Images of Dictatorship

Stalin in Literature

Rosalind Marsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351762021
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

Originally published in 1989, this book presented the first study of the image of Stalin in literature. Analysing the literary presentaiton of historical character and the treatment of 20th Century tyrants in European prose fiction, the book draws a comparison between the depiction of Hitler in German literature and Stalin in Russian literature. It explores the way in which Stalin has been portrayed by Soviet, emigré Russian, and European writers including Orwell, Nabokov, Mandelstam, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn. It examines in detail two important novels which had hitherto received little critical attention: the revised (1978) version of Sozhenitsyn's The First Circle and Anatoly Rybakov's Children of the Arbat. This book will be of interest to students of Soviet/Russian literature, history and politics and those intsted in the relationship between history and fiction in the 20th Century.

Chapter one

An approach to the presentation of historical character in European prose fiction

Georg Lukács admitted in his pioneering work The Historical Novel, first published in Russian in 1937 and reissued in English in 1960, that a study of the historical novel was ‘almost virgin territory’.¹ The majority of critics concerned with historical themes have chosen to discuss individual writers of historical fiction, such as Shakespeare, Scott, Schiller, Goethe and Tolstoy. There are still relatively few general studies of the European historical novel, and in these works the portrayal of historical characters is only mentioned in passing.² Even fewer studies have been devoted to the general development and separate periods of the historical novel in Russia.³ Moreover, of those studies of the historical novel which have appeared, the majority have concentrated on works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The importance of history for the twentieth-century European novel is, however, demonstrated by the fact that many modern writers - Thomas Mann, Arthur Koestler, Paul Scott, Graham Greene, André Malraux, Olivia Manning, Victor Serge and Solzhenitsyn, to name but a few - have chosen to deal in works of fiction with historical events in the present or the recent past because they themselves have experienced historical cataclysms in their own lives.

Literary scholars have been divided in their approach to such works, expressing uncertainty as to whether they can be defined as ‘historical novels’. Harry E. Shaw, in a book on historical fiction which is mainly concerned with Walter Scott, deliberately avoids discussing the representation of history in novels set in the recent past or the present. Gilles Nélod goes even further, dismissing works on contemporary historical periods which the author lived through as ‘memoirs’, ‘eye-witness accounts’, ‘documentary reports’ or ‘polemical works aimed at their contemporaries’.⁴ Lukács, however, convincingly argues that the fictional treatment of contemporary lived history has, since the time of Balzac’s Comédie Humaine and Tolstoy’s War and Peace, been a legitimate literary genre, an extension of the social novel. Xenia Gasiorowska, in her study of portraits of Peter the Great in Russian literature, considers a novel to belong to the historical genre ‘if it is set in a time recent to the author but historically completed and closed so that a perspective of events can be achieved and so that research becomes necessary’.⁵ This definition can usefully be applied both to Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Hadji Murat and to Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle. The works of Solzhenitsyn and other writers who treat the theme of Stalinism can be regarded both as ‘novels of the recent past’,⁶ a subclass of the wider genre of the historical novel, and, in Irving Howe’s wide definition, as ‘political novels … a novel in which we take to be dominant political ideas or the political milieu’.⁷

Avrom Fleishman regards the inclusion of at least one ‘real’ historical personage as an essential element if a novel is to qualify as historical: ‘The historical novel is distinguished among novels by the presence of a specific link to history: not merely a real building or a real event but a real person among the fictitious ones’.⁸ However, this is an arbitrary requirement which excludes from the genre many important novels with a historical setting such as Middlemarch and Nostromo. Fleishman’s definition leads to confusion, because he fails to distinguish between different kinds of historical novels. The useful term ‘documented historical novels’ has been coined by Joseph W. Turner in order to describe novels in which actual people from the past occur, emphasising their direct links with recorded history.⁹ The novels and stories containing portraits of Stalin which will be considered in this study all fit into the category of ‘documented historical fiction’.

