The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

By the mid-1920s, a certain “normalization” had set in. One index of stability was Maksim Gorky’s decision in 1927 to return to Russia from Sorrento, Italy, after seven years of self-imposed exile. Such returns into the lap of Stalinism would be repeated by other great Russian creative artists, including the composer Sergei Prokofiev in 1936 and the poet Marina Tsvetaeva in 1939. A world-famous and well-traveled writer before the Revolution, Gorky had exiled himself once before, 1906–13, to the Italian island of Capri. There he befriended Lenin and other visionary revolutionaries. But his relations with Lenin became tense, and at times bitter, during the Revolution, especially over repressions of the cultural elite. By temperament Gorky was more a revolutionary humanist than a Bolshevik (he was not a Party member). His humanitarian activity on behalf of threatened writers embarrassed the more iron-fisted of the Bolsheviks. But Gorky, an autodidact from a working-class family with no formal schooling after the age of eleven (and with no “suspicious” foreign languages at all despite his several sojourns abroad), had achieved the Soviet-era equivalent of the status that Count Leo Tolstoy enjoyed under the Old Regime. Ties with Lenin, together with his fame and reputation for moral goodness, made him a difficult man to silence. Lenin himself pressed a second voluntary exile on Gorky in 1921, “for reasons of his health.”

The regime trumpeted Gorky’s return as a political and cultural triumph, rewarding him with fabulous gifts. He received a former millionaire’s mansion as his Moscow residence, an estate in the Crimea, an unlimited bank account (although Gorky cared little about money), and the honor of having towns, streets, schools and factories namedafterhim while he wasstillalive. Atthe same time, police surveillance over Gorky (sustained at modest levels during the exile years through members of his own household) significantly increased. Surely Gorky’s monolinguality heightened his willingness to return; unlike the quatra-lingual Prokofiev or Tsvetaeva, Gorky carried Russia within him wherever he was and could make for himself no other verbal home. It seems that he accepted

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the chairmanship of the Writers’ Union in 1932 with the intent of saving lives, as he had done in 1919–21. But deeper affinities to emerging Stalinist norms must have played a role as well: his unquenchable idealism, his intolerance for truths that depress and deplete, and his preference for hope (which Gorky saw as a form of creativity) over the harmful facts of the present.

The stabilization of literary politics in the mid-1920s turned out to be more apparentthan real: the spectrumwas shifting. One early harbinger of thechange had been the so-called “philosophers’ steamship” in 1922, the deportation to Western Europe of Russia’s prominent idealist philosophers and religious thinkers (with no right of return). This gifted group lent prestige and visibility to the Russian emigration until the end of World War II. Philosophy permitted to remain active on Soviet soil increasingly came to share the tenets of dialectical materialism – or, as it was popularly known, “diamat.” This world-view became part of the (willing or unwilling) mental equipment of all Soviet citizens, who were required to take academic courses in the discipline at all levels of their education. Dialectical materialism could be resisted, amended, and parodied (as Bulgakov does brilliantly on several levels in his novel The Master and Margarita), but only privately. Combined with socialist realism, the presumptions of “diamat” made possible the optimism, self-confidence, and energetic but oddly flattened psychology of generations of state-approved Stalin-era “positive heroes.”4