eyes. I could have turned the reunion with Józsi into a much more affable, direct, and honest one had I followed my instincts and asked straight out about our former mutual girlfriend—that singular, exceptionally intelligent being, who had, in fact, brought us together and over whom a few years later we broke with each other. I knew that she—who had been, in one way or another, our spiritual mentor in Budapest and even in the Viennese emigration had functioned as an arbiter between us in intellectual and personal matters—now lived in Russia, and I also knew that she had been forsaken by all her friends, and perhaps—and this is what I did not know—she was in an even worse, indeed, the worst possible situation. But I did not mention her name. I remembered the intense fear with which I had been instructed here in Moscow on our first days. We were still in Paris when I heard that Ernő Czóbel had been exiled to Siberia for some sort of offense against the Soviet party line. I knew Ernő Czóbel from my childhood years. He was already a gimnázium teacher in the capital and a journalistic commentator. Despite the difference in our ages, every time he came down to Szabadka, he was willing to spend hours with me, a gimnazium student, and listen attentively to my enthusiastic but poor poems, which were only weak imitations of Ady. It was to visit Sarolta

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Lányi, the daughter of my music teacher, Ernő Lányi, who did so much to initiate me into the mysteries of classical music. Sarolta became Czóbel’s wife and she was now living in Moscow. As soon as I had learned of this, I inquired about her address. I thought—I believe correctly—that she would be pleased to see someone whom she had met while still a young girl, in her father’s house in Szabadka and in the summers in Palics. 4 But as natural as this wish seemed to me, Karcsi (Charley) Garai, whom I had asked for the address, reacted to it with strong disapproval, almost indignation. He explained to me that it would be completely out of place for me not only to visit Sarolta but even to continue my inquiries about her address or about her current situation. I did not understand. I objected that Sarolta obviously had not done anything wrong or she would not be allowed to continue living at liberty in Moscow. I was given the answer that this of course is true—but still, she is the wife of a man who was exiled to Siberia in punishment and so you shouldn’t even think about looking her up or asking others about her. “You can’t possibly be afraid that I will come under suspicion,” I asked with a laugh. The answer shocked me: “Not just of that. And that is not the issue. It is also a matter of the duty of a communist. Among these is the duty of avoiding any suspicious activity with which you could call the attention of the GPU upon yourself. Your visit to, or even your inquiries about the wife of a Communist exiled to Siberia would force the GPU to look into whether there was anything behind that. It is impermissible for anyone who is a communist to make extra work for the GPU purely for sentimental reasons. That is why,” so went the advice and the warning, “one does not speak about anyone who might be directly or indirectly suspicious in the Soviet Union, a country surrounded by enemies.” I had come to like Karcsi Garai, currently the editor of the German newspaper in Moscow, back in the twenties when we lived together in the Grinzing Barracks. He was a gentle, kind, and open man whose warmth was, and still is, evident. And yet, he has become conditioned here to this mental discipline, compared to which the so-called Spartan ideal is childsplay. (Romain Rolland believes that Moscow is more like Athens than like Sparta, but I think he is wrong.) Karcsi Garai has been living here for ten years. Is it possible that after ten years I, too, will advocate with similar conviction not just self-denial but something that is much harder, the principle of unconditional agreement with everything? We got used to thinking, having grown up in the other world, that being a revolutionary manifested itself of necessity in a critical attitude and in one of opposition. In the Soviet Union, being a revolutionary requires exactly the opposite attitude. Here, what is expected of a revolutionary is extreme conformism. Will I ever be capable of this internal metamorphosis? And can we be sure that if a person puts all his human

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spontaneity into chains, that this personal performance, this individual transformation will not lead to the deformation of our humanity? It is not easy to be a revolutionary in the country of the victorious revolution. But it is incredible how quickly my behavior is adjusting to what is required here. I sat with Józsi and Kun without mentioning Lena’s name once. Fortunately, Kun started to talk about the Optimists. “I have already read three-quarters of the manuscript,” he said, “and if I continue not to have any political objections to the rest, I will recommend it for publication.” And then—I had the feeling that he was speaking not so much to me as continuing the conversation with Józsi that we had interrupted with our arrival—he complimented in the Optimists just what Károlyi, as well as I, had feared the most from Kun’s reaction. He praised it for being “a mercilessly true book with regard to the depiction of events and people.” In connection with this he mentioned that a while ago, he had read my “Ballad of Two Hanged Men,” which I had published in Paris in a Hungarian-language communist newspaper on the anniversary of the executions of Sallai and Fürst. 5 “The portrayal of characters in literature,” said Kun, “as either heroes or cowards, saints or sinners, is a vestige of the Middle Ages. The Hungarian Communist obituaries made such an ascetic out of Sallai, when Sallai actually . . .” He didn’t finish his sentence but looked straight at Józsi and continued with a question: “Why the hell do they portray the communist in the same way that Gyula Benczúr, in his pathetic ermine-full paintings, portrayed Vajk being christened or the ancient Magyars?” 6 Révai remained passive throughout the meeting. It is true that he had not read the novel but at least in connection with Kun’s reflections, he could have given his reactions. But he confined himself to following the conversation as an aloof but attentive observer with a thoughtful face and a smile. Was it because being together in this way with M and me was both a painful and an exciting occasion, as it was for us? Or was it because he wished to remain reserved before Kun? It’s strange but true: he, whose heady spontaneity and habit of reacting with virulent, sometimes unjust but always fully engaged intensity—which is what I liked best about him—now seems inscrutably “diplomatic” compared to Kun. He reacted only with a smile even when Kun listed all the people whom he recognized in the characters of the Optimists. “The character of Vértes provided me with the most surprising discoveries,” said Kun. “I had no idea that right in the midst of the dictatorship, there in the Hotel Hungaria, two doors down from my room, during the night, an entire company was transforming Marxism into a Marxist theology, and was reinterpreting theological questions into Marxist questions.”

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Kun had said this with a chuckle, but Józsi stopped smiling. He seemed to blush. (This blushing made him the old Józsi for a second.) What surprised me the most was that after so much destruction and bloodshed, if I saw this correctly, the factional struggles and old conflicts, both ideological and personal, of the early emigration days still had their sting among the leaders of the Hungarian Communist Party here in Moscow. Why else would Kun have shown so much interest in the character of Vértes? 7 It was Kun—not Józsi—who inquired about our plans, and with great concern. We told him that we wanted to stay in Russia; that M had already taken a job at the Central Cancer Institute, though she hasn’t yet started; that I was planning to write, as soon as the business with the Optimists could be settled: to write without the burden of financial worries, to write for the first time in my life among calm conditions befitting a human being. I was quite surprised by the fact that Kun approved of my plans with great enthusiasm. “Among our greatest mistakes was the attempt to remake man according to a particular model,” he said; and again I felt that he was speaking at least as much to Józsi as to me. “I am so much happier with this plan of yours than if you had said that you wanted to work in the Party.” His agreement made me happy. So much so that contrary to my custom, I answered him in detail concerning my literary plans, that is, about the drama that I had started to write in Paris after I had completed the Optimists. This was the drama of Budapest, of the fourteen tense days that elapsed between the arrests of Sallai and Fürst and their execution. And of the film scenarios! Seeing how interested Kun was in what I was saying—which is why I went on about them at length—they became even more important to me, more mine. When I left Kun, whom I need to call again today, I felt like doing nothing so much as returning to our hotel room, unpacking, and doing nothing but sitting at my desk, writing, writing, and writing. The same day at night Kun came to the phone right away when I called. He has read all but the last hundred pages of the manuscript. He likes it a lot. “I have no objections to it. Call me on the 7th again and then we will talk over the details. We will meet on the 7th for certain.” I am finally beginning to believe that this blasted manuscript will at last be published. Or rather, I am beginning to have serious hopes for it. I will only believe it when the contract is in my hands. [. . .] We are looking for a place to live, at least temporarily, so that we have somewhere to go when we leave the hotel. They say that this time, especially

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June, or the summer months are the best time to look, when everyone leaves Moscow. People generally rent out their apartments and use the money to fund a part of their vacation expenses. It is mostly intellectuals who go on vacation in this manner. According to another version, it is not only for financial reasons that people rent out their apartments. They also want to make sure that there is someone who takes care of it. They are afraid of thieves and break-ins. (I have so far not been able to find any crime statistics. But one often hears that “you have to be careful.” The newspapers mention it a lot, but only in generalities about “hooliganism,” which here has a political sense, in addition to referring to everyday criminals.) Here is a scene that we run into every day in our search. What was once a separate apartment is now communal. Each room contains a family (sometimes that family and their workshop); common kitchen, common bathroom, and everywhere the depressing smell of Primus stoves. A totally separate, real apartment is an immense privilege. The Steklers, whom we visited last night, have one, for example. The tall Stekler was a quite uninteresting but diligent student back in the barracks in Vienna. But our evening with him now was not at all boring. It is not that he has become more interesting but the world in which he lives has. He is an engineer and he is so deeply involved in the work of construction that just listening to him, one can get a vivid, colorful picture of what goes on in the most varied branches of production. He is passionate about his work and loves to talk about it: about the rails that have not yet cooled but are already being shipped from the steel mills; about the houses that are only a few weeks from completion when it turns out that electrical wires or pipes for water and sewage are not to be found anywhere—or rather, what has been produced in the factories are needed in more important places. Textile plants that are furnished with the most up-to-date machinery are silent and have not even been started, because they have not been supplied with raw materials of cotton or wool . . . Tea kettles whose prices have to be raised one thousand percent because too few have been produced, and this is the only way to prevent a run on them. On the tram today: a bearded old man. He was holding his ticket between his teeth, like a dog a bone. A tattered old military coat from czarist times covered his even more tattered “clothes.” June 4th [. . .] Bruno Steiner. Until I heard him talk, he seemed to me like some sort of diplomat. He is elegant, but his elegance strikes one as simply the discreet result of his orderliness. He is very attentive when listening to someone. This is what makes him stand out from the rest. No matter how many people are

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talking to each other, as soon as you notice him, even if you don’t know him, you automatically direct your words to him. At least this is what happened to me when I met him in Vienna, at Fannina Halle’s. 8 Fannina Halle’s thick book, Die Frau in Sowietrussland (Woman in Soviet Russia), which had just been published by Zsolnay-Verlag, was very popular in left-wing circles at that time. We were talking about the Soviet Union on that night, too, in her apartment. I was expounding a theory on the dialectics of the dictatorship of the proletariat, that dictatorship which would be the gravedigger of all dictatorships, but in order to fulfill its mission, it must be pursued with consistency, as it is in the Soviet Union. There, in Fannina Halle’s apartment, a stranger was listening to me so attentively that he surprised me when he said in a quite friendly way to me that he could say a thing or two on this topic, since he had been a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union, had experienced the revolution there, and with minor breaks, he has been living there at first as a member of the Austrian trade delegation and later as a specialist. After this, he attempted to refute everything that I had said, based on his own experiences. More than three years have elapsed since that evening at Fannina Halle’s where a rather intense debate had thus ensued between us. I could only deploy my convictions into the struggle while he reasoned from knowledge based on experience. Regardless of the intensity of our debate, I found him so pleasant a person that I asked him late at night as the guests were leaving if we could meet again sometime. But he was already returning to Moscow in the morning, he said. He, too, regretted that we would not be able to see each other, but at the same time, he stubbornly repeated and summarized his view: “Yes, back to the Soviet Union, where there are so many good things and also so much that is bad. But socialism, there is not.” I myself don’t know exactly why, but, although three years had elapsed between our brief meeting, as soon as we arrived to Moscow, or more precisely, as soon as I was left alone in our hotel room after arriving from the rail station that morning, I spotted the phone book on the desk, I looked up Bruno Steiner and called him up. I asked him if he was the person with whom I had spent that evening, and I was not even surprised that he, too, had not forgotten our meeting. But what I was not prepared for was his answer: “I’ll be right there.” And, true enough, in less than ten minutes he was in our hotel room. One of the most beautiful serendipities of life, indeed, its most beautiful, is such mutual attraction which always falls into our lap as a gift—with that self-evident incomprehensible simplicity which is a no less mysterious gift than talent, character, or beauty: spiritual or physical; no easier to explain than in general the extreme facts of an individual’s life can be explained. But one searches nonetheless for a rational explanation. Of course what is called “external appearance” also plays a part: even his appearance strikes

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you as that of an intellectual personality. He is around fifty but has retained the love of seeing; that of seeing, which is inseparable for him with the love of thinking. It is typical of him, in my opinion, to argue, as he did already at our meeting in Vienna, that the Stalinist Soviet Union is not the actualization of the hopes raised by Lenin’s October. “Look at a picture magazine from Lenin’s time and compare the faces and physiques of Lenin and his contemporary Bolshevik leaders with those of the Stalin team. Even if I knew nothing of today’s Soviet Union, simply this comparison would tell me enough, indeed everything.” It was as if our first meeting had been last night, not years ago. When I briefly told him what brought us to the Soviet Union, he asked me about the theme of the Optimists and immediately asked me for the manuscript. We then continued our debate where we had left off in Vienna. I told him that I was carried away by how kind, direct, and personable everyone is here, of which we had ample evidence on board the ship. He warned me right off that the crew of a ship represents a privileged stratum and that I should not forget the age-old characteristics of the people of this country. [. . .] Even our differences of opinion seem to bind us together. Hardly a day has passed since we have been in Moscow when we did not meet. Both M and I have often said, “We will never convince him, and hopefully, neither will he ever convince us.” M hit the nail on the head today when, after our meeting (and naturally our debate), she exclaimed that what ties us to him and him to us is that he starts out from the same premises and hopes as we do, but he reaches negative conclusions whereas we find his doubts impermissible by those same premises and hopes. Incidentally, I just found out today, that he shares an apartment and housekeeping with I. E. Babel, the author of Odessa Tales and that Babel says that he would like to meet me. Steiner told him about Optimists. About Optimists: Steiner was full of praise for it, having actually read it. This was the one topic over which we did not argue. His only criticism was that the author seems to have been incapable of depicting the Social Democrats “from within,” as he was able to do with the Communists. I had never thought about this, but, no doubt, he is right. He said that my Social Democrats, with the single exception of the “Comrade President,” are not drawn in a way that makes the reader feel their pain. I must do something to get my hands on some money very soon: I took two chapters of Optimists to the editorial office of Litterature Internationale. Apletin—that is the name of the person who makes the decisions there—was extremely kind. He had already heard about me and about Optimists. I explained to him why the matter is urgent for me. He understood, and he promised that he will at least give me an advance before the end of the week. I should call him on the phone. 9

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Moscow, June 7, 1935 To say that Professor Grivtsov was inventive would be an understatement. The only adequate adjective to describe the solution that he came up with is to say that it is ingenious! [Grivtsov, whom Romain Rolland’s wife, Mariya Pavlovna, had asked to translate Facing the Judge, delegated the task to his “best student,” Natalia Ivanovna. As Sinkó points out, this was in order to deflect any possible political fallout for the translation to her.] Natalia Ivanovna actually came by. She had started to translate the work but she had to tell me that as interesting as she finds it, she is personally bothered by the fact that in this manuscript I attribute so much importance to the killing of a counter-revolutionary policeman and that on the whole I speak of the revolution with such lack of respect. For example, I say that even a revolution has need of “executioners.” [. . .] Totally illogical, she claims, since one can speak of executioners only in the context of czarism. When I objected that death sentences are meted out during revolutions as well and that there has to be someone who will carry these out, she was quite indignant, shook her head vehemently, and said that she finds such statements shocking. And while saying this, she turns quite red. The impenetrable, closed world-view given by a Soviet education is a limitation but at the same time a source of strength, which I first saw in Natalia Ivanovna’s behavior. It was but an intellectual version of the way that Vyacheslav Fyodorovich looked at the world. Natalia Ivanovna recommended that I should leave “the unseemly parts” out of my autobiography. [Apletin at Litterature Internationale, who seemed very understanding at the first meeting (see the end of the June 4th entry), now wants to wait until GIHL makes a decision.] Everyone is waiting, like Pilate, for someone else to make a decision. Phone conversation with Kun. When I told him that I found out at GIHL that the comrade to whom they gave my manuscript for an opinion is named Mathejka, he greeted the news in a not very encouraging way: “Oh boy! He’s an idiot!” and he asked me to come to meet him in the Comintern. I went there but a message was waiting for me: Kun was urgently called to a meeting. [. . .] My mood is hardly made any better by Ilf and Petrov’s article, entitled Mother (Mat’), which appeared in Pravda today. I had to rub my eyes. [. . .] Something is not right here after all. It cannot be that Ilf and Petrov, those two extraordinarily original and funny talents, would have sat down and written an article about which they could have written a terrific parody but which they wrote in all seriousness. Neither their style nor their views match anything in this article. Just like the professor at the abortion clinic, they must have received an order. However, there is a difference. I was only able to see through the

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article by the professor because he had expressed verbally during our visit just the opposite of what he had written. But Ilf and Petrov are writers, and talented writers at that. 10 Hence, they have a distinctive stamp, a unique cadence and personality. While in everyday life, in normal conversation, most people can lie so that they cannot be found out, the writer who is talented, if he ever lies in writing, is defenseless; he will certainly betray himself—in fact, it is his writing that will betray him. As soon as he picks up his pen, all possibilities of lying are over, that is, of successfully lying. There is no routine that would let him mimic the authenticity of written words that spring from experience. He cannot hide behind the recitation that it is simply a recitation. Today it has become evident: the professor’s article against abortion was just the first measure, a signal for the sounding of a planned-in-advance orchestral performance. Ilf and Petrov, the two of them—of all people—were handed the flute and told to produce some heart-rending sounds. Just as Natalia Ivanovna is scandalized by my “lack of respect” toward the Revolution, I find it scandalous that Ilf and Petrov write about the “exalted concept” of the mother with a pathos reminiscent of the unctuous sermons of village priests. It is this fake pathos that I find lacking respect—both toward the idea of motherhood and toward the reader. And my discomfort is only heightened by the fact that the two authors who are known for their gentle outspokenness and impish honesty, only laud motherhood in their joint article so that they can also laud the holy institutions of marriage and condemn divorce as immoral. . . . They practically demand that in the name of Soviet morality, divorce should be made illegal. [. . .] [. . .] Moscow, June 11, 1935 I’m not going to forget these last three days anytime soon. It took me a while to realize the full import of the thing. I went to see Yonov with the intention of picking up my advance for the Russian edition of Optimists, thinking that the pre-condition, Kun’s opinion, could no longer be in doubt. But this time, Yonov received me with a frightening formality and with a chilling, serious face. The State Publisher of Literature has received the written opinion of its reader, Mathejka, regarding Optimists. This is good, thought I, since we are a step closer to the printing press, and in my soul, I paid my admiring respect to the unknown censor, Mathejka, for his bravery. After all, he was the first person among all of the editors and publishers I had dealt with in the Soviet Union who did not wait and did not deflect the responsibility onto others, but provided an opinion under his own

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name and according to his own thoughts: a written opinion, as Yonov pointed out. “According to our reader’s written opinion,” he continued after a short pause in his funereal tones and with downcast eyes, “the manuscript of Optimists is in some places openly, in some places implicitly, but on the whole and in its essence, a manuscript fueled by the spirit of counterrevolution.” That’s what he said: fueled, fueled by the spirit of counterrevolution. I have used manuscripts for fuel in the past but a manuscript that I fuel, or that I fueled with the spirit of counterrevolution, this metaphor made a deep impression on me. For a moment I even stopped breathing, and then I laughed out loud, probably quite hysterically. But then for the next three days I had nothing to laugh about. When I left the State Publisher’s building and made my way back to the hotel, back to my room so that I could sit by the phone until I could reach Kun, my only support and hope, there was a guardian angel from the VOKS waiting for me in the hotel lobby with a not at all pleasant message, under the circumstances, from Arosev: “Comrade Arosev regrets to inform you that the VOKS can no longer consider you its guest.” Translated into simpler terms, this meant that we were suddenly homeless. Here we were in the middle of Moscow not only without shelter but in the direst existential uncertainty; we would need to borrow for tomorrow’s meal and even for the tram. And on top of all this, here I stand, along with M, as the author of a book, Optimists, that is fueled by the spirit of counterrevolution. At first I thought that the coincidence of the notice from the VOKS and the diagnosis of my novel as counterrevolutionary were the workings of chance. But a number of events in the last three days lead me to think that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between Mathejka’s opinion and the brutal notice from the VOKS. In the last three days I have been constantly on the phone or desperately running around not only to find a furnished room somewhere but also to get however slight an advance from any of the various publishers to whom I have given a manuscript that they have promised to publish. The number of such publishers is already considerable. Apletin at the Litterature Internationale had told me quite plainly that he intended to wait until the GIHL makes a decision, so, after Mathejka, there is no point in even going there. But there is still Za Rubezhom and Ogonek, and there is the other major publishing company, the one for foreign writers where Kurella himself gave Bork, its director, the manuscript of Optimists, and Bork—after hearing Romain Rolland’s opinion along with the uncommonly warm recommendation of Kurella—said that the German translation, which is fortunately complete, will be sent to press next month.

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But now suddenly everything has changed. Wherever I phoned or went they already knew that the reader of GIHL had labeled Optimists as counterrevolutionary and so the author of Optimists was received in that spirit, or rather most people avoided him altogether. If he was received, he was told that under the given circumstances it is out of the question that anything from him could be published and hence, naturally, no advance could be given. In my harried, anxious condition I was foolish enough to say that the reason I needed the advance was because the VOKS had told me that I am no longer their guest. This fact only frightened all these not very enterprising bureaucrats of literature. One would think that there would be at least one individual who would sit down before the manuscript and use his own head, his own judgment to decide whether it was Romain Rolland or Mathejka, that modern Ferapont, 11 who was right; but it seems not one person thought that this also could be a method of uncovering the truth. Those few editors and directors who have not yet fully rejected me, such as Deutsch at Za Rubezhom, keep repeating that especially now, after even the VOKS has given me notice, nothing can be done but to wait for Béla Kun’s final decisive statement. I race from editor to publisher, publisher to editor and all in vain; I find myself in the same situation as I was in Paris: it takes all my strength to force myself to step through the door of any building that has anything to do with literature and if I manage to make myself reach the door of an office, I am tempted to turn back without ringing the doorbell. If I do ring after all and enter, and then, standing before the desk of a grimacing bureaucrat of literature, open my mouth to say “Optimists” or “advance,” at such times I feel like I am in the same situation as that one-legged beggar whom I saw recently on a street in Moscow. The only difference is that within a few minutes, five people gave him something, while I have been making call after call and walking my legs off for the last three days without results. There must be some kind of law in this, too; I have tried calling Kun at all sorts of hours in the last two days. [. . .] I was finally able to reach him today. He invited us to meet him at the Comintern the day after tomorrow. I was beginning to feel, while sitting and stewing in anger at the phone, as if someone had gradually siphoned the air out of the room. It was only when I finally heard Kun’s voice that I was able to breathe normally again. Poor M has been sleeping on the bed since six in the afternoon. She has been running around since eight this morning, alone or, just like Sonya with Raskolnikov, she accompanies me to the torture chambers of editorial offices and waits for me down in the street until I come down empty-handed, just as in Paris. It is certain now that she will get a job in the cancer institute but the institute is closed in July and August, and during that time she will not get a salary. So it is an interesting question: How will we survive? [. . .] Our

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situation here in Moscow is starting to be just as “interesting” as it was in Paris. Kun told me to bring a copy of Mathejka’s evaluation to him. Yonov, whom I finally was able to reach today by phone, roundly refused. Although we don’t yet know how we are going to repay it, we borrowed money for an advance on a room that we will be renting by the month in Trubnaya Street. We can stay there until September 15th. The VOKS, which previously overwhelmed us with its generous attention, now responded with its regrets to my request for a car with which to move our belongings—they are very short of means of transportation. In Pravda and Izvestia, the “plebiscite,” as they call it, for a law forbidding abortions is in full swing. A horrible nag writes that she bore fourteen children. Others should also give birth without limit. While earlier, there were a few women who took the call for a public debate seriously—for example, an actress wrote that the outlawing of abortion would be equivalent to making women into slaves—, now the only letters that are published are, without exception, requesting or demanding that the law against the immoral practice of abortion be repealed. Moscow, June 14, 1935 Yesterday at the Comintern with Kun. I told him everything in detail. [. . .] He seemed very agitated and also ill. He thought for a minute and then said, “The devil take them. I will not let them suppress this book.” He phoned Yonov. Of course I couldn’t hear what Yonov said but I surmised from Kun’s words that he didn’t tell Yonov of my presence and he asked him what Mathejka had written about Optimists. When he heard the answer, he announced: “I am not speaking of what Romain Rolland said. I am giving you my own opinion. I have read it. And you can be sure and you can tell Mathejka that what he wrote about this book is either ordinary piggishness or a shocking proof of his extraordinary stupidity.” The conversation lasted over a quarter of an hour. Kun explained to him that this is not a matter of propagandistic literature but literature, revolutionary literature at that. He also told Yonov that he had been meaning to call him anyway to tell him that he just read Silone’s novella and that while he knows that Silone 12 is today a Trotskyist, he thinks the work ought to be published. He even told him the story of the aged proletarian who makes the trip from his homeland to a foreign country in a dog cage. Though I couldn’t follow the conversation after a point, I was overjoyed to hear Kun say, “Sinkó’s novel is the kind of book that Lenin would have read with great interest.”

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From now on, I have no reason to fear any further obstacles. After the phone call, Kun kept us with him for another half an hour. I let M do all the talking because I was so excited that I could barely keep myself from hugging Kun, like a child hugs its mother, but I had no strength left for intelligent words. Now that it is over, I realize what choking, dark visions I had lived under in the last few days. I had felt doomed. It nearly seemed that here too, at the heart of the world, in Moscow, I would again have to live in isolation, denied of all possibilities of meaningful work, just like among the Swabians of Prigrevica-Sveti Ivan 13 who pitied the “Frau-Doktor” for her useless, oddball husband. That a person about whom I know nothing, who is perhaps not even malevolent but just unintelligent, that the stupidity of a subaltern nobody like this Mathejka can toss me into such a situation, is this, too, a historical necessity? It would be a myopic oversimplification to judge a whole system on the basis of a personal encounter with such a minor figure, but at the same time, it is evident that there are certain dangers, perhaps inevitable but nonetheless worrisome, of a centrally supervised and centrally directed cultural life. If a random reader from the GIHL labels an author politically dubious or dangerous, that doesn’t just mean that a single door has closed before that author. Here the closing of a door works the way that pressing an electric button works during a bank robbery: all the doors and means of exit are hermetically shut. But it doesn’t just affect one building. It affects all the publishing houses and editorial offices in Moscow and in the entire Soviet Union. I am a witness to this. But now the quarantine is over. Steiner was as overjoyed as if it had been his own personal victory. Yet he, too, noted that M showed little enthusiasm. Of course she was glad, but not in the same way as, for example, I was. She seemed melancholic. And Steiner also guessed the reason. It is not just that she can now let her guard down and show her true feelings. That plays a part, but primarily what prevents her from fully rejoicing is the thought of what would have happened if Kun had perchance not been the broadminded, magnanimous individual that he turned out to be with his declaration about Silone and with the way that he stood up for me. Is it possible that here, too, everything depends on what kind of human qualities the people “up there” happen to have? Can it be that here, too, it is not the system that is the guarantor but single individuals and their characteristics? If this is so, it is a depressing discovery. In the afternoon, when I met with Kurella, he already knew about the changed situation. From the speed with which news travels, you would think Moscow were just a village. By the afternoon, everyone had learned from Kurella or from elsewhere about the position that Kun had taken: Bork, who is the head of the Publishing House of Foreign Writers; Deutsch, who heads Za Rubezhom; and Apletin, who is responsible for Littérature Internationale.

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And smiles are spreading everywhere like wildfire: everyone is friendly, yes, even Yonov has learned to smile. [. . .] Today is M’s first day of work at the cancer institute with Professor Frenkel. NOTES 1. For more information on Béla Kun’s early history, see Introduction. After the failure of his regime in Hungary, Kun made his way back to the Soviet Union where he eventually became the head of the Hungarian Communist Party and in charge of cultural policy at the Communist International. His second-in-charge in that role was Alfred Kurella. By the time that Sinkó arrived to Moscow, Kun had long advocated a hostile policy toward European social democratic parties, including in Germany before Hitler’s accession to power. He took much of the blame for this when the Soviet leadership reversed its policy and turned toward the Popular Front in 1935. He was also blamed for the serious setbacks that the Hungarian Communist Party suffered in Hungary through its infiltration by Horthy’s police. Kun was a victim of the purge. He was arrested in June, 1937. The circumstances of his death are unknown. 2. József Révai (1898–1958) became the “Stalinist” cultural tsar of Hungary in the Rákosi era (1948–1953) after which his influence declined. Although his change in personality surprised Sinkó, there are premonitions of it in Optimists where Sarkadi, his fictional alter ego, fails to understand the ethical dilemmas voiced by Vértes (Lukács). 3. The reference to the Congress of the Second International, the organization of Socialist movemens formed in 1889, is a mistake, since the organization was dissolved in 1916 during the First World War because the Socialist parties of various nations supported their own country’s war effort. Perhaps Sinkó is referring to an attempt initiated by the Comintern after Hitler’s accession of power to revive a unified Left in Europe, the Popular Front policy, which lasted from 1934 to 1939. 4. Palicsfürdő was a spa near Szabadka. 5. Imre Sallai and Sándor Fürst were two leaders of the Hungarian Communist Party within Hungary who were executed in 1932. They had been arrested when the Horthy regime declared martial law following the derailment of a train in 1931 over a gorge. Szilvester Matuska, who had single-handedly carried out the act of terrorism later turned out to have had no connection with the Communist Party. 6. Gyula Benczúr (1844-1920), a painter of Hungarian historical scenes in the Romantic style. 7. Vértes in Optimists is clearly modeled on György Lukács, the Hungarian Marxist philosopher. Lukács, Révai, and Sinkó, in their fictional characters, are portrayed in Optimists as having intense philosophical discussions during the 1919 Soviet Republic about the ethics of revolution, expressing these at times in theological analogies. Of the three, it was Sinkó who ultimately drew the conclusion that one must not kill. Lukács argued that revolutionaries needed to take on the “sin” of murder as a means to redeem society. Lukács expressed this with the analogy of the biblical Judith, as interpreted by the German Romantic writer, Friedrich Hebbel (1813–1863). As Judith is about to cut off the head of Holofernes, she asks, “. . . if God has placed sin between me and the deed required, who am I that I should be able to evade it?”The émigré dispute to which Sinkó alludes concerned, among other issues, whether Hungarian Communists should be sent back to Hungary to foment revolution. Kun was the major proponent of this suicidal policy. Lukács recognized its foolhardiness and opposed it. For the conflicts between Lukács and Kun, see György Borsányi, The Life of a Communist Revolutionary, Béla Kun, for example, 222, 245. 8. Fannina Halle (1881–1963) was born in Ponevezh, Imperial Russia (today’s Panevezys, Lithuania), studied art history in Vienna, and married an Austrian industrialist. Her Women in Soviet Russia (Berlin, 1932) painted a positive portrait of the situation of Soviet women.

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9. Mikhail Apletin was a key functionary in several Soviet cultural foreign policy organizations, including VOKS. Around this time in 1935, he was one of the organizers of the Foreign Commission of the Soviet Writers Union. He was adept at wooing foreign writers to produce works abroad that served the interests of the Soviet Union. He apparently did not find Sinko to be a suitable candidate for such a task, since, in contrast to his other charges, he treated Sinko rather poorly. See Ludmilla Stern, Western Intellectuals, and Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment. 10. Ilya Ilf (1897-1937) and Yevgeny Petrov (1903–1942) were a team of satirical writer who became well known during the relatively prosperous NEP (New Economic Policy) period, 1922–28. 11. Father Ferapont played a similar role of censor to Father Zosima in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov as Mathejka played to Sinkó. 12. Ignazio Silone (1900–1978) was an Italian writer and founding member of the Italian Communist Party in 1921. He visited the Soviet Union in 1927 and by 1930, living in Switzerland, had become a critic of Stalinism, for which he was expelled from the Communist Party. Despite this fact, his anti-fascist novel Fontamera (1933) was published in the Soviet Union in 1935. He is one of the six writers (including Andre Gide and Arthur Koestler) featured in Richard Crossman (ed.), The God that Failed, a 1949 book about former communists who lost their faith. 13. The town in Serbia where the Sinkós lived from 1927 to 1934 before leaving for Paris. Irma worked as the village doctor, earning their living, while Sinkó wrote Optimists.

Chapter Twelve

The Adventures of Optimists and its Author are Just Beginning

Moscow, June 21, 1935 It was in 1919 in Munich during the Bavarian Soviet Republic that Alfred Kurella went through that same hope-filled storming of heaven and the subsequent baptism by fire during the collapse that my generation and I had traversed in Budapest that very year. I have never met a German to whom I have felt so close. His father was a university professor. He himself is extraordinarily cultivated, with the kind of knowledge whose foundations one must obtain in childhood. He not only reads but also speaks fluently all of the major European languages, including Russian, as well as the Scandinavian tongues. Currently, he is editing a collection of documents relating to Dimitrov and to his trial, for publication in French. In this capacity, he has obtained Dimitrov’s prison diaries. 1 I am looking through the manuscript. The first words that Dimitrov wrote in jail are a quote: “Danton! pas de faiblesse!” (Danton! Resist all weakness!) Thus spoke Danton to himself, and see, even a Dimitrov conjures up a model to follow, as will others in the future conjure up Dimitrov when they need to be strong. [. . .] We must have heroes to recall at the grand heroic moments of our lives. This is clear, but the question arises: there is another kind of heroism, and might this other kind of heroism, which I witness every day here in the Soviet Union, be equally inspiring and motivating for imitation? I am thinking of Kurella. He has stood up openly and fraternally for Optimists, that is, for me, from the very first day, despite the fact that by the time that I had arrived, he was no longer Dimitrov’s secretary. This was partly in punishment for having shown himself in public in the company of people who, it later turned out, had strayed from the party line. He could no 101

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longer be Dimitrov’s secretary. Kurella himself tried to convince me at length that he had, in fact, made a mistake. He should have been even more careful, for when you are Dimitrov’s secretary, you must not provide any grounds for doubt, however slight. One is responsible for making sure that one’s behavior leaves no room for misinterpretation. Kurella has a talent, indeed a need, for explaining every act and regulation of the government as unavoidable and necessary, and thus desirable from the point of view of the proletarian revolution. I am learning much from him, but it sometimes happens that I am still incapable, not so much of seeing things from his point of view, but of feeling the same emotions toward them as he feels. 2 Since we have been here, there has been a propaganda campaign for the restoration of the family and marriage. In his book Mussolini ohne Maske (Mussolini unmasked), Kurella calls attention, among other things, to the disgusting lies and hypocrisy of the fascist cult of family and children. And now, the way that the cult of the “hero mother” is being spread here—that is, the mother, or woman, as a breeder—leaves me, I cannot help it, with a feeling of moral revulsion. Kurella, on the other hand, says that it is easier, immeasurably easier, to learn the theory of dialectics than to utilize it in evaluating phenomena. He explains enthusiastically that even if the propaganda for marriage and against abortion uses the same words here as in the capitalist or fascist countries, their meaning is different in the socialist Soviet Union than over there. While there these words imply that women have to remain in domestic slavery, here the entire economic mechanism is directed toward drawing women into production and into having them take an active role in economic life. For a few years after the revolution, it was necessary to loosen, indeed, to a certain extent to demolish the traditional, inherited forms of life and ways of thinking. But the revolution has completed this work: women have been integrated into production. It would have been possible to continue along this path of revolutionizing the equality of the sexes, had the state been capable of fully accepting the role of childcare and rearing. But the socialist state, encircled as it is by hostile capitalist powers and therefore having to be in battle and battle-ready at all times, is not yet in a position to fulfill the role of a collective mother. For this reason, an assignment as critical for society as is the care and rearing of children remained without an owner, and this condition required an immediate fundamental intervention. The regulations aimed at eliminating the criminality of minors, the sustaining of marriages, and fighting against abortion—regulations that did not shy away from threatening capital punishment—were all made necessary by the very same, ever-deepening crisis. [. . .] This whole dialog arose as a continuation of our discussion of my film scenario, whose theme (which Kurella thinks is outstanding) would be about a young woman who escapes from Romania to the Soviet Union, not out of

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ideological motives but purely private ones. In Romania, she had lived in some tavern more or less as a prostitute, and she was planning to continue that sort of life here, but starting with the Soviet boat on which she hides, all the way to what she experienced when she lands on Soviet soil, etc. etc. . . . The whole theme came into my mind before the campaign for the restoration of the family, and now Kurella likes it better than I do, because unlike Kurella, I can no longer imagine such positive outcomes for my heroine. I confided this to him, based on a truly disturbing experience that I had today. On my way here on Tverskaya Street, I saw a very pretty, young mother who was sitting on the curb suckling her infant and begging, dressed in rags. Straying from the original topic, I confessed to Kurella that ever since I saw that picture of thousands of Stalin portraits pinned above the breasts of thousands of marching women in Vyacheslav Fyodorovich’s boat cabin, the cult of Stalin strikes me as an insult to taste, to thought, to man, and above all to the dignity of the revolution itself. I cannot get used to it. And one cannot get used to it because since I have been here, it has not diminished, but rather, grows more intense every day. “It’s manufactured” up above, according to a plan, systematically, and it strikes me as a deliberate and artificial way of keeping people in the dark. I cited and tried to translate for him the lines from an ode of János Arany: A people, who praises the praiseworthy and august thus, Possesses the faith, virtue, and strength for life. (Nép, mely dicsőt, magasztost így magasztal, Van élni abban hit, jog és erő!) 3

But what is happening here with this cult of Stalin is not the uplifting and love-filled recognition of a great man by the people, as described in the poem, but a barbarian caricature of that; it is not the cult of a great and worthy man but rather, the cult of slavelike kneeling, practiced under the pretext of a cult to a great and worthy man. A side-effect of this Stalin cult is the mummification of Lenin and the use of his mausoleum as a place of pilgrimage. I feel this role is disrespectful of Lenin and contradictory to Leninism. I pass by the Mausoleum several times a day but I can never bring myself to get into the long line of visitors, to stand among the people whose dark, atavistic, magical, reliquary-loving instincts are being reinforced through the use of Lenin’s theatrically displayed corpse. We were in the Hotel Lux, but not in Kurella’s room. While I was “confessing,” I was pacing up and down, and when I pronounced the words about the reinforcing of popular ignorance, I got so worked up that I stopped in my tracks. The only reason I was talking so much was that I was happy that another German comrade, the owner of the room, was listening to me. This was also someone for whose expertise I had great respect, and I was secretly

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hoping that in the whole thing there is something that I am not seeing and about which the two of them will enlighten me. But instead of this, the owner of the room suddenly and nervously pulled me away from the radiator and pulled up a chair for me to sit, far from the radiator. So is it true? Even in the Lux, which is reserved for the guests of the Comintern, these people themselves consider that there might be listening devices in the heating system. Vehemently, Kurella along with the other German, explains to me the error in my rebellion against the Stalin cult. I am premising my criteria on idealistic grounds in a totally un-Marxist manner, without taking into consideration the existing situation. If I would take the given situation as my starting point, I would see that the Party is faced not with a choice between beautiful abstract ideas, but rather, with solving quite practical problems that can and must be solved with the aid of the masses who are at an extremely low level of culture, in a country of 170 million people. The Party is faced not with a handful of intellectuals reared on Descartes or, better yet, on Marx, but with the multitudes belonging to peoples that are intellectually still living their childhood. We know that at a certain stage of culture, primitive materialism is by necessity accompanied by a belief in magic. Nations at this level of culture cannot be led into battle under the flag of sovereign and critical reason, free of deference to authority. Peoples at such a level require symbols that speak to their emotions, that inspire awe: something visible, the Father of All, embodied in a person, someone embodying Wisdom, Foresight, and Science. Is it possible that in practical politics this is the way things stand and as they should stand? M keeps reminding me lately about Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor and his theory of the relationship between the caste of the high priests and their flock: that the priests must present the world as if it were a sort of kindergarten, without any disturbing problems, in the rose-colored fog of Lilliputian idylls. But can this be a theory of revolution? More precisely: in the interests of the revolution, here, at this time, could this be the only possible and necessary method of creating a responsible public? Can Kurella be right? I ask this and sigh as I write the next question: if it is true, what good is a truth for which I can’t conjure up, for which one must not conjure up, any enthusiasm? Today is memorable. Today, for the first time, I have received Soviet money for something I wrote. Apletin, of Littérature Internationale, filled out a requisition for an advance, at my request, for 100 rubles for one of the chapters of Optimists. “Now,” he said squeezing my hand, “after the telephone conversation between Béla Kun and Yonov there will be no obstacle to our publishing portions of Optimists, and not just in the French version of the journal but in the English and German versions as well.”

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“In the next issue?” It was evident that such speed is contrary to Apletin’s temperament. In his mind, speed and rashness were related concepts. He even told me: “Oh, no. What were you thinking? One must not rush into anything,” is just about how he put it. “I just wanted to say that in theory, it seems, the obstacles have disappeared. That’s something. The rest, we’ll have to consider with the editors.” What can this “rest” be? The same day, at night I have noticed in the last few days here and there that people pronounce a name, and everyone raises their eyebrows: silently, but all the more significantly. Sometimes, in muted tones, someone makes a comment that everyone understands but me. I finally realized today what is going on. There are rumors, albeit, so far unverifiable ones, of some kind of unusually largescaled “purge.” And I am again thinking about my Parisian plan: I should write the tragedy of the man of “deviations,” the heretical communist. I emphasize, the heretical communist, not the enemy of the communists. The enemies of the communists are uninteresting from a dramatic point of view; they just deny, hate, and lack faith. This is quite different from a communist who is heretical but a communist: he is a believer, just as the heretics of medieval Catholicism believed in Christ. Their faith was no less intense and in content it was in no way inferior to the official belief of the Church. The faith of the heretic is also a burning faith. And the word “burning” applies not only to the faith which lives in the believer’s heart but also to the stake, which the believer is always ready to light under the heretic. Burning fire is equally the symbol of the Church’s faith and of that of the heretic. Faith is somehow a characteristic of humanity but humaneness is not characteristic of faith, of any faith. Trotsky is wrong to accuse Stalin of tyrannical cruelty. Had Trotsky won, being a believer, he would have been no more lenient. The “Que sais-je?” (What do I know) attitude of Montaigne is the negation of the faith of the Church but also of that of the heretic. It is the attitude of the man without a flag. The Church and the heretic agree on one thing in their faith: the tolerant attitude of Montaigne is, in the eyes of each, an unpardonable betrayal, if not an assassination attempt against justice then at least morally equivalent to a betrayal of the struggle for justice. In today’s Soviet literature, there is not a word about this problem, even though every communist in the Soviet Union is vitally interested in this question in one way or another. More generally, in today’s Soviet literature one cannot even discover the echo of any of the problems of the people who are living here today, of Soviet life as it is really lived, though they are

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unique, unparalleled, and monumental problems. Kun said that Optimists reminded him often of Rousseau’s Confessions—and I think that it is exactly this subjective element that is missing from today’s Soviet literature: that convincing, authentic human element that made Soviet literature in the first years of the October Revolution the most interesting literature in the world. June 22 With M in the park of culture that bears the name of Maxim Gorky. This institution clearly illustrates the victory of what M calls the empire of the Grand Inquisitor and what I call the spirit of the kindergarten: There are eight or ten lecterns separated from each other by about a hundred steps. Behind each one sits a man. Every lectern has a tablet hanging from it and on the tablets an inscription in large letters, such as, for example: “Why does the Soviet Union need the Arctic? If you are interested, I will be happy to enlighten you about it.” Or, “Here you can get information about the significance and goal of the treaty signed between the governments of the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia.” 4 And so on. True, there is not the kind of bustle before these lecterns as there is for the merry-go-round, or especially for the parachute jump, 5 but the professional explainers sit behind their lecterns with hands folded in their laps, their heads held high, waiting for believers thirsty for knowledge. A middle-aged worker stops before the lecterns and reads each sign with interest to see what is being offered. He decides that he will dip into the fountain of truth behind the lectern of the man who knows about the significance and goal of the treaty between the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. He goes up to the speaker, who immediately lifts his hands from his lap, places both of them on the lectern, leans forward ready for service, and speaks with a vehemence as if he were addressing thousands. Both the listener and the instructor are impressively serious. I have not yet met a native Russian here who is frivolous. It is also in the so-called park of culture that another obvious opportunity to observe this curious seriousness presents itself. In the sweltering heat, crowded together on a raised platform, several hundred couples are dancing to jazz music. In the middle of the stage, standing on a sort of stool and wiping his face, stands the dance master. Dance master? Yes, judging by his function that is what he is, but his behavior reminds one more of a worried and conscientious work-brigade supervisor. The hemmed-in, dancing couples are generally not very graceful, indeed, they are quite ungainly, but they are almost deadly serious. Like good children, they wrestle doggedly with the new assignment given to them, in the rhythm of the jazz but not in its spirit. Jazz is a novelty here. Last year it was still considered as a symptom of capitalist decadence and incompatible with socialist culture and morality. But a delegation of the Red Army in Ankara was unable to dance at a

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reception in its honor, in contrast with the other guests, who were swinging to western dance tunes. Consequently, they say, Stalin himself has ordered that in the Soviet Union the teaching and practicing of Western dances must commence. Some discoveries that I don’t know how to interpret: obedience as a quality of the revolutionary, and the lecterns behind which sit people from whom you can get answers to all your questions, so that there is no need to use your own head, to form your own opinions . . . [Sinkó summarizes a newspaper article that he cut out from Izvestia on July 5th. It is about a woman in a remote Moslem area of the Soviet Union, in the city of Karaganda, who was rewarded with a sewing machine for the exemplary cleanliness of her home. “One finds conditions in Moscow as well that could use a cleaning.”] First night in our room in Trubnaya Street. Our landlord is an elderly engineer, an educated man, who has been abroad. When I told him in the morning that all night I fought a bitter and hopeless battle against bedbugs, he, with total calmness, told me that, indeed, the battle is hopeless because the whole house if full of bedbugs, as is the entire street. Thus, I experienced on my own hide, literally, the utility of the campaign initiated in Karaganda. But we should abandon the habit of measuring such an important but nevertheless elementary civilizing task and its elementary means with the metrics and spirit of socialism, or even identifying it with socialism. Moscow, June 23, 1935 M, in addition to the cancer institute, took on a few hours of x-ray work at the clinic of the “Sharikopodshipnik”—the ball-bearing factory. In this country, in general, doctors take on work at more than one institution and for the same reason that M did: you cannot make ends meet on one salary. This factory, far out on the periphery, employs 14,000 workers. It is a veritable new city with parks, sparklingly clean streets, libraries, clubs, and a stolovaya (cafeteria). And, if one also knows, as we learned from Steiner, that it is equipped with the latest machinery, one cannot help but be impressed. It attests to the existence of a large-scale plan and to the tremendous scale of construction. But there is also something here that provides a peek behind the scenes of this unparalleled effort and to the extraordinary price that has to be borne for its realization, namely the barracks. The overwhelming majority of the workers of the factory live in barracks that make the émigré barracks in Grinzing seem like bourgeois apartments, because, while in Grinzing even single people had their own rooms, here, one room houses thirty people or more.

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You would think that if you go around with open eyes and observe things on the streets, on the streetcar, and in the cafes—even eavesdropping quite indiscreetly to the conversations of strangers—you could somehow form a picture for yourself of the conditions under which the population of a city lives. But the fact of the matter is that if you take your room and board in a luxury hotel with food selected from a copious menu and served by waiters in frock coats, you cannot but live extraterritorially, in a somewhat unreal world in relation to the actual life of the city. Thanks to the VOKS, our guest appearance in the guise of illustrious tourists has suddenly come to an end. It is only now that we see what serious hardships are still involved here in satisfying the most basic necessities of life. In Gastronom Number One (next-door to the Hotel Lux), that is, in the old Yelisev fine-foods store of tsarist times, you (or those who are allowed to) can still buy everything good to eat and drink—from pheasant to fresh butter, from caviar to snow-white bread—without much waiting and with the most courteous service. In other places that distribute food, you almost always have to wait in line in a dirty store whose windows are filled with pictures of Stalin and with bottles bearing decorative labels; the most frequently bought items here are cheap smoked fish and bread so black that I have never seen the like of it before. Trubnaya Street, where we live, was prior to the revolution the notorious den of thieves, fences, and prostitutes: the Moscow underworld; and this street, eighteen years after the revolution, as effective proof of the power of genius loci, has retained its lumpen proletarian character. It is dirty and poorly maintained, with overcrowded houses and many drunken and ragged people visible at all hours. It is clear that “high up” there is a tremendous and constant effort to liquidate this past. But in addition to the institutions and the regulations in which this government’s effort manifests itself, it is interesting to observe the great determination on the part of some people to free themselves in their daily activities and in their ways of thinking from the dirt and misery of centuries, from this inhuman way of life. The apartment within which we are renting one room consists of three rooms in total. The other two rooms are occupied by the engineer, his much younger wife and three children. In contrast with Kurella’s theory about The Soviet Woman, who he claims has been irreversibly integrated into the labor force and therefore enjoys her freedom and emancipation, our landlord’s wife’s greatest dream, her most cherished wish is that her husband could earn enough money so that she could stay at home, clean and cook, and spend time with her children. The person whom they now charge with the tasks of housekeeping and, more or less, with the care of the children is the eighth occupant of the apartment: Tonya, the “frizorka” (hairdresser), who in fact lives not in the apartment but in the small, narrow hallway that separates the entrance-door from the rooms (she doesn’t actually “live” there but just

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sleeps there on something that they lay out each night.) In exchange for this she, more or less (unfortunately mostly less), takes care of the apartment. Tonya is eighteen years old. She is a rather large girl who obtained a place to sleep here as a domestic employee and meanwhile, she is training to be a hairdresser. As a domestic servant and an apprentice she earns a total of 180 rubles a month. Day after day, she eats black bread for dinner and habitually pilfers from us whatever she can: from sugar cubes to, oddly enough, mouthwash. Unfortunately, the soap does not interest her. She’s satisfied with just painting her nails red like the women driving the trams. And she is convinced that she has arranged her life very cleverly because compared to the village where she comes from, life here is “ochen harasho” (very good) and she has every reason to hope, which for her is the most important thing, that she can stay here, eventually as a worker, as a “frizorka,” in Moscow. This time it is Steiner who warns me that in judging the conditions of life of the people today, one must not use European standards. Comparisons should only be made to the former conditions under which people lived here. One other fact must be kept in mind: the productivity of the average Soviet worker, who only yesterday was still a peasant, is so far below that of the average European worker’s productivity, that Soviet enterprises produce at higher costs, despite the extraordinarily low wages here, than any capitalist European companies. And one more thing: due to the shortage of highly skilled workers, the expensive and delicate machines that are purchased from the West at great sacrifice become unusable incredibly quickly. In addition to the tremendous investments that are made [in heavy industry], these factors go a long way toward explaining why the living standards of the masses are not rising at a faster rate. But to this we must add—and Steiner speaks from experience—the lumbering slowness of the incredibly large administrative apparatus, and the personnel costs for those who comprise this apparatus. Don’t forget—said Steiner—that this apparatus does everything, I emphasize, everything, as indecisively and haltingly as what you are experiencing with the publication of Optimists, which, by the standards of this country, is not at all slow. Such is the bureaucracy. In every undertaking, everyone, at all times, tries to avoid taking responsibility. And those who are brave and enterprising operate, as far as expertise and intellectual horizon are concerned, at the level of a Mathejka, so that in these cases, less enthusiasm and bravery are generally to be preferred. Yesterday with Béla Vágó 6 at the Café Moscow. The one-time commissar of the interior [of Hungary during the Soviet Republic in 1919] told me that they have figured out who appears under what name in Optimists. Long discussion about old times. What always surprises me here in Moscow with all the Hungarian émigrés, especially those who did not end up working in actual production, is not their nostalgia but a kind of bitterly sad lethargy. One is sometimes tempted to interpret this underlying mood as disillusion-

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ment, which is frequently expressed in certain gestures and sometimes even in explicit words. Right after Hitler came to power, Vágó was involved in illegal work in Berlin for months. He edited and circulated the Rote Fahne (Red Flag). He admits that directly before Hitler came to power, he, like the leading German comrades, believed that what was about to happen would be not the onset of fascism but the victory of the German proletarian revolution. Then the conversation came around again to Optimists. The manuscript, he tells me, is being passed from hand to hand among the Hungarians: of course those who are “up there” get it first. Thus, he has not yet seen it. This is how he lets me know that he, who used to be one of the most important leaders of the Hungarian Communist Party, has “come down in the world.” He pronounces these unpleasant words with bitterness. He says, “Well, yes, I’ve come down in the world.” And in connection with this, he speaks in generalities, speaks about intrigues, about bounders, as if in the leadership of a revolutionary party such terms were self-evident. “Could there be some intrigue also,” I ask, “in the fact that Optimists has been declared to be counter-revolutionary? Who is this Mathejka?” “He’s an honest man,” says Vágó, pronouncing the word “man” in his lovable Kecskemét accent. Vágó knows him well. He’s from Transylvania and in Romania he was condemned to death. They even took him out with nine others to a meadow to carry out the sentence. After the firing squad left, however, Mathejka, despite his serious wounds, regained consciousness and was able to crawl on all fours to a nearby peasant’s house. There he found some decent people, and later, again with superhuman effort, he succeeded in escaping to Soviet territory. The only reason this man would have written in his evalution that Optimists is counter-revolutionary is because he is truly convinced that it is. Kurella just called: Romain Rolland is on his way to Moscow. He will be arriving tomorrow. June 26 In the room all day, just like at Prigrevica-Sveti Ivan or in Paris. The word “or” between the name of the Swabian hamlet and Paris slipped out of my pen unintentionally. 7 It was unintentional but quite justified. At Prigrevica-Sveti Ivan I could still dream that if I ever get out of this Swabian “nest,” and perhaps to Paris, to the miraculously beautiful Paris, perhaps a miracle could happen even for me. But when I was there, no longer expecting a miracle, the only difference in my situation was that I was not sitting at a makeshift desk in Prigrevica-Sveti Ivan but at one in Paris in an even worse room than in the village in Bácska county. And now—semper idem (always the same)—I am sitting at a makeshift desk in Moscow in a room that is even

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worse than the one in Paris. Will I soon be sitting in Moscow, too, shorn of those hopes that I had tied to Moscow when I was in Paris? The only evident difference between my life in Prigevica-Sveti Ivan, Paris, and Moscow is that nowhere else in my thirty-seven years of life have I been on the telephone as much as here. I phone and I phone and I phone— and then I wait for the phone to ring—and then I phone again because even the publication of segments from Optimists doesn’t seem to be nearing realization. And the lack of money, this “Nile of the mendicants” that Ady wrote about and whose swamp follows me everywhere is also an acquaintance of more than a decade. It’s ridiculous that its dirty stream should lap at my heels, in fact, reach up to my knees, even here in Moscow. And my bad mood is only exacerbated by my mania of continuing to write, or, as at this moment, because of my depression, my inability to shake off my lethargy. I just sit catatonically staring out the window for half an hour in between two telephone calls, looking at the courtyard. Seen objectively, my conscience is bothered for not adding to the world’s glut of unwanted manuscripts. Nile of the Mendicants: 1. After innumerable calls to the editors of Za Rubezhom, I finally reached someone “authorized with responsibility,” and this “responsible” person promised to try to issue an order, and after several more phone calls actually did order that I be paid an advance of 150 rubles for the chapter to be published from Optimists. But then to let me see what a great favor he was granting me with the advance, he told me that he “cannot tell” when the piece will actually be published, because we still need permission from certain “responsible” forums to send the manuscript to the printers. Yes, he has heard about Kun’s opinion, but unfortunately, Kun gave this opinion on the phone, and, after all, says the cultivated man, he holds to the Latin wisdom: “Verba volant, scripta manent.” (Words fly, writing lasts.) In plain words, or rather in Russian, we need a bumashka. Being forced to beg for an advance and then to listen to these lectures about “responsible forums” of course does not help to stimulate my good spirits. [Sinkó describes similarly frustrating experiences of the day at Littérature Internationale and GIHL.] M is at work all day, in the morning at the cancer center and in the afternoon at the polyclinic of the ball-bearing factory. And I am locked in a cage with the telephone, standing by the window looking at the courtyard. From here, I see not only this building’s courtyard but also those of the nearby houses. The mood of the “day off” (vihodnoi den in Russian): so reminiscent of Sunday afternoons of my small-city youth. Only, the courtyards here are a lot plainer and dirtier than they were in Szabadka. There I hated and rebelled against this sleepy Sunday atmosphere, while here, being older, it just makes me feel melancholy, and brings home to me the stubborn power of the poverty and emptiness of this false idyll. Its power can be felt here, too. Down in the courtyards, the women, wearing slippers or tattered

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sandals, but mostly in white canvas shoes, talk loudly to each other while most of them are mending clothes. Occasionally, some women sunning themselves on a balcony also chime in to the discussions of those sitting down below repairing the clothes and darning the stockings while keeping an eye on the children playing. At the same time, the men—just as in my childhood in Apatin, where the Swabian peasants in their black outfits and shiny boots would sit, loafing and spitting, in front of the church—here, in the Moscow courtyards, the men sit in their Russian shirts (rubashkas) and white canvas shoes, loafing and spitting. I recall what Kurella said during one of our first days in Moscow when I told him about a wonderfully equipped worker’s club that I had just visited. “People have come to find the clubs boring. And since the cafés are too expensive, the question of how people should spend their free time has become a serious and as yet unsolved problem.” This is what Kurella said, but I see since then that this is primarily a problem for the men; unfortunately only for them. Women have not yet risen to the level of this advanced problem. [. . .] My landlord’s wife, for example, has no such problem even though she, with her three-room apartment, has the status here of an aristocrat. For her, the “day off” is a hard day of laundering, house cleaning, and mending. Just as Marx in his debates with the young Hegelians clarified the concept of emancipation in general as well as the difference between bourgeois and human emancipation, so we, based on our experiences with bourgeois and proletarian societies, should point out the areas where women have not yet been emancipated, contrary to the predictions of the feminist literature of the last century, and contrary to the propaganda of the social democrats and the Soviet government (including the work of Fannina Halle.) No, I am not at all impressed when I see female subway drivers, or photographs of girls or married women in mines with pick axes in their hands. These are signs of poverty and misery, not signs of emancipation. It seems as if in the matter of women’s emancipation, Soviet development—the socialist revolution itself—has gotten stuck along the path somewhere. The party and the government are led exclusively by men. (They give Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow, the purely decorative, unearned, and demeaning role of the great man’s widow: a rather pitiful role.) If here and there some comrades quietly confide that the banning of abortions and the raising of the prestige of marriage were made necessary in order to protect women, this only means that for the time being the Soviet system has put aside the battle for the emancipation of women, that is, for the elevation of the relationship between men and women to a higher plane, one that is more worthy of mankind. The policy turns away from the hard battle and settles for the “protection” of women. I may be wrong in all this, but surely I am right to wonder why there is no trace of any serious discussion in the press about these important question

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befitting adult, thinking people. Instead [. . .] we are always shown pictures of crowds, of happy, smiling people, and hackneyed, liturgical sounding phrases. I don’t know if this contradicts or supports the above question but it reminds me that I ran into Sándor Barta a few days ago in one of the anterooms of Za Rubezhom. In 1917 and 1918 we both got our start, along with Révai and Komját, 8 in Lajos Kassák’s A Tett (The Act) and later MA (TODAY). 9 These were futurist-expressionist-dadaist-surrealist journals, but what is most important and really the only positive thing about them, is that they were totally anti-militarist and anti-bourgeois. In Vienna in the 1920s, when the only value I saw in these artistic movements was their social intent, Barta continued the piling up of tilted and crisscrossed words where we had left off in Budapest. In Vienna, he became the publisher, editor, and, for the most part, sole staff member of the typically named The Hanged Man (Akasztott Ember). This magazine was not just a curiosity. Despite its immature theories of art, despite the fact that its credo was the passionate denial of all art and of all literary values, Barta expressed all this with such intensity and dazzling inventiveness, with such authentic revolutionary bitterness [. . .] that his exceptional poetic force and uniquely suggestive vision outshone the false elements of his ars poetica. The last time we had seen each other was in Vienna when his Hanged Man was at its peak. He now waited for me while I tried to take care of the unfinished business (still unfinished) with the editors of Za Rubezhom, and then we walked out together. Of course he, too, had heard about Optimists, and, as he said, one rarely hears such contradictory opinions here about a book as he has heard about this one. But, as he had not read Optimists yet, I was more interested to learn what had happened to him, how had he developed here in Moscow, because I had always liked him and always agreed with those who, back then, had held him to be one of the most [. . .] talented members of the new Hungarian generation of revolutionary writers. So I was happy to accept his invitation to go up to his place. On the way, we exchanged a few words about our times of empty stomachs in Vienna as something in the distant past. “Here, the writer,” says Barta, “is in a more-than-privileged position. He is cosseted, pampered.” He has quite a good apartment, considering this is Moscow. (The furnishings: the new Soviet furniture that I am already familiar with. Table and bed with those decorated legs and headboard; a narrow couch with upholstered back which serves as more of an ugly piece of decor than a comfortable piece of furniture. Products of outdated petit bourgeois taste, no longer manufactured elsewhere. Oddly enough, here they make only these kinds of pieces, because, as an expert explained to me, the workers and peasants now wish to

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have the kinds of furniture that in former times they had seen as beyond their means and envied in the homes of landlords, merchants, and manufacturers.) I asked Barta what he has been worked on in the last ten years, what is he working on now? He replied that unfortunately, he belonged to those Hungarians who would never be able to master the Russian language well enough to write in it for a living. But some of his poems that came out well have been translated into Russian. And he shows me his newest manuscript, which Sarló és Kalapács (Hammer and Sickle), the journal of the Hungarian party, wants to publish. I read the poem. It is in stanzas of six lines and each stanza’s last line ends with the refrain: “Stalin, our good father.” The refrains vary from each other in that the beginning of the last lines alternate with “You encourage us through your struggle,” “You forge arms,” “You create new land,” and then I only remember the last line of the sixth stanza, “You stay awake to guard us. Stalin, our good father.” I didn’t know where to look in my embarrassment. After a pause I said to him, “I much preferred your poems from the time of the Hanged Man.” And Barta, with a friendly but unabashedly superior smile and an unmistakably sincere voice answered: “That was decadence, a petit bourgeois, anarchistic gesture of contempt, a sickness. Here you regain your health. In you, I still hear the voice of the unreformed. But then, you have just arrived. You have not yet been able to free yourself of the old standards.” Misunderstanding my facial expression, he continued, “It takes time. You can’t get rid of these old habits right away. You don’t yet know how to be free. You don’t know how to believe. I believe in Stalin.” I don’t know for certain whether I have reproduced the entire conversation precisely, but his last words were verbatim, “I believe in Stalin.” His wife was there, too. She is Lajos Kassák’s younger sister, who, in the time of The Deed (Tett) and TODAY (MA) also wrote, under the name of Erzsi Újvári. She, too, is a sympathetic, warm person, and she, too, looked indulgently when I confessed that I liked Barta’s poetry from the time of the Hanged Man more than this poem of his, entitled “Stalin, our Good Father.” We didn’t talk about literature any more, but about his wife’s illness. “Incurable, multiple sclerosis,” Barta whispered to me when he saw me out. Ars poetica whose cornerstone is “I believe in Stalin!” If I try to see myself with Sándor Barta’s new eyes, I definitely appear suspicious. I am incapable of even wishing that Barta’s encouragement should come true, that I would be “cured.” Is it possible that I, too, am incurable? I have a meeting with Kun at 10:30 at the Comintern. Oh, that I could forget this whole business of the novel! Moscow, June 27

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The meeting with Kun has been cancelled. He is so ill that they might put him into the hospital of the Kremlin. Nonetheless, he sent a message that I should try calling tomorrow. Kurella thinks I am foolish for doing nothing in the interest of arranging a meeting with Rolland. But I am very much put off by this banging of the bass drum and blowing of the bugle, this earsplitting noise that they are making around Rolland’s visit. It’s amazing how incapable the Russians are of moderation. There is plenty that could be written in connection with Rolland’s visit: about Rolland himself and about the historically considered symbolic significance of this visit. What this visit really means is that one of the most important representatives of European intellectual life has chosen to make his way to the socialist Soviet Union at the end of his life to draw hope, faith, and new knowledge from this country which represents the victory of the proletariat and the revolutionary negation of the entire bourgeois world. There is much that could be and should be said about this. But instead of meaningful human words, the leading articles, indeed, all newspaper articles give us toasts frothy with such superlatives as one usually hears from drunken men. Reading these phrases, which try to outdo each other, one would think that the world has no greater literary artist and Stalin no greater admirer, worshiper, or soldier than Romain Rolland. The most disgusting thing in this is the way they use Rolland to fashion trophies for Stalin. In writing about Rolland they mention Stalin over and over again, affixing to his name [. . .] all the apparently obligatory honorifics, the epitheton ornans (decorative epithets) such as “the great steersman of the revolution” and the ever more frequent phrase—totally out of line with Marxist thought—”the liberator of mankind.” I see from the photos that appear by the dozens in the newspapers that Rolland is a thin, tall, bony, aged man who even in these hot summer days wraps his wide cape about him as if he were cold. He smiles somewhat embarrassedly and fearfully before the cameras and the people swirling around him. [. . .] I will not go. I don’t want to be among those who trouble him, pull him, tire him out, so that from all the events and hullabaloo, he can’t see or hear anything. June 28 [Silvio, Sinkó’s young friend from Paris is an engineer who would rather be doing “creative work,” that is directing a film or writing. As an engineer, Silvio is given many job offers in the Soviet Union, though he came here to get away from his diploma and to do something “creative.” Sinkó sees a good short story theme in this: a man persecuted by his diploma, modern man

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rebelling against being pigeon-holed. At the same time, Sinkó wishes he had a specialty, like his wife or Silvio, with which he could earn a living.] In the Soviet Union, based on my experience so far and in contrast to Sándor Barta’s claim, the writer labors under conditions less worthy of man than all other workers. This is simply because he depends on editors, publishing managers, and spineless creatures called publishers’ readers. He is at their mercy, moreover, in matters of life and death, literally life and death, because it is up to them whether he dies of starvation or not. Pamper the writers? Yes, this is true, too. M and I received permission to take our meals in the House of Writers any time we wished. There, verily, one can eat well in comfortable surroundings and with good service, although, of course, for more money than we can afford. Anyone whose manuscript is published here has plenty of money, more than anywhere else, but to have your manuscript published, that is, before you can be pampered, you have to go through a purgatory of editorial ante-chambers and reception rooms: a purgatory beyond the middle of which I have not been able to penetrate and about which I cannot be entirely sure if in my case, it does not lead to the gates of hell. This poetic association occurred to me in connection with Bork. I finally reached him on the phone and he informed me that Kun spoke to Yonov, not to him directly. So, although he knows as a private person what Kun’s opinion is, this is not official. He has to have it in writing, in black on white, “Schwarz auf Weiss,” as he said. [That same day, Sinkó met with the ailing Kun who graciously wrote the requested letter to Bork, as well as to the editors of Za Rubezhom. He also advised Sinkó to compose a foreword to Optimists “for the benefit of weaker readers.”] June 29 Late last night Natalia Ivanovna brought over her Russian translation of my autobiography. It turned out that the theory that I had built around Natalia Ivanovna’s revolutionary zeal—the theory of how a limited experience of the world leads to both an intellectual narrowness and to strength—is totally off target. But Steiner hit the nail on the head. He said that although he had never met this student of Grivtsov, it sounded like she was playing the familiar game of “putting on a revolutionary face.” It is very easy to get the wrong impression if one draws conclusions from what people say here. Maybe the little lady’s greater sincerity was aided by the fact that she was no longer sitting as an elegant guest in the elegant hotel of the VOKS, but here on the Trubnaya, in a furnished room, between walls on which the signs of the nightly bloody battle with bedbugs were clearly visible.

