The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  This, of course, is the wrong kind of immortality. When his closest friend, Tyutchev, tells him that it is “precisely at this biological crossroads between old age and a woman” that “the final boundary can be seen,” Kurilov objects vehemently. “Not true! It was not death he feared, but dying: losing the chance to influence the world and becoming an object of ridicule for his enemies and a burden and object of pity for his friends!” Immortality is not about his own eternal youth—it is about the “renewal of our planet.” Tyutchev, who believes otherwise (and is named after the poet-author of “The Last Love,” as well as “Spring Is on Its Way”), is a theater director and famous wit who turns Kurilov’s birthday celebration into a magic show (and Kurilov’s House of Government apartment, into Auersbach’s cellar).26

  Kurilov thwarts the devil by making a speech about “iron and rational discipline.” In due course, his speech is interrupted by a summons from the Road; his journey to the Road is interrupted by an attack of pain; his pain is cured by love; and love seems, by its very nature, incompatible with iron and rational discipline. Faced with a choice between two young women—Marina, his simple-minded proletarian biographer, and Liza, a talentless theater actress anxious for access to the all-powerful Tyutchev—Kurilov chooses the latter. Love proves redemptive, as well as blind, and Liza grows more mature as Kurilov grows younger. “What she needed now to be happy was not the coveted interview with Tyutchev, but just a little approval from Kurilov.” She tells him that she would like to have his son, and just as they are about to consummate their love, he is incapacitated by another attack and loses his pipe for good. The test of love ends in the same way as the test of friendship.27

  Liza cannot give Kurilov a son, but Marina, whose name suggests a connection to Ocean, already has a son named Ziamka, to whom Kurilov has become attached. “Ziamka” is short for “Izmail” (Ishmael), which suggests illegitimacy, but that may be the point: true immortality is not about your own children or even your adopted children (Kurilov has taken in two homeless boys): it is about all the children, all those who will travel down the Road he is building.

  Once, on a moonlit night, Kurilov opens the window of his office, looks down at the garden below, and sees a whispering young couple under a snakelike tree branch. “At this point it might be nice to whistle (fingers in mouth) just as the Lord once did when faced with two such organisms. The famous exile would be repeated; the spell of the garden would be broken; and not they, but Kurilov himself would be that much poorer.” The couple keeps reappearing in various guises; the day before his operation, Kurilov runs into them again. “Every time he thought of them, he ran into them—everywhere—at all the great construction projects … or at the May First demonstrations (walking hand in hand past the reviewing stands) … or at his railway station (perhaps on their way to the mysterious city of Komsomolsk, halfway to Ocean). There was a peculiar regularity to their appearance.”28

  In one of the novel’s central episodes, Kurilov and the industrialist Omelichev reproduce the dialogue between Father Nikolai and the young revolutionary in Voronsky’s In Search of the Water of Life. The conversation takes place during the Civil War. Omelichev, who is married to Kurilov’s sister, Frosia, shelters him from the Whites, but accuses him of blindness:

  “You don’t understand the people. Take everything away from me, but leave me a tiny plot, a tiny plot of land … and I’ll grow a miracle on it. You’ll see a tree and birds building their nests amidst golden apples. But this plot must belong to me, my son, my grandson, my great-grandsons.”

  “You seek immortality, Omelichev … but property is a flimsy stairway to it. And you don’t even have a son yet.”

  Omelichev ignored his mockery. “I know man as well as you do. He becomes a magician when he takes charge of his own life. No one will give him and his whelps anything when they go hungry, and he knows it, the son of a bitch. And so he looks around, racks his brains, comes up with solutions, and rejoices.”29

  Both are proven wrong. Omelichev cannot conceal his tenderness toward other people’s children (even before his first son dies and his second, Luka, is born deaf and mute). Kurilov “loses faith in his body” and hears the call of kinship. When Frosia asks for permission to stay for a few days in his House of Government apartment, he tells her that she should be ashamed of herself. “We’re family, after all,” he says. Iron Klavdia warns him that Frosia’s husband, now a fugitive from Soviet justice, might show up unexpectedly to visit his child. “He might,” answers Kurilov. “The revolution did not abolish the rights of fathers.”30

