Zamyatin, Yevgeny - Soviet Heretic (Chicago, 1970) PDF
Zamyatin, Yevgeny - Soviet Heretic (Chicago, 1970) PDF
Zamyatin, Yevgeny - Soviet Heretic (Chicago, 1970) PDF
Vevgeny Zamyatin
Yevgeny Za
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A SOVIET HERETIC: ESSAYS BY
Yevgeny Zamyatin
EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY MIRRA Gl NSB U RG
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Standard Book Number: 226-97865-6
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 7 1 -94 1 04
Illustrations ix
Introduction by Alex M. Shane xi
Editor's Preface xix
5. Two Letters
Letter of Resignation from the Writers' Union ( 1 929 ) 301
Letter to Stalin ( 1 93 1 ) 305
Sources 3 1 0
Index 3 1 3
ILLU STRATI O N S
ix
I NTR O D U CTI O N:
ZAMYATI N TH E C R ITI C
1 This biography was not included in the present volume both because
of its length and because it bears only tangentially on the main subject of
this collection-literature .-EDITOR
xvii Introduction
ALEX M. SHANE
University of California at Davis
E D ITO R'S P R E FAC E
H
11M
AUTO 8 I0 G RAPHY
In the early 1 920s much stress was laid in Soviet Russia on the biog
raphies of writers, and nume rous autobiographical sketches, written in
response to questionnaires, were published in periodicals, collections, and
as prefaces to volumes of the given author's works.-EDITOR
3
ZA M Y A T I N A B O U T H I M S E L F 4
was not always on easy terms with mathematics. This was per
haps why (out of stubbornness) I chose the most mathematical
of professions, naval engineering, which I studied at the Saint
Petersburg Polytechnic Institute. Thirteen years ago in May
(snow fell on the flowers that May) I finished my qualifying
projects in engineering and my first story. The story was pub
lished then and there in the old Obrazovaniye [Education]. Well,
then, this meant that I could write stories and get them published.
Hence, for the next three years, I wrote-about icebreakers,
about motorships, about "Theoretical Investigations into the
Functioning of Dredges." This had to be : I was retained as an
instructor in the Department of Naval Architecture of the Ship
building Faculty (I am still teaching there today) .
_
If I have any place i n Russian literature, I owe it entirely to
the Saint Petersburg Department of Secret Police : in 1911 they
exiled me from Petersburg, and for the next two years I led an
extremely isolated life in Lakhta. There, in the white winter
silence and the green silence of summer, I wrote A Provincial
Tale. After which the late Izmailov1 decided in print that I was
a shaggy provincial in high boots, with a thick cane-and was
astonished to find me altogether different.
I had become altogether different, however, only after two
years in England during the war. In England I built ships, looked
at ruined castles, listened to the thud of bombs dropped by Ger
man zeppelins, and wrote The Islanders. I regret that I did not
see the February Revolution and know only the October Revolu
tion ( I returned to Petersburg, past German submarines, in a ship
with lights out, wearing a life belt all the time, just in time for
October. This is the same as never having been in love and wak
ing up one morning already married for ten years or so.
Today I do not write much-probably because I am becoming
ever more demanding of myself. Three new volumes of my works
( A t the World's End, The Islanders, and Tales for Grown-up
Children ) have lain for the past three years at the Grzhebin
Publishing House and are only now going into type. The fourth
volume will be my novel We-my most jesting and most serious
work.
But perhaps the most interesting and most serious stories have
not been written by me, but have happened to me.
I922
1 Constitutional Democrats.
5
Z A M YA T I N A B O U T H I M S E L F 6
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The rubber boy says "not air, for example" or "his ancestor
17
T H E S TA T E O F R U S S IA N L I T E R A T U R E 18
was Adam" and is the first to roar with laughter. But to the
public, to those with softer hearts, it isn't funny at all.
Ah, so it isn't funny? Well, in that case the rubber boy will
astound you with his art, his antics, his unnatural contortions
he'll stick his head between his legs, if need be, but astound you
he will.
"In a certain important place there occurred an appearance
of extreme importance; the appearance occurred, that is to say,
it was." "Likhutin rushed headlong into the hallway ( I mean,
simply into the hall ) ."
Or take the chapter headings : "And, Having Seen, Expanded,"
"Of Two Poorly Dressed Little Students," "And His Face Was
Shiny," and so on and on.
And, of course, the novel abounds in contortions-"mira
cleries," "flamings," "Septemberly night," "Octoberly day."
"Septemberly" and "Octoberly"-try and get anyone to say
such things of his own free will! No one will do it, not for anything
-his conscience will speak up : it's too offensive. But Andrey
Bely . . .
Yet, look we must: Andrey Bely also plays the part of the
bird atop the hurdy-gurdy, the one that picks out tickets with
your fortune, or misfortune. Andrey Bely prophesies every kind
of disaster for Russia : "There will be a leap over history ; there
will be a great upheaval ; the earth will crack; the very mountains
will tumble from the great quake, and the plains will everywhere
rise up in humps . . . " "I await thee, Kulikovo Field!2 On that
day the last sun will shine over my native land."
A cruel destiny pursues our rubber boy : when he twists him
self into pretzels to amuse you, you pity him; when he prognosti
cates in a sepulchral voice, you want to laugh.
And this destiny of his is all the more cruel because he is not
untalented. If Bely were without talent, what the devil, there
would be no reason to feel sorry. But even in his Petersburg
you see a keen eye and valuable ideas : he wants to grasp all of
the Russian revolution, from the very top down to the lowliest
policeman. Take, for instance, Senator Ableukhov (for all the
2 Kuli kovo Field on the Don River, the scene of a great battle in the
fourteenth century, in which the Russians defeated the Tartars of the
Golden Horde.
19 "Sirin"
One righteous man, they say, can save ten drowning sinners.
But in Sirin the sins of the unrepentant Andrey Bely are so great
both in kind and in number ( 350 pages out of 500! ) that they
drag both issues down to the bottom.
1 914
S CYTH IAN S ?
Zamyatin published this article under the pen name of Mikhail Platonov.
21
T H E S TA T E 0 F R U S S I A N L I T E R A T U R E 22
In the first issue of Skify we read these ruby red lines, watered
with the heart's blood, by Bely, who always glitters with such
icy brilliance :
4 G. R. berzhavin ( 1 743-1 8 1 6 ) , poet patronized for a time by Catherine
the Great.
25 Scythians?
But this is about the Krylenkos, who have covered Russia with
a pile of carcasses, who are dreaming of socialist-Napoleonic
wars in Europe-throughtout the world, throughout the uni
verse ! But let us not jest incautiously : Bely is trustworthy, and
did not intend to speak about the Krylenkos.
Ivanov-Razumnik shaved his head more carefully than other
Scythians, but even his stubble stands up and pricks the wrong
people, rather than those he would like to prick.
In his article "Two Russias" Ivanov-Razumnik wrote : "And
when their bitter hate ceases to be impotent and becomes a force,
when it is given vent in actions in the name of 'law,' and 'order,'
'in the name of Christ' . . . Just let them gather strength and wait
it out until the right moment-they will spill rivers of blood in the
name of suppressing revolutionary lawlessness." What Ivanov
Razumnik had in mind when he prophesied this was, of course,
a Russian Thiers, shooting down communards on a hypothetical
Russian Pere Lachaise. But by the whim of that mocker, fate,
the prophecy of Ivanov-Razumnik is being fulfilled chiefly by
Russian communards-in the name of their own Christ, whom
they had brought down to earth. Perhaps a Thiers will also come,
but what is permissible to Thiers is not permissible to Caesar's
wife.
It is good to be a profound expert on Russian literature, like
Ivanov-Razumnik : not everyone can dip into the well of the
classics and bring up such a present-day image as the fool
Yekimovna from The Moor of Peter the Great.5 From the ava
lanche of Western culture that rushed into old Russia through
the window on Europe hacked out by Peter the Great, the
fool Yekimovna assimilated only "monsieur-mam'selle-assembly-
But how, indeed, did it happen that Remizov, with his "Tale
of the Ruin of the Russian Land," is now part of the triumphal
march of those who sing the glory of the victors? And what is
he there for?
The explanation is this. Whenever the Roman emperors
marched into Rome after a victory over the barbarians, the king
of the barbarians was Jed in the procession behind one of the
chariots, and a special crier called out the wealth and power of
this king for the greater glory of the victorious emperor. And it
was to the same end that Ivanov-Razumnik brought Remizov
into the triumphal procession-for the greater glory of the vic
tors. And therefore, after smashing Remizov in the face, Ivanov
Razumnik proclaims : "The 'Tale of the Ruin of the Russian
Land' is one of the most powerful, most remarkable works writ
ten in our day."
We quite agree with Ivanov-Razumnik's judgment: Remizov's
"Tale" is a work of great power. But the power lies not in Remi
zov's usual artistry, but in the shattering sincerity of the work.
Remizov's other works can be admired from this side, from that,
from a plank thrown over them : far below, under the plank, the
beautiful, clumsy wheels of the mill are turning, the water hums
27 Scythians?
A lexey Remizov
--
- -
29 Scythians?
derness and love for the lowliest human being, the least blade
of grass-to all this Ivanov-Razumnik is blind. Yet it is precisely
these best qualities of the Russian soul that underlie the un
quenchable Russian longing for peace, for all mankind.
Love of the s ickle and hate of the sword are the qualities that
are most truly Russian, most truly of the people. And this is why
the strophes born of these stand out so movingly in the "made-to
order" revolutionary poems of Yesenin and Kluyev.
Here are the magnificent closing lines of Yesenin's "Singing
Call" :
People, my brothers,
Where are you? Answer me !
I do not need you, fearless,
Bloodthirsty knight.
I do not want your victory,
I need no tribute !
We are all apple trees and cherry trees
In a blue orchard . . . .
We did not come into the world to destroy,
We came to love and to believe.
M y Russian field,
And you, its sons,
Who have caught
The sun and the moon
On your paling.
Or:
Russia, Russia, Russia
Messiah of the coming day !
tressing to see Kluyev a s the author o f odes. The little gray ones
may run after the victors like a flock of roosters-God himself
has meant them to. But not the Kluyevs : this is not for them.
The revolution has come, and who was the first to bow
down before it? And should the counterrevolution come,
33 Scythians?
No, there are not many of them. And there can never be
"hosts, and hosts, and hosts." And if they can be counted in
hosts, they are not stubborn, freedom-loving Scythians. Free
Scythians will not bow to anything. Free Scythians will not run
after the victors, after rude force, behind "the mayor and Khle
stakov, under the protection of Derzhimorda," whatever the color
of the mayor's cockade.
1 918
You come to a mountain. You ascend it. You see the mountain
very well : a stone, a shrub, a caterpillar crawling on the shrub.
You see everything. And yet, when you are on the mountain,
you cannot judge its size or trace its contours. It is only from
afar, when you have gone a dozen versts away, when the shrub
and the caterpillar and all the details of the mountainside are
long out of sight, that you will see the mountain itself.
The grandiose events of recent years-the World War, the
Russian Revolution-are much like the mountain. For the time
being, we see only the shrub, the caterpillar, the stone; we'll see
the mountain only when we are ten years away from it. And
only then can genuine literature about the war and the revolu
tion begin to appear. The attempts of our writers to speak about
this today are wasted labor (one-sided in one way or another ) .
The contemporary inevitably finds himself in the position of the
petty officer's wife who cursed Napoleon in 1 8 1 2 for no other
reason but that her excellent cow had been hit by a stray bullet
during the Battle of Borodino.
This is why, when I discuss the newest Russian literature with
you, I shall not touch upon the very latest writers-! shall by
pass attempts at an immediate response to the roar of the storm
outside the walls. Such attempts will become part of the history
of the revolution, but not the history of literature.
In order to approach what I call the newest Russian literature,
34
35 Contemporary R ussian Literature
planes through the air. The early airplanes may have been
clumsy, they may have tumbled to the ground-no matter, it was
a revolution in means of transportation, it was a step forward.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Russian literature
resolutely cut itself off from earth : the Symbolists made their
appearance. You will recall what I said earlier about the dia
lectic method of development, and the crude example of Adam.
First the body-the earth, daily life-developed as far as it could
go. Now the spirit began to develop-a principle antithetical,
revolutionary in relation to the corporeal, to earth.
The beginnings of this were already apparent in Chekhov. Then
came Andreyev. The Symbolists-Fyodor Sologub, Andrey
Bely, Gippius, Blok, Bryusov, Balmont, Andreyev, Chulkov,
Vyacheslav Ivanov, Minsky, Voloshin-are definitely hostile to
the earth, to daily life. "What daily life? There is no such thing.
All the plots have been raveled and unraveled. There is but a
single, eternal tragedy-Love and Death-and it alone clothes
itself in a variety of vestments." "To be with people-what an
intolerable burden! "
Sologub, i n his novel Deathly Charms and i n many o f his other
works, always has two images side by side : Aldonsa and Dul
cinea. Aldonsa, a ruddy, buxom female, is the crude earth the
writer hates. Dulcinea, beautiful and delicate, is the air, the dream
in which Sologub lives and which does not exist on earth. Alex
ander Blok's poems-entire volumes of them-speak of one
thing-the Unknown One, the Fair Lady, the Snow Maid. And
she is, in essence, the same as Sologub's Dulcinea. Blok seeks
his Fair Lady everywhere on earth. For a moment it seems he
has found her. But he raises the veil-and it is not she, it is not
the Fair Lady. Blok's Fair Lady is not to be found on earth. And,
of course, Sologub and Blok are not speaking only of the woman
Dulcinea or the woman who is the Fair Lady. The disappoint
ments in Dulcinea, the impossibility of finding the Fair Lady, are
a symbolic reflection of the fate of every achievement, every
ideal on earth. Those who have seen high mountains know : from
a distance, the mountain is crowned with pink and golden clouds
of ineffable beauty ; once you climb up to the very top, into the
very clouds-you find blurred mist, and nothing else.
And so the Symbolists do not find answers to their questions
or solutions of their tragedy on earth and seek them in the upper
T H E S TA T E O F R U S S IA N L I T E R A T U R E 38
you will see clefts, enormous bumps, pits; from the pits something
rises, as thick as a young lime tree-a hair; next to it is a huge
boulder-a speck of dust.
What you see will bear little resemblance to the usual appear
ance of skin; it will seem incredible, like a nightmare. Now ask
yourselves : which is more real-this smooth, pink skin, or that
one, with the bumps and clefts? After some thought, you will
have to say : the real thing is that incredible skin we see under a
microscope.
You understand now that what appears at first glance incred
ible and shocking reveals the true nature, the reality of a thing
far more accurately than the credible. No wonder Dostoyevsky-
1 believe it was in his novel The Possessed-said that "real truth
is always incredible."
And so, the Realists depicted the apparent reality, visible to
the naked eye. The Neorealists deal most frequently with the
other, true reality that is concealed under the surface of life just
as the true structure of the human skin is concealed from the
unaided eye.
This is why the picture of the world and of people in the works
of the Neorealists often strikes you with its exaggerations, its
grotesque and fantastic qualities. Take the same Peredonov, men
tioned earlier, who spits at the walls of his room. This action is,
perhaps, implausible, but it conveys Peredonov's petty vicious
ness better than pages of realistic description. Wherever he looks,
Peredonov sees something nasty, unclean, grayish-perhaps a
clump of dust, perhaps a devil's cub. This gray little vision hounds
him and lies in wait for him everywhere. Peredonov always feels
it behind him and crosses himself to exorcise it. In reality there
could be no such thing, it is incredible, but the author has created
it to convey the state of mind of a man who lives in the atmo
sphere of constant gossip, spying, eavesdropping, and malicious
rumors that prevailed in the small town. And the device ac
complishes its purpose.
Or take another example, from Andrey Bely's novel, Peters
burg. One of the principal characters in the novel is the chief
procurator of the holy synod, Pebedonostsev, of evil memory. In
the novel he is called Apollon Apollonovich ; he owns a carriage
of a special, geometric shape-a perfect cube-and his room is
also cubelike, geometric. In reality, of course, Pobedonostsev had.
43 Contemporary R ussian Literature
The life of big cities is like the life of factories. It robs people
of individuality, makes them the same, machinelike. Hence, wish
ing to draw the most vivid characters possible, many of the Neo
realists turned from the big city to the deep province, to the
village, to remote, godforsaken regions. The entire action of
Sologub's The Petty Demon takes place in the provincial hinter-
45 Contemporary R ussian Literature
And now about the language, the verbal art of the Neorealists.
By the time the Neorealists appeared, life had become more
complex, faster, more feverish. It had become Americanized.
This is especially true of the big cities, the cultural centers for
which writers primarily produce their works. In response to this
new way of life, the Neorealists have learned to write more com
pactly, briefly, tersely than the Realists. They have learned to
T H E S T A T E 0 F R U S S IA N L I T E R A T U R E 46
say in ten lines what used to be said in a whole page. They have
learned to compress the contents of a novel into the framework
of a novella or a short story. Their teacher in this respect was
Chekhov, who produced astonishing models of compactness.
I shall deal with brevity briefly. It will suffice to recall the three
lines from Gorodetsky's poem "Yaga," quoted earlier.
For the sake of the same economy and greater vividness in
depicting the movement of life, the Neorealists avoid descriptions
of place or characters. The Neorealists do not describe, they
show, so that their works could more aptly be described by the
term showings, rather than narratives or stories.
For example, take two characters-Ivan Ivanych, tall, already
old and gray, and Marya Petrovna, short and small. The old
school Realist would begin : Ivan Ivanych was so and so, and
Marya Petrovna, such and such.
The Neorealist will convey the appearance of his heroes by
some action : "Ivan Ivanych was putting on his coat. He grunted,
his joints creaked, his hands would not obey him. He asked
Marya Petrovna to help him. And to make it possible for her to
reach, Ivan Ivanych had to bend, as usual." There is no descrip
tion of the characters' appearance, but it is clearly visible between
the lines. The same was true in the characterization of Semyon
Semyonovich Blinkin. There was not a word about the cunning
that was the essence of Blinkin's character, only action, and the
action immediately presented all of Blinkin, briefly and vividly.
I have said earlier that, in their search for vivid, colorful
ways of life the Neorealists turned to the backwoods, to the
village. This left a special imprint on the language of many of
them. The language of the Neorealists was enriched by purely
folk expressions and turns of phrase, as well as by localisms
hitherto unknown in Russian literature. The greatest contribu
tion in this respect was made by Remizov. Among the Nee
realist poets who worked a great deal over their store of words, I
would mention Gorodetsky, Alexey Tolstoy, Kluyev .and Yesenin.
methods of por tr ayal wer e also skeletal, incor por eal. The diffi
cu lty of their themes compelled the Symbolists to develop a high
degree of ver bal techniqu e. They ar e char acterized a lso by r e
ligiou s mysticism.
Ou t of the co mbination of these two antithetical tr ends, Real
ism and Symbo lism, emer ged Neor ealism, a n antir eligiou s trend.
To the Neor ealists, the tr agedy of life is its ir ony. They hav e r e
turned to the depiction of lif e, fl esh, ever yday f acts. Bu t while
they make u se of the same mater ia l as the Realists, the facts of
da ily lif e, the Neorealist wr iter s u se it chiefl y to depict tho se
asp ects of lif e that the Symbo lists wer e co ncern ed with. The
char acteristic featur es of the Neor ealists are the seeming im
pr obability of char acter s and events, which r eveals tru e r eality ;
repr esentation of images and moods by means of one particu larl y
sa lient impr ession-in other wor ds, u se of the method of Im
pressio nism ; clarity and sharp, often exagger ated, vividness of
co lor s ; u se of the village, the backwo ods, as the scene of actio n ;
bro ad, abstr act gener aliza tio ns-achieved b y dep iction of ever y
day trifles ; ter seness of langu age ; "showing" r ather than "telling
abou t" ; u se of folk and local speech ; u se of ver bal mu sic.
My survey of the latest tr ends in liter atur e wou ld be inco m
plete withou t mentio n of the so- called Fu turists, fr om the Latin
futurum. Fu tur ism is an even mor e r ecent trend than Neor ealism.
It is u ndou btedly an off shoot of the Symbo list movement. Fr om
the Symbolists, the Fu tur ists have borro wed the idea that the
wor d-taken separ ately, by itself , and not only the wor d, bu t even
the individu al sou nd, the individu al consonant or vowel, evokes
certain a ssociations. This idea is well fou nded, and its eff ective
application by the Symbo lists pro du ced r ich r esu lts. Bu t the
Fu tur ists have carried it to an extr eme, to absur dity. Their ar gu
ment has been that, if words and sou nds evoke images by them
selves, ther e is no need to trou ble abou t binding the words by
any u nity of meaning, ther e is no need for lo gical connectio n. In
other words, ther e is no need f or content ; the wor ds will speak
for themselves and pr odu ce an impr ession. The wor ks based on
this theor y, which ar e no mor e than simple collectio ns of
mu sical words and sou nds, might have been ap pro pr iate f or
p eop le if they wer e devoid of the facu lty of thou ght and equ ipped
o nly with ear s-a nd, I wou ld say, ears somewhat longer than
or dinar y hu man o nes.
