David Bergelson's Judgement

David Bergelson's Yiddish novel, Judgment, reminds me of Platonov's beautiful but profoundly sad book, Soul.  Bergelson resembles Plotonov in his capacity for deploying metaphors and similes to make everyday life feel exceedingly unfamiliar and strange.  Like Platonov, Bergelson's prose is powerfully original, and derives much of its poignancy from its systematic conflation of the animate and inanimate worlds.  In Soul, Platonov describes the emotional condition of his protagonist by projecting that protagonist's desperate loneliness and existential isolation onto the animals he encounters in his travels.  For Platonov, every camel, vulture, or dog, is actively reflecting the ongoing tragedy of earthly existence. Here, for example, is a description of homes in a local Jewish village:  "The houses were buried deep in the snow.  Like wrestlers in the ring too exhausted to throw their opponents, they remained hunched over in their corners."  For Bergelson, every cloud, gust of wind, forest, or home is alive with a kind of ominous and willful intensity. Thus, abandoned buildings "peer" out of dark corners, storms are "measured and coldblooded," and the moon has the "face of a cadaver." Bergelson's depicts the physical world as dark, threatening, and unsafe, but also curiously magical and furiously alive.  Probably the greatest similarity between Bergelson and Platonov is that they each somehow manage to demonstrate that the world can be both sad beyond recoking and simultaneously beautiful.  Take, for example, Bergelson's bleak depiction of characters who are both tragic and magnificently unique.  One character was "gypsy dark with gold hoops in her ears, with a pair of eyes that always looked exhausted, worn out from her own beauty."  Another character was a "deaf-mute" but still had enough vitality to "flood the whole world with pancakes" if he wasn't told to stop cooking. 

If Bergelson's novel resembles the mood and style of Platonov's Judgment, its plot or subject matter more closely resembles Babel's Red Cavalry short stories. For both books deal with the chaotic period immediately following the Revolution.  While Babel's Red Cavalry follows the Bolsheviks' ultimately unsuccessful campaign against non-communist Poland, Bergelson's novel depicts a border region in which the communists are still working to more fully exert their influence. In Bergelson's world, revolutionaries are still rounding up enemies, patrolling the border areas, and suppressing Social Revolutionary plots. A doctor waits to see if the revolution will be overturned.  As Bergelson writes, "Every time he put a piece of gauze in a patient's mouth, he would run to the window to check whether the current regime had been abolished."

 Bergelson's view of the Revolution is complex and multifaceted. To be sure, the revolution is violent.  In the new revolutionary climate, you could grab and whip you "just the same as if you'd done nothing."  It was best "not to get in the revolution's way."  And many were "given the authority from the revolution to reduce everyone standing here to ashes..."  The revolution is also a monumental force of change, capable of rupturing both time and space.  In terms of time, the revolution has created a clear divide between past and present.  New types of people had emerged in its wake.  "In the past men like Filopov didn't exist," writes Bergelson. The world had been overturned by revolution.  As the narrator laments, "People just didn't know how to live in times like these." Bergelson's characters agree with the narrator.  One says that "if you knew somebody yesterday, that doesn't mean you know who he is today," and another exclaims that "life got rerouted onto a strange and crooked path."   In terms of space, the revolution was someone akin to Tarkovsky's alien zones in the film Roadside Picnic.  Where the revolution existed, life operated according to one set of almost physical laws;  where the revolution did not exist, life operated in entirely different ways.  As one characters declares, a "journey of a mere four or five hours gets you to a place where the revolution is over" and this meant that one could encounter a "different kind of snow, whiter and freer..."  Just across Russia's border there was a "city at the seashore" where "music will be playing--just music, without speeches."  The revolution's defenders agreed with this sentiment and saw the revolution as a sack.  "We keep on patching it up, but you here at the border are like mice, nibling away."  The fear was that the revolutionary zone would spill into the non-revolutionary zone, or vice versa.  "You are eating out a hole at the edge of the sack and everything's going to spill out," declared the local communist boss. 









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Platonov's Soul

In the translator's introduction to Andrei Platonov's novella, Soul, Robert Chandler makes the bold claim that Platonov will one day become known as Russia's greatest prose stylist, the analog to Pushkin's role in the world of Russian poetry.  The claim is bold but I read Chandler's introduction only after I had completed the work itself and come to the same conclusion.  In the past couple of years, I have encountered several of Platonov's works almost haphazardly, but each time my appreciation for the Soviet author has deepened immeasurably.  Only several weeks ago I read several of Platonov's plays.  This time I was left wondering why Platonov hadn't received more credit as a forerunner to many of the twentieth century's many other brilliant European modernists.  The plays were funny, sardonic, and strangely futuristic.  They also seemed to capture the essential absurdity of Soviet ideology and language while somehow indicting the whole of modern European civilization.

