A novel about the most decorated kind of Soviet courage opens with an animal that cannot read.
For several pages there is no human being in the book at all. Wolves go back into the thick of the forest to digest the night's kill; foxes leave winding tracks; a woodpecker taps so cleanly in the frost that it seems to be tapping a violin and not the trunk of a tree. A magpie cleaning its beak on an alder hears something big coming and goes. What comes is an elk, and the dogfight that has brought down the man this book is about is then described as the elk is obliged to take it — as weather, and insects, and a bird:
It was like the low droning of cockchafers circling among the leaves of a budding birch-tree. Now and again a short, sharp, rasping sound, like the evening croak of a corncrake in the marsh, was added to their droning.
The cockchafers come into sight, dancing in the blue frosty sky with glittering wings. One of them hurtles to the ground with outspread wings; the rest continue their dance in the azure. Then something enormous strikes the tree tops, the noise sounds like a groan, the powdery snow floats down sparkling, and out of the silence comes a man's groan and the crunch of snow under the paws of a bear that the war has driven out of its lair too early and left hungry.
It is the best writing in the book, and it is over in a few pages, and everything worth arguing about in A Story About a Real Man lies in the distance between that opening and the sentence the title comes from.
The copyright leaf of the Progress printing is unusually talkative, and worth reading before the novel.
The Russian is Повесть о настоящем человеке. The English is "Translated from the Russian by the late Joe Fineberg", edited by David Skvirsky, illustrated by Nikolai Zhukov. Then a printing history: First printing 1949 / Second printing 1952 / Third revised edition 1957 / Fourth printing 1967 / Fifth printing 1973. A further printing is advertised on Progress jackets in 1979. This is one of the most continuously reissued Soviet novels in English, and the only book in this series whose publisher was still setting it up thirty years after the war it describes.
Two things in that history matter.
The first is the word revised. There is a 1957 state of this translation and there is a later one, and they are not the same text. The copy digitised for the present reissue is the Foreign Languages Publishing House "Third Edition" — the 1957 revision — and it is that text you are about to read. Set beside the 1973 Progress reprint, the wording moves. Where the 1957 has the men of ward forty-two listening to the wireless "fearing to lose a single word", the 1973 has them "afraid to miss a single word". That is not damage in a scan; it is an editor's hand. Nobody is told. Neither volume carries a note saying that the English has been worked over, still less what was done in the revision of 1957 — the year after the Twentieth Congress.
The second is the credit itself. Our own catalogue entry for this book recorded that no translator was named; that was wrong, and the correction matters, because Joe Fineberg is not an anonymous house hand. The same name stands on the English of Lenin's What Is to Be Done? in the Collected Works, and on much else that Moscow sent abroad in English; his dates we have not been able to establish. What the page says is "the late Joe Fineberg" — a translator dead long enough by 1967 for the adjective to be added, and then left standing through printing after printing. He is the only person in the apparatus of this book who is identified with any candour at all.
The 1973 volume does something no other book in this series does. In place of the usual commissioned essay by a critic, and in place of Polevoi's own autobiographical Author's Note — which the earlier printing carries, and which is the front matter of the text you have here — it prints four pages headed ABOUT THE AUTHOR — By Hero of the Soviet Union ALEXEI MARESYEV.
The subject of the novel introduces the novel about himself.
Maresyev writes plainly and rather well. He describes the summer of 1943 at the Kursk Salient, climbing out of a cockpit tired and hungry and seeing a stranger among a group of airmen pointing in his direction. "What a bore. Another correspondent," he thought, and hurried off towards the canteen. The stranger caught him up and introduced himself: "I'm Boris Polevoi, Pravda war correspondent." They talked in the dugout until dawn, Polevoi filling notebooks, and on leaving he said: "I'll give this a write-up, Alexei. Definitely. I can't say how exactly but I'll certainly write the story." Four years later Maresyev switched on the radio and heard an announcer close a broadcast with the promise of the next instalment of A Story About a Real Man at nine the following morning.
Now turn to the back of the same volume. Polevoi's Postscript describes the identical night, and the two accounts do not agree about the one thing that matters. In Polevoi's version he says, "I would very much like to write about you in the Pravda," and the airman answers with no enthusiasm whatever — "That's up to you to decide" — and then, very sleepily, adds: "But perhaps you'd better not. Goebbels will get hold of the story and trumpet all over the world that the Russians are compelling footless men to fight, and that sort of thing.... You know what those fascists are."
These are not two memories of a night. They are two settlements with a fact. Maresyev's version has a writer who promised to tell the story; Polevoi's has a pilot who asked him not to, for a reason entirely about how the story would be used abroad. The novel exists because the second man overruled the first. That is worth knowing before page one, and the volume prints both without a word of editorial acknowledgement that they diverge.
The foreword has a further date problem. "Today Pelevoi is 60," Maresyev writes — with the author's name misspelt in the printed text. Polevoi was born, as his own note says, on 17 March 1908. The piece was therefore written for the fourth printing of 1967, and Progress reprinted it unaltered in 1973, when he was sixty-five, and the book was advertised again in 1979. Nothing in this volume is later than 1968; its last dated line, at the end of the Postscript, is "Moscow, November 28, 1950". A book sold in 1973 as the living record of a living man is a sealed object from twenty-three years earlier with a five-year-old preface glued to the front.
