Zoshchenko

[osprey_archer]

Russian writers are so weird.

I'm not talking about their stories (although some of those are bizarre, too); I'm talking about the writers as people. Take, as an mild example of such weirdness, Zoshchenko: an extremely popular Soviet short story writer from the twenties till '46, when he was denounced as counterrevolutionary, which destroyed his career even though the authorities didn't actually kill him.

I have no idea why it took them till 1946 to denounce him. In the early twenties he, a) made a public statement that he joined the Red Army not because he believed in Communism - he loathed it, he said; but because he hoped shooting at people would help lift his depression; and b) belonged to a writers' group with the credo that, one, writers shouldn't be political, and two, that writers shouldn't belong to groups.



But this anti-writers' group writer's group is just the tip of the iceberg of the weirdness of Russian writers. Gogol, a great Russian writer from the nineteenth century, used to wander the Swiss Alps killing lizards because they were "Satan's children

But this doesn't even begin to touch the weirdness of Alexander Blok, a poet who died in 1920. Alexander Blok married a woman he believed to be Sofia, the female embodiment of God - and this was not merely a metaphor because he was in love and thought she was awesome; no, he really believed she was the female embodiment of God.

I cannot but wonder how she felt about this.

But anyway, as if that isn't striking enough, all of Blok's friend went along with the whole "female embodiment of God" thing. And not in a "Ha ha, did you hear Sasha's crazy ideas about his new wife, it seems harmless so we should humor this latest delusion" - no, they too were convinced that she was the female embodiment of God. Because the Silver Age Russian intelligentsia were just special like that.

Blok was convinced that the Silver Age intelligentsia was hopelessly decadent and corrupt, that he was the apogee of this decadence, and that any day now some great force was going to come along and sweep them into the dustbin of history. And why couldn't any day now be yesterday already? Because this existence thing was getting tiresome.

He was totally psyched when the Bolsheviks came to power. He wrote them a rambling letter about how happy he was, because they were going to destroy EVERYTHING, and also because they weren't Marxists and he hated Marxists, so hurrah.

I wonder what the Bolsheviks made of that one.

And then he wrote a couple of poems about how great the Bolsheviks were, after which he stopped writing until 1920 or so, when he turned against the Bolsheviks because they were Not What He Had Hoped For. Possibly he noticed that they were Marxists, after all, but I'm inclined to think he was actually depressed about the fact that the Bolsheviks had created programs to keep the former intelligentsia from starving in the street. Damn it, they were supposed to be destroying EVERYTHING!

(Starving in the street is not hyperbole. The former intelligentsia didn't have ration cards, because they weren't working in the factories/the army where the ration cards were handed out, so they were literally starving. The Bolsheviks warehoused them in hospitals, where the intelligentsia ate their way out of starvation, translated the Great Books of the World into Russian, and wrote each other completely cracked correspondence about the nature of life, death, and the possibility of flinging off all the culture you ever learned like you would throw off a funeral pall if you woke up under it.)



Incidentally, I highly recommend Zoshchenko if you want to stick a toe into the waters of Russian lit. His stories are short, funny, and surprisingly compassionate (especially given the whole "I want to shoot people!" thing). I would link one but I can't find any online.

One of my favorites, though, is about Pelegaya, an illiterate peasant woman who learns to read because she thinks her husband is getting love letters from one of those educated, Communist women he works with. But the letter, when she reads it, isn't a love letter at all; it says instead that her husband must take care to teach his wife to read, must "make her feel how disgusting it is to be an illiterate peasant woman."

The disgustingness of illiteracy was a common theme in Communist articles at the time. It's a topic for a different essay, but the Bolsheviks had this weird mixture of adulation and disdain for the lower classes.

And Zoshchenko's story - which is this short, funny little story, just three pages and a bit - points out gently that it's awful to say to someone that who they are is disgusting, even if you do it out of the desire to help.

