22

p Conditions for a socialist revolution ripened earlier in Russia than in other countries. A progressive revolutionary class—the Russian proletariat—grew up at the factories and plants built at the end of the last and the beginning of this century. It was headed by Lenin’s monolithic party armed with a revolutionary theory. The positions of the bourgeoisie were shaky. The mounting crisis, the imminent revolutionary explosion, the tense ideological and emotional atmosphere that prevailed at this point in Russian history, were reflected widely and from different angles in the literature of those years, producing new images and views in the writings of people who belonged to such apparently opposed aesthetic movements as realism, symbolism and futurism.

p Alexei Tolstoi, describing the situation in his novel The Ordeal wrote: “In the last ten years, huge enterprises were built up with extraordinary speed. Millions were made as if by magic. Banks were erected from glass and concrete, and so were new music halls, skating rinks and gorgeous night-clubs where people were deafened by the music, and dazzled by the reflections in the mirrors, the halfnude women, the brilliant lights and the champagne. Gambling houses, brothels, theatres, cinemas and amusement parks were hastily opened.” But at the same time “the spirit of destruction was felt everywhere; it seeped like a deadly poison into the fabulous stock-exchange deals of the notorious Sashka Sakelman, into the sullen resentment of the steel workers, and the twisted dreams of the fashionable poetess brooding till five in the morning in a bohemian basement cafe. . . . Destruction was considered good taste, and neurasthenia a sign of refinement. This was preached by the fashionable writers who sprang from nowhere and became celebrities overnight. To breathe the smell of the grave and feel beside you the trembling of a woman’s hot body, excited by morbid curiosity—such was the mood of poetry written in those last years: death and lechery".

p The First World War greatly enhanced the feeling of approaching crisis in literature. Illustrated literary magazines like Niva (The Field), Solntse Rossii (The Sun of Russia) and Stolitsa and Usadba 23 (The Capital and the Country Estate) were full of sentimental war stories, and there was a flood of songs on the “all-is-over” and “everything-is-going-to-the-dogs” theme, urging people to “take it now while you can" as recommended by Artsybashev, Verbitskaya and company. The stream of pseudo-patriotic eulogies to the tsar (which carried away even writers of such stature as Leonid Andreyev and Sergei Gorodetsky), chauvinistic verses, boastful war reports, articles, plays, declarative announcements and invectives formed, for a time, something like a united front in literature (with the exception of Maxim Gorky, Mayakovsky, Serafimovich, Yesenin, Veresayev and a few others). On the eve of the Revolution the country’s literary life, concentrated in the editorial offices of the literary journals and in St. Petersburg salons and circles, the whole intellectual atmosphere in the literary world throbbed with the excitement of capitalist enterprise and a desire to either gloss over the contradictions or flee from them. But it was a “feast on a smoking volcano”. This is what Alexander Blok wrote in 1919, recalling Russian literary life just before the Revolution: ”. . .1 am becoming more and more convinced that such wonderful Russian magazines as, say, Stariye Cody (Times of Old) and Apollon (Apollo) were perfectly crazy undertakings; leafing through those gems of typographic art today, I quite seriously almost go mad trying to puzzle out how their editors could possibly have failed to feel what we would turn into, what we’d become in three or four years’ time.” From this one should not draw the conclusion that the whole of Russian literature had turned decadent and despondent on the eve of the Revolution. In fact, it was as rich in talents as before, as in the 19th century. Many outstanding writers who adhered to realism, the leading trend in literature which was headed by Gorky (with his Znaniye collections), produced works which are still the pride of our literature today.

p Gorky’s generation of writers included Korolenko, Leonid Andreyev, Sergeyev-Tsensky, Bunin, Veresayev, Kuprin and Serafimovich. All that was sound and healthy in literature, all that held promise of developing further, was at first connected in one way or another with the Znaniye group, and particularly with Gorky himself. Later, of course, the Znaniye group fell apart and these writers joined different camps. The ideological struggle waged by Gorky in his articles had a resonant public quality and was of extreme importance for the development of literature. The pessimism and morbidness which prevailed in the poetry of the time was countered by Mayakovsky’s bold revolutionary spirit. Serafimovich and Valery Bryusov pursued a consistently democratic course.

