Sergie: yes, indeed. I think the underlying Soviet horror was the uncertainty: Stalin’s arbitrary whims of approval and oft-fatal rejection almost regardless of the artist’s devotion to the party-line. There were those abject CONFESSIONS from artists under threat. The whole confessional phenomenon was as irrational as the accusations, as captured by Nabokov in ITAB. The crimes of Cosmopolitanism and Enemy of the People are as unanswerable as VN’s chilling GNOSTIC TURPITUDE.
Refusal to confess implied guilt, but so did a confession! As Victor Fet has pointed out, we have the reality behind Lewis Carroll’s “Sentence first, Verdict afterwards,” significantly modified in VN’s translation as “At first the Penalty, then the Verdict”
«Сперва казнь, а потом уж приговор!»: о переводе Льюиса Кэрролла Набоковым. В кн.: «Побережье» (Филадельфия), 2009, 18 (опубл. 2010)
Sergie reminds us that Gorky’s own death was probably a Stalin-instigated murder, even though Uncle Joe was a mournful pall bearer at Gorky’s lavish funeral. (BTW, Lenin was no better. Gorky’s personal friendship with VIL failed to save the life of writer Gumilyov in 1921.) Mysteries abound over the sudden death of Gorky’s son, May 1934, and Gorky’s reported house-arrest following the infamous Kirov assassination in December 1934. The latter, also probably Stalin-instigated, triggered mass arrests and the pretence for Stalin to remove many a fine comrade. Moving ahead to the Bukharin show trials of 1938, the pattern of Stalin’s squad of killers being themselves purged was repeated: Yagoda's NKVD were charged with Gorky’s murder! See, the TRUTH will out! To paraphrase Monty Python and Mel Brookes, “It’s FUN being absolute Dictator.”
Carolyn seems to misread my quick answer to her hypothetical question, What kind of a Soviet writer would VN have made? I wrote: a MURDERED Soviet writer LIKE Mandelshtam and Babel. CK objects that VN was UNLIKE either Mandelshtam or Babel, which nobody can deny. My use of LIKE, a common English idiom, means only that VN would have shared the FATE of the named writers, viz., beyond doubt murdered at Stalin’s behest. Space precluded a full list of victims! We have seen that this list includes many devoted Stalinists as well as many devoted anti-Stalinist Communists (Trot being the shorthand) and many outright anti-Communists of diverse shades of Liberal Pink and Tsarist White. In other words, there was no guarantee of survival whether you “toed the line,” or played hard in seeming to conform, or were bravely suicidal enough to openly attack the Party. Some of the latter escaped murder-by-bullet, but died in the Gulags. Some, LIKE Solzhenitsyn, (but also UNLIKE Solzhenitsyn!!) even miraculously survived the camps. Others LIKE Pasternak (but also UNLIKE Pasternak) kept their noses clean enough, suffering occasional bullying and censorship (Pasternak’s Zhivago, of course, was banned but leaked abroad; so were innocent poems like Gamlet) but lived to die natural deaths in comfort!
Wiki records how lucky Pasternak and Bulgakov were:
Although Pasternak was widely panned for excessive subjectivism, Stalin is said to have crossed Pasternak's name off an arrest list during the purges, saying "Don't touch this cloud dweller." According to Simon Sebag Montefiore, "He recognized that Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Bulgakov were geniuses, but their work was suppressed. Yet he could tolerate whimsical maestros: Bulgakov and Pasternak were never arrested. But woe betide anyone, genius or hack, who insulted the person or policy of Stalin -- for the two were synonymous."
To usefully speculate further on possible scenarios for VN’s fate as a Soviet writer, we must decide on the hypothetical historical background. Do we imagine that the 18-year-old VN was unable to escape the Bolsheviks? We might try and guess his career had he survived (some aristocrats managed that unlikely trick) into adulthood. There are more WHAT-Ifs than I care to pursue. Would he have attended a University or been coopted to dig grandiose canals? During the brief so-called Leninist Flowering, he might have established his name as an experimental writer. To survive, always a high human priority, I’ve no doubt he could, to borrow your phrase, “bow to authority.” Biding his time; planning escape; inventing samizdat? A fascinating and safer route would have him become a respected Lepidopterist working under Lysenko at the Soviet Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. (This joke is dedicated to Stephen Blackwell and Victor Fet!)
