by Roger Silverman.
In Russia, literature and revolution are inextricably intertwined. There is a proud and unbroken Russian tradition of defiance of successive autocratic regimes by artists and writers. It happened under the Tsars; it happened under the tyranny of Stalin and his successors; and it happens still today under the Putin dictatorship.
There is no country with a richer tradition of literary and artistic protest against autocracy than Russia. Stretching back to the aftermath of the Decembrist revolt against tsarism in 1825, successive generations of writers defied the censors and braved the living hell of Siberia to throw down their challenge to Tsars, commissars and oligarchs. Even Russia’s Shakespeare, Alexander Pushkin, only escaped the risk of execution through participation in the coup due to his exile at the time in southern Russia. Later in the nineteenth century, Chernyshevsky was locked in the Peter-Paul Fortress; Dostoyevsky endured a mock execution and years of hard labour in Siberia; even the aristocratic Count Tolstoy, living in splendid seclusion as a hermit on his estate, was a kind of utopian socialist. Later, the list of writers and artists who perished in Stalin’s gulag is almost endless. Even the years of the so-called “thaw” under Khrushchev, from the mid-‘50s to the mid-‘60s, was very short-lived, and was brought to a sudden end by the trial of the writers Sinyavsky and Daniil, following which there was a new crop of victims.
In Russia, the attitude of the writer towards the state has almost always been one of defiance. The revolution liberated the creative energies of a whole generation, who had grown up in a Russia thrown into turmoil by one shock after another: defeat in the war against Japan; the 1905 revolution; the brutal repression that came in its aftermath (there were thousands of executions by hanging, known as “Stolypin’s necktie”); the world war, in which at least 2-3 million soldiers were killed… and then came a decade of dizzying upheavals: the overthrow of Tsarism, the October revolution, the civil war, and then a new dark age of Stalinism.
The first years of the revolution gave a dynamic impetus to artistic experimentation. Artistic freedom flourished as never before or since: theatre, cinema, poetry, music, art and sculpture sprang up and touched the lives of the population everywhere. For the first time there was an explosion of popular creativity, with mass participation in street theatre, music, films, drama… In 1920, to mark the third anniversary of the storming of the Winter Palace, there was even a mass re-enactment of the occasion (actually a highly hyped-up enhancement of it!) in which 10,000 people participated. There was a renaissance of experimentation and creativity and imagination: Meyerhold in the theatre, Kandinsky in art, Stravinsky in music, Eisenstein in cinema, with countless more names to be added… But the focus here is on literature.
In stark contrast to the stifling fumes of despotism soon to choke society, the Bolsheviks defended to the death the absolute right of artistic and literary freedom. As an integral part of his relentless struggle against the encroachments of censorship, Trotsky insisted: “Art, like science not only does not seek orders, but by its very essence, cannot tolerate them… Truly intellectual creation is incompatible with lies, hypocrisy and the spirit of conformity.”
He explicitly acknowledged the need at times for even the most flamboyant gestures in the interests of the further development of cultural life. He insisted: “Every new artistic or literary tendency… has begun with a ‘scandal’, breaking the old respected crockery, bruising many established authorities. This flowed not at all solely from publicity-seeking (although there was no lack of this). No, these people – artists, as well as literary critics – had something to say. They had friends, they had enemies, they fought, and exactly through this they demonstrated their right to exist.”
That did not stop even Trotsky in his day engaging in some gentle mockery of the more exotic elements in the contemporary wave of artistic experimentation: “To be sure, a young Futurist did not go to the factories and to the mills, but he made a lot of noise in cafes, he banged his fist upon music stands, he put on a yellow blouse, he painted his cheeks and threatened vaguely with his fist.” (Futurism was the dominant trend among the avant-garde in Russia, who welcomed the revolution; in Italy, conversely, the Futurists rallied round the flag of Mussolini.)
So Lenin and Trotsky did not always fully agree with the more extreme of these literary pioneers. Lenin expressed a kind of avuncular irritation with those who demanded the instant creation of a “proletarian culture”. For a start, he said, we’d be happy enough to get a decent bourgeois culture; a reasonable aspiration, after all, on the terrain of a peasant country still hobbling along on the technology of the medieval wooden plough amid a fog of feudal superstition and mass illiteracy.
Trotsky too was critical of the impatience of some Futurists for the instant “overthrow” of the old culture. “To say that Futurism has freed art of its thousand-year-old bonds of bourgeoisdom is to estimate thousands of years very cheaply… The call of the Futurists to break with the past, to do away with Pushkin, to liquidate tradition, etc., has a meaning in so far as it is addressed to the old literary caste, to the closed-in circle of the intelligentsia…. But the meaninglessness of this call becomes evident as soon as it is addressed to the proletariat. The working-class does not have to, and cannot break with literary tradition, because the working-class is not in the grip of such tradition. The working-class does not know the old literature, it still has to commune with it, it still has to master Pushkin, to absorb him, and so overcome him.”
Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that even during the privations of the early 1920s, for all their reservations Lenin and Trotsky willingly endorsed the publication at state expense of the full range of artistic output – if only, as they put it jokingly, for the sake of “cranks and charlatans”; the point being that even the most outlandish of tastes were still in those days provided for without question.
The young intelligentsia experimented with new modes of expression, in art, music, and poetry. The old forms and the old structures made no sense to them in an epoch of catastrophe. As the most talented of the new poets, Vladimir Mayakovsky, said of the turbulent period in which they had grown to adulthood: “these events made Futurists of us all.”
At one end of the poetic spectrum, there were those like Khlebnikov, who in 1912 wrote a manifesto called A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, and Kruchenikh. They busied themselves, literally, with inventing a new language composed of meaningless syllables. This was called za-um, or “trans-sense” – a poetry style utilising nonsense words. One prime example of this is Khlebnikov’s poem Zaklyatiye smekhom (“Incantation by Laughter”), in which a series of permutations is generated which was built by adding to the root word smekh (“laughter”) multiple nonsense prefixes, suffixes and variations on the word (you could translate it as laughity laughsome laughness, but it sounds funnier in Russian.
At the other end of the spectrum were those who strove to overcome their past record of rebellious individualism and fuse their hopes with the victory of the revolution. The most prominent of these was Mayakovsky himself. He had started as a conspicuously ostentatious bohemian rebel poet; but, unlike many of his contemporaries, he wholeheartedly welcomed the revolution (he called it “my revolution”). When the civil war came, he voluntarily sacrificed his former quest for notoriety and subjected himself to an intense personal discipline, and renounced his extraordinarily talented larger-than-life ego and devote his talents exclusively to the service of the revolution. For three years he worked flat out, day in, day out, composing catchy advertising jingles for the thousands of public-information posters put out throughout the civil war by the agitprop agency ROSTA. Later he put it very eloquently: “I stamped on the throat of my own song”. By the end of the civil war, exhausted and still feeling personally frustrated and unfulfilled, he found himself increasingly at odds with the social filth and trash thrown up by the ebb-tide of the fast-retreating world revolution: the speculators and kulaks and NEPmen and the growing army of bureaucrats that were infesting the state apparatus and Soviet life. Yearning for fresh air, he went on a trip to the USA, and wrote a futuristic poem celebrating the engineering feat of Brooklyn Bridge. But after the exhilaration of that experience he returned to an exhausted and deflated society, and could find no worthier focus for his talent than a series of bitingly sharp satirical plays scourging the new bureaucratic order. The best of these was a play called “The Bedbug” in which the main character – a parasitic party hack who considered his role indispensable – was identified with that most vile species of poisonous insect, which was now infesting every aspect of Soviet life.
The prevailing mood of despair was most dramatically captured by one demonstrative act on the part of the romantic peasant poet Sergey Yesenin. In 1925 Yesenin booked a room at a Moscow hotel, the Hotel Angleterre. There he slashed his wrists and wrote a farewell suicide poem in his own blood, ending with the lines: “There’s nothing new in dying, but living is no newer.” Yesenin was a popular voice of the peasant youth, and his shocking act of conspicuous melodrama precipitated a wave of suicides. In spite of his own mood of discontent and disillusion, Mayakovsky considered it his obligation to do all he could to break the evil spell, and he did this with a piece of savage mockery. He wrote a scathing parody of Yesenin’s farewell poem, including the lines
“Was the hotel short of a bottle of ink? Did you really need to slash your veins?… Your admirers rejoiced… A host of them have copied you, and they too are dead. But why increase the statistics by one death more? Why not increase the production of ink instead?” And he ended: “In this life it’s not difficult to die. To make life is far more difficult.”
BUT… five years later this literary giant himself went on to take his own life. In his suicide note he wrote: My death is no one’s fault. Please don’t gossip: the dead hate gossip. My boat of love is smashed on the rocks of daily life.”
Neither individual rebellion, nor futuristic experimentation, nor devotion to the Party cause, nor biting political satire had provided sufficient outlet for his energies in these perplexing times.
For the last years of his life, Mayakovsky had been hounded to despair by the Stalinist puppy-dog poet Demyan Bedniy of the so-called “Association of Proletarian Poets”. Bedniy stood at the opposite pole to Mayakovsky of Soviet literature; he conformed to the stultifying drab sludge of so-called “socialist realism”. He was a scribbler of Stalinist doggerel; anarchetypal hack who slavishly toed the party line during its worst excesses. As head of the Association of Proletarian Writers anyone displaying any original or creative talent, a special target of his being Mayakovsky. He was rewarded by the regime with a shower of ill-deserved honours. Even after later himself falling out of favour – due not to any sign of rebellion against the establishment, but simply to his debauched lifestyle – he later crawled back into the regime’s good graces by penning appalling verses fawning to Stalin’s police state and explicitly glorifying the execution of Tukhavchev sky and the Red Army top brass. His writing was so unutterably awful that even Stalin at one time remarked: “ten volumes of verse by Demyan Bedniy are not worth one poem of Mayakovsky’s”.
