Whenever I told people I was working on a book about Soviet writers, I received pitying glances. ‘Boy meets tractor’ is the common designation for Soviet letters. And indeed, what excitement is there to be found in a title such as How the Steel was Tempered?
In Western reference works, the same judgement is passed again and again: the only literature of lasting value from the USSR is that which was clandestine, banned, confiscated, hand-copied, smuggled to the West or never published at all. By comparison, books bearing the nihil obstat of the Soviet censor are, with few exceptions, merely hollow and pathetic.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica roundly states that, with the publication of Gorky’s collective Belomor, Soviet literature had already reached its ‘moral nadir’ by 1934.
In this book I have not tried to apply any judgements based on retrospective wisdom. Instead, I have allowed myself to be carried along by the expectations and desires of the new generation of Soviet writers.
More than even the headstrong, uncompromising thinkers (Mikhail Bulgakov, Daniil Kharms, Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky), I was fascinated by the complete and partial hangers-on, the converts, the backsliders and the doubters. Perhaps because their dilemmas and weaknesses are so recognisable.
During my wanderings through the land of Soviet letters, I went to work selectively. By pausing to consider what interested me and by leaving countless details unreported, I have sketched a route of personal enthusiasms.
In order to recount the life stories of writers, scientists and other characters from within the perspective and experience of their own times, I have taken frequent recourse to reconstruction. The passages arrived at in that fashion are based on a host of sources, many of which are not noted in the main narrative.
With regard to the life of Maxim Gorky I have drawn on his autobiographical trilogy (My Childhood, Among People, My Universities, Het Spectrum, Utrecht 1981, 1983, 1985), on Gorky: A Biography by Henri Troyat (Crown Publishers, New York 1989), on Gorky by Nina Gourfinkel (Evergreen Books, London 1960) and on A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924 by Orlando Figes (Penguin, New York 1998). A discussion was under way at the time of writing concerning the background to Gorky’s return to the Soviet Union. I discovered new material and new insights in sources including the article ‘The Great Humanist’, found in the journal Novoye literaturnoye obozreniya, vol. 4, 1999.
In his book The KGB’s Literary Archive (Harvill Press, London 1995), Vitali Shentalinksy – the first to gain access to the KGB archives as chairman of the Commission for the Literary Heritage of Writer-Victims of the Repression – had already unearthed a wealth of information about Maxim Gorky. A great deal about Babel, Pilnyak and Platonov I also found in the work of Shentalinsky, whose dogged determination between 1988 and 1992 helped him make his way into the locked files of the Lubyanka. Shentalinsky assumes that there was no personal dossier concerning Paustovsky. That is not to say that the intelligence service never collected information about him, only that he was never considered important or controversial enough to merit a dossier marked ‘to be saved indefinitely’.
There are any number of reports of Stalin’s meeting with some forty writers at Gorky’s home. My own account was based largely on the notes taken by the literary critic Kornely Zelinsky, an eyewitness. Under the heading ‘The Conversation of J.V. Stalin with the Writers, 26 October 1932’, his notes are to be found in the Russian State Archive for Literature and Art (RGALI), folder 1604.
The original Dutch title of the survey by Johan Daisne mentioned in the book as Ten Centuries of Russian Literature is Van Nitsjevo tot Chorosjo: Tien eeuwen Russische literatuur (Electa, Brussels 1948). Daisne, whom I have referred to as chief librarian of the city of Ghent, was also a well-known poet, writer, Slavicist and film historian.
Information concerning the bay at Kara Bogaz was taken primarily from Paustovsky’s book Kara Bogaz (Molodaya Gvardiya, Moscow 1932). Supplementary information was found in the Soviet journal Earth Sciences (vol. 10, 1983), in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (various editions) and in the above-mentioned thesis by Dr Amansoltan Saparova, Kara Bogaz: Scientific Research and Industrial Recovery (Turkmen Academy of Sciences, Ashgabat 1992).
