Modernism and Revolution: Russian Literature in Transition, by Victor Erlich

...Erlich is emphatic about the importance of humanist and liberal values...

...Like its French, English, American, and Italian counterparts, Russian modernism was characterized by a sense of discontinuity with the recent past and a perception of a fragmented and disturbing present...

...Pilnyak, who welcomed the revolution as a purifying and anarchic elemental storm, had trouble reconciling that vision with liberation through technology, byword of the 1920s...

...More often, what requires explanation is ambivalence, "one of the leitmotifs of the decade...

...Julia Kristeva suggests that the "rhythm of death and the future" championed by the Modernists, especially by the Formalists, was inherently resistant to the politicization of art...

...With the new century, and especially after the strikes and upheavals of 1905, poets and writers produced an aesthetic variant of these social values: an apocalyptic vision that combined an intuition of impending doom with the hope of creating a new culture...

...To wash away the mind's memory .. . and come out naked like the first man, naked, joyous and light, remembering nothing of the past except how heavy and stifling those clothes were" —this wish, expressed in 1921 by the eminent literary and cultural historian Mikhail Gershenzon, was felt in the decade before the revolution by Symbolists and Futurists alike...

...Andrei Platonov creates for his often semiliterate characters a mouthful of marbles: a peculiar linguistic olio of political propaganda, desiccated abstractions, grammatical solecisms, and folk simplicity that "gropes toward making sense out of a bewildering, topsy-turvy, dislocated reality...

...Czeslaw Milosz, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, took the opposite view...

...He discusses as a group the four poetic horsemen of Russia's apocalypse —Mandelstam, Pasternak, Akhmatova, and Tsvetaeva— and then turns to individuals: Babel, Zamyatin, Zoshchenko, Mayakovsky, and less familiar writers such as Andrei Platonov, Viktor Shklovsky, and Lev Lunts...

...Perceived therefore as dangerous by the state, it was purged...

...Of course, it is repulsive, extremely repulsive, to be an intelligent...

...Most of them were WINTER • 1995 • 125 Books torn between acknowledging the value of the old world and rejecting it, between welcoming the Dawn of History and defending artistic autonomy from the encroachments of increasingly repressive political forces...

...Olesha put it plainly, if in an excess of self-loathing: "I want to reeducate myself...

...Erlich sketches enough background to place each writer intellectually, using biography to explain adult choices, both political and artistic...

...Those who wish to be Soviet writers must realize that nihilistic debauchery and anarchical individualistic posturing are no less alien to the proletarian revolution than open counterrevolution with fascist slogans...

...It was Howe, many years ago, who suggested to Erlich that he was the right man to unravel the fierce tangle of literary modernism and political radicalism that characterized the decade and a half after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia...

...Neither will it surprise the many students of Russian literature who have learned from Erlich directly, at Yale, or indirectly, from his scholarship and especially his groundbreaking book on Russian Formalism...

...In his first chapters Erlich traces the heritage bequeathed by these movements to the Modernists...

...When the long anticipated cataclysm came, in 1917, precisely that espousal of radical novelty "made many of [modernism's] leading figures receptive to Bolshevik rhetoric...

...But as the 1920s wore on, their room for maneuver shrank significantly...

...By then neither revolutionary ardor nor artistic innovation was acceptable...

...Erlich recognizes a measure of truth in each position...

...The bulk of Erlich's book is devoted to these figures and their response to the new society that emerged in the 1920s...

...His book is the graceful product of a lifetime steeped in Russian culture: penetrating and judicious, full of thoughtful assessments of complicated writers in a turbulent time...

...It will come as no surprise to readers of Dissent that Howe's editorial judgment was sound...

...By 1931 his mockery of the bureaucratic quicksand that was choking the ideals he had fought for drew a fairly typical splash of official vitriol: "Selfcriticism," said one of the worst watchdogs, "has nothing in common with freedom of speech for the kulak, for the Menshevik...

...Moreover, in its early days Bolshevism offered the tantalizing promise of a way for intellectuals and artists to expiate their burden of guilt about the advantages of the class they were born into...

...In his too-brief but valuable conclusion, Erlich reconciles two seemingly incompatible interpretations of the relationship between the modernist disposition and the totalitarian state...

...It is rather a lack of internalized values—of a strong conviction that the values to which one is 'subjectively' drawn are `objectively' worth defending and capable of survival...

...Yet Erlich also defines with precision the flaw in Shklovsky and not in Shklovsky alone: ". . .what is at issue here is not lack of courage, failure of nerve, or political opportunism...

...Sometimes what requires explanation is ideological commitment...

...He is consistently nuanced, often distilling complex insights into a single phrase (he speaks of Bely's "characteristic overexplicitness," for instance, two words that open up one of the main problems in Bely's work...

...Appropriately, his book ends in the early 1930s, when the thread ran out...

...WINTER • 1995 • 127...

...Few were as clear-sighted as Zamyatin, who early on warned of the "Gospel of Compulsory Salvation" in his novella "The Islanders," and who portrayed in his 1920 novel We the twin perils of social engineering and ideological forcefeeding...

