“that if the word lacks for air . . .”
—CYPRIAN NORWID
THE FRENCH papers carry the news from Moscow of January 12 that the Soviet writers Simonov, Fadeyev (president of the Writers’ Union), Ehrenburg, Fedin, and Makarov have been accused by the Bolshevik Party organ Culture and Life of ideological criticism and ideological deviations.1 Simonov is said to have transgressed in Mist of the Fatherland, because “this work does not demonstrate sufficiently the advantage of the socialist system over contemporary bourgeois systems,” and Fadeyev erred because in telling the story of a Russian village under German occupation in The Young Guard he described the panic overcoming the population without mentioning that this could occur only in an exceptional case. For naturally the Russian peasant, the Soviet peasant, is always heroic and fear cannot exist in the Bolshevik state.
So now it is not Akhmatova, or Zoshchenko, but the most servile of the servile, those who sing the splendor of Soviet culture and its superiority over the West at every opportunity, who are punished brutally for writing about the Soviets without enough “patriotism,” enough dithyrambic ecstasy. Russian literature, which in the course of barely a hundred and fifty years grew to be one of the greatest literatures in the world, is withering, cut off at the root by thirty years of Soviet cultural politics. It is difficult to compare books now published on the Soviet Union with what we used to think of as Russian literature, which conquered the globe. For there is no large library or bookstore in the world now where we would not find at the very least Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Gorky; there is no country that hasn’t felt the influence of Russian literature in one way or another. Its glory shines everywhere, but it shines like a constellation of stars that in reality are long since extinct, but whose light still illuminate the earth, creating the delusion that the source of that light is still burning.
The number of translations from the Russian, studies of Russian literature, of Russian life, of Russian history, of the current situation in Russia, has grown in recent years to an avalanche. After the period—even before 1900—of Tolstoy’s vast popularity, which for that matter hasn’t completely dimmed, follows the “discovery” of Dostoevsky and his popularization, above all through Gide’s book on Dostoevsky and his lecture on him at Vieux-Colombier around 1908. After World War I, Russia’s political problem, the Russian Revolution, and the enormous wave of Russian emigration to the West increased a hundredfold the interest in Russian literature. In that period Gide, Malraux, Mauriac, and pleiades of lesser writers quote the characters Stavrogin and Shatov, the brothers Karamazov and even Smerdyakov or Lebiadkin in their private conversations as if they were close acquaintances. All of Dostoevsky was retranslated, his Notes from Underground appeared simultaneously at two presses in two different French translations. Feux croisés published Rozanov’s Apocalypse of Our Time and Solitaria with an excellent study of the author. Guéhenno quoted Blok’s lectures; Aragon, then still a surrealist, made superb translations of Mayakovsky, not to mention the fact that Gorky and Chekhov could be found in all the bookshops. There was a flood of translations from all Russian literature. Gogol with illustrations by Chagall, Shchedrin, and a whole constellation of Soviet writers, like Pilnyak, eventually liquidated, but in his time hyper-Soviet, and a whole band of second- and third-rate writers as well. At the same time émigré writers—Merezhkovsky, Berdyaev, Remizov, Bunin—were published in many languages. Bunin was awarded the Nobel Prize.
Today the flame of Russian literature has been extinguished in the Soviet lands. Russian writers have been liquidated in one way or another, and some died natural deaths. Those who are still alive have fallen silent, mostly what is published and shouted about is by “the lackeys and skirtchasers of the times,” who despite the best will to please and blind obedience to “cultural politics” are still punished by the Party brass. The number of émigré writers has shrunk immeasurably, and some of them already write in French.
Nevertheless, the interest in Russian literature and the influence of classic Russian literature endure. Here in Paris a new French translation of Pushkin is in preparation, and there are constantly new editions of Dostoevsky appearing. Biographies of Pushkin and Dostoevsky pour out, and romans-fleuves by Frenchified Russians writing about Russian life are awarded literary prizes.
