The House of Government

20

THE THOUGHT OF DEATH

The swamp was back. The “juice of the old life” from Arosev’s “Ruined House” had seeped into the house of socialism. But there was no reason for panic—because the Bolsheviks never panicked and because the new steel foundations ensured the essential soundness of life inside the building. As Voronsky wrote in 1934 (while sitting in his study in Apt. 357), it is private property “that makes ‘material things’ suspect and the spirit, sick”:

It is obvious that, with the disappearance of such property, the body-spirit dualism must lose its absolute character.

The “transformation” of the flesh and the spirit and a more organic—earthly and not supernatural—connection between them will result not in the resurrection of the dead, as Gogol hoped, but in a fully developed Communist society. Man will see in things not a temptation and not a dangerous snare that breeds greed and self-interest and deadens the human soul, but [Gogol’s] “lovely sensuality” and “our beautiful earth”—not an oppressor, but a friend, which will help him develop his best capabilities ad infinitum.

Things will once again become the source of joy that they are in Homer’s The Odyssey, but they will be richer, more varied, and not only a source of pleasure but also a means to the resounding victory of man over the elemental forces of nature and over himself.¹

Was this hubris? Was it true, as Adoratsky’s “prayerful” mother wrote to her son, that “people had rejected God, taken over God’s dignity, and become lost in arrogance and corruption”? Voronsky’s answer was consistent with the doctrine of historical materialism. The Communist transformation was not a rejection of God insofar as “God” stood for Eternal Law. In fact, it was Gogol’s modern followers who, in their talk of changing the world by way of moral self-improvement, had rejected Providence in favor of rootless individualism:

Those who fight for the social transformation of life cannot be, and have never been, indifferent to the human soul. Every revolutionary, and certainly every Marxist revolutionary, every Bolshevik, goes, in the course of his struggle, through a hard school of inner reforging, sometimes agonizing and always very intense. He has his own “spiritual work” to do, but he cultivates in himself traits that are very different from—indeed, the opposite of, those of a Christian ascetic. In any case, it can never be said about a Marxist revolutionary that he is indifferent to his inner enlightenment. What makes him different from Gogol’s followers is not an indifference to spiritual work, but his conception of that work, a conception that rests on the conviction that man transforms the outside world and himself not arbitrarily, but in obedience to certain laws that guide that transformation.²

Voronsky’s answer, in other words, was consistent with what he had learned in the seminary and what both Gogol and Adoratsky’s mother believed to be true. Human salvation depended on the marriage of predestination and free will—or, in Voronsky’s terms, of “historical inevitability” and conscious human action, both social and spiritual. The difference between Bolshevik and Christian spiritual work was not apparent (the emphasis on violence was neither exceptional by apocalyptic standards nor central to the 1934 Bolshevik self-portrait), and the final goal—the aligning of one’s thoughts and desires with eternal truth—was the same. The tools employed in such work included the study of sacred texts, the production of accurate autobiographical statements, full participation in the life of the “collective,” regular purge confessions, and routine self-scrutiny. The latter, known as “psychology,” included injunctions to “work on the self” and perhaps to keep a diary, but no specific instructions or recommended exercises comparable to monastic or Puritan self-monitoring techniques. Arosev described his diary as his “thought laboratory,” “an imperfect sketch of the human soul,” “an attempt to live on after death,” and a “frightening report to oneself and nobody.” His private spiritual work was a series of improvisations. As he wrote on November 12, 1935, “I was looking at Lenin’s portrait, thinking: human life is primarily about psychology. Man is all about psychology. Psychology is our life. But, up until now, psychology has not been able to stand on firm scientific legs, i.e., our understanding of the essence of life is still quite weak. And so, consequently, is our understanding of death.”³

Death—as self-sacrificial martyrdom or “traumatic nervosis”—had always been central to Bolshevism. After the foundations of the eternal house had been laid, it became a problem. As the Old Bolsheviks entered their fifties, they required better health care and longer stays in hospitals and sanatoria. (In the summer of 1934, the veteran of the Decossakization campaign and high-ranking trade and education official, Iosif Khodorovsky, from Apt. 365, was appointed head of the Kremlin Health and Sanitation Department with a mandate to dramatically expand its budget and range of services. In 1936, the House of Government outpatient clinic, a branch of the Kremlin Department, had about twenty-five employees, including three physicians, three pediatricians, one neurologist, one halftime ophthalmologist, and the famously cheerful otolaryngologist, David Yakovlevich Kuperman, who addressed everyone as “my dear.”) The longer they convalesced, the more they thought about their own mortality and about the central problem of all millenarian movements—that of succession (the transition from sect to church and the legitimacy of infant baptism, or automatic conversion). But the challenge was much greater. Death from torture, wounds, labor, and tears had a clear meaning repeatedly explicated in word and image. But what did it mean to die peacefully in the eternal house?⁴

Insofar as Arosev’s diary was his “thought laboratory,” his “thought of thoughts” was “the thought of death.” “It dictates my diary entries. It writes my stories and novels. It rules my imagination. I want to penetrate the mystery of nonbeing. My consciousness is more durable than my body. It endeavors to lift the body up to its own level. But instead of doing this great mental work, I am caught up in the ‘vermicelli strands’ of petty and unnecessary chores.” One way to break free was to live each day as if it would last a lifetime. “If one day equals life, then only those who die on that day are mortal, and everyone else is immortal. That means that deaths are accidents, and most people are immortal.” Another was to concentrate on overcoming the fear of death. “Fear turns man into beast; fearlessness, into God. My mother, who was shot by the Whites on September 18, 1918, ten versts from the town of Spassk, Kazan Province … was terrified of death. Her motto had always been: death is a small word, but knowing how to die is the greatest deed.” She did know, or had learned, when the time came. But the times had changed. Immortality was both closer and farther away.⁵

In Yuri Trifonov’s The Disappearance (which remained incomplete at the time of his death in 1981), “Nikolay Grigorievich” is based on his father, Valentin, and “Liza,” on his mother (and his father’s second wife), Evgenia Lurye. “Grandma” is based on Yuri’s own grandmother—his father’s first wife and his mother’s mother.

