M O S C O W Interview with Leonid Shishkin - Passport magazine

Russian Reflections
Books have
their own fate
Text and photos by
Tobie Mathew
“Poetry is taken so seriously in Russia
that people are even shot for it.” This
quip, uttered by the great poet Osip
Mandelshtam, may have been meant
ironically but it still contains more than a
kernel of truth. Since the earliest days of
ancient Rus, the written word has been
granted near mythic status in the country;
worshipped by its citizens as the
Osip Mandelshtam
20 June 2010
source of ultimate knowledge, but desecrated
by rulers in fear of its power.
Russian governments throughout
history have sought in vain to control
the shape and flow of printed matter,
unilaterally imposing their views on the
literary world and silencing all other dissident
voices. In the minds of the country’s
leaders, writers were alluring but
dangerous creatures who all too often
needed to be separated from the masses
by the black bars of the censor’s pen.
And when this failed the threat of the
hangman’s rope was never far away.
Those in power had good reason to be
fearful, for writers were uniquely placed
to work against government, using their
creations as vehicles for spreading subversive
opinion. As the Soviet leaders
later found out to their cost, books were
often far more effective than ballot papers
in giving a largely disfranchised
population a democratic voice. The
state tried hard to combat this, but while
it succeeded in subjugating the vast majority,
there was always someone who, in
Tolstoy’s words, “could not stay silent”;
a novelist or poet who was prepared to
risk their all to present an alternative narrative
to the people.
Both tsarist autocrats and Soviet commissars
were highly alert to this threat
and between them they succeeded in
staining the history of Russian literature
with the blood of many of its finest writers.
One name however stands out from
all the rest: Stalin, who took this dubious
tradition to a new extreme, murdering
a slew of writers, poets and intellectuals
in an effort to shut down forever what
the political thinker Alexander Herzen
called, “Russia’s second government”.
In Stalin’s world there was no freedom
of thought, let alone freedom of speech.
Writers who did not bend to the will of
the state sooner or later found themselves
at its mercy. As his brutal dictatorship
slowly clamped its jaws around
the literary milieu, all aspects of creative
thought were stifled. Isaac Babel noted
wryly at the time that a man could speak
freely, “only with his wife, at night and
with the blanket pulled over his head.”
Babel and Mandelshtam both paid
the ultimate price for their inability to
conform, a fate shared by countless
others during Stalin’s reign of terror. “I
would like to recall them all name by
name but the list has been taken out,
it is nowhere to be found,” wrote the
poetess Anna Akhmatova. Most of the
victims, including Babel and Mandelshtam,
were buried in unmarked graves,
their final resting places lost forever. But
while nothing carnal remains of these
two writers, their literary and spiritual
legacy survives almost untouched, for
this Stalin could never destroy.
Today, almost every Russian knows the
quotation, “Manuscripts do not burn”,
from Mikhail Bulgakov’s anti-Stalinist
satire, The Master and Margarita. The
novel in part tells the story of a young
writer who torches his life’s work, only
to have it restored to him later by the
devil. Bulgakov wrote the story, ‘for the
desk drawer’, knowing that it was highly
unlikely it would ever see the light of