The novel opens in a police cell in 1908, and the first thing that happens is a man being rewarded for informing on his neighbours.
On a June day in 1908 two men were talking in the detention cell of the Tomsk gendarmerie. These were Inspector Lakhnovsky, a short man of about thirty-five with a stubby, obtuse nose, and Kosorotov, the chief warden, an untidy man with a large, protruding jaw.
The inspector is in his undershirt because of the heat, his tunic on the back of the chair, drinking tea; the warden waits on him with a tea towel over his arm, which "only heightened his resemblance to a tavern waiter". Kosorotov wants a transfer to the Alexandrov Central Prison — "It's my cherished dream, sir. Ever since I was a boy" — and Lakhnovsky, amused, promises to help, because "diligence and faithful service should be rewarded".
Remember the inspector's name. Lakhnovsky is a minor figure in this volume and he becomes, in the second half of the novel, the author of the most widely believed forged document in modern Russia. We return to that at the end.
The Eternal Call is the biggest book in this series — some 266,000 words in English, and this volume is only half of it. The last line on the last page reads End of Book One.
Progress issued it in 1979 in the Soviet Authors Library, translated by Fainna Glagoleva and illustrated by Peter Pinkisevich, with the English translation copyrighted 1978. Glagoleva's version is fluent, unfussy and reads at speed, which is what this book requires; it is a page-turner and was meant to be.
The jacket describes the author:
Anatoly Ivanov (b. 1928), State Prize Winner and editor-in-chief of Molodaya Gvardia magazine, has been writing for over twenty years.
Both halves of that sentence matter, and the second is the one an English reader in 1979 could not have decoded.
Anatoly Ivanov (1928–1999) was a Siberian, a genuinely popular novelist, and — as the jacket says — editor-in-chief of Molodaya Gvardiya. That journal had been, through the late 1960s, the principal platform of the Russian nationalist tendency inside Soviet literature: the "russophile" current that set the Russian village, the Russian past and Russian spiritual continuity against the internationalist and modernising strands, and that carried on a long war with the liberal Novy Mir. In 1970 the journal's direction was examined at a session of the Politburo and its then editor was removed for being excessively "russophile".
The word is the apparatus's, not ours, and in English it pulled the other way. For Engels it meant a politician or a paper serving the Tsar's interest — writing to Lafargue, he hopes to wean the English Liberals from "Gladstone's Russophilia" and notes what even "the Russophile Daily News" has been driven to say — and in the socialist press of 1979 it still meant a friend of Moscow. In the Central Committee's usage it meant almost the reverse: a writer who preferred the Russian nation to the October Revolution. It is kept in quotation marks here for that reason, and it is theirs every time it appears.
By the time this translation appeared, Ivanov was editing the journal.
He was still editing it eight years later, and by then the journal's position needed no inference. Roy Medvedev — whose own history of Stalinism circulated in samizdat for twenty years before it could be published in the Soviet Union — surveyed the press of the glasnost period and found journal after journal turning, even Nash Sovremennik, "which previously was noted for a strongly Russian-nationalist position, close to Stalinism". One did not turn:
But only one magazine has come out openly and actively against the current criticism of Stalin: Molodaya gvardiya, led by such writers as A. Ivanov, P. Proskurin, and V. Gorbachev [no relation to Mikhail Gorbachev]. They have taken as their slogan two lines by the pro-Stalinist poet V. Fyodorov: "Do not disturb the graves of old. They are fraught with new disasters."
That is the author of this novel, named among the writers leading the magazine, by a Soviet Marxist historian, in the revised edition of Let History Judge (Columbia University Press, 1989; Medvedev's note cites Molodaya gvardiya, 1987, no. 7, p. 240). Whatever the reprimand of 1970 was meant to correct, it did not take. Seventeen years on, the journal was the only one in the country still openly resisting the criticism of Stalin, and it resisted in the name of the graves.
We set this out not to convict a novelist of his job. We set it out because the foreword printed in this volume reads very differently once you know it, and because a reader who is handed a fifty-year Soviet epic is entitled to know which current inside Soviet letters produced it.
The volume opens with a foreword, "A Powerful Call to Life (Anatoly Ivanov and his work)", running to about 2,450 words and signed Boris Leonov.