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“Très hardi,” (very brave) she said now of the manuscript whose translation she had just delivered. And she made this comment about my courage and foolhardiness not in a disparaging tone. Rather, there was the shadow of admiration mixed with sympathy and concern in her voice, as if it pleased her that there is someone who tells “them” how it is. “Them” for Natalia Ivanovna refers clearly to the revolutionaries, the victors. I don’t think she realized that for me “they” are the fighters of a cause that has grown closest to my heart and—contrary to her—this is why I dare to write sincerely about things that in her view one can only treat with lies or silence. I learned something now about Natalia Ivanovna, who in our previous meeting upbraided me with seeming vehemence for regretting the death of András Vén, 10 a gendarme of the old regime. It turns out that her father was an officer of the police in tsarist times and that she herself is a tiny insect whose goal in life is to stay alive and not be crushed under foot by anyone. She also brought greetings from Grivtsov along with a message: since I insisted that the translation of Facing the Judge should be published with no omissions from the original— as it had appeared in Europe—he, Grivtsov, will not present it to any publishers nor (and this amounts to raging caution) will he give it to Gorky’s secretary, Kryuchkov. 11 [Sinkó gave the translation of his autobiography to Kurella so that he would give it to Rolland who could then personally hand it to Gorky.] I read about Japan’s latest provocation on the Manchurian-Soviet border in today’s Izvestia. Here it comes! The threat of the new war is ever closer. We are already living in its shadow, under its menacingly darkening cloud, and it is only an illusion that life here goes on peacefully. It is only from the perspective of this approaching danger that we can understand and rightly judge the sort of life we see in this country, particularly in its least appealing aspects. Mankind has no treasure so great as that which is trying to be born here, and thus, what exists here today is only the precondition and cowl of that future. It is enough for me to think about Budapest, Berlin, Rome, and, in general, about any of the major world centers outside the Soviet borders to realize that it is a stroke of luck—a personal, most intimate stroke of luck—for everyone who is truly human that there is such an unexampled power as the Soviet Union, even if its imperfections hurt me as if they were wounds dealt to my own body. There is a power in the world today whose every success must be felt by everyone, in his capacity as a human being, as his personal joy, and whose every failure, as his personal pain. When everywhere else in the world only rogues have weapons and power, there is also a military, a proletarian military, equipped with airplanes and warships whose only goal is to wipe from the face of the earth even the memory of every sort of roguery, all aggression, all armies, including itself. The future of mankind has no better guarantor than the existence of this power, of this proletarian army. This sole carrier

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and guarantor of our hopes deserves all the love and all the service we can give it. But . . . but, my friend, you should draw some practical conclusions from this. If this is so—and it is, without a doubt—then why aren’t you building with the builders and cheering with those who cheer? Why have you written so little besides these journal notes since you have arrived? Why don’t you work? Why don’t you write? Even if not with enthusiasm, even if not about happiness, why not write about your faith, and in such a way that your faith will strike the flame of enthusiastic love in others? It seems as if I made a personal friend of Rákosi’s brother, Zoltán, with the little article that I wrote in Europe [back in France] in connection with his brother’s trial. And I am ashamed how little I work, how little I do for the cause. By the way, Zoltán Rákosi wants to get together with us. His wife wants to meet us, too. We settled on the first of the month, and as it is customary here, at ten at night. By then, the decision on his brother’s case might be in. Priacel is here, too. He was present at the trial as a French journalist. I hear music coming through my window from the street. Moscow is getting ready for tomorrow’s big athletic celebration, “fiskulturnii parad” (physical culture parade) as they call it here. At night, as we were returning home from the Kurellas, groups of young women in bathing suits were running in the roadway on Tverskaya, training for the festival. They were as serious as the explicators of the Czech-Soviet Treaty in the park of culture [. . .]. But occasionally a peal of laughter rose from one group or another. And then I stood there truly grateful to be able to listen until the joyful voices died out under the lit windows of the night-time street, full of people even then. NOTES 1. Georgi Dimitrov (1882–1949), a Bulgarian Communist, was the leader of the Comintern from 1934–1943. Arrested in Hitler’s Germany after the Reichstag fire (1933), he was acquitted by a German jury, based on his impassioned self-defense. 2. Kurella may have had a talent for this but it was also his job. He was one of the architects of the Soviet outreach to Western writers through the Comintern. See Ludmila Stern, Western Intellectuals, 45. Contrast Kurella’s attitude to that of Malraux as expressed in the epilogue of this work in regard to Gide. 3. From János Arany’s 1860 poem Széchényi Emlékezete (In memory of Széchényi.) István Széchényi was an aristocrat who advocated Hungary’s economic, cultural, and political modernization in the first half of the nineteenth century. János Arany (1817–1882) was Hungary’s preeminent Romantic poet after 1849. 4. The Soviet-Czechoslovak Pact of 1935, like the Franco-Soviet Pact of the same year, in fact were both important elements of the Soviet attempt to cooperate with Western countries for the restraint of Hitler’s Germany at this time. It is interesting that even as this policy was being touted, Sinkó recorded rumors of a great purge earlier in this chapter. This would seem to

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counter the argument that the Great Purge was one part of the Stalin’s response to the failure of collective security. 5. Parachute jumping from a tower was a popular entertainment in the 1930s, promoted by the state for military reasons. 6. Béla Vágó (1881–1939). A Social Democratic functionary active in the peace movement during the First World War, he was a founder of the KMP and became one of the leaders of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. He was killed in the purges. 7. Prigevica-Sveti Ivan is a small town in modern-day Serbia, near where Sinkó was born. See the translator’s introduction. Its population was mostly ethnic Germans (called Swabians) whose ancestors had been invited by Hungary’s Habsburg rulers in the eighteenth century to resettle from Germany to southern Hungary after the expulsion of the Ottomans. 8. Aladár Komját (1894–1963) See the translator’s introduction. 9. Lajos Kassák (1887–1967) was a locksmith, painter, writer, and leading personality of the Hungarian avant garde and political left during World War I. He founded the Tett in 1915 which was soon banned for its anti-war stance. In 1916 he founded the MA. Sinkó and many of the young communists he describes in Optimists came from Kassák’s circle but Kassák himself was too much of an individualist to follow Kun’s bolshevism in 1919 or later. 10. Vén is mentioned in Sinkó’s short autobiography, Facing the Judge and in Optimists. He was summarily executed by the Hungarian “Lenin Boys,” when Sinkó was city commissar of the Hungarian city of Kecskemét in 1919. See Foreword. 11. [Veering from his general practice, Sinkó added a footnote at this point in the original edition to explain that he had learned in 1937 after his return to Paris that year, that Kryuchkov had been executed as “an evil-doer and enemy of the people.” He wrote to Romain Rolland’s wife about this. She replied from Switzerland, rather oddly, that one never knows whom to trust, showing that she believed (or pretended to believe) the charge. In fact, as Sinkó points out, Kryuchkov was probably working for the NKVD under Yagoda and was a victim of the purge of Yagoda’s men carried out by the next NKVD chief, Yezhov.]

Chapter Thirteen

The Happy Life and Gratitude

Moscow, July 2, 1935 After three days, just to be doing something or to have the illusion that I am doing something, I will record everything methodically. It is as if something had attacked me from behind, and just like an ox that is felled by a well-aimed poleaxe, something has laid me low. It was evidently a lurking depression, my old acquaintance. But what is it doing here in Moscow? How could it have followed me here, too? In whatever way it came, it is here now on top of me. I feel it in my shoulders, my eyelids, my arms, like some final exhaustion. I have a mind to just let everything go. This languid fatigue is so overpowering that I suspect I would leave my hand dangling, immobile, even if I knew that my loosening grip was letting life itself slip from it. Where to begin? Silvio departed for Paris. He left a letter authorizing me to pick up the money owed to him by the Dorozhniy Trest (Highway Trust). The young cashier with the flushed face and red polished nails used an abacus to calculate the amount it owed me. [But the firm could not pay because it had run out of cash, much to the frustration of Sinkó, the helpless cashier, and the twenty or so others in the office waiting to be paid.] “The explanation is,” says my landlord, to whom I described my day, “that trusts have to request money at the beginning of each year, documenting every single item that they will need. If during the year they have an expense that was not planned, that’s the manager’s problem. He cannot get money for it from the bank. Previously, the trusts were very loose with their money. Now the state is teaching them discipline. My landlord is a Jew. He studied in Munich. He knew Bebel 1 and the old Liebknecht. 2 Whenever he could, he would attend the workers’ meetings to 121

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hear them speak. He is sixty-five years old now. He experienced the entire revolution in Moscow. He says the revolution was much bloodier and caused much greater hardships than he had thought it would when he was young. He says that he wasn’t able to bring himself to be a Bolshevik and he still can’t because socialism, too—this is how he expresses himself—socialism is cruel in practice and goes with a lot of injustice, and what is the worst: it is often heartless toward people. But he says that if Soviet Russia will be attacked, he will take up arms to defend it. I am often alone at home, and since it is his day off, he knocks on my door and we talk. He tells me what hard years he lived through and how life is still very hard here. He is not talking about his own situation: with his wife they make five hundred rubles a month and he can add to this what we now pay in rent for our room. They are alright, but at his place of work, the typist makes 125 rubles. And an unskilled railroad worker makes 64 rubles a month. As far as he is concerned, he has no desire to go to the West even if he could. Yet, there is someplace that he would gladly go even at his age: Palestine. But it is not allowed. Zionism is prohibited here. I listen to him and I see dancing before my eyes the slogan’s huge letters leading the procession, carried aloft above all the heads by a line of workers from one of the factories on the day of the fiskulturniy parad, traversing the city in the flood of big Stalin portraits nailed to hundreds and thousands of poles. “Spasibo tovarischu Stalinu za schastlivuyu zhizn!” (Thank you, Comrade Stalin for a Happier Life!) It is foolishness and the sort of vileness of which only an enemy is capable to blame the revolution for the horrible conditions in which the great majority of Soviet people live, dress, and feed themselves. Can one blame the defenders of a fortress that is surrounded by hateful enemies for the hard life of those within? [. . .] But what is all this thanking of Comrade Stalin for? How is this a revolutionary slogan? And what kind of treatment is this of a people that can only be admired for their loyalty to the great goals of the great idea despite their obvious indigence and ever-returning hardships: to force these people in rags to declare: “Ha ha! Life is a Feast!”? To force them to declare it: because if there is anything that I know, that I now know from experience, it is that not one person or group would write such slogans, in such huge letters, on the flags of thousands of marchers by their own initiative. In the Soviet Union, not one decree, not a single letter or accent sees the light of day without official authorization from above. It would have been pleasant to believe that in this particular case, there was some overzealous, shameless fawning at play. But such a hypothesis is fundamentally disproven by the fact that since then my eyes are assaulted with the same spasibo (thank you) message, appearing as if by magic, from the

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sides of houses, on the trams, on flyers of various sizes stuck on walls, and today even in the grocery store window where I bought my bread. I always thought that it was only the enemies of socialism that underestimated the judgment of the masses. But can one interpret such slogans as other than the narcotization of the masses? Moreover, it is done not with the techniques of propaganda but with the most devious tools of advertising. Visit at Zoltán Rákosi’s. He claims that this cult of Stalin is a matter of realpolitik. The party needs it because the low intellectual level of the masses necessitates the use of such methods to provide a magical aura to the party’s authority. But then how can we expect, I ask, that the masses raise themselves from this low level? “We don’t have time to work on that at this point,” answers Rákosi. “War can break out any day. And war will require an unapproachable authority about which the masses harbor no doubts and are immunized to all doubts.” I would be incapable of writing a single line in the interest of this goal, even if I recognized that it was an absolutely correct goal from the point of view of realpolitik! This is what I thought and immediately said out loud with sadness. “There is no reason for you to write it,” answered Rákosi’s wife, with a chuckle. She is also a pleasant, direct person, a pediatrician and an adjunct professor here at the university. “There are already enough people working on that assignment.” Zoltán Rákosi is an engineer working on electrification. He says wonderful things about the work and about the results. He is preparing to give a talk at the Academy of Science. I felt again of how much more interesting it would be to be a good technical professional here than a writer of even above average caliber. I can say this because in the meantime I have read Sándor Barta’s novel, No Mercy. It is party literature and not of the bad type. In places, given its theme, it is even interesting. And yet, even the better party literature is only interesting, at best, in parts, but taken as a whole, it is sterile. It doesn’t make you happy. It does not communicate any of that kind of joy in suffering that only art can evoke in a person. Since we have been living here on the Trubnaya, I have been hounded by an idea for a short story, or, I should say, a desire to come to know the world of this neighborhood well enough so that I can describe that old woman whom I see day after day kneeling in the Trubnaya Park with one hand holding a cup that has lost its enamel long ago, and every time that the cup rings out with the sound of a coin, she makes the sign of the cross with her other hand. Every time I am in the park, regardless of the hour, I see her in the same spot, in the same position with the cup in her hand. She is a living, timeless statue. It is possible that she was kneeling here at the same spot with the same, dusty, brown-rather-than-black shawl on her head already in October 1917 and even earlier when the tsarist regiments marched this way to the

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front. (I hear that close to Moscow there are two villages whose inhabitants have traditionally lived from begging since time immemorial.) [. . .] This morning before M left for work, we searched through every pocket thoroughly and found that between us our entire fortune, including the kopeks, consists of six rubles. [Sinkó was determined to get some money before his wife returned from work and made the rounds of the publishers to urge them to pay, now that they had received Kun’s blessings in both oral and written form. But he ran into obstacles everywhere. At Za Rubezhom, Deutsch told him in confidence that the political editor who had read the novel told him, also in confidence, that the excerpt of Optimists that they were planning to publish, just like the entire novel, “provides too much positive publicity for Kun and that there might be people at the highest levels who might not like that.”] I had to laugh. Before coming to Moscow, not only Károlyi, but I also thought that Kun might place the greatest obstacles before the publication of the novel, precisely because it is anything but a paean to him. And now this political editor fears “that there might be people at the highest level . . .”, this “might be” and this “highest level” in the socialist Soviet Union . . . Either I have gone crazy or random fortune has brought me into contact with only people who are crazy. [. . .] I left Za Rubezhom not the way I had hoped I would. But now that I was at it, I was determined not to retreat. I went to see Bork [at the State Publisher for Foreign Writers. After seeing Kun’s letter of recommendation a few days earlier, Bork had promised him an advance within a few days. Now, Bork said he needed another opinion from an internal reader and suggested that Sinkó call him a few days later. Sinkó showed him his last three rubles but Bork would not be moved. He next rushed to see Yonov at GIHL. There he learns that Yonov is on vacation for the next two months. The secretary, after some hesitation, told him the name of Yonov’s assistant, Comrade Anisimov, who could only be reached by phone that day.] And that is why today’s diary entry is so extensive. I turned back from the GIHL with much slower steps toward home, to the Trubnaya, through the park, where I saw the old beggar woman with the cup in her hand in her usual place. And instead of lunch, which I skipped, I celebrate my first day of fasting in Moscow by writing my diary. M just called from the Sharikopodshipnik where she works in the afternoons after finishing her work at the cancer institute. She asks what is new and I answer, “nothing.” She understands what I mean. She called because it was then 6 P.M. and thus she was done with work, but there was a meeting scheduled for the doctors and nurses of the clinic for 8 P.M. It made no sense

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to come home. By the time the tram got her home, she would need to turn around. So she was staying. It was my landlord who had called me to the phone. He sees that I am very disappointed by what I hear (that was because it occurred to me that first of all, M would not be home until midnight and second, that nothing had come of my plans from this morning to put our affairs in order. I cannot even make dinner for her.) I told my landlord that M had to stay late because of a meeting. “That’s odd, because they don’t have so many meetings as they used to,” said he. “Earlier they had meetings that lasted till midnight every day. Now, however, the boss is responsible, he decides. Or at least that is how it is in the factories.” July 5 M’s mornings are free as of yesterday. The reason: the cancer institute where she worked in the mornings will be closed for two months of “remont.” The concept of remont, which everyone takes for granted here as something unalterable, like a law of nature that people have become accustomed to since ancient times, signifies an annual maintenance period for institutions. “Closed for Remont,” “Ne rabotayet” (out of order, not working) because of remont, it says everywhere, from the elevators to every locked door and lowered shade. Maintenance is done elsewhere as well but I have never seen the need to close for two full months such essential institutions as the one where M is working. Our financial situation: aside from our debts—we owe money to people who are themselves destitute—we are above water for the moment because M has received her first salary from the clinic at the ball-bearing factory. Despite this, because I know that moments vanish, I was indefatigably at the telephone, and thus, after two days, I succeeded in reaching Anisimov 3 at GIHL “in person” as Tucholsky would say. 4 When I realized that my name says nothing to him, I said: Optimists. Answer: It has only been a few days since he took over the office and he has not yet had the time to “ramp up” on all matters, and Yonov only told him in vague terms about all the current projects before going on vacation. At this point, his head was spinning. I tried to give him some information at least about my current project. To what effect? He thanked me for the information and told me to call him back in a couple of days. I did so today. [. . .] They are advertising a carnival for tonight in the culture park named after Maxim Gorky, and it is a masked carnival at that. The Moscow papers have been writing about this for days as a great event in the making. My feeling is that this carnival is part of that organized—a bit too evidently organized— happiness campaign.

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Those who are not happy, I for one, are made to feel guilty in a place where everyone, or rather the press, films, the theater are abuzz with talk about how happy life has become. (In the major newspapers, minor “human interest” articles are a rarity, but the day before yesterday there was an article in Izvestia in tiny print: a member of the militsiya 5 apprehended a woman in the act of burying her newborn baby. The child was successfully freed from his grave and taken to the hospital. The “stringent investigation” of the mother has begun.) Speaking of “the happy life.” Yesterday, we ate at an inexpensive place and the waiter, who put the shabby meal before us, —a skinny man with a strongly greying head—hearing that we were speaking Hungarian, smiled broadly at us and began a conversation. He only spoke a bit of Hungarian and hence switched to Russian after a few words. He told us that he was taken prisoner in the War in 1915. He lived in Szabadka, and worked at some “Piuk’s.” 6 It turned out that this Piuk was named Piukovitch. It was long ago, he has forgotten the full name, but what he hasn’t forgotten was how happy life was while being a prisoner at Piuk’s. “He was a terrific person, this Piuk. He had a hundred rows of grapes, twenty of sugar beets, and he even had a factory. And he was a good man. We got meat every day and bread so white that I haven’t seen the like of it since.” He also remembered that the girls around there were very pretty but his enthusiasm was the greatest and his tone the warmest when he reminded himself of the daily meat and white bread. A man who remembers his prisoner-of-war experience as “the happy days,” and this man is a worker in the socialist Moscow! Perhaps this is exactly why the slogan of the Happy Life is needed. The newspapers, by showing photographs only of happy-faced male and female workers and peasants, are trying to at least inspire that satisfaction which they cannot yet provide in reality. Kurella considers this propaganda for happiness to be a manifestation of the new humanism, a consequence of the consolidated order of the irreversibly victorious revolution, and in any case, of tremendous significance. We cannot imagine, he explains, what horrible hardships the first Five-Year Plan and the collectivization drive meant in the lives of this population, and now this population literally needs to relearn how to laugh without care. Kurella might be right in this, but I don’t understand why this requires that the population have a false picture of how workers live in the West. I learned that the film that French intellectuals and Communists prepared as a present for the Soviet Union about the lives of French unemployed workers will not be shown in the Soviet Union because it has been determined that the unemployed French workers in the film are dressed too well. It is incredible that here, in general, even educated people have no idea about the real inhumanities of Western life nor about the equally real human rights and other

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valuable achievements that are almost taken for granted there. (A nurse asked M whether in France factory owners had the right to cane their workers!) [. . .] An endearing picture in today’s Pravda: Romain Rolland in Gorky’s summer home, sitting on a bench in the garden next to Gorky. Gorky is the happier one; next to Rolland, he somehow seems happily above it all. Kurella, who knows how my affairs here have become stuck, attacked me again for not availing myself of this unparalleled opportunity to finally meet with Rolland in person and to speak to him, and through him to Gorky, when with a single word they could dispel all the stupid obstacles in my way. Kurella knows that for me the dispelling of these obstacles is a life-anddeath matter. But if Rolland, who is visibly ill and in the last years of his life, decided to take on this great, tiring, final voyage, it was not so to have a chat with some sort of European émigré like me, but so that he could meet with people from this land, to get to know the life of this country. And while I can hound Anisimov and Yonov, I do not want to make use of Rolland’s stay in Moscow for my own ends. All of this spins through my mind, but I don’t say it out loud, because I know that the real reason for my passivity lies elsewhere. The thing that leads Kurella to urge me on is exactly what makes me so passive. Rolland here, today, especially since Stalin deigned to meet with him, has become a celebrated man of power, and inside me there is an insurmountable resistance, an almost unfair coldness toward those people who are “up there.” There is yet another, perhaps the most decisive reason: I have read Rolland’s daily statements to the press. I see that he is absolutely enthusiastic, but if I were to speak to him for the first time in my life, I would have to admit to him that though I, too, am a believer, in my faith there is less joy than grim determination. “Rolland knows my address,” I answer, to which Kurella responds with a surprising warning: “You should take into consideration that there might be those who would prefer that you do not meet with Rolland. There is a lot of jealousy and political intrigue, especially in literary circles.” In literary circles? I had lunch a few times in the House of Writers; so far that was the extent of my encounter with “literary circles,” unless I consider the torture chambers of publishers and editorial offices to be literary circles. But those are rather the circles of hell. July 8 No, there should not be such a literary jungle here in socialist Moscow. I am talking about the situation at Za Rubezhom. The political editor, whose name I learned was Goldenberg, did not come to the office yesterday at all, and according to what the secretary had heard—the excerpt from the novel will

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not be published at all. M, who takes advantage of her free morning by accompanying me on such trips, just as she used to do in Paris, could not dissuade me from setting out to find this Goldenberg. I succeeded in discovering that he can be found in the editorial offices of Pravda. I went there straight away and even now I could not describe what the man looks like. The case itself had me so riled up, and I had the feeling that I was not dealing with a living human being but with a phantom, with some mechanism that was totally incomprehensible to me. I demanded that he tell me to my face what political objections he had against a novel dealing with the Hungarian dictatorship of the proletariat, a novel that Béla Kun has found to be appropriate. I wanted to know, he should tell me here and now why he is obstructing the publication of an excerpt of this novel in Za Rubezhom. I was ready for anything but not for the answer that he gave. This mechanism named Goldenberg denied that he had any objections to the publication of an excerpt. There is some misunderstanding. It is just that so far, there has not been room in the journal, but the excerpt will certainly be published. “In order to remedy the misunderstanding, I ask that, while I am here, you call the secretary of the editorial office of Za Rubezhom and tell her this.” Meanwhile, it started to rain outside and I dragged M back with me to Za Rubezhom. There, the secretary greeted me full of reproaches. Not only did Goldenberg call her once while I was with him, but he called back a second time to upbraid her for her indiscretion. The same evening [. . .] Wenn in userer engen Zelle, Die Lampe wiederfreundlich brennt . . . (From Goethe’s Faust, Part I, Scene III (The Study): Ah, when in our narrow chamber, The lamp with friendly luster glows . . .)

“Friendly” may be an exaggeration because the lighting is bad and occasionally I have to scratch myself, but still, the evening creates the inner preconditions to reflect with melancholy coolness. If I think of Goldenberg, whom I would not recognize if I saw him coming toward me on the street, I feel only one thing: shame. And now I feel that deep down I have nothing to do with all that for which I am fighting every day. Deep down the only things that have to do with me in this whole literary “business” are a table, ink, and pen (my fountain pen was stolen out of my pocket two weeks ago), so all I really have anything to do with is writing and how I write. The rest, all this running about, is forced upon me from the outside. From the outside, just like back then in Szabadka in the Sixth Infantry Regiment at Lieutenant Rörich’s com-

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mand in the training ground we had to shout hurrah while fixing bayonetts and practicing the assault, and I ran like a madman, fearing meanwhile, that I might stab the guy in front of me, another human being who was also put into a uniform, commanded to fix bayonets and charge. The problem is not that this is what is happening to me, but that these Yonovs, Goldenbergs, Anisimovs, Deutsches, and various secretaries, almost everyone—even He, yes He with the big H—seem to me to be putting on an act, as if they were doing what they do and also not doing what they don’t do at the command of some impersonal and invisible Rörich. [. . .] That’s the doorbell. The Kurellas are here. We are going to the culture park together to see the carnival. July 9 Just like my siblings and I used to play the “English-Boer War” in our children’s room, so the inhabitants of Moscow played carnival in the culture park named after Maxim Gorky. Even the best-behaved children could not have played at carnival in a more restrained and gentle manner. The only thing that was gigantic about it was the number of people who participated. Estimates varied between 150,000 and 200,000. These adults were childlike, too, in their willingness to make believe that what they were playing was a real carnival, or almost a Saturnalia. They were handing out paper spectacles and paper “Bobby helmets” at the entrance to the park. We received some, too. These were the masks and costumes, but even of these there were not enough to go around, so most people, who came late, did not get any. We promenaded with these presents and in the light of the colored lanterns we observed how tremendously many of us there were. This was the real attraction, that there were so many people. This was a greater attraction than the songs that emanated from the rowboats and the temporary stages or the folk dances of the amateur groups, some in folk costumes and some not. There was something else of interest: on the main walking path of the park there was a long line of portraits of the martyrs of the world revolution, several times larger than life and painted in an embarrassingly dilettantish technique. Under each could be read their name and when and where they were murdered. True, there were many unforgettable names missing from the last fifteen or twenty years of history of the workers’ movement, but it was a nice thought that here and during this celebration we are reminded of those whom “the proletariat holds dear in its great heart.” It is as if by setting up this jarring portrait gallery for the occasion and on the main thoroughfare, they were setting forth a credo and at the same time a warning: Moscow will never and should never forget, even in the middle of a celebration, that it owes its victory to its own struggle and to that of the

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bloodied victims of the international working class, and that in the places where many of these martyrs died, power still remains in the bloodstained hands of their murderers, and that newer martyrs shall line the path of the remaining struggle. Yes, this is how I wished to be able to understand this display, but there were two facts that I could not square with this interpretation: namely that from the Soviet press one can hardly learn what is happening in the world outside the Soviet Union, and at the same time, even about what is happening inside the Soviet Union, the press speaks mainly of the telegrams to Stalin expressing, or rather, blaring out their gratitude, and trumpeting the Happy Life. Here, too, at the carnival there are thousands upon thousands of small slips of paper and larger banners giving thanks with the sentence that has become a byword: “Spasibo tovarishchu Stalinu . . .” (Thank you, Comarade Stalin.) Looking at the propaganda of the Happy Life from this perspective, is it not in the spirit of Saint Thomas Aquinas and the Church Triumphant (ecclesia triumphans) that the witnesses to the power of Hell have been lined up here? It is as if they were saying, take a look at the victims of Hell’s wrath so that you may feel and believe how happy your lives are; in fact, that life could not be happier. For me, nothing can be sadder than that comfortable emptiness reeking of beer, that absence of the intensive life signified by the slogan of “the happy life” even if that life were as gemutlich (pleasant) as a tavern in Grinzig. And what if it is not even true, what if we are made to make believe that it is true simply to obscure how little of it is true? [. . .] There were so many people that it was not your decision but the packed human flood that determined which way you went once you somehow got caught up by the current of the crowd. This is how we came to be separated right at the entrance from the Kurellas. Then, at midnight, as we were trying to board the buses, I was already on board one when I noticed that a human wave had washed M away from my side. I succeeded in stopping the bus and fighting my way through a crowd of people, who were standing not next to each other but on top of each other. But I could not find M. I took the metro to Dzerzhinsky Square and walked home from there. Since I have a terrible sense of direction, I wandered around, reaching our home near 2 A.M. But M was still not there. She reached home only much later and I think I will never forget in what condition she was. For a few moments she just stood with a look of horror in her eyes, and then said while sobbing, “I didn’t think this was possible. I would not have believed that this was possible.” She then told me how people used both elbows and their fists; not only did they push the weaker ones aside but pushed them over, climbing over them to fight their way onto the buses. There were fistfights. M had been

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swept along to the steps of the bus several times, but each time, she was knocked down, and kicked. Some people acted as if this, too, was part of the carnival and made a sport of showing off their strength, while others screamed in wild panic as if escaping from a burning house; and all this over who gets home first. They are uncivilized, brutish; they are hardly past the caveman stage. It is bad enough that this is so, but this is not the worst of it. The worst of it is that day after day newspapers, films, writers and orators make the claim that they are not just civilized but that they are “the New Man.” What makes me so distraught is not that I see all that is still lacking here. What makes me distraught is that besides the Cult of the Leader, there is an absence, as far as I can tell, of any effort on the part of the leadership to cultivate the intellect in the spirit of socialism, to have people strive to understand their real situation. Ervin Szabó, who grows greater and greater in my estimation as the years go by, wrote at the end of his life that the creation of the economic and political preconditions will not be sufficient to lead to the achievement of a socialist society. He considered the struggle for an intellectual and ethical transformation as important as the struggle for the economic and political preconditions. 7 [Sinkó learned from Kurella the name of the reader at GIHL to whom his novel had been assigned. He spoke to her and found out that she had read 800 pages of it already but that she was upset with how much time it required of her, and in her opinion it was all for naught because this novel will never be published. She refused to say why. Sinkó also learned from Kurella that Romain Rolland had compiled a list of a few people whom he would like to see at Gorky’s summer house, and this included Sinkó and Kurella, but someone at the House of Soviet Writers had removed Sinkó’s name. Kurella theorized that it might have been Arosev (of VOKS) or Anisimov (GIHL). Kurella called Sinkó to tell him that he had arranged with Tretyakov (the president of the Writers’ Union), to invite Sinkó after all. Kurella and Sinkó were scheduled to set off from the Writers’ House, along with a large delegation, an hour after Sinkó recorded this news in his diary.] NOTES 1. Ferdinand August Bebel (1840–1913) was a founder of the German social democratic movement. 2. Karl Liebknecht (1871–1919) was, along with Rosa Luxembourg, the founder of the Spartacist League and the German Communist Party. In January1919, Liebknecht and Luxembourg led the Spartacist uprising in Berlin and other German cities. The uprising was put down by the Social Democratic government with the help of paramilitary forces. Liebknecht and Luxembourg were beaten and executed. The main female character in Optimists, thus, possibly

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Irma Rothbard, Sinkó’s wife, attended their memorial service in Berlin while the communists were in power in Hungary. 3. Ivan Anisimov (1899–1966), Soviet writer and cultural functionary. He was frequently charged with accompanying French visiting writers during their stays in Russia. See Stern, Western Intellectuals, 79. 4. Kurt Tucholsky (1890–1935) was a satirical writer for the German magazine Die Weltbühne during the Weimar era. The reference may be to his 1931 poem Das Persönliche. 5. Militsiya was a term for the police in the Soviet Union, probably an undercover agent of the NKVD. 6. Szabadka (now Subotica, Serbia) is where Sinkó grew up. 7. Ervin Szabó (1877–1918) was a Hungarian socialist intellectual, head of the Metropolitan Library in Budapest and the translator of Marx and Engels into Hungarian, who died just before the outbreak of the Aster Revolution in 1918. Sinkó had assigned Szabó to his Ludovika students during the Hungarian Soviet Republic. See translator’s introduction.

Chapter Fourteen

Gorky, Rolland, and a Word about Barbusse

July 10, 1935 Yesterday! I had misgivings as soon as I reached the House of Writers and saw three large buses as well as a fleet of cars from VOKS, and around these, the milling multitudes. These misgivings did not fit in with the sense of awe and excited expectation with which I prepared for my first face-to-face meeting with the person who so unexpectedly and with such extraordinary kindness took my affairs in hand, and about whom I think every day, especially here in Moscow, with a sense of personal debt, and for some time now, with a sense of pain. I barely knew one or two people personally among the multitudes who were chattering in front of the House of Writers. It was only when, as in school, the president, Tretyakov, 1 read out the names, that I learned with whom I was travelling. And since Kurella only arrived at the last moment, I stood there somewhat awkwardly, while everyone knew everyone else. And since I noticed that there was also someone, a very tiny, an amazingly tiny woman, standing by herself to the side as I was, I naturally glanced in her direction with interest and sympathy. It seemed that, perhaps because of the contrast, she also noticed me, and since I was standing to the left of the gate and she to the right, we slowly inched our ways toward each other, and after some hesitation, stood side by side. The unusually short woman, who otherwise had quite broad shoulders and was not skinny, had to tilt her head—with its boyish haircut—back, since she wanted to take a closer look at me. She must have come to a favorable conclusion, because she extended her hand to me and introduced herself as Lydia Seifullina. 2 133

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“Seifullina!” I repeat after her, stupidly amazed, and instead of also politely introducing myself, I named the book that back then in Vienna (in the Soviet series published by Malik) I could not put down: “Virinea!” But I didn’t tell her that I also know more than this about her, though it just so happened that Steiner had recently told me a little story about her in the course of what has become our running debate. Seifullina is of Tatar background. She was born somewhere in the Urals, as Steiner told it, and she worked as a country teacher until the outbreak of the revolution. She was around forty when she was first sent abroad, to Vienna, with some kind of a commission. She found Vienna dazzling with its palaces, art treasures, and no less with its shop windows. But Steiner, who had been her friend already in Moscow and who happened to be in Vienna at the time, took her into one of those gigantic, multistory apartment buildings with their comfortable apartments, each one with their own bathroom, which “Red Vienna’s” Social Democratic republic had built for the Viennese workers. Seifullina was so surprised that in the capitalist world workers could live like this that she began to cry. Until recently, she must have had a cute, childlike face. Her dark eyes are still an attractive feature. [. . .] What was strange throughout our little friendship was that we hardly spoke to each other. We just got on the bus together, sat down next to each other, and from time to time would catch ourselves looking, I down and she up, into each other’s face with a smile. While it might sound strange, this was the only unreservedly pleasant aspect of my first meeting with Rolland in Gorky’s villa. I returned home with painful, often troubling and, on the whole, uncomfortable impressions. [. . .] Gorky’s summer home is in fact a villa of the sort that bankers and rich merchants had built for themselves all over Europe. At first we just saw the big park in which a young man in a white suit was already waiting for the guests and then greeted everyone familiarly as an old friend. “Kryuchkov, Gorky’s secretary,” I was informed by Kurella, who had meanwhile sidled up to me, not alone, but with a red-faced, smiling, rather large fellow, whom he introduced as Anisimov. [. . .] Oh, “Optimisti,” and he makes believe that he is happy to see me, but he cannot be that happy because as soon as he can, he disappears and joins a group that is quite far away. Tretyakov, in his capacity as president of the Union of Soviet Writers, takes the lead and following Kryuchkov, herds us into a spacious lobby. There we didn’t have long to wait. A stunningly good-looking, and in this environment, stunningly well-dressed woman—Rolland’s wife—approaches us, and in her wake, her husband: a tall, skinny old man, [. . .] with his coat slung over his shoulder and held shut by his left hand as if he were cold while he extends his right to be shaken by the procession of Soviet writers. These

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pass him one at a time after which Mariya Pavlovna speaks a few words with each one, like old friends, and introduces them to her husband. When in the literary row of ducks, I in my entire length, waddled in front of her, the moreor-less continuous ceremony came to a temporary halt and Mariya Pavlovna, looking at me with some embarrassment admitted that she didn’t remember who I was. She addressed me in Russian but I responded in French that I am not a Russian writer and that she could not possibly recognize me because we are seeing each other for the first time. And when I told her my name, Rolland, who was standing a bit back, behind his wife, reached forward to grab my hand, squeezed it and shook it, saying, “Who would have thought when you were in Paris that we will meet here! In Moscow! Who would have thought!” He said the word “Moscow” with the enthusiasm of an admirer. [. . .] This did not surprise me. It was the voice of that Romain Rolland who cannot believe any other way than admiringly. But I had imagined him differently. [. . .] Though I knew his age, I didn’t realize that the man to whom I was writing and from whom I was receiving back such wonderfully youthful and warm letters, who made even my most minor problems his own, was a visibly ill, frail, old man. [. . .] “This is the first time I have left Villeneuve in the last thirteen years,” he said to me. [. . .] Anyone with eyes to see, those who should have seen, for they were not blind, were ruthless with him. We went into a larger room and sat down beside a long table with Rolland at its head and Gorky next to him. They only led those to Gorky whom he did not already know. There were only two or three such people. He handled the whole situation superficially, without exerting any effort, as if he had a disdain for the entire group. He waved at them, as if he were greeting them but also as if he were dismissing them without illusions. This struck me at the time but it was only later that I understood. I felt that Gorky was right. Once we were settled around the table, someone got up, stepped back a bit from the table, pulled a manuscript from his pocket, and started to make a speech. He was followed by someone else, then a third, a fourth, a fifth; I don’t know how many there were. Each one read a prepared speech in honor of Rolland in Russian. [. . .] The worst was a Ukrainian poet who spoke about how happy the Ukrainians were. [He went on for a half an hour, though Rolland didn’t understand a word of Russian.] The old man no longer knew where to look. No one came to his aid. I would have liked to grab the Ukrainian by the throat, but like a coward, I just got up and walked to the door where Mariya Pavlovna was standing and said to her that someone should put an end to this. She agreed with me, and said: “C’est terrible! C’est affreux! Que faire?” (That’s terrible! That’s horrible! What can we do?)

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Then the Ukrainian finally finished, but only he was finished. [. . .] It was Gorky who put an end to the torture. He had been drumming on the table with his fingers for a while, with increasing impatience. [. . .] He finally said: “That’s enough.” [. . .] Now milder tortures followed. One by one, everyone sat down next to Rolland’s chair, and partly in French, partly with Mariya Pavlovna interpreting, said a few words and received an answer in a few words accompanied by a pitiable, tortured smile. I found all this unbearable and retreated to a corner of the room where I suddenly realized that I was next to Seifullina. I rejoiced, as if I had found the only other human being in a world emptied of humans. And again we just smiled at each other. But Mariya Pavlovna noticed us and came to get us. Seifullina didn’t want to go. “What for? I am not interesting. And Rolland is tired!” she said. But Mariya Pavlovna insisted and led both of us over, and in the end I did sit down on the chair next to Rolland. Though he recognized me right away, he stopped for a moment and thought about what to say to me. His nostrils twitched and then he extended his hand—his long, fine fingers impatiently moved on my hand—and he finally asked: “Tell me, dear friend, have you become acclimatized?” I quickly answered that I had and hurried away from the table. [A select few were taken into an adjoining room for a group photograph with Rolland and Gorky. Mariya Pavlovna grabbed Sinkó’s hand, and Sinkó grabbed Seifullina’s arm and thus all three entered the room. The next day, Sinkó received many phone calls, even from publishers’ secretaries, to congratulate him for being in the photo, which appeared in Pravda along with a large article about the meeting.] During the visit, Kurella, in Mariya Pavlovna’s presence, took Natalia Ivanovna’s Russian translation of my Facing the Judge out of his pocket and handed it to me. Mariya Pavlovna immediately took possession of it, saying that she would give it to Gorky that same day. She also talked about coming to town incognito along with Rolland in the next three or four days and that they would meet with me and M then. I have every reason to think of Romain Rolland’s wife only with gratitude, and yet, I cannot help but ask myself: How can she allow and even assist in making this fragile old man the object of a soulless ceremony, when on his bald forehead, above his white eyebrows overhanging his eyes, the shadow of death is already visible? Even if perhaps Rolland had been the one who wanted to make this trip and perhaps felt it his duty to take part in such receptions, would it not have been Mariya Pavlovna’s duty . . . I have thoughts, indeed doubts, which I dare not write down even in this diary and don’t even wish to formulate mentally. Or rather, I would have preferred not to have formulated them mentally.

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In fact, my extraordinarily bad mood today is not just the after-effect of yesterday’s visit or the result of our financial situation. What I heard yesterday from Kurella on the way back from Gorky’s contributed at least as much. I think I made a note a while back about Kurella working on Dimitrov’s biography and prison journals. And now Pravda’s former Berlin correspondent has put her name on the book, not even mentioning Kurella. A woman who is a coworker of the central paper of Lenin’s Party! But I was even more shocked by another revelation. Kurella will get fifty percent while Barbusse will get the other fifty for a book that Barbusse will not even read but which will appear under his name: this is how Kurella is writing Stalin’s biography under Barbusse’s name. Kurella’s name will not even be mentioned. This is the same way in which Kurella is editing, for publication by the Parisian Les Editions Rieder, Lenin’s letters to his family. Lettres de Lénine à sa famille will say “with the collaboration of Alfred Kurella” but it, too, will appear under Barbusse’s name and again, Barbusse will pocket fifty percent. [. . .] What is most interesting in this affair is that communists in the Soviet Union should consider it natural for someone (to use the French expression) “to play the role of the nigger.” Kurella says there is nothing wrong with this. By publishing the book through a bourgeois French publisher, it will reach readers that a communist publisher would not be able to approach, and the only reason that a bourgeois publisher will take on the book is because the “world famous” Barbusse’s name is on the cover. Yes, but what about the fifty percent? I never realized how hard it is to write history; we are living here in a city, in the center of the coming world, and we are debating how to interpret what we see. In fifty years, the historian will see what came of today and from that he will draw conclusions and judgments about our times, about the past. But by then, this reality will be wrapped in a fog; how high-handed will the interpretations be? It is among the most difficult of tasks, even for one living today, to give a true and certain picture, I could say a naturalist photograph, of a reality that is full of contradictions. But one thing is for sure: what is being formed here is our future, mankind’s future. It is being formed here. What will happen here, indeed, what is now happening here will determine whether and to what extent it will have been worthwhile to await and hope for that future. NOTES 1. Sergei Tretyakov (1892–1937) was an avant-garde writer, playwright, and journalist, who held important positions related to cultural politics, including that of managing contacts with foreign writers. Sinkó claims in several places that Tretyakov was president of the Writers’s Union, but I have not been able to verify this. He did attend meetings of its presidium. He was executed in 1937. See Ludmila Stern, Western Intellectuals, 82–85. Also Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome, 159.

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2. Lidia Seifullina (1889–1954) was a Siberian writer, journalist, and educator praised for the realism with which she depicted the language and life of rural people in the early years of the Soviet Union.

III

Part III

Chapter Fifteen

Nighttime Thoughts, or Letter to My Yet Unborn Friend

Today, on July 15, I have had several experiences that I need to relate. These experiences all ended up interacting with each other, and without describing them, the nighttime thoughts that they inspired might seem too abstract or too “personal.” [. . .] The “public” might not yet realize that my personal affairs are also its affairs, but I realize it, and that is sufficient for now. It started in the morning when I read an article in Izvestia. The author was E. Taratuta and the title was “Why are they reading Pinkerton?” The question, eighteen years after October, refers to the Soviet Union’s secondary schools. Taratuta writes that in Moscow, students have created secret, “underground” organizations for reading books that appeared in tsarist Russia and were already then considered trash fiction. Nick Carter, Pinkerton, and other detective novels and horror stories constitute the jealously guarded treasures of such illegal student libraries. “[. . .] The books are passed from hand to hand like the most precious gems . . . A single book must be shared among six or seven people each day. They read it feverishly during class, at home during lunch, early in the morning and late at night, because the next person is eager to grab it, as are the other readers awaiting their turn.” [. . .] The public library named after Usevich in Moscow sent out a questionnaire to students in the Moscow secondary schools: What kind of books do you like to read, and what do you think of the books that you have read? The anonymous responses reveal that more than half of the students (54.8 percent) prefer books of adventure or travel and most responses agreed that the required readings are boring. They find boring those works of Gogol and even of Pushkin that are part of the curriculum by the school authorities. E. Taratuta notes that “this is a serious indictment of the Soviet schools.” 141

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I find the critique of the books of living Soviet authors particularly interesting. About some of the books, the responses go like this: “While you are reading it, it is interesting, but once you finish it, you would never think of picking it up again.” Another student: “There is nothing mysterious in it.” A third: “As you turn the pages, you are not very curious about what is going to happen.” But most important—and in my opinion promising and encouraging— was the way in which the young readers criticized a novel entitled The Second Spring by the contemporary Soviet writer Frayerman. The article says, “It is a good book that tells a story of the second Bolshevik spring, about the role of the tractors and agricultural machine stations.” But I am more inclined to believe the students quoted by the author of the article, especially those who are critical of the novel’s heroine, Varya. According to a student in the sixth grade, “you cannot tell from the novel about Varya how she lived before she became a tractor driver, when she was still in the city, and I object to the fact that she has no childhood memories at all.” An eighth-grade girl writes: “This Varya is a robot. She is just the executor of the wishes of the Party; she is not convincing as a person: there are no young girls whose only interests lie in their social obligations. This Varya does not have a private life. Such people don’t exist.” A third, equally wise comment: “When you read about Varya, you don’t feel the experience that she is supposedly going through.” It is only for me that there is a connection between my reading this morning and the likeable young Chinese fellow named Tru, an assistant director at the Vakhtanov Theater, who looked me up here in Trubnaya. He came on account of my film scenario, but our conversation soon took a different direction. He wanted to know about the Optimists, which has already become mythical in Moscow, and in connection with this, he told me his opinion of Malraux’s book about an early phase of the Chinese Revolution. Tru is currently translating The Human Condition, and he claims that this story, which takes place in China, is full of inaccuracies that every Chinese reader would find comical. Although Malraux had been to China, he was not there long enough. Not only does he not know how the Chinese live, but he does not know the topography of Shanghai well. He told this to Malraux, and Malraux gave him permission to correct his mistakes, but Tru says that it is impossible to fix everything. This makes him sad. I tried to console him. I reminded him that Shakespeare’s Roman heroes are only Englishmen dressed in theatrical costumes, but they are wonderful nonetheless. While Malraux is not Shakespeare, the interest of his Chinese heroes lies not in their being Chinese but in the dynamic way that they reflect the internal debates of a European revolutionary intelligentsia raised on Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky.

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Tru is silent for a long time, and then says that he does not agree. “You might be a brilliant poet,” he says, and places his effeminate, small hand on my knee for a moment. He repeats: “You might be a genius, but you have only lived in Moscow for a few months; if you were writing a novel about Moscow and the characters were Muscovites, it would be impossible for that novel to be true; in the best case, it might be interesting. I have come to realize that the great literature of today cannot do without the Tacitus element, that is, it must be an artistic document of the time and place in which we live. [. . .] Great literature is credible in a historical sense as well.” I would have liked to have continued our conversation, but in the meanwhile Steiner had called and asked if I would be in the mood to leave my cave, given that M was off from work today. He offered to pick us up with his car and introduce us to a Soviet artist, and also to something else,—he added secretively—to something that “speaks louder than words.” And in a few moments he was before our house. So I have Steiner to thank for today’s third experience. He refused to divulge where he was taking us, and he stopped his car in front of a cemetery. We proceeded among graves, the likes of which I had never seen and which gave striking evidence that even the Revolution has no choice but to simply confess the pain of death. The simpler and quieter this confession of pain, the more humane it is, and the more worthy of man. But in the first years following the October Revolution, here in Moscow, there was a rebellious attempt to make even death take note of the new style of life. This again confirms the fact that in the October Revolution there truly was a childish but at the same time Promethean, utopian intent without which (and here Plato was right) it would be neither worthwhile nor possible to believe. This is true and while I cannot recall that chiliastic revolutionary atmosphere otherwise than with nostalgic respect, I have to admit that the whole row of funerary monuments that can be seen here from the first years of the Revolution—that is, all the monuments inspired by those great intentions and hopes—seem like grotesque memorials to an aberration of human thought and taste. Yes, this long line of hypermodern memorials—one depicting railroad semaphores; another having a human-sized pair of compasses; a third one, a hammer; the fourth, a cubist image constructed of crossing steel bars—speak unmistakably, though not quite eloquently, of that intention of the Revolution to radically remake the world, so that even cemeteries would be forced to advertise the victory of a new life demanding new symbols. Yes, the intention is unmistakable: death—which didn’t give a damn about October, which despite October and after October stupidly continued its occupation, just as it had under the tsars and under capitalism, indeed, in the most barbarian past—death, too, would be forced to conform by October to the new world: death, no matter how indecently stupid or reactionary it

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was, would be taught to speak a new language, using new symbols to praise creative will and creative work. Yes, the intention is clear, but what was born from this intention upon these memorials shows just how wrong Kant was in considering the intention the only ethical criterion of an action. Even more so, it shows that in art it is not the intention that counts but solely how it is embodied. [. . .] We continued through the graves and one could see that after the childish experiments of the Revolution, the Revolution suddenly sounded the retreat; it retreated from the cemetery [. . .] admitting that it could do nothing about death. [. . .] As I wondered through the graves, browsing at their inscriptions, my gaze sometimes resting on the beauty of a supremely indifferent verdant young tree above a grave, an Orthodox priest of tremendous size with a white beard popped out from among the stones. He did not deign to acknowledge us with even a glance but proceeded past us with a posture and a gait that spoke of an inscrutable, self-aware dignity—like someone who sees himself as invincible, at least here in the cemetery. The catastrophe—at least, I see it as a catastrophe—followed next. I have forgotten to mention that before we reached the cemetery, Steiner had stopped his car on Tverskaya Street and picked up a middle-aged man who was waiting for us. Our new travelling companion introduced himself as Shadr. 1 He pronounced his name clearly and as if with a certain emphasis, but since this short syllable had no associations for me, I did not give it much thought. On the whole trip, M and I sat in the back and he in the front next to our friend. When we arrived at the cemetery, I even forgot about our friend’s playful, ironically mysterious behavior; he still refused to tell us what surprise he held in store for us. But after we had been walking among the gravestones for quite some time, an armed guard wearing the uniform of the interior police suddenly popped up to block our path and said we could go no further. [. . .] Our companion, Shadr, reached into his pocket and produced some sort of a bumashka, exchanged a few words with the uniformed one, who then politely stepped aside. [. . .] After a few moments there were no more graves on either side of us. We proceeded on a field covered with tiny stones. Again, uniforms: this time two of them. But these did not put any obstacles in our way. It was Shadr who told us to stop. “There!” he said, pointing to a grave which stood alone in the middle of the gravel-strewn field. Shard’s blue eyes glanced at me for a brief second. Then he became deeply absorbed in viewing the work. [. . . Steiner looked down and studied the toes of his brightly polished shoes.]