p Yet Gorky, who closely followed the literary life of those years and analysed various works and their main characters, especially 24 revolutionaries in a number of articles (“The Destruction of Personality”, 1909; “On Modern Times”, 1912, and others), invariably drew the conclusion that “the old literature freely reflected the moods, feelings and thoughts of all Russian democrats, while modern literature meekly submits to the persuasions of the small pettybourgeois groupings. . .inwardly demoralised and hastily clutching at whatever comes to hand....".

p Further on, Gorky continues: “A modern writer can hardly be suspected of worrying about the fate of his country. Even the ’elder greats’, if asked about this, will probably not deny that their motherland is of secondary importance to them at best, that social problems cannot inspire their art as strongly as does the riddle of individual existence, and that the main thing for them is free art, objective art, which is superior to their country’s destinies, politics and parties, and which lies beyond the interests of the day, the year, and the age.”

p Such, in brief, was the ideological and political baggage with which the majority of the writers met the October Revolution.

p The Revolution burst into this atmosphere like a great, cleansing storm. We know how difficult it was for many to grasp what was happening at first. Even Gorky did not correctly understand the events of the proletarian revolution immediately (see his “Untimely Thoughts”). The bloodshed frightened Korolenko, a remarkably gentle, compassionate man, and confused Veresayev. Gorky’s friend Stepan Skitalets left the country (to return in 1934). Ilya Ehrenburg wrote in one of his poems (included in the volume Fire}:

Rain falls on earth, a scorching rain.
My lonely heart is trembling.

And in another:

I do not know who’s right, who’s wrong.
They’re flying different colours.

 

p Indeed, many were stunned by the revolutionary storm, and some, voicing the despair of the defeated class, harped variously on the theme of universal doom. Alexander Blok poked sarcastic fun at them in his poem The Twelve. A long-haired character says in an undertone: “Russia’s finished”, and the author remarks: “He must be a glib-tongued writer".... B. Sadovsky, whose name once adorned the pages of Apollon, Vesy and Stolitsa and Usadba, called his first book of verse published after the Revolution The Abode of Death. While Anna Akhmatova wrote:

All has been looted,
Sold,
Betrayed.

 

25

p Literary life was undergoing the same radical changes as everything else in the country. Everything was changing—people, magazines, ideas, life itself.

p Nor could it have been otherwise: to begin with, for political reasons. The Revolution divided the writers into those who voted for Soviet power and those who were against it. It swept aside the reptilian servants of capitalism and opened the way to new writers from the midst of the victorious people.

p In the first years of Soviet power this revolutionary process was extremely intense. Yet many failed to grasp it at the time since the issue was confused by the complexity of the general situation in the country. The situation mixed all the cards in literature, and the crushing blows it suffered from famine, economic dislocation and war were seized upon by the enemies of the Revolution in their attempts to blame everything on Soviet power, making it out to be the original cause of literature’s decline.

p The first change to take place concerned the collapse of the prerevolutionary pattern of literary life. The people who came and went in the editorial offices of the magazines, attended the Wednesdays and Saturdays of Countess Kleinmichel in her St. Petersburg drawing rooms (where Yesenin and Klyuev sang their ditties), frequented the salon of Zinaida Gippius and her husband Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Vyacheslav Ivanov’s “tower”, or the Moscow house of Margarita Morozova, the Russian Madame Recamier, and those who belonged to the Society of Free Aesthetics in Dmitrovka Street or the Literary Circle—in short, that whole world where names were made, literary fashions set and sensations born, that world of small, cheap bourgeois newspapers and respectable publishing houses, of worthy and worthless writers who moved noisily through the labyrinths of the editorial offices from morn till night, filled the drawing rooms, the exhibition halls, and dined in private rooms at the restaurants, this world which was maintained by patrons of the arts and dealers in art, and which was essentially bound up with the old landlordist Russia began to disappear in the very first months following the Revolution and especially after the closing down of the bourgeois newspapers in the summer of 1918, gradually folding up and assuming unrecognisable forms.

p The threadbare fabric of the life of the bourgeois intelligentsia soon wore through and fell apart. Their streets, mansions and de luxe apartments were taken over by the working people who made up the “great-coat” audience of Demyan Bedny, and whom Mayakovsky saluted and asked rhetorically in the Futurists’ Gazette published in 1918: “With what fantastic buildings will you cover the site of yesterday’s fires? What songs and music will pour from your windows? To what Bibles will you open your souls?”

