The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism
Brand: Brookings Institution Press
Categories: Books, Politics & Social Sciences, Politics & Government



Dimensions: 6.25 x 1 x 9.5 inches
ISBN-13: 978-0815709046
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0815709048
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Print length: 242 pages
Publication date: February 9, 2004
subtitle: Hardcover – February 9, 2004
author: Isaiah Berlin Visit Amazon's Henry Hardy Page search results Henry Hardy Strobe Talbott
review: Editorial Reviews Review "This remarkable volume is superb. Berlin's great powers of observation combine with his great knowledge and literary gifts to provide us with a fascinating series of insghts.... Even a reader who is only casually interested in the history of Russia will be fascinated. Every day the media present us with lumps of coal, and to find a real diamond is a delight." Geoffrey Riklin, IntellectualConservative.com , 4/20/2004 "...a useful compilation of Isaiah Berlin's writings about Russian and Soviet culture and history. His narratives of his encounters with Akhmatova...and Pasternak are included and offer intimate and thoughtful portraits of these great writers." Paul Richardson, Russian Life , 5/1/2004 "This is an excellent resource for those interested in 20th-century Russian history." P. E. Heineman, Choice , 3/1/2005 "This collection of essays, some never published before and some not well known because they were published under pseudonyms to protect his remaining relatives living in Russia, are a remarkable group....For the committed reader, Berlin is the most congenial of writers. His writing style is inimitable, deriving as it does seamlessly from his style of speaking--pellucid yet labyrinthine, drawing the reader to the top of a conversational wave, and holding him there effortlessly, and allowing him to glide down the other side to a momentary calm, before the next wave carries him forward." Patricia Anderson, Quadrant , 4/15/2005 "As always, Berlin's writings are as engaging as they are informative. Framed between Hardy's preface and Rappaport's glossary, however, The Soviet Mind is a distinguished collection." Jason Ferrell, McGill University, Slavic and East European Journal "...a collection of Berlin's essays on Russia, Czarist and Stalinist, is a welcome arrival...What makes this book essential reading for Berlinophiles is that it contains essays never before published and some originally published under pseudonyms to protect relatives living in the Soviet Union. And they are as readable as when they were first composed." Arnold Beichman, The Washington Times , 5/2/2004 About the Author Isaiah Berlin (19091997) taught for most of his life at Oxford University, where he was successively professor of social and political theory and founding president of Wolfson College. Thereafter he served as president of the British Academy. Henry Hardy is a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford University. He is one of Isaiah Berlin's literary trustees and has edited a number of other collections of Berlin's essays. Strobe Talbott is president of the Brookings Institution. He is the author of several books on Russia and the Soviet Union. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Soviet Mind Russian Culture Under Communism By Isaiah Berlin Brookings Institution Press Copyright © 2004 Brookings Institution Press All right reserved. ISBN: 0-8157-0904-8 Chapter One THE ARTS IN RUSSIA UNDER STALIN December 1945 The Soviet literary scene is a peculiar one, and in order tounderstand it few analogies from the West are of use. For a varietyof causes Russia has in historical times led a life to somedegree isolated from the rest of the world, and never formed agenuine part of the Western tradition; indeed her literature has atall times provided evidence of a peculiarly ambivalent attitudewith regard to the uneasy relationship between herself and theWest, taking the form now of a violent and unsatisfied longing toenter and become part of the main stream of European life, nowof a resentful ('Scythian') contempt for Western values, not byany means confined to professing Slavophils; but most often ofan unresolved, self-conscious combination of these mutuallyopposed currents of feeling. This mingled emotion of love and ofhate permeates the writing of virtually every well-known Russianauthor, sometimes rising to great vehemence in the protestagainst foreign influence which, in one form or another, coloursthe masterpieces of