That makes him sound like a moralist, and he isn't. He's just sympathetic to his characters - and his characters are people other people don't think to write, except as comic relief - kind to them without excusing their failures. I want to be able to write like that.

Comments

[anait.livejournal.com]

Zoshchenko's beliefs a) and b) would be quite funny if he meant them as irony. But I have a feeling that perhaps he didn't, in which case :/

And what did the lizards ever do to Gogol?

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I don't know how serious he was about the shooting people thing. He was clearly a complicated person.

However, in defense of Zoshchenko's anti-writer's group writing group: early Soviet Russia was filled with competing writer's groups, which passionately hated all the other writer's groups over minor points of disagreement. I think Zoshchenko's group was not so much against the idea of writers congregating to chat about whatever writers chat about, as of writers forming what were essentially cults.

As for the political thing - I don't know. Do you think writers ought to be political? In a sense it's unavoidable - they're going to have opinions no matter what - but I wouldn't think it's necessary or often desirable. Or were you just objecting to the fact that Zoshchenko's group thought, as a matter of principle, that writers shouldn't be political ever?

And as for Gogol and his lizards - who knows? Maybe they were just too scaly for him to deal with.

[anait.livejournal.com]

Or were you just objecting to the fact that Zoshchenko's group thought, as a matter of principle, that writers shouldn't be political ever?
No objection on philosphical grounds. Just the way you phrased it, that he joined political writing group whose manifesto was that writers should be neither political nor belong to groups; it sounded like a particularly good joke, or a kind of post-modernist deep irony or maybe just a sort of off-the-deep end insanity. I couldn't tell.

In a sense it's unavoidable - they're going to have opinions no matter what - but I wouldn't think it's necessary or often desirable.
Unavoidable, yep, even if they never write about politics in their work. I don't think it's necessary, although it's sometimes interesting to read an author's work after knowing their personal and politics history and beliefs; it can add an extra layer of meaning. Also, there's some great novels out there by people writing fiction with a strong social or political message. I'm reading some right now!

Tolstoy was a weird one too, speaking of strange Russian writers. I have a short story collection by him, and his idea of an ideal marriage seems to be one in which a much younger woman has her opinions on all things and her worldview gently shaped by her mature husband so that they are in 'perfect accord' on all things in their marriage. o_o

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I think that "perfect accord" idea stretches all the way back to Aristotle, so Tolstoy's crazy is for once not just him.

I've always thought it was odd that writing advice always says DON'T WRITE A STORY WITH A MESSAGE, and everyone always complains about how they hate message books - but authors on their blogs always talk about what political or social thing they want their story to show, reviewers go on and on about the themes of the books they review, and one of the reasons Great Books are Great is because of their universal themes.

I think the advice actually means Don't warp your story to fit a message, or Don't make the message to clear cut and obvious because that's boring. But I guess that's much more difficult advice to follow. How do you know what "too clear-cut" is?

[anait.livejournal.com]

I think the advice actually means Don't warp your story to fit a message, or Don't make the message to clear cut and obvious because that's boring.

I think you have hit on the important point with this. Of course political and social themes are relevant, interesting and important in fiction-- to say an author shouldn't write about these things is like saying they shouldn't have any views about anything important in life. But if you make a 'message' book, it can be so blatant that anyone who disagrees with the author's views may be turned off. Also, the book may not age well for the next generation if it holds an anachronistic viewpoint too firmly.

I think the kinds of books like this that are successful for me are the ones that are not so much trying to hammer away at a message, as the ones that hold up a mirror to real life; and the reflection incorporates (how can it not?) the worldview of the author. Not so much taking sides as, 'Here it is.' The reader can draw their own conclusions rather than being given them outright (which I would probably mistrust and reject as a reader). Of course if the author is skillful, it is probably a foregone conclusion that the reader's sympathies will be engaged in the desired direction.

