Soviet Writers: Another Solzhenitsyn? by Tamara Deutscher 1974
Source: Ramparts, January 1974. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
Review: Vladimir Maksimov, Seven Days of Creation (Possev Verlag, Frankfurt/ Main, 1971).
Russian literature has been traditionally political. Truism? Yes, but one that cannot be overlooked by any literary critic or, for that matter, by any reader of Russian belles lettres. Both writer and bureaucrat, from opposite sides of the gulf that separates them, have been and are intensely concerned with the political and social message contained between the covers of a book. Our Western politician, more often than not, pays no attention to literary life around him and treats writers with a mixture of indulgence and indifference. It would certainly not occur to him that any danger is to be apprehended from literature. In the United States, even in the worst period of McCarthyism, highly political books circulated freely (while their authors – if they were foreigners – were denied an entry visa, as if their bodily presence was more subversive than their ideas).
Russian writers and intellectuals may derive a wry satisfaction from the tremendous importance which the state attaches to their work; their sense of mission is also heightened by the tense expectancy with which society listens to them. All this, however, cannot by any means compensate for the oppressive atmosphere, the dull-witted censorship, and finally for the cruel persecution to which they are subjected. And yet many of them are prepared to put themselves at risk in order to remain what they are, to say what they have to say, and to do what they feel they must.
When Vladimir Maksimov’s novel Seven Days of Creation began to circulate in samizdat (manuscripts surreptitiously duplicated and passed from hand to hand) in Moscow and Leningrad some two years ago, it created an unusual stir and a controversy. Maksimov was acclaimed as a ‘new and better Solzhenitsyn’ by some; others denied him any literary merit at all, and were repelled by the shockingly retrograde ideological content of his work.
Born in Leningrad in 1932, Maksimov had a difficult childhood. An orphan (his parents had perished either in the purges or in the war) deprived of any family life, he was brought up in children’s homes and at an early age was sent out as an apprentice worker. His first trade was that of a bricklayer or a mason. Some unusual spirit of adventure must have possessed him, because he moved from one construction site to another in various remote parts of the country. At one time he was even engaged in diamond digging in Taimyr, well above the Arctic Circle. From there he moved right across the continent to the South, in the district of Kuban. Here in the more congenial climate of the Black Sea he settled down for a time and began writing at the age of 20. At that time, Solzhenitsyn, 14 years his senior, was still serving his sentence of imprisonment and exile ‘in perpetuity’, which did not end until 1956. That was the year in which Maksimov published his first collection of poems, followed in 1961 by a long short story included in a volume edited by K Paustovsky. In 1964 he published a play. Thus his literary career began in a perfectly legal way.
In the same year in which Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich appeared (1962) in Novyi Mir, with the special authorisation of Khrushchev, Maksimov published his novel Man Alive, which was, in 1965, dramatised and performed by the Moscow Pushkin Theatre. From 1965 Maksimov was a regular contributor to, and even member of the editorial board of, the literary magazine Oktyabr which, unlike Tvardovsky’s Novyi Mir, was not harassed by the authorities. The hide-bound Kochetov, appointed as editor of Oktyabr in 1961, gathered around him a group of rather mediocre orthodox writers, of a conformist, patriotic-nationalistic outlook, relentlessly opposed to any kind of Thaw. While the ‘liberals’ congregated around Novyi Mir, the conservatives identified with Oktyabr.
Maksimov’s collaboration with Oktyabr did not last long. In 1967 his writings and his name disappeared from its pages without any explanation. In 1968 he was rebuked by Moscow’s writers’ organisation for having signed one of the many declarations in protest against the Galanskov – Ginzburg trial. In November 1969 he protested against the expulsion of Solzhenitsyn from the Writers’ Union. Two years later he was himself expelled from that illustrious body directed – in Solzhenitsyn’s words – by ‘custodians of State Security’. Soon afterwards the French showed their appreciation by making him a member of their PEN Club. Early in 1973 Maksimov, together with Sakharov and four other intellectuals, warned against the disastrous effect which the accession of the USSR to the copyright convention could have on the work of dissident authors. During the recently-engineered ‘popular’ outburst against Sakharov, Maksimov, together with Academician Shafarevich and Alexander Galich, rallied to his support by putting forward his candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. Such a record supports Solzhenitsyn’s opinion that Maksimov is an ‘honest and courageous writer’.
