THE WRITERS IN THE previous subsection embody dreams of alternate realities and express increasing anxiety as the years of upheaval and civil war roll over Russia. These were cataclysmic, apocalyptic times … At the end of Pilniak’s Naked Year, for instance, we see Russia awaiting the return of Ilia of Murom as English dreamers awaited the return of King Arthur. These are heroes who can save the land because they are of it, an organic part of its past.
Enchanted flights of fancy over the Russian landscape were no longer possible after the end of the Civil War. In a materialist march to a command society, Russia’s new leaders forced the populace to embrace a new kind of utopian vision, mechanized and international in scope, or, as V. I. Lenin stressed at its genesis: “I could care less about the fate of Russia—all I care about is World Revolution.” But the proletarian revolution did not engulf the world in spite of Lenin’s wishes, and once I. V. Stalin took command over Soviet society for over a quarter century, Russia was to face a new challenge: enunciated by the “glorious leader” himself. The inhabitants of the USSR were to frame the socialist future within the confines of one state—Russia itself. This future was to be attained by the doctrinaire destruction of most vestiges of Russia’s religious and economic past, replacing these with materialist ideology and a planned economy. Anything thwarting these plans was considered treason against the state. It was increasingly dangerous to oppose the regime, especially after the beginning of the “Second Five-year Plan” in 1932, a period which also saw the creation of the Union of Soviet Writers along with the abolition of all free-thinking literary organizations and consequent persecution of all errant individuals. In the event, there were millions of these.
The writers chosen for this subsection—Nikolai Zabolotsky (1903-58), Daniel Kharms [Yuvachev] (1905-42), Yuri Olesha (1899-1960), and Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940)—stand here as representatives of the incredibly rich field of Russian poets and writers who came to prominence in the 1920s. They were a decade or two younger than Evgeny Zamiatin, the writer whose literary craft had more or less predicted the reality of political oppression they were to experience in their lives. Unlike Zamiatin, who was allowed to emigrate, many of this generation physically perished in concentration camps by the 1930s; those that survived found their energies sapped by the regime to the point that they ceased to be productive altogether, as their creative gifts were ill-suited to the now mandatory production work of socialist realism.
Given the tragic outcome of their lives, it is all the more gratifying to see in their works an incredible capacity for life-affirming humor. Liberating themselves from the lockstep march of socialist dictates, they created alternate, dreamscape worlds. We are uniting these quite different authors here to familiarize the contemporary reader with some of the less translated (except for Bulgakov) works of this period. Obliquely each of the works chosen is also connected with the concept of flight, be it the flight of fancy, the flight of an insect, flight “on the wings of love,” or the flight of Bulgakov’s witch-heroine, Margarita.
Most selections are also united by the years 1928-1929, the last years when free creativity was still imagined to be possible, but also the years when outright bans on free fiction began in earnest. Zabolotsky’s and Olesha’s short works were written in 1929, and Bulgakov’s subsequently famous novel was begun in the same year. Each of the selections probes to a greater or lesser extent the meaning of historical truth and the applicability of ancient myths to the modernist context. In Bulgakov’s novel, completed a decade later, such mythopoetic truths find full expression, whereas in Zabolotskys’ Signs of the Zodiac their applicability to the modern world is far more equivocal. This uncertainty is practically erased in Human of the Snows, a poem composed thirty years later (1957) at the height of nuclear war anxiety. Here no hope is held out to humanity by Nature, Reason, Religion or Technology. In the Bibilical context God gave Adam the authority to name His creatures, but in this poem the Half-man Half-beast capers pointlessly around his skinned prey, spouting gibberish. In Kharms’ The Young Man who Surprised the Watchman, a miniature of Kafkaesque brevity, literal flight is physically squashed, while the possibility of metaphoric flight to the gates of Heaven is implicitly preserved. No such gates present themselves to Kalugin, the protagonist of Kharms’ The Dream—a victim of a society perhaps even less humane than the one imagined in Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
In 1929 Zabolotsky, Kharms, and Olesha collaborated with eminent Formalist critics in a never completed collection entitled Archimedes’ Bath, which was to include contributions by members of Oberiu—The Association for Real Art (Ob”edinenie real’nogo isskustva). Zabolotsky and Kharms had been instrumental in the 1927 founding of this, the last freely-formed Russian literary group. When Oberieu was effectively quashed in 1930, several of its participants were able to work in the somewhat marginalized area of children’s literature; others perished in the purges. The fates of the two founders of Oberiu—each represented here by a couple of entries—can be said to typify what happened to the rest. Zabolotsky’s collections of poetry beginning in the late twenties and continuing into the thirties were harshly attacked by the Soviet press; in 1938 he was arrested and sentenced to five years of hard labor; he was to survive into the post-Stalin years, but rarely again to write with the striking originality of the late 1920s. Kharms was arrested in 1931 on the charge that his “trans-sense” poetry was distracting the people from the task of building socialism; although he was only held for a year and released, he was increasingly under a cloud, and 1941 saw him again in prison, where he died.
