The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Socialist realism, like every other party line in Stalinist Russia, was never a fixed formula, and certainly not in the 1930s. En route to cleansing Russia of her superfluous heroes and depraved plots, quite a bit of humor and self-criticism remained. Language satire was one vital site for it. Much as eighteenth-century playwrights, including the Empress Catherine II herself, had satirized awkward and ill-learned Frenchifying among the upwardly mobile rural gentry, so the garbled Soviet-speak of the new, barely literate peasants-turned-officials, full of acronyms and poorly digested Bolshevik slogans, was ridiculed by masters of oral narrative or skaz (Mikhail Zoshchenko was one such master; Isaak Babel another). Several years before his suicide in 1930, the poet-playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky had parodied this jargon through the brilliant jingles and slick commercial street talk that formed the aural backdrop to his futuristic farce, The Bedbug. Dysfunctional or substandard speech – a product of the imperfect,

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and thus potentially sympathetic human face – is naturally individualizing. The right to integrate such disoriented language into art was an indispensable safety valve in a society that otherwise demanded ever more conformity and obedience.

Satire and criticism were tolerated, even welcomed, if the target of the satire was a corrupt official or a “NEPman,” one of the small entrepreneurs who flourished between 1921 and 1927. (Bulgakov’s “Adventures of Chichikov” from the mid-1920s follows this approved formula.) The vast expansion of government bureaucracy had provided many berths for swindlers; both state and reader benefited by having this fact made public. The most beloved hero in this vein, however, was thoroughly unruly and seemingly of no benefit to anyone but himself. This was the con man and imposter Ostap Bender, heir to Gogol’s Khlestakov, created by a pair of comic journalist-novelists known by their pen names Ilf and Petrov (Ilya Fainzelberg, 1897–1937 / Evgeny Kataev, 1903–42). They published two famous novels about this trickster, The Twelve Chairs (1928) and The Golden Calf (1931), at the start of the Stalinist cultural takeover – and each became an immediate bestseller.10 Throughout the darkest years, Soviet readers continued to respond to these novels rapturously, with a mix of indignation, envy, and unfeigned admiration. Ostap Bender became the shadow comic double to those more single-minded heroes who frantically, devotedly built socialism in the serious novels of the time.

Outright mockery of the heroic task of socialist construction was not permissible. If authors desired to provide an alternative or ambivalent perspective on the state-building or state-defending events of the 1930s and 1940s, the literary means had to be indirect. The three exemplary prose works for this chapter, two novels and one play, were selected with this problem in mind. The basic plotline of each (parodied to various degrees) reflects the simplified types and roles canonical for the era. A positive, politically conscious hero who furthers the Purpose is confronted by an “enemy” – which can be either a person or a concept, usually faceless, always heartless. A third indispensable actor is the “masses”: hungry, responsive, confused, in need of leadership and an “idea.” This cast of characters invariably seems flattened and two-dimensional when compared with the peaks of nineteenth-century psychological prose. Its “simplified” quality can inspire us, irritate us, amuse us or depress us, depending on the genre in which the characters are embedded and the attitude we bring to the Purpose being pursued.

Only one of our three exemplars is canonically socialist realist. The other two hover around the periphery of that doctrine, build off its needs, mouth its words, envy or parody its self-confidence, and expose its impossible pretensions. Fyodor Gladkov’s Cement (1925) was one of several party-minded novels

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