The Journey

by Sergio Pitol

  MEYERHOLD’S LETTER

  Between 1933 and 1939 hundreds of thousands of citizens suspected of terrorist activities were arrested throughout the Soviet Union as enemies of the people: some were Trotskyists, others agents of intelligence services in Europe and Japan. Among them, in the early morning of May 16, two intellectuals of great importance were arrested: the writer Isaac Babel, whom we all know, and the theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold, Russian theater’s greatest innovator. Meyerhold was to the theater what Eisenstein was to film.

  During the final phase of perestroika, a committee of writers led by Vitaly Shentalinsky began, after a tireless and arduous struggle with police agencies and their defenders, the inspection of the literary archives of the KGB. These documents are horrendous and shocking; the whole of the terror of the Great Purge is encapsulated there.

  Those arrested, in general, were convinced that top state officials did not know what was happening in the country, that their imprisonment was the result of a provocation organized by perverted minds to discredit the Communist system, and carried out by murderers of the worst sort.

  The far-reaching purges began in December of 1934, after the assassination of Sergei Kirov, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, whose popularity obscured the figure of Stalin. During the Gorbachev period, people began to speak openly about the possibility that the murder was arranged by the NKVD and ordered by Stalin himself. The persecution of the enemies of Kirov brought an end to all of his opponents. “We must extinguish the enemy without quarter or pity, without paying the slightest attention to the moans and sighs of professional humanists,” a senile and troubled Gorky demands in Pravda on January 2, 1935. The systematic work of extermination, the so-called “purges,” decreased in late 1939. One of Gorbachev’s great virtues has been his attempt to clean up the past. Communism would be devoid of any moral grounds if it did not vigorously reject the crimes committed. Khrushchev was heroic in denouncing Stalin’s crimes, releasing political prisoners falsely accused and restoring their reputation when the whole of the mechanism of terror was in motion, when the criminals were still alive. The apparatus took a few years but eventually halted it. Gorbachev is attempting to take the next step. The old guard has placed in his way the same obstacles—adding even more—with which they defeated Khrushchev. They made the task impossible for him; they caused him to fail. And what they achieved was a suicide. Times were different and they, oblivious to reality for a very long time, succumbed and destroyed what was left of the socialist system.

  In Vsevolod Meyerhold’s file, Shentalinsky found a letter to Vyacheslav Molotov, president of the Council of the People’s Commissars, with the assurance that if it arrived in his hands he would be released and, also, the criminal proceedings being employed in the Lubyanka would end.

  The investigators began to use physical methods on me, a sick, 65-year-old man. I was made to lie face down on the floor and then beaten on my feet and spine with a rubber strap. They sat me on a chair and beat my feet from above, with considerable force…For the next few days, when those parts of my legs were covered with extensive internal hemorrhaging, they again beat the red-blue-and-yellow bruises with the strap, and the pain was so intense that it felt as if boiling hot water was being poured on these sensitive areas. I howled and wept from the pain. They beat my back with the same rubber strap and punched my face, swinging their fists from a great height.

  When they added the “psychological attack,” as it’s called, the physical and mental pain aroused such an appalling terror in me that I was quite naked and defenseless. My nerve endings, it turned out, were very close to the surface on my body and the skin proved as sensitive and soft as a child’s. The intolerable physical and emotional pain caused my eyes to weep unending streams of tears. Lying face down on the floor, I discovered that I could wriggle, twist and squeal like a dog when his master whips it. One time my body was shaking so uncontrollably that the guard escorting me back from such an interrogation asked: “Have you got malaria?” When I lay down on the cot and fell asleep, after 18 hours of interrogation, in order to go back in an hour’s time for more, I was woken up by my own groaning because I was jerking about like a patient in the last stages of typhoid fever.

  Fright arouses terror, and terror forces us to find some means of self-defense.

