According to Ravich, the workers in The Recasting suffered from too much doubt, and, according to the Vecherniaia Moskva (Evening Moscow) reviewer, the wrecker in the play was “too much of a Hamlet.” Both seemed to be talking about Kaverin himself. As he wrote in his diary on September 3, 1928, “I love theater so much that life without it is like a desert. Yet sometimes I agonize to the point of believing that theater is like a silly and totally useless piece of candy and that only totally useless people can take it seriously, and so I start making perfectly fantastic plans about my future life outside the theater. I love theater, and I hate it. I love actors and I despise them.” The key, he wrote on December 7, was “to keep on working as conscience dictates.”51
Within two years, Kaverin’s studio had passed the test of modernity and was invited to move into the future House of Government. After two more years, on April 23, 1932, a special Central Committee decree ordered the dissolution of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers and “a similar change in other forms of art.” On November 13, 1932, the newly renamed State New Theater (117 employees, including 60 actors) inaugurated its new 1,300-seat auditorium. The Prologue, which included characters from some of the troupe’s best-known productions, was followed by the seven hundredth performance of Kinoroman and an official welcome ceremony featuring addresses by the deputy commissar of enlightenment, Comrade Epstein; deputy chairman of the Moscow City Soviet, Comrade Melbart; director of Odessa’s January Uprising Factory, Comrade Ershov; spokesman from the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy, Comrade Lass; and head of the All-Russian Theater Society and celebrated Maly Theater actress, A. A. Yablochkina.52
Kaverin, who had just turned thirty-five, was awarded the title of “Distinguished Artist of the Republic.” He was still subject to doubt: one month after the inaugural performance in the House of Government, he “accidentally came across” Trotsky’s My Life. “The book is filled with such passion and conviction that sometimes you can’t help having doubts: and what if all this is true? But no, it cannot be.” It could not. Following the Party’s rejection of the “Cheka methods” in the arts and owing to his own hard work of self-improvement, Kaverin had largely succeeded in recasting himself. Over the course of the summer and fall of 1932, while the theater was moving into the House, he had read Adoratsky’s On the Significance of Marxist-Leninist Theory; Lenin’s Selected Articles on the National Question (“copying out quotations chapter by chapter”), and, with particular diligence, Engels’s Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (“this one is particularly useful for the theater; I should get to know it well; I’ve taken notes on the whole book, and will proceed this way with my classics”). The old classics looked different in light of the new ones: Anna Karenina “left a completely different impression after studying Marxism. Levin’s utterly tendentious gentry point of view really sticks out in places.” Les misérables was not appropriate for the stage either: “I don’t see much point in it because I am wary of abstract romanticism and humanism.” Nothing, in the end, could compare to Lenin as depicted in N. K. Krupskaia’s memoirs. “The book touched me greatly. It forces you to think about such endless, unswerving self-abnegation in the service of an idea. As a human being, Lenin seems to be, in this sense, an ideal, … an amazing union of philosophical thought and daily activity.”53
The first season in the House did not go well. According to Smirnova (who, as the studio’s founder, also became a Distinguished Artist on November 13), “in the [old] small theater, the audience was able to see and hear everything. The actors were used to speaking in normal voices, applying light makeup, acting intimately, and conveying slight nuances by means of gestures and facial expressions. Neither the directors nor the actors took this into account when they pushed for moving from a crowded space into a large theater.” In the new building, Kinoroman, in the words of Kaverin’s friend and student, B. G. Golubovsky, “got lost in the vast expanse of the never-ending stage. The barely audible dialogue did not reach the audience; the only people laughing were those who had seen the show many times before.” Kaverin called the opening night a bad omen. “The old shows did not take off on the enormous new stage; removed from the intimate space in Gnezdnikovsky Alley, they lost their charm.”54
The new show, The Other Side of the Heart, did not take off either. Based on a Ukrainian-language novel by Yuri Smolich, it was a tale of doubles: two men who share the name Klim Shestipalyi. One “resembles a wolf, but a cunning wolf. His distinguishing characteristic is the degenerate’s low forehead, with the hairline beginning almost at the eyebrows.” The stage directions refer to him by his last name, “Shestipalyi” or “Sixfingers,” which, according to a popular construction-plot convention, indicates the stamp of the beast. The other Klim—known simply as “Klim”—is “lanky, awkward, and absent-minded. His distinguishing features are his eyes: huge, with long eyelashes, radiant, naive, and ever ready to light up with joy, excitement, and enthusiasm.”