49 Contemporary Russian Literature
/ ...._
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55 I A m Afraid
when to discard it," when to sing hail to the tsar, and when to
the hammer and sickle-we offer them to the people as a litera
ture worthy of the revolution. And the literary centaurs rush,
kicking and crushing one another, in a race for the splendid prize
-the monopoly on the scribbling of odes, the monopoly on the
knightly pursuit of slinging mud at the intelligentsia. I am afraid
Payan was right-this merely corrupts and degrades art. And
I am afraid that, if this continues, the entire recent period in
Russian literature will become known in history as the age of
the nimble school, for those who are not nimble have been silent
now for the past two years.
And what was contributed to literature by those who were
not silent?
The nimblest of all were the Futurists. Without a moment's
pause, they proclaimed themselves the court school. And for a
year we heard nothing but their yellow, green, and raspberry red
triumphant cries. However, the combination of the red sanscu
lotte cap with the yellow blouse and yesterday's still visible blue
flower on the cheek proved too blasphemously glaring even for
the least demanding. The Futurists were politely shown the door
by those in whose name these self-appointed heralds galloped.
Futurism disappeared. And as before, a single beacon rises amid
the tin-flat Futurist sea-Mayakovsky. Because he is not one of
the nimble. He sang the revolution when others, sitting in Peters
burg, were firing their long-range verses at Berlin. But even this
magnificent beacon is still burning with the old reserves of his
"I" and "Simple as Lowing." In the "Heroes and Victims of the
Revolution," in "Doughnuts" and the poem about the peasant
woman and Wrangel, it is no longer the same Mayakovsky, the
Edison, the pioneer whose every step was hacked out in the
jungle. From the jungle he has come out upon the well-trodden
highway ; he has dedicated himself to perfecting official themes
and rhythms. But, then, why not? Edison, too, perfected Bell's
invention.
The "horsism" of the Moscow Imaginists is too obviously
weighed down by the cast-iron shadow of Mayakovsky. No mat
ter how they exert themselves to smell bad and to shout, they
will not outsmell and outshout Mayakovsky. The lmaginist
America, alas, has been discovered long before. Back in the era
of Serafino, one who considered himself the greatest of poets
T H E S TA T E O F R U S S IA N L I T E R A T U R E 56
Yes, this is one of the reasons for the silence of true literature.
The writer who cannot be nimble must trudge to an office with
a briefcase if he wants to stay alive. In our day, Gogol would be
running with a briefcase to the Theater Section; Turgenev would
undoubtedly be translating Balzac and Flaubert for World Lit
erature ; Hertzen would lecture to the sailors of the Baltic fleet;
and Chekhov would be working for the Commissariat of Public
Health. Otherwise-to live as a student did five years ago on his
forty rubles-Gogol would have to write four Inspector Generals
a month, Turgenev would have to tum out three Fathers and
Sons every two months, and Chekhov would have to produce a
hundred stories every month. This sounds like a preposterous
joke, but unfortunately it is not a joke; these are realistic figures.
The work of a literary artist, who "embodies his ideas in bronze"
with pain and joy, and the work of a prolific windbag-the work
of Chekhov and that of Breshko-Breshk:ovsky-are today ap
praised in the same way : by the yard, by the sheet. And the writer
faces the choice : either he becomes a Breshk:o-Breshk:ovsky or
he is silent. To the genuine writer or poet the choice is clear.
But even this is not the main thing. Russian writers are accus
tomed to going hungry. The main reason for their silence is not
lack of bread or lack of paper; the reason is far weightier, far
tougher, far more ironclad. It is that true literature can exist only
where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy officials, but
by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics. But
when a writer must be sensible and rigidly orthodox, when he
must make himself useful today, when he cannot lash out at
everyone, like Swift, or smile at everything, like Anatole France,
there can be no bronze literature, there can be only a paper
literature, a newspaper literature, which is read today, and used
for wrapping soap tomorrow.
Those who are trying to build a new culture in our extraordi-
T H E S TA T E O F R U S S IA N L I T E R A T U R E 58
nary time often turn their eyes to the distant past-to the sta
dium, the theater, the games of the Athenian demos. The retro
spection is correct. But it must not be forgotten that the Athenian
agora, the Athenian people, knew how to listen to more than
odes; it had no fear of the harsh scourge of Aristophanes either.
And we-how far we are from Aristophanes when even the
utterly innocuous Toiler of Wordstreams by Gorky is withdrawn
from the repertory to shield that foolish infant, the Russian
demos, from temptation!
I am afraid that we shall have no genuine literature until we
cease to regard the Russian demos as a child whose innocence
must be protected. I am afraid that we shall have no genuine
literature until we cure ourselves of this new brand of Catholi
cism, which is as fearful as the old of every heretical word. And
if this sickness is incurable, then I am afraid that the only future
possible to Russian literature is its past.
1921
PARAD I S E
Much has been said by many about the imperfection of the uni
verse, the creation of old Ialdabaoth. But, I believe, it never
occurred to anyone that the focal tastelessness of the universe lies
in its astonishing lack of monism : water and fire, mountains and
abysses, saints and sinners. What absolute simplicity, what hap
piness, unclouded by any thought, there would have been if he
had from the very first created a single firewater, if he had from
the very first spared man the savage state of freedom! In poly
phony there is always a danger of cacophony. After all, he knew
this when he established paradise : there you have only mono
phony, only rejoicing, only light, only a unanimous Te Deum.
We are unquestionably living in a cosmic era-an era of crea
tion of a new heaven and a new earth. And naturally we will not
repeat Ialdabaoth's mistake. There shall be no more polyphony
or dissonances. There shall be only majestic, monumental, all
encompassing unanimity. Otherwise, what kind of a realization
of the ancient, beautiful dream of paradise will it be? What sort of
paradise will it be, indeed, if the thrones and dominions thunder
forth Te Deums, and the powers and principalities sing Miserere?
And so, it is clearly on this granite foundation of monophony
that the new Russian literature and the new poetry are being
created. The cunning bringer of dissonance, the teacher of doubt,
Satan, has been forever banished from the shining mansions. All
we hear now are the voices of angels, and the rejoicing of kettle
drums and bells, of hail and glory and hosanna.
59
T H E S TA T E O F R U S S IA N L I T E R A T U R E 60
only "We" and "1." Today we have also Labor, Life, Strength,
Will, Sleep, Laziness, Merriment, Love, Proud Reason, Achieve
ment, Evil, Blood, Joy, Youth, Knowledge, Rot, the Future in a
Fiery Cradle, Everydays, Yesterday, Tomorrow, the Ninth Wave.
Self-veneration has reached such extremes that everything relat
ing to the Self is Written in Capitals: even Sleep and Laziness.
Naturally, one must not compare the Titans with the Pushkins
and the Bloks : the latter belong to the old, lilliputian universe.
Titans can be compared only to one another. The Petersburg
Gryadushcheye and Plamya, the Pskov Severnye zori [Northern
dawns] play in the chorus of Titans the role ( perhaps the com
parison is too mundane) of the left section of the church choir,
consisting, by established custom, of the little goat-bearded dea
.
con and his sons, who sing just anyhow, in the plain old-fashioned
way. They are helped by amateurs from among the people-the
Moscow Tvorchestvo [Creation] and the Poltava Raduga. And,
finally, there is the right section of the choir, where the singing is
in real earnest, with proper voice parts Kuznitsa, Gorn [Forge],
-
Khudozhestvennoye slovo.
Only one voice stands out in the left choir-that of Ivan
Yeroshin. He has a good teacher, Kluyev, and not the Kluyev of
"The Copper Whale, " but the Kluyev of the "Hut Songs." The
rest are little deacons.
The amateurs-how can art be demanded from them? So
long as they are zealous, so long as they are pious.
And who can say that this is not duly pious? Lilies, we are told,
Have turned as red as blood,
Feeling both rapture and love
As they watch the heroism of the proletarian.
D. Tumanny, in Tvorchestvo
Or:
0 valiant knight without reproach or fear!
0 heart-pure fighter for the poor!
M. Zorev, in Tvorchestvo
And who will say that there is no zeal in the rhapodist's
eulogy on the taking of Kazan by Raskolnikov1 :
Boris Pilnyak
65 Paradise
happy tears of his wife, who had hastened to his bed" ( "White
Terror," in Plamya [ 1 920] ) .
And here is a sermon on the topic, "Long Live the United
Labor School! " And a sermon on the topic, "The Duty of a
Revolutionary-Stronger than Love, Stronger than Death." And
a sermon on the topic "The Old God, Served by the Minions of
Darkness, Ignorance and Superstition, Does Not Exist." And a
sermon on Whitsuntide. And a sermon on Good Friday. And
a sermon . . .
Even at the risk of perishing from association with the angels
of Satan, the poets of the new universe ( Muscovites) are never
theless learning to use "weapons of the latest design." The prose
writers, on the other hand, firmly remember the wise words of
F. Kalinin : 2 "Even in the tiniest doses, bourgeois art is extremely
noxious and demoralizing" ( Gryadushcheye, no. 4 [ 1 920] ) . And
they beware of this deadly poison and choose the wooden plow
rather than the tractor, the good, old, creaky coach of the 1 860s
rather than the automobile. They all merge into a single mono
phonic grayness, like stately ranks, companies, and battalions
dressed in uniforms. And, indeed, how else? After all , rejecting
banality means standing out from the orderly ranks, violating the
law of universal equality. Originality is unquestionably criminal.
Nevertheless, there are still a few criminals. And the foremost
of these is Kiy ; once read, he cannot be forgotten like the rest.
Take the rhythm of his prose-what's Andrey Bely compared to
him! And the style-what's Count Rostopchin!3
"The poor abroad came out and overthrew the ancient thrones
and crowns, lending wings to our struggle, but the calls to world
unity were drowned out by the voices of the flabby leaders, social
liars, and cowards." And "Islands came in sight, golden shores,
where the bright good sun shone for everyone, beckoned every
one to brotherhood and equality." And "The greenery around
spread like a carpet, glimmered brightly with aromatic little
flowers, with velvet little butterflies" ( "Truths and Fictions," in
Gryadushcheye, no. 3 [ 1 920] ) .
And it is not only little butterflies that are obedient to Kiy's
This essay was also signed with the pseudonym Mikhail Platonov.
Gryadushchaya Rossiya was a monthly which began publication in Paris
in 1 920. A. N. Tolstoy was one of its editors.
1 Demyan Bedny ( 1 883-1945 ) , popular Communist poet who produced
great quantities of propaganda verse.
68
69 "Gryadushchaya Rossiya"
eerie, spectral, transparent soul of the city that lives in the Peters
burg of Blok, Bely, Dobuzhinsky. Alexey Tolstoy strolls through
Petersburg as an outside observer, though an acute and intelli
gent one. Chiefly, and most unexpectedly, intelligent. Until now,
Tolstoy knew how to conceal this with extraordinary skill-as,
I believe, Chukovsky pointed out in his article on A. N. Tolstoy.
And suddenly, in this new novel-intelligent conversations, in
telligent people. Not many of them, and yet, and yet! In the past,
Tolstoy's whole charm was precisely in absurdity, in alogic. Now,
out of the pile of his former surprises and absurdities, you sud
denly fish out a syllogism here and there. But Petersburg is all
straight lines, all geometry and logic. A man who comes here
from a crooked Moscow lane is therefore inevitably a mere
visitor. This is why The Road to Calvary is only an epic, with
out any of that lyricism which is inevitably present, as an im
plicit function, even in an epic by a Petersburg native writing
about Petersburg, about himself.
And one more thing : it is, of course, impossible to capture all
of Petersburg when the writer's palette consists solely of realistic
colors, without any admixture of Gogol and Hoffmann. There
must be sharpness, hyperbole, grotesquerie, there must be a new
kind of reality-the seemingly implausible reality which is re
vealed to the eye looking through a microscope. Alexey Tolstoy
is almost entirely devoid of this. Only in the beginning of the
novel does he rise for a moment over the heavy, three-dimen
sional Moscow world-in the passages where we get a glimpse
of the deacon who has seen an imp and spread the rumor that
"Petersburg will be an empty city," where the devil drives at
breakneck speed in a cab, and where a dead man looks through
the carriage window at a privy councilor. But this is only in the
first chapter, in which the author takes a highly concentrated,
skillful and clever (and this is especially notable-clever! ) glance
at the history of Petersburg, down to our-no, not our days, days
that were a hundred years ago.
And here are these days, in the year 1 9 1 4 : "It was a time
when love, when kind and wholesome feelings were considered
outdated and cheap. Young women concealed their innocence,
husbands and wives, their fidelity. Destruction was considered in
good taste, and neurasthenia, a mark of refinement. . . . Worn
out by sleepless nights, drowning its anguish in wine, in mud,
T H E S TA T E 0 F R U S S I A N L I T E R A T U R E 10
mind. And you do not know why Katya suddenly goes with
Bessonov to a hotel, where he "takes her without loving her,
without feeling anything, as if she were a doll." And you do not
know why the preposterous Futuristic young lady, Yelizaveta
Kievna, goes with the same Bessonov, and perhaps to the same
hotel. Or why Dasha comes to him. You do not know, and
most important of all-you have no desire to know. This is a
clear victory by the author : he succeeds in hypnotizing the reader
into mindlessness, into believing everything without question or
argument.
When Tolstoy speaks of the "magnificent absurdities" of the
Petersburg Futurist colony, he is altogether in his own, Nalymov
milieu (what a first-rate Futurist the world has lost in Tolstoy
himself! ) . "The Central Station for Fighting Banality" in the en
gineer Telegrin's apartment; the poems about "young jaws crack
ing church cupolas like nuts"; the stroll along Nevsky Prospekt
on a spring day of young men in orange blouses and top hats,
with monocles on thick cords. These future "proletarians" and
erstwhile state poets are beautifully depicted.
The novel breaks off after the description of the strike of the
Obukhov workers-and the fateful day draws ever nearer. Its
scarlet light may redden the second half of the novel, published
by another Paris journal, Sovremennye zapiski [Contemporary
annals].
The parts published in Gryadushchaya R ossiya are sufficient
for critical conclusions. Alexey Tolstoy has finally come out of
his linden-shaded lane and taken up new themes. But though
the themes are new to him, his methods and technique remain
the same; to use the French proverb, he does not look for any
thing better than wheat bread.
Indeed, what can be better than wheat bread? What can be
better than Alexey Tolstoy of The Lame Master? And then, there
is always a risk of exchanging wheat bread for our present bread,
full of chaff. But the road of the truly great artists is always the
road of Ahasuerus; it is always the road to Calvary, always a
giving up of the bird in hand for the greater one in the sky.
Tolstoy clutches at his bird and fears the soaring one. For an
instant the huge wings rustle over his head : "Dasha looked at
her sister with stern, 'furry' eyes." And immediately Tolstoy is
frightened of these magnificent furry eyes, and shields himself
T H E S TA T E O F R U S S IA N L I T E R A T U R E 72
from the soaring bird with quotation marks. And diligently fences
off every unusual image with quotation marks, or with "as if,"
"as though" and "it seemed." "It was as though the very air
sang in the evening stillness"; "It seemed that the body had be
come light and pure, without a single spot" ; "Dasha seemed to
be purifying herself with solemn music."
But we, who live in the spectral city, we know that what seems
already is. We know that the air really sings in the evening still
ness, and that one really becomes spotless, and really purifies
oneself with solemn music. Tolstoy himself can also transcend
his Moscow body at moments and see this. "Katya had done
something terrible and incomprehensible, something black. Last
night her head had lain on a pillow, turned away from every
thing alive, loved, and warm, and her body had been crushed,
shattered. This was how Katya experienced what Nikolay Niko
layevich called infidelity . " Clearly, Alexey Tolstoy is capable of
seeing; but why does he see so rarely, why is he afraid of vision?
Plotinus said, "He who sees becomes the thing he sees." Alexey
Tolstoy has never seen Petersburg with the vision that Plotinus
speaks about. He has merely written an excellent novel about
Petersburg. He has told about Petersburg, he never showed it.
The rest of the material in the journal is chiefly the work
of sinners hanging on for salvation to the only righteous man,
Alexey Tolstoy. In the first issue there is a story by Dikhof
Derental, "Daddy," dealing with revolutionary life-one of those
stories whose passport says : "Height, average. No distinguishing
characteristics." There are also Boborykin's recollections, "Half
a Century," about Hertzen, Lavrov, Mikhailov, Tkachev, M.
Kovalevsky, Lev Tolstoy. The talented publicist and orator
Alexinsky signs his name to a very feeble bit of fiction ( "Tale
about the Archangel Annail" ) . In the second issue we stumble
unexpectedly upon another venerable debutant, G. E. Lvov, with
a story, "The Peasants." The story is inept, clumsy, with occas
sional irritating lapses into the style of the folk epic, but there
are also fresh peasant turns of phrase and expressions, from a
genuinely peasant, not paysan vocabulary. The story is appended
by a lengthy sermon on the topic "Animals decide their conflicts
with their teeth, man is endowed with the capacity for deciding
his conflicts with his heart." The sermon is both fine and timely,
73 "Gryadushchaya Rossiya"
but even the most graceful church cupola won't do as a roof for
a Russian peasant hut.
There are poems-by Ropshin, Minsky, Vladimir N abokov
( in the first issue ) , Amari, Wilkina, and Teffi ( in the second
issue ) . Reading these poems is like driving down a street in a
provincial town in England : all the houses are clean and tidy,
and one is like the other-not a stray curl or sagging window.
75
T H E S TA T E O F R U S S IA N L I T E R A T U R E 76
The others have all been more or less derailed and are bump
ing along the crossties. It is not clear how they will end : some
of them, perhaps, in catastrophe. This is a hazardous path,
but true.
The most catastrophe-prone of the seven writers assembled in
the first anthology of the Serapion Brethren are Lunts, Kaverin,
and Nikitin.
Lunts is all shaken u p ; every particle within him is in a state
of suspension, and there is no telling what color the solution will
be when everything in it settles. From successful biblical styliza
tion ("In the Desert" ) he skips to tragedy, from tragedy to a
pamphlet, from pamphlet to a fantastic tale ( I know these
works) . He is rougher and clumsier than the others, and he
makes more mistakes. The others see and hear much better than
he, but for the present he thinks better. He reaches out for broad
syntheses, and the literature of the immediate future will inevi
tably turn away from painting, whether respectably realistic or
modern, and from daily life, whether old or the very latest and
revolutionary, and turn to artistically realized philosophy.
The same tendency can be sensed in Kaverin. This is not as
noticeable in his Chronicle of the City of Leipzig as in his other,
still unpublished works. Kaverin has taken a difficult course :
he follows in the path of Theodor Hoffmann;1 he has not yet
climbed across this peak, but there is reason to hope that he will.
While Zoshchenko, Ivanov, and N ikitin are working chiefly with
language and ornamentation, Kaverin is obviously drawn to ex
periments with plot, to the problem of synthesis of fantasy and
reality, the pungent game of destroying illusion and creating it
anew. I n this game he is skillful. But in the excitement of the
game, he sometimes ceases to hear words, and his phrases turn
out somewhat askew. But as Dr. Khorosheva said recently, in
the presence of the Serapion Brethren, this is very easily cured.
Kaverin has one weapon which, I think, no one else among the
Serapions possesses-irony (the professor in the Chronicle of
the City of Leipzig, the early parts of chapters 6 and 7 ) . This
sharp and bitter herb has until now grown very sparingly in our
- c e r_Q_A tt � -
l����
�-· A . P E M VI 3 0 B
. H V1 K � T Y1 H
3 0 lU E H t< O
J1 Y H U.
Mikhail Zoshchenko
T H E S TA T E O F R U S S I A N L I T E R A T U R E 78
Russian fields; the more valuable the attempt to plant it, and the
more uniqueness it lends the author.
Zoshchenko, Ivanov, and Nikitin are folklorists and painters,
"icon painters. " They do not look for new architectural or plot
forms ( although Nikitin has lately begun to do so ) , but take a
ready form-the skaz. 2
For the time being, Zoshchenko utilizes the simplest form of
the skaz-that written in the first person. His entire cycle "The
Stories of Sinebryukhov" is written in this form (the story in the
anthology is taken from this cycle) . Zoshchenko makes excellent
use of the syntax of popular speech ; there is not a single mistake
in the order of the words, the verb forms, the choice of syno
nyms. He knows how to lend amusing novelty to the most worn,
most hackneyed words by a ( seemingly ) wrong choice of syno
nyms, by intentional pleonasms ( "to live a life of full family
pleasure," "at one end, a hillock, at the other-vice versa-a
hillock," "in his bottom underpants" ) . And yet Zoshchenko
should not stop too long at this station. One must move for
ward, even if one has to bump over the crossties.
