Kafka in Russia
Herling-Grudzinski, Gustav
Kafka's recent entry into Russia has a history of its own. For several decades the visionary from Prague belonged—theoretically he still belongs—to the Unholy Trinity of Proust, Joyce, and...
...Does the mirror once more reflect two premonitions or only one...
...how a relatively mild ruler finds it difficult to get rid of the tools of torture used by his ruthless predecessor...
...until a nasty character wrote to Action that its inquiry was useless, as Kafka's books had already been burned by the Nazis...
...He gives a detailed explanation of how the "peculiar apparatus" functions and asks his guest to intervene on his behalf with the new Commandant...
...Therefore Kafka's "premonition of fascism" is no mystification...
...A whole day before the ceremony the valley was packed with people...
...but soon after its appearance, some earthly governments developed perfect procedures for making us knock and wait in vain...
...By the end of the year, the Soviet censor permitted Victor Nekrasov to make a "shameful confession" in his travel notes from Italy—he reported a conversation with the Italian novelist Moravia in which he had admitted his ignorance of Kafka's work...
...When Brod read The Penal Colony in Prague, at the threshold of World War I, he saw in it a modern transposition of the Book of Job, the story of a man who cannot understand God's cruel and unjust punishment...
...The distinguished guest is invited to witness the execution of a soldier who is to die a particularly horrible death under the teeth of a moveable harrow that forms part of an ingenious torturing machine...
...This third dimension gained more and more importance as the embryonic phenomena solidified and took on flesh and blood...
...Or will they, like his Polish readers of October 1956, apply the "prophetic ring" to their own experience...
...Within a few hours, the edition was sold out...
...Max Brod was essentially right when he called Kafka a religious thinker, although he made the typical mistake of the jealous exegete—he presented his interpretation as the only and final one...
...Action then abandoned its project...
...And today...
...The explorer refuses...
...There the Austrian Communist writer Ernst Fischer asked his hosts the dramatic question, "Will you finally give Kafka his entry permit...
...Circumstances favored this delicate operation...
...The explorer leaves the place of execution and goes to the center of the colony...
...But his books were merely subjects for discussion among party heretics...
...When Constantin Fedin, speaking for the hosts, pronounced once more the official formula of the Unholy Trinity, two guests from Paris, Natalie Sarraute and Alain RobbeGrillet, did not conceal their irritation...
...Travellers looking for traces of Kafka in his native Prague were called guilty of "provocative acts...
...It finally became too embarrassing for the Soviet Union to fight a writer whom its foreign "comrades" and "good friends" dubbed a "realist" who had a "premonition of fascism...
...only the Zurich edition remained, and it was doubtful that the Swiss could be persuaded to burn that...
...But a contemporary Polish or Soviet reader can hardly be expected to limit himself to this interpretation...
...His French colleague Roger Garaudy now chose to forget that his party had once debated whether Kafka's books should be burned and cleverly gave a new direction to the trial of The Trial...
...At the Moscow Peace Congress, Sartre made an open plea for Kafka...
...The Trial is a novel about Grace denied to a man at the Gates of Heaven...
...We know a good deal about the reaction of those who read the Polish translation of The Penal Colony in October 1956...
...He penetrated this reality so deeply with his "secret eye" that his novels and stories acquired three dimensions...
...Burn...
...The real issue is this: how do Kafka's Soviet readers react to his Penal Colony...
...Eduard Goldstuecker, Prague's expert on German literature who had been tried with Slansky, confessed many years later: "Until 1962 it was quite an achievement in our country—requiring considerable effort and endurance—to locate books by or on Kafka...
...It should be added that the editor of Inostrannaya Literatura, Boris Riurikov, is generally considered one of the most incorrigible Stalinist bureaucrats...
...Kafka's recent entry into Russia has a history of its own...
...This Trinity has been condemned in Russia on every possible occasion, until it became a classical negative cliche, a literary equivalent to the Trotsky-Zinoviev-Bukharin bloc...
...The Soviet inquisitors did not, of course, read the books they designated for burning...
...He diplomatically tried to persuade his hosts that, if the author of Amerika were proscribed in the East, he would automatically become a cold-war hero in the West...
...We may conclude from Knipovich's note to the Russian translation and an article by Zatonsky in Literaturnaya Gazeta, that, in the final analysis, Kafka was permitted to enter Russia through the efforts of Western "socialist" writers...
...But when Brod launched a furious attack against Guenther Anders, who viewed Kafka as an unconscious anticipator of totalitarianism, he did so as the owner and defender of an "unchallengeable truth...
...This is why Kafka is infinitely more "realistic" today than he was during and shortly after his life-time...
...they all came only to look on . . they all knew: Now Justice is being done...
...Soon the teeth of the harrow will write out various commandments which he will read in wounds on his body...
...To avoid the dangerous analogies which so disturbed the "enlightened Marxists," he proposed that alienation, a theme dominating Kafka's work, should be viewed as integral to modern industrial society as a whole rather than as the attribute of any particular social system...
...At about the same time, Goldstuecker rushed to the attack in Prague...
...Now the ground was prepared for Kafka's official entry into Russia...
...he said that, although he did not like Kafka, he could not deny his importance...
...Priscilla Johnson, the American Kremlinologist, writes in the introduction to her Khrushchev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture 1962-1964: It is particularly surprising that the Soviet reader was given access to The Penal Colony, a parable of dictatorship, with its descriptions of...
...From all over France the barbarians roared their answer: `Burn...