Some good novels with a political/social message:
'A Handmaid's Tale' by Margaret Atwood
'Anil's Ghost' by Michael Ondaatje
'The Diary of Anne Frank'
'The Caine Mutiny' by Herman Wouk
'Reservation Blues' by Sherman Alexie

I have even read one or two good fanfics that were able to do this (although it's a rarity in fandom to find stories about social/political/ethical themes, which I always think is too bad).

Do you have similar thoughts?

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's basically what I was trying to say. I find it very annoying in books when authors take sides, either ethically or on the part of a specific character; it's ugly and manipulative and it ought to be unnecessary.

As for the specific books you listed, I've only read The Diary of Anne Frank and A Handmaid's Tale; I thought Anne Frank was good and A Handmaid's Tale well-written but...paranoid?

I remember reading a quote from Margaret Atwood, around the time I read A Handmaid's Tale, defending the plausibility of her world-building on the grounds that "things like this were happening in Afghanistan." It really lowered my opinion of the book; you can't just transport cultural and historical occurrences to a totally different milieu.

[anait.livejournal.com]

'Handmaid's Tale' is, I think, a product of its time-- an angry feminist novel by a sharp, clever woman during the decades when women authors were really fighting it out for us in the arena of fiction. The anger really works for me. It's one of the few books where, when I finished, I felt a kind of red haze of rage. Effective, yes, I think so.

I didn't know about the Afghanistan connection. I always thought she was drawing on the Biblical precedent for the handmaid idea. What I find more interesting is that she wrote it pre-Bush, and some of her predictions regarding a fundamentalist Christian United States were borne out after the novel was published. Scary.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Yeah, she was drawing on the Biblical precedent too, to give the whole thing a Christian flavor.

I think what bothered me about the book is that even the farthest far-rightist Quiverfull Christians don't advocate female illiteracy or getting rid of women's ability to spend money, and while there are Christian groups who are pro-polygamy (old-school polygamy, not polyamory) they're a very, very powerless fringe minority.

I think extrapolating from the Evangelical movement to a theocratic American dystopia would have looked very different - it could still have been awful and evil, but it would be a new and different kind of awful and evil instead of THE TALIBAN CAN HAPPEN HERE TOO.

I would think it was just that I wanted something from the book it never meant to deliver, except for that Margaret Atwood quote. Sometimes I am doubtful of the wisdom of listening to authors talk about their books.

[girl-called-sun.livejournal.com]

I am intrigued by Zoshchenko..I'll look out for his stories. Worried by Blok and Gogol, though.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

BE AFRAID. BE VERY AFRAID. But don't worry, Zoshchenko will keep you safe.

[melp.livejournal.com]

This post was made of win, as it spoke to the very deepest depths of my nerdy lit heart!

And I think your thesis is correct - even the bigger names like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky did things like start their own religions and somehow foreshadow their own deaths in their major works. And really, don't even start with the contemporary authors (I recommend a novel called "Death and the Penguin" though, if you have the time!)

I'm hunting down a copy of Zoshchenko right now!

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

There need to be more posts to plumb the deepest depths of our nerdy lit hearts. The internet should generate them spontaneously, like it generates cat pictures.

Also, re: Death and the Penguin. OMG. IT INVOLVES A PET PENGUIN. If I can ever hunt down a library that admits to having a copy, I am definitely reading that book.

[melp.livejournal.com]

A manic depressive pet penguin - EVEN BETTER.

lol, I <3 the Russians, but only if they are not evil LiveJournal spambots.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

A manic depressive penguin?

Okay, to hell with the homework. I AM HUNTING DOWN THIS BOOK.

[exuberantself.livejournal.com]

This Sofia personified must have been one heck of a woman.

I haven't actually read Russian lit in years, I should work on that. Hmmm. Toss me an awesome rec and I'll pick up when I'm done with Brideshead.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Actually? This is embarrassing, but I haven't read that much Russian literature. Beyond Zoshchenko I wouldn't know where to start for a rec.

Well, I am reading the book recced in the comments above: Death and the Penguin. So far it seems fascinatingly cracked.