A partisan detachment in the Far East is retreating, and it has a man with a bullet in his abdomen who cannot be moved and will not recover. The commander and the doctor discuss him.
"In short—is there any hope of his getting better?" "No hope at all. But is that the chief thing?" "Still, it makes it easier," Levinson confessed.
He feels ashamed of that in the same instant — ashamed of the relief, ashamed of having tried to deceive himself with it — and then gives the order anyway. The doctor works out the method: "It'll soon be time to give him bromide, so instead of bromide...." Levinson asks whether it could be done today, and whether anyone will suspect, and above all whether the man himself will know. Then he seeks reassurance from the doctor, who needs it more than he does.
That is the commander of this novel, and he is its hero. He is a Bolshevik, he is Jewish, he is small and red-bearded and physically unimpressive, and over nineteen chapters he holds a detachment together by force of will, loses almost all of it, and ends the book weeping in front of strangers. He also poisons his own wounded man and robs a starving peasant family of the pig that was to feed them through the winter.
Fadeyev wrote this in 1925–26, when he was in his middle twenties. Twenty-five years later he was General Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers, and was rewriting his own war novel to insert the Party's guiding hand. The Rout is the measure of the distance, and the most useful thing about having it in this series is that both books are here.
A novel of the Civil War published in 1927 could have been an adventure. This one is organised around three scenes that no adventure would contain.
The pig. The detachment, a hundred and fifty hungry men, reaches a Korean farm where the family has one pig, "about ten poods", their meat for the whole winter. Levinson goes to find the farmer:
The trembling grey-haired Korean, wearing a dented wire hat, at once began imploring them not to touch his pig. Levinson, conscious of a hundred and fifty hungry mouths behind him and pitying the Korean, tried to prove to him that he had no choice except to take the pig. The man, not understanding a single word, continued to plead, clasping his hands in prayer and repeating, "Don't eatee-eatee it.... Don't...." "It's all the same ... shoot the pig!" Levinson said, and his face wrinkled up as if it were himself, not the pig, that was going to be shot.
Note what Fadeyev does and does not do. He does not make the Korean a class enemy, or the requisition a lesson, or Levinson unfeeling. He gives you the man on his knees weeping, the commander's face wrinkling as though he were the one to be shot, and the order given regardless. Both things are true and the book does not resolve them.
The poisoning. Above. The novel takes four pages over a decision that a later Soviet novel would have taken as read or omitted entirely, and it spends them on the two men's shame rather than on the necessity.
Morozka and Metchik. The book opens with Morozka — a miner, a thief, a drunk, married to a nurse everyone has slept with — saving the life of a wounded student. He dislikes him instantly: "Morozka had no love for nice, clean people. He knew them to be uncertain, good-for-nothing, untrustworthy creatures."
The novel then spends three hundred pages testing that judgement, and confirms it. Metchik, the clean young intellectual who joined the partisans out of an idea of himself, is not a villain; he is fastidious, self-pitying, and frightened, and Fadeyev tracks his deterioration with a precision that is close to cruel. At the end, scouting ahead of the detachment, he sees the Cossack ambush and rides away. Morozka, riding behind him, fires the three agreed warning shots and is killed for it, thinking not of himself but of "those tired, unsuspecting men who had entrusted themselves to him".
The thief dies for the detachment. The educated boy saves himself. Nineteen men come out of the taiga.
There is a fourth scene, and it is the best thing in the book.
Metelitsa, the detachment's scout — a herdsman by origin, illiterate, the most purely capable man in the novel — rides into an occupied village at night and is taken. In the morning the Cossacks assemble the village to identify him. A peasant pushes through the crowd, leading a child:
he was leading a thin, black-haired boy in a long jacket, terrified and resisting, his dark eyes skipping from Metelitsa to the squadron commander.
It is the shepherd to whom Metelitsa had handed his horse the night before. The peasant, hoping to be useful to the new authorities, bends down and asks him, pointing: "That's him, eh?"
For a few moments the shepherd boy and Metelitsa stared straight into each other's eyes—Metelitsa with affected indifference, the boy with fear, sympathy, and pity. Then the boy's eyes turned to the squadron commander and rested on him for the fraction of a second as if glued to the Cossack officer's face; then his eyes passed on to the peasant, who was holding him by the hand and leaning expectantly towards him. He drew a deep sigh and heavily shook his head to show that he could not identify the man.
The crowd goes so quiet that "everybody could hear a calf move in the churchwarden's barn". And then the adult denounces Metelitsa anyway — frightened, fidgeting, squeezing his cap obsequiously, reasoning aloud about the saddle and the holster, and turning on the child who would not help him: "Say it's him, don't be afraid ... ah, you viper!"
Consider what Fadeyev has built. The illiterate child is the one with courage; the grown peasant is the one who informs; and the informing is done not out of conviction but out of a servile wish to be seen to be helpful, which is worse and truer. There is no speech, no lesson, and no consolation. A boy shakes his head, and it is not enough.
