A New Mosaic out of Old Fragments: Soviet History Re-Codified in Modern Russian Prose
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A New Mosaic out of Old Fragments: Soviet History Re-Codified in Modern Russian Prose Natalya Ivanova (Moscow) In the past 12 years (from 1986 to 1998), the Soviet Empire and its history were repeatedly subjected to decomposition and reconstruction, particularly in literature. As the search for historical identity continues, new literary versions of Russian history continue to appear. Stage One was the period of a) de-Stalinization, b) de-Leninization, c) freeing the public consciousness of totalitarianism. The years 1986 to 1991 saw mass-scale publications of previously suppressed literary works from the 1920s to the 1980s. The process of publication had a double historical effect. Those texts were perceived not only as literature, but also as historical evidence refuting (or correcting and adjusting) the official historiography. Works based on historical truth (as opposed to official Soviet lies) appeared alongside the memoirs suggesting writers’ own versions of historical events, rehabilitating a number of historical names and doing away with ideological taboos and censorship. Stage Two, historiosophic, saw the rise of a “different” literature and the marginalization of fictional “histories” written to enlighten the public about the nation’s past. Judgment and assessment was replaced not so much by conceptions, as by metaphors of Russia’s historical development. Stage Three, postmodernist, is based on further complication of the metaphor, on juxtaposition of pseudo-historical texts with commentaries, on re-codification of myths, legends and personages from Soviet history. A disillusionment with the efficacy and usefulness of politicized history (Stage One) and its philosophical interpretation (Stage Two) is now aggravated by a disillusionment with the lackluster present and the 2 problematic future, and a nostalgic longing for Great Style. In the “histories” mass- produced today, simple historical plots and elementary psychological motives are used to divide Russian history into “good” and “evil”. No subsequent stage has negated the previous ones completely. In a reduced form, all of them coexist on the Russian literary scene today. Neither the professional historians, nor the writers have so far come up with a unifying conception of Russian history. Once the myths of Soviet history were shattered, a multitude of contradictory “histories” took their place. (“A Polka Dot History of Russia” is the name of the book by historians D. Volodikhin, O. Yeliseeva and D. Oleinikov commenting on current pseudo- historical concepts). Being offered several history textbooks and manuals to choose from, Russian secondary school pupils today have a choice of their national history. At the beginning of 1998, The Caravan of Histories, a new thick and glossy magazine, richly illustrated and printed in Europe, hit Moscow news stands. What stories does it tell? None that has anything to do with real history: not a single historical publication or review, no archive finding about persons or personages who have influenced the course of history. The magazine’s interest lies elsewhere, it catalogues the love affairs of “passions’ hostage” Jacqueline Kennedy, writes about the cost of Joan Collins’ success, and traces the seduction of teen-age Tatyana Drubich by the film director Sergei Solovyov. This rich-looking and highly-priced magazine reflects the changes in society’s attitude to the word “history” - from the general (the history of a nation, society, country, the state), to the private (“My 20th Century”, a series of contemporary memoirs from the Vagrius Publishers), and now to the intimately personal (The Caravan of Histories). 3 As the last 12 years became history on August 17, 1998 when Sergei Kiriyenko’s cabinet officially defaulted on state debts, it might be useful to look back - before we are drawn into another “history”, brand new and yet obviously reminiscent of the times past, for it was no accident when the country’s newly appointed chief banker Victor Gerashchenko answered a reporter’s question about the direction of his future efforts with a joke: “Head on to Communism”. There is a grain of joke in every joke. But there is a grain of truth in every joke, too. The phrase about literature in Russia, and then in the USSR, being “our all” - by voluntarily taking upon itself uncharacteristic yet socially indispensable functions of the sociologist, philosopher, politologist, psychologist and others, has become hackneyed and banal. An important omission in the above list is the hard work of an historian our literature did, as well as it was possible (or impossible), to expand the nation’s historical knowledge. Its role became especially notable during the publishing boom of the late 1980s when a new metaphor, “blank spots in our history”, was coined. These “blank spots” were soon mapped with the help of previously suppressed manuscripts. It is enough to recall the reviews and topical articles of the period to understand the key role the publication of literary works played in the