The action begins shortly before the Revolution and ends during the Five-Year Plan. Sixfingers follows Klim everywhere, the way a last name follows a first. His job is to tempt, and possibly to reveal. Klim is a peasant who “parts with his pigs, breaks with his family, and leaves for the city to study and become a doctor.” Once there, he continues to study while his friends join the Revolution. During the Civil War, he (still shadowed by Sixfingers) goes to fight—briefly and absentmindedly—on the side of the Reds. Arrested by the Whites for speculation, he saves his Bolshevik fiancée by claiming that she, too, is merely a trader. After the war, he lives abroad for a time among Cossack émigrés, who beat him up. Back in the Soviet Union, he reunites with his friends and fiancée and resumes his studies.
The last act begins in Kharkov: “In the background is the scaffolding of socialist construction. Then, before the eyes of the audience, the scaffolding disappears and the socialist city takes shape behind it.” When Klim has only one exam left before graduation, he, his friends, his fiancée, and Sixfingers (who has been posing as a Soviet activist) decide to hire a maid. The old peasant woman who answers the ad turns out to be Klim’s mother. “Angry, threatening, her arms akimbo,” she tells him that their pigs have been collectivized and that his father has been sent to the Solovki concentration camp for attempting to burn down the house of the “whore” who presided over their ruin. Once inside the apartment, they realize that the “whore” is Klim’s fiancée and that her acolytes are his friends and roommates. Stunned, Klim drops his mask and reveals what he has been hiding “on the other side of his heart.” “The revolution has kept me from making something of myself!” he screams. “It has taken everything away from me! It has destroyed my life!”55
By the time he pulls himself together, it is too late: he has shown himself to be the enemy. His fiancée tells their friend, the undoubting Bolshevik, Makar Tverdokhleb (“Hardbread”): “Only yesterday I was urging our comrades to be vigilant, and look at me now.” Sixfingers calls the secret police and reports on Klim’s “brazen counterrevolutionary display.” Makar Tverdokhleb orders Sixfingers to sit down and wait for the secret police. Curtain.56
The censor ordered Kaverin to “tone down the kulak hysterics” in the final act. Even after the revisions, however, most critics were not convinced. At a special discussion in the Theater Department of the Commissariat of Enlightenment on December 17, 1933, one of them, a Comrade Vinogradov, called the whole premise erroneous. “You would like to show Klim as a class enemy under the mask of romanticism and realism. The audience likes Klim, the audience believes in him and sympathizes with him when he makes mistakes. It feels sorry for Klim and thinks that his mistakes are the result of his weakness. And then, suddenly, in the last act, in the starkest—I would even say, RAPPist—way possible, you proclaim him to be a class enemy. Who will believe it? No one will believe it because the dramatic material does not plant a single seed for such a transformation.” In fact, said another participant, “what stands out in the minds of the spe
ctators who have seen the three previous acts is not the biological connection to the mother, which you try to demonstrate, but the development of the character that they have been observing for three hours. The spectators know Klim as someone who has been wavering for three hours, but is always on the side of the Reds, and then, suddenly, his mother comes and he is reborn. The spectators do not believe it.” The trust between the theater and the audience had been broken. “This is not theatrical deception,” argued another critic, “this is a swindle. Deception is achieved by more complex means, but if you try to swindle your audience, all it is left with at the end of the show is a sense of disappointment.” According to a certain Comrade Uspensky, “a story has been making the rounds about an old Jew, who happened to be sitting next to a Party member. At the beginning of the fourth act, he suddenly says: ‘There’s something fishy going on here’ [laughter].” “So why does the Fourth Act feel false? Because every morning, our spectator reads in the newspapers about the White Sea–Baltic Canal and the construction of the Volga–Don Canal, and reads various letters from former wreckers, … and so this spectator knows that, in our epoch, human regeneration is an everyday occurrence. But in this show, he sees the opposite: he sees that, in spite of everything, he cannot be reborn, cannot become a useful member of society. It is no wonder the spectator feels that the ending is false.”57
