The Boss, however, had other plans for Bulgakov.
My father was friends with Yuri Karlovich Olesha. They had both attended the Richelieu High School in Odessa. In the twenties and thirties Olesha was one of the most fashionable writers. But after that … well, he was never imprisoned; they merely stopped publishing him. He spent his time jotting down mundane aphorisms, drinking heavily, and, when truly drunk, throwing his scraps of paper into the wastebasket. In the fifties the whole street would turn round to look at the man with the disheveled mane of gray hair, the dirty scarf around his neck, and the aquiline nose. He often visited my father to ask for money, and they would talk for hours. On one such occasion he told my father how Bulgakov, driven into a corner, decided to write a letter to Stalin. The idea was put into his head by a dubious character widely believed to be an informer. Bulgakov had no money at all, and had tried in vain to find work with the Arts Theater. He nerved himself to write a desperate letter asking Stalin to let him go abroad. This was suicide when so many intellectuals were standing trial. As Olesha told the story: “It all happened in April. It was April 1 and we all played April fool jokes on each other. I knew about this letter, so I rang him up and said, with some sort of accent, ‘Comrade Stalin wishes to speak to you.’ He recognized my voice, told me to go to hell, and lay down (he always had a nap after dinner). But then the phone rang again. A voice at the other end said, ‘Comrade Stalin will speak to you now.’ He swore and hung up, thinking that I just wouldn’t leave him alone. The phone rang again immediately, and he heard Stalin’s secretary say sternly, ‘Don’t hang up. I hope you understand me.’ Another voice, with a Georgian accent, cut in: ‘What’s the matter, are we getting on your nerves?’ After Bulgakov had got over his embarrassment and greetings had been exchanged, Stalin said, ‘I hear you’re asking to be sent abroad.’ Bulgakov, of course, answered as expected, that ‘a Russian writer cannot work outside his Motherland,’ and so on. ‘You are right. I also believe that you want to work for the Arts Theater?’ ‘I should like to, yes, but … they’ve turned me down.’ ‘I think they’ll agree.’ With that he hung up. And almost immediately there was a call from the theater asking Bulgakov to start work there.”
So Bulgakov wrote Molière, a play about a king who was Molière’s only protector against a spiteful court camarilla. Kerzhentsev—who else?—instantly denounced the author to the Central Committee: “What is the author’s political intention? Bulgakov … sets out to show the fate of a writer whose ideology is at odds with the political order, and whose plays are banned. Only the king stands up for Molière and defends him against his persecutors.… Molière has such lines as ‘all my life I’ve been licking his (the king’s) spurs with only one thought: don’t trample on me. Maybe I haven’t flattered you enough, maybe I haven’t crawled enough?’ The scene concludes with Molière exclaiming, ‘I hate arbitrary tyranny’ (we amended ‘arbitrary’ to ‘the king’s’). The idea around which the author builds his play is sufficiently clear.” The Boss agreed with Kerzhentsev’s recommendation to take the play out of the repertoire. But he remembered that only the king had helped Molière and took note of Molière’s readiness, much as he hated tyranny, to serve his only protector, the king.
In 1936 the old Bolshevik Kerzhentsev would be shot. But Bulgakov survived.
BURIED ALIVE
The Boss was gradually inculcating the idea that nothing escaped his attention. Everything of the slightest importance was reported to him. In 1931 a ticklish situation arose. The demolition of the Danilovsky Monastery was under discussion. The monastery’s graveyard would also cease to exist. But this was where the remains of one of Russia’s greatest writers, Gogol, had been laid to rest. The Boss decided that the writer’s remains should be transferred from the Danilovsky to the Novodevichi cemetery. After this had been done, a strange, indeed terrifying rumor went around: when the grave was opened it was found that Gogol had been buried alive.
Historians of literature excitedly remembered the text of Gogol’s will: “My body is not to be buried until unmistakable signs of decomposition appear. I mention this because in the course of my illness I have experienced moments of suspended animation, in which my heart and my pulse ceased to beat.”
