Pilniak’s patriarch, Yakov Karpovich Skudrin, drips slime on the living room floor and cradles his hernia through a slit in his pants. “His eyes watering with his eighty-five years, the old man swelled up, putrid and happy, like a boil full of pus.” He is an aged, but defiant Smerdiakov offering his services to a despondent Ivan Karamazov (the engineer Poltorak). “There’s always some deadwood in the swamp: the mud sucks it in; the leeches cling to it; the crawfish grab onto it; the minnows swarm round it; and the cows piss in the midst of all this filth and stench—while I live on, playing the fool, fouling the earth, seeing and understanding everything. We don’t mind killing. Just give me a name.”78
True “wreckers” are selflessly and uncompromisingly devoted to the devil. “I can do anything,” says Skudrin, “but I wish only evil, and only evil makes me happy.” Their purpose is to sabotage the work of creation. They may take on various disguises, but their true nature is duly noted by the narrator and discovered—eventually, if not always simultaneously—by the reader and the secret police investigator. Skudrin has to cradle his hernia; Poltorak’s teeth are “disfigured by gold”; Gladkov’s Khablo has “blind eyes” and a “hideously scarred arm”; and of the three main villains in Man Changes His Skin, one is left-handed, one has a misshapen finger, and the third is missing an eye. All of them plan to unleash a flood. During the era of construction, a flood is the devil’s work. The devil’s work is, ultimately, God’s will. Skudrin is part of “that power which would the evil ever do, and ever does the good.”79
Leading the charge against the swamp and treading the winepress of the fury of historical necessity are the Bolshevik commanders of the army of builders. Some construction heads, chief engineers, and Party secretaries are young enough, or timeless enough, to serve as the Adams of the new world. Kataev’s David Margulies, Jasienski’s Ivan Morozov, and Shaginian’s Arno Arevyan find young socialist brides and give every indication of being fruitful and multiplying. Others cannot “jump out of time” (as Kataev puts it). In Gladkov’s Energy, the head of the site’s Party organization, the Old Bolshevik and Civil War hero Miron Vatagin, goes for a swim, gets caught up in a whirlpool, and is pulled ashore by a young girl named Fenia. Both are naked. “‘Why is he being so shy?’ thought Fenia in amazement. She thought it was funny—funny and pleasant. Up until then, it would never have occurred to her that Miron could possibly be shy in her presence—timid and confused because of such a trifle, just because he was naked in front of her. After all, she was also naked—and did not feel any shame at all.” Miron, it turns out, has seen too much good and evil to be admitted into paradise. He comes to terms with his mortality, adopts a paternal role, and watches Fenia fall in love with someone her own age.80
In The Sot’, the head of the project, Uvadyev, and his chief engineer, Burago, are both in love with their protégée, Suzanna. She chooses a younger man, and they console themselves by listening to “The March of the Trolls” from Grieg’s Peer Gynt. “In my view,” says Burago, who stands for intelligentsia self-reflectivity next to Uvadyev’s Bolshevik action, “a new Adam will come and name all the creatures that predated him. And he will rejoice.” Suzanna will inherit the earth because she is as innocent as a child. “But I am an old man. I still remember the French Revolution, the Tower of Babel, Icarus’s unfortunate escapade, and the vertebra of a Neanderthal in some French museum.”81
What is their role in the creation myth, then? Pilniak’s engineer Laszlo, who knows he is not God, goes back to what all “fathers” keep going back to: the exodus. “Turn your attention to Comrade Moses who led the Jews out of Egypt. He was no fool. He journeyed across the bottom of the sea, made heavenly manna out of nothing, lost his way in the desert, and organized meetings on Mount Sinai. For forty years he searched and fought for a decent living space. But he never reached the Promised Land, leaving it to Joshua the son of Nun to cause the sun to stand still. His children reached it in his stead. People who have known Sodom cannot enter Canaan—they are not fit for the Promised Land.”82