Before going to bed, Nikolai Grigorievich stood at the window in his study—it was a moment of quiet, the guests had left, Liza was in the bathroom, Grandma was asleep in her room behind the curtain—and after turning out the light, leaving only the reading lamp by the couch, he looked out over the courtyard, at the thousands of windows, still filled with evening bustle, lit up by orange, yellow, or red lampshades—green ones appeared only rarely—and in one window out of a thousand was a bluish light, and he thought, confusingly, about several things at once. His thoughts formed layers, were made of glass, each one showing through the other: he thought about all the houses he had lived in, beginning with Temernik, Saratov, Yekaterinburg, then in Osypki, in St. Petersburg on the Fourteenth Line, in Moscow in the Metropole, in sleeping compartments, in Helsingfors on Albertsgatan, in Dairen, and God knows where, but nowhere had he been at home, everything had been ephemeral, rushing along somewhere, an eternal sleeping compartment. That feeling had only arisen here, with Liza and the children, of life running out, it had to happen sometime, it was for the sake of that, for the sake of that, after all, that revolutions were made, but suddenly it occurred to him, with immediate and devastating force, that this pyramid of coziness, glowing in the night, this Tower of Babel made of lampshades, was also temporary, was also flying, like dust in the wind—deputy people’s commissars, central board heads, public prosecutors, army commanders, former political prisoners, presidium members, directors, and prize winners, turning out the lights in their rooms and enjoying the darkness, flying off somewhere into an even greater darkness. That’s what occurred to Nikolai Grigorievich for a second just before bedtime, as he stood at the window.⁶

■ ■ ■

In August 1936, the journal Literaturnyi kritik (Literary critic) printed Andrei Platonov’s short story, “Immortality.” A special editorial introduction (probably written by Platonov’s main supporter on the board, Elena Usievich) explained the unusual decision to publish a work of fiction by arguing that the author had overcome “the grave creative errors” of “Doubting Makar” and “For Future Use,” produced new stories of “great artistic value,” and was being treated unfairly by the literary journals, which refused to publish his work out of “a bureaucratic fear of consequences” masquerading as Bolshevik vigilance. The story’s main character, Emmanuel Semenovich Levin, is a stationmaster at a junction called the Red Line. He hardly ever sleeps or eats, and does not talk much. His wife and daughter live far away, and his soul, scarred by anti-Semitism, had “anticipated its distant death” when he was still a little boy. “He had pushed aside the hands of his wife and friends so he could leave for the station at midnight whenever he felt there was any grief or worry down there. The train cars contained cargo: the flesh, soul, and labor of millions of people living beyond the horizon. He could feel them more strongly than the loyalty of friends or the love of a woman. Love must be the first service and aid in his worry about all the unknown but dear people living beyond the faraway terminals of the tracks running from the Red Line.”⁷

He does not spare himself and wants “to live out his life as quickly as possible,” but he is different from a Christian ascetic and from his own former self because he has heard Stalin’s 1935 speech about the “cadres deciding everything,” understood the importance of a complete human being at the gate of the new world, and seen the “hen-and-rooster problems” his workers were suffering from for what they were: “not a dangerous snare,” but a “lovely sensuality” and “our beautiful earth.” “It had become clear to him long ago that, in essence, transport was a simple, straightforward thing. So why did it demand, sometimes, not ordinary, regular work, but anguished effort? The dead or hostile human being—that was the difficulty! That was why you needed to warm another person with your breath constantly and without ceasing and to hold him close, so that he would not die, and so that he would feel his importance and would give back, if only out of shame and gratitude, the warmth of help and comfort he had received in the shape of honest work and honest living.”⁸

One day, an employee named Polutorny tells Levin that he needs a “suitable, worthy rooster” for his wife’s special hens. “Levin looked quietly at Polutorny’s face: the things a person could live for—even hens and roosters could feed his soul and even in a backyard chicken coop could his heart find consolation! ‘I understand,’ said Levin quietly. ‘I know a chicken breeder in Izium. He’s a friend of mine…. I’ll give you a note for him, and you can go see him on your day off.’” There is also Polutorny’s wife, who wants to study French; a young clerk and his wife who need a babysitter; a tired worker who needs help with his sleeping schedule; and various other “small accidents and minor injuries” that need attention. “Levin understood that little glitches were major catastrophes that only by chance died in infancy.” He is needed everywhere, by everyone, all the time.⁹

Love for others demands self-sacrifice. Levin does not preach asceticism: he practices it quietly because someone must. (He has a maid who worries about his bodily comfort, but she understands his mission and shares his wisdom.) His job is to ensure the salvation of others. “At night, after a short rest, Levin went back to the station. There was nothing dangerous happening, but Levin felt bored at home. He believed that for a transitory, temporary person there was no point in living for himself. The real, future people may already have been born, but he did not count himself among them. He needed to be away from himself day and night in order to understand others…. In order to hear all voices, one has to become almost mute oneself.”¹⁰

Levin is “a lonely man,” but he is not alone. Shortly before dawn, the station telephone rings:

“Hello, Red Line stationmaster speaking.”

“And this is Kaganovich speaking. How are you, Comrade Levin? And why did you pick up the phone so quickly? How did you manage to get dressed? Weren’t you asleep?”

“No, Lazar Moiseevich, I was just about to go to bed.”

“Just about! Most people go to bed at night, not in the morning.… Listen, Emmanuel Semenovich, if you ruin your health down there at the Red Line, I’ll charge you for the loss of a thousand locomotives. I’m going to be checking on your sleep, but don’t make me be your nurse.”

The remote, kind, deep voice fell silent for a while. Levin also stood silently: he had long loved his Moscow interlocutor, but could never, under any circumstances, express his feelings directly: there was no way to do it without being tactless and indelicate.

“It must be night in Moscow, too, Lazar Moiseevich,” said Levin quietly. “Most people don’t go to bed in the morning there, either.” Kaganovich understood and burst out laughing.¹¹

Levin is not alone. Kaganovich is to him what he is to Polutorny; he is to Kaganovich what his maid is to him; and Kaganovich is prepared to be his nurse, if need be. Such is the immortality of the people bound together by the tracks running from the Red Line. Such, in particular, is the immortality of those who do not sleep when others do. The following night, an hour after Levin goes to bed (“not for the pleasure of repose, but for the sake of the morrow”), he is awakened by a call from the station office: “They just contacted us from Moscow to ask about your health and whether you were asleep. As if you were a great, immortal being!” A midnight call to see if Levin is asleep is not just foolishness: it is a reminder, as well as a confirmation, that Levin is a great, immortal being. “Levin sat on his bed for a while, got dressed, and went back to the station.”¹²