Painting a Dark Canvas: Seven Days of Creation is a long novel divided into six chapters – one for each day of the week; ‘Sunday’, the finale, consists of one sentence only. It is an ambitious novel covering the period from the Revolution and Civil War till the 1960s. Each chapter is self-contained, yet the book is skilfully constructed to form a whole. The character providing the main link of the story is Piotr Vassilevich Lashkov, and Seven Days of Creation narrates the saga of his family to the third generation.
Lashkov, now a retired railway worker, has lived practically all his life in the important but faceless railway junction of Uzlovsk. It is through his dreams and somewhat complicated and confused flashbacks that we learn about his past: a faithful Bolshevik, enjoying the complete confidence of the party, he rose to a comparatively high position in the hierarchy and became a commissar of the Red Army and head of the district railway network.
He has been building his universe, stone by stone, slowly but surely... Law and order reigned in this universe... Life was divided into a ‘Yes’ and a ‘No’. ‘Yes’ comprised himself and his idea of what was around him; ‘No’ – all that was contrary to it. He carried this universe, like a monolith, within himself, and nothing could shake it.
What Maksimov wants to prove is that this universe is false, that it falls to pieces. To achieve this Maksimov confronts Lashkov with his own ‘universe’. Maksimov’s own version of reality, a highly distorted one, according to which the only true and everlasting ‘universe’ in which Lashkov can find peace and salvation is that of religion, mysticism and God.
As a theme this is, of course, neither new nor original. To bring his story to this predetermined and archaistic denouement, Maksimov adopts a method which greatly facilitates his task: he takes as his hero a man who has gone through all the 70 years of his life blindfolded, seeing nothing, understanding nothing, questioning nothing, and sometimes even feeling nothing. Then, all of a sudden, almost at his journey’s end, ‘two or three minute incidents’, ‘two or three accidental encounters’ shake the universe of certainty which Lashkov has put together with so much care.
Suddenly he notices that his daughter has been drinking; accidentally he stumbles into a murky service of a religious sect conducted by an old railway mechanic. From now on events move faster and unexpected encounters multiply. From now on it also becomes obvious that, in the end, both unhappy daughter and father, whose edifice of life has collapsed, will see The Light. And indeed, in the last paragraph of the novel Piotr Lashkov begins moving in the rays of the rising sun, his grandchild in his arms: ‘He moved forward and he Knew. He Knew and he Believed.’ Then comes ‘The Seventh Day’, ‘the day of hope and resurrection’.
Between the confusing and clumsy opening of the story and its primitive and melodramatic finale, Maksimov paints on a large canvas his picture of post-revolutionary Russia. And he uses very dark colours indeed. The rare glimmers of brightness derive almost exclusively from those who possess The Light within them. Only they know where they are going – the others are like leaves tossed about by the cruel winds of Soviet life.
To present various aspects of this life Maksimov resorts to a simple literary device: in his old age Piotr Lashkov is trying to establish long-lost contacts with some members of his family. Maksimov takes him around and confronts him – and us – with a picture of life and death so gruesome, so full of black despondency, that both reason and feelings revolt.
In the porter’s lodge, where the oldest Lashkov lives now in poverty and loneliness, Piotr ‘watched attentively a cobweb, spun across the right corner of the window, where a moth, obviously at the end of its strength, moved convulsively to free itself. The cobweb vibrated, holding its prey ever tighter. Caught in the deadly net the dusty wings finally stopped fluttering.’ The brothers face each other after an interval of 40 years. As in all other Russian encounters, a bottle of vodka unties the tongues and Vassili pours forth the tale of his bright hopes with which as a young Communist he had returned from the Civil War. Why were they dashed? Who or what ruined them? ‘You, who belong to the party, explain to me...’, he challenges Piotr. Later on in the chapter Vassili himself is absorbed in catching a fly under a glass: ‘The fly was finally caught and kept buzzing inside, hitting the glass walls. Wickedly and even with some feeling of sensuous vindictiveness, Lashkov thought: Go on, now, go on, turn, you dirty beast. The fly, exhausted, fell, then pulled itself up, and again began its vain search for a way out.’