The Boss was informed. Yagoda gave him a detailed account of what had happened at the cemetery: the director of the Novodevichi cemetery, to which the remains were taken, invited a number of writers. Olesha, the novelist and short story writer Lidin, the poet Svetlov, and others duly arrived. Also present were certain friends of the director: he had distributed invitations freely as if they were complimentary theater tickets. And “comrades” from the department, who needed no invitation.
The coffin was opened and the astounded spectators saw lying there a skeleton with its skull twisted to one side.
While the remains were being transferred there was a certain amount of pilfering. Lidin took a small piece of Gogol’s waistcoat. One of the director’s friends helped himself to his boots, and even a bone.
These proceedings were not to the Boss’s liking. Yagoda was given his instructions, and a few days later all the stolen articles were returned to the grave. Later the newspapers carried an official explanation of Gogol’s posture: “There is nothing mysterious about the turning of the deceased’s head. The sides of a coffin start to rot first, and the lid subsides under the weight of the soil above it, pressing down on the corpse’s head, and causing it to turn gradually sideways. This is a quite frequent phenomenon.” Stalin was satisfied. He did not want any awkward associations of ideas at a time when he was burying the art of the Revolution alive, burying the avant-garde and the Great Utopia together.
The beginning of the eighties. I am sitting on the beach at Pitsunda. Sitting next to me is Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky. The great theorist of left-wing art and friend of Mayakovsky. He is completely bald. His longish head gleams in the Pitsunda sunshine. He was, however, just as bald at the age of twenty. Throughout my childhood Viktor Borisovich was never out of my sight for long. He and my father worked on screenplays together. Only later did I learn that he was mainly responsible for the theories of the great avant-garde movement of the twenties. The shining sphere that was his head was glimpsed at all the famous debates of the decade. He is now ninety, and completely alone: the other participants in those controversies had gone to their graves long ago. Most of them to unmarked graves, shot in the days of Stalin’s Terror. When he speaks, his thoughts are like the fallout of an atomic explosion. I write it all down as carefully as I can: “Gorky was one of the old school, he didn’t know the first thing about the avant-garde, he thought it was all bogus.… Stalin did the right thing, sending for Gorky when he decided to do away with the art of the Revolution. Gorky didn’t understand painting at all. All the main characters in the avant-garde were fully developed before the Revolution … Malevich, Meyerhold, Khlebnikov.… They hated the ‘repositories’—their name for the palaces and galleries in which art languished. So after the Revolution they brought it out onto the streets. The great world of leftist art arrived. Tatlin, Malevich … Tatlin once came to see your father, do you remember?… No, of course not, you were only little. Tatlin was a poor creature by then, a broken man. In the twenties he’d been the Messiah. He hated Malevich. It was mutual. And also worshiped him. He put up that famous tent in his studio so that when Malevich called he couldn’t steal his ideas. He was very serious, no sense of humor. After October he designed the Tower of the Third International—a symbol of the New Time. He thought of it as a modern Tower of Babel. The proletariat would reject God, and climb its spiral ramp to a new heaven. The heaven of the world revolution. Comintern was supposed to make the tower its headquarters. It was a synthesis of all that was new in architecture, sculpture, and painting. And of course nobody could possibly build it. It was just a dream. Later on he designed a costume for the proletariat which no tailor could make. Then he put on a play based on a poem by Khlebnikov, which no one could understand. Then he desig
ned a flying machine which, needless to say, would not fly. As he saw it, art’s only duty was to set the agenda for technology. All he did was done for the future.”
He saw that Future. Vladimir Tatlin, the genius of the Great Utopia, lived in Moscow in obscurity and in constant fear until his death in 1956.