There has been little theoretical writing on the fictional presentation of historical characters. Lukács established that the ‘world-historical personage’ in the classical historical novel appears as only a minor character compositionally, a figure described from the outside, in action, whose character is not developed throughout the novel, but whose presence, words and actions have a significant effect on the other fictional characters.¹⁰ Lukács’s analysis can usefully be applied to the depiction of such episodic characters as Richard Coeur de Lion, Louis XI, Elizabeth I, Mary Stuart and Cromwell in the novels of Walter Scott, and to the portrayal of Pugachev and Catherine the Great in Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter, which was influenced by Scott. This technique of ‘external characterisation’, to use Harry Shaw’s term,¹¹ was also used to portray such historical tyrants as Marat, Danton and Robespierre in Victor Hugo’s Quatre-Vingt Treize, Robespierre in Anatole France’s Les Dieux ont Soif and Tolstoy’s caricatures of Napoleon in War and Peace and Nicholas I in Hadji Murat.

To some extent Lukács’s analysis held true for the presentation of Stalin in the first (1968) version of Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle : he was a minor character whose entrance was, nevertheless, carefully prepared, and whose influence was felt throughout the novel. However, Lukács’s interpretation breaks down, even for the first version of The First Circle, because of Solzhenitsyn’s great interest in the psychology of his ‘world-historical personage’, which is more typical of the twentieth-century historical novel than of earlier historical fiction. A useful distinction has been drawn by Gasiorowska between conventional historical novels, in which historical characters remain outsiders whose role is limited to ensuring in the reader’s imagination the authenticity of the period, and ‘biographical novels’ where they are protagonists and personalities whose image is of paramount importance to the plot, and in which milieu becomes secondary. In this sense The First Circle could be considered a ‘biographical novel’: the image of Stalin dominates the novel, although he himself only appears in a few chapters.

When referring to both genres, Gasiorowska makes a totally unjustified generalisation: ‘A historical novelist should not become involved in an in-depth psychological study of the inhabitants of his fictional world’, justifying her view by the argument that historical characters ‘are too remote for complete empathy’.¹² Such prescriptive comments by critics on what a novelist should or should not do are not particularly useful. Harry Shaw is on less controversial ground when he points to the difficulty involved in depicting historical characters in fiction: ‘We are likely to resent the intrusion into the minds of actual historical figures of thoughts we suspect are placed there because they serve the ideological or moralistic needs of the author. We want, in other words, no more information than can be inferred from the historical record’. Shaw also argues that whereas with many fictional characters the depiction of the inner life is the most important evidence about a character, and in many novels the character’s consciousness is the character, ‘With actual historical figures in historical novels, by contrast, the direct portrayal of consciousness can never have such a significance. It most properly serves as a summation of what we learn about the character by other means’.¹³ It is certainly true that in the majority of historical novels writers are less concerned with the character’s inner consciousness than with the social and historical significance of the character, and that for this purpose Scott’s ‘external characterisation’ is still a useful device. However, Taine’s criticism of Scott also possesses some validity: ‘Walter Scott pauses on the threshold of the soul and in the vestibule of history’.¹⁴ It is this lack of psychological and historical depth which some twentieth-century writers have attempted to remedy.

The evolution of the documented historical novel is related both to the development of the novel form and to changing attitudes towards historical scholarship. Although in practice such twentieth-century novelists as Anthony Powell, with his vignette of Field-Marshal Montgomery in his series A Dance to the Music of Time, and Philip Roth, with his depiction of Nixon in Our Gang, have conformed to Lukács’s classical model, the twentieth century has also seen an increase in fictional representations of historical characters based on a close reading of historical sources, testifying to a much greater concern for historical authenticity on the part of modern writers and to their aim of recreating a whole socio-political and moral world. Some twentieth-century novels probe deeply into the inner consciousness of historical personages, tracing their psychological development. This is true, for example, of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius and Marguerite Yourcenar’s meticulous Les Mémoires d’Hadrien, and also of some works closer in time and conception to Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle, for example Richard Hughes’s novels The Fox in the Attic and The Wooden Shepherdess, which contain a fascinating psychological portrait of Hitler.