It is warm, competent, and mostly about Siberia. And its vocabulary is worth setting out, because in a foreword to a novel covering the years from the 1900s through revolution, civil war, collectivisation and the German invasion, the proportions are these:
People outnumbers class by more than three to one and Party by ten to one. And Leonov's closing sentences state the position plainly:
No matter what Anatoly Ivanov's subject, he remains faithful to his own outlook on life: the Russian Revolution was brought about by the anguish of the people in the past. It was born of the people's struggle for land, for freedom and happiness. This understanding of the truth of our way of life has made him the writer he is.
Read that as a proposition. The revolution was produced by the anguish of the people and born of the people's struggle for land, for freedom and happiness. There is no class in it, no party, no programme, and no Marx. It is a populist account — closer to the Narodniks of the 1870s than to anything in Lenin — and it is offered, in 1979, as the thing that makes Ivanov the writer he is.
Set it beside the other forewords this series has examined. The 1952 Ostrovsky quotes Stalin eight times and cites the Short Course. The 1974 Turgenev runs Engels's argument about Balzac. This one manages, across two and a half thousand words about the Russian Revolution, a single mention of Marx.
That is not carelessness. It is a different politics, and it had a journal.
Having said that, we should say the other thing, because this introduction is not an indictment.
The Eternal Call is a serious popular novel and it does what popular novels are for. It follows the Savelyev brothers and their village across half a century, and Ivanov can handle a crowd, a fight, a courtship and a death. The book was filmed as a nineteen-part television serial and watched by tens of millions, and the reasons are on the page: strong hooks, fast scenes, characters you can tell apart in the dark.
It is also honest about things a more doctrinaire novel would have smoothed. The prologue's informer is not a monster but a careerist with a cherished dream, being poured tea. The peasants are not a chorus.
And Ivanov has an ear. Here is a boy who has volunteered in 1941, being scolded by a local official at the station as the troop trains load:
"In case you're interested, they load cattle. We're people. We board a train. Understand? Idiot!"
At which he pulls the official's cap down over his eyes.
That is a real line — a seventeen-year-old correcting an administrator's vocabulary on his way to the front, and the correction is about whether human beings are freight. It is worth more than a chapter of Leonov's people.
The novel's spine is three Savelyev brothers from a Siberian village and what the century does to them. Ivan is named nine hundred and sixty-two times, Fyodor eight hundred and forty-three, Anton four hundred and forty-six; Semyon, of the next generation, four hundred and eighty-two. Against them stands Kaftanov, the rich local man, named three hundred and eighty-one times, and Polipov, the slippery one, three hundred and sixteen.
It is a family saga in the strict sense: the political history arrives as something that happens to brothers who already dislike each other, and Ivanov is better on the dislike than on the history.
And the book's title comes from a toast.
It is proposed by Kruzhilin at a table, aimed at Fyodor — the brother who has gone wrong — while Ivan sits with his head lowered and his hand trembling under the tablecloth until his wife's hand covers it:
"Luckily, man has been blessed with intelligence," Kruzhilin continued, looking straight at Fyodor. "That's why he's a human being. And sooner or later he'll begin thinking about the meaning of life, the life of his fellow-men, of society and his own actions and deeds. A powerful, compelling, eternal call to life, an eternal desire to find his own place in life is what forces him to do this. And I believe that from this moment on a person, no matter what mistakes he may have made, becomes a true member of the society in which he lives, a defender of justice, human dignity and happiness. And so, my friends, let's drink to this noble, eternal call..."
That is the sentence the novel is named after, and the jacket quotes part of it as "the key to all of Anatoly Ivanov's work". It is worth reading closely, because it is a doctrine.
What forces a man to become a true member of society is an eternal call to life and an eternal desire to find his own place in life — something innate, permanent, and inside him. Not his position in production, not his class, not organisation, not anybody's programme. And the redemption is unconditional: no matter what mistakes he may have made.
This is a theory of moral awakening, of a kind that would sit comfortably in a nineteenth-century Russian novel and does not sit anywhere in Marx. A man finds his place because something eternal in him summons him to it. There is a word for the view that the decisive facts about a people are permanent and inward rather than historical and material, and the journal Ivanov edited spent twenty years elaborating it.
The scene is also, as a scene, rather good — the toast is being used to shame a man at his own table, and Ivanov keeps his eye on the wrong brother's trembling hand. He usually does. That is the difficulty with this book and the reason it cannot be dismissed: the doctrine is soft, and the craft is not.
The volume closes at the station in 1941, and it is the best writing in it.