  “Death, oh, most certainly, death is easier than this!” the interrogated person says to himself. I began to incriminate myself in the hope that his, at least, would lead quickly to the scaffold…4

  VSEVOLOD MEYERHOLD

  4 Translated by John Crowfoot.

  22 MAY

  Morning at the Pushkin Museum. I lingered in the hall where the Matisses are, both upon entering and on my way out. To see them again is like winning a prize. I wanted to go later to the little Gogol Museum. It was in that apartment where he spent his last crises, it was there that he burned the notebooks written over the years, including the second part of Dead Souls, where he spent his long death throes and lived his last scene, pathetic and grotesque like everything having to do with him. The priest who tortured him for months, Father Matvey, a cruel and demented mind, had attached a cluster of leeches around his nostrils (to extract the bad blood and the fetid mucus he was emitting); as he lay dying, he regained consciousness from time to time, during one of which, quite disturbed, he tried to wrest the disgusting animals from his face, horrified because he believed that the fingers of the devil were seizing his soul. He died with that conviction, and he was right, except the devil’s name was Matvey, but he did not know it. The place is small, I seem to remember it having sparse, rundown furniture, all of it from the period of Gogol, which may have even been his. I couldn’t go in because it was under renovation. I only went there once, when I worked at the embassy, accompanied by Kyrim. There were about seven or eight of us at the time plus the old woman in charge of explaining the author’s life, his work, and his belongings; we all began to act like characters from Gogol, as if someone had hypnotized us or wound us up. It was not an intellectual or student audience. They were people of modest means; one would think they only came to a museum because they were one step from the door and a terrible storm suddenly struck. But that was not the case. I spent about half an hour there, maybe more, fascinated by the nonsensical conversation that arose among the small group of spectators and the director, from all appearances the only employee, with that look only old maids possess: fragile, trembling, sophisticated, and modest, a caricature of expressions and gestures of Marlene Dietrich and Kay Francis, a voice that whistled trying to hide the absence of an upper front tooth; the others, as far as I remember, were a hearty and cranky old man, another man of the same age, timid and skittish, and a young deaf-mute, a girl his age, perhaps his girlfriend, who translated the director’s explanation into sign language, and two older women who moved like wind-up dolls, without blinking or breathing, but alive, that was immediately obvious. I think that was all of us. The little old maid recounted inconsequential episodes from the life of Gogol, coloring them with a moralistic and didactic tone; she transformed him into a “positive” writer, “realist in form and national in content,” “as progressive as they come.” The timid old man dared, in a terrified voice, to ask if his influence had reached the October Revolution, and the other old man, the sour-faced man, who from the outset had assumed command, roared: “Vaprosi patom!” (Questions at the end!). Whenever Kyrim would translate into French for me something I did not understand or when I made a comment to him, the grumpy man looked at us ferociously and demanded respect for Russian culture and for the revolutionary work of the immortal hero whose house we were in. Another time, the same old man chided the young woman who was translating into sign language the old woman’s speech for the mute to be discreet, and to try not to attract attention with so many gestures, because it amounted to a boycott of culture. For a few minutes there was a tension that wasn’t particularly threatening. It was clear that the situation would have to le
ad to a comic end, which we began to provoke covertly. Upon hearing us speak French, the spinster attempted to demonstrate for our benefit knowledge that she was seldom able to display. All of a sudden, she said that Gogol wrote standing up just like Hemingway, so that his blood would better irrigate his scalp and fantasy would flourish like in an apple orchard. The splenetic man wanted to know who the person was who wrote standing up, and the woman, with mocking courtesy, replied that it was none other than Hemingway, an American writer and friend of the Soviet Union. “Answer, citizen, why have you compared him with Gogol?” And she, vindictively, responded with the Vaprosi patom! that the old man had abused until then, and she continued sketching the image of Gogol, but it was no longer at all “positive:” she referred to the young writer’s first trip abroad, when after landing at Hamburg he wrote to his mother that he had left Russia to cure a venereal disease, a terrible clap, difficult to cure in St. Petersburg, only to, at the end of the same letter, recant and ask that she never believe the fallacy that his enemies