Levin is “a lonely man,” but he is not alone. Shortly before dawn, the station telephone rings:
“Hello, Red Line stationmaster speaking.”
“And this is Kaganovich speaking. How are you, Comrade Levin? And why did you pick up the phone so quickly? How did you manage to get dressed? Weren’t you asleep?”
“No, Lazar Moiseevich, I was just about to go to bed.”
“Just about! Most people go to bed at night, not in the morning.… Listen, Emmanuel Semenovich, if you ruin your health down there at the Red Line, I’ll charge you for the loss of a thousand locomotives. I’m going to be checking on your sleep, but don’t make me be your nurse.”
The remote, kind, deep voice fell silent for a while. Levin also stood silently: he had long loved his Moscow interlocutor, but could never, under any circumstances, express his feelings directly: there was no way to do it without being tactless and indelicate.
“It must be night in Moscow, too, Lazar Moiseevich,” said Levin quietly. “Most people don’t go to bed in the morning there, either.” Kaganovich understood and burst out laughing.11
Levin is not alone. Kaganovich is to him what he is to Polutorny; he is to Kaganovich what his maid is to him; and Kaganovich is prepared to be his nurse, if need be. Such is the immortality of the people bound together by the tracks running from the Red Line. Such, in particular, is the immortality of those who do not sleep when others do. The following night, an hour after Levin goes to bed (“not for the pleasure of repose, but for the sake of the morrow”), he is awakened by a call from the station office: “They just contacted us from Moscow to ask about your health and whether you were asleep. As if you were a great, immortal being!” A midnight call to see if Levin is asleep is not just foolishness: it is a reminder, as well as a confirmation, that Levin is a great, immortal being. “Levin sat on his bed for a while, got dressed, and went back to the station.”12
Andrei Platonov
Platonov and Elena Usievich (in whose House of Government apartment he was a frequent guest) seemed to believe that he had finally grasped the true spirit of the Revolution and perhaps even solved the mystery of Bolshevik immortality. They were wrong. A year later, Red Virgin Soil published an essay by the influential critic, A. S. Gurvich, in which he argued that Platonov’s new work was as “profoundly erroneous” as his “Doubting Makar” and “For Future Use.” “Whatever we may have been told about the socialist content of the story ‘Immortality,’ we see in its protagonist an ascetic, a self-denying penitent.” Platonov’s Bolshevik was another one of his beggars and holy fools, and Platonov’s vision of immortality was “an absurdity, dead end, and slander.” “Does he realize that his ‘love’ can only benefit those who hate, and that his mournful, sorrowful pose can attract only those who try to ‘grow into socialism’ in the guise of little jesuses?” Platonov’s characters, according to Gurvich, were divided into those who wanted to abolish the state, like Makar, and those who wanted to merge with the state, like Levin. They were either “poor Evgenys” or the bronze from which the Galloping Horseman was made. In reality, however—and especially in the new reality of unfolding socialism—the great work of construction and the simple human joys were inseparable. “More than that, they presuppose each other.” Socialism brings life, and life’s “miracle-working sources” include, in equal measure, “the Bronze Horseman and poor Evgeny, the big picture and private Makar, the roar of the train and the quiet birdsong.”13
Platonov, Usievich, and the editorial board of the Literaturnaia gazeta objected to the harshness of Gurvich’s criticism and pointed to signs of conversion and rebirth, but Platonov’s career never recovered. In Gurvich’s view, the problem was not his criticism, but Platonov’s lukewarmness. “His popularity is limited to a narrow circle of literary specialists” because he is “anti-national,” and he is anti-national because he lacks “power, depth, and breadth in the depiction of human emotion.” In Russia, the most national of poets was Pushkin. Platonov had represented him as “our comrade.” Gurvich represented him as a reproach to Platonov: “Platonov understands Pushkin’s great dream, which makes him ‘our comrade’—a dream about a time ‘when nothing will prevent a man from releasing the sacred energy of his art, feelings, and intelligence.’ Pushkin believes, writes Platonov rapturously, that ‘a brief, ordinary human life is quite sufficient for the accomplishment of all conceivable goals and a full enjoyment of all the passions. Those who are not able to do it will not be able to do it even if they become immortal.’ Do not these words spell the death sentence for the ‘immortal’ Levin?”14
