Two boats cross a lake north of Petrograd on a pale night in July 1917. In the first sits a forty-seven-year-old man who has just worked out that he cannot see the far shore and may as well close his eyes. In the second sits his companion, who is watching the first boat and has begun to imagine that it is drifting towards a chasm, dragging his own boat after it, and who wants to shout "Stop! Don't go on! Stop!"
The first man is Lenin. The second is Grigori Zinoviev.
Later, in the hut in the hayfield, Lenin will ask him "Shall we go to sleep, Grigori?", will be told about the blister he has got from wrapping his foot-cloths badly, and will tell him to take a philosophic view of misfortunes, since the moon "has seen everything there is to see" and it is "probably not the first time it's seen intellectuals hiding from the police and not knowing how to wrap a foot-cloth." Later still, talking to a workman about how he never smoked and never drank, Lenin will glance across and say: "Sleeping, Grigori? He's asleep. Tired. He needs a real rest, he's quite worn out."
Count the names in this volume. Zinoviev: 111 times. Kamenev: twice. Stalin: twice, once of them a city. Trotsky: not once. And the word Yiddish: once — in a subordinate clause of the preface, about the language its author wrote in before the war.
Everything worth saying about this book is in those five numbers.
Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1978, in the Progress Soviet Authors Library. The copyright leaf reads Translated from the Russian / Illustrated by Anatoli Zykov, and gives the Russian as Эммануил Казакевич / Избранное / На английском языке. Then it carries two copyright lines, and they do not say the same thing. The Russian one claims the compilation and the preface — © Состав и предисловие, издательство „Прогресс", 1978, с иллюстрациями. The English one, directly beneath it, claims only: "© Progress Publishers. Illustrated, 1978." In Russian the house takes credit for choosing what is in this book and for commissioning its introduction. In English it takes credit for the pictures.
No general translator is named on that leaf either. As with the Paustovsky volume in this series, the translators are in the contents, attached to the individual works, and there are four:
The back matter consists of a Request to Readers, advertisements for four forthcoming Soviet Authors Library titles, and a loose errata slip correcting three lines. There is also a short section called NOTES, which is not annotation at all: it is four dated extracts from Kazakevich's own diaries and letters, one per work, and it is the only editorial commentary the volume contains.
The advertisements are worth reading beside that. The one for Trifonov's The Impatient Ones — a novel about Narodnaya Volya, and itself a volume in this series — ends: "The book includes a big foreword and a historical and literary commentary." Another advertises Maria Prilezhayeva's Lenin's Life, the work of a woman who "has researched Lenin's life and works for almost 30 years". Progress knew perfectly well how to annotate a book about the Russian revolutionary movement, and said so on the last leaf of this one.
Hold that thought. This book prints a novella in which a man shot after the first Moscow trial of August 1936 appears more than a hundred times as Lenin's friend — and its entire apparatus consists of the dead author's diary jottings and a preface written in 1962. The sentences of that trial were not annulled until June 1988, ten years after this printing; Lynn Walsh set out the sequence in Militant International Review no. 44, when the Supreme Court's announcement finally came.
The preface is In Memory of a Friend, by Alexander Tvardovsky, and it is dated, at the foot of the last page, 1962. That is the year Kazakevich died. It is an obituary essay, and Progress reprinted it, unaltered and unexplained, sixteen years later.
The reader of 1978 was told nothing about who Tvardovsky was. Our own press had followed him closely. In March 1966, at the 23rd Congress of the CPSU, Ernest Mandel — writing as Ernest Germain in the International Socialist Review — recorded the removal from the Congress and from the Central Committee of "two intellectuals considered to be leaders of the moderate 'liberal' wing, Tvardovski and Polevoi". In the spring of 1967 George Saunders reported in World Outlook on "the battle around Novy Mir", describing Tvardovsky as "editor of the Soviet literary monthly Novy Mir and leading spokesman of the liberal intellectuals", and noting the sacking of two of his assistant editors and the persistent rumours that he would go too. He was forced out in February 1970 and died the following year.