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M and I, who stood between them, also remained silent. Shadr obviously misunderstood our silence because he considered us worthy of hearing his artistic conception. As the marble gravestone’s golden inscription showed, we were standing before the grave of Nadya Alliluyeva. She was Stalin’s wife and had committed suicide a few years ago. But it was not to the fine marble grave that Shadr directed our attention but to the frighteningly realistic pink rose that was placed at the edge of the grave and which he had sculpted out of marble. In a choking voice and without taking his eyes off the rose he told us that when a commission came “from the highest place” for the design of the grave, he thought long and hard about how he could show that he was worthy of this unprecedented, great honor. (Steiner was still staring at the toe of his shoe; he had obviously heard this story before and seen the monument in the company of the artist.) Shadr expounded his theory that there are fortunate moments of inspiration and it was in such a fortunate moment that presented him with the idea of putting a pink marble rose on the grave; an ordinary rose fades but a marble rose is not only beautiful but its endurance symbolizes steadfastness. Only a marble rose could be worthy of someone who was mourning Nadya Alliluyeva. [. . . Shadr invited the Sinkós and Steiner to his studio. On the way there, he asked them if they had seen the monumental female nude statue at the entrance to Gorky Park. The Sinkós had seen it and thought it was horrible, though they did not confess this to Shadr. Their impressions of the works that Shadr was showing them in his studios, which included the design for Russian State Bonds, also failed to impress the Sinkós and they found Shadr, who held himself to be a modern Michelangelo, laughable.] I cannot understand those who say and write that to live here is all beauty and happiness. Don’t they realize, can’t they sense, that with their impermissibly modest expectations they are betraying the future and the true goals of the struggle? If it were not my belief that the current Soviet Union’s right to exist lies primarily in its present being the precondition and vessel of a more humane future, what would bind me to it? I am bound to it only because I believe in a tomorrow that will grow out of this Soviet Union but in which no trace will remain of the spirit that characterizes the Soviet Union of today. Steiner speaks openly with me and I with him, though, facing him, I always feel it necessary to defend and represent “the party line,” whereas with Kurella, I am always the questioning and doubting heretic. When I am speaking with them, I feel completely honest in both cases. But when I am alone, I feel that I didn’t reveal everything to them after all. Regarding this faith in tomorrow, Steiner says that in the Soviet Union, he has been hearing about the wonderful future for nearly twenty years. He said that the faith that we project into the future is the same kind of psychological self-delusion as the belief in a life beyond the grave. He is wrong. The Soviet Union must prepare itself militarily, economically, and mentally for any

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eventuality, but primarily for a war in which, at least in the beginning, it will have to stand by itself against a world united by the goal of destroying it. [. . .] This is my credo: I believe in a tomorrow, a socialist tomorrow that will be so much more humane, in which people will live under conditions so much more suited to mankind that they will not be able to understand why we, people of today, were willing to tolerate the renaissance of dark superstitions, of ignorance, arrogance, ugliness, and transparent lies, as well as Soviet propaganda’s justification of the cardinal importance of the state, in short, the atmosphere of today’s Soviet Union. [. . .] Because I believe in a tomorrow, a socialist tomorrow that will look upon today’s Soviet Union as the age of backwardness, of inhumane tyranny and of inhumane bureaucracy, I will try to [. . .] reach my hand out to a young man who will live when our lives will only signify a painful reminiscence told in the schoolbooks of a happier human race. I reach across the fence of time not only in my name but also in the name of a whole generation, à la Villon: Frères humains qui après nous vivez N’ayez les coeurs contre nous endurcis (Men my brothers who will live after us/ Do not harden your hearts against us. From Villon’s Epitaph (Ballad of the Hanged), François Villon (1431–1463)

[. . .] I have already confessed what is most difficult for me and for those who are living today: to be feeling as if we were evildoers, full of secret thoughts that must not be discussed here, of all places, where the unreserved sharing of feelings, the effusion, the great melting into one is our deepest wish. “God sees everything. He sees the most hidden of thoughts.” This concept of a [. . .] Secret Policeman of unlimited power, at once Judge and Executioner, is the [. . .] perfect definition and the manifestation of the highest degree of terror as a subjective condition. [. . .] The terror of religion replaces human responsibility with the responsibility of the subject. And since human responsibility poses tasks that are much more complicated and difficult than those posed by even the most arduous responsibilities of the subject, the terror of religion relieves one from the duty of many painful human endeavors. It defines certain human endeavors as sins but at the same time makes them unnecessary for the subject. If [. . .] a person could be reduced to a perfect subject, then a certain harmony would come about: in an inharmonious world, harmonious man would be born. This would be a harmony built not on self-knowledge but on complete dependence and on complete trust.

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Man reduced to the subject of a heavenly phantom: this is the ideal of religion. Hitlerism, the totally militarized, totally dehumanized nation as a unity of individuals, is an outgrowth of this religious ideal. While this can be achieved to some extent, it was not fully achieved by the Middle Ages, nor, hopefully, will it be achieved by the Third Reich. Today’s Soviet Union also has a unique vision—forced upon it by the current international situation—about what kind of spirit should fill, and here, too, totally fill Soviet Man. [. . .] After much thought, I have come to define this concept in the following way: The Soviet Union wants to form a Man that is the total negation of a Hamlet or a Faust, a Man for whom there are no questions or doubts that could not be answered by pre-formulated, authoritative answers. [. . .] The Party—responsible for the survival, defense, and victory in the worldwide struggle of the proletarian state surrounded by a ring of hostile powers—has found no other means for the mobilization and governing of a nation of one hundred and seventy million people [. . .]. Since the great hopes for a world revolution, on which the success of the October Revolution was built, did not materialize, the Party adjusted its methods of rule and cultural policies, its slogans and demands to the cultural level of the nation [. . .]. It is so not because this is how Stalin or someone else likes it to be but because there is no other way for the Party to complete its task: to build up that power which can victoriously confront all enemies of human liberation. It is tragic but true: Mussolini and even more so Hitler learned much and adopted much from the propaganda methods of Soviet governance. [. . .] The contamination is mutual. Only an army can fight successfully against an army, and it is increasingly clear that the Soviet Union is forming its ideal person—who worships only Stalin—in imitation of the methodically dehumanized German nation bent on conquest and worshiping only Hitler. And if an actual Soviet citizen is not yet able to live up to the ideal that is demanded of him with every possible means, then he has a bad conscience. He is afraid that he will be found out and he will endeavor to avoid the punishment, which, if it should come down upon him, he must feel he deserves. He knows that no matter how hard he has tried, he was able only to approach but not fully realize the happy ideal demanded of him. What about me, personally? If indeed this is the price that must be paid in case of a German attack so that the Soviet Union can strike a deathblow to German fascism and to its allied dark powers; if indeed, this is the price for which the Soviet Union will be able to build a socialist society, then I am willing to pay this price. [. . .] But it does not follow from this that I can or that I wish to fool myself into enthusiastically believing that what exists is an accomplishment of the goals of socialism, that it is anything but a heavy price that has to be paid. I can confess in a whisper to you, my young friend, on this paper, at this late hour.

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I trust that you will understand: we people of today thought in 1917, 1918, 1919 that in a matter of weeks or months we would exit our suffocating dark tunnel and emerge onto sunny plains. We were mistaken. [. . .] We who live today are still living in the dark and who knows for how much longer we will need to do so. But we have not become accustomed to it. At least in our desires and in what we demand, we have remained human. It only goes to show how difficult life is for us today if I admit that it has become our unavoidable fate [. . .] to constantly disagree with ourselves, something that I would call the tragic Tartuffe-like existence of the revolutionary. Most people, or at least many people here, have been hypocrites for such a long time [. . .] that they themselves no longer know the extent to which their assumed face varies from their true one. [. . .] These perfect hypocrites are the martyrs of our time. I have heard it said about Imre Sallai that he had fierce disagreements with Béla Kun and according to one version that I cannot verify, Kun sent him to Budapest for illegal work to be rid of him. They say that Sallai knew this and hated Kun for it. Yet, when he was about to be executed, under the scaffold, with a noose around his neck, Sallai shouted “Long live Béla Kun.” [. . .] Sallai is the heroic embodiment of that ascetic discipline in which one subordinates oneself to the impersonally obligatory mask even unto the grave. But I am a bungler even in this. Not only do I always feel the mask to be a mask but I also want to peek out from under it [. . .] if only by means of such jottings as I am making now for future generations. But there is more to it than that. [. . .] The future would become impossible if the present would succeed in making those living today satisfied, happy, and unquestioning. This is why I will never forget E. Taratuta’s name. [. . .] I needed this encouragement, this refreshment that frightened E. Taratuta. E. Taratuta intended to point out a danger and there is no doubt that what he writes about is indeed dangerous. Then why am I happy about it? [. . . After all], I say “yes” to the goal that the Soviet Union represents. But there has heretofore never before been an era in human history in which a “yes” was so full of internal contradictions as that required of today’s revolutionary. [. . .] If I were not driven by humane and ethical reasons to say yes, humane and ethical reasons would make me wish to see these policies relegated to the darkest recesses of hell. This is why I rejoice, simply and spontaneously, when I see this contradictory feeling manifested in others as well, for it is the human security-pledge for tomorrow’s more humane future. [. . .] In my thoughts, I say, “Bravo, boys and girls!” I am cheering for you not because you are reading Nick Carter but because, even if a bad source is drawing you on, it shows that your instincts are still alive, which makes you thirst for the forbidden, for adventure, for that which falls beyond the bounds

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of conformity, the true rather than the conventional. It is an instinct that distorts [. . .] but it is nonetheless evidence of the indestructability of the human, of Hamlet and Faust in man. What draws you to Nick Carter and Pinkerton and other imbecilic horror stories? There is something in the present Soviet reality that does not satisfy you. You are loyal to Soviet reality and have faith in it but you feel oppressed by the fact that here everything is planned, everything is the way that the bureaucracy says it must be. There are very good things here, but they are all by regulation, like that carnival was. Even the carnival is precisely planned and excludes all surprises. And one other thing that E. Taratuta deplores makes me especially happy: that you rebel against the patriarchal, bucolic atmosphere that they are trying to make dominant now in the Soviet mentality, against the silencing and denying of the painful and the tragic, against the constraining of desire to the bounds set by “reality.” [. . .] It is as if they were trying to teach Eros to become a vegetarian, or at least to make you believe that it, too, is a Stakhanovite worker dedicated solely to socially constructive purposes, a domesticated servant who always politely defers to the virtues that support the Soviet state. The nationalization of the means of production was certainly useful and good. It is possible that today it is necessary to regulate the human in man in the same way that the unruly bends in rivers, which hindered transportation and production, were regulated, that is, to nationalize what is human. But Soviet children irresistibly search out the demonic. This makes governing difficult, but . . . . I would invert the biblical myth: it is not the fallen angels that have become demons but rather those demonic powers that in the living man of today resist the complete dominance by the state, those forces which in today’s situation haunt us as demons, hide within themselves angels: it is these forces that will eventually show their true faces as legal and constructive forces: at some future time that will allow for the full development of the potential inherent in man. I have long been convinced that there are many antisocial people who are only antisocial in a particular society and that in a society that would give greater scope to the development and manifestation of what is human, many of today’s antisocial people would turn out to be above-average personalities. Someone can be bad because the ancient barbarian vestiges are still too strong in them. But someone can be bad also because they are too sensitive, too vulnerable to the narrow and inhumane conditions of today’s society, or incapable of making the compromises necessary to adjust to inhumane conditions. [. . .] One more thing: I didn’t discuss this with Tru because I know that here one does not discuss certain things. But I cannot help but hear in the convic-

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tion with which Tru said that we must show “the truth,” that, “it must be historically true as well,” the scream of my own secret, painful observation, which is also a question: what is it that is true here? There is so much dressing up, spinning, speechmaking, ideological gloss, interpretation, and explanation that it is hard to see the true face of things behind all of this. [Sinkó learned from his meeting with Shadr how official Soviet kitsch obscures reality.] There was “official” kitsch in the time of Napoleon III as well as in Wilhelmine Germany and in every nation and province of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. But besides Mihály Szabolcska there also lived and published the poet Endre Ady, just as beside the official art of their time, Baudelaire and Cézanne were able to write, paint, and have an effect. But here in the Soviet Union it is completely different. Here, the official kitsch exercises a tyranny with the help of an all-encompassing state bureaucracy that consistently puts its mark on any artistic product it allows to appear. This artificial breeding of kitsch, reminiscent of the intolerant and jealously exclusive autocracy of Yahweh, is an organic consequence of the method of government. Kitsch, the twin brother of sloganeering, is a public employee here and fulfills a state-upholding function. [. . .] I am often asked by people here—rather friendly and well-inclined people—if I have become accustomed to the “severity” of life in this country. I was initially surprised to find that so many people use precisely this word— (suroviy)—to characterize life. But I finally understood today why this generally used word is so apt. Everywhere, people with a certain sense of dignity, spiritual refinement or simply insight have a disdain for external success and fortune. That is, all of the great European writers, from Cervantes to Byron, from Flaubert to the Scandinavian poets, teach us that the more distinct, the more demanding a person is, the more inevitable is their fatal misfortune [. . .]. In other words, modern European moral and esthetic culture sees the suffering man as surrounded by a humane and poetic aureole in accordance with Baudelaire’s axiomatic: Je sais que la douleur est la noblesse unique (I know that pain is the only true nobility.) But in the Soviet Union, it is not the individual who is glorified but the social establishment. Perhaps what we are witnessing is the early stage of a future, truly new, revolutionarily new culture. But one thing is for sure: if someone here happens to suffer misfortune, or if misfortune is visited on him as a result of conflict with society and its demands, then, according to the quite clearly drawn rules of Soviet etiquette, it is considered improper to delve into an examination of the poor man’s intentions or psychology. Rather, one is expected to assume that the misfortune and the fact of a conflict cannot be the result of anything but of the moral failings of the individual.

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Suroviy: this word expresses quite accurately the atmosphere of life here. There is a measure of puritanism in it, a certain unforgiving, heroically consistent objectivity with regard to reality. If you are in trouble, if you’ve drawn the short end of the stick, this is normally reason enough for sorrow. But here, beyond this, you are guilty! Why else would you have encountered trouble? And if you should wonder whether the fault really lies with you, and if it is your fault that you got into trouble, then you will realize that you are living in a state that demands an unconditional acceptance of your guilt or else there really is something wrong with your papers—mentally. It is already dawn and I am reading my nighttime confessions about the present and directed to the future. But what is my conclusion? [. . .] I would not be a communist, I would be a Christian, if I did not believe that the ancient strain, the strain of Fortinbras, [that is, of war] shall also eventually cease in this world. To be a communist means, in the first place, to possess a militant readiness, because we possess a faith in the possibility of a world in which something that always was, will end—can be made to end— so that something that until now did not exist, can come into being. [The beginning of Marxist history, if it means anything at all, means that the ancient March of Fortinbras can be forever abolished.] And this is the only reason that today’s Soviet Union is “interesting.” At other times and elsewhere it was those who ended up in the catacombs who were indifferent to the ruling order, or denied it, or rose up against it. Here, it is also those, and especially those, whose innermost thoughts and pains constrain them to fight for this ruling order, while feeling guilty about their innermost thoughts and pains. To hell with me and my Optimists—with all our problems—and long live Shadr and his “happy,” unproblematic, “life-force rich” “art.” To hell with everything else and long live Shadr and the Shadrs if they are what is necessary for the socialist Soviet Union’s coming victory in the war with fascism and for the realization of socialism’s goals: Amen! Amen, amen, amen. But I must record one more question here. When, a long time ago, the German Social Democrats turned to Engels with the suggestion to create a “monumental” memorial at Marx’s grave in London, Engels reminded them that Marx’s daughters would not agree to this under any circumstances as this would be incompatible with the revolutionary spirit of their father. Engels himself, reared on Romanticism, ordered in his will (as if even after death he “owned” his body) that his body be cremated and his ashes strewn into the sea. This may be a slightly pathetic gesture but nonetheless, it is a statement. So my question is, what kind of statement is it when Nadya Alliluyeva’s grave is placed in a circle of gravel, separated by a great distance from the graves of ordinary people—the dead are all ordinary—and why does Nadya Alliluyeva’s grave have to be distinguished also by having armed guards around it day and night in a state that belongs to the proletariat? Is it not out of concern for the dead but for the living that this seemingly

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unimportant question flows from my pen? But if the question were really unimportant, I would not have been afraid to ask someone in Moscow about it. And it was not for myself that I was afraid but for those whom I would have asked. NOTE 1. Ivan Shadr (1882–1941): one of the Stalin period’s most important sculptors, who designed, for example, the figures on Soviet currency.

Chapter Sixteen

While the Censors Write

Moscow, July 17, 1935 I received a call today from Mezhrabpom 1 inviting me up to discuss my screenplay with them. M developed the habit in Paris and continues it in Moscow of accompanying me and waiting outside, though this time she waited downstairs in the lobby rather than in the street. [. . .] The director of Mezhrabpom is named Feldman. He is a light-skinned, thin, short man with a red goatee; one of those Jews whose intelligent eyes look sad even when their owner is smiling. [. . .] He speaks excellent French and he greets me by saying that I know everything about you. “Everything?” “Everything. I read your autobiography, Facing the Judge, in Europe,” he says in a very friendly way, offering me a seat next to him. “I know everything about you, and what I do not know I can easily guess,” he says, and adds that he has read my screenplay, considers it good, and wants to buy it. He continues with a laugh, “How unusual that one would work autobiographical elements even into a screenplay.” [. . .] Krejcsi, 2 who had arranged this meeting, came in and immediately Feldman became more formal. He dropped the topic of my autobiography, indeed, he even turned his chair back to face his desk. He repeated that he wanted to buy my screenplay, the Doctoresse du village (The Village Doctoress), but the film director would have to read it first. [Sinkó was told that in a few days, after they reached agreement on the details, the company would be ready to sign a contract and he would receive an advance.] M saw from afar that I was gaily hurrying toward her down the stairs. She raised her eyebrows. As I described what happened and looked at her, I realized that after all, like so many times before, nothing happened. I was 153

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given some promises. Still, the fact that in one of the offices of the cultural sector someone spoke to me in a friendly way and that, in addition, I found a likeable person there had the effect of a totally unexpected surprise for me. [. . .] At Night A short but true story: A foreign communist 3 who has been living here for years married the daughter of a family who had formerly been merchants in Moscow. This young wife, precisely because her husband had an important position in the Comintern, had broken off all contact with her parents and relatives. But one day, she happened by chance to run into her father in a department store in the Arbat. They greeted each other, inquired about their well-being, each one perhaps glad to see the other. They spent no more than ten minutes talking together and then each went on their way, one to the left, the other to the right. The next day, on the basis of someone’s report, investigations were started against the young woman (she had talked in a very friendly way to her father), and, on account of her, also against her husband. In response to his embittered reproaches—in my presence and very contritely—she admitted that she had been “very thoughtless.” To my inquiries, the husband admitted that he had no personal complaints or suspicions about his father-in-law. “But tell me, could a person who would report you for such an action really be a communist?” I asked. “It was his duty to do so,” answered the husband. “Would you do the same in a similar situation?” “Certainly.” “Forgive me, but I don’t believe you.” He shrugged his shoulders in response. He was upset, but in addition, he obviously felt like he was talking to the deaf, and then, that it was easy for me to say so, and also, that I have not yet rid myself of my prejudices. Through my silence, I agreed that there was no point continuing the discussion. [. . .] Moscow, July 18, 1935 [. . .] “Don’t you think the political atmosphere would have a less realistic effect if, by eliminating the concrete personal concerns of the people in the novel, the characters were made fainter? The novel is in fact about people for whom communal concerns are just as seriously personal a matter as say, their love life,” [argued Sinkó, trying to convince his very thorough, but admiring,

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and well-intentioned censor for the Cooperative Society of Foreign Workers of the Soviet Union (VEGAAR), 4 Hans Günther, that he should not be required to cut out the personal drama from the Optimists. Günther was polite but steadfast. He insisted that about a third of the novel, those parts dealing with personal matters, must be eliminated.] I must be desperate. I am led to this conclusion, because I was happy, though with some underlying bitterness, to have achieved even this “result.” I was grateful to Günther for having promised, at my request, to prepare a “provisional” report, which he would give me before midnight tonight so that, on the basis of that, I could finally get an advance from VEGAAR tomorrow. Hopefully I will finally get the advance, since for the last two days we have hardly eaten. For instance, today, we skipped lunch. We ate in the evening when we visited Karcsi, who goes under the name Kürchner here and is one of the editors of the Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung. [Sinkó describes Karcsi (that is, Charley) Garai, a friend from his years in the Viennese émigré barracks. In the barracks, there was also a shortage of food, but everyone shared what they had, so no one went hungry for long. “I never thought that I would think nostalgically—here in Moscow—of the Viennese refugee barracks.” As a guest at Karcsi’s, Sinkó noticed that despite the mutual affection that Karcsi and he felt for each other, neither one dared to speak quite openly with the other. “In Moscow it is simply impolite to admit that you haven’t had lunch or that you are hungry.” On the subject of Moscow’s urban renewal, which was announced a few days ago, Sinkó had some qualms that the buildings would be in the style of “German monumentalism” or “Greekcolumned” and overly grandiose. But when Karcsi showed intense enthusiasm for the plans, Sinkó dared not contradict him. “So I did not lie, but I was also not sincere.” That same night, Peter Meyer showed up around ten in the evening at the Garais’s apartment. Meyer had been the political commissar of Munich during the Bavarian Red Republic of 1919. Sinkó knew several people from the leadership of that uprising from their Vienna days and knew that they were basically bohemian artists, quite out of place in the world of politics. All of Meyer’s comments that evening were in praise of life in the Soviet Union.] This Bavarian, [Meyer . . .], has received and absorbed the ways of Moscow and has tied himself into knots, thoroughly and in an oddly exaggerated way. He seems like someone who goes to sleep applauding and applauds when he wakes. [. . .] But what really intrigues me is how insincere Karcsi has become. [. . .] As I watched him during the not very uplifting conversation, I had to conclude: in certain circles here, silence has become the most common form of lying. [. . .]

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I found Günther in front of the Pushkin Café at midnight, just as he had promised—ready for his vacation, in shorts, with a knapsack and with a stick—with the temporary report: ten pages, typed, dated July 15, 1935. He said to me as he handed it over that he knows that Béla Kun has declared his support for publishing Optimists, but he has nevertheless felt it to be necessary to state—and I should not misunderstand this—that “in any event” and “in black on white” (Schwartz auf Weiss), it should be up to the Hungarian Party to have the deciding word about the Optimists. “But Kun has already given his approval, moreover in writing.” “So much the better. Since the reader’s review is an official document, I had to point out ‘in any event’ and ‘Schwartz auf Weiss’ the extent to which I am willing to take responsibility.” He asked me to tell Bork that he was taking the remaining two hundred pages with him and would read them soon, and within eight days he would send a supplementary report to Bork from Maleyevka, where he would be spending his vacation. Reader’s Judgment [The full review is reproduced. It is seven and a half pages long. Its main message is that the novel is quite good but needs to be shortened from its 1200 typed pages to about half, mainly by abbreviating the exposition of the personal, mostly romantic dramas of the novel. Interestingly enough, there were no political criticisms of the novel. Probably it was the last two hundred pages, which Günther had not yet read, that contained what would be most objectionable from a Stalinist censor’s point of view, namely, Sinkó’s objections to revolutionary terror. The earlier censor, Mathejka, was more critical of the political content. See chapter 11.] July 20 Yesterday, I took Günther’s “provisional judgment” to Bork. I thought he would sit down to read it right away or at least to leaf through it. Instead, he reached in his pocket, took out an impressive bunch of keys. [. . .] Meanwhile, he told me that he was in a great hurry and that he was already late for a very important meeting. [. . .] He held one end of the packet and I held onto the other, while I asked him to take a look at the report before putting it into the drawer. “As you may remember, I had pressed Comrade Günther to complete and submit his report to you because you, Comrade Bork, said that this was all that was necessary for you to pay my advance, of which I am very much in need.” This is the gist of what I said to him and it was quite hard for me to say this. The truth is, I have still not recovered from the shock of Günther’s

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“enthusiastic” judgment. What he objected to and on what basis shows, along with what he praised, that he misunderstood the work. It is not that I think that it would be impossible to describe many things differently or in a better way, but I do think that what I wrote, the inseparability of the private and the general, of the confluence of love and revolution in the lives of individuals, and that intensity of thoughts and passions that sprang from the same root was what I had to convey about my generation of 1919. It is typical of his attitude that Günther, like a modest little girl, puts a finger to his mouth, lowers his eyes, and calls the prostitute “die Kokotte” (the coquette). One could write a separate chapter, a thorough study, on Soviet prudery, which in public life—of course only in public life—is proclaimed in posters, newspapers, and literature and which exceeds that of any sanctimonious Catholic ladies’ committee in the West. And still, like Shylock with his own promissory notes, I was forced to point to this review and demand consideration, not for my rights, but of my strained circumstances. [After submitting to Sinkó’s insistent entreaty that he look at a few underlined passages in the report, Bork explained apologetically that although he is convinced that the book will be published, he cannot give an advance now because in July and August the State Bank takes the money from all the enterprises and allocates it for the purchase of the harvest.] [The censor for the GIHL, Zaprovskaya, was even more thorough than Günther had been. She wrote an eighty-two-page typed review, as she told Sinkó on the telephone, but she was unwilling to share the report with him and wanted to talk to Anisimov about it in person.] I must be careful. I am recording the journey of Optimists with barely controlled, monomaniacal anger, as if by having written this book I had sold my soul to the devil. Scratch that “as if.” Indeed, I have; as soon as you take up a task, you become an accomplice of an unknown power, and the more engaged you become in the work, the greater control it assumes over you. What is unusual in my case is that the bondage persists, though the work has long been completed. To free myself, I am looking for a new bondsman, a new buyer for my soul. I am working on the drama which takes place in Budapest in 1932 at the time of the execution of Sallai and Fürst. 5 [. . .] Evening walk with M. Not far from our house, a chorus, as if it were something out of the opera Boris Godunov: a crowd of white-bearded, old men, women, and children are begging and mumbling prayers before a church, while from inside, the scent of incense and singing. It is not only outside the church that there is a crowd milling in the evening twilight wearing rags that reminds me of old paintings: the church, too, is packed with people. [. . .] We can only proceed slowly from the entrance toward the altar. Three priests—one of them with a golden crown-like decoration on his

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head—were leading the service with the help of an acolyte and a nun. Meanwhile the congregants were crossing themselves rapidly, as if a required number of crosses had to be made in a certain interval of time [. . .]. Despite the blinding lights, the whole and its parts, here in Moscow, seemed as if one had walked by mistake into the midst of an underworld cave, into a forgotten world of magic, thought to have long disappeared but which lived on according to its own laws. There was something frightening in the way that people bowed and fervently kissed the icons, relics, and the hands of the priest. I looked at the outstretched hands of the priest with their upward-turned palms. The blackened ends of his nails and his rough palms gave evidence that these hands had already learned to work for a living. Then the faithful started to queue up. This time, silently, humbly, without the slightest sign of impatience or shoving. They go before the priest mostly in somber piety or with their faces transfigured by evident ecstasy, and the priest tirelessly and with the care of a craftsman draws a cross on their foreheads with a brush dipped in oil. Next to some of the priests there is a tray with cubes of dry bread, and a woman with a white head-dress stands next to the tin tray as if she were some sort of housekeeper. There were so many believers that even if there had been ten priests there, they could hardly have managed. In contrast to the priests, who are bearded elders, the congregation contained not only middle-aged but also many young women and men. Before me stood a tall, skinny, quite well-dressed man with a little boy in his arms, and he kept the boy in his arms as he knelt and bowed down before the icons before kissing them. With the incense still in our noses we walked around outside on Sretenka Street under the electric lights. Everything is lit up. We pass through new, clean, market halls with modern installations where they sell fresh vegetables, produce for sauces, and beautiful fruits in clean, freshly painted stores. We hear laughter, we see children and the gleaming eyes of women, and men in the white linen clothing typical of Moscow summers; life, life of the twentieth century, the airiness and light of the twentieth century, of socialism. One can only judge what is happening here when one remembers that it has not yet been twenty years since the dominant spirit here in Moscow and in the entire Soviet Union was not that of today’s Sretenka Street but that of the church. Additionally, only if one has seen that crowded church can he free himself from the naive illusion that it is enough to put the sign “Closed” outside the doors of churches or to wait only another twenty years to allow rationality to overcome the magical traditions of the more than one-hundredmillion-strong masses. [. . .] One learns that the present does not mean that the past is dead but only that [. . .] within the dense and strong tissues of the past, the new formations of the present have also appeared.

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This, too, is of tremendous significance, but it is not what we in 1919 imagined it to be when György Lukács explained to us in the House of the Soviet that “the Leninist idea has made time move faster,” that we are witnesses of the “great leap” from the spiritual and intellectual prison of our heritage, from the realm of necessity to the realm of the liberated man, from the misery of barbaric magic to the empire in which man is master. In Moscow, mankind learns to think in great distances, not only in space but in time as well. [. . .] “How sad it is that mankind, indeed you too, have become so awfully smart,” said M; and we both laughed, because despite it all, it was so pleasant to be walking together in the evening. NOTES 1. Mezhrabpomfilm, from the word film, and the Russian acronym for Workers International Relief, was a German-Russian film studio, from 1922–1936. 2. Possibly Frigyes Krejcsi, a writer and a Hungarian communist leader living in Mosocw who was the editor or the Sarló és Kalapács (Hammer and Sicle), the paper of the Hungarian Communist Party. In any case, the Krejcsi referenced by Sinkó in an earlier and here omitted part, worked for MORP (International Association of Revolutionary Writers), one of the organizations, along with VOKS, that sought to engage and influence Western intellectuals who could eventually be led into action on behalf of the Soviet Union. See Ludmila Stern, Western Intellectuals, 5. 3. We know from Sinkó’s diary that this story is actually about Kurella and his wife. 4. The VEGAAR was established in 1931 as a Comintern institution with about 40 national sections. Its major task was the publication of the Marx-Engels Complete Editions, but it also published literature. See Brigitte Studer, trans. Dafydd Rees Roberts, The Transnational World of the Cominternians, (New York: Palgrave, 2015). 5. This eventually became the novel, Tizennégy nap (Fourteen Days), completed in 1942 and published in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia, by Testvériség in 1950.

Chapter Seventeen

My Incurable Individualism and an Unforgettable Lesson

July 22 I hesitated about making note of this. Why record it when I know—unfortunately—that I will never forget it? It is one of those experiences that are so embarrassing—not so much on ethical grounds but rather on aesthetic ones— that you hesitate to mention it even to your most intimate other. (I doubt there is anyone who has never had such an experience.) I am not talking about misdeeds, not at all, but rather about minor, mostly minor memories, that nevertheless starkly demonstrate man’s basic failings. In this instance, it was not for myself but on account of a comrade that I experienced this intensely ugly feeling. I will note it down just as it happened, so that although I cannot free myself from it, I shall gain some distance from it. It began the way these meetings with nearly forgotten former Hungarian comrades happen again and again here in Moscow. I dropped into the Pushkin Café in the hopes of running into Krejcsi, thinking that I might hear something from him about how the business of my film scenario at Mezhrabpom is going. He wasn’t there, but Comrade X was. He recognized me, and immediately had me take a seat next to him. 1 The last time we sat next to each other was sixteen years ago, in Budapest during the White Terror. I was then hiding in the basement apartment of Béni and Noémi Ferenczy. 2 On a rainy autumn day, the light outside their window was already on when a man came in whose external appearance was quite unlike that of anyone who used to turn up there as a courier. With his great red beard, which hardly covered his oddly shaped broad mouth, he looked just like one of those Galician Jewish refugees who flooded Budapest be161

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tween 1914 and 1918. He didn’t give the impression of one of those narrowchested, sensitive, and long-faced rabbis but of one of those rough, conceited types. The red beard made him unrecognizable. I only realized who he was when he started to speak. In those days it was life-threatening to appear on a Budapest street with such a sharply etched Jewish profile. But for Comrade X it was still safer than to show his former unshaven face, which was especially well known to the college students from whom the ruffians of the Awakening Hungarians and officers detachments were being recruited. 3 Comrade X had come because there were signs that his hideout was no longer safe and also, because we had to discuss when and how he would be smuggled to Austria by our Czech friend, Kotidek. I have seen many excellent comrades in X’s situation sweating, indeed, their whole bodies trembling from fear. This is a matter of nerves; at least as much a matter of an active phantasy as of moral fortitude. As I remember it, Comrade X did not even appear to be nervous. Throughout our discussion of his situation and the plan for action, he remained calm and deliberate. It was in this light that I had formed a picture of him. I saw in him a person strong in his convictions, ready for personal sacrifices when necessary. He was not likely to produce anything intellectually significant by himself, but he would endeavor to make up for the lack of special talent with his steadfastness and, especially, with his diligence. If until this meeting in Pest I felt uncomfortable about his intellectual ambition outstripping his abilities, our meeting at that time occurred under such critical conditions, that all disturbing features receded completely into the background and only his positive traits appeared before me. Comrade X, about whom I had until then thought that he was only concerned about his own overblown ambitions, moved and surprised me with the warmth and respect with which he spoke of M, who was then still in jail, where she had ended up right at the beginning of the White Terror. “She has a stoic nature,” X had said about M, and although I knew by then that this evaluation was false, I understood that coming from him, this was the highest praise, and that nothing was more foreign to him, for example, than I with my obviously non-stoical mental make-up. Thus, while neither X nor I considered us to be close friends, the mere circumstance that after so much time we should bump into each other here in Moscow, and especially his surprise and joy, made me happy as well. Despite the fact that my kopeks were few and spoken for, and that everything in the very pleasant Pushkin Café is horribly expensive, I joined him at his table as he greeted me. And I regretted it right away. His first words were congratulations for the picture in Pravda as well as in the last issue of Literturnaya Gazeta, showing me in a group photo at Gorky’s dacha. He congratulated me and immediately informed me that “he can’t complain, either,” and then he mentioned the name of the highly respected party institute where he is a professor.

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I had to realize once again that there are people who once they lose their formal position, lose with it all that is interesting about them. Nothing remained of Comrade X but an ugly, biting, jealous striver who takes pleasure in the hardships of others as a sort of personal vindication. He felt this way especially about people who were intellectually or ethically above him. No matter which of our mutual acquaintances I asked about—and I was interested in how their lives, personalities, relationships had turned out—he would invariably reply with information about where they stood in the party hierarchy, or about how they had “come down” in status. Comrade X is smart and tries to hide how much he dislikes everyone and how happy it makes him to be able to talk about the “downward slide” of someone who had been, back then in Budapest, highly respected for his or her intellectual and moral qualities by many and by him as well. For example, about György Lukács he says: “He is now only allowed to work as a literary compiler. He has come down greatly,” and he smacks his lips as if he were eating some delicacy. His character is best illustrated by what he says about Kurella, knowing full-well that Kurella is my friend. “Yes, he is a well-formed Marxist, a valuable man. While he was still Dimitrov’s secretary, I would often meet with him, but in recent times, he has had a lot of misfortune.” This “but” is a perfect illustration of what I described a few days ago in my diary to my fictive future young friend about the attitude toward luck in this country. There was an element of naïve advice in the way he spoke to me about Kurella. He held up his own behavior as an example: X had, until the incident, met with Kurella often, but in recent times, “a lot of misfortune has befallen him,” and therefore X now avoids him. It is worth noting the expression “misfortune.” It is characteristic of Comrade X’s type that they do not take note of the person to whom they are talking. He was so happy to have encountered someone uninitiated like me and to be given a chance to go through a rollcall of the changing fortunes of all his potential rivals, that he was quite surprised when, no longer able to tolerate his various expressions (“moved down,” “put in cold storage,” “the ground is shaking beneath his feet,” “he is falling fast,” “a burnt-out star,” “has seen better days,” “there is no resurrection for him,” etc.), I finally had the courage to stand up and say that there is an urgent matter; I must go. X looked at his watch and was surprised at the time, though he said we had hardly begun to talk. I could not refuse his suggestion that he come up tonight to our Trubnaya apartment after nine; he wanted to meet with M as well. All this is necessary to give context to what happened during his visit, or rather, in the last few minutes of our time together. [. . . Sinkó notes that at their apartment, X made an effort to demonstrate that he could talk about

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other things than party intrigues and the momentary constellation of party officials.] He spoke of Germany and Berlin where he had worked for many years in the German Communist Party (KPD) and lived there illegally for a few months even after Hitler came to power. It turned out that he knew my sister, Boriska, and he praised her for having turned out to be an excellent comrade. “She proved to be too-good a comrade,” said I, and I proceeded to explain what I meant by this. Boriska was always a faithful exponent of whatever illusions happened to justify the momentary party line. After a certain point, all thinking persons could see that the KPD had become a helpless prisoner of the political mistakes it had been making for many years, that it was continuing its suicidal tactics and policies, and that the victory of Hitler’s counter-revolution, brought about in no small part by the party’s policies, would be upon them in a matter of weeks or days. But when Boriska visited us in Vienna in December, 1932, we were shocked by her euphoria and by her attempt to prove to us that everything was developing very well in Germany, and what was about to take place was not the accession to power of the Nazis but of the revolution of the proletariat: the certain and bright dictatorship of the proletariat. Suddenly, Comrade X seemed very likeable to me. I think that dark and painful memories must have come to him, because, contrary to his custom, he did not interrupt me; indeed, after I stopped speaking, he shrugged his shoulders, not dismissively but slowly, like when someone tries to shrug off a burden. “I still can’t understand,” said M, “how Thälmann, the leader of the German Communist Party, could have voluntarily reported to Hitler’s police to protest against the slanderous claim that he had some part in the setting of the Reichstag fire.” “This too shows,” says Comrade X, “that at that time in Berlin, we all thought the same way as Boriska.” He got all worked up. He talked about wanting to write a book about the errors committed by the German party. He is in the possession of facts that no one else who is alive today is aware of. “This will be a horrifying book, believe me, horrifying,” he said, “but . . .” And it was as if he suddenly realized what he was doing. His voice changed. He laughed. This was his ugly gargling type of laugh that was preceded by a broad smile of his already wide lips. “But this book can only appear after the worldwide victory of the communist revolution.” [Sinkó, not noticing in time that X had realized the danger of speaking openly, began to criticize Stalin’s overly optimistic views about the prospects for a working-class revolution in the West.]

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“The war is coming. I agree with everything that serves the interests of the Soviet Union!” declared X with his unpleasant, sometimes unbearably unpleasant smile, or rather with his self-complacent, chillingly jeering grin. July 23 [Sinkó continues his notes from the previous night on X’s visit but first wants to tell about the latest events related to Optimists. There was bad news. He learned from Anisimov that Zaprovskaya had judged his novel to be politically unacceptable for publication in its present form because “of the passages dealing with the Lenin Boys and their commandant.” The Lenin Boys were the terror brigade of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Zaprovskaya considered the use of Lenin’s name in this context a “sacrilege.” When Sinkó pointed out that this was a historical novel and that the Lenin Boys referred to themselves that way in real life, Anisimov suggested that Sinkó simply leave those episodes out of the novel. Sinkó is very hesitant to make the changes, but he plans to go to Anisimov’s office for an advance the day after tomorrow regardless, because they are totally out of money. He hears that evening from Kurella that Anisimov is leaning toward not publishing the book at all, given Mathejka’s judgment of the book’s “counterrevolutionary spirit.” On the other hand, Sinkó is still hopeful that Bork, at VEGAAR, will give him an advance.] Well, yes, so that’s how it is. And here is how it was with Comrade X. I was impressed when he said that he would support the Soviet Union under all circumstances. Such a sentence always fills me with admiration. The strange thing was that he made this declaration with a raised voice, as if he assumed that I might not agree with him about serving the Soviet Union. “Why do you think that I don’t feel the same way?” I asked. This is precisely what he wanted to talk to me about with respect to Optimists, about which he has heard the most contradictory views, although he himself has not yet had an opportunity to read it (and he interjects the question of whether it is true that he is not mentioned in the novel). But he did read Facing the Judge which appeared in Europe and he feels the need to make some comments to me about that. In short, he is unhappy from the perspective of the Party with this autobiography, which at the same time attempts to present a shortened version of the history of the Hungarian revolution. This work is too subjective, too lyrical, and it is short on Bolshevik self-criticism. The author does not condemn with sufficient force his period of wavering and doubt, his humanist-Christian aberration. The piece is missing the accentuation of regret and of sharp Bolshevik condemnation. Additionally, the fact that the writer is still far from having completely and finally turned his back on his petit-bourgeois doubts is best illustrated by a sentence which he probably committed to paper without much thought, not even notic-

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ing what a horrible thing he was writing. Yes, in this work there is a sentence that betrays just how far its author is (that is, I am) from what it means to be a true fighter for Bolshevism. From the moment that Comrade X started to speak about my still recurring doubts and about my shortcomings as a revolutionary, he was no longer a specific person to me but a representative of the Party, of the revolutionary struggle, who had no idea how accurately he had hit the nail on the head in referring to my doubts, my uneasiness, in a word that there was something not right in my “Bolshevik conscience.” I never had any trouble shrugging off and dismissing without a care criticism that questioned my intentions. But when someone calls me to task for badly executing an assignment whose importance and necessity I share— and I always feel a great obligation, as well as inadequacy, toward such assignments—my immediate, involuntary reaction is to admit that the person who is dissatisfied with me is right. So I reached impatiently for the volume of Europe that contained my autobiography. It was not without trepidation that I gave it to Comrade X, and waited for him to show me that certain sentence which would reveal more than all other sentences. [. . .] It didn’t take long for him to find it. In this autobiography, I write at one point about that juvenile enthusiastic faith with which in a small provincial city in still-feudal, backward Hungary, I, as a teenager, looked up with great hope to the huge German Social Democratic Party and, in general, to the West European social democrats. I also described the collapse of these hopes; this first ruin, for me a first, all-obscuring ruin of sacred ideals. It was in this connection that there follows a passage which Comrade X stabbed with his thick, flexed index finger. He read: “Perhaps this naive belief seems odd to people here in the West, but I am still incapable of smiling about it. I believe that in distant cities and villages, in Korea, in the Balkans, in China and in the African colonies there are still such sixteen-year-olds who think today with the same hopes and similar feelings about Moscow and about a socialist or communist leader who might be living in Paris or London. And if it turns out that these youngsters are naive in their expectations, the shame can never be laid at their feet.” Comrade X, putting the Europe into his lap, and then straightening himself on the wobbly chair, which gave a squeak, looked up at me like a lawyer who knows that the evidence he has just cited destroys, must destroy the accused. As for me, I once again experienced something similar to what I felt when looking through my short stories that I had brought with me and I wanted to find one that I could publish here in the Soviet Union. I again experienced how here in the Soviet Union a thought or a sentence could have a different effect, could acquire a different edge than it did in Paris or Vienna. [. . .] Here in Moscow, even I who wrote those sentences felt as if I were hearing them for the first time [. . .] and I understood his horror, indeed, felt

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as he felt even before Comrade X had begun his explanations of what had upset him. Here, in the Trubnaya, I felt that even the mere supposition that young people might someday be disappointed in the hopes that they were placing in Moscow was a [. . .] destructive act and thus reveals how far its author is from that approving, unwavering faith which is an absolute requirement for anyone who does not wish to be considered an enemy here. I asked him to believe me that I, too, support every measure that serves the interests of the Soviet Union, but I am not convinced that everything that is happening here does indeed serve the interests of the Soviet Union. And I dragged out documents that I had been clipping day after day from the Soviet press, just as Ivan Karamazov had done long ago from the newspapers of tsarist Russia as proofs against the existence of God. I pulled forth that nearly full-page photo of Stalin which appeared on the first page of all newspapers, in which Stalin is holding his daughter Svetlana in his arms while she embraces her father’s neck with glee. I pulled out the long article that recently appeared in Pravda in which an eighty-two-year-old peasant woman tells an interviewer that “her whole body was suffused with a miraculous force when our good and wise Stalin gently touched her shoulder.” I showed him an article from Vechernaya Moskva [. . .] in which workers who were received by Stalin and then interviewed spoke, like the eighty-two-year-old peasant woman of their miraculous good fortune and about what they felt when they were able to see Stalin in person. These were not senile, backward, old hags and not immature children but the masters of the new world, its creators and fighters, the workers [. . .], “tractor constructors” by profession, who are quoted as saying that they are “infinitely happy that their work has been recognized by our dear, beloved Stalin.” Even the most loyal journalist [in the former Austria-Hungary] would never have thought of preceding every instance of the name of Francis Joseph with His Highness, or Beloved by God, or Beloved by all the people over whom he ruled as Emperor and King. But Stalin’s name is never mentioned without an endless string of oft-repeated adjectives [. . .]. And finally, it seems to me that since I have been here, this trend has grown stronger each day. I don’t know how much longer I would have gone on, had I not caught a glimpse of M. I saw that she was sitting on the edge of the bed, with a straight back, like a statue: motionless, looking stiffly before her with the expression that she wears whenever she, for one reason or another, is dissatisfied with me. If I think back now on how Comrade X answered me, I am reminded of those explanations that try to give a scientific basis for all the stories of the Bible—the six-day creation of the world, the immaculate conception, the resurrection, and all other holy miracles—just to prove that what is in the Bible is believable. But at the time, I was just surprised and amazed to hear Comrade X justify this deification propaganda not on the usual grounds of

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practicality, as others with whom I had spoken about it had done. No, Comrade X fervently defended the thesis that all this: the Father, the Good, the Wise, the Steersman of the Revolution, [. . .], the Joy of His People, the Sun of Truth, etc., etc., were simply the precise expressions in prose of ordinary, real facts. [Comrade X went on to excoriate Sinkó for his incurable individualism. Sinkó compares X to a medieval mystic except that the object of his veneration is not the medieval God but a human being who is subject to all the weakness that all men are subject to. At this point, Comrade X was so scandalized that he insisted on talking no more.] It was after midnight and Comrade X, in a bad mood, stood up to take his leave of us and to give me a lesson that I would never forget. With the gate key in my hand, I accompanied him in silence down the stairs. But I had hardly opened the building’s gate and extended my hand to him, when he looked around in the gateway, cleared his throat, and quietly said the following: “Your wife was there while we were talking. You will come to realize that in Moscow you don’t spill your heart out to anyone with a third party present. I don’t want you to believe that I have been Russified. My culture is European as well. How can you think that it is not uncomfortable for me to lecture about Marxism and repeatedly reference that certain name and to place before it each time the adjectival formulas that have been decreed by the synod?” I felt as if I had been slapped from both right and left and then someone had laughed in my face. But Comrade X was not laughing. It was as if all of sudden he felt very warm. He took off his coat and put it on his arm. He even unbuttoned his shirt collar and then with a sad sigh, extended his hand to me, turned on his heels, and hurried to the tram stop with a slight waddle. NOTES 1. Comrade X was the philosopher Béla Fogarasi (1891–1959), a member of Lukács’ Sunday Circle. 2. Benjamin Ferenczy (1890–1967) was a painter, and his twin sister Noémi (1890–1957) was a tapestry weaver. They were members of Lukács’s Sunday Circle and played a role in the Cultural Directorium of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. 3. During the Hungarian White Terror, which followed the 1919 Soviet Republic, paramilitary bands of former army officers and right-wing college students perpetrated acts of violence against Jews, falsely assuming that all Jews had been supporters of the Communists.

Chapter Eighteen

In Black and White

July 25 Evening in Bubnov Park in the Sokolnik section of Moscow: Here, too, there is a large outdoor platform on which people are learning to do Western dances, surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. This park, despite its dance platform, seemed more pleasant, at least in the evening, than the “park of culture and relaxation” named after Gorky. It seems more distinguished, less like a fair, less Prater-like. There are many workers, and the relaxing worker always strikes me as truly noble. Here, they also seem to be aware of being in a “park of culture.” They move with ceremonial formality—and in contrast to the Parisian worker in the Bois de Boulogne, who nonchalantly litters the park with his banana peels and with the paper bag in which he brought his food—I saw some workers here place even their cigarette butts into the trash receptacles that are placed along the paths. In the square, which they call “kultbaz” (cultural base), they sit with books in their hands, reading, or those who are talking do so with lowered voices. A father, who holds a book in one hand and leads his son with the other, leans down to his ear and almost in a whisper explains the workings of the excavator exhibited there. After this comes the outdoor performance of Othello. Amazing: they are not declaiming! It is as if the words are born before our eyes from the mouths of the actors. Yes, from within, actually virginally, these words seem to be pronounced for the first time since the beginning of the world, as if we had never heard them before. The audience is wonderfully receptive. I find the staging overemphasizing the spectacle, for which neither Shakespeare’s words nor, in general, any true drama has a need. But maybe the director is right and I am not. Maybe even this exceptionally receptive audience would not be so captivated by the power of words alone if they were not so spell169

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bound by the spectacle. Even more impressive than the performance is the feeling of being one with the crowd, with its common heartbeat. If in this earthly existence he had not been given a post for which he lacks all abilities—as would I, for example, if I had to sing in an operetta or if in real life I had to play the role of a bon vivant—that is, if his job were not that of a censor who had to write opinions about literary works, then—as far as his reliability, thoroughness and precision are concerned, this John, this Hans Günther, would indeed be an angel or at least a quite constructive and much deserving fellow citizen. He has lived up to his word. He asked me where I will go for my summer vacation, to which I admitted that so far, I have never in my life gone anywhere for a summer vacation and I would be extraordinarily satisfied this summer if I had enough to live on here in Moscow. He kept his word, because he said that I will see that he would do everything in his power to make that possible. He kept his word because, voilà, he did in fact hurry and did not forget about me. At Maleyevka, where he went for his rest, he not only read the more than two hundred remaining pages, and based on these wrote an addendum to his review which he sent to Otto Bork at VEGAAR, but he also sent me a typewritten copy of this addendum.* And with this valuable document in my pocket, I immediately set out to see Comrade Bork, who had already promised, even without this, to give me a 500-ruble advance. At the corner of Nikolskaya I saw Béla Illés 1 coming toward me. He and I had completely different ideas about what constitutes literature and what does not, and it would never have occurred to me to discuss such matters with him. For this very reason our relationship is just as warm and friendly as it was fifteen years ago in the Viennese émigré barracks. (It’s sad but I’m starting to realize: most human relationships survive only if one party surrenders certain demands and remains silent about certain things, in fact sometimes those things that are the most essential.) We stopped for a minute to greet each other and also so that I could answer the question which is already beginning to become a tradition here in Moscow, just as it was once in Paris: What’s happening with the publication of Optimists? And this is how I learned from Illés that he, too, had a meeting with Bork today, in fact, just fifteen minutes previously (the VEGAAR office is the third house from the corner on the right). I hurried on, first of all, so that I, too, could find Bork in his office, and secondly, because—as always when approaching the door to one of the offices of a literary establishment—I felt the urge to run away with some excuse, or with no excuse at all. In short, just to be done with the painful “tooth extraction” and not to have time to reconsider the thing, I walked as fast as my legs would carry me into VEGAAR and opened the door, sweating and out of breath from the exercise. In the anteroom, the secretary stood up as soon as she saw me and said she will see if Comrade Bork is in. She was obviously following a stupid

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order, since there was only one door from Comrade Bork’s office and that led through the secretary’s room. Thus, if her boss had not been in his room, she would have known it without having to look. Additionally, just because the only door to Bork’s office opened into the secretary’s room and probably because of the midday heat, it was half ajar. Excitedly and without thinking, I told the secretary—admittedly more loudly than one customarily would—not to bother, the director is here since it has not been two minutes since I saw Béla Illés, and I know from him that Comrade Bork is here, and I must see him to ask whether he has received the addendum to the review from Comrade Günther, and because Comrade Bork promised me that “at the latest” it would be today that I would get my 500-ruble advance for which I have the utmost need. Yes, one can become aggressive, not because he feels himself to be strong but on the contrary, because he feels himself abused and powerless. He can become aggressive just because he would prefer to disappear without a sound, and it is this urge that he has to counteract. So, not waiting for the secretary to announce me or to return with an answer, I simply pushed Comrade Bork’s half-closed door open with my elbow and I was already over the threshold. But there was no one at the large desk. The armchair behind the desk with the noonday sunlight streaming onto it greeted me with the melancholy of unused, lifeless objects, when I spied (since I am quite tall and was able to see behind the large desk) between the armchair and the desk, the back part of the haircut of the director of the publishing house, with his neck pulled between his shoulders. I saw the nape of his neck, his back, or rather his white shirt. I saw the director himself hiding from me, trying to become invisible in a squatting position. In retrospect of course I knew: Bork had heard my every word and as he heard that I was there, he hid. And the only considerate thing, the only humane thing for me to have done would have been to make believe that I didn’t see him. I could have done this because he didn’t see that I saw him, since he was completely bent over and he would not have looked up had I not let him know that I had found him, discovered him in this rather undistinguished pose. But at the time, I was so surprised, so upset, in fact, so frightened by what I saw that instead of going toward the exit, I walked behind the desk and, pulling the armchair back, asked the crouching man: “For God’s sake, what are you doing, Comrade Bork?” I can’t brag about my question being at all clever, but no doubt, Comrade Bork would also not be very happy with himself if he were to think back to his explanation, mumbling something about the bell whose wire he was trying to adjust under the desk. Meanwhile, the man’s easily blushing face turned as red as if his head had been dunked into a pail of vermillion paint and then turned up toward me. “This heat is hellish,” he said then, and while still squatting, he smoothed back his hair from his forehead, as if trying to brush away a bad dream, and

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only then could he bring himself to get up. But even before he had straightened himself completely, he began to inform me that he received Comrade Günther’s addendum to his review from Maleyevka and that while he is unable to live up to his promise to give me an advance today, tomorrow— “todsicher” (sure as death)—I can pick up the 500 rubles in his office. The sun did, indeed, shine unusually fiercely today but nonetheless, I felt as if I had walked into a refreshing shade when I found myself once again out in the street, even with its asphalt sticky from the heat. [. . .] July 28th News from Anisimov: He did in fact ask Kurella to “consult” on Optimists. Kurella saw Zaprovskaya’s frighteningly voluminous dissertation, her socalled “reader’s review.” In that, one can read so much, pro and contra, that Anisimov, who needs a definitive yes or no, feels that his paid reader is trying to make a fool out of him, as if she were mockingly showing him the finger and avoiding the responsibility of a definite answer, just like Anisimov would like to do. You could interpret the heavy bundle of paper that Zaprovskaya larded with a great many quotes as saying “pregnant” or “not pregnant,” depending on your inclination. So Anisimov called in a consultant and, after a long struggle with himself, made a decision—which I learned from Kurella—that one can’t really call original: He will request an opinion from Béla Kun, but one that, as Günther would say, must be a “Schwartz auf Weiss,” written, opinion addressed directly to the GIHL. And until he gets this, Anisimov is going to be undeterred from—waiting. Anyway, it’s better to wait. “More eyes see more,” he said and also: “Go slowly, and you will get farther,” and finally, he came up with the dialectical intensification of the saying “Nothing ventured, nothing gained” (which is the foundation of all these others). He said, “Nothing ventured, most probably not much lost.” In contrast to this, it seems that VEGAAR will finally soon publish Optimists, and this means not just in German, but also in Hungarian, which is what I really have my heart set on. And in French and English — Kurella is sure of it. The matter will be facilitated and sped up all the more if, as it is rumored, the little Huppert has declined, with the excuse that he is too busy, to be a second reader after Günther of the debatable and much debated manuscript. Consequently, they say, VEGAAR intends to ask Kurella for his opinion. The author of Optimists could not ask for a more favorable turn of events even if he were still an optimist. The sudden change for the better in the prospects of the novel being published in the near future makes the assignment before me, of having to write an introduction, all the more acute. I find this idea, which was first suggested, and I believe rightly so, by Béla Kun, much preferable to

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Günther’s recommendation (made out of his concern for the benefit of the souls of those “not well versed in Marxism”) that I change the dialogues in the novel to contain “ideologically correct solutions.” Kun’s suggestion was that in this foreword, I should try to explain and elucidate the era of Optimists, its actors and problems. Kurella, too, is urging me to write this foreword. He doesn’t understand why I am hesitating about something that should be self-evident. “You simply have to write that in 1919 we did not yet know those answers with which the current Soviet reality has enriched mankind and since you have come to know Soviet reality, thanks to the new insights gained in the Soviet Union, the problem of a conflict between individual morality and the demands of politics that seemed unavoidable has been resolved and rendered irrelevant. All the ethical problems and doubts which, with the victory of the revolution, confronted the revolutionary, in other words, all the ethical problems of political activity which often appeared as tragic dilemmas have been solved harmoniously in the Soviet reality, its living conditions, and practice. Simply . . .” Simply, says Kurella. But I’m more than usually depressed exactly today—since the start of the Congress of the Third International. 2 Lines of poetry flow through my brain, a whole cycle’s worth of poems that want to go under a single title: “For Hard Times.” Translated into prose, I would write for consolation, to reassure myself: “In the final analysis, there are some things that are true and which one must not doubt; one must not and one cannot doubt that we will be victorious. We cannot doubt that our victory will be the victory in history of the humane principle; sunrise out of darkness. This is certain. And since this is certain, what does everything else matter? Compared to this, what does it matter that . . .” And this is what Kurella does not comprehend, or in which he does not agree with me: there is much, much, in the column of “what does it matter that,” so many things in fact, that, ultimately, the lines for hard times that were meant to encourage would speak with sadness of the final, comforting solace. No, for me it is not easy to write that foreword; less so here today than it would have been a few months ago in Paris. I fear nothing so much as having to lie, even if unintentionally. And I would be lying, whatever I would write here and now in this foreword. I would be lying; because I am not sure how firm I am in my “yes” and where my “no” begins. Perhaps this is not important to anyone, since it is only a matter of degree. Steiner told me in connection with his time at Petropavlovsk that during an outbreak of typhus there, they incinerated twelve-thousand bodies in the brickmaking kilns—including many people who only seemed dead—and

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ever since, he finds it comical when he catches himself attaching any importance to this or that problem related to his individual fate. I can relate to this. But despite this, I stubbornly continue to feel that it is important what I write: as if, in the flood of the hundreds of million of short-lived alphabetic characters that appear every day in every part of the world, much depended on how I place one letter after another on the paper that lies on my table in my Trubnaya Street apartment. If I did not hold on to the fiction, wholly without a basis in objective fact, that in this way I affect that which is and will be, and that through my writing I bear some kind of essential responsibility—without this fiction, I could not write. And this is why I cannot write now, exactly because I feel the responsibility. And this is why I am now starting to agonize about what it is that they will want to expunge from Optimists. To cross something out, even a single name, because it would not be opportune today, that too, would be one form of lying. Feldman called to ask that I visit him at the Mezhrabpom to sign the contract for my screenplay. He pushed a pink, typed sheet in front of me. It said that Mezhrabpom would pay 10,000 rubles for the screenplay, of which the author (that is, I!) would receive twenty-five percent on the day of signing. It turned out, however, that I rejoiced too soon because for the contract to count as signed it was not enough for Feldman and me to sign. Feldman has a boss, something like Samsonov. He has to approve it, too. Important as it is to me to come into so much money so easily and smoothly right now (after paying my debts, there is only enough left for a few more days from the 518 rubles I received from VEGAAR), this is not why I am recording this incident. With the pink sheet in my hand, I heard Feldman’s voice: “The proletariat has nothing to lose but its chains.” I didn’t understand and looked at him puzzled while he stroked his red beard and looked at me with an attentive, warm smile. “I said that because you signed even before reading what it said, and only then did you read to see what you had signed.” It was true and I hadn’t even noticed that this was so. I also laughed. “In this country I sign everything without looking,” I said, but then, surprising even myself (and perhaps because from the first moment of our meeting I feel confidence in this person or because since the start of the Congress, depression has me by the throat) I added, “But it is not true that the proletariat can lose only its chains. What if it were to lose its faith . . .” I thought but did not say “in the Soviet Union” because Feldman’s dark blue eyes suddenly looked at me in shock and a deep and almost angry wrinkle appeared on his forehead. A second later he lit a cigarette, offered me one, and, as if nothing had happened, we started to talk about the films that were under preparation, or rather, he told me about a terrific film about the revolution in the Russian village that Eisenstein was working on.