26

p They were the people who appeared to Valcry Bryusov as the implacable judges of the old world, whom Alexander Blok portrayed as the symbol of retribution in his poem The Twelve, and whose victory the proletarian poet Nikolai Poletayev (1889-1935) welcomed as happily as if it were a joyous family gathering.

p The very elements that had fed the old literature disappeared. The Olympians and those who worshipped the Muses on Parnasus, famous lawyers and wealthy society ladies, hurried to the south of Russia, driven by animosity and fear, and from there made their way abroad. Bunin, Kuprin, Balmont, Zinaida Gippius, Merezhkovsky, Zaitsev and Shmelyov left the country. Alexei Tolstoi, swept up by the retreating wave, followed the fleeing White Army out of Russia at the end of 1918 though he was to return a few years later.

p All these people were well known to the Russian reading public, and I remember how anxiously we asked each other when we met in Petrograd or Moscow immediately after the Revolution or later, during the Civil War, when we returned for a few days’ leave from the front: “What side is Bunin on? Where is Leonid Andreyev?" We wanted to know where they were and whose side they were on—Blok, Balmont, Shmelyov, Zaitsev and all the other writers whose names we were so used to seeing in the literary magazines, newspapers and playbills. And I remember how happy we were to learn that Blok was with the Revolution, and how painful it was to hear that Kuprin had left with Kerensky’s cadets.

p Soviet literature was born as the old world came crashing down and the class struggle reached an unparalleled intensity. The drama of the situation is well rendered in both Mayakovsky’s and Blok’s poetry written at the time.

p The class split, the Civil War and the armed intervention of fourteen foreign powers headed by England and France, at first created a chaotic situation in Russia, causing people to flee the country en masse, and not just the aristocracy, the nobility, the big landowners and the court, but a large part of the intelligentsia too.

p Altogether, about a million people emigrated, the majority belonging to the top strata of old Russian society. This was an unprecedented case in the history of the Russian state. Later, in other countries where socialist revolution triumphed we were to witness a similar emigration of a part of the population (in the Baltic states, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary, and China), but never on such a scale as after the Russian revolution.

p New literary associations were formed abroad and magazines in Russian began to come out in Paris, Berlin, in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and, finally, in the United States. Although the scale on which the Russian emigre writers launched their literary activities was pretty ambitious (they set up their own publishing houses and founded 27 many magazines and newspapers), none—with the exception of Bunin and Kuprin—produccd anything serious that could claim a place in the history of Russian literature.

p Ivan Bunin is a wonderful stylist and a subtle artist. His stories The Gentleman from San Francisco, Chang’s Dreams, The Cup of Life and others, published in 1912-1916, have been translated into many languages and brought him world renown. He was elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences for his translation into Russian of Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha. Bunin left Russia in 1920 and settled in Paris. In his publicistic articles he often spoke out against communism. But they are not to be taken too seriously, any more than the majority of his recollections about his contemporary Russian writers—Chekhov, Mayakovsky, Yesenin and others. In his memoirs published in Paris in 1950, the subtlety of his observations and the beauty of his style are as remarkable as his spitefulness which is like the annoying and malicious grumbling of a doting old man. Bunin does not speak well of anyone, thus depriving his work of the poetry for which his prose is distinguished.

p While abroad Bunin wrote three of his major works: The Life of Arsenyev, Mitya’s Love and Leka, and also some of his best short stories including Light Breathing, Sunstroke, Shadowed Paths.

p In 1933 Bunin was awarded the Nobel Prize—the first Russian writer to receive the honour.

p Bunin’s prose conjures up for us a picture of the old Russian countryside with its sprawling estates, its smell of wild flowers, in which the sweetness of gillyflowers mingles with the bitterness of wormwood. His own feelings are as conflicting, and with him sorrow and joy are always intertwined. His heart is as full of sadness as it is of admiration for all that is beautiful in the world. Bunin frankly extols the charm of the landed gentry’s life, but at the same time he paints the grimness and crudeness of the peasants’ existence with the merciless realism of Emile Zola.

