Abram Tertz and Grotesque Stalinism

"But not even the oldest inhabitant has ever seen bison or tapirs or giraffe.  So Dr. Linde's story of coming across a prehistoric pterodactyl at the foot of the Hill must be sheer invention."

"I'd sooner have something by Feuchtwanger or Hemingway."

"Why should a man struggle and exert himself when he can pick up a book on the very first page get himself a new wife and children, a new home and a mass of colorful impressions--all virtually without any risk?"

"Was Lyubimov played out, sunk in its inertia to the end of time?  Had it no ambitions, no trick up its sleeve, no wish to astonish the world by a brand-new Utopia of its own?"

"You can have your mighty and benevolent tsar.  I give you a leader endowed with that intangible power you've been raving about for three centuries!?

"...and what's the use of freedom to a Russian if he is not to have his fling and enjoy himself to the damnation of his soul, the terror of his enemies, and for something to remember at the hour of his death?"

"We Russians are not fond of tippling amateurishly, in solitude, each in his corner, a teaspoonful at a time."

"What kind of a wedding breakfast is this?  Vodka and gherkins!  Where are the signs of our prosperity?  Disgraceful!  What will they say in Europe?"

"a slice of that small-calibre pre-war Crakow salami--just the thought of it turns your spit into mayonnaise and oils your mouth so that you have to be careful not to swallow your tongue!"

"Your task as a writer, as the historian of our city, is to observe reality in its unwavering march towards the future and faithfully to record each event."

Andrei Sinyavesky (a.k.a., Abram Tertz) was one of the Soviet Union's best and brightest authors.  Soviet Roulette has discussed his brilliant Soviet Civilization: A Cultural History previously.  I have also touched upon his treatment of Russian folklore.  Sinyavesky has much to recommend him, but his chief strength is his ability to step back from everyday Soviet criminality to examine its mythical or poetic aspects.  A keen student of Soviet peasant religiosity, read together, Sinyavesky nonfiction and fiction works give readers a good idea of just how grotesque the Soviet experiment really was.  But not grotesque merely in the sense of perverse or evil.  Rather, Sinyavesky helps us to see the Soviet state from the perspective of Russia's myriad peasants, whose lively oral tradition had already conceptualized equally outlandish or even ridiculous entities. Sinyavesky's book, The Makepeace Experiment, depicts Stalinism, and Soviet politics in general, as a cosmic absurdity rather a political tragedy.  And perhaps, over time, this is the way Stalinism will come to be depicted by historians.  At the present moment, Stalinism is hardly something to laugh about:  too many people lost their lives in the gulag or lost relatives to man-made famine or chaotic purges.  But perhaps the peasants' age-old response to official brutality won't someday make sense in the way that the Makeshift Experiment makes poetic sense.  When all is said and done, the Soviet Union was but an absurd experiment in Utopia, and a failed one at that.  In two hundred years, we may well have forgotten Stalin's personal turpitude.  What then?  What will be remembered when we're no longer obsessed with the devil's physical incarnation?  Perhaps we'll accept the peasant worldview, that faraway leaders tried to magically transform the world but necessarily failed.  It's a paradox worth exploring. On the one hand, the Makeshift Experiment seems to be mocking a peculiarly Russian-peasant mentality that could accept a leader's vain promises to transform a river into alcohol.  On the other hand, weren't Russian peasants the only ones who knew that this couldn't be done, notwithstanding the beliefs of intellectuals, workers, and dictators alike.

The Language of the Revolution

Andrei Sinyavsky's brilliant treatise on Soviet culture, Soviet Civilization: A Cultural History, reminds us that revolutions are linguistic phenomena as much as they are political ones. It's not surprising then that the Bolshevik victory in 1917 led to linguistic changes in the Russian language that rival those of Peter the Great's momentous reign in the early eighteenth century. What were those changes? As a folklorist, Sinyavsky is well-placed to analyze and categorize these changes. He says that the Revolution unleashed a plethora of new words, expressions, metaphors, phrases, slogans, and literary constructions.

The linguistic revolution had both positive and negative implications. On the one hand, it led to new and sometimes startlingly original literature, as exemplified by the Blok's poetry and Zoshchenko's prose. The vernacular, as connoisseurs of Hip-Hop and Rap music know, is alive, endlessly inventive, and refreshingly spontaneous.

But as the language of the street entered into the central discourse of the Russian political and cultural elite, it had a coarsening effect on public life--"[c]rude words corresponding to the language of the street; sometimes very apt and exact, sometimes word monsters." Moreover, the violence and absurdity of the new language were one of the worst aspects of Bolshevik rule, responsible in part for many of its tangible and therefore sanguinary crimes. As Sinyavasky reminds us, the very term, Soviet Union, makes little sense, or worse, is an Orwellian construction signifying the very impotence of the workers' councils, or soviets, that acted as rubber stamps for the Politburo or Party Leader's decisions and played no part in the formulation of Soviet policy at any point in Soviet history.