And yet the foreword contains the best joke in the book, and Maresyev tells it against the West. On a trip to the United States a well-known journalist, himself an ex-airman, told Polevoi that he could not believe the story of Alexei Maresyev, that "it was all the work of Polevoi's imagination". On a later visit Polevoi brought Maresyev with him and introduced him to the American as "material evidence". "But I don't think even that made him change his mind." The man exists; the man is standing here; the story is still not believed. Maresyev closes by turning the title round: were he a man of letters, he says, he would most certainly have written A Story About a Real Man about "a fine friend and a REAL MAN—of Boris Polevoi."
The novel is at its strongest where it is least ideological, which is in hospital.
Polevoi is very good on the mechanics of a body relearning itself, and exact about the thing nobody thinks of: that walking is a habit acquired in infancy, that artificial limbs set the old impulse at war with the new one, and that "Many people who have lost their limbs, if they lack sufficient will-power, never again learn the art of walking that we so easily learn in childhood." There is no miracle anywhere in it. Meresyev turns the toe of the artificial foot outward, rests on the heel, transfers his weight, and the leather creaks; he stands away from the wall swaying, arms out, not daring the next step, with a cold sweat breaking out on the bridge of his nose. When the old surgeon Vasily Vasilyevich catches him at it, what he says is exactly right for a doctor and exactly wrong for a hagiography: "Good going! Why are you alone, without a nurse or an orderly? Proud, I suppose.... But never mind. As in everything you do, the first step is the most important, and you've got over the most difficult part."
Ward forty-two is the book's real achievement. Polevoi was a reporter by trade and he built the ward the way a reporter builds a story, out of people who get on each other's nerves: the sour, unsociable Kukushkin, who names the mortuary "ward number fifty"; Gvozdev, who knows about wireless sets; the vain Major Struchkov; and above all the Regimental Commissar Semyon Vorobyov, who arrives, lays out his tooth-paste and shaving tackle in neat stacks as though settling in for years, announces in a rolling bass that he is quiet and a non-smoker and will not be among them long, and then spends what is left of his life cheerfully bullying the others into living. "The Commissar died on the first of May" is as good a chapter opening as Soviet war fiction produced.
The Commissar's funeral passes below the window. The men of ward forty-two crowd to watch; the major, whose legs are in splints, cannot see and demands to be told who it is. Kukushkin answers in a dry, cracked voice: "It's the funeral of a real man ... a Bolshevik."
And then the novel explains itself: "The expression: 'a real man,' sank into Meresyev's mind. A better description could not have been imagined."
There is the whole doctrine, and it is worth being precise about what it does. The phrase is not left as a character's opinion; the narrator immediately certifies it as the best description available. "Real", in the title of this book, does not mean genuine as against invented, nor fully human as against maimed — the two senses a reader naturally brings to the story of a legless pilot. It means Bolshevik. The title is a definition, and the definition is a membership.
That is socialist realism doing precisely what it was designed to do, and it is why the novel keeps tipping over. Everything Polevoi observed — the elk, the creaking leather, the sweat on the bridge of the nose — is evidence about a man. Everything he was required to conclude needs that evidence to certify a Party. The book is honest enough that the seam shows. After the funeral Meresyev's desire is not to recover, or to fly, but "to become a real man, like the one who had just been taken on his last journey"; the physical struggle that fills four hundred pages is quietly reclassified as an apprenticeship in correctness of soul.
The strongest pages Polevoi ever wrote are at the end of this book, and they are not fiction.
He sat in the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg on the day Hermann Goering's cross-examination was closing. Roman Rudenko, the Soviet Prosecutor, put it to him that in treacherously attacking the Soviet Union he had committed a most heinous crime. Goering, in a low voice, frowning and lowering his eyes: "It was not a crime, it was a fatal blunder." What they had failed to reckon with, he said, was not guns or aircraft or industrial capacity, all of which they knew approximately, but the people: "The chief thing we did not know, nor understand, was the character of the Soviet Russians. They have been and remain a riddle."
Polevoi's answer to this is the one unambiguously Marxist sentence in the volume. He refuses the riddle. The Nazi account of the Eastern Front was racial and national — and so is the flattering version of it that a Soviet patriot could comfortably have accepted, the unfathomable Russian soul, opaque to foreigners since Napoleon. Polevoi will not have it: "How, indeed, could the inventors of the wretched 'theory' about the Germans being the Herrenvolk understand the soul and strength of a people reared in a socialist country?" Not Russians: a people reared in a socialist country. The property is social, and it was made, and what was made is makeable, and therefore anybody's. It was in that hall, he says, that he decided to write this book.