  Omelichev does show up unexpectedly, and he and Kurilov have another version of their first conversation. Their roles are reversed, but the arguments are the same. Meanwhile, Kurilov is being domesticated, and even Klavdia, who lives seven floors below, is beginning to show signs of sisterly love:

  Frosia’s vigorous housekeeping had affected Kurilov’s whole apartment. The furniture stood solidly where it belonged, the scrubbed windows admitted twice as much light as before, and on top of the bookcases, where the sickly Katerinka never looked, not a speck of dust remained. Dinner was ready at a fixed hour, and Frosia scolded her brother whenever he was late. Klavdia came to see him more often, but each time it would appear to be only a chance visit. Walking slowly through the rooms, she could see all the little signs of what had been going on in her absence. Opening the sideboard, she would find new things instead of the old broken, ill-matched pieces of china; glancing into the bathroom, she would see a clean, shiny floor. Life was returning to this uninhabited barn.31

  Could it be that paradise was hidden in plain sight—in the garden outside Kurilov’s office window or even in his own House of Government apartment? Kurilov does not think so. Young couples on their way to Ocean must pass through Komsomolsk, and his job is to prepare the tracks. The key to true immortality is faith in the coming of Communism. Through a thousand different channels, the flood of the Revolution is flowing into the shimmering, ever-wakeful Ocean. Kurilov is justified by faith alone: nothing on earth is stronger than death—except his dream of Ocean: “A man of his time, Kurilov always tried to visualize the distant lodestar toward which his Party was moving. This was Kurilov’s only form of leisure. Of course, he could fantasize only within the narrow confines of the books for which he managed to steal time from work or sleep. And this imaginary world, more material and more adapted to human needs than the Christian paradise, was, in his view, crowned by the outer limit of knowledge—non-death.”32

  Four times over the course of the novel—three times after suffering bouts of pain and, finally, after dying—Kurilov (“the statesman”), accompanied by the author (“the poet”), travels to the Ocean of his imagination. The rust inside his body can deprive him of love, friendship, and fatherhood, but it cannot take away his Party’s lodestar or his ability to visualize it. “When our eyes failed, and the insight of the poet equaled the perspicacity of the statesman, we also resorted to fiction. It served as a wobbly bridge across the abyss, where torrents rush—in an unknown direction.”33

  The future consists of two ages. First comes the “indescribable slaughter,” borrowed, in equal measure, from “the poet from the little island of Patmos” and from Kurilov’s favorite stories about South Sea pirates. “I followed with interest the evolution of characters from an old childhood book,” comments the narrator in a footnote. “I recognized the words ‘Pernambuco,’ ‘Fortaleza,’ and Aracajú,’ which sounded like birds calling to one another in a tropical forest at noon.” The statesman concocts a future apocalypse out of the colonial adventure books he has read, and the poet can reproduce that apocalypse because he has read the same books. If the surgeon, Ilya Protoklitov, were to join them, he, too, would feel at home in Pernambuco. The stamps he collected as a child represented “giraffes, coral islands with horseshoe-shaped lagoons, palm trees, black-mustachioed South American generals, pyramids, and sailboats. All these were pictures from the boys’ world of James Fenimor
e Cooper, Louis Jacolliot, and Louis Henri Boussenard.” Most of Leonov’s readers and Kurilov’s neighbors among the House of Government leaseholders had grown up in this boys’ world, and so had their sons (and so would their sons’ sons). Jacolliot would go out of fashion, but Cooper and Boussenard (of Le Capitaine Casse-Cou fame) could be found in every apartment, next to new Soviet editions of Jules Verne, Mayne Reid, Jack London, Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson, and O. Henry.34