The Old Bolshevik in The Sot’ is dying from leukemia; the Old Bolshevik in The Second Day is dying from heart disease; and the Old Bolshevik in Energy is dying from tuberculosis. In Platonov’s The Foundation Pit, all the builders of the eternal house are their own grave diggers. Only Kozlov “still believed in the life to come after the construction of the big buildings,” but Kozlov masturbates under his blanket, has a weak chest, and is eventually killed by the kulaks. The others know that the big houses are for “tomorrow’s people,” take in a little orphan girl, and observe “the sleep of this small being who one day would have dominion over their graves and live on a pacified earth packed with their bones.” Those who did not die in the normal course of events would have to be killed. The war invalid Zhachev, who represents unquenchable proletarian wrath, “had made up his mind that, once this little girl and other children like her had matured a bit, he would put an end to all the big shots of his district. He alone knew that the USSR was inhabited by all-out enemies of socialism, egotists, and the blood-suckers of the bright future world, and he secretly consoled himself with the thought that sometime soon he would kill the entire mass of them, leaving alive only proletarian infancy and pure orphanhood.”83
Ehrenburg’s Old Bolshevik, Grigory Markovich Shor, is forty-eight years old, but his young disciple, Kolka, calls him an old man. Shor’s life resembles “a completed questionnaire from the Party archive.” The son of a shopkeeper, Shor joins the Party while it still feels “like a tiny reading circle.” He spends time in prisons, exile, and Paris. After the revolution he makes speeches “in circus tents, in barracks, on trucks, and on the steps of Imperial monuments.” During collectivization he is beaten by the kulaks. In Kuznetsk, he studies bricks and concrete the way he used to study political economy, agriculture, and the “prison ABCs.” “But behind that harsh, rigid life was a stooped man, short-sighted and genial, with a poorly-knotted tie, who could rapturously smell a flower in a railway station garden and then ask a little girl, ‘What kind of flower is this, or rather, what is its name?’” Shor lives next to the blast furnace. Once he hears a fire alarm and races over, but the alarm proves false. He feels unwell, returns home, and dies in the arms of young Kolka.84
In Pilniak’s The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea, the Old Bolsheviks live right next to the furnace, but they belong to the swamp as much as they do to the fire. They are spent men “for whom time stopped at the end of War Communism,” and their leader is Ivan Ozhogov (“Burnt”), first head of the local executive committee, brother of the slime-dripping wrecker, Yakov Skudrin, and descendant of Leonov’s underground monks. “Ivan Ozhogov plunged into the depths near the factory furnace, into the dark, stifling heat, and crawled toward the mouth…. The heavy air smelled of smoke, tar, stale humanity, and fish—like the crew’s quarters on a ship. Ragged men with long, matted hair and beards lay in the dark on the clay floor around the mouth of the furnace.” They are Left Deviationists—the fire-and-brimstone radical Puritans of the Bolshevik Revolution who have spent the years of the great disappointment weeping next to the mouth of the furnace. They know that the coming flood will be the second act of creation. “The year 1919 is coming back!” says Ozhogov. Or, as the Bolshevik Sadykov responds to the tale of Moses’s demise just short of the promised land: “It is true that he never got there, but he did write the Commandments.”85
Gladkov’s Old Bolshevik, Baikalov, is an orthodox Party official whose life is the proletarian version of Shor’s “student” (Jewish) biography, but he, too, is “burning with an inner fire.” He, too, was present at the Battle of Dair, “when there was nothing in the dark of night but a hurricane of flames, as if the whole world were exploding amidst the rumble, fire, and smoke of an earthquake.” He, too, realizes that the coming flood is the beginning of eternity. “It is true that soon he will be no more and that the world will disappear for him. And yet, he is immortal.” As he tells another Bolshevik Moses, “I decla
re with the greatest conviction, that death, in its old, obsolete sense, cannot exist for us.”86