While driving to suicide and later executing outright a whole generation of talented writers, Stalin also commandeered the popularity of others and in effect kidpnapped them. The nest example is the almost equally terrible plight of Maxim Gorky. Gorky was born into a grindingly poor peasant family; he worked in a succession of sweatshops; he became an eloquent storyteller and a genuine voice of the people. He wrote a classic three-volume autobiography of his life, which was faithfully turned into a stunningly beautiful series of three films, directed by Mark Donskoi – one rare case of a creative artist who survived intact.
Gorky rejoiced at the downfall of Tsarism, but he distrusted the Bolsheviks and shrank from the harsh imperatives of the revolution. At first he escaped the dilemma by taking refuge in Capri – and continuing to live there through the first years of Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship. Later he was lured back to Russia by Stalin as a token literary mascot: pampered in luxury, showered with multiple awards and prizes, had whole cities and parks named in his honour, and was forced as a to play the part of a laureate of the regime. Towards the end he made feeble attempts to intercede for Stalin’s victims and deplore his regime’s excesses, but he ended his days as a virtual prisoner and was soon quietly put to death and buried – of course, with due pomp and ceremony.
Most of this brilliant generation of writers found other ways to cope with the overwhelming pressures of the time. As the world revolution receded and Soviet society became suffocated by the dead hand of Stalinism, the tightening stranglehold on art and literature became an indispensable element in the consolidation of bureaucratic tyranny. Those writers that managed even temporarily to survive felt it necessary to resort increasingly to grotesquerie, surrealism and satire, the better to hurl their barbs at the new regime more obliquely.
Yevgeniy Zamyatin wrote the classic futuristic dystopian novel We – the original prototypefor its later (and far inferior) Western imitations Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and George Orwell’s 1984.
Isaac Babel was a celebrated writer of short stories, the best known of them describing the civil war and the life of Russian Jews in Odessa. Naturally he came under the shadow of the purges. In 1934, at the first congress of the Union of Soviet Writers, Babel noted that he was becoming “the master of a new literary genre: the genre of silence“. He was later arrested and under horrific torture incriminated several of his contemporaries. Later, however, he had the courage to make the following confession to his interrogators: “I ask the inquiry to take into account that, though in prison, I committed a crime. I slandered several people.“ He was summarily tried and shot.
One of the most outstanding writers of this generation was the novelist and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov. His most famous work was the novel The Master and Margarita. This was a shocking and savage satire, set partly in Moscow during the 1930s, where Satan appears among a crowd of bureaucratic functionaries and sycophants, and partly in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, where we meet Pontius Pilate and Jesus of Nazareth, among a host of others. Bulgakov was a critic of the regime but he was no revolutionary, and no doubt for that reason was to some extent protected from the terrible fate of many of his contemporaries. He was never arrested, let alone tried and executed; but he was denied permission to publish his later novels or stage his plays. He pleaded in vain to be allowed to emigrate to escape the stifling of his talent and the suffocating routine of his life. He died in 1940 – perhaps just in time.
Some writers escaped the same fate by muffling their protest, using gentle mockery and keeping safely to mere journalistic sketches, with hints of gentle satire. Among these were Ilf and Petrov (like Babelalso products of the rich earthy folk culture of Odessa), and Mikhail Zoshchenko, whoused a very simple deadpan style of satire in vignettes published in short newspaper columns. These gained him widespread popularity without ever reaching a scale of daring that might bring him to the attention of the censors.
Some writers gained a further temporary lease of life by seeking relative safety using a clever subterfuge: confining themselves to writing for children. Many of these showed remarkable ingenuity in their subversive use of this genre.
One of these was Evgeny Schwartz, who just for one performance succeeded in smuggling past the censors a play for children. It was about a village terrorised by a dragon which offers it “protection”… but demands in return the annual sacrifice of one local maiden of its choice. A hero arrives called Lancelot, who slays the dragon, and the village is liberated. However, Lancelot then disappears, and the glory for his action is usurped by the corrupt town mayor, who fraudulently awards himself the title of “Dragon-killer”, and soon becomes an even more hated tyrant. The village is languishing under the tyranny of the fake “Dragon”. Soon, however, the village becomes festooned with the mysterious appearance on the town walls of the letter “L”, and they feel hope that their hero will return to liberate them anew. It was a reference that was certainly not lost on the delighted Moscow audiences, who enthusiastically applauded its one-and-only performance on stage. For there was to be no repeat performance.