p Maxim Gorky thought very highly of Bunin, calling him a superb stylist who could make an image tangible, visible and evocative, whether he was describing the desperate longing of someone in love or the boredom of provincial life. In his letters to Teleshev, written just before he died in Paris in 1953, Bunin said that he wished to return home, but this never came about because he was too old and ill and there were some financial reasons, besides. After his death, his collected works were published in the Soviet Union twice, both times in large impressions. The second, 9-volume edition includes stories written by him as an emigre.

p Another emigre writer who cannot be ignored is Alexander Kuprin, who was born in 1870, the same year as Bunin. Kuprin had a vivid, ebullient life-loving talent, but he was less profound than 28 Bunin. He returned home in 1937 (and died the following year). I met him at the Metropol Hotel immediately upon his arrival, and he struck me even then as a man who had spent all his life strength and had come home to die.

p Kuprin lived an eventful life, moving from his early youth in Bohemian and fast-living officers’ circles. But being a democrat, he liked the company of sailors, musicians and wrestlers just as well. He described all of them in his stories. When one reads his Emerald (the name of a race horse the story is about) one is reminded of Tolstoi’s Kholstomer. Kuprin’s Duel, which has been filmed in the Soviet Union, shows how empty and hopelessly dull life was for the officers of a garrison stationed in a small provincial town in tsarist Russia. It is a dramatic story which ends in tragedy. I also remember the popularity enjoyed by Kuprin’s Captain Rybnikov about a Japanese spy who posed as a Russian officer.

p Kuprin paints his canvases in bold strokes and vivid colourshis sunlight is brilliant, his shadows deep. One is constantly aware of his passionate nature. His books make interesting reading, and they are reprinted again and again in the U.S.S.R.

p Bunin and Kuprin, both realist writers of the old school, were inheritors and continuators of the traditions of Russian classical literature.

p But the best writers of the older pre-revolutionary generation either stayed in the U.S.S.R. or soon returned home. One such was Alexei Tolstoi. Another was the poet Valery Bryusov. Strange as it may seem, this pillar of pre-revolutionary decadence, this exponent of symbolism and friend of Verhaeren, who was bound by a thousand ties to West-European literature, showed no intention of quitting Moscow and, what is more, was very active in promoting the cultural undertakings launched by the Soviet government and immediately after the Revolution joined the Communist Party.

p Another writer who stayed behind and accepted the Revolution was Alexander Blok (1880-1921), one of the most important early 20th-century Russian poets, who can be ranked with Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov and Tyutchev. No other Russian poet ever succeeded in expressing with such sincerity, subtlety and depth the torments of a man’s soul which, straining towards everything radiant and splendid in life, stumbles into the filth and sordidness of the surrounding world. Blok’s lyricism has a spell-binding power. His love poems, which throb with an anguished dissatisfaction with life, have an irresistible appeal.

p Blok’s poetry, as distinct from Pasternak’s idyllic lyricism, is profoundly historical. It is filled with sensations arising from the poet’s responsiveness to social reality. Block despised the Russian bourgeoisie. A dreamer and a romantic, he longed for great 29 upheavals and great changes in this sinful life. He called old Russia a “frightful world”. This is why he welcomed the October Revolution with gladness and hope. His famous poem The Twelve written in January 1918 can be justly called the first major literary work about this great turning-point in the history of Russia. The whole poem is permeated with a deep-felt acceptance of the Revolution and sympathy with it. It is significant that at the time certain lines from it were used as slogans.