As a revolutionary state, the U.S.S.R. came up with neologisms for everything. Old terms associated with the bourgeoisie, church, former military order, or tsardom in general, were no longer acceptable. Ministers became people's commissars and almost everything was given the prefix, Soviet, to differentiate the new from the old. Indeed, the term, "man," was now seen to be inadequate, or redolent of everything that was outdated or wrong in the world. In contrast, the phrase "Soviet man" connoted everything that human beings were striving to become through enlightenment, education, industrialization, and socialism. And what of the simple, hoary term, Russia? It too was seen to be inadequate and was of course replaced with the infinitely more complex term, Russian Federated Socialist Republic or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Over time, the language of the Soviet state became almost nonsensical, filled as it was with strange-sounding acronyms, neologisms, and novel new Bolshevik names for ancient Russian cities. Even ordinary Russians were likely to receive new names. In Sinyavasky's example, the Revolution almost put an end to common Russian names such as "Ivan," which seemed too atavistic to be employed by good, future-oriented Bolshevik parents. Better to name one's child after the heroes of socialism such as Lenin, Stalin, Marx, Engels, or even a symbol of socialist accomplishment such as electrification or the tractor.

Other linguistic trends included the new passion for terms associated with modernity, including mechanization, modernization, industrialization, "chemicalization," and electrification, and the creation of myriad scientific-sounding terms for non-scientific phenomena, such as idealism, materialism, Trotskyism, "deviationism," and so on. Sinyavsky sees the strange expression, "I-don't-give-a-damn-ism" was emblematic of Soviet discourse. The term, like so many others, absurd and illustrates his argument that Soviet citizens began to speak in "word signals" rather than words, since no one, "not even themselves," can explain their meaning.

As Soviet rule wore on, Soviet language ossified, its bureaucratic underpinnings becoming ever more apparent. Khrushchev sees to exemplify its increasingly boorish essence. Although both clever and populist, Khrushchev's verbiage was often violent, crude, and semi-literate. Khrushchev also mixed peasant constructions with an impoverished Marxist, sloganeering, brand of agitprop and officialese.

In the end of course Soviet language became so divorced from reality that it practically signified its opposite. In other words, one could often read state newspapers or listen to public broadcasts and determine that the reverse of whatever was said was in fact true. It seems that Soviet language and Soviet reality had, at long last, veered too far apart to be sustainable.

Revolutionary Adjectives

How does one describe a revolution? What are the best adjectives to capture the essence of one? Let's examine the words of the brilliant dissident author used in his Soviet Civilization: A Cultural History. Sinyavsky intermittently uses the following adjectives, among others, to explain the Bolshevik Revolution to his readers: elemental, volcanic, revitalizing, organic, wild, irrational, creative, explosive, bursting, nonsensical, senseless, chaotic, murderous, spontaneous, emotional, primitive, powerful, metaphysical, sensuous, sublime, inspiring, popular, passionate, spontaneous, anarchic, visceral, atavistic, cataclysmic, seductive, miraculous, expansive, and rapturous.

What's interesting about listing revolutionary adjectives in general is that they fall into three categories: some are positive, some are negative, and some are value-neutral. To his credit, Sinyavasky, a severe critic of the Revolution and its historical legacy, uses a large number of neutral descriptors to capture the essence of Revolution. The Revolution may have hurt Russia, but it was akin to a natural disaster as much as it was the work of a malevolent conspiracy of amoral or immoral men. Moreover, it had a life or dynamic of its own that is not reducible to the intentions of any or even all of its component parts, the revolutionary and anti-revolutionary actors.

Use Their Skulls As Ashtrays

Andrei Sinyavsky's book, Soviet Civilization; A Cultural History, provides us with one of the most sophisticated analyses of the Evil Empire ever written. The book's arguments will be examined in future posts. For now, here are a few of the quotations Sinyavasky uses to explain the essence of the USSR for his readers.

Leon Trotsky. "If the symbol is a concentrated image, then the revolution is the supreme maker of symbols, since is presents all phenomena and relations in concentrated form."

Aleksandr Blok. "To smoke the nobs out of their holes we'll light a fire through all the world, a bloody fire through all the world--Lord bless our souls!"

Aleksandr Blok. "To redo everything. To organize things so that everything will be new; so that our lying, dirty, ugly life will be just, pure, merry, and beautiful."

Feodor Dostoevsky. "Here, my dear, a new religion is coming to replace the old. That's why there are so many soldiers about."

Vladimir Kirillov. "We're drunk with a rebellious, brutal passion; Let them scream: "You are the hangman of beauty, In the name of our tomorrow, we'll burn Raphael, Destroy museums, crush the flowers of art underfoot."

Yury Olesha. "We young poets didn't understand what a frightening world we were living in. This world hadn't been explained as a world. Now I lived in an explained world. I understand the causes. I am filled with a feeling of enormous gratitude, expressible only in music, when I think of those who died to make the world explained, to explain it and reconstruct it."

Konstantin Balmont. "You were utterly mistaken: your beloved people are not at all the people you dreamed of, not at all."

Mayakovsky. "We'll destroy you, old romantic world! In place of faith in our soul we have electricity and steam. In place of misery, pocket the riches of all worlds! The old men? Kill them! And use the skulls as ashtrays!"