Through such conventionally sombre symbols in which the book abounds, Maksimov intensifies the mood of absolute hopelessness which permeates The Seven Days. Everybody, the whole of the vast country, is caught in a filthy terrifying net, in a trap, which strangles it – and there is no way out, Yes, perhaps in 1905 and 1917 Piotr Lashkov and his comrades had tried to build a better society. They might have been well-meaning, but they were thoughtless. They failed abysmally also because they were blind and did not see where the root of the evil was. Who were they to set out to improve the world? In the name of their puny, earthly conception of justice they were meting punishment, and so everything disintegrated ‘because at the beginning was sin, and from each punishment a new sin is born’.
Journey Across Russia: The Moscow block of flats seen through the eyes of Vassili Lashkov, its ‘dvornik’ or concierge, is obviously intended as a microcosm of the capital from the time when, after the Civil War, middle-class families were reduced to living in one or two rooms and the apartments were packed to bursting point with homeless riff-raff and the ‘lower classes’. Lashkov saw it all: impoverishment, wickedness and misery, theft, murder, searches and arrests by the dreaded Cheka; treachery and denunciations, searches and arrests by the not-less-dreaded GPU; bureaucratic stupidity, senseless deportations and the return of human wrecks from Stalinist concentration camps. Hopelessness and helplessness: all are caught like flies in the deadly cobweb: the extremely dignified Tsarist officer who celebrates only religious Holy Days and the birthday of Prince Alexander Nikolayevich Romanov, the Heir to the Throne, as well as the tubercular policeman Kalinin who shoots himself to escape duties odious to him.
Piotr Lashkov’s visit to his younger brother gives Maksimov an opportunity to paint the horrors of Russian peasant life. During the war Andrei had been entrusted by the party with the task of evacuating 12,000 head of cattle from western Russia to Derbent, on the Caspian Sea. The day and night trek through sandstorms and snowstorms, through mountains and desert, is described panoramically and with great power, marred only by a superabundance of primitive philosophising. Here Maksimov presents a picture of the old, very old, Mother Russia, untouched by civilisation, with her drinking, swearing, lynching peasants capable of some good deeds in their unpredictable moments of lucidity. Is this picture of utter backwardness another indictment of the revolution and of its inability to raise the muzhik from the mire? The ‘wise man’ of the story, a former Kornilov officer, enlightens Andrei: ‘Men like you... are all alike. You want to act for the good of all, and automatically you commit mistakes. The obscurantism of the people is of such a nature that it does not accept any light.’ In Maksimov’s version the only ‘light’ the peasants accept and follow faithfully is that of the Greek Orthodox priests.
In the chapter entitled ‘Thursday – The Belated Light’ Piotr Lashkov makes a vain attempt to rescue his grandson from a psychiatric hospital. Again, just as in the ‘free’ world outside, everybody is trapped till death; the real madmen are those who are not aware of this. Here, too, the only solace is alcohol. After a few drinks Kreps enlightens Vadim: ‘The muzhik had his soul taken away and nothing but vodka was given to him to replace it...’ (It is not made clear, however, who it was that deprived the muzhik of his soul.)
All our reformers of woe of the kind of Peter the Great and his Marxist admirers had died with the sense of duty accomplished, very proud of themselves, while their beautiful artefacts are costing us a great deal... What kind of law is it that makes the whole nation pay for a bloody whim of a few paranoiacs? ... The whole world curses us... But the universe should bless Russia... because by her cruel example Russia showed others what must not be done.
Vadim does not ask and Kreps does not say what in his view must be done.
From ‘Monday – Journey into Oneself’ to ‘Thursday’ Maksimov forces his narrative towards its culmination. In ‘Friday’ we are given the story of Piotr Lashkov’s daughter and her husband Nikolai. Nikolai, who also happened to be Piotr Lashkov’s godson, fell foul of the authorities and the only job he could get was that of a building worker in the windswept, desert-like steppe of Central Asia. There the couple belong to the so-called ‘free’ workers, though for all practical purposes they live like convicts. Most of their workmates are wrecks who have survived prison, camp and exile. Only a few characters have managed to preserve somewhere in the corner of their souls some human emotion of kindness and charity. One of them is Ossip Mekler, the son of the Jewish dentist. He had wanted to study law, but could do so only at the price of becoming an informer. This he refused to do. Through the chapter Mekler is presented as one of the noblest characters.
What are Ossip, his team and all the other workers-slaves constructing? What purpose will serve this grim building, half buried under the ground, with its innumerable, identical, tiny, non-communicating cubicles opening only on unending dark corridors? Nobody wants to know, but some cannot help guessing: Antonina overhears a hushed voice: ‘As I have always said... did your grandfathers need all this hullaballoo just in order to change jailers?’ ‘What a life’, Antonina murmurs, ‘Without realising it one ties for oneself the rope on which one gets hanged...’
