Natasha's Dance (80 page)

    * Dostoevsky was despised (though not read) by Lenin, who once famously dismissed his novel
The Devils,
which contains a devastating critique of the Russian revolutionary mentality, as a ‘piece of reactionary trash’. Apart from Lunacharsky, none of the Soviet leadership favoured his retention in the literary canon, and even Gorky wanted to get rid of him. Relatively few editions of Dostoevsky’s works were therefore published in

    (continued)

    issued in their millions as a new readership was introduced to them. Landscape painting, which had been a dying art in the 1920s, was suddenly restored as the favoured medium of Socialist Realist art, particularly scenes that illustrated the heroic mastery of the natural world by Soviet industry; all of it was styled on the landscape painters of the late nineteenth century, on Levitan or Kuindzhi or the Wanderers, with whom some of the older artists had even studied in their youth. As Ivan Gronsky once remarked (with the bluntness one might expect from the editor of
Izvestiia),
‘Socialist Realism is Rubens, Rembrandt and Repin put to serve the working class.’
¹¹⁰

    In music, too, the regime put the clock back to the nineteenth century. Glinka, Tchaikovsky and the
kuchkists,
who had fallen out of favour with the avant-garde composers of the 19 20s, were now held up as the model for all future music in the Soviet Union. The works of Stasov, who had espoused the cause of popular nationalist art in the nineteenth century, were now elevated to the status of scripture. Stasov’s championing of art with a democratic content and progressive purpose or idea was mobilized in the 1930s as the founding argument of Socialist Realist art. His opposition to the cosmopolitanism of Diaghilev and the European avant-garde was pressed into the service of the Stalinist regime in its own campaign against the ‘alien’ modernists.* It was a gross distortion of the critic’s views. Stasov was a Westernist. He sought to raise Russia’s culture to the level of the West’s, to bring it into contact as an equal with the West, and his nationalism was never exclusive of Europe’s influence. But in the hands

    (continued) the 1930s - about 100,000 copies of all his works were sold between 1938 and 1941, compared with about 5 million copies of Tolstoy’s. It was only in the Khrushchev thaw that print runs of Dostoevsky’s works were augmented. The 10-volume 1956 edition of Dostoevsky’s works published to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of his death ran to 300,000 copies - though this was still extremely small by Soviet standards (V. Seduro,
Dostoevski in Russian Literary Criticism, 1846-1956
(New York, 1957), p. 197; and same author,
Dostoevski’s Image inRussiaToday
(Belmont, 1975),p. 379). * For example, in the foreword to the 3-volume 1952 edition of Stasov’s works (V. V. Stasov,
Sobranie sochinenii v 3-kh tomakh, 1847-1906
(Moscow, 1952)) the Soviet editors made the extraordinary announcement that ‘the selection of materials has been determined by our attempt to show Stasov in the struggle against the cosmopolitanism of the Imperial Academy, where the prophets of ‘Art for Art’s sake’, aestheticism, formalism and decadence in art were to be found in the nineteenth century’.

    of the Soviet regime he became a Russian chauvinist, an enemy of Western influence and a prophet of the Stalinist belief in Russia’s cultural superiority.

    In 1937 Soviet Russia marked the centenary of Pushkin’s death. The whole country was involved in festivities: small provincial theatres put on plays; schools organized special celebrations; Young Communists went on pilgrimages to places connected with the poet’s life; factories organized study groups and clubs of ‘Pushkinists’; collective farms held Pushkin carnivals with figures dressed as characters from Pushkin’s fairy tales (and in one case, for no apparent reason, the figure of Chapaev with a machine-gun); scores of films were made about his life; libraries and theatres were established in his name; and streets and squares, theatres and museums, were renamed after the poet.
¹¹¹
The boom in Pushkin publishing was staggering. Nineteen million copies of his works sold in the jubilee alone, and tens of millions of subscriptions were taken for the new edition of his complete works which had been planned for 1937 - though because of the purges and the frequent losses of staff in which they resulted it was only finished in 1949. The cult of Pushkin reached fever pitch when
Pravda
declared him a ‘semi-divine being’ and the Central Committee issued a decree in which he was heralded as the ‘creator of the Russian literary language’, the ‘father of Russian literature’ and even as ‘the founder of Communism’.
¹¹²
In an article entitled ‘Pushkin Our Comrade’, the writer Andrei Platonov maintained that Pushkin had been able to foresee the October Revolution because the spirit of the Russian people had burned like a ‘red hot coal’ within his heart; the same spirit had flickered through the nineteenth century and flared up anew in Lenin’s soul.
¹¹³
As Pushkin was a truly national poet whose writing spoke to the entire people, his homeland, it was claimed by
Pravda,
was not the old Russia but the Soviet Union and all humanity.
¹¹⁴