Andrei Platonov

Platonov and Elena Usievich (in whose House of Government apartment he was a frequent guest) seemed to believe that he had finally grasped the true spirit of the Revolution and perhaps even solved the mystery of Bolshevik immortality. They were wrong. A year later, Red Virgin Soil published an essay by the influential critic, A. S. Gurvich, in which he argued that Platonov’s new work was as “profoundly erroneous” as his “Doubting Makar” and “For Future Use.” “Whatever we may have been told about the socialist content of the story ‘Immortality,’ we see in its protagonist an ascetic, a self-denying penitent.” Platonov’s Bolshevik was another one of his beggars and holy fools, and Platonov’s vision of immortality was “an absurdity, dead end, and slander.” “Does he realize that his ‘love’ can only benefit those who hate, and that his mournful, sorrowful pose can attract only those who try to ‘grow into socialism’ in the guise of little jesuses?” Platonov’s characters, according to Gurvich, were divided into those who wanted to abolish the state, like Makar, and those who wanted to merge with the state, like Levin. They were either “poor Evgenys” or the bronze from which the Galloping Horseman was made. In reality, however—and especially in the new reality of unfolding socialism—the great work of construction and the simple human joys were inseparable. “More than that, they presuppose each other.” Socialism brings life, and life’s “miracle-working sources” include, in equal measure, “the Bronze Horseman and poor Evgeny, the big picture and private Makar, the roar of the train and the quiet birdsong.”¹³

Platonov, Usievich, and the editorial board of the Literaturnaia gazeta objected to the harshness of Gurvich’s criticism and pointed to signs of conversion and rebirth, but Platonov’s career never recovered. In Gurvich’s view, the problem was not his criticism, but Platonov’s lukewarmness. “His popularity is limited to a narrow circle of literary specialists” because he is “anti-national,” and he is anti-national because he lacks “power, depth, and breadth in the depiction of human emotion.” In Russia, the most national of poets was Pushkin. Platonov had represented him as “our comrade.” Gurvich represented him as a reproach to Platonov: “Platonov understands Pushkin’s great dream, which makes him ‘our comrade’—a dream about a time ‘when nothing will prevent a man from releasing the sacred energy of his art, feelings, and intelligence.’ Pushkin believes, writes Platonov rapturously, that ‘a brief, ordinary human life is quite sufficient for the accomplishment of all conceivable goals and a full enjoyment of all the passions. Those who are not able to do it will not be able to do it even if they become immortal.’ Do not these words spell the death sentence for the ‘immortal’ Levin?”¹⁴

■ ■ ■

Leonid Leonov (Courtesy of N. A. Makarov)

A much more serious attempt to tackle the problem of Bolshevik immortality was Leonid Leonov’s The Road to Ocean. Leonov was the same age as Platonov (both turned thirty-six in 1935, when The Road to Ocean was published), but his career had been moving in the opposite direction: from unsound (merchant) social roots and “fellow-traveler” literary beginnings to the vanguard of socialist realism following the acclaim of The Sot’ and the effect of his speech at the writers’ congress about the “great planner” and the small mirror. The Road to Ocean was meant to mark the culmination of his professional and spiritual journey and the appearance of the great planner as a literary hero commensurate with Faust (in a mirror commensurate with the great planner). As Leonov said many years later, “that novel is the pinnacle of my faith”: “I wrote The Road to Ocean in a state of spiritual exaltation, with an almost physical sensation of the grandeur of our accomplishments and aspirations.” In the opinion of Voronsky, his patron in the 1920s, “Leonov creates and sees types. In this sense, he has preserved more of the sacred fire of the classics than his contemporaries. He is in a position to connect modern literature to the classics by a strong, straight thread.” After 1934, nothing was more important than the thread connecting modern literature to the classics, and no one seemed in a better position to create and see the new hero than Leonid Leonov. The challenge was to move into the new era by returning to the most classic of genres. “Only a genuine tragedy,” wrote Leonov, “can stake out a place for the new man in the gallery of world characters.”¹⁵

The Road to Ocean is about a railway line from Moscow to the Pacific—and, at the same time, “a road to the future, the dream, the ideal, to Communism.” What makes The Road to Ocean a tragedy is that its central character (the railroad’s political commissar and an Old Bolshevik) Aleksei Kurilov, learns that he has cancer. The figure of an Old Bolshevik dying in peacetime had appeared, inauspiciously, in Pilniak’s Tale of the Unextinguished Moon, and then again in various construction novels, in the secondary but structurally important role of Moses on the bank of the Jordan. Now the time had come to move him to the center of the plot and organize the world around his approaching demise and presumed immortality.¹⁶

The person Leonov had in mind when writing the novel (“to some degree, a prototype”)—the person he interviewed, accompanied on inspection tours, and eventually became close to—was the director of the Moscow–Kazan Railroad, Ivan Kuchmin. Born in 1891 to a peasant family in the Volga Region, Kuchmin enrolled in a teachers’ college, joined a Marxist reading group, discovered Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus, and taught for two years in a village school before becoming a full-time revolutionary. During the Civil War he distinguished himself as the organizer of the defense of Uralsk in May–June 1919 and as a commissar in Ukraine, Turkestan, and Poland. During the First Five-Year Plan, he served as chair of the Stalingrad District Executive Committee and then first secretary of the Stalingrad Party Committee. In August 1931, he was transferred to Moscow, first as deputy chair of the Moscow Province Executive Committee and then, in August 1933, as political commissar and then director of the Moscow–Kazan Railway. Kuchmin’s wife, Stefania Arkhipovna, also of Volga Region peasant background, taught biology at the Institute of Chemical Engineering and presided over the Moscow–Kazan Railroad’s Women’s Council. The Kuchmins lived in a five-room apartment in the House of Government (Apt. 226, in the prestigious Entryway 12, facing the river) with their two children (Oleg, born in 1922, and Elena, in 1926) and Stefania’s sister Ania, who did all the housework. Ivan’s study and the large dining room were rarely used; the other rooms included the parents’ bedroom, Oleg’s room, and the room shared by Ania and Elena. During the famine in the Volga Region, many of the Kuchmins’ relatives came to stay with them for long periods of time; Stefania’s (and Ania’s) younger brother, Shura, came to stay for good, but a few months later accidentally killed himself playing with Ivan’s revolver. Elena, who had been the one to discover Shura’s bleeding body, was taken to the Leonovs’ apartment on Gorky Street, where she spent three days. The Kuchmins and the Leonovs were also dacha neighbors (in Barvikha, across a small ravine from the Osinskys). It was at the dacha that Leonid and Ivan first met and where they used to go on long walks and talk about The Road to Ocean.¹⁷

