The Naked Year

by Boris Pilnyak

  …there is the genuine Russian nation, these here hollow, gray ones, eaten away by filth and sweat, with harrowing faces like huts, with hair like the thatched roofs. The old man was looking westward; the other was sitting motionless, having drawn up one leg and put his head on it. The girl was sleeping, sprawled out on the asphalt, expectorated on and bespattered with sunflower seed. They were silent. And it was pitiful and frightening to look at them–at those by whom and in whose name the Revolution is made. A people without a history–for where is the history of the Russian people?

  In passages such as these there is an implicit question as to the ethics of depriving such backward people of their backwardness. The peasant of pre-Revolutionary Russia was free to fish and generally indulge his rural pursuits, but the Revolution has imposed another lifestyle on these peasants and thundered freedom at them down the barrel of a gun. The “freedom” now enjoyed by these people is the freedom of “having nothing, refusing everything–being poor!”

  The October Revolution may have liberated a nation from tyranny, but at what price?

  “–I’ve been in the town. Can you imagine what’s going on? In winter everyone will die of hunger and will freeze. There’s no salt, without which it’s impossible to smelt steel, without steel it’s impossible to make saws, there’s nothing to saw wood with–in winter the house will freeze–because of no salt! It’s frightening! –What frightening, deaf silence. Just look–death is more natural than birth, than life. All around is death, hunger, scurvy, typhus, smallpox, cholera… The woods and ravines are swarming with bandits. You can hear it–a deadly silence! Death. In the steppes there are villages which have died out completely. Nobody buries the corpses, and in the darkness at nights dogs and deserters roam about… The Russian nation.”

  Another “freedom” germane to the 1917 Revolution, according to Pilnyak, was that freedom afforded by events to the violent, instinctive drives in Man, that energy and basic life-force which had preoccupied

  Pilnyak from the beginning of his writing career. For him the social and economic reasons for the cataclysm with which historians are concerned formed only part of the picture. Pilnyak saw the Revolution as being, in part at least, a vast orgasmic release; and in his story “Ivan and Maria” (1922) he actually states through Ksenya Ordinina that “The Revolution smells of sexual organs.” In The Naked Year the pristine violence which was partly responsible for the Revolution is embodied in characters such as the swashbuckling Irina.

  Irina is the epitome of anarchistic arrogance and unfettered vector energy which sweeps aside all opposition and incorporates the Darwinian thesis that the strong survive and the weak perish. In strikingly luscious, lyrical prose she is able at once to describe the sylvan pleasures and natural charm of the Russian countryside, and then suddenly alter her theme and tone to make a bombastic plea for violent virility in Russian manhood:

  “Surely men don’t ask?–men take! They take freely and wilfully like bandits and anarchists! You’re an anarchist, Comrade Andrei. In life there are tsars–those who have strong muscles, like stone, will-power as elastic as iron, a free mind, like the devil, and who are beautiful like Apollo or the devil. One has to be able to strangle a man and thrash a woman. Surely you don’t still believe in some sort of humanism and justice?–to the devil with all that! let those die who cannot fight! Only the strong and free will remain!”

  Irina is, in fact, the direct antithesis to the intellectual Natalya, admiring violence for its own sake and the willingness to live life in a manner uncomplicated by an anaemic concern for others.

  In dealing with his final “freedom” Pilnyak goes beyond the confines of contemporary historic events and enters the realms of the philosophy of language.

  There are several passages in this chapter (as elsewhere in the novel) which appear to defy any interpretation which does not indicate pure

  linguistic experimentation. The opening paragraph to Chapter 3 contains the lines:

  “The stones of the embankment crumbled, flew together with it down into the ravine (the wind of fall whispered: gviu!…) and everything showered down like sparks of eyes from the fall–and then remained only: a red heart.”

  Later in the novel words are deliberately misspelled, people talk in elliptical sentences and use esoteric images and figures of speech. Perhaps these linguistic contortions and the imagistic surrealism, included as they are for the most part in the chapter on “Freedom,” are an attempt on the author’s part to push language to the limits of its usefulness. Excessive use of experimentation in language implies the destruction of communication, in which case language becomes meaningless. But where is the point beyond which linguistic conformity is minimal but communication still possible? One may ask if Pilnyak is attempting to find the ultimate freedom, namely freedom from the constraints of linguistic orthodoxy?

