CIVIL WAR IN PETROGRAD, DEAD HORSES IN THE STREETS. THE “SHIP OF FOOLS.” THE SERAPION BROTHERS: LOTS OF YOUNG PEOPLE, SOME IN THEIR TEENS. REVOLUTION = DICTATORSHIP OF THE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. MEYERHOLD, THE OLDEST DIRECTOR IN THE WORLD. HIS ARCHIVES SAVED BY EISENSTEIN. TWO INSPECTORS GENERAL. ZOSHCHENKO TURNS ON SOME DISCONCERTING LIGHTS. BERLIN. A MISTREATED HAT. AN UPLIFTING SONG.
Shall we try to pick up again where we left off? We were up to 1917. You had returned to Petrograd after being wounded in the war . . .
Aleksey Maksimovich Gorky had gone back to Petrograd before the revolution and had started the magazine Letopis [Chronicle]. It was there that some of my reviews came out. They were very harsh reviews. But I wasn’t scared. I was young. At the time Gorky was a liberal—very liberal—Democratic-Socialist. The magazine published many Bolsheviks too. Mayakovsky published some of his things there; Babel was in there too, early Babel with his wonderful stories, nothing like them since—I remember the one about the two old Chinese men: they go looking for women, one of them is impotent and a very kind prostitute heals him . . . then Babel took off down the Volga. After the revolution . . . Several plans came about. At the time I was on the editorial staff of the Vestnik Iskusstv [Herald of the Arts]. It was a newspaper, and we didn’t have anything to paste it on the walls. So we put the papers in water, and the cold alone made them stick to the walls, you just had to be careful not to freeze your hands too. Those were hard times . . . Nobody shoveled the snow on the street, on Nevsky, I remember, there was only a little path that was practicable, which wound through tall mounds of snow. And at night a clarinetist would pass through, I think he was from the Mariinsky Theater, and he played his instrument. People gave him a lot of money, he played well. In that period, after the revolution, I spent a great deal of time with Gorky. He had scurvy, and he would rinse out his mouth with an infusion of oak bark. Yes, they were very hard times. Near the Troitsky Bridge, I remember, a dead horse lay for a long time. It was there for a while, then people cut it up and everybody took away a piece for themselves.
And at about the same time Esenin wrote, in a poem, “Black crows, their wings spread out like sails, were eating its flesh.”
Esenin wasn’t the only one to write about it. Mayakovsky wrote “A horse fell” . . . and at the same time, in Moscow, Gorky published a feuilleton about a fallen horse. Yes, at that time horses didn’t last long. But we had big plans . . . When 1921 came—and it came with a horrible famine—I remember that Gorky’s son, a good boy, talented, brought a cart or two with horse heads to Petrograd. Evidently the rest of those horses was somewhere, but we got the heads. That was when Tikhonov, fresh from the war, wrote:
Ships call on us only by chance, and freight trains
Bring cargoes out of habit, that is all;
Just count the men belonging to my country—
How many dead will answer to the call!
On the corner of Nevsky and the Moika, not far from the house where Pushkin died, there’s a huge building. The “House of Arts” opened there. Grin lived there, Shaginyan, Gumilyov, Miklashevsky, a good painter unknown outside Russia, Pyast lived there too. And I went to live there as well. There were lots of us. Sometimes we didn’t even know each other. They gave us a little money. In that period Gorky wanted to create a publishing house, “Universal Literature,” which would publish writers from every era. All of world literature, from Gilgamesh, say, to Leonid Andreyev. The books were all translated, and translated well, but most of them were only published several years later. I don’t have them, they wouldn’t all fit in my house. It was a way to help and organize writers. And it was because of this opportunity that the House of Arts held translation courses. They would serve tea, some bread, and a little something else. And the group that assembled in that translators’ studio was wonderful.
Who gave the lessons?
There was Zamyatin teaching, Chukovsky; I held lessons too. One time when there was a terrible cold, just like today in Moscow, in fact, the only one who showed up was Blok.
With professors of that stature they must not have been simple lessons on translation . . .
