The heart of socialist realism, argued Bukharin at the first Writers’ Congress, was romanticism. “The soul” of “most of the young people of that time,” wrote Svetlana Osinskaia, who turned ten in 1935, was “romantic”—romantic in the sense of being exalted, vibrant, hopeful, and vulnerable, and romantic in the sense of seeking transcendence in the here and now: in nature and, above all, within itself. The fathers’ generation had been shaped by the expectation of the apocalypse; the children’s generation was “religious” about the heavenly city they inhabited. The fathers had comrades: fellow sectarians bound together by a common cause. The children had friends and lovers: unique individuals whom they loved for reasons they felt compelled to discuss but were never supposed to exhaust. The fathers’ first loyalty was to the Party and, through the Party, to history; the children’s first loyalty was to each other and, by extension, to the Party. The fathers’ “classical” reading was tempered by symbolism and disciplined by the study of Marx, Lenin, and economics. The children were bored by modernism, entirely innocent of economics, and only indirectly acquainted with Marxism-Leninism through speeches, quotations, and history-book summaries. How the Steel Was Tempered appeared as a natural sequel to the adventure books that both Pavel Korchagin and Nikolai Ostrovsky read growing up. No one ever read Das Kapital.
Schools propagated and institutionalized the new faith. After 1932, and especially after 1934, the “leftist excesses” and “harmful experiments” left over from the previous age were systematically removed in favor of massively reinforced and transparently hierarchical educational institutions charged with the organized transfer of a well-defined body of knowledge to individually graded “schoolchildren.” At the center of the new system, which closely followed the old imperial one, were standard curricula, stable textbooks, structured lessons, and professionally trained teachers—assisted, in a subordinate capacity, by parents. Exams, abolished after the Revolution, came back as “testing trials” and later as “exams”; class preceptors (responsible for good conduct, morals, and teacher-parent relations) came back as “group leaders” and, later, “class mentors.” “Pedology,” a branch of child psychology committed to intelligence testing and present in most Moscow schools in the form of special labs, was banned in 1936 (on the initiative of Boris Volin, recently transferred from the central censorship office to the Central Committee’s School Department) for “abandoning the study of a particular living child,” preaching the concept of “the fatal dependence of a child’s development on biological and social factors,” and spreading “the most harmful and ridiculous nonsense” about the impending disappearance of the family.16
School subjects were to reflect the most important branches of human knowledge, including, in particular, history, geography, physics, chemistry, and biology. Laying the foundation for everything else and taking up the bulk of class time were mathematics and the newly acclaimed queen of all subjects, language and literature. By far the largest public campaign conducted by the Moscow schools in the 1930s was the celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of Pushkin’s death, which culminated in a week-long series of events beginning on the anniversary day of February 10, 1937, and involving concerts, contests, readings, meetings, rallies, lectures, shows, tours, and parades.17
Some House of Government children attended the Moscow Exemplary School, located directly across the river and named after the Old Bolshevik, Panteleimon Lepeshinsky (who lived in Apt. 212 with his wife, a specialist in human rejuvenation and the leading proponent of the theory of spontaneous generation of life from inanimate matter). Hubert L’Hoste and the Arosev sisters went to the Karl Liebknecht German school; Vladimir Ozersky, the son of the former Soviet trade representative in Great Britain, A. V. Ozersky, went to the Anglo-American school; but the great majority of House children went to School No. 19, formerly the Maria Women’s College, on the Sophia Embankment. Rachmaninoff’s piano (a Julius Blüthner) was still there; the ground floor still contained the administrative office and the dining hall. According to Georgy Lesskis, who was a student there in the mid-1930s, “a sweeping staircase led up to the second