    ’Poetry is respected only in this country’, Mandelstam would tell his friends in the 1930s. ‘There’s no place where more people are killed for it.’
¹¹⁵
At the same time as it was erecting monuments to Pushkin, the Soviet regime was murdering his literary descendants. Of the 700 writers who attended the First Writers’ Congress in 1934, only fifty survived to attend the Second in 1954.
¹¹⁶
Stalin was capricious in his persecution of the literary fraternity. He saved Bulgakov, he cherished

    Pasternak (both of whom could be construed as anti-Soviet), yet without a moment’s hesitation he condemned Party hacks and left-wing writers from the ranks of RAPP. Stalin was not ignorant of cultural affairs. He read serious literature (the poet Demian Bedny hated lending books to him because he returned them with greasy fingermarks).
¹¹⁷
He knew the power of poetry in Russia, and feared it. Stalin kept a jealous eye on the most talented or dangerous writers: even Gorky was placed under constant surveillance. But after 1934, when full-scale terror was unleashed, he moved towards more drastic measures of control. The turning point was the murder in 1934 of Sergei Kirov, the Party boss in Leningrad. It is probable that Kirov had been killed on Stalin’s orders: he was more popular than Stalin in the Party, in favour of more moderate policies, and there had been plots to put him into power. But in any case, Stalin exploited the murder to unleash a campaign of mass terror against all the ‘enemies’ of Soviet power, which culminated in the show trials of the Bolshevik leaders Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev in 1936-8 and subsided only when Russia entered the Second World War in 1941. Akhmatova called the early 1930s the ‘vegetarian years’, meaning they were relatively harmless in comparison with the ‘meat-eating’ years that were to come.
¹¹⁸

    Mandelstam was the first to be taken. In November 1933 he had written a poem about Stalin which had been read in secret to his friends. It is the simplest, most straightforward, verse he ever wrote, a fact his widow Nadezhda would explain as demonstrating Mandel-stam’s concern to make the poem comprehensible and accessible to all. ‘It was, to my mind, a gesture, an act that flowed logically from the whole of his life and work… He did not want to die before stating in unambiguous terms what he thought about the things going on around us.’
¹¹⁹

    We live, deaf to the land beneath us,

    Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,

    All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer,

    The murderer and peasant-slayer.

    His fingers are fat as grubs

    And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,

    His cockroach whiskers leer

    And his boots gleam.

    Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders -

    Fawning half-men for him to play with.

    They whinny, purr or whine

    As he prates and points a finger,

    One by one forging his laws, to be flung

    Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin.

    And every killing is a treat

    For the broad-chested Ossete.
¹²⁰

    Akhmatova was visiting the Mandelstams in Moscow in May 1934 when the secret police burst into the flat. ‘The search went on all night’, she wrote in a memoir about Mandelstam. ‘They were looking for poetry, and walked across manuscripts that had been thrown out of the trunk. We all sat in one room. It was very quiet. On the other side of the wall, in Kirsanov’s flat, a ukulele was playing… They took him away at seven in the morning.’
¹²¹
During his interrogations in the Lubianka, Mandelstam made no attempt to conceal his Stalin poem (he even wrote it out for his torturers) - for which he might well have expected to be sent straight to the gulags in Siberia. Stalin’s resolution, however, was to ‘isolate but preserve’: at this stage, the poet was more dangerous to him dead than alive.
¹²²
The Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin had intervened on Mandelstam’s behalf, warning Stalin that ‘poets are always right, history is on their side’.
¹²³
And Pasternak, though obviously careful not to compromise himself, had done his best to defend Mandelstam when Stalin called him at home on the telephone.
¹²⁴