p Andrei Bely (the pen-name of Boris Bugayev, 1880-1934), was another pre-revolutionary pillar of symbolism who took up the cause of the new, revolutionary Russia. I saw a lot of Bely. Baldheaded, his movements somehow elusive, he was really impressive. 30 Some people considered Andrei Bely to be a writer with flashes of genius. I don’t know about that. But I do know that there was no other poet in the world who could have expressed the premonition of an imminent revolutionary cataclysm as powerfully and originally as Andrei Bely. His style is unconventional, somewhat jerky, and based on phonetic associations, yet it conveys remarkably well the psychology of a man who is awaiting a world-wide explosion. In one of his verses he actually predicts the invention of the atomic bomb. He referred to himself as a man “with a forever staggered mind”. His most important work is the novel Petersburg written in 1913-1914 and revised somewhat in 1922. This is indeed a poem of fear. The characters of the novel, bomb-throwing terrorists, a senator and his son playing at revolution, are more like phantoms than real people, and there is something about them that reminds one of Maeterlinck. Senator Ableukhov (the name is a distortion of slap-in-the-face) paints a magnificent mental picture of the indestructible tsarist Empire where everything is divided into cubes and squares, while his son, who puts on a red domino to go to a masked ball, has already become involved with terroristrevolutionaries, and has actually planted a bomb in an empty sardine tin on his father’s table.

p To be sure Andrei Bely was a poet of crises, a medium of horrors, and yet he accepted the socialist revolution and stayed on to work in the Soviet Union.

p What is the explanation for all this? How can we explain the fact that Bryusov, Blok, Bely and others (to name but a few)— people who stood so far removed from the Revolution—welcomed it as a deliverance? The explanation must be sought in Russia’s unique historical conditions.

p No thinking person could help feeling the stirrings of a guilty conscience as he pondered on the contrasts then existing in Russia where the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie lived in gorgeous mansions and splendid country estates while the peasants suffocated in wretched log huts and the workers froze in clapboard barracks, and where people, children too, slaved at the factories from ten to twelve hours a day. Writers were also influenced in this by the traditions of Russian literature. After all, Russian literature has always been a “literature of great compassion" as Rosa Luxemburg once so aptly described it. Another circumstance of no little importance was that Russian capitalism began to rot, unable to compete with its West-European rivals, before it had developed sufficiently to give factory and office workers such relative benefits as they were already receiving in England and the United States.

p This is why even those who were entirely dependent on the patrons of the arts and the prosperous publishers, and whose 31 livelihood actually came from the capitalists’ profits (Andrei Bely put this very well in his memoirs At the Turn of the Century, 1930)— even these people, or at any rate many of them, renounced the bourgeoisie when the Revolution came.

p But in order to picture what happened to Russian literature immediately after the Socialist Revolution of October 1917, one must bear other and probably more important things in mind. One is the fact that such well-known writers as Mayakovsky, Yesenin, Veresayev, Alexei Tolstoi, Fedin and most of the young authors whose works had begun to be published before the Revolution sided with Soviet power. Another and perhaps even more important fact is that those revolutionary years witnessed an extraordinary upsurge in artistic creativity among the literate workers and peasants. Dozens of new magazines and newspapers were started. They printed poems and stories by Gladkov, Bakhmetyev, Lyashko, Bezymensky, Gastev, Gerasimov, Kirillov, and many other beginners.

p At first, much of what the working and peasant youth produced had slight intrinsic literary value. But from the point of view of its social and cultural worth, this upsurge in the artistic creativity of the masses was an extremely important phenomenon which cannot be ignored if we want to understand just what was happening to Russian literature in those years. By focusing all our attention on the outstanding writers of the time, such as Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak, of whom I have more to say later on, we are liable to let these names block our view of the floodtide of popular artistic endeavour and fail to appreciate the historical process itself. Naturally, what Pasternak wrote in those years is far greater in terms of artistic merit than the poetry written, say, by Nikolai Poletayev, one of the first working-class poets. Although Pasternak did not remain aloof from the historic events of his time, in those first years his poetry was mainly concerned with the past.

p The poems of Alexei Gastev and Nikolai Poletayev, on the other hand, expressed entirely new and unusual emotions, then being experienced by millions of people. Poletayev described the feelings of the basement dwellers who, after the Revolution, moved into the apartments vacated by the fleeing aristocrats and capitalists.

