40
Soviet Literature 1940 (Essay, 1941)*1
The corrected galley proofs of Nabokov’s 1941 essay, “Soviet Literature 1940,” for Decision, a high-level but short-lived journal, which folded before the essay could be published
“The personality of the artist should develop freely and without restraint. One thing however we demand; acknowledgment of our creed.” Thus spoke the Nazi, Dr. Rosenberg.1
“Every artist has the right to create freely; but we, Communists, must guide him according to plan.” Thus spoke Lenin.
Both are textual quotations and their similitude would have been highly diverting, had not the whole thing been so very sad. What was the freedom of which Lenin spoke? A further quotation supplies the answer. “It will be a free literature because neither greed nor ambition, but the ideas of Socialism and sympathy for the workers will bring more and more writers to our ranks.” The subtle shade of the term “freedom” will be fully appreciated if it be remembered that one of the points of the Communist creed is that all foreign writers are either the lackeys or the victims of Capitalism and therefore cannot be called “free.”
“We guide your pens.” This, then, was the fundamental law laid down by the Party and supposed to produce “vital” literature. The round body of the law had delicate dialectical tentacles. The next step was to plan the writer’s work as thoroughly as the economic system of the country, and this promised him what Communist officials called “an endless variety of themes”; for every turn of the economic and political path implied a turn in literature. One day the lesson would be factories, the next, farms; then wreckers, then the Red Army—and so on, with the Soviet novelist puffing and panting, and dashing about from model sanitarium to model mine, always in mortal fear that if he were not nimble enough he might praise a Soviet rule or a Soviet hero that would be abolished on the day of his book’s publication.
When tackling the job of examining the Soviet literary output for 1940, I apprehended the dreariness of my task; but fortunately the material obtainable here did not prove too extensive. The features corresponding to the program for the given year turned out to be as follows: praise of Stalin, praise of the literature of the Soviet minorities, a benevolent attitude toward nature lyrics, certain allowance for romantic emotions, illustrations of the spiritual health of Homo sovieticus, Polar expeditions, absence of new talent, and absence of the former “villain”—the Fascist wrecker.
These points are continuations or developments of the 1939 problems, and the general luridly patriotic atmosphere is also not new. Let us examine these features one by one.
Perhaps the most humorous aspect of Stalin-worship is that any present-day writer describing events of the Lenin period, for instance the Civil War, is expected to show Stalin as Lenin’s equal, Lenin’s boon companion and best adviser, the twin idol of revolutionary Russia in the early twenties. This retrospective myth makes a farce of history, for in point of fact the present dictator in those days was a far less conspicuous figure, both in the public eye and in Lenin’s entourage, than any specimen of the lot later withdrawn from circulation by the dictator. Famous witnesses of his obscurity, former successful rivals, demigods of past propaganda in prose and verse, were thus very neatly removed and now, twenty years later, a prudent and well-meaning writer, when he looks back and sees the once brilliant figures blotted out by today’s censor, automatically picks out the burly, heavily mustached hero whom the others once screened from view. But what is funnier still, is that in the literature of that distant period no mention was ever made of Lenin’s Best Friend.
A good instance of the retrospective myth may be found in Alexis Surkov’s poem “Childhood of a Hero” (Novy Mir, June 1940), where the soldiers who “shook the world” twenty-three years ago are made to fire a young boy’s imagination by enthusiastic references to Lenin’s Companion.
All this, as a Russian saying goes, are mere flowers—now come the berries.
In the May issue of the Krasnaia Nov the reviewer of the “Collection of Hymns to Stalin” expresses an official warning of a kind which I think has never been matched at any time in the annals of hero-worship. “One must oneself possess the brush of a genius in order to convey the greatness of this man who has fulfilled the fondest hopes of mankind”—the satanic point being that authors are henceforth forbidden to produce “trite formal portraits of the Man”: their innermost thoughts and feelings in regard to Him must find expression “in deep and vivid images.” The Party now tells the poets (with a grim smile): “Well, let us see what you really think: if your poem about Stalin turns out to be of a ready-made type, then the adoration you express is insincere.” One has to go back to the Dark Ages to find something similar, and even then casuistry was not so sophisticated and the test by fire not so exact. It is a spiritual fire that is now tried, and the test is reversed; if you burn, you are saved. When the poet Stiensky writes that “any words of mine are eclipsed by the greatness of his achievement,” the author, as the reviewer darkly observes, is “somewhat inaccurate” because he (the miserable Stiensky, who by now is shaking in his miserable shoes) “mentions only the great task accomplished, but not the greatness of the man who accomplished it.”
With this extravagant “inquiry into the spirit” ruthlessly applied, the difficulties which a flatterer encounters attain nightmare absurdity. In Lenin’s time, at least, a pundit was quite satisfied with the most banal words of praise, provided this praise was abundant.