Hold that sentence against the novel it explains and the novel does not hold. Four hundred pages earlier, when a medical commission is astonished that a man with no feet proposes to fly, the narration reaches for the other register: "What couldn't a Russian do?" The Nuremberg pages know exactly what is wrong with that question. The fiction asks it anyway, more than once, and without discomfort. What Polevoi proved to himself in Nuremberg he could not hold for the length of a book, because the doctrine he wrote under had itself gone over to the national explanation during the war, and a man who had spent those years on Pravda was not placed to notice the substitution. His trial notebooks were published separately — the Progress list records them as Final Reckoning: Nuremberg Diaries — and on the evidence of these few pages the reportage is the better book.
The pairing is not accidental, either. The division that shoots Meresyev down on page twenty-two is the Richthofen, "manned by the finest aces in the fascist Reich", and it is "under the patronage of Goering himself". Goering puts the hero in the snow at the beginning and stands in the dock at the end. Structurally the novel is an argument with one man, and the argument is won in the Postscript, in Polevoi's own voice, and not in the fiction.
Read the text, then count.
Stalin's name does not occur in this novel. It occurs thirty-three times inside the word Stalingrad, and not once on its own. The word "Party" appears three times in the whole volume, all three in Polevoi's Author's Note: it does not occur in the novel at all. Lenin appears twice — once as the name of a medal, and once in a slogan.
The slogan is the give-away. The Commissar dies on May Day 1942 while the ward listens to the wireless. The announcer, whose voice "was known and listened to all over the world in those days" and who is not named, reads the Order of the Day of the People's Commissar of Defence; the men strain not to miss a word; and the passage quotes the order's closing line: "Under the invincible banner of Great Lenin—forward to victory!" The office of People's Commissar of Defence was held, in May 1942, by Stalin. The novel prints the office, quotes the order, and declines to print the signature.
We cannot prove from the two printings in front of us what the 1949 English said, still less the Russian that Polevoi began writing at Nuremberg; no honest introduction should pretend otherwise. What can be said is this. The volume you are reading is a revision made in 1957. A war novel begun in 1946, on Soviet radio by 1947, reaches the foreign reader with the most prominent name of its period scoured out of it down to a single unattributable Order of the Day. And not one line of apparatus in any printing admits that anything was changed. The reader is handed a monument to authenticity — "I think there is nothing extraordinary about this authenticity," Polevoi writes in the Author's Note; "Our socialist life... daily, hourly lays bare before a writer" its subjects — which has itself been rewritten at least twice, silently.
Polevoi is not the villain of his own book, and it would be lazy to treat him as one.
The Author's Note printed here is the autobiography of a provincial newspaperman. Tver, renamed Kalinin; a barrister father dead of tuberculosis in 1916, remembered chiefly through the library he left; a mother who went to work in a factory hospital, so that the boy grew up among the workers' children at the Morozov mill. His spare time went on the Tmaka, "a grimy little factory stream", and on his dead father's books. "I liked Gorky best of all." His first collection of feature articles was sent to Gorky in Sorrento by friends at the Komsomol paper without his knowledge; Gorky replied on six pages of foolscap, going through the "immature composition" with attention and indulgence and telling him to learn from the masters to polish his style much as a "lathe operator polishes metal". He went into the dyeing-and-finishing mill of the Proletarka factory, became a worker-correspondent, joined the Party in 1940, and spent the war as a Pravda correspondent, keeping a notebook of heroism — sixty-five entries in the end — because the editor-in-chief had told him that to keep it was "your civil duty. More, it is your duty as a member of the Party."
That instruction is the key to everything he wrote and to its limits. Polevoi's method was to take down what happened and alter the names as little as he could: the real man is Maresyev, the character Meresyev, one letter changed, and he says so. His honest conviction was that the material was so strong it needed no invention. It is a reporter's faith, and it produced the elk, the ward, the creaking leather. It also left him defenceless against the frame his material was poured into, because a writer who holds that reality supplies the meaning has no way of arguing with an editor who tells him what reality means.
The bureaucracy did not thank him for it. In March 1966, at the 23rd Congress of the CPSU, Polevoi and Tvardovsky — "two intellectuals considered to be leaders of the moderate 'liberal' wing" — were dropped from the Congress and from the Central Committee. Ernest Mandel, writing as Ernest Germain in the International Socialist Review that autumn, set it down as part of the ideological hardening that ran on from the Sinyavsky–Daniel trial. A year later, the man just removed as too liberal was fronted in his own most famous book by a Hero of the Soviet Union.
Read the forest, and the hospital, and the Postscript, and give the doctrinal passages the attention they deserve, which is the attention you give to a seam.
The book's afterlife has mostly run in the doctrinal register. It was on Soviet radio by 1947, exported in this translation for thirty years, and used as proof of a quality in Soviet people that could be admired abroad without ever being explained. Polevoi explained it once, in Nuremberg, in a single sentence, better than anyone who has used the book since. A people reared in a socialist country: which is to say that a society can produce a kind of person, that the kind of person is therefore an argument about the society, and that it can accordingly be lost. Everything in this volume that survives its own apparatus is contained in that.
The man in the snow knows none of it. He is being approached by a bear, and he is working his hand, very slowly, towards the pistol in his thigh pocket. Start there.