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NOTES *(author’s footnote) “Addendum to review of Sinkó’s novel, Optimists Reading the last 200 or so pages of the novel only confirmed what I had earlier noted, thus I will not repeat that here. With the exception of a few details, these last 200 pages, similarly to those preceeding it, represent a work of high quality. Among those few sections that must be changed I include in the first place the dialogues about ideology, on the one hand between Vértes and Báti and on the other between Báti and Török. First of all, both dialogues are too long and thus definitely need to be considerably shortened. Secondly, in both conversations both sides take false positions; the fallacy of their positions however is not demonstrated in the course of the remainder of the novel and is not elaborated with sufficient clarity. I would therefore recommend that some sentences should be put into these conversations to indicate the limitations of the ideological stances of Vértes and Török. Without this, those readers who are not well versed in Marxism, might well be confused. What I have said before about the amount of space that the romantic and spiritual tribulations of the intellectuals occupy in this novel holds also for the conversation between Lénárt and Báti. In this dialogue, too, I find the emotional and self-important tone disturbing. It should be reduced to a minimum. Moscow, July 22, 1935 Hans Günther” 1. Béla Illés (1895–1974) was another Hungarian writer/participant in the Hungarian Soviet Republic who wrote a novel about it, entitled Ég a Tisza (The Tisza is Burning). Illés’s book was published in the Soviet Union in 1929. It has a more acceptable, Socialist Realist style, with a true working-class hero. 2. The Seventh Congress of the Third International, that is, the Comintern, was a major event in the foreign policy of the Soviet Union. It announced a radical change from confrontation to cooperation between the communist parties and other anti-fascist parties: this is also known as the Popular Front policy, described further in the next chapter and in the translator’s introduction.

Chapter Nineteen

“One Must Get Used to Life”

July 29 [1935] Then it really is true: after Huppert refused the risky honor, VEGAAR decided to give Optimists to Kurella to act as a sort of “super censor.” This is now certain because he has the bumashka as well, that is, VEGAAR’s official letter. Kurella told me on the phone that he is sitting at his desk and rereading it. I am sure he will act quickly. “Now it seems that they may publish it after all,” answered M, when I called her at the clinic with the news. She said the “may” with a laugh, though not only with a laugh. She was obviously very happy, too. [. . .] July 31 Last night—until three—the Kurellas were at our place. We had an interesting discussion on War Communism and about today’s Soviet Union. I envy Kurella. He approves of everything without reservation. August 3 It has been raining all day. Silvio, who went to Paris on vacation, took our passports with him so that he could have their expiration date extended—and we have heard nothing from him. Although this country covers one-sixth of the terrestrial globe, knowing that we are here without passports and that if anything were to happen to them we would never be able to obtain a Yugoslav passport, that is, any passport, again, so that in this life we would never be able to step beyond these borders, makes me feel imprisoned, trapped. 177

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And the most varied possibilities go through my mind, those which are facts of life for everyone here, and which are naturally so unappealing that, for example, last night, I was unable to sleep—and not just because of the bedbugs. Today, at the Congress, Dimitrov made a speech signaling a radical change in the tactics of the world’s communist parties. His explanations seem to be a programmatic elaboration of the ideas that he first expressed at his trial in Leipzig before a German fascist court. In light of today’s speech, the moral stature of this man continues to grow. It is evident that even with a noose around his neck, he concentrated his energies on working out the basic concepts for a new tactic for the international revolution and it was nothing but his great moral strength that saved him from the rope. 1 [. . .] Levanevsky set out today on a flight across the North Pole to [San] Francisco. 2 There was a short article the day before yesterday about the destruction of a submarine with 52 men aboard. There was not a word of commentary in any of the papers attached to the news, neither that day nor the day after. Meanwhile, Levanevsky’s flight is being treated as the major event of the day. It gets the headlines and everyone is talking about it everywhere. Should the flight succeed, the papers and all the organs of propaganda are sure to be filled with this victory and its celebration for a long time. There is something singularly fantastic about how people and peoples are being consistently and methodically trained from above to be confident and full of the joy of living. Oh, that this pedagogy could only work on me, however slightly! The same day There will be rain, blood rain. People are right to fear it. Those are right who fear it. The ground crumbles. The lightning’s flashes Fail to enlighten us, The wells of wisdom have gone dry. With cracked lips, but insanely, with prattling tongues We tell hope-filled lies. But the wind is already here, It distracts, but speaks woe and blood Through the wild-tussled trees. There will be rain, blood rain . . .

August 5 I looked back: it was exactly on May 28th that I noted in this journal that in accordance with my agreement with the editor Deutsch, the review Za Rubezhom was going to publish an extract from Optimists in its next issue. Today,

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after two months and many urgings, interventions, guarantees and further promises, a badly amputated selection from the Optimists has indeed appeared in that periodical, along with the impossible illustrations of an E. Topikov and with an introduction referencing Romain Rolland. And I just noticed that the periodical’s first page lists Maxim Gorky as its editor and next to it is the name of Mikhail Koltsov, 3 about whom it is said that no American press mogul rules over as large a mass of writers, journalists, presses, and sheets of paper as he does. August 9 In Paris, when I was making daily rounds to the Soviet Embassy to inquire about my eagerly awaited visa, there was one person into whose office I was embarrassed to enter because, unlike those who imitated the well-mannered but noncommittal and uninterested French bureaucrats, this man was full of sincere apologies, tranquil but honest regrets, as if he himself had been at fault for having to let me know that my visa had not yet arrived. And one time, at the beginning of April, he said to me in very personal terms that he hopes I will not be offended if he tries to help me over my “momentary difficulties.” He took from his pocket some money, two hundred francs, which he had placed there for the purpose, and handed it to me, saying that it was a down payment for the Moscow edition of Optimists; I should not forget to send him a copy when it comes out. I did not forget. While I could not yet send him a book, M carefully packaged up the issue of Za Rubezhom containing the extract, I addressed it to him, Dilkovsky, First Secretary of the Soviet Embassy in Paris, took it to the post office, and sent it registered. Here they cannot print as many copies of the newspapers as there are people wanting to buy them and only certain privileged people are allowed to subscribe. So, on my way to Mezhrabpom after the post office, I stopped at a locked case on the street that displayed behind glass the pages of today’s copies of Pravda and Izvestiya. Among the news items, I read: TASS reports from Paris that Dilkovsky has died, the victim of an automobile accident. At Mezhrabpom, Feldman greets me with a completed contract for the film scenario. It has all the necessary signatures. He is an unusual person. I see disappointment in his face, the disappointment of a person who was sure that he would be causing happiness and is surprised that the expected effect is missing. To excuse myself, I explained to him the sorrow I had just experienced and that I felt bad about not having written to Dilkovsky earlier. I had waited until I could write him something to be happy about. Thinking it over, I am not sure that I can explain why Dilkovsky’s death affected me so much. Perhaps it was the fact that I had just mailed a letter to someone and upon leaving the post office I learnt that I had just written to a dead man . . .

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Feldman smiled with a melancholic, hesitant expression around his mouth and said some kind words which appeared all the more meaningful to me because of the way he said them, with one of his eyebrows raised, and thoughtfully: “One should get used to life. But for some of us, this is the most difficult thing: to get used to it.” And then, as always before, as if he disapproved of having allowed himself this involuntary, confessional sigh, he put on an objective mien. “Don’t forget,” he warned me, “the contract gives you until October 15th to submit The Village Doctor in its final form. The Village Doctoress,” he says again and takes a pen in his hand. “No, let the working title be The Optimist,” and on the copy of the contract that remained with him, he crossed out Doktorsa iz Deveni and wrote in “The Optimist.” “It sounds better here. And anyway, this is just a working title . . .” Of course my novel’s title is not The Optimist but Optimists, but since Béla Kun had himself approved of it, Feldman thought at the last moment that this title would lend some sort of protection to the project. It is as if everyone were afraid: the sun is shining and yet they are looking for a shelter from the rain. So, I received a contract for a non-existent film scenario called The Optimist—and I got an advance of no less than 1200 rubles. I earned this, though not with my Optimists, but with the novel’s mangled title. It is the first time in my life that I have earned enough money to have no worries for the rest of the month, of which we are still at the beginning, and even for the next. As beginner bourgeois, we decided with M that we would take Russian lessons and make enquiries about a language teacher. August 12 “Your modesty prevents me from telling you my opinion,” Kurella keeps repeating, and he informs me on the phone that he has already finished writing his review of Optimists and sent it to Bork. He was in a hurry to complete it, all the more so because he and his wife are leaving for a vacation to the Caucasus. Now I am confident that it is not my fate to be a failure after all. Finally there is also a telegram from Silvio: he cleverly and successfully took care of the matter of the little books (the extension of the passports). The fact that I felt such joy at this news made me suspicious, even to myself. We, M and I, took our second Russian lesson today. Our teacher, Lopukhina, is a direct descendent of Peter the Great’s foreign minister and the daughter of the one-time chief of police who—as Lopukhina tells it—secretly sympathized with the revolutionaries and gave them the evidence with which they could uncover Azef, the provocateur. 4 Lopukhina is closer to forty than to thirty and it is evident that she goes to great lengths to dress like

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a “grande dame.” She is also the language tutor to the local American Embassy officials and says of them that they are drunkards and show no interest in anything. In general, she talks a lot, too much in fact, and in this case M’s caution is unnecessary whenever she kicks me under the table to warn me against saying something that were better not said in front of this woman. Actually, under her heavy makeup, the woman appears such a tortured wreck both socially and personally that she could serve as a model for a type. Nevertheless, I, who once rebelled so vehemently against school, enjoy studying again. It has the effect on me that a bromide has on the nerves. Oh, beautiful, calm life within bounds! To receive specific assignments for the completion of which one must do nothing else than to be attentive and diligent, and then to hear from an unimpeachable authority that you performed your task well! Here is the key to how one can live in peace, without endless problems and inner strife: to find an authority for all problems, an unquestionably, absolutely authorized forum. For me so far this has happened only in relation to the Russian language. August 16 Kurella left with his wife for the Caucasus but he left me a copy of his plaidoyer (plea) in support of my Optimists. He is my enthusiastic but at the same time careful defense attorney—of course “careful” only by European standards. If I compare his attitude in what he has written and signed with that of others, then it is evident that he has stood by me with unparalleled bravery. First of all, without explicitly discussing the issue, he defends the novel from the abridgements that Günther demanded. There are a few places where he quite unmistakably argues with Günther, though it is true that he adopts, even if with a damper, some of Günther’s, indeed, Zaprovskaya’s ideological objections; for example, in the case of the Lenin-boys, he, too, objects to the terminology and recommends changing their name, as if it were the fault of the writer of historical fiction that they were called thus and not some other way. But with him this seems more like a concession, made to enhance the effectiveness with which he rebuts other objections. On the other hand, I gave a great deal of thought to parts that are probably not tactical; rather, they express his own convictions. This applies foremost to the paragraph in which he warns me that in today’s world there are certain truths which, if expressed, can become weapons in the hands of those who are enemies of all truth—especially in the hands of the German fascists—and for this reason it would be best to sacrifice these truths. “A revolutionary writer,” he writes, “must never forget this aspect, and if this aspect so demands it, then those ‘biographical’ details and problems, no matter how much he has taken them to heart, must be sacrificed.”

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Is there not a self-delusion in this formulation? Is it really for fear of the fascists that Kurella wants to sacrifice a certain honesty—for this is what is at stake: the writer’s sincerity, that is, the complete sincerity of a human being. Or is his concern with the masses, our masses, whom he feels lack maturity and who must be sent to the children’s room while we adults have our discussion? Is he not saying, in effect, that our masses have not yet matured to the point where we can speak openly to them about everything? Is there not a sort of ideological guardianship, ideological self-deification behind these fears? In the final analysis, is it not a sort of self-importance or conceitedness vis-à-vis our own people from which this underestimation of the masses—or more simply, of people, of human understanding—this grandinquisitorial attitude originates? Guarding something as a mystery and excluding the public as unworthy of initiation: what has this conception and attitude to do with the universalist spirit of the revolution? [Sinkó reproduces Kurella’s full review. It is likely that Soviet publishers, contrary to Sinkó’s reading of it and perhaps Kurella’s intentions, saw the review as indicating the dangers of publishing the novel.] It is inconceivable that Kurella’s review will not have its positive effect. I hope that Bork, who gave me an appointment for three o’clock today will not hide under his desk again. [. . .] Dimitrov made his closing remarks at the Congress. If only this speech had been made four years ago, at least four years ago! There are people who take offense even at a sigh like this and immediately start to argue that this speech could not have been made at that time, but only now when it was made. Such use of dialectics, God forgive my sins, makes my blood boil. This is the inhumane logic of the middle ages, which concludes that since the plague and lice exist, they were made for the benefit of mankind. . . . It makes me shiver when I hear communists justify modern hell-holes with this inhumane, unmerciful logic. It is not true that Dimitrov’s speech could not have been made four years ago when the German Communist Party saw its main enemy not in Hitler but in the Social Democrats. In fact, what Dimitrov announced yesterday as the mandatory party line, was already said four years ago but then the same forum declared the idea to be counter-revolutionary. August 21 I signed the contract for the German edition of Optimists with Bork. But the contract is not yet valid. It still needs the signature of Bork’s chief, who is called Krebs. 5 Nomen est omen? Hopefully not! As for Anisimov, this ruddy man, unlike Bork, is not a neurasthenic. This Anisimov, flashing the world’s most innocent smile and practically making a

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display of his excellent spiritual balance, surprised me with the news that although he has received what he had requested, Kun’s approval letter directed to him (plus Kurella’s review), he has sent the manuscript of Optimists to be read by yet a third censor. “Why? To whom?” To this question, he answers self-assuredly, with imperturbable calm and with the innocence of a lamb, with another question: “Why not?” Is he toying with me or does he not realize that I can’t help but experience his mysterious calmness as mockery? [. . .] NOTES 1. Sinko is referring to Dimitrov’s trial in 1933 (see earlier, part II, chapter 12). The “new tactic” is the Comintern policy of the Popular Front. Whereas in line with the previous hardline policy, which only facilitated Hitler’s ascension to power, the German Communists, for example, had refused to cooperate with the Social Democrats, whom they apostrophized as “Social Fascists,” the Popular Front tactic directed the Communists throughout the world to cooperate with all anti-fascist parties whether bourgeois or working class. It was, of course, too late to do this in Germany but the policy helped the Socialist Leon Blum come to power in France. Béla Kun had been an early theoretician of the confrontational policy that the Congress rejected. Although by the time of the Congress, Kun, too, had discarded his earlier policy, his position in the Comintern was further weakened after the Congress. Sinkó seems to have been unaware of this. 2. The pilot was Sigizmund Aleksandrovich Levanevsky (1902–1937). The flight in August 1935 turned out to be successful, but Levanevsky died on a subsequent arctic flight. 3. Mikhail Koltsov (1898–1940), Soviet journalist and publishing executive, closely associated with Stalin. Although he was given much latitude in the mid-1930s, he, too, became a victim of the purge that also disposed of the NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov. See Katerina Clark’s 2011 book, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2011), 32–40, 146–150. 4. Peter the Great’s first wife, Eudoxia Lopukhina, shares a surname with the language teacher. Peter divorced Eudoxia because her politically active relatives were not to his liking and sent her off to a monastery in 1698. Evno Azef was a double agent working for the Social Revolutionaries and for the Okharina, the tsarist secret police He was uncovered in 1909 with the aid of the former director of the police department, Alexei Lopukhin. 5. Crab.

Chapter Twenty

In a Foreign Land . . .

August 31 I am reading Kant. A century and a half ago, in 1784, to the question of what is enlightenment, Kant gave the confident and convincingly unambiguous answer: “Enlightenment is intellectual maturity; its slogan is: ‘Have the courage to use your own understanding.’” If, eighteen years after the October Revolution, I were to ask myself the similar question of what is the slogan that exemplifies this revolution’s spirit, could I provide as confident an answer, with equal sovereign dignity as Kant did a century and half ago? Would I not have to admit that the slogan today is the inverse, the opposite of what Kant had given: “Do not have the courage . . .”? These days I sometimes feel again that it is hopeless (that is, that I am hopeless), that I am fated to be out of line. What I have wanted so much: to lose myself and to belong to a large community of struggle—I just cannot, cannot do it. Despite Kurella’s mention in his review of Optimist of my continuing “ideological development,” I find myself again almost in the same place that I have always found myself as long as I can remember: I know to which groups I do not belong. But this is not enough to make me happy. It induces paralysis. I am paralyzed because here it is only in exceptional, very exceptional cases that one can speak completely honestly. I am left to confront depressing facts by myself, in isolation. There are wonderful and encouraging things that I see. These might provide a cure, if . . . if only the atmosphere were not rendered so suffocating precisely by the absence of that directness which for me, in the literal sense of the word, is my life. Pierre Vorms is here with his wife, having arrived a few days ago. Vorms owns a gallery and a literary agency in the Rue de la Boëtie. Because projects promising the least financial success exercise a magical effect on him, he 185

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could not but have noticed me. He ran around quite a bit and wrote lots of letters to find a publisher for Optimists in Paris, and even approached publishers in London as well. The lanky, prematurely balding Vorms, although he is beyond thirty, still believes himself to be an inventive merchant, and he still acts as if he believed that it has simply been accidental that he has not succeeded in cashing in on beautiful works of visual art and good literature. It is his gallery that has shown and continues to show Masereel’s work. 1 It was Masereel who in Paris told me that for Vorms business is just an excuse: he is one of those odd types of artists who does not produce any work himself but, perhaps for this very reason, is an unselfish devotee of beauty, more so than are other artists. It is also from Masereel that I know that what wealth Vorms once had has been swallowed up by his gallery, which he now maintains with some difficulty. Last year, when he was already in dire straits, he thought he had a brilliant idea for putting his finances in order: he organized in Paris the first international exhibit of anti-fascist painters. One could say it was a tremendous moral victory but also quite an expense which he never recouped. He is now in Moscow with a project to learn about Soviet art and to organize a double exhibit, showing his painters in Moscow and Moscow’s painters in his Parisian gallery. I met with him several times in Paris, in his Rue de la Boëtie office, in the role of a so-called client, but it is typical of Vorms that already then I thought of him not as a person who was hoping to make money from me but someone who wanted to help me. Still, I find it surprising that we have become so close in the last few days since we ran into each other here in Moscow. And the reason has to do precisely with the fact that it is in Moscow that we met again. This new friendship is a good thing and makes me happy, but it has also opened my eyes to something about which I can hardly be joyful: that is, I would not feel so close to him if I were not such a stranger here and not in such a strange land. What has brought us surprisingly and immediately so close to each other is the similarity in the way we relate to this environment and the way we react to it spontaneously. The fact that I understand him so well shows me just how insurmountable is the barrier that prevents me from making my home here, now or ever. Since Vorms has been here, it is as if I were seeing myself in a mirror: this man from Paris is a mere acquaintance, yet we understand each other more intimately and simply, without exchanging a word, than I do with anyone else here. On the whole, he actually believed everything that he read day after day in L’Humanité about the general good life in which the Soviet people were basking. But because he has good eyes, and in addition to his eyes, he has with him his wife, Mira, who had left Russia as a child but who has not forgotten her mother tongue, Pierre saw and heard many things already in the first hour of his stay here that clearly belie the pictures inanely sketched by

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L’Humanité about the carefree and happy Soviet life. Thus, for example, he noticed that a kilo of meat costs ten rubles, black bread one ruble, butter 26 rubles, and a pair of shoes around 150 rubles. At the same time, even before talking to me, he also knew that the average worker is paid 200 rubles a month while the chornorabochiy, that is, an unskilled worker, does not make more than 100–120 rubles, in other words, considerably less than what an unemployed French worker can buy in food with his unemployment payments. Pierre is a communist and if the discovery was unpleasant for him and it meant that he had to change some of his notions about Soviet citizens basking in the good life, he, quite correctly, concluded only that L’Humanité creates propaganda regarding the Soviet Union in a harmful and idiotic way. Why must they underestimate European workers by assuming that their sympathy toward the Soviet Union would not be enhanced precisely by telling them the truth, by telling them about the hardships and sacrifices that Soviet citizens must still endure in the interest of creating a socialist army, a socialist industry, and in general, the means for advancing into a higher form of civilization? Hearing the news that Vorms and his wife were here, Priacel came to our apartment on the day of their arrival, that very night, to greet them. Currently, Priacel writes his reports from Moscow for L’Humanité, and for other communist papers and picture magazines that appear in France. I don’t know what he is like as a person otherwise, but he spoilt the evening for us, for our guests as well as for M and me. If a German or anyone else acts deaf and blind, the act can be believable and one can think that out of some a priori principle, he is in fact deaf and blind. But if it is a French intellectual that acts the blinkered believer, and moreover, does so in the language of Montaigne and Voltaire, with the turns and expressions of this very language—such a Frenchman, acting deaf and blind, strikes one as unpardonably rhetorical and tactless. [. . .] Vorms received an invitation to a lecture for Soviet artists by a Soviet person named Beskin on the subject of contemporary French painters and painting. Pierre knew Beskin from Paris where they had met at an embassy function. Beskin spoke in Russian and he didn’t know that Mira was Russian, or that she was translating Beskin’s lecture simultaneously for her husband. Comrade Beskin spoke unsuspectingly about the French painters and painting as if he were inspired by Goebbels himself: he expanded on the concept of “entartete Kunst” (degenerate art) with the notion of the “entarteter Künstler.” He spoke of the degenerate artist who lived outside of society, was indifferent to the struggles of millions, was decadent, sickly, in a word, rotten. This is a question on which Vorms does not tolerate nonsense. As soon as Beskin finished his talk, Pierre—as Mira told it—went up to him quite indignantly and took him to account, listing for him a dozen French painters, his

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personal friends, who are all communists, active and self-sacrificing antifascists, and well-known names in today’s French art scene. Beskin, who speaks French quite well, became veritably frightened. He took Pierre aside, just like Comrade X did with me, and assured him that he personally doesn’t believe anything from the talk that he had just made in public, after all, he is no fool. He had had an opportunity to meet these painters in Paris and he is in awe of them and of their art—“mais que voulez-vous, mon vieux . . .” (but what can I do, my old friend)—and he laughed (Vorms told us himself) innocently and with good humor. This is something more than just cynicism: I’m beginning to believe that there is a stage of decay which is accompanied by a sense of innocence. Still, it is disturbing to think that there are people, and many of them here in the Soviet Union, whom you feel like taking aside to a corner after hearing them talk for a half-hour and asking, “but what do you really think?” By the way, Pierre, after having visited the studios of several eminent Soviet artists—including that of Shadr—gave up on his plan to show their work in Paris. It is also true that Pierre found little enthusiasm here for mounting an exhibit of French works in Moscow. I am reading Platonov’s History of Russia and have learned much from it. 2 It is not enough to be familiar with the events of the last two decades. You have to keep the whole history of the Russian Empire in mind if you want to correctly see, understand, and evaluate the present, which is in many ways incomprehensible without a knowledge of the past. It is true that the Revolution meant a leap. But this Hegelian-Marxist terminology is only partially helpful in designating the qualitative change that took place. No matter how essentially new in quality may be what started with this leap; the past leapt along with the people, with their cultures: the past does not remain back on the other side, it comes along and continues on. [. . .] M just called me from the hospital: today’s Pravda reports that Barbusse is dead. September 1 [Sinkó evaluates Barbusse and considers his best work to have been his nonfictional reportage on the Macedonian civil war taking place since the end of the War.] In connection with this: the cultural authorities here are constantly demanding work related to today’s problems, but under the rubric of contemporary issues no one ever touches on real problems. And I am convinced that every great work of literature was born from an effort to deal with the most current problems of its time. [Pravda turned the obituary of Barbusse, who died suddenly while in Moscow on August 30, 1935, into a tribute to Stalin. Sinkó quotes:]

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“Barbusse’s last great work, Stalin, is dedicated to the great leader of the world proletariat and of every working man, the brilliant helmsman of the socialist revolution, before whom Barbusse bowed down and in whom he was right to see mankind’s liberator.” It is possible that Kurella could excuse this. He would also explain how one can reconcile with Marxist theory and, in general with the demands of normal human understanding, anyone, any individual calling himself such revolting drivel as the “liberator of mankind” and, no less, in a newspaper that is printed under his personal supervision. [. . .] Acquaintance with “Kutya” [which means dog in Hungarian]. I don’t know her real name; those who don’t speak Hungarian and don’t know how distasteful it is to use this word as a name for a young woman call her that. Her husband gave her this nickname, and of course he is Hungarian. There is some perverse humility in how this former Komsomol member—a darkhaired, skinny, run-down creature who, perhaps as recently as a few years ago, might have been good-looking, indeed, very good-looking—has found this name to be an adequate expression of herself and uses it everywhere. She is a Russian Jewess, but speaks French well. In contrast to her, her husband looks like a well-fed bon vivant, a showy young man; he dresses with much more care than she does and resembles Silvio, also his friend, in that he, too, would like to do “creative work,” though in his case, he lacks a definite profession. By all signs it seems that the only one bringing in any money at this moment is Kutya, a photographer. [Kutya, who makes photographs of the Party leaders, including the president of the Soviet Union, Kalinin, describes how the pictures are always staged and if necessary, touched up to make sure that the subjects are always well-coifed and their ties straight. Kalinin, whose function was largely ceremonial, also served as a sort of complaint office for the country. Some of Kutya’s pictures show him, looking like a bearded “elder Zosima” from Dostoyevsky, listening with good-natured attentiveness to the complaints of an aged, bent, peasant woman.] Yesterday was the “Day of Youth” celebration. The magnitude surpassed anything I could have imagined. The streets and boulevards were flooded not by a “stream of humanity” but by an ocean. Thousands upon tens of thousands of Stalin pictures, flags, signs, like sails above people’s heads, and every house decorated in red! And to think, that today, this same spectacle takes place in every city where people live in this endless empire! Never before in the history of the world has a single party or a state been able to mobilize so many people with a single wave of its hand, all carrying the same pictures, flags, and slogans ordered from the same central point. Naturally, such masses cannot be, as far as their thinking goes, “conscious” revolutionary masses. But the important thing is that the power which controls them and gives them a direction, does so in the name of slogans which in other

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parts of the world would lead to jail and then to the gallows. Yes, it’s an ocean, and just like when I see the ocean I am filled with awe and at the same time dread. [Sinkó’s dealings with Bork and with Anisimov continue to stall. In fact, much to Sinkó’s distress, Anisimov informs him without a trace of regret that the reader will not be finished reading his manuscript for another ten days and by then, Anisimov will no longer have to make a decision, because Yonov will be back and it will be his task to do so. Sinkó comments wryly that he will probably have to start all over again.] Soon the family whose room in Trubnaya we have been “enjoying” will also be back from vacation. Along with other problems, we will now be faced with the problem of shelter, which is, after all, a necessity. In response to this threatening change, the frizorka (hairdresser)—who until now has “paid” for her sleeping space (which was mostly placed in the hallway) by means of what one could euphemistically call tidying up the house—has moved out, and her place was quickly taken by another domrabotnica (household worker). In Europe, she would be considered a beggar. She is around forty years old. At one time she was the wife of a prosperous German peasant near the Volga. She was having lunch with her family (her husband and two sons) when the officials appeared and informed them that they must go to the train station without delay where the train and engine are already waiting for them. They had to leave without being able to clean up. The potato soup with sausage (which is what they had cooked that day) was left on the table. At the railway station the long train was crowded with other peasants and their families, and they travelled for a long time until they arrived in Siberia. In their great hurry, they had not even brought a blanket. They had not been told where they were being sent and, even if they had known it, they probably would not have been allowed to bring anything other than what they were wearing at table. Her husband and two sons “did not return” from Siberia. She survived them. It was not entirely clear how she got to Moscow and I did not press her on it because I could see that the question made her uncomfortable. She has a German-language Bible. In addition to the clothes she is wearing, that is her entire property. September 3 I received an illustrative lesson on the difference between reality and the official ideology. This afternoon I was called for a discussion with the literary director of Mezhrabpom—Feldman’s boss—in regard to my screenplay. They explained that they had already given me an advance of 25 percent for my screenplay and it was now time to decide what the theme of the film would be. I had thought that this was already decided, since I had given them a Russian

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translation of the complete script and received the contract only after having discussed it with its future director. “The real topic will have to be decided today,” said Feldman. I proceeded to describe in detail my ideas about the already accepted script. My plan was to write about a young French woman, a recently licensed doctor, who settles in a small village expecting to lead an idyllic life. The village would be an exceptionally appropriate milieu for my heroine to encounter all those contradictions and conflicts of which she, having lived in a city among her books and noble intentions, is ignorant. [. . .] Feldman heard me out patiently to the end. [. . .] I listened to him in the same silent manner that he had listened to me, though in my case, not out of politeness. What he said surprised me so much that I did not even understand it at first. When I did finally understand, I was dumbstruck. [Feldman explained that Soviet audiences are tired of films] whose themes involve peasants, masses, and social conflict. They want nothing to do with films that have a semblance of propaganda. [He cited as a positive example to follow the recent hit Peter, a Hungarian/Austrian/American co-production starring the Hungarian actress Fraciska Gál. As a negative example, he mentioned Pudovkin’s Deserter, which was poetic and groundbreaking in terms of film technique but played to empty theaters.] In Moscow, the director of the Mezhrabpom said word for word the same thing to me that publisher Albin Michel had said to me in Paris when he was leafing through the manuscript of Optimists and saw the name of Liebknecht. The Soviet Union demands apolitical art! “People want individual complications, families, romance, adventure, and comic depictions; things that are cheerful, refreshing, and light-hearted.” I think the contrast between my long-faced expression and the description of the joyous and cheerful films that were in demand must have been striking because Feldman let out a laugh and then with his kind and warm smile said: “You may not be the right person for writing a comedy,” (he suddenly began to use the familiar form of address). “For that, you are too melancholy a man, aren’t you?” “A comedy writer does not need to be cheerful,” I said in objection. And so it happened. We agreed, having absorbed the lesson from the unparalleled success of Peter, that I would write a screenplay which takes place in Paris, in an intellectual milieu among writers, painters, and other such people. I was all the more prepared to do this because in fact, among my various papers, I have a sketch from my Parisian days when I was preoccupied with thoughts of a satire, a comedy about how one becomes a famous artist in Paris, a socalled world-class celebrity. I could not have believed it or even comprehended it, had I not ended up here but stayed in Paris, if someone had said to me that today—when mankind is staring into the face of war the way that a bird, paralyzed by fear,

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stares at a mercilessly approaching boa constrictor; when the fact that there exists (the mere fact that there can exist) such a thing as fascism as a life form, which demands from us that we exert every ounce of our strength against it; when we must feel sometimes that it is not to our credit, indeed, that it is a betrayal, to think of other things than the necessary task—that today, in Moscow, the director of the Mezhrabpom is looking for an apolitical screenplay, one that should be modeled on the carefree film Peter. I would not have believed this from anyone. Clearly, this is not a matter of personal taste or opinion but a general trend whose official manifestation is what happens at the conclusion of the Kremlin congresses: everyone sings the operetta march of Happy-Go-Lucky Guys 3 in the presence of the entire government, including Stalin. Living here, one can find the explanation for what would seem incomprehensible, indeed, unimaginable when viewed from Paris. I have spoken much to people from here who have experienced the horrors of the Civil War. And only a person who has heard these innumerable detailed stories [. . .] can fully appreciate that even the power of Shakespearean fantasy and language would not suffice to describe the bloodshed, horror, and suffering that this land, these cities, and villages have suffered. And something else that I have learned only since I have been here: the price in blood and in the varied and extreme forms of suffering incurred for the “social transformation” whose cold, official name is “collectivization of agriculture,” was by no means less than that incurred in the era of the first years of the Revolution, the armed interventions of foreign powers, and of the Civil War. Masses consisting of millions, of more than a hundred million people cannot remain in the paroxysm of revolutionary fervor for eighteen years. Inevitably, they experience a sort of choking exhaustion. They want a relaxation of tension, to think of something else, or rather, not to think about anything, and if this is not possible at other times, then at least in their private hours of rest they don’t want to hear about demonstrations, the masses, or the struggle. All this would be just fine if alongside this mental state and as its contradiction, there did not stand the plight of Europe’s proletariat, just about to begin its climb to Golgotha. Here, in any case, they are acting as if for those who live here the revolution were over and is complete. Here, even at the top, they are trying to suggest that for those living here, the post-victory era has begun; rather than the era of the anthem Internationale, it is the era of the Happy-Go-Lucky Guys. Yet, it is as if all this whistling derives not so much from the happiness of the population as from the intention to induce a happiness in it. I spoke to Bork. Krebs has still not signed the contract. “But the publisher is out of cash in any case,” he adds, “so you haven’t lost anything by having to wait until next week.”

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September 7 [Sinkó lists his worries, chief among which are the need to find a place to live (“even if one as bed-bug ridden as the one we have now”) and the lack of income. Krebs, Bork’s superior at VEGAAR, keeps claiming that he has been too busy to sign the contract for the German-language publication of Optimists. Kun is sick and Sinkó doesn’t want to bother him. In his desperation, Sinkó writes to Romain Rolland, hoping for some help from that quarter.] September 11 Kun is on vacation, but Hajdu 4 came to visit me with the Hungarian text of Optimists under his arm, the same copy that has been making the rounds in the Hungarian Party since my arrival. And he brought me good news, of which, indeed, I had great need. Perhaps I am being sentimental—and if so, I see no shame in that—but the relationship of the Hungarian Party, particularly of Béla Kun, to my work as a writer is extremely important to me. For this reason, especially after receiving the critiques of Günther and Kurella, I have frequently thought with some trepidation about what kinds of changes the Hungarian comrades are going to demand from me out of practical, political considerations. And I have just heard the pleasant news that they have no such demands. Kun, via Hajdu, simply called my attention to some mistakes in dates, the topography of Budapest, and other similar, historically factual but essentially unimportant errors. Hajdu had another message from Kun as well: Kun thinks it best to publish the novel in Hungarian and French in Paris with a non-Party publisher but one paid to do so by VEGAAR. Since Vorms has fortunately not yet left Moscow, it would be best to arrange this matter through him. 5 Hajdu is going to speak about this matter to Krebs, who is in charge not only of the German editions at VEGAAR but also of all other languages. [Sinkó asks Hajdu to remind Krebs to sign the contract for the German edition which Krebs has apparently been too busy to sign. (See previous chapter.)] At night at Karcsi Garai’s. We had our coats on already, ready to leave, when I remembered that, after all, I am at a Hungarian home, and I asked Karcsi if he had any Hungarian books. “I am interested in anything that has been printed in Hungarian in the last fifteen years,” I told Karcsi. He sighed; he, too, misses being able to read Hungarian books. “I would even settle for something printed a hundred years ago,” and he sadly pointed to a pile of books on his bottom shelf. “That’s all I have . . .” The first book that I opened up was entitled Visegrad Street, 6 published in Moscow a few years ago by VEGAAR and written by the person whom I had

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called Sarkadi in Optimists. Standing as I was, I started to leaf through it and I noticed a chapter entitled “Judith and Judas.” Right under the title I saw the name of György Lukács and next to it, my name. Now, as I write this, the book is by my side. The author in this “reminiscence” makes Otto Korvin, who can no longer object [having been executed by the counter-revolution in 1919], to be his mouthpiece. The whole thing was obviously written to curry favor with those who at the time of the writing [1929] stood in opposition to Lukács, that is, in the first place with Béla Kun. Moreover, the author wanted to make up for the fact that at one time he himself—as he writes—had come under the influence of Lukács and indirectly, under my influence. He seeks to indict Lukács and to smear me, a one-time follower of Lukács. I see now how well I drew the figure of Sarkadi. What surprised me was not that it was he who had written it. But I was unprepared to meet with this kind of “literature” in Moscow. [. . .] September 18 [Sinkó is given a run-around by Krebs, who tells him to call him after 10:00 P.M. in his room at the Hotel Lux. Sinkó, increasingly frustrated, tries calling every ten minutes. He finally reaches Krebs at 1:40 A.M. and the fully awake Krebs tells him that he doesn’t have time to deal with the matter but he will instruct his subordinate, Wendt, to take care of it. He gives Sinkó Wendt’s phone number.] September 20 It seems that I have become jaded. I can see on Vorms’s face that the mode with which these literary hippopotami called directors or deputy directors deal with people and their works falls far from every human norm. I had earlier told Vorms with great pleasure about my telephone conversation with Wendt, who asked that Vorms and I go to see him and we would figure out together how to realize the matter of the Hungarian and French Parisian editions that Vorms is to arrange. Vorms readily accompanied me in the belief that the three of us would put our heads together and decide upon a plan. This is not what happened. . . . [An increasingly frustrated Sinkó is told by Wendt that he is only a subordinate and cannot do a thing without Krebs, that Sinkó must talk to Krebs, though that is now impossible because Krebs is incredibly busy. Sinkó asks that Wendt at least sign the contract for the German translation which has been agreed upon and describes his total penury. Wendt pleads inability to do anything without Krebs’s signature.]

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September 21 [The Kurellas return from their Caucasian vacation and find that their room in the Hotel Lux has been given to someone else. Kurella knows that this can mean serious personal danger, but nonetheless enquires about Sinkó’s situation as soon as he gets home. Sinkó is touched by this gesture of concern.] September 23 [. . .] I received a call today from the Comintern. “This is Comrade Kun’s assistant speaking. We have heard that you have still not been able to publish Optimists nor received an advance for it. We are very upset by the way you are being treated. If you have need of money, please come by; the Hungarian Party can give you a loan of a couple of hundred rubles. I am not sure who was at the phone—I have a feeling it was Huszti, 7 whom we used to call “your reverence” back in the [Viennese] barracks because with his clean-shaven face, sonorous voice, and slow, ceremonious movements he reminded us of a village priest. I was so surprised and moved by the friendly voice that I think I may have even forgotten to say thank you. And this is what we are living on now. I am referring not only to the money but to what their concern means to me in spirit, just when I was starting to lose all hope. Another no less pleasant experience. Our close friends have been warning us since our arrival that one cannot extend the residency permit forever. Foreigners are expected after being here a few months to decide if they are going to become Soviet citizens or not. They can keep their foreign passports, but in that case, they must leave the country. In any case, whenever I wanted to extend my residency permit, I had to do it through the Organization of Revolutionary Writers, that is, through that Comrade Apletin who has been leading me around by the nose about publishing a sample of my work in Litterature Internationale since my arrival in Moscow. This time, Comrade Apletin greeted me with a particularly sour expression and asked on what basis he should recommend the extension of my residency permit. In the end, he decided that he will not recommend me. Instead, he will convey the opinion that he receives from the Hungarian Party. He dialed the Party and asked them the question, upon which his face lit up and he told me that they support my request unconditionally. This made him so happy that he started once again to promise that the Littérature Internationale would publish chapter XI of Optimists very soon, “there being only a few minor formalities to be gotten out of the way.”

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[Steiner invited Sinkó and his wife to dinner along with two French writers, Luc Durtain and Charles Vildrac, as well as Vorms and his wife. Sinkó thinks that with their help, he is sure to be able to publish.] I find Vildrac a much more reliable, honest sort of person, and more serious as a revolutionary, than Durtain. The latter has a medical practice in Paris and literature is for him just a sort of gentlemanly hobby. It is characteristic of Durtain that on the basis of the two weeks that he has spent in Moscow, he plans to add a book on the Soviet Union to his other travel books written on the basis of similar short travels. Durtain is considered one of the preeminent French writers of our time. The fact that many people will be reading his book on the Soviet Union simply because of his reputation and believing that they are now really learning something about the Soviet Union makes me wonder. I discover time and again how much forged currency there is circulating in the well-respected Western literary market. If he writes his book, he will do it the same way that he wrote that letter addressed to Koltsov, the highest arbiter of the Soviet press and publishing, on my behalf. In this letter he speaks about me, from whom he has probably not read a single line, in the most brilliant superlatives of the French language, and uses similar superlatives to describe my works, especially “the ingenious novel, Optimists.” The sad thing is that I made use of the letter, and even sadder is that such a brief letter, lacking all personal conviction, helps more here than the 1200page manuscript which is its subject. The letter created a path for me into those heights which one can only describe as Olympian. On these heights those things that weigh upon, beat down, and choke us mortals are simply unknown, and for those who live up there all these evaporate at a single word or wave of the hand. And at the peak of this Olympus, Koltsov acts. He not only saw me right away but took action on the spot, or it seems like he will act in my interest. Perhaps if this had been the only letter of recommendation I was carrying, it would not have been so effective. But I happened to find another supporter among the same dinner guests, in the person of Jean Effel, the childlike caricaturist of the Canard Enchainé. He is just like his drawings: there is something in his essence that is adorably and arrestingly infantile. [. . .] Everyone is taken with him. Effel, once the others had explained my situation to him, took the first opportunity that he could to help me. This first opportunity is called Maria Osten, who is Koltsov’s wife. 8 One sign that the young, very beautiful Maria Osten belongs to the most envied Olympians here is that she is able to make a yearly trip to Paris from where she returns with so many suitcases as she needs to satisfy her ambition to be the most fashionably elegant woman in Moscow. They say she is also clever and well educated. I only had a chance to exchange a few words with her when Effel introduced us before she

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disappeared into his fancy car and they drove off. Such important foreign intellectuals as Jean, who looks more like a dreamy, skinny youth than a famous caricaturist, is only partially entrusted to the guardian angels of the VOKS (about whom incidentally Effel is preparing an entire, not exactly decent, in fact, quite immodest dissertation); rather it is Maria Osten who takes them under her wings; she dines them, takes them on outings, and it is her company that they enjoy at the theater and concerts. So, Maria Osten, at Effel’s intercession, interceded so that I could hand Luc Durtain’s letter to Koltsov in person. Koltsov, who is served not by a secretary but by a whole secretariat, is a skinny, thirtyish, short-statured man who takes your measure with short glances from behind gold-rimmed glasses through intelligent, slightly inflamed brown eyes. He seems for this place to be a pleasantly worldly presence judging from his ease and agility, and the freedom with which he speaks about people and things. He was genuinely surprised, indignant, and visibly angry (or so it seemed) after I told him about the slowness of Goslitizdat 9 and about how Krebs and Vendt made me run around in circles. He promised quick remediation. It seems that his office is a sort of central directorate, because like some master handyman, he just pushed a button on his desk and Tretyakov, President of the Soviet Writers’ Union, appeared, the same person whom I had been vainly chasing after for weeks since I met him at Rolland’s reception. And voilà, there he stood in all his length. Although Koltsov squeezed his hand in a friendly manner, but, strange to say, the author of the revolutionary drama Cry, China stood before Koltsov like an office clerk stands before his boss when he is summoned. Tretyakov remembered me and when Koltsov told him that he considered the sudden changes of fortune that the Optimists has been subjected to by Goslitizdat to be “shameful,” Tretyakov was quick to second him, telling him that during his visit to Moscow, Rolland also told him about the qualities of Optimists. He even said to me that I made a mistake in not turning to him earlier and he promised that he will immediately take the necessary steps at Goslitizdat. He offered to publish a chapter of the novel very soon in the journal Krasnaya Nov. 10 . . . Koltsov also asked me for a short excerpt from the novel for Ogonok, and in addition to what Tretyakov had promised, he would also call not Anisimov or Yonov—pronouncing their names with disdain—but their immediate superior, Liupold, yet another name added to the list of those in charge of my fate. Everyone tries to encourage me, saying that Koltsov is not the kind of person who lets a matter rest, but I just found out today that Liupold is on vacation until October 15th. Met with Feldmann at Mezhrabpom. I tried to convince him to make a film based on my script whose setting is the Hungarian White Terror. I showed him my outline but he was more interested—and he has made up his mind on this—on my apolitical satirical comedy, The Ad (Reklám). Its theme

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is how, in the culture market of the West, great careers and celebrated names come about not by dint of their true merit, but, quite on the contrary, from artificial “sensational” stories unrelated to their merits. It is odd that when this topic excited and attracted me, I was convinced that the concept of a market in literature was applicable only in Western conditions. Now that I have come to realize that it is not only about the careers of Western intellectuals that one can speak satirically, I find much less pleasure in the prospect of working on this theme. September 29 Nothing has happened that comes even close to answering such horribly banal and horribly urgent questions as: what will we eat, where will we live, and will we have the strength to survive until the case of Optimists is finally decided. And something else has popped up to in my mind: what if we cannot wait out the settlement of this case, what if it turns out that we cannot survive here financially? What then? Where do we travel from here? Where is the place where we are more likely to be able to feed ourselves? And there is another problem which at the moment seems to have no solution: where to find the money for our travel expenses. Among such circumstances, I am not inclined to be amused by the stories that the truly gentle Effel tells regarding his hotel-room adventures with the women of the VOKS and their mad infatuations with any sort of foreign clothing, even men’s underwear. [. . .] It is one thing to be a tourist here and to be amused by what is lacking here, or by what is a flaw, or even something grotesque, and quite a different matter to be here in order to find the positive answers to life’s decisive questions: because if not here, then where? There is an extraordinary talent with which some artists—and not only artists—can go through life like a tourist. I, on the contrary, carry my home on my back like a snail. I carry everywhere, and at all times, the weight of the fact that I have no homeland, or rather, that we (I can use the plural here) have no home. [. . .] It was in this mental state that I received a letter today from Romain Rolland’s wife. I am sure that her intention was not this, but, because of the conditions in which I am now living, the effect that some of her sentences, advice, and explanations had on me were those that Marie Antoinette’s naïve advice of “let them eat cake” must have had on the hungry rabble demanding bread. Her letter made me wonder. If she is trying to cheer me up and encourage me, why does she try to do this by ascribing my problems to “technical” difficulties when it is obvious that problems are not simply technical? Is she afraid to acknowledge the true causes wreaking havoc in my particular situation? One thing is for sure. In order to really be able to console someone, you

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have to be in a similarly difficult situation. Without this, the words of consolation cannot ring true. [Marie Rolland’s letter, written from Villeneuve on September 24, 1935, explains that Romain is too busy these days to write, having inherited the affairs of the anti-war and anti-fascist movements from the deceased Barbusse. She tries to counsel Sinkó to be patient, attributing the delay with the publication to the pre-existing commitments of the publishers, to the shortage of paper and the great number of writers among whom it must be allocated. She advises him to try to publish the book in two volumes, as her husband has done with several of his longer works. She promises that they will write to Gorky but cannot guarantee his help or his reaction. She also counsels patience with regards to their apartment situation, claiming that the overcrowding affects members of the Party as well and is a result of everyone having a right to decent housing which the country cannot immediately satisfy. Romain Rolland added the following post-script:] “I too say to you, my dear Sinkó, ‘patience!’ I am convinced that in a short while everything will work out well. It is encouraging that you have found certain important people who have shown sympathy for you and an interest in your novel. While you wait for the publication of your book, work on collecting material for the next one!” [. . .] NOTES 1. Frans Masereel (1889–1972) was a Flemish expressionist graphic artist who worked mostly in France. His woodcut novels focused on social problems in interwar Europe but also influenced artists working in that medium in China in the 1930s. He is considered one of the founders of the graphic novel. Politically, he was close to Rolland. He began as a pacifist during World War One. 2. Sergey Platonov (1860–1933) was a non-Marxist historian, highly respected for his archival studies on the repression of Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century and of the Time of Troubles in the seventeenth. He was allowed to work as an archivist until 1930, when he was arrested on charges of taking part in a monarchist plot, and exiled to Samara, in southern Russia, where he died. 3. Veselye Rebyata (1934) was the first Soviet musical comedy film. The policy of cheerfulness that began around this time is well documented, for example in Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Everyday Stalinism, Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times, Oxford, 1999, 90–95. 4. Pál Hajdu (1896–1938) was a journalist and an associate of Béla Kun since the formation of the Communist Party of Hungary in late 1918. He worked in various capacities within the Hungarian Communist Party in the Soviet Union from 1922 until his execution on trumpedup charges by the Soviets in January, 1938, seven months before Kun’s execution. 5. Considering that VEGAAR was a Comintern entity and Kun and Kurella still had ties, however tenuous, to the Comintern, this suggestion may have been made with the best of intentions at the time. Was it also a hint to Sinkó to return to France? 6. The work, Visegrádi utca, is a personal account of the Hungarian Soviet Republic by the novelist József Lengyel. It portrays Sinkó as a drunkard and a naïve dreamer, but at the same time, validates Sinkó’s claims about his leniency toward the counter-revolutionary rebels first

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in Kecskemét and later of the Ludovika military academy, as well as Sinkó’s turn to Christianity. (See the translator’s introduction). Sinkó never forgave Lengyel, though Lengyel spent two stints and over ten years in the Gulag after 1938. He returned to Hungary in 1955 and became an important, though increasingly controversial and critical writer there. His book From Beginning to End (Elejétől végig), published in 1962 (English translation, 1966), describes his Gulag experience. 7. Sinkó is referring to Ferenc Huszti (1893–1938), an ally of Kun, executed in Moscow in 1938, along with much of the Hungarian Communist Party. 8. In fact, Maria Osten, was Koltsov’s German-born mistress, Maria Gresshöner, whom Koltsov had met on one of his trips to Germany in 1932. Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome, 146. 9. State publishing house for literature. 10. Red Virgin Soil, an important “thick magazine” in the Soviet Union which gave voice to some of the top Soviet writers.

IV

Part IV

Chapter Twenty-One

Commentary on Three Months, which are Only Summarized by the Journal

Moscow, January 25, 1936 [Sinkó explains the absence of three months of diary entries. Although Koltsov and Tretyakov did not keep their promises regarding publishing chapters of Optimists in their journals, he did get a contract from Krebs at VEGAAR for a shortened version of the German edition. He and his wife worked feverishly for the last three months to shorten the work to fit onto 35 “parent sheets” bearing 40,000 characters each. Given that his original was 1200 typed pages, this was a considerable abridgement which involved rewriting entire chapters and having his wife retranslate them. He had received 25 percent of his commission up front but was in dire need of the next 35 percent which, by contract, would be given him after the manuscript was approved by the censors. He delivered the manuscript in January 1936. After the final censor, the manuscript was to go to an editor. “All this is like an accursed stairwell in which one never reaches the top but always encounters a new bend. Will I ever reach the end?”] [. . .] When this period was over, having completed the task before him, the writer set out to summarize in one diary entry [. . .] what he had neglected to do in over 120 days. But this summary, as we shall see below, is quite detailed. One could even call it thorough. Yet, there is something missing from it. The writer is not completely honest with himself. The young man in question does not say a word about the real reason for not being in the mood to maintain his journal. Yet, the answer to this question is essential to The Novel of a Novel. The author of Optimists wished so hard for his manuscript to be transubstantiat203

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ed into a book, and he himself fell so deeply into a trap in far-away Moscow, that the appearance of Optimists grew into the decisive question of his life. It was not just a matter of receiving payment; rather, the publication of Optimists was the only way that he could prove that Arosev, Grivtsov, Yonov, Anisimov, Bork, Apletin, and a whole legion of editors had been wrong to fear, and that they no longer needed to fear, making room for the author of Optimists in the circle of Soviet-friendly, revolutionary, publishable writers. And so it happened that the writer more or less committed treason. He betrayed himself and his novel, just so that it could be published. I do not know how the inner process of betrayal transpires with other traitors. It is possible that with other betrayals, too, sometimes the perpetrator, in order to hide his shame from himself, finds expressions that are less severe for what he is doing, at least for his own use. And he may succeed for a time in deluding himself. But he who has to sit for three months day after day until midnight with a stack of paper full of writing, and cross out words and sentences or rewrite pages and chapters that he had penned in a fevered devotion only a short time ago—and to do this not because he believes that this time he can create something better, more beautiful, or closer to the truth but because he must—he has no chance to fool himself. He must feel that he is submitting to externally imposed requirements and that what he is doing is the result of a shameful compromise that he performs without inner conviction and against his own better judgment just so that others will be satisfied with him. When I reflect today on what I had tried to do once—as it turned out, without sufficient zeal, hence without success—and hundreds and thousands of other writers whose calling should be to tell the truth do successfully throughout their lives, then I understand how that wonderful Russian literature that in the nineteenth century decisively influenced world literature and in the first years after the Revolution was the most interesting literature in the world, being the world’s most vital and brave, turned after Lenin’s death into an increasingly cowed, well-behaved, and finally mostly grey, uniformed regime-literature. The contract that VEGAAR made with me was no exception. I was treated no worse than anyone else who receives a contract there. My contract was a printed, nearly filled-out, standard form with only the writer’s name, the manuscript’s title, the date, the number of parent sheets, and the amount of the payment to be filled in with a typewriter. For this reason, it will not be uninteresting if I quote its fourth paragraph verbatim, which exposes the writer, or rather the work of the writer, to the whims of the publisher. “4. VEGAAR will consider the manuscript complete when: It is delivered on time in two copies [. . .]; It is not rejected within a month by VEGAAR [. . .]. If VEGAAR requires revisions to the submitted manuscript, these must be performed to VEGAAR’s satisfaction by the author within the timeframe

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determined by VEGAAR. [If VEGAAR is not satisfied with these changes, it has the right to void the contract and not pay the earlier agreed sum.]” Literature which is “manufactured” under such conditions brings to the fore those writers who have the least original messages and the least to sacrifice, those who have the least individual formats and styles and hence are capable of successfully, indeed, with a spirited diligence adapting themselves to every externally imposed requirement. Naturally, this is true not only for literature but for all the arts and for all kinds of intellectual products. [Feldmann disappeared at the Mezhrabpom. His place was been taken by a Hungarian, named Gold, who was willing to make a film of Sinkó’s screenplay The Ad (Reklám) but insisted that in light of recent political developments, Sinkó should weave into this satire about Parisian intellectuals a subplot about striking French miners. Sinkó refused, and the project came to an end. Gold was decent enough to pay Sinkó 4,500 rubles for the work that he had already completed. At this time, Sinkó also received a commission from the Hungarian Communist Party for a series of weekly presentations in the Hungarian-language broadcasts of Radio Moscow. The first talk was about his impressions abroad the Vitebsk-Chapaev on his way to the USSR. Sinkó was extremely happy about this opportunity to address his fellow countrymen for the first time since 1919 in his native language, “in the language of my dreams.”] I don’t know if others have this experience as often as I do but sometimes I look at a person, not thinking of anything else than that person, and suddenly, through that person I am shocked to see myself—or if not exactly myself, then something essential about myself. That night before the microphone of the Moscow radio station when I tasted the premonition of victory, that same night, in that very hour, I had to confront the realization of the shipwreck called emigration. It was revealed to me oddly by the joy that can come from so modest a recompense as the permission to stand before a blind microphone and to read a fixed, previously censored text for a quarter of an hour. I saw how living in emigration had degraded hope; I saw a man who had been degraded into a ravaged and deformed shadow of his former self. That is, just as I finished reading my text, a worn-out old fighter holding his own text in his hand, with graying hair combed back and a sickly pallor, came to the mike. It was Dezső Bokányi. I first met Bokányi before the First World War, in 1913 in Szabadka. I was still an adolescent at that time. I walked with a small delegation from the Workers’ Home of Szabadka—accompanied by a larger contingent of police—to greet Bokányi at the rail station. From there, we marched through Kossuth Street, with the evening promenade already in full swing, to the overcrowded Workers’ Home, where, in the presence of a uniformed Hun-

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garian police officer, Bokányi, as the emissary of the Social Democratic Party from Budapest, held a speech about how István Tisza 1 must decide: he will either grant to his people universal, secret, equal suffrage or watch as the people attain that right using their own methods. [. . .] I even remember that he quoted Petőfi’s poem about the peasant rebellion led by György Dózsa. [. . .] The police officer, sitting next to the presiding Dr. Dezső Forgács at the small brown table, would often rise to object and to warn the speaker to moderate himself, or he would disperse the meeting. At each such intervention, Bokányi would turn to him as if surprised, raise his hand to smooth back his thick, brown hair while with the other one, he calmly twisted his mustache between his thumb and index finger as if about to sit down to enjoy a meal, and would make a comment over his shoulder that would bring the crowd to roar with laughter or buzz with anger; it seemed as if he had the power to make even the police officer laugh, or, with a glance, to have him thrown out or even torn to pieces. When it seemed that the latter was about to happen, he would just stretch out his arm—meanwhile, his starched white cuffs would be revealed—and at one word from him, the crowd would fall silent, and his warmly ringing, powerful voice, like an organ at a celebration, would enrapture his audience to a man. [. . .] But now [. . .] we waited together for the transmission to start; at this late hour, he was visibly tired. We chatted. [. . .] He obviously did not remember me, the teenager from Szabadka. [. . .] He said that Hungarians everywhere listen to our broadcasts, even the bourgeoisie, indeed, unfortunately mostly they, since the workers don’t have radios. As evidence, he mentioned that he had recently read the book of a very talented writer living in Hungary; if I remember correctly, it was Sándor Márai. The author described the wellknown common habits of the typical Budapest bourgeois, among which he lists, with a bit of satirical tone, that every Monday, feeling a slight frission while at the same time enjoying his own security, he makes a ritual of tuning his radio to Moscow at the appointed night-time hour and listens to the “Red” broadcast in Hungarian. [. . .] When it was his turn to speak, I hardly paid attention at first, being busy with my own thoughts about my first Hungarian-language radio performance, but suddenly I noticed his voice, which seemed not to be coming from the tired, broken, old man with whom I had just been chatting. Soon, it was no longer the voice that intrigued me but the gestures accompanying the words. I was unable to listen to the words or what they meant. I have no idea what he said. It was the spectacle that engraved itself upon my memory; a man who has been speaking for years on Moscow Radio’s Hungarian-language broadcast stands before the unseeing mike, holding the paper from which he is reading, and I see how he at times stands erect, at times throws

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his head defiantly back, or leans forward as if he wanted to throw himself into a throbbing crowd that stands before him [. . .]. When it is over, the man who had been glowing just before in the rapture of activity or of its illusion, suddenly, before my very eyes, falls back into the tired, worn-out, sad, grey old man, as if an invisible stage-director had turned out the spotlight. [. . .] [Sinkó delivered two more talks before January 25, 1936. The second one was about the Russian New Year. It was in 1936 that the fashion of “Christmas trees” was revived. This broadcast, as he later learned, had been heard by his parents. The third broadcast was about Romain Rolland at 70. But the naïve joy of participating in these broadcasts would never return after he had witnessed Bokányi, the former “tribune of the people” waving his arms in what must have appeared comical to those who had not known the older man in his prime. Sinkó also mentions that it was around this time that his younger sister, Boriska (Barbara), had moved to Moscow. She was a sculptor who, unlike Sinkó, was an enthusiastic member first of the French and then of the German Communist Party. She was disappointed when she was not allowed to join the Soviet party, though she had declared her intention to settle there permanently.] The other and extraordinarily important change in our external circumstances: when it seemed no longer possible to delay the move from our Trubnaya street room and we had no means of finding any shelter, there was a sudden fortunate twist to this seemingly unsolvable problem and—like so many other times before—it was an unexpected friendly hand that provided a solution that exceeding our every expectation. That is, Steiner had to travel to Vienna on some personal business and from his rather large circle of friends he chose us to guard and to enjoy his home. Without this, we could hardly have completed the monstrous work on Optimists on time. After all, M worked in the cancer institute and came home at six in the evening, at which point we had dinner and then we worked on the abridgement and on the retranslation of the revised parts until we dropped. We did this work here at Steiner’s apartment. The ground-floor apartment, which looks out on a little garden, consists of two handsome and rather spacious rooms plus a wellequipped kitchen, bath, and maid’s room. Steiner had gradually furnished this apartment with valuable furniture during his many years in Moscow. There is everything in this home, comfortable by not just Moscow standards, including a desk, which I have not had for a long time. We temporarily inherited Mariya Nikolaevna, his elderly cook; Minna, a young maid who hales from the Volga German region; as well as a handsome, large, black, gentle dog named Daisy who was to be my constant companion. There is something provincially peaceful in this Bolshoi Lane that could well pass for one of Zombor’s larger side streets. 2 This two-story little house in which we live was built during the NEP period as a family home. Only the

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ground floor has a kitchen and a maid’s room and there is a spiral staircase in the entry hallway from which one can ascend to the second story. Steiner’s friend Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel, the great master of the Russia novella, the author of Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories, had moved into the second floor of this house at the same time as Steiner. Together, they enjoyed what is a rare privilege here, not only to have a quiet apartment, but to have no one else besides the two of them living in the house, except for the caretaker at the back of the yard. Babel and Steiner shared the costs of the elderly cook who kept house for them and of the maid who kept their apartments tidy. They also shared the telephone; while there was a phone in each apartment, there was only one line. Babel accepted Steiner’s proposal that in his absence Babel should carry on the shared arrangements with us, and there was every indication that the great fortune that had befallen us—the very pleasant and beautiful apartment, the comfort, unparalleled since our wanderings had begun—would be crowned by an even greater stroke of fortune: the sympathy of that occasionally charmingly kind, warm, witty, and profound person, Babel. Our friendship did not spring up with such suddenness as had happened between Steiner and us, but the more we got to know each other, with time, this sympathy, paired with increasing confidence in each other, deepened into friendship. We had been living here for days but, lest he feel that sharing a house with us is burdensome for him, we avoided even the appearance of trying to make his closer acquaintance. If someone called me on the telephone and he picked it up, he would shout down to me: “Ervin Izidorovich, telephone,” and similarly [. . .] I would yell up to him: “Isaac Emmanuilovich!” If he were not at home, I would tell him who had called. For a while our contact consisted of this and, on the weekends, of evenly dividing up the shopping bills that the old cook presented to us. We divided the costs into two equal parts because he was also not alone. His twentyyear-younger girlfriend, the good-looking, slender Antonina Nikolaevna, 3 who came to Moscow from some God-forsaken place in Siberia, lived with him. By profession, she was an engineer. I have never seen anyone enjoy with such intensity the good fortune that frequent visits to her tailor and new clothes meant for her. Our friendship with Babel began one night, or more precisely, around two past midnight. He, too, worked at night and he had the curious custom that when everyone else in the house was asleep, he would descend the stairs silently—to the extent that his already overweight frame would allow—and, as if afraid of being found out, glide into the pantry off the kitchen, select one of the masterpieces made by the old cook, preferably a specialty prepared in the style of his native Odessa, and begin to eat. It was on such an occasion, at two in the morning, that he stopped before our door and hearing the

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clicking of the typewriter, knocked, stuck his shiny bald head into the crack of the open door, and with his index finger to his lips, beckoned M and me to join him in the kitchen. This was the first time I saw him this way: his shirt unbuttoned at his thick neck; his audible, asthmatic breathing; a femininely small, snub nose on his round face, like that of a vizsla, as if constantly sniffing, smelling; his serious, dark eyes twinkling from behind thick glasses—and he is explaining that good people like to eat and in whispers he is recommending and offering the joys of such night-time culinary expeditions. We remained in the kitchen for a long time and talked about many things. No doubt the confidential, sincere, indeed, intimate nature and mood of our conversation was due in part to the need to keep our voices down so as not to awaken Minna, sleeping next to the kitchen. Sometimes, Babel, who kept indicating to me that I should speak even more quietly, burst into loud laughter. Without warning, he would say something whose neat formulation would make him glad, then he would be silent for a moment as if surprised, and in the next moment he would break into joyful and self-satisfied laughter. He told me that he grew up in a well-off Jewish bourgeois family in Odessa, that he had attended a Talmud school, and when he moved to St. Petersburg, he had to hide from the police because at that time Jews were not yet allowed to settle in the capital. This is when he took his first novella to Gorky in which he described how he survived a pogrom during his childhood. He had been preparing for this visit for a long time and he kept putting it off because whenever it was time to go, in fact, when he was already on the way, he would discover more and more flaws in his novella. He revised it innumerable times, re-crafting it, polishing it, until he finally not only set off but resolved to go through with it. (He has since maintained this style of working.) Even now he pronounces Gorky’s name with a religious awe which strikes me as odd because his otherwise biting wit is one of his dominant characteristics. There is something of the French rationalist about him, as if the spirit of Rabelais were inspiring him. We are getting to know each other; he is reminiscing, and then suddenly, without a transition, he interrupts his own story, looks at me, strikes his high forehead and says: “But Ervin Izidorovich, how can someone pile up as many impossible attributes as you have. To be Hungarian is in itself a misfortune, but somehow one can live with that. To be Hungarian and Jewish, now that’s a bit too much. To be Hungarian, Jewish, and a communist writer, that’s real perversity. But to be Hungarian, Jewish, a communist writer, and a Yugoslav citizen, compared to this the fantasies of the departed Sacher-Masoch are simply innocent lapdogs!” He has to remove his glasses, he is laughing so hard. I have never seen a man laugh in such a way, actually with his whole body.

