Koltsov goes on to describe the life of Ostrovsky the writer, merging it with the life of Ostrovsky’s literary creation, Pavel Korchagin: rebellious youth, Civil War heroism, railroad construction, Komsomol activism, and, finally, sickness, paralysis, blindness, and testimony through writing. Ostrovsky’s—and Korchagin’s—life is extraordinary, and therefore typical. “The attraction of the struggle is so great,” concludes Koltsov, “and the power of persuasion of our common work is so irresistible that blind, paralyzed, and incurably sick warriors are joining the march and vying heroically for a spot at the head.”44
Ostrovsky’s novel, How the Steel Was Tempered, had been slowly growing in popularity amidst silence from literary critics and government officials. (Serafimovich, who had made it his vocation to nurture young proletarian writers, had visited him in his little room in Sochi and made several editorial recommendations, but never suggested that he had discovered anything extraordinary.) After the publication of Koltsov’s essay about Ostrovsky, How the Steel Was Tempered eclipsed The Iron Flood and everything else ever written by any Soviet writer. Ostrovsky was presented with the Order of Lenin, a new apartment in Moscow, and a big house in Sochi. He received thousands of letters. Pilgrims came to see him and be touched by him. One of them was André Gide. “If I were not in the USSR,” he wrote, “I should say he was a saint…. During the whole hour our visit lasted, his thin fingers never ceased caressing mine, entwining them and transmitting to me the effluvia of his quivering sensibility.” He died on December 22, 1936, with the whole country looking on. How the Steel Was Tempered would become the most widely read, translated, reprinted, and, from what one can tell, beloved book by a Soviet writer in the history of the Soviet Union and the Communist world as a whole.45
Aleksandr Serafimovich by Nikolai Ostrovsky’s bedside
One reason for the book’s success seems to have been the near total fusion of the author with his main character (suggested by Ostrovsky himself and designed forcefully and deliberately by Koltsov in his essay). The mythic hero was there in the flesh, embodying the reality of the age of heroes and serving as the “bridge over which people pass into the future.” Another reason—and the guarantee that the hero could appear in the flesh without risking desacralization—was the fact that he had no flesh left: that he was a “mummy,” or a living relic. He was there and not there at the same time: he embodied sainthood by appearing in spirit only.
The greatest virtue of the text itself was that it represented the sacred story of the Revolution as a straightforward bildungsroman: the education of a Bolshevik from innocence to knowledge. Each chapter in the history of Bolshevism corresponds to a stage in Pavel’s (Paul’s) journey: the early apprenticeship culminating in conversion; the “battle of unheard-of ferocity” leading to the “crushing of the beast’s head”; the struggle against the philistines at the time of the great disappointment; the construction of a railroad in the “sticky mud” of a boundless swamp; and, finally, the office work as an “apparatchik” (as Pavel refers to himself ironically at the end of the book). Each major episode ends with the hero’s symbolic death followed by resurrection. (The construction chapter concludes with a formal announcement of Pavel’s death and his subsequent “resurrection in the organization’s rolls.”) At each stage, Pavel loses the use of one or more parts of his body, so that by the end of the story he has attained full knowledge at the cost of complete immobility and blindness. As one female character, tortured and raped by the servants of the beast, says to her fellow martyrs on the eve of their execution: “Comrades, remember, we must die a good death.”46
Most readers would have recognized the hero’s quest (or warrior-saint’s life) resulting in a good death and subsequent immortality. They would also have recognized and appreciated the novel’s style, which had a great deal in common with the books that both the hero and his creator grew up reading. Pavel’s favorites were Ethel Voinich’s The Gadfly, Raffaello Giovagnoli’s Spartacus, James Fenimore Cooper’s frontier novels, and, in particular, the anonymous chapbooks serializing the adventures of Giuseppe Garibaldi. Ostrovsky himself also admired Jules Verne, Walter Scott, Conan Doyle, Alexandre Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Edgar Allan Poe. Those were, of course, the same books that Kurilov read on the road to Ocean. The difference is that Kurilov set The Three Musketeers aside in order to read about the history of world religions, and when his proletarian biographer, Marina, asked him whether he was