As a fan of Soviet literature one of my great frustrations
is the lack of good writing from a pro-Stalin perspective. There is no shortage
of books about the evils of Stalin and the system he created- Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov
and Bulgakov all spring to mind- but what about those writers who actually
believed in his vision for the USSR?
After all, even today many Russians view Stalin with a
mixture of awe and terror, or simply awe. As for me, I think he was a vile individual,
yet I would still like to know what it feels like to believe in that living god. Of course many authors in the 30s and
40s wrote books praising Stalin but they were mostly if not all rotten:
monotonous, simplistic, shallow and dishonest.
For a while I subscribed to an extraordinary little magazine,
the Sovlit.com “Thin Journal” that provided summaries of these books, on the
grounds that most people have neither the time nor the inclination to read
them. Of course it wasn’t very popular and the magazine ceased to exist around
issue # 11. Today even the website is gone, which is a pity as it contained
some very fine, profoundly obscure information.
Even so, it was rare that I read one of those summaries and
wanted to read the whole book. The question remains then- is there a great
author, broadly pro-Stalin, who can convey to the reader honestly what it was
like to be alive in that most terrible of epochs? In fact the answer is yes,
and his name is Andrei Platonov- a devout communist with the unfortunate habit
of telling the truth.
I first encountered his writing in his extraordinary novel The Foundation Pit, set during the
period of collectivization. It is a mind-bendingly bleak work, filled with
infinite suffering, profound compassion and written in luminous prose that is
at once alien but suffused with human feeling. Reading it you would think
Platonov loathed the regime, but he didn’t:
he wanted to believe in the glorious future but could not deny the suffering
he witnessed.
Next I read Soul, an
account of a lost tribe on the verge of death in the wastes of Turkmenistan. In
this book turtles have souls and a mythological Stalin shimmers like some
remote beacon in the distance, providing hope to the lost. This faith seems
pathetic to us now, but this is not a problem for the narrative- it only adds extra
poignancy to the despairing undercurrent in Platonov’s weak hope.
Just before Christmas I read Happy Moscow, an unfinished novel from the 1930s, set in the soviet
capital just as the city was assuming its modern form. As with all of
Platonov’s novels the prose is weirdly alienating but also intimate, and the
book teems with tropes from the “Golden Age of Stalinism” if you will permit me
to use such a phrase. Moscow Chestnova, the titular heroine is a beautiful girl
who becomes a parachutist; she goes to work in the metro but loses a leg; then
she moves in with a bizarre, shiftless character who has more or less given up
on life.
Other men fall in love with Moscow. One of them is an
Esperanto enthusiast while another is carrying out research into immortality
and believes he may have located the soul in the lower intestine. As with Platonov’s other works, this may sound
surreal but in fact finding a scientific route to immortality was taken very
seriously in Russia at the time- Maxim Gorky was a major patron of an
experimental institute seeking to abolish death. Lurking in the background is
the inspirational figure but sketchy figure of Stalin- remote, vague, an idea
rather than a person. As is usual with Platonov everybody suffers horribly.
Of course, while Platonov considered himself a communist
many of his peers were repelled by the honesty in his work, and most of his books
were not published until long after his death. According to his English
translator Robert Chandler, however, critics increasingly view him as Russia’s
greatest prose writer of the 20th century.
I’m not keen on aesthetic ratings systems but I do agree that
Platonov is an exceptional writer. This was confirmed for me not just by Happy Moscow but by an unexpected
encounter with his retellings of old folk yarns in the new Penguin anthology Russian Magic Tales. These were the very
last things he wrote, when he could no longer get his original stories past the
censor: kid’s stuff, you might think.
In fact, here his gift is at least as evident as it is in
his novels. With the exception of Pushkin’s folk tales, most of the other yarns
in the book are fairly straightforward retellings. Platonov however enters deep
into the world of folktale and myth, and while still operating within strict
confines, reanimates them with the same poignant, sad wisdom as his novels. At
his hands, these hoary old chestnuts become new and strange and startling
again- and that, surely, is the mark of a genius.
24/1/2013