Literature and Revolution
Chapter 2
The Literary “Fellow-Travellers” of the Revolution
Transitional Art – A New Soviet Populism. – Kliuev, a Revolutionary “Fellow Traveller” – Yessenin And The Imagists – The Unformed Realism of the “Serapion Fraternity” – The Retrogressional Realism of Pilnyak – Rustic or Peasant-Singing Poets – The “Changing Landmarks” Group – Neoclassicism or “Revolutionary Conservatism”
N ON-REVOLUTIONARY or non-October literature, as we characterized it in the first chapter, is now in reality a past stage. At first, the writers placed themselves in active opposition to October, denying all artistic recognition to everything connected with the Revolution, just as the teachers refused to teach the children of revolutionary Russia. The non-October character of literature, therefore, not only expressed the deep alienation that lay between the two worlds, but it became also a tool for active politics, the sabotage of the artist. This policy annihilated itself; the old literature is now not so much unwilling, as unable.
Between bourgeois art, which is wasting away either in repetitions or in silences, and the new art which is as yet unborn, there is being created a transitional art which is more or less organically connected with the Revolution, but which is not at the same time the art of the Revolution. Boris Pilnyak, Vsevolod Ivanov, Nicolai Tikhonov, the “Serapion Fraternity”, Yessenin and his group of Imagists and, to some extent, Kliuev – all of them were impossible without the Revolution, either as a group, or separately. They know it themselves and do not deny it, do not feel the necessity of denying it, and some even proclaim it loudly. They do not belong to the literary job-holders who are beginning little by little to “picture” the Revolution. They are not even the “Changing Landmarks” group, because in this is implied a breach with the past, a radical change of front. The majority of these writers just mentioned are very young, between twenty and thirty. They have no revolutionary past whatever and if they broke away from anything at all it was from bagatelles. In general their literary and spiritual front has been made by the Revolution, by that angle of it which caught them, and they all have accepted the Revolution, each one in his own way. But in these individual acceptances, there is one common trait which sharply divides them from Communism, and always threatens to put them in opposition to it. They do not grasp the Revolution as a whole and the Communist ideal is foreign to them. They are all more or less inclined to look hopefuully at the peasant over the head of the worker. They are not the artists of the proletarian Revolution, but her artist “fellow-travellers”, in the sense in which this word was used by the old Socialists. If non-October (in essence anti-October) literature is the moribund literature of bourgeois land-owning Russia, then the literary work of the “fellow-travellers” is, in its way, a new Soviet populism, without the traditions of the old populism and – up to now – without political perspective. As regards a “fellow-traveller”, the question always comes up – how far will he go? This question cannot be answered in advance, not even approximately. The solution of it depends not so much on the personal qualities of this or that “fellow-traveller”, but mainly on the objective trend of things during the coming decade.
However, in the dualism of the point of view of these “fellow-travellers”, which makes them doubtful of themselves, there is a constant artistic and social danger. Blok felt this dualism of morals and art more deeply than the others; in general, he was deeper. In the reminiscences of him, written by Nadezhda Pavlovich, there is the following sentence: “The Bolsheviks do not hinder the writing of verses but they binder you from feeling yourself a master~ he is a master who feels the axis of his creativeness and holds the rhythm within himself." In the expression of this thought there is a certain indefiniteness so common to Blok, and besides, we are dealing here with reminiscences, which, as everyone knows, are not always accurate. But the inner resemblance to truth and the significance of this sentence make one believe it. The Bolsheviks hinder one from feeling oneself a master because a master must have within himself an organic, irrefutable axis and the Bolsheviks have displaced the main axis. None of the “fellow-travellers” of the Revolution – and Blok was also a “fellow-traveller”, and the “fellow-travellers” form at present a very important division of Russian literature – carry the axis within themselves. And therefore we have only a preparatory period for a new literature, only études , sketches, essays – but complete mastery with a reliable axis within oneself, is still to come.
