The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

194 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

for dealing with the functional necessity of intercourse. A brisk public debate developed over the best ways to avoid sexual arousal (“Never drink alcohol . . . Upon waking, stand up at once . . . Urinate before going to bed . . . Flirtation, courtship and coquetry should not enter into sexual relations . . . There should be no jealousy”).2 In 1927–28, as part of this high-profile debate, Vsevolod Meyerhold defended to Party skeptics his staging of Sergei Tretyakov’s play I Want a Child, about the conception and production of a healthy Soviet child by a no-nonsense communist woman who refuses to endure the indignities of Dionysian libido. Meyerhold advocated turning its strange love-free plot into a public discussion, bringing the audience on stage for improvised dialogue in the spirit of commedia dell’arte.

With this agenda in the moral and physiological sphere, conflicts of state interest were inevitable. Some high-ranking Bolsheviks, who promoted a healthy and harmonious body for the New Soviet Man, advocated the prohibition of all alcohol – but in 1927 Stalin (following his tsarist predecessors) instituted a state monopoly on vodka, justifying it as an indispensable revenue source for Russia’s industrialization.3 These clean-living campaigns might strike us now as na¨ıvely high-minded, but such priorities appealed powerfully to many artists, as much for Tolstoyan reasons (subduing our “animal” side) as for political ones. Many took pride in the fact that in communist Russia, “healthy art for the people” was not obliged to cater to a Hollywood market mentality aimed at pleasing the crowd at any price, nor (at the other extreme) to an arrogantly isolated, incomprehensible avant-garde. Indeed if need be the tastes of both elite and mass audiences could be ignored, since the official success or failure of a work was judged “scientifically,” before its publication or performance, by Party committees. Serious art in Russia meant serious social engagement toward a positive goal, determined in a collectively “conscious” – not an independently “spontaneous” – manner. Consciousness, once achieved, was always unified, goal-directed, and stable: a second-order simplicity.

Collaborator versus dissident, free versus unfree: such categories are too rigid to be useful. From the perspective of Russia’s most gifted creators, it is possible that the maximally criminal aspect of Stalinist cultural policy might turn out to be not its cruelty, wastefulness, utopian or dictated aspects – although those qualities certainly applied – but the fact that it was so arbitrary and discontinuous. Party-line shifts were abrupt, unpredictable, justified by coded or meaningless phrases. Even those who wanted to cooperate (a far more compassionate verb than the sinister “collaborate”) could never be sure how to go about it. This arbitrariness – defined here as a demand that does not need to justify itself – is called in Russian proizvol. Live under it long enough, and the