One thing leads to the next. They cover plaster figures with bathing suits and cut out kissing scenes from movies, and watch out, artist, if you plan to exhibit a nude. You'll be showered with threatening letters, and not all of them from above. The simple folk will be incensed, 268
saying that the depiction of naked women is offensive to our simple Soviet worker-peasant point of view.
One simple man wrote a really wonderful put-down of such shamelessness in the representational arts. He said, ''Such depictions arouse extraordinary lust and lead to the destruction of united family life."
He ended with, "The artist should be put on trial for such moral decay!" This isn't something that Zoshchenko or I invented, it actually happened.
All art is under suspicion, all literature. Not only Chekhov, but Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. That chapter from The Possessed will never be published,* they are worried about its effect on the Soviet citizen. Soviet man has withstood everything: hunger, and destruction, and wars-one worse than the other-and Stalin's camps. But he won't be able to take that chapter from The Possessed, he'll crack.
And so Stalin suspected Zoshchenko of wanting to undermine the Soviet family. They hit him, but not fatally. They decided to give him the final blow later, and for the same reason that they hit me. The Allies set us up.
Actually, to be accurate, there are three versions. When you think of it, it's amazing-why did they pick Zoshchenko and Akhmatova, why those two as the main target? They put them out naked and threw stones at them. One version goes like this: Akhmatova and Zoshchenko were the victims of a struggle between two of Stalin's toadies, that is, between Malenkovt and Zhdanov. Allegedly Malenkov wanted to become Stalin's main ideological adviser, a rather important position, right below Stalin's top executioner, Beria. He would be the executioner on the cultural front. Malenkov and Zhdanov fought to prove themselves worthy of that honored position. The war with Hitler was won and Malenkov decided to stress public relations and to glorify the homeland, so that the entire enlightened world would gasp and see that Russia was the "homeland of elephants."
Malenkov worked out grandiose plans, one of which was a series of
•A refc. .:nce to the chapter "At Tikhon's" (also known as "Stavrogin's Confession"), deleted by Dostoevsky under pressure from the censors from the edition of The Possessed published in his lifetime. In the Soviet Union, "Stavrogin's Confession" was not printed for over fifty years, although it was known that Dostoevsky valued the chapter highly.
tGeorgi Maximilianovich Malenkov (b. 1902), a Communist Party leader who was chairman of the Council of Ministers after Stalin's death. In 1957 Khrushchev removed Malenkov from power as a member or' an "anti-Party group."
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deluxe editions of Russian literature from antiquity to the present. I think the series began with The Lay of Prince Igor and ended, believe it or not, with Akhmatova and Zoshchenko. But Malenkov's idea didn't work and Zhdanov outguessed him. He knew Stalin better and considered that laudatory editions were fine, but steadfast struggle with the enemy-vigilance, so to speak-was more important.
With the aim of getting rid of Malenkov, Zhdanov attacked Malenkov's ideas and proved to Stalin, like two plus two, that it was vigilance that Malenkov had lost. Zhdanov, unfortunately, knew what and how Akhmatova and Zoshchenko wrote, since Leningrad was Zhdanov's own turf.
This was Zhdanov's argument: The Soviet Army is victorious, we are advancing on Europe, and Soviet literature must be an aid in this, it must . attack bourgeois culture, which is in a state of confusion and decay. And do Akhmatova and Zoshchenko attack? Akhmatova writes lyric poetry and Zoshchenko writes derogatory prose. Zhdanov won, Stalin took his side and Malenkov was removed from leading the cultural front. Zhdanov was empowered to strike a blow at harmful in ..
ftuences, at "the spirit of negative criticism, despair, and nonbelief."
Zhdanov later announced, "What would have happened if we had brought up our young people .in the spirit of despair and nonbelief in our work? What would have happened was that we would not have won the Great Patriotic War." Now, that scared them. Just think, one short story by Zoshchenko, and the Soviet regime might have toppled.
Another symphony by Shostakovich, and the country would fall into the slavery of American imperialism.
The second version is that Stalin pointed out Zoshchenko personally and for personal reasons. You see, the leader and teacher was hurt.
Years ago Zoshchenko had written a few stories about Lenin to make some money, and one of the stories depicted Lenin as a gentle and kind man, a luminary. For contrast, Zoshchenko described a crude Party official, as an exception, just for contrast. The crude man, naturally, was not given a name, but the story made it clear that the boor worked in the Kremlin. In Zoshchenko's story the boor had a beard and the censor said that the beard had to go because people might think he was Mikhail Kalinin, our president. And in their hurry, they made a horrendous mistake. Zoshchenko removed the beard, but left the mus-270
tache. The crude Party official had a mustache in Zoshchenko's story.
Stalin read it and took offense. He decided that it was about him.
That's how Stalin read fiction.
Neither the censor, nor certainly Zoshchenko, could have foreseen or imagined such a turn of events and so they didn't think about the fatal consequences of removing the beard.
I think that both versions have some truth in them, that is, both did take place. But I still think that the main cause, for both Zoshchenko and me, was the Allies. As a result of the war, Zoshchenko's popularity in the West grew considerably. He was published frequently and discussed readily. Zoshchenko wrote many short stories that were perfect for newspapers, and they didn't even have to pay, since Soviet authors were_n't protected by copyright law. It was cheap and satisfying for the Western press. And it turned out to have tragic consequences for Zoshchenko.
Stalin kept a close eye on the foreign press. Naturally, he didn't know any foreign languages, but his flunkies reported to him. Stalin weighed other people's fame carefully and as soon as it seemed to be getting a little too heavy, he threw them off the scales.
So they let Zoshchenko have it, they used every four-letter word they could think of about him. Zoshchenko's morals were disgusting, and he was rotten and putrid through and through. Zhdanov called him an unprincipled, conscienceless literary hooligan. Criticism in the Soviet Union is a wondrous thing. It's construed along the famous principle: they beat you and don't let you cry. In antediluvian times it wasn't like that in Russia. If you were insulted in the press you answered in another literary forum, or your friends took your part. Or if worst came to worst, you vented your spleen in your circle of friends.
But that was before the flood. Now things are different, more progressive.
If you are smeared with mud from head to toe on the orders of the leader and teacher, don't even think of wiping it off. You bow and say thanks, say thanks and bow. No one will pay any attention to any of your hostile rejoinders anyway, and no one will come to your defense, and most sadly of all, you won't be able to let off steam among friends.