NICOLAT KLIUEV
Bourgeois poetry, of course, does not exist, because poetry is a free art and not a service to class. [1] But here is Kliuev, a poet and a peasant, and he not only recognizes it, but repeats it, underlines it, and boasts of it. The difference is that a peasant poet feels no inner call to hide his face, neither from others, nor, above all, from himself. The Russian peasant, oppressed for centuries, reaching upward, spiritualized by populism in the course of the decades, never instilled in those few poets who were his own the social or artistic impulse to conceal their peasant origin. It was true in the old days as in the case of Koltzov and it is still more true these latter years in the case of Kliuev.
It is exactly in Kliuev that we see again how vital is the force of the social method of literary criticism. They tell us that a writer begins where individuality begins and that therefore the source of his creativeness is his unique soul and not his class. It is true, without individuality there can be no writer. But if the poet’s individuality and only his individuality is disclosed in his work, then to what purpose is the interpretation of art? To what purpose, let us ask, is literary criticism? In any case, the artist, if he is a true artist, will tell us about his unique individuality better than his babbling critic. But the truth is that even if individuality is unique, it does not mean that it cannot be analyzed. Individuality is a welding together of tribal, national, class, temporary and institutional elements and, in fact, it is in the uniqueness of this welding together, in the proportions of this psychochemical mixture, that individuality is expressed. One of the most important tasks of criticism is to analyze the individuality of the artist (that is, his art) into its Component elements, and to show their correlations. In this way, criticism brings the artist closer to the reader, who also has more or less of a “unique soul”, “artistically” unexpressed, “unchosen”, but none the less representing a union of the same elements as does the soul of a poet. So it can be seen that what serves as a bridge from soul to soul is not the unique, but the common. Only through the common is the unique known; the common is determined in man by the deepest and most persistent conditions which make up his “soul”, by the social conditions of education, of existence, of work, and of associations. The social conditions in historic human society are, first of all, the conditions of class affiliation. That is why a class standard is so fruitful in all fields of ideology, including art, and especially in art, because the latter often expresses the deepest and most hidden social aspirations. Moreover, a social standard not only does not exclude, but goes hand in hand with formal criticism, that is, with the standard of technical workmanship. This, as a matter of fact, also tests the particular by a common measure, because if one did not reduce the particular to the general there would be no contacts among people, no thoughts and no poetry.
If you take away from Kliuev his peasanthood, his soul not only will become orphaned, but nothing at all will remain of it. For Kliuev’s individuality is the artistic expression of an independent, well-fed, well-to-do peasant loving his freedom egotistically. Every peasant is a peasant, but not everyone can express himself. A peasant who can express himself and his self-sufficient world in the language of a new artistic technique, or rather, who has kept his peasant soul through bourgeois schooling, is a big individuality, and such a one is Kliuev.
The social basis of art is not always so transparent and irrefutable. But that is only because, as has already been said, the majority of poets are bound up with the exploiting classes which, because of their exploiting nature, do not speak of themselves in the way they think, nor think of themselves in the way they are. However, in spite of all the social and psychological methods by which class hypocrisy is maintained, the social essence of a poet can be found even if it is diluted in the most subtle form. And not to understand this essence, leaves the criticism of art and the history of art hanging in the air.
To speak of the bourgeois character of that literature which we call non-October, does not therefore necessarily mean to slander the poets who are supposedly serving art and not the bourgeoisie. For where is it written that it is impossible to serve the bourgeoisie by means of art? Just as geologic landslides reveal the deposits of earth layers, so do social landslides reveal the class character of art. Non-October art is struck by a deathly impotence for the very reason that death has struck those classes to which it was tied by its whole past. Without the bourgeois landholding system and its customs, without the subtle suggestions of the estate and of the salon, this art sees no meaning in life, withers, becomes moribund and is reduced to nothing.