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He is one of those people who can be very lively, indeed colorful, when he talks, and it is evident that he enjoys doing so. [. . .] But his stories are not ends in themselves; they throw a sharp light onto the larger point that he is trying to make. For example, we were talking about the period of collectivization. To illustrate what it was like then, he told me that he was visiting some Ukrainian towns that were quite familiar to him but the faces that he saw, and even the houses (which of course stood in their places), indeed the whole landscape, seemed to him like some kind of hallucination. And he himself did not know why. Then one night it was just that silence, that choking silence, that completely unlikely silence that woke him from his dream, and he realized that for days he had been going from town to town and had not heard the bark of a single dog. These were towns where not only the cows, pigs, fowls had disappeared but also the dogs. There were no living animals. He suddenly heard that he was not hearing the barking of dogs. Everything indicates that this night will be the beginning of a true friendship. NOTES 1. Hungarian prime minister at the outbreak of World War I. 2. Zombor (today’s Sombor, Serbia) was a small provincial city in Southern Hungary, near to, but smaller than, the Szabadka where Sinkó grew up. 3. Pirozhkova (1909–2010). In her memoirs, At His Side, The Last Years of Isaac Babel, (South Royalton, Vt. : Steerforth, 1998), she remembers Sinkó, though in not as positive a light as he remembers her. Although Sinkó calls her Babel’s girlfriend, she was more than that. They were not formally married but she was for practical purposes, his third wife. They also had a child together, born soon after Sinkó left.

Chapter Twenty-Two

“Degenerate Art”

January 29 Oh, Life is no great joy Anywhere. But one can still be amazed . . . 1

[. . .] Thanks to Babel, one of those privileged ones who can subscribe to Pravda, I am able to read the paper in my room in the morning, and yesterday morning I found an article in a prominent part of the paper with a headline in large letters: “Wild Noise Instead of Music.” 2 It is evident from the first lines that it is the music of Shostakovich, his opera based on the novella of Leskov, that the article brands as wild noise: the opera which has been showing day after day in Moscow to a full house ever since our arrival in Moscow, the one to which we could not have gotten tickets without the active aid of Comrade Arosev, the one—that pride of Soviet art music—to which Koltsov has been dispatching every prominent foreign guest, as if on a pilgrimage, in the company of Maria Osten. An opera that until now I have only heard described with admiration, is labeled by Pravda as “wild noise.” The official paper, Pravda, writes about this piece—or against this piece— with a vehemence reserved until now for their worst political enemies. [The critique by Pravda demands that instead of obsequious praise, the young composer should be told the truth about his work so that he can produce music that the recently educated audience demands. “This unbridled ‘leftism’ (is given to us) in place of natural, human music. The ability of good music to grip the masses is here made a victim to petit-bourgeois formalistic attempts, to a crabbed striving at fake originality. This toying with serious things can have a bad ending.”] 211

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This threatening last sentence is only an introduction to the second part of the article which arrays a number of authoritative-sounding complaints against Shostakovich. These complaints clearly confirm my earlier observation that the dominant characteristic of today’s Soviet mentality is that any enthusiasm that could challenge heaven, that is, the demonic element in which Hamlet and Faust reveled, is forbidden. What the French bourgeoisie calls “bon sens” (good sense) is here christened “good music, commonly understandable, natural, and human,” and “a struggle against naturalism.” This article, setting out and mandating a program, demands no less than that Shostakovich should adopt as his own ideal the inhumanly unproblematic and self-satisfied emptiness of Shadr, that “Michelangelo of Modern Times.” What is most disturbing [. . .] is the apparent contamination of the terminology used here by the artistic views of German National Socialism. Today, all Soviet newspapers reprinted Pravda’s article from yesterday. It must have felt strange for the German comrades who translated the article for the Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung to have to use the words “Entartete Kunst,” the words of Goebbels which sound even more ominous here. [. . .] Pravda claims to speak in the name of the Soviet audience, though that public has been spellbound day after day for who knows how long by the magic of this sincerely artistic production, a piece that truly stands out as unique from the series of saccharine, false, “monumentally realistic” kitsch. [. . .] January 30 [Sinkó is rereading Tolstoy’s War and Peace and finds it to be outdated in parts. He has come to appreciate Dostoyevsky’s critique of Tolstoy’s works as the “literature of the landlords.” Sinkó draws the lesson from this that your social position inevitably influences your perceptions of reality.] I record this here for my own education, because I still have not been able to get over the disagreeable feelings induced in me by the Pravda article and by the fact that after the appearance of the article, Shostakovich’s opera was immediately taken off the stage. The style of the article reminded me of the demeanor and attitude with which István Tisza went to Sarajevo to “negotiate” with the Serbians: with a horsewhip and a lash in his hand. At the same time, I ask myself suspiciously: Is it not my own subjective, intellectual, and artistic point of view that leads me to condemn the whole system, to negatively affect my relationship to the whole system on the basis of one presumptuously critical article? How many hundreds of thousands of

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workers or peasants are there in this Soviet Union of millions and tens of millions of workers who have even read this article and how many such workers or peasants could there be who would be upset by this article? And if I now, for the third day in a row, cannot think of anything else, or even when thinking of something else, cannot get over the shock of this article, is this not a result of my own “professional” narrow point of view? [. . .] Lenin was right in his letter of August 31, 1919, to the despairing Gorky, who had teetered in his faith, indeed, become disillusioned by the revolution: “You must change the position from which you observe the events. Otherwise, you will not see what is essential and what is, despite all, uplifting.” We must change the angle from which we judge so that we do not feel, as Gorky did at that point, that “to live today is not only difficult, but in every way repugnant.” January 31 Babel surprised me with the news that he called the editor of Krasnaya Nov to convince him to publish my “confessions,” those that appeared in Europe. 3 He told me that he was on the phone for half an hour. He prepared the editor for my various heretical feelings and thoughts lest he become extremely frightened from the start. Krasnaya Nov has already sent someone here for the Russian translation. Babel thinks there is a seventy percent chance that it will be published. He thinks it would be important to publish this because it would open a path to the publication of Optimists in Russian. “Once someone takes the first step, others, seeing that no ill has come of it, will also be ‘brave.’” But this is precisely the problem. Someone must take the first step. Dinamov, to whom Apletin gave the manuscript, [. . .] returned it with pompous, large exclamation marks in the margins, especially on those pages describing the role played by the Lenin Boys during the time of the Hungarian Commune. This is the same man who said to me: “Don’t misunderstand. Even if I don’t publish it, I personally read it with great enjoyment and excitement.” Vágó was here for dinner tonight. You would think that everyone who might count as an intellectual would be talking about the Pravda article. Instead, everyone acts as if they were not surprised by it. If I mention it, they raise their eyebrows a bit—and then start talking about something else, preferably something unconnected to current events. It is incredible to what extent all those who have lived here for a while have become “trained.” This goes for Vágó, too, whom, back then in the old days, I had liked so much for his temperament, so suited to his folksy Kecskemét accent. I still like him and I am grateful to him for tonight. He has no idea how relevant I found the things that he was talking about for the drama I am working on. 4 He wandered into the distant past to talk about the former leaders of the Hungarian

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working class, how they got started, those same leaders whose names were later identical with the concepts of servility and betrayal. 5 He talked about the salon of the Pollacseks 6 where Dr. David Papp, having just returned from studies in France, sat down at the piano to introduce the audience to a song that striking French workers were singing instead of the Marseillaise. It was the Internationale. [. . .] Béla Kun is seriously ill. He is in the Kremlin hospital where it is impossible to visit him. February 1 [. . . T]he campaign against “egalitarianism” has begun. [. . .] They celebrate those who have money. The assumption is that those with money are members of that group about whom Stalin said at the Congress of the Stakhanovites that “they are the ones who will guarantee the future improvement in the cultural and technical level of the people [. . .] which will make possible the transition from socialism to communism [. . .].” The fault is not in the principle. It is the practice that is so repulsive. It is especially repulsive because it is justified in the phrases of socialism. My parents were bourgeois from tip to toe but it was taken for granted that the servants would eat the same food as their masters. I heard from Comrade Rác, the woman who had been coming to our house every day for two months as a typist, that at her publishing company, she and her manager eat together side by side every day in the company cafeteria. In line with the principle of “to each according to their contribution,” only the boss gets meat and baked sweets each day. 7 “It was strange at first, but in Russia one gets used to everything,” said Comrade Rác, who hales from Nagyvárad. 8 It doesn’t occur to the boss that he should offer her some of the meat or the cake, though she is sitting next to him eating only soup and cooked vegetables, and both are Hungarian emigrants and comrades. “Believe me,” says Rác, with a laugh, “it’s just a matter of getting used to it.” [. . .] So much is said about the “New Man” these days, yet I can’t help but find the courtesies of the former gentleman more appealing, more humane, than the New Man’s attitude. M tells me that it is the same way at the cancer institute. When she asked the nurses who bring the lunch for the doctors whether they ate the same food, they answered in amazement: “How can you imagine that?” The very-red-headed Fannina Halle, the author of Woman in the Soviet Union, at whose house in Vienna back then I had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of Steiner, has shown up again in Moscow. She was in the Caucasus to make notes for her book on a Jewish tribe, Mountain Jews

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(Bergjuden), that lives there. A mysterious man knocked on her hotel door at night in Baku. He asked her to carry a letter to a Moscow acquaintance of his. It was written on his forehead, says Fannina Halle, that he was a provocateur. He even came out to the railroad station to try to push the secretive letter on her. Fannina Halle, a native Russian speaker, also met a woman in Baku who washed dishes at the hotel. She worked at nights so that she would not have to leave her three young children home alone during the day. For her nighttime work she received dinner and 60 rubles a month. Who knows how many such silent martyrs there are? Must it be so? Must incomes be in proportion to one’s contribution? [. . .] If Stakhanovites can be pampered [. . .] could there not be a higher level at which others could be provided a more humane minimum existence? [. . .] What exists here today cannot be called socialism without degrading the humanity and purity of the socialist idea. February 2 [Sinkó met André Ribard, a member of the French Communist Party, who, to Sinkó’s annoyance, found everything to be perfect in the Soviet Union. “After a quarter of an hour, boredom, like a dark cloud, lay over the room.” Ribard related a conversation he had had with Pierre Laval (who had held the post of both prime minister and foreign minister of France in 1935 in which Laval had “shamelessly” told him that he had never visited the Soviet Union before 1935 though he had been there in 1919 as the deputy of the French Communist Party at the founding of the Third International. When Sinkó mentioned this to Babel, Babel compared Laval to Yagoda 9 for his ability to lie without compunction.) Sinkó’s wife took on additional hours at work so that the couple could make ends meet.] February 5 For days we have had absolutely no money. The shared housekeeping has become a trap for us. Because of Babel, we cannot dismiss our cook and our maid, though we eat less than they eat. It would be better to starve openly than to live thus at Babel’s expense. [. . .] We cannot move, because if we do, Steiner would lose his apartment; nor can we do it out of consideration for Babel, because he is not indifferent about who his co-tenants are. [. . .] I am beginning to understand what it is like when someone, simply because he cannot take it anymore, hangs himself. February 6

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[. . .] Karcsi Garai came to visit us in the evening with his wife. We have gotten together often since our arrival in Moscow and as usual, our evening started with a friendly but apparently obligatory argument. Karcsi, like Kurella, always reacts to everything that is painfully wrong here by saying that it is necessary. And he says this as if that were consoling, indeed encouraging! But the way I see it, it is I who am being an optimist when I am inclined to believe that [the essential problems here . . .] are due to the ordinary—or if we consider the extent, more than ordinary—mistakes of the leadership. And my way of looking at things is much more consoling than to think that the only way to reach socialism is through this current cult of individualistic advancement, individual conspicuous well-being, and social careerism. What kind of socialism is that in which the most basic feeling of solidarity with our fellow man and anything that reminds us of a collective spirit is declared to be a vestige of petty-bourgeois mentality? At the same time, the gap between a small elite is visibly growing and being encouraged to grow. [. . .] February 7 Some people are incapable of succeeding in life. I must be one of those. [Sinkó describes his latest frustrations with the editor of Litterature Internationale, Apletin, who has still not taken a stand on publishing chapter XI of Optimists in French, despite the recommendations of Kurella, Kun, and Pierre Herbart, the editor of the French version of the magazine. Yet, Apletin graciously does give Sinkó an advance and explains, “Do not misunderstand [. . .] You see what is going on with Shostakovich. One cannot be too careful.”] February 8 [Sinkó summarizes Pravda’s account of a meeting that took place on February 5–7 of the plenum of the Association of Leningrad Composers and Music Critics in response to Pravda’s article about Shostakovich discussed above. The plenum buckled under criticism and promised to change the way music would be composed henceforth.] February 9 The satirical magazine Krokodil, as well as the Literaturnaya Gazeta, repeatedly ask: Where is Babel, what is with him, why does he not produce anything? Sometimes jokingly, sometimes in the tones of indignant scolding, they ask for an explanation for his silence. And since our telephone is shared, whether I want to or not, I am witness to how he is called, entreated, indeed chased after by various publishers who would not have a word with me even

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if I begged. And Babel plays hide-and-seek with them: he denies being at home, sometimes he promises a manuscript only to later ask for another extension; he makes new promises, then gives premeditated excuses or comes up with new, or deploys his humor. It is in vain that he tries to shake them off. These publishers, editors, and institutions keep coming back day after day for something from his pen and they try to convince him by their persistence that he is needed here; they need him, just him, his person, his work, his very being they consider of public value. There is a certain place for him here, a place that he must fill, or it will remain empty. But I, a Hungarian writer, am as unnecessary to everyone in Soviet Russia as I was in France or Prigrevica-Sveti Ivan and Vienna. I have no place, because where I would have had one, in Hungary, well, my Hungary does not exist anymore. In contrast to Babel, in every hour of the day I have to strain to NOT believe that what I am doing is superfluous, that it is socially so uninteresting that it is, at best, tolerated, though it is felt to be unpleasant and burdensome. In that mood into which I tumbled after reading the article in Pravda about the Leningrad plenum, I admitted to Babel that it seems to me that he does not know how lucky he is to be able to complain that he is not left alone, that he is practically torn to pieces. This confession burst out of me during one of our customary midnight picnics. 10 A shared good mood may be a good occasion for joint amusements but it is only a shared sadness that opens us up to confide in each other. Even if it was not so much sorrow as a certain nervous bad mood that I noticed in Babel, he reciprocated my openness. He answered by saying that he understood my situation, but I did not understand his. I am mistaken if I think that I see his situation clearly. That is, not so much his situation as the possibilities before him. They call him, even ask him in public, question him, urge him on, demand an answer from him as to why he is not working—as if he weren’t working. “What else do I do but work from morning till night? I like the horses, true; I visit the horses, I spend a lot of time at the races, but that’s about it. The only other thing I like is working. And Paris, where it is so good to live! But now I have only the horses and work left. Just think, if they say to a musician, we are counting on you, yes, on your work—well, that sounds enviable, but only so long as we forget that those who are inviting you in this way, begging and trying to convince the musician for new works, have as their musical ideal Dunaevsky. 11 As long as I don’t publish, they can only accuse me of laziness. But if I were to publish, suddenly I would invoke a cascade of much more serious and dangerous accusations to fall upon my bald head. I am like the pretty girl at the ball who is asked by all for a dance—but I know that if I were to dance, all the guests at the dance would turn against me. [. . .] To dance at this ball the way that I dance—and I cannot

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dance otherwise—would count as provocative indecency, indeed as wild and pernicious precedent.” Putting his slightly bent index finger to his thick lips and leaning toward me, he says secretively, like one who is worried, “Among those who by word of mouth or in writing invite me to the dance, there are many who do it only because they know that as soon as I accept, at the start of the first waltz …” and, lifting his hand, laughing loudly and bitterly, he makes a motion like one who is waving farewell, and he finishes with the words “Addio mare!” 12 At this moment, it became clear to me: this man is frightened. And perhaps not only on occasion. And perhaps most of the time he is just pretending, for the benefit of others as well as himself, to be full of the joy of life. [. . .] Epilogue I longed to be a poet, Ripened, and inviting to the harvest The old beggar and the young rebel, And even the wealthy swindler. Girls, wives, all the people of the world Invited as guests into my song. The best of you, the worst, come all to my harvest. The heart, after all, is born a profligate, And I get drunk on those who get drunk on me. But like swelling clusters on a vine My bounty weighs on me heavily: Is there no mercy for me? Why are you late? Come, pluck my harvest. This is the relief I ache for. . . I wanted to be a poet, But no one partakes of my harvest. The golden vine wilts into brown, And weeds over weeds shroud the un-trodden path. With no one to drink, the well runs dry. Wasting, With no one to warm, the fire dies out. What will I become, what has become of me, Neither lyre, nor sling, Just a vagrant bird. With nowhere to fly, With nothing to live for, The world is my cage. 13

NOTES Entartete Kunst: a reference to the Nazi regime’s campaign against modern art, used ironically to reflect on the Soviet Union’s similar policy.

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1. “Oh, az élet nem nagy vigalom/ Sehol. De ámulni lehet . . .” Endre Ady from the 1907 poem “A Gare de l’Esten” (At the Gare de l’Est.). 2. The infamous Pravda headline that was applied to Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is usually translated into English as “Muddle Instead of Music,” but “wild noise” is closer to Sinkó’s Hungarian translation. 3. En face du juge. 4. Fourteen Days (Tizennégy nap). 5. Sinkó has in mind the leaders of the Social Democratic movement, many of whom were in opposition to the radicalism of the Hungarian Communists until foreign invasion drove them to fuse the two leftist parties. 6. The Polányis, Michael and Karl, both played important roles in the modernist movements of Hungary before the Hungarian Soviet Republic and later became prominent academics in the West. 7. While Marx spoke of communism as adhering to the principle of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” Lenin and socialists before him had changed this “to each according to their contribution” until the intermediate condition of socialism would lead to the state of communism, an economy of plenty. 8. A city formerly in Hungary (today’s Oradea, Romania) that had a large Jewish middle class in Sinkó’s childhood. It called itself “The Paris on the Körös [River].” 9. Genrikh Yagoda was the head of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, between July 1934 and September 1936, hence at the time that this diary entry is written. It is unlikely that Babel would have made such a statement at the time, though he might have after Yagoda was purged and Nikolai Yezhov took over the NKVD. Yezhov’s second wife, Yevgenia Freigenburg, was one of Babel’s lovers and the relationship, or at least the social friendship, continued even after she married Yezhov. In any case, the statement that Sinkó attributes to Babel in the February 2, 1936, entry of The Novel is not found in the published version of the Moscow diary itself. Yagoda was executed when Yezhov took over the NKVD, as Yezhov would be in 1938, when Beria took over the agency. 10. It might be worth noting that while Sinkó’s envy of Babel’s popularity with publishers is noted in his diary (under the February 17 entry), the conversation which he records here is not. 11. Isaac Dunaevsky (1900–1955), a popular composer at the time who wrote the score to the film Veselye rebyata, mentioned in the entry for September 3, 1935. 12. Italian: Goodbye to the sea. 13. Translated by George Deák and Stewart Alter.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Comrade Bukharin Must Correct His Views

February 10, 1936 I once said to Kurella: “It is as if, using the example of the model sentence ‘nulla dies sine linea’ (no day without a line), a new rule seems to have been put in place here, namely, that every day must bring a new surprise.” But he replied enthusiastically, “Yes, that’s exactly it. Life is incredibly dynamic here.” He went on to explain that those “up there” must constantly react to ever-newer demands because life is developing here at a tempestuous pace: demands that we down below can hardly understand. What sort of a demand elicited today’s surprise, a surprise that struck like a bombshell? What surprised me the most is that elsewhere, the greater the sensation, the more it is discussed, while here, even if the bomb explodes in the middle of an otherwise ordinary weekday, everyone acts as if they had not noticed a thing; no one even looks up or changes the state of a smile. They simply go on with their walk or conversation, quite heroically or like perfect actors, as if nothing had happened, as if everyone were actors on some huge stage before an invisible audience. About a rotten concept: this was the headline with which today’s Pravda served up the bracing lesson. The lesson teaches us that we never know at night to what we will wake up next morning. Not even the editor-in-chief of Izvestia, the largest newspaper alongside Pravda, can know this, even if he has the additional, higher-still distinction of bearing the name N. I. Bukharin. The Pravda article about the rotten concept treats the editor-in-chief of Izvestia as an angry, overbearing teacher would treat a little kid. He gives his ear a good yank and, after striking him hard with his stick, demands that after this public beating, he, the kid known as N. I. Bukharin, respectfully, immediate221

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ly, and publicly beg for pardon from the just, old teacher, because if he does not. . . . And then the kid, who is called N. I. Bukharin, is threatened not with another public caning but with a much more serious punishment. There is not a single sentence in the Pravda article which it would be hard, even for me, to prove that it is objectively false and that it is trying to compensate through harsh tones for the untenable weakness of its argument. How easily then could Bukharin tear apart, demolish the Pravda article, if he could enter into a debate through the newspaper of which he is the editor-inchief. But I have come to realize that it is not the spirit of objective truths, independent of time and place, that drives such passionate official positions as that of the Pravda article. [. . .] It is tactics, determined by the needs of practical politics. The occasion (or excuse) for the article (or rather, the diatribe) was provided by a commemorative piece that Bukharin had written on the anniversary of Lenin’s death in Izvestia on the twenty-first of last month, or more precisely, that in this essay Bukharin had described the old tsarist Russia before Lenin’s revolution as being dominated by the spirit of Oblomov, as being a nation of Oblomovs. 1 He even underlined the word nation. “Unformed, living at a low level of self-consciousness, sluggish in an Asiatic manner” were the words used by Bukharin to describe tsarist Russia and the Russian people of that time and these words are quoted by Pravda as examples and proofs of Bukharin’s “rotten conception.” Pravda references these descriptions but totally neglects the fact that Bukharin emphasized the negative aspects of the past so that he could highlight, in commemoration of Lenin’s death, Lenin’s greatness in transforming the old Russia into the Soviet Union and the old Asian giant into a giant which moves mountains from their places, changes the course of rivers, conjures fertile lands from the deserts, and amazes even its enemies in building a new world. Pravda [. . .] distorts the sole message of Bukharin, which is dedicated to the praise of Lenin. There is no writer on whose head it would not be possible to call down the most horrible curses with such misquoting. [. . .] As heartwarming as it was when Dimitrov said before the German fascist court that he was proud to call himself “a son of the Bulgarian people,” it is repugnant and astonishing when Pravda, using Lenin’s words out of context and deploying many Stalin quotes, tries to prove that in the Soviet Union socialism demands the inviolability of pride in the old Russian nation. All pride is foolish but surely that pride is the most foolish and contrary to Marxism-Leninism, or simply to common sense and today’s reality, which is based on the color of one’s skin, or whether my native tongue happens to be French and not Russian, or vice-versa, Russian and not French. I cannot understand and will never be able to understand why someone who is free of this most grievous sickness of today’s civilization can—in the Soviet Union (we are not in Germany)—be accused of rottenness.

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In addition, [. . .] Pravda also takes Bukharin to task for a lead article that appeared in Izvestia on the second of this month, picking out the following: “And the peoples for whom the word ‘Russian’ was not so long ago equivalent with ‘gendarme,’ ‘priest,’ ‘soldier,’ ‘punitive expedition,’ or ‘pillaging racketeer’ and with a politics which brought starvation, death, and the annihilation of national cultures . . .” Pravda ends the quote with these three dots, but I saw Bukharin’s article, where he goes on to contrast the methods of rule employed by the former Great-Russian nation—conquest, colonization, and plunder—with the Soviet reality of today. He points out that the proletarian revolution is in the process of subduing in short order the negative traditions of the past, its national hatreds, suspicions, and provincialisms. In their stead, it is creating everstronger bonds between the various, equally ranked peoples of the Soviet Union. [. . .] It is from reading today’s Pravda article that I understood why Pokrovsky’s 2 history of Russia is now considered to be so bad a book here that it has been removed even from the libraries. The strangest thing is how the concepts of nationalism and internationalism have been stood on their heads. [. . . Besides analyzing the “conceptual” sins of Bukharin] there is another, more personal conclusion in the Pravda article. It demands no less than that Bukharin make a public confession: what he considered internationalism is a rotten nationalist conception, and what he called a nationalist concept is a Marxist-Leninist one. “Comrade Bukharin must correct his ‘conception’ and we hope that he will do this as soon as possible and with utmost clarity.” And what if he does not do this? What if he is not convinced by Pravda’s article that his concept is rotten? What if Bukharin, whose developed sense of humor is well known, objects to Pravda’s statement that “our great nation deserves pride of place among the fraternal family of nations of the world because it has given such great leaders to the world as Lenin and Stalin.” What if Bukharin comes to the defense of the Georgian nation which the writer of the article is trying to rob of its well-deserved place at the front? 3 But Pravda (and this is not funny) is not interested in what Bukharin thinks. Pravda publicly commands—“by order of the chief” (par ordre du mufti)—[that Bukharin make a public retraction.] [. . .] I don’t have any doubt that in this affair, too, what Kurella calls “necessity” plays an important role. I am reminded of my conversation with Feldmann about the [foreign] film Peter with Francisca Gál. 4 There is a politically dangerous attraction to everything that is foreign here. There is a certain nostalgia that is kept alive and fed by the prohibition of foreign papers and of the impossibility of stepping outside of the Soviet borders. [. . .] This is what

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they wish to counteract from above by artificially inflating a sense of Russian confidence, self-respect, and pride. Perhaps this really is “necessary.” But is it possible to instill a sense of self-respect and pride into people through such humiliating brutality, by means of a cudgel? Could this goal not be reached with less shameful means that did not discredit and degrade the written word, when, after all, there is so much here of which one could be proud? That same night “It is good to sleep and even better to be made of stone As long as the agony and the shame remain . . .” (Caro m’è ‘l sonno e più l’esser di sasso,/ mentre che ‘l danno e la vergogna dura . . .) Michelangelo Buonarroti

Continuing where I left off this morning: there is much about which one could rightly be proud here; and not just for the Soviet citizen but for all mankind since we all have a stake in the success of the Soviet Union. But just as there is much to be proud of, there remain things that are shameful. “Remain?” The trouble is that these are not remnants of the past that have not yet been cleared away but new developments, newborn initiatives. [. . .] M was right: The invective against Shostakovich was just the beginning, and each day brings another dark, ominous threat, more dire than anything we could have imagined. The government has created a committee, the All Soviet Committee for Artistic Matters, whose task it is to direct the artistic “production” throughout the territory of the Soviet Union. Today’s issue of Vechernaya Moskva (Evening Moscow) gives an indication of the spirit in which this directing will occur. The president of this new committee, P. M. Kerzhentsev, gave a speech outlining his program before a plenum of the Central Directorate of Artistic Workers, convoked for this purpose. Kerzhentsev announced that he is now in charge of supervising the artistic output of all the peoples of the Soviet Union and in all branches: film, theater, music, and architecture. Regardless of whether this Kerzhentsev is an intrepid genius or a YonovAnisimov-like stick-carrying bailiff afraid of his own shadow, I cannot help but dread the centralized direction and supervision about which Kerzhentsev is so enthusiastic. [. . .] This new president who rules over all of the Soviet Union’s arts has also declared that from this day on, “every worker in the arts must keep in mind the instructions issued by Stalin and Molotov in Pravda’s article on Shostakovich.” (Vechernaya Moskva has introduced a new practice. Stalin’s

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name is consistently printed in bold letters both within the articles on the plenary meeting and in the transcript of Kerzhentsev’s speech.) “Every artist is duty-bound to draw the ultimate consequences from these instructions about how to conduct the struggle for socialist realism [. . .]” Shostakovich is mentioned by name to provide a concrete example of how a composer can go wrong. He should have composed “like the great composer Rimsky-Korsakov, who spent many years collecting Russian folk songs.” “Shostakovich created his opera while sitting in the quiet of his workroom, far from the rich creations of the people.” Should he have gone to a tavern and written his opera there, instead of staying in his studio? The president of the All Soviet Artistic Committee has, or pretends to have, a concept about the psychological process of artistic creation that reminds me of my former drill sergeant, Trombitás. Standing before our infantry regiment in Szabadka with legs apart and his mustache pointing skyward [. . .] he gave us a lecture on morality, explaining the meaning of the phrase “Emperor and King, by the Grace of God.” “Every one knows that the soldier answers to the corporal, the corporal to the sergeant [. . .] the lieutenant to the general [. . .] all the way up to the emperor who was appointed king by God, for who else could have done it who is higher than the king? And whoever thinks otherwise, should step forward. I’ll teach the rascal, God damn it, that what I say is an order and there will be no backtalk.” Naturally, no one volunteered [. . .] just as no one raised any objections when Kerzhentsev declared that real art is the art that he demands—“art that can be understood by, is close to, and popular with the broadest masses.” The attack against Bukharin’s “rotten concept” is organically connected to the demands placed upon Soviet art. Kerzhentsev made this clear in his speech by mentioning, as an example of the “formalist and naturalist deviation,” the film Prometheus by Kavaleridze. The theme of this historical film is the war of independence waged by the mountain peoples of the Caucasus in the first half of the previous century against tsarist Russia. Just as Bukharin was accused of sinning when he wrote that tsarism made the name of Russia hateful to the numerous oppressed peoples of the tsar’s empire, Kerzhentsev accuses the director of this film of falsifying history. In fact, this can only mean one thing: Kavaleridze did not falsify history but chose a theme which is “inopportune” here today. But why is it inopportune here when all conflicts between the various peoples of the Soviet Union have ended, as has all national oppression? [. . .] For me, the conclusion is the following: It has long been my heartfelt desire to create literary works that are “understandable by, close to, and popular with the broadest masses”—and perhaps this is not only my desire, but that of every artist:

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[Sinkó explains that he cannot and does not wish to create art that is accessible, close to, or understandable by people like Shadr, “the Modern Michelangelo,” Stalin’s favorite sculptor, or for Kerzhentsev: people “who do not know the meaning of shame.”] NOTES 1. Ivan Goncharov’s (1812–1891) 1859 novel about the eponymous Russian nobleman characterized by his lassitude. 2. Mikhail Pokrovsky (1868–1932) was the most influential Marxist historian of the 1920s who held a very negative view of pre-Soviet Russian history. 3. Stalin was, of course, born Georgian. 4. See entry for September 3, 1935.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Andor Gábor, the New Censor of Optimists

[. . .] February 16, 1936 There is something wrong with me lately, or perhaps I am just getting older—or perhaps it’s both together, but it hardly happens anymore that a new acquaintance leads to new, enriching discoveries or even to a feeling of being refreshed. Yet, such joys still occur, however rarely. That was the case in my encounter with Andor Gábor today. I was with him until four in the afternoon, and I want to make a note of it now, because it was a real event for me. M will not be home before nine tonight and in my current state there is nothing else more useful that I can do. Andor Gábor . . . I first encountered his name in my adolescence when I read his translation of the Provençal epic, Mireio, 1 and then I devoured his translation of Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character (Geschlecht und Character) along with his introduction to the book. It had the power of revelation for me. I remember it was also he who wrote something of earthshaking interest about Nietzsche and the French Symbolists. (Ah, the vast world of adolescent readings! Everything seemed “strikingly interesting.”) Later, as the War was drawing near, and especially in the first years of the War from 1914 to 1916 there were few names that one came across as frequently as his in the “books and theater” sections, and in the fiction columns of the Budapest papers. He was famous for his jokes in the Érdekes Újság (Interesting News). He was one of many, just like Ferenc Molnár and Sándor Bródy, who had great ambitions and promise but then disappeared. They became the very popular and wealthy entertainers of the theaters and 227

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cabarets of Budapest. Gábor turned out a slew of comedies, the typical Budapest operetta lyrics and cabaret hits, just what suited the tastes of the Budapest gentry, bourgeoisie, petit bourgeoisie, and the Jewish, well-off public. He had a major part in making the War years the Golden Age of this typically Pest-centered, clever, sometimes virtuosic, modernly cynical, superciliously sentimental and often funnily profane entertaining artform, which then spread to the provincial cities, indeed, had great success as an export article throughout Central Europe. These cultural products had the same relationship to real art as the comely and heroic anecdotes about “our boys,” which filled the reports of war correspondents, had to real Hungarian soldiers and to what was actually happening on the battlefields. This is why I had come to associate Gábor’s name in the course of the War with well-paid literary careers. In November 1918, in the first month of the Károlyi Revolution, he appeared in one of the offices of the National Propaganda Committee with an oddly elegant briefcase in his hand—a gentleman whom the officers greeted with great deference and immediately conducted to the room of the President of the Propaganda Committee, Dezső Bokányi. [. . .] When I was told that this was Andor Gábor, it seemed to me, in my youthful revolutionary rigidity, that if he is welcome here, that, too, speaks against the Social Democrats and their National Propaganda Committee. [Sinkó goes on to narrate the consummate bourgeois Gábor’s transformation into a communist, which he attributes largely to the inhumane treatment of prisoners that Gábor observed during his own five-day imprisonment at the start of Horthy’s White Terror, in August 1919. Gábor emigrated to Vienna in 1920. 2 Gábor was full of praise for Optimists, finding that it captured the atmosphere of early twentieth-century Hungary and of the centrality of its café culture. The novel had struck a chord of nostalgia for the graying Gábor. “He thought it a mistake to have abbreviated the first chapter so much under pressure ‘from above.’”] NOTES 1. A romantic epic poem by the French author Frédéric Mistral, written in the Occitan language in 1859. 2. Gábor moved from Vienna to Paris and then Berlin, ending up in Moscow in 1933. He became the director of the Hungarian broadcasts of Moscow Radio and, having survived Stalinism and the Second World War, returned to Hungary in 1945 to become the editor of Ludas Matyi, the Hungarian satirical weekly, in the early 1950s. He died in 1953.

Chapter Twenty-Five

André Malraux and the Marxist Encyclopedia

February 17 Babel tells me that Shostakovich wanted to commit suicide but Stalin had the composer pay him a visit and cheered him up. He told him not to take what the papers were writing too much to heart. He should travel—and try to study folk songs. [. . .] February 18 The papers here are all acting as if it were of no interest to them that in Budapest Hungarian Communists have been arrested and that the Horthy regime is planning to charge them with espionage before a military court. If the reason for this is that support by the Soviet Press of the Hungarian Communists could only harm them, then feigning indifference is justified. But there is something about which I was just recently talking to Karcsi Garai and even he could not give a good “explanation” for it. He only said, “others have also noticed this, but there must be a good reason for it.” I think no one reads Stalin’s pronouncements with as much attention as I do, and now that his major speech on Stakhanovists has been reprinted in a separate pamphlet, I underlined the following: “Besides our proletarian revolution . . . we know of only one among the many proletarian revolutions that succeeded somehow in attaining power. That was the Paris Commune. But it was short lived.” Is that all? What about the Bavarian Soviet Republic and about Red China. And we know about the Hungarian Soviet Republic. According to 229

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Lenin the latter fulfilled a historical mission by tying down considerable Entente forces for months which could otherwise have been deployed against the Soviet Union. Could Stalin have simply forgotten that there was a Hungarian Commune when its former leaders are living here in Moscow, there at the Comintern before his eyes? [. . .] “Others have noticed this also, but there must be a good reason for it.” This is the kind of answer about which Heine speaks: Until they stuff a handful of dirt into our mouths— But what kind of answer is that? 1

“But what kind of answer is that?” I ask. In any case, here I am, with a novel about the Hungarian Soviet Republic that—so it seems—never existed. February 19 [One of the three censors at Krasnaya Nov convinced the other two that the “times are not right” for publishing Sinkó’s autobiography, Facing the Judge. They are still considering publishing a chapter of Optimists, though Sinkó expects to be disappointed, since both works reflect the same basic personality—his. To counter the excuses of the publishers, Sinkó tells them that the times are never right, until someone makes them right. Sinkó visited his sister Boriska’s studio, which was in the Spasskaya barracks of Moscow, where she taught sculpture to soldiers. He was both impressed with and at the same time critical of the policy of the Soviet Union on cultural literacy, which insisted that everyone become cultured, but only up to a point.] To humanize life: this must be the sum of every worthwhile endeavor, including socialism. But life cannot be humanized for an ethnic group as long as it remains in its ethnic, traditional mindset: a crowd, an individually undifferentiated primitive collective. This is why I cannot be enthusiastic about the cult of folklore, folk dances, folk customs, and folk songs being created here. When I visited Boriska, I saw that various groups in the barracks formed groups for the purpose of intensely nurturing these folk cultures. Despite my inborn anti-militarism, [. . .] despite the cult of folklore that I noticed there, I was thrilled by many things that I saw and heard in the Spasskaya barracks. They have a library, and posters are placed side by side in the corridors to encourage the brushing of teeth and the reading of books. [. . .] It’s another question whether this campaign for reading is well conceived when it is presented as yet another official duty of citizenship. For example, there is a sign in the corridor with the horrible word “Litminimum” in large

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letters, that is to say, the list of authors, each represented by one book, that must be read to be considered educated. The authors include Pushkin, Tolstsoy, Chekhov, and Shakespeare. Their pictures are there, too: a barracks with the pictures of Pushkin and Tolstoy! [Sinkó was asked by Kun to think of some way to mobilize Western friends of the Soviet Union to help the Communists who were arrested in Hungary, among them Zsigmond Kis, the brother-in-law of Pál Hajdu, Sinkó’s contact to the Hungarian party. The support that Sinkó received from the party, including the assignments for radio broadcasts and a promise to publish some chapters in the local Hungarian language newspaper, Sarló és Kalapács (Hammer and Sickle) were, emotionally and financially, very important to Sinkó.] February 11 I just received a copy of Andor Gábor’s censorship report of the shortened version of Optimists. He had just delivered this to Bork personally. [Gábor writes: “The best book that we have about one of our great revolutionary events.” He considers the abridgement of the twelvehundred-page manuscript into an eight-hundred-page, two volume book to have been a success, except for the first chapter, which he thinks should be restored to its original form of fifty pages because it sets the stage for the rest of the novel. He argues that the publication of the work would stimulate the production of similar works about revolutionary events in Bulgaria, Bavaria, Austria, and Spain.] March 1 With Kun every day, at his apartment. It was a good idea to introduce Herbart 2 to him. Herbart tries to provide whatever help he can. He is writing letters to Gide, André Viollis, Bernanos, and others, urging them to act and to mobilize their friends to protest as well. Herbart based his letters on the notes that Kun had written for him. Nevertheless, Kun insisted on reading each letter before they could be sent and had comments on almost all of them. I realized once again: there is a fantastic, peculiar personal force which enables some people to give orders in such a way that the one receiving the order receives with it an incredible desire to fulfill it. [. . .] Herbart has no personal connections with the Communists arrested in Budapest—there is nothing exceptional about Communists being jailed somewhere these days. As far as Herbart is concerned, Kun must be some kind of veteran to whom he has no personal connection, and besides, he himself is a rather blasé and, on the whole, comfort-loving type of man. And yet, from the moment that Kun told him what he was asking of him, he

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succeeded in taking Herbart under his spell. And—just as once upon a time I was inspired in Budapest and I am inspired now in Moscow— Herbart is made visibly happy if Kun says to him: “This is good.” 3 [. . .] Kun also wanted to see the letter that I wrote to Romain Rolland enlisting his aid for those arrested. Kun was especially pleased with this letter and immediately directed me to write a whole slew of letters, not in my own name but, rather, for other Hungarians living in Moscow to sign. One was addressed to Lord Cecil in the name of the wife of the arrested Zsigmond Kis. Even old “uncle” Klein (Otto Korvin’s father, who lives in Moscow, whose son was hanged by Horthy and his men seventeen years ago) is now going to ask for help against the same executioners, not for himself but for Zsigmond Kis and companions. [. . .] We are still out of money. As a result of Gábor’s report, Bork filled out a requisition for payment of 35 percent of the fee but the cashier will only pay on the tenth of this month. The 35 percent is a considerable sum. Three months ago, it would have seemed a fortune, but now it is not even enough to pay off all of our debts. March 6 It is as if the seventeen years that have passed since 1919 have been blown away by a single breath. I went again with Herbart to see Kun. For a few moments it seemed that Kun, in his apartment with its petit bourgeois furnishings, his frame now so gaunt that all his clothes hang on him, became his former self. [Kun spoke approvingly about a conversation between Stalin and an American journalist in which Stalin declared that an attack on the Mongolian People’s Republic by the Japanese would be considered a causus belli.] It is not what he said but the way that he said it that made him once again the person that I had known a long time ago. I have no doubt that the fate of the comrades under detention in Budapest is close to his heart. But there is something pitiable in the care with which he reads every letter written on their behalf, modifies a word or a sentence here or there to give it a slightly different shading. All that energy now finds only the surrogate of the arena in which it could have had its full effect. It suddenly dawned on me that the ugly and savage factional struggles which at one time had occurred within the Hungarian party can be largely explained by the circumstance of having been denied the boon of great battles, great tasks, great goals; so these men, in the ghetto of emigration, created alternatives for themselves. All the zeal that these men could have used to organize and direct the rebuilding of a country was used in conspiring and waging a war against each other. (I am now sorry that I did not write the novel I started in Paris, Barrackland; I should have been the one to write the true novel about the life of the émigré politicians.) 4

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[. . .] March 8 It is as if I had experienced theater, seeing a live performance on a stage, for the first time. One evening we were at Babel’s and there was a rather ugly older man present. It was Mikhoels, who, at Babel’s request sang us some rather beautiful Yiddish songs. 5 In Moscow, and in general, in the Soviet Union, Hebrew is not tolerated but Yiddish is in favor. We talked about today’s tragedies and about Shakespeare. I opined that there are certain specifically modern tragedies about which even Shakespeare could not have known. Mikhoels invited me to the Moscow Yiddish Theater of which he is the director and in which he is playing the role of King Lear. I will never forget how he played the part. I do not understand Yiddish but I think that even if I had never read King Lear, I would have understood every word that he said, from his voice and his silences. [. . .] He enchanted the audience, though I think that many viewers, most of them soldiers, spoke no more Yiddish than I. [. . .] March 10 André Malraux is visiting Moscow. Already in Paris I had the suspicion that among French intellectuals who could be considered communists, there is no one who could measure up to him. Here in Moscow we are often together and I have become ever more confident in this opinion. I don’t know if his strength as a writer, as a creator of characters will develop—the characters in his novels lack, for me, the suggestion of physical presence—but there is something in his own personality, in his essence as a man, of what Goethe honored as demonic. He belongs to that rare variety of Frenchmen who possess not only a keen intellect but also an intellectual temperament that is always at high intensity. I am always surprised by that combination of Byronic and Pascalian mentality that makes him so attractive. There is something grand in this man of nerves. His ideas and plans are unusual also in their magnitude. It was such a plan that has brought him to Moscow: it is no less than to create, with the aid of the Soviet Union, the encyclopedia of the twentieth century, a Marxist encyclopedia which will play the same role in the intellectual development of mankind today that the enterprise of d’Alembert and Diderot had in the eighteenth century. The participants would be recruited from every country of the world. This work would be the highest achievement of the new spirit of mankind, a spirit that has now become international: it would appear simultaneously in four languages: Russian, English, French, and Spanish.

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We talked a lot about Dimitrov. Malraux went to see him to win him over for his plan. He was sure that Dimitrov would be an enthusiastic supporter, since, as Malraux said, the program of the Marxist Encyclopedia would entail not just a simple inventory of the past and present achievements of man’s life, but, being a Marxist inventory, this encyclopedia would scientifically project from today’s perspectives into the future. The encyclopedia would be an indispensable source for the literary and artistic history of five continents, useful also in the semi-colonial and colonial parts of the world . . . Nonetheless, and to Malraux’s disappointment, Dimitrov remained cool to the idea. There are still too many theoretical questions that have not yet been settled to allow us to undertake such a project without risk—this was the thought behind his not quite explicit but still unmistakably negative remarks. And among the questions that are of prime importance and whose clarification is just now underway, Dimitrov mentioned the articles about Shostakovich that have been published and are about to be published in Pravda. Reflecting on what Dimitrov gave as his own opinion concerning the problems in the areas of the graphic arts and literature made current by the Pravda articles, Malraux said: “One can sense the man’s personal greatness, despite what he says about questions of literature and the manner in which he says them.” [. . .] It was I who led Malraux to visit Béla Kun. Even though the main topic of conversation was to consider how Malraux could enlist help in Paris in support of the Communists who were in Hungarian jails, Malraux managed to find a way to ask Kun about his thoughts on the Pravda articles, which have caused considerable consternation in Parisian intellectual circles. Malraux does not yet know that there is no one in the Soviet Union, and especially not a politically involved person who would, in response to a straight question, give the straightforward answer that he does not agree with Pravda. Unfortunately, this is true for Dimitrov as well. [. . .] Kun sidestepped the question cleverly by also talking about the “errors” of Soviet art, but locating those errors elsewhere than did the Pravda articles. [Kun goes on to recommend that both Malraux and Sinkó look up what Engels had to say to the Blanquist émigrés of the Paris Commune. Sinkó did: Engels commented that all revolutions, just as all eras, make many mistakes, which they only realize as having been errors (of commission and omission) in hindsight.] “See,” I said to Kurella, it seems that according to Engels one cannot conclude that just because something occurs it occurs “by necessity.” Kurella, half seriously and half in jest answered: “In the given situation, the given people could not have acted otherwise. Thus, for them, their actions were by necessity.” I responded briefly and spontaneously: “I have no respect for such necessity!”

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At this, Kurella really started to laugh. “This is plagiarism. You are plagiarizing Optimists. And I wrote in my review that the author of Optimists will learn from his experiences in the Soviet Union!” [. . .] March 18 Malraux is back from the Crimea. According to Babel: The meeting between Malraux and Gorky was almost catastrophic—only “almost” because Malraux is so enthralled with his own ideas that he doesn’t realize when he alone is afire. The fact that Malraux did not come back too disappointed can probably be credited to Babel [. . .] who acted not only as a interpreter but also as a diplomat. Everything went well with the encyclopedia. [. . .] The problem began when Malraux asked, “Have you read Radek’s article last year on Joyce? It said that his work was the anti-humanist apotheosis of decay, of the decay of society and of man.” Gorky had not read Radek’s article. But if Radek said it, he agrees with him. He tried reading Joyce but found it unbearable, physically repulsive. To Malraux’s objection, that Joyce represents a new, significant stage of human sensibility, Gorky waved his hand and praised Bunin, who is now living abroad as a counterrevolutionary, but, whose literary worth far surpasses that of the neurotic and individualistic Western celebrities. The word “individualistic” led naturally to a discussion of Nietzsche (Neets—as Malraux pronounces it. [. . .]) Here, Babel, the interpreter, had to use all of his diplomatic skills, because Gorky, in the name of socialist humanism, took the position of complete rejection, while Malraux, of course, maintained that Nietzsche’s work has certain aspects which make him one of the greatest heroes in the struggle for the liberation of the human spirit, precisely from the point of view of socialist humanism. [. . .] Of course Malraux is aware that what separates him from Gorky’s way of thinking are not just marginal differences but major contradictions. Just like Heine, who dreamt of a great, fertile reconciliation between the Hellenic and Jewish spirit, Malraux has his own dream of a synthesis: the struggle for socialism, as he sees it, or rather as he lives it, must produce a new cult of the heroic, and along with this, an individualism rooted in the collective and a collective that cultivates the individual. The problem which is Malraux’s point of departure is individualistic and particular. Gorky’s most basic experience, however is the incendiary social reality, the revoltingly demeaning human suffering engendered by social conditions. I see Gorky as one who loves mankind with the same intensity that Malraux finds in beauty, justice,

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and human dignity. Malraux told me the following about his conversation with Gorky. Malraux: What is your opinion of Dostoyevsky? Gorky: Bad. I don’t like preachers, and more than that, he is a theologian. Malraux: You have to distinguish between two Dostoyevskies. The Dostoyevsky who asked, “What is the world?” is, along with the answer that he gave, obsolete. But the Dostoyevsky who asked, “What is life? What is a person to another person?” the one who asked these questions in the name of the lonely individual who looks for community, is pointing the way to the future. Gorky: The most important question in life, as in literature, is much simpler. Tolstoy was right. [. . .] The most important question is, “What shall I do?” Malraux: The primary experience of every great writer is consternation at the mere fact of life. Do you agree with me that behind every work of art the basic question is: “What is life? Why life?” Malraux claims that with certain reservations, Gorky in general agreed with him on this formulation as well as in the judgment that contemporary Soviet literature was “watered down” because it does not want to accept the unavoidability of this question. [In a later conversation in Malraux’s company at the Kuns’, Sinkó learned from party loyalist Antal Hidas, Kun’s son-in-law and the “poet of the Hungarian Party,” that Boris Pasternak had been given a lashing at the Writers’ Congress. Hidas asked how a Soviet writer, in 1936, could write a poem with the refrain, “Na dache spyat” (It is good to sleep at the dacha.)] It is true that one could think and say many interesting things about this question. But that is not what happened at the congress. Rather, a number of revolutionary Soviet writers with European reputations armed themselves by extracting from a rather significant poetic oeuvre, a single poem, and from that poem a single line—which, incidentally, has a nice musical sound—and charged at Pasternak, who was sitting there in the hall, as if the praise of sleeping at the dacha were the most sinister counterrevolutionary act imaginable. What is most disgusting in all this is the tone of the criticism. An observer in my position could not reject the thought: for those who are the loudest here, it is not poetry or even the revolution that is most important; they simply enjoy pummeling a poet, led by who knows what motives, but clearly not from noble and selfless ones. [. . .]

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In Malraux’s presence, Kun is not his usual, eruptive self. He is not even spontaneous. Before he says something, there is a pause, and he consistently sidesteps every overly direct question. Nor is Babel completely open with Malraux even though he has known Malraux longer than he has known me. Is it because Malraux will travel back home and it is important now what impressions he brings back to France, a country upon which the Soviet Union is now pinning its greatest hopes? I caught myself, and also M, acting toward Malraux in the same way as Babel. We behaved in a way that has often embittered us greatly when our friends here have acted that way toward us: rather than discussing the facts and how miserably certain facts make us feel, we talk about how one should understand them. We try to find, or rather, give “an explanation.” And the strangest thing of all is that meanwhile “the explanations” have some merit! The whole truth again lies somewhere else. Yes, the explanations have some merit. However stupid the articles dealing with this problem may be, however full of Byzantine fawning, deceitfulness, and personal rancor the so-called theoretical remarks connected with the problem, no one can deny that the government must find a solution to it. This government must wrestle with the problem because it governs a population of one hundred and seventy million people who have learned to read and write only a few years ago—these millions need something to read, watch, and hear. According to Babel’s calculations, in a few years there will be twenty thousand theaters in the Soviet kolkhozes—and the theaters have nothing to put on their repertoire! I think this problem cannot be separated from the question of the artistic process and its psychology. Is it possible for the collective to be present within the psychological process of creation as a productive factor, as an imagined audience, just as in a letter there is present not only the writer of the letter but also the addressee and the whole relationship between them? I live in a monologue, especially when I am writing. But is this a law of nature or just the result of countless, given, passing, historical, and individual factors? If artistic creation were possible as a dialogue, then indeed it would be possible for a literature to be great and yet popular, a new Homeric epic. But it is ridiculously stupid to try to force “the dialogue” as a life-style and to dictate content to the artist. It is either there or not. It all depends on how the artist relates internally to the collective. Can he escape his loneliness through the collective? And this is not the only thing on which it all depends. The real question is whether a humanely ethical socialist collective has come into being, or at least is in the process of being born. Yet this is just what we are not even allowed to question, and hence, the mode in which the workers of literature are sitting in judgment of Pasternak, an undoubtedly real and truthful artist, is illogical, hypocritical, and shamefully stupid.

