No, Shurik wasn’t like that.
But all that was over.
Time rushed on. (There was even a new novel entitled Forward, Time!) The Five-Year Plan in Four Years extended itself and rumbled over them. Back in the Pedagogical Institute they had all been instilled with the idea that Soviet literature—and therefore, teachers of literature—must not lag behind the demands of the Period of Reconstruction. The very same month Nastya was preparing to teach her first lessons, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers published its resolution calling for positive heroes in literary works and for shock-worker projects in literature; workers themselves should become writers and thus ensure that art did not lag behind the demands of the working class. Some were even setting forth the idea that only the newspaper or the propaganda poster could be the literature of our time—certainly not the novel.
Well, this was all so rash and impetuous that it took your breath away. What did they mean—no novels? What would happen to the novel?
Now you have to go and meet the children, at a time when the Education Directorate is saying that teaching Krylov’s fables within the walls of the Soviet school poses a definite pedagogical risk.
Nastenka (now she was addressed as Anastasia Dmitrievna) was given three parallel fifth-grade classes—twelve-year-olds—and was the homeroom teacher for Five A.
Her first lesson! But it was the first for the children as well: in this second level they were no longer little kids, and how proud they were of that! September 1 was a joyful, sunny day. A few of the parents brought flowers to class. Anastasia Dmitrievna wore a bright shantung dress; the girls were all in white frocks, and many of the boys wore white shirts. Their funny little faces and brightly shining eyes were full of exultation. At long last her dream had come true, and she could do all that Maria Feofanovna had done . . . (And even more: in this present age, when everything had become coarse and crude, she could make sure that these little boys became decent men, not like the ones today.) Now, in lesson after lesson, she could pour into their heads all the things she had preserved from this great and good literature.
But somehow it wasn’t happening that way. She could not yet see a way to break through the rigidly determined teaching program:The building cranes crash
By the foundation pit . . .
And the regional inspector might drop in on any of her classes to check on her. She had to begin with the Turkestan-Siberian Railway that was now being completed and see that the children memorized how the trains passed through the desert:. . . past all they fly
Scaring people and flocks,
Not letting them by
On the caravan tracks.
And then she had to take up Magnitogorsk, and then the Dnieper Dam and Bezymensky’s poem ridiculing a doomed professor-suicide from the dying class. And then there was the poem about an Indian boy who had heard something about Lenin, the inspiring leader of all the oppressed in the world, and who had made his way to him in Moscow on foot all the way from India.
Next, they saddled her with the slogan “To Demyanize Literature”: to instill it with the militant spirit of Demyan Bedny.
Anastasia Dmitrievna, completely perplexed, saw no way to resist these things. And how could she take the responsibility for shutting off these little children from the era in which they were living?
It was good, though, that they were still in the junior grades. Today’s harsh conditions will pass, and with a few years’ more study they’ll get to the cherished classics. And even today not all of Pushkin has been written off:Here all bear heavy yokes unto the grave,
Afraid to cherish hope or private dream;
A maiden blossoms to become a slave
And victim of her heartless master’s scheme.
She read it aloud in class, striving to convey to the children the poet’s pain, but alongside the crashing of the cranes, the lines of his verse seemed to be coming from another world, one that was far, far away.
Inspiration came only in her Russian language classes: this was a straightforward, unshakeable, and eternal subject. But it, too, had been shaken! Look at what they were doing with the new orthography! And the rules were changing so quickly, she couldn’t keep up with them herself.
Still, Nastenka taught all these production and Five-Year Plan works with the same dedication that she felt to her own sacred cause of literature ; she taught so that the kids loved her, surrounded her during recess and looked at her with gratitude, reflecting the constant radiance in her own eyes.
Meanwhile, the stores in the city stood empty, and all the private shops had been closed. There were the first mentions of “difficulties in the meat supply,” and then “difficulties in the sugar supply.” Soon there was nothing left to buy, and food ration cards were introduced. (Teachers were considered civil servants, and this entitled them to 400 grams of bread, while her ever-weakening mother went to work in a tobacco factory so as to get a “worker’s” ration card for 600 grams.) A hungry time set in, and no one had wages high enough for the private market. In fact, the militia were driving off the market sellers.
Even the old week, with each day measured off, had ended. Now there was an “unbroken five-day week.” Members of a family would have free days at different times, and the common Sunday was done away with . . . “Forward, Time!” Time rushed along so quickly that it lost its very dignity and seemed to stop simply being.
