University of New Hampshire University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository Faculty Publications 2019 Meat: A Novel Sergey Belyaev Boris Pilnyak Ronald D. LeBlanc University of New Hampshire, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.unh.edu/faculty_pubs Recommended Citation Belyaev, Sergey; Pilnyak, Boris; and LeBlanc, Ronald D., "Meat: A Novel" (2019). Faculty Publications. 650. https://scholars.unh.edu/faculty_pubs/650 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Sergey Belyaev and Boris Pilnyak Meat: A Novel Translated by Ronald D. LeBlanc Table of Contents Acknowledgments . III Note on Translation & Transliteration . IV Meat: A Novel: Text and Context . V Meat: A Novel: Part I . 1 Meat: A Novel: Part II . 56 Meat: A Novel: Part III . 98 Memorandum from the Authors . 157 II Acknowledgments I wish to thank the several friends and colleagues who provided me with assistance, advice, and support during the course of my work on this translation project, especially those who helped me to identify some of the exotic culinary items that are mentioned in the opening section of Part I. They include Lynn Visson, Darra Goldstein, Joyce Toomre, and Viktor Konstantinovich Lanchikov. Valuable translation help with tricky grammatical constructions and idiomatic expressions was provided by Dwight and Liya Roesch, both while they were in Moscow serving as interpreters for the State Department and since their return stateside. Sam Smith, Professor Emeritus of Animal Sciences at the University of New Hampshire, proved invaluable as a source of information on animal physiology, human biology, and slaughterhouse practices. Andrei Zorin and Eric Naiman, two fellow Slavicists, were, as always, extremely gracious in providing feedback on issues involving the political, literary, and cultural history of Russia. I also appreciate very much the feedback that I received from numerous colleagues in Slavic Studies to queries that were posted online to the SEELANGS e-list. Finally, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the woman I love, Lynda Galard-LeBlanc, whose patience, forbearance, and tolerance during this project have been truly amazing and whose support can never be entirely repaid in kind. I will, nonetheless, certainly try my best to do precisely that. III Note on Translation & Transliteration As a scholar of Russian literature, I turned to translation only near the very end of my academic career, at which point in time I had become deeply interested in two so-called novels that Boris Pilnyak had written during the 1930s: Okay: An American Novel [O’kei: Amerikansky roman] (1932) and Meat: A Novel [Myaso: Roman] (1936). To the best of my knowledge, neither of these two works has yet been translated into English and neither of them has garnered much, if any, attention from Pilnyak scholars. It seems to me, however, that Meat: A Novel should most certainly be translated into English, especially for the sake of those potential readers who – whether they harbor an interest in slaughterhouses, animal rights, and/or human nutrition or they are mainly curious about how Soviet writers sought to depict contemporary social reality in Socialist Realist novels produced during the Stalinist 1930s – are not able to read Russian. I have decided not to provide explanatory annotation, but instead to identify the first names and patronymics of those historical figures, mentioned by the narrator, whose surnames are not likely to be widely familiar to most readers. These first names and patronymics are provided in brackets for such people as, for example, Doctor [Aleksey Andreyevich] Zamkov and the theatrical performer [Vsevolod Nikolayevich] Aksyonov. Readers who are curious about what these people did (or what they are best known for) can conduct searches on their own to find answers to such questions. Brackets have also been used throughout the translation to provide American equivalents for Russian measures of weight and length (for example, a pood [36.11 pounds] and an arshin [28 inches]), to clarify what some abbreviations and acronyms stand for (for example, MTS [Machine and Tractor Station] and FZU [Factory-and-Workshop Apprentice School]), to identify exotic and/or archaic terms (for example, Romanée [vintage wine from Europe], mazulya [thin porridge], and “Maksims” [machine guns]), and to disambiguate various idiomatic expressions. My aim throughout has been to spare the reader, as much as possible, the need to look to the bottom of the page – or, worse yet, to the end of the text – to access annotation. The few footnotes that do remain are devoted almost exclusively to language issues that tend to get lost in translation. The names of well-known historical figures are given in their English equivalent: for example, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Tsar Nicholas II. All other Russian personal names are transliterated. In transliterating Russian personal (and place) names