None of that is in the book. What is in the book is a warm, particular and very good piece of writing about a friend, and — planted in the middle of it — one sentence of open polemic:
Incidentally, this is one of the examples that totally refute the absurd notion that Soviet literature at certain periods was incapable of producing any compelling or really honest books. As if true art, intimately bound up with the life of the people, could ever wait in silence for some particularly favourable conditions in which to appear!
Read that in 1962, from the editor of Novy Mir, and it is not boilerplate. It is a position in a live quarrel — his quarrel, with people who were saying that everything written under Stalin was worthless, and with people who were saying that nothing had been wrong. He goes further on the same page: he would find it hard, he says, to name a book by any young writer working "in the far more favourable literary climate of today" that comes near Star. The man who published Solzhenitsyn was insisting that the honest book had been written in 1946.
The rest of the preface is unsentimental portraiture. The bespectacled, prematurely grey intellectual who looked like a stay-at-home and was a crack shot, an excellent driver, a singer of army songs, the company song-leader. The decoration he had won as a divisional reconnaissance chief for bringing in a prisoner, which Tvardovsky learned about not from him but from his general, and which Kazakevich then described in his own way:
"The thing that worried us most," he told me with his customary humour, "as we were crawling back with our burden under enemy machine-gun fire, was that one of those bullets would hit the German and ruin the whole thing, because we could never have pulled it off a second time."
The old writer who had lost his flat and had nowhere to sleep, and whom Kazakevich simply moved into his own apartment, with his wife, for about a year. And the last of it, dictated against pain: "All I want is to be able to write — it's so terrible to have it all churning uselessly through your head."
Now the sentence the whole apparatus turns on. Tvardovsky is explaining where the prose writer came from, and he writes that it was in the crucible of the war that there was born "a distinguished exponent of Soviet prose... who before the war had been known only as the author of verses and poems in Yiddish."
That is the only occurrence of the word "Yiddish" in three hundred and forty-three pages. "Jew" and "Jewish" do not occur at all. Neither does Birobidzhan — though Tvardovsky comes within a few words of it when he mentions that on one of his Siberian trips the two of them "visited the places where he had once been a theatre manager and chairman of a collective farm". A Yiddish poet who ran a theatre and chaired a collective farm in the Soviet Far East is not an obscure biographical puzzle; but the volume leaves the foreign reader with no means of solving it, and no reason to try.
And it leaves out what the sentence implies. Kazakevich stopped being a Yiddish writer and became a Russian one, and the Yiddish literature he came out of was destroyed: the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee broken up, its leaders shot in 1952, the anti-cosmopolitan campaign, the Doctors' Plot. Readers of this series will have met the other side of that silence already, in Yuri Ivanov's Caution: Zionism! and in the chapters of Races and Peoples that can find racism everywhere except at home. Here the same state publisher issues the selected works of one of the few major Yiddish writers of his generation to survive, and records his origin in six words of a relative clause.
The Blue Notebook was written in 1961. It covers the weeks after the July Days, when Lenin and Zinoviev hid at Razliv while the Sixth Congress met without them, and it takes its title from the notebook labelled "Marxism About the State" that became The State and Revolution. In Kazakevich's version Lenin sends a courier, Zof, to fetch it: "In Stockholm — Nadezhda Konstantinovna knows just where — I left one of my notebooks. It's a blue notebook with a stiff cover."
The daring of the thing is not the Lenin. The Lenin is superb — interior, tired, funny, entirely without halo. Crossing the lake he reflects "that, in fact, Ulyanov's life was not very dear to him. That Ulyanov, born forty-seven years ago in Simbirsk, having read piles of books and written mountains of sheets of paper, felt very tired, and suffered from insomnia and headaches." But a sympathetic Lenin was permitted.
The daring is Zinoviev, and specifically that Kazakevich goes inside his head and lets him doubt:
But Zinoviev was not asleep. He felt wretched, he had a dizzy feeling in his head.
"Are we travelling in the right direction? Aren't we going to get lost in this fog? Isn't there in Lenin's courage and implacability an element of sectarianism or, still more dangerous, of an urge for self-sacrifice?"
