Boris Pilnyak's Endless Story

...Where the Symbolists were esoteric (as with Andrei Bely's anthropo-sophic bias), Pilnyak was often incomprehensible, sometimes even in terms of syntax...

...He was well into his career when he made this statement...

...As an influential writer of the '20s (the term pilnyakovshchina, connoting his style, passed into the critical language), Pilnyak made a prominent target in the campaign against fellow travelers generally...

...To a society intent on forging literature into an instrument that revealed delimited structures, a work like Mahogony appeared unwieldy at best...

...The extensive polemics, seemingly pervasive, also did their part in staking out a mythology designed to negotiate an order amid the chaos of postrevolutionary life...

...And the Symbolists' innovations, such as their search for more expressive genre divisions, yielded in Pilnyak to simple misrepresentation: Chapters he labelled poems, novels—tales, and the imprecise "fragment" became a key element...

...Pilnyak's effort seemed to reach horizontally only: tableaux joined endlessly, the perfect iconic symbol for vast Russia...

...An overarching literary attitude could be more elusive, and subversive...

...His notorious remark, in the story John and Mary, "The Revolution smells of genital organs," meshed badly with the jargon of social command...

...But the conflict was not merely ideological...

...Reviewed by VICTOR RIPP Translator, the forthcoming "Selected Essays of Peter Kropotkin" This new collection of Boris Pilnyak's shorter pieces is welcome —if only as a concrete reminder that he was a working writer, quite prolific in fact...

...In an autobiographical sketch, The Three Brothers, he wrote: "The point is that if art is everything I have taken from life and poured into words, as it is for me, then every story is endless, as life itself is boundless...

...Trotsky saluted his merit, Voronsky printed him in the leading journal, Red Virgin Soil...

...That the breathtaking immensity of the task did not deter Pilnyak perhaps proceeded from his view of the problem...

...but neither did they have an anti-plot...

...the novel had no plot, only anti-plots which satirically rebutted the portentious themes of 19th century fiction, from the political nihilism in Dostoevsky to the problems of fathers and children in Turgenev...

...What is important is what I will do...

...it took considerable imagination to throw the coin away...

...ideology could be confronted and put to rather unexpected uses...

...Russian criticism had an effective hermeneutic tradition that went back at least to Dobrolyubov's willful misreading of Oblomov...

...The title story effectively recapitulates some of the props of Pilnyak's world—brutish peasants, inept Bolsheviks, the ravaged Russian land which bound them—and it is placed first in this volume...

...Whatever the case, he could not be faulted for lack of daring...

...Such a facile equating of life and art ignores other crucial terms, but whatever its weaknesses the formulation provided Pilnyak with a working method...

...The defenders of the New Society acted correctly, given their premises, for despite a continued fascination with the Revolution, Pilnyak saw it as an exercise in corybantic anarchism, not the dawn of proletarian democracy...

...The uneven and refractory surfaces of Pilnyak's creations established his link with the Symbolists, but essentially the relationship was cannibalistic: Pilnyak assimilated the forms, the soul flickered out...

...Always a controversial figure, Pilnyak managed to fit into the Soviet Union's emerging literary tradition only in the early '20s, when the frenetic rearrangement of the defining terms gave that tradition the look of flexibility: If Pilnyak was guilty of eclecticism, orientalism, retrogressionalism (the possible damnations were endless), it was also true that he serviced the state by depicting the "living reality" of the victorious Revolution...

...Too often the political implications that incrusted his career have obscured his literary significance and left his image curiously disbalanced, both in the Soviet Union and in this country...

...Pilnyak's works also typically did not have a plot...

...Machines and Wolves incorporated parts of Tales of Black Bread, Materials for a Novel, Bare Year...

...He took up one of the Symbolists' more solid efforts, establishing a holistic view of the literary object, and veered it dangerously close to a limit...

...For a short time Pilnyak's works about anarchic peasants and corrupt officials were defended as portrayals of "contemporary issues...

...Because their own country was not a party to international copyright agreements, this was normal procedure for Soviet writers...

...What I have done is unimportant," he said...

...or—much the same thing—that too often his fiction failed because he squandered the achievements of his predecessors...

...Stability was paid for in scope, but a disconcerting complexity was sometimes brilliantly reduced to a single shining set of oppositions...

...Mahogony was inserted with no damage into The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea...

...Having once transformed some aspect of life into pages of print, he did not hesitate to use the imputed substitute again: Varying artistic contexts presumably could not alter a sturdy reality...