...The new Czech rulers would probably have levelled Kafka's tomb in the Jewish Cemetery had they not been afraid of being called superstitious...
...Such questions can be answered only with suppositions, but suppositions which have a solid foundation...
...His "premonitions" and "prophecies" are now common currency—and this, incidentally, does some harm to the three-dimensional structure of his work...
...It even has a precedent in the "premonition of totalitarianism," observed by Guenther Anders...
...To be sure, in The Trial, guilt is, par excellence, metaphysical...
...The first signal to douse the symbolic book burning was flashed from Poland, where Kafka had been excellently translated before the war by Bruno Schulz...
...So much for France...
...According to the official recipe...
...but it was reality in statu nascendi, invisible to his contemporaries and only dimly visible to Kafka himself...
...The realistic interpretation of Kafka is hardly an invention of "enlightened Marxists...
...An "explorer" from abroad visits a penal colony...
...The real turning point came in July 1962...
...Jifi Hajek and Ladislav Mnachko, two other guests, from Prague, energetically opposed Fedin in the name of the "enlightened Marxists...
...But their co-religionists in the West, who did read Kafka, also wanted to burn them...
...Long before they discovered it, the adjective "Kafkaesque" had been applied to many—and mostly the depressing— phenomena of our time...
...This sounds like Kafka squared...
...The exact date on which Kafka re-entered Poland is significant, and so is the choice of the text: The Penal Colony, translated by Witold Wirpsza and published in the literary magazine Twu rczosc in October 1956...
...We must remember that Brod's biography appeared in 1937, when the prophetic realism of some of Kafka's vision was not as obvious as it is today...
...The new Commandant still tolerates the magnificent invention of his predecessor, but not very willingly...
...Today the explorer is the only spectator...
...but not long after it was written, we were to witness such trials or suffer them ourselves...
...There he is shown the grave of the old Commandant...
...But before this can happen," Goldstuecker wrote, "a very important condition must be fulfilled...
...The officer sighs for the bygone age: "During the old Commandant's lifetime the colony was full of his adherents...
...Kafka next surfaced in Leningrad in July 1963, during an inter national symposium on the novel...
...The condemned man looks at the torture machine with indifference...
...Many years ago, after Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union, a similar phrase was used about another writer banished by Stalin...
...In May 1963 Goldstuecker organized a conference near Prague, aimed at adapting Kafka to "socialist society...
...The Metamorphosis and The Penal Colony were chosen for that solemn ceremony, celebrated in January 1964 in the pages of Inostrannaya Literatura (Foreign Literature...
...The Possessed appeared in Moscow, with a commentary stressing Dostoyevsky's "premonition of Hitlerism...
...There were the visions governed by their own logic (Kafka's "fantasies") ; the confrontations of man with God or Fate (Kafka's "religious parables") ; and enlarged projections of future events developed from mere indications (Kafka's "magnifying glasses...
...That is why the adjective "Kafkaesque" was coined to suggest the analogies so dreaded by Goldstuecker...
...In 1946 the Paris Communist weekly Action published answers to the question "Should Kafka's Books Be Burned...
...Besides, only a few visitors from the West bothered to seek out the grave...
...The machine kills the executioner and falls to pieces...
...he is interested only in the details of its design...
...The "Great Moderator," Ilya Ehrenburg, was quickly mobilized...
...With time Kafka outpaced his two colleagues of the Unholy Trinity and became the Number One Menace...
...His starting point was reality...
...nor was it the fault of the mirror that it reflected twin "premonitions" instead of one...
...Whereupon the officer orders the soldier to be removed from the platform under the harrow, undresses himself, takes his place and sets the machine in motion...
...From Poland the new Lucifer penetrated Hungary, Yugoslavia, and his native Czechoslovakia, spreading his dark light...
...The officer hopes to move the visitor to admiration, not indigniation, so as to help save the incomparable machine and the purpose it serves...
...He appealed to the "enlightened Marxists" to rescue Kafka from Max Brod, Kafka's close friend and biographer, who, he claimed, had falsely turned him into a religious thinker...
...But the black ghost of the tubercular man with the burning eyes may have floated at night, like a solitary raven, over the city of the Golem...
...For the initiated, this last phrase rings a bell...
...In Russia and the "people's democracies," new hands kept adding fuel to the symbolic flames...
...We must see to it that even the gloomiest imagination cannot equate our government offices with Kafka's visions of bureaucratic cruelty and chicanery...
...For several decades the visionary from Prague belonged—theoretically he still belongs—to the Unholy Trinity of Proust, Joyce, and Kafka...
...He started out with something concrete and turned it into something that seems to us a hundred times more so...
...But The Penal Colony is a case apart—its parallels with the present are remarkably specific...
...Postscript: After this was written, news came from Moscow of the publication of a Russian translation of The Trial...
...The seed sowed by this muchcourted hand was bound to yield a quick harvest...
...The quintessence of "bourgeois poison," he seemed to threaten the very foundations of "socialism...
...The argument of Action ran: Kafka's gloomy pessimism, a product of the bourgeoisie's moral decay, casts a shadow upon the bright perspectives opened up for humanity by the genius of Stalin...
...This "peculiar apparatus" was invented by the former Commandant...
...The German literary critic Willy Haas has made the illuminating remark that Kafka had the brilliant gift of deriving one reality from another...
...And we can easily guess the impression it made on the Soviet followers of the Old Commandant...
...What's more, the officer suspects that the distinguished guest was invited to witness the execution in order to arouse his indignation, which would then be used as a pretext for liquidating the old system...
Vol. 13 • July 1966 • No. 4