Nikitin is represented in the anthology by "Desi," a story al
together untypical of him. This is his first attempt to leave the
rails of the skaz and create what I have on occasion called a
pokaz, a "showing," in a concentrated, disjoined form. The story
is made up of individual fragments, seemingly discrete, without
cement, and only from a distance can it be seen that the rays
extending from all the pieces meet in a single focus. A most in
teresting experiment in composition, but it overtaxed the author's
resources ; in the second part, "Epos" and "Sky," he lapsed back
into an ordinary story. The result is a train consisting half of
airplanes, half of cars. Naturally, the airplanes do not fly. But
even if the experiment ends in a catastrophe, even if the author
emerges from it black and blue, the attempt is still good; it shows
that Nikitin does not seek to settle into a steady and untroubled
existence, that he has no desire to become an efficient literary
landowner. Indeed, he has already passed through the settled
stage-with his excellent story "Stake," well-integrated and rich
in fresh imagery. This story would have been the best in the
anthology, but was not included for reasons beyond the author's
control.
Vsevolod Ivanov has strength enough for two, but his instru
ments are coarser than those of Zoshchenko and Nikitin. The
skaz form he uses is not consistently maintained : every now and
then he forgets that he must look at everything with Yerma's
eyes ( "The Blue Beastie" ) and think with Yerma's brain; every
now and then "a leaf etched by the birch tree in the sky" will
jump out at you. Altogether unnecessary and jarring is his at
tempt to convey folk speech with primitive naturalism, as though
he were taking ethnographic notes. To convey a village morn
ing symphonically, it is quite unnecessary to put a live rooster
and a calf into the orchestra, next to the first violin. Ivanov can
do very well without these ethnographic notes, especially since
he is not even consistent in his usages, and his Yerma speaks
the same words differently on the same page. This is simply
careless work. It seems to me that Ivanov writes too hastily and
too much; he does not search as intensely and restlessly as some
of his neighbors in the anthology . And that's a pity, because he
is not less talented than they are. What marvelous new images
he can find when he wants to : "dark, airless huts-and the
people in them like flies in bread, baked into it," or "water
among the tussocks, heavy, sated." Strong, sturdy words, "like
l rbit carts. "
Slonimsky, like Lunts, i s still searching for himself; h e i s still
in the state of an Ahasuerus : plays, war stories, grotesques, con
temporary life. With Kaverin and Lunts, he forms the "Western"
group of the Serapion Brethren, tending to operate predomi
nantly with architectural masses, with plot, but with relatively
little ear or love for the Russian word itself, its music and its
color. The latter is more within the ken of the "Eastern" group
Nikitin, Zoshchenko, Vsevolod Ivanov, and, partly, Fedin. Slo
nimsky's story, "The Wild One," is very dynamic and frequently
verges on pokaz. Slonimsky has succeeded in shifting his rhythms
with the appearance of various characters and with changes in
the relative intensity of the action (chapter 1 -Abraham-lento;
2-1 van Gruda-allegro; 7-presto ) . Slonimsky does not have
the rich imagery of Nikitin and Vsevolod Ivanov ; some of his
images are wrongly invested with the author's colors, not those
T H E S TA T E 0 F R U S S IA N L I T E R A T U R E 80
+ , -, - -
These are the three schools in art, and there are no others.
Affirmation, negation, and synthesis-the negation of negation.
The syllogism is closed, the circle completed. Over it arises a
new circle-new and yet the same. And out of these circles the
spiral of art, holding up the sky.
A spiral ; a winding staircase in the Tower of Babel ; the path
of an airplane rising aloft in circles-such is the way of art. The
equation of the movement of art is the equation of a spiral. And
every circle of this spiral, the face, the gesture, the voice of every
school, bears one of these stamps :
+ , -, - -
The plus : Adam-nothing but clay ; the world-nothing but
clay. The moist, emerald clay of grass; peach warm, the naked
body of Eve against the emerald; cherry red, Eve's lips and breast
tips, apples, wine. Vivid, simple, firm, coarse flesh : Moleschott,
Buchner, Rubens, Repin, Zola, Tolstoy, Gorky, Realism, Natu
ralism . 1
But now Adam is satiated with Eve. He is n o longer drawn
to the scarlet flowers of her body, he immerses himself for the
first time in her eyes, and at the bottom of these eerie wells cut
in the three-dimensional, clay world, he finds the misty glim
mering of another world. And the emerald grass pales; the red,
81
T H E S TA T E 0 F R U S S I A N L I T E R A T U R E 82
see side by side, on the same plane, mammoths and house com
mittees of present-day Petersburg, Lot and Professor Letayev.
There has been a displacement of planes in space and time.
For the depiction of present, fantastic reality, the displacement
of planes is a method as logically necessary as projection on the
planes of Xs, Ys, and Zs is in classic descriptive geometry. The
door to this method was rammed out by the Futurists, at the cost
of their foreheads. But they employed it like a first-year student
who has deified the differential but does not know that a differ
ential without an integral is a boiler without a manometer. As a
result their world-the boiler-exploded into a thousand dis
connected pieces, words decomposed into meaningless sounds.
Synthetism employs integral displacement of planes. Here the
pieces of the world set into one space-time frame are never ac
cidental. They are welded by synthesis, and-whether nearer or
farther-the rays issuing from these pieces invariably meet at
one point; the pieces always form a single whole.
Take Annenkov's Petrukha and Katka, from Blok's "The
Twelve." Katka : a bottle and an empty glass turned upside down;
a cheap clock decorated with painted flowers ; a black window
with a bullet hole and cobwebs ; forget-me-nots. And Petru
kha : a bare autumn branch ; croaking ravens ; electric wires, a
brigand's knife, and a church cupola. A seeming chaos of ap
parently contradictory objects , accidentally thrown onto the same
plane. But take another look at "The Twelve," and you will see
the focus where all these scattered rays are gathered, the strong
links that bind the bottles and the sentimental forget-me-nots,
the brigand's knife and the church cupola.
This is true of Annenkov's latest paintings. In his earlier works
such integration of fragments is often impossible ; there you have
only independent, deified differentials, and the world is shattered
into pieces only because of a mischievous infantile desire to kick
up a row.
At times you also find there one of the Futurists' favorite
errors : a hopeless attempt to fix upon the canvas the sequence of
several seconds-to introduce into painting, a three-dimensional
art, a fourth dimension : continuity, time (a dimension given only
to words and to music ) . Hence, these "traces" of the supposedly
moving hand in the portrait of Elena Annenkova (a drawing
superb in its synthetic economy of line ) ; the "traces" of the sup-
T H E S TA T E O F R U S S I A N L I T E R A T U R E 88
All our clocks are, of course, mere toys ; no one has a true
clock. Today, an hour, a year are altogether different units of
time from what they were yesterday, and we are unaware of this
only because, floating in time, we do not see the banks. But art
has keener eyes than we do, and the art of every epoch reflects
the speed of the epoch, the speed of yesterday and today.
Yesterday and today are a stagecoach and an automobile.
Yesterday you traveled along the steppe road by unhurried
stagecoach. A slow wanderer-a village church-is floating
toward you. Unhurriedly, you open the window ; you narrow your
eyes against the steeple gleaming in the sun, the whiteness of the
walls; you rest your eyes on the blue slits of sky; you will remem
ber the green roof, the lacy sleeves of the weeping birch, like the
sleeves of an oriental robe, the solitary woman leaning against
the birch.
And today-by car-past the same church. A moment-it
rises, flashes, disappears. And all that remains is a streak of
lightning in the air, topped with a cross; beneath it, three sharp,
black shapes cut in the sky, one over the other, and a woman
birch, a woman with weeping branches. Not a single secondary
detail, not a single superfluous line, not a word that can be
crossed out. Nothing but the essence, the extract, the synthesis,
revealed to the eye within one one-hundredth of a second, when
all sensations are gathered into focus, sharpened, condensed.
Annenkov did not paint this flashing church steeple. The pic
ture is mine, verbal. But I know-had he painted it, this is pre
cisely how he would have done it. Because he has a keen
awareness of the extraordinary rush and dynamism of our epoch.
His sense of time is developed to the hundredth of a second. He
has the knack-characteristic of Synthetism-of giving only the
synthetic essence of things.
The man of yesterday, the stagecoach man, may find this un-
Karney Chukovsky
T H E S TA T E 0 F R U S S fA N L I T E R A T U R E 90
92
93 The New Russian Prose
the daily life of the revolution. They see nothing but the body
and not really the body, but hats, military style jackets, mittens,
boots. As for the vast, fantastic sweep of the spirit of our epoch,
which has demolished everyday life to pose the problems of
being-it is not to be found in any of their works. They are the
Peredvizhniki," the Vereshchagins6 of literature. And if there
were a revolutionary tribunal in art, it would surely try these
groups of prose writers for literary counterrevolution.
Next to them on the defendant's bench would be the Russian
Futurists. The material evidence? LEF no. 1 -"a journal of the
left front in Art." Three most dynamic manifestos; an auto
salute : "We know that we are the best artists of the age"; truly
masterful poems by Aseyev and Mayakovsky ; and suddenly
right about turn!-from Aseyev to Avseyenko : 7 Erik's story
"She Is Not a Fellow Traveler," a most successful parody
on the drawing-room story in a contemporary setting. Even
the "elegant" names of the heroes are obvious parodies : Strepe
tov! Velyarskaya! The author has played a clever practical joke
at the expense of the editors of LEF, but, of course, this parody
is not traveling with any kind of new art.
The Serapion Brethren, born of the Petersburg House of the
Arts, were at first welcomed with great fanfare. But the articles
bestowing laurel wreaths upon them have now given place to
what are virtually articles of the criminal code. According to the
newest data (provided by the Cosmists ) , it turns out that these
writers "don't have a penny to their names," that they are "wolves
in sheep's clothing" and "don't accept" the Revolution. The
Serapion Brethren are not Mozarts, of course, but they also have
their Salieris. And all this is unquestionably the purest Salierism :
there are no writers hostile to the Revolution in Russia today
they've been invented to relieve boredom. And the pretext was
that the Serapion Brethren do not regard the revolution as a con
sumptive young lady who must be protected from the slightest
draft.
But then, the Serapion Brethren are generally a fiction, like
his short novella Apollo and Tamara, built on the very sharp
borderline between sentimentality and parody on sentimentality,
suggest that the author's range is perhaps broader than the skaz
form.
Among Fedin's assets is the oddly mature story "The Garden,"
which even Bunin would sign his name to. In A nna Timofeyevna
there is slight shift to the left. A further shift, I believe, is to be
found in his still unfinished novel. For the time being, Fedin is
more to the right and more canonical than the rest.
Three Serapion Brethren-Kaverin, Lunts, and Slonimsky
are traveling with long-distance tickets. They may, perhaps, get
off somewhere halfway, without going to the very end. Slonim
sky may run out of strength, and Lunts, of patience. But in the
meantime, they have gone much further away from the traditions
of Russian prose, bogged down in daily life, than their four
comrades. The traditional disease developed by Russian fiction
writers is a certain pedestrian quality of imagination, a plot
anemia; everything is thrown into painting. But these three have
architecture, plot structure, fantasy-though at the cost of paint
ing. Nevertheless, their kinship with Hoffmann goes beyond their
passports.
This is especially true of Kaverin. His geography consists of
Heidelbergs and Wiirttembergs, inhabited by magisters, burgo
masters, and fraus. Words to him are a, b, c, x, y-mere designa
tions, the same in any language. He does not know of any con
crete number words, and he knows nothing of painting, because
he has plunged himself entirely into architecture. And here his
experiments are very interesting : he obtains strong alloys of
fantasy and reality; he skillfully sharpens his composition by
playing at exposing his own game; he knows how to deepen his
perspective philosophically, as though by parallel mirrors ( "The
Fifth Wanderer" ) . To become a highly original writer, Kaverin
ought to transfer his Nuremberg at least to Petersburg, to color
his words a little, and to recall that these words are Russian.
Lunts, like Kaverin, is all in algebra, in blueprints, not in
painting. His stories have not yet emerged from the exercise
stage, and may not emerge from it : his plot tension is usually so
great that the thin shell of a story cannot contain it, and the author
chooses the form of a movie scenario or play instead. His play
Outside the Law, constructed in some algebraic Spain, bears far
T H E S TA T E O F R U S S IA N L I T E R A T U R E 98
years have not changed their technique; the epoch has expressed
itself only in the monumental character of their edifices, their
novels, and in their use of material from contemporary life.
However, these edifices are only beginning to be opened for
inspection. Because of their specific gravity, the older writers
came within the cone of explosion, and the blast of 1 9 1 7 scat
tered them in every direction. Only now do they begin to emerge
from printless deserts, and we learn of works mostly by rumor.
In some Crimean wilderness Sergeyev-Tsensky silently finished
the huge building he had begun during the war, his novel The
Transformation ( as yet unpublished) . Prishvin has written a
novella Ape Slave, which contains so much of today we shall read
it only in some remote tomorrow. Ivan Novikov, B . Zaitsev, and
Shmelyov are also working on novels seeded by the epoch.
Shmelyov's superb story, "It Was" ( in the Nedra [The depths]
anthology) , in which daily life is ready every moment to swirl
into delirium, may be taken as a promise that Shmelyov will have
sufficient strength to encompass the age in his novel as well.
In Nedra and Novaya Moskva [New Moscow] a large group of
prose writers (Trenyov, Nikandrov, Shishkov, A. Yakovlev, and
others ) is still clinging to the good old realistic slice-of-life man
ner. These writers may be stronger, more stable, and more tal
ented than some of the younger ones, but they represent the old
Moscow, not the new.
Among the writers scattered abroad, thrown into the bits of
Russia in Berlin, Paris, and Prague, there are few pussy willows
( a pussy willow blooms anywhere, even in a bottle of water) .
Kuprin, Merezhkovsky, Gippius, and Bunin have stopped bloom
ing (although only recently we have been told of new Bunin
stories ) . Of Bely's two branches, only one-the poetic branch
has sent forth new shoots. Remizov still draws his nourishment
from the little box of Russian soil he brought with him to Berlin;
the expected results of Steinach's operation are still to be seen in
his case. But there are also two productive names: A. N. Tolstoy
and Ehrenburg-and their work can vie with that which has been
turned out in Petersburg-Moscow Russia.
Tolstoy's Road to Calvary cannot properly be called a new
novel. It is the last old Russian novel, the last fruit of Realism, of
the real Tolstoy-Lev. Nevertheless, for A. N. Tolstoy this novel
T H E S TA T E O F R U S S IA N L I T E R A T U R E 1 02
is new : until now his heroes thought with anything but their
heads; here they have suddenly begun to think with their heads.
From lack of practice, this does not always turn out successfully.
When he makes Burov, in the Road to Calvary, discourse on love
and say that love is a lie, he discovers gunpowder for the one
thousand-and-first time ; the last Schwarzes before him were
Artsybashev and Vinnichenko. But Gvozdev on the "herd" and
the "inch," Zhdanov on "the law of man and the law of humanity,"
on the antinomy of freedom and equality-these are something
else again, these are the real thing, Faustian. True, the novel
moves along the rails of plot according to a mail-train schedule;
true, the author encloses every daring epithet that slips through in
quotation marks ; true, the wineskin is old, but it is filled with
good wine. Gulping down some of the pages, the reader becomes
intoxicated. Because it is given to A. N. Tolstoy to know what
love is (many of our young writers know it only from anatomy
textbooks ) .
I n his latest novel, A elita, Tolstoy attempted to transfer from
the mail train to the airplane of the fantastic, but all he managed
was to jump up and plop back on the ground with awkwardly
spread wings, like a fledgling jackdaw that has fallen out of its
nest (daily life) . Tolstoy's Mars is no further than some forty
versts from Ryazan; there is even a shepherd there, in the standard
red shirt; there is "gold in the mouth" ( fillings? ) ; there is even a
house manager who "secretly held out two fingers like horns to
ward off the earthmen"-he had evidently paid an earlier visit
to Italy with his barin. The only figure in the novel that is alive,
in the usual Tolstoyan fashion, is the Red Army soldier Gusev.
He alone speaks, all the others recite.
The language of the novel : next to vivid, original expressions,
you suddenly read something totally bald, such as "memory
awakened the recent past." And the "recent past" predominates.
Language and symbols have suffered the same fate here that
women sometimes do after a bout of typhus : the hair is clipped
and there is no longer any woman, she turns into a boy. Tolstoy
was compelled to clip the customary symbols and the details of
everyday life, but he did not succeed in inventing new ones.
And, finally : A elita has many rich relatives, beginning with
Wells and Zulawski. In the pages of Krasnaya nov [Red virgin
soil], A elita undoubtedly blushes over her acquaintance with such
1 03 The New Russian Prose
Stories, Thirteen Pipes, and Six Tales about Easy Ends) are three
points through which we can trace the trajectory of Ehrenburg's
formal shifts. In the first book, daily life is intertwined with the
fantastic, and the language is still Russian. The second is a shoot
from Jurenito. In the third, the language is compact, sharp, quick,
telegraphic, international ; there is an unquestionable kinship with
the newest French prose ( the Dadaists, Cendrars, Jules Ro
main's Donogoo-Tonka ) . Perhaps this is why even the peasants
in this book speak like paysans ( Yegorych in "Mercure de
Russie," Silin in "Colony No. 62" ) .
All the numerous blemishes in Ehrenburg's language can be
explained (though, of course, not excused ) by the fact that he is
a convinced constructivist; hence, both in his novel and in his
stories, his first concern is not ornamentation, not color, but
composition. And it must be said that his compositional inven
tiveness is frequenly more ingenious than that of his colleagues
working in the same area on this side of the border. ( In Jurenito,
the device of introducing the author as one of the characters is
highly successful; the construction of the story in the form of a
scenario for a film is new to Russian prose, although it is bor
rowed from Jules Romains . ) Ehrenburg closes the left wing of
contemporary Russian prose.
1 07
T H E S TA T E O F R U S S IA N L I T E R A T U R E 1 08
The law of revolution is red, fiery, deadly; but this death means
the birth of new life, a new star. And the law of entropy is cold,
ice blue, like the icy interplanetary infinities. The flame turns
from red to an even, warm pink, no longer deadly, but com
fortable. The sun ages into a planet, convenient for highways,
stores, beds, prostitutes, prisons : this is the law. And if the planet
is to be kindled into youth again, it must be set on fire, it must be
thrown off the smooth highway of evolution: this is the law.
The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow ( in
the Book of Genesis days are equal to years, ages) . But someone
must see this already today, and speak heretically today about to
morrow. Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the
entropy of human thought.
This is what children ask. But then children are the boldest
philosophers. They enter life naked, not covered by the smallest
fig leaf of dogma, absolutes, creeds. This is why every question
they ask is so absurdly naive and so frighteningly complex. The
new men entering life today are as naked and fearless as chil
dren ; and they, too, like children, like Schopenhauer, Dostoyev
sky, Nietzsche, ask "Why?" and "What next?" Philosophers of
genius, children, and the people are equally wise-because they
ask equally foolish questions. Foolish to a civilized man who has
a well-furnished European apartment, with an excellent toilet,
and a well-furnished dogma.
are movi ng fast, the c anoni zed, the c ustomary eludes the eye:
henc e, the unusual, often startli ng, symboli sm and voc abulary.
The i mage i s sharp, synthetic , wi th a si ngle sali ent featu re-the
one featu re you wil l gli mpse from a speedi ng c ar. The c ustom
hallowed lexicon has been i nvaded by provi ncialisms, neologi sms,
sci enc e, mathematics, tec hnology.
I f thi s bec omes the rule, the wri ter's talent c onsi sts i n maki ng
the rule the exc epti on. There are far more wri ters who turn the ex
c epti on i nto the rul� .
Sci enc e :m d art both projec t the world along c ertai n c oordi
nates. Diff erence s i n form are du e only to diff erenc es i n the
c oordi nates. All reali stic forms are proj ec ti ons along the fixed,
plane c oordi nates of Euc li d's world. These c oordi nates do not
exi st in nature. Nor does the fini te, fixed world; thi s world i s a
c onventi on, an abstrac ti on, an unreali ty. And therefore R eali sm
-be i t " soci ali st" or " bourgeoi s" -i s u nreal. Far c loser to reali ty
i s proj ec ti on along speedi ng, c urved su rfac es- as i n the new
mathematic s and th e new art. Reali sm that i s not pri mi ti ve, not
realia but realiora, c onsi sts i n di splac ement, di storti on, c urvatu re,
nonobj ec ti vi ty. Only the c amera lens i s obj ec ti ve.
A new form i s not i ntelli gi ble to everyone; many find i t diffi
c ult. P erhaps. The ordi nary, the banal i s, of c ourse, si mpler, more
pleasant, more c omfortable. E uc li d's world i s very si mple, and
Ei nstei n's world i s very diffic ult- but i t i s no longer possi ble to
return to Euc li d. No revoluti on, no heresy i s c omfortable or easy.
For i t i s a leap, i t i s a break i n the smooth evoluti onary cu rve, and
a break is a wou nd, a pai n. Bu t the wou nd i s nec essary: most of
manki nd suff ers from heredi tary sleepi ng sic kness, and vic ti ms
of thi s sic kness (entropy ) must not be a llowed to sleep, or i t wi ll
be thei r final sleep, death.