Creation stories included conversion stories; conversion stories—successful or not—had to be psychologically motivated. According to the majority opinion, Klim’s character “cannot be considered from the point of view of social categories. He is a pathological character, not a social category.” There were some obvious enemies, like Sixfingers; there were some obvious paragons, “who do not oppose the personal to the collective.” And then, “lost in between these two sets of characters, is a blue-eyed boy named Klim.” He was the only nontransparent character, the only candidate for conversion, the only protagonist whose motivations needed to be understood. He might yet be saved (like those “Canal Army Fighters” baptized by Aron Solts), or he might be damned (like Ehrenburg’s Volodia Safonov in The Second Day)—but he could not simply switch masks. Vigilance was about psychological insight, not relentless paranoia.58
Kaverin defended his creation along two interconnected lines. One had to do with his theatrical credo, his desire “to work with a text that has an edge to it, that rises somewhat above the pedestrian realism and naturalism that reigns in most other theaters and that we consider unacceptable and refuse to make our own.” The audience was shocked because the theater had done its job. “When the old Jew mentioned by Uspensky says, ‘there’s something fishy going on here,’ he is saying exactly what we want him to say. We know that when the fourth act starts, the spectator has to say to himself: ‘this makes no sense.’ There are moments on stage when we say: ‘pause.’ This pause should make the spectator believe that the actors have forgotten their lines.” The idea, it is true, is “to deceive the spectator,” but “only at a certain moment in the show, as a way of breaking with existing theatrical conventions.”59
Kaverin’s other argument had to do with the ideological concept of the enemy and with his own efforts at self-recasting. Most of those present were of nonproletarian origin. None mentioned, and perhaps none thought relevant, that Fedor Kaverin, an intelligentsia fellow traveler, was “soft and trusting, like a child”; that he had “no practical sense, no shrewdness, and no toughness”; and that he was “always excited about something, and not just excited, but enraptured to the point of ecstasy, of delirious infatuation.” There was a special reason why he wanted to stage The Other Side of the Heart:
This Klim—this soft, trusting Klim who is so quick to fall under the influence of others and so quick to escape it—this Klim struck us all, including the actors, as a particularly familiar enemy because this Klim, lit up by the suns of his eyes, still lives in many of us. This Klim may be a greater enemy than Sixfingers because Sixfingers is an obvious enemy, whereas Klim is someone we still feel within ourselves, someone we are still trying very hard to completely strangle within ourselves, but have not been able to completely strangle yet. We realize that this Klim still lives in our attitudes toward our roles, toward each other, and toward our work. This Klim deserves more of our hatred and our anger.60
A few speakers supported Kaverin. The actress Maria Boichevskaia (herself the daughter of a high tsarist official) said that she had realized right away that Klim would turn out to be an enemy. A Comrade Garbuzov said that Klim had not been executed yet and might still be reborn (“I can foresee a whole story of inner struggle, a whole history of regeneration,” an “Act Five”). But it was Kaverin’s colleague, S. I. Amaglobeli, the recently arrived and soon-to-be-retired administrative director of New State Theater, who spelled out the implications of Kaverin’s position:
Politically, this show is done correctly because none of us has a fully transparent soul. If we take a transverse section of our souls, including that of Comrade Vinogradov, we would find positive and negative traits—not good and evil in the general sense, but, as part of the complex creation of the socialist era, some enduring elements of individualism….
We can see that each part of the show plays with the spectator the way a cat plays with a mouse. The cat lets the mouse loose, and then pounces on it again. Our theater does the same thing. In this show, it offers a story, then grabs the spectator, confounds that story, and proclaims that it is nothing but bourgeois individualism. It is a good device, but it is painful for those who find themselves in the role of the mouse.