Natasha has come to say goodbye to Semyon and cannot find him in the crowd around the freight cars — each open door "a deep, bottomless pit". When she reaches him the train is already moving, and she remembers what she came to say:
"I wanted to leave with you to where the fighting is. But I can't now, because I'm.... Because we're going to have a baby."
He has already jumped onto the step of a moving car. He jumps back down, grips her, shakes her — "What did you say? What did you say?" — and then the train is going.
Men hung in clusters from the cars as the train crawled off, curving as if to break through the solid wall of weeping, moaning voices. Semyon was running after the train, trying to catch up with the last car. "He won't make it. He won't," Natasha's hopes soared. "He won't make it, and then he'll stay here with me. It's so simple. And then we'll go home, and everything'll be just like it was." As he caught up with the last car hands reached down to him, grabbed him, lifted him and dragged him into the black, bottomless pit. Natasha swayed and fell in a dead faint into the hot dust that had been churned up by so many hundreds of feet.
End of Book One
A woman hoping her husband will miss his train to the war, and being wrong. Nobody who writes that is a hack.
Now the thing this introduction began with, and the reason the strange minor policeman of the prologue is worth remembering.
In the second book of The Eternal Call — not in this volume — Lakhnovsky returns. The tsarist gendarme of 1908 has become an SS officer, and he interrogates a captured Soviet officer named Polipov. In the course of it he sets out a plan: the Soviet Union will not be destroyed by arms but from within, over generations, by corrupting its youth, substituting false values, and attacking the people's historical and spiritual foundations until national unity dissolves.
It is a villain's speech in a work of fiction, published in 1971. Ivanov rewrote it for the 1981 edition, breaking it into shorter passages scattered through the book.
And then it left the novel.
In 1993, Metropolitan John (Snychev) of St Petersburg published the speech as a discrete document and attributed it to Allen Dulles, the former director of the CIA. Under the name "the Dulles Plan" it became, and remains, the most popular conspiracy theory in Russia — quoted by politicians, clergy and television, printed as though it were a declassified American directive, and used to explain everything that has happened to Russia since 1991.
It is a forgery whose original is a Soviet adventure novel, and the man who wrote it edited the journal of the Russian nationalist tendency.
We record this without relish. Ivanov invented a Nazi to say a wicked thing, which novelists are entitled to do; he did not forge anything, and he cannot be blamed for a Metropolitan's use of his work two years before his own country's literature stopped being state business. But it is the most consequential afterlife of any book in this series, and a reader meeting Inspector Lakhnovsky on page one should know where that character ends up — not in Book Two, but in the political life of a country thirty years later.
The volume carries thirty-nine plates by Peter Pinkisevich, and they deserve a line because they are doing something the text is not.
Pinkisevich was one of the most prolific Soviet book illustrators, and his manner here is dark, heavy-contoured, almost woodcut-like: faces in three-quarter shadow, figures against snow, groups pressed into the frame. Against Ivanov's fast, cinematic prose the pictures pull the other way — slow, monumental, closer to the graphic language of the 1930s than to a 1970s bestseller.
It is a reminder that a Soviet book was assembled by several hands with several intentions, and that the illustrations were often the most conservative element in the package. A reader of this reissue sees them as Progress's readers did.
The station in 1941, the boy with the accordion, and the informer being poured tea in 1908.
The Eternal Call is the most-read novel in this collection and the least like the others. It has no doctrine in it, which is precisely what should be noticed: the late-Soviet blockbuster did not fail to be Marxist by accident. Its foreword tells you what replaced the doctrine — the people, the soil, Siberia, anguish, a struggle for land — and the journal its author edited was where that replacement was being worked out, in public, for two decades before the state that published this book dissolved.
One further thing is worth saying to readers of this series in particular. It is tempting, from our tradition, to treat a book like this as simply the enemy — the officially garlanded blockbuster by the editor of the nationalist journal. That would be a mistake, and not only because the novel is better than the position.
Ivanov's readers were real, in their millions, and what they were reading was a story in which ordinary Siberians endure a century and are not condescended to. The reason the populist account of the revolution could take hold inside Soviet literature was not that anyone was fooled. It was that by the 1970s the official Marxism had become a language nobody spoke at home, and the people and the soil were available, warm, and required no explanation. A tradition that wants to understand how the Soviet Union ended has more to learn from the success of this novel than from any number of dissident memoirs.
Read it as a novel; it earns that. Then read the foreword again and count the nouns.