p Alexei Gastev was a veteran industrial worker, a Communist who had been sentenced to hard labour by the tsarist government. He wrote an amazingly original book of verse entitled The Poetry of a Worker’s Blow (1918), which in rhythm is vaguely reminiscent of Walt Whitman. By means of form and intonation Gastev sought to render the rhythms of the Revolution itself: the rhythms of movement, explosions and blows. He renounced rhyme. In his blank 32 verse he tried to create original, eloquently expressive portraits and sketches that would convey through their romantically enlarged and generalised features the thoughts and sentiments of the proletarian operating a machine. His poetry is slightly abstract, tending to draw symbolic images portraying the life of a work team, the working class as a whole, or even whole historical epochs. Man with his warmth, his soul and his anger, does not figure as a person in Gastev’s poetry. His epic studies: We Have Dared, My Life, We Are Coming, Come Out and others are extremely original works. Later, Gastev became the director of the Institute of Labour, gave up poetry writing, and devoted himself to the task of raising Russia’s technical efficiency. I should very much like to quote a passage from one of Gastev’s articles inspired by Lenin’s plan for the electrification of Russia. In 1920, when Gastev wrote this article, he was merely putting down on paper the dreams of a poet, and now more than fifty years later we find that most of these dreams have come true.

p “Although the West European and American countries surpass us in technical accomplishments and economic scale, Russia has one fortunate peculiarity which may in a relatively short space of time turn the dream of electrification into a very tangible reality. We are a semi-nomadic, semi-civilised country. We have peoples who believe in witch doctors, and intellectuals whose theories create sensations in Europe; we have vast stretches of virgin tundra, but we also have whole areas virtually encased in steel which can rival even the United States in machinery. We are a country that has not gone rusty under the pressure of traditions, while the vastness of our land and the constant movement of the population from one region to another lend us a peculiar freshness of outlook, unknown in the West. Much of what we do is started from scratch. Ten years ago the residents of Petrograd travelled in a rattling horse tram, and then suddenly a fast, new tram came speeding down Sadovaya Street, Nevsky and Kamenno-Ostrovsky prospekts, which made the trams in Paris look ridiculous and ugly in comparison. Swamps and woods surrounded Petrograd and Moscow, the Urals and Siberia on all sides, and suddenly, one fine day, factory chimneys shot up everywhere, like bolts from the blue, and machinetools which were considered rarities in the United States and Germany were installed where once the quag sucked people under. Does anyone need reminding that during the war Russia managed to raise such factory buildings in the wildest of wildernesses and set up such machine-tools which now stagger foreigners, fed on tales of Russian bears, into open-mouthed stupefaction. We are glad that we have not yet entrenched ourselves so deeply in stone and iron as Europe, we are glad that we have not entangled our land 33 in railways and are free to draw straight, long roads across Russia, covering it with a new pattern of meridians and parallels.”

p Much of this may sound naive and rhetorical, but all of it was projected into the future like an arrow on a taut bow-string.

p The colourful figure of Demyan Bedny loomed large during the turbulent period of the Civil War and the first years of socialist construction. Demyan Bedny (the pcn-name of Yefim Alexeyevich Pridvorov, 1883-1945) came from a poor peasant family, but was educated at the university of St. Petersburg. He wrote political poetry imbued with civic ardour, much of which appeared in Pravda, a Bolshevik newspaper founded by Lenin in 1912. Demyan Bedny’s association with Pravda, which lasted all his life, had a decisive influence on the shaping of his talent. His work was addressed to the popular masses, and his poetry came across even to the completely illiterate listeners. This explains why his writings acquired such importance in the first post-revolutionary years. That was the time when the peasants and workers, aroused by the Revolution, badly needed the vital questions of political struggle to be answered for them in clear, easily understandable terms. And in Demyan Bedny’s poetry, the mass reader and listener found an explanation to the political situation of the moment, offered in an easily assimilable form and in a language that appealed to them with its plebeian coarseness, wit, idiomatic turns of speech and popular slang.

p However, Demyan Bedny’s poetry had its weaknesses too. He did educate his mass audience politically, but at the same time he played up, to a certain extent, to their backwardness. In his reminiscences Gorky wrote: “Lenin repeatedly and insistently emphasised the importance of Demyan Bedny as an agitator, but said that he was rather course. ’He follows the reader when he should be a little ahead of him.’ "

p But in the first years after the Revolution the weak points of Demyan Bedny’s aesthetics went unnoticed, because what mattered more was his excellent knowledge of the people, their life, their vocabulary, their tastes and their sayings. He certainly made remarkably good use of all this knowledge for rousing people to struggle. The song How My Mother Saw Me Off to War, written in 1918, won Bedny truly nation-wide popularity.