Kliuev is not of the rustic school; he is not peasant-singing; he is not a populist; he is a real peasant (almost). His spiritual countenance is truly a peasant one, a North peasant one at that. Kliuev, like a peasant, is individualistic; be is his own master, he is his own poet. The earth is under his feet, and the sun is above his head. A well-to-do peasant proprietor has grain in his bin; milking cows in his barn; carved weather-cocks on the crest of his roof – his economic self-consciousness is solid and self-reliant. He likes to boast of his household, of his prosperity and of his clever management – as Kliuev does of his talent and of his poetic manner. It is as natural to praise oneself as to belch after a heavy feast or to make the cross over one’s mouth after a yawn. Kliuev has studied. When and what we do not know, but he manages his knowledge like a well-read person and also like a miser. If a well-to-do peasant should accidentally carry a telephone receiver out of the city, he would fix it in the main corner of the room not far from the ikon. In the same way, Kliuev embellishes the main corners of his verses with India, Congo and Mont Blanc; and Kliuev loves to embellish. A simple, scraped harness yoke is only owned by a peasant out of poverty or shiftlessness. A good peasant has a carved yoke painted in several colors. Kliuev is a good poet-master endowed with abundance: he has carvings, cinnabar, vermilion, gilt and lintels everywhere, and even brocades, satins, silver and all kinds of precious stones. All this shines and plays in the sun and one might even think that the sun is his, a Kliuev sun, because truly in this world there exists only he, Kliuev – his talent, the earth under his feet and the sun above his head.
Kliuev is a poet of a closed-in world, inflexible in its essence, but none the less of a world which has changed greatly since 1861. [2] Kliuev is not a Koltzov: one hundred years have not passed in vain. Koltzov is simple, submissive and modest. Kliuev is much more complex, exacting, ingenious. He has brought his new poetic technique from the city, as a neighboring peasant might bring a phonograph; and he uses poetic technique, like the geography of India, only for the purpose of embellishing the peasant framework of his poetry. He is many-colored, often bright and expressive, often quaint, often cheap and tinsel-like – and all this is on a firm peasant basis.
Kliuev’s poems, like his thought and like his life, are not dynamic. There is too much ornamentation in Kliuev’s poetry for action – heavy brocades, natural colored stones, and all manner of other things. One has to move about cautiously not to break and destroy. And yet Kliuev has accepted the Revolution, which is the greatest dynamics of all. Kliuev accepted it not for himself alone, but together with all the peasantry, and accepted it in the manner of a peasant, too. The abolition of the noble estate pleases Kliuev. “Let Turgenev cry about it on a shelf.” But the Revolution is, above all, a city one; without the city there could have been no abolition of the nobles’ estates. Here is where Kliuev’s dualism arises in relation to the Revolution – a dualism, again, which is characteristic not only of Kliuev but of the entire peasantry. Kliuev does not love the city, he does not recognize city poetry. The friendly-enemy tone of his poems is very instructive where he urges the poet Kirillov to reject the thought of factory poetry, and to come into his, the Kliuev pine-woods – the one source of art. Of “industrial rhythms”, of proletarian poetry, of the very principle of it, Kliuev speaks with the natural contempt that comes to the lips of every “strong” peasant, when he glances at the propagandist of Socialism, the houseless city worker, or, what is still worse, the vagabond. And when Kliuev condescendingly invites the blacksmith to lie down for a while on an embroidered peasant bench, it is like a rich and broad-backed peasant from Olonetz charitably offering a piece of bread to a hungry hereditary Petrograd proletarian, “in city rags, in heels worn on city stones”.
Kliuev accepts the Revolution because it has freed the peasant, and he sings many of his songs to it. But his Revolution is without political dynamics and without historic perspective. To Kliuev it is like a market or a sumptuous wedding where people come together from various places, get drunk with wine and song, with embraces and dances, and then return to their own houses: their own earth under their feet and their own sun above their heads. To others it is a republic, but to Kliuev it is the old land of Russ; to others it is Socialism, but to him it is the dead and gone dream-city of Kitezh. He promises paradise through the Revolution, but this paradise is only an exaggerated and embellished peasant kingdom, a wheat and honey paradise: a singing bird on the carved wing of the house and a sun shining in jasper and diamonds. Not without hesitation does Kliuev admit into his peasant paradise the radio and magnetism and electricity; and here it appears that electricity is a giant bull out of a peasant epic and that between his horns is a laden table.
