The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  For about two years, Voronsky was the supreme and uncontested discoverer, promoter, publisher, censor, and dictator of the new Soviet literature. His job was to separate the weeds from the good seed and to champion the very best of the good. “Political censorship in literature,” he wrote a propos of the first task, “is a complex, important, and very difficult endeavor that requires great firmness but also flexibility, caution, and understanding.” As he explained to the author of We, Evgeny Zamiatin, “We have paid for this right with blood, exiles, prisons, and victories. There was a time … when we had to keep silent. Now it is their turn.” As for finding “the most talented,” Voronsky may have been influenced by those he was guiding (as Vsevolod Ivanov claimed), but his general sense of what constituted good literature was derived from his prison reading, which—like that of all “student” revolutionaries—was centered on the “classics.” His particular favorites were Pushkin, Tolstoy, Gogol, Chekhov, Homer, Goethe, Dickens, Flaubert, and Ibsen. His most prized protégés were Babel, Esenin, Ivanov, Leonov, Seifullina, and Pilnyak.16

  In 1923, Voronsky’s monopoly began to be challenged by a small but vocal group of “proletarian” critics, who argued that all literature that was not militantly and self-consciously revolutionary was counterrevolutionary, and that Voronsky was, “objectively” and perhaps deliberately, advancing the cause of the proletariat’s class enemies. None of the proletarian ideologues was a proletarian. Most of them were young men from Jewish families (at the time of the formation of the “October” group of proletarian writers in 1922, Semen Rodov was twenty-nine; Aleksandr Bezymensky and Yuri Libedinsky, twenty-four; G. Lelevich, twenty-one, and Sverdlov’s nephew Leopold Averbakh, seventeen). They were all Party members, however, and believed that the job of leading the Bolshevik artistic production should be transferred from the lukewarm Voronsky to a true “Party cell.” Which of the feuding “proletarians” should receive the commisson was a matter of dispute, but everyone agreed that Voronsky and his “fellow-travelers” had to go.17

  Aleksandr Voronsky

  Voronsky responded by describing his detractors as false prophets of the apocalypse (and caricatures of his underground alter ego, Valentin): “Those righteous and steadfast men ate locusts and wild honey, did not drink alcohol, walked not in the counsel of the ungodly nor stood in the way of sinners, but did unceasingly rebuke the men of little faith and of no faith in public squares, and whenever the prophetic trumpet failed them, they would, by all accounts, apply themselves sullenly and noisily to shattering glass, smashing window frames, and breaking down doors.” More important, he responded by formulating a theory of literature that added Freud and Bergson to Belinsky and Plekhanov to produce a synthesis he believed to be genuinely Marxist. Literature, according to Voronsky, was not a weapon in the class struggle but a method of discovering the world. “Art, like science, apprehends life. Art and science have the same object: reality. But science analyzes, art synthesizes; science is abstract, art is concrete; science is aimed at man’s reason, art, at his sensual nature.”18

  Artistic process was about neither class nor “technique”: it was about “intuition” (formerly known as “inspiration”). Intuition was a way of getting at the truth “by going beyond conscious, analytic thought.” Every true artist was Pushkin’s “seeing and perceiving” prophet. “He steps aside from the daily routine, the petty joys and disappointments, and the clichéd views and opinions, and becomes suffused with a special sympathetic sense, a feeling for the life of others that exists separately and independently from him. Beauty is revealed in objects, events, and people irrespective of how the artist would like to interpret them; the world separates itself from man, frees itself from the self and its impressions, and appears resplendent in its original beauty.” The whole of human life was organized around the memory of that beauty and the hope of recovering it:

  Surrounded by the world distorted by his impressions, man preserves in his memory, if only as a faint, distant dream, the unspoilt, genuine images of the world. They make themselves known to man in spite of all the obstructions. He knows about them from his childhood and his youth; they reveal themselves to him in special, exceptional moments, or during the periods of public upheavals. Man yearns for those pristine, bright images, and creates sagas, legends, songs, novels and novellas about them. Sometimes consciously but mostly unconsciously, genuine art has always sought to restore, find, discover these images of the world. This is the true meaning of art and its true function.19