The other scenario (hardly more plausible) that I had in mind when invoking the fate of Gorky, was that VN escapes the Bolsheviks as per BB’s biography, becomes a famous writer in exile, and, at some date to be debated (the choice of date could be critical: pre- or post-Stalin? Pre- or Post- Khrushchev’s 20th Congress?), is enticed into returning. In these unlikely contexts the question of “bowing to authority” could be variously relevant. Under, or shortly after Stalin, most Slavs on this list would surely agree that VN’s fate would be LIKE that of Stalin’s many victims REGARDLESS of what VN wrote. A Soviet Socialist novel+poem called STALIN’S FIRE (written to protect Véra and Dmitri?) would not guarantee his survival.
Did VN ever have such a work in mind? JS = John Shade = Joseph Stalin! ADMIRABLE REDS? Hardly a coincidence. Suitable pastiches invited. Note: VN’s Stalin’s Fire poses no elitist-intellectual puzzles about the afterlife. JS lives forever.
Carolyn now completely reframes her original question:
What I am saying is, did Nabokov have the right to criticize those who stayed behind? I am thinking for example of Pasternak. Did Nabokov forgive the murdered? -- CK
My answer is YES, VN has the right to criticize anything/anyone about which/whom he is critical. We, in turn, have the right to review specific criticisms and judge their merits. (To avoid any confusion, it should be noted that Pasternak died of lung cancer, to the best of our knowledge! He’s far from typical of ‘those who stayed behind.’) As to whether VN ‘forgave the murdered’ we really need to be more specific. ALL murdered Soviet writers or just those VN knew and expressed opinions about? Or the 10+ million Soviet non-writers? NOT sure if FORGIVING the dead, however they died, is at all meaningful, even if you SPECIFY their presumed SINS? You can feel deep sorrow over someone dying, whether known or unknown, and this sorrow is amplified if that death was unnatural. So, name the murdered, name the sin. Ask if forgiveness is relevant? Isn’t it a tad too LATE? Jesus said LET THE DEAD BURY THE DEAD. He, they say, handles the sins of the dead. Our limited powers of forgiveness extend only to the LIVING. Did Nabokov forgive the murdered? We know he was highly (sometimes idiosyncratically) critical of many writers, some of whom were Soviet and later murdered. He may have been devastated at their cruel demise, but that’s unrelated to VN’s literary judgment. Also note that not all VN’s strong opinions remained fixed for life. We too must remain open to changing our minds in the light of new evidence and tolerant exchange of ideas.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
On 22/05/2010 04:07, "NABOKV-L" <NABOKV-L@HOLYCROSS.EDU> wrote:
Dear Stan,
just a little "headnote" - the fact that Stalin named the whole city
for Gorky didn't stop (very probably) Gorky to be murdered by an
order of Stalin, or, more likely, with Stalin's consent or hint. Murder
at this time didn't contradict praise. (Nabokov probably would be
murdered without...)
All the best
Sergei Soloviev
> Adding to Victor Fet¹s comment on the Soviet¹s brutal attack on artistic
> freedom and creativity, I see a new book on the subject reviewed by
> Wendell
> Steavenson in the latest Sunday Times: ENGINEERS OF THE SOUL, In the
> Footsteps of Stalin¹s Writers, by Frank Westerman (Harvill Secker, £14.99
> pp
> 306.)
>
> Westerman reminds us of the romantic novel under Soviet Socialist Realism:
> Boy meets Girl, Girl meets Tractor.
> He tells of Akhmatova reduced to writing poems in praise of Stalin to try
> and get her son released from the camps.
> And who dare blame her for that? ³Stalin corralled the liriki to match the
> efforts of the fisiki, to serve the breakneck industriaiization of the
> 1930s.² ³If workers can pour concrete in brigades, why can¹t brigades of
> writers produce a collective book?² (M Gorky)
>
> The reviewer warns us not to expect a comprehensive study on Soviet
> Literature (a well-ploughed field). Rather, Westerman seeks new ground,
> covering lesser-known writers, especially the hangers-on¹ who suffered
> but
> survived.
>
> Carolyn asks: Has anyone ever speculated, by the way, as to what kind of
> soviet writer Nabokov would have made?
> The quick answer is a MURDERED Soviet writer, like Mandelstam and Babel.
>
> The gruesome tale of Stalin coaxing Maxim Gorky back to the CCCP offers
> scant food for further speculation. Gorky succumbed and was richly
> rewarded
> for becoming ³Godfather of the subversion of literature to the efficacies
> of
> the Five-Year Plan!²
>
> But, a huge BUT, to even THINK of that happening to the exiled Vladimir
> Nabokov is UNTHINKABLE! Still, just imagine: Stalin naming a whole city
> for
> Nabokov, an honour Uncle Joe bestowed on the obsequious Gorky in 1932 (it
> reverted to Nizhny Novgorod in 1991).
>
> Stan Kelly-Bootle