The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

(Gorky’s 1906 Mother was another) to be declared a prototypical socialist realist work retroactively, that is, after the doctrine became official policy in 1934. In return for this honor, Gladkov was obliged to rewrite his novel several times in accordance with changing party-mindedness. The plot of Cement is original to the Soviet experiment and constructed in defiance of the Western novelistic canon; its driving force is not money, fame, self-expression, erotic or family love, but economic production. Our second exemplar, Evgeny Shvarts’s dramatized “fairy tales for adults” and especially his Dragon (1943), rely on familiarity and old-fashionedness, not originality and industrialization. Shvarts created a distinctively self-conscious, quasi-ironic tone for the stage that did, after a fashion, follow Gorky’s 1934 behest to writers to exploit the “profound, striking, artistically perfect types of hero created by folklore.” Andrei Platonov, our final exemplar, is the greatest writer of the three. He would have liked to be a “fellow-traveler.” But that category of writer had disappeared by 1931 – when Stalin himself purportedly read Platonov’s short story “For Future Use” “Vprok” and wrote in the margins: “Talented, but a son-of-a-bitch” [talantlivo, no svoloch]. Platonov was classified a “kulak writer” and relegated to the opposition.

Cement and construction (Fyodor Gladkov)

Fyodor Gladkov (1883–1958), a self-made writer from a family of poor Old Believerpeasants,became aMarxistearlyin life andwashelpedbyGorky toward aliterary career. “Lermontov, Dostoevsky and Tolstoyintoxicatedme,” Gladkov wrote in an autobiographical note. “Pushkin and Gogol left me cold.”11 Cement tells the story of the reconstruction of a ruined factory under the leadership of one of its workers, Gleb Chumalov. Returning from the fronts of the Civil War (1918–21), Gleb finds the cement factory in ruins and its workers pilfering, squabbling, and demoralized. His wife Dasha, now liberated from hearth and marriage, heads the Women’s Section of the Party. Their hut is neglected, their daughter Nyurka now lives in a children’s home. Everything around him is estranged and paralyzed. But Gleb is a bogatyr, an epic hero.12 Once recovered from his initial shock, he radiates energy and restlessness.

Gladkov’s fondness for Dostoevsky (and his indifference to Pushkin) leaves its trace in the extraordinarily lush hyperbole of his prose and its heightened emotional aura. His world is one of uninterrupted crisis time and precarious threshold space. Characters are constantly grinding their teeth, clenching their fists, gasping, frothing, flailing their arms. Maximalism is the norm. When Gleb recruits the old-regime engineer Kleist to the factory’s cause, he promises

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him 5,000 workmen, all the material he wants, his word of honor to shoot any saboteurs on the spot, if only he will complete a task that should take a month within four days (p. 116). Kleist is skeptical at first, but then won over. “Heroism means doing the impossible,” Gleb remarks to his female comrade Polya (p. 55), who tosses her curly head in agreement – in this novel, men and women flirt via such phrases. Gladkov taps into Nature’s wanton energy as well, with nourishing and intoxicating metaphors that we can almost taste, as in the opening lines of the novel: “Behind the roofs and angles of the factory the sea foamed like boiling milk in the flashing sunlight. And the air, between the mountains and the sea, was fiery and lustrous as wine” (p. 1).

The ruined factory is always at the center of our vision. Inside this structure, however, the production of cement is intermittent at best. Production starts up halfway through the novel but is immediately interrupted by armed attacks from anti-Bolshevik forces in the surrounding mountains (tsarist Whites, anarchist-peasant Greens, hostile Cossacks). Mostly the factory is the site of party meetings. Unlike the “boiling milk of the sea” and the lustrous wine-like open air, indoors everything is tobacco smoke, screaming, tramping, rush, filth. Notwithstanding this local ecology, however, Gladkov’s novel introduces a new chord in the Russian literary canon: the positive presentation of bureaucratic work. To be sure, bureaucrats can always ossify into self-serving scoundrels, and Gleb is forever threatening to line them up and shoot them. The image of the bullying (and lecherous) Party boss was censored variously in different editions of the novel. But overall, Gladkov presents the stern, leather-jacketed, bronze-faced committee chairmen and security police, who answer to “higher organs” and authorize inhumanly cruel measures, as necessary, positive repositories of consciousness.