They argued about the new art. In the tiny rooms of communal flats urbanistic mirages were born in Asiatic Russia. And with them, countless literary movements. There was no furniture in these apartments—it had all been burned in the cold winter of 1918. Furniture was declared “petit bourgeois.” Their women despised housework, and simply covered cigarette butts and remnants with a layer of newspaper. The floor was a little higher after every party. There, on this bed of newspaper, they made love to girls who, like them, believed in the new art. Their mistresses’ haunches reclined among reports of Party discussions and the battle cries of world revolution.
I ask Shklovsky why the left-wing intelligentsia sided with Stalin in his fight with Bukharin and the rightists. The rightists, he says, stood for “the world of the well-off, NEP, shopkeepers, prosperous peasant dimwits. We wanted something quite different. When Stalin sounded the call for industrialization we rejoiced. It meant—to us—that the time of urbanization and of the new art had arrived. Not for nothing was Tatlin awarded the title ‘Honored Artist’—the highest distinction in those days.”
Only to be denounced as a “bourgeois formalist” in 1932. As I listen to Shklovsky, I ask myself, Did they really believe? Or did they just think it wise to believe? After all, the country was already ruled by total terror. It forced Eisenstein to remake his October. And enabled the Boss to stifle the art of the Great Utopia calmly and without excuses.
One of the leaders of the avant-garde, Vladimir Mayakovsky, had dutifully performed the Russian poet’s role of prophet. Like Yesenin before him, Mayakovsky had a feel for the future. On the threshold of the terrible thirties, with the end of left-wing art in sight, he ended his life with a bullet from a revolver. His best-known slogan in verse—“Life is good, and it’s good to be alive!”—mocked the unfortunate man who lay on the floor with a bullet in his heart.
The avant-garde and the Great Utopia breathed their last beside him.
The avant-garde had wanted a revolution in art, but the new regime wanted art to serve the revolution. The first assault on leftist art was Lenin’s idea. Immediately after establishing the post of General Secretary he had set up the RAPP—Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. RAPP, with its team of Party critics, undisguisedly sought to control art.
But many Trotskyists and Zinovievites had made themselves at home in RAPP. The Boss handled the situation neatly. When in 1932 he was about to abolish RAPP by decree, most of the writers interpreted this as a sign of relaxation, and were naturally delighted. The same decree, however, dissolved all other literary groupings. The avant-garde was simply decreed out of existence. He delayed publication of the decree so that the writers themselves could take the initiative in abolishing RAPP and suppressing the avant-garde.
THE GOODS WE NEED: PEOPLE’S SOULS
I was told about this famous meeting on various occasions by Peter Pavlenko and by two other writers, Evgeny Gabrilovich and Korneli Zelinsky.
On the eve of RAPP’s dissolution the telephone rang in the homes of many well-known writers. They were asked to report to Gorky’s residence, no reason given. The writers assembled as bidden.
Gorky, looking mysterious, met his guests on the stairway, and invited them into the drawing room. They sat there waiting for quite a while before the guests of honor finally appeared. Stalin, surrounded by his senior henchmen. Gabrilovich used to tell us how he could not take his eyes off the dictator: a small man in a dark green tunic of fine cloth, smelling of sweat and unwashed flesh. Gabrilovich remembered the thick black hair that tumbled over his narrow brow and the pockmarked face, the pallor of someone who worked indoors without a break. He moved quickly, as small people generally do, and laughed a lot in short bursts from under his mustache, looking for the moment sly and Georgian. But when he was silent his bushy brows rose at an angle and made him look harsh and grimly determined. He listened politely to the writers’ statements. But from his responses everybody realized with amazement that he was supporting the non-Party writers against the mighty RAPP. Then he made a speech, in which he tore the former leaders of RAPP to pieces. He lavishly praised the writers there before him: “You produce goods that we need. Even more than machines and tanks and airplanes we need human souls.” He went so far as to call writers “engineers of human souls.” He liked that definition: people’s souls interested him greatly. Chatting with the writers during a break in the proceedings, he repeated it, aiming a finger at the chest of one of them as he did so. The writer in question blurted out, “Me? Why me? I’m not arguing!” To which the artless Voroshilov retorted, “What’s the good of just not arguing? You have to get on with it.” The writer nodded vigorously. He wasn’t sure exactly what “it” was, but he was eager to get on with it.