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March 24 [Sinkó notes that he is reading through Babel’s rich library, including Osveyenko’s 6 book on the battles of the Red Army. He would like to read John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook The World again, but it has been removed from all the libraries, even though Reed’s body is still buried in the Kremlin wall. Other books are also disappearing fast.] March 27 [Sinkó visited Kun to talk about the letter-writing campaign. Afterward, Kun was in the mood to chat.] When we started to talk about the play that I was working on—and in connection with that, about Hungary, and then about the year 1919, the conversation became increasingly intimate. He wanted to know more about me, about M and the others who were in our early twenties back then. The whole excursion into the past had a strange feel to it. It was as if we had met again on another planet and were reminiscing about a former, incredibly distant life. And when I tried to say that unlike he, who by 1919 had behind him his great store of experience, his battles and work in the Russian proletarian revolution, we, youngsters then, fell completely unprepared into complicated, responsibility-laden historical situations, he accused me of being unfair to myself and to the rest of the young revolutionaries of the time. “It was not you but the revolution, the times, that were naïve back then,” he said. “We were unsuspecting because the revolution was unsuspecting. Not only with us in Budapest but also in Russia, Berlin, Helsinki, Warsaw, and Munich—everywhere! Russia! It was the ‘well-prepared’ Bolsheviks who won here, but even the Bolsheviks let the White General Krasnov go free upon his word of honor, though he had attacked Petrograd with armed men. The Finnish Communists arrested the bourgeois ministers and parliamentarians only to let them go free as an act of generosity, and then it was these same people who organized and carried out the great massacres of the White Terror. We were as unsuspecting as youth itself. We were all, even Lenin, misled by the magic youthfulness of revolution. We knew nothing about the monsters that already lay in wait for us. Yes, even Lenin concluded from the bloodless victory of the Hungarian proletarian revolution that in the more cultured countries, the bourgeoisie will step aside by itself without bloodshed and difficult battles, to open the way for the victory march of revolution. “The proletarian revolution has no need for terror to reach its goals. It hates and loathes the killing of people . . .” 7 Do you know who said that? You see, this too is something that deserves a book. There is a symbolic meaning to the fact that it was Rosa Luxembourg who said this, the same

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Rosa Luxembourg whose fate was the first warning that the era of revolution can turn into the era of counter-revolution. Of course, only temporarily. But this temporary restoration, as we can see, is not necessarily of short duration. [. . .] NOTES 1. “Bis man uns mit einer Handvoll / Erde endlich stopft die Mäuler – / Aber ist das eine Antwort?”: from Zum Lazarus (To Lazarus), by Heinrich Heine. 2. See chapter Degenerate Art, above. 3. Sinkó evidently did not realize how much trouble Kun was in with the Comintern by this time. The arrest of the Communist Party’s leadership in Hungary in January was blamed on Kun’s failure to ensure proper conspiratorial procedures. Kun’s interest in freeing these leaders was not only for their benefit but for his own as well. He was also blamed for having opposed cooperation with the Social Democrats in Hungary and elsewhere, and even for the in-fighting in the Hungarian Party in Moscow. Mostly, he had become suspect, according to his biographer, because of his association with Zinoviev. The sequence of events that would lead to his arrest in 1937 and his execution soon thereafter had begun. See György Borsányi, The Life of a Communist Revolutionary, Béla Kun. 405–36, especially 418, where Borsányi posits that Kun’s support of the Optimists may actually have hindered its publication. 4. In fact, Sinkó began to write Tizennégy nap (Fourteen Days) about the Sallai-Fürst affair later in 1936, and the story of a writer’s life among the emigrés in the Viennese barracks in the early 1920s is woven into the main plot. 5. Solomon Mikhoels (1890–1948), actor and artistic director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater. During the Second World War he was the head of the Jewish anti-Fascist Committee. He was killed in an anti-Jewish purge at Stalin’s orders after the war and his death was disguised to resemble a car accident. 6. Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko (1883–1938) was a Bolshevik revolutionary and Red Army commander instrumental in the defeat of Ukrainian separatists and of the White Army in 1918–1919, resulting in the incorporation of Ukraine into the emerging Soviet state. He was killed in the purges. 7. “Die proletarische Revolution bedarf für ihre Ziele keines Terrors, sie hasst und verabscheut den Menschenmord . . .”

Chapter Twenty-Six

I Am Beginning to “Understand” Babel

April 8 Back home in the Bácska, in the evenings people may already be sitting outside their houses, but here the mercury is still well below zero. And it is snowing, incessantly snowing. It shows an incredible and actually senseless stubbornness for someone to cling to a life which has been reminding him incessantly for many years that his unshakable love is the unwelcome advance of the wrong man. That this is the case and not otherwise, and so that all doubt can be excluded, here it is again: I’ve come to the Soviet Union, and even here I am led to understand, perhaps even more brutally than elsewhere, that I am behaving like an intruder. But if here, of all places, I am treated as a troublesome impostor, than in what land, on what star or island could my persistent, pushy love be seen as something other than unrequited and grotesquely one-sided? Am I being ungrateful? Is there not someone who stands by my side as an exception? Yes, I know! But I also know that my one stroke of good fortune is this someone’s misfortune. [. . .] Did anything unusual happen to make me feel as if I were being pushed to the ground (or under it) by this fatigue? No, nothing unusual happened. And that’s just it. [Sinkó goes on to discuss more delays with the publication of the German version of Optimists.] There is nothing unusual about this. But I did participate in something that was new for me: the debate in the Soviet Writers’ Union “on formalism and naturalism.” I never held the belief that people who write professionally are, thereof, ethically superior to other mortals. Indeed, I have always had a strong suspicion that constantly appearing before the public, setting success 241

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as a goal, and becoming dependent on success feed a host of negative character-traits and tendencies. But the manner in which the debate about “formalism and naturalism” has flowed here in the Great Hall of the Writers’ Union, swelling and rolling, can, on the whole, best be likened to a hot flood of hellish anger and accumulated hatred suddenly breaking forth and swallowing up in its foul currents all traces of a fundamentally necessary politeness and well-intentioned human dignity. Listening to these debates, I felt the same thing that I feel when reading the newspapers from Budapest, which, after a long absence, I now have access to via Kun. I read the papers with a masochistic anger, line by line to the very last advertisement, and I inhale that pestilent, megalomaniacal, pseudo-cultured, genteel Hungarian air which emanates nauseatingly from those poor Hungarian words. This is what I felt day after day in the building of the Writers’ Union (incidentally, the same building in which the Rostov family of War and Peace once resided), and one evening, I confessed to Babel and Herbart why I was dissatisfied with their remarks at the meeting, what I thought about the problem, and what I see as its essence. Babel and Herbart both thought that it would be useful if I were to express at the conference the ideas that I had just conveyed to them. Herbart, as the Editor of the Littérature Internationale, telephoned the secretary of the Writers’ Union and registered me as a commenter. Babel warned me that I should not speak ad lib because a sentence or two might be inadvertently—or even deliberately—misunderstood, and it would be better if I were to first write out what I wanted to say. Babel was right because on the designated evening, when I arrived at the house of the Writers’ Union with M and my sister, Boriska, a comrade stepped up to me saying that he is the secretary of the Union, and in a very friendly way asked me for my text, saying that he was very interested in what I was planning to say. “You can give it to me,” he said. “Your turn is still a ways away.” About ten minutes later another unknown person came up to me in the Great Hall, took me aside and returned my text. I wanted to go back to my place but he kept me there, saying that he has a message from the secretary: unfortunately, there will not be time for my speech; there are too many speakers; I should have registered earlier. “How about tomorrow?” I asked. “No, not even tomorrow.” I returned to my place and physically felt what it is like to be muzzled. Never mind. It’s over. Or rather, it would have been over and without a sequel had Babel not asked me for the text of my speech. While reading it, he would look up and push his glasses up so that he could take a good look at me, and then he would read on some more and again, with a look of surprise, stop for a minute to study me. And when eventually, in this manner, he came to the end of the five-page text, he took a deep breath and said to me:

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“Dear Ervin Izidorovich. To write all this with such seriousness, such warmth, with such plain honesty one must be as touchingly stupid, as much of an ass as you are.” He was truly touched by what I had written. In my presence, he called the editorship of the Literaturnaya Gazeta. “That foreign writer who wrote the novel Optimists” (the novel has become a sort of mythical concept here, as it had in Paris), Babel said into the phone, “has compiled some observations for the debate taking place at the Writers’ Union, in which he places the tasks before Soviet literature into historical perspective.” Babel thought that Literaturnaya Gazeta should publish these. This was a week ago. And today, since we have no money, literally none, I called Literaturnaya Gazeta to ask when I could pick up my commission. The editor who accepted the article is no longer on the staff but the person on the phone knew about the matter and informed me that the article will not appear in the next issue. Nor in the next one. The debate on the topic has ended and the next issue will be dedicated to problems of the Komsomol and the following one to how life on the kolkhozes is portrayed in Soviet literature. [Sinkó complains that under the circumstances, he has no energy to write, though he did get a good start on his new novel, Fourteen Days.] Babel: “I am correcting screenplays for Mosfilm. I am writing dialogues for Mosfilm screenplays. Day after day, I read idiotic screenplay manuscripts and write opinions on them. I’ll do anything so that I don’t have to write, or what would be even worse, to publish. Now do you understand?” [. . . More false leads and money problems recorded on April 15th and 21st. A German editor, Herzfelde, 1 of Malik-Verlag, to whom Kun had introduced Sinkó expressed doubts about a pending deal with VEGAAR by which Malik-Verlag would take over 1000 to 1500 copies of the German edition.] “I am not yet comfortable with your book,” Herzfelde said. “Your portrayal of the war-invalid, Kozma, that’s terrific. But I have concerns about the book on ideological grounds. And I do not find the title to be very fortunate. I wonder if it is right to give this book the title Optimists, given that the word optimist is inseparable from the concept of the good revolutionary, that is, the true revolutionary.” We still have no money. We are living off Babel. Malraux took our passports to Paris to have them extended—and not only have we not received them back but we have not even had any news about them. Thus, in this situation without passports, our “circumstances” are not exactly happy. The only good thing: I have gone crazy and I am writing the novel about SallaiFürst, Fourteen Days. I have permission through Karcsi to sit in the Comintern School and read the newspapers from 1932 that are necessary for the novel. I am taking lots of notes. [. . .]

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April 27 It’s hard to believe it, but it is true. Herbart has won. I touched, I smelled the proofs of chapter XI of Optimists at Littérature Internationale in French, along with Kurella’s study. And also an excerpt from Optimists in the Hungarian party journal along with an article by Révai—after seventeen years, we two are working side by side again. [. . .] NOTE 1. Wieland Herzfelde (1896–1988), German Communist publisher. He fled Germany for Prague in 1933. He lived and taught in East Germany after 1949.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The Optimists Makes Propaganda for Zinoviev

May 3 The night before May Day, the whole city was lit up. Our first May Day in Moscow! The area in front of the Manège 1 was turned, as if by magic, into an Eldorado. Hundreds of booths, boastfully stacked tall as the height of a man, with sausages, rolls, pastries, drinks, and even toys. Other booths where people are freely entertained with various spectacles. The gay crowd is unimaginably large. For a night, this city has turned into a land of dreams. Moscow no longer celebrates May Day as the revolutionary holiday of international labor but as a holiday of hundreds of thousands of placards of all sizes giving thanks for the happy life. [. . .] Even if this dream of plenty is a Potemkin façade compared to the every-day reality here, there is truth to Lenin’s saying that “we must dream.” That this is so was demonstrated by the hosts of visibly moved, joyous, and amazed faces, the bountiful laughter, and the childlike euphoria which for a few hours in the evening and well into the night filled the city. Interesting short conversation with Babel in the early hours of May 1st. He was genuinely excited. The gayness in Moscow made an even greater impression on him than it did on us. You cannot imagine, he told us, what you have seen here tonight. To do that, you would have to have seen Moscow through the years: hungry, cold, and sullen. You would have had to have seen people’s faces three, or even just two years ago. Without that, you cannot understand what it means when it is not ten, or a hundred, or a thousand people who are happy in this city but when this city is echoing with the laughter of immense crowds! 245

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But practically, for me, May 1st meant only that M had to get up at dawn and leave home so that she could go from her workplace to Red Square and line up at a designated hour. She arrived home dead tired, dispirited. They had to proceed at almost a run past the mausoleum on top of which stood Stalin and the other officials, because as they approached, marshals with their backs to the mausoleum and facing the marchers, constantly hurried them on. [. . .] One could not even carry a briefcase in the march, and, naively, I, watching lazily on the sidelines, expected to see the workers carrying arms, having read long ago that they had been armed by the October Revolution. There were no armed workers. This was our May 1st. On the previous day, M had received her salary from both of her workplaces and we handed it over to the last kopek to Babel. M’s salary barely covers two weeks of the costs that fall to us for the house and we have been living at Babel’s expense for more than a month. [The previous day, Sinkó, deparate for some money, went to see Yonov, at Goslitizdat. Yonov received him right away and reached into his desk drawer.] “I am happy that you are finally here,” he said, and on his sour, yellow face there was an expression that one could mistake for cheerfulness. But he continued, “and I can free myself of this manuscript.” “Please explain what you mean . . . I don’t understand . . .” I’ve never seen him act with such determination and energy. He pressed the manuscript into my hands and nearly pushed me toward the door. “Here is the latest reader’s review. I have nothing to explain. It’s a novel that makes propaganda for Zinoviev 2 . . . take it, just take it away from here.” 3 Zinoviev’s name turns up only once in Optimists. Agatha Koltay is quoting an article that appeared in Moscow which discusses the world revolution as an event expected within the next few months. To the question of who is the author of the article, Agatha answers: Zinoviev, president of the Third International. That’s all. This is in that same chapter XI that was just printed in Littérature Internationale along with articles by Sholokhov, Pasternak, Marshak, and Bukharin—not bad company. As soon as I got home I checked and I noticed that the editors of the journal also noticed this proscribed name. Their simple solution: to the question “What is this article?”—instead of giving the original answer, they substituted the not very clear statement from my Agatha: “. . . From the Review of the 3rd International.” I remembered that when Mathejka, the first publisher’s reader, reported to Goslitizdat that Optimists is a counter-revolutionary novel, every door suddenly closed to me, and now I understood why it was that again, for weeks, I have been unable to find a single publisher (other than for Herbart and, thanks to Kun, for the Hungarians) who would accept anything that I have written. [. . .]

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What to do? I went to see Kun. To whom else could I have turned? Fortunately, he was feeling better. He again telephoned Fonyó, and told him that he should explain to Yonov that since Kun had recommended this novel for publication, there was no way that it could be interpreted as “making propaganda for Zinoviev.” And he again pressed Fonyó to quickly do something in the interest of the publication of Optimists. It should be easy now. After all, Littérature Internationale just came out with a large excerpt and a study of the novel by Kurella. [. . .] This was yesterday. And today, it looks like it is here in Moscow, of all places, that I have to make friends with the idea of suicide; I picked up the phone today (to call the cashier at the radio to see if I could collect my commission for the broadcasts [. . .]) but I heard Babel talking to someone and he just mentioned my name. He said he was at his wits’ end, he didn’t know what to do, he had become the breadwinner for a large family, that it wasn’t anyone’s fault, but he is going to write to Steiner. He was talking with Steiner’s girlfriend. He also said that it was uncomfortable for him to see us in this situation because it was evident that we, too, were uncomfortable. I heard Babel say that M looks like someone who is already sick, even though she is more capable of self-control than her husband . . . At this point, I could no longer bear it and I quietly hung up. Earlier, this morning, I was able to work well on the novel. Now I am incapable of doing any work or of even having any thoughts. I could cry. To die: to doze off, and to sleeeep! May 7 [. . .] This run of bad luck would not have been complete if the radio’s cashier had not also failed us. When I called they said that my money was ready to be picked up. M accompanied me there on her way to work. At the cashier’s, they asked for my papers, as is normal, but returned them right away, saying there was nothing there for me yet. In the morning, when I had called, they had mixed me up with a Czech by the name of Szinko whose money has been waiting for him for three weeks already. M and I looked at each other and began to laugh. It was not a hysterical laugh but relieving, heartfelt, loud laughter. This is wonderful. We still have a sense of humor. We can still laugh at ourselves. Damn it, it seems we are still young. And so, despite everything, I went to the library of the Comintern to work. [. . .]

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NOTES 1. The square near Red Square in front of a historic early nineteenth-century building that was originally a military riding school. 2. Grigory Zinoviev (1883–1936) was one of the leaders of the Bolshevik Party during the time of the October Revolution. Despite his disagreements with Lenin about the wisdom of the Bolsheviks seizing power through a coup in 1917 (a disagreement which Lenin later forgave), he had become a high Soviet functionary who was seen by Stalin as a possible rival. Along with Lev Kamenev (1883–1936), who had a similar background in the Communist movement, Zinoviev was a key target of the first political show trial that marked the beginning of the period of the Great Terror. Both men were accused by Stalin and his NKVD deputies of fomenting the atmosphere that led to the assassination of Kirov in December, 1934. They were imprisoned in 1935. While in prison, in mid-1936 new charges of having plotted with agents of Trotsky against Stalin were leveled against them. It is evident from the events described by Sinkó that already in May, the sense that Kamenev’s name was again toxic had begun to circulate around Moscow. This was more than three months before the trial of the so-called Zinoviite-Trotskyist center (aka Kamenev-Zinoviev trial, Trial of the Sixteen) started and concluded with the execution of both men on August 25th. This show trial would be followed in January 1937 by the trial of the Parellel anti-Soviet Trotskyist Center (Trial of the Seventeen) in which Karl Radek, Yuri Piatakov, and Grigory Sokolnikov were the most prominent Bolshevik defendants. The third trial of Bolshevik political leaders, that of Bukharin and his alleged associates (Trial of the Twenty One) took place in March, 1938. In the meantime, the purge of the generals had begun with the secret trial of Mikhail Tukhachevsky (1893–1937) and others in June, 1937. 3. It was only later, already in Paris, that I learned that Yonov had reason to worry. Yonov was a close relative of Zinoviev, and there was plenty of reason for not just nerves but for panic in those times. [Author’s footnote]

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The Screenplay for Mosfilm

May 15 A Comrade Shumyatsky 1 recently put in charge of Soviet film production, has expressed interest in me. Kun probably has something to do with this. Babel, to show something of mine in the genre, took my screenplay The Ad (Reklám), the scenario in which I was unwilling to insert miners, to the director of Mosfilm, a woman named Sokolovskaya, who Babel says resembles M. Babel advised me to work up my idea about which he had heard from Feldman and which I had offered to Mezhrabpom in vain. [It is about a Bessarabian prostitute who finds herself in the Soviet Union and is redeemed by the new progressive policy toward women there.] May 22 Is it possible that my luck has changed? Fonyó spoke with Luppol, the chiefchief director of Goslitizdat, who instructed his deputy, Kinn, to see me. It was also Fonyó who spoke to a certain Comrade Stupniker at the journal Krasnaya Nov—it looks like this one, too, is above those editors and chief editors with whom I had been in touch earlier. This Stupniker told Fonyó to select a few chapters from Optimists for publication by Krasnaya Nov. I took the chapters that Fonyó had selected, along with a letter from him, to Krasnaya Nov. [. . .] I was told at the office that I would get a definitive answer by the end of the month. From there, I went to see Kinn. I am again emboldened to hope that something will come of the Russian edition after all. My new hope is founded on Kinn who has returned to Moscow from Paris where he was posted for several years. Finally, someone who appears not to be a bureaucrat but an intellectual. It’s true that as soon as I told him what I 249

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wanted, he said that he would have to ask Luppol, lest there be a misunderstanding. Since he, Kinn, was head of the Russian section and since I am not Russian, I should be talking to Yonov. To this I declared quite firmly that in that case I prefer that Optimists should never appear in Russian. I explained to him why I didn’t want to deal with Yonov. Kinn went into the office of the chief-chief director, Luppol, and after a few moments, he returned, saying that indeed, I was in the right place. Luppol told him that I am “a special case,” and that he should make the decision, not Yonov. I left two chapters in addition to what had been published in Littérature Internationale, all in French. [. . .] Regardless, this Kinn is the kind of person who forgets his official position when he enters into a conversation. He displays a pure interest in literature, indeed in people. He is a manager in publishing and, yet, he is an intellectual and very likeable. (Of course it may be that Babel is right and I react to the various publishing managers in the way that Huysman’s deprived bachelor reacted to restaurants: he was excited when he discovered a new one because his stomach and nerves could not stand the old ones anymore.) May 21 There is no question; it does look like my luck has changed after all. I met with the director of Mosfilm, Sokolovskaya, 2 about whom I have a feeling as toward no one else here among my already quite extensive new acquaintances: her mere existence, that I know that she exists, makes life less odious to me. After so many ugly and depressing encounters and meetings, to meet such an intelligent, in every way sophisticated woman, who always speaks in a quiet, gentle voice and in whose reclusiveness there is something serious, reliable, yet radiating a humanity—even if I never see her again, it will be good to have known her and good to recall her, as with a painting that we have seen and that has given us beauty and peace. May 28 I am just back from Sokolovskaya to whom I had sent my screenplay through Babel. I had an appointment for two o’clock and she received me exactly at two. There were three other coworkers of hers waiting for me in the room: Maryanov, Ceizer, and another one whose name I don’t know. Each one had a copy of my outline before them. [. . .] She started out by saying that since she has been at Mosfilm, they have always worked as a collective and that the entire collective is there to serve the author with their observations and suggestions. [Each one gave their opinions on the screenplay, provisionally called Katya.]

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Even if they had voiced objections rather than agreement, I would have felt fortunate to have people who know their craft, thinking through my problems from every angle in a working group with this kind of atmosphere. This was my first opportunity to realize that not only can I participate in collective work but that I, who have always lived like a hermit, am actually by inclination, a social being, who enjoys being a part of an accepting collective. [. . . At the end, after the three comrades had left], I too was getting ready to leave, but Sokolovskaya held me back. She took out the already prepared contract. I will receive 20,000 rubles for the screenplay, of which she will release 25 percent immediately. I can pick the money up in three days at the Mosfilm cashier’s office. When I submit the screenplay, they will pay another 25 percent. She thanked me for having conveyed my ideas “so nicely and with such enthusiasm.” Such enthusiasm is important, because it energizes others. “Did you notice how my co-workers became more and more involved? I am happy that we will be working together.” I don’t know what I answered to all this. Most likely, nothing clever. And now as I am recording this, I still cannot believe that everything that happened really happened just so. M knows nothing yet. But while I am amazed, I also know that this meeting and the way I was treated, the tone of voice in which I was addressed is what is normal; this is the way every person who wants to work from their heart and soul should be dealt with. But what is normal is by now so rare and seemingly out of a legend of a thousand and one nights that in its simplicity is seems unbelievable. [. . .] [Sinkó was told that Krasnaya Nov had decided not to publish any chapters after all, but he did get the advance, a considerable sum, from Mosfilm.] I felt great until something happened, and it was no small matter, either. Because of the great heat, Babel’s windows and door are open, and as I was walking up the stairs to his quarters, when I arrived at the threshold, I saw a man sitting in shirtsleeves, leaning forward, with a broad back, his head buried in his hands, his shirttails outside his pants, and I see that his back, his shoulders, are trembling violently but silently, as if he were cold. Babel, was sitting perhaps two steps away, behind his desk, his chin resting on his left hand, looking somber and motionless, silent like the other man, and staring before himself. I wanted to turn back but Babel noticed me at that very instance and invited me to enter with an unnaturally loud voice that made his guest flustered and quickly sit up straight. That is when I recognized Eisenstein, whom I had met several times in this same room. The first time I met him, I was a bit flustered myself. After all, this was the great Eisenstein 3 and he belonged to the artistic lore of the October Revolution in the same way as John Reed’s book belonged to its history. But my selfconsciousness soon dissipated because I found myself before a rather corpu-

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lent, friendly person who enjoyed jests and who would always stop to tell a joke, indiscriminately, even in the midst of a serious conversation, and he would be the one to laugh the hardest. Now, however, he looked at me with a long, gray face. I don’t know if he recognized me. It was obvious that he was just as uncomfortable as I was to have surprised him so. He mumbled something about the heat and at Babel’s advice, went into the bathroom to put himself in order, and then soon took his leave: soon, but not easily—he stopped a few times as if it were hard for him to go. I have noticed a number of times that when Babel speaks of something that is uncomfortable for him, he takes off his glasses and slowly draws two fingers across his closed eyes, as if his eyes were hurting from something that he saw or as if he wanted to erase something from there. I sat down on the chair that Eisenstein had just vacated. “If you hadn’t come, he might have stayed all evening,” remarked Babel. “I am glad you came.” But he himself felt that the word “glad” was a bit strong and corrected it to “It is good that you came.” For a moment his face lit up, almost as if he was about to laugh. “‘Throw him out before my heart breaks in two. . .’ You have heard that expression, haven’t you? I just realized that there is a terrible truth in this saying. If there is someone before us who needs our help but we are unable to provide it . . . someone that I can’t, simply can’t help, just like I cannot help myself. Why is he torturing me? Why is he humiliating me by making me an impotent witness to his impotence in the face of injustice?” [. . .] I knew that Eisenstein had been working on a film for the last two and a half years. 4 He is one of those artists who, once they have completed a work, consider it to have been a study for something that does not yet exist and that is calling on them to bring it into existence. He saw the film on which he was now working, the theme of which was the Russian village at the time of collectivization, as the final culmination of all his previous efforts, from his first silent films to his fantastically beautiful film about Mexico. [. . .] Babel, who knew the screenplay and has seen large parts from the film, always spoke of it in raptured tones that were unusual for him. I was especially impressed by the scene, as Babel described it, in which the peasant crowd, armed with scythes, shovels, hatchets, and clubs breaks into the church and, while singing their old religious songs, forcefully and with revolutionary dispatch, smashes the icons before which they had only yesterday, and for centuries before, knelt in quivering humility in the expectation of miracles. The film has been completed. A commission, consisting of the most august leaders including Molotov and Mikoyan, viewed it and not only banned it but declared that it had to be destroyed. They accused it of formalism, naturalism, and mysticism, and another thing: the film portrays the Russian national past too darkly—just as Bukharin’s had done in that article.

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The film slanders the Russian peasant, showing him as an uncultured, wild, and mythical being. Eisenstein had burst into Babel’s apartment like a madman. He cursed, gnashed his teeth, struck his forehead with his fists, and then in the midst of a tantrum, started to laugh and then to cry. Babel had previously heard about the catastrophe by telephone. The reason for Eisenstein’s visit was to ask for Babel’s help. The film still existed. He should do something to save it. Vae victis (woe to the vanquished). It is incredible that even an excellent person like Babel is influenced by failure. He himself doesn’t realize it but I see it clearly: he speaks differently about the film than he had in the past. “Eisenstein is a genius,” he says, “but it is geniuses who are most often liable to make the greatest mistakes, and it had already occurred to me before that Eisenstein was going down the wrong alley, that he was leaving out important factors that he could have, indeed, should have taken into account.” The film has cost nearly three million rubles so far, and now Eisenstein is being blamed for this. And what is horrible is that unless Eisenstein can somehow fend off the attack, they have warned him that they will use his alleged unconventional sexual inclinations as a weapon against him. Additionally, Babel has been depressed for the last few days; Gorky is ill and the old Dr. Levin, who has been treating him, has been reporting to Babel on the phone every day. “As soon as he opens his mouth, I know from his voice and his first words, that he has bad news,” says Babel. He keeps repeating that he has a feeling that Gorky is going to die. “He was the only one; the only one who wanted to and was able to stand by me. If he weren’t ill now, I could have said something encouraging to Eisenstein, too. But thus? He was the only person . . .” And I understand what it means, especially these days, to be in Babel’s situation: for a writer, who is a true writer, to lose the support of a person with Gorky’s prestige. June 15 What joy it is to be no longer writing for the desk drawer or rather for the vulcanized suitcase that has served that function for most of my life! I can work on the screenplay, knowing that there are people whose artistic sensibilities I can trust and who are waiting for it to be completed so that they can sit at a table with me and discuss its every episode. So far, I have not needed Babel’s help on this, though I am pleased that he asks me every day about how I am coming along with it. He does so even though he is visibly careworn and glum. If Doctors Levin or Pletnev 5 do not call, he right away thinks of the worst. He has even discontinued his mid-

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night snacks. He sees everything as a bad omen, including Stalin’s visit to the sick man, and the fact that the newspapers were full of pictures of the event. A strange misfortune has occurred with Steiner. The telegram and the letter that he sent from the border arrived at the same time. He has his Soviet visa but when he wanted to return to Moscow—where he has been working for over a decade and where all his possessions are, where his entire existence is rooted—he was told at the Soviet border at Negoreloye that though everything was in order with his visa, there were instructions from Moscow not to let him back into the country. I want to do everything I can for him, but there is not much I can do. Babel would be able to do more, but Babel’s panic is exacerbated by even the mention of getting in touch with Steiner. [. . .] Steiner is probably still sitting at the border, waiting for the countermanding order from Moscow to arrive. NOTES 1. Boris Zakharovich Shumyatsky (1886–1938) was appointed by Stalin to lead the film industry in 1930. He was instrumental in banning Eisenstein’s film Bezhin Meadow. In 1938, he was purged “for collaborating with saboteurs” and shot. In the previous year, probably to deflect criticism from himself, he caused the arrest of a number of film executives, including Yelena Sokolovskaya, on whom, see below. See also Andy McSmith, Fear and the Muse Kept Watch (New York: The New Press, 2015), 166. 2. Yelena Sokolovskaya (1894–1938) was, in 1936, the deputy director and then acting director of Mosfilm. She died a victim of the purge. See Jamie Miller, Soviet Cinema: Politics and Persuasion Under Stalin. (London: I.B.Tauris, 2009). 3. Sergey Eisenstein (1898–1948) was one of the most innovative and celebrated film directors in the Soviet Union and considered important to this day in the history of film for his use of montage and other techniques. Some of his early successes were the films Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October: Ten Days that Shook the World (1926). In 1936, he was making a film at Mosfilm, Bezhin Meadow, about the collectivization of agriculture that led to the starvation of millions in 1929–1933. 4. Feldman, at Mezhrabpom, had told him about Eisenstein’s project, probably Bezhin Meadow. See above, chapter “Schwartz auf Weiss.” 5. Lev Grigorievich Levin (1870–1938) was a Kremlin doctor and personal physician of Maxim Gorky. Dmitri Pletnev (1871–1941) was a cardiologist who also attended to Gorky. Both doctors were arrested and died in the purges. They were charged during the 1938 trial of Bukharin with having been instrumental in killing Gorky. If the charges are true, it is likely to have been at Stalin’s orders.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

A Human Trait Has Been Lost

June 23 Masereel and his wife came over for lunch [returning the passports that Malraux had taken to Paris.] I am forced to realize how much we have lost during the year that we have been here if having a valid Yugoslav passport again in hand can cause me such joy. M can take six weeks of vacation starting in August. If I can deliver the screenplay and if at least the German version of Optimists can go to press, we could travel during those six weeks to see my aging parents. It is not advisable to go home to Yugoslavia. Even when we exchange letters with them it must be through Paris. The only way we can meet them would be through some small spa in Transylvania—but for this, we would need Romanian visas and, what is no less difficult to get, visas to exit and return here. And, somehow, to arrange a meeting with Steiner. . . We already have our program but that’s all we have. What is missing, is how to make it a reality. The German text of Optimists, says Bork, will not be published until Herzfelde returns the second volume of the work. “So Herzfelde is holding things up. Why don’t you ask him to hurry?” “Because it is not important to us. We would prefer to wait until Goslitizdat publishes the Russian edition. Let them be first,” confessed Bork. “But what if Goslitizdat is thinking similarly that VEGAAR should go first?” This idea caught Bork by surprise: “You are quite right. This is a vicious circle.” [. . .]

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Babel already has the fourth draft of Katya. Even this is not the final text, but I think that I accomplished something by working ten or twelve hours a day—putting the novel completely aside—and yet the work does not betray how tired I was. This is what I learned from the French and, since I can read Pushkin in the original, also here: you should write the way Mozart created music. The effort that was required should not be noticeable on the completed work. I will record this at the end, because I was, and am still preoccupied by it (and Babel was even more so; he mourns Gorky as if he had been his own father). Everyone here has the inexplicable sense that with Gorky’s death an unredeemable ill has befallen them, or perhaps more accurately: it is as if now that Gorky is no more, some indefinable danger looms all the more darkly. Of course I am not thinking of the official eulogies and obituaries; these, unfortunately, here too, as everywhere in the world, are full of superlatives and platitudes, and have the effect of ritualistic noise that paralyzes all thought rather than allowing us to pay the respect due to a great man and to the strangeness of death. I felt it again: the only adequate ritual for death is crying or wordless, complete silence. Anything else is hucksterism and cruel, insulting hocuspocus. It seemed to be by accident that Molotov’s eulogy, through a slip of the tongue, expressed something of what everyone was truly feeling on the day of the funeral: “At this moment we somehow feel as if a bright part of our own lives has passed forever.” Elsewhere, this, too, might be a platitude; but here, it almost feels like a heresy. If one reads the obituaries—which make use of Gorky’s death as an occasion to praise the “the People’s Sun” and “Father,” and His great works—then one can have no doubt that to speak of a coming darkness here is an involuntarily heretical confession, an involuntary echo emanating from the deep anxiety felt, truly, by millions. When it was my turn to enter the palace for a last glance at the laid-out body, I turned away at the gate and walked for hours in the city. (There is some kind of atavistic resistance in me against all pomp which tries to profane or soothe the somberness of death.) Thus, I did not proceed past the catafalque, but I did stand there through three and a half hours in the crowd that had started to gather already after midnight. The crowd was of a size that one rarely sees, even in Moscow. Ever since seeing such crowds march under rather questionable slogans and under unquestionably inhumane ones, there is something both uplifting and threatening in the sight, like some kind of natural phenomenon. The absolute silence only served to intensify the impression of unique grandeur. Young and old, mothers with babies on their arms—and I noticed everywhere that people were holding books in their hands, books written by that dead man of whom they were taking leave. For these hours, this crowd had become a people, as they stood waiting with incredible Russian patience. There was

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something that bound them into one, into a single community: the feeling of a great loss united them. Maybe only one out of a thousand, or one out of ten thousand, could have explained why they felt such a loss, but it was as if in each consciousness there had come to nest a kind of heavy, constricting apprehension. My mind kept coming around to this thought. It seems to me that Stalin’s prestigious image lacks the element of the common man, a certain cordiality and nearness. People feel him to be great, magnificent, and correspondingly distant. Gorky was close as a person, not a legendary power but a legendary man, and with his death, a human motif has been silenced in the reality of Russian life, which everyone refers to with the word “suroviy” (harsh, severe).

V

Part V

Chapter Thirty

The Last But Most Eventful Part, Ending in Paris

The diary entries of the following section were shaped in such a way by circumstances (one could say without exaggeration, by historical circumstances), that if I were to publish them without explanations, the reader would understand them no better than the author, who recorded them understood at the time what was happening in general and being decided about him. This last section of the novel of the novel—in contrast to its beginning, and even more so, with its ending—begins, by the evidence of the journal, in a state of euphoria, one could say exultation, thus:

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Chapter Thirty-One

Brief, Happy Excitement but “The Times Are Unfavorable”

Moscow, June 25, 1936 I don’t dare to believe it but it is a settled matter: Optimists will be published in Russian translation. I called Kinn today at two o’clock at Goslitizdat. [… Kinn told Sinkó that he should come to his office right away, because he was ready to sign a contract. Sinkó had made the call at Babel’s urging, who had also just sent the screenplay for Katya with his highest praise to Mosfilm. Sinkó stopped writing the entry and went to see Kinn. In retrospect (1953–1955), he summarized the event, writing about himself as the diarist:] The diary entry from July 4th is less enthusiastic. It explains that “in the meantime it seems that hostile forces have intervened,” because Kinn, on the previous day, July 3rd, greeted the diarist by saying that he can’t sign the contract after all. The best that he can do is to sign an agreement that Goslitizdat will have the novel translated into Russian and while the translation is in process, it will pay the author 600 rubles a month and when the translation is done, then it will decide whether to sign the final contract. [. . .]. “I did everything that I could do,” said Kinn, “but the times are unfavorable.” The diarist is about to travel and is running around trying to get the necessary visas. He did not understand the obscure oracular remark about “unfavorable times.” Nor did he understand why Sokolovskaya informed him after receiving the screenplay that she needed to leave town immediately, that, consequently, the collective discussion had to be postponed indefinitely, 263

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but that, since Babel had already approved the screenplay, she would now requisition a payment of 25 percent of the royalties to the author. The diarist read the Russian papers diligently. Every day, he found there the complete texts of letters to Stalin full of boasts and gratitude, signed by the “millionaire” kolkhozes, by the gigantic industrial collectives, or by the heroines of the vegetable fields. No matter how thoroughly the diarist read the papers, all the articles spoke only of the most happy and undisturbed idylls throughout the land. The great battle, the war in Spain was already raging, but the Russian papers would report about events there in small-print three-line articles on page three. Then, one day on the first page one could read Stalin’s declaration that what happens in Spain is “the common cause of advanced and progressive mankind everywhere.” “Advanced and progressive!” I was present when groups of grown men, cultivated men, revolutionaries, would discuss and analyze the deeper meaning of this “apparent” pleonasm. What does it mean when Stalin, in three sentences, speaks about the segment of mankind that is “advanced and progressive”? However strange it may seem, we were used to this; we had to get used to it. This was the order of things. Everything was calm and orderly, or at least, there was nothing visible and nothing could be heard about what was going on beneath the orderly surface, and even less about what was in store. [Sinkó notes that he again found himself behaving in a two-faced manner. With those who enthusiastically applauded and justified everything in the Soviet Union, he played the skeptic, but with skeptical foreign visitor, as when he met the French socialist writer Eugène Dabit, he downplayed specific criticisms and steered the conversation toward more general topics that threw a positive light on the country.] But the truth is that in July 1936, living in Moscow, I had not the foggiest notion of what was happening around me. I did not suspect that thousands, tens of thousands were disappearing, as if into a silent trap door of a stage, nor did I notice how everyone, increasingly, was gripped by some kind of unremitting, all-encompassing, febrile chill from the fear or knowledge that they were under threat. This can be explained not so much by my naivety as by a fundamental and deeply ingrained characteristic of the Soviet world: that just like the newspapers, people are fantastically silent, even those who you would think are your close friends. Just as I did not understand Kinn’s mysterious declaration about the times being unfavorable, I was amazed when the Union of Revolutionary Writers, that is, Apletin, and similarly, VEGAAR and Mosfilm plainly and roundly refused my request for a written statement about their relationship with me. I needed these to obtain my exit-and-reentry visa. I was not asking for a recommendation, just a statement saying that we had a signed contract for my work, or, in the case of Littérature Internationale, that I was doing

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work for them, since they had already had a chapter of Optimists translated into both German and English. I was even more amazed when a Hungarian comrade advised me not to ask for a recommendation from Kun for the Russian visa. I thought that it was simply because it would be a burden for him, and I took the Hungarian comrade’s advice to ask Koltsov for a note saying that he supports my application for an exit-and-reentry visa. In fact, it was Koltsov who got me the necessary stamps, just as he was setting off for the Caucasus with Gide, who was then being fêted by the entire Soviet press. What also made it difficult to see behind all the incomprehensible events was that there were still some people who continued to speak their minds, indeed, to forcefully advocate their opinions. They were probably as clueless as I was. They did not realize that just being alive—regardless of what one did or refused to do—had become life threatening. Now I think that Kinn was such a person. Rather than waiting for a mythic tomorrow to arrive, he managed to get Yonov to write up his opinion and two hours before my departure for Romania, I received a “provisional contract,” number 1849, signed by Ivan Kapitonovich Luppol, for the publication of Optimists. It is here still among my Moscow documents. Thus, I left for our vacation with the thought that even if it has taken more than a year of effort, what I have accomplished in the Soviet Union is no small feat. I expected that when I will have returned from vacation, the work of realizing my screen play would be waiting for me. The translation of Optimists into German might slip, but I had a contract to ensure that it would be done. As for its Russian edition, I also had good reason for hope: I had been present when Kinn told the translator to hurry so that it should be done in six months if possible. From the moment that our train crossed the bridge over the river separating the Soviet Union from the Kingdom of Romania, everything that we saw and experienced on the Romanian side argued in favor of the world that was under construction in the land we had just left behind.

Chapter Thirty-Two

The Soviet Union, Seen from the Perspective of Madame Lupescu’s Kingdom

[. . .] It is as if we were traveling not in a space but in time, and backward: over the bridge from today’s Russia, we found ourselves in the Russia of Gogol and Saltikov-Schedrin, in that same, unchanged Bessarabia that Pushkin saw when he lived there. This impression, that we were travelling backward in time, was heightened by the fact that we heard everywhere the same Russian language we had heard in Moscow—and yet it was not the same. The Russian language, Russian population, gave us a vivid sense of what all of Russia would now have been like had there not been an October 1917. [Sinkó notes that the railway stations and restaurants are cleaner than in Russia because the police keep the poor peasants from loitering there.] From this perspective it seemed to me that in the Soviet Union I had not been able to see the forest for the trees. I accused myself of being a typical intellectual, a man of letters [who looks at everything from the point of view of the arts and literature.] [Steiner had travelled from Vienna to Romania to meet the Sinkós in the Carpathian spa of Borszék (Borsec, Romania) where Sinkó’s parents also travelled to see the Ervin and M. Although Steiner remained critical of the Soviet Union, he surprised Sinkó with the confession that he felt homeless now that after fifteen years of living in Moscow he could not return there.] Steiner said, “I cannot find my place in this world of stock market speculators and businessmen. In the Soviet Union, I felt a connection to every problem. Here, I feel no connection.” Sinkó reflected that in Vienna, under the constellations of Stahremberg, Hitler, and Mussolini, or in Romania, 267

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among Titulescu, Professor Jorga, and Codreanu, it was not only capitalism but fascism that made it impossible for Steiner (or Sinkó) to feel at home. Yet, on the day after Steiner’s arrival, the Sinkós were notified by the police in Borszék that the Siguranca (Romanian military intelligence and counter-intelligence) had sent a telegram declaring the couple to be “unwelcome aliens” and ordering them to leave the Kingdom immediately. The Sinkós obeyed and bought train tickets the same day, but since it was Sunday and the banks were closed, they had to resort to local merchants to exchange their dollars (!) for Romanian currency. They noticed from the names that most of the stores, well stocked but empty, were owned by Jews. This inspired Steiner and Sinkó to reflect on the anti-Semitism that was at the fore of political discourse in Vienna but not in Moscow. When the storekeeper who exchanged their money learned that the friends wanted to buy tickets, he quickly had his assistant fetch Salamon, a scalper, who sold them train tickets at a deep discount, proving the validity and bargain value of the tickets by taking the buyers to the cashier at the train station. Sinkó records the story of Salamon. It turns out that Salamon was a teacher by profession but it was hard for teachers to get a job, and nearly impossible for Jews. Salamon was also at that very time a soldier of the Romanian army. He was able to pursue his various black-market activities and to dress as a civilian only by paying hefty bribes to the local authorities. He had migrated to Palestine but was apprehended by the British there and extradited to Romania, getting many beatings along the way.] I asked him, “Why did you want to go to Palestine?” [. . .] “It was because I was not born a ganef (Yiddish: thief). Like everyone, I was not born to be a ganef. Like others, I wished to live productively. [. . .]” I realized as we continued our conversation [. . .] that the word “Moscow,” which had led him to confide in me, now had the same meaning for this man that Palestine had once held: the negation of everything that was the Romanian Kingdom, the negation of the fact that the teacher cannot teach. In other words, it meant a place where one didn’t have to be a ganef, where one could live a “productive life.” We thought we [that is the Sinkós, unlike Steiner, who had to return to Vienna] were travelling back to the safest place on earth. We had not yet crossed the border when at the railroad station in Kishinev we learned from the Neue Freie Presse that TASS had just announced officially that in five days Zinoviev, Kamenev, Smirnov, and thirteen others would face trial before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union.

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NOTE Elena (Magda) Lupescu (1895?–1977) was the commoner mistress of King Carol II of Romania (ruled 1930–1940). She was rumored to be of Jewish heritage and was held (wrongly) by many (apparently also by Sinkó) to be the power behind the throne. Carol II’s reign usurped much of the power of parliament, introduced a number of anti-Semitic laws to appease popular opinion, and ruled in what may be characterized as a right-wing, modernizing, authoritarian style marked by a high level of corruption.

Chapter Thirty-Three

“These Mad Dogs Must Be Shot”

Moscow, Sept. 2, 1936 [. . .] In his youth, Robespierre submitted a petition to Louis XVI, urging him “to create an immortal alliance . . . which will reconcile human politics with morality.” What incredible naivety on the part of the future revolutionary to request this of Louis XVI, of all people. But it is even greater naivety to believe that such an immortal alliance could ever be possible. Yet! it is exactly the belief that this foolish hope will once be realized, that it must be realized, that has sustained every revolution and revolutionary. How odd that it might very well be the approaching twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution that, as a sort of Christmas present, should disabuse us of this frivolous and childish illusion! I keep telling myself: anyone who plots assassinations here, whoever he may be, must be rendered harmless, for he is an accomplice of fascism. [. . .] But if the individuals involved are like the ones in this case [that is, the case against Zinoviev, Kamenev, Smirnov, and thirteen others], then, if only for the sake of the revolution, a case must be made that demonstrates to everyone, without the shadow of a doubt that the death penalty is being applied for this reason and not for another. I have been around long enough to know that individuals, only individuals, react to nuances; that historical forces on the other hand act in a summary fashion. I also know that while individuals are able to conceive of a more differentiated means of justice and hence are often incapable of participating in the administration of justice, the revolutionary class struggle and the self-defense of the revolution cannot be other than indifferent to fine gradations of justice. For this reason, revolution is some271

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times unjust in individual cases but on the whole it creates justice, historical justice, history. I know and understand all this. I also understand that intellectuals, in their attitude toward politics, tend to vacillate between two extremes: extreme enthusiasm and extreme disgust. But I must ask: were those who organized this trial unaware of this? If such a trial had to be, then why was it not managed in a different manner by those who until now understood how important a role moral prestige plays in the struggle again that bestiality called fascism, and that it was precisely its moral prestige that elicited sympathy toward the Soviet Union? From Romania we first went to Odessa. It was there that we hoped to continue our summer vacation, interrupted in Borszék by the Romanian Sigurance. We even had plans to travel around the Soviet Union. [. . .] Babel showed us around Odessa, his home town, with generosity and enthusiasm. We swam in the Black Sea, sunned ourselves on an excellent beach, roomed in a huge, first-class hotel—but all for naught. The news that the trial was going to take place was already an unpleasant accompaniment to a merry vacation. The Russian newspapers that we grabbed as soon as we crossed the border were even more depressing than the news that there was going to be a trial, or maybe even more depressing than the trial itself. The Russian newspapers now wrote not a single line about the more than one hundred White Guards who had been executed in connection with the Kirov assassination in 1934, about which we had read the official TASS announcement back in Paris. Who were these White Guards? If it now turns out that the assassination of Kirov was organized by Zinoviev and Kamenev, then were those White Guards innocent, or if they were not, then are the charges against Zinoviev and Kamenev unfounded? We read every word of the newspapers in Odessa but found not a word about these White Guards. And there was another fact: when Kirov’s assassin, Nikolaev, that young worker, was condemned to death, then Zinoviev and Kamenev were put on trial with the charge that they had created a political climate with their oppositional policies that made them “morally responsible” for Nikolaev’s act. The court then sentenced Zinoviev and Kamenev to ten years of prison each. And now, hardly two years later, they are put on trial again. What could they have done while in prison? Or has something been discovered in the meantime about their involvement before they went to prison? We lay on the beautiful sand under the blue sky wondering about such things. But we thought then that we will get answers to these questions in the course of the trial. We could not expect answers anytime sooner. Our expectations were in vain. When the trial opened—we were still in Odessa—both Pravda and Izvestia took on a tone that was disconcertingly similar to that of the Awakening Hungarians (Ébredő Magyarok), the daily

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paper of the White Terror in Budapest in the months following the fall of the proletarian dictatorship [in August 1919], when even Dezső Kosztolányi, the otherwise sensitive, highly talented and sensible poet, called for a pogrom in the wildest, most rabid tones in his column called “Pardon.” The Soviet poets, too, made an appearance in the overture of the trial. In one respect, the Soviet press even outdid the Hungarian press of the time in its delirium for revenge: Pravda published a little poem from a girl who, according to the paper, was twelve years old. “You must shoot these mad dogs,”

said one line of the poem which we read in our bathing suits, standing before a bulletin board where Pravda was posted, while around us, the normal life of the beach continued, with mothers and their little girls, with the young and the old. [. . .] If indeed it was a twelve-year-old girl who wrote this poem, the editor who published it deserves twenty-five lashes to be administered on his behind in public. [. . .] The worst part is that it is possible that the poem was, indeed, written by a twelve-year-old. We have become accustomed to seeing in Hitler’s Germany how children can be artificially made into the victims of the atmosphere of pogroms, where they could merrily sing “wenn Judenblut spritzt” (when Jewish blood sprays) while marching. But that such things should occur in the Soviet Union . . . At first, Babel was optimistic. He reminded me that the death penalty had not been applied in the Ramzin trial (though the accused had confessed to having prepared an armed intervention with the help of the French General Staff) or in any of the other sabotage trials before and after it. 1 [. . .] But already before the trial had started, and then throughout its course, as a whole new vocabulary of the pogrom—even more extreme than the expression “mad dogs”—gained prominence in the Soviet newspapers, Babel preferred to speak exclusively about Odessa and his childhood memories. [Not in the mood for further vacationing, the Sinkós cut their travels short and returned to Moscow, hoping to be able to gain more information about the trials there.] On the day of our arrival a three-line article announced that the death sentences brought by the supreme military court on August 23rd had been carried out on the 24th. And again, this Russian phenomenon to which we could not get accustomed: not crowds but groups somewhat larger than usual read the newspaper pages posted on locked boards behind wire mesh in the streets, but not even an observer with the sharpest eye could detect the slightest reaction on any of the faces. Without even glancing at each other, having finished what they had wanted to read, each person went indifferently on their way.

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What did we gain by hurrying so much? Now I too am one of those who moves on in silence after having read the news. Only we are not in Odessa but in Moscow. M returned to work yesterday. I too should get back to work on the novel, which is similarly about executions that are the topic of conversation in a city, but, oh, so much more vociferous than here, and with definite positions taken, in a fever that is more visible, a hundred times as visible. I should work. But it is not easy, even though our personal situation was never so favorable as now. While we were away, some chapters of Optimists were published here in German and English, and the Russian translation is making good progress. We even have money. Yet, I feel as if I have been beaten and robbed. That one can feel this way even when one has no personal reason for complaint is something I have never experienced as strongly as I do now. [Sinkó reports that his sister, Boriska, a sculptor who moved to Moscow soon after he did, just married another sculptor from a Russian peasant family. Boriska is the type who never questions the latest party line. Sinkó explains this as stemming from a great inner weakness. “She was beaten like a dog so often in her life, it is so important for her not to be considered an outsider that this need is stronger than any inner resistance.” 2 ] September 10 [Sinkó notes that people with whom he only had a slight acquaintance would stop by at his house and try to engage him in conversation about topics that no one talked about in the Soviet Union. One time, a German acquaintance came and told him that he was writing a book about the conflict between the humanist ideology and the realist demands of the proletarian revolution. Sinkó realized that this was a dangerous subject, but because it was a problem that had exercised him ever since his participation in the Hungarian Soviet Republic, he decided to explain his thoughts anyway. When M came into the room, she indicated to him with her “ice cold stare” that he should stop. He accused her of falling victim to the type of mass hysteria that Manzoni described in his novels. She, on the other hand, told him the story of Zinaida, her colleague who had disappeared from the clinic. No one would give a straight answer to M’s queries about what had happened, not even Zinaida when she reappeared briefly one day and M rode homeward on the tram with her. M found out six months later that Zinaida was a relative of Zinoviev and was banished to Siberia for that reason. Sinkó also illustrated the hypocricy in the promulgation of a new Soviet constitution, thus:] Like Zinaida on the tram, even the victim did not dare to scream. According to the gospel, the word of the Redeemer made the lame walk again. The Stalin Constitution undertook to produce another kind of miracle: the words of the Stalin Constitution left the lame lame, but he was

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expected to believe that he was walking or that his lameness was the full expression of health and completeness. How much of this did I see in 1936? The main thing I noticed was the barefaced and brazenly authoritative lying. I saw, too, along with the reign of lies, the growth of fear and servility. There was terror in Lenin’s time as well, but then the terror was openly called by its name. In 1936, however, they were talking about the imminent victory of full socialism. NOTES 1. The trial of Leonid Ramzin, an engineer, took place in 1930 and, indeed, Ramzin’s death sentence was commuted. He was pardoned in 1932. But Babel was mistaken (if Sinkó’s account is accurate) about the death penalty not being applied in any of the economic sabotage trials. For example, five of fifty-three defendants were executed after the Shakhty trial of 1928, the first of the “wrecking” show trials, named after the coal mining city where the sabotage allegedly took place. 2. This remark might refer to Boriska’s broken relationship with the Hungarian writer Gyula Illyés.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Proof of the Author’s Blindness

Moscow, October 27, 1936 Instead of writing my novel, instead of . . . Isn’t it horrible, shameful, humiliating that when all my thoughts are with what is happening in Spain and what should be happening here in connection with the Spanish revolution—I have been chained for days now to this telephone like a slave to his galley, and not in the name of some great cause but simply so that I can talk to someone who counts for something at Mosfilm so that I can get the money which is owed me, because I have to pay my electric bill and rent. I could not sleep all night. My head aches, I feel miserable and sick. My life makes me nauseous. I feel humiliated! And I fear the future: what can I expect if even here it is so? And yet, I would rather become a horse trader, anything, but a scribbler-for-hire. No, I refused to become that in Vienna and in Paris, and of all places I refuse to become one here in Moscow! 1 The explanation for this entry may be found in a letter whose draft I have found among my papers. [Sinkó had written a letter of complaint against Mosfilm addressed to an editor at Pravda. In it, Sinkó relates in detail how his screenplay, Katya, had been accepted by Sokolovskaya, describes Babel’s involvement, what he had been paid, what he was still owed (50 percent of the total value of the contract), and his troubles in reaching Sokolovskaya since his return from vacation. The letter concludes with:] If I were in a capitalist society, I would content myself with taking this case to court. But here, in the Soviet Union, for me, there is a principle at stake. First of all, I cannot consider the procedure to which I have been subjected to be consistent with the values of socialism, or for that matter, to the behavior that can be expected from a cultured person. Moreover, I feel that I should not remain silent about how a Soviet company treats the money of its citizens and 277

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Chapter 34 the work of its writers. This is why I decided to take my case to the Soviet courts as well as to you, the editors of Pravda.

Today, I am a bit ashamed when I read this letter. It demonstrates that a person could be a Michael Kohlhaas and a Don Quixote 2 at the same time. When I wrote it, Sokolovskaya [. . .]—as I learned much later—was already out of favor, in fact, probably under arrest. I had considered the campaign that Pravda was waging against the careless work of companies and their managers as encouraging examples that I wished to emulate. Day after day, Pravda would label various companies as irresponsible for their poor work. It would publish legions of letters from teachers and students about unusable notebooks and about maps with mislabeled seas. [. . .] Such articles in Pravda and in the Soviet press in general convinced me that those who are careful and timid are in the wrong, for here was proof that the leaders of the Soviet Union use the entire weight of the press to support all well-intentioned complaints and criticism. It seemed to me that all cowardice, fearful silence, and spineless accommodation was simply a betrayal of what Stalin was trying to accomplish. I missed Babel; he was still in Odessa. But I did not doubt for a second that he was going to be proud of me when he learned that I had taken up the cudgel against the management of Mosfilm with energy and without his prodding. [Sinkó points out that he was not alone in thinking that he could turn to the courts and the press for redress. His friends, especially the Hungarians, cheered him on when he turned to Pravda and to the courts.] At this time, right after the Zinoviev-Kamenev trials, there developed a climate of opinion which tended to accept the official position that everything that was bad, everything that was incomprehensible in the life of the Soviet Union was the result of intentional wrecking carried out by organized enemies. Back then, none of my many friends thought that Sokolovskaya and other film makers were among the “disappeared”—among those who vanished from one day to the next. They were much more inclined to believe that these people were Trotskyist wreckers who had gone into hiding and who had treated me as they had because they wished to demoralize me and make me into an enemy of the regime. [. . .] [Sinkó admits that his wife was more skeptical about what was happening in the Soviet Union. He cites the example of the writer Demyan Bedny, a champion of Socialist Realism and a persecutor of those writers who did not follow its formulas. Bedny had even written a poem demanding the death sentence for the accused in the Zinoviev-Kamenev trial, but he himself came under criticism in late 1936 and his play about Russian legendary folk heroes was banned. Sinkó, like many of his friends, thought that this was a sign that the literary strictures were going to be relaxed. M, on the contrary, argued that this was a sign that no one, not even Bedny could feel secure.