That is the October question, asked three months early, by the man who would ask it publicly in October and be right or wrong about it for the rest of Soviet historiography. Kazakevich does not make him a villain. He makes him frightened, physically uncomfortable, loyal, and wrong — and Lenin fond of him. When Sverdlov and Dzerzhinsky come out to the hut, Lenin asks whether everyone will understand the new slogan, is told no, says "That's good. You don't think so. Correct," and adds: "That's what Grigori thinks too."
He goes further, and this is the passage that ought to be quoted whenever anyone says Soviet fiction could not think:
He realised that he ought to let Lenin know his point of view clearly and unambiguously. But he said nothing. He was afraid. Expressed aloud, his thoughts would have been taken as a sign of weakness and indecision, and weakness was something Lenin and the Party as a whole despised more than anything else. After all, Zinoviev, by repeating persistently and conscientiously Lelin's [sic] formulations with something akin to religious fervour, enjoyed a reputation among the comrades of being unflinching and indomitable.
That is not a description of 1917. It is a description of how a reputation for firmness is manufactured inside a party apparatus by a man who is privately afraid, and it was written in 1961 by someone who had watched the machine work for thirty years.
The misspelling is the book's, not ours, and the book knows it. Of the three errors Progress thought worth a loose errata slip, one is that line on page 245: Lenin's name, set wrong in the sentence about repeating his formulations with religious fervour.
When the Fourth International's press saw this material, it understood immediately what it was. The film made from the novella had its first showing on 12 February 1964, and World Outlook devoted an article to it in March under the title "Are New 'Rehabilitations' in Preparation in the Soviet Union?" The film, it reported, "created something of a sensation in Moscow". It did not present Zinoviev and Kamenev as "traitors," or "enemies of Bolshevism," as the Stalinist stereotype required; on the contrary, said the report, "the movie stresses their friendly relations with Lenin." (World Outlook was a mimeographed weekly bulletin and its text is quoted here from the scan of that duplicated sheet.)
The article then printed something the novella does not contain: Lenin's own undated letter of 1917, first published in 1924 and suppressed from the editions of the collected works issued under Stalin, restored only in volume 36 of the fourth edition —
"To Comrade Kamenev. Between us — if I am liquidated, I ask you to publish my notebook: 'Marxism and the State' (it was left in Stockholm). It is a notebook with a blue cover."
So the blue notebook of the title is, in the documentary record, the subject of a letter from Lenin to Kamenev. In Kazakevich's novella Kamenev appears twice — once in a list of those arrested after the July Days, once in Lenin's memory of being criticised "from the left" — and the errand goes to Zof. How far that was the author's choice and how far the censor's, this volume gives no means of telling, and offers no note on the point.
The rest of the World Outlook piece is the argument that makes this book worth reprinting today. Rehabilitating Zinoviev and Kamenev, it said, could not be stopped where the bureaucracy wanted to stop it: once it is admitted that Stalin falsified the history and that the trials were frame-ups, the logic runs on, and "this re-evaluation cannot be blocked from including Trotsky, with whom Zinoviev and Kamenev were closely associated in the leadership of the United Left Opposition in 1926-27, in which Lenin's widow, Krupskaya, also participated." And it recorded the state of play: "Eight years after the denunciation of the 'personality cult,' Zinoviev and Kamenev have not yet been officially rehabilitated."
They still had not been in 1978, when Progress put this novella into a series for foreign readers. That is the fact to hold on to. The thaw that made The Blue Notebook possible had been over for a decade; Tvardovsky was dead; and a Soviet state publisher was exporting, without annotation, a text in which an unperson is Lenin's friend a hundred and eleven times over — while, on another shelf, its historians were still not printing his name. The volume does not resolve the contradiction. It ships it.