Facts about the background to Platonov’s novella Soul or Dzhan, were found in the encyclopedic Turkmenskaya SSR (Ashgabat 1984), and in the afterword by Thomas Langerak – ‘Over Dzhan en Andrej Platonov’ – to the Dutch translation of Soul by J.R. Braat (Pegasus, Amsterdam 1994). In his study Andrei Platonov: Uncertainties of Spirit (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1992), Thomas Seifrid also deals with Dzhan. Under another title, excerpts from this novella were first published in the Literaturnaya Gazeta of 5 August 1936, and in the journal Ogonyok (vol. 15, 1947). It was only in 1964 that the entire text appeared under the title Dzhan in the magazine Prostor (vol. 9).
Certain insights into the work of Platonov I have drawn from Russische notities by Charles B. Timmer (Van Oorschot, Amsterdam 1981). The Dutch-language afterword to Happy Moscow (Meulenhoff, Amsterdam 1999) translated by Lourens Reedijk also proved helpful. The most complete overview, with all relevant entries from the writer’s dossier, was recently published in Moscow: Strana Filosofov: Andreya Platanova (Institut Mirovoi Literatury, Moscow 2000).
A valuable source for my description of Gorky’s literary excursion to the Belomor Canal in 1933 was Making History for Stalin: The Story of the Belomor Canal by Cynthia Ruder (University Press of Florida, Miami 1998). The opinions of farmers and workers concerning literature and theatre were taken from the collection Socialist Realism Without Shores (Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina 1997) and, more specifically, from Yevgeny Dobrenko’s contribution to it.
The ‘ornithological riddle’ of the 1930s, as well as the suggestion that hunting parties in the Gulag camps of Arctic Russia contributed to the decimation of Brent goose populations, comes from the Polish-German ornithologist Eugeniusz Nowak, as explained by him in the article ‘Jagdaktivitäten in der Vergangenheit und heute als Einflussfaktor auf Gänsepopulationen und andere Vögel Nordsibiriens’, 1995. I would also like to thank Jan Jaap Hooft and Gerard Boere for drawing my attention to Nowak’s work, and for providing their expert views on it.
Biographical and bibliographical information about Paustovsky I took from his own memoirs (Povest o zhizni, Sovremenny Pisatel, Moscow 1995, including letters, photographs and commentary) in the six-volume Dutch-language edition (De Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam) translated by Wim Hartog, with part seven (Paustovsky’s literary recollections) added as De gouden roos. Also worthy of mention is the festschrift Vospominaniya o Konstantine Paustovskom (Sovyetsky Pisatel, Moscow 1983) and the journal Mir Paustovskogo. Volumes 15 and 16 (2000) of this latter publication include a diptych by Vadim Paustovsky, entitled ‘The Silver Ring’, dealing with his father’s private life. An abridged version appeared earlier in the Dutch edition of The Romantics (De Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam 1995).
Other works consulted concerning Paustovsky were: Der Stil Konstantin Georgievic Paustovskijs by Wolfgang Kasack (Böhlau, Cologne 1971); Konstantin Paustovskijs Auffassung vom dichterischen Schaffen by Irmhild Reischle (Eberhard Karls-Universität, Tübingen 1969); K. Paustovski i Sever by Faina Makarova (Moscow 1994); Konstantin Paustovski, écrivain-modèle by Leonid Heller in Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique, vol. 26 (1985) and Konstantin Paustovski: otsyerk tvortsyestva by Lev Levitsky (Sovyetsky Pisatel, Moscow 1997).
Paustovsky’s address to the Second Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers was published in the Dutch-language daily newspaper De Waarheid under the title ‘Laten wij toch openhartig spreken’ on 8 January 1955. The account of his Drozdov Address is found in Martin Ros’s afterword to the pocket edition of Paustovsky’s memoirs; additional information about this speech and about the smear campaign against Boris Pasternak after his winning of the Nobel Prize was taken from Political Control of Literature in the USSR, 1946–1959 by Harold Swayze (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1962).
The Soviet presentation at the New York World’s Fair was best described by Tony Swift in ‘The Soviet World of Tomorrow at the New York World’s Fair, 1939’ in The Russian Review, vol. 57, no. 3 (1998). In addition, I have quoted from the English-language visitors’ brochure Waterways and Water Transport in the USSR (Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow 1939).
