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Iurii Trifonov: a Study of a Soviet Writer

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Iurii Trifonov: a Study of a Soviet Writer FINAL REPORT TO NATIONAL COUNCIL FOR SOVIET AND EAST EUROPEAN RESEARC H TITLE : IURII TRIFONOV : STUDY OF A SOVIET WRITER AUTHOR : JOSEPHINE WOLL Howard University CONTRACTOR : Howard University PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR : Josephin e Woll COUNCIL CONTRACT NUMBER : 801-1 1 DATE : June , 198 8 The work leading to this report was supported by funds provided b y the National Council for Soviet and East European Research . Th e analysis and interpretations contained in the report are those o f the author . JOSEPHINE WOLL Contract #801-1 1 IURII TRIFONOV : STUDY OF A SOVIET WRITE R EXECUTIVE SUMMAR Y Throughout his career, but increasingly from 1969 until hi s death in 1981, Iurii Trifonov analyzed the nature and consequenc e of moral choices within the matrix of Soviet history . All of hi s late (and best) fiction attempts to explore the relationshi p between the ideals of the October Revolution, the reality of th e Stalinist world, and the offspring of both, present-day Sovie t society . In each work one particular relationship between the present and the past is established, and then investigated : i n Another Life (1975) the narrator's late husband was an historia n by profession, particularly interested in the double-agents o f the tsarist secret police ; in House on the Embankment (1976) th e protagonist tries to forget his role in the anticosmopolita n campaign as a graduate student in the late 1940s ; in The OldMa n (1978) the protagonist excavates personal memory and documentar y texts to arrive at the truth of an incident in the Civil War wit h moral and political implications for subsequent generations ; i n Time and Place (1981) the protagonist, a novelist, attempts t o unravel the past by means of his art . Trifonov himself, examinin g the Soviet past considerably before the onset of the new opennes s in public discussion of the subject and writing within a syste m of external and internal constraints, was of necessity oblique . He did not avoid judgment, but he expressed his judgments via th e techniques of his art--narrative voice, metaphor, time-shifts and WOLL, #801-1 1 structural montage . Evolving both intellectually and artistically, Trifonov mos t clearly expresses his belief that memory is the sina qua non o f the moral life in his two most accomplished works, House on th e Embankment and The Old Man . Willful failure of memory an d deliberate distortion of the past condemn not just an individua l but an entire society to an ethical and spiritual void . Whe n Trifonov's "Moscow novellas" appeared in 1969, 1970 and 197 1 their depiction of the Soviet intelligentsia provoked much debate ; the anomie of his characters, and the spiritual vacuum o f their lives, seemed a result partly of individual personality , partly of the conditions of modern urban life . In Trifonov' s later fiction, however, the contemporary urban Soviet world i s always presented in the context of and in relation to the past . As one Soviet critic put it, in his later years Trifonov could n o longer write the "horizontals" without the "verticals," withou t digging down into the bedrock from which the modern lode o f Soviet reality has emerged . In House on the Embankment Trifonov anatomizes the mentalit y of one of the props of Stalinism, the kind of man without whic h that system could not have survived . The central event in each o f the two main periods of the novel (1937 and 1948) is an act o f betrayal committed by the protagonist, Vadim Glebov . As a chil d during the Terror, he betrays other boys ; as a man during th e anticosmopolitan campaign, he betrays his teacher and mentor . Be- trayal and the personal qualities which motivate it are directly WOLL, #801-11 3 linked by Trifonov with an individual's demonstrated willingnes s to forget or significantly distort the past, and his carefu l delineation of the atmosphere of the times serves not t o exculpate Glebov but to suggest the symbiotic process by whic h Stalinism both created men like Glebov and depended on and wa s sustained by men like Glebov . In The Old Man, whose hero is obsessed with the men and idea s of the Revolution and Civil War and their heirs in today's Sovie t Union, the Stalinist years exist as a persistent subtext for th e reader, but are not part of the direct action of the novel . Lik e Glebov, the old man seeks arguments to justify his own complicit y in the betrayal of the Cossack general Filip Migulin in 1919 ; like Glebov, he finds reassurance in recalling his own impotence , the "lava" which blinded him, the "current" that was sweepin g everything before it . Yet comforting