The same di sease often affiicts arti sts and wri ters: they si nk
i nto sati ated slumber i n forms onc e i nvented and twic e perfec ted.
And they lac k the strength to wou nd themselves, to c ease lovi ng
what they onc e loved, to leave th ei r old, fami li ar apartments
filled wi th the sc ent of laurel leaves and walk away i nto the open
field, to start anew.
Of c ourse, to wound oneself i s diffic ult, even dangerous. But
for those who are ali ve, li vi ng today as yes terday and yesterday
as today i s sti ll more diffic ult.
1 923
T H E DAY AN D
TH E AG E
1
To the female sparrow it undoubtedly seems that her gray little
mate does not twitter, but sings-and sings not a bit worse than
the nightingale : that, in fact, he can put the best of nightingales
to shame. Such a sparrow world has prevailed in our literary
criticism in recent years. The she sparrows have listened to their
mates with melting hearts, adoring them in all sincerity. And the
sparrow flocks are teeming all around us to this day-just as they
do during the Lenten season in March, pecking out treasures in
the yellowed ruts with deafening chatter. But now we are be
ginning to hear nonsparrow voices as well, with sufficient courage
to tell themselves and others that the chirping, enchanting as it is
( to the mate ) , and highly useful ( for breeding purposes) , is,
nevertheless, nothing more than chirping.
Fortunately, songs that give pleasure not only to she sparrows
but to birds of any breed, and to man as well, are still heard, and,
like all songs, they are, above all, truthful. And they can be dis
tinguished at once.
Truth is the first thing that present-day literature lacks. The
writer has drowned himself in lies, he is too accustomed to speak
prudently, with a careful look over the shoulder. This is why our
literature fulfills so poorly even the most elementary task assigned
to it by history-the task of seeing our astonishing, unique epoch,
with all that it contains of the revolting and the beautiful, and
recording it as it is. The interminable, century-long decade of
1 9 1 3-23 might well have been a dream; one day man will
awaken, rub his eyes-and the dream will be gone, because it has
1 13
T H E S TA T E O F R U S S IA N L I T E R A T U R E 1 14
not been told. What remains in our literature of the war? For the
purpose of hatching patriotic eggs, it was considered useful to
wrap them in a thick layer of tinsel. And almost nothing remains
today except the tinsel.
The tinseling turns out to be a hereditary disease : it was in
herited by our present-day, postrevolutionary literature, and
three-quarters of this literature in solidly tinseled. Our virtuous
modesty is so great, that the moment naked truth flashes its bare
knee or belly before the footlights, we hastily throw an operatic
toga over it.
In America there is a society for the suppression of vice which
once decided, in order to prevent temptation, that all the naked
statues in a New York museum must be dressed in little skirts,
like those of ballet dancers. These puritan skirts are merely
ridiculous, and do little damage : if they have not yet been re
moved, a new generation will remove them and see the statues
as they are. But when a writer dresses his novel in such a skirt,
it is no longer laughable. And when this is done not by one, but
by dozens of writers, it becomes a menace. These skirts cannot
be removed, and future generations will have to learn about our
epoch from tinseled, straw-filled dummies. They will receive far
fewer literary documents than they might have. And it is there
fore all the more important to point out such documents where
they exist.
2
In all our "literary and social" journals, the department of belles
lettres plays only a subsidiary role; it is merely a vestibule for the
uninitiated, meant to lead them into the sanctuary of the other
department. Literary documents are, perhaps, more likely to be
found in anthologies, where literature is offered not only to entice
the public to a "concert meeting" ( at one time such meetings were
in fashion everywhere, but today they survive only in the literary
field ) , but to draw the public to a concert proper.
And so, here are four of the latest anthologies : Nedra, no. 1 ;
Nashi dni, no. 2 ; Krug, no. 3 ; and Rol, no. 3 .
Nedra [The depths] is clear kin to the former Zemlya [Land ] .
Its name seems to suggest that the layer o f black earth has been
dug to great depths, and that treasures which have lain buried for
many years have at last been brought into the light.
1 15 The Day and the Age
beaten faces of all the passersby, and down the faces of the old
men," and "tremble brightly in the eyes of the young girls."
Yet the ore mined by Serafimovich for his Iron Stream is so
rich that even its operatic processing could not entirely devalue
it. Some of the scenes are memorable. There are occasional apt
images (Horpyna's husband has "hands like hooves"; the cos
sacks have "frenzied, beefy eyes" ) ; one flashing second in the
mountains is done well ( p . 1 1 1 ) . But these are as scarce as the
righteous in Gomorrah.
Sergeyev-Tsensky chose one of the simplest forms of the skaz
for "The Professor's Story" : the Red Army commander Ry
bochkin tells the author the story of his life. There is no trace
here of that tense, agitated language, the last ripples of which
were still present in "Movements." The neoclassicism of this
story is entirely justified by the form chosen and is, of course,
vastly superior to operatic peudoclassicism. The web of the story
is strong and honest from beginning to end. Only one page (p.
1 94 ) -a philosophic excursion by the author-lapses from
literary to journalistic prose. And yet, perhaps it is precisely this
page that lifts the story above the level of a mere "picture of con
temporary life."
The only modem piece in Nedra is Bulgakov's "Diaboliad."
The author unquestionably possesses the right instinct in the
choice of his compositional base-fantasy rooted in actual life,
rapid, cinematic succession of scenes--one of the few formal
frameworks which can encompass our yesterday-1 9 19, 1 920.
The term "cinematic" is all the more applicable to this work
since the entire novella is two-dimensional, done on a single
plane ; everything is on the surface, and there is no depth of scene
whatever. With B ulgakov, Nedra loses its classical ( and pseudo
classical ) innocence for what I believe is the first time, and as
happens so frequently, the provincial old maid is seduced by the
very first brash young man from the capital. The absolute value
of this piece, somehow too thoughtless, is not so great, but good
works can apparently be expected from its author.
In its choice of poems, Nedra still clings to its Realistic vir
ginity-and clings to it so rigidly that the verses of Kirillov, Polon
skaya, and Oreshin have the sameness of ten-kopek coins : of the
six poems published, four even have the same meter-iambic
tetrameter.
1 17 The Day and the Age
3
The earth, as we know, rests on three whales. An anthology, as
we know, must rest on one. In Nedra ( no. 3 ) the deputy whale
is Serafimovich; in Nashi dni [Our days] the temporary acting
whale is Shishkov. In Nedra we have Ukrainian opera; in Nashi
dni, the melodrama The Gang.
It seems to be an epidemic disease today : the writers of fiction
have forgotten how to finish their works. The endings are always
worse than the beginnings. The roots of this may lie in our epoch
itself, so like a novel the end of which even Shklovsky3 cannot
compute with his arithmetic. This ending sickness afflicts Sera
fimovich. Shishkov suffers from the same disease : at the finish
of The Gang he limps into melodrama.
The subject matter of The Gang is well chosen. It is not spur
ious, Meyerholdian, but genuinely of the "rearing earth." It deals
with an elemental uprising of Siberian peasants against Kolchak4
-with that "Bolshevism of the soil" which Blok considered to
be the whole essence of the history of our recent years. This
theme is curiously intertwined with another, at first glance quite
unexpected : Lenin and the schismatic's leather rosary; Bolshe
viks from among the Old Believers. The author contrives to pass
unscathed through this psychological paradox : the Old Believer
partisans demolish churches and chop off the heads of priests
with a clear conscience-because those churches and those
priests are Nikonian, of the antichrist. Very forthrightly, with
brutal, Gorky-like directness, without covering the truth in any
Quaker skirts, Shishkov shows us a paralyzed old woman thrown
out of a window, a priest sawed in two, a public execution.
Shishkov has coped successfully with the staging of these most
difficult scenes, but beginning with act 3-with chapter 1 0
o f his novel-his actors launch into melodrama : they gurgle,
wheeze, growl, howl, moan.
" 'The scum, why didn't they wait!' Naperstok wheezed
hoarsely."
"Growling and squealing, he gnawed his own hands, tore his
clothes, howled and rolled on the ground."
3 Victor Shklovsky (b. 1 893 ) , writer and critic, one of the founders of
the Formalist school which stressed literary technique and devices.
4 A. V. Kolchak ( 1 870-1 920) , one of the leaders of the White forces in
the civil war following the revolution.
T H E S TA T E O F R U S S IA N L I T E R A T U R E 118
4
The third anthology is Krug [Circle]. The first two issues were
breaths of fresh air. The third suddenly has a dense smell of
naphthalene from way back in the 1 8 60s. Just recently Luna
charsky 5 repented his former patronage of Futurism and took
under his wing a certain Ostrovsky. Could this most recent slo
gan-"Back to Ostrovsky ! "-have affected Krug as well?
But if only it were "back to Ostrovsky"! It is back to Uspen
sky, and not Gleb, not Nikolay,6 but A. Uspensky. What this
Uspensky, the author of "Retraining," needs is simply training
of the most elementary kind; he needs to learn at least the rudi
ments of the technique of the short story, he needs to learn how
to sew on his moral with a needle at least a little smaller than
the huge burlap needle he uses today.
The only modem element in the story is its theme, the post
revolutionary province. The author's purpose is not art, but a
sermon; he wants to "expose" this province-and not rudely
but as patriotically as possible. Even such a curtsying satire,
however, was deemed too dangerous by the editors, and the
story was published with a fig-leaf "preface" glued on in the
appropriate place.
Inspired by the very latest of the Russian writers he has read
-Denis Fonvizin7-A. Uspensky begins by labeling his heroes :
Abcin (a teacher, of course! ) , Taxov ( of the Finance Depart
ment-obviously ! ) , Sedulov, Silensky. After that, these allegori
cal figures stride across the pages, while the author, his hand
inside the lapel of his frock coat (a long one-surely below the
knees ) moralizes to them :
"Ah, Duncetown, Duncetown! How good it would be to dry
out the mud you're wallowing in; to clean you up, to tidy you
and dress you up; to teach you to partake of the new happiness
-rational and splendid! "
The exhortation to "plant the seeds o f the reasonable, the
good, the eternal"8 does not appear anywhere in the story. But
the author clearly winds up every oration about his native Dunce
town with precisely this homily-and old ladies, male and fe
male, wipe away their tears.
It would, however, be libelous to say that A. Uspensky rests
blissfully on Fonvizin; he reads current newspapers, and in doing
this, he is himself Sedulov, and he culls from them the most tin
selly cliches. One feels sorry for the sedulous author, and even
sorrier for the rich anecdotal material he ruins in working it over.
The innocence of the Naturalism of the 1 8 60s, unclouded by
any compositional or stylistic heresies, prevails in Aizman's
novel, Their Life, Their Death, and in the stories by Shishkov
( "The Black Hour" ) and Fedorovich ( "A Tale about the God
Kichag and Fyodor Kuzmich" ) .
Aizman's novel is from the French, a Ut Zola. Shishkov's story
belongs to his very old (and, generally, old) ethnographic series
-the form he began with. The present day may be found only
in the topic of Fedorovich's story.
Fedorovich's signboard calling his story a skaz should receive
no more credence than the signboard over a store-"Vasily
Fyodorov from Paris." This is not a skaz, it is simply a story,
occasionally freshened by folk expressions in the author's asides.
One day perhaps he will succeed in producing a skaz: he has a
good sense of dialogue and of the humor inherent in folk speech.
The author (or the editor?) with quite a serious mien provides
notes explaining the Ukrainian words used by his characters. The
plot is as instructive as the notes; it concerns the overthrow by
a Communist cell of the statue of Alexander I ( "Fyodor Koz
mich" ) , around which a folk legend has been created. The author
has succeeded, however, in avoiding tinsel, although the subject
offers ample opportunity for its use.
The four other authors represented in Krug have also been
caught in the charmed circle of the skaz form : Babel ( "The
Sin of Jesus") , Leonov ( "Yegorushka's Death") , Forsh ( "Two
Bases" ) , and Rukavishnikov ( "The Buffoon's Tale") .
8 A quotation from "To the Sowers," a poem by N. A. Nekrasov,
radical nineteenth-century poet.
Isaac Babel
1 23 The Day and the Age
Of the four, Babel is the most successful with the form. The
entire little story, including the author's comments, is composed
of elements of folk dialogue; the needed synonyms are chosen
with great skill, and clever use is made of the syntactic deforma
tions typical of folk speech. Work over the ornament did not, as
so often happens, make the author forget his compositional prob
lem. And one more thing : Babel remembers that, in addition to
eyes, tongue, and the rest, he also has a brain, which many
writers today treat as a rudimentary organ-something like an
appendix. The little story is raised above the material of daily
life and illuminated by serious thought.
In Leonov's skaz, the three-dimensional screen of daily life
also expands occasionally into the fantastic ( the appearance of
the little monk Agapy ) . But at the end it is as though the author
suddenly looked down upon the earth, felt dizzy, and made a
hurried dive back into the plane of reality. The flight of Yego
rushka and Agapy on "human birds," which promised to de
velop into something important, is revealed by the author to
have been nothing more than a dream; a lame ending is attached
to the story (again the "end sickness") .
The entire story is built in a kind of churchly manner, and
becomes cloying in spots. This is the result of an overabundance
of affectionate diminutives and occasional transpositions of word
order ("of northern lights the flames," "soft and damp, the
earth," and so on) . Leonov's vocabulary is rich and bold, as it
always is, with many very organic neologisms. The mistakes in
the story are good mistakes : they result from the difficulty of
the tasks the author sets himself, and a fondness for difficult
tasks is a good sign.
The task which Olga Forsh set herself was much easier: she
sought to capture in a lively skaz form a piece of "revolutionary
life"-the religious revolution taking place today. The form is
followed consistently and skillfully ; yet this is only the plane sur
face of daily life, and only the already canonized skaz form. One
prefers to see a writer make good mistakes in a difficult under
taking-they are more valuable than easy achievements.
Rukavishnikov's experiment in versified skaz is most interest
ing. The rhythmic structure of the folk epic ( Rukavishnikov
attempts to revive this form ) and the rhythmic structure of liter
ary prose, essentially analogous, have not yet been adequately
T H E S TA T E 0 F R U S S IA N L I T E R A T U R E 1 24
5
Next to the solid Nashi dni, the well-fed Nedra, the rotund Krug,
a lean little stranger with an odd name, Rol, timidly sits down on
the edge of a chair. The men in frock coats and riding breeches
don't notice him, and yet the stranger is worth talking to-and
talking about.
Not its verse; here we find the same golden mean of different
degrees of purity. But of its four prose writers, two-Lidin
and Ivan Novikov-are superior to a good many in its solid
neighbors.
In the paintings of the French Impressionists one often sees
color reflections on faces-green from leaves, orange from or
anges, raspberry red from an umbrella. Similar extraneous re
flections have colored Lidin's face from his very first stories,
colored by Bunin. Today he is in the shadow of Tolstoy, and
Lidin's face shows Tolstoyan hues. But this is as natural as the
fact that there is a sky over us. And under this sky, Lidin's
"One Night" turned out to be dense and full-bodied. Its topic,
close to our time, is the recent war. The plot, skillfully devel
oped, with effective pauses, is combined with a language made
fresh by seemingly simple shifts in its symbolism ( "the sun fleck
of a shy smile," "the stars poured out strongly" ) . And behind
this external fabric, one senses a certain synthesis which lends
the story perspective and depth.
There is even greater synthesis and deeper perspective in Ivan
Novikov's story, "Angel on Earth."
The myth about the angel who rebelled against his Lord is the
most beautiful of all myths, the proudest, the most revolution-
1 25 The Day and the Age
6
This word, "present-day," which slipped in inadvertently, is
nowadays the most widely used yardstick in measuring art. What
is of today is good, what is not of today is bad. Or, the contem
porary is good ; the uncontemporary is bad.
But that is just the point: there can be no such "or." The
"present-day" and the "contemporary" do not exist within the
same dimensions. In practice, the "present-day" has no dimension
in time-it dies tomorrow. But the "contemporary" exists in the
temporal dimension of the epoch. That which is of the day greed
ily clutches at life, indiscriminate in its choice of means : it must
hurry, it has only until tomorrow. And hence , that which is of
the day is invariably shifty, nimble, servile, lightweight, afraid
to dig an inch deeper, afraid to see the naked truth. The con
temporary, that which is of the age, is above the day, it may be
out of tune with it, it may be ( or may seem to be ) nearsighted
because it is farsighted, because it looks ahead. The present-day
takes from the epoch only its coloration, its skin; it lives by the
law of mimicry. But the contemporary takes its heart and its
mind from the epoch-it lives by the law of inheritance.
T H E S TA T E 0 F R U S S f A N L I T E R A T U R E 1 26
is that his work be sincere, that it lead the reader forward instead
of back, that it disturb the reader rather than reassure and lull
his mind.
But where forward? And how far forward? In the answer to
these questions we find the basic error of the majority of today's
critics and the majority of writers who are obediently following
critics incapable of thinking dialectically.
We feel that the correct answer to these questions should be :
the farther the better, the more valuable. Reduction of prices,
better sanitation in the cities, tractorization of the village-all this
is very good; it is, naturally, a movement forward. I can imagine
an excellent newspaper article on these topics ( an article that
will be forgotten the next day ) . But I find it difficult to imagine
a work by Lev Tolstoy or Romain Rolland based on improvement
of sanitation. I find it difficult to imagine readers truly, deeply
moved by such a sanitary Tolstoy.
It is time, at last, to understand that the stubborn limitation of
writers to the area of "minor affairs" creates only a philistine,
subservient literature, and nothing more. It is time to understand
that literature, like science, is divided into major and minor
branches, each with its own tasks. There is a firm division of
surgery into "major" and "minor." "Major surgery" carries
science forward; "minor surgery" fulfills daily, current needs.
"Major surgery" conducts the experiments of Carrel and Voron
off; "minor surgery" bandages a sprained arm. Astronomy is
divided into major and minor: the former seeks to determine the
course of the solar system; the latter recommends methods of
determining a ship's position at sea. If we compel Carrel to
bandage sprains, we shall obtain one more male nurse; of course,
this would be useful, but stupid, for in gaining a male nurse,
humanity would lose a scientific genius.
Our criticism is pushing Russian literature today into the role
of male nurse; the name of the sickness that afflicts Russian litera
ture is malenursism. No wonder Marietta Shaginyan (whom all
the Gorbachevs have recently invested with the formal title of
"Left Fellow Traveler" ) lost patience and cried out in her book,
Daily Life and A rt, that one of the reasons why "the writer is
sick" is lack of "projections of the future." She made a single
mistake : this is not one of the reasons, but the only reason, to
which, broadly speaking, all the others reduce themselves.
T H E S T A T E 0 F R U S S IA N L I T E R A T U R E 1 30
- ------
A P I E C E F O R AN
ANTH O LO GY O N B O O KS
When my children come out into the street badly dressed, it hurts
me. When street urchins throw stones at them from behind a
corner, I suffer. When a surgeon approaches them with forceps
or a knife, I think I would prefer that he cut my own body.
My children are my books : I have no others.
There are books of the same chemical composition. as dyna
mite. The only difference is that a piece of dynamite explodes
once, while a book explodes a thousand times.
Man ceased to be an ape, vanquished the ape, on the day when
the first book was written. The ape has not forgotten it to this
day : try and give it a book-it will immediately spoil it, tear it up,
befoul it.
23 December 1 928
131
M 0 S C OW-PETE R S B U R G
1 32
133 Moscow-Petersburg
ings are still drier, more abstract and bare than the model they
are patterned on. A typical example of this style is the dark, grim
cube of the Lenin Institute on Tverskaya Street, in the very
center of Moscow. Some of the left-wing Moscow architects
have proclaimed this American-Berlin style proletarian ( and
hence, the most fashionable) . However-the proletariat refused
to believe them and protested vigorously when these dreary cubes
began to rise in workers' districts. As one of the most prominent
Moscow architects, Shchusev, admitted, "We have found that the
simplified Constructivist type of architecture is not always ac
ceptable or understandable to the masses . . . . The boxlike, poorly
designed exterior of the buildings quickly wearied the eye . . . .
It became necessary to study the works of the great masters of
earlier epochs . . . . Architecture cannot solve its tasks without
mastery of the two related arts-painting and sculpture."
with the need to seek a way out i n works accessible to the mass
consumer-in colonizing the realm of applied art.
The beginning of this colonization had been made by Peters
burg back in the years of war communism : it launched a great
exodus of artists into the book field-to work in book illustration.
A number of publishers sprang up in Petersburg, gathering
around them first-rate artists and leaving a legacy of small mu
seums of art on the shelves of booklovers (these include the
excellent publications of such houses as Akvilon, Petropolis, and
Academia) . With the demise of the NEP, these private publish
ing houses were liquidated as capitalist enterprises, but their
cultural traditions and their technical forces remained and have
concentrated during the past two years chiefly around two pub
lishing houses-the cooperative Izdatelstvo Pisatelei [Writers'
Publishing House] and the Academia, which was taken over by
the government. Petersburg was followed, somewhat later, by
Moscow, and fine literary publishing houses appeared there as
well. In the meantime, however, the best examples of fine book
publishing are still produced in Petersburg. At any rate, both
Moscow and Petersburg are witnessing the characteristic phe
nomenon of the mass migration of artists from the easel to the
book.