My copy of Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotism dates from 1981 (Vintage Books, New York). The information about Dutch participation in the Volga–Don Canal was taken from De lange weg naar Moskou by Ben Knapen (Elsevier, Amsterdam 1985).
By way of secondary literature concerning Boris Pilnyak, I consulted Boris Pilniak: A Soviet Writer in Conflict with the State by Vera Reck (Queen’s University Press, Montreal 1975), Arthur Langeveld’s afterword to his translation of City of Storms (De Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam 1993) and that of Alexander Tulloch to his translation of The Naked Year (Ardis, Ann Arbor 1975).
Yakov Rubinschtein’s dossier is kept in folder 140527 at the Russian State Archive for Socio-Political History (RGASPI). The film Kara Bogaz – Chornaya Past (Yalta 1935), directed by Alexander Razumni, is filed under number 2972 at the Gosfilmofond state film archive.
The machinations of the GlavLit censorship agency have been researched most exhaustively and described by Herman Ermolaev in Censorship in Soviet Literature, 1917–1991 (Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham 1997). The quotes from former GlavLit censor Vladimir Solodin are taken from the congress report KGB: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow (Glasnost Public Foundation, Moscow 1995).
John and Carol Garrard have documented the history of the Union of Soviet Writers in Inside the Soviet Writers’ Union (The Free Press, New York 1990). My account of the First Congress in 1934 is based in part on that work.
The magazine Itogi (vol. 21, 2001) contains a great deal of information about the writers’ colony at Peredelkino. Lev Shilov, director of the Shukhovsky Museum at Peredelkino, was also an important source, both oral and written (in his brochure Pasternakovskoye Peredelkino, Moscow 1999).
Concerning Isaak Babel, I turned to his own book Brieven naar Brussel, 1925–1939 (Moussault, Amsterdam 1970); the article ‘De dood van Babel’ in the collection Russische werkelijkheden by Charles B. Timmer (De Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam 1991); and Steden zonder geheugen. In het voetspoor van Isaak Babel by Pauline de Bok (Meulenhoff, Amsterdam 1996).
The British diplomat present at the show trials in Moscow’s Pillar Hall was Fitzroy Maclean. His comments cited here are from his book Eastern Approaches (Penguin, London 1991). Isaiah Berlin’s 1945 memorandum on Soviet literature was republished by The New York Review of Books in October 2000 under the title ‘The Arts in Russia under Stalin’.
In describing cotton cultivation in Central Asia, I made use of the doctoral thesis ‘Tussen Oxus en Jachartus; de geschiedenis van de katoenbouw in Oezbekistan’ by Greetje van der Werf (Amsterdam 1995), and Turkestan Solo, the travel report by Ella Maillart from 1932 (Century, London 1985).
The water-transfer project and the outcry against it are described in New Atlantis Revisited, Akademgorodok, the Siberian City of Science by Paul Josephson (Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey 1997) and in A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev by Douglas Weiner (University of California Press, Berkeley 1999).
I would also like to thank my informants, most of whom I have quoted in the form of dialogue in the text, for their insights and information, and their willingness to share those with me.
An indispensable role behind the scenes was also played by Galina Medvedeva, the driving force behind the NRC Handelsblad newspaper’s KorPunkt in Moscow, and Oleg Klimov, photographer, friend and fellow-traveller on a number of the journeys described in this book.
Julia Otshetova was also with me in the Solovetsky Islands, and at the bay at Kara Bogaz. For her virtuoso interpreting skills, her knowledge of Russian literature and her intrepid detective work in archives and libraries, I am deeply indebted to her.
Critical readers of the work in progress brought me back, often and in timely fashion, to the straight and narrow and saved me from blunders. My thanks in that respect go to Regina Bennink, Bas Blokker, Lucette ter Borg, Emile Brugman, Ans Jansen-Wouters, Eddy Naessens and Pieter Westerman.
Above all, I am thankful for the untiring encouragement of Suzanna Jansen, who kept me on my toes every step of the way.
Moscow, 18 December 2001