In regard to the vogue enjoyed today by the writings and songs of Soviet minorities (especially of the Eastern tribes) one cannot help feeling that it is also connected with hero-worship, being based upon the Hero’s racial antecedents and not merely upon that crude form of imperialism which the Soviet Government has recently developed. We learn that “in the matter of attaining wonderful heights” the poetry of the East-Russian tribes Ashoogui, Jirshi and Akyni (of whom the present writer, being a poor ethnologist, hears for the first time) is remarkable in every way. Marietta Shaguinian writing of Azerbaijan prose, and more particularly, about the short story “The Letter-Box” by someone called Mamed-Kuli-Zade, observes that “it is hardly possible to find in the literature of the whole world many stories that attain the same level of artistic force and social truth.” The story in question is about a peasant who quarreled with the postman because he thought that the latter had no right to take letters out of a box where people put them; it is a mere anecdote interesting only from the point of comparative folklore. The Usbekistan and Tajikistan poets are also doing well as was predicted by a poor Yorick2 at the Congress of Writers in 1934, when among other things he (Radek) so wisely said: “Our way does not lie through Joyce but along the highroad of Socialist Realism.”*2
Now comes a bright spot. Even in former years it could be noticed that short nature lyrics about stones and stars had a better chance to be published than a novel or short story that avoided social considerations. Perhaps the Party thought that the reader ought to enjoy a little relaxation now and then; it also believed (basing its opinion on the absurd dualism of “form and content”) that Soviet literature ought to show what it could do in the Verlaine line. Incidentally, this leniency toward poets who dared seek inspiration in nature and natural suggestions resulted in Pasternak being able ten years ago to publish his exquisite verse in Russia (it may be noted here that by far the two greatest Russian poets of recent years are Pasternak and Hodassevitch; the latter died in Paris in 1939). Thus, it is very refreshing to find among the official rubbish already mentioned, a delicate little poem about a nightingale holding a caterpillar in its beak or a very minor poet’s chat with the sea in the good old style: “Thy cool kiss has left its salt upon my lips.”
On the other hand, the fiction represented in the monthlies I have examined is of incredibly poor quality. I could not force myself to plod through a serial novel by Alexis Tolstoy, but I tackled a story by Fedin who has long been considered a promising writer. The story deals with a lung sanitarium in Davos. Being under the fatal spell of Capitalism, the doctor managing the establishment “discovers” tuberculosis in healthy people so as to avoid bankruptcy. The style is about that of, say, Vicki Baum. The characters are drawn according to the so-called Monte Carlo tradition (as for instance in Grand Hotel).3 There is the emotional girl, the rich capricious widow, the English clergyman and so on. The hero is a Soviet engineer of the strong silent type with a humorous twinkle, the quiet he-man imposed by the myth of Lenin’s personality. Thanks to his Communism, he steadily improves at Davos, in spite of Capital and quacks.
The health motive based on the syllogism: Communism is sound, I am a Communist, I am sound, appears to be very popular lately. “Nowhere does the spiritual health of the Soviet citizen express itself so thoroughly as in his behavior when confronted with trees in a wood,” says one writer—and this does not mean, translated into bourgeois language, that the citizen enjoys climbing trees; it means that he has the sacred satisfaction of knowing that every tree in every wood, just as every hair on every head, is counted and checked by the Perfect State.
Because they provoke such healthy emotions, stories about forest life and wild creatures are well represented in these periodicals. “His (the stag’s) mighty horns rocked slightly, and the young aspens bowed before him as if they were grassblades”—that kind of stuff—and then follow some sound facts about the preservation of wildlife in the Soviet Garden of Eden. Polar expeditions are welcome, too, with a full list of the grub taken:
chocolate……….40 kg.
biscuits……….. 250 kg.
white flour………150 kg.
condensed milk….. 500 kg.
and so on, in order to show how generous the State is, if a fellow shows his Soviet pluck. A holiday dessert is also described:
Cake Napoleon
Biscuits “Pot-Pourri”
Chocolates “Derby,” “Swan” and “Tennis.”
Note the delightful names.
That the Soviet citizen’s mouth must water when he reads this is confirmed by a very pathetic reflection in the late Ilf’s notebook:4 “It is always pleasant to read in books of discovery the list of provisions taken by the explorer.”
But the average citizen wants something more than candy; he wants Romance. In the Perfect State where all are happy, where boy-gets-girl and vice versa, where sexual disaster is impossible, because there can be no social conflict, neither Werther, nor Hedda Gabler, nor Madame Bovary may appear in the flesh, and thus cannot be described from Soviet examples. If the citizen is permitted to read Madame Bovary (which is very popular at present in Russia), it is because he is expected to enjoy the book from an artistic and historical angle: “bourgeois literature gives us form, we provide matter.” But the Soviet citizen pounces upon the artistic and historical roman because here at least he finds an emotional outlet, a tale of wonder and woe, a boy-does-not-get-girl story. Here, too, as in the lyric department, the management allows a good cry and then points out the lesson: the does-not-get theme is reactionary because it is only in capitalistic countries that the upper classes develop laws that produce love-conflicts and romantic tragedies. Curiously enough, the idea that a healthy Soviet girl may not care for the particular healthy Soviet boy who cares for her is absolutely ignored. So when a new Russian novel, Freierman’s First Love,5 was allowed to appear and became last year’s best seller, the Government achieved two ends: it gave the child a green apple and then, when the apple was consumed and thoroughly enjoyed, pointed out that green apples were bad for children. The novel itself is unquestionably of the pulp variety, but what is interesting, is the Soviet reviewer’s attitude toward it: “The author has poisoned his heroine with torturing thoughts and reflexes unnatural in a young girl. He has deprived her of the happy sense of Soviet reality, of the passionate urge to struggle for social ideals….Literature’s main purpose ought to be to create bright, attractive pictures of young people, youthful patriots who ardently strive to perform great feats with the object of enriching their country….A novelist ought not to indulge in the description of misty or cloudy landscape; the Soviet countryside must be shown to be gay and sunny.”
These observations sum up all that one can gather from a perusal of these dismal periodicals. No literature can be expected to produce anything of permanent value when its only objective, as ruled by the State, is to embody this or that governmental whim.
And by the way, where, oh, where is he, the arch-villain, our old friend the Baron von Something, alias civil engineer Schultz, who lurked with eyeglass and cigar behind the ranks of local wreckers in Soviet magazine stories up to September 1939?