formation of the public opinion. The “perestroika” set in motion by Mikhail Gorbachev was far more difficult to implement in real life than on paper. Therefore it began first and foremost in the publishing business. Over several years following April, 1986 when the popular Ogonyok weekly published Nikolai Gumilev’s poems with an introduction by the then First 4 Secretary of the USSR Writers’ Union Vladimir Karpov, the journals published a mass of literary works created over previous decades. The publications of archive materials, commentaries and conceptual works by professional historians were visibly lagging behind literature. It so happened that the reader received historical knowledge primarily from literary works. Because those publications were delayed in time, their content was perceived as historically authentic, as the historic truth about the events and the people of the 1920s, ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s and the ‘60s - in contrast with the pseudo-history and lies abounding in the official books on Soviet history. Notes to newly published literary texts outlined the history of each work, described the ordeals and misery, the tragedies and dramas experienced by the authors, many of them long dead, and so re-codified not only the history of national literature, but also the history of the whole nation which at that moment was living through a historically crucial phase of perestroika. The stories of literary characters, the plot of a novel, the twists and turns of fictional lives were perceived by the readers as positive historic evidence, as documents of the time. Fiction addressed the double task and brought about the double result of a) destroying the well-established historical myths, stereotypes and legends (in particular, about Stalin, Trotsky, Bukharin, the old Bolsheviks, the “enemies of the people”); then destroying a more recent myth of the “positive role” the old Bolsheviks Bukharin and Zinoviev had played, and later still, doing away with the myth of the wise Lenin, “who wished well but ran out of time” (to use F. Iskander’s phrase); and b) suggesting a true picture of history according to the given author, to fill in the space cleared of the myths. 5 In performing both tasks, Platonov differed radically from Grossman, Grossman from Yampolsky, Dudintsev from Trifonov, Lipkin from Pasternak, Bulgakov from Zamyatin, Solzhenitsyn from Shalamov, Berberova from Akhmatova, Nabokov from Gazdanov. The writers did not merely testify, like witnesses in a court of law, each with a dramatic or tragic story of his or her own. They (or their texts) argued with one another. But this was not so evident at the beginning, as it appeared later on, after the lyrical mist cleared up and the publishing euphoria (hysterically defined as “necrophilia” by the Soviet writer Pyotr Proskurin, who kept clinging to the fast-diminishing territory of Soviet civilization) was over. As a person directly involved in the processes described here, I had the impression they were all lifting, link by link, the same chain of historical truth from the same deep well. Another effort, one more pull - and the chain would come to light in its entirety. Taking part in the publications boom was like contributing to the Restoration of Historic Truth, and the term “rehabilitation” began to be referred not only to concrete individuals, but also to literary texts. Any criticism of the rehabilitated works’ literary quality, an ambiguous assessment or a dispute about their style was seen by the euphoric public as blasphemous and detracting from the main thing, the truth. What does style matter, when it goes about the victims and executioners of the 1930? Who cares about the language when we are denouncing Stalin and doing away with the totalitarian era? “Stylistic niceties” were regarded as nonsensical, and Akhmatova’s “Requiem” was discussed alongside (and on a par with) “The Dismantling”, an anti-Stalinist novel by Anatoly Zlobin. Telling an anti- Stalinist author that his text could not be published because it lacked literary merit was 6 impossible, you would not be (and were not) understood. That early period of our literary life focused on the search for historical truth and could well be called The Enlightenment. Authors outpaced historians, who were accused by the public of procrastination and incompetence. Authors were seen as full-fledged historians of the Soviet period, especially in the absence of historical studies and against the background of official lies. Letters to the Editor the Ogonyok weekly published in every issue showed that society was avidly perusing and discussing not so much the literary texts, as the newly discovered historical reality. Historical research would not (and could not) keep in step with literature. The newly acquired historical knowledge seemed instrumental in resolving the problem of exiting from Soviet history , of breaking away from the vicious circle of Russian history propelled by “revolutions from the above” instigated by reformers (this concept was proposed by the historian Nathan Eidelman, for whom Mikhail Gorbachev was just another example of such a reformer).