were spreading in Saint Petersburg, discrediting him to the world and especially in the eyes of his revered Pushkin so that he would abandon him in disgust. “Citizen, you are going too far in your insolence, be careful, I am warning you, you would do well to reconsider,” but the horse was already out of the barn, and she commented that some of Gogol’s contemporaries, during his years in Rome, insinuated that he was a reprobate, not because he was afraid of women, that was the least of it, but because he was marked by terrible obsessions, such as falling in love with dying youths, whose bodies were marked by an almost immediate death, without which there could be no explanation for the marvelous creations of such a mad genius, and she stopped. We all applauded enthusiastically. The irascible old man started kicking the ground. He opened a door and said: “I demand, citizen, that you confess what it is you are hiding here,” and at that moment the deaf-mute pushed him, and the two middle-aged women, who had not said anything, closed the door. We all ran out of the house-museum to the building’s central courtyard. The young woman asked for help from a doorman who approached us to remove the madman from the museum. We then saw the bizarre man ranting to himself, without any of us understanding a word. The timid old man was questioned, and said that the irate man had launched into the director and threatened to harm her if she continued to clarify for us the life of Gogol and of other Russian writers, that all he wanted was for her to tell him about an American writer who wrote standing up, to which the two women bore witness, and the madman was ordered to not cause any more scandals in public places, and to be thankful that at that hour of the day there was not a militsioner, a policeman, because if there had been, he would see how it would have gone for him to threaten that noble old woman, the custodian of Russian culture. As I write, I think I may be exaggerating, that everything happened very quickly, very routinely, crazier and more Gogolian, much funnier, and not as pretentious and sensationalist as I described it. Questions at the end! I had lunch today at Baku with diplomat friends, midlevel career officials, two of them specialists in cultural affairs. Baku is one of the best restaurants in Moscow, with food and music from Azerbaijan, a different crowd than other places, many Caucasian faces, especially Georgians. I felt as if I were witnessing a reenactment of conversations about perestroika with diplomats in Prague. Livelier, of course, because we were at the center of events. The host is a Brazilian friend, Antonio, an art connoisseur and collector, widely read, the son of a professor of aesthetics; I have shared two posts with him but only for a short time, as one of us was leaving the other was arriving; I was bound to him more by a taste for letters more than to other diplomats with whom I have dealt in different cities over the years. Angelo was there, also “cultured,” whom I met years ago in Hungary at the Italian Cultural Institute in Budapest, and whom I ran into again upon my arrival in Prague. He left a few months later; I could not imagine him in Moscow. I am indebted to him for having introduced me to two writers who have been fundamental to me. In Budapest, he spoke to me enthusiastically about a young Austrian and his works and presented me with a copy of Gargoyles in Italian, it was my first contact with Bernhard; and in Prague, on my arrival, he told me that the key to understanding the culture of Bohemia lay in Ripellino, his namesake—Angelo Maria Ripellino—whose Magic Prague he also sent me. Someone at the Mexican embassy mentioned in passing that I was going to spend a few days in Moscow and suggested to Antonio, the Brazilian, that he invite me to lunch. The reaction to world events is largely a matter of biotypes: the pessimist, the skeptic, the optimist, the person who knows that everyone around him is naïve (to avoid a cruder term), the person who believes he is the only one who possesses the truth, the person who is not interested in anything, the scholar, the slacker, the sensualist, the surly, and so on. They say that from week to week the situation here changes, that internal alliances split frequently, other unpredictable ones emerge, and there are provocateurs among the higher ranks that create panic among the masses. There has been a conspiracy to allow food to rot in the fields and not reach the cities, to prevent trains and airplanes from departing on time and wages from being available on payday. One would think that decades had passed, but in reality it was just two years ago that Gorbachev began to cautiously introduce new terms into the official discourse. At that time the Baltic republics were the best allies, and there are now conflicts with them. Forces are being dangerously radicalized. In some sectors, there’s a feeling of enthusiasm, at universities especially, among the intellectuals, but in others the resistance is stunning. The country could come to a halt with a general strike by the miners. A number