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Sinkó accused her of having a narrow vision. But on November 15th, they read in Pravda that the reason Bedny’s play about Russian legendary folk heroes had been banned was because he did not treat these legends with sufficient respect, in other words, he had insulted Russian nationalism. Sinkó recognized that M had been right and that he had again been overly optimistic in his judgment of the latest trend. He was at a loss to explain at the time why the regime would be promoting nationalism.] Moscow, November 24, 1936 3 [. . .] It seems that the Zinoviev-Kamenev trial was not the end but the beginning of something because the last two editions of Pravda have reported on some kind of new trial and also on its “results.” The place this time is the Siberian town of Kemerovo. According to the indictment, the Trotskyist managers of the mine at Kemerovo have been deliberately causing mining accidents to occur in the last two years in order to endanger the lives of the miners. Furthermore, two assistant commissars supported the sabotaging managers in implementing their plans. The court has condemned eight people to death and the sentences have already been carried out. 4 I am not an expert on mines, but if it is true that the accused have all confessed to having committed the offenses with which they were charged, I am besieged by questions that cannot be silenced: how was it possible for the accused to promote accidents in the Kemerovo mines for two years without attracting any notice from the departments charged with inspections or from the shop stewards? Is it possible that in the Soviet Union until now so little care has been shown for safeguarding the lives of the miners, or that safety issues were organized in such a slovenly fashion, or that a few engineers and technicians could have succeeded in organizing and carrying out mass killings without being detected? Why did this so important question not come up during the trial? Why are the newspapers or the miners themselves not asking this? And as for the accused, why does the court content itself with calling them “enemies of the people” and “monsters disguised as men,” and accepting their admissions that they are indeed as described, without spending any time to investigate how and why engineers and technicians could have become obsessed with committing mass murders in the mines entrusted to them? I, however, cannot get the questions of what really happened out of my mind. What were all the things that had to have happened before communists, not in a fit of momentary rage, but through two years of premeditation, would methodically destroy comrades and miners? What if the charges (and the confessions of the accused) are false but necessary from a political point of view, that is, to serve “a higher interest”? This would mean that in the Soviet Union the situation is so catastrophically bad domestically, that is, in

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terms of production and in satisfying the needs of the population, that a scapegoat has to be found who can be saddled with responsibility for everything. Anyone who would have acquiesced to be sacrificed would have acted in a super-human manner and would be a saint of the revolution. But what about those who put him up to it? So it would also be horrible if the charge (and the confessions) were false. But if they are not false? This is even worse, because then we are faced with the question: if twenty years after the workers’ revolution, its own heroes have become so demoralized that they have become the murderers of other workers, does it not mean that in the course of time some irremediable ill has struck the revolution itself, or that this victory, even this victory, was not the victory of socialism? And if it is possible for the bourgeois social order to demoralize the bourgeoisie, then is it possible that the victory of socialism . . . Until today I had believed that this was the only victory for which Nietzsche’s observation, that every victory demoralizes—that is, dehumanizes—its victors, would not apply. 5 NOTES 1. This entry is indeed copied verbatim from Sinkó’s Moscow journal. 2. Heinrich von Kleist’s 1808 novella about the evil that comes from a fanatical quest for justice is here contrasted with Cervantes’s famous hero who prefers not to see the world for what it is. 3. Unlike most of the entries in The Novel of a Novel, the entry for this date and its philosophical point cannot be found in Sinkó’s Moscow Diaries. 4. The Kemerovo Trial was a sort of dress rehearsal for the more prominent anti-Trotskyist trials of Bolshevik leaders that followed. See Vadim Z. Rogovin, 1937, Stalin’s Year of Terror (Oak Park, Michigan: Mehring Books, 1998), 96. 5. The reference to Nietzsche is probably to his essay on the German victory over France in 1871. For a translation, see Herbert Golden (trans.), “David Strauss, Writer and Confessor,” in Friedrich Nietzsche, William Arrowsmith (general ed.), Unmodern Observations, Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (New Haven Conn: Yale University Press, 1990), 15.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Funeral

Moscow, November 30, 1936 “My God, this, too, has failed,” wrote Ady, about “the beautiful Easter sadness” for which he had prepared in vain. 1 I, too, prepared for this day, M’s birthday; I wanted to find a way for us to surmount this choking depression, to leave behind, at least for this one day, everything that is bitter: Mosfilm, Optimists, our lack of money and the problems surrounding our residency permit. (This latter is starting to pursue us like a frightening, dark shadow: our residency permit can only be renewed after many inquiries and much legwork, and always for only a month.) I wanted to pull myself together so that we could spend this day, M’s birthday, if not merrily then at least with some hopeful news . . . “My God, this, too, has failed!” I am starting to take anniversaries ever more seriously. Lately, I have come to fear them. Her birthday or mine, and New Year’s Eve, each one [. . .] forces me to confront the question of how much longer can we live in a state of mere anticipation. One milestone follows the next and again nothing has happened that would justify my existence. [. . .] I cannot even be of any help to the person who stands closest to me. I cannot lighten her burden. If she bears those burdens freely, that is her business, but it is my responsibility to pose the question: how long is it permissible for me to go on this way? Today, it has been seventeen years that I have been “going on” like this. I have been living without a “normal” occupation for seventeen years. That is, for seventeen years I have done nothing but write. And I do this as if I were alone, that is, as if I believed, or had reason to believe that such a parasitic existence—writing—were the only means by which I could eventually overcome being alone in the world, alone and like some sort of superfluous person. 281

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And now I, too, am laughing, though not very happily, in fact, quite bitterly. How did I prepare to make this day, M’s birthday, one that we would not spend in the mood of the shipwrecked? Did I buy flowers and place them in every corner of our apartment? This would have required money, as, in general, money is needed for everything that can be purchased, and we have no money. So I decided that I would surprise M by finishing the fifth chapter of my novel about Sallai-Fürst. I am going to work on this as if the roof over our heads were not about to fall on us any minute now. (This mention of the roof is not some poetic metaphor: Steiner was definitively denied his Soviet visa and hence, the battle for his apartment, in which we now live, has begun. Recently, a not very appealing man appeared here with a decree in his hand which stated that he could move into one of the rooms of the apartment. This not very appealing man claimed that he was single and thus would not bother us much because he would only come home to sleep. But he made it clear that we should not try to put obstacles in the way of his moving in because he is working in a people’s committee of the Ministry of the Interior. Nevertheless, I appealed the decision, and we have so far managed to keep our apartment for ourselves.) I have struggled much in the last few days with this fifth chapter and I had hoped to put it into its final form yesterday—but nothing came of this either, because . . . it was yesterday that Babel returned from Odessa, and immediately, after my hearty greeting (I could hardly wait for him to be back), he surprised me in such an unimaginable, unpleasant way, that even now (and it is almost midnight) I have been feeling like a beaten beggar. If I think about it—and I cannot think of anything else—my face burns as if I had been slapped around. No, this is not quite true. What happened is not primarily about me and not just about the concrete consequences this might have for me and my affairs. For me, it is first of all about Babel. I have never in my life witnessed a person whom I loved and whom I held to be my friend turn out to be such a coward. Twenty-four hours have elapsed and I am still terribly ashamed to have seen him act this way. [. . .] With a tanned face, Babel greeted me as happily and warmly as in Odessa, and he listened with great interest to the account of my adventures [at Mosfilm with a certain Vareikis]. He will find out, he said, from Yezhov’s wife who this Vareikis is. Such marauders must not be allowed to run around sticking their noses into everyone’s business and interfering with artistic “output.” I responded, nearly bragging, that I did not even wait until his (Babel’s) return, but driven by thoughts similar to what he had just expressed, I had already been to see Lesnev at Pravda; that Lesnev had listened to my story about Mosfilm and Vareikis with the same sense of indignation as Babel had and asked me to write up the whole affair and to send it to Comrade Nazarov, to whom he introduced me then and there.

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“Molodets!” (Well done!), shouted Babel approvingly, and he asked: “Have you written it? Where is the letter?” “I have already sent it to Nazarov at Pravda,” I said. In fact, at Lesnev’s advice, I went to the courts and sued Vareikis and Mosfilm.” “And what did you write to Pravda in the letter?” asked Babel suddenly in a voice that I had not expected. And when I mentioned that I had referenced him as the consultant for Mosfilm to whom Sokolovskaya had sent me and that I wrote that it was with Babel that I had conferred about many aspects of the screenplay, then Babel suddenly became a different person. Before my very eyes he turned into another person. He grabbed his bald head and asked me again what I had written about him. He asked for the copy of the letter and, when I handed it to him, grabbed it from my hand, started reading it, took off his glasses, and stared before himself as if he had just learned about some awful, as yet inconceivable event. Silence. I too was shocked and looked on without speaking for moments, during which only his asthmatic breathing could be heard. He finally made a move, got up without even looking at me—he seemed to have forgotten that I was there—and left, scurrying over the carpet as if it were on fire. I followed him. He grasped the handrail of the creaking wooden staircase and dragged himself up to his quarters as if some terrible weight had fallen upon him. I yelled after him, “Isaac Emmanuelovich!” With his right hand on the rail, he waved me away with his left without turning around and continued up the stairs. He disappeared into his room and I just gaped after him, bewildered. But there was one thing that I knew, that I saw. Babel had become frightened by the fact that I had mentioned him in my letter to Pravda. At the same time, I knew that I had to tell M that Babel had returned. She was at some meeting of radiologists and was going to return late at night, and when she came home, I would have to tell her that Babel is here and also how he surprised me: a surprise that bodes no good. Thus it came to pass that on M’s birthday, everything worked out differently than I had expected. “My God, this, too, has failed!” [. . .] After yesterday’s nervous breakdown, Babel came down to my apartment at noon with the intention of greeting M and sat with us for about an hour. We conversed. What happened that made him get a hold of himself after yesterday’s panic attack? They had told me earlier at Pravda that before publishing my letter they would speak to Babel when he returned. Babel did not say a word about the whole matter. He bantered good-naturedly—too good-naturedly—and it was obvious that he was trying to be carefree, blithe, and entertaining as if nothing had happened yesterday. But this just made the day even more depressing for me. I have always felt this system of ethical compartmentalization to be unbearable. I always found it insufferable when, for example, a merchant behaved in business according to a set of ethical codes

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that he would consider impermissible in his family or with his friends. Devil take that communism in which people keep in different drawers those ethical norms which they consider obligatory in their personal dealings and those which they follow when dealing with the party, or the socialist homeland, or as communists. [. . .] Here, November 30, 1936, my Moscow diary entries end. It was only in May of the following year, in Paris, that I tried to record all that had remained unrecorded between November 30, 1936, and our departure from the Soviet Union on April 14, 1937. By this time, I understood too well why at the beginning of our stay my Moscow friend had looked at me with such disbelief and why he had slapped his hands together when he found out that in my blessed or cursed stupidity I kept a diary—in Moscow. By this time I could no longer bring myself to continue recording what I saw and heard, and least of all, what I thought. [Sinkó’s attempts to earn a living all continued to flounder. Béla Kun’s support of his efforts to publish Optimists had, he tells us, become a hinderance. Kun was arrested in these months, as Sinkó was to learn later in Paris. No one in the party would divulge this to Sinkó while he was still in the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, his time was taken up with trying to extend his residency permit. He was told by the Soviet authorities that he would have to surrender his Yugoslav passport and apply for Soviet citizenship if he we wished to stay longer. Feeling that there was no opportunity for him elsewhere as a writer, the couple wanted to stay in the Soviet Union but not at the price of never being allowed to leave again.] These Yugoslav passports, of questionable value, meant for us that there remained a chance, however slight, that we could choose where we lived. [. . .] In the last months we even thought that we might actually have to escape: to escape the hopelessness of psychological and material bankruptcy. NOTE 1. Endre Ady’s 1910 poem “Az Elmaradt Szomorúság” (The Missed Sorrow).

Chapter Thirty-Six

The Friendly Visits of Comrade Lopuhina

[A former aristocrat, once “Madame” Lopuhina, and cleary identifiable from her questions as now an undercover agent of the NKVD, came to visit the Sinkós and stayed (quite boorishly) for hours, trying to provoke Sinkó into speaking ill of the Soviet Union. By this time, and in this particular situation, Sinkó knew better. The couple were outraged.] M and I were convinced that our attitude toward the Soviet Union was essentially positive and we still did not think that people at our level were in any danger. No, this simply did not occur to us. We even tried to accept the fact that in theory everyone could be suspect. [. . .] But is it possible to trust and believe in those who choose people like Lopuhina to find out what people think?

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My Witness, I. E. Babel

[. . .] My friendship with Babel came to an abrupt end on the day that he returned from Odessa and surprised me. He still came down sometimes to the pantry around midnight to snack, but I no longer forayed into the kitchen to join him as I had earlier for our long nocturnal conversations. [. . .] One night, he came into our room, saying that on the way to the kitchen, as he passed by our door, the silence of our sitting there in sorrow was deafening, and so he knocked and wanted to tell us something he had just heard that was so funny that even we would laugh. After André Gide’s visit, the epilogue of which was the book Retour de l’URSS, Lion Feuchtwanger was the first well-known European guest to arrive in Moscow. Contrary to Gide, who only made some succinct comments while he was here, Feuchtwanger, who is now being fêted, is quoted at length in the Soviet press, giving testimony to his enthusiasm and pleasure at what he sees here. Eisenstein (who had meanwhile exercised his obligatory self-criticism [. . .]) had composed a clever little ditty, playing on the similarity of the word for Jew and Gide in Russian: Feuchtwanger u dverei

(Feuchtwanger stands at the door

Stoit s umilynym vidom;

With a friendly look;

O kakby sei Yevrei

O, may this Hebrew

Ne pokazalsia – Zhidom.

Not turn out another – Gide.)

Babel recited this little poem slowly and mysteriously and had to repeat the last line because he was laughing so hard that we could not understand it. Having mentioned Eisenstein, Babel must have remembered that he had asked the film director to carry my screenplay to Sokolovskaya. It is even possible that he mentioned Eisenstein so that he could bring up the business 287

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with Mosfilm, about which we had not spoken since that day when my Pravda letter had given him such a scare. I might be wrong, but my impression was that he was in a very good mood that night and he wanted to tell me what I would learn from the editors of Pravda in any case. But he didn’t start right away with my letter to Pravda. He began with his former custom of looking at me with a long, friendly smile. Clearly with the intention of making up, he appealed to his rights as my elder to give me some confidential advice. He said that my gravest fault—and he again called me Ervin Izidorovitch—was that I took things too seriously: I was either “himmelhoch jauchzend” or “zum Tode betrübt” (exulting heavenward or in deadly sorrow). 1 Since in this flea-infested world of ours a smart person like Ervin Izidorovitch will find ever fewer occasions for exultation, a person as smart as Ervin Izidorovitch would do well to learn to view everything that happens with a mollifying sense of humor. Without humor, we become too strict with everyone. We become churlish and unjust and threatened by the dangers of melancholy. Without humor, you cannot be humane in this world. Humor is a great, the most beautiful gift of the spirit. It is the most effective instrument of self-defense. Without it, man loses sight of what it means to be human, in fact, inevitably comes to hate it. Liberating laughter is the best antidote to sinful misanthropy and despair. That this is so, is truly understood in practice only by the French and the Jews. Babel voiced these reflections with his usual dynamism and charm in connection with Eisenstein’s mocking little verse, but he suddenly changed his tone, and while wiping his eyeglasses, he told me that he reread my letter at Pravda and that he “succeeded” in convincing them not to take up my cause. There is no point in taking things tragically. If Pravda had published my letter or if Pravda had written an article about this case based on my letter, I would only have increased the number of my enemies, something of which I have no need right now. Why go public with everything? It should suffice that I am suing Mosfilm, as I explained in my letter, and I should be happy that I am sure to win that suit and then receive the rest of my commission. What else do I need? I refused to agree with him and to all his arguments, I answered that he will be summoned as my witness at the trial. Babel saw clearly how I received the news that it was he who stopped Pravda from coming to my aid to get satisfaction. And perhaps so that he could soften my hardly humorous mood, he pretended to be very happy at my announcement that he will have a chance to testify in my behalf. “Yes, that’s quite smart. Because, you see, if Pravda writes about something, that immediately becomes a political matter. But to sue, to bring the matter to a civil court, that’s totally different. Just have me called up as a witness. There, I will tell them everything. If you wish I will even tell them that Vareikis is an ox, an impertinent ox,” said he, and because he was able

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to agree with me, he become jolly again. “One doesn’t have to be a lawyer to see in advance that the court will find in your favor, Ervin Izidorovitch, and Vareikis is an ox, an impertinent ox . . .” He did not finish his sentence. It was as if he had heard someone else’s voice, he listened, perked up his ears, and as if sniffing with his snub nose, he was surprised by his own words, his own grotesque juxtaposition of images and suddenly began to chuckle, repeating with satisfaction: “An ox, an ox that is impertinent!” And raising his arms high, drew with his hands the outlines of a big animal in the air. “An ox, an impertinent ox! How comical!” Babel had the ability to charm you, especially [. . .] when he gave himself over to the carefree enjoyment of his own wit. I am sure he was quite sincere when he said that he would testify against Vareikis and on my behalf. He was quite sincere at the time. The final occasion on which I spoke to Babel was when he appeared as my witness before the court in my suit against Mosfilm. The trial was scheduled for ten o’clock in the morning. Before leaving home, I went up to Babel’s floor to remind him that he is required to appear at ten. He rebuffed the very idea that he could forget something that was so important to me and promised to be there on time. He said that Yezhov’s wife was sending a car over because he had to look in on her first. When I arrived at the courthouse, I found my lawyer already there and his first question for me was whether I was sure that Babel will come. The judge was there, too; a rather pleasant young man whom I had met earlier when I requested that the date of the trial be brought forward. No one was there yet from Mosfilm. There was an older man in rumpled clothes, dressed just as badly as my lawyer. The latter whispered in my ear that the older man, who walked back and forth with his coat collar turned up as he waited for the trial to start in the poorly heated court room, was the representative for Mosfilm. At ten o’clock, the judge and two others, who looked like laborers, took their places behind the table that stood on a small podium. The trial started with my lawyer explaining the case. The representative of Mosfilm did not even ask to be allowed to contradict any of his opponent’s statements or conclusions, which were that Babel, the consultant for Mosfilm who had been designated by Sokolovskaya herself to work with me, had declared my screenplay to be acceptable and as such sent it himself to Sokolovskaya; and since Mosfilm had not raised any objections against it within the time period laid out in the contract, the company was legally obliged to fulfill its end of the bargain. At this point, the judge asked Babel to take the stand as witness. Babel came in with his fur-lined coat unbuttoned, and with his fur cap in his gloved hands. He looked neither left nor right. As always when he was outside his home, he was impeccably dressed and his appearance suggested that he was

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an unbiased, somehow illustrious person. I found it odd that he did not even greet me with a glance. “Are you aware of having been designated by Sokolovskaya as the decisive consultant for the screenplay that is being discussed here?” asked the judge. “I am not aware of that,” replied Babel. I was sitting on the side, but when I heard this I stood up, as did my lawyer. The likable judge was taken aback for a moment and looked at me with surprise. “Did you help the author with your advice while he was working on the screenplay?” The answer was again short. “No.” “When the screenplay was completed, did you approve of it?” Answer: “Not I.” And Babel, as if he felt that with all this he had not dissociated himself sufficiently from the case, added: “I had nothing to do with any of this.” “Can you give us your opinion of the screenplay?” “I cannot give an opinion of it because I am not familiar with it. But I trust the opinion of the people at Mosfilm.” At the beginning, Babel looked somewhat stiff, but as the judge, who was obviously puzzled by my having asked Babel to be my witness, asked him question after question, Babel started to ease up and soon answered the questions with an easy, conversational tone, so much so that in the end the representative of Mosfilm got in the mood to join in and a dialog developed between him and Babel in the course of which each one concluded that they were in complete agreement with each other. My lawyer, naturally, became flustered, and if he thought anything, it must have been that I, his client, was some sort of idiot, having chosen this witness of all people. “The client,” that is, I stood there in a state dominated by a sense of shame such as I had never felt before or since. [. . .] The pleasant judge turned to me and asked: “Is there perhaps anything you would like to ask the witness?” “Do you not remember telling me in Odessa that I should make no more changes on my screenplay but wait for a director to be assigned?” Babel, that same Babel whom I had until then thought I knew, turned toward me for the first time and, looking into my eyes with his brown eyes from behind his thick glasses, answered calmly: “I don’t recall talking about your screenplay at all in Odessa.” I didn’t ask him any more questions. As the hearing had come to an end at this point, Babel bowed with a certain elegant, easy manner and left the court room. With this, the hearing ended. My lawyer asked me if I wished to appeal the forthcoming decision, about which, after what had happened,

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there could be no doubt. I told him, no, and quickly left the room so that I could escape and be alone in the street. But in the vestibule of the building—I could barely believe my eyes—there stood Babel in one of the recesses before a window. I passed by him in silence but he stepped forward, saying, “I will explain everything to you, Ervin Izidorovitch. You must understand . . .” He said something like that, and that Yezhov’s wife’s car was waiting outside. I should go with them. She’ll take us home. He meanwhile put his arm into mine, but this physical contact, like some further insult startled me and at the same time made me so mad that, losing all self-control, I yelled at him: “Shame on you! You, Isaac Emmanuelovitch, can no longer even feel any shame!” I don’t know if he understood that I was thinking of that conversation we once had in which he said about Yezhov’s predecessor, Yagoda, that there are people who have lost their ability to feel any shame. During his entire testimony I had had the feeling that there was something that this whole thing reminded me of but I could not remember what it was. And now I suddenly realized: it was that confidential conversation we had had about the head of the GPU, which now, ghostlike, returned to me. I did not know what had prompted him to behave as he did, what concrete reasons had impelled him to do so. Had he decided already that morning when I dropped in on him before the hearing that he was going to deny everything, that is, that he would betray me and lie; or perhaps had he heard some news from Yezhov’s wife on their way to the court, on the basis of which he thought it advisable to deny all solidarity with me despite the fact that he knew quite well the difficult situation that I was in, in every respect? I could only try to guess his reasons, since no more conversations would take place between us except for a few conventional and unavoidable words necessitated by our continued residence under the same roof. He tried to make up, but I could not forgive him. I knew that his wife, Antonina Nikolaevna, was about to give birth and that Babel needed a lot of money for other family obligations as well. I also knew that his consulting for Mosfilm had for some time already become his sole source of income, and that they paid him relatively well. I thought that he did not want to ruin his relationship with his employer, and that thus, he mercilessly chose me as the sacrifice. 2 But today, I think it much more likely that what he feared was not the loss of his income but of his life. And in order to save it, he wished to deny not only all collaboration with me but also—maybe primarily—with having had any contact with Sokolovskaya. I was absolutely wrong in attributing Babel’s behavior in this matter solely to a weakness of character. It is true that I could not have seen any other reason for it, because paradoxically, while living in the capital of the Soviet Union, I knew less about what was going on in the country than later in Paris, when I was able to pick up pieces of news from various sources

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about the events in the Soviet Union. In Moscow, I did not yet realize that those public and greatly publicized bloody political trials were taking place, among other reasons, to hide the totally silent and fatal mass arrests, deportations, and executions that were going on behind the scenes in parallel with these trials. Those who knew that people were disappearing in this silent manner only knew because someone close to them had disappeared. But even they might have thought that this was a singular event, and since the person had been close to them, they were afraid of becoming a target themselves— and so they remained silent. And it was thus that the complete psychological and physical isolation of the individual from the power apparatus of the state came about, an isolation for which one could hardly find another example in history. But Babel, who, especially after Gorky’s death, had found a protector in Yezhov—the successor of Yagoda—knew much better than I and many others that those quiet, individual cases numbered into the tens and hundreds of thousands. [In the rest of this chapter, Sinkó describes somewhat at length his reactions to the terror that had become general in the Soviet Union in January, 1937, as the trial of Radek was getting under way. We shall only excerpt the remainder of the chapter because there is much repetition in his major points. In it, Sinkó again expresses his fundamental depressing conundrum: On the one hand, he recognized that what was happening was an indication that the revolution had gone afoul of its goals. On the other hand, Sinkó felt that any open criticism of the Soviet power structure, such as what Gide had published abroad, was impermissible because it would only strengthen international support for Hitler’s Germany, which he considered to be clearly the greater danger.] I do not underestimate the power of individual ethical action or the responsibility of each person, but the potential for any individual action should not be overestimated under the conditions then prevailing in the Soviet Union. [. . .] At this time in the Soviet Union everyone, even if not to the same extent, inevitably became a victim of a general demoralization. In some cases it was fear and in others the recognition of helplessness that induced and deepened in every single person an ever greater demoralization. To take any sort of individual initiative in the interest of changing the direction in which events were tending, or even just to influence them in some way, seemed so patently absurd that no one even considered it. In the best case, one could think only about how to adapt to a situation that was created from above, independently of his own will. I am convinced that the psychological enigma regarding the “confessions” of the accused in the Moscow trials, about which there was so much talk abroad, is incomprehensible only if we fail to take sufficient note of the isolation of each person and of the futility of any individual resistance toward the Stalinist state apparatus. There is no cell for solitary confinement in

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which a person can be rendered more isolated than by that unavoidable subliminal message according to which the apparatus of the state is almighty and the individual is powerless, hopelessly and forever. This is not some sort of theoretical conclusion but rather something that I observed on myself at this time, the time of the Radek trial. [. . .] I knew that invisibly we were hundreds of thousands, millions, living in this same solitary confinement, but this did not embolden us at all. On the contrary, it made our sense of powerlessness all the more intense. [Everyone tried to hide their isolations from everyone else. Only the pretense was collective.] The only reality was state power, that power whose irresistible dark will was represented by the unscrupulous, cynical state prosecutor, Andrey Vishinsky. In Budapest, Berlin, or in the colonial world, despite the raging White Terror, communists could always draw strength from the idea of revolution and from the faith that a more humane world was possible. A communist elsewhere could always feel strong. But in Moscow, in 1937, it was the communists, precisely because they were communists, who could not hope for a different reality in face of or against the reality that was Moscow. [. . .] However embittered I was by Babel’s betrayal, I could not avoid asking myself: at the time of the trials, including that great trial which was just a sort of overture in 1937 and which included among its accused Radek, Pyatakov, Sokolnikov, and Serebjakov, was there a single voice indicating even the slightest bravery among the accused or among those who commented publicly on the cases? And did I—I asked myself—have the slightest reason to consider my own behavior at the time of the Radek-Pyatakov trial to be significantly superior to that of others? In one way, I behaved like everyone else: I did nothing. I accepted as an ethical principle that the main task of all possible and permissible personal intellectual activities was to find the justification for everything that the leaders of the Soviet Union were doing. But already at the time that the press was starting to report on the preparation for the Radek-Pyatakov trial or during the time of the trial itself, I could not find any justification for the methods used in the preparation or conduct of this trial. Already before the trial and during it, the Soviet press reported on the many hundreds of public meetings and conferences in which those present “unanimously” voiced their support for declarations demanding the death penalty, always using the same stock phrases. One of these many declarations was that signed by foreign writers living in Moscow. Pravda published the declaration with the names of the signers. My name was not present. In January, 1937 (the monster trial started on the 23rd and lasted until the 30th), I did not leave my apartment and hid from all those who could have asked me to sign the declaration if we had run into each other. [. . .] Although I was silently not in agreement with everything I saw, I considered any criticism, and even more so, any sort of attempt at active resistance

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to be a sin. The example of André Gide is proof that, given the state of the world at that time, no other attitude could have been justifiable than to fully support the regime. When Gide tried to defend the principles of a humanist proletarian revolution in opposition to what he saw in the Soviet Union, did he not end up, contrary to his intentions, the celebrated hero of the darkest power of inhuman darkness? Was not Gide’s book, Retour de l’URSS, promulgated in excerpts and in its entirety by every reactionary and fascist paper, with the Völkischer Beobachter at their head? And as a consequence of the then current historical constellation, when a conquering fascism was preparing for a new world war, did not all those who tried to organize resistance within the Soviet Union end up in the same tragic situation of helping Hitler independently of their own subjective intentions? By now it is evident that Hitler’s accession to power and the fact that day by day National Socialist Germany was growing into an aggressive Great Power contributed substantially to the fatal victory of the Stalinist system: the threat posed by National Socialist Germany served to legitimize the inhumanities of the Stalinist system. [This . . .] is what made it possible for the Stalinist system to present before the eyes of the world and before Vishinsky’s military court the former heroes and organizers of the October Revolution as an isolated group of corrupt and incompetent conspirators, as a caricature of former revolutionaries who pilloried themselves as penitent miscreants. You can forbid yourself to give voice to your thoughts, but you can’t forbid yourself from being besieged by those thoughts under the impact of besieging events. [. . .] I was on the lookout every morning for the arrival of Babel’s newspaper carrier so that I could read [. . . the coverage of the trials] in both Pravda and Izvestiya before Babel woke up. In the course of this, I began to suspect ever more strongly that what I had called the general demoralization of the Soviet people was not only the consequence of an objective situation but that the entire apparatus of the Soviet state was intentionally and in accordance with a master plan being utilized to create and deepen this psychological state of individual helplessness and terror. Every instrument of the state was used to convey the message that there is a sort of infallible, all-knowing, god-like, super-human, super-intelligent power in this country in which one must believe unconditionally. With this, everything that was not unconditional obedience and humility was degraded into sin. At the same time, the open deification of Stalin and of the entire governing apparatus of the Soviet state made all Soviet citizens equal by demoting all that was human in people, since all rewards, punishments, praise, and reprimands could only come from above and in accordance with whether each individual fulfilled his orders well or poorly. Orders were

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given for everything and they had to be accepted not as orders but as the only form possible for the care of each person. It would be a mistake to attribute the insane tastelessness of the Stalin cult to a sort of Caesaromania. Early in our acquaintance, Babel had told me about an incident that he had witnessed in the company of Gorky. Stalin’s young daughter, Svetlana, had come in to greet Stalin when she came home from school with her school bag in her hand. “Tell the Father of the People, the Leader of the World’s Proletariat, and the Brilliant Steersman of the World Revolution what you learned in school today,” asked Stalin, laughing. Babel said that Stalin often mocked the epithets that blindly zealous respect attached to his name. [While closely following the reporting on the trials,] I came to the conclusion that the slogan “Thank you, Comrade Stalin for our happy life” became the most frequent slogan between the Kirov murder and the Moscow Trials because everything that still remained from the “climate” of the revolution had to be transformed into the “climate” of subjection. It served to implant the suggestion of obedience as a revolutionary virtue and thus to declare as an anti-state crime the critical thinking that is characteristic of anyone who wants to improve things, that pride which is inseparable from what it means to be human. The Radek-Pyatakov trial seemed to show that the state had succeeded in this intention because in the long seven days of the trial, there was not a single moment when one could detect among the former leaders of the revolution even the embers of anything like that fundamental human pride that comes with consciousness. [The former revolutionaries had been destroyed in their pride and selfrespect even before they were arrested by having been induced to testify against their former comrades, Zinoviev and Kamenev. They had lost not only a battle but also their faith in the existence of anything for which it was worth fighting or for which they, with their compromised reputations and consciences, could fight.] NOTE 1. Quote from Goethe’s and Schiller’s co-written Romantic era play, Egmont. 2. [Author’s footnote] In 1947, at a reception in Zagreb, I met the Soviet writer Simonov and inquired about Isaac Emmanuelovitch Babel. He mumbled under his breath: “He was a Japanese spy. They deported him.” Later, I learned from other Soviet writers who were visiting us that he had been executed as a Japanese spy. After the XX Congress, his execution has been admitted officially and Babel is among that long list of people who have been “rehabilitated.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

“Now Nothing Can Be Known For Sure”

[Sinkó considered the show trials to be an indication, regardless of whether the charges against the accused were true or not, that something had gone terribly and irremediably wrong within the party and with the claim of the Soviet Union to be a proletarian state. He cites as an example the story of a brave revolutionary, Jakov Naumanovich Drobnis, a co-defendant of the Radek-Pyatakov trial and whose past Sinkó had investigated via pamphlets and books written between 1917 and 1927; documents that had become increasingly hard to find. There was a grave problem either way: whether such dedicated revolutionaries were turned into saboteurs, or alternatively, if they were made to bear false witness against themselves and their colleagues. Sinkó had doubts about the truth of the confessions at the trials, since he saw with his own eyes at the Mosfilm trial how Babel could be made to lie, or in another instance, how Eisenstein contritely but dishonestly exercised self-criticism and thanked the authorities for banning one of his films. Yet, every word of the confessions had its significance. A Hungarian comrade pointed out to him that although the accused had “admitted” to having plotted the assassinations of Yezhov and Beria, they did not mention Yagoda. “This was not a good omen for Yagoda. It was possible that they were hoping to take revenge on Yagoda in this way, but it was also possible . . . Now nothing can be known for sure. . . .” If the former head of the GPU had been an enemy, then what guarantee was there that it was not the best people who had been arrested and executed on the basis of false charges?]

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Chapter Thirty-Nine

Two Years Later

As far as my own situation was concerned, during the last two and a half months that I spent in Moscow, every change, literally everything that happened and that did not happen, had the effect of pushing me out of the country. [. . .] The publication of Optimists? Just the thought of this seemed so anachronistic even to me that I made no effort to shepherd it along or to inquire about where it stood. When it became evident that Kun could not be reached by telephone or otherwise, I lost my only source of income, the work at the Hungarian broadcasts of Radio Moscow. My last experiment at participation in public life was an article, “An Open Letter from Moscow to André Gide,” which I had written before the trials in response to his book, Retour de l’URSS. 1 The manuscript (which I still have) was returned to me as “not publishable” and decorated with exclamation points and questions marks on every page in black and green ink. I was unemployed, in Moscow, and soon after the trial of Radek-Pyatakov [which ended January 30, 1937], the reddish-blond man who had once already tried to move into Steiner’s, that is, into our apartment, appeared again, but this time with a decree that could not be appealed. In fact, he moved into one of the two rooms that we had occupied. He immediately and with great noise nailed the door between our rooms shut. The “bachelor’s” wife and children also arrived. “The noise and the GPU have moved in,” said Babel to me vehemently and reproachfully, as if it were all my fault. What formal right did I still have to an apartment or even to reside in the Soviet Union? Not only did I lack a formal right to these, but I also lacked all means of earning a living. Yet, I stood in line persistently and with diligence with those who wanted to renew their residency permits from month to month. Why did I want to stay at any price? Later, already in Paris, it seemed to me that precisely in those last two months, when both spiritually and financially my situation had be299

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come hopeless, I was so mesmerized by the myriad of mysterious events taking place before my very eyes that I had in fact become insensitive to my own personal problems. This is why I greeted what should have been quite foreseeable, as a totally improbable and surprising calamity: they informed me at the office [for the extension of residency permits . . .] that my request had been rejected and that in fourteen days, that is, after April 14, I would no longer have a right to be on the territory of the Soviet Union. [Sinkó pleaded with the official at the little window: his wife was a doctor, he had contracts with publishers, no country would accept him after having spent two years in the Soviet Union—all to no avail. Although they had many friends in the Soviet Union and many were officials in the Comintern, there was no one to whom they could turn. They looked in M’s Parisian address book and Sinkó’s glance fell on the name of one of M’s radiologist colleagues.] We were not close friends but we knew that he knew about us and about Optimists, and we also knew that he was a communist and that he was well acquainted with our best Parisian friends. M could not understand why I had stubbornly insisted on calling him (and nor could I). Indeed, he was quite surprised to receive a phone call after midnight from M and from Moscow. I was however surprised by how quickly he grasped the situation: that we only had thirteen days to leave the country and that we were told by the French consulate that they could not give us an entry visa without an explicit directive from Paris. M asked him to inform our common friends and together with them to do everything possible so that we could quickly obtain our visa. [The friend reassured M that he would do everything in his power. His tone and his immediate grasp of the situation conveyed to the Sinkós the concern with which communists in France regarded the events that were taking place in the Soviet Union. It was only then that they realized that they might be facing grave dangers.] This phone conversation made a great impression on us for yet another reason. It was only then that we realized how, after two years in Moscow, we no longer expected anyone to act spontaneously and with dispatch, openly and actively rather than with doubt and only after asking endless questions. Four days before our time limit, on April 10th, our Parisian friends informed us that the French consulate in Moscow had been sent a telegraph with permission to give us an entry visa. In the remaining four days we had to obtain transit visas and the funds for our travel expenses. Steiner gave us permission to sell everything that could be sold from his former Moscow apartment. This is how we were able to buy our tickets to Vienna and then, via Switzerland, to Paris. It was typical of the novel of the novel that the last hurdle that we had to surmount concerned my manuscripts. I learned at the last moment that I could take my manuscripts with me only after they were inspected by a “special” office of the Ministry of Education.

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We loaded two large suitcases full of manuscripts into a taxi on an unusually hot day in April and when we got out, we noticed right away that there was a sign on the door saying that the elevator was out of order. [. . .] M and I dragged the same “vulcanized” suitcases up to the fourth floor of the office of the ministry that we had dragged with great effort up the narrow metal stairs of the Vitebsk two years earlier, but now the suitcases were further burdened with the typed, abridged manuscripts and various translations of Optimists and with several incomplete drafts of my new novel, Fourteen Days. And we did all this just so that they would allow us to lug back all this accursed paper full of writing which had been growing in volume for fifteen years and becoming an increasingly irksome curse upon me. We finally found the office we were looking for at the end of one of the long hallways on the fourth floor. We must have been quite a sight with our weighty suitcases for the two rather primitive-looking Russian bureaucrats, but they were even more surprised when, at their request, we opened the suitcases and they were confronted by its seemingly incomprehensible contents. They dug around in it, pulled out one packet at random and asked almost indignantly, “So, what’s this?” They were at a loss as to what to do with these Hungarian, German, and French texts. Finally, they decided that we had to leave the suitcases there for inspection. M became a bit agitated and she nearly threatened the two men rather impolitely, saying that we have to leave on the fourteenth and there was no way that we were going to leave without the suitcases. We got the suitcases back the day before our departure. The manuscripts inside were tied with string and bore lead seals. (At the Soviet border, the seals were removed. [. . .]) But my Moscow journal was not in the suitcases. M had wrapped it in paper, addressed it to our friend in Paris, and just before we left, she gave it to our old, illiterate cook, Mariya Nikolaevna, and asked her to take it to the post office on the next day and send it via airmail. We had to consign it to good fortune. Late in the afternoon on the fourteenth, we visited my sister, Boriska. She had been reduced to a skeleton by her serious illness (cancer) and had just been sent home from the hospital. [Sinkó describes the sad scene of their leave-taking as Boriska’s husband, his young daughter, and his relatives, celebrated euphorically that she was home again. Boriska, however, was on the verge of tears throughout.] As the taxi stopped before our house and we started to carry our luggage out the door, strangers rushed into our room, shouting and threatening each other, fighting about who should take possession of the apartment. The shouting could be heard through the open window and Babel (with whom I could still not bring myself to behave in a conventionally friendly manner) shuffled around us looking pale and awkward. Just as the car was about to

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leave, a policeman appeared with a piece of paper in his hand, explaining that he was there to make sure that we were departing. Thus we took our leave of Stalin’s Moscow. [. . .] We had “escaped” from Paris and now we had succeeded in “escaping” back to Paris. [Sinkó explains that the word escape may not be the right word for a situation in which one is told to leave.] Our only other success was that we were allowed to drag the manuscript of Optimists back with us. This would have been the summation of our trip if life really consisted only of successes and failures. But at the railway station in Moscow, as we were looking out the window of our train, waiting for it to leave, we realized that this is not so. We were surprised by how many people had come to the station so that they could shake hands with us one more time. Karcsi Garai (“Kürschner”) was there: he died later in the Soviet Union (as I was to learn in Budapest during my visit in 1947), accused, even he, of being a “Trotskyist.” Like the others who were waiting with us, he was agitated in a certain way, but he did not try to spend the time until the train left in conversation as is often the case in such situations. Only when he embraced me at the end— and it was evident that he had been waiting for this occasion—did he address me and asked, in an almost entreating tone: “You will not say anything shameful about us out there, will you?” Another comrade pulled me aside for a few words. He did not know Malraux personally but since he worked for the Comintern, he knew exactly what kind of services Malraux was performing at the Spanish Front as a pilot. He therefore asked me to convey to Malraux the message that in the future he should refrain from making such ill-considered statements as he had made recently. A journalist had asked Malraux what the relationship was like in Spain between the Trotskyists and the Communists. Malraux had answered: they are dying together and they will be victorious together. I was to explain to Malraux that one is not allowed to speak in that way about Trotskyists—and that because of this statement he will no longer be published in the Soviet Union, nor will his name be mentioned by the Soviet press as belonging to the camp of antifascist writers. When the train started, I opened the small package that Kurella had handed me through the window. Next to the book, Lenin’s Letters to his Family (in French), on the title page of which the name of Barbusse appeared as author, there was a small envelope and in it there was a photograph of Kurella with a friendly dedication, which, at the moment, with the cursed suitcases of manuscripts on the rack above my head, had an odd effect on me. It read: Der Optimist des Optimisten dem Optimisten

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der Optimisten.

(The optimist / Of the optimists / To the optimist / Of the Optimists.) NOTE 1. The trials that he refers to are those of Radek-Piatakov (January 23–30, 1937) but the trials of Kamenev and Zinoviev had already taken place. Sinkó’s open letter to Gide has been published in Ervin Sinkó, Az út, 334–349. Sinkó’s main argument in the letter is that Gide should not have aired his criticisms at the time that he did because they provided support for the political goals of Nazi Germany. But he also claimed that Gide was mistaken in his perceptions of Soviet shortcomings, measuring them by unrealistic standards. In other words, Sinkó gave the standard excuses for Soviet enomomic shortcomings and denials of individual rights. He did not mention any of his own doubts. Still, his arguments against Gide were too respectful of Gide for the Soviet authorities, who did not allow the publication of the letter.

Chapter Forty

On the Meeting of Romain Rolland with Stalin

I wrote to Romain Rolland while we were still in Moscow that we had to leave the Soviet Union and asked him to let us know by way of Steiner’s address in Vienna if my wife and I could pay him a visit of a few hours [in Villeneuve, Switzerland] on our way to Paris. [. . .] One reason why this meeting with Rolland was important to me was because he had not made any public statements about the Moscow trials. [. . .] The few days that we spent in Vienna—where the clerical-fascist government was congratulating itself with the popular line that they were the lesser evil when compared to Germany’s National Socialist fascism, and hence they were the best of all possible worlds—allowed me to conclude again that not supporting Stalin’s Soviet Union only fanned the flames of that Viennese graveyard reasoning according to which all great hopes were either dead or dying, all resistance was futile, and hence there was no other choice than to accept the lesser evil. I had not been able to discuss any important issues with Rolland in Moscow, but would he be willing to speak to me openly now? I feared his high, starched collar and his stiff self-discipline which was so different from the style of his letters. But in less than five minutes of sitting across from him, I could feel that this old man was almost eruptive in his sincerity; he was so sincere that it was difficult for me to requite his kind openness, though I had decided beforehand that I would not hide my most “destructive” doubts from him. Paris, August 14, 1937 I am here in Paris, but in my mind I am not yet here but rather in Moscow and in Madrid. [. . .] I can neither think nor talk about anything else. Wasn’t 305

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Moscow the only topic which we discussed with Rolland and, while sitting across from him in his Villeneuve villa, wasn’t my supreme hope that I would learn as much as possible from him, and he from me, about Moscow; I wanted to learn something that would make me see more clearly. I did not need to be on site in Vienna to sense the smell of corpses, nor in Paris to see up close how the illusions tied to the Front Populaire were going up in smoke. I knew without being in these places that Moscow was where all our hopes, our fate, would be decided. And I feel this all the more strongly now. “Everything now depends on Madrid,” said the old man of Villeneuve. I agreed, but added: “It seems now as if they have forgotten this in Moscow. It seems that they now considered the most important thing to be the struggle against—Trotskyism.” Rolland made no attempt to mince his words: “Stalin is not the Soviet Union!” It only took a few minutes for him to become visibly more and more agitated. He complained that the Swiss government had banned the Soviet papers and thus he had no means of gaining first-hand information about events in the Soviet Union. At the same time, the comrades were urging him to declare his support of the prosecution even though he did not have enough information about the background of the events. To illustrate this, he mentioned Bukharin. He knew Bukharin from the time when he was living in Europe as an émigré from Tsarist Russia. He also had met with him last year in Moscow. “He is a wonderful person, charming and witty. He spoke to me enthusiastically about what has been accomplished already and what is yet to come in the Soviet Union. He was full of enthusiasm. He has amazing energy.” As soon as he found out that Bukharin had been jailed, Rolland wrote a letter to Stalin. He asked him to do everything he could in Bukharin’s interest who through his extraordinary personality and intellectual abilities is certain to continue to make great contributions to the cause of the Revolution. “I was afraid that my letter would not reach Stalin or not soon enough. I asked my wife to hand it to Litvinov in Geneva. It has been several weeks and I have yet to received an answer. But ten days ago our comrades asked me to declare in writing my confidence in Bukharin’s guilt, even though the trial has not yet begun. This is absurd! They claim that my statement is necessary because the reactionaries in France are exploiting the trials against us. I know this and I would be willing even to break with Bukharin, but I first need to see the proceedings of the trial, that is, the evidence on the basis of which he has been jailed. Without this? Absolutely not!” I responded that when I had left Moscow, some people told me that after Sokolnikov, who had been convicted along with Radek, one of Litvinov’s assistants, Krestiansky, had also been arrested. Under these circumstances, it was certainly possible that Litvinov’s own position was shaky. In any case, it

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will not be easy for him, of all people, to hand Stalin a letter in favor of Bukharin. Although I knew well that Rolland was not politically inclined and that it was only the deadly threat of fascism against all human values that could bring him to place himself at the head of political actions organized on behalf of the Soviet Union, I was surprised when he asked with the simplicity of the Evangelists, as if there could be any doubt: “What do you think, are all these things happening in Moscow happening with Stalin’s approval?” And perhaps because he noticed that M and I involuntarily looked at each other, he tried to explain himself: “Yes, especially since I have sat across from Stalin, it is hard for me to imagine that all this is happening with his approval. There is an extraordinary force and calmness in him, and besides, his amiable, open, and direct manner instilled trust in me. I even told him that in the West even the most faithful friends of the Soviet Union were crushed by the news from TASS about the mass executions of White Guards. That is, that this happened as punishment for the murder of Kirov. Stalin was not upset by my honesty,” and Rolland looked at his wife, Mariya Pavlovna, as if calling upon her to be his witness, since, after all, she had been his interpreter, “but he answered me by saying that he agreed with me completely and added, literally ‘If it had been up to me, this would not have happened. But do not forget that I cannot stop everything from happening and it is not I alone who decides.’“ Roland believed him at the time. This was before the Zinoviev-Kamenev trial. But since then it seems that Rolland too has had some doubts. He now asked: “Is it possible that Stalin was not being sincere?” Mariya Pavlovna left us alone for a few moments. Rolland made use of the opportunity to tell us how the Parisian Trotskyists are constantly slandering his wife in their papers and brochures. Most recently, even Victor Serge wrote that Mariya Pavlovna was sent to Rolland by the GPU and that she is still serving the GPU. Victor Serge, of all people, writes this, as if he did not know that he owes his freedom to Rolland. Mariya Pavlovna reappeared to call us to dinner at midday and Rolland continued his story, now in her presence, about how they had succeeded in working on behalf of Victor Serge back then. But his account only served to convince me that Stalin was not only insincere with him but that he was mocking this great and pure-hearted old man. That is, Romain Rolland, according to his own account, told Stalin that if there are charges against Victor Serge, then those should be made public. But if there were none, he should be given his freedom and allowed to return to France, because, in fact, it is the left-wing intellectuals who were most disturbed by the fact that Victor Serge has been in jail now for years without a public trial. Stalin acted as if this were the first time he had heard the name of Victor Serge, but then, as if he had, after all, succeeded in recalling who he was:

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“Victor Serge? We don’t consider the Trotskyists to be a danger anymore. As far as I know, there are no serious charges and Victor Serge . . . As far as I am concerned, he can go wherever he wants!” Rolland was a different person in his own home than he was in his letters or the way I had perceived him in Moscow. Now he was not an apostle and was not ascetic; he didn’t consider it his task to influence me in any particular direction (as, for example, I had thought it important to do during my transit through Vienna). He let his doubts and anxieties break through, at times to the point of despair. He raised the question: “How can I trust Yezhov, and trust him absolutely when Yagoda, his predecessor, we are now told, was a villain, though he was lord over life and death for ten years and whom, we were told until now, we could trust completely?” He was saying this, but suddenly, he stopped, stood up, took a pillow and put it behind M’s back. “I see that the voyage has tired you out. Isn’t that more comfortable?” This was no mere conventional politeness. M was indeed quite pale, though not from the tiring voyage, but from the anxiety. I was moved by the thin, tall, bent, old man’s gentle gesture [. . .]. After our meal, we didn’t want to tire Rolland further. [. . .] Mariya Pavlovna was visibly concerned about how the conversation had made Rolland so agitated. She urged him to rest for at least half an hour. But he reacted vehemently to her fussing over him and continued tirelessly to inquire about what exactly was happening in the Soviet Union and whether it was not going to detrimentally affect the unity of the antifascist front in Spain and France? What he said sounded a lot like what M and I had so often expressed to each other between the four walls of our Moscow apartment in Nikolovorobinsky Pereulok. He sometimes expressed himself with an edge that I would not have permitted myself in my most bitter secret Moscow monologues. Yet, when we started to speak of Gide’s book, Retour de l’URSS, Rolland, contrary to me, was not willing to accept that Gide had acted with good intentions or that he was a victim of a political blindness typical of apolitical intellectuals, that he did not understand that one cannot publicly criticize the Soviet Union, surrounded as it is by enemies, without providing a service to the fascists. Gide, I claimed, did not think of this. But I could not convince Rolland that one could err so badly and yet have good intentions. He accused Gide of cynicism, dandyism, and of wishing to be in the limelight. [. . .] Rolland could not forgive Gide for advertising what was bad in the Soviet Union “in the presence of Hitler’s Germany,” to use his phrase. As long as fascism threatens the world, one must support the Soviet Union! [Yet, through his silence, Sinkó points out, Rolland was denying his solidarity with the Soviet Union in the same way that Gide was doing out loud.] Mariya Pavlovna accompanied us to the train station. [She told them about the opulent quarters in which she and Rolland were housed in the

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Soviet Union. But when Rolland had retired, he found the bed full of bed bugs.] Finally, let me mention that when we parted, Rolland did not forget about my little personal problem, namely, that I had to live on something in Paris. He, therefore, gave me a letter to the editor of the communist paper Ce Soir, Jean-Richard Bloch, who, he said, would gladly, and he hoped successfully, come to my aid.

Epilogue

Having left Moscow, I continued writing my journal in Paris more or less regularly between May 2, 1937, and September 4, 1939. [. . .] Although the place of the action of the novel of the novel was no longer Moscow but Paris, I was soon led to realize that the fate of Optimists—as well as of its author—still depended on Moscow. That is, after a certain time in Paris, I suddenly encountered incomprehensible obstacles [. . .] as if some unapproachable, invisible powers (just as in Franz Kafka’s Trial) were making decisions about my fate—about me but without me. The difference between Franz Kafka’s schizophrenic Josef K. story and mine was that after I had been “properly prepared,” those powers which were deciding my fate looked me up, not in a mysterious way, as in Kafka, but quite concretely, and informed me of their ultimatum-like demands. Things began well: in 1937 we arrived in Paris not as we had in 1933. In 1937, we were returning. We returned not only to the city but to a definite circle of people: acquaintances, comrades, as well as friends with whom our relationships had not ended while we were in Moscow; or in some cases, if they had travelled through Moscow and we met again, it was there, through Moscow, that our friendships deepened in the space of a few days to a level that it might have taken years to reach or would never have reached otherwise. I noticed this difference with surprise and pleasure already in the first days. [. . .] [Having returned, people were curious about them. Sinkó was now better known, his autobiographical essay, Facing the Judge, as well as some of his other writings having been published in Europe while he had been away. No longer would he be greeted in offices with “de la part de qui?”]

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But the main cause of the friendly welcome and of the interest in us lay elsewhere. I had predicted already in Moscow that Gide’s book would make a big stir in Paris but I did not foresee the degree to which Gide’s negative testimony would frighten and sow doubt among intellectuals who had sympathized with Moscow. Even those leftists who found some way to get over the disorientation caused by Gide’s book started to credit the dark picture that Gide had painted of conditions in the Soviet Union, as they learned about the endless series of Moscow trials and ever newer executions. In vain had Gide written in his Retour de l’URSS: “The particular errors of one country are not sufficient to compromise the truth of an international, universal cause.” Despite the logic of this sentence, once the faith invested in the Soviet Union had been shaken, a moral crisis took hold within socialism, weakening the antifascist front precisely when fascism was gaining ground even in France and cleverly exploiting the growing disillusionment caused by the economic and political impotence of the Popular Front. Someone coming from the Soviet Union just then could provide facts and explanations as of an eyewitness relevant to the passionately debated questions that had set former friends against each other. [. . .] [Some typical opinions:] KÁROLYI: “I don’t care whether what is happening there is ‘necessary’ or not. If it is not necessary but happening nevertheless, then that is terrible. But if it is happening because after twenty years of revolution it is still necessary. . . . To hell with socialism if twenty years after the revolution, Stalin must do the same thing that Hitler did at the beginning of his reign, that is, when he killed his own one-time friends, Röhm’s followers . . .” GUÉHENNO: “The moral prestige of the revolution has been destroyed by the professional revolutionaries, whether Stalinists or Trotskyists. Every sane Frenchman wishes only one thing: God save the French proletariat and France from the professional revolutionaries.” (And he gave me his recently published article “La mort inutile,” that document of lost faith and of all understanding of the political situation.) “I would be happy if you could convince me otherwise.” CASSOU: I have been getting letters by the dozen, including from longterm subscribers of the journal Europe. They will no longer subscribe, because Europe has not protested against the execution of former revolutionaries. As far as I am concerned, and let this remain between you and me, I didn’t believe Yagoda, but I also don’t believe Yezhov. And yet, whoever admits this publicly, betrays the Soviet Union. We have to make believe that we believe blindly. Hitler and Mussolini are here ante portas, and the only power that will never become their accomplice is the Soviet Union.” [. . .] Anna Seghers confessed to me as an old friend: “My solution is to forbid myself to think about these things,” and she changed the subject.