A relatively small number of painters found the door open to
another area, measured not by the centimeters of the book page,
but by the dozens of meters of stage sets. In this field, Moscow
has taken the unquestioned lead, and for a long time "all-out
fashion" was dictated both to Petersburg and to the rest of Russia
by Meyerhold. This new fashion of "Constructivist sets, which
expelled all traces of painting from the theater and abolished
theatrical costumes ( replacing them by the same "industrial
clothing" for all characters) , was parallel in its schematic char
acter and bareness to what was taking place in other fields as
well. Fortunately, Meyerhold is the product of long Petersburg
schooling, and, most important of all, he is far more talented
than his left-wing neighbors in the other arts. Therefore, the
scenic artists who worked in accordance with his principles pro
duced a number of extremely interesting works ( such as those
of the Moscow artists Nivinsky, Rabinovich, and Shlepyanov,
and the Petersburg artists Dmitriev and Akimov) . But this
skeletal, geometric fashion has already been abandoned even by.
1 39 Moscow-Petersburg
its orginator. Side by side with a return to colorful sets and rich
costumes (especially in opera and the ballet) , the last word today
is the method of "concentrated realism," which demands the
construction on the stage of "three-dimensional sets" and the
furnishing of the play with a minimum of "real things."
the tastes of the theatergoer and ( which was even more important
in terms of practical consequences ) the tastes of the Moscow
authorities clearly shifted toward Stanislavsky about two years
ago. Even before that, Meyerhold entered a period of failures with
the production of Mayakovsky's The Bathhouse. He recouped
his position to some extent, though far from fully, by his produc
tions of The Inspector General and Woe from Wit.2 But even
his brilliant directorial imagination could not save the poor play
Introduction, produced last season. Just recently, Meyerhold's
Petersburg vassal, the Alexandrinsky Theater, turned from him :
direction of this theater came into the hands of an old pupil of
Stanislavsky.
This theatrical shift from the extreme left to the center is also
reflected in the repertoire, in which we see the reappearance of
the classics, pushing the often second-rate Soviet plays into the
background. From the period of risky experiments, the Moscow
theater is moving over to a calmer and more organized activity,
to a consolidation of its victories. The defeated Petersburg theaters
glow only with the reflected light of Moscow. The only fort which
has not yet hoisted a white flag is the Petersburg Theater of Opera
and Ballet, the former Mariinsky Theater, which still competes
for first place with the Moscow Bolshoi.
The first postrevolutionary decade was a difficult period for
opera and ballet, both in Petersburg and in Moscow. The com
panies of those two theaters were bled more severely than dra
matic companies by the loss of first-rate artists abroad. These
losses were recouped more rapidly by the Petersburg Mariinsky
Theater, which had inherited from the imperial era both a wealth
of tradition and a better school, especially in ballet. Another
troubled area was in the repertoire : attempts were made to
sovietize it at forced speed. But the light skiff of opera and ballet
turned out to be ill adapted to the transportation of the heavy
load of utilitarianism. Most of the "industrial" propaganda ballets
and operas were fiascoes ( the ballet Bolt in Petersburg, the opera
Breakthrough in Moscow, and so on) . This caused a turn to the
classic repertoire, expressed even more sharply in opera and
ballet than in drama. In addition, Petersburg also found another
solution : it opened its window on Europe and produced a series
Sergey Yesenin
1 47 Moscow-Petersburg
to build the new not on totally denuded ground, but on the foun
dation of the earlier, Western culture, even if it was branded by
the odious designation of "bourgeois." Both Yesenin and Maya
kovsky were hostile to the West : the former, in the name of a
unique brand of Slavophilism, in the name of faith in a Bolshevik
peasant Russia; the latter, in the name of a new, Moscow
American, supermechanized, Communist Russia. Of all the
Petersburg poets of those years, Blok was the only anti-Westerner
(witness his magnificent poems, "The Scythians" and "The
Twelve" ) . However, his revulsion against the West reached such
extremes that it grew into a certain revulsion against the revolu
tion itself when the dry Marxist skeleton began to protrude more
and more insistently from under its original elemental forms.
But Blok spoke only for himself; he walked alone, followed by
no one. This became especially obvious when Blok failed to win
reelection as chairman of the Petersburg Poets' Union and was
replaced by Gumilyov. Gumilyov is known abroad chiefly be
cause he was shot by the Cheka, and yet he must take his place
in the history of the new Russian literature as an important poet
and leader of the typically Petersburg poetic school-the Acme
ists. The compass of Acmeism clearly pointed west. The helms
man of the Acmeist ship sought to rationalize the poetic element
and gave major stress to work on poetic technology. It was not
accidental that, in the field of art, Blok and Gumilyov were ene
mies. And it is not accidental that a seemingly paradoxical phe
nomenon has been observed in Soviet poetry in recent years : in
order to learn how to write, the younger generation of proletarian
poets studies the poems of the rationalist romantic Gumilyov,
rather than those of Yesenin or the author of the revolutionary
poem "The Twelve," Blok.
The poetic school of the Acmeists existed at that time in
Petersburg not only figuratively, but literally, in the shape of the
Literary Studio (attached to the Petersburg House of the Arts ) ,
which played a major role i n the development of Soviet literature.
At this studio, Gumilyov gave a course in poetics and conducted
a poetry seminar. Similar work in the department of criticism was
performed by the young critic V. Shklovsky, and in the depart
ment of prose, by the author of the present essay.
It would, perhaps, not be an exaggeration to say that the cold,
unheated lecture rooms of the Studio, where both the lecturers and
1 49 Moscow-Petersburg
happy memory, who turned their group into a kind of assay office
for the new Soviet literature." In the life of the country this was
a period of momentous events. The radical qgrarian revolution,
the feverish industrialization-these should have given artists a
wealth of material, but not, of course, as a matter of "doing a
job," of working under command, of hurried production, which
contradict the very essence of the creative process-a process
far more complex than the commanders of the RAPP imagined.
Some of the most important writers, who understood ( or, rather,
felt) the danger of such "service," almost ceased to appear in
print ( Babel, Seifulina, Sergeyev-Tsensky, and others ) . Others
chose to withdraw from this danger into past centuries. Thus, the
sudden revival of the Russian historical novel (A. N. Tolstoy,
Olga Forsh, Yury Tynyanov ) . And characteristically, this, again,
took place in Petersburg.
At the same time, however, both Petersburg and Moscow
writers produced a number of works on the most topical subjects :
industrialization, "wrecking activities," defense, and so on. Suc
cessful works in these areas were but rare exceptions, and those
were produced solely by Communist writers ( Sholokhov, Afino
genov ) , for entirely understandable reasons. These writers were
not compelled to give constant proof of their reliability at the ex
pense of artistic truth. Most of the novels and plays written by
Fellow Travelers as a matter of obligatory service, without genu
ine creative enthusiasm, turned out to be considerably inferior
to their authors' general level ( Pilnyak's The Volga Falls into
the Caspian Sea, Katayev's Vanguard, Leonov's Sot, N. Tikho
nov's War, N. Nikitin's In the Line of Fire, The Busy Workshop
by Forsh, and others ) .
It became increasingly obvious that all was not well in litera
ture. The symptoms of literary anemia developed with alarming
speed where only recently there had been flourishing health.
Clearly, some energetic treatment was needed to put the patient
back on his feet.
Br
..... eH
_ 11M
aM
--c:;,._ HT
TH E PSYC H O LO GY
O F C R EATIVE WO R K
1 59
T H E W R I T E R 'S C RA F T 1 60
How does a plot come into being? Where does the writer get it
from? From life? But did Tolstoy know all the characters who
people his War and Peace-Bolkonsky, Pierre, Natasha, the
Rostovs? Had he ever seen Napoleon, who died decades before
the writing of War and Peace? Had Hoffmann ever seen the
archivist Lindhorst and the student Anselmus, whom he had put
into a glass bottle? Had Dostoyevsky ever seen the Karamazovs?
Had Andrey Bely known his geometric Senator Apollon Apol
lonovich, and Lipanchenko, and Alexander Ivanovich, and all
the other characters in his Petersburg? Of course not. All these
people, all these living people--Bolkonsky, Pierre, Natasha, the
Rostovs, the Karamazovs, Senator Apollon Apollonovich-all
of them had been given birth by the writer, who created them
out of himself.
1 65
T H E W R I T E R 'S C R A F T 1 66
for the end of the novella, novel, or story. If they are brought in
earlier, the reader will not be able to respond to the subsequent
situations which have a lesser emotional charge.
This law of emotional economy has its corollary-the need
for interludes. Emotional intensification in a literary work should
be followed by a breathing spell, by a lessening of tension. The
reader cannot be subjected to forte all the time, or he will turn
deaf. The tempo and the volume of the sound must vary. This
rule applies equally to the novel, the novella, and the long story.
Very short stories of two or three pages can reach the reader
even if they are written throughout in a high key ; the reader's
attention will have no time to slacken. He can read and respond
to the story in a single breath. In a longer work, the breathing
spell, the interlude, can be achieved by one of several methods.
The simplest, but also the crudest and most primitive method
is to insert episodes. In other words, the narrative is interrupted
by additional, inserted stories, essentially unconnected or con
nected very tenuously with the basic plot. There are many exam
ples of this : Dostoyevsky's story about the merchant Vosko
boynikov, the stories of Akhilla and of the dwarf in Leskov's
Cathedral Folk. All of this achieves its purpose, but, as I have
said, it spoils the architecture and disrupts the harmony of the
work.
Other methods are the author's lyrical disgressions and com
ments. These were often employed by Gogol, as in his "Troyka."
Among the new writers, we find such digressions in Remizov
and Bely, both of whom derive from Gogol. This device, how
ever, although it achieves its end, giving the reader a rest and
diverting him from the flow of the plot, has a serious drawback : it
permits the reader to awaken for a time, it cools him and weak
ens the spell of the work. It is as though an actor were to re
move his makeup in the middle of the play, say a few words in
his own voice, and then go on. Especially bad is the device of
comments by the author, telling the reader about the feelings of
his heroes which had already been shown in action. This is al
ways superfluous; this is chewing the cud. An example of this is
Chekhov's "The Husband."
Another means of achieving an interlude is description of the
landscape or the situation in which the action is taking place.
T H E W R I T E R 'S C RA F T 1 72
1 75
T H E W R I T E R'S C RA F T 1 76
The writer not only uses language, he also creates it; he creates
its rules, its forms, and its vocabulary. He must therefore be fully
aware of his responsibility in the choice of words. He must choose
words capable of enriching the language, words that will purify
it rather than litter it.
The prime source and creator of language is the people. We
must study folklore. We must listen carefully to folk speech.
2 This is followed by a page of brilliant analysis which, unfortunately,
had to be omitted since it deals specifically with Russian forms.
T H E W R I T E R 'S C RA F T 1 80
Here we may find such unexpected images, such apt and witty
epithets, such expressive words as will never occur to city people
brought up on newspapers, to intellectuals whose language has
been corrupted by newspapers. All these gems must be dug up,
and not in big cities, but in the depths of the Russian heartland
-in the provinces. ( We must not, however, forget Pushkin's
dictum that the best Russian may be learned from the old women
of Moscow, her bakers of communion bread. ) Generally, the
truest and purest Russian survives only in the central Russian
provinces and, I will add, in the Russian north-in the Olonetsk
and Archangel regions. Only here can you learn the Russian lan
guage, only here can you draw on resources that can truly en
rich literary Russian.
In the western Russian provinces, the Russian language has
been corrupted by Byelorussian and Polish influences; in the
provinces of southern Russia, by admixtures of Polish, Ukrain
ian and Yiddish. The use of southern and western provincialisms
in dialogue is, of course, entirely legitimate. But it would be a
gross error to introduce them into the text, into the author's
comments or descriptions of landscape. This fault is especially
pronounced in the works of southern writers, since the worst
adulteration of the language has occurred in the south and par
ticularly in Odessa.
In addition to the living sources capable of enriching the Rus
sian language, there are also literary ones. These include above
all folk poetry, epics, tales and songs. In order to utilize these,
we must, of course, use primary materials, such as the texts re
corded by the Russian Geographic Society of the Academy of
Science, rather than anthologies and reworked versions. And,
finally, we shall not go wrong if we go still further upstream, to
the very origins of Russian, in our search for verbal gems ; if we
study old Slavonic texts, apocrypha, hymnals, and lives of the
saints-especially those of the Old Believers. If you compare the
Church Slavonic literature of the Old Believers with the Ortho
dox texts, you will discover the enormous difference between
them. And this difference is not in favor of the Orthodox books,
because during the reign of Peter the Great ecclesiastical books,
and particularly the lives of saints, were revised, censored, and
badly mutilated. The deletions include accounts of a number of
delightfully absurd miracles-a tribute to the nascent spirit of
1 81 On Language
You will achieve originality and make the reader feel that you
speak your own language only if you draw directly upon pri
mary sources.
A few words must be said here about the technical methods
to be followed in using provincialisms and old Russian words.
Some writers, totally devoid of taste, generously interlard their
text with provincialisms or, even worse, with foreign words, ex
plaining them in notes at the bottom of the page. It is quite ob
vious that such footnotes distract the reader, divert his atten
tion, and break the spell of the work. They are absolutely inad
missible. On the other hand, it is equally inadmissible to litter
the text with words which are entirely incomprehensible to the
reader. What is the solution? The solution lies in presenting
an entirely new and unfamiliar word in such a way that the
reader will understand its general sense, if not its exact mean
ing. Sometimes this may be difficult, and then another method
may be used : next to the unfamiliar word you add a clarifying
apposition or a better-known synonym. You will thus make sure
the reader understands you, without vitiating the effect and with
out the pedantic device of the footnote.
Up to now we have spoken about various sources for the en
richment of the language. In addition to these outside sources,
however, the writer has still another one, closer home : himself.
What I want to say is that the writer has the right to create new
words-so-called neologisms. There is no doubt that the primary
sources of language which we draw upon as a matter of course
were also enriched in the same manner-by the creation of neo
logisms. Among the people, we often encounter men who are
never at a loss for words, men with an innate talent for language.
And just as the man endowed with musical talent will naturally
create new melodies, so the man with linguistic talent will create
new words. And if these new words are apt and expressive, they
remain fixed in the memory of the listeners and gradually acquire
the rights of citizenship. The use of neologisms is the natural
path of the development and enrichment of language. Indeed, it
is the only path. And the writer must not be denied the right to
create them.
However, the only viable neologisms are those which are in
harmony with the laws and spirit of the language, those which
are created by the subconscious rather than invented. Neolo-
1 83 On Language
narrative form. If you use spoken forms, you will say : "I dined,
drank my coffee, lit a cigar, and settled down to read a novel."
In spoken language, you use particles such as "well" and "now."
This is similar to folk usage ; the only difference is that folk
speech uses them more frequently and has a greater variety
of them.
When words express intense emotion or passion, this verbal
clothing is never neatly buttoned all the way in living speech,
it is always careless, often fragmentary. In such dramatic scenes,
speech is characterized by incomplete sentences, by omission of
such parts of speech as subjects and predicates; it is feverish,
broken.
It might seem unnecessary to point out that dialogue must be
couched in living, conversational language. If I do so, it is only
because our writers, even modern ones, frequently write dia
logue in corseted, pomaded, oratorical language. This is espe
cially true of writers who work with previously conceived themes,
who build their plots by the deductive method. Among these
we might name Artsybashev, Vinnichenko, and ( occasionally)
Gorky.
In addition to gray, newspaper language, which reads like a
bad translation, we often find them guilty of still another fault
lengthy monologues. As you know, the monologue was in great
vogue in old drama but is entirely out of fashion in the new.
Nor has it any place in the new literary prose. A monologue is
always best developed in action, interspersed with other material.
Another requirement of dialogue demands great skill on the
part of the author. But if the device succeeds, it is extremely
effective and provides enormous artistic economy. I am referring
to the individualization of each character's speech. Each char
acter, or at any rate each principal character, should speak his
own, individual language. Artistic economy is achieved by this
method because it obviates the need to remind the reader of the
specific characteristics of the heroes : their individualized speech
itself serves this purpose. And artistic economy is an imperative
in literary prose : the fewer words you use and the more you say
with them, the greater the effect, and-all other conditions being
equal-the greater the artistic "efficiency."
What I have said about oral language will, I hope, make the
difference between the language of dialogue and the usual liter-
T H E W R I T E R 'S C RA F T 1 86
flash before the reader once, and twice, and three times in the
course of the work. So that, when they appear at a moment of
heightened action, they must come to the reader's mind as al
ready familiar, as a living reality, known and remembered.
In addition to the main purpose-greater vividness and palpa
bility, a sharper presence in the reader's imagination-the
method of reminiscence achieves yet another purpose, that of
artistic economy.
Thus the methods based on the principle of joint creative effort
are incomplete phrases, false denials and assertions, omitted
associations, allusions, and reminiscences. In addition, there is
also the method of the reflected image. Chekhov writes : "He
was met by a lady, tall and bony, with slightly graying hair and
black eyebrows, evidently non-Russian . . . . At dinner they served
meatless soup, cold veal with carrots, and chocolate. Everything
was sweetish and insipid, but the table glittered with gold forks,
bottles of soy sauce, an extraordinary ornate cruet stand, a gold
pepper box."
All these are the methods of Impressionism. As we see, the
new trends in literature closely parallel the new trends in painting.
1 91 9-20
BAC KSTAGE
and after a few seconds, instead of colorless water, you have the
gleaming facets of crystals. Sometimes we, too, are in a state of
saturated solution, and then a chance visual impression, a frag
ment of a sentence heard in a railway car, a two-line item in a
newspaper may be enough to crystalize several printed pages.
On one occasion I went from Petersburg ( it was still Peters
burg then) to Tambov Province, to the luxuriant, black-earth
town of Lebedyan, to the same street, overgrown with mallow,
where I had run about as a schoolboy. A week later I was re
turning-via Moscow, along the Pavelets road. I awoke as the
train stopped at a small station not far from Moscow and raised
the blind. Before my window-as though framed by it-the
physiognomy of the station gendarme slowly floated by : a heavy
forehead pulled low over the tiny, bearlike eyes, a grim square
jaw. I caught the name of the station : Barybino. Those moments
marked the birth of Anfim Baryba and A Provincial Tale.
In Lebedyan, I remember, I had a call from a local fellow
writer-a postal official. He told me that he had eight pounds
of poems at home, and in the meantime, he read me one, which
began with these lines :
These five lines did not let me rest until they finally became
transformed into the story "Alatyr," with its central figure, the
poet Kostya Yedytkin.
In 1 9 1 5 I was in the Russian north-in Kern, Solovki, Soroki.
I returned to Petersburg seemingly ready, filled to the brim, and
immediately began to write, but nothing came of it : the final
grain of salt, necessary for the beginning of crystalization, was
still lacking. It was only two years later that this grain was added
to the solution : in a railway car I overheard a conversation about
bear hunting, and someone said that the only way to escape from
a bear is to feign death. This gave me the end of the story "The
North," and then the rest of the story unfolded from end to be
ginning (this method-the reverse unfolding of the plot-is most
frequent with me ) .
1 93 Backstage
sions of the play. And quite regardless of the fact that the play
never reached the stage, all this turned out to be only preparatory
work for the novel.
rhythmics of verse have long been analyzed; they have their own
code of laws, and their own set penalties. But no one has yet
been brought to trial for rhythmic crimes in prose. In analyzing
prose rhythm, even Andrey Bely, the subtlest student of verbal
music, made a mistake : he applied a verse foot to prose (hence his
sickness-chronic anapaestitis ) .
To me, it is entirely clear that the relation between the rhyth
mics of verse and prose is the same as that between arithmetic
and integral calculus. In arithmetic we sum up individual items;
in integral calculus we deal with sums, series. The prose foot is
measured, not by the distance between stressed syllables, but by
the distance between (logically ) stressed words. And in prose,
just as in integral calculus, we deal not with constant quantities
(as in verse and arithmetic ) but with variable ones. In prose,
the foot is always a variable quantity, it is always being either
slowed or accelerated. This, of course, is not fortuitous : it is de
termined by the emotional and semantic accelerations and re
tardations in the text.
Let us take two examples : "and the silence became still deeper,
more bitterly cold"-retardation; "suddenly a car veered out"
acceleration, surprise ( a series of unstressed and therefore rapidly
spoken syllables ) .
When these phrases were written, mathematics were, of course,
only the blue light; the rhythm was chosen by the subconscious,
but it was chosen correctly. I need only have written "quiet was"
instead of 'silence became," and the retardation would have been
spoiled. I could have written "suddenly an automobile appeared,"
and the element of suddenness would have been weakened.