Life grew ever harsher. One day you might get 200 grams of bread on your ration card, the next day 300, and the amounts would alternate. You always went around feeling hungry. Rumor had it that people were dying of hunger in the villages across the whole region. You would come across the bodies of people who had made their way from the countryside and dropped dead on the streets of the city. Nastenka herself never stumbled on a corpse, but once a peasant woman from the Kuban, emaciated beyond belief and barely able to stand on her feet, knocked at her door. They fed her some of their own thin soup and she, no longer able to weep, told of how she had buried her three little children and set off across the steppe haphazardly in hope of saving herself. The whole of the Kuban had been cordoned off by soldiers, and they would catch anyone trying to flee and turn them back. This woman had somehow managed to slip through the cordon by night, but boarding a train was impossible: they could pick her out near a station or inside the train, and then it was back behind the line of doom or to prison.
Should they let her stay with them?
She left, stumbling at every step.
Mama said: “I feel like dying myself. Where will all this end?”
Nastenka tried to raise her spirits: “We’ll break through to a better world, Mama! Communism, after all, is based on the same ideals as Christianity; it just takes a different path to reach them.”
Student notebooks had disappeared from the stationery stores. There were a few lucky children who still had some from their previous stock, but a regular two-hundred-page notebook bound in oilcloth was now a real treasure. Then notebooks were reduced in width and made with rough paper that caught at the pen nibs. They began distributing notebooks through the schools, each pupil getting two of them for a quarter of the school year, and they had to be used for all the subjects together. Somehow the kids had to divide these skinny little notebooks among their different subjects and write smaller—so much for penmanship. What remained was the blackboard and more rote memorization. A few parents were able to get old bookkeeping forms or warehouse timesheets, and their children wrote on the backs of them.
But children of that age could cope with absolutely everything. They still laughed and ran around at recess. But what about you? How were you to get through this painful year? How were you to lead the children toward a better time while preserving unspoiled their sense of the Pure and the Beautiful? And how were you to teach them to discern the rightness and the inevitability of the New Era through all the jumbled ugliness of the life around them? Nastenka vividly recalled Shurik’s enthusiasm. Even now she was still inf
ected by him: there was someone who possessed a true vision! As the poet said:They’ll bear it all, and build themselves a road
With muscle and bone . . .
Was Russian literature not continuing even today? Was the present love for the people not the direct product of the sacred precepts of Nekrasov, Belinsky, Dobroliubov, and Chernyshevsky? All those dry commentaries of Kogan and Friche, or the passionate monologues of Shurik—surely they weren’t built on thin air?
When one considered it carefully, Dobroliubov’s ray of light had never stopped shining! It had penetrated into our time as well, but now was it not a ray of burning scarlet? One simply had to be able to pick it out in today’s conditions.
But then she went to read the latest instructional guidelines from the Education Directorate, the articles of Osip Martynovich Beskin in particular, and her heart sank: she read that an artist could not rely on intuition in his work; he was obliged to take control of his perception through class consciousness. And furthermore: this so-called literature with a heart was nothing more than a slogan soiled by the greasy fingers of Russophiles, and it had been raised in Russia over a foundation laid by a patriarchal cabal.
Literature with a heart! That was what she longed for most of all!
The program for next year included the “iron foundation” of Soviet literature: Fadeev’s Rout; Panfyorov’s Bruski, about collectivization; Gladkov’s Cement (a horrid thing because it presented thirteen-year-old children with violent scenes of erotic conquest). Yet it was true that Serafimovich’s Iron Flood showed in remarkably laconic fashion the actions by a mass of people as a whole—something, it seems, that our literature had never done before. Libedinsky’s The Week aroused sympathy for Robeyko as he forced his tubercular throat to call out the inhabitants to cut down the monastery forest for firewood so that the peasants could buy seed grain. (Still, that must mean that every tiny bit of last year’s seed grain had been confiscated.)
Forty pairs of childish eyes were fixed on Anastasia Dmitrievna every day, and how could she betray their trust? Yes, children, sacrifices are inevitable, and the whole of Russian literature has called out to us to make sacrifices. Yes, there has been “wrecking” going on here and there, but the unprecedented scale of our industrialization will bring us all a happiness we’ve never known before. And when you grow up, you’ll have a chance to take part in it. You have to examine every event carefully, even the dark ones, as the poet said so aptly:Only he can rise to glory,
Only he can join our rush
Who finds, ’neath petty facts, the story
Of Revolution’s forward push.
But then they took back the textbooks they had just given out for the year: they had been found incorrect and lagging behind reality. They began publishing “loose” textbooks—ones that dealt with contemporary issues and were to be used only for the current half of the year, because by the next year they would already be outdated. A newspaper published Gorky’s article “To the Humanists,” in which he denounced and damned those humanists—and this was immediately included in the next loose textbook: “It is entirely natural that workers’ and peasants’ power is crushing its enemies like lice.”
It all left you terrified, scarcely able to catch your breath, and utterly confused. How could you possibly present that to the children? And why?