Olesha’s 1927 novel, Envy, and a series of superb short stories had earned him wide acclaim, but after 1932 Olesha published very little. Olesha’s highly original and evocative imagery—representing the world “through the wrong end of binoculars” (as Nils Åke Nilsson, a connoisseur of Olesha’s oeuvre, notes)—deftly made everyday objects seem alien or new by stirring up the “estrangement response” (ostranenie). But beyond such devices, showering his readers with an ensemble of pioneering similes, the writer contemplates in his fiction the role of human sensuality, feeling, and myth within the context of an insistently materialist, dehumanized, and demythologized world. This is evident in the miniature masterpiece newly translated for this volume, which was first published in the Moscow almanac “Earth and Factory”, vol. 2. Beyond the obvious allusions to such universally recognizable topoi as the Garden of Eden, the Western reader should be aware that in naming his heroine “Lelia,” Olesha is creating a feminine counterpart to the Russian Love-god, Lel’. In fact Lel’ is of doubtful antiquity, with roots in the folkloric revival rather than in the deep past, but mention of this deity is common in the writings of Russian early nineteenth-century poets such as Derzhavin and even Pushkin, who felt the need for a native variant of the classic Love-god, Eros.
Our other selection from Olesha’s oeuvre is his essay “On the Fantastic in H. G. Wells,” written on the eve of WWII in 1937, which provides the reader with a rare glimpse into the autobiographic laboratory of Olesha’s own growth as a writer. Moreover, the essay serves as a natural transition to the space-fantasies in the final section, predicated on the belief in the victory of technologies which would ground fantasy-making in the experienced reality of space-flight.
Selections from the writings of Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov (1891-1940), equally famous for his prose works and his plays, end this section. Some details of Bulgakov’s biography parallel those of Russia’s two greatest nineteenth-century writers who excelled in composing both fiction and drama, Nikolai Gogol and Anton Chekhov. Like the latter, Bulgakov was trained as a medical doctor and practiced this art; along with Chekhov he wrote socially relevant plays and prose works, was acclaimed in his lifetime, and died in his forties. But it is especially to Gogol that Bulgakov cultivated a life-long aesthetic allegiance. Like Gogol, Bulgakov was born and raised in Ukraine, and moved as an adult to the capitol; like Gogol he wrote satires, reworking in the process many of Gogol’s themes and images, even rewriting and adapting Gogol’s masterpiece, Dead Souls, for the contemporary stage. And just as Gogol had done before him, Bulgakov would ultimately burn some of his own manuscripts. Indeed, in tribute to his admiration of Gogol, a piece of rock which used to stand on Gogol’s grave in the Donskoy cemetery was reused for Bulgakov’s tomb.
Especially mindful of this comparison with Gogol, we have made our brief selections from what is arguably the twentieth-century Russian novel best known in the West, The Master and Maragrita. Bulgakov ultimately suggests in this novel that society founded solely on materialist values is the least desirable destiny for Man. The exhilaration of flight is present in the novel as experienced by the central protagonist Margarita, transformed into a witch by the application of a magic cream. Although reminiscent of the flights in Gogol’s Vyi and Turgenev’s Fantoms, Margarita’s flight gives her and the reader a bird’s eye view of a modern, Soviet Russia caught in a mesh of cities and their lights: the signs of “progress.”