Vowels also determine the solution of another problem, as
dynamic as rhythm. They determine what Bely calls the "breath"
of the phrase. We have inhalation in the rise of vowels :
oo-o-e-ii-iJ-ee; exhalation-in their fall, from ee to the closed,
muted oo. I have learned to hear this breath quite recently, but
ever since then it has been painful for me to read a phrase ex
pressing a rising mood and yet built on falling vowels, or a phrase
stretched horizontally by repeating a's, when the meaning de
mands that it drop to the bottom like a stone . . . 1 .
I Because the sounds and their emotional associations are very different
in Russian and English, some of the examples given by Zamyatin in this
and the following two paragraphs had to be omitted in translation.
T H E W R I T E R'S C RA F T 1 98
Consonants are the static element, the earth, substance. If, for
example, I not only see but also hear a landscape, it is instru
mented on consonants. "Fog, close as cotton, and the strange
sound of muffled footsteps-as though someone were persistently
following behind you . . . " This phrase ( from The Islanders) is
colored by dark, unresonant sounds-!, t, th, st. . . .
On consonants I also build the external picture of my char
acters. This is consistently followed in The Islanders, where each
person has his own leitmotiv, which invariably accompanies his
appearance on the scene . . . .
There was a time when I acutely felt that I had lost one hand,
that I needed a third hand. This was in England, when I first
drove a car : I had to work the steering wheel, shift gears, man
age the accelerator, and blow the horn, all at the same time.
I had a similar feeling many years ago, when I began to write :
it seemed utterly impossible at the same time to direct the move
ment of the plot, the emotions of the characters, their dialogues,
the instrumentation, the images, the rhythms. Later I learned
that two hands are quite sufficient for driving a car. This hap
pened when most of the complex movements became a matter
of reflex, were carried out without conscious effort. The same
thing happens sooner or later at the desk.
The image of the automobile driver that I employed is, of
course, incorrect, imprecise. Such an image is permissible only
backstage; on stage, in a story or novel, I would surely have
crossed it out. The image is incorrect because a good driver will
guide his car unerringly--even in London-from the Strand to
Euston Road. But I, after reaching Euston on paper, will return
to the Strand and will take the same road a second time-and
it is, perhaps, only on the third trip that I will bring my pas
sengers to their destination. A work that would seem to be fin
ished is not yet finished to me. I invariably begin to rewrite it
from the beginning, from the first line, and, if I am still dissatis
fied, I rewrite it once again ( the short story "The Land Surveyor"
was rewritten about five times ) . This is equally true of a novel,
a story, a novella, or a play. And even of an article : to me, an
article is the same as a story. I think that it is easiest for me to
T H E W R I T E R 'S C RA F T 200
out walls. I remember the end of it. I said, "You have gone very
far from what you were a year ago. You are changing." The
answer was : "Yes, I feel it myself."
winter. He told me that since his illness it was difficult for him
to walk.
Overhead the cloud, the slab. Again I saw the familiar, faintly
visible shadow on his temple. And I thought : No, he will not
take a rest, he will not sit down. This is only a momentary flash
of sunlight.
Blok was wholly of the Neva, the mists of white nights, the
Bronze Horseman. The motley Moscow, earthly, full-bodied,
like a merchant's wife, was alien to him, and he was alien to
Moscow. His readings in Moscow, in May of 1 92 1 , demon
strated this.
His last, sad triumph was in Petersburg, on a white April night.
I remember him saying that the authorities had not permitted
his evening ; there were charges of speculation, of admission prices
which exceeded the set norm. Finally, permission was granted.
The huge theater (the Bolshoi ) was filled to the very top. In
the dim light there was a rustling-women's faces, many faces,
turned to the stage. Chukovsky talked about Blok, in a tired
voice. And then, lit from below, from the footlights, Blok, with
a pale, tired face. For a moment he hesitated, his eyes choosing
a place to stand. Then he took his place at the side of the lec
tern. And, in the silence, his poems about Russia. His voice was
muted, as if already coming from far away, monotonous. And
only at the end, after many ovations, it momentarily rose higher,
grew firmer-the last flight.
There seemed to me a mournful, sad, tender solemnity in this
evening, Blok's last one. I remember a voice behind me, in the
hall : "They seem to be holding a wake!"
And, indeed, it was a wake, the city's wake for Blok. For
Petersburg, Blok had gone directly from the stage of the Dra
matic Theater beyond that blue, serrated wall that is patrolled
by death. On that white April night Petersburg saw Blok for the
last time.
217
EIGH T WRITERS AND ONE PA I N TER 218
Fair Lady. Blok may call her the Unknown One, and Sologub,
Dulcinea, but she is one and the same, and neither will ever
reconcile h imself to the Lady becoming Darya, simply Darya,
yawning with relish at supper, in a bathrobe, with paper curlers
in her hair. Darya, or Aldonsa-the name makes no difference,
she has thousands of names, but never the one, Dulcinea-is
ample-bodied and rosy-cheeked. She is not a bad woman, she is
not black, merely blackish, or perhaps gray ; she may even be
almost white. And any Chichikov, any Sancho Panza, will be
delighted to accept her-because they are wise, they know that
even the sun has spots, they know that to accept a human being
and life with "the good and the bad" and the "almost," to love
them black or gray, is far more practical, simpler, more com
fortable, more sensible.
But the eccentric Don Quixote and the eccentric Sologub will
turn away from Aldonsa at once, because they possess some
innate reagent which tells them unerringly when the wine of
Aldonsa-life contains even a single milligram of "the good and
the bad," a single drop of "almost." And both Don Quixote and
Sologub will throw such wine out the window. Not because they
do not love the wine of life, but because they love it more than
anyone else, because they love it too much : they want either
the purest or none at all, everything or nothing. And this deter
mines the road traveled by those who have been granted the mag
nificent, tormenting gift of intransigent love.
This road is the tragic road of Ahasuerus, the road to Damas
cus taken by Sologub's knight Romualdo de Turenne, the road
of those eternally hungering souls about whom the pious sing on
Thursday of Holy Week. The roses, the palms, the fountains and
cupolas of the city in the desert may tell thousands of people
that this is indeed Damascus. Don Quixote and Sologub and his
knight Romualdo will leave Damascus to go further; their path
will lead them on into the endless desert until their bones come
to rest in it. It is their great and difficult destiny not to be satisfied
with any Damascus that may be achieved. To them every achieve
ment, every embodiment destroys the true Damascus. To them
there is nothing more terrible than walls, than settling down in
one place. And it is precisely here that they are at the opposite
pole from the millions of Chichikovs and Sancho Panzas or what
ever other names they may have. The Chichikovs can live only
219 Fyodor Sologub
within walls, in the secure, the solved, the found, the answered.
Romualdo and Sologub can live only when there is something
beyond, still undiscovered, still unanswered. The Chichikovs
dread infinity above all else; to Sologub, to the romantic, infinity
is his own true element. Millions of Chichikovs are undoubtedly
frantic with joy because Einstein, lost in sophisms, has calculated
that the universe is finite and that its radius is so many billion
miles. But Sologub would be unable to live in this universe if he
did not know that the calculations are mere sophistry. It would
be too confining for him-because, no matter when, its end can
be reached.
I have until now consistently juxtaposed these two names :
Don Quixote of La Mancha and Fyodor Sologub. This has been
done frequently ever since Sologub came out to the tourney with
a shield on which he had written in his own hand the name of
his lady, Dulcinea. And yet Sologub was mistaken, I was mis
taken, everyone else was mistaken. The parallelism of the lines
of Don Quixote and Sologub is only seeming : at a certain point
their lines intersect, to diverge broadly. And the angle of this
divergence is so great that at the end of his road Don Quixote
ceases being Don Quixote. Many have heard his last words :
"Why no, Good Sirs, do not call me the Knight of La Mancha.
I am simply Alonzo the Good." No one will ever hear such
words from Sologub.
Sologub's love is the color of white-hot lightning, flashing be
tween two poles, fusing the plus and the minus with fire. Don
Quixote's love is the color of a cloud floating off into infinite
distance. Don Quixote's love is gentle and good-humored; he
never killed anyone. Sologub's love is merciless ; Sologub kills.
But the weapon that Sologub kills with is the stiletto which
medieval knights called misericordia ( mercy ) ; it was used-for
humane reasons, because of love of man-to finish off those
who were mortally wounded. Just so-because of love of man
-Sologub kills all his favorite ·heroes with the misericordia, to
spare them the bitterness of discovering Aldonsa in Dulcinea.
In the "Poisoned Garden" the Youth and the Beauty die, of
course, after embracing for the first time. The knight Romualdo
de Turenne dies, of course, on the way to Damascus. And Vera,
of "The Snake Charmer," unquestionably must die when she is
only a step away from her Damascus. And Seryozha, in the story
to . A .
''�'·
Fyodor Sologub
221 Fyodor Sologub
knowing. And the whip of satire must be cracked over him once
again-we must have a new Petty Demon.
The patent for the knout has, not without good reason,_ been
recorded by history in Russia's name-but only of the knout
made of leather. Irony, satire have been imported into Russian
literature from the West. And, although there is no more fertile
soil for satire than our black earth, we have thus far raised only
three or four full-grown plants, and one of these is, of course,
Sologub. The reason for this is that in Russia the Sancho Panzas
have always been too weak-nerved to have sufficient courage to
listen calmly to satire. I do not know whether the edict of Peter I,
which stated that "For composing satire, its author shall be put
to the cruelest torture," has ever been repealed. But even this
is not the main thing. The truth is simply that the Russian writer,
with few exceptions, has always had too much Russian soft
heartedness, has always been too easy-going. I n this respect,
Sologub is fortunately not Russian : he can, when the need arises,
turn into steel, gleaming and merciless.
And not only is his satire European; his entire style is tem
pered in the European forge and bends like steel. Without the
slightest trace of strain or fracture he withstands the 1 80-degree
bend from the stoniest, heaviest everyday life to the fantastic;
from the land permeated with the smell of vodka and cabbage
soup to the land of the olla. 2 The fine and difficult art of bringing
together within a single formula both the solid and the gaseous
states of the literary material, the everyday and the fantastic, has
long been known to European masters. Among Russian prose
writers the secret of this alloy is truly known, perhaps, to only
two, Gogol and Sologub.
The word has been tamed by Sologub to such an extent that
he even permits himself to play with this dangerous element,
bending the traditionally straight style of Russian prose. In The
Petty Demon and Deathly Charms, as well as in many of his
stories, he deliberately mixes the strongest extract of everyday
language with the elevated and refined diction of the romantic.
In "The Steward Vanka and the Page Jean," these dissonances
are sharpened even more and are further complicated by a
charming play with deliberate anachronisms. In the "Fairy
224
225 Chekhov
the stronger grew his faith in "the great and brilliant future" of
man, in the "kingdom of eternal truth" ( "The Black Monk" ) .
"Oh, if only it came soon, this new, bright life, when we shall be
able to look directly and boldly in the eyes of our fate, and know
ourselves right, gay and free," he wrote ( "The Bride") a short
time before his death in 1 903.
As before, the quiet glow of twilight lies over everything he
wrote during his last years. But this is not the old twilight: it is
not the evening twilight which is followed by night; it is the
twilight before sunrise, and through it, in the distance, the dawn
comes up ever more brightly.
It would be a crude mistake to conclude from what has been
said that Chekhov was a tendentious writer. He was further from
tendentious sermonizing than any other Russian writer. "Ten
dentiousness is based on people's inability to rise above specifics."
"The artist must be only a dispassionate witness." "I am not a
liberal, not a conservative, not a gradualist. . . . I want to be a
free artist." These ideas are found in many of his letters. In life,
Chekhov was a doctor, but in his novellas, stories, and plays
there is not a single political prescription. He could j ustly say of
himself, in Hertzen's words : "We are not the doctors, we are
the pain."
Chekhov looked at life without glasses-and it is precisely this
that helped him to become a genuine Realist. As an "impartial
witness" he lived through the end of the nineteenth and the be
ginning of the twentieth centuries, and everything written by
Chekhov is as valuable a document for the study of Russian life
during this period as Nestor's chronicle is for the study of the
beginnings of old Russia.
This, then, is what we uncover when we remove the snowdrift
piled up over Chekhov in recent years. We uncover a man pro
foundly agitated by social problems; a writer whose social ideals
are the same as those we live by ; a philosophy of the divinity of
man, of fervent faith in man-the faith which moves mountains.
And all of this brings Chekhov close to Russia's recent blizzard
years, all of it makes Chekhov one of the harbingers of these years.
If we take an attentive look at Chekhov as an artist, a master,
we shall, again, find a close kinship with the literary art of
our epoch.
In Chekhov's stories everything is real, everything has dimen-
229 Chekhov
231
E I G H T W R I T E R S A N D 0 N E PA I N T E R 232
about that Kustodiev's old Russia and mine could now be painted
on canvas and on paper in the same colors. It so happened that
I met the artist Kustodiev in our joint book, In Old R ussia. And
this was also the beginning of my friendship with the man Boris
Mikhailovich.
In the fall of 1 922, the Akvilon Publishing House sent me a
series of Kustodiev's "Russian Types," with the request that I
write an article about them. What was I to write about? Kusto
diev's painting technique? Others could do it better. I wrote no
article, but did something else : I simply spread out before me all
those Kustodiev beauties, coachmen, merchants, innkeepers,
nuns. I looked at them as I had once looked at his painting at
the exhibition, and the story "In Old Russia" somehow wrote
itself.
I finished it, and two days later received a telephone call from
Akvilon that Kustodiev would like me to visit him in the evening.
Interpreting "evening" in the usual Petersburg manner, I called
on Boris Mikhailovich late, about 1 0 : 00 P . M . , and had my first
glimpse of the ordeal-! can think of no other word to describe
it-that was his life during those last years.
A small room, a bedroom, and on the right, in the bed by the
wall-Boris Mikhailovich. I remember that bed very well; it had
a rail stretched from head to foot at the height of about a meter,
and I wondered about it. My manuscript lay on the little table
by the bedside. Boris Mikhailovich wanted to talk to me about
some passages in the text. He stretched his hand, and suddenly
I saw : he raised himself a little on his elbow and grasped the rail ;
then, clenching his teeth and fighting down the pain, he ducked
his head, as if to ward off a blow from behind. Afterwards, I saw
this movement many times, and eventually became used to it,
as we become used to everything. But then, I remember, I felt
ashamed of being healthy while he was convulsed with pain,
clutching the rail ; I felt ashamed that I would soon get up and
go, and he could not get up. This shame prevented me from hear
ing what he said about our book; I understood nothing and left
as quickly as I could.
I went away with the impression, What a frail, exhausted, pain
racked man.
Several days later I was there again, and this time I thought,
What vitality, what astonishing strength of spirit this man
possesses.
233 Meetings with Kustodiev
I was taken to his studio. The day was bright and frosty, and,
whether from the sun or from Kustodiev's paintings, the studio
was gay : opulent bodies glowed on the walls, crosses burned with
gold, green summer grass carpeted the earth-everything was
alive with joy, blood, running sap. And the man who had filled
all those canvases with the rich sap of life was sitting in a wheel
chair ( near the potbellied stove customary in those years ) , with
dead feet wrapped in a blanket, and speaking jestingly : "Feet
what are they but a luxury? But now my hand is beginning to
hurt-that's something to be resented."
Many things are revealed to us only in contrasts, in the juxta
position of opposites. And it was only in that room, when I first
saw the artist and his paintings, the artist and the man, that I
realized what enormous creative will was needed to paint all
those canvases sitting thus in a wheelchair, gripped with pain.
I understood that Boris Mikhailovich was stronger and tougher
than any of us. And also that his life was a martyrdom, and he
himself was a consecrated man, a zealot, such as his beloved
old Russia had known in olden times. With the sole difference
that his feat was not for the salvation of the soul, but for the
sake of art. Illarion the Hermit, Afanasy the Sitter, Nil the Sty lite,
and-in our own day-yet another anchorite and sitter. But this
hermit did not curse the earth, the body, the joy of life; he cele
brated them with his colors.
As we know from all the lives of the saints, every true anchorite
and saint was occasionally visited and tempted by the devil. It
fell to me to become such a devil to Boris Mikhailovich-and
the result of the temptation was Kustodiev's only published series
of erotic drawings-his illustrations to my story "The Healing of
the Novice Erasmus." This book, published by the Petropolis
Publishing House in Berlin, was our second joint work.
The artist's task in this case was extremely difficult. What was
required, of course, was not the crude, overt eroticism of the
kind found in Somov's well-known works; the illustrations had
to provide in images what was given in the text only in allusions,
between the lines. And this seemingly insoluble task was solved
by Kustodiev with extraordinary grace and tact, and-I must
add-with a great sense of humor.
I do not know how Kustodiev had managed to retain this sense
of humor, to carry it unimpaired through his pain-racked life.
E I G H T W R I T E R S A N D 0 N E PA I N T E R 234
1 I can imagine, for example, how he would have laughed over the
article in Izvestia, in which the Moscow critic Friche contrasts the virtuous
Kustodiev with iniquitous me, never suspecting, in his innocence, that Kus
todiev illustrated my story "The Healing of the Novice Erasmus," or that
"In Old Russia" was written as the text to Kustodiev's paintings.
What a pity that Boris Mikhailovich was denied this opportunity for
another hearty laugh . A uTHOR s NOTE.
- '
235 Meetings with Kustodiev
that feeling was returning to his feet. But he never spoke about
it again. The operation merely provided some relief; it did not
end his ordeal or return him to a normal life.
tury and leaning like the Tower of Pisa. The other end opened
on a limitless expanse of fields. This was "the real thing," genuine
old Russia.
I lived in the next street, five minutes' walk from the Kusto
dievs. Every day, either my wife and I visited Boris Mikhailovich
or he was wheeled in his chair to our garden. Sometimes we all
went out into the fields, or to the banks of the Don. And I saw
how greedily Boris Mikhailovich devoured everything with his
starved eyes, how he rejoiced in the distances, in rainbows, faces,
summer rain, ripe, ruddy apples.
That summer the fruit was especially fine in the garden of the
house we lived in. We often saved a branch of apples for Boris
Mikhailovich and wheeled him to it in his chair, to give him the
pleasure of plucking them himself. "Yes, yes, this is just what I
wanted-to pick apples myself," he would say. And, crunching
an apple, he would sketch and sketch : he was particularly fond
of the view from above, from our garden, across the Don.
I had seldom seen Boris Mikhailovich so gay, talkative, and
full of jokes as he was all through that month. But by the end of
August the weather turned cold and rainy, and Boris Mikhailo
vich began to complain of feeling chilly. Soon he returned home,
to Leningrad. I saw him again the following winter at rehearsals
of The Flea at the Bolshoi Dramatic Theater. By the time next
summer came, Boris Mikhailovich was dead.
The head bent over the desk is covered with a dark velvet cap.
Around the cap, an aureole of fine, flying gray hair. On the desk,
thick, open volumes on atomic physics, the theory of probability.
Who it this? A_professor of mathematics?
But strangely, the mathematician is lecturing at the Petersburg
House of the Arts. Quick, flying movements of the hands, tracing
curves in the air. You listen, and you find that these are the
curves of rising and falling vowels. This is a brilliant lecture on
the theory of versification.
Another view : the same man with hammer and chisel in hand
on scaffolding in the dim cupola of a temple. He is carving out a
pattern. The temple is the famous Goetheanum in Basel, built
with the participation of the most dedicated adherents of an
throposophy.
And after the silence of the Goetheanum, suddenly the fren
zied hubbub of a Berlin cafe, the imps of jazz squealing as they
fly out of the throat of the trumpet, out of the saxophone. The
man who had worked on the anthroposophic temple, his tie
twisted, a slightly bewildered smile on his face, is dancing the
fox-trot.
Mathematics, poetry, anthroposophy, fox-trot-these are some
of the sharpest angles that make up the fantastic image of Andrey
Bely, one of the most original Russian writers, who has just ended
his earthly journey : he died in Moscow on a blue, snowy Janu
ary day.
What he had written was as extraordinary and fantastic as his
life. This is why even his novels-not to speak of his numerous
241
E I G H T W R I T E R S A N D 0 N E PA I N T E R 242
1 Some of his works have since been translated, notably his novel
Petersburg.
243 A ndrey Bely
sharp conflict. In this book, Bely's best work, Petersburg finds its
true portrayer for the first time since Gogol and Dostoyevsky.
Bely spent the prerevolutionary years ( 1 9 1 2- 1 6 ) in restless
wanderings in Africa and Europe. His meeting with the leader
of the anthroposophists, Dr. Rudolph Steiner, proved decisive for
Bely. But anthroposophy to him was not the quiet haven it is for
many weary souls-to him it was merely a port of departure
into the infinite spaces of cosmic philosophy and new artistic
experiments. The most interesting of these was the novel Kotik
Letayev, perhaps the only attempt in world literature to embody
anthroposophic ideas in a work of art. A child's psyche is chosen
as the screen that is to reflect these ideas-at the age when the
first glimmerings of consciousness stir within the child, when the
child steps out of the world of shadowy recollections of his pre
natal existence, the world of four dimensions, into the solid,
three-dimensional world which wounds him painfully.