p In his poetry he combines narrative with a popular exposition of the Party’s appeals, citations from newspapers with lyrical digressions, and ardent publicism with virulent satire. Mayakovsky in his article “How to Make Poetry" (1926), remarked on the power of Bedny’s “fable-like style" and the “precision of his aim".

p During the Civil War Bedny lived among the soldiers, sharing their front-line hardships, travelling with them in troop trains, 34 bivouacking with them and sleeping in their barracks. I remember the first time I saw him. In the summer of 1919 I was escorting a freight car carrying literature from Moscow to the southern front. At one of the stations I pushed back the door a little to let in the early morning air, and a hubbub of excited voices tore in. A troop train was standing alongside ours, and I saw a crowd of soldiers making their way towards the Revolutionary Military Council train some distance away. On enquiring the cause of the excitement, I discovered that Demyan Bedny was in that train. He came down the steps of the carriage to meet the crowd of soldiers—a stoutish, portly man wearing the famous Budyonny pointed cap, a tunic with wide red collar insignia, and baggy trousers tucked into knee-high boots. He looked like a Russian bogatyr from Vasnetsov’s painting.

p After Bedny’s “man-to-man” chat with the soldiers, the brochures with his verses were literally snatched out of my hands, I remember. His poetry took the mass reader into a familiar world of customary names and notions: Grandad Sofron, Brass-Buckle Yashka the Soldier, the Mother-in-Law who has more Spite than Right, the Ivans, Kuzmas, Provs, Klims and scores of others straight out of their own lives. Each poem described some topical theme or exciting event in real life: a peasant going off to war, a deserter seeking asylum in his home village and dying at the hand of his own father, a Menshevik revealing his traitorous soul, a White general using flattery to make the peasants more tractable, and the Red Army routing the Polish interventionists. All the vital themes of the day, political, historical and moral, found some sort of reflection in Demyan Bedny’s works. Taken together they form a poetic chronicle of the period.

p Although the work of Demyan Bedny and Mayakovsky followed the same general trend, and had a somewhat similar content, these two poets had an entirely different style and approach. It is not simply that Mayakovsky was exclusively a town poet, while Demyan Bedny’s poetry drew its nourishment from rural sources. The differences were fundamental. Mayakovsky’s work presents a poetic image of the epoch. Demyan Bedny’s verses (taken in their chronological order) are more like a record of events. With Mayakovsky man is inseparable from history, he is bound up with it entirelyfrom his most intimate emotions to his ideas on the communist transformation of the world. The poet achieves this by blending personal and social themes into one, by combining the lyrical element with the epic, and by rendering his poetry in an extremely novel manner. With Demyan Bedny, on the other hand, the purely didactic principle prevails over all else. He captivates the reader with his original manner in order to teach him. Mayakovsky awakens lofty emotions in his reader; he also teaches, but he does 35 it in such a way as to inspire the reader with the universal aims of communism. (“Realists we are, but not grazing the grass at our feet, not bending our snouts to the ground.”) His poetry is romantic. Demyan Bedny’s is down to earth, and not infrequently this tendency leads to an unnecessarily utilitarian attitude to reality. Hence that preponderance of naturalism in his poetry. It is not surprising, therefore, that Lenin (according to his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya) liked his lofty dramatic poetry more than his satirical verses.

p In his best poems, Bedny showed himself to be an heir to the finest revolutionary traditions of Russian literature. Bedny understood the soul of the Russian people well and, moreover, he had an excellent knowledge of Russian history, literature, and popular speech. He was probably the keenest bibliophile in Soviet Russia, owning a personal library of over a hundred thousand books.

p As one of the representatives of militant revolutionary art, Demyan Bedny holds a prominent place in the history of Soviet literature. His popularity waned within a few years, and not only for political reasons (Stalin’s dislike of him). This was mainly due to the aesthetic rift between the intellectual level and tastes of the new generations of readers and those feuilleton and pamphlet genres which Bedny cultivated and which were wholly geared to the current, day-to-day politics. Besides, a poet is bound to produce verbal dross eventually if he goes on writing didactic tales or feuilletons for the daily newspapers as a matter of routine, year in year out.