When the flood finally comes, Ivan Ozhogov’s cave fills “with green, slow-moving swamp water.” Ivan—“a splendid man from the splendid era of 1917–21”—dies next to his furnace. A little boy named Mishka is watching the flood. “The creation of the new river signaled Mishka’s genesis, just as the factory whistle had for Ozhogov and Sadykov.” Peopling the newly cleansed earth will be today’s children: Petka, Kolka, Mishka, and the two Fenias, among others. Some of them have reached the age of fruitfulness (every construction story contains at least one pregnant woman, and Olesha’s Valia and Volodia plan to get married on the day construction is completed), but most are innocent representatives of proletarian infancy and pure orphanhood. Platonov’s diggers keep digging for the sake of a little girl named Nastia, who will have dominion over their graves and live on a pacified earth packed with their bones. Leonov’s Uvadyev imagines a little girl “somewhere over there on the radiant border, beneath the rainbows of a vanquished future.” “Her name was Katya, and she was no more than ten years old. It was for her and her happiness that he fought and suffered and imposed suffering on all around him. She had not yet been born, but she could not fail to appear, since untold sacrifices had already been made on her behalf.” And in Shaginian’s Hydrocentral, the artist Arshak is thundering against rams and goats in tailcoats when he suddenly has an epiphany. “It came from a pair of eyes, the dark brown and wide open eyes of an eight-year-old girl, the house’s Cinderella. With her chin resting on the edge of the table and her little head tilted back, she listened to him with her mouth open, with all the seriousness of her mysterious child’s being.”87
Standing between the dying Bolsheviks and pure orphanhood are thousands of builders being tested by the act of building. Some are doomed from the start by illegitimate birth and branded with the seal of the beast; others, the intelligenty, spawn spiritual sickness and plebeian wreckers with their delirious speech. Ehrenburg’s Volodia Safonov cannot stop reading Dostoevsky. “Feeling guilty but unable to help himself,” he keeps plunging “into the thicket of absurd scenes, hysterical crying fits, and hot, clammy pain.” One day, he meets the embodiment of his faithlessness (a boy named Tolia), talks to him of freedom, and forces him to repeat a version of Smerdiakov’s refrain (“It’s always interesting to talk to an intelligent person”). The following morning Tolia wrecks an important piece of equipment.88
But most builders pass the test: reforge themselves, achieve full conversion, submit to baptism (often in a river), and join the Bolsheviks in building the eternal house. In one of the central scenes in the quasi-documentary history of the White Sea–Baltic Canal, “a Ford comes roaring” into a labor camp.
The car made a sharp turn. Dust flew from under the braking wheels. A shaggy head popped out of the window and looked around.
On the opposite bank was a human anthill. The foundation pit reached to the horizon. Dusty wheelbarrows could be seen surging toward the crest. On the right stood the scaffolding of an unfinished structure. That was the lock.
A foreman ran up to the car and saluted. The shaggy-headed one put out his hand: “I’m Solts.”
He walks through the crowd “as if he were in Moscow in his own apartment.” He knows they have been reborn and baptizes them with the word “comrades.” They respond by shedding their “socially unhealthy” pasts and promise to work harder. “That same day they christened themselves the Five-Year Plan Crew and dug up eight hundred cubic meters of soil instead of the usual two hundred.”89
The new world is born in a labor camp. Or did it give birth to a labor camp? Few Five-Year Plan creation stories are free of irony. All come out of The Bronze Horseman, and all belong to the continuum between a paean to the New City and a lament to its victim, who perishes in the flood.
There were young Communists working at the construction site. They knew what they were doing—they were building Leviathan. Working alongside them were some expropriated kulaks. They had been brought here from far away: peasants from Riazan and Tula. They had been brought here together with their families, but they did not know why. They had traveled for ten days. Then the train stopped. There was a hill above a river. They were told that they would live there. The babies cried, and the women gave them their shrunken, bluish breasts to suckle.
They looked like survivors after a fire. They were called “special settlers.” They began to dig in the earth—to build earthen barracks. The barracks were crowded and dark. In the morning the people went to work. In the evening they returned. The children cried, and the exhausted women muttered, “Hush!”