  Beyond Armageddon and Aracajú lies Ocean, which, on closer inspection (and not unexpectedly, given the original blueprints), turns out to be a city. “We gave this city the generic name of Ocean because this capacious word contains a maternal sense with regard to the seas of all ranks, which, in turn, are united by the brotherly ties of the rivers and canals.” From the center of the city, “if you walk from the embankment down Stalin and Yangtze Streets past Academy Square,” you can see Unity Hill with its huge fountain called “The Tree of Water.” The narrator mentions a few science-fiction staples, including winged canoes and multi-level streets (“the ancient tendency of architecture to concern itself with the view from above has finally received its definitive, harmonious expression”), but keeps the list relatively short (“reports sent by early explorers are always sketchy and inaccurate”). The real question is how different life in Ocean is from life in the House of Government. The poet finds “the usual proportion of loafers, fools, and malcontents.” The statesman “emphatically denies the existence in this city of the future of any dust, flies, or accidents—or even the various minor evils that are inevitable in any human community.” The poet is proven right when the two are “sucked into a gigantic magnetic dust collector” and attacked by a swarm of “unbearable boys.” Kurilov later claims that this episode never happened, but it is the narrator who has the last word. The future belongs to the poet. Mayakovsky’s question has been resolved and Lenin, quietly, proven wrong. Bedbugs are indestructible, after all.35

  But what about Kurilov? His roommate in the Kremlin hospital hears the stories he tells Ziamka and accuses him of not being a true atheist. “Atheism is ignorance of God,” he says. “But you reject him, pick fights with him, try to wrest the universe away from him…. You can’t be angry at something that does not exist, can you?” Kurilov tells him that he should talk to his sister Klavdia, who loves such conversations. He needs more time to think about it. Back when he was reading about world religions, it had occurred to him “that someday this book might include pages written about him.”36

  The next morning Kurilov is taken to the operating room. The surgeon is the father of Liza’s aborted child and former clock collector, Ilya Protoklitov. The operation is successful, but two days later Kurilov dies of a hemorrhage. His death coincides with the coming of spring. “Storm clouds accumulated, thickened, and broke apart, but each new one appeared darker and more threatening than the ones before (making it that much easier for the mind’s eye to perceive behind them the blue, sorrowless sky of the future).”37

  Kurilov’s satellites, chastened by his bodily disappearance, drift in the same direction. Frosia and her deaf-mute child leave for Siberia to start a new life; the iron Klavdia begins her speech at the next plenum with the words “we are called to work in a joyous and beautiful time, my dear comrades”; and Liza says no to Tyutchev’s offer of a job in the theater. One of Kurilov’s adopted sons, the deputy editor of the Road newspaper and amateur Road historian, Alesha Peresypkin, comes to see the narrator, and they travel to Ocean together. “Actually, there were three of us: Kurilov was there, too, because, once we had left the present, his reality became equal to ours…. We passed hundreds of indistinct events, barely sketched on the surface of the future; we visited dozens of cities, remarkable for their history, that did not yet exist. Frolicking like little boys, Alesha and I romped through the immense expanse of the universe, and Kurilov’s shadow loomed over us, like a mountain.” Then the rain comes. They take cover under some trees and suddenly see a whispering young couple. Just as suddenly, the couple disappears. “Lovers have always had that magic ability to hide from a stranger’s curiosity by dissolving into the rustle of trees, the moonlight, and the fragrance of nocturnal flowers…. And although our Moscow Textile Factory coats were soaked right through at the shoulders, we left our shelter and silently set off down the road that must be taken by anyone who leaves home in stormy weather.” The End. The Soviet Faust had ascended to a heaven of his own making. Alles Vergängliche / Ist nur ein Gleichnis; / Das Unzulängliche, / Hier wird’s Ereignis. (“Everything transient is but a likeness; the unattainable is here the past.”)38

  The publication of The Road to Ocean became a great literary event. Novyi mir organized a two-day conference on the novel in November 1935, while it was still being serialized, and in May 1936, the presidium of the governing board of the Writers’ Union staged a formal discussion (the first such discussion in the board’s history). On both occasions, the Literaturnaia gazeta proclaimed that The Road to Ocean was “a great victory not only for Leonov, but for Soviet literature as a whole.” The book was widely praised for its scale, range, courage, literary quality, and sincere commitment to socialism. Ultimately, however, most reviewers agreed that the novel had failed to fulfill its two monumental ambitions: to paint a worthy portrait of the hero of the age and to write a novel worthy of the classics.39

