The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

depth in each character derives from this sense of uninterrupted development combined with inner incompleteness – for at any given moment, the hero is multidirectional. Doubts coexist with convictions. The Modernist novel, in contrast, overtly experiments with non-continuity: abrupt breaks, hallucinations, glimpses, slices. Juxtaposition and contrast matter more to it than the development of character. Since socialist realism emerged as a deliberate, even militant alternative to Modernism, it is not surprising that psychology returns. As we saw in Cement, the spectrum of emotions is broad and the vigor of their expression almost embarrassing. What strikes one as depthless and thin, however, is the unnatural linearity, segmentation, and “one-wayness” of the emotions expressed. There are powerful displays of hatred, jealousy, love, grief – but only in a row, one at a time. Dasha grieves intensely over the death of her daughter, but her grief passes and does not impede her future Party work. Badin, the leather-jacketed chairman, enters Polya’s room and rapes her; she is upset about it for one night, his womanizing makes everyone uncomfortable, but it too passes without any lasting consequence, neither straining him nor traumatizing his targets. (It bothered theStalinistcensor, however, when official policy shifted toward conventional “family values” in the mid-1930s; Gladkov was required to tone down Badin’s libido.) Gleb is devastated by the loss of his wife and home – but a few lines later he is joking with a neighbor woman and then is delirious with joy at the opening of the factory. Transitions are never a problem, Gasparov points out, and each character, at any given time, is whole. The inner struggle of a personality to answer for a contradictory, side-by-side layering and backsliding of deeds, emotions, responses, is not part of the hero’s task.

There is also a Tolstoyan moment in the closing scene of the final chapter, titled “A Thrust into the Future” – Tolstoyan not in style, but in idea. The factory is again working. The dedication ceremony is under way, brass bands playing, the speaker’s platform vibrating, Gleb is “pale and glazed,” his face convulsed. Gleb does manage to utter some slogans, but the novel ends entirely focused on the mute mass deed. As deeds go, a cement factory would hardly have interested the sage of Yasnaya Polyana – although he would have approved the transcendence of sexual love and the escape from the trap of the biological family. But the reopening of the factory is not in fact the deed being celebrated. The primary product is not material, but psychological and sentimental. Just as in Tolstoy’s theory of art, what is being celebrated is not the artifact – a novel, a symphony, a cement factory – but the change of spirit in the producer and the receiver of the artifact. This change in attitude is made possible through “revolutionary romanticism”: the insistence on seeing and acting on a singular, united sense of the good.14 Cement is a byproduct. Tolstoy would agree

The Stalin years 207

with these priorities. It is significant that throughout the Stalinist period, the quest for a “Red Tolstoy” continued. Appropriately trimmed and packaged, his legacy was not incompatible with many versions of socialist realism. A “Red Dostoevsky” or “Red Chekhov” is inconceivable.

The Dragon and destruction (Evgeny Shvarts)

With its lack of irony and its advocacy of a straightforward Purpose, socialist realism (if judged by Enlightenment criteria) seems to infantilize its participants. For skeptics, this is one reason why children’s literature enjoyed such high status under communism. But more substantial reasons exist for the high priority placed on writing fiction for the young. Intense interest in the proper upbringing of the “New Soviet Child” (Gorky founded the first post-revolutionary magazine for children in 1919) reinforced Russia’s distinguished research record in developmental child psychology. Writing for children attracted brilliant literary talents who were also shrewd child psychologists – most notably the poets Samuil Marshak (1887–1964) and Korney Chukovsky (1882–1969), both prote´ge´s of Gorky – as well as avant-garde poets and prose writers interested in Modernist, Formalist techniques of “estrangement.” But children’s literature was always ahaven.The “world from theview of thechild”is an ancient mode of protest against servility and convention, from the Andersen tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” to the response of the childish Natasha Rostova to an opera performance in War and Peace. Fantastic and eccentric visions too whimsical or provocative to pass the grown-up censorship were often tolerated as a category of childish imagination.