Even so, I left the plays thinking that perhaps Platonov was a wonderfully talented niche writer who, sadly, hadn't been productive enough, or free enough, to really make his mark in modern letters.  I had read the Foundation Pit and been deeply impressed by the author's intentionally elliptical style, which somehow reminded me of Joseph Conrad, who always wanted to tell you something about the limits of language.  But again, I thought the work was perhaps too short to justify any grandiloquent claims on the author's behalf.  Platonov could have been a major writer, I thought, if only he had lived in a society that recognized and encouraged his talent, or if only he had a more human subject matter than Soviet bureaucratic violence.  I suppose deep down I thought that socialist realism had killed genius in Soviet Russia, or that the scale of violence in Russia permitted no truly humane literary treatments of Soviet life.

At any rate, with all this in mind, Platonov's Soul came as a shock to me.  The short novel is a depiction of a lonely Soviet hero in search of his mother, his wandering Central Asian nation, and meaning itself.  The work is overwhelming tragic.  In fact, I think I have never read a sadder book.  Soul does have something to say about Soviet life.  It mentions Stalin from time to time, and always juxtaposes Moscow's modernity with the almost neolithic life of his wandering kind fold in Central Asia.  In a sense, the book could perhaps be seen as replicating a kind of postcolonial logic, with Communist Russians representing progress, and his protagonist's "nation" of misfit individuals from desperate ethnicities representing a primitive past.  However, Platonov's empathy for his protagonist and all of his characters is almost supernatural.  Someone once said that Tolstoy was such a brilliant novelist because he had so much empathy he could basically cry for the fate of a horse he encountered.

The quote applies to Tolstoy but also points to why Platonov was also a truly brilliant novelist.  Platonov not only affords us the opportunity of understanding his desperately poor and downtrodden characters, he does this by forcing us over and over again to get to know and feel the sad plight of all living things, including many dozens of animals.  I thought of the Tolstoy quote many times as Platonov forced me to think deeply, and feel deeply, about a long series of animals in the desolate landscape, including birds of prey, dogs, and sheep.  In fact, it's almost impossible not to cry when Platonov describes the inner life of a camel his protagonist encounters.  The author's extended interest in animals is no accidental literary device.  The point of the repeated exercise in uncanny empathy must be that he intends all of his readers to understand life at his deepest, most primordial, almost animalistic level:  we live, we suffer, and we die.  Soul is a deep meditation on the nature of suffering, but somehow it isn't really merely tragic.  In fact, I would say that Platonov wants us to suffer so much with his characters that we somehow come through with him to the other side, and see that joy is somehow the other side of tragedy, that life itself is too profound to be treated in any simple or one-dimensional way.

The translator tells us that Platonov was full of ironies or dichotomies, and that his secularism was strangely religious.  This seems to be an apt description of his project in Soul, to make us look at ordinary life through the eye of a Jesus, Muhammad, or Buddha.  There is no sharp distinction between life and death Platonov seems to say, or even between different people, or perhaps between people and animals.  We exist.  We are connected.  Platonov's says the same thing in almost a hundred different but equally profoundly novel ways, but his description of people who are essentially dead already ultimately makes the point that there really isn't all that much difference between being dead and being alive:  even in a Soviet Russia--or perhaps especially in a Soviet Russia--everything is, and remains, Soul.

Platonov Quotes from Two Plays

In my previous post, I touched upon Platonov's plays within the context of the Russian war on boredom.  Plotanov's two plays, The Hurdy-Gurdy and Fourteen Little Red Huts also contain themes related to Soviet ideology, propaganda, verbal savagery, and impending violence.  As a playwright, Platonov's greatest virtue may be his strikingly funny turns of phrase.  One sometimes thinks that Oscar Wilde might have written lines that resemble Platonov's one liners if he had been forced to describe human interactions in the inhuman age of Soviet man-made famine.  Here are just a few of the quotes that I thought captured Platonov's ability to capture the absurd nature of Soviet modernity. Probably, most literary critics would compare Platonov's plays with Beckett and other absurdists,because the absurd dialogue usually occurs in rather fantastically abstract social situations. But the insistently clever and almost inevitably paradoxical nature of every line reminds me of Wilde.