...He is very sympathetic toward Viktor Shklovsky, for instance, a brilliant writer and Formalist critic who relinquished his anguished attempts to preserve a measure of intellectual autonomy as the twenties gave way to the grisly thirties...

...It was a complex and contradictory legacy...

...The Symbolists, especially the poets Alexander Blok and Andrei Biely, passed on a stew of self-hatred and guilt toward the poor, nostalgia for lost innocence (usually located in the "simple" life), fascination with destruction, and recognition of the artist's need for creative freedom...

...Choices were limited: capitulation, arrest, silence...

...At the same time the Formalist orientation toward artifice, invention, and self-referentiality could be and sometimes was a way of evading the moral and political issues of daily life...

...Fedin, Zoshchenko, and Erenburg at times valued their own sophistication and humanitarian scruples—and at times shrugged them off as superfluous, nineteenth-century ballast to be jettisoned as quickly as possible...

...The deliberately cruder and more negative Futurists (Kruchonykh, Khlebnikov, Shershenevich, Livshits, Mayakovsky) forged their identity out of a repudiation of all traditions, presenting themselves—as outrageously as possible—as the misunderstood harbingers of the future...

...Although Erlich understands Mayakovsky's ardent embrace of Bolshevism, and 126 • DISSENT Books admires—with qualifications—Babel's techniques of displacing horror, his affinity is for those, like Zamyatin, who were not afraid to assert "the basic tenets of civilized existence": kindness, compassion, regard for human life, pride in human achievement...

...Many psychological and social factors contributed to each writer's ambivalence, but as members of the intelligentsia they suffered from what the remarkable literary scholar Lydia Ginzburg identified in herself as "the ineradicable trace of . . . self-abnegation...

...Thanks to his clear prose and his gift for setting ideas and events in context, Erlich has written a book not just for specialists, but for all readers with an interest in how Russian writers responded to 124 • DISSENT Books the ferment that ended by swallowing up so many of them...

...In the chaotic conditions during and immediately after the Civil War, when the Bolsheviks had other things to worry about, the qualified acquiescence of the fellow-travelers was adequate...

...Nearly all of the writers Erlich discusses were "fellow travelers," sympathetic to at least the aims of the Bolsheviks...

...Platonov, virtually the only writer of stature who was a proletarian by background, became a target no less than his intelligent colleagues...

...He linked self-referential theories of literature with the growth of the totalitarian state: because autonomous artistic systems, however innovative in form, are contained within themselves, they pose no danger to the state, and can easily be tolerated...

...As Soviet culture was constricted into the narrow channel of Socialist Realism, which occurred long before the doctrine was officially promulgated at the Writers' Union Conference of 1934, modernism was doomed in Russia...

...What were preferences in the early Bolshevik years—the utilitarian role of art, its mimetic function—became, by the late 1920s, rigid prescriptions...

...For Mayakovsky, the most brilliant of the Futurist poets, the wooden spoon he wore as a boutonniere was the sartorial equivalent of his fierce poetic hyperbole: the more gasps he provoked, the happier he was...

...Babel was full of admiration for the goals of the revolution, appalled (if fascinated) by the "exigencies of revolutionary action" (in Erlich's understatement...

...Experimentation— the sine qua non of modernism—was outlawed as "formalism...

...Victor Erlich is a superb guide through the maze of a bewildering epoch...

...Recoiling from the past, modernism vaulted into a dreamt-of-future—via quasi-political fantasies, via aesthetic innovation, and often enough via both...

...He created a narrative persona for his "Red Cavalry" stories that effectively conveys his moral revulsion at what he saw—and at what he himself was part of...

...Of all the writers Erlich discusses who lived into the thirties, only Zamyatin—who received Stalin's permission to emigrate in 1931—retained both his health and his principles...

...In prerevolutionary Russia, the artists of the so-called "Silver Age" were members of an intelligentsia that shared a revulsion against the czarist autocracy and a profound dedication to social change...

...Thus, in his chapter on Boris Pilnyak, a gifted if uneven prosaist, Erlich explores the "seeming compositional anarchy" of Pilnyak's most famous novel, The Bare Year—its mixture of diary extracts, letters, anecdotes, slogans, and obscenities—as the verbal equivalent of profoundly traumatizing historical conditions...

...The Modernist spirit, with its love of irony and parody, its taste for complexity and its commitment to experimentation, was generally subversive of Soviet Socialist Realism...

...Rather than analyze all the works of any one writer, Erlich examines the writers, a few of their individual works, and their characteristic aesthetic strategies to illuminate Russia's cultural mood at that time...

...For Lev Lunts, whose early death (in 1923) "saved him from compromises," as Victor Shklovsky wrote, and to a greater extent for Babel, the tensions between Jewish and Russian identity, between the roles of moralist and activist, were productive but anguished...

...On the first page of his introduction, Victor Erlich refers to Irving Howe's "still resonant" essay "The Idea of the Modern...