No, of course not, they were lectures, free lectures. Blok talked about art, the revolution, the intelligentsia. I spoke on literature. Sometimes there were only five people in a huge room. It used to be the dining room of Yeliseyev, an extremely wealthy merchant who had emigrated. The building where the House of Arts was, in fact, had been his house—enormous, three floors, with a library and music hall. It’s the Yeliseyev who left the big grocery store on Gorky Prospekt in Moscow. He was famous, in his time: in France they gave him the Legion of Honor for his method of aging wines. He was an expert oenologist. And the buildings he constructed in Petersburg and Moscow have lasted. Tolstoy called them “temples of sausage.” But in our time Yeliseyev was already gone, there was no more sausage, only the house remained. And that’s where we had our meetings. And that’s where we formed—actually, it formed itself, right after the House opened—the “Serapion Brothers”: Zoshchenko, Vsevolod Ivanov, Lunts, Pozner—then very young (later, he returned to Paris)—me, Fedin, Nikitin, Elizaveta Polonskaia, Tikhonov. Tikhonov joined after the group had already formed. He was coming from the war. He wore a long military overcoat, he’d been in the Red Army cavalry. He hadn’t published anything yet, but he brought some excellent poems from the war. We were all very young, some of us were just boys . . . Who else was there? There was Slonimsky, he was the grandson of a publisher, and he was a good writer, not great but good, and a good person. Because of the cold, he was always in bed, under his overcoat, and who knows why but the Serapion Brothers always met at his place, in his room, around his bed, instead of in the big room. And for some reason, something that, I remember, amused Gorky to no end, in Slonimsky’s room there was a vent that dripped water. Apparently a pipe had broken somewhere . . . Anyway, the atmosphere was . . . Olga Forsh called the House of Arts a “ship of fools” . . .
It was Gorky’s initiative to create the House of Arts. What was his relationship to the Serapion “Brotherhood?”
Gorky was a friend. He would come often . . . He was a multifaceted man, a great talent, with an incredible memory. He could recite a Chekhov story with every punctuation mark. One time he ran into an old acquaintance at our place, someone from his town, and he listed every single person who used to live there . . .
What was the role of Zamyatin’s teachings in the Serapions’ practice and choices?
Zamyatin was very important for the brotherhood. He was a very strong man, and a good novelist, just look at The Islanders. And he was a good engineer too. He was the one, you know, who built the “Krasin,” the ship that saved Nobile. Zamyatin was called when the Nobile disaster happened, and if he had come back to Russia he would have been the one to save Nobile, on his ship. After emigrating, Zamyatin never wrote again . . .
And you held lessons alongside Zamyatin, Blok . . . That shows that you weren’t simply a member of the “brother-hood,” but somehow an authority for the other “brothers.”
The fact is, I was older. I’d already been to war, for a long time, I had been wounded. Anyway, you could say that there were two groups within the brotherhood. At the center of one was Vsevolod Ivanov. Who, I must say, started out as a great writer. When he joined us he was fresh from the war—actually, no, he was coming from Siberia, from the partisan struggle. One day Gorky told me that a guy with a red beard had shown up, his coat singed, with a wide face, Kyrgyz perhaps, and that this person was looking for him. And he told me to get some money for him, you never knew, I might run into him. I was astonished: “But, Aleksey Maksimovich, that seems highly unlikely . . .” But I got some money, and that very day, on Nevsky, at the corner of Sadovaya, I saw a man with a reddish beard and a singed coat. I stopped him and said: “Are you Ivanov?” And he: “How do you know?” I replied: “Gorky knows how to paint a picture.” I gave him the money. Then he and Gorky met, they talked. And Vsevolod Ivanov wrote a wonderful story; the next one, however, was bad. He was maybe the oldest out of all of us. He wrote war stories. His father was a Cossack who, in his time, who knows why, had studied for a while at the Lazarev Institute of Foreign Languages. Vsevolod Ivanov came from a Cossack stanitsa where there was no stone left upon another . . . All of us, at the time, thought he would become the Russian Balzac.
So, Ivanov was the head of this group . . .
No, for heavens’ sake, nobody was at the head of anything. There were no heads. And, in general, back then it was easier to call the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet than it is to get a hold of the Housing Office today—you can call for hours without anybody answering. One time I had to call Sverdlov about a very important matter, he told me that I should come by at a certain time. I got there, he let me in, and the first thing he said was: “Shklovsky, you have no idea what a great pleasure it is for an old revolutionary to be able to write and take notes. That wasn’t possible before. You had to keep everything in your head. And now, you see, I’ve taken your documents (I had just gotten back from Ukraine, I had all sorts of cards) and I can see everything that happens . . .” It was a period in which everything got done. Once, the Neva flooded and, like in the times of Onegin, we saw a huge barge on Mokhovaya Street. In short, we felt like it was the end and the beginning of the world at the same time. The white nights, then, were whiter than they’ve ever been since. Because our heads were clear, our eyes were fresh. And hope. What hope? No less and no more than of rebuilding the entire world. We believed that there would be revolution not only in, let’s say, Hungary or Germany, but also, inevitably, in France. We weren’t thinking of Italy at the time, but in Spain, yes, there would be revolution, we were sure of it.