■ ■ ■
Leonid Leonov (Courtesy of N. A. Makarov)
A much more serious attempt to tackle the problem of Bolshevik immortality was Leonid Leonov’s The Road to Ocean. Leonov was the same age as Platonov (both turned thirty-six in 1935, when The Road to Ocean was published), but his career had been moving in the opposite direction: from unsound (merchant) social roots and “fellow-traveler” literary beginnings to the vanguard of socialist realism following the acclaim of The Sot’ and the effect of his speech at the writers’ congress about the “great planner” and the small mirror. The Road to Ocean was meant to mark the culmination of his professional and spiritual journey and the appearance of the great planner as a literary hero commensurate with Faust (in a mirror commensurate with the great planner). As Leonov said many years later, “that novel is the pinnacle of my faith”: “I wrote The Road to Ocean in a state of spiritual exaltation, with an almost physical sensation of the grandeur of our accomplishments and aspirations.” In the opinion of Voronsky, his patron in the 1920s, “Leonov creates and sees types. In this sense, he has preserved more of the sacred fire of the classics than his contemporaries. He is in a position to connect modern literature to the classics by a strong, straight thread.” After 1934, nothing was more important than the thread connecting modern literature to the classics, and no one seemed in a better position to create and see the new hero than Leonid Leonov. The challenge was to move into the new era by returning to the most classic of genres. “Only a genuine tragedy,” wrote Leonov, “can stake out a place for the new man in the gallery of world characters.”15
The Road to Ocean is about a railway line from Moscow to the Pacific—and, at the same time, “a road to the future, the dream, the ideal, to Communism.” What makes The Road to Ocean a tragedy is that its central character (the railroad’s political commissar and an Old Bolshevik) Aleksei Kurilov, learns that he has cancer. The figure of an Old Bolshevik dying in peacetime had appeared, inauspiciously, in Pilniak’s Tale of the Unextinguished Moon, and then again in various construction novels, in the secondary but structurally important role of Moses on the bank of the Jordan. Now the time had come to move him to the center of the plot and organize the world around his approaching demise and presumed immortality.16
The person Leonov had in mind when writing the novel (“to some degree, a prototype”)—the person he interviewed, accompanied on inspection tours, and eventually became close to—was the director of the Moscow–Kazan Railroad, Ivan Kuchmin. Born in 1891 to a peasant family in the Volga Region, Kuchmin enrolled in a teachers’ college, joined a Marxist reading group, discovered Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus, and taught for two years in a village school before becoming a full-time revolutionary. During the Civil War he distinguished himself as the organizer of the defense of Uralsk in May–June 1919 and as a commissar in Ukraine, Turkestan, and Poland. During the First Five-Year Plan, he served as chair of the Stalingrad District Executive Committee and then first secretary of the Stalingrad Party Committee. In August 1931, he was transferred to Moscow, first as deputy chair of the Moscow Province Executive Committee and then, in August 1933, as political commissar and then director of the Moscow–Kazan Railway. Kuchmin’s wife, Stefania Arkhipovna, also of Volga Region peasant background, taught biology at the Institute of Chemical Engineering and presided over the Moscow–Kazan Railroad’s Women’s Council. The Kuc
hmins lived in a five-room apartment in the House of Government (Apt. 226, in the prestigious Entryway 12, facing the river) with their two children (Oleg, born in 1922, and Elena, in 1926) and Stefania’s sister Ania, who did all the housework. Ivan’s study and the large dining room were rarely used; the other rooms included the parents’ bedroom, Oleg’s room, and the room shared by Ania and Elena. During the famine in the Volga Region, many of the Kuchmins’ relatives came to stay with them for long periods of time; Stefania’s (and Ania’s) younger brother, Shura, came to stay for good, but a few months later accidentally killed himself playing with Ivan’s revolver. Elena, who had been the one to discover Shura’s bleeding body, was taken to the Leonovs’ apartment on Gorky Street, where she spent three days. The Kuchmins and the Leonovs were also dacha neighbors (in Barvikha, across a small ravine from the Osinskys). It was at the dacha that Leonid and Ivan first met and where they used to go on long walks and talk about The Road to Ocean.17