Perhaps the main reason for the lack of a separate theory of historical characterisation is that all characters in a novel are fictional; since there is no difference between ‘real’ historical personages and any other characters in ‘invented’ fictions, there can be no general theory. All novels are forms of literary discourse; the very presentational form chosen ensures that it can contain only different degrees of unreality. As Käte Hamburger says, ‘The form of fiction in and of itself posits a demarcation from reality of any kind’. Hamburger also makes a general point about historical character when she refers to the difference between an invented content and a fictive one. Historical characters in a novel, such as Napoleon in War and Peace, are not ‘invented’, but nevertheless in their capacity as figures in a novel they are fictive. Just like purely invented characters, they ‘are’ only by virtue of their being narrated. What does vary is the degree of ‘feint’, to use Hamburger’s term, which authors use in their presentation of historical characters. Certain writers take pains to invest their works with a high degree of historical authenticity, and use literary techniques such as first-person narration which diminish the amount of ‘feint’ involved in characterisation. As Hamburger states: ‘If historical figures become first person narrators, then it depends on the nature of the narrative to what degree the author renders them feigned’.¹⁵ In Les Mémoires d’Hadrien, for example, which is formally presented as a genuine autobiography of the Emperor Hadrian and backed up by extensive documentation, Yourcenar takes care to ensure that the degree of feint is very slight by avoiding all fictionalising techniques such as dialogue.¹⁶ As we will see, authors who paint portraits of Stalin also vary considerably in the degree of ‘feint’ which they employ.

Solzhenitsyn’s portrait of Stalin, particularly the new portrait which presents an imaginative reconstruction of Stalin’s entire biography up to 1949, is deeply influenced by classical models, especially by the caricatured portraits of historical characters in the works of Pushkin and Tolstoy. It also bears the imprint of the twentieth-century interest in psychology which has affected not only writers of fiction, but also historians: Joachim Fest’s biography of Hitler, Max Gallo’s study of Robespierre and Robert Tucker’s biography of Stalin are prominent examples of the genre of ‘psycho-history’.¹⁷

Chapter two

Tyrants in twentieth-century literature

Before discussing the literary portrayal of twentieth-century tyrants, it may be useful to consider the more general question of the strategies employed by writers in presenting the terrible events of recent or contemporary history. Many authors who attempt to treat such subjects as the Nazi holocaust or Stalin’s terror are fully conscious of the magnitude of the task they have undertaken, since there are certain enormities which it is impossible to depict adequately in fiction. In the words of Lionel Trilling, ‘The great psychological fact of our time which we all observe with baffled wonder and shame is that there is no possible way of responding to Belsen and Buchenwald’.¹

Some writers, aware that certain things are literally unspeakable, make a conscious decision to avoid the subject completely. Boris Pasternak, for example, breaks off his Essay in Autobiography (1956) before the dreadful years of the Great Purge with the words: ‘to continue it would be immeasurably difficult... one would have to talk in a manner which would grip the heart and make the hair stand on end’.² One method of presenting evil in fiction which avoids the melodramatic piling of horror on horror is extreme factuality. A simple documentary approach is used by Anatoly Kuznetsov in his novel Bab’ii Yar (1966), which is based on contemporary documents, newspaper cuttings and the testimony of eye-witnesses, including the remarkable account of Dina Pronicheva, a Jewish woman who survived one of the mass executions at the ravine of Babi Yar near Kiev in 1941.³ Kuznetsov reports her account verbatim, without adding anything of his own; and the same memoir was subsequently used, with very few changes, by D. M. Thomas in The White Hotel. Similarly, Primo Levi’s eye-witness account of Auschwitz, If This is a Man (1947), is couched in a quiet, calm, almost gentle tone. Such restraint and understatement give a good idea of what Hannah Arendt has termed ‘the banality of evil’. However, many writers feel that mere realism is not a sufficiently powerful medium to provide an adequate evocation of evil. A more common approach is the use of satire, the grotesque, hyperbole and humour, as, for example, in the works of Mikhail Bulgakov. Satire is able to convey evil by pointing to the distinction between the ideal and the real, while at the same time diminishing the weight of negative phenomena by teaching the reader to laugh at them. A third strategy is the use of allegory and fantasy, as in George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 and Georgy Vladimov’s Faithful Ruslan. As we will see, writers who attempt to depict either Hitler or Stalin have adopted one, or a combination of these literary techniques.

An examination of portraits of Hitler in fiction suggests some interesting parallels with literary portraits of Stalin. In the first place, during the period of Hitler’s ascendancy German writers exalted their Eihrer in similar eulogistic tones to those of Soviet writers glorifying Stalin: a prominent example is Will Vesper’s poem of 1943, Dem Führer.⁴ It is, however, significant that since Hitler’s death there have been very few portraits of Hitler in German literature in co...