But Gorky was a great writer, a Russian classic, and an authority respected across the globe, so how could your wretched little mind dare challenge him? And here, right alongside, he writes about those who have lost contact with reality and live lives of ease: “What is it that this class of degenerates wants? . . . a well-fed, colorless, licentious, and irresponsible life.” And then you remember Nekrasov’s lines, “From the exultant, idle chatterers . . .” And didn’t Chekhov call for a little man with a hammer to trouble the sleeping conscience each day?
So she decided to organize a literary circle. A dozen of her most responsive, favorite students from Six A signed up, and after class Anastasia Dmitrievna would take them through the best of the nineteenth century, things that weren’t included in the syllabus. But there was no way she could hide her circle from the principal (a caustic woman who taught social science). From her it went up to the Region, and an instructor from the methodology office came and sat down like a toad at one of the meetings of the literary circle. Anastasia Dmitrievna cut out all of the enthusiasm, all the sense, all the inspiration, and could scarcely recognize what remained as her own. The verdict of the toad was: Enough harping on the classics! The fact is that it distracts students from life.
“Fact” had become a byword in these years. The word rang out as something incontestable, deadly as a pistol shot. (And the toad-like instructor could have reached a far more brutal verdict: “This was sneak attack!”)
There was another possibility—outings to the theater. The five-day week had now changed to six days, and every date divisible by six was a common rest day, similar to the former Sunday. On these free days the theater put on cheap matinees for schoolchildren. Children, accompanied by their teachers, would come from all across the city. The enchantment of the lights dimming in the hall, the curtains drawing back, the actors moving under the bright spotlights, their vivid appearance in makeup, their ringing voices—how these things could capture the heart of a child, and what a shining path to literature they offered.
It was true that the plays were what you could expect, requisites of the Five-Year Plan: Trenyov’s Lyubov Yarovaya, in which the wife of a White officer shoots her husband out of ideological commitment; and quite a lot of Kirshon—The Rails Are Humming, about the subversive activities of engineers; and Bread, about the vicious resistance of the kulaks and the ardor of the poor peasantry. (After all, you couldn’t deny the class struggle and its role in history.) She did manage to bring her students to Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe. And so, taking up the children’s enthusiasm, Anastasia Dmitrievna arranged a reading in which students in group Seven A took the various roles in the play. A star student, a skinny boy with disheveled hair that would never stay in place, read in an unnatural voice dripping with tragedy and aping his favorite actor: “Louisa, did you love the marshal ? This candle will not burn out before you die . . .” (This same boy was the class deputy on the school pedagogical council, as was the practice.) Schiller’s play was considered compatible with revolutionary times and attending it would not bring a reprimand. But if they were thinking of reading anything by Ostrovsky they had to choose very, very carefully.
Rostov-on-the-Don was declared “a city of hundred-percent literacy” (though there were still more than plenty illiterates). In the schools, they were using the “brigade-laboratory method”: the instructor did not present the lesson and did not assign individual grades. The class was split into brigades of four or five, and the desks were rearranged accordingly; one of the students in each brigade would read aloud, in a low voice, from the “loose” textbook. Then the instructor would ask for one student to answer for the whole brigade. And if the answer was “satisfactory” or “very satisfactory,” then each member of the brigade would receive a “ sat.” or a “ v. sat.”
Then there was a school quarter when none of the usual loose textbooks arrived and no required curriculum was assigned. Without them, even the city education authorities were lost: Did this mean some major shift in the party line? They decided that for the time being each teacher would carry on however they chose and take responsibility for what they did.
It was then that their social science teacher and principal began teaching bits from Marx’s Capital to the fifth, sixth, and seventh grades at once. Did that mean Anastasia Dmitrievna could now teach some of the Russian classics? But how could she make the right choice and not fall into error? Dostoevsky, of course, was ruled out, and in any case the students were not yet ready to be exposed to him. And Leskov—no, even he was ruled out. Nor could she take Aleksei Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan the Terrible or Tsar Fyodor. As for Pushkin—well, not everything. And Lermo
ntov—not everything. (And if any of the young lads asked about Esenin she would change the subject and not answer—he was strictly forbidden.)
In fact, she had grown unaccustomed to such freedom. She herself could no longer even express what she had once felt. After all that Nastenka had read, discovered, and had been taught to see over these past years, even the former unshakeable integrity of Russian literature now seemed to have been shaken. Now she was frightened to talk about an author or a book without providing some class basis for them. She paged through Kogan and found the phrase, “the types of ideas with which this work falls into line.”
Meanwhile, new issues of Soviet literary journals were coming out, and the newspapers were heaping praises on some new works. She lost heart: she could not allow these young adolescents to lag behind. They were the ones, after all, who would have to live in this world, and she must help them find their way into it.
And so she sought out these new poems and stories that had been hailed in the press and brought them to her students. Here, children, is the highest degree of selflessness for the sake of the common cause:I’ll gladly give up both my name and rank
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