Mixing science fiction with mystical belief was typical of the Russian literary tradition, where the path to the ideal was so often seen in terms of the transcendence of this world and its mundane realities. The Russian Revolution was accompanied by a huge upsurge of apocalyptic science fiction. Bogdanov, the Bolshevik co-founder of Proletkult, took the lead with his science-fiction novels, Red Star (1908) and Engineer Menni (1913), which portrayed the communist Utopia on the planet Mars sometime in the middle of the third millennium. This cosmic vision of socialist redemption fuelled the boom of science fiction writing in the 1920s, from Platonov's Utopian tales to Aleksei Tolstoy's bestselling novels Aelita (1922) and The Garin Death Ray (1926), which returned to the Martian theme of science in the service of
the proletariat. Like its nineteenth-century antecedents, this fantastic literature was a vehicle for the great philosophical and moral questions about science and conscience. Zamyatin's science fiction drew from the Russian tradition to develop a humanist critique of the Soviet technological Utopia. His dystopian novel We derived much of its moral argument from Dostoevsky. The central conflict of the novel, between the rational, all-providing high-tech state and the beautiful seductress I-3 30, whose deviant and irrational need for freedom threatens to subvert the power of that absolutist state, is a continuation of the discourse which stands at the centre of 'The Grand Inquisitor' in The Brothers Karamazov about the unending conflict between the human needs for security and liberty.*
Science fiction largely disappeared in the 1930s and 1940s. Socialist Realism left no space for Utopian dreams, or any form of moral ambiguity, and the only science fiction that was not stamped out was that which extolled Soviet technology. But the space programme of the 1950s led to a resurgence of science fiction in the Soviet Union, and Khrushchev, who was a devotee of the genre, encouraged writers to return to the traditions of the pre-Stalin years.
Ivan Efremov's Andromeda (1957) was perhaps the most important work in this new wave, and certainly one of the bestselling (with over 20 million copies sold in the Soviet Union alone). Set in a distant future, when the earth has been united with the other galaxies in a universal civilization, it portrays a cosmic paradise in which science plays a discreet role in providing for all human needs; but what emerges above all else as the purpose of existence is the eternal need of human beings for ethical relationships, freedom, beauty and creativity. Efre-mov was bitterly attacked by communist hardliners: his emphasis on spiritual values was uncomfortably close to a fundamental challenge
* It may be that the title of Zamyatin's novel We was drawn at least in part from Dostoevsky - in particular from Verkhovensky's words to Stavrogin (in The Devils, trans. D. Magarshack (Harmondsworth, 1971), p. 42.3) where he describes his vision of the future revolutionary dictatorship ('[W]e shall consider how to erect an edifice of stone… We shall build it, we, we alone!'). Perhaps more obviously, the title may have been a reference to the revolutionary cult of the collective (the Proletkult poet Kirillov even wrote a poem by the title of 'We'). See further G. Kern, Zamyatin's We: A Collection of Critical Essays (Ann Arbor, 1988), p. 63.
to the whole materialist philosophy of the Soviet regime. But he was not alone. Science fiction was rapidly becoming the principal arena for liberal, religious and dissident critiques of the Soviet world view. In Daniel Granin's Into the Storm (1962), the physicist hero is a humanist, a Pyotr Kapitsa or an Andrei Sakharov, who understands the need to harness science to spiritual human goals. 'What,' he asks, 'distinguishes people from animals? Atomic energy? The telephone? I say - moral conscience, imagination, spiritual ideals. The human soul will not be improved because you and I are studying the earth's magnetic fields.'201
The science fiction novels of the Strugatsky brothers (Arkady and Boris) were subversively conceived as contemporary social satire in the manner of Gogol and, drawing much from Dostoevsky, as an ideological critique of the Soviet materialist Utopia. That, to be sure, is how they were received by millions of readers in the Soviet Union who had grown accustomed from years of censorship to read all literature as allegory. In Predatory Things of the Century (1965) the Strugatskys portrayed a Soviet-like society of the future, where nuclear science and technology have delivered every conceivable power to the omnipresent bureaucratic state. Since there is no longer any need for work or independent thought, the people are transformed into happy morons. Sated with consumer goods, the citizens have become spiritually dead. This same idea was taken up by the dissident writer Andrei Sinyavsky in his Unguarded Thoughts (1966), a collection of aphoristic essays which renounce science and materialism for a Russian faith and native soil-type nationalism that could have come directly from the pages of Dostoevsky.