Sample quotes:


Miud:  What was if my heart starts to ache for some reason?
Aloysha:  Doesn't matter.  It will be cut out of you, to save it from torment.

Miud:  Aloysha, I've gotten bored of living in the world.
Alyosha:  Never mind.  Soon there will be socialism--then everyone will rejoice.

Aloysha:  As soon as socialism sets in, I will invent you all over again, from square one--and you will be the child of the whole international proletariat.

Alosha:  Sabotage on the part of Nature, Miud.
Miud:  Is Nature a Fascist?

Miud:  Waiting is boring.

Serena:  We want to be with you.  We love your whole bitter fate!

Stervetsen:  Here you have a shock-working psyche.  Enthusiasm is visibly located on every citizen's face.

Stervetsen:  And you--just give us the gift of your superstructure!   What do you need it for?  You have the base, after all--so you can live for the time being on the foundation.

Shchoev:  Where on earth can these bastard birds have sprung from?  Everything was so quiet and consistent with the Plan, the entire apparatus had adopted the Party line for the organization of fleshy crayfish deeps-and now in come the birds!  Try and procure them!

Shchoev:  I myself am a human being.

Shchoev:  Boredom...a tender, decent feeling...in youth it can lead to developmental complications.

Shchoev:  Oh Yevsei, Yevsei, food is really just a social convention, nothing more!

Yevsei:  No comrade, we procure only uncultured animals.  We love hardships.

Stervetsen:  Nothing should be left untried.  The whole world is only an experiment.

Serena:  Papa!  Are these locusts?  Are they eating saboteur insects?

Alyosha:  You're an uncollectivized egotist!

Shchoev:  All animals, Yevsei, love one another.  But what we need isn't love, it's the Party line.

First female office worker:  Comrade Shchoev, please, let me go off duty now!  I've already spent a whole evening being joyful.

Serena: Papa, where do they keep their superstructure?

Shchoev:  What we need now is containers and packaging, not spirit.

Shchoev:  Do you imagine we keep our superstructure heaped up in a barn somewhere like bales of hay?

Shchoev:  It's all the same.  Once you enter our periphery, you no longer posses a personality.

Stervetsen:  But is your soul really manufactured like some industrial product?
Shchoev:  Our soul is the superstructure, you idiot!  The superstructure rising over the interrelationships of stuff! Of course we manufacture it.

Stervetsen:  ...your hears...are shock workers of joy hammering in your chests.

Shchoev:  O Lord, Lord, if only you truly existed!

Miud:  Aloysha, I'm bored here, I'm all in tears.  Let's get away from here and move on to socialism.

Miud:  All I care about is fulfilling the Five-Year Plan within four years.

Miud:  Don't cry Aloysha.  Just close your eyes tight and I will lead you to socialism as if you were blind.

--Chastise yourselves on your days off!

Yevsei: You are a gift of God--but there is no God...

State collective farm agent:  I am chasing birds and fish back into the economy!  But what's up with you?

Stervetsen:  Deceivers, grasping self-servers, eulogizers of the status quo, impetuous drifters...

Shchoev:  Friendly elements represent the greatest danger, Yevsei.

Boredom in Goncharov, Boym, Chekhov, and Platonov

Boredom is surely one of the most important motifs in both late Russian and Soviet literary history. One thinks immediately of Ivan Goncharov's treatise on the subject of boredom, Oblomov, where his protagonist can't usually think of anything compelling enough to make him leave his room or even rise from his bed.  The theme of boredom is perhaps most exquisitely manifested by Anton Chekhov, whose plays seem filled with superfluous characters bemoaning their existential fate as well as their economic fate as representatives of obsolete classes.  Svetlana Boym's brilliant book, Common Places:  Mythologies of Everyday Life, depicts boredom as one of the central tragedies of Russian culture.  Boym's argument is that Russians mourn banal existence and all too often seem to prefer extraordinary events to what they see as the tragedy of quotidian life.