    The Mandelstams were exiled to Voronezh, 400 kilometres south of Moscow, returning to the Moscow region (but still barred from the capital itself) in 1937. Later that autumn, without a place to live, they visited Akhmatova in Leningrad, sleeping on the divan in her room at the Fountain House. During this last visit Akhmatova wrote a poem for Osip Mandelstam, the person whom she thought of almost as her twin. It was about the city they both loved:

    Not like a European capital With the first prize for beauty -

    But like stifling exile to the Yenisei,

    Like a transfer to Chita,

    To Ishim, to waterless Irghiz,

    To renowned Atbasar,

    To the outpost Svobodny,

    To the corpse stench of rotting bunks -

    So this city seemed to me

    On that midnight, pale blue -

    This city, celebrated by the first poet,

    By us sinners and by you.
¹²⁵

    Six months later Mandelstam was re-arrested and sentenced to five years’ penal labour in Kolyma, eastern Siberia - in effect a death sentence in view of his poor health. On his way there he passed the Yenisei river, the towns of Chita and Svobodny, and ended up in a camp near Vladivostok, where he died of a heart attack on 26 December 1938.

    In her memoir about Mandelstam, Akhmatova recalls the final time she saw her friend, stripped of everything, on the eve of his arrest: ‘For me he is not only a great poet but a great human being who, when he found out (probably from Nadya) how bad it was for me in the House on the Fontanka, told me when he was saying goodbye at the Moscow train station in Leningrad: “Annushka” [which he had never used before], always remember that my house - is yours.” ‘
¹²⁶

    Mandelstam’s seditious poem also played a role in the arrest of Lev Gumilev, Akhmatova’s son, in 1935. Since the death of his father, in 1921, Lev had lived with relatives in the town of Bezhetsk, 250 kilometres north of Moscow, but in 1929 he moved into the Punin apartment at the Fountain House and, after several applications (all turned down on account of his ‘social origins’), he was finally enrolled, in 1934, as a history student at Leningrad University. One spring evening at the Fountain House Lev recited the Mandelstam poem, which by that time he, like many people, knew by heart. But among his student friends that night was an informant of the NKVD, who came to arrest him, along with Punin, in October 1935. Akhmatova was driven to a frenzy. She rushed to Moscow and, with the help of Pasternak, who wrote personally to Stalin, secured lev’s release. It

    was not the first time, nor the last, that Lev would be arrested. He had never been involved in anti-Soviet agitation. Indeed, his sole crime was to be the son of Gumilev and Akhmatova; if he was arrested it was only as a hostage to secure his mother’s acquiescence to the Soviet regime. The mere fact of her close relationship with Mandelstam was enough to make the authorities suspicious of her.

    Akhmatova herself was being closely watched by the NKVD during 1935. Its agents followed her and photographed her visitors as they came in and out of the Fountain House, in preparation, as archives have now revealed, for her arrest.
¹²⁷
Akhmatova was conscious of the danger she was in. After Lev’s arrest she had burned a huge pile of her manuscripts in full expectation of another raid on the Punin apartment.
¹²⁸
Like all communal blocks, the Fountain House was full of NKVD informants - not paid-up officials, but ordinary residents who were themselves afraid and wished to demonstrate their loyalty, or who bore a petty grudge against their neighbours or thought that by denouncing them they would get more living space. The cramped conditions of communal housing brought out the worst in those who suffered them. There were communal houses where everyone got along, but in general the reality of living together was a far cry from the communist ideal. Neighbours squabbled over personal property, foodstuffs that went missing from the shared kitchen, noisy lovers or music played at night, and, with everybody in a state of nervous paranoia, it did not take much for fights to turn into denunciations to the NKVD.

    Lev was re-arrested in March 1938. For eight months he was held and tortured in Leningrad’s Kresty jail, then sentenced to ten years’ hard labour on the White Sea Canal in north-west Russia.* This was at the height of the Stalin Terror, when millions of people disappeared. For eight months Akhmatova went every day to join the long queues at the Kresty jail, now just one of Russia’s many women waiting to hand in a letter or a parcel through a little window and, if it was accepted, to go away with joy at the knowledge that their loved one must be still alive. This was the background to her poetic cycle
Requiem
(written between 1935 and 1940; first published in Munich in 1963).