Chapaev and His Comrades War and the Russian Literary Hero across the Twentieth Century Cultural Revolutions: Russia in the Twentieth Century Editorial Board: Anthony Anemone (Th e New School) Robert Bird (Th e University of Chicago) Eliot Borenstein (New York University) Angela Brintlinger (Th e Ohio State University) Karen Evans-Romaine (Ohio University) Jochen Hellbeck (Rutgers University) Lilya Kaganovsky (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) Christina Kiaer (Northwestern University) Alaina Lemon (University of Michigan) Simon Morrison (Princeton University) Eric Naiman (University of California, Berkeley) Joan Neuberger (University of Texas, Austin) Ludmila Parts (McGill University) Ethan Pollock (Brown University) Cathy Popkin (Columbia University) Stephanie Sandler (Harvard University) Boris Wolfson (Amherst College), Series Editor Chapaev and His Comrades War and the Russian Literary Hero across the Twentieth Century Angela Brintlinger Boston 2012 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: a bibliographic record for this title is available from the Library of Congress. Copyright © 2012 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN - 978-1-61811-202-6, Hardback ISBN - 978-1-61811-203-3, Electronic Cover design by Ivan Grave On the cover: “Zatishie na perednem krae,” 1942, photograph by Max Alpert. Published by Academic Studies Press in 2012 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com Effective December 12th, 2017, this book will be subject to a CC-BY-NC license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. Other than as provided by these licenses, no part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or displayed by any electronic or mechanical means without permission from the publisher or as permitted by law. The open access publication of this volume is made possible by: This open access publication is part of a project supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book initiative, which includes the open access release of several Academic Studies Press volumes. To view more titles available as free ebooks and to learn more about this project, please visit borderlinesfoundation.org/open. Published by Academic Studies Press 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com Contents Introduction. War and the Hero in the Russian Twentieth Century . 7 Part I CREATING HEROES FROM CHAOS Chapter One. Born in the Crucible of War: Chapaev and His Socialist Realist Comrades . 34 Part II WORLD WAR II AND THE HERO Chapter Two. Th e Peasant-Soldier: Alexander Tvardovsky and a New Chapaev . 66 Chapter Th ree. Eyewitnesses to Heroism: Emmanuil Kazakevich and Vera Panova. 91 Chapter Four. Retreat: Viktor Nekrasov and the Truth of the Trenches . .117 Part III COLD WAR REPERCUSSIONS Chapter Five. From World War to Cold War: Tvardovsky, Solzhenitsyn, Voinovich, and Heroism in the Post-Stalin Period . 146 Chapter Six. Antiheroes in a Post-heroic Age: Sergei Dovlatov, Vladimir Makanin, and Cold War Malaise . 174 Part IV CHAPAEV AND WAR: RUSSIAN REDUX Chapter Seven. Revisiting War: Viktor Astafi ev and the Boys of ’24 . 206 Chapter Eight. Revisiting Chapaev: Viktor Pelevin and Vasily Aksyonov . 232 Aft erword . .257 References . .263 Index . .278 Acknowledgements Chapaev and his Comrades has been in progress for a number of years, and so I have accumulated numerous debts in its writing. Many students and colleagues have been a part of this book project — in courses like War and Russian Literature in the 20th Century and at seminars and talks — and I thank them for their aid and indulgence. I tried out versions of some of these chapters in Madison, WI and Bryn Mawr, PA, in London and Stockholm, and in Los Angeles, Providence, RI, Urbana, IL, Columbus, OH and New Brunswick, NJ. I also drew on my 2004 Slavic Review article “Th e Hero in the Madhouse: the Post-Soviet Novel Confronts the Soviet Past” in writing chap- ters 6 and 8 of the book. Tatiana Smorodinskaya and Andrei Rogatchevsky have commented on some of the ideas and chapters that have been folded into this book, and Yvonne Howell, Catherine O’Neil, and Carol Apollonio became my elected community and their intellectual and emotional support essential to completing the project. Ruth Melville gave the manuscript a careful read, and I appreciate her insights, and Ian Lanzillotti off ered critical technical support during the last set of revisions. I want to thank the staff at Academic Studies Press, especially Sharona Vedol and Kira Nemirovsky, and series editor Boris Wolfson. Publishing academic monographs today is a risky business, and I appreciate ASP’s expertise in bringing my book to an interested audience across several continents. What’s more, despite the prosaic and even bloody nature of my subject matter, having the shade of A. S. Pushkin hover over the book — if only in the press’s acronym — has felt like a blessing. Finally, I am fortunate to have family members who are smart and critical, and who moved this book