Russian literature. A short introduction

this half-man, half-beast must be a figment of my mind.

Safe rationality is soon re-established, and the ‘half-man, half-horse’ stripped of its mythological significance to be revealed as the head of a starved nag sawn off its scraggy neck by the pen-knife of a desperate Muscovite. Yet the vision, like the nightmare that it resembles, cannot be reduced to an emanation of the everyday: it is not even simply an intimation of death. It remains irreducible, a manifestation of fears normally banished from the modern city, but rising up unsuppressibly at times of extremity.

‘Two Not Wholly Usual Occurrences’, then, is not an example of imaginative power sacrificed to didactic aims, but of the former and the latter inextricably entwined with each other. It appeals to a sensibility nurtured on psychoanalytical interpretations of myths as archetypes of human experience as much as it no doubt did to a Bolshevik believer convinced that the suffering of the revolutionary years could only be averted through Communism. The gruesome centaur of the Moscow streets, intended as an exemplum to support Mayakovsky’s political sermon, is a creature with its own artistic life, perhaps even a metaphor for Modernist poetry as grotesque and unnatural hybrid.

Discussions of Soviet literature’s didacticism as aberrant, then, are based on a misapprehension. The ultimate starting point of this is an understandable squeamishness over the nature of the aims that Soviet literature’s didactic means had in view. Is it possible to detach artistic value from moral integrity? Can an ode to the Soviet secret police, or to a dictator as vicious as Stalin, ultimately responsible for the death of millions, have any aesthetic value whatever, even when produced by a writer of indisputable artistic talent? These are not merely hypothetical questions. The ‘soldiers of Dzerzhinsky’ were in fact the subject of a eulogistic poem written by Mayakovsky in 1926. And the mid-1930s, when Socialist Realism was established, also saw the full-scale