In postrevolutionary Russia, with its new religion of material
ism, anthroposophy was out of place, and in 1 92 1 Bely went
abroad once more. This was to him a period of "temptation in
the desert" : the woman he loved left him to be near Dr. Steiner;
the poet remained alone in the stone vacuum of Berlin. From the
anthroposophic heights he plunged down-into fox-trot, into
wine. But he was not smashed, he had strength enough to rise
and start life again, returning to Russia.
The hair around the cupola of his head, covered with the velvet
cap, was now gray, but he was full of the same impetuous flight,
the same youthful ardor. I recall one evening in Petersburg when
Bely dropped in to see me "for a few moments. " He was in a
hurry, he had to deliver a lecture that evening. But then the con
versation touched upon a topic especially close to his heart-the
crisis of culture. His eyes lit up, he squatted down and stood up,
illustrating his theory of the "parallel epochs," the "spiral move
ment" of history. He spoke uninterruptedly. It was a brilliant
lecture, delivered before a single listener. The others vainly waited
for him in the lecture hall that evening. It was only when mid
night struck that Bely suddenly recalled himself from his flight
of enthusiasm and clapped his hands in consternation.
This lecture was a chapter of his large work on the philosophy
of history, on which he had been working continuously through
out the preceding years. As though already sensing the nearness
245 A ndrey Bely
They lived together, Gorky and Peshkov. Fate bound them inti
mately, indissolubly. They resembled one another closely, and
yet they were not entirely alike. Sometimes they argued and quar
reled, then they made peace and walked through life side by side.
Their paths diverged only recently : in June, 1 9 3 6, Alexey Pesh
kov died; Maxim Gorky continues to live. The man with the very
ordinary Russian worker's face and the modest name of Peshkov
had chosen for himself the pen name Gorky. 1
I knew them both. But I see no need to speak about the writer
Gorky. His books speak about him best of all. I should like here
to recall the man with the great heart and the great biography.
There are many remarkable writers who have no biography,
who pass through life only as brilliant observers. One of these,
for example, was a contemporary of Gorky and one of the sub
tlest masters of the Russian word, Anton Chekhov. Gorky could
never remain a mere observer; he always plunged into the very
thick of events, he wanted to act. He was endowed with such
great energy that the pages of a book confined it : it brimmed
over into life. His life is itself a book, an absorbing novel.
The background against which this novel opens is extraordi
narily picturesque and, I would say, symbolic.
High, serrated walls of an ancient kremlin on a steep river
bank, golden crosses, and the cupolas of innumerable churches.
Lower down, by the water, endless warehouses, barns, wharves,
stores. Every year this was the site of a famous Russian fair,
1 "Bitter." A romantic gesture in the spirit of the time, but rather
amusing, since Gorky was not a bitter man.
246
247 Maxim Gorky
and it certainly did not seek them in Gorky's realism. Their atti
tude toward Gorky was therefore all the more revealing : it was
truly love for the man.
For this group, as for all Soviet writers who were not Com
munists but only Fellow Travelers, the years between 1 927 and
1 93 2 were the most difficult period. Soviet literature had fallen
under the command-it is difficult to describe it by any other
word-of the organization· of "proletarian writers" (in the Soviet
code language, the RAPP ) . Their principal talent was their party
card and their purely military decisiveness. These energetic young
men took upon themselves the task of immediate "reeducation"
of all the other writers. Naturally, nothing good came of this.
Some of the writers subject to "reeducation" became silent; the
works of others betrayed obvious false notes which jarred even
the least demanding ear. Anecdotes about the censorship multi
plied, and dissatisfaction grew among the Fellow Travelers.
I spoke about this many times during my meetings with Gorky.
He smoked silently, biting his moustache. At times he stopped me,
saying: "Wait a moment. I must make a note about this incident."
The meaning of these notes did not become clear to me until
much later, in 1 932. In April of that year, a genuine literary
revolution occurred, surprising everyone : by government decree,
the activity of the RAPP was declared to "hamper the develop
ment of Soviet literature," and the organization was disbanded.
The only man to whom this did not come as a surprise was Gorky :
I am convinced that it was he who had prepared this action, and
he had done it like a highly skilled diplomat.
At that time he no longer lived in Petersburg but had moved
to Moscow. In the city proper, the house of the millionnaire
Ryabushinsky was placed at his disposal. But Gorky stayed there
infrequently, spending most of his time at a summer home about
one hundred kilometers from Moscow. Stalin's summer home
was nearby, and he took to visiting his "neighbor" Gorky with
increasing frequency. The "neighbors," one with his invariable
pipe, the other with a cigarette, closeted themselves for hours,
talking over a bottle of wine.
I believe that it will not be inaccurate to say that the correction
of many "excesses" in the policy of the Soviet government, and
the gradual softening of the dictatorship's rule resulted from
257 Maxim Gorky
I shall not expand here on the reasons why and how I had
come to see that it was best for me to go abroad for a time. In
those years, it was not easy for a writer with my reputation as a
"heretic" to obtain a passport for foreign travel. I asked Gorky
to intervene in my behalf. He begged me to wait until spring (of
1 93 1 ) . "You will see, everything will change. " In the spring
nothing changed, and Gorky, rather reluctantly, agreed to secure
permission for me to go abroad.
One day Gorky's secretary telephoned to say that Gorky
wished me to have dinner with him in the evening at his country
home. I remember clearly that extraordinarily hot day and the
rainstorm-a tropical downpour-in Moscow. Gorky's car
sped through a wall of water, bringing me and several other
invited guests to dinner at his home.
It was a "literary" dinner, and close to twenty people sat
around the table. At first Gorky was silent, visibly tired. Every
body drank wine, but his glass contained water-he was not
allowed to drink wine. After a while, he rebelled, poured himself
a glass of wine, then another and another, and became the old
Gorky.
The storm ended, and I walked out onto the large stone terrace.
Gorky followed me immediately and said to me : "The affair of
your passport is settled. But if you wish, you can return the pass
port and stay. " I said that I would go. Gorky frowned and went
back to his other guests in the dining room.
It was late. Some of the guests remained overnight; others,
including myself, were returning to Moscow. In parting, Gorky
asked : "When shall we meet again? If not in Moscow, then per
haps in Italy? If I go there, you must come to see me! In any
case, until we meet again, eh?"
This was the last time I saw Gorky.
I
The laciest, most Gothic of cathedrals are, after all, made of
stone. The most marvelous, most fantastic fairy tales of any
country are, after all, made of the earth, the trees, the animals of
that country. In woodland tales, there is the wood goblin, shaggy
and gnarled as a pine, hooting like a forest echo. In tales of the
steppes, there is the magical white camel, flying like storm-driven
sand. In tales of the Arctic regions, there is the shaman-whale and
the polar bear with a body of mammoth tusks. But imagine a
country where the only fertile soil is asphalt, where nothing grows
but dense forests of factory chimneys, where the animal herds are
of a single breed, automobiles, and the only fragrance in the
spring is that of gasoline. This place of stone, asphalt, iron, gaso
line, and machines is present-day, twentieth-century London,
and, naturally, it was bound to produce its own iron, automobile
goblins, and its own mechanical, chemical fairy tales. Such urban
tales exist : they are told by Herbert George Wells. They are his
fantastic novels.
The city, the huge modern city, full of the roar, din, and buzz
ing of propellers, electric wires, wheels, advertisements, is every
where in H. G. Wells. The present-day city, with its uncrowned
king, the machine-as an explicit or implicit function-is an in
variable component of every fantastic novel written by Wells, of
every equation in his myths; and this is precisely what his myths
are-logical equations.
Wells began with the mechanism, the machine. His first novel,
The Time Machine, is the modern city version of the tale of the
259
E I G H T W R I T E R S A N D 0 N E PA I N T E R 260
flying carpet, and the fairy-tale tribes of morlocks and eloi are,
of course, the two warring classes of the modern city, extrapo
lated, with their typical characteristics heightened to the point
of the grotesque. A Story of the Days to Come is a look at the
present city through the monstrously enlarging telescope of irony.
Everything here rushes with fabulous speed-machines, ma
chines, machines, airplanes, turbine wheels, deafening gramo
phones, flickering fiery advertisements. In When the Sleeper
A wakes, once again airplanes, electric lines, searchlights, armies
of workers, syndicates. In The War in the A ir, again airplanes,
swarms of airplanes and dirigibles, herds of dreadnoughts. In
The War of the Worlds, London, London trains, automobiles,
crowds, and that product of asphalt, the most typical city goblin
-the Martian, a steel, hinge-jointed, mechanical goblin, with a
mechanical siren, to call and to hoot in a manner befitting one
who performs the duties of a goblin. In The World Set Free, we
see the city version of the legendary bursting grass, 1 but this
bursting grass is not found in a clearing in the woods on Mid
summer night; it is found in the laboratory, and is called atomic
energy. In The Invisible Man, there is chemistry again-the
present-day, urban, chemical invisible cap. Even when Wells
seems for a moment to be untrue to himself and takes you from
the city to the woods, the fields, or a farm, you hear the hum
of machines and smell the odors of chemical reactions. In The
First Men in the Moon, you find yourself on an isolated farm in
Kent, but you discover dynamos in the cellar, a gasometer in the
arbor, and workshops and laboratories in all the outbuildings.
In The Food of the Gods, a little house in the forest turns out to
be a laboratory of experimental physiology. No matter how much
he may wish to get away from asphalt, Wells still remains on
asphalt, among machines, in the laboratory. The modern
chemical-mechanical city, enmeshed in wire and cables, is the
very foundation of H. G. Wells, and all he writes is woven on
this foundation, with all its fanciful and, at first glance, para
doxical and contradictory patterns.
The motifs of the Wellsian urban fairy tales are essentially the
same as those encountered in all other fairy tales : the invisible
cap, the flying carpet, the bursting grass, the self-setting table-
1 In Russian folklore a magical plant that blooms briefly on Midsummer
night and is believed to open all locks and reveal hidden treasure.
261 H . G. Wells
visible Man. What nonsense! How can we, who live in the
twentieth century, believe in such a child's fairy tale as an in
visible man?
But wait : what is invisibility? Invisibility is nothing more than
the simplest, most realistic phenomenon, subject to the laws of
physics, the laws of optics. And it depends on the capacity to
absorb or reflect light rays. A piece of glass is transparent; the
same piece of glass in water is invisible. And if we grind the glass
into powder, the powder will be white, it will be opaque, it will
be clearly visible. Consequently, the same substance may be either
visible or invisible; everything depends on the condition of its
surface. You will say : yes, but man is living substance. What of
that? Among the creatures in the seas are jellyfish, almost in
visible; some of the marine larvae are entirely transparent. You
may say : Yes, but those are larvae, and this is man-two very
different things. But do you know that, already today, medicine
uses transparent or partly transparent anatomic preparations of
the human body for purposes of study and instruction? I can even
name you the man who developed this method; he is a German,
Professor Spalterholtz. And if we can make one hand transparent,
we can make two hands transparent; and if we can do it with
two hands, we can do it with the entire body. And if science has
succeeded in achieving this transparency in a dead body, perhaps
it will succeed in achieving it in a living body as well? After all,
transparency, visibility, a living organism-these are not in any
way mutually incompatible concepts; we have seen that. And
hence . . . And you are already thinking : "Who knows, perhaps, it
may well be so." And you are already enmeshed, you are hitched
to the steel locomotive of logic, and it will carry you along the
rails of the fantastic wherever Wells may choose.
In the same way, in The Island of Dr. Moreau, Wells will com
pel your belief in a surgeon who transforms animals into men by
skillful operations. He will compel your belief in the sleeper who
awakes one hundred years later; in Cavorite, a substance that
shields you from the earth's gravity, and in the possibility
already quite obvious--Df making a perfectly easy journey to the
moon in an apparatus constructed of this Cavorite; in the inven
tion of Herakleophorbia, which increases the growth of humans,
plants, and animals to giant dimensions. He will compel your
belief in the possibility of traveling not only in space, but also
263 H. G. Wells
lutions, disasters. And Wells is, perhaps, the only one to see,
through all that quiet and serenity, the violent, madly rushing life
we know today.
At that time, when the first automobiles were just beginning
to crawl along the streets, when they existed only to amuse the
street urchins, Wells was already describing with amazing ac
curacy, in his book A nticipations, today's rushing London street,
crowded with taxis, buses, trucks-a street where there is as little
opportunity to see a horse as there is to see a gentleman in a silk
hat in a Russian street today.
In the sky, too, Wells saw something altogether different. Only
the most reckless dreamers thought of airplanes at that time.
Somewhere in America Hiram Maxim's contraption, the ancestor
of the modern airplane, was clumsily making running starts on
rails. But Wells, in his novel When the Sleeper A wakes, already
heard, high in the sky, the hum of passenger and military planes ;
he already saw battles between aerial squadrons, and airfields
everywhere.
This was in 1 89 3 . And in 1 908, when no one seriously enter
tained any thought of a European war, he discerned in the seem
ingly unclouded sky unprecedented, monstrous storm clouds. In
that year he wrote his War in the A ir. Here are a few lines from
it, pregnant with prophecy :
II
When I saw a flying airplane for the first time some twelve years
ago and the airplane landed in a meadow and the flying man
climbed out of his canvas wings and took off his strange, goggled
mask, I was somehow disappointed. The flying man-small,
clean-shaven, plump and ruddy-faced-turned out to be exactly
like the rest of us; he could not get out his handkerchief with his
chilled hands, and he wiped his nose with his fingers. Such a
feeling-something akin to disappointment-will inevitably
come to the reader when, after Wells's fantastic novels, he opens
his realistic works. "Is this also Wells?" Yes, it is also Wells, but
here he does not fly, he walks. On earth, this flying man has turned
out to be not so very different from other English novelists. And
if formerly we could, after reading two pages, say "This is Wells"
without glancing at the signature, now we must take a look at the
signature. And if formerly, in the field of science fiction and social
fantasy, Wells was one, now he became "one of." True, one of
the most significant and interesting English writers, but never
theless "one of."
The reason for this is, undoubtedly, that Wells, like most of
his English colleagues, devotes far more attention to plot than
to language, style, the word-to all the things that we are ac
customed to value in the latest Russian writers. He has not
created his own Wellsian language, his own Wellsian manner of
writing. And, indeed, there was no time for this, or he could not
271 H . G. Wells
have managed to turn out the forty volumes he has written. His
own, original, unique contribution is to be found in the plots of
his fantastic novels. But as soon as he climbed out of the airplane,
as soon as he turned to more usual plots, he lost a part of his
originality.
The headlong, airplane flight of plot in the fantastic novels,
where everything whizzes by-faces, events, ideas-this head
long flight makes it physically impossible for the reader to look
closely at details, at the author's style. But the slow, unhurried
movement of the novel of daily life provides an occasional op
portunity to sit down and take a look at the storyteller's face, his
clothes, his gestures, his smile. There seems to be something
familiar in all that. But what? Another careful look, and it be
comes clear-Dickens, Charles Dickens-he is Wells's famous
ancestor. The same slow speech, perhaps too slow for today's
reader; the same complex, lacy, Gothic periods; the same manner
of giving a full, complete projection of the hero in all his dimen
sions, often from the moment of his appearance in the world; the
same method of fixing the image of the character in the reader's
memory by repetition of the salient trait; and, finally, as in
Dickens, the ever-present smile. But Dickens's smile is gently
humorous, it is the smile of a man who loves people, whatever
they are, whatever their faults. Wells's smile is something differ
ent again : he loves man and at the same time hates him-for not
being man enough, for being a caricature of man, a narrow
philistine. Wells loves with a sharp, hating love, and that is why
his smile is the smile of irony, and that is why his pen frequently
turns into a lash, and the scars from this lash last a long time.
Even in his most innocently amusing and witty tales, seemingly
written for a twelve-year-old reader, the more attentive eye will
discern the same hating love. Take The Food of the Gods. The
marvelous food produces chicks the size of horses, nettles as big
as palms, rats more terrible than tigers, and, finally, giant humans
as high as a church steeple. You read about a prince standing be
low, glancing up with horror through his monocle at his giant
fiancee, fearful of looking ridiculous if he married her. This is
amusing. You read about the tiny policeman who tries to arrest
a giant and catches at him somewhere way below, at his leg; this
is also amusing. You read of dozens of funny confrontations be
tween giants and pigmies, and the searchlight of Wellsian irony
E I G H T W R I T E R S A N D O N E PA I N T E R 272
lights up more and more sharply the puny little figure of the
philistine pigmy who clings to his familiar, comfortable life in
fear of the future, powerful giant man. And you begin to see
more than the merely funny. Or take The War of the Worlds:
there is a worldwide catastrophe, everything is collapsing, every
thing is perishing-and suddenly, in the midst of the crashing
noise, you hear the voice of the pious curate, who laments the
passing of the Sunday school.
This irony appears even more clearly in the web of Wells's
realistic novels. Society ladies whose essential shape is held to
gether by nothing more than their corset stays; fiercely moral old
maids; wooden-headed school teachers ; bishops who would dis
miss Christ from his job for being poorly dressed and speaking
words unsuited to a prince of the church ; the stockbroker who is
sincerely convinced that it was the Lord God himself who had
inspired him to buy Pacific stocks. England may well be shocked
to look into this cruel mirror of an angry love. And, it seems to
me that nowhere does the Wellsian blade flash more keenly than
in Tono-Bungay, perhaps the best of Wells's realistic novels.
"I've met not simply the titled but the great. On one occasion
it is my brightest memory-! upset my champagne over the
trousers of the greatest statesman in the empire." We read this
in one of the first pages of the novel, and this irony winds its way
through every page, through every adventure of the unforgettable
Mr. Pondervo, that genius of advertising and charlatanry.
The world knows Wells the aviator, Wells the author of fan
tastic novels ; these novels have been translated into every Euro
pean language, they are even translated into Arabic and Chinese.
And it is probably known to but a small minority of the wide
reading public that Wells the author of fantastic novels is only
one-half of Wells; he has written fourteen fantastic novels and
fifteen realistic ones. His fantastic novels are : The Time Machine,
The Wonderful Visit, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible
Man, The War of the Worlds, When the Sleeper A wakes, A Story
of the Days to Come, The First Men in the Moon, The Sea Lady,
The Food of the Gods, In the Days of the Comet, The War in
the A ir, The World Set Free, Men like Gods. His realistic novels
are : The Wheels of Chance, Love and Mr. Lewisham, Kipps,
The History of Mr. Polly, The New Machiavelli, A nn Veronica,
Tono-Bungay, Marriage, Bealby, The Passionate Friends, The
H. G. Wells
273 H. G. Wells
ut
A "'"'" t\ '
f '-'1 !'>{"
- - -- · '
275 H. G. Wells
And thus, Wells builds a temple to his God, and next to it,
on the same foundation, he erects his scientific laboratories, his
socialist phalansteries. And now his seemingly surprising, seem
ingly incomprehensible turn to religious topics becomes under
standable. With Wells this is, of course, the result of the terres
trialization, of the materialization of his former fantasies, and
not "God-seeking" in the usual sense of the word.
The first of Well's novels about God is The Soul of a Bishop.
In a preface which Wells wrote for a certain edition of his trans
lated works, Wells calls this novel an ironic reflection of the
changes which had occurred in the Anglican church under the
impact of time. But in truth there is less irony here than any
where else in his works, and the reader senses that the author is
once again trying to answer the question : Has he any use for
this rather prim and hypocritical English God? The novel, half
realistic and half-fantastic, clearly answers his question. The
reader sees a most respectable bishop, wealthy, happy in his
family life, brilliantly successful in his career. Everything seems
to be fine, there seems to be nothing else to be desired. Yet some
thing begins to gnaw at the bishop's soul-something tiny, al
most invisible, like a speck of dust in the eye. And this speck of
dust gives him no rest by day or by night; it finally grows into
the tormenting question : Does that God whom the bishop serves
really exist? And is that God really the Christ who had com
manded that everything be given to the poor?
The bishop tries psychiatric treatment with several doctors in
succession, and finally comes to a young doctor, one of those
daring scientific revolutionaries who are so dear to Wells's heart.
He begins to treat the bishop in a manner different from all the
others : instead of trying to put out the flame in the bishop's
soul, he fans it. He gives the bishop a marvelous elixir which
raises his spirit to ecstasy, leading him away from our three-
E I G H T W R I T E R S A N D 0 N E PA I N T E R 278
years? Men are still endlessly murdering one another for no good
reason. And the end is in sight. Soon the entire human habitat
will cool and freeze over, and there will be an end to everything.
But no, God argues, in the end man will rule the world. For
"My spirit is in him."
Satan proposes to God that they finish their eternal chess game:
the game is becoming too cruel. All of mankind today is Job.
Would it not be more merciful to destroy everyone at once?
The dispute between the two mighty interlocutors now turns
to the question of Job, of who won and who lost in that contest.
God asserts that he had been the victor because, in spite of
all misfortunes, an unquenchable, undying fire remained alive
in man.
And God allows Satan to repeat his experiment with a new
Job. This new, modern Job is the English school teacher Mr.