Griboedov, Pushkin, Gogol, Nekrasov,Dostoevsky, Herzen, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Blok. The October Revolution insulated Russia even more completely,and her development became perforce still more self-regarding,self-conscious and incommensurable with that of itsneighbours. It is not my purpose to trace the situation historically,but the present is particularly unintelligible without at leasta glance at previous events, and it would perhaps be convenient,and not too misleading, to divide its recent growth into threemain stages - 1900-1928; 1928-1937; 1937 to the present - artificialand over-simple though this can easily be shown to be. 1900-1928 The first quarter of the present century was a time of storm andstress during which Russian literature, particularly poetry (aswell as the theatre and the ballet), principally (although one is notallowed to say so today) under French and, to some degree,German influence, attained its greatest height since its classicalage of Pushkin, Lermontov and Gogol. Upon this the OctoberRevolution made a violent impact, but it did not dam the swellingtide. Absorbed and inexhaustible preoccupation with social andmoral questions is perhaps the most arresting single characteristicof Russian art and thought as a whole; and this largely shaped thegreat Revolution, and after its triumph led to a long, fierce battlebetween, on one side, those primarily artistic rebels who lookedto the Revolution to realise their own most violent 'antibourgeois'attitudes (and attitudinising) and, on the other, thoseprimarily political men of action who wished to bend all artisticand intellectual activity directly to the social and economic endsof the Revolution. The rigid censorship which shut out all but carefully selectedauthors and ideas, and the prohibition or discouragement ofmany non-political forms of art (particularly trivial genres suchas popular love, mystery and detective stories, as well as all varietiesof novelettes and general trash), automatically focused theattention of the reading public on new and experimental work,filled, as often before in Russian literary history, with stronglyfelt and often quaint and fanciful social notions. Perhaps becauseconflicts in the more obviously dangerous waters of politics andeconomics might easily be thought too alarming, literary andartistic wars became (as they did in German countries a centuryearlier under Metternich's police) the only genuine battlefield ofideas; even now the literary periodicals, tame as they necessarilyare, for this very reason make livelier reading than the monotonouslyconformist daily, and purely political, press. The main engagement of the early and middle 1920s wasfought between the free and somewhat anarchist literary experimentersand the Bolshevik zealots, with unsuccessful attempts ata truce by such figures as Lunacharsky and Bubnov. This culminated,by 1927-8, first in the victory, and then, when it seemedto the authorities too revolutionary and even Trotskyist, in thecollapse and purge (during the 1930s), of the notorious RAPP(Revolutionary Association of Proletarian Writers), led by themost uncompromising fanatic of a strictly collectivist proletarianculture, the critic Averbakh. There followed, during the period of'pacification' and stabilisation organised by Stalin and his practically-mindedcollaborators, a new orthodoxy, directed principallyagainst the emergence of any ideas likely to disturb and sodivert attention from the economic tasks ahead. This led to a universaldead level, to which the only surviving classical author ofthe great days, Maxim Gorky, finally and, according to some ofhis friends, with reluctant despair, gave his blessing. 1928-1937 The new orthodoxy, which became finally established afterTrotsky's fall in 1928, put a firm end to the period of incubationduring which the best Soviet poets, novelists and dramatists, and,indeed, composers and film producers too, produced their mostoriginal and memorable works. It marked the end of the turbulentmiddle and late 1920s, when Western visitors were astonishedand sometimes outraged by Vakhtangov's stage; whenEisenstein, not yet a film producer, directed his amusing futuristicexperiments on stages discovered in the disused palaces ofMoscow merchants, and the great producer Meyerhold, whoseartistic life is a kind of microcosm of the artistic life of his country,and whose genius is still only secretly acknowledged, conductedhis most audacious and memorable theatrical experiments.There occurred, before 1928, a vast ferment in Soviet thought,which