personally acquainted with the author of Spartacus, he only smiled at her naïveté. Romantic adventure books were good for fantasies about future wars, not for “Kurilov’s life in all of its complexity,” which could barely be fit within Leonov’s epic. Nikolai Ostrovsky, Pavel Korchagin, and most Soviet readers took a different view. How the Steel Was Tempered was Kurilov’s life written by a Kurilov never touched by “Dostoevsky’s gloomy and spiteful shadow.” It was a spiritual autobiography inside a five-kopeck chapbook. Early in the novel, Pavel falls in love with a girl named Tonya, who seems to reciprocate his feeling. Soon afterward Victor, the son of a local notable, asks Tonya if she has read the romance novel he lent her: “‘No, I have started a new romance, more interesting than the one you gave me.’ ‘Is that so?’ muttered Viktor, annoyed. ‘Who is the author?’ Tonia looked at him with her shining, mocking eyes: ‘No one.’”47
Tonia’s romance is an event in her life, not a novel written by someone else. How the Steel Was Tempered was written by its hero, not by an author, and it was read by everyone, not just those touched by Dostoevsky’s shadow. As Samuel Johnson said of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, “this is the great merit of the book, that the most cultivated man cannot find anything to praise more highly, and the child knows nothing more amusing.” There were only two other books that Johnson considered the equal of The Pilgrim’s Progress as books “written by mere men that were wished longer by their readers.” One, of course, was Don Quixote; the other was Robinson Crusoe, the Pilgrim’s successor as the Puritan gospel that even children (including the young Stalin and his adopted son, Artem) find amusing. Leonov’s Soviet Faust (or was it Hamlet?) may have failed, but Ostrovsky’s Pilgrim’s Progress proved a great success. The magazine editor from Ilf and Petrov’s Pravda essay had been right, after all: one could write a Robinson Crusoe that was “amusing, original, and full of interesting adventures” while also taking place on a peninsula that contained a trade union committee with a safe deposit box, a chairman’s bell, a pitcher of water, a tablecloth, and broad masses of working people.48
One way in which the original Robinson Crusoe attains true knowledge is by writing down the story of his discoveries (both spiritual and material). In How the Steel Was Tempered, this is a central theme: when Pavel realizes that he is too weak to serve in any other way, he devotes himself to writing. His last symbolic death comes when the only copy of his manuscript gets lost in the mail, but then he starts over, and the story is born again. Ostrovsky’s book about Pavel ends with the publisher’s acceptance of Pavel’s book about himself. “The iron ring was broken. Armed with a new weapon, he was returning to the ranks and to life.”49
But there was also another path—one mostly ignored by critics, but crucially important to Kon, Kurilov, Arosev, Osinsky, Serafimovich, and other Old Bolsheviks from the House of Government. After Pavel is given his pension and “labor invalid” certificate and can no longer walk without crutches, he briefly considers suicide, but rejects the idea as “too cowardly and easy.” Instead, he offers his “friendship and love” to Taya Kyutsam, the eighteen-year-old daughter of his philistine landlord. “I can give you a lot of what you need,” he tells her, “and vice versa.” What she needs is his help in becoming a Party member; what he needs is not made explicit, but the reader knows that “her firm young breasts are bursting out of her striped worker’s blouse.”50
Before becoming an invalid, Pavel has been celibate. He has had a number of temptations, but he has resisted them all in the same way he has forced himself to
stop swearing and smoking. His model is the Gadfly—“a revolutionary for whom the personal was nothing compared to the collective.” Once, when Pavel’s mother asks him if he has found a girl, he says, “Mother, I have taken a vow not to make love to any girls until we have exterminated the bourgeoisie all over the world.” When he meets Taya, the bourgeoisie has not yet been exterminated, but two things have changed: his flesh has been mostly mortified, and socialism seems more secure. After Taya accepts his proposal, he repays her “tender caresses” with a “profound tenderness” of his own and sees the “glow of barely concealed joy” in her shining eyes. Several weeks later, he loses the use of his legs and left arm, and then, finally, his eyesight. He offers Taya her freedom, but she stays with him, as his partner at home and his equal within the Party. Both are rewarded with the publication of his book and, eventually, immortality. Ostrovsky’s widow, R. P. Ostrovskaya (née Raya Matsyuk), would publish her husband’s biography in Gorky’s The Lives of Extraordinary People series. Platonov’s Levin, Leonov’s Kurilov, and young Pavel Korchagin were justified in their asceticism during the time of wars, cease-fires, and dam building. But now that the foundations of socialism had been laid and the revolutionaries’ bodies had been tamed, they were entitled to some tenderness and family immortality. Christian the Pilgrim and his wife had found knowledge and salvation; Robinson Crusoe had found knowledge and wealth; Pavel Korchagin found knowledge and a wife.51