Chekhov's Three Sisters seems to capture this predilection.  As, for example, when Masha and Vershinin try to decide how best to suffer the banality of small town life.  "To speak three languages in this town is not an accomplishment, " mourns Masha.  "It is a deformity."  Vershinin has only a slightly more optimistic view of the situation.  He believes that in the very distant future things will be better. "In two, three hundred years... life on earth will have become unutterably beautiful.  Men need such a life.  We do not have it, but we dream of it.  We anticipate it.  We wait.  We wonder.  We prepare for it."  More than this, Vershinin's view of the present is that it should perhaps be thought about as a rough draft for a better life.  Irina also complains, although it's not entirely clear whether her lament is a class-based complaint or an existential one.  One suspects it is a mixture, or that the aristocratic life somehow symbolizes the more general human condition.  "And if one does not work...that's why we are unhappy. Isn't it?  Because we have nothing to do.  We are born of people who despise work."

For Chekhov's characters, the melancholy of the present can only be redeemed by the splendor of the future, although his characters rarely seem certain about the extent to which that future will actually come about.  "Can we not day dream, as it were, of what life will be in a hundred  years?" Vershinin asks Tuzenbach.  Tuzenbach begins optimistically.  "People will move in hot air balloons.  Fashions will change. We will see the discovery and development of the Sixth Sense."  But then Tuzenbach sours even on this idyll.  "But life...Life will remain the same. Dark. Full of mysteries.  Dark. Difficult.  Unhappy.  In a thousand years, too."  Vershinin retains his enthusiasm for the future.  He can bear the sorrowful present only if life will change in the future.  "At some time...Life will have changed.  How can we think that it will not--as it is changing now?  ..a happy life--a life of betterment."

Chekhov's attitude toward everyday life, and toward boredom in particular, sometimes seems to anticipate the Russian Revolution.  Although we know Chekhov could not have predicated the revolution, we can see in the revolutionary impulse some desire to transcend everyday existence in favor of a radically different future.  As it turned out, the Soviet future was worse than the Old Regime's dreary present, much worse.  For this reason, it's interesting to pair Platonov's brilliantly absurd plays about the Soviet experience with Chekhov's more naturalistic treatment of turn-of-the-century Russian hope of radical transformation.  For Platonov, post-revolutionary communist life remains supremely boring, although that boredom has become almost ideologically necessary to the Soviet state's continued existence.

In both Fourteen Little Red Huts and the Hurdy-Gurdy, Soviet citizens are supremely bored, but boredom (made more vicious by the presence of man-made famine) in the present seems to consolidate one's faith in the Soviet future.  Hurdy-Gurdy opens with the theme of boredom as Miud says to Aloysha, "I've gotten bored of living in the world," and Aloysha replies:  "Never mind.  Soon there will be socialism--then everyone will rejoice."

In fact, Aloysha's retort shows that the Soviet state seems to have finally harnessed Russia's unending (and therefore tedious?) problem with boredom.  When Serena in the Hurdy-Gurdy asks Aloysha later in the play, "Why do you look so bored on your face?" Alyosha's reply is once again ideologically sound.  "Because I'm always yearning for socialism...."  Of course, Alyosha's faith in the future is perhaps no less fragile than Chekhov's Vershinin's faith in the future was.  When Serena shows even a hint of doubt about Aloysha's faith by asking, "And will it be wonderful?"  Aloysha logically replies:  "For a question like that I could kill you. Can't you see?"

In fact, the Soviet Union's principle contribution to humanity may be its putative solution to boredom. In Fourteen Little Red Huts, we see that Communism has solved the problem of suffering in the present by actually turning suffering into a positive virtue.  Thus Bos says "That's good--suffer! Suffering's splendid.  I'm reminding you, so you don't forget."  Communism also provides citizens with a road-map to the future that justifies the present.   With Marx and the Party Line, Soviet citizens "can see right through humanity to the whole of fate!"  In the end, Platonov shows us that the Soviet state has developed a number of different solutions to the problem of time, which is in the end another way of labeling the problem of boredom.  The Soviet state has discovered tools for defeating time.  For instance, the Soviet state has five year plans that can be completed in four years, and shock workers who can do the work of multiple days in a single day.

The Soviet Union has also shown Russian citizens that they do not need to even create the future, as Chekhov's characters suggested.  Rather, they can do what Platonov's Bos suggests, which is precisely nothing.  This is because the Communists had showed him that it's okay to "languish without motion amid the historical current." There's a paradox here, but Platonov suggests that Soviet citizens can defeat boredom in two equally absurd ways.  First, they can work twice as hard to speed up time, and second, they can do nothing and drift in the current of the proletarian future.  Bos sums up the paradox of Soviet boredom this way:  "I'm bored of you all with your youth and enthusiasm, your capacity for work, and your faith in the future.  You stand at the beginning, but I already know the end.  We can't understand each other."