Kliuev evidently was in Petrograd at the time of the Revolution. He wrote in the Krasnaya Gazeta , and he fraternized with the workers, but, as a shrewd peasant, Kliuev, even in those honeymoon days, weighed in his mind whether in one way or another any harm would come from all this to his, the Kliuev household, that is, to his art. If it should seem to Kliuev that the city did not appreciate him, then he, Kliuev, would at once show his character and raise the price of his wheat-paradise as compared with the industrial hell. And if they should reproach him for something, he would not hunt long for a word, but he would lay his opponent low and praise himself strongly and convincingly. Not so long ago Kliuev started a poetic quarrel with Yessenin, who decided to put on a tail-coat and a high hat and who announced this in his poems. Kliuev saw in this treason to his peasant origin and quarrelsomely soaped the younger man’s head for him in just the same way as a rich elder brother would scold a younger one who had taken into his head to marry a town hussy and join the down-and-outs.
Kliuev is jealous. Somebody advised him to refrain from holy words. Kliuev became offended:
It seems neither saints nor villains exist
For the industrial heavens.
It is unclear whether he himself believes or does not believe. His God suddenly spits blood and the Virgin Mother gives herself to some Hungarian for a few yellow pieces. All this sounds like blasphemy, but to exclude God from the Kliuev household, to destroy the holy corner where the light of the lamp shines on silver and gilded frames – to such destruction he does not consent. Without the lamp, everything is unfulfilled.
When Kliuev sings of Lenin in “hidden peasant verses”, it is not very easy to decide whether it is for Lenin or against Lenin. What a dualism of thought, of feeling and of words! And at the basis of all lies the dualism of the peasant, that bast-shod Janus, who turns one face to the past and the other to the future. Kliuev even rises to song in honor of the Commune. But they are just songs of praise – “in honor to”. “I don’t want the Commune without the peasant oven.” But the Commune with a peasant oven is not a reconstruction of all the foundations of life in accordance with reason, with compass and yardstick in hand, but the same old peasant paradise.
The golden sounds
Hang like clusters on the tree;
Like halcyon birds, the words
Settle on the bronches. – The Brass Whale
Here are the poetics of Kliuev in their entirety. Where is there here revolution, struggle, dynamics, a striving towards the new? Here we have peace, a charmed immobility, a tinsel fairyland. “Like Halcyon birds, the words settle on the branches.” This is something curious to look at, but a modern person cannot live in such an environment.
What will Kliuev’s further road be – towards the Revolution or away from it? More likely away from the Revolution; he is much too saturated with the past. The spiritual isolation and the aesthetic originality of the village, despite the temporary weakening of the city, are clearly on the decline. Kliuev seems also to be on the decline.
SERGEY YESSENIN
Yessenin (and the entire group of Imagists – Marienhof, Shershenevich, Kusikov) stand somewhere at the crossing of the road between Kliuev and Mayakovsky. Yessenin’s roots are in the village, but not so deep as those of Kliuev. Yessenin is younger. He became a poet at the time when the village was shaken up by the Revolution, when Russia was shaken up. Kliuev was formed entirely in the pre-War years, and he responded to the War and to the Revolution only within the limits of his backwoods conservatism. Yessenin is not only younger but also more flexible, more plastic, more open to influences and to possibilities. Even his peasant underpinnings are not the same as those of Kliuev; Yessenin has neither Kliuev’s solidity, nor his somber and pompous sedateness. Yessenin boasts that he is arrogant and a hooligan. But if the truth must be told, his arrogance, even his purely literary arrogance ( The Confession ) is not so terrible. Still, Yessenin is undoubtedly the reflection of the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary spirit of the peasant youth whom the disturbed life of the village has driven to arrogance and turbulence.
The city has told on Yessenin more sharply and clearly than on Kliuev. Here is the point where the undoubted influences of Futurism come in. Yessenin is more dynamic, to the extent that he is more nervous, more flexible, more responsive to the new. But Imagism is the reverse of dynamics. The self-sufficient meaning of the image is bought at the expense of the whole; the parts become separated and cold.
It is said incorrectly that the abundant imagery of the Imagist Yessenin flows from his individual tenderness. As a matter of fact, we find the same traits in Kliuev. His verses are weighted down with an imagery which is even more isolated and immobile. At bottom, this is not an individual, but a peasant aesthetics. The poetry of the repetitive forms of life has at bottom little mobility and seeks a way out in condensed imagery.