floor and the huge assembly hall with its high ceiling. The recreation hall was slightly smaller and on the wall was an enormous clock with a pendulum that was almost the size of a small first-grader. Its chimes, which could be heard throughout the school, seemed to echo the Kremlin’s Spasskaya Tower ones, which could also be heard quite clearly. Along both sides of the assembly hall were doors leading into bright, spacious classrooms with high ceilings and windows that looked out over the tops of the small trees growing in the school yard.” The larger assembly hall had a huge aquarium flanked by two potted palm trees. According to Mikhail Korshunov (the son of the Intourist director, P. S. Korshunov, from Apt. 445), there were also some “ancient mirrors in which our girls used to admire themselves a hundred times a day,” “tall white doors with ornamental reliefs and thick glass,” tiled stoves in the corridors, and, “in the administrative office, a huge leather couch that looked like a carriage without a top.” A narrow stairway led up to the third floor with its low ceilings and small classrooms converted from young ladies’ bedrooms. The most popular one was a physics lab with two small windows leading out onto the roof.18
Some teachers had taught in prerevolutionary gymnasia, but most were the young beneficiaries of accelerated reconstruction-era training programs. The Moscow City Education Department worried about the level of preparation of some new recruits but seemed to have no complaints about School No. 19. The House of Government parents had neither the time nor the inclination to ask questions, and the children themselves loved their principal (who turned twenty-nine in 1935); their principal’s successor, whom Gaister described as “a quiet, cultured person”; their vice principal for academic affairs (who lived on the ground floor of the school with his son, Mikhail Korshunov’s classmate); and most of their teachers, who seemed to share their hopes, their enthusiasms, and their assumption that school was, in some crucial sense, an extension of the courtyard. Everyone’s favorite was the literature teacher, David Yakovlevich Raikhin, who turned twenty-seven in 1935, lived on the ground floor, next to the vice principal, and was, according to Korshunov, “a genius and an innovator.” “His obvious erudition was combined with an extraordinary narrative skill,” wrote Moroz. “His literature classes were pure joy. No one noticed how the forty-five minutes flew by, and no one wanted to leave when the class was over. But he was also strict and demanding, would punish the lazy, and occasionally (extremely rarely!) get angry and kick people out.” Of Lesskis’s eighth-grade class of sixty students, only twenty-six remained at the time of graduation. “For three years,” he writes, “all twenty-six of us were immersed in literature (although only two of us—Ira Bunina and I—went on to major in literature). We went with David Yakovlevich to the Tretyakov Gallery, attended theater performances he recommended, ran a literary society, and published a literary journal.” There were also physics and mathematics societies, citywide “school Olympics” (in mathematics and later in physics and chemistry), concerts, excursions, and newspapers. “Since we lived so close to the school, we often hung around there till late in the evening,” wrote Inna Gaister. “Even if we ran home to have lunch, we often went back afterward. It was interesting at the school: there were a lot of clubs and different activities. I really loved our school.”19
School No. 19
What was interesting in school was also what was interesting at home and in the courtyard: friendship and learning. The children learned from their teachers, from each other, occasionally from their parents, and—continually and religiously—from books. Samuil Moroz thought of himself as a late developer:
I learned to read before I was five. The first book I ever read was called Great Love Stories. All I remember from that book were the names: Abelard and Heloise, Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura. It was not until much later that I found out who they were: back then I was, like Gogol’s Petrushka, more i
nterested in the actual process of reading.
After that, I read nonstop. By the time I was sixteen, I had read virtually everything by Jules Verne, Mayne Reid, and Cooper, and a great deal by Boussenard, Jacolliot, and Burroughs. I read Burroughs’s Tarzan several times.