But what did revolution mean to you then?
Well, for example, we thought: there will be the dictatorship of the Academy of Sciences. Why are you laughing? Exactly that: the dictatorship of the Academy of Sciences, or rather, the dictatorship of art. The freedom of art. Look, I’ll try to explain it this way: there was a train headed for the future and we were pushing and shoving one another to get on. But we were convinced that it would come . . .
How long was the Serapion Brotherhood active?
Three or four years. As for me, I left. I also abandoned Opoyaz. And anyway, you see, you grow up, you mature. Nikolai Nikitin, for example, was a talented writer, who wrote good things—then came the first successes, the first money, the first new people, the first women. Tikhonov, who impressed us all with his skill, fought in the Finnish War, and later became—how should I put this, not a bureaucrat, but someone who wanted to prove that he was in on everything. Gruzdev wrote a biography of Gorky. Only the beginning, of course. It would be extremely difficult to finish, but it should be done, it would be very interesting . . . Gorky, at a certain point, left, he went abroad, and after that, I too, by chance, found myself abroad. I’ve already mentioned that story. I was supposed to testify at a trial. A political trial. I wasn’t a Socialist-Revolutionary. It was a trial against the Socialist-Revolutionaries. I refused to participate. How? I was young then. I went over the ice, crossed a frozen segment of the Gulf of Finland and ended up in Finland. And then I ended up in Berlin. I had no ties there. I’m not political. And the acquaintances and friends I had there were Bolsheviks. There was Larisa Reisner, the wonderful Meyerhold came with the young Zinaida Raikh . . .
Before moving on to your memories of Berlin, would you mind saying something about Meyerhold?
Meyerhold was the oldest director in the world. I fought with him. We fought about Gogol, The Inspector General. The mise-en-scène was brilliant, but I didn’t like the fact that the mayor’s wife—played by Raikh—was such a beautiful woman. Because she was so beautiful it was painful. I remember the set of The Inspector, gorgeous: at that time it was unbelievably easy to find the most precious Venetian crystals on the street. And this lavishness . . . You see Meyerhold’s mises-en-scène didn’t take the author into account, they passed over him. But sometimes they hit the mark. For example, with Ostrovsky’s The Forest. Raikh was in that as well. The priest, I remember, had gold hair, made out of tinsel. And you know how it ended, what the comedy’s conclusion was? Schastlivtsev and Neschastlivtsev need to find a tragic actress . . . They find one and finally all together they can create a new type of theater: the theater of Meyerhold . . . As strange as it is, this fantastic show with dancing sailors, balalaika players, this crazy spectacle was successful with audiences. What else can I say about Meyerhold? That he lived and died a Bolshevik.
I understand what you mean, but bringing up Meyer-hold’s death can’t not bring to mind the atrociously unjust way in which he died, and also, a question as obvious as it is unavoidable: in the face of all this—persecution, disappearances, death—what did people do? Were they afraid, did they protest, react somehow?
They were afraid, of course. But Meyerhold left behind an enormous archive. When everything was over, this archive was discovered in Eisenstein’s dacha. Eisenstein had never said anything to anyone. How he was able to take all that material from a guarded house, I really can’t figure out. And he never talked to anybody about it, so that word wouldn’t get out, and thus the archive was preserved.
I’m sorry, I interrupted you—you were talking about Meyerhold’s productions.
You see, Meyerhold was very indebted to Stanislavski, on the one hand, and on the other, he was a madman who let his students put on the production only to then interrupt it and turn it on its head. And the great thing is that it gave you the impression that the work was perfectly comfortable in that position. It’s as if to start, Meyerhold first needed to stage the work in an ordinary, traditional manner.
And Meyerhold the man?
He was charming, inventive, he knew how to be poor with grace. My wife, Serafima Gustavovna, often went to his house. One anecdote: Meyerhold had a ruined stomach, he suffered from diarrhea. And his house, one day, was full of guests, there were people everywhere, even on the floor. He, Meyerhold, first went to the bathroom on tiptoe, then he strode by with long, magisterial steps, then he went on all fours, with newspaper pages in his mouth. He was someone who could make a show out of anything.
And you, Viktor Borisovich, do you remember another famous, sensational production of The Inspector General in the ’20s? I’m thinking of Terentyev’s show, which was probably also the last public appearance of such a gifted artist, who also died prematurely, it seems, in Stalin’s purges.
