The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

204 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

him 5,000 workmen, all the material he wants, his word of honor to shoot any saboteurs on the spot, if only he will complete a task that should take a month within four days (p. 116). Kleist is skeptical at first, but then won over. “Heroism means doing the impossible,” Gleb remarks to his female comrade Polya (p. 55), who tosses her curly head in agreement – in this novel, men and women flirt via such phrases. Gladkov taps into Nature’s wanton energy as well, with nourishing and intoxicating metaphors that we can almost taste, as in the opening lines of the novel: “Behind the roofs and angles of the factory the sea foamed like boiling milk in the flashing sunlight. And the air, between the mountains and the sea, was fiery and lustrous as wine” (p. 1).

The ruined factory is always at the center of our vision. Inside this structure, however, the production of cement is intermittent at best. Production starts up halfway through the novel but is immediately interrupted by armed attacks from anti-Bolshevik forces in the surrounding mountains (tsarist Whites, anarchist-peasant Greens, hostile Cossacks). Mostly the factory is the site of party meetings. Unlike the “boiling milk of the sea” and the lustrous wine-like open air, indoors everything is tobacco smoke, screaming, tramping, rush, filth. Notwithstanding this local ecology, however, Gladkov’s novel introduces a new chord in the Russian literary canon: the positive presentation of bureaucratic work. To be sure, bureaucrats can always ossify into self-serving scoundrels, and Gleb is forever threatening to line them up and shoot them. The image of the bullying (and lecherous) Party boss was censored variously in different editions of the novel. But overall, Gladkov presents the stern, leather-jacketed, bronze-faced committee chairmen and security police, who answer to “higher organs” and authorize inhumanly cruel measures, as necessary, positive repositories of consciousness.

Thus the novel Cement modifies a longstanding Russian literary tradition that presents bureaucratic activity as pathetic, corrupt, mad, or worthless: the pen-pushing clerks or venal officials in Gogol (Akaky Akakievich, the major who tries to bribe Khlestakov), the schizophrenic functionaries in Dostoevsky (Golyadkin), the irrelevant or ineffectual state ministers in Tolstoy (Aleksei Karenin), the doddering reactionary senator in Bely (Apollon Apollonovich). In Gladkov and socialist realism generally, a man – or woman – can answer to a committee or take part in a task force and not be ridiculed for it. In fact, this is the proper route. Look first to institutions and only later to the specific needs of individuals. Genuine agency resides in Party and collective doctrine, not in the personal story.

This new positive role for committee work went hand in hand with an enhanced role for the secular book. In a novel otherwise obsessively taken up with deeds and deadlines (“do it on time or be shot”), the seemingly passive