The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

and plots. Our starting point will be 1934, the First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers. That Congress declared the doctrine of “socialist realism,” formulated two years earlier, as the official (and sole) successor to the Russian literary tradition as we have presented it so far in this book. In his opening speech, the recently repatriated Maksim Gorky, president of the Writers’ Union, surveyed that tradition and found it seriously flawed, especially in two widespread nineteenth-century movements he proceeded to classify as unac-ceptably bourgeois: “the old romanticism” and “critical realism.” To help us grasp Gorky’s plea for a clean literary slate for Russia, and to better orient us in the resulting ideological terrain, we must first clear away two enduring Western misconceptions – two bad binary oppositions – about artistic creativity in the Stalinist period.

First is the familiar opposition of “collaborator” versus “martyr.” This convenient yet dysfunctional Cold War binary divides up the residents of a totalitarian society into two camps: conformists or dissidents, the triumphantly self-righteous or the suffering victim – which was itself a Romantic cliche´ that Gorky deplored. Most people, including artists, are neither. They simply survive, balancing daily the benefits and costs of being useful, “normal” citizens in their society. This means taking a stand at some points, lying low at others, and constantly devising compromises to protect one’s comfort, dignity, work, and family. Moreover, during these years the collaborator often became the martyr, rewarded one day and pilloried the next. Such a carrot-and-stick, two-steps-forward-one-step-back method proved to be one of the shrewdest psychological levers of Stalinism. In a system run not by market mechanisms but by patronage plus terror, it was hardly worth “commanding” or terrorizing minor talent. But this policy of seduction and rejection complicated any easy model of “Poet versus Tsar.” Thus the famous ritual humiliations: pampering Shostakovich, then publicly shaming him in 1936, then reincorporating him into Soviet music; banning Bulgakov’s work and then (after a personal phone call from Stalin in April 1929) partially reinstating him in the Moscow Art Theatre. Mikhail Zoshchenko (1895–1958), an immensely successful satirist in the 1920s, was singled out for savage attack, together with the preeminent poet Anna Akhmatova, to mark the onset of a new repressive party line in the arts in 1946. The martyrdom of these writers was all the more precious to the Party when there was collaboration, or at least acquiescence, on either side of it.

The second bad or inadequate binary pits “free” against “unfree” art. Liberal or open societies usually insist on the right of creative artists to be political or apolitical as it suits them. In this regard, Stalinism grotesquely narrowed the sphere of the private: every personal act was potentially political. This politicized dimension was not necessarily punitive or imposed. Recent work on

The Stalin years 193

Stalin-era diaries suggests that “forging an identity,” for a young Soviet citizen, was not the individualizing process familiar in the West (or in Tolstoy), with its goal of a unique voice free from societal constraint. More likely it was the reverse, a striving for the transcendence of the personal: “a Communist should make himself permanently at home in a heroic universe by means of uninterrupted, sustained ideological thinking and acting” and should understand failure as a matter of one’s “personal deviations from a mandated norm.”1 This model recalls the saint’s life, which a human subject internalizes and “grows into” as into an ideal prototype. Such self-fashioning complemented a more general shift toward active monitoring of creative acts. To the negative censorship familiar from tsarist Russia (deleting what could not be said) was added a new layer of positive censorship (dictating what must be said). This peremptory guidance was transmitted through a sotsial'nyi zakaz or “social command”.