Science fiction films were equally a vehicle for challenging Soviet materialism. In Romm's Nine Days (1962), for example, some scientists engage in long debates about the moral questions posed by atomic energy. They philosophize about the means and ends of science as a whole - to the point where this very verbal film begins to resemble a scene out of Dostoevsky in which characters discuss the existence of a God. In Andrei Tarkovsky's masterpiece Solaris (1972) the exploration of outer space becomes a moral and spiritual quest for self-knowledge, love and faith. The cosmic traveller, a scientist called Chris, journeys to a space station in the distant galaxies where scientists
have been researching the mysterious regenerative powers of a huge burning star. His journey becomes a more personal quest, as Chris rediscovers his capacity to love, when Hari, his ex-lover, whom he had driven to suicide through his emotional coldness, is brought back to life, or a mirage of it, by the powers of the star. Hari's sacrifice (she destroys herself again) releases Chris from his emotional dependence on her and allows him to return to earth (an oasis which appears in the burning star). In a spirit of atonement he kneels before his father to beg forgiveness for his sins. The earth thus emerges as the proper destination of all journeys into space. Man ventures out not to discover new worlds but to find a replica of earth in space. This affirmation of the human spirit is wonderfully conveyed in the scene on the space station where Hari looks at Bruegel's painting Hunters in the Snow which helps her to recall her former life on earth. The camera scans in detail over Bruegel's painting as Bach's F minor Choral Prelude, interspersed with the sounds of the forest and the chimes of the Rostov bells, rejoices in the beauty of our world. Solaris is not a story about space in the literal sense of Stanley Kubrick's 2001, with which it is so frequently compared. Whereas Kubrick's film looks at the cosmos from the earth, Tarkovsky's looks from the cosmos at the earth. It is a film about the human values in which every Christian culture, even Soviet Russia's, sees its redemption.
In his cinematic credo, Sculpting in Time (1986), Tarkovsky compares the artist to a priest whose mission it is to reveal the beauty that is 'hidden from the eyes of those who are not searching for the truth'.202 Such a statement is in the tradition of the Russian artist stretching back to Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and beyond - to the medieval icon painters such as the one whose life and art Tarkovsky celebrated in his masterpiece, Andrei Rublev (1966). Tarkovsky's films are like icons, in effect. To contemplate their visual beauty and symbolic imagery, as one is compelled to do by the slowness of their action, is to join in the artist's own quest for a spiritual ideal. 'Art must give man hope and faith', the director wrote.203 All his films are about journeys in search of moral truth. Like Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov, Andrei Rublev abandons the monastery and goes into the world to live the truth of Christian love and brotherhood among his fellow Russians under Mongol rule. 'Truth has to be lived, not taught. Prepare for battle!'