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[Sinkó looked up Jean-Richard Bloch, who already knew about him and received him with open arms, inviting the Sinkós to his home to meet his family and offering to publish any stories he may have or wish to write in Ce Soir. He also asked Sinkó to give a lecture on his impressions of the Soviet Union. The lecture was to be organized by a group called Les amis de l’URSS. Bloch also explained that the editorship of the newspaper was offered to him by Louis Aragon who wanted to compete with the sensationalist boulevard evening papers such as the Paris Soir, copying their unscrupulous methods, but with the goal of popularizing the Communist Party and the Spanish Republic.] He [Bloch] found that the personal and warm tone in which I spoke to him about the problems of the Soviet Union provided a certain perspective, that it was convincing—and reassuring. Then, with a skeptical, fine, sad smile around his thin lips he added: “And of course, anyone among us who claims not to need reassurance . . .” and his unfinished sentence had the character of a confidential confession. 1 In these days, I found only one person from this circle who did not appear to be disillusioned, embittered, or even (to live with the expression of JeanRichard Bloch) to need reassurance. True, this person was André Malraux, who had returned to Paris only for a few days from the Spanish front. He had a small toy-like car. His wife sat at the steering wheel and when we all somehow managed to find a place in it, Malraux, quite astutely, noted that one could not get a sense of French cuisine in the prix fixe restaurants that M and I frequented exclusively. He took us to a small inn by the banks of the Seine and while we chose the table, he and the “patron,” who greeted him as an old acquaintance, conferred as experts about the best way to acquaint us with the merits of French cooking. Then, he joined us in an upbeat mood. He was full of energy, tanned, trim as always—and after reminiscing some about his trip to Moscow, he did not ask about the trials; this was not what he wanted to talk about. Instead, he spoke about his own experiences: about the Spanish peasant whom he took in his plane because he needed a guide so that he could find a weapons depot that he needed to bomb; about his experiences with Spanish workers; and about battles (which I later recognized in his book L’Espoir.) [. . .] I understood: only those who remain passive observers are depressed by events. The significance of Spain is that whatever happens in Moscow, there is still a front where hope and the Revolution are alive and those who fight on this front think of nothing else. Still, we did, of course, talk about the trials. I asked him how they were seen in Spain. “There, we are busy fighting Franco and the German and Italian fascists, and that consumes us,” he answered. I reminded him that he had made a similar statement to a newspaper and I conveyed to him the message that I was given at the railroad station in Moscow by a comrade from the Comintern. While we were consuming the wonderfully prepared chicken, Malraux listened to my message with interest,

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but found it quite entertaining. It was not news to him. His words about Pasionaria 2 were not very respectful. She too had been upset by the “objectionable” statement, as had the leadership of the French Communist Party. But Malraux had foreseen this and that is why he made the statement, because there is a type of political cretinism—with both Stalinists and Trotskyists, but mostly with Stalinists—who wish to make acute a problem that does not exist and must not exist while the battle is raging. Malraux considers Gide’s book to be a catastrophic error but speaks of his intentions with respect. He thinks that the pundits who write for L’Humanité underestimate French intellectuals. No one is going to believe the claim that Gide has been bought with a lot of money by someone. This explanation as a psychological explanation is just as stupid as calling the defendants in the Moscow trials “mad dogs.” Malraux spoke with Gide and told him that the question is not whether what he saw existed but whether he had seen all that there was to see that was good. In any case, Malraux told Gide, he should not have published this book at this time. But one must keep in mind about Gide, says Malraux, that he is an aesthete and a hedonist for whom, nonetheless, it is absolutely necessary to be pure when it comes to matters of the written word, of thought and the intellect. For him, ethics, his ethics, follows from an extraordinarily aesthetic sensibility. It is not true that his book suffers from any sudden impression. His disappointment did not reach him unprepared. Gide belongs to those extremely intelligent individuals about whom people have a hard time realizing how thorough he is. Before departing for the Soviet Union, he read through a great many studies and surrounded himself with people who informed him about many things in advance. It is true that Gide is apolitical. Gide denies the theory that there are truths that must not be pronounced in the presence of the enemy. M told Malraux about the rationale with which my story about Salamon, the Romanian Jew, was rejected for publication and that I had accepted this rationale as valid, because unlike Gide, I believe that one is also responsible not to give occasion to being misinterpreted. “Do you know what Gide would answer to this? That, then one could not say anything worthwhile, since we can be sure in advance that everything can be misunderstood: Jesus Christ just as much as Nietzsche, Michelangelo as much as Marx. So hurrah for Soviet representative art, because that cannot be misinterpreted.” [The dinner went on past midnight. Malraux asked the Sinkós how they planned to make a living in Paris. Sinkó, filled with optimism, told him about all the journal editors (Cassou at Europe, Bloch at Ce Soir, Guéhenno at Vendredi who had promised to publish his work), and about Pierre Vorms, with whom they had become close in Moscow and who was putting them up on the Quai d’Auteuil until they had some income. Sinkó even mentioned that he was hopeful that the Optimists, too, might be published in France after

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all, though only because he noticed that Malraux looked rather skeptical throughout this exposition of his prospects.] “Je pense,” said Malraux after some silence [. . .]—and with him this meant I am certain—, “that you are lucky to have been allowed to leave the Soviet Union and you surely have Romain Rolland’s support to thank for that. But what now? I am sure that Cassou is well intentioned, but Europe pays very poorly and with great delays, and Cassou is not alone in making decisions there; Guéhenno is an excellent person but he is again up to his neck in a crisis of conscience and by the standards of his paper, the Vendredi, you are probably still too much of a Stalinist, so you can’t count on him, either. Jean-Richard Bloch, the Ce Soir and your possible lecture, well, yes, this might have some possibilities. But beware! Bloch has even less independence than Cassou. [. . .] If you hold your lecture on the Soviet Union, they will consider you a Stalinist and then you will have no one else on whom to lean than the party. But the party will not trust you. You came back from Moscow. Why did you have to come back? It is better to be careful with him than to make a mistake, etc., etc. If I were to recommend you, [. . .] they would say to themselves, ‘It is better to be careful with someone recommended by Malraux.’ It is most important that Romain Rolland write a letter now to Vaillant-Coutourier and Cachin to prevent any possible misunderstandings. 3 [. . .] But there is another possibility: Spain. We need doctors there, especially radiologists. As you know, foreigners cannot work in Paris as doctors. But with us, in Spain, such problems do not exist. That is the only country where internationalism is still alive. So the problem is not with the radiologist in our company but with her husband. But we’ll find something for him, too.” [Malraux told them he would return to Spain in two days and urged them, especially M, to promise that they will join him there.] [The Sinkós decided to stay in Paris rather than risking the rigors of war in Spain.] I was convinced that Malraux’s doubts about my prospects were exaggerated. Not only did “possible misunderstandings” not crop up, [. . .] I was able to place a translation of a short story in Ce Soir. My lecture on the Soviet Union was being organized quickly and without hindrance. I only had to pay Madame Duchêne a visit first. 4 In her upperclass apartment, the white-capped maid asked for my calling card in vain [. . .] but Madame Duchêne, this rather distinguished, likeable older lady was already waiting for me. [She informed Sinkó that he would have to talk about the painful topic of the trials as well. Along with the wife of JeanRichard Bloch, they decided that the venue would be in one of the smaller halls of the palace of the Mutualité. Upon being asked, Sinkó outlined to the two ladies the main ideas of his talk. They approved it, saying it was what was needed, not the usual doctrinaire and programmatic explanations. Someone not directly involved in the party would introduce him as a private

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person who was giving his own personal observations and not those of the party. Sinkó warned the ladies that he did not believe in writing out a text but in speaking spontaneously. He was therefore invited to speak first to a smaller, more intimate circle of young people, known as the Savoir group.] This Savoir group had me as a guest in a pleasant villa near Paris. The host, a thin older gentleman with a delicate face, wearing a short velvet jacket, greeted me and led me into a large room. [It was full of male and female students.] While tea was being served, I had a chance to exchange a few words with some of them. And so it happened that even before I began my talk, a certain rapport was established. [. . .] This audience was expecting to hear testimony from me about one of the most decisive questions of the present moment and for me it was most important that I do not deceive them, that I should not be a false witness, but convince them that the Soviet Union, surrounded by enemies and preparing for the unavoidable showdown with fascism, continues to wage an immense battle for the salvation of human values and for the realization of the most worthy goals—using methods which can only be understood if we keep in mind this gigantic empire’s inheritance from the past, and the current situation. After my talk, every question had to do with the Moscow trials. I tried to demonstrate that in politics, especially in such critical situations as we face today, it is not intentions that determine whether an act is ethical or not but whether one has a correct understanding of the situation in which one acts and whether the action satisfies the demands of the current situation. Those people who opposed Stalin were the victims of a tragic mistake; they denied the correctness of Stalin’s understanding of the situation, they denied that because the prognosis of the October Revolution about the imminence of the world revolution turned out to be mistaken, it was necessary—even at the cost of the greatest sacrifices—to create heavy industry and to collectivize agriculture at the fastest possible tempo. With this, the Soviet Union will be capable of carrying forward the world revolution—despite the enmity of a hostile world. Since the opposition did not see the situation or the possibilities for action in this way, it lost touch with reality; it lost its way and embarked on increasingly adventurous paths. It lost its freedom of action, because every struggle has an inherent logic of its own. Every step that a person takes, regardless of his subjective intentions, goes a long way in determining his next step, and this is how in the end—because of a previous wrong step—he finds himself facing the void or of arriving at a place where he had no intention of going . . . The audience consisted mostly of party members; the debate lasted late into the night but remained a friendly exchange of thoughts, which was expressed at the end by grateful and long applause. The host, the elderly man [. . .], as he saw me out the door, thanked me once more for the “extremely interesting explication,” but added, after a slight pause: “Only, it would be

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better, all the same, if they didn’t shoot so many people, so many old revolutionaries.” It became evident to me that this presentation before the Savoir group had been a sort of dress rehearsal and that it had been judged favorably by those in responsible positions when the following day I learned that my lecture at the Mutualité has been scheduled for the 11th and that Luc Durtain would be introducing me to the audience as well as presiding over the public debate that was to follow. 5 My lecture, “The Politics of the Soviet Union and Soviet Ethics,” took place in the packed small hall, and afterward I had to answer a slew of questions. But these questions were not just about the trials but also about the recent laws against abortion, about the standard of living, and about aspects of Soviet life upon which the public’s attention had been focused by Gide’s book. After the event, Madame Duchêne and the Bloch family invited me to a café. Several members of the editorial board of L’Humanité came with us, and they were all agreed that the event had been a complete success. Bloch asserted on the basis of this success that the best propaganda is that which honestly exposes the problems and that there was no need to constantly press the phraseology of “mad dogs,” but that, yes, it was possible to speak about politics and political struggles in a normal way to normal people. Everyone at the table agreed to the motion that my talk should be published in the form of a pamphlet and that I should prepare the manuscript as soon as possible. Instead of that pamphlet, I completed my essay “The Ways of Don Quixote” a year later. It was published in Europe but it dealt with an entirely different set of problems, seen in an entirely different way, than those of my talk at the Mutualité. This essay was about the struggles faced by the revolutionary who finds himself in a tragic conflict with the reality of a victorious revolution. It expressed, in addition to what I had experienced and learnt in Moscow, those conclusions to which only subsequent events had led me. I never did write the pamphlet that they had requested about my apologetic talk at the Mutualité. I did not write it because news soon arrived from Moscow about a new wave of events and it would have been a lie to assert that I still believed in the “explanation” I had given barely two weeks ago, in which I had defended the Soviet Union against doubters. [. . .] The day after my talk I received a letter from Moscow with the news sub rosa that Béla Kun had been arrested. A few days later, L’Humanité [. . .] and the other dailies contained the official TASS announcement that Tukhachevsky 6 and seven other Soviet generals, all members of the Soviet Supreme Command, had been arrested and executed. “They were spies and traitors.” [Sinkó corresponded with Rolland about Marshal Tukhachevsky. Romain was prone to believe in the marshal’s guilt because he had heard that it was

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the French military staff that had betrayed Tukhachevsky to the Russians. There is no evidence for this. Sinkó also asked Romain to intervene with Stalin on behalf of a Hungarian communist whom he does not name in this work because the person was still alive at the time of publication (1955). Rolland rebuffed the request and urged Sinkó to ask his Soviet friends to intervene. Sinkó was disillusioned by Romain’s naivety. At the same time, he admits that Rolland’s inability to face the facts revealed to Sinkó his own willful blindness. It was “. . . as if I were looking in a mirror; I have no reason to reproach Rolland because my sincerity was no more complete than his when I attempted to protect my faith in the Soviet Union against all doubters.” . . .] [Through M, who, in order to earn money, worked (among other jobs) as a free-lance typist, Sinkó met Victor Serge. Sinkó asked Serge, whom he found to be an admirable, morally pure person with a deep knowledge of the Soviet Union, whether he did not consider opposition to Stalin to be inadvertenly strengthening Hitler. Serge pointed out that Stalin continued to export petroleum to Germany, just as he had exported oil to the Italian fascists during the time of the Abyssinian War. Serge predicted that Stalin “will make a pact with Hitler and Mussolini if he finds it necessary to do so, because Stalin is a counter-revolutionary, just as Hitler and Mussolini are. As for Romain Rolland, he is unwittingly surrounded by GPU agents.” Yet, Sinkó did not see any hope in the programs of Serge or the Trotskyists. Unlike the Soviet Union, they had no masses or armies behind them. Nor was he sure that they would have been able to lead the Soviet Union in a better direction if they had come to power.] Thus, there was nothing of equal strength that could have replaced the faith that I had placed in the Soviet Union, and yet, that faith, rather than lifting me up and making me happy made me feel deformed. To stay true to such a Soviet Union—to remain faithful to it—increasingly turned into a sort of betrayal of the most fundamental positive human traits. To be a revolutionary had always meant that one was ready for any sacrifice, and the inevitability of such a sacrifice was uplifting and made the warrior a better human being. [. . .] But the consistent warrior of humanism, being a communist, could not remain a consistent communist without accepting and defending every excess of tyranny and inhumanity. And even the victim sought to safeguard the good reputation of the executioner. [Sinkó points out that this behavior of the victims of the terror in the Soviet Union had no analog in the French Revolution. Danton and the other victims of the Terror had gone to their deaths free to criticize their executioners.] [As an example of the inhumanity of the Soviet Union where it touched him in a personal way, Sinkó describes the travails of his sister. Although she was terminally ill with cancer, she was torn away from her family in Moscow

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and put on a train to the West soon after her residency permit expired on December 31, 1937. She died en route in Vienna. After an auspicious start following his talk at the Mutualité, when Ce Soir published short stories from Sinkó every two weeks, by January, 1938, Sinkó was unable to have anything published. Nor could he get an explanation for this from his contacts at the journals. The couple subsisted on M’s meager earning. Sinkó, a heavy smoker, admits that he was on the verge of picking up cigarette butts from the Parisian sidewalks.] July 22, 1938 I read Thomas Mann’s letter in the papers: “Whatever the fate of the Republic in Spain, the Republic has already won the battle morally.” Maybe this provides some satisfaction to Thomas Mann, but I wish that we had a simple, ordinary victory for once. We are always winning morally, but meanwhile we are dying. But even this is not true any longer for the Soviet Union. Whatever the final outcome of what is happening there today, the Revolution has been lost, at least morally. [On September 14th, M observed: “It seems we are under blockade again” after Sinkó again returned empty-handed from making a round of all the editorships.] October 10, 1938 [. . .] From my apartment window below which there is a market every morning, I see the daughter of Jean-Richard Bloch, the little black-haired France, who is studying chemistry at the university. She is hawking the party’s illustrated journal, Regard. She noticed us and it was evident that she didn’t mind us watching her as her hair was being blown by the wind while she stood at the market, holding a huge sheaf of papers under her arms, the coins ringing in her pocket. The Moscow trials, and the bankruptcy of the idea of revolution? She is evidently convinced that she is serving mankind when she is hawking Regard. I envy her. Yesterday, I read in Pravda that Marshal Blyukher has also lost favor. “Lost favor”—this means that he has been indicted and that means, eo ipso, that he will be found guilty. At one time I cut out a picture of the military leaders of the Supreme Soviet. There were thirteen generals in two rows. [. . .] Of these, I believe only Budyonny 7 is still alive. Of the rest, only one died of natural causes. Of the jurors who condemned Tukhachevsky and his co-defendants to death, the same fate befell Alksin, Kasirin, and Orlov. Poor gentle France Bloch! Prav-

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da writes that the wives of the executed Soviet generals have cursed their executed husbands, declaring them enemies of the people and low traitors. And they also shot the old doctor who treated Gorky. They claim he deliberately mistreated his patient. He “admitted” that it was at Bukharin’s orders; so, we can expect . . . These are the thoughts that occur to me, and so many other things as I watch the red-cheeked young girl rapturously yelling: “Comrades, buy Regard!” [. . .] No, I don’t envy her after all. I see her and hear her, and all of a sudden I know: there is something dangerous in this zeal. This rapturous enthusiasm, even if it comes from the purest motives is dangerous if it is blind. [On May 30th, 1939, Sinkó received a phone call from Madame Luc Durtain, informing him that Madame B., the widow of a famous French writer, wished to speak to him. (The lady in question, as we know from Sinkó’s actual diary, was the widow of the French communist writer Henri Barbusse, 1873–1935, whose biography of Stalin had appeared posthumously in 1936).] Madame B. sent word that she wished to discuss a matter of great importance to me. “It is as if we were under a blockade,” M had said a few months ago. I learned from my visit to this lady that it was not “as if,” but we were in fact under a blockade. I had had the opportunity of experiencing this blockade first person, but it was only at that meeting on the last day of May that I realized that there really had been a prescribed and methodically carried out plan to this effect; and I was able to verify it on the following day, on June 1, 1939. I went to the meeting, naturally on time. It is was an opulent apartment. The foyer’s large, beveled mirror, the antique Chinese silk covering the walls and the maid with a white head-dress, high-heeled shoes, and a soft, courteous and respectful voice all suggested right from the start that you were entering a world of privilege or even that of the elect, some kind of higher sphere. The beveled mirror was a reminder that you should glance at yourself once more before proceeding any further and, to the extent possible, make your Balkan appearance, clothing, and necktie as presentable as possible. The maid announced me and the lady came out to meet me, opening the doors wide and directing me into the room that had been set up for tea. I could not sit down to table right away but rather was ushered into “a more intimate corner,” as she put it. The lady was probably much older than she seemed or wanted to seem—but actually not much could be seen of her because she was completely covered in makeup. She had on a kind of blue silk dress and rings sparkled on her fingers when she raised the lid of a carved box that was on the table and asked what I preferred, cigarettes or a cigar. Then the lady gave me an opportunity to witness anew and with won-

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der how people who are used to high society have the peculiar capability of speaking at length without saying anything. [. . .] Ten minutes later, we were sitting at the table set for tea. There were pastries there that under other circumstances would have been of great interest to me, but now I was more interested in why I had been summoned. Naturally, the lady mentioned Optimists in the context that many people had spoken to her of me—she claimed that she was not trying to curry favor—and of my original and exceptional talent. . . . But as we started to drink our tea, the lady switched to the substantive topic of our conference: “As I understand, for quite some time now you have lived among quite strained financial circumstances.” I was surprised but answered all the more honestly, “Yes. Quite strained circumstances . . . In fact, Madame, this is putting it euphemistically. I live off what my wife . . .” The lady did not let me finish. “I know, I know . . . But I want to speak about you. You cannot find a publisher for Optimists; in fact, for some time now you cannot place your short stories either, or anything else that you have written. Right?” Surprised, and simultaneously amused and agitated, I placed my cup back on its saucer. “Precisely so. How did you know?” She did not answer my question. “C’est affreux! That’s horrible; especially when one considers how successful someone with your talents could be! And you cannot even manage, despite your talent, to have Ce Soir publish some itsy-bitsy short story—that is ridiculous and horrible!” Then, after a short pause, as if she wanted to intensify my surprise, she added reproachfully: “And you know who is at fault here? It is you. Only you!” I laughed. Not out of cheerfulness, but because I felt so dumb that in my confusion, I did not know what else to do. “I?” “And it’s purely up to you. You can radically change this ridiculous and awful situation at a single stroke. It is not I who say this. I was asked to convey this message to you. You held a lecture in the Mutualité about the Moscow trials (‘de ces procès affreux’) and the comrades—and this is the point at which the lady first mentioned the “comrades”—were not happy with your talk.” I tried to contradict her. I claimed that the comrades—and I gave their names—were so well satisfied with the lecture and its reception that they wanted to publish it in a separate pamphlet. The lady interrupted me. She was not talking about those comrades but the ones with authority. At that moment, I recalled a hunchbacked man in an

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elegant gray suit with a white handkerchief in his breast pocket, whom I saw at my talk to the Savoir group and whom I was surprised to see at my Mutualité talk as well. He stood among those who congratulated me but he did not congratulate me. Someone even mentioned afterward that the man in the gray suit worked at the Soviet Embassy in Paris and that he had commented that my presentation, in his opinion, had not been sufficiently “pointed.” “This is a mistake. It was, in fact, just after this presentation that I was received everywhere with the most friendly welcome,” I tried to convince the lady. “Well, yes. They received you in a friendly manner because they were hoping that you would improve. So many things have happened since then in Russia. They waited. Then they stopped waiting. They let you suffer for your sins. In short, the comrades have asked me to convey the message to you that they expect you to show your true colors. Whether in the form of an article or an essay is up to you. What’s important is the content. You lived in the Soviet Union for two years and now you must write a dynamic, enthusiastic, and bold piece explaining that those who are punished by the Soviet judiciary are incorrigible evil-doers, etc., etc. . . . But then, you know how to do this.” There was something amazing about how the refined, charming, friendly smile had disappeared from the face of the genteel lady. Before my very eyes she turned into a worldly, sober business person or a lawyer with a dry, objective logic: even her ethereal soprano was transformed into a harder, deeper voice. “The comrades can radically alter your difficult situation in the blink of an eye, but for them to want to do so, it is necessary that it should suit their interests. If you become active in the direction and with the methods that are desired, then [. . .] not only will it be possible for you to publish your short stories in Ce Soir, but Optimists will finally be published. In that case, nothing will be simpler than publishing your novel in Paris, London, and at some emigré publishers in German. They will take care of publicity. They will make you famous so that the few articles, essays, or statements that you would occasionally write would have all the greater effect. But the condition, the precondition is that you publish something without delay that is energetic, unambiguous, and bold. This is simple enough and your situation will change immediately. [. . .] This is the message I was asked to deliver.” The great writer’s widow smiled again. [. . .] I was not even able to fully comprehend what had been said, but what I had understood was enough to make me want to conclude the conversation as quickly as possible. “Are you in such a hurry?” I heard her ask when I stood up, “You have not even had your tea.” The truth is, I did understand the message. At each moment, its meaning became clearer to me. But my throat constricted and I could not utter a

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sound. The lady’s face expressed surprise: “After all, as far as the future goes, I think what you have heard from me should be pleasing to you, indeed very pleasing.” “I have often been in difficult situations but it has never occurred to me to write something other than what I thought, and to sell myself, that it should be comrades who would think that I can be bought . . .” I stammered something like that, though not so coherently. But she had understood me. By now we were both standing, each in their place by the table. “If that is your answer, I will not convey it,” she said reproachfully. “Think about it, say, until tomorrow. Until tomorrow at noon. But do not forget—and it is not I but the comrades who are saying this—they have the means not only to help, to open a path for your career, to make you famous; they have the means to do the opposite as well, as you have experienced. They can make your present situation even worse than it is, much worse. And after all, they are asking for nothing more than comradely help. Do not be imprudent!” Everything was spinning around me: “This sounds like a threat, like some sort of ultimatum . . .” “My God, why use such ugly words for a friendly message?” opined the lady, and while seeing me out, she said, “Call me on the phone, tomorrow.” [Sinkó declined a night out on the town to which a wealthy friend from Split, Yugoslavia, had invited him and his wife. He told the friend that he had received an ultimatum. At home, the couple discussed what to do. Sinkó could not believe that comrades would treat comrades in such a manner, starving them and then present them with a choice that contained a threat. He thought maybe the lady was just trying to seem important. M advised him not to see her again. To ascertain whether he had in fact been deliberately “starved,” he arranged a meeting a few days later with Jean-Richard Bloch. Bloch confided to him that it was true; Bloch had been forbidden to publish anything in Ce Soir from Sinkó until further notice. Aragon had conveyed the message to Bloch directly from Moscow. Bloch excused himself for not being able to act in any other manner. He suspected the directive had come from the Hungarian Communist Party in connection with the arrest of Kun, but Aragon could not confirm this.] [Sinkó also wrote a letter to Romain Rolland, telling him about the ultimatum...] I cannot imagine that Rolland would not have replied to this letter if it had in fact reached him. This was my last letter to Rolland and the only one to which I did not receive a reply. A whole period of my life began with a letter from him, that I had not expected, and this period ended without a letter that I had every right to expect. [. . .]

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M was at this time the typist for a rather old lady, Frau Zuckerkandl, the widow of the famous Viennese anatomist. She had fled Hitler from Vienna where she had been the host of a sort of literary salon. The émigré German and Austrian writers still referred to the rather influential old lady as Frau Hofrat. As far as her political opinions went, she considered the AustroHungarian Monarchy to have been the most perfect, and from her own point of view with reason, the most pleasant political formation that ever existed. Nevertheless, she developed a liking for M and when Franz Werfel asked her to recommend a typist who would be willing to go down to Sanary (on the French Riviera) with him, Frau Zuckerkandl recommended M. Werfel paid enough so that I, too, could go down there with her and both of us could live on her income. After Paris, Sanary was an idyllic interlude. [. . . Sinkó resumed writing his novel, Fourteen Days, that had been suggested by Béla Kun in the Soviet Union.] Even the possibility of publishing Optimists surfaced once again. This happened as Werfel and his wife started to show an interest in us. I was invited [to their seaside villa] and Werfel knew how to direct the conversation so that despite our differences of opinion, points of contact came about between us. He encouraged me by saying that his American publisher was about to arrive and was sure to become my publisher as well at his recommendation. But this idyllic interlude lasted only six weeks. Before the arrival of the American publisher to Sanary, Ribbentrop had made a visit to Moscow. On that August day, after I walked M over to Werfel’s villa, on the way home I noticed on the main square that the faces [. . .] that normally looked cheerful and carefree in that southern seaside town wore a very serious expression. [. . .] Something must have happened. I bought the Petit Var, the first daily that had arrived, and saw right away on the front page “Coup de théatre à Moscou” (Sensational turn of events in Moscow.) Later, L’Humanité arrived. There was a picture of Stalin on page one with a caption: “The great combatant for Peace.” This is the same paper that only yesterday had labeled everyone who even considered the possibility of some sort of modus vivendi with Hitler to be a sworn enemy of the French people. Now it argued for peace at any price, as did Le Temps a while ago with the headline “To Die For Danzig?” [. . .] Monday, September 4, 1939 [. . . War has been declared. The Sinkós are back in Paris.] We foreigners can be recognized on the street in that we do not have gas masks, contrary to the French who have received masks from the state. [. . .] They are hammering below us. On the ground floor, they are boarding up the windows of the steam laundry. M has pasted paper tape across our

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windows as directed by the building’s superintendent. We had to put blue paper around the light bulb already yesterday. When we awoke this morning, we remarked in wonder that this had been our first night of war. [. . .] In Sanary, M did not have time to type for me. Werfel was dictating his novel to her. It is intended to laud the “eternal virtues” of Catholicism. My manuscript is piling up. I started to dictate it to M today. In Sanary, I finished the twelfth chapter of Fourteen Days. There is enough for at least five days of typing. Five days! Will we even be alive five days from now? NOTES 1. Jean-Richard Bloch (1884–1947) was a French critic, journalist, and playwright of Jewish heritage. He had been critical of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and early 1930s but after Hitler came to power, he drew closer to it. According to the historian Ludmila Stern, the Foreign Commission of the Praesidium of the Soviet Writers’ Union had a very close relation with him, initiated by Ilya Ehrenburg. Bloch and his family were guests of the Foreign Commission in Moscow in 1934 and came away with a very positive impression, partly, as Stern demonstrates, because of the luxury and honor to which they were treated. Although as we see above, he was disturbed by news of the show trials, he did not act upon these concerns. He became a member of the French Communist Party after the Munich Agreement (September 30, 1938), hence more than a year after the meeting described here by Sinkó. During the war, he fled the Nazi occupation and spent the war years in the Soviet Union. He returned to France after the war and wrote laudatory pieces about Stalin and the Soviet Union until his death in 1947. See Stern, Western Intellectuals, 18–20, 196–200. 2. La Pasionaria was the nom de guerre of Dolores Ibárruri (1895–1977), a Basque, working class-born leader of the Spanish Communist Party who had come under the influence of the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. During the civil war, she was an agent of the Comintern. To understand Malraux’s criticism of her, consider that the Germans had bombed the Basque city of Guernica in April 1937 (about a month before the meeting between Sinkó and Malraux) and Ibárruri demanded that the Republican forces retaliate with equal brutality against populations supporting Franco. Another, even more likely reason for Malraux’s criticism was her support of the Soviet Union’s treatment of the nonStalinist (Anarchist and Trotskyist) Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification, POUM. In early May, the Soviet Union, under the direction of the NKVD General Alexandr Orlov attacked the forces of the POUM in Barcelona, killing about 1000 of its members. Ibárruri called the POUM the “Fascist enemy within.” 3. Paul Vaillant-Cutourier (1892–1937) and Marcel Cachin (1869–1958) were both prominent members of the French Communist Party with close connections to Moscow. Cachin was also the director of l’Humanité, the Party’s paper. 4. Gabrielle Duchêne (1870–1954) was a French pacifist, feminist, and pro-Soviet antifascist. She was a Secretary of the International Committee of Women against War and Fascism. 5. Luc Durtain (1881–1959) was a prolific French leftist writer associated with the journal Europe. 6. Marshal Michael Tukhachevsky had been suspected of Napoleonic ambitions by Stalin already in 1930. Yet, the charges against him were most likely trumped up and the confessions extracted by force. His wife and brothers were also executed. He was rehabilitated in the 1960s. 7. Semyon Budonny (1883–1973) was the general who led the Russian forces during the Polish Soviet War of 1920 mentioned in Babel’s Red Cavalry. His objections to the picture of

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him painted by Babel may have contributed to the author’s death. Budonny was a favorite of Stalin and survived despite bad decisions that he made during World War II.

Postscript

Zagreb, 1955 [Postscript to the first edition of The Novel of a Novel, published in 1955] With this, and in this way in Paris, the Moscow episode of the life story of the author of Optimists came to an end. The next episode of his and his novel’s story took place in Yugoslavia. But the plot there is no longer the continuation of the old story but the beginning of something new. Something the writer was advised and urged to do in Moscow, but would not and could not have done at the time, that is, to write an introduction or postscript to Optimists, explaining it from a new perspective, has now been accomplished here—with the publication of this Moscow diary, the novel of a novel. This new era—a new beginning also from the point of view of the writer’s personal life—made it possible for the novel and for the novel of the novel, and with them, for the life of their author, to achieve a happy ending.

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Zagreb, 1965 The herein published journal entries first appeared in 1955, in Croatian translation, under the title The Novel of a Novel. After the book came out again in 1961, in Hungarian, and especially after its publication in German, in Köln, in 1962, I received letters and personal visits from people living in various European countries, as well as in America, who had at one time been connected closely, or in some manner, with one or another of the individuals described in this book. They wanted to know particulars, but at the same time, they provided me with information about the fates of people that I had lost sight of when I had to leave the Soviet Union in 1937. In this way, the hand-written journal which had assumed the form of a book, began and continued to live a life of its own, separately from the author’s. Thus, without any intervention on my part and often in ways that were surprising to me, the book was enriched from the outside with material for dramatic continuations and with details that cast new light and new perspectives on what had been written, indeed, with entire chapters worth of material. But it is as a spontaneous journal with daily entries that The Novel of a Novel has value as a historical document and testament. It would be wrong to change the original text now on the basis of information received at a later date and secondhand. This original text must remain unchanged. Nevertheless, I must admit: the new data have brought home to me just how multilayered my Moscow journal entries are, as are all authentic texts. In possession of this new information, nearly three decades later, I too now read what I have written differently than I had read it formerly; the new data 329

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illuminate dismaying backgrounds and reveal new connections. I registered my experiences, surprises, disappointments, doubts, and disillusionments carefully, often with self-torturing precision. Yet—and now it is evident— even when I thought that I was seeing an unmistakable reality, what I saw was just an artificially and deliberately muted façade over a reality that was many times more horrible than the horrors that were visible. To see in a proper light the notes that comprise The Novel of a Novel, the reader, too, must become acquainted, at least briefly, with the fates of those who back then decided the author’s fate. They, unlike the author, knew quite well the kinds of dangers that could befall them for any position they took, indeed, for any word they said or failed to say. Today I know that not I but Comrade Arosev, the president of the VOKS, was right when at the start, back in Paris at the Soviet Embassy, he would not even take hold of the manuscript of Optimists as I tried to hand it to him— however shocked I was by this—but shifted all responsibility for my invitation to the Soviet Union onto Romain Rolland. And I understand today something I was incapable of understanding at the time, by the evidence of my journal: the reason for Arosev’s explicit refusal, when I was already in Moscow, to introduce me to any Moscow publishers, citing specifically his own high and thus exposed position. Comrade Arosev knew what he was doing when he made a consistent effort not to do anything on his own initiative. I understand today why he tried as far as possible to fulfill that high position which he held as director of cultural relations with the West, without directing anything himself. This was not because by nature he had an aversion to independent action. His biography, which I only learned later, attests to the opposite. Alexandr Arosev was born in 1890 in Kazan. He joined the revolutionary movement at the age of fifteen, in 1905. He was jailed in tsarist Russia, then deported. During the October Revolution, he fought in the Red Army and afterward, in the most difficult of times, he accepted and executed the most demanding, varied, and numerous military and organizational assignments for the party. Thus it was not by nature that he was careful or cowardly. But by the time I encountered him, he had learned that one can never be too cautious. And he tried to be maximally cautious. Despite this, as it turned out, he was not cautious enough. As I had noted in The Novel of a Novel, Alexandr Arosev was mentioned by someone during the last weeks of my Moscow sojourn, imprisoned on the basis of unknown accusations, and executed in 1938, barely a year after I was forced to leave the Soviet Union. The nearly three decades since my Moscow stay have populated the landscape of my life with many graves. [. . .] Poor Comrade Bork, my torturer at VEGAAR, whom I had mercilessly discovered with his hair falling into his eyes, and who came out from under his desk with a beet-red face! He, too, like the others who were given the role of managing my fate in Moscow, floundered between the horns of that no-

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exit, Kierkegaardian, existentialist dilemma’s socio-political variant: hang yourself and you will regret it; don’t hang yourself and you will regret it. It would be a gross, impermissible simplification and mistake to explain the feverish anxieties of the managers and censors of the Moscow publishing world as deriving from fears about their insecure positions or personal security. This is only one side of what motivated them. These people were also party members, which meant at that time, more or less, that they were believers. They believed in the then-reigning, panic-inducing slogan which demanded maximal vigilance [. . .] And believing in a dangerous, terribly sneaky Satan, they could never be “vigilant” enough. [. . .] In my case they were being asked to decide one way or the other about a writer who had arrived from the West without fitting into any official rubric, with a manuscript that could also not be easily categorized and that had elicited multiple interpretations. Not quite a year after I left Moscow, in March of 1938, the entire editorial staff of the Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung, a paper published under the supervision of Pravda, as well as the managerial staff and coworkers of VEGAAR, most of whom were members of the German Communists Party, were arrested and executed. These included Otto Bork and my pedantic reader, Hans Günther. Wendt was also among those arrested, but he survived the Siberian camps and served for some years until his recent death as foreign minister of the GDR. The first censor of Optimists, Mathejka, who sensed a counter-revolutionary intent and danger within the book—and about whom I had learned from Béla Vágó that in Romania he had been put before a firing squad with nine other communists but, after regaining consciousness, was able to creep in the dark, despite his serious wounds, to a peasant’s house, and then as a convalescent, escape to the Soviet Union—Mathejka was condemned to death once more in the Soviet Union under God knows what kind of charges, but this time he did not escape. The list could be continued with the former director of the GIHL, Yonov, who was so desperately and dilligently careful in his dealings with me and who also became a victim of the tyranny, along with a long line of others who played a part in The Novel of a Novel. They were mostly arrested under the charge or suspicion of espionage and executed or deported in that endless host sent to the death camps of Siberia. I was able to learn about the fate of Sándor Barta, who had also become a victim of the Great Purge. He had been a contributor to the futurist journals, A Tett (Action) and MA (Today) and later the publisher and editor of the literary journal Akasztott Ember (The Hanged Man) that appeared during the Viennese emigration. [. . .] It was he who surprised me in Moscow with his clichéd and well-heeled stanzas lauding “Our father, Stalin,” and it was he who with a sincerely friendly, warm smile tried to reassure me that with time I too would succeed, just as he had, in freeing myself of my petit-bourgeois, decadent

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aesthetic prejudices and would learn, just as he had, to “believe in Stalin.” The purge also took Béla Vágó, one-time commissar of the Hungarian Soviet Republic as it did Huszti, and the tall Stekler 1 whom I knew from the Viennese émigré barracks of the twenties. Neither did Koltsov escape this fate, even though he represented the type of person—along with his beautiful, young wife, Maria Osten, who dressed according to the latest Parisian fashions—that dared to act and could act without worrying; he even had the courage to affix his own signature and seal to some sort of “bumashka” for me. [. . .] In the The Novel of a Novel I described how one day I stumbled upon the name of József Lengyel from the distant past, by means of his short book, Visegrádi utca (Visegrád Street). I knew him from the time following World War I and from the years of our Viennese emigration. He had been the model for my rakish character, Sarkadi, in Optimists. I was unexpectedly and painfully surprised by a mockingly vitriolic chapter in Visegrádi utca, describing me and György Lukács. I was embarassed not so much for myelf or Lukács but for Lengyel. But I neglected to record in The Novel of a Novel that a Hungarian comrade, Andor Gábor, had briefly whispered to me with a somber and much signifying look in 1937, when the name of Lengyel again cropped up in conversation, that since the time that Visegrádi utca was published, its author has “paid penance for the past and also the future.” 2 It was only twenty-six years later, in 1963, that I received an explanation of these oddly intoned words. That is, it was in 1963 that my one-time friend’s reminiscences, Elejétől végig (From Beginning to End), appeared in a Budapest periodical, describing what he suffered during the endless seventeen years that elapsed between the time of his arrest in Moscow in 1937 and his release in 1954: an odyssey that went from jail cell, to hearing, to closed wagons carrying prisoners, to the hull of a ship, and to labor camps in minusforty-degree cold. Only while reading József Lengyel’s book in 1963 did the author of The Novel of a Novel see and experience in all its nakedness that reality that could well have been his own fate between 1935 and 1937. The daily conversations of the twenties that had gone on for years in friendship (at least on my side), thus resumed in 1963 between me and the author of Elejétől végig through the printed word. However, there were conversations that took place between true and consistently loyal friends with whom I shared confidences with an open heart. As the result of violent external interventions some remain not only forever without continuation but, in the perspective afforded by time, retroactively take on a different meaning. Facts that have come to my attention since, cast new light on conversations which I thought previously to have been transparently clear but now seem incomprehensible and demanding new explanations. Alas, the only ones who could authoritatively clear up these questions

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are no more. A dialogue is no longer possible to clarify the doubts that besiege me. The dead do not confess. I am alone. I can only guess and attempt to find by myself the explanation that would dispel the mystery. I am talking about that oft-mentioned Karcsi Garai in The Novel of a Novel who, under the name of Kürchner, was the editor of Deutsche ZentralZeitung and whom I had known and come to love from the twenties in the Grinzing barracks that housed many Hungarian and Central-European communists. In Moscow, there were few people with whom I spent more time than Karcsi. He was the one who always found a dialectical explanation for everything that happened in the Soviet Union. Even when I would come up with a question for which he could not find an explanation, he would not get flustered. At such times, he was satisfied with the calm observation of a true believer: “There must be a good reason for it.” And he was the one who almost beseechingly pressed me: “You will not say anything to shame us out there, will you?” It was only as an unexpected echo of the German edition of The Novel of a Novel that I received the news that Karcsi, along with the entire editorial staff of Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung, had been arrested in March, 1938. Something almost unexampled: after a year-and-a-half-long investigation, during which he was in jail, he was freed. But not for long. He was re-arrested when war broke out in 1941. He was put behind barbed wire in some distant concentration camp and died there at the beginning of 1942. Along with this, I learned that a common acquaintance of ours from the Grinzing barracks, who had become the young Karcsi’s lover and later his life-mate, had been arrested in Moscow while I had still been in the city. Anyone closely connected in some way to someone who was accused was also automatically endangered. As an example, after Béla Kun’s arrest, his wife, daughter, son, and son-in-law were torn from each other and transported separately each to a different and isolated camp. Back then, it was Karcsi who had warned me that I must not look up Sarolta Lányi, since her husband, Ernő Czóbel had been deported. This shows that Karcsi could have had no illusions when he exposed himself and tried to prove that his former life-mate was the victim of an error, and he ran from one place to another to try to free her from jail, that is, to save her from deportation to the camps. These must have been horrible months in his life. When this was going on in 1936, there were no topics that we did not discuss. But I knew nothing about this matter. Karcsi stayed true to the rule which required a rigorous camouflage even with close friends. He adapted to the unprecedentedly well-functioning gigantic theatrical mechanism that obscured reality so cleverly and consistently that however hard you tried to look behind the scenes, you could hardly suspect the nature of the country where you were living, what was happening day after day in your immediate surroundings, near you and next to you, that is, unless you fell directly or

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indirectly into the hellishly bloody meat grinder yourself. [. . .] The cult of the seemingly carefree and the pleasant life was the supreme law: every word and everything visible was subordinated to this. No one was ever allowed to see a wagon carrying prisoners: people were woken up at night and transported to prison in bread wagons about which no one could suspect that they were carrying anything but freshly baked bread to the various parts of the immense city. It was with the skills he had learned from illegal party work in Budapest that Karcsi, even in 1936, impersonated before me with unwavering inscrutable discipline the role of the completely unperturbed communist who always agreed with every action of the Stalinist Soviet Union and who condemned all concern, restlessness, doubt, and especially criticism. The sons of the Biblical Noah covered the nakedness of their drunken father. They did not want to see and they did not want others to even glimpse their father in a debased state. It was love that inspired their action, which hid Noah even from their own eyes. People identify themselves with what they love. But it was not such a spontaneous emotional relationship that characterized the attitude of Karcsi toward Stalin’s Soviet Union—and this was true not just for Karcsi but for the other victims, as well. They were motivated by something else: loyalty to an ideology for which they were ready to deny loyalty to themselves. It is unique and without precedent that under the influence of an ideology, the believers forbid themselves to even wince, and feel duty-bound to help the executioner so that he can remain invisible in his role as executioner. Sometimes one hears an objection posed in the form of a question but tinged by impatience and often irritation: Why speak of the past? Today’s Soviet Union is no longer the empire of Stalinist socialism. And those who were its victims, whether rehabilitated or not, are politely turning to dust underground. Isn’t it time to “get over” that which, after all, is no more than a memory? What happened, happened! What good is this sterile obsession with recalling the dead when it is with today’s problems that today’s people must deal? But that is the point! It is only the living, the present time in which the fate of the future is decided, only our life that is worth discussing. What we have been talking about here is man’s relationship to the way in which each particular phase of socialism is realized, keeping in mind that socialism is that grand system of thought which, starting with man and history, has recognized that man is capable of creating a world in which he is not a passive object but—in contrast with all past history—its freely creative master and maker. We have learnt our lesson: There is no ideology and no social system that automatically liberates man.

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Every revolutionary concept, at every stage of its history, must be modified on the basis of a tireless gathering of new information and criticism. Every formation that has been realized must constantly reevaluate its own existence and its results, using the material and moral needs of man as the foremost criteria. “The Sabbath was created for mankind, not mankind for the Sabbath.” This ancient evangelical rebellion has not lost its timeliness. Without this fundamental humanist governing principle, all ideologies and truths, rather than becoming sources of power that liberate and inspire, turn into selfserving, blind, and blinding fetishes. Those for whom a great ideology or social system became or becomes a fetish might have been or might be, by themselves, quite noble, enthusiastic, self-sacrificing people, but the more ready they are for any sacrifice, the more inevitable will be their denial of themselves—something that has its own pathos but still is nothing other than methodically and successfully executed, moral and spiritual mutilation, the ultimate consequence of which is the murderous dehumanization of human relationships—ad maiorem Dei gloriam (to the greater glory of God). In the final analysis it was with the variations of this theme that is by no means obsolete that this book and this postscript were concerned. NOTES 1. The engineer mentioned in the chapter on Béla Kun. 2. This is a quote from the Hungarian National Anthem, written by Ferenc Kölcsey in 1923. The lines there are literally, “This nation has already paid penance for its past and its future.”

Index

abortion, xxii, 72, 76, 80, 92, 96, 102, 112, 126, 317 Abraham, Paul, 50, 54n4 Ady, Endre, xv, xix, 4, 9n1, 85, 111, 151, 219n1, 281 Albin Michel, Éditions, 18, 191 anti-Semitism, xiii–xiv, xv, xix, xxi, xxv, xxix, xxxiiin4, 35, 45, 49, 162, 268, 273, 269n Apletin, Mikhail, 91–92, 94, 97, 99n9, 104, 105, 195, 204, 213, 216, 264 appeasement policy, xxvi, 324 Aragon, Louis, 28, 33, 313, 323 Arosev, Alexandr Iakovlevich, xxiii–xxiv, 22, 25–27, 29–30, 35, 66–73, 76, 94, 131, 204, 211, 330 Babel, Isaac Emmanuilovich, xii, xxviii–xxix, 91, 207–209, 210n3, 211, 213, 215–218, 218, 219n9, 229, 233, 235–218, 241–243, 245–246, 247, 249, 250–254, 256, 263, 272–273, 275n1, 277–278, 282–283, 295, 295n2, 297, 299, 301, 325n7; Eisenstein and, 251–253; Gorky and, 209, 213, 253, 256; Sinkó vs. Mosfilm trial, 287–291 Babits, Mihály, 34, 36n3 Barbusse, Henri, xxiii, 29, 30, 31n5, 133, 137, 188, 199, 302; widow of, xxviii, 320–323 Barta, Sándor, 113–114, 116, 123, 331

Bartók, Béla, xvii Benatzky, Ralph, 50, 54n4. See also Abraham, Paul Bethlen, István, xix Bezhin Meadow (film), xxviii, 175, 252, 254n1 Bloch, Jean-Richard, xxiii, 309, 313, 314–320, 323, 325n1 Blum, Léon, xxii, 183n1 Blyukher, Vasily (Marshal), 319 Bokányi, Dezső, 205–207 book banning, 223, 238, 297. See also Bezhin Meadow Bork Otto, 94, 97, 116, 124, 154, 156–157, 165, 180, 182, 190, 192–193, 204, 231, 255, 330–331; hiding under desk, 170–171 Brač, Croatia (concentration camp), xxix Bubnov Park, 169 Bukharin, Nikolai, xxvii, 221–223, 225, 246, 248n2, 253, 254n5, 306–307, 320 Bulgakov, Mikhail, xii Cachin, Marcel, 315, 325n3 Cassou, Jean, 312, 314 Céline (Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches), 28, 31n4 Central Cancer Research Institute, 77, 88, 95, 98, 107, 111, 124, 125, 207, 209, 264

337

338

Index

Chapaev (ship). See Vitebsk/Chapaev (ship) Chelyuskin (ship), 47, 54n3 child homelessness, 79, 103 Children’s Museum, 78–80 Comintern, xxiii, 16n1, 62, 104, 118n1, 154, 159n4, 183n1, 195, 199n5, 230, 244, 247, 300, 302, 325n2; Kun, Béla and, xxvii, 65, 82, 83, 85, 92, 95, 96, 114, 183n1, 195, 239n3, 313; Seventh Congress of the Third International, xxii, 98n3, 174, 175n2, 178. See also Kun, Béla Cominform, xxxi Communist Party, xxv, 28; of France, xxviii, 28, 30n3, 33, 80, 313, 325n3; of Germany, xxxiii, 53n1, 131n2, 164, 182, 331; of Hungary, xxvii, 6, 9n3, 16n1, 19, 23n4, 88, 98n1–99n12, 110, 159n2, 199n4, 200n7, 205, 239n3, 323; of Soviet Union, 60, 71 Comrade X. See Fogarasi, Béla cultural policies in Soviet Union,: overcentralization, 97, 224; shallowness of, 73, 74, 86, 145, 150, 188, 204, 212, 217, 236. See also films; Shadr, Ivan; Shostakovich, Dimitrov; theater Czechoslovakia, xvi, xviii, 36n4; treaty with Soviet Union, 106 Czóbel, Ernő, 85, 333 Dabit, Eugène, 264 Deutsch (editor). See Za Rubezhom Dimitrov, Georgi, 118n1; Kurella and, 101–102, 105, 163; Malraux and, 234; Popular Front policy, 178, 182; Reichstag fire and case against, 28, 101 divorce law in Soviet Union, 93, 102 Dollfuss, Engelbert, 14–15 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, xviii, 51, 99n11, 143, 188, 212, 236; Grand Inquisitor and, 104 Dunaevsky, Isaac, 217, 219n11 Durtain, Luc, 30, 196 Durtain, Madame Luc, 320 Eckhart, Meister, 19 Effel, Jean, 196–197, 198 egalitarianism, campaign against, 214

Ég a Tisza (The Tisza is burning), 21 Eisenstein, Sergey, xxviii, 175, 251, 252–254n4, 287–288, 297 Érdekes Újság (Interesting News), 13 Ethiopia, 28, 45 Europe (journal), xxiv, 27, 28, 30, 33–35, 36n2, 37, 38, 68, 117, 312, 314, 317, 325n5 fascism, xvii, xxii–xxv, 5, 6, 14, 16n1, 23n7, 26, 28, 38, 39n2, 110, 151, 192, 267, 271–272, 293, 305, 307, 308, 312, 316; similarities to Stalinism, 147, 273, 312; White Terror and, 36 Facing the Judge (Szemben a bíróval, En face du juge), xiv, xxiv, 35, 38, 68, 92, 117, 119n10, 136, 153, 165, 230, 311 Feldman, 153, 174, 179–180, 190–191, 197, 205, 223, 249 fellow travelers, xxvi Ferenczy, Benjamin and Noémi, 161 Feuchtwanger, Leon, xxvi, 287 films, 74; Chapaev (film), 51, 74; Deserter (Pudovkin), 191; Happy-Go-Lucky Guys, 192; Peter, 191, 192, 223; Sound of the Flute, 74; See also Bezhin Meadow Fogarasi, Béla, 161–168n1 formalism, 187, 204, 241–242, 253. See also naturalism Fourteen Days (novel), 157, 159n5, 214, 219n4, 232, 239n4, 243, 301, 324, 325 France, Anatole, 30 Fürst, Sándor, 87, 88, 98n5, 157, 239n4, 243, 282; See also Fourteen Days; Sallai, Imre Gábor, Andor, 227–228n2, 231–232, 332 Garai, Karcsi, 86, 155, 193, 216, 229, 302, 333 German-Soviet Non-aggression Pact, xxix, 30n3, 318, 324 Gide, André, 28, 38, 61, 99n12, 231; Retour de l’URSS , 265, 287, 293, 299, 303n1, 308, 312, 314 GIHL (State Publisher of Literature), 68, 71, 92, 94, 97, 111, 124–125, 131, 157, 172, 331

Index Gorky, Maxim, xxii, 36n1, 45, 53n2, 127, 179, 254n5, 256–257, 320; Babel and, 209, 213, 253, 256; James Joyce and, 235; Rolland’s visit and, 133–137, 162; Sinkó and, 36, 37, 68, 117, 131, 199. See also Babel, Isaac Emmanuilovich; Gorky and Gorky Park, 106, 125, 129, 145, 169 Goslitizdat (Gosudarstvennoe Izdatelstvo Huduzhestvenoe, State Publishing House for Literature), 197, 200n9, 246, 249, 255, 263. See also GIHL GPU, 51–53, 55–56, 86, 291, 297, 299; Rolland and, 307, 318. See also NKVD Great Depression, xxii, xxiv, 36n2 Great Famine, xxi, 210. See also Bezhin Meadow Great Terror, xi, xix, xxiv, xxvi, 207, 269, 291–295, 312. See also GULAG; show trials Grinzing (Vienna), xix, 6, 8, 14, 89, 91, 113, 134, 155, 170, 195, 232, 277, 333 Grivtsov, Boris Alexandr, 37, 68–69, 92, 116, 117 Guéhenno, Jean, xxiv, 28, 33–35, 36n2, 312, 314 GULAG, xxii, xxvii, 199n6, 331, 332, 333 Hajdu, Pál, 193, 199n4, 231 Halévy, Daniel, 28 Halle, Fannina, 89–90, 98n8, 112, 214 Hamburger, Jenő, 19 Hamsun, Knut, 74 Hebbel, Christian Friedrich, 6, 7, 9n4, 98n7 Herzfelde, Wieland, 243, 244n1, 255 Hitler, Adolf, xxii, 5, 14, 147, 182, 267, 273, 293, 308, 317; accession to power, xxv, 98n1, 164, 183n1; and dominance of Stalinism in Soviet Union, 294; fear of anti-Stalinism supporting, 15, 147, 292, 293, 308, 312, 318. See also fascism historical determinism, 234 hooliganism, 77, 89 Horthy, Miklós, xix, xxi, 5, 9n2, 12, 16n1, 21, 23n4, 83, 98n1, 229, 232 Hotel Europe (Leningrad), 52, 55

339

humanist socialism, xi, xxv, 6, 105, 112, 218, 237, 257, 274, 280, 318, 335; human rights and, 126 Hungarian Soviet Republic, xi, xvii–xviii, xx, 21, 23n4, 26, 30n1, 34, 71, 82, 98n7, 101, 119n6, 165, 199n6, 229, 331 Ilf, Ilya, 92–93, 99n10 Illés, Béla, 23n8, 170, 175n1 Illyés, Gyula, 275n2 industrialization drive in Soviet Union, xxi, 70, 109, 126, 187, 264, 316 Istrati, Panait, xxiii, 37–38, 38n1 József, Atilla, 6, 9n3 Joyce, James, 235 Kamenev, Lev, xxiii, xxvii, 248n2, 268, 271, 272, 278, 279, 295, 303n1, 307 Kant, Immanuel, xvi, xvii, 144, 185 Károlyi Katalin, 14 Károlyi, Mihály, xv, xvi, xxxivn12, 12–16, 17–22, 84, 87, 124, 312 Kecskemét, xviii, xix, 119n10, 199n6 Kemerovo Trials, 279, 280n4 Kerzhentsev, Platon Mikhailovitch, 224–226n1 Kinn (Goslitizdat), 249–250, 263, 264–265 Kirov, Sergey, xxvi, 55, 248n2, 272, 295, 307; execution of “White Guards”, 55, 272, 307 Kis, Zsigmond, 231, 232 Kodály, Zoltán, xvii Koestler, Arthur, xxvi, xxxiii, 99n12 Koltay, Ágota, 19, 246 Komját, Aladár, xvi, xx, 113 Korvin, Otto, xviii, 34–35, 194, 232 Krebs, 182, 186, 193, 194, 197, 203 Krleža, Miroslav, xxx, xxxi–xxxii Kudasheva, Mariya Pavlovna (Mme. Romain Rolland), xxi, 21, 22, 23n7, 25, 37, 66, 68, 69, 92, 119n11, 134, 135, 136, 198, 307–308, 308, 318. See also Rolland, Romain Kun, Béla, xxviii, 16n1, 21, 81–98n7, 115, 124, 148, 172, 193, 194, 199n4, 200n7, 214, 234, 237, 239n3, 247, 249, 264, 284, 317, 323, 324, 333; enlists Sinkó in letter writing campaign, 231,

340

Index

231–232, 238; Hungarian Soviet Republic and, xvi–xvii, xx, xxi, 238; supports Sinkó, xxvii, xxviii, xxxivn12, 72, 97, 104, 105, 111, 116, 124, 128, 156, 175, 182, 193, 195, 299 Kurella, Alfred, 37, 60, 94, 97, 99n11, 101, 101–104, 108, 110, 112, 115, 118n2, 126–127, 129, 130, 134, 136–137, 145, 172–173, 177, 180, 181, 182, 185, 189, 195, 199n5, 216, 221, 223, 234–235, 244, 247, 302; GPU and wife of, 154, 159n3, 163, 165

Mathejka, János, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 109, 110, 156, 165, 246, 331 May Day 1936, 245–246 Meyer, Peter, 155 Mikhoels, Solomon, xxviii, 233, 239n5 Monde (journal), 16n1, 29, 30, 33 Móricz, Zsigmond, 5, 6, 9n2 Mosfilm, xii, 243, 249–254n3, 263–264, 277–278; Sinkó’s suit against, 281–283, 287–291, 297 Mussolini, Benito, 15, 102, 147, 267, 312, 318

Lányi, Ernő, 85, 333 Lányi, Sarolta, 85, 86, 333 Laval, Pierre, xxii, 215 Lecocq, Charles, 74, 80n3 Lenin Boys, xviii, 20, 119n10, 165, 181, 213 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 23n7, 28, 46, 59, 61, 91, 96, 103, 137, 213, 222, 223, 245, 275; Hungarian Soviet Rupublic and, xv, xvi, xxvi, 229, 238 Lengyel, József, 199n6, 332 Levanevsky, Sigizmund Aleksandrovich, 178, 183n2 Levin, Lev Grigorievich, 190, 253, 254n5 Litterature Internationale, 91, 92, 97, 104, 111, 195, 216, 246, 247, 250, 264 Litvinov, Maxim, 46, 306–307 Love (Szerelem, short story), 30 Ludovika Military Academy, xviii, xxv, 132n7, 199n6 Lukács, György (a.k.a Vértes in Optimists), xvii, xviii, xxi, 9n4, 88, 98n1, 159, 163, 168n1, 168n2, 332 Hotel Lux, 37, 62, 66, 186, 195

naturalism, 212, 241–242, 249. See also formalism Nazism, xxii, xxiv, xxv, 31n4, 147, 164, 303n1, 218n New Soviet Man, xxvii, 6, 46, 131, 147, 214 New Writing, 30 Ney, Lancelot, 30 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xiv, xv, xxiv, xxxii, 60–63, 143, 227, 235, 280, 280n5, 314 Nizan, Paul, xxiii, 33 NKVD, xxvii, 118n1, 132n5, 177, 219n9, 248n2, 285. See also GPU Nyugat, 5, 9n1

Makhno, Nestor, 45 Malraux, André, xxiii, 18, 23n3, 28, 30, 61, 71, 142, 233, 234, 235–237, 243, 255, 302, 313–315, 325n2 Mandelstam, Osip, xii Márai, Sándor, 206 market for literature in Soviet Union, 69, 198 Marshak, (Ilya Yakovlevich Ilin), 37, 246 Masereel, Frans, 186, 199n1, 255

Ogonek , 94 Opatin (Serbia), xiii Osten Maria, 196, 197, 200n8, 211, 331 Osvát, Ernő, 5–6, 9n2 Pasternak, Boris, 236, 238, 246 Petrov, Yevgeny, 92–93, 99n10 physical culture parade, 118, 122 Pirozhkova, Antonina Nikolaevna, xxviii, 118, 208, 210n3, 291 Platonov, Sergey, 188 Pletnev, Dmitri, 253, 254n5 Popular Front, xi, xxii, xxiii, xxvi, xxxivn13, 98n1, 175n2, 178, 183n1, 312 poverty of Soviet citizens, 89, 107, 111, 123, 126 Priacel, Stefan, 118, 187 Prigrevica-Sveti Ivan, Serbia (Bácsszentiván), xx, 4, 97, 110, 217

Index Publishing Company of Foreign Workers of the USSR, 6, 26, 67, 94 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 76, 185 Rab, Croatia, xxix–xxx Radek, Karl, 61, 235, 248n2, 292–293, 295, 297, 303n1, 306 Rákosi, Mátyás, 18, 23n4, 35, 98n2, 118 Rákosi, Zoltán, 118, 123 Reed, John, 51, 238, 252 Révai, József, xx–xxi, 83, 85, 87, 98n2, 113, 244 Ribard, André, 215 risk aversion, 172, 255, 300, 330 Rolland, Romain, xxi, xxiii, xxiv, 23n7, 25–36, 37, 39n2, 51, 67–68, 70, 73, 86, 94, 95, 96, 179, 197, 207, 232, 315; meeting with Sinkó in Switzerland, 305–309; visit to Soviet Union, 110, 115, 117, 127, 131, 133, 134–136. See also Kudasheva, Marina Pavlovna Romania, xvi, xviii, xxiii, 37, 38n1, 103, 110, 219n10, 255, 265, 267–272, 314, 331 Rothbart, Irma (Mrs. Ervin Sinkó, mentioned throughout the book as M), xiv, xix, xxix, xxx Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), xxiii Russo-French Treaty (Pact of Mutual Assistance of May 1935), xxii, 46 Sallai, Imre, 87, 88, 98n5, 148, 157, 239n4, 243, 282; See also Fourteen Days; Fürst, Sándor Sarajevo, xix, 211 Schiller, Friedrich, 74, 226 Seghers, Anna, 312 Serge, Victor, 33, 307, 318 Shadr, Ivan, 144–145, 150, 152n1, 188, 212, 226. See also cultural policy in Soviet Union; Socialist Realism Sharikopodshipnik (ball bearing factory), 107, 111, 124, 125 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 67, 73, 75, 211–212, 216, 219n2, 224–225, 229, 234 show trials, 248n2, 254n5, 268, 271–274, 279, 291, 293–295, 297, 305, 306, 307, 314, 325n1; Sinkó’s Paris presentation

341

on, 315, 317, 321. See also Great Terror Shumyatsky, Boris Zakharovich, 249, 254n1 Seiffullina, Lidia, 133–136, 138n2 Silone, Ignazio, 96, 97, 99n12 Simmel, Georg, xvii Sinkó, Ervin (Spitzer, Ferenc): avoids signing petition against accused in Radek/Pyatakov trial, 293; Christian/ Tolstoyan phase, xviii, xxiv, 19, 26, 36; depressions, 111, 121; early biography, xiii–xxi; exile (sense of), 198, 205, 217, 255; Partisans in World War II, xxix; suicidal thoughts, 247; treason against truth of literature, 204. See also humanist socialism Social Democratic Party (Hungary), xiv Socialist Realism, xxii, xxxi, 141–142, 225, 278. See also Shadr Sokolovskaya, Yelena, 249–251, 254n1, 263, 277–278, 283, 287, 289, 291 Soviet Writers’ Union, 131, 197, 241; Foreign Commission of the Board of, xxiii, 94, 98n3, 134, 325n1 Spitzer, Borbála (Boriska), 164, 207, 230, 242, 274, 275n2 Sputnik Agitatora, 47 Stakhanovites, 149, 214, 215, 229 Stalin cult, 47, 103, 104, 108, 114, 115, 122–127, 130, 147, 167, 188, 189, 192, 214, 222, 264, 294, 324, 325n2, 332 Stalin, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, 145, 151 Stalin, Svetlana, 295 State Publishing Company, 26 State Publisher of Literature. See GIHL Steiner, Bruno, xxvii, 89–90, 91, 97, 107, 109, 116, 134, 143, 144–145, 172, 196, 207–208, 214, 215, 247, 254, 255, 267–268, 282, 299, 300, 305 Sunday Circle, xvii Swabians, xiv, 4, 110, 112, 119n7 Szabadka (Subotica, Serbia), xiii–xv, xxxiiin4, 85, 86, 111, 126, 128, 132n6, 205, 206, 210n2, 225 Szabó, Ervin, xix, 131, 132n7, 150 theater: Gorky Park, 169; Malii, 74; Tairov, 74; Vakhtangov, 74, 142;

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Index

Yiddish, 233, 239n5. See also films; Shostakovich, Dmitry Tisza, István, 12, 16n2, 206, 212 Tito, Josip Broz, xii, xxix–xxxii Tolnai Világlap (World News of Tolna), 13 Tolstoy, Leo, xviii, 19, 61, 78, 212, 231, 236. See also Sinkó, Ervin; Christian/ Tolstoyan phase Tretyakov, Sergey, 131, 133, 134, 137n1, 197, 203 Trotsky, Leon, 33, 111; supporter of (real or alleged), xxii, xxx, 96, 248n2, 278, 279, 280n4, 302, 306, 307, 312 Trubnaya Street, 96, 107, 108, 116, 123, 124, 142, 163, 167, 174, 190, 207 Tukhachevsky, 248n2, 317, 319, 325n6 United States of America, xx, xxiii, xxv, 45, 179, 181, 191, 232, 324, 329 Vágó, Béla, 105, 109, 110, 118n2, 213, 331 Vaillant-Coutourier, Paul, 315, 325n3 VEGAAR (Cooperative Society of Foreign Workers of the Soviet Union), 155, 159n4, 165, 170, 172, 174, 177, 193, 199n5, 203, 204, 243, 255, 264, 330, 331 Vienna, xix, 6, 8, 13, 14, 47, 74, 83, 89, 91, 113, 134, 155, 164, 167, 207, 214, 217, 228, 267, 268, 277, 300, 305, 306, 308, 318, 324. See also Grinzing barracks Vildrac, Charles, 196 Vitebsk/Chapaev (ship), 41, 43, 45, 51, 52, 53, 205, 301 VOKS (Vsesoiuznoe Obshchestvo Kulturnoi Sviazi s zagranitsei [AllUnion Society for Cultural Ties Abroad]), xxi, xxiii–xxiv, 22, 23n9, 26,

31n5, 37, 51, 52, 53, 65–68, 74, 76, 78, 94–96, 99n9, 108, 131, 133, 159n2, 197, 198, 330 Volga Germans, xxii, 190, 207 Vorms, Pierre, 185–188, 193, 194, 196, 324 Vyacheslav Fyodorovich (ship’s mechanic), 44–45, 46–47, 50–51, 54n4, 92, 103 Weber, Max, xvii Werfel, Franz, 324–325 Whites (Russian Revolution), 45–46, 74, 238, 239n6 White Terror in Hungary, xix, 19, 35, 36, 83, 161–162, 168n3, 187, 228 women’s emancipation (lack of), 112. See also abortion Yagoda, Genrikh, 119n11, 215, 219n9, 291, 292, 297, 308, 312 Yezhov, Nikolai, xii, xxvii, 119n11, 183n3, 219n9, 282, 289, 290–291, 297, 308, 312 Yonov, -, 68, 69–73, 75, 93, 96–97, 104, 116, 124–125, 127, 129, 190, 197, 204, 224, 246–247, 250, 265, 331. See also GIHL Yugoslav Academy of Arts and Sciences, xxx Yugoslavia, xi, xii, xv, xvi, xix, xx, xxi, xxix–xxxii, 4, 21, 177, 255, 323, 327; passport from, 177, 209, 255, 284 Za Rubezhom, 72, 77, 94, 95, 97, 111, 113, 116, 124, 127, 128, 129, 178–179 Zinoviev, Grigori, xxvii, 239n3, 245, 246–247, 268, 271–272, 274, 278–279, 295, 303n1, 307. See also Kamenev, Lev

About the Editor and Translator

George Deák came to the United States from Hungary, by way of Yugoslavia, at the age of nine after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. He received his PhD in history from Columbia University in 1980 but worked thereafter as a software engineer until his retirement. He has recently returned to the field of academe as a translator and a scholar of Ervin Sinkó's life and work.

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