Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

In the case of Soviet art, then, it is simply not possible to draw an easy connection between talent and moral steadfastness: many of the most gifted writers had attitudes to tyranny that were equivocal or even admiring. One logical response would be to see nearly everything, including much work produced ‘for the desk drawer’ (neither Bulgakov nor Kharms had any illusions about being able to publish their later writings), as damnable on the grounds of its ethical dubiety, while consigning Master and Margarita to a different circle of hell from, say, Anna Karavaeva’s trilogy The Motherland (1951), which celebrates the joys of life under the wise governance of the all-seeing Stalin. But this would be to imitate in reverse the narrow-minded cultural politics of the Soviet era, according to which only works imbued with ‘Communist morality’ and ‘progressiveness’ deserved to survive (see Chapter 2). It would also conceal the extent to which the moral dilemmas of Soviet artists resembled those of artists at other times and in other socities; as the Russian historian Boris Groys has pointed out, ‘historically, art that is universally regarded as good has frequently served to embellish and glorify power’. If one takes a longer or broader view of the tradition of ‘embellishing and glorifying power’, it is instructive to read Mandelstam’s ‘Ode to Stalin’ in the context of Lomonosov’s tributes to Peter I (hardly the most merciful of rulers). It is equally illuminating to compare the Socialist Realist novel with Third Reich fiction, with the Catholic novel of mid-twentieth-century France, Italy, and Ireland, or indeed with formulaic genres such as the ‘Harlequin romance’ and the detective novel in Britain and America.

A second position is to ignore Soviet art’s relationship with political power. If Dostoevsky may be stripped of the Pan-Slavic messianism and anti-Semitism that are painfully obvious in Diary of a Writer (1876–81) (and incidentally evident in the novels) and understood as a prophet of universal human freedom, it might be equally legitimate to see the 1920s Mayakovsky as a prophet of liberty in spite of himself. During the final scene in The Bed-Bug (1928), the worker Prisypkin, who throughout the play has been relentlessly guyed as a manifestation of the worst kind of petit-bourgeois materialism, suddenly becomes a tragic figure, writhing in a cage to expostulate against the sterile smugness of the Utopian future, and by extension, the stupidity of any community that believes that bringing the future into existence would represent progress.

Alternatively, ethical judgement may be suspended altogether: Soviet literature may be studied in and for itself, and discussed from an ‘anthropological’ perspective. This means replacing the question of whether the composition of five-year plan novels or odes to Stalin was morally and aesthetically justifiable by the question of what it meant to write them and how they were understood by contemporary readers. Katerina Clark’s pioneering study of Socialist Realism, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, first published in 1981, showed that the homiletic and formulaic novels produced by Socialist Realism were in fact the expressions of powerful myths of self-transformation and loyalty which helped to hold the edgy and unstable new nation of the Soviet Union together. These novels’ sketchy characterization and scant consideration for psychological plausibility, and their emphasis on progress via the overcoming of external obstacles, allied them with the devices of traditional Russian folklore on the one hand and classical epic on the other. More recently, other critics, such as David Shepherd, Thomas Lahusen, and Jochen Hellbeck, have analysed the active process of self-shaping undergone by Socialist Realist writers themselves, as they struggled, in private diaries as well as public statements, to mould themselves in the manner required by Party dictates, repeatedly rewriting early versions of their works in order to make them conform with changes in policy. Processes of this kind may not suit Western ideals of artistic and ethical independence, but they were in no sense unambiguous and easy to interpret: one central tragedy of the Stalinist era, indeed, was the amount of complex thought and agonized intelligence that went into producing the simple-minded propaganda novels and poems required by Party policy.