p I once had a conversation with Bedny about this. It was some time in 1939. I ran into him in the street outside his house, and so we had a chat, remembering the old days.

p “Oh well,” he said, “I, too, can scrape together enough poetry to fill a volume that will be as good as anyone else’s and will be here to stay. Now, you’re supposed to be an aesthete. Go ahead and select what you think should stay. Let it be a volume to suit your taste.”

p “Very well,” I replied, in the same bantering tone. “But you won’t let me do the choosing in peace anyway. You’ll never trust me entirely. You’re sure to leave something in.”

p “I suppose so,” he agreed. “I’ll meddle in something. It’s too late for me to change now. But still my star will continue to shine in your sky too.”

p He was right. His star shone brightly in the years of the Civil War, and it still shines for us today across the years.

p Radical changes took place in Russia’s literary life after the socialist revolution. Petrograd and Moscow stopped publication of such old Russian literary magazines as Vestnik Yevropy, Russkaya 36 Mysl, Mir Bozhy and others which had been coming out for decades. Some of these magazines were true masterpieces of printing, for instance Apollon maintained by the millionaire Ryabushinsky. The large publishing houses also closed down and the old literary life was paralysed partly due to the shortage of food, fuel and transport, but mainly because the owners of the publishing houses, print shops and magazines refused to accept Soviet power, its policy and its ideology and were leaving the country.

p Dozens of dwarfish private publishers sprouted on the ruins of the past, and as early as 1919 the world’s first publishing house owned by workers and peasants was opened in Petrograd. This was the State Publishing House of the Russian Federation. New Soviet magazines also began to appear in 1919-1920, among them Kniga i Revolyutsia (Book and Revolution) to which Konstantin Fedin contributed, and Khudozhestvennoye Slovo (Literary Word) published by the Commissariat for Education, with Valery Bryusov playing the leading role.

p Among the magazines which acquired the greatest importance were those published by Proletarian Culture, the new mass organisation generally known as Proletkult. Printed in many cities they were more than just a haven for budding poets and writers from the masses. The leaders of Proletkult, Bogdanov and Pletnyov, expounded on the pages of Proletarskaya Kultura (Proletarian Culture), Corn (Bugle) and other magazines their theories on the creation of a new proletarian culture. These theories ran counter to Lenin’s idea that the new culture of a socialist society should be a nation-wide and not a narrow class culture.

p The leftist theories of the Proletkult leaders have long been forgotten. But then they never influenced the development of Soviet literature enough to matter. Still, we might remember them if only because the Proletkult leaders attracted the notice of Lenin who found the time to criticise their “guild” attitude. In December 1920, on Lenin’s initiative, the Party adopted the letter of its Central Committee on the subject of the Proletkult. This letter is interesting in that it gives an example of the way the Party strove to influence the artistic intelligentsia by persuasion. Pointing out the fallacy of the leftist approach to problems of art, the Central Committee addressed the writers as follows: “Far from wishing to fetter the initiative of the working intelligentsia in the sphere of artistic endeavour, the Central Committee, on the contrary, wants to create a healthier and more normal atmosphere that will be beneficent for artistic endeavour as such. The Central Committee fully realises that with the war coming to an end workers will be taking a greater interest in problems of art and proletarian culture. The Central Committee appreciates and respects the desire of the front-rank 37 workers to place on the agenda the question of the individual’s greater spiritual development.”

p Looking back over the past now, we see that both the Letter on the Proletkults and Lenin’s public speeches about the creation of a communist culture, made in the first years after the Revolution, already contained those principles on which the Party has since based its policy as regards literature. After the October Revolution, Soviet literature developed under the influence of this new and fruitful factor, guided by the Communist Party’s ideas, organised and aided by it in every respect. By rendering this aid, the Soviet state was performing its new educative function. Reviewing the course followed by Soviet literature we sec how our art absorbed the historical experience of the working class in its struggle for socialism, how little by little it began to express this experience, thereby becoming an active participant in the struggle. It was precisely along this road that Lenin tried to direct the development of Soviet literature from the first.

Before going any further, we would do well to examine what Lenin had in mind when he spoke of “the road of development" of the new literature, and first and foremost, we should consider the principle of partisanship in socialist realism in the light of Lenin’s teaching.