The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The Stalin years 197

the chairmanship of the Writers’ Union in 1932 with the intent of saving lives, as he had done in 1919–21. But deeper affinities to emerging Stalinist norms must have played a role as well: his unquenchable idealism, his intolerance for truths that depress and deplete, and his preference for hope (which Gorky saw as a form of creativity) over the harmful facts of the present.

The stabilization of literary politics in the mid-1920s turned out to be more apparentthan real: the spectrumwas shifting. One early harbinger of thechange had been the so-called “philosophers’ steamship” in 1922, the deportation to Western Europe of Russia’s prominent idealist philosophers and religious thinkers (with no right of return). This gifted group lent prestige and visibility to the Russian emigration until the end of World War II. Philosophy permitted to remain active on Soviet soil increasingly came to share the tenets of dialectical materialism – or, as it was popularly known, “diamat.” This world-view became part of the (willing or unwilling) mental equipment of all Soviet citizens, who were required to take academic courses in the discipline at all levels of their education. Dialectical materialism could be resisted, amended, and parodied (as Bulgakov does brilliantly on several levels in his novel The Master and Margarita), but only privately. Combined with socialist realism, the presumptions of “diamat” made possible the optimism, self-confidence, and energetic but oddly flattened psychology of generations of state-approved Stalin-era “positive heroes.”4

Dialectical materialism might be laid out simply as follows. All reality, in its essence, is material. Matter is objective and primary. But matter is not dead; Marx insisted that motion is an essential quality of all matter, and by this he meant not mere mechanical motion but a vital impulse, a tension inherent in the material world. Since the psyche that receives this vital material is initially blank and has no independent existence, reality is fully knowable. The knowing subject must act on matter so as to release the energy in it. In this sense, subjects are both born into their world and become the responsible makers of it. But a subject is not authorized to act or think in a wholly autonomous way, as in Romantic or Idealist theories of cognition, because the material world, to a large extent, determines the subject. This circular conditioning takes place through “social being,” of which the subject can be more or less aware. In this imported “Western” doctrine of dialectical materialism we already glimpse certain tenets compatible with Russian folk and Orthodox views of the world: a reverence for matter and its transfiguration, the primacy of the communal whole over the individual specimen. Not by chance did many great twentieth-century Russian religious philosophers experience in their youth a passionate Marxist phase.