This is a twenty-five-year-old writing in 1926, and it is better than almost anything in the Soviet fiction of the next thirty years, because nobody in it is where the doctrine would later have required them to be.
The draft of this introduction that stopped at the three hard scenes was missing the passage that holds the novel together, and it is not an action scene at all. It comes at night, after Levinson has walked out to inspect his sentries and found Metchik, the young intellectual, standing guard with an unoiled rifle whose bolt has jammed.
Metchik breaks down and asks to be sent away. He is useless, nobody will be his friend, he approached everyone with an open heart and got "coarseness, mockery, and contempt" — and then he says the thing that decides his fate in the book: it sometimes seems to him that if these men "happened to fall into Kolchak's hands tomorrow, they'd serve Kolchak just as readily, and they'd treat everybody just as cruelly."
Levinson tells him that is completely wrong, and begins to explain why. Then Fadeyev writes this:
The longer he spoke the more clearly he saw that he was wasting his words. The occasional remarks Metchik threw in made him realize that he ought to be speaking of something which was more fundamental and elementary, something which he himself in his time had come to understand not without difficulty, and which was now part of his flesh and blood. But this was not the proper time to speak of these things because every moment demanded swift and resolute action.
That is an astonishing thing for a Bolshevik novel to admit, and it would not have survived the doctrine ten years later. The commander knows that what this boy needs is political education, that he himself acquired it slowly and with difficulty, and that the war makes it impossible to give. The detachment cannot make communists; it can only use the ones it has. Everything that happens to Metchik afterwards follows from a conversation that both men know was the wrong conversation, held at the only time available.
Then Levinson walks back through the taiga and Fadeyev gives us his history in a single image.
The only thing he could clearly see in the past was an old photograph of a skinny Jewish boy with large, ingenuous eyes, wearing a black jacket, who looked with surprising, unchildish intentness at the spot in the camera where he had been told a pretty little bird would fly out. The bird didn't fly out, and he remembered that he had almost cried with disappointment.
And from that, the whole of his politics:
he understood what untold misery men suffer because of these lying tales about pretty little birds — pretty little birds which are expected to fly out from somewhere or other and which never do appear, though many people spend their lives waiting for them. No, he had no further need for them! Relentlessly he had suppressed all sweet and vain regrets for them — all that he had inherited from past generations brought up on these lying tales of pretty little birds. To see everything as it is, in order to change everything that is, to hasten what must be born and must be — this wisdom, the simplest and most difficult of all, Levinson had finally achieved.
To see everything as it is, in order to change everything that is. A twenty-five-year-old put the materialist position in eleven words and then built a novel that obeys it, which is why the pig is taken and the wounded man is poisoned and the book is called what it is called. The same man is permitted his private reason for it all: that he wants "to live to see men become stronger, kinder, and more beautiful", and that "there would have been no Levinson at all, but someone else" without that wish.
Two things follow that belong in an introduction to this volume rather than to the novel in general.
The first is that "Jewish" occurs exactly once in The Rout, in that photograph, and it is the origin of the detachment commander's entire outlook. Fadeyev in 1926 made a Jewish revolutionary the moral and intellectual centre of his book and traced his materialism to a Jewish childhood, without apology, explanation or defensiveness.
Now look at the imprint. This English edition was printed in Moscow in 1950. By then Solomon Mikhoels had been murdered in a staged traffic accident in Minsk in January 1948; the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee had been dissolved and its leaders arrested; the campaign against "rootless cosmopolitanism" was in full run in the Soviet press; and the Committee's leadership was in prison awaiting the secret trial that ended with their execution in August 1952. In the middle of that, the Foreign Languages Publishing House sent abroad, in English, a novel whose hero is a Jewish commander named Levinson and whose finest passage is about a photograph of a Jewish boy. We do not know whether anybody in the house noticed. It is the sort of contradiction a state publishing programme generates when the canon is fixed and the line has moved, and it is worth recording, because the same volume that carries this passage was issued by the same apparatus that was at that moment destroying Soviet Jewish culture.
The second is smaller and more cheerful. The best piece of Marxist analysis in the book is delivered on horseback by a demolition man. Morozka has been saying he cannot stand peasants — they are stingy and cunning, and what good does it do them, since they are beggars anyway. Goncharenko, who listens well, answers that if you scratched any of them — "me, say, or you, or Dubov there — you'll find a peasant in everyone", and then argues it out: half the men at the pit go home to their villages in summer, everyone has a garden, their wives work the plots, and for thousands of versts there is nothing but villages. Does that have an influence? "Of course it has!" The conclusion is that "we — and you, too, Morozka — ought not to put on airs in front of the peasant. Why, without the peasant we would...." and he shakes his head and stops.
That is the composition of the Russian working class, and the worker-peasant alliance, established from the inside by a man who cannot read, with Morozka admiring the debating rather than the argument. Nobody explains it to the reader. No commissar arrives to confirm it. It is simply true, and the novel lets a blaster say it.