Ivan Kuchmin

In the novel, Aleksei Kurilov is immediately recognizable as an Old Bolshevik and a reflection of the iconic Stalin. “He was a large and somber man; only rarely was his greying, waterfall moustache disturbed by a smile.” He has “the shoulders of a stevedore and the forehead of Socrates,” and his eyes, at closer inspection, appear “not unfriendly.” His past and thoughts explain his appearance—two sacred images are “merged” in his mind: that of Lenin and that of his former teacher, the metal caster Arsentyich (a double of Osinsky’s “Blacksmith” who, in an extra reference to Hephaestus, walks with a cane). Kurilov’s last name (“Smoker”) and his ever-present pipe reinforce, and further merge, the Stalinist, Promethean, and proletarian allusions. His early Bolshevik education has included both Pushkin and Shakespeare.¹⁸

He lives on the top floor of the House of Government. One morning, the narrator comes over for one of their regular conversations. “We are at the window looking out. The house is tall. If you press your cheek to the frame, you can just see a corner of the Kremlin from Kurilov’s window. Today it appears stooped and a bit diminished. The sky is overcast, although it was below freezing last night. There is a gigantic plume of black smoke stretching from the nearby power station to the faded gold of the Kremlin. Snowflakes hover in the air, slowly looking for a place to land.”¹⁹

Kurilov embodies the landscape—the Kremlin, the House of Government, the Big Stone Bridge—and looms over it. He is a “man-mountain, from whose summit the future can be seen,” “a bridge over which people pass into the future,” and “an enormous planet” in whose orbit others circle, like so many “insignificant satellites.” Among them are his quiet wife, Katerinka, who is bound to him by a relationship of “honest and sober friendship,” and whose death early in the novel presages Kurilov’s own passing; his sister Klavdia, a “dry, self-willed, straightforward” Party inquisitor who has “no personal biography” beyond “public anniversaries”; another sister, Frosia, who marries the industrialist, Omelichev, and is punished for it with a deaf-mute son; Omelichev himself, whose function is to provide “malicious and intelligent criticism,” but whose mirror is “too small to reflect Kurilov’s entire expanse”; and Kurilov’s prey, double, and antagonist, Gleb Protoklitov (“First-Named”), who has three doubles of his own: a secret one in Leonid Leonov, whose biography he has partially appropriated, and two obvious ones, including his redeemable self and brother, Ilya Protoklitov. Ilya is a surgeon married to a theater actress named Liza, who aborts his child; Liza has an uncle, a former Latin teacher named Pokhvisnev, who prophesies the end of the world; Pokhivsnev has his own double, the former director of Ilya’s gymnasium, who lives in an “old-regime catacomb” amidst the rotting leftovers of the human past. And so on.²⁰

Eva Levina-Rozengolts, The Power Station in Winter (1930–31) View from Apt. 237 (Courtesy of E. B. Levina)

Kurilov’s planet has many more satellites, which have their own satellites, which tend to travel in pairs along intersecting orbits and clash occasionally, producing minor and major catastrophes. But Kurilov’s most important relationship is with his own mortality. The novel begins at the scene of a train wreck. In the confusion, one of the surviving passengers, the former Latin teacher, Pokhvisnev, drops his book, which Kurilov picks up. It is a history of world religions.

The gods were fashioned from fear, hatred, flattery, and despair; the material at hand determined the face of the god. There was a winged one with an all-seeing eye in the back of its head so no man could attack from behind; another in the image of an aloof woman decorated with armored breasts another in the shape of a hairy nostril inhaling sacrificial smoke, and yet another in the form of a misty sphere full of slanted eyes in perpetual motion. There was a god with thirty hands, according to the number of human trades, a dog-headed god, a bull, a Cyclops, an elephant with a sacred spot on its forehead (and it will be amusing to see what shape this image will take in Kurilov’s mind over the course of the next few months), a she-wolf, a many-headed hydra, a prickly African Euphorbia with poisonous milky sap, and finally, a simple block of wood painted in sacrificial blood with narrow Ostyak eyes and a greedy mouth big enough to devour itself.

Next comes Hellas. “Rosy-heeled goddesses cavorted in laurel groves; uncouth giants, Homer’s playthings, drunkard gods, swindler gods, and gods of the military profession feasted in the company of assorted relatives and upwardly mobile proletarians on a tall mountain in the middle of the world.” But it is Charon, the ferryman of the dead, whom Kurilov finds most interesting: “Out of the luxuriant animal chaos came the first sad glimpse of self-knowledge. Having learned the smile, humanity learned to fear its absence. Not being familiar with the living conditions in antiquity, Kurilov imagined Charon after the Russian fashion. Round-faced and pock-marked, his legs wrapped in soldier’s puttees, Charon sat in the stern of his leaky boat on sackcloth he had spread for himself, rolling cheap cigarettes and fouling the air; a worn army canteen—to bail out water that seeped through the cracks—lay at his feet.”²¹

What had happened to mankind happens to Kurilov, too. Out of the luxuriant animal chaos comes the first glimpse of self-knowledge. “I have lost faith in my body,” he tells a doctor, who has a photograph of Chekhov in his study. “I’m afraid something is rusted inside.” The doctor confirms the presence of rust, telling him that he has a cancerous tumor in his kidney. Kurilov’s pains continue to grow worse until, one day, he loses consciousness and then discovers that his pipe—his manhood, divine attribute, and human essence—has been stolen. “‘What do you need a pipe for, now, brother?!’ the soldier Charon from Pokhvisnev’s book seems to be saying to Kurilov.”²²

There are several possible paths to immortality. The most obvious one is through formal memorialization: the deputy editor of the railroad newspaper, Alesha Peresypkin, researches the road’s prerevolutionary origins; a “regional patriot” writes a history of the Omelichev family fortune; a young woman named Marina, who works for the railroad propaganda department, writes Kurilov’s biography; and the narrator, who is also a character, playfully and self-consciously writes a history of them all. Pokhvisnev, the Latin teacher, walks around with a history of world religions; Ilya Protoklitov, the surgeon, collects clocks; and his former teacher, the professional historian, collects everything.