Ivan Kuchmin
In the novel, Aleksei Kurilov is immediately recognizable as an Old Bolshevik and a reflection of the iconic Stalin. “He was a large and somber man; only rarely was his greying, waterfall moustache disturbed by a smile.” He has “the shoulders of a stevedore and the forehead of Socrates,” and his eyes, at closer inspection, appear “not unfriendly.” His past and thoughts explain his appearance—two sacred images are “merged” in his mind: that of Lenin and that of his former teacher, the metal caster Arsentyich (a double of Osinsky’s “Blacksmith” who, in an extra reference to Hephaestus, walks with a cane). Kurilov’s last name (“Smoker”) and his ever-present pipe reinforce, and further merge, the Stalinist, Promethean, and proletarian allusions. His early Bolshevik education has included both Pushkin and Shakespeare.18
He lives on the top floor of the House of Government. One morning, the narrator comes over for one of their regular conversations. “We are at the window looking out. The house is tall. If you press your cheek to the frame, you can just see a corner of the Kremlin from Kurilov’s window. Today it appears stooped and a bit diminished. The sky is overcast, although it was below freezing last night. There is a gigantic plume of black smoke stretching from the nearby power station to the faded gold of the Kremlin. Snowflakes hover in the air, slowly looking for a place to land.”19
Kurilov embodies the landscape—the Kremlin, the House of Government, the Big Stone Bridge—and looms over it. He is a “man-mountain, from whose summit the future can be seen,” “a bridge over which people pass into the future,” and “an enormous planet” in whose orbit others circle, like so many “insignificant satellites.” Among them are his quiet wife, Katerinka, who is bound to him by a relationship of “honest and sober friendship,” and whose death early in the novel presages Kurilov’s own passing; his sister Klavdia, a “dry, self-willed, straightforward” Party inquisitor who has “no personal biography” beyond “public anniversaries”; another sister, Frosia, who marries the industrialist, Omelichev, and is punished for it with a deaf-mute son; Omelichev himself, whose function is to provide “malicious and intelligent criticism,” but whose mirror is “too small to reflect Kurilov’s entire expanse”; and Kurilov’s prey, double, and antagonist, Gleb Protoklitov (“First-Named”), who has three doubles of his own: a secret one in Leonid Leonov, whose biography he has partially appropriated, and two obvious ones, including his redeemable self and brother, Ilya Protoklitov. Ilya is a surgeon married to a theater actress named Liza, who aborts his child; Liza has an uncle, a former Latin teacher named Pokhvisnev, who prophesies the end of the world; Pokhivsnev has his own double, the former director of Ilya’s gymnasium, who lives in an “old-regime catacomb” amidst the rotting leftovers of the human past. And so on.20
Eva Levina-Rozengolts, The Power Station in Winter (1930–31) View from Apt. 237 (Courtesy of E. B. Levina)
Kurilov’s planet has many more satellites, which have their own satellites, which tend to travel in pairs along intersecting orbits and clash occasionally, producing minor and major catastrophes. But Kurilov’s most important relationship is with his own mortality. The novel begins at the scene of a train wreck. In the confusion, one of the surviving passengers, the former Latin teacher, Pokhvisnev, drops his book, which Kurilov picks up. It is a history of world religions.
The gods were fashioned from fear, hatred, flattery, and despair; the material at hand determined the face of the god. There was a winged one with an all-seeing eye in the back of its head so no man could attack from behind; another in the image of an aloof woman decorated with armored breasts another in the shape of a hairy nostril inhaling sacrificial smoke, and yet another in the form of a misty sphere full of slanted eyes in perpetual motion. There was a god with thirty hands, according to the number of human trades, a dog-headed god, a bull, a Cyclops, an elephant with a sacred spot on its forehead (and it will be amusing to see what shape this image will take in Kurilov’s mind over the course of the next few months), a she-wolf, a many-headed hydra, a prickly African Euphorbia with poisonous milky sap, and finally, a simple block of wood painted in sacrificial blood with narrow Ostyak eyes and a greedy mouth big enough to devour itself.
