The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

218 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

appended to Pasternak’s great novel of the Revolution, Doctor Zhivago (1957). The applause is over; Hamlet is about to walk out on stage. He knows his lines and his fate. Both the “murkiness of night” and “thousands of binoculars” are focused on him. He is “willing to play this role” – he is an actor, he has no choice – but “another drama is now taking place. / For now, release me.” And so Hamlet’s plea: “If you can, Abba, Father, let this cup pass me by.” Shakespeare’s tragic hero as Christ figure in this poem has its own huge subtext in Pasternak’s life. It peaks during the Terror, the very years that Akhmatova was composing her “Requiem,” and is linked with the poet’s reverence for Meyerhold, and especially for that great director’s conviction that every canonical literary work should be adapted freely to the stage in the spirit of its present-day contemporary audience. Early in 1939 Meyerhold, already shamed in the press and deprived of his theatre but still at liberty, commissioned Pasternak to prepare a new translation of Shakespeare’s tragedy for staging at the Pushkin Theatre in Leningrad.23 Pasternak produced the translation but Meyerhold never read it: in June of that year the director was arrested, and several months later, executed. Pasternak expected his own arrest. It never came. Throughout this period he sustained himself by Hamlet; twelve versions of his translation remain. Indeed, “another drama was going on.”

In the early, ambitious Bolshevik years there were spirited debates over “crises” in all inherited literary genres. In 1922 Osip Mandelstam, one of the century’s very great lyric poets, predicted the end of the novel. The European novel, he wrote, had been perfected over an immensely long period of time as “the art form designed to interest the reader in the fate of the individual.” Its two identifying features, “biography transformed into a plot” and “psychological motivation,” require a “special sense of time,” developmental and continuous. That sense, Mandelstam insisted, has been lost. Personal psychological motifs are now impotent; individual action has become abrupt, disconnected, and cruel. “The future development of the novel will be no less than the history of the atomization of biography as a form of personal existence,” he predicted. “We shall witness the catastrophic collapse of biography.”24

To be sure, Mandelstam was wrong about the novel. But Mandelstam’s musings in the 1920s are instructive in light of our three exemplary Stalin-era writers. Their fictional worlds are very much a product of the ideology of their time – which, among other savageries, did indeed further the “atomization of [individual] biography” in a ghastly literary sense. Gladkov, Shvarts, and Platonov represent very different ways of accommodating the Stalinist experiment as Maksim Gorky laid it out in 1934 at the First Writers’ Congress. All were to some extent “believers.” Gladkov created a master socialist realist