metaphors obscure the rea l dilemmas both he and Glebov faced and the real choices they had : by presenting alternatives, Trifonov insists that the "lava" di d not blind everyone, and that it was possible to swim against th e current ; the metaphors are first and foremost excuses, an d inadequate ones at that . Moreover, the old man's version of the past, which relies heavily on linguistic devices (passive an d impersonal verb forms) and metaphor to convey the elemental , anonymous forces that were at work during the Civil War years, i s countered by the memories of other characters and by th e information contained in archives and dusty documents, bits o f paper which reveal that specific decisions were made by specific WOLL, #801-11 4 individuals, who bear responsibility for them . It is in th e juxtaposition of, and interstices between, those two version s that Trifonov's views are to be found . It was in part thanks to Trifonov's adroit manipulation of th e "dotted lines," the ellipses through which his own judgments ca n be inferred, that he managed to publish works like House and The Old Man . He was favored by luck and circumstance as well . Although it is impossible to determine with any certainty why a given manuscript is passed by Soviet censors, a number of factor s can be important influences . In Trifonov's case he was aided b y his editor, Sergei Baruzdin : though the journal Druzhba narodov had a reputation for "conservatism, Baruzdin was willing to argu e strenuously on Trifonov's behalf . (There were also rumors that h e was too ill at the time to care overmuch about the consequences . ) The emigration and/or expulsion of what was by the mid-1970s a substantial number of prominent artistic figures increase d pressure on the authorities to keep those whom they could, an d Trifonov's general reluctance to proclaim his views publicall y made him a likely candidate . The publication of House may also owe something to Trifonov' s mode of story-telling . As he became more probing thematically h e coupled his historical consciousness with skillful aestheti c manipulation of narrative voice . What sometimes confused reader s (and critics) accustomed by prevailing Soviet literary norms t o explicit praise and censure may even have begun as a means o f obfuscating his censors . But in all of Trifonov's mature fiction WOLL, #801-11 5 his interweaving of narrative personae serves an aesthetic a s well as ethical function, allowing the author to stand back ye t make known his own opinions and forcing the reader to become a participant, juror and judge, defendant and prosecutor . Insist- ing that the past is knowable, Trifonov at the same time insist s on its complexity, resisting intellectually the determinism o f Marxist analysis and, artistically, the certitude of a singl e omniscient narrator . In the Brezhnev era, conventionally considered years o f repression and intolerance, many of the creative forces unleashe d by Khrushchev's thaw were stifled or had to find their way int o illicit channels . Yet even then literature was being publishe d which defied apparently inflexible strictures . For writers lik e Trifonov a mutually advantageous if tacit contract seems to hav e governed the publication of their work . For the regime it served , in some cases, as a kind of lightning rod : critical, but far les s dangerous than a Solzhenitsyn or a Voinovich . Writers, for thei r part, want to be read by the most appropriate audience . Althoug h the terms were never spelled out, and could be changed withou t warning, individuals who avoided public protest, or who rejecte d the option of publishing abroad, or who criticized recently - visited Western countries, had some small but real room t o manoeuver . And while neither open, systemic criticism, no r explicit examination of Stalinism was tolerated in those years , writers otherwise acceptable could and did allude to suc h matters, establishing oblique connections and encouraging attent- WOLL, #801-11 6 ive readers to draw certain inferences . The strategists and theoreticians of glasnost', did not com e from nowhere . Most of them are of the generation born in th e 1920s and 1930s ; they came of age during the Khrushchev era . Now , when economists like Nikolai Shmelev and sociologists lik e Tat'iana Zaslavskaia, literary critics like Vladimir Lakshin an d poets like Evgenii Rein are publishing their work openly in th e leading newspapers and magazines of the Soviet Union, when film s made 15 and 20 years ago are being widely distributed, whe n leading historians are rewriting the textbooks of Soviet history , it is clear that even during the Brezhnev years these people wer e working, thinking, waiting, even if most of them could not g o public with their work .
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