from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet, I have largely followed the advice provided by J. Thomas Shaw, who maintained that for English-speaking readers who are not familiar with the Russian language, “a transliteration system should suggest something about the pronunciation of that language” and that “the less the reader knows of Russian, the closer the transliteration needs to be to something representing fairly accurately the pronunciation of the words.” As a result, I have followed System I (the system designed for non-specialists and members of the general public) outlined by Shaw in The Transliteration of Modern Russian for English-Language Publications (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967). I have made some exceptions, however, in those cases where certain spellings (spellings that do not follow Shaw’s System I religiously) would look more familiar or sound less confusing to readers. IV Meat: A Novel: Text and Context As a scholar who had long been interested in the use of food imagery and eating metaphors in works of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian literature and who had just recently concluded an examination of Lev Tolstoy’s vegetarian beliefs, I was pleasantly surprised near the end of my academic career to learn of the existence of a work of Soviet fiction titled Meat: A Novel. Authored primarily by the well-known modernist writer, Boris Pilnyak, and serialized in the February, March, and April 1936 issues of the journal Novy mir, this novel, I soon discovered, contains a rather amorphous, disjointed, and puzzling text. Here, very briefly, is the political context for the novel. It was commissioned late in 1935 by the Food Commissar, Anastas Mikoyan, who expected Meat: A Novel to be a Socialist Realist piece of propaganda that would glorify the achievements of the fledgling Soviet meat industry – especially the modern, state-of-the-art meat packing plant, built in Moscow in 1933, that bore Mikoyan’s name – under the leadership of Stalin and Mikoyan. As I have detailed elsewhere, however, the literary canvas that Pilnyak ultimately painted (his co-author, Sergey Belyaev, a physician and writer of science fiction, seems to have served essentially as a silent partner in this endeavor) failed to meet the expectations of the Soviet literary authorities.1 Pilnyak, they claimed, had written not a genuine, but a faux Socialist Realist novel that many dismissed as a piece of “hack work” (khaltura). Plans to have this novel appear in book form as a separate edition by the publishing house “Soviet Writer” [Sovetsky pisatel] were quickly scrapped, and Pilnyak soon found himself hounded mercilessly by Party officials, literary bureaucrats, fellow writers, and even many of the workers and supervisors at the Mikoyan meat packing plant. The vicious campaign of vilification that had been directed against Pilnyak by certain overly zealous proletarian writers during the late 1920s was soon revived as part of the larger campaign against “formalism” and “naturalism” in the arts that was launched in early 1936, initially attacking Dmitry Shostakovich’s new opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, as “muddle” rather than “music.” Pilnyak’s Meat: A Novel was singled out as a discordant work of prose fiction that was similarly contaminated by an assortment of formalist and naturalist elements. The author was arrested a year and a half later at his dacha in the writers’ colony in Peredelkino on trumped- up charges of spying for Japan, of plotting terrorist acts upon high-ranking Party leaders (specifically, Stalin and Yezhov), and of being a Trotskyite. He was tried, convicted, and executed for these alleged crimes in April 1938. That, in brief, is the political context of Pilnyak’s ill-fated Meat: A Novel. As far as the text itself is concerned, Meat: A Novel is divided into three parts. Part I is set almost entirely in tsarist 1 Readers who are interested in learning more details about the political context surrounding Meat: A Novel and its critical reception in Stalinist Russia are encouraged to consult two articles I have written on this novel and its author: “The Mikoyan Mini-Hamburger, or How the Socialist Realist Novel About the Soviet Meat Industry Was Created,” Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies, 16, no. 2 (2016): 31-44, and “The Final Campaign Against Boris Pilnyak: The Controversy over Meat: A Novel (1936),” Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Scholarship. 453 [https://scholars.unh.edu/lang_facpub/453/] V Russia during the late nineteenth century. The narrative focuses here primarily on the primitive, unsanitary conditions that prevail at private and municipal slaughterhouses in a number of major cities within the Russian empire, mainly Moscow, St. Petersburg, Baku, and Tiflis. Government corruption allows a handful of merchants to control the meat trade and to amass considerable profits at the expense of both the workers and the consumers.