All things end up in the “shimmering, ever-wakeful Ocean.” Those who find their historians live longer and perhaps fuller lives. Kurilov, a human mountain and bridge to Ocean, will have a posthumous existence worthy of his size. The problem is that histories, including Leonid Leonov’s own The Road to Ocean, cannot be trusted. Marina, whom Kurilov calls his “Plutarch,” wants heroic deeds, not a life he would recognize as his own. He mocks her by reciting “an edifying tale” she might or might not recognize as quasi-sacred: “I was born fifty years ago of honest and pious parents.”²³

Much more reliable are Kurilov’s old comrades: the living monuments to their common struggle. “When I look at your faces,” he tells them at his fiftieth birthday party, “those dear old funny faces of yours, I see myself reflected in them many times over…. And if I fall out of this circle, your friendship will remain unchanged. It binds you by an iron and rational discipline; it does not spoil or decay.” It does not decay, but it may end. One difficulty with this kind of immortality is that there is (as Kurilov’s iron sister, Klavdia, keeps reminding them) no guarantee against betrayal; another is the fact that Kurilov and his friends belong to a particular generation, and that none of them will outlive Kurilov for long. The biggest question is not whether they will continue to live in each other’s memories, but whether those who come after them will keep their memory from being turned into “edifying tales.” Their successors will have their own memories to worry about. “We may be self-taught,” says one of Kurilov’s comrades, “but we know this much of Hegel and Heraclitus: the stream does not stop, and it carries with it whatever is needed for life to continue.” Kurilov is not convinced, but the conversation is interrupted by a telephone call. Kurilov is needed at another crash site, but his back pain is so severe, he cannot move.²⁴

The most obvious, but also most treacherous, path to immortality is love. Most of Leonov’s House of Government readers would have read Goethe’s Faust, and would remember that the temptation of friendship is followed by the greatest temptation of all (at least as far as the devil was concerned). They would also remember that before Faust can meet Margaret, he has to drink the witch’s magic potion and become young again. Kurilov finds true love soon after turning fifty. “Here, at the sunset of his life, love was becoming a powerful and as yet unexplored means of physiotherapy. At any other time he would have thought it was magic. For two days in a row, it seemed to him that he had completely forgotten about his attacks. He was now counting the symptoms of his rejuvenation by the dozen.”²⁵

This, of course, is the wrong kind of immortality. When his closest friend, Tyutchev, tells him that it is “precisely at this biological crossroads between old age and a woman” that “the final boundary can be seen,” Kurilov objects vehemently. “Not true! It was not death he feared, but dying: losing the chance to influence the world and becoming an object of ridicule for his enemies and a burden and object of pity for his friends!” Immortality is not about his own eternal youth—it is about the “renewal of our planet.” Tyutchev, who believes otherwise (and is named after the poet-author of “The Last Love,” as well as “Spring Is on Its Way”), is a theater director and famous wit who turns Kurilov’s birthday celebration into a magic show (and Kurilov’s House of Government apartment, into Auersbach’s cellar).²⁶

Kurilov thwarts the devil by making a speech about “iron and rational discipline.” In due course, his speech is interrupted by a summons from the Road; his journey to the Road is interrupted by an attack of pain; his pain is cured by love; and love seems, by its very nature, incompatible with iron and rational discipline. Faced with a choice between two young women—Marina, his simple-minded proletarian biographer, and Liza, a talentless theater actress anxious for access to the all-powerful Tyutchev—Kurilov chooses the latter. Love proves redemptive, as well as blind, and Liza grows more mature as Kurilov grows younger. “What she needed now to be happy was not the coveted interview with Tyutchev, but just a little approval from Kurilov.” She tells him that she would like to have his son, and just as they are about to consummate their love, he is incapacitated by another attack and loses his pipe for good. The test of love ends in the same way as the test of friendship.²⁷

Liza cannot give Kurilov a son, but Marina, whose name suggests a connection to Ocean, already has a son named Ziamka, to whom Kurilov has become attached. “Ziamka” is short for “Izmail” (Ishmael), which suggests illegitimacy, but that may be the point: true immortality is not about your own children or even your adopted children (Kurilov has taken in two homeless boys): it is about all the children, all those who will travel down the Road he is building.

Once, on a moonlit night, Kurilov opens the window of his office, looks down at the garden below, and sees a whispering young couple under a snakelike tree branch. “At this point it might be nice to whistle (fingers in mouth) just as the Lord once did when faced with two such organisms. The famous exile would be repeated; the spell of the garden would be broken; and not they, but Kurilov himself would be that much poorer.” The couple keeps reappearing in various guises; the day before his operation, Kurilov runs into them again. “Every time he thought of them, he ran into them—everywhere—at all the great construction projects … or at the May First demonstrations (walking hand in hand past the reviewing stands) … or at his railway station (perhaps on their way to the mysterious city of Komsomolsk, halfway to Ocean). There was a peculiar regularity to their appearance.”²⁸

In one of the novel’s central episodes, Kurilov and the industrialist Omelichev reproduce the dialogue between Father Nikolai and the young revolutionary in Voronsky’s In Search of the Water of Life. The conversation takes place during the Civil War. Omelichev, who is married to Kurilov’s sister, Frosia, shelters him from the Whites, but accuses him of blindness:

“You don’t understand the people. Take everything away from me, but leave me a tiny plot, a tiny plot of land … and I’ll grow a miracle on it. You’ll see a tree and birds building their nests amidst golden apples. But this plot must belong to me, my son, my grandson, my great-grandsons.”

“You seek immortality, Omelichev … but property is a flimsy stairway to it. And you don’t even have a son yet.”

Omelichev ignored his mockery. “I know man as well as you do. He becomes a magician when he takes charge of his own life. No one will give him and his whelps anything when they go hungry, and he knows it, the son of a bitch. And so he looks around, racks his brains, comes up with solutions, and rejoices.”²⁹

Both are proven wrong. Omelichev cannot conceal his tenderness toward other people’s children (even before his first son dies and his second, Luka, is born deaf and mute). Kurilov “loses faith in his body” and hears the call of kinship. When Frosia asks for permission to stay for a few days in his House of Government apartment, he tells her that she should be ashamed of herself. “We’re family, after all,” he says. Iron Klavdia warns him that Frosia’s husband, now a fugitive from Soviet justice, might show up unexpectedly to visit his child. “He might,” answers Kurilov. “The revolution did not abolish the rights of fathers.”³⁰

Omelichev does show up unexpectedly, and he and Kurilov have another version of their first conversation. Their roles are reversed, but the arguments are the same. Meanwhile, Kurilov is being domesticated, and even Klavdia, who lives seven floors below, is beginning to show signs of sisterly love:

Frosia’s vigorous housekeeping had affected Kurilov’s whole apartment. The furniture stood solidly where it belonged, the scrubbed windows admitted twice as much light as before, and on top of the bookcases, where the sickly Katerinka never looked, not a speck of dust remained. Dinner was ready at a fixed hour, and Frosia scolded her brother whenever he was late. Klavdia came to see him more often, but each time it would appear to be only a chance visit. Walking slowly through the rooms, she could see all the little signs of what had been going on in her absence. Opening the sideboard, she would find new things instead of the old broken, ill-matched pieces of china; glancing into the bathroom, she would see a clean, shiny floor. Life was returning to this uninhabited barn.³¹

