98
From Platonov to Aitmatov; from Eisenstein to Abuladze
to that, also the world. According to K. Clark, Gorbachev shared this belief.20 Before the convention of the Union of Writers in 1986, he even addressed a group of authors and asked them for help in his fight against conservatives and bureaucrats. But during the time of Gorbachev, literature had already begun to lose its former significance. It was primarily film which paved the way for changes at the peak of glasnost (1987–1988). The Repentance by Tengiz Abuladze was put in countrywide distribution in January 1987. However, sometime around 1990 all the existing values began to collapse, and parody developed. In 1995 Timur Kibirov in his novel When Lenin Was a Child (Когда был Ленин маленьким) transformed the story of the “idol of the revolution” into a post-modernist pastiche.21 But let us go back to the October Revolution and its reflection in literature. The rage of the revolution and the horrors of the civil war written about by Vsevolod Ivanov (1895–1963), for instance, in Coloured Winds (Цветные ветра, 1921): They brought locksmith lathes captured in the town to the Foxes’ Den … Bombs were being prepared … The time has come that killing is inevitable. I don’t know why but it is so. It was also a subject for Artyom Vesolyi (1899–1939), real name Nikolai Ivanovich Kochkurov, a victim of the Stalinist repressions. The best novel of his is Russia Washed with Blood (Россия, кровью умытая, 1932), which he constantly expanded and worked on until his death (he began writing it in 1920). Gorky considered Vesolyi one of the most competent writers to have employed the topic of the history of the civil war in literature. Wooden fences cracked under the weight of decrees: “Martial law … next time … strictly drunkenness … looting … culprits … shot dead.” […] The heads of the locals, who had never boasted of special courage, were spinning … Vesolyi also mentioned that a clever man knows what to do even in times of revolution. Boris Pilnyak (1894–1941) in his novel The Naked Year (Голый год) wrote the following about the Bolsheviks: leather men in leather jackets; each of them leatherly handsome, leatherly firm … – Do you actually know what’s going on in Russia? – I sure do – the power has been taken by the riff-raff, people have nothing to eat and racketeering is rife. – Could our Russia face the whole world?
20 Ibidem, p. 387. 21 Ibidem, p. 378.
Ukázka elektronické knihy, UID: KOS500118
From Platonov to Aitmatov; from Eisenstein to Abuladze
99
The Naked Year (Голый год) is considered to be the first novel on the Russian Revolution and was published for the first time in Berlin in 1922. But it is rather a kind of montage of fractions and fragments, a co-existence of novels, as Viktor Shklovsky referred to it. It was a remarkable formal experiment. Pilnyak included in the text of The Naked Year, almost without any change, passages from his early short stories on the revolution in provincial headquarters. He tried to astonish the reader by a counterpunctual montage of various genres on the grounds of their confrontation as well as parody. A similar type of montage became one of the primary modifications of the modern novel in Soviet fiction.22 On the other hand, Pilnyak was one of the greatest Russian stylists who absorbed both the linguistic richness of classical Russian literature as well as stimuli from the symbolists and the language experiments of the 1920s. Pilnyak was able to express the whole tragic nature of the revolutionary times in several terse sentences spoken by one of the main female characters: Bread and shoes are the most precious things on earth, more valuable than any theory, as without bread and a skilled craftsman people die and all their theories die with them. And bread is given out by the muzhiks in the countryside. So let the rural people and craftsmen decide how they will handle the values they produce … Or: To create always means to demolish. These simple truths cost him his life. He was arrested in 1937 and his next of kin were only later informed of the date of his death. The literary theoretician, historian and fiction writer Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984) in his Sentimental Journey (Сентиментальное путешествие, Berlin 1923) understood what happened after the revolutions in very much the same way as Pilnyak did: At that time, cholera broke out in St. Petersburg, but people hadn’t yet started to eat one another. […] It was quiet, sunny and there was hunger, great hunger […] There was no light. People used to sit for long hours in the dark. It was no longer possible to live. They were getting ready to die. But they were out of time. The spring was coming …
22 NOVOTNÝ, Vladimír: Pilňak, Boris: Holý rok. In: MACURA, Vladimír a kol.: Slovník světových literárních děl. Díl 2. Odeon, Praha 1989, p. 129.
Ukázka elektronické knihy, UID: KOS500118
100
From Platonov to Aitmatov; from Eisenstein to Abuladze
But many died or were shot dead. And Shklovsky would add: There’s no need to cry, one must love the living! […] It is not fair that we have suffered so much in vain and nothing has changed. The rich and the poor remain … The writer who made perhaps the deepest probe into the core of the revolution, so much connected to the Russian soul, was Andrei Platonov (1899–1959), who is considered to have been one of the most specific fiction writers of the 20th century. Born in a village near Voronezh to the family of a railway employee, he went to work as an aid in a railway depot at the age of 14. From there also comes his love for locomotives, apparent in some of the characters in his novel Chevengur. He also worked as an engineer in South Russia’s dry steppe areas where he drew inspiration for his novel Dzhan (Джан). In the late 1920s he left Voronezh for Moscow, where he got a basement apartment on Tverski Boulevard on the premises of the then Literary Institute. From 1927 he was a professional writer. After the publication of his book Makar the Doubtful (Усомнившийся Макар, 1929), however, he fell from favour of those in power, and his novel To the Profit (Впрок, 1931) led to a complete ban on the publication of his works. Platonov’s short stories began to reappear in the press no earlier than during World War Two, when he was a war correspondent. After the war he was banned again, and new editions of his books were published only in the 1960s after his death. The key novels The Foundation Pit (Котлован) and Chevengur (Чевенгур) were first published abroad, and they were not published in the Soviet Union until perestroika in 1987–1988. Chevengur, which he wrote in 1926–1929, is a picture of pre-revolutionary Russia (At that time, Russia was shining a light on the way of all the nations, only for its own houses did have no light.). The novel, which is difficult to translate, is innovatory also as regards the language. Left-wing writers and artists were actually convinced at that time that revolution should also be made in art. Everything that the author presents is seen from the viewpoint of the folk masses. He uses a fairytale motif of wandering for glory (knowledge), where the revolution symbolises the truth. But its seekers never get to the destination, the writer questioned not only the meaning of the revolution but most likely also the meaning of the human effort itself. Chevengur as an epopeia of the failure of the revolutionary vision is also the tragedy of the impossibility of communication between the revolution and the people. All great truths are relativised in the novel, and the Narodniks’ myth of people and village is also destroyed. The Russian revolution is conceived here as an eschatological phenomenon, is linked to the idea of the end of the world. At the same time, unceasing questions arise as regards the meaning of human existence. Andrei Platonov, unlike other authors who captured only a certain aspect or
Ukázka elektronické knihy