Terentyev, there’s a man who’s been forgotten . . . On the Moika, right across from the house where Akhmatova lived, there was the “House of the Press.” It was there that Terentyev put on The Inspector General. The set, I remember, was made of transparent material. Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky were played by two women. The merchant Abdulin was a Tatar and he sang in Tatar. In the end, when the real inspector’s arrival is announced, he enters, removes his cap, and we discover that it’s Khlestakov again. It was a wonderful show. Terentyev had also staged a text by a Proletarian writer, now I can’t remember who—I remember that at some point there was a woman dying; she was put on the table and she lay there, dead, when all of a sudden she starts talking and describing the situation. I remember that even the audience was scared . . . You see, they say that sometimes scientists play this game: forget reality, anything is possible, don’t be afraid to invent. Bohr, I am quite sure it was him, once said to me about an idea: it’s not crazy enough to be true. And old Tolstoy said that the reasonable is impoverished whereas everything that’s foolish is rich, fecund. In art this absolute freedom, freedom from assistance, from external support, is indispensable. For example, opera, at one time, was financed, today we have the Bolshoi Theater which, for heaven’s sake, we all love and respect, but . . . But we were talking about the Serapion Brothers, right?
Yes. You said that Ivanov had one group. And the other?
The other one was very, very “leftist.”
And that was the one, let’s not say headed by you, but open to your influence?
I wouldn’t know. I don’t think they were crazy enough to be open to my influence. In this second group there was Pozner, Lunts, a very interesting writer who died suddenly, very young—even as a young man he wrote some nice theater pieces. Gorky had arranged a trip to Spain for him. Lunts died suddenly, en route. And he already had a very sad work among his things: Journey on a Hospital Bed. There was also Elizaveta Polonskaia. There was Kaverin, who had started off his writing career very well. I remember one of his stories from that period: two people have a cellar and they want to expand it a little. They begin digging, they dig and dig and they come to the end of the world. They find themselves in a strange space, like a folded-up polygon. And where is the world? They walk around, they keep going, at a certain point they see the world rolling toward them in the form of a barrel. And the story ends there. Kaverin was full of ideas, of discoveries . . . Eh, at that time these inventions were easy, very easy . . .
And which group was Zoshchenko in?
Zoshchenko was between the one and the other. He joined our group. He was handsome. He had a nice physique. Straight legs. He was easygoing and quiet. But he was always getting offended, even though we all liked him and nobody teased him. He’d been an officer in the army, he’d received major military awards, then he had worked for the police and finally he ended up with us. His satires and comic stories were real. I remember his story “Poverty.” They install electricity, and put lightbulbs in the house. But the light reveals that the house is ugly, a mess, in need of repair. And they start improving things, but it’s so difficult that instead of going on with the renovation they get rid of the lights. Or this other amazing story: a man is walking on the outskirts of Piter and sees on a building, up on the third floor, a bronze plaque that indicates the level of the water during the flood of 1824. He’s perplexed. He asks some people nearby and they tell him: we had to put the plaque there so that nobody would steal it. Zoshchenko’s stories, his irony, his jabs at bad people, a bad past . . . But the people who built the world wanted that world to be as if it were designed, they wanted Potemkin villages. And when they started reading Zoshchenko, they tore him apart. That had a big impact on him, because he was fully convinced that he was a realist. Like Shostakovich. Shostakovich expected Pravda to publish an essay of his analyzing the score for The Nose. You see, this is the situation of the artist who’s ahead of his time. Even if it must be said that, sometimes, his time understands him. Zoshchenko, for example, was absolutely loved by the people. And when he died, there were tons of people at his funeral. He was buried between two sand dunes, in the bare sand, and on the grave there’s a stone in the shape of a book, which just says “Zoshchenko.” It was the workers in the Sestroreck factory who made him that monument. They loved him.
Zoshchenko’s name is linked—in a negative way, unfortunately—to Zhdanov, who signed the famous resolution against Zoshchenko, and Akhmatova, in 1946. Who was Zhdanov, Viktor Borisovich?
He was someone who knew how to play the piano.
But as far as you know was he a literary critic, was he involved at all with literature?
No.
Yet he was destined to become the star of Soviet cultural politics in the postwar period.
You know something? One time Zoshchenko came to Moscow, he went to a hotel, but there were no rooms. He settled in a common area. And people were astonished that he was still around, still in circulation. Stalin . . . He was an atrocious phenomenon. But it’s not possible for a man like that to make it by chance. And you can’t put all the blame on a single person. Zhdanov was a civil servant. At some point they told him: Write. There’s a legend about the Zoshchenko affair. One day, Stalin was on vacation at his daughter’s; he found one of his books, read it, and it unsettled him. He was seeing the world in another way.
This detail, legendary or no, confirms the peculiar, appalling arbitrariness of the “mechanism.” And if Stalin had found a different book that day? To use an absurd example, a book by Mayakovsky . . .
