A Book of Russian Martyrs
SHUB, ANATOLE
A Book of Russian Martyrs Arrested Voices: Resurrecting the Disappeared Writers of the Soviet Regime By Vitaly Shentalinsky Translated by John Crowfoot Introduction by Robert Conquest Free Press....
...Bulgakov, Platonov and Kluyev were not only writers of rare talent...
...The two longest chapters—the first, on Babel...
...He bequeathed the absurd literary doctrine of "socialist realism"?nev er adequately defined but used, nonetheless, to harass writers and suppress their works for half a century...
...Perhaps that is because their works seem to point to a variety of sources from which Russia's spiritual renewal may (some would say...
...These contacts, originally authorized, were denounced as "treasonous" only a few years later, when Stalin began clearing the decks for his pact with Hitler...
...they were forceful men of integrity and conviction...
...the following day he was executed...
...320 pp...
...the last, on Gorky—take us farthest into the grim Lubyanka and Kremlin at the height of Stalin's terror...
...and the sublime apocalyptic poems of Kluyev, with their symbols of Russia's Old Belief...
...The KGB files add many particulars to the tragic account by his widow, Nadezhda Mandelstam, in her classic Hope Against Hope...
...before the Military Tribunal of the Supreme Court, Babel repudiated all his previous testimony as false...
...must) eventually spring...
...Stalin's special treatment of Maxim Gorky over the years is also detailed...
...evaluations by the interrogators and other police officials...
...I found the accounts of Florensky, Bulgakov...
...denunciations by informers...
...Yevgenia herself was said to have committed suicide in prison in 1938, but suspicions remain that she was murdered...
...The excerpts from the KGB files?mostly from the terrible 1930s—recount the ordeals of the writers themselves...
...Babel and other "premature anti-Fascists" paid the price...
...Once he returned...
...Kluyev and Mandelstam...
...It is much harder to feel sorry for Gorky than for the other writers in this book...
...Stalin's "justice...
...In sharp contrast, offering truth and sanity in the midst of the madness, there are the contemporary remarks and later recollections of friends and relatives of the writers...
...They include the writers' own words, free or coerced...
...Babel applied his literary talent to his "confession," infusing it with detail and context to minimize the damage to others, coloring his own admissions of "espionage" so as to raise doubts, letting real circumstances and motives shine through his nominal acknowledgment of fantastic charges...
...whose third husband, nearly a decade later, was Yezhov...
...Stalin tempted him with power and eminence, gradually isolated him from non-KGB contacts, and—possibly (the author presents the various theories without taking sides)?shortened his life" with the help of Kremlin doctors...
...Both Babel and Yezhov were executed, as were Yev-genia's first and second husbands...
...A note of grisly comedy surrounds the changing answers to the question of who knew what and when about the affair...
...He decided to sign "confessions" so long as he did not have to implicate others, consciously accepting martyrdom in the spirit of his faith...
...So, too, was the frail, brilliant Mandelstam, whose poem attacking Stalin was repaid by years of torture and, finally, death...
...how, with timely political support from Aleksandr N. Yakovlev, the author became first a vice-chairman, then chairman, of a quasi-official commission devoted to their rehabilitation...
...he did not hold out as strongly as Florensky, Kluyev and Mandelstam...
...At 1:30 a.m...
...however, was impartial...
...and how inside the dreaded Lubyanka compound the author's descent into the hellish files was guided by an improbable "Virgil" in the person of Colonel, now General Ana-toly Krayushkin, head of the KGB archives department...
...It speaks of Stalin's "cockroach eyes" (rather than "whiskers," as earlier...
...All in all...
...Shentalinsky also shows how rarely, despite many appeals...
...Perhaps the most fitting judgment on Gorky is that few today in the new Russia pay attention to him, even as many study the "resurrected" works of his betters: Bulgakov and Platonov...
...We can now read, for example, Mandelstam's final, prison variant of that Stalin poem, written in his own hand...
...and, lurking behind them, the sinister figures of Stalin and his successive police chiefs, Genrikh G. Yagoda, Nikolai I. Yezhov and Lavrenti P. Beria...
...and it is painful to read about...
...Babel's persecution stemmed primarily from his contacts in Western Europe in 1934-35 with Ilya Ehrenburg, Andre Malraux and other anti-Fascist writers, as well as with Boris I. Nicolaevsky and other Russian emigres...
...The deepest level, however, is achieved in surviving fragments of previously unpublished works by several of the writers...
...Platonov, and Kluyev most illuminating, even inspiring...
...Among them are Bulgakov's ironic, imaginative sketches on his relationship with Stalin, some of which prefigure moments in The Master and Margarita...
...The sufferings of these very different individuals are described in many voices...
...And then there is Florensky, "the Russian Leonardo da Vinci," a scientific polymath and Orthodox priest, hailed as a bridge "between Athens and Jerusalem" during Russia's "silver age" before 1914...
...Arrested Ibices pays deserving homage to their memory...
...transcripts of interrogations and concocted "confessions" (artfully deconstructed by Shentalinsky...
...major sections first appeared in the Russian picture weekly, Ogonvok...
...At ground level, Vitaly Shentalinsky explains how in 1988-89 he and others pushed for opening the KGB files on the Russian writers repressed by Stalin...
...nor did his appeals to Soviet authorities...
...Gorky intervened on behalf of w riters w ho were in trouble...
...25.00...
...That is to say...
...In 1918 he had denounced the Bolshevik Revolution, yet in 1931 he was hailing the redemptive power of slave labor in building the (useless) White Sea Canal...
...chapters from Platonov's rueful, unfinished "Technical Novel," his fictional last word on the failure of Utopia...
...Yet it inevitably recalls Dante's Inferno and Orpheus in the underworld as it moves back and forth in time and atmosphere, from the early 1990s to the 1920s, to reveal and narrate its many gripping tales on three levels...
...On the other hand...
...These range from "mere" harassment and ostracism for Mikhail Bulgakov and Andrei Platonov to arrest, torture and execution for Isaac Babel, Pavel Florensky, Boris Pilnyak, Nikolai Kluyev, and Osip Mandelstam...
...On January 28, 1940...
...With ample quotations from the files, Shentalinsky recounts how Stalin manipulated Gorky in exile, surrounding him with informers, then luring him back to Russia...
...The Babel chapter reminds us (as do others) of what a "small town" Moscow was before World War II: Everyone—in the elite political and artistic circles, at least—seemed to know (virtually) everyone else, and many slept with (almost) everyone else...
...Gorky means bitter in Russian, as Alexei M. Peshkov knew when he made it his pseudonym, and the Gorky story is one of the most depressing in the history of Russian literature...
...Pilnyak—arrested, tortured and executed for a novel ( The Telle of the Unextinguished Moon) that suggested Stalin had War Commissar Mikhail V Frunze murdered on the operating table—behaved more normally when put to the extreme test...
...Florensky's notes and letters indeed bespeak a superior mind of unusual awareness, precision and moral clarity, even under torture...
...It did not help much...
...It surely did not help Babel, either, that he had long been friendly—and in 1927 had been intimate—with Yevgenia Kha-yutina...
...Reviewed by Anatole Shub Author, "An Empire Loses Hope," "The New Russian Tragedy" IN ITS FORM and style this dense, uneven, painful book is superior journalism...
Vol. 79 • August 1996 • No. 5