of writers who during my time moved within the liberal sphere, in important positions, such as Valentin Rasputin, the Siberian, have become frightened by the pace of change; Rasputin believes that Western influence is excessive, and he has partnered with a despicable group. Like he, there are others who during the times of Khrushchev passed for liberals and are now the opposite. Some of the diplomats at lunch do not trust Gorbachev, nor the possibility that something serious is happening in the country because they think he’s a fraud, that he’s hiding behind a libertarian façade to confuse the West, he’s trying to get the Americans to be careless so that by the time they notice they’ll have already signed documents on disarmament that threaten the whole world; or because he knows very well that perestroika cannot succeed because the Russians are not educated for freedom, they do not want it, it is not a part of their culture. Deep Russia will reject all the changes because the sacred element here is essentially pagan, pantheistic: land, forest, vast rivers—Nature remains the greatest deity; Gorbachev knows all this very well, but the national excitement serves to get rid of his opponents. At every turn, there is an official who falls, a powerful politician who goes on a long technical assignment to the Arctic or as ambassador to Africa. Once he has gotten rid of all of them, he will forget about democracy, about uncensored creation and will become a czar like all the rest. I heard these and other arguments. When lunch was over, my Italian friend, Angelo, says that he never imagined he would live in such a formidable moment as this, touch history with his hand. I told him about my conversation yesterday with Markov at the Writers Union, about the Ukrainian bloc that could halt any changes. “Indeed,” he says, “they are nervous, what happened with the filmmakers has them on the edge of hysteria, they never thought that something like this could happen. No one, absolutely no one, could foresee that Bondarchuk would have to go home with his arms up in the air, not even the rebel filmmakers themselves. Perhaps the writers will not take such important steps in their conference, but they are sure to gain a widening of their creative space. If the hardline literati prevail, God forbid, they will have to make more concessions than there were during your time. Sure, they’ll make noise, they’ll threaten, they’ll seem more intolerant than ever, now that their slogans are atrocious, they express them crudely, as if Stalin and his gunman Zhdanov had risen from the dead, but that is just lip service, I suppose. They have lost a
great deal of power.” That evening, Gogol again, this time at the Sovremennik, a perfect theater, a superb performance of The Government Inspector. When the Russians are good at theater, no one surpasses them—they are supreme. Khlestakov, the false inspector general, is a dissolute young man, an imbecile and a trifler, as demanded by the text; this performance could have been merely a very amusing sketch, and that would have been fine, but this staging takes on a remarkable complexity, it becomes a game of chiaroscuros while remaining immensely entertaining. The presumed inspector, despite his apparent insignificance and vacuousness, is the incarnation of evil. In the first scene, he appears subordinate to his servant without even realizing it; his birdbrain does not allow it. Khlestakov is anemic and colorless, non-existent; the footman, on the other hand, is decisive and active. He is the brain and Khlestakov his instrument, a puppet molded out of clay. He acquires whatever shape the other characters impress on him; he obeys reflexively, changes colors immediately, the words he speaks are those the listener longs to hear. He is the voice of his master, and the master is Osip, the servant. In this staging, the almost psychopathic aspect of their relationship is accentuated, and a climate of terror that any don nadie, any nobody, can cause in his surroundings. We are witnessing a world terrorized by a grotesque lunatic, a straw doll, manipulated like a marionette, a two-bit Golem. In the theater lobby, there is a large photograph of Khlestakov in a 1926 staging executed by Meyerhold. The actor was named Erast Garin; he is characterized and dressed in a ridiculous and macabre way, an expressionist figure, similar to the character Conrad Veidt in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It reminded me for a moment of a brilliant production directed by Erwin Axer in Warsaw of Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, where he demonstrates how a band of gunmen invents a capo and transforms him into the absolute ruler of a State. The scenery shows a world crowded with yellowed bundles of official documents, torn and stained with fly droppings that add a bureaucratic stamp to the terror. The pacing is brilliant, rapid, delirious. The name of the formidable young actor who plays him is Vasily Mishchenko. A good while has gone by, I’m in my room, but I seem not even to want to leave the theater. Tomorrow I fly to Leningrad.