Later I started reading serious books. Around the age of twelve, I read Tolstoy’s War and Peace and at fourteen or so, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. At sixteen I fell in love with foreign literature: Romain Rolland, Stefan Zweig, Maupassant. I cannot possibly list them all.20
Elena Kraval, who turned fourteen in 1935, remembered her father (Osinsky’s successor as the head of the Central Statistics Bureau) coming home to find her reading Maupassant, and first saying that it was too early, but then allowing her to go on. Among her childhood favorites were “the marvelous” academic edition of Pushkin, “Scheherazade’s tales,” Robinson Crusoe, The Count of Monte Cristo, and War and Peace, which she read at the age of twelve, “skipping all the war parts.” Tatiana Smilga (sixteen in 1935) read “indiscriminately, everything from Maupassant to Turgenev and on.” She did not remember any Soviet books. “I remember mostly reading the classics. Balzac, Byron, Shakespeare, and the Russians, of course: Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and my true love, Pushkin.” (As she put it in 1998, “I consider Russian literature to be incredibly beautiful and wonderful. I think that without the Russian literary classics, the whole world would collapse.”) Inna Gaister (ten in 1935) “read a lot: at home, in class, at every free moment; read nonstop, indiscriminately: Turgenev, Gogol, Pushkin, Balzac, Zola.” Postyshev’s son Leonid (fifteen in 1935) remembered “reading a lot, nonstop, and without much discrimination.” Gaister’s cousin, Igor, who lived in Apt. 98, had to be searched before going into the bathroom, to make sure he did not lock himself in with a book. In 1935, Mikhail Koltsov spent a week as a ninth-grade teacher in School No. 27, not far from the House of Government. The most popular writer among his students was Jules Verne: none of the thirty-five students had read fewer than three of his novels, and half the class had read between eight and ten.21
Inna Gaister in fourth grade (Courtesy of Inna Gaister)
Most of the House children read more or less “nonstop” (the same Russian term is used for “binge drinking”), but they did not read “indiscriminately.” The “classics” were by definition extraordinary, and even the adventure books constituted a tight, mostly nineteenth-century, canon that the children had inherited from their parents (and could explore “indiscriminately” at home). They read—and went to the theater, opera, concerts, museums, and exhibitions—for pleasure, but also as a matter of social obligation and personal self-improvement. They made lists, filled gaps, set goals, took lessons, designed projects, and made informal presentations on a variety of artistic and academic topics. They thought of the world as something to be known and joyfully possessed, and of knowledge, as a finite collection of cultural achievements and scientific disciplines to be mastered and put to use. They were animated by Faust’s passion to “understand whatever / Binds the world’s innermost core together, / See all its workings, and its seeds.” They loved atlases and encyclopedias, memorized flags and capitals, and collected coins and stamps (preferably from the “colonies”). They were all Chelyuskinites and “Captain Grant’s children”: knowledge and adventure were one and the same thing. The song that defined the decade came from the movie version of Jules Verne’s The Children of Captain Grant (In Search of the Castaways), released by Mosfilm in 1936. It was called (and addressed to) “The Jolly Wind,” and sang “about wild mountains, the deep mysteries of the seas, bird conversations, blue horizons, and brave and great people.” The refrain was: “Those who are jolly will laugh, Those who desire will receive, Those who seek will always find.” The biblical references would not have been noticed by the House of Government children; the Promethean ones would.
True knowledge was inseparable from self-knowledge; the mastery of the world both presupposed and generated self-mastery. The House children prepared themselves for the journey by strengthening their bodies (Leonid Postyshev, Vladimir Kuibyshev, and Vladimir Rabichev all took up boxing, with Jack London in mind), exercising their willpower, and fine-tuning their emotions. As Faust put it, “Whatever is the lot of humankind / I want to taste within my deepest self.” Some wrote poetry, novels, or short stories; many kept diaries, in which they probed their deepest selves. The effort of careful introspection in the service of learning and self-improvement was known as “working on oneself.” The overall goal was the pursuit of truth and knowledge understood as one and the same thing. The ultimate reward was socialism understood as universal harmony.
The House of Government children admired their fathers and saw themselves as their true heirs—the legitimate children of the Revolution—but their greatest heroes came from the “international constellation of human types” that they found in literature. Most of these heroes were, in some sense, rebels, but only a few of them—the Gadfly, Spartacus, Pavel Korchagin—happened to be proper revolutionaries. What mattered was the larger romantic rebellion, the Promethean defiance of the jealous gods. Not all great heroes were lone individuals (great love—Abelard and Heloise, Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura—and great friendship, from Herzen and Ogarev to the three musketeers, were crucial parts of the quest), but they were all individuals, not party members. When asked to identify nonliterary heroes, the House of Government children, encouraged by their schoolteachers, tended to name the greatest officially celebrated individual martyrs for truth and knowledge, Galileo and Giordano Bruno.