An Ill-Defined Longing: At the opening of the novel Piotr Lashkov recalls how some time in 1905 , during a skirmish between the workers and the gendarmes, he had noticed a pink succulent ham hanging behind the broken window of a grocery shop. It was so tantalising that he risked his life and dashed amid the whistling bullets to grab it. Breathless, he stretched his hand for the coveted prize. Under his eager fingers he felt the roughness of thickly painted papier-mâché. He burst out into uncontrolled sobs.
This image of disillusionment repeats itself. All bravery, all endeavour is futile: ‘... another madman installed himself on top... and poor Russia... again, like a hundred years before, bleeds profusely...’
It is difficult to say to what extent Maksimov is under the influence of Solzhenitsyn. He certainly looks for inspiration much further back, and, most obviously, to Dostoyevsky. He sees the revolution as having been made by The Possessed who attempted to do away with God. Has not Dostoyevsky’s gloomy prophesy come true? The Poor People have been led astray by those who ‘never worked with their hands’. They have ‘stirred the lowest instincts’ of the ignorant crowds and incited them to ‘take from him who has food, and to eat; to take from him who has clothing, and to dress themselves; and to take power from those who hold power’. By whom are the laws written? Not by poets, but by ‘those seminarists who have dropped their studies, by failed lawyers, and by miserable discoverers of perpetuum mobile...’. This verdict with its allusion to Stalin, Lenin and Trotsky, comes from the febrile lips of Khramov the poet, who continues a tirade which might have been taken from the pages of The Brothers Karamazov: ‘The Smerdiakovs have invaded Russia... All is possible, all is permissible.’ But what Maksimov has not learned from his master is the ability to modulate his voice: he is strident, he overwhelms when he thunders his warnings of further impending disasters. Our sensitivity is blunted by the monotony of dark colours too thickly laid on. Maksimov lacks dramatic control and the right measure which is the essence of all artistic creation.
Maksimov has taken over Dostoyevsky’s philosophy, but flattened it, depriving it of its depth and originality. Unlike his master, he is unable to make us perceive this philosophy through the deeds and thoughts of his dramatis personae: he flings it at us directly, explicitly, until it becomes a kind of intemperate propaganda: his condemnation of the revolution is absolute and total. He sees the whole half-century that has passed as a continuous, undifferentiated, unchanging, uniformly black pit of despair. In this book, written in the naturalist-realistic conventional manner, the great tragedy and the prodigious élan of the nation at war are hardly mentioned. No notice is taken of Stalin’s death and all the traumatic shocks that followed it. There is not a single redeeming feature in what the men of 1917 had done, no recognition of what the revolution has achieved since. None of Maksimov’s characters give any hint of what they expect or what they wish for the future. What Maksimov in fact proposes is to beat a retreat, to go back at least a hundred years in time and... to stay there.
Isaac Deutscher said that ‘it is inconceivable that Russia should ever call back the Romanovs, even if only to overthrow them for a second time... The revolution... has outlasted all possible agents of restoration.’ At times Maksimov’s voice seems to ‘call back the Romanovs’. From his book comes a strong whiff of an ill-defined longing for some sort of ‘spiritual restoration’.
How representative are Maksimov’s views on Russia’s recent past? We have no means of conducting a survey of the underground literary opinion. There is no doubt that such an opinion exists, and that it is characterised by a multiplicity of currents. ‘There are always currents, even in waters that appear stagnant’, says LO in a little book on Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914 – Judged By the Russian Readers. [1] Unfortunately, adds LO, ‘our “public opinion” manifests itself in few, all too few documents’. Perhaps a similar collection of readers’ reactions to Maksimov’s writings will reach us before long. But even then the verdict could not be conclusive: for this we depend too much on those ‘middlemen’ in Frankfurt, like XTS, Possev and Grani who have a near monopoly of supplying the West with samizdat literature; and they certainly have their anti-revolutionary bias. So far only rumours of a sharply divided opinion – pro- and anti-Maksimov – have reached us from Russia.
1. Lucille Nivat and Alfréda Aucouturier (eds), Août quatorze jugé par les lecteurs russes (Du Seuil, Paris, 1973) – MIA.