“I have no use for satirists.”
So says Stalin in an early chapter of Mikhail and Margarita, this love-quadrangle novel set in 1933 Moscow. Bulgakov is summoned to the Kremlin after writing a letter in defense of the recently arrested Osip Mandelstam, and then Stalin and Bulgakov take a spin about the capital in the vozhd’s posh convertible.
It is a fabulistic conceit, and this brilliant novel is filled with many more, but also with vivid language, sly references to Bulgakov’s novel, and a generally haunting image of life under the Great Leader’s thumb.
During their ride, Stalin laughingly calls Bulgakov a rabbit: “happy in your burrow, fearful of the sky and its owl.” But who wouldn’t be, and, more importantly, how does one square the need to make art with a state that cannot brook freethinking?
There ought to be two Writers Unions, Bulgakov muses at one point, “one for those who were actually writers and another for those who simply place words on a page.” Such a sentiment – one many shared during the twentieth century – lies at the center of Himes’ novel. What is the role of the artist and writer when the society into which he is born does not have affection for him? Ought one endure torture and imprisonment? Or perhaps cower and write what can pass the censors, joining the fake Writers’ Union? Or should one up and leave, abandoning one’s homeland?
And what of love? What if it forces you to ask the same questions? What if love makes you adore someone that society hates? Or what if you so love your homeland that you cannot think of leaving it, cannot think of betraying it by giving it less than your finest creations?
Beautifully written, touching on some of the deepest, most unanswerable questions of twentieth century Russian culture, Mikhail and Margarita will make you want to pick up Bulgakov’s masterpiece again. That alone makes it an invaluable work.
Those familiar with twentieth century Russian history will read Catherine Walworth’s Soviet Salvage feeling the pendulum about to swing like a wrecking ball against the arts. In a nation ravaged by war and revolution, idealistic artists worked in varying styles of Russian Modernism loosely grouped as Constructivists. Due to scarcity, artists relied on found and reused materials left behind by the fallen regime for artistic expression, hence the “salvage” in the title.
Each chapter focuses on an artist or group in a given medium: Tatlin’s assembled sculpture; thousands of Romanov porcelain blanks repainted by Altman and Schekotikhina-Pototskaia; Lamanova’s simple dress designs that could be made in-home from tablecloths and other available materials; Esfir Shub’s films created from found footage of the imperial family.
Walworth is at her best describing the porcelain, graphic propaganda illustrations that were part of the everyday. “The Bolsheviks,” she writes, “commemorated each yearly event, anniversary, and milestone with porcelain dishes, like paving stones on a future path to stable rule.”
Then came the First Five Year Plan, the exhibition Art of the Capitalist Era (1931-32) denigrating the Constructivists, the charge of “formalism,” and socialist realism. Out with the new, in with the old.
It is somewhat hard to classify this book.
Not merely a work of history, it delves into belles lettres and biography, and also into literature and philosophy, to say nothing of architecture and urban planning. Topping out at over 1100 pages, it offers a sweeping, Tolstoyan narrative of twentieth century Russian history and life seen through a singular prism.
That prism is the massive Government House apartment building that Boris Iofan designed and built in the 1930s. But just as Government House was far more than an apartment building, this book seeps relentlessly into most everything it adjoins. It is rich in biographies of those who lived there (as compelling recounting their pre-revolutionary lives as it is when revealing the diaries of their denouements), and it teems with the cultural, political, literary, and philosophical currents that washed over, in, and around this architectural edifice.
Those who ended up in Government House – in one of the 550 luxurious apartments in the self-sustaining grey fortress perched across the Moscow River from that other, more famous red-bricked fortress – were the Bolshevik elite. And when, a few years after Iofan’s building was completed, the revolution began to viciously devour its own, Government House became its central feedlot. For all of Soviet Russia’s best and brightest were gathered here with their families, carefully monitored and gratuitously fattened up for Stalin’s slaughter.
That it all worked out this way, Slezkine argues, is because the Bolsheviks were secular millennialists – atheist zealots whose belief system was as unassailable and misguided as that of any religious zealot. But they were zealots who got control of a state and its instruments of violence and power. And while their fanaticism and political ruthlessness served them in the acquisition of power, and in the forced collectivization, industrialization, and totalitarianization of Russian society, such traits can only build for a time. When the fanaticism and ruthlessness have run out, when the soul of society and its individuals have been crushed, the unraveling begins. And this is what Slezkine chronicles in this important tome.
By showing us in fascinating, often excruciating detail, what life was like for the true believers, how the first generation of revolutionaries betrayed their ideals and objectives, unable to even convince their heirs of their cause, Slezkine documents how truly unnatural was the imposition of the Soviet State on Russian history. Or, as Slezkine writes toward the end of the book, “Bolshevism... was a massive missionary campaign mounted by a sect that proved strong enough to conquer an empire, but not resourceful enough to either convert the barbarians or reproduce itself at home.”
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