The Thinking Reed

At the same time a different tendency made its appearance — one objectively turned towards the future, even though the material used in its art was often not the present day only, but history as well. This was what could be called, for convenience, ‘the analytical tendency’. In prose its strongest representative was, perhaps, Yuri Trifonov, while in drama this role was played, each in his own way, by M. Shatrov and A. Gel'man. For lack of space I can deal only with these three, although many others deserve to be discussed — the Azerbaijan film Interrogation (scenario by Ibragimov), about corruption in leading circles; V. Fokin’s play And in the Spring I’ll Come Back to You, which showed, so to speak, the anatomy of the Soviet Thermidor of the 1920s; and so on.

Trifonov’s task was akin to that of a researcher: to understand, to analyse history, to re-establish the truth — not only to reconstitute true situations, but also to discover historical tendencies, to perceive the genesis of a society. In The House on the Embankment, the establishment of a new ruling class, the nomenklatura; in The Old Man, the development of anti-democratic tendencies and forces within Bolshevism. Trifonov’s novellas are written in an offhand sort of way; their form is not carefully realized, and sometimes — as for instance in The Old Man — matters appear that are incongruous with the subject: whole sentences taken from his book The Campfire's Gleam. The author is in a hurry; it is as though he knows that he is doomed not to live to sixty. In this situation the refining of artistic forms has no place. What matters above all is to provide a snapshot of social history. This photograph is imprinted in the destinies and personalities of the characters — hence the image ‘the campfire’s gleam’. History advances through Trifonov’s heroes. The main thing is to understand, and to explain to others. These are, in their way, the notes of an eye-witness, reconstituted with hindsight.

Analytical reconstruction of history is the essence of the work of M. Shatrov, the author of a series of plays about Lenin. Shatrov’s works flatly contradict official historical accounts. Here also we have a quest, the quest for ‘the real Lenin’. Shatrov turns his attention to crucial moments in the history of Bolshevism: 6 July 1918, the revolt of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, which led to the initiation of the one-party system and the restriction of Soviet democracy; 5 September 1918, the Council of People’s Commissars discusses the question of Red terror. In his later plays, in the seventies — Revolutionary Etude and This is How We’ll Win! — the subject is Lenin’s clash with the new bureaucracy. Shatrov undoubtedly idealizes Lenin; nevertheless, his hero differs markedly from the official ‘honeycake Ilyich’. Lenin’s revolutionary spirit is contrasted with the bureaucratized Communists whom Lenin sees as the worst enemies of the proletariat.

This theme of moral and political disparity between Lenin and his ‘heirs’ gave Shatrov no rest. His plays had great difficulty in getting past the censor: the latest of them, This is How We’ll Win! was for some time thought to be doomed. The question of letting it be performed was decided at the highest level and was the occasion of a clash between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ members of the state leadership. The ‘softs’ won the day: the statocratic upper circle preferred to put a brave face on what for them was a sorry business. On 3 March 1982 the Political Bureau, with Brezhnev at its head, went to the Moscow Art Theatre to see Shatrov’s play as produced by O. Yefremov. In its report, Sovetskaya Kultura added that the performance enjoyed ‘great success’.5 To be sure, the paper did not indicate precisely with whom.

The struggle for power at the top had caused yet another ideological crack to appear, into which Shatrov and Yefremov inserted themselves. The long review by M. Stroeva in Literaturnaya Gazeta, which millions of people had been able to read even before the ‘historic’ visit to the Moscow Art Theatre by Brezhnev & Co., was in its way no less an event than the performance itself. The theatre, wrote Stroeva, had resolved to show a Lenin who was ‘suffering and unable to understand’. There stood before the audience ‘a Lenin who was the victim of a tragedy’.6