The meaning of technological progress is in doubt in the first selection of this section, The Fatal Eggs (an homage to Wells’ The Food of the Gods), where Bulgakov advances the notion that technology is doomed to catastrophe in the Soviet social context. In our ealier neo-Wellsean selection, Kuprin’s Liquid Sunshine, social bliss based on technology was undermined by the romantic woes of a single individual. In The Fatal Eggs, however, such failure is shown to be systemic. The ray causing the reptilian eggs to mutate, thus hatching the catastrophe, is a red ray—the hue itself an overarching symbol of everything touched by the Bolshevik regime. The significance of the machine, consistently glorified by the Communists, is embodied in their most powerful vehicle, the propaganda press: the ray’s inventor, Persikov, is badgered by such publications as Red Spark, Red Pepper, Red Projector, Red Evening Moscow, Red Raven, etc. Under the umbrella of the color which medieval Russians had considered the most appealing of all (“Red Square,” for example, originally meant “Beautiful Square”) the disoriented, powerless citizens of the new command society bungle everything, sleep during working hours, and drink homerically. Bulgakov shows how, in such a society, it is no wonder mistakes are made, and a fatal “error” is, in fact, inevitable. Set in the 1920’s, the story (especially chapter V) even seems prescient, given the current plausibility of a global avian plague.
The Fatal Eggs, first published in 1924 in a collection of stories titled The Diaboliad, was set in the years of the very near future—1928-29. But in 1929, when Bulgakov began Master and Margarita under the working title The Man with a Hoof, reality had become even bleaker than he had anticipated five years earlier. His art thus began to exploit even more seriously the concept which had been a life-long concern for Gogol as well—the Devil and all His works. The fact that ethical concerns are of primary importance to Bulgakov is underscored by his implicit invitation to the reader to ponder the meaning of the famous exchange from Goethe’s Faust that he chose as the novel’s epigraph:
—Then who are you?
—I am a part of the force that eternally wishes Evil and eternally accomplishes Good.
In the Soviet Russia of the 1930’s, with the Church decimated to the point of extinction, the only FORCE of any consequence was Communist rule. And if we were to read this epigraph with the plus and minus signs switched—as Bulgakov clearly wishes—the exchange unmistakably alludes to the Bolshevik regime, which trumpeted explicitly utopian notes about its Good intentions, but accomplished Evil beyond comprehension. All of Russia had essentially become a huge concentration camp, as its people were murdered in orchestrated famines and purges on a scale transcending any medieval plague. Under such circumstances metaphysical intervention was to Bulgakov the only remedy. With a Savior utterly silent in those days, he focused his artistry on the Old Testament God’s “right hand”—the Devil. For reasons too complex to summarize here and in any case best discovered by reading this uniquely intriguing work itself, the Devil in the person of a gentlemanly yet sinister stage magician Woland descends on Moscow. Woland observes Soviet reality, and through his eyes we see a humanity deadened, all vital impulses wasted on banal trivialities. Satan seems to find it almost depressing that He can do no worse to Man than Man has done to himself. Accompanied by Behemoth, a huge cat packing a Browning, and Koroviev, an etiolated prankster in a checkered jacket, Woland ruthlessly and thoroughly disrupts the comfortable socialist philistinism of the Soviet capital.
The Germanic root of Woland’s very name plays productively with the Latinate morphology of More’s Utopia—Which land? Where is that land? No land. Nowhere. His diabolical realm begins to intersect with Soviet materialist space right from the first chapter. The novel begins as Berlioz, the well-paid editor of a state-sponsored literary journal, is about to explain to a colleague the historical impossibility of Jesus Christ, when Koroviev appears in midair:
At that moment the sultry air thickened in front of Berlioz, and wove itself into a transparent citizen of the very strangest appearance. He wore a jockey cap, and a cropped, checkered, spectral jacket … The citizen was nearly seven feet tall but narrow in the shoulder, incredibly thin and with a face that was, please note, derisive.
Berlioz’ life had been arranged in such a way that he was unaccustomed to unusual apparitions. Turning even paler he rubbed his eyes and exclaimed confusedly: “This can’t be! …”
But alas, it could be, and the elongated transparent citizen, feet not touching the ground, hovered before him and swayed to the left and to the right.
Whereupon terror seized Berlioz to such an extent that he shut his eyes. And when he opened them,—he saw it had all passed off, the mirage had dissolved, the checkered individual had disappeared, and simultaneously the dull needle withdrew from his heart.
—Oof … what the Devil!—exclaimed the editor …
Such intersection never relents, as Bulgakov crafts his revenge on the regime that tormented him. The novel ultimately succeeds in turning the Soviet world, predicated on a false utopia, upside down.