Amid this torrent of publications special note should be given to a book on Aleksandr Blok that recently appeared on bookshop shelves. It should be of particular interest to us, Poles, because the poet’s tragic fate is a kind of prefiguration of what awaits any art worthy of the name in the Soviet or nearly Soviet atmosphere of “cultural politics.”
The book was written in French by the Russian poet Nina Berberova,2 the widow of the poet Khodasevich. It is not a book of observations merely about a literary era, which might seem to us outdated or of indifferent interest. The fate of the greatest poet of pre-Revolutionary Russia, who foretold a cataclysm from 1907 onward, and responded to the Revolution with pained enthusiasm, the history of his brief “romance” with the Soviet authorities, is insufficiently known, excessively simplified in general opinion, and deformed under the influence of Soviet sources. Berberova’s beautiful book illuminates the life of a multifaceted poet.
We non-Russians know Blok mostly not as a symbolist, as the author of the poems on the “Beautiful Lady,” which reached over the heads of the utilitarian poets of the second half of the nineteenth century to the great poetry of Pushkin, Tiutchev, and Lermontov (even his epic poem Retribution, which has strong polonophile accents, is not well known among us), but above all as the author of The Twelve. This epic poem arose directly from Russian folksong, chastushki, and it grew just as directly from the hungry streets of revolutionary Petrograd in January 1918 as Wyspiański’s The Wedding once grew from a village near Kraków. We know The Twelve affirmed in a way the truth of the October Revolution, that it was shot through with the hope that from the battles, blood, crime, and hunger of that time a new world would be born. At the head of twelve Bolsheviks armed with rifles, a pale Christ with a wreath of white roses trips lightly across the snowdrifts and dark streets of Petrograd.
From 1908 onward Blok had prophesied the annihilation of Europe, studied the relationship between the intelligentsia and the people, and found that in Russia more than anywhere else intellectuals were separated from the people by an abyss, that contemporary civilization was facing an elemental catastrophe, that in Russia the people would sweep away an alien culture just as an earthquake swept away Messina.
After the Revolution, especially after October, the Bolshevik Revolution, Blok sees in the Soviet system, in Soviet power, an expression of the victory of elements until then suppressed in Russia, and in his lecture of 1918, “Intelligentsia and Revolution,” he writes: “We loved dissonances, shrieks, bells, unexpected transitions . . . in the orchestra, but if we truly loved those sounds, if they were not just something to tickle the nerves in a crowded theater, after dinner, then we should also hear and love the same sounds when they come flying from the orchestra of the world.” In another lecture, after the revolution, Blok puts his thesis emphatically: the Russian intelligentsia wanted the czar’s power liquidated, it wanted a turnaround, so it should be logical, it should clearly state its support for Soviet power. The same month, January, in which Blok writes The Twelve, also sees the birth of his epic poem Scythians.* In that poem Blok honors the blind element, invites Europe to a bit of brotherly advice, threatening that if it does not accept the challenge of brotherhood, then:
Henceforth we’ll not do battle!
As mortal battles rage we’ll watch
With our narrow eyes!
We will not lift a finger when the cruel Huns
Rummage the pockets of corpses,
Burn cities, drive cattle into churches,
And roast the meat of our white brothers.
That winter of 1917 to 1918, Blok believed in the annihilating but also regenerating force of the element set free.
The deification of that element, combined with a brilliant foreboding of the cataclysms on the way, a sharpened inner ear (“while writing and after finishing The Twelve I felt physically, in my ear, a great noise around me, no doubt the noise of the old world collapsing”)—this was the Blok of those years.
For the Russian intelligentsia, overwhelmingly hostile to the October Revolution, The Twelve, Scythians, and some of the poet’s lectures constituted a tribute to October, a betrayal. What was Christ doing here as a symbol seemingly affirming civil war and bloodshed—many in the anti-Soviet camp asked themselves this.