At any rate, Imagism is overladen to such an extent with images that its poetry seems like a beast of burden and therefore slow in its movements. An abundance of imagery is not in itself an evidence of creative power; on the contrary, it may arise out of the technical immaturity of a poet who is caught unawares by events and feelings which are artistically too much for him. The poet almost chokes with images and the reader feels as nervously impatient to get on as fast as possible to the end as when one listens to a stuttering speaker. In any case, Imagism is not a literary school from which one can expect serious developments. Even the tardy arrogance of Kusikov (“the West at which we Imagists sneeze”) seems curious and not even amusing. Imagism is perhaps only a stopping point for a few poets of the younger generation who are more or less talented, but who resemble one another in one thing only, that they are all still unripe.
Yessenin’s effort to construct a big work by the Imagist method has proved inadequate in Pugachev . And this is so regardless of the fact that the author has unloaded his heavy imagery quite considerably and stealthily. The dialogue nature of Pugachev got the better of the poet rather mercilessly. The drama in general is a most transparent and unyielding form of art; it has no room for descriptive and narrative patches, or for lyric outbursts. Through the dialogue, Vessenin came out into clear waters. Emelka Pugachev, and his enemies and his colleagues, are all without exception Imagists. And Pugachev himself is Sergey Yessenin from top to toe: he wants to be terrible, but he cannot. Yessenin’s Pugachev is a sentimental romantic. When Yessenin introduces himself as a somewhat bloodthirsty hooligan, it is amusing; but when Pugachev expresses himself like a romantic, burdened with imagery, it is worse. The Imagist Pugachev becomes a bit ridiculous.
Though Imagism, having hardly existed, is gone already, Yessenin himself is still of the future. To foreign journalists he declared himself more left than the Bolsheviks. This is in the natural order of things, and frightens no one. At present Yessenin, the poet, who may be more left than we sinners, but who smells none the less of medievalism, has begun his “wander-years”, and he will not return the same as he went. But we will not surmise. When he returns, he will tell us himself.
THE “SERAPION FRATERNITY”
VSEVOLOD IVANOV; NIKOLAI NIKITIN
The “Serapion Fraternity” are youngsters who still live with the brood. Some of them have not come to the Revolution through literature, but have come into literature through the Revolution. Just because they trace their brief pedigree from the Revolution, they, some of them at least, have an inner need to move away from the Revolution, and to protect the freedom of their work from its social demands. It is as if they feel for the first time that art has its own rights. The artist David (in N. Tikhonov) immortalizes at the same time both “the hand of the patriot murderer” and Marat. Why? “But so beautiful is the flash of the wrist to the elbow, splashed with the cherry-like paste.” Quite often the Serapions go away from the Revolution or from modern life in general and even sometimes from man and write about Dresden students, Biblical Jews and tigresses and dogs. All this gives merely an impression of a groping, of an attempt, of a preparing. They absorb the literary and technical achievements of the pre-revolutionary schools without which there could be no movement forward. Their general tone is realistic but as yet quite unformed. It is too early to estimate individually the “Serapion Fraternity”, at least within the covers of this work. In general they indicate, among many other symptoms, the renascence of literature on a new historic basis, after the tragic collapse. Why do we relegate them to being “fellow-travellers” of ours? Because they are bound up with the Revolution, because this tie is still very unformed, because they are so very young and because nothing definite can be said about their tomorrow.
The most dangerous trait of the Serapions is that they glory in their lack of principles. This is stupidity and thickheadedness. As if an artist ever could be “without a tendency”, without a definite relation to social life, even though unformulated or unexpressed in political terms. It is true, that the majority of artists form their relation to life and to its social forms during organic periods, in an unnoticeable and molecular way and almost without the participation of critical reason. The artist takes life as he finds it, coloring his relation to it with a kind of lyric tone. He considers its foundations to be immovable and approaches it as uncritically as he does the solar system. And this passive conservatism of his forms the unseen pivot of his work.