The Rout is a novel about whether revolutionary authority can be exercised without becoming monstrous, and its answer is that it cannot be exercised cleanly and must be exercised anyway. Levinson's authority is real and it costs. Fadeyev is interested in exactly the place where necessity and decency come apart, and he keeps the reader there rather than talking him out of it.
The same evenness governs the one scene of revolutionary justice. Morozka is tried by a village assembly for stealing melons, and Fadeyev lets the peasants argue it out. Someone objects that the thief should be punished; someone else says the lad "has been fighting these six years—what if he did take a fancy to a melon?"; a third is baffled that anyone would steal something so trivial rather than ask — "we feed the pigs with them, so why grudge such dung to a good man!" What Fadeyev records is the sentence that matters: "There was no anger in the peasants' voices. The majority agreed that the old laws did not hold good any longer and the matter had to be dealt with in a new way." That is what a revolution looks like from below, and it is neither a tribunal nor a riot. It is a room full of people working out, without much heat, that the rules have changed and nobody has written the new ones yet.
The book is also, and this matters for what came later, uninterested in the Party as an institution. There is no district committee. There is no political instructor whose judgement settles anything. Levinson's decisions are his own and he has no one to refer them to — which is why the poisoning scene has to be a conversation between two exhausted men rather than an instruction carried out. The organisation in this novel is nineteen survivors and a commander who has run out of everything except the requirement to go on.
And it ends on that note, in a paragraph that is one of the best things in Soviet fiction:
Levinson looked silently, with moist eyes, at the vast sky and earth, which promised bread and rest, at these alien people on the threshing-ground whom he would soon have to make his own—as near and dear to him as were the eighteen who followed him in silence; and he ceased crying. A man has to live and do his duty.
No victory. No vindication. A defeat named in the title, a commander crying and stopping, and a last sentence of six words that declines every consolation available to it.
The volume is a Foreign Languages Publishing House printing in the Library of Selected Soviet Literature, translated by O. Gorchakov and designed by O. Vereisky — the artist who would later illustrate Tvardovsky's Vassili Tyorkin. There is no introduction, no editorial note, no date of composition, and no indication of where the book stands in its author's career or in the literary politics of the country that produced it. The reader is handed seventeen chapters and left to it.
For once that reticence does no harm, and may be a mercy. A commissioned foreword of the period would have had to explain what the novel means, and the novel's virtue is that it declines to mean tidily.
What the silence does conceal is the position of the book by 1950. The Rout had become a classic — set, taught, canonical — and its author was by then the chief administrator of Soviet letters. An English reader in 1950 is being handed the founding text of a reputation without being told what the reputation had become.
Put the question this series puts to every volume, and the answer arrives from an unusual direction: from the author's own later conduct.
The doctrine that governed Soviet fiction from 1934 required the leading role of the Party to be visible, required the positive hero, and required the arc to arrive somewhere. The Rout fails all three tests. Its Party is a single man improvising without reference to anyone; its most admirable character is a thieving drunk; and it arrives at a threshing-ground with nineteen men and no promises. Written seven years before the doctrine was codified, it would not have passed after.
Its author administered the code. And in 1951, when The Young Guard was attacked for showing young people acting on their own initiative, Fadeyev rewrote it to install an underground district committee as their guiding hand — adding two Party figures who between them are named over four hundred times in the revised text. He knew exactly what he was doing, because he had written The Rout. He had produced, at twenty-five, the strongest available demonstration that a novel about Bolsheviks does not need a Party apparatus in it to be true; and at fifty he was supplying one, to his own book, under instruction.
The tradition this introduction is written from had described the machinery in 1936. In The Revolution Betrayed Trotsky wrote that under the bureaucracy "Gifted writers who cannot do sufficient violence to themselves are pursued by a pack of instructors armed with shamelessness and dozens of quotations," and that "The most eminent artists either commit suicide, or find their material in the remote past, or become silent." Fadeyev did the violence to himself, and in May 1956, three months after Sholokhov attacked him from the rostrum of the Twentieth Congress, he shot himself.
One correction is owed, in the same breath, because this series applies its standards at home. In the same chapter Trotsky also wrote that "Mediocre but 'right-thinking' storytellers like Serafimovich or Gladkov are inaugurated as classics", and predicted that the epoch would be remembered "pre-eminently as an epoch of mediocrities, laureates and toadies". Fadeyev became a laureate and an official, and the verdict fits the career. It does not fit this book. The Rout is not the work of a mediocrity, and a tradition that reads Soviet literature honestly has to be able to say so about a man whose later record it condemns.
The refusal to make it easy.
Every difficulty this novel raises is one the revolutionary tradition still has: what a commander owes a man he cannot save; what an army owes a peasant it is feeding itself on; whether the people who turn out to be reliable under pressure are the ones anybody expected. Fadeyev at twenty-five had no settled answers and did not pretend to. He put Levinson in front of the Korean and let both faces wrinkle up.
Read The Rout first, before The Young Guard, and the second book becomes legible in a way it is not on its own. Read them the other way round and you will simply think the young Fadeyev was better. He was — but the more exact statement is that he was permitted, in 1927, to write a book that he himself would later have been required to correct.