  Stylistically, there is much in The Naked Year which is reminiscent of the Symbolists. Andrei Bely, in particular, is constantly recalled in the staccato sentences, strained imagery and arbitrary movement within the time-space continuum. Sentences in Pilnyak’s works are often cut short; linguistic lubricants such as conjunctions, commonplace expressions and images are often conspicuous by their absence, and the reader is presented with a prose style which appears jerky, unfinished and, at times, chaotic. Of course, this is perfectly suited to the desired aim of reflecting a turbulent period in Russia’s history when a sense of order or definite direction was difficult to find. But more than this, Pilnyak’s choosing not to be restricted by linear time allows him to present events not in the order in which they occur, but in a sequence which best suits his purpose. The opening passage (particularly the opening lines) of the novel immediately transpose the reader back into the eighteenth century, where the apparent stability of capitalist Moscow is shown to be undermined, even then, by Russia’s resurgent Oriental past. The constant symbolic references to China-Town, which peeps around the corners at night (when the bowler hat has been put away till the next day) like soldiers’ buttons, anticipate the return to a consciousness of Oriental antiquity, jolted by the Revolution. Even in the eighteenth century the Orient was on the move, and a hundred years later the same force erupts as potent as ever, just as if, in this respect time has stood still.

  Later in the text the confusion of contemporary events is viewed against a backcloth of time, which is seen as a figment of man’s imagination; when passages resembling nedieval Russian documents follow descriptions of the creation of the new Soviet state, the impression is that nothing has changed. History, eternally moving forward, is at the same time eternally static.

  Perhaps one of the most striking features of Pilnyak’s style, next to his manipulations of time, is his manipulation of nature. Nature is not merely a backdrop to the action or narrative, but an omniscient, active force. At times it serves to move the narrative forward; at others it revitalizes otherwise limpid, repetitive descriptions of events; and at others its function resembles that of a Greek chorus, in that it comments on humanity and places human weaknesses and foibles within the context of eternity. In the conversation between Comrade Yuzik and Andrei, the former gazes up at the stars, and the sheer vastness of space and awesome eternity make him realize that all human endeavor, including the Bolshevik Revolution, is paltry:

  “When you think about the stars, you begin to feel that we are totally insignificant. The earth–is a worldly prison; what are we, humans? What do our revolution and injustice mean?”

  Particularly noticeable in Pilnyak’s style is the frequency with which he suspends the narrative at a critical or climactic point to insert a description of natural phenomena. The impression thus given is that Pilnyak is using nature to frame human actions–further evidence that man cannot be treated as a separate entity in the context of existence, and that man is merely another phenomenon of nature, a part of the whole which comprises man, animals and even inanimate bodies such as the stars, oceans and mountains. In the train speeding across t
he Russian steppe-lands a soldier is suddenly overpowered by his sexual instincts and:

  …his thoughts throng like mottled peasant women at the fair–thoughts are flying to the devil!–a wild animal! instinct!–and the man kisses, kisses, kisses the naked female belly passionately, painfully–who is she? where’s she from?–The peasant woman slowly wakes up, scratches herself, says sleepily:

  –“Finish, loudmouth… Oh, you smarty!… “–and she begins to breathe unevenly.

  Steppe. Emptiness. Boundlessness. Darkness. Cold.

  For this man the gratification of his sexual impulses is of supreme importance; he is totally oblivious of everyone and everything else in the universe, but the contextual interruption of the author’s stark description of impartial nature renders the whole episode banal and unimportant.

  In describing the Revolution itself Pilnyak frequently draws on nature for his images and similes. The unleashed violence of the Revolution is described at times as a snowstorm (possibly a symbol taken directly from Alexander Blok), and at times it is compared to the irresistible power of a Russian river in full flood:

  “…but in the first spring of the Revolution when the rivers had overflowed with their voluminous spring torrents–his life changed sharply” and later, “The Revolution came like white blizzards and May storms.” And later still, he fuses the two images: “was our Revolution not a May storm?–and weren’t they March flood waters which washed away a two-hundred year scab?”

