The phenomenon does not cease with the Revolution. The three post-revolutionary novels selected by Bethea are very different from each other in other ways, but share this apocalyptic structure. Apocalypticism, with its play on symbols, merges into Modernism and it comes as no surprise that it arrives there courtesy of Gogol, Dostoevskii and the Symbolists.
The Symbolist-modernist novel, exemplified by Belyi's Petersburg, and discussed in Robert Russell's essay, foregrounds through its style as well as through its subject-matter the disintegration of the subject. Dostoevskii's narrators had sometimes raised questions about the status of their own narrative and jumped unpredictably between incompatible narrative points of view. The narrator of Petersburg goes further. He cannot resist the temptation to suggest that his narrative is nothing but cerebral play. John Elsworth has argued that the entire system of relationships in the novel may be governed by occult forces.11 No less important is the sense that the normal conventions of fiction are about to explode in our faces, and this subversion of realist or representational narrative conventions in favor of techniques of defamiliarization extends to all branches of culture in the extremely rich period of innovation and experimentation of the late tsarist and early Soviet periods. In art, it should be remembered, this was the period not only of Symbolism but also of Neoprimitivism, Cubofuturism, Rayonism, Suprematism and Constructivism.12 Where the printed word was concerned a radical fragmentation often extended to typographical devices (for example in the work of Belyi, Kruchenykh, Kamenskii, Zdanevich, Maiakovskii), and not only in poetry. Petersburg itself contains some thirty cases of typographical devices (major indentations) used to suggest a shift in consciousness through visual effect.13
What actually occurred after 1917 was neither a Second Coming nor a Utopia, though it was often represented in millennial terms. It was, perhaps, more in the nature of a Purgatory (always a questionable concept in Orthodox theology), a period of waiting in which a purifying suffering would be rewarded (or not rewarded in the case of the sinner/bourgeois/ kulak) with a future paradise. Marxist-Leninists called this period "the dictatorship of the proletariat." But whatever it was called, Russian literature felt the need to reflect a paradise deferred, placing it in a situation not unlike that of the Christian Church in the first century ad. The failure of the millennium fully to materialize gave rise, among other, less notable literary phenomena, to the genre of dystopia (Zamiatin's We) and the dynamic of Platonov's unique novel, Chevengur, neither of which appeared in full in Russia until the period of glasnost'.14 Both these novels end in the apparent victory of state bureaucracy over the forces of individual spontaneity and idealism. In We, this conclusion seals the triumph of a scientifi-
cally organized totalitarian state over the individualism of its citizens. In Chevengur, the depressing ending concludes the Quixotic quest of the hero for the home of true socialism but seems to imply that this is the inevitable consequence of the sort of anarchistic political idealism celebrated in such novels of the Civil War period of Revolutionary Romanticism as Pilniak's Naked Year. The Utopian programme of the inhabitants of Chevengur is presented as entirely futile. Gorkii was right in seeing in the novel a profound ambiguity: it is both Utopian and anti-utopian. Its centre of gravity is located beyond and above both. But, most important of all, this centre of gravity is not spirituaclass="underline" the myth has been secularized; the spiritual has become material.
Translated into practical, political terms, the predicament faced by Platonov was also the predicament faced by the new Soviet State and those who supported it. The issue was how, if at all, the Revolution could be secured by a judicious balance of spontaneity and political force. The State was supposed to be withering away, yet spontaneous, anarchist, naive Communism was demonstrably not capable of creating the brave new world envisaged by the Bolsheviks. The idea of revolution as a spontaneous, elemental, natural force is reflected in many a novel of the early Soviet period as well as in its better-known reflection in Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago.15 Katerina Clark has argued convincingly that the spontaneity/ consciousness dialectic is the structuring force that shapes the master plot of the Socialist Realist novel and not, as might be thought, the class struggle itself. The characters in Platonov's novel never graduate to political consciousness. Socialist Realists were supposed to put this right by providing models for the Soviet citizen, more or less bewildered by the failure of the Soviet State to "wither away" as Marx and Lenin said it should. Although the term "Socialist Realism" was coined only in 1932., the official Soviet view was that it had been evolving for the last quarter of a century. Precursors such as Gorkii's Mother (1906), Furmanov's Chapaev (1923), Serafimovich's The Iron Flood (1924), Fadeev's The Rout (1927), Gladkov's Cement (1925) and the first two parts of A. Tolstoi's Tour of Hell (1923-41) were all written and published before the key date.16 What was now needed, in Zhdanov's phrase, was "a combination of the most matter-of-fact everyday reality with the most heroic prospects,"17 resulting in what Clark calls its "proclivity for making sudden, unmotivated transitions from realistic discourse to the mythic or Utopian" and "the absence in it of those features that can be seen as exploration or celebration of the objective/subjective split: parody, irony, literary self-consciousness, and creative or complex use of point of view."18 In a sense Soviet society was making the same implausible claim as the Catholic Church in the early
Middle Ages, and trying to fend off heretics with the pretense that the millennium had already arrived.19 The heroes of the Socialist Realist novel often displayed characteristics familiar from medieval Russian religious and secular narratives and the trajectory of their plots often followed the familiar Christian pattern of death, transfiguration and resurrection. While mese novels may be, and were, called classics of Socialist Realism, they have never been recognized as classics of world literature and the thousands of novels which followed the models of Socialist Realism generally failed to transcend their level of achievement. On the other hand, their cultural significance is of great interest. The novels of the high Stalinist period attempt to celebrate that triumph of heroism, science, technology and reason over the forces of anarchy and nature which the mainstream of Russian culture had always problematized. Regrettably, therefore, they find no place in this volume.