Could it be that paradise was hidden in plain sight—in the garden outside Kurilov’s office window or even in his own House of Government apartment? Kurilov does not think so. Young couples on their way to Ocean must pass through Komsomolsk, and his job is to prepare the tracks. The key to true immortality is faith in the coming of Communism. Through a thousand different channels, the flood of the Revolution is flowing into the shimmering, ever-wakeful Ocean. Kurilov is justified by faith alone: nothing on earth is stronger than death—except his dream of Ocean: “A man of his time, Kurilov always tried to visualize the distant lodestar toward which his Party was moving. This was Kurilov’s only form of leisure. Of course, he could fantasize only within the narrow confines of the books for which he managed to steal time from work or sleep. And this imaginary world, more material and more adapted to human needs than the Christian paradise, was, in his view, crowned by the outer limit of knowledge—non-death.”³²

Four times over the course of the novel—three times after suffering bouts of pain and, finally, after dying—Kurilov (“the statesman”), accompanied by the author (“the poet”), travels to the Ocean of his imagination. The rust inside his body can deprive him of love, friendship, and fatherhood, but it cannot take away his Party’s lodestar or his ability to visualize it. “When our eyes failed, and the insight of the poet equaled the perspicacity of the statesman, we also resorted to fiction. It served as a wobbly bridge across the abyss, where torrents rush—in an unknown direction.”³³

The future consists of two ages. First comes the “indescribable slaughter,” borrowed, in equal measure, from “the poet from the little island of Patmos” and from Kurilov’s favorite stories about South Sea pirates. “I followed with interest the evolution of characters from an old childhood book,” comments the narrator in a footnote. “I recognized the words ‘Pernambuco,’ ‘Fortaleza,’ and Aracajú,’ which sounded like birds calling to one another in a tropical forest at noon.” The statesman concocts a future apocalypse out of the colonial adventure books he has read, and the poet can reproduce that apocalypse because he has read the same books. If the surgeon, Ilya Protoklitov, were to join them, he, too, would feel at home in Pernambuco. The stamps he collected as a child represented “giraffes, coral islands with horseshoe-shaped lagoons, palm trees, black-mustachioed South American generals, pyramids, and sailboats. All these were pictures from the boys’ world of James Fenimore Cooper, Louis Jacolliot, and Louis Henri Boussenard.” Most of Leonov’s readers and Kurilov’s neighbors among the House of Government leaseholders had grown up in this boys’ world, and so had their sons (and so would their sons’ sons). Jacolliot would go out of fashion, but Cooper and Boussenard (of Le Capitaine Casse-Cou fame) could be found in every apartment, next to new Soviet editions of Jules Verne, Mayne Reid, Jack London, Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson, and O. Henry.³⁴

Beyond Armageddon and Aracajú lies Ocean, which, on closer inspection (and not unexpectedly, given the original blueprints), turns out to be a city. “We gave this city the generic name of Ocean because this capacious word contains a maternal sense with regard to the seas of all ranks, which, in turn, are united by the brotherly ties of the rivers and canals.” From the center of the city, “if you walk from the embankment down Stalin and Yangtze Streets past Academy Square,” you can see Unity Hill with its huge fountain called “The Tree of Water.” The narrator mentions a few science-fiction staples, including winged canoes and multi-level streets (“the ancient tendency of architecture to concern itself with the view from above has finally received its definitive, harmonious expression”), but keeps the list relatively short (“reports sent by early explorers are always sketchy and inaccurate”). The real question is how different life in Ocean is from life in the House of Government. The poet finds “the usual proportion of loafers, fools, and malcontents.” The statesman “emphatically denies the existence in this city of the future of any dust, flies, or accidents—or even the various minor evils that are inevitable in any human community.” The poet is proven right when the two are “sucked into a gigantic magnetic dust collector” and attacked by a swarm of “unbearable boys.” Kurilov later claims that this episode never happened, but it is the narrator who has the last word. The future belongs to the poet. Mayakovsky’s question has been resolved and Lenin, quietly, proven wrong. Bedbugs are indestructible, after all.³⁵

But what about Kurilov? His roommate in the Kremlin hospital hears the stories he tells Ziamka and accuses him of not being a true atheist. “Atheism is ignorance of God,” he says. “But you reject him, pick fights with him, try to wrest the universe away from him…. You can’t be angry at something that does not exist, can you?” Kurilov tells him that he should talk to his sister Klavdia, who loves such conversations. He needs more time to think about it. Back when he was reading about world religions, it had occurred to him “that someday this book might include pages written about him.”³⁶

The next morning Kurilov is taken to the operating room. The surgeon is the father of Liza’s aborted child and former clock collector, Ilya Protoklitov. The operation is successful, but two days later Kurilov dies of a hemorrhage. His death coincides with the coming of spring. “Storm clouds accumulated, thickened, and broke apart, but each new one appeared darker and more threatening than the ones before (making it that much easier for the mind’s eye to perceive behind them the blue, sorrowless sky of the future).”³⁷

Kurilov’s satellites, chastened by his bodily disappearance, drift in the same direction. Frosia and her deaf-mute child leave for Siberia to start a new life; the iron Klavdia begins her speech at the next plenum with the words “we are called to work in a joyous and beautiful time, my dear comrades”; and Liza says no to Tyutchev’s offer of a job in the theater. One of Kurilov’s adopted sons, the deputy editor of the Road newspaper and amateur Road historian, Alesha Peresypkin, comes to see the narrator, and they travel to Ocean together. “Actually, there were three of us: Kurilov was there, too, because, once we had left the present, his reality became equal to ours…. We passed hundreds of indistinct events, barely sketched on the surface of the future; we visited dozens of cities, remarkable for their history, that did not yet exist. Frolicking like little boys, Alesha and I romped through the immense expanse of the universe, and Kurilov’s shadow loomed over us, like a mountain.” Then the rain comes. They take cover under some trees and suddenly see a whispering young couple. Just as suddenly, the couple disappears. “Lovers have always had that magic ability to hide from a stranger’s curiosity by dissolving into the rustle of trees, the moonlight, and the fragrance of nocturnal flowers…. And although our Moscow Textile Factory coats were soaked right through at the shoulders, we left our shelter and silently set off down the road that must be taken by anyone who leaves home in stormy weather.” The End. The Soviet Faust had ascended to a heaven of his own making. Alles Vergängliche / Ist nur ein Gleichnis; / Das Unzulängliche, / Hier wird’s Ereignis. (“Everything transient is but a likeness; the unattainable is here the past.”)³⁸