Among those present was Sholokhov, author of the celebrated novel Quiet Flows the Don. Rumors that Sholokhov had stolen his novel from a Cossack officer destroyed by the regime were already going around. People did not believe that a man so young and so unintellectual could have written a great book. Sholokhov was Stalin’s writer, promoted by him. And he threatened to arrest those who said such things. The rumors nonetheless persisted, because nobody could understand why Sholokhov himself behaved so strangely and feebly, why he failed to defend himself. The authorship of The Quiet Don became one of the literary riddles of the century.
Yet it was all easily explicable. Poor Sholokhov didn’t dare try to prove anything, because the man on whose life the novel was based had been arrested shortly before the first part appeared.
THE LITERARY RIDDLE OF THE AGE
June 6, 1927. Case No. 45529 against Citizen Yermakov was heard by an OPU board.… Yermakov, Kharlampi Vasilievich was sentenced to death by shooting. (From a declassified case file)
The dossier includes a photograph of a young Cossack with a mustache, and a biography of Yermakov. His life story is that of Grigori Melikhov, hero of The Quiet Don. Yermakov, just like Melikhov, was called up for military service in 1913, fought in the First World War, was awarded four St. George Crosses, and promoted to the rank of ensign. Again like Melikhov, he had fought on the side of the Reds against Colonel Chernetsov’s guerrillas, had behaved in the same way during the rebellion in the Cossack village of Veshenskaya, etc., etc.
It all becomes clear when you read the most intriguing document included in the dossier. This is a letter from the young Sholokhov, then a little-known writer, to Yermakov, in 1926: “Dear Comrade Yermakov, I need to obtain from you some additional information about the 1919 period. I hope that you will not refuse me the favor of supplying this information.… I plan to be with you in May-June this year.… Yours, Sholokhov.”
Sholokhov, then, could not produce the simplest possible proof of his authorship—the name of his hero and informant. That would have meant killing the book, since Kharlampi Yermakov, hero of the best Soviet novel, was an enemy of the people, shot by the GPU. He was not rehabilitated until 1989, after Sholokhov’s death. Sholokhov had to remain silent till the day he died. And carry on drinking.
IN THE IMAGE OF THE PARTY
All writers—Party members and nonmembers alike—now had to unite in the Union of Writers, an organization modeled closely on Stalin’s Party: it had secretaries, plenums, congresses—all just the same. He gave this Party-for-writers a leader of its own, the celebrated Gorky, with his aversion to left-wing art. This had been Stalin’s reason for calling him home. It had all been planned in advance. Gorky’s name was meant to blind European radicals to the suppression of the avant-garde.
Stalin had entrusted the organization of the Writers’ Union to Bukharin. The work took him away from the day-to-day business of the Party, and a dependable overseer was attached
to him—Ivan Gronsky, editor-in-chief of Izvestia and of the magazines Novy Mir and Krasnaya Niva.
THE SEDUCTION
Gronsky’s reputation was that of a very nice if not very clever man. Here is a story told by that nice man in 1963, talking to staff members (including me) of the Gorky Archive: “I went to see Gorky once. A man of medium height was standing there. Gorky introduced him—His Highness Prince Svyatopolk-Mirsky. One of the most exalted names in tsarist Russia.” They sat at the table. And Gronsky was struck by the fact that the more the prince drank, the more cautious he became. He did not like this, and when he got back he asked the GPU to look up whatever information they had on the prince. When he learned that Mirsky was an alumnus of the Corps of Pages, that he had known Denikin and Wrangel and had lived in England before returning to Russia, the vigilant Gronsky instantly “recognized the handiwork of the British Intelligence Service.” He raised the matter with Yagoda and with Stalin personally. After which the hapless prince, who had been talked into moving to the USSR, vanished into the camps.
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