But the epic poem did not delight the victors either; far from it. Christ at the head of the Bolsheviks?
Lunacharsky, commissar of popular education, was irritated by the “effeminate and outdated” symbol. Kamenev says to Blok: “You celebrate what we older socialists abhor more than anything.” Trotsky advises Blok to replace Christ with . . . Lenin. Nevertheless Blok, as the most prominent poet of the era, or at least one of the most prominent, calling for people to accept Bolshevik power, for the time being remains a valuable ally who should be spared.
But there is another face to Blok of which we learn through Berberova’s book. After 1918 the poet has a brief enthusiasm for chaos and revolution, a delusion of flight. Blind surrender is followed by a bitter awakening. He has no wings. The poet did not fly out high and far from the burning edifice of Russia on the wings of revolution, but fell flat on the pavement. In fragments of his remarks, from his laconic notes, we see that by the winter of 1920 the poet is lying bloodied on the pavement. It is then that he wrote of The Twelve: “In January 1918 I gave myself blindly to the element for the last time. . . . Whoever sees in The Twelve a political poem, is either blind in relation to art, or is himself sitting up to his ears in the mud of politics. . . . For myself I can speak of it [The Twelve] only with irony.” Of politics the poet writes with more than irony, he writes with scorn and disgust.
In January 1920 he notes in his diary: “Art cannot be reconciled with pressure exerted by any power.” In January 1921 he writes: “My coming poetry collection will be titled Black Days.” And in April, just a few months before his death: “Lice have conquered the world, this is a fact, and now everything is changing, but not in the way we expected, in the direction we loved and lived for, but the complete opposite.”
In February 1921 Blok makes a speech in Petrograd on the hundredth anniversary of Pushkin’s death. He is obliged to repeat his speech three times. The hall cannot hold all the people who come to hear him; the poet is emaciated, his hair has gone gray, he has red blotches on his face, his eyes are heavy and extinguished. He always wears the same white sweater and black jacket.
“The poet is a child of harmony. He has to fulfill a role in world culture,” Blok says. “Three things are his responsibility: (1) to free sounds from the native element in which they dwell; (2) to bring these sounds into a harmony, give them form; (3) to carry that harmony into the outside world.” Later when the poet speaks of Pushkin, the whole audience already feels what he wants to say. That he is speaking not of Pushkin but of himself: “The poet dies because he has no air to breathe. Life has lost its meaning . . . may the officials beware who wish to steer poetry toward some end of their own. Those officials who reach out to seize his inner freedom and thwart poetry in its secret destiny.”
When at one of his last readings the audience requests that he recite The Twelve, his face is distorted by a painful grimace; the poet doesn’t want to recite that poem. What are other Russian poets and writers, contemporaries of Blok, doing at this time? Only Bryusov joins the Bolshevik Party and becomes a Soviet persona grata. Gippius and Merezhkovsky escape to Poland in 1920, at the same time Sologub and his wife wait desperately for an exit visa. At the last minute they are ordered to stay in Russia, and in despair, Sologub’s wife throws herself into the Neva; the poet finds her body a year later, when the ice melts. Rozanov, the “Russian Nietzsche,” dies in abject poverty in a monastery not yet closed down. Even Bely, who in 1917 wrote enthusiastic poems in honor of Russia’s messiah, leaves the land of revolution never to return. Gumilyov, leader of the Acmeist group and husband of Akhmatova, is shot on August 3, 1921.