  Art, in other words, had “the same goal as religion.” But “religion” (by which Voronsky meant the latter-day Christianity he had learned in the seminary), sought pristine beauty in another, ultimately false, world, whereas art “seeks, finds, and creates ‘paradise’ in living reality.” Religion competed with art on its territory (Tolstoy and Gogol lost their gift of clairvoyance when they turned toward religion), but art, as true revelation, had nothing to fear in the end. “The more successful an artist is at surrendering to the power of his immediate perceptions and the less he insists on correcting those impressions by imposing general rational categories, the more concrete and independent his world becomes.”20

  The dictatorship of the proletariat had nothing to fear, either. Lenin was, in a sense, “possessed,” and had “the prophetic sight given by nature and life to geniuses.” “Such ‘possessed’ men look at everything from the same angle and see only those things that their main idea, feeling, and mood force them to see. The keenness of their sight, hearing, and powers of observation are superhuman. But to be possessed by one great idea does not mean to miss the details.” The best illustration of this was Lenin’s relationship with his early disciples, the Old Bolsheviks—“those special human beings ‘who are looking for the city that is to come.’” On the one hand, he “unites, organizes, disciplines, and welds people together into one collective, one cohort of steel.” On the other, he judges them on the basis of passion, intuition, and “the immediate perception of the very core of their beings.” He was both an Old Testament prophet and an artist who surrendered to the power of his gift with the “almost feminine tenderness toward the human being.” Bolshevism as a whole was both about science (the Law) and art (the intuitive recovery of the original beauty of the world). It was exactly like religion except that it was true.21

  True art, and especially great literature, had “the same goal” as Bolshevism. Voronsky’s “proletarian critics” were like Gogol’s doomed seminarian haunted by a flying witch: “They are drawing a magic circle around themselves lest the bourgeois Viy give the Russian Revolution over to the unclean and the undead. This is, of course, praiseworthy, but it should be done with some sense: the circle should have a radius.” The true artists from the past did not just belong on the inside—they had helped reveal the sacred realm that, under Communism, would encompass the world. “In order to find the new Adam, who yearns for his new, very own paradise, … we must keep fighting tirelessly against the old Adam within us and without. In this struggle, the classical literature of past epochs is one of our most loyal friends.” Without the classics, one could neither vanquish the undead nor locate the new paradise—“discovered, in spite of everything, in spite of logic and intelligence, in spite of all things evil and unjust by Homer, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Lermontov, and Flaubert, among others. They love such happy and rare revelations and seem to want to exclaim, along with Faust: ‘Oh moment, stay a while—you are so fair!’”22

  The response of Voronsky’s critics amounted to a reminder that Faust’s words were part of his bargain with the devil and that he had never uttered them, anyway. Voronsky’s quest for “exceptional moments” was a fool’s errand; Voronsky’s “Circle” (the name of the publishing house he had founded) was filled with the unclean and the undead. To counter the political support that Voronsky was receiving from Trotsky, Osinsky, Radek, and Mikhail Frunze, the proletarians recruited several patrons of their own, including the ideologue of the Bolsh
evik “sense of time,” Platon Kerzhentsev, and the only Old Bolshevik proletarian taking part in the literary debate, Semen Kanatchikov. According to Voronsky’s November 11, 1924, letter to Stalin, Kanatchikov, in his capacity as head of the Central Committee’s Press Section, was “creating the impression that the Communist Party does not need literature except as a form of blunt and narrowly conceived propaganda and that the Central Committee supports the vulgar and aggressive position of Rodov and company.”23