  “The theme of love and family, etc., etc., can, of course, be a central, not a marginal theme,” wrote Ivan Vinogradov, “but then one should find a typical conflict and show here, too, the principal theme of our age, the theme of the struggle for the socialist way of thinking and feeling, for socialist human relations.” If Kurilov is truly a human mountain, then everything about him must be big, whatever his physical condition. His love, argued Elena Usievich, must be worthy of a life-loving Bolshevik; his hatred, argued Aleksei Selivanovsky, must be worthy of an ever-vigilant Bolshevik. Instead, argued V. Pertsov, “Kurilov ends up being a very lonely, sad widower, a mortally sick man with an unfulfilled love.” Everyone agreed with Gorky that “Dostoevsky’s gloomy and spiteful shadow” had darkened much of the text. Socialist realism was about a return to the classics, and a return to the classics meant, in Vinogradov’s formulation, “an orientation not toward decadent, externally complex but internally impoverished art, but toward the art of the golden age, classical art.” Dostoevsky was not a classic in this sense, and The Road to Ocean was too indebted to Dostoevsky to be truly Faustian.40

  In the final analysis, the novel’s fatal flaw was that it had been designed as a tragedy. Leonov’s assumption that “in the arts, the social maturity of a class expressed itself in tragedy” might be correct with regard to other ruling classes, but it could not possibly be correct in the case of the proletariat. The critic I. Grinberg concludes his discussion of The Road to Ocean by siding with Kurilov against Leonov: “The works of art of past centuries were full of pictures of suffering and unhappiness. Now, the time has come for a great change in the life of mankind. We are witnessing the destruction of the social order that dooms people to suffering and torment. On one-sixth of the earth’s surface, a happy and beautiful life has already been created. Therefore, the time has come for a great change in the arts. Soviet artists have a lofty task: to depict people who are destroying suffering and unhappiness, people who are creators of happiness.”41

  This was the key to solving the book’s central problem—the problem of death and immortality. “The revolution has transformed the question of death,” said Viktor Shklovsky at the Writers’ Union discussion in May 1936. “The novel fails because, as has been said before, it resolves new situations with old methods.” Mikhail Levidov agreed: “Any decent person can die well. But only in our age and in our social environment are the objective conditions being created that will facilitate a good death.”42

  ■ ■ ■

  The Road to Ocean failed as a novel because it failed to represent a good death. It failed all the more obviously because, shortly befo
re it came out, everyone was shown what a good death—and a good book about death—ought to look like. On March 17, 1935, Koltsov published an essay in Pravda called “Courage,” about an unknown thirty-year-old writer.

  Nikolai Ostrovsky is lying flat on his back, completely immobile. A blanket is wrapped around the long, thin, straight pillar of his body, like a permanent, irremovable case. A mummy.

  But inside that mummy, something is alive. Yes, the thin hands—only the hands—move slightly. They feel damp to the touch. One of them clutches weakly at a thin stick with a rag tied to the end of it. With a weak movement, the fingers direct the stick toward the face. The rag chases away the flies that have boldly assembled on the ridges of the white face.

  The face is also alive. Suffering has wizened its features, dulled its colors, and sharpened its contours. But the lips are open, and two rows of youthful teeth make the mouth beautiful. Those lips speak, and that voice is soft but steady, only occasionally trembling with exhaustion.

  “Of course, the threat of war in the Far East is great. If we sell the Eastern Chinese Railway, the border will be a little quieter. But don’t they understand that it is too late to fight with us? We are strong now and getting stronger all the time. Our power builds and grows with every day. Just recently someone read a piece out of Pravda to me …”

  At this point we suddenly make a terrifying new discovery. Not everything—no, not quite everything—in that man’s head is alive! The two large eyes with their dull, glassy glow do not respond to sunlight, an interlocutor’s face, or newsprint. On top of everything else—the man is also blind.43