■ ■ ■
Fedor Kaverin’s last production before the State New Theater was expelled from the House of Government was Uriel Acosta, based on the 1847 Romantic play by Karl Gutzkow. A staple of Russian and Yiddish theater, it had been staged by Kaverin’s nemesis, Konstantin Stanislavsky, and Kaverin’s close friend, Solomon Mikhoels (both had played the lead role). The action takes place in the Jewish community of Amsterdam in the seventeenth century. Uriel Acosta is excommunicated for writing a rationalist treatise questioning rabbinical dogma. His only supporter is the beautiful Judith, who is engaged to a rich merchant, Ben Jochai. Uriel and Judith persist in their defiance until Uriel, with a heavy heart, decides to recant in order to save Judith and his elderly mother from dishonor. While he is held incommunicado, preparing for the ceremony of public confession, his mother dies and Judith agrees to marry Ben Jochai, who blackmails her by ruining her father. Uriel recants his views and is about to be subjected to the ritual trampling at the synagogue’s threshold (with the triumphant Ben Jochai first in line) when he learns that his sacrifice has been in vain. He reasserts the truth of his convictions, utters Galileo’s “and yet it moves,” and condemns his judges for their blindness and hypocrisy. Judith drinks poison, and Uriel shoots himself offstage, leaving behind his disciple, the young Baruch Spinoza.22
Kaverin had finally found his hero. On the one side, according to his conception of the show, are “the oppressive power of the Torah and the Talmud, connected with the power of money; the deadening, leaden traditions with no room for hesitation or doubt; the place of death.” On the other is Uriel Acosta, “young, ardent, in love with life and with his Judith, accepting life and not the letter of the law, the author of a treatise that undermines the foundations of the stock exchange and the synagogue, the spring wind that bursts into the grim vault and sends the thousand-year-old scrolls of the dead law flying in all directions.” Uriel and Judith stand for youth and good books: the manifestos of free thought that Uriel has written and the original book of love—the Song of Songs—that they read to each other. One of the central episodes in Kaverin’s production is a ceremony that suggests both the historical depth and contemporary relevance of Uriel’s struggle. “On a dais, the heretical books of a true scholar are piled up high. In vain does Uriel try to pull out at least one; the flames rise up and, amidst general rejoicing, the fire burns and precious, thought-provoking pages, perish.�
�� But, of course, they do not. As one of the most articulate spokesmen for Soviet Faustianism put it (at about the same time), “manuscripts do not burn.” In the play’s final scene, the young Spinoza falls on Uriel’s body and says his last farewell. “In his teacher’s cloak he finds a book, the only one that Judith rescued from the flames and handed to Uriel before she died. The boy presses the book to his chest and walks through the frozen crowd, carrying it into real life, into the future.”23
The response was universally enthusiastic. The censor from the Main Repertory Committee cut a few lines from Uriel’s monologue in which he praises Christianity for serving as a stage on his journey to inner freedom, and, after the pre-release discussion in the Commissariat of Enlightenment, Kaverin promised to eliminate any suggestion that there was anything specifically Jewish about “talmudism,” but the consensus was that the overall conception was a triumph. The deputy head of the Theater Department of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, Pavel Ivanovich Novitsky, concluded the discussion by congratulating Kaverin on capturing the spirit of the age. The confrontation was between dogmatism of all stripes and the tradition of free thought represented “by a number of great men from Galileo, Bruno, and Spinoza all the way to Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.” It was a tradition of spring, wind, and eager learning, and Kaverin’s best insight was to stress Uriel’s youth. “Acosta must be young, temperamental, impetuous, and, at the same time, in his everyday behavior, he must be a person who loves life, who is filled with joy and a special feeling for life. He absolutely must be young.” And so he was. “Instead of an antiquarian philosopher and wise scribe,” wrote Em. Beskin in Literaturnaia gazeta, “we have a vibrant, exciting, and excitable young enthusiast, full of the spring flowering of his feelings for his beloved Judith and of his faith in the social cause that he fights and dies for.”24
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