  Among the established writers, the main supporter of the “proletarians” was the author of The Iron Flood, Aleksandr Serafimovich, whose Moscow apartment served as the headquarters of the anti-Voronsky forces. “How many evenings did we spend in that small, warm, cozy apartment!” wrote one of its members, Aleksandr Isbakh. “We used to sit around a large table under a bright lamp, a samovar hissing noisily before us.” The young writers would read their works and argue “for hours” about literature. Serafimovich always presided, occasionally “rubbing his bald head and straightening his signature white shirt collar, which he wore pulled out over his suit jacket…. He liked to joke and to laugh at our jokes. Whenever a new guest arrived, he would squint slyly, introduce him formally to his wife, Fekla Rodionovna, invite him to the table, and begin the ‘interrogation.’ ‘Well, young man, I can see by your eyes that you have written something extraordinary. Don’t try to hide it, my dear man, don’t try to hide it.’”24

  Fekla (Fekola) Rodionovna Belousova was Serafimovich’s second wife. A peasant from the Tula province, she had worked for several years in his house before marrying him in 1922, when he was fifty-nine years old and she was thirty. They lived with Fekla’s mother, whom everyone called “Grandma,” in the First House of Soviets in the apartment next to the Voronskys, and later in a small house in Presnia. Serafimovich’s favorite pastime was singing folk songs. According to one of his proletarian protégés, “His voice was rather mediocre, but he sang with great feeling, waving his arms about like a choir conductor. Our most devoted listener was Serafimovich’s mother-in-law, who was a great admirer of his singing. As we sat together, singing, she would sit with her hand on her cheek, looking at him with awe and repeating over and over again: ‘What a voice! What a voice!’ He would be flattered, of course, and say, with feigned indifference and a bit of bravado: ‘Wait till you hear what I can really do, Mother-in-law, dear!’”25

  Aleksandr Serafimovich

  But literature came first. According to Isbakh, the most memorable gathering of their reading group was the evening Serafimovich read his manuscript of The Iron Flood:

  It was a remarkably solemn evening. The brightly polished samovar gleamed festively; the table was laden with all sorts of delicacies. Fekla Rodionovna had baked some exceptionally good, absolutely delicious pies.

  Seated around the table were the writers of the older generation: Fedor Gladkov, Aleksandr Neverov, and Aleksei Silych Novikov-Priboi. We youngsters stood modestly in the rear.

  Serafimovich was wearing a blindingly white shirt collar.

  Fekla Rodionovna was serving out wine and pie.

  Serafimovich winked at us, his other eye squinting, as usual.

  “I’m a sly fox…. My plan is get you all drunk, so you’ll be a little kinder. And then you can criticize all you want.”

  He read well, not too fast, and with feeling.

  He did not stop until midnight.

  Oh how proud we were of our old man!26

  The old man was proud of them, too. “Go after them!” he used to say, according to Gladkov. “You’re sure to win. Why are you coddling these types? They may be wreckers, for all we know.” “The most important public discussions usually took place in the Press House. Serafimovich would sit in the presidium like a patriarch, surrounded by Komsomol members. When making one of our tough, aggressive speeches, we would look back at him, see his encouraging smile and slyly squinted eye, and reenter the fray with renewed confidence.”27

  In June 1925, the Politburo ordered a ceasefire. A special decree on Party policy toward literature, written by Bukharin, declared: “In a class society, there can be no such thing as neutral art,” but “the class nature of the arts in general and of literature, in particular, is expressed in forms that are infinitely more diverse than, for instance, in politics.” On the one hand, the Party considered proletarian writers to be “the future ideological leaders of Soviet literature” and wanted to “support them and their organizations.” On the other, it was determined to struggle against “any careless or dismissive attitude toward the old cultural heritage” and “all forms of pretentious, semiliterate, and self-satisfied Communist conceit.” In literature, as in many other spheres of life involving the mysteries of human emotion, there were limits to how far and how fast the Party could go. “While directing literature in general, the Party cannot support one particular literary faction (classified according to its views on style and form), any more than it can issue decrees on the proper form of the family, even though it obviously does direct the construction of a new everyday life.”28