during those early years was genuinely animated by thespirit of revolt against, and challenge to, the arts of the West, conceivedas the last desperate struggle of capitalism, presently to beoverthrown on the artistic as well as every other front by thestrong, young, materialist, earthbound, proletarian culture, proudof its brutal simplicity and its crude and violent new vision of theworld, which the Soviet Union, agonised but triumphant, wasbringing to birth. The herald and chief inspiring force of this new Jacobinismwas the poet Mayakovsky, who, with his disciples, formed thefamous LEF association. While there may have been a great dealthat was pretentious, counterfeit, coarse, exhibitionist, childishand merely silly during this period, there was also much that wasbrimming with life. It was not, as a rule, didactically Communistso much as anti-liberal, and had in that respect points of resemblancewith pre-1914 Italian futurism. This was the period of thebest work of such poets as the popular 'tribune' Mayakovsky,who, if he was not a great poet, was a radical literary innovatorand emancipator of prodigious energy, force and, above all, influence;the age of Pasternak, Akhmatova (until her silence in 1923),Sel'vinsky, Aseev, Bagritsky, Mandel'shtam; of such novelistsas Aleksey Tolstoy (who returned from Paris in the 1920s),Prishvin, Kataev, Zoshchenko, Pil'nyak, Babel', Il'f and Petrov;of the dramatist Bulgakov, of established literary critics andscholars like Tynyanov, Eikhenbaum, Tomashevsky, Shklovsky,Lerner, Chukovsky, Zhirmunsky, Leonid Grossman. The voicesof such migr writers as Bunin, Tsvetaeva, Khodasevich,Nabokov were heard only faintly. The emigration and return ofGorky is another story. State control was absolute throughout. The only period offreedom during which no censorship existed in modern Russianhistory was from February to October 1917. In 1934 the Bolshevikregime tightened old methods by imposing several stagesof supervision - first by the Writers' Union, then by the appropriateState-appointed commissar, finally by the Central Committeeof the Communist Party. A literary 'line' was laid downby the Party: at first the notorious Proletkul't, which demandedcollective work on Soviet themes by squads of proletarian writers;then the worship of Soviet or pre-Soviet heroes. Nevertheless,arresting and original artists were not, until 1937, alwaysbrought to heel by the omnipotent State; sometimes, if they wereprepared to take sufficient risks, they might manage to convertthe authorities to the value of an unorthodox approach (as thedramatist Bulgakov did); sometimes unorthodoxy, provided thatit was not positively directed against the Soviet faith, was givensome latitude of expression, as a not unwelcome seasoning, attimes exceedingly sharp, of the flat daily fare of normal Soviet life(for example, the early, gay, malicious satires of Tynyanov, Kataevand, above all, Zoshchenko). This was not, of course, permittedto go far or occur too often, but the possibility of it was alwayspresent, and the genius of writers was to a certain extent stimulatedby the very degree of ingenuity which they had to exercisein order to express unconventional ideas without breaking theframework of orthodoxy or incurring outright condemnationand punishment. This continued for some time after Stalin's rise to power andthe imposition of the new orthodoxy. Gorky died only in 1935;and as long as he was alive, some distinguished and interestingwriters were to a certain degree shielded from excessive regimentationand persecution by his immense personal authority andprestige; he consciously played the role of 'the conscience of theRussian people' and continued the tradition of Lunacharsky (andeven Trotsky) in protecting promising artists from the dead handof official bureaucracy. In the field of official Marxism an intolerantand narrow 'dialectical materialism' did indeed holdsway, but it was a doctrine concerning which internal disputeswere permitted, between, for example, the followers of Bukharinand the followers of the more pedantic Ryazanov or Deborin;between various brands of philosophical materialism; betweenthose 'menshevisers' who saw Lenin as a direct disciple ofPlekhanov, and those who stressed their differences. Witch-hunts occurred; heresy, both on the right and the left,was continually being 'unmasked' with grisly consequences tothe convicted heretics; but the very ferocity of such ideologicaldisputes, the uncertainty as to which side would be condemnedto liquidation, communicated a certain grim life to the intellectualatmosphere, with the result that both creative and criticalwork during this period, while suffering from one-sidedness andexaggeration, was seldom dull, and indicated a state of continuingferment in all spheres of thought and art. Well might the sympatheticobserver of the Soviet scene compare such activityfavourably with the slow decline of such of the older generationof migr Russian writers in France as Vyacheslav Ivanov,Bal'mont, Merezhkovsky, Zinaida Gippius, Kuprin and others,though their literary technique was, at times, admitted, even inMoscow, to be often superior to that of a good many of theSoviet pioneers. 