The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The relationship between Modernist aesthetics and the most destructive totalitarian regimes of twentieth-century Europe – Fascism and Stalinism – has long been in dispute. On the Russian front, one transition can be found in the closing sentences of Leon Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution, published in 1924. It is an eloquent and enlightened Marxist treatise, in which Futurists, Russian Formalist critics, and budding proletarian art are all discussed, their positive and negative aspects weighed. Trotsky, although no friend of Modernism, acknowledged the artistic avant-garde as a potential ally in building the new world. He did not, of course, exempt its members from the “consciousness” versus “spontaneity” dialectic: “We stepped in to the Revolution,” he insists, “while Futurism fell into it.”33 But “mysticism” and “Romanticism” of the old Symbolist and nineteenth-century sorts are declared altogether incompatible with the Revolution.

Then Trotsky ends his treatise on a vision so mystically romantic that it recalls an utterance from Zamyatin’s D-503 in his most true-believing phase, before the birth of his doubting soul. “Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent . . . to create a higher biologic type, or, if you please, a superman,” Trotsky wrote (p. 256):

Social construction and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same process . . . Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, a Marx. And above this ridge, new peaks will rise.

Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929 and murdered in Mexico on Stalin’s orders in 1940. But the utopian sentiments expressed in those final lines continued to inspire, guide, and torment writers throughout the Stalinist years.

Chapter 8

The Stalin years: socialist realism, anti-fascist fairy tales, wilderness

1921:Victory of Bolsheviks in Civil War; imposition of one-party rule

1921:New Economic Policy (NEP) (some private enterprise restored in

service sector and limited free market)

1921–28:Maksim Gorky in exile in Italy

1924:Death of Lenin

1928:Joseph Stalin becomes General-Secretary of the Party and launches

first Five-Year Plan

1929:Expulsion of Trotsky from the Soviet Union

1930:10 million peasants forcibly collectivized during two winter months

1931:Beginning of terror-famine in Ukraine

1932:Creation of Union of Soviet Writers and doctrine of socialist realism

1934:First Congress of Union of Soviet Writers

1937–38:The Great Terror

1941:Hitler invades the USSR

1945:World War II ends with full victory for USSR

1948:Party crackdown on creative elite

1953:Death of Stalin

It is always difficult to reconstruct the appeal or the relevance of a losing side. All that remains are the products, without the living, electrifying myths or manipulated audiences that sustained them. The Stalinist period of the Russian literary tradition (1928–53) is one such massively discredited enterprise. Politically, economically, militarily, culturally, the Soviet Union was a “command state”: governed by decrees from above and profoundly unliberal in its professed ideals.

This chapter limits itself to the literary side of the Stalinist experiment. Appalling violence, waste, caprice and lies disfigured those years, but boldness and a thrilling enthusiasm illuminated them as well. We tend to forget how very bad Western capitalism looked in the 1930s and 1940s, with its worldwide depression, unchecked military aggression, abominable race relations – and thus how courageous and appealing many found the Soviet insistence on an entirely new basis for literary and political culture, a fresh slate of heroes

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