There were prisoners working at the Osinov mines, digging coal. Ore and coal together produced iron. Among the prisoners was Nikolai Izvekov [“from time immemorial”], the priest who administered the last sacrament to Kolka Rzhanov’s mother. After Izvekov was purged from the Sanitation Trust, he began to preach “the Last Days.” He copied the epistles of St. Paul and sold the copies for five rubles each. He also performed secret requiem services for the deceased Tsar. He was sentenced to three years in a concentration camp. Now he loaded coal in a pit. By his side worked Shurka-the-Turk. Shurka used to sell cocaine. Izvekov would say to Shurka: “The impious will be cast into the lake of fire and brimstone.”90
Socialist construction sites were also labor camps, and possibly gateways to hell. On the Dnieper, “workers with shovels and crowbars, singly and in groups, swarmed among the rocks, next to the cables, trolleys, and iron boxes.” On the Sot’, “the number of diggers kept shrinking, and the last thirty had only seven square feet or so to maneuver in.” And on the Mizinka, “the scoop bucket rose, the gravel poured drily into the open mouth of the cement mixer, and from above, at automatic intervals, a thin stream of water squirted down on the gravel like a spray of saliva…. Rising again, the scoop bucket overturned the dripping mass into the concrete mixer, and the its jaws chewed on the gravel mixed with sand.”91
“This is like the creation of the world,” writes one of Ehrenburg’s Communist brides to the doubting Volodia Safonov. “Everything at once: heroism, greed, cruelty, generosity.” The creation of the world demands great sacrifice; great sacrifice involves great suffering, and great suffering produces doubt: the same doubt that Sverdlov and Voronsky struggled with in their own prerevolutionary catacombs. Volodia Safonov’s torment is not his alone: “At meetings everyone knows beforehand what each person will say. All you have to do is remember a few formulas and a few figures. But to speak like a real human being, that is, tripping up, stammering, and with passion, to speak about something personal—that they cannot do…. And yet they are the builders of a new life, the apostles called upon to make prophecies, the dialecticians incapable of error.” When the engineer Burago says that he cannot enter the new world because he remembers Icarus and the Tower of Babel, is he saying that he is too old or is he saying that the “new Adam” will have to learn about hubris?92
Burago is an honest tower-builder, but even the dishonest and ill-intentioned ones manage to speak with considerable power and conviction. The oily American in Kataev’s Time Forward! surveys the Magnitogorsk panorama and then looks down at an old baste shoe lying in the grass before him:
“On the one hand, Babylon, and on the other, a baste shoe. That is a paradox.”
Nalbandov repeated stubbornly: “Here there will be a socialist city for a hundred and fifty thousand workers and service employees.”
“Yes, but will humanity be any happier because of that? And is this presumed happiness worthy of such effort?”
“He is right,” Nalbandov thought.
“You are wrong,” he said, looking coldly at the American. “You lack imagination. We shall conquer nature, and we shall give humanity back its lost paradise.”93
The smooth German riding on the train in Ilf and Petrov’s The Golden Calf makes the same point by telling the story of a Communist Adam and Eve who go to Gorky Par
k, sit down under a tree, pluck off a small branch, and suddenly realize that they are made for each other. Three years later they already have two sons.
“So what’s the point?” asked Lavoisian.
“The point is,” answered Heinrich emphatically, “that one son was called Cain, the other Abel, and that in due course Cain would slay Abel, Abraham would beget Isaac, Isaac would beget Jacob, and the whole story would start anew, and neither Marxism nor anything else will ever be able to change that. Everything will repeat itself. There will be a flood, there will be Noah with his three sons, and Ham will insult Noah. There will be the Tower of Babel, gentlemen, which will never be completed. And on and on and on. There won’t be anything new in the world. So don’t get too excited about your new life…. Everything, everything will repeat itself! And the Wandering Jew will continue to wander the earth.”94
The only person to respond with a story of his own is the “Great Operator” and one the most popular characters in Soviet literature, Ostap Bender. The Wandering Jew will never wander again, he says, because in 1919 he decided to leave Rio de Janeiro, where he had been strolling under the palm trees in his white pants, in order to see the Dnieper River. “He had seen them all: the Rhine, the Ganges, the Mississippi, the Yangtze, the Niger, the Volga, but not the Dnieper.” He crossed the Romanian border with some contraband, and was caught by Petliura’s men and sentenced to death. “‘But I am supposed to be eternal!’ cried the old man. He had yearned for death for two thousand years, but at that moment he desperately wanted to live. ‘Shut up, you dirty kike,’ yelled the forelocked commander cheerfully. ‘Finish him off, boys!’ And the eternal wanderer was no more.”95
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