  Both sides felt vindicated, and, after a short lull, hostilities resumed. Leopold Averbakh, who had emerged as the uncontested leader of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), proclaimed that “Voronsky’s Carthage must be destroyed.” Voronsky responded with a generalization and a warning: “The Averbakhs of the world don’t appear by accident. They may be young, but they are going places. We have seen our share of such clever, successful, irrepressible, everywhere-at-once young men. Self-confident and self-satisfied to the point of self-abandonment, they harbor no doubts and make no mistakes. Naturally they swear by Leninism and naturally they never depart from official directives. But in our complex, multicolored world, their cleverness can sometimes turn downright sinister.”29

  It could turn particularly sinister when supported by official directives. On October 31, 1925, Voronsky’s old prison comrade and main Central Committee patron, the people’s commissar for military and naval affairs, Mikhail Frunze, died of chloroform poisoning during a routine stomach ulcer operation. Three months later, Boris Pilniak wrote a novella called The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon, which opens with a dedication to Voronsky (“in friendship”) and a disclaimer that any resemblance to the circumstances of Frunze’s death is coincidental, and goes on to tell the story of how a famous Red Army commander dies of chloroform poisoning during a routine stomach ulcer operation. In the “Tale,” Commander Gavrilov does not want to have an operation, but “the unbending man,” whose movements are “rectangular and formulaic” and “whose every sentence is a formula,” tells him that the operation, and the risks associated with it, are in the interests of the Revolution. “The wheel of history, and especially the wheel of the revolution—regrettably, I suppose—are mostly moved by death and blood. You and I know this only too well.” The night before the operation, Gavrilov goes to one of the Houses of Soviets to see his old comrade, Popov, who tells him that his wife has left him for an engineer and “a pair of silk stockings” and that he now lives alone with his little daughter. “Popov related the petty details of the separation, which are always so painful precisely because of their pettiness—the kind of detail, the kind of pettiness that obscures the important things.” Gavrilov responds by telling Popov about his own wife, “who has grown old but is still the only one for him.”

  Finally, late at night, he gets up to leave. “Give me something to read, but, you know, something simple, about good people, a good love, simple relations, a simple life, the sun, human beings and simple human joys.” Popov did not have such a book. “That’s revolutionary literature for you,” says Gavrilov, as a joke. “Oh well, I’ll reread some Tolstoy, then.” He does reread Tolstoy’s “Youth” and, the next morning, dies during the operation. The operation reveals that the ulcer has healed. Popov receives a letter with Gavrilov’s last testament: “I knew I was going to die. Forgive me, I realize you’re no longer young, but I was rocking your little girl, and I
thought: my wife is growing old, too, and you’ve known her for twenty years. I’ve written to her. You should also write to her. Why don’t you move in together, get married, perhaps, and raise the kids. Please forgive me.”

  There is the kind of pettiness that obscures the important things, and there is the all-important revolutionary necessity that ends up being a mistake. And then, perhaps somewhere in between, there are the good people, good love, simple relations, simple life, sun, human beings and simple human joys, including the most important ones—getting married and “raising kids.” Only Commander Gavrilov—“a man who has the right and the will to send other men to kill and die”—understands this—and only because it is now his turn to die. “Revolutionary literature” cannot provide either solace or understanding. Tolstoy can.30

  Voronsky’s antiproletarian stance ended up being a Faustian bargain, after all. Within days of the publication of the Tale (in the May issue of Novyi mir), the Politburo issued a decree calling it “a malicious, counterrevolutionary, and slanderous attack on the Central Committee of the Party,” and ordering an immediate confiscation of the entire print run. “It is obvious that the whole plot and certain elements of Pilniak’s Tale of the Unextinguished Moon could only have been made possible as a result of the slanderous conversations that some Communists were having about Comrade Frunze’s death, and that Comrade Voronsky bears partial responsibility for this. Comrade Voronsky is to be reprimanded for this.” He was also to write a letter to the editor of Novyi mir, “rejecting the dedication with an appropriate explanation approved by the CC Secretariat.”31