The Shallow Bite of Soviet Satire

...To have imposed such restraints on such a turbulent, gifted people as the Russians is another illustration of the potency inherent in the singular melange of technology and myth characteristic of the Soviet regime...

...Reviewed by JOEL CARMICHAEL Author, "An Illustrated History of Russia" Foreign interest in Russian literature has always been concentrated on the great Russian masters, perhaps a half-dozen writers at most, and the word "genius" has been applied to them all with such conventional repetitiousness that the disappointment with the mediocrity of Russian letters after the 1917 revolution is only natural...

...A government that had been begun by a handful of doctrinaire scholastics was engaged in churning up the whole of Russian society: alienating the peasantry still further from the land it had longed for over a period of centuries, straitjacketing a lively and rapidly growing working- class and intelligentsia, and subjecting the whole of the country to an ordeal with no parallel in history...

...While providing targets for satire, it has rigorously delimited its scope, and has changed the social terrain so fundamentally as to have made it impossible, in the course of almost two generations, to create any real works of art at all...

...It seemed convenient to explain the incredible talentlessness of Soviet literature, by and large, as due to the deadening hand of political oppression, which with the rise of the Stalin dictatorship toward the end of the '20s assumed truly monstrous proportions...

...So shallow, in fact, that one's first reaction is to wonder at the extreme prickliness of a regime that would make life difficult for writers of such satire...

...Why, after all, should a half-trained peasant bureaucrat not be clumsy...

...There have been exiles, there has even been a sort of literary underground: Manuscripts could have been, and have been, smuggled abroad...

...But even the most extravagant flatterers would not compare anything that has come out of the Soviet Union with any classical Russian work...

...The condition of Russian satire, I am afraid, must be taken as a symptom of a society so profoundly imbued with the alien will of a dictatorial clique that it cannot summon up any organic resistance whatever...

...Zhivago, whose monumental mediocrity and tediousness is at last being conceded by many, conveyed a rather vague feeling of alienation from the regime, or rather from Socialist statemaking in any form, but it still did not attack the Stalin enterprise wholeheartedly...

...but could it really explain everything...

...Indeed, many illegal works have been hailed enthusiastically by throngs of well-wishers all over the world...

...There would be no point comparing them, to be sure, with classical Russian literature— why bother...

...They are both clever and sensible, and in such a wilderness that is surely enough...

...This is all very understandable, but even if one recognizes the cleverness of the little satires on the clumsiness of the bureaucracy, the new rules of marriage and divorce, the confusions of production, etc., their targets remain extremely superficial...

...The censorship exercised by the Bolshevik regime could explain much...

...Why should there not be difficulties in production?'What Miss Ginsburg refers to as the "bold irreverence" of the early period in Soviet satire—the '20s—is really just the sort of thing any sensible regime would have applauded, and laughed at more loudly than anyone else...

...Yet even the works smuggled out of the Soviet Union are superficial...

...In the humanities, at least, it must be admitted that the Soviet dictatorship has been successful in spreading its leprosy...

...In addition, the contrast between what has been thought of as the grandeur of classical literature and the paltriness of its successor has been exacerbated by the all-too-obvious presence of its cause —the Soviet dictatorship...

...True, a really basic satire would no longer be satire, it would be revolt, and that is clearly too dangerous...

...Ilya Iif & Yevgeny Petrov, and others...

...Yet there is something about Soviet satire as a whole that strikes one as shallow...

...It is true that these pieces did appear in the Soviet press, but the dictatorial repression grew so rapidly that the bite of the permitted satirical pieces rapidly grew more and more feeble...

...It was almost as though the dictatorship had succeeded not merely in stifling artistic expression, but in nipping it in the bud— in fundamentally discouraging any form of creativity, so that artists would fail to create not through fear alone but through despair...

...For that matter, it had been authorized for publication by a state publishing committee, and it was not until later that permission was rescinded for reasons of a literary nature that I personally found very convincing...

...An illustration of the wilderness Soviet artists have been living in for so long is this altogether admirable collection of short stories and sketches selected by the highly talented translator Mirra Ginsburg...

...I suppose this is a most unusual achievement...

...Surely an audience somewhere or other would have welcomed any literary expression that had fallen afoul of the regime...

...How is it, then, that Russian satirists selected such trivial targets...

...The Fatal Eggs and Other Soviet Satire, and contains stories by some of the best-known contemporary Russian writers: Valentin Katayev, Mikhail Bulgakov, Leonid Leonov, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Mikhail Zoshchenko...

...Did the building of a "new society," even with the brutality, mendacity and stupidity associated with the Stalin dictatorship, necessarily condemn the arts to an extreme of boring tastelessness...

...It must be said at once that many of these stories and sketches are delicious, even—a miracle!—funny, and full of subtlety and intelligence...

...It can only be said, rather unsatisfactorily, that the regimentation of society launched by the Bolshevik experimenters was infinitely more pervasive than any mere censorship—so pervasive that it left no spiritual room for any work hostile to or simply different from the aims of the political leadership...

...Would not a talented people like the Russians find some way of expressing itself even under the monolithic weight of political despotism...

...I see no way of explaining this curious situation, in a country whose intelligentsia was surely one of the most distinguished intellectual formations in history, an intelligentsia that has not vanished entirely and that has in a practical way inspired untold millions of Soviet citizens...

...If one compares the satirical writing of the '20s with that of the '30s and '40s, it becomes obvious that the writers were getting more and more wary...

...As long as the basic system itself was not attacked—the brutal vivisection of a whole society — any ruler with insight might have been expected even to subsidize such satires...