Another group of writers who sometimes resorted to children’s literature for clandestine anti-Stalinist propaganda was the Oberiu group. These were early Soviet avant-garde writers whose absurdist innovations made them controversial in their time, and landed many of them in prison. They used an often violent brand of humour.
The most conspicuous members of this group were Alexandr Vvedensky and Daniil Kharms. Kharmswas the most shocking and hilarious of the group. He wrote a dystopian novel reminiscent of Kafka’s Trial. His stories are violent and his characters are completely cold and amoral. The Russia he presents has been described as “cruelty’s utopia”. His writings and his whole persona frightened the regime, and Kharms ended up dying of starvation in a lunatic asylum.
All the members of that group show a bitterly dark picture. Here’s a quote from one poem by Nikolai Zabalotsky: “The horses of adjectives trample the faltering figures of nouns… The war elephants of the subconscious crawl out and shuffle like giant dwarfs”. And from Nikolai Oleinikov: “There it is, beyond reproach: the marvelous structure of the cockroach. O energetic cockroachy legs…They’re saying something, they’re scribbling on air”.
Like their counterparts in the West, but on the even grander dimensions of the Russian steppes, writers like Kharms and Vvedensky used paradox and absurdity to mirror the horrors and irrationality of the epoch. This was an anticipation of surrealism. What, after all, could be more grotesque, more absurd, let alone more horrifying, than the nightmare that was hanging over their heads? The mass purges, the show trials, the labour camps, the millions incarcerated in the Stalinist gulag? And hardly a hair’s breadth ahead, the world war, the holocaust, the Nazi gas chambers, the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Like many Western writers during the madness of the twentieth century in Europe – Kafka, Ionesco, Beckett and many more – these writers too created an entirely new genre that incorporated the madness of the world around them into their art.
Finally, as a postscript, let’s look at a very different and more recent act of artistic rebellion. There is a direct link: the Pussy Riot trio – a feminist punk rock performance art group which in 2012 staged a provocative unauthorised gig at a Moscow cathedral, and were jailed.
They considered themselves an audacious modern configuration of the OBERIU group. The Pussy Riot demonstrators explicitly traced a direct link to that school of dissident Soviet writers who had made the very last heroic stand of Russian modernism in the 1930s before the flame of artistic creativity was finally snuffed out by the Stalinist terror – to the members of the OBERIU group. Tolonnikova quoted Vvedensky’s aphorism: “The inexplicable is our friend”, and commented that “the OBERIU poets and their search for thought on the edge of meaning were finally embodied when they paid with their lives, which were taken by the senseless and inexplicable Great Terror…. Paying with their lives, these poets unintentionally proved that they were right to consider irrationality and senselessness the nerves of their era. Thus, the artistic became an historical fact.”
The performance of these punk rockers owes something to this same heroic Russian tradition of rebellion; and when they staged their demonstration in 2012 there was a huge groundswell of public sympathy in their defence – a public mood that even won reluctant acknowledgement from the authorities, in the form of the relatively mild sentence demanded by the prosecutors and the rather grudging hints by Putin himself that they should not be treated too harshly (judged, presumably, only by the none-too-gentle standards of his KGB heritage). This gives the Pussy Rioters a proud place in the deeper Russian tradition of artistic protest. What these performers did was the right and prerogative of artists throughout history: to find their own voice, no matter how “shocking” the initial effect. And they would have found no more enthusiastic champion than Trotsky at their side today.
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova in particular places the Pussy Riot act firmly in the tradition of two centuries of Russian protest. Listen to what she said: “This is a trial of the entire political system of the Russian Federation… repeating all of the worst moments of Russian history. What was behind our performance? Nothing other than the autocratic political system. Pussy Riot’s performances can either be called dissident art or political action that engages art forms. Either way, our performances are a kind of civic activity amidst the repressions of a corporate political system that directs its power against basic human rights and civil and political liberties… We put on political punk performances in response to a government that is rife with rigidity, reticence, and caste-like hierarchal structures. It is so clearly invested in serving only narrow corporate interests.”
In their closing speeches to the court, the Pussy Riot women turned the tables and placed the Russian state on trial. Maria Alyokhina called the performance that prompted their arrest “a small and somewhat absurd act” that has “snowballed into an enormous catastrophe”, and she correctly concluded: “This would obviously not happen in a healthy society. Russia, as a state, has long resembled an organism sick to the core. And the sickness explodes out into the open when you rub up against its inflamed abscesses…. Having spent almost half a year in jail, I have come to understand that prison is just Russia in miniature.”
These courageous women inspired millions by their example. Like generations of Russian artists and writers before them, their art was not a diversion or an escape from reality but a weapon with which to change it.