21
THE HAPPY CHILDHOOD
Most House of Government leaseholders were assured of collective immortality by virtue of being high priests of the Revolution (as confirmed by their assignment to the House of Government). Of the more personal strategies, the most obvious one was having one’s name attached to a more lasting object. Serafimovich, who doubled his (heavenly) name by making his pen name identical to his patronymic (resulting in “Aleksandr Serafimovich Serafimovich”), divided his time between Serafimovich Street in Moscow and the town of Serafimovich on the Don. A closely related approach (central to the plots of both The Road to Ocean and How the Steel Was Tempered) was to publish one’s life story—either as a memoir or as a biography produced by someone else. For those unwilling to wait (or trust in the future), the best hope for a Faustian “time, stay!” moment was a “last love,” as proposed to Kurilov by his Mephistopheles. “I have revived, I have become younger,” wrote the seventy-four-year-old Feliks Kon about the effect that his relationship with Maria Komarova had had on his life and on his ability to record it.1
Arosev, whose diary was suffused with his “thought of thoughts” about conquering death, was unhappy in his last love, but persistent on other fronts. He asked his children to inter his ashes in the Kremlin Wall (as a “fighter of the October days and a revolutionary who has devoted his whole life to the struggle for Communism”); considered commissioning a statue of himself from the sculptor Merkurov (who specialized in death masks and Lenin and Stalin images); wrote a series of memoirs (and some drafts of an autobiographical epic); and was planning a novel with a wide cast of characters (including a Bolshevik, Trotskyite, “honest legalist,” and fascist who sides with the Trotskyite and “those who defy Stalin and our regime”). He shared his ideas with Stalin, who represented the Revolution, and kept a diary, which represented “an attempt to continue life after death.” According to an entry written three weeks after the Writers’ Congress, the idea of recording all his “encounters, conversations, and observations” had been inspired by the Persian poet Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (The Book of Kings), “as well as Stendhal and the chroniclers.” Stendhal represented a strategy of combining historical novels, heroic biographies, multiple autobiographies, and private diaries in a successful effort to immortalize the Revolution along with its chronicler.2
But the main path to salvation lay in the children. When the new world was still being born, Nina Podvoiskaia once wrote in her diary that if the sacred fire of the Revolution did not burst forth within her, it would do so through her children, “who will make me immortal.” In 1935, Nikolai Podvoisky wrote to their children that they owed their membership in the Soviet community to their mother’s effort to “nurture, raise, and educate” them. When the eternal houses were being built, Osinsky wrote to Anna Shaternikova that Soviet factories were as dear to him as his own children. In 1934, he wrote that his “best creation” was his youngest son, Valia. And Arosev, in his search for the keys to his own immortality, concluded that “the truest and most beautiful ones” were his children. “The question of death, which has tormented me for many years and prevented me from writing, working, and living straight, without wavering, seems to be coming to a resolution. Death is inevitable. I am not to blame for it any more than I am for my birth. I must simply look it straight in the eye and prepare to leave—not meekly and haphazardly, caught unawares—but having fully prepared and taken care of the children…. Once I have taken care of them—by all means!—I will not fear death and decay.”3