The publication of The Road to Ocean became a great literary event. Novyi mir organized a two-day conference on the novel in November 1935, while it was still being serialized, and in May 1936, the presidium of the governing board of the Writers’ Union staged a formal discussion (the first such discussion in the board’s history). On both occasions, the Literaturnaia gazeta proclaimed that The Road to Ocean was “a great victory not only for Leonov, but for Soviet literature as a whole.” The book was widely praised for its scale, range, courage, literary quality, and sincere commitment to socialism. Ultimately, however, most reviewers agreed that the novel had failed to fulfill its two monumental ambitions: to paint a worthy portrait of the hero of the age and to write a novel worthy of the classics.³⁹

“The theme of love and family, etc., etc., can, of course, be a central, not a marginal theme,” wrote Ivan Vinogradov, “but then one should find a typical conflict and show here, too, the principal theme of our age, the theme of the struggle for the socialist way of thinking and feeling, for socialist human relations.” If Kurilov is truly a human mountain, then everything about him must be big, whatever his physical condition. His love, argued Elena Usievich, must be worthy of a life-loving Bolshevik; his hatred, argued Aleksei Selivanovsky, must be worthy of an ever-vigilant Bolshevik. Instead, argued V. Pertsov, “Kurilov ends up being a very lonely, sad widower, a mortally sick man with an unfulfilled love.” Everyone agreed with Gorky that “Dostoevsky’s gloomy and spiteful shadow” had darkened much of the text. Socialist realism was about a return to the classics, and a return to the classics meant, in Vinogradov’s formulation, “an orientation not toward decadent, externally complex but internally impoverished art, but toward the art of the golden age, classical art.” Dostoevsky was not a classic in this sense, and The Road to Ocean was too indebted to Dostoevsky to be truly Faustian.⁴⁰

In the final analysis, the novel’s fatal flaw was that it had been designed as a tragedy. Leonov’s assumption that “in the arts, the social maturity of a class expressed itself in tragedy” might be correct with regard to other ruling classes, but it could not possibly be correct in the case of the proletariat. The critic I. Grinberg concludes his discussion of The Road to Ocean by siding with Kurilov against Leonov: “The works of art of past centuries were full of pictures of suffering and unhappiness. Now, the time has come for a great change in the life of mankind. We are witnessing the destruction of the social order that dooms people to suffering and torment. On one-sixth of the earth’s surface, a happy and beautiful life has already been created. Therefore, the time has come for a great change in the arts. Soviet artists have a lofty task: to depict people who are destroying suffering and unhappiness, people who are creators of happiness.”⁴¹

This was the key to solving the book’s central problem—the problem of death and immortality. “The revolution has transformed the question of death,” said Viktor Shklovsky at the Writers’ Union discussion in May 1936. “The novel fails because, as has been said before, it resolves new situations with old methods.” Mikhail Levidov agreed: “Any decent person can die well. But only in our age and in our social environment are the objective conditions being created that will facilitate a good death.”⁴²

■ ■ ■

The Road to Ocean failed as a novel because it failed to represent a good death. It failed all the more obviously because, shortly before it came out, everyone was shown what a good death—and a good book about death—ought to look like. On March 17, 1935, Koltsov published an essay in Pravda called “Courage,” about an unknown thirty-year-old writer.

Nikolai Ostrovsky is lying flat on his back, completely immobile. A blanket is wrapped around the long, thin, straight pillar of his body, like a permanent, irremovable case. A mummy.

But inside that mummy, something is alive. Yes, the thin hands—only the hands—move slightly. They feel damp to the touch. One of them clutches weakly at a thin stick with a rag tied to the end of it. With a weak movement, the fingers direct the stick toward the face. The rag chases away the flies that have boldly assembled on the ridges of the white face.

The face is also alive. Suffering has wizened its features, dulled its colors, and sharpened its contours. But the lips are open, and two rows of youthful teeth make the mouth beautiful. Those lips speak, and that voice is soft but steady, only occasionally trembling with exhaustion.

“Of course, the threat of war in the Far East is great. If we sell the Eastern Chinese Railway, the border will be a little quieter. But don’t they understand that it is too late to fight with us? We are strong now and getting stronger all the time. Our power builds and grows with every day. Just recently someone read a piece out of Pravda to me …”

At this point we suddenly make a terrifying new discovery. Not everything—no, not quite everything—in that man’s head is alive! The two large eyes with their dull, glassy glow do not respond to sunlight, an interlocutor’s face, or newsprint. On top of everything else—the man is also blind.⁴³

Koltsov goes on to describe the life of Ostrovsky the writer, merging it with the life of Ostrovsky’s literary creation, Pavel Korchagin: rebellious youth, Civil War heroism, railroad construction, Komsomol activism, and, finally, sickness, paralysis, blindness, and testimony through writing. Ostrovsky’s—and Korchagin’s—life is extraordinary, and therefore typical. “The attraction of the struggle is so great,” concludes Koltsov, “and the power of persuasion of our common work is so irresistible that blind, paralyzed, and incurably sick warriors are joining the march and vying heroically for a spot at the head.”⁴⁴

Ostrovsky’s novel, How the Steel Was Tempered, had been slowly growing in popularity amidst silence from literary critics and government officials. (Serafimovich, who had made it his vocation to nurture young proletarian writers, had visited him in his little room in Sochi and made several editorial recommendations, but never suggested that he had discovered anything extraordinary.) After the publication of Koltsov’s essay about Ostrovsky, How the Steel Was Tempered eclipsed The Iron Flood and everything else ever written by any Soviet writer. Ostrovsky was presented with the Order of Lenin, a new apartment in Moscow, and a big house in Sochi. He received thousands of letters. Pilgrims came to see him and be touched by him. One of them was André Gide. “If I were not in the USSR,” he wrote, “I should say he was a saint…. During the whole hour our visit lasted, his thin fingers never ceased caressing mine, entwining them and transmitting to me the effluvia of his quivering sensibility.” He died on December 22, 1936, with the whole country looking on. How the Steel Was Tempered would become the most widely read, translated, reprinted, and, from what one can tell, beloved book by a Soviet writer in the history of the Soviet Union and the Communist world as a whole.⁴⁵

Aleksandr Serafimovich by Nikolai Ostrovsky’s bedside

One reason for the book’s success seems to have been the near total fusion of the author with his main character (suggested by Ostrovsky himself and designed forcefully and deliberately by Koltsov in his essay). The mythic hero was there in the flesh, embodying the reality of the age of heroes and serving as the “bridge over which people pass into the future.” Another reason—and the guarantee that the hero could appear in the flesh without risking desacralization—was the fact that he had no flesh left: that he was a “mummy,” or a living relic. He was there and not there at the same time: he embodied sainthood by appearing in spirit only.