Tarkovsky said that Hermann Hesse's line from The Glass Bead Game (1943) 'could well have served as an epigraph to Andrei Rublev'.204
The same religious theme is at the centre of Stalker (1979), which, in Tarkovsky's own description, he meant to be a discourse on 'the existence of God in man'.205 The stalker of the film's title guides a scientist and a writer to 't
he zone', a supernatural wilderness abandoned by the state after some industrial catastrophe. He is straight out of the Russian tradition of the Holy Fool. He lives alone in poverty, despised by a society where everyone has long ceased to believe in God, and yet he derives a spiritual power from his religious faith. He understands that the heart of 'the zone' is just an empty room in a deserted house. But, as he tells his travelling companions, the basis of true faith is the belief in the Promised Land: it is the journey and not the arrival. The need for faith, for something to believe in outside of themselves, had defined the Russian people, in their mythic understanding of themselves, since the days of Gogol and the 'Russian soul'. Tarkovsky revived this national myth as a counter to the value system of the Soviet regime, with its alien ideas of rational materialism. 'Modern mass culture', Tarkovsky wrote, 'is crippling people's souls, it is erecting barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.'206 This spiritual consciousness, he believed, was the contribution Russia might give to the West - an idea embodied in the last iconic image of his film Nostalgia (1983), in which a Russian peasant house is portrayed inside a ruined Italian cathedral.
It may seem extraordinary that films like Stalker and Solaris were produced in the Brezhnev era, when all forms of organized religion were severely circumscribed and the deadening orthodoxy of 'Developed Socialism' held the country's politics in its grip. But within the Soviet monolith there were many different voices that called for a return to 'Russian principles'. One was the literary journal Molodaia gvardiia (Young Guard), which acted as a forum for Russian nationalists and conservationists, defenders of the Russian Church, and neo-Populists like the 'village prose writers' Fedor Abramov and Valentin Rasputin, who painted a nostalgic picture of the countryside and idealized the honest working peasant as the true upholder of the Russian soul and its mission in the world. Molodaia gvardiia enjoyed
30. 'The Russian bouse inside the Italian cathedral'. Final shot from Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalgia (1983)
the support of the Party's senior leadership throughout the 1970s.* Yet its cultural politics were hardly communist; and at times, such as in its opposition to the demolition of churches and historic monuments, or in the controversial essays it published by the nationalist painter Ilya Glazunov which explicitly condemned the October Revolution as an interruption of the national tradition, it was even anti-Soviet. The journal had links with opposition groups in the Russian Church, the conservation movement (which numbered several million members in
* It had the political protection of Politburo member Mikhail Suslov, Brezhnev's chief of ideology. When Alexander Yakovlev attacked Molodaia gvardiia as anti-Leninist on account of its nationalism and religious emphasis, Suslov succeeded in winning Brezhnev over to the journal's side. Yakovlev was sacked from the Party's Propaganda Department. In 1973, he was dismissed from the Central Committee and appointed Soviet ambassador to Canada (from where he would return to become Gorbachev's chief ideologist).
the 1960s) and the dissident intelligentsia. Even Solzhenitsyn came to its defence when it was attacked by the journal Novy mir (the very journal which had made his name by publishing One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962).207 In the 1970s Russian nationalism was a growing movement, which commanded the support of Party members and dissidents alike. There were several journals like Molo-daia gvardiia - some official, others dissident and published underground (samizdat) - and a range of state and voluntary associations, from literary societies to conservation groups, which forged a broad community on 'Russian principles'. As the editor of the samizdat journal Veche put it in his first editorial in 1971: 'In spite of everything, there are still Russians. It is not too late to return to the homeland.'208
What, in the end, was 'Soviet culture'? Was it anything? Can one ever say that there was a specific Soviet genre in the arts? The avant-garde of the 1920s, which borrowed a great deal from Western Europe, was really a continuation of the modernism of the turn of century. It was revolutionary, in many ways more so than the Bolshevik regime, but in the end it was not compatible with the Soviet state, which could never have been built on artists' dreams. The idea of constructing Soviet culture on a 'proletarian' foundation was similarly unsustainable -although that was surely the one idea of culture that was intrinsically 'Soviet': factory whistles don't make music (and what, in any case, is 'proletarian art'?). Socialist Realism was also, arguably, a distinctively Soviet art form. Yet a large part of it was a hideous distortion of the nineteenth-century tradition, not unlike the art of the Third Reich or of fascist Italy. Ultimately the 'Soviet' element (which boiled down to the deadening weight of ideology) added nothing to the art.
