From the side of its neck
hangs a vein,
scattering drops on the streets
that freeze blackly where they ooze.
I look and look at the crawling shade:
shuddering from an unbearable certainty:
this half-man, half-beast
must be a figment of my mind.
Safe rationality is soon re-established, and the ‘half-man, half-horse’ stripped of its mythological significance to be revealed as the head of a starved nag sawn off its scraggy neck by the pen-knife of a desperate Muscovite. Yet the vision, like the nightmare that it resembles, cannot be reduced to an emanation of the everyday: it is not even simply an intimation of death. It remains irreducible, a manifestation of fears normally banished from the modern city, but rising up unsuppressibly at times of extremity.
‘Two Not Wholly Usual Occurrences’, then, is not an example of imaginative power sacrificed to didactic aims, but of the former and the latter inextricably entwined with each other. It appeals to a sensibility nurtured on psychoanalytical interpretations of myths as archetypes of human experience as much as it no doubt did to a Bolshevik believer convinced that the suffering of the revolutionary years could only be averted through Communism. The gruesome centaur of the Moscow streets, intended as an exemplum to support Mayakovsky’s political sermon, is a creature with its own artistic life, perhaps even a metaphor for Modernist poetry as grotesque and unnatural hybrid.
Discussions of Soviet literature’s didacticism as aberrant, then, are based on a misapprehension. The ultimate starting point of this is an understandable squeamishness over the nature of the aims that Soviet literature’s didactic means had in view. Is it possible to detach artistic value from moral integrity? Can an ode to the Soviet secret police, or to a dictator as vicious as Stalin, ultimately responsible for the death of millions, have any aesthetic value whatever, even when produced by a writer of indisputable artistic talent? These are not merely hypothetical questions. The ‘soldiers of Dzerzhinsky’ were in fact the subject of a eulogistic poem written by Mayakovsky in 1926. And the mid-1930s, when Socialist Realism was established, also saw the full-scale blossoming of the official cult of Stalin. Writers who wanted to be published needed to manifest partiinost’, or fidelity to party values, including (from the late 1930s) the adulation of the leader. In countless poems, stories, and novels, he appeared as the all-seeing friend of every good Soviet citizen:
Late at night, when every sound falls silent,
Behind the Kremlin’s grey and ancient towers,
The people of all nations’ secret wishes
Are entrusted to dear Stalin by the world.
This poem by Aleksandr Surkov is terrible by any standards; but writers of real talent also responded to the Stalin cult. An ‘Ode to Stalin’ by Mandelstam, for instance, is distinguished by its nobility of phrasing and apparent sincerity of feeling.
For many critics belonging to the so-called ‘first wave’ of the emigration (those who left Russia during or soon after the Revolution), the case against Soviet art was settled in advance. According to Vladislav Khodasevich, a formidable literary critic as well as an outstanding poet: ‘Mayakovsky has never been the poet of the revolution, any more than he has ever been a revolutionary poet. His rhetoric is, in fact, the rhetoric of the pogrom, directing violence and invective against anything weak and defenceless, whether that be a German sausage-shop in Moscow or a bourgeois gripped tightly round the throat.’ On its own terms, Khodasevich’s assessment is hard to assail, but the trouble is that few texts produced in post-1917 Russia would satisfy the criterion of unqualified support for those who suffered under Soviet power. Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem, a lament for the victims of the Great Purges (the butchery of millions of supposed ‘enemies of the people’ in 1937–8), and implacably hostile to their torturers, was a work of artistic skill dedicated to a morally impeccable purpose. But this was exceptional. Mostly, the talented writers caught in the different waves of repression dealt in various forms of moral compromise. Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita (1928–40), for example, juxtaposed to the vision of a corrupt 1920s Moscow, disrupted by Satan, a ‘humanized’ version of Jesus Christ as socially impotent ‘holy fool’, moving through a Jerusalem that has uncanny resemblances to the Moscow of the late 1930s. And the novel’s epilogue allowed the final word to Woland, Bulgakov’s version of Mephisto, who voiced a code of moral relativism in which ‘good’ and ‘evil’ were associated with ‘light’ and ‘dark’ in the physical world, both being seen as necessary in a life without sensual monotony. For their part, the short stories of Daniil Kharms, such as Incidents (1934–6), were brilliant exposures of the dehumanization of life in the 1930s and also texts in which meaningless cruelty itself became a central artistic device, and indeed the object of collusive pleasure for narrator and reader.
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 Noveclass="underline" 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.