Next comes Hellas. “Rosy-heeled goddesses cavorted in laurel groves; uncouth giants, Homer’s playthings, drunkard gods, swindler gods, and gods of the military profession feasted in the company of assorted relatives and upwardly mobile proletarians on a tall mountain in the middle of the world.” But it is Charon, the ferryman of the dead, whom Kurilov finds most interesting: “Out of the luxuriant animal chaos came the first sad glimpse of self-knowledge. Having learned the smile, humanity learned to fear its absence. Not being familiar with the living conditions in antiquity, Kurilov imagined Charon after the Russian fashion. Round-faced and pock-marked, his legs wrapped in soldier’s puttees, Charon sat in the stern of his leaky boat on sackcloth he had spread for himself, rolling cheap cigarettes and fouling the air; a worn army canteen—to bail out water that seeped through the cracks—lay at his feet.”21
What had happened to mankind happens to Kurilov, too. Out of the luxuriant animal chaos comes the first glimpse of self-knowledge. “I have lost faith in my body,” he tells a doctor, who has a photograph of Chekhov in his study. “I’m afraid something is rusted inside.” The doctor confirms the presence of rust, telling him that he has a cancerous tumor in his kidney. Kurilov’s pains continue to grow worse until, one day, he loses consciousness and then discovers that his pipe—his manhood, divine attribute, and human essence—has been stolen. “‘What do you need a pipe for, now, brother?!’ the soldier Charon from Pokhvisnev’s book seems to be saying to Kurilov.”22
There are several possible paths to immortality. The most obvious one is through formal memorialization: the deputy editor of the railroad newspaper, Alesha Peresypkin, researches the road’s prerevolutionary origins; a “regional patriot” writes a history of the Omelichev family fortune; a young woman named Marina, who works for the railroad propaganda department, writes Kurilov’s biography; and the narrator, who is also a character, playfully and self-consciously writes a history of them all. Pokhvisnev, the Latin teacher, walks around with a history of world religions; Ilya Protoklitov, the surgeon, collects clocks; and his former teacher, the professional historian, collects everything.
All things end up in the “shimmering, ever-wakeful Ocean.” Those who find their historians live longer and perhaps fuller lives. Kurilov, a human mountain and bridge to Ocean, will have a posthumous existence worthy of his size. The problem is that histories, including Leonid Leonov’s own The Road to Ocean, cannot be trusted. Marina, whom Kurilov calls his “Plutarch,” wants heroic deeds, not a life he would recognize as his own. He mocks her by reciting “an edifying tale” she might or might not recognize as quasi-sacred: “I was born fifty years ago of honest and pious parents.”23
Much more reliable are Kurilov’s old comrades: the living monuments to their common struggle. “When I look at your faces,” he tells them at his fiftieth
birthday party, “those dear old funny faces of yours, I see myself reflected in them many times over…. And if I fall out of this circle, your friendship will remain unchanged. It binds you by an iron and rational discipline; it does not spoil or decay.” It does not decay, but it may end. One difficulty with this kind of immortality is that there is (as Kurilov’s iron sister, Klavdia, keeps reminding them) no guarantee against betrayal; another is the fact that Kurilov and his friends belong to a particular generation, and that none of them will outlive Kurilov for long. The biggest question is not whether they will continue to live in each other’s memories, but whether those who come after them will keep their memory from being turned into “edifying tales.” Their successors will have their own memories to worry about. “We may be self-taught,” says one of Kurilov’s comrades, “but we know this much of Hegel and Heraclitus: the stream does not stop, and it carries with it whatever is needed for life to continue.” Kurilov is not convinced, but the conversation is interrupted by a telephone call. Kurilov is needed at another crash site, but his back pain is so severe, he cannot move.24
The most obvious, but also most treacherous, path to immortality is love. Most of Leonov’s House of Government readers would have read Goethe’s Faust, and would remember that the temptation of friendship is followed by the greatest temptation of all (at least as far as the devil was concerned). They would also remember that before Faust can meet Margaret, he has to drink the witch’s magic potion and become young again. Kurilov finds true love soon after turning fifty. “Here, at the sunset of his life, love was becoming a powerful and as yet unexplored means of physiotherapy. At any other time he would have thought it was magic. For two days in a row, it seemed to him that he had completely forgotten about his attacks. He was now counting the symptoms of his rejuvenation by the dozen.”25
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