The greatest virtue of the text itself was that it represented the sacred story of the Revolution as a straightforward bildungsroman: the education of a Bolshevik from innocence to knowledge. Each chapter in the history of Bolshevism corresponds to a stage in Pavel’s (Paul’s) journey: the early apprenticeship culminating in conversion; the “battle of unheard-of ferocity” leading to the “crushing of the beast’s head”; the struggle against the philistines at the time of the great disappointment; the construction of a railroad in the “sticky mud” of a boundless swamp; and, finally, the office work as an “apparatchik” (as Pavel refers to himself ironically at the end of the book). Each major episode ends with the hero’s symbolic death followed by resurrection. (The construction chapter concludes with a formal announcement of Pavel’s death and his subsequent “resurrection in the organization’s rolls.”) At each stage, Pavel loses the use of one or more parts of his body, so that by the end of the story he has attained full knowledge at the cost of complete immobility and blindness. As one female character, tortured and raped by the servants of the beast, says to her fellow martyrs on the eve of their execution: “Comrades, remember, we must die a good death.”⁴⁶

Most readers would have recognized the hero’s quest (or warrior-saint’s life) resulting in a good death and subsequent immortality. They would also have recognized and appreciated the novel’s style, which had a great deal in common with the books that both the hero and his creator grew up reading. Pavel’s favorites were Ethel Voinich’s The Gadfly, Raffaello Giovagnoli’s Spartacus, James Fenimore Cooper’s frontier novels, and, in particular, the anonymous chapbooks serializing the adventures of Giuseppe Garibaldi. Ostrovsky himself also admired Jules Verne, Walter Scott, Conan Doyle, Alexandre Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Edgar Allan Poe. Those were, of course, the same books that Kurilov read on the road to Ocean. The difference is that Kurilov set The Three Musketeers aside in order to read about the history of world religions, and when his proletarian biographer, Marina, asked him whether he was personally acquainted with the author of Spartacus, he only smiled at her naïveté. Romantic adventure books were good for fantasies about future wars, not for “Kurilov’s life in all of its complexity,” which could barely be fit within Leonov’s epic. Nikolai Ostrovsky, Pavel Korchagin, and most Soviet readers took a different view. How the Steel Was Tempered was Kurilov’s life written by a Kurilov never touched by “Dostoevsky’s gloomy and spiteful shadow.” It was a spiritual autobiography inside a five-kopeck chapbook. Early in the novel, Pavel falls in love with a girl named Tonya, who seems to reciprocate his feeling. Soon afterward Victor, the son of a local notable, asks Tonya if she has read the romance novel he lent her: “‘No, I have started a new romance, more interesting than the one you gave me.’ ‘Is that so?’ muttered Viktor, annoyed. ‘Who is the author?’ Tonia looked at him with her shining, mocking eyes: ‘No one.’”⁴⁷

Tonia’s romance is an event in her life, not a novel written by someone else. How the Steel Was Tempered was written by its hero, not by an author, and it was read by everyone, not just those touched by Dostoevsky’s shadow. As Samuel Johnson said of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, “this is the great merit of the book, that the most cultivated man cannot find anything to praise more highly, and the child knows nothing more amusing.” There were only two other books that Johnson considered the equal of The Pilgrim’s Progress as books “written by mere men that were wished longer by their readers.” One, of course, was Don Quixote; the other was Robinson Crusoe, the Pilgrim’s successor as the Puritan gospel that even children (including the young Stalin and his adopted son, Artem) find amusing. Leonov’s Soviet Faust (or was it Hamlet?) may have failed, but Ostrovsky’s Pilgrim’s Progress proved a great success. The magazine editor from Ilf and Petrov’s Pravda essay had been right, after all: one could write a Robinson Crusoe that was “amusing, original, and full of interesting adventures” while also taking place on a peninsula that contained a trade union committee with a safe deposit box, a chairman’s bell, a pitcher of water, a tablecloth, and broad masses of working people.⁴⁸

One way in which the original Robinson Crusoe attains true knowledge is by writing down the story of his discoveries (both spiritual and material). In How the Steel Was Tempered, this is a central theme: when Pavel realizes that he is too weak to serve in any other way, he devotes himself to writing. His last symbolic death comes when the only copy of his manuscript gets lost in the mail, but then he starts over, and the story is born again. Ostrovsky’s book about Pavel ends with the publisher’s acceptance of Pavel’s book about himself. “The iron ring was broken. Armed with a new weapon, he was returning to the ranks and to life.”⁴⁹

But there was also another path—one mostly ignored by critics, but crucially important to Kon, Kurilov, Arosev, Osinsky, Serafimovich, and other Old Bolsheviks from the House of Government. After Pavel is given his pension and “labor invalid” certificate and can no longer walk without crutches, he briefly considers suicide, but rejects the idea as “too cowardly and easy.” Instead, he offers his “friendship and love” to Taya Kyutsam, the eighteen-year-old daughter of his philistine landlord. “I can give you a lot of what you need,” he tells her, “and vice versa.” What she needs is his help in becoming a Party member; what he needs is not made explicit, but the reader knows that “her firm young breasts are bursting out of her striped worker’s blouse.”⁵⁰

Before becoming an invalid, Pavel has been celibate. He has had a number of temptations, but he has resisted them all in the same way he has forced himself to stop swearing and smoking. His model is the Gadfly—“a revolutionary for whom the personal was nothing compared to the collective.” Once, when Pavel’s mother asks him if he has found a girl, he says, “Mother, I have taken a vow not to make love to any girls until we have exterminated the bourgeoisie all over the world.” When he meets Taya, the bourgeoisie has not yet been exterminated, but two things have changed: his flesh has been mostly mortified, and socialism seems more secure. After Taya accepts his proposal, he repays her “tender caresses” with a “profound tenderness” of his own and sees the “glow of barely concealed joy” in her shining eyes. Several weeks later, he loses the use of his legs and left arm, and then, finally, his eyesight. He offers Taya her freedom, but she stays with him, as his partner at home and his equal within the Party. Both are rewarded with the publication of his book and, eventually, immortality. Ostrovsky’s widow, R. P. Ostrovskaya (née Raya Matsyuk), would publish her husband’s biography in Gorky’s The Lives of Extraordinary People series. Platonov’s Levin, Leonov’s Kurilov, and young Pavel Korchagin were justified in their asceticism during the time of wars, cease-fires, and dam building. But now that the foundations of socialism had been laid and the revolutionaries’ bodies had been tamed, they were entitled to some tenderness and family immortality. Christian the Pilgrim and his wife had found knowledge and salvation; Robinson Crusoe had found knowledge and wealth; Pavel Korchagin found knowledge and a wife.⁵¹