  The narrative of The Naked Year, with all its chaotic appearance is held together by descriptions of nature as the one permanence in the universe, which contrasts with man’s pathetic stumblings through his transitory existence. When Pilnyak punctuates the novel with references to the cathedral bells ringing our every five minutes–“Dong, dong, dong” (in Russian “Don, don, don”)–the symbolism is both subtle and double-edged. There is the obvious symbolism of the survival of religion in Russia and the inextricable place it occupies in the mind of the people. But there is also the onomatopoeic reference to the mighty river Don and as such yet another reminder that Russians (and, indeed, all humanity) are controlled by rather than control the latent natural resources of energy which exist in the universe. Such imagery serves to remind us of our violent origins and that we, as products of such violence, are still unconsciously governed by it.

  A feature of the novel which must be particularly repugnant to the Party hierarchy (especially since the adoption of Socialist Realism) is Pilnyak’s portrayal of the Bolsheviks. His treatment of them ranges from portraying them as mindless dinosaurs who are capable of gargantuan feats of strength, to describing them as beings totally impervious to sentiment and blindly insensitive to the sufferings of others. When we are told in Chapter One that Jan Laitis is preoccupied with courting Olga Kuntz and learning to play the clarinet while droves of poor people are searching the steppe lands for food, the only inference possible is that the Revolution has not matched up to its promises. References to the Bolsheviks as “Leather people in leather jackets,” and lines such as, “You won’t wet them with the lemonade of psychology,” leave little room to doubt the proposition that Pilnyak was not particularly enamoured of the new rulers of Russia.

  Pilnyak’s Bolsheviks contrast sharply to the prototype of the “Soviet New Man” whom writers in the Soviet Union have been required to depict in literature since the inception of Socialist Realism in 1932. Taking as their model Pavel Vlasov, the hero of Gorky’s Mother (1907), writers were required to portray heroes as paragons of all the Socialist virtues such as compassion, dynamism and dedication to the cause. Although Pilnyak’s novel predates Socialist Realism, the retrospective nature of the doctrine made him, along with writers such as Babel and Zamyatin, persecution fodder when Stalin purged the intellectuals of dissident influences. Almost without exception Pilnyak dwells on the negative qualities of the Bolsheviks’ mentality; and descriptions such as those already mentioned, combined with the behavioral implications of such attitudes of mind, served only to add fuel to the fire. The insensitivity implicit in Laitis’s “bourgeois” activities is made explicit when Pilnyak starkly portrays the institutional disregard for human life in passages such as this:

  On that day, at that hour intrepid was the word written in the Executive Committee room–by the son Arkhip Arkhipov:–

  TO BE SHOT.

  The arbitrary powers of arrest implied by Olga Kuntz’s churning out of arrest warrants on the duplicating machine indicates a lack of freedom for individuals which equalled, if not surpassed, the restrictions placed on society by the Tsarist regimes. It is not that the Bolsheviks were necessarily more efficient, but the arbitrariness of such widespread arrests produced a social system in which no one was immune from the possibility of undeserved incarceration. And as we see when Laitis himself is arrested, the wrath of the Party was just as likely to descend on the faithful as on the miscreants.

  Western readers know writers in the Soviet Union are made to toe the Party line by rigorous censorship measures and other bureaucratic controls (witness the notoriety surrounding the literary and legal hounding of Pasternak, Sinyaysky, Daniel, and Solzhenitsyn), While this is undoubtedly true, it should be remembered that immediately following the Revolution, and during the New Economic Policy (1922-28), writers were afforded some degree of freedom; and a number of them elected either to deal with the Revolution in terms which were not entirely laudatory, or to ignore it entirely.

  The Twenties were charged with experimental ardor. The works of the Serapion Brothers, the Futurists, and Constructivists are obvious examples. It was also the era of attempts to create a literature with roots firmly embedded in the proletariat, written by artisans and engineers for artisans and engineers. Many writers’ schools came into being at this time, all of them concerned with adapting the literary heritage of Russia to the needs and hopes of the new society. They wanted to break down the class distinctions associated with a literature deriving from and intended for an educated minority. However, few of these groups survived more than a few years, and those which went by such un-inspiring names as “Smithy,” “On-guardists,” and “Proletcult” are now of interest only to literary historians.

