page_title: Boris Pilnyak
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: Boris Pilnyak / Biography
caption_attribution_description: English: sitting left to right: Georgy Chulkov, Vikenty Veresaev, Christian Rakovsky, Boris Pilnyak, Aleksandr Voronsky, Petr Oreshin, Karl Radek and Pavel Sakulin standing left to right: Ivan Evdokimov, Vasily Lvov-Rogachevsky, Vyacheslav Polonsky, Feodor Gladkov, Mikhail Gerasimov, Abram Ėfros and Isaac Babel Differing description: Meeting in Moscow on 21 February 1927 at the Herzen House. In commemoration of the journal, "Red Virign Soil."
context_page_description: Boris Pilnyak was a Russian writer.
context_section_description: He was born Boris Andreyevich Vogau (Russian: Бори́с Андре́евич Вога́у) in Mozhaysk. His father was a doctor, descended from German farmers who settled on the banks of the Volga during the reign of Catherine the Great. His mother came from an old merchant family from Saratov. Boris first became interested in writing at the age of nine. Among his early influences were Andrei Bely, Aleksey Remizov, and Yevgeny Zamyatin.
  Pilnyak achieved fame very quickly at the age of 25 through his novel The Naked Year (Голый год, 1922; translated into English 1928), one of the first fictional accounts of the Russian civil war. He was a major supporter of anti-urbanism and a critic of mechanized society, views which  brought him into disfavor with Communist critics. The poet Demyan Bedny denounced him in Pravda on 16 October 1923 as a 'stinking' member of the 'horde of clueless fellow travellers'. The Old Bolshevik, Aleksandr Voronsky, founding editor of the journal Krasnaya nov (Red Virgin Soil), was offended by the remark, made by a character, that the Russian revolution "smells of sexual organs", but acknowledged Pilnyak's talent, and published his next work Materials for a Novel. 
  Pilnyak followed this with a strange short story The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon, published in the literary journal Novy Mir ('New World') in May 1926. In the story. a Red Army commander is ordered by 'the three who lead' to undergo a medical operation, which he does reluctantly. He dies on the operating table, the implication being that the 'three who lead' had wanted him dead. In October 1925, Mikhail Frunze, who had replaced Trotsky at the head of the Red Army, died after being advised by the Politburo, then dominated by the triumvirate of Joseph Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, to undergo an operation. There is no evidence that Stalin wanted Frunze dead, and Pilnyak tried to cover himself against the charge of slandering the leadership by adding a note at the end of his story, dated 28 January 1926, saying that he hardly knew Frunze and that the reader should not look for 'genuine facts and living persons' in the story. Nonetheless, the story created a scandal. Voronsky was shocked and embarrassed that the story was dedicated to him and declared that "I reject this dedication with disgust." The offending edition of Novy Mir was banned and the OGPU visited all known subscribers to confiscate their copies. They were later sent a substitute edition with a different story in place of Pilnyak's The magazine issued a public apology. He was in China, on a tour of the Far East when the storm broke, and could have defected, but instead hurried back to defend himself. Despite showing no enthusiasm for the Bolshevik revolution, he knew several high ranking communists, and turned for protection to the chief editor of Izvestya, Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov who introduced him to the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (or prime minister) Alexei Rykov. At Rykov's urging, he wrote a letter expressing remorse, which was published in Novy Mir in January 1927.
  By now Pilnyak was second only to Maxim Gorky as the most read living Russian writer, in the Soviet Union and abroad. To protect his copyright had an arrangement under which all his works were published simultaneously in Moscow and Berlin. His best known novel, Mahogany (Кра́сное де́рево, 1927, translated 1965), was banned in Russia, but - like his other work - was published in Berlin. This gave Pilnyak's enemy, Leopold Averbakh, head of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers the pretext to launch an attack that was carried through four successive weekly editions of the 'Literary Gazette', which Averbakh controlled, and which headlines such as 'A Hostile Network of Agents in the Ranks of Soviet Writers' and 'Boris Pilnyak, Special Correspondent for the White Guard'. The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky joined in, claiming that "at the present time of darkening storm clouds this is the same as treachery at the front" and Maxim Gorky wrote to one of the secretaries of the Communist Party, Andrey Andr
caption: Sitting left to right: Georgy Chulkov, Vikenty Veresaev, Christian Rakovsky, Boris Pilnyak, Aleksandr Voronsky, Petr Oreshin, Karl Radek and Pavel Sakulin. Standing left to right: Ivan Evdokimov, Vasily Lvov-Rogachevsky, Vyacheslav Polonsky, Feodor Gladkov, Mikhail Gerasimov, Abram Ėfros and Isaac Babel.
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