He probably liked Mayakovsky.
In recompense, Lenin didn’t like Mayakovsky. At least the poem “150,000,000,” since—remember?—he recommended against its publication . . .
As far as that poem is concerned, you see, the mistake is also Mayakovsky’s. Because there the poet isn’t speaking with his voice, but with the voice of the politician. He wants to represent the whole country . . . To think that here, to this day, a collection of Mayakovsky’s love poetry has never been published. Why take love from Mayakovsky? And here, anyway, I believe, and in Italy as well, kids are horrified by what they have to study in school: Pushkin, Gogol, Mayakovsky . . . They read them, they have to read them for exams, so they don’t like them . . . And revolution transforms the world, it creates a new world, but it finds itself still in the old one . . . But what was I talking about?
Going in chronological order, though with many whims and digressions, we had come to your Berlin days. You were in Berlin for almost two years, right?
I was. And in Berlin there were—or they passed through—many of my friends and acquaintances. There was Mayakovsky, Eisenstein (though by the time I got there he was already gone), there was Igor Severyanin, there was even Nemirovich-Danchenko. Bely was there, bitter and sad after his affair with anthroposophy went sour. There were many painters in the avant-garde. One time I went to see an exhibit and I was astonished: it was like being in Moscow . . . Berlin was going downhill. I’m not much for politics, I’m no politician, but I think that if at the time there hadn’t been that division which later emerged—neither of their volition nor of ours—between Social-Democrats and Bolsheviks, Berlin wouldn’t have become fascist. But I saw the fascists, with my own eyes. Long before, after the defeat, when we had disbanded the army, they shaved the backs of their heads. And when someone shaves his head it means a war is about to begin. Germany is a very tenacious, precise country. For us Russians it’s incomprehensible, even if enviable in many ways: they know how to work, they’re precise in their work. I remember I bought a hat and in the pension where I was living—at the time Erenburg was living there too—there was a doorman who usually opened the door by pushing a button, after checking to see who it was. One night, I ring the bell and I see him get up and come to open the door himself. He was holding a tray, and on the tray there was a hat. “Young man,” he says to me, “do you see this hat? I’ve been wearing it for four years. But you, you just bought your hat, and look what condition it’s been reduced to! Do you think you can treat things this way?” Eh, sure, it wasn’t his business, but it’s also true that things don’t like to be treated badly. Berlin . . . Remizov, who also lived in Berlin at that time—and, you know, was supposed to return to Russia, I was supposed to go and pick him up at the station myself—Remizov wrote: “Krug is a German word. There’s nothing to feel superior about. And malyar is a German word too. We shouldn’t consider ourselves superior.” Anyway, you see, everyone is made in his own way, and I couldn’t last in that climate for long. Of course, at the time I didn’t know what was going to happen. Gorky and Mayakovsky actively took on my case, and, moreover, I hadn’t done anything. Long story short, I went back to Russia. Water, as they say, is water for the fish but not for the birds. In Berlin, I never wrote for the White papers, I didn’t have ties of any kind, connections, not even with people who spoke Russian well. For a while, in Berlin, I lived with Gorky, who in that period was also waiting for another revolution, but he didn’t believe in the peasants, he believed in the proletariat. You see, men expect miracles from themselves, remember what I told you about Filonov? But we weren’t able to walk on water . . . It takes patience, and lots of testing the water in the meantime. I suppose that’s how it has to be. I remember a great writer who said: “Don’t give up desperation.” Because one could say that desperation is indispensable. It helps not to think that it’s your neighbor keeping you from being happy. Man’s principal enemy is his heart. Yuri Olesha wrote wonderfully about this. One time, he wrote, he suddenly heard a strange noise. He asked his grandmother what it could be: it was his heartbeat. It was the first time he had heard his heart beating. And from that moment on he listened to it for the rest of his life. We need to listen to our heart, without ruining it. Art always poses man the task, the problem of the future. Don Quixote, as Dostoyevsky said, isn’t guilty of anything. He’s cultured, he doesn’t exploit his mad glory, he’s intelligent, he doesn’t need anything, it’s just that he isn’t able to transform the world instantly. But humanity needs that. You see, the Russian term poka chto is ugly, I don’t like it, this one is nice: nichego. One time, Tolstoy wrote down a song that the Russian soldiers in the Caucasus used to sing. A lovely, difficult song. Wait, I’ll sing it to you:
In a word, it’s terrible
Or certainly not quite bearable
Well, let’s just say it’s nothing.
And this word, nichego, which in Russia is used so often, whose exact meaning nobody knows, in actuality means many things—it means that one is not yet defeated. And that we go on, even if it’s very difficult.