  But Pilnyak was never one of those writers who were concerned about the creation of a literature of the masses; and he took advantage of the relative artistic freedom to continue (after The Naked Year) to write on themes which interested him, and in the style which he found most natural and suitable to those themes. In these works the Revolution is somewhat underplayed, or it is dealt with as a source of demonstrable proofs for his own theories. In “Ivan and Maria” (1922) Pilnyak continued to describe the Revolution in the experimental prose of The Naked Year, showing its sociological shortcomings and failure to create a society based on universal equality. In 1924 his novel The Third Capital (also called Mother-Stepmother) was published in Berlin. This novel used the theories of Spengler, including the idea that civilization, which had originated in the East, was now moving through Europe and would then continue through America and emerge again in Russia. In 1924, in his novel Machines and Wolves (published 1925) Pilnyak depicted the Revolution as a technological rather than sociological one, with the main conflict between the individual and the machine. Pilnyak saw the machine as a potentially greater (and more anonymous) tyrant than even the Bolsheviks.

  In 1926 a watershed was reached in Pilnyak’s career. This was the year in which “The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon” was published, and its publication placed the author under permanent suspicion. The story appears to deal with the mystery surrounding Stalin and his involvement in what has since come to be known as the “Frunze Affair.” Red Army Commander Mikhail Frunze was virtually forced by Stalin to undergo an operation which he did not need; and he died (or was murdered) on the operating table. Pilnyak protested that there was no real connection between the story and Frunze’s death, but the similarity between the story and the rumors is much too pronounced for one to believe his recan
tations.

  The last of Pilnyak’s experimental works was Ivan Moscow of 1927. It is perhaps the most cryptic of all his works, blending as it does the stylistic chaos and surrealist imagery of his earlier works with a hallucinatory confusion of time, symbolic references to Egyptian mummies, life-like puppets, and a syphilitic central character. The basic theme of this story, as in Machines and Wolves, is the role which the machine is to play in the new, industrialized Soviet Union; but here Pilnyak emphasizes the destructive effect the machine can have on man’s intellect.

  A year after the publication of Ivan Moscow, 1928, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers was set up as a sort of watchdog committee whose function it became to “protect” Soviet literature against non-conformist elements; and as such it paved the way for the single Union of Soviet Writers (1932), and introduction of Socialist Realism and its concomitant Social Command as the iron rule for all Soviet writers. The adoption of and propaganda for the First Five-Year Plan in 1928 also helped erode the relative freedom writers had enjoyed. Pilnyak was head of the Moscow section of the liberal All-Russian Writers’ Union in 1929 when his short novel Mahogany was published abroad (for copyright purposes). This gave RAPP an excuse to attack him with special fervor, calling him a criminal and conspirator, linking him to Evgeny Zamyatin (head of the Leningrad section of the Writers’ Union) as men opposed to the new ideology. Pilnyak recanted publicly. But his new works were not very exciting. The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea (1930) was intended as rejection for his former “errors”; but its central theme, the construction of a Soviet hydroelectric dam, was of palpably little interest to him, and partly because a revised Mahogany was included in it as an integral part, not only did it fail as a work of art, it also failed to convince the Party hierarchy that its author’s conversion was genuine. His O’Kay (1933) was another attempt to curry favor with the mandarins of Soviet literature. This was not a novel but a collection of impressions recorded during a brief visit to America in 1933. A politically biased piece of anti-American propaganda, this work also has little to recommend it as a work of literature; its chief value lies in its demonstration of how the Soviet bureaucratic mania for conformity was able to destroy a writer who could have been one of the most interesting to emerge from post-Revolutionary Russia. In his book about Japan, Stones and Roots (1934), Pilnyak advocates such strict control of writers that one almost thinks he is being ironical. But he had little time left to practice his craft; his last book, The Ripening of the Fruit, was published in 1936, and he was arrested in 1937. According to one story he was shot as a Japanese spy. His exact fate has still not been revealed, but the Soviet Shorter Literary Encyclopedia gives 1937 as the year of his death.