1937 TO THE PRESENT DAY Then came the great dbcle which to every Soviet writer andartist is a kind of St Bartholomew's Eve - a dark night which fewof them seem ever completely to forget, and which is scarcelyever today spoken of otherwise than in a nervous whisper. TheGovernment, which evidently felt its foundations insecure, orfeared a major war in, and possibly with, the West, struck at allsupposedly 'doubtful' elements, and innumerable innocent andharmless persons besides, with a violence and a thoroughness towhich the Spanish Inquisition and the Counter-Reformationalone offer remote parallels. The great purges and trials of the years 1937 and 1938 alteredthe literary and artistic scene beyond all recognition. The numberof writers and artists exiled or exterminated during this time - particularlyduring the Ezhov terror - was such that Russian literatureand thought emerged in 1939 like an area devastated bywar, with some splendid buildings still relatively intact, butstanding solitary amid stretches of ruined and deserted country.Men of genius like Meyerhold the producer and Mandel'shtamthe poet, and of talent like Babel', Pi'nyak, Yashvili, Tabidze, thethen recently returned London migr Prince D. S. Mirsky, thecritic Averbakh (to take the best-known names alone) were'repressed', that is, killed or done away with in one way oranother. What occurred after that no one today seems to know.Not a trace of any of these writers and artists has been sighted bythe outside world. There are rumours that some of them are stillalive, like Dora Kaplan, who shot and wounded Lenin in 1918,or Meyerhold, who is said to be producing plays in theKazakhstan capital Alma-Ata; but these seem to be circulated bythe Soviet Government and are, almost certainly, quite false.One of the British correspondents, whose sympathies were alltoo clear, tried to persuade me that Mirsky was alive and writingin Moscow incognito. It was obvious that he did not reallybelieve this. Nor did I. The poetess Marina Tsvetaeva, whoreturned from Paris in 1939 and fell into official disfavour, committedsuicide, probably early in 1942. The rising young composerShostakovich was criticised in 1937 so harshly, from aquarter so high, for 'formalism' and 'bourgeois decadence', thatfor two years he was neither performed nor mentioned, and then,having slowly and painfully repented, adopted a new style incloser accord with present-day official Soviet demands. He hason two occasions since then had to be called to order and torepent; so has Prokofiev. A handful of young writers unknownin the West, who are said to have showed promise during thisperiod, have, so one was told, not been heard of since; they areunlikely to have survived, although one cannot always tell.Before this the poets Esenin and Mayakovsky had committedsuicide. Their disillusionment with the regime is still officiallydenied. So it goes on. The death of Gorky had removed the intellectuals' only powerfulprotector, and the last link with the earlier tradition of therelative freedom of Revolutionary art. The most eminent survivorsof this period today sit silent and nervous for fear of committingsome fatal sin against the Party line, which anyhow wasnone too clear during the critical years before the war, nor thereafter.Those to fare worst were the writers and authors in closestcontact with Western Europe, that is, France and England, sincethe turning of Soviet foreign policy away from Litvinov's policyof collective security, and towards the isolationism symbolised bythe Russo-German Pact, involved individuals regarded as linkswith Western countries in the general discredit of pro-Westernpolicy. Bending before authority exceeded all previously knownbounds. Continues... Excerpted from The Soviet Mind by Isaiah Berlin Copyright © 2004 by Brookings Institution Press . Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. 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