Evolution of a Soviet Novel
LOURIE, RICHARD
Evolution of a Soviet Novel How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin's Russia By Thomas Lahusen Cornell. 256 pp. $29.95. Reviewed by Richard Lourie Author,...
...There was no truth in there...
...Obviously," says Lahusen, "any allusions to the real experience on which the novel was based had to be suppressed...
...He was sentenced to four years in a corrective labor camp where he helped build the second great trans-Siberian railway known as BAM (Baikal-Amur Main Line...
...His study focuses primarily on the evolution and fate of a single work of fiction, Far From Moscow by Vassily Azhaev, winner of the Stalin Prize in 1951...
...The award alone suggests corruption and compromise, and Lahusen documents both in sometimes absorbing, sometimes soporific detail...
...That is, at best, a dubious assumption...
...If there was an ounce of truth in Azhaev's prose, it was gone by the time the editorial board was done with it—300 pages were cut, 200 rewritten...
...Not everyone was fooled...
...The eight years between the end of World War II and Stalin's death in 1953, in particular, were a vile time for the arts in the Soviet Union...
...The single most stultifying sentence in this decidedly academic treatise is Lahusen's...
...Poetic license aside, it is natural at the conclusion of so significant an era—especially since we can now view the "experiment" in full— to look back and ask what actually happened, what was gained, what was lost...
...Boring books come from boring readers...
...Had she lived long enough, she would probably have declared that it ended with the fall of the Soviet Empire in 1991...
...Why is the book over triple its original size in translation...
...Nevertheless—and this is testimony to the power Stalin had over readers as well as writers—the book was a genuine hit...
...The entire conscious life of Aleksei's generation was inseparably linked with Stalin, his work, his books, his speeches...
...Far From Moscow was first published in Novy Mir, the journal that would later regain its honor by running Solzhenitsyn's One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich...
...Azhaev's ascendancy began with his arrest in December 1934 for counterrevolutionary activities...
...In 1946 Akhmatova and the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko were attacked, signaling that any relaxation resulting from a wartime need to foster the Russian people's enthusiasm for their country was now officially at an end...
...A woman worker wrote a letter to Azhaev saying that "her doctors had agreed to postpone a critical operation in order to grant her last wish—to finish reading Far From Moscow—and she survived...
...But the more important question is how he approaches his subject, and it seems to me the answer is supplied in the quotation he uses from Andrei Platonov's novel Chevengur to open his own narrative: "...there are no senseless or boring books if only the reader will seek the meaning of life in them attentively...
...Never before had he, Aleksei Kovshov, been so keenly, so palpably conscious, aware of his place in the life of his great Homeland, in her titanic struggle for the future...
...After his release, he stayed on as a "free laborer...
...Solzhenitsyn, very much the passionate Leninist until his stint in the Gulag, underwent a similar change of heart...
...It concerns the relationship of Stalin's security and intelligence apparatus, the NKVD, to the railway system...
...Stalin had become for Aleksei Kovshov and other young people of his age the sole mentor whose authority was invariably lucid and infallible...
...Far From Moscow is a Socialist Realist "industrial" novel depicting and celebrating the laying of an oil pipeline under difficult conditions in the Soviet Far East...
...Solzhenitsyn makes a veiled reference to the novel in The First Circle, calling it Far From Us...
...If that makes Far From Moscow sound less than interesting, it is...
...Arrest and exile often have a way of making a person conservative...
...But in their cases the transformation resembled a revelation...
...Azhaev was "reforged," for him "coercion becomes desire," as Lahusen aptly explains it...
...Lahusen doesn't say...
...Whatever his motivations and reservations, Azhaev complied with government policy regarding the necessity for literature to exhibit the right ideological content...
...Here is the novel's hero listening to Stalin's first radio broadcast after the outbreak of World War II: "Kovshov, his face pale, his eyes glued to the loudspeaker, stood drinking in every sound, at times guessed at rather than heard...
...Still another, who had read the book 20 times, put it most plainly: "It was all a lie...
...When the war had broken out and many of the strongest and stoutest hearts had faltered, thoughts had turned with hope to Stalin...
...He experienced such a sense of exultation that he could have sung with sheer joy...
...Yet the book is valuable when it sticks to describing the symbiosis of Socialist reality and Socialist Realism that made Far From Moscow such a success...
...Visiting the region that served as the model for the novel, Lahusen finds witnesses from that time who provide the most telling and succinctjudgments of Far From Moscow...
...This rapturous passage notwithstanding, Azhaev—through personal experience and from materials he collected that Lahusen has meticulously examined— was aware of two great truths...
...The passages cited from Azhaev are intrinsically boring, and so in places is Lahusen...
...Dostoyevsky went to Siberia a romantic Socialist Utopian and came back a fire-breathing nationalist...
...Poorly welded and not buried deeply enough in the ground, the pipe was constantly bursting...
...In fact, Lahusen notes, "Azhaev wrote the first lines of his future Stalin Prize-winner as he worked in the administration of the Lower Amur Corrective Labor Camp...
...Neither Dostoyevsky nor Solzhenitsyn would have ever been capable of writing the closing lines of Azhaev's novel, describing his hero flying away from Siberia: "He almost physically sensed the immensity of his country and of everything that was taking place on its boundless spaces...
...Another wept and said that he "had read 20 pages and couldn't read further...
...He says the author probably knew the truth of the construction project and "was lying with cold, glassy eyes...
...Reviewed by Richard Lourie Author, "Hunting the Devil," "Russia Speaks" The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova said that the 20th century did not really begin until 1914...
...The novel mirrors his fate...
...And it was a disaster...
...Thomas Lahusen's efforts as an "archeologist of culture" in How Life Writes the Book are a part of that process...
...Azhaev simply sold out to those in authority...
...Lahusen tells us it is a "typical expression of the 'conflictlessness' and 'varnishing of reality' that characterized Soviet literature at the depth of its decline during the last few years under Stalin...
...As Lahusen himself wryly concedes: "Indeed, the reader of today needs a good deal of patience, and a perhaps perverse determination, to read through the 456-page Stalin Prize novel (1,430 pages in its three-volume English translation...
...Can you imagine another 1,400 pages of that, ? Boring Reader...
...Socialist Realism, however, was immune to such realities...
...The tractors, the bulldozers, nothing of this sort ever existed, only shovels and bare hands," one says...
...The pipeline that served as a model for his novel was constructed not by selfless Socialist idealists whose "gray eyes reflected the fire of the sunset," but by prisoners who were worked to death...
...Eventually, he became part of the very organization that had persecuted him...
Vol. 80 • December 1997 • No. 19