...The postrevolutionary literary tradition could have been grateful to Pilnyak for effecting, or at least evidencing, the destruction of the Symbolist novel, always associated in the Soviet Union with bourgeois decadence...

...It is still too early to judge me...

...he was first hobbled artistically, then imprisoned and presumably shot...

...On that score, as a matter of fact, there is evidence that Pilnyak showed considerable courage during the terror, continuing to aid his friend Karl Radek after he had been purged...

...One could say that Pilnyak daringly moved fiction outside the general tradition...

...But when Pilnyak emphasized the "boundlessness" of both life and art, when he insisted on the contingency of each of his publications, he was introducing an indeterminancy that neither alternative in the established duality could accommodate...

...Pilnyak wrote in and about the especially disorganized period immediately following the Revolution, and the fiction he produced was also especially disorganized...

...Pilnyak himself was last reported seen in a Moscow prison, in 1939...

...Bely's Petersburg was an implicit polemic against its immediate predecessors...

...The infighting and wrangles of the '20s did more than establish political and philosophical policy...

...Pilnyak's intentions were nevertheless deemed subversive...

...In addition, Pilnyak often seemed to invite attack...

...but neither should his fame rest on the Mahogony controversy, on what Max Eastman ungraciously proclaimed the world's "best example of the unadulterated motive of self-preservation...

...And Pilnyak's disclaimer in the introduction only confirmed the supposition that the story's sinister 'Number One' was indeed intended as Stalin...

...But it did not welcome him: His effort had left his best work strangely distended, parts of his victim still clung, and throughout his career Pilnyak was regarded with suspicion...

...The new dimensions of postrevolu-tionary life, perhaps his own disorderly methods, moved Pilnyak to try to carry the Symbolists' achievements to precarious new levels...

...They lacked both a hero and an anti-hero, porten-tiousness and satire...

...None of these works paid much attention to characterization or plot, and moral complexities, to the extent they appeared at all, were defined passively, as by rerunning a critical event through the eyes of another character...

...But in the course of events, Pilnyak proved to be of stuff unsuitable to the new society...

...In a characteristically oracular preface to one of his works, Pilnyak declared, "I came out of Bely . . ." As with many oracles, this one was only perversely correct...

...Given Pilnyak's overview of his work, however, a chronological arrangement would probably have been better...

...Attracted and awed by the apocalypse that seemed at hand, he strove after a commensurate form, one that did away with the niggling concerns of the individual and instead comprehended the whole of Russia...

...Many sections of Bare Year had previously been published separately...

...With the copious self-borrowings, the insistence that he was publishing fragments of a continuing work, Pilnyak seemed to be defining his literary monad as nothing less than his whole corpus...

...It mattered little if literature was discussed in terms of mechanism/' vitalism, cognition/agitprop, living reality/social command, or in any of a number of similar pairs, for ultimately all the pairs were revealed as reassuringly congruent...

...He remained unacceptable...

...This new collection of Pilnyak's shorter works includes Mahogony, as well as The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon and The Three Brothers...

...The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon was a thinly disguised reference to the affair of General Frunze, the popular Commissar of War who had died on the operating table under suspicious circumstances...

...Subsequently Pilnyak reworked Mahogony to Party specifications, participated in a kom-manderovka against the kulaks in Tadzikstan, and denounced America and capitalism in Okay—all to no avail...

...The Party's final decision on literary policy did not emerge until the first Five-Year Plan, yet long before that most men were left to stare at the two sides of the same spinning coin...

...As a bureaucratic equivalent, the name of this most popular writer of the time was expunged from Literaturnaya Entsiklopediya, not to be resurrected until the 1950s...

...The translation, by Vera Reck and Michael Green, reads smoothly, which is to say that Pilnyak has been tampered with—necessarily, for probably only a fully annotated edition could adequately render all the colloquialisms, obscenities and folk sayings...

...Suspicion turned to bitter accusation when Pilnyak had Mahogony published abroad in advance of its release in the Soviet Union...

...In part, obviously, the attacks were purely political...

...It was, after all, merely a stage in the ongoing, essentially undefined task Pilnyak had set himself...

...On the basis of intrinsic literary merit, Pilnyak certainly will never deserve such attention...

...Among the results of this method was a remarkably interconnected corpus...

...The Soviet government imposed its own terminus in 1937, when Pilnyak was arrested...

...He was then 45...

...Nevertheless, political terms provide only a partial explanation of Pilnyak's position...