Russ. He is showered with disasters : a message arrives that his
only son, a flier, has been killed in the fighting in France; a fire
ruins Mr. Russ and destroys his life's work, his cherished school ;
and finally, he develops cancer. This may be his last day, for he
is to undergo an operation. Before the operation, he receives
three visitors : one of his former colleagues and two capitalists
who had invested their money in his school. The purpose of their
visit is to persuade him to give up his post as director of the
school.
The next two hundred pages are devoted to a two-hour dis
cussion about God. Each of the participants in this discussion
has his own set ideas on religion. One has a portable, pocket
sized, philistine God who does not prevent him, even during the
terrible days of the war, from living comfortably and pursuing
his business deals. The other is a dedicated believer in spiritual
ism. The third is the doctor who is treating Mr. Russ, a consistent
materialist without any God whatsoever. And, finally, there is
the new Job, Mr. Russ, who obviously speaks for Wells himself.
The cruel absurdity of war has caused Wells to amend his pre
vious thesis that the world is logical and rational, and therefore
must be governed by a higher intelligence, which he called "God."
Today, human life, so full of cruelty, diseases, misfortunes, and
poverty, is absurd, irrational, illogical. And yet, Wells feels, man
has the ability to conquer all of this. He will conquer it, he will
surely conquer it and build a beautiful life on earth. More than
E I G H T W R I T E R S A N D 0 N E PA I N T E R 280
that, he will break the crystal prison of our planet in space and
will step off the earth into the invisible vistas of the universe.
And since this is so, since this is inevitable, then there surely is
a power leading man into this path, a power which Wells de
scribes by the same term, "God."
This path, which man will follow, has not been traced by a
blind, elemental process. No, the elements as such are irrational.
Left to the elements, the world and man would go into decline.
No, this path of the future is chosen by the higher, organizing
intelligence, God, and it is his undying fire that burns in man.
Such are the words of the new Job, worn out by misfortunes, in
his final hours. And his faith in the powers of man--ergo, in
God-is rewarded : the operation is successful, and a telegram
arrives, informing Mr. Huss that his son was not dead, but taken
prisoner by the Germans.
An echo of the same eternal, grandiose dispute between Satan
and God can also be heard in Wells's latest novel, Joan and Peter.
But here the colossal, cosmic chess game is placed inside a mi
crocosm, man. This man is Peter, an English pilot during the last
war. And it is not Satan, as in the earlier novel, but Peter who
comes forward in the wig and robe of the accuser in the contest
between mankind and God. Wounded and mutilated after an en
gagement with a German flier, the delirious Peter throws out a
reproach to God : Why don't you manifest yourself? There is so
much evil in the world. This appalling waste of lives in the war.
How can you bear all this cruelty and filth?
And God replies : Why? You people don't like it? No, says
Peter. Then change all this, says God. And the contemporary
God goes on to enunciate a new, modern chapter in theology :
"If I was the hot-tempered old autocrat some of you people pre
tend I arrt, I should have been tickling you up with a thunderbolt
long ago. But I happen to have this democratic fad . . . and so
I leave you to work out your own salvation. . . . I leave you
alone." Why, for example-God goes on-don't you abolish
your kings? You could. People could, but they don't want to
badly enough.
And Peter sees more and more clearly that "the great old
Experimenter" is right and wise : evil is as necessary in the cos
mic organism as pain in the organism of man : it is a warning to
hurry and try to cure the disease.
281 H . G . Wells
are found in Wells. The airplane, daring what until now has been
permitted only to angels, is, of course, the symbol of the revolu
tion taking place in man. And it is this revolution that Wells is
writing about all the time. I know of nothing more urban, more
of today, more contemporary than the airplane. And I know of
no English writer more of today, more contemporary than Wells.
the other, with the indefatigable sailor, the seeker of new lands,
the dreamer and adventurer (an adventurer is always a dreamer) .
And the two Wellses-the realist and the fantasist-reflect these
two trends.
The former trend reached its apex in Dickens, an apex still
unsurpassed. And the first Wells, the sober realist and skeptic,
indulging at times in good-humored, at other times in angry
mockery, is clearly descended from Dickens. This is an instance
of the direct blood kinship we mentioned earlier. And here Wells
is only one of the branches growing out of the mighty trunk of
Dickens. Other branches are Eliot, Meredith, Hardy, Shaw, Gis
sing, Bennett, Galsworthy.
The links between Wells, the author of social fantasies and
science fiction, and the latter current of English literature are
far more complex, subtle, and distant. Here he has no direct
forebears, and will probably have many descendants.
Take Wells's sociofantastic novels-the first literary definition
which comes to mind and which we have often heard is utopia.
These novels have been described as social utopias. If this were
true, then a long line of shadows would arise behind Wells, be
ginning with Sir Thomas More's Utopia, through Campanella's
The City of the Sun, Cabet's A Voyage to Jcaria, and all the way
up to William Morris's News from Nowhere. But this genealogy
would be incorrect, for Wells's sociofantastic novels are not
utopias. His only utopia is his latest novel, Men like Gods.
There are two generic and invariable features that characterize
utopias. One is the content : the authors of utopias paint what
they consider to be ideal societies; translating this into the lan
guage of mathematics, we might say that utopias bear a + sign.
The other feature, organically growing out of the content, is to
be found in the form : a utopia is always static; it is always de
scriptive, and has no, or almost no, plot dynamics.
In Wells's sociofantastic novels we shall hardly ever find these
characteristics. To begin with, most of his social fantasies bear
the - sign, not the + sign. His sociofantastic novels are almost
solely instruments for exposing the defects of the existing social
order, rather than building a picture of a future paradise. His
Story of the Days to Come does not contain a single rosy or
golden glint of paradise; it is painted, instead, in the murky colors
of Goya. And we find the same Goya hues in The Time Machine,
2 87 H. G. Wells
The First Men in the Moon, The War in the A ir, and The World
Set Free. Only Men like Gods, one of his weakest sociofantastic
novels, contains the sugary, pinkish colors of a utopia.
Generally, Wells's sociofantastic novels differ from utopias as
much as +A differs from -A . They are not utopias. Most of
them are social tracts in the form of fantastic novels. Hence,
the roots of Wells's genealogical tree must be sought only in such
literary landmarks as Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Ludvig Holberg's
Niels Klim's Journey under the Ground, and Edward Bulwer
Lytton's The Coming Race. But all that Wells has in common
with these writers is his approach to the theme-not the theme
itself, and not the literary methods employed. In fact, although
we sometimes find Wells using themes which had been developed
earlier by other writers ( such as the theme of a journey to the
moon, encountered in Cyrano de Bergerac, Edgar Allan Poe, and
Jules Verne; or the theme of a sleeper who awakens after many
years, borrowed from numerous folk tales, first by Louis Mercier
at the end of the eighteenth century in his Memoirs of the Year
2440, then by Bellamy, Willbrandt, Edmond About, and others),
his approach to the theme is entirely different. All this leads us
to conclude that, in his sociofantastic novels, Wells created a
new, original variety of literary form.
Two elements lend Wells's fantasies their own unique charac
ter-the element of social satire and the element of science fic
tion invariably fused with it. This second element sometimes ap
pears in Wells's writings in pure, isolated form, expressing itself
in his science fiction novels and short stories ( The Invisible Man,
The Island of Dr. Moreau, "Aepyornis Island," "The New Ac
celerator," and others ) .
Of course, science fiction could enter the field of fine literature
only in the last decades, when truly fantastic potentialities un
folded before science and technology. This is why the virtually
sole example of science fiction in the literature of past centuries
is Francis Bacon's utopia, The New A tlantis, in its chapters which
describe the house of learning, "Solomon's House. " In these
chapters Bacon brilliantly anticipates many of the modern con
quests of science, which to the seventeenth century appeared as
pure fantasy. After that ( if we disregard several pallid hints in
Cabet's Voyage to Icaria) , true science fiction clothed in literary
form will be found only at the end of the nineteenth century. It
E I G H T W R I T E R S A N D 0 N E PA I N T E R 288
was that period-and this was not accidental, but entirely logi
cal-that witnessed the almost simultaneous appearance of Kurd
Lasswitz's Pictures of the Future and Soap Bubbles, ( 1 879-90 ) ,
Bellamy's Looking Backward ( 1 8 87 ) , Theodor Hertzka's Free
land ( 1 88 9 ) , and the works of William Morris, Flammarion,
Jules Verne, and others.
In the works of these authors we find many details of a fan
tastic future akin to those envisaged by Wells : aerial carriages and
perfected machines in Lasswitz; electric self-setting tablecloths in
Hertzka, much like those seen in Wells's A Story of the Days to
Come. But these parallels are due merely to the fact that Wells
and the other writers necessarily drew their fantasies from the
same realistic source-the same science, the same scientific logic.
·
And, of course, none of the enumerated writers possessed such
steely, artful, hypnotic logic as Wells, none had his rich and dar
ing imagination. The only writers who could have given Wells
literary impetus in his science fiction are Flammarion and Jules
Verne. But even Jules Verne cannot be placed on the same plane
with Wells ( not to speak of Flammarion, who was not an artist
at all ) . Only a child can be beguiled into belief by Jules Verne's
fantasies ; they can create the illusion of reality only in a child's
unsophisticated mind. But the logical fantasies of Wells, most of
them enhanced by a sharp seasoning of irony and social satire,
will capture the mind of any reader.
This is further helped by the form of Wells's sociofantastic and
science-fiction novels.
As we have pointed out, the elements of classic utopia are ab
sent from Wells's works (with the sole exception of his novel
Men like Gods) . Static well-being, petrified paradisiac social
equilibrium are logically bound with the content of a utopian
work; hence the natural consequence in its form-a static plot
and absence of a story line. In Wells's sociofantastic novels the
plot is always dynamic, built on collisions, on conflict; the story
is complex and entertaining. Wells invariably clothes his social
fantasy and science fiction in the forms of a Robinsoniad, of the
typical adventure novel so beloved in Anglo-Saxon literature.
In this respect Wells carries on the traditions created by Daniel
Defoe and continued by James Fenimore Cooper, Mayne Reade,
Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe, and by the contemporary writers
Haggard, Conan Doyle and Jack London. However, in adopting
289 H. G. Wells
the form of the adventure novel, Wells deepened it, raised its in
tellectual value, and brought into it the elements of social philos
ophy and science. In his own field-though, of course, on a pro
portionately lesser scale-Wells may be likened to Dostoyevsky,
who took the form of the cheap detective novel and infused it
with brilliant psychological analysis.
An artist of considerable stature, a brilliant and subtle dialec
tician who has created models of an extraordinarily contempo
rary form-models of the urban myth, of socioscientific fantasy
-Wells will unquestionably have literary successors and de
scendants. Wells is only a pioneer. The period of socioscientific
fantasy in literature is only beginning. The entire fantastic his
tory of Europe and of European science in recent years makes
it possible to forecast this with certainty.
In modern English literature, Wells is followed by Conan
Doyle, in some of his works (as, for example, in The Lost World,
where the theme of Wells's story "Aepyornis Island" is devel
oped in the form of a novel) , and Robert Blatchford ( in his
novel The Sorcery Shop ) . The influence of Wells is felt unmis
takably in Jack London's sociofantastic novel The Iron Heel, as
well as in Before A dam ( compare them with Wells's "A Story
of the Stone Age" ) . In the most recent period, George Bernard
Shaw and Upton Sinclair have entered the field of fantasy, with
Shaw's Back to Methuselah and Sinclair's novel They Call Me
Carpenter and his play Hell. It is Wells, too, who has probably
given an impetus to the talented Polish writer Zulawski, author
of a moonlight trilogy, On the Silver Sphere, The Victor, and
The Old Earth, as well as the young Swedish writer Bergstedt,
author of the sociofantastic satire, A lexandersen. The French
man Anatole France is working parallel to Wells in the field of
the social pamphlet clothed in the artful form of ironic-fantastic
novels The White Stone, Penguin Island, and The Revolt of
-
the A ngels. The latter takes the same point of departure as Wells's
The Wonderful Visit-angels among men. But France developed
this theme far more profoundly, wittily and subtly than Wells.
Claude Farrere has also turned to socioscientific fiction; his novel
The Condemned, however, is considerably less successful than
his usual exotic works.
Germany and Austria, which have gone through revolutions,
provide a far more fruitful soil for the growth of fantastic litera-
E I G H T W R I T E R S A N D 0 N E PA I N T E R 290
ture than other countries, which are still resting on their old
foundations. The postrevolutionary years in these two countries
have yielded the richest harvest of fantastic novels : The Third
Road by Colerus, Brehmer's The A ndromeda Nebula, Roland
Betsch's Messiah, Scheff's Flaming Sea, Eichacker's Panic,
Hans Christoph's Journey into the Future: A Novel of Rela
tivity, Madelung's Circus Man, and the remarkable philosophic
fantastic novel of the Czech writer, Karel Capek, The A bsolute
at Large.
The petrified life of the old, prerevolutionary Russia produced
almost no examples of social fantasies or science fiction, as in
deed it could not. Perhaps the only representatives of this genre
in the recent history of our literature are Kuprin, with his story
"The Liquid Sun," and Bogdanov, with his novel Red Star, which
has more journalistic than literary value. And, if we look further
back, Odoyevsky and Senkovsky ( Baron Brambeus ) . But post
revolutionary Russia, which has become the most fantastic coun
try in modern Europe, will undoubtedly reflect this period with
literary fantasy. And the beginning has already been made : A. N.
Tolstoy's A elita and The Hyperboloid of the Engineer Garin,
We, by the author of this essay, and I. Ehrenburg's novels Julio
Jurenito and Trust D. E.
1 922
0. H EN RY
1 Pilnyak and Zamyatin were among the first victims of the RAPP when
it became virtual dictator of the Soviet literary scene in the late 1920s.
Pilnyak recanted of his "sins"; Zamyatin refused to submit.
T WO L E T TER S 304
Yevg. Zamyatin
Moscow
24 September 1 929
L ETTER TO STALI N
305
T WO L E T TE R S 306
by the Second Studio of the Moscow Art Theater for four sea
sons, was withdrawn from the repertory. The publication of my
collected works by the Federatsiya Publishing House was halted.
Every publishing house which attempted to issue my works was
immediately placed under fire; this happened to Federatsiya,
Zemlya i Fabrika, and particularly to the Publishing House of
Leningrad Writers. The latter took the risk of retaining me on its
editorial board for another year and ventured to make use of my
literary experience by entrusting me with the stylistic editing of
works by young writers, including Communists. Last spring, the
Leningrad branch of the RAPP succeeded in forcing me off the
board and putting an end to this work. The Literary Gazette
triumphantly announced this accomplishment, adding quite un
equivocally : "The publishing house must be preserved, but not for
the Zamyatins." The last door to the reader was closed to Zamya
tin. The writer's death sentence was pronounced and published.
In the Soviet criminal code, the penalty second to death is de
portation of the criminal from the country. If I am in truth a
criminal deserving punishment, I nevertheless do not think that
I merit so grave a penalty as literary death. I therefore ask that
this sentence be changed to deportation from the USSR and that
my wife be allowed to accompany me. If, however, I am not a
criminal, I beg to be permitted to go abroad with my wife tem
porarily, for at least one year, with the right to return as soon
as it becomes possible in our country to serve great ideas in
literature without cringing before little men, as soon as there is
at least a partial change in the prevailing view concerning the
role of the literary artist. And I am confident that this time is
near, for the creation of the material base will inevitably be fol
lowed by the need to build the superstructure-an art and a
literature truly worthy of the Revolution.
I know that life abroad will be extremely difficult for me, as I
cannot become a part of the reactionary camp there; this is suffi
ciently attested by my past ( membership in the Russian Social
Democratic [Bolshevik] party in tsarist days, imprisonment, two
deportations, trial in wartime for an antimilitarist novella) . I
know that, while I have been proclaimed a right-winger here
because of my habit of writing according to my conscience rather
than according to command, I shall sooner or later probably be
declared a Bolshevik for the same reason abroad. But even under
309 Letter to Stalin
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
"The Psychology of Creative Work"-"Psikhologiya tvorches
tva," Grani, no. 32 ( October-December 1956 ) . Originally pre
pared as a lecture in the course on the craft of fiction given at
the House of the Arts in 1 920-2 1 .
"Theme and Plot"-"0 syuzhete i fabule," Navy zhurnal, no. 75
(March 1 964 ) . Originally a lecture ( see above ) .
"On Language"-"0 yazyke," Navy zhurnal, no. 7 7 ( September
1 964 ) . Originally a lecture, as above.
"Backstage"-Appeared untitled in the collection Kak my pishem
(Leningrad : Izd. Pisateley, 1 93 0 ) . The title "Zakulisy [Back
stage]" was given the essay when it was reprinted, somewhat
abridged, in Litsa.
Part 4
"Alexander Blok"-Litsa. Originally published as "Vospomina
niya o Bloke," Russky savremennik, no. 3 ( 1 924 ) .
SO URCES 312
Part 5
313
I N D EX 3 14
Leipzig, 76, 78; "The Fifth Leonov, L. M., 96, 98, 1 00, 1 05 ,
Wanderer," 97 123, 1 5 1 ; Lot, 1 54; "Yegorushka's
Kazin, V., 63, 93 Death," 1 2 1
Khudozhestvennoye slovo [Artistic Lermontov, M . Y., 39
word], 60, 62, 63, 66 Lerner, N. 0., 208
Kirillov, V., 60, 1 1 6 Lesage, A. R. : Gil Bias, 170
Kiy, 65; "Loyalty and Treason," 66; Leskov, N. S., 173, 1 8 1 ; Cathedral
"Truths and Fictions," 65 Folk, 1 7 1 ; "The Sealed Angel,"
Klimov, 142 1 74
Kluyev, Nikolay, 24, 29, 3 1-32, 39, Letopis [Annals], 249, 306
45, 46, 56, 1 8 1 ; "Conversational Levinson, A., 206
Tune" ( Besedny naigrysh ) , 3 1 ; Levitan, I., 1 67
"The Copper Whales," 62; "Hut Libedinsky, Y. N. : A Week, 93
Songs," 3 1 , 62; "Song of the Lidin, V. : "One Night," 1 24
Sun-Bearer," 30, 3 1 Literary Gazette ( Moscow) , 1 55 ,
Kok (captain of the Red Guards ) , 2 1 3 , 302, 303, 308
11 Literary Leningrad, 1 5 5
Komissarzhevskaya, V., 9 Literary Studio ( Leningrad ) , 148
Korolenko, Vladimir, 226 Literaturnaya Rossiya [Literary
Koussevitsky, Serge, 1 4 1 Russia], 3 0 1
Krasnaya nov [Red virgin soil], 102, Lobachevsky, N. I . , 1 07 n
150 Lomonsov, M. V., 1 83
Krenek, Ernst : Leap Over the London, Jack, xiv, 288; Before
Shadow, 1 4 1 A dam, 289; The Iron Heel, 289;
Kruchenykh, A. Y., 178 n ; "Poem Martin Eden, 29 1 ; The White
of Silence," 1 7 8 Fang, 80
Krug [Circle], 1 1 4, 1 20, 1 2 1 , 1 24 Lunacharsky, A. V., 1 20
Krylenko, N. V., 22 n Lunts, Lev, 75, 79, 1 05 , 1 49; "In the
Krylov, I. A . : "Demyan's Fish Desert," 76; Outside the Law,
Soup," 74 n 97-98
Krymov, V., 237 Lvov, G. E., "Our Tasks," 7 3 ; "The
Kuprin, A. 1., 38, 1 0 1 , 206-7; "The Peasants," 72
Duel," 3 5 ; "Emerald," 178; "The Lyashko, N. N . : "Stirrups," 1 1 8- 1 9
Liquid Sun," 290
Kustodiev, Boris Mikhailovich, xiii, MacOrlan, Pierre, 1 05 , 1 06
1 9 3 , 23 1-4 1 ; "Russian Types," Madelung, Aage, 1 05 ; Circus Man,
232 290
Kuznitsa [The Smithy], 56, 60, 6 1 , Malishevsky, 124
62, 63, 66, 93 Mallarme, S., 242
Kuznitsa group, 93 Malyshkin, A. G., 98; "The Fall of
Dair," 100
Lasswitz, Kurd : Pictures of the Maly Theater, 139, 1 77
Future, 288; Soap Bubbles, 288 Mandelshtam, Osip, 3 9
Lavrentiev, V., 209, 2 1 1 Mann, Heinrich, 1 7 3
Le Corbusier, 1 3 4 Marianne, 255
LEF, Left Front in Art Mariinsky Theater, 1 40
(organization ) , 1 7 8 Markevich, Boleslav, 1 7 3
LEF (journal) , 94, 147 Marx, Karl, 2 2 , 1 05
Lelevich, G., 128 Mashbits-Verov, I. M., 306
Lenin, V., 73, 80, 254 Matveyev, A., 1 3 5
Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, Maupassant, Guy de, 1 73 , 229, 293 ;
141 Strong as Death, 1 62-63
Leonidov, 0 . , 60 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 49, 54 (pl.),
I N D EX 318