Nor should the limit be missed. Zinoviev is in the book because the Party had decided, some time around 1961, that Lenin at Razliv could be shown with the companion he actually had. Trotsky is not in the book at all — and the novella is careful about it. When Kazakevich lists the losses of the July Days he writes that "Kamenev, Kollontai, Raskolnikov, Roshal, Sivers and many others had been arrested." Trotsky was arrested in the same days and is not in the list; he was elected to the Central Committee in his absence by the very Congress these characters are preparing for, and he is not in the preparations either. A hundred and eleven Zinovievs and no Trotsky is not an oversight. It is the shape of the permission. The line was moved. It was not removed.
Star is why Tvardovsky wrote the preface, and it deserves the praise.
It is short, it is about a reconnaissance group sent across the German lines, and it kills them. The Soviet war novel of 1946 was not supposed to end the way this one ends. The scouts go silent; the signals girl Katya stays at her set calling for Star; "Filled with hope and an iron persistence, she waited. Now nobody else waited, but she did." A letter arrives for the dead lieutenant from his mother, about the red notebook for physics she has found and is keeping for him, because he will want it when he sits his college entrance exams. Bugorkov reads it aloud and then hunches over the radio and says, in a choked voice: "If only the war ended soon.... No, I'm not tired. I'm not saying I'm tired. But it's high time people stopped being killed." And Katya realises "with horror that perhaps her vigil here and her endless calls for Star were useless. The Star had set, it was extinguished."
The conclusion, two years later in the advance across Poland, gives the general his moment to make a speech about them, and he does not take it: "Then, overtaken by some sad memory, he started to add something but checked himself and waved his hand."
Two Men in the Steppe (1948) is the stranger achievement. A young lieutenant, Ogarkov, fails to deliver an order, the division is believed lost, and a tribunal sentences him to death; he is marched across the steppe by a guard, Dzhurabayev, while his appeal is considered. Kazakevich puts the flaw in the proceedings on the page, in 1948:
But somewhere a third witness was fighting the enemy. That witness was the division and it was invisibly present in this village hut.
The division had not been lost. It had broken out, retreated and reported in, and during the retreat its units had marched past the very dugout where the condemned man was being held. And when the case was reconsidered, "that third and most formidable witness — the division — had not been present in court."
Kazakevich's own diary note on the story, written five years later and printed at the back of this volume, gives the doctrinally correct reading: that a person formed by socialism, even when he has committed a crime and been rejected by society, "still does not betray his essentially Soviet nature and conscience". That is a fair account of Ogarkov. It is not an account of the tribunal, and the tribunal is what the story is about.
By the Light of Day (1960) is the odd one out: a postwar story that Kazakevich, in the diary note printed at the back, says he had carried for thirteen years before he could write it — "I conceived the idea for this story thirteen years ago and it has been haunting my imagination ever since." Thirteen years before 1960 is 1947. It is the weakest thing here, and the dating is the most interesting fact about it.
What is missing from the selection is also worth naming. Tvardovsky's preface lists the other war books — Spring on the Oder, The House in the Square, Heart of a Friend — and records that Kazakevich died dictating the continuation of a novel about the 1930s called The Thirties, which he had been working on for years. A Soviet novel about the 1930s, by this writer, unfinished. Two of the three — Spring on the Oder and The House in the Square, which the earlier English printing calls The House on the Square — are in this series in their own right, in the Foreign Languages Publishing House editions of 1953 and 1950. Heart of a Friend is not, and The Thirties exists nowhere.
Read Tvardovsky's preface first, and read it as what it is: a 1962 document, written by a man who was about to lose the argument it belongs to, reprinted in 1978 by people who had won it and saw no reason to say so.
Then read Star, which is as good as its reputation, and Two Men in the Steppe, which is better than its author's own account of it.
Then read The Blue Notebook twice. Once for the writing, which is genuinely fine — the boats, the hut, the hay, a leader of a revolution worrying about a colleague's blistered foot. And once with the counting in mind: one hundred and eleven Zinovievs, two Kamenevs, no Trotsky, and not a single line of apparatus anywhere in the volume to tell a foreign reader in 1978 that any of those three names had ever been a problem. What a state publisher permits, and where it stops, is itself a text. This one is unusually legible.