The Georgian film director Otar loseliani recalls a conversation with the veteran film-maker Boris Barnet in 1962:
He asked me: 'Who are you?' I said, 'A director'… 'Soviet', he corrected, 'you must always say "Soviet director". It is a very special profession.' 'In what way?' I asked. 'Because if you ever manage to become honest, which would surprise me, you can remove the word "Soviet".'205
8
From beneath such ruins I speak,
From beneath such an avalanche I cry,
As if under the vault of a fetid cellar
I were burning in quicklime.
I will pretend to be soundless this winter
And I will slam the eternal doors forever,
And even so, they will recognize my voice,
And even so they will believe in it once more.210
Anna Akhmatova was one of the great survivors. Her poetic voice was irrepressible. In the last ten years of her long life, beginning with the release of her son from the gulag in 1956, Akhmatova enjoyed a relatively settled existence. She was fortunate enough to retain her capacity for writing poetry until the end.
In 1963 she wrote the last additions to her masterpiece, Poem without a Hero, which she had started writing in 1940. Isaiah Berlin, to whom she read the poem at the Fountain House in 1945, described it as a 'kind of final memorial to her life as a poet and the past of the city - St Petersburg - which was part of her being'.211 The poem conjures up, in the form of a carnival procession of masked characters which appears before the author at the Fountain House, a whole generation of vanished friends and figures from the Petersburg that history left behind in 1913. Through this creative act of memory the poetry redeems and saves that history. In the opening dedication Akhmatova writes,
… and because I don't have enough paper, I am writing on your first draft.212*
* Akhmatova informed several friends that the first dedication was to Mandelstam. When Nadezhda Mandelstam initially heard her read the poem and asked her to whom the dedication was addressed, Akhmatova replied 'with some irritation': 'Whose first draft do you think I can write on?' (Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned, p. 435).
The poem is full of literary references, over which countless scholars have puzzled, but its essence, as suggested by the dedication, is foretold by Mandelstam in a prayer-like poem which Akhmatova quotes as an epigraph to the third chapter of her own poem.
We shall meet again in Petersburg
as though we had interred the sun in it
and shall pronounce for the first time
that blessed, senseless word.
In the black velvet of the Soviet night,
in the velvet of the universal void
the familiar eyes of blessed women sing
and still the deathless flowers bloom.213
Akhmatova's Poem is a requiem for those who died in Leningrad. That remembrance is a sacred act, in some sense an answer to Mandelstam's prayer. But the poem is a resurrection song as well - a literal incarnation of the spiritual values that allowed the people of that city to endure the Soviet night and meet again in Petersburg.
Akhmatova died peacefully in a convalescent home in Moscow on 5 March 1966. Her body was taken to the morgue of the former Sheremetev Alms House, founded in the memory of Praskovya,
where she was protected by the same motto that overlooked the gates of the Fountain House: 'Deus conservat omnia'. Thousands of people turned out for her funeral in Leningrad. The baroque church of St Nicholas spilled its dense throng out on to the streets, where a mournful silence was religiously maintained throughout the requiem. The people of a city had come to pay their last respects to a citizen whose poetry had spoken for them at a time when no one else could speak. Akhmatova had been with her people then: 'There, where my people, unfortunately, were.' Now they were with her. As the cortege passed through Petersburg on its way to the Komarovo cemetery, it paused before the Fountain House, so that she could say a last farewell.
8
overleaf:
Igor and Vera Stravinsky arriving at Sheremetevo Airport in Moscow,
21 September 1962
1
Homesickness! that long Exposed weariness! It's all the same to me now Where I am altogether lonely
Or what stones I wander over Home with a shopping bag to A house that is no more mine Than a hospital or a barracks.
It's all the same to me, a captive Lion - what faces I move through Bristling, or what human crowd will Cast me out as it must -
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