Critical periods do not allow an artist the luxury of an automatic and irresponsible elaboration of social points of view. And whoever boasts of this, whether insincerely or even without pretense, is masking a reactionary tendency or has fallen into social stupidities or is making a fool of himself. It is, of course, possible to do youthful exercises in the spirit of Sinebriuchov’s stories, or in the manner of Fedin’s novelette, Anna Timofeevna , but it is impossible to give a big or a significant picture and even in sketches one cannot hold out long without troubling one’s head about social and artistic perspectives.
The novelists and poets who were born of the Revolution and who are still very young, being almost in their swaddling clothes, try, in the search for their artistic individualities, to get away from the Revolution which has been their environment and in which milieu they have yet to find themselves. From this come the tirades of the “art for art’s sake” which seem very significant and bold to the Serapions, but which in fact are a sign of growth at best and an evidence of immaturity in any case. If the Serapions would get away from the Revolution entirely, they would reveal themselves at once as a second-rate or third-rate remnant of the discarded pre-revolutionary literary schools. It is impossible to play with history. Here the punishment follows immediately upon the crime.
Vsevolod Tvanov, who is the oldest and the most notable of the Serapions, is the most significant and the most weighty. He writes about the Revolution and only about the Revolution, but exclusively about peasant and out-of-the-way revolutions. The onesidedness of his theme and the comparative narrowness of his artistic grasp put an impress of monotony on his fresh and bright colors. He is spontaneous in his moods and in his spontaneity he is not sufficiently careful and strict with himself. He is very lyrical and his lyricism flows without end. But the author makes himself felt too insistently, comes forward too often in person, expresses himself too loudly, slaps nature and people on the shoulders and back too hard. As long as one feels that his spontaneity comes from his youth, it is very attractive, but there is a great danger of its becoming a mannerism. To the degree that spontaneity decreases, a broadening of the creative grasp and a heightening of technique must come in its place. This is possible only if one is strict with oneself. The lyricism with which Ivanov warms so much both nature and the dialogue, must become more secret, more internal, more hidden and more miserly in its expression. A phrase must be born from a phrase by the natural force of the artistic matter without the visible aid of the artist. Ivanov learned from Gorky and learned well. Let him go through this school once again, but this time backwards.
Ivanov knows and understands the Siberian peasant, the Cossack, the Khirgiz. Against the background of revolt, of battles, of fires and of suppressions, he shows very well the peasant’s lack of political impersonality in spite of his stable social strength. While in Russia, a young Siberian peasant, a former Tsarist soldier, supports the Bolsheviks, but on his return to Siberia he serves “Tolchak” against the Reds. His father, a bored and prosperous peasant, who was looking for a new faith, imperceptibly and unexpectedly to himself becomes the leader of the Red groups. The whole family breaks up; the village is burned. But as soon as the hurricane is over, the peasant begins to mark the trees in the forest for cutting down and begins to build anew. After swinging in various directions, Roly-poly tries to settle down firmly on his leaden base. In Ivanov various individual scenes reach great power. The scenes where the “conversation” between the Far Eastern Reds and a captured American takes place, or the drunken debauch of the rebels, or the Khirgiz searching for a “big God”, are splendid. But in general, whether Ivanov wants it or not, he shows that the peasant uprisings in “peasant” Russia are not yet revolution. The peasant revolt bursts forth suddenly from a small spark, unevenly, often cruel In its helplessness – and no one sees why it flared up or whither it leads. And never and in no way can the disjointed peasant revolt be victorious. In Colored Winds a hint is given as to the essence of a peasant uprising, in the figure of the city Bolshevik Nikitin, but it is vague. Nikitin in Ivanov’s story is an enigmatic bit of another world, and it is unclear why the peasant element turns around him. But, from all these pictures of Revolution in distant corners, there follows one undeniable conclusion, that there is being remelted in a great crucible and on a hot fire the national character of the Russian people. And Roly-poly will not come out of this crucible the same as he was.
It would be a good thing if Vsevolod Ivanov could also mature in this crucible.