This looked like surrender—a return to the “ruined house” and the “loathsome forms of life.” The Revolution, according to Nina Podvoiskaia, was the blue bird of universal happiness, but Maeterlinck’s play from which she had borrowed the symbol—the play with which her children and all the other House of Government children had begun their journey of self-discovery—was about the eternal return and the circuitous road home. As the main characters, the boy Tyltyl and the girl Mytyl, discover at the end of the play (and at the beginning of their self-aware lives), the truth they seek has been with them all along: indeed, they are that truth. This was also the story of Peer Gynt, which Sverdlov and Voronsky had admired in their Siberian exile, and the most persistent theme of the “world culture” with which socialist realism had become identified. The “creation” of St. Petersburg is, like its divine predecessor, followed by a flood; Faust wins his bet partly because he loses it; Don Quixote and Sancho Panza return home, at least temporarily; and Robinson Crusoe finds nothing new in the new world. And then there was War and Peace. If seeing the Art Theater’s production of The Blue Bird at the age of six or seven was the rite of passage that ushered in the age of reason, reading War and Peace at puberty was the ticket to adulthood. And War and Peace seemed to suggest that truth and happiness were hidden in plain sight and that any attempt to build, or even plan, the eternal house was a folly best represented by Napoleon’s vanity and the German generals’ pedantry.4
To the House of Government dialecticians, however, the apparent surrender was the antithesis leading to the synthesis. The focus on children was not about reproducing oneself or passing on accumulated wealth, material or otherwise: it was about “nurturing, raising, and educating” the citizens of a redeemed world. The Augustinian era of Soviet history was the “happy childhood” on the eve of eternity. Children were at the center of life not because children were always at the center of life or because the Bolsheviks had to start over, but because the Soviet Union was a country where Tyltyl and Mytyl did not have to grow up. Tania Miagkova, who had been expelled from the House, discovered that her hope of return was coterminous with her daughter’s childhood. Those who still lived in the House knew this by virtue of being good Soviet citizens.
■ ■ ■
The nomenklatura families within the House represented a great variety of traditions with very different kinship systems, divisions of labor, rules of inheritance, and patterns of cohabitation. Once inside the House, all of them tended toward the nineteenth-century Russian model as represented in “golden age” Russian literature (which, unlike most of its western European counterparts, was aristocratic, not bourgeois): the remote, admired, feared and usually absent father; the less remote, less admired, less feared and frequently absent mother; the more or less pitied German governess; the more or less dreaded piano teacher; and the beloved peasant nanny, who did most of the child rearing until it was time to see The Blue Bird and go to school.
Fathers were associated with festive day-off activities: trips to theaters and
fine arts museums, stays in one-day rest homes, Sunday dinners at the dacha, book reading and chess playing in the evenings, and occasional summer vacations on the Black Sea. (Most parents traveled to resorts by themselves, leaving their children in Moscow or at the dacha in the care of nannies and female relatives.) Mothers were not associated with anything out of the ordinary, except perhaps trips to the theater in early childhood. Some families had live-in German governesses; the rest had them come every day to give German lessons. Many small children belonged to “playground groups” supervised by German teachers (who doubled as governesses with particular families). Besides language instruction, “the German women” (most of them middle-aged political émigrés, refugees from the Baltic states, or professional governesses with prerevolutionary experience) were responsible for teaching good manners and correct posture. They tended not to develop a strong rapport with their charges and were greatly resented by the Russian nannies jealous of their prerogatives. The Terekhovs (the family of Roman Terekhov, the former Donbass miner and Ukrainian Party official transferred to Moscow after Stalin called him “a writer of fairy tales”) fired their children’s governess after the nanny complained that she was cruel to the children. The Kuchmins (the family of Ivan Kuchmin, the son of Volga peasants and the prototype for Leonid Leonov’s Kurilov) fired the first of their three German governesses after repeated pleas from the children. The Belenkys (the family of Mark Belenky, the son of a Baku industrialist and head of the Grain Trust) fired their daughter’s nanny after she pummeled the German governess. The director of the Party Publishing House and the Lenin Museum (and Kerzhentsev’s deputy at the Committee for the Arts), Naum Rabichev, forbade his mother to teach his son German because of her Yiddish accent.5
The House of Government Page 87