Four days later, Blok dies. He dies because there’s no air for him to breathe. Left in place are the poets embraced wholeheartedly by the Revolution. Yesenin and Mayakovsky. Both will end their lives in suicide. Did they too run out of air? From that time onward, after the death of Blok, the Soviets systematically and efficiently prune the vital twigs that keep trying to grow from the old trunk of Russian art. Zhdanov’s speech, the pummeling of Akhmatova and Zoshchenko, these are stages of the recent purges. Everything that happens after that, the brutal, shallow articles on literature in Izvestia, about Russian writers, about the responsibility of the writer, a wave of comments praising Zhdanov’s speech as a historic date in Russian literature, the sea of optimistic cant about the blooming of Soviet literature, all of it shows what literature, or what dares to call itself that, has come to. And it concerns not only Russian writers. Korneichuk and another Ukrainian Soviet poet write articles spiked with denunciations in which they state with delight that it is easier and lighter to write after Comrade Zhdanov’s splendid speeches. The happy republics newly attached to the Soviet Union, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, all rush to confirm the same thing. At the Congress of Soviet Writers the deputy secretary of the Latvian Writers’ Union praises the Central Committee’s historic decision on the periodicals Zvezda and Leningrad (a resolution banning Akhmatova and Zoshchenko from publishing and issuing reprimands to these publications) and says that the decision, the resolution, “aids in the intellectual growth of Latvian writers”; a Lithuanian Soviet writer also notes the blessed effects of the Central Committee’s decision on Lithuanian literature, and the delegate of Estonian writers swears that the decision “played an enormous role in the development of Estonian and Soviet literature.” What does all this have to do with literature beyond being one of the signs of its destruction, for this is happening in a state where no literature can exist outside the official literature? Reading the testimony, one has the impression of reading Olszewski’s “We’re Building a Canal.”3 But one really feels no impulse to laugh, reading these statements of frightened, venal, or utterly naive writers.
The situation in Poland is different again, and the stages of current “cultural politics” with us are perhaps more reminiscent of the efforts in cultural politics of Soviet Russia twenty years ago. Polish magazines publish quite a lot of Blok in translation; you can still find interesting critical studies of him; and Borejsza too quotes Blok, but naturally he quotes his “proud” 1918 poem on the Scythians when writing in Przekrój magazine he throws down a challenge to the Polish reader: “Yes, we are agents of Moscow.”
At the Congress of Delegates of the Union of Polish Writers in Wroclaw, Stefan Żółkiewski proclaims theses on the current predicament of contemporary literature spiced with quotes from Lenin, Feuerbach, and Gorky, as if taken wholesale from the East. The same job they did after Blok’s death, the same methods, the same quotes.
“Social literature, useful in the modern sense, is literature consciously connected to the general directives of the cultural politics of our country,” Żółkiewski begins his programmatic speech. Those general directives, that “current of popular optimism,” whose necessity in literature Żółkiewski and all who support the regime stress, the indications that art must above all be understandable, the lessons not just on what should be written, painted, or composed, but how—but we know all this only too well from our neighbors. If there are any people of true goodwill among the ideologues, and probably there are, let them now read closely the literary criticism of Literaturnaya Gazeta, let them see to what level of literary discussion and culture that methodology leads. In issue number 66, of December 24, 1947, in a long article abusing Dostoevsky by the leading critic Ermashov, we find the following argument against Dostoevsky: “His works are widely and variously exploited in the savage, furious assault on man unleashed by the literature of Wall Street lackeys.”
How not to think of Blok now, and the words in his little deathbed diary: “Art cannot be reconciled with the pressure exerted by any power.”
When in Russia it is now not only Akhmatova but Fadeyev and Simonov who are shoved aside and in Poland Borejsza and all the Żółkiewskis apply themselves with their carrots and whips to reforming Polish literature, to calling fascist and reactionary everything that refuses to follow the direction of their instructions—the tragic figure of Blok and his words stand before us as a terrible memento.
“Beware officials who wish to steer poetry toward some end of their own. Those officials who reach out to seize our inner freedom and thwart poetry in its secret destiny.”
Kultura, 1948
*This poem was ably translated by Baliński. Only in comparison with the French translation in Berberova’s book, in which I am unable to feel even a hint of the music of Blok’s poem, can we evaluate Baliński’s achievement. [J. C.]