Yes, there is the White Sea–Baltic Canal construction. And from that we can conclude that wreckers are being reborn because our Soviet reality is so bounteous that even our enemies can be reborn…. But does that mean that we will not be watching every move they make? Of course not. It would be a mistake to say that we should not be extra vigilant toward those who engage not in deception, like Klim Sixfingers, but in self-deception, like the other Klim.61
The general Bolshevik conception of sin was identical to St. Augustine’s (“a thought, words and deed against the Eternal Law”). The key Marxist innovation consisted of the discovery that original sin (derived from the primeval division of labor and perpetuated through class exploitation) applied in different degrees to different social groups. Various nonproletarian categories were to be subjected to “concentrated violence,” close surveillance, and special requirements concerning the “inner struggle” in “act five.” This did not mean, however, that proletarians were free of the “enduring elements of individualism.” The difference was one of degree: no one’s soul was fully transparent, and no one’s thoughts adhered unswervingly to the Eternal Law. As Bukharin put it, “even some relatively wide circles of the working class bear the seal of commodity capitalism. This inevitably leads to the need for coercive discipline…. Even the proletarian avant-garde, consolidated in the party of the insurrection, must establish such coercive self-discipline in its own ranks; it is not strongly felt by many elements of this avant-garde because it coincides with internal motives, but it exists nonetheless.”62
No one’s internal motives, including Bukharin’s, coincided with the Eternal Law; everyone, with the possible exception of the Eternal Law’s ex officio representative, was a mouse. Bolshevik soteriology, like its Christian rival and predecessor, assumed that full perfection in this world was impossible. Only with the coming of Communism would the seal of commodity capitalism be wiped off, the enduring elements of individualism, eliminated, and the cycle of eternal return, broken forever. The real question—for all theories of salvation—is what happens in the meantime. How can one prepare oneself and help others prepare? Amaglobeli’s (perfectly Christian) answer was that everyone—to varying degrees—was to submit, and subject others, to permanent surveillance and relentless repentance. This was obviously correct in the abstract, but what did it mean for literary plots, theater performances, and individual lives? As Bukharin’s fellow-Rightist
, Mikhail Tomsky, said at the Sixteenth Party Congress, “it seems to me, comrades, that it is a little difficult to be in the role of a permanent penitent.” Sixfingers could not be trusted; the other Klim could not be trusted; Tomsky could not be trusted; and, since no one’s soul was fully transparent, the undoubting Bolshevik Makar Hardbread could not be trusted, either. If “words are meaningless,” concluded Tomsky, “then we must stop talking altogether. What is the point of talking?”
Most of the participants in the discussion of The Other Side of the Heart in December 1933 did not stop talking. A solution, of sorts, was provided by the deputy head of the Theater Department of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, Pavel Ivanovich Novitsky, who presided over the conference. “The question of the class enemy, the double-dealer, the traitor, the timeserver … must be addressed,” he said in his concluding remarks, “but I insist that the question of the class enemy is not the same question as that of the remnants of bourgeois and petit bourgeois mentality in each one of us.” There was a difference between defeating the class enemy and overcoming the enduring elements of individualism, a difference that was not directly related to class origins. “If the theater wanted to show the class enemy in each of us, in our morals and everyday behavior, if it wanted to unmask many of us, it went about it the wrong way.”63
Novitsky was proposing a version of Thomas Aquinas’s distinction between mortal sins, which involve a deliberate rejection of the Eternal Law, and venial sins, which are a matter of carelessness and disorder. The story of Klim falls into the second category. “I insist that the blue-eyed Klim, as a dramatic character, is evolving in the direction of Soviet reality. For me, this is a fact…. And if he is evolving in the direction of Soviet reality, then the theme of the class enemy has been replaced by another theme, that of the possibility of class rebirth.” The play’s denouement betrayed the spectator by betraying its own “aesthetic texture”:
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