in the right direction, particularly my husband Steven and father- in-law Peter Conn. I am grateful for their input and their belief in me and my work. Steve has been my stalwart comrade through thick and thin, though I married him because he is a peacenik. Ironies never cease, and he appreciates that more than most. Living with me — and Chapaev — has sorely tried his patience, and I thank him for sticking with us. My interest in war and how it aff ects literature, readers, and the culture around them stems from visits to Soviet museums and war memorials in the 1980s, but grew more urgent aft er the arrival of my children and the onset of the Iraq War. I did not want my children to grow up in a war-torn world, and although many of the confl icts remain distant from us geographically, the eff ects of war in the twenty-fi rst century have spread across the oceans and into the lives of us all. I hope that some of the ex- amples in this book of how war plays out in a culture will prove inspirational, while I am certain that other examples will remind readers of how violence, especially state- sponsored violence, manipulates our psyches and damages our souls. Introduction War and the Hero in the Russian Twentieth Century For every generation—its own war and its own victims, which also means its own myths . В каждом поколении—своя война и свои жертвы, а значит, и свои мифы . -Mikhail Epstein Not long aft er the collapse of the Soviet state in 1991, Moscow poet Olga Sedakova commented, “Something has happened to the hero in our century.” Sedakova was concerned primarily with the hero in lyrical poetry, but she inadvertently put her fi nger on an issue of central importance for Russian fi ction as well. Something had indeed happened to the hero in twentieth- century Russian fi ction, and that something was war. Th e history of Russia in the twentieth century was, more than anything else, a history of war and the variety of its consequences: the eff ects that war inevitably brings to the structure of the economy; the toll that it takes on daily life and on social and familial bonds; the physical destruction of cities, towns, and farms; the dislocations both physical and emotional of populations; and fi nally, the ongoing struggles over the memory and meaning of these cataclysmic events. With the possible exception of China, in the twentieth century no other country has experienced these consequences more than Russia and the Soviet Union did. It is worth reviewing the litany of Russia’s militarized twentieth century. Before the fall of the tsarist regime, Russians fought a war in the Far East with the Japanese. Soon aft erward, a decade of almost constant war ensued, with the First World War interrupted by the Revolutions, and the Revolutions devolving into a long and bloody Civil War. Th e 1920s saw the beginning of the ongoing Soviet terror against the country’s own citizens. Th at terror, orchestrated and justifi ed as “class war”—which, among other things, devastated the peasantry and countryside and decimated the offi cer corps of the Red Army—eased somewhat as the 1930s drew to a close, but only because Russians were consumed with and by World War II. Th e terror quickly resumed when World War II ended in victory. 7 Introduction Th e second half of the twentieth century was dominated by the Cold War against the West. Th is took many forms—proxy wars in the third world; a dizzyingly dangerous arms race with the United States; great military parades through Red Square, featuring tanks, phalanxes of marching soldiers, and intercontinental ballistic missiles; and briefl y, from the mid-1950s through the late 1960s, the concomitant space race. It all ended with the chaotic col- lapse of the Soviet state, a consequence, some have argued, both of an arms race the Soviet Union could not aff ord and the disastrous decade-long Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979–1989). Even aft er the dissolution of the Soviet Union, war has remained a central fact of Russian life. Russian leaders have picked up where their Soviet predecessors left off , fi ghting wars in Chechnya in 1994–1996 and 1999–2009, conducting border skirmishes with Georgia in 2008, and dealing with their own ongoing “war on terror.” Virtually an entire century of war and everything that goes with it—ideo- logical propaganda campaigns, draft s and recruitment into the armed forces, economic mobilization, and the repression of urban and rural populations across the country—created a thoroughly militarized society. Th e century saw actual fi ghting in the streets and across the geographic spaces of the Rus- sian empire; incursions into other political spaces, including the annexation of the Baltic Republics and Ukraine; the march of Soviet soldiers all the way to Berlin; failed and costly struggles in the mountains of Afghanistan; civil sacrifi ces, evacuations, and suff ering; self-policing, interrogations, and house arrests; and prison camp sentences, exile, and forced emigration.