Nikitin came forward clearly from among the Serapions within the past year. What he wrote in 1922 marks a big jump forward from what he did in the preceding year. But there is something just as disquieting in his rapid maturing as in the precocity of a youth. Anxiety is caused first of all by the manifest note of cynicism which is characteristic to a greater or lesser degree of almost all the youth today, but which in Nikitin assumes at times an especially evil character. The question is not of rude words, nor of naturalistic excesses – though excesses are always excesses – but in a challengingly crude and apparently realistic approach to people and events. Realism, in the broad sense of the word, that is, in the sense of an artistic affirmation of the real world with its flesh and blood and also with its will and consciousness, may be of many kinds. One can take man, not only social, but even psycho-physical man and approach him from different angles – from above, from below, from the side, or walk all around him. Nikitin approaches, or more accurately steals up to him – from below. That is why all his perspectives of man become crude and sometimes even disgusting. Nikitin’s talented precocity gives the fellow an especially ominous character. It is a road that leads to a blind alley.
Under these verbal improprieties and naturalistic debauches is hidden a lack of faith or a dying out of faith, and this is true not only of Nikitin. This generation was caught in the whirl of great events without any preparation, political, moral or artistic. It bad nothing that was stable, or, rather, conservative, and therefore the Revolution conquered it easily. But because the conquest was easy, it was extremely superficial. The young people were caught in the whirl and all of them, Imagists, Serapions, etc., became Dissenters, semi-consciously starting from the conviction that the fig-leaf is the main emblem of the old world. It is very instructive that the generation which was caught in its adolescence by the Revolution is the worst, not only among the urban intelligentsia, but also among the peasantry and even among the working-class. It is not revolutionary, it is turbulent and has the ear-marks of anarchistic individualism. The succeeding generation which rose under the new regime is much better; it is more social, more disciplined, more exacting towards itself and its thirst for knowledge is growing Seriously. It is this youth which gets along so well with the “old fellows”, with those who were formed and strengthened before March and October of 1917, and even before 1914. The revolutionism of the Serapions, as of the majority of the “fellow-travellers” of the Revolution, is much more related to the generation which came too late to prepare for it and too soon to be educated by it. Having approached the Revolution from the wrong side of a peasant and acquiring this half Dissenter’s point of view, these “fellow-travellers” become disillusioned, and the more so, the more clearly it appears that a revolution is not a thing of joy, but a conception, an organization, a plan, a work. The Imagist Marienhof takes off his hat and politely and ironically bids good-by to the Revolution which has betrayed him (that is Marienhof). And Nikitin, in his story Pella , in which this form of a pseudo-revolutionary Dissenter finds his most perfect expression, ends with the innerly skeptical words that are not as coy as Marienhof’s but just as cynical: “You are tired and I have already thrown away the chase ... And now it is futile for us to be running after. There is no sense to it. Don’t look for dead places.”
We had heard this once before, and remember it very well. The young novelists and versifiers who were caught by the Revolution in 1905, turned their backs to it later with almost the same words. When they took off their hats to say good-by to this stranger in 1907, they seriously imagined that they had settled their accounts with it. But it returned a second time and much more firmly. It found the unexpected first “lovers” of 1905 prematurely aged and spiritually bald. For this reason – though to tell the truth, entirely without bothering much about it – it drew into its circle the new generation of the old society (along its very periphery and even at a tangent). But then came another 1907; chronologically, it is called 1921-22 in the shape of the NEP. The Revolution wasn’t such a splendid stranger after all. Only a trader’s and nothing more!
It is true these young people are ready to maintain on many occasions that they are not thinking of breaking with the Revolution, that they were made by it, that they are unthinkable outside the Revolution and cannot think so of themselves. But all this is very indefinite and even ambiguous. Of course they cannot separate themselves from the Revolution, in so far as the Revolution, although a trader’s one, is a fact and even an environment. To be outside the Revolution means to be among the émigrés. Of this there can be no discussion. But apart from the émigrés abroad, there are the internal ones. And the road to them lies along estrangement from the Revolution. He who has nothing more to run after is a Candidate for spiritual emigration. And inevitably this means artistic death, because there is no use of fooling oneself – the attractiveness, the freshness, the